A Wilderness So Immense Read online

  Fire was a threat to cities everywhere, hut New Orleans was particularly unfortunate in the closing years of the eighteenth century. On Good Friday 1788 a great fire consumed 856 of the town’s thousand buildings, including the first casa capitular, or Cabildo. No sooner had New Orleans begun to rebuild than a second conflagration on December 8, 1794, destroyed 212 structures. Prominent among the buildings that survived both fires are the Old Ursuline Convent of 1734, on Chartres Street, and the Cabildo, completed in 1799. The surviving eighteenth-century structures in the French Quarter of New Orleans exhibit varied mixtures of Spanish, French, and Caribbean architectural influences. (Courtesy Louisiana State Museum)

  Núñez lived in the heart of New Orleans at 619 Chartres Street, one block upriver from the Place d’Armes and two blocks from the levee. “The south wind was blowing violently,” according to another eyewitness, whose account was carried to Vera Cruz on a merchant ship and published in the Gaceta de Mexico, and the fire spread with “irresistible fury” from one wooden building to another, from one shingled roof to the next. Flames jumped narrow streets, spreading from the Núñez house in three directions away from the river. “All the prompt and opportune aid and vigilance of the authorities were useless, including the fire apparatus many of which were burnt by the heat of the flames.” They moved rapidly down Chartres and across St. Philip Street to engulf the casa capitular, or town hall, and the church at the Place d’Armes. Flames consumed tightly built houses along Royal and Bourbon and Dauphine Streets as the fire raced toward the city’s northern rampart and the area then known as Place de Négres and later as Congo Square. The flames blazed steadily upriver, too, destroying houses and businesses as they crossed Toulouse, St. Louis, and Conti Streets. Whenever the fire discovered a cache of gunpowder “which some citizens had cautiously hidden in their houses in violation of government orders and the most strict searches,” explosions resounded through the chaos, as though a brigand were daring onlookers to interfere. Residents found it “useless to try to save anything,” Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró reported, “because as soon as they moved things to a place which seemed safe from the flames, the fire would spread there and all would be destroyed.”

  “In less than five hours,” all the eyewitness accounts agree, “eight hundred and fifty-six houses were razed to the ground. Amongst these were all the commercial houses, excepting three.” Of the city’s thousand structures, scarcely one hundred fifty remained. “The loss of buildings has been estimated at one million and forty thousand pesos,” Governor Miró guessed, and “the total loss, which we have grossly considered, will amount to three million pesos.”

  The human toll was terror and devastation. “If I could only describe with vivid colors what my eyes have seen and my hands touched,” Governor Miró wrote in his report to his superiors in Havana,

  it would seem unbelievable. It is a difficult task to decide which has caused the most sorrow, whether the destruction of the city or the pitiful situation of all its inhabitants. Mothers looked for nothing more than a refuge for their children, abandoning the rest of their property to the voracity of the conflagration, running away to the open fields to be mute witnesses of their own misfortune. Fathers and husbands endeavored to save as much as the rapidity of the fire permitted, but as the fire spread rapidly and there was such confusion, they could hardly find a place of safety for themselves. The darkness of night effaced for a time the picture of horror, but with the dawn the scene appeared more horrible and pitiful, seeing along the road in the most abject misery so many families who, a few hours before, enjoyed large fortunes and more than the average comforts of life…. Their tears and sobs, and the ghastliness of their faces told of the ruin of a city which, in less than five hours, had been transformed into an arid and horrible desert—a city which was the product of seventy years of labor.

  At first, amazingly, it seemed that no one had died in the great fire of Good Friday 1788. “If… there is something capable of mitigating our sorrow,” wrote the eyewitness whose letter was published in Mexico, “it is the fact that not a single person perished in the confusion.” Governor Miró’s report of one fatality was more accurate but still astonishing. “Had this unfortunate event happened in the small hours of the night, it would have caused the loss of many lives,” he wrote, “but, thanks to God, the only casualties were some people slightly injured and a sick negress who was killed.”

  Despite the minimal loss of life or limb, “the dawn of the following day presented the most horrible spectacle. In place of the flourishing city of the day before, one could see nothing more than ruins smoldering and debris.”

  The official report written by Governor Miró and Intendant Martin Navarro, who was independently responsible to the crown for all the tax revenues of Louisiana, chronicled the destruction of “all the business houses and homes of the principal citizens of the city.” Between Chartres Street and the levee, “a few private buildings fronting the river have been saved.” Below Dumaine Street the Ursuline Convent, two regimental barracks, the Indian warehouse, and the charity hospital were undamaged. Beyond the walls of the city, a customhouse and tobacco and artillery warehouses were safe along Bayou St. John, where they welcomed ships approaching New Orleans by way of the Rigolets and Lake Pontchartrain. Around the Place d’Armes, however, the casa capitular, parish church, presbytere, and Capuchin chapter house were gone—as were the jail, guardhouse, and the arsenal “with all the arms therein contained except for 750 guns.” The heart of the city was a wasteland of ash and ruins, and “stupor and silence was the only expression on people’s faces, regardless of class and position.”

  • • •

  Governor Miró and Intendant Navarro had witnessed it all. Their offices stood on either side of St. Louis Street, just two blocks upwind of the Núñez house and chapel on Chartres. Their “efforts to save the buildings situated by the river front”—the customhouse, tobacco warehouse, government house, and intendancy—had been largely successful, and they had also rescued the colonial archives and “all His Majesty’s money, either in silver or in paper,” and “deposited it on the bank of the river.” Of the eight thousand residents of New Orleans and its environs, nearly half lived outside the walls of the city, where they now exhibited “the most delicate sentiments of hospitality.” Governor Miró distributed biscuits, rice, tents, and small amounts of cash to seven hundred persons whose “extreme want compels them to invoke our aid.” He also borrowed 24,000 pesos from the colonial treasury and sent merchant vessels to fetch flour and other commodities from as far away as Philadelphia. The governor and the intendant were proud to report that within twenty-four hours of the disaster, “there was not a person left without shelter,” and that “the loss caused to His Majesty by the fire is of slight consideration.”

  By all accounts, then and since, Esteban Miró and Martín Navarro showed exceptional skill in directing the city’s response to the disaster. Eyewitnesses credited their “generous heart and quickness of perception” as deserving of “the greatest applause.” Their official report said as much, and for many reasons it may be taken at face value. On the other hand, the Spanish empire was a complex organization replete with all the reports, memoranda, and other paperwork of a mature (some might say antiquated) bureaucracy. Office workers no longer bundle files with crimson ribbons, but the myopic world of red tape is timeless, and Miró and Navarro were, respectively, military and civilian careerists within a huge international bureaucracy.

  Had Miró’s or Navarro’s response to the fire of Good Friday 1788 been inadequate in any respect, posterity would know. Had there been disparaging commentary about Miró or Navarro—in the press, in private letters, or in the gossip of ambassadors and courtiers—word would have reached some eighteenth-century functionary and rival quills would have consigned rumor to paper. Instead, Navarro was honored upon his retirement from New Orleans and welcomed to court at Madrid, and Miró was promoted to brigadier “in testimony of the Royal sa
tisfaction in his zeal.”

  Notable as well is the fact that two officials, neither subordinate to the other, could act so quickly and harmoniously. Had Miró and Navarro disagreed about what was best for Louisiana or doubted each other’s motives, the fire of 1788 would be told as a story of discord as well as disaster. The moment of chaos, when anything can happen, tests a person’s wisdom, courage, and morality. Some prove themselves looters—selfishly ready to seize power, spoils, or advantage over a rival. Genuine leaders, on the other hand, build a community response to crisis upon its shared values.

  If any ulterior motive can be discerned in Miró’s and Navarro’s response to the fire, it was a policy objective to which they and others in Louisiana were committed but to which the late Carlos III had been cool: the encouragement of trade and immigration. After chronicling the horrible destruction of New Orleans, the efforts to save lives and property, and the care offered to the hungry and homeless, Miró and Navarro’s report anticipated that these measures, “and others that are being taken, using money which has been borrowed from the royal treasury… will prevent the total emigration of these [displaced] people by giving them assurance that within a month they will be able to obtain anything they may need.” The governor and the intendant also suggested an easing of imperial trade regulations to encourage long-term recovery and prevent the departure of “people who always have bravely battled against hardships and ill fate.” None of this was new.

  Since the 1760s, Carlos III had valued Louisiana chiefly as a barrier to keep Americans away from the silver mines of New Spain. French ownership of the colony had suited him just fine, but when that was no longer possible, a wilderness inhabited mainly by hostile Native American tribes had sufficed equally well—at least through the end of the American Revolution. In the 1770s Louisiana had witnessed some agricultural experiments with hemp, flax, indigo, and snuff, but Carlos and his ministers were more interested in useful commodities than in making Louisiana self-sufficient. The French crown had thought differently, but it was close to bankruptcy and did not have any silver mines to protect. Within Spanish ministerial circles, Carlos III made no secret of his policies—his accountants tallied the annual costs of administering Louisiana (about 400,000 pesos) as a debit on the books of New Spain. As needed, usually twice a year, the superintendent of the royal mint in Mexico sent a ship full of newly minted pesos to New Orleans via Havana.17 This subsidy, the situado, was regarded as a business expense for the annual convoys that carried tons of Zacatecas silver from Vera Cruz to Cádiz. Late in his reign, Carlos III perhaps sensed a need to reexamine his restrictive policies as Americans ventured into Kentucky and began floating goods down the Ohio—but his death and the subsequent retirement of his chief minister, the count de Floridablanca, prevented the newly created supreme council of state (which might have addressed these issues) from formulating a new and more coherent approach.18

  From their side of the Atlantic, both Miró and Navarro saw Louisiana’s potential for growth and trade. Born in 1738 in Galicia, at the northwest corner of Spain, Navarro was the son of a tavern keeper in the port city of La Coruña, where the invincible Armada found shelter from the weather before sailing toward England in 1588. After ten years’ apprenticeship in the treasury office of the poor and densely populated province, he won a promotion of sorts to the new Spanish treasury office in Louisiana. The afternoon of March 5, 1766, was cold and rainy when the twenty-eight-year-old accountant and a handful of civil servants disembarked at New Orleans with the internationally recognized scientist Antonio de Ulloa (a member of the Royal Society of London no less!) and the ninety soldiers with whom he was expected to rule the colony for Spain. Within three years Navarro witnessed the expulsion of the gentle Governor Ulloa by a sullen clique of xenophobic French colonists and the vindication of Spanish rule by General Alexander O’Reilly y McDowell and twenty-one hundred experienced troops in July 1769. Born in Catholic Ireland and drilled in Prussia under Frederick the Great, O’Reilly was a stalwart agent of Carlos Ill’s enlightened despotism. After crushing the rebellion, a thorough investigation identified a dozen ringleaders. He executed five rebel leaders and even they got the final decency of a firing squad, rather than a criminal’s death by hanging. Six others went to jail, and O’Reilly offered amnesty to the rank and file in exchange for an oath of allegiance to Spain. The Spanish objective was stability, not revenge. Firmly but fairly, O’Reilly made Louisiana a province of the Spanish empire (and in recognition of his achievement there are drawing rooms in New Orleans where the descendants of those sullen French regard the mention of Alexander O’Reilly’s name as unwelcome still).

  Six years younger than Navarro, Esteban Rodríguez Miró was a career soldier. Born in Reus, near the ancient Roman seaport of Tarragona on the Mediterranean, Miró had joined the army at sixteen, fought against Portugal in 1762, and risen to the rank of lieutenant during eight years in Mexico. After fighting with O’Reilly in Algiers and a year at the military academy of Avila, Miró arrived in Louisiana in 1778 as a lieutenant colonel. He was second in rank only to the colonial governor, Bernardo de Gálvez, whose talents for administration, diplomacy, and warfare were being challenged by the circumstances of the American Revolution.

  A career soldier and protégé of Bernardo de Gálvez, Esteban Rodríguez Miró governed Louisiana from January 1782 through December 1791—the longest and most effective tenure of the colony’s Spanish governors. Returning to Spain as a brigadier general at the age of forty-seven, Miró advised Carlos IV’s ministers on colonial affairs in 1792 and 1793. Then, promoted to field marshal and assigned to active duty, he saw action against the French revolutionary armies in the Pyrenees. Miró died at the front, from natural causes, in June 1795. (Courtesy Library of Virginia)

  France and Spain had taken the American side against Great Britain—secretly at first and then openly—and for Louisiana the implications of that alliance were profound.

  Miró shared in the glory when Gálvez took Mobile and Pensacola from the British in 1779, and when the crown sent Gálvez to plan a campaign against Jamaica, he appointed Miró acting governor of Louisiana and West Florida in January 1782. During the war, with British seapower a constant threat to Spanish vessels carrying food and supplies to Louisiana, Carlos III eased trade restrictions with the United States as a wartime necessity. Spanish officials in New Orleans not only permitted Americans to bring flour, pork, and other produce down the Mississippi River, they encouraged the American trade, for while the colonists and their slaves produced indigo, lumber, and other commodities for export, they did not raise food sufficient for their needs. Opening the colony to foreign trade was a calculated risk, for it would be difficult to reimpose restrictions when the war ended. And coaxing the genie back into the lamp would be more difficult because, having seen her good works, Governor Miró, Intendant Navarro, and the leading merchants of New Orleans all admired the genie.

  Intendant Martin Navarro’s treatise, Political Reflections on the Present Conditions of the Province of Louisiana, made the case for open trade and population growth. Written late in 1780, after two devastating hurricanes had struck the colony and demoralized its inhabitants, Navarro’s treatise blamed Spanish imperial trade restrictions for Louisiana’s poverty19 Navarro recognized “the indispensable need for forming a barrier to the great and envied continent of Mexico”—the bedrock of Carlos Ill’s North American trade policy since 1762—but he also contended that under “a sovereign whose laws were not opposed to a system of free trade,” Louisiana would quickly prove itself “one of the most useful and best established provinces in America.” The colony offered “furs, indigo, tobacco, timber, cotton, pitch, tar, rice, maize, and all kinds of vegetables,” as well as wheat, barley, hemp, and flax “if they be cultivated with intelligence.” Despite its agricultural potential, however, Louisiana’s “commerce is poor” because it was conducted “in a manner most harmful and burdensome to the colony as well as to the king.” Optimistic about
the “advantages that would result from a numerous population and large commerce,” Navarro’s opinions echoed other critics of mercantilism.

  Whether expressed in Spanish, French, English, or Dutch, the free traders’ argument was that nations and kings benefited when their colonies thrived, regardless of where the goods went—a viewpoint that Carlos III and his ministers could readily find in Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Smith contended that when individuals pursue their own self-interest their actions contribute to the good of all, as if guided by an invisible hand, and that government interference with trade was generally detrimental.20 Navarro’s observations about free trade and laissez-faire economics grew directly out of his experience in Louisiana and his recognition of its strategic importance as a no-man’s-land between the United States and Mexico—and for these reasons he had profound influence among Spanish policymakers well into the 1790s.

  Reviewing the early economic history of the colony, Navarro blamed both the French and the Spanish for “the decadence of Louisiana.” Under the French, royal policies had undermined the currency while local corruption had discouraged credit, “for it was a crime to demand justice for a debt contracted by a member of the council or by any person immediately related to such a member.” After the Spanish takeover, trade with France and the French Caribbean was suppressed and Louisiana was forced into a “mercenary trade with Havana,” a Spanish port that was unable to supply “articles and things of prime necessity” and where Louisiana products had low market value. “From that time,” Navarro concluded,

  the colony experienced the desertion and emigration of various families who went to the French colonies. Property lost three-fourths of its value. Houses were not repaired, for the reconstruction cost more than the capital investment. The farmer planted no more than he could consume … preferring] what he might do in another country, to the selling for a cheap price of what he had produced in this.