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Colonel Bernardo de Gálvez, commander of the Spanish Army’s Fixed Louisiana Infantry Regiment, arrived in New Orleans in December 1776. He almost immediately took office as acting governor of the Louisiana colony on January 1, 1777, upon the departure of Luís de Unzaga. Gálvez was then thirty years old. Despite his youth and inexperience, he effectively dealt with various civil, military, and diplomatic challenges in the Mississippi Valley and northern Gulf Coast, not the least of which was the recently declared war between Great Britain and the colonies that would eventually become the United States.

In 1779, following Spain’s declaration of war on Great Britain, Gálvez led a small force that successfully captured Fort Bute on the Mississippi and Iberville Rivers, as well as British outposts at Baton Rouge and Natchez, effectively ending British control of the lower Mississippi Valley. Gálvez’s subsequent victories in Mobile (1780) and Pensacola (1781) restored Spanish rule in West Florida, and eliminated a British threat to the American Revolution.

Charles III elevated Gálvez to the Spanish nobility and promoted him to the post of Viceroy of New Spain formerly held by his father. For his support of the American cause, Gálvez received the official thanks of the Continental Congress. He remained popular until his death in 1786 at the age of 40.

This beautiful document from a grateful king extols Gálvez’s virtues as a soldier and as a man, and declares him to be the Viscount of Galveston and Count of Gálvez. A detail in Gálvez’s new coat of arms immortalizes Gálvez’s brave entry into Pensacola Bay. The banner on his sailing brig reads “Yo Solo” (I alone), though he had not actually been alone aboard his flagship.

Even though the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education set the stage for school desegregation in 1954, the process did not actually begin in New Orleans until the fall of 1960. On Monday, November 14, four six-year-old Black girls, accompanied by US marshals for protection, integrated two formerly all-white elementary schools. Ruby Bridges alone attended William J. Frantz Elementary, while Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost, and Gail Etienne together attended McDonough 19.

National media followed the events as they unfolded that November and December, which led to an outpouring of support for the first-grade girls during the Christmas season. In contrast to the verbal abuse that Ruby, Leona, Tessie, and Gail encountered outside of their schools, many sympathizers from across the United States sent Christmas cards offering them love and support. Of the cards on display in the Louisiana History Galleries at 533 Royal Street, I found this one to be particularly touching. The card shows four children of different ethnicities praying together—a simple, beautiful message of kindness and compassion during a dark period in our city’s history. The poem inscribed inside the card also celebrates diversity:

           When Christ said,

           “Let the children come to me!”

           He wanted all children to sit at his knee.

           He didn’t say, “Come,

           If your skin is light.”

           Or, “Come, if the slant

           To your eyes is slight.”

           For he knew it was not

           The tone of the skin

           That insured a man’s worth,

            But the heart within!

This card touched me on a personal level. My mother was born in Rangoon, Burma, called Myanmar today. When she moved to New Orleans, where I was born, she experienced prejudice because of her ethnicity and accent. Because of her experience, she instilled in me a deep respect for humanity regardless of race and ethnicity. Sixty years after these brave little girls integrated New Orleans schools, it is important to keep their stories alive. I am grateful that The Historic New Orleans Collection has given me the opportunity to engage and speak to our visitors about this momentous event, and to show them the courage found in those four six-year old girls. The message of this card is timeless and powerful, showing goodwill and kindness will always prevail among all peoples.

The presidential election of 1828 was the first in which white male Americans who did not own property had the right to vote. This group’s new enfranchisement was expressed by the election of its champion: Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. Jackson had voiced the concerns of poor, everyday Americans four years earlier, but was denied the office despite receiving the plurality of the popular vote. This only fueled Jackson and his supporters to continue fighting, and Jackson spent the next four years campaigning against those he claimed were out of touch with everyday people.

Campaign souvenirs and memorabilia were not new to American elections, but they took on a newfound importance as more and more people were allowed to vote, and Jackson’s campaign knew this well. His supporters produced and marketed everyday items and tools, such as brooches, jacket buttons, wallets, and pitchers, to remind voters of Jackson’s appeal: he was a poor Southerner by birth, a war hero, a frontiersman, and a committed Democrat. This pitcher—copper cast with lusterware, small, not particularly ornate—features an engraving of the future president captioned “General Jackson: The Hero of New Orleans.”

Upon first glance, it seems like an average piece of kitchenware that I’d assume would be found in the home of an average American in the late 1820s, and this is likely intentional: people who would want or use this everyday item were Jackson’s voter base. The message that Jackson saved New Orleans from the British with a ragtag army made up of everyday Americans was one of Jackson’s most brilliant and effective campaign strategies. This perception contributed to the boom in Jackson-related memorabilia long after he had finished running for office.

By the mid-1800s a serious problem had formed in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the centuries, the Mississippi River deposited sediment at the mouth of the river, creating sandbars that eventually prevented ships from sailing in and out of the Mississippi River basin. The Corps of Engineers proposed to Congress that a canal be built between the river and Gulf to bypass the sandbars. However, engineer James Buchanan Eads said that jetties, not canals, were the solution to the problem.

If anyone knew the Mississippi River, it was Eads. He first experienced the Mighty Mississippi as a youth in St. Louis while salvaging wrecks on the river. His diving bell invention allowed him to walk along the bottom of the river with an open-ended barrel that had a hose connected to the top, allowing air to be pumped down from a boat; and once at the muddy bottom, all senses relied on touch. He knew the river more intimately than any other engineer, so it seemed odd when Congress rejected his proposal for jetties. After a few years of persuasion, Eads finally made a deal with Congress: he would build the jetties at his own expense, and if they maintained a 30-foot channel, Congress would then pay for the jetties.

Eads wanted to build two parallel piers far out into the Gulf, which would narrow the river and increase its current. The concentrated current would then cut its own channel through the sandbar. So in 1875, two lines of pilings were driven to extend the east and west banks of South Pass, and Eads used willow “mattresses” to build up each jetty wall. These were made of trunks of willow trees that were bound together and stacked. The mattresses were held down with stones and topped with concrete. The crevices were eventually filled with sand and mud as the river flowed past them, rendering the jetties impermeable.

Eads’s jetties were completed in 1879 and maintained a 30-foot channel, eliminating the silt buildup, and opening up the mouth of the Mississippi once again to ships. New Orleans went from ninth largest port in the US to the second largest, just behind New York. This illustration from Harper’s Weekly, published in 1883, shows several views of Eads jetties at the South Pass.  The top and center scenes show ships bustling in and around the jetties. Two scenes on the left show cross section views of the 30-foot channel, and several scenes in the lower portion display various perspectives of the willow mattresses.

I have always appreciated the power of cityscapes. These lofty views can reveal the sprawl of a metropolis at a glance, orient the observer within the broader geography, and¬—as unique markers of a place, like fingerprints—inspire civic pride. Before the advent of aerial photography in the late 1850s and early 1860s, however, producing such images required considerable ingenuity from artists. John Bachmann (active 1849–85) was one of many nineteenth-century printmakers who used the bird’s-eye view to illustrate New Orleans’s growth. The perspectives in these artists’ pieces varied: some looked upriver, some downriver, some focused on a narrower slice of the city, and some pulled out for broader vistas. What stands out about this work by Bachmann, who made similar lithographs of many other cities, including New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, is its particularly ambitious scope. Many other panoramic views of New Orleans were cast from realistic vantage points—the top of St. Patrick’s Church was a popular spot—but Bachmann’s gazes out from a contrived position somewhere high above the West Bank, showing most of urban New Orleans along a sweeping curve of the Mississippi River and extending all the way to Lake Pontchartrain on the horizon. Accuracy, understandably, was an issue with many of these bird’s-eye views, though Bachmann’s work is considered relatively faithful for its time. Its most notable distortions can be seen in his emphasis of iconic buildings: St. Louis Cathedral, one hundred seventy feet tall in reality, would be seven hundred feet tall if this image were to scale. Bachmann’s dramatic portrayal of the busy port town, complete with intricately detailed steamboats chugging up and down the river, captured public interest and was reproduced many times in the United States and abroad. Today it provides a fascinating glimpse at the way many people would have imagined the breadth of New Orleans during its rapid expansion in the mid-nineteenth century.

Directories to houses of prostitution in New Orleans's infamous Storyville red-light district are collectively called Blue Books. Storyville—named for Alderman Sidney Story, who sponsored legislation to confine prostitution to a designated part of the city—occupied an area just north of the French Quarter, the site of today's Iberville public housing development. During Storyville's twenty-year existence, from 1898 to 1917, many editions of the Blue Book were issued, listing prostitutes by race and address; however, the guides among The Historic New Orleans Collection’s holdings contain no descriptions of specific sexual services and no fees. They do contain advertisements for other services and products, such as restaurants, quack cures for venereal diseases, liquors, and cigars. Most editions also include a warning that the guides “must not be mailed” because regulations banned the distribution of suggestive materials through the United States Postal Service. Blue Books were sold to men as they stepped off trains at Basin Street or were available in barbershops and saloons. Although many were distributed, authentic editions are scarce today.

Overflowing with groggeries and brothels in the mid- to late nineteenth century, Gallatin Street in the lower French Quarter notoriously found itself center stage for all forms of rioting and debauchery. Wiley Sylvester Churchill’s sarcastically titled ink-on-board depiction of these everyday mass outbreaks identifies the confusion and violence experienced by both patrons and producers. Churchill expressly pairs the wild fervor of the rioters with his own ink strokes and shading, having each pen stroke give ferocious, distinct physicality to the rioters and simultaneously shaping the group as one violent outbreak. While almost none of the subjects’ facial features can be understood, this only emphasizes the brutish nature of certain characters and the unassuming demeanor of the defeated ones. In the center of the image are two assumed prostitutes tugging at each other’s hair and clothes, while just to the right is another woman standing squarely over what appears to be her defeated, male combatant. Just to the left, a man appears to be restraining an oncoming blow from a weapon. Throughout the image’s backdrop, raised and clenched fists shoot up, ready to strike. These images pair humorously with characters such as the man to the far right, sitting with a hand resting upon his cheek, befuddled by the riot behind him. Churchill’s image powerfully displays the wide spectrum of emotions expressed by rioters, both instigators and victims alike, towards prostitution in Gallatin Street.

The focal point of the living room in the Williams Residence is the large circular coffee table. Situated near the middle of the pink and green room, the table—with its dark top, bleached bottom, and glittering gold accents—draws the eye of the visitor. The table was created in the 1940s in the shop of Leila Williams’s designer, Marc Antony, by combining two old objects to make a modern piece of furniture. The top of the table was originally part of a papier-mâché breakfast table. The tabletop, which was made in England around 1850, exhibits all the popular elements of Victorian design. Papier-mâché was a popular material used to make moveable household goods in the mid-nineteenth century, including wine coasters, trays, and breakfast tables. The lightweight pieces were decorated with gold leaf, mother of pearl inlay and painted scenes derived from popular artworks. The central scene on this tabletop shows a queen in renaissance clothing on horseback, surrounded by squires and hunting dogs. It is reminiscent of the popular 1840 romantic painting of Queen Victoria by Edwin Henry Landseer. Depictions of Victoria’s eight castles are featured on the outer rim of the tabletop. The base of the amalgam coffee table is an inverted Corinthian capital that came from a pair of cypress columns salvaged from a nineteenth-century house in New Orleans. The use of cypress is a reminder of the eighty thousand acres of cypress swamps that were the source of the Williamses’ lumber and oil fortunes. The Victorian tabletop and New Orleans capital, two nineteenth-century objects, were melded together to make a piece of twentieth-century furniture. As separate pieces, the papier-mâché tabletop and the cypress columns are reminders of wealth, art, and history, but together they create a modern form emblematic of preservation and mid-nineteenth century design.

Dr. George Humphrey Tichenor was a Confederate surgeon during the Civil War. In 1863 his leg was wounded in battle, and for fear of an infection setting in, army doctors wanted to amputate. Tichenor refused, insisting the wound be treated with an antiseptic he had formulated years earlier. Composed mostly of alcohol, with some peppermint oil and arnica, the formula healed the wound and saved Tichenor’s leg, allowing him to revolutionize medical treatments and subsequent surgeries during the war. By 1905, the Dr. G. H. Tichenor Antiseptic Co. was founded in New Orleans. The bottled antiseptic is still sold in drug stores to treat ailments ranging from cuts to sore throats.