Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
I think you may be badly underestimating New Orleans both in actuality and potential. There were already large cotton plantations there and up the Mississippi, and the potential for development of trade and exploitation of the region from New Orleans was great, and recognized as such. The city didn't just trade with the USA, it also had Mexican trade. It's positioned so ideally as a trade entrepot it's hard to imagine it not becoming a great center.
I don't think it's arguable that the French were far better at commerical development and settlement by the late 18th c than the Spanish in every category. Besides, the Spanish had far lesser resources and way more pressing priorities.
Quebec can not only be blockaded, it can be fairly easily attacked overland. Not so New Orleans - or at least not in 1800.
I don't think it's arguable that the French were far better at commerical development and settlement by the late 18th c than the Spanish in every category. Besides, the Spanish had far lesser resources and way more pressing priorities.
Quebec can not only be blockaded, it can be fairly easily attacked overland. Not so New Orleans - or at least not in 1800.
The person doesn't matter, though I admit I thought Britain was being referred to. But anyone who can blockade French Canada most certainly can blockade French Louisiana. New Orleans isn't even a rich city by 1800, and little will change that.
Why? The money isn't really there. Louisiana is only commercially viable at the time because of American trade that goes through New Orleans, which is exactly what made it so strategically necessary to the US that they were willing to go to war for it.
If you want money, go to the Caribbean. If you want good farm lands, it's not in Louisiana. Louisiana is empty except for the Indians, and initial French settlers are going to be outweighed by settlers from the east coast soon enough.
No, it wasn't much more important by then. Not to anyone but the US, that is. New Orleans by 1800 is small, pitiful, and poor. Even if you trippled the population, the region would still be small, underpopulated, and poor. The only real trade it gets is from settlements from up the Mississippi and west of the Appalachians, where it was cheaper to float it down river and sail back up the east coast than it was to use wagons across the Appalachians at a time when roads are laughable.
But this trade is largely one-way, since shipping up stream was at a mile-per-hour pace, and almost all the settlers west of the Appalachians were from the US. This makes New Orleans by far disproportionately important to the US compared to every other power.
Royalist remanents might choose New Orleans, for some strange reason, but if they're already in the position of being driven off to New Orleans in the first place then they aren't going to be able to keep the city.
New Orleans was the target of concentrated and explicit American desire for decades. Britain knows this, because the US was on the edge of an Anglo-American alliance of OTL. France knew this, because the US told them so in trying to buy the city. New Orleans is the geopolitical linchpin in American westward expansion and security west of the Appalachians, and the US and everyone else knows it.