Louisiana

The state that still runs on French law, bought in a sale neither side expected. France founded the colony in 1699 and New Orleans in 1718, ceded it to Spain in 1762, took it back in 1800, and sold the whole watershed to the United States in 1803 for about fifteen million dollars after Napoleon's attempt to reconquer Saint-Domingue failed - the Haitian revolution is the reason the Louisiana Purchase happened. Jefferson had sent envoys to buy New Orleans and was offered eight hundred thousand square miles. The state kept its civil law tradition, derived from French and Spanish codes rather than English common law, and it is still the only state that does; its subdivisions are parishes, not counties. Its population was equally distinctive: francophone Creoles, Acadians expelled from Nova Scotia who became Cajuns, and a large community of free people of colour with property and education unmatched in the South. Sugar and cotton made it rich and made slavery brutal. New Orleans was the largest slave market in the country. Jazz was invented there. Hurricane Katrina flooded eighty per cent of the city in 2005 after the levees failed. The coastline is losing land continuously. Baton Rouge is the capital and New Orleans the largest city. The Mississippi delta forms much of its southern edge. Mardi Gras and its krewes date from the early nineteenth century. Tabasco has been made on Avery Island since 1868. The state has the highest incarceration rate in the country. Its parishes were originally ecclesiastical divisions under Spanish rule.

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