French Quarter New Orleans Tours

08/05/2026

In 1844, a New Orleans lawyer won an election by loading steamboats full of strangers and floating them downriver to vote again and again. 🗳️

He was John Slidell, and he was one of the most powerful and slippery men Louisiana ever produced. A transplanted New Yorker who reinvented himself as a Creole gentleman, he became a lawyer, a congressman, and a master of the one art that truly ran antebellum Louisiana, politics without scruple.

In the presidential contest of 1844, Slidell needed votes in the sparsely settled parishes below New Orleans, Plaquemines chief among them. So he manufactured them. According to the accounts that scandalized the nation, he chartered steamboats, packed them with hundreds of men from the city, many of them recent arrivals who had no right to vote at all, and carried them from polling place to polling place along the lower river. At each stop they cast a ballot, climbed back aboard, and steamed down to do it again. Whole precincts recorded more votes than they had residents.

The Plaquemines frauds became a byword for stolen elections, and yet they worked. The tainted returns helped swing Louisiana, and the country tilted toward the men Slidell served. He would go on to become a United States senator, then slip abroad as a Confederate envoy, spending the Civil War charming the courts of Europe while his home state bled.

Slidell was never really punished. That was the lesson, and it is an old Louisiana lesson. Power here has always known how to dress corruption in fine clothes and a warm accent. Long before Huey Long, before the machine bosses and the sheriffs who owned their parishes, there was a smiling lawyer on a levee, counting men off a boat.

We tell his story not to celebrate it, but because it is part of the hard, honest truth of who we are. Louisiana has always bred both the reformer and the rogue, and sometimes they wore the same face. Remember him, and you understand a little more about the ground you stand on. ⚜️

08/04/2026

They say that on rainy nights in the French Quarter, if you stand near the old cathedral before dawn, you can still hear a lone voice singing the Kyrie. They say it belongs to Pere Dagobert. 🌧️

The story reaches back to 1769, one of the most dramatic moments in Louisiana's colonial history. France had secretly handed the colony to Spain, and the proud French and Creole citizens of New Orleans rebelled against their new rulers. The rebellion failed. The Spanish general Alejandro O'Reilly crushed it and had the leading rebels executed, then reportedly forbade their grieving families from giving them a proper Christian burial. Their bodies were left in the open as a warning.

Into this cruelty stepped Pere Dagobert, a beloved Capuchin priest who had served the city for decades and had baptized, married, and buried its people through good times and bad. According to legend, in the dead of a rainy night, he quietly gathered the bodies of the fallen rebels, and with the grieving mothers and widows following behind, carried them into the church. There, in the darkness, he sang a soft funeral Kyrie for their souls and gave them the burial the Spanish had denied.

The rain, they say, hid the sound and covered the secret. By morning the bodies were gone and the families had their peace.

Whether every detail is true, the legend captures something real about this city, a defiance wrapped in faith, a refusal to let power have the final word over love and grief. And so the story goes that Pere Dagobert never truly left. On quiet, rainy mornings, his mournful Kyrie still drifts through the Quarter, a priest forever singing the dead home.

Some men are remembered for their power. Pere Dagobert is remembered for his mercy. And in New Orleans, mercy echoes longer than any empire. 🕊️

07/31/2026

Louisiana was once the greatest get rich scheme in the world, and it nearly took France down with it. The man behind it was a Scottish gambler named John Law. 💰

In 1717, France was drowning in debt after the long reign of Louis XIV. Into this desperation stepped John Law, a brilliant and charming Scotsman with a gift for numbers and a taste for risk. He convinced the French crown to let him run a new venture called the Company of the West, later the Mississippi Company, which held the trading rights to France's vast Louisiana colony.

Law promised investors that Louisiana was a land of gold, silver, and endless riches. Shares in his company soared. Ordinary people and nobles alike poured their fortunes in, and the word millionaire was coined in these very months to describe those who struck it rich on paper. Paris went mad with speculation.

There was just one problem. Louisiana was not a land of gold. It was a hard, humid frontier of swamp and forest, and it needed people to survive. So to make the dream look real, Law's company shipped colonists to Louisiana by the thousands, some willing, many not. Convicts, orphans, the poor, and the desperate were gathered up and sent across the ocean to populate the settlements along the Gulf, including the brand new town of New Orleans, founded in 1718.

Then the bubble burst. By 1720 investors realized the riches were imaginary, the shares collapsed, fortunes vanished overnight, and John Law fled France in disgrace. The Mississippi Bubble became one of history's first great financial crashes.

But here is the strange gift buried in the ruin. The colonists Law sent to prop up his fantasy stayed. They built lives in the mud and the heat, and their descendants became the founding families of French Louisiana.

A con man's lie put real people on this land. And out of that broken dream, a whole culture was born. 🌾

07/18/2026

Antebellum New Orleans held a community that existed almost nowhere else in the South at that scale: thousands of free people of color, les gens de couleur libres. 🏰

Under French and Spanish rule, Louisiana had developed a three tier society rather than the strict two tier world of the Anglo South. Between enslaved people and white residents stood a large class of free Black and mixed race Creoles. Many were educated, some in France. They owned property and businesses, worked as skilled artisans, merchants, and craftsmen, and built the ironwork, the furniture, and the buildings the city still admires.

They had their own newspapers, their own schools, their own literary and musical culture, their own Catholic churches and benevolent societies. Some were quite wealthy. They occupied a real but fragile middle position, with more freedom than almost any Black community in the region and never anything close to equality.

When war and Reconstruction came, it was often from this educated, organized community that Louisiana's earliest civil rights leaders emerged. ✊ The Comite des Citoyens behind the Plessy case grew directly from this world.

A whole layer of Louisiana society that the simple version of history leaves out entirely.

11/08/2024

This was during my grandmother’s years! It’s so cool to see how the city was during their time!❤️

11/06/2024

If you’re celebrating victory today, I hope you’re able to do so graciously.

If you’re handling defeat today, I hope you’re able to find peace.

Your neighbor is still your neighbor. Despite how today may feel, there’s more that connects us than divides us. I hope we can begin to stand on that common ground in the future rather than on the things that separate us. Be kind today. ❤️💙

03/16/2024

Amazing history!

“For more than 365 days WWL Louisiana documented two Black Masking Indians, capturing each step and process as they made their suit.”

12/09/2023

The craziest thing… I went to Dollar Tree today. There was only one lady working in the entire store. The lines were backed up to the back of the building. I began to get irritated, until someone said that she was the only one there working. Usually, I would just leave the buggy and go, but today was different. I looked at this lady, she was a bit stressed, but smiling and checking everyone out as quickly as she could. I decided to stay, since she was so game! I thanked her profusely for staying and taking care of everyone and told her how much she was appreciated today by me and I’m sure, many others. Sometimes people just step up & make a difference! I’m thankful for her & the many others who do the same!

03/21/2022

It’s about time! Come on down, y’all!

NOLA Ready: Requirements on COVID-19 vax/negative test have been lifted in NOLA, effective as of today. Find more info at

Protecting public health and safety will continue to drive the City of New Orleans’ response to COVID-19. Procedures and decisions will be informed by State and Federal guidance, an internal City task force, external advisory groups, and robust data analysis. Specific public health milestones mus....