Three Flags Over Fort San Carlos

The bluff above the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge is a good place to put a fort. The French figured that out in seventeen nineteen, when they threw up a small military post on the high ground to control river traffic and warn against flooding. The small French garrison post went by more than one name over the years, as river forts often did. For forty-four years, French soldiers watched the river from this bluff.

Then, in seventeen sixty-three, France lost the Seven Years' War, and with it, this entire stretch of the Mississippi's east bank. Britain took over. The fort became British, the surrounding colony became British West Florida, and the settlers who arrived in the following years were largely Protestant English-speakers from the seaboard colonies. A city that had begun as a French trading outpost was suddenly an outpost of the British Empire.

That lasted sixteen years. In seventeen seventy-nine, Spain entered the American Revolution on the side of the colonists, and the Spanish governor of Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez, moved fast. He marched a mixed force of Spanish regulars, French Creoles, free Black militia, and Choctaw allies up from New Orleans and stormed the British fort at Baton Rouge in a single day. The British garrison surrendered on September twenty-first, seventeen seventy-nine. Gálvez renamed the fort San Carlos, and Baton Rouge became Spanish.

What all this colonial shuffling meant on the ground was a population that had layered loyalties, layered languages, and a sharp awareness that flags changed but the river did not. By eighteen ten, the descendants of those British settlers would stage their own revolt against the Spanish, an event we'll hear about shortly, right here on these same bluffs.

Three empires in less than a century. The river watched all of them arrive, and watched all of them leave.