Charitable and Penal Institutions.— The State Board of Charities and Corrections can only inspect and report. The old system of leasing out convicts to private contractors was abolished by the constitution of 1898, and they are now only employed on public works or con vict farms, or in manufactures owned and operated by the State; and parish jail inmates may be employed on public works within that parish. The State Insane Asylum is at Jack son. a Lepers' Home in Iberville Parish, insti tutions for the deaf and blind at Baton Rouge and there are State hospitals at New Orleans and Shreveport. The health of New Orleans is regulated by a board of health composed of three members appointed by the New Orleans city council Churches.— The strongest denominations in order of church societies are the Baptists, Southern Methodists, the two forming the bulk of the Protestants, Roman Catholics, Presby terians. Protestant Episcopalians, Lutherans and Unitarians. The Roman Catholics are stronger here from the long Spanish and French domination than anywhere else in the South. In New Orleans are located a Roman Catholic archbishop and bishops of the Protestant and Methodist Episcopal churches. There are also Roman Catholic bishops at Natchitoches and Lafayette.
History.— The earliest knowledge of Louis-. Tana dates from the discovery of the mouth of the Mississippi in 1528 by Narvaez. De Soto, 13 years later, erased the great river on rafts at some point about the Arkansas; of the im portance of this discovery the Spaniards were wholly ignorant The next Europeans to sail on the great river were the French. In 1673 Marquette and Joliet were sent by the governor of Canada to seek the river which might lead to the great western ocean. They descended as far as the mouth of the Arkansas. In 1682 they were followed by La Salle. who completed the work of discovery and took possession of the country, which he called Louisiana, in the name of Louis XIV. In 1684 he sailed from France with colonists to form a settlement. He missed the mouth of the river, landed at Matagorda Bay and was murdered in 1687. Brave men were not lacking to take up the enterprise, and in 1698 Iberville, with his brother, Bienville, sailed from Brest for the Mississippi. Finding the Spanish in possession of Pensacola, he stayed for a short time at Mobile and then entered and explored the lower part of the rivers. His first settlement was at Biloxi, despite the protest of the Spanish governor of Pensacola. In 1702 the site of the colony was removed to Mobile. Antoine Crozat obtained the concession of Louisiana in 1712. It was handed over for 25 years to the Western or Mississippi Company, founded by John Law. Bienville was again made governor and was able to carry out his long-formed plan to create a city where is now New Orleans. Later, in 1722. he was able to make it the capital of the colony. The Western Company sent out large numbers of emigrants, and the colony increased in population, but not hi prosperity; misgov ernment and Indian wars prevented all progress. In January 1732 Louisiana was surrendered to the king. Iberville resigned in 1743 and was succeeded by Vaudreuil, under whom were is sued levee ordinances and police regulations for New Orleans. In the following years there was no improvement in the condition of the colony, of which the annual expense was a drain on the exhausted resources of France. In
1762, by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, Louisiana west of the Mississippi, together with the island of Orleans, was ceded to Spain, and in the next year Louisiana east of the Mississippi, together with Florida, was surrendered to Great Britain by the Treaty of Paris. The dissatisfaction of the Louisianians and the long delay of Spain in taking possession of her new colony gave rise to a serious revolt which was sternly suppressed by O'Reilly. He, however, provided for a form of government under which the colony made considerable progress. The great growth of the population on the upper Mississippi caused a demand for freedom from all restrictions of commerce on the river. This was obtained temporarily by concessions from the Spanish governors, but when the right of deposit was refused in 1803, there was grave danger of a descent on New Orleans. The desire of Napo leon to create a colonial empire in America led to the secret Treaty of Saint Ildefonse in 180U, by which France acquired that portion of Louis iana formerly ceded to Spain. In 1803 fear of English invasion induced Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the United States for $15,000,000.
(See ANNEXATION; LOUISIANA PURCHASE, for statistics of size and location). On 28 March 1804 the part south of lat. 33° N. was organ ized as Orleans Territory; the northern part being organized as Louisiana Territory, after ward changed to Missouri Territory. An en abling act was passed 20 Feb. 1811 to form Orleans into a State, and it was admitted 8 April 1812. The French element was so strong that the constitution allowed members of the legislature to debate either in French or in Eng lish, and the dividing line in politics was usually between the two, wth temporary alliances of other elements. The organization of the Whig party, one of whose cardinal tenets was pro tection. which helped sugar, turned Louisiana into one of the strongest Whig States in the South. she twice voting for Whig Presidents. The slavery issue, after 1860, made it more and more strongly Democratic, and in 1860 it was heavily for secession. New Orleans was cap tured by the Federal troops 25 April 1862, and the State government, whose seat had been Baton Rouge since 1852, was transferred to Opelousas. During the rest of the war the territory held by the Federals was recognized as the legitimate State government, though un der a military governor, and sent members to Congress. On 30 July 1866 an attempt of the colored leaders to hold a constitutional conven tion at New Orleans and secure the admission of their race to the franchise resulted in the massacre of many of the delegates by the whites, which had much to do with the exces sive severity with which the subsequent Recon struction government bore on the latter. (For the general history of the time, see RECON STRUCTION. For the part borne by the State in the imbroglio of 1876, see ELEcroant. Commis sion). The most important item in the subse quent history was the passing of the Constitu tion of 1898. with the ((Grandfather Clause? to disfranchise the negroes, which reduced the negro registration to about 7,000, as against over 120,000 whites.