History of Baton Rouge - Early Louisiana Statehood and Incorporation As Capital (1812-1860)

Early Louisiana Statehood and Incorporation As Capital (1812-1860)

In 1812, Louisiana was admitted to the Union as a State. As Baton Rouge was a strategic military outpost, between 1819 and 1822, the U.S. Army built the Pentagon Barracks, which became a major command post through the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). Lieutenant Colonel Zachary Taylor, supervised construction of the Pentagon Barracks and served as its commander. In the 1830s, what is known today as the "Old Arsenal" was built. The unique structure originally served as a gunpowder magazine for the U.S. Army Post.

In 1825, Baton Rouge was visited by the Marquis de Lafayette as part of his triumphal tour of the United States, and the town made him the guest of honor at a banquet and ball. To celebrate the occasion, the city changed the name of Second Street to Lafayette Street.

In 1846, the Louisiana state legislature in New Orleans, dominated in number by rural planters, decided to move the seat of government to Baton Rouge. The majority of representatives feared a concentration of power in the state's largest city. In 1840, New Orleans' population was around 102,000, then fourth largest in the U.S. Its economy was thriving, based on the domestic slave trade and the largest slave market in the nation. Products from the center of the country flowed through New Orleans for export, and ships arrived with a range of goods for the city, and the many towns upriver. The 1840 population of Baton Rouge, on the other hand, was only 2,269.

New York architect James Dakin was hired to design the new capitol in Baton Rouge. Rather than mimic the federal Capitol Building in Washington, as so many other state designers had done, he conceived a Neo-Gothic medieval castle, complete with turrets and crenellations, overlooking the Mississippi. In 1859, the Capitol was featured and favorably described in DeBow's Review, the most prestigious periodical in the antebellum South. But the riverboat pilot and writer Mark Twain loathed the sight; later in his Life on the Mississippi (1874), he wrote, "It is pathetic ... that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things ... should ever have been built in this otherwise honorable place."

Twain wrote further of the city:

"Baton Rouge was clothed in flowers, like a bride — no, much more so; like a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now — no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures. The magnolia trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dense rich foliage and huge snowball blossoms....We were certainly in the South at last; for here the sugar region begins, and the plantations — vast green levels, with sugar-mill and negro quarters clustered together in the middle distance — were in view."

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the city grew steadily as the result of steamboat trade and transportation; at the outbreak of the American Civil War, the population was 5,500 people. The Civil War halted economic progress, but the city was not physically affected until it was occupied by Union forces in 1862.