Just as today, in the mid-19th Century New Orleans was known as the most wide open of America's cities: a thriving melting pot teaming with creativity, intrigue, and heavy on personality. Blood was shed in duels nearly every day beneath the huge spreading oaks of New Orleans City Park. When the Civil War began, New Orleans assumed the mantle of the Union's most important military target.
The city also spawned the term Killer Hurricane. It became part our lexicon. New Orleans became a Coming Out Party for the country's first taste of the Industrial Revolution. It became a moment in time when the mindset of an entire population began to answer when confronted by a challenge, "We Will Solve the Problem!"
But it was also a time when America began asking itself, "How do we separate ourselves from the darker moments of our past?" It began to offer an answer when a drunkard and roustabout became a hero along with more than 200 others at an abandoned mission called the Alamo.
All of these events came to a head during a fateful few days in April 1865 as Lee met Grant, Lincoln and Armstrong met a man named Booth, and Hippolyte met . . . well, that's a story for the Andersonville and Cahaba Confederate POW camps.