One A Spot on the Globe New Orleans assaulted the senses with friendly weapons. Bitter aromas from its coffeehouses mingled with smells from European, African, and Caribbean kitchens, spilling into streets redolent of rose and citrus gardens, warehouses of pungent sugar and tobacco, the acrid droppings of cart horses, and the fishy tang of the great river. Street mongers'' cries hawked everything from bread to silks, vying with shouting auctioneers selling cattle and slaves, the rhythms of shod hooves and ironbound carriage wheels, the boasts of carousing riverboatmen, and the puffing stacks and belching boilers when a steamboat made landing. Most of all, there were the sights of the city: the many-colored wooden buildings lining most of its seventy blocks, broadclothed and beaver-hatted gentlemen in their countinghouses, aproned merchants at shop doors, buckskinned upriver backwoodsmen on the streets, ladies in Parisian fashion strutting the banquettes, and Choctaw women in deerskin and gingham. Everywhere were the dusky faces of slaves and the formerly enslaved, and the coffeed complexions of mulattoes and quadroons inhabiting the city''s almost unique terra incognita between white and black. A sightseer might roam the known world or simply come to the crescent bend of the Mississippi and see it all in New Orleans. No wonder a late war visitor declared, "I could scarcely imagine myself in an American place." Some 25,000 people inhabited the place by late 1814, forty percent of them slaves or freedmen, making it the infant nation''s sixth largest city.

Americans were but a quarter of the white population. The rest bled French or Spanish blood, most of them creoles born there or in the Caribbean, and most resenting the American arrivZes since the 1803 Purchase. The creoles clung to Catholicism, spurned English, and practiced an indolence that affronted the ambitious Yankees. Everything was an excuse for a party, even saints'' days, when sexes and races mixed inappropriately, the men got drunk, and everyone feasted. Language defined politics and loyalties. Few Federalists or Republicans here; they were French or American. Even the Francophile Jefferson feared the creoles were so immured in French and Bourbon ideology that New Orleans might drift back to France or Spain. Whoever governed it controlled the commerce and security of the entire American interior from the Alleghenies to the Pacific.

More than a third of the nation''s produce now passed through its wharves and warehouses. Attorney Abraham Ellery was not overly hyperbolic in calling the city "the deposit and Key of the Western World." Nor is it any wonder that, before he bought Louisiana, Jefferson foretold that "there is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy." It was New Orleans. English eyes had long looked in that direction. Leaders in London considered a plan to overwhelm the Spaniards there in 1770 to seize its trade in indigo and furs. Two years later the British commander in North America proposed to anchor transports in Lake Borgne, northeast of the city, and send boats rowing eighteen miles from the lake up its sluggish tributary Bayou Bienvenue to land just seven miles from the city, and in 1781 another plan emerged that proposed to do the same. Now, more than three decades later, a new war raged, yet the creoles outside the city took so little interest in it that the American deputy attorney general feared only a British invasion could rouse them.

An invasion is exactly what they got. Shortly before dawn on December 13, 1814, an American commodore commanding a miniature squadron of seven sailing sloops and schooners, with just 25 cannon and 204 men, had his flotilla off Malheureaux Island, 75 miles northeast of New Orleans and 30 miles from the entrance to Lake Borgne. As the first glimmers of light penetrated mists blanketing the water, a nightmare emerged from the gloom to crawl toward him. The British had not forgotten those earlier plans. Forty-five boats mounting 42 guns were rowing 1,200 redcoats toward him to board his squadron. The commodore knew very well that at that moment he was all that stood between the enemy and New Orleans. The War Office in London meant to change the dynamic in North America. In 1812-1813, Kentucky and Tennessee sent thousands of militia north to threaten Canada.

Divert that supply of volunteers elsewhere, and His MajestyÕs hold in Canada would be more secure. The raid on Washington and Maryland was one such diversion. A similar strike somewhere below Tennessee held promise of diverting even more. The ideal place was the Gulf Coast and particularly New Orleans. Ironically, even Americans had mused on plots to take the city. In 1804 the embittered vice president Aaron Burr, his presidential ambitions dashed, proposed to seize newly purchased Louisiana and hand it to Britain in return for half a million dollars. London ignored Burr''s offer, but by 1806 he planned to use Louisiana as his base for the conquest of Spain''s Mexico and Texas provinces, implying that he would create a new southwest empire with himself as ruler. Many in New Orleans supported him, not least the Irish-born lawyer Lewis Kerr.

An early champion of Jefferson''s Republicans, he had a magnetic attraction for controversy. In 1802, on the advice of his friend Colonel Andrew Jackson of the Tennessee militia, Kerr moved to Natchez, where he made a fast friend in the governor of Mississippi Territory, William C. C. Claiborne, who appointed him attorney general. Aged just twenty-seven, that precocious Virginian had already been a supreme court judge in Tennessee, the youngest congressman in history, governor of Mississippi, and then, in 1803, governor of the Orleans Territory of Louisiana, a position the jealous Jackson had coveted. Claiborne actually sent Kerr to New Orleans ahead of himself to survey the local militia, and on taking office made the Irishman its chief of staff. The authoritarian Kerr was unpopular, thanks not least to his claims of kinship to Robert Dundas, soon to be Viscount Melville and Britain''s First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lieutenant General John Hely-Hutchinson (Baron Hutchinson). Some suspected Kerr''s loyalty, but Claiborne steadily advanced him and even had him codify the territory''s criminal law.

Then Kerr fell under Burr''s spell. He began recruiting men for an "army" that he would lead to conquer Spain''s provinces in North and South America and promised British assistance, thanks to his influential "relations." Kerr courted officers of the United States Army and tried to enlist the already legendary Reuben Kemper. Six feet tall, powerfully built, hazel eyes glowing from a face deeply scarred by Spaniard foes, Kemper and his brothers had led resistance to Spanish rule in the West Florida parishes above New Orleans that both Spain and the United States claimed. The nation watched via newspaper coverage in 1805 when the Spaniards beat and kidnapped the Kempers from their Mississippi homes, only for them to be saved from prison or death by the United States military. Reuben later confronted his kidnappers one by one, exacting revenge with bullwhip and knife, and carved notches in the ears of one as a warning to all. This was the kind of man Kerr wanted. He met with Reuben and his brother Samuel, boasted of the important backing he enjoyed, asked them to raise men in Kentucky and Tennessee, and promised money in abundance, even if banks must be robbed.

Then another Irishman stepped into the picture, Judge James Workman. He had earlier called on Britain to forcibly seize Louisiana. When he was ignored, he approached Jefferson, who showed no more interest than the British. After the 1803 purchase, Workman moved to New Orleans and soon fell into Kerr''s orbit. In January 1805 they joined lawyer Edward Livingston, merchant Beverly Chew, Orleans Gazette, for the Country editor John Bradford, and several others to form the Mexican Association of New Orleans, with Workman as president and its goal to seize Mexico. The connection with Burr was transparent. The Kempers wanted nothing to do with the scheme, and Reuben went to Washington to alert Jefferson, but the president was already aware of Burr''s plans. Governor Claiborne also refused to cooperate and fell out with both Irishmen, Workman dismissing him thereafter as "a mauled bitch.

" By temperament affable, Claiborne quickly adapted to dealing with the prickly creole population, married the daughter of a prominent family, and confronted the daunting task of merging a population of Catholic Frenchmen and Spaniards with the predominantly Protestant American ZmigrZs and their new democratic institutions. "There was a strange fascination in his manners," recalled one of those Americans, but there was also a crafty politician. "He never refused, but always promised." His diplomacy did not work with General James Wilkinson, sent by Jefferson in 1806 to secure the city against further plots. Greedy, autocratic, and treasonous, Wilkinson was a paid Spanish spy as well as an American general. He simply ignored the governor and began arresting anyone suspected of complicity with Burr, with whom he was himself in league until he betrayed Burr, too. Wilkinson censored mail and instituted virtual martial law, one observer declaring that "his visit to New-Orleans was like that of a pestilence." Wilkinson arrested Kerr and Workman, accusing them of sedition, but juries twice failed to convict.

Both just disappeared in early 1809. Workman settled in Havana for several years. Kerr moved to the Bahamas to prac.