Wicked Good Living : Jackson Square

Dispatches from the Crescent City: Jackson Square — The Reckoning

I started the morning by taking a very refreshing shower. I took my morning pills at 8 a.m. as usual, but the Tuesday case had opened in transport, so I had to fish around in my backpack for loose pills. I found the most important ones and I think I got all of them, which seemed sufficient.

I walked to French Truck Coffee and ordered a large New Orleans iced coffee and a cinnamon muffin, which was basically a mini cinnamon roll and was delicious. When I stepped outside, it was around 40° and chilly. Last night, on the Streets of Sin tour, I was freezing by the end of it. I kind of wish I had brought a warmer coat and a beanie, but it was almost 80° the day before I arrived, so I didn’t think I needed it. I do have my leather jacket that I bought in Florence, so at least I feel cool.

After French Truck, I wandered over to the river and through Jackson Square. The Riverwalk along the Mississippi is quite nice, and the sun was shining. I sat on a bench in the square for a bit before realizing my hand was numb from taking photos and scribbling notes on my phone.

I don’t know if it was the coffee or a lightness I felt, but I kept zooming around the French Quarter and ran all my errands. I picked up my creamy pralines from Leah’s, grabbed a few magnets obviously, bought a sign for my classroom, and picked up a toothbrush at CVS, where I somehow managed to find travel toothpaste in an unfamiliar CVS. Yeah, I didn’t brush my teeth last night. Sue me.

My jacket pockets were bulging because I refuse to carry bags around like a tourist. I didn’t want anyone hassling or hustling me, so I dropped all my swag back at the hotel and headed out again for a frozen Irish coffee at Erin Rose, which is definitely one of my favorite places in New Orleans. Erin Rose was bustling, and by the time I finished two, it was already time for lunch.

I wanted to get a muffaletta at Napoleon House, but there was an obnoxious line halfway down the block, so I said forget it and went across the street for gumbo instead. After lunch, I headed back to Jackson Square to see what the midday vibe was like. A jazz band was playing in front of St. Louis Cathedral. I watched briefly, then went into the bar right on the square. The bartender from the night before had stored my leftover red beans and rice in the beer cooler, which I thought was very, very kind, so I went in to get a drink and leave a good tip.

Jackson Square sits at the center of a city that has never stayed still. French hands laid it out. Spanish rule reshaped it. The United States claimed it with the stroke of a pen through the Louisiana Purchase. A deal struck between Thomas Jefferson and the First Consul of France, Napoleon Bonaparte. Flags changed. The square remained.

Andrew Jackson’s statue dominates the space, frozen mid charge, horse reared back, posture confident, defiant. It is easy to forget how this came to be. Jackson did not come to this city easily. He fought his way to it.

In the winter of 1814, Jackson marched his army through swamps to defend New Orleans from the British during the War of 1812. The conditions in the swamp wore men down. Shoulder-deep water, mosquitoes big enough to stand flat-footed and eat your lunch, alligators and deadly snakes moving through the same mud as exhausted soldiers. Disease spread faster than orders. Many of the men were poorly trained, poorly supplied, and badly outnumbered. Jackson pressed on anyway.

The Battle of New Orleans was fought after the War of 1812 had technically already ended. The Treaty of Ghent had been signed in Europe weeks earlier. No one in Louisiana knew it yet. News traveled slowly in those days. So they fought.

The British tested Jackson’s hold on the American defensive line for days, then launched a final assault on January 8. Jackson decisively defeated the British and was widely celebrated as the second coming of George Washington for defending the United States against the British. Washington had won independence and Jackson defended it.

Jackson became a symbol of American resolve, a man willing to endure hardship for an idea. The United States was still a young country on shaky ground, and Jackson’s victory gave it confidence. He was celebrated not because he was kind and gentle, but because he was committed. He believed in the country fiercely enough to suffer for it.

That is the version of Jackson this square was built to honor.

Time complicated that image. As the country matured, so did its memory. The same man once praised as a defender of the nation became a figure of moral reckoning. His role in the Indian Removal Act. The violence inflicted on Native nations. The cost of expansion paid by people who were never asked. The enslaved, whose humanity was postponed in the name of expansion. History did not change what Jackson did. It changed how we understood it.

We tend to think of heroes as permanent. We assume that once someone occupies that place in our lives, they will always belong there. But history rarely works that way. We like to believe that meaning stays fixed. That once someone earns a place in history, that place is secure. But history is not a monument. It is something that changes as time adds context and clarity. Time widens the lens. New facts surface. Old actions are reexamined. What once looked like resolve can start to resemble cruelty. What once read as dedication can begin to feel like disregard. Jackson was celebrated here as a defender of the city and the nation, a man willing to march through swamps and disease and danger to hold New Orleans.

Standing in this square now, it is impossible not to feel how much that story has changed. The figure remains, but the meaning does not. History keeps asking us to look again, not to erase the past, but to understand it more honestly than we were able to before.

Jackson Square holds all of that at once. The pride. The damage. The illusion of permanence. The reckoning.

We revise what we once believed not because it was meaningless, but because we see more clearly.