First Presbyterian Church

Benjamin Morgan Palmer came to the pulpit in 1856 and stayed until his death in 1902. On November 29, 1860, he preached a Thanksgiving sermon arguing that Southerners held a divine trust to keep and extend slavery, and urging Southern states to call conventions and leave the Union. It was reprinted across the South. Palmer later became the first moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States, and he and the congregation campaigned against the Louisiana lottery. The downtown building was sold to the federal government in 1938, and the church reopened uptown in 1939.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 1.7 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 2.6 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• Congo Square — 2.8 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 2.8 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• First Unitarian Universalist Church — steps away
• Newcomb Pottery Garden — 0.7 mi
• H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College — 0.7 mi
• Carrollton Cemetery No. 1 — 0.9 mi