The Wikipedia quote (above, posted last week on 2 Oct 12) is even less trustworthy than most Wiki info ~ for starters, Andrew Jackson was NEVER Governor of Louisiana. To my mind, this level of ignorance puts the entire article in doubt.

Also: Jackson TN is pretty far away from NO, especially for a 19th century narrator who never gets any further north than Lake Pontchartrain. Jackson MS is quite a bit closer, and Jackson LA even closer than that, and both are better candidates for consderation as the song's "Jackson town."

My own favorite theory links the song to the brief wave of Irish immigration into New Orleans in the 1830s, a response to the first Great Famine that occurred when immigrant labor was being recruitted to dig the New Basin Canal. So many workers on that project died of yellow fever* that word got back to Ireland, and the Irish never again emigrated to New Orleans in significant numbers.

I will grant that the line about "foreign money" strongly suggests a Civil War timeframe, due to the existence of USA and CSA currency. That does not preclude an earlier origin, however, since paper money was issued by banks in the early 19th century, not by the national government(s), and would not always be recognized as valid outside a local area.

I am NOT going to reiterate my customarily lengthy spiel about the possible origin of this lovely song; I've done so too many times already, and anyone interested can scan through the "related threads" listed above.

*Somewhere in one of those other threads, I mistakenly equated "yellow fever" with malaria, and got called on it. My bad: malaria's old-fashoined colloquial name was "yellow jaundice, not "yellow fever."