Spanish Colonial Louisiana

Spanish Colonial Louisiana

Spain governed the colony of Louisiana for nearly four decades, from 1763 through 1802, returning it to France for a few months until the Louisiana Purchase conveyed it to the United States in 1803. Under kings Carlos III and Carlos IV, the administration of Spain’s Atlantic empire was strengthened and improved through a number of policies called the Bourbon Reforms. In Louisiana the period began amid uncertainty and a major rebellion, but it ended with an unprecedented degree of prosperity. By disbursing large annual subsidies and employing competent administrators who were culturally sensitive to the colony’s French-speaking Creole population, the Spanish managed to accomplish what their French predecessors had never done—make Louisiana a relatively stable, growing outpost, even as the turbulent age of Atlantic revolutions unfolded.

The period was also marked by the dramatic expansion of slavery in the young colony. The unprecedented arrival of thousands of enslaved Africans, combined with Spain’s liberal manumission policies, contributed to the growth of a caste of free people of color. Many of them lived in New Orleans, which developed significantly during the Spanish period and was largely rebuilt in the wake of catastrophic fires in 1788 and 1794. Driving these demographic changes was the lower Mississippi Valley’s plantation economy, which accelerated in the mid-1790s as cotton and sugar replaced tobacco and indigo as the region’s major cash crops. Trade and credit connections multiplied—both upriver toward the expanding American West and downriver toward the Gulf—as New Orleans grew into a vital port integrated into the Atlantic economy. By the time Louisiana was sold (over Spanish objections) to the United States, it had been transformed from a sparsely settled military buffer zone into a dynamic commercial center.

1762–1769: Cession, Uncertainty, and Rebellion

The colony’s economic potential was, ironically, only a secondary consideration for Spanish officials when they initially gained possession of Louisiana through a peace treaty. During the French and Indian War (1756–1763), King Carlos III of Spain supported his Bourbon cousin, Louis XV of France, only to lose important colonies in Cuba and the Floridas to the victorious British. Likewise, the French had lost their northern colony of Canada to Great Britain, so as partial compensation to Spain for its losses, France ceded the rest of its North American territory—Louisiana—to Spain with the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau, which was kept secret until France could negotiate peace with the British. The French preferred Louisiana to be under Spanish control than in the hands of Great Britain.

In 1763 France, Spain, and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the French and Indian War. For the Spanish, Louisiana would now serve as a generously subsidized military colony, keeping lucrative Mexican mines safe from the ambitions of British North America, which now extended as far west as the Mississippi River.

When Spain inherited Louisiana, the colony was vast and sparsely populated. It stretched north to remote French fur-trading settlements on the upper Mississippi River and west into the Texas borderlands, where Natchitoches served as a key Indian trading post. Relations with Native American tribes required lavish gifts that consumed royal funds. The colony’s nonnative inhabitants numbered about 7,500, and the majority lived along the lower Mississippi River. About a third of them were enslaved Africans, whose population had not increased since the wave of slave imports sponsored by the Company of the Indies in the 1720s. Too remote for regular trading connections with the broader Atlantic world, Louisiana remained what historian Daniel Usner has called a “frontier exchange economy,” where Indians and settlers traded furs and subsistence crops in relative isolation from commercial markets.

Around New Orleans, however, a nascent white Creole merchant-planter class began to emerge in the second-generation colonists who were descended from the French and German settlers. During the colonial period, “creole” (criollo in Spanish) denoted people (free or enslaved) and livestock bred in the New World colonies, as opposed to those born in the Old World. With fewer sentimental ties to Europe, white Creoles evidenced a strong determination to maintain their own hard-won social supremacy over officials sent from Europe. This class had dominated the colony through the Superior Council in the final years of French neglect, and, feeling threatened, they mounted a serious challenge to Spanish rule in the Insurrection of 1768.

This rebellion originated when the first Spanish governor, distinguished scholar and explorer Antonio de Ulloa, arrived in New Orleans in March 1766. Because he lacked military reinforcement, he failed to immediately proclaim Spanish sovereignty. Instead, Ulloa governed for two years through the pliant French governor, Charles-Phillippe Aubry. Despite his weak position, Ulloa sought to impose mercantilist trade restrictions and to curtail the Superior Council’s authority. The response of the Creoles, led by attorney general Nicolas de Lafrénière, was to banish Ulloa from the colony in November 1768. Spain, in turn, dispatched a far more determined governor, the Irish-born Alejandro O’Reilly, who arrived in August 1769 with a formidable force of 2,000 troops aboard twenty ships. O’Reilly immediately proclaimed Spanish sovereignty and abolished the Superior Council outright. The leading conspirators were arrested; six were imprisoned in Havana, Cuba, and their property was confiscated. Lafrénière and four others were publicly executed by firing squad.

Spanish rule in Louisiana has been portrayed in history books and articles as merciless military despotism, personified by “Bloody O’Reilly” and his violent suppression of the revolt. In truth, Lafrénière and his co-conspirators were more interested in maintaining local autonomy than in defending French rule. In the decades after 1768, prominent Louisianans lived comfortably and prosperously under Spanish governance.

O’Reilly remained in Louisiana for only six months, but he created an enduring set of institutions and laws. The colonial government he designed was militarily, judicially, and ecclesiastically subordinate to the governor-general of Cuba, and Havana became the main trading center for Louisiana’s merchants. O’Reilly crafted an adaptation of the colony’s existing French laws, bringing them in line with those of Spain; the result, thereafter known as the O’Reilly Code, became the basis of the colony’s legal system. Day-to-day governance became the province of the newly formed Cabildo, a combined municipal council and judicial system where titled seats could be purchased or inherited. O’Reilly also divided Louisiana into parishes, instituted a new slave code that banned Indian slavery, and reorganized the regular and militia forces, including a battalion of free men of color. By the time he handed over power to his lieutenant, Luis de Unzaga y Amezaga, in February 1770, O’Reilly had molded almost every aspect of Louisiana’s civic life into a form that would not change substantially until 1803.

1770–1783: Peace, Partnership, and a Nearby Revolution

Unzaga set the tone for subsequent Spanish governors by embracing Louisiana’s elite Creoles, especially when he married one—Marie Elizabeth St. Maxent, the oldest daughter of a prominent New Orleans planter. Unzaga’s successor, Bernardo de Galvez, later married Marie’s younger sister, Felicité, and many other Spanish officials followed the governors’ example, marrying power with wealth and influence by wedding daughters of the Creole elite. It soon became clear that Spanish rule would allow Louisianans significant autonomy, as the Creole-dominated Cabildo was given wide latitude in local governance. Spain’s administrators focused instead on organizing the military and collecting customs revenues. Nor did Spanish officials impose their language on Louisiana; all Spain’s governors and colonial officials spoke French.

Under Spanish rule, Louisiana’s population began to grow, especially through renewed immigration from various directions. Acadian immigrants (whose descendants are known as Cajuns) were by far the most numerous, having been evicted from their North Atlantic homeland by the British during the French and Indian War. As many as five thousand Acadians arrived between 1762 and 1770; most settled in the bayous and prairie country south and west of New Orleans. Encouraged by Spain to populate undeveloped areas, groups of Canary Islanders, or Isleños, also began to arrive in the 1770s, some settling in Galveztown in Ascension Parish, others traveling downriver from New Orleans to what is now St. Bernard Parish. Settlers from Malaga, Spain, founded the town of New Iberia. Numerous Anglo-Americans also came to Spanish Louisiana, some as urban merchants, others as pioneer settlers lured by free land in the regions farther upriver. After the St. Domingue Revolution (1791–1803), numerous émigrés from that French colony also found their way to Louisiana.

In the early years of Spanish rule, despite the easing of ethnic and national tensions and the colony’s dramatic population surge, economic growth came more slowly. Beginning in 1770 the Spanish crown promoted the development of Louisiana tobacco culture by requiring the royal tobacco monopoly in Mexico to purchase the entire crop from the Natchitoches area. Soon the Louisiana product was in high demand, its quality judged to be among the best in North America. When the Spanish first acquired Louisiana, forty-nine Natchitoches planters harvested eighty thousand pounds of tobacco per year; by 1791 eighty-three plantations there yielded more than seven hundred thousand pounds. The population of both free and enslaved people grew dramatically in this region as well; the number of slaves more than tripled between 1765 and 1803, from 269 to 948 people. Tobacco production flourished so quickly that by 1789, warehouses in Mexico and Spain had large surpluses on hand. Mexico stopped importing Louisiana tobacco entirely, and Spain cut its quota to forty thousand pounds, leaving Natchitoches planters without buyers. The market for animal pelts had also collapsed from oversupply in the 1770s. In the 1790s Louisiana planters began to shift away not only from tobacco but also from indigo because that crop, too, proved difficult to sell in the global market. Meanwhile, with no manufacturing to speak of, Louisianans still had to import basic items, such as clothing, shoes, soap, glass bottles, and alcohol. Yet stringent Spanish restrictions on commerce inhibited growth in imports and exports alike.

Unzaga, Galvez, and their successors dealt with this situation in part by turning an official blind eye to the ever-increasing contraband trade. The British and American traders were technically forbidden to do business in Spanish New Orleans, but, in practice, the colony depended on them. In 1772 Unzaga made a brief show of expelling the Anglo merchants, and it seemed to satisfy Madrid. In reality, official tolerance of smuggling became the norm and led to corruption and favoritism. Colonial officials throughout New Spain became so accustomed to complying with royal decrees superficially while skirting their substance that they developed a bureaucratic shorthand for it: obedezcopero no cumplo (“I obey but I do not fulfill”).

As Spanish Louisiana grew, the eastern half of North America was plunged into war when the thirteen British Atlantic colonies declared their independence in 1776. Spain, seeing a chance to reclaim the Floridas from Britain, entered the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) on the side of America (and France) in the summer of 1779. Under Governor Galvez’s personal leadership, a mixed force of Creole militiamen, Spanish regulars, and volunteer free men of color overwhelmed the British garrisons at Manchac and Baton Rouge. The group went on to seize Mobile (Alabama) and eventually Pensacola (Florida), finally capturing the latter outpost in May 1781 after a prolonged siege and unsuccessful British relief efforts. These campaigns made a hero of the dashing Galvez. They also ensured, in the ensuing peace settlement, that the Floridas would be retroceded to Spain after twenty chaotic years under British rule. For the first time, Carlos III’s possessions surrounded the entire Gulf of Mexico—from the Yucatan to the southern tip of East Florida—and it appeared a rejuvenated Spanish Atlantic empire might be poised for a new era of dominance.

Slavery Expansion and Gens de Couleur Libres

As Creole elites began to prosper under Spanish rule, they sought labor for the plantations that now dotted the banks of the Mississippi River as far north as Pointe Coupée. At the same time, British slave traders based in Jamaica began a sharp increase in slave re-exports to Spanish America. Both of these circumstances—increased demand and ample supply—led to a dramatic expansion of African slavery in Louisiana. It was not Spain’s intent to suddenly increase the slave supply, but Spanish governors were not inclined to block the human traffic that their Creole allies so obviously desired. The surge in slave importation in the 1770s and 1780s transformed Louisiana’s economy and culture alike.

Before 1782 the British slave trade was illegal in Louisiana, but ships with a stated destination of Manchac in British West Florida could not be refused entry to the Mississippi River. Once there, they found it easy to sell their human cargo to Louisiana planters. By the time the Spanish legalized this trade in 1782, the slave population of Louisiana had already more than doubled. During the next decade, an average of 800 enslaved people per year disembarked in New Orleans, with a peak number of 1,550 arriving in 1787. In the context of the total Atlantic slave trade, these numbers were still small; however, for Louisiana, they were enormous. All together, the thirty-seven years of Spanish rule saw a tenfold increase in the enslaved population, with as many as twenty-nine thousand slaves arriving in Louisiana—almost all of them African, almost all brought via Jamaica.

This sudden influx “re-Africanized” a slave population that had adapted to the Creole, French-speaking ways of the previous regime. African music and drumming began to be heard on rural plantations as well as during Sunday gatherings in an open field (now known as Congo Square) in New Orleans. As enslaved Africans spoke their native languages in the streets and servants’ quarters, the African population became both more visible and more distinctly foreign.

Differences in the laws that governed slaves and slaveholders in the Spanish colonial empire led to other significant social changes in Louisiana. Wealthy Creole plantation owners chafed under new rules, resenting the limits imposed on them and fearing that the more lenient policies would spur slave revolts. The mass meetings in Congo Square, for example, could not have taken place under the French regime. The Spanish legal code also made provisions for enslaved workers who were severely abused: they could—and did—lodge formal complaints against their masters. While the overall conditions of slavery remained inhumane and unjust, a few of the people held as property managed to improve their lives. Manumission was more readily available during the Spanish period than it had been under French rule. Both colonial regimes permitted slaves to earn wages by hiring themselves out when their labor was not needed by their own master. But only the Spanish slave code permitted the practice of coartación, a system of slave self-purchase. Typically, 2 to 4 percent of the slave population might be manumitted per year, about half through coartación; women made up a considerable majority of those freed. Coartación accelerated following the two New Orleans fires as the Spanish Crown invested heavily to rebuild the city and hired many slaves to do the construction—in effect, financing their ability to purchase their own freedom.

In time, these manumissions led to the formation of a distinct class of gens de couleur libres, or free people of color, who numbered about fifteen hundred by 1803. The libres worked as laborers, storekeepers, and skilled craftsmen; a small minority became slaveowners themselves. The most prestigious male libres bore arms as members of the moreno and pardo volunteer militia companies (the former for blacks and the latter for mulattos, or mixed-race individuals).

1783–1795: Miró, Carondelet, and a World of Revolution

After the Pensacola campaign, Galvez appointed his aide-de-camp Esteban Rodríguez Miró as acting governor. Appointed full governor in 1785, Miró served until 1791, making his tenure the longest of any Spanish governor of Louisiana. In these years it became clear that the territorial ambitions of the British colonists had been tame compared with those of the newly independent Americans. Louisiana’s connections with the United States, both profitable and destabilizing, soon became the central fact and a key problem of Miró’s administration.

Even before the end of the Revolutionary War, settlers had begun to migrate across the Appalachians into what became the new states of Kentucky and Tennessee. Further south, both Spain and the United States claimed the region around Natchez on the Mississippi River’s east bank. Miró took a twofold approach to this conflict: he offered land grants and promises of religious tolerance to induce Americans to settle in Spanish territory while at the same time encouraging and fomenting separatist movements in the American West. Thousands of American settlers—including such well-known figures as Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark—gladly swore Spanish loyalty oaths in exchange for lands in Louisiana and West Florida. A settlement along the Ouachita River at Fort Míro (now Monroe) extended Spanish influence northward.