DOTTED AROUND NEW Orleans—the city considered to be the most “French” in the United States—are a number of tiled plaques on the side of buildings. They commemorate former street names, but they are Spanish, not French. A regal coat of arms sits to the left of the lettering on one of them, on chipped, uneven tiles. It reads: “When New Orleans was the Capital of the Spanish Province of Louisiana 1762–1803 / This square bore the name Plaza de Armas.” Today, that plaza is called Jackson Square and is the heart of the Vieux Carré, or the French Quarter. Most of New Orleans’s millions of tourists walk past these plaques without a second’s curious hesitation. Yet the architectural footprint of the Spanish is far more evident than it may seem at first glance, not least because the Spanish were forced to rebuild the city twice.
Although the cities of the Spanish empire used straight lines and plazas to order space in the Americas, Spanish architects cannot take full credit for the gridded tranquillity of the oldest part of New Orleans. That original 1721 plan, drawn up by the French chief royal engineer Pierre le Blond de la Tour and his assistant Adrien de Pauger, envisaged a city bounded by three walls and streets laid out in a grid facing a bank of the Mississippi, with a central plaza placing the church at the heart of it. Work began while they were alive—Le Blond de la Tour died in 1724, and Pauger in 1726—though there were considerable delays owing to a hurricane in 1722.1 New Orleans grew, but in 1788, by which time it was under Spanish rule, a fire started on Good Friday that devoured the city, consuming the many structures built from cypress wood. More than eight hundred buildings, including the main church, were destroyed. Spanish officials quickly tried to rebuild, though this was followed by another, less extensive fire in 1794.
The Spanish replaced the wooden buildings with grander edifices, befitting a city with a population then of around five thousand, leaving New Orleans with an urban environment that blended French and Spanish colonial styles. Civic leaders were at the center, while the slaves and free people of color were pushed to the fringes, a spatial arrangement connecting New Orleans to other parts of the Hispanic world, such as Havana.2 The stone buildings that replaced the burned wooden ones included Spanish features, such as internal courtyards and balconies with ornamental iron railings.
Spain’s time in charge of what had been French Louisiana was, in many respects, a tale of two colonies: the frontier of Upper Louisiana, a great expanse of land to the north and west of the northern part of the Mississippi River; and the world of New Orleans and Lower Louisiana, which was a part of the wider Gulf and Caribbean. Despite their differences, the two Louisianas would experience similar upheavals before the end of the eighteenth century.
THE EARLIEST YEARS of Spanish rule in New Orleans, beginning in 1763, had a turbulent start. When the first Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa, finally arrived in 1766, he faced the same problem his counterparts had in Florida—no money and no men—with the extra headache of a preexisting French political power structure. The captain-general of Cuba, Antonio María de Bucareli—who later became the viceroy of New Spain—reported in a 1767 letter to ministers in Spain that Ulloa had sent “two letters for me in which he made clear the sad situation he found himself in for lack of money, and asked me to send him quickly 40,000 to 50,000 pesos,” which Bucareli was not able to do.3 However, Ulloa was granted a budget of 250,000 pesos a year, at least on paper, starting in 1768, though much of this money depended on the silver being sent from New Spain.4 As with the funding for Florida and the other less profitable colonies, this silver subsidy, known as the situado, had long been part of Spanish imperial finance. The eighteenth century had been rocky financially, as the constant rounds of warfare meant there were large spikes in the amount of silver being sent to these peripheral colonies to shore up defenses: in 1770–79 nearly 5 million pesos were exported, but by 1790–99, this figure would reach 9 million, representing about 40 percent of New Spain’s silver production in this period.5 Despite the sums involved and the urgency, payments could be delayed or lost, leaving many governors, like Ulloa, to scrape through in the meantime.
Ulloa was a renowned scientist and intellectual, but he was a less able administrator, and he faced many challenges from the outset in Louisiana. At first, Ulloa and the French governor at the time of the handover, Charles-Philippe Aubry, tried to share power.6 Ulloa struggled to assert his authority and by October 1786 the situation spiraled out of control as French colonists, including New Orleans merchants, had Ulloa arrested on charges of malfeasance, while they declared their ongoing loyalty to Louis XV. The French had a number of grievances, not least Ulloa’s failed attempt to implement Spain’s strict—and unpopular—trading laws, which included a crackdown on contraband and on smuggling. Local merchants were also frustrated that Spain produced few manufactured goods. Ulloa was given three days to leave, and he returned to Cuba, accompanied by his family, some officials, and a few soldiers.7
Spanish Louisiana was without a governor for many months, until Madrid sent one of its top military officers, Irish-born Alejandro O’Reilly, along with two thousand soldiers and twenty-one ships.8 O’Reilly had an established career in the service of Spain before he arrived from Havana on the Volante on August 18, 1769, to cheers of “Viva el Rey,” while the artillery fired salutes.9 He then raised the Spanish flag over the fleur-delis, a symbolic act that Ulloa had failed to perform.10 After he executed five Frenchmen thought to be behind the earlier revolt, he earned the nickname “Bloody O’Reilly,” but there would be no more rebellions on his watch. Spanish control was complete, for the time being.11
New Orleans, like many port cities of the era, was already earning a reputation for being raucous, and O’Reilly attempted to regulate the number of inns, billiard halls, and cabarets, “which many individuals have established with impunity and without permit,” believing them to be “very dangerous to public order.”12 By early 1770 he had implemented a degree of what Spanish administrators often referred to as “tranquillity” through a number of such laws and reforms, something the governors after him would replicate. He put the administration of the territory under the control of the captain-general in Havana and shored up the military installations. In 1771, O’Reilly handed control to Luis Unzaga, who served until 1777, when he was replaced by Bernardo de Gálvez.
The development of Spanish New Orleans and Lower Louisiana happened against the backdrop of the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. Its future would be shaped by more conflict: the French Revolution, the subsequent Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and the mass slave rebellion in France’s West Indian sugar colony, Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti). The three conflicts were connected, and Spain and Louisiana would be forced to respond to different aspects of them. For officials in Madrid, the most pressing concern was the fighting that erupted throughout Europe in the wake of the French Revolution. Closer to New Orleans, however, Lower Louisiana was threatened by the unrest taking place in the Caribbean.
Calls in France for liberty, equality, and fraternity traveled across the Atlantic, reverberating loudly in Saint-Domingue. That colony held some five hundred thousand enslaved people—many of them recent arrivals from Africa—thirty thousand free people of color, and thirty thousand whites. At first, the free people, many of whom were wealthy indigo or coffee planters, and even owners of their own slaves by this point, demanded the equality they were hearing about from France. They saw a chance to overthrow the discriminatory laws that had intensified over the years, for instance, placing restrictions on what sorts of clothing they could wear or which public places they could frequent.
Vincent Ogé, a member of the gens de couleur from Saint-Domingue, put his case for equality to the National Assembly in France in 1790, but his call went unanswered. He returned to the colony later that year and led a revolt before being captured and killed. At the same time, the white community was fracturing—the poor whites were leaning toward republicanism, while the wealthy sugar planters and the clergy remained supporters of the king. Into this already volatile mixture another combustible element was added: the hundreds of thousands of slaves who had been paying close attention to these events. In August 1791, they launched their own struggle for freedom, later known as the Haitian Revolution, which would last thirteen years.
Officials and slaveholders throughout the Caribbean became alarmed, as did the United States and the Spanish in Florida and Louisiana. For Spain, the threat had two faces: the prospect of freed slaves in the Americas and republicanism in Europe. The Spanish soon discovered a plot organized by Edmond-Charles Genêt, French ambassador to the United States during the Revolution, to attack Spain’s colonies in the Americas, including Florida, though it did not come to fruition.13 To add further concern, the National Assembly in France decided to recognize equal rights for free people of color in 1792, and this measure was followed by the abolition of slavery, declared by the French revolutionary commissioner in Saint-Domingue, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, in August 1793. He hoped such a move might bring the uprising to an end, but although abolition was upheld by the National Assembly the following year, it did not smother the flames of the revolt on the island. By this point there were numerous factions, with black former slaves fighting free mulattoes, and royalists battling revolutionaries. There was an additional layer of complexity when the British sent in troops in 1793, hoping to use the upheaval to take the island from France, but they were driven out by 1798.
These events combined to provide a constant stream of anxiety in the minds of slave owners and colonial administrators throughout the region. The Spanish remained on high alert, and throughout their empire they tried to prohibit the circulation of incendiary material from Republican France, such as pamphlets or newspapers. Despite these efforts, the movement of information was difficult to control, especially in a port city like New Orleans, which was full of sailors and smugglers who could circulate illicit reading material and pass around the latest rumors. The then governor of Louisiana, Francisco Luis Héctor, Baron de Carondelet, issued propaganda critical of the Revolution in an effort to counter any positive reports from France.14 Carondelet, who was French-born but married into a prominent Spanish family and served the Spanish crown, was in office from 1791 to 1797, through much of this period of uncertainty, and he implemented a range of policies in his efforts to keep the peace. Not all were popular—some of the French called Carondelet cochon de lait (suckling pig).15 The white French in Louisiana were divided, too; some aligned with the Revolution, others remaining loyal to the monarchy or to Spain.16 Likewise, people of color did not have a uniform stance. As in Saint-Domingue, there were social divisions, including slave, free, darker-skinned black (moreno), or lighter-skinned (pardo). Many people of color also were members of the pardo and moreno militias, a crucial part of the defense of Spanish Louisiana. Even before the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, Spanish administrators in Louisiana had taken care to keep firm control over people of color through legal means and manipulation, for instance, attempting to stop free people of color from fraternizing with slaves.17
Throughout the period of the Haitian Revolution, a number of restrictions were placed on the importation of enslaved people, including a ban on those from the French Caribbean. The entry of any people of color fleeing Saint-Domingue was also prohibited. Slavery in Louisiana was not on the same scale as in Saint-Domingue, though slave ships had been making regular arrivals by the 1770s, with some enslaved people ending up there after being re-exported via British colonies such as Jamaica.18 From 1783 until 1789, at least sixty-two hundred slaves were brought to Louisiana; another seventeen hundred were brought from 1790 to 1796. With the addition of people born into enslavement, the total number of slaves reached around twenty thousand in 1788 in an overall population of around forty-two thousand.19
Slaves in Louisiana, as elsewhere in the Spanish empire, could exercise the right to buy their freedom, known as coartación. This was a long-standing legal provision that allowed enslaved people to negotiate a price and pay their masters for manumission. In New Orleans, there were just under one hundred free people of color in 1771, but this number had reached nine hundred freed people by 1785, against a larger city population of around forty-four hundred whites and ninety-five hundred slaves.20
For those still enslaved, the Spanish, like the French, implemented slave codes in Louisiana to govern behavior. In general, these codes outlined provisions such as religious instruction for slaves, what sort of punishment was allowed, and how to deal with captured runaways, though many of these rules were often ignored. France’s Code Noir was first issued in 1685, and a version for Louisiana was enacted in 1724. Spain’s laws for the treatment of enslaved people stretched back to the thirteenth century’s Las Siete Partidas, with its roots in Roman law. In 1784, the crown issued the Código negro carolino, an attempt to copy the French code and foster the growth of slavery and agriculture in Santo Domingo, the poorer Spanish neighbor of Saint-Domingue. This was later followed by the 1789 instructions Codigo negro español, and the social control placed upon slaves and free people of color grew in the 1790s as it became clear that other parts of Spain’s Caribbean empire could profit from the events in Saint-Domingue. The years of fighting had seen many planters flee and cane fields destroyed. Cuba and Puerto Rico, and to a lesser degree Louisiana, were in a position to turn their economies to sugar, taking over where Saint-Domingue had left off. Cuba, especially, would emerge as the sugar powerhouse of the Caribbean.
The treatment of slaves and free people of color was also subject to local rules and ordinances. For instance, in the beginning of Spanish rule in Louisiana, Ulloa had implemented measures such as a curfew, permission for slaves to be whipped, and not allowing the slaves of different masters to assemble together.21 At the same time, however, he gave his own chaplain permission to marry a white man and an enslaved woman—the French laws had prohibited marrying across these lines—causing a scandal in French planter society.22 The white French worried that the Spanish were too permissive and that their approach would undermine the whole slavery regime.23 Despite these concerns, concubinage continued in New Orleans, while the population of free people of color grew. By the 1780s, the then governor, Esteban Miró (1785–91), instituted ordinances to curb the social powers of this growing community. He made a number of other edicts directed at people of color, turning his attention to concubinage. He targeted women he described as concubines, requiring them to dress in less elegant garb. Expensive hats and heavily coiffured hair were prohibited, to be replaced by a tignon, a hair wrap worn by slaves, in an attempt to keep these women in the confines of their social category.24 Miró criticized the “idleness of the free negro and quadroon [women],” claiming that “they subsist from the product of their licentious life without abstaining from carnal pleasures,” and calling for them to “go back to work.”25
Despite the many restrictions placed on people of color in Louisiana, one tradition was not infringed upon: the Sunday afternoon assembling of enslaved people after the morning market in New Orleans, to drum and dance at a site on the edge of the city later known as Congo Square. Slaves were meant to be given the Sabbath off, and many in the city would gather for these “dances, or amusements.” This continued through the Spanish period, with the stipulation from officials that “they shall always cease before night” lest the slaves entertain more subversive notions.26
Although the Haitian Revolution remains the best-known and largest slave uprising, it was not the only one in the 1790s. Indeed, in 1795 alone, the Dutch faced an uprising in Curaçao, and the British a revolt in Dominica, in addition to the ongoing conflict, known as the Maroon Wars, against the descendants of runaway slaves who lived in the hills of Jamaica. Revolution, rebellion, and the corresponding hopes and anxieties found their way to Louisiana, too. North of Baton Rouge is an area called Pointe Coupée, where by 1788 enslaved outnumbered free almost three times over, 1,492 to 512—numbers that grew by 1795 to 2,000 whites and 7,000 enslaved people. Two plots were uncovered, in 1791 and 1795, with the latter also including white participants, to the consternation of the Spanish officials. The alleged ringleaders were rounded up and tried, with around 25 black people sentenced to be hanged, another 30 or so people sent to hard labor at a Spanish presidio, and others banished from Louisiana. Four of the people who were hanged were then decapitated, their heads put on posts along the main road at Pointe Coupée to serve as a warning; another two severed heads went to New Orleans, and six others were scattered around other Louisiana outposts.27 In the following year, 1796, Governor Carondelet attempted to ban all entry of enslaved people to Louisiana, while also trying to convince owners that they needed to treat their slaves better in order to prevent any further conspiracies. Despite the ban, slave smuggling persisted, and the next governor, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, rescinded the order in 1799.28
THE ISSUE OF West Florida’s unresolved status also resurfaced during the tumult of the 1790s. Now back under Spanish control after the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the colony still had a small population.29 The United States persisted in its demands about the disputed Florida boundary, and in 1795 the first minister of Spain, Manuel de Godoy—who had replaced Floridablanca—yielded to them. Distracted by Spain’s involvement in the French Revolutionary Wars in Europe, and desiring a good relationship with the United States while simultaneously displaying little interest in Louisiana, in October 1795 he signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo, also known as Pinckney’s Treaty in the United States after the negotiator Thomas Pinckney.30 This treaty granted the United States everything it wanted, including confirmation of the West Florida boundary at N 31°, navigation and trade rights for U.S. ships on the Mississippi, a joint U.S.-Spanish effort to prevent cross-border Indian attacks, and sharing trade with Native Americans rather than competing over it.31 Upon hearing its terms, James Madison received the initial impression that, as he told Thomas Jefferson, it “adjusts both the boundary and the navigation in a very satisfactory manner.”32 By 1798, the United States had created its Mississippi Territory, which reached along the thirty-first parallel from that river to the Chattahoochee River, today part of the border between Alabama and Georgia.33
This drive for expansion was not a confident one, however, as U.S. leaders considered each move west in these earliest years of nationhood to be a potential snag that could unravel the delicate fabric of the republic.34 Once Congress ratified Pinckney’s Treaty, Madison tempered his earlier enthusiasm, calling the deal “a bitter pill to some,” in part because it was “inviting additional emigrations to the Western Country.”35 They had cause for concern, as breakaway schemes like Franklin in 1784 had shown the extent of the fragility at the edges of the nation. Also unsettling were the ongoing hostilities with the Native Americans, which Secretary of War Henry Knox blamed on the “desires of too many frontier white people, to seize, by force or fraud upon the neighboring Indian lands.” Knox found the settlers’ treatment of Native Americans worrying, saying, “Our modes of population have been more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.”36 Yet Spain and the United States were on the brink of a land deal that would overshadow the 1795 agreement and transform the fortunes of both nations.
By 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte had consolidated power in France and turned to his still rebelling colony, Saint-Domingue, eager to return it to being the wealthy, sugar-producing, slave-owning “pearl of the Antilles.” Bonaparte now redoubled his efforts, which included reinstating slavery in 1802 and sending his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, with ten thousand troops to take back the colony. Almost the entire expedition was killed, if not by the renewed and invigorated effort against the French led by former slave Jean-Jacques Dessalines, then by yellow fever. Leclerc succumbed to the disease and was replaced by Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, Vicomte de Rochambeau, a general whose father had led French troops during the American Revolution. Rochambeau and his men were no match for the former slaves. He capitulated in 1803. The toll on France was high; an estimated fifty thousand soldiers died over the course of the conflict.
Bonaparte had also run up a great deal of debt fighting in that war and in Europe. While the conflict in Saint-Domingue was in its final throes, Bonaparte and Spain opened negotiations over Louisiana. Spanish ministers thought returning Louisiana to France could help them better protect the much more valuable New Spain.37 They were growing increasingly concerned that the United States would push through Louisiana into Texas, and then to their silver mines. The French, on the other hand, would be far less likely to pursue this course of action and could help keep U.S. settlers out of the west. Bonaparte, however, had something else in mind when he signed the secret Third Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800. The deal returned control of Louisiana to France under the requirement that it not be sold to a third party, a stipulation Bonaparte quickly ignored. He sold the Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803 for $15 million (about $250–$300 million today), a bargain that would double the size of the young nation.
When the negotiations began, Jefferson and his ministers harbored the more modest hope of obtaining New Orleans and West Florida, though this soon grew to include lands that extended to the Río Grande.38 By 1803 Republicans and Federalists were questioning the wisdom of the much larger deal now on offer, both feeling that such an extensive acquisition came with many risks.39 Jefferson also had to do a delicate political dance around the fact that this purchase was not in line with the Constitution. The negotiators had not been authorized to buy so much land, and Jefferson’s own interpretation of the government’s powers within the Constitution prohibited such a purchase as well, meaning the government would need an amendment in order to have the power to acquire such an enormous addition.40 Its passage could take months and there simply was not time to wait for Congress, so Jefferson went ahead, realizing that the opportunity was too good to let slip through his fingers.41 As he later wrote to Madison: “The less we say about the constitutional difficulties respecting Louisiana, the better.”42 Although Jefferson signed the deal, he did not receive everything he had hoped for: Florida remained Spain’s. Spanish minister Pedro Cevallos wrote to the Louisiana governor Marqués de Casa Calvo, who had been given the task of overseeing the transition, that the United States had Florida in its sights, wrongly believing it should be part of the Louisiana deal. Louisiana was ceded to Spain, argued Cevallos, but Florida was “founded on the right of conquest.”43
The Spanish were outraged by Bonaparte’s double-dealing and tried to nullify the purchase, while attempting to claw back parts of Arkansas and Missouri using some of their maps as evidence; this too failed, however. They continued to fear for New Spain, knowing that Jefferson had become inquisitive about it. He solicited information from the visiting naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who had traveled to New Spain and who was well positioned to answer the president’s questions on the extent of “ore production … especially [in] those [territories] to be ceded in the event that the mouth of the Rio Bravo del Norte [Río Grande] becomes the boundary of Louisiana.”44 During the boundary negotiations with Spain, Jefferson continued to argue that the territory ceded by France stretched all the way to the Río Grande to the west and into much of West Florida to the east, a claim Spain dismissed.45 In 1804, Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to survey the Louisiana territory, and they began their epic march west. The spy James Wilkinson reappeared at this juncture to tip off the Spanish and try to goad them into intercepting Lewis, but holding back the mission of the U.S. explorers would only have delayed what was clearly becoming the inevitable.46