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. During the colonial period, “creole” ( criollo in Spanish) denoted people (free or enslaved) and livestock born and bred in the New World colonies, as opposed to those born in the Old World. 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.Īround 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. 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. The colony’s nonnative inhabitants numbered about 7,500, and the majority lived along the lower Mississippi River. Relations with Native American tribes required lavish gifts that consumed royal funds. 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. When Spain inherited Louisiana, the colony was vast and sparsely populated. 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. In 1763 France, Spain, and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the French and Indian War. The French preferred Louisiana to be under Spanish control than in the hands of Great Britain. 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. 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. 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. 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.ġ762–1769: Cession, Uncertainty, and Rebellion 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. 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. 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 17.
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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. The period was also marked by the dramatic expansion of slavery in the young colony. 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. In Louisiana the period began amid uncertainty and a major rebellion, but it ended with an unprecedented degree of prosperity. 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. Spain governed the colony of Louisiana for nearly four decades, from 1763 through March 1803, returning it to France for a few months until the Louisiana Purchase conveyed it to the United States in 1803. This translated copy shows the original Spanish Plan of New Orleans from 1798. Spanish Colonial Louisiana Spain governed the colony of Louisiana for nearly four decades, from 1763 through March 1803, returning it to France for a few months until the Louisiana Purchase conveyed it to the United States in 1803.Ĭourtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection.
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