Empires of the Imagination : Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase 9780813928173, 9780813928074

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EMPIRES OF THE IMAGINATION t r a ns at l a n t ic h istor i e s of t h e l ou isi a na pu rch a se

F E di t e d by Pet e r J. K a stor a n d F r a nçoi s W e i l

University of Virginia Press  |  Charlottesville and London

e m pi r e s of t h e i m agi nat ion

Jeffersonian America Jan Ellen Lewis, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Editors

EMPIRES OF THE IMAGINATION t r a ns at l a n t ic h istor i e s of t h e l ou isi a na pu rch a se

F E di t e d by Pet e r J. K a stor a n d F r a nçoi s W e i l

University of Virginia Press  |  Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press © 2009 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2009 1  3  5  7  9  8  6  4  2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Empires of the imagination : transatlantic histories of the Louisiana Purchase / edited by Peter J. Kastor and Francois Weil. p. cm. — (Jeffersonian America) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8139-2807-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8139-2817-3 (e-book) 1. Louisiana Purchase.  2. United States — Relations — France. 3. France — Relations — United States.  4. United States —  Territorial expansion — History — 19th century.  5. United States — Social conditions — 19th century.  6. United States —  Civilization — French influences.  7. National characteristics, American.  I. Kastor, Peter J.  II. Weil, Françoise. E333.E57  2009 973.4'6 — dc22    2009011470

Contents Introduction peter j. kastor and fr ançois weil

1 Prologue: Jefferson, Louisiana, and American Nationhood Peter S. Onuf

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Empire The Louisiana Purchase and the Fictions of Empire Richard White

37 From Incorporation to Exclusion: Indians, Europeans, and Americans in the Mississippi Valley from 1699 to 1830 Cécile Vidal

62 The Haitian Revolution and the Sale of Louisiana; or, Thomas Jefferson’s (Unpaid) Debt to Jean-Jacques Dessalines Laurent Dubois

93 A Tornado on the Horizon: The Jefferson Administration, the Retrocession Crisis, and the Louisiana Purchase James E. Lewis Jr.

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Identity The Louisiana Purchase in the Demographic Perspective of its Time Paul Lachance

143 Refracted Reformations and the Making of Republicans Emily Clark

180 Slave Migrations and Slave Control in Spanish and Early American New Orleans Jean-Pierr e Le Glaunec

204 “They Are All Frenchmen”: Background and Nation in an Age of Transformation Peter J. Kastor

239 Edward Livingston, America, and France: Making Law Mark Fernandez

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Memory The Purchase and the Making of French Louisiana Fr ançois Weil

301 Celebration and History: The Case of the Louisiana Purchase Jacques Portes and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol

327 List of Contributors 365 Index 367

e m pi r e s of t h e i m agi nat ion

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n 2003, the United States and France found themselves at odds. As the United States prepared for war, France emerged as one of the most vocal critics of military operations in Iraq. It was a dispute that unleashed passions in both countries, but also a certain degree of confusion. It had been years since France and the United States expressed such profoundly divergent foreign policies, and people struggled to decide just how to understand the dispute. Appropriately enough, the debate and the confusion unleashed by the Iraq War came just as people were commemorating the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, an agreement that seemed (on the surface at least) to symbolize the way French-U.S. accord could benefit both countries. Equally important, the diplomatic moments of 1803 and 2003 gained much of their power from their ability to touch raw nerves in both countries. Yet the broader subject of how the United States and France have interacted with one another remained something of a mystery. The struggle to understand the French-U.S. dispute in 2003 and the problematic notion of French-U.S. accord in 1803 help to explain why. The commemoration of the Purchase proved far more important in the United States than in France. Of course, Americans are in the habit of commemorating bicentennials. They did so for the Declaration of Independence in 1976 and for the Constitution in 1987. In 2003, they did so again, this time for two events: the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition. Much of the public commentary described the Purchase and the expedition as definitively American moments. Expansion into the North American West forced the citizens of the young republic to define what it meant to be American. If that process forced Americans to encounter anybody else, bicentennial commemorations usually focused on Native Americans, and rightly so. Absent from so much of this discussion was the fact that the events of 1803 also constituted a profound moment in the relationship between the peoples and the governments of

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France and the United States. The absence of a substantive discussion of that relationship was problematic in 2003 and remains revealing to this day, for it captures the difficulties that come with examining France and the United States in broad, connected terms. That remains the case despite the fact that the Louisiana Purchase was so clearly a moment when France and the United States together sought to transform North America. The basic statistics certainly suggest as much. In a single treaty, France ceded over 800,000 square miles that later became fifteen American states (either in whole or in part), doubled the size of the United States, and extended its border from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. The Purchase made the United States a continental power, and began a process of territorial expansion that would eventually lead the United States to dominate North America and extend its reach on a global scale. The implications of the Purchase now appear simple, and they seem to reflect only the robust outlook of the United States. But what the Purchase meant in its own time was more subtle and more varied. While American policy makers proclaimed it a watershed, the negotiations came and went with relatively little fanfare in Paris, overwhelmed as the French were by the French Revolution and the war that, coming in the Revolution’s wake, consumed Europe for over two decades. The news came to New Orleans and Saint Louis — the centers of white settlement and colonial administration — in the months that followed. Residents in the northern Plains heard of the Purchase in 1805–6 from the American expedition under Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Still others did not learn for years, nor did they necessarily care, since the Purchase brought no immediate change to their lives. That seemingly simple act — receiving news of an international agreement — suggests the complexity at work in the Louisiana Purchase. That complexity notwithstanding, one thing is clear. Whether it was greeted with excitement, concern, or even disregard, the Purchase nonetheless came as a surprise to Frenchmen, who did not expect to sell Louisiana; to Americans, who did not anticipate buying it; to Spaniards, who had specifically demanded that Louisiana not be sold to the United States when they had been pressured to agree to return the colony to France; and to Indians, who marveled at the gall of whites who claimed ownership of land that Indians inhabited and controlled. And while the Purchase might have no immediate impact on residents of the Plains and the Rockies, residents of the Mississippi River suddenly found that the



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balance of power in North America had shifted, to some advantageously and to others ominously. So unexpected was the Purchase that it could properly have entered American memories as the Louisiana Surprise, not the Purchase. But it did not. Over the two centuries that followed, the idea that the lands included in the 1803 treaty belonged as if naturally to the United States became predominant, so predominant indeed that it excluded or crowded out people, stories, and events that did not fit into this master narrative. That story was well in place by 20 December 1903, when a celebration at the Cabildo on Jackson Square in New Orleans — the very site of the transfer of power exactly a century before — testified to the success of the triumphant nationalist interpretation of the events of 1803. The Purchase, it was argued at the time, announced and symbolized the glorious American expansion across the continent, which would ultimately result in the conquest of the continent and the making of the United States into a world power in the wake of the Cuban-Spanish-American War of 1898. The 1903 centennial celebration also sought to define racial categories. Whether they were celebrating white settlers, showcasing a Native American history that seemed to be reaching its end, or ignoring the slaves and free persons of color of African and Afro-Creole descent who had been so conspicuously part of Louisiana in 1803, exhibition planners had a clear racial story they wanted to tell. While the limitations and problems with this triumphalist vision of the Purchase now appear obvious, efforts to revise that story have created their own set of problems. After a century and a half in which writers of all stripes tended to celebrate this story, scholars claiming to reject that outlook in the late twentieth century nonetheless kept certain assumptions in place. The United States remained a powerful nation shaping its own future, only that story functioned less as a form of celebration than as the basis of a critique for imperialism that explained everything from Indian Removal to the Vietnam War. The Louisiana Purchase was a story of empires, only instead of a story in which the Europeans and later the United States brought progressively greater forms of civilization to the West, those empires eradicated peoples, destroyed cultures, and crushed individual spirit. If the verdict was different, the narrative was still pretty much the same.1 Those broad continuities in the study of American history are all the more striking because they have remained in place even as scholars have reimagined the particular history of Louisiana and of the Purchase. His-

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torians have attempted to balance the narratives of what went wrong and what went right, searching for those who had been forgotten in the earlier narratives because of the color of their skin, the place of their birth, and the nature of their work or their gender; and looking for a context that makes sense of seemingly disconnected experiences. Once celebrated, empires are now subject to critical investigation; once taken for granted, identities are now questioned, as are issues of memory, individual or collective. This book addresses those issues. Our specific goal is to use the Louisiana Purchase as a foundation for considering the relationship of the United States and France in broad terms. This is, in part, the diplomatic story of the negotiations between the United States and France that concluded with the events in Paris of April 1803. But it is also a cultural story, as the emerging folkways of the United States and France interacted in a geographic space that may have been called Louisiana, but that lacked clear forms of political power, geographic boundaries, or fixed social rules. While Louisiana may at one time have been “French” before becoming “American,” its residents could just as easily claim it was Indian country or a new African melting pot. More generally, however, the essays in this collection use the Louisiana Purchase as a point of departure for a consideration of intercultural dynamics and the sources of change in North America. As a result, many of the essays move beyond the years immediately surrounding the Purchase, setting the Purchase in a broader context and associating it with a broader series of developments. And what emerges is a situation in which the Purchase is both as irrelevant as French or Indian observers thought and as important as Anglo-Americans and Francophone Louisianians believed it to be. That ambiguity extends to the very definition of “Louisiana.” The Louisiana Purchase itself was vague. The nominal boundaries of the Purchase  — from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the mouth of the Mississippi to the Canadian border — contained innumerable distinct localities. This territory changed hands — either in whole or in part — among European powers as much as any place in North America even as Indians wielded more real power than almost anywhere else. The goal of these essays is not only to explore the diversity of peoples within that space, but in that diversity to identify important commonalities. Reconsidering the histories at work in the geography covered by the Louisiana Purchase also provides the ideal means to explore a host of broader questions. First is the question of population. Historians have



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long attempted to chronicle the social construction of race, but have spent far less time on the nature of ethnicity, a more elusive term in the Americas that usually suggests a combination of culture, physical appearance, and distinct pasts. Louisiana was home to numerous ethnic groups, but the degree to which those differences — so obvious from a distance — mattered as a factor of lived experience remains an open question that these essays explore. Second is the question of power. The very label “Louisiana Purchase” imposes unity onto a place that was the site of numerous overlapping, competing polities. Nothing reflected this state of affairs more powerfully than the obvious question that emerges from the Purchase itself. To what degree did this decision really change life in Louisiana? We hope to enlarge the narrative and offer new directions for future research by broadening the spectrum of problems and by suggesting the framework of a new history of the Louisiana Purchase. We intend to begin that process by the very organization of this volume. Although originally conceived as a series of essays addressing discrete topics, it became clear that the contributors’ understanding of the Purchase crystallized around three major themes: empire, identity, and memory. Each of these themes has been the subject of intense scholarly inquiry, and yet a particular focus on the Louisiana Purchase shows the limitations of that scholarship. The goal of this volume is therefore twofold: to reconceptualize the narrative of the Louisiana Purchase through a focus on empire, identity, and memory, but also to show how a consideration of the Louisiana Purchase forces scholars to reconceptualize those three analytical terms.

Empire Historians of the Americas like to talk about empires, especially when it comes to the eighteenth century. The contest of empires would certainly seem to have particular importance for the land that the United States eventually acquired through the Louisiana Purchase. In 1763, France ceded a loosely defined Louisiana to Spain as both powers sought to shore up their own colonial holdings throughout the globe and, in the process, to preserve imperialism itself. While the loss of its American colonies twenty years later was a devastating blow for Great Britain, the United States immediately emerged as an empire of sorts, and scholars have long seen in the Louisiana Purchase an effort by the United States to impose its own brand of imperialism onto the world scene. Meanwhile, Napoléon Bonaparte’s

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decisions, first to acquire Louisiana through the retrocession with Spain in 1800 and then to dispense with the colony three years later, suggested the way that political leaders in distant centers of power continued to shape life in American colonies. Indeed, Bonaparte’s attempt to re-create the French empire on the North American mainland was only part of a larger imperial mission that included the reconquest of the Caribbean island of SaintDomingue following close to a decade of racial revolt. The essays in this book suggest a very different notion of empire. They challenge the very idea of imperial power and suggest alternative models for thinking about the way people in the Americas conceived of their relationship to imperial polities and imperial histories. Not only does a static portrait of empire fail to capture the political realities surrounding the Purchase, but empires also emerge as artifacts of historians’ efforts to impose order onto a region that defied the scholar’s goal of clarity. Richard White’s study of the North American interior emphasizes the fundamental challenge of describing a place in the absence of clearly defined systems of power. As White shows, French observers like the Baron de Lahontan and Henri de Bourgmont vastly overestimated the extent of their political reach (either individually or imperially). Equally important, the Indian systems of power were also weak in these areas of the Purchase. This, too, eluded French observers, who assumed they would find powerful confederacies rather than individual villages contesting the nature of authority in the Plains. The need to make empire a reality — both politically and intellectually — made Lahontan and Bourgmont only the first in a series of white observers to construct an unrealistic vision of the West. But White’s essay also serves as a reminder of the persistent allure of empire, since it enables historians to subsume diverse places under a single, conceptually manageable political rubric. The notion of a French or Spanish empire that included Louisiana may have been instrumental in decision making in Europe or in the United States, but it does not accurately describe social relations within Louisiana itself. Cécile Vidal confirms White’s argument by focusing on the northern corollary to White’s southern Plains. Examining the Upper Mississippi valley and the northern Plains, Vidal chronicles the numerous means through which Native peoples successfully restrained imperial power at the same time that they welcomed certain forms of imperial contact. French sovereignty over the continental space they called Louisiana was largely theoretical. Indeed, it was more an imperial project than an imperial reality. As long as demographic weakness prevented white settlers



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from fully implementing this project, white incorporation into the Indian world was the norm in Louisiana. If the notion of empire becomes problematic in the Plains, the struggle to redefine empire accounts for developments in the Mississippi valley and the Caribbean. Scholars have long acknowledged that the primary cause of the Louisiana Purchase was Bonaparte’s decision to dispense with what looked like a geographically vast but strategically irrelevant colony after losing his grip on the geographically small but economically invaluable colony of Saint-Domingue. At the time, white observers described a racial apocalypse on Saint-Domingue as slaves rose against their masters. More recently, the movement that led to the creation of Haiti has been described as a freedom movement in which slaves and free people of color joined forces to overthrow the exploitative labor system that was at the heart of so many empires. But Laurent Dubois complicates that story by focusing on the broad political objectives of men like Toussaint-Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. He describes free men of color who were no less intent on preserving empire than white elites in the British colonies in the 1760s. They imagined a reformed French empire that dispersed its power to the peripheries, granting local elites — in this case, elites of color — the ability to take charge of local administration. And they broke from that vision of empire to declare an independent republic in 1804 for reasons very similar to those in the British colonies in 1776. They, too, concluded that Europeans failed to grasp the need to reform empire. The linkages between Haiti and the United States suggest more than an ironic counterpoint to the efforts by the United States to undermine a black republic. To Peter Onuf and James Lewis, the very Louisiana Purchase that scholars usually treat as the first steps toward American imperialism suggests instead a profound ambivalence toward imperial models. Lewis describes a federal leadership in Washington, D.C., that attempted to manipulate French imperial designs in Europe to advance its central goal of safeguarding the union. The limited territorial goals — New Orleans and the Gulf Coast — that were the object of that foreign policy reflected these fears as well as broader American concerns about replicating a European vision of empire. Meanwhile, the Americans’ belief in their ability to exploit the European situation indicated their own conviction that the European imperial model was unjust and, in the end, irrational. Onuf’s essay, originally delivered as the keynote address for the conference that gave rise to this volume, indicates alternatives. Focusing on Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence with the French intellectual Comte

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Destutt de Tracy, Onuf describes the effort, deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, to create a community of intellectuals that transcended national boundaries and imperial contests. But the content of that correspondence reflected Jefferson’s ongoing fears of imperial contests and his own national chauvinism. The independence movements in the Americas during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries suggest a collapse of long-standing empires that was swift, violent, and complete. Louisiana shows a process of decolonization that was more ambiguous, with empires appearing far less absolute in their heyday and postcolonial leaders feeling far more ambivalent about their imperial histories.

Identity Part of what complicated these imperial ambitions was a world in which few people defined themselves as French or Spanish or British or American. Indeed, a generation of research has shown how those nationalist labels often came into being for the specific goal of cementing the political authority of individual states.2 The acquisition of Louisiana by the United States came in the midst of this process, but it also came as the population of Louisiana itself underwent wholesale change. People identified themselves with varied communities — ethnic, racial, national, imperial — in ways that upset the notion of identity itself. Focusing primarily on Lower Louisiana, these essays suggest how people engaged local institutions in ways that reflected their divergent backgrounds and advanced their agendas. What emerges is a world in which the relative importance of the Louisiana Purchase depended in large part on the specific benefits or threats that residents discerned from the transfer of power. Their own identities proved both malleable and complex, responding as much to real circumstances as to abstract ideologies. Although the French and Spanish imperial projects in Louisiana were generally unsuccessful, it was not for want of trying. Public officials and local boosters alike were keen to convince settlers of the opportunities awaiting them in the new world. Imperial officials never believed the diverse population of Louisiana was “French” or “Spanish,” but they did go out of their way to convince themselves that they were enacting policies that made those people acknowledge European sovereignty. How the residents of Louisiana defined themselves in relationship to larger communities — which ranged from local to religious to racial to political — suggests what iden-



Introduction

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tity, a term very much of the twentieth century, would mean at the turn of the nineteenth century.3 Essays by Paul Lachance and Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec capture the dizzying population changes that came on the eve of the Louisiana Purchase, changes that in turn redefined social communities and imperial policies. Lachance’s demographic profile of late-colonial Louisiana also chronicles the frenzy for statistics, first among the Spanish officials who collected that data and then among the Americans who hoped to benefit from it. In the same way that historical geographers have shown the way that maps assert aspirations more often then they reflect realities, so too did the Spanish census make its own claims to imperial power.4 Knowledge of the population made it possible to believe that Spanish authority was in place. But the very paucity of that information reinforces the reality that Richard White and Cécile Vidal describe of a West where power was more apparent than real. Lachance charts the factors that worked against a single regional identity for white residents of late-colonial Louisiana. Prior to the Purchase, Louisiana was sufficiently attractive to draw newcomers from other parts of North America, but never so attractive that any one European power could create a truly dominant population base. The closest to such a base was the French-speaking population, but they were divided between native-born Creoles and migrants from the rest of the Francophone world. Le Glaunec’s essay focuses on the most dramatic areas of demographic change: the Africanization of late-colonial Louisiana. Under pressure from the Francophone planter elite, the Spanish reopened the foreign slave trade in Louisiana after the trade had dwindled under France during the mid-eighteenth century. The result was not only an immediate and dramatic increase in the number of black Louisianians, but also a wholesale transformation in black culture. “Negotiation” is a popular academic term for describing various forms of contact and conflict, but Le Glaunec explores the literal and fictive elements of that term in discussing the way slaves not only defined themselves but also attempted to define life in Louisiana. The influx of new slaves precipitated a surge in runaways, suggesting that the slave system was at once both robust and precarious. Slaves who chose not to run away acted in ways that managed to combine both conformity and resistance. By laying claim to the Saint Louis Cathedral, slaves announced that late-colonial Louisiana would be a place where institutions not only preserved slavery, but also served slaves. Catholicism itself would became a vital catalyst for Afro-Louisianians, con-

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necting native-born slaves to African newcomers and occasionally connecting slaves to free people of color. The Louisiana Purchase did little to change the state of affairs that Le Glaunec describes. Not only did slavery itself weather the change, but the Catholic Church would remain crucial to the workings of race, culture, and politics. Emily Clark’s essay on the Ursuline nuns of New Orleans shows how those issues of religion and race overlapped with gender to situate people in multiple communities. The nuns themselves were entirely from France or from the French-claimed, French-speaking imperial community. They welcomed the patronage of Catholic monarchies, first French and later Spanish. But after 1803, the nuns made a remarkably smooth transition to life in the republican United States, a place with a notoriously anti-Catholic political leadership that often assumed Catholicism and republicanism were inherently incompatible. How they did so speaks to the subtlety of identity. Clark shows how the Ursulines’ own political mobilization — and that of other Louisiana Catholics — emerged from a broader debate about Catholic governance connected more to the Reformation than to the American or French revolutions. Clark reconfigures not only the process of American politicization within Louisiana, but also suggests a different understanding of the history of Catholicism in the Atlantic world. If some in Louisiana looked to their religious history to define the lens through which they understood politics, still others looked to the political structure to envision a place for themselves in the United States. Peter Kastor’s essay examines how people deployed the word “French” in direct response to the uncertainty of ethnic and national labels. For AngloAmerican observers, French usually functioned as a pejorative that encompassed a broad range of political and culture qualities at a time when what it meant to be “American” was up for grabs and when the two dominant political parties — the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans  — considered their opponents’ ideologies not only unacceptable but definitively foreign. Meanwhile, Francophone residents of Louisiana were more practical in their use of French, arguing that the French language and customs rooted in their French ancestry did not prevent them claiming “American” as their primary identity. They made that claim in large part because they recognized not only greater benefits in being American citizens than a French ethnic minority, but also because they associated benefits with membership in the United States that far exceeded those that would accrue to them from rejoining the French empire. Mark Fer-



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nandez’s essay on Edward Livingston tells a similar story, but from a very different perspective. At first, few people seemed more at odds with the Francophone population of Louisiana than Livingston. The migrant from New York generated considerable controversy, in large part because he ignored French legal traditions. Over the course of three decades, however, Livingston managed to become the author of Louisiana’s legal code, represent Louisiana in the House as well as the Senate, and then serve as Andrew Jackson’s secretary of state. Livingston concluded his career by returning to the Francophone world, not on its frontier periphery but rather at its cosmopolitan center. By the time he concluded a stint as the U.S. minister to France from 1831 to 1833, Livingston embodied the way that ambitious men had manipulated the contingency that came with the Louisiana Purchase and the uncertainty of identity itself. Identity is a modern term, and not one people would have used in 1803. But the underlying concept was clearly on peoples’ minds as they contemplated the ramifications of the Louisiana Purchase. The resulting transformations of identities resulted less from the particulars of the treaty than local institutions and concerns.

Memory The need to rediscover these narratives of empire and identity is revealing in its own right. It serves as a reminder of the way emerging memories reshape the past, not only ignoring specific experiences but creating new narratives. The Purchase would soon enter various narratives, some complementary and others colliding as state and national identities collided with nostalgia, international policy, and racial practice. The Purchase entered American and French historical memory almost as soon as the treaty between the two nations was signed. The essay by Jacques Portes and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol analyzes the construction of a historical narrative about the Purchase in nineteenth-century France and the United States. By focusing on contemporary French observers and commentators like Barbé-Marbois and later U.S. historians like Henry Adams, they describe how two nationalist master narratives — one celebrating the sale, the other the Purchase — were created on both sides of the Atlantic. The climax for this vision of the Purchase was, perhaps appropriately, the centennial celebration that took place in Saint Louis (the host of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition that was meant to open in 1903 and was delayed until 1904) and New Orleans. Portes and Rossignol

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describe how the World’s Fair in Saint Louis started as a celebration of the Purchase and ended as the demonstration of American economic and cultural power, while the celebration in New Orleans provided the French government with an opportunity to weave together its past colonialism in America and its contemporary colonialism in Africa and Indochina. The nationalist narratives of the Purchase were so convincing that for most of the twentieth century they met with little or no challenge. The Purchase entered American and French historical memory in yet another, unexpected way. François Weil’s essay discusses how Louisiana —  a Creole colony more powerfully defined by its Spanish than its French colonial period — was constructed as French by Americans and Frenchmen at the time of the Purchase, and how the post-Purchase vision of Louisiana as a French region developed during the nineteenth century into a powerful cultural construction stimulated by the arrival of SaintDomingue refugees and immigrants from metropolitan France. Alternative narratives, emphasizing the place of the French-speaking free people of color or of the Cajuns, lagged behind at the time, and it took most of the twentieth century, a civil rights revolution, and the recognition of ethnicity, for the meaning of “French Louisiana” to change once again.

Engaging the Purchase At the core of these essays is the assumption that there was something in the relationship between France and the United States that remained unknown and that the Louisiana Purchase could help to explain. It was not simply that the Purchase was an important event in the diplomatic relationship between the United States and France. Rather, the acquisition by the United States of a large population with a significant but complex relationship to France also created the opportunity to consider how (or whether) it was possible to connect the transatlantic history of ideas to the transatlantic movement of peoples. The essays in this collection are the product of a conference on the Louisiana Purchase that met in Paris in June 2003, and in Charlottesville, Virginia, in October 2003. The inspiration for this conference came from Olivier Zunz and Peter Onuf, historians at the University of Virginia, and Jim Horn, at the time director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, located near Thomas Jefferson’s plantation at Monticello. They started from the assumption that while the Louisiana Purchase was the product of  French-U.S. diplomacy, historians had rarely



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connected the Purchase to a longer history of contact between France and the United States. Initial planning began in the summer of 2001. At the time, a conference to reconsider the Louisiana Purchase seemed like an important academic event, but one wholly within the realm of historical inquiry. The need to develop a broad-reaching study of the French-U.S. relationship remained a compelling motivation, and the Louisiana Purchase seemed the ideal place to conduct such a study. The planning proceeded in the predictable manner for academic conferences. By the time the participants actually met in Paris, however, circumstances had changed in ways none of us had anticipated. But perhaps that was only appropriate, given the fact that we were studying what could well have been called the Louisiana Surprise. In June 2003, a sense of global context was no mere academic affair. War in Iraq had caused a vicious diplomatic rift between the United States and France. Any concerns surrounding the conference itself quickly faded, as the American participants found a welcome greeting in France and vice versa. But the story here is less of transatlantic academic friendship than of the way events of 2001–3 served as a reminder of events from two centuries before. The comparisons may seem trite, but they were too obvious to avoid. It was not simply that the French-U.S. dispute came exactly two centuries after the Louisiana Purchase, but rather that it was articulated in ways that revealed the space the Purchase occupied in two very different national memories. In France, critics of the Iraq War claimed the United States was behaving in the unlawful, neoimperialist manner that had characterized the worst elements of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century and that reflected the worst traditions of European imperial history. They drew on a condemnation of colonialism that repudiated France’s own history of imperial holdings throughout the world. In the United States, supporters of Operation Iraqi Freedom believed the United States was not the imperialist but the liberator. They drew on a celebration of American involvement overseas that many believed had helped replace European-style colonialism with a system that fostered independent nations. People in both countries tied these critiques to histories stretching back to the era of the Louisiana Purchase. The loud arguments both between and within the United States and France did not intrude on the conference but did surround it in oddly illuminating ways. It also reflected what soon became clear: that the Louisiana Purchase occupied different historiographical territory for participants

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from the two countries. This was hardly the product of the celebratory narratives that initially emerged around the Purchase. Rather, the differing notions of the Purchase reflected more subtle scholarly distinctions. For the Americans, the Purchase was very much tied to the history of the North American West and of the slaveholding South. The Purchase helped explain Anglo-American expansionism, resettlement in the Mississippi valley and the Great Plains, emerging conflicts with Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the sectional dispute over the expansion of slavery that fueled the Civil War. To the French participants, the orientation of the Louisiana Purchase was not so much to Europe as it was to the Caribbean. Settlement patterns, systems of racial supremacy, and French policy toward Louisiana only made sense in relation to developments in the Caribbean, especially the French Caribbean. As the bicentennial observations concluded and the French-U.S. disputes over Iraq subsided, it seemed the Louisiana Purchase would once again become the province of history. But then the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005 and the controversies that came in its wake showed just how much the past informed contemporary life. Two of the participants in the conference were New Orleans residents, and found their own lives thrown into disarray. Meanwhile, as the governments of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the United States all fumbled about for a response to the crisis, people began to ask questions about race, class, and geography that seemed eerily familiar to those of us who had studied Louisiana’s past. In their ruminations on pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans, commentators of all sorts — journalists, activists, and public officials — often discussed the city and indeed all of Louisiana as a place that remained somehow different and special because its culture seemed to emerge from historical roots so different from the rest of the United States. These circumstances showed just how much the Louisiana Purchase, long an unchanging mainstay of a familiar narrative of American history, could return to punctuate American public life. Yet the Purchase itself remained a subject that historians had generally studied in a cursory manner, especially when it came to the broader connections between France and the United States. For years the Louisiana Purchase floated in and out of studies on the early American republic. The Purchase was often a placeholder in history textbooks, an event that helped connect the emergences of the first party system in the 1790s to the continental expansionism of the antebellum era. Meanwhile, to many academic historians the Pur-



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chase was an example, one of a series of events that demonstrated emerging developments in the young republic. The Purchase was an early sign of American expansionism, a revealing flashpoint in American constitutionalism, and a formative moment in presidential leadership and diplomatic development. For public and academic commentators alike seeking to construct a grand narrative of the United States, the Purchase helped American conceive of their nation in ambitious, imperial terms, for better or worse. In all this, the particulars of the Purchase itself remained a secondary concern. One of the only exceptions was This Affair of Louisiana, Alexander DeConde’s detailed 1974 study of the political and diplomatic circumstances surrounding the Purchase. Thirty years later, many of  DeConde’s conclusions have been superseded by scholars who have questioned his assumption of unchecked expansionism on the part of the United States or his treatment of the Jefferson administration as a diplomatic powerhouse able to aggressively steer the United States through the complexities of European affairs. But DeConde’s structure — focusing primarily on elite decision making primarily in the United States and to a secondary degree in Europe — formed a model for later historians. Indeed, many of the books, museum exhibits, and television documentaries released during the bicentennial of the Purchase followed this approach, focusing on the goals and personalities of men like Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and Napoléon Bonaparte. They did little to question the notions of American leadership, American expansionism, and international relations that DeConde first established. Worse still, some of this work ignored the complexities of DeConde’s analysis for a more simplistic approach that either celebrated the United States for bringing freedom to western North America or assaulted the federal leadership for duplicity in 1803 and during the years that followed. This remained the case despite more recent studies of the particulars surrounding the Louisiana Purchase that have created a far different picture of French-U.S. diplomacy and politics. Many of these studies have made Bonaparte — not Jefferson — the central player in the destiny of the North American West. Still others have emphasized the tremendous insecurity and limited options available to American policy makers, in sharp contrast to the confident leaders who had figured in earlier accounts. A number of authors writing for the bicentennial sought to bridge these worlds, linking the traditional narrative focus on Jefferson and other American leaders to a set of broader assertions about the political culture

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of the early American republic. That was certainly the case for Jon Kukla’s book A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America. A talented historian with deep roots in the study of Louisiana’s history, Kukla sought to combine a narrative of diplomatic tension between statesmen with a context that allowed for a broad range of actors on both sides of the Atlantic. Released in 2003, A Wilderness So Immense had the largest circulation of any single volume addressing the Louisiana Purchase. Yet Kukla was hardly alone. Two of the contributors to this collection — James Lewis and Peter Kastor — were among a number of authors to produce books for general audiences that sought to situate the Purchase primarily in a context of American politics and diplomacy.5 These books coincided with numerous public commemorations that sought to restore the Louisiana Purchase in the American public consciousness. Meanwhile, the various academic conferences that gathered to consider the Purchase resulted in their own published work. Those conferences — and the varied publications they produced — reflected a scholarly shift that coincided with the bicentennial but was hardly shaped by it.6 Instead, in the decades before 2003, scholars had examined the Purchase territories within a broader effort to understand and reinterpret North American borderlands. The Purchase has played a vital role in this work, in large part because it lends itself to an examination of so many topics. Historians of political culture and policy making emphasized the way the Purchase transformed the young republic.7 Meanwhile, social and cultural historians had identified a wealth of research opportunities in Louisiana. Not only did the region prove fascinating in its own right, but Louisiana also raised profound comparative questions on matters that included (but were hardly limited to) race, environment, migration, and law.8 In all this work, however, discussing the Purchase remained primarily a story of the place that became the State of Louisiana. Studies of the Purchase itself usually focused on the Lower Mississippi valley, which was at the center of concern for American policy makers, or the southwestern borderlands, which remained a subject of international contest in the years that followed. Studies of culture in the era surrounding the Purchase tended to be regionally specific, asking important national questions but nonetheless focusing on the Mississippi valley and the Gulf Coast. The Upper Mississippi valley was generally out of the picture altogether. Meanwhile, the Plains that were also encompassed in the Purchase remained the preserve of that other bicentennial — the Lewis and Clark



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expedition — which generated commemorations that proved so popular they overshadowed many of the events associated with the Purchase. And whether it was the Purchase or the expedition, these were primarily histories of the United States in which France, Spain, or the Indians of North America were negotiating partners, but little more. Our own goal in this volume is to reestablish the complex link between the United States and France that was so obvious in 1803, whether to diplomats negotiating the Purchase or to residents of the Purchase territories. Such a study seemed all the more necessary because so little had been written on the subject. Of the three major European players in North America — Britain, France, and Spain — the French dimension seemed strangely unexplored and undertheorized. Historians of the United States may have long discussed — and often celebrated — Thomas Jefferson’s Anglophobia, but for decades historians themselves have spent far more time discussing the relationship between the United States and Britain than with any other place. From its start, the American historical profession had tied the American experience to British roots. Even scholars like Frederick Jackson Turner or Vernon Parrington who argued for American exceptionalism over a century ago nonetheless saw that culture take form in the movement west from predominantly British settlements on the East Coast into a frontier that was conquered, tamed, and in the end replaced by a culture with little apparent connection to anything French. That Anglocentric vision of the North American West began to collapse under the force of scholarship that chronicled not only the history of Native peoples, but also the extensive studies of the Hispanic heritage in North America.9 Lost in all of this was a consideration of France. The abundance of scholarship on the Spanish presence in North America, and the paucity of research on the French, explains why these essays generally eschew the Spanish presence in Louisiana, which included not only the transfer of people and institutions but also an official period of Spanish rule lasting forty years. The reason why scholars ignored France seemed simple: there were so few Frenchmen in the Americas, especially in the territory that became the United States. This remains the case despite the growth in recent years of a small cadre of scholars who have produced an illuminating literature on the spread of French culture to the North American interior. Among the first people to theorize a different way of understanding the French experience in North America were Indian historians. They described how the French decision to pursue commercial benefit in North America through

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Indian alliances fueled the spread of French culture even as it retarded French migration. As a result, many of the Native peoples in the North American West spoke French rather than English or Spanish and crafted their own visions of a transatlantic world according to a fundamentally French model.10 The need to situate France in the cultural history of North America was all the more important because forms of French cultural contact — with Indians, with other Europeans, with Africans — occurred at all points of the compass. It happened in the Northeast and the Great Lakes. It happened in the Lower Mississippi valley. Finally, it happened in transatlantic context. Jefferson the Anglophobe was defined for historians by his contrast with Jefferson the Francophile. Long before he became the third president, Jefferson was one of a number of Americans who found in Enlightenment France a source of intellectual inspiration and the home of intellectuals who would correspond with the eager Americans.

Stories What became clear in crafting these essays was just how much the Louisiana Purchase had existed within a series of scholarly and popular stories that could coexist with relative ease despite their obvious conflicts. At one level — an international one — some residents of Louisiana have come to celebrate what they saw as their connection to a rich French heritage even as they condemned it as corrupt or un-American. Meanwhile, a story of national triumphalism operated alongside powerful critiques of a triumphalist culture. Likewise, some localities made the Purchase central to their identities while others forgot it altogether. Finally, France and the United States have situated the Louisiana Purchase — and Louisiana itself — within very different histories that nonetheless both claim to explain transatlantic and transcontinental affairs. A deceptively simple matter of translation indicates the subtlety at work here. The term “Louisiana Purchase” rarely appears in French-language texts. Instead, the most common term is “la vente de la Louisiane” (the sale of Louisiana). The difference between “purchase” and “sale” is no small affair. “Louisiana Purchase” implies that Americans constructed a story with the United States clearly in charge of its own destiny. In this narrative, the United States purchased Louisiana through visionary statecraft that achieved a remarkable victory. And that narrative began to take form as soon as news of the Purchase arrived. In the midst of public debate over



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the benefits of the Purchase, the pamphleteer Samuel Brazer articulated what would eventually become the way most Americans understood their own role in the negotiations. “The acquisition of the vast territory of Louisiana, in itself was a great, a wonderful achievement of wisdom and policy,” Brazer explained. “The means by which it was obtained, afford an honorable, an unprecedented example of magnanimity and justice.”11 The United States purchased Louisiana as part of a planned and grand vision of expansion that spread Anglo-American institutions across North America. In stark contrast, the “sale” of Louisiana describes a very different dynamic. First and foremost, the term implies that France sold Louisiana for its own reasons. More specifically, Napoléon Bonaparte sold Louisiana to serve a statecraft that historians of France would describe as no less ambitious than the vision of Thomas Jefferson. That sale occurred in Paris, the product of developments emanating from Europe rather than the Americas, let alone the United States. The French were clearly in charge of this sale, with the United States playing a secondary role in world affairs. Finally, the sale of Louisiana was a matter to be dispensed with quickly, either by Napoléon Bonaparte or by historians. In the midst of the tremendous changes within France brought about by the French Revolution and coming during a brief respite in the wars that consumed Europe for more than twenty years, the Louisiana Purchase was a minor event. Purchase or sale: Nothing better reflects the way seemingly minor semantic differences indicate the profoundly different interpretations that people impose on a deceptively straightforward event. And few passages provide a better indication of the complex intersection of American relations with France and the French experience in the Americas better than the distinctions between the terms “Louisiana Purchase” and la vente de la Louisiane. In the end, the very insignificance to French history of the negotiations in Paris in 1803 and their tremendous potency in the United States helped make “Louisiana Purchase” a term that entered the scholarly lexicon in a way that overwhelmed la vente de la Louisiane. The fact that this volume uses “Louisiana Purchase” reflects that state of affairs. This is therefore the story of a cultural process forgotten by some even as it has been romanticized by others. The Purchase itself may be a standard milestone in U.S. history — whether in high school textbooks or political histories of the early American republic — but broader themes related to the Purchase are rarely the subject of scholarly inquiry. The power of those stories remains to this day. In France, the bicenten-

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nial of the Louisiana Purchase commanded even less public attention than the negotiations two centuries ago. In the state of Louisiana, the Louisiana Purchase has formed part of a romantic construction of regional history. All of these images have become increasingly powerful as Louisiana staked its own claim as a tourist destination that offers great sightseeing and also offers Americans an exotic, multinational locale within national boundaries. Jazz music, Creole cuisine, and Cajun culture have all become products that Louisiana puts forward to offer visitors an experience that is satisfying and in some way authentic.12 Yet, in a revealing example of the unpredictable fate of French-U.S. relations, the celebration of French culture in Louisiana has no real equivalent now in Saint Louis, the place where the Louisiana Purchase was most enthusiastically celebrated at its centennial. A single weekend of events in March 2004 marked the bicentennial of the Purchase. And while much of that event concerned French culture in the mid–Mississippi valley, more striking was just how much the Purchase was overshadowed by the real bicentennial behemoth of 2004: the Lewis and Clark expedition. While commemorations of the expedition discussed themes related to the Purchase, most notably through discussion of French and French-Indian participants of the expedition, titles alone can be revealing. By focusing on Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, most commemorations —  whether books, documentaries, museum exhibits, or education seminars  — attempted to encapsulate the American experience through the story of the Anglo-Americans Lewis and Clark making confident strides through the West. Along the way they announced — both literally and figuratively  — their arrival as a political force claiming sovereignty and a demographic force seeking habitation. By the time William Clark died in 1838, the Anglo-American presence in the Purchase territories was eclipsing earlier French and Indian histories, while the give-and-take of life for Afro-Louisianians was increasingly giving way to the entrenched system of racial hierarchy and enslavement. Eventually, one of the strongest physical reminders of that early history would be New Orleans itself, which would build first its own local identity and then its tourism industry around the preservation of its French past. In September 2005, even that history seemed endangered when Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States. While a remarkable number of buildings and records dating to the Louisiana Purchase survived intact, the level of human suffering produced no such welcome news. Instead, the aftermath of Katrina would force people to



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once again consider how the workings of policy, the complexities of race, and the power of the rivers combined to shape people’s lives. It would also offer a telling and tragic reminder of the extent as well as the limitations of power and culture.

Notes 1. Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Michael J. Hogan, Paths to Power: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations to 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987); John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7–11, 56–61; William Appleman Williams, From Colony to Empire: Essays in the History of American Foreign Relations (New York: Wiley, 1972). 2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991); David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 3. For the history of identity in academic discourse, see Philip D. Gleason, “Identifying Identity: A Semantic History,” Journal of American History 69 (1983): 910–31. 4. Gregory H. Nobles, “Straight Lines and Stability: Mapping the Political Order of the Anglo-American Frontier,” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (1993): 9–35; Paul William Mapp, “European Geographic Ignorance and North American Imperial Rivalry: The Role of the Uncharted American West in International Affairs, 1713–1763” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2001). 5. Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York: Knopf, 2003); James E. Lewis Jr., The Louisiana Purchase: Jefferson’s Noble Bargain (Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 2003); Peter J. Kastor, The Great Acquisition: An Introduction to the Louisiana Purchase (Great Falls, Mont.: Lewis and Clark Interpretive Association, 2004). 6. For examples of essay compilations released in the years surrounding the Louisiana Purchase bicentennial, see Paul E. Hoffman, ed., The Louisiana Purchase and Its Peoples: Perspectives from the New Orleans Conference (Lafayette: Louisiana Historical Society, 2004); Patrick G. Williams, Charles Bolton, and Jeannie M. Whayne, eds., A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005).

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7. Jeremy Adelman and Aron Stephen, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 814–41; Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes. 8. For selected examples of recent work on Louisiana’s history in the era surrounding the Purchase, see Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People, 1803–1877 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Richard Holcombe Kilbourne Jr., Debt, Investment, Salves: Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825–1885 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995); Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). Many of the historians who would play a crucial role in producing the recent surge of scholarship on Louisiana produced essays for Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). 9. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); David J. Weber, “Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 66–81. 10. For studies of Francophone culture and the French presence in the territory that became the United States, see William Cronon, George A. Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: Norton, 1993); Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Jay Gitlin, “Negotiating the Course of Empire: The French Bourgeois Frontier and the Emergence of Mid-America, 1763–1863” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2002); Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française (Paris: Flammarion, 2003); Lawrence S. Kaplan, Entangling Alliances with None: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1987); Usner, Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy; Cécile Vidal, Au pays des Illinois: Français et Indiens en Haute-Louisiane (Paris: Belin, forthcoming); and Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 11. Samuel Brazer, “Address, Pronounced at Worcester, on May 12th: 1804 in Commemoration of the Cession of Louisiana to the United States” (Worcester: Sewall Goodridge, 1804), 6. 12. Sara Le Menestrel, La voie des Cadiens: Tourisme et identité en Louisiane (Paris: Belin, 1999).

Pet e r S. On u f

M Prologue

Jefferson, Louisiana, and American Nationhood

F

or Thomas Jefferson, the westward expansion of the new United States epitomized the progress of civilization. Near the end of his life, he looked back on the new nation’s history. “Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast,” he wrote William Ludlow, and he will have observed “this march of civilization advancing from the sea coast, passing over us like a cloud of light”: as civilization advanced, “Barbarism has . . . been receding.”1 Nearly a quarter of a century earlier, in his First Inaugural Address, Jefferson looked forward in time and west across the continent to that “chosen country, with room enough for our descendants, to the thousandth and thousandth generation.”2 Jefferson’s conception of history enabled the “philosophic observer” to situate himself in time and space. By 1824, this progress seems much more rapid, as if it had already been accomplished. Imagining himself high above the continent, Jefferson compresses the entire history of a great people and its seemingly boundless domain into a single synoptic view. Now, barely a generation after his imaginative leap into his country’s glorious future, Jefferson looks back on his country’s achievements with a founder’s satisfaction. These two quotations illuminate Jefferson’s understanding of the world-historical significance of the American Revolution and the new nation’s inexorable expansion across the continent. North America was destined to be the site of something “new under the sun,” a great republican empire that would secure the liberties of its citizens and provide an inspirational example for the oppressed peoples of the world. There were no other true — modern and civilized — nations on the continent, no “frontiers” in the conventional geopolitical sense, and therefore no seri-

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ous obstacles to the progress of expansion. The frontiers that Jefferson noted in his letter to Ludlow instead marked the stages of development in the history of man from savagery to civilization; the new nation thus was boundless, without “frontiers” — its “frontier” was instead a vast and bountiful wilderness awaiting the transforming hand of civilized man. In 1801, Jefferson could thus envision the continent as a blank slate, or terra nullius, on which America’s history would be inscribed: “in the beginning,” as John Locke wrote in his “Second Treatise on Government,” “all the World was America.”3 The elegiac octogenarian thus surveyed a transforming landscape, fraught with historical and moral significance. History’s design and the new nation’s destiny were immanent in the land itself, made manifest in the progress of expansion. Jefferson’s teleological sense — his faith that history moved progressively, by stages, toward more civilized forms of social and political life — was central to his moral philosophy. The moral philosopher did not take refuge in his closet, cultivating his inner life and striving toward otherworldly transcendence. He was instead, like Jefferson, an “observer” who charted — and helped promote — mankind’s enlightenment and improvement. Progress in time became apparent in progress across space, and the animating force for this transformation was the new nation’s republican civilization.

Natural Boundaries Jefferson’s confidence in the new nation’s future seems as boundless as the continent itself. Yet this confidence could not fully conceal or suppress persistent anxieties and doubts. If, in his geopolitical imagination, the new nation was boundless, Jefferson knew that the American union was in fact tenuous at best and might very easily succumb to internal as well as external threats. Similarly, his identification of the cause of the new republic with the progress of political civilization — of the American people with mankind generally — stood juxtaposed to the gnawing fear that the revolutionaries would fail to live up to their exaggerated pretensions and professions. The United States, if it survived at all, was at best a second-rate “power” in the family of nations. It was incredibly weak in conventional terms: vulnerable both at sea, because of its continuing dependence on European markets, and in the hinterlands, where Indians still held sway and European imperial powers continued to exercise enormous influence — even within the new nation’s recognized boundaries.



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The federal union of state-republics, subject to the centrifugal pressures of sectionalism, interstate rivalries, and separatism, was particularly vulnerable, and nowhere more clearly than in the West, where Jefferson imagined the new nation’s historical destiny would be fulfilled. It was no coincidence that Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address, his most visionary statement of the American prospect, was immediately preceded by the most serious constitutional crisis in the union’s short history. Throughout the late 1790s, in what Jefferson described as a “reign of witches” by northern High Federalists, partisan and sectional tensions had risen to a high pitch: the likelihood that the union would even survive  — much less prosper and expand — seemed progressively dimmer in these dark days, particularly when Federalists threatened to steal the election during the electoral stalemate of February 1801 in the House of Representatives.4 And it would not be long after Jefferson’s inauguration when yet another diplomatic, political, and constitutional crisis, precipitated by Spain’s retrocession of Louisiana to France, threatened to destroy the union. France’s possession of New Orleans and the navigation of the Mississippi meant that the new American states and territories of the Mississippi-Ohio watershed would be drawn inexorably into the French orbit. The fact that revolutionary France, America’s “sister republic,” was a great, expansive nation made the threat of its new western empire all the more formidable: the continent Jefferson imagined as a blank slate was now crowded with potentially powerful enemies — including Americans who bolted the union. Just as the succession crisis of 1800–1801 threatened to destroy the union, and so draw a boundary between Americans North and South, so now the Louisiana Crisis threatened to cleave West from East. Once established in Louisiana, France could enlist Indian allies in a bloody war to reverse the tide of American settlement; so too it might foment slave insurrections that would overturn the social and racial order in the stapleproducing southern states. Successive crises of the union — in 1801, in 1802–3, and in subsequent years and decades — constituted a dark counterpoint to the sense of infinite possibility and boundlessness that Jefferson so brilliantly articulated in his inaugural address. These were times when the boundaries of the United States — the limits to its potential expansion — became all too apparent. But those limits, the geopolitical realities that Jefferson and his successors faced as they looked north, south, and west, were always present in fantasies of boundlessness. Jefferson’s visionary geopolitics sought escape

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from “entangling alliances” and European influence by drawing a “line of separation” between Old World and New. The fantasy was compelling precisely because the United States could never be neatly extricated from the European balance of power — nor did American farmers, planters, and merchants want to turn their backs on their best customers. And, as Jefferson recognized, American independence ultimately depended not on a fantastic isolation, but rather on being able to mobilize and deploy sufficient power to command the respect of the Old World. “When our strength will permit us to give the law of our hemisphere,” he wrote in 1812, “it should be that the meridian of the mid-Atlantic should be the line of demarkation between war and peace, on this side of which no act of hostility should be committed, and the lion and the lamb lie down in peace together.”5 To put the paradoxical point bluntly: the new nation would have to become more European — more of a conventional power — in order to become more American and so bring on the republican millennium. Only by acting effectively in history, by assuming a “separate and equal station . . . among the powers of the earth,” could Americans initiate the reign of peace and enlightenment at history’s end.6 Even now, Jefferson wrote in 1807, Americans enjoyed a foretaste of historylessness. While, over the last twenty years, “Europe has been in constant volcanic eruption,” America had been a “blest . . . nation whose silent course of happiness furnishes nothing for history to say.”7 The new nation escaped history as long as it did not confront powerful rivals on its frontiers. Then there were no obstacles to the expansion of the union until it reached its “natural boundaries.” Weak neighbors — savage Indians, thinly populated outposts of European imperial powers — were bound to recede, for the Revolutionary United States was the only great nation in the Western Hemisphere. When Jefferson invoked the idea of an “empire for liberty” in a letter to James Madison in 1809, he was anticipating the annexation of Cuba to the south and Canada to the north. Within these extended boundaries — boundaries that nature decreed — “we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation; and I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.”8

Great Nation The United States was “the strongest Government on earth,” Jefferson explained in his First Inaugural Address, and its expansion across the con-



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tinent irresistible. The genius of the American empire was the ties that bound Americans to each other and to governments they identified as their own. Jefferson imagined Americans progressively knit together as one great family, spreading across their “chosen country” through thousands of generations. All good Americans embraced the same political creed: they were “brethren of the same principle,” though “called by different names.” “We are all republicans, we are all federalists,” Jefferson famously exclaimed, equally attached to the “union and representative government.”9 And as Americans pursued their happiness, secure in their individual rights, they discovered common interests that drew them ever closer together. Jefferson’s vision of the United States as a great and powerful nation was most fully illuminated after he stepped down from the presidency in 1809 in an exchange with the French “ideologist” Destutt de Tracy. Destutt, a leading liberal intellectual who idolized Jefferson and the new American republic, asked Jefferson to respond to his unpublished “Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws” (in French), an ambitious effort to provide a new conceptual framework for political science in the post-Revolutionary world.10 Destutt charged that Montesquieu, the great oracle of political wisdom in the transatlantic world of the Enlightenment, was irrelevant to the modern world because he remained enthralled to Aristotle’s typology of regimes: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, the rule of one, the few, the many. But, insisted Destutt, the American and French revolutions had revolutionized the modern world. The only salient distinction now was between partial or “special” regimes that promoted the interests of a particular individual or class and truly “national” regimes that represented the whole people. Jefferson wholeheartedly agreed. As “sister republics,” the United States and France both embodied the new principle of self-government and national self-determination. Jefferson had long cherished the belief that the American Revolution was an epochal moment in world history and had sustained his faith in the French Revolution  — its sequel and counterpart — despite its excesses, long after other commentators had been alienated and disillusioned. Destutt’s work was a vindication of revolutionary change in the form of a scientific treatise. An enthusiastic Jefferson personally translated one of Destutt’s chapters (book 6, a vigorous assault on the British constitution that Montesquieu so admired), commissioned the translation of the remainder, and saw the Commentary and Review through publication in Philadelphia in 1811. Of course, Jefferson understood that the two revolutions had taken

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different courses: neither he nor Destutt was an apologist for Napoleon. But both men were determined to vindicate the fundamental principles of their revolutions, and they agreed that France’s troubled history was a function of its unfortunate geopolitical circumstances. If power had been dangerously centralized in France, thus preparing the way for Napoleon’s rise, it was because the republic faced a counterrevolutionary “conspiracy of kings.” The United States, by happy contrast, did not face serious competition or resistance; once independence was secured, the new nation could demobilize, political power could be distributed and diffused among the state governments, and the people could be secure in their liberties. All of the familiar hallmarks of Jefferson’s political philosophy — his emphasis on provincial liberties and states’ rights, his hostility to consolidated power, and his libertarian fantasy of minimal government — came to the fore as threats to independence, security, and vital national interests receded. But when Americans were threatened they would “unite with one heart and one mind,” sacrificing all to preserve the nation, meeting “invasions of the public order as [their] own personal concern.”11 Then the underlying identity of the two revolutions and the great nations they produced would become apparent. Throughout his later career, Jefferson’s thinking about American nationhood came into sharp focus when he looked eastward, to developments in revolutionary France. The American nation was born in bloodshed, as patriots won their independence through revolutionary resistance to despotic Britain. History required — and redeemed — the loss of lives, however lamentable on a personal level. As Jefferson lectured protégé William Short on the sanguinary turn of events in France in 1793: “I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.”12 Looking back on the revolutionary holocaust at the end of his life, Jefferson continued to think in these sanguinary terms. As he wrote in his Autobiography (1821), “the loss of millions of lives” had yet to liberate the nations of the Old World and inaugurate the republican millennium. Therefore, it followed, “millions and millions of it’s inhabitants” must yet be “destroy[ed].” National liberation was historical necessity: “the appeal to the rights of man, which had been made in the U S. was taken up by France, first of the European nations. From her the spirit has spread over those of the South. The tyrants of the North have allied indeed against it, but it is irresistible. Their opposition will only multiply it’s millions of human victims.”13



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Revolutionary violence was not merely defensive. A “conspiracy of kings” may have initiated the European bloodbath, but revolutionary France, conscious of its irresistible force, was naturally expansive. It was France’s destiny to liberate the oppressed peoples of the continent, Destutt argued, and so to create a European empire for liberty and national self-determination. Jefferson thought in similarly aggressive terms about liberating Indians from bonds of savagery, or liberating the land itself for higher uses. The “great nation,” both agreed, was limited only by nature. Just as an expanding market produces a more elaborate division of labor and greater prosperity for all participants, the great nation secures the freedom of self-governing citizens throughout its expanding domain. The expansive tendency of the great nation, like the economists’ market, was to universalize its benefits, thus identifying a particular people with all mankind. This was a protean conception of nationality, not fixed to a particular place or people, but embracing all peoples within its expanding domain. Though there was plenty of bloodshed on the expanding frontier of settlement, the absence of powerful enemies spared the United States from the never-ending cycle of wars unleashed by the French Revolution. But suddenly, during the Louisiana Crisis of 1802–3, the prospect of a rising French empire in the West threatened to revolutionize the new nation’s once-fortunate geopolitical situation. Simply, two great, expansive nations could not share the same territory: the sister republics must be enemies. French occupation of New Orleans “completely reverses all the political relations of the United States,” Jefferson wrote Robert R. Livingston, his ambassador in France: “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans, fixes the sentence which is to restrain her forever within her low-water mark. . . . From that moment, we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” At the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans controlled the future of the West, and therefore of the American nation itself. If any other great nation “takes possession,” it must become “our natural and habitual enemy.”14 Spain’s continuing occupation of the region constituted no threat, for Spain was hardly a “nation” at all according to Jefferson’s (and Destutt’s) exalted standard, and the Spanish empire’s authority barely and ineffectively extended to its far northern reaches. Jefferson looked on Spanish Louisiana as a kind of trusteeship: in due course, the Americans, the region’s legitimate heirs, would take possession. Nor, at this point, was Jefferson concerned about British power. Chastened by its experience in the

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American Revolution, Britain would have little stomach for a new imperial experiment: in any case, a “nation of shopkeepers” would be much more interested in opening up lucrative new markets. The Anglophobic Jefferson’s extraordinary marriage proposal was a diplomatic ploy (designed to impress the French) and should not be taken too seriously. But it did underscore his concerns about the French threat. As long as France confined itself to revolutionizing the Old World — and respected its own “natural boundaries” — it would remain “our natural and habitual ally and friend.” But when this “powerful and enterprising people” overleaped the “meridian of the mid-Atlantic” and encroached on “our hemisphere,” it could only be an enemy.15 France would be an enemy precisely because it was, like the United States, a great and expansive nation. Anxious commentators thus envisioned French expansion as a mirror image of the irresistible tide of American settlement: as William Dunbar warned Jefferson, “an ambitious, enterprising and warlike people are preparing to scatter their myriads over these countries.”16 In the wake of Aaron Burr’s alleged conspiracy of 1806–7 — yet another challenge to the new nation’s sovereignty in the Mississippi watershed  — Jefferson looked back on recent western history with characteristic complacency. “For myself,” he told Kentuckian James Brown, “I never entertained one moment’s fear” of Burr and his minions. Self-consciously invoking the language of his inaugural address, Jefferson was “satisfied . . . that let there ever be occasion to display the banners of law, . . . the world will see how few and pitiful are those who shall array themselves in opposition.” Nor, he now claimed, did he “fear foreign invasion.” The United States, “the strongest Government on earth,” was “prepared to meet even the most powerful . . . foreign invasion,” even “that of a Bonaparte.”17 Of course, Jefferson’s recollections were wildly, even bizarrely inaccurate: this was a good time to bait Napoleon, now hopelessly mired in the Peninsular Campaign, and Jefferson naturally would want to downplay his recent, much exaggerated fears of a Burrite coup. But there was a deeper truth for Jefferson in his mythic conflation of an air-brushed version of the new nation’s history, beginning with the American Revolution as a people’s war, and his visionary evocation of America’s glorious future prospects. Jefferson was seeking to articulate — and to reaffirm his faith in — a conception of modern nationhood, a conception that Destutt would elaborate in cooler, more scientific, “ideological” terms in his Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws.



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The Significance of the Louisiana Purchase The conventional interpretation of Jefferson’s diplomacy in the Louisiana Purchase is that he abandoned his idealistic professions — and particularly his strict constructionist scruples about enlarging the original union — by embracing the precepts of European statecraft. But Jefferson knew that fulfillment of the new nation’s potential depended on mobilizing the power of the people to meet internal as well as external threats to its independence and vital interests. The United States was a great nation, a progressive, powerful, history-making force in the world, born in violence and bloodshed and fulfilling its destiny at any cost. France’s folly was to try to transcend Nature’s limits, to aspire to a “Universal Monarchy” that exceeded and betrayed its national destiny. The tragic consequence of Napoleon’s ultimate failure was that the old regime, in the guise of the reactionary Holy Alliance, had gained a new lease on life: the final chapter of Europe’s struggle for freedom therefore would have to be written in the blood of millions. By contrast, the United States knew its place, recognizing the limits nature set, as armies of settlers spread inexorably across the continent. Lewis and Clark’s arduous trek to the mouth of the Columbia River and back in 1804–6 suggested that the “Stony” or Rocky Mountains might constitute that limit; perhaps American settlements along the Pacific coast would form their own republics and a new federal union. The Louisiana Purchase cleared the way westward for the great nation’s expansion. “Possession of both sides of the Mississippi,” exulted Senator John Smith of the new state of Ohio, “shall form an invincible Bulwark to the western Country, and the epoch of its commercial, manufacturing and political importance.”18 Remarkably, and in stark contrast to revolutionary France’s expansion across Europe, this vast addition to America’s “empire for liberty” had cost no lives. Americans breathed a great sigh of relief when the Mississippi crisis was resolved so expeditiously, and even the most visionary expansionists — Jefferson included — were astonished by the dimensions of the immense territory Napoleon offered to the American negotiators James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston. Few commentators saw any immediate use for the trans-Mississippi West (the settlement frontier generally remained far to the east) — though it would not be long before Americans began to systematically exploit the region, extending the nation’s boundaries still farther through war and diplomacy and conquering and displacing its Native peoples. The significance of the

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Louisiana Purchase was to make expansion seem “natural,” even providential, by eliminating its only serious obstacle: the imperial designs of France, another great, expansive nation. As a result, the new nation’s great power remained latent, its destiny manifest. In the nineteenth century and beyond, the narrative of conquest, of national expansion through the exercise of preponderant force over weak neighbors, was subordinated to a triumphalist narrative of liberation that focused on the “natural,” irresistible extension of agricultural settlement and the progress of civilization. The fulfillment of the national promise Jefferson so eloquently articulated in his inaugural address thus seemed to result from the sublimation and diffusion of power, made possible by the “free security” that disentanglement from Europe and the rapid retreat of vanishing Indians afforded. Americans were uniquely blessed, a providentially favored people, because they had no “natural and habitual” enemies: this was the gospel of American exceptionalism. Jefferson proved a poor prophet. The United States did not escape violent conflict, and “the meridian of the mid-Atlantic” did not become the boundary between zones of “war and peace.” But if the American Civil War negated one Jeffersonian prophecy, it more than fulfilled another. On the battlefield, Jefferson’s disunited states became two of the “the strongest Government[s] on earth,” strong enough to spill the blood of hundreds of thousands of patriots. Meanwhile, unenlightened Europe avoided conflicts on this massive scale, preserving a measure of peace and stability that the Americans’ new world order could not afford. Thus Jefferson’s prediction for Europe was fulfilled in America. But, of course, Americans don’t see it that way, for they continue to understand their history within the narrative framework Jefferson set forth in his letter to William Ludlow in 1824. The nation is suppressed in Jefferson’s narrative, fulfilling and transcending itself because it meets no resistance from other nations. Americans could imagine that their westward movement across the continent, like their revolution against British despotism, served the interests of mankind as a whole. The United States was a “nation of immigrants,” a nation that embraced and transcended nations, the best and brightest hope for the human race. By eliminating a French presence in the American West, the Louisiana Purchase made it possible for Jefferson to identify the American people with all of mankind, to imagine by the end of his own life that the United States was rapidly approaching the end of history. But the progress of civilization would take some unexpected turns. The enormous power Jefferson recognized



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within the nation would be unleashed time and time again in the great wars among nations that have shaped the history of the modern world.

Notes 1. Thomas Jefferson to William Ludlow, 6 September 1824, in Thomas Jefferson Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1496–97. 2. Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801, in Jefferson Writings, ed. Peterson, 494. 3. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), “Second Treatise,” para. 49, 342. 4. Jefferson to John Taylor, 4 June 1798, in Jefferson Writings, ed. Peterson, 1050. 5. Jefferson to Dr. John Crawford, 2 January 1812, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1903–4), 13:119. 6. Declaration of Independence as Adopted by Congress, 4 July 1776, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd et al., 35 vols. to date (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950– ), 1:429. 7. Jefferson to Monsieur Le Comte Diodati, 29 March 1807, in Writings of Jefferson, ed. Lipscomb and Bergh, 11:181–83. 8. Jefferson to James Madison, 27 April 1809, in Writings of Jefferson, ed. Lipscomb and Bergh, 12:277. 9. Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801, in Jefferson Writings, ed. Peterson, 493, 494, 493. 10. Antoine Claude Destutt de Tracy, A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. Prepared for the Press from the Original Manuscript, in the Hands of the Publisher (Philadelphia, 1811; rpt., New York: Burt Franklin, 1969); Jefferson to A.L.C. Destutt de Tracy, 26 January 1811, in Thomas Jefferson Writings, ed. Peterson, 1241–47. 11. Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801, in Jefferson Writings, ed. Peterson, 493. 12. Jefferson to William Short, 3 January 1793, in Jefferson Papers, ed. Boyd et al., 25:14. 13. Jefferson, Autobiography (1821), in Jefferson Writings, ed. Peterson, 85, 93, 97. 14. Jefferson to Robert R. Livingston, 8 April 1802, in Writings of Jefferson, ed. Lipscomb and Bergh, 10:311–13. 15. Jefferson to Harrison, 27 February 1803; Jefferson to Crawford, both in Writings of Jefferson, ed. Lipscomb and Bergh, 10:371, 13:119, my emphasis. 16. Dunbar to Jefferson, 10 June 1803, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 17. Jefferson to Dr. James Brown, 27 October 1808, in Writings of Jefferson, ed. Lipscomb and Bergh, 12:184–85. 18. John Smith to Jefferson, 30 August 1803, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.

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or all practical purposes, early nineteenth-century French Louisiana consisted of New Orleans, a corridor along the Mississippi, and fingers of land extending up the major western tributaries of the Mississippi, but the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 conveyed a much larger area to the United States. This area was less a place than a claim, and really less a claim than an object of desire — a desire for what empires had previously not been able to possess. The object of desire embodied a double fiction. The first fiction was that the seller possessed the object conveyed, and the second was that the object corresponded to what either the seller or buyer imagined. Europeans and eventually Americans had been imagining for a century or more that out there lay the route to Asia and the route to the mines of Mexico and wealth beyond imagining. Far more recently, it had become in effect a simple receptacle for fledglings from the American republic, “the nest,” in Jefferson’s words, “from which all America North & South is to be peopled.”1 It contained enough land to sustain republican liberty for millions of people for hundreds of years, although the liberty would not encompass those then living there. Celebrated as an example of peaceful expansion, the sale of Louisiana itself was conceived amidst violence: the actual deaths of thousands of French soldiers trying to restore slavery in Haiti and anticipated death on a far greater scale in Europe as the Napoleonic wars resumed. Violence, desire, imaginary possession, and illicit sale all came together in the Louisiana Purchase as if diplomacy were a form of pornography. Imperialism bought and imperialism sold what it did not possess, but what kind of space was it that was claimed, conveyed, and yet still beyond control? Whom did it contain? What was there was an arbitrary slice of a larger space of a kind that was dwindling and becoming rare across the globe. In North America, that larger space ran from the Arctic deep into

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Mexico and from the Pacific to roughly the Red River and the Missouri River on the east. Within it were small islands of imperial control, but they survived in a larger sea of native peoples. This world was not static. Over much of the Louisiana Purchase not only were the ways of life of many of the people living there new, not only was the distribution of the population new, but many of the peoples themselves had new identities. Four things, all coming in from the outside, had contributed to these changes — the horse, the gun, metal tools, and smallpox. People had died from virgin-soil epidemics — diseases to which they had no resistance and with which they had no experience. Tribes had in response amalgamated with other peoples and shifted locations. Farmers, with their denser populations, had suffered disproportionately from such diseases, and they had gradually yielded territory and power to mounted hunters whose combination of pastoralism and buffalo hunting, dependent on the horse, was a new way of life. In the midst of all this, trade routes had altered, and slaving — often to serve imperial markets — had increased. The most powerful peoples of Louisiana — the Lakotas, the Comanches, and the Osages  — were relatively recent arrivals to most of the lands that they occupied. Many of the peoples of this space were remaking themselves, assimilating others, adopting captives, taking slaves, drifting away to join other bands or towns. There was a fluidity to identity and, for that matter, to culture during the eighteenth century.2 This was a land influenced by empires and states, in contact with empires and states, but still beyond their control. The Europeans had no specific name for such a place. They conceived of it as quite literally nothing —  a vast emptiness. Or they used what amounted to an expletive — savagery  — to describe it. Or they transmuted savagery into a yearning for places Europeans quite mistakenly thought history had not yet overtaken — Edens. Robert Livingston, the American minister to France who helped negotiate the Purchase, simply thought of it as “vast solitudes” and suggested trading it for the Floridas. Fisher Ames, a Federalist who criticized the Purchase, thought of it as “a great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any being except wolves and wandering Indians.”3 What imperialists could not describe, they could not control, and this lack of control extended not just to the existing inhabitants. Empire lost control of its agents. On the eastern margins of this land in the mid-eighteenth century lay three French places — Canada, the Illinois Country (which had become administratively part of Louisiana), and Lower Louisiana, all of which the French originally held because of their alliances with Indian peoples. The



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Illinois Country was the most unusual of these places, for it was the only example in North America of the French establishing agricultural villages outside of elite imperial control.4 Louisiana as a name rather than as an imperial presence encroached on the tumultuous native places farther west. Louisiane was part of a nomadic nomenclature, drifting across eighteenth-century maps. On Carte du Cap francois de Saint Domingue de l’isle de Cube, de la Jamaique avec le Canal de Bahama, le entrée du fleuve saint Louis et le pays de la Louisiane . . . , the “Louisiane” country only extends up the Mississippi a little beyond the Arkansas River.5 The maps of Guillaume and Claude De L’isle, which served as a basis for many eighteenth-century maps, labeled the lands south of the Arkansas from the Rocky Mountains to the English colonies as “Floride” in 1722.6 The 1782 version of Delisle’s Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi of 1782 has the name “Louisiane” trailing boldly onto the country across the Mississippi and out onto the prairies and Plains. It seems to have the same authority there as on the lands around New Orleans, but the smaller print is truer: “pays des Apaches et des padoucas,” and east of them “pays des Osages.”7 On the maps of the early eighteenth century, the “pays des Apaches and des padoucas” had been a void, a blank space north of the “Apaches de navaio” and the “Grand Teguaio” as on De L’isle’s 1703 Carte du Mexique et de la Floride.8 The blank space conveyed a certain truth because these lands were themselves contested as the Comanches and allied peoples began to push the Apaches off the Plains. Apaches, Comanches, and, to a lesser degree, the Osages existed in a different relation to the French than the peoples of Louisiana proper and Canada. They were not children of Onontio. They had not created with the French a middle ground: the hybrid world of common custom forged out of calculated and productive misunderstandings.9 Thirty years after the French departure, their old Indian allies east of the Mississippi yearned for the empire’s return. In 1798 and 1799, rumors circulated among Indians in the Great Lakes and Ohio River country, part of the old pays d’en haut of French Canada, that Onontio had returned to North America and that soon French troops and their southern Indian allies would move up the Mississippi.10 Onontio was the ritual name that the Iroqouian- and Algonquian-speaking peoples gave to the old French governor in Canada. Onontio was, in Marcel Mauss’s phrasing, a personnage: a social identity assumed by different individuals at different times. In this case, it was an identity that individual Canadian governors had

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assumed as they took office and abandoned as they left.11 Onontio was, in the terms of the old French alliance, a father to his Indian children. The rumors of the reappearance of Onontio were spurred by the French reacquisition of Louisiana from Spain, and they dissipated after the Louisiana Purchase, although nostalgia for the French did not. As William Henry Harrison reported in 1809: The happiness they enjoyed from their intercourse with the French is their perpetual theme — it is their golden age. Those who are old enough to remember it, speak of it with rapture, and the young ones are taught to venerate it as the ancients did the reign of Saturn. “you call us,” said an old Indian chief to me “your Children why do you not make us happy as our Fathers the French did. They never took from us our lands, indeed they were in common with us — they planted where they pleased and they cut wood where they pleased and so did we — but now if a poor Indian attempts to take a little bark from a tree to cover him from the rain, up comes a white man and threatens to shoot him, claiming the tree as his own.”12 For Indian peoples of the old pays d’en haut, the American purchase of New Orleans and Louisiana was a tragedy, taking away the hope of a powerful European ally who could stand with them against the Americans. It was one of factors involved in bringing the peoples along the Mississippi into Tecumseh’s confederation against the Americans.13 The French were imperialists — brutal imperialists in the case of the Natchez, whom they destroyed, and the Fox whom they tried to destroy — but their empire had needed Indian allies to survive. Now those old allies had to put all of their hopes in resisting an American empire on Spain and Great Britain, and forlorn hopes they proved to be. But for most of the Indian peoples of the broader Louisiana beyond the narrow range of forts and European settlements on the eastern fringe, the shift of sovereignty from Spanish to French to the Americans meant little in the short run. They were influenced by European empires, but they were not ruled by them or allied to them in the way the Choctaws in the South or the Algonquian-speaking peoples farther north had been. The middle ground that the French had created in Canada had rested, among other things, on an infrastructure of empire — from missions, to posts, to a network of alliance chiefs, to a set of mutually comprehensible and oft-repeated rituals — that had not penetrated much beyond the Mississippi. These things both depended upon and generated knowledge. The



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stories of two men can convey the difference between the French knowledge east of the Mississippi and their knowledge to the west. The two men are Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan, and Henri de Bourgmont. The Baron de Lahontan was the discoverer of the Rivière Longue. On Guillaume Delisle’s 1703 map of Canada, the Rivière Longue flows into the Mississippi from the west.14 It is there in 1720 on H. Moll’s A New Map of the North Parts of America claimed by France under ye names of Louisiana, Mississipi, Canada and New France with ye Adjoining Territories of England and Spain and on later maps he produced. The river flows through Essa­ nape Country to a large lake, labeled “La Hontan’s Limit,” that the limit of the Baron de Lahontan’s explorations. Evidence of his discoveries remained on maps after birth of the American Republic. 15 In the Atlas Nouveau Contenant Toutes Les Parties du Monde . . . ,” published in Amsterdam sometime after 1775, the Esanapes live west of Lac Tinton.16 The Baron de Lahontan was the son of his father’s old age, who inherited his father’s title and litigation. The litigation gnawed at his estate while, as a young soldier, he was stationed, among other places, at the straits of Mackinac, where Lake Michigan meets Lake Huron, the “fag end of the world.”17 In North America, Lahontan fought the Iroquois, and he fought the English. He traveled widely from the coast to the Great Lakes. He hunted, had dalliances with women, French and Indian, and found favor with the governor at Quebec. Then it had all ended badly; he deserted his post, and he fled back to Europe. In disgrace, his estate gone, he turned to writing to recover his fortunes. His first fictions concerned La Salle’s final failed expedition to Texas. He wrote a letter to the French court from Hamburg claiming to have met survivors of the La Salle expedition there. He hoped to win the favor the court; he ended up revealed as a liar.18 Caught in a small lie, he was shrewd enough to realize that larger ones had more hope of success. In the midst of financial distress, he published his letters from North America in 1703. These are, for the most part, a thrilling and entertaining account of his experiences in North America, and they were, by the standards of the time, a best seller.19 And then there is letter sixteen, dated “Michilmackinac, 1689.” The letter detailed de Lahontan’s travels to the west up the Long River. He met the Essanapes and the Gnacsitares. He was mistaken for a Spaniard, and he, in turn, mistook Indians whom he called the “Mozeemlecks” for Spaniards because they were bearded and fully clothed. The Mozeem-

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lecks lived near a Great Salt Lake where they had six noble cities and one hundred towns.20 He was eager for news of the Spaniards, who supposedly were known to the Indians whom he met. There was no Long River. There were no Essanapes, no Gnacsitares, and no Mozeemlecks. It seems to have been nearly twenty years before anyone who was literate grew suspicious. The Frenchmen who knew better, the coureurs de bois, probably never read Lahontan.21 The coureurs de bois were illegal traders who operated outside of the licensed official trade of the French empire, and they were problematic Frenchmen who drifted beyond imperial control. Trade drew them into the lands west of the Missouri just as it drew them to other regions. Indians of the Arkansas River valley, Osages and Quapaws, had come to the French posts in the Illinois country as early as 1680 soliciting trade.22 Frenchmen were probing the West well before Lahontan penned his fictions, and French trade goods and French traders had moved into the West, but trade alone was not enough to reproduce the alliance.23 In 1699, the French settled along the Gulf coast and the Lower Mississippi, and this area, too, became a point from which Frenchmen departed west. The lure was not just furs but also “New Mexico, the province of Texas, and the Kingdom of Léon, where the Spaniards have important mines.”24 In the maps of Jean-Baptiste Louis Franquelin that dominated French understanding of the interior in this period, the Missouri River supposedly originated near Santa Fe and thus provided the easiest route to the mines of northern Mexico.25 These Frenchmen spread not so much empire as imperial confusion. They were as much a danger to a French empire as an asset since their trade with one group often made enemies for the French of that group’s enemies. They also alarmed Spanish officials who imagined Frenchmen under imperial control, an odd belief for imperialists unable to control their own subjects. The Spanish imagined that the shadowy Frenchmen who in Indian stories appeared from the Rio Grande north to the Missouri were agents of a rival sovereign.26 They were more like outlaws operating beyond the boundaries of the imperial system. They did not, by and large, relay to French authorities accurate information about their movements or what they found. There was no reason to since such information could be used against them. These Frenchmen provoked a real imperial foray into the area that would become part of the Louisiana Purchase, and the foray was a disaster. In 1720, Pedro Villasur died along with a substantial portion of the



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Spanish military of New Mexico along the Upper Platte River in what would later be part of the Louisiana Purchase. The men who killed them were Pawnees or Otoes, accompanied by coureurs de bois.27 This could not have come at a more opportune time for Etienne du Véniard de Bourgmont. By the end of 1720, Bourgmont, the recipient of the Cross of St. Louis for his explorations of the Missouri and his service to Louisiana, was in France seeking support for a scheme to make peace between the Missouri River Indians and the Plains Apaches, thus opening the way to Mexico. Both fear and greed piqued the crown’s interest. The French feared that the Spanish would retaliate with another expedition that would push toward the French settlements in Louisiana. Bourgmont could shield the lead mines of Illinois Country from Spanish attack while opening the borderlands of New Mexico to French trade.28 All Bourgmont asked in return was funding and a grant of nobility if he was successful.29 Etienne du Véniard de Bourgmont was an odd echo of Lahontan, a man who demonstrated how easy it was to pass from being a servant of empire to being an outlaw and then move back again. The parallels between Bourgmont and Lahontan were not exact. Bourgmont was not born to a title, and he had not come to Canada as an officer. He had fled arrest in Normandy, joined the army, and risen through the ranks in Canada. But, like Lahontan, early success in the service of the king gave way to disgrace and desertion. Like Lahontan, he sought redemption, but Lahontan’s imagined voyages beyond the Mississippi were to become, in time, Bourgmont’s actual journeys. Where Lahontan had fled immediately to Europe, Bourgmont had remained in North America, and there he had accomplished the redemption Lahontan only imagined. He had done so by first becoming a coureur de bois. Bourgmont had been command at Detroit in 1706 when the numerous nations Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac had gathered there exploded into the internecine violence that Bourgmont and the French alliance were supposed to prevent. Cadillac had established the post with his usual grand ambition and inattention to practical detail. He had left Bourgmont in charge, and Bourgmont had failed, and failed miserably. The resulting bloodbath threatened to wreck the Indian alliance that New France depended upon. Fearing disgrace and demotion or worse, and in love with the wife of another man, he deserted and pursued his lover into the forests near Lake Erie.30 Fleeing Detroit to join Madame Tichenet was a dangerous choice.

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Bourgmont compounded his failure as a commander by subverting an imagined imperial order. Disorder in the French empire was always unregulated life in the woods. The French excelled at it, and they feared it. Bourgmont was reported to be “living in the woods like a savage” with Madame Tichenet aka Elizabeth Couc aka La Chenette, but best known as Madame Montour. She was what would later be called a métis, the daughter of a European father and an Indian mother. She represented other dangers — a voracious female sexual appetite that consumed and discarded men. Cadillac claimed she had had one hundred men, Indian and European, and left them all. She threatened not just the men she loved and left but the careful patriarchal model of empire that both the French and their allies crafted. She would, when her liaison with Bourgmont was over, travel to Albany and become a power broker along the borders where the French and English competed for influence, trading partners, and allies. She became a person much more widely known and influential than Bourgmont.31 Bourgmont made his way west, supposedly in ardent pursuit of a Missouri Indian woman, and married among that tribe and had a son, whom neighboring peoples called the Little Missouri. His domestic arrangements helped rehabilitate his imperial standing. He became a man who, with the aid of his relations, knew more about the Missouri River country and its peoples than any other Frenchman and who had traveled up the Missouri farther than any other Frenchman. He created significant unease among the French authorities in the Illinois Country, but the French do not seem to have tried very hard to capture him. In time, his service in imperial wars and his knowledge of the Missouri country made him an asset to France. In 1718–19, Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, began sending expeditions west from Louisiana. The first, led by Jean-Baptiste Bénard, sieur de la Harpe, went up the Red River; the second, led by ClaudeCharles du Tisné, went from Kaskaskia in Illinois to the Wichita towns on a tributary of the Arkansas.32 By 1723, Bourgmont was on his way up the Mississippi from New Orleans on a third expedition to ascend the Missouri and penetrate the Great Plains. His expedition became an object lesson in how little power empires exerted in western North America, and why they nevertheless mattered. To accomplish his goals, Bourgmont needed to end the slaving and raiding between the Missouri River peoples and the Padoucas, or Plains Apaches.33 Such mediation was central to the alliances that made France



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a North American power. His failure to mediate had disgraced him at Detroit; he was determined not to fail again. His tools in making this peace were not force — the soldiers he had with him were a pitiful few — but rather the trade goods he carried, his own ability, and the understanding of the politics of the region.34 He was trying to extend a common world, neither Indian nor French, that governed relations between peoples. It was a world of Indian forms — calumets, councils, the ordering of peoples as kin with the French as fathers and the Indians as children — and negotiated meanings. Where Bourgmont was going, however, the infrastructure of this common world did not exist. There were neither French Jesuits nor French garrisons; there were no licensed traders.35 There were none of the common meanings of the alliance and none of its history of success against common enemies such as the Iroquois and English. And arrayed against Bourgmont were years of hostility along the prairie/Plains margins and the ambitions of other Frenchmen and other Indians. The Otoes and Iowas had commenced an alliance with the Sioux, the enemies of the French, who threatened the French presence along the Missouri. Bourgmont used his influence to break it up.36 It was bad enough that there were coureurs de bois interested in promoting slave raids, but some of the very officers who traveled with Bourgmont saw the expedition as an opportunity to acquire Padouca slaves. Bourgmont had them dismissed.37 The contradictions of empire ran more deeply. There were reasons why existing French colonies did not want the alliance extended farther west. Governor de Bienville of Louisiana wrote to the French commander in the Illinois Country, Dugué de Boisbriant, that not only would Bourgmont’s efforts fail, but it was also probably best that they failed. The stillstruggling colony needed the revenue from the trade in slaves.38 Bourgmont, however, had left Illinois before the letter arrived.39 Bourgmont set out to create an infrastructure to extend the alliance. His immediate goal was to establish the small post of Fort d’Orléans, and he persisted despite the outbreak of disease at the Kansa towns that scattered many of the Indians Bourgmont had called together and killed the Padouca slaves he meant to restore to their people.40 Bourgmont replaced the slaves and started out onto the Great Plains with a tumultuous cavalcade that included 1,100 Kansa, delegations from other tribes, and nineteen other Frenchmen. The procession spoke volumes about why the Kansa, Iowas, Missouris, Otoes, Skidi Pawnees, and other peoples of the Missouri border wanted peace. They had few horses.

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Dogs, women, and children carried the burdens. Dogs pulled travois, but the French were astonished at the loads young girls carried — roughly one hundred pounds. In the heat and dust of the Plains, they could not carry them far.41 As a Skidi Pawnee chief would later explain, they needed peace first, for their own tranquility, second to be able to hunt buffalo on the Plains in peace, and finally “in order to have horses, which will help us to carry our equipment when we go into winter quarters, because our women and children are terribly overburdened on our return.”42 The expedition moved slowly; Bourgmont grew deathly ill, probably a recurrence of malaria that had plagued him earlier, and they turned back. He sent forward one Frenchman, François Gaillard, and two new Padouca slaves that he had acquired.43 Gaillard appears to have traveled all the way to El Cuartelejeo, an Apache town among the irrigated fields of Ladder Creek, a small tributary of the Smoky Hill River in Kansas that descended from high short grasslands of the Great Plains. It still seems to archaeologists who work there as if a small piece of the Southwest had somehow been misplaced far to the north and east.44 Eventually, after innumerable complications, Bourgmont rose from his sick-bed and followed.45 Bourgmont’s second expedition was much smaller. That October, Bourg­mont, his young son, nine soldiers, and several other Frenchmen, including Gaillard, ten pack horses full of goods, and a delegation of Otoes, Iowas, Skidi Pawnees, and Kansa set out for the Plains. Again Gaillard, now with another Frenchman and two Padoucas, went ahead to arrange a meeting with the Plains Apaches. As they moved onto the buffalo Plains dominated by the tough short grasses of the arid region, Bourgmont and his men were astonished at the abundance of game, both buffalo and deer. They killed buffalo at will. They ate the fattest and from the others they took only the tongue. On October 18, they encountered Gaillard, who was bringing the “Padoucas” — the Cuartelejeo Apaches — to see them.46 Bourgmont used all the props of the French alliance. He and the Apaches smoked the calumet, and Bourgmont gave gifts. He divided his goods into piles, each pile of a kind: muskets, gunpowder, knives of various kinds, needles, kettles, cloth, wire, vermilion, and more. “Take all this merchandise,” he said; “the King gives it to you. As for me, I ask nothing from you in return.” He gave a French flag to the man he deemed chief of the Apaches, and the Apache chief distributed the rest of the gifts among his people. The Apaches, in turn, feasted the Frenchmen, took them into their homes,



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and offered them their daughters. In embracing the French, the Apaches eagerly embraced peace and alliance. When the Apache leader admired Bourgmont’s tobacco box, Bourgmont gave it to him. When he asked to trade for Bourgmont’s blue coat — “the one lined with red and adorned with a row of brass buttons on each side” — Bourgmont gave it to him. The Apaches said they would bring bison robes and horses to trade with the French and their allies. The Spanish, the Cuartelejeo leader said, traded only a few horses, knives, and inferior axes. They did not trade in guns or lead, in blankets or any of the other goods that the French brought. The Spanish were now as dirt to them. The Spanish could not match French generosity; they could not mediate peace on the Plains. The French had, for the moment, established peace on at least a small slice of the Plains, taken the first steps toward alliance and power, and opened, Bourgmont hoped, the way to New Mexico.47 It was Bourgmont’s triumph. Having achieving it, he returned to France, where his letters of nobility and a new French wife awaited him. His son  — the Little Missouri, as the neighboring peoples had called him —  did not go to France with him. Bourgmont would have French children by his French wife, but they all died in infancy.48 So did the alliance he had hoped to extend out onto the Great Plains. With him gone, and no French with their gifts and mediation to sustain it, the peace he negotiated on the Great Plains fell apart. The French abandoned Fort Orleans, his post on the Missouri near the Little Osages and the Missouris.49 The Apaches suffered the most. They resumed their long, slow, stubborn retreat from the Plains. Outside of the activities of Louis Juchereau de St. Denis in what is now western Louisiana, the expeditions of Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye, his sons, and his nephew up the Missouri River to discover “la Mer de l’Ouest” were the fullest attempts to transplant all the elements of the alliance to the West. 50 La Vérendrye brought not only a military presence, the rituals of the alliance, but also licensed traders and a missionary. He tried to mediate peace as he pushed his posts west.51 But La Vérendrye could never break through the Sioux then moving west along the Missouri and its tributaries to his south. He became entangled in the warfare of the northern prairies and Plains when he ceased to mediate and allowed one of his sons, Jean-Baptise, to accompany a Cree war party. Jean-Baptiste was one of twenty-one voyageurs to die at the hands of a Sioux war party in June 1736. And although La Vérendrye initially hoped for vengeance, he

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later tried to disengage the French from the warfare of the northern Plains and to make peace but without success.52 La Vérendrye operated in an imperial fog — a set of claims and ambitions for a route to the Western Sea so thick with ignorance that he could never be sure if the people moving vaguely within reach were actual or apparitions. In 1733, he forged his plans to reach the Mandans from a set of accounts of about those people “dont un bon nombre se son révélés exacts, mais don’t plusieurs autres étaient le fruit de leur imagination ou de leur désir de se rendre intérressants.”53 La Vérendrye did not find the Western Sea, but he did reach the Mandan towns, which served as a trade center for the northern Plains, in 1738. In 1742–43, two of his sons, LouisJoseph and François, pushed farther west to the Big Horn Mountains, but the warfare of the western Plains stopped further advance. Even here they were in places affected by Europeans. The Indians were mounted; there was news of other Frenchmen nearby, and they talked with slaves who spoke Spanish and who had been raised as Christians in New Mexico.54 After 1742, La Vérendrye’s sons and associates turned north and northwest, continuing a methodical French advance into Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where they competed with English traders from Hudson Bay. But contacts along the Missouri River resumed in the 1770s, for in the actual life of the Plains there was no sharply defined border between the Canadians Plains and prairies and Upper Louisiana. Empires pretended these were distinct places even if they could not specify the point or the nature of the division other than that one such place belonged to a crowned head who knew nothing about it and the other to another who possibly knew even less.55 Like the unnamed Frenchmen whom the La Vérendrye brothers heard of on the Upper Missouri, there were other Frenchmen moving without imperial permission through this country. By and large their efforts came to the attention of imperial authorities after the fact. There was the Frenchman who lived “depuis quelques années avec les Panimahas” and had in 1734 supposedly discovered gold and silver mines. There were the Mallet brothers, who, abandoning the conventional attempts to reach Santa Fe by following the Missouri, struck out from the Pawnee towns in 1739 and reached New Mexico.56 De Bertet, the commander of the Illinois, complained in 1744 of unlicensed traders “competing with one another by giving away their goods at very low prices, and even selling them at a loss, which would bring the voyageurs’ ruin, and also prevent commerce from increasing with the nations because of the ease which they



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had of satisfying their needs, which has made them up to the present time indifferent to the opportunities for the abundant hunting in the whole extent of this river.” The coureurs de bois killed each other, and Indians killed them. Many entered the records only as dead men: “Sans Peur,” who was killed by the Panimahas, and the ones named “Petit Jean and Dupre, who were killed by the little Otos.” The trade monopoly granted Deruisseau in exchange for supporting the soldiers at a post at the Kansa towns supposedly partially checked the disorder, but unlicensed traders kept moving up the Missouri and its tributaries as well as along rivers farther south. Officials in Louisiana and Canada struggled to control this movement of men and goods out onto the prairies and Great Plains, but with success only at the margins. Official expeditions largely failed. The gains that were made consisted of little more than establishing a new post on the Lower Missouri.57 It was hard to stabilize knowledge of this place, to standardize it, reduce it to maps, and render it transparent. Not only did peoples shift location and identity, but the oral knowledge obtained from Indians and voyageurs always ran ahead of what appeared on maps even as such accounts contradicted the maps and each other. In 1785, twenty-two years after the cession of Louisiana to Spain, the governor general, Esteban Rodriguez Miró, could only apologize for having no map of the province except for the Mississippi and the French settlements along it. He gave a long, vague account of the region between the Missouri and New Mexico that depended on the French, “who have been the masters of this province.”58 At the end of 1795, the lieutenant-governor stationed at Saint Louis, Zenon Trudeau, complained that more than thirty years after the acquisition of the territory, the Spanish flag had never been seen on the Upper Missouri.59 This space that the Spanish empire could not specify or penetrate could not be controlled. British traders, who were in fact largely French Canadians, worked the Missouri from the Otoes to the Mandans and beyond. The American penetration was not nearly so extensive, but still worrisome.60 The empires on the region’s borders continued to shed their subjects, who moved across it either as free agents or as agents of the fur-trading companies that sustained their own ambiguous relations to empire. They appear sometimes in documents like latter-day Lahontans, their information and claims hard to evaluate at a distance.61 The Spanish tried to create an imperial order on the Missouri, but their attempts were as futile as those of the French. Attempts to create trade monopolies on the river and those to the south failed. They opened the

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Missouri to all Spanish subjects while closing it to others in 1792.62 This did not work, in part, because the Spanish could not control the powerful peoples of the Lower Missouri — the Osages, Omahas, and Sioux. When they tried to punish the Osages by cutting off trade, it was the Saint Louis merchants, already being pushed off the Mississippi by the British, who suffered more than the Osages, who still had access to illegal traders on the Arkansas River and British traders who reached the Missouri across Iowa. The Spanish restricted the merchants out of fear of breaking the embargo, and the Osages threatened to sack those who did try to pass. Free trade gave way to a syndicate of Saint Louis merchants that eventually mutated into the Missouri Company that sought to monopolize the trade on the upper river in exchange for seeking a route to the Western Sea and pushing British traders off the river. By 1795, the Missouri Company, insisting on its determination to reach the Western Sea, was also confessing its impotence. It was necessary, “do not doubt this, to buy the good will of every nation and tribe which may oppose our communications; these expenses grow to a large sum . . . and sap our fortunes.” They needed subsidies, or British traders would dominate the river.63 The Missouri Company, in turn, devolved into Clamorgan, Loisel and Company, which, in effect, became a dependency of the House of Todd, a British Company originally trading out of Michilimackinac. Andrew Todd, having lost his core trading territory in the Old Northwest of the United States when the British and Americans signed the Jay Treaty in 1795, sought to switch his efforts to the Missouri River trade.64 The Spanish empire, in other words, in order to exclude the British empire from the Missouri, bestowed the trade of the Missouri on a British trading house. In making arrangements in New Orleans, however, Todd supplied the final devolution. He died in an epidemic.65 The Missouri Company fell into disarray.66 There was a certain logic to this seemingly mad imperial strategy of hiring your enemy’s subjects to protect you. A trader’s loyalty did not necessarily follow his nationality. Trading companies could be ventures utterly dependent on and in the service of empires. The Hudson’s Bay Company was a mercantilist enterprise with a royal grant and governing functions. But not all trading companies were so clearly linked to a particular empire. The Northwest Company contested the Hudson’s Bay Company’s grant and eventually fought not just a trade war but a shooting war against them. Northwest Company men would later become agents of Astor’s American Fur Company, only to switch back to the British at the



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outbreak of the War of 1812.67 Traders and trading companies usually did not confuse their nationalities with their economic interests. The House of  Todd could help the Spanish, but they could not be depended upon to do so. Todd had interests of his own. Traders on the Upper Missouri commented on and disparaged the Indians’ unwillingness to distinguish between Europeans, but why distinguish when imperial identities were so weak and feeble as to be inconsequential? The Missouri Company’s initial expedition up the Missouri was to one degree or another true of most expeditions in the 1790s. Jean Baptiste Truteau, who led the expedition, initially had difficulty even in creating the most confined imperial spaces — the trading fort, the trade convoy — that served as the seeds of empire. Because of the lack of timber, Truteau complained at the Arikara villages, “it would be most difficult for us to construct either houses or forts in this locality; we would need many people and much time to succeed.” Instead he relied on the Arikaras’ own fortifications. When those failed, and the Sioux sacked the Arikaras’ town, Truteau fled with them. Truteau’s pirogues could not stand against determined native resistance. His voyage up the Missouri in 1794 was a series of blockades, extortions, and payments of tribute particularly to the Omaha and Sioux. To pass safely without tribute was to pass secretly.68 Traders came and traders went. Usually they spoke French, although they could represent the British, Spanish, and later American empires. John Evans, a Welshman who had originally come in search of supposed Welshspeaking Indians, appeared in the service of the Spanish and fought with Frenchmen in the service of the English. Loyalties and nationalities were flexible and fluid. No wonder, as Truteau noted, Indians on the Upper Missouri “do not know any distinction between French, Spanish, English, etc., calling them all indifferently White Men or Spirits.”69 The quarrels between traders in the Mandan towns were certainly imperial struggles on one level, and the Spanish fear that the loss of Upper Louisiana would mean the loss of Mexico was real, but these quarrels had goals well below imperial divisions of the continent.70 When John Evans, acting on behalf of the Spanish, tried to kick out the Frenchmen who served, or deserted from, British trading companies, the “imperial” struggle was alternately comic and murderous, but it was also a struggle between trading companies and groups of Mandans.71 All the accounts of Evans’s altercations with the French ended up in the hands of Scotsmen, one serving the Hudson’s Bay Company, one the Northwest Company, and one the Spanish. Depending on whose account one believes, the re-

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sult was that “Mr. Evans and the Canadians was almost at fisticuffs” over his attempt to prevent the trade, and that the attempt led to the Indians threatening to kill him, which was followed by his precipitous departure.72 Or that the René Jusseaume and French servants of the Northwest Company tried to assassinate Evans, recruiting “some of the inferior class” of Mandans to their aid, but the chiefs supported Evans until his departure.73 James Sutherland of the Hudson’s Bay Company was less annoyed by these insults to Frenchmen who were British subjects by a Welshman who was a Spanish subject than by his trying to use the Spanish against Evans’s British commercial rival, the Northwest Company.74 In many regards, the Upper Missouri remained a haven for men slipping the control of empire. They were often deserters and outlaws.75 Lower down the river, Indians made distinctions. Like Tecumseh, his contemporary, the Europeans regarded Black Bird, an Omaha leader of the 1790s, as one of the most remarkable men they encountered on the continent. Black Bird, whose own authority was derived in large part from his dealings with Europeans, was in the process of replicating some of the building blocks of the middle ground that had emerged in the great imperial rivalry between the French and British east of the Mississippi.76 He sought to play off the English and the French. He sought a Spanish post among his people as well as annual gifts to the Omahas. He promised, in turn, to cooperate with the Spanish in maintaining an orderly trade and allowing free passage up the Missouri. He would keep out the British, although the threat of British trade was one of his clubs. He could do this relatively easily because the Frenchmen who were now Spanish with whom he dealt were children of the middle ground themselves. They knew the ceremonies, the rituals of gift giving, the rituals of fictive kinship, which made kinship relations both metaphorically and actually the basis for political and economic relations. Truteau and other agents of the Missouri Company conformed to the usages of the old middle ground — the medals, commissions, pipes, gifts, councils, and the support of what amounted to alliance chiefs whose power came from their ability to mediate with Europeans.77 But Black Bird was not really dealing with Spain despite the commissions and medals he received; he was dealing with the Missouri Company. To be sure, empire could be delegated, but only if the delegates — such as the Hudson’s Bay Company — found it profitable. Empires might subsidize traders, but traders would not willingly subsidize empires for long. The empire could in some cases secure traders’ loyalty simply by the granting of a monopoly, but this alienated competing traders. In other



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cases, it could attract broader loyalty by subsidizing a trade — providing infrastructure, presents, price supports, and restricting access to those licensed by imperial officials. This was expensive. In North America, the French had been willing to support trade as a tool of empire rather than seek empire as a way to promote trade. Individual traders profited even as the trade as a whole and the imperial establishment operated at a loss. Spain proved unwilling to do this in Upper Louisiana. The Missouri Company tried to arrange for an imperial subsidy of ten thousand pesos a year to allow it keep one hundred soldiers on the Missouri, but the intendant of Louisiana refused.78 As a result, elements of the middle ground appeared, but they did not cohere. The essential logic of innovation based on misunderstanding, of each side trying to appeal to what it saw as the belief and logic of the other, did not have the supports it needed to grow. Black Bird’s negotiations remained a playing off of traders. Empires were not irrelevant to Upper Louisiana, but the influence did not spring from any control they exerted there, but rather from their ability to restrict the gateways leading to Upper Louisiana and western Canada. Traders departed from Montreal, St. Louis, and Michilimackinac. They came from the American settlements in the old Illinois Country and crossed Iowa to the Missouri. By regulating and taxing traders at the places from which they departed and to which they would return, the empires could exert leverage. But such was the weakness of Spain that even this was feeble and incomplete. The lieutenant governor of Illinois rationalized reducing duties on goods imported by the House of Todd and letting them have the monopoly of the Missouri on the grounds that most of the partners of the Missouri Company paid no duty on their trade goods which they smuggled in from Michilimackinac.79 The Missouri River did not grow any more orderly; it grew more anarchic as trade rivalries between Spanish subjects and between Spanish subjects and foreigners, smallpox epidemics, and the repercussions of renewed imperial war in Europe all exerted their influence in the late 1790s and early 1800s.80 The return of the French was never much more than mémoires and dreams. Louis Vilemont’s suggestions to the crown for the governance of Louisiana were partially the methods of the old middle ground and partially modifications of British and American Indian policy, which were themselves borrowed from early French techniques. The core assumption of his plans was that for the near future only an Indian alliance could maintain Louisiana against French imperial rivals.81 The American acquisition of Louisiana eliminated the possibility of

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renewed French access to the area, but, despite the great changes that would eventually follow, American claims were initially only another lens through which imperialists could view and understand this vast space. Jefferson imagined Upper Louisiana as site for a kind of political, social, and economic mimesis. The United States would not change; it would only replicate itself in the West. Upper Louisiana would become a replication of the America Jefferson already knew. In Merrill Peterson’s apt phrase, Jefferson imagined the United States “expanding through space” rather than “developing through time.”82 The republican future of Upper Louisiana was, however, almost immediately put on hold. Jefferson wrote to John Breckinridge that “[t]he territory west of the Mississippi would be given to the Indians ‘in exchange for their present country,’ and the sale of these vacated lands would ‘make this acquisition [of Louisiana] the means of filling up the eastern side, instead of drawing off its population’ . . . ‘when we shall be full on this side, we may lay off a range of States on the western bank from the head to the mouth, and so, range after range, advancing compactly as we multiply.’ ”83 In other words, Upper Louisiana would continue to feel the effects of neighboring empires but would no more be controlled by the United States than it had been by Spain, France, or Britain. Americans, like the French, British, and Spanish before them, passed into this territory, and the most famous passage for twentieth- and twentyfirst-century Americans — although not necessarily for those of nineteenth century — was the Lewis and Clark expedition. The attempt to travel across the continent to the Pacific was not new. La Vérendrye and his sons had attempted it before Lewis and Clark. So had John Evans. They had failed. Alexander MacKenzie had attempted it a decade before them and had succeeded. Lewis and Clark represented not so much the dawning of a new order as another iteration of the old. They led an expedition prompted by imagination and imperial desire. They moved through a space they neither knew nor controlled. They built on previous passages, relying heavily on the reports, maps, and experience of John Evans and his superior James Mackay.84 Jefferson knew of Alexander MacKenzie’s passage to the Pacific in 1792–93 and read his Voyages in 1802, using them in formulating the Lewis and Clark expedition.85 On the Pacific coast, the Columbia River, and the Missouri River, Lewis and Clark either met or found signs of other Europeans who had preceded them. Except for their difficult passage over



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the Rockies and into the Columbia basin, the Indians they met were quite familiar with whites, although not as familiar with blacks. After Lewis and Clark had passed, things continued much as before their passage. The knowledge they produced proved neither uniformly lasting nor secure. Some dribbled out; some was lost. Both their knowledge and their expedition had become a footnote by the end of the nineteenth century. It could be argued that William Clark produced far more effective imperial knowledge in his famous map created during his years as a powerful western superintendent of Indian Affairs in Saint Louis.86 Upper Louisiana as part of the broader unnamed place outside the control of states and empires was not significantly altered by the passage of Lewis and Clark. It would continue to be beyond the domain of empires and states for roughly a half century after the return of the expedition. Narrowed and whittled down, to be sure, it nonetheless remained. It would vanish with the transcontinental railroads in Canada, Mexico, and the United States following the American Civil War. Centennials and bicentennials make great claims that the world was different in their wake. This is their nature. Those claims often seem foolish in retrospect because they can obscure the larger, and perhaps more significant, things that did not change. And what did not change, at least then, can contain possibilities at least as interesting as the celebrated events that obscure them. If only as a metaphor, Upper Louisiana as part of a larger “no place” beyond the control but within the influence of empires and states is worthy of notice.

Notes 1. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 29. 2. Willard Rollings, The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 67–178. For identity, see James Brooks, Captives and Cousins (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 3. Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York: Scribner, 1976), 173; Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 292; Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 138. 4. Winstanley Briggs, “Le Pays des Illinois,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 47 (January 1990): 30. 5. Carte du Cap francois de Saint Domingue de l’isle de Cuba, de la Jamaique

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avec le Canal de Bahama, l’entrée du fleuve Saint Louis, et le pays de la Louisiane et les isles adjacentes, let tout depuis 16 degrees de latitude jusqu’a trente six, 1747, Newberry Library. 6. Carte du Mexique et de la Floride des terres angloises . . . Par Guillaume de L’isle . . . a Amsterdam, 1722, Newberry Library; Ralph E. Ehrenberg, “Exploratory Mapping of the Great Plains Before 1800,” in Mapping the North American Plains: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Frederick C. Luebke, Frances W. Kay, and Gary E. Moulton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 4. 7. Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi avec les colonies anglaises, Revue, corrigée consisidérablement augmentée in 1782 par Guillaume Delisle, Newberry Library. 8. Carte du Mexique et de la Floride . . . Par Guillaume de L’isle Paris, 1703, Newberry Library. 9. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 50–53. Various groups of Osage sustained different relations to the French (see Rollings, The Osage, 115–30). 10. I discuss this in The Middle Ground, 475. 11. Marcel Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self” (1938), discussed in Richard White, “ ‘Although I Am Dead, I Am Not Entirely Dead, I Have Left a Second of Myself’: Constructing Self and Persons on the Middle Ground of Early America,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 410–12. 12. Harrison to Secretary of War, 5 July 1809, in Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison, ed. Logan Esarey, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Commission, 1922), 353–54. 13. White, Middle Ground, 511–13. 14. Carl J. Wheat, The Spanish Entrada to the Louisiana Purchase 1540–1804, vol. 1, Mapping the Transmississippi West, 5 vols. (San Francisco: Institute of Historical Cartography, 1957), 61–62. 15. A New Map of the north parts of America claimed by France under ye names of Louisiana, Mississipi [sic] Canada and New France with ye adjoyning Territories of England and Spain, H. Moll, Geographer, 1720, Newberry Library. 16. Nouvelle Le Carte Particuliére de L “Amérique,” in Atlas Nouveau Contenant Toutes Les Parties du Monde . . . (Amsterdam, Chez Jean Cóvens & Corneille Mortier [pencil notation, after 1775]), Newberry Library; John Logan Allen, Passage through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 9–13. 17. Reuben Gold Thwaites, Lahontan’s New Voyages to North-America, 2 vols. (Chicago: McClurg, 1905), 1:xxi. 18. Ibid., 1:xxxiii. 19. Ibid., l:xxxiii–xxxiv, liv. 20. Ibid., 1:190–93.



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21. Ibid., l:xxxviii–xxxix; Robert Weddle, The French Thorn (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1991), 311. 22. Kathleen Duval, “A Good Relationship & Commerce: The Native Political Economy of the Arkansas River Valley,” Early American Studies 1 (Spring 2003): 61–62. 23. Antoine Champagne gives an account of the reports and rumors of many of these voyages in Les La Vérendrye et le poste de L’Ouest (Quebec: Presses De L’Université Laval, 1968), 27–28, 31–32. 24. Jean-Baptiste Bénard de La Harpe, The Historical Journal of the Establishment of the French in Louisiana, USL History Series no. 3 (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1971), 13–16, 84; Memoir, ibid., 222. 25. Ehrenberg, “Exploratory Mapping,” 5–7. 26. André-Joseph Pénicaut, “Relation de Pénicaut,” in Découvertes et établissments des Français dans l’ouest et dans le sud de l’Amérique septentrionale (1614–1754): Mémoires et documents originaux, ed. Pierre Margry, 6 vols. (Paris: Maisonneuve et Ch. Leclerc, 1888), 5:402; Herni Folmer, “Contraband Trade between Louisiana and New Mexico in the Eighteenth Century,” New Mexico Historical Review 16 (July 1941): 259–67; Duval, “A Good Relationship,” 75, 81–83. 27. Portion of a “Diary of the Reconnaissance Expedition of Colonel Don Pedro de la Villasur, along the Platte River, 1720,” in After Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696–1727, ed. and trans. Alfred Barnaby Thomas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1935), 36–38, 124; Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The Spanish Archives of New Mexico, 2 vols. (n.p.: Torch Press, 1914), 2:191. 28. Extrait d’une lettre de Bienville au Conseil de Régence, 20 Juillet 1721; and Extrait d’une lettre de Bienville au Conseil de Régence, 25 Avril 1722, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:386–87; Endroit ou doit s’etablir le Sieur Bourgmont, Mémoire du sieur de La Renaudière, 23 aoust 1723, joint à lettre de M. Perry, du 1 Septembre 1723, ibid., 6:392–96 29. Frank Norall, Bourgmont, Explorer of the Missouri, 1698–1725 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 33–34. 30. Ibid., 3–17. 31. Ibid., 16–17. Suzanne Boivin Sommerville, who has done extensive research on the Montours, believes Madam Montour is much maligned. 32. Ehrenberg, “Exploratory Mapping,” 10–11. 33. Norall, Bourgmont, 36; Instructions Données au Sieur Bourgmont, signé Fa­gon, Ferrand, Machault et Dodun, 17 Janvier 1722, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:391. 34. He departed New Orleans with forty Frenchmen, losing many of them along the way from desertion and disease (Norall, Bourgmont, 42; De La Harpe, The Historical Journal, 186ff.). 35. French missionary activity took place among people who hunted to the west, such as the Quapaws, but the missions proper remained close to the Mississippi (Duval, “A Good Relationship & Commerce,” 75–77).

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36. Lettre de Bourgmont à MM. Les Commissaires et Memberes du Conseil de la Louisiane, 11 Janvier 1724, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:396–97. 37. Norall, Bourgmont, 42–44. For slaving on the Plains and Bourgmont’s orders to stop, see “Les voyageurs Francais achètent les esclaves,” 25 October 1720, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:316. 38. Extrait d’une lettre escrite à M. de Boisbriant par M. de Bienville . . . le 20 aoust 1723, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:391–92. Here, as in other cases, Margry sometimes edits to eliminate things he would rather the French had not done — in this case, Bienville’s endorsement of the slave trade (see Norall, Bourgmont, 45, 48). 39. Norall, Bourgmont, 47. It was near Wakenda, on the north bank of the river in present Carroll County, Missouri. Margry prints Bourgmont’s Journal in Découvertes, 6:398–449, and Norall gives an English translation in Bourgmont. I will cite Norall’s translation. Bourgmont Journal, 25 June 1724, in Norall, Bourgmont, 125–26. 40. Bourgmont Journal, 7–19 July 1724, in Norall, Bourgmont, 126–133. 41. Ibid., 24–29 July 1724, in Norall, Bourgmont, 135–37. 42. Ibid., 6 October 1724, in Norall, Bourgmont, 145. 43. Ibid., 30 July–3 August 1724, in Norall, Bourgmont, 138–39. 44. Thomas, After Coronado, 53. 45. Bourgmont Journal, 4 August, 6 September 1724, in Norall, Bourgmont 140–42; Norall, Bourgmont, 59–62. 46. Bourgmont Journal, 8–18 October 1724, in Norall, Bourgmont, 146–50. 47. Ibid., 19–22 October 1724, in Norall, Bourgmont, 150–58. 48. Norall, Bourgmont, 88. 49. Extrait des Instructions données à M. Périer, 30 September 1726, in Margry, Découvertes, 6:452; Willard Rollings, The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 91, 117. 50. Antoine Champagne, Les La Vérendrye et le poste de L’Ouest (Quebec: Les Presses De L’Université Laval, 1968), 13–14. 51. Ibid., 116–45. 52. Beauharnois to Maurepas, n.p., n.d., “On the Discovery of the Western Sea,” in Journals and Letters of Pierre Gaultier de Vareenes de la Vérendrye and His Sons . . . , ed. Lawrence Burpee (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1927), 128–19; “Report in Journal form of all that took place at fort St. Charles from May 27, 1733 to July 12 . . . 1734,” ibid., 180–86; “Affair of the murder of twenty-one voyageurs at the Lake of the Woods in the month of June, 1736,” ibid., 262–65; “Mémoire du sieur de la Vérendrye,” in Margry, Découvertes, 6:595; La Vérendrye, Journal, in In Search of the Western Sea: Selected Journals of La Vérendrye, ed. Denis Combet (Winnepeg: Great Plains Publications, 2001), 73, 107. 53. “[O]f which a good number described them accurately, but many others were the fruit of their imagination or their desire to make them more interesting” (Combet, In Search of the Western Sea, 142).



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54. Journal du voyage fait par le Chevalier de La Vérendrye . . . (Partis le 9 avril 1742), in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:598–611; Champagne, Les La Vérendrye, 241–44, 267–70; Ehrenberg, “Exploratory Mapping,” 13; Journal of Louis Joseph, Chevalier de La Vérendrye, 1742–43, in Combet, In Search of the Western Sea, 123, 127. 55. W. Raymond Wood and Thomas D. Thiessen, Early Fur Trade on the Northern Plains: Canadian Traders among the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, 1738–1818 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 22–24, 42–44, appendix 1. 56. “Extrait d’une Lettre de M. de Bienville au Ministre de la marine, 22 avril, 1734,” in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:455; Voyage des fréres Mallet . . . 1739–1740; Extrait du Journal, ibid., 6:455–62. 57. A. P. Nasatir, ed., Before Lewis and Clark: Documents Illustrating the History of the Missouri, 1785–1804 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 34–42. 58. Miró to Rengel, 12 December 1785, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 119–27; Carondelet to Alcudia, January 8, 1796, ibid., 388–91. 59. Trudeau to Carondelete, 19 December 1795, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 374. 60. Miró to Rengel, 12 December 1785, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 125; Perez to Miró, 1 December 1788, ibid., 128; Carondelet to Trudeau, 28 November 1792, ibid., 163; Abraham Nasatir, “Anglo Spanish Rivalry on the Upper Missouri,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 16 (December 1929): 366, 378–79. 61. See Gardoqui’s description of “one of the many enthusiastic Englishmen who roam these western countries” (Garodqui to Floridablanca, 25 June 1789; Miró to Rengel, 12 December 1785, both in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 130–31). 62. Carondelet’s instructions to Trudeau, 28 March 1792, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 151–52. 63. For a summary of Osage/Spanish relations, see Rollings, The Osage, 154– 77. “Report of Santiago Clamorgan and Antoine Reihle, St. Louis, 8 July 1795, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 335–39; Mackay’s Journal, 14 October 1795–18 January, 1796, ibid., 363. 64. Merchants of St. Louis to Carondelet, 22 June 1793, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 181–83; Regulations for the Illinois Trade, 15 October 1793, ibid., 186–94; Petition of Juan Munier, September 1793, ibid., 194–97; Trudeau to Carondelet, 24 April 1794, ibid., 207–8; Distribution of the Missouri Trading Postings, 1–3 May 1794, ibid., 209–11; Articles of Incorporation of the Missouri Company, May 1794, ibid., 217–28; Nasatir, “Anglo Spanish Rivalry on the Upper Missouri,” 368–72; Devolution, Clamorgan to Carondelet, 10 April 1796, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 421–25; Carondelet to Alcudia, 8 January 1796, ibid., 400–402; Minutes of the Council of State, 27 May 1796, ibid., 437–39; Trudeau to Carondelet, 4 August 1796, ibid., 443; Agreement between Todd and Clamorgan, 26 October 1796, ibid., 464–69; Trudeau to Gayoso de Lemos, 16 May 1798, ibid., 557–60.

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65. Morales to Gardoqui, 1 December 1796, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 482. 66. Trudeau to Gayoso de Lemos, 15 November 1798, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 585–86. 67. James Ronda, Astoria and Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press); Wood and Thiessen, Early Fur Trade on the Northern Plains, 8–17. 68. Trudeau to Carondelet, 28 September 1793, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 197–203; Clamorgan’s Instructions to Truteau, 30 June 1794, ibid., 243– 52; Journal of Truteau on the Missouri River, 1794–95, ibid., 250–60, 262–63, 264–79, 280–89. Quotation, ibid., 295. 69. Journal of Truteau on the Missouri River, 1794–95, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 296. 70. Loss of Mexico, Trudeau to Gayoso de Lemos, 15 November 1798, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 585. 71. Black Bird, Journal of Truteau on the Missouri River, 1794–95, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 282–86; Nasatir, “Anglo-Spanish Rivalry on the Upper Missouri,” 510. 72. Extracts from Brandon House Journal, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 463. 73. Extracts of Mr. Evans’s Journal, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 496–98; Nasatir, “Anglo-Spanish Rivalry on the Upper Missouri,” 514. 74. Sutherland to Evans, 26 February 1797, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 501. 75. Wood and Thiessen, Early Fur Trade, 50. 76. Tanis Thorne, “Black Bird, ‘King of the Mahars’: Autocrat, Big Man, Chief,” Ethnohistory 40 (Summer 1993): 412–13, 415–17; John Ludwickson, “Black­ bird and Son: A Note Concerning Late Eighteenth-  and Early-NineteenthCentury Chieftainship,” Ethnohistory 42 (Winter 1995): 134–41. 77. Journal of Truteau on the Missouri River, 1794–95, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 308–9; Thorne, “Black Bird,” 419–25; Ludwickson, “Blackbird and Son,” 134–41. 78. Clamorgan to Carondelet, 27 October 1796, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 470; Morales to Carondelet, 3 November 1796, ibid., 473. See also Thorne, “Black Bird,” 424–25. 79. Contraband, Carondelet to Trudeau, 9 November 1796, in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 476. 80. Clamorgan to Salcedo, 18 April 1801; Clamorgan to Casa Calvo, 27 April 1801, both in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 632–35; Delassus to Calvo, 3 April 1801, ibid., 631–32; Memorial by Lisa and Others to the Governor, 8 October 1801, ibid., 646–60. 81. Vilemont to Minister, 14 Messidor An 10 (3 July 1802), in Before Lewis and Clark, ed. Nasatir, 690–702, esp. 702. 82. Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 30. 83. Quoted in Peter S. Onuf and Leonard J. Sadosky, Jeffersonian America (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2002), 203.



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84. James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark among the Indians (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 1984), 1–14. For maps and knowledge of Mackay and Evans, see Ehrenberg, “Exploratory Mapping,” 22–23. 85. James Ronda, Astoria and Empire, 29–30. 86. Ibid., 128–30. For the general idea of no place, I am indebted to Kate Brown.

C é ci l e V i da l

M

From Incorporation to Exclusion Indians, Europeans, and Americans in the Mississippi Valley from 1699 to 1830

T

he history of intercultural relations in the North American interior was nothing if not complex. Throughout the eighteenth century, a place that came to be called “Louisiana” came into being through the intersection of imperial rivalry, commercial development, and local negotiation. Understanding how Indians, Europeans, and Americans understood that world therefore requires some background on its creation. In 1699, the French founded the colony of Louisiana. This same year, d’Iberville reached Biloxi bay, and the priests of the Seminary of Foreign Missions established the first permanent mission of the Illinois Country at Cahokia. In 1718, one year after the cession of Louisiana to the Company of the West, later called the Company of the Indies, the Illinois Country was incorporated into this colony, having previously been under Canadian dominion. Thus, in the eighteenth century, “Greater French Louisiana” (the expression coined by Joseph Zitomersky) not only corresponded to the present state of Louisiana, but extended from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Appalachian to the Rocky Mountains.1 This region can be divided into two geographic, administrative, and economic entities: Upper Louisiana, which included the Illinois Country and joined Canada to the Lower Mississippi valley; and Lower Louisiana, whose northern limit was located in the Arkansas valley. In 1762–63, after the disasters of the Seven Years War, the treaties of Fontainebleau and Paris conferred the eastern part of Louisiana on the British, except for New Orleans, while the right bank of the Mississippi, with the capital, was given to Spain. The French reoccupied this vast terri-



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tory for a few weeks before selling it to the United States in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase allowed Jefferson to initiate a policy of Indian removal, which culminated with the Removal Act of 1830 under the first Jackson administration. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the various Native nations of the Mississippi valley maintained relations among themselves, and these connections did not vanish with colonization. Moreover, the valley under French rule, and then with its right bank under Spanish domination, was unified politically and administratively. It was also an integrated economic space: Upper Louisiana served as a wheat granary for the Lower Mississippi valley and depended on New Orleans for its supply of manufactured goods. Therefore, the relations between the Europeans and Indians in the eighteenth century must be studied in the Mississippi valley as a whole, and not only in Lower Louisiana.2 Indeed, ignoring the Illinois Country would minimize the food trade between Upper and Lower Louisiana and accentuate the Europeans’ dependency on the Indians for their subsistence.3 It would also downplay the essential role played by some Native nations of Upper Louisiana in the French or Spanish alliance. Analyzing the European-Indian interactions over a long period, which saw the succession or coexistence of French, Spanish, English, and American sovereignty in the Mississippi valley, allows me to question the idea, developed by the traditional historiography since Francis Parkman, that the French demonstrated a “colonial genius” when they dealt with Indians.4 The thrust of this argument is that the French, as a people, developed more open, fluid, tolerant, and conciliatory relations with the Indians than did the Spanish or the Anglo-Americans. This stereotype was not simply an a posteriori assertion by historians. From the outset of the eighteenth century, officials and travelers in Louisiana voiced this opinion. In 1708, Bienville, governor of Louisiana, declared: “the savages are naturally fond of the French and become attached to the English only by necessity and interest.”5 Nevertheless, if European-Indian relations brutally changed with the arrival of the British and then of the Americans, the Spaniards in Louisiana followed the same Indian policy as the French after 1769. Furthermore, neither the “French,” “Spanish,” “British,” nor “Americans” constituted homogeneous groups. In fact, European attitudes toward Indians greatly varied according to the colonial actors: the central power in the mother country, local officers, missionaries, traders, and settlers. Thus, we must go beyond this stereotype and analyze the reasons why the French and Spanish on the one hand, and the Indians on the other, globally main-

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tained good relations in Louisiana until 1803, while Indian-American interactions worsened in the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this essay, I argue that two series of factors explain the success of the French in dealing with the Indians. The most important reasons concern demography, economy, and geopolitics. French migration to Louisiana was so small that the French were never able to densely people the country. Moreover, they were dependent on the Indians for food and trade goods. In the context of increasing imperial rivalry in North America, the French also needed the Native warriors as military allies against the British and Indian enemies. After 1769, the Spanish experienced the same demographic weakness and had to face the same British and then American competition as the French. It was for this reason that they adopted the same policy of alliance with the Indians as their predecessors. In contrast, the arrival of thousands of American migrants eager for agricultural lands in the Mississippi valley in the first decades of the nineteenth century led to the removal policy of the federal government. The U.S. government was able to buy Native lands because Indians were increasingly economically dependent, and, since the United States had no rivals after 1815, they were no longer able to maintain their political autonomy. It was these pragmatic concerns of demography, economy, and geopolitics — rather than the divergent notions of race and race policy distinguishing Europeans and Euro-Americans — that forged the intercultural landscape of French Louisiana. This hardly means culture was irrelevant. The beliefs that Europeans, Americans, and Indians brought with them informed what practices they considered possible or acceptable. Nonetheless, it was their strategies to populate, trade, and negotiate that would shape and eventually reshape life within a broader place called Louisiana. In making this claim, I join a chorus of historians who have come to favor these demographic and economic explanations while rejecting the idea that the success of the French-Indian alliance resulted from “a peculiar, natural, cultural, or intellectual Gallic affinity” for Indians.6 One can argue, however, that the political and social culture of Old Regime France also favored the recognition of Native autonomy and the process of acculturation during the French period. Although I use my own work on the Illinois Country during the French Regime, this essay draws mainly on secondary literature.7 Most American historians who study the relations between Europeans and Amerindians in the Mississippi valley specialize in one region of this vast area or/and one historical period of the 130 years between the arrival of the French on



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Biloxi bay in 1699 and the Removal Act of 1830. Since the development of ethnohistory and of the New Indian history in the 1970s and 1980s, they have produced numerous works.8 At the same time, Canadian historians such as Cornelius Jaenen, Olivia Dickason, Denys Delâge, and Bruce Trigger have significantly contributed to a better understanding of the relations between French and Native Americans.9 More recently, Indian history has also attracted a few French historians, such as Gilles Havard.10 Among all the works recently written on the subject, two, published in the beginning of the 1990s, changed historians’ view on Indian-French interactions. First, Richard White’s Middle Ground is one of the most influential books written in American Indian history.11 Second, Daniel H. Usner’s Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy sheds new light on a region long neglected by American colonial historians.12 They are complementary because they are not centered on the same areas (the Great Lakes region, including the Illinois Country, on one hand, and the Lower Mississippi valley, on the other) and on the same aspects of European-Indian interactions: while Daniel H. Usner deals mainly with socioeconomic relations, Richard White’s focus is on diplomacy and political culture.13 Neither discusses at great length the processes of acculturation and métissage.14 Therefore, this essay examines each of the following topics: the demography of European-Indian encounters; the formation of an alliance between the French and Indians and the evolution of this alliance after 1763; and the cultural exchanges that took place in all aspects of everyday life. The conclusion will show how the relations with Native nations changed when the United States entered the scene. As everywhere in the New World, the Indian-European encounter had immediate, dramatic consequences for the former.15 The Europeans brought with them infectious diseases, smallpox in particular, to which the Indians had no immunity. They died by the thousands. The fall of Native populations began as early as the sixteenth century with the arrival of conquistadors, such as Hernando de Soto in 1540–43. As many as 80 percent of the Indians may have died during this period. New epidemic waves preceded and accompanied the French when they reached the Mississippi valley in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Not all Indian nations suffered from the epidemics on the same scale; death rates depended on their location and proximity to the Europeans. The tribes settled on the Gulf coast and in the Mississippi valley were the most

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affected. The demographic decline pushed some of them to migrate and even to amalgamate with others. The Indians needed several generations to develop immunities to these diseases. The Native populations did not begin to grow until the 1760s.16 However, the Indians were always more numerous than the French. Emigration from France (or from the German states and Swiss townships) was very weak. Only 6,000 settlers came in 1717–20, when the only migratory wave of the French period took place, and 60 percent of them died during the journey or soon after their arrival. The slave trade from Africa nearly ceased in 1731. This is why the Lower Mississippi valley had no more than 10,000 non-Indian inhabitants (fewer than 6,000 black slaves and 4,000 white settlers) in 1763, while the French villages of the Illinois Country counted fewer than 1,400 inhabitants (with more than 50 percent being white settlers) in 1752. Moreover, during all the French period, fewer than 1,000 soldiers were garrisoned in the entire colony, except for during the Seven Years War. In Lower Louisiana, there were always more Choctaws than French, even if the Choctaws decreased from 30,000 individuals to 8,000 between 1699 and 1726; it was the same in the Upper Mississippi valley, where the Illinois still counted 2,300 members in 1763. Thus, the French in Louisiana lived in a world demographically dominated by the Indians.17 These circumstances remained partly valid for the Spanish period, even if the slave trade from Africa resumed in 1772.18 Until 1803, the troops had no more than 1,000 soldiers. Few white immigrants arrived in Louisiana. Fewer than 3,000 Acadians migrated in several waves and settled in the backcountry. In 1777–83, the colony received 100 migrants from Málaga and 2,500 Isleños from the Canaries. Therefore, in 1785, while the proportion of the non-Indian population had grown and constituted half the total population, there were only 30,500 white or black inhabitants in Lower Louisiana on both banks of the Mississippi River.19 Moreover, although the cession of Louisiana to Great Britain and Spain coincided with the beginning of the Native population’s demographic recovery, the Spanish in the Upper Mississippi valley looked for more Native military allies who would have constituted a buffer against the Osages and who could have helped them against the English and then the Americans. During the last third of the eighteenth century, some Peorias and Kaskaskias from the Illinois Country, Shawnees and Delawares from the Ohio valley, and Cherokees and Miamis moved to the west bank in order to escape American encroachments on their lands, but also to exploit the bountiful



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hunting grounds and to profit from the fur trade.20 Thus the Spanish, as the French before them, were largely dependent on the Indians. It is only in the first decades of the nineteenth century that the white settlers outnumbered the Native population in the Mississippi valley. In Upper Louisiana, from 3,000 (including fewer than 500 slaves) in 1796, the non-Indian population grew to over 20,000 (3,000 slaves) by 1811. After the departure of the British in 1815, migrants flew into the Old Northwest. In 1830, the states of this region had 1,470,000 inhabitants. In the Arkansas valley, the number of non-Indian settlers increased from fewer than 400 in 1803 to more than 14,000 in 1820 and 30,000 (including 15 percent slaves) in 1830. In the Mississippi Territory, the population included nearly 5,000 whites, 35,000 black slaves, and 200 free blacks in 1798, while there were 127,000 whites and 75,000 black slaves in the states of Mississippi and Alabama in 1820. Globally, the population of the United States rose from 5 to 15 million inhabitants between 1800 and 1828; during the same period, the number of states increased from thirteen to twenty-four. Thus, the demographic balance was no longer in favor of the Indians.21 Because there were fewer French, their colonization in North America cannot be reduced to a pattern of European domination and Indian submission, a process the Natives would have resisted. The French claim of sovereignty over a huge part of the continent, especially in the interior, was largely theoretical; it existed only because the Indians integrated the French into their world. As Kathleen A. DuVal wrote about the Arkansas valley, “colonialism met, not resistance, but incorporation.” The Indians were not passive toward transformations introduced by the newcomers. They often shaped their responses to these changes and negotiated the way their relations with the French developed. The latter needed Indian allies against Native enemies and especially against the British. In the context of the French-British rivalry in North America, the French could not have stayed as long as they did without this alliance. The Indians not only supplied them with furs and skins, they also become indispensable military auxiliaries.22 To maintain this alliance, some diplomatic, military, and economic relations developed according to French and Indian rituals and practices in dialectics between both cultures. Richard White has shown that this process of accommodation took place in what he terms the “middle ground.” He defines this concept as “the place in between: in between cultures,

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peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages. . . . On the middle ground diverse peoples adjust their differences through what amounts to a process of creative, and often expedient, misunderstandings. People try to persuade others who are different from themselves by appealing to what they perceive to be the values and practices of those others. They often misinterpret and distort both the values and the practices of those they deal with, but from these misunderstandings arise new meanings and through them new practices — they share meanings and practices of the middle ground.”23 However, this process of accommodation in which the French agreed to participate was not contradictory with a process of conquest. The French had a long-range imperialist goal: they wanted to dominate the Indians; acculturation and métissage were used as a colonialist arm to integrate the Native populations and territories within the French empire. The Spanish had the same desire to dominate, as the correspondence of Gálvez, the new vice king of New Spain in 1785, demonstrates.24 In the political vocabulary of the alliance, the governor, representative of the king of France, was the father and the Indians were his children. This familial metaphor appeared in Canada in the 1660s and 1670s and then was used in Louisiana. It corresponded to parental ties used to metaphorically qualify political relations in both cultures: the king of France was the father of his subjects; among Indians, allies were often called uncles, nephews, or brothers. However, even if the French and the Indians used a common figure to describe their symbolic relationship, they did not envision the relationship in the same way; rather, they interpreted it in reference to their own culture. According to the absolutist model of monarchic power in France, the king as the father of his subjects exercised a coercive power over them. The Indians, however, did not conceive of parenthood in the same way: parents did not use constraints to educate their children. Moreover, in many Native societies, such as that of the Choctaw, filiations were matrilineal: the maternal uncle, not the biological father, was responsible for the education of his sister’s sons and exercised some authority over them.25 Hence, the fact that the Indians called the governor their father did not mean that they put themselves in a position of subjugation; they instead considered him as a mediator and supplier. According to Native conceptions of chieftaincy, the governor’s influence was based on his power of persuasion, his abilities to arbitrate, and his generosity. To impose unilateral decisions was out of the question.



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The Indians did not agree to engage in war each time the French or the Spanish asked them to do so; their answer depended on their own interests. During the America Revolution, for example, the Quapaws did not feel “obligated to help the Whites make War.”26 Thus, the governor in New Orleans and the commandants in the outposts had to assemble the allies regularly in order to consult them. In these meetings, oratorical talent was of fundamental importance. As the Indians were not inclined to learn French, French interpreters translated the speeches. The presence of interpreters did not shock Indians since Native chiefs often appointed skilled orators to speak for them. As soon as they arrived in Canada and later in Louisiana, the French used truchements: these young men had to live among the Native populations for several years to learn their language. Patricia Galloway has suggested that in Choctaw and Chickasaw societies these truchements were adopted as fanimingos, members of a foreign group who were given hospitality, presents, and significant kinship roles and had in return to represent them in the council of their own people. Some officers did not even need interpreters and spoke one or several Indian languages. Bienville distinguished himself among all governors by the fact that he spoke Choctaw.27 Moreover, the governor had to be generous and to give many presents.28 Presents played a fundamental role in Native societies, and they were involved in every familial, social, economic, political, and military ritual. Indians viewed French gifts as the sign of friendship and alliance. Once a year, the French distributed presents. The distributions took place in New Orleans, Mobile, and in the forts the French built in the interior of the continent. The Indians appreciated these forts: they meant that they could count on a regular supply of presents and trade merchandise. Gifts included covers, clothes, guns and powder, kettles, tools, etc.; reciprocally, the Indians brought some skins or furs, smoked meat, bear oil, etc. While the gifts given to Indians were paid by the king, the ones they gave in exchange were kept by local officers. Important ceremonies were associated with the annual distribution of presents. They consisted in the calumet ritual, songs, dances, speeches, and feasts. Food hospitality was as important as present giving.29 The governor or the commandants had to offer a banquet to the Indians who came to visit them. If French officers displayed some admiration for the Native rituals of alliance and diplomacy, they also tried to impress their allies: they invited them to their own ceremonies, such as the celebrations in honor of the royal family or the

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Corpus-Christi; and they brought some of them to France, such as when fours chiefs from Upper Louisiana were introduced by Étienne Véniard de Bourgmont to the king at Versailles in 1725. In order to obtain more profit from gift giving, the French tried in vain to impose their conception of the presents as wages or pay for services by trying to control their redistribution inside each nation. Presents were given to a select group of “medal chiefs” specially appointed by the French. The goal of the French was to dominate the Native populations politically by imposing centralized authority and a vertical political hierarchy on them, traditions that ran contrary to those of most Indian nations, which were structured horizontally, with several chiefs sharing noncoercive power (except for the Natchez, Taensas, and Tunicas). Consequently, the French selected certain chiefs to whom they gave a medal imprinted with the face of the king of France and among whom the presents were divided. These “medal chiefs” were selected from among the most influential chiefs or the ones who demonstrated the greatest inclination to collaborate with the colonial power. As a result, in most instances, the French could not give a medal to an individual who had not already been recognized as chief by the other members of his village. These chiefs’ influence was reinforced by the French presents they redistributed. Among the Choctaws, Bienville even tried to establish a chief hierarchy, with a “Great Chief” at the top who had to redistribute the presents among other less important chiefs and so on. This policy, however, was a failure: the Choctaws never regarded the Great Chief as superior to the other chiefs.30 In fact, this medal-chief system did not give the French complete control over each nation due to the significant divisions among them. In the Upper Creek country, after 1720 an increasing number of individuals were buried with medals, uniforms, and goods obtained from either the French or the English. This pattern reflects the coexistence of two opposed factions among the Creeks, which helped them maintain their neutrality.31 The Spanish, the English, and then the Americans pursued the same policy, giving medals, gorgets, and patents to chiefs, along with flags and uniforms.32 Among Indians, trade was strictly tied to presents. Every deal began with gift giving. The allies considered trade a duty for the French, exactly like the annual distribution of presents. Indians did not conceive of trade according to the market economy.33 They were not motivated by the accumulation of goods; they only looked for the satisfaction of their needs, which were limited. Thus, their reply to the increase of European demand was not to bring more skins but rather to reduce their production, since



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they could get as many manufactured goods as before and still have their needs satisfied. Moreover, they asked for a high fixed price independent of supply and demand. Because the political dimension of trade was more important in the eighteenth century than its economic value, the French agreed to modify the terms of exchange in favor of the Indians. However, such arrangements did not prevent them from enduring British competition. The English paid a better price for skins, they sold merchandise of better quality, and they were able to supply the Indians with no difficulty. In contrast, the French had to face numerous periods of shortage. The shortages of goods for presents and trade caused frequent tensions throughout the alliance, the Indians then turning toward the English. In fact, such balancing between the French and the English is what allowed the Native population to maintain its political autonomy. Life for a French trader was not easy. Indians, even allies, attacked or killed some of them. What attitude did the royal power adopt toward these crimes? The difficulty lay in the fact that the French and Indians did not share the same conception of justice. The Natives thought that the community was collectively responsible and looked for reparation and reconciliation: they “covered” the body with presents or replaced it by the gift of a “slave” (a war captive). The French imposed an individual punishment on the criminal. However, for the benefit of the alliance, the royal power agreed that the crimes committed by Indians should be punished according to local principles of compensation. When they applied another policy, as Bienville did with the Natchez in 1716, the officers learned that it could be prejudicial to the French in the long range. Thus, the Indians were not subjected to royal laws. In fact, the monarch granted them some autonomy within the empire. This particular status was in harmony with the French political and administrative mosaic and with the existence of many privileged groups in Old Regime France; it conformed with the French political culture of the time.34 The Spanish followed the same policy of accommodation in the matter of justice.35 Nevertheless, the French were unsuccessful at forging alliances with all the Indian nations they encountered. By the time of the great peace of Montreal in 1701, they had already fought long wars against the Iroquois. In the eighteenth century, the French led wars of extermination with their Native allies against some Indian nations. As Brett Rushforth has recently demonstrated, the Fox Wars, between 1712 and 1738, were related not so much to the use of force rather than mediation by the French, as to a disagreement between the French and their Algonquian allies about

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the limits of the alliance: the French wanted to include the Fox, which the Algonquians refused, successfully using their slave raids against the Fox to make any peace between the French and the Fox impossible.36 At the same time, the tensions with the Natchez began in 1715, when the governor, Lamothe Cadillac, failed to respect Native diplomatic protocols. It shows how European-Indian relations deeply depended on individuals and how they could vary according to the ability of the different players. However, the most dramatic incident occurred in 1729 with the slaughter of 250 Frenchmen. This surge of violence was connected with a dispute over land. The French retaliated with two expeditions in 1730 and 1731.37 Some Natchez took refuge among the Chickasaws, with whom the French had difficult relations because they were allied with the English. In fact, it was in the French’s interest to refuse peace with the Chickasaws for several reasons. First, the French did not have the means to supply the Chickasaws with trade goods. Second, peace would have allowed the Chickasaws to approach the Choctaws — essential military auxiliaries of the French —  possibly turning away the Choctaws from the French alliance. Finally, the war the Choctaws fought against the Chickasaws weakened this neighboring tribe. The Chickasaw refusal to surrender the Natchez refugees opened a long period of turmoil, during which Bienville organized two unsuccessful expeditions, in 1736 and 1739.38 Even with their traditional allies, the French encountered difficulties. In the late 1740s, in the multiethnic villages of the Ohio valley and in the Illinois Country, they had to face troubles related to the diminution of presents, the rise of prices, and the shortage of goods; the policy of firmness and severity they adopted only worsened the situation. At the same time, in Lower Louisiana, they were unable to resolve disputes between several Choctaws factions, which resulted in a devastating civil war.39 When the British took possession of the western French outposts after 1760, they refused to assume the role that the French had played in the alliance. At first, George Croghan, an Indian Affairs agent who knew both the region and the Native Americans very well, liberally distributed gifts. But in August 1761, General Jeffery Amherst, supreme commandant of British forces in North America, ordered a halt to all gift distributions. Unable to understand Native diplomacy, he thought that the Indians had to depend on trade and hunting instead of presents. Fearing that they might revolt against the British, he also decided to leave them scarce of ammunition. This decision worsened Native groups’ life in a time of disease and famine. In 1762, different nations began to assemble and tried to create



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pro-French and Pan-Indian alliances. During the same time, they became sensitive to the teachings of prophets such as Neolin, a Delaware Indian from a village in the Ohio Country. Neolin urged them to culturally purify and spiritually restore their communities by cleansing themselves of European impurities. In this context, in April 1763, an Ottawa war leader called Pontiac influenced by Neolin’s teachings succeeded in convincing more than one hundred warriors to attack the British garrison in Detroit. When the news of the successful siege spread in the Upper country, different Native groups, without consultation, followed Pontiac’s example and attacked other British outposts. They were influenced by a rumor about the return of the French king. Gregory Evans Dowd has demonstrated that this rumor was not inspired by the French and that the war was not the result of a French conspiracy; on the contrary, it was the Indians who tried to manipulate France and to induce the French king to come back through French ceremonies as well as military victory. Even if the French did not come back, however, the British needed two years to recover all their forts. Thus, it was not until 1765 that they were able to take possession of the eastern part of the Illinois Country.40 In contrast, because they had to defend a sparsely populated colony from British threat, the Spanish adopted the same policy of alliance as their predecessors. The Frenchmen they kept in service as commandants of the outposts, such as Athanase de Mézières in Natchitoches and Balthazár de Villiers in Arkansas, incited them to do so. In fact, the Spanish first misinterpreted this policy, thinking that it was only a less onerous way of dominating the Natives. However, the Indians — the Quapaws and the Osages in particular — taught them the true meaning of the alliance, with its reciprocal duties between relatively equal partners, even if they complained about the scarcity of presents until 1778. Subsequently, the Spanish intervention against the British in the American War of Independence forced both sides to increase the number of presents in order to obtain the assistance or neutrality of Indian allies. At the end of the war, the Spanish refused to recognize American independence and to cede the territories they had conquered on the east bank of the Mississippi River. The Spanish were therefore still dependent on the Indians, who exploited the American-Spanish rivalry — just as they had exploited the rivalry between the French and the English — in order to preserve their political autonomy. Nevertheless, after the treaty of 1795 and their withdrawal three years later, the weakened Spanish decreased the supply of gifts.41 In Louisiana, the Spanish did not conduct wars of conquest as they

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had in Texas or in New Mexico during the same period despite considering that option several times against the Osages, who had become one of the most powerful nations of the western side of the Mississippi River under French rule. The Osages therefore continued their expansion, which worked to the detriment of the other Indian nations of the region. In 1772, the governor considered exterminating the Osages but knew that he did not have the means to do so. Twenty years later, he opted for war. Once again, however, the Spanish lacked the necessary troops and were unable to stop illegal trade from supplying the Osages with guns and powder. No matter how eager Spain’s Native allies were to get rid of these enemies, they refused to participate in a war that they regarded as suicidal. Ultimately, the war did not break out, and relations with the Osages improved thanks to the construction of Fort Carondelet in the Missouri valley in 1794.42 during the eighteenth century, Louisiana was a cosmopolitan world where relations between the Native Americans and Europeans were close, and where the frequent contact between the groups was not limited to matters diplomatic and military.43 Thus, after the peace of 1722 with the Natchez, Antoine Le Page du Pratz explained to a chief: “It is good that we are going back to our way of living together.” According to this planter, the French colonization could only work “in close conjunction with the Indians from whom we got a lot of information about land products and animals . . . and some fur skins and foods.”44 As this comment suggests, borrowings, transfers, and acculturation took place that affected both European and Native cultures. As occurred nearly everywhere in New France, a process of dual land occupation developed in Louisiana, with French and Indian settlements closely linked to one another.45 Either the French settled near Native villages, or they invited the Indians to establish themselves near French outposts. Some Acolapissas, Chaouachas, Ouachas, Houmas, and Chitimachas villages, for example, moved to get closer to New Orleans between 1718 and 1720. For the French, such close contact ensured a steady food supply, while for the Indians the close proximity provided easily attainable manufactured goods. Both looked to the other for better security. In this way, the Native Americans tried to cope with their demographic decline and to protect themselves from the slave raids of the Chickasaws. However, if the settlements were close, they were separate. When some officers built a fort in Natchitoches in 1716, they moved it away from the



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Native village where the traders had first settled in 1713–14; in the Illinois Country, where the coureurs de bois lived amid the Kaskaskias and Cahokias, the officials separated the French and Indian villages when they arrived in 1719. This is why Joseph Zitomersky speaks of an “intimacy at a distance” between the French and Indians in Louisiana.46 Still, some missionaries, traders, and coureurs de bois kept living in the Natives’ summer villages and following the Indians in their winter hunts. In 1719, Boisbriant, commandant of the Illinois Country, decided to separate the Native and French villages because he wanted to end the neighborly conflicts. Small tensions appeared in every outpost where the French and Indian settlements were close to one another: the Indians accused the French of allowing their cattle to graze in Indian fields; the Natives’ dogs ate French livestock; and the Indians sometimes killed the settlers’ pigs and cattle since they did not have the same conception of property as the French and considered domestic animals as game. However, with the exception of the dramatic events in Natchez and small tensions in the Illinois Country,47 there was no antagonism in French Louisiana over land because of the small French population and the demographic decline of the Native population. Moreover, the French often settled on lands recently abandoned by Indians: thus, they got fertile and already cleared fields, allowing the French to maintain much better relations with the Indians than did the Anglo-Americans. If their settlements were distinct, the Indians frequently visited the French forts, villages, and towns. The French governor regularly received Native delegations in New Orleans or in Mobile as did the commanders in the forts. The Spanish governor pursued the same policy, as the ceremonies presided over by Alexandro O’Reilly in the capital in 1769 show, while the English in West Florida organized no congress between 1765 and 1772. From 1783, the Indians kept coming to New Orleans, but they refused to do so on a regular basis so as not to give signs of exclusive allegiance to the Spanish. After 1803, the creation of agencies near the great nations in the interior put an end to their visits; for a decade, only the small neighboring tribes kept coming to New Orleans, before being rejected in the backcountry. In the eighteenth century, the Indian presence amid the French settlements was also related to the essential role they played in the food supply of the white settlers in Lower Louisiana.48 The French called upon their help particularly during the first years of colonization, when the colony was cut off from the home country because of the War of Spanish Succes-

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sion or when, from 1717 to 1720, the Company of the Indies transported thousands of settlers and slaves into Louisiana without enough food to sustain them. The settlers bought food from the Indians and sent soldiers to live in the local villages. The Natives supplied the inhabitants with corn, chickens, fish, game, bear oil, etc. The women also sold rush baskets and earth vessels. Progressively, however, the settlers and slaves undertook more and more responsibility for their own subsistence; the flour and bacon exportation from the Illinois Country allowed them to reduce their dependency on the Indians and on the importations from the home country. Still, food sale by Natives in the New Orleans market continued throughout the eighteenth century and even into the nineteenth century. The daily relations between the French and Indians were not restricted to the food supply, the fur trade, or the hiring of local guides, hunters, or rowers. Exchanges took place not only on an economic level, but also on a cultural one. First, contacts were made easier by the fact that some settlers and slaves learned Mobilian, a pidgin developed among Indians from the Southeast.49 Furthermore, the French borrowed from local cultures those traits and practices that could help them survive and adapt themselves to their new environment. Thus, they adopted moccasins and pirogues, and they did not hesitate to use shamans to be healed, to fight against drought, or to predict the future. In Upper Louisiana, they learned how to fight war according to Native ways. Furthermore, French and Indians shared a common sociability and, sometimes, personal relations. Children played together, teaching French youth how to shoot with a bow. During the Spanish period, the settlers and slaves began playing a ball game called toli by the Choctaws and raquettes by the French. Among the Europeans, the traders were the most Indianized, explaining why Philippe Jacquin called them the “white Indians,” using a term coined by James Axtell for the white captives who had been adopted by Indians.50 According to Gilles Havard, the strong attraction Native cultures exercised over some Frenchmen was partly linked to the value placed on nobleness in Old Regime society. The French settlers recognized as noble values the Indians’ emphasis on the essential place of war and hunt in their societies and the idleness connected with this way of life.51 Some Indians, and particularly slaves, lived permanently within French settlements. The Europeans did not introduce slavery in North America, a condition that already existed thanks to wars driven, in part, by the Natives’ desire to seize captives for torture, adoption, or servitude. Indeed,



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the first Indian slaves were offered to the French “as culturally powerful symbols of their emerging partnership” with their Native allies.52 In 1673, for example, during his journey on the Mississippi River, Louis Jolliet received a young captive from the Illinois Country. Slaves were highly regarded presents in Native diplomacy. Thus, the institution of the Pax Gallica first stimulated the Indian slave trade and slavery. Some of the slaves acquired in exchanges of captives in the Upper countries were brought to Montreal and Quebec, where they worked as domestics or farm laborers. Slavery then increased under the pressure of the Europeans for economic reasons. In Lower Louisiana, even before the arrival of the French, the Carolina traders incited the Creeks, Chickasaws, and Natchez to capture slaves among the Choctaws and the smaller nations of the region. Between 1670 and 1715, at least fifty thousand Native Americans were enslaved and sold in the Caribbean by the Carolina traders.53 Subsequently, the French were easily able to form alliances with those nations of Lower Louisiana who had been victims of these raids. However, the French authorities also soon began to enslave Indians: in 1706, they sold many Chitimachas to settlers to punish them for killing a missionary. Despite this incident, the French crown tried to limit slavery to its enemies, such as the Fox, Natchez, and Chickasaws. During the FrenchIndian conflicts, the French local authorities themselves sold war prisoners as slaves: in 1730–31, they deported 450 Natchez to Saint-Domingue. Never­theless, most of the time they incited their local allies to capture slaves from their common enemies, and, as Brett Rushforth has demonstrated, they used the exchange of captives as “one of the most effective means of stabilizing the . . . alliance.”54 Among others, the Illinois took many Fox, Natchez, and Chickasaw captives. Most slaves, however, came from among the nations of the Missouri basin. Thus, even if the royal power tried to make peace among the Indians of this region and to forbid their enslavement, this trade continued throughout the period. Consequently, most of the Indian slaves in Louisiana came from these nations, and the word panis (Pawnee), the name given to several Plains nations, became a synonym of a Native slave. In the Illinois Country, as in Lower Louisiana, there were never more than two hundred Indian slaves in the French settlements, and their number decreased during the French regime either because they were victims of diseases or because they escaped easily. Moreover, the planters preferred African slaves because they judged that they were better suited for fieldwork. Among the Indian slaves, women were the most numerous: tradi-

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tionally they had been the main victims of wars of capture, and they served as domestics and concubines for the French. Indeed, they played a great part in propagating elements of Indian cultures among whites. As the interpreters, they were translators and brokers between the two cultures.55 Since the middle of the sixteenth century, the Spanish had prohibited the slavery of Indians. Therefore, in 1769, when he arrived in Louisiana, General Alexandro O’Reilly promulgated a decree forbidding buying and selling such slaves. The goal was the gradual extinction of this institution. He also ordered a census to evaluate the importance of slavery. However, until 1790, the local authorities did not make serious efforts to enforce the O’Reilly legislation. In the 1790s, several slaves of Indian descent by maternal line successfully sued their masters to get their freedom. This is why, in 1794, some residents of Pointe Coupée and the German Coast asked the crown to end the liberation of Native slaves. Waiting for the king’s answer, Governor Carondelet suspended all the suits. Nevertheless, the answer never came, and Indian slavery continued illegally on a small scale until the end of the Spanish regime. In the eastern part of the Illinois Country under American sovereignty from 1783, slavery was prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, but the law made an exception for the “French slaves” who were the property of residents of Kaskaskia and other French communities. Thus, Indian slavery in this region only gradually disappeared. In Missouri, which was not part of the United States when the Northwest Ordinance was promulgated, Indian slavery still existed in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It was not until 1834 that a descendant of a Natchez women enslaved in 1730 was granted her freedom by the Missouri Supreme Court. In Lower Louisiana, after 1803, the development of a rigid tripartite racial structure (with free whites, black slaves, and free persons of color) led to the disappearance of Native slaves, who were amalgamated into other racial categories.56 The persistence of the enslavement of the Native population can be explained by the concubinary relations between the masters and their female slaves. In general, sexual intercourse between Frenchmen and Indian women was frequent everywhere in North America and particularly in the outposts of the interior because of the lack of white women in these regions and the precious help these local women could provide to the traders: 57 they made moccasins and snowshoes, procured and preserved food, helped building and paddling the canoes, tanned skins, and served as guides and interpreters. Most importantly, the kin networks gave the traders the permanent trade connections they needed. In return, the In-



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dians secured access to outposts and goods and gained prestige. As for the women, relations with traders gave them easy access to the kettles, knives, needles, awls, and woolen clothes that took much of the hard work out of their daily tasks. Thanks to the indentured servants, they no longer had to carry heavy loads. Their role in the redistribution of goods also greatly increased their influence and status.58 In the Illinois Country, Christian weddings celebrated by the Jesuits coexisted with such concubinary relations from the end of the seventeenth century. In this way, the coureurs de bois tried to secure their lifestyle and trade networks in a period when the royal power sought to expel them from the Upper Country. For the Illinois, these marriages were a sign of their alliance with the French.59 Until 1763, each time the Illinois wished to express their attachment to the French, they said that “they [had given] them women.”60 This relationship was facilitated by the fact that there were four Illinois women for one man and because the number of single women increased with the diminution of polygamy among the Kaskaskias under the pressure of missionaries in the last decades of the seventeenth century and at the outset of the eighteenth century.61 The Jesuits considered these mixed marriages the only way to eliminate concubinary relations. In Upper Louisiana, the number of mixed marriages decreased with the arrival of white women beginning in the 1720s and the demographic decline of the Illinois, who increasingly refused to give their women. However, some weddings, particularly of soldiers and traders, were still celebrated in the 1740s, and concubinary relations remained frequent during all the French and Spanish periods.62 The diminution of the mixed marriages might also have been related to the position of the royal power toward them. Several times, local authorities condemned intermarriage, and the king strictly forbade it, while in the seventeenth century a policy of intermarriage had been envisaged by Champlain and, subsequently, Colbert. By the next century, however, officials used racist arguments against Indians and most of all against mixed-blood children. They wrote about “the change such marriages would bring in the whiteness and blood purity of children,” about the fear that Louisiana would become “a colony of mulattos who are naturally lazy, dissolute, and rascals,” and about the “depraved heart” of the mixed-blood individuals, the “dishonoring alliances for the nation,” and the “bad race” they produced.63 The royal power feared that these mixed marriages would lead to the Indianization of the French rather than to the Frenchification of the Native population. In 1738, the Jesuit priest of Kaskaskia opposed this idea.

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He argued that the legitimate children born from these marriages were more easily integrated into French society because of the education and the legacy they received than the natural children born of the concubinary relations, all of whom opted to live in Indian societies. According to the priest, Native women married to Frenchmen broke their ties with their parents under the pressure of their husbands and became real “French Creoles.”64 Thus, after 1720, with the arrival of new settlers and the separation of the French and Indian villages, the integration of these women and their métis children into French society implied their Christianization and Frenchification, and their at least partial renouncement of their original culture.65 The villages of the Illinois Country were not in the process of becoming a métis community such as those developed in the Great Lakes region, even if cultural exchanges between French and Native populations persisted.66 If the French established close relations with the Indians and adopted some of their practices out of necessity, they considered their own culture to be superior to that of their Indians neighbors. The fact that they called the Indians “savages” shows their cultural racism and explains why they tried to enforce a policy of assimilation.67 Assimilatory policies failed, particularly in the religious sphere. The missionaries succeeded in evangelizing the Illinois, mainly the Kaskaskias and the small nations of the Gulf Coast. In the Illinois Country, the Jesuits were particularly successful with the young women. According to several historians, the adoption of the Christian religion gave the women greater control of their spirituality and sexuality and relative autonomy from their husbands; through preaching and confession they were also able to express themselves publicly. Gilles Havard argues that women were particularly attracted to the cult of the Virgin Mary because they connected it with a Native female ritual of sexual abstinence.68 In fact, Christopher Bilodeau has demonstrated that in the last decades of the seventeenth century the Illinois adopted Catholicism only because they understood its beliefs and practices according to their own conception of the world and spirituality. Thus, a process of syncretism occurred, and a new “Indian type of Christianity” was created. This phenomenon was recognized by the Jesuit Claude Allouez when he acknowledged that the Illinois “honor[ed] our Lord among themselves in their own way.”69 Evangelization failed everywhere else because of the small number of missionaries. The time of mystic enthusiasm, as Canada experienced in the seventeenth century, was over with the end of the Catholic Reform.



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Even more significantly, the Christianization process forced the Indians to give up polygamy, sexual freedom, nudity, and many rituals that they viewed as essential for health and hunting. They also had to adopt some culturally foreign notions, such as the concept of sin. Yet, Catholicism, with its polytheistic belief in the trinity, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, and its magical rituals, was better suited than Protestantism to mix with the Native religions. Despite this failure, the missionaries played an important role in Louisiana as agents of the Pax Gallica: they guaranteed the alliance among Indian nations.70 Unlike in the religious sphere, the acculturation of Native populations was significant in the material sphere. They appreciated metal utensils —  which were more efficient than their traditional bone, wood, or stone tools  — because they eased their daily life. For example, between 1680 and 1719, the Illinois Indians ceased the production of their own pottery; instead, they used the metal and, later, ceramic vessels obtained through French trade. These lighter brass kettles were more suited to their semi-sedentary way of life. After 1750, the Illinois abandoned all the aboriginal vessels they had traded from the Natchez.71 In general, the Native Americans selected those European goods that proved helpful and refused the ones they thought useless. They kept using bows and arrows rather than guns, and they mixed furs and woven garments. Thus, traditional products and manufactured goods coexisted. Indian “consumers” also changed the purpose of some European tools, cutting kettles into pieces, for example, and making arrowheads or pearls with them. Europeans goods were incorporated into the Indian economic systems, and in the eighteenth century, traditional ways of life were not completely changed by European material culture and economic organization because the Indians needed only limited quantities of manufactured goods. Nevertheless, as the latter could not repair or replace European goods by themselves, they became dependent on settlers for their supply. Alcohol was the product responsible for the greatest devastations. The Indians used alcohol to escape the stress generated by the changes with which they were confronted. They increasingly demanded it. Thus, alcohol became an essential component of the fur trade. While a woolen blanket would have lasted several months and a knife several years, alcohol consumption was immediate, and brandy or rum had to be replaced very quickly. In New France, the importance of the fur trade to maintain the alliance and the rivalry with the British induced the French authorities to

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allow the sale of alcohol to Indians. They also supplied their Native allies with tafia, among other presents. Despite pressures from the missionaries for temperance, the officials defended the alcohol trade as a necessity, or, when they recognized its destructive consequences, they found themselves powerless to stop it. After them, the Spanish were confronted with the same dilemma when they faced rising competition from English and American traders. The latter used alcohol to increase the Indian demand and to force them to hunt more animals. Consequently, the Indians became more dependent on them. Some British and then American officials also tried to ban the alcohol trade. However, in the Northwestern territories, during the Seven Years War, Jeffery Amherst’s action against the trade was defeated by Johnson and a group of Albany merchants. In the same way, the Intercourse Act of 1802 and the numerous territorial laws banning the sale of alcohol to Indians in what became Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Louisiana, and Mississippi between 1805 and 1815 were not respected because they contradicted the merchants and settlers’ interests. Thus, the annuities paid by the federal government for the purchase of Indian lands often served to buy alcohol.72 These lands were acquired by the United States through a series of treaties passed with the Indians. The first treaty was signed with the Delawares in 1778. It started a radically different policy from the one implemented by the French, who did not conduct such treaties for land cessions. Indeed, the arrival of the Americans in the Mississippi valley after 1783 dramatically changed the situation of the Native nations. The American policy toward them had two interrelated dimensions. On the one hand, the federal government wanted to “civilize,” educate, Christianize, settle, and transform Indians into small farmers in order to make them American citizens. This policy of assimilation was implied through the distribution of instruments of husbandry and cattle, the education of young Indians in schools on the East Coast, and the work of missionaries to Christianize and educate the Native populations. On the other hand, more and more Indian territories were bought by treaties in order to satisfy the land hunger of the increasing number of settlers west of the Appalachians and to strengthen the frontiers with British and Spanish rivals. This policy of acquisition of Indian lands began before the end of the War of Independence, but it accelerated during Jefferson’s presidency.



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If his program toward Native nations was formulated between December 1802 and July 1803 — thus before the Louisiana Purchase — the cession of this vast territory made more feasible the Indian removal west of the Mississippi Jefferson wanted to enforce peacefully and progressively. He did not consider that the removal contradicted his desire to “civilize” the Indians; in fact, according to him, the assimilation of Native populations should have favored the abandonment of hunting grounds. However, the federal government’s policy of expansion met Indian resistance, and wars raged several times in various regions west of the Appalachians between 1789 and 1815. Some Native nations fought on Great Britain’s side during the War of 1812, but they were defeated by the U.S. army.73 With the end of the war, the policy of purchasing Indian lands resumed. Nevertheless, the signing of several treaties and the acquisition of vast territories did not satisfy the land hunger, and the pressure on Native lands greatly increased over the following fifteen years because of the surge of immigration in the Mississippi valley, which was facilitated by the arrival of steamboat travel in 1820 and the boom of cotton production in response to the demand from Great Britain and New England. Hence, the debate about the complete removal of all Indians east of the river became an important issue in the presidential campaign of 1829, and Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of 1812 and the successful treaty commissioner between 1815 and 1820, was elected partly thanks to his position in favor of the removal. In 1830, Congress approved the Removal Act. One year later, in the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Marshall, who had already ruled in 1823 that the Indians held their lands by a “right of occupancy” subordinate to the “right of discovery” the United States inherited from Great Britain, proclaimed that the Indians belonged to “domestic dependent nations.” Thus, Native nations were no longer able to preserve the political autonomy they had defended successfully throughout the eighteenth century. The absence of foreign rivals to the United States after 1815, the destruction of the traditional Indian way of life, their growing economic dependence, the divisions of their societies, and the cultural changes they experienced undermined their position in the balance of power. In September 1830, at Dancing Rabbit Creek, the Choctaws were the first nation to sign a removal treaty under the stipulations of the Removal Act: they resettled in Arkansas Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. The process of the incorporation of the Europeans into the Native world was over; it had been replaced by a policy of exclusion of the Indians from the Anglo-American world.74

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Notes 1. Joseph Zitomersky, “In the Middle and on the Margin: Greater French Louisiana in History and in Professional Historical Memory,” in “Le citoyen dans l’empire du milieu: Perspectives comparatistes,” ed. C. Féral, special issue, Alizés (Université de la Réunion) (March 2001): 201–64. 2. For a different point of view, see Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 7. 3. Carl J. Ekberg, “The Flour Trade in French Colonial Louisiana,” Louisiana History 37, no. 3 (1996): 261–82; Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Time (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Cécile Vidal “Les implantations françaises au Pays des Illinois au XVIIIe siècle (1699–1765)” (Ph.D. diss., EHESS, Paris, 1995); Cécile Vidal, “Antoine Bienvenu, Illinois Planter and Mississippi Trader: The Structure of Exchange Between Lower and Upper Louisiana Under French Rule,” in Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, ed. Bradley G. Bond (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 111–33; Cécile Vidal, Au Pays des Illinois: Français, Indiens et Africains en Haute-Louisiane au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Belin, forthcoming). 4. According to Francis Parkman, “Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him” (see The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century [1867; Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997], 131). For the questioning of the idea of “French colonial genius,” see Cornelius Jaenen, The French Relationship with the Native Peoples of New France and Acadia (Ottawa: Ministry of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Research Branch, 1984), 5–13; Gregory Evans Dowd, “Wag the Imperial Dog: Indians and Overseas Empires in North America, 1650–1776,” in A Companion to American Indian History, ed. Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 55–56; and Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française (Paris: Champs Flammarion, 2006), 249–54. 5. Bienville to the minister, 1708, Archives des Colonies (hereafter cited as “AC”), C13A, 2:171, quoted in Histoire de l’Amérique française, 252. 6. Dowd, “Wag the Imperial Dog,” 55. 7. Vidal, “Les implantations françaises au Pays des Illinois au XVIIIe siècle (1699–1765)”; Au Pays des Illinois: Français, Indiens et Africains en Haute-Louisiane au XVIIIe siècle. 8. Deloria and Salisbury, eds., A Companion to American Indian History. 9. Cornelius Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); Olivia Patricia Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984); Denys Delâge, Le Pays renversé: Amérindiens et Européens en Amérique du nord-est, 1600–1664 (Quebec: Boréal, 1985); Bruce G. Trigger, The



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Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976); Bruce G. Trigger, Les Indiens, la fourrure et les Blancs: Français et Amérindiens en Amérique du Nord (Montreal: Boréal; Paris: Seuil, 1990). 10. Gilles Havard, La Grande Paix de Montréal de 1701: Les voies de la diplomatie franco-amérindienne (Montreal: Recherches amérindiennes au Québec, 1992); The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’en Haut, 1660–1715 (Sillery: Septentrion; Paris: Presses de l’Université de la Sorbonne, 2003). See also Saliha Belmessous, “D’un préjugé culturel à un préjugé racial: La politique indigène de la France au Canada” (Ph.D. diss., EHESS, Paris, 1999); and Arnaud Balvay, L’épée et la plume: Amérindiens et soldats des troupes de la Marine en Louisiane et au Pays d’en Haut (1683–1763) (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2006). 11. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); “Forum: The Middle Ground Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63, no. 1 (2006): 3–96. 12. Usner, Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy. On the historiography about the relations between French and Indians in the Lower Mississippi valley before Usner’s book, see Michael J. Forêt, “The French and the Indians of the Lower Mississippi Valley, Petits et Grands: Changing Perspectives,” Proceedings of the Eighteenth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, Montreal, May 1992, ed. J. Pritchard (Cleveland: French Colonial Historical Society, 1993), 74–82. 13. Havard, Empire et métissages, 16. 14. Acculturation has been defined by Nathan Wachtel as “all the phenomena of interaction which are the result of the encounter between two cultures (Wachtel, “L’acculturation,” in Faire de l’histoire, vol. 1, Noveaux problèmes [Paris: Gallimard, 1974], 174). 15. Russell Thornton, “Health, Disease, and Demography,” in A Companion to American Indian History, 68–84. 16. John R. Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998), 39–45; Daniel H. Usner Jr., “A Population History of American Indians in the Eighteenth-Century Lower Mississippi Valley,” in American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories, ed. Usner (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 33–55; Peter H. Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685–1790,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 35–103; David G. Anderson and Marvin T. Smith, “Pre-Contact: The Evidence from Archaeology,” in A Companion to Colonial America, ed. Daniel Vickers (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 1–24. 17. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development

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of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 56–95; Havard and Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française, 193–248; Thomas N. Ingersoll, “The Slave Trade and Ethnic Diversity of Louisiana’s Slave Community,” Louisiana History 37, no. 2 (1996): 133–61; Paul Lachance, “The Growth of the Free and Slave Populations of French Colonial Louisiana,” in Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, ed. Bond, 204–43; Joseph Zitomersky, French Americans — Native Americans in Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Louisiana: The Population Geography of the Illinois Indians, 1670s1760s (Lund: Lund University Press, 1994). 18. Jean-Paul Le Glaunec, “Slave Migrations in Spanish and Early America Louisiana: New Sources and New Estimates,” Louisiana History 46, no. 2 (2005): 185–209, 211–30. 19. Gilbert C. Din, “Spanish Immigration to a French Land,” Revue de la Louisiane/Louisiana Review 5 (1976): 63–80; Gilbert C. Din, “Spain’s Immigration Policy and Efforts in Louisiana during the American Revolution,” in A Refuge for All Ages: Immigration in Louisiana History, ed. Carl A. Brasseaux (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1996), 183–97; Carl A. Brasseaux, The Founding of New Acadia: the Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765–1803 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 73– 89, 111; Usner, Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy, 108–15. 20. Daniel H. Usner Jr., “An American Indian Gateway: Some Thoughts on the Migration and Settlement of Eastern Indians around Early St. Louis,” Gateway Heritage 11, no. 3 (1990–91): 42–51; John Mack Faragher, “ ‘More Motley Than Mackinaw’: From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing of the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783–1833,” in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830, ed. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredricka J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 305–6; Kathleen A. DuVal, “ ‘Faithful Nations’ and ‘Ruthless Savages’: The Rise and Fall of Indian Diplomacy in the Arkansas River Valley, 1673–1828” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Davis, 2001), 161–68; Kathleen A. DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 21. Usner, “An American Indian Gateway,” 49; Daniel H. Usner Jr., “American Indian and the Early Cotton Economy,” in American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories, 74, 92; Jonathan Hughes, “The Great Land Ordinances: Colonial America Thumbprint on History,” in Essays on the Economy of the Old Northwest, ed. David C. Klingaman and Richard K. Vedder (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987), 12–13; DuVal, “ ‘Faithful Nations’ and ‘Ruthless Savages,’ ” 248–49. 22. DuVal, “ ‘Faithful Nations’ and ‘Ruthless Savages,’ ” 8–11; Havard, Empire et métissages, 17. 23. White, The Middle Ground, x. 24. DuVal, “ ‘Faithful Nations’ and ‘Ruthless Savages,’ ” 136; Havard, Empire et métissages, 15–16, 773–77. 25. Patricia Galloway, “The Chief Who Is Your Father: Choctaw and French



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Views of the Diplomatic Relation,” in Powhatan’s Mantle, 254–78. For the evolution of the concept of “father” during the early republic, see Richard White, “The Fictions of Patriarchy: Indians and Whites in the Early Republic,” in Native Americans and the Early Republic, ed. Frederick Hoxie et al. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 62–84. 26. DuVal, “ ‘Faithful Nations’ and ‘Ruthless Savages,’ ” 125–29. 27. Patricia Galloway, “Talking with Indians: Interpreters and Diplomacy in French Louisiana,” in Race and Family in the Colonial South: Essays, ed. Winthrop D. Jordan and Sheila L. Skemp (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 109–29. 28. Wilbur R. Jacobs, Wilderness and Indian Gifts: The Northern Colonial Frontier, 1748–1763 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1950); Khalil Saadani, “L’État, les Amérindiens et les présents: La Louisiane française au XVIIIe siècle, 1699–1765” (Ph.D. diss., Université Cadi Ayyad, Beni-Mellal, Maroc, 2001–2); Khalil Saadani, “Gift Exchange between the French and Native Americans in Louisiana,” in Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, ed. Bond, 43–64. 29. John Taylor Carson, “Sacred Circles and Dangerous People: Native American Cosmology and the French Settlement of Louisiana,” in Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, ed. Bond, 65–82. 30. Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 49–53. 31. Gregory A. Waselkov, “French Colonial Trade in the Upper Creek Country,” in Calumet and Fleur de Lys: Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent, ed. John A. Walthall and Thomas E. Emerson (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 45. 32. John C. Ewers, “Symbols of Chiefly Authority in Spanish Louisiana,” in The Spanish in the Mississippi Valley, 1762–1804, ed. John F. McDermott (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 274–86; Morris A. Arnold, The Rumble of a Distant Drum: The Quapaws and Old World Newcomers, 1673–1804 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 81–87; DuVal, “ ‘Faithful Nations’ and ‘Ruthless Savages,’ ” 93–95; Francis Prucha, Indian Peace Medals in American History (Bluffton: Rivilo Books, 1994). 33. During the 1950s, a debate developed about the nature of Native trade. It opposed formalists and substantivists: the former defended the idea that the Amerindian behavior can only be explained by an adaptation to the market, while the latter insisted on the social and political function of the trade. Nowadays, the ethnohistorians, who have changed the study of European-Indian relations in the last twenty or thirty years, remain divided. On the one hand, Bruce Trigger has adopted a position halfway between the formalists and substantivists: he still considers the Native Americans as middlemen partly motivated by profit, but pays more attention to Indian cultural realities than the formalists usually do. On the other hand, Richard White and Daniel K. Richter are clearly substantivists. The latter, for instance, argues that even in the eighteenth century the European never succeeded in imposing their own vision of the fur trade

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on the Indians (see Trigger, Les Indiens, la fourrure et les Blancs, 255–70; Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 177; and White, The Middle Ground, 97–99, 128–32). 34. Joseph Zitomersky, “Espace et société en Amérique coloniale française dans le contexte comparatif du Nouveau Monde,” in Les Français des États-Unis d’hier à aujourd’hui, ed. Ronald Creagh (Montpellier: Editions Espace 34; CIRCAN, Université de Montpellier III, 1994), 66; Havard and Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française, 275–93. 35. Arnold, The Rumble of a Distant Drum, 117–37. 36. White, The Middle Ground, 149–75; Russell David Edmunds and Joseph L. Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mesquakie Challenge to New France (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); Brett Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63, no. 1 (2006): 53–80. 37. Patrica D. Woods, French-Indian Relations on the Southern Frontier 1699– 1762 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979–80), 23–32, 56–63, 71–79, 95–109; Marcel Giraud, The Company of the Indies, 1723–1731, vol. 5, A History of French Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 388–430; Daniel H. Usner Jr., “French Natchez Borderlands in Colonial Louisiana,” in American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories, 15–32; Arnaud Balvay, La révolte des Natchez (Paris: Éditions du Félin, 2008). 38. Woods, French-Indian Relations on the Southern Frontier, 13–22, 45–53, 65–71, 111–46; White, The Roots of Dependency, 50–51. 39. White, The Middle Ground, 186–221; White, The Roots of Dependency, 61–64. 40. Gregory Evans Dowd, “The French King Wakes Up in Detroit: ‘Pontiac’s War’ in Rumor and History,” Ethnohistory 37, no, 3 (1990): 254–78; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 21–36; White, The Middle Ground, 269–314; Eric Hinderaker and Peter C. Mancall, At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 119–24. 41. Arnold, The Rumble of a Distant Drum, 97–99; DuVal, “ ‘Faithful Nations’ and ‘Ruthless Savages,’ ” 75–169; White, The Roots of Dependency, 69–96; F. Todd Smith, “Indian Policy in Spanish Louisiana: The Natchitoches District, 1763–1803,” in The Spanish Presence in Louisiana, 1763–1803, ed. Gilbert C. Din (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1996), 284–95. 42. Carl H. Chapman, “The Indomitable Osage in Spanish Illinois (Upper Louisiana) 1763–1804,” in The Spanish in the Mississippi Valley 1762–1804, ed. John F. McDermott, 281–311; Gilbert C. Din and A. P. Nasatir, The Imperial Osages: Spanish-Indian Diplomacy in the Mississippi Valley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983); DuVal, “ ‘Faithful Nations’ and ‘Ruthless Savages,’ ” 107–21, 138–53; Smith, “Indian Policy in Spanish Louisiana.”



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43. Usner deals with various socioeconomic aspects of European-Indian relations in several books and articles. See “Frontier Exchange in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Race Relations and Economic Life in Colonial Louisiana, 1699– 1783”; and “The Frontier Exchange Economy of the Lower Mississippi Valley in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 44, no. 2 (1987): 165–92; “American Indians in Colonial New Orleans,” in Powhatan’s Mantle, 104–27; Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy; “American Indians in a Frontier Exchange Economy,” in American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories, 56–72; and “ ‘The Facility Offered by the Country’: The Creolization of Agriculture in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” in Creolization in the Americas, ed. David Buisseret and Steven G. Reinhardt (Arlington: Texas A&M University Press, 2000), 35–62. 44. Antoine Le Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane (Paris: 1758), 1:186, 188, quoted by Havard and Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française, 309. 45. Joseph Zitomersky, “The Form and Function of French-Native American Relations in Early Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Louisiana,” in Proceedings of the Fifteenth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, Martinique and Guadeloupe, May 1989, ed. Patricia Galloway and Philip P. Boucher (Lanham, N.Y., and London: University Press of America, 1992), 154–77. 46. Zitomersky, “Espace et société en Amérique coloniale française dans le contexte comparatif du Nouveau Monde,” 69. 47. Vidal, “Les implantations françaises au Pays des Illinois au XVIIIe siècle (1699–1765),” 286–89, 511–15. 48. Ian W. Brown, “Certain Aspects of French-Indian Interaction in Lower Louisiana,” in Calumet and Fleur de Lys, ed. Walthall and Emerson, 19–24. 49. Kenneth H. York, “Mobilian: The Indian Lingua Franca of Colonial Louisiana,” in La Salle and His Legacy: Frenchmen and Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, ed. Patricia K. Galloway (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982), 139–45; Emmanuel J. Drechsel, “Towards an Ethnohistory of Speaking: The Case of Mobilian Jargon, an American Indian Pidgin of the Lower Mississippi Valley,” Ethnohistory 30, no. 3 (1983): 165–76. 50. James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 32, no. 1 (1975): 55–88; Philippe Jacquin, Les Indiens blancs: Français et Amérindiens en Amérique du Nord (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Payot, 1987). 51. Havard and Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française, 355–67. 52. Brett Rushforth, “ ‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’: The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 60, no. 4 (2003): 777–808; quotation 779. See also Almon Wheeler Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within the Present Limits of the United States (Williamstown: Corner House, 1979); Russell M. Magnaghi, “Red Slavery in the Great Lakes Country during the French and British Regimes,” Old Northwest 12, no. 2 (1986): 201–17; Marcel Trudel, Deux siècles d’esclavage au Québec (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 2004). 53. Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the

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American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002). The Carolina traders also acquired Indian slaves from the Illinois in the first decade of the seventeenth century (see Rushforth, “ ‘A Little Flesh We Offer You,’ ” 799–800). 54. Rushforth, “ ‘A Little Flesh We Offer You,’ ” 779. 55. Vidal, “Les implantations françaises au Pays des Illinois au XVIIIe siècle (1699–1765),” 502–11. 56. Russell M. Magnaghi, “The Role of Indian Slavery in Colonial SaintLouis,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin 31, no. 4 (1975): 264–72; Stephen Webre, “The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana, 1769–1803,” Louisiana History 25, no. 2 (1984): 117–35; Andrew R. L. Cayton and Peter S. Onuf, The Midwest and the Nation: Rethinking the History of an American Region (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 15–17. 57. Indian men and European women also had sexual intercourse, but these relations were the exception because of the small number of white women and the great transgression such relations represented in the European eyes. 58. Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 6, 25, 53–80. 59. White, The Middle Ground, 68–69. 60. Saint-Ange to Bienville, no date, Fort de Chartres, AC, C13A, 17:248–52; Macarty to Vaudreuil, 20 January 1752, Kaskaskia, Vaudreuil Papers (hereafter cited as “VP”), LO 328; Macarty to Vaudreuil, 18 March 1752, VP, LO 338. 61. White, The Middle Ground, 65–66; Zitomersky, French Americans — Native Americans in Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Louisiana, 185–86. 62. Tanis C. Thorne, The Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower Missouri (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 76–81. 63. Duclos to the minister, 25 December 1715, Dauphine Island, AC, C13A, 3:815–20; Report on the Illinois Country, 1732, AC, F3, 24:235–41; Bienville and Salmon to the minister, 16 May 1735, New Orleans, AC, C13A, 20:85–92; minister of navy to M. l’abbé de Brizacier, 4 October 1735, AC, B, 62:88; minister of navy to Bienville and Salmon, 4 October 1735, Versailles, AC, B, 63:608; Vaudreuil to Macarty, 8 August 1751, VP, LO 325; Vidal, “Les implantations françaises au Pays des Illinois au XVIIIe siècle (1699–1765),” 489–96; Jennifer M. Spear, “ ‘They Need Wives’: Métissage and the Regulation of Sexuality in French Louisiana, 1699–1730,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999), 40–46; Jennifer M. Spear, “Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 60, no. 1 (2003): 75–90; Guillaume Aubert, “ ‘Français, Nègres et Sauvages’: Constructing Race in Colonial Louisiana” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 2002), 46–90, 147–63, 171–76, 233–41; Guillaume Aubert, “ ‘The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic Word,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 61, no. 3 (2004): 439–78. 64. R. P. Tartarin, Report on the Weddings of Savage Women with Frenchmen (1738), Illinois, AC, C13A, 23:241–42.



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65. Vidal, “Les implantations françaises au Pays des Illinois au XVIIIe siècle (1699–1765),” 496–502. 66. Most historians do not acknowledge this transformation of the Illinois Country after 1720, and they continue to present it as an emergent métis society (cf. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 110–19); Jacqueline Peterson, “The People in Between: Indian-White Marriage and the Genesis of a Métis Society and Culture in the Great Lakes Region, 1680–1830” [Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1981]; Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. H. Brown, The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Metis in North America [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985]; Susan Sleeper-Smith, “Women, Kin, and Catholicism: New Perspectives on the Fur Trade,” Ethnohistory 47, no. 2 [2000]: 423–52; and Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001], 23–37). 67. Jaenen, Friend and Foe, 53. 68. Mary Borgias Palm, The Jesuit Missions of the Illinois Country, 1673–1763 (Cleveland, 1933); White, The Middle Ground, 66–68; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 54–64; Sleeper-Smith, “Women, Kin, and Catholicism: New Perspectives on the Fur Trade,” 423–52; Havard, Empire et métissages, 707–9. For access to public speech in another region, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Iroquois Women, European Women,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, 1994), 243–58. 69. Christopher Bilodeau, “ ‘They Honor Our Lord among Themselves in Their Own Way’: Colonial Christianity and the Illinois Indians,” American Indian Quarterly 25, no.3 (2001): 353–77; quotations 352 and 369. 70. Havard and Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française, 337–43; Havard, Empire et métissages, 709–15. 71. John A. Walthall, “Aboriginal Pottery and the Eighteenth-Century Illini,” in Calumet and Fleur de Lys, ed. Walthall and Emerson, 155–74. 72. White, The Roots of Dependency, 58–59, 69–96; Gilbert C. Din, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Indian Trade in Spanish Arkansas,” in Cultural Encounters in the Early South: Indians and Europeans in Arkansas, ed. Jeannie Whayne (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995), 119–22; Peter. C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 7–8, 43, 52–57, 137–54, 160–62; William E. Unrau, White Man’s Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade and Prohibition in Indian Country 1802–1892 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 13, 17–8, 41–59. 73. Colin G. Calloway, “The Continuing Revolution in Indian Country” and Reginald Horsman, “The Indian Policy of and ‘Empire of Liberty,’ ” in Native Americans and the Early Republic, ed. Hoxie et al., 3–61; Russell David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Russell David Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Cy, 1984); Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 116–90; Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America

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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy 1782–1812 (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967); Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973); Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999); White, The Middle Ground, 366–523. 74. Faragher, “ ‘More Motley than Mackinaw,’ ” 304–26; Francis P. Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984–1986), 64–93; Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars (New York: Viking, 2001); Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 1–125; Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).

L au r e n t Du boi s

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The Haitian Revolution and the Sale of Louisiana; or, Thomas Jefferson’s (Unpaid) Debt to Jean-Jacques Dessalines

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rom the perspective of the history of France and its Atlantic empire, what in the United States is known as the “Louisiana Purchase” is remembered as the “Sale of Louisiana.” And it has traditionally been interpreted as primarily, if not exclusively, the result of European “balance-of-power” politics, specifically the complicated diplomatic and political tensions between France and Britain during the brief period of peace that lasted from late 1801 until 1803. But, as Robert Paquette has emphasized, seeing Bonaparte’s decision to sell Louisiana in purely European terms is “rather parochial,” for it is impossible to separate the “balance of power” between Britain and France at this point from events in one of the central theaters of imperial conflict: the Caribbean, and particularly Saint-Domingue. The events in this colony, he notes, were certainly shaped by European imperial rivalries, but they shaped these rivalries as well, “in some cases decisively.”1 The transfer of Louisiana was one such case. In this essay, I argue that most important causal force in shaping France’s sale of Louisiana was not the diplomatic maneuverings and choices of European governments, but the actions of a revolutionary movement in a colony on the verge of becoming the independent nation of Haiti. By refusing Bonaparte’s plan to reenslave them, the people who made up this movement — most of them former slaves — “drastically limited Napoleon’s capacity to fulfill his western design and to project power in the Americas.” They therefore rendered French designs on Louisiana irrelevant and paved the way for its cession to the United States.2

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The connection between the Louisiana Purchase and the Haitian Revolution is rich with irony: it was the courage of men and women fighting to preserve their liberty, and the leadership of the one-time slave JeanJacques Dessalines, that made possible one of Thomas Jefferson’s signal political achievements, one of whose major results was the expansion of slavery in the United States. But remembering the centrality of Haiti in the transfer of Louisiana also calls for us to think differently about the broader place and significance of this event: as Richard White notes in his essay in this volume, what is often remembered as a remarkably “peaceful” transfer of land was in fact predicated on events of enormous violence that took place in the Caribbean. The war for liberty and independence that created Haiti was an extremely brutal one in which upward of fifty thousand French troops, and probably twice as many men and women from Saint-Domingue, lost their lives. The victory in Haiti was the result of the commitment and sacrifice of its revolutionaries. But the French defeat on the battlefield was the result of another kind of defeat that preceded it, which I explore in detail in this essay: the inability of Bonaparte’s government to accept the reconfiguration of empire being offered up to them by the Caribbean of the late 1790s. What ultimately doomed Bonaparte’s plans for the region was a fatal combination of ambition and blindness. The goal of his “western design” was to reconstruct and expand a French empire in the Americas in order to secure and sustain a powerful sea-born empire that could successfully challenge England. But in imagining the shape of this empire, he did not take into consideration the dramatic transformations that had taken place in the Caribbean during the previous decade. A lack of political imagination  — one tied both to racism and to a misunderstanding of the situation on the ground in the Caribbean — prevented decision makers in Paris from seeing that France’s best hope of channeling emancipation into a reconstitution of export-oriented plantation economy in fact lay in collaboration with Louverture’s regime. Instead of enabling the realization of Bonaparte’s new imperial dreams, the attempt to assert direct metropolitan control over Saint-Domingue incited a war in the colony, reversing the economic progresses of the previous years and opening the way for a group of generals to declare the full independence of the colony. In seeking to resurrect the past, Bonaparte unwittingly turned on the very people who might have made a renewed French empire in the Americas a reality. Yves Benot, who has provided the most detailed examination of Bonaparte’s colonial policy during these years, has concluded that it “re-



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veals only infatuation, obviously racism, and bloody stupidity.” There is much to support this conclusion, but it also deserves to be somewhat refined. What united Bonaparte and his advisors at the Colonial Ministry, and ultimately shaped their choices, was of course racism and an acceptance of slavery, but also a crucial by-product of this: the inability to truly understand the nature of the changes that had taken place in the Caribbean. As Michel Rolph Trouillot has famously argued, much about the Haitian Revolution was “unthinkable” to contemporaries, and here this observation holds true. But there is an important twist to this observation. It was not only that these thinkers had not understood that the former slaves of Saint-Domingue were committed to maintaining their freedom, and that their ideas about themselves and their place in the world had been profoundly transformed by the revolution they had made. It was also that they were unable to see that this revolution had produced a new elite that — despite its African ancestry and, in many cases, direct experiences with slavery — was willing and able to produce a new order in which plantation labor remained at the center of colonial society. They could not see that what Louverture was offering them was a system in which racial equality, granted to a new elite and taken as the foundation of the administration of the colony, could co-exist with a system of coercion in which the majority of those of African descent in the colony were forced to remain plantation laborers. Trapped in a set of prerevolutionary categories and visions of the former slaves of the Caribbean, they could not see that a true revolution had taken place: one profound enough to have produced both a remarkable change and a profound continuity in the workings of exploitation and power.3 Napoleon Bonaparte’s plans for reintegrating Louisiana into the French empire were an extension of his dream of reviving the plantation economy of the once-resplendent colony of Saint-Domingue. During the eighteenth century, the obsessive focus of planters on the production of export commodities had made it necessary to import most of the provisions required for the sustenance of the plantation system. Although slave gardens and provision grounds provided some food for the colony, French merchants rarely did, and the planters turned to a lively and lucrative contraband trade, mostly with North American merchants, to supply their needs. The “subproducts” of sugar (particularly molasses) were traded for a variety of provisions; U.S. ships brought “flour, corn, oats, rice, biscuits,

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salt beef, salt cod, herring, mackerel, salmon, fish, oils, peas, potatoes, onions and apples,” as well as “live animals including pigs, cows, sheep and turkeys.” French administrators seeking to enforce monopoly regulations were of course displeased by this, but they eventually came to realize there was little hope of stopping it, and during the late eighteenth century they made some concessions by opening certain ports to foreign ships. As he planned to rebuild the plantation economy of Saint-Domingue, Bonaparte envisioned a more elegant plan: Louisiana, instead of the United States, would provide the colony with “provisions, cattle and wood.”4 Of course, the problem of finding a ready source of provisions for a reconstructed Saint-Domingue was only one in a series of obstacles to Bonaparte’s imperial designs. He also had to reverse a decade-long set of colonial transformations that had produced a new political order and a new class of leaders committed to defending it. Inspired in part by their counterparts in North America, the elites of the French Caribbean had hoped, during the early years of the French Revolution, to gain more economic autonomy and political control for themselves. Their efforts, however, were soon surpassed by a massive uprising of enslaved insurgents seeking reform and ultimately liberty. Through their military and political successes, this movement ultimately forced the abolition of slavery in the colony of Saint-Domingue in 1793, a decision ratified and extended to the entire French empire in 1794. According to this law, all men of all colors had the rights of citizenship. The abolition of slavery went hand in hand with a dramatic reconfiguration of imperial relations, one that represented a distinct break with traditional practices in the Atlantic. In principle (though not always in practice), the proclamations of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the laws derived from it were applied equally across all regions of the empire. France’s 1795 constitution included a statement that made clear that it was to be applied in the colonies as it was in the metropole, thus eliminating any juridical and political distinctions between the two regions. The entire population of the colony of Saint-Domingue was represented, frequently by elected officials of African descent and in one case by one who was African-born, Jean-Baptiste Belley, in France’s representative bodies in Paris. In Saint-Domingue by the late 1790s, meanwhile, power was firmly in the hands of ToussaintLouverture.5 The radical antislavery colonial order was challenged repeatedly in the years after 1794. But it was only after Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power in 1799 that it came under direct and sustained assault within the



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French state itself. Bonaparte came to believe both that it was necessary for France to recover the pre-1789 levels of its colonial production and that in order to do so he would have to destroy the power of the new elites in the Caribbean, particularly Louverture. Driven by these perceptions, from the end of 1799 through 1803, Bonaparte made a series of choices that led to open conflict in Saint-Domingue, the reestablishment of slavery in the French empire, the independence of Haiti, and the cession of Louisiana. Unfortunately for historians, he left few written traces of the evolution of his thought on colonial policy during these years — much of what we know of his opinions comes from reports made by those who worked around him during these years — and as a result it is difficult to know precisely when or how he came to the decisions he did, and how seriously he considered the paths not taken. Nevertheless, it is possible to outline the major influences and turning points in the ultimately disastrous series of choices made by the First Consul.6 Napoleon Bonaparte came to power through the famous coup of 18 Brumaire An VIII (9 November 1799). The coup was orchestrated by the Abbé Sieyès, whose famous 1789 pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? had played a crucial role in the French Revolution, but who a decade later was concerned about the chaos and instability of democratic politics in France and hoping to create a regime centered on a strong executive. His solution was to reform the parliamentary system in such a way as to create a very attenuated form of popular representation that would place a great deal of power in the hands of a Consulate of three members. Bonaparte, famous for his military exploits and with experience as an administrator of conquered territories, notably in Italy, was the central beneficiary of the coup. It was his brother-in-law Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc — whom Bonaparte would soon send to his death in Saint-Domingue — who led the troops who faced down the coup’s opponents in the Legislative Assembly. Bonaparte took up the post of First Consul, and once in this position went further than Sieyès had intended, centralizing nearly all decision making in his hands rather than sharing it with the other two members of the Consulate. Bonaparte therefore had essentially no counterweights to his authority either from the other consuls or from the Corps Législatif, Council of State, or Senate that were put in place. He was the one who proposed the laws, and there were few spaces for the open discussion and debate of these laws.7 The impact of this new political configuration on the evolution of colonial policy was dramatic. Since 1789, issues of colonial policy had been

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furiously debated and struggled over in France’s parliaments. The balance between defenders and foes of emancipation had shifted repeatedly. Critics of abolition were active essentially from the moment it was decreed, but given that the principles of equality and liberty were sacralized in France’s 1795 constitution, it was difficult to mount a frontal attack on the policy. The most successful opponents of emancipation were the planters of France’s Indian Ocean colonies, who in March 1796 rebuffed representatives sent from Paris to institute the abolition decree there, and managed to stave off any change in their societies. The example of this resistance gave comfort to enemies of abolition in Paris, and in early 1797 a crop of planters elected to the Conseil des Cinq Cents (one of two legislative bodies) criticized the situation in the Caribbean colonies, notably by targeting Toussaint-Louverture. They claimed the end of slavery had opened the door to the innate barbarism and laziness of the ex-slaves and proposed various policies to force them to work. But they did not openly call for a reversal of abolition.8 In September 1797, a coup annulled the elections from earlier in that year and therefore purged many of the conservatives from the legislature. Several men who had been critics of emancipation fled into exile or were deported. Among them was François Barbé-Marbois, an ex-colonial administrator who had served in the Conseil des Anciens after 1795, and who was imprisoned and sent to Guiana — quite a dangerous fate. These conservatives were replaced by a series of firm supporters of abolition, most notably Etienne Laveaux, who had been Louverture’s ally in SaintDomingue in the years after emancipation. They mounted a spirited and effective defense of emancipation, passing a 1798 law on the colonies that assured French nationality to all individuals in the colony and opened the door for electoral participation by men of African descent, including ex-slaves serving in the army.9 When Bonaparte took power, then, pro-emancipation forces were still quite powerful and had been able to shape colonial policies through their actions in the legislative assemblies. After the 18th Brumaire, however, that all changed: “Everything was decided at the level of the executive.” Bonaparte, of course, had advisors to guide his decisions, but he was the one who appointed them, and he seems to have been most comfortable turning to planters and individuals who had served as administrators before the Revolution. Indeed, a few weeks after taking power, he arranged a dinner with a group of planters from Saint-Domingue in Paris. Several such planters had a clear influence on Bonaparte’s thinking, notably Pierre



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Malouet, a property owner from Saint-Domingue who was a member of the pro-slavery Club Massiac in 1791 and in 1793 led the negotiations through which the planters of Saint-Domingue, fearing the end of slavery at the hands of the French Republic, offered to hand the colony over to the British. François Barbé-Marbois, meanwhile, returned from exile to Paris, and Bonaparte named him to the Council of State, which advised Bonaparte on legislation; he would be named minister of the treasury in September 1801 and was an important voice in shaping colonial policy during this period. Bonaparte also immediately fired Bourdon de Vatry, a defender of emancipation, from the position of minister of the navy and the colonies, and replaced him with Forfait, an engineer who had not previously taken a public position on the question of slavery. And the First Consul staffed the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies (Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies) with several members of an “old guard” who represented the prerevolutionary colonial order. A former intendant from Saint-Domingue, Guillermin de Vaivre, was placed in an important part of the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies. The prolific and influential Creole intellectual Moreau de St. Méry, who was an important defender of slavery in the early 1790s as well as a long-standing proponent of the production of local codes of law for the colonies, was given a position as the “historiographer” at the ministry. In addition to all these planters and former colonial administrators, Bonaparte also may have been influenced by his wife, Joséphine, who was born into a slave-owning family in Martinique. Joséphine has been the focus of anger for her supposed role in influencing Bonaparte’s decision to reestablish slavery: in the 1980s a statue of her in Fort-de-France was beheaded and spray-painted with the word “whore.” (It remains headless to this day, much more of an attraction than in its previous form.) But her precise opinions and influence on the course of colonial policy remain the subject of conjecture all too often infused more with convenient gender stereotypes than with concrete information.10 The ideology of planters and ex-colonial administrators had an early and decisive influence on the shaping of colonial policy under Bonaparte. Bonaparte’s new constitution, issued in mid-December, declared: “The regime of the French colonies will be determined by special laws.” This new policy, a major break with the inclusion of the 1795 constitution, was explained as being necessary because of a difference in the “nature of things and the climate.” Bonaparte’s constitution shunted aside the imperial universalism of the previous years, eliminating the possibility of colonial representation and returning to an older model in which the colonies

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were understood as politically and legally distinct from the metropole. It was a return to the pre-emancipation colonial order. The constitution also made clear that there would be different codes for French colonies in different regions, opening the door for an acceptance of the refusal of emancipation on the part of the planters in the Indian Ocean colony. Indeed, as Thomas Pronier has argued, Bonaparte’s rather inconsistent attitude regarding colonial insubordination and autonomy — he never expressed much dismay at the refusal of the planters of the Indian Ocean to apply the law of the Republic, but soon grew quite disturbed by ToussaintLouverture’s independent actions in the Caribbean — provides us with another early indication of where his sympathies lay.11 The rhetoric of “special laws” was drenched with significance. In the early 1790s, intellectuals like Moreau de St. Méry had used the demand for “particular laws” for the colonies as a rallying cry during the early years of the Revolution for planters seeking to oppose moves against racial segregation and slavery; the idea that “nature” and “climate,” as well as the plantation economy and the slavery it required, demanded laws that were different from those of the metropole served as an ideological bulwark against the dangerous application of universalist ideas of rights to the Caribbean. Defeated in 1794, this ideology won the day again under Bonaparte, though in an altered form: while Creoles had hoped that the “particular laws” would be crafted within the colonies, Bonaparte made clear they would be decreed from Paris. For former slaves, most of whom had been freed in 1794, the return of the ideology of “particular laws” was quite a threatening development, one that propelled ballooning fears of a return to slavery. Indeed, in early December, just a few days after Bonaparte had met with the Saint-Domingue planters in Paris, a rumor spread through the city that slavery was going to be reestablished. Rumors of a reestablishment of slavery had in fact circulated in the French Caribbean regularly during the previous years, and political enemies often accused one another of planning to reverse abolition. Many took the rumors quite seriously: in Guadeloupe in 1799 and 1800, several individuals began to take concrete legal steps to try to assure that they would maintain their freedom in the event of a reestablishment of slavery. The specter of a return to the old order also preoccupied ToussaintLouverture. Indeed, as early as 1797, when conservative planters had criticized the results of emancipation in Paris, Louverture had warned the Directory regime that the people of Saint-Domingue were ready to fight rather than give up their freedom; and in subsequent years, his dealings



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with Britain and the United States were shaped by the fact that he understood it might become vital to have support outside the French empire if he was forced to defend liberty in Saint-Domingue.12 But Bonaparte’s constitution provided an opening for Louverture of which he took advantage in a bold and creative way. If France wanted “special laws” for the colonies, Louverture decided, he would oblige, but he would do so on his own terms. In presenting Bonaparte with a detailed set of “particular laws” for Saint-Domingue, Louverture perhaps hoped that despite the obvious challenge this represented, the First Consul would see that the constitution in fact offered a quite effective way of governing SaintDomingue as part of the French empire. The constitution, drafted in late 1800 and proclaimed in early 1801, began by announcing unambiguously that Saint-Domingue was a “part of the French empire,” but it laid out a system of autonomous government for the colony. It made Louverture governor-for-life of the colony and laid out in minute detail its economic and political administration. The constitution responded to the fears of a return to slavery, declaring the institution forever outlawed on the colony. But at the same time it consecrated the by then well-established policy of forcing ex-slaves to continue working on plantations.13 Since the mid-1790s, when emancipation and imperial warfare had led to a dramatic decline in the production of sugar and coffee in a colony that had been the central source of France’s external trade, administrators had sought ways to maintain the plantation system by putting in place a system of production based on nominally free but extensively controlled labor. Like other administrators in the French Caribbean during the revolutionary period, Louverture put in place a system that forced most former slaves to continue working cutting cane and harvesting coffee. By 1801, he was having some success at creating a revival of the colonial economy. Although more research is needed on the topic, and exact numbers are difficult to come by because a great deal of trade went on through illegal —  or at least unrecorded — channels, official reports from 1801 indicate that coffee exports had risen from almost nothing to two-thirds of the level they had been at in 1789. Though the improvement in the sugar industry, where damages were more difficult to repair, were smaller, by 1802 exports were at one-third what they had been in 1789. This represented a significant increase over the previous years. The system was infused with tensions between those former slaves whose lives were circumscribed to plantation labor and the new elite — a number of them also former slaves — who over-

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saw the work and the punishment of those who sought to escape it. These tensions occasionally exploded into open revolt, but on many plantations the new relationships of power that had emerged after emancipation seem to have been settling into a relatively well-functioning labor system.14 The strictness of Louverture’s labor system, and the brutality of some its enforcers, such as Jean-Jacques Dessalines, led many to portray it at the time as little more than a continuation of slavery. Exiled planters were fond of arguing that their former slaves in the Caribbean were in fact pining away for their return, regretting the lost paternalism of slavery that had provided them with protection, health care, and food, and that had only been replaced by an even more miserable condition. More astute observers, however, noted that despite the evident violence and coercion of the new system, a great deal had changed. In the new regime, the British abolitionist James Stephen wrote in 1802, industry was “considered a duty to be inculcated by persuasion, or enforced by the sanctions of municipal law aided by a military police, and not a mere physical effect to be excited by the application of the lash.” Punishment was meted out by agents of the state, and work was not exacted only by the threats of whip-wielding drivers working for their masters. Though Stephen underestimated the troubling continuities between the old and new regimes, he nevertheless was right to insist that the former slaves in the colonies knew the difference between what they had and what they would be returned to if they were enslaved once again. The “distinctions of political freedom or restraint known in Europe,” he noted, “shrink to nothing, when compared with the unspeakable difference between the terms ‘slave and free,’ in the colonies.” It would be as impossible to submit the people of Saint-Domingue to slavery as it was “to renew in a philosopher the superstitions of the nursery.” There had been not only a “revolution” in their habits, but a dramatic transformation in their “ideas.” The French General Pamphile de Lacroix would later write in a similar vein that the great failure of Bonaparte and his advisors was their blindness to the fact that the blacks were not “as they had left them,” and to underestimate the profound political consequences of “ten years of revolution” in Saint-Domingue.15 As the inheritor and representative of this revolution, Louverture attempted a difficult balancing act, seeking to contain the aspirations of the ex-slaves of Saint-Domingue by maintaining the plantation system, but doing so precisely in order to defend emancipation against those who argued that it inevitably meant the end of productivity in the Caribbean colonies. His constitution in fact offered up a compromise of sorts. His



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system aimed to maintain a colony focused on the production of colonial commodities for export, even if that meant using coercion to maintain labor productivity. In return, it insisted on an end to the old form of slavery that had dominated the colony, and also instituted an order of racial equality in which the ranks of the elite were to become integrated. Bonaparte, however, did not see Louverture’s constitution as a compromise, but as a challenge. Until 1801, Bonaparte had not taken any direct action against Louverture, whose military role as the leader of Saint-Domingue in the context of continuing war against the British seems to have outweighed other misgivings the First Consul might have had about him. Indeed, in March 1801, Bonaparte promoted Louverture to the rank of captain-general of SaintDomingue, which meant that he would be the “commander in chief” over any French officer sent to the colony. Bonaparte’s opinion of Louverture, however, began to shift soon afterward, when news arrived in France that in late 1800 he had sent his troops to occupy the neighboring colony of Spanish Santo Domingo. In a 1795 treaty with Spain, France had officially gained control of Santo Domingo. (The French government had, at the time of the negotiations, attempted to gain control of Louisiana instead, a plan the Spanish had refused.) Since then the government had contented itself with keeping a few representatives there. Bonaparte believed that the actual occupation of the region should only have been carried out under orders from the metropole. Angered by this new demonstration of Louverture’s independence, he reversed his promotion of Louverture, and indeed eliminated him from the list of those who were to be maintained as officers in Saint-Domingue. Bonaparte’s advisors in the Colonial Ministry increasingly encouraged him to eliminate Louverture as a first step to rebuilding the colonial economy. In September 1801, the officer François Kerverseau, who had served in Saint-Domingue, wrote in an official report that the Republic should “examine whether, after having laid down the law for all the monarchs of Europe,” it was appropriate for it to “receive laws from a rebel negro in one of its own colonies.”16 Bonaparte’s suspicions of Louverture were cemented when he received a copy of his constitution in October of 1801. The Second Consul, Cambacérès, later recalled how Bonaparte determined at that point that he must send a mission to end Louverture’s “state of rebellion against the Republic.” “The indignation of the First Consul was extreme,” wrote another contemporary. “The conduct of Toussaint Louverture struck him as an attack against the authority and dignity of the Republic.” Bonaparte wrote more

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diplomatically in the letter he gave to Louverture’s sons that the new constitution, which “included many good things,” also contained “some that are contrary to the dignity and the sovereignty of the French people, of which Saint-Domingue is only a part.” Although Louverture had suggested to the Consul that he send emissaries back to the colony to discuss the terms of the constitution, Bonaparte did not send a “negotiator.” Instead, “he sent an army,” under the command of Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc.17 The turn against Louverture was shaped by the broader changes taking place in late 1801, when it seemed increasingly likely that nearly a decade of war between the British and French empires was about to end. The prospect of peace had major implications for the Caribbean, for emancipation had from its beginning been tied to and justified by the fact of ex-slave military service. The backbone of the French army in the Caribbean — a major theater of war in which sixty thousand British troops lost their lives in the late 1790s — was made up of ex-slaves, and defenders of emancipation consistently pointed to the sacrifices and loyalty of the black troops of the region in countering the racist portrayals of planters. The imminent end of war with Britain of course substantially reduced the strategic importance of the black armies of the Caribbean. And it also made it conceivable to send troops across the Atlantic, something that would have been impossible in a context of war in which the British dominated the seas. Bonaparte’s government was at pains to present their mission to SaintDomingue as something that represented a service to all European powers. As Claude and Marcel Auguste, the leading historians of the Leclerc expedition, have written, they presented it as “a crusade of civilized people of the West against the black barbarism that was on the rise in America.” Talleyrand argued in his correspondence with the British that it was “in the interest of civilization in general to destroy the new Algiers that is being organized in the center of America,” and that the Leclerc mission deserved the support of all “states that have colonies and commerce.” This was in part simply a shrewd diplomatic strategy, but it also reflected a broader sentiment that the new society that had developed in revolutionary Saint-Domingue was a profound threat to the European colonial system as a whole. The British government concurred. Addington declared that the “interests of the two governments is exactly the same — to destroy Jacobinism, especially that of the blacks.” After his arrival in SaintDomingue, Leclerc summed up the sentiment of many in French government circles when he declared, “it is here and at this moment that it will be determined whether Europe will retain its colonies in the Caribbean.”18



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“Rid us of these gilded negroes,” Bonaparte wrote to Leclerc in July 1802, “and we will have nothing more to wish for.” He was “counting on” him to deport “all the black Generals” to France by September 1802. “Without this,” Bonaparte noted, “we will have done nothing, and an immense and beautiful colony will always remain a volcano, and will inspire no confidence in capitalists, colonists, or commerce.” The stakes were enormous, insisted Bonaparte: “Once the blacks have been disarmed and the principal generals sent to France, you will have done more for the commerce and civilization of Europe than we have done in our most brilliant campaigns.”19 In his written instructions to Leclerc, Bonaparte did not call for a re­ establisment of slavery in Saint-Domingue. “The French nation will never place shackles on men it has recognized as free,” he wrote. The “political goal” of the mission in the “French part” of the island was to “disarm the blacks” and to make them “free” cultivators. This did not mean, however, that Bonaparte rejected slavery. In the Spanish part of the island (where Bonaparte assumed Louverture had abolished slavery), Leclerc’s goal was to disarm the blacks and to return them to slavery. And in Martinique, which the British had occupied since 1794 but which was to be returned to France once peace was negotiated, the whites, Bonaparte announced, “did not need to fear the liberation of the slaves.” Such assurances were made privately, as a public declaration to this effect might have incited revolt in other colonies. But they make clear that Bonaparte had, by late 1801, decided on a major shift in colonial policy: France would once again accept, and even embrace, the existence of slavery in its empire.20 But what of Saint-Domingue? When was the decision taken to re­ establish slavery there, as well as in Guadeloupe and Guiana, where it had been abolished? There is, unfortunately, no clear answer to this question. As early as January 1800, a bureaucrat in the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies was working on a set of laws about slavery and the slave trade, but these laws would have been necessary even if Bonaparte had allowed slavery only in Martinique and the Indian Ocean colonies. And Bonaparte seems to have entertained the possibility of a colonial policy that included both slave and free colonies. “The question,” he explained in May 1800, was not whether it was a good idea to “abolish slavery,” but rather whether it would be reasonable to “abolish liberty” in Saint-Domingue. “My policy is to govern men the way most of them wish to be governed,” as this was the best way to “recognize the sovereignty of a people.” “It was by making myself Catholic that I ended the war in the Vendée, in making myself a

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Muslim that I established myself in Egypt,” he explained. “If I was governing a Jewish people,” he continued, “I would rebuild the temple of Solomon.” “And so I will speak of liberty in the free portion of Saint-Domingue [i.e., the French part]; I will confirm slavery in the Ile de France [in the Indian Ocean], and even in the enslaved portion of Saint-Domingue [i.e., the Spanish portion], and I will reserve the right to soften and limit slavery, where I maintain it, and to re-establish order and introduce discipline, where I maintain liberty.”21 But of course such a policy would be quite difficult to enforce, as Stephen noted in his 1802 text. Not far from Martinique was the island of Guadeloupe, in which the French had abolished slavery in 1794. (He could have just as easily pointed out that in Saint-Domingue/Santo Domingo there would be a slave colony and free colony on one island.) Could France really administer one colony in which all people were free, and another a short distance away where the majority were enslaved? “To maintain two such opposite systems in islands within sight of each other, would be not more preposterous than impracticable.” Were the French simply naïve? Stephen thought not. Instead, he argued that they were simply hiding their true intentions for Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe. “The true, though unavowed purpose of the French government in this expedition,” he concluded, “is to restore the old system of negro slavery in St. Domingo, and in the other colonies wherein it has been subverted.” The promises made by Bonaparte’s regime were simply part of his strategy. Knowing that an open announcement of the return of slavery would incite mass insurrection, the governors of France were declaring they respected liberty so that they could position themselves to destroy it.22 According to this interpretation, Bonaparte had made his decision about the final goal of his mission before he ever sent Leclerc across the Atlantic. Claude and Marcel Auguste have argued that the two men must have discussed the question of reestablishing slavery in conversations that “left no direct written traces,” and carefully kept it secret only because they knew they had to in order to succeed. This interpretation is buttressed by the fact that, in August 1802, Leclerc complained that the leaders in Guadeloupe had reinstituted slavery on that island “three months too early” and as a result undermined his efforts in Saint-Domingue. For the reference to make sense, Leclerc must have had some knowledge of a plan that was put in place to reestablish slavery near the end of 1802, by which time Bonaparte assumed Leclerc would have successfully won out over the “black generals” in Saint-Domingue. The declarations issued by



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Bonaparte “in favor of the liberty of the blacks of Saint-Domingue” were then, as Auguste and Auguste put it, “nothing but pure diplomacy, trickery, shrewdness, production, technique and pretense” whose aim was to gain from Louverture through “peaceful means” what the French government “feared having to take from him by force.” As his plans unraveled in Saint-Domingue, Bonaparte did indeed express openly racist sentiments when he angrily declared: “I am for the whites because I am white; I have no other reason, and that one is good.” “How is it possible that liberty was given to Africans, to men who had no civilization, who didn’t even know what the colony was, what France was? It is perfectly clear that those who wanted the freedom of the blacks wanted the slavery of the whites.”23 The official decision to reestablish slavery in Guadeloupe and SaintDomingue was not issued until June 1802, after news of Louverture’s open resistance to Leclerc had arrived in France. Even then, the ministry warned the leaders in Guadeloupe not to announce the reestablishment of slavery until resistance in the colony had been completely crushed. The threat of ongoing insurrection was serious enough in Guadeloupe that it was not until May 1803 that the official reintroduction of slavery took place. Starting in July 1802, however, the previous labor codes in Guadeloupe were replaced by much more draconian ones that forced ex-slaves to return to the plantations where they had been on the eve of emancipation and stripped them of their right to payment for their work. And citizenship was declared to be off-limits to anyone who was not white. In French Guiana, a similar decree was put into place in December 1802, though again the term “slavery” itself was studiously avoided until 1803. These actions seem to fit with the theory that the delay in a reestablishment of slavery was part of a strategy to eliminate resistance, but they do also suggest some degree of confusion and inconsistency in the application of colonial policy. (This, of course, was a regular feature of imperial governance long before Bonaparte came along.) Curiously, though, Bonaparte seems to have had some hesitations on the subject, at least if we are to believe François Barbé-Marbois, who actually reports the First Consul saying in April 1803, during a discussion about the fate of Louisiana, that he was “again . . . undecided as to maintaining or abolishing slavery.” By then, of course, upward of one hundred thousand French soldiers and revolutionaries in Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue were dead as a result of Bonaparte’s decisions, so it was a little late to be wondering about the wisdom of resurrecting slavery.24 Interestingly, though Bonaparte did consider a rather different alterna-

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tive, one that might have enabled him to shore up his “western design” if he had pursued it. According to Barbé-Marbois, as he developed his plan “of giving France a preponderance in America,” he envisioned making Saint-Domingue “a vast armed camp” and “[having] there an army always ready to carry war into their own colonies.” He was speaking of the black army of ex-slaves whose strength as an attacking force would be increased by the fact that they could encourage local slaves to join them in pursuit of emancipation. During his May 1800 discussion of colonial policy, Bonaparte noted that preserving liberty in Saint-Domingue would have its advantages: “They may make less sugar, than when they were slaves, but they provide us, and serve us as we need them, as soldiers. If we have one less sugar mill, we will have one more citadel occupied by friendly soldiers.”25 In late 1801, during negotiations with the British, Bonaparte again considered using the army of the Caribbean in pursuit of his goals rather than seeking to destroy it. In mid-November 1801, the British had not yet announced to the French that they would accept the departure of a large expeditionary force to the Caribbean. Bonaparte and his strategists had concluded that in order to be successful his troops must occupy SaintDomingue before April, because later in the year “the climate of the colonies becomes very dangerous for European troops who are not acclimated to it.” If the troops were unable to leave early enough, Bonaparte would have to delay his expedition, and he might well end up having to “recognize Toussaint” and accept the existence of “black Frenchmen” in SaintDomingue. Although this would mean the loss of income for France — free labor, he was convinced, would be less profitable than slavery, and more black soldiers would mean fewer agricultural workers — it would be to its military advantage. Talleyrand passed on these reflections to the French ambassador in Britain, noting that “Saint-Domingue re-conquered by the whites” would “for many years” be a weak power, one that would survive only through “a long peace and support from the Metropole.” “The government of the Blacks recognized in Saint-Domingue and legitimized by France,” in contrast, would be a “formidable base for the Republic in the New World.” France could collaborate with Louverture, using SaintDomingue as a military base, and deploying its black army against the colonies of its enemies. The Republic could, as it had in the mid-1790s, use emancipation as a potent weapon of imperial war. If a “new power” were “constituted and recognized” in Saint-Domingue, Talleyrand asserted,



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“the scepter of the New World” would “sooner or later” fall into France’s hands. The consequences for Britain would be “incalculable.”26 James Stephen argued that this possibility was indeed quite dangerous for Britain. France, he argued, could conclude: “Since the negroes will not resume their hoes, let us avail ourselves of their muskets. By means of these African auxiliaries, we shall wound Carthage [i.e., Britain] in its most vulnerable side, clip the wings of her commerce, and enrich ourselves with her spoils!” France would “stand in need of no armies from Europe” to carry out these conquests. In British slave colonies like Jamaica, the “attractions” of emancipation, and “the very complexion” of the French troops, would “ensure her in every slave Colony she invades, numerous and irresistible allies, ready not only to facilitate, but to perpetuate her conquests.” Indeed, it is conceivable that Saint-Domingue could have provided more than simply soldiers, but also settlers in Louisiana. Precisely such a solution had been envisioned in 1766 by the Abbé Nicholas Bauleau, founder of the Ephémerides du Citoyen, who wrote in the pages of his journal that the best way to colonize France’s vast North American colony would be to import Africans not as slaves but rather as “free men, industrious cultivators,” and “true citizens of Louisiana.” What would the history of North America have looked like if Bonaparte’s France had envisioned such a plan, drawing on the vast population of ex-slaves who actively sought the autonomy of land-ownership? What would the history of Haiti have looked like? It is both impossible and enticing to imagine.27 It is also, of course, too late. It was too late when Bonaparte, on his deathbed, lamented that he should have “recognized Toussaint” and governed through him instead of seeking to destroy him. Indeed, it was already too late in late 1802, when a seemingly unstoppable insurrection was turning Bonaparte’s best-laid plans into a brutal debacle in Saint-Domingue. For the “black generals” and — more importantly — a population determined not to be forced back into slavery responded with determination and military brilliance.28 At first it seemed that Bonaparte’s plan for Leclerc’s mission would be achieved. Stephen had predicted that the strategy of attacking the “black generals” would indeed work at first. “The towns and forts on the coast of St. Domingo will probably be conquered with great facility” and indeed would perhaps offer “no resistance.” “Toussaint may submit,” he conceded. Indeed, “by specious promises of a well regulated freedom,” Stephens concluded, “a general submission to the authority of the Repub-

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lic may be speedily obtained; and thus the whole work may appear to be at once accomplished.” He was correct. Many of Louverture’s generals in fact joined the French on their arrival, and though Louverture fought back, he and his top generals eventually surrendered to the French as well. Louverture was tricked and deported to France.29 But Louverture’s resistance had lasted long enough to take a significant toll on Leclerc’s army, while his soldiers increasingly fell prey to yellow fever. Leclerc was forced to depend on the very army, and the very “black generals,” he had been sent to destroy. For the surrender of the highranking leadership in the colony did not end the resistance. Throughout Saint-Domingue, insurgent bands, often led by African-born leaders like Sans-Souci and Macaya, continued to fight the French. And though Leclerc deployed Dessalines — who distinguished himself for his brutality against the insurgents — and Christopher against them, the popular resistance remained strong. It was driven by an increasingly clear sense on the part of the ex-slaves of Saint-Domingue that what was at stake was liberty itself. As 1802 wore on, there were increasing indications — the reestablishment of the slave trade, the maintenance of slavery in Martinique and the Indian Ocean, the repression in Guadeloupe — that the true intent of Bonaparte’s regime was to reenslave the people of the colony.30 “It is when the true design shall be avowed,” Stephen had predicted early in 1802, “or begin to unfold itself: when the negroes shall discover, that not to the fasces of the Consul only, but to the whip of the driver, their submission is demanded, when the master shall take possession of his estate, and the bell and the loud report of the driver’s whip, announcing the approach of dawn, shall summon again to the field,” that the tide of the war would begin to change. The French would learn what the British already had, that there was a “difference between subduing the coast, and ruling the interior, of this extensive Island; between gaining the chiefs, and coercing the new formed people.” “What energies are not likely to be called forth, what desperate struggles to be made, in defending not only private property, but the very capacity of possessing it,” Stephen had wondered in his ruminations on the Leclerc expedition. The population of exslaves was “a large community of negroes inured by a ten years experience to the habits of freedom,” and would embark on a war of resistance whose legitimacy outshone that of any other war.31 As the fighting continued, increasing numbers among the rank-and-file colonial troops fighting for the French began to desert to the other side. In



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response, the French became increasingly paranoid and brutal, striking out repeatedly against black troops serving under them whom they suspected of disloyalty, in the process helping to produce precisely what they feared. Caught between a widening insurrection that threatened to demolish the French army and those serving with it and the threat of French brutality, more and more soldiers cast their lot with the resistance. Eventually, the leaders followed their troops. In mid-October 1802, Dessalines, along with several other important generals, defected from the French side. Bringing many of the remaining units of the colonial army with them, they swelled the ranks of the resistance and began the last stage of a war of independence that now engulfed the entire colony. Leclerc was left, in October 1802, writing to Bonaparte requesting five thousand more troops not because they would actually help the military situation — he admitted that they would “probably die” in the colony — but in order to keep alive the “idea of the force of France.” It was a clear admission that France had lost all legitimacy and power in the colony. Soon afterward Leclerc died of yellow fever, to be replaced by General Rochambeau, whose use of terror and atrocity against the rebels only helped to spread the rebellion. Though it would take another year of brutal fighting before the French fled the island, the defection of Dessalines and other important generals essentially sealed their defeat. Dessalines managed to unite the diverse forces fighting the French and secure a victory in the course of the next year.32 According to Barbé-Marbois, Bonaparte’s original plan to secure a French presence in Louisiana was as follows: “It consisted in first subjecting the revolted colony [Saint-Domingue], by sending there such considerable forces that he might be justified in regarding success as infallible. After the reduction of the rebels, a part of the army was to be conveyed to Louisiana.” Bonaparte had in fact sent considerable and veteran forces to Saint-Domingue, but by early 1803 it was clear that was not enough, and that he would have to send many more if he was to keep alive any hope of success. In January, Bonaparte learned of General Leclerc’s death and apparently decided to slow down the sending of new reinforcements to Saint-Domingue. By March, then, as Livingston negotiated for the purchase of New Orleans, the French response to the U.S. entreaty was inevitably haunted by an inescapable fact: whatever Bonaparte’s designs for their Atlantic empire, the tens of thousands of troops he had sent to SaintDomingue to eliminate a “rebel negro” were rapidly vanishing. The cost of

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the venture was dramatic, and it seemed increasingly unlikely that SaintDomingue could ever again be what the nostalgic planters, and Bonaparte himself, imagined it must. This fact provides the central explanation for understanding the background for the surprise offer that was made to cede not just New Orleans but all of Louisiana to the United States. The turnabout in Saint-Domingue pushed Bonaparte’s dreams for Louisiana, and for an expanded French empire in the Americas, out of reach. The people of Saint-Domingue had, of course, no such goal in mind. They were struggling to defend their own freedom and independence. But their actions forced a dramatic alteration in French policy in the Americas.33 On Easter Day (10 April) of 1803, Bonaparte called upon two of his ministers — Denis Décrès, the minister of the navy and the colonies, a firm supporter of the reestablishment of slavery in the Caribbean, and François Barbé-Marbois, then minister of the treasury — to get advice from them about whether to sell Louisiana. Bonaparte noted that “our affairs” in Saint-Domingue had been “growing worse every day since the death of Leclerc,” and declared of Louisiana: “I already consider the colony as entirely lost.” Barbé-Marbois, according to his own account, then delivered a long speech arguing in favor of selling Louisiana. He argued that French efforts to create colonies on the continent of America had “every where proved abortive,” and that even if Louisiana became prosperous, this would only create the “germ of independence.” He also argued that ultimately slavery would be eliminated — that the “general sentiment of the world is favourable to emancipation” and that this “movement” of “public opinion” was unstoppable. Furthermore, the old “exclusive system” of colonial commerce was also certain to be swept away. Barbé-Marbois’ account of his speech must be read with some skepticism, given that he presents himself, from the comfort of 1830, as a quite prescient observer of the doom of colonialism and slavery in the Americas. On the other hand, Barbé-Marbois had almost gotten killed twice because of colonial policy — once during the early days of the revolution in Saint-Domingue (at the hands of whites), and later by being deported to the deadly climate of Guiana — so perhaps his feelings of hostility toward the enterprise were heartfelt. The feelings of Dénis Decrès, the minister of the navy and the colonies, went in the opposite direction, arguing for maintaining Louisiana as a way to “indemnify” French colonial losses during the previous decades. “If we must abandon” Saint-Domingue, he declared, “Louisiana will take its place.” The ideas of both ministers, then, were shaped by an acknowledgment of the likelihood of defeat in Saint-Domingue, which



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was shaped by Bonaparte. The First Consul, however, was not convinced by Decrès’ optimistic claims about the possibilities of a new empire in the Americas, and ultimately sided with Barbé-Marbois. At dawn the next day, he announced: “I renounce Louisiana.”34 Two days earlier, in a cold and dank prison cell in the Jura Mountains, Toussaint-Louverture had died. The coincidence was fitting: Louverture had, though Bonaparte had not seen it at the time, represented the possibility for a different kind of French empire in the Americas, one predicated on racial equality but still focused on the production of plantation commodities. Bonaparte saw the destruction of Louverture as a way to open the door to prosperity and a revitalized empire; instead, the attempt to rebuild slavery in Saint-Domingue created a reef that sank the First Consul’s plans. The important role of Toussaint-Louverture in shaping the context of the cession of Louisiana has long been acknowledged: Henry Adams, for instance, noted that Louverture had as much influence on the process as “any European leader.” But there has been little remembrance of the role of Dessalines and the masses of ex-slaves who were in fact directly responsible for Bonaparte’s decision to sell the territory. Louverture makes for a more palatable hero, perhaps, because of Dessalines’ notorious massacres of white planters after independence. But it was Dessalines, and more importantly the tens of thousands of soldiers and laborers who fought and died both before and after his defection, who won the war against the French. To them, Jefferson and the United States ultimately owe one of their greatest unpaid debts.35

Notes 1. Robert Paquette, “Saint-Domingue and the Making of Territorial Louisiana,” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Geggus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 204–25, 210. 2. Paquette, “Saint-Domingue,” 210. I present a narrative history of the events discussed in this essay in Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), chaps. 8–13. 3. Yves Benot, “Bonaparte et la démence coloniale,” in La démence colonial sous Napoléon, by Benot (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1991), 19; Michel Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 4. See Paul Lachance, “Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Louisiana,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David

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Geggus (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 209–30, esp. 210. The list of traded goods, based on sources from the early 1790s, is from Chaela Pastore, “Merchant Voyages: Michel Marsaudon and the Exchange of Colonialism in Saint-Domingue, 1788–1794” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001), 224; the quotation regarding Bonaparte’s vision for Louisiana comes from François Barbé-Marbois, The History of Louisiana (1830; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 200. 5. I present an examination of the transformations of French imperial policy and ideology during this period in A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pt. 2. 6. See Thomas Pronier, “L’Implicite et l’explicite dans la politique de Napoléon,” in Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises, 1802, ed. Marcel Dorigny (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 2003), 51–67, esp. 51. 7. Albert Soboul, La France Napoléonniene (Paris: Arthad, 1983), 46–47. 8. On this period, see Bernard Gainot, “Metropole/Colonies: Projets Constitutionnels et rapport de forces, 1798–1802,” in Rétablissement de l’esclavage, ed. Dorigny, 13–28; see also my A Colony of Citizens, 288–303. On the Indian Ocean colonies, see Claude Wanquet, La France et la première abolition de l’esclavage: Le cas des colonies orientales (Paris: Kharthala, 1998). 9. See Gainot, “Metropole/Colonies”; and Marcel Dorigny and Bernard Gainot, La Société des Amis des Noirs, 1788–1799: Contribution à l’histoire de l’abolition de l’esclavage (Paris: Editions de l’UNESCO, 1998). 10. Gainot, “Metropole/Colonies,” in Rétablissement de l’esclavage, ed. Dorigny, 26; Pronier, “L’Implicite et l’explicite,” 54, 63–64; see also Yves Benot, “Bonaparte et la démence coloniale (1799–1804),” in Mourir pour les Antilles: Indépendance nègre ou esclavage, 1802–1804, ed. Michel Martin and Alain Yacou (Paris: Editions Caribbéennes, 1991), 13–35; on Barbé-Marbois, see E. Wilson Lyon, introduction to The History of Louisiana, by François Barbé-Marbois (1830; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), xxxviii; on Moreau de St. Méry and the broader legal tradition of which he was a part, see Malick Walid Ghachem, “Sovereignty and Slavery in the Age of Revolution: Haitian Variations on a Metropolitan Theme” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2001). 11. Pronier, “L’explicite et l’implicite,” 54–55. 12. Ibid., 55; on Guadeloupe, see my A Colony of Citizens, chaps. 13–15. 13. The best study of Louverture’s constitution is Claude Moïse, Le projet nationale de Toussaint Louverture et la Constitution de 1801 (Port-au-Prince: Editions Mémoire, 2001). 14. See Mats Lundahl, “Toussaint Louverture and the War Economy of Saint Domingue, 1796–1802,” Slavery and Abolition 6, no. 2 (September 1985): 122–38 and more generally. The most detailed biography of Louverture is Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Fayard 1989), 405–41. 15. James Stephen, The Crisis of the Sugar Colonies; or, an Enquiry into the Objects and Probable Effects of the French Expedition to the West Indies (1802; New York, 1969), 24, 46, 75–76; Lacroix, Révolution, 282.



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16. Pluchon, Louverture, 456–57; Claude Bonaparte Auguste and Marcel Bonaparte Auguste, L’Expedition Leclerc, 1801–1803 (Port-au-Prince: Editions Henri Deschamps, 1985), 27; Benot, La démence coloniale sous Napoléon, 46–56. On the 1795 negotiations, see Dolores Hernàndez Guerrero, “La Révolution haïtienne et l’expansion territoriale des Etats-Unis,” in Le rétablissement de l’esclavage, ed. Dorigny, 453–67, 456; and Michel Poniatowski, Talleyrand et le Consult (Paris: Perrin, 1986), 621–22. 17. Beaubrun Ardouin, Etudes sur l’histoure d’Haïti (1853–65; Port-au-Prince: Dalencourt, 1958), 4:97–98; Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, Mémoires inédits (Paris, 1999), 1:587–88; Bonaparte to Louverture, 18 November 1801, in Lettres du Général Leclerc, ed. Paul Roussier (Paris: Sociéte de l’histoire des colonies françaises, 1937), 307–9; Pluchon, Louverture, 398. 18. Marcel Bonaparte Auguste and Claude Bonaparte Auguste, La Participation étrangère à l’expédition française de Saint-Domingue (Quebec: self-published, 1980), 21, 47–53; Benot, La démence, 59–62; “Notes pour servir aux instructions,” in Lettres, ed. Roussier, 269; Leclerc to Minister, 27 February 1802, ibid., 102–11. 19. Bonaparte to Leclerc, 1 July 1802, in Lettres, ed. Roussier, 305–6. 20. “Notes pour servir aux instructions,” in Lettres, ed. Roussier, 269, 272; Germain Saint-Ruf, L’Epopée Delgrès: La Guadeloupe sous la révolution française (1789–1802) (Paris: Editions de l’Harmattan, 1977), 88. 21. Pronier, “L’implicite et l’explicite,” 56; Pluchon, Louverture, 449–50. 22. Stephen, Crisis, 7, 36. 23. Leclerc to Bonaparte, 6 August 1802, in Lettres, ed. Roussier, 199–207; Auguste, L’expedition, 18; Benot, La demence, 89. Pronier, in “L’implicite et l’explicite,” also argues strongly that, from 1799 on, Bonaparte was essentially committed to reestablishing slavery. 24. On the return of slavery in Guadeloupe, see my A Colony of Citizens, chap. 16; and Fréderic Régent, “Le rétablissment de l’esclavage et du prejugé de couleur en Guadeloupe (1802–1803),” in Le rétablissement de l’esclavage, ed. Dorigny, 283–96; on Guyana, see Serge Mam Lam Fouck, “La résistance au rétablissement de l’esclavage en Guyane française: Traces et regards, 1802–1822,” ibid., 251–72. 25. Barbé-Marbois, History of Louisiana, 169–70; Pluchon, Louverture, 450. 26. Auguste and Auguste, Participation étrangère, 11, 57–58; Benot, La démence, 62. 27. Stephens, Crisis, 89, 91; for Bauleau, see “Des colonies françoises aux Indes occidentales,” Ephémerides du Citoyen 5 (1766): 68, 75; and Edward Seeber, Antislavery Opinion in France during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937), 99, 114–15. 28. Pluchon, Louverture, 451–52. 29. Stephens, Crisis, 44–45. 30. Carolyn Fick, “La résistance populaire au corps expéditionnaire du général Leclerc et au rétablissement de l’esclavage à Saint-Domingue (1802–1804),” in Le rétablissement de l’esclavage, ed. Dorigny, 127–48. For the best narrative of the war of independence, see Auguste and Auguste, L’expédition Leclerc.

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31. Stephen, Crisis, 45–48, 55–56, 69. 32. Fick, “La résistance populaire,” 146. 33. Barbé-Marbois, History of Louisiana, 184, 249. 34. Ibid., 263–74; Poniatowski, Talleyrand, 631–32. 35. Henry Adams, The History of the United States under the Administration of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Antiquarian Press, 1967), 1:378.

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A Tornado on the Horizon The Jefferson Administration, the Retrocession Crisis, and the Louisiana Purchase

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n the spring of 1801, during the first months of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, news began to reach the United States of a recent, secret agreement between France and Spain. Newspapers, private letters, reports by merchants and other travelers, and, in time, official dispatches from American diplomats abroad all carried the disturbing rumors. The most reliable, and the most worrisome, of these reports came from Rufus King, the American minister in London. In a letter that arrived in Washington in late May, King provided further evidence that Spain had “ceded Louisiana and the Floridas to France.” What seemed most alarming about this transaction to King was that “certain influential Persons in France” were known to consider the Appalachians a natural “line of Separation between the People of the United States living upon the two sides of the . . . Mountains.” As such, he feared “that this cession is intended to have, and may actually produce, Effects injurious to the Union and consequent happiness of the People of the United States.”1 Other American diplomats in Europe were neither so confident that a retrocession had taken place nor so alarmist about its implications. But the new president and his cabinet — Secretary of State James Madison, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, and Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, in particular — understood the danger of a French return to Louisiana in precisely the way suggested by King — as a threat to the union of the Atlantic and trans-Appalachian states and, thus, to the “happiness” of the American people. Just one day after reading King’s letter, Jefferson described the cession as “very ominous to us.”2 Most accounts of the Louisiana Purchase have misunderstood the fears

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that drove the administration and shaped its policies. Over a century after Henry Adams first explored how the retrocession unleashed fears of disunion, most historians have generally forgotten the implications of his work.3 They have suggested that the administration’s great concern was — or, at least, should have been — the threat of Napoleonic France to American security. Or they have argued that Jefferson and his cabinet worried that a French Louisiana would prevent American expansion beyond the Mississippi. Or they have suggested that an agrarian-minded Jefferson feared that, without the vast acreage of Louisiana, men who might have become virtuous farmers would be forced to live in cities and work in factories. But Jefferson, his cabinet members, and many of his contemporaries worried about something very different — the impact of French control over the mouth of the Mississippi River on the permanence of the American union. Fewer than fifty years after independence and fewer than fifteen years after the Constitution, the outcome of the American experiment in self-rule, republican government, and federal union still seemed very uncertain. They understood and accepted that westerners would not remain loyal to a government that could not protect and promote their economic interests. And nowhere in the United States were such interests as focused upon one spot as in the West. As Madison explained at the height of the crisis, the Mississippi was “every thing” to westerners: “It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac and all the navigable rivers of the atlantic States formed into one stream.”4 If the federal government could not secure them the use of the river, westerners would break from the union. They might accept some form of dependency upon France that protected their trade. More likely, they would erect a separate confederacy in the West that could promote their interests. If they did, the United States would lose nearly half of its territory and would gain a potentially hostile neighbor. Spanning the Appalachians and ending at the Mississippi, the United States was an unnatural empire with unnatural boundaries. French control over the river might end in a redivision of the North American continent into two more natural empires — one east of the Appalachians, the other on both sides of the vast Mississippi watershed between the Appalachians and the Rockies. Whether controlled by France or by Americans, this vast empire would inevitably become more powerful than its eastern neighbor. Disputes over borders, commerce, and other issues would lead to conflict and war; the internal peace that seemed essential for independence, republican government, and prosperity would be lost forever. As Jefferson, Madison, and



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their contemporaries understood, the retrocession crisis, if mishandled, could result in a separate American nation beyond the Appalachians that would be much more threatening than a weak French colony beyond the Mississippi.5 Even before the administration knew the precise terms of the Treaty of San Ildefonso, it had decided upon a preferred solution to the crisis that made clear the nature and limits of its fears. At no time before Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe concluded the Louisiana Purchase treaty in late April 1803 had Jefferson or Madison suggested or authorized purchasing all of Louisiana. In fact, Madison’s instructions had never discussed purchasing any territory west of the Mississippi. Instead, the administration wanted to acquire all of the territory east of the river — the so-called “island” of New Orleans and the provinces of East and West Florida — from whichever power, France or Spain, owned them. When Livingston and Monroe informed Madison of the Louisiana Purchase, they opened their letter to Madison by acknowledging that “an acquisition of so great an extent was, we well Know, not contemplated by our appointment.”6 According to Madison, “the purchase of the country beyond the Mississippi” had not been included in the instructions sent to Livingston and Monroe because it “was not deemd at this time within the pale of probability.”7 But the acquisition of territory west of the river was not just seen as improbable; it was also considered unnecessary. If it could obtain New Orleans and the Floridas, the United States would no longer have to contest commercial access to the Gulf of Mexico with any other nation or doubt western loyalties. In the administration’s thinking, resolving the crisis created by France’s imminent return to Louisiana did not require expansion across the Mississippi. One of the first things to emerge from the administration’s assessment of the new situation created by the retrocession of Louisiana was a ranking of the union’s potential neighbors on its southern and western frontiers. In the late spring and summer of 1801, no one questioned that Spain, the weakest of the likely contenders, was the most desirable. In one of the earliest letters on the subject, Madison reminded his minister in Madrid of the United States’ “preference” for “the neighbourhood of Spain over that of every other nation.”8 With its successful army, impressive navy, and vaulting ambition, Napoleonic France seemed far more worrisome. But it was Great Britain, not France, that the administration considered “the last of neighbours that would be agreeable to the United States.”9 In shaping their response to the retrocession crisis over the next two years,

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Jefferson, his advisors in Washington, and his ministers in Europe always included Great Britain along with France and Spain in their calculations. The administration’s initial response to the retrocession reflected both its continued uncertainty about the actual existence of a treaty and its initial analysis of the probable reasons for France’s recovery of Louisiana. Reports of the treaty were sufficiently indefinite that Jefferson and Madison could hope that none had been signed, and that their diplomatic efforts could prevent one from being concluded. If a treaty had been concluded, they could imagine France and Spain simply abandoning it if urged to by the United States. The initial instructions to Livingston, the new minister to France, and Charles Pinckney, his counterpart in Spain, left no doubt that their primary charge was “to prevent a change of our Southern and South Western neighbours” by “proper means” — ”that is to say the means of peace and persuasion.”10 To discover the best means of “persuasion,” Jefferson and his cabinet tried to imagine why France wanted Louisiana and the Floridas. Even without knowing exactly what the treaty included, or even whether one had been concluded, they believed that they understood its source. Their analysis turned not upon renewed French imperial designs in the Caribbean, as Napoleon’s did, but upon recent Franco-American tensions. To Jefferson and Madison, French interest in reacquiring Louisiana resulted naturally from the anti-French, pro-British tilt of the Federalist Adams administration. France wanted Louisiana, according to this logic, to counteract “the Atlantic States[’] . . . partiality for Great Britain” and to prevent “the mouth of the Mississippi” from falling into British hands, an event that would have “strengthen[ed Great Britain’s] hold on the United States.” If France sought Louisiana for these reasons, then the United States might prevent the retrocession by allaying these fears. “Our conduct and our communications,” Madison informed Pinckney and Livingston, had to demonstrate “that the Atlantic States [were] not disposed to enter, nor [were] in danger of being drawn into[,] partialities towards Great Britain” and that the United States, “so long as they are guided by the clearest policy,” could never favor British acquisition of “any part of the Spanish possessions on the Mississippi.”11 At bottom, this approach involved convincing France that the new Republican administration would not act as the old Federalist one had. At the same time, Jefferson and Madison tried to warn France that its return to Louisiana would produce unnecessary tensions with an otherwise friendly United States. Madison listed many of the possible sources



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of tension in his initial instructions for Livingston and Pinckney. There was “the danger to which the Western settlements of the United States would be subject[ed] . . . by military expeditions between [British] Canada and [French] Louisiana.” There was “the inquietude which would be excited in the Southern States, whose numerous slaves ha[d] been taught to regard the French as the patrons of their cause.” But, most importantly, there was the general problem of neighborhood. Regardless of the desire of the United States for “harmony and confidence with” France, the simple fact of neighborhood would produce friction and conflict.12 Just “the contact of their territories,” Madison explained, would create a “danger of collisions between the two Republics.”13 Trying to regulate jointly the commerce of the Mississippi guaranteed additional conflicts. Madison even hinted that, in time, France might discover that its return to Louisiana had the opposite effect of what it intended, as the “jealousies and apprehensions” fueled by “a French neighbourhood” might “turn the thoughts of our citizens towards a closer connection with her rival,” Great Britain. All of these suggestions, particularly the last, had to “be managed with much delicacy” if the goal was to dissuade France from recovering Louisiana.14 If the retrocession had “irrevocably taken place,” then a different course would have to be followed. Madison provided Livingston with clear instructions for just such a contingency. In that case, “sound policy” called for “nothing [to] be said or done which [would] unnecessarily irritate our future neighbours, or check the liberality which they may be disposed to exercise in relation to the trade and navigation through the mouth of the Mississippi.” Instead, the government should “patronize the interests of our Western fellow citizens, by cherishing in France every just and liberal disposition towards their commerce.” The United States would insist upon the rights secured to it by the Treaty of San Lorenzo (1795) — the use of the river to the Gulf of Mexico and the right of deposit in New Orleans. But France might also accept more advantageous arrangements than those already settled with Spain, such as the right to station a consul in New Orleans. Livingston should also try to induce France “to make over to the United States the Floridas . . . or at least West Florida.” If France had not received the Floridas, Madison wanted Livingston to attempt to “dispose her to favor” Pinckney’s negotiations to acquire them directly from Spain.15 When Pinckney and Livingston arrived at their European posts in the fall of 1801, they found it difficult to follow Madison’s instructions. Even

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though the existence of a retrocession treaty was an open secret, neither the Spanish nor the French government would discuss it officially with the new American ministers. According to Livingston, the French foreign minister “absolutely den[ied] that any [treaty] had been formed on the subject.”16 Within weeks of arriving in Europe, Livingston and Pinckney grew frustrated by their inability to make any progress. Even more disturbing were Livingston’s reports about the French government, which, he insisted, had “nothing that can be called republican in its form & still less in its administration.” It must have amazed Jefferson and Madison to read “that the change in the politicks of the united States is not what it would have wished.”17 Their initial response to the retrocession rumors had been based upon the opposite assumption — that a republican government in France would naturally desire improved relations with the new Republican administration in the United States. Jefferson responded to these discouraging dispatches from Europe with perhaps the most famous letter to emerge from the retrocession crisis. On 18 April 1802, he wrote a private letter to Livingston in which he outlined a perspective on the crisis that seemed to leap quickly to, and even beyond, the most dire suggestions of Madison’s initial instructions. France’s acquisition of Louisiana and the Floridas, the president noted, “completely reverses all the political relations of the United States, and will form a new epoch in our political course.” France had been seen “as our natural friend”; but its possession of these provinces would change everything. “There is on the globe one single spot,” Jefferson explained, “the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy[ — ]New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market.” By “placing herself in that door,” France assumed an “attitude of defiance” toward the United States. “Feeble” and “pacific,” Spain could have held the mouth of the Mississippi “quietly for years.” But France and the United States could not possibly remain friendly if “they [met] in so irritable a position.” “The day that France [took] possession of New Orleans” would fix not only American hostility toward France, but also American alliance with Great Britain. “From that moment,” Jefferson famously concluded, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” Jefferson assured Livingston that his intention was not to threaten France. France could prevent the “inevitable” by abandoning the treaty. But it could delay it, at least, and “remove the causes of jarring and irritation” by “ceding to us the island of New Orleans and the Floridas.”18 If this letter is the most famous document produced by the retroces-



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sion crisis, it is probably also the most misleading. To draw the correct conclusions from it, we need to know a couple of things about it. First, it was a private letter. While we might assume that a private letter from the president would provide the most accurate picture of the administration’s thinking, the truth is quite different. At the time, a private letter, even from the president, did not carry the same weight as an official one. Jefferson’s next letter to Livingston hinted as much: “I have got further into this matter than I meant when I began my letter of Apr. 18, not having deliberately intended to volunteer so far in the field of the Secretary of state.”19 Second, this nominally private letter for Livingston was written for the eyes of the French government. Normally, such a momentous letter, whether private or official, would have been sent in code. But encoding it would have defeated Jefferson’s plans. Even before writing the letter, he had arranged for his friend Pierre Samuel DuPont de Nemours, a French immigrant who was visiting Paris, to deliver it. Jefferson intended for DuPont to read the letter. In fact, he practically instructed DuPont to read it so that he could “impress on the government of France the inevitable consequences of their taking possession of Louisiana.”20 Jefferson could have simply written the letter to DuPont; he must have calculated that such sentiments would have more weight with Napoleon if expressed in a letter to Livingston. Even if the letter was intended more to manipulate Napoleon than to instruct Livingston, it still points to a telling shift in the administration’s approach to the retrocession crisis. Jefferson and Madison clearly had no real intention of “marry[ing them]selves to the British fleet and nation,” but just raising the possibility showed a departure from the original idea of impressing upon France the distance between the United States and Great Britain. In a sense, the decision to hint at an Anglo-American accord — a suggestion that Madison had warned, the preceding September, needed to “be managed with much delicacy” — had been made for them. In the weeks before Jefferson’s 18 April letter, the administration had received dispatches from Paris showing that Livingston had written, on his own discretion, to Rufus King in London. Livingston had asked King to encourage British opposition to the transfer of Louisiana as a way to check French plans, but had urged him to act discretely, in order to maintain the desired illusion of distance between the United States and Great Britain. On first reading about Livingston’s bold gambit, Jefferson and Madison thought that their minister had taken too great a risk. “A confidential re-

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sort to [Great Britain],” Madison warned Livingston in mid-March, “may be abused for the purpose of sowing jealousies in France and thereby thwart our object.” In such a dangerous game, he noted, “too much circumspection cannot be employed.”21 Jefferson’s private letter to Livingston seemed to show that the administration had decided to join its ministers in this game. But Jefferson and Madison actually did something quite different. Livingston and King tried to involve Great Britain without France learning of their efforts. Jefferson and Madison invoked Great Britain to France without ever involving it. They clearly saw that Livingston and King’s efforts would become embarrassing if discovered. But they must also have known that these efforts could be compromising if successful. The British would not resolve an American crisis without expecting something in return — something that the administration would not want to give. Jefferson’s letter — nominally a private letter to Livingston, but effectively an open letter to Napoleon — sought to achieve the benefits of British involvement without paying any of the costs. It could only achieve this goal, however, if DuPont actually disclosed its contents to Napoleon or someone else high in the French government. But there is no evidence that he did. In fact, DuPont took offense at Jefferson’s barely concealed threat to his native country. He warned the president that Napoleon would “be much more irritated than impressed.” By seeking New Orleans and the Floridas, instead of merely a confirmation of the United States’ existing rights, the administration seemed to show an ambitious spirit that would end only with “the conquest of Mexico.”22 Instead of successfully enlisting his friend to convey a warning to Napoleon, Jefferson found himself laboring to dispel what he described as DuPont’s “false impressions of the scope of the letter.”23 Eighteen months into Jefferson’s presidency, little progress had been made toward resolving the retrocession crisis. The administration had not answered all of its questions about the details of the treaty; Livingston’s and Pinckney’s dispatches, moreover, revealed that the confusion over whether it included the Floridas persisted not just in Washington, but also in Paris and Madrid. Nor had the administration entirely abandoned its initial policy. Madison still hoped to “[divert] the French Government from its unwise project” in October 1802, long after Livingston’s and Pinckney’s discouraging initial reports reached Washington.24 Nor had the administration’s concerns changed. Jefferson, his cabinet, and his ministers still did not view the French return to Louisiana as a military threat. In Jefferson’s assessment, France’s power, while greater than that



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of the United States when “compared in the abstract,” was “nothing in comparison of ours, when to be exerted on our soil.”25 Livingston agreed. “The Colonies that France might attempt to establish on the west side of the Missisippi,” he informed Madison, “would be too feeble to injure us.”26 What the administration continued to worry about was the impact of a French “neighbourhood,” particularly when “a possession of the mouth of the Mississippi [was] to be added to other causes of discord.”27 American policy makers understood that control over the Mississippi would give France the leverage to detach the trans-Appalachian West from the union. As Pinckney put it, if westerners thought “that it was to France they were to look for the permission to navigate & deposit & not to their own Government[,] it would be a most unfortunate [idea] indeed & might ultimately produce a Separation.”28 Nor did the administration’s thinking about Louisiana and the Floridas change between the spring of 1801 and the fall of 1802. It still viewed the acquisition of New Orleans and the Floridas “on convenient terms” as “the happiest of issues” that might arise from this “most perplexing of occurrences.”29 With respect to the vast province beyond the Mississippi, Jefferson and his advisors preferred Spanish ownership to that of any other nation, including the United States. In July 1801, Madison assured the French minister in Washington that the idea of the United States “crossing the Mississippi” should be “regard[ed] . . . as a phantom.”30 Ten months later, he informed Pinckney that the administration would consider a “guaranty of [Spain’s] territory beyond the Mississippi” in exchange for all of its “Territory including New Orleans on this side.” Jefferson and Madison attached so much importance to acquiring the territory east of the river, and, thus, securing the river for western trade, that they were willing not only to foreswear Louisiana for themselves, but also to help Spain defend it against any other power. The Mississippi, in this case, would form “a natural and quiet boundary with Spain.”31 In May 1802, Jefferson assured DuPont that Louisiana was not sought by “a single reasonable and reflecting man in the US.” He admitted “that the day may come, when it would be thought of,” but insisted that it was “a very distant one.” “At present we should consider an enlargement of our territory beyond the Missisipi to be almost as great a misfortune as a contraction of [our territory] on this side.”32 By the fall of 1802, American policy makers and diplomats had already identified the forces that seemed likely to resolve the retrocession crisis. The dispute between France and Spain over whether the Treaty of San

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Ildefonso included the Floridas would surely delay its implementation. Peace between France and Great Britain always had to be considered precarious. Given British opposition to a French return to North America, increased Anglo-French hostility could work a transformation. It already seemed clear, moreover, that France’s efforts to crush the decade-old revolt of slaves and free people of color in the Caribbean colony of SaintDomingue were “like to be protracted.”33 Since France could only spare funds, troops, and ships either to occupy Louisiana or to subjugate SaintDomingue, the continued success of the revolution in the latter ensured delays in taking possession of the former. The Jefferson administration was not nearly as supportive of the black revolutionaries as the Adams administration had been. Still, by the fall of 1802, it had defined a neutrality policy toward the island that permitted the rebels to buy whatever goods American merchants took to the ports that they controlled, including arms and ammunition. Taking all of these factors into consideration, Livingston concluded in September 1802 that, “were it not for the uneasiness it excites at home [Louisiana] would give me none for I am persuaded that the whole will end in a relinquishment of the country [to Spain] and transfer of the Capital [New Orleans] to the United States.”34 This analysis seemed to recommend a policy of patient diplomacy. The Jefferson administration was shocked into reevaluating this policy by developments not in the Caribbean or Europe, but in New Orleans, the trans-Appalachian West, and Washington. In mid-October 1802, Juan Ventura Morales, the Spanish intendant (the principal fiscal and commercial official) at New Orleans, suspended the American right of deposit. The news of the decree produced shock and outrage as it radiated out from New Orleans by land and sea. The governor of the Mississippi Territory informed Madison that the news instantly “excited considerable agitation in Natchez and its vicinity.”35 Within a week of learning of the decree, the Kentucky state legislature sent a memorial to the president and Congress. That “agitation” could easily become something more dangerous was clear from this memorial, which pledged to support “such measures as the honor, and interest of the United States [might] require” “at the expence of our lives and fortunes.”36 Throughout the West, such war talk became common. The newly arrived customs collector in Natchez reported that New Orleans was “weak & this territory could alone take it in a week[,] which all Classes are anxious to try.”37 According to a Virginian who had recently returned from the West, westerners were “like a large combustible mass[ — ]they want only a Spark to set them on fire.”



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“Either by treaty or by the sword,” James Barbour warned the administration, they would secure themselves the use of the Mississippi.38 Most of these reports painted a picture of a bellicose West, one likely to engulf the nation in war with or without a formal declaration by Congress. “The People of that District,” as one North Carolinian noted, were “a brave, hardy Race, not disposed to wait” and not easily restrained by the federal government.39 Even as they recognized the problems that western bellicosity and impetuosity might cause for the United States, most reporters on western conditions during this crisis insisted that westerners were firmly attached to the union, in general, and the Jefferson administration, in particular. But other views were sometimes expressed. Late in the crisis, Daniel Clark, the American consul in New Orleans, warned Jefferson and Madison that many westerners seemed “indifferent about their Country or at least indifferent about the effect French measures may produce on the Union.” “No dependence ought to be placed on a majority of [westerners],” he insisted; they would “[secede] from the General Government” “if even very slight advantages were held out” by France.40 In his 18 April 1802 letter to Livingston, Jefferson had asserted that “every eye in the United States [was] now fixed on the affairs of Louisiana.” “Nothing since the revolutionary war,” he then suggested, “has produced more uneasy sensations through the body of the nation.”41 When he wrote Livingston, Jefferson certainly overstated domestic sentiment, probably for the same reasons that he overstated his diplomatic calculations — to impress upon Napoleon the gravity of the situation. What was hyperbole in mid-April, though, was accurate by mid-December, when news of the suspension of the deposit had spread across the country. Previously, the administration had enjoyed considerable freedom to analyze the situation, decide its priorities, and implement its policies. All of this changed when the intendant effectively closed the Mississippi to most American trade. Now, the administration had to respond to an intensified foreign crisis within a context of unprecedented domestic pressure from both the West and the Federalist opposition. Jefferson and Madison developed their initial response to the decree within days of receiving the first reports from New Orleans on Novem-­ ber 25. Immediately, they sent a formal protest to Carlos Fernandez Martínez de Yrujo, the Spanish minister, that urged him to use his influence to revoke the decree. Since Yrujo had no formal authority over the intendant, Madison also directed Pinckney to make “representations to the Spanish Government,” on the presumption that its agent had acted “contrary to its

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intentions.”42 Jefferson and Madison knew that they had to allow Spain an opportunity to disavow the intendant’s decree. With no reason “to impute this infraction to orders from the Spanish Government,” Madison explained, the United States could not seek “redress, in the first instance, [in] the use of force.”43 Jefferson did not simply await the result of this diplomacy, however. He developed a new Indian policy that was shaped by the retrocession crisis and was designed to “[establish] a strong front on our Western boundary.”44 Jefferson considered it “all important to press on the Indians, as steadily and strenuously as they can bear, the extension of our purchases on the Mississippi.”45 In the past, the government had tried to buy Indian land farther east, closer to existing white settlements. But Jefferson wanted to prepare for a time when the United States might need either to defend itself against French Louisiana or, more likely, to seize New Orleans. By purchasing Indian lands on the eastern bank of the river and encouraging white settlement there, the government could “[plant] such a population on the Mississippi as [would] be able to do their own business, without the necessity of marching men from the shores of the Atlantic 1500 or 2000 miles thither, to perish by fatigue & change of climate.”46 The means did not have to be pretty. Jefferson hoped to convince the Indians to abandon hunting in favor of “agriculture, . . . spinning and weaving,” which required less land. But he was also willing to “push our trading houses” so that Native leaders would run up large debts, since, “when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.” And he urged the governors of the Indiana and Mississippi territories to act: “What ever can now be obtained must be obtained quickly.” France’s expected return to Louisiana was “already felt like a light breeze by the Indians” and would only “stiffen [them] against cessions of lands to us.”47 When combined with the ongoing negotiations of Livingston and Pinckney, the diplomatic efforts to restore the deposit and the emerging plans for strengthening the western frontier seemed adequate for the present. Certainly, Jefferson did not invite congressional involvement; his annual message opening the session entirely ignored the suspension of the deposit and barely mentioned Louisiana. When the House of Representatives requested information, Jefferson and Madison provided little and offered no encouragement for further congressional activity. In general, congressional Republicans seemed willing to follow this lead. But Federalists, in and out of Congress, condemned Jefferson’s restraint. “In an



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emergency like the present,” Jefferson’s longtime antagonist Alexander Hamilton insisted in late December, “Energy is Wisdom.” Hamilton saw that there were both national and partisanal goals to be served by Federalist calls for an energetic policy. He argued that “the Unity of our empire and the best interests of our Nation” required seizing “all the territory East of the Mississippia.”48 But he also recognized that Federalist pressure for military action might pay political dividends in the overwhelmingly Republican West. The administration responded to the domestic pressure in mid-January 1803 by nominating Monroe as a special envoy to France and Spain. Writing to his new minister, the president clearly laid out the administration’s thinking. “The agitation of the public mind,” he noted, “is extreme.” In the West, such sentiments were “natural, and grounded on honest motives.” Elsewhere, in Jefferson’s view, they were unnatural and dishonest. The “sea ports” wanted war only for the profits. The Federalists sought to force the administration into war “in order to derange our finances, or if this cannot be done, to attach the western country to them, as their best friends, and thus get again into power.” The Monroe mission would answer the genuine concerns of westerners and, hopefully, thwart the devious efforts of the Federalists. All of the administration’s previous measures had been “invisible,” the president conceded. It was time for “something sensible” — something that could be seen and felt by westerners. Given the intended audience of the mission, Monroe was the best possible choice since he “possessed the unlimited confidence” of westerners.49 By early February, the president could already assert that, from the “moment” the mission was announced, “all [had] become quiet.”50 But Jefferson’s assertion reflected nothing more than a hopeful prediction of the domestic response. With respect to western Republicans, it turned out to be largely correct. But Federalists ridiculed the Monroe mission as “the weakest measure that ever disgraced the administration of any country.”51 Hamilton was especially critical. In a New York newspaper, he assessed what he saw as the only available options: “to negociate and endeavour to purchase, and if this fails to go to war,” or “to seize at once on the Floridas and New-Orleans, and then negociate.”52 Certain that Napoleon would never sell, Hamilton advocated the latter option, an immediate military response. A week later, congressional Federalists attacked the administration’s policies in the Senate. Echoing Hamilton, the lone western Federalist, Pittsburgh’s James Ross, called for seizing New Orleans in order to “negotiate with more advantage.”53 He introduced a

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series of resolutions that would have authorized the president to take possession of New Orleans and provided the militia and funds with which to do so. After three days of intense debate, the Ross resolutions were finally defeated by a slim margin. The Monroe mission was not merely a response to domestic pressure, however. It was also the administration’s reaction to a reassessment of French plans for Louisiana. Long before the intendant issued his decree, Livingston and Pinckney had asked their respective hosts whether the Treaty of San Ildefonso had recognized the American rights — to use the river and to deposit goods at New Orleans — fixed by the Treaty of San Lorenzo. Both had received reassuring verbal answers. But, despite repeated requests, neither the French nor Spanish governments had actually committed themselves in writing on this crucial point. After months of French avoidance, Livingston reported, in a letter that reached Washington on January 3, that the French viewed “the treaty as wastepaper.” He predicted an “early attempt to corrupt our western people.”54 Suspending the deposit had appeared to be the act of the intendant. But what if it was not? What if it was, instead, a glimpse of what was to come? Westerners needed the Mississippi to export their produce; their “interest” would always connect them to the power that controlled the river.55 This fact seemed to account for the French desire to recover Louisiana. Writing to Livingston and Monroe, Madison explained that France believed “that by holding the key to the commerce of the Mississipi, she [would] be able to command the interests and attachments of the Western portion of the United States.” In that position, France could “either controul the Atlantic portion also” or “seduce the [West] into a separate Government, and a close alliance with herself.”56 Jefferson and Madison clearly stated the diplomatic goal of the Monroe mission. “The object,” Madison wrote, was “to procure a cession of New Orleans and the Floridas to the United States and consequently the establishment of the Mississippi as the boundary between the United States and Louisiana.” Over and over, in official documents and private letters, Jefferson and Madison reiterated this goal. They were not looking beyond the river, which was perfectly satisfactory as a western boundary. Owning the eastern bank of the Mississippi to the Gulf, including the existing port at New Orleans, would meet western needs. Acquiring the Floridas, moreover, would protect the interests of future settlers on the other rivers that flowed into the Gulf from Georgia and the Mississippi Territory. Information from Livingston and DuPont encouraged Jefferson and Madison to



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believe that a purchase was possible. It was only necessary to decide “the sum of money to be thrown into the transaction.” DuPont had suggested roughly $5.5 million. But the administration “hoped that less [would] do.”57 In the end, the instructions for Livingston and Monroe accepted DuPont’s figure. But they also divided the purchase into its components in case only a partial deal was possible: nearly $4.5 million for the island of New Orleans, almost $740,000 for West Florida, and about $360,000 for East Florida. Given their concerns, it made perfect sense that the tiny “island” of New Orleans, most of which was swamp, would be worth more than twelve times as much as the entirety of modern Florida. The instructions for Livingston and Monroe demonstrated that the administration could imagine a number of resolutions to the crisis that were preferable to immediate war. Purchasing all of the French and Spanish claims east of the Mississippi was the optimal solution. But Jefferson and Madison also thought that the crisis could be alleviated by purchasing just New Orleans or just the two Floridas or just West Florida. They would even settle for “as large a portion” of the island of New Orleans as France would agree to sell. “Should no considerable portion of it be attainable,” Madison continued, “it will still be of vast importance to get a jurisdiction over space enough for a large commercial town and its appurtenances, on the banks of the river” near its mouth. If France would not sell New Orleans, the United States would just build its own port near the mouth of the river. If France would not sell any territory along the Mississippi, the instructions called for the ministers to confirm “the present right of deposit” and expand it by adding the privileges of owning real estate in New Orleans and of “having Consuls residing there.” Madison warned that “the United States [could] not remain satisfied, nor the Western people be kept patient,” with any less.58 As low as the administration had set its minimum demands, Madison’s warning reads, at first glance, as ridiculous bluster. But we should read it, instead, as a clue to the administration’s thinking — one that can be combined with other evidence from private letters. This evidence shows that Jefferson and Madison saw two crucial dividing points in their array of proposals and solutions. The first separated peace from eventual war. If the two ministers could acquire at least New Orleans or West Florida, then the United States would “insure to ourselves a course of perpetual peace and friendship with all nations.”59 If they failed to do so, yet managed to make any of the other arrangements authorized by their instructions, they would at least buy time for further preparations and negotiations be-

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fore any military action became necessary. Madison’s minimum demands marked the second dividing point. If Livingston and Monroe could not secure those demands, then the administration would need to plan for immediate war. Accepting even the possibility of the closure of the river or the suspension of the deposit was unthinkable. “The use of the Mississippi [is] so indispensable,” Jefferson informed DuPont, “that we cannot hesitate one moment to hazard our existence for its maintenance.”60 In the early spring of 1803, Jefferson and Madison saw ample grounds for patience and restraint. All of the news from Europe made a renewed Anglo-French war seem imminent. Such a war would make France both more likely to sell and less able to defend New Orleans. Furthermore, French efforts to regain control over Saint-Domingue were in a “disastrous state,” as Madison noted. Yellow fever had decimated the French troops there, taking the commanding general along with countless others. Unless France intended “to abandon the reduction of that Island,” Madison concluded, it would not have enough troops to take possession of Louisiana.61 This statement suggests that the administration, while recognizing a linkage between the two French colonies, did not fully comprehend Napoleon’s imperial vision, in which Saint-Domingue was central and Louisiana was only peripheral. Still, it perceived that French troops could not be in both places at once and that any developments that prolonged their stay on Saint-Domingue would delay their arrival at New Orleans. Domestic considerations suggested the value of patience as well, at least to the administration. More time would allow for reducing the national debt, encouraging settlement along the Mississippi, and, generally, “obtain[ing] more of that strength which is growing on us so rapidly.” Reports from New Orleans that the intendant, on orders from Madrid, had revoked his decree seemed to confirm the wisdom of negotiation. In the president’s view, peaceful means had quickly accomplished what the favorite policy of “our federal maniacs”62 could have won only with “7. years of war, 100,000 human lives, 100 millions of additional debt, besides ten hundred millions lost by the want of market for our produce, and the general demoralizing of our citizens which war occasions.”63 Even as he admitted that he was not confident of “obtaining New Orleans from France for money,” Jefferson insisted that he remained “confident in the policy of putting off the day of contention.”64 Despite the transformative effects of the suspension of the deposit, despite the new pressures from the West and in Congress, despite the new concerns about French intentions, Jefferson and Madison remained



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consistent in their thinking about that part of Louisiana — the vast majority — west of the Mississippi. Over and over, in their instructions to Livingston and Monroe, in their letters to friends and supporters, and in their conversations with foreign diplomats, they referred to the Mississippi as the desired western boundary of the United States. What they were saying, of course, was that they hoped to acquire everything east of the river. But what they were not saying was that they wanted to acquire anything west of the river. The administration knew very little about Louisiana west of the river. Its vast — and, to their minds, empty — spaces had begun to seem like a vacuum, one that was likely to be filled by something alarming. They would have thrilled to see it back in Spanish hands since, as King put it, “they were quiet neighbours.”65 Instead, the French were readying themselves to take possession. A French Louisiana could be reconciled with American interests, if New Orleans and the Floridas were sold or ceded to the United States. But the French seemed certain to draw in the British. Even if Great Britain just claimed Upper Louisiana, north of the Missouri River, “the evils involved in such an extension of her possessions in our neighborhood and in such a hold on the Mississippi [were] obvious.” The prospect of the British filling the vacuum of Louisiana, Madison insisted, was “altogether repugnant to the sentiments and sound policy of the United States.”66 Madison assessed the dangers of a British presence in Upper Louisiana in the context of what he described as his “ulterior” (meaning “further”) instructions for Livingston and Monroe. These instructions were to apply only if France had rejected the administration’s minimum proposal for a negotiated resolution to the crisis and had been “ found to meditate hostilities or to have formed projects which constrain the United States to resort to hostilities.” In that case, Livingston and Monroe were to “sound [Great Britain’s] dispositions and invite its concurrence in the war” against France. This step had to be taken with great care, to avoid “precipitat[ing] France into hostile operations” or misleading Great Britain into believing that the decision for war lay with it rather than the United States. As such, Madison suggested that Livingston and Monroe should “exchang[e] ideas” with the British minister in Paris rather than “[repair]” to London, “which might be viewed by both [France and Great Britain] as a signal of rupture.” Given “the just repugnance of [the United States] to a coalition of any sort with the belligerent politics of Europe,” the administration was authorizing a huge step.67 Dated 18 April 1803, Madison’s “ulterior” instructions can be compared

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instructively with Jefferson’s “private” letter to Livingston of exactly one year earlier. Writing for Napoleon’s edification, Jefferson had argued that “marrying ourselves to the British fleet and nation” was the inevitable, if undesirable, consequence of a French return to Louisiana, particularly to New Orleans. If France’s rejection of a negotiated solution made this “marriage” a necessity, then Madison’s instructions provided the terms for a “prenuptial agreement.” What is most striking, perhaps, is how little the administration was willing to give in exchange for British assistance against arguably the most powerful nation in Europe, even in the worst-case scenario of peace between Great Britain and France. Even as he admitted that “the advantages” of British “cooperation” were “too obvious and too important to be renounced,” Madison offered few of the things that might induce Great Britain to launch a war against its powerful rival. The United States would agree not to “make peace or truce without [British] consent,” but a stipulation against a “separate peace” was typically the minimum condition for any alliance. The United States would also accept improved British commercial access on the Mississippi and in any ports acquired as a result of the war, but it would not obligate itself to “exclu[de] the trade of any particular nations or nation.” That was about as far as the administration was willing to go. There would be no “mutual guaranty” of territory. And there could be no British expansion into Upper Louisiana, though the United States would agree, “in alleviation of any disappointment” that the British might feel, that the French would not retain any of the territory either. Livingston and Monroe were charged by the administration with making the “connection” with Great Britain “as little entangling as the nature of the case [would] permit.”68 Unbeknownst to Jefferson and Madison, events in Paris had already made these “ulterior” instructions obsolete as they were being written. Late on 12 April, the day that Monroe finally arrived in the French capital, Livingston learned from François Barbé-Marbois, the minister of finance, that Napoleon wanted to sell all of Louisiana to the United States. Over the next two weeks, Livingston, Monroe, and Barbé-Marbois worked toward an agreement on price and other terms. Conscious that they were about to exceed their authority and their budget, the American ministers tried, at least, to “cheapen the purchase.”69 But this effort soon collided with their recognition that the entire transaction would become infinitely more complicated if the negotiations were still ongoing when the looming Anglo-French war began. On 30 April, they concluded a draft treaty that fixed the total price for Louisiana at $15 million. In doing so, Livingston



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and Monroe committed their government to spend two-and-a-half times what they had been authorized to spend to buy a province that they had never been instructed to buy. Livingston and Monroe clearly understood that the product of their negotiations was likely to be controversial at home. As such, they filled their official dispatches and private letters to Washington with lengthy explanations of their actions. Their official letter announcing the treaty explained both the “Circumstances” that had made obeying their instructions impossible and the “Considerations” that had induced them to buy all of Louisiana. “Mr. Marbois was absolutely restricted to the disposition of the whole,” they assured Madison; it was “useless” to press for less. At the same time, they argued that purchasing the entirety of Louisiana would go even further than purchasing New Orleans and the Floridas to secure American commerce on the Mississippi. They also insisted that it would remove the threat of “neighbourhood” by eliminating the possibility of conflicts with whatever power owned the western bank of the river; “by this acquisition,” such dangers were “banished for ages from the U. states.” And the two ministers predicted that the purchase would distance the United States “from the European World & its concerns, especially its wars & intrigues,” and strengthen “the Bond of our Union.”70 Jefferson and his cabinet shared Livingston and Monroe’s appraisal of the importance of the new acquisition. Neither the administration in Washington nor its diplomats in Paris nor the opposition party wanted Louisiana’s vast acreage opened to new settlement for generations. But Jefferson never doubted, as many Federalists did, that obtaining all of Louisiana was better than just acquiring the island of New Orleans. The latter “would of itself have been a great thing,” he informed one supporter, since it would have secured western trade. But the acquisition of Louisiana was “inappreciable.” No longer would the United States share the river with a potentially hostile neighbor. As such, the purchase would prevent “those bickerings with foreign powers” that seemed certain to lead to war. This analysis led Jefferson to reject without hesitation the Federalist argument that all of Louisiana west of the river should be exchanged with Spain for the Floridas. Confident that the United States would acquire the Floridas in any case, he insisted that such an exchange would needlessly “let Spain into the Mississippi,” breeding future quarrels over its use. Like Livingston and Monroe, Jefferson found in the Louisiana Purchase a promise of permanent peace for the United States, believing that it would “[secure] to us the course of a peaceable nation.”71

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In late January 1804, Jefferson reflected on the defining event of his first term as president — the retrocession crisis and Louisiana Purchase  — in a letter to the English immigrant Joseph Priestley. “I very early saw that Louisiana was indeed a speck on the horizon which was to burst into a tornado,” Jefferson claimed. He insisted that “nothing but a frank and friendly development of causes and effects on our part, and good sense enough in Bonaparte,” had “saved us from that storm.” It had only been necessary to wait for a new war between France and Great Britain and to prevent Federalist hotheads from “forc[ing] a premature rupture,” to end the crisis. There had been risks in such a plan, Jefferson admitted, but “the dénouement [had] been happy.”72 Jefferson’s letters to Priestley, like those to most of his European correspondents, typically offered the most favorable and optimistic assessments. But self-criticism was never one of Jefferson’s strengths. Others, at the time and since, found much to criticize in his handling of the retrocession crisis. We might readily agree with these critics that the fact that the crisis ended in the Louisiana Purchase — and not the “New Orleans Purchase” or the “West Florida Purchase” — stemmed more from Napoleon’s assessment of the prospects of renewed war in Europe and of continued rebellion in Saint-Domingue than from American policy making. But that it ended in a treaty at all, rather than in a war with France or an alliance with Great Britain, must be credited to the administration’s refusal to adopt the course urged by the Federalists. Jefferson and his cabinet may not have fully understood the motives that prompted Napoleon to reacquire Louisiana from Spain. But they clearly perceived that the real threat of the retrocession of Louisiana was to the union of the states. As such, they rejected any measure, including immediate war with France or entangling alliance with Great Britain, that seemed more dangerous to the union than a weak French colony in Louisiana. Only a French attempt to control the economic prospects, and thus the political loyalties, of the trans-Appalachian West justified an immediate rupture in their eyes.

Notes 1. Rufus King to James Madison, 29 March 1801, in The Papers of James Madison: Secretary of State Series, ed. Robert J. Brugger et al., 8 vols. to date (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986– ), 1:55; hereafter cited as Madison Papers (SSS). 2. Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 26 May 1801, in The Works of Thomas



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Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, Federal edition, 12 vols. (New York: Putnam’s, 1904–5), 9:260; hereafter cited as Jefferson Works. 3. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Library of America, 1986), 284. More recently, John Kukla has located these fears within the broader political economy of the United States, in particular concerns about the Ohio River and its confluence with the Mississippi (see A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America [New York: Knopf, 2003]). 4. Madison to Charles Pinckney, 27 November 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:147. 5. Influential accounts of the Louisiana Purchase include: Arthur Preston Whitaker, The Mississippi Question, 1795–1803: A Study in Trade, Politics, and Diplomacy (New York: Appleton-Century, 1934); Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York: Scribner’s, 1976); Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 185–208; and Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). My argument builds upon my account of the Purchase in The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783–1829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 12–40, and is fully developed in The Louisiana Purchase: Jefferson’s Noble Bargain? (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2003). 6. Robert R. Livingston and Monroe to Madison, 13 May 1803, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:601. In a private letter to his friend Madison, Monroe admitted that if they could “have procur’d a part of the territory we shod. never have thot. of getting the whole” (Monroe to Madison, 14 May 1803, in Madison Papers [SSS] 4:610). 7. Madison to Monroe, 25 June 1803, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:117; italicized words were originally in code. 8. Madison to Pinckney, 9 June 1801, in Madison Papers (SSS), 1:276. 9. Madison to King, 24 July 1801, in Madison Papers (SSS), 1:470. 10. Ibid., 1:469–70. 11. Madison to Pinckney, 9 June 1801, in Madison Papers (SSS), 1:275. 12. Madison to Livingston, 28 September 1801, in Madison Papers (SSS), 2:144. 13. Madison to Pinckney, 9 June 1801, in Madison Papers (SSS), 1:276. 14. Madison to Livingston, 28 September 1801, in Madison Papers (SSS), 2:144–45. 15. Ibid., 2:145. 16. Livingston to Madison, 13 January 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 2:389. 17. Livingston to Madison, 31 December 1801, in Madison Papers (SSS), 2:359; italicized words were originally in code. 18. Jefferson to Livingston, 18 April 1802, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Definitive edition, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905–7), 10:311–15;

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hereafter cited as Jefferson Writings. This letter appears in almost every account of the Louisiana Purchase; it is usually seen as an accurate description of the administration’s thinking. 19. Jefferson to Livingston, 5 May 1802, in Thomas Jefferson Papers, online edition, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; hereafter cited as LC: Jefferson Papers. Jefferson later informed Livingston: “My letters to you being merely private, I leave all details of business to their official channel” (Jefferson to Livingston, 10 October 1802, in Jefferson Writings, 10:337). 20. Jefferson to Pierre Samuel DuPont de Nemours, 25 April 1802, in Jefferson Writings, 10:317. 21. Madison to Livingston, 16 March 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 3:38; italicized words were originally in code. 22. DuPont to Jefferson, 30 April 1802, in Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, 1798–1817, ed. Dumas Malone (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 54, 58. 23. Jefferson to Livingston, 5 May 1802, in LC: Jefferson Papers. 24. Madison to Livingston, 15 October 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:24–25. 25. Jefferson to Livingston, 18 April 1802, in Jefferson Writings, 10:313. 26. Livingston to Madison, 30 July 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 3:443. 27. Madison to Livingston, 1 May 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 3:175–76. 28. Pinckney to Madison, 24 August 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 3:513. 29. Madison to Livingston, 15 October 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:24–25. 30. Louis-André Pichon to Charles-Maurice Talleyrand-Périgord, 20 July 1801, in Madison Papers (SSS), 1:403 n. 1. 31. Madison to Pinckney, 11 May 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 3:215–16. 32. Jefferson to DuPont, 5 May 1802, Papers of DuPont de Nemours, Winterthur Manuscript Group 2, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Del. I appreciate the assistance of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson Project in tracking down this letter. 33. Livingston to Madison, 24 April 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 3:157; italicized words were originally in code. 34. Livingston to Madison, 1 September 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 3:536; italicized words were originally in code. Jefferson’s policies toward SaintDomingue in this period are best explained in Tim Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” Journal of Southern History 41 (May 1995): 209–48. 35. William C. C. Claiborne to Madison, 29 October 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:67. 36. Memorial of the Kentucky legislature, 1 December 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:179 n. 1. 37. Hore Browse Trist to Mary Trist, 10 December 1802, in Nicholas P. Trist Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 38. James Barbour to Madison, 9 December 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:184. 39. Samuel Johnston to unknown correspondent, 18 March 1803, in Hayes Col-



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lection, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 40. Daniel Clark to Madison, 27 April 1803, in “Despatches from the United States Consulate in New Orleans, 1801–1803,” American Historical Review 33 (January 1928): 340. 41. Jefferson to Livingston, 18 April 1802, in Jefferson Writings, 10:315. 42. Madison to Pinckney, 27 November 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:147. 43. Madison to King, 23 December 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:216. 44. Jefferson to Henry Dearborn, “Hints on the subject of Indian boundaries, suggested for consideration,” 29 December 1802, in LC: Jefferson Papers. 45. Jefferson to Claiborne, 24 May 1803, in Jefferson Writings, 10:391. 46. Jefferson to John Bacon, 30 April 1803, in Jefferson Works, 9:464. 47. Jefferson to William H. Harrison, 27 February 1803, in Jefferson Writings, 10:369–70, 373. For the development of Jefferson’s Indian policy in response to the retrocession crisis, see Mary P. Adams, “Jefferson’s Reaction to the Treaty of San Ildefonso,” Journal of Southern History 21 (May 1955): 173–88; and Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 220–24. 48. Alexander Hamilton to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, 29 December 1802, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke, 27 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–87), 26:71–72; hereafter cited as Hamilton Papers. 49. Jefferson to Monroe, 13 January 1803, in Jefferson Writings, 10:343–44. 50. Jefferson to Livingston, 3 February 1803, in Jefferson Writings, 10:353. 51. [Charles Brockden Brown], Monroe’s Embassy, or The Conduct of the Government, in Relation to Our Claims to the Navigation of the Mississippi (Philadelphia: John Conrad & Co., 1803), quoted in DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 139. 52. “Pericles” [Hamilton], “For the Evening Post,” 8 February 1803, in Hamilton Papers, 26:83. 53. James Ross, speech of 14 February 1803, in Annals of Congress, 7th Cong., 2nd sess., 86. 54. Livingston to Madison, 10 November 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:110– 11; italicized words were originally in code. Both Livingston, in a subsequent letter, and Madison, in his response, viewed the “wastepaper” language with some skepticism. 55. Madison to Pinckney, 27 November 1802, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:147. 56. Madison to Livingston and Monroe, 2 March 1803, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:366. 57. Madison to Livingston, 18 January 1803, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:259–60; italicized words were originally in code. 58. Madison to Livingston and Monroe, 2 March 1803, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:377–78. 59. Jefferson to Monroe, 13 January 1803, in Jefferson Writings, 10:344. 60. Jefferson to DuPont, 1 February 1803, in Jefferson Writings, 10:349. In midApril, Madison reminded Livingston and Monroe that, “if France . . . avow[ed]

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or evince[d] a disposition to deny to the United States the free navigation of the Mississippi, . . . war [was] inevitable.” But Madison did not consider the closure of the deposit as certain a casus bellus, considering it “possib[le] that Congress [might] distinguish between the two cases” (Madison to Livingston and Monroe, 18 April 1803, in Madison Papers [SSS], 4:530). 61. Madison to Livingston, 18 January 1803, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:260. 62. Jefferson to Hugh Williamson, 30 April 1803, in Jefferson Writings, 10:386. 63. Jefferson to Bacon, 30 April 1803, in Jefferson Works, 9:464. 64. Jefferson to Williamson, 30 April 1803, in Jefferson Writings, 10:386. 65. King to Madison, 2 April 1803, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:475. 66. Madison to Livingston and Monroe, 18 April 1803, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:529; italicized words were originally in code. 67. Ibid., 4:527–28; italicized words were originally in code. 68. Ibid., 4:528–30; italicized words were originally in code. If an Anglo-French war had already begun, or seemed imminent, Livingston and Monroe were expected to avoid any “recurr[ence] to Great Britain” or to arrange British support at an even lower cost. 69. Livingston to Madison, 13 April 1803, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:515; italicized words were originally in code. 69. Livingston and Monroe to Madison, 13 May 1803, in Madison Papers (SSS), 4:601–3. 70. Jefferson to John Dickinson, 9 August 1803, in Jefferson Works, 10:28. 71. Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, 29 January 1804, in Jefferson Writings, 10:446– 47. Jefferson had used the same image of the speck on the horizon becoming a tornado in reference to Louisiana nearly two years earlier (see Jefferson to DuPont, 25 April 1802, in Jefferson Works, 10:318).

M

Identity

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M

The Louisiana Purchase in the Demographic Perspective of Its Time

T

he amount of territory included in the Louisiana Purchase has relegated to a second plan the number of people who lived there. It added 827,000 square miles of land to the United States, almost doubling the previous area of the new nation and extending its western boundary from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. National histories usually describe this part of the North American continent at the time it was acquired from France as a vast, unsettled wilderness, over which, until 1890, a frontier of civilization steadily advanced.1 Nevertheless, it was already inhabited in 1803 by indigenous peoples who remembered the first encounters of their ancestors with Spanish explorers in the early sixteenth century, by descendants of the French colonists and African slaves who established a permanent colony on the Gulf coast and at strategic locations in the Mississippi valley at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and by more recent immigrants from Europe, Africa, and various regions of the Americas. How their presence was represented in censuses and commented upon in contemporary pamphlets and memoirs is the subject of this essay. My approach is twofold. I begin with a critical evaluation of censuses taken in the years surrounding the Louisiana Purchase. This evidence reveals a deceleration in the rate of population growth in the decade preceding the Purchase consistent with current knowledge about white and black immigration into Spanish Louisiana. This slowdown contrasts with the rapid settlement of areas west of the Appalachians, but east of the Mississippi River, belonging to the United States at the end of the eighteenth century. The second part of the essay discusses French, Spanish, and American perceptions of these demographic disparities and their

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geo­political implications. The way in which people understood the population of Louisiana had profound implications for the ways they conceived of economy, politics, and diplomacy. Using data from seventy-four censuses of Louisiana and West Florida taken between 1763 and 1803, Antonio Acosta Rodríguez has constructed age-sex pyramids and calculated sex ratios, age-specific fertility rates, and household size for the free and enslaved populations of New Orleans and rural posts from the beginning to the end of the Spanish colonial period.2 Important as his findings are, the demographic concepts and models underlying much of his analysis had not yet been developed when the censuses were taken. Reconstructing the meaning of demographic data at the time it was collected remains an important task for historians and a central goal of this essay.3 Spanish censuses were, and continue to be, the main source of information about the population of Louisiana on the eve of its purchase by the United States.4 Two particularly revealing censuses (in 1788 and 1797) were transmitted to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs after Napoleon became First Consul.5 A Spanish census of Louisiana from 1785 and another coinciding with the year of the Louisiana Purchase were printed in an appendix to An Account of Louisiana, a pamphlet published by the United States government in 1803 to provide information on what was still terra incognita for most Americans.6 The first complete American census of the Territory of Orleans, whose boundaries were roughly those of the state of Louisiana today minus the Florida parishes, was taken in 1806. The federal census of 1810 was the first to cover all districts in both Lower and Upper Louisiana.7 These censuses will be treated as “texts” requiring essentially the same kind of critical analysis as any primary source. They are constructions of demographic reality by imperial officials for fiscal, military, and administrative purposes. Their functions explain which elements of the population were counted and the types of information about them that were collected, as well as which elements were not enumerated, notably Native Americans. Neither France nor Spain included Indian “nations” in their censuses of colonial Louisiana. Separate reports estimated the number of warriors they represented. Categories for Indian slaves in most censuses of French Louisiana were dropped by Spain, which prohibited Indian slavery. The practice continued, but Indian slaves were reclassified in Spanish censuses as persons of African descent.8



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Censuses of French and Spanish Louisiana also differed in the way they reported age and race. Whereas French censuses distinguished only between adults and children, and only for certain groups, Spanish censuses divided males and females of all elements of the population into three age groups: 0–14, 15–49, and 50 years and older. The middle group corresponded with the age of militia duty. The term “Mulatto” was used for the first time in the French census of 1763 as a heading under which free persons of color were listed. In the Spanish censuses of 1769, 1777, and 1788, both free persons of color and slaves were subdivided into pardos (light-skinned) and morenos (dark-skinned).9 Five groups defined by racial phenotype and condition of freedom or slavery formed corporate entities in a hierarchical order: whites, free mulattoes, free blacks, mulatto slaves, and black slaves.10 Censuses taken by the Americans after the Louisiana Purchase reduced the number of categories into which the population was divided. The 1806 census distinguished white male children from adults, but reported only the total number of white females, free persons of color, and slaves in each jurisdiction. At least it labeled “Free men, and women and children of Colour” as such. The 1810 federal census schedule classified both white males and white females into five different age groups, but contained single columns for “All other free persons, except Indians not taxed,” and slaves, in effect depriving free persons of color of the minimal recognition of identity afforded by nomenclature. Not until 1850 did the United States federal census add a variable for racial phenotype of free persons of color and slaves — “Black” or “Mulatto.”11 Exclusion of untaxed Indians from United States censuses may be taken as tacit recognition of their effective autonomy.12 In this respect, the United States continued, for the moment, the practice in French and Spanish censuses from the eighteenth century. In this essay, I focus on the types of information in censuses most often remarked by contemporaries of the Louisiana Purchase: the total size of the population, the number of inhabitants who were free and enslaved, and their geographical distribution. These were the concerns informing the sixth of a set of “Queries about Louisiana” that the United States government sent in 1803 to various individuals considered to be in a position to respond knowledgeably:

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What is the population of the province distinguishing between Whites & Blacks but [not] including Indians on the East side of the Mississippi, of the settlement on the West side next to the mouth, of each distinct settlement in the other parts of the provence, & what [is] the geographical position and extant [sic] of those settlements?13 The range of estimates made in response to this question was considerable. John Pintard, a New Yorker who had visited New Orleans in 1801, is an example of how misinformed were some contemporaries: “On this head, I speak without book. If  I do not misremember, the aggregate population of the whole province including Mobile & Pensacola, amounted to 156.000 souls — this estimate was formed from the Bishops returns of marriageable females, within his diocese — I suppose, therefore — Blacks, not to be included — N. Orleans contained in 1801 — by actual return — 12.000 souls — of whom ⅓ might be blacks.”14 His figure for the total population is at least three times its actual size and almost ten times greater than the number of whites in Spanish Louisiana at the turn of the century. The figure for the population of New Orleans is also on the high side, but not impossible in months of peak economic activity. Blacks, however, made up more than half the city’s population. A more useful starting point for discussion of how many people lived in Louisiana at the time of the Purchase is the 1803 census in An Account of Louisiana. It reported 42,375 inhabitants. They included 34,859 persons in the places that, in 1804, became the Orleans Territory, 84 percent of the population in the area of the Louisiana Purchase. The population of the District of Louisiana was 6,416, of whom 6,028 lived in settlements in “Spanish Illinois” relocated in the state of Missouri, and 388 in and around the Arkansas post. Subtracting 1,100 persons in Spanish territories outside the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase, the total population of Lower and Upper Louisiana was 41,275.15 An Account of Louisiana provided separate information on Indians compiled by an American, John Sibley. Including tribes on the rivers and bayous in the Red River valley, a total of 4,675 Indians resided in Lower Louisiana, quite close to the 4,000 estimated by Peter Wood as present in the region of Natchez and Louisiana in 1790. These numbers marked a striking decline from the 42,000 estimated to have lived in the same area in 1685.16 In addition, the Account of Louisiana estimated 29,655 Indians along the Arkansas, Missouri, and Upper Mississippi rivers, or their tributaries, plus 2,000 Indians who had recently emigrated from the eastern



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woodlands. Assuming at least 30,000 Sioux and members of other unnamed tribes,17 more than 60,000 Indians inhabited Louisiana in 1800, almost ten for every colonist and slave in Upper Louisiana and more than the total number of colonists and slaves west of the Mississippi in both Lower and Upper Louisiana counted in the census of 1803.18 Indians aside, how accurately did the 1803 census represent the population of European and African origin living in the area of the Louisiana Purchase? A memorandum to the census pointed out that it was surely an undercount. Not all its information was up-to-date. Indeed, much of the demographic data came from a Spanish census of 1797. Even where the census was up-to-date, “certain causes induced the inhabitants to give in short returns of their slaves and of their own members.” The Spanish government, according to the compiler of the census, considered the true population to be in excess of 50,000.19 A memoir presented by Joseph de Pontalba to Napoleon on 15 September 1800, estimated 70,000 inhabitants in Louisiana, although that number included residents of the district of Natchez in territory on the left bank of the Mississippi River already recognized by Spain as belonging to the United States in 1797.20 Another appendix to An Account of Louisiana presented a “conjectural estimate” for different posts and districts adding up to 89,970 whites and blacks.21 If the true population were more than 50,000, the census of 1803 undercounted it by 15 percent or more. The comparison of this census with censuses dating from 1788, 1795, and 1797 shown in table 1 confirms its partial construction from earlier figures.22 Many of these population estimates (both total numbers and racial percentages) are identical.23 Use of figures from an earlier census is normally interpreted as evidence that whatever growth has since occurred is limited enough to rely upon the preceding census for an approximate count of the population; but it could mean that the 1803 census did not fully reflect recent population growth in Louisiana. In some districts in the Lower Mississippi valley, however, the number of inhabitants did vary from census to census between 1788 and 1803. In districts enumerated in both 1788 and 1797, one remarks a decline from 20,288 to 17,287 inhabitants in those where earlier figures reappear in the 1803 census, and an increase from 13,828 to 20,017 in the others. On closer inspection, one district in the first subset, Chapitoulas, accounts for most of the population decline. It may be exaggerated in the censuses of 1797 and 1803; but a sharp drop in the 1790s is entirely possible. The Chapitoulas Coast was the area where plantations were being sold to form the

Table 1. Total Population of Districts in Louisiana Censuses, 1788–1803 District

1788

1795

1797

1803

A. Districts where the same population is reported in different censuses New Orleans and 5,321 5,106 8,056 8,056   suburbsa Below the city to 2,388 1,150 2,388 2,388   the Balizea Barataria 40 40 St Bernard or Terre   au boeuf 671 597 661 661 Bayou St Jean and   Gentilly 772 772 489 489 Chapitoulas Coast 7,494 3,827 1,444 1,444 268 437 247 247 Galvestowna a 2,004 2,350 2,150 2,150 Point Coupee a 309 435 432 432 Ayoyelles Natchitoches 1,021 1,631 1,420 1,631   Subtotal 20,288 16,345 17,287 17,498 B. Districts where population varies from census to census First German Coast   or St. Charles 2,388 2,488 2,414 Second German   Coast or St. Jean  Baptiste 1,368 1,981 2,413 Cabahanoce or   Acadian Coast 1,559 1,299 2,742 Lafourche de   Chetimachas 1,164 — 1,154 Valenzuela 1,500 1,210 2,742 Iberville 944 1,178 1,100 Attakapas 2,541 2,641 3,746 Opelousas 1,985 2,485 2,427 Ouachita 232 286 498 Rapides 147 349 781   Subtotal 13,828 13,917 20,017

2,421 1,950 2,200 1,141 2,064 1,057 1,447 2,454 361 753 15,848

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Table 1 (continued) District

1788

1795

1797

1803

C. Lower Mississippi valley districts not included in the 1797 census Manchac 284 304 Baton Rouge 682 686 1,513 Feliciana 730 414 b 190 290 New Madrid Natchez 2,679 4,906   Subtotal 4,565 6,600 1,513 D. Upper Louisiana Arkansas Spanish Illinois Subtotal

119 2,093 2,212

171 3,014 3,185

388 6,028 6,416

E. Gulf ports Mobile Pensacola   Subtotal

1,453 265 1,718

1,725 290 2,015

800 300 1,100

42,611

42,062

Grand Total a Same

b “New

37,304

42,375

number of whites, fpc, slaves reported Iberia” in the 1788 census

upriver suburb of Ste. Marie, which appeared for the first time in the 1805 census of New Orleans.24 The increase from 34,116 to 37,304 in the total population of Lower Louisiana in districts enumerated in both 1788 and 1797 (the first two sections of table 1) equates to a growth rate of 0.8 percent per year. Between 1797 and 1803, the population in these districts declined by almost 4,000; but even if it had continued to grow after 1797 at the same rate as in the previous nine years, it would not have reached 40,000 by 1803. Including 6,416 persons in Upper Louisiana, that would not have been enough to produce a total population of more than 50,000 in the year of the Louisiana Purchase.

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In three of the four censuses taken between 1788 and 1803, the total population of Louisiana is approximately 42,000. It is less in 1797 primarily because the census from that year did not include the Gulf ports or posts in West Florida and Upper Louisiana. To put population change in the decade preceding the Louisiana Purchase in long-term perspective, figure 1 plots on a logarithmic scale the number of inhabitants throughout Louisiana counted by censuses from 1720 to 1860.25 It shows that population growth stalled between 1788 and 1803. The boundaries of Louisiana were substantially redefined three times during the 140 years pictured on the graph. Greater French Louisiana was divided between Great Britain and Spain after the Seven Years War. Spain recovered the Floridas in the American War of Independence. The United States divided Lower from Upper Louisiana when it acquired all the territory of former Spanish Louisiana on the right bank of the Mississippi in 1803. The graph is drawn from the total population as it was reported in each census. It includes colonists and slaves in the districts of Mobile and Pensacola through 1737 except for 1731, and from 1788 to 1803 except for 1797. Inhabitants of the Illinois Country lived in settlements on the left bank of the Mississippi River up to 1763. Spanish censuses of Upper Louisiana counted only those who migrated to the Missouri side rather than remaining under British domination. From 1810 to 1860, the graph shows the population in all the territories and states formed out of the Louisiana Purchase, not just in the state of Louisiana. An initial period of rapid growth in French Louisiana may be observed in the 1720s. Despite extraordinarily high mortality among 7,020 Europeans and 1,902 Africans transported to the colony by John Law’s Company of the Indies from 1717 to 1721, the survivors constituted a population base of 2,666 persons enumerated in six censuses of different posts in the colony from 1721 to 1723, among whom 2,079 lived along the Mississippi River and its tributaries.26 Censuses taken in 1731 and 1732 registered an increase to 6,072 inhabitants in Lower and Upper Louisiana. With the Natchez massacre in 1729 and curtailment of the slave trade in the 1730s, the population of this area fell back to 5,659 in 1737. The decline is not visible on the graph, which shows a total population of 6,672 in 1737, because it includes 1,013 inhabitants of Gulf Coast settlements who were not enumerated in the previous census taken in 1731. No census was taken of French Louisiana between 1737 and 1763, but it increased by the end of this period to 8,193 inhabitants in Lower Louisiana alone. The June 1766 census, which included the Illinois Country, but not the Gulf Coast area



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fig. 1. Population growth in the area of the Louisiana Purchase, 1722–1860

already occupied by the British, reported 11,034 persons.27 The annual growth rate fell from over 10 percent in the 1720s to less than 2 percent from 1737 to the 1760s.28 The population of Spanish Louisiana almost quadrupled from 11,034 in 1766 to 42,611 in 1788. The second total, but not the first, includes Mobile, Pensacola, and West Florida posts. Excluding them from the comparison, the population increased to 37,200 in 1788, and then to 41,275 in 1803. Up to 1788, the growth rate was 5.7 percent per annum. Then it fell to 0.7 percent in the last fifteen years of Spanish domination. By contrast, between 1803 and 1806 — the year of the first census of the Territory of Orleans subsequent to the Louisiana Purchase — the population in Lower Louisiana increased from 34,859 to 53,441, at a rate of 15.3 percent per annum, the highest growth rate between two censuses in Louisiana history. From 1806 to 1810, the annual growth rate remained a robust 9.4 percent, slipping to 7.2 percent over the next decade, and 3.9 percent for the remainder of the antebellum period. In the entire area of the Louisiana Purchase, the population increased at a rate of 7.3 percent from 97,401 in 1810 to 3,336,414 in 1860.29 The explosive growth of Lower Louisiana between 1803 and 1806 provides another basis for judging how much the 1803 census could have underestimated the actual population. For the total population of Lower and Upper Louisiana to surpass 50,000 in 1803, Lower Louisiana would

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have to have had 44,000 inhabitants in 1803 rather than around 35,000 as reported in the census. A population of that size would reduce the annual rate of growth in Lower Louisiana between 1803 and 1806 from 15.3 to 6.7 percent. In light of the arrival in New Orleans of more than 10,000 Saint-Domingue refugees from Cuba in 1809, it is possible that the rate of population growth in Louisiana was lower in the first three years following the Louisiana Purchase than the 9.4 percent per annum in the next four. Nevertheless, a population of 50,000 in 1803 implies a rate of increase of only 1.8 percent per annum since 1788, still much lower than the 5.7 percent growth rate per annum for Lower and Upper Louisiana between 1766 and 1788. The rapid growth of Louisiana in the first twenty-five years of Spanish domination, followed by marked deceleration in the last decade of the eighteenth century, fits what we know about economic development and migration patterns between 1763 and 1803. The number of administrative units increased from an average of nine per census in the 1760s to twenty-four in 1788. The increase resulted in part from the division of the German Coast along the Mississippi into two separate districts in 1788, but mostly from new settlements at Terre au boeuf, Bayou Lafourche, Valenzuela, Iberville, Galveztown, Manchac, Feliciane, Baton Rouge, Natchez, New Madrid, Ouachita, Rapides, and Avoyelles. Over three-fifths of the increase in population between 1766 and 1788 took place in areas whose settlement dates from the French period, and the other two-fifths at posts established or reestablished (in the case of Natchez) after 1763. By contrast, the only new post created after 1788 was Concordia, opposite Natchez, mentioned in the 1803 census as “alors naissant” without indication of the number of inhabitants. Four units in the 1788 census were not included in the 1803 census: Natchez, Manchac, Feliciane, and New Madrid.30 Robust population growth in Lower Louisiana up to 1788 and much slower increase from then until the Louisiana Purchase are also consistent with the timing and size of migration flows into the area. Two identifiable groups of white immigrants, Acadian exiles and Canary Islanders, arrived during the first quarter century of Spanish domination. The manuscript of the 1763 census contains an addendum mentioning 606 Acadians who arrived in 1764 and 1765. Then, in the censuses of May and June 1766, their presence at the posts of Attakapas, Opelousas, and Natchitoches was observed. By 1769, the area along the Mississippi River above the German Coast was called the “Acadian Coast.” It had been referred to as the upper



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and lower coast of Cabanoce in the 1766 censuses. Acadians began to settle there at that time. Carl Brasseaux estimates that around 1,000 Acadians migrated to Louisiana between 1757 and 1770.31 That number may seem small, but it represents a 33 percent increase in the white population of Lower Louisiana enumerated in the 1763 census. Another contingent of Acadians, this one numbering 1,600, arrived in 1784–85.32 The second distinct group of white immigrants in the Spanish period came from the Canary Islands. Soldiers between the ages of seventeen and thirty-six were transported with wives and children at royal expense to help defend Louisiana against the British during the American Revolution. Passenger lists exist for eight ships transporting 2,010 Isleños from the Canaries in 1778 and 1779. They settled in Valenzuela on Bayou Lafourche, in Galveztown on Bayou Manchac, and at Terre au boeuf. These establishments are mentioned for the first time in the 1785 census, which records all but 53 of 1,180 inhabitants as white. Three years later, the total population more than doubled to 2,498, comprised of 1,852 whites and 646 slaves.33 Saint-Domingue refugees are sometimes mentioned as a third identifiable group of white immigrants in the Spanish period. While it is true that Louisiana was one of the destinations of colonists who fled after the slave rebellion of 1791, only a few hundred arrived before the Louisiana Purchase. The largest waves of migration occurred in 1804, when several thousand arrived from Jamaica, and 1809, when more than 10,000 arrived from Cuba and Santo Domingo, many of whom were not white.34 A decline in white immigration into Louisiana in the 1790s is the only possible explanation of the decrease in the annual rate of increase of the white population in Lower Louisiana from 5.7 percent between 1766 and 1788 to 0.1 percent between 1788 and 1803. Even if whites were undercounted by several thousand in the 1803 census, the white growth rate between 1788 and 1806 was 2.7 percent, less than half as high as the rate between 1766 and 1788, and almost certainly lower before than after 1803.35 White immigr ation to Louisiana in the eighteenth century ebbed and flowed with the importation of slaves. The cession of Louisiana in 1764 had the important consequence of reopening the slave trade. The last recorded arrival of a slave ship in the French colonial period was in 1743; and that was the first shipment from Africa since 1731.36 According to a memoir by Intendant Martin de Navarro in 1780, the colony had profited

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greatly during the 1770s from the stimulus to commerce produced by the rights of the British to free navigation of the Mississippi after the Seven Years War. “[Louisiana] owes its present state to the wise forbearance of a good servant of the king [Luis de Unzaga, governor from 1769 to 1776], and to the illicit trade of the English; for without them, who was there to furnish these subjects with negroes and tools for the cultivation of their lands, by receiving their products in payment?”37 France eventually replaced Great Britain as the primary provider of slaves. In 1786, 14 vessels from France and 58 from the French West Indies arrived in New Orleans, compared to 43 from Spanish colonies, 8 from the British West Indies, 1 from Philadelphia, and none from England.38 The 1780s were the apogee of French colonial commerce.39 Louisiana appears to have benefitted in that decade from permission to trade with French colonies granted by Spanish authorities. Imports from the French West Indies are the most likely source of the increase of the slave population from Navarro’s estimate of 11,000 in 1780 to 19,126 in the 1788 census. The free population grew concomitantly from around 10,000 to 18,074 over the same eight years.40 The sharp reduction in the annual growth rate of Lower Louisiana from 5.7 percent between 1766 and 1788 to somewhere between 0.7 and 1.8 percent between 1788 and 1803 was due especially to decline in the slave population.41 The total population of plantation districts adjacent to New Orleans actually fell from 11,335 in 1788 to 4,982 in the 1797 and 1803 censuses. Censuses also reveal a decline in slaves from 64 percent of the population of New Orleans and adjacent districts in 1788 to 49 percent in 1806. Comparison of the number of slaves in Lower Louisiana reported in the 1788 and 1803 censuses points to loss of as many as 3,600 slaves in the interval between them.42 Sacramental records provide independent confirmation of the effect of measures adopted in the 1790s to first curtail and then completely prohibit the slave trade for several years. Patrick Manning’s database of these records subdivides baptisms into three age categories: infants less than 2 years old, children from 2 through 19 years of age, and adults 20 and older.43 Most infant slaves were presumably born in Louisiana, most adults in Africa. Figure 2 shows fluctuations in the age distribution of slaves baptized at the Saint Louis Cathedral between 1744 and 1803. Adult baptisms were particularly numerous in years following the arrival of slave ships from Africa. From 1791 to 1799, however, when the slave trade was curtailed, adults dropped to 6 percent of all slave baptisms, and to less than 2 per-



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fig. 2. Slave baptisms by age group

cent between 1792 and 1794. Using the total number of adult baptisms as a proxy for slave importations, they fell by 90 percent in the 1790s relative to the 1780s. The surge in adult baptisms in 1801 and 1802, after importation of slaves from Africa was reauthorized, points to an increase of the slave population on the eve of the Louisiana Purchase, albeit not large enough to alter the contrast between rapid growth prior to 1788 and much slower growth in the decade of the French Revolution. One of the most important developments of the Spanish period was the growth of the free colored population. From 82 in the 1763 census of Lower Louisiana, their number increased to 330 in the 1769 census of the same area, at least in part as a result of the change from the French to the more rigorous Spanish criteria of racial classification.44 At the same time as Spanish authorities insisted that manumitted slaves and their children be distinguished from whites rather than be considered simply an addition to the free population, they made manumission easier by introducing the practice of coartación (right of self-purchase). Despite incomplete enumeration, every Spanish census reported an increase of 200 to 500 free persons of color in Lower Louisiana since the preceding census. Their annual growth rate was higher than that of whites and slaves in every period between censuses up to 1797.45 Nevertheless, the growth of the free colored population had a minimal impact on the population dynamics of the slave population. The manumission rate in New Orleans and adjacent areas between 1771 and 1785, when it can be calculated, was around 7 per 1,000 slaves per year. In the 1790s, manumissions in this area averaged 63 per year, one for every 3.6 infant slaves who were baptized.46

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fig. 3. Population growth west and east of the Mississipi River, 1766–1820

Slower growth of the white and slave populations, if not free persons of color, in the area of the Louisiana Purchase in the last decade of the nineteenth century contrasts with demographic change across the Mississippi River.47 Settlers flooded into the territory west of the Appalachians recognized as part of the United States by the Treaty of Paris, which ended the War of American Independence (see figure 3). The federal census of 1800 counted 5,308,483 whites and blacks throughout the United States. A growth rate of 2.4 percent per annum since 1750 and 3 percent since 1790 was high enough to allow a sizeable internal migration westward without a decline in the population in any of the Atlantic states.48 Meanwhile, the flow of American migrants across the Appalachians into the eastern part of the Mississippi valley increased dramatically after the War of Independence. An estimated 50,000 settlers west of the Proclamation Line in 1774 grew to 75,000 by 1785. Already 109,000 in 1790, the population of Kentucky and Tennessee more than tripled to 326,000 in 1800, with an additional 51,000 settlers in the Northwest Territory and 18,000 south of the Ohio River by the end of the century.49 The rate of increase east of the Mississippi River between 1774 and 1790, 5.0 percent per annum, is less than the growth rate of 7.1 percent per annum in Spanish Louisiana between 1777 and 1788. However, in direct contrast with the deceleration in population growth west of the river to less than 2 percent per year between 1788 and 1803, it accelerated in American-



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held territory to 13.5 percent per annum between 1790 and 1800.50 After the Louisiana Purchase, the rates of growth on both sides of the Mississippi converged. Despite the rapid growth of the population east of the Mississippi and treaties that reduced Indian territory following defeats in wars in the 1790s, most of the trans-Appalachian West remained Indian country in 1800.51 Peter Wood estimates a total of 44,900 Indians in the southern states and territories east of the Mississippi in 1790, all but 800 west of the Appalachians.52 This number includes 42,300 Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Florida tribes (presumably Seminoles), and is much higher than Francisco Bouligny’s estimate of the combined size of these nations in a report written in the 1790s: 30,000 with 6,000 ablebodied men, hunters, or warriors.53 However, since the five tribes numbered close to 80,000 when counted in 1845, when most had been removed to the Indian Territory created west of the Mississippi River,54 it is possible they were already growing through natural increase by the end of the eighteenth century. Thus an estimate of around 50,000 in 1800, with 10,000 capable of bearing arms, is not unreasonable. This broad array of statistical data circulated throughout the Atlantic world. Some information was restricted to policy-making officials within specific countries, but much of it was available to the general public. How did contemporaries of the Louisiana Purchase perceive the implications of the population disparities described in the preceding pages? In general, demographic considerations received growing attention in political pamphlets and memoirs of the time, in part because censuses taken in the eighteenth century supplied ever more detailed data for observations and commentary, and in part because writers like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Malthus began to familiarize the literate public with the basic concepts of demographic analysis.55 The Louisiana Purchase provides a number of examples of how French, Spanish, and American statesmen and political commentators took demographic disparities and population trends into account in the strategies that they recommended regarding control over the Mississippi valley. According to Alexander DeConde, consciousness of the rapid growth of the population of the thirteen colonies made Americans expansionist even before they became independent. He cites Benjamin Franklin’s “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries,

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&c,” published in 1751, for its vision of “Anglo-Americans pushing westward across the Mississippi, uprooting Indians, multiplying and eventually outnumbering the people of mother England.”56 In 1786, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North & South is to be peopled.”57 Jedidiah Morse’s American Geography, first published in 1789, anticipated “the period, as not far distant, when the AMERICAN EMPIRE will comprehend millions of souls, west of the Mississippi.”58 Equivalent premonitions of the domination of the Americas by the United States were expressed by spokesmen for Spain and France. Support of the American Revolution, warned the Count of Aranda, should not blind Spain to the danger presented by the creation of a new nation from the thirteen British colonies. “The federal government is born a pigmy. . . . It has required the support of two such powerful States as France and Spain to obtain its independence. The day will come when she will be a giant, a colossus formidable even to these countries. She will forget the services she has received from the two powers, and will think only of her own aggrandizement. The liberty of conscience, the facility of establishing a new population upon immense territories, together with the advantages of a new government, will attract the agriculturalists and mechanics of all nations, for men ever run after fortune.”59 Napoleon, too, anticipated the long-term consequences of his decision to sell Louisiana to the United States: “Perhaps it will also be objected to me, that the Americans may be found too powerful for Europe in two or three centuries; but my foresight does not embrace such remote fears.”60 In the years immediately preceding the Louisiana Purchase, the demographic development that elicited the most commentary from contemporaries was the rush of settlers into the region between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River after the American Revolution. For all parties vying for control of the Mississippi valley, this migration introduced a new supplier of agricultural produce and a new market into the world economy, but also potential dangers. In the case of France, it reawakened interest in the territory on the eve of the French Revolution. When France ceded the colony to Spain in 1762, argued Éleonore François Élie Moustier, the French ambassador to the United States from 1787 to 1789, there was little prospect of peopling it. Since then, he observed, the trans-Allegheny region had been settled rapidly; and the emergence of this hinterland offered French merchants the opportunity to profit from exporting its produce and supplying its needs. Indians and colonists alike would welcome the



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return to allegiance to France. Spain would itself have everything to gain from a return to French rule over Louisiana because it would strengthen the barrier against the Americans. While the latter should be guaranteed free navigation of the Mississippi, Moustier also recommended that they not be allowed to immigrate into Louisiana.61 A few years later, after Spain declared war on France, the Republic sent Edmond Charles Genet to the United States with the mission of implementing a project to revolutionize North America, liberating Canada from British domination and Louisiana from Spanish control. Moustier had already envisaged a liberal colonial regime with a representative assembly for Louisiana when it was restored to France. A memoir written by the citizen Lyonnet in 1794 went further, imagining Canada and Louisiana as sister republics under a French protectorate. New Orleans, he wrote, was already at the dawn of its prosperity as the entrepôt for all the products of the interior of North America, especially due to the settlement of Americans on the Ohio, Cumberland, and other rivers. Observing that Congress had sacrificed them to the interests of inhabitants of the Atlantic Coast, he pointed out the vulnerability of poorly defended Spanish forts to an invasion force consisting of westerners and French inhabitants of Louisiana. The republic they would then create would be advantageous to France in various ways. Louisiana could take the place of the United States as the supplier of French islands in the Caribbean. Above all, the loss of Louisiana would be a fatal blow to New Spain, exposing Mexico to an attack by the “French augmented by Louisianians and American adventurers. . . . Masters of Louisiana, the French would overrun the Gulf of Mexico where they would plant the tree of liberty on the debris of Castillian despotism.”62 After the failure of the Genet conspiracy and the resumption of peaceful relations with Spain, France reverted to diplomatic pressures on Madrid to obtain retrocession of Louisiana. A memoir submitted by Victor Collot, the general sent by the Directory to reconnoiter the Mississippi valley in 1796, differs from Lyonnet’s in its depiction of France as being in a position in which it would have to compete with the United States in peopling its part of the territory, should it be restored to France. On this score, he was optimistic. He considered France to be a third too populated. If just a small part of the surplus of its 32 million inhabitants could be induced to join the 20,000 primarily French-speaking white colonists already in Louisiana, the large number of refugees from French colonies dispersed throughout the United States, and “as much immigration of Americans

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as it will be wise and necessary to accept,” he predicted as rapid a rate of reproduction of this initial population as in the United States, where the number of inhabitants had been doubling every eighteen years. Echoing reasoning found in Benjamin Franklin’s 1751 observations on population increase in the English colonies, he wrote that, as long as there was cheap land to buy, marriages and population would increase. Only when all the land was settled and prices rose so high that many inhabitants could no longer become property holders would a class of paupers appear, corruption spread, and population growth cease.63 Also like Franklin, Collot argued that slavery discouraged white immigration by devaluing labor. Observing the presence of 30,000 slaves in Louisiana, 25,000 of them in Lower Louisiana, he remarked that importations of late were sporadic and few in number (another confirmation of the effect of restrictions on the slave trade during the 1790s). The scarcity of slaves had the consequence they were relatively well-treated, as did lenient provisions of Spanish slave law, which he recommended the French should retain. Such a policy would in fact have been a step backward since France had abolished slavery in its American colonies in 1794; but Collot did add that, among all the colonies, Louisiana was the one that could most easily grant to its slaves “the total freedom so desired by all friends of humanity and so necessary for the security and prosperity of whites.”64 In 1800, just before the retrocession of Louisiana by Spain to France became public knowledge, Pierre-François Page included a “Disgression sur les États-Unis et la Louisiane” in his two-volume Traité d’économie politique et de commerce des colonies. Only thirty years earlier, he remarked, the population of the thirteen colonies was less than 2 million. At the beginning of the current year, it had reached 6 million spread out over an area 1,250 miles long and 1,040 wide. “Impatient to colonize the nation, they had crossed the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains, forded the Ohio, Wabash, Illinois, and Wisconsin rivers, and waged a war as bloody as it was unjust against the indigenous peoples who defended their lands with the courage of despair.” Arguing that Spain lacked the power to defend Louisiana against this relentlessly expansionist people, he wrote that France had every interest in doing so to protect its access to the Mexican market, once it was opened by the inevitable independence of Spanish colonies: “[I]f 790,000 inhabitants of our American colonies give as strong a stimulus to commerce as we have seen, one can only imagine the value of commercial relations with 8 million persons [Latin Americans] working on even richer land!” For Page, Louisiana was less interesting for its em-



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bryonic sugar production than for export of provisions to the West Indies. He also expressed the view that France had more to gain from the annexation of French Canada to the United States than from its recovery as a colony, since the effect of 400,000 Canadians on American tastes would increase the demand there for French imports. In Page’s geopolitical vision, territorial ambitions should be governed by calculation of commercial advantage to the metropole.65 In travel accounts, pamphlets, and memoirs on Louisiana published after confirmation of rumors of its retrocession, French remarks about slavery hardened in the sense that authors no longer envisaged, as they had in the 1790s, its abolition or prohibition of the slave trade. Reflection on how to avoid a slave rebellion like the one that had occurred in SaintDomingue, however, led several writers to insist on strict enforcement of measures requiring humane treatment. Although Louisiana was the colony that could most easily do without slaves owing to its temperate climate, Baudry de Lozières, the brother-in-law of Moreau de St. Méry, contended that it was important to maintain slavery for political and humanitarian reasons. To do so, precautions such as limiting the right to own slaves to planters living in the countryside were necessary. Besides not allowing them in New Orleans, slaves should not be permitted in the north of Louisiana or along its frontiers to avoid their contact with Indians.66 If the slave trade were allowed in Louisiana, wrote a missionary who had lived in French Guyana for twenty-two years, the government should ensure that it be pursued with equity in Africa and that the Negroes be treated with humanity in the colonies and freed at age fifty.67 Such humanitarian considerations are not found in the memoir addressed to Napoleon by Joseph de Pontalba, a planter who had resided in Spanish Louisiana for the previous eighteen years. He was categorical regarding the need to augment the population: “Louisiana wants working hands. Give her population and she will become an inexhaustible source of wealth for France. Give her population, whatever be the means employed, but give her population.”68 With respect to slaves, Pontalba affirmed without nuance: “Louisiana cannot dispense with the slave trade. The excessive heat prevailing during the five months in which the hardest works are to be executed on the plantations, does not allow the use of free and white labor and renders the blacks indispensable.”69 Pontalba insisted on the vulnerability of Louisiana to invasion by the large number of Americans who had migrated into the trans-Appalachian West in terms almost identical to those used by Spanish authorities in

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Louisiana: “their position, the number of their population, and their other means, will enable them to invade this province whenever they may choose to do so.” Kentuckians, single-handed or allied with inhabitants of neighboring districts, could reach New Orleans with 20,000 or 30,000 men, transported on the same large flatboats that they used to bring their produce to market. The rapidity of the Ohio and other rivers discharging into the Mississippi would facilitate the invasion, as would the character of westerners. “A powder horn, a bag of balls, a rifle, and a sufficient provision of flour — this would be the extent of their military equipment; a great deal of skill in shooting, the habit of being in the woods and of enduring fatigue — this is what makes up for every deficiency.” To counter this threat, Pontalba said the Mississippi should be made an “impenetrable barrier.” For this, it was necessary to increase its free population through immigration to make it “sufficiently large to defend her from all attacks.” He identified settlers east of the Mississippi as the main source of new settlers, in fact, imagining enough movement in a decade to make Louisiana “formidable to her neighbors.” At the same time, “the western districts of the United States, which are now tenanted by individuals of all nations, would soon be deserted.” As to the loyalties of these immigrants, interest would tie the first generation to France, and the next generation would be loyal to their native land: “succeeding ones will of course know no other country than the one in which they shall have been born, and it will then be left to the wisdom of government to imprint on the tender and impressive hearts of youth the true sentiments of patriotism and justice.”70 The French merchant James Pitot also alluded to the difference in population growth west and east of the Mississippi in his Observations, written in 1802 for French officials whom he expected to assume control over Louisiana: “When resources for the colonists in the entire province were available only in the settlements of Lower Louisiana, which the [Spanish] government had no desire at all to increase, it is not surprising that New Orleans was regarded as a miserable port condemned to the paltry exportation of products from the swamps that surround it. Under such circumstances, it would have taken many centuries to bring it to the point where it is today, but now that 400,000 to 500,000 souls live at the sources of the Mississippi’s tributaries, what statesman could view the situation of New Orleans without imagining that it must one day be very prosperous?”71 The secret instructions for Pierre Laussat, the captain-general of Louisiana, approved by Napoleon on 26 November 1802, when he still intended



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to take control of the colony, reveal the population policy that the French government planned to adopt. Regarding the part of the colony situated in the lowest latitudes that was cultivated by slaves: “That regime shall be maintained, as it has been in various colonies by the law of an X, 30 Floréal [19 May 1801]; but trade in slaves shall be made only with Africa, and no slaves shall be received in Louisiana that come from the American colonies, as it is the only means of preserving Louisiana from the moral contagion that has infected these colonies.” Immigrants without property were to be sent to Upper Louisiana. Reflecting anxiety that they might align themselves with slaves against the planter class, Laussat was instructed to prevent “men dangerous to the rural system of Lower Louisiana” from settling below the Arkansas River. Regarding the population east of the Mississippi, special attention was to be given to the inhabitants of Kentucky, who were characterized almost word-for-word as they were in Pontalba’s memoir: “The rapid current of the Ohio and of the rivers whose shores they inhabit, and which empty into the Mississippi, permit them so much the more easily to attempt an expedition against New Orleans.” They must be “watched [and] fortified against also by alliances with the Indian nations scattered on the east side of the river. The Chickasaws, Choctaws, Alibamons, Creeks, etc., are represented as being entirely devoted to us.” At the same time, Laussat was directed to encourage immigration, including Americans: “One means of fortifying the colony will be that of peopling it abundantly. All emigrants from Europe must, therefore, be hospitably welcomed.” Emigrants from the United States would demand more “prudence.” They should be allowed to enter “because of the capital which they will pour into Louisiana,” without losing sight that they “could end, perhaps, by becoming dangerous.” American emigrants should be settled, therefore, near the best affected settlements; English customs should be rejected; and only the French language should be encouraged.72 From the start, the colony of Louisiana was strategically important to Spain. As early as 1768, before the great migration across the Appalachians began, the Count of Aranda spoke of the “urgent necessity of establishing a permanent barrier between the growing power and ambition of the northern British colonies and the wealthy but weak provinces of Mexico.”73 In the peace negotiations during the War of Independence, Spain unsuccessfully attempted to obtain a settlement limiting the ter-

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ritory of the United States to the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, with control of the territory on the other side of the mountain divided between Spain and the Indian nations.74 When at peace with France, it resisted pressures to return Louisiana up to the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800.75 Various considerations underlay the eventual capitulation to French demands, not least the province in Italy that the Spanish royal family received in exchange. The number of inhabitants of the duchy of Parma was 415,000 in 1800, almost ten times the population of Spanish Louisiana.76 Second, Spain’s ability to resist pressure from Napoleon was limited by a metropolitan population only a third as large as that of France. Third, the rapid settlement of the trans-Applachian West made Louisiana increasingly vulnerable to invasion by frontiersmen descending from the north. As long as the territory to the east of the Mississippi was in British hands, the threat to Louisiana was mitigated by Britain’s policy of limiting movement of the population across the Proclamation Line of 1763. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 restored the Floridas to Spain, but it also removed all checks on American migration into areas of the Mississippi valley to the north. Even before the American Revolution, British immigration into the area around the posts of Natchez, Baton Rouge, Mobile, and Pensacola represented a significant addition to the hinterland of New Orleans. After the Revolution, this hinterland was further enlarged by the settlement of American immigrants along eastern tributaries of the Mississippi River.77 Spanish officials recognized the profits to be gained from commerce with these areas and in general advocated liberalization of trade to do so, at the same time fearing the descent of an invasion force by the same river system. In a military report drafted by the Baron de Carondelet in 1794, the Spanish governor wrote that the potential advantages of the rich resources of Louisiana and trade with its 40,000 inhabitants were “counterbalanced by the unmeasured ambition of a new and vigorous people, hostile to all subjection, advancing and multiplying in the silence of peace and almost unknown, with a prodigious rapidity, ever since the independence of the United States was recognized until now. . . . [T]he vast territory that was a wilderness in the year of 1780 already comprehends three states and various settlements whose total population exceeds fifty thousand souls capable of bearing arms, and is being increased annually by more than ten thousand emigrants from Europe.”78 It is significant that Carondelet



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identified settlers of the American side of the Mississippi valley as “emigrants from Europe.” Spain adopted a liberal immigration policy, without much success, to induce them to cross the river and take up residence in Spanish territory.79 At the same time, through General Wilkinson and other agents in its pay, it undertook “intrigues” to encourage separatist tendencies, with respect to the United States government, in Kentucky and other settlements across the river. Spain also relied greatly on its alliance with Indian tribes east of the Mississippi to protect Louisiana in case of attack. In 1792, 297 regular soldiers in the New Orleans garrison were augmented by 469 more sent from Havana. Governor Carondelet never realized his plan to increase the militia to 3,379 men.80 Against these numbers one can measure the importance of Indian allies in his strategy of defense against an attack mounted by Kentuckians and other western settlements: “I have proposed the means of sheltering Louisiana from their purposes and of devastating all their possessions by means of our allies, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee nations, who fearful of the usurpations of the Americans, will be disposed to make the most destructive war on them whenever incited by presents and arms.” He went on to describe deployment of Spanish troops, militia, and Indian allies at posts along the Mississippi River to defend Louisiana. One regiment was to be stationed in the area between Saint Louis and Ste. Genevieve, where “[t]he savage nations both of the Shawnees, Abenaquis, Cherokees, and Osages would form a second line of fifteen hundred men at least, which would not allow any hostile band to penetrate.” Four galleys would guard the mouth of the Ohio. In the event the enemy decided to descend to Nogales rather than besieging New Madrid, the galleys would follow them. “[P]rotected at Ecores à Margot by the fire from both shores [of the river], that is, by that of the Chickasaws who could occupy their bluffs with a thousand or more warriors, while our Indians directed their fire from the opposite bank, it is clear they would be exposed to the most complete rout.” If the invaders made it past this point, they could be stopped at Nogales, five leagues below the Yazoo, where “all the forces of the province will have had time to assemble on the Yazoo [supported] at the rear and left flank a swarm of Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians.” If not blocked there, the invasion could be stopped at a rebuilt fort at Galveztown, where “One hundred and fifty militiamen of the district, supported by a body of Choctaw Indians, would suffice to

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prevent the enemy from penetrating into the province.” It suffices to count the number of Indians mentioned at each defensive position to appreciate the essential military role assigned to them by the Spanish governor.81 The Genet conspiracy of 1793 was but one of a series of plots involving an invasion force of American frontiersmen acting in concert with a maritime power that punctuated the last decade of Spanish rule, and indeed extended beyond it if one adds the Burr conspiracy. In this context, France made the persuasive argument that it was more capable of defending Louisiana than Spain itself. It is also important to note that Napoleon gave written assurance to Spain that France would never alienate Louisiana to another power. From the Spanish perspective, one advantage of French domination was that it was less likely than the United States to people the left bank rapidly. Mariano Luis de Urquijo, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, wrote in 1800, “It would be very useful to place a barrier between [the Americans] and ourselves — a barrier against their plans of colonization — by means of a nation like France, which lacks great talent for colonizing and also the necessary resources, in view of her European affairs.”82 Under the Federalist governments of Washington and Adams and the first republican mandate of Jefferson, the United States pursued a consistent policy of opposition to any threat that either of the two great powers, England or France, replace Spain in its sovereignty over Louisiana. In 1790, at the time of the Nootka Sound crisis between England and Spain, Jefferson was very clear in his “Considerations on Louisiana” on the danger to the interests of the United States “should [Great Britain] attempt the conquest of Louisiana and the Floridas.” Fearing that control of the west bank of the Mississippi would enable Great Britain to seduce the inhabitants of the east bank and to monopolize trade with them, Jefferson warned: “She will encircle us completely, by these possessions on our land-board, and her fleets on the sea-board. Instead of two neighbors balancing each other, we shall have one, with more than the strength of both.”83 In 1802, when the prospect was French takeover of Louisiana, he described its implications in similarly dramatic terms: “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our



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inhabitants.”84 Allowing for rhetorical exaggeration (the population west of the Appalachians was still only 7 percent of the American population in 1800), the importance placed by Jefferson on the growing population of the West is clear. In contrast to England and France, the presumed weakness of Spain meant the United States had little to gain by the cost of war compared to what would inevitably be won through diplomacy. For Thomas Jefferson, movement of settlers from the left to the right bank of the Mississippi could only work to the advantage of the United States in the long run. Commenting on Spanish attempts to induce trans-Appalachian settlers to cross the river, he wrote: “I wish a hundred thousand of our inhabitants would accept the invitation. It will be the means of delivering to us peaceably, what may otherwise cost us a war. In the meantime, we may complain of this seduction of our inhabitants just enough to make them [Spaniards] believe we think it is a very wise policy for them. & confirm them in it.”85 The vigorous opposition of the United States to the retrocession of Louisiana to France was prompted by its perception that France was a much more formidable enemy than Spain. By 1800, as a result of the growth of the population in the trans-Appalachian West, assurance of free navigation of the Mississippi and the right of deposit in New Orleans had become critical to maintaining the loyalty of the West to the United States. American diplomats used the military potential represented by frontiersmen to put pressure on France in negotiating guarantees of access to the Gulf of Mexico. Congress debated bills authorizing the mobilization of as many as 50,000 militia from settlers in the West.86 Logistically, this was impossible; and Jefferson’s policy was in any case one of avoiding war at any cost.87 To obtain the port of New Orleans and the Floridas, or at least promises from France to allow free navigation of the Mississippi, he was quite willing to promise in return American acceptance of perpetual French occupation of the trans-Mississippi West.88 The small population of Spanish Louisiana meant it had little present value; and fears were expressed that its acquisition would produce a further dispersion of the population of the United States inimical to economic growth. No one anticipated at the time the possibility of rapid economic development of the trans-Appalachian West simultaneous with settlement of the trans-Mississippi West, and both happening without hampering the economic development of the Atlantic states. Once Napoleon offered the “whole” of Louisiana to the United States, albeit

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without the Floridas, Republicans did not have any trouble rationalizing acceptance of the proposal. Nevertheless, a pamphlet defending acquisition of Louisiana warned that the United States should delay opening it to settlement: “So long as Louisiana appertained to Spain, whose pacific and unenterprising character promised to make her a quiet neighbour, . . . the acquisition of that immense country was by no means a desirable object to the United States, who are already possessed of more than ten times as much land as they have hands to cultivate. . . . [T]o a people already possessing a superabundance of land, the acquisition of as much more, without any increase of population, offers no present advantage; on the contrary it would rather serve to depreciate that which they already possess; and what is worse, may operate to diminish the national strength, by dispersing the people over an immense wilderness, instead of drawing them together as closely as may be consistent with the fertility of our lands, and other natural advantages.”89 At the same time that Jefferson proclaimed that the United States was the nest from which the rest of the Americas would be populated, he also said in 1801, when the Mississippi River still defined its western boundary, that it was fortunate in “possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.”90 After the acquisition of Louisiana, but seven weeks before the actual transfer of sovereignty, Jefferson wrote to Dupont de Nemours: “Our policy will be to form New Orleans, and the country on both sides of it on the Gulf of Mexico, into a State; and . . . to transplant our Indians into it, constituting them a Marechaussee to prevent emigrants crossing the river, until we shall have filled up all the vacant country on this side. This will secure both Spain and us as to the mines of Mexico, for half a century, and we may safely trust the provisions for that time to the men who shall live in it.”91 Jefferson’s comment is eerily correct with respect to the timing of the Mexican-American war, if not to the actual pace and pattern of settlement of the trans-Mississippi West after 1803. Nevertheless, statements like his, made after Napoleon offered the “whole” of Louisiana to the United States, should not obscure initial lack of interest in the immediate takeover of the entire territory of Spanish Louisiana. Its small population meant it had little current value. Extension of the territory of an underpopulated nation, by the criteria of the time, risked exacerbation of sectional differences and retardation of economic development. For analogous reasons, the Marqués de Casa Yrujo argued after the fact



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that Spain need not be too upset by American assumption of sovereignty over Louisiana: “It is true that until now we have seen its population increase in an incalculable ratio; but notwithstanding the territory which they possess is now so extensive that even supposing the continuation of the same ratio — which is not believable — two centuries at least would be necessary to populate the country as heavily as are some of the most deserted provinces of Spain.” Within its boundaries prior to the Louisiana Purchase, he calculated, only 30 million of 600 million acres were under cultivation, and only 10 million were cultivated with the perfection to which they were susceptible. If it were possible to bring half the population of Europe to this country, and settle them on uncultivated lands, there would yet remain sufficient land to accommodate the other half. The United States contains one million square miles; if they were peopled as thickly as England, Germany, France, and other European countries, they would have at least a population of one hundred and fifty millions. In view of the above, your Excellency may see that it is a kind of madness, with only five millions of people already scattered over so extensive surface, to add a new world of woods to the actual possessions.92 What Yrujo did not foresee, nor could he be expected to, was the transportation revolution that made possible the increase of population in the area of the Louisiana Purchase from less than 50,000 in 1800 to more than 3 million in 1860 without retarding economic growth east of Mississippi river. As it turned out, the enlarged national market resulting from territorial expansion enabled the United States to industrialize without ever approaching the population density in Europe. Even today, the ratio of 290 million inhabitants to 3.6 million square miles of territory in the United States, approximately 80 per square mile, is well below the 150 per square mile in Western Europe in 1800, which has increased since then to around 600 per square mile. In the decades that followed the Louisiana Purchase, perspectives on its demographic significance evolved as the area received hundreds of thousands of immigrants as diverse as the thousands who had arrived in the eighteenth century. These newcomers interacted with the indigenous, African, French, Spanish, and other peoples already there without ever completely effacing the diverse founding cultures. The complex process of population growth and cultural evolution in this part of the North

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American continent is not yet finished. It remains contingent on future developments that we would be arrogant to think we can better foresee than did observers at the beginning of the eighteenth century. On the contrary, demographic factors that they took into account warrant attention two hundred years later: the growth rate of the population in adjacent territories, especially Mexico, and population density, are today measured in terms of the much greater demand put on natural resources by each person as a result of technological advances since 1800.

Notes 1. This is my impression from a perusal of the pages on the Louisiana Purchase in several dozen college textbooks. Jefferson’s vision of the “immense, uncharted territory” as “land for American farmers” is adopted without acknowledging the role of Spanish and French explorers in charting it well before the Lewis and Clark expedition, nor the inhabitants from whom the land would have to be taken. Another refers to the inhabitants, but only through their description by a critic of the Louisiana Purchase as a “Gallo-Hispanic-Indian” collection of “savages and adventurers.” The image of a vast, unsettled territory is also evoked by the title of Jon Kukla’s excellent monograph on the Louisiana Purchase, A Wilderness So Immense (New York: Knopf, 2003). The book itself gives due attention to Louisianians and concludes that the “human significance” of the event lies in its incorporation of a city “filled with Catholics, Creoles, French, Spanish, Native Americans, West Indians and Anglo-Americans, [w]ith Irish, Germans, and countless others soon to arrive,” into a public life that was until then largely “the domain of Protestant, agrarian, English-speaking men” (338–39). Also on the positive side, according to the National History Standards proposed in 1996, American high school students should be able to “[a]nalyze how the Louisiana Purchase affected relations with Native Americans and the lives of various inhabitants of the Louisiana Territory” (National Standards for History, Basic edition [Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools, 1996]; electronic version: www.sscnet.ucla.edu/nchs/standards/era4–5–12.html). 2. Antonio Acosta Rodríguez, La Población de Luisiana española, 1763–1803 (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1979). 3. The problem is analogous to that presented by the methodology of retrospective diagnosis in the history of medicine: using the concepts of modern medicine to explain diseases in the past. See the summary of this methodological debate in Karol Weaver, “ ‘She crushed the child’s fragile skull’: Disease, Infanticide, and Enslaved Women in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue,” French Colonial History 5 (2004): 95. Just as it is “the historian’s responsibility to show how a particular society reacted to and understood a particular disease,” so should he describe how demographic developments were perceived and understood in the past.



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4. As remarked by Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz in The Population of Latin America: A History ([Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974], 8), two types of written sources are needed to study any population: those that describe its characteristics at a given point in time and those that record its vital statistics (births, marriages, and deaths). For Louisiana in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, censuses supply the first type of information, and sacramental records have the potential of supplying the second. The aggregate results of censuses were circulated soon after they were taken, and they remain available to researchers in archives. Manuscripts of the forms on which information about households was collected are also extant for certain censuses. Many censuses have also been transcribed and published, alas all too often with the introduction of errors in addition to those that were inevitably made in taking the census in the first place. Use of sacramental records to determine vital rates requires their translation into machine-readable format. This work has only just begun, but it is sufficiently advanced to allow my use of data on slave baptisms later in this essay. 5. “Resumé général du recensement fait dans la province de la Louisiane, District de la Mobile et Place de Pensacola en 1788,” and “Population de la Louisiane en l’Année 1797,” Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, Correspondance consulaire pour la Nouvelle-Orléans, I (1804–17), 55, 6; “Census of Louisiana, in the Year 1785” and “Census of the Districts or Posts of Louisiana and West Florida,” in An Account of Louisiana (Philadelphia: T. and G. Palmer, 1803), appendices 2 and 3, lxxxlv–lxxxvii. These censuses also appeared in the translation of this pamphlet entitled Mémoires sur la Louisiane et la NouvelleOrléans, by M. *** (Paris, 1804). 7. “A General return of the Census of the Territory of Orleans taken for the year 1806,” New Orleans, 31 December 1806, in The Territory of Orleans, vol. 9, The Territorial Papers of the United States, ed. Clarence Carter (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940), 702; “Aggregate amount of each description of persons within the Territory of Orleans in 1811,” in the report entitled Aggregate amount of each description of persons within the United States of America, and the Territories thereof, agreeably to actual enumeration made according to law, in the year 1810 (Washington, 1811), 82; “Aggregate amount of each description of persons within the territory of Louisiana,” 10 January 1811, Saint Louis, in The Territory of Louisiana-Missouri, 1806–1814 (1943), vol. 14, Territorial Papers, ed. Carter, 431. 8. The category for Indian slaves appears for the last time in the “Census of Louisiana” dated “New Orleans, 2 September 1771,” but taken in 1769. Technically Spanish, this census was based on French schema like other censuses of the 1760s. The results of the census are transcribed in Lawrence Kinnaird, comp., “Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765–1794,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 196. The original is in the Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Papeles Procedentes de la Isla de Cuba, leg. 2357. On the continuing enslavement of Indians, but reclassification as persons of African descent, in the Spanish period, see

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Kimberly Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 10, 15. 9. Census of 1763 in Jacqueline Voorhies, trans. and comp., Some Late Eighteenth-Century Louisianians: Census Records of the Colony, 1758–1796 (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1973), 103–5; census of 1769 in Kinnaird, “Spain in the Mississippi Valley,” 196; census report, 12 May 1777, cited in John Caughey, Bernardo de Galvez in Louisiana, 1776–1783 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), 78; and copy of 1788 census in French Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères. In the last document, prepared for the French government, the categories for pardos and morenos for free persons of color and slaves were collapsed from four to two sets of information, one for “Mulatres et négres libres” and the other for “Mulatres et négres esclaves.” 10. Thomas Fiehrer, “The African Presence in Colonial Louisiana: An Essay on the Continuity of Caribbean Culture,” in Louisiana’s Black Heritage, ed. Robert Macdonald, John Kemp, and Edward Haas (New Orleans: Louisiana State Museum, 1979), 19–25. There was considerable variation in the racial categories into which the populations of Spanish colonies were divided. The 1753 census of Mexico City used six racial categories: Spanish, mestizo, castizo, mulatto, black, and Indian (Patricia Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” Hispanic American Historical Review 62, no. 4 [November 1982]: 577). 11. Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for the United States, Regions, Divisions, and States,” Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, Working Paper Series No. 56 (September 2002): www.census.gov/ population/www/documentation/twps0056.html. 12. U.S. Constitution, 1787, Article I, sec. 2. 13. “Queries respecting Louisiana, with the Answers,” in Territorial Papers, ed. Carter, 9:32. 14. John Pintard to the Secretary of the Treasury, New Rochelle, N.Y., 14 September 1803, in Territorial Papers, ed. Carter, 9:51. 15. Account of Louisiana, lxxxv–lxxxvii. 16. Ibid., 23–29; Peter Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685–1790,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southwest, ed. Peter Wood (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 38–39, table 1, “Estimated Southern Population by Race and Region, 1685–1790.” 17. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2, Continental America 1800–1867 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 98, table 1, “Indian Populations, Western Borderlands,” adapted from the Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1845, lists 25,000 Sioux and 7,000 Assiniboine. 18. In the Lower Mississippi valley alone, the colonial population overtook the number of Indian inhabitants in the 1780s, according to Daniel Usner, Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi



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Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 115. 19. Account of Louisiana, xxxvii. 20. Charles Gayarré, The Spanish Domination, vol. 3, History of Louisiana, 4 vols. (New Orleans: Armand Hawkins, 1885), 416, 445. 21. Account of Louisiana, appendix 6, xc. 22. The censuses of 1788, 1797, and 1803 are cited above in notes 3 and 4. The 1795 census is included in the dispatch of Governor Carondelet, New Orleans, to Pedro de Acuna, 24 January 1795, Madrid, in the microfilm edition of the Records of the Diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas, 1576–1803, roll 3 (1791–January 1795), University of Notre Dame, 1967. Essentially the same census, but dated five years later, is found in the Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Papeles de Cuba 1815, “Estado de los Curatos, Curas, y Miseoneros de estas Provincias de la Luisiana y Florida Occidental, de sus Poblaciones, y numero de habitants Catolicos y Protestantes. 1800.” All the district totals are the same as in 1795, except New Orleans and its suburbs (6,000 rather than 5,106), Cabahanoce (1,210 rather than 1,299), Lafourche de Chetimachas (1,100 in 1800, but not listed in 1795), Manchac (3,048 rather than 303, probably an error of transcription in the 1800 census), Pensacola (350 rather than 290), and the total population of posts in Spanish Illinois (2,996 rather than 3,014). 23. For example, the censuses of 1797 and 1803 both reported exactly 3,948 whites, 1,335 free persons of color, and 2,773 slaves living in the city of New Orleans. 24. Census of New Orleans by Matthew Flannery, 5 August 1805, reprinted in New Orleans in 1805: A Directory and a Census (New Orleans: Pelican, 1936). At that date, the faubourg Ste. Marie had 1,087 inhabitants. 25. The graph represents the total population of Louisiana reported in French and Spanish censuses of 1721–23, 1726, 1731–32, 1737, 1763, 1766, 1771, 1777, 1788, 1795, 1797, and 1803, and the population of all territories and states formed out of the area of the Louisiana Purchase in federal censuses of the United States from 1810 to 1860. Transcriptions of the aggregate returns of colonial censuses have been compiled by Paul Lachance, “Louisiana Census Data Set,” in AfroLouisiana History and Genealogy, 1699–1860 (electronic resource), ed. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). The nineteenth-century population in the area of the Louisiana Purchase has been reconstructed from historical data of the U.S. Census Bureau in Gibson and Jung, “Historical Census Statistics.” 26. Archives Nationales Section d’Outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, G1 464 for Mobile and vicinity (28 June 1721), New Orleans and vicinity (24 November 1721), Natchitoches (1 May 1722), Mississippi River from Cannes Brulees to Tunica Indian village (13 May 1722), Natchez (19 January 1723), and Arkansas (18 February 1723). In addition to 2,666 Europeans and Africans, these censuses enumerated 183 Indian slaves for a total population of 2,849. 27. The June census of 1766 counted 773 persons in Upper Louisiana, 60 at

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the Arkansas post, and 713 in St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve. Less than the 941 persons in the Illinois Country according to a census taken in 1737, and 1,305 in a census taken in 1752, the 1766 figure does not include French inhabitants and slaves who remained on the east bank of the Mississippi River after its cession to Great Britain in 1763. The rate of increase of the population of Upper Louisiana in the French colonial period appears to have been higher than it was in Lower Louisiana. Censuses for Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and three other villages in the 1760s are summarized in Evarts Greene and Virginia Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (1932; Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1966), 186–88. Their total population varies from 870 to 2,950. 28. Differences in the areas covered by censuses of the French colonial period complicate calculation of growth rates. Between the censuses of 1721–23 and those of 1731–32, the rate of increase for Upper and Lower Louisiana, excluding the Gulf ports, which were not included in the second set of censuses, was 11.3 percent per annum. Again excluding the Gulf ports, for which we do not have censuses in the 1760s, the rate of increase in Upper and Lower Louisiana from 1737 to June 1766 was 1.7 percent per annum. 29. In Upper Louisiana, the growth rate between 1766 and 1788 was 4.9 percent per annum, slightly less than in Lower Louisiana. However, from 1788 to 1803, when the growth rate declined in Lower Louisiana, it increased in Upper Louisiana to 7.4 percent per annum. Its proportion of the total population of Spanish Louisiana increased from 6 to 15 percent. Between 1803 and 1820, when the growth rate of Lower Louisiana was almost 10 percent per annum, it was even higher in Upper Louisiana, and population growth there continued to outpace that of the state of Louisiana in the last forty years of the antebellum period. 30. Natchez, Manchac, and Feliciane are located on the east bank of the Mississippi. New Madrid is situated on the west bank within the boundaries of the state of Missouri today. 31. Carl Brasseaux, Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765–1803 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 73. 32. Gilbert Din, “Spain’s Immigration Policy and Efforts in Louisiana during the American Revolution,” in A Refuge for All Ages: Immigration in Louisiana History, ed. Carl Brasseaux, vol. 10, The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1996), 188. 33. Gilbert Din, The Canary Islanders of Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). 34. Paul Lachance, “The Foreign French,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 104–5. 35. Comparison of the number of whites, free persons of color, and slaves in the 1797 census with the number reported in the censuses of 1788 and 1803 abuts against the problem that the 1797 census, unlike the other two, did not break down the population of rural areas adjacent to New Orleans by race and legal



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condition. Even so, it reported 17,860 whites in Lower Louisiana, about 2,000 more than the 15,728 whites in the 1788 census and the 15,961 whites in the 1803 census. If the white population did increase from 15,728 in 1788 to 17,860 in 1797, it did so at a much lower rate of increase, 1.4 percent per year, than during the preceding two decades; and this slowdown was followed by a rate of decrease of -1.9 percent per year between 1797 and 1803, within the range of natural decrease in a high-mortality milieu like Louisiana’s. 36. Gwendolyn Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of AfroCreole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), appendix A, 382–84. 37. Martin de Navarro, “Political Reflections on the Present Condition of the Province of Louisiana,” Archivo General de Indias, Papeles de Cuba, Estados del Misisipi, no. 7, in Louisiana under the Rule of Spain, France, and the United States, 1785–1807; Social, Economic, and Political Conditions of the Territory Represented in the Louisiana Purchase, as Portrayed in Hitherto Unpublished Contemporary accounts by Paul Alliot and Various Spanish, French, English, and American Officials, ed. and trans. James Alexander Robertson, 2 vols. (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1910–11 [1969]), 1:244. Although dated here as ca. 1785, its actual date is 24 September 1780. Arthur Whitaker, trans. and ed., Documents Relating to the Commercial Policy of Spain in the Floridas with Incidental Reference to Louisiana ([Deland: Florida State Historical Society, 1931], 226n), provides the date of 24 September 1780, as does Din, “Spain’s Immigration Policy,” 196n. Navarro estimates on page 250 of Robertson that the current population of Louisiana as 21,000 is considerably below the 32,062 persons enumerated in 1785, but approximately what one would interpolate it to be in 1780 from the population of 17,925 in the preceding census of 1777. 38. John Clark, New Orleans, 1718–1812: An Economic History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1970), 223, 228. 39. Jean Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: L’évolution du régime de “l’Exclusif ” de 1763 à 1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 739, 759. 40. These figures exclude Natchez, Manchac, Feliciana, Pensacola, and Mobile, to be consistent with other statistics for the area included in the Louisiana Purchase. The estimate of 10,000 whites is based on interpolation between 1777 and 1785 censuses. 41. The higher estimate of 1.8 percent per annum allows for an undercount in the 1803 census and a total population of 50,000 in that year. 42. To the extent the census of 1803 underreported the slave population, the decline of the slave population may already have been partially offset by large imports of Africans in 1801 and 1802. 43. Patrick Manning, database of Louisiana sacramental records, Saint Louis Cathedral, slave baptisms, 1744–1803, developed for his collaborative research project with Gwendolyn Hall, “Africans in French, Spanish, and Early American Louisiana,” funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1991. 44. Hall recounts how free people of African descent continued to be lumped

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together with whites in censuses of the remote district of Pointe Coupee until 1803 (Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 258–59). 45. The annual rate of increase of free persons of color was 6.2 percent between 1769 and 1777, 8.6 percent between 1777 and 1785, and 14.4 percent between 1785 and 1788, before falling to 2.0 percent between 1788 and 1797. 46. Number of manumissions by decade, from Hanger, Bounded Lives, 21, table 2, “Decade by Type of Manumission, New Orleans.” The manumission rate was estimated by dividing the average number of manumissions per year in the 1770s by the slave population of New Orleans and outlying plantation districts in 1777, and in the 1780s by the slave population of the same area in 1788. The same calculation could not be made using the 1797 census because it reported only the slave population in the city of New Orleans; but the average number of manumissions per year in the 1790s could be compared with slave baptisms at Saint Louis Cathedral corresponding to births in that decade in Manning’s data set. 47. As calculated from censuses of Louisiana, the growth rate of free persons of color between 1788 and 1797 was 2 percent per year, but the number living in the rural area adjacent to New Orleans was not reported in 1797. In 1788, 382 free persons of color were enumerated in this area, and 1,026 in 1810. Free persons of color were also undercounted in the 1803 census. Between 1788 and 1806, both of which appear to be relatively accurate, the growth rate of free persons of color was 4.4 percent per year, lower than it had been between 1769 and 1788. However, a slower rate of growth in the 1790s is less certain for free persons of color than for whites and slaves. The number of manumissions increased steadily from 44 per year in the 1770s to 53 in the 1780s, to 63 in the 1790s, to 91 between 1800 and 1803. 48. John McCusker and Russell Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 54, table 3.1, “Estimated Population of the British Colonies in the Western Hemisphere, 1650–1770” (for 1750); Gibson and Jung, “Historical Census Statistics,” tables A-26 and A-25 (for 1790 and 1800). 49. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); 340 (for 1774); Arthur Preston Whitaker, The Spanish‑American Frontier, 1783‑1795: The Westward Movement and the Spanish Retreat in the Mississippi Valley (1927; Lincoln: University of Nebraska press, 1970), 26 (for 1785); Gibson and Jung, “Historical Census Statistics,” tables A-26 and A-25 (for 1790 and 1800). These are conservative estimates that do not include regions of Virginia beyond the Appalachians. Clark mentions a population of 136,000 in western Virginia and the Northwest Territory by 1800 (New Orleans, 212). 50. Kukla calls attention to the disparity in the rate of population growth on either side of the Mississippi River (A Wilderness So Immense, 113). 51. See the extensive area still attributed to Indian tribes in the map of the United States ca. 1800 in Arthur Preston Whitaker, The Mississippi Question 1795–1803: A Study in Trade, Politics, and Diplomacy (American Historical As-



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sociation, 1934; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1962). 52. Wood, Powhatan’s Mantle, 38–39. Wood’s estimate is almost identical to the 45,000 Indians, including 13,500 warriors, estimated in Whitaker, The Spanish‑American Frontier, 24. 53. Francisco Bouligny, “Plan de defensa de la Provincia de Luisiana,” Ms. 243, Kuntz Collection, Howard-Tilton Library, Special Collections, Tulane, p. 8, cited in Thomas Fiehrer, “The Baron of Carondelet as Agent of Bourbon Reform,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1977), 2:517–18. 54. Meinig, Continental America, 98. 55. Alan Houston, “Population Politics: Benjamin Franklin and the Peopling of North America,” Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California — San Diego, Working Paper No. 88 (December 2003): www.ccis-ucsd .org/PUBLICATIONS/wrkg88.pdf. 56. Benjamin Franklin, “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c” (1751), in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959– ), 18 vols., 4:231, as paraphrased in Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York: Scribner, 1976), 22. 57. Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, Paris, 25 January 1786, in Jefferson Papers, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University, Press, 1954), 9:218, cited in DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 49. 58. Jedidiah Morse, The American Geography; or View of the Present Situation of the United States of America (Elizabethtown, N.J., 1789), 469, cited in DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 41. 59. Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3:393–94. The authenticity of Aranda’s 1783 memoir to the king of Spain is discussed by Arthur Whitaker, “The PseudoAranda Memoir of 1783,” Hispanic American Historical Review 17 (1939): 287– 313, and in the same issue by A. R. Wright, “The Aranda Memorial, Genuine or Forged,” 445–60, cited in Richard Morris, The Peace-Makers: The Great Powers and American Independence (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 425. 60. François Barbé-Marbois, The History of Louisiana (1830; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 276. 61. Éleonore François Élie Moustier, French ambassador to the United States from 1787 to 1789, to Montmorin, Minister for Foreign Affairs, 10 March 1789, cited in E. Wilson Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy (1934; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 60–66. The table of contents and a chapter of Moustier’s memoir have been published in “Notes and Documents: Moustier’s Memoir on Louisiana,” ed. E. Wilson Lyon, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22, no. 2 (September 1935): 251–66. His estimate of the population of Louisiana is slightly higher than the number enumerated in the 1788 census: “Sa population actuelle se monte à environ 20 000 Europeens ou Creoles et le nombre des negres peut être évalué à 25 000” (255). 62. Considérations sur la Louisiane par le Citoyen Lyonnet, Adressées au Comité de Salut-Public” (1794), 57–61, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Mémoires et documents, États-Unis, X (1793–1812). 63. “Mémoire et reconnaissance des états de l’ouest, du Nord-ouest, et la

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haute et basse Louisiane . . . , par M. Collot” (an VIII or IX — 1799 or 1800), 210–15, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Mémoires et documents, États-Unis, X (1793–1812). 64. Ibid., 214–16, 266–68. 65. Pierre-François Page, Traité d’économie politique et de commerce des colonies, 2 vols. (Paris: Brochot père et compagnie, an IX — 1800), 1:232–47. 66. Louis-Narcisse Deslozières, Voyage à la Louisiane, et sur le continent de l’Amérique septentrionale, fait dans les années 1794–1798, 2 vols. (Paris: Dentu, Imprimeur-Libraire, an XI — 1802), 1:100, 263. 67. Jacquemin, Mémoire sur la Louisiane, contenant la description du sol et des productions de cette île, et les mesures de la rendre florissante en peu de tems (Paris: Imprimerie de J.M. Eberhart, an XI — 1803). 68. Pontalba, Memoir, in History of Louisiana, by Gayarré, 3:442. 69. Ibid., 3:433. 70. Ibid., 3:425–32. 71. James Pitot, Observations on the Colony of Louisiana from 1796 to 1802, trans. and ed. Henry Pitot (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 104. 72. “Instructions by Minister Decrés to French Officials,” in Louisiana under the Rule of Spain, France, and the United States, ed. and trans. Robertson, 1:361–74. 73. Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 51; Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3:392. 74. DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 36–37. 75. Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 79–98. 76. Statistics for Parma in Italy in Jan Lahmeyer, comp., “Population Statistics: Growth of the Population per Country in a Historical Perspective, Including Their Administrative Divisions and Principal Towns,” www.populstat .info/. 77. Clark, New Orleans, 181–82. 78. Baron de Carondelet, “Military Report on Louisiana and West Florida,” 24 November 1794, New Orleans, in Louisiana under the Rule of Spain, France, and the United States, ed. and trans. Robertson, 1:297–98. 79. Whitaker, Spanish‑American Frontier, 103; Lawrence Kinnaird, “American Penetration into Spanish Louisiana,” in New Spain and the Anglo-American West: Historical Contributions presented to Herbert Eugene Bolton, ed. George Hammond, 2 vols. (1932; repr., New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1969), 211–37. 80. Fiehrer, “Baron de Carondelet,” 2:459–60. 81. Carondelet, “Military Report,” in Louisiana under the Rule of Spain, France, and the United States, ed. and trans. Robertson, 1:300–309. 82. Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 104. 83. Thomas Jefferson, “Considerations on Louisiana” (1794), in Louisiana under the Rule of Spain, France, and the United States, ed. and trans. Robertson, 1: 265.



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84. Thomas Jefferson to Robert R. Livingston, 18 April 1802, in 1803: Jefferson’s Decision, ed. Richard Skolnik (New York: Chelsea House, 1969), 36–37. 85. Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, Philadelphia, 2 April 1791, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Ford, 6:239, cited in DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 52. 86. Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 179. 87. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (1889–91; New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1986), 285. 88. Ibid., 298. 89. Sylvestris (St. George Tucker), “Reflections on the Cession of Louisiana to the United States” (Washington City: Samuel Harrison Smith, 1803), in Magazine of History 43, no. 3 (extra number 171): 133–34. The pamphlet is dated 10 August 1803. 90. Thomas Jefferson, inaugural address, Washington, 4 March 1801. 91. Thomas Jefferson to Dupont de Nemours, 1 November 1803, in United States Dept. of State, State Papers and Correspondence Bearing upon the Purchase of the Territory of Louisiana (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1903), 261–62. 92. The Marqués de Casa Yrujo to his Excellency, Don Pedro Cevallos y Guerre, 24 July 1803, “Important Reflections on the Cession of Louisiana, etc.,” in Louisiana under the Rule of Spain, France, and the United States, ed. and trans. Robertson, 2:73–75.

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hen he visited New Orleans in 1805, the Philadelphia journalist John Watson recorded his impressions of the new American city with the careful descriptive detail latter-day anthropologists employ in their field notes on exotic cultures. And, like them, he paid particular attention to religious behavior: “On Monday (the day of Ascension) the priests, with the host and an altar, issue from the cathedral and go round the Place D’Arms in solemn procession, chanting, crossing, and smoking frankincense. As the host is held on high, the people fall down and worship in the street.” He later clarifies the distinctiveness of this mode of religiosity when he notes that “There is no such thing as public preaching” in New Orleans.1 Watson approached New Orleans and its Catholicism as a curiosity and was among the earliest of many who helped to fashion the persistent myth of the city’s essential difference from the Anglophone Protestant root onto which it was grafted by the Louisiana Purchase. This essay grants the accuracy of Watson’s observations of the phenomenal differences between Catholic and Protestant worship. It also concedes that there were other features of Catholicism that set New Orleans apart from the cities of the early republic situated in former British colonies. What this essay rejects, however, is any assessment that casts religion as a monolithic stumbling block to the city’s “Americanization.” Religion is a multifarious cultural and social institution, in which church, clergy, congregation, religious organizations, belief, and practice compete for defining prominence. What follows is a disaggregation of some of these component elements in an attempt to uncover a more complete understanding of the degree to which the Catholic past of New Orleans proved an obstacle to the city’s incorporation into the young American republic. This exercise delineates two distinct strands of the city’s colonial religious history, differentiating



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the history of the Church from the history of Catholicism. The result is a reading of colonial religion’s influence on the city’s early nineteenthcentury identity that suggests that the debate that pits New Orleans’ successful Americanization against entrenched distinctiveness rests on a flawed dichotomy between British and Continental colonial religious experience. The confessional divide did distinguish the two colonial episodes from one another in some ways, but the Atlantic’s division of colony from motherland engendered a unity in key aspects of early American religion, Catholic and Protestant, that provided important elements of a shared political culture. On the one hand, this essay argues that the ecclesiastical history of Louisiana, at least as it unfolded in New Orleans, shares in general outline that of the British colonies. The Catholic Church, far from being an impediment to the city’s acculturation to republicanism, aided the process of “Americanization” because it provided a space in which New Orleanians asserted the interests of the colonial polity in opposition to what they perceived as metropolitan or imperial interference. The broader Catholic religiosity of New Orleans, on the other hand, harbored practices, traditions, and institutions that hindered that process. Matters of race and gender stood at the heart of the cleavage between the responses of Church and church, that is, between the institutional manifestation of Catholicism and its popular enactment by those constituting its congregation and its nonclerical personnel. While the Church in New Orleans served as a site for the rehearsal of white male republican authority, the black majority of its congregation and the female religious personnel who nurtured it rendered Catholicism more subversive of the extension of the Planter’s Republic into Louisiana than did the tired tropes of the Popish Plot and paganish ceremonies.2 Religion served both to facilitate the city’s assimilation into the American polity and to retard it because it served early modern Europeans as a crucial ideological lens through which they viewed and enacted relations of power. Theories of government were inherently grounded in the recognition of the primacy of divine authority. Filmer’s well-known analogy of patriarchy to monarchy depended on a universal understanding of the ultimate hierarchy embodied in the relationship between God and humankind.3 Eighteenth-century republicanism, though undeniably a product of the Enlightenment, was no less dependent upon religion as a popular ideological framework within which people understood and accepted its principles — or rejected them. The Reformation represents a critical turn-

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ing point in this regard, because it opened for renegotiation several hierarchies of authority, most notably between the heads of Church and state, bishop and priest, and minister and congregation. Less well-known is the Reformation’s engagement of female religious authority in both practical and symbolic forms. Catholics and Protestants resolved these issues in different ways. Most significantly, Protestants put an end to the tradition of nuns and convents while Catholics expanded both the size and scope of institutional female religious life. France was the site of a particularly vigorous resurgence that introduced a revolutionary activism into female religious life. The divergent tracks of female piety taken by Protestants and Catholics, particularly French Catholics, resonated in the way that Catholics and Protestants encountered and adopted republicanism and created tensions in the era of the Louisiana Purchase. Differences between Anglo-Americans and Louisianians sown by the Reformation-era gender divide were balanced by similarities engendered by the colonial situation. The Catholics of Louisiana shared with the Anglicans of the British mainland colonies a growing desire for autonomy. As distinctive colonial interests emerged and local elites matured, metropolitan authorities of Church and state were perceived variously as unhelpful, irritating, meddlesome, and tyrannical. The lay leadership of Louisiana’s colonial Catholic Church, like that of Virginia’s Anglican Church, rehearsed self-government and acquired practice in it. That experience served both groups well when they became citizens of a republic. The double nature of my argument and its preoccupation with recognizing similarity along with difference is indebted to trends in Reformation history over the past thirty years. The posthumous publication in 1968 of a series of lectures given by the otherwise obscure Outram Evennett broke with the traditional narrative of a Protestant Reformation inspired by Martin Luther’s revolt, followed by a reactionary Catholic Counter-Reformation. Instead of a tug-of-war between Catholics and Protestants over doctrine and ecclesiastical governance, Evennett posited a single religious renewal movement with multiple constituencies and divergent outcomes. Others, notably Jean Delumeau and John Bossy, have subsequently elaborated this interpretation of the process and delineated the protagonists and their causes more clearly.4 The revisionist understanding of the Reformation that has emerged runs roughly as follows. As early as the twelfth century, Western European Christians began to register discontent with the religious status quo. Many objected to the “worldliness” of the Church, and enjoined poverty



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and humility upon its members. Others registered dissatisfaction with the range of religious observance available to them and sought more meaningful forms of personal piety. Some questioned the value of priestly mediation and advocated mysticism and scriptural authority as the truest ways to know God and achieve personal salvation. Both laypeople and members of the clergy advanced these challenges, but certain strands of reformist thought had more natural affinities with the laity than with the clergy, and the differences hinged on the divergence of personal and institutional aims. For example, Francis of Assisi’s rigorous imitation of Christ through literal poverty, self-mortification, and humility held great appeal for laymen and -women seeking salvation. Here was a way to approach God by means of simple actions within anyone’s capacity. Francis’s example was equally attractive to men and women who wished to embrace the more challenging commitment of vowed religious life, but it posed difficulties at the institutional level. How could a community of monks or nuns ensure its survival if it embraced absolute poverty? How could decisions be taken if universal self-abnegation precluded formal leadership within the community? This tension between the religious aspirations of the laity who comprised the congregation of the faithful and the perpetuation of an institutional Church was, according to revisionist Reformation history, the central challenge of the sixteenth-century Reformation — Protestant and Catholic. Some of the things sought by the church — the community of the faithful — were possibly obtainable, according to some, without benefit of clergy. Both mysticism and a belief in scriptural authority held out the possibility of an individual’s making a connection to the divine without the guidance or intervention of either clergy or the sacraments they administered. The threat of these trends to the Church as an institution is obvious. Other trends were less radical, but no less dangerous. The Franciscan revival of the late twelfth century spawned a rash of new lay associations generally known as confraternities. Members of confraternities exhibited their piety through charity, prayers for the dead, penance and self-mortification, and attendance at a chapel supported by like-minded others. The parish priest and the church organization he served were second in line for attention and material support. On the eve of the Lutheran revolt there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the laity had found considerable satisfaction in the piety that took shape in the centuries following the Franciscan revival. Confraternities (known as “guilds” in Britain) provided fellowship and support for the

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faithful, community observance of the feast of Corpus Christi celebrated the centrality of the congregation to the conception of “church,” and personal forms of devotion such as the Rosary gained widespread popularity. However, as one historian has noted of pre-Reformation England, “although laypeople were in the main content with their religion, they were not content with their Church.”5 Key to understanding what happened after the Lutheran break with Rome is to recognize that the Church, for its part, was not content with its laypeople. The Church deemed the laity’s obsession with their own salvation a good thing, but that obsession had to be attached to the mediation of the Church and its clergy. On this point, Luther and the pope were in firm agreement, and the Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation marched in step in their campaign to gather their sheep into orderly flocks that submitted to the protective enclosure of the sheepfold and heeded their shepherd’s benign authority. Discipline and surveillance marked both Protestant and Catholic ecclesiology in the sixteenth century. There was renewed emphasis on attending church regularly and an insistence on the indispensability of clerical mediation. Among Protestants, hearing the word preached by an educated minister was the requirement that commanded the physical presence of the faithful at church on Sunday. The Council of Trent reasserted the importance of the sacraments and the primacy of the parish. Extra-parochial piety was discouraged. Confraternities defined by profession or neighborhood were suppressed in favor of confraternities attached to parishes. Both the Protestant Church and the Catholic Church demanded greater regularity in church attendance and promoted new standards of personal morality. Sacramental marriage was enjoined and enforced not only for the educated and moneyed, but for all.6 The bi-confessional insistence on conformity and discipline was enforced by a well-ordered and tightly managed centralized ecclesiastical authority. The break with Rome did not result in a rejection of hierarchy. The Anglican Church retained bishops; the Lutheran Church of Germany vested regional authority in a civil magistracy; the Presbyterian Church of Scotland looked to a regional body of elders comprising laymen and clergy for governance. Each of these Protestant arrangements, like the Catholic Church in France and Spain, recognized the union of Church and state and complemented the established civil authority. As the Atlantic World emerged in the middle of the sixteenth century, the Church, Catholic and Protestant, defined Reformation in terms of institutional renewal and congregational obedience. It was a partner to the



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state in advancing conformity to the dicta and demands of centralized authority, and it was a formidable agent of social control in its promotion of strict standards of personal behavior. Visible conformity, particularly in the form of regular church attendance, was a key aim of both Church and state. The English Act of Uniformity required all subjects to “diligently and faithfully” attend church “every Sunday and other days ordained and used to be kept as holy days, and then and there to abide orderly and soberly during the time of the common prayer, preachings, or other service of God.” Failure to comply resulted in a fine of “twelve pence, to be levied by the churchwardens of the parish where such offence shall be done.”7 At about the same time, the Council of Trent issued a decree instructing Catholic priests to “admonish their people to repair frequently to their own parish churches, at least on the Lord’s days and the greater festivals” and echoed the Anglican attention to proper comportment when it called for the banishment of “all secular actions; vain and therefore profane conversations, all walking about, noise, and clamour, so that the house of God may be seen to be, and may be called, truly a house of prayer.”8 Progress toward universal observance of these ideals of compliance and conformity was never satisfactory from the Church’s vantage point. In the late 1550s, the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury lamented of the English people that “For the most part they were never persuaded in their hearts, but from the teeth forward and for the king’s sake, in the truth of God’s Word.”9 The discourse of ecclesiastical discontent continued unabated in the New World. The Puritan clergymen of Massachusetts complained in 1679 that “There is much Sabbath-breaking; . . . Many that do not take care so to dispatch their worldly businesses, that they may be free & fit for the duties of the Sabbath, and that do (if not wholly neglect) after a careless, heartless manner perform the duties that concern the sanctification of the Sabbath.”10 When they did appear in church, members of the congregation failed to conduct themselves according to clerical expectations. “It is a frequent thing for men (though not necessitated thereunto by any infirmity) to sit in prayer time, and some with their heads almost covered, and to give way to their own sloth and sleepiness,” charged the Massachusetts clergy.11 These Puritan divines could have written the script for the harried clergymen of colonial New Orleans, who indicted their communicants in like fashion. The Capuchin pastor of the capital’s parish reported that his flock observed “almost no difference between feast days and Sundays

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and workdays, between Lent and Carnival, the Easter Season and the rest of the year.”12 And one gathers that he would have welcomed the gentle snoring of the wayward New Englanders in preference to a scene that took place at Saint Louis Church in 1726: On the tenth of last November Mesdames Fleuriau, Brulé and Perry, having laughed and talked very immodestly at the beginning of the parochial mass, were first warned by the master of the school to remember the sanctity of the place and then by Father Hyacinthe who was at the altar. . . . Father Hyacinthe, seeing that they were continuing, told them to leave the church or that he would not say the mass. One of them . . . replied aloud, “The devil! I am not going out like that.”13 Whether writing from Massachusetts or New Orleans, the New World clergyman’s catalog of congregational faults was long and discouragingly familiar across temporal and geographic boundaries. Attendance at services was irregular, and profane behavior in the sanctuary a commonplace. Nor did the churchmen’s diagnosis of the cause and prescription for cure vary by confession. “The commands of God and of the church were transgressed with so much license that it seemed that they were no longer binding when they had crossed the seas,” grumbled Father Raphael of New Orleans.14 Like many of his contemporaries and no small number of religious historians since, the French priest attributed the impiety of colonial congregations to their distance from direct metropolitan religious authority. The remedy, so far as he was concerned, was clear: “If we had a bishop here at our head, all these difficulties would cease.”15 There was no resident bishop in Louisiana for all but a few years of the colonial period. During the French regime, Louisiana’s ultimate clerical authority presided over the colonial church much of the time from the comfort of France and held a title — bishop of Quebec — that failed to incorporate the vast colony of the Mississippi watershed. This was only slightly less insulting than the Anglican Church’s episcopal provision for its mainland American colonies. The bishop of London had jurisdiction over the colonies in which the Church of England was established.16 The inhabitants of both the British mainland colonies and Louisiana enjoyed a long stretch of salutary neglect in the matter of episcopal attention. When a change to that status quo was threatened at different junctures in Louisiana and the British colonies, important segments of the laity in both places resisted. That reaction was also an echo of congregational dis-



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satisfaction with the Church’s Reformation-era assertion of institutional priorities and conformity. These episodes of Protestant and Catholic resistance shared more than a common history of opposition to episcopal authority; they enacted crucial elements of the republicanism that the former British colonies and Louisiana would come to share.17 The Bishop Controversy of 1763–75 is familiar to students of early American history as one of several manifestations of pre-Revolutionary discontent with the imposition of unaccustomed levels of British intervention in colonial affairs. Following the end of the Seven Years War, the English episcopate renewed its interest in appointing a resident bishop to serve the colonial Church of England. Clergymen in the Middle Colonies were in favor of the move, in no small part because it would make it possible for colonial clergymen to receive ordination in America. Churchmen in the southern colonies were divided on the matter, but congregations everywhere generally shared the sentiments of William Nelson, president of the Virginia Council, who stated succinctly, “We do not want bishops.”18 The strength of the opposition to a resident bishop was rooted in part in the specific experience of the colonial Church. The distant authority of the bishop of London necessitated modification of various governance and financial arrangements to respond to practical necessity. The Virginia Church, in particular, saw the development of powerful lay vestries that assumed practical authority for naming pastors of colonial congregations, an arrangement sanctioned by the Virginia House of Burgesses.19 In addition, a deep antipathy to clerical hierarchy had been engendered by seventeenth-century events in England. The triumph of Parliamentary forces in the English Civil Wars resulted in the temporary abolition of the episcopate, which was named as a corrupting, absolutist influence on both Church and state. John Milton and others elaborated an anti-episcopal ideology in Restoration England that kept opposition to clerical hierarchy firmly entrenched in the popular English imagination. The outbreak of the Stamp Act crisis overlapped the Bishop Controversy and politicized it in contemporary terms.20 On the eve of the American Revolution, the imposition of a bishop on the colonial Church of England was understood as an assault on customary liberties of both English and colonial origins. It was, at the same time, a clear rejection of the nature of the relationship between Church and state in England, where bishops served at the direct pleasure of the monarch. While the Episcopal Church that replaced the Church of England in the United States did not abolish the episcopate, it did institute a form of

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shared lay and clerical governance to which all clerics, including bishops, were subject.21 The vestrymen of the early American republic devised a way to enjoy the advantages of a hierarchical organization for the church that mirrored their own preferences with respect to proper social order without ceding their own authority over the Church. Theirs was an ingenious solution that preserved their social power and privilege without endangering the republican project. The vestrymen of early national New Orleans were likewise prepared by their experience of the colonial Church to assume the presumptions and values of republicanism. They demonstrated that readiness in a singular episode that took place shortly after the Louisiana Purchase. Although some four decades separate the Bishop Controversy and the New Orleans incident, the two share an essential feature: conflict over church governance during a people’s transition from monarchy to republicanism. In the course of Louisiana’s rapid passage from Spanish to French and ultimately American hands between 1801 and 1803, the chain of ecclesiastical authority was both disrupted and disputed. Patrick Walsh, a cleric of Irish ancestry and Spanish commission, claimed to hold the highest ecclesiastical rank in the city and proclaimed himself the rightful pastor of Saint Louis Cathedral. Walsh had been appointed to his post by the last bishop to exercise jurisdiction over Spanish New Orleans, and he looked to the new American Catholic bishop, John Carroll of Baltimore, to confirm his post. The five men who served the cathedral parish as trustees rejected both his claim and the episcopal authority upon which it rested. On a spring morning in 1805, the city council ordered that the church bell be rung to call the faithful to Saint Louis Cathedral. Four thousand inhabitants surged into the sanctuary, where they were greeted not by a priest, but by the parish trustees. The equivalent of Anglican vestrymen, these men claimed the authority to appoint the pastor of their parish. In keeping with the political system of the nation of which they had just become a part, the trustees made a show of employing the tools of civil democracy to underscore their rights. A secret ballot was commanded, but pandemonium broke out before there could be an orderly procession to the locked box at the front of the nave: “All the Catholics of this parish arose as one and in a body, asserting that as things had come to such as pass they would make use of the privilege that the freedom of the American government permits them and would appoint a pastor of their own choice.”22 The men who led the coup d’église of 1805 were not yet citizens of the United States; Louisiana’s statehood was deferred until 1812. Federal offi-



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cials lacked confidence in the inhabitants’ loyalties and worried that their history as subjects of first one absolutist regime and then another was poor preparation for the privileges of republican citizenship. New Orleanians’ Catholicism provided another basis for suspicion: the papacy had been the absolutist bête noire of the British for more than two centuries, a tyrannical threat to liberty much more securely rooted in the AngloAmerican psyche than George III’s ephemeral villainy. The American territorial administration might have granted Louisianians their citizenship sooner, or at least rested easier in their beds, had they had the benefit of seeing, as we may, the broad sweep of Reformation history that reveals British and French colonials to have been fellow travelers in their negotiation of ecclesiastical governance. At least one rather famous American seems to have been quite willing and able to see republican virtues where others spied dangerous papist loyalties and a religious tradition rife with superstitious practices. Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Ursuline nuns of New Orleans in 1804 to reassure them that the American government had no intention of confiscating the property that had been given them by former colonial governments. “Whatever diversity of shade may appear in the religious opinions of our fellow citizens,” wrote the president, “the charitable objects of your institution cannot be indifferent to any; and its furtherance of the wholesome purposes of society, by training up its younger members in the way they should go, cannot fail to ensure it the patronage of the government it is under.”23 The Ursulines were a teaching order, and they had provided religious instruction and general education to the girls of New Orleans since 1727. Jefferson may have gained familiarity with the order and its work during his tour of duty in Paris, but the wording of his letter suggests that he saw the nuns as players in the distinctly American project of Republican Motherhood. In the movement first identified and named by the historian Linda Kerber, early national women were entrusted with the crucial task of producing the educated citizenry on which a successful republic depends. The Protestant women of Anglo America took to the task with enthusiasm, and gradually used it to expand their range of action beyond the household.24 Jefferson’s generous construal of the Ursulines’ educational apostolate as a variation of Republican Motherhood was fortuitous for the nuns, but it was mistaken in several ways. The nuns were educators, to be sure, but they educated only girls, not the future male citizens of the young republic. Moreover, their extrafamilial female enterprise presented a troubling

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exception to the patriarchal family that was adopted as the exclusive building block of the American polity. Finally, the nuns included free and enslaved girls of African descent in their educational mission, a practice that further distanced them from the American republican project at the turn of the nineteenth century.25 The nuns were, in fact, more a threat to the healthy progress of American republicanism in New Orleans than they were its agents. Mr. Jefferson did not recognize the nuns for the threat they were because the Catholic and Protestant Reformations did part ways when it came to gender. The consequences of that divergence in New Orleans also shaped the relationship between religion and race in ways that did not fit easily within the compass of early national republicanism. When it abolished female religious orders and swept away lay confraternities, the Protestant Reformation eradicated options for female religious action that operated beyond the direct control and supervision of men and foreclosed acceptable alternatives to marriage and motherhood. The result was that Protestant women were forced to live and act from within male-dominated institutions. In the civil realm, a woman was subject to either her father or her husband; only widowhood offered an acceptable alternative. In organized religious activity, she was restricted to membership in a congregation headed by a male clergyman. She could not become a member of the vestry, or in any other way exercise a voice in the formal governance of her religious association. While some historians point to the gains women enjoyed as a result of the Protestant Reformation —  literacy usually tops the list — others maintain that the loss of associative autonomy and alternatives to marriage tips the balance in a decidedly negative direction. One historian boldly asserts that German cities embraced the Reformation only when it abjured some of its radical implications for women and promoted a conservative patriarchal agenda.26 In the British American colonies, the legacy of the Reformation meant that women were excluded from the governance of institutions of the established Church, whether Anglican, Presbyterian, or Congregationalist. There was nothing in the Protestant tradition to disturb the easy relationship between household religion and republicanism. Both recognized the patriarchal model as exclusively normative; neither offered a woman standing in an institution of church or state in her own right. Republican Motherhood was, by definition, a family institution that called for the consent of the paterfamilias to his wife’s contribution to the commonweal.27 The Catholic Reformation, particularly as it played out in France, created a different paradigm for female religious activity. Convents and



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women’s lay confraternities not only survived, but enjoyed a dramatic revival in seventeenth-century France. When the Edict of Nantes (1598) granted limited tolerance to Protestantism, devout Catholics responded by mounting a vigorous internal missionary campaign. With the priesthood still undermanned as a result of the disruption of clerical education during the French wars of religion, women’s efforts to assist in the project were generally welcomed by ecclesiastical authorities. Their work initially took shape informally, with small groups of particularly devout women providing instruction in Christian doctrine to village children and lapsed parishioners. Very quickly, however, clusters of women sought more formal modes of association and a broader range of apostolic action. By the 1620s, there were a half dozen new French female religious congregations and orders engaged in teaching, nursing, and serving the poor. Among them were the Ursulines, the Soeurs de Notre Dame, and the Filles de la Charité. They differed significantly from their medieval predecessors. Members of the new religious orders served through apostolic action in the world rather than through the mode of cloistered contemplation observed by all earlier nuns. Their movement was also far larger than medieval female monasticism had ever been. At the end of the century, as many as one in ten French women lived as an unmarried member of a religious community.28 In their earliest years, the new congregations and orders did not observe even a modified form of cloister. Women simply lived in community under simple vows taken privately. Though some, including the Ursulines, later sought and gained recognition as a regular religious order and adopted a form of cloister, all retained elements of autonomy won during their foundation. Ursulines, for example, elected the male cleric who served as their spiritual advisor and ministered to their sacramental needs, and enjoyed control over their property and the disposition of their resources.29 The new orders also preserved a degree of independence regarding their missions. During the first two decades of the seventeenth century, civil and ecclesiastical authorities judged the work of teaching nuns like the Ursulines beneficial to the achievement of religious and social order. By midcentury, however, French social policy had shifted in favor of a more coercive institutionalized approach to managing social disorder and deviance, known as the renfermement. Female monastics lost the widespread official support they had enjoyed earlier, and were pressured to modify their missions to accommodate the new trend in social control. In the main, the orders stubbornly maintained their original missions.30

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The female religious of early modern France supported the institutional Reformation embodied in Tridentine Catholicism, on the one hand, by promoting regular sacramental observance. At the same time, the apostolic nature of their work, their extraparochial organization, and the space they created for female religious activism and authority, resonated strongly with the popular face of the Reformation. These women likewise assisted in the restoration of social order following the chaotic decades of the wars of religion, but they showed themselves unwilling to march in lockstep with civil authorities when fashions in social control changed some decades later. The female religious tradition that developed in seventeenth-century France grew to be somewhat at odds with the patriarchal order that governed church and state, a feature that bode ill for its encounter with republicanism at the dawn of the nineteenth century. French laywomen also experienced expanded opportunities in religious life as a result of Reformation trends. Part of the Tridentine project was to place the parish and its priest at the center of religious devotion. In an effort to mute neighborhood and occupationally based confraternities that subverted parochial loyalty, clerics promoted Marian confraternities. The Virgin was a universal patron, recognized across geographic, occupational, and social boundaries. Though the saint’s appeal also transcended gender boundaries, women were particularly drawn to the new Marian confraternities. In addition to making up the majority of the membership, women also often assumed leadership of these popular organizations. This marked a distinct change of course in the history of confraternities. In the late medieval period, these associations had increasingly become identified with forms of penitential piety, including flagellation, that were generally deemed unsuitable for women. The number of mixed-sex confraternities declined during this period, and all-male brotherhoods dominated. Paradoxically, the innovation of Marian confraternities that was designed to concentrate authority in the hands of male parochial clergy resulted in the creation of a new vehicle for female religious leadership, particularly in post-Nantes France.31 The fruits of the revival in female religious life traversed the Atlantic along with French colonization. An Ursuline community was established in Quebec in 1639 and other female religious communities followed in Canada and the Caribbean. The establishment of the Ursuline community in New Orleans in 1727 was the last of these colonial foundations. In the New World, the presence of apostolic women’s orders gave Catholicism a tool that was particularly valuable in the colonial context. Religious women



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expanded the available religious workforce beyond the limited number of clergymen assigned to the colonies. In addition, their apostolates  — particularly that of the Ursulines — were especially suited to the circumstances of colonial Catholicism, particularly the work of conversion. The Ursulines’ specialty was catechizing lapsed Catholics and converting Huguenots, in addition to inculcating young women with the standards of piety and moral behavior deemed desirable for social order. The Ursuline project was easily adapted to the conversion of Indians and enslaved Africans in the New World and to the imperatives of social control in the colonial setting. Laywomen’s confraternities that were organized under their sponsorship to provide catechesis, charity, and the enforcement of social order further expanded the reach of their work.32 As supportive of colonial aims as the French female religious legacy might be, it could also prove troublesome, particularly when religious women asserted themselves in matters they deemed within their authority. New Orleans Ursulines found themselves frequently at odds with colonial authorities over matters of self-governance. The proprietary Company of the Indies explicitly contracted with the nuns to come to New Orleans not to conduct their accustomed teaching mission, but to administer the military hospital. The women would be allowed to take on boarding students, but the contract stipulated that “none of those who will be charged with the sick will be taken away from them, or applied to the education of the boarders.” Within weeks of their arrival, however, the nuns had opened a school with both boarding and day divisions; four months later, they had yet to assume their hospital work.33 The missionaries asserted their autonomy in other ways, as well. When the Company attempted to foist a priest of its own choosing on the convent to act as its spiritual director and say mass, the nuns threatened to leave New Orleans for Cap Français. “I have never understood that it was the intention of the Company that we should depend on its orders for our conduct,” the mother superior wrote to the Company’s clerical director. “I would have been a mad woman to accept such a condition.” The nuns would choose the priest who was to serve them, and were not impressed by the rank of the cleric whose choice they rejected: “It matters little to us whether or not Father Raphaël is vicar-general. That does not give him any more right over us.”34 The French colonial Catholic Church was certainly every bit as patriarchal as the British colonial Church of England, but French colonial Catholicism also sheltered formally organized institutions constituted of

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and governed by women. Those institutions pursued an agenda that supported the Church by instructing young girls and adult converts to participate in parochial devotion. At the same time, however, their missionary work produced consequences and a congregational demography that was not what the clergy and the colonial Church most desired. When the Capuchin missionaries in New Orleans complained about poor church attendance and lax piety, their anxiety was fixed not only on how many attended mass, but on how many of what sort filled the pews. Success was measured in the number of free white men who proved themselves devout and regular parishioners. These were not the objects of the Ursulines’ missionary activity. The baptismal registers of colonial New Orleans chronicle a history of robust congregational growth, but the increase came from thousands of enslaved people of African descent. In the 1730s and 1740s, many of them were brought to the font through the efforts of members of a laywomen’s confraternity sponsored by the Ursulines.35 People of African descent gradually assumed to themselves the role of sponsorship at baptism, and women were especially active in this activity. By the end of the colonial period, the community of faithful Catholics in New Orleans comprised a substantial black majority, and among them, women predominated. “Visit the churches when you will,” John Watson observed following his 1805 reconnaissance of New Orleans, “and the chief audience is formed of mulatresses and negresses.” This church dominated by black women was to prove an ill fit with the patriarchal Church dominated by white men upon which the ideal of southern American republicanism came to rest.36 When the trustees of Saint Louis Cathedral staged their pastoral election in 1805, they drew on a colonial ecclesiastical experience shared by Protestants and Catholics that paved the way for a republican reformulation of the relationship between Church and state. That common past was doubtless amplified by the French Republic’s own renegotiation of the Church-state contract. The trustees’ declaration that they would “make use of the privilege that the freedom of the American government permits” demonstrated, however, that they were playing to an American conceptualization of republicanism that was, in key respects, a construct more congenial than its French counterpart to the plantation society that would reach its full flower under the American flag. In the antebellum American South of which the state of Louisiana became a part, republicanism restricted citizenship unambiguously to free white men. Women, children, and servants enjoyed its benefits only



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through the mediation of the heads of household whose authority the ideology upheld. Protestantism, which insisted that women’s religious lives be mediated by husbands, fathers, and clergy, shaped and supported the American strain of republicanism that emerged in the former British colonies. New Orleans came into American hands as the region’s plantation economy finally came into its own and the boundaries between the ruling class of white male property owners and their free and enslaved dependants were drawn and enforced with unprecedented rigor. The AngloAmerican, Protestant variation of republicanism that unambiguously pronounced the patriarchal household the only proper place for a woman perfectly suited the needs of the emerging slave society of early national New Orleans.37 The gender history of French Catholicism, by contrast, was a thorn in the side of republicanism. France’s post-Reformation religious tradition provided a model of gender relations not wholly suited to the citizen patriarchy that followed the French Revolution. Catholicism not only condoned unmarried women, but also allowed all women opportunities for religious association and action that lay beyond the direct control of fathers, husbands, and clergymen. The Concordat of 1805 relaxed the regulation of the clergy and ended the suppression of religious orders. A period of religious revival followed that saw French women renewing their old partnership with the Church and their commitment to religious life. Contemporary assessments of this alliance pronounced it a strategy of conniving priests who sought the downfall of the Republic and a return to the Church’s ancien régime status. Clergy supposedly advanced this aim by seducing weak-minded women into religious fanaticism to divert them from their proper duties as good republican wives. Jules Michelet pronounced this tidal wave of pious women a dangerous and despicable threat to the project of French republicanism.38 More recent scholarship offers a different reading. French women, it argues, were dissatisfied with republicanism because it did away with the ancien régime political culture that allowed women an informal, but effective, voice in public affairs. Republicanism restricted participation in political discourse to citizens — a category from which women were explicitly excluded. Religious activity had been a pre-Revolutionary vehicle for female activity outside the household, and after the Concordat of 1805, French women employed it again to elude the constraints of domestic patriarchal control.39 The extraordinary revival of female religious life that erupted on the heels

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of the Concordat supports the revisionist line. Although the priesthood experienced a boost in vocations, the groundswell of religious activism was exponentially greater among women. The movement reprised many of the major features of the early seventeenth-century renaissance. Once again, new apostolic orders sprang up, with teaching orders dominating. Women flocked in huge numbers to conventual life, and even more women joined new confraternities. The restoration of Catholicism in republican France was the initial objective of both the orders and the confraternities, but a broader missionary agenda quickly developed. The expansion of Catholicism in America became an objective for the new incarnation of the French female apostolic tradition.40 New Orleans was among the destinations of the new wave of French missionaries, where they found a robust foundation on which to build. The French Revolutionary suppression of the Church and religious orders by-passed Spanish colonial New Orleans, leaving the French Catholic tradition in female religious life untouched. The colonial legacy, now reinforced by French missionaries, offered the women of New Orleans, including those of African descent, opportunities to sidestep the constraints of American republicanism. In the decades following the Louisiana Purchase, women of African descent, with support from several French missionaries, advanced the nature and effect of their religious leadership in ways that distinguished the city from other places in the antebellum American south, where the Protestant tradition dominated. The gender and racial order of American republicanism that took shape in the early national period was in no small part dictated by the requirements of the slave societies of the southern states. Citizenship and true independence were restricted to the free white male; all others were relegated to some form of dependency upon him and were subject to his governance. Citizenship’s most salutary benefits, if not its liberties and privileges, could be extended at his pleasure to white wives and children. Free black men, dependent on white men for the limited liberties they enjoyed, were next down in the hierarchy. Free black women were the rightful subjects of free men, white and black, as mistresses or wives. Enslaved men and women were equally subject to the authority of all free people. Within this framework, all white women were to be subject to the rule of a patriarch holding the role of husband or father. A free woman of color was doubly subject, first by her race to all white people, and also by her gender to all free men. In her personal life, she was to be subject to the authority of either a free black spouse or a white lover.41



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The popular historical image of the free black women of New Orleans harmonizes with this ideal gender and racial order. It focuses on plaçage, an arrangement in which a white man took a free woman of color as a long-term mistress. Typically, such men made provision to support the woman and any offspring of the liaison, notwithstanding their marriage to white women. Within the tradition of plaçage, free women of color were deemed both the rightful subjects of white male lust, and scheming seductresses bereft of the moral virtue achieved by lawfully married white women. They thus conformed to the prevailing ideology of racial and gender order, which placed them beneath all white people both in terms of authority and morality.42 In 1836, a group of free women of color confounded the plaçage paradigm when they formed a religious community that they named the Sisters of the Congregation of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Led by Henriette Delille, they later achieved recognition as a religious order of nuns, the Sisters of the Holy Family.43 Delille was descended from a long line of female religious activists of African descent, women who embodied the translation of the seventeenth-century French female religious tradition into an Afro-Creole phenomenon. Delille’s life experience reflects the marriage of the new French missionary project and the colonial legacy that nurtured a female Afro-Catholic congregation. She was educated at a school for free girls of color sponsored by the Ursuline nuns. During the period of time when she would have been a student, the schoolmistress was not an Ursuline, but a hospitalier missionary sister from France named Marthe Fortier. The historical record is silent about Fortier’s diversion from nursing to teaching, but it does reveal her to have been a product of the French missionary movement. Delille was touched again by the French revival when she became a member of a confraternity for young free women of color organized by a French missionary priest, Michael Portier. Like contemporary French confraternities, the association was dedicated to the promotion of orthodox piety and the propagation of Catholicism.44 Delille and two companions took over the confraternity in 1836 and transformed it into the Sisters of the Congregation of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The new organization marked a commitment beyond what was customary for laywomen. While not yet taking the step of defining themselves as vowed religious women, Delille and her companions nonetheless announced their intention to renounce the way of life typical for free women of color in antebellum New Orleans. Rather than

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marrying or entering into a long-term liaison with a white man and bearing children, they made private vows of chastity, began to live in community, and undertook an educational and charitable ministry to the city’s free and enslaved people of African descent. Unmarried black women living in community, making and managing their own money, educating young black women: each of these things contested white southern republican ideals of racial and gender order. The religious life of colonial New Orleans that unfolded in the larger spiritual place beyond the sanctuary and ecclesiastical politics created an alternative to sexual subjugation and dependency not only for white women who chose to become nuns, but also for women of color. It thus doubly challenged the republican order that emerged in post-Purchase America, rejecting its insistence on marriage for white women and invisible powerlessness for black women. That the element of conflict between religion and republicanism in New Orleans turned on gender and race reinforces an important finding that emerges from other essays in this volume. In one instance after another, the extension of the American republican mantle after the Louisiana Purchase was accompanied by a pattern of exclusion and erasure. It is clear that the religious legacies of the thirteen mainland colonies and Louisiana acted to lubricate the Americanization of some even as they threw up barriers to others. This is a modest addition to an emerging revision of the historical meaning of the Louisiana Purchase. The New Orleans example might provoke a second look at other accepted strands of the historical narrative. It challenges, for example, the interpretation of gender and race in American history that attributes progress toward equality to an awakening among Protestant Evangelicals. If American historians can shed the parochial Anglo-Protestant outlook that they have long shared with the nineteenth-century men who bought Louisiana and defined the parameters of American citizenship, perhaps we can begin to recognize other influences in the emergence of a more inclusive American society in the nineteenth century. We may begin to wonder if Calvinist predestination’s replacement by free will and perfectionism was merely the result of the triumph of Revolutionary democracy and had nothing to do with the increasing presence of Catholics who believed in universal grace.45 And we may contemplate the rise of female benevolence and education and concede the possibility that Catholic nuns who ran orphanages, hospitals, and schools provided inspiration, role models, and a spur to create Protestant alternatives.46 Finally, we may begin to think



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that America’s distinctive brand of democracy is much more the product of all of the people who have lived within the nation’s boundaries than of the rebellious former British colonists who could only imagine others like themselves as citizens. With that, we would recognize the only true reason to celebrate the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase: a sudden diversification of the American people that would ultimately bring into being a citizenry beyond the imaginations of the Founders.

Notes 1. John F. Watson, “Notitia of Incidents at New Orleans, in 1804 and 1805,” American Pioneer 2, no. 5 (May 1843): 230, 234. 2. James P. Wind and James W. Lewis, eds., American Congregations, vol. 2, New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) presents a series of essays that explore the function of congregations as cultural, social, and political communities that act separately, though not necessarily in opposition to, the institutionally organized Church. 3. “As the Father over one family, so the king, as Father over many families” (Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works, ed. Peter Laslett [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949], 63). 4. For overviews of the Tridentine reformation, see H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, ed. John Bossy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968); John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther & Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation, trans. Jeremy Moiser (London: Burns and Oates, 1977). John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), is the most recent contribution to the revisionist scholarship of the Catholic “Counter-Reformation.” 5. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 40. 6. Bossy, Christianity in the West; Delumeau, Catholicism. On changes in confraternities, see especially Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Ronald F. E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1982). Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 21–23, 30; Kathryn Norberg, Rich and Poor in Grenoble, 1600–1814 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 41, 58, 62; Louis Chatellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, trans. Jean Birrell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), speak directly to the French experience. Sarah T. Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), is particularly informative on the clerical campaign for sacramental conformity.

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7. “Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity (1559),” Documents Illustrative of English Church History, ed. Henry Gee and William John Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1896), http://history.hanover.edu/texts/engref/er80.html, 463. 8. “The Council of Trent, the Twenty-second Session: Decree Concerning the Things to Be Observed, and to Be Avoided, in the Celebration of Mass,” http://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct22.html (1562). 9. Haigh, English Reformations, 202. I adopt the view that ecclesiastical discontent with the quality of the laity’s participation was a product of a divergence between institutional/clerical priorities and the laity’s religious interests. For another view that posits a general lack of Christianization among the laity, see Jean Delumeau, Catholicism. 10. “The Result of the 1679 General Synod,” American Colonists Library: A Treasury of Primary Documents, http://personal.pitnet.net/primarysources/ jeremiad.html (Source: Williston Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism [Boston, 1893], 423–31). 11. Ibid. 12. Dunbar Rowland and Albert Godfrey Sanders, eds. and trans., Mississippi Provincial Archives 1701–1729, French Dominion, vol. 2 (hereafter cited as MPA, vol. 2) (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1929); Father Raphael to Abbé Raguet, 15 May 1725, New Orleans; Archives des Colonies, Correspondance Générale, Louisiane, Archives Nationales de France (hereafter cited as AC, C13A): 8, 402–402v. 13. MPA, vol. 2; Father Raphael to Abbé Raguet, 28 December 1726, New Orleans, AC, C13, 51v. 14. MPA, vol. 2; Father Raphael to Abbé Raguet, 15 May 1725, New Orleans; AC, C13A 8, 402–402v. 15. MPA, vol. 2; Father Raphael to Abbé Raguet, 28 December 1726, New Orleans, AC, C13, 48v. 16. Frederick V. Mills Sr., Bishops by Ballot: An Eighteenth-Century Ecclesiastical Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 26. 17. The See of Quebec was instituted in 1674, but a bishop had governed the Church of New France since 1658 as vicar apostolic (Charles Edwards O’Neill, Church and State in French Colonial Louisiana: Policy and Politics to 1732 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966], 134). The bishop of London exercised jurisdiction over the colonial Church by virtue of a commissary from 1675 (Mills, Bishops by Ballot, 26). 18. 11 May 1771, quoted in Mills, Bishops by Ballot, 85. 19. Ibid., 17. 20. For a good summary of the seventeenth-century roots of opposition to the episcopate, see Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 199–209. 21. Mills, Bishops by Ballot, 182–307. 22. Casa Calvo to Caballero, 30 March 1805, in “The Schism of 1805 in New



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Orleans,” ed. Stanley Faye, Louisiana Historical Quarterly 22, no. 1 (January 1939): 105. 23. Thomas Jefferson to Sister Therese de St. Xavier Farjon, May 15, 1804, Ursuline Convent Archives of New Orleans. 24. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: Norton, 1986). 25. On the New Orleans Ursulines’ education of enslaved and free women of African descent, see Emily Clark, “ ‘By All the Conduct of Their Lives’: A Laywomen’s Confraternity in New Orleans, 1730–1744,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54, no. 4 (October 1997): 769–94; and Emily Clark and Virginia Gould, “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727–1852,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 59, no. 2 (April 2002): 409–48. 26. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg, Oxford Studies in Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 27. The Quakers provided a notable exception, though the Society of Friends was never the established church of any colony. 28. The shadow of nineteenth-century ultramontanism obscures the spirit of autonomy that animated this early burst of female religious organization. Communities of nuns such as the Ursulines were founded and operated independently of one another and were subject to no higher authority than the local bishop. His authority was, in turn, circumscribed by the order’s rule, which gave it significant autonomy over a wide range of matters, including the disposition of its financial assets and the naming of the clergyman who served them. 29. Les Constitutions des Religieuses de Saint Ursule de la Congrégation de Paris (Paris: Gilles Blaizot, 1646), pt. 3, chap. 1, 3–8, specifies the Ursulines’ authority to elect their own clerical superior. On the power of the superior of female religious communities and the practical limits of episcopal and clerical authority, see Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 119–24. 30. On the French renfermement generally, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977); Cissie C. Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence, 1640–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Colin Jones, The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Regime and Revolutionary France (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Jütte, Poverty and Deviance, esp. 176–95. On the decline of support for teaching orders, see Rapley, Les Dévotes, 50–53; 58–59, graph 1; and Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister, 78–95. 31. Raoul Allier, La Cabal de Dévots, 1627–1666 (Paris, 1902; repr., Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970); James R. Banker, Death in the Community: Memorialization and Confraternities in an Italian Commune in the Late Middle Ages (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988); Black, Italian Confraternities; Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon; Elder Mullan, The Sodality of Our Lady Studied in the Documents (New York: P. J. Kennedy, 1912); Norberg, Rich

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and Poor in Grenoble; Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Nicholas Terpstra, “Women in the Brotherhood: Gender, Class, and Politics in Renaissance Bolognese Confraternities,” Renaissance and Reformation 14, no. 3 (1990); Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence. On the agency of women in French Marian confraternities, see especially Norberg, “Women, the Family, and the Counter-Reformation: Women’s Confraternities in the 17th Century,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 6 (1978): 55–63. 32. Vincent Grégoire, “L’éducation des filles au couvent des Ursulines de Québec à l’époque de Marie de l’Incarnation (1639–1672), Seventeenth-Century French Studies 17 (1995): 87–98; Marie de l’Incarnation, Word from New France: The Selected Letters of Marie de l’Incarnation, ed. and trans. Joyce Marshall (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967); and Clark, “By All the Conduct of Their Lives.” 33. Contract between the Ursuline Nuns and the Company of the Indies, “Déliberations du Conseil,” Article 24, Ursuline Convent Archives of New Orleans. 34. AC, C13A, 11:279–279v. 35. Ibid.; Clark and Gould, “Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism.” 36. Watson, “Notitia,” 234. 37. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), provides the best analysis of American republicanism in the South. 38. See, for example, J. Cabanis, Michelet, le Prêtre et la Femme (Paris, 1978); and A. Mitzman, Michelet, Historian: Rebirth and Romanticism in NineteenthCentury France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 39. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York: Viking, 1999); Hazel Mills, “Women and Catholicism in Provincial France, c. 1800– c. 1850: Franche-Comté in National Context,” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1994). 40. On the religious revival that followed the Concordat, particularly with respect to women religious, see Claude Langois, Le Catholicisme au Féminin: Les Congrégation Françaises à Superiéure Générale au XIXe Siècle (Paris: Les Edition du Cerf, 1984); Ernest Sevrin, Les Missions Religieuses en France sous la Restauration, 1815–1830, vol. 1 (Saint-Mandé: Prêtres de la miséricorde, 1948); and Yvonne Turin, Femmes et Religieuses au XIXe Siècle: Le Féminisme “en Religion” (Paris: Nouvelle Cité, 1989). For the foreign missionary outlook that developed from the revival, see Edward John Hickey, “The Society for the Propagation of the Faith: Its Foundation, Organization, and Success (1822–1922)” (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1922); and David LaThoud, Marie-Pauline Jaricot, 2 vols. (Paris: Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1937). 41. McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds; Leeann Whites, “The Civil War as a



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Crisis in Gender,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 3–21. 42. Contemporary accounts that contributed to this image of the free women of color of New Orleans include Paul Alliot, “Historical and Political Reflections on Louisiana,” in Louisiana under the Rule of Spain, France, and the United States, 1785–1807, ed. James Alexander Robertson (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1911), 1:46–47; Thomas Ashe, Travels in America Performed in 1806, For the Purpose of Exploring the rivers Alleghany, Monogehela, Ohio, and Mississippi (Newburyport: E. M. Blount, 1808), 344–46; Pierre-Louis Berquin-Duvallon, Vue de la colonie espagnole du Mississipi ou des provinces de Louisiane et floride occidentale, en l’année 1802, par un observateur résidant sur les lieux (Paris: L’Imprimerie Expéditive, 1802), 243–47. 43. Clark and Gould, “Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism.” 44. Ibid. 45. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 46. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19th-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Social Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York: Norton, 1984).

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M

Slave Migrations and Slave Control in Spanish and Early American New Orleans

T

he period that broadly frames the Louisiana Purchase was a period marked by intense slave migrations that today remain partly undocumented and largely misunderstood. In the present essay, I have seemingly simple objectives. I first want to answer still partly unanswered questions as to approximately how many slaves migrated to New Orleans in the late Spanish and early American period, the routes by which they arrived, and who they were.1 I begin by looking at slave migrations before the Louisiana Purchase as far back as 1783. I then consider the patterns of slave migration that characterized the period that followed the Louisiana Purchase until the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808. This part of the discussion is based upon untapped primary sources found on both sides of the Atlantic from Seville to London, and from Paris to New Orleans. Next, I look at the question of slave migration from the angle of slave control and slave resistance, and not just in terms of raw numbers and ships’ arrivals. I focus specifically on the period that followed the Louisiana Purchase when the problem of slave control was felt particularly acutely by slaveholders and authorities alike. One of the reasons why this problem was felt with such anxiety at the time was that slave migrations had reached unprecedented proportions at the same time that public authority was being transferred and redefined. Slave resistance in Louisiana has often been described as a problem that slaveholders had to face no matter what the period. This tendency to homogenize slave resistance and slave control in the history of Louisiana is due, in part, I argue, to inaccuracies in the way the history of slave migration has been told, in particular for the period extending from the



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1780s to 1812. In this understudied period, the large influx of new African, Caribbean, and North American slaves posed a serious threat to the emerging slave system as well as generally instilling the perception that slave resistance was getting out of control and that too many new slaves would, in the end, ruin the place. This essay is an attempt to explore some of the quantitative and political implications of slave migrations at a time when slaves and slaveholders in Louisiana were busy negotiating and renegotiating the terms of their coexistence.

Slave Routes to Louisiana from 1783 to the Louisiana Purchase This first section is based upon two sets of primary sources. Both of them have been generally ignored by historians of Louisiana and the Louisiana slave trade: they are the shipping returns of the ports of Jamaica and Dominica for the 1780s and early 1790s and the customs registers kept by the employees of the post of La Balize — also called La Fourche or Passe à la Loutre — at the mouth of the Mississippi.2 The shipping returns list the departures of all ships carrying slaves to Louisiana between 1783 and 1791 — with a few gaps; the Balize registers list the arrival of more than sixty ships with slaves and slave ships between 1784 and 1793 — also with a few gaps. The two sets of sources are incomplete — and more research is needed — but they represent more than a fair sample of the slave trade to Louisiana between its liberalization in 1782 and its prohibition in 1796.3 Clearly, it is misleading to say that “for Louisiana . . . from 1783 to 1810, few extant records document the arrival of foreign slave ships.”4 It is equally wrong that “Spanish customs documents . . . are far from complete,” and that “except for the year 1786, information in Spanish customs documents about slaves imported into Louisiana is very sparse.”5 This argument, the scarcity of sources, is very often used in the Louisiana literature; and yet sources are often surprisingly rich and complete compared to those for other plantation societies. First of all, I propose to look at the free ports and slave entrepôts of Roseau, Dominica, and Kingston, Jamaica. They were the center of gravity of the New Orleans slave trade for most of the Spanish period, accounting for roughly two-thirds of the total New Orleans slave trade, a still littleknown and underrated fact in the history of Louisiana.6 “The effect of the

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free port acts was to admit small foreign vessels from neighboring foreign colonies in certain ports of the British West Indies with the privilege of importing and exporting certain types of goods.”7 In the case of Louisiana, slaves were prominent among the types of exported “goods.” Merchants and traders in New Orleans were given the opportunity to take an active part in the British free-port trade system when the Spanish authorities liberalized the Louisiana slave trade, first in 1777, and then in 1782, lifting the import duty on slaves and allowing the exportation of silver.8 Under the Freeport Act of 1766, renewed periodically until 1780 and in 1787, Dominica had two free ports: Roseau and Rupert’s Bay. By 1787, Dominica was no longer the frontier “society with slaves” that it was in 1763, when it was ceded to Britain by France. As a slave society grounded upon the cultivation of sugar, it played an important role, first, in the transatlantic slave trade and also in the intra-Caribbean reexport slave trade. In 1788, 1789, and 1791, it received no fewer than 14,000 African slaves, more than half of whom were taken from the Bight of Biafra.9 A total of 1,284 slaves were then reexported from Roseau to New Orleans: 286 in 1788, 916 in 1789, and 82 in 1791. In 1789, slaves left for New Orleans almost on a monthly basis. Ten brigs, two sloops, and two schooners left the port of Roseau, all but one Spanish. The embarkations were small, averaging sixty tons, but the average number of slaves taken on board reached 92. Only five of the ships had fewer than 100 slaves. It is unclear what proportion of the slaves were African, but it is likely that most of them were, as mixed-blood slaves were generally prohibited from entry in Louisiana and also because of the large slave surpluses in Dominica. In the early 1790s, the slave trade between New Orleans and Roseau slackened markedly. Dominican slave reexports were now almost strictly intra-Caribbean — excluding Louisiana. Several factors accounted for this trend. The total exportation of Africans to Dominica was reduced fivefold in the early 1790s, and after 1794, it was nil or minimal.10 Most of the incoming slaves were therefore needed on the sugar plantations of the island or the neighboring islands. Rebellion in Saint-Domingue, war preparations in Europe, and the abrupt decline in indigo production in Spanish Louisiana were also factors that contributed to such reduction in slave reexports. The Dominican reexport slave trade was indeed firmly tied to the short-lived surge in indigo production of the late 1780s.11 This is reflected in the description of the goods shipped from Louisiana to Dominica in exchange for slaves. At the end of January 1789, for example, the brig Mississippi arrived in Roseau with thirty-three casks of indigo and



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twenty thousand dollars. It left two months later with a slave cargo numbering 127 slaves.12 Kingston, a few days’ trip from Dominica, was also declared a free port in 1766. Unfortunately, no returns of ships clearing from any of Jamaica’s ports have survived for the 1770s. It is known, however, that Jamaica supplied Louisiana with plenty of slaves during that period.13 In 1776 alone, at least eleven ships arrived from Jamaica with cargoes of slaves.14 Sources are also missing for the 1790s, with the only surviving evidence of slave ships going to Louisiana being derived from the appendices of the 1799 Votes of the Jamaican Assembly and from the Balize registers.15 Between 1783 and 1788, however, we have fairly complete lists of all foreign and British ships clearing from two Jamaican ports: Kingston and Savannahla-Mar. Forty-six brigs, sloops, and schooners officially cleared for Louisiana with an aggregate slave cargo of 2,701 slaves, an average of more than 60 slaves per embarkation.16 As for the Dominican trade, it is unclear how many Africans versus non-Africans were transported. The Jamaican reexport trade in slaves dealt, however, mostly in Africans, and there is no reason to think that Louisiana was an exception. Clearly, then, Jamaica “emerged as the leading source of slaves” for Louisiana long before the 1790s.17 In the two years, 1783 and 1784, when the Jamaican free-port trade picked up again after the war slump, the reexportations of slaves to Louisiana were only marginal. As early as 1785, however, a fifth of all slaves reexported from Kingston were bound for Louisiana. The proportion rose to a fourth the following year, and in 1787, more than half of all reexported slaves from Jamaica left for the mouth of the Mississippi.18 For the first two and a half years, the shipments of slaves were small, generally under 50 slaves. From 1785 onward, the average size of slave cargoes increased markedly. Nine vessels transported more than 100 slaves each, eighteen had between 50 and 100, and only three had fewer than 50 slaves on board. The free-port system in Jamaica had been devised to attract Spanish ships along with Spanish raw materials — therefore prolonging the contraband trade that had characterized English-Spanish commercial relationships before 1766. Thirty-three of the returned slave ships sailed under the Spanish flag. There were also five English vessels, two French, and one Dutch. Most of the slave ships left Jamaica in the first half of each year, thus arriving in New Orleans before the start of the rainy season. Each slave ship was manned by an average of six seamen, or one seaman for ten slaves. There were, however, great disparities between ships. The

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Table 1. Slaves Clearing from the Ports of Kingston and Roseau (number of ships in parentheses) Origin Kingston

1783

1784

1785

1786

1787

1788

30 (1)

220 (9)

699 (12)

702 (10)

918 (12)

132 (2) 286 (3) 418 (5)

Roseau Total

30 (1)

220 (9)

699 (12)

702 (10)

918 (12)

1789

916 (9) 916 (9)

1791

Total

82 (2) 82 (2)

2,731 (46) 1,284 (14) 3,995 (60)

Source: Shipping Returns, National Archives, London.

English brig Marian transported slightly fewer than 200 slaves with only 10 crew members as opposed to the Spanish ship Margaretta, which transported only 26 slaves with 13 sailors (see table 1). For fragments of the 1780s and 1790s alone, it therefore appears that more than 4,000 slaves — most of them presumably African — left Dominica and Jamaica bound for the mouth of the Mississippi. It is difficult at present to estimate with precision how many slaves eventually ended up laboring on Louisiana plantations. Large numbers of slaves were often packed on small embarkations, and the mortality rate must have been very high.19 Existing arrival sources — whether the Balize registers or notarial records — indicate, however, that often more slaves arrived in Louisiana than had been officially listed as having departed from Jamaica and Dominica. Out of eight ships for which we know the dates of departure and arrival from the shipping returns and the Balize registers, four had more slaves at their arrival, two had the same numbers, and two had slightly fewer. This may reflect the fact that slaves would have been underreported to the Jamaican and Dominican customs officers to avoid paying export taxes; it may also indicate that ship captains sold their own slaves when they arrived in Louisiana or that ships stopped at other places to buy slaves before reaching Louisiana.20 Of course, slaves also migrated to New Orleans along other routes: directly from Africa, from American states and territories, and from the French Caribbean (see table 2). At least three — and maybe five — ships arrived from the African coast. The Santa Catalina and the Feliz reached the post of La Balize in 1788 with 204 and 228 slaves respectively. The

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Table 2. Slave Migrations to Louisiana, 1783–1792 Origin Jamaica Dominica Martinique Africa Saint  Domingue Cuba Others Total

1783 30

1784 1785 1786 1787 1788 1789 1790 219

694

723

1,247 164

55

272

423 285 154 432

231 916 177

1791

51 60 516

36

30

219

723

90 1,773 1,330 1,327

601

79 3,697 22 1,283 35 1,046 307 739 50 100

34 50 799

1792 Total

60

413 134 140 593 7,452

Sources: Papeles de Cuba (with gaps) and Shipping Returns (with gaps).

Amable Victoria arrived at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1792 with 307 slaves, after having called at Saint-Domingue. El Guipuscano may also have arrived from Africa in 1790 with a cargo of 197 slaves, after having called at Martinique.21 The islands of Martinique and Saint-Domingue also played an important role in the displacement of slaves to New Orleans  — with ten and eight ships respectively — in the two decades under consideration here, but their exact role remains to be gauged, pending further research. It must be noted, however, that the slave shipments from Martinique were particularly large and often resembled those from the island of Dominica. In the 1790s, the trade in slaves between New Orleans, Jamaica, and Dominica underwent a sharp decrease. Due to mounting anxiety regarding the possibility of a black revolution, the slave trade to Louisiana was repeatedly curbed by the Spanish authorities until its total prohibition was enacted in February 1796, at about the same time that sugar was being successfully experimented with in Louisiana. The ban did not remain effective for long and did not prevent the smuggling of slaves. Three years later, for example, a certain Santiago Fletcher was allowed to introduce 200 slaves or so into Louisiana.22 In November 1800, under the pressure of planters whose aging labor force had been hit hard by the smallpox epidemic, the slave trade was again reopened, although with stringent regulations.

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Compared to the period delineated above, the slave trade took new and different Caribbean routes, and involved new patterns of displacement. Cuba was now the epicenter of the New Orleans slave trade, with Jamaica playing a more limited role and Dominica no longer a slave supplier. Cuba was, by then, rapidly developing into a prosperous sugar colony, and it had received large numbers of Africans ever since the liberalization of its slave trade in February 1789:23 “By the period of world peace in 1800–1803, [the Cuban slave trade] moved into a period of growth even more rapid than that of sugar.” This meant, among other things, that it had numerous slaves to reexport to such nearby ports as New Orleans.24 For the three years preceding the Louisiana Purchase, I here again use two sets of records: the records of the Spanish Superior Court and the registers kept by Thomas Allo and Jose Garcia Capetillo, the two Spanish officers in charge of visiting incoming and outgoing vessels at the post of La Balize.25 Both records show that between 1801 and 1803, the slave trade was based almost exclusively on the reexportation of small numbers of African slaves from Cuba. This trade was, at first, prohibited on the grounds that a royal privilege had been granted to a company based in Bordeaux — the Cassague Company — for the delivery of 5,000 Africans. But it became widely tolerated on the principle that new Africans were only to be introduced for private use and not to be resold.26 Planters were required to petition the Superior Court whenever they bought slaves in Cuba, and the introduction of slaves would be authorized on the condition that the slaves were new Africans — mixed-blood slaves were prohibited by law from entry. Spanish officials in Louisiana actually encouraged the Cuban trade, observing that it was unclear whether the French company would ever ship slaves before the start of new war turbulences. In addition, a dispensation dated 1 December 1788 made it lawful for Spanish citizens to introduce slave property as long as it benefited the agriculture of the colony and contributed to the growth of its slave population (“en beneficio de la agricultura y aumento de su poblacion”).27 One planter, for example, explained to the Superior Court that he needed slaves to cultivate cotton on his plantation. One Spanish official remarked that slaves were badly needed for the cultivation of sugar.28 Between late 1801 and late 1803, the Superior Court examined sixtyone slave-trade petitions involving 300 slaves. Most petitions — a majority of them concerning the introduction of one or two slaves only — were received in 1803, when the reexport trade between Cuba and New Or-



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leans reached its climax. The approximately 100 African slaves reexported from Cuba were bought from more than thirty-two different African slave ships.29 The Balize registers kept between February 1801 and December 1803 document the introduction of an additional 1,050 or so slaves, transported onboard eighty-seven vessels. Most slaves were introduced in small numbers of 10 or fewer. One notable exception was an American brig from Baltimore, the Cizner, that carried 69 slaves to Natchez in September 1802.30 The five most frequent places of embarkation of the incoming vessels were Havana — accounting for more than half of all embarkations — Africa, Jamaica, Baltimore, and Charleston. There were also a few slaves introduced from Saint Thomas, New York, Campeche, Martinique, Bordeaux, Philadelphia, Savannah, London, Boston, and Saint-Domingue. By combining the Superior Court records and the shipping records, one comes to an estimated slave migration of at least 1,150 — more than 80 percent of whom were African (see table 3). Generally, the “nations” of the new African slaves were not given except when they were part of the names of the slaves, as in Luis Carabaly, Thomas Mina, Christobal Mandinga, and Antonio Mandinga.31 The remaining 20 percent were either not identified or typified as ladinos (mixed-blood), ingles or americano, frances, civilicidos — as opposed to bruts — criollo or español. Apart from the Cuban reexport slave trade, the existing Spanish records testify to the arrival of three slave ships directly from the African coast. The first vessel to be spotted at the mouth of the Mississippi was L’Africain, a brig from “Senegal” captained by Pierre Farnuel, and owned by two French merchants, Guilbaud and Roustand. The manifest of the ship given to Jose Garcia Capetillo listed 143 new slaves.32 On 24 May, a petition was addressed to the Superior Court for the introduction of the new slaves. Pierre Farnuel explained that he had come to Louisiana having heard that France had taken possession of the Territory (“en la creencia segun publica vox, de haver tomado posecion de esta provincia la republica francesa de que es miembro, pero habiendo encontrado no ha tenido aun efecto”).33 The Spanish authorities acceded to the request since Louisiana was indeed in the process of being retroceded to France; the colonial prefect, Pierre Clément de Laussat, gave his permission. The second slave ship to arrive was the French brig La Confiance, under Captain Jean Louis Sacray, from the “coast of Senegal,” with 170 slaves —  34 slaves having been sold in Martinique, where La Confiance had previously stopped. Little is known about the slaves themselves except that at

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Table 3. Estimated Slave Migrations in the Last Years of Spanish Louisiana, 1801–1803 (African slaves in parentheses) Origin Africa Cuba Jamaica Martinique Saint-Domingue Lowcountry Baltimore Other Caribbean Other North America Others Unknown Total

1801

4

2 6

12 (8)

1802 187 6 17 5 69 6 4 9 303 (201)

1803

Total

423 223 92 32 15 8 3 8 8 4 18 834 (713)

423 410 102 32 32 15 72 20 12 4 27 1,149 (918)

Sources: Papeles de Cuba, Superior Court Records, and Parliamentary Papers.

least a third were between ten and twelve years old (“mas de la tercera parte de diez a doze años”), according to Pierre Favrot, the commandant of the Fort of Plaquemines, where the ship was detained.34 Once again, the ship was allowed to sail up the Mississippi only after the intercession of the French colonial prefect. In a letter to Juan Morales dated 15 June, Laussat explained that the detention of the brig was to be as short as possible because, although very healthy, the new African slaves suffered from the heat and insects swarming down the river.35 The third and last slave ship that arrived before the end of 1803 was the brig Sally. It entered the passes of the Mississippi on 6 September.36 The voyage of the Sally from Bordeaux to the Congo River, from the Congo River to Cuba and from Cuba to New Orleans is unusually well documented. The Sally was originally owned by a New Yorker called Hugo Williams. In 1802, while the Sally, under Captain Enrique Edward, was heading toward the Congo River, an agreement was reached in France between Hugo Williams and J. Loup and Company — partners of Guilbaud and Roustand. Auguste Guibert, a captain who was used to commanding slave expeditions, was to sail to the Congo River, “Coast of Angola,” buy the brig



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Sally for 1,600 pounds sterling, purchase 170 slaves from Enrique Edwards, sail to St. Thomas for food and water, and then to Cuba where further orders would await him. On 10 May 1803, Enrique Edward sold 170 slaves to Auguste Guibert for a total of 4,320 pounds sterling — about 25 pounds per slave. The exact date of departure of the Sally is unknown, as are the details of the Middle Passage. It is known, however, that the brig left the coast of Cuba with 150 slaves sometime in August 1803, and that it landed in distress in Pensacola soon after. Bad weather and a lack of food and water between Havana and New Orleans resulted in the deaths of several African slaves, with many others falling ill (“el buque ha sufrido las calamidades a que lo obligaron los malos tiempos, y vientos contrarios, de escasez de viveres y aguada, causando la muerte de algunos negros y enfermedad de otros”). Faced with such difficulties, Jean François Merieult, to whom the slaves were consigned, petitioned Juan Morales for the slaves to be either shipped to New Orleans in small embarkations or allowed to freshen up before the sale could take place (“dejarlos reposar y refrigerar”).37 Despite everything, the slaves were advertised as “healthy” “Congo and Mandings” slaves. When they did arrive in New Orleans, they numbered only 110.38 Except for the arrival of small numbers of slaves from Cuba and the three African slave ships described above, the history of the New Orleans slave trade between the end of 1800 and the Louisiana Purchase was mostly a story of frustration for planters and merchants alike. Because of a series of mercantilist regulations and war disturbances, the planters of Louisiana received very few slaves in the three years that preceded the Louisiana Purchase: about 1,200 compared to an estimated 12,000 to 14,000 slaves for the entire Spanish period — at least three-quarters of whom were Africans. Indeed, I estimate from existing primary sources that from 3,000 to 4,000 slaves arrived between 1763 and 1783 — at least 1,000 slaves were recorded for 1776 alone — 7,000 to 8,000 slaves between 1783 and 1792, and another 1,000 or so before 1796.39 Overall, about as many slaves arrived in 1788 alone as in the whole interregnum period. The Cassague Company never delivered the expected slaves, and much uncertainty remains as to who the company associates were.40 Juan Bautista Coffigny, a New Orleans merchant, was not given permission to go to Havana to buy a cargo of Africans.41 As for Joseph Faurie, another New Orleans merchant, he did receive permission to leave for Africa, but it is unclear whether he ever did so, and if he did, whether he transported his cargo to New Orleans.42 The Fortier family — an influential family of merchants based in New Orleans and Bordeaux — also never fulfilled its expectations of playing an

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active role in the African slave trade. Several reasons accounted for their failed expectations. Peace between France and England was short-lived, and war considerably disturbed the trade. It was much more convenient, cost-effective, and safe to ship slaves to the French Caribbean instead of going all the way up the Mississippi with a potentially restless African cargo. In addition, not all slave ships could enter the Mississippi; and French merchants were very hesitant because of the Spanish mercantilist regulations.43

Slave Routes in the Early Years of American Rule until the War of 1812 After a three-year period of limited slave migration — limited in scope and limited by law — French, American, and Louisiana Creole planters hastened to import slaves under American rule. Between 1804 and 1808, on the one hand, and between 1808 and 1812, on the other, an estimated 12,000 African, Caribbean, and American slaves were brought to Louisiana, overland and overseas, excluding the migration of the SaintDomingue refugees’ slaves. Between 7,000 and 8,000 slaves arrived between 1804 and 1808 alone. In 1797, the total slave population for Louisiana stood at approximately 20,000. In 1810, it was almost three-quarters more, with an annual increase rate of almost 9 percent between 1806 and 1810.44 It is likely that at least a third of all slaves counted in the 1810 federal census were newly arrived or had arrived in the preceding decade or so. Between 1804 and 1812, the routes taken by slaves differed again from the pre–Louisiana Purchase period. A few slaves arrived directly from Africa, some continued arriving from the British and Spanish Caribbean, but most now came along North American routes. Such sizeable slave migration had incalculable repercussions upon the slave community as a whole. Between one-half and two-thirds of all slaves introduced were Africans who brought with them languages and cultural references unknown to large proportions of Louisiana slaves. Whereas most Creoles and Creolized slaves spoke either French, Spanish, “Creole,” or “Creole French,” the new African slaves spoke no European languages, or just a few words. The remaining slaves were, for the most part, Anglophones from the Atlantic seaboard and from the British Caribbean, who often migrated in family groups.45



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I used a variety of primary sources to estimate the volume of slave migrations after the Louisiana Purchase. Since no or hardly any shipping records similar to the Balize registers have survived, I had to rely extensively on newspaper advertisements for slave ships, slave cargoes, newly arrived runaway slaves, and shipping news. All existing newspapers published in New Orleans were researched: Le Moniteur de la Louisiane, the Louisiana Gazette, Le Courrier de la Louisiane, the Union, the Telegraph, and the Orleans Gazette.46 As far as newspapers are concerned, I also used the shipping lists published in the Charleston Courier and the Papel Periodico de la Havana, issues of which are kept at the Spanish National Library, and scattered issues of the Royal Gazette of Jamaica. For the Jamaican and Bahamian trade in slaves, I turned to the shipping returns kept in the British National Archives and to the British Parliamentary Papers. I also used various collections of primary sources as well as the data made available by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. It is true that my database is incomplete. The origins of new slaves, for example, were not always specified, and it was at times difficult to distinguish between African and Creole migrations. Also, the exact numbers of transported slaves were often not given, and I therefore had to make assumptions. The following estimates are, nonetheless, the most researched so far.47 In 1804, a year of political transition, the slave trade was freed from the stringent mercantilist regulations of the Spanish era. The slave routes were still partly Caribbean-centered — a reminder of the late-colonial pattern of migration. Between 1,500 and 2,000 slaves — Africans and Creoles  — reached New Orleans, including Saint-Domingue slaves transported from Jamaica. This was a far cry from what Governor William Claiborne had estimated in his letters to James Madison: “slaves are daily introduced from Africa, many direct from this unhappy Country, and others by way of the West Indies islands,” and “I am inclined to think that previous to the 1st of October thousands of African Negroes will be imported into this Province.”48 Slave ships either came directly from Africa or indirectly via Cuba or Jamaica. The two slave ships that came directly from the coast of West Central Africa were the Margaret and the Sarah, both consigned to John McDonogh. The exact number of slaves transported by the two ships is unknown, but each had at least 300 slaves on board.49 The Margaret and the Sarah did not open the way for other African slave ships. Indeed, following the implementation of the first grade of Territorial Law in October 1804, the New Orleans slave trade was again closed, to the dismay of the

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New Orleans sugar and cotton planters who eyed with envy the rice and cotton planters of South Carolina and the cotton planters of the Mississippi Territory, who continued importing large numbers of slaves.50 For the first ten months of 1805, slave migrations were therefore stalled. Soon, however, taking advantage of the ambiguity of the 1805 Act for the Government of the Orleans Territory, Louisiana merchants and planters started introducing slaves again, this time along North American– centered routes. One African slave ship, the Alexander, arrived at the end of 1805 after having stopped at Montego Bay for water.51 Between 1,000 and 1,500 slaves were introduced the following year. The apex of the slave trade was then reached in 1807, when an estimated 2,800 African and Creole slaves were imported to Louisiana. Most African slaves were now reexported from the port of Charleston, where the slave trade had been reopened in 1803.52 The ships engaged in the Charleston reexport trade were of two kinds. There were embarkations such as the brig Carolina or the schooner United States, which commuted between Charleston and New Orleans two or three times a year. The transported slaves were selected from among larger slave cargoes. The 140 “Congo” slaves brought on board the brig Ethiopean, for example, were chosen from a cargo of 400 freshly arrived Africans.53 There were other vessels that stopped at Charleston and then shipped their “entire” African cargoes to New Orleans. At least four slave ships left Africa to New Orleans by way of Charleston between 1805 and 1807. The brig Armed Neutrality, for example, stopped at the port of Charleston with 213 slaves at the end of July 1807. Two and a half months later, the same brig was advertised in New Orleans with 200 “prime Congo and Mandingo slaves”: “This cargo [was] entire as when it left the coast of Africa.”54 The schooner Miriam, under Captain Muir, also called at Charleston for a while before continuing south to New Orleans.55 At least fifty-three “slave ships” and “ships with slaves” entered the port of New Orleans between 1804 and 1808, seven in 1804, ten in 1806, twentyfive in 1807, and thirteen in 1808 (see table 4). There were thirty-two brigs, thirteen schooners, one frigate, six ships, and two sloops.56 The gender of the African slaves was not known in all cases, but males constituted about 70 percent and women 30 percent of the known total. If most of the new migrant slaves who arrived between 1804 and 1808 were Africans reexported first from Cuba and then from Charleston, there were also significant numbers of Africans and Creoles — slaves born in North America or the Caribbean — imported from Tennessee, Kentucky,



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Table 4. Estimated Number of African Slaves Introduced in New Orleans between 1804 and 1808 (from primary sources only) Year

Africa

1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 Total

600 552 350 1,502a

Charleston Jamaica

527 945 189 1,661

458 1 1 40 500b

Havana

Unclear

170

170

170

405 471 427 1,473

Other 19

43 62

Total 1,398 572 933 1,806 659 5,368

Sources: Union: 1804 (10/1, 10/20, 9/4, 5/25, 2/27, 7/11, 1/9, 9/4, 11/10); Moniteur: 1803 (2/18, 9/17), 1804 (7/19), 1806 (11/15, 8/9, 11/12, 5/10, 5/21, 11/19, 7/19, 11/5, 9/10, 9/3, 6/7, 11/29, 12/6), 1807 (12/5, 7/15, 8/8, 5/30, 4/29, 2/7, 7/4, 6/3, 11/14, 11/21, 11/7, 4/15, 7/3, 10/17, 8/12, 6/20, 3/18, 1/28, 2/25, 2/28, 4/18, 4/22, 8/22, 8/29, 1/21), 1808 (1/9, 2/27, 3/5, 3/23, 1/13, 3/12, 1/6); Gazette: 1804 (8/28), 1806 (2/4, 11/25, 6/6, 10/31, 8/5, 6/24, 5/13, 11/15, 12/5), 1807 (9/1, 6/12, 2/6, 6/5, 2/27, 3/27), 1808 (2/16, 1/8); Aviso: 1806 (5/13), 1808 (5/5); Telegraph: 1806 (8/23, 9/4), 1808 (2/25); Orleans Gazette: 1807 (6/16, 10/19); Courrier: 1807 (11/9), 1808 (5/20); National Archives, Kew Gardens: CO 142/21 (pp. 128, 155), CO 142/23 (pp. 85, 97, 131); Parliamentary Papers, 1806 (pp. 705, 805). Also McDo­ nogh Papers and Dufilho Papers, Tulane Special Collections.   a For 1805, one of the ships went via Charleston; another went via Tortola. For 1807, the two ships went via Charleston.   b There is a possibility that not all 500 were African slaves. The Parliamentary Papers, from which most of the data are taken, do not specify whether or not they were Africans, but there is a strong probability that they were.

Jamaica, or Maryland as documented, for example, in the records left by the slave merchant John McDonogh.57 In the first half of 1808, the last Charleston ships engaged in the African reexport trade entered the Mississippi River. The migration of slaves was, again, about to take new forms, along the lines of the ninth section of the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves. Slaves introduced before January 1808 could be imported coastwise on vessels weighing forty tons or more.58 African, Caribbean, and American slaves thus started to arrive in Louisiana by the hundreds through coastal North American trade. The center of the coastal trade in slaves moved north to such ports of departure as Baltimore, Maryland, or Norfolk, Virginia, which now competed with Charleston. Slave sale and runaway advertisements suggest that the coastal trade was particularly brisk in the four years preceding the War of

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1812. The brig Mary, under Captain Cutcheon, from Philadelphia; the brig Adherbal, under Captain McNeal, from Baltimore; and the brig Stephen, under Captain Gale, from New York, are three examples among many advertised in Le Moniteur, the Courrier de la Louisiane, and the Louisiana Gazette.59 The shipments of slaves were moderate in size, usually fewer than 50 slaves, but they were very frequent. Among the New Orleans merchants who now engaged in the coastal trade in slaves were Michel Fortier and his son Jean-Michel. Unsuccessful at the African slave trade in the early years of the nineteenth century, they seem to have finally recouped their losses thereafter.60 Other slave merchants included L. M. Sagory, John Garnier, Cavelier and Son, Dutillet and Peyrellade, John Lanusse, Benjamin Morgan, P. A. Lay, and Lachataignerais. The full extent of slave migrations between 1808 and 1812 — by land and along waterways — still remains to be thoroughly investigated. For the purpose of this article, it has been estimated that more than 4,000 slaves reached Louisiana after the end of the Atlantic slave trade and before statehood. At least half of the estimated migrants were probably young African slaves — mostly male.

Slave Resistance and Slave Control in the Wake of the Louisiana Purchase For the planters who had established their plantations in and around New Orleans, slave migration was a double-edged sword. Slaves were badly needed to work on the sugar plantations of Saint Charles and Saint John the Baptist, for example, two parishes located north of New Orleans. They were equally sought after for the transformation of the lands located immediately south and east of the English Turn. The slave trade fueled the sugar and the cotton revolutions, but, as many at the time perceived and feared, it also fueled marronage, while generally reinforcing the slaves’ spirit of rebellion and revolt. One of the effects of the slave trade was to make the slave community a very unstable and restless one. It transformed many plantations from small establishments marked by proximity between planters and slaves to large systems in which the modes of control had to be redefined. According to many at the time, the corollary of slave migration could only be “a spirit of great insubordination,” as Governor William Claiborne repeatedly put it.61 When, in early 1807, two shipments of 20 convicted slave criminals deported from Jamaica arrived in New Or-



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leans, the corollary was indeed, to many, verified.62 Slave migration could easily lead to slave resistance. At the very least, it reinforced the planters’ and authorities’ perception of resistance. Whether real threat or heightened perception or a combination of  both, records show that for most of the early American period, planters and authorities pondered with anxiety over the “insufficiency, relaxation and almost lack of control of the slave population.”63 If New Orleans planters doubted the efficiency of Spanish internal security, the American model did not convince either. Over the whole period, planters described slave resistance as a phenomenon spiraling out of their control — runaway slaves “infested” the city and its suburbs; they assembled after sunset to dance and sing; and they drank and found refuge in taverns and cabarets. It was, of course, not the first time planters had expressed alarm in such terms, a habitual strategy to enact stricter slave regulations, but the planters’ sense of alarm was not completely unwarranted.64 Several internal and external factors coincided to foster black resistance, which in turn alarmed planters and authorities: a revolutionary spirit brought by cosmopolitan slaves; a temporary breakdown of social control caused by the transfer of public authority entailed by the Louisiana Purchase; a context of widespread Atlantic turbulence with the proclamation of the black republic in Saint-Domingue; and the emergence of racial identities within diverse and changing slave communities. Nowhere was slave resistance as perceptible as in the number of fugitive slaves whose lives filled the newspapers, the patrol reports, the City Court proceedings, and the notarized acts of sale that planters and authorities shared with one another.65 Between 1801 and 1815 alone, more than one thousand runaway slaves were advertised in the newspapers of New Orleans — Le Moniteur de la Louisiane, the Friend of the Law, Le Courrier de la Louisiane, the Louisiana Gazette, the Orleans Gazette, the Telegraph, and the Union.66 Whether they ran away for short or long periods of time, slaves again and again asserted their humanity. The origins of the runaways were known in more than 60 percent of the advertisements published. One in two identified runaways was African (28.2 percent of the total runaway sample), and one in five was American (19.5 percent). A little less than one in eight were Creoles of Louisiana (8.4 percent). There were also 45 Caribbean slaves (4.7 percent of the total). Among runaways identified as new slave migrants, there were about twice as many Africans as Americans, and four times as many Americans as

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Caribbean slaves — proportions that would seem reasonably reflective of the overall new slave arrivals. Newspapers were a constant reminder of the physical absence/presence of runaway slaves. The “print presence” of runaways in early American New Orleans, in turn, no doubt influenced and shaped the planters’ and public authorities’ perceptions and representations of black resistance, as exemplified by the following petitions sent to the municipal council of New Orleans in June and September 1804: La . . . requête a pour objet d’observer que les marronnages se multiplient.67 (my emphasis) [The object of the request is to observe that the number of fugitive slaves is on the rise.] Permettés que nous mettions sous vos yeux, les vols qui se multiplient chaque jour avec fracture, et que les Nègres Marons sont rassemblés autour de la ville, ce qui rends nos propres esclaves, recèleurs de leurs brigandages, leur fournissent aussi des vivres et des munitions . . . et les nègres de la campagne se joignent à eux avec d’autres ennemis qui nous environnent ; dans le moment ou les ressors [sic]de la police sont relachés.68 (my emphasis) [May we alert you that burglaries are multiplying daily, that fugitive slaves are gathered around the city, which makes our own slaves receivers of their stolen goods, that our slaves provide them with food and ammunition, . . . that country slaves join with the runaways along with other enemies that surround us, at a time when police regulations are relaxed.] The language of the two petitions is symptomatic of the mood that accompanied and followed news of the Louisiana Purchase, a time when public authority was being transferred and redefined. Planters pondered apprehensively over the “multiplication” of acts of black resistance. The runaway slaves were portrayed as “surrounding” the city, corrupting all disciplined slaves and receiving the support of the rural slave population. Acting upon such petitions, the successive mayors of New Orleans regularly ordered runaway and maroon hunts, to no avail.69 Any long-term solution to the problem of runaway slaves presupposed the strict enforcement of measures to control the overall movements of slaves in all public and private spaces, as on Sundays when slaves congre-



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gated to dance and play. In early January 1814, for example, the police jury (a local governing body) of the Parish of Orleans was informed that “some of the planters allow their slaves to dance at night in their houses, and such abuses may lead to the worst dangers.” Such margins of self-expression could obviously not be tolerated — they would too easily be turned into margins of resistance. During the last few days of the French interregnum, the Conseil de Ville had tried hard to exert stricter control over slaves and fugitive slaves. New police regulations were proposed, and an ordinance was drafted to curb the movements of slaves at night. It was deemed necessary to prevent slaves from running about the streets, “il a été proposé par le citoyen Tureaud de s’occuper des moyens d’empêcher, d’une manière efficace, que les nègres esclaves ne courent les rues la nuit.” (It has been proposed by citizen Tureaud to find ways to successfully prevent Negro slaves from running about the streets at night.)70 It was one of the several attempts on the part of public authorities to circumscribe slaves in predefined places — a recurring problem in early American New Orleans. In an 1804 circular to the “Commandants of Districts,” William Claiborne stressed the importance of taking “measures . . . to prevent slaves from wandering about either by day or night, without passes.”71 Slaves encountered in the streets after nine o’clock in the evening would be taken to prison. In November 1812, attempts were again made to exert more control over slaves’ movements. Games and dances, which had been tolerated up to then, were strictly forbidden on Sundays by a new city ordinance.72 Public taverns, the number of which the municipal and legislative councils repeatedly tried to limit, were strongly suspected of harboring runaway slaves and of being places of social masquerade, “repaires à esclaves et à gens de mauvaise vie” (haunts of slaves and other depraved characters).73 There, slaves and lower-class whites mingled freely and without public supervision. In May 1810, for example, the superintendents and the watchmen of the City Guard were asked to patrol the streets of New Orleans and arrest all runaways. Fugitives would most likely be found haunting the meat market — where some occasionally found rest at night — peddling stolen goods or, revealingly, in and out of the city taverns.74 In the wake of the 1811 German Coast slave insurrection, concerns about taverns revived. It was observed at one session of the municipal council that slaves were armed, drunk, uncontrolled most of the time, and always in or near the city taverns,

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Les esclaves ne sortent plus qu’armés, ils s’enivrent continuellement dans les cabarets ou restent attroupés à la porte des ces lieux de débauche ; et les dimanches et fêtes, ils prolongent leurs danses et leurs jeux longtemps [sic] après le coucher du soleil.75 [Slaves never go out unarmed anymore, they never stop getting intoxicated in the taverns, or they group themselves outside those places of debauchery; on Sundays and on feast days, they prolong their dances and games long after sunset.] The existence of gambling houses, as such, and as haunts for runaways, also deeply troubled the authorities. Their proliferation contributed to fostering the widespread paranoia about the supposedly uncontrollable movements of slaves. One councilor reported that runaway slaves often gambled in the city and in the suburbs: Le Conseil informé que plusieurs esclaves, et même des esclaves en marronnage, se livrent fréquemment à des jeux de hasard en divers endroits de la ville, et notamment du faubourg Sainte Marie, ce qui les porte à commettre journellement des vols chez leurs maîtres et ailleurs.76 [The Council (has been) informed that many slaves, even fugitives, often take part in gambling activities in different parts of the city, notably in the faubourg Sainte Marie, which leads them to daily acts of theft at their masters’ or elsewhere.] The rhetoric of the petition is again that of multiplicity. Runaway slaves “frequently” gambled in “several” parts of the city, where they “daily” robbed their masters and all categories of citizens. Runaway advertisements often referred to runaway hideouts. Jim and Joe, for instance, were “supposed to be lurking about the city or its vicinity.” A female slave was arrested in the attic of one of the New Orleans bakeries.77 The existence of such areas of slave marginality was often brought to the attention of the municipal council. Slaves hid in the neighborhood of the Charity Hospital, in the vessels abandoned in the harbor or in the wooden houses illegally built on the batture, between the levee and the river. They were found hidden in marshes or in sugar cane fields.78 According to many an anxious planter, the topography and the physical environment of the city — with its numerous waterways — was a prime factor that contributed more than anything else to the successful escape of too many runaway slaves. Lieutenant Marshall, commandant of Fort



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St. John, would have heartily agreed. Indeed, as he was not legally entitled to ask for the passports of all the people of color who navigated out of Bayou Saint John into Lake Pontchartrain, runaway slaves easily escaped his supervision: Faute de pouvoirs qui l’autorisent à exiger de tous gens de couleur et nègres à leur sortie du Bayou, l’exhibition de leurs [sic] passeports il va et vient continuellement une foule de nègres, mulâtres, dans des canots, se disent pêcheurs; que sous pretexte il passe des nègres marrons qui sont dés lors perdus pour leurs maîtres.79 [As he is not entitled to demand their passports from all people of color and other Negroes at the exit of the bayou, a crowd of Negroes and mullatoes continuously come and go in boats calling themselves fishermen; under this pretext, fugitive slaves manage to pass unnoticed and are thereby lost to their masters.] The language used by Lieutenant Marshall is again enlightening. He refers to “crowds of people of color” coming and going “at all times” on the river and pretending to be fishermen. The public representation of marronage was one of a canker spreading and corrupting the entire slave community. As in other slave societies, one of the causes of the “disease” getting out of control was the possibility for runaway slaves to hire themselves out and hide in the dense urban network. Town councilors strongly disapproved, for example, of the liberty granted to hired slaves to live on their own, away from the supervision of their masters. Article nineteen of the 1804 “Réglement de Police” forbade slaves from doing so unless they were legally married to a free woman or a free man.80 A few months later, further legislation was voted, this time to bar runaway slaves from the hiring-out system, “pour ôter aux nègres . . . la possibilité de trouver à se louer, lorsqu’ils sont en marronnage” (to prevent Negroes . . . from hiring themselves, when they are runaways). Slaves who hired themselves were to wear a badge mentioning the names of their masters.81 Watchmen, however, did not enforce the measure, and few slaves were seen wearing the required identification.82 Slave resistance expanded into interstices of liberty at the very moment the mechanisms of slave control in general reached, or seemed to reach, a low ebb, making it even more alarming, perceptible, and seem-

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ingly uncontrollable. On 25 November 1807, a town councilor remarked that watchmen did not perform their duty (“la ville [est] fort mal gardée durant la nuit par les watchmen”). Much like “Gabriel’s Richmond,” it seems that New Orleans had severely defective slave patrols (“le système des patrouilles . . . paraît être la cause de ce défaut de surveillance”).83 In December 1811, the members of the Conseil de Ville complained, in a letter to the governor, that “order and safety are nonexistent in the city,” and that “police regulations are not enforced.”84 Overall, it would seem that James Pitot’s observation on the last years of Spanish Louisiana would have applied to the early American period, too. He lamented: The patrols are insignificant; the garrison is inconsequential; the militia not in uniform. . . . Negroes, less subject to authority and more able to move around without supervision on the main roads and in town, are in a position to learn the ways of corruption . . . and the anxious owner lives in a state of war with his slaves.85 The cession of Louisiana to America and the period that immediately followed it affected the habitual modes of slave control.86 The City of New Orleans was underfunded and sometimes could not pay the salaries of its guard; there were jurisdictional disagreements between city and parish authorities; limits of districts and arrondissements were constantly redrawn; planters often declined to play the role of syndics; the militia did not meet regularly; the prisons were known to be in constant need of basic repairs, but authorities disagreed over responsibilities, and taxes were difficult to raise. One recurrent problem was how and when to patrol the city of New Orleans at night when runaway slaves were thought to be plotting to set fire to the shops and houses. With the dramatic expansion of slavery in the rural areas, there also arose the problem of regulating slave life in a much wider zone. One of the overriding concerns of the city, parish, and territory authorities was indeed to extend slave control to the spaces that the expansion of the slave society and the acceleration of the slave trade had left unsupervised. The perception of slave insubordination was partly caused by the resistance of slaves themselves, and partly by the inability of the authorities to exert panoptic powers where slavery had recently taken new roots. Early on, Governor William Claiborne stressed the important role of the militia in controlling slaves. In a letter dated 6 August 1804, he defined the duty of the militia as “to arrest all Negroes who may be found after



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9 o’clock.”87 Less than two weeks later, Colonel Bellechasse announced to the municipal council that he had successfully organized the militia. They were now ready to patrol the city.88 On 18 August, the municipal council issued a set of regulations for the militia patrols. Each night, sixteen soldiers, two officers, two sergeants, and two corporals would march through the city.89 A few months later, following the Act for Regulating and Governing the Militia of the Territory of Orleans, the night patrols were reorganized.90 The number of militiamen to patrol the city now included one superintendent, eight deputy superintendents, and twenty-four militia men, among whom were ten free people of color.91 On 29 January 1806, the commander in chief, William Claiborne, ordered a company of the militia to be on duty in the city every night between five in the evening and six in the morning. This service was to be performed in rotation by the Orleans volunteers, the first, second, and fourth regiments of the militia.92 Just a few months before the militia patrols were organized by Colonel Bellechasse, the municipal council had discussed the possibility and the necessity of another project, that of setting up a gendarmerie — or maréchaussée — for the city, its faubourgs, and suburbs. Twenty-five men, white or free mulattoes, headed by white officers, would “perpetually” chase runaway slaves: Une maréchaussée composée de 25 hommes blancs ou à ce défaut de mulatres libres, dont les officiers seraient blancs, destinés à faire des patrouilles lorsqu’ils en seraient requits par les sindics des districts et qui seraient perpétuellement à la poursuite des nègres marrons.93 The gendarmerie, which came into existence soon after the incorporation of the city, was, in the end, composed of a captain, a commandant, a lieutenant, a deputy-lieutenant, a sergeant, three brigadiers, and thirtytwo gendarmes. A tax of one dollar, levied on each slave, financed the new police force.94 Although it had seemed urgently necessary, the gendarmerie was surprisingly short-lived. Several slaveholders refused to pay the tax, and a petition signed by slaveholders of “Chapitoulas” and “Gentilly,” in the suburbs of the city — areas that had greatly benefited from the arrival of the new slave migrants — requested the dismissal of the gendarmes.95 In December of the same year, the horses of the guards were sold, thus reducing dramatically their chances of catching fugitives.96 Due to mounting public discontent, the gendarmerie was dismissed soon after, on 15 February 1806. It was reported that the gendarmerie had failed in its duty of pursuing and arresting runaway slaves, though one wonders

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how they could ever have done it without proper equipment in the dense natural areas of New Orleans. It was replaced by a City Guard meant to exclusively patrol the city and its faubourgs. The rural areas were thus left unsupervised.97 The City Guard was composed, for the city itself, of one superintendent, two deputy-superintendents, and twenty watchmen, and for the Faubourg Sainte Marie, of the same superintendent, of two deputy-superintendents, and eight watchmen.98 In March 1807, article I of the ordinance concerning the City Guard specified that an additional twelve watchmen would be hired, bringing the force to a total of forty-three men. In December of the same year, however, like the gendarmerie a year before, the Garde de Ville was deemed incapable of performing its duty. The number of watchmen went down to eight men.99 Yet, at the same time, African slaves were arriving from Charleston by the hundreds, and slaves increasingly figured as fugitives in the New Orleans newspapers. Now that the Garde de Ville was almost moribund, Colonel Bellechasse, in charge of the First Regiment of the Militia of the Territory, was asked to reorganize the night militia patrols.100 They were just as shortlived and were dismissed in November 1809, at which time the City Guard then rose again from its ashes and a new tax was levied on slaves for its financing.101 The City Guard was to exert its control over all public spaces, but more particularly, over spaces occupied by potential runaways — the streets, the public squares, the levees of the city, the meat market and the public taverns, A dater de la publication de la présente ordonnance, il sera du devoir des Commissaires de police composant la Garde de cette ville, de commencer le service des patrouilles chaque soir à l’entrée de la nuit, et de parcourir les rues, places publiques et levées, à l’effet de maintenir le bon ordre, et de saisir et arrêter tous vagabonds, esclaves en marronnage . . . et de dissiper tous rassemblements d’esclaves dans la Halle des Boucheries et aux portes des cabarets de la ville et des faubourgs.102 [Starting with the publication of the present ordinance, it will be the duty of the Police superintendents of the City Guard to start patrolling the streets, public squares, and levees each day at sunset, in order to maintain order, to stop and arrest all vagabonds, runaway slaves . . . and to break any slave gatherings in the meat market as well as outside the taverns of the city and faubourgs.]



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In early January 1811, as news of the Charles Deslondes slave insurrection came to the ears of the authorities, fifty additional watchmen were hired to suppress any possible slave revolt in the city. For the first time, instead of dismissing the guard in a time of turbulence, the municipal council raised the possibility of its permanent enlargement. A new tax on slaves and other properties was voted in.103 Yet, as soon as the slave insurrection scare died away, and as it appeared that urban slaves had not been involved in the plot, the number of watchmen was again reduced in a desperate attempt to ease the financial situation of the city.104 The frustrating question of the suppression of marronage surfaced again after police juries were formed in all the new parishes created by the 1807 “Act Supplementary to an Act, Entitled, ‘An Act Providing for the Superior Court Going Circuit,’ and for Establishing Courts of Inferior Jurisdiction.”105 Each police jury was entitled by law to set up and finance through taxation a gendarmerie to arrest runaways and suppress maroon camps. No sooner had the police jury of the Parish of Orleans voted to establish such a police force, with a ratio of one gendarme for one hundred slaves (which would have meant the recruitment of over 135 gendarmes), than the problem of taxation was again brought to the foreground, which endlessly delayed the creation of such a force.106 Indeed, the municipal council argued that since the inhabitants of the city already paid a slave tax to finance a City Guard, they should not have to pay the tax for the upkeep of the new gendarmes. The mayor argued that the citizens of the city would only pay for the rewards due to the gendarmes if they captured any of their slaves in the suburbs of the parish. On the opposite side, Judge Moreau Lislet, a Saint-Domingue refugee, argued that the city and the rural areas would both benefit from the creation of the new police force, “une Gendarmerie destinée spécialement à poursuivre les nègres marrons dans les bois, est un établissement dont l’avantage doit être partagée par les habitans tant de la ville que de la campagne.” (The advantage of establishing a Gendarmerie meant especially to chase runaway slaves in the woods must be shared by the inhabitants of the city as well as the countryside.)107 The controversy between the city and parish authorities was about how to exert full and uncontested control over all possible places of slave resistance, in this case, the woods (les bois) that circled the city. Such a problem arose because slave migration had changed the geographical distribution of the slave labor force, thus altering by the same token the cartography of slave resistance.

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The Orleans Parish project of creating a gendarmerie was a clear attempt to adapt the modes of slave control to this new cartography. The July 1811 ordinance creating the gendarmerie is probably the first full-scale attempt to control the areas to which the new slaves ended up migrating in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase. The purpose was to ensure order in the plantations that surrounded the city, where a “large population of slaves” was said to live. The ordinance is of particular interest for at least two reasons. It defined a very detailed grid delineating the different spaces runaway slaves occupied, a grid not limited to urban spaces. The typology of runaway places included woods, cypress swamps, prairies, bayous, the city, public roads, slave houses, and cultivated fields. The second notable aspect was that it decentralized slave control to slaveholders themselves. In many ways, the establishment of the gendarmerie was supposed to seal a new political alliance between authorities and slaveholders, relegating the city authorities to the background. The gendarmes were to be stationed on five plantations owned by prominent slaveholders: Macarty and Lanusse, De la Ronde, Harang, Jourdan, and Leblanc. Each escouade, or group, of five gendarmes was under the direct control of a planterslaveholder appointed by the governor. On each plantation, gendarmes were to have four pairs of handcuffs and stocks for captured runaways. This plantation-centered organization contrasted sharply with the first city gendarmerie, which was placed under the authority of a captain who was to conduct captured runaways to the city jail.108 The gendarmes, however, never patrolled the suburbs of the parish. On 10 October 1811, the police jury met to discuss the ways to resolve the problem of financing.109 At the end of 1812, the gendarmerie was still only a project and had yet to capture a single runaway.110 At the beginning of April 1813, the gendarmerie still did not exist, and the suburbs were therefore still not supervised on a regular basis. At its session held on 24 April 1813, the jury received yet another new proposal, “to form a company of twenty young men to chase and arrest runaway slaves.”111 This company was authorized one month later, but no records have remained that would provide testimony of its activities, even less of its existence. What is certain, however, is that on 26 June, the jury observed, again, that a “quantity of runaway slaves infested the suburbs.” The decision was taken to search all slave cabins for fugitives, in the four arrondissements of the suburbs. The justices of the peace remarked, interestingly, that by doing so they ran the risk that runaway slaves, chased from the suburbs, would hide in the not yet incorporated faubourgs of New Orleans, which were not pa-



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trolled.112 New slaves and slaves in general were able to resist on a large scale in the early American period because the territory was being slowly organized, in terms of jurisdictions, roads, and modes of control.113 The abrupt arrival of thousands of new slaves from all parts of the Atlantic world catalyzed slave resistance in early American Louisiana. Slave resistance in turn expanded particularly strikingly in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase because the modes of control remained, at best, erratic and were based, principally, on ad hoc measures and regulations from competing jurisdictions. “In the unsettled declining moments of a Government, or in the Passage of Countries from one Dominion to another, it often happens that laws are evaded and Municipal regulations entirely neglected. This seems to have been too much the case in the various changes which have lately taken place in Louisiana.”114 Thus spoke Governor William Claiborne a short while after the Louisiana Purchase. The primary sources researched for this essay seem to indicate that his opinion was true for most of the period that led to statehood. This is not to say, of course, that planters entirely failed to control their slaves. Records of patrols show that slaves were regularly arrested when they did not have permission tickets from their owners. Prisons were overcrowded with captured runaways and other slave criminals. The slave insurrection, possibly led by Charles Deslondes, that started in early 1811 on the plantation of Manuel Andry in the parish of Saint John the Baptist was brutally and rapidly repressed, a clear indication of the planters’ power. The planter class was never, however, as supreme as one may imagine. New migrants, whether African, Creole, or “Creolized,” may not have been sufficiently united to overthrow slavery, but they constantly resisted by making use of all the possible spaces of liberty they could locate in and around the early American city of New Orleans — be they taverns, cabarets, sugar cane fields, or nonincorporated faubourgs. The early years of American Louisiana were marked by a clearly heightened perception of resistance fueled by the migration of new slaves. It was one of the signs that Louisiana was, at last, truly turning into a slave society in its own right.

Notes Research for this article was made possible, in part, by the Deep South Regional Humanities Center at Tulane University, which awarded me a Summer Dissertation Fellowship in 2003, and by the Ecole Doctorale of the Université Paris 7,

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which partially funded many of my research trips across the Atlantic. I would like to thank all those who have read versions of this article, including Sylvia Frey, Bernard Bailyn, the participants of the Fall 2003 Omohundro Institute seminar, the participants of the 2004 Atlantic History seminar, Claire Parfait, Nathalie Dessens, and the authors of the other articles presented in this book. Very special thanks to the staff of the many archives I visited: in particular the New Orleans Public Library, the Louisiana State Museum, the New Orleans Historic Collection, the Tulane University Special Collections, the Archivo General de Indias, the Spanish National Library, the National Archives at Kew Gardens, and the Cambridge University Special Collections. 1. Estimates of the volume of the Louisiana slave trade in colonial and early American Louisiana vary greatly from one historian to the next (see Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969], 82–83; Alan Kulikoff, “Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution, 1790–1820,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983], 149; Paul Lachance, “The Politics of Fear: French Louisianans and the Slave Trade, 1786–1809,” Plantation Society 1, no. 2 [June 1979]: 162–97; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992]; Gilbert Din, Spaniards, Planters and Slaves [College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999]; Thomas Ingersoll, “The Slave Trade and the Ethnic Diversity of Louisiana’s Slave Community,” Louisiana History 37 [1996]: 133–61; Thomas Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819 [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999], 286–87; and James McMillin, The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810 [Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004]). 2. In his Spaniards, Planters and Slaves, the historian Gilbert Din used some of the registers kept by the employees Josef Petely and Ygnacio Balderas, but he did not look for them on a general basis, and he missed some important records located in the very bundles of documents that he consulted. He did find, however, documents that time constraints prevented me from reading (see Legajos 15B, Papeles de Cuba, Archivo General de Indias). I have used them in table 2 (see Din, Spaniards, Planters and Slaves, 123–24). 3. Jamaica Shipping Returns, CO 142/17 (1766–69), CO 142/18 (1762–65), CO 142/19 (1782–84), CO 142/20 (1786–88), CO 142/21 (1783, 1800–1804), CO 142/22 (1784–86), CO 142/23 (1795–98), CO 142/24 (1804–7); Dominica Shipping Returns, CO 76/4 (1788–94), CO 76/5 (1788–89). The Balize registers that I used are in the Archivo General de Indias (hereafter cited as “AGI”), Papeles de Cuba (hereafter cited as “CUBA”): Legajos (hereafter cited as “Leg.”) 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 25A, 25B, 26, 112, and 602B. 4. James McMillin, The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 36.



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5. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 72. 6. The role of the ports of Jamaica and Dominica does appear in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s database (hereafter cited as “GHD”). The database includes an important number of “slave ships” or “ships with slaves” from Africa, Jamaica, Dominica, Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Havana, Guadeloupe, Cayenne, and Nassau. (Three searches were made in the database: DOCTYPE = 25, SLAVETRADE = 1 [with or without the name of a slave ship], and SLAVETRADE = 0 but VIA = 1.) The approximate numbers of slaves introduced on known slave ships or ships with slaves between 1783 and 1796 were: Origin Not Specified = 597, Jamaica = 971, Dominica = 100, Saint-Domingue = 310, Martinique = 410, Havana = 101, Cayennes = 43, Guadeloupe = 40, Nassau = 1. I would also like to thank Thomas Ingersoll for sending me some of his notes on the slave trade. Additional evidence about disembarked slaves may be found in Glenn Conrad’s two books of abstracts of civil records. See, notably, St. Charles: Abstracts of the Civil Records of St. Charles Parish, 1770–1803 (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1974), p. 195: no. 963, p. 189: no. 930, p. 183: no. 902, p. 114: no. 587. On the Roseau reexport slave trade, see also the appendix of James McMillin’s dissertation, “The Final Victims.” 7. Frances Armytage, The Free Port System in the British West Indies: A Study in Commercial Policy, 1766–1822 (London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1953) 2. 8. For details on the different Spanish slave trade policies, see Lachance, “The Politics of Fear”; and Ingersoll, “The Slave Trade in Louisiana.” 9. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 10. Ibid. 11. Jack D. Holmes, “Indigo in Colonial Louisiana and the Floridas,” Louisiana History 8 (Fall 1967): 329–49. 12. CO 76/4. 13. See “Memoria historica y politica sobre la Luisiana por Don Francisco Bouligny,” 16 August 1776, Madrid, MSS/19265, folios 43–44, Spanish National Library. 14. Leg. 112, CUBA, AGI. 15. Votes of the Honourable House of Assembly of Jamaica, in a Session Begun February 19, and ended March 14, 1799 (St. Jago de la Vega: Printed by Alexander Aikman, 1799), appendix, p. 353. 16. On the differences between brigs, sloops, and schooners, see Armytage, The Free Port System, 64. 17. Ingersoll, “The Slave Trade,” 68. 18. On the Jamaican African slave trade and Caribbean reexport trade, see Richard B. Sheridan, “The Slave Trade to Jamaica, 1702–1808,” in Trade, Government, and Society in Caribbean History, 1700–1920: Essays Presented to Douglass Hall, ed. B. W. Higman (Kingston: Heinemann Educational Books Caribbean,

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1983), 1–16. Roderick McDonald, “Measuring the British Slave Trade to Jamaica, 1789–1808: A Comment,” Economic History Review, 33, no. 2 (May 1980): 253–58; Herbert S. Klein, “The English Slave Trade to Jamaica, 1782–1808,” Economic History Review 31, no. 1 (February 1978): 25–45. 19. Acts of sale show that many slaves reexported from Jamaica were sick or lame (see GHD). 20. See also GHD. The ship Margaretta cleared from Kingston on 23 May 1785 with 26 slaves. It arrived in Louisiana on 14 June with 36 slaves. The ship Minerva left Kingston the same day as the Margaretta with 60 slaves. It arrived in Louisiana with 66 slaves. See also the Neptune (1785), the Friends (1786), and the Jeune Sophie (1786). 21. The Santa Catalina was recorded in Eltis, A Database on CD-ROM, but with uncertainties regarding the date of its arrival, the number of slaves it carried, and where it had called before its final destination. It appears that the Santa Catalina, Captain John McDonough, arrived on 9 September 1788 after calling at the island of Dominica. La Feliz, Captain Alexandro Bauden, reached Louisiana on 29 October 1788 after calling at Saint Bartholomew. La Amable Victoria was thought by Jean Mettas to have been destroyed or lost after it had left SaintDomingue. It arrived at La Balize on 18 July 1792 (Leg. 14, 522, 606; Leg. 16, 196; Leg. 25A, 844, CUBA, AGI). 22. Jack D. L. Holmes, “The Abortive Slave Revolt at Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 1795,” Louisiana History 11 (Fall 1970): 357. 23. Cuba actually began to play an increasing role in the reexport trade in slaves to New Orleans in the early 1790s. 24. Herbert S. Klein, “The Cuban Slave Trade in a Period of Transition, 1790– 1843,” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 62, no. 226–27 (1975): 69. See also D. C. Corbitt, “Shipments of Slaves from the United States to Cuba, 1789–1807,” Journal of Southern History 7 (1941): 540–49. 25. Leg. 580, 603, 604, 629–2, 630, CUBA, AGI. 26. Petition of Juan Bautista Coffigny, dated 25 May 1802, Leg. 549, CUBA, AGI. 27. Petition of Guillermo Martin Johnson, 7 May 1802, Superior Court Records (hereafter cited as “SCR”), Louisiana State Museum (hereafter cited as “LSM”). 28. Petition of Dn Cayetano Olibella, 4 March 1803, and Petition of Dn Christoval de Armas, 5 February 1803, SCR, LSM. 29. The thirty-two vessels engaged in the Cuban transatlantic slave trade were: the American schooner Washington, Captain Sherman; the French brig Rosa, Captain Vicente Langlois; the English brig Samparel, captain unknown; the French frigate Ellis [Ella], Captain Jayme Porter [Sonter]; the American brig Sally, Captain Wilber; the Portuguese frigate La Cira, Captain Manuel Galbon y Silva; the English frigate Almijante Colpayo, captain unknown; the schooner Lovely Lass, Captain Adam Boyd; the Danish frigate La Fraternidad, captain unknown; the English frigate Activa [Actived], Captain Eduardo William; the English frigate Hector, Captain Guillermo Handiside; the English frigate Flora,



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Captain D. Woolbert [Wolbert]; the English schooner Maria, Captain Juan Bowles [Bowers]; the schooner Alexandrina, Captain William Hastings; the English frigate Plover, Captain Browers; the Spanish schooner Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, Captain D. J. Maria Ormasabal; the English frigate Dasher, Captain Hance Hamilton; the American brig Femina [Fanny] Va[?], Captain Criok Gladd [?]; the schooner Forsooket, Captain Gadner; the English frigate Rober, captain unknown; the American brig Elizabet Sarah, Captain Miller Wickham; the Danish brig Polly, Captain Anry Sabin; the Spanish frigate Penelope, Captain Thomas Fagar; the American brig Paragon, Captain Peter Kelly; the American brig Sunflower, captain unknown; the English frigate Maria Elena, Captain Fornay [Fumps]; the Danish brig Rachel, Captain George Robertsin; the English frigate General Ellyot, captain unknown; the American brig Flower, Captain Fisson; the Spanish frigate Constancia, Captain Juan Rossi; the Spanish brig San Luiz, Captain Bernardo Rapalo; and the American brig Sally, Captain Hudson. These are not all inventoried in Eltis’s Database on CD-ROM. 30. Allo and Capetillo Shipping Reports, 7 September 1802, CUBA, AGI. 31. Ibid., 19 February 1803, CUBA, AGI. 32. Ibid., 21 April 1803, CUBA, AGI. See also Salcedo to Morales, 25 April 1803; draft of Morales’s reply to Salcedo, 26 April 1803; Salcedo to Morales, 21 May 1803, CUBA, AGI. See also Le Moniteur de la Louisiane (hereafter cited as Moniteur), 21 May 1803, 344; 4 June 1803, 346; 11 June 1803, 347; 25 June 1803, 349. 33. “Expediente sobre la introducion de 150 negros bozales introducido en el bergantin El Africano,” 24 May 1803, SCR, LSM. 34. Salcedo to Morales, 15 June 1803, Correspondence of Salcedo to Morales, CUBA, AGI. 35. Laussat to Morales, 15 June 1803, Laussat Correspondence, Leg. 602, CUBA, AGI. See also Laussat to Salcedo, 15 June 1803, Gel. 602, CUBA, AGI. 36. Allo and Capetillo Shipping Reports, 29 August and 6 September 1803, CUBA, AGI. See also Moniteur, 3, 10, and 17 September 1803, 359–61. 37. Morales to Capetillo, 22 August 1803, Correspondence of Morales to Cape­ tillo, Leg. 604, CUBA, AGI. The letter is also located in the Allo and Capetillo Shipping Reports after the report dated 11 December 1803. 38. Moniteur, 359–61, 3, 10, and 17 September 1803. 39. For 1776, see folios 4, 7, 14, 21, 22, 24, 30, 36, 167, 171, 185, 189, and 193, Leg. 112, CUBA, AGI. 40. About the Cassague Company, see letters dated 4 December 1801, 7 January 1802, and 14 April 1802, Jean-Michel Fortier’s Letterbook, RG 311, LSM. 41. 25 May 1802, Leg. 549, CUBA, AGI. 42. “Joseph Faurie solicitando la compra de un buque y registro de mercancias, viveres y plata para la costa de Guinea,” 21 October 1802, SCR, LSM. 43. Jean-Michel Fortier’s Letterbook. See letters dated 4 November 1801; 24/27 April, 27 May, and 2 June, 27 June, 31 July, 1 November, and 1 September 1802. 44. Lachance, “Politics of Fear,” 196.

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45. Louisiana Gazette, 24 January 1807, 243; and 27 January 1807, 245. 46. For the book based on his dissertation, James McMillin read only the Louisiana Gazette. 47. Other sources include the Inward Slave Manifests; United States Customs Service, New Orleans, Louisiana, Foreign Inward Cargo Manifests, 1804–1808, National Archives. Also useful is Glenn R. Conrad’s The German Coast: Abstracts of the Civil Records of Saint Charles and Saint John the Baptist Parishes, 1804–1812 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, Southwestern Louisiana University, 1981). As far as censuses are concerned, I used the 1809 census (Louisiana Gazette, 20 September 1810), the 1810 census, and the 1811 census (Le Moniteur de la Louisiane, November 1812). The Nassau Shipping Records are at CO 27, National Archives, Kew Gardens. I also used various collections of primary sources (Kuntz Collection, Tulane University; John McDonogh Papers, Tulane University; Louis Dufilho Papers, Tulane University; John McDonogh Papers, Collector’s Office of the Port of New Orleans, Shipping Records, National Archives). I derived further data from D. C. Corbitt, “Shipments of Slaves from the United States to Cuba, 1789–1807,” Journal of Southern History 7, no. 4 (November 1941): 549. 48. Claiborne to James Madison, New Orleans, 8 May 1804, 2:134; Claiborne to James Madison, New Orleans, 12 July 1804, 2:245, in Official Letter Books of William C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816, ed. Dunbar Rowland, 6 vols. (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1917). 49. For the Sarah, see Doc. #3, 28 November 1804, John McDonogh Papers, Tulane Special Collections. See also Gazette, 28 August 1804, 6, and the Union, 20 October 1804. For the Margaret, see Eltis, A Database on CD-ROM. See also Moniteur, 19 July 1804, 424, and the Union, 1 October 1804. One may also use the Doc. #1, Folder C, Box II, Heartman Collection, Xavier University. 50. “Pétition des citoyens et habitans de la province de la louisiane mise sous les yeux de Messieurs les commissaires américains,” Doc. #408, Laussat Papers, Historic New Orleans Collection. 51. Eltis, A Database on CD-ROM. See also the Royal Gazette (Kingston, Jamaica) 27, no. 45, 2–9 November 1805. 52. Patrick S. Brady, “The Slave Trade and Sectionalism in South Carolina, 1787–1808,” Journal of Southern History 37 (1972): 601–20. See also Lachance, “Politics of Fear,” 180–81 n. 63. 53. Louisiana Gazette, 6 February 1807, 23. 54. Orleans Gazette, 19 October 1807, 88. 55. Moniteur, 21 November 1807, 773. The brig George Clinton was reported by Elizabeth Donnan as having arrived in Charleston sometime in 1807 (see Eltis, A Database on CD-ROM). The “subsequent fate” of the brig had been, up to now, unknown. The brig was advertised in November 1807 in Le Moniteur with over one hundred “Senegalese” slaves for sale. The fate of the brig Resolution, Captain Maximilien Sebastiani, was also uncovered while researching the present article. David Eltis et al. tell us that the brig docked in Charleston in December



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1807 after having come from the Loango region in West Central Africa. The brig was advertised in the Courrier de la Louisiane in 1808 with “90 Choice new Negroes of both sexes.” 56. Seven “ships with slaves” originally bound to New Orleans had to sail in distress to other ports of the Atlantic world, and their final destinations remain unclear. The schooner Atalanta, Captain Mitchell, left from Charleston to New Orleans but was lost. The slaves and the passengers were saved and taken to Nassau at the end of March 1806. The brig Three Sisters, Captain Lindsey, was forced to sail to Havana in August 1806 for want of provisions after having lost thirty of its slaves. In March 1807, the schooner Sally, Captain Abbott, “went ashore on Abacco,” and the slaves were taken to Nassau. There, a brig was to be chartered to transport the slaves to New Orleans. In August 1807, the schooner Lucy “with 61 slaves, [was] detained and sent into Nassau by the British government schooner Haddock.” Some of the slaves of the Lucy and Sally may have eventually been sent to New Orleans. Indeed, at the end of October, the ship Enterprize cleared from the port of Nassau for New Orleans with eighty-seven shipwrecked slaves (CO 27). In November 1807, the ship Heroine, transporting eighty-five slaves, was also rerouted to Nassau. Finally, in February 1808, a Bristol ship transporting 275 slaves was wrecked. The sixty slaves who survived were landed at Turks Island. One should also include the schooner Hope, captain unknown, with seventy-one slaves on board, mentioned once in the Charleston Courier in December 1806. Its exact fate remains unknown (sources: Charleston Courier, 28 March, 11 September, and 15 December 1806; 23 March, 11 August, and 11 November 1807; 23 February 1808). 57. See Box 13, Folder 28, Slave Sales, 26 October 1804 to 26 December 1806, John McDonogh Papers, Tulane Special Collections. 58. Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Washington, 1930–33), 4:669. 59. Moniteur, 13 April 1808, 814; Courrier, 5 May 1809 and 27 November 1811, 246. 60. Courrier, 10 May 1811, 562, and 3 July 1811, 585. 61. Territorial Papers, 8 November 1804, enclosed in letter to James Madison, 9 November 1804. About slave migration and slave resistance, see Lachance, 168–69. 62. CO 142/23. The first ship was the schooner Friendship, Captain Joseph du Jarreau. It cleared from Kingston on 24 December 1806. The second ship was the schooner Generous, Captain A. J. Silva. It cleared from Kingston on 6 January 1807. 63. This is how the French colonial prefect, Pierre Clément de Laussat, justified his proclamation of 17 December 1803 meant to strictly enforce the 1724 Slave Code (see Lachance, “Politics of Fear,” 178). 64. Further examples of planters’ alarm can be found in Lachance, “Politics of Fear,” 175. 65. Patrol Reports of the Second Municipality, 1814–15 and miscellaneous re-

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ports, 1808–9, Heartman Collection, Xavier University; Pierre Pedesclaux Records, New Orleans Notarial Archives, January–May 1806; Dockets #594, 1579, 1660, 1623, 1904, and 2018, City Court Records, NOPL,. 66. The breakdown is 1801: 1; 1802: 5; 1803: 18; 1804: 8; 1805: 15; 1806: 85; 1807: 132; 1808: 118; 1809: 138; 1810: 130; 1811: 171; 1812: 167; 1813: 95; 1814: 79; 1815: 39. This is based upon a careful examination of all extant runaway slave advertisements published in Louisiana between 1801 and 1815. The availability of newspapers varied: Moniteur (1801–15, with gaps), the Union (1804, with gaps), the Friend of the Law (1810, 1813–14, with gaps), Courrier (1807–15, with gaps), Gazette (1804–15, with gaps), the Orleans Gazette (1807–9, with gaps), and the Telegraph (1806, 1808–12, with gaps). A few copies kept at the American Antiquarian Society could not be researched in time for this essay. 67. Minutes of the Conseil de Ville (hereafter cited as “MCV”), 30 June 1804, New Orleans Public Library (hereafter cited as “NOPL”). 68. “Pétition de plusieurs habitants sur divers objets de police, Adressé aux Membres Municipaux” (#524), 26 September 1804, Letters, Petitions and Reports, 1804–1835, Conseil de Ville, NOPL. 69. See, for example, Charles Trudeau to the Mayor, 23 March 1807, Kuntz Collection, Tulane Special Collections. 70. 13 frimaire an 12, MCV, NOPL. 71. Circular to the Commandants of Districts, 1804, in Claiborne’s Letter Books, 72. 72. 2 November 1812, MCV, NOPL. 73. 28 December 1803, MCV, NOPL. 74. 10 May 1810, MCV, NOPL. 75. 14 December 1811, MCV, NOPL. See also the report of the Grand Jury of the Town and Parish of Orleans published in the Courrier, 21 August 1811: “The prodigious number of cabarets and taverns frequented by sailors increase every day . . . several of those places have become nightly places for quarrels and scandalous orgies; facing the faubourg Saint Mary, a great number of boats and flatboats from Kentucky have been turned into taverns and cabarets where illintentioned people meet night and day.” 76. 18 July 1812, MCV, NOPL. About gambling houses, see article 22 of the “règlement de la Nouvelle garde montée,” 18 May 1805. 77. Louisiana Gazette, May 19, 1810, 605; 9 May 1810, 596. 78. See eight miscellaneous receipts found in Parish Prison, at New Orleans, 1808–1, RG 68, LSM; 19 September 1804, 4 April 1805, 25 November 1807, 19 October 1808, and 21 November 1810, MCV, NOPL. 79. 2 March 1808, MCV, NOPL. 80. 17 March 1804, MCV, NOPL. 81. 19 May 1804, MCV, NOPL. 82. 2 November 1808, MCV, NOPL. 83. James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pt. 1, chap. 2; 25 November 1807, MCV, NOPL.



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84. 14 December 1811, MCV, NOPL. 85. James Pitot, Observations on the Colony of Louisiana from 1796 to 1802 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 29–30. 86. See Din, Spaniards, Planters and Slaves: “The decline of Spanish authorities affected the enforcement of the slave regulations” (218). See also Lachance, “The Politics of Fear,” 178. Lachance explains that the end of Spanish governance resulted in an alteration of the relationship between slaves and planters, violently pitting the two groups against each other. 87. Claiborne to Julien Poydras, 6 August 1804, New Orleans, in Claiborne’s Letter Books, 294. 88. 18 August 1804, MCV, NOPL. 89. 18 and 25 August 1804, MCV, NOPL. 90. 10 August 1805 and following, Copies of General Orders, Territorial Papers. 91. 5 October 1805, MCV, NOPL. 92. 29 January 1806, Copies of General Orders, Territorial Papers. 93. 17 March 1804, MCV, NOPL. See also 4, 11, and 14 April 1804, ibid. 94. 18 May 1805, MCV, NOPL. See also 31 August 1805, vol. 1, subseries I, Ordinances and Resolutions. See articles 17–23 of the new regulations for a description of the different rewards that the gendarmes were supposed to receive for the capture of runaways. 95. 14, 17, 24, and 31 August, and 14 September 1805, MCV, NOPL. 96. 14 December 1805, MCV, NOPL. 97. 15 February 1806, MCV, NOPL. 98. Ibid.; see articles 3, 7–8, and 10 of the new “Règlement.” 99. 12 and 30 December 1807, MCV, NOPL. 100. 30 October 1807, Municipal Papers, Kuntz Collection. 101. 1 and 29 November 1809; 20 January, 3 February, 7 April, 5 and 8 May 1810, MCV, NOPL. 102. 5 May 1811, MCV, NOPL. 103. 12, 16, and 24 January 1811, MCV, NOPL. See also vol. 1, subseries I, Ordinances and Resolutions: “Ordonnance pour imposer une taxe sur les esclaves et autres propriétés immobilières de la Ville et des faubourgs.” 104. 12 January 1811, MCV, NOPL. 105. An “Act Supplementary to an Act, Entitled, ‘An Act Providing for the Superior Court Going Circuit,’ and for Establishing Courts of Inferior Jurisdiction,” in Acts Passed at the Second Session of the First Legislature of the Territory of Orleans (New Orleans: Bradford and Anderson, Printers to the Territory, 1807), sec. 9. 106. 3 and 7 August 1811, MCV, NOPL. 107. Lislet to the Conseil de Ville (#581), 3 September 1811, vol. 1, Letters, Petitions and Reports, Conseil de Ville, NOPL. See also “Lettre de Moreau Lislet au Conseil de Ville au sujet de la Gendarmerie,” 7 November 1812, doc. 233, Box 6, 109, General Manuscripts, 18 February 1812 — 28 December 1813, John Minor Wisdom Collection, Tulane Special Collections.

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108. Courrier, 29 July 1811, 596. 109. Courrier, 4 October 1811 625. 110. 7 November 1812, MCV, NOPL. 111. 23 April and 17 May 1813, Orleans Parish Police Jury Records, NOPL. 112. 26 June 1813, Orleans Parish Police Jury Records. 113. In September 1813, it was again proposed to create a gendarmerie to control the ateliers of the suburbs. It was thought, once again, to be too expensive. Instead, patrols were recommended, and new regulations were issued accordingly. There were to be weekly patrols, each time at a different period of the day. Each patrol was to be composed of three to five men, more if required to suppress maroon camps (13 September and 4 October 1813; 17 January 1814, Orleans Parish Police Jury Records, NOPL). 114. Claiborne’s Letter Books, 71.

Pet e r J. K a stor

M

“They Are All Frenchmen” Background and Nation in an Age of  Transformation

P

ierre Derbigny was a Frenchman — some of the time. He certainly came from France. He was born in Laon in 1769. Napoleon Bonaparte was born that same year, and both men faced reversed versions of the same challenge. Where Napoleon had to convince people that his birth on Corsica did not prevent him from claiming membership in a French national community, Derbigny had to convince people that his birth in France did not always make him a Frenchman. Derbigny eventually joined a small but influential population of French expatriates who came to Louisiana in the wake of the French Revolution. By 1803, he was hard at work building a legal practice and connections within the local elite. As much as anybody, Derbigny appreciated the challenges and the opportunities that came with the Louisiana Purchase. He also recognized that his ability to overcome those challenges and to capitalize on those opportunities depended in large part on his defining what it meant to be French and what it meant to be American. Discussing relations between the French and the Americans of course assumes one thing: there were Frenchmen and there were Americans who defined themselves as such. While this may seem like something of a truism, it also conflicts with the abundance of scholarship that has emphasized the constructed nature of identities and the particularly fluid identities on the frontiers of North America. There certainly were polities called France and the United States, but were there Frenchman and Americans? Given the fact that nationhood as a concept was in its infancy, and residents of both the United States and Francophone America often had a fundamentally localist perspective, it would seem that talking about Frenchman and Americans is an impossible conversation.1 Meanwhile, the very complexity of Louisiana’s population made labels

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a troublesome task in the early nineteenth century. The Francophone population was diverse enough, with its combination of locally born Creoles, newcomers from the French Caribbean, and migrants from France itself. Add to this the substantial population with other European ancestries, as well as the reality of Louisiana’s numerous jurisdictional changes during the eighteenth century, and a single name for the population becomes all the more difficult. Equally important, most Louisiana Creoles at the time of the Purchase had spent their lives as Spanish subjects, emerging from a colonial experience that specifically denied any consistent or unified label. The problem of definition not only applies now for any study of Louisiana, but, more importantly, it created a host of problems after 1803, as people attempted to determine the fate of Louisiana. This essay explores that question, exploiting Louisiana to investigate how people in North America conceived of individual and collective identities in an age before “identity” had even entered the public lexicon as the sort of social scientific tool it has become today.2 In particular, this essay considers how people used the words “French” and “American” as a means to make sense of the upheavals unleashed by the Louisiana Purchase or to sort out the troublesome concept of nationalism. The geographic extent of this essay is what became the State of Louisiana, including both its jurisdictional predecessor, the Territory of Orleans, and its colonial existence as Lower Louisiana. The Americans to whom I refer were the predominantly Anglophone citizens of the United States from outside Louisiana. The Louisianians were the predominantly Francophone residents of Louisiana who found their nationality transformed by the Purchase. My own caveats about identities in the early nineteenth century notwithstanding, I want to make the case that we can talk about Frenchman and Americans, because people certainly used those terms. The question was simply which label was appropriate, or whether both could apply to the same person. The Louisiana Purchase precipitated a relentless effort among whites to prove that the lines between people were clear and absolute, this at the same time that the process of joining those groups could remain fluid. While this may seem like a contradiction in terms, it was nonetheless consistent with the highly pragmatic vision of federal policy makers in the United States and white settlers in Louisiana. Both groups concluded that successful realization of their goals required the assumption that white Louisianans could become Americans at the same time that other peoples would remain fixed in their identities.



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Louisiana’s first historians came of age during these years and were usually veteran politicians.3 Together, they crafted the most enduring vision of early national Louisiana: a place of bitter rivalry between Creoles and Americans. Their descriptions of ethnic conflict — and Francophone ethnic solidarity — became a standard assumption for historians in the years that followed.4 But those early historians crafted their accounts in the very different circumstances of Jacksonian Louisiana. As a result, recapturing the possibilities and conflicts unleashed by the Louisiana Purchase means remembering the very real distinctions between early national Louisiana and antebellum Louisiana. These arguments about who was French and who was American actually had little to do with culture, in large part because so many people went out of their way to claim that culture need not define nationality. Instead, it was matters of politics, citizenship, and race that shaped this conversation. When culture entered the mix, it was either from Francophone residents of Louisiana who claimed that culture was irrelevant to these sort of nationalist labels, or from Americans whose initial beliefs to the contrary slowly faded during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. That process of expanding the American nation — not just the geographic boundaries of the United States — emerged through a conversation that white Louisianians and white Americans attempted to conduct, and a conversation they refused to conduct with Indians, slaves, and free people of color. It is also an unfortunately one-sided conversation, at least from the historian’s perspective. As is so often the case, nonwhites left few written sources, although that body of text is at least larger than in many other areas of North America. Rather, it is the absence of descriptive correspondence from white Louisianians that is more striking.5 As a result, uncovering the political culture and the ethnic politics of early national Louisiana remains a frustrating task. This may well account for why scholars of the Lower Mississippi valley have eschewed questions of political culture during the early republic, and why political historians of the early republic have given Louisiana short shrift. Despite these limitations, the records that do remain provide glimpses of a revealing engagement with the most vital issues of social organization. As the Francophone majority of Louisiana faced the predominantly Anglo-American policy makers of the federal government, they asked that most basic of questions: How large could one society become? There was, of course, ample resentment to go around. Those disputes took the form

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of Louisianians condemning federal policy makers who seemed insensitive to local concerns, American policy makers who saw in Louisiana all they disliked in European colonialism and Roman Catholicism, or the real disputes among Louisianians themselves, who were already divided between Creoles, Francophone migrants, and people of other ancestries. Nonetheless, whites quickly committed themselves to enlarging the dominion of the United States, embracing a political definition of an American national people that they believed might overcome the boundaries that seemed inevitable when discussing other forms of association. The reality of Louisiana’s internal divisions was too complicated for American considerations, and the possibility of insurmountable ethnic differences was unacceptable to the fundamentally nationalist project at work in Louisiana after 1803.

Empires and Colonists If the Louisiana Purchase unleashed abrupt changes within Louisiana, the questions that the Purchase posed about the composition of nations and empires were hardly new. To the contrary, these were vital questions that people had engaged on both sides of the Mississippi during the decades before 1803. Louisiana and the United States had proceeded on profoundly different political and constitutional trajectories, but the visions of nationhood that emerged in both places were quite similar. Whites in the United States and Louisiana concluded that the sort of ethnic definitions that were at the heart of so many European nationalist movements were unacceptable in the Americas. They also reached this conclusion for highly pragmatic reasons, a pragmatism that remained firmly in place after 1803. The political culture of colonial Louisiana remains something of an unknown. Most scholars of the colonial period have focused on social and economic development, this in sharp contrast to studies of British and Spanish settlements that have examined politics in great detail. While developments throughout Europe and the Americas shaped white Louisianians’ understanding of nationhood, carving a place for themselves within the Spanish empire proved most important for Louisianians.6 Spain acquired Louisiana in 1763, part of the elaborate land transfers among European empires that followed the Seven Years War. Spanish officials hoped to orchestrate a peaceful exchange that would consolidate



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imperial power in North America, creating a buffer for more valuable colonies farther south and west. They treated Louisiana accordingly: a minor colony of moderate strategic importance and limited economic value. As a result, the Spanish government invested little of its concern or resources in Louisiana. This policy emerged less from any lack of concern for Louisiana’s Francophone population than from standard European assumptions about empire, which assumed that secondary colonies received secondary attention. In the years that followed, white Louisianians did what white residents did throughout the European colonial world: they complained. Rather than complain about Spanish efforts to install their own institutions in Louisiana, Louisianians complained about policies that kept them relegated to subordinate status within the Spanish empire. White Louisianians opposed commercial policies that seemed to exclude them from opportunities enjoyed by other Spanish colonies.7 They also feared that Spanish policy would jeopardize their fragile economy and social structure.8 Demographic changes in Louisiana during the 1780s and 1790s continued to work against any cohesively “French” identity. Most of these newcomers were themselves refugees, whether Acadians (later known as Cajuns) who felt the political and economic squeeze of the British regime in Canada; the Caribbean settlers who feared the racial revolt in SaintDomingue; or the Frenchmen who fled the assault on the privileges they had known in monarchical France. These groups all had their own agendas and experienced more than their share of disagreements. At the same time, all shared a similar outlook. They demanded equality before the law, commercial access, and opportunities for political advancement.9 The increasingly diverse collection of white Louisianians continued to search for a viable identity within the Spanish empire.10 Much as they might resent their sense of imperial isolation, Louisianians accommodated themselves in part because Spanish imperial officials never sought radical changes to Louisiana’s social order.11 French remained the lingua franca, buildings reflected French and French-Caribbean architecture, and local residents followed events in France with great interest. At the same time, white Louisianians and Spaniards found common ground over external threats that often seemed more dangerous than internal divisions, whether that meant opposition to the British during the American Revolution or, more powerfully, the fear of slave revolt that only became more pronounced as the number slaves increased in the 1790s.12 In addi-

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tion, apprehension among merchants, planters, and clerics in Louisiana about the leveling impulses of the French Revolution eroded loyalties that some white Louisianians felt toward the Paris regime. The very weakness of nationalist sentiment in the eighteenth century actually goes a long way toward explaining the plasticity of local affiliations in Louisiana. White Louisianians might share personal and familial connections that linked them to France and French world, but the same localism that guided the way Louisianians acted toward Spain also helps account for why they did not take stronger action toward becoming French. In the same way that policy makers in the United States had to argue the case for their countrymen to create an American union, residents of Louisiana showed none of the sentimental attachments to their land of ancestry that are the hallmark of more recent nationalist movements. Instead, Louisianians could pick and choose their attachments. The role of Spain was particularly important. Francophone Louisianians approached their Spanish rulers in conflicting ways. They might resent policies that excluded them from full membership in the Spanish empire, yet the Francophone population eventually invested tremendous energy in denying any real Spanish influence on local culture. Likewise, in the years surrounding 1803, Spain provided the perfect means to argue both for and against the power of culture. As commentators sought to explain the anemic growth of late-colonial Louisiana, Spain provided the ideal means to defend Francophone culture. Nobody argued this more strongly than Jacques Pitot. Like Derbigny, he came to Louisiana by way of the United States. By 1796, he was in New Orleans, and soon published a narrative of his travels that singled out the Spanish for special condemnation. “More than any other colony,” Pitot wrote, “Louisiana has experienced the extent to which a government could go in tying its resources; yet Louisiana will soon prove that the combined advantages of its resources can overcome the most malevolent authority. . . . The errors of the Spanish government in Louisiana are those that perpetuate the mediocrity of a country, but which individually do not bother its citizens. Such an administration restrains commerce, restricts population, and does not encourage agriculture; and, by this unchanging policy, as well as the mingling of Spanish families with French ones, it has hardened an indifference in the colony that scarcely suspects the possibility of a better existence.”13 So if white Louisianians were neither Spaniards nor Frenchmen, then what were they? First, neither term is entirely appropriate because the very notion of being a “Frenchman” or a “Spaniard” was a novel prospect.14 On



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a daily basis, the factors that shaped their lives were those of a peripheral colony where economic stability remained elusive and racial supremacy appeared tenuous. That Americans approached the concepts of empire and nation in similar ways only made sense because they saw the world in similar, if grander, terms. And nationalism as practiced in the United States also had its roots in the 1760s. The growing opposition to British policy that climaxed in the Declaration of Independence began with claims that inequality for colonial subjects was incompatible with the emerging conceptions of British nationalism. A nationalist argument provided the means to demand constitutional reform, and when Parliament failed to authorize those reforms, nationalism proved equally important for the constitutional order of an independent United States. The United States was no less localist than colonial Louisiana. As a result, the political necessity of union that so many Americans embraced demanded a corresponding nationalist argument. But the reality of tremendous differences within the population of the United States invalidated most forms of nationalist appeal just as it did in colonial Louisiana.15 In the end, political necessity and political culture overlapped to create the vision of nationhood that Americans brought with them to the prospect of an American Louisiana. In the absence of the ethnic, historic, religious, or linguistic foundations that European nationalists used to rationalize national communities, Americans emphasized the political principles of the Revolution and the attachment of individual citizens.16 This consensus remained in place despite the fact that Americans disagreed radically on what “republican” actually meant.17 Nationhood proved all the more attractive in the United States because, in the absence of a king, national principles provided the unifying identity without which people could not believe a nation actually existed. While this was a political definition, it was nonetheless circumscribed by race. The legal exclusion of nonwhites  — enslaved or free — emerged from theories of racial supremacy that were nonetheless closely tied to issues of politics and nationalism.18 Like many people throughout the United States, white Louisianians had a localist outlook that emerged from shared experiences as well as linguistic and ethnic commonalities within the Francophone population. Yet localism is insufficient, because the Louisianians certainly thought in terms of larger communities. They were colonial provincials attempting to maximize their possibilities within larger polities. As a result, Americans and Louisianians shared a certain consensus in the ways they conceived

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of citizenship and nationhood. By 1803, both groups saw advantages in equality among white male citizens and benefits from broad networks of interest. For Americans, equality would preserve the union and a republican political culture; for Louisianians, equality would establish prosperity and local power.

“Prepossession of the Most Unfavorable Kind” No sooner did news of the Purchase reach Louisiana than local residents began to articulate their own vision of how French and American would interact. The catalyst was politics itself, or rather the political structure imposed by the territorial system and, subsequently, the process of creating a State of Louisiana. As white Louisianians sought a way to describe themselves in a post-Purchase world, the term “American” presented obvious advantages. Federal officials — whether appointed officials of the territorial regime, members of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, or members of Congress — responded in kind. Where Louisianians focused on the concept of “American,” Americans needed the term “French” to articulate their own predictions and fears. From 1803 through Louisiana statehood in 1812, these people continued to fumble about for a way of describing populations. In their efforts to work around local or national diversity, they found that “French” and “American” provided a viable solution. Derbigny was among the first to seek a way of reconciling the meanings of French and American. That Derbigny was himself multilingual was no small matter, since few elite Louisianans spoke English and fewer still of the first American officials in Louisiana spoke French. On 29 December 1803, barely a week after the transfer of power in New Orleans, his name appeared on a set of port regulations as “P. Derbigny, Interprète du Gouvernment.” The brief reference was appropriate in so many ways. Derbigny was, quite literally, a paid interpreter. But his vision of interpretation was far broader than the regular work he received translating documents from English to French. He hoped to interpret federal goals to the Francophone population.19 Even Derbigny’s name was suggestive. While most references to him  — including documents he signed — called him “Pierre Derbigny,” in August 1803 he anglicized his name to “Peter” in a letter to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin. After news of the Louisiana Purchase had reached New Orleans but before the formal transfer of power, Derbigny reminded Gal-



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latin that the two men had met a decade before in Pennsylvania during Derbigny’s lengthy migration from France to New Orleans. Gallatin had been a rising congressman at the time and Derbigny a fledgling attorney. “I was then a complete youth, morally and physically speaking,” Derbigny explained. Derbigny hoped to make himself a candidate for public office through direct correspondence or, better still, through references from men like Gallatin and Claiborne. In December 1804, the outcome of that campaign was still in doubt, and whether he would be Pierre or Peter Derbigny was up for grabs.20 Within months, Peter Derbigny died, and Pierre Derbigny was reborn. As political reforms and patronage opportunities of the type that Derbigny expected failed to materialize, he immediately drafted a Frenchlanguage pamphlet condemning federal policy. This pamphlet, Esquisse de la situation politique et civile de la Louisiane . . . , was an anomaly at a time when Louisianians usually published in both English and French to make certain they reached the Anglophone American officials. But Derbigny had other goals. He hoped to create a Francophone community where none existed, with the French language and resistance to the federal regime as the foundation of a regional identity that nonetheless proclaimed itself American. Once again, Derbigny was careful in selecting a name. He wrote under the pseudonym “Louisianais,” a wise choice for a man who wanted to establish his local credentials while creating a local constituency.21 Once again, Derbigny fancied himself a translator, this time rendering the opinions of Louisianians to the federal government. Derbigny joined a larger group of white Louisianians who first articulated their own vision of themselves as Americans in the “Remonstrance of the People of Louisiana Against the Political System Adopted by Congress for Them.” Completed in May 1804, it became the Louisianians’ first assertion of their political presence within the American system. The “Remonstrance” specifically responded to the initial territorial government for Louisiana, which established no elected offices and offered no provisions for statehood. Louisianians explained that they were “persuaded that a free people would acquire territory only to extend the blessings of freedom, that an enlightened nation would never destroy those principles on which its Government was founded, and that their Representatives would disdain to become the instruments of oppression.” Borrowing from the specific guarantee in the Purchase that the “the inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the union of the United States, admitted as soon

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as possible,” the “Remonstrance” charged that “to be incorporated into the Union must mean to form a part of it.” This statement did not mean that the Louisianians demanded immediate statehood. Instead, they sought a modified territorial system with elected offices and representation in Congress.22 The “Remonstrance” was far less antagonistic than Derbigny’s Esquisse, establishing the tone of most statements that came from white Louisianians. Critical of specific federal policies but never opposed to the Louisiana Purchase, public statements from Louisiana consistently celebrated American nationhood. This had the obvious practical objective of creating goodwill in Washington. But the Louisianians had good reasons for making these statements, since the principles of American nationhood seemed so beneficial to their specific circumstances. The Louisianians closed the “Remonstrance” with two provocative questions. “Are truths, then, so well founded, so universally acknowledged, inapplicable only to us?” they asked. “Do political axioms on the Atlantic become problems when transferred to the shores of the Mississippi?” Their answer was a resounding “no.”23 Derbigny joined two Creoles, Jean Noël Destrehan and Pierre Sauve, in delivering the “Remonstrance” to Washington in the winter of 1804–5. They returned to New Orleans in the spring of 1805, convinced that the federal government had no intention of responding to their grievances. “We found already established a prepossession of the most unfavorable kind,” they reported. “Days and weeks passed on without an appearance of their bestowing a thought on us. In vain by our constant attendance at every setting of Congress, and by the frequent visits we paid to the members charged with our affair, did we seek to rouse their attention.” Their reception, like the Governance Act itself, showed that policy makers may have accepted that the Louisianians were citizens, but still did not consider them fellow countrymen.24 Derbigny, Destrehan, and Sauve had managed to secure an audience with President Thomas Jefferson, only to conclude that he was unresponsive to their concerns.25 If the delegation from Louisiana was unsuccessful with the president, among their first converts was William Plumer, a Federalist senator from New Hampshire whose only great distinctions were his singular practice of keeping a detailed journal of Senate proceedings and the dubious honor of being the only senator never to serve on a committee. Proving that attitudes toward Louisiana were not prescribed in either geographic or partisan terms, Plumer concluded “they are all



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gentlemen of the first respectability in that country. Men of talents, literature & general information — Men of business, & acquainted with the world. I was much gratified with their company.”26 He explained “they are all frenchmen,” despite acknowledging that Destrehan and Sauve were Creoles. What made them Frenchmen was a cursory cultural interpretation. They were Frenchmen because they spoke French as their first language, they all had French ancestors, and an implicit assumption that Spanish rule had done little to change this state of affairs. But any difference within the Francophone population went too far. Plumer assumed a Francophone community. Plumer also explicitly rejected the sort of logic that Pitot had constructed in explaining the effects of Spanish colonial rule on local culture. To Plumer, the Francophone population was uniform and distinctly French, its roots coming directly from France itself. Plumer’s only caveat was to suggest that these men were not entirely typical Frenchmen, but might instead possess some of the qualities that Plumer found most admirable in Americans. He found the men so agreeable because “they have little of French flippery with them — They resemble New England men more than the Virginians.”27 Plumer was more forgiving than other members of Congress, who described Louisianians as a fundamentally corrupt population. Critics of the Louisianians also cast a wider net. They were willing to include cultural deficiencies rooted in Spanish practices, especially the power of the Catholic Church within the Spanish empire. Nonetheless, members of the House and Senate deployed the term “Frenchmen” as the catch-all phrase for a cohesive community of disloyal, potentially lawbreaking malcontents. Other officials followed suit. “French” or “Frenchmen” seemed a required term whenever federal officials in Louisiana itself wanted to discuss a problem with the local population. The textbook case for this sort of cultural analysis has always been William C. C. Claiborne, who served as governor throughout the life of the Territory of Orleans. No sooner did he arrive in New Orleans than he dispatched a series of worried letters to Washington, with “French” and “Spanish” serving as qualifiers for the institutions that he believed would prevent Louisiana from developing a republican political culture. In time, Claiborne renounced those beliefs. Marriage to two Creoles certainly helped, but so too did his eventual conclusion that cultural differences between Americans and Louisianians did not prevent the latter from acquiring the political beliefs that would, in the end, make them American. Other officials in Louisiana shared Claiborne’s initial concerns because

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they believed that Louisianians were “Frenchmen,” and could not be both French and American at the same time. In 1804, General James Wilkinson, who commanded federal troops in Louisiana, sent Jefferson a list of potential candidates for appointed office. Like all other commentators, he assumed that loyalty to and understanding of republican principles were the first requirements for public office. But Frenchness mattered too, in large part because Wilkinson believed it helped predict political behavior. For example, when discussing Etienne de Boré, who had already served as mayor of New Orleans, Wilkinson wrote, “he is principally distinguished by his vanity & a blind attachment to the French Nation.” Nor was he much kinder when it came to Jacques Pitot, whom he considered guilty of “pedantry & arrogance . . . . He thinks the French the first of nations & himself the first Frenchman.” Wilkinson dismissed many white Louisianians for “poor morals.” In contrast to these men, Wilkinson described Evan Jones, a transplant from the United States who had lived in Louisiana for years, as “an American by birth and attachment.”28 Consider as well the case of David Porter, who commanded the New Orleans naval station from 1808 to 1810 and generated no end of trouble by seizing European vessels and arresting Louisianians he suspected of breaking federal neutrality laws or commercial regulations. He aimed particular scorn at the federal marshal, Michael Fortier, complaining that so long as “the Marshall is a frenchman there will be allways a large Majority of frenchmen on the Juries and a frenchman can never be convicted however heinous his crime.”29 The Port of New Orleans, the subject of so much of Porter’s concern, became a place where people constantly sought to establish the connections between Louisiana and France, Louisianians and Frenchmen. Porter himself assumed that Francophone Louisianians would also assist French vessels breaking either the laws of commerce or the laws of neutrality. The Francophone residents showed a consistently ambivalent attitude toward the French Revolution in large part because their own experiences with the revolutionary regime were so varied. At the same time, they did make sufficient statements in favor of a French victory over Great Britain to provide American observers with evidence that white Louisianans were a potential diplomatic force unto themselves. As late as 1816, a party celebrating Napoleon included a toast for “the unfortunate Hero, who for so long a time caused the French name to be respected.”30 Derbigny himself seemed to prove that Frenchness could work against American policy making. He represented the captains of French vessels



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seized by the U.S. Navy, and in 1810 wrote an angry letter to Governor Claiborne on behalf of the captain of one of those vessels, demanding that Porter personally reimburse the captain for ten thousand dollars in damage.31 A year after Porter complained of the “Frenchmen” who ran the port, Claiborne selected another marshal who exemplified the particular meanings that people associated with French and American. Martin Duralde Jr. seemed a logical choice. Claiborne explained that he “is capable and will receive further patronage if he embraces the present occasion to place himself in a situation to improve his mind.” Claiborne made these comments in a letter to Duralde’s farther, also named Martin.32 Duralde’s children had married well. Martin Jr. had married the daughter of Henry Clay, while his sister Julie married Henry Clay’s brother. Claiborne himself wrote to Duralde Sr. with such affection because he himself had been married to another Duralde daughter, Clarissa, who had died in 1809.33 When they had married three years earlier, Claiborne explained that Clarissa “is a native of Louisiana . . . and united to other qualities, which to me were interesting, those of a sincere Attachment to the Government of the United States, and to the American Character.”34 Meanwhile, in August 1811, Clay wrote to Attorney General Caesar Rodney on behalf of his own family by marriage in Louisiana. He provided an introduction for Duralde Sr., whom he called “a French gentleman, wealthy and respectable.” But Duralde was not French. He was, in fact, a Creole of Spanish ancestry. But many Americans used the word “French” for want of a better description of the residents of Louisiana. The key for them was to acknowledge that he was somehow foreign, and then belie that fact by emphasizing the Duralde’s membership in an American family, both literal and figurative. These comments bore a striking resemblance to those of William Plumer, who in 1804 had described the men who delivered the “Remonstrance” as “Frenchmen,” only to modify that statement by associating Frenchness with the Jeffersonian Republicans.35 The label of “Frenchman” did not work against the Duraldes, at least when it came to people like Claiborne and Clay, because the Duralde family had established itself as American in two crucial ways. While marriage to Americans was essential it was not sufficient. Rather, it was “a sincere Attachment to the Government of the United States” that made for an “American character.” The increasing optimism of Claiborne and the consistent pessimism of Porter predicted attitudes in Washington when Congress considered

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Louisiana statehood in an extended debate lasting from 1810 to 1812.36 Nathaniel Macon became the most adamant advocate for Louisiana and, in the process, for the notion that political culture was far more important than ethnic culture. “There ought to be no question as to what stock they sprung from,” he informed his House colleagues. Macon “was as willing now to make Orleans a State as he had been to make Ohio a State. The great object is to make us one people; to make this nation one.”37 This statement was less an assumption than an argument. The overtly nationalist language that Macon espoused was new on the rhetorical landscape. Americans had rarely made such unapologetic claims that the American people were, in fact, one people. But nationhood provided the ideal means — perhaps the only means — to argue for Louisiana statehood. Opponents of statehood actually made similar arguments, albeit with a different conclusion. Of course political culture mattered, but they claimed that ethnic culture continued to retard developments in Louisiana. Its residents remained Frenchman, and therefore could not yet fully be Americans. “I was born in Virginia, sir,” said New York congressman Jonathon Miller, “and I have not yet lost some of my Virginia feelings . . . I cannot see why we should expect the people of Orleans to act and feel differently from other people, more particularly, when the French nation is towering so far above the other nations of the earth.” Attachments were not so easily malleable, he argued. The result was a situation in which the Louisianians “will have a secret pride in their glory, they will have some attachments, to what extent I cannot say; but, inasmuch as we know that if we send Paddy to Paris, that Paddy he will come back, the idea is certainly not unworthy of our consideration.” For want of a better term, Miller concluded they were still French.38 “The population of the Orleans Territory is not a French population,” was the rejoinder from Tennessee congressman John Rhea. “Whatever the population was, before the treaty alluded to, it is now and for about seven years past has been a population composed of citizens, to a certain extent of the United States.”39 Rhea and Miller both discussed Louisianians in terms similar to those of William Plumer, or for that matter David Porter. In all cases, it was more than language or history that made somebody “French.” Plumer described the Louisianians as Frenchman, despite knowing that two of his guests were Creoles, yet the absence of “French flippery,” the similarity to New Englanders, and the specific dissimilarity with Virginians all combined to



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make Louisianians acceptable. For Porter, their Frenchness was inseparable from their resistance to federal law. Miller made similar assumptions, claiming that Frenchness was rooted in attachments to France more than local forms of culture. Rhea made a similar claim, arguing that American attachments proved the Louisianians had long since ceased to be foreigners. Congress eventually approved Louisiana statehood on 8 April 1812. The legislation did not go into effect until 30 April, a nice touch that created a certain chronological symmetry between statehood and the Louisiana Purchase nine years earlier. In the process, Congress did not so much ignore differentiation as discriminate among its forms. As loyal citizens who embraced republican politics, white Louisianians were welcome to the national community. Americans hardly forgot the differences in customs and manners that made white Louisianians unique.

Alien Enemies, Alien Friends If the creation of the Territory of Orleans and the State of Louisiana had provided the means for people to argue whether the residents of Louisiana were American, the War of 1812 would force people to decide if they were Frenchmen. Louisianians followed two strategies: either they exploited the war to prove that they could be American, or they asserted their Frenchness for equally pragmatic reasons. In either case, they claimed that identities were both fixed and fluid. That was certainly the case with Jean Baptiste Desbois, a white SaintDomingue refugee who settled in the Territory of Orleans in 1806. Desbois failed to report his arrival to federal officials, and as a result did not begin the naturalization process. With all foreigners defined either as “alien friends” or “alien enemies,” Desbois suddenly faced potential legal restrictions or persecution as an alien, even an “alien friend.”40 In an age when no branch of government had firmly defined the relationship between state and federal citizenship, a topic on which the Constitution itself was silent, Desbois found that very ambiguity provided the ideal means to establish himself as an American. Desbois claimed that by providing state citizenship for all residents, the Louisiana constitution automatically conferred federal citizenship, even for those who had not completed the mandatory period of naturalization. The state Supreme Court agreed in terms that reverberated with concerns Louisianians had stated since 1803. In its decision, the Court stated:

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He admits he has no claim of citizenship by birth, nor by naturalization, under the acts of congress to establish an uniform rule of naturalization . . . . He contends, however, that natural birth, and a compliance with the formalities of these laws, are not the only modes of acquiring the citizenship of the United States, that the constitution itself has provided a third, viz. the admission in to the Union, of a state of which one is a citizen. The Court further explained that “every alien, coming to the United States in time of peace, therefore, acquires an inchoate right under the constitution to become a citizen.” Otherwise, a resident alien would be “thrown away, an outcast upon the world.”41 While the Court seemed to validate the claims of so many Francophone Louisianians, this was no Creole bastion. The chief justice was a former South Carolina legislator and chief judge of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court. Joining him on the bench was George Mathews, a former Georgia governor who came to Louisiana late in the territorial period to serve as judge. But both men had reasons for reaching this decision that had little to do with Louisiana. Desbois’ argument drew from the most essential principles of American citizenship. If Hall and Mathews had national reasons for reaching this decision, the third justice had local reasons for concurring. The last member of the Supreme Court was none other than Pierre Derbigny, who had long argued not only that Louisianians could not be denied the status of Americans, but that the Francophone community needed to be just that: a community with a united interest. Did this mean that all residents of the Territory of Orleans became citizens of both the State of Louisiana and the United States in 1812? Neither the state government nor the Supreme Court ever made such a public statement on the matter again. But the newcomers from Saint-Domingue certainly seem to have been treated as citizens, and in 1813 the Federal District Court as well as the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the principles of Desbois’ case for an Irish immigrant who arrived under similar circumstances.42 Federal jurisprudence, local concerns, and nationalist ideology overlapped to provide immigrants with the ability to demand their acceptance as Americans — except, of course, for those migrants who asked to be considered aliens, and during the War of 1812, they had reason to do so. In 1813, male refugees from Saint-Domingue began to realize that along with U.S. citizenship came the requirement of wartime militia service. Louis



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Toussard, the French consul, acknowledged that “the strangers who have settled . . . no doubt, owe . . . their service, and thereby contribute to the safety of the place where they receive hospitality and protection.” “But when . . . they are called by draft,” Toussard asked, “should these strangers be included in this order?” His choice of words could not have been better. Public officials in Louisiana had always used “stranger” as a colloquial reference for “foreigner.” They usually did so to brand people whom they considered public enemies. Now Toussard used it to defend Frenchman, arguing that so long as these men had not completed American naturalization, they “have not lost their title of French citizens.” Worse still, he added that French law would strip these men of their citizenship once they became “affiliated with a strange military corporation.” Toussard lamented this status in much the same way the Louisiana Supreme Court worried that men without formal nationality would become “thrown away, an outcast upon the world.”43 By January 1814, seventy-five men claimed they were Frenchmen. They were not the metaphorical Frenchmen of American critics who concluded that white Louisianians, despite their U.S. citizenship, seemed more French than American. These men claimed that they were French citizens and needed to be treated as such. In his defense of these claims, Toussard made arguments similar to those in the decision of Desbois’ Case, explaining that to force unnaturalized immigrants to lose their French citizenship before they could acquire American citizenship would create a throng of the very “outcasts upon the world” that the Court hoped to prevent. The refugees won their case with Claiborne, who excused them from militia service, in large part because he already accepted the notion that it was unnatural to force a Frenchman to be an American. In 1815, Andrew Jackson reserved special scorn for Toussard and for the “Frenchmen” he defended. On 28 February, he ordered all French subjects to leave New Orleans. His nominal reason was to remove potential foreign infiltrators, but Jackson left few doubts that he also intended to punish immigrants who chose foreign identities to escape militia duty.44 And when Jackson’s refusal to end martial law unleashed a storm of local opposition, he attributed the situation to “a few Traitors — Tories and foreign emisaries amonghst [sic] whom may be included, Colo Toussard the French consul  — with the aid of the Feeble Governor W. C. C. in petto — Toussard is a wicked and dangerous man and ought to be removed from the U States as consul.”45 British military planners had reached their own conclusions that Loui-

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siana provided the ideal circumstances to promote domestic unrest in ways that would assist an invasion of the Gulf Coast. In the summer of 1814, Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Nicholls circulated a broadside in Louisiana stating: “Spaniards, Frenchmen, Italians and British, whether settled, or residing for a time in Louisiana, on you also I call to aid me in this Just cause. The american usurpation in this country, must be abolished, and the lawful owners of the soil, put in possession.”46 As far as Nicholls was concerned, the Francophone residents of Louisiana were, in fact, a united community of Frenchman whose Frenchness must mean they objected to Anglo-American rule. He was hardly alone in this assumption. Not only did other British officials share his assumptions, but federal policy makers retained a lingering fear that the residents of Louisiana might yet abandon their claims to being American. The Saint-Domingue militiamen seemed to support that fear. The Battle of New Orleans would of course prove the doubters wrong. A local alliance repulsed the British invasion, defeated British-Indian alliances, and preserved white authority over slaves who sought their freedom with the British or by running away. For white Louisianians, the invasion provided the ideal moment to prove their loyalty at the same time they used it to celebrate local culture. Meanwhile, federal leaders and veterans of the territorial regime who had retained positions of power after statehood likewise concluded that a decade of cultivating political connections had built the foundation for a union strong enough to withstand an invasion at what might have been its weakest point.

Language If people in Louisiana argued that ethnicity was a red herring when it came to the ability of Louisianians to become Americans, language and race posed different problems. The fact remained that the majority of white Louisianians spoke French, while the majority of American officials and American migrants spoke English. And whatever the composition of whites, people of African ancestry constituted a slim majority in Louisiana as a whole. The response to language and to race reflected the same principles that had defined politics and policy making. In yet another attack on ethnic difference, white Louisianians immediately set out to prove that their whiteness trumped anything that might separate them from white Americans against counterclaims from free people of color who sought to use the political definition of American nationhood to their own ad-



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vantage. Meanwhile, linguistic difference would provide yet another set of circumstances that people exploited in pragmatic ways, all the while reinforcing the emerging definitions of what made somebody American. A major complaint by Louisiana Creoles during the era of Spanish rule was limitations on their power as slaveholders. New Orleans also became home to North America’s largest population of free people of color. While this happened in part because some whites proved willing to work with former slaves, many white Louisianians resented the challenge to their own status that came from the number and prosperity of free people of color. The Louisiana Purchase immediately presented two conflicting opportunities. Free people of color had already employed the language of independence and equality generated by the French Revolution in the 1790s. After 1803, they could easily draw on similar language from the American Revolution. Meanwhile, whites could exploit the explicitly racialized language of American nationality. The question was not whether the residents of Louisiana would attempt to tackle the racial implications of nation, but how.47 Soon after the Louisiana Purchase, free people of color began to employ the same rhetorical principles of American nationality as white Louisianians. They recognized that a system based on belief rather than background might present unprecedented opportunities. As a collection of free men of color explained things in a letter to Congress: “We are Natives of this Province and our dearest Interests are connected with its welfare . . . . We are duly sensible that our personal and political freedom is thereby assured to us for ever, and we are also impressed with the fullest confidence in the Justice and Liberality of the Government towards every Class of Citizens which they have here taken under their Protection.”48 Free people of color in Louisiana sustained forms of prosperity and social contact unmatched in the rest of the United States, but they faced profound challenges after the Louisiana Purchase. The men who took charge of the territorial regime shared the same outlook as their superiors in Washington. In an attempt to import the racial systems they had known in home states (in most cases, Virginia), they were eager to impose new restrictions on slaves and free people of color. White Louisianians were only too happy to oblige. New controls on their slaves had obvious benefits. Crushing the political aspirations of free people of color reaffirmed that European ancestry mattered most, regardless of the particular national origin of that ancestry. While new laws used whiteness to reinforce the Americanness of  Loui-

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siana’s Francophone population, other strategies sought to overcome or to subvert the problem of language. Written and spoken languages would create real disputes and real problems in the first years following the Louisiana Purchase, greater problems than they had caused under the Spanish. At the same time, the broader definition of language being crafted in the political arena provided the means for people to claim that language was an inconvenient obstruction rather than a permanent barrier. The Spanish had never attempted to impose their own language onto Louisiana’s population, and much of the public activity during the decades of Spanish rule occurred in French and was recorded in French. The United States was less comfortable with this kind of arrangement, and soon made efforts to make English the language of official documentation, if not the official language of the population. Louisianians long complained of Claiborne’s inability to speak French, and his initial decision to print public acts in English was one of the objections listed in the “Remonstrance” of 1804. In one of the few positive references to the Spanish, the “Remonstrance” claimed that Spain had selected officials “who possessed our language, and with whom we could communicate personally.” By comparison, the United States seemed to be imposing a “sudden change of language in all the public offices and administration of justice.”49 Americans and white Louisianians soon reached a characteristic compromise. Public acts appeared in both English and French. So intent were public officials on guaranteeing that language barriers not create social barriers that the state legislature occasionally ordered minor adjustments to the wording of existing legislation to guarantee the most literal translation. The role of language became most explicitly clear in the claims of educators, who found that the challenges of a multilingual society in the charged political climate after the Louisiana Purchase gave them exactly the means they needed to seek students. Teachers who knew French and English claimed that their work eradicated the linguistic barriers that separated people in Louisiana. In 1811, for example, a “Mr. Martin” started a school in which he “proposes opening a course of Lectures on the French language for young men and strangers who may not have an occasion to be instructed in that branch of education necessary.”50 Recent arrivals from France also laid claim to a role for themselves. French migrants believed they could bring a sophistication and intellectual achievement that were sorely lacking in the local population. This applied for boys as well



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as for girls. In addition to instructing young men in the complexities of politics, business, and science, French teachers claimed to have knowledge of vital social skills, training affluent boys and girls in the intricacies of elite behavior. They argued that the education they delivered was no less important than what students would receive public schools. They, too, helped to incorporate Louisiana by teaching elite children how to associate with members of their class.51 That sort of socializing role was at the core of government plans for the College of Orleans, a public boarding school in which a system of competitive examinations would select the brightest students from the territory, whose room and board would be paid for at public expense.52 The legislature specifically required the College of Orleans and other public educational institutions to teach in both English and French.53 Overcoming ethnic difference was never without political content. When the territorial legislature first proposed a system of public education, they explained that “the independence, happiness and grandeur of every republic depend, under the influence of Divine Providence, upon the wisdom, virtue, talents and energy of its citizens and rulers.” In making this statement, they drew on traditional arguments within the United States that education would not only reinforce a republican political culture, but that through creating a uniform politics, it would provide the similarity among American citizens that religion, ethnicity, and background failed to provide.54

Politics The question of what made somebody French or American was most vigorously fought in a political context, and for various reasons. First and foremost, the political stakes were extremely high, whether for white Louisianians, who grasped political opportunities for themselves in the United States, or for American policy makers, who concluded that a successful integration of Louisianians into a larger American nation was vital to the survival of the union. A political definition of nationhood that ignored ethnic differences and avoided ethnic labels was essential to that process. That the labels “French” and “American” had lost much of their public value became particularly clear in Louisiana’s first three gubernatorial elections. They represented a perfect combination of the various constituencies. In 1812, Claiborne won an easy victory as the first governor. With the state constitution limiting governors to a single four-year term, in 1816

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Claiborne surrendered office to the man who had been his nearest rival in the 1812 election, the Creole Jacques Phillipe Villeré. The 1820 contest was a vicious affair, and while former congressman Thomas Bolling Robertson won, the competition between two other candidates provided a better indication of Louisiana’s complex political culture. As they squared off in the 1820 contest for governor, Pierre Derbigny and Jean-Noël Destrehan had come a long way since they carried the “Remonstrance” to Washington. Destrehan had become an eager servant of the territorial regime, while Derbigny remained something of a gadfly. Where Destrehan was the quintessential Creole planter, the French-born Derbigny seemed the embodiment of the ambitious newcomers who so often irritated Louisiana Creoles. Nonetheless, a suggestion of Derbigny’s future came in 1803, when he secured work as a translator. He grasped that title with a vengeance. He tried to position himself as the Louisianians’ interpreter, speaking on their behalf to Americans who seemed unable to understand local concerns. At the first celebration of the Fourth of July in 1804, for example, Derbigny translated for New Orleans mayor James Watkins, attempting to convert Watkins’s explanation of American political principles into terms Louisianians could understand. This came at the same moment that Derbigny and other white Louisianians hoped the “Remonstrance” would prove their understanding of those principles.55 The question was not whether Louisianians would unite behind a Creole, as they had done in 1816. The real unknown was whether Derbigny could make that relationship work the other way around in his contest with Destrehan. It was never close. Derbigny outpaced Destrehan throughout the state, including in heavily Creole districts. The immigrant received 1,187 votes compared to the Creole’s 627. What Derbigny could not know was that his intellectual construction would be his own undoing; for when the dust settled, it was another newcomer to Louisiana, Robertson, who had received the largest margin of victory yet in a gubernatorial election. Claiborne’s secretary during the final years of territorial rule and a threeterm congressman after statehood, Robertson enjoyed a 716–vote margin over Derbigny. Even in defeat, however, Derbigny had shown that one need not be a Creole to be a Louisianian.56 But Robertson’s election had also shown that one need not be Francophone to lead Louisianians. Nor was this limited to gubernatorial contests. Statewide offices rarely indicated ethnically polarized voting, especially in heavily Creole districts. This does not mean that Louisianans did



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not take particular pleasure in electing their own, but it does mean that ethnic ancestry alone did not determine political outcomes.57 This outcome could not have been more pleasant to Americans and Francophone Louisianians alike, who since 1803 had argued that Louisiana need not be home to ethnic polarization. This political landscape hardly means that French ancestry did not matter. Nor did Derbigny’s strong showing in 1820 indicate amity within the Francophone population, which continued to be the site of  long-simmering resentments. But it does mean that the disparate reasons why people in Louisiana would embrace a nationalist outlook continued to drive a frenzied quest to prove that the Francophone majority could indeed be American. Once again, the issue of Spain provides a revealing case in point. If there was ever a claim that national culture could work against American nationalism, it was directed at Spain. For not only was Spanish colonial administration a source of corruption, so too was the Spanish vision of Roman Catholicism, political economy, and race. When Bernard Ma­ rigny, one of the wealthiest men in Louisiana, ran for State Senate in 1818, the Louisiana Gazette published a letter that used Spanish culture and the abandonment of Marigny’s own French ancestry to condemn him as unqualified for office within the American system: Bernard Marigny was born about 33 years ago, under the despotic government of Spain; and he appears to have imbibed the most tyrannical principles from his cradle. Though the heir of an immense fortune, his education was much neglected; he was never taught even the rudiments of the French language . . . [and] he has not sense nor resolution enough to improve himself by reading or study.58 The criticism of Marigny’s legislative record, his campaign techniques, and even his résumé further connected Louisiana’s new world of election to its colonial past. The Spanish regime remained the symbol of corrupt politics. Not only did Marigny fail to mirror the interests of his constituency, but so too would he fail to represent themselves honestly. Marigny recovered from these accusations, and would remain a leading figure in Louisiana’s elite into the antebellum era. But his circumstances in 1818, like Derbigny’s, suggested how much aspiring politicians needed to distance themselves from the Spanish past, deny social divisions within the Francophone population, and reject any suggestion that local sympathies prevented national loyalty.

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Conclusion Pierre Derbigny may have lost the 1820 election, but he would not be denied leadership in Louisiana. He served as secretary of state for eight years before finally winning election as governor in 1828. It was a short-lived triumph. A year into office, Pierre Derbigny died after being thrown from his carriage. By the time Derbigny ascended to the governorship, Louisiana politics was becoming the home of bitter ethnic disputes. The notion of a single French community no longer applied, replaced by the competing political and economic ambitions within the diverse Francophone population. But those conditions in antebellum Louisiana were not in place in early national Louisiana. Creoles, Frenchmen, Saint-Domingue migrants, and Americans might form distinct cultural communities, but they created porous political communities. Membership and allegiance shifted depending on circumstances.59 This was hardly the world of die-hard ethnic political communities that generations of scholars would later attribute to Louisiana. But it was a world that Derbigny understood all too well.

Notes 1. For general theoretical work on nationalism, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991); John Alexander Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Walker Connor, “The Politics of Ethnonationalism,” Journal of International Affairs 27 (1973): 1–21; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 399–484; E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 2. For the problems of using identity, see Philip D. Gleason, “Identifying Identity: A Semantic History,” Journal of American History 69 (1983): 910–31. 3. Charles Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane (New Orleans: Magne and Weisse, 1846); Charles Gayarré, Romance of the History of Louisiana: A Series of Lectures (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G. S. Appleton, 1848); Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1867). 4. Joseph G. Tregle, “Political Reinforcement of Ethnic Dominance in Louisiana, 1812–1845,” in The Americanization of the Gulf Coast, 1803–1850, ed. Lucius F. Ellsworth (Pensacola: Historic Pensacola Preservation Board, 1972); Lewis William Newton, The Americanization of French Louisiana: A Study of the Process of Adjustment between the French and Anglo-American Populations of Louisiana, 1803–1860 (New York: Arno Press, 1980); Lewis William Newton, “Creoles and



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Anglo-Americans in Old Louisiana: A Study in Cultural Conflicts,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 14 (1933); John Wilds, Charles L. Dufour, and Walter G. Cowan, Louisiana, Yesterday and Today: A Historical Guide to the State (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 19–22. 5. As they did throughout their American colonies, the Spanish kept a magnificently rich public record during their tenure governing Louisiana from 1768 to 1803. Likewise, the extended life of the Territory of Orleans left a mass of federal records that eventually found safe haven in the National Archives. At the same time, actual correspondence from white Louisianians, especially those who did not hold public office, is extremely rare during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. 6. In addition to a limited number of studies on Lower Louisiana, several projects are currently under way on this subject, most of them exploring the region of Upper Louisiana near Saint Louis (see Jay Gitlin, “On the Boundaries of Empire: Connecting the West to Its Imperial Past,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George A. Miles, and Jay Gitlin [New York: Norton, 1993]: 80–83; Jay Gitlin, “Children of Empire or Concitoyens?: Louisiana’s French Inhabitants,” in The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation, ed. Peter J. Kastor, Landmark Events in U.S. History series. [Washington: CQ Press, 2002], 22–37; Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns in Mid-America and the Course of Westward Expansion, 1763 to 1863 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004]; Paul F. Lachance, “The Politics of Fear: French Louisianans and the Slave Trade, 1786–1809,” Plantation Society 1 [1979]: 162–97; and Peggy K. Liss, “Creoles, the North American Example and the Spanish Imperial Economy,” in The North American Role in the Spanish Imperial Economy, 1760–1819, ed. Jacques A. Barbier and Allan Kuethe [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984], 12–25). 7. Carl A. Brasseaux, Denis-Nicolas Foucault and the New Orleans Rebellion of 1768 (Ruston: Louisiana Tech University, 1987); John Preston Moore, Revolt in Louisiana: The Spanish Occupation, 1766–1770 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 84–142; Reinhart Kondert, “The German Involvement in the Rebellion of 1768,” Louisiana History 26 (1985): 385–97; Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 116–18. The roots of the 1768 Revolt have occupied historians of colonial Louisiana since the first scholars began writing the region’s history in the midnineteenth century. The question of local intentions remains contested. Although historians have often concluded that the Louisianians sought the restoration of French authority, there is little evidence to support this assertion. At no time did the Louisianians invite French involvement, contact French officials, or launch a more systematic effort to remove the new Spanish presence. 8. Charles E. A. Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 4 vols. (New Orleans: F. F. Hansell, 1903), 3:97–98; Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–1826 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 95. .

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9. The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792–1809 (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1992). 10. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 11. Gilbert C Din, Francisco Bouligny: A Bourbon Soldier in Spanish Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 110–12, 199–200; Gilbert C. Din and John E. Harkins, The New Orleans Cabildo: Colonial Louisiana’s First City Government 1769–1803 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 83–89; Jerah Johnson, “Colonial New Orleans: A Fragment of the Eighteenth-Century French Ethos,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 18, 46–57. 12. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Lachance, “The Politics of Fear.” For general studies of the American Revolution in Spanish Louisiana, see Jack D. L. Holmes, “The Historiography of the American Revolution in Louisiana,” Louisiana History 19 (1978): 309–25. 13. James Pitot, Observations on the Colony of Louisiana from 1796 to 1802 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 2–3. For similar comments in other travel narratives, see Berquin-Duvallon, Travels in Louisiana and the Floridas in the Year 1802 (New York: I. Riley & Co., 1807); Henry Marie Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, Together with a Journal of a Voyage Up the Missouri River, in 1811 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1962); Estwick Evans, A Pedestrious Tour, of Four Thousand Miles, Through the Western States and Territories, During the Winter and Spring of 1818 . . . (Concord: Joseph C. Spear, 1819); Amos Stoddard, Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1812). 14. For the development of nationhood in France and Spain, see Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). 15. James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 173–209; Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 167–96; Jeff Spinner, The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Liberal State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 124–25, 129. 16. For studies examining the linkages between nations and national identity, see The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Claudia Hilb, “Equality at the Limit of Liberty,” 103–12; Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).



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17. Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1995), 295–98; Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States (New York: Norton, 1986), 163–64; William T. Hutchinson, “Unite to Divide; Divide to United: The Shaping of American Federalism,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 66 (1959): 3–18. 18. For the political foundation of American nationalism, see Elise Marienstras, Les Mythes fondateurs de la nation américaine: Essai sur le discours idéologique aux États-Unis à l’époque de l’indépendance, 1763–1800 (Paris: F. Maspero, 1976); Andrew W. Robertson, “ ‘Look on This Picture . . . And on This!’: Nationalism, Localism, and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787–1820,” American Historical Review 1006, no. 4 (2001): 1, 1263–80; Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes. 19. Port Regulations (New Orleans: 1803), Historic New Orleans Collection. 20. Pierre Derbigny (signed “Peter Derbigny”) to Albert Gallatin, 12 August 1803, in The Territorial Papers of the United States, comp. Clarence Edwin Carter (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1934–75) (hereafter cited as “Carter”), 9:12–13. 21. Louisianias [Pierre Derbigny], Esquisse de la situation politique et civile de la Louisiane . . . (New Orleans, 1804). 22. American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832–61) (hereafter cited as “ASP-MI”), 1:399. 23. Ibid. 24. Orleans Gazette (New Orleans), 11 June 1805. See also William C. C. Claiborne to James Madison, 18 March 1805, in Carter, 9:420–1. 25. Orleans Gazette 11 June 1805; William Plumer, William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate 1803–1807 (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 223. Jefferson himself left no record of this meeting. The most detailed analysis of his reaction to the “Remonstrance” is Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term 1801–1805 (Boston: Little Brown, 1970), 360–61. 26. Plumer, William Plumer’s Memorandum, 222. 27. Ibid. 28. James Wilkinson to Jefferson, 1 July 1804, in Carter, 9:248–58. 29. David Porter to Madison, 21 September 1810, in The Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series, ed. Robert A. Rutland, J.C.A. Stagg, and Jeanne Cross (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986– ), 4:621. See also Porter to Paul Hamilton, 1 January 1810, in Letters Received by the Secretary of the Navy from Commanders (Washington: National Archives Record Group 45, Microfilm Copy M147, 4:1; Porter to Hamilton, 10 March 1810, ibid., 4:35; Porter to Samuel Hambleton, 18 July 1810, in David Dixon Porter Papers, Library of Congress. 30. Louisiana Courier (New Orleans), 19 August 1816. 31. Joshua Lewis to the Sheriff of New Orleans, 26 March 1810, in The Letter Books of William C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816, ed. Dunbar Rowland (Jackson: Mississippi State Archive, 1917), 5:28 (hereafter cited as “Claiborne Letter Books”);

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Petition of Pierre Derbigny, 26 March 1810, ibid., 5:26–28; Thomas B. Robertson to Robert Smith, 8 April 1810, in Carter, 9:880–81. 32. Claiborne to Martin Duralde, 2 February 1811, in Claiborne Letter Books, 5:143; Louisiana Gazette (New Orleans), 1811 Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States of America (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1969), 2:123, 156. 33. Henry Clay to Caesar A. Rodney, 17 August 1811, in The Papers of Henry Clay, ed. James F. Hopkins and Mary W. M. Hargreaves (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1959), 1:575; John Clay to Clay, 31 October 1820, in Clay Papers, 2:899; A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, ed. Glenn R. Conrad (New Orleans: Louisiana Historical Association, 1988), 1:273. 34. Claiborne to Thomas Jefferson, 12 November 1806, in Carter, 9:687. 35. Claiborne and Robertson to Porter, 6 May 1809, in Claiborne Letter Books, 4:349; Clay to Rodney, 17 August 1811, in Clay Papers, 1:574–75. See also Recommendation of James Brown to Jefferson, 28 December 1803, in Carter, 9:154; John Breckinridge to Clay, 30 December 1803, in Clay Papers, 1:124–25; Brown to Madison, 7 May 1805, in Carter, 9:448–49; Brown to Claiborne, 24 August 1805, ibid., 9:494. For a similar example of Clay’s patronage, see Clay to Rodney, 10 April 1810, in Clay Papers, 1:409. 36. Congress initially considered the issue when debating a petition from the Territory of Orleans to organize a state constitutional convention. Congress approved the measure, and once again began asking about the Louisianians during the winter of 1812 when debating statehood itself. 37. Annals of Congress: Debates and Proceedings of the Congress of the United States (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834–56), 11th Cong., 3rd sess., 485. 38. Ibid., 496. 39. Ibid., 501. 40. For actions against aliens, see Louisiana Courier 21 April 1813. 41. Desbois’ Case, 2 Martin 185 (LA 1812). See also Laverty v. Duplessis, 3 Martin 42 (LA 1813); Johnson v. Duncan et al.’s Syndics, 3 Martin 530 (LA 1815); United States v. Laverty, 3 Martin 733 (LA 1815). For actions against aliens, see Louisiana Courier, 21 April 1813. 42. The major studies of the foreign French do not consider when or how white migrants from Saint-Domingue gained the legal status of citizens. See also Laverty v. Duplessis. 43. Louis Toussard to Claiborne, 30 December 1813, in Louis Toussard Papers, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University. See also Claiborne to Toussard, 13 October 1812, in Claiborne Letter Books, 6:190; and Toussard to Claiborne, 9 and 10 January 1814, both in William C. C. Claiborne Papers, TUL. The controversy began when Claiborne demanded that Toussard produce a list of all French nationals in Louisiana (see Claiborne to Toussard, 31 August 1812, in Claiborne Letter Books, 6:169–70). Diego Morphy, the Spanish consul, made similar claims (see Diego Morphy to Andrew Jackson, 17 February 1815, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Sam B. Smith and Harriet Chappell Owsley et. al [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980– ], 3:283).



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44. Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 308–11. 45. Jackson to Alexander Dallas and Monroe, 28 April 1815, in Jackson Papers, 3:349. 46. Edward Nichols Broadside, 29 August 1814, in Edward Nicholls and William H. Percy Letters, Historic New Orleans Collection. 47. Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 25–32. 48. Address from the Free People of Color, January 1804, in Carter, 9:174. 49. ASP-MI, 1:399. 50. Louisiana Courier 29 November 1811. See related announcements on 17 and 24 October 1810. See also Louisiana Courier, 17 June 1818. 51. Louisiana Courier 12 October 1810; 1, 15, 17, and 19 March 1813; 8 July, 19 October, 11 December 1818; Acts Passed at the Legislature of the State of Louisiana (New Orleans: Bradford and Anderson, 1806–12), 96–101, 104–11. 52. Stuart Noble Grayson, “Governor Claiborne and the Public School System of the Territorial Government of Louisiana,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 11 (1928): 638–39. 53. Acts Passed at the Legislature of the Territory of Orleans (New Orleans: Bradford and Anderson, 1806–12), 314. 54. Ibid., 304–21. 55. Clay to Clay, 7 July 1804, in Clay Papers, 1:139–41. 56. Louisiana Gazette 27 November 1820. 57. Detailed records of voter turnout for this period are extremely rare, but general statistics indicate that heavily Creole districts rarely voted in overwhelming numbers for Creole candidates. The greatest source of ethnic voting came on the Gulf Coast, where predominantly American districts rarely voted for Creoles. See also Louisiana Congressional Election Papers, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University. 58. Louisiana Gazette, 6 July 1818. 59. For the subsequent development of more cohesive — and combative —  ethnic communities, see Joseph G. Tregle, “Creoles and Americans,” in Creole New Orleans, ed. Hirsch and Logsdon, 131–85; and Joseph G. Tregle, Louisiana in the Age of Jackson: A Clash of Cultures and Personalities (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999).

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Edward Livingston, America, and France Making Law

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hat does it mean to be an American? That question, perhaps still confounding today, was even more confusing in the after­ math of the Louisiana Purchase. In recent years, historians have made great strides toward defining the Creole culture and the Creolization of Louisiana. Few historians, however, have paid similar attention to the idea of Americanization. For most of the twentieth century, the idea of Americanization has centered on the immigration of Anglo-Americans and their efforts to gain ascendancy in government, politics, and society. Consequently, Americanization has always been treated as a rather homogeneous process with singular goals.1 Edward Livingston’s experience in Louisiana and his interaction with politicos and denizens of the Territory of Orleans and the State of Louisiana, however, suggests that the aims of the Americans and the process of Americanization was something much more fluid and contentious. Perhaps by exploring his example, we can reach a deeper meaning of the problematical concept and, in turn, bring greater refinement to the terms “Creolization” and “Americanization.” The Louisiana Purchase offered Edward Livingston, like many Americans, a chance to start his life over. Recovering from yellow fever, embroiled in an embezzlement scandal, and suffering from the kind vicious partisan attack that he had found so attractive in an earlier part of his career, the New York mayor and United States attorney looked at the Crescent City as a place to resurrect his suffering fortunes. Livingston had spent much of his early career like a phoenix — catching fire, burning out, and then rising from the ashes. Even his childhood schoolhouse went up in flames during the American Revolution. After a



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brilliant career at Princeton, he studied law and steadily rose through the ranks of the New York Bar. In 1795, he was elected to Congress, where he enjoyed a brief, tempestuous career. As a scion of the famous New York Livingston family, he arrived in Congress with a pocketful of pizzazz and patronage. He quickly found his way into the inner circles of the fledgling Democratic-Republican Party using family and school connections to garner plum assignments on important committees. Congressman Livingston possessed a sharp tongue and a fiery, dramatic oratory style. Soon he became the Republicans’ firebrand, launching into scathing speeches against the Federalist’s record on foreign policy. In a particularly acrimonious debate about Jay’s Treaty, he suggested that the House of Representatives should have the right to review treaty documents and spearheaded a resolution for the executive branch to turn over a series of classified papers. This brash, and unconstitutional, initiative forced George Washington to respond by arguing that the framers never intended the House to have such oversight over presidential authority. Washington’s response warranted a response from James Madison, who blamed Livingston for creating an unnecessary brouhaha. Single-handedly, Livingston had created the first national debate over original intent and angered one of the most important men in his party. At the turn of the century, as the Republicans rode the wave of negative publicity that the Federalists had launched with the ill-advised Alien and Sedition Acts, Livingston declined to run for another term, knowing that party leaders would not go to bat for him. Back home in New York, Livingston licked his wounds and relied on his family’s considerable clout to resurrect his damaged career. After his congressional term expired in 1801, Livingston managed to claim the dualoffice prize of United States attorney and mayor of New York City. For the most part, Livingston applied himself to the new positions with diligence and aplomb. At times, however, his prickly personality could not resist jabs at his associates. For example, in his inscription to his edition of decisions in the New York Mayor’s Court, he chided the members of the New York Bar, remarking that he had compiled the decisions to combat their inefficiency.2 Livingston might have lived happily ever after in New York if not for the bumbling of one of his staff members. As United States attorney, Livingston had access to the kind of honest graft eligible to all public officials of his day. He as well as his key underlings could use monies from his considerable budget for private investments as long as he replaced the funds

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in the proper accounts in time for quarterly audits. One of Livingston’s deputies mismanaged his investments and in early 1803 came up $100,000 short in his quarterly report. New York’s Federalists, every bit as rabid as Livingston when attacking a political opponent, salivated as they related story after story implicating Livingston in an embezzlement scheme to the hungry press. Livingston, to his credit, accepted his responsibility and bailed out his deputy by settling with the government for a $100,000 fine. Although the fine was to be paid in cash, Livingston, like so many of his contemporaries, had a cash-flow problem. He scraped together $60,000 and pledged $40,000 in property on the debt. The Federalists screamed that the property was worthless and condemned Livingston for again fleecing the public. In the midst of all this hubbub, Livingston contracted yellow fever and retreated to his country estate. With the press attacks raging in the city and the fever raging in his body, Livingston had reached the nadir of his career. In the early fall of 1803, he made a decision that so many Americans would make in the coming years: he decided to start fresh in Louisiana. In December 1803, as Louisiana was being passed from Spain to France to the United States, Livingston set sail for the Crescent City. These early activities reveal much about the contentious place that was early America. From the time of the Revolution through the early national period, there was no recognizable “national consensus,” no vehement patriotism or attachment the United States. Politics was a fractious, amateurish, and chaotic engagement. Men like Livingston could thrive on that chaos. Americanization, then, should not be viewed as a homogeneous process, but a heterogeneous amalgamation. In Louisiana, momentous events paved the way for Livingston’s arrival. Louisiana entered the Union on 20 December 1803, when General James Wilkinson and William C. C. Claiborne accepted the keys to the city of New Orleans from the French prefect, Pierre Clément Laussat. The exchange took place at a lavish ceremony in Hôtel de Ville. As the Stars and Stripes was raised, the French Tricolor, which had flown over Louisiana for the previous two weeks, was lowered. When the colors passed each other on the flagpoles, the forts and batteries along the Mississippi fired waves of celebratory volleys. The crowd that assembled at the Hôtel de Ville exemplified the diversity of the citizenry affected by the Louisiana Purchase. American soldiers and merchants of Anglo-American extraction saluted the Stars



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and Stripes in anticipation of the heady days to come. Spanish-speaking citizens and soldiers huddled behind the Marquis de Casa Calvo, whose very presence bespoke the ambivalence of rival nations toward the United States’ ability to manage the territory. French-speaking citizens, many of whom had recently fled to the Crescent City in hopes of resurrecting their fortunes after losing all in Saint- Domingue, watched the Tricolor fall and wondered if their opportunities and prospects were also on the decline. On the fringes, African and African American residents of the city, both free and enslaved, watched the spectacle wondering what, if anything, it meant to their lives. No one in the crowd really knew what to expect. Americans hoped for a smooth transition and an era of prosperity and growth. Governor William Claiborne, however, fretted about winning the acceptance of the citizens and keeping the peace. Wilkinson attended in expectation of resistance. Of course, no one really could have known what thoughts had crossed his devious and complicated mind. Casa Calvo, along with his retinue, watched with some reticence. Ceding Louisiana to the French two weeks earlier had dashed the hopes and prospects of so many of his men. To a man they must have wondered if the Americans could hold the diverse territory.3 Louisiana presented unique problems both to the new directors and its native citizens. How would the fledgling American nation fare in its first attempt at occupying a new territory? Would the inhabitants of Louisiana accept their largely Anglo-American, Protestant rulers? Would the transition occur smoothly or would a rebellion like the one that followed the Spanish takeover trump the hopes of the Jefferson administration? What few understood, in 1803, however, was that the Americans themselves disagreed on what Americanization should bring to Louisiana. Of all the problems confronting Louisiana and the United States, none seemed as vexing as the question of how to meld the conflicting and distinctive legal systems of an Anglo-American nation complete with constitutional guarantees and nearly three centuries of experience in commonlaw tradition and the civil-law heritage of Louisiana’s colonial experience.4 The civil-law tradition that emerged on the Continent in the Middle Ages and had become the bedrock of eighteenth-century legal development in France and Spain differed significantly from the Anglo-American common-law tradition of the United States. Common law tended to empower judges to become innovative lawmakers while civil law cast the judge as more of an interpreter of the laws. The two systems differed sub-

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stantially in many areas of law as well, especially in regard to inheritance, the rights of women, and criminal law. Would the native Louisianians and recent immigrants from Saint-Domingue distrust the common-law system? Would they rebel in fear of having an alien conspiracy steal their property with exotic laws and strange proceedings? Of all those present, these pressures weighed most heavily on William Claiborne. After a successful stint as governor of the Mississippi Territory, his cousin, President Jefferson, entrusted him with the office of governor of this unique experiment in American government. The task was an enormous one, one that few Americans would have wanted. Louisiana, to Americans, seemed an exotic place. Established by royal charter in 1712, the colony had a dismal history. Its leaders, especially, had not fared well. Antoine Crozat engaged in so much corruption that he had to be recalled and the colony reorganized. In 1768, the first Spanish governor, Antonio de Ullõa, tried to reform the colony’s legal system and provoked a revolt from the Creole citizens who believed that he intended to use new laws to dispossess them of their land. After Ullõa’s expulsion, the crown appointed Alejandro O’Reilly, a soldier of fortune, to the post. O’Reilly crushed the rebellion so successfully that he earned the nickname “Bloody O’Reilly.”5 Ullõa’s experience weighed most heavily on Claiborne. In December 1803, legal revolution was about the only thing one could reliably predict as a result of the Purchase. Americans and Creoles suspected a wave of American immigration. Many predicted a rough transition from colony to American province. Vast and rapid changes in the basic jurisdiction of Louisiana, however, were mandated by the Constitution. Could Claiborne and his American cohorts achieve this revolution peaceably, or would he become another Ullõa? Legal change, however, while predictable, represented only one of the many challenges facing Claiborne, the territory, and its inhabitants. At the national level, pundits pummeled Jefferson’s decision to purchase Louisiana on both constitutional and political grounds. Congress braced itself for a battle over the questions of incorporating the territory into the national domain. And in Louisiana, citizens, both Americaine and Ancien, pondered what the specter of “Americanization” might mean. These problems did not concern Edward Livingston. In fact, the present chaos suited his aims well. Louisiana was in for a hard time, and during hard times, talented men can rise to power. When Livingston arrived in Louisiana about a month after the cession, political, social, and legal



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problems abounded, leaving the citizens and the territory’s leaders on tenterhooks in anticipation of the chaotic times ahead. A brilliant lawyer and seasoned politician, Livingston was well positioned to influence the type of legal settlement that would develop in Louisiana. And he had a head full of ideas. As a young law student of the famous John Lansing, he became fascinated with Continental law and codification, ultimately concluding that it was vastly superior to the common-law system that defined the United States’ legal traditions. What Livingston admired about the civilian approach to law were the logical codes and the limited role of the jurists. In England and America, judges played a more innovative and independent part in the legal system, allowing them to wield a tremendous amount of arbitrary power and opening up the law to greater opportunities for human error.6 As a young congressman, Livingston attempted unsuccessfully to devise a criminal code for the United States in order to abolish the arbitrary and sanguinary aspects of the American system.7 Although he failed in that attempt, the drive to codify law, both public and private, would remain a lifelong ambition. In Louisiana, he would continue those efforts. He would also play the part of the lightning rod in the drive to preserve Louisiana’s civil-law heritage. That French law continues to inform Louisiana’s judicial system today is attributable, in part, to the efforts of Edward Livingston. But Livingston’s role as a beacon for the preservation of civil law stemmed only partially from his commitment to the civil law. Livingston was a politician, and his personal ambitions drove his efforts to preserve civil law in Louisiana.8 In other words, Livingston’s drive to promote the civil law maybe be viewed as part of the process of Americanization. Livingston’s attempts to champion civil law took place in two phases. Initial efforts in the territorial period set the stage for latter changes in the 1820s. The first and most formative phase of territorial organization offers one of the best forums from which to understand the complexity of Americanization. When he arrived in New Orleans in January 1804, Livingston immediately set about building a career in the city. In short order, he hung out his shingle and began courting the major financial leaders in the city as his friends. Soon Claiborne appointed him to a committee to organize a bank.9 Through the committee, Livingston became friendly with Evan Jones, who had been in New Orleans for a time before the Purchase and had made important connections among the Creole elite. Shortly after his arrival, Livingston became friendly with Daniel Clark, a Federalist,

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who was on his way toward becoming the largest landowner in Louisiana. Politically, Livingston was handicapped. His zeal as a congressmen, his unfortunate involvement in the embezzlement scandal, and Gallatin’s suspicion of Livingston as a Burr associate all conspired against an alliance between him and Governor Claiborne. The internecine intrigues and rivalries among these subtle politicians must be considered a part of a more complex view of Americanization. The Americans who migrated to Louisiana, for the most part, might have agreed that Louisiana should be “Americanized,” but they undoubtedly disagreed on what Americanization meant. And contrariness was the order of the day in national politics. Claiborne faced an enormous task in ordering the territory. Only in his late twenties, he was a bit young and inexperienced for the job. The Creole citizens of the city distrusted the Americans and looked down upon them as uncouth. Young Claiborne seemed a perfect example. He spoke neither French nor Spanish, he seemed indecisive, and, perhaps most importantly, they perceived him as a threat.10 The Creoles feared dispossession and disfranchisement in the months following the Purchase. Remembering Ullõa’s experience, Claiborne and Jefferson both grasped this important point. Although both wanted to soothe the fears of the ancienne population, the enormous task of stabilizing such a diverse territory promised trouble. Edward Livingston thrived on trouble. Painted as a political outsider immediately upon his arrival, he depended on controversy to provide a vehicle for him to rise in status. For Livingston, the quest for Americanization offered opportunities to resurrect his career through opposition politics. Through his efforts, Creole interests would then be brought to the forefront of the question of incorporation. Livingston set foot in the Crescent City as Congress debated the Breckinridge Bill to organize the territory. Before that act passed in March 1804, Claiborne ruled with the assistance of an appointed legislative council. Members of the Orleanian population distrusted the council. Even Americans found it troubling to defer to nonelected officials. Most of the dissatisfaction manifested itself in criticism of Claiborne. Hostilities, however, also arose between Creole and American groups at social events, balls, and parties. In one famous incident, fisticuffs broke out at a party when American soldiers refused to uncover as the band played the Marseillaise. When the orchestra played “Yankee Doodle,” the French turned their



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backs. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the incident, but it demonstrated the growing animosity between the two groups.11 Passage of the Breckinridge Act settled congressional disputes over whether or not Louisianians were entitled to full rights of citizenship. In Louisiana, however, no one rushed to rejoice. The Breckinridge Act split the Louisiana Purchase into two territories. “Lower Louisiana,” mainly the area that comprises present-day Louisiana, became the Territory of Orleans, while “Upper Louisiana,” the remainder of the Purchase, became the Louisiana Territory. The Territory of Orleans, of course, became the focus of immediate attention because of the importance of New Orleans and the lack of settlement in the Louisiana Territory.12 Livingston quickly emerged as a leader of the opposition to the Breckenridge Act that emerged owing to its inadvertent proscriptions against slavery.13 He and other Americans on the outs with the Republican administration forged a powerful coalition with suspicious Creole citizens. Evan Jones, Daniel Clark, and Livingston formed a formidable triumvirate that quickly reached out to upstanding Creoles and foreign French and Spanish citizens. A Bostonian named Tupper organized protests, and Livingston was enlisted to draft a memorial to Congress to protest Claiborne’s rule. Historians have too often viewed the memorial as an attempt to embarrass the governor, overlooking its deep economic motives. No one, however, ever accused Livingston of being discreet. The memorial contained the same kind of incendiary language that Livingston had used against the Federalists. Three Creoles — Pierre Derbigny, Jean Noël Destrehan, and Pierre Sauve — were dispatched to Washington to present the memorial in July 1804. Meantime, the Clark-Jones-Livingston junto whipped up popular opposition to Claiborne in the Crescent City. One of their more effective tactics was to encourage Creoles and friendly Americans to refuse appointments to the legislative council of this government that they so vehemently opposed. Claiborne’s most formidable task as governor was to fill the civil list. With Jones leading the way, appointment after appointment was turned down, further adding to the chaos that Claiborne had to mitigate. Exasperated, Claiborne wrote Secretary of State James Madison, his immediate superior, that “Mr. Ed. Livingston . . . cannot fail to make an Impression.”14 Thus, some of the most formidable “Americans” like Jones, Clark, and Livingston actually led the early efforts at Creolization. At wits’ end, Claiborne coddled and cajoled his appointments and fi-

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nally, by December 1804, succeeded in putting a council in place. Appointments to civic offices, especially in the outlying parishes, nagged him for many years. This problem was more than just a political one. To create an American-style government, Claiborne had to establish an enormous number of necessary institutions. Laussat complicated this task significantly when he suspended the Cabildo in December 1803 as he moved forward with his grandiose plans to reorganize the territory even though his instructions made them meaningless. Claiborne inherited a territory bereft of laws and government. He also had an especially weak pool of talent for recruitment. Livingston’s talents could have greatly assisted the governor, but his estrangement from the party prevented him from joining the political establishment. One must question, however, Livingston’s forceful opposition. The only explanation is that he saw opposition politics as the swiftest and surest route to success. In the arena of the law, however, Livingston was destined to rise with or without Claiborne’s help. His legal expertise also ensured that he, at times, would be pulled into service for his adopted city. The Clark-Jones-Livingston junto provides further evidence that there was no homogeneous movement for Americanization. Americans in New Orleans who delved into politics were men schooled in the factional nature of early America. They thrived on controversy. Livingston, Clark, and Jones provide excellent examples of the “diversity” that informed the “Americanization” of Louisiana. Despite its perceived shortcomings, the Breckinridge Act aimed to fill the legal and institutional void left by Laussat’s suspension of the Cabildo. On the institutional front, it provided for the creation of a judicial system. The act created three courts: the Court of Common Pleas, a Governor’s Court, and the Superior Court for the Territory of Orleans. The Court of Common Pleas was just that, a court of first instance for petty civil cases. Essentially, it was New Orleans’ version of the New York Mayor’s Court that Livingston had served on before he came to the Crescent City.15 The Governor’s Court heard original and appellate cases and presided over criminal trials. At the high appellate level, the Superior Court for the Territory of Orleans had original and appellate jurisdiction. As an appellate court, it was the tribunal of last resort. These courts were clearly based on American models. Claiborne had a devil of a time filling positions on the Superior Court. One of his original appointees, Ephraim Kirby of Connecticut, like Livingston, a strong proponent of codification, died en route to New Orleans.



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Peter S. DuPonceau of Pennsylvania, one of the period’s most brilliant legal minds, declined his appointment, preferring to remain in Philadelphia. As a result, John B. Prevost ended up serving alone on the court for two years before additional appointments were accepted in 1806.16 The dearth of talent and qualified men in New Orleans forced Claiborne to deal with his enemies. Generally, Livingston’s forays into public realms centered on his role as a member of the bar of the Superior Court, not as Claiborne’s ally. Even though Livingston made this task a difficult one, Livingston himself could not ignore the call to service from time to time. Prevost had a difficult time pulling the Superior Court together. Three problems nagged at Prevost. The inability of the governor to fill judicial positions left him isolated, overworked, and dramatically underpaid. His two-thousand-dollar salary barely covered his board and entertainment expenses. The court lacked rules and procedures, so hearings tended to be disorderly and dysfunctional. Finally, the confluence of three legal systems — French, Spanish, and Anglo-American — required a Herculean level of expertise, something Prevost possessed but that few others in the territory, save maybe Livingston and Louis Moreau Lislet, could boast. Livingston played a part in addressing all three problems. At times, this put him at odds with Claiborne, a fact that seemed to delight Livingston all the more.17 His activities in territorial Louisiana contributed to the hybridization of the legal system. When one judges Louisiana’s legal system against other state jurisdictions, it does have its unique elements; however, hybridization is a part of all early American jurisdictions, especially those in the Southwest. For two years, Prevost sat alone on the bench. His labors required superhuman effort. He worked earnestly and exhibited an impressive level of professionalism, but by the end of 1805, he was exhausted. He was also broke. By 1805, the debts were mounting. Estimates suggest that by 1806 he owed his creditors $17,500. The territory’s lawyers respected Prevost and, on several occasions, lobbied federal officials for relief. Livingston signed a petition along with other members of the bar in 1805. His close associate James Brown went so far as to write to Jefferson and to Secretary of State Samuel Smith for assistance.18 The territorial legislature tried to resolve the basic problems of practice and procedure with the Practice Act of 1805. Although the act had a broad range and addressed many of the questions confronting the territory’s lawyers, it did not provide a consistent set of rules and procedures to ensure that the court would function effectively.19

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The most vexing problem Prevost faced stemmed from Laussat’s suspension of the Cabildo and all of the Spanish laws in force. Prevost, then, inherited a judicial system that had no formal law or legal institutions. In any other region of the United States, one might have celebrated the opportunity to start from scratch, but Louisiana — with its jumble of civilian heritage and a diverse, and at times hostile, foreign population — required the judge to straddle the line between the three legal systems. To make the situation more complicated, Jefferson had instructed Claiborne to install the common law as the core of Louisiana’s judicial system. The Constitution also required a common-law approach to ensure its guarantees of the right to trial by jury, habeas corpus, and presumption of innocence, none of which had any part in the civilian system. Many of the cases begged for Spanish solutions, especially those still pending in the Spanish courts at the time of the retrocession. In lawyers’ pleadings, many cases sought resolution with English, Spanish, French, and American remedies. Prevost had to wade across these stormy seas every time he rendered a decision. The reliance on Americans and recent migrants to Louisiana as lawyers and judges complicated this already dreadful situation. Jefferson’s charge to Claiborne to mingle the two systems along with Claiborne’s own caution, and perhaps, indecisiveness, led to the retention of civilian customs. The necessity of importing American constitutional guarantees, when combined with the reliance on new American lawyers and judges, however, ensured that the judicial system would evolve as a mixture of AngloAmerican and continental conventions. Again, “Americans” played a part of this hybridization called “Americanization.” Livingston used the innate fear of legal innovation — so much a part of the native population’s worldview — to cozy up to Creole leaders and to rain criticism down on Claiborne. The primary problem of these conflicting legal traditions centered on two basic issues. Would the new judicial system respect the property rights of the native populace? What would Louisiana law actually entail? Historians and legal scholars have often confused this clash of legal traditions as a battle between the common law and the civil law. Nothing could be further from the truth. The very creation of an American-style judicial system ensured that some sort of common law would dominate. The real question that faced Louisiana’s lawyers and judges is, What would Louisiana’s common law be? Would it rely on traditional French and Spanish civil law authorities (and there was a good deal of difference of opinion over which of these traditions should rule), or would the Anglo-American common law become the law of the land?20



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Simply put, the laws in force as compiled by the great efforts of James Brown and Louis Moreau Lislet in the Digest of 180821 and Lewis Kerr’s Exposition of the Criminal Laws of the Territory of Orleans22 created a mixed jurisdiction for the new territory. Meanwhile, the courts followed a distinctively American pattern. Not only would these tribunals function according to Anglo-American procedures, but also they achieved nothing short of a legal revolution. In pursuing their Cokean adherence to American judicial customs and procedures, Louisiana’s judges abandoned the civilian custom of jurisprudence constante in favor of a process that more closely resembled the Anglo-American doctrine of stare decisis. This meant that Louisiana’s judges would emerge as new, powerful agents of the new system — as lawmakers, a conception utterly alien to Continental legal systems. This legal revolution combined with Louisiana’s status as an uncertain frontier territory, low pay, and the inhospitable habits of the Creole population discouraged experienced lawyers and judges from accepting positions in the new territory. Nor were there many American jurists like Peter Duponceau of Pennsylvania — who declined an appointment to the Superior Court — skilled in both common law and civilian patterns of justice. Fewer Anglo-American lawyers had attained fluency in English, Spanish, and French. Judge John Prevost, who ultimately sat on the Superior Court, was one of the few attorneys on the continent to command such a combination of legal and language skills.23 These problems of jurisdiction, administration, and manpower revealed themselves in significant ways in the legal revolution of the territorial period. Confusion over the laws in force prompted the creation of the Digest and the Exposition. Twentieth-century legal scholars have only recent stopped squabbling about the nature of the Digest, the central argument being whether its origins lay in French or Spanish law, but an important secondary argument also raged over the question of whether or not the compilation assumed the authority of a code. In ordering Louisiana’s mixed jurisdiction, Claiborne, the legislature, and the territory’s lawyers and judges (mostly Anglo-Americans) were not so much engaging in a Creole-American conflict as they were exercising an American commitment to judicial traditions based on an equally American dependence on local custom and tradition and American judicial procedures. Thus, at the heart of the legal revolution of the Louisiana Purchase is Sir Edward Coke, the seventeenth-century Englishman who was also at the heart of the foundation of the American legal system.

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This point can be demonstrated by an analysis of a legal cause célèbre of the territorial period, the creation of the Digest of 1808. It must first be remembered that the call for both the Digest and the Exposition came at the same time. Although the drive for the compilation of the Digest was punctuated by the legal questions stirred up in the famous batture fight, it was equally influenced by the frustrations of the territorial courts and the legislature over the lack of a consistent redaction of the private laws in force. Historians have mistakenly explained this measure as a result of Creole agitation; hence the adoption of the Digest has been interpreted as a triumph of the civil law. It is important to note, however, that the architects of the controversy were Edward Livingston and James Brown, a New Yorker and a Kentuckian. But these points pale in significance to the fact that the legislature commissioned a compilation of the public laws of the territory at the same time that they called for the Digest. What these two authorities represent is a simple concern with finding reliable authorities. In other words, both works represent efforts to compile the laws in force, a necessary effort in a region dominated by a Cokean reliance on custom and practice. Both the Digest and the Exposition reveal the fact that the redactors of the two compilations strove to marry both the civilian traditions of colonial Louisiana and the Anglo-American heritage of its new sovereign into a consistent, fluid body of law. This approach mirrored Jefferson’s instructions to Claiborne to install the common law with caution and to allow the residents to retain the things near and dear to their interests. True, the Digest of 1808 melded Spanish and French authorities, such as the Siete Partidas, the Recopiaçion de las Indies, Justinian’s Institutes,24 and several early projets prepared for the Code Napoleon, but not the Napoleonic code itself; however, it also contained a healthy dose of English law citing the works of Sir William Blackstone and Sir Edward Coke.25 Livingston had been active in agitating for these codes, but his activism stemmed more from the need to have a logical and consistent body of law instead of the incomplete chaos inherited from the Laussat era. These efforts assured that in the process of Americanization, French, Spanish, and Roman traditions would be preserved in Louisiana. It is important to note that these efforts were spearheaded by Americans like Livingston, Clark, and Jones who were at odds with the Democratic-Republican establishment. Lewis Kerr’s Exposition centered on English and American criminal laws to the exclusion of other authorities. The exposition served as the



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source of criminal law in conjunction with James Workman’s Crimes Act of 1805.26 Like the Digest, the Exposition served more as a common-law reference book than a civilian code. It is interesting to note that Livingston was not directly involved with the compilation of the criminal laws even though his thoughts on the subject were well known and well defined. At the time the Exposition was written, Kerr, Claiborne’s distant relative, was one of the governor’s protégés and on the opposite side of the political fence from Livingston. The Burr controversy, however, would thrust both Livingston and Kerr into the same camp as their reputations were tainted by hints of complicity.27 These two compilations illustrate much about Louisiana’s early legal system. They document a genuine effort to find a compromise that would satisfy the competing interests in early Louisiana society. To Claiborne’s credit, he set ego aside in favor of national interests. Unlike Ullõa, he sought to serve the interest of the people instead of some personal sense of grandiosity. The legislature’s choice of Kerr, Workman, and Moreau Lislet reflects the factional divisions in territorial politics. Moreau Lislet, a Claiborne ally but a staunch supporter of maintaining civilian traditions, served shoulder to shoulder with Brown, one of Claiborne’s more vocal critics. Kerr, an early protégé of Claiborne’s, had already become estranged from the governor by the time of his appointment in 1806; still, he earned enough support among the legislative opposition to garner the appointment. Kerr’s appointment reveals much about the unformed nature of early territories. Although at odds with the governor, he was one of the few qualified Americans available to hold the post. For Livingston, even with Brown’s influence on the Digest, the compilations failed to create a viable code. In 1808, he stood in the vanguard of Americans who lobbied for codification. Over the next several decades, Livingston, and others like him — Jefferson, John Tyler, and countless lawyers on the frontier — raised their voices and gained following for the need to codify laws to revamp America’s common-law system. Nationwide, these men played an important part in transforming American law.28 In Louisiana, Livingston and like-minded lawyers like Pierre Derbigny were less successful.29 Nonetheless, Livingston agitated for codal revision tirelessly over the next several decades. These efforts forecast the American codification movement. Livingston’s agitation for codification allowed him to cultivate support within the Creole community and increased the tension between him and

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Claiborne. The legal maneuvering, however, paled in comparison to two great events of the territorial period that cast Claiborne and Livingston as archrivals — the Burr conspiracy and the famous batture controversy. Aaron Burr had been a thorn in Livingston’s side since 1804, when Burr named Livingston a “special friend” in the first, and lesser-known, of the Burr conspiracies, Burr’s attempt to inflate the office of president pro tempore of the Senate. Livingston denied any association, but, already on the outs with the Republicans over his audacious actions in the House of Representatives, he drew the ire of the Republican establishment, especially Albert Gallatin. In the second, more famous, Burr conspiracy, Livingston was again named as an ally to the fugitive vice president. Although Livingston would successfully defend himself against the charges, the taint of a possible association with Burr stayed with him for the rest of his life. In the short term, it destroyed any hopes of a political career in New Orleans and led to bitter feelings between Livingston and the governor. To make matters worse, the Burr conspiracy transformed New Orleans politics. Livingston’s ally Daniel Clark was ruined. Other Claiborne opponents like James Workman, Lewis Kerr, and John Watkins were destroyed. Livingston not only lost his American allies, but his cachet among the Creoles also disappeared. The murky aims of Burr and his associates may never be understood in their entirety. What is clear from the events is that Americans both in and out of Louisiana were still debating just what kind of country America should become. Again, the Burr conspiracy reveals the contentious nature and lack of attachment in early America. Down and out, Livingston resorted to legal means to resurrect at least his fortunes if not his fate. In 1807, he filed a lawsuit on behalf of John Gravier that would in one form or another continue until the end of Livingston’s life. The judgment of the Superior Court for the Territory of Orleans in John Gravier v. The Mayor, Alderman, and Inhabitants of the City of New Orleans (1807) gave Gravier the right to use alluvial batture lands along the Mississippi for private purposes. As Gravier’s attorney, Livingston received a 33 percent share of the land and set to put it to his own commercial uses. By improving the land, Livingston cut off public access to the batture that native New Orleanians regarded as an ancient right. An angry mob gathered on the batture on 15 September 1807. Unwittingly, Livingston’s actions put Claiborne in a difficult bind. He could disband the mob and side with his bitter enemy, or he could make a popular decision and yield to mob rule. He chose instead to kick the



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problem up to his superiors, promising both the crowd and Livingston that President Jefferson would resolve the situation. On 25 January 1808, Jefferson ordered United States Marshall Breton D’Orgenois to seize the batture in the name of the United States government. Jefferson’s actions precipitated one of the longest and most complicated legal actions of the nineteenth century. Pamphlets, summonses, and subpoenas flew throughout the territory. At one point, Livingston even sued Jefferson in federal court. Throughout the controversy, Livingston advocated civilian principles of property law to support his claim, while the Americans favored common-law solutions. The complex web of suits that followed the initial suit occupied American courts until the case was settled in Livingston’s favor in 1823. As Livingston championed civilian solutions, he regained some support among the population ancienne. While the batture controversy waged, Livingston’s stock continued a topsy-turvy run in Louisiana. The War of 1812 brought a brief revival to his stature as he became Andrew Jackson’s aide-de-camp. When Jefferson placed the city under martial law after the Battle of New Orleans and jailed popular local leaders, he ran afoul of local authorities that sought to punish him for contempt of court. Livingston represented the general and once again drew the ire of the local populace. Livingston’s miraculous resurrection and his swift fall during the War of 1812 could serve as a microcosm of his life. As one used to ups and downs, Livingston came through the affair determined to continue his quest to enjoy that most precious American freedom — the ability to grow and prosper. Upon settling the batture case, and reestablishing the law practice he had before the war, he began to realize a good living. Like most city dwellers of his age, he looked to turn his profits into a gentrified lifestyle. After all, the real promise of the Louisiana Purchase lay in real estate, not the professions. Plaquemines Parish, a rich preserve to the south of New Orleans, was one of the fastest-growing agricultural regions in the state. The rural county boasted a navigable coastline with abundant seafood and waterfowl. The fertile lands of Plaquemines would prove a gold mine for sugar cane planters in the nineteenth century, and Plaquemines also would eventually grow into one of America’s choice citrus-producing areas. Livingston purchased several large parcels of land in Plaquemines, and like his ancestor Robert Livingston before him, established yet another Livingston Manor in America. Livingston moved his residence to Plaquemines and assumed the role of nouveaux grandee. In nineteenth-century

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rural America, this title came with power — power over tenants and slaves, power over one’s neighbors, and, in America’s democratic system, the power of politics. The first chance for Livingston to exercise his new political power came in the gubernatorial election of 1816. In many ways, this particular election offered men like Livingston, who had been on the outside of Claiborne’s political circle, a chance to emerge as powerbrokers like none other in the history of either the territory or the state. Governor Claiborne, who parlayed his territorial post into that of the first state governor, would have to take a sideline seat for this campaign. A constitutional provision limited him to one term in the statehouse. Moreover, his battles with Jackson during the war limited his popularity. Despite the outcries over martial law and the whole Hall-Dick incident, Louisianians quickly began to see Jackson as their hero. As Claiborne readied himself to run for senator, a post he actually won but never held, owing to his untimely death on 23 November 1817, Louisianians pondered the momentous step of electing a new governor. The gubernatorial election of 1816 signaled a trend began that would ring true in Louisiana ever after, the rivalry between New Orleans’ interests and those of the central and northern portions of the state. Early evidence of the trend might be traced to the constitutional convention of 1812, which reflected urban versus rural divisions more than the expected CreoleAmerican conflict. This urban versus rural dynamic is a common theme in early America. In 1816, the New Orleans bloc that included southeastern parishes like Plaquemines backed Jacques Villere while the opposing group supported Joshua Lewis. At that time, New Orleans’ power and size still casued it to dominate the state, and Villere won. By the late nineteenth century, however, the tables would turn. For the governor’s office, Livingston backed Villere, giving him an edge with the new governor that he had not enjoyed since his early days in New York. Louisianians also elected state legislators in 1816. Livingston, who had run unsuccessfully for the constitutional convention in 1812, once again threw his hat into the ring. In a close race, H. Forstall pummeled Livingston by questioning his integrity on the batture question and won the race gaining forty-eight votes to Livingston’s forty-four. That Livingston lost the election by such a close margin in spite of his opponent’s effective use of the batture scandal gave Livingston hope, and he began to ponder future races.



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Among the overflowing fields and canals of Plaquemines in the years between 1816 and 1818, Livingston began dreaming of another stint in Congress. Washington, D.C., had quickly become the place to be in America. The old rivalry between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans was dying out. News of the Hartford Convention of 1814, a supposedly secret affair, had leaked out, and Americans realized the dangerous aims of the New England Federalists who had plotted secession. That prominent Federalists would even consider such seditious measures in a time of war took whatever starch was left out of the old party. With James Monroe in the White House, American politics had not exactly turned into a one-party system; rather, the shards of Federalism drifted along with new frontier interests and a realignment that would ultimately divide and do away even with the Democratic-Republican Party. Accompanying this period of political transition and realignment was the sobering realization that American faced utter destruction in the late war and that the Treaty of Ghent represented sort of a second chance to regroup and redefine the national interest. War had convinced Americans, at least for a while, to put away their petty differences and foreign ambitions and concentrate on building up the vast domain of the Louisiana Purchase and the Old Northwest. With these developments exploding at every turn, Americans realized the inherent dynamism in their society. This fact could not escape the attention of someone as astute as Edward Livingston; so with the nation all abuzz with excitement, Livingston began to think about returning to the national arena. Livingston tested the political waters in the 1818 congressional election. It was a crowded campaign. Four candidates ran from the tiny district. Thomas Butler emerged as the leading candidate. Josiah Johnston contended. Also competing was the inimitable Fulwar Skipwith, an émigré from West Florida via Virginia, where he hailed from a prominent backcountry family. Livingston’s chances were slim, but with so many candidates in the race, he felt that he had an outside chance to capture a majority. Butler won, but Livingston, in spite of all the unpleasant baggage that he carried, finished a surprising second. In 1820, he again vied for a seat in the state legislature. This time, he won. The Louisiana legislature hardly represented a political plum, but for Livingston, after years of frustration, the seat in the assembly meant a second chance at political life. Emboldened by his recent success, he campaigned for Speaker of the House when the legislature convened, but

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his reputation proved a handicap. Livingston received only two votes for the job. His constituents might have found him palatable enough to send to New Orleans, but his fellow legislators had long memories. The disappointment in the Speaker’s race was sobering. It demonstrated to Livingston that, despite years of trying to build a Creole, or outsider, voting bloc, his efforts had failed. Election to the statehouse, however, revealed a glimmer of hope. If he could build a coalition in the legislature, the phoenix might yet rise again. In addition to several appointments, Livingston gained the prestigious chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, a crucial spot in any elected body as it opened the door to its members, especially the chair, to build patronage. When Livingston’s appointment was announced, however, a controversy erupted. Another member of the legislature contended that Livingston was not eligible for the post because he lacked proper credentials. The whole affair smacked of payback. The delegate who raised the technical objection was James Wilkinson. Wilkinson’s challenge proved only a blip on the screen as the Committee on Elections efficiently investigated the matter and verified Livingston’s eligibility. Once rekindled, however, the smoldering hostilities from the Burr controversy could not be extinguished so easily. Next day, Wilkinson memorialized the legislature contending that Livingston had not resided in his district in the previous year, and therefore could not constitutionally occupy the seat. Joshua Lewis, a judge on the federal district court, came to Livingston’s defense. He testified that he had known Livingston for a long time and often had to continue cases in which Livingston was involved because Livingston was at home in Plaquemines. Like nearly every other wealthy southerner of his day, Livingston often divided his time between his country estate and the city. The practice was so common that nearly every other legislator followed the same pattern. Again the election committee heard the testimony, verified Livingston’s ownership of the plantation, and reviewed a number of witnesses who testified that they had enjoyed Livingston’s hospitality at the house. After considering the evidence, the committee cleared Livingston. Once in the house, he had a chance to begin again as a politician. And the Louisiana statehouse was rife with opportunities. Perhaps the greatest of all the opportunities afforded to him by his election was the chance to smooth over things with old rivals and gain new friends. As fate would have it, most of the other members of the assembly were men that Livingston had encountered many times in New Orleans. Rival lawyers like



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Louis Moreau Lislet along with friends John Grymes and Henry Carleton had also won election to legislature. During his first term, a Livingston agenda quickly arose. He introduced resolution after resolution to reform Louisiana’s legal system. Livingston also enjoyed the political patronage of Governor Villere, whom he had helped to elect. On 21 November, the governor offered Livingston a gift beyond his wildest dreams. As was customary at the beginning of the session, the governor addressed a joint meeting of both houses. In his speech, Villere lamented problems with the state’s criminal laws. Seizing the opportunity after the address, Livingston proposed a committee to draft a response to the governor’s speech. Accordingly, he received appointment as chair of a committee to revise the state’s penal law. Finally, after nearly thirty years of pushing for penal reform, Edward Livingston found himself in a position to bring about real reform. Penal law had fascinated Livingston for his entire adult life. As a law student with John Lansing, he pored over the ancient codes and developed a disposition for civil law and codification. By the time he gained admission to the bar, he had developed not only a fondness for the codes, but also a certain dislike for the heavy-handed role of the judge in AngloAmerican legal practice. As a practitioner in New York, his admiration for civil remedies grew as the law of that state drew much from the Dutch civilian tradition. Years of practice in New York and Louisiana, and his own outlook as a judge on the Mayor’s Court, only reinforced his disdain for the common law. The wry comments he often made about his own decisions in the court reports he published in New York provide clear evidence of his thoughts on the subject. Livingston’s briefs before the Superior Court and the Territory of Orleans revealed his frustration with the bastardized combination of civil law and common law in Louisiana. His arguments, through their complexity and contradictions, sought not only to win cases for his clients, but also to editorialize about the shoddy nature of Louisiana’s common-law system. Now he had a chance to wield the power of the state legislature to bring about change. Joining him on the committee were John Randolph Grymes and Louis Moreau Lislet. Grymes was a close associate. Moreau Lislet was an old adversary, but one who admired Livingston’s legal acumen. Livingston respected both men as well. The three men also received appointments to another committee to deal with problems pertaining to civil law. Livingston’s committees acted swiftly on civil law reforms, reserving

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the criminal matters that required more careful planning and consideration for later. In tackling the civil issues, however, the three opened a Pandora’s box that would lead to what was perhaps the most successful effort at codification in the nineteenth century. Initially, the committee focused its efforts on correcting pressing problems. The first issue the group tackled dealt with matters of divorce. Louisiana, like most American dominions, dealt with divorce in an antiquated fashion by following the colonial practice of requiring the couple to seek legislative approval. In colonial days, especially in Puritan New England, this device was employed to make divorce a difficult, if not impossible, practice. But the Enlightenment loosened ideas about the need to legislate morality. By the early nineteenth century, the number of divorce petitions had grown to such an extent as to disrupt legislative proceedings. Most Americans also began to see the practice as a matter for the courts, not the legislature. Livingston introduced a bill to grant the power to authorize divorces to the inferior courts. Still, in Roman Catholic Louisiana, divorce represented an evil specter for the many members of that faith. Livingston’s reform failed. Livingston was unsuccessful in pushing for another major reform — to give the Supreme Court of Louisiana authority to hear criminal appeals. The 1812 constitution barred the practice; indeed, the court had no criminal jurisdiction except on matters brought before it by a writ of error. His bill failed, mainly because Louisianians saw the American approach to criminal law to be so much more progressive than the laws of France or Spain that they saw no need to enhance the rights of criminals. The rest of the act dealt with more mundane, but important matters of court procedure. In the 1820s, the state Supreme Court judges rode circuit, holding monthly sessions in New Orleans from November to August and convening in the western hamlet of Opelousas in September and October. The judges sometimes had trouble sometimes juggling their busy schedules and fulfilling their travel obligations. Frequently, the court failed to reach a quorum, which created a procedural problem. If no judge was around on the day appointed for a session, then what would happen? Livingston’s act allowed the sheriff or a deputy to adjourn the court until a judge arrived. Finally, the act clarified rules regarding the appellee’s rights to the trial record, the confusing rules governing cross appeals, and providing an opportunity for rehearings. The act was a necessary one given the somewhat unruly nature of the early court’s operations. Livingston, Grymes, and



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Moreau Lislet all had vast experience on the court, and their expertise and familiarity with the court’s problems were reflected in the act. Jacques Villere left office in 1820 and was replaced by Thomas Robertson. Robertson’s inaugural address also dealt with the sorry state of the criminal laws and the deplorable condition of the jails. Again, remarkably, Edward Livingston and the governor of Louisiana found themselves in agreement. The prison system represented the most pressing area of reform. Juvenile offenders lived in the same cells as murderers and rapists. Debt prisoners, a sorry comment on American freedom as well, also ended up in the general prison population. Governor Robertson condemned these deplorable conditions, worrying not only about the safety of the debt prisoners and children, but also pointing out that incarcerating juveniles along with seasoned criminals only cemented their commitment to a life of crime. These were progressive views. Livingston shared them all, although there is no evidence that he conferred with the governor about the address. Robertson’s speech gave a remarkable endorsement to Livingston’s committee, causing him and Grymes and Moreau Lislet to pursue their work with great enthusiasm. The jails got their immediate attention, and they drafted a bill to build a state penitentiary. After two attempts, Livingston succeeded in engineering its passage. The Penitentiary Bill whetted Livingston’s appetite to embark on taming the most important problem with the state’s penal system, revising the criminal law. Ever since his days in Congress, Livingston had spoken out against the evils of the American way of dealing with crime and punishment. American law, inspired by English practices born in the Middle Ages, focused on bloodthirsty acts of retaliation for criminals. Hard labor, solitary confinement, and capital punishment all seemed to Livingston to have no redeeming social value. Criminals were people, too. They could learn, they could improve, and they could be rehabilitated. These views reflected new, progressive ideas born of Enlightenment rationalism and the idea that man could somehow learn to control or at least harness all the forces of nature, even the evil ones. Livingston, of course, was not alone in these beliefs. Across the Western world, nineteenth-century intellectuals were shaping such thoughts into what would become, by midcentury, a forceful movement toward liberalism. His ideas on the law complemented this new trend that held that men could legislate positive change in society if they used the democratic apparatus to its best extent. This new “legislative positivism” undergirded

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the drive to write comprehensive law codes that swept across Europe and the Americas. Toward that end, Livingston drafted a bill to have the assembly authorize a committee to revise Louisiana’s penal code. Some have argued that Livingston’s idea was hatched on its own, but that was hardly the case. Since his days with Lansing, he had criticized the bloody nature of American law. Other friends and acquaintances shared his feelings. In Lansing’s parlor, Livingston discussed law with such luminaries as James Kent. As a junior member of the New York congressional delegation, he proposed a new penal code for the United States, which though unsuccessful, led him to debate the matter with prominent American lawmakers. Thomas Jefferson and other Democratic-Republicans of the early national period shared similar views as Livingston on the matter of penal reform. So the notion that the whole scheme was his own is wrong. To bring the code to fruition, however, demanded legislative action. And Livingston was indeed the sole force behind the movement in 1821. Capitalizing on an initiative to revise the civil code two years earlier, Livingston drafted a bill to appoint a committee to rework the penal laws. The matter passed, and the legislators elected Livingston to chair the committee. Wasting no time, Livingston presented a bill the following day to segregate first offenders from lifetime criminals. Writing a full criminal code, however, eventually took more time, and Livingston plodded along with that task at a slower pace. One of the many things that slowed him down was the work of the legislature on revising the civil laws, a task that seemed much more pressing at the time. Yet there was progress on the criminal front. In March 1822, Livingston succeeded in getting the legislature to approve a plan for the erection of the new penitentiary based on a model recently employed in South Carolina. Livingston had studied the various methods of housing criminals and, with some cost-effective modifications, got his fellow lawmakers to approve his plan. Success inspired him, and his work on the full-scale code continued in spite of his busy schedule. By the end of the 1822 term, however, he could only present the House with a progress report on the criminal code. Nonetheless, the legislators were impressed and passed a resolution authorizing him to continue his work. In these years as a legislator, Livingston exhibited a maturity that he lacked in his early years in Congress. Throughout his tenure, there is no record whatsoever of an incendiary speech or back-room dealing. Instead, Livingston worked cooperatively with other committee members and,



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generally, with the exception of Wilkinson’s attempt to unseat him, ignored partisan infighting. Livingston’s efforts to draft a penal code reveal how Americans of the age grappled with the conception of Americanization. Enlightened views of rehabilitation, abolition of the death penalty, and belief that such codification should have a positive effect on society demonstrate how American intellectuals like Livingston had already begun to embrace nineteenth-century ideals of liberalism and legislative positivism. The fact that Louisianians rejected his efforts illustrates how divided Americans could still be on fundamental questions of identity. One of the reasons that things went so smoothly during these terms emanated from national political trends. The fiery competition between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans had cooled down during the Era of Good Feelings. Indeed, the old parties had nearly fallen apart. President James Monroe described himself as a Democratic-Republican, but he would be the last president to do so. Federalists had all but disappeared after the Hartford Convention. These developments did not signal an end to partisanship, but instead they outlined a need for realignment. In the midst of all this change, however, political disputes still thrived. By 1820, however, those disputes seemed to be more sectional than partisan. The Industrial Revolution had boomed in the Northeast and the developing American West. Indeed, the lands of the Louisiana Purchase had much to do with the rapid expansion and political redefinition. Settlers poured into the new territories. Soon what was once the wilderness blossomed. Towns and villages, each creating new constituencies and alliances and demanding national attention, dotted the forests and hills. Missouri petitioned for statehood in 1819. The resulting discussion destroyed whatever “good feelings” the previous decade had produced. For thirty years, Americans had managed to avoid a significant national discussion of the slavery question. The Constitutional Convention produced compromise that lasted longer than most would have supposed. By prohibiting Congress from restricting the slave trade for twenty years, the delegates ensured that southerners would not be deprived of their rights to accumulate laborers. After the 1808 prohibition of the foreign slave trade, a practice that even slave owners denounced as brutal and inhumane, there had been little opportunity for discussion of the volatile issue. War from 1812 to 1815 dominated national politics, and after the war, Americans occupied themselves with their vast building programs. Sectional divisions, especially over the question of slavery, began to intensify on the national level. In Louisiana, these political disputes tended to rage between New

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Orleans and the outlying communities. Cultural differences also divided Louisianians along similar lines as the Catholic, and still prominently Creole, southeastern section of the state provided more resistance to the Americanization that seemed to flow out of the central, northern, and western regions that were also heavily Protestant and almost fully Americanized. The conflict erupted from many sources. Historians have for too long oversimplified the matter as a Creole versus American battle. But the reasons were much more complicated. Louisiana experienced growing pains like no other part of the world in the 1820s. With the war and the prospect of incorporation behind them, the citizens old and new set about the task of expanding and developing the frontier. New Orleans boomed. In many way, however, it still resembled a frontier town: there were not many ways in or out, and none of them were reliable; sailors, thieves, and wastrels inhabited the taverns and dockside hovels, infesting the city with crime and lawlessness. And, throughout the city, merchants, planters, and politicians schemed endlessly to capitalize on the opportunities that rapid expansion offered. The city endured many physical changes as well. Residences and businesses swelled the Vieux Carre until it nearly burst at the seams. New dwellings popped up on the eastern side in the Faubourg Marigny, named for the legislator and entrepreneur who had the largest plantation in the area. Upriver from the city, engineers and workman cut new streets in the Faubourg Ste. Mary, extending commerce and settlement northward toward the rich plantations along the river toward Baton Rouge. So much of this expansion spoke to the flood of Anglo-American immigrants into the city. In New Orleans, their numbers soon dominated both the merchant community and the electorate. Conflict of the sort that marked the territorial period flared up now and again; however, by and large the populace moved toward cultural, political, and economic accommodation. Although the Creoles generally regard the Americans as raw, uncultured, and grasping, the prosperity of the new citizens could not be ignored. Many a Creole father brokered a strategic marriage. Americans, who often saw the Creoles as frivolous and lazy, also realized, much as Edward Livingston had in the early nineteenth century, the many conveniences of a Creole union. In time, alliances began to form and New Orleans molded itself into an Americanized community that sported a great deal of Continental refinement. Money was the glue that bound the diverse community of New Orleans



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together. Creoles and Americans realized the advantages of prosperity. And the city, which was rapidly growing into one of the largest ports in the United States, offered boundless opportunities for the ambitious, shrewd, and lucky to acquire that wealth. All this activity bred an urban identity. Although many of the city’s most distinguished powerbrokers (Livingston and Marigny, for example) resided on outlying plantations, New Orleans provided the lifeline to a lucrative fortune. The city drew its denizens into a common culture. Men who dealt and schemed to enhance their wealth needed the city as a heart for conspiracy and connivance. Lawyers buzzed about the town hovering over every opportunity. In the hinterland, growth boomed as well. Cotton planters swept over central and northern Louisiana like a plague of rich locusts. River plantations popped up all the way north of Baton Rouge, opening the door for the eventual development of the northern part of the state near Shreveport. West toward Texas, towns like Opelousas flourished along the byways and crossroads that would tie the developing regions together. To the south, a healthy Acadian community thrived on hunting, trapping, and fishing, slowly but surely adapting to the abundant prospects of rice and sugar cane. These regions, more Protestant than Catholic New Orleans and dominated more by American slave owners than by Creole gentlemen and American entrepreneurs, often found themselves at odds with the New Orleans faction. Nonetheless, rural Louisiana provided the commodities that enriched New Orleans, tying the two diverse communities into a common and complementary economy. This was the kind of environment in which Edward Livingston thrived. As in the old days when he practiced law in New York, Livingston became an active and important member of the community. In the legislature, he sometimes wielded great power sitting on a vast array of committees. At other times, when the New Orleans junto was fractured or overthrown by country interests, he worked on the penal code. Livingston’s experiences in the fractious yet somehow functional statehouse allowed him to rise once again as a force in Louisiana. Working with fellow delegates on the codes and on committees of the assembly allowed him to reinvent himself yet again. Instead of the contentious, sometimes obnoxious fellow that Louisianians of all stripes seemed to detest at one time or another during the territorial period, this Livingston seemed more the elder statesman and legal scholar. Many still remembered the batture controversy, but few cared about his role in Old Hickory’s martial

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law debacle. If the batture controversy weighed against Livingston, other powerful men had committed transgressions that limited their careers as well. By the 1820s, the playing field created by the Louisiana Purchase, one that Livingston had capitalized on to thrust him into the limelight by virtue of his expertise and natural ability, had leveled off for Edward Livingston. His own hard work and discretion in the statehouse now were his only tools. With a new and better political climate and governors who actually supported him at times, Livingston found himself in a position unprecedented during his time in Louisiana. Finally, he was on the inside of state politics. He was determined to stay there. His behavior and contributions to Americanization were typically American. As he plugged away at the penal code and advised his fellow legislatures on the revision and translation of the civil code, Livingston reflected on his new role in state affairs and saw an opportunity to rise further. If he could cast off the suspicion and animosity that plagued him in the territorial period and become an effective state legislature, then he could vie for national office. In 1820, he tested the waters, running a competitive though unsuccessful campaign for the United States House of Representatives. Although he lost to Josiah Johnston, he received encouraging support. While he served his second term in the state legislature, a new congressional district opened up in 1822. Using his new-found reputation as a legislator and with the help of Governor Robertson and allies like Grymes and Moreau Lislet, Livingston won the race and gained the seat for the new district. In December 1823 at the age of fifty-nine, twenty-one years after ending his first experience as a United States congressman, Edward Livingston left Louisiana for Washington, D.C. From Washington, Livingston continued to advocate codification. These efforts not only ensured Livingston a place as one of the world’s great codifiers, they also endeared him to the Creole population of Louisiana. In the wake of the Louisiana Purchase and the vast infusion of Americans into their ranks, the Creoles, led by men like Livingston, gravitated toward their French heritage and more consciously attached themselves to a French identity. Edward Livingston’s greatest contributions to world history no doubt came from his efforts as a codifier, but for America and France, he should probably be best remembered as the catalyst for the emergence of a stronger French identity in Louisiana. But as the firebrand of that identity, Livingston served less as a French sympathizer and more as an American dedicated to the positive development of his country. His example should



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serve to temper the one-dimensional view of Americans and Americanization that dominate the historiography of early Louisiana and to demand an expansion of our consideration of that important group and their part in the history of the Louisiana Purchase. One can only wonder what Livingston thought of France in 1833–35, when he served as the United States’ minister to the country that so influenced his thinking about codification. By the 1830s, Napoleon’s legal reforms were in full swing. Livingston’s, on the other hand, were under attack by Louisiana’s judges. He would never really see the effects of his penal code on the Western world as its significance did not reach fruition until midcentury. As legal reform continued apace in America with the growth of the codification movement in the 1830s — a movement that echoed the forward-looking ideas of American thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, Governor John Tyler of Virginia, and Edward Livingston — the American legal tradition began to emerge. It is hard to imagine a definition of Americanization that ignores the subtle example of the combative Edward Livingston.

Notes 1. The most comprehensive analysis of this trend can be found in Lewis William Newton, The Americanization of French Louisiana: A Study of the Process of Adjustment between the French and Anglo-American Populations of Louisiana, 1803–1860 (New York: Arno Press, 1980). 2. For an analysis of Livingston’s career in New York, see Mark F. Fernandez, “Edward Livingston and the Problem of Law,” in The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation, ed. Peter J. Kastor (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2002), 93–94. 3. The complexities of the legal transition are discussed in numerous sources. The following works represent the most recent and more definitive analyses: George Dargo, Jefferson’s Louisiana: Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); Richard H. Kilbourne Jr., A History of the Louisiana Civil Code, 1803–1839 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Mark F. Fernandez, From Chaos to Continuity: The Evolution of Louisiana’s Judicial System, 1712–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001). 4. The differences between common-law and civil-law systems are complex. In the American tradition, common law gave judges a more innovative and powerful position than in the civil-law tradition. The concept of “judge-made law” and the more flexible approach to using precedent to decide cases and “make law” greatly inflated the role of the judge (Albert Tate, “The Role of the Judge in Mixed Jurisdictions,” in The Role of Judicial Decisions and Doctrine in Civil Law

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and in Mixed Jurisdictions, ed. Joseph Dainow [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974], 1–38). Technically, Louisiana judges were supposed to restrict their deliberations to “fact pleading” and not engage in the custom of stare decisis that gave Anglo-American judges their innovative power; however, the lack of an authoritative code and the informal, haphazard nature of the nineteenth-century judicial system in Louisiana led to a sort of “Louisiana” version of the practice. 5. John Preston Moore, “Antonio Ullõa: A Profile of the First Spanish Governor of Louisiana,” Louisiana History 8 (Summer 1967): 189–219; John Preston Moore, Revolt in Louisiana: The Spanish Occupation, 1766–1770 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 42–130, 190–217; Fernandez, From Chaos to Continuity, 1–15. 6. Livingston found the role of common-law judges to be abhorrent (see “Notes on the Introduction of Common Law,” n.d., in Papers of Edward Livingston, Special Collections, Box 76, Firestone Library, Princeton University; hereafter cited as “ELP”). 7. William B. Hatcher, Edward Livingston: Jeffersonian Republican and Jacksonian Democrat (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1940), 37; Edward Livingston, “Autobiography” n.d., Box 80, ELP. 8. Hatcher, Edward Livingston, 35–37. 9. “Petition to William C. C. Claiborne for the Establishment of an Bank of New Orleans,” n.d., Box 62, ELP. 10. Historians have disagreed vehemently about Claiborne’s effectiveness and his impact on Louisiana. For contrasting views, see Joseph G. Tregle Jr., Louisiana in the Age of Jackson: A Clash of Cultures and Personalities (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999); and Joseph T. Hatfield, William Claiborne: Jeffersonian Republican and Jacksonian Democrat (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1976). 11. Good accounts of this tension may be found in Samuel Groner, “Louisiana Law: Its Development in the First Quarter Century of American Rule,” Louisiana Law Review 8 (January 1948): 350–82; Elizabeth Gaspar Brown, “Legal Systems in Conflict: Orleans Territory, 1804–1812,” American Journal of Legal History 1 (1957): 35–75; Brown, “Law and Government in the Louisiana Purchase: 1803–1804),” Wayne Law Review 2 (1956): 169–89. 12. “An Act Erecting Louisiana into Two Territories, and Providing for the Temporary Government Thereof, March 26, 1804, in United States Congress, Statutes at Large, comp. Richard Peters (Boston: 1845), 322. 13. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 contained a provision prohibiting slavery. 14. Claiborne to Madison, 8 October 1804, in The Official Letterbooks of W.C.C. Claiborne, 1801–1806, ed. Dunbar S. Rowland (Jackson, Miss.: State Department of Archives and History, 1917), 2:349. 15. Livingston’s disdain for sloppy common-law practices and lazy lawyers can be seen in his introduction to his edition of proceedings of the Mayor’s Court.



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16. Fernandez, From Chaos to Continuity, 19–22; Mark F. Fernandez, “Local Justice in the Territory of Orleans: W.C.C. Claiborne’s Courts, Judges, and Justices of the Peace,” in A Law Unto Itself?: Essays in the New Louisiana Legal History, ed. Warren M. Billings and Mark F. Fernandez (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 79–98. 17. Mark F. Fernandez, ed., “Rules of Court of the Territory of Orleans,” Louisiana History 38 (Winter 1997): 63–73. 18. W.C.C. Claiborne to Thomas Jefferson, 1 July 1804, in The Territorial Papers of the United States, comp. Clarence E. Carter, comp. (Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940), 9:247; “Petition to Congress by Lawyers of the Territory, 1805, ibid., 9:269; James Brown to Thomas Jefferson, 8 January 1805, ibid., 9:365–66; Brown to John Breckinridge, 15 January 1805, ibid., 9:360; Brown to Samuel Smith, 28 November 1805, ibid., 9:537–39. 19. For discussion of the codification movement, see Fernandez, From Chaos to Continuity, 31–34. 20. Livingston’s critique of the Anglo-American system can be glimpsed in his “Notes on the Introduction to Common Law.” Nonetheless, he was a master of common law and a brilliant lawyer in a common-law context. Analysis of his legal arguments before Louisiana’s various courts demonstrates this point; unfortunately, time and space constraints prohibit such an analysis here. For a useful glimpse of his subtle and nimble grasp of the question, see his arguments in Lebreton v. Nouchet, 3 Mart. (o.s.) 59–63 (1813), Lebreton v. Nouchet, Docket 10, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Department of Special Collections and Manuscripts, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans. 21. James Brown and Louis Moreau Lislet, comps., A Digest of the Civil Laws Now in Force in the Territory of Orleans, with Alterations and Amendments Adapted to Its Present System of Government (New Orleans: Bradford and Anderson, 1808). 22. Lewis Kerr, An Exposition of the Criminal Laws of the Territory of Orleans; The Practice of the Courts of Criminal Jurisdiction, the Duties of Their Officers, with a Collection of Forms for the Use of Magistrates and Others (New Orleans: Wm. W. Gaunt and Sons, 1806). 23. Fernandez, “Local Justice,” 79–98. 24. Thomas Cooper, The Institutes of Justinian (1812; New York: Halsted and Voorhies, 1841). These were the most commonly used editions in early Louisiana. 25. The debate over the sources of the Digest has been vigorously contested. The most comprehensive treatment of the subject may be found in Rudolpho Batiza, “The Louisiana Code of 1808: Its Actual Sources and Present Relevance,” Tulane Law Review 48 (1972): 4–164; Robert A. Pascal, “Sources of the Digest of 1808: A Reply to Professor Batiza, Tulane Law Review 48 (1972): 603–52; Batiza, “Sources of the Civil Code of 1808, Facts and Speculation: A Rejoinder,” Tulane Law Review 48 (1972): 628. 26. Orleans Territorial Acts (1805), 416–64.

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27. Lewis Kerr to Edward Livingston, April 16, 1807, Box 82, ELP. 28. I am currently working on a comparison of John Tyler’s and Edward Livingston’s early attempts at codification. For information on Tyler, see Mark F. Fernandez, “The Appellate Question: A Comparative Analysis of Supreme Courts of Appeal in Virginia and Louisiana 1776–1840” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1991). 29. Pierre Derbigny to Edward Livingston, 27 November 1826, Box 72, ELP.

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afayette’s five-day visit to New Orleans in April 1825 was quite an event. The “Nation’s guest” was received with extraordinary respect. The Cabildo was chosen to serve as his accommodations and cleaned, repaired, and refurnished for the occasion. “Elegant tints and draperies, brilliant chandeliers, heavy mirrors, novelty rugs — nothing, in fact, was spared to furnish properly what was already becoming known as ‘The House of Lafayette.’ ” A 68–feet-high triumphal arch, “decorated with colossal statues of Justice and Liberty,” was built on the Place d’Armes in honor of the revolutionary hero. When the “Guest of Louisiana” made his entry in New Orleans on 10 April after a stormy steamboat ride from Mobile, the rain that “fell by torrents” did not prevent the people of New Orleans from assembling in mass to welcome the great man. He was first addressed by Governor Henry Johnson at the house of William Montgomery, which had served as Andrew Jackson’s headquarters during his New Orleans campaign of 1814–15; then, he was complimented by Mayor Joseph Roffignac (a native of Angoulême who had emigrated to the United States to escape the French Revolution) under the triumphal arch, and finally, he was harangued by City Recorder Denis Prieur in the hall “where the City Council was convened.” There were parades, banquets, addresses, balls, and illuminations. Numerous visitors  — including members of the Louisiana House of Representatives; members of the Bar of New Orleans; a delegation of the Spanish residents of the city; former revolutionary officers and soldiers; the bishop of New Orleans, Mgr Dubourg; Father Antonio Sedella of Saint Louis Church; a delegation of the free colored militia with its commander, John Mercier; the members of the Medical Society of  New Orleans; and a deputation of the Grand Lodge of the State of Louisiana and “all the masons residing in this city” — called on Lafayette to pay their respects and invite him

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to celebrations. Lafayette, in turn, paid many official and private visits. When he left the city on 15 April, a procession took him from the Cabildo through an immensely crowded Chartres Street to the river and the steamboat Natchez, which was to carry the great man to Saint Louis.1 Similar celebrations took place elsewhere in the United States during Lafayette’s grand tour. But in New Orleans they took on a meaning of their own. Not only did they serve — as elsewhere — as a symbol of national unity. Not only did they suggest the legitimacy of Louisiana’s place within the nation. They also signaled the presence in New Orleans of a vibrant French culture for all to see. Although “Louisiana did not share with you in the toils and glory of the war of independence,” Governor Johnson reminded his guest, “her inhabitants are as ardently attached to its principles as their brethren, and as firmly resolved to preserve inviolate the blessings conquered by their ancestors.” He added more importantly: “You will find in Louisiana one subject of consolation and delight which no other part of the United States can present to you. . . . This State settled by Frenchmen, and principally inhabited by their descendants, enjoys as a member of the American Confederacy the full measure of that liberty, for which you toiled and bled. And the wise and temperate use of which Frenchmen have here made of it, is a triumphant answer to those who have proclaimed them unfit for freedom, and stigmatised you for labouring to confer on them the greatest of all blessings.”2 Lafayette did not miss the point. He forcefully agreed that Louisiana gave “a daily evidence” of “the fitness of the French population for a wise use of the blessings of free institutions, and self government” —  something, he hinted, that was denied to them during the Restoration as it had been during the Empire.3 Subsequently the “French” character of New Orleans was repeatedly emphasized by Lafayette and the various orators. To Mayor Roffignac’s address, Lafayette replied that he had always hoped that his “Louisiana countrymen might some day participate in the benefits of republican liberty and independence” and that he was happy to see this “hope . . . now realized.” Recorder Prieur insisted that the inhabitants of New Orleans greeted him “as members of the great American family” and also “as the descendants of Frenchmen.” At a banquet, Governor Johnson toasted “the countrymen of the illustrious guest of the nation” who had proved in Louisiana that they are “fully capable of appreciating, administering and defending a free government.” On behalf of the marshals who superintended the general’s reception, Canonge insisted that New Orleans “was composed both of men proud of claiming their birth



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from your ancestors and of citizens, in whose cause you have so valiantly fought.” During the reception and banquet given by the Masons on 14 April, the (American) grand master, John Henry Holland, noted in his welcoming address that he ought “to have addressed my felicitations to you in my native language” but had thought “that it might be pleasing to you, in a country inhabited by so many citizens of French origin, to hear the assurance of the love of an American in that language.”4 As many participants to the 1825 celebration suggested at the time, the “French” character of New Orleans and much of Louisiana was well established by the 1820s — indeed, so much so that its historic, time-specific dimension was lost on contemporaries and later historians alike. In their descriptions, comments, and narratives, Louisiana had become French while a colony of France; it had remained French while a colony of Spain; it retained its French traits since the Purchase. It was so French, indeed, that when Judge Charles Gayarré published his Histoire de la Louisiane in 1846, he pointed out in the introduction that he would later have to publish an American translation of his work that would be different from the French original. Indeed, the introductions to both editions are quite different.5 In this essay I argue that we should historicize our understanding of the “French” character of Louisiana. I contend that Louisiana was constructed as culturally “French” mostly after it became politically “American” —  that is, after 1803. The definition, meanings, and contents of this elaboration were always a matter of cultural and political debates and disagreements, with no consensus emerging before the Civil War and only what I propose to call a consensus by attrition being created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, until a new definition was adopted after the 1960s, bringing Cajuns to the fore.6

A Creole Colony The indisputable fact that Louisiana was a colony of France until it was ceded to Spain in 1762–63 did not necessarily make it “French” in cultural and social terms. Eighteenth-century metropolitan Frenchmen who heard about Louisiana were likely to associate the colony either with the infamous Mississippi Bubble that burst in January 1720 and led to the demise of John Law, or with the deportation of convicts made famous in Abbé Prévost’s 1731 novel Manon Lescaut. Others saw it as a frontier area that provided interactions with Indians, as Le Page du Pratz suggested in

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his 1758 Histoire de la Louisiane.7 French diplomats were no more likely than other Frenchmen to invest the colony of Louisiana with favorable cultural meanings — nor, indeed, to invest much in it at all. Eighteenthcentury French colonial policy was premised on the idea that colonies had to be rich and useful to French commerce, providing the metropolis with products it needed. Louisiana failed on all counts. Its importance was strategic, as French policy makers saw it as a buffer against AngloAmerican incursions into the Mississippi valley. On the whole, however, Louisiana (and Canada) mattered far less to French policy makers than the West Indies — colonies that were rich and did provide France with products it did not have.8 It is little wonder, therefore, that when France lost the war for North America and time came for the French to choose between Louisiana and Saint-Domingue, Choiseul logically kept the richest of all sugar islands and relinquished French sovereignty over Louisiana to Spain. It was also a cultural decision. Cap Français in the 1750s and 1760s was a bustling (if unruly) colonial city, the great French metropolis of the Americas that boasted a rich cultural life financed by the rapidly growing plantation economy. In contrast, New Orleans was a small town of fewer people, resources, attractions, and opportunities.9 The cession of Louisiana to Spain in 1762–63 and the subsequent revolt of Franco-Louisianian colonists against the Spanish governor Ullõa in 1768 offer a rare glimpse into the views of “French Louisiana” held by Louisianians.10 When the news of the cession reached Louisiana in late 1764, Louisianians reacted with apprehension to the change — expressing their fears that Spanish mercantilism would prevent Louisiana commerce with France. They sent the merchant Jean Milhet to Paris to make their case to the French authorities. Similarly, soon after the Revolt of 1768, New Orleans colonists wrote letters and memoirs and sent delegates to the French authorities requesting the restoration of French sovereignty.11 Yet the idea that Louisianians felt strongly French should be handled with care. Colonists revolted in the fall of 1768 when they learned that the king of Spain had issued a decree putting Louisiana under the rule of the exclusive. Not only did the decree forbid Louisianians to trade with France, but its existence meant that the Spanish had decided to become more active in their new colony’s affairs — something the colonists clearly resented. A good case can be made, therefore, that the revolt had economic rather than patriotic causes and that the subsequent appeal to the French was an attempt to protect the insurgents from future reprisals.



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As is well known, the French authorities were embarrassed by the revolt. Choiseul made sure the Louisiana delegates would not see Louis XV; he met with them but did not give them an audience as an official delegation; the French commissioner in New Orleans, Aubry, was ordered to give the name of the revolt’s leaders to the Spaniards. Several were executed as a result. Choiseul’s greatest fear was the fall of Louisiana into British hands, and he made sure the colony remained under Spanish authority.12 Given France’s unsupportive attitude in 1768, Louisianians had little reason to cultivate good feelings toward monarchical France over the following two decades. Spain’s severe repression of the revolt soon gave way to commercial and demographic policies that suggested that the Spanish were more interested in Louisiana than the French had ever been. As a consequence, the colony and its capital experienced significant growth during the Spanish period. Likewise, the French Revolution did not create new loyalties. Its impact on Spanish Louisiana was much weaker than some feared at the time, especially after the beginning of war between Spain and France in 1793. There were, to be sure, French Republicans and Jacobins in Louisiana, but their number and role remained limited. The news of the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 encouraged some Louisianians to petition the French Convention to restore French rule, and the Spanish governor Carondelet was greatly alarmed by reports of the Marseillaise being sung at the theater. Yet many other Louisianians strongly opposed revolutionary ideas and were in constant fear of their spread in Spanish Louisiana. When Citizen Genêt saw fit the same year to send a pamphlet from “the Freemen of France to their brothers in Louisiana” assuring the “Frenchmen of Louisiana” that “you still love your mother country” and encouraging them to revolt, the agitation was limited to more Marseillaises and Carmagnoles, and by January 1794 the ever-worried Carondelet could report to Madrid that Louisiana was quiet.13 Indeed, a good case could be made that the agitation of the free persons of color and the slave revolt in nearby Saint-Domingue came to play a defining role in Louisianian perceptions of the pros and cons of revolutionary agitation — and of local attitudes toward France and French culture. In its first phase, the Saint-Domingue agitation stimulated the ambitions of free persons of color like Pierre Bailly, who demonstrated on several occasions a commitment to republicanism that antagonized Spanish authorities. In its second phase — the slave insurrection — it sent a message of hope to many slaves while scaring white Louisianians as well as some

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free persons of color throughout the 1790s and early 1800s. Undoubtedly the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue became a central episode for individual and collective memories and consciousness.14 In other words, the reference to France during the French and Spanish periods was loaded with contradictions. Monarchical France had been indifferent to its colony and colonists while, for most white Louisianians, revolutionary France symbolized social disorder and economic disaster. What developed in eighteenth-century Louisiana was a local variation on a well-known theme and process in both the British colonies of North America and French Saint-Domingue: Creolization, or the development of “l’esprit colon.”15 At the same time that French nationalists were inventing a cult of the nation as a project for metropolitan France, many Louisianians developed a specific Creole identity — and referred to themselves as “Louisianais” or “habitants de la Louisiane,” not Frenchmen. Acadian refugees who had recently arrived from Acadia and their errands in the Atlantic world (including for some an attempt to return to France that proved a failure) and had settled in isolated areas of prairie and bayou Louisiana experienced a similar process in the late eighteenth century. They, too, developed a local identity and failed to evoke a direct relation to France.16

Inventing “French Louisiana” The idea that Louisiana had always been French became important in the very first years of the nineteenth century. The retrocession of Louisiana to France forced French partisans of the re-creation of a French empire in North America and the West Indies to articulate a role for Louisiana in their colonial grand design. Admittedly the empire’s center would remain Saint-Domingue after the island had been recaptured and pacified by Leclerc’s expedition. Louisiana, however, was given an importance it never had before 1762.17 The new colonial prefect, Pierre Clément Laussat, was ordered to insist that Louisiana was dear to the French government and part of French history. Laussat visibly took his instructions to heart. When he arrived in New Orleans in late March 1803, he was convinced that “all Louisianians are Frenchmen at heart” (an interesting distinction in itself), and he issued a proclamation that emphatically said so. During the next four months — while Louisiana was still officially under Spanish rule pending on the official transfer to France — Laussat made “every



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effort to become well acquainted with a country in which nothing would henceforth be alien or indifferent” to him.18 This new understanding of Louisiana by French government officials originated in part in a number of pamphlets, reports, and travel narratives that were published at the time. Joseph Pontalba of New Orleans submitted a “Memoir on Louisiana” to the French government, where he described Louisiana’s economic and commercial circumstances and insisted that “almost all the Louisianians” were “born French,” or “of French origin.” “It is with enthusiasm that they would again become French,” Pontalba argued, “if they had no apprehensions as to the organization to be established among them in relation to the blacks, whose emancipation would destroy the fortune of all, annihilate all the means of existence, and be the presage of the greatest misfortune.” Louis-Narcisse Baudry des Lozières published a diary of his Louisiana travels that offered many suggestions for the administration of the colony.19 The new doctrine took on a different meaning when Bonaparte decided to sell the colony to the United States — a return to Choiseul’s policy of avoiding potential British control over Louisiana at all cost that was motivated by the First Consul’s pragmatic evaluation of the situation: the disaster of Leclerc’s expedition in Saint-Domingue; the sorry state of the French navy; President Jefferson’s firm statements on Louisiana to the French chargé d’affaires in Washington, Pichon; and finally, the expectation of a forthcoming war in Europe.20 Laussat’s new orders, which he received disbelievingly in August 1803, informed him of the sale of Louisiana and instructed him to emphasize France’s (and Bonaparte’s) good feelings toward Louisianians. In French official discourse, the Louisianais became symbols of a new French-American political relationship, only a few years after the Quasi War and a few months after the tensions that preceded the Purchase. On the day of the transfer of sovereignty from Spain to France (30 November), Laussat issued a proclamation insisting that Louisianians would become “the beloved pledge of friendship between the two Republics, which cannot fail to grow stronger every day and will contribute so powerfully to their common peace and prosperity.” The colonial prefect’s rhetoric suggested that France now invested Louisiana with a symbolic function that had never existed during the eighteenth century. French officials realized that, unlike the cession of 1762–63, the sale of 1803 was definitive, and they developed a cultural and memorial argument to preserve the future.21

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The power of symbols notwithstanding, it is doubtful that this creation of a lasting French significance for Louisiana would have amounted to much, had the notion not immediately taken on a life of its own in the view of many American officials. The notion that Louisiana was “French” had never been much of a matter of discussion in American official circles before the Purchase. Now that Louisiana had suddenly become American, ethnicity became an issue. Claiborne and other officials quickly understood its complex nature and made much of what they perceived as the complex and potentially dangerous French identity of the new American possessions, thereby contributing to the idea that Louisiana had always been French. In a letter to Madison in early 1804, Claiborne referred to all French-speaking Louisianians as “French officiers and citizens” or “Frenchmen.” He well knew the difference, however. A few weeks later, he established a distinction between Frenchmen and Creoles. The first ones were soldiers and sailors, “as well as between twenty and thirty young adventurers from Bordeaux and St. Domingo who are troublesome to this Society, they are men of some information, desperate fortunes, and inflated with the Idea of the invincibility of Bonaparte, and the power of the French nation; the feel mortified at the possession of this Province by the United States, and seem determined to sour the Inhabitants as much as possible with the American Government.” These habitants were “the Creoles of the Country,” whose “language, manners and habits here” were “French.” But they were not Frenchmen, although Claiborne noted that “a strong partiality still exists for the French nation.”22 Indeed, he remarked in a brief account of the “commemoration of the destruction of the Bastile” by “a number of Frenchmen” that “many years will elapse before the strong partiality of the Louisianians for their Mother Country will be effaced,” and that “This partiality is not confined to the emigrants from France[;] it seems to be infused more or Less into all the descendants of Frenchmen.”23 Claiborne’s relative ability to sort out the various types of Frenchspeaking individuals he encountered in Louisiana was not shared by all Americans. In July 1804, Wilkinson sent Jefferson a “characterization of New Orleans residents” that called several New Orleanians “Frenchmen.” James Pitot was said to think “the French the first of nations & himself the first Frenchmen” [sic]; Derbigny was “much attached to his native country,” Boré “principally distinguished by his vanity & a blind attachment to the French nation”; Meyange was “apparently attachd to the Spanish government, but in reality a Frenchman.”24 Likewise the postmaster John



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Gurley repeatedly mentioned “French citizens” and “French inhabitants” in a letter to the postmaster general.25 While American officials discovered that Louisiana was French, white Louisianians continued to emphasize their Creole identity. They understood that the new context created by the Purchase made new cultural strategies possible. The substitution of a geographically and politically proximate American regime to a more distant Spanish government encouraged them to make new claims to reinforce their position vis-à-vis the government of the United States and build on French cultural prestige for their own interests. Within a year of the transfer of Louisiana to the United States, two pamphlets appeared that emphasized Louisianian identity and demands — a memorial (written in French and English) “presented by the inhabitants of Louisiana to the Congress of the United States” (its final draft had actually been written by Edward Livingston on behalf of a group of Louisianians) in May 1804, and a pamphlet (in French) on “the political and civil situation of Louisiana” published six months later by a “Louisianais” — probably Pierre Derbigny.26 Both pamphlets suggested the existence of a white Creole Louisianian identity and of Louisiana as a “country” with its own culture. “A Governor is to be placed over us,” the memorial protested, “whom we have not chosen, whom we do not even know, who may be ignorant of our language, uninformed of our institutions, and who may have no connections with our Country or interest in its welfare.” Moreover, they regretted that the division of former colonial Louisiana into two distinct administrative entities deprived the inhabitants of the new Territory of Orleans of “the distinguished name which belonged to us, and to which we are attached.” As for the Esquisse, not only did its author use “Louisianais” as his signature, but he repeatedly referred to “Louisianais,” “habitans de la Louisiane,” and “citoyens de la Louisiane.”27 Except when referring to the French language, the term “Français” (Frenchmen) appeared only three times in the pamphlet, in very specific contexts: about Frenchmen who were not from Louisiana, about Louisianians as subjects of France in a technical sense during Laussat’s interregnum, and about Louisianians called “French Citizens” by American pamphleteers because they did not speak English.28

Antebellum Visions and Contradictions The post-Purchase construction of Louisiana as a culturally French region built on the visions and conceptions developed between 1800 and 1804.

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It was a dynamic and contradictory process that involved different actors and was clearly inscribed in time and space. In chronological terms, there were two main moments — before and after the Civil War and Reconstruction era — that together covered the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In geographical terms, the space of the new “French Louisiana” was increasingly reduced in a growingly American environment. The new meaning did not apply to the regions of colonial Greater Louisiana that had not become part of the new Territory of Orleans (later the State of Louisiana); within this entity, it applied mostly to New Orleans and, to a lesser extent, to commercial towns like Donaldsonville or Natchitoches. In other words, it largely excluded the areas settled by Acadians, who continued to develop their own cultural and economic patterns during the nineteenth century.29 Making Louisiana French would not have been possible without the influx of Gallic newcomers. Many of them, in turn, may not have settled in Louisiana had they not felt they were relocating to a culturally French territory. This was true of Saint-Domingue refugees as well as of later migrants from France. A few of those who left Saint-Domingue during the 1790s and early 1800s went directly to Spanish New Orleans, but the majority did not — instead relocating to Cuba, Jamaica, or the American cities of Charleston and Philadelphia. Typical was the itinerary of Christian Miltenberger. Born in Saint-Domingue in 1764 in an Alsatian family, Miltenberger weathered the events of the 1790s on the island, marrying Marie-Aimée Mercier, the daughter of a slaveholding owner of a coffeeplantation in 1802. In the aftermath of the Leclerc disaster, Miltenberger and his family fled to Cuba in 1803, like thousands of other white and free colored Domingans. Their expulsion from Cuba after Napoléon’s invasion of Spain brought them in 1809 to New Orleans, where Miltenberger began to practice medicine. Miltenberger was one of the nine thousand white, free colored, and slave refugees who arrived in New Orleans from the Cuban ports of Santiago and Baracoa between May 1809 and January 1810, almost doubling the city’s population and giving new meaning to the city’s French traits.30 Saint-Domingue refugees were actually a mixed crowd — not only because the 1809 group included about one-third whites, one-third free people of color, and one-third slaves, but also in social terms. Next to former grands blancs who had left their plantations behind, there were numerous petits blancs — artisans, shopkeepers, merchants, etc. — who had migrated from France to Saint-Domingue in the three decades before the Revolu-



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tion hoping to make a fortune. Marie Santon, the daughter of a master silk dyer in Lyons, moved to Saint-Domingue in the 1780s and opened a perfume shop in Cap Français. She escaped to Cuba in 1803 with the man she had recently married, Jean Augustin, the son of a Chinon notary who had arrived in Saint-Domingue in the 1780s. Both left Cuba for New Orleans in 1809. Their son Donatien Augustin became a judge in New Orleans and a brigadier general of the Louisiana militia. Jean-Baptiste Lesueur Fontaine was no aristocrat, either. Born in Paris in 1745 into a family of artisans and shopkeepers, he moved to Saint-Domingue in 1774 and for the next twenty years tried his hand at many occupations — being successively a baker, a shopkeeper, an employee, and a small planter. When he fled Saint-Domingue for Baltimore in the summer of 1793, he had become a rich man (he owned forty-five slaves), although he lost everything in the revolution. Relocating to New Orleans, he became the editor of Le Moniteur de la Louisiane and rebuilt his fortune. Men and women like Marie Santon, Jean-Baptiste Lesueur Fontaine, or Jean Augustin brought to New Orleans their experiences and identities as French natives, immigrants to Saint-Domingue, and Saint-Domingue refugees.31 Migrants from France also contributed to the cultural construction of Louisiana as French. During the 1790s, New Orleans (unlike Philadelphia) had not been a major destination for the émigrés who escaped revolutionary France. In the new post-Purchase context, the establishment and then the fall of the Empire and the Royalist restoration in France made New Orleans an attractive destination for French republicans and Bonapartists.32 Moreover, it became a favorite magnet for thousands of French men and women who chose to leave their country and look for a better life in the United States during the antebellum period. At least 28,618 natives of France arrived in New Orleans between 1820 and 1852 (out of a total of 181,976 for the United States), but missing passenger manifests at various times during that period suggest that migration from France to New Orleans was actually much larger. As the yearly number of French men and women who removed to the United States grew from several hundred in the early 1820s to several thousand in the 1830s and 1840s, Louisiana remained a choice destination, outranked only by New York City. To French emigrants in the 1830s and 1840s, Louisiana seemed as close as their two favorite destinations in Latin America (Buenos Aires and Montevideo), and much closer than New York City. Moreover, Louisiana was a springboard for further migrations to Mexico, Texas, and the Mississippi valley. As a result, until the Civil War, New Orleans was

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always the first urban destination in the United States and the Americas for French migrants: over 7,500 French natives resided there in 1850 while New York City had 4,990 and Philadelphia 1,981; by 1860, there were 10,564 French natives in New Orleans, 8,074 in New York City, and 3,072 in Saint Louis. By 1870, the situation had changed: although New Orleans still outranked New York (8,845 versus 8,265), it was clearly less dynamic than the northern port; moreover, the largest concentration of migrants in the Americas could be found now in Buenos Aires, where 14,180 French natives resided at the 1869 census.33 The cultural construction of Frenchness in antebellum Louisiana was both public and private. Many New Orleanians of Gallic origin maintained lively personal ties with France throughout the period under consideration. Saint-Domingue refugees corresponded with French officials about possible compensation for their property losses on the island. Like Christian Miltenberger, many communicated with their relatives in France — in Miltenberger’s case, in Alsace and the Bordeaux region. Immigrants from France — then called “foreign French” — wrote and received similar letters. Ties with France were not limited to upper-class Louisiana families who sent their sons to France for educational purposes. They mattered to many immigrants of varied social and economic standing. Pierre-Firmin Helluin, a native of Franqueville in the Northern department of Somme who migrated in 1820 to Napoleonville, where he became a planter, exchanged letters between 1838 and 1855 with his nephew Louis, who had stayed behind as a merchant in the Somme town of Doullens. Helluin discussed family and business questions, described his experience in Louisiana, and kept abreast of political events in France. Séverin Carrière of Dordogne similarly wrote to his family during the 1850s, as did hundreds of other migrants.34 Beyond official events like Lafayette’s 1825 visit, the public elaboration of Louisiana as a French cultural construct was a daily occurrence. It was demonstrated in the visibility of French artisans like the cabinetmakers François Seignouret and Prudent Mallard or the bookstore owner Antoine Louis Boimare, all of whom worked in a largely Gallic world — unlike their compatriots who had chosen to settle in New York or Buenos Aires rather than New Orleans. Boimare arrived in New Orleans in the early 1820s and participated in the growth of a network of Gallic cultural institutions (libraries, reading cabinets, literary coffeehouses, and bookstores) that developed in post-Purchase New Orleans. Not only did Boimare sell works by the most recent French authors like Victor Hugo or Honoré de



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Balzac in his Chartres Street “French and Spanish bookstore,” but from 1827 to 1829 he edited a literary magazine, Le Passe Tems, Macédoine politique et littéraire. He also published books that contributed to New Orleans’s French culture, like textbooks in French for schoolchildren, an Abrégé de la vie du Révérend Père Antoine de Sedella, or a Catéchisme de la Louisiane in the late 1820s. Boimare returned to France in the mid-1840s, but he maintained his ties with Louisiana: he published the first bibliography of Louisiana history in Paris in 1853, and his children chose to return to New Orleans to run a bookstore like their father.35 Thanks to Boimare and many others, Gallic culture in antebellum New Orleans was lively and astonishingly diverse. It was neither hegemonic nor united, however. Its domination was constantly challenged by alternative cultural models proposed by Americans and immigrants from other European countries. Yet until the Civil War, Gallic culture was socially and spatially present in New Orleans and several Louisiana towns to an extent unknown anywhere else in the Americas. New Orleans had many literary and political and commercial French newspapers and magazines in the 1840s and 1850s. Freemasons read Le Franc-Maçon Louisianais (published in 1845–46), theatergoers La Lorgnette: Revue des Théâtres, Courrier des Salons, Journal des Artistes (1841–43).36 Many newspapers were short-lived, but their fate did not prevent French-speaking journalists from launching new projects. According to one account, “between 1840 and 1850, thirtythree new French journals were started in New Orleans and seventeen in the parishes.” Donaldsonville, for instance, was a town of 1,500 in the 1840s with several French-language newspapers: the short-lived L’Amir des Planteurs (1841), La Gazette de Lafourche (1844–45), and above all Le Vigilant (1845–58, and itself part of a network of French-language news­ papers that covered the towns of St Francisville, Iberville, Attakapas, Baton Rouge, Pointe Coupee, etc.). Donaldsonville also boasted French cafés, restaurants like Le Petit Paris, theaters, and two militia companies, Les Canonniers and Les Chasseurs.37 The diversity of Gallic culture was no less striking than its visibility. Class, race, and gender combined to split Gallic New Orleans into many discrete segments. Best known is the high culture of New Orleans white Gallic elites, but the middle-class culture of white artisans, shopkeepers, and businessmen was as visible. In many respects, race played a central role within New Orleans French culture. Colonial and antebellum Louisiana was a three-tiered society organized along the distinction between whites, free persons of color, and slaves. Free persons of color had been

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present in Louisiana long before the Purchase, and many others had arrived in 1809 from Saint-Domingue through Cuba.38 Free persons of color knew they had nothing to gain from the implementation of a two-tiered American racial order (free whites/African American slaves) that would deprive them of their freedom and status; accordingly, they defended both during the antebellum period. They lost many battles: under the Spanish regime free persons of color had made much of their participation in the pardo and moreno militias that served as vehicles of upward mobility. Less than fifteen years after the Purchase, the colored militia was history, despite its demonstration of loyalty to the United States during the Battle of New Orleans. Even more threatening for free colored Louisianians was the process of legal containment, then rollback, that began immediately after the Purchase and was exemplified in the codes of 1808 and 1828.39 This context encouraged free persons of color to turn their attention to cultural battles, to make use of French culture and references, and to take advantage of the particular profile of New Orleans society in a subtle strategy to fight the American racial order. To carve a space for themselves and to resist the pressure of American conformity was one of the goals of the free colored writers and poets published in Armand Lanusse’s 1845 anthology Les Cenelles. Born in New Orleans in 1812, Lanusse became a publicist and propagandist of Franco-African culture. He was active in the publication in 1843 of a literary magazine, L’Album Littéraire: Journal des Jeunes Gens, Amateurs de la Littérature, to which contributed free men of color. In 1845, he wrote the introduction to Les Cenelles. In the 1850s, he was an educator, serving as director of the Institution Catholique des Orphelins Indigents until the Civil War.40 French romanticism pervaded the pages of Les Cenelles. Its contributors shared even the ambiguity of French romantic writers toward Napoléon: while Victor Séjour celebrated the cult of the emperor, Manuel Sylla reminded his readers that Bonaparte had attempted to reinstate slavery in Saint-Domingue. Other free persons of color chose to emphasize French-language educational institutions to resist American pressures while yet others joined Masonic societies or political clubs, where they elaborated languages and discourses strongly influenced by French republicanism.41 Clearly, among antebellum New Orleanians, there was no unanimity about the meaning of their relationship to France. In fact, New Orleans was one of the few places outside France where the political debates of the revolutionary period went on during the nineteenth century as they did in metropolitan France. The diversity of New Orleans’s French-language



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press, for instance, testified to the existence of Republican, Bonapartist, and Royalist journalists and readers. Benjamin Buisson, the editor of the Journal du Commerce (1829–32), was a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique (class of 1811) and a veteran of Napoléon’s army who had fled Royalist France. Both J. C. Saint-Romes — the editor of the Courrier de la Louisiane from 1815 to 1843 — and François Delaup, who founded L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans in 1827, were Saint-Domingue refugees. Even more revealing are New Orleanians’ reactions to the French revolutions of July 1830 and February 1848. In 1830, many New Orleanians apparently opposed Charles X’s government and policies. Two weeks before news of the revolution reached Louisiana in late September 1830, the Abeille’s editor expressed his fears that tensions between the government and the people (“le peuple”) would have dire consequences. “This beautiful country of France will be once again affected with horrible convulsions,” he prophesied. “Streams of blood are about to run.” Responsibility for the crisis, in his opinion, lay with the Bourbons’ “irreconcilable hatred of the new France’s free institutions.” When information about the “glorious revolution” reached New Orleans, the Abeille and many New Orleanians celebrated. “Tri-colored flags were instantly made and triumphantly borne through the whole city, public houses and others were decorated by them.” The city was “plunged in a delirious state of joy,” which lasted for several days. As the Abeille editor perceptively noted, “it actually offered a miniature of Paris.” Although undoubtedly some participants hoped for the establishment in France of a republican regime and others were in favor of an imperial regime under Napoléon’s son — Napoléon II, the Duke of Reichstadt — most seemed satisfied with the arrival of the Duke of Orléans on the throne. What mattered to them was “the establishment of a truly constitutional government.”42 In 1848, the language of liberal constitutionalism gave way to outright republicanism. As in 1830, many New Orleanians took to the streets when they learned of the fall of Louis-Philippe’s regime. In late March and April 1848, New Orleanians celebrated the advent of France’s Second Republic in a series of public events — an assemblée républicaine, funeral services for dead revolutionaries, and banquets — that testified to the vitality of French-American republicanism in the city.43 This complex process of cultural and political construction of Frenchness in antebellum New Orleans took place in the larger context of the city’s impressive economic, demographic, and spatial expansion. The city did become more American as time went by, but the weight of its French

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component remained heavy until the late 1850s because economic growth stimulated further migration from France. However, French culture was increasingly on the defensive in the 1840s and especially the 1850s. Gallic Louisianians were being outnumbered by the addition of American, Irish, and German immigrants, and cultural elaborations of  Franco-Louisianian identities lost part of their most lively content. Some Gallic Louisianians sought refuge in more intellectual pursuits. It is not surprising that during this period the first nostalgic historical narratives of the French colonial period were published — like Charles Gayarré’s Histoire de la Louisiane (1846–47). Gayarré and others New Orleanians also supported the American Party and Know-Nothingism in the early 1850s, targeting Irish immigrants in order to break the Irish-German-American alliance that put them in the numerical and political minority.44 This changing climate and growing defensiveness explains in large part the attitude of many Gallic New Orleanians during the Civil War. Fighting on the Confederate side seemed a logical and practical choice to best resist the imposition of an American cultural order in New Orleans and the defense of a slaveholding social order, which they also defended as southerners. During the war, Alfred Mercier and others pleaded the Confederate cause in Paris and hoped that French intervention in Mexico might pave the way for a racialized, military alliance between France and the Confederate states. This vision of Creole and Gallic Louisiana found its public expression after 1861 in a new political and literary periodical founded by Émile Hiriart and Henry Vignaud, La Renaissance Louisianaise. During its ten-year existence (1861 -71), it redefined Gallic New Orleans in racial terms, identified French culture with white Creole purity, and advocated a white-only, mythically French, and increasingly narrow culture. The Confederate defeat only reinforced these individuals’ desperate defensiveness and the virulent racism they displayed in the pages of La Renaissance Louisianaise and the satirical Reconstruction weekly Le Carillon (1869–75).45 Free persons of color were no less on the defensive than the Gallic white supremacists during and after the war. Afro-Creole leaders decided to bet on the northern side and later hoped that radical Reconstruction would guarantee their status and their leadership position vis-à-vis both white Louisianians and freedmen. Union occupation of Confederate New Orleans in the spring of 1862 opened new avenues to Afro-Creole leaders. Until the end of Reconstruction, they fought to establish equal citizenship, “true republicanism, democracy without shackles.” Men like Paul



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Trévigne (editor of L’Union), François Boisdoré, Louis Roudanez, Joseph Tinchant, Francis Dumas, and many others eloquently defended AfroCreole claims to social and political equality. Despite their efforts and the role of L’Union and its successor, La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orléans, the subsequent failure of radical Reconstruction in Louisiana dashed their hopes.46

Redefining “French Louisiana” The meaning of “French Louisiana” changed again after Reconstruction. Migration from France became negligible as potential emigrants weighed Louisiana’s economic prospects carefully and decided they would be better off in Argentina, California, or New York.47 The decline of new immigrant arrivals reinforced the defensiveness and growing isolation of white Franco-Louisianians that had emerged in the 1840s and 1850s. As New Orleans became an American city, its streets and shops lost much of its Gallic flavor. French culture became less of an everyday occurrence and more of an intellectual and political project. The number of French newspapers and periodicals in New Orleans fell dramatically from sixteen during the 1870s to seven in the 1890s and two in the 1900s.48 The creation in 1875 of a new cultural society, L’Athénée louisianais, constituted an attempt to encourage the use of the French language and the resistance of Franco-Louisianian culture to Americanization. The period also saw the development of a growing body of literature on the white Creoles and colonial Louisianians that mythicized their experience and history, including Alfred Mercier’s novels or Charles Gayarré’s 1885 lecture “The Creoles of History and the Creoles of Romance.” By the turn of the century, white Gallic culture in New Orleans belonged to the realm of nostalgia and romantic historical reconstruction, as suggested by the funerals of Gayarré in 1895 in an empty cathedral or the pageant and ceremonies that took place to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase on 20 December 1903 in New Orleans.49 An alternative vision of French Louisiana, developed by free persons of color until the end of Reconstruction, also fell apart in the 1880s as a new American racial order took over New Orleans for good. According to the new rules, there were two racial groups in Louisiana, the whites and the blacks — the latter including African American and Afro-Creole freedmen as well as former free persons of color. To all appearances, the former free persons of color had lost the cultural battles they had waged in the

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previous decades. However, they used a preserved consciousness of their cultural heritage to keep on fighting legal battles and maintain a distinct identity well into the twentieth century — as illustrated by the example of the New Orleans writer Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes (1849–1928), the author of an important book on Gallic Creoles of color, Nos hommes et notre histoire (published in Montreal in 1911), and one of the members of the Citizen’s Committee that launched the famous Plessy case in the 1890s.50 By the late nineteenth century, French Louisiana was a powerful cultural construction that had little relation to the contemporary reality of Louisiana and was not fed by new arrivals from France or former French possessions. There were disagreements over what French Louisiana was, who belonged, and who was excluded. The historical and literary works of Charles Gayarré, Lafcadio Hearns, George Washington Cable, Grace King, Alfred Mercier, and Alcée Fortier — despite their differences — all contributed to this imaginary construction. As the 1903 celebration suggested, French Louisiana could become the subject matter of a pageant. This conception of French Louisiana — at times mythical, literary, sensationalist, or picturesque — has remained powerful to this day. During the 1920s and 1930s, it greatly benefited from the efforts of the writer Lyle Saxon, who reinvented a Gallic meaning for New Orleans’s Vieux Carré and began a movement for the rejuvenation of a notion of French Louisiana premised on heritage and tourism.51 At the same time, a new definition of French Louisiana developed outside of New Orleans in the Cajun country. This was a startling break with the nineteenth century, a period that saw Acadians turning into Cajuns in the positive sense of an ethnic elaboration, but that also saw the Cajun identity acquire a more negative connotation outside of the Acadian/Cajun community. Positive or negative, Cajun culture and identity had little to do with the various uses of Frenchness that developed in New Orleans and other urban areas in Louisiana. This situation began to change slowly in the late nineteenth century when Alcée Fortier rehabilitated the Cajun language and culture and included it in a larger study of Francophone Louisiana. Fortier (1856– 1914), a white Creole, was a professor of French literature at Tulane University with a marked interest in Louisiana culture. A frequent lecturer at the Athénée louisianais, Fortier became interested in Cajun culture in the 1880s — giving a paper titled “Bits of Louisiana Folk-lore” at the Modern Language Association Meeting in 1887 and another one in 1891 titled “The



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Acadians of Louisiana and Their Dialect.” In 1894, he published his Louisiana Studies, an important work that for the first time brought Acadians back into Louisiana history — and paved the way for the transformations that Cajun culture experienced from within the community in the twentieth century, up to the contemporary reinvention of French Louisiana as Cajun Louisiana.52 On 20 December 1903, exactly one century after the transfer of Louisiana to the United States, Professor Alcée Fortier played the part of the colonial prefect, Pierre Clément Laussat, in the pageant organized by the Louisiana Historical Society that re-created the original ceremony faithfully. As a descendant of a white Creole family, a scholar of French language and literature, the first specialist of Cajun studies, and the president of the Louisiana Historical Association at the time, Fortier was a fitting choice to act the part of one of the early inventors of Louisiana as French. In the segregated context of 1903 New Orleans, however, one major strain of nineteenth-century Franco-Louisianian culture was conspicuously absent from the celebration. It would take many more decades to bring the Franco-African experience back in.53

Notes This essay is a revised and expanded version of the papers I presented at the two conferences organized in 2003 in Paris and Charlottesville that gave rise to this book, of the keynote address I gave at the Annual Conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History in New Orleans in June 2003, and of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities lecture I delivered in November 2003 at Tulane University. I am deeply grateful to Professor Sylvia Frey of Tulane University for inviting me to speak on these two occasions. 1. Edgar Ewing Brandon, comp. and ed., A Pilgrimage of Liberty: A Contemporary Account of the Triumphal Tour of General Lafayette through the Southern and Western States in 1825, As Reported by the Local Newspapers (Athens, Ohio: Lawhead Press, 1944), 63, 64. On Lafayette’s tour of the United States in 1824–25, see Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825: or, Journal of a Voyage to the United States, trans. J. D. Godman, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1829); Ann C. Loveland, Emblem of Liberty: The Image of Lafayette in the American Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971); Stanley J. Idzerda, Ann C. Loveland, and Marc H. Miller, Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds: The Art and Pageantry of His Farewell Tour of America, 1824–1825 (Flushing, N.Y.: Queens Museum; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989). On Lafayette in Louisiana, see Patricia Brady, “Carnival of Liberty: Lafayette in Louisiana,” Louisiana History 41, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 23–40.

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2. Brandon, Pilgrimage of Liberty, 167. 3. Ibid., 168. On Lafayette’s efforts to influence French politics from the United States during his 1824–25 visit, see René Rémond, Les États-Unis dans l’opinion française, 1815–1852, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1962), 2:617–28; Sylvia Neely, “The Politics of Liberty in the Old World and the New: Lafayette’s Return to America in 1824,” Journal of the Early Republic 6, no. 2 (1986): 155–59. 4. Brandon, Pilgrimage of Liberty, 170 (Lafayette); 171 (Prieur); 179 (Johnson); 183 (Canonge); 186 (Holland). 5. John R. Ficklen, “Judge Gayarré’s Histories of Louisiana,” Publications of the Louisiana Historical Society 3, no. 4 (March 1906): 15–16. See Charles Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane, 2 vols. (New Orleans: Magne and Weisse, 1846–47); and Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 4 vols. (New York: Redfield, 1854–66). 6. For a thoughtful analysis of the construction of colonial Louisiana in American historiography, see Daniel Usner, “Between Creoles and Yankees: The Discursive Representation of Colonial Louisiana in American History,” in French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, ed. Bradley G. Bond (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 1–21. 7. Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane, 3 vols. (Paris, 1758). On the image of Louisiana in eighteenth-century France, see Mathé Allain, “Not Worth a Straw”: French Colonial Policy and the Early Years of Louisiana (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1989); Carl Brasseaux, “La Délaissée: Louisiana during the Reign of Louis XIV, 1699–1715,” in A Refuge for All Ages: Immigration in Louisiana History, ed. Carl A. Brasseaux (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1996), 13–23; Marcel Giraud, “France and Louisiana in the Eighteenth Century,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 36, no. 4 (March 1950): 657–74. 8. Donald Lemieux, “The Mississippi Valley, New France, and French Colonial Policy,” Southern Studies 17, no. 1 (1978): 39–56; James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For appraisals of colonial Louisiana’s economic standing in the French empire, see Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003); Shannon Lee Dawdy, “La Ville Sauvage: ‘Enlightened’ Colonialism and Creole Improvisation in New Orleans, 1699–1769” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2003), and “La Nouvelle-Orléans au XVIIIe siècle: Courants d’échanges dans le monde caraïbe,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 62, no. 3 (2007): 663–85. 9. On eighteenth-century Cap Français, see Pierre de Vaissière, Saint Domin­ gue: La société et la vie créoles sous l’Ancien Régime (1629–1789) (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1909). Recent works emphasizing diversity and racial interactions also suggest the lack of French cultural symbolism during the “French” era (see Joseph Zitomersky, “In the Middle and on the Margin: Greater French Louisiana in History and in Professional Historical Memory,” special issue, Alizés: Revue angliciste de la Réunion [March 2001]: 201–64). 10. On the cession of 1762–63 and the Revolt of 1768, see Arthur S. Aiton,



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“The Diplomacy of the Louisiana Cession,” American Historical Review 36, no. 4 (July 1931): 701–20; Sylvia L. Hilton, “Las relaciones anglo-españolas en Norteamerica durante el reinado de Carlos III: Revision historiográfica,” in Coloquio Internacional: Carlos III y su siglo. Actas, 2 vols. (Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1990), 1:839–82; James E. Winston, “Causes and Results of the Revolution of 1768 in Louisiana,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 15, no. 2 (April 1932): 181–213; John Preston Moore, Revolt in Louisiana: The Spanish Occupation, 1766–1770 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); E. Wilson Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 1759–1804 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934); Pierre Boulle, “French Reactions to the Louisiana Revolution of 1768,” in The French in the Mississippi Valley, ed. John F. McDermott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965); Carl Brasseaux, Denis-Nicolas Foucault and the New Orleans Rebellion of 1768 (Ruston, La.: McGinty Publications, 1987); Allen Christelow, “French Interest in the Spanish Empire during the Ministry of the Duc de Choiseul, 1759–1771,” Hispanic American Historical Review 21 (November 1941): 519–37; Emily Leumas, “Ties That Bind: The Family, Social, and Business Associations of the Insurrectionists of 1768,” Louisiana History 47, no.2 (2006): 183–202. 11. Moore, Revolt in Louisiana, 40. 12. Lemieux, “Mississippi Valley,” 39–56. 13. Ibid.; Ernest Liljegren, “Jacobinism in Spanish Louisiana, 1792–1797,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 22, no. 1 (January 1939): 47–97; Paul Lachance, “The Politics of Fear: French Louisianians and the Slave Trade, 1786–1809,” Plantation Society in the Americas 1, no. 2 (June 1979): 162–97; Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769– 1803 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). 14. Thomas Fiehrer, “Saint Domingue/Haiti: Louisiana’s Caribbean Connection,” Louisiana History 30, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 419–37; Robert Paquette, “Revolutionary Saint-Domingue in the Making of Territorial Louisiana,” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 204– 25; Paul Lachance, “Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Louisiana,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David Geggus (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 209–30; John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1988). On Pierre (Pedro) Bailly and Saint-Domingue, see Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 150–62. On the Saint-Domingue revolution, see also David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), and Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 15. On Creolization and “l’esprit colon,” see Gabriel Debien, Esprit colon et esprit d’indépendance à Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Larose, 1954); Charles Frostin, Les révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue au XVIIe et XVIIIe siè-

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cles: Haïti avant 1789 (Paris: L’Ecole, 1975); Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies. For British North America, see Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). See also David Buisseret, ed., Creolization in the Americas (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2000). 16. Louisianais [pseud.], Esquisse de la situation politique et civile de la Louisiane, depuis le 30 Novembre 1803 jusqu’au 1er Octobre 1804: Par un Louisianais (New Orleans: De l’imprimerie du Télégraphe, 1804); Carl A. Brasseaux, The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765–1803 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). 17. Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy; Albert H. Bowman, “Pichon, the United States, and Louisiana,” Diplomatic History 1, no. 3 (1977): 257–70; Dubois, Avengers of the New World; Laurent Dubois, “The Haitian Revolution and the Sale of Louisiana,” Southern Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2007): 18–41. 18. Pierre Clément Laussat, Memoirs of My Life: To My Son during the Years 1803 and After, Which I Spent in Public Service in Louisiana as Commissioner of the French Government for the Retrocession to France of That Colony and for Its Transfer to the United States (1972; New Orleans: Published for the Historic New Orleans Collection by Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 18, 21. For instance, Laussat sought and received information about Upper Louisiana from Pierre Chouteau of Saint Louis (see William E. Foley and C. David Rice, The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000], 88). 19. Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3:432, 433; Christine Vella, Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness De Pontalba (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 94–95; Louis-Narcisse Baudry des Lozières, Voyage à la Louisiane, et sur le continent de l’Amérique septentrionale, fait dans les années 1794 à 1798 (Paris: Dentu, 1802). 20. Bowman, “Pichon, the United States, and Louisiana”; Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York: Knopf, 2003); Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 21. Laussat, Memoirs of My Life; see also Laussat’s letter to Decrès, 8 April 1804, AN (Aix) C13A53, F° 48. In a letter to Madison, Claiborne accused Laussat of pro-French agitation in the city: “I have discovered with regret that a strong partiality for the French government still exists among many of the inhabitants of this city, and it appears to me, that Mr. Laussat is greatly Solicitous to encrease that partiality” (William C. C. Claiborne to James Madison, 10 January 1804, in Official Letter Books of W.C.C. Claiborne 1801–1816, ed. Dunbar Rowland [Jackson, Miss.: State Department of Archives and History, 1917], 1:330); hereafter cited as Claiborne Letter Books. See also Claiborne to Madison, 6 February 1804, ibid., 1:363–64. 22. Claiborne to Madison, 24 January 1804, in Claiborne Letter Books, 1:345– 46. See also Claiborne to Madison, 31 January 1804, ibid., 1:354; Claiborne to Thomas Jefferson, 29 May 1804, ibid., 2:176, mentioning “The Louisianians or



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rather the Natives of Louisiana”; Claiborne to Madison, 16 October 1804, ibid., 2:353, mentioning “ancient Louisianians” and “modern Louisianians” (or “native Americans”). 23. Claiborne to Madison, 16 July 1804, in Claiborne Letter Books, 2:249–50. 24. “Characterization of New Orleans Residents,” in The Territory of Orleans, 1803–1812, vol. 9, The Territorial Papers of the United States, ed. Clarence Edwin Carter (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940), 248–58. 25. John W. Gurley to the Postmaster General, in The Territory of Orleans, 1803–1812, 262–65. 26. Mémoire présenté au Congrès des Etats-Unis d’Amérique par les habitans de la Louisiane (New Orleans: De l’imprimerie du Moniteur, 1804); Esquisse de la situation politique et civile de la Louisiane. For the attribution of the Esquisse to Derbigny, see Jared William Bradley, ed., Interim Appointment: W.C.C. Claiborne Letter Book, 1804–1805 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 44. 27. Mémoire présenté au Congrès des Etats-Unis d’Amérique, 8, 26; Esquisse de la situation politique et civile de la Louisiane, ii, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 18, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 34, 37, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46. 28. Esquisse de la situation politique et civile de la Louisiane, 25, 30, 43. 29. Carl Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun: The Transformation of a People, 1803– 1877 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992). 30. On the Saint-Domingue refugees in Louisiana, see the useful collection edited by Carl Brasseaux and Glenn R. Conrad, The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792–1809 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana); Paul Lachance, “The 1809 Immigration of Saint-Domingue Refugees to New Orleans: Reception, Integration, and Impact,” Louisiana History 29 (1988): 109–11; Ashli White, “ ‘A Flood of Impure Lava’: Saint Dominguan Refugees in the United States, 1791–1820” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2003); and Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to Louisiana: Migration and Influences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007). For Miltenberger, see Christian Miltenberger Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 31. “Extrait du registre du secrétariat de l’agence du gouvernement français établie à Santiago de Cuba, 15 ventôse an XII,” Augustin, Wogan, Labranche Family Papers, 1803–1936; and “Testament de Jean-Baptiste Lesueur Fontaine, 15 juin 1812,” Petitpain-Fazende Papers, both in Special Collections, HowardTilton Memorial Library, Tulane University. 32. Winston C. Babb, “French Refugees from Saint-Domingue to the Southern United-States: 1791–1810” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1954); Frances S. Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940); Rafe Blaufarb, Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); Brasseaux and Conrad, eds., Road to Louisiana. 33. Carl Brasseaux, comp., The “Foreign French”: Nineteenth-Century French Immigration into Louisiana. 3 vols. (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1990–1993), 1:xxv–xxx, 2:xviii–xx, 3:xii–xiv;

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Paul Lachance, “The Foreign French,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 101–30. For a demographic analysis of the French in antebellum New Orleans, see Marjorie Bourdelais, “La Nouvelle-Orléans: Une ville francophone, 1803–1860,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, 2007). For a general perspective on nineteenth-century French emigration, see François Weil, “French Emigration to the Americas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries as a Historical Problem,” Studi Emigrazione 123 (1996): 443–60. On French migration to Mexico, see Javier Pérez Siller, ed., México Francia: Memoria de una sensibilidad común, siglos XIX–XX (Mexico City: BUAP-CEMCA-El Colegio de San Luis, 1998). On migration to Texas, see François Lagarde, The French in Texas: History, Migration, Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 34. Pierre Firmin Helluin Letters, Mss. 4649, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge; Séverin Carrière Papers, Mss. 2543, ibid. 35. Librairie française et espagnole, de A. L. Boimare: livres nouvellement reçus, broadside, Historic New Orleans Collection; Charles François Lhomond, Eléments de la grammaire française (New Orleans: Boimare, 1828); Joseph Rosati, Catéchisme de la Louisiane (New Orleans: Buisson and Boimare, 1829); Edward Larocque Tinker, “Boimare: First and Still Foremost Bibliographer of Louisiana,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 24 (1931): 34–42; Florence M. Jumonville, “Books, Libraries, and Undersides for the Skies of Beds: The Extraordinary Career of A. L. Boimare,” Louisiana History 34, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 437–59; Charles D. Peavy, “French Cabinetmakers in the Vieux Carré,” Louisiana Studies 1, no. 2 (Summer 1962): 6–19. 36. Edward Larocque Tinker, Bibliography of the French Newspapers and Periodicals of Louisiana (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1933), 54, 60. 37. Ibid., 12 (quotation), 113 (Le Vigilant), 88–124 (French newspapers outside New Orleans). 38. On free persons of color in Saint-Domingue, see, in particular, Garrigus, Before Haiti; Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); and Dominique Rogers, “Les libres de couleur dans les capitales de Saint-Domingue: fortune, mentalité et intégration à la fin de l’Ancien Régime (1776–1789)” (Ph.D. diss., Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux III, 1999). 39. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 109–35, 163–68; Kimberly S. Hanger, “Conflicting Loyalties: The French Revolution and Free People of Color in Spanish New Orleans,” Louisiana History 34, no. 1 (1993): 5–33; Donald E. Everett, “Emigrés and Militiamen: Free Persons of Color in New Orleans, 1803–1815,” Journal of Negro History 38 (October 1953): 377–402; Roland C. McConnell, Negro Troops of Antebellum Louisiana: A History of the Battalion of Free Men of



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Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968); Mark F. Fernandez, From Chaos to Continuity: The Evolution of Louisiana’s Judicial System, 1712–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Warren M. Billings and Mark F. Fernandez, eds., A Law unto Itself?: Essays in the New Louisiana Legal History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001). 40. Rodolphe L. Desdunes, Our People and Our History: A Tribute to the Creole People of Color in Memory of the Great Men They Have Given Us and of the Good Works They Have Accomplished, trans. and ed. Sister Dorothea Olga McCants (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); Tinker, Bibliography, 39. 41. Armand Lanusse, Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes (New Orleans: H. Lauve, 1845); Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 89–136. 42. L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans, 9, 23, 25, and 28 September 1830. 43. Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, 159–67. 44. Joseph Tregle, “Creoles and Americans,” in Creole New Orleans, ed. Hirsch and Logsdon, 167. 45. Alfred Mercier, Du panlatinisme: Nécessité d’une alliance entre la France et la Confédération du sud (Paris: Librairie centrale, 1863); Tregle, “Creoles and Americans,” 168–69; Charles E. Newell, “Henry Vignaud: Louisiana Historian,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1955): 1–25; Bobs M. Tusa, “Le Carillon: An English Translation of Selected Satires,” Louisiana History 35, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 67–84. On white Creole efforts to argue their case in France, see Salwa Nacouzi, “Les créoles louisianais défendent la cause du Sud à Paris (1861‑1865),” Transatlantica (2002), http://transatlantica.revues.org/document451.html. 46. Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, 222–75; Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell, “The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850–1900,” in Creole New Orleans, ed. Hirsch and Logsdon, 216–51, esp. 222 (quotation); David C. Rankin, “The Impact of the Civil War on the Free Colored Community in New Orleans,” Perspectives in American History 11 (1977–78): 379–416; Tinker, Bibliography, 20–24. 47. Paul d’Abzac, Enquête sur la navigation, l’immigration et le commerce français à la Nouvelle-Orléans en 1876 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1876). 48. Tinker, Bibliography, 37. 49. George Reinecke, “Alfred Mercier, French Novelist of New Orleans,” Southern Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1982): 145–76; Charles Gayarré, The Creoles of History and the Creoles of Romance (New Orleans: C. E. Hopkins, 1885); Tregle, “Creoles and Americans,” 185. On the 1903 pageant, see Alcée Fortier, comp., Centennial Celebration of the Louisiana Transfer (New Orleans: Louisiana Historical Society, 1904); Louisiana Historical Society, Official Souvenir Programme of the Transfer of Louisiana from France to the United States: Commemoration by the Louisiana Historical Society at New Orleans, La., December 18th, 19th and 20th, 1903 (New Orleans, 1903). 50. Logsdon and Bell, “Americanization of Black New Orleans,” 201–61;

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Joseph Logsdon with Lawrence Powell, “Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes: Forgotten Organizer of the Plessy Protest,” in Sunbelt Revolution: The Historical Progression of the Civil Rights Struggle in the Gulf South, 1866–2000, ed. Samuel C. Hyde Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 42–70; Rebecca J. Scott, “Se battre pour ses droits: Écritures, litiges, et discrimination raciale en Louisiane (1888–1899),” Cahiers du Brésil contemporain 53/54 (2003): 175–209. I thank Rebecca Scott for calling my attention to these two references. 51. Jeanette Raffray, “Origins of the Vieux Carré Commission, 1920–1941,” Louisiana History 40, no. 3 (1999): 283–304; Anthony Stanonis, “ ‘Always in Costume and Mask’: Lyle Saxon and New Orleans Tourism,” Louisiana History 42, no. 1 (2001): 31–57. 52. Alcée Fortier, “Bits of Louisiana Folk-lore,” Transactions of the Modern Language Association of America 3 (1887): 100–168; Fortier, “The Acadians of Louisiana and Their Dialect,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 6, no. 1 (1891): 64–94; Fortier, Louisiana Studies: Literature, Customs and Dialects, History and Education (New Orleans: F. F. Hansell and Brothers, 1894); Sara Le Menestrel, La Voie des Cadiens: Tourisme et identité en Louisiane (Paris: Belin, 1999). 53. Fortier, comp., Centennial Celebration.

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istorical celebrations uneasily combine authentic or reconstructed memory with political goals. So historians may rightly feel they are acting under constraint when they are involved in such projects, while government officials cannot organize ceremonies without professional historians’ specific approach and tools: the development of public history and the growing employment of professional historians in North American — and to a lesser extent French1— museums and historical parks do not make the issue any less sensitive. Consider, for example, the problems caused in 1995 when the Air and Space Museum decided to commemorate the ending of the Second World War together with the dropping of the first atomic bomb in an exhibition. As the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution said when he cancelled the projected exhibition: “We made a basic error in attempting to couple an historical treatment of the use of atomic weapons with the 50th anniversary commemoration of the end of the war. . . . Veterans and their families were expecting . . . that the nation would honor and commemorate their valor and sacrifice. . . . They were not looking for analysis.”2 Veterans’ groups were so angered when they read the exhibition script — prepared by a team of curators with professional expertise in history — that they obtained a resolution of support on the part of the Senate as part of a controversy that led to the resignation of the museum’s director.3 As Richard H. Kohn commented, “Thus one of the premiere cultural institutions of the United States . . . surrendered its scholarly independence . . . to accommodate to a political perspective.”4 Official celebrations may also underline the growing gap between established historical knowledge and the public representation of major national events: a case in point was the bicentennial of the French Revolution in France in 1989. Throughout the twentieth century, historians

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with a Marxist perspective such as George Lefebvre and Albert Soboul analyzed the French Revolution in social as well as socialist terms: they saw the French Revolution as a social, sometimes bourgeois, upheaval that caused “the total subversion of the political institutional and social order.”5 That vision of the French Revolution had long dominated French historiography, as well as French politics, since the Marxist Left treasured the legacy of the French Revolution as a progressive message with contemporary relevance. By the time the bicentennial of the French Revolution was about to be celebrated, however, this view was in the process of being replaced with that of François Furet. Furet’s revisionist views on the French Revolution as a whole, and most particularly on the Terror — now no longer tolerated as “necessary follow-up to 1789” but seen as a brief “counter-current parenthesis,” the harbinger of later “totalitarian revolutions” — contrasted with the positive vision of Marxist historiography.6 By showing that the Revolution in France was the conclusion of decades, or even centuries of slow social change, Furet’s aim was also to dissociate the French Revolution from contemporary political debate: “[The French Revolution] is no longer, in point of fact, a central stake in real political or ideological conflicts.”7 It is thus no surprise that the bicentennial of the French Revolution, taking place at the time communism was unraveling everywhere in Europe, but also in French elections, awkwardly illustrated the growing pregnancy of Furet’s thesis: public commemorations were sometimes oddly trendy, or frankly odd — the Fourteenth of July parade was prepared by Jean-Paul Goude, an artist well known for his advertising photography and films, while the commemoration of the national Battle of Valmy was put in the hands of Buren, a sculptor specializing in vertical stripes — but never popular in the communist sense of the term.8 According to Steven Kaplan, the academic commemorations did not launch radically new research, in spite of the best efforts of the historian Michel Vovelle, a specialist in the French Revolution in the traditional, Marxist style. Kaplan argues that although Vovelle, not Furet, was in charge, it was, ironically, Furet’s critical appraisal of the Revolution and his new interpretations of the event that dominated the academic community. But the overall political context, more than anything, stifled the resumption of any political mythification of the French Revolution: “In the end, the rout of the Jacobino-Marxists owed much more to internal weaknesses and the broader political and cultural conjuncture than to the revisionist onslaught.”9



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The French Revolution was now definitely a “cold” historical subject. This is probably what the French state hoped for in organizing the event at a time when the Communist vote in the nation had considerably declined and Communist participation in the government was moving to a mainly symbolic role; but such a paradoxical result for a massive scholarly commemoration was probably unexpected by its academic architect, Vovelle. Unlike the bicentennial of the American Declaration of Independence, which had impressed observers with its vibrant display of a national “civil religion,” the bicentennial of the French Revolution may be considered to have enshrined the French people’s divorce from their own history, something even the leaders of the French state may not have envisioned.10 One may thus conclude that although those politicians who launch and promote certain historical celebrations may have a personal, or even maybe some degree of historical and historiographical knowledge of the event, generally speaking historians’ interpretations of an event and what actually gets translated by officials and steering committees do not always coincide. Officials read and select what is immediately usable for their purpose; historians, on the other hand, generally do not have any specific reason to gear their research to the spirit of an upcoming celebration  — unless they covet a publishing contract — so the motivations and time frames of both groups are different: they may coincide, or they may not. Worse still, academic narratives of an event may not be compatible with the vision politicians want to offer the public. Or celebrations may highlight the competing historical narratives around an event, complicating any attempt at a clear, national interpretation. The case of the Louisiana Purchase is a fitting illustration of the uneasy, but revealing, relationship between celebrations and professional history, with an added twist. The celebrations of both centennials, 1903 and 2003, were transatlantic affairs, involving two nations, two governments, and, of course, two agendas, but one should not overlook the particular motivations of specific states within the United States as regards these commemorations. Although the field of commemoration studies has been explored by historians in the wake of the “site of memories” investigation conducted by Pierre Nora and his team in France, or in the wake of Michael Kammen’s work on the construction of tradition in the United States, there seems to be no study available of transatlantic commemorations such as the Louisiana Purchase.11 Such a “culture and international

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relations” approach can be related to Akira Iriye’s work on culture and international relations, or to that of Frank A. Ninkovitch on diplomacy and cultural relations.12 Throughout the nineteenth century, the Louisiana Purchase was seen as a central historical event in the United States — less so in France — and that century’s historical narratives culminated in 1889–91 with Henry Adams’s vision of the Purchase as a central event in Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. Soon thereafter, the first centennial celebration in Saint Louis and New Orleans in 1903 corresponded to a moment in American and French history when both nations could treasure a common past for specific political reasons. Later in the twentieth century, however, the Purchase faded from public memory, as no innovative historical research about the event was conducted and leaders in both nations no longer saw any political need to turn the bicentennial into a mutually beneficial commemoration. In this essay, we examine how the Louisiana Purchase was instrumentalized at the beginning of the last century on the basis of a powerful historical narrative and a favorable political context, but was largely forgotten afterward. Both historiographical traditions will be explored, as will commemorations of the event on both sides of the Atlantic.13

The Construction of the Louisiana Purchase Historical Narrative Historical knowledge about the Louisiana Purchase was built on the work of a few historians, starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Alhough, in France, the Purchase paled in comparison with other events of 1803, analysts showed interest in the geopolitical dimensions of this transaction in which the land was ceded first by Spain to France (1800), and then by France to Spain. One case in point is “Max, a cosmopolitan,” who published Coup d’oeil sur l’intérêt de l’Europe, dans les débats actuels du Congrès des Etats-Unis, au sujet de la Louisiane (A Look at Europe’s Interest in the Current Debates of Congress about Louisiana) in May 1803 in Paris. Louisiana had already been sold to the United States, but the booklet obviously was published just as the final treaty was being signed and the author still believed Louisiana to be in French hands with American western interests still clamoring for action in the U.S. Congress. In the wake of a number of French observers who had campaigned for the reconquest of Louisiana in the 1790s, Max insisted that the acquisition of Louisiana would be



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beneficial to France, for many reasons.14 His vision is broadly geopolitical and encompasses relationships between Europe and the New World in general: Louisiana must be preserved as a European colony so that the United States would be restricted in its expansion and be given neighbors that the upstart nation would have to respect. He explains that the Ross resolution in Congress and the agitation in the West are proof of the territorial and political ambitions of new “power.” Max was not alone in voicing such concerns, and similar preoccupations had probably guided Napoleon’s and Talleyrand’s project of recreating the French New World Empire, but by May 1803, with the sale of Louisiana, they no longer were realistic. Napoleon had decided that curbing Britain in Europe was more important than curbing the United States in North America. The sale of Louisiana itself was rationalized by its inventors, Napoleon and Barbé-Marbois (chief negotiator), as the best way to curb the growth of British power in the Americas. As Barbé-Marbois reports in his 1829 narrative of the event, Napoleon justified his decision on 10 April, the day before the official opening of the French-American negotiations, by explaining that selling Louisiana to the United States was a way to take it out of British hands and to secure American political and commercial partnership.15 Yet that did not guarantee that the Napoleonic administration meant to foster trade between the two republics and give up its system of exclusive commerce with its remaining colonies. By contrast, free trade was what Barbé-Marbois, a modern economic liberal, had in mind, at least as he portrayed his own position at the time of writing in 1829. Such a liberal vision (that the sale of Louisiana and free trade would bring about the lasting friendship of the United States and France) echoed that of LouisAndré Pichon, the French chargé d’affaires in Washington from 1800 to 1804 (who was later, like Barbé-Marbois, to have a long civil service and political career under the returned French Bourbons).16 These various contemporary (or quasi-contemporary, as in the case of Barbé-Marbois, who wrote later in his life) French comments and narratives highlight a number of geopolitical questions that the Louisiana Purchase raised in France as regards relationships between France, Europe, and the North American continent: Would the United States continue its expansion westward unhindered? Was it to be the dominant power in the Americas? How could it be countered? Should it be countered or propitiated and turned into an equal economic partner (at least)? American observers typically focused on what the Louisiana Purchase

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brought to the new nation, in terms of future prosperity and expansion,17 though some critical voices, such as Alexander Hamilton’s, insisted that the government should try to “barter with her [Spain] for the Floridas, obviously of far greater value to us than all the immense, undefined region west of the river.”18 Among the first detailed narratives of the Louisiana Purchase by American historians, one may rightly focus on Henry Adams’s History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and History of the United States during the Administrations of James Madison, originally published between 1889 and 1891.19 There were other publications on the Louisiana Purchase at the turn of the nineteenth century, revealing Americans’ interest in the continental expansion of their nation at a time of imperial ambitions, but few have endured so well and retained so much credit with the contemporary historical profession.20 Admittedly Henry Adams stood out among his contemporaries, and one may stop a little here to examine this fascinating figure. Situated halfway between amateur and professional historians, Adams is central to the Louisiana Purchase narrative. John Higham places him within the school of American “amateurs” such as Moses Coit Tyler or Theodore Roosevelt, who published major works on American history during the last quarter of the nineteenth century with no professional training and a conservative interest in the heroic actions of American leaders.21 But Michael Kraus correctly sets Adams apart from these luminaries and devotes a specific chapter to him, as he considers that Adams “may be said to have inaugurated” the scientific period in American historiography.22 This is corroborated by the recent work by Garry Wills, who describes Adams’s early interest in history and historical research, and then his tenure as a professor in medieval history at Harvard, as so many elements in a quasiprofessional career.23 Although Adams belonged to one of the founding families of the United States, he deliberately chose not to study his forbears, but instead Presidents Jefferson and Madison — both staunch democrats and political enemies of his Federalist great-grandfather — in a clear gesture of intellectual independence. Another enduring characteristic of Adams’s historical work is its literary quality: like the French historians Michelet, Renan, and Taine, whom he admired, Adams represented a blend of scholarly qualities typical of the age.24 Like them, he was a writer of national history



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at a time when nations and national histories went hand in hand. But he could remain critical while praising the nation, probably one reason why his work retains its classic status. After the publication of the nine volumes of his History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and History of the United States of America under the Administrations of James Madison, “historical scholars immediately recognized this work as one of the most significant that American had produced.”25 Richard Hofstadter is even more complimentary: “[T]he volumes he produced have been acclaimed  — rightly, I think — as the summit of American achievement in historical writing.”26 The Histories may be criticized, but what comes out as their most outstanding quality is the “handling of diplomatic questions by Adams, who had an excellent knowledge of domestic and foreign manuscript materials.”27 As regards the Louisiana Purchase proper, one can argue that Adams established in his superb work what can be considered the “classic narrative” of this diplomatic event by an American historian (Barbé-Marbois might be given a similar status on the French side).28 What is remarkable in Adams’s case is that the narrative he established became the standard narrative and has not yet been radically displaced from this position. The Louisiana Purchase may be seen as Adams’s intellectual and literary creation, a historical creation so fascinating that it has captivated generations of historians, leading them to repeat the tale with only minor variations. Adams conjures up the key ingredients to the story: First he presents the French efforts to rebuild their empire and the vital connection between Louisiana, Saint-Domingue, and the slave revolution on the French sugar island: The story of Toussaint Louverture has been told almost as often as that of Napoleon, but not in connection with the history of the United States, although Toussaint exercised on their history an influence as decisive as that of any European ruler. His fate placed him at a point where Bonaparte needed absolute control. St. Domingo was the only centre from which the measures needed for rebuilding the French colonial system could radiate. Before Bonaparte could reach Louisiana he was obliged to crush the power of Toussaint. Adams then argues that the Jefferson administration itself was not worried over the news of the retrocession of Louisiana but rather that it had to react to the pressures of the Democratic-Republican westerners on the

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U.S. administration as New Orleans, a vital access to the Gulf of Mexico and national and international trade, was closed off to them by Spanish authorities in October 1802. This action was widely interpreted as a forerunner of the attitude that French authorities would soon take toward the new nation, and Adams writes that Jefferson, always preferring peace to war, chose diplomacy by sending Monroe to Paris with instructions to buy New Orleans and the Floridas from France and to secure New Orleans as a place of deposit if the French would not sell.29 The narrative makes it clear also that the offer of Louisiana came as a complete surprise to the American negotiators; they haggled over the price but not over the boundaries, the Floridas being ostensibly left out of the Purchase. Adams does not directly link the signing of the treaty with the Lewis and Clark expedition, which is mentioned briefly twice, together with other Jefferson-directed expeditions. This is interesting in light of the considerable attention that the Lewis and Clark expedition received on the occasion of its bicentennial (2003–6), a contrast we will discuss later. Adams does say that the expedition “served to prove the immensity of the new world which Jefferson’s government had given to the American people”; however, as if in an afterthought, he later disparages it: Creditable as these expeditions were to American energy and enterprise, they added little to the stock of science and wealth. Many years must elapse before the vast region west of the Mississippi could be brought within reach of civilization. The crossing of the continent was a great feat, but was nothing more. The French explorers had performed feats almost as remarkable long before; . . . for many years to come progress must still centre in the old thirteen States of the Union.30 Although Frederick Jackson Turner had not yet set out his frontier thesis, certainly a pessimistic Adams was presenting a position that, to some degree, conflicted with the exceptionalist and nationalistic overtones that national construction was taking at the time in the United States: according to him, Lewis and Clark should not be seen as the discoverers of the continent; the westward movement was not inevitable and still distant. Yet Adams is enthusiastic about the long-term value of the treaty, if not the small expedition that followed in its wake. Talking about Livingston, whose real role in the treaty is not often recognized, he adds:



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[H]e had achieved the greatest diplomatic success recorded in American history. Neither Franklin, Jay, Gallatin, nor any other American diplomatist was so fortunate as Livingston for the immensity of his results compared with the paucity of his means. Other treaties of immense consequence have been signed by American representatives  — the treaty of alliance with France; the treaty of peace with En­ gland which recognized independence; the treaty of Ghent; the treaty which ceded Florida . . . but in none of these did the United States government get so much for so little. The annexation of Louisiana was an event so portentous as to defy measurement; it gave a new face to politics, and ranked in historical importance next to the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution,  — events of which it was the logical outcome; but as a matter of diplomacy it was unparalleled, because it cost almost nothing.31 Why did it give “a new face to politics”? Adams is not immediately specific, but in two later chapters he describes the process of ratification of the treaty in Congress, and the subsequent Louisiana legislation, as a turning point in constitutional interpretation from strict construction, which Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans had heretofore supported, to broad construction.32 The Louisiana treaty was the opportunity that enabled the federal government to show its scope of action: “[T]he essential point was that for the first time in the national history all parties agreed in admitting that the government could govern.” But governing meant rapidly exceeding its powers, as French-speaking Louisianians were kept away from self-government until a similar number of English-speaking inhabitants established themselves in the region: “Louisiana received a government in which its people, who had been solemnly promised all the rights of American citizens, were set apart, not as citizens, but as subjects lower in the political scale than the meanest tribes of Indians, whose right to self-government was never questioned.”33 While introducing a critical perspective into the national and political interpretation of the Louisiana Purchase, Adams keeps his focus on the international and diplomatic aftermath of the Purchase, showing the determination with which the American government tried to secure the Floridas in the succeeding years, a harbinger of the expansionist mood that was to last into the 1840s and beyond.34 Adams’s brilliant, though critical, national narrative thus gave a central role to the Louisiana Pur-

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chase. The next decade was to see the first centennial of the Purchase celebrated by France and the United States. Both countries were then in a mood of national affirmation and pride that could flourish in such public displays.

1903: The First Centennial Commemorating historical events is as old as organized society, but an increase in celebrations occurred in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century as nationalism developed. The United States made a national effort to turn the Fourth of July into a true holiday, and, during the same period, cemeteries of the Civil War were embellished and open to visitors; these were new ways to affirm national unity and pride. In France, a similar trend occurred for comparable reasons with the celebration of Bastille Day and of Jeanne d’Arc. This evolution can be related to the contemporary surge of a national history in each nation. The period was rich enough in Franco-American historical dates to provoke a large number of common celebrations, from Yorktown (1881) to Mission Rochambeau in 1902 and Mission Champlain ten years later, on each occasion with exchanges of statues and reciprocal visits of officials: Washington and Lafayette had their own statue in Paris in 1900.35 In the United States, either groups such as the Daughters of American Revolution or rich individuals initiated all these events, and these initiatives were reciprocated by the French government. The American motto was “America does not forget,” which provided a means to strengthen a traditional friendship by stressing the role of France in the early days of the United States and to prove that Americans, too, had a memory. On the French side, such events gave officials an opportunity to promote the greatness of their country, without which the American Republic might have evolved differently. These events, which had minimal press coverage, did not attract a lot of people in either of the two countries, but the promoters of these exchanges did rely on the work of some historians.36 The first Louisiana Purchase celebration must be seen as an American initiative and a French response. Strangely enough, scholars and pundits have forgotten this centennial, but in 1903 it gave Americans an opportunity to look back on an event that was seen as central in terms of future national development as the outcome of the War of Independence, maybe more. Louisiana had been so suddenly appropriated by the United States that the new territory became the symbol of American expansionism with



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radical consequences for Native Americans; through the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Purchase may be seen to have led to the Civil War, the immediate cause of which was the extension of slavery in the new states carved out of Louisiana. Without Louisiana, American history would have been profoundly different. Whether in the sale of Louisiana to the United States or in the gift of the Statue of Liberty to her American sister republic, France’s acts had unanticipated successful consequences, and they became powerful American icons and symbols. For all these reasons, the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase had to be largely celebrated. A Buoyant America in Saint Louis The Louisiana Purchase celebration was mostly an American affair, intended to display the successes and accomplishments of the country since 1803. “The 1904 World’s Fair, also called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, was held to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the purchase of Louisiana from France by the United States” in Saint Louis, which had been one of the starting points of the exploration of the West. As was mentioned in the Report of the Special Committee on the Centennial of the Louisiana: The movement for a celebration of this great international event had its inception among the people inhabiting the various States and Territories carved out the vast area acquired in 1803. The movement resulted in a convention of delegates duly appointed by official authority, and representing 15 States and 2 Territories. This convention met in St. Louis on January 10, 1899, to consider the most appropriate way of celebrating and erecting a permanent memorial of this remarkable event in American history. It was unanimously determined to hold an international exposition during the centennial year of this purchase. The city of St. Louis was solicited to inaugurate the enterprise.37 The following year, the project had been largely welcomed and supported by many state legislatures throughout the country, by labor unions, and by the leading commercial organizations, as well as by the press. The aid of the federal government was solicited, and in June 1900, the House of Representatives provided $10 million for “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company.” Such a process was comparable to what had been done for the Philadelphia Exposition in 1877 and the Columbian Exposition in 1893. A minority among the representatives contested the right of the

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federal government to go into the exposition business, but they acknowledged the magnitude of the Louisiana event. This was not a grassroots movement; it originated with small groups of informed and educated citizens, and it reached neither workers nor African Americans.38 The Special Committee of the House explained the high stakes of such a celebration: No event in the life of our nation except the achievement of national independence has contributed so much to the peace, happiness, prosperity, power, and commanding influence of the American people as the purchase of the territory of Louisiana. In the evolution of the North American Republic the acquisition of this territory outranks every other event. Since then we have sown that territory with enlightened endeavor, created an empire, greater in area than the territory comprising the original States, into fifteen noble democracies, and found the Mississippi River, the original primary object of the purchase, a mighty weapon of power in the preservation of the Union.39 Steeped in an optimism that irresistibly calls to mind Frederick Jackson Turner’s work, the celebration signified American national pride, and, though no foreign country could challenge it, other nations could be invited to admire its accomplishments. President Roosevelt, himself a historian and a specialist of western expansion, was a strong supporter of the Saint Louis Fair, and he stressed “the greatest instance of expansion in our history,” but he was more aware than Congress of its international dimension: “We earnestly hope that foreign nations will appreciate the deep interest our country takes in this Exposition, and our view of its importance from every standpoint, and that they will participate in securing its success.”40 The fair was to open on 1 May 1903, but the opening was delayed for one year, due to financial reasons. Nevertheless, the dedication of the exhibition took place in Saint Louis on that first date, and the Purchase itself was celebrated during this ceremony, with speeches from American officials and from some foreign emissaries. However, in 1904, when the Universal Fair opened, the Purchase was forgotten, in spite of its being the official denomination. Many French visitors were enthusiastic about what they saw, but no one noticed the French origin of Louisiana or commented on the sale. Everybody was enthralled by the modernism and amused by the invention of hot dog:



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In a golden age of invention, discovery, and exploration, the World’s Fair celebrated the cultural, industrial, and social riches and curiosities of a new world. Thomas Edison oversaw the proper set-up of the electrical exhibits, and the Palace of Electricity covered seven acres devoted to the wonders of this new marvel. A Moving Picture Theatre gave many Americans their first glimpse of the new medium, and for many the fair was the first opportunity to communicate across thousands of miles by wireless or telephone.41 New Orleans to Reinvent Its French Roots The Historical Society of New Orleans could not accept having the Louisiana Purchase celebrated only in Saint Louis and proposed its own celebration in New Orleans, on the exact centennial of the sale: 20 December 1903. The first proposal came in 1900, at the same time that the project of the Universal exhibition was first put together. On 20 December 1902, Alcée Fortier, the president of this society, recalled the process to the French consul: “The Historical Society of New Orleans, understanding the importance of the cession of Louisiana to the United States, thought that the celebration of such an event has to be organized at New Orleans, in the Cabildo building, where was located the transfer of this province by Spain to France on November 30, 1803, then the transfer by France to the United Sates, on December 20, 1803.” In 1900, the legislature of Louisiana accepted this proposition, and in July 1902, it appropriated $25,000 to the Historical Society for this very purpose. A thirty-member committee was constituted and an invitation sent to the president of the United States as well as to representatives of France and Spain. Alcée Fortier had good hopes that the U.S. Congress and the municipal council of New Orleans would contribute to the event. He also conveyed to the consul the friendly sentiments of the French-speaking population in Louisiana and seemed to be sure that he would receive a positive answer from France.42 The Daily Picayune and the Daily Democrat gave their support to the initiative, and both editorials reminded their readers of the historical part of the cession. So, given these American initiatives, the celebration of the Louisiana Purchase centennial occurred in two steps: first, on 1 May 1903 in Saint Louis with President Roosevelt, who invited all foreign ambassadors for a national event; and second, on 18–20 December 1903, in New Orleans at the state level, but with a naval parade and a special invitation sent to Spanish and French emissaries.

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France’s Answer: “Enough, but Not Too Much” The French government had no policy toward the centennial of the sale of her old colony, but it did agree with Barbé-Marbois’ thesis, which had become nearly an official position: the sale was a good thing. Jules Cambon, then U.S. ambassador, was contacted in July 1901 by American officials from the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company; they wanted to erect a statue of Napoleon in the park of the fair, and before proceeding they preferred some sort of an agreement with the French representative. Cambon explained the issue to his minister: We don’t have anything to do with that. But if this project were carried out, I have to make you aware of this fact from a French point of view, for it’s essential that when it becomes public the French press and public opinion neither misunderstand it nor comment upon it in a way that discredits us in American eyes. For them, the France of Louis XVI, who gave them Lafayette and Rochambeau, was the same France when Napoleon sold Louisiana; and it’s important for us to understand this sentiment in France and to find a way to be honored by it.43 In 1903, when Jean-Jules Jusserand, the new French ambassador to the United States and a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, wrote for the first time about the Louisiana Purchase Fair, Delcassé’s answer followed Cambon’s line: participation without any great expectation. Theophile Delcassé did not have a specific policy, and he trusted the ambassador, who was allowed relative autonomy in dealing with Americans about this event. Certainly Jusserand had read Barbé-Marbois’ and Henry Adams’s books. Such an attitude could not bring any disturbing consequence, as the French public was not aware of what was going on during this American celebration: indeed, the celebration was totally ignored by the French press. The only difficulty came later in the year, when the Historical Society of New Orleans officially invited French president Émile Loubet to come to town to celebrate the centennial along with President Roosevelt. Delcassé used the word “measure” to justify his refusal: for him there was a sort of balance to respect. In 1902, the celebration of Rochambeau had been important, with a large French delegation going to the United States and vice versa, but Rochambeau was unquestionably a hero for both countries, and the role of France in his time was noble; the cession of Louisiana had



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been reasonable and legitimate but could not be celebrated as an event of similar importance. President Loubet could not come to the United States simply to please the Historical Society of New Orleans. For the same reason, there was a small internal debate in Paris to decide which vessel the French navy would send to participate in the naval parade: it could neither be a fleet, nor too old a ship, and it had to come from close by to avoid too great a cost. Finally, the modern cruiser Jurien de la Gravière came from Haiti to New Orleans. France did take part in the celebration but kept a low profile: “enough but not too much.” In fact, neither president went to New Orleans; both of them claimed that important legislative debates kept them away, but that was only a pretense: E. Loubet had no reason to come, and Roosevelt probably wanted to avoid a visit to a Democratic state. L’Abeille was furious at Roosevelt’s refusal: “The surprise and the indignation of our officials, especially of our governor, in the face of this deplorable indifference, is quite understandable . . . we have to protest.”44 But in Saint Louis, as in New Orleans, the French ambassador had a prominent position and did his best to honor it. Because many had been invited, quite a few foreign officials came for the dedication day of the fair: “Diplomats Lend Pomp and Glitter to International Day Ceremony”; emissaries from France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Costa-Rica, Chili, China, and Venezuela were in Saint Louis, but only two representatives of these countries made a speech.45 Diplomatically, the French position was the strongest and the easiest, and Jusserand registered no complaint when he had to speak on the second day instead of the first, as he had previously been told. In New Orleans, the only foreign representatives came from France and Spain. The Spanish representatives could not say much and had to keep their speeches strictly historical; the Mexican representative was constrained from celebrating American expansionism, so Jusserand alone was able to speak freely. In Saint Louis in April, the celebration went smoothly during two days in the Liberal Arts Building, with 1,300 spectators, devoted to the dedication speeches given by President Roosevelt and ex-president Cleveland; foreign representatives from France and Mexico gave short banquet discourses. Roosevelt, as usual, defended a historical and expansionist position insisted upon by the New York Times: “But the inference of the President is, nevertheless, correct. We shall establish self-government in the Philippines as surely as we have established it in the Valley of the Mississippi and for the same reasons.”46 Roosevelt was well aware — as his own

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works testify and also as a result of Adams’s and Turner’s theses — of the actual interpretation of the Purchase. Cleveland was the most applauded and delivered an electoral and humorous speech, as he hoped at that time to be nominated again as the Democratic presidential candidate. Jusserand admired the former, but thought the latter “could have given a better part to France”; on the first of May, the international day, the hall was less crowded and noisy, but the French ambassador was then the prominent speaker, and he expressed his esteem to Spain’s Ambassador Ojeda, who was obliged to keep a low profile. Papers such as the Saint Louis Post Dispatch and the New York Times gave sufficient space to excerpts from the French and Spanish ambassadors’ conversations. In New Orleans in December, the atmosphere was more festive, with many people in the streets, a bright naval parade on the Mississippi with three American vessels around the French Jurien de la Gravière: navy bands played, and there were many exchanges among the officers. Banquets and receptions followed. Although presidents were absent, as were top officials (Admiral Wise represented the federal government), there were still many luminaries: the Louisiana governor, the French ambassador and consul, the New Orleans mayor and Louisiana congressmen, the Spanish consul, navy officers, and New Orleans’s leading citizens. As a result, the three days were successful in promoting Louisiana and in keeping French friendship active; a historical museum was inaugurated, ceremonies were held at the Cabildo, and a High Mass was celebrated in the Saint Louis Cathedral.47 On both occasions, Jusserand’s position was a clever one: admiration for the success story of the Louisiana Purchase and, at the same time, illustration and defense of French colonial policy. Such a balanced explanation avoided any regrets about the cession and promoted present France’s strength and accomplishments: This huge region, given over by us for a trifling sum, is now the richest part of the American Republic. We can omit its endless agricultural resources but therein is Colorado, a State that produces alone more gold production than all California. The annual output of this very State is largely superior to the final sum we were paid for the cession. The French representative comes in this place, which had been French, with a sentiment of admiration for what you have done



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there and without any regret. Frenchmen have always approved the cession. As for his own country, if she has surrendered those immense domains, she has, on the other hand, found under different skies other territories for the peaceful employment of her inexhaustible energy, with results, which will forever redound to the praise of the Government of the Republic. And, as for Louisiana itself, France rests satisfied with remembering that she could not have dreamed of more friendly heirs.48 Colonial optimism was at its heyday: speeches by Jusserand and Theodore Roosevelt were loaded with historical examples. For both, the Purchase was unavoidable and had been a success; both, with nuances, could celebrate it enthusiastically, all the more so as France could compensate for the sale with its new colonial empire; for her it was the perfect way to have a strong part in the celebration. American expansion and French generosity could still be united around the celebration of a diplomatic event.

The Decline of the Louisiana Purchase in Public History and Memory After 1904, the Louisiana Purchase did not give rise to challenging new research in either country. A few people were still interested in the former French territory and wrote about it, but they followed the usual pattern of explanation.49 Coming in the wake of Barbé-Marbois and Henry Adams, later narratives strike the reader as something of a letdown, whatever their often admirable qualities. This is principally the case with Elijah Wilson Lyon, a prolific writer on the subject.50 Lyon is fascinated by the event and its protagonists but somehow does not seem able to inject new vision into his presentation of the Purchase and relevant negotiations. As a result, his interpretation remains narrowly diplomatic and his contribution is that of an elegant writer and thorough researcher, confirming Napoleon’s determined intent to reconquer the former French empire in Louisiana and Saint-Domingue, documenting French elite enthusiasm for the retrocession of Louisiana, highlighting Livingston’s role in spreading the idea of a possible sale of Louisiana to France, and spelling out his own minor disagreements with Barbé-Marbois’ narrative, clearly his model.51 Later, Lyon’s fascination with Marbois’ narrative led him to write a

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full-length biography of the moderate French civil servant in which he recapitulated his analysis of the Louisiana Purchase. Like Henry Adams, he thinks that, “The cession of Louisiana was one of the most important events in modern history. One could make a good case for the thesis that it was one of the most significant acts of Napoleon’s career. Livingston, Monroe, and Barbé-Marbois all realized at the time that they were principals in a great drama.”52 But Marbois’ focus, unlike that of Henry Adams, is on French diplomacy, not on the consequences of the event for the United States, and his analysis does not add anything new to the interpretation of the event for the American nation. Lyon was honest in his admiration and criticism of Marbois’ work, which after all had been penned before professional history came into its own, and is yet complete with all sorts of relevant documents in its appendixes.

The Second Generation: The Louisiana Purchase, the West and National Expansion One has to wait until the 1970s to see a new surge of interest in the Louisiana Purchase that moved away from the international dimension of the event that had been a major element in the late nineteenth century and toward greater emphasis on the westward expansion the Purchase made possible in later years. This is the case with John Keats’s 1973 Eminent Domain: The Louisiana Purchase and the Making of America, which does not qualify as original research but puts forward the idea that Americans jumped at the offer of Louisiana because it corresponded to an American Dream.53 This close connection between the Louisiana Purchase, the West, and national identity in a Turnerian tradition is also to be found in a much more scientific account of the Louisiana story, that by Marshall Sprague in 1974. Sprague makes no secret of the teleological underpinning of his hypothesis: “With the passage of time, the Louisiana Purchase emerges as a happening that had as much to do with forming the national character and creating the United States of today as the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.”54 Unlike Adams’s, Sprague’s narrative is not anchored in Europe-based diplomatic negotiations but in the long American history of Louisiana as a colonial, western territory with its beginnings in 1541. Sprague insists that the sending of Monroe to Paris coincided with Jefferson’s putting forward his plans of western exploration:



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On January 13, the Senate approved sending Monroe to Paris. These favorable actions convinced Jefferson that it was politically safe at last to give the nation some inkling of his secret continental dreams. His veiled method of revelation was to propose the same transcontinental exploration that he had discussed with George Rogers Clark in 1783, with John Ledyard in 1788, and with André Michaux in 1793. Those discussions had come to nothing. This time he was prepared to put the scheme through. During 1802, he and his young private secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, had spent many evenings enjoying vicarious travel while poring over masses of books, maps and reports on Louisiana that Jefferson had been collecting since the start of his Paris residence.55 The same clear connection between continental expansion is made later in the book as Sprague imagines Monroe’s reaction to being offered the whole of Louisiana: “He was seeing suddenly with Jefferson’s eyes Jonathan Carver’s ‘stately temples’ rising above the Falls of St. Anthony . . . , and most of all, the great river and its branches unifying the wilderness and waiting for future generations of Americans to push on west and enjoy their bounty.”56 With the 1990s came a number of publications on the subject, perhaps because Louisiana itself as a former colonial territory was celebrating the tricentennial of its foundation by the French.57 After years in the doldrums, maybe early American diplomacy was also forging ahead with new names, and hopefully, new ideas.58 Though written in a traditional vein, Tucker and Henrickson’s 1990 Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson certainly reconciles diplomatic and political analyses with the modern historiography of the early republic. Tucker and Henrickson — like Hamilton, Adams, and other contemporary observers — focus on the diplomatic dimension of the event: they describe the Louisiana Purchase as resulting, not from Thomas Jefferson’s halfhearted threats of alliance with the British, but from a sequence of events that benefited the United States by chance.59 Still, they contend, Jefferson’s diplomacy was brilliant as he consistently and avowedly “played for time,” waiting for war to resume in Europe and for the Leclerc expedition irrevocably to meet defeat at the hands of the black rebels on Saint-Domingue. According to Tucker and Henrickson, however, such a strategy displayed less independence of mind and action than nationalists such as Alexander Hamilton would have hoped and might have been desirable.60

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The two historians’ best contribution to the Louisiana Purchase narrative comes after the Purchase proper, when they deal with “the gambit for West Florida,” an aftermath of the Purchase to which Adams also devotes a lot of space but without really highlighting its long-term stakes. Tucker and Henrickson turn the Florida controversy into a real opportunity to debate early American expansionism, and more particularly, Jefferson’s ambitions for the West. Jefferson had no grounds for claiming that West Florida was part of the deal, and yet he lost no time in doing so. “To continue to insist upon interpreting a treaty in a manner that was plainly at odds with the interpretation given by the parties to that treaty bordered on the absurd,” Tucker and Henrickson admit, and they add in some bafflement: “Yet this remained the position of the United States until the Madison administration finally occupied the territory and incorporated it into the Union.” To solve what they see as a riddle, the two authors turn to Jefferson’s “appetite for expansion.”61 Tucker and Henrickson think that Jefferson’s expansionist passion, as revealed through the Florida controversy, was not pragmatic, but idealistic: it enabled the American leader to project the American experiment in liberty into the future, as this experiment should not be contained within the present limits of the United States. Jefferson, they say, was not worried by the prospect of sister republics in the Far West: that was merely a possibility to toy with, not a threat. The real threat would have been the continued presence of the Spanish or any nonrepublican power, in North America, which would require the United States to invest in an army and war, and limit the amount of land necessary to the expansion of virtuous agriculturalists. “Expansion,” they conclude, “was at the center of Jefferson’s reason of state. It constituted the great necessity of his statecraft, one that was no less imperious because he was ultimately unwilling to employ force in its pursuit.”62 Although the original date of “manifest destiny” is hard to agree on, given the constant appetite for western land in American history, Tucker and Henrickson nevertheless make a good case for 1803 — not as the year when Americans met their destiny, but as the year when Thomas Jefferson launched federally sponsored expansion with both a geopolitical and a political design for the ultimate American West. The Louisiana Purchase was also studied through the expansionist lens in the 1994 Le ferment nationaliste.63 This volume contributes to the Louisiana Purchase narrative by connecting the rising nationalism and the expansionist vision of the future of the United States: Americans’ belief in their right to contiguous territories fuelled their budding national-



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ist sentiment. In response to Tucker and Henrickson’s disappointment at Jefferson’s apparent pusillanimity in the Louisiana crisis of early 1803, Le ferment nationaliste suggests that Jefferson believed in the juggernaut of American popular expansion, and later events, such as the creation of the state of Texas, certainly proved him right.64 Jefferson was not simply an idealist in his vision of western expansion. He was also highly pragmatic and relied on a combination of state initiative and popular realization to carry out his expansionist vision. Unlike Tucker and Henrickson, Le ferment nationaliste then connects the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Louisiana Purchase, not to celebrate the pioneering spirit of the two explorers or the scientific acumen of Thomas Jefferson, but mainly to suggest that this expedition meant staking a claim to the sovereignty of the West as far as the Pacific Ocean.65 The expedition is thus encompassed within the broader framework of the Louisiana Purchase. The conclusion is that the Lewis and Clark expedition had as great an impact on the American national psyche as on Jefferson’s geopolitical agenda: echoing Tucker and Henrickson, but from a different angle, the book suggests this impact paved the way for the concept of manifest destiny (a phrase that is not used) both at the state and the popular levels.66 Finally, one may say that Le ferment nationaliste was an attempt to adapt the perspective of revisionist diplomatic historians, such as W. A. Williams and Walter LaFeber, to early American history. As a result, the Louisiana Purchase is also presented as a source of disorder in the West: Jefferson and Madison immediately start planning the annexation of West Florida; Indians and French-speaking Louisianians are supposed to assimilate, not to resist, American expansion, and not even to express their cultural differences.67 The analyses in the book nevertheless did not change the basic outline of the Louisiana Purchase narrative, but merely expanded the reflection on its impact and consequences. Connecting the Louisiana Purchase with the West and expansion, these publications, whether aimed at the general public or a scholarly audience, laid the groundwork for the later reconsideration of the Purchase at the time of the bicentennial.

French Perspective on the Sale of Louisiana, 1990s–Early 2000s Before moving to the bicentennial proper, it must be noted that the Louisiana sale narrative also experienced a minor revival in France in the

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1990s and in the first years of the twenty-first century. The Abbé Garnier’s highly useful reference work Bonaparte et la Louisiane was published in 1992.68 Garnier does not suggest new motives for the sale of Louisiana by France to the United States, but he documents French interest in Louisiana at the time of the Revolution and the Empire; he thoroughly analyzes the expedition led by Général Victor that was to recover Louisiana as well as the arrival and adjustment of Préfet Laussat in New Orléans.69 Although Napoleon could not have held on to Louisiana, he intended to restore French power in the Northern Hemisphere, and was not reticent about the means: Garnier thus makes a definitive case for French interest in North America under the Consulate. According to Lahlou, writing in the Revue du Souvenir napoléonien, Garnier also corrects French perceptions of the sale as a mistake that Napoleon could have been avoided. Garnier documents American hostility in the West that would probably have made the Victor expedition to Louisiana very difficult: the sale of Louisiana was the only reasonable and realistic option left to Napoleon in the spring of 1803, and as Barbé-Marbois and Lyon had noted before, it preserved friendship between France and the United States while preventing an alliance between the United States and Britain.70 Although Garnier, Lentz, and Lahlou do not radically revise the narrative of the Louisiana sale as presented by Barbé-Marbois and Lyon, they replace it within the larger and complex context of Napoleon’s colonial ambitions in the New World, something Lentz is particularly successful in doing.71

The Coming of the Bicentennial: Revising National Myths, Opening Perspectives Thus, from the 1990s there was a clear effort by historians to rejuvenate and problematize the classic narrative of the Louisiana Purchase through new insights and new historiographic stances: yet as the Louisiana bicentennial celebrations approached, few works were available at first to narrate the Purchase innovatively.72 Jon Kukla’s and Roger G. Kennedy’s books came out in 2003, but Peter J. Kastor’s was only released in 2004 while other books came out still later.73 Both Kukla and Kennedy challenge the traditional narrative of the Louisiana Purchase: Kukla focuses on the usually neglected role of Spain as a still powerful neighbor of the United States in the 1780s and 1790s, as well as on the opposition to the Purchase by New Englanders. Thus his book presents the Purchase nei-



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ther as preordained nor as universally supported in the early American republic. Kennedy looks back at the Purchase and very critically assesses what it has destroyed, instead of emphasizing it as the engine of national construction. The collection of essays edited by Williams, Bolton, and Whayne takes Native Americans to center stage in the story of the Purchase, in sharp contrast to traditional narratives. In the same way, the classic diplomatic narrative — still to be found in the books by Kukla, Fleming, and Lewis — was mainly limited to the introduction of The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation, a collaborative effort edited by Peter J. Kastor. The spirit of Kastor’s book is typical of the recent Louisiana Purchase scholarly literature in the sense that he brings in new historiographical perspectives, such as American Indian history or the New Western history, to the interpretation of the 1803 diplomatic event. Thus we will pause to examine it at some length. As Kastor writes in his introduction to this work: “ ‘Louisiana Purchase’ actually has two different usages. . . . First the term applies to the agreement by which France sold its possessions on the North American mainland to the United States. Second, the Louisiana Purchase has acquired a more colloquial meaning that refers to the land itself.” If one follows the second definition, that of a large geographical area, “a rough triangle, with the Mississippi River, the Rocky Mountains, and the U.S.-Canadian border forming its outlines,” with a wide array of different cultures in it, one must admit this area has indirectly received a large degree of attention from historical scholars in the past decade through the “New Western history” pioneered and promoted by Richard White, Clyde A. Milner II, and Patricia Nelson Limerick, among others.74 The New Western historians have indeed managed to “readdress and rework the entire frameworks of western American significance,” and to cast a critical look at western founding myths.75 For the past fifteen years or so, they have reexamined the American West, leaving aside “the triumphal account of an advancing empire, of the development of a mythic garden, and the nineteenth century” to “look at the grimmer side of a story of conquest, tally the human and environmental waste involved, study the victims of the advance of empire and those neglected in the storytelling, analyze intercultural relations, and examine the twentieth-century West.”76 Thus they offer a fascinating angle through which to study the Louisiana Purchase in a broader perspective. Peter J. Kastor’s paper in The Louisiana Purchase, “Dehahuit and the Question of Change in North America,” testifies to the influence of this

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new approach: through the example of Dehahuit’s quandary when the French decided to sell to the Americans, Kastor seeks to understand “what the Louisiana Purchase meant to other Indians, because Dehahuit’s experience was not unique. . . . Many concluded that the decision meant nothing, and rightly so, for throughout much of the North American interior, it was Indians — not the Americans, the Spanish, or the French — who exercised sovereignty.”77 Thus the history of the Louisiana Purchase is being rejuvenated through the perspective of Native Americans and other, non-Anglo people.78 The reconceptualization of western history is now established, and existing works on Louisiana itself as a colonial territory have now taken all these dimensions into account.79 And this brings us back to the first part of Peter J. Kastor’s definition of the Louisiana Purchase as an “agreement”: How can the history of this agreement be revamped beyond the now well-established diplomatic narrative? A new focus should be on the period when the agreement took place — a brief interval of peace in Europe and the Atlantic world before another long period of war — and on the place that was really at stake in the 1803 negotiation, New Orleans, its port, and its close relations with the troubled Caribbean region. Louisiana at the time of the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic wars, with its large slave population, is seen by many recent historians as a key place in the Caribbean basin at a time when the French Revolution, and then the Haitian Revolution, had a serious impact on the economy and the society of the various European colonies in the region, eventually forcing some countries to reconsider their imperial ambitions (Britain) or leading to a reorganization of the economy of colonies such as Cuba. Within this very Atlantic perspective, Louisiana at the time of the Purchase finds itself connected, not so much to American nationhood and western expansion, as to the American South as a specific region, to Saint-Domingue and Haiti, and more generally, to the military and political events that raged in the Caribbean and throughout the Atlantic world during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. Historians thus focus on Louisiana’s rich and intriguing set of race relations, which question our assumptions on slavery and race relations in the rest of North America. Paul Lachance has long demonstrated the key link between the Haitian Revolution and the development of New Orleans as city with specific race relations while Jo Zitomersky ponders the nature of the growing rigidity of race relations in the state of Louisiana after 1803.80 But the link between Louisiana, Caribbean studies, and Atlantic history was brought to the fore in two recent collections of essays, one edited by



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David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, the other by David Geggus.81 These new Atlantic, cultural, racial, and political perspectives are bound to generate interest in the Louisiana Purchase for some time to come, not directly in the agreement itself, but through the renewed contextualization they offer to the signing of the treaty. One good example of this multilayered approach is to be found in the CD The Louisiana Purchase, published by the Deep South Regional Humanities Center at Tulane University.82 Yet these historiographical revisions did not reverberate in the very low-key public celebrations of the 2003 bicentennial.

2003: A Different Atmosphere for a Celebration There was no objective reason for the 2003 Louisiana bicentennial celebration to be either meaningful or successful. Today in France there is very little interest in a forgotten history that cannot be celebrated with glory and has no connection to current French problems or historiography: as Cécile Vidal and Gilles Havard reminded readers recently in their Histoire de l’Amérique française, when colonial history means anything at all in France, it means Africa and Asia, not America. In the United States, the 1904 optimism about the opening of the West has vanished; the old Louisiana Territory is no longer a focus of national ambition, and the city of Saint Louis is decaying, with half the population it had in the 1920s. As the International Herald Tribune reports: [O]n the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, an event that doubled the size of the United States and that many historians rank second only to the writing of the Constitution in importance to the country, much of the land in that deal is being drained of people. And the Missouri, the chocolate-colored artery that gives life to the Upper Plains, is a river in transition. . . . More than 60 percent of the counties in the Great Plains lost population in the last census. An area nearly equal to the Louisiana Purchase now meets the 19th-century definition that some historians used for frontier, with six people or fewer per square mile.83 For these reasons, France and the United States had little to celebrate around Louisiana in 2003. Their mutual indifference to the event was strengthened by the current diplomatic crisis between the two countries caused by France’s hostile reaction to the United States’ decision to launch a war in Iraq.

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As a result, anyone looking for French Web sites on the Louisiana Purchase in 2003 was disappointed. The site of the Fondation Napoléon, a major private institution on Napoleonic studies, did not even list 1803 as an outstanding date: and, after all, selling Louisiana certainly would not rank among Napoleon’s accomplishments. Recent publications on Napoleon and his age were equally discreet: Jacques-Olivier Boudon only mentions the official date of the Louisiana treaty (3 May 1803) in the chronology in his Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire (Paris: Perrin, Tempus, 2000), while Thierry Lentz quips: “Il n’y a pas lieu de s’étendre ici sur l’affaire de la Louisiane. Si elle a pris de puis une certaine importance, c’est au regard de ce que sont devenues les relations franco-américaines.” (There is no reason for spending too much time on the subject of Louisiana. If it has become important, it is because French-American relations are important.)84 Both the American embassy in France and the French Ministry of Culture maintained sites on the subject: but the Ministry of Culture’s site was slow to become operational (www.louisiana.culture.fr); whereas the United States embassy site (www.amb-usa.fr/ca/louisianapurchase/ geo.htm) mainly offered useful links to American sites.85 Eventually, one major conference was held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in France. A survey of American Web sites was conducted by Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec for the French electronic journal Transatlantica in 2003. This is what he concluded: The number of Web sites that refer directly or indirectly to the Louisiana Purchase has grown dramatically in the past couple of years. Most, however, have a tendency to replicate each other in terms of contents and images. . . . Many are just calendars of events and share an emphasis on tourism and education. Most Web pages originate from the state of Louisiana per se and rarely extend beyond Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Missouri. In other states carved out of the Louisiana Purchase, webmasters are busy commemorating, first and foremost, the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition.86 Some of the sites did improve in late 1803 and the following years, but that does not detract from the fact that at the time of the bicentennial, little had been done. One of the sites claiming to be the official Web site (www.louisianapurchase2003.com/home.cfm) gave information in early 2003 on a large array of celebrations.87 These remained centered on Louisiana and were to include “a re-enactment of the signing of the Louisiana



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Purchase” in December with “President George W. Bush, the President of France and the King of Spain as guests.” Indeed, although Congress established a Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Commission in 2002 and urged it “to be inclusive of all Americans,” the specific Louisiana Purchase celebrations remained centered on and around New Orleans and the main impetus for the celebrations appears to be the State of Louisiana, in its constant quest for new tourist attractions, a mainstay of its economy.88 Louisiana did manage, however, to offer a number of quality exhibitions at the Historic New Orleans Collection, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Louisiana State Museum, and the New Orleans Public Library, some of which are still available on Web sites or as catalogues.89 These exhibitions, together with a number of major scientific conferences relating to the Purchase that were held in New Orleans, established the academic standing of the celebration. But although the Louisiana Purchase transferred what were to become twelve other states apart from the current Louisiana (Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Wyoming, and South Dakota), these states did not launch similarly vast programs of celebrations.90 Yet 2003 was undeniably taken up by the other 1803 bicentennial event, that commemorating the launching of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which drew much more public and national attention in the United States, an observation corroborated by the many sites, celebrations, and publications on the subject. The two are of course connected. For most Americans, the national meaning of the Louisiana Purchase lies in the fact that it opened the West to settlement, as the Committee on Resources of the House of Representatives acknowledged in July 2002: “The Louisiana Purchase helped shape the American destiny. Commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase and the related opening of the West can enhance public understanding of the impact of the democratic westward expansion of American society.”91 As a result, communities identify better with the latter event, with its clear nationalist and domestic repercussions, than with the former, a complex diplomatic act with international and environmental repercussions. What was to be the climax of the American celebrations — the 20 December reenactment of the 1803 signing ceremony that transferred the Louisiana Territory to the United States, with President George Bush, President Jacques Chirac, and King Juan Carlos of Spain in attendance — 

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never took place.92 Authorities in Louisiana initially objected to Chirac’s participating at the height of the Franco-American diplomatic crisis in the spring of 2003, and the tension never abated on this issue, either at the local or the national level. When Jacques Chirac met George Bush in New York on 23 September, Chirac was not issued an official invitation to the event. Bush did not go either, and there was no point in Juan Carlos attending. The celebration thus lost whatever international dimension it may ever have had and was definitely limited to a series of local events aimed at the more or less educated tourist.93

Conclusion The Louisiana Purchase offers the example of an event that fails to inspire historians today as much as does a far less important event, the Lewis and Clark expedition, which should be studied within the Louisiana Purchase framework, not separately. Neither does the Louisiana Purchase, even with its recent historiographical revisions, resonate with the political elite that plans celebrations. As an international and diplomatic event, it is unlikely to generate broad interest among the often parochial Americans, while it never had much impact on the French, who tend to view it as an insignificant aspect of their national history. Studying the historiography and the public memorialization of the Purchase is a fascinating probe into the decline and quasi-disappearance of an event from international history and memory. Post-celebration publications in the United States, however, suggest that an academic reconsideration of the event might be under way within the framework of the New Western and Atlantic histories. Yet the Louisiana Purchase bicentennial raises the question of international celebrations, underlining the issue of conflicting perceptions of the same event in two or three nations: while the event may be described as central in North American history, the sale of the territory was a marginal act in France, and it probably had no impact at all in Spain. The comparison of the first and second centennial confirms this analysis. In 1903, American officials still could celebrate the promise of the West and the French could still balance growing American power through their own process of colonization in other parts of the world. The celebration was a question not so much of national and international politics as of history. Indeed, the Louisiana Purchase was already a very marginal event in French historiography, while Henry Adams had established it at the heart



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of the United States’ national founding narrative. But the commemoration celebrated the American present more than it did the past. In 2003, the celebration of Louisiana Purchase could not be as buoyant it had been a century before. French officials and media largely ignored a forgotten and only historical event as they could not find any equivalent reason to celebrate what had been only a sale. Very few French articles or books were published on this occasion. And on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the prospect was not very promising either: nearly all the states carved out the Louisiana Territory had been declining demographically and economically. Saint Louis, from which Lewis and Clark departed as part of an exploration of the newly acquired territory, had lost a large part of its population, which declined from 816,000 in 1940 to 348,000 in 2000. And “an area nearly equal to the Louisiana Purchase now meets the 19thcentury definition that some historians used for frontier, with six people or fewer per square mile.”94 As agriculture receded and more Americans moved toward coastal areas, wilderness began to reclaim Louisiana. In New Orleans, the bicentennial was celebrated but principally as an opportunity to draw visitors to the historic culture of New Orleans and Louisiana. Such a celebration was devoid of any deep national significance, and quite understandably neither President Chirac nor President Bush came to celebrate, especially at a time of Franco-American tension over Iraq. Instead, in the United States much emphasis was placed on the Lewis and Clark celebration — numerous books, great Web sites, reenactments, films — as it was possible through the commemoration of this journey to stress the heroism of real American individuals, as well as the importance of the Indians, with whom the two captains usually got on well. The Lewis and Clark bicentennial enabled Americans to identify positively with a multicultural national past and to renew American founding myths in the light of recent historiography. However, those few historians working on the Louisiana Purchase today should rejoice: this event is not today a contested site in either French or American memory, as evidenced by the fate of the bicentennial. They should therefore feel free from all constraints, whether political or public, and should work unhindered to reconstruct this major international and national episode in modern historiographical terms, as they have begun to do. The principles celebrated in the commemorations of the Lewis and Clark expedition were on display most recently in the quadricentennial of

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the founding of Jamestown. The commemorations surrounding the first permanent English settlement on the North American mainland were most remarkable for their silences. There were none of the protests, disagreements, and serious discussions that had surrounded the quadricentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. To be sure, there were critics who charged that the commemorations failed to adequately address the violence, conquest, and suffering of Native peoples and the growth in the Atlantic slave trade that came as a result of the British imperial project in Virginia. Likewise, organizers of the commemorations went out of their way to claim they were well aware of these concerns. In the end, however, this was fundamentally a celebration of the British presence in North America. It was not so much a corollary to the Louisiana Purchase bicentennial as it was a response. Instead of a commemoration emphasizing cultural contact from all directions, the Jamestown events focused on a westward vision. Englishman reached American shores, and their American descendants never looked back.

Notes 1. History museums, covering specific themes most of the time, are much more popular and widespread in the United States than in France (see Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989]). 2. Quoted in David Thelen, “History after the Enola Gay Controversy: An Introduction,” Journal of American History (December 1995): 1029. 3. This is the text of Senate Resolution 257 — Relating to the “Enola Gay” Exhibit (U.S. Senate, 19 September 1994): “Resolved, That it is the sense of the Senate that any exhibit displayed by the National Air and Space Museum with respect to the Enola Gay should reflect appropriate sensitivity toward the men and women who faithfully and selflessly served the United States during World War II and should avoid impugning the memory of those who gave their lives for freedom.” Reprinted from Congressional Record in “Documents,” Journal of American History (December 1995): 1136. 4. Richard H. Kohn, “History and the Culture Wars: The Case of the Smithsonian Institution’s Enola Gay Exhibition,” Journal of American History (December 1995): 1036. The whole roundtable discussion appears between pages 1029 and 1144. 5. Elise Marienstras and Naomi Wulf, “French Translations and Reception of the Declaration of Independence,” Journal of American History 85, no. 4 (March 1999): 1320. 6. François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution française (Paris: Hachette, 1973), 10; Marienstras and Wulf, “French Translations,” 1320.



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7. Marienstras and Wulf, “French Translation.” 8. As George Rudé had presciently written in 1988: “Yet there is some doubt whether Frenchmen in Paris or elsewhere still feel the same degree of involvement, and it is likely that the experience of the past fifty years blunted the image of the Revolution as a continuing vital force. Has it not rather become a page from a history book, or a museum piece to be safely locked away or forgotten until the next National Day?” (The French Revolution: Its Causes, Its History, and Its Legacy after 200 Years [New York: Grove Press, 1988], 182–83). 9. Steven Lawrence Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution: The Historians’ Feud: France, 1789–1989 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) 194–95. My analysis is greatly shaped by his. 10. Pierre Nora, “L’ère de la commémoration ,” vol. 3, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 1006. 11. Michale Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (Knopf: New York, 1991). 12. Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Frank A. Ninkovitch, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). One can also refer to David K. Adams and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., Transatlantic Encounters: Public Uses and Misuses of History in Europe and the United States (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2000). 13. Obviously we do not intend this essay to be an exhaustive survey of both national historiographies on the subject of over two hundred years of history. Rather, we attempt here to cover main historiographical trends, as well as to focus on specific historical works that have made their mark in historiography or struck us as worth discussing. 14. Rayford W. Logan refers more specifically to the diplomats Moustier and Fauchet as well as to Genêt (The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776–1891 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941], 55). 15. Barbé-Marbois, Histoire de la Louisiane et de la cession de cette colonie par la France aux Etats-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale (Paris: F. Didot, 1829). 16. Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, “A la recherché d’une diplomatie post-révolutionnaire: Louis-André Pichon, chargé d’affaires à Washington, 1801–1804,” in La France et les Amériques au temps de Jefferson et de Miranda (Paris: CTHS, 1994), 18. 17. Ibid., 254 18. “Hamilton on the Louisiana Purchase: A Newly Identified Editorial from the New York Evening Post.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 12, no. 12 (April 1955): 276. 19. As Jon Kukla reminds us, Adams devoted all of 189 pages to the Purchase in his massive history of the Jefferson and Madison presidencies. This is almost as much as most of the books published on the occasion of the bicentennial (see Kukla, review of A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest, ed. Patrick G. Williams, S. Charles Bolton, and Jeannie M. Whayne, in Journal of American History 93, no. 1 [June 2006]: 199).

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20. This may not be an exhaustive list; more research remains to be conducted for a review of this material: Frank Bond, Historical Sketch of Louisiana and the Louisiana Purchase: with a Statement of Other Acquisitions (Washington, D.C.: U.S Government Printing Office, 1933); Everett Somerville Brown, The Constitutional History of the Louisiana Purchase, 1803–1812 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1920; repr., Clifton: A. M. Kelley, 1972); Ripley Hitchcock, The Louisiana Purchase and the Exploration Early History and Building of the West (Boston: Ginn, 190); Louis Houck, The Boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase ([1901]; New York: Arno Press, [1971]); James Quay Howard, History of the Louisiana Purchase (Chicago: Callahan and Cy, 1902); James Kendall Kosner, The History of the Louisiana Purchase (New York: D. Appleton and Cy, 1902); Charles Franklin Robertson, The Louisiana Purchase in Its Influence upon the American System: A Paper Presented to the American Historical Association September 9, 1885 (New York: Putnam, 1885); Walter Robinson Smith, Brief History of the Louisiana Territory (Saint Louis: St. Louis News Co., 1904). 21. John Higham, with Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert, History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall, 1965), 150. 22. Michael Kraus, The Writing of American History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), 177. 23. Garry Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2005). 24. See Richard Hofstadter: “Among the leading historians at work in the Gilded Age, Henry Adams stands, as he no doubt would have wished to stand, alone — singular not only for the quality of his prose and the sophistication of his mind, but also for the unparalleled mixture of his detachment and involvement” (The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington [New York: Knopf, 1968], 30). 25. Kraus, Writing of American History, 179. 26. Hofstadter, Progressive Historians, 32. 27. Kraus, Writing of American History, 187. 28. In The New Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard Lamar (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), the author of the entry “Louisiana Purchase” refers to Barbé-Marbois’ The History of Louisiana as the “classic account by Napoleon’s minister of the treasury” (658). The outline of the accounts by Adams and Barbé-Marbois are to be found in virtually all Web sites on the Louisiana Purchase, as well as most encyclopedias. The term “narrative” is here used deliberately to refer to the fact that “a historical narrative is a discourse that places disparate events in an understandable order” and reflects the now fairly widespread constructionist view that: “While still constrained by what actually happened (historians do not invent events, people or processes) . . . , the meaning of history as a story comes from a plot, which is imposed, or as Hayden White insists, invented as much as found by the historian” (Alun Munslow, in Re-thinking History, by Keith Jenkins [London and New York: Routledge, 2003], 10–11).



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29. This point should not be taken for granted as Thierry Lentz, a French specialist on Napoleon Bonaparte, mistakes the Americans’ interest in New Orleans as a determination to obtain Louisiana (Le grand consulat, 1799–1804 [Paris: Fayard, 1999], 499). 30. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge, England: Library of America, 1986), 255, 311, 276, 610, 751–52. 31. Ibid., 334. 32. Ibid., 379, 358–92. Adams’s arguments were formulated by John Quincy Adams in his Memoirs, as quoted by David A. Carson: “Years later he denounced Jefferson for being elected under the banner of state-rights and for attacking the implied powers of the national government, “when the first thing he did was to purchase Louisiana — an assumption of implied powers greater in itself and more comprehensive in its consequences than all the assumptions of implied powers in the twelve years of the Washington and Adams administrations put together” (“Blank Paper of the Constitution: The Louisiana Purchase Debates,” Historian 54 [Spring 1992]: 489–90). Carson himself takes up Henry Adams’s arguments and develops them in detail but adds nothing new to Adams’s original analysis. Although he quotes other works by Adams, he does not refer to The History of the United States. The constitutional argument was also taken up by Everett S. Brown in his Constitutional History of the Louisiana Purchase. 33. Adams, History of the United States, 379, 385–86. 34. Ibid., 496–515, 674–703. Fear of expansion, and maybe of later disunion, was voiced by the Federalists in the debates on the Louisiana Purchase, as Carson testifies: “Josiah Quincy, another Federalist from Massachusetts, said that the extent of the nation was already a national misfortune. It was bad enough to have Kentuckians in the legislature, but if the new treaty went into effect, Congress would be crowded with “buffaloes from the head of the Missouri and alligators from the Red River” (“Blank Paper of the Constitution,” 488). But expansionism seems to have been less of an issue during the debates than the constitutionality of the Purchase and the treaty. The booklet on the Louisiana Purchase published in 1912 by Frank Bond, chief clerk of the General Land Office, is in fact a series of remarkable maps of Louisiana retracing the various sizes and different owners of the territory, but insisting that West Florida was part of the original Louisiana Purchase. 35. The Count of Rochambeau (1725–1807) was the commander of six thousand French troops who were sent to America in July 1780. They moved from Newport the following year to meet with other marine troops and American forces under George Washington. All together they cornered Cornwallis, the British general, in Yorktown, where he surrendered in October 1781. 36. Jacques Portes, Fascination and Misgivings: The U.S. in French Opinion, 1870–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6. 37. Report of the Special Committee on the Centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, 8 February 1901, House of Representatives, 56th Cong., 2nd sess., Report No. 2765, 6.

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38. They did not take part in the fair itself, in spite of being a strong community in Saint Louis. 39. Report of the Special Committee on the Centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, 8 February 1901, House of Representatives, 56th Cong., 2nd sess., Report No. 2765, 6. 40. Theodore Roosevelt, Annual Message of the President, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1901, xviii; The Winning of the West: An Account of the Exploration and Settlement of Our Country from the Alleghenies to the Pacific (New York: G. P Putnam’s Sons, 1889). 41. “Historical Context of the Fair,” Web site of the exposition. 42. A. Fortier to P. Richard, Consul General of France in New Orleans, 20 December 1902, Post of New Orleans, Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (All original documents in French have been translated by Jacques Portes.) 43. J. Cambon to T. Delcassé, 2 July 1901, Political Correspondence, Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 44. L’Abeille, 20 December 1903. 45. Headline from Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, 1 May 1903. 46. New York Times, 2 May 1903. 47. Centennial Celebration of the Louisiana Transfer, December 1903, Publications of the Louisiana Historical Society, 1904, 35. 48. J.-J. Jusserand to T. Delcassé, 15 May 1903, Political Correspondence, Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 49. Emile Lauvrière, La Louisiane dans l’histoire des colonies françaises (Paris: Plon, 1929). 50. Elijah Wilson Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 1759–1804 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934); Elijah Wilson Lyon, “Barbé-Marbois and His Histoire de la Louisiane: Correspondence with James Monroe,” FrancoAmerican Review 1 (1937): 357–67; Elijah Wilson Lyon, The Man Who Sold Louisiana: The Career of François Barbé-Marbois (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1942). 51. Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 129–36, 156, 159–61, 200. 52. Lyon, Man Who Sold Louisiana, 22, 118. 53. John Keats, Eminent Domain: The Louisiana Purchase and the Making of America (New York: Charterhouse, 1973). 54. Marshall Sprague, So Vast, So Beautiful a Land: Louisiana and the Purchase (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 314. Other books published in the 1970s were Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York: Scribner, 1976) (a classic, and very good, treatment of the topic); and Mary Kay Phelan, The Story of the Louisiana Purchase (New York: Cromwell, 1979). One should also note: Library of Congress, Louisiana Purchase Sesquicentennial, 1803–1953: An Exhibition in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 11 September 1953 to 31 December 1953 (Washington, D.C., 1953). 55. Sprague, So Vast, So Beautiful a Land, 293. 56. Ibid., 305. 57. The Louisiana Purchase, introduction by Mary C. Ryan (Washington,



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D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1987); Dolores Egger Labbé, The Louisiana Purchase and the Making of America (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1998). 58. Peter J Kastor, ed., The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation ([Washington D.C.: CQ Press, 2002], 820 n. 5) reminds readers of the literature dealing with the “problems facing the study of early American foreign relations.” 59. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 114–24. 60. Ibid., 125–36. 61. Ibid., 144, 159. 62. Ibid., 162. 63. Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, Le ferment nationaliste: Aux origines de la politique extérieure des Etats-Unis, 1789–1812 (Paris: Belin, 1994). Translated into English as The Nationalist Ferment: The Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1792–1812 (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2003). 64. Ibid., 250, 251–53. 65. Ibid., 256–61. 66. Ibid., 266–70. We are much kinder to the scientific dimension of the trip than is Henry Adams, and maybe the scientific impact of the trip should be reconsidered in comparative perspective, as Adams recommends. Still, in the wake of the Lewis and Clark expedition, North America became a favorite place for scientific expeditions of all kinds, the often European scientists joining the U.S. military expeditions to explore the West (see Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, “Mémorialistes de la prairie perdue: Les naturalistes dans l’Ouest américain 1789–1830,” in Mémoire privée, mémoire collective dans l’Amérique pré-industrielle, ed. Elise Marientras and Rossignol [Paris: Berg International, 1994]). 67. Rossignol, Le ferment, 270–82. 68. Raphaël Lahlou thus characterizes Bonaparte et la Louisiane: “Dans ce bel ouvrage sont reproduits des documents des fonds français, anglais, espagnols et surtout américains: pièces souvent données in extenso et essentielles” (“Le rêve américain et caraïbe de Bonaparte: Le destin de la Louisiane française: L’expédition de Saint-Domingue,” Revue du Souvenir Napoléonien, no. 405 [January-February 1996]: 7–23, www.napoleon.org/fr/salle_lecture/articles/ files/ameriquecaraibe_lahlou.asp 1–11, 10). 69. Michaël Garnier, Bonaparte et la Louisiane (Paris: Brogniart, 1992), 32–35, chaps. 4 and 5, 99–101. 70. Lahlou, “Le rêve américain,” 1, 2, 10. 71. Thierry Lentz, “Les relations américano-françaises de la Révolution à la chute de l’Empire (1789–1815), Revue du Souvenir Napoléonien, no. 440 (AprilMay 2002): 3–21, www.napoleon.org/fr/salle_lecture/articles/files/relations_ americano-francaises_Revolution_chutel.asp, 1–3. 72. Charles Cerami told a classic diplomatic narrative for the general public in Jefferson’s Great Gamble: The Remarkable Story of Jefferson, Napoleon, and the Men behind the Louisiana Purchase (Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2003).

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73. John Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America; Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Other 2003 publications were Thomas Fleming, The Louisiana Purchase (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley); James E. Lewis, The Louisiana Purchase: Jefferson’s Noble Bargain? (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Foundation), and Peter J. Kastor, The Great Acquisition: An Introduction to the Louisiana Purchase, preface by James P. Ronda (Great Falls, Mont.: Lewis and Clark Interpretive Association). Peter J. Kastor, ed., The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office), was published in 2004, while Patrick G. Williams, S. Charles Bolton, and Jeannie M. Whayne, eds., A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American South West (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press), came out in 2005, and Frank W. Brecher, Negotiating the Louisiana Purchase (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland), in 2006. 74. Quote from the preface of Kastor, The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation, xii. Here is a short list of some of the best-known books in the New Western history vein: William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: Norton, 1992); Clyde A. Milner II, ed., A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Howard R. Lamar, ed., The New Encyclopedia of the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton , 1987); Clyde A. Milner II and Charles Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991); and Ramon A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 75. William Deverell, “The Significance of the American West in the History of the United States,” in A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West, ed. Milner, 47. 76. Allan G. Bogue, “The Course of Western History’s First Century,” in A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West, ed. Milner, 14. 77. Peter J. Kastor, “Dehahuit and the Question of Change in North America,” in The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation, ed. Kastor, 74. 78. As mentioned earlier, my own narrative of the Louisiana Purchase stressed the negative impact on the Native population and the French-speaking inhabitants, and Jay Gitlin describes Louisiana at the time of the Purchase as a “region of colonial towns within Indian country,” adding that “French was literally the lingua franca that tied together this complex polyglot, multicultural midAmerica” (“Children of Empire of Concitoyens?: Louisiana’s French Inhabitants,” in The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation, ed. Kastor, 24). 79. This is exemplified in Daniel H. Usner’s Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a



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Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 80. Joseph Zitomersky, “Culture, classe ou Etat?: Comment interpréter les relations raciales dans la grande Louisiane française avant et après 1803?” in La France et les Amériques au temps de Jefferson et de Miranda, ed. Marcel Dorigny et Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, 62–89 (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 2000). 81. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); David P. Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). 82. The Louisiana Purchase/La cession de la Louisiane: A History in Maps, Images and Documents on CD-Rom. Deep South Regional Humanities Center at Tulane University (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). 83. Timothy Egan, “A River in Transition,” International Herald Tribune, 2 June 2003. 84. Thierry Lentz, Grand Consulat (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 499. 85. This site is maintained by Gilles-Antoine Langlois, an urban studies specialist who also acted as curator for a Paris exhibition on Louisiana at the Mona Bismarck Foundation, which opened on 16 December. Eventually the Web site of the Ministry of Culture proved to be beautiful, full of iconography and texts from the French National Library and other collections. 86. Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, “Re-constructing and Celebrating the Louisiana Purchase in New Orleans,” Transatlantica 3 (2003): 154, http://etudes.americaines.free.fr/TRANSATLANTICA/3/leglaunec.html. 87. All sites were visited at the time of the first “Louisiana” conference in early June 2003 or September 2003. 88. Le Glaunec, “Re-constructing and Celebrating the Louisiana Purchase in New Orleans,” 154. 89. Jefferson’s America and Napoleon’s France, the catalog for the exhibit of the same name, deals with art, culture, and society in both France and the United States at the time of the Louisiana Purchase. It does focus on the figures and careers of both Napoleon and Jefferson, two leaders very different in style and ideology. The catalog ends with a section devoted to the Native Americans who lived in the vast expanses of Louisiana (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2003). 90. See Le Glaunec’s typology of New Orleans and Louisiana celebrations in “Re-constructing and Celebrating the Louisiana Purchase in New Orleans,” 155–59. 91. Ibid. 92. The Web site that had announced the coming of the heads of state in 2003 simply stated on 13 December: “A re-enactment of the signing of the Louisiana Purchase took place in December at the Cabildo in New Orleans. Dignitaries from France and Spain helped celebrate the official event” (www.louisianapur chase2003.com).

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93. As for the failure of the reenactment, Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec brought the following Times Picayune articles to my attention, for which I thank him: “Will Bush, Chirac be in N.O. a deux?” 24 September 2003; “Bush Still Hasn’t Asked Chirac to RVSP for Purchase Event,” 25 September 2003; “Chirac May Have Hard Time Getting La. Visa,” 26 September 2003. 94. Timothy Egan, “A River in Transition,” International Herald Tribune, 2 June 2003.

Contributors Emily Clark is Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University. A specialist on the history of women in early America, she is the author of Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (2007). She has also translated and edited Relation du voyage des dames religieuses Ursulines de Rouen à la Nouvelle-Orléans (2007). Laurent Dubois is Professor of History at Duke University. A specialist on the history of slavery in the French Caribbean, he is the author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (2004). Mark Fernandez is Professor of History at Loyola University, New Orleans. A specialist in early American legal history, he is the author of From Chaos to Continuity: Evolution of Louisiana’s Judicial System, 1712–1862. He is also the editor, with Warren M. Billings, of A Law Unto Itself?: Essays in the New Louisiana Legal History (2001). Peter J. Kastor is Associate Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Much of his work has focused on the causes and implications of the Louisiana Purchase. He is the author of The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (2004) and the editor of The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation (2003). Paul Lachance is Invited Professor of History at the University of Ottawa. He is also currently Visiting Professor of History at Emory University, where he is an NEH researcher on the transatlantic slave trade database. The author of numerous articles and essays on the demography and migration of peoples in the Atlantic world, his articles have appeared in Social History, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, and Slavery and Abolition. Jean-Pierr e Le Glaunec is Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History, Dalhousie University, Halifax. He is the author of “ ‘Grand Dieu Quand Serais-Je Délivré de ces Tracasseries’: The Lost World of Jean-Michel Fortier, Citizen and Merchant of Louisiana, as Seen Through His Correspondence,” in Haïti: Regards Croisés (2007). His article “Slave Migrations in Spanish and Early American Louisiana: New Sources and New Estimates,” in Louisiana History (2005), received the Hugh Rankin Prize from the Louisiana Historical Association.

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James E. Lewis Jr. is Associate Professor of History at Kalamazoo College. A specialist in American political and diplomatic history, he is the author of The Louisiana Purchase: Jefferson’s Noble Bargain? (2003) and The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse Of The Spanish Empire, 1783–1829 (1998). Peter S. Onuf is Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia. He is the author of numerous books and articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history. His most recent work includes The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (2007) and (with Nicholas Onuf) Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (2007). Jacques Portes is Professor of American History at the University of Paris VIII. The author of numerous studies of cultural history in France and North America, his recent work includes Fascination and Misgivings: The United States in French Opinion, 1870–1914 (2006) and De la scène à l’écran: Naissance de la culture de masse aux États-Unis (1997). Marie-Jeanne Rossignol is Professor of History at Université de Paris VII– Denis Diderot. A historian of the early American republic, her work includes The Nationalist Ferment: The Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1789–1812 (2003) and La France et les Amériques au temps de Jefferson et de Miranda (2001). Cécile Vidal is Senior Lecturer at L’Ecole des Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is the author of “Africains et Européens au Pays des Illinois durant la période française (1699–1765),” in French Colonial History (2003), and (with Gilles Havard) Histoire de l’Amérique Française (2003). Fr ançois Weil is Directeur d’Etudes and President of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. The author of numerous books and articles on the intersections of French and American history, he is the author of Les Franco-Américains 1860–1980 (1989). Most recently, he is the editor (with Nancy L. Green) of Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation (2007). Richard White is Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. He has written extensively on American Indian history, American environmental history, and the history of the North American West. His books include “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (1991) and The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991).

Index Account of Louisiana, An (U.S. government pamphlet), 144–47 acculturation and assimilation, 63– 65, 74–77, 80–82 Adams, Henry, 11, 118, 330, 332–36, 343–46, 354 Alien and Sedition Acts, 269 Americanization, 180–81, 239–62, 268, 271, 275–80 American Revolution, 23, 27–30, 153, 158, 164, 187, 336, 344 Apache Indians, 46–47 Armand, Louis. See Lahontan, Baron de Barbés-Marbois, François, 331–33, 340, 343–44 Baton Rouge, 149, 152, 164, 292, 293, 313 Battle of New Orleans, 256, 283 batture, 281–85, 294–95 Bienville, Sieur de (Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne), 44, 45, 63, 69, 70, 71, 72 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 5–7, 15, 28–31, 94–100, 103–13, 133–36, 164–67, 250, 307–8, 331, 340 British empire, 51–71, 72–73, 108–9 Brown, James, 30, 277, 279–81 Burr, Aaron, 30, 166, 274, 281–82, 286 Cajuns, 12, 20, 243, 303, 318, 319 Canada, 26, 38–43, 53–55, 62, 68–69, 159–61, 192, 243, 304 Caribbean (region), 7, 14, 100–109, 205–9, 212, 215 Catholicism, 80–81, 154–55, 180–99, 249, 261 Cavelier, René Robert. See La Salle, Sieur de

Choctaw Indians, 68–69, 165 Claiborne, William Charles Cole, 215, 219–26, 249–51, 255, 258–60, 270–84, 308 Clark, Daniel, 273, 275, 280, 282 commerce and trade, 42, 45, 50–53, 60, 63, 69–71, 95–96, 101, 154, 204– 30, 304, 331 Creoles, 3, 9, 99–100, 197, 214–17, 240–42, 248–54, 272–86, 292–94, 306–9, 316–19 Cuba, 26, 152–53, 209–17, 310–14, 350 demography, 9, 74, 143–70, 204–30 Derbigny, Pierre, 240, 245, 247–51, 255, 261–63, 282, 309–10 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 7, 94, 102, 110–13 Destrehan, Jean Noël, 248–50, 260– 61, 276 Destutt, Antoine Louis Claude. See Tracy, Comte de Detroit, 43, 45, 73 Digest of the Civil Laws Now in Force in the Territory of Orleans, A (Brown and Lislet), 279–81 Dominica, 205–9, 212 du Mortier, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert. See Lafayette, Marquis de du Pont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel, 123, 124, 125, 130, 131, 132 East Florida. See Floridas, the empires and imperialism, 3, 5–8, 13, 27, 37–39, 58–62, 63–64, 99, 101, 157–70, 181 ethnicity, 8, 12, 240–42, 249–50, 256– 57, 262, 302–19

368

Index

Floridas, the, 38, 75, 117, 119–36, 144, 150–51, 157, 164–68, 285, 332–35, 346–47 Fortier, Alcée, 318–19, 339–41 Fox Indians, 40, 71, 72, 77 free people of color, 7, 102–3, 155, 197– 98, 257–60, 313–16 France: and Louisiana Purchase, 105– 13, 128–32, 304–10, 341–56; settlement in North America, 16–18, 38– 39, 42–43, 145–69, 183–85 French empire, 6–7, 10, 29, 38–49, 58– 63, 67–73, 94–95, 98–101, 106–8 French Revolution, 2, 19, 27–29, 96– 97, 100, 155, 158, 195–96, 239, 244, 250, 257, 301, 305–7, 327–29, 350 Gallatin, Albert, 117, 246–47, 274, 282, 335 Gayarre, Charles, 302, 316–17 Gulf Coast, 7, 16, 42, 62, 65–66, 80, 119–21, 149–50, 159, 167–68, 256 Haiti, 7, 37, 93, 94, 97, 109, 341, 350. See also Saint-Domingue Havana, 165, 211, 213, 215 Iberville, 152, 313 identity, 8–11, 239–62, 252–54, 304–19 Illinois Country, 38–39, 42–45, 53, 62–66, 72–73, 79–80, 150 illness and disease, 38, 65–66, 72 immigration and migration, 65–67, 150–51, 158–68, 204–18, 240, 243, 253–56, 310–12, 317 Indian diplomacy, 44–47, 67–72, 73 Indians. See specific groups by name Iowa Indians, 50, 53, 353 Jackson, Andrew, 3, 11, 17, 63, 83, 255, 283, 284, 301, 334, 338 Jamaica, 205–9, 212, 215, 219 Jefferson, Thomas: and France, 29– 30, 122–23; and future for the U.S., 23–33; and Great Britain, 29; and

Louisianans, 189–90, 203; and Louisiana Purchase, 25, 31–33, 94, 189–90, 244, 272; presidency of, 82–83; and Spain, 29, 118–19; and U.S. expansion, 23–24, 30–32, 37, 117–18, 158, 168–69 Jones, Evan, 273, 275, 280 Kentucky, 126, 156, 163, 165, 217 Lafayette, Marquis de (MarieJoseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier), 301–2, 312, 326, 336, 340 Lahontan, Baron de (Louis Armand), 6, 41–43, 49 language and culture, 257–59, 279, 302–3 La Salle, Sieur de (René Robert Cavelier), 41 Lassuat, Pierre, 162–63, 211–12, 276– 80, 306–7, 309, 319, 348 Leclerc, Victor-Emmanuel, 97, 104– 12, 306–10, 345 Le Moyne, Jean-Baptiste. See Bienville, Sieur de Le Page du Pratz, Antoine-Simon, 74, 303–4 Lewis and Clark Expedition, 16, 20, 31, 54, 55, 334, 347, 352, 353, 355 Livingston, Edward, 11, 268–95 Livingston, Robert R., 31, 38, 119, 283, 334–35, 344 Louisiana (state), 16, 20, 62, 188–89, 229–30, 240, 246–48, 252–54, 352–53 Louisianans, 4, 9, 159, 182–83, 240–61, 274–75, 280, 291–93, 305–19, 335 Louisiana Purchase: causes for, 93, 110–13, 121–23; commemoration of, 336–44, 339–42, 351–54; definition and boundaries of, 4, 18–19, 39–42, 49–50, 62, 143, 150; exploration of, 38–39, 47–49, 54; impact of, 2–3, 19; memory of, 3, 11–13, 18–19,



Index

316–18, 327–56; negotiations for, 1–2, 93, 121–36, 333–34; reaction to, 244–48, 270–72, 307–8, 330, 335; scholarly interpretation of, 3–4, 14–18, 327–56 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 11–12, 337–44 Louverture, Toussaint, 7, 94–98, 100– 108, 110, 113, 333 Ludlow, William, 23, 24, 32 Madison, James, 26, 117–18, 130–35, 215, 246, 269, 275, 308, 332–33, 346– 47 métis, 44, 79–80 Mexico, 37–38, 42–43, 51, 55, 124, 159, 163, 168–70, 311, 316, 341 Mississippi Crisis, 25, 29, 128–36 Mississippi River Valley, 2, 44, 49–51, 66, 73–77, 118, 143, 147, 150–52, 156– 58, 164–65, 168, 217, 338, 349 Missouri (state), 78 Missouri Compromise, 337 Monroe, James, 15, 31, 119, 129, 130–35, 285, 291, 334, 344, 345 Moreau-Lislet, Louis, 227, 279, 287 nationalism, 23–30, 244–46, 252–57 Native Americans. See specific groups by name New Mexico, 42–43, 47–49, 74 New Orleans: government of, 212–22, 224–29; politics in, 273–76, 260– 62, 284, 292–93; port of, 250; slaves and slavery in, 206, 212–14, 218–30 1904 World’s Fair. See Louisiana Purchase Exposition Northwest Territory, 78, 82, 156 O’Reilly, Alexander, 75, 78, 272 Orleans, Territory of, 144–46, 151, 188–89, 215–16, 246–53, 268, 274– 80, 309–10 Otoe Indians, 43, 45, 46, 49

369

Padouca Indians, 44, 46 party politics, 10, 128–30, 269 Pawnee Indians, 46, 48, 77 Pitot, Jacques, 162, 224, 244, 249–50, 308 political culture, 10, 252 politics, in Louisiana, 259–63, 273–88, 246–53 Protestantism, 182–88, 195 Quebec, 41, 77, 186, 192 race, 14, 78, 81–83, 95, 255–57 Reformation, 182–85, 190 regions and regionalism, 12, 16–17, 249 religion, 9–10, 80, 180–99 Remonstrance of 1804, 247–60, 258– 59, 304 republicanism, 195 Retrocession of 1800, 6, 25, 117–28, 136, 159–61, 278, 306–7 Robertson, Thomas Bolling, 260, 289, 294 Saint Domingue, 37, 39, 93–113, 253– 55, 310–12, 333. See also Haiti sex and gender, 10, 44, 78–79, 182, 189–95 Sioux Indians, 45, 47, 50, 51, 147 slavery and slaves, 9–10, 65, 76–79, 96–101, 106–7, 153–54, 161, 204–30, 241–45, 256–57, 291, 305–7, 309–12 Spanish empire, 29, 47, 49–51, 63–64, 71, 73–74, 158, 163, 242–43, 304–6 Stephen, James, 102, 107, 110–11 St. Louis, 2, 11–12, 20, 43, 49–55, 165, 186, 312, 330, 337–44, 351, 355 St. Louis Cathedral, 9, 154, 180, 188, 194, 301, 342 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de, 104, 108, 331 Tecumseh, 40, 52 Texas, 41–42, 74, 293, 311, 347

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Index

Tracy, Comte de (Antoine Louis Claude Destutt), 7–8, 27–30 Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800), 119, 126, 130, 164 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 17, 334, 338

United States Supreme Court, 78, 253, 254, 255, 288 Upper Louisiana, 53–55, 62–64, 76– 79, 133–34, 147–50, 275 Ursuline nuns, 10, 189–97

Ulloa, Antonio de, 272–74, 281, 304 United States: expansionism of, 1–2, 15, 19, 23, 156–57, 158–60, 167–70, 331, 333–34, 341, 344–46; foreign policy of, 7–8, 117–36; imperialism of, 3, 7; Indian policy of, 82–83, 128–29 United States Congress, 83, 127–32, 246–53, 269, 272–75, 289–91, 330– 31, 335–39, 353

Villeré, Jacques Phillippe, 260, 284–89 War of 1812, 83, 254–56, 283 Washington, George, 269, 318, 336 Watson, John, 180, 194 West Florida. See Floridas, the Wilkinson, James, 165, 250, 270–71, 286, 291, 308

jeffersonia n a mer ica

Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, editors Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture Peter S. Onuf Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood Catherine Allgor Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government

Francis D. Cogliano Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy Albrecht Koschnik “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 John Craig Hammond Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West, 1787–1820

Jeffrey L. Pasley “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic

David Andrew Nichols Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier

Herbert E. Sloan Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (reprint)

Douglas Bradburn The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804

James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, editors The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic

Clarence E. Walker Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

Phillip Hamilton The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family: The Tuckers of Virginia, 1752–1830

Timothy Mason Roberts Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism

Robert M. S. McDonald, editor Thomas Jefferson’s Military Academy: Founding West Point

Peter J. Kastor and François Weil, editors Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase

Martha Tomhave Blauvelt The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780–1830