Governor Carondelet found Bailly guilty of treasonous activity, and he spent two years in prison in Havana. Carondelet, a conservative aristocrat, faced these developments with revulsion and fear. He renovated the ancient fortifications of New Orleans in anticipation of attack. He suspended slave imports after , fearing a St. Domingue-style slave uprising. When a group of fifty merchants sent representatives to France to express support for the revolutionary government, Carondelet had the leaders banished from Louisiana.
Above all, they were outraged by his ban on slave imports and his intermittent efforts, also inspired by his fears of rebellion, to promote humane standards in the treatment of slaves.
New Orleans grew significantly during the s, in spite of—or perhaps because of—catastrophic fires in and The fires led to the passage of new laws prohibiting wooden structures, as well as the wholesale rebuilding of most of the town. For the first time the city expanded outside its original walled rectangle the present-day French Quarter when the Faubourg Ste. The streets St. Charles, Carondelet, and Baronne were named after the king, the governor, and his wife, respectively.
Governor Carondelet embarked on ambitious civic improvements—most notably, the construction of a one-and-a-half-mile canal to link the Mississippi River with the Bayou St. John and Lake Pontchartrain. He also bought new streetlamps and created a corps of lamplighters who doubled as night watchmen. In the Acadian prairie parishes to the southwest and on the Texas frontier near Natchitoches, ranchers raised large cattle herds for export and to feed the local New Orleans market.
In the Texas-Louisiana frontier region, ranchers commonly adopted the technique of herding cattle on horseback, using Spanish-style tack on their horses. Maritime products, including hemp, tar, and lumber—all vital to the growing shipping sector—came down the Mississippi from as far away as Kentucky.
In two events transformed the economic future of Louisiana. The treaty also granted Americans the right to freely navigate the Mississippi and allowed US merchants a place in New Orleans to deposit their goods for duty-free re-export.
The St. Within a few seasons, more than one hundred plantations around New Orleans were producing six million pounds of sugar each year through the labor of nearly two thousand enslaved workers. Meanwhile, the development of the cotton gin transformed the agricultural landscape of upcountry Louisiana, as it did throughout the American South. By there were twenty-five cotton gins along the Red River, and cheap, profitable cotton soon replaced tobacco as the crop of choice on Red River plantations, on the upper Mississippi, and in the western prairies.
Cotton culture also predominated in what would later become the Florida Parishes, especially along the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, where a predominantly Anglo-American planter population had sworn allegiance to Spain in exchange for generous land grants. In New Orleans, commerce soon centered on cotton trading, fueled by the ever-growing demand from British merchants in Liverpool and textile mills in Manchester, England.
Increasing numbers of flatboats descended the Mississippi, laden with pork, hemp, and flour from as far away as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At the same time, coasting vessels from the Atlantic ports came upriver to sell British trade goods and pick up sugar and cotton cargoes. New Orleans was now both a strategic point of transshipment and a major market in its own right.
The long-obscure colonial outpost had finally become a city with ambitious plans for urban development and municipal improvements. The Cabildo, St. But even as Spanish Louisiana began to thrive, Spain itself was deeply troubled.
Now ruled by the meek, indecisive Carlos IV, the country was reluctantly dragged into a ruinous war against Great Britain. In exchange, Spain received a small kingdom in Tuscany. The treaty remained a secret because Bonaparte wanted to conclude the Peace of Amiens with Britain before implementing his grand colonial scheme—an undertaking that would make Louisiana the wheat-growing breadbasket for a reconstructed, slave-based sugar colony in the Caribbean.
But when the army sent to subdue and re-enslave the people of St. Domingue collapsed, Bonaparte abandoned the whole plan and sold Louisiana to the United States, violating his agreement with Spain that the province would not be transferred to any third party. Some Creoles looked back fondly on the years of relative stability under Spanish administration, but many others, especially merchants, anticipated prosperity, free trade, and self-rule in the American republic.
Spain, however, continued to exert authority and influence in large areas of present-day Louisiana well after In West Florida, now claimed by both the United States and Spain, prosperous planters were happy to remain under the Spanish flag. Not until the West Florida rebellion were American troops able to claim the region. After Spanish forces blocked an expedition sent by President Jefferson to explore the Red River in , Wilkinson now governor of the northern Louisiana Territory and Lt.
Louisiana was an anomaly in the Spanish Atlantic empire. Peripheral colonies like Louisiana and Cuba were valued primarily because they helped keep the riches flowing from the mines of Mexico and the Andes. Nowhere in the Americas besides Louisiana did Spain administer a colony based on staple agriculture, with a population of European-descended settlers and African slaves. Jambalaya, strikingly similar to paella, is embedded in the foodways of Ascension Parish and most of South Louisiana.
In southwestern Louisiana the Spanish cultural legacy survives in cattle herding and cowboy culture. The distinctive style of the architecture resulted from Spanish building codes, enacted after the great fires of and , that required stucco exteriors and tiled roofs. Settlers from southern Spain built homes that incorporated their customary patios and long iron balconies.
In the Spanish period, Louisiana developed all the salient attributes that characterized the state during the antebellum period: a large African population of both slaves an d gens de couleur libres and a slave-based plantation system producing cotton and sugar that was dominated by an elite Creole planter-merchant class. During this period New Orleans also emerged as the center of commercial and social life, influencing the broader region to a degree that few colonial cities did.
The so-called three-caste race system of whites, slaves, and free people of color was never stable and always contested.
Spain was still a considerable threat and shared a long border with the U. Prior to that, goods were taxed and tolls were charged for the use of the river. During the s, the U. The French Revolution had escalated beyond a national conflict into a global one by The U. France began seizing U. France tried to get the U. Then, France allowed the U. By that point in , Napoleon Bonaparte had named himself Emperor of France.
His ambition was to subdue all of Europe for France, and to reclaim his American colony in Louisiana. At roughly the same time, a slave revolt broke out in the French held island of Haiti. The lands of the Louisiana Purchase were settled by the s, and the country would now extend from coast to coast.
Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Esther Fleming October 13, Table of Contents.
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