Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 by M. K. Beauchamp

Abstract

Reviewed by: Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 by M. K. Beauchamp Aaron R. Hall Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815. By M. K. Beauchamp. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 314. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7428-9.) In 1803 the United States became the latest empire striving to govern the complex world encompassed by the territory of Orleans. Native nations, enslaved Africans, free people of color, Creole slave owners, and Anglo-American settlers populated the region, and each group pursued competing desires for autonomy and freedom, power and security, and health and wealth. This internal heterogeneity was compounded by delicate geopolitical relations with imperial rivals and indigenous neighbors. If eventual statehood and affluence through expropriated labor and land was the common aim of Anglo-American arrivals, then it was the daily work of U.S. administrators to steer the territory toward these ends. That meant maintaining order while producing a new one. A cohort of local officials made the orderly administration of Louisiana their business with varying degrees of diligence and faithfulness. In Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815, M. K. Beauchamp shows that the problems these officials encountered, the resources they accessed, and the policies they adopted “rendered Louisiana’s territorial experience republican in theory but imperial in practice” (p. 3). Taking an administrator’s-eye view of early national Louisiana, Beauchamp delivers a fine-grained analysis of how officials cultivated and exercised authority during Louisiana’s formative decade under the jurisdiction of (but not yet within) the United States. In ways that were unique to Louisiana but that also resonated with other zones of territorial rule, officials deployed techniques of imperial governance: accommodating local elites, moderating the metropole’s directives, arbitrating between factions, tailoring racial exclusions to suit strategic concerns, displaying military capacity, and modifying institutions in response to discontent. Through a careful reading of state papers and administrative correspondence, Beauchamp delivers a sophisticated account of the reorganization of Louisiana, a process that appears at once abrupt or gradual and shallow, depending on subject and vantage point. Instruments of Empire is a clarifying contribution to Louisiana political history and a valuable [End Page 347] addition to a field of scholarship on the early federal government in which continuities of political practice loom large (see Gautham Rao, “The New Historiography of the Early Federal Government: Institutions, Contexts, and the Imperial State,” William and Mary Quarterly 77 [January 2020]: 97–128). Instruments of Empire unfolds in six thematic chapters addressing different facets of official concern. It opens with a chapter analyzing external challenges to American sovereignty, introducing territorial officials’ abiding anxiety about Creole loyalties. As Spanish power receded, however, American officials came to trust the Francophone “ancient Louisianans” with greater authority (p. 183). Next, Beauchamp draws out administrators’ multipronged approach to Native American relations before the post-statehood arrival of enfranchised, land-hungry settlers. Their initiatives included efforts to maintain peaceable relations with the Comanche, counter Spanish influence among the Caddo and the Wichita, incorporate the Native communities around New Orleans known as petites nations, and court Choctaw allies. A significant third chapter illustrates how the violence of racial enslavement was foundational to governance. Slavery was the subject of extensive regulation by new elected bodies, and it created a shared interest through which American order could be appreciated by new and old slaveholders. At no time was the centrality of slavery more evident than during the suppression of the German Coast uprising, when U.S. troops provided critical support. This bloodshed confirmed slaveholders belonged to “a common planter class, since the rebels did not distinguish between Anglo and Francophone plantations” (p. 104). Given this evidence, one is left to wonder whether concerns about Creole loyalty were exaggerated. When Anglo-Americans took charge, free Black Louisianans hoped to gain rights by being the most loyal of allies; but in chapter 4, Beauchamp shows that they held little leverage to move territorial officials. The arrival of statehood in 1812 would only empower white Louisianans to make that racial order...