Petitions from Peripheries of Empire: Louisiana and Québec

Abstract

By the 1760s, British subjects in North America were familiar with elected assemblies. As their imperial administrators made a concerted effort to control colonial trade and to collect more taxes to pay down a massive war debt that had increased during the Seven Years' War, many British North Americans had come to the conclusion that local assemblies were essential to the protection of their interests. State legislatures were established, and thousands fought to defend a hastily cobbled together association of representative governments. The fragile republic established as a result served as a model to opponents of monarchy in other nations--most notably, France. Slaves in the French colony of St. Domingue (now Haiti) learned the lessons of revolution and overthrew their masters. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, no corner of North America was untouched by the outcomes of these revolutions. Spanish imperial administrators, who governed the colony from 1762 until 1800, when it was returned to France, became increasingly fearful of peoples who arrived in Louisiana from the United States, France, and St. Domingue with an open disrespect for royalists. When the United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803, those survivors of three revolutions constituted an important segment of the new American territory's population. Despite the expansion of attachment to representative government in North America after the mid-eighteenth century, Britain in 1763 and the United States in 1803, seeking to maintain effective control over vulnerable new territories inhabited primarily by those who had served monarchs of hostile empires, established remarkably similar unrepresentative governments for Louisiana and Quebec, respectively. An appointed governor ruled over people who were not granted the power to elect an assembly. The French of Quebec had lived under an appointed royal governor who answered only to the king of France before the British conquest of that province, formalized in 1763, and the French and Spanish of Louisiana had also lived under such a system under French and Spanish rule before 1803. (1) Quebec and Louisiana had greatly changed after the mid-eighteenth century, however. By the time of the British conquest, over 60,000 people lived in Quebec. Although British subjects were a small minority (Governor Murray reported that there were but two hundred Protestant subjects in the Province in 1764 (2)), those subjects, hoping to reap the economic benefits of their military victory (especially with regard to the fur trade), considered it only just that this colony would have a system of government that included assemblies similar to other British colonies in North America. Furthermore, they believed that any assembly should be reserved for Protestants. Americans settled in Louisiana while Spain ruled the colony, and by 1803 the total population of Louisiana was approximately 43,000. (3) Because of their connections to American trade and American settlers, some Louisianans of Spanish and French origin were well aware of the history of representative government in North America, and Americans who had fought in the American Revolution Jived and traded with them. Given the fact that some peoples in Quebec and Louisiana were at the very least familiar with the benefits of representative assembly, the British and American governments that established unrepresentative forms of government for Quebec and for Louisiana were bound to face resistance. In Quebec after 1763, and in Louisiana after 1803, some citizens protested against the unrepresentative systems of government, founded on their behalf, by sending petitions to London and Washington. An analysis of two such petitions will provide important evidence regarding the various arguments made by the inhabitants of Louisiana and Quebec to pressure governments in Washington and London to introduce representative government in newly acquired territory. …