Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana, 1763-1803

Abstract

Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana, 1763-1803. Gilbert C. Din. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 356. $49.95.) The Trial of Don Pedro Leon Lujan: The Attack Against Indian Slavery and Mexican Traders in Utah. Sondra Jones. (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2000. Pp. vii, 182. illustrations, maps. $27.50.) Recovering the hidden world of the enslaved is difficult enough without having to do it in three languages. Perhaps for that reason alone, scholars of the African-American past have tended to shy away from colonial Louisiana or the territorial Southwest. Gilbert C. Din, professor emeritus at Fort Lewis College and the author of numerous studies of the early gulf South, knows his terrain and has written what will undoubtedly be regarded as the standard institutional study of unfree labor in pre-1803 Louisiana. Somewhat less successfully, Sondra Jones explores the peculiar world of African slavery and the trade in Native-American children in the lands west of Texas. Din writes with a number of goals in mind, all of which are admirably and explicitly established early on, and most of which are accomplished. Specifically, he suggests that the now tattered Tannenbaum thesis-the theory that Spanish statutes and Catholic teachings rendered slavery less brutal in Madrid's American empire than in colonies controlled by Britain or France-pays far too much attention to legal theory and far too little notice to the indifference with which Rome actually regarded the material condition of life for enslaved Africans. Although church officials admittedly demanded physical as as spiritual care of bondpeople in parts of Spanish America, they rarely did so in Louisiana and appeared content to accept conditions as they found them when King Carlos III obtained the territory from France in 1763. On the question of slave marriage, for example, most priests chose not to challenge the power of the planter class, who enjoyed the legal right to deny this sacrament to their bondpeople. More tellingly, even when permission was obtained, the clergy understood that they would not be paid for their labors and so reluctant to proffer their services on this and other church sacraments as well (129). Yet Din is equally impatient with the conventional wisdom that slavery in Spanish Louisiana differed little from the institution that existed during the decades of French control. Within three short years, Governor Antonio de Ulloa altered practices dating from the French Code Noir of 1724 (which itself was adapted from a similar code of 1685 for the French West Indies). When French Creoles balked at his modest reforms, Spanish authorities announced that henceforth the statutes of Castile and the Indies were to govern the colony. The author is equally precise in what he does not cover. He observes that because scholars have discussed free blacks and mulattoes, he sees little reason to do so here (although that assertion does not prohibit him from repeatedly citing the voluminous and influential writings of the late Kimberly S. Hanger). Neither does Din have a great deal to say about slave culture or religion-a term wholly absent from his index-except to disagree with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall on a number of critical points. Because of his determination to focus on governors and regulations, or in words, the world the slaveholders made, Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves has a curiously antiquated feel to it. …