Spanish Louisiana Research Articles

Territorial Expansionists and Troublesome Locals: Daniel Clark at New Orleans and John Christian Schultz at Red River

Abstract The United States and Canada began major efforts to acquire territory in North America’s interior in the nineteenth century. In 1803, the United States purchased approximately 827,192 square miles of territory from France. Canada began to govern 1,409,900 square miles of territory known as Rupert’s Land in 1869. Historical accounts of American and Canadian officials’ efforts in Washington and Ottawa to obtain these vast territories are abundant. Historians have devoted less attention, however, to expansionists who supported American expansion in Louisiana and Canadian expansion in Rupert’s Land. Daniel Clark, U.S. Consul to New Orleans, used his office to promote American acquisition of Spanish Louisiana. Canadian John Christian Schultz, an influential “doctor” and businessperson at Red River, became the owner of the only newspaper in the settlement and used it to advocate for Canadian possession of Rupert’s Land. Clark arrived in Louisiana from Ireland in 1786 and Schultz from Upper Canada between 1859 and 1861. Clark and Schultz were opportunists who understood that American and Canadian territorial ambitions presented them with opportunities to advance their business and political careers. Far less important to both men were the futures of other residents of New Orleans and Red River. Clark and Schultz for example, both argued that representative local government should not be immediately introduced in their regions.

"It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages": The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana Revisited, 1769–1803

Abstract: The enslavement of Indigenous peoples by Europeans was not a small and isolated practice in the lands that now comprise the United States. Contests for land and labor were not mutually exclusive, and enslaved Native people labored in mines, domestic households, and plantations across North America. In the vast Louisiana Colony, French records frequently enumerated enslaved Indigenous people, but their presence is conspicuously absent from Spanish period records. Scholars have previously assumed that the practice of Indian slavery had simply been outlawed and any remaining Indian slaves were emancipated under the Leyes y Ordenanzas Nuevamente de las Indias after Don Alejandro O'Reilly raised the Spanish flag over New Orleans in August 1769. However, the very first case brought before the Louisiana State Supreme Court disproves that assumption. During the period of its supposed illegality, Indigenous enslavement persisted through a discursive practice of Indigenous erasure; changing notions of race and legal personhood hid enslaved Native Americans within a socioracial order that negated their existence. These machinations allowed "Indianness" to be controlled and exploited, and Native people continued to be trafficked and enslaved across the Gulf South into the antebellum period. Their stories must become part of the broader history of American slavery.

AWASH IN TRANS-IMPERIAL TRADE: SPANISH NEW ORLEANS AND NATCHEZ, 1783-1803

Spanish Louisiana (1766-1803) was probably the most prolonged and open Spanish experimentin free trade. The colony’s riverine ports of New Orleans and Natchez were awash intrans-imperial trade from France, British colonies, and especially the new North Americanempire. This trade flowed through both ports in both directions, upriver and down, constantlyrecirculating - but through the U.S. economy, and not that of metropolitan Spain.Louisiana’s riverine planters and merchants simultaneously owned plantations, stores, andships, and enjoyed access to ready capital and multiple sources of produce, goods and slaves.By the 1790s, these men and sometimes women no longer needed to see themselves as Spanish,and moved closer in their political discourse to that of the people already labeled losAmericanos. Therefore, even before 1803, riverine Louisiana was already both trans-imperialand, in the broadest sense, American.

Spanish New Orleans: An Imperial City on the American Periphery, 1766–1803 by John Eugene Rodriguez

Reviewed by: Spanish New Orleans: An Imperial City on the American Periphery, 1766–1803 by John Eugene Rodriguez Dean Sinclair Spanish New Orleans: An Imperial City on the American Periphery, 1766–1803. John Eugene Rodriguez. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiii+247, map, tables, charts, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8071-7489-0. A common perception of the Bourbon Spanish Empire in the Americas is that it was characterized by neglect, as well as economic and cultural drift, and that the incompetently managed Louisiana Territory was much better off under French rule, rife with corruption and dramatic contrasts between rich and poor. Spanish New Orleans explores the Spanish period in the long history of New Orleans and serves as a corrective to this perception, challenging narratives like DeConde's This Affair of Louisiana (1976) or Pitot's Observations on the Colony of Louisiana from 1796 to 1802 (1980), which portray Louisiana as a corrupt and neglected part of the Spanish Empire, longing for return to France or even attachment to the United States. France founded New Orleans in 1718 and it became the capital of Louisiana in 1723. The French held Louisiana for only forty-nine years before it was ceded to Spain in the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Spain occupied Louisiana for almost as long as the French, forty years, until the retrocession of Louisiana to France in the Treaty of Ildefonso, signed in 1800 but not in effect until 1803. Rodriguez employs a wide range of archival sources to argue that Bourbon Spain was not neglectful of its American possessions but rather employed a variety of means to encourage demographic, [End Page 124] economic, and political development of its empire. That success was mixed is obvious, yet in Spanish Louisiana throughout the years of Bourbon rule, there was little unrest in the cities or the countryside, and no active movement toward independence. In fact, it can be inferred that without Napoleon's retrocession, Bourbon Spanish rule might have lasted several years past 1803. Rodriguez's Spanish New Orleans is an innovative and engaging addition to the literature on Bourbon Spanish America. The author's purpose "is not to merely reinsert New Orleans into Spanish imperial history . . . [but] to consider what Spanish New Orleans reveals about the challenges and opportunities for the large Bourbon empire" (5). To accomplish this, Rodriguez examines demography, trade, and political discourse, framing these issues in a historic context, taking an evolutionary approach to New Orleans as an integral part of the late eighteenth-century Bourbon Spanish Empire. The evolutionary approach suggests that as Spain took control, demographic changes led to economic changes, including the creation of a multiethnic elite, which led to a vibrant political discourse, little of which generally correlate with later-stage Bourbon Spanish America. Rodriguez begins with population. There is a perception of demographic stagnation in the late 1700s Spanish Empire, but the author firmly establishes New Orleans as a place of population growth, using a variety of census data to establish this, as well as a unique use of economic records. As it was important for the Spanish rulers to understand the people in the empire and the expected tax revenues, several censuses were taken during the Spanish period. Census counts, including a 1795 "chimney census," are analyzed, yielding not only counts of people but also data on age and sex, ethnicity, and status as free or slave. Rodriguez also examines the voluminous notarial records for demographic changes. The twenty thousand pages of handwritten documents from the Spanish period track the routine business practices in the city, providing a data set that can be used to follow business transactions. Using this data, Rodriguez confirms that as the Spanish period continued, the city became less French and more Spanish, while revealing a growing population with northern European surnames as well as free people of color. He establishes that during the Spanish period New Orleans grew in population, and though the French presence remained significant, the population became more cosmopolitan with the arrival of immigrants [End Page 125] from Spain and other European countries and an increasing presence of Anglo-Americans. Rodriguez spends chapters...

To the Vast and Beautiful Land: Anglo Migration into Spanish Louisiana and Texas, 1760s–1820s by Light Townsend Cummins

Reviewed by: To the Vast and Beautiful Land: Anglo Migration into Spanish Louisiana and Texas, 1760s–1820s by Light Townsend Cummins Jeffrey A. Zemler To the Vast and Beautiful Land: Anglo Migration into Spanish Louisiana and Texas, 1760s–1820s. By Light Townsend Cummins. The Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and Southwest. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii, 266. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-741-5.) Over the years, Light Townsend Cummins, a former state historian of Texas, has written many articles and books. To the Vast and Beautiful Land: Anglo Migration into Spanish Louisiana and Texas, 1760s–1820s is a compilation of eleven of his essays written between 1988 and 2015. They all speak to the arrival of English-speaking immigrants in Spanish Louisiana and Texas and these newcomers’ effect on the land and society. Cummins argues that land acquisition and commerce brought the Anglo-American settlers to the area and that their mercantile enterprises linked the region with the English-speaking ports of the Atlantic, causing a dramatic transformation in the commercial patterns established during the region’s French and Spanish eras. American hegemony, he further states, did not arrive in the region with the Louisiana Purchase or the Texas Revolution. Rather, it preceded both events. Cummins makes it clear that he is challenging two assumptions found in the historical literature. First, he argues that no “westward movement,” as described by Frederick Jackson Turner, occurred with regard to the Spanish borderlands (p. xi). Instead of Turner’s image of American settlers moving steadily west by [End Page 140] wagon from their homes along the Atlantic coast, Cummins argues, movement into the Spanish borderlands was “maritime in nature” (p. xi). Rafting down the Mississippi River or arriving in New Orleans by ship, these settlers bypassed the entire trans-Appalachian West of the United States as they settled the Spanish borderlands. Second, Cummins argues that the mercantile operations of the many Anglo-American merchants in the region provided support for the successful arrival of Anglo-American settlers, whom Spanish officials wanted and welcomed. These merchants began arriving in the region before the American Revolution. Cummins begins each article with a brief introduction that includes the title of a recent monograph that addresses some of the topics contained within the essay. A popular subject of discussion for Cummins is the Anglo-American merchant Oliver Pollock, whose efforts helped the Americans during their revolution. Cummins uses Pollock to showcase how Anglo-Americans ingratiated themselves into Spanish society and quickly assumed control of the region’s commercial operations. It is, however, with the multiple essays on Pollock that one becomes aware of the repetitive nature of the book, a situation that Cummins readily admits in his preface. Despite the inconvenience to the reader, Cummins feels it essential to maintain the integrity of the original essays in this collection. Most of the essays in this book deal with Spanish Louisiana. Only one essay, the last, deals with Texas. Cummins views Texas as the backcountry of Louisiana. Everything flowed eastward from Texas to New Orleans until the mid-1860s, when the long-distance steamships from Galveston and the newly constructed railroad supplanted this decades-long relationship. He also dislikes the “atomization” of the Spanish borderlands, as scholars dare not cross the imaginary line between the southeastern and southwestern halves of the region (p. 206). He scolds, for instance, scholars who simply drop the empresarios in Texas without providing a clear understanding of their earlier efforts, which often occurred in Spanish Louisiana. Cummins has succeeded in compiling a rather compelling narrative of Anglo-American influences on the region, especially Spanish Louisiana. Although some of the essays are thirty years old, all are insightful, and Cummins’s decision to include a bibliographical essay helps make their citations current. Jeffrey A. Zemler Brookhaven College Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

To the Vast and Beautiful Land: Anglo Migration into Spanish Louisiana and Texas, 1760s–1820s by Light Townsend Cummins

Reviewed by: To the Vast and Beautiful Land: Anglo Migration into Spanish Louisiana and Texas, 1760s–1820s by Light Townsend Cummins Bradley Folsom To the Vast and Beautiful Land: Anglo Migration into Spanish Louisiana and Texas, 1760s–1820s. By Light Townsend Cummins. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019. Pp. 288. Notes, bibliography, index.) Light Townsend Cummins wrote the eleven previously published essays included in To the Vast and Beautiful Land: Anglo Migration into Spanish Louisiana and Texas, 1760s–1820s over the course of a long and distinguished career that helped redefine how historians have interpreted colonial and early national Texas and Louisiana history. In addition to this book, Cummins has written or contributed to some twenty books and given countless lectures on this subject matter. Perhaps owing to his prolific record, there is nothing groundbreaking about the thesis of this volume, "that commerce and land acquisition by Anglo-Americans went hand in hand as dual motivators for the migration of English speakers into Louisiana and Texas" (vii). Indeed, few modern historians would argue against this premise, but, falling in line with current trends in historiography, they may find that these articles do not properly explain how this "commerce" extended beyond North America and was a part of a greater Trans-Atlantic trading network. They may also find fault in the lack of discussion of how much of this "land acquisition" was by slave owners and would-be slave owners who wanted land in Louisiana and Texas for slave-driven plantation agriculture. What makes this book refreshing and sets it apart from similar collections, however, is that Cummins recognizes that historiography has changed and that new revelations have arisen since he originally wrote many of the articles. He addresses this evolution in the book's introduction, in prefaces to each article, and, most impressively, in a detailed bibliographic essay, explaining where research stood when he wrote each article and providing more recent works that address the subject matter from a different perspective or in greater detail. In spite of this self-effacing, highly valuable approach, a number of these essays address topics that continue to remain unexplored or underexplored. [End Page 364] For example, "Church Courts, Marriage Breakdown, and Separation in Spanish Louisiana, West Florida, and Texas," provides much needed insight into how Spanish colonial courts dealt with marital disputes involving adultery and domestic abuse. Cummins discovers that colonial officials were not cold and unfeeling bureaucrats bent solely on enforcing state and church edicts, but frequently offered practical, albeit patriarchal, solutions that protected women and punished abusive husbands. In another insightful article that challenges traditional understanding about gender relations on the colonial frontier, Cummins details the story of Anne McMeans, a Pennsylvania woman of humble origins who went west to Louisiana during the American Revolution. After a series of escalating tragedies, including the death of her husband, she decided the West was not for her and set out for home, a difficult endeavor considering that the trip to Louisiana had left her and her family penniless. This tale provides an interesting temporal, geographical, and gendered juxtaposition to the oft-repeated narrative of the single young adult American male who headed west in the mid-nineteenth century to make his home and fortune. McMeans's story also provides valuable insight into the material motivation for the westward movement of middle and lower class Anglo Americans, or "frontier folk" as Cummins refers to them, thereby addressing a demographic group that historians have overlooked in recent years. The book's first article, "An Enduring Community" finds that many Anglo American settlers moved into British West Florida prior to the American Revolution to acquire land. In order to retain titles to this land, the settlers stayed in Florida after Spanish takeover, but, much like later American settlers in Texas, their community remained culturally distinct from that of their new government. Other articles focus on Anglo American merchants who moved to New Orleans while it was under Spanish rule to deal in slaves, land, and agricultural commodities, and tied the economy of Louisiana to that of the eastern United States through currency manipulation and preexisting business partnerships. Even the four articles that concern colonial...

Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity by John C Havard

Reviewed by: Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity by John C Havard Maria A. Windell HAVARD, JOHN C. Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2018. 224 pp. $44.95 cloth; $44.95 e-book. The president of the United States is an avowed nationalist who constructs his position as such most consistently through xenophobic screeds against (im)migrants from Latin America. In such a political moment it is vital that we both produce and attend to scholarship that explores the US’s relationship to the Americas. John C. Havard’s Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity undertakes this task by tracking how the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century US defined itself through and against depictions of Spain’s imperial presence in the Americas. Havard posits the Hispanicism of his title as a counterpart to Edward W. Said’s and Toni Morrison’s more familiar formulations of Orientalism and Africanism. His use of Hispanicism builds on Ed White’s earlier coining of the term as a hemispheric parallel to the exoticism of Orientalism, and his argument more generally builds on developments in transamerican studies that highlight the necessity of nuancing nationalist and transatlantic framings of US literary traditions. In particular, he emphasizes Hispanicism’s “political dimension,” arguing that it “had a special role” in developing “the idea that Anglo-Americans were racially fitted for liberal-democratic self-government,” an idea that he insists goes beyond Africanism’s “constructi[on of] whiteness as a prerequisite for freedom and agency” (15). He thus asserts, “It is no coincidence that US representations of Hispanic difference focus on what is construed as the metaphysical aversion to liberty of the Spanish and their New World descendants in a period in which US expansionists turned their eyes toward Spanish Louisiana, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America” (18). Hispanicism and Early US Literature covers the aftermath of the American Revolution through the late nineteenth century, working to explain how the nation arrived at 1898 and the Spanish-American War, so often seen as a turning point in the development of US imperialism, with a discourse fully prepared to promote US intervention in Spanish America. In tracing Hispanicism across the long nineteenth century, Havard engages an array of canonical and noncanonical authors and texts—at times crossing these categories by, for instance, working with lesser-known novels by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper. The study includes poetry, novels, novellas, and essays, thereby demonstrating Hispanicism’s breadth, depth, and duration. Havard’s argument balances its formal, temporal, and geographic range with a focus on literature’s relation to US political discourses, particularly liberalism. Each chapter of Hispanicism and Early US Literature close reads its central text(s) while questioning how Hispanicism related to developments within liberalism. Havard notes that Hispanicism and liberalism were not, as we might presume today, opposed in the nineteenth century: “For many early national and antebellum whites, it seemed obvious that the capacity to establish liberal institutions was a specifically Anglo-American faculty. Liberalism and racialism were not at odds for these US Americans” (17). By locating Hispanicism within liberal political discourse, Havard illustrates not only the literary but also the cultural, social, commercial, and governmental impact of US tendencies to paint the Spanish (Americas) with a broad brush. The book is organized into an introduction, conclusion, and five chapters divided in two parts. The introduction offers an historical and critical framework [End Page 320] for Hispanicism. Part I of the book examines “The Black Legend, Hispanicism, and the Emergence of National Identity in the Early United States.” The three chapters that compose this section cover ways US authors positioned the nation in relation to ideas, perceptions, and images of Spain, Mexico, and Spanish(-American)ness from the 1780s through the years preceding the US Civil War. The first chapter reads Joel Barlow’s epic poems The Vision of Columbus (1787) and The Columbiad (1807) as establishing an Hispanicist ideology by juxtaposing a rising, cosmopolitan, commercial US against a greed-driven...

Translation and Transmission in the Early Americas: The Fourth Early Americanist “Summit

Translation and Transmission in the Early Americas: The Fourth Early Americanist “Summit Andrea Pauw (bio) Cosponsored by the Society of Early Americanists and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Washington, DC, and University of Maryland June 2–5, 2016 The Fourth Early Americanist “Summit” brought together more than 150 scholars to discuss the theme of “Translation and Transmission in the Early Americas.” The four-day, multilingual occasion featured three keynote addresses and forty panels led by experts in the fields of anthropology, history, linguistics, and literary studies. The event emerged on the Twitter stratosphere with its very own “hashtag.” Conference attendees could share their thoughts before, during, and after the event, such as Marie Taylor’s optimistic reaction, “Feeling energized to write after a great conference #UMDColonialTranslation” and Alejandra Dubcovsky’s praise of a fellow attendee’s presentation: “@Jillio brilliant comment to ‘task of translator’ panel #UMDcolonialTranslation ‘translation as a haunted space.’” This interface transported discussions beyond the walls of Tawes Hall so that even those who regretfully missed the conference (“Wish I had been there #UMDColonialTranslation”) could take part in the dialogue. Indeed, praise for the conference and for fellow participants was not confined to Twitter. When asked about her impressions of the summit, one participant remarked on the highly collegial atmosphere sustained throughout the weekend. Seasoned attendees greeted familiar colleagues and welcomed new faces. In addition to the friendly and supportive environment of the conference, I also appreciated the early American “field trips” to local cultural attractions. Co-organizers Ralph Bauer and Allison Bigelow facilitated outings to downtown Washington for Davíd Carrasco’s and Michael Witgen’s keynote addresses at the Mexican Cultural Institute [End Page 257] and the National Museum of the American Indian. The long bus rides into DC did not bother conference participants, providing a chance to reflect on stimulating panel presentations or simply to catch up with friends. Throughout the summit, scholars repeatedly called attention to the interpretive and ideological hazards of translation. Panels fostered interdisciplinary dialogue concerning the problematic issues raised by the practice of translation in the early Americas and beyond. Examples of translation in religious, scientific, literary, and political discourse offered a wide variety of complex cases to consider. With titles such as “Languages of Belonging and Exclusion in the Early Modern Circum-Caribbean,” “Talking Books: Alphabetic Literacy in Colonial Encounters,” and “Translating Nature: A Transcultural History of Early Modern Science” among others, panels and especially the participatory roundtables allowed for open discussion and creative brainstorming among conferences attendees. Many panelists prefaced their work by asking for constructive criticism from the audience during question-and-answer sessions. As noted in the Twitter comments, the conference was a useful place to present incipient research projects in order to receive alternative perspectives from collaborative participants. Panels deliberated on the issues of transmission and religion—evidenced in the militant theology used to indoctrinate newly converted Christians in sixteenth-century Brazil, in Peruvian criollo Fray Jerónimo de Oré’s evangelistic texts, and in the significant role of Jesuit translators in eighteenth-century Yucatan. Roundtables addressed literary questions of translation such as early modern theorizations of horizontal and vertical translation, the Othering language of Abel Posse’s twentieth-century retelling of colonial shipwrecks in El largo atardecer del caminante, the “contagion” of sentimentality in eighteenth-century French texts produced in Spanish Louisiana, and the defiant graffiti of conquistadores in colonial Mexico. Other sessions considered scientific knowledge in translation such as Álvaro Alonso Barba’s advocacy of Quechua mining techniques in seventeenth-century Spain, as well as the pervasive contemporary privileging of European Enlightenment epistemologies that “accommodate” indigenous knowledge. The downtown outings provided access to relevant venues that promoted further reflection on the issues discussed during roundtables throughout the day. On Thursday evening I was enthralled by Roberto Cueva del Río’s colorful murals as I climbed the winding staircase to hear [End Page 258] Davíd Carrasco’s keynote address at the Mexican Cultural Institute. Carrasco introduced the theme of translation with his fascinating story of the discovery and restoration of the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan Número 2. He highlighted two of the recurring themes prevalent throughout the conference: the...

Meriwether Lewis: The Assassination of an American Hero and the Silver Mines of Mexico by Kira Gale, and: The Unknown Travels and Dubious Pursuits of William Clark by Jo Ann Trogdon

Reviewed by: Meriwether Lewis: The Assassination of an American Hero and the Silver Mines of Mexico by Kira Gale, and: The Unknown Travels and Dubious Pursuits of William Clark by Jo Ann Trogdon Don R. Byrnes Meriwether Lewis: The Assassination of an American Hero and the Silver Mines of Mexico. By Kira Gale. (Omaha, Neb.: River Junction Press, 2015. Pp. xxiv, 552. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-9914093-0-3; cloth, $29.95, 978-0-9914093-1-0.) The Unknown Travels and Dubious Pursuits of William Clark. By Jo Ann Trogdon. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. Pp. xxii, 469. $36.95, ISBN 978-0-8262-2049-3.) These two works join the extensive bibliography on Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and the great journey of discovery to the shores of the Pacific Ocean during the Thomas Jefferson administration. The writers represent the growing interest in local history and the emergence of amateur historians with a laser-sharp focus on specific events and historical figures that impacted their neighborhoods. Conspiracy theories are common elements of the two books, but the methodology is diverse and tailored to the interests of the two writers. In 2006 Kira Gale published Lewis and Clark Road Trips: Exploring the Trail Across America (Omaha, Neb., 2006), describing some eight hundred tourist destinations along the trail, which she traveled. Her next work, written with James E. Starrs, a forensic law professor at George Washington University, was The Death of Meriwether Lewis: A Historic Crime Scene Investigation (Omaha, Neb., 2009). Gale’s new study includes General James Wilkinson as a principal player because of his support for the idea in 1800 to capture Spanish Louisiana (providing access to the silver mines of Mexico) in the event that France attacked the United States. Wilkinson is portrayed as the conspirator par excellence who supported Aaron Burr’s effort to take the presidency in the disputed election of 1800, believing it would enable the invasion (see Norman W. Caldwell, “Cantonment Wilkinsonville,” Mid-America, 31 [January 1949], 3–28). But for the invitation from Thomas Jefferson to serve as his private secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis might well have been part of Wilkinson’s private army. While in Philadelphia, Lewis made “preparations to lead an army expedition called ‘The Corps of Volunteers for North Western Discovery’” (p. 157). After 125 pages of a detailed account of the journey, Gale introduces the Burr-Wilkinson conspiracy. When Wilkinson arrived in Kentucky in 1783, [End Page 159] he was in the westernmost part of the United States, where the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers met. To the south was Spanish territory in West Florida and the parishes of Spanish Louisiana that extended from Baton Rouge to Mobile. General James Wilkinson was a veteran of the Revolutionary War who continued to serve in the military for a number of years thereafter. Jefferson appointed him to be the governor of the Louisiana Territory. Philip Nolan traveled to Mexico on Wilkinson’s behalf, where he accepted Spanish silver dollars. Nolan was later killed by the Spanish because of his 1801 expedition to Texas to attempt to gain land and wealth there. The relationship of Burr and Wilkinson was a marriage of convenience that Wilkinson exploited to gain land as well as support from the Spanish who were trying to maintain the function of what Herbert Eugene Bolton has called the “borderlands” to protect their holdings south of the United States. Gale describes Wilkinson as “an instigator and a collaborator” (p. 342). After attending the trial of Aaron Burr at Jefferson’s order, Lewis became the governor of the Louisiana Territory. Gale is convinced that Lewis did not commit suicide but was murdered by agents seeking to prevent the disclosure of Wilkinson’s involvement with Burr. The strength of the work, however, is the account of the expedition and not the redemption of Lewis. The book is well documented, and there is an extensive bibliography, as well as a functional index. Jo Ann Trogdon is an attorney who lives in Columbia, Missouri, where she found the 1798–1801 journal of William Clark in the State Historical Society of Missouri. She has previously published articles in Arizona Highways and in...

Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed America by Julie M. Fenster

Reviewed by: Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed America by Julie M. Fenster Francis X. Galán Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed America. By Julie M. Fenster. (New York: Crown Publishing, 2016. Pp. 422. Notes, bibliography, index.) In this lively work about the “men of Jefferson,” principally six explorers of the early American West, Julie Fenster presents an intimate portrait of colorful characters we thought we already knew. More importantly, the author deftly connects our understanding of international events leading [End Page 388] to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 with Thomas Jefferson’s prior role as secretary of state and his involvement in the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, two experiences that had merged his interest in westward expansion with purely scientific exploration. Fenster’s inclusion of Texas into this broader American narrative is refreshing: she raises some other powerful folks from the dead to dance the two-step around controversies while she paints a less romantic vision of the same explorers Jefferson encouraged during an era of tremendous optimism and fear. While readers may otherwise not see in various chapters any connections among Jefferson’s interest in the mustangs of Texas, navigation rights down the Mississippi to New Orleans, surveying the thirty-first parallel in West Florida, and the famous Lewis and Clark expedition’s search for the headwaters of the Missouri, Fenster shows in the opening chapter how these events followed from Jefferson’s concern over the Nootka Affair in Western Canada during the early 1790s. Jefferson feared Spain and Britain might go to war against each other over the fur trade in this region, with Britain possibly seizing Spanish Louisiana as a result. Jefferson’s advice to Washington’s cabinet expressing opposition to Britain and support for American neutrality, even if a bluff, marked the first victory of sorts for the diplomatic approach upon which Jefferson came to rely as president, especially after Napoleon’s rise to power in France. Fenster describes Spain’s rapprochement with Britain over coexistence in Nootka as a “tremor of weakness” for having “blinked” (12), but it also made Spain more determined to defend its claims in North America such as the border of Texas with Louisiana. Perhaps of all the explorers Fenster covers, her discussion of Thomas Freeman does justice to a man sold short for his important survey work on behalf of the nation to find the source of the Red River before his expedition was cut off by Spanish troops from Nacogdoches. Meanwhile, Fenster humanizes Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as well as Zebulon Pike: these men relied on grit in the outdoors and assistance from strangers, including Sacajawea for the former and the Spanish from New Mexico for the latter. Fenster brings to life other important power brokers such as the Kadohadacho chief Dehahuit in the Louisiana–Texas borderlands and the Mandan Indians in present North Dakota who could make or break nations and explorers. The author interestingly remarks that “Natchitoches was the Nootka of 1806” (332) in regards to continental ambitions: Pike could not return on time in support of Freeman whereas Pike’s mentor, General James Wilkinson, delayed support while under suspicion as a double agent for Spain. Fenster relies upon a strategic combination of printed primary and secondary sources, including important works by such scholars as Dan Flores, Colin Calloway, and F. Todd Smith to name a few. While her book [End Page 389] is intended for a general audience, her analysis is sound and written in a fast-moving style. Francis X. Galán Texas A&M University—San Antonio Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

The vitriolic blood of a Negro: the development of racial identity and Creole elitism in New Spain and Spanish Louisiana, 1763–1803

This paper shows that the introduction of concepts of whiteness, purity of blood and legitimacy of kin under the Spanish caused a transformation within the New Orleans coloured community. As generations of mixed-race men and women emerged from interracial families established during the late French Period, Spanish social and legal practices permeated the New Orleans cultural landscape. Suddenly, new ideas of racial science, mixture and definition appeared in law, gradually affecting social intercourse. The ambiguous awareness of mulâtres and negres under the French gave way to a regimented taxonomy of ‘races’ and ‘hybrids’ developed over more than a century in Latin America and the Caribbean and manifested in the social and racial identities of the New Orleans mixed-race community.

Old Roots, New Shoots: Early American Environmental History

Some two hundred years before publication of William Cronon's Changes in Land, widely acknowledged text of early American environmental history, Indians in Spanish American borderlands were looking to environment to help interpret history legacv of European-Native encounters.1 In one account, Indians told a hunter who had found a mineral deposit in Spanish Louisiana that ore was the white treasure, and that amongst these mountains of Oar a noise was often heard like explosion of a Cannon . . . which Indians said was Spirit of white people working amongst their Treasure.' A similar tale recounted how uncommon Animal [was] seen by Natives in a lake in . . . New Mexico. It is compared to upper part of body of a Spaniard with his broad brimmed hat. The Indians express a dislike or abhorrence of place . . . assert that departed Spirits of first Spaniards who conquered their Country dwell in lake.3 Such stories record Natives'-or, perhaps, Anglo-American recorders'- enduring associations among death, Spaniards, precious metals, environments where all these things converged. These environmental histories, it seems, offered a fitting lens for interpreting key aspects of early contact era.Why ought environmental historians to pay more attention to early America Atlantic world, why, in turn, should early Americanists (and we define that term in its broadest terms, hemispherically) become more invested in telling stories about ecologies-about plants, animals, rivers, climates, all that? This is question that we asked ourselyes as we proposed organized this special issue of Early American Studies. After all, these are fields that do not necessarily jump to mind as easy allies. Scholars such as Peter Mancall have commented on irregular (if undeniably growing) appearance of environmental history in major journals of early American historv equally rare sightings of early Americanists at venues such as annual conference of American Society for Environmental History.4 Covering a time place before advent of sorts of scientifically minded sources that inform a great deal of more modern environmental historv' without an obvious stake in sort of moral project imagined for environmental historians Avho seek to influence policy public opinion about natural catastrophes both forecast already occurred-who seek nothing less than saving world, according to Donald Worster-studies of early American environments have lacked energy that has made field one of most dA'namic today.5Yet environment mattered to peoples of early America. At most obvious level, this was because they realized their health wealth were caught up in environmental circumstances as diverse as population of white-tailed deer, Avinter frosts, urban miasmas, rising floodAvaters. Decades centuries of priA'ation suffering created colonial communities attuned to local emdronments, millennia of experience created indigenous communities with a deep knowledge of American places. But early Americans' engagement with environment was also narrative historical: they told stories in which relationship between man nature was central to explaining past, present, future conditions of peoples places.This should challenge us as we consider genealogy of environmental history as a practice, for it suggests that environmental history has deeper roots in early American history than might often be appreciated. The standard historiographical periodization of environmental history tends to place its origins in twentieth century or, according to some borderlands scholars, Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis of 1890s. As Alfred Crosby put it, American environmental history got momentum in mid-twentieth century because legacy of Turner thesis had ensured that the historian of frontier was . …

The Acadian Diaspora by Christopher Hodson

Reviews 241 purpose is underscored by the subtitles of each chapter, which are labeled with oneline lessons or recommendations that relate to the chapter content. Hawthorne’s“story of the story”succeeds in revealing the truth about this fascinating and enigmatic figure while allowing the reader to share in the frustration and joy of discovery in humanities research. Texas Christian University Sharon L. Fairchild Hodson, Christopher. The Acadian Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. ISBN 9780 -19-973977-6. Pp. 260. $34.95. In late summer of 1755, British ships entered present-day Nova Scotia to deport 7,000 out of 15,000 Acadians into the unknown. Soon after, 5,000 more from Île SaintJean (Prince Edward Island) and Île Royale (Cape Breton Island) followed them.After years of hard work and alliances with the Mi’kmaq Native Americans,these descendants of seventeenth-century French immigrants had succeeded in producing abundant crops. Caught in the political power struggles between Great Britain and France, they maintained their neutrality. The British, reluctant to adopt Francophone Catholics into their expanding Empire, expelled the unwanted settlers and repopulated the area with loyal citizens. Hodson sees this dérangement in biblical terms, similar to the Jewish diaspora in ancient and contemporary history. Inhospitable receptions and separation of families became the lot of these eighteenth-century exiles, much like today’s ethnic cleansing. The Acadians landed in various cities along the Atlantic coast, in Spanish Louisiana, across the Atlantic in England and France. Almost nowhere were they welcomed. Dreams of restoring a lost colonial empire impelled French adventurers to send them to Saint-Domingue (Haiti), French Guiana, and the Falkland Islands. All ventures failed. The Acadians’agricultural prowess prompted the French government to settle them in Poitou and Belle-Ile-en-Mer. Their reception was no better there. Disease and epidemics claimed many, as they huddled in overcrowded boats and in harbors that refused them entry. Yet the tenacity of the Acadians remains legendary. In literature and legend they appear as people who sought their loved ones, guarded their traditions in hopes of recreating a lost world. However, Hodson explores the diaspora from another perspective, namely, that Acadian destinies depended not only on their own identities, but also on the historical times in which they lived. He develops“the role of Acadians in building empires, and the role of empires in forming Acadians”(10). They became pawns in a colonial market in the aftermath of the Seven Years War.Hodson studies the colonial fortunes and misfortunes,the rivalries and ruses of the British and French in building their empires. Hodson has consulted numerous archival sources to document the wanderings and eventual settlements of the displaced Acadians. He relates a series of mini-biographies and episodes that give faces and names to the dispersed exiles. Some formed friendships with their hosts, like Charles White (Leblanc) in Philadelphia, or Simon Leblanc near Boston. Others led rebel groups, like Joseph Broussard, dit Beausoleil, who journeyed from Halifax to the Caribbean . Still others,likeAugustin Benoit and his family,found prosperity,albeit temporary, in the Falkland Islands. The book is well-documented, with numerous footnotes and references, but unfortunately without a bibliography. Hobson includes many French sources and some Acadian terms, such as aboiteaux (dikes) which provide local color. Maps and illustrations provide visual anchors. The book is intriguing, and provides an additional dimension to the Acadian story by situating it in its historical and geopolitical context, along with the individual actors of a dramatic event. Chestnut Hill College (PA) Mary Helen Kashuba Kepel, Gilles. Banlieue de la République: société, politique et religion à Clichy-sousBois et Montfermeil. Paris: Gallimard, 2012. ISBN 978-2-07-013682-7. Pp. 530. 28,90 a. Ce livre est le résultat d’une enquête réalisée en 2010 auprès de cent personnes habitant ou ayant habité à Clichy-Montfermeil,en banlieue parisienne.L’agglomération, à l’origine des émeutes qui embrasèrent la France en 2005, est présentée comme une banlieue emblématique où peut s’observer la réalisation—ou pas—de la promesse républicaine. Les interlocuteurs, étrangers (vingt-trois) et français (soixante-dix-sept, dont soixante...

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2013. vi, 526 pp. $35.00 US (cloth) In 1803 the custodian of Spanish Louisiana, Napoleon Bonaparte, sold the territory to the United States for approximately 15 million dollars. price included a debt from the War for Independence. Bonaparte was at war, needed the money and had no strategic need of the territory. On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson's government had simply sought freer access through the port of New Orleans. French cession put the Mississippi River and New Orleans wholly within the United States and doubled the nation's sovereign territory taking it west to the Rocky Mountains. Louisiana Purchase would expand Jefferson's luminous of liberty, a boundless space populated by independent republican farmers. And so it appeared in the northwestern reaches of the Purchase. But a darker vision of empire took shape in the sub-tropical lower Mississippi Valley, in a powerful slave-based society within the ambit of the Mississippi River. That bright to dark imagery introduces Walter Johnson's ambitious new study of the Cotton Kingdom. rich soil and abundant land of Louisiana, Mississippi, and adjacent states were exploited with distinct strains of cotton, steam-driven riverboats, and global textile markets. Most important was the labour of hundreds of thousands of slaves, measured by planters as so many hands. millions of bales of cotton that went through New Orleans every year began with the toil of the enslaved. By 1850 the Cotton Kingdom was the wealthiest region in the United States. Johnson's treatment of life, racism and human degradation, and of the as labour producing commodity is powerful and depressing. Some 95 per cent of all African Americans in the Cotton Kingdom were in bondage, in a conspicuous colour line between slavery and freedom. As with all scholars seeking a perspective, Johnson has to rely on limited sources. few available narratives, including that of the well-known Solomon Northrop, cannot speak for the millions of illiterate, trapped slaves who lived and died in the Cotton Kingdom. However, for the most part, the narratives amplified by ancillary evidence are handled with tact and some theorizing. It seems that in order to address scholarly theories of accommodation and fatalism, Johnson's cotton-bound slave community did not succumb to the regime but adopted caring and cooperation as defensive and resistance strategies. Otherwise, Johnson's typical appears to be malnourished, ragged, intimidated and routinely whipped or beaten. reader will find no benevolent masters in Johnson's composite plantation culture. Johnson is a polished writer. His fondness for allusion in some of his fourteen chapter titles, leads, for example to the self-evident The Steamboat Sublime, Dominion, Carceral Landscape, and The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny. He also uses detail effectively to illustrate a particular theme or topic. In one example he traces the fate of a bale of cotton with great facility by following the trail from the worn fingers of the picker across thousands of miles to the appraisal of the bale's value by a Liverpool broker. Johnson's chapters on the Mississippi's unique hydrology, seasonal shifts in river usage, on steamboat technology, and the logistics of a thousand plus miles of commerce and communication include a lively analysis of the sociology of the river's class- and race-layered culture. …

The Origin of Citizen Genet's Projected Attack on Spanish Louisiana: A Case Study in Girondin Politics

In 1792 the Girondin ministry decided to send Edmond Genet to the United States with plans to recruit western frontiersmen and invade Spanish Louisiana. The episode is well known in American history, but the literature on its French origin is sparse and overemphasizes the contribution of revolutionary leader Jacques-Pierre Brissot. This essay contextualizes the French decision within the debate between Brissot, Minister of Foreign Affairs Pierre Lebrun, and General Charles-François Dumouriez over whether France should send troops against Spanish colonies in South America. The essay argues that Lebrun promoted the western scheme in order to attack Spanish interests without straining French resources. Rather than merely embodying a spirit of universal freedom, Lebrun's plan was grounded in the geopolitical advantages the mission might afford France in its European wars. En 1792 le ministère girondin a décidé à envoyer Edmond Genet aux Etats-Unis en mission pour embaucher des frontaliers de l'Ouest et envahir la Louisiane espagnole. Cet événement est célèbre dans l'histoire américaine mais très peu de littérature existe à propos de ses origines françaises et celle-ci surestime la contribution du leader révolutionnaire Jacques-Pierre Brissot. Cet essai place la décision française dans le contexte du débat entre Brissot, le ministre des affaires étrangères Pierre Lebrun et le général Charles-François Dumouriez sur l'engagement potentiel de troupes contre les colonies espagnoles en Amérique du Sud. L'essai défend la thèse selon laquelle Lebrun aurait favorisé le projet d'attaquer les intérêts espagnols sans faire appel aux ressources françaises. Plutôt que d'incarner simplement l'esprit de la liberté universelle, le plan de Lebrun était fondé sur les avantages géopolitiques que la mission pourrait rapporter à la France dans ses guerres européennes.

"A Bondage So Harsh": Acadian Labor in the French Caribbean, 1763-1766

At the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763, geopolitical equilibrium gave way to grotesque imbalance. Great Britain became a leviathan, acquiring Canada, several key islands in the Caribbean, Senegal in Africa, French possessions in the Mediterranean, in India, and on the East Indian island of Sumatra, while crushing Gallic pretensions to the Ohio Valley. Across the triumphant empire, news of the rout sparked rounds of drunken celebration among some, while others quietly speculated that Christ's millennial reign would soon begin. For Louis XV and his cast of ministers, however, defeat provoked sober reflection and hard-edged reasoning. Britain's newfound dominance demanded a rapid, inventive response. The integration of France's remaining overseas territories into a muscular, vibrant polity became the ultimate projet in a kingdom bursting with les hommes a projets.1Ensconced in the rhetoric of progress, the schemes that emerged from this hothouse of patriotism and personal ambition promised an extension of imperial authority unlike any France had ever seen.2 Few of these proposals ever came to fruition. This essay, however, examines two that did. The first, a colony on the Kourou River in Guiana, collapsed in spectacular fashion only months after its foundation in 1763. Disease and starvation killed thousands of migrants, sending destitute survivors fleeing to Europe or elsewhere in the Caribbean. The second, a smaller settlement on the remote northern coast of Saint Domingue, was constructed early in 1764. It proved a disappointment, lapsing into obscurity over the next two years. Most of its residents died or filtered to greener if equally fetid pastures in Spanish Louisiana. Both projects shared a unique trait. In a region where African slavery thrived as nowhere else, the settlements were manned, in full or in part, by an unlikely workforce: Acadian refugees.These men, women, and children had been through a great deal. During the mid-seventeenth century, their ancestors had been recruited to settle Acadia, a colony to the northeast of Massachusetts Bay. Along the tidal basins of the Bay of Fundy, the newcomers forged economic, political, and marital bonds with the local Mi'kmaq, traded with both Bostonian and canadien merchants, and built an intricate system of dikes to wall seawater from rich farmland near the shoreline. Government was weak. No seigneurial regime existed, rents went unpaid (and, generally, unmentioned) and the yeoman who could produce a legal title to his land was a rare find. Practiced with various degrees of devotion, Catholicism linked Acadians to each other, the Jesuit order, and the metropolis. Since the nineteenth century, generations have echoed (albeit in kinder language) Francis Parkman's characterization of the Acadians as a simple and ignorant peasantry, but new research has recovered a complex society-primarily agricultural, Catholic, and French, yet scored by multiple divisions of rank, wealth, and political allegiance.3 Such vibrancy meant little to Louis XIV. In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht gave Acadia to the British, who named the province Nova Scotia and set up a garrison at Annapolis Royal to lord over two thousand Acadian subjects. Forty years of coexistence followed, during which the Acadians skirted oaths to Hanoverian monarchs, proclaimed political neutrality, enjoyed stunning demographic increase, and otherwise made themselves the bane of their new rulers. Like that of the Irish, the situation of these Catholics in a Protestant empire might have endured forever, had not imperial conflict intervened.In the fall of 1755, on the cusp of the Seven Years' War, a combined force of British regulars and Massachusetts volunteers received orders from Nova Scotia's invasion-wary lieutenant governor to remove the entire Acadian pop ulation-fifteen thousand souls-from his province. They proceeded with brutal efficiency, capturing seven thousand civilians and chasing those who escaped deep into the wilderness. …

Eighteenth‐Century Land Speculation at the Margins of the Anglo‐American World

AbstractSometimes, by looking closely at one emblematic life we can see the ways in which historical dynamics work themselves out. Such is the case with George Morgan and his pursuit of land in the trans‐Appalachian west. During the late eighteenth century he was, like many others, a fur trader, a diplomat, and a partner in a variety of land speculation schemes west of the Appalachian Mountains. As Americans of European extraction moved farther west, Morgan applied the trans‐Appalachian speculation model in a unique manner and attempted to gain vast wealth and political power by obtaining rights to land west of the Mississippi River in Spanish Louisiana. In the end, his attempts to settle land and create a new society west of the Mississippi River extended, expedited, and facilitated the spread of Anglo‐American settlements across the nation during the nineteenth century.

A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America

A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Edited by Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. vii, 283. Illustrations. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95.) A Centre of Wonders looks at the human body from the perspective of several overlapping disciplinary fields: literary studies, feminist theory, religious studies, and history. The book's fifteen provocative essays focus on various aspects of the early modem body, ranging widely from symbolic to material interpretations of corporeality. The book is organized around four themes: correspondence (between bodies and the outside world); fixity (the regulation of bodies and the categorization of difference); fluidity (culturally mediated views of the body); and metaphor (how bodies can represent something else). Individual authors have read each other's essays and refer frequently to them; thus readers can almost hear a conversation emerging among early American scholars. All of the essays in A Centre of Wonders stimulate us to think about the human body in novel and original ways, and by so doing, to gain deeper insight into the early modern mind. Robert Blair St. George examines the relationship between witchcraft, the body, and domestic space by focusing on the seventeenth-century analogy between the dwelling and the human body. Accompanied by St. George's beautifully precise pen and ink drawings, this opening essay challenges us to think of the body expansively and metaphorically as a building and, vice versa, to consider houses as representations of bodies. Houses, like bodies, were supposed to protect their interiors, but during witchcraft outbreaks, their inner sanctums were susceptible to attack. Women's spaces, like women's bodies, were particularly vulnerable. Mentally mapping the body onto a structure allowed seventeenth-century people to consider the relationship between their own lives and their social world and its politics. Many of the essays examine the ways in which ideas about the body and its functions served to explain the broader world. Trudy Eden shows, for example, how one of the body's simplest necessities was imbued with cultural meaning. English colonists believed that eating English foods kept them English, while those who accepted American (Indian) food, such as corn, risked losing their Englishness and degenerating into something other, less refined. Martha Finch's essay also examines the relationship between the civilized body of the colonists and the landscape they inhabited, which threatened to turn their human bodies into those of savage beasts if nature's wildness was allowed to seep in. We get the sense that colonists envisioned the body as porous and borderless, with the capacity to melt into its environment or to be invaded by it. Several authors, especially those dealing with race, examine the process by which ideas about bodily mutability became fixed when it came to determining racial identities. Nancy Shoemaker focuses on skin color as the marker of difference between Native Americans and Europeans in the seventeenth century. While other parts of the body seemed similar among all peoples, the skin struck colonists and Indians as unalterably different and laden with meaning. Jennifer Spear and Joanne Pope Melish focus on the escalating distress about the definition and fixity of racial categories in eighteenth-century Spanish Louisiana and Revolutionary and early national New England. Spear argues that certain characteristics-honor, faith, and respectability-became racialized as the categories of mestizo, mulatto, and white became formalized and codified. Raced bodies became linked to inheritable personality traits as well as to notions of blood purity. Melish traces the anxieties felt by whites, afraid that bodies lacked such fixity. Unease grew as stories circulated of blacks becoming white, and whites worried that under certain circumstances they could become black, compromising their independence, perhaps even their freedom. …

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

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. …

Francisco Bouligny: A Bourbon Soldier in Spanish Louisiana

Francisco Bouligny: A Bourbon Soldier in Spanish Louisiana