French Louisiana

At a glance

What was French Louisiana?

A claim to the entire Mississippi basin, named for Louis XIV, settled at its mouth and governed from a swamp. La Salle claimed the river for France in 1682; Iberville and Bienville planted the first permanent settlement at Biloxi in 1699; Mobile followed in 1702, and New Orleans was founded in 1718 and made the capital in 1722. From there France claimed everything drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries — the whole middle of the continent — while actually controlling a thin ribbon of settlement along the lower river.

The colony's purpose was strategic: to hold the interior against the English and to supply the French Caribbean. It never paid for itself, never fed itself, and depended on the Crown, the Company of the Indies and, later, Spanish subsidies. Its importance was geographic, and that is exactly why three empires fought over it.

Why did France struggle to settle it?

Because the land was hard, the climate lethal and the economy wrong. The first settlements were on the Gulf coast, where the soil was poor and the fevers were deadly; New Orleans was a swamp until the levees and drainage works made it habitable. Antoine Crozat received a trading monopoly in 1712 and gave it up in 1717; John Law's Company of the Indies took over, promoted the colony as a speculative paradise, and presided over the 1720 bubble that collapsed in France.

The settlers came in small numbers: soldiers, indentured servants, convicts, a few hundred German families on the German Coast from 1720, and about 6,000 enslaved Africans between 1719 and 1731. The Natchez revolt of 28 November 1729 — in which the Natchez attacked the French settlements and killed some 200 people, the figures varying by source — showed how fragile the colony was. The French destroyed the Natchez in response and drove the survivors into slavery or exile.

The Company surrendered its monopoly in 1731–32 and Louisiana became a royal colony, which meant it became a royal expense. The Crown kept it because of the Mississippi, not because of the returns.

Its strategic value lay upstream. The Illinois country — the settlements along the middle Mississippi — grew wheat and supplied flour to New Orleans, and the river was the only route to market for the whole interior. Whoever held New Orleans controlled the trade of a continent's middle, which is why the French built a fort at the mouth, the Spanish kept the city out of British hands in 1763, and the Americans cared more about the port than the territory.

France also used Louisiana as a diplomatic counter. It gave the colony away once to keep it from Britain and took it back once as part of a European dynastic bargain. The people who lived there were rarely consulted and never asked; the colony changed hands four times in forty years, and each time the inhabitants simply acquired a new sovereign.

Who lived in Louisiana?

A society of Native nations, African captives, French and Spanish officials, Creoles, Germans and Acadians, in which the European element was a minority and the Native element was essential. About 70,000 Native Americans lived in Lower Louisiana at the end of the seventeenth century; the Choctaw and Chickasaw were the great powers of the interior, and the French depended on them for food, trade and military support. Daniel Usner's "frontier exchange economy" — local networks of exchange rather than a metropolitan mercantile system — is the standard way of describing how this actually worked.

Creole in Louisiana meant native-born, whatever the race; by the nineteenth century it had come to imply a French- or Spanish-speaking Catholic heritage. The Creole elite dominated the Superior Council under France and the Cabildo under Spain, and led the 1768 revolt against Spanish rule.

Africans arrived from 1719, about 6,000 of them by 1731, roughly two-thirds from Senegambia. They were governed by the Code Noir of 1724, a 55-article edict that required Catholicism, expelled Jews, banned interracial marriage, restricted manumission and prescribed whipping, branding and ear-cropping for runaways. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall argued that the Senegambian majority produced a cohesive Afro-Creole culture and a tradition of resistance; Thomas Ingersoll disputed the homogeneity and the link to resistance. Marronage was endemic: by 1726 the attorney general was warning of armed runaways outside New Orleans.

Free people of colour existed from 1722, grew under Spanish rule — where self-purchase (coartación) was recognised, and 1,921 people gained freedom in New Orleans between 1771 and 1803 — and by 1801 the free Black militia had more than 450 men.

Acadians began arriving from the mid-1760s after their expulsion from Nova Scotia, settling at St Gabriel, then in the Attakapas and Opelousas country; the numbers are disputed, with estimates from about 3,000 to 5,000.The Acadians were the colony's most tragic addition. Expelled from Nova Scotia from 1755, they were scattered to the American colonies, France and the Caribbean, and began arriving in Louisiana from the mid-1760s, settling at St Gabriel above Bayou Lafourche, then in the Attakapas and Opelousas country. Estimates of how many came range from about 3,000 to 5,000, with 1,600 recorded in 1785. They became the cattle and rice farmers of the prairies and wetlands, and their descendants — the Cajuns — are the second great French-speaking population of the state.

What did the economy do?

Fur and deerskins first, then tobacco, indigo, timber and naval stores — and never enough food. In 1731 the governor estimated the colony needed 3,000 quintals of flour a year; for 1732–34 only fifty tons were imported, and the shortfall was covered by flour sent down from the Illinois country. Soldiers' bread was baked from a mixture of rice and wheat because wheat flour was chronically short. A colony that could not feed its own garrison was not a colony in the ordinary sense; it was a fort with a hinterland.

The Spanish period changed the economy. Tobacco planting expanded, and after Étienne de Boré produced the first refined sugar in 1795, sugar became the great crop: within a few seasons more than a hundred plantations round New Orleans were making six million pounds a year with nearly 2,000 enslaved workers. Cotton gins spread along the Red River. By the time of the Purchase, Louisiana was becoming a plantation economy — which is why the American takeover mattered so much to the people it enslaved.

What did the French and Spanish do about Native nations?

Depended on them, traded with them, fought them and enslaved them. The French alliance system in the lower Mississippi was built on the Choctaw and, to a lesser extent, the Chickasaw; the Choctaw split into pro-French and pro-English factions by 1747, and the French fought the Chickasaws repeatedly without defeating them. The Natchez, who had a rigid class system and a matrilineal Great Sun, were destroyed after 1729 and their survivors enslaved or dispersed.

Indian slavery was part of the economy from the start, and the Code Noir of 1724 included articles on it. Spain banned Indian slavery in 1769, which pushed the colony towards African labour and, with the sugar boom, towards the mass importation of enslaved Africans from the Caribbean. Usner's point is that this was not a simple story of European dominance: Native nations controlled the interior, set the terms of trade, and shaped where the French could settle.

What happened under Spain?

Spain received western Louisiana and New Orleans by the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau in November 1762, and Britain took the east bank and Canada in 1763. The first Spanish governor, Ulloa, arrived in 1766 and was expelled by the Creole Superior Council in 1768 — the only successful colonial revolt against Spain in the Americas. O'Reilly reoccupied the city in 1769, executed five ringleaders, dissolved the Council and installed the Cabildo, which governed Louisiana until 1803.

Spanish rule was better for the colony than French rule had been. The population grew from 7,500 in 1763 to 32,000 in 1784, 42,000 in 1788 and about 48,000 by 1795. Slavery expanded tenfold: as many as 29,000 enslaved people arrived over 37 years, almost all African, almost all via Jamaica. The free Black militia was established, Indian slavery was banned, and the sugar and cotton economy took off. By 1800 Louisiana was a prosperous, slave-based plantation colony with a French-speaking Creole elite and a Spanish government — an arrangement nobody much liked but everybody used.

How was the colony governed?

Badly, and by a succession of people who did not want the job. Under Crozat and the Company of the Indies the colony was a commercial concession; after 1732 it was a royal colony run by a governor and an ordonnateur (the intendant's equivalent), with a Superior Council of leading colonists acting as a court and a sounding board. The governor commanded the troops and conducted diplomacy with Native nations; the ordonnateur ran the money, the stores and the courts. They quarrelled constantly, and both quarrelled with the Council.

Spanish rule was more institutional. O'Reilly's code of 1769 replaced the Superior Council with the Cabildo, a city council with judicial functions modelled on Spanish municipal government, and the governor-general of Louisiana reported to the captain-general of Cuba and, later, directly to Madrid. The Cabildo survived the retrocession and the Purchase: it was the body that handed the keys over in 1803, and its building is still on Jackson Square.

The continuity is striking. The French language, the Catholic parish, the civil-law notary and the Cabildo all outlasted the empires that created them, and American Louisiana inherited a legal and administrative culture that was neither English nor common-law.

Why did it come back to France?

Because Napoleon wanted an empire in the Americas and Spain wanted a kingdom in Italy. By the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1 October 1800, Spain promised to cede Louisiana to France six months after the Duke of Parma's conditions were met — in exchange for the Kingdom of Etruria for the Spanish queen's family — and France promised not to sell or transfer the territory to anyone else.

The treaty was secret, but not for long: Rufus King reported rumours to Washington in 1801, and Madison had a copy by November. Spain delayed the handover, which suited Napoleon while Saint-Domingue was unresolved. In October 1802 a Spanish official at New Orleans briefly withdrew the American right of deposit, and the western states threatened to take the city by force. Jefferson's response is the clearest statement of why Louisiana mattered: "There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans."

Why did Napoleon sell?

Because Saint-Domingue had failed. The colony was meant to be the granary of the French Caribbean — flour, timber and salt meat for the sugar islands — and without Haiti it had no purpose. Leclerc's expedition of 1801–02 captured Toussaint Louverture but was destroyed by yellow fever and Dessalines's counter-offensive; Leclerc himself died in November 1802, and the army withdrew in 1803.

Add the resumption of war with Britain, the impossibility of defending a vast territory across the Atlantic, and the Americans arriving with money, and the decision made itself. In April 1803 Napoleon instructed Barbé-Marbois, his treasury minister, to offer the whole territory. Livingston and Monroe had authority to spend up to $10 million for New Orleans and the Floridas; they agreed to $15 million for everything.

What was the Purchase?

Three documents: the treaty of cession and two conventions — 60 million francs for the territory and 20 million francs to settle American claims against France. The total was $15 million for 828,000 square miles, about three cents an acre. The treaty is dated 30 April 1803 in the text (10 Floréal an XI), though some accounts give 2 May for the signing. The Senate consented on 20 October 1803 by 24 votes to 7.

The transfer took two ceremonies at the Cabildo. On 30 November 1803 the Spanish governor handed the keys to Laussat and released the Louisianians from their oath to Spain, and the Spanish flag came down in a chilly rain. On 20 December Laussat transferred the territory to Claiborne and Wilkinson. French possession had lasted twenty days. Upper Louisiana followed at St Louis in March 1804.

What was slavery like in practice?

Brutal, and more African than the French period suggests. The Code Noir prescribed Catholicism and banned interracial marriage, but its enforcement was uneven and its punishments were severe: whipping, branding with a fleur-de-lis, and ear-cropping for runaways. Marronage was endemic — armed bands outside New Orleans by 1726, bounties funded by a tax on owners in 1728, and villages threatened for harbouring refugees.

Under Spain the law changed in ways that mattered. Manumission no longer required government approval, and coartación — the right of an enslaved person to buy their own freedom — was recognised; 1,921 people gained freedom in New Orleans between 1771 and 1803, most through self-purchase. The free Black militia grew to more than 450 men by 1801, and free people of colour became a distinct social class with property, education and military standing.

The sugar boom changed the balance. More than a hundred plantations round New Orleans were making six million pounds a year by the early 1800s with nearly 2,000 enslaved workers, and the German Coast held "the highest density of enslaved people in the territory". The 1811 uprising there — after the Purchase — was the largest slave revolt in American history, and it grew out of exactly this economy.

What was daily life like?

Hot, wet and unhealthy. New Orleans was built on low ground between the river and the lake, and the French learned to build levees before they learned to build much else; yellow fever and malaria killed newcomers in their first summer, which is why the colony needed a constant supply of immigrants and why the "seasoning" was feared. Houses were timber and bousillage — mud and Spanish moss between posts — with galleries, shutters and raised floors for the heat; later Creole houses were brick between posts, with courtyards and outside staircases.

Food came from the river and the bayou: fish, shrimp, oysters, turtles, ducks and game, with rice, corn and beans, and the maize-and-pork diet of the American interior arriving downriver. The market was the social centre, and the Catholic calendar — Lent, Easter, the feast days — structured the year. Travel was by water: the river, the bayous, the lake, and the Gulf.

The colony's characteristic institution was the plantation, but its characteristic society was a port town of merchants, officials, soldiers, priests, free people of colour and enslaved workers living close together. That mixture — African, French, Spanish, Native and later American — produced the Creole culture that outlasted every empire that governed it.

What happened to the people?

For white Louisianians, citizenship came at once, and Claiborne promised them "the security of your liberty, your property, and the religion of your choice". For the free Black and enslaved populations, the treaty said nothing, and the territorial government moved quickly to restrict both: the first restrictive laws followed in 1806 and 1808, and white Louisianians of every faction united to impose them.

The first federal census after the purchase, in 1810, counted about 77,000 people in the Territory of Orleans, about 17,000 of them in New Orleans — swollen by some 10,000 refugees from Saint-Domingue.

The Purchase also raised a constitutional question that Jefferson could not answer to his own satisfaction. The Constitution did not expressly authorise the acquisition of foreign territory or the incorporation of its inhabitants, and Jefferson drafted an amendment to cover it before concluding that the treaty power was sufficient. The Senate consented 24 to 7, and the territory was governed by Congress under the treaty and the ordinances that followed — an empire acquired by treaty and ruled by statute, which is the pattern the United States has followed ever since. The plantation economy the Spanish had built continued and expanded, and Louisiana became one of the great slave states of the antebellum South.

What survives?

A language, a legal system and a culture. French is still spoken in Louisiana, and Cajun and Creole French are living vernaculars; the civil law, not the common law, governs property and family in the state; the Catholic parish, the notary and the Cabildo-shaped courthouse are French and Spanish inheritances. The food, the music and the street names are the most visible survivals, and the Mardi Gras calendar is a Catholic one.

The Louisiana Purchase is the hinge. It turned a Caribbean-facing French and Spanish colony into an American state, doubled the territory of the United States, and made the Mississippi a domestic river. It also sealed the future of the people the treaty did not mention: the plantation economy expanded, the slave trade continued illegally after 1808, and Louisiana became one of the great slave states of the antebellum South.

Why does the map draw it from 1800?

Because that is the period the border data gives the French possession: 1800, when Spain promised the retrocession, to 1804, when the American takeover was complete. The map is technically right — France held title from 1800 — and practically misleading, because French rule in fact lasted twenty days in December 1803. The entry covers 1699–1803 because that is the history; the card sits at 1802 because that is the drawn range.

The gap is worth noticing. A map of sovereignty is a map of legal claims, not of lived experience, and Louisiana in 1802 was a Spanish colony administered by Spanish officials, populated mostly by people who spoke French, and promised to a French government that had not yet arrived.

Common myths about French Louisiana

Timeline of French Louisiana

What the map shows next

At 1762 on the map Louisiana is Spanish, New France is about to be ceded, and the English colonies are on the verge of independence.

At 1810 on the map Louisiana is American, the United States has doubled, and the Confederacy is fifty years away.