A Look Inside – Spanish Louisiana: Contest for the Borderlands, 1763-1803
Detail from cover illustration of Spanish Louisiana, LSU Press 2024. Le Missisipi ou la Louisiane dans l'Amérique septentrionale by Chereau, Jacques-François, 177?, Library of Congress
January 2025A new book from LSU Press provides a comprehensive overview on the oft-overlooked history of the Spanish in Louisiana and New Orleans.
– by John S. Sledge
This column is underwritten in part by Karen Hinton & Howard Glaser
Spain’s 40-year Louisiana tenure is enjoying considerable scholarly attention these days.
Books like Bernardo de Gálvez: Spanish Hero of the American Revolution (2018) by Gonzalo M. Quintero; Spanish New Orleans: An Imperial City on the American Periphery 1766-1803 (2021) by John Eugene Rodriguez; and Spanish New Orleans and the Caribbean (2022) by Alfred E. Lemmon, Light Townsend Cummins, and Richard Campanella have all placed refreshing emphasis on this previously neglected era.
Comes now Frances Kolb Turnbell, a visiting lecturer at the University of North Alabama and editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, whose Spanish Louisiana: Contest for the Borderlands, 1763-1803 (LSU Press, cloth, $45) utilizes a mix of primary and secondary sources to thoroughly examine the Lower Mississippi River Valley from New Orleans’ muddy byways to outposts like Point Coupée, Natchez, and Ouachita.
Click on the cover to order from your favorite indie bookseller
Turnbell rightly notes that “historians have often considered the Spanish period insignificant” and as a result, “no comprehensive study of Spanish colonial Louisiana yet exists.” Her book seeks to remedy this lack.
Thanks to relentless celebration of Louisiana’s Gallic heritage by tourist agencies and magazine writers, modern visitors to the French Quarter might not realize that there are as many manifestations of Spanish influence on display as French.
Besides the colorful Talavera tile markers identifying the Quarter’s street names during the Spanish period, other examples include signature buildings like Madame John’s Legacy (1788), the Presbytere (finished during the American period but designed in 1791), and the Cabildo (1799), as well as charming flourishes like entresols, archways, ironwork, and courtyards.
Turnbell notes these things, but delves far more broadly and deeply, examining personalities, policies, and especially how the colony’s diverse human residents, accustomed to exploiting the fluidity of their borderland status to advantage, reacted to and, more particularly, accommodated themselves to Spanish hegemony.
As New Orleans was rebuilt following the fires of 1788 and 1794, its architecture began to take on a decidedly Spanish character, as evident in the Presbytere in Jackson Square, New Orleans. Photo taken after 1933 by New Orleans architect Richard Koch. (Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress)
When France handed Louisiana over to the Spanish after the Seven Years War (1756-1763) many colonists expressed outrage and held mass meetings. They considered themselves French and actively opposed the change in government. Their violent agitation kept the new governor, Antonio de Ulloa, cooling his heels at the Mississippi River’s mouth until the arrival of the no-nonsense Alejandro O’Reilly with 2,000 troops.
Antonio de Ulloa was a man of the Enlightenment whose French language skills recommended him for the role of first Spanish governor of Louisiana. Andres Molinary, Governor Antonio de Ulloa, ca. 1910. (Courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum, Museum Purchase, 04940)
O’Reilly, one of Ireland’s “Wild Geese” in the service of Catholic Spain, quickly took control, executed a half dozen ring leaders (Frenchmen Street is named for them), and set about integrating the colony into the Spanish empire.
In fact, Spanish rule proved relatively mild. In stark contrast to later American policy, for example, it “recognized the legal personhood of the enslaved as well as certain rights belonging to enslaved people” and allowed for manumission and self-purchase. That said, there were slave insurrection scares aplenty, thanks in part to the influential fervor of the various revolutions that swept the Atlantic world between 1776 and 1800.
“Revolutionary turbulence abroad made movement of people into and within Spanish Louisiana more unpredictable and worrisome for imperial authorities,” Turnbell writes, “who now recognized mobility as a conduit of rumor, news, and revolution.”
Louisiana’s Spanish authorities also had to deal with the region’s numerous Indian tribes, the so-called petite nations. As Turnbell rightly notes, “Unwittingly, by imposing an international border on the Mississippi in 1763, diplomats pitted the projects of their respective empires against the topography of the natural world.”
Numerous Native peoples living in Spanish Louisiana participated as allies of Spain during the American Revolution. Etching ca. 1789. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
Native peoples employed the important calumet ceremony as they expressed relationships of peace with representatives of empire and tied these newcomers to Native society. Du Paix, New Voyages to North America, 1703(?). (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
The petite nations exploited this blunder skillfully, variously courting the British and the Spanish, playing one power against the other. “The petite nations did not operate with the concept of exclusive alliances that Spain and Britain desired,” Turnbell explains.
Rather, they looked to their own interests, moving at will, and generally viewing “imperial borderlands as an advantage.” Unfortunately for them, their influence declined due to epidemics and warfare, and by the early 1800s their remnants blended into larger nations like the Choctaws.
As for the colony’s white and Creole residents, they too worked to preserve the benefits of borderland living. For them, the Mississippi was an inviting corridor that facilitated travel and trade with any and all comers. Those who could adroitly manage the situation prospered.
Men and women of diverse backgrounds continued to participate in marketing at New Orleans well beyond the colonial period. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Market Folks, New Orleans, 1819. (Courtesy of the Maryland Center for History and Culture, Benjamin Henry Latrobe Works on Paper)
Turnbell cites successful merchants like Isaac Monsanto, a Sephardic Jew, whose “Caribbean and Atlantic connections” included Illinois fur traders, Cuban shop owners, Mexican businessmen, and Spanish, French, and English men of affairs as well as British officers in neighboring West Florida. Turnbell declares that such associations – by no means unusual or unique to Monsanto – “were stronger than the boundary that agents of empire attempted to impose.”
Turnbell highlights numerous important episodes in the colony’s history, including the 1768 revolt, which cemented Spanish rule; the 1788 New Orleans fire, which led to a much stronger Spanish architectural imprint; and the American Revolution, when Gov. Bernardo de Gálvez drove the British out of the Mississippi Valley and West Florida.
Young and affable, Bernardo de Gálvez gained popularity quickly in Louisiana. Governor Bernardo de Gálvez (twentieth-century rendering based on earlier portraits). (Courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum, T0002.1967)
Unfortunately, there was no rest for weary Spanish authorities afterward, who faced burgeoning pressure from the infant United States. By the Treaty of San Lorenzo (1795), the Spanish crown agreed on firm boundaries with the U.S. and finally threw open the Mississippi River to free navigation.
What had been a quasi-surreptitious river trade became a torrent led by flatboats bearing the wealth of a continent—furs, whiskey, meat, lime, saddles, tallow, flour, and a thousand other things. Spanish Louisiana’s residents quickly “recognized greater economic advantage in a future tied to the United States than one tied to Spain” and acted accordingly.
Spanish Louisiana is a relatively standard university press offering. Buttressed by black-and-white maps and illustrations, over thirty pages of endnotes and a full bibliography, it reads like the thoroughly researched monograph that it is.
This should not deter lay readers from assaying its pages, however. Turnbell has done yeoman service in shining a light on this underappreciated era on the so-called “French Coast.”
Although it’s now known only as the French Quarter, the original city of New Orleans was influenced greatly by the Spanish. Philip Pittman, Plan of New Orleans, 1770. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
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