Louisiana Legacies

Readings in the History of the Pelican State

Janet Allured, Michael S. Martin

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118541890
• eBook ISBN: 9781118541883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Showcasing the colorful, even raucous, political, social, and unique cultural qualities of Louisiana history, this new collection of essays features the finest and latest scholarship.

• Includes readings featuring  recent scholarship that expand on traditional historical accounts
• Includes material on every region of Louisiana
• Covers  a wide range of fields, including social, environmental, and economic history
• Detailed, focused material on different areas in Louisiana history, including women's history as well as the state's diverse ethnic populations

PART ONE

LOUISIANA’S COLONIAL CONTEXT

Although Europeans had ventured into the lower Mississippi Valley in the century and a half before their arrival, the Le Moyne brothers, Pierre and Jean-Baptiste, led the expedition that would establish the first permanent European settlement in the region in 1699. The Le Moynes, better known by their aristocratic titles of Sieur d’Iberville and Sieur de Bienville, are considered the founding fathers of the French colony of Louisiana, and their actions there set in motion a collision of cultures and populations with far-reaching effects.

The colony of Louisiana held only a tenuous place in the imperial designs of the French monarchy. As such, it remained underdeveloped from a European mercantilist perspective, and historians for centuries deemed it a failure. Daniel Usner, however, chooses to evaluate French colonial Louisiana on the basis of its internal economy, and he shows how a “frontier exchange economy,” made up of small-scale, personal interactions actually fostered cross-cultural contacts. In describing American Indians, Europeans, and Africans on the edge of European empires engaging in day-to-day exchanges, Usner emphasizes the fluidity, rather than rigidity, of the boundaries between their lives.

Carl Brasseaux’s essay on the moral climate of French colonial Louisiana shows how the Louisiana settlers, situated as they were on the periphery of the French empire, ignored—sometimes unintentionally, but often purposely—the moral strictures of the Catholic Church and the colonial governments. Brasseaux shows that this disregard for traditional morality, manifested most often in extramarital sex, drunkenness, and gambling, reflected in part the makeup of the population of Europeans who ended up in Louisiana, notably the convicts, prostitutes, and soldiers. But it was also a characteristic transmitted to the colonists by the coureurs des bois, French trappers who lived either on their own or among the Indians much of the time. Brasseaux’s essay points to the fact that once established as the norm by the 1720s, the permissive morality became so ingrained in the colonial psyche that it was handed down to succeeding generations of newcomers to the colony.

The Louisiana colony became a dominion of the Spanish empire in 1763, although Spanish authority was not truly consolidated until the rule of General Alejandro O’Reilly in 1769 and 1770. Over the three decades that followed, the Spanish governors of Louisiana instituted a series of reforms to bring Louisiana into line with the Spanish imperial system. Among these reforms were the institution of liberal immigration policies, designed to grow the colony’s population in order to increase its agricultural output to enhance its position as a buffer between New Spain (with its capital at Mexico City) and the English North American colonies along the eastern seaboard. As a result, immigrants from around the Atlantic world established themselves in the lower Mississippi Valley. Some of these peoples came to Louisiana by choice, such as the Acadians or the Canary Islanders, others by force, such as the African and Caribbean slaves.

Among the most notable groups of immigrants to Louisiana during the era of Spanish control, and perhaps the most surprising, were the English speakers from the British colonies. They arrived in increasingly large numbers in the 1780s and 1790s. Some of them, like Oliver Pollock, the subject of Light Cummins’s essay, came even earlier. Pollock, a financial backer of the patriot cause during the American Revolution, established himself in the area of the lower Mississippi Valley then known as West Florida in 1769. Between that year and 1824, under the British, Spanish, and American governments, he amassed landholdings and created substantial plantations, made considerable profits as a merchant, lost most of his personal wealth as a result of his support for the American cause, and then reemerged as a major economic player in the region. Cummins contends that Pollock is representative of other Anglo immigrants to Louisiana before the American Revolution.

THE FRONTIER EXCHANGE ECONOMY OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY BEFORE 1783

by Daniel J. Usner

Even the most devoted historians of Louisiana are quick to point out that the colony in the Mississippi Valley constitutes “a study in failure” or “a holding action” in comparison with the English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. Louisiana suffered from a low priority in the mercantile designs of both France and Spain. Immigration and population growth proceeded slowly, exportation of staple products to Europe fluctuated, and subsistence agriculture predominated over production of cash crops. But Louisiana’s sparse populace and tentative transatlantic commerce can actually be used to the historian’s advantage, allowing one to turn more attentively to dimensions of economic life that have been neglected in the lower Mississippi Valley as well as in other colonial regions of North America. Studies of economic change in North American colonies concentrated for a long time on linkages with home countries and with each other through the exportation of staple commodities. Historians are now turning to economic relationships that developed within regions, with greater attention to activities not totally dependent upon production for the Atlantic market.

Here I will examine the formation of a regional economy that connected Indian villagers across the lower Mississippi Valley with European settlers and African slaves along the Gulf Coast and lower banks of the Mississippi. The term frontier exchange is meant to capture the form and content of economic interactions among these groups, with a view to replacing the notion of frontier as an interracial boundary with that of a cross-cultural network.… Small-scale face-to-face marketing must be taken seriously, especially for understanding how peoples of different cultures related to and influenced each other in daily life.

… [T]he lower Mississippi Valley is here defined as an economic region that was shaped by common means of production and by regular forms of trade among its diverse inhabitants.… In 1763 the lower Mississippi Valley was partitioned into the Spanish province of Louisiana and the English province of West Florida. The latter colony, therefore, must be included in any study of the region’s economy. The persistence of frontier exchange across the political boundary can too easily be overlooked when Louisiana and West Florida are treated separately.

The focus of this study falls not directly on familiar economic settings—the fur trade for Indians and plantation agriculture for blacks—but rather on the interstices in which people exchanged small quantities of goods in pursuit of their livelihood. A brief summary of how the formal network of towns and outposts took shape is accompanied by an outline of population changes in the lower Mississippi Valley. Then the reader is asked to follow more closely the multiple directions of interaction through which deerskins and foods circulated from group to group. Over most of the eighteenth century, exchanges of these two kinds of products contributed strongly to the notable fluidity of social relations among lower Mississippi Valley inhabitants. It must be emphasized, however, that exchanges occurred under, and often despite, very unequal social conditions because a colonial elite worked steadily to enforce bondage upon black Louisianians and West Floridians, dependency upon Indians, and subordination upon a mixed lot of white settlers.…

I

Sent by France late in 1698 to establish a military post near the mouth of the Mississippi River and to forestall Spanish and English advances in the region, naval captain Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville encountered dismal prospects for what he hoped would become a colony. Already overextended imperially and facing shortages of food at home, France was not prepared to deliver supplies with any regularity to the Gulf Coast. Like many other nascent colonial ventures before it, Iberville’s isolated outpost therefore depended heavily upon trade with neighboring Indian villages for its survival. Soldiers and sailors either purchased food directly from Indians or acquired peltry from them to exchange for imported grains and meats. During the second decade of the eighteenth century, this trade expanded from localized exchange with villages near the Gulf into an extensive network of interior posts that not only facilitated the movement of deerskins to the coast but functioned as marketplaces for the exchange of food.…

To advance trade up the Red River, a French garrison occupied a post near the Caddo village of Natchitoches in 1716, and a subsidiary trade station was established at an upriver Indian town called Upper Nasoni in 1719. Only twenty miles southwest of Natchitoches, the Spanish, who had been gradually edging toward the Red River, constructed a military post at Los Adaes in 1721. Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, who became commandant of French Natchitoches in 1719, had already been trading in this area for several years—with both Spaniards and Indians. In 1721 a small detachment of soldiers from the Yazoo River garrison joined a group of about one hundred settlers at the lower Arkansas River.…

A decade of immigration and slave trading to Louisiana, attended by death for hundreds of Europeans and Africans, resulted by 1732 in a population of only about 2,000 settlers and soldiers with some 3,800 slaves, at a time when the number of Indians of the lower Mississippi Valley, though rapidly declining from disease and war, was still in the range of 30,000. Large-scale immigration from Europe stopped by the mid-1720s, and only about 400 black slaves reached the colony between 1732 and the 1760s. This slow growth of population—to approximately 5,000 slaves, 4,000 settlers, and 100 free people of color—meant minimal encroachment on Indian lands: most settlers and slaves lived along the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River below its junction with the Red River. Trade relations with the Indians developed more freely because, for a time at least, the region’s tribes were not markedly agitated by French Pressure on their territory.

At first, given the scanty and erratic supply of trade goods from France, Louisiana officials relied on distribution of merchandise among Indian leaders in the form of annual gifts. In doing so, they accommodated by necessity to Indian protocols of trade and diplomacy. For the Indians, exchanges of material goods represented political reciprocity between autonomous groups, while absence of trade was synonymous with a state of war. Because commerce could not operate independently from ritual expressions of allegiance, such formal ceremonies as gift giving and smoking the calumet had to accompany economic transactions between Indians and Europeans. Conformity to these conventions recognized the leverage of such large tribes as the Choctaws and Caddoes on Louisiana’s commerce and defense. They were essential to the initiation of the network of trade for deerskins and food—both items important to the success of Louisiana—against the threat of English competition from South Carolina and Georgia.

Even so, the formation of this network did not occur without costly conflict. Only after a long war against the Chitimachas, which provided Louisiana with many of its first slaves, did the French secure the alliance of all Indian tribes in the Mississippi delta. While small tribes like the Chitimachas confronted French power directly, conflict between larger Indian nations was fueled by intercolonial competition. In the 1720s Choctaw and Upper Creek villagers helped the French thwart British expansion to the Mississippi River, while the Chickasaws and Lower Creeks fought against them to protect English traders still operating within the Louisiana hinterland. The most explosive crisis came in 1729 when, after a decade of deteriorating relations with encroaching settlers, the Natchez Indians waged a desperate war against the French. Meanwhile, a push by Louisiana officials and planters for the production of tobacco and indigo provoked resistance within: as the volume of these exports rose during the late 1720s, so did the level of slave rebelliousness. A Negro plot was discovered in New Orleans shortly after the Indians destroyed the French plantations at Natchez, and many of the slaves taken captive there assisted the Natchez in their ensuing, but losing, defense against the Louisiana army. Dealing with a black majority within the colonial settlements, and living in the midst of an even larger Indian population, officials employed greater vigilance and harsher coercion as time went on.

Toward mid-century, chronic shortages of merchandise and English intervention nearly turned the Choctaw nation, a bulwark of Louisiana’s security, against the French. The benign policy of gift giving could go only so far in mitigating the effects of unreliable imports upon the deerskin trade with Indians. Unable to divert the powerful Chickasaw nation from the English because of inadequate quantities of trade goods, French officials resorted to a strategy of intimidation and debilitation, employing Choctaw warriors on major campaigns and in continuous guerrilla raids against Chickasaw villages. Participation in this conflict through the 1740s, which was motivated by the need to avenge enemy hostilities as well as to fulfill obligations to the French, took its toll on the Choctaws. Rebellion by a pro-English party within the nation broke out in 1746, costing the Choctaw people much suffering and death in what became a violent civil war waged to preserve their alliance with French Louisiana.

Louisiana’s frontier exchange economy survived the Choctaw revolt, with the exportation of deerskins steadily increasing alongside that of tobacco and indigo. Demographic and geopolitical changes that began in the 1760s, however, portended greater challenges to the trade-alliance network. Immigration into the lower Mississippi Valley resumed after Great Britain drove French settlers from Nova Scotia in 1755. By 1767, seven years after Spain obtained Louisiana from France, more than a thousand of these Acadian refugees reached the colony, forming new settlements along the Mississippi about seventy miles above New Orleans and at Atakapas and Opelousas on Bayou Teche. From 1778 to 1780, two thousand “Islenos” migrated from the Canary Islands and established their own communities, along the Mississippi and Bayou Lafourche below New Orleans. In 1785 seven ships carried another 1,600 Acadians from France to Louisiana. Meanwhile Great Britain was accelerating colonization on the eastern side of the river, having acquired West Florida by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Settlers from the Atlantic seaboard, many with slaves, increased the colonial population of West Florida to nearly 4,000 whites and 1,500 blacks by 1774. An even larger influx occurred after the outbreak of the American Revolution as loyalist refugees sought asylum in the Florida colony and settled mainly in the Natchez area. By 1783, when Spain gained sovereignty over West Florida and control over both sides of the Mississippi, the colonial population of the lower Mississippi Valley approached 16,000 Negro slaves, 13,000 whites, and over 1,000 free people of color.

By the 1780s, the Indian population in the region was, for the first time, becoming outnumbered by colonial inhabitants, while the colonial economy shifted toward greater dependence upon expanding commercial agriculture. Consequently, Louisiana officials exerted tighter political control over interethnic exchange in order to concentrate slave labor on cash crops and to reduce the mobility of Indian villagers. The frontier exchange economy did not fade from the lower Mississippi Valley, however, for efforts continued to be made into the nineteenth century by many old and new inhabitants to perpetuate small-scale trade across heightening racial divides.

II

Before 1783 the deerskin trade … encouraged widespread participation in a network of diffuse exchange from Indian villages to colonial port towns. Indian customs and French commercial weaknesses, as already seen, required a formal sphere of trade-alliance relations, but many people across the region also relied upon informal and intimate forms of cross-cultural trade.…

[T]he Indian trade in lower Louisiana was shaped by a complex of … circumstances. A small number of colonial troops with minimal support from the crown had to be dispersed among a few select posts. Intertribal conflicts and English trade with Indians in the region determined when and where French stations were constructed and, furthermore, continued to be destabilizing influences on Louisiana’s trade. The irrepressible eastward flow of beaver skins from the upper Mississippi Valley to Canada also affected the trade network in Louisiana, making the Lower valley a separate, predominantly deerskin-producing, trade region.

The economic and political importance of the Indian trade to Louisiana is evidenced by the close attention that officials paid to the details of its operation. The overall interest of colonial administrators centered upon the interference and competition of English traders, but particular measures were required for regulation of the region’s internal commerce as well. In order to maintain stable relations between traders and villagers, governments in all North American colonies administered tariffs or rates of exchange. In 1721 the Choctaws and the French agreed to trade at the following prices: a quarter of an ell (one meter) of woolen cloth called limbourg or one axe for four dressed deerskins; one blanket or tomahawk for two dressed deerskins; and two-thirds of a pound of gunpowder or twenty gun flints for one dressed deerskin. As the cost of European manufactures rose and additional goods entered the regional economy, new tariffs were negotiated from time to time by colonial and tribal leaders. Although much of the trading occurred at varying rates, depending upon local conditions and individual circumstances, official tariffs represented colonial accommodation to Indian insistence that trade be contained within the political sphere of relations. Once it established rates of exchange, the Superior Council of Louisiana had to contend with complaints from traders and Indians alike about inadequate supplies or inappropriate prices. Operating between a fixed ceiling of rates set between tribal and colonial governments and a rising floor of costs charged by import merchants, the traders tended to have, as noted in the minutes of a meeting in December 1728, “a greater share in the complaints that have been made about the high price of the goods than the Indians themselves.” For their part, Indian representatives bargained for better exchange rates by repeatedly comparing the expense and quality of French and English merchandise.

Despite attempts by groups of merchants and officials to monopolize Indian commerce, the deerskin trade involved many colonial inhabitants as well as Indians. Even during the demographic and agricultural expansion of Louisiana in the 1720s, settlers relied upon deerskins, acquired directly or indirectly from Indian villagers, as a means of buying imported goods.… Many settlers and even slaves exchanged something for deerskins once in a while, and innumerable colonists passed in and out of the deerskin trade as a temporary means of livelihood. Others made a lifetime occupation from seasonally trading imported merchandise for peltry and other native products. The identities of some professional traders among the Choctaws offer informative glimpses into the business. Marc Antoine Huché grew up among the Choctaws, was hired in 1721 as interpreter for the company at “five hundred livres per year with two rations for himself and his wife,” and traded for Mobile commandant-entrepreneur Bernard Diron d’Artaguette.…

After 1762 the number of traders operating in Indian villages increased with the growth of the colonial population, and their ethnic composition became more English. By the mid-1780s, Spanish officials estimated that five hundred traders, employees, and transients were living in and around Choctaw and Chickasaw towns, while nearly three hundred more operated in Creek towns. Considered “vagabonds and villains” by colonial administrators interested in orderly commerce, many of these men married Indian women and became affiliated with specific villages.… The children born to this generation of traders and their Indian wives belonged to the clans of their mothers, and some became important tribal leaders by the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Most deerskin traders learned to speak the language of the tribe with whom they dealt. As emphasized by an anonymous chronicler of the Choctaws’ trade with Louisiana, who may have been a trader sometime before the mid-1730s, “it is necessary to know their language well.” Many traders probably spoke Mobilian, a trade language or lingua franca, instead of or in addition to distinct tribal languages: “when one knows it,” noted Lt. Jean François Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, “one can travel through all this province without needing an interpret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Editors’ Preface
• Part One: Louisiana’s Colonial Context
• Part Two: Women, Race, and Class in Early Louisiana
• Part Three: Transformation of The Louisiana “Creole”
• Part Four: Violent Louisiana
• Part Five: Progressives and Race
• Part Six: Modern Louisiana Politics
• Part Seven: Transitions in Race Relations
• Part Eight: Culture and Environment in Modern Louisiana