Spanish New Orleans

An Imperial City on the American Periphery, 1766–1803

John Eugene Rodriguez

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780807175019
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

John Eugene Rodriguez's Spanish New Orleans is the first comprehensive academic analysis of how Spain governed the largest imperial city in its North American empire. Rodriguez suggests that the Spanish empire was, at least on the northern edge, slipping into economic and perhaps political independence a decade before the overthrow of its Bourbon Spanish rulers in 1808. His work questions that of earlier historians, who argued that Latin America was fundamentally conservative and complaisant under Bourbon rule. Instead, Spanish New Orleans shows that in the capital of Louisiana, Spanish rulers were slowly losing control of three interwoven aspects of the city: demography, trade, and political discourse. Rodriguez demonstrates how the multiethnic, multilingual population of the city played a central role in encouraging trans-imperial free trade and especially trade with the United States, to the point of economic dependence. This dependence in turn prompted the Bourbon governors in New Orleans to negotiate both economic and political discourse in a city that was steadily moving closer in every way to the United States. Far from being a peripheral city in a peripheral colony, by 1803 New Orleans was reshaping the Spanish empire beyond the comprehension of the Spanish king. Chapters on the city's foundational merchants, literacy, and the judicial system all point to the unique character of this imperial city on the American periphery. This study marks new methodological paths for historians of Latin America and early U.S. history by making use of enormous data compilations on population, ethnicity, and economics. Rodriguez also analyzes previously ignored eighteenth-century Spanish-language documents, including petitions, postal records, and military rosters, and engages underutilized tools such as signature analysis. Through his use of original sources and innovative methodologies, Rodriguez makes new and intriguing comparisons between New Orleans and other contemporary Spanish imperial cities as well as cities in the then-expanding United States. In Spanish New Orleans, Rodriguez goes beyond simply positioning New Orleans within Spanish imperial history. Taking a broader view, he considers what Spanish New Orleans reveals about the challenges and opportunities faced by the Spanish Bourbon empire, and he sheds light on how a new North American empire could so quickly and easily absorb a Spanish city.

1

A City of Chameleons

Withdrawn into the peace of this desert,

along with some books, few but wise,

I live in conversation with the deceased,

and listen to the dead with my eyes.

—FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO, “From the Tower”

By 22 November 1803, when Spanish authorities formally ceded Louisiana, and a mere nineteen days later, when France in turn ceded the colony to the United States of America, the city of New Orleans was no longer French—at least demographically.¹ Census rolls and mountains of notarial and court documents clearly indicate that less than half of the city’s populace still bore French surnames by 1803. Most residents still spoke the French language routinely, but most also had little reason to consider themselves “French” and were bilingual. Instead, the percentage of non-“French” residents increased year by year during Spanish rule, and the city became more multiethnic, multilingual, and multiracial, even as it became more “Spanish.” By 1803, New Orleans was a city of chameleons.

However, unlike elsewhere in the Spanish empire, this demographic increase was a double-edged sword, because many of these residents, white and of color, had come from other empires—those of France, Great Britain, and the United States. All of these new residents, consequently, could work within multiple imperial structures and with multiple languages, beyond those of Spain. And most of these residents had not come to New Orleans at the invitation or instigation of the Spanish king and his governors—they had either been born in Louisiana, or they had come on their own.

THE CENSUS TAKER

In 1791, a census taker walked through the muddy frontier city of New Orleans, writing the names of the living. He was conscious of rank—he labeled dozens of the residents as “Don,” and a few key officials not by their name but their position—“El Senor Assessor,” for example, rather than “Dr. Nicolas Maria Vidal,” who then filled that post. The census taker required that every male head of a family and every single or married female present both a first and a last name; he did otherwise only with widows, substituting the words la viuda for their first name. He was probably Spanish with reasonable French language skills, for he spelled most of the Spanish and only some of the French names wrong—and even some of those “incorrect” names he may have actually spelled correctly, for free people of color in the eighteenth century would often modify their names only slightly from the name carried by their white relatives. But in his written work, this census taker made no note of ethnicity or race. And when he was done with his compilation, he forwarded it to the governor and the cabildo.

It was important to the Bourbon kings and governors that they enumerate and know something about the peoples they sought to rule and, not coincidentally, tax, and this was certainly true of the new colony of Louisiana and its capital, New Orleans. Charles III had made a choice between using brute force or working with the people he had been given in the new colony, and he had chosen the path of acceptance, limited accommodation, and, presumably, eventual dominance. But he needed to understand exactly who was encompassed in this colony.

The 1791 census taker was actually following a time-honored procedure in both the Hapsburg and Bourbon Spanish empires. The Spanish had conducted their first censuses (censos) in the New World in the 1500s. However, it was only in 1776, during the reign of Charles III, that the Spanish royal court requested standardized, annual population data on its worldwide colonies. Given the size of those colonies, it was difficult for colonial governors and viceroys to comply, and certainly not on an annual basis. Puerto Rico was a notable exception, and issued aggregate population tables (padrones) every year from 1779 to 1802. Instead, most cities and towns only compiled detailed censos once or twice during the late Bourbon era.²

The Spanish first compiled aggregate population numbers for Louisiana in 1763, soon after Bourbon administrators arrived in the colony. The Récapitulation generale des recensements ci-joint faits a la Nouvelle Orléans et dans tous les quartiers was prepared by a French resident, in his own language. The Spanish compiled similar tabulations (padrones) in 1766, 1777, 1788, and 1800. However, only two detailed censos of the city were compiled—one in 1778 and another in 1791.³ Governor Carondelet conducted a subsequent “chimney census” in 1795–96, but, because it was meant primarily for taxation purposes, that census was only prepared piecemeal and then only of the city’s core.

As the census taker walked through New Orleans in 1791, most of the buildings he saw were Spanish in construction, for most of the city had been destroyed only three years earlier in the Good Friday Fire of 1788. Although he would not have known, a subsequent fire in another three years, in 1794, would complete the task of destroying the city’s wooden buildings, leaving a single French building to survive to this day—the Ursuline convent at the eastern end of the city.⁴ The Spanish architecture taking shape inside the city included the use of stone, tiled roofs, iron railings on balconies, and cool inner courtyards and was presumably of little surprise to the census taker—for Spain had already ruled the vast Louisiana colony and this small but humming colonial capital of New Orleans for a quarter of a century.

True, some French planters had forced out the imperial governor long before, in 1766, but now in 1791, a quarter of a century later, the planters were older and wiser, their sons served in the Spanish militia, some of their daughters were married to Spanish immigrants, and those who had disagreed with the rule of Charles III, the longtime Bourbon King of Spain, and now the rule of his admittedly less competent son, Charles IV, remained quiet. Those executed by the Spanish governor had been dead and dust for an entire generation, and none were interested in following their predecessors’ example. New Orleans was undeniably Spanish.

Historians have generally minimized the Spanish role in Louisiana and its capital.⁵ However, the historians were wrong, and the census taker was right. Like Quevedo, we must “listen to the dead with my eyes”—but not only to the voices of one or two or ten. Rather, we must hear if not all of the voices, most of the voices in colonial New Orleans during the Spanish era, using the documents of not only the census taker, but also those of public notaries, tax collectors, a judge, a priest, a sergeant, a nurse, merchants, and even two artists. To do so, we will listen to the dead in lists of chimneys, ledgers of debts owed, internment and baptismal registers, military musters, hospital registers, and voluminous notarial, judicial, and military archives.⁶ We will also use a large and comprehensive database, compiled by the author, of notarial business transactors in New Orleans from 1780 to 1799. Such a large database has never been used in colonial Spanish American history. To minimize miscalculation and inconsistency, I have used this comprehensive database of 10,000+ New Orleans residents in late Spanish New Orleans to ascribe a single ethnic background to each name based upon their surname and any additional historical details immediately available. This database permits a researcher to determine how both first names and surnames are initially spelled and misspelled throughout the two decades from 1780 to 1799.

POINTS IN TIME—1791 AND 1795

The census taker reported that 1791 New Orleans contained 5,037 residents; by way of comparison, the city was probably a little larger than the nearest US city—Savannah, Georgia—half the size of Montevideo in the Rio Plata, about 40 percent the size of Baltimore, Maryland, and only one-fourth the size of Charleston, South Carolina.⁷

The 1791 census listed 829 individuals (roughly one-quarter of the free population) by name, although four were actually not named but instead identified by their government titles (the gentleman governor, assessor, auditor, and bishop). The census taker assigned honorific titles to 90 individuals among these 829: the 4 government officials, a priest, and 85 men referred to with the title Don.⁸

The men with formal titles or considered as a don may be the city’s male elite. Such an elite, captured by a single man at a single moment in the city’s history, is admittedly subjective and presumably somewhat inaccurate, and it would not have remained static. But the title Don is a useful tool for evaluating which residents were perceived to be worthy of recognition in that moment. These men represented, at least in the eyes of the census taker, an elite of 15 percent of the free male population. Half of these “elite” males had Spanish surnames, another third carried French surnames, and a handful were of northern European ancestry. Based on their street listings, these men lived intermixed throughout the city; there was no elite neighborhood or street in the city then. However, none were free people of color—the census-taker had a limited view of who could be a respectable don.⁹

Ancestry and ethnicity are clearly social constructions, but analysis of the building, revision, and even dismantlement of those social constructs provides useful historical insights into how a society reshapes itself. The residents of New Orleans were, like many societies, very busy with social construction, and the era of Spanish rule was no different. Consequently, I use surnames to determine probable ancestry—dividing those surnames into three categories: French, Spanish, and northern European, while setting aside a fourth category for those identified in the archives as being free people of color. Surnames do not determine the ancestry or ethnicity of any individual, if such could ever be delineated—but surnames can provide hints, and those hints are especially useful in tracking migration and the fusion of societies.¹⁰

Surname identifications are also not precise. People in the eighteenth century moved across imperial borders—or those borders themselves moved—quite often, and inevitably their names metamorphosed, for example from Seymour to Zamora, from Ryan to Raillen or Riano, and Rodriguez to Roderick. Despite the inevitable imprecision, surname identification very clearly indicates the changing demography within New Orleans and how it may have varied from other Spanish imperial cities. How much that demography indicates about cultural dominance is subject to discussion.

The 1791 census was only a single moment, a single portrait of the city in a specific year. Fortunately, another census was conducted only four years later, although it is not well remembered as a census of people. Instead, at least in public discourse in 1795, the next census was of chimneys. This census was officially meant by Governor Carondelet to provide data for taxes for street lighting, based on the numbers of chimneys in the core of the city. However, given that the “chimney census” not only carefully chimneys but also counted and named the residents in each building, the intent of someone in the government, perhaps Carondelet himself, was clearly to take the opportunity for a second census.¹¹

The 1795 chimney census was divided into three imprecise age groups: Group 1 (ages 0–14), Group 2 (ages 15–50), and Group 3 (over age 50). It was also divided into free people and slaves, each further divided by sex and racial heritage—white, mixed, or African.

The division of residents by age group in table 1.1 was imprecise: Group 1, for example, was meant to count children from birth to puberty, while Group 2 was meant to capture the number of men able to serve in the militia. Similarly, the census taker and even the residents themselves probably made mistakes or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A City of Chameleons
• 2. The Merchants of Spanish New Orleans
• 3. Trade in Spanish New Orleans
• 4. Spanish Attempts to Control Trade
• 5. Literacy in a Spanish Imperial City
• 6. The Judicial System in Spanish New Orleans
• 7. Political Discourse and Practices in Spanish New Orleans
• Conclusion: The Transition between Two Empires
• APPENDIX 1: The Foundational Merchants of Spanish New Orleans
• APPENDIX 2: The Foundational Merchants of American New Orleans
• APPENDIX 3: Petition from the Merchants of New Orleans, August 1796, to King Charles IV of Spain
• APPENDIX 4: Petition from the Free Military Officers of Color, 24 October 1800, to the Cabildo of New Orleans
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index