Louisiana

Explorers commanded by the French-born Canadian seigneur Rene-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, sailed from Canada by interior navigation to the mouth of the Mississippi River, where they claimed for France the Mississippi Valley, naming the region after Louis XIV on April 6, 1682. By subsequent explorations the claim was enlarged to encompass the Mobile and Missouri River systems. A Province of Louisiana was established in 1699, when Jacques and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Canadian sieurs of Iberville and Bienville, respectively, established the first permanent colony between the mouths of the Mississippi and Mobile Rivers. (See Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville.) This remained a small military outpost of a few hundred people, mostly Canadians, until 1718, when New Orleans was founded by one of the largest single immigrant waves from the Old World, sponsored by the Company of the Indies between 1718 and 1731. In 1763 Louisiana produced indigo and other provisions for export, for the region was rich in natural resources, but it still had a remarkably small population of 11,496 whites and 5,552 black slaves, plus an unknown number of Indians, in a census of 1766. Few immigrants arrived from France after 1731, and few slaves were carried from Africa to the remote seaport of New Orleans. Then, in 1763, the Treaty of Paris awarded the English the territory east of the Mississippi, except for the “Isle” of New Orleans, which lies primarily on the east bank. At that time Louis XV gave the remaining huge province, extending west of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, to his Bourbon relation in Madrid, Charles III. Spain administered it until 1803, when Charles IV yielded it back to France, which sold it to the United States. When the slave rebellion in the French-claimed island of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) succeeded in the early 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte decided to abandon his quest for a significant French empire in North America. He, therefore, offered the Louisiana Territory to President Thomas Jefferson, forever altering the future of the new United States.

When the French colonized the region, they encountered powerful Native Americans, including the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez, living in highly organized societies and producing most of their food by agriculture. The Crown attached the Illinois region to Louisiana in 1718, inhabited by the Fox, Sauk, Potawatomi, Menominee, Winnebago, and other peoples. Most soon became involved in the fur trade, bartering deerskins and animal furs for European goods.

Most Europeans in Louisiana in 1763 were the descendants of migrants from western France who had arrived in New Orleans between 1718 and 1731, although Canadians from New France were a second important source of the population, but this was predominantly a multiracial society. White Louisianians faced two primary challenges: defending their claims to the province from both Indians and English and keeping their African slaves subordinated. The French generally allied with the Choctaw in chronic imperial warfare with the British and their Chickasaw allies until 1763. In 1729 the Natchez and a few black slaves attacked the French in one of the most dramatic moments of North American colonial history; the colonists rallied and brutally suppressed the Natchez. Their principal antagonists in the upper Mississippi Valley were the Fox Indians.

About 5,400 Africans were brought to New Orleans between 1718 and 1731, most coming from present-day Senegal and neighboring regions. Local planters purchased the great majority of them, so New Orleans Parish became a slave society where blacks formed a large majority. Slaves produced indigo, rice, tobacco, wood products, and other items exported to France and the West Indies. Treated much like the slaves in other North American colonies, they formed a comparatively tight-knit and stable community in part because slave imports were so limited between the 1730s and the 1760s. During the war years between 1754 and 1763, however, several large estate sales

This map shows French settlements and expansion in Louisiana. (Library of Congress)

Disrupted the family and social lives of many slaves. A tiny number of African Americans were free, most of whom were men who fought the Natchez in 1729 and thereby earned their freedom.

See also French colonies; French immigrants.

Further reading: Bradley G. Bond, French Colonia Louisiana and the Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mamon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999).

—Thomas N. Ingersoll