Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves is a provocative look at the institution of slavery and how it functioned as a part of Louisiana's culture during the years of Spanish rule. Gilbert C. Din challenges the idea that conditions under the Spaniards differed little from the years of French rule and examines how local culture merged with colonial government and residual laws to create a slave system unlike any other in the Deep South. Din presents many aspects of the slavery issue, including a look at the French system, conflicts between planters who favored the established system and governors who promoted the less stringent Spanish laws, and the political favoritism that sought to benefit the wealthy New Orleans district. Din also discusses the role of the Catholic Church and debates the commonly held idea that the church's influence made Spanish slavery less brutal, asserting instead that its role in most areas was insignificant and largely observational. Using government documents from archives in Spain and Louisiana, Din paints a historically accurate portrait of a time when the blended culture of the eighteenth-century colony resulted in conflict and turmoil. Most important are the Papeles Procedentes de la Isla de Cuba, a collection of colonial documents that illustrate not only the actions but also the personalities of the governors and how they implemented changes and handled problems within the slave system. Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves is the first in its field to capture the years of Spanish rule as a specific and unique point in Louisiana's history of slavery. Din's research uncovers both the complexities of the slavery issue and the Spanish heritage that ultimatelyhelped to shape the slave system of the future state. It is an ideal study for anyone interested in the history of both colonial Louisiana and slavery itself.

In Francois Valle and His World, Carl Ekberg provides a fascinating biography of Francois Valle (1716-1783), placing him within the context of his place and time. Valle, who was born in Beauport, Canada, immigrated to Upper Louisiana (the Illinois Country) as a penniless common laborer sometime during the early 1740s. Engaged in agriculture, lead mining, and the Indian trade, he ultimately became the wealthiest and most powerful individual in Upper Louisiana, although he never learned to read or write. Ekberg focuses on Upper Louisiana in colonial times, long before Lewis and Clark arrived in the Mississippi River valley and before American sovereignty had reached the eastern bank of the Mississippi. He vividly captures the ambience of life in the eighteenth-century frontier agricultural society that Valle inhabited, shedding new light on the French and Spanish colonial regimes in Louisiana and on the Mississippi River frontier before the Americans arrived. Based entirely on primary source documents wills and testaments, parish registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials, and Spanish administrative correspondence found in archives ranging from St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve to New Orleans and Seville, Francois Valle and His World traces not only the life of Francois Valle and the lives of his immediate family members, but also the lives of his slaves. In doing so, it provides a portrait of Missouri's very first black families, something that has never before been attempted. Ekberg also analyzes how the illiterate Valle became the richest person in all of Upper Louisiana, and how he rose in the sociopolitical hierarchy to become an important servant of the Spanish monarchy. Francois Valle and His World provides a useful corrective to the fallacious notion that Missouri's history began with the arrival of Lewis and Clark at the turn of the nineteenth century. Anyone with an interest in colonial history or the history of the Mississippi River valley will find this book of great value.

Frances Kolb Turnbell’s study of Spanish colonial Louisiana is the first comprehensive history of the colony. It emphasizes the Lower Mississippi valley’s status as a borderland contested by empires and the region’s diverse inhabitants in the era of volatility that followed the Seven Years’ War. As Turnbell demonstrates, the Spanish era was characterized by tremendous transition as the colony emerged from the neglect of the French period and became slowly but increasingly centered on plantation agriculture. The transformations of this critical period grew out of the struggles between Spain and Louisiana’s colonists, enslaved people, and Indians over issues related to space and mobility. Many borderland peoples, networks, and alliances sought to preserve Louisiana as a flexible and fluid zone as the colonial government attempted to control and contain the region’s inhabitants for its own purposes through policy and efforts to secure loyalty and its own advantageous alliances. Turnbell first examines the period from 1763 through the American Revolution, when the Mississippi River was a boundary between empires. The river’s designation as an imperial border ran counter to the topography of North America and counter to the practices of the valley’s inhabitants, who employed its waterways to trade, communicate, migrate, and survive. Turnbell pays special attention to the Revolt of 1768, the burgeoning trade along the Mississippi prior to the American Revolution that involved British and American merchants, Spanish preparation for war, and the crucial involvement of the borderland’s diverse inhabitants as the war played out on the Lower Mississippi. Turnbell then explains how the activity of borderland peoples evolved after the Revolutionary War when the Lower Mississippi was no longer an imperial boundary. She considers the instability and fluidity of postwar years in Louisiana, American trade and migration, Louisiana’s experience of the Age of Revolutions—from pro-French sentiments to plans for rebellion among the enslaved—and ultimately, Spain’s political demise in the Mississippi River valley.

This volume considers the responses to the social and institutional norms of the Spanish colonial system along Spain's northern frontier provinces.

Chronicles the history of the city from its being contended over as swampland through Louisiana's statehood in 1812, discussing its motley identities as a French village, African market town, Spanish fortress, and trade center.

"As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation in early British America was a serious and brutal enterprise. Beyond resources and weapons, a plantation required a significant force of cruel and rapacious men men who, as Trevor Burnard sees it, lacked any better options for making money. In the contentious Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic because to speak bluntly it worked. These economically successful and ethically monstrous plantations required racial divisions to exist, but their successes were always measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Burnard argues that the best example of plantations functioning as intended is not those found in the fractious and poor North American colonies, but those in their booming and integrated commercial hub, Jamaica. Sure to be controversial, this book is a major intervention in the scholarship on slavery, economic development, and political power in early British America, mounting a powerful and original argument that boldly challenges historical orthodoxy."--

In this sweeping, foundational work, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer draws on extensive research to show how enslaved Africans and their descendants enlarged American ideas of freedom in varying ways in different regions of the early United States. African Founders explores the little-known history of how enslaved people from different regions of Africa interacted with colonists of European origins to create new regional cultures in the colonial United States. The Africans brought with them linguistic skills, novel techniques of animal husbandry and farming, and generations-old ethical principles, among other attributes. This startling history reveals how much our country was shaped by these African influences in its early years, producing a new, distinctly American culture. Drawing on decades of research, some of it in western Africa, Fischer recreates the diverse regional life that shaped the early American republic. He shows that there were varieties of slavery in America and varieties of new American culture, from Puritan New England to Dutch New York, Quaker Pennsylvania, cavalier Virginia, coastal Carolina, and Louisiana and Texas. This landmark work of history will transform our understanding of America’s origins.

Winner, 2020 Booker Worthen Literary Prize During the antebellum years, over 750,000 enslaved people were taken to the Lower Mississippi Valley, where two-thirds of them were sold in the slave markets of New Orleans, Natchez, and Memphis. Those who ended up in Louisiana found themselves in an environment of swamplands, sugar plantations, French-speaking creoles, and the exotic metropolis of New Orleans. Those sold to planters in the newly-opened Mississippi Delta cleared land and cultivated cotton for owners who had moved west to get rich as quickly as possible, driving this labor force to harsh extremes. Like enslaved people all over the South, those in the Lower Mississippi Valley left home at night for clandestine parties or religious meetings, sometimes “laying out” nearby for a few days or weeks. Some of them fled to New Orleans and other southern cities where they could find refuge in the subculture of slaves and free blacks living there, and a few attempted to live permanently free in the swamps and forests of the surrounding area. Fugitives also tried to returnto eastern slave states to rejoin families from whom they had been separated. Some sought freedom on the northern side of the Ohio River; othersfled to Mexico for the same purpose. Fugitivism provides a wealth of new information taken from advertisements, newspaper accounts, and court records. It explains how escapees made use of steamboat transportation, how urban runaways differed from their rural counterparts, how enslaved people were victimized by slave stealers, how conflicts between black fugitives and the white people who tried to capture them encouraged a culture of violence in the South, and how runaway slaves from the Lower Mississippi Valley influenced the abolitionist movement in the North. Readers will discover that along with an end to oppression, freedom-seeking slaves wanted the same opportunities afforded to most Americans.

Tales of Cajuns, Creoles, and New Orleans decadence dominate both popular and professional impressions of Louisiana and have undoubtedly distracted attention from the region that arguably experienced the most dramatic pattern of development in Louisiana, if not the entire Gulf South. Louisiana's Florida Parishes, located in the southeastern part of the state, have endured a tumultuous evolution, including domination by every major power that invaded North America, exclusion from the Louisiana Purchase, insurrection and the establishment of the original Lone Star Republic, and some of the highest rates of rural homicide recorded in American history. The area was long neglected by scholars until some of its foremost experts came together to explore and recognize its singular identity. This volume is a result of that collaboration and consists of ten essays on the history and culture of this unique territory. In tracing the progress of Louisiana's Florida Parishes, the book begins with an eye-opening ethnographic history of the territory during its days as a French colony, the brief era of British rule, and slavery as it was practiced under the Spanish regime. A revealing look at the region during the War of 1812 provides a dynamic account of the only major naval battle in the South during that conflict. Subsequent essays give lucid and insightful examination to the area's guerrilla tactics during the Civil War, credit crisis of the postbellum era, and ecological transformation through pine forest harvesting. The final third of the book considers the demographic changes wrought by black labor employed in the lumber mills of the early twentieth century, the challenges confronting a rural, depression-era black community, and recent environmental changes in the parishes that impact ongoing economic development. A Fierce and Fractious Frontier employs a comprehensive approach supported by provocative groundbreaking research to explain the difficulties of the past and suggest considerations for the future of Louisiana's Florida Parishes. It will stand as a model for the emerging field of southern subregional studies.

In Complexion of Empire in Natchez, Christian Pinnen examines slavery in the colonial South, using a variety of legal records and archival documents to investigate how bound labor contributed to the establishment and subsequent control of imperial outposts in colonial North America. He examines the dynamic and multifaceted development of slavery in the colonial South and reconstructs the relationships among aspiring enslavers, natives, struggling colonial administrators, and African laborers, as well as the links between slavery and the westward expansion of the American Republic. By placing Natchez at the focal point, this book reveals the unexplored tensions among the enslaved, enslavers, and empires across the plantation complex. Most important, Complexion of Empire in Natchez highlights the effect that different conceptions of racial complexions had on the establishment of plantations and how competing ideas about race strongly influenced the governance of plantation colonies. The location of the Natchez District enables a unique study of British, Spanish, and American legal systems, how enslaved people and natives navigated them, and the consequences of imperial shifts in a small liminal space. The differing—and competing—conceptions of racial complexion in the lower Mississippi Valley would strongly influence the governance of plantation colonies and the hierarchies of race in colonial Natchez. Complexion of Empire in Natchez thus broadens the historical discourse on slavery’s development by including the lower Mississippi Valley as a site of inquiry.