Louisiana (New Spain)

Spanish Louisiana was a province of New Spain from 1762 to 1801, covering the western half of the Mississippi river basin and the city of New Orleans. Spain received it from France at the end of the Seven Years' War and returned it to France shortly before the United States bought it in 1803.

In 1682 the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, travelled down the Mississippi to its mouth and claimed the whole river basin for France, naming it Louisiana after King Louis XIV. French settlements followed, including Mobile in 1702 and New Orleans in 1718, founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. The colony was small and struggling, relying on trade with Native nations, such as the Choctaw, and on enslaved Africans, imported from 1719. The Natchez revolt of 1729 was crushed. The Code Noir regulated slavery.

In 1762, near the end of the Seven Years' War, France secretly gave Louisiana west of the Mississippi, along with New Orleans, to Spain in the Treaty of Fontainebleau, partly to compensate its ally for the loss of Florida to Britain, and to keep the territory out of British hands. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 gave the east bank, except New Orleans, to Britain.

The French settlers of New Orleans were unhappy with Spanish rule and trade restrictions. When the first Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa, arrived in 1766, he had few troops, and in 1768 the colonists rebelled and expelled him. In 1769 Spain sent Alejandro O'Reilly, an Irish-born general, with about 2,000 troops. He crushed the rebellion and executed five of its leaders, earning the nickname "Bloody O'Reilly", but also reorganised the government, introducing Spanish law and the cabildo, a town council.

Spain governed Louisiana mostly through French-speaking officials and allowed French settlers to keep their culture. Spain saw Louisiana as a buffer protecting its silver mines in Mexico from the British and later the Americans. It encouraged settlers: Canary Islanders, the Isleños; Acadians expelled from Canada by the British, who became the Cajuns; and Americans. Spanish law allowed enslaved people to buy their freedom, coartación, and the free population of colour grew.

Governor Bernardo de Gálvez supported the American Revolution, sending supplies to the rebels, and after Spain declared war on Britain in 1779 he captured British posts at Baton Rouge, Natchez, Mobile in 1780 and Pensacola in 1781. Galveston, in Texas, is named after him, and in 2014 he was made an honorary citizen of the United States. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 returned Florida to Spain.

Great fires in 1788 and 1794 destroyed much of New Orleans. The city was rebuilt in brick and stucco, with courtyards, balconies and arcades, and many buildings in the French Quarter, such as the Cabildo and the St Louis Cathedral, date from the Spanish period. The Mississippi became a vital route for American farmers in the Ohio valley, and Pinckney's Treaty of 1795 gave Americans the right to ship goods through New Orleans.

In 1800, by the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso, Spain agreed to return Louisiana to Napoleon's France, in exchange for a kingdom in Italy for a Spanish prince. The formal transfer took place in New Orleans on 30 November 1803. Napoleon, after losing an army in Haiti and facing war with Britain, had already agreed in April 1803 to sell the whole territory to the United States for 15 million dollars, the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the country. The American flag was raised in New Orleans on 20 December 1803.

Our maps show Spanish Louisiana on the 1783 and 1800 maps, with an outline of up to about 3.1 million square kilometres, entirely in today's United States. New Orleans lies inside it. On the 1800 map, the basemap still uses the Spanish label, though the treaty returning Louisiana to France was signed that year. On the 1815 map the region is part of the United States.