Contested Spaces of Early America

Chapter 8. Remaking Americans: Louisiana, Upper Canada, and Texas

chapter 8  Remaking Americans: Louisiana, Upper Canada, and Texas Alan Taylor In the wake of the American Revolution, the new republic alarmed its imperial neighbors: the British to the north in Canada and the Spanish to the west in Louisiana. The imperial officials especially feared the great and growing number of Americans, who expanded their settlements with a remarkable rapidity. About 3.7 million in 1790, the American population would double during the next twenty-five years. And the population was shifting westward. From just 12,000 in 1783, Kentucky’s population exploded to 73,000 in 1790 and to 221,000 in 1800. In 1793 the Spanish governor of Louisiana, Baron de Carondelet, warned his superiors in Spain to beware of the unmeasured ambition of a new people, who are vigorous, hostile to all subjection, and who have been uniting and multiplying . . . with a remarkable rapidity from the time of the recognized independence of the United States. . . . This vast and restless population, driving the Indian tribes continually before them and upon us, is endeavoring to gain all the vast continent occupied by the Indians between the Ohio and Misisipi [sic] Rivers, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Appalachian Mountains.1 Another Spanish official regarded the settlers as ‘‘distinguished from savages only in their color, language, and the superiority of their depraved cunning and untrustworthiness.’’ The Spanish worried that the American Remaking Americans 209 frontier folk would sweep across the Mississippi River into Louisiana—and on across the Great Plains to take New Mexico and eventually Mexico, the silver-rich heart of the Spanish Empire.2 The British and Spanish colonies were especially vulnerable because they were so vast and so thinly populated by colonists. Sprawled along the entire western side of the Mississippi River, Louisiana stretched westward across the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains to include about 828,000 square miles, but Louisiana had only about forty thousand colonists in 1790. Almost all of them lived in two clusters on the colony’s eastern margin in the Mississippi Valley. The main cluster lay along the lower river around the capital and seaport at New Orleans. In Upper Louisiana, a secondary, and more dispersed, set of settlements stretched along the Mississippi River near the confluence of the Missouri and Ohio rivers (in the future state of Missouri). At one thousand inhabitants, St. Louis was the primary Euroamerican settlement in Upper Louisiana and second only to New Orleans in the colony. Most of the Louisiana colonists descended from French settlers who came before the colony’s 1763 transfer from French to Spanish rule. Enslaved Africans made up the second largest group. A few Spanish high officials governed a small French population (and their slaves), while struggling to cope with the many Indian nations who dominated the continental interior. No wonder the governors dreaded the looming prospect of American intrusions and invasions.3 The British colony of Upper Canada was equally immense and thinly populated. In 1790 the fourteen thousand colonists lived in new settlements straggled along the St. Lawrence, Niagara, and Detroit rivers and the northern shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Most of the colonists were newly arrived Loyalists, refugees from the civil war known as the American Revolution . As in Louisiana, Upper Canada had more Indians than colonists.4 To strengthen their colonies, British and Spanish officials sought emigrants who could provide a militia and develop the agricultural economy. Florida’s Spanish governor, Vicente Manuel de Zespedes, explained, ‘‘The best fortification would be a living wall of industrious citizens.’’ Imperial officials preferred to recruit Europeans, deeming them more tractable to authority and less prone to revolutionary republicanism. But Europeans lacked the experience and skills needed to dispossess Indians and to transform forests into farms. They were also expensive to ship across the Atlantic and to subsidize during their first two years, when they would struggle to subsist in a new land. During the 1780s and 1790s, Britain and Spain could 210 Alan Taylor not afford those additional costs because they were burdened by the massive military establishments demanded by their global wars. Already reeling from crushing debts inflicted during the American Revolution, the empires faced renewed war in 1793.5 For want of European settlers, the British and the Spanish enticed Indians to leave the United States. Greatly outnumbered by the Americans, the British counted on Indian...