This nearly verbatim publication of a 1983 Tulane University doctoral dissertation forms part of a Garland series on African American history and culture. The author has performed considerable original research in investigating crime and the administration of criminal justice in Spanish Louisiana. White notables, he finds, usually sought redress outside the system. Upper-class white women hardly ever lowered themselves by appearing in court. The most oppressed members of society were those most likely to find themselves before Spanish magistrates. Thus, the underutilized records of these proceedings, the most important of which are in the archives of the Louisiana State Museum, contain a rich lode of information on lower Louisiana’s resident slave population, whose labor was beginning to transform a frontier into a plantation economy.
Spain acquired Louisiana as compensation from France during the Seven Years’ War. This vast territory appeared ideally located to serve as a buffer between Spain’s far more precious possessions to the southwest and England’s restless colonists to the east. With limited resources, Spanish governors based in New Orleans tried to extend Spanish laws and institutions to Louisiana’s unruly Indian, French, and African inhabitants. Spanish authority, however, weakened with distance from the center, and most of the outlying post commandants continued to practice a less formal, personalistic rule that tended to reflect the interests of the French-speaking elite in their districts.
After describing the structure and function of the seven Spanish courts that replaced the French Superior Council, Derek Kerr analyzes the criminal records. He distinguishes three categories of crime: against persons, property, and public order. The last, which covered everything from slander to slave rebellion, kept prosecutors the busiest by far. Baron Carondelet’s rule during the French and St. Domingue revolutions produced the greatest number of serious crimes or, perhaps better said, more serious repression of the lower classes, as evidenced by the number of cases handled by the governor’s court itself. In the 1790s, two slave conspiracies were uncovered in the plantation district of Pointe Coupée. More frequently, the court records document individual acts of illegal slave behavior, such as murder, poisoning, theft, possession of firearms, desertion, and arson. New Orleans, as the only sizable North American port between Veracruz and Charleston, also attracted a rowdy transient population that mixed with people of color and with many of the miserable common soldiers who garrisoned the city. Indeed, recruits from Louisiana’s regiments competed with slaves for space in the jailhouse.
Few of Kerr’s conclusions relating Spanish Louisiana’s crimes and criminals to its socioeconomic conditions will surprise specialists. Several tables and lengthy appendixes identifying criminal cases in select districts and naming Spanish Louisiana’s alcaldes, regidores, síndicos, comisarios, and comandantes do make this volume a handy reference and heuristic tool. It complements two excellent recent books on colonial Louisiana, by Daniel Usner on the frontier economy [Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783, 1992] and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall on the development of African slavery [Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1992].
