Guillemard, a Frenchmen by birth, had long been a member of the Spanish military force in Louisiana (he designed the five forts ordered by Governor Carondelet in 1794). In this 1797 letter Guillemard asks the Cabildo members to compensate him for his work. They agreed to pay him the amount of 200 pesos, presumably half of the total that Guillemard ultimately received. Later, as the building neared completion, the Cabildo agreed to repay to Almonester the 8,000 pesos he had lent for the project.
     [Miscellaneous French and Spanish Documents, #350]

Spain was at war with England during 1797 and evidence of that conflict is reflected in the entries for January 31 and February 8, both of which list English vessels that had been captured by French corsairs. Note also that on February 8 the schooner Amistad was at New Orleans--this was not the same vessel that was made famous by the 1839 slave insurrection.
     [Miscellaneous French and Spanish Documents, #45]
      The original document is badly faded; the item on display is a facsimile

According to historian Kimberly Hanger ("Almost All Have Callings: Free Blacks at Work in Spanish New Orleans," 1994), a census taken in 1795 shows that free blacks numbered twenty-one of the city's thirty-seven carpenters, ten of the nineteen shoemakers, thirty of the fifty-nine seamstresses, and all but one of the thirty-three laundresses. Free black residents of New Orleans continued to play an important economic and social role in the municipality up to the time of the American Civil War.      [Miscellaneous French and Spanish Documents, #325]

Almonester (1725-1796) was a native of Mayrena in Spain. He came to Louisiana with Governor Alejandro O'Reilly in 1769 and became one of the wealthiest men in the province, largely through his real estate holdings and developments. Almonester was also one of Louisiana's most important early philanthropists—he built a new Charity Hospital for New Orleans and rebuilt St. Louis Cathedral and the Presbytere after they were destroyed by fire.
     [Miscellaneous French and Spanish Documents, #188]

Throughout most of the Spanish period the men responsible for maintaining the streetlights also served as the city's night police. When they were not keeping the lamps adequately supplied with fish oil, bear fat and pelican grease, the watchmen were on the lookout for fires and a variety of suspicious characters. For their efforts, they were paid a monthly salary of fifteen pesos (twenty pesos for the Corporal in charge).
     [Miscellaneous French and Spanish Documents, #42]

The plan also shows the old Spanish customhouse and two of Carondelet's forts--St. Louis, at what is now the foot of Canal Street, and Bourgogne, between present-day Burgundy and North Rampart Streets, near Canal--and the wall connecting them. The forts remained in place, though not in use for military purposes, well into the American period.
     [Louisiana Map Collection, MS-27]

There appears to be no earlier mention of weapons for the policemen, nor is it clear what prompted the Cabildo to order the lances in 1800. Perhaps there was simply a general increase in violent activity as the port attracted more and more non-resident sailors and flatboat men into the city. Control of the city's slaves, of course, was always a concern, but the local militia played more of a role in that effort than did the night policemen who, after all, were primarily responsible for lighting and looking after the city's street lamps.
     [Miscellaneous French and Spanish Documents, #116]

This document is interesting because it includes descriptions of obnoxious behaviors observed at some earlier dances, and requests that guards be posted at Coquet's establishment in order to keep proper order. It also provides evidence of the role of African Americans in the military establishment of Spanish Louisiana, specifically in the campaign against Fort San Marcos de Apalache, an English outpost in Florida.
     [Letters, Petitions and Decrees of the Conseil Municipal, #367]

Actually, Salcedo and the Cabildo knew as early as March 11 that Louisiana was to be transferred to the French. Within three weeks Pierre Clément de Laussat was in New Orleans to begin preparations for the retrocession. The formal transfer of power did not take place until November 30.
     [Letters, Petitions and Decrees of the Conseil Municipal, #411]

Badger's correspondent, Shepherd Brown, was a native of Virginia, who came to New Orleans in 1800 and established himself in business with Baltimore merchant William Taylor and, later, with the firm of McDonogh and Payne. By 1802, he had formed his own company, Shepherd Brown and Co., while continuing his association with McDonogh. Brown's company pursued the newly developing western trade, purchasing agricultural products from up river for eventual transshipment to eastern markets. In 1805 Brown retired to his farm in St. Helena, where he was appointed an alcade by the Spanish rulers of West Florida and, because of his opposition to the revolution there, was briefly imprisoned. After the Florida parishes were annexed by the United States, he was appointed a parish judge. He died in Baltimore in 1818. The records he left behind, along with the records of McDonogh and Payne, both preserved in the Louisiana Division, provide a wealth of information on trade practices in New Orleans during the late colonial and early territorial periods.
     [Shepherd Brown and Co. Records, 1801-1804, #106]

In addition to Jean Etienne Boré, the first mayor of New Orleans, Laussat's municipal government included a future mayor, John Watkins, and two future governors of Louisiana, Pierre Derbigny and Jacques Philippe Villeré. Two of the members, Evan Jones and William Donaldson, were Americans, indicating the strength of that segment of the population even before the U.S. took control of the province.
     [Letters, Petitions and Decrees of the Conseil Municipal, #436]

This is one of only a handful of extant documents from the Governor's Court. (Only a minute book survives from the Court of Pleas.) In this case, Charles Lalande Dapremont, of the Cote des Allemands, asks Governor Claiborne to rule on a matter begun in the Spanish courts but left incomplete at the time of the Purchase. Dapremont asks that his former employer, the Widow Isabelle Renaud Trepagnier, be compelled to pay him salary and expenses due him in his role as overseer of her plantation. The record does not record the outcome of the case.
     [Louisiana Province. Governor's Court, Dapremont v. Trepagnier, docket # 70]

The small pox vaccine (actually an injection of the less serious disease cow pox) had only been discovered by British physician William Jenner in 1796; it was introduced into New England in 1800 and reached the Southern colonies a few years later. When smallpox appeared in the city in 1804, Governor Claiborne strongly supported the use of the new vaccine over the older form of inoculation or variolation (which involved deliberate exposure to smallpox itself), and, as a result, a major epidemic was averted.
     [Conseil de Ville. Letters, Petitions and Reports, #506]

Accompanying Pollock's request was a map by the surveyor Barthélémy Lafon showing the property Pollock owned and the lot he wished to purchase. The map itself is more interesting than Pollock's petition to purchase his lot, since it shows the location of the old military barracks ("casernes") in the large square which also housed Ursuline convent and the Royal Hospital (neither of which appear on the map). John McDonogh, who bought the barracks and the land surrounding them in 1821, described the larger of the two buildings as "of great extent and of brick, it is 56 feet in width, by 225 feet in length,--and its height, equals that of a three story house—it is capable of lodging 2000 men . . . " By the late 1830's, Chartres Street and Hospital Street were cut through the large square, the Ursulines relocated to a new convent on the Industrial Canal, the barracks were demolished (in 1838), the troops moved to Jackson Barracks, and the square was subdivided and sold to individual owners.
     [Conseil de Ville. Letters, Petitions and Reports, #531]

The meat market referred to here is not the current meat market on Decatur between St. Anne and Ursulines. That building, the oldest of the current French Market structures, was not built until 1813. The market that Laveau repaired was completed in May, 1790 by contractor Augustin McCarty and located on the levee approximately where the current meat market stands today.
     [Miscellaneous French and Spanish Documents, #354, Item 19]

After the Louisiana Purchase and the lifting of many inland trade restrictions imposed by the Spanish and French, business in the port surged. In 1803 hundreds of barges, flatboats and keelboats, loaded with such commodities as flour, pork, lard, tallow, whiskey and corn, reached New Orleans from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and elsewhere upriver. By the end of the decade, thousands arrived annually, particularly in the late fall and spring.
     [Collector of Levee Dues. Register of Flatboats, Barges and Rafts in the Port of New Orleans, 1806-1823]

The case is interesting, not simply because of the map filed amongst its papers, but because it touches upon some of the same issues of ownership of "public" land as the more famous "Batture Case," filed several years later.
     [Territory of Orleans. Superior Court #645; removed to Louisiana Map Collection, MS4]

This letter to the Conseil de Ville from Louis Moreau Lislet, one of the College's regents (and one of the authors of Louisiana's civil code), lays out the terms of the 1811 agreement, outlining the obligations of the Territory and the City.
     [Conseil de Ville. Letters, Petitions and Reports, #576]

The will shown here was written in 1811, two years before Clark's death. But Gaines claimed that Daniel Clark had written a second will shortly before he died in 1813, naming her as his only legitimate child. This all-important second will, she argued, had been destroyed by Clark's business associates to protect their own interest. It was the 1811 will shown here, however, that was admitted to probate in New Orleans, setting off an impossibly complicated legal proceeding that ended, ultimately, with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Gaines' favor (after the court changed its mind several times). But by the time of the Court's final ruling in 1891, attorney's fees and other debts had eaten drastically into Clark's estate, and Mrs. Gaines' heirs (for Myra Clark Gaines herself died before the suit was finally settled) got very little.
     [Court of Probates. Olographic Wills, 1813]

Interestingly, affixed to this document is perhaps the earliest instance of the New Orleans city seal, still in use today.
     [Office of the Mayor, Indentures, Vol. 1, # 11]

Included in the Journal are a number of maps, including this early map of the mouth of the Mississippi River.
     [Andrew Ellicott. The Journal of Andrew Ellicott (Philadelphia, 1803)]

On these pages, he describes New Orleans as it existed a scant eight years after the disastrous fire of 1794, with its muddy, dirty streets (a common complaint of visitors to the city) and its few public buildings. He focuses, however, on the "small theatre" near the center of town, where he attended "several dramas performed with considerable ability." The theatre was probably the St. Peter Street Theatre, the first theatre in the city, which operated from 1792 to 1810. Berquin-Duvallon, who did not have too many compliments to pay to New Orleans, seemed surprised to find such signs of culture in the colony.
     [Berquin-Duvallon. Travels in Louisiana and the Floridas in the year 1802 . . . ; translated by John Davis (New York,1806)]

Like a number of other newcomers or visitors to New Orleans, du Lac found more to criticize than to praise. His chapter on the city during the last days of Spanish rule begins, "New Orleans, at which I arrived in six weeks, does not merit a favorable description." du Lac found the city dirty, smelly, and unhealthy, the Spanish officials corrupt and foolish, the clergy debauched, and the Creoles vain and overly fond of pleasure. Nevertheless, he lamented the loss of the French empire in the New World. On the page shown here, he lists the income derived by Spain from the Louisiana colony (and hints that if not for Spanish corruption and mismanagement, the colony could provide far more riches).
     [François Marie Perrin du Lac. Travels Through the Two Louisianas . . . (London, 1807)]

The page shown here is from Book I, Title VI, Chapter 3, Article 17, "Of Slaves."
     [Louis Moreau-Lislet and James Brown. Digest of Civil Laws Now in Force in the Territory of Orleans . . . (New Orleans, 1808)]

On these pages, Nolte describes the business climate in New Orleans at the time of its transfer to the United States, focusing on the business acumen of such enterprising American merchants as Shepherd Brown, W.M. Montgomery, and John McDonogh, all of whom made their fortunes in the "great and growing city" of New Orleans.
     [Vincent Nolte. Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres or, Reminiscences of the Life of a Former Merchant (New York, 1854)]