Law.—Louisiana has been peculiar among the states of the Union in the history of the development of its legal system. In Louisiana alone (as the state is known to-day), out of all the territory acquired from France as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, was the civil law so established under French and Spanish rule that it persisted under American dominion. In all the other states formed from the Purchase, the civil law, never existent practically, was early expressly abrogated, and the common law of England established in its place. After O’Reilly established his power in 1769 (see History, below), the Spanish law was supreme. All the old codes of the Peninsula, as well as the laws of the Indies and special royal decrees and schedules, were in force in the colony. The United States left the task of altering the laws to the people, as far as there was no conflict between them and the Constitution of the United States and fundamental American legal customs. Copies of the Spanish codes were very rare, and some of them could not be had in the colonies. Discussions of the Roman Institute and Pandects were common in the deliberations of the courts. Great confusion prevailed in the first years of American dominion owing to the diversities of languages and the grafting of such Anglo-Saxon institutions as the jury upon the older system. A provisional code of judicial procedure, prepared by Edward Livingston, was in effect in 1805 to 1825. The earliest digest, completed in 1808, was mainly a compilation of Spanish laws. The project of the Code Napoléon, however—the code itself not being available in Louisiana, though promulgated in France in 1804—was used by the compilers in the arrangement and substance of their work; and the French traditions of the colony, thus illustrated, were naturally introduced more and more into the organic commentaries and developments that grew up around the Code Napoléon. This evolution was little marked, so similar in large parts were the systems of France and Spain (although in other parts, due to the Gothic element in the Spanish, they were very different)—a similarity which explains the facility with which O’Reilly and his successors introduced the Spanish laws after 1769. The Louisiana code of 1808 was not, however, exhaustive; and the courts continued to go back to the old Spanish sources whenever the digest was inconclusive. Thus so late as 1819, when the legislature ordered the compilation of such parts of King Alfonso’s Siete Partidas (the most common authority in the colony) as were considered in force, this compilation filled a considerable volume. In 1821 the legislature authorized Livingston to prepare the “Livingston Code” of criminal law and procedure, completed in 1824 (in French and English) and published in 1833, but never adopted by the state. In 1825 legislative sanction was given to the greater part of a civil code prepared by a commission (including Livingston) appointed in 1821, and the French element became steadily more important. In its present form the law shows plainly the Latin and English elements. English law has largely moulded, for example, criminal and commercial law and the law of evidence; the development of the law of corporations, damages, prohibitions and such extraordinary remedies as the mandamus has been very similar to that in other states; while in the fusion of law and equity, and the law of successions, family relations, &c., the civil law of Spain and France has been unaffected.
Education.—Schooling was very scant before the creation of the public schools in 1854. Very little was done for education in the French and Spanish period, although the Spanish governors made commendable efforts in this regard; the first American Territorial legislature began the incorporation of feeble “colleges” and “academies.” To some of these the state gave financial aid ($1,613,898) before 1845. The public schools were flourishing at the outbreak of the Civil War. War and reconstruction threw upon them the new burden of the black children. The constitution of 1879 was illiberal in this respect, but a healthier public opinion soon prevailed. The money given by the state to the public schools is distributed among the parishes according to their school population, and the constitution of 1898 set a generous minimum to such aid. An annual poll-tax is also collected for the schools from every adult male. Local taxes, besides, are imposed, and these are becoming heavier. The parishes retain primary control of the schools. Institutes, summer schools and rural libraries have been introduced. The salaries of white teachers advanced from a monthly average of $38.87 in 1903 to $61.84 in 1906. The average attendance of enrolled black and white pupils is practically identical, but the enrolment of whites (about 52% in 1902) is somewhat higher and that of the blacks about a third lower than their ratio in the population. The school term for white children is much longer than for negroes, and white teachers are paid much better salaries—in 1906 the average monthly salary of a negro teacher was $29.15. The total enrolment is very low. But progress is now being made very rapidly in the improvement of the educational system. Higher schools include: the State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College (1860) at Baton Rouge (q.v.); Tulane University of Louisiana (1864) in New Orleans; Jefferson College (1864; Roman Catholic) at Convent; the College of the Immaculate Conception (1847; Roman Catholic) in New Orleans; St Charles College (1835; Roman Catholic) at Grand Couteau; St Joseph’s College (1849; Roman Catholic) at Baton Rouge; the following colleges for women—Silliman Collegiate Institute (1852; Presbyterian) at Clinton, Mansfield Female College (1854; Methodist Episcopal, South) at Mansfield, the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College for women (a part of Tulane University) in New Orleans and the Louisiana Female College (1856; Baptist) at Keatchie; the State Normal School of Louisiana (1884) at Natchitoches and the New Orleans Normal and Training School; the South-western Louisiana Industrial Institute at Lafayette; the Louisiana Industrial Institute at Ruston; and, among schools for negroes, the Peabody State Normal and Industrial School at Alexandria and New Orleans University (1873; Methodist Episcopal), Luther College (Evangelical Lutheran), Leland University (1870; Baptist), Straight University (Congregational) and Southern University (1883; aided by the state), all in New Orleans.
Charitable and Penal Institutions.—The State Board of Charities and Correction, for which the constitution of 1898 first made provision, and which was organized under an act of 1904, is composed of six members, appointed by the governor for six years, with the governor as ex-officio chairman. The members of the board serve gratuitously, but elect a salaried secretary. The board has no administrative or executive power, but makes annual inspections of all public charitable, correctional or reformatory institutions, all private institutions which receive aid from, or are used by municipal or parochial authorities, and all private asylums for the insane; and reports annually to the governor on the actual condition of the institutions. Any suggestions as to improvements in institutions must be approved by the majority of the governing body of that institution before they may be put into effect. The charitable institutions include two charity hospitals—at New Orleans (1832) and Shreveport; an Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital, a Hôtel Dieu, the Touro Infirmary and a Home for Incurables, all at New Orleans; an Institute for the Deaf and Dumb (for whites—there is no state provision for negro deaf and dumb) and an Institute for the Blind, both at Baton Rouge; an Insane Hospital at Jackson and another at Pineville; and the Louisiana Retreat for the Insane at New Orleans. At Monroe there is a State Reform School, and at New Orleans a Coloured Industrial Home and School. There is also a state home for disabled Confederate soldiers at New Orleans on Bayou St John. The State Penitentiary is at Baton Rouge, and a House of Detention at New Orleans; and there are parish prisons. State convicts, and all places in which they are confined or employed, are under the supervision of a Board of Control appointed by the governor. This board may allow commutation or diminution of sentence for good behaviour, meritorious services or exemplary conduct. The leasing or hiring of state convicts is prohibited by the constitution, but parish convicts may be hired or leased for farm and factory work, work on roads and levees, and other public undertakings. Such convicts are classified according to physical ability and a minimum rate is fixed for their hire, for not more than ten hours a day. Many state convicts are employed in levee construction, and there are convict farms at Angola, Hope, Oakley and Monticello.
History.—The early history of Louisiana belongs to the romance of American history. It is possible that the mouth of the Mississippi was discovered in 1519 by Alonso Alvarez de Piñeda, but this interpretation of his vague manuscript remains conjectural; and that it was discovered by the expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez cannot be established. That Hernando de Soto entered the borders of the present state of Louisiana, and that his burial place in the Mississippi was where that river takes the waters of the Red, are probable enough, but incapable of conclusive proof. Survivors of de Soto’s expedition, however, descended the Mississippi to its mouth in 1542. Spain set up no claim to the region, and when Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle, came down the river in 1682 from the French possessions to the north, he took possession in the name of France, which hereby gained her first title to the vast drainage basin of the Mississippi. In honour of Louis XIV. the new possession was named “Louisiana”—a name then and until 1812 applied to a much larger area than that of the present state. La Salle attempted to settle a colony in 1684, but missed the Mississippi’s mouth and landed in Texas, where he was murdered in 1687 by some of his followers. In 1697, after Ryswick, Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville (1662-1706) was chosen to lead another colony, which reached the Gulf coast early in 1699. Soon after Iberville had built Fort Maurepas (near the present city of Biloxi, Mississippi) in 1699, a fort was erected on the Mississippi river about 40 m. above the mouth.
This was the earliest settlement in what is now the state of Louisiana. It was unhealthy and unprosperous. From 1712 to 1717 “Louisiana,” or the French possessions of the Mississippi valley, was held by Antoine Crozat (1655-1738) as a private grant from the king. It proved as great a drain upon his purse as it had proved to the crown, and he willingly parted with it to the so-called “Western Company,” afterwards incorporated with the great Company of the Indies. The head of this company was John Law, who, after spreading glowing accounts of the new land, launched his famous “Mississippi scheme” (see [Law, John]). The company accomplished much for the colony of Louisiana. Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville (1680-1768), a brother of Iberville, was sent out as governor. For forty years he was the life of the colony. One of his first acts was to found the city of New Orleans on its present site in 1718. In this same year seven vessels were sent from France with stores and immigrants; eleven followed during the next year. Five hundred negroes from the Guinea coast were imported in 1719, and many hundreds more soon followed. The Law company eventually came to an end fatal to its creditors in France, but its misfortunes did not check the prosperity of “Louisiana.” The company retained its grant of the colony until 1731, when it reverted to the crown. Meantime New Orleans had become the seat of government in 1722. In 1766 an official census showed a total population of 5552. The years of royal rule were uneventful. Cotton culture began in 1740, and sugar-cane was successfully introduced from Santo Domingo by the Jesuits in 1751. Tafia rum and a waxy, sticky sugar syrup subsequently became important products; but not until the end of the century were the means found to crystallize sugar and so give real prosperity to the industry.
By a secret treaty of the 3rd of November 1762, “Louisiana” was transferred from France to Spain. This treaty was not made public for a year and a half, and Spain did not take full possession of the colony until 1769. By a treaty between Spain and France on the one hand and Great Britain and Portugal on the other, signed at Paris in February 1763, all that portion lying E. of the Mississippi river, the Iberville river, and Lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain was ceded to Great Britain. The international interests thus created, and others that sprang from them, heavily burdened the diplomacy, and even threatened the safety of the United States after they were placed in possession of the eastern bank of the Mississippi down to 31° in 1783.
The news of the cession of the colony to Spain roused strong discontent among the colonists. Antonio de Ulloa (1716-1795), a distinguished Spanish naval officer and scholar, came to New Orleans in 1766 to take possession for his king. Merchants, people, and many civil officers held toward him from the beginning a hostile attitude; the military, especially, refused to pass into the Spanish service as stipulated in the treaty; and Ulloa was compelled to continue in an ambiguous and anomalous position—which his lack of military force probably first compelled him to assume—ruling the colony through the French governor, Philippe Aubry (who loyally supported him throughout), without publicly exhibiting his powers. The fear of Spanish commercial laws powerfully stimulated resistance to the transfer, and though Ulloa made commercial and monetary concessions, they were not sufficient. When the colonists found protests at Paris unavailing, they turned to the idea of independence, but sought in vain the armed support of the British at Pensacola. Nevertheless they compelled Ulloa to leave the colony or exhibit his credentials. He took his leave in November 1768. The open resistance by the colonists (October 1768) was a carefully planned revolt. There is no doubt that the men who led the Creole opposition contemplated independence, and this gives the incident peculiar interest. In the summer of 1769 Alejandro O’Reilly came to New Orleans with a strong military force (3600 troops). Beginning his rule with an affability that allayed suspicions and securing from Aubry proofs against the popular leaders, he invited them to a reception and arrested them while they were his guests. Five were put to death and others were imprisoned at Havana. O’Reilly put down the rebellion with determination and in accord with the instructions of his king. Regarded without republican sympathies, and in the light of 18th-century doctrines of allegiance, his acts, however severe, in no way deserve the stigma of cruelty ordinarily put upon them. He was liberal and enlightened in his general rule.
Among the incidents of these troubled years was the arrival in Louisiana (after 1765) of some hundreds of French exiles from Acadia, who made their homes in the Attakapas country. There their descendants live to-day, still somewhat primitively, and still in somewhat of the glamour thrown over land and people by the Evangeline of Longfellow.
On the 18th of August 1769 Louisiana was formally transferred to Spain. Spanish law and Spanish tongue replaced the French officially, but the colony remained essentially French. The Spanish rulers made efforts to govern wisely and liberally, showing great complaisance, particularly in heeding the profit of the colony, even at the expense of Spanish colonial commercial regulations. The judicial system was much improved, a better grade of officials became the rule, many French Creoles were appointed to office, intermarriages of French and Spanish and even English were encouraged by the highest officials, and in general a liberal and conciliatory policy was followed, which made Louisiana under Spanish rule quiet and prosperous. Bernardo de Galvez (1756-1794), a brilliant young officer of twenty-one, when he became the governor of the colony, was one of the most liberal of the Spanish rulers and of all the most popular. During the American War of Independence he gave valuable aid to the United States; and when Spain finally joined in the war against Great Britain, Galvez, in a series of energetic and brilliant campaigns (1779-1781), captured all the important posts in the British colony of West Florida. The chief interest of the Spanish period lies in the advance of settlement in the western territories of the United States, the international intrigues—British, French and Spanish—involving the future of the valley, the demand of the United States for free navigation on the Mississippi, and the growing consciousness of the supreme importance of the river and New Orleans to the Union. With the Spanish governor Estevan Miro, who succeeded Galvez in 1785, James Wilkinson of Kentucky, arrested at New Orleans with a flat-boat of supplies in 1787, intrigued, promising him that Kentucky would secede from the United States and would join the Spanish; but Wilkinson was unsuccessful in his efforts to carry out this plan. In 1794 Spain, hard pressed by Great Britain and France, turned to the United States, and by the treaty of 1794 the Mississippi river was recognized by Spain as the western boundary of the United States, separating it from Louisiana, and free navigation of the Mississippi was granted to citizens of the United States, to whom was granted for three years the right “to deposit their merchandise and effects in the port of New Orleans, and to export them from thence without paying any other duty than a fair price for the hire of the stores.” At the expiration of the three years the Spanish governor refused the use of New Orleans as a place of deposit, and contrary to the treaty named no other port in its place. Spanish rule, however, came unexpectedly to an end by the retrocession of Louisiana to France in 1800; and French dominion gave way in turn in 1803—as the result of a chain of events even more unexpected, startling, and for the United States fortunate—to the rule of the last-named country. On the 30th of November 1803 the representatives of the French republic received formal possession from the Spanish governor, and on the 20th of December lower Louisiana was transferred to the United States. (See [Louisiana Purchase].)
By an Act of Congress of the 25th of March 1804,[4] that portion of the Louisiana Purchase S. of 33° was organized as the Territory of Orleans, and was given a government less democratic than might otherwise have been the case, because it was intended to prepare gradually for self-government the French and Spanish inhabitants of the territory, who desired immediate statehood. The foreign slave-trade was forbidden by this organic act. English was made the official language. The introduction of English law, and the changes made in the judicial and legal systems of Louisiana after 1804 have already been described.