The Colonial Period: Merchants and Speculators
Before 1783 there was little immigration from the British North American colonies to Louisiana. If such colonists wanted to relocate southward, they could choose the British colony of West Florida, which included thriving planter communities around Natchez and Manchac. After the American Revolution (1775–1783), the wave of Loyalist émigrés leaving the former colonies went mainly to Canada, the Floridas, and the British Caribbean. Later in the 1780s, however, governor Esteban Miró tried to attract western American settlers with promises of free land and religious toleration. Land-hungry migrants (including, at one point, Daniel Boone) took Spanish loyalty oaths in exchange for generous grants, but ultimately most American settlers of the 1780s preferred to move to West Florida (now retroceded to Spain) or to settlements in northern parts of the Louisiana territory beyond the borders of the future state.
In the 1790s, closer commercial links with the United States and liberalized Spanish policies toward American merchants started to attract ambitious Anglo-Americans to southern Louisiana, and New Orleans in particular. Credit connections with northern cities multiplied, and American shipping dominated both imports and exports in what emerged as a major commercial port and thriving international city. Many of the new arrivals were Atlantic world cosmopolitans with malleable national identities. Irish-born Daniel Clark, Jr., who served as the first representative of the Territory of Orleans in the US House of Representatives, provided an interesting example. After working as a young man in Philadelphia, Clark moved to New Orleans about 1790, learned Spanish, and became a trusted protégé of Governor Francisco Luis Hector baron de Carondelet. But then, after a quarrel with Spanish authorities in 1798, he took the oath of US citizenship in nearby Mississippi Territory and began agitating for an American takeover of Louisiana. Clark would become one of Louisiana’s wealthiest merchants, planters, and landowners.
The reputation of New Orleans for unhealthiness dissuaded many wealthy merchants from relocating there. Instead they sent young surrogates—such as John McDonogh, who found wealth and fame in colonial New Orleans. Sent at age twenty to represent the commercial interests of William Taylor of Baltimore, McDonogh soon began trading on his own account. He also branched out into sugar planting, slave importation, and land speculation. McDonogh’s land investments in West Florida and his plantation on New Orleans’s West Bank eventually made him one of the richest men in antebellum Louisiana. Later he became famous for the compensated emancipation and colonization program he offered his slaves, as well as for posthumously endowing the public school systems of both Baltimore and New Orleans—where numerous McDonogh schools still exist.