ABSTRACT
Joseph Dubreuil de Villars’ passionate opposition to American efforts to curtail the slave trade makes it difficult to realize that in the preceding decade influential Louisianians like him had persistently demanded from Spanish authorities restrictions on the trade. Through the Cabildo, the instrument of local government under Spanish domination, planters and merchants had insisted throughout the 1790s on banning slaves from the revolution-torn French West Indies and, in the years 1795 to 1800, from Africa as well. Slave-trade policy in Spanish Louisiana may be divided into two distinct phases: progressive liberalization up to 1786 and progressive curtailment thereafter. Each year between 1771 and 1780, royal orders directed officials in the province to encourage slave importations, principally through tariff reductions. Official policy on the slave trade was one thing, actual practice another. A series of slave plots and conspiracies in Louisiana heightened anxieties.
