Free A Wilderness So Immense by Jon Kukla Page B

of his compliance with my request,” Father Sedella said, “but I have now no use for your services. You shall be warned in time when you are wanted,” he promised as he prepared to return to his sleep. “Retire then with the blessing of God.” 6
    Instead, the captain placed Father Sedella under arrest. “What!” exclaimed the monk, “will you dare lay your hands on a Commissary of the Holy Inquisition?” 7
    “I dare obey orders,” the officer replied, as he ushered Father Sedella aboard a vessel that sailed the next day—April 30, 1790—for the Spanish port of Cádiz. 8
    “When I read the communication of that Capuchin,” Governor Miró reported to the ministry in Spain, “I shuddered.” The emerging policy of strengthening the Spanish borderlands through population growth—a policy Miró fully supported—depended upon “the pledge that the new colonists should not be molested in matters of religions, provided there should be no other public mode of worship than the Catholic.” Miró knew that “the mere name of the Inquisition uttered in New Orleans would be sufficient, not only to check immigration … but would also be capable of driving away those who have recently come.” 9
    As it was, Miró feared that his prompt deportation of Father Sedella might still have “fatal consequences” arising from “the mere suspicion of the cause of his dismissal.” 10 The success of Spain’s new defensive policies in the borderlands depended not on the fidelity and zeal of the Spanish Inquisition but on winning the loyalty of new settlers, most of them American Protestants, during a cataclysmic decade that challenged loyalties of every kind in Europe and the Americas.
    The revival of Pére Antoine’s appointment as Louisiana commissary of the Inquisition and his specific assignment to root out subversive literature were direct reflections of Spain’s initial reaction to the French Revolution—an event that shocked the Atlantic world, played havoc with Spanish efforts to maintain control of the Mississippi River Valley, and inmany ways set the stage for the Louisiana Purchase. Already vulnerable to attack from the north, Louisiana was now exposed both to the imperial wars unleashed by the French Revolution and to the example of a successful slave revolt, fueled by revolutionary propaganda, in the Caribbean colony of St. Domingue.
    “Spanish by its government,” New Orleans merchant James Pitot wrote, Louisiana’s population was “still generally French in its tastes, customs, habits, religion, and language.” At a distance of three thousand miles from the Parisian crowds and their pikes, the early patriotic appeal of the French Revolution—“Arise ye children of the fatherland, the day of glory has arrived!”—melted thirty years of disenchantment with a nation that had abandoned Louisiana to the Spanish in 1761. The residents’ nostalgia for
la Patrie
gave the colony’s governors—Miró, who returned to Spain at forty-seven in 1791, and his forty-four-year-old successors, Governor François-Louis Hector, baron de Carondelet et Noyelles, in New Orleans, and Governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos in Natchez—new reasons for worry. “In our very midst in this province,” Gayoso wrote in July 1792, “there is one disadvantage which must be watched with as great care as those offered by our enemies.” Louisiana “is inhabited by people of French extraction,” he warned, and “although many of them are pacifically inclined, the majority are fond of novelty, have communication with France and with [French] posessions in America, and hear with the greatest pleasure of the revolution in that kingdom.” Gayoso feared that “if war were declared on France, we should find but few inhabitants of Lower Louisiana who would sincerely defend the country.” 11
    Slave conspiracies in 1791 and 1795 at Pointe Coupée, halfway between Natchez and New Orleans, compounded the problems facing the Spanish