Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Having lost Canada (New France), King Louis XV of France proposed to King Charles III of Spain that France should give Spain "the country known as Louisiana, as well as New Orleans and the island in which the city is situated." [1] Charles ratified the treaty on November 13 and Louis ratified it on November 23, 1762.
De Soto claiming the Mississippi, as depicted in the United States Capitol rotunda. Louisiana (Spanish: La Luisiana, [la lwiˈsjana]), [1] or the Province of Louisiana (Provincia de La Luisiana), was a province of New Spain from 1762 to 1801 primarily located in the center of North America encompassing the western basin of the Mississippi River plus New Orleans.
According to Monroe, France never dismembered Louisiana while it was in her possession (as he regarded November 3, 1762, as the termination date of French possession). After 1783 Spain reunited West Florida to Louisiana, thus completing the province as France possessed it, with the exception of those portions controlled by the United States.
France also ceded the eastern half of French Louisiana to Britain; that is, the area from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains. [8] France had already secretly given Louisiana to Spain three months earlier in the Treaty of Fontainebleau, but Spain did not take possession until 1769. Spain ceded Florida to Britain. [6]
Spain procrastinated until late 1802 in executing the treaty to transfer Louisiana to France, which allowed American hostility to build. Also, Spain's refusal to cede Florida to France meant that Louisiana would be indefensible. Napoleon needed peace with Britain to take possession of Louisiana.
During the Seven Years' War in 1756, Spain was allied with France; they re-captured Menorca but lost Havana and Manila in 1762. As part of the Treaty of Paris (1763) that ended the war, Britain exchanged these for Spanish Florida, while France compensated Spain by transferring ownership of Louisiana (see Map).
Louisiana [b] or French Louisiana [c] was an administrative district of New France.In 1682 the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle erected a cross near the mouth of the Mississippi River and claimed the whole of the drainage basin of the Mississippi River in the name of King Louis XIV, naming it "Louisiana".
For commercial reasons, Napoleon wanted to reestablish France's presence in North America, the November 1801 Saint-Domingue expedition being the first step. [14] The March 1802 Treaty of Amiens ended the War of the Second Coalition and in October, Spain transferred Louisiana to France. [15]