Folio, (300 x 205 mm). 4 ff. Modern wrappers. Roughly trimmed, light stain to center and small stain to upper margin running through each leaf, else fine.

Historical context: Spain acquired Louisiana from France secretly at the Treaty of Fontainebleau in November 1762, which followed the Battle of Signal Hill, the last battle in the French and Indian War which had decisively confirmed British control of Canada. Meanwhile, the Seven Years War continued to rage, and having already lost Canada to Britain, King Louis XV 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” to keep it from falling into British hands. The agreement covered all of “Louisiana”: the valley of the Mississippi River from the Appalachians to the Rockies. The Treaty of Paris finally ended the war with Britain, and divided Louisiana at the Mississippi: the eastern half was ceded to Britain, while the western half and New Orleans were nominally retained by France; Spain ceded Florida to Britain, and western Louisiana became Spanish by way of compensation. The Treaty of Paris provided that for a period of 18 months French Canadian colonists who did not want to live under British rule could freely emigrate to other French colonies, many of whom moved to Louisiana, where they discovered that it was now Spanish territory, a fact which did not become formally known until 1764 when Louis XV informed the governor, Charles Aubry, in a letter. The French colonists in Louisiana were reluctant to accept Spanish governance, and after the Spanish attempted to control commerce with this decree, which excluded all commerce with France and her colonies, they expelled the first Spanish governor, Antonio Ulloa, in the Rebellion of 1768. Alejandro O’Reilly (an Irish émigré) suppressed the rebellion and formally raised the Spanish flag in 1769.

Palau 251076; Streeter I 147.