Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Quebec. The first royal governor of Quebec, James Murray, and his successor,
Guy Carleton, blocked the institution of any assembly.
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, Spain was in no particular hurry to take over
from France. The first Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa, finally arrived
in Louisiana in 1766, and without difficulty managed quickly to alienate
almost all groups in the population. Open rebellion and general disgust
with government ensued. Things came to a head in 1768, when Spain
imposed a thoroughly mercantilist decree excluding all but Spanish ships
in Louisiana commerce, and all trade but those to Spanish ports. Five
hundred protesters signed a petition demanding the removal of Ulloa and
the restoration of freedom of trade. At the end of October, New Orleans
was captured by the French rebels. When Ulloa was finally sacrificed to
the massive demands for his removal, the citizens of New Orleans poured
into the streets to laud the French and attack the Spaniards.
The French government, in politic fashion, rejected a petition from the
rebels pledging allegiance to France. Spain decided to crack down on the
revolt, and sent as the new governor General Alejandro O'Reilly. Bringing
two thousand crack troops, O'Reilly characteristically invited the twelve
leaders of the rebellion to meet him at his quarters, only to arrest them
there and charge them with treason for rebelling against Spain. Five of the
rebel leaders were promptly executed.
At the end of two decades of aggressive war against France, the triumphant
British government had succeeded in driving the French empire
completely off the North American continent, and in replacing France
largely by its own hegemony. By the early 1760s, the British rulers felt
themselves to be masters of all they surveyed. Furthermore, the king and
the various Tory factions had succeeded in using the war to achieve one
of their long-cherished aims: the removal of the liberal, quasi-libertarian
Whigs from the seats of ministerial power at home. With that, the major
check upon the expansion of the power of the Crown and its allies, at
home and throughout the empire, was at last extinct. Since the death of
Queen Anne and the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty in the early
part of the eighteenth century, the Whigs, headed by Robert Walpole
and the Pelham brothers, had succeeded, by crafty manipulation of Parliament,
in imposing a lengthy rule that had kept the Tory centralizers and
imperialist expansionists under severe and unwelcome fetters. Now, in the
early 1760s, the Tories and imperialists had at last succeeded in rooting
out the Whig-Pelhamite checkrein on their goals and designs.
In particular, in the colonies, the impatient king and the Tory factions
were now free to scrap the policy of "salutary neglect," which Walpole
and Newcastle had managed to impose on the reluctant Crown and Par-
267