in the struggle against Great Britain.  So on May 8, 1779, Spain formally declared war against Great Britain, and on July 8 authorized all Spanish subjects in America to take their share in the hostilities against the English.  No news could be more welcome to the dashing young Galvez, to whom a policy of neutrality was decidedly distasteful.  He decided to forestall the attack on New Orleans, which he had learned was to be made by the British, by attacking first, and on August 26 gathered his little army together.  From New Orleans, as Gayarre tells, were 170 veteran soldiers, 330 recruits, 20 carabiniers, 60 militiamen, and 80 free blacks and mulattoes.  On the way up the river, they were reinforced by 600 men from the coast of “every condition and color,” besides 160 Indians.[34]

On the march, the colored men and Indians were ordered to keep ahead of the main body of troops, at a distance of about three quarters of a mile, and closely to reconnoitre the woods.  In capturing the two forts of Baton Rouge and Natchez, which were held by the British, Galvez found a considerable number of Negro slaves who had been armed by the British.  Many of these he set free.  In his dispatch to his government at Madrid, Galvez reports that the companies of free blacks and mulattoes, who had been employed in all the false attacks, and who, as scouts and skirmishers, had proved exceedingly useful, behaved on all occasions with as much valor and generosity as the white soldiers.[35] But not alone were the exploits of Galvez’s little army celebrated in history.  Poetry added her laurel wreath to its crown.  Julien Poydras de Lalande, known to all Louisianians as Poydras, celebrated the victory in a poem, “The God of the Mississippi,” wherein the brave deeds of the army, white and colored, are hailed in French verse, lame and halting, it may be in places, but impartial in its tribute.

The close of the Revolutionary war found the colony partially paralyzed as to industry.  During the Spanish domination the indigo industry declined, tobacco was difficult to raise, and the production of cotton was not then profitable.  Sugar raising was the only other industry to which they could turn.  In 1751 the Jesuit fathers had received their first seed, or rather layers, from Santo Domingo and from that time sugar-cane had been grown with more or less success.  But it was a strictly local industry.  The Louisianians were poor sugar-makers.  The stuff was badly granulated and very moist, and when in 1765 an effort was made to export some of the sugar to France, it was so wet that half of the cargo leaked out of the ship before it could make port.  It was just at this psychological moment, in 1791 to 1794, when the planters of the lower Delta saw ruin staring them in the face, that there came to the rescue of the colony a man of color, one of the refugees from Santo Domingo, where the blacks had risen in 1791.  From the failure of this abortive attempt to emulate