The foreign language, laws, customs,
and manners of the inhabitants, required the immediate and cautious
attention of Congress, which, instead of extending, in the first
instance, to these territories the ordinance of 1787, ordained special
regulations for the government of the same. These regulations were from
time to time revised and altered, as observation and experience showed
to be expedient, and as was deemed most likely to encourage and
promote those changes which would soonest qualify the inhabitants for
self-government and admission into the Union. When the United States
took possession of the province of Louisiana in 1804, it was estimated
to contain 50,000 white inhabitants, 40,000 slaves, and 2,000 free
persons of color.
More than four-fifths of the whites, and all the slaves, except about
thirteen hundred, inhabited New Orleans and the adjacent territory; the
residue, consisting of less than ten thousand whites, and about thirteen
hundred slaves, were dispersed throughout the country now included in
the Arkansas and Missouri territories.
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