Madrid eventually decided that the territory west of the Mississippi River was more trouble than it could handle. It was costly to guard such a long border with the United States, too expensive to maintain a river fleet of galliots and bombardiers. British traders, still a powerful presence in the Mississippi Valley, meddled in local politics. French colonists resisted Spanish authority.fn1 The radicalism of the French and Haitian revolutions was spilling into Louisiana. In 1795, in Natchitoches, a local priest had organized a group called the Revenants, which ran rough over the settlement, chanting revolutionary slogans and singing revolutionary songs—apparently in opposition to the Spanish policy of encouraging Anglo settlement. Revenant comes from an old French word that means “the returned,” referring, in myth, to reanimated corpses, an echo of the terrors then unfolding in Haiti. New Orleans likewise was feared to be a hotbed of Black Jacobinism, confirmed by the discovery, also in 1795, of a slave conspiracy to set fire to plantations. And so Spain, in 1802, gave it up, turning New Orleans and greater Louisiana over to France. In compensation, the Spanish monarchy received Etruria, an Italian kingdom of about a million people. Tuscan hills were much preferable to Mississippi mosquitos.

— America, América by Greg Grandin