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Major Acquisition of Manuscripts Documenting the Legacy of John Law in Louisiana
In the late summer of 2010 The Collection acquired an exceptional collection of some 232 documents concerning Scottish economist John Law’s infamous System, which encompassed far-reaching economic programs for the establishment of a national bank and a global trading company. Law’s enterprise, first known as the Company of the West, then as the Company of the Indies, undertook the establishment of New Orleans in 1718. Comprising imprints, posters, and manuscripts, the John Law Collection (MSS 606) allows researchers to trace, step by step, the development of Law’s financial system and the ramifications of its collapse for Louisiana. One of the rare documents included in the acquisition is the only known surviving manuscript copy of the “Lettres patentes portant privilege en faveur du Sr. Law...” (May 2, 1716), which permitted Law to establish the Banque Generale, France’s first national bank. The precious parchment document is signed by both six-year-old Louis XV and the regent, Philippe, due d’Orleans. Also of interest is a simple, anonymous, tongue-in-cheek manuscript genealogy tracing Law’s lineage to Beelzebub. Such items bear testimony to the eventual emotional and financial trauma that Law’s experiment caused in France. To contextualize the importance of this collection, this issue of the Quarterly features essays providing overviews of John Law’s rise and fall (pages 2-5) and The Historic New Orleans Collection’s notable assemblage of materials documenting French Louisiana (pages 6-8).
—Alfred E. Lemmon
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“Lettres patentes portant privilege en faveur du Sr. Law et sa Compagnie d’establir une banque generalle,” May 2, 1716 (2010.0158.1), acquisition made possible in part by the Clarisse Claiborne Grima Fund and the Boyd Cruise Fund
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The Rise and
ambler, swindler, statistician, geniushave. all been used to describe one of ancien regime France’s most notable and notorious figures: John Law. Born in Scotland in 1671, Law spent much of his early adulthood frequenting the gaming tables of Amsterdam, Genoa, Paris, and Venice, where he used his mathematical genius to amass a substantial fortune. Personal gain was not Law’s only motivation, however. Time spent in Europe’s financial capitals also afforded him access to the worlds of high finance and economic theory.
In 1714 Law took up permanent residence with his common-law wife, Katherine (Knowles) Seigneur, in a lavishly furnished house on Paris’s exclusive Place Louis-le-Grand (now Place Vendome). He likely chose the newly constructed square because the residences lining it were home to some of the most influential financiers in Paris, including Antoine Crozat, whose company maintained exclusive rights to trade in Louisiana.
By the time Law settled in Paris, he was already on his way to establishing himself as one of the period’s most influential economic theorists. In 1705 he had published .Money and Trade Considered with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money, a treatise Law hoped would cure the economic ills of his native Scotland. Law’s proposal centered on the creation of a land bank, which would bv design alleviate the country’s specie shortage through the issuance of paper money backed by the value of land. Though Law published the treatise anonymously, his authorship was well known by the time it was considered—and rejected—by the Scottish Parliament in the summer of 1705. His reputation as a gambler and worse (sentenced to death for killing a man in a duel, he had escaped from London’s