Whatever the fate of these French champions of the newly awakened desire for liberty may have been, the effects of O'Reilly's cruelty were felt far beyond the still ill defined boundaries of the colony. Though the king of Spain was reported to have expressed his approval of O'Reilly's summary procedure, even in Spain voices rose to condemn it. A pall spread over Louisiana. Business life was for a time paralyzed. Commerce came to an absolute standstill. In the country parishes of the colony, the Spanish authority was accepted with sullen silence. Many of the wealthy families, long identified with the history of the colony, abandoned their homes and emigrated to other parts of the continent. The government of the colony was reorganized on the pattern of all Spanish colonies. The restrictions which were placed upon commerce robbed the people of whatever initiative and enterprise they had possessed. A period of stagnation set in, contrasting sharply with the activity and the animation that had previously reigned in the city which claimed and was reported by travelers of that time to have been fairly well started on the road of becoming the Paris of America. It was an inauspicious beginning for the Spanish régime in Louisiana. But the successor of O'Reilly, D. Luis de Uznaga, made up for his predecessor's mistake by showing so much discretion and exercising his authority with such mildness, that he gradually succeeded in reconciling a part of the population to the Spanish rule. Only the families of the victims that had paid for their loyalty to France with their lives remained the implacable enemies of Spain, as long as the colony remained under her rule. Aubry, who immediately after the tragedy of the twenty-fifth of October had set sail for France, suffered shipwreck on his voyage and perished. The six men who had been committed to the dungeons of Havana were, according to Bancroft, later set free by the aid of France. This tragic prelude to the Spanish rule in Louisiana, little as it has to do with Cuba, with which colony it was but loosely connected in an administrative way, was the herald of a new epoch dawning upon the horizon of the New World. The establishment of the little republic at the mouth of the Mississippi had been frustrated. But the establishment of the greater republic on the continent, under the protection of which Cuba was to come some centuries later, was even at this time approaching consummation. CHAPTER IX