Vicente Sebastian Pintado y Brito (February 20, 1774 - August 20, 1829) was a Spanish cartographer, engineer, military officer and land surveyor of Spanish Louisiana and Spanish West Florida. He is known for conducting surveys of lands for settlers who had requested grants in Louisiana and Florida, as well as the so-called "Pintado plan", a street map of Pensacola drawn in 1812 which included the position and size of the solares designated for construction of the city's church and other public buildings. In the course of his military career, he suppressed the 1795 Pointe Coupee slave Conspiracy and the 1804 Kemper Rebellion. As a man familiar with violent uprisings, and having been Alcalde (a magistrate) since 1800, he was sent on a diplomatic mission in 1815, to negotiate for the recovery of fugitive slaves from a British outpost of the Royal Navy. He lived for more than 35 years in America (25 of them in Louisiana and Florida) and left a large corpus of work consisting of maps, plats, letters and documents vital to an understanding of the complicated sale of lands in Florida and Louisiana during the period. In 1974, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. obtained a donation of the Pintado Collection, a collection of about 1,500 documents now stored in its Division of Manuscripts.
Biography
Early years Vicente Sebastian Pintado was born on February 20, 1774, in Santa Cruz de La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain). His parents were Diego Eligio Pintado and Antonia de Brito y Salazax. Although little is known of his youth, Beerman theorizes he would be expected to have had a good background in mathematics and design. It has been theorized his family may have migrated to Louisiana as part of the Canary Islander, or Isleño, settlements in the 1770s. His presence in Louisiana in 1793 is first documented, when Pintado sailed for Havana, Cuba aboard the barque La Hermosa María Yendo de Campo. During its passage north of Tolvos island he prepared a maritime chart of latitudes, this being his first commission as a cartographer. From Havana, he was ordered to Louisiana, a Spanish province at the time.
Louisiana In 1794-1795, Pintado served under baron Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet, the governor of Louisiana and West Florida, headquartered at New Orleans. Carondelet entrusted him with the command of a sloop to carry out various commissions, operating from the Spanish fort San Juan del Bayou that protected the Lake Pontchartrain entrance of Bayou St. John and Lake Borgne, often carrying letters from Carondelet to the Captain General of Cuba, Luis de las Casas.
In 1795, at the behest of Carondolet, Pintado led a survey of the lands around the fort at Christian Pass (Pasa Cristian), as well as 1,300 acres of land on the banks of the Carondelet Canal belonging to Jean Baptiste Macarty, colonel of the militia of New Orleans. Pintado subsequently performed numerous other surveys in Louisiana. In 1796 Carondelet commissioned Pintado to conduct a survey of lands granted to Ambrosio Longue-Épée in Iberville County on the west bank of the Mississippi River opposite Baton Rouge. After the work was completed, on May 1 of that year Carondelet appointed him assistant surveyor of Spanish Louisiana, an office he occupied from 1796 to 1805. In 1797, Carondelet instructed Pintado to do surveys in the district of New Feliciana north of Baton Rouge, and in 1798 he served as captain of mounted militias raised in the same district. The following year he bought some land near Baton Rouge. On April 1, 1800, Pintado was appointed mayor and commandant of the militia in Bayou Sara, near the modern city of St. Francisville on the Mississippi River, replacing the late Captain Anselmo Blanchard. He continued to serve as a Captain, albeit in the cavalry squadron of the Legion Mixta de Milicias del Misisipi After the recovery of Louisiana by France in 1801 and its sale to the United States in 1803, the political climate around Baton Rouge became precarious for Pintado. In 1804, three brothers, Samuel, Nathan and Reuben Kemper, wanting to separate this region from Spanish control and deliver it to the United States, attempted to foment a rebellion. On August 7, Samuel and Nathan Kemper marched on Baton Rouge with some 30 men to seize the fort. According to the last treaty, Baton Rouge was under Spanish sovereignty, although most of its inhabitants were Anglos who preferred the sale of Louisiana to the United States. On hearing of the impending attack on Baton Rouge, the Spanish governor, Carlos de Grand Pré, prepared to defend Baton Rouge, forcing the withdrawal of the Kemper brothers to Bayou Sara, which was still under the command of Pintado. The rebels subsequently captured the settlement, burning its houses and a cotton mill. Pintado managed to escape and led a detachment of troops to harass those Americans who supported Kemper, forcing the insurgents to withdraw above the 31st parallel of latitude north, into the Territory of Mississippi. The Kemper brothers, undaunted by this setback, organized another assault the following year, with Ruben Kemper moving to the Bahamas where he solicited the British government for aid in expelling the Spanish from Baton Rouge. Pintado assisted in repelling this latest intrusion by the rebels, and on September 3, 1805, Nathan and Samuel Kemper were arrested by the Spanish authorities.
Florida Pintado served as assistant surveyor of Spanish West Florida from 1803 to 1805. Recognized by the Spanish authorities for his ability in this office, Pintado was named surveyor general of West Florida on October 9, 1805, his appointment being confirmed on December 13. Carlos Trudeau, the surveyor general of Louisiana, had previously been selected for the position, but because of his advanced age and family ties in Louisiana, refused a relocation to Pensacola. Trudeau and his former assistant Pintado divided possession all maps, plats and documents pertaining to official land measurements, Pintado keeping those related to the Floridas and Trudeau those concerning Louisiana.
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