BOOK FIVE:  The Bayou State

 

BOOK ONE:         French Acadia

BOOK TWO:        British Nova Scotia and the French Maritimes

BOOK THREE:     The Great Upheaval

BOOK FOUR:      French Louisiana and a New Acadia

 

The steamboat Louisville arrives at St. Martinville, April 1826 ...

From Subjects to Citizens:  the Acadians and the Americans, 1803-1812

Becoming American did not change them fundamentally.  The great majority of them still spoke their distinct French patois, though some of them, especially the hand full of merchants, learned English to communicate with les Americains.  A few of them welcomed the rough-and-tumble game of democracy the new republic brought to them, while most watched the play unfold, so strangely, from the safety of the political sidelines.  They were grateful to see that the Americans tolerated their religious faith.  Only the priests and the hand full of devout Catholics among them complained when Protestant congregations appeared in their communities.  The economy of the region changed slowly but inexorably as the plantation system took hold; none could escape the play of that peculiar game.  Their laws changed gradually also, a pleasant surprise for most.  Every one of them was concerned about the integrity of their Spanish land grants and mastered as best they could the intricacies of the new American system of land distribution.  ...

South Louisiana Geography and the Acadians, 1803-1861

Two years after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the old Attakapas District became Attakapas County in the Territory of Orleans.  When the Americans created the first civil parishes for Louisiana in 1807, the old Attakapas District became St. Martin Parish.  In 1817, the site of the old Attakapas Post became the incorporated "city" of St. Martinville, which styled itself La Petite Paris.  In the years that followed, the old Attakapas country became the civil parishes of St. Martin, St. Mary (1811), Lafayette (1823), Vermilion (1844), and, after the War of 1861, Iberia (1868).

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After the Louisiana Purchase, the old Opelousas District became the civil parishes of St. Landry, sometimes called Imperial St. Landry (1807), Calcasieu, also called Imperial Calcasieu (1840), and, after the War of 1861, Cameron (1870), Acadia (1887), Evangeline (1910), Allen (1912), Beauregard (1912), and Jefferson Davis (1912). The last three prairie parishes, in fact, were among the final ones created by the State of Louisiana. ...

An interesting note can be found in five Opelousas marriage records dated 27 December 1814 and 1, 2, and 5 January 1815.   The Reverend Michel Bernard Barrière had served as pastor of St. Martin of Tours church at St. Martinville in the 1790s, retired for a time, and was transferred to St. Landry church at Opelousas in the early 1800s.  Father Barrière recorded a series of marriages on pages 261, 262, and 263 of volume 1-A of the parish's marriage register, with the notation: "The above five marriages ... were celebrated during Advent due to the war and the immediate departure of the militia leaving from here [Opelousas] on the 4th January 1815."  The culminating battle of New Orleans was fought at Chalmette Plantation four days later.  ...

For a few months during the War of 1861, Opelousas served as the capital of Confederate Louisiana. ...

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The great transition following Jefferson's Purchase inevitably led to geo-political changes in the region. ...

Ascension became the town of Donaldson in 1806 and Donaldsonville in 1823.  Thanks to the machinations of its founder, William Donaldson, the town served briefly as the state capital from 1829 to 1831 before the legislature moved the seat of government to Baton Rouge.  On upper Bayou Lafourche, the name Valenzuéla disappeared, replaced by the name Assumption, after the church located at present-day Plattenville.  Ascension and Assumption survived as the names of two of the 19 original civil parishes created by the legislature of the Territory of Orleans in 1807.  Donaldsonville became the seat of Ascension Parish, and remains so to this day.  The seat for Assumption Parish was eventually placed at the town of Napoleonville, where it remains. 

Interior Parish, farther down Bayou Lafourche, also was one of the original civil parishes.  In 1812, with the creation of the State of Louisiana, the legislature renamed Interior Parish, Lafourche Interior Parish.  Thibodauxville, a trading post named after local planter and politician  Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, who served briefly as governor of the State of Louisiana in late 1824, was designated the seat of Interior Parish in 1807 and remained the seat of Lafourche Interior Parish in 1812.  The legislature incorporated  Thibodauxville as a town in 1830.  Eight years later, it was renamed Thibodeaux, but its name was usually spelled like the governor's surname.  Not until 1918 was it officially named Thibodaux.  Meanwhile, in 1853, the state legislature dropped "Interior" from the parish's name, and it became simply Lafourche Parish, with Thibodaux remaining as its seat.

In 1822, the state legislature carved a new civil parish, Terrebonne, French for "good earth," from the lower end of Lafourche Interior Parish.  The original seat of Terrebonne Parish was at the confluence of Bayous Cane and Terrebonne but was moved to the village of Houma on Bayou Terrebonne in 1834.  Houma, named after the Indians who had moved from the Mississippi to Bayou Cane during the late colonial period, was founded in 1810 (some sources say 1834) but was not incorporated until 1848. 

The Acadians and the Church in Antebellum Louisiana

The most memorable priest to serve Attakapas was Father Michel-Bernard Barrière, a fugitive from the French Revolution, who officiated at St.-Martin de Tours from 1795 to 1804.  Joseph Roger Baudier, historian of the Church in Louisiana, notes that Father Barrière "took up his residence about a mile from the village but he walked to the church every morning for Mass and he remained at the church all day on Sunday."  The St. Martin parish registers attest to Father Barrière's diligence in documenting the lives of his Attakapas parishioners.  Baudier goes on to call him "'The Apostle of the Teche Country', for to him is really due the laying of the foundation of the Faith in most of the present Catholic parishes in a wide area around St. Martinville, now independent church parishes, but then all children of the mother-parish of St. Martin of the Attakapas."01

New ecclesiastical parishes arose in Assumption civil parish during the antebellum period.  In 1839, Church authorities created a new parish, St. Élisabeth, at Paincourtville, a few miles up from Plattenville, on land donated by Miss Élisabeth Dugas along the west bank of Bayou Lafourche.  In the mid-1850s, St. Philomena Parish arose down bayou at Brûlé Labadie, now Labadieville, near the civil parish line; the first mass in the area had been held in the home of Widow Zacharie Boudreaux in the spring of 1842, soon after Brûlé Labadie had become a mission of the Thibodaux church, but St. Philomena did not officially become a parish until 1855. ...

In 1817, Church authorities founded St. Joseph Parish at Thibodauxville, today's Thibodaux.  ...

Church authorities created St. Francis de Sales Parish at Houma in 1847.  Today, St. Francis de Sales serves as cathedral and St. Joseph of Thibodaux as co-cathedral for the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, which Church authorities formed from part of the Archdiocese of New Orleans in 1977.  Reverend Warren L. Boudreaux, a native of Berwick, near Morgan City, and an Acadian descendant, served as the first bishop of the new diocese. ...

The Acadians and the South's Plantation Economy

Some Acadians played prominent roles in the region's plantation economy.  Most, especially the great majority who did not own slaves, were compelled to remain on the sidelines, participating only peripherally.  ...

Acadian Settlement and Marriage Patterns, 1803-1861:  the Louisiana Acadian "Begats"

The antebellum period witnessed the burgeoning of established Acadian communities and the creation of new ones.  From the lower and upper Acadian coasts, Acadian families continued to move upriver into the Baton Rouge area, some even into Pointe Coupee, where few Acadians had settled during the colonial period.  Acadians from upper Bayou Lafourche tended to move in the opposite direction--down bayou to lower Bayou Lafourche, over to Bayou Terrebonne, and to the edges of the vast coastal marshes, where they settled on other distributaries such as bayous du Large, Grand Caillou, Petit Caillou, and Pointe-aux-Chênes.  The most dramatic movements were out on the prairies.  There, the direction of migration was generally westward, up to and across the Mermentau and its many tributaries, on to the Calcasieu, and even west of the Sabine.  Others moved down into the coastal marshes at the southwest corner of the state, where they settled atop the tree-covered chênières running parallel to the coast.   

Meanwhile, Acadians continued to play a role in the creation of a regional "melting pot" by taking wives and husbands from other cultures.  Their rate of exogamy in colonial Louisiana, based on family surnames, had stood just below 20 percent when Jefferson's Purchase turned them into "Americains."   Five and a half decades later, at the end of the antebellum period, their exogamy rate stood at 38 percent.  The culture had been transformed.  No family or community, old or new, escaped this phenomenon.  Even Anglo-American families became "Cajunized" when their children adopted the folkways of their Acadian mothers.  Aristocratic French Creoles, as they had done during the colonial period, did their best to dissuade their children from marrying "lowly" Acadians, but as descendants of Acadian exiles became members of Louisiana's planter elite, proud Creoles allowed their sons and daughters to marry into those families.  By the eve of the War of 1861, families of various nationalities had intermarried so often with Acadians, they, too, were becoming what Anglophones soon would be calling Cajuns.02a   

From 1764 into the early 1800s, members of at least 157 Acadian families emigrated to Louisiana, but not all of their names survived there.  Fifty-four of these families, many latecomers to Acadia, most refugees from France, failed for various reasons to perpetuate lines in the Bayou State: 

Basque fishermen were among the first Europeans to go to North America, and some of them settled in French Acadia.  Pierre Arostey or Arosteguy, perhaps a French Basque, emigrated to British Nova Scotia probably from his native Bayonne, in the Gascogne region, by May 1737, when he married Marie, a daughter of Charles Robichaud dit Cadet, at Grand-Pré.  They moved on to Chignecto, where they settled on the Beauséjour ridge.  Marie gave Pierre at least five children, including two sons, Pierre, fils and Jean.  Although they lived near the site of Fort Beauséjour, built by the French in 1751, after the fort's fall in June 1755, Pierre and his family escaped the British roundup of the Chignecto Acadians and escaped, most likely, to the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore.  By the early 1760s, however, they fell into British hands and "came home" to Beauséjour, as prisoners of war.  In August 1763, the British counted Pierre, wife Marie, and five of their children in the prison compound at Fort Cumberland, Chignecto, formerly Fort Beauséjour.  Pierre, fils evidently married Isabelle Comeau, a fellow Acadian, during Le Grand Dérangement.  With 300 other Acadians who came to Louisiana via Cap-Français, French St.-Domingue, in 1765, the Arosteguys settled at Cabahonnocer, present-day St. James Parish.  Pierre, père and Marie likely died soon after their arrival, among the dozens of Acadians there who perished during the first year of settlement.  Evidence of their early death can be found in the Spanish census at Cabahannocer of April 1766, which counts both Pierre, père and Pierre, fils, each with a "woman" and a "girl" in their respective households, followed by a Spanish report of Acadians at New Orleans in July 1767, in which daughters Marie-Théotiste and Marguerite and son Jean (whom the Spanish official called Arostéllie) are counted, but neither of their parents.  No other census record in colonial Louisiana enumerates Pierre Arosteguy, père and Marie Robichaud after April 1766. 

Two of their three daughters married soon after they came to the colony.  Anne wed Bernard Capdeville of Ste.-Foix de Morlaas, Bern, Switzerland, chief surgeon of the French vessel L'Intelligence, at New Orleans in February 1766--one of the earliest marriages in Louisiana between an Acadian and a non-Acadian.  Marie-Théotiste married Antoine-Emmanuel Morin at New Orleans in January 1768--another "mixed" marriage.  There is no record of Pierre, père's daughter Marguerite or son Jean ever marrying, so it fell to older son Pierre, fils, to carry on the family's name in Louisiana.  But it was not to be.  Pierre, fils evidently fathered no sons, so only the blood of this Acadian family survived in the Bayou State.03

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In April 1766, Spanish officials counted Joseph Barthélemy as part of Judice's Company of militia at Cabahannocer, an enumeration consisting mostly of Acadians who had arrived from Halifax via French St.-Domingue the year before.  One wonders if Joseph also was Acadian.04

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Jean or Joannis Bastarche dit Le Basque, whose family name also was spelled Basterretche, was born probably at Bayonne, in the Basque country of southern France, in c1658.  Jean came to French Acadia in the early 1680s and married Huguette, daughter of Frenchman Pierre Vincent, at Port-Royal in c1684.  According to Acadian genealogist Bona Arsenault, Jean's brother Michel dit Le Basque, a flibustier, or pirate, also came to Acadia, with a wife and two children.  Jean and Huguette settled on what Acadians called the haute-rivière, above Port-Royal, today's upper Annapolis River.  There they had five children, and there they remained, among the few Acadian families of the seventeenth century who did not move on to other settlements.  All three of Jean and Huguette's sons married, into the Labauve, Richard, Forest families; and they, too, remained in the Annapolis valley.  In January 1752, on the eve of Le Grand Dérangement, one of Jean's granddaughters, Anne, from his second son Jean, fils, married Salvator, son of Sr. Jean Mouton, a surgeon at Chignecto who also had lived at Annapolis and Minas. 

The Grand Dérangement of 1755 scattered the Bastarche family to the winds.  Anne and husband Salvator escaped the British roundup at Chignecto and fled to the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore.  With them went two of Anne's younger sisters, Marie-Modeste and Élisabeth.  In c1760, at Restigouche, Marie-Modeste married Salvator's younger brother Louis Mouton, and Élisabeth married Salvator's and Louis's nephew, Jean dit Neveu Mouton, in one of the Nova Scotia prison compounds in c1763.  In 1765, the Moutons and their Bastarache wives were among the 300 Acadians from Halifax via French St.-Domingue who settled at Cabahannocer on the river above New Orleans.  Since Anne, Marie-Modeste, and Élisabeth were the only descendants of Jean dit Le Basque to come to Louisiana, only their blood, through several lines of the Mouton family, survived in the Bayou State.  Anne Bastarche, who died probably at Cabahannocer, present-day St. James Parish, soon after she came to the colony, was, in fact, the paternal grandmother of Louisiana's first popularly-elected governor, Alexandre Mouton of Lafayette Parish.05

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The Le Borgne de Bélisle family, called Bélisle in Louisiana, was one of the most distinguished families in Acadian history, though they were not very prolific there.  In 1642, Emmanuel Le Borgne, sieur du Coudray, a native of Calais but now a wealthy merchant of La Rochelle, became a partner, and creditor, of Charles de Menou, sieur d'Aulnay de Charnisay, Acadia's future governor.  However, not until after d'Aulnay's death in 1650 did Le Borgne himself go to the colony, and not as a settler.  In the summer of 1653, he sailed to Port-Royal to complete what his henchmen had failed to accomplish in the years since d'Aulnay's death--the conquest of all rivals in Acadia, including former governor Charles La Tour, and the collection of the huge debt d'Aulnay's widow still owed him.  But Le Borgne did not remain in Acadia long.  In the summer of 1654, a New English fleet under Robert Sedgwick attacked French Acadia.  Le Borgne was compelled to return to France, but he left his oldest son, Emmanuel du Coudray, as a hostage to the English, who were determined to maintain their hold on the colony.  After a few months, young Emmanuel was allowed to return to France.  In November 1757, while the English still held the colony, the Company of New France declared the elder Le Borgne proprietary governor of Acadia, in absentia.   The following spring, Le Borgne sent his second son, Alexandre, then only age 18, to secure the family's interests in Acadia.  The impetuous Alexandre attacked the English garrison at La Hève, on the Atlantic side of the peninsula.  The attack failed, and Alexandre fell into English hands and was held prisoner at Boston and London.  In September 1659, the English relented, and La Hève was returned to the Le Borgnes.  

Alexandre did not return to Acadia until the summer of 1670, after the English surrendered the colony to France.  By then, he was age 30 and still a bachelor.  He also had assumed his father's seigneuries in Acadia, which included Port-Royal as well as La Hève.  In c1675, at age 35, he married Marie, daughter of former governor Charles La Tour and d'Aulnay's widow Jeanne Motin de Reux, who had remarried to La Tour.  Alexandre was now styling himself Le Borgne de Bélisle, and he alone of his three brothers settled in Acadia.  Marie gave him seven children, including two sons who created families of their own.  Older son Emmanuel le jeune married Cécile, a daughter of Pierre Thibodeau, in c1698.  In December 1707, younger son Alexandre, fils married Anastasie, daughter of capitaine de sauvages Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, third baron de Saint-Castin, and Abenaki princess Mathilde.  Emmanuel le jeune had no sons.  Alexandre, fils had only one son, Alexandre III, who married Marie, daughter of Jean LeBlanc and Jeanne Bourgeois, at Grand-Pré in January 1731.  Before Alexandre III died in August 1744, only 36 years old, he fathered at least four sons:  Alexandre IV; Anselme; Jean-Pierre, called Pierre; Joseph-Marie; and Mathurin. 

During Le Grand Dérangement, Alexandre IV, age 19 in 1755, fled to Canada, where, at L'Islet, on the St. Lawrence River below Québec city, he created a family of his own.  His widowed mother and younger siblings, however, were deported to Maryland, where British authorities counted them at Annapolis in July 1763.  By then, Alexandre III's son Anselme, while in his early 20s, had married cousin Anne, daughter of Paul Babin and Marie LeBlanc of l'Assomption, Pigiguit, probably at Annapolis.  Anselme and Anne were counted at Annapolis in 1763 with no children.  By 1767, however, Anselme had fathered a son, Paul, born probably at Annapolis in October 1766. 

It was son Anselme who brought the family name to Spanish Louisiana.  He, wife Anne, and infant son Paul were in the second contingent of Maryland Acadians who arrived at New Orleans via Cap-Français, French St.-Domingue, aboard the English ship Virgin in July 1767; his widowed mother and none of his siblings accompanied him to the colony.  Anselme and Anne settled with their fellow passengers at St. Gabriel d'Iberville, a new Spanish post on the river above New Orleans.  Anne died not long after the family reached Louisiana, and Anselme remarried to another cousin, Marie-Josèphe, daughter of Joseph Dupuis and Élisabeth LeBlanc of Grand-Pre, probably at Ascension, between St.-Gabriel and Cabahannocer, in the late 1760s or early 1770s.  They appear in a Spanish census at Ascension, conducted in August 1777, living on the right, or west, bank of the river on 5 arpents of frontage with a single slave.  By then, Anselme's children included not only Paul, now age 13, but also Marie, age 6; Françoise-Hélène, age 4; and Marguerite, age 2.  Another son, Joseph-Anselme, was baptized at St.-Jacques, formerly Cabahannocer, in May 1778.  A third son, Auguste, was born at either St.-Jacques or Ascension in c1782.  During the late 1780s, Anselme took his family to upper Bayou Lafourche, where they settled among dozens of Acadian families who had recently come to Louisiana from France.  In 1788, Anselme owned 14 head of cattle but still only a single slave.  By 1797, he owned three slaves.  Whatever aristocrat pretensions he may have brought to Louisiana likely had been beaten down by exile and resettlement.  He died in Assumption Parish, on the upper Lafourche, in February 1817; he was 80 years old. 

Meanwhile, in 1793 and 1799, Anselme's daughters Françoise-Hélène and Marguerite married at Ascension and Assumption on upper Bayou Lafourche into the Landry family.  The priests who recorded the marriages called Anselme's daughters Belille.  Anselme's oldest son Paul died at Ascension in August 1791; he only 25 years old and still a bachelor.  Second son Joseph-Anselme married at least twice, the second time to Marie Azélie, daughter of fellow Acadian Joseph Duhon and widow of Augustin LeBlanc, at Paincourtville, Assumption Parish, in September 1850, when he was in his early 70s.  Youngest son Auguste died near Paincourtville in May 1855; he was 73 years old.  Area church and civil records hint that neither of Anselme's married sons fathered children of their own, so only the blood of this prominent Acadian family seems to have survived in the Bayou State.06

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André Célestin dit Bellemere, a blacksmith, came to Acadia with wife Pérrine Basile in c1690.  They settled at Grand-Pré, at the time a new settlement in the Minas Basin, where they raised seven children, including two sons who created families of their own.  Older son Jacques dit Jacob married a Landry at Grand-Pré in February 1719 and used his father's dit, Bellemère, as a surname.  Younger son Antoine married a Gautrot at Grand-Pré in November 1718 and called himself a Célestin

In the fall of 1755, members of both Jacques's and Antoine's families were rounded up by British forces and deported to two seaboard colonies.  Antoine's descendants went to Maryland, where they were counted at Annapolis in July 1763.  Amazingly, when 625 of the Acadians in Maryland set sail for New Orleans between 1766 and 1769, none of them were descendants of Antoine Célestin

Brother Jacques dit Jacob's descendants were sent to Virginia, where their fate was even more tragic than their cousins who ended up in Maryland.  In late autumn of 1755, when five transports appeared unexpectedly at Hampton Roads, Virginia's royal governor, Robert Dinwiddie, protested their deportation to his colony without his consent.  More of the exiles died on the filthy, crowded ships anchored in Hampton Roads while the Virginia authorities pondered their fate.  Acadians from one vessel were moved up to Richmond, two of the vessels were unloaded at Hampton, and two more at Norfolk.  A hand full of young Acadians managed to slip away and trek overland through fields and forests, over the mountains, and on to French Canada, but most of the exiles remained in Virginia.  Finally, in the spring of 1756, Governor Dinwiddie and Virginia's House of Burgesses made their decision ... the Acadians must go!  On 10 May 1756, the four transports filled with Acadians left for England--299 to Bristol, 250 to Falmouth, 340 to Southampton, 336 to Liverpool--1,225 of the original 1,500 sent to the Old Dominion.  During the rest of the French and Indian War, the British treated the Acadians in their midst like incarcerated criminals, holding them in prison warehouses for seven long years. 

In the spring 1763, the Acadians in England were repatriated to France.  Descendants of Jacques dit Jacob Bellemère sailed aboard the French vessel L'Ambition, which reached St.-Malo in late May.  They settled at St.-Servan, a St.-Malo suburb, with hundreds of fellow exiles.  In the early 1770s, they followed dozens of fellow Acadians to the Poitou region, where members of the family perished.  A decade later, only two of Jacques's descendants were still living in France, at Chantenay, near Nantes, across the Breton peninsula from St.-Malo.  Jacques's daughter Anastasie, now in her mid-40s, was married to second husband Honoré Comeau of Ste.-Famille, Pigiguit.  Jacques's son Bruno had died in Poitou a decade earlier, but Bruno's daughter Josèphe-Marie was still alive and living with relatives in Nantes.  When the Spanish government offered the Acadians in France the chance for a new life in faraway Louisiana, Anastasie and Josèphe-Marie agreed to take it. 

Josèphe-Marie was age 18 when she came to Louisiana aboard Le Beaumont, the third of the Seven Ships, in August 1785 and followed her fellow passengers to St.-Jacques on the Acadian Coast.  Her aunt Anastasie and uncle Honoré Comeau, along with three of Anastasie's Boudrot sons from her first marriage, arrived aboard Le St.-Rémi, the fourth ship of the Seven Ships, in September and settled on upper Bayou Lafourche.  Josèphe-Marie married twice in Louisiana, to fellow Acadian Pierre Lambert at St.-Jacques in October 1787, and to French Canadian Félix Pallaquin at St. James in January 1805.  She died in Assumption Parish, on upper Bayou Lafourche in October 1846, a widow again.  She was age 79 at the time of her passing--the last of her family in the Bayou State.07

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The Belliveaus were among the earliest families to settle in Acadia.  Antoine Belliveau, a farm worker perhaps from La Chaussée, near Blois, in the Orleanais region of the Loire valley, came to the colony in the mid-1640s, during the civil war being fought between rival colonial leaders Charles La Tour and the sieur d'Aulnay.  In c1651, Antoine married Andrée Guyon, a widow, at Port-Royal and remained there.  Andrée gave him two children, a daughter who married Germain Bourgeois, and a son, Jean, who became a carpenter as well as a farmer.  Jean married twice, first to Jeanne, a daughter of Antoine Bourg, at Port-Royal in c1673 and then to Cécile, a daughter of Charles Melanson dit La Ramée, at Port-Royal 30 years later, when he was in his early 50s.  Both of Jean's wives gave him children: his first wife three sons and a daughter, his second wife another son and two more daughters.  All four of Jean's sons created families of their own. 

Perhaps to escape British rule, in the early 1720s, Jean took his second wife and their children to Port-Toulouse on the French Maritime island of Île Royale, today's Cape Breton Island, where he likely worked as a carpenter.  Later in the decade, he moved his family to Île St.-Jean, present-day Prince Edward Island, which was then another French Maritime possession.  Jean died at Tracadie on Île St.-Jean in the mid-1730s, in his 80s.  His descendants by his second wife remained on the island, settling at Port-Lajoie and St.-Pierre-du-Nord.

Most of Jean's children by his first wife, meanwhile, remained at Port-Royal, renamed by the British Annapolis Royal, where they became a fairly prominent family.  One of Jean's grandsons, Charles, by his oldest son Jean, fils, married a daughter of René Granger of Grand-Pré in November 1717 and worked as a pilot and ship's carpenter in the colonial capital.  A few Belliveaus settled at Chignecto on land their ancestor Antoine had purchased there. 

Le Grand Dérangement scattered this family to the winds.  Some Belliveaus escaped the British roundup at Annapolis, crossed the Bay of Funday, and made their way up Rivière St.-Jean before continuing on to Canada.  The Belliveaus who fell into British hands at Annapolis were placed on ships heading to Massachusetts and North Carolina.  However, the ship destined for the southern colony, the Pembroke, did not make it there.  Soon after it left Annapolis Basin, the ship fell into the hands of the exiles led by Charles Belliveau the pilot.  He and his compatriots sailed the Pembroke first to Baie Ste.-Marie, on the western shore of Nova Scotia, where they hid for a month, and then crossed the Bay of Fundy to the mouth of Rivière St.-Jean in January 1756.  In early February, they fought off a British attack in the lower St.-Jean, burned the vessel, and retreated upriver to the Acadian settlement at Ste.-Anne-du-Pay-Bas, today's Fredericton, New Brunswick, where they spent the rest of the winter.  That summer, food having run low in the St.-Jean settlements, the Belliveaus and other Pembroke passengers made their way north to Québec, while others went to Miramichi and Restigouche on the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore.  Charles Belliveau, the hero of 1755, died at Québec in early 1758.  Meanwhile, Belliveaus at Chignecto either escaped the British roundup there and joined their cousins in Canada, or the British deported them to South Carolina and Massachusetts.  When the war with Britain finally ended in 1763, the Belliveaus in Massachusetts joined their cousins in Canada.  Members of the family settled in present-day Québec Province at Trois-Rivière; at Bécancour, Maskinongé, St.-Grégoire-de-Nicolet, and Nicolet between Trois-Rivières and Montréal; at St.-Jacques-de-L'Achigan, St.-Sulpice, and L'Assomption near Montréal; and at Grande-Rivière on the southern shore of the Gaspé Peninsula.  They also settled at Memramcook in present-day New Brunswick; at Rustico on Prince Edward Island; at Pubnico, Grosse-Coques, Ste.-Anne-du-Ruisseau-de-l'Anguille, and at St.-Bernard and Pointe-de-l'Église, now Church Point, on the Baie Ste.-Marie in Nova Scotia.  One community along the eastern shore of the Baie Ste.-Marie became L'Anse-aux-Belliveau, now Belliveau Cove.  

In 1755, the Belliveaus of Île St.-Jean, living in territory controlled by France, escaped the British roundup in Nova Scotia, but their respite from British oppression proved to be short-lived.   After the fall of Louisbourg on Île Royale in July 1758, the British deported the island Acadians, including perhaps Belliveaus, to France.  Either from France or directly from Île St.-Jean,  Belliveaus migrated to Île Miquelon, a French-controlled island off the southern coast of Newfoundland, in the 1760s.  Either overcrowding or another war with Britain forced them to France, where Belliveaus from Miquelon could be found at La Rochelle in the late 1770s and early 1780s.  No member of the family can be found on the passenger lists of the Seven Ships bound for Louisiana in 1785. 

Only one member of this prominent Acadian family seems to have gone to Louisiana.  According to the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, he was Pierre Belliveau dit Bideau.  Judging by his dit, he likely was a descendant of Charles dit Bideau of Annapolis Royal, one of Jean, père's sons by his first wife.  The date of Pierre dit Bideau's arrival in Louisiana, where he settled, and who he married, if he married at all, remain a mystery.  He did not come to Louisiana from France.  Did he arrive in 1765 with the exiles from Halifax, or in 1766-69 with the Acadians from Maryland?  A perusal of the church records of the New Orleans, river, and prairie parishes where the Acadian exiles settled turns up no one named Belliveau.  Nor can anyone with that name be found in the surviving Spanish colonial censuses.  It is safe to say, then, that the family name brought to Acadia by Antoine Belliveau, whose descendants in Canada can be numbered in the thousands, did not survive in the Bayou State.  Antoine's blood, however, and that of his wife Andrée Guyon, can be found in many South Louisianans.08

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Billeray,

Bonnevie,

Boucher,

Brun,

Carret,

Chaillou,

Clemençeau,

Clossinet,

Corporon,

Cousin,

Darembourg,

Darois,

De La Forestrie,

De La Mazière,

Mius d'Entremont,

Dumont,

Duplessis,

Durel,

Flan,

Fouquet,

Grossin,

Guénard,

Guérin,

Hamon,

Hugon,

Josset,

Lafaye,

Chenet dit La Garenne,

Lagrése,

Lamoureaux,

Latier,

Lavergne,

L'Enfant,

Livois,

Marant,

Neveu,

Noël,

Olivier,

Patry,

Pellerin,

Précieux,

Quimine,

Rassicot,

Renaud,

Ritte,

Savary,

Segoillot,

Surette,

.

The failure of these families to establish lines in the Bayou State left 103 families to serve as the foundation of today's Cajun culture.  Forty-six of these "foundational families" produced fairly large lines in Louisiana during the colonial and antebellum periods.  Among the largest, eight of them--Babin, Boudreaux, Braud/Breaux, Hébert, Landry, LeBlanc, Richard, Thibodeaux--were some of the oldest families of Acadia.  Two others--Broussard and Guidry--had been relatively small families in the old country but proliferated dramatically in Louisiana.  Many of the other older Acadian families--Arceneaux, Aucoin, Benoit, Bergeron, Bernard, Blanchard, Bourg/Bourque, Bourgeois, Chiasson, Comeaux, Cormier, Daigre/Daigle, Doucet, Dugas, Dupuis, Foret, Gaudet, Gaudin, Gautreaux, Girouard, Guilbeau, Leger, Lejeune, Martin, Melançon, Pitre, Prejean, Robichaux, Savoie, Sonnier, Theriot, Trahan--created substantial lines in the Bayou State.  Several families--Duhon, Guillot, Mire, and Mouton--had reached Acadia somewhat later than the others and were relatively small in size there, but in Louisiana they, too, proliferated during the antebellum period.  Most of the Acadian families in the Bayou State, however--Achee, Allain, Arbour, Arcement, Babineaux, Barrilleaux, Berteau, Bertrand, Boutin, Brasseaux, Bujole, Clément, Clouatre, Crochet, Dantin, David, De Goutin, Delaune, Deroche, Doiron, Dubois, Gousman, Granger, Gravois, Henry, Jeansonne, Labauve, Lachaussee, Lalande, Lambert, Lanoux, Lebert, Legendre, Levron, Longuépée, Louvière, Mazerolle, Michel, Moise, Molaison, Naquin, Orillion, Ozelet, Part, Pinel, Poirier, Potier, Prince, Rivet, Roger, Roy, Semere, Talbot, Templet, Use, Villejoin, and Vincent--were, by the end of the antebellum period, comparatively smaller in numbers than their prolific cousins.02

The surviving families settled in every corner of South Louisiana, including areas in which Acadians did not go, or where they had been numerical minorities, during the colonial period.  Beginning in the 1830s, led by the Guidrys, a hand full of Acadian families from the western prairies crossed the Sabine River and resettled in East Texas, the first of them while Texas was still a province of Mexico.  One family--the Gousmans, descended from a Spanish immigrant in Nova Scotia--moved from the Mississippi River below New Orleans north to St. Tammany Parish in the 1820s, and there they remained.  But most of the foundational families remained in the predominantly-Acadian areas of South Louisiana:  the river parishes above New Orleans, still being called the Acadian Coast; the Bayou Lafourche/Bayou Terrebonne valley; and out on the southwest prairies.  Members of many families, especially the largest ones, could be found in all three Acadian areas, east and west of the Atchafalaya Basin: 

Achee

Allain

Arbour

Arcement

Arceneaux

Aucoin

Babin

Babineaux

Barrilleaux

Benoit

Bergeron

Bernard

Berteau

Bertrand

Blanchard

Boudreaux

Bourg/Bourque

Bourgeois

Boutin

Brasseaux

Braud/Breaux

Broussard

Bujole

Chiasson

Clément

Clouâtre

Comeaux

Cormier

Crochet

Daigre/Daigle

Dantin

David

De Goutin

Delaune

Deroche

Doiron

Doucet

Dubois

Dugas

Duhon

Dupuis

Foret

Gaudet

Gaudin

Gautreaux

Girouard/Giroir

Gousman

Granger

Gravois

Guidry

Guilbeau

Guillot

Hébert

Henry

Jeansonne

Labauve

Lachaussée

Lalande

Lambert

Landry

Lanoux

Lebert

LeBlanc

Legendre

Léger

Lejeune

Levron

Longuépée

Louvière

Martin

Mazerolle

Melançon

Michel

Mire

Moise

Molaison

Mouton

Naquin

Orillion

Ozelet

Part

Pinel

Pitre

Poirier

Potier

Préjean

Prince

Richard

Rivet

Robichaux

Roger

Roy

Savoie

Semere

Sonnier

Talbot

Templet

Thériot

Thibodeaux

Trahan

Usé

Villijoin

Vincent

...

Louisiana's Antebellum Acadian Governors

Extreme examples of the Acadian capacity for assimilation into the dominant American culture can be found in the lives of three of Louisiana's governors who served during the antebellum period.  The first was a latter-day immigrant, but the other two were born in the Bayou State, one the son of an exile from Chignecto, the other the grandson of a Minas exile.   

.

The first of them may not have been Acadian at all.  His principal biographer, noted Louisiana historian Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., says Henry Schuyler Thibodaux was French Canadian.  If Thibodaux was Acadian, he certainly was not a typical one.    

During the late colonial period, a Thibodeau came to Louisiana not with his family or with other relatives but on his own.  His intelligence, ambition, and perseverance made him one of the most accomplished Louisianans of his day.  Professor Tregle says Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, as he spelled his name, was a son of Alexis Thibodaux and Anna Blanchard, common Acadian surnames in pre-dispersal Nova Scotia, and that Henry was born at Albany, New York, in 1769.  According to Professor Tregle, Henry was orphaned at an early age and was raised "in the family of Gen. Philip Schuyler" of Albany, hero of the American Revolution.  Professor Tregle claims Henry was educated in Scotland before he emigrated to Louisiana.  According to family tradition, Henry's trade in the Spanish colony was that of a shoemaker, an unusual occupation for someone with a classical education.  At least five Louisiana primary sources--the baptismal records of three of his children, and the records for both of his marriages--agree on the names of Henry Thibodaux's parents and ties them to Canada.  Henry's first marriage record calls his parents Alexo and Ana Blanchar "of New York in America," and the record of his second marriage calls him "Henri of Canada," lending credence to Professor Tregle's version of the story. 

However, the research of family genealogist Dick Thibodeau of Massachusetts, as related in Dean Jobbs, The Cajuns, and that of Wendy Pitre Roostan of Hampshire, England, found on her website "The Pitre Trail from Acadia," tells a different story--one, in fact, which convinces them that Governor Henry Schuyler Thibodaux of Louisiana was a descendant of Pierre Thibodeau of Acadia.  According to Dick Thibodeau, Henry's family was transported in the autumn of 1755 from Village Thibodeau, Pigiguit, probably aboard the sloop Three Friends to Philadelphia.   Acadian genealogist Stephen A. White, in online corrections to his Dictionnaire Généalogique Des Familles Acadiennes (DGFA-1), September 2003, notes that Alexis Thibodeau, born in c1723, married Marie-Anne, daughter of René Blanchard and Anne Landry, in c1747, place unrecorded, but it could have been Pigiguit, where a branch of the Thibodeau clan resided in large numbers.  DGFA-1, 149, says Marie-Anne Blanchard's husband Alexis was a son of Joseph Thibodeau and Marie-Josèphe Bourgeois, but Stephen White's online corrections note that Alexis's parents actually were Jean Thibodeau and Marguerite HébertDGFA-1, 1508-09, 1513, lists Jean as the eighth child and second son of the family's progenitor, Pierre Thibodeau, so Alexis Thibodeau of Acadia was a grandson of the seigneur of Chepoudy.  Stephen White's online corrections also reveal that Alexis à Jean Thibodeau remarried at St. Joseph Church, Philadelphia, to Catherine, daughter of Jacques à René LeBlanc and Catherine Landry and widow of Jean-Baptiste Babin, on 17 February 1762.  This complicates Professor Tregle's version of Henry's story if one follows the Acadian alternative:  If Henry Thibodaux of Louisiana was born at Albany, New York, in 1769, as Professor Tregle insists, then Marie-Anne Blanchard, first wife of Alexis Thibodeau of Acadia, could not have been Henry's mother. 

This, of course, lends credence to Professor Tregle's claim that Henry Schuyler Thibodaux was French Canadian, not Acadian.  But Ms. Roostan proposes that the 1769 birth date is a fiction, that Henry, son of Alexis Thibodeau and Anne Blanchard, was born in c1761 not at Albany but at Philadelphia, where the exiled family still resided.  In 1763, after the war with Britain finally ended, most of the Acadians still languishing in the northern British seaboard colonies were repatriated to the St. Lawrence valley.  According to Stephen White's corrections, Alexis Thibodeau of Acadia was counted at Nicolet, across from Trois-Rivières, in 1795-96, age 73.  By that date, son Henry, now in his early 30s if we follow Ms. Roostan, had gone to Louisiana and married his first wife on the lower Acadian Coast.  Alexis died at Nicolet in July 1802, age 79--when Henry, now remarried to a French Canadian from Pointe Coupee, was about to leave the river parishes and move his growing family to upper Bayou Lafourche. 

But where did Henry à Alexis Thibodeau spend his early years?  Other than a notation in a marriage record, what historical evidence is there that Henry Thibodaux of Louisiana spent any time in Albany, or anywhere else in New York for that matter?  If he was only two years old in 1763, as Ms. Roostan claims, he likely would have been taken by his father and stepmother to British Canada, which may explain why a marriage record called him "Henri of Canada."  Or did they go to Canada first and move down to New York, as the marriage record hints?  Or go first to New York and then to Canada?  Did Henry leave his father's home during his late teens, while the American Revolution still raged?  Looking down the road from Nicolet to Albany, one could fashion an interesting story of the travails of a young Acadian whose parents had settled in Canada:  Was he conscripted into the Canadian militia and captured by the Americans, perhaps in upper New York?  In one of the most dramatic moments of the Revolutionary War, Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne surrendered his army of redcoats and German mercenaries to American General Horatio Gates at Saratoga, New York, in October 1777.  Henry, son of Alexis of Pigiguit, would have been 16 or 17 years old at the time, old enough to have served in the Canadian militia.  Was the bright young Acadian (technically an orphan since his birth mother was dead) taken by his captors to Albany?  Following Professor Tregle's version of the story, did Henry ingratiate himself with members of the Schuyler family, who taught him to speak and read English, providing him a basic, if not a classical, education?  Ms. Roostan's research reveals that the Schuyler family was noted for their charity, including raising, though not adopting, orphans, both native and European.  Was Henry's tutor a Scotsman, hence the pleasant fiction that General Schuyler sent the bright young orphan to Scotland for a proper education?  Ms. Roostan's research in the United Kingdom has turned up no trace of a Henry Thibodaux, or even a Henry Schuyler, enrolled at any of the universities in Scotland.  Nor has her research in Schuyler family records turned up evidence of the family adopting an orphan named Henry Thibodaux.  Major fighting in the Revolution ended in October 1781, when another British army, this one led by Charles Cornwallis, surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, Virginia.  Henry, son of Alexis of Acadia, would have been 20 or 21 years old at the time.  The war ended officially in September 1783 with the signing of another Treaty of Paris.  Henry now would have been in his early 20s.  Did he return to Nicolet and live with his aging father?  Did he remain at Albany and learn the shoemaker's trade?  Stephen White's Dictionnaire reveals that most of Henry's closest Thibodeau relatives would have been living in Canada during the 1780s.  What motivated Henry to emigrant to faraway Louisiana?  Did he see more opportunity in Spanish Louisiana than in British Canada?  Did he have a falling out with his father, or with British authorities, and set out on his own?  Professor Tregle insists that, after he finished his education in Scotland, Henry Schuyler Thibodaux "immigrated to Louisiana shortly after 1790." 

In May 1793, the future governor finally generated a primary-source record for historians to ponder:  Called Henrrique, son of Alexo Tibodaux and Ana Blanchar "of New York in America," he married Félicité, daughter of Jacques Bonvillain, a French Creole from the German Coast, at St.-Jacques on the Lower Acadian Coast.  If one follows Professor Tregle's birth date for Henry, he would have been 24 years old when he married Félicité; using Ms. Roostan's date of birth, Henry would have been age 32.  Interestingly, Félicité's mother was an Hébert, as Henry's paternal grandmother may have been.  Henry remarried to Brigitte, daughter of French Canadian Nicolas Bélanger of Pointe Coupée, at Baton Rouge in June 1800; the marriage record calls him "Henri of Canada."  By 1804, Henry had moved his growing family to upper Bayou Lafourche and settled in present-day Assumption Parish.  He soon moved farther down bayou to near the headwaters of Bayou Terrebonne, which made him one of the pioneer settlers of what became Terrebonne Parish. 

The humble shoemaker did not remain humble long.  He promptly threw himself into local politics while he amassed land and slaves on upper Bayou Terrebonne near present-day Schriever.  He named his plantation St. Brigitte (usually spelled St. Bridget) after his wife.  In 1805, at age 36, his neighbors sent him to the legislature of the United States Territory of Orleans.  In 1808, he became a justice of the peace for Lafourche County.  In 1811, he was chosen as a delegate to the state constitutional convention that helped create the State of Louisiana.  His neighbors promptly elected him to the new state Senate, in which he served for over a dozen years.  From October 1814 to April 1815, he served as a company officer in the Louisiana state militia.  In 1824, Henry was serving as president of the Senate when Governor Thomas B. Robertson resigned his office to become a federal judge.  The Louisiana state constitution of that day designated the president of the state Senate, not a lieutenant governor, to succeed a governor who resigned from or died in office.  Henry Schuyler Thibodaux served as interim governor of Louisiana from November to December 1824, until the inauguration of Robertson's elected successor, Henry Johnson.  After his short time as governor, Henry returned to the state Senate and continued as its president.  Three years later, while campaigning for a regular term as the state's chief executive, he was struck down by a liver ailment (an abscessed liver) at his home on Bayou Terrebonne.  He died in October 1827, perhaps in his late 60s, and was entombed at Halfway Cemetery near Schriever, though many decades later his ashes were reinterred at St. Bridget's Church Cemetery in Schriever.  His will, dated 28 Jul 1817, named his wife Brigitte and his oldest son Léandre as his executors.  His succession inventory records were filed at the Houma courthouse, Terrebonne Parish, in November 1827 and at the Thibodauxville courthouse, Lafourche Interior Parish, in January 1828, so he owned property in both parishes.  The town named after him in Lafourche Interior Parish existed during his lifetime but was not incorporated until three years after his death. 

Governor Thibodaux had five sons.  The two by his first wife married Acadians.  The three by his second wife married French or German Creoles.  A daughter by his first wife married into the Acadian Bourgeois family.  His daughters by his second wife married into the Barras and Porche families.  The governor's grandsons tended to marry French Creoles, and at least three of them married Anglo Americans, but one of his grandsons and several of his granddaughters married Acadians.  Judging by the number of slaves the governor's sons held during the late antebellum period, the family prospered on their farms and plantations on upper Bayou Terrebonne and along the Lafourche.  ...233

.

The second Acadian governor of Louisiana and the state's first popularly-elected chief executive was a paragon of assimilation into American culture.  No Acadian of antebellum Louisiana accumulated more personal and political influence than Alexandre Mouton of Lafayette Parish. 

"Here is this one on a smooth green billow of the land, just without the town [of Vermilionville].  It is not like the rest--a large brick house, its Greek porch half hid in a grove of oaks.  On that dreadful day, more than a century ago, when the British in far-off Acadie shut into the chapel the villagers of Grand Pre, a certain widow fled with her children to the woods, and there subsisted for ten days on roots and berries, until finally, the standing crops as well as  the houses being destroyed, she was compelled to accept exile, and in time found her way, with others, to these prairies.  Her son founded Vermilionville.  Her grandson rose to power--sat in the Senate of the United States.  From early manhood to hale gray age, the people of his State were pleased to hold him, now in one capacity, now in another, in their honored service; they made him Senator, Governor, President of the Convention, what you will."

So writes the bard of the Creoles and Cajuns, George Washington Cable of New Orleans, in his story "Carancro," which appeared in the January and February 1887 issues of the then-popular Century Magazine.  He goes on:  "I have seen the portrait for which he sat in early manhood to a noted English court painter:  dark waving locks; strong, well-chiseled features; fine clear eyes; an air of warm, steady-glowing intellectual energy.  It hangs still in the house of which I speak.  And I have seen an old ambrotype of him taken in the days of this story:  hair short-cropped, gray; eyes thoughtful, courageous; mouth firm, kind, and ready to smile."  In the story, Cable is describing a character referred to only as "the ex-governor," but anyone familiar with the southwest Louisiana of that day would know the identity of the character's original.  "I am a Creole," a destitute widow says to the ex-governor when she comes to him for assistance.  "Yes," he tells her, "and, like all Creoles, proud of it, as you are right to be.  But I am an Acadian of the Acadians, and never wished I was any thing else."222  

Alexandre Mouton indeed was an Acadian whose paternal ancestors had lived in old Acadie.  Although Cable's character, the ex-governor, was based on Mouton, the character's genealogy is not quite the same as that of the real former governor of Louisiana.  ...223 

Alexandre's father Jean served under Spanish Governor Don Bernardo Gálvez in the fight against the British during the American Revolution.  In the late 1770s, he crossed the Atchafalaya Basin and settled along upper Bayou Teche in the Attakapas District.  There, in June 1783, at age 29, he married Marie-Marthe, called Marthe, daughter of a prominent resident of the Attakapas Post, surgeon Antoine Borda, a native of France and second husband of Marguerite Martin dit Barnabé, an Acadian born at Chignecto.  Jean and Marthe produced a large family:  sons Jean-Baptiste, Joseph, François, Charles, Louis, Pierre-Treville, Alexandre, Antoine-Émile, and Césaire, and daughters Marie-Modeste, Marie-Adélaïde, and Marie-Marthe--a dozen children in all.  Alexandre was born in November 1804, the year after the United States purchased Louisiana from France.  He was born at his father's plantation house on Bayou Carencro in present-day Lafayette Parish, where Jean had become a prominent sugar planter at the northern edge of the Attakapas District.224  

Alexandre, like other children of prominent planters, received an elementary education in the local district schools, where he was instructed in his native French.  He also learned to speak English fluently, which stood him in good stead when he enrolled in a prominent Jesuit school, Georgetown College in Washington, D.C.  Back home in Louisiana, he studied law first in the offices of Charles Antoine, then in St. Martinville with Judge Edward Simon.  In 1825, at age 21, he was admitted to the Louisiana bar and began his practice in Lafayette Parish.225

His career in the law was short-lived.  His father gave him a plantation near the village of Vermilionville, now the city of Lafayette.  Alexandre transformed the plantation into a major sugar-producing operation.  He would henceforth make his substantial living as a sugar planter, not as a lawyer, and become the quintessence of what a twentieth-century folklorist called a "genteel Acadian."  He lived first in a townhouse in Vermilionville that had been built by his father around 1805, when the community was called Grand Prairie.  Over the years, Alexandre amassed a plantation of 19,000 arpents, which he ran from the Greek revival home that he built in the 1830s on the banks of the Vermilion, a house he called Île Copal after the exotic trees that graced the property.  By 1860, he owned 121 slaves to work his extensive holdings.  No one in Lafayette Parish owned more slaves than ex-governor Mouton.226

Like his grandfather Salvator, Alexandre Mouton also married twice.  In 1826, he married French Creole Célestine Zelia, called Zelia, Rousseau, a granddaughter of Jacques Dupré, one of the wealthiest cattle ranchers in St. Landry Parish who later served briefly as acting governor of the state.  Among the four children of Alexandre and Zelia was Jean Jacques Alexandre Alfred, their third child and second son and the only son to survive infancy.  Alfred, as he was called, was born in February 1829 in St. Landry Parish.  Their other surviving children were daughters Henriette Odèide, Marie Cecilia Arcade, and Marie Céleste Mathilde.227

In the same year of his marriage, at age 22, Alexandre's political career began when he was elected to represent Lafayette Parish in the lower house of the state legislature.  He served in that body until 1832 and as its speaker in 1831-32.  He was an avid Jacksonian Democrat and served as an elector for that party's national tickets in 1828, 1832, and 1836, the year he was sent back to the state legislature to represent Lafayette Parish again.  The following year, in 1837, the state legislature chose him as United States Senator to serve out the term of Alexander Porter, who had resigned.  Alexandre was only 33 years old when he assumed this high office, only three years older than the minimum age of 30.  At the end of the Senate term, in 1838, he was elected to the United States Senate in his own right and served in Washington until March 1842, when he resigned his senatorial seat to run for governor of Louisiana.  

Alexandre's wife Zelia had died in Lafayette Parish  in November 1837, early in his senatorial career.  Two months before he left Washington to return to Louisiana to run for governor, in January 1842, at age 38, he remarried to Anne, 12-year-old daughter of Charles K. Gardner of New York.  Gardner had served as adjutant general of the United States Army during the War of 1812 and was at the time of his daughter's marriage to Mouton a clerk in the United States Treasury Department.  Alexandre and Emma had seven children, six of whom survived to adulthood:  daughters Marie Thérèse and Anne Eliza, and sons Alix Gardner, who died an infant, George Clinton, William Rufus King, Paul Joseph Julien, and Charles Alexandre.  

Alexandre Mouton, the first popularly-elected governor of Louisiana, was inaugurated in January 1843 and served until February 1846.  When he assumed the governorship, the state was deeply in debt, but by the time he left office, most of the state's indebtedness had been liquidated.  During his governorship, he was active in the 1844 presidential campaign of Jacksonian James K. Polk, helping the Democratic ticket carry Louisiana in the federal elections.  He promoted the development of railroads in the state and pursued this interest after he returned to private life.  He was chosen president of a railroad convention held in New Orleans in January 1852.228

Though he held no more elective offices after his term as governor, Mouton remained active in Democratic politics.  He served as a delegate to the Democratic national conventions at Cincinnati, Charleston, and Baltimore in 1856 and 1860.229

His most interesting public service after his governorship was as president of the 1858 vigilance committee created by prominent local leaders to rid the southwest prairie region of marauding cattle rustlers.  For years these outlaws had raided local cattle herds from their hiding places on the prairies west of Vermilionville.  By 1858, their numbers and depredations had increased to the point that local law enforcement could not control them.  The vigilance committee's armed force, led by the governor's son Alfred, a graduate of West Point, brutally suppressed the band of rustlers, and even hanged some of its leaders without trial.  ...

.

During the late antebellum period, a scion of one of the largest families became the third Acadian governor of Louisiana.  Paul Octave, eldest son of Paul Hébert and his first wife Marie Eugènie Hamilton, was a native of Iberville Parish, on the upper Acadian Coast, where he was born on his father's plantation in December 1818.  ...

Acadians in Gray

After the federal Congress counted the electoral ballots and certified the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, South Carolinians called for a convention of delegates to re-consider their place in the Union.  The result was a secession ordinance, passed unanimously at Charleston on December 20, followed four days later by the publication of a "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union."  Emphasizing the sovereignty of the separate states, the South Carolinians reminded the world of the nature of the "law of compact" and the importance of that part of the federal Constitution which guaranteed the return of individuals "held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another....  For many years these laws were executed", the South Carolinians reminded the world, "But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the general government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution."  Pointing out specific instances of Northern refusal to return fugitive slaves to their owners and even to "surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia," the South Carolinians insisted "the constitutional compact had been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation."  After indicting Northerners for denouncing "as sinful the institution of Slavery" and for creating "a sectional party" devoted to the abolition of the peculiar institution, the South Carolinians declared that "A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.  He is to be entrusted with the administration of the Common Government," they contended, "because he has declared that that 'Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,' and that the public mind must rest in the belief that Slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction." 

Soon after South Carolina's secession, the Louisiana legislature authorized the election of a convention of delegates to address the momentous question.  Delegates were chosen by popular vote on 7 January 1861 to convene at the capitol in Baton Rouge on January 23.  The convention would conduct its business there until the state legislature opened its new session, after which, if necessary, it would reconvene at New Orleans, where it could complete its work.  Lafayette Parish chose Alexandre Mouton as its delegate to the state convention.  Reflecting the fact that he was still a popular and respected leader in his native Louisiana, the convention at its opening session elected the 56-year-old former governor as its president.  Mouton openly supported secession, as did a majority of his fellow delegates.  After three days of debate and deliberation, on 26 January 1861, the convention, still meeting at Baton Rouge, voted 113 to 17 to secede from the Union, the sixth state to do so.  Soon afterwards, delegates from the seven seceded states--South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas--meeting in the Alabama state capitol at Montgomery, formed a southern Confederacy on February 4, while the Louisiana convention was still in session at New Orleans.  Three days later, the delegates in Montgomery fashioned a provisional constitution for the new nation, dubbed the Confederate States of America.  On March 11, the delegates finished, and signed, a "permanent" constitution for the Southern Confederacy, which it submitted for ratification to the seceded states.  The state convention in New Orleans, having recessed on February 12, reconvened on March 4, the day of Lincoln's inauguration, and took up the question of ratification when it received its copy of the new constitution.  On March 21, with a vote of 101 to 7, Louisiana ratified the Confederate constitution and became a member of the Southern Confederacy.  The state convention adjourned fives days later, exactly two months after it had taken Louisiana out of the federal Union. 

In the weeks following Louisiana's secession and the state's frantic preparations for war, more memorable actions shook the South and sunk the nation into civil conflict:  Lincoln was inaugurated President of the United States; Confederates fired on the Federal garrison in Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on the evening of April 12; three days later, Lincoln called for volunteers to suppress the Southern rebellion; more Southern states seceded into the summer; and the seat of the Confederate government moved from Montgomery to Richmond, Virginia, by the end of May.230  

The business of secession concluded, Governor Mouton returned to his home near Vermilionville to await the consequences of these momentous actions.  Because the state convention did not adjourn at New Orleans until late March, the former governor was not one of the Louisiana delegates sent to the convention of states at Montgomery.  An enthusiastic Confederate, he offered himself as a candidate for a seat in the national senate.  For the first time in his political career, however, he failed to win election.  He would sit out the war for Southern independence as a private citizen.  His son Alfred and thousands of other Louisianans, however, including Acadians like himself, would endure the war as soldiers, wearing the gray and butternut uniforms of a new American nation the "Acadian of the Acadians" helped to create.  ...231 

 

 SOURCE NOTES - BOOK FIVE

01.  Quotations from Baudier, The Catholic Church in LA, 239. 

02.  Family size is determined by the number of recorded marriages in a family between 1765 & 1861.  The larger families had 100 marriages or more, the largest (Landry) recording slightly over 1,200 marriages during that period.  See Appendix

Non-Acadian families with substantial connections to Acadian families include Adam, Andrus, Barras, Baudoin, Bonin, Caruthers, Castille, Delhomme, Exnicios, Falgout, Fontenot, Gros, Janise, Langlinais, Le Boeuf, Lirette, Malbrough, Montet, Morvant, Oubre, Patin, Rousseau, Simon, and Toups.  See Appendix

02a.  See Book Five. 

Etymologies in both Random House and Webster's dictionaries give 1868 as the first appearance of the word "Cajun" in print. 

03.  See Bourgeois, Cabanocey, 161; NOAR, 2:6, 40 (SLC, B5, 190); NOAR, 2:211, 245 (SLC, M2, 3 or 33); Voorhies, Some Late Eighteenth-Century Louisianians, 114-15, 426; White, DGFA-1, 1405; Books Two, Three, & Five; Arosteguy family page. 

04.  See Bourgeois, Cabanocey, 165; Voorhies, Some Late Eighteenth-Century Louisianians, 117, 210; Book Five; Barthélemy family page. 

05.  See Arsenault, Généalogie, 401-05; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 388; Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 29; "The Origins of the Bastarache, Bastrash and Basque Families," AGE, May 2008, 45; White, DGFA-1, 80-82; White, DGFA-1 English, 17; Books One, Two, Three, & Five; Bastarche family page. 

06.  See Arsenault, Généalogie, 405-08, 1100-01, 2415; BRDR, vols. 2, 7; Clark, Acadia, 107, 119, 132-34; Clément Cormier, "Le Borgne de Belle-Isle, Alexandre," in DCB, 1:435-36; Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian, 77; Jehn, Acadian Exiles in the Colonies, 154; Oubre, Vacherie, 29; Robichaux, German Coast Families, 34, 36, 118-22; Voorhies, J., Some Late Eighteenth-Century Louisianians, 65, 129, 134, 257, 264, 370, 404; Mason Wade, "Le Borgne, Emmanuel," in DCB, 1:433-35; White, DGFA-1, 6, 136, 1024-31, 1100-01; White, DGFA-1 English, 218-19; Wood, Acadians in Maryland, 83; Books One, Two, Three, & Five; Bélisle family page. 

07.  See Arsenault, Généalogie, 1133-34; Brasseaux, Scattered to the Wind, 8; BRDR, vols. 2, 3, 6; Faragher, A Great & Noble Scheme, 381-83; Jehn, Acadian Exiles in the Colonies, 154; Robichaux, Acadians in Châtellerault, 7, 15; Robichaux, Acadians in Nantes, 42, 115; Robichaux, Acadians in St.-Malo, 45-46, 341, 350; White, DGFA-1, 325-26; Books One, Two, Three, & Five; Bellemère family page. 

08.  See Arsenault, Généalogie, 408-27, 842-45, 2206-07; Brasseaux, "Scattered to the Wind", 55-61; Hébert, D., Acadians in Exile, 24; Historical Atlas of Canada, 1: plate 29; <landrystuff.com/ExpulsionShips.html>; White, DGFA-1, 96-104; White, DGFA-1 English, 19-20; Milling, Exile Without End, 41-42; Wall of Names, 11; Books One, Two, Three, & Five; Belliveau family page. 

The author, a native of South Louisiana, is a direct descendant of Antoine Belliveau & his wife Andrée. 

222.  Quotations from Cable, Creoles & Cajuns, 248, 249.  See photo.

223.  See also note 05, above. 

224.  Jean's gravestone holds a plague that calls him a patriot of the American Revolution.  See photo

The Attakapas District was created and first settled by a hand full of French Creoles, most of whom raised cattle, a decade before the Acadians arrived in 1765.  The church records for the district date back to 1756.  The site of the old French/Spanish post was renamed St. Martinville in 1817.  See Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, 1-A: 728. 

The Indian name is pronounced uh-TACK-uh-paw & is "officially" spelled Atakapas, but the name of the district is almost invariably spelled Attakapas.  

To illustrate the point that "all" Acadians are related, Marguerite Martin, Alexandre Mouton's maternal grandmother, is one of the author's ancestors as well.  Her first husband was René Robichaux, & one of their daughters, Geneviève, married Amand Dugas, father of Rosalie Dugas, who married Pierre Cormier, père, called Pierre of Opelousas, one of my paternal great-grandfathers.  Who knows how many other Cajuns today share blood with Gov. Mouton.

225.  The principal source used here for the details of Alexandre's life is DAB, 7:295. 

As to the spelling of Alexandre Mouton's given name, his grave stone and the article in the DAB spell it "Alexander," the anglicized spelling of the name.  All other sources spell his first name using the French version, "Alexandre," used here.  See photo for his likenesses and his gravesite, as well as a portrait of five of his children. 

Edward Simon was a native of Belgium who served as an associate justice on the LA Supreme Court from 1841-49.  Simon died at St. Martinville in 1867.  His son, Arthur, served as a major in the Confederate army under Alexandre's son Alfred.  See Perrin, SW LA, pt. 2:78.

226.  The c1800 town house built by Jean, later called the Sunday House, is still standing in Lafayette as part of the Alexandre Mouton House Museum on Lafayette Street, near downtown.  See photo.  Jean Mouton is celebrated as the founder of Vermilionville/Lafayette.  Alexandre Mouton's slave count is from the 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Slave Schedules, Lafayette Parish, pp. 53-54.  His slaves in 1860, 51 females & 70 males, ranged in age from 2 to 70 years old.  

For the origin of the term "genteel Acadian," see Dormon, Cajuns, 30, who attributes it to folklorist Patricia K. Rickels.  See her essay, "The Folklore of the Acadians," in Conrad, ed., The Cajuns, 223, 229-30, in which she categorizes Cajuns as "Genteel Acadians" and "Just Plain Coonasses."  (This author confesses that he is one of the latter.)

227.  Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, 2-A:822, her baptismal record, spells her name Céleste Zilia, so there is also confusion in the spelling of Zelia Rousseau Mouton's name.  Her tombstone, like her birth record, spells her name "Zilia," but genealogical and family records spell it "Zelia," used here.  See photo.

228.  See <sec.state.la.us/33.htm>.

229.  See Bragg, LA in the Confederacy, 8-10, 12, 14-15.

230.  The LA Convention remained in session a little over two months, first in Baton Rouge, convening on Jan 23 in the state capitol and meeting there until the state legislature convened a few days later.  The convention then moved to New Orleans, where it reconvened on Jan 29, went into recess on Feb 12, reconvened on Mar 4, and adjourned on Mar 26.  One of the convention's most significant actions during its session in New Orleans was the ratification of the Constitution of the Confederate States by a vote of 101 to 7 on Mar 21, 5 days before it adjourned.  When the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter on Apr 12 & Lincoln called for volunteers to suppress the Southern rebellion 3 days later, the LA Convention had been done with its work for 2 1/2 weeks.  See Bragg, LA in the Confederacy, 27-46.

231.  See Bragg, LA in the Confederacy, 180-81. 

As in the U.S. at the time, the C.S. constitution provided that the state legislators, not the voters, would choose national senators, 2 per state.  The LA state legislature cast ballots for the office on 28 Nov 1861.  Mouton came out sixth of 10 on the first ballot & was not even considered for the second ballot, which elected men from Concordia & Orleans parishes to the national senate, meeting in Richmond.  So one could claim that Alexandre Mouton never lost a popular election.

233.  Although he is not on their commemorative Wall of Names with the other Acadians who emigrated to LA, the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, LA, recognizes Henry S. Thibodaux as the first of 4 Acadian governors of the state. 

Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., DLB, 786, calls him Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, says he was born in 1769 in Albany, NY, that his father Alexis Thibodaux was a "French Canadian" & his mother was Anna Blanchard, details his life, including wives & children, & says he died in 1847 [obviously a misprint].

BRDR, 2:104-05, 694 (SJA-2, 20), the record of his first marriage, calls him Henrrique Tibodaux, calls his wife Felicitas Bonvilen (Bonvillain), gives his & her parents' names, says his parents were Alexo Thibodeaux & Ana Blanchar "of New York in America," says her parents were "of St. Charles Parish," & that the witnesses to his marriage were Francisco Frederic, Rosalia Frederic, & Josef Frederic; BRDR, 2:69, 694 (SJO-3, 25 & 26; SJO-85, 5), the record of his second marriage, calls him Henri Thibodeaux "of Canada," calls his wife Brigita Bélanger, gives his & her parents' names, says his parents were Alexi & Anna Thibodeaux, & that the witnesses to his marriage were Nicolas Bélanger [probably his father-in-law], Guilermo Doiron/Dorion, & William Dawson; <www.sec.state.la.us/26.htm>, calls him Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, includes a portrait of him from the LA State Museum, labels him a National Republican, says that he was Catholic, that he was a shoemaker after his term as governor, provides his correct death date, & says that he died of an abscessed liver during his campaign for governor; Hébert, D., South LA Records, 1:503 (Houma Ct.Hse.: Succ.: #17), a succession inventory record, dated 24 Nov 1827, calls him H. S. Thibodeaux m. (2)Brigitte Bélanger, m. (1)Félicité Bonvilain, dates his will 28 Jul 1817, & lists his children as, from his first marriage, Léandre Bannon, Aubin B., & Eugènie, &, from his second marriage, Henry Michel, Émilie, Elmire, Henry Claiborne, & Barron Goforth; Hébert, D., South LA Records, 1:503 (Thib.Ct.Hse.: Succ.: Year 1828), another succession inventory record, dated 5 Jan 1828, calls him Henry Schuyler Thibodeaux m. Brigitte Belanger, & lists his children as Léandre, Aubin, & Eugènie; Hébert, D., South LA Records, 1:503 (Thib.Ct.Hse.: Succ.: Year 1828), papers related to a land sale, dated 6 Nov 1828, calls him Henry S. Thibodeaux m. Brigitte Bélanger, & lists his children as Léandre B., Eugènie m. Joseph Paul Bourgeois, Émilie m. Leufroy Barras, Elmire m. Evariste Porche, Henry Claiborne, & Bannon Goforth.  Hébert, D., South LA Records, 1:503-04, includes many other court documents--deeds, loans, hypotheques, mainlevees, mortgages, acquitances of mortgage, quittances, quit claims, receipts, & the like--relating to Henry Schuyler Thibodaux & his family & associates. 

West, Atlas of LA Surnames, 140, citing Reeves's study of LA governors, published in 1976, and Marguerite E. Watkins's LSU master's thesis on the history of Terrebonne Parish, dated 1939, says Henry S. Thibodaux "was not an Acadian refugee, but was born in Albany, N.Y., in 1769 of French-Canadian parents."  To be sure, Henry S. Thibodaux came to the colony alone, not with other Acadians.  A recent study, however, Jobb, The Cajuns, 265-66, using information gathered by Dick Thibodeau of MA, says that Henry S.'s father, Alexis, was from Village Thibodeau at Pigiguit, on the Ste.-Croix River near present-day Windsor, NS. & that Alexis, his wife Anne Blanchard, & sons Simon, age 5, & Étienne, age 3, were exiled to PA in the fall of 1755, deported probably aboard the British sloop Three Friends, which left Pigiguit on 27 Oct & reached PA 21 Nov, but Gov. Morris did not let the Acadians land until early Mar 1756.  Anne died in either the late 1750s or early 1760s in PA, &, in 1762, Alexis remarried to Catherine LeBlanc, a widow with 4 children from her previous marriage.  Their son Joseph was born in PA in 1763, so, according to Jobb & his source, Henry Schuyler Thibodaux's mother had to be Catherine LeBlanc, not Anne Blanchard, if Henry was born at Albany, NY, in 1769.  However, his 2 marriage records, cited above, & the baptismal records of 3 of his children, that of son Cubino, dated 23 Apr 1796, in BRDR, 2:694 (SJA-3, 136), daughter Eugenia, dated 7 Jan 1798, in BRDR, 2:694 (SJA-3, 160), & son Miguel Enrique, dated 18 Jul 1801, in BRDR, 2:697 (SJO-1, 148 & 149), are clear that Henry S. Thibodaux's parents were Alexis Thibodeau & Anne Blanchard, not Alexis Thibodeau & Catherine LeBlanc.  

Wendy Pitre Roostan's study of the governor can be found at <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pitretrail/myline/paternal/HSThibodaux.htm>.  See also White, DGFA-1, 149, 1508-09, 1513; White, DGFA-1 Corrections, p. 1515 (no longer accessible). 

Jehn, Acadian Exiles in the Colonies, 193-96, lists 249 Acadians in NY in 1763 & shows no Thibodeaus among them.  Only 2 deportation transports were sent to that colony in 1755:  the Experiment, which left Annapolis Royal in Dec & reached NY in early May 1756 after being blown off course to Antigua with 250 Acadians aboard; & the Mary, with approximately 100 Acadians from Cap-Sable, which left the cape at an unrecorded date & reached NY in late Apr 1756.  See Appendix.  Jehn, p. 218, lists "Allexis Thibodeau, Catherine Thibodeau his wife and seven children" in PA in 1763 but does not name the children. 

.

For Opelousas militia in 1815, see Hebert, D., Southwest LA Records, 1-A: Introductory Notes, 653, 2-A:63, 85-86, 203, 248, 311, 352, 394, 469-70, 619, 879. 

 

BOOK ONE:         French Acadia

BOOK TWO:        British Nova Scotia and the French Maritimes

BOOK THREE:     The Great Upheaval

BOOK FOUR:      French Louisiana and a New Acadia

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Copyright (c) 2001-15  Steven A. Cormier