BOOK EIGHT

BOOK NINE: The Bayou State

INTRODUCTION

BOOK ONE: French Acadia

BOOK TWO: British Nova Scotia

BOOK THREE: Families, Migration, and the Acadian "Begats"

BOOK FOUR: The French Maritimes

BOOK FIVE: The Great Upheaval

BOOK SIX: The Acadian Immigrants of Louisiana

BOOK SEVEN: French Louisiana

BOOK EIGHT: A New Acadia

BOOK TEN: The Louisiana Acadian "Begats"

BOOK ELEVEN: The Non-Acadian "Cajun" Families of South Louisiana

BOOK TWELVE: Acadians in Gray

The steamboat Louisville arrives at Franklin via Bayou Plaquemine and the Atachafalaya Basin, April 1825 ...01a

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

Becoming American did not change Louisiana Acadians fundamentally. Despite American officials insisting that English was now the "official" language of the province, the great majority of Acadians still clung to their cultural verities and spoke their distinctive French patois, though some of them, especially the hand full of merchants and planters, learned English to communicate with les Américains. Some of them welcomed the rough-and-tumble game of representative democracy the new Jeffersonian republic brought to them, while most watched the play unfold, so strange and discordant, from the safety of the political sidelines. They were grateful to see that, unlike the British of Nova Scotia, 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, even those who lived on modest holdings, could escape the play of that peculiar game. For those who held others in bondage, or sought to do so, after it became clear that their new rulers had no intention of abolishing slavery in Louisiana, the American system of slavery held some appeal. Louisiana's system of laws changed gradually, a pleasant surprise for most Acadians. Universally concerned about the integrity of their Spanish land grants, they mastered the transformation of Spanish arpents into acres, sections, and townships. But the transition from Spanish subject to American citizen was by no means trouble free.03

In 1804, Lieutenant Henry Hopkins of the United States army "arrived in the Attakapas region to formally raise the U.S. flag over the Teche." A similar ceremony was held, no doubt, in the Opelousas District. Late that year, "Spanish officials in Nacogdoches ... spread news of a royal decree that offered asylum to any slave escaping from American-held Louisiana into the province of Texas. Officials in New Orleans," including Spanish "commissioner of limits" and former interim governor the Marqués de Casa Calvo, "confirmed its existence. Within weeks rumors of insurrection spread through the lower part of the Louisiana district, and slaves began fleeing American territory for Texas," some of them likely from Attakapas and Opelousas farms and plantations. Louisiana Governor William C. C. Claiborne beseeched the marqués to rescind the decree. The Spaniard ignored him, and slaves continued to flee to Nacogdoches.

The western Louisiana borderland, again, was a potential scene of conflict.

In 1806, Spanish and American agents met on the Sabine River to work out a compromise. The result was the Neutral Ground Agreement in which the disputants "agreed to a sort of 'demilitarized' zone between Texas and the United States, which they hoped would prevent war." The Americans nevertheless insisted that the boundary resulting from Jefferson's Purchase and the creation of the State of Louisiana nine years later should lay along the Sabine, while the Spanish placed the boundary there at Rio Hondo near their long-abandoned presidio at Los Adaes. In February 1819, the Adams-Onís Treaty set the boundary between Louisiana and Texas along the Sabine, and Spain ceded the Floridas to the United States. Not until after the treaty's second ratification in February 1821 did the spectre of war evaporate along the western frontier. However, Mexico's war with Spain, which erupted the year the Adams-Onís Treaty was signed, promised to unsettle the area once again. Mexico gained its independence in August 1821. Seven years later, Mexico signed a "Treaty of Limits" with the United States that recognized the boundaries set in 1819, and the treaty went into force in April 1832. Except for the continued movement of escaped slaves from South Louisiana into Texas and the uproar it caused, the frontier remained quiet until 1835-36, when Texians fought for, and won, their own independence from Mexico. Texas chose to be a slave republic, so escaped slaves now would have to avoid capture there before finding refuge in Mexico.04

By then, Acadians from Attakapas and Opelousas, now St. Martin and St. Landry parishes, left their homesteads in the old Neutral Ground and crossed the Sabine into East Texas. ...12

In 1809, hundreds of refugees from the turmoil in Haiti who had escaped to Spanish Cuba poured into New Orleans from Havana, some of them Acadians. Most remained in New Orleans, but a hand full settled in the prairie districts west of the Atchafalaya Basin. ...13

Although only a small portion of the Acadian presence in Louisiana was affected by it, the so-called Bonnie Blue Flag Revolt of 1810 shook up the Baton Rouge area, where river Acadians had settled as early as the 1780s following the British defeat in the American War for Independence. Acadians who had come to the colony from Maryland in 1767 and settled at San Gabriel in the Spanish District of Manchac crossed the bayou into the Baton Rouge District after 1783 to occupy abandoned British lands. In 1785, more Acadians arrived, this time from France, and chose to settle at Baton Rouge, where they remained, and in the New Feliciana District along Bayou des Écores, today's Thompson Creek, north of Baton Rouge, which most of them abandoned by the mid-1790s. According to the Spanish, even after Jefferson's Purchase the area remained part of their province of West Florida, headquartered at Pensacola, with its eastern boundary on the Perdido River and its western boundary on the Mississippi. The Americans thought otherwise. Despite its lack of legitimacy, Jefferson pressed the American claim to Spanish West Florida as part of his Purchase in 1803. This policy continued, also passively, under Jefferson's successor, James Madison, who became the fourth President of the United States in March 1809. Meanwhile, Anglo-American settlers in substantial numbers drifted into the disputed territory, including the present-day Florida parishes of southeast Louisiana and the southern halves of the present-day states of Mississippi and Alabama. They established farms and plantations on the rich lands there and engaged in a thriving commerce not only out of the Gulf coast ports, but also along the Mississippi. Acadians also continued to infiltrate into the disputed territory but in much smaller numbers, mostly around Baton Rouge. Few of them held slaves on their new farms along the river, but slaves were a prominent feature of the cotton plantations established by Anglo-Americans and planters of other nationalities, including French and Spanish, throughout West Florida.17

Unsatisfied with Spanish rule, in 1804 West Floridians staged a revolt against the Spanish, still headquartered at Pensacola, but also garrisoned at Mobile and Baton Rouge. Despite the small size of the Spanish garrisons, the revolt was quickly put down. In 1808, the province suffered an unexpected political upheaval, as did the rest of Spanish America. Napoléon Bonaparte, the western world's most dangerous imperialist, overthrew the Bourbon monarcy in Spain and installed his brother Joseph as the Spanish king. The Peninsular War that erupted affected not only the mother country, but also Spain's far flung colonies. According to Andrew McMichael, "This would have important consequences for West Floridians, for whom" the Bourbon kings "represented the center of their monarchy-based political loyalty. For West Floridians, as for other Latin Americans, the loss of their sovereign and the seeming demise of their mother country was more a psychologial and political blow than an economic and social problem. West Florida had always been a mixture of many different cultures and remained tied economically to several other places, Spain being one of many. But the sovereign king had always been a tangible object of their loyalty and one to whom they swore their fealty in document after document." Now the province was rocked by an instability it had never felt, which made it more vulnerable than ever to the imperialist desires of its closest neighbor.18

A year before Napoléon's conquest of Spain, that closest neighbor, in one fell swoop, virtually destroyed West Florida's economy. Reacting to the "near destruction" of the frigate Chesapeake by the British frigage Leopard in June of 1807, Jefferson, in order to counter the clamor for war against Britain, pushed through Congress the Embargo Act, which ended all trade between the United States and other nations, including those nations' colonies. The embargo "officially closed West Florida and Baton Rouge to American trade" via the American port of New Orleans and essentially cut off the Mississippi side of the province and its trade with the rest of the world. Acadian farmers and merchants in the Baton Rouge area had no choice but to ship their goods to the Gulf Coast ports at considerable expense or to smuggle goods down to New Orleans, hoping American officials would not catch them. When the Spanish government "inquired about an exception to the embargo," U.S. Secretary of State James Madison not only denied the request, but the Jefferson administration stationed naval vessels on Lake Pontchartrain and along the Mississippi, "essentially blockading West Florida." And then came the conquest of Spain by Napoléon in 1808 and the outbreak of general war in Europe... again ... in 1809.19

For many reasons, Jefferson's embargo was an utter failure and was modified by "a nonintercourse law" passed by Congress in December 1808, a month after Madison's election. After his inauguration on 4 March 1809, the nation's economic struggle against Britain and Napoléon was the new American president's problem, as was American relations with its southeastern neighbors, the Spanish Floridas. It did not take long for that relationship to become even more complicated for the new president. In April 1809, Charles Louis Boucher de Grand-Pré, former governor of the Baton Rouge district, died. Carlos de Grand-Pré, as he was known to his fellow Floridians, like no one else, had been a shaker and mover in the province. According to Andrew McMichael, "In the long term, Grand-Pré's death removed one of the final pieces of the support structure in Spanish West Florida society. Without Grand-Pré the government apparatus and, perhaps more importantly, the people's relationship to it began to collapse. His death added immediacy to the weight of the local failure of the Spanish government, compounded the differences regarding the policial economy of the United States and Spain, and left the ongoing disputes over land policies without a trusted mediator. In short, after having lost their metropolis," Bourbon Spain, "and at a time when the rest of the world was crumbling around them, residents of Spanish West Florida then lost the personification of their loyalty to the Spanish Crown." The residents of the Baton Rouge district despised Grand-Pré's successor, Carlos Dehault De Lassus, who they insisted was corrupt and merely a "placeman." Moreover, Governor David Holmes of nearby Mississippi Territory, and even exiled participants in former vice president Aaron Burr's abortive conspiracy to separate the Louisiana Territory from the United States, tried to convince U.S. Secretary of State Robert Smith, and President Madison himself, that West Floridians, especially in the Anglo-American community of the Baton Rouge area, feared foreign--that is, British or French--intervention and would welcome American annexation of the province.20

In the summer of 1810, Anglo-American conspirators in West Florida, from their base at Bayou Sara in the Feliciana district north of Baton Rouge, tried again to overthrow Spanish government in West Florida. This time, with the inadvertent "help" of Governor De Lassus, they succeeded. With De Lassus's approbation and cooperation, a convention of delegates, essentially an unauthorized district assembly, met at Baton Rouge in July and August to discuss and implement reforms in the governing of the local districts under De Lassus's jurisdiction. Evidently there were as many delegates at the convention in favor of the province remaining under Spanish control as there were those who favored independence. Unfortunately, in early September, rumors spread that the provincial governor, Juan Vicente Folch, who distrusted the convention as well as De Lassus, had appeared in the western part of the province and was sending troops from Pensacola to Baton Rouge to quell what he believed was an incipient rebellion. Rumor followed rumor for the next several weeks, including the gathering of a pro-independence militia at Bayou Sara intent on attacking the fort at Baton Rouge.21

On 22 September 1810, pro-independence delegates, after the mass resignation of delegates who opposed independence, issued a "preliminary Declaration of Independence," what Andrew McMichael calls "the final step toward separation from the mother country." The following morning, 80 or so armed militia cavalrymen from Bayou Sara, led by a Frenchman named George of Passau and Anglo-American Philemon Thomas, attacked the ramshackle, undermanned fort at Baton Rouge. The fort fell within minutes, and the rebels, issuing orders in French and English, not in Spanish, promptly arrested Governor De Lassus, who lived nearby. The rebels also seized the provincial archives, housed at the fort, symbolically seizing the provincial government itself. Two defenders died and three were wounded in the melee at Baton Rouge. One of the dead was Louis de Grand Pré, 23-year-old son of the former governor, who was mourned by many of his fellow West Floridians. The rebels raised their new flag, later called the Bonnie Blue Flag, with a five-pointed white star on a blue field, above the fort. Three days later, the West Florida convention declared independence from Spanish rule. The delegates promptly urged Mississippi Territory Governor David Holmes or Orleans Territory Governor William C. C. Claiborne to take possession of the province for the United States, but the two American governors hesitated, seeking advise from President Madison in Washington, D.C. Assuming that they had been rebuffed, convention delegates, led by John Rhea and Fulwar Skipwith, declared West Florida an independent republic and created a government to be seated at St. Francisville, in the Feliciana district above Bayou Sara. The delegates adopted a constitution, similar to that of the United States, on October 24 and chose Fulwar Skipwith, native of Dinwiddie County, Virginia, graduate of William and Mary College, veteran of the American War for Independence, diplomat to Martinique and France during the Washington administration, negotiator of the Louisiana Purchase, and founder of the Agricultural Society of Baton Rouge, as president of the new republic. He proved to be its only president.22

When Madison learned of the revolt in West Florida, he acted decisively. On 17 October 1810, only three days after the West Floridians formed their national government at St. Francisville, without the consent of Congress and without negotiation with the Spanish government or leaders of the new republic, and fulfulling Jefferson's claim that West Florida had been part of his Louisiana Purchase, Madison proclaimed that the former Spanish province now belonged to the United States. He ordered Governor Claiborne at New Orleans, with assistance from Governor Holmes in Mississippi, to send U.S. troops to Feliciana to occupy Bayou Sara and St. Francisville, which they did on December 6 and 7. Three days later, American troops lowered the flag of the new republic, with its single white star, and raised the Stars and Stripes over the fort at Baton Rouge. The Republic of West Florida faded into history. Not until 1813, however, during the next American war with Britain, did the Spanish garrison at Mobile surrender to American forces under General James Wilkinson. Meanwhile, the Acadians in the Baton Rouge district and the few who may have remained in Feliciana, like the rest of their Acadian confreres on the lower river, along the Lafourche, and on the western prairies, were citizens of the United States of America, whether they liked it or not.23

Meanwhile, momentous political changes came to lower Louisiana that affected everyone there, even the most insousiant of Acadians. ...

South Louisiana Geography and the Acadians, 1803-1861

Two years after the Purchase of 1803, the 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 village that had grown up around the Attakapas church became the incorporated "city" of St. Martinsville (as it was originally spelled), later called by its residents 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 1861-65, Iberia (1868).05

The 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 1861-65, 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 marriages recorded between 27 December 1814 and 5 January 1815. Father Michel Bernard Barrière had served as pastor of St. Martin de Tours church at St. Martinsville 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--those of German Creole Michel Bihm and Acadian Eugénie Lejeune on December 27, French Creoles Donatien Guillory and his cousin Selesie Fontenot on January 1, Spaniard Thomas De Los Santos Cortines and mulatresse libre Maria dite Pene Estaphania on January 1, French Creole Louis Carrière and Acadian Célestine Doucet on January 2, and French Creole Lucien Bergeron and German Creole Madeleine Guillaume Spargenberg on January 5--and included 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, so the Opelousas militia likely reached the city soon after the battle was fought. ...10

For a few months during the War of 1861-65, Opelousas served as the capital of Confederate Louisiana. ...

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

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 civil 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 1848.11

Acadian Settlement Patterns During the Antebellum Era

These political changes in the Lafourche/Terrebonne valley and other areas of South Louisiana were the result of discernible settlement patterns among the Acadians living there during the antebellum period. ...

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 of Tours 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. ...

Meanwhile, in 1817, Church authorities founded St. Joseph Parish at Thibodauxville. ...

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. ...14

The Acadians and the South's Plantation-Based Economy

Some Acadians, including three who became governors, played prominent roles in the region's plantation-based economy. Most Acadians, however, especially the great majority who did not own slaves, were compelled to remain on the economic sidelines. Carl Brasseaux notes: "Upwardly mobile Acadians who aspired to the planter class embraced their wealthy neighbors' proclivity for conspicous consumption; this, in turn, increased their need for money, which ultimately meant expansion of both their real property holdings and their slave labor force." This did not mean that the traditional socioeconomic clash between Acadians and Creoles, dating to the beginning of the their arrival in Louisiana in the 1760s, was not ended by this mimickry on the part of the wealthier Acadians. Brasseaux insists that "upwardly mobile Acadians wished to emulate only those Creoles of higher social status than their own." The majority of their fellow Acadians still disdained the pretentious Creoles and Anglo-Americans who lived among them. "Many Acadians," in fact, Brasseaux explains, "rejected this materialistic mentality and sought to perpetuate their traditional life-style in the relative isolation of the lower Lafourche Basin and in the vast prairies of southwestern Louisiana." Nevertheless, sugar production on the Mississippi and the Lafourche, cotton and sugar production on the Teche, and a thriving cattle industry on the southwest prairies gave rise to a new phenomenon among the Acadians--new at least since they came to Louisiana with only their families and the clothes on their backs: the so-called "genteel Acadian." "The fragmentation of the once extremely cohesive Acadian community appears to have taken place between 1790 and 1810, when second- and third-generation Acadians embraced both slavery and the plantation system," Brasseaux notes. This embrace began as early as the late 1760s and early 1770s, when a few members of the first generation of immigrants began to purchase slaves in the New Orleans market soon after their arrival. What had been anathema to most of the Acadian immigrants--racialized human chattel slavery and all of its attendant horrors--which some had observed first hand during exile in Maryland, South Carolina, and the French Antilles, was now becoming widely accepted among their descendants.15

This, as much as anything, transformed Acadians not only into "Americans," but into southern Americans. Regardless of their economic status, Acadians, too, would come to embrace this unique distinction during the nearly six decades of Louisiana's antebellum period. For some, the embrace came early. Brasseaux goes on: "Acadians' growing acceptance of slavery gradually transformed their transplanted culture, particularly in the water bottoms, where staple crop production slowly began to take root. Though slaveholders still constituted a minority of the total Acadian population in the early 1800s, a majority of those residing along the Mississippi River and Bayou Teche owned chattel by 1810, and they produced large surpluses of cotton for sale to the New Orleans commercial establishment."16

And then the war came. ...

Louisiana's Antebellum Acadian Governors and Lieutenant Governors

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

The first indisputably 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 and cotton planter and land speculator 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. ...

In 1846, Trasimond Landry of Ascension Parish was elected the first lieutenant governor of Louisiana. ...02

During the late antebellum period, a scion of one of the largest Acadians families became the second Acadian governor of Louisiana. Paul Octave, eldest son of Paul Hébert and his first wife Marie Eugénie Hamilton, was a native of Iberville Parish on the upper Acadian Coast, where he was born on his father's plantation in December 1818. Paul Octave graduated first in his class at Jefferson College in St. James Parish in 1836. He was age 18. He also was first in his class at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1840. He was age 22 when he graduated. He married Cora Laetitia Wills, daughter of Anglo Americans Thomas C. Vaughn and Harriet L. Winn, at the St. Gabriel church in August 1842 while on active duty with the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Their son Thomas Paul was born in July 1844 and Robert Octave in October 1846. Paul Octave fought in the Mexican War in 1846-47 and was brevetted colonel for gallantry at Molino del Rey in the campaign against Mexico City. After he resigned his commission, he was elected governor of Louisiana in 1851, the youngest ever elected to that office up to that time (he was only age 33), and served from January 1852 until January 1856. From January to March 1861, he served on Louisiana Governor Thomas O. Moore's five-man state Military Board. During the War of 1861-65, Paul Octave served as colonel of the 1st Regiment Louisiana Heavy Artillery and, like his double first cousin Louis Hébert of Iberville, rose to the rank of brigadier general. Later in the war, Paul Octave commanded the Department of Texas with headquarters at Galveston, as well as the Subdistrict of North Louisiana. After the war, he was active in Democratic Party politics. He died of cancer in New Orleans in August 1880, age 61, and was buried at St. Raphaël Cemetery, near Bayou Goula, close to his birthplace. If any of his sons married before 1870, they do not appear in local church records. ...06

INTRODUCTION

BOOK ONE: French Acadia

BOOK TWO: British Nova Scotia

BOOK THREE: Families, Migration, and the Acadian "Begats"

BOOK FOUR: The French Maritimes

BOOK FIVE: The Great Upheaval

BOOK SIX: The Acadian Immigrants of Louisiana

BOOK SEVEN: French Louisiana

BOOK EIGHT: A New Acadia

BOOK TEN: The Louisiana Acadian "Begats"

BOOK ELEVEN: The Non-Acadian "Cajun" Families of South Louisiana

BOOK TWELVE: Acadians in Gray

SOURCE NOTES - BOOK NINE

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

01a. See Bernard, Teche, 70-71; Brasseaux & Fontenot, Steamboats on Louisiana's Bayous, 41-42, 207-08; Johnson, W., River of Dark Dreams, chap. 3.

02. See Marshall, M., Gallant Creoles, 8; Landry family page.

03. See Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun, chap. 3; Faber, Land of Dreams, xii, 5-6, 8-10, 282; Hall, G. M., Africans in Colonial LA; Hatfield, Claiborne, chap. 5; McMichael, Atlantic Loyalites, 66-67, 70-71, 73-74.

For the many differences between the Spanish and Anglo-American systems of slavery, see G. M. Hall; Hatfield, McMichal; Book Eight.

04. Quotations from Bernard, Teche, 59; McMichael, Atlantic Loyalites, 63, 72; Gilbert C. Din, "Caso Calvo, Sébastien Calvo de la Puenta y O'Farrill, marqués de," in DLB, 158. See also Baumgartner, South to Freedom; Hatfield, Claiborne, chap. 5; McMichael, 73; online Wikipedia, "Adams-Onís Treaty," "Treay of Limits (Mexico-United States)"; Books Seven & Eight.

The Americans initially declared the boundary between the U.S. & Spanish Mexico lay along the Rio Grande, which would have included all of TX! See Hatfield.

05. Bernard, Teche, notes that the current spelling of St. Martinville did not appear until the early 20th centry. See also Appendix; Books Seven & Eight.

06. See Books Ten & Twelve; Hébert family page.

10. Quotation from Hebert, D., Southwest LA Records, 2-A:63, 86, 203, 248, 311, 352, 394, 469, 619, 879. See also Hebert, D., 1-A: Introductory Notes, 2-A:653, 2-A:85, 351, 470; Appendix.

11. See Appendix; Appendix.

12. See Appendix.

13. See Brasseaux & Conrad, eds., The Road to LA; McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties, 154.

14. See Appendix; Appendix.

15. Quotations from Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun, 4-5. See also Dormon, Cajuns, 30; Books Five, Seven, & Eight.

According to ethnologist James H. Dormon, the term "genteel Acadian" was first used by folklorist Patricia K. Rickels of USL (now ULL) in her essay "The Folklore of Acadians" in Conrad, ed., The Cajuns, 229. Dormon says Professor Rickels used the terms "Genteel Acadians" and "just plain 'Cajuns,'" but her actual terminology was "Genteel Acadians" and "Just Plain Coonasses."

16. Quotation from Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun, 5.

17. See Faber, Land of Dreams, chap. 9; McMichael, Atlantic Loyalites, chap. 7 & Epilogue; Book Eight.

18. Quotation from McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties, 151.

19. Quotations from McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties, 151-52.

20. Quotations from McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties, 153, 156. See also McMichael, 152, 154-55, 157-59, 175.

21. See Faber, Land of Dreams, 294-96; McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties, 159-64.

22. Quotations from McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties, 164. See also Faber, Land of Dreams, 295-96; McMichael 165-70; "The Republic of West Florida (1810)," at https://exploresouthernhistory.com/westflorida.html;online Wikipedia, "Fulwar Skipwith."

23. See Faber, Land of Dreams, 295-96; McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties, 169-71, 175; "The Republic of West Florida (1810)."

McMichael details the abortive attack on Mobile by West Floridians and the Kemper brothers in late 1810, after the creation of the short-lived republic.

24.

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

For details on Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, who served briefly as governor of LA in late 1824, see Book Eight. Thibodaux's connection to the Thibodeaus of Acadie has not been fully determined, hence the qualified language in calling Alexandre Mouton "The first indisputably Acadian governor of Louisiana."

223. See also note 05, above.

224. See Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, 1-A: 728.

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 Frenchmen, most of whom raised cattle, a decade before the Acadians arrived in 1765. As a result, the church records for the district date back to 1756. The site of the old French/Spanish post was renamed St. Martinsville in 1817 & eventually was spelled St. Martinville. See D. Hébert; note 05, above.

The Indian name is pronounced uh-TACK-uh-paw & is "officially" spelled Atakapas, but the name of the district is usually spelled Attakapas. See Book Seven.

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 the author's paternal great-grandfathers. Who knows how many other Cajuns today share blood with Gov. Mouton.

225. See DAB, 7:295; Perrin, W. H., SW LA, pt. 2:78.

The spelling of Alexandre Mouton's given name, in the records as well as in books of history & reference, is inconsistent. 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 5 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 W. H. Perrin.

226. See 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Slave Schedules, Lafayette Parish, 53-54; Dormon, Cajuns, 30; Rickels, "The Folklore of the Acadians," 223, 229-30.

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 Slave Schedules. 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, who attributes it to folklorist Patricia K. Rickels. Her essay, "The Folklore of the Acadians," categorizes Cajuns as "Genteel Acadians" and "Just Plain Coonasses." (This author confesses 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> [no longer accessible].

229. See Bragg, LA in the Confederacy, 8-10, 12, 14-15, 27-46.

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