This family is truly the exception
among Acadians who emigrated to Louisiana.
Mathieu de Goutin, the family's progenitor in Acadia, was, in fact,
no colonist at all. Born in France in c1663 to a family of the
lesser nobility, he ingratiated himself to an influential marquis and
came to Port-Royal in 1688 to serve as the King's lieutenant général civil et criminel, or "general
representative for justice," replacing the
aging Michel
Boudrot in August of
that year. Mathieu
also served as écrivain, or colonial secretary, as conseiller,
or counselor, and as trésorier,
or paymaster, at Port-Royal. In 1691, he was granted a
seigneurie at Mouscoudabouet, today's Musquodoboit, on the Atlantic side of the peninsula.
In c1689, as Acadian Governor
Louis-Alexandre de Friches de Menneval lamented, Mathieu married "foolishly
to a peasant's daughter"--17-year-old Jeanne Thibodeau.
Jeanne's father was Pierre
Thibodeau, who had come to the colony in 1654 as a young lieutenant serving
with Emmanuel Le Borgne de Bélisle and married Jeanne, daughter of
Jean Thériot
and Perrine
Rau, in c1660. Jeanne was
Thibodeau's
seventh child and sixth daughter, one of 16 children by his only wife!
Menneval was no fan of the sturdy colonist. About the time of
Jeanne
Thibodeau's marriage to Mathieu
De Goutin, the governor briefly
imprisoned and fined her father for trading brandy to the
Indians. In the late 1690s, under Menneval's successor, Joseph Robinau
de Villebon, Pierre and his sons explored and founded the Acadian settlement
of Chepoudy on the upper Baie Française, now the Bay of Fundy, so
Thibodeau was
no peasant.
Mathieu
de Goutin's
"foolish" marriage "to a peasant's daughter" produced 13 children, all but
one of them born at Port-Royal. Two of their six sons married into the
Aubert de La Chesnaye,
Puypéroux de La Fosse, and
Caron
families; the other four sons survived childhood but did not marry.
Five of their seven daughters married into the
Hertel de Cournoyer,
de Saint-Rémy,
Duboisberthelot,
Boucher, and
Sabatier
families.
Mathieu's kinship to
Pierre
Thibodeau had its consequences. It made him an enemy of the
irascible Menneval, who wrote in 1689 that De Goutin was "an
undeserving, worthless character, ... (who is) quite stubbornly
convinced of his ability, ... (and) sure that the two offices he holds
will give him a rank and authority here which are, if not above, at
least equal to that of the governor." Mathieu shared an equal
contempt for the governor and the colonial clergy whom the governor
championed. The conflict between the two colonial officials led to
Mathieu's recall, but luckily for him war intervened. In 1690,
during King William's War, New Englanders under Sir William Phips of Boston
captured Port-Royal. Phips took both the governor and the young
judge as prisoners of war but soon released them.
Menneval returned to France while Mathieu went first to Rivière St.-Jean
and then to Canada before sailing to France to plead his case to the
King. The effort paid off. In August 1692, the King granted Mathieu a
seigneurie at Mouscoudabouet,
today's Musquodoboit Harbor, an Acadian/Mi'kmaq settlement on the Atlantic
side of the peninsula.
In 1696, he received a second seigneury at Pointe-aux-Chênes, today's Oak
Point, on Rivière St.-Jean. He and his family did not live on either
seigneurie but remained at the colonial capital. In August 1696, in
one of the last campaigns of King William's War, Mathieu
accompanied Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, the future founder of Louisiana, in
an attack on English Fort William Henry at Pemiquid, today's Bristol, Maine.
(It was Iberville's destruction of Fort William Henry that led to Colonel
Benjamin Church's punitive attack on Chignecto, Acadia, later in the year.)
Mathieu returned to France after his venture at Pemiquid and was back at
Fort Nashwaak on Rivière St.-Jean, the colonial capital under Villebon,
in 1697. Mathieu clashed with Villebon and his successors as well.
Jacques-François de Memberton de Brouillon, governor at Port-Royal in
the early 1700s, complained that De Goutin was "hardly in a
position to make good judgments [as the colony's chief judge] ...
because a third of the settlers are relatives of his wife."
However, Mathieu got along well with Daniel d'Auger de Subercase, who
succeeded to power in 1706 and proved to be Acadia's last French
governor. Mathieu's oldest son, François-Marie, served as an army
cadet at Port-Royal under Subercase, who was so impressed with the young
man's performance during Queen Anne's War that he "considered
recommending his promotion to second ensign."
The De Goutin family's
fortunes took a turn for the worse in 1710. Queen Anne's War had
been raging in North America for eight years when New Englanders
captured Port-Royal one last time. After the surrender of the
capital in October, Mathieu again returned to France, taking his wife
and a dozen children with him; oldest son François-Marie, now age 20,
followed his family to France. Mathieu's thirteenth and final child, a
daughter, was born at Nantes in c1711, but the family did not remain in
the mother country very long. In
January 1714, after the Peace of Utrecht awarded peninsula Acadia,
including Port-Royal, to Britain but retained Île Royale and Île
St.-Jean for France,
the King appointed Mathieu as scrivener on Île Royale, but he did not hold
this important position very long. Mathieu died on Île Royale that
Christmas, in
his early 50s. One of his biographers captures the complexity of the
man and his contribution to Acadian history: "Traditionally,
Mathieu de Goutin has been described, somewhat unfairly, as an
'unscrupulous mischief maker.' Though his arrogance and vanity are quite
apparent, it would appear nevertheless that he was a capable official.
Indeed, his superiors persisted in recognizing this for 22 years.
Because one of the functions of effective civil officials was to serve
as a restraint upon the otherwise near-absolute power of the governor,
it is perhaps as much for this reason, as for his alliances among the
inhabitants, that Mathieu de Goutin also enjoyed the confidence
of the Acadian peasantry, who had acquired long before a natural
distaste for the inflexibility of colonial administration."
In September 1715, Jeanne
Thibodeau, now a widow with 11 minor children, requested "the
election of a guardian for them." For a time, she and her children
received rations from the King's stores. Most of her children
remained on Île Royale. Oldest son François-Marie, called
sieur like his father, served as an officer in the regular colonial
troops, as a colonial official on Île Royale and Île St.-Jean, married
twice, and created a large family; he fathered 11 children, including
seven sons, by two wives. All of his children were born at Louisbourg on
Île Royale. Mathieu and Jeanne's youngest son Joseph de Ville became an army officer, also
was called sieur, and was the only other son to create a family
of his own The four middle sons--Alexandre-Abraham, called
Abraham; Mathieu; Jacques; and Antoine--survived childhood and were
called sieur, but all died "without heirs, never having been
married." Five of the seven De Goutin daughters
married well, to army officers and colonial officials. Jeanne
Thibodeau died at Louisbourg, Île Royale, in April 1741, in her
early 70s. She never remarried. François-Marie died on Île
St.-Jean in January 1752, in his early 60s. At least one of his
sisters, Jeanne, was deported with her family from Île Royale to La
Rochelle, France, in 1758 during Le Grand Dérangement.
[See also
Book Three]
LOUISIANA
Joseph de Goutin
de Ville was, indeed, the first Acadian in Louisiana. But though
he was born and raised in greater Acadia, and his mother's family was a
large one there, giving him many cousins, he came to Louisiana not as a
harried exile, like many of his cousins, but as a young army
officer, still a bachelor, assigned to service in a French colony.
He arrived in Louisiana, in fact, decades before his cousins' Grand Dérangement.
Descendants of Joseph DE GOUTIN
DE VILLE (1705-late 1760s or 1770s)
Joseph de Ville, sixth and
youngest son of Mathieu de Goutin, colonial official, and Jeanne Thibodeau,
was born at Port-Royal in March 1705 during Queen Anne's War.
Joseph was only the second of his parents' many sons to create a family
of his own; all of his five brothers survived childhood, but only he and
his oldest brother, François-Marie, took a wife. When Joseph was
five years old, a British force captured Port-Royal, and his father took
the family to France. When Joseph was nine, his father received an
appointment as scrivener on the French-controlled island of Île Royale,
and Joseph followed his family to Louisbourg, which the French
transformed into a fortress. Joseph's father died in December
1714, soon after the family moved to Île Royale. Joseph came of
age at Louisbourg and, like his oldest brother, became an army officer
and may have served in the Louisbourg garrison as an officer of
troupes de la marine. When his mother died there in April
1741, Joseph would have been age 36. He was still unmarried.
He may have still been a part of the garrison at Louisbourg when it
surrendered to New-English and British forces in July 1745 and may have
been among the troupes de la marine transported to France, to
be exchanged for British prisoners of war. If so, he did not
remain in France very long. He came to New Orleans in c1746, while
the war was still on, perhaps still an officer on active duty. At age 42, married
Marie-Jeanne, 15-year-old daughter of Jean Caron and Marie-Anne
Monique, at New Orleans
in July 1747. She was a native of the city. They raised a large family, including at least five sons and
three daughters. Not surprisingly, most of the godfathers for
Joseph's children were fellow officers, some of them chevaliers of the
Order of St.-Louis. Daughter Françoise married into the
Peyroux family. In June 1764, Joseph received a "complete" 50x50-arpent
land grand on upper Bayou Teche, near where Bayou Fuselier flows into the
Teche, but there is no evidence that he and his
family lived there. He may have been instrumental in luring some
of his Acadian cousins to Louisiana in 1764 and 1765. His kinsman
Olivier Landry was among the first Acadian exiles to
come to the colony, in February 1764. Kinsman
Joseph
Broussard
dit
Beausoleil settled his party of 200 exiles on lower Bayou Teche in the spring of
1765. According to genealogist/historian Stephen A. White, Joseph
de Ville was the "Denville" who harbored Acadian participants in the
October 1768 revolt against Spanish Governor Ulloa at New Orleans.
Joseph died between 1768 and 1778, in his 60s or early 70s. In May 1786, his widow lay
claim to 50x40 arpents of land along the east bank of Bayou Teche
granted by Spanish Governor Miró, the title for which was confirmed by Governor Carondelet in
May 1794 and by Morales, a Spanish official, in April 1802 (this
probably was her husband's original French grant of June 1764), but there is
no evidence that she and his children moved there. She sold the
land to fellow colonist Charles Jumonville de Villier in July 1802, who
promptly sold it to Alexandre Delhomme of Attakapas.
Marie-Jeanne did not remarry. She died at New Orleans in June
1802, age about 70, and was buried in St. Louis Cathedral "in the third
section of the nave of the chapel of the Holy Virgin of the Rosary."
1
Oldest son
Jean-Baptiste-Joseph was born at New Orleans in June 1751. In
March 1764, at age 12 1/2, he stood as godfather at New Orleans for 3
1/2-year-old Jean-Baptiste, son of Jean Poirier and Madeleine
Richard, among the first Acadians to reach Louisiana. Did he
marry?
2
Charles was born at New
Orleans in October 1757.
3
Louis was born at New
Orleans in January 1760.
4
Joseph, fils, born at
New Orleans in June 1761, used the surname Bellechasse or Villechasse.
He entered Spanish service as a soldier in 1775, age 14, was appointed
a cadet in the Fixed Louisiana Infantry Regiment in 1778, and
participated in Gálvez's attack against Fort Bute and Baton Rouge in
1779, at the siege and capture of Mobile the following year, and in the
battle of Pensacola in 1781. After Gálvez's campaign in West
Florida, Joseph, fils remained to help re-establish Spanish
government in that province. In 1786, he was promoted to
lieutenant in the Fifth Company, Third Battalion of the Louisiana
Regiment and
served in the expedition led by Mobile commandant Vicente Folch against runaway slaves
in West Florida in
1789. In 1792, he left West Florida and joined the
Mississippi squadron, taking command of the galley La Felipa. In
1793, he was named a lieutenant of grenadiers in the First Battalion of
the Louisiana Regiment and stationed in New Orleans. As a
lieutenant, he served as commandant of Spanish Fort San Fernando de las Barrancas
at present-day Memphis, Tennessee, in 1797-98. In October 1797, he married Marie-Josèphe-Adélaïde, called Adélaïde, daughter of Étienne Lalande d'Alcour
and Adélaïde Oliver de Vézin, at New Orleans; his wife's paternal grandfather, Pierre-François
Olivier du Closel de Vézin, a native of Maine, Lorraine, France,
lived at Trois-Rivières, Canada, before moving to New Orleans, where he
served as royal councilor and chief surveyor and inspector of colonial
roads during the French regime; Adélaïde Lalande
d'Alcour's paternal uncle, Charles-Honoré-Hughes Olivier de Vézin,
served as regidor of New Orleans during the Spanish period and
moved his family to Bayou Teche in the 1790s.
After promotion to captain in 1798, Joseph, fils commanded the
Feliciana District, where Acadian exiles from France had settled in
1786. At the end of the Spanish period, he retired from military
service "and engaged in business enterprises in New Orleans and on the
German Coast." In 1803, French
prefect Pierre Clément, baron de Laussat, appointed him colonel and
commander of the reorganized Louisiana militia. Joseph, fils
was present at the transference of the colony to the United States on 20
December 1803 at New Orleans. He continued to
command the militia under the Americans until 1805, when he
was elected an alderman and city recorder in the municipal council at
New Orleans. In 1806, he served as president of the city council,
recorder, and judge for the Orleans Territory. He was a member of
the legislative council of the territorial General Assembly in 1806-07,
served as president of the legislative council in 1810, and was
appointed to the administrative council of New Orleans Charity Hospital
in 1811. The following year, he became a member of Louisiana's
first constitutional convention and so helped create the Pelican State.
However, he did not remain long in Louisiana. In 1814, he moved
his family to a sugar plantation in Matanzas province, Cuba, and served
in the Spanish militia there. On 8 May 1830, records show him
serving as a lieutenant colonel in the Matanzas infantry, "probably
indicating his last years were spent under the flag he had served for
most of his active career." Meanwhile, his son Jacques
Émile Adolphe was born at New Orleans in June 1808, and Jean
Louis in August 1814, on the eve of the family's emigration to
Spanish Cuba.
5
Youngest son François-Marie
was born at New Orleans in June 1765.
.
Joseph, père's daughter Marie Françoise,
widow of Pierre Charles Peyroux, died at New Orleans in June 1821,
age 69.
Joseph, père's daughter Marie-Grégoire,
"unmarried," died at New Orleans in September 1824; the priest who
recorded her burial said Marie Grégoire had been born in May 1750,
so she was age 74 at the time of her death.
CONCLUSION
From the late 1680s to 1710, the
de Goutins were a
privileged family in Acadia. Mathieu, the family's progenitor, was
second only to the governor in power and influence; at one time, he held
four important positions--chief judge of civil and criminal
matters, counselor, colonial secretary, and paymaster--and in 1691 he
was granted a seigneur on the Atlantic side of peninsula Acadia. He
complained at one point that he had "no set time for drinking and
eating, (for) I am more busy on feast days and Sundays than on working
days, (because) the settlers use these days to conduct their business
when they come to Mass." One of those settlers was Pierre
Thibodeau. When de Goutin married one of Thibodeau's
daughters, the young official established a lasting connection
with a significant number of settlers, from Port-Royal all the way
around to the upper Fundy settlements. One Acadian governor
complained that it would be difficult for de Goutin to render an
objective judgment in many civil and criminal cases "because a third of
the settlers are related to his wife." De Goutin may have
been, in fact, the only colonial official that the Acadians trusted to
look after their best interests. His long career in Acadia ended
with Britain's final seizure of Port-Royal in 1710. Although
de
Goutin was given an important position on Île Royale, now Cape
Breton Island, when the French established a colony there in 1714, he
died within a year of his appointment. His wife and children--they
had 13 of them--remained on Île Royale. De
Goutin's oldest son, François-Marie, also became a colonial
official, on Île Royale and Île St.-Jean, today's Prince Edward Island,
and was nearly as highly placed as his father had been at Port-Royal.
It was de Goutin's
youngest son, Joseph de Ville, who was the first Acadian native
to emigrate to Louisiana. By the 1740s, Joseph had come to New Orleans, perhaps still in the King's
service. In 1747,
at age 42, he married a local Creole girl
who was only in her teens, and they remained in the
colony after he retired from military service. By the early 1750s,
Joseph was an officer in
the colonial militia and "settled (in business)" at New Orleans.
He fathered at least eight children, including five sons, all born at
New Orleans. At least one of his sons, Joseph, fils, born
in 1761, married
and fathered sons of his own. As a lieutenant in the Fixed Spanish
infantry regiment of Louisiana, Joseph, fils, who used the surname
Bellechasse or Villechasse, served
as commandant of Spanish Fort San Fernando de las Barrancas at
present-day Memphis, Tennessee, in 1796-97; commanded the Feliciana
District as a captain in 1798; and, as a colonel, commanded the Louisiana militia during the
final days of French control in Louisiana as well as during the early
American period, before becoming a fixture in New Orleans and Louisiana
territorial politics. In 1814, he moved to his sugar plantation in Matanzas,
Cuba; was serving as a lieutenant colonel of the Matanzas infantry in
May 1830; and died there probably in the 1830s "under the flag he had served
for most of his active career."
According to
genealogist/historian Stephen A. White, Joseph de Ville's kinship with many of
his fellow Acadians may have been a factor in so many of them coming to
Louisiana. Scholars note that Olivier Landry of Chignecto,
whom the British had deported to Georgia, was a kinsman of the de
Goutins (Olivier's paternal grandmother, Marie Thibodeau, was
Joseph de Ville's mother's older sister). As the story goes, while Olivier and his family languished at Savannah
at the end of the final war with Britain, they somehow communicated with
their cousin in New Orleans, who informed them that the French authorities
in Louisiana would welcome Acadians there. The Landrys and
three other families--the Cormiers, Poiriers, and
Richards, 21 in all--left Savannah for Louisiana via Mobile
in December 1763 and reached New Orleans the following February--the
first recorded Acadian families in Louisiana. Olivier and Joseph
may have enjoyed a tearful reunion, and it would be no surprise if
Joseph was kin to other members of the party as well (de Goutin's
eldest son Jean-Baptiste De Ville, only 12 years old, served as
godfather for 3-year-old Jean-Baptiste, one of Jean Poirier's
sons, soon after the party reached New Orleans). Olivier, Jean,
and their fellow exiles went on to Cabanocé, on the river above the city, and sent
word out by the remarkable Acadian grapevine that the French authorities
in Louisiana had indeed welcomed them to the colony. Exactly a year later, in
February 1765, the first large contingent of Acadian exiles, 200 men,
women, and children led by resistance fighter Joseph Broussard
dit Beausoleil (another kinsman of Joseph de Goutin de Ville;
Broussard's wife, now deceased, was a niece of Joseph de Ville's
mother), reached New Orleans from Halifax via Cap-Français,
St.-Domingue, and settled on Bayou Teche, not far from a land grant held by
Joseph de Ville. Hundreds more Acadians came from Halifax later that year, and
more from Maryland in the next four years.
It is possible, then, that Joseph
de Goutin de Ville, the first Acadian in Louisiana, played a significant role in his kinsmen's mass migration to the
lower Mississippi valley. Joseph de Ville's contribution was so
significant, in fact, that Stephen A.
White calls him "the Godfather of the New Acadia in Louisiana."
White adds that during the October 1768 Creole-led rebellion against the
unpopular Spanish Governor Antonio de Ulloa, the Acadians who
participated in the uprising rallied at Joseph de Goutin's home
in New Orleans, evidence that the "first Acadian" remained close to his
fellow Acadiennes, at least for political purposes.
Of Joseph de Ville's
five sons, only the fourth one, Joseph, fils, seems to have
created a family of his own. The younger Joseph, who used the
surname Bellechasse or Villechasse, served from a young
age in the Spanish service, married into the colony's French-Creole
elite, and, after a military career more distinguished than his
father's, became a successful New Orleans businessman. In 1814, he
took his family to Cuba, where they lived on one of his sugar
plantations. He was still there, at Matanzas, in 1830, serving as
a lieutenant colonel of the colonial militia. By then, the
family's name disappears from South Louisiana records.
In Louisiana, the family's name also is
spelled Degoutin, Degoutins, Desgoutin, Deville, Deville Degouin,
Deville Degoutain, Deville Degoutin, De Ville De Goutin, Deville Des
Goutins, Deville Des Gouttain, De Ville De Goutin Bellechasse, Deville
Degoutin Villechasse. [See also
Book Ten]
Sources: Jane B. Chaillot, "Bellechasse,
Joseph Deville DE GOUTIN," in DLB, 60, source of quotations; Clark, A.H., Acadia, 116,
118, 147n72; Conrad, Attakapas Domesday Book, 1:35, 47-48;
De Ville, LA Troops 1720-1770, 124; De Ville, Mississippi Valley Mélange, 2:14; Faragher,
A Great & Noble Scheme, 430; Eric R. Krause, "GOUTIN,
François-Marie," DCB, 3:264-65; McDermott,
ed., The Spanish in the Mississippi Valley, 45n18; NOAR, vols. 1, 2,
4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16; Bernard Pothier, "GOUTIN,
Mathieu de," in DCB, 2:257-58, source of quotes; White, DGFA-1, 756-59, 1508-09; White, DGFA-1 English, 155-56,
source of quotation; Stephen A. White, "The First Acadian in Louisiana:
Joseph DE GOUTIN de Ville," in <acadian-cajun.com/degoutin.htm>
[currently inaccessible];
Stephen A. White, "Joseph DE GOUTIN de Ville: The Godfather of the New
Acadian in Louisiana," at <acadianmemorial.org>;
<www.usskidd.com/heritage-nationalguard.html>
[currently inaccessible].
The hyperlink attached to an individual's name is connected to a list of Acadian
immigrants for a particular settlement and provides a different perspective
on the refugee's place in family and community.