1697-1750.
LOUISIANA.
The Mississippi to be occupied.--English
Rivalry.--Iberville.--Bienville.--Huguenots.--Views of Louis
XIV.--Wives for the Colony.--Slaves.--La Mothe-Cadillac.--Paternal
Government.--Crozat's Monopoly.--Factions.--The Mississippi
Company.--New Orleans.--The Bubble bursts.--Indian Wars.--The Colony
firmly established.--The two Heads of New France.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century an event took place that was
to have a great influence on the future of French America. This was the
occupation by France of the mouth of the Mississippi, and the
vindication of her claim to the vast and undefined regions which La
Salle had called Louisiana. La Salle's schemes had come to nought, but
they were revived, seven years after his death, by his lieutenant, the
gallant and faithful Henri de Tonty, who urged the seizure of Louisiana
for three reasons,--first, as a base of attack upon Mexico; secondly, as
a dépôt for the furs and lead ore of the interior; and thirdly, as the
only means of preventing the English from becoming masters of the
West.[287]
Three years later, the Sieur de Rémonville, a friend of La Salle,
proposed the formation of a company for the settlement of Louisiana, and
called for immediate action as indispensable to anticipate the
English.[288] The English were, in fact, on the point of taking
possession of the mouth of the Mississippi, and were prevented only by
the prompt intervention of the rival nation.
If they had succeeded, colonies would have grown up on the Gulf of
Mexico after the type of those already planted along the Atlantic:
voluntary immigrants would have brought to a new home their old
inheritance of English freedom; would have ruled themselves by laws of
their own making, through magistrates of their own choice; would have
depended on their own efforts, and not on government help, in the
invigorating consciousness that their destinies were in their own hands,
and that they themselves, and not others, were to gather the fruits of
their toils. Out of conditions like these would have sprung communities,
not brilliant, but healthy, orderly, well rooted in the soil, and of
hardy and vigorous growth.
But the principles of absolutism, and not those of a regulated liberty,
were to rule in Louisiana. The new French colony was to be the child of
the Crown. Cargoes of emigrants, willing or unwilling, were to be
shipped by authority to the fever-stricken banks of the
Mississippi,--cargoes made up in part of those whom fortune and their
own defects had sunk to dependence; to whom labor was strange and
odious, but who dreamed of gold mines and pearl fisheries, and wealth to
be won in the New World and spent in the Old; who wore the shackles of a
paternal despotism which they were told to regard as of divine
institution; who were at the mercy of military rulers set over them by
the King, and agreeing in nothing except in enforcing the mandates of
arbitrary power and the withering maxim that the labor of the colonist
was due, not to himself, but to his masters. It remains to trace briefly
the results of such conditions.
The before-mentioned scheme of Rémonville for settling the Mississippi
country had no result. In the next year the gallant Le Moyne
d'Iberville--who has been called the Cid, or, more fitly, the Jean Bart,
of Canada--offered to carry out the schemes of La Salle and plant a
colony in Louisiana.[289] One thing had become clear,--France must act
at once, or lose the Mississippi. Already there was a movement in London
to seize upon it, under a grant to two noblemen. Iberville's offer was
accepted; he was ordered to build a fort at the mouth of the great
river, and leave a garrison to hold it.[290] He sailed with two
frigates, the "Badine" and the "Marin," and towards the end of January,
1699, reached Pensacola. Here he found two Spanish ships, which would
not let him enter the harbor. Spain, no less than England, was bent on
making good her claim to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, and the
two ships had come from Vera Cruz on this errand. Three hundred men had
been landed, and a stockade fort was already built. Iberville left the
Spaniards undisturbed and unchallenged, and felt his way westward along
the coasts of Alabama and Mississippi, exploring and sounding as he
went. At the beginning of March his boats were caught in a strong muddy
current of fresh water, and he saw that he had reached the object of his
search, the "fatal river" of the unfortunate La Salle. He entered it,
encamped, on the night of the third, twelve leagues above its mouth,
climbed a solitary tree, and could see nothing but broad flats of bushes
and canebrakes.[291]
Still pushing upward against the current, he reached in eleven days a
village of the Bayagoula Indians, where he found the chief attired in a
blue capote, which was probably put on in honor of the white strangers,
and which, as the wearer declared, had been given him by Henri de Tonty,
on his descent of the Mississippi in search of La Salle, thirteen years
before. Young Le Moyne de Bienville, who accompanied his brother
Iberville in a canoe, brought him, some time after, a letter from Tonty
which the writer had left in the hands of another chief, to be
delivered to La Salle in case of his arrival, and which Bienville had
bought for a hatchet. Iberville welcomed it as convincing proof that the
river he had entered was in truth the Mississippi.[292] After pushing up
the stream till the twenty-fourth, he returned to the ships by way of
lakes Maurepas and Ponchartrain.
Iberville now repaired to the harbor of Biloxi, on the coast of the
present State of Mississippi. Here he built a small stockade fort, where
he left eighty men, under the Sieur de Sauvolle, to hold the country for
Louis XIV.; and this done, he sailed for France. Thus the first
foundations of Louisiana were laid in Mississippi.
Bienville, whom his brother had left at Biloxi as second in command, was
sent by Sauvolle on an exploring expedition up the Mississippi with five
men in two canoes. At the bend of the river now called English
Turn,--_Tour à l'Anglais_,--below the site of New Orleans, he found an
English corvette of ten guns, having, as passengers, a number of French
Protestant families taken on board from the Carolinas, with the
intention of settling on the Mississippi. The commander, Captain Louis
Bank, declared that his vessel was one of three sent from London by a
company formed jointly of Englishmen and Huguenot refugees for the
purpose of founding a colony.[293] Though not quite sure that they were
upon the Mississippi, they were on their way up the stream to join a
party of Englishmen said to be among the Chickasaws, with whom they were
trading for Indian slaves. Bienville assured Bank that he was not upon
the Mississippi, but on another river belonging to King Louis, who had a
strong fort there and several settlements. "The too-credulous
Englishman," says a French writer, "believed these inventions and turned
back."[294] First, however, a French engineer in the service of Bank
contrived to have an interview with Bienville, and gave him a petition
to the King of France, signed by four hundred Huguenots who had taken
refuge in the Carolinas after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The
petitioners begged that they might have leave to settle in Louisiana,
with liberty of conscience, under the French Crown. In due time they
got their answer. The King replied, through the minister, Ponchartrain,
that he had not expelled heretics from France in order that they should
set up a republic in America.[295] Thus, by the bigotry that had been
the bane of Canada and of France herself, Louis XIV. threw away the
opportunity of establishing a firm and healthy colony at the mouth of
the Mississippi.
So threatening was the danger that England would seize the country, that
Iberville had scarcely landed in France when he was sent back with a
reinforcement. The colonial views of the King may be gathered from his
instructions to his officer. Iberville was told to seek out diligently
the best places for establishing pearl-fisheries, though it was admitted
that the pearls of Louisiana were uncommonly bad. He was also to catch
bison calves, make a fenced park to hold them, and tame them for the
sake of their wool, which was reputed to be of value for various
fabrics. Above all, he was to look for mines, the finding of which the
document declares to be "la grande affaire."[296]
On the eighth of January, Iberville reached Biloxi, and soon after went
up the Mississippi to that remarkable tribe of sun-worshippers, the
Natchez, whose villages were on and near the site of the city that now
bears their name. Some thirty miles above he found a kindred tribe, the
Taensas, whose temple took fire during his visit, when, to his horror,
he saw five living infants thrown into the flames by their mothers to
appease the angry spirits.[297]
Retracing his course, he built a wooden redoubt near one of the mouths
of the Mississippi to keep out the dreaded English.
In the next year he made a third voyage, and ordered the feeble
establishment at Biloxi to be moved to the bay of Mobile. This drew a
protest from the Spaniards, who rested their claims to the country on
the famous bull of Pope Alexander VI. The question was referred to the
two Crowns. Louis XIV., a stanch champion of the papacy when his duties
as a Catholic did not clash with his interests as a king, refused
submission to the bull, insisted that the Louisiana country was his, and
declared that he would hold fast to it because he was bound, as a son of
Holy Church, to convert the Indians and keep out the English
heretics.[298] Spain was then at peace with France, and her new King,
the Duc d'Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV., needed the support of his
powerful kinsman; hence his remonstrance against French encroachment was
of the mildest.[299]
Besides Biloxi and Mobile Bay, the French formed a third establishment
at Dauphin Island. The Mississippi itself, which may be called the vital
organ of the colony, was thus far neglected, being occupied by no
settlement and guarded only by a redoubt near one of its mouths.
Of the emigrants sent out by the court to the new land of promise, the
most valuable by far were a number of Canadians who had served under
Iberville at Hudson Bay. The rest were largely of the sort who are
described by that officer as "beggars sent out to enrich themselves,"
and who expected the government to feed them while they looked for
pearls and gold mines. The paternal providence of Versailles, mindful of
their needs, sent them, in 1704, a gift of twenty marriageable girls,
described as "nurtured in virtue and piety, and accustomed to work."
Twenty-three more came in the next year from the same benignant source,
besides seventy-five soldiers, five priests, and two nuns. Food,
however, was not sent in proportion to the consumers; and as no crops
were raised in Louisiana, famine and pestilence followed, till the
starving colonists were forced to live on shell-fish picked up along the
shores.
Disorder and discord filled the land of promise. Nicolas de la Salle,
the _commissaire ordonnateur_, an official answering to the Canadian
intendant, wrote to the minister Ponchartrain that Iberville and his
brothers, Bienville and Chateauguay, were "thieves and knaves."[300] La
Vente, curé of Mobile, joined in the cry against Bienville, and stirred
soldiers and settlers to disaffection; but the bitterest accuser of that
truly valuable officer was the worthy matron who held the unenviable
post of directress of the "King's girls,"--that is, the young women sent
out as wives for the colonists. It seems that she had matrimonial views
for herself as well as for her charge; and she wrote to Ponchartrain
that Major Boisbriant, commander of the garrison, would certainly have
married her if Bienville had not interfered and dissuaded him. "It is
clear," she adds, "that M. de Bienville has not the qualities necessary
for governing the colony."[301]
Bienville was now chief in authority. Charges of peculation and other
offences poured in against him, and at last, though nothing was proved,
one De Muys was sent to succeed him, with orders to send him home a
prisoner if on examination the accusations should prove to be true. De
Muys died on the voyage. D'Artaguette, the new intendant, proceeded to
make the inquiry, but refused to tell Bienville the nature of the
charges against him, saying that he had orders not to do so.
Nevertheless, when he had finished his investigation he reported to the
minister that the accused was innocent; on which Nicolas de la Salle,
whom he had supplanted as intendant, wrote to Ponchartrain that
D'Artaguette had deceived him, being no better than Bienville himself.
La Salle further declared that Barrot, the surgeon of the colony, was an
ignoramus, and that he made money by selling the medicines supplied by
the King to cure his Louisianian subjects. Such were the transatlantic
workings of the paternalism of Versailles.
Bienville, who had been permitted to resume his authority, paints the
state of the colony to his masters, and tells them that the inhabitants
are dying of hunger,--not all, however, for he mentions a few
exceptional cases of prosperity. These were certain thrifty colonists
from Rochelle, who, says Bienville, have grown rich by keeping
dram-shops, and now want to go back to France; but he has set a watch
over them, thinking it just that they should be forced to stay in the
colony.[302] This was to add the bars of a prison to the other
attractions of the new home.
As the colonists would not work, there was an attempt to make Indian
slaves work for them; but as these continually ran off, Bienville
proposed to open a barter with the French West Indies, giving three red
slaves for two black ones,--an exchange which he thought would be
mutually advantageous, since the Indians, being upon islands, could no
longer escape. The court disapproved the plan, on the ground that the
West Indians would give only their worst negroes in exchange, and that
the only way to get good ones was to fetch them from Guinea.
Complaints against Bienville were renewed till the court sent out La
Mothe-Cadillac to succeed him, with orders to examine the charges
against his predecessor, whom it was his interest to condemn, in order
to keep the governorship. In his new post, Cadillac displayed all his
old faults; began by denouncing the country in unmeasured terms, and
wrote in his usual sarcastic vein to the colonial minister: "I have seen
the garden on Dauphin Island, which had been described to me as a
terrestrial paradise. I saw there three seedling pear-trees, three
seedling apple-trees, a little plum-tree about three feet high, with
seven bad plums on it, a vine some thirty feet long, with nine bunches
of grapes, some of them withered or rotten and some partly ripe, about
forty plants of French melons, and a few pumpkins. This is M.
d'Artaguette's terrestrial paradise, M. de Rémonville's Pomona, and M.
de Mandeville's Fortunate Islands. Their stories are mere fables." Then
he slanders the soil, which, he declares, will produce neither grain nor
vegetables.
D'Artaguette, no longer fancying himself in Eden, draws a dismal picture
of the state of the colony. There are, he writes, only ten or twelve
families who cultivate the soil. The inhabitants, naturally lazy, are
ruined by the extravagance of their wives. "It is necessary to send out
girls and laboring-men. I am convinced that we shall easily discover
mines when persons are sent us who understand that business."[303]
The colonists felt no confidence in the future of Louisiana. The King
was its sole support, and if, as was likely enough, he should tire of
it, their case would be deplorable. When Bienville ruled over them, they
had used him as their scapegoat; but that which made the colony languish
was not he, but the vicious system it was his business to enforce. The
royal edicts and arbitrary commands that took the place of law proceeded
from masters thousands of miles away, who knew nothing of the country,
could not understand its needs, and scarcely tried to do so.
In 1711, though the mischievous phantom of gold and silver mines still
haunted the colony, we find it reported that the people were beginning
to work, and were planting tobacco. The King, however, was losing
patience with a dependency that cost him endless expense and trouble,
and brought little or nothing in return,--and this at a time when he had
a costly and disastrous war on his hands, and was in no mood to bear
supernumerary burdens. The plan of giving over a colony to a merchant,
or a company of merchants, was not new. It had been tried in other
French colonies with disastrous effect. Yet it was now tried again.
Louisiana was farmed out for fifteen years to Antoine Crozat, a wealthy
man of business. The countries made over to him extended from the
British colonies on the east to New Mexico on the west, and the Rio del
Norte on the south, including the entire region watered by the
Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio, and their tributaries, as far north
as the Illinois. In comparison with this immense domain, which was all
included under the name of Louisiana, the present State so called is but
a small patch on the American map.
To Crozat was granted a monopoly of the trade, wholesale and retail,
domestic and foreign, of all these countries, besides the product of all
mines, after deducting one-fourth reserved for the King. He was
empowered to send one vessel a year to Guinea for a cargo of slaves. The
King was to pay the governor and other Crown officers, and during the
first nine years the troops also; though after that time Crozat was to
maintain them till the end of his term.
In consideration of these and other privileges, the grantee was bound to
send to Louisiana a specified number of settlers every year. His charter
provided that the royal edicts and the _Coutume de Paris_ should be the
law of the colony, to be administered by a council appointed by the
King.
When Louisiana was thus handed over to a speculator for a term of years,
it needed no prophet to foretell that he would get all he could out of
it, and put as little into it as possible. When Crozat took possession
of the colony, the French court had been thirteen years at work in
building it up. The result of its labors was a total population,
including troops, government officials, and clergy, of 380 souls, of
whom 170 were in the King's pay. Only a few of the colonists were within
the limits of the present Louisiana. The rest lived in or around the
feeble stockade forts at Mobile, Biloxi, Ship Island, and Dauphin
Island. This last station had been partially abandoned; but some of the
colonists proposed to return to it, in order to live by fishing, and
only waited, we are told, for help from the King. This incessant
dependence on government relaxed the fibres of the colony and sapped its
life-blood.
The King was now exchanged for Crozat and his grinding monopoly. The
colonists had carried on a modest trade with the Spaniards at Pensacola
in skins, fowls, Indian corn, and a few other articles, bringing back a
little money in return. This, their only source of profit, was now cut
off; they could sell nothing, even to one another. They were forbidden
to hold meetings without permission; but some of them secretly drew up a
petition to La Mothe-Cadillac, who was still the official chief of the
colony, begging that the agents of Crozat should be restricted to
wholesale dealings, and that the inhabitants might be allowed to trade
at retail. Cadillac denounced the petition as seditious, threatened to
hang the bearer of it, and deigned no other answer.
He resumed his sarcasms against the colony. "In my opinion this country
is not worth a straw (_ne vaut pas un fétu_). The inhabitants are eager
to be taken out of it. The soldiers are always grumbling, and with
reason." As to the council, which was to be the only court of justice,
he says that no such thing is possible, because there are no proper
persons to compose it; and though Duclos, the new intendant, has
proposed two candidates, the first of these, the Sieur de Lafresnière,
learned to sign his name only four months ago, and the other, being
chief surgeon of the colony, is too busy to serve.[304]
Between Bienville, the late governor, and La Mothe-Cadillac, who had
supplanted him, there was a standing quarrel; and the colony was split
into hostile factions, led by the two disputants. The minister at
Versailles was beset by their mutual accusations, and Bienville wrote
that his refusal to marry Cadillac's daughter was the cause of the spite
the governor bore him.[305]
The indefatigable curé De la Vente sent to Ponchartrain a memorial, in
the preamble of which he says that since Monsieur le Ministre wishes to
be informed exactly of the state of things in Louisiana, he, La Vente,
has the honor, with malice to nobody, to make known the pure truth;
after which he goes on to say that the inhabitants "are nearly all
drunkards, gamblers, blasphemers, and enemies of everything good;" and
he proceeds to illustrate the statement with many particulars.[306]
As the inhabitants were expected to work for Crozat, and not for
themselves, it naturally followed that they would not work at all; and
idleness produced the usual results.
The yearly shipment of girls continued; but there was difficulty in
finding husbands for them. The reason was not far to seek. Duclos, the
intendant, reports the arrival of an invoice of twelve of them, "so ugly
that the inhabitants are in no hurry to take them."[307] The Canadians,
who formed the most vigorous and valuable part of the population, much
preferred Indian squaws. "It seems to me," pursues the intendant, "that
in the choice of girls, good looks should be more considered than
virtue." This latter requisite seems, at the time, to have found no more
attention than the other, since the candidates for matrimony were drawn
from the Parisian hospitals and houses of correction, from the former of
which Crozat was authorized to take one hundred girls a year, "in order
to increase the population." These hospitals were compulsory asylums for
the poor and vagrant of both sexes, of whom the great Hôpital Général of
Paris contained at one time more than six thousand.[308]
Crozat had built his chief hopes of profit on a trade, contraband or
otherwise, with the Mexican ports; but the Spanish officials, faithful
instruments of the exclusive policy of their government, would not
permit it, and were so vigilant that he could not elude them. At the
same time, to his vexation, he found that the King's officers in
Louisiana, with more address or better luck, and in contempt of his
monopoly, which it was their business to protect, carried on, for their
own profit, a small smuggling trade with Vera Cruz. He complained that
they were always thwarting his agents and conspiring against his
interests. At last, finding no resource left but an unprofitable trade
with the Indians, he gave up his charter, which had been a bane to the
colony and a loss to himself. Louisiana returned to the Crown, and was
soon passed over to the new Mississippi Company, called also the Western
Company.[309]
That charlatan of genius, the Scotchman John Law, had undertaken, with
the eager support of the Regent Duke of Orleans, to deliver France from
financial ruin through a prodigious system of credit, of which
Louisiana, with its imaginary gold mines, was made the basis. The
government used every means to keep up the stock of the Mississippi
Company. It was ordered that the notes of the royal bank and all
certificates of public debt should be accepted at par in payment for its
shares. Powers and privileges were lavished on it. It was given the
monopoly of the French slave-trade, the monopoly of tobacco, the profits
of the royal mint, and the farming of the revenues of the kingdom.
Ingots of gold, pretending to have come from the new Eldorado of
Louisiana, were displayed in the shop-windows of Paris. The fever of
speculation rose to madness, and the shares of the company were inflated
to monstrous and insane proportions.
When Crozat resigned his charter, Louisiana, by the highest estimates,
contained about seven hundred souls, including soldiers, but not blacks
or Indians. Crozat's successors, however, say that the whole number of
whites, men, women, and children, was not above four hundred.[310] When
the Mississippi Company took the colony in charge, it was but a change
of despots. Louisiana was a prison. But while no inhabitant could leave
it without permission of the authorities, all Jews were expelled, and
all Protestants excluded. The colonists could buy nothing except from
the agents of the company, and sell nothing except to the same
all-powerful masters, always at prices fixed by them. Foreign vessels
were forbidden to enter any port of Louisiana, on pain of confiscation.
The coin in circulation was nearly all Spanish, and in less than two
years the Company, by a series of decrees, made changes of about eighty
per cent in its value. Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, of
trade, and of action, were alike denied. Hence voluntary immigration was
not to be expected; "but," says the Duc de Saint-Simon, "the government
wished to establish effective settlements in these vast countries, after
the example of the English; and therefore, in order to people them,
vagabonds and beggars, male and female, including many women of the
town, were seized for the purpose both in Paris and throughout
France."[311] Saint-Simon approves these proceedings in themselves, as
tending at once to purge France and people Louisiana, but thinks the
business was managed in a way to cause needless exasperation among the
lower classes.
In 1720 it was ordered by royal edict that no more vagabonds or
criminals should be sent to Louisiana. The edict, it seems, touched only
one sex, for in the next year eighty girls were sent to the colony from
the Parisian House of Correction called the Salpêtrière. There had been
a more or less constant demand for wives, as appears by letters still
preserved in the archives of Paris, the following extract from one of
which is remarkable for the freedom with which the writer, a M. de
Chassin, takes it upon him to address a minister of State in a court
where punctilio reigned supreme. "You see, Monseigneur, that nothing is
wanting now to make a solid settlement in Louisiana but a certain piece
of furniture which one often repents having got, and with which I shall
dispense, like the rest, till the Company sends us girls who have at
least some show of virtue. If there happens to be any young woman of
your acquaintance who wants to make the voyage for love of me, I should
be much obliged to her, and would do my best to show her my
gratitude."[312]
The Company, which was invested with sovereign powers, began its work by
sending to Louisiana three companies of soldiers and sixty-nine
colonists. Its wisest act was the removal of the governor, L'Épinay, who
had supplanted La Mothe-Cadillac, and the reappointment of Bienville in
his place. Bienville immediately sought out a spot for establishing a
permanent station on the Mississippi. Fifty men were sent to clear the
ground, and in spite of an inundation which overflowed it for a time,
the feeble foundations of New Orleans were laid. Louisiana, hitherto
diffused through various petty cantonments, far and near, had at last a
capital, or the germ of one.
It was the sixth of September, 1717, when the charter of the Mississippi
Company was entered in the registers of the Parliament of Paris; and
from that time forward, before the offices of the Company in the Rue
Quincampoix, crowds of crazed speculators jostled and fought from
morning till night to get their names inscribed among the stockholders.
Within five years after, the huge glittering bubble had burst. The
shares, each one of which had seemed a fortune, found no more
purchasers, and in its fall the Company dragged down with it its ally
and chief creditor, the bank. All was dismay and despair, except in
those who had sold out in time, and turned delusive paper into solid
values. John Law, lately the idol and reputed savior of France, fled for
his life, amid a howl of execration.
Yet the interests of the kingdom required that Louisiana should be
sustained. The illusions that had given to the Mississippi Company a
morbid and intoxicated vitality were gone, but the Company lingered on,
and the government still lent it a helping hand. A French writer remarks
that the few Frenchmen who were famishing on the shores of the
Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico had cost the King, since the colony
began, more than 150,000 livres a year. The directors of the Company
reported that they had shipped 7,020 persons to the colony, besides four
hundred already there when they took possession, and that 5,420 still
remained, the rest having died or escaped.[313] Besides this importation
of whites, they had also brought six hundred slaves from Guinea. It is
reckoned that the King, Crozat, and the Mississippi Company had spent
among them about eight million livres on Louisiana, without any
return.[314]
The bursting of the Mississippi bubble did not change the principles of
administration in Louisiana. The settlers, always looking to France to
supply their needs and protect them against their own improvidence, were
in the habit of butchering for food the livestock sent them for
propagation. The remedy came in the shape of a royal edict forbidding
any colonist to kill, without permission of the authorities, any cow,
sheep, or lamb belonging to himself, on pain of a fine of three hundred
livres; or to kill any horse, cow, or bull belonging to another, on pain
of death.
Authority and order were the watchwords, and disorder was the rule. The
agents of power quarrelled among themselves, except when they leagued
together to deceive their transatlantic masters and cover their own
misdeeds. Each maligned the other, and it was scarcely possible for the
King or the Company to learn the true state of affairs in their distant
colony.
Accusations were renewed against Bienville, till in 1724 he was ordered
to France to give account of his conduct, and the Sieur Perier was sent
out to take his place. Perier had no easy task. The Natchez Indians,
among whom the French had made a settlement and built a fort called Fort
Rosalie, suddenly rose on their white neighbors and massacred nearly
all of them.[315] Then followed a long course of Indian wars. The French
believed that there was a general conspiracy among the southern tribes
for their destruction,--though this was evidently an exaggeration of the
danger, which, however, was serious. The Chickasaws, a brave and warlike
people, living chiefly in what is now western Tennessee and Kentucky,
made common cause with the Natchez, while the more numerous Choctaws,
most of whose villages were in the present State of Mississippi, took
part with the French. More than a thousand soldiers had been sent to
Louisiana; but Perier pronounced them "so bad that they seem to have
been made on purpose for the colony."[316] There were also about eight
hundred militia. Perier showed little vigor, and had little success. His
chief resource was to set the tribes against one another. He reports
that his Indian allies had brought him a number of Natchez prisoners,
and that he had caused six of them, four men and two women, to be burned
alive, and had sent the rest as slaves to St. Domingo. The Chickasaws,
aided by English traders from the Carolinas, proved formidable
adversaries, and when attacked, ensconced themselves in stockade forts
so strong that, as the governor complains, there was no dislodging the
defenders without cannon and heavy mortars.
In this state of things the directors of the Mississippi Company, whose
affairs had gone from bad to worse, declared that they could no longer
bear the burden of Louisiana, and begged the King to take it off their
hands. The colony was therefore transferred from the mercantile
despotism of the Company to the paternal despotism of the Crown, and it
profited by the change. Commercial monopoly was abolished. Trade between
France and Louisiana was not only permitted, but encouraged by bounties
and exemption from duties; and instead of paying to the Company two
hundred per cent of profit on indispensable supplies, the colonists now
got them at a reasonable price.
Perier was removed, and again Bienville was made governor. Diron
d'Artaguette, who came with him as intendant, reported that the
colonists were flying the country to escape starvation, and Bienville
adds that during the past year they had subsisted for three months on
the seed of reeds and wild grasses.[317] The white population had rather
diminished than increased during the last twelve years, while the
blacks, who had lately conspired to massacre all the French along the
Mississippi, had multiplied to two thousand.[318] A French writer says:
"There must have been a worm gnawing the root of the tree that had been
transplanted into so rich a soil, to make it wither instead of growing.
What it needed was the air of liberty." But the air of liberty is
malaria to those who have not learned to breathe it. The English
colonists throve in it because they and their forefathers had been
trained in a school of self-control and self-dependence; and what would
have been intoxication for others, was vital force to them.
Bienville found the colony again threatened with a general rising, or,
as he calls it, a revolt, of the Indian tribes. The Carolina traders,
having no advantage of water-ways, had journeyed by land with
pack-horses through a thousand miles of wilderness, and with the aid of
gifts had instigated the tribes to attack the French. The Chickasaws
especially, friends of the English and arch-enemies of Louisiana, became
so threatening that a crushing blow against them was thought
indispensable. The forces of the colony were mustered to attempt it; the
enterprise was mismanaged, and failed completely.[319] Bienville tried
to explain the disaster, but his explanation was ill received at court;
he was severely rebuked, reproved at the same time for permitting two
families to emigrate to St. Domingo, and sharply ordered to suffer
nobody to leave Louisiana without express license from Versailles.
Deeply wounded, he offered his resignation, and it was accepted.
Whatever his failings, he had faithfully served the colony, and gained
from posterity the title of Father of Louisiana.
With the help of industrious nursing,--or, one might almost say, in
spite of it,--Louisiana began at last to strike roots into the soil and
show signs of growth, though feebly as compared with its sturdy rivals
along the Atlantic seaboard, which had cost their King nothing, and had
been treated, for the most part, with the coolest neglect. Cavelier de
la Salle's dream of planting a firm settlement at the mouth of the
Mississippi, and utilizing, by means of it, the resources of the vast
interior, was, after half a century, in some measure realized. New
France (using that name in its broadest geographical sense) had now two
heads,--Canada and Louisiana; one looking upon the Gulf of St. Lawrence,
and the other upon the Gulf of Mexico. Canada was not without jealousy
of her younger and weaker sister, lest she might draw away, as she had
begun to do at the first, some of the most active and adventurous
elements of the Canadian population; lest she might prove a competitor
in the fur-trade; and lest she should encroach on the Illinois and other
western domains, which the elder and stronger sister claimed as her own.
These fears were not unfounded; yet the vital interests of the two
French colonies were the same, and each needed the help of the other in
the prime and all-essential task of keeping the British colonies in
check. The chiefs of Louisiana looked forward to a time when the great
southern tribes,--Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and even the dreaded
Chickasaws,--won over by French missionaries to the Church, and
therefore to France, should be turned against the encroaching English to
stop their westward progress and force them back to the borders of the
Atlantic. Meanwhile the chiefs of Canada were maturing the plan--pursued
with varying assiduity, but always kept in view--of connecting the two
vital extremities of New France by a chain of forts to control the
passes of the West, keep communications open, and set English invasion
at defiance.
FOOTNOTES:
[287] _Henri de Tonty à Cabart de Villermont, 11 Septembre, 1694_
(Margry, iv. 3).
[288] _Mémoire sur le Projet d'establir une nouvelle Colonie au
Mississippi, 1697_ (Margry, iv. 21).
[289] _Iberville au Ministre, 18 Juin, 1698_ (Margry, iv. 51).
[290] _Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction au Sieur d'Iberville_ (Margry,
iv. 72).
[291] _Journal d'Iberville_ (Margry, iv. 131).
[292] This letter, which D'Iberville gives in his Journal, is dated "Du
Village des Quinipissas, le 20 Avril, 1685." Iberville identifies the
Quinipissas with the Bayagoulas. The date of the letter was evidently
misread, as Tonty's journey was in 1686. See "La Salle and the Discovery
of the Great West," 455, _note_. Iberville's lieutenant, Sugères,
commanding the "Marin," gives the date correctly. _Journal de la Frégate
le Marin_, 1698, 1699 (Margry, iv.).
[293] _Journal du Voyage du Chevalier d'Iberville sur le Vaisseau du Roy
la Renommée en 1699_ (Margry, iv. 395).
[294] Gayarré, _Histoire de la Louisiane_ (1846), i. 69. Bénard de la
Harpe, _Journal historique_ (1831), 20. Coxe says, in the preface to his
_Description of Carolana_ (1722), that "the present proprietor of
Carolana, my honour'd Father, ... was the author of this English voyage
to the Mississippi, having in the year 1698 equipp'd and fitted out Two
Ships for Discovery by Sea, and also for building a Fortification and
settling a Colony by land; there being in both vessels, besides Sailors
and Common Men, above Thirty English and French Volunteers." Coxe adds
that the expedition would have succeeded if one of the commanders had
not failed to do his duty.
[295] Gayarré, _Histoire de la Louisiane_ (1846), i. 69.
[296] _Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction au Sieur d'Iberville_ (Margry,
iv. 348).
[297] _Journal du Voyage du Chevalier d'Iberville sur le Vaisseau du Roy
la Renommée_, 1699, 1700.
[298] _Mémoire de la Junte de Guerre des Indes. Le Ministre de la Marine
au Duc d'Harcourt_ (Margry, iv. 553, 568).
[299] Iberville wrote in 1701 a long memorial, in which he tried to
convince the Spanish court that it was for the interest of Spain that
the French should form a barrier between her colonies and those of
England, which, he says, were about to seize the country as far as the
Mississippi and beyond it.
[300] _Nicolas de la Salle au Ministre, 7 Septembre, 1706._
[301] "Il est clair que M. de Bienville n'a pas les qualités nécessaires
pour bien gouverner la colonie." Gayarré found this curious letter in
the Archives de la Marine.
[302] _Dépêche de Bienville, 12 Octobre, 1708._
[303] D'Artaguette in Gayarré, _Histoire de la Louisiane_. This valuable
work consists of a series of documents, connected by a thread of
narrative.
[304] _La Mothe-Cadillac au Ministre_, in Gayarré, i. 104, 105.
[305] "Que si M. de Lamothe-Cadillac lui portoit tant d'animositié,
c'étoit à cause du refus qu'il avoit fait d'épouser sa
fille."--_Bienville in Gayarré_, i. 116.
[306] _Mémoire du Curé de la Vente, 1714._
[307] The earlier cargoes of girls seem to have been better chosen, and
there was no difficulty in mating them. Serious disputes sometimes rose
from the competition of rival suitors.--Dumont, _Mémoires historiques de
la Louisiane_, chap. v.
[308] Prominent officials of the colony are said to have got wives from
these sources. Nicolas de la Salle is reported to have had two in
succession, both from the hospitals. Bénard de la Harpe, 107 (ed. 1831).
[309] _Lettres patentes en forme d'Édit portant établissement de la
Compagnie d'Occident_, in Le Page du Pratz, _Histoire de la Louisiane_,
i. 47.
[310] _Règlement de Régie, 1721._
[311] Saint-Simon, _Mémoires_ (ed. Chéruel), xvii. 461.
[312] _De Chassin au Ministre, 1 Juillet, 1722_, in Gayarré, i. 190.
[313] A considerable number of the whites brought to Louisiana in the
name of the Company had been sent at the charge of persons to whom it
had granted lands in various parts of the colony. Among these was John
Law himself, who had the grant of large tracts on the Arkansas.
[314] Bénard de la Harpe, 371 (ed. 1831).
[315] _Lettre du Père le Petit_, in _Lettres Édifiantes_; Dumont,
_Mémoires historiques_, chap. xxvii.
[316] "Nos soldats, qui semblent être faits exprès pour la colonie,
tants ils sont mauvais."--_Dépêche de Perier, 18 Mars, 1730._
[317] _Mémoire de Bienville, 1730._
[318] For a curious account of the discovery of this negro plot, see Le
Page du Pratz, iii. 304.
[319] _Dépêche de Bienville, 6 Mai, 1740._ Compare Le Page du Pratz,
iii. chap. xxiv.