Class ._EMq._ Rook ^C^C l. (^li^htN" COPYKIGHT DEPOSIT. '^ . .' »/ ^:' 'L'! ''r'l'W^ r-ii'l !/\: ■ >C^ .''1 '. ■"■' JacUson Square, New Orleans, formerly the Place d'Armes. The Creoles OF Louisiana George W. Cable Author of " Old Creole Days," " The Grauhine; " Dr. Sevier," etc. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1^ vy. CoPVRUiHT, 1884, BV CHARLES SCKIl'.NER'S SONS TROWS niNTmS AND eOOKBINDING COMPANY, NEW YORK. CONTENTS. PAGE I. — Who are the Creoles? 1 II. — French Founders, 9 III. — The Creoles' City, ...... 17 IV. — African Slaves and Indian Wars, . . .28 V. — The New Generation, 37 VI. — The First Creoles, 41 Vll. — Praying to the King, 53 VIII. — Ulloa, Aubky, and the Superior Council, . . 57 IX. — The Insurrection, G4 X. — The Price of Half-convictions, . . . .68 XI.— Count O'Reilly and Spanish Laws, . . .72 XII.— Spanish Conciliation, 80 XIII. — The American Revolution on the Gulf Side, . 85 XIV. — Spanish New Orleans, . . . . . .94 XV. — How Bore made Sugar, 108 XVI. — The Creoles Sing the Marseillaise, . . .114 XVII.— The Americans, 118 VI CONTENTS. XVIII. — Spain aoainst Fati:, .... XIX.— New Okleans Souoiit— Louisiana Bought, XX.— New Orleans in 1.S(»;5, . XXI.— Fkom Subjects to Citizens, . XXII. — Buhk's CoNsriK.vcv, . XXIII. — The West Inpian Cousin, XXIV. — TlIH PlUATKS OK BaKATAUIA, . XXV. — Bau.vtahia Dkstkoyei), . XXVI.— The Buitisii Invasion, . XXVII.— The Battle of New Oule.vns, XXVIII. — The End of the Pikatks, XXIX. — F.\UBOUUG Ste. Maiue, . XXX. — A IIuNDUED Thousand People, XXXI.— Flush Timks, .... XXXIl. — Why not Biocer than London, XXXIII.— The School-master, XXXIV.— Later Days, .... XXXV.— Inundations, .... XXXVI. — Sauve's Crevasse, . XXXVII.— The Days of Pestilence, XXXVIIL— The Gre.\t Epidemic, . XXXIX. — Brighter Skies, PAGE i:W \m 141 147 10(5 101 172 185 189 203 210 217 227 240 2r,(J 261 266 276 284 291 303 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE Jackson Square, New Orleans, formerly the Place d'Armes, Frontispiece Map of Louisiana, Facing p. 1 Bienville, 11 Plan op City, showing Buildings, 15 Old Ursuline Convent, 21 In the New Convent Garden, 24 Old Villa on Bayou St. John, ...... 43 Old Canal formerly in Dauphine Street, . . . .47 "Cruel O'Reilly." (From a miniature in possession of Hon. Charles Gayarre, of Louisiana.), 75 Old Cabildo as built by Almonaster, 1794, and corner of THE Plaza, ' . , .97 "Gratings, balconies, and lime-washed stucco," . . 101 The "Old Basin," 105 Etienne de Bore, Ill In the Cabildo, 114 A Royal Street Corner, 117 Vlll LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAOB TiiK Mahiony House, where Loris Philippe stopped in 1798, 127 Autographs fhom the Aiuiiives, i;j4 TUANSOM IN THE PoNTALHA lillLUINdS, JaCKSON St^UAUE, . 140 Wii.i.iAM CiiAiiLEs Cole Claiboune, Goveunok of Loiisi- ANA KUOM 1803 TO 1816, 143 Rev. Father Antonio de Seoeli.a (Pkue Antoine), . . 145 In Rue du Maine, 159 Bakatarian Luggers at the Fruit LANoiNti, . . 182 Jackson's Headquarters, 195 Packenuam's Headquarters (from the rear), . . 197 The Battle-Ground, 201 Old Spanish Cottage in Royal Street, Scene of Andrew Jackson's Trial, 204 Tomb of Governor Claiborne's Family, .... 208 Old Bourse and St. Louis Hotel. (Afterward the St.\te House.), 221 The Picayune Tier, , 226 A Cotton Press and Yard, 229 Entrance to a Cotton Yard, 233 The Old Bank in Toulouse Street, 237 Among the Markets, 243 Exchange Alley. (Old Passage de la Bourse.) Looking toward the American Quarter, 247 Old Passage de la Bourse. Looking toward the French Quarter, 250 LIST or ILLUSTRATIONS. ix PAGE Behikd the Old Fuench Market, 353 A Crevasse. (Story's Plantation, 1882.), .... 270 In the Quadroon Quarter 274 A Full Kiver. (Lower front corner of the Old Town.), . 277 A Cemetery Walk. (Tombs and "Ovens."), .... 294 The Old Calaboza, . . 309 An Inner Court — Royal Street, 311 Old Spanish Gateway and Stair in the Cabildo, . . 314 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. I. WHO ARE THE CREOLES? /~\NE city in the United States is, without pretension ^-"^ or intention, picturesque and antique. A quaint Southern-European aspect is encountered in the narrow streets of its early boundaries, on its old Place d'Armes, along its balconied fa9ade8, and about its cool, flowery inner courts. Among the great confederation of States whose Anglo- Saxon life and inspiration swallows up all alien immigra- tions, there is one in which a Latin civilization, sinewy, valiant, cultured, rich, and proud, holds out against extinc- tion. There is a people in the midst of the population of Louisiana, who send representatives and senators to the Federal Congress, and who vote for the nation's rulers. They celebrate the Fourth of July ; and ten days later, with far greater enthusiasm, they commemorate that great Vv.^.^tV.^^'a'a V\.X. 9i Longitude MAP OF LOUISIANA, Showing, 1st, the country of the French-speaking populations, bounded on the east by the Mississippi, on tlie south by the Gulf of Mexico, and on tlie west and northeast by arbitrary right lines; and, 2d, the Bayou Tcche running southeasterly through this region, and divid- ing roughly between the prairies, occupied mainly by the Acadians, and the Swamp country adjacent to the Mississippi, the home of the Creoles. 2 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. Fourtcentli that saw the fall of the Bastile, Other citi- zens of the United States, hut not themselves, they call Americans. AVIu) are they ? AVhcre do they live ? Take the map of Louisiana. Draw a line from the southwestern to the northeastern corner of the State ; let it turn thence down the Mississippi to the little river-side town of Baton Tlouge, the State's seat of government; there draw it eastward through lakes Maurepas, Pontchar- train, and Borgne, to the Gulf of Mexico; thence pass along the Gulf coast hack to the starting-point at the mouth of the Sahine, and you will have compassed rudely, but accurately enough, the State's eighteen thousand seven hundred and fifty square miles of delta lands. About half the State lies outside these bounds and is more or less hilly. Its population is mainly an Anglo- American moneyed and landed class, and the blacks and mulattoes who were once its slaves. The same is true of the population in that part of the delta lands north of Red River. The Creoles are not there. Across the southern end of the State, from Sabine Lake to Chandeleur Bay, with a north-and-south width of from ten to thirt}'^ miles and an average of about fifteen, stretch the Gulf marshes, the wild haunt of myriads of birds and water-fowl, serpents and saurians, hares, rac- coons, wild-cats, deep-bellowing frogs, and clouds of in- sects, and by a few hunters and oystermen, whose solitary and rarely frequented huts speck the wide, green horizon WHO AKE THE CREOLES ? 3 at remote intervals. Neither is the home of the Creoles to be found here. North of these marshes and within the bounds already set lie still two other sorts of delta country. In these dwell most of the French-speaking people of Louisiana, both white and colored. Here the names of bayous, lakes, villages, and plantations are, for the most part, French ; the parishes (counties) are named after saints and church-feasts, and although for more than half a century there has been a strong inflow of Anglo-Americans and English-speaking blacks, the youth still receive their edu- cation principally from the priests and nuns of small colleges and convents, and two languages are current : in law and trade, English ; in the sanctuary and at home, French. These two sorts of delta country are divided by the Bayou Teche. West of this stream lies a beautiful ex- panse of faintly undulating prairie, some thirty-nine hun- dred square miles in extent, dotted with artificial home- stead groves, with fields of sugar-cane, cotton, and corn, and with herds of ponies and keen-horned cattle feeding on its short, nutritious turf. Their herdsmen speak an ancient French patois, and have the blue eyes and light brown hair of Northern France. But not yet have we found the Creoles. The Creoles smile, and sometimes even frown at these ; these are the children of those famed Nova Scotian exiles whose ban- ishment from their homes by British arms in 1755 has so 4 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. often been celebrated in romance ; they still bear the name of Acatlians. They are found not only on this westei-n side of the Teche, but in all this French-speaking region of Louisiana, But these vast prairies of Attakapas and Opelousas are peculiarly theirs, and here tliey largely out- number that haughtier Louisianian who endeavors to withhold as well from him as from the " American " the proud appellation of Creole. Thus we have drawn in the lines upon a region lying between the mouth of Red River on the north and the (xulf marshes on the south, east of the Tcche and south of Lakes Borgne, Pontchartrain, and Maurepas, and the Bayou Manchac, However he may be found elsewhere, this is the home, the realm, of the Louisiana Creole. It is a region of incessant and curious paradoxes. The feature, elsewhere so nearly universal, of streams rising from elevated sources, growing by tributary inflow, and moving on to empty into larger water-courses, is entirely absent. The circuit of inland water supply, to which our observation is accustomed elsewhere — commencing with evaporation from I'emote watery expanses, and ending M'ith the junction of streams and their down-flow to the sea — is here in great part reversed ; it begins, instead, with the influx of streams into and over the land, and though it in- cludes the seaward movement in the channels of main streams, yet it yields up no small part of its volume by an enormous evaporation from millions of acres of overflowed swamp. It is not in the general rise of waters, but in WHO ARE THE CREOLES? 5 their subsidence, that the smaller streams deliver their contents toward the sea. From Red River to the Gulf the early explorers of Louisiana found the Mississippi, on its western side, receiving no true ti'ibutary ; but instead, all streams, though tending toward the sea, yet doing so by a course directed away from some larger channel. Being the offspring of the larger streams, and either still issuing from them or being cut off from them only by the growth of sedimentary deposits, these smaller bodies were seen taking their course obliquely away from the greater, along the natural aqueducts raised slightly above the general level by the deposit of their own allu- vion. This deposit, therefore, formed the bed and banks of each stream, and spread outward and gently downward on each side of it, varying in width from a mile to a few yards, in proportion to the size of the stream and the dis- tance from its mouth. Such streams called for a new generic term, and these explorers, generally military engineers, named them bay- ous, or hoyaus : in fortification, a branch trench. The Lafourche (" the fork,") the Boeuf , and other bayous were manifestly mouths of the Red and the Mississippi, gradually grown longer and longer through thousands of years. From these the lesser bayous branched off con- fusedly hither and thither on their reversed watersheds, not tributaries, but, except in low water, tribute takers, bearing off the sediment-laden back waters of the swollen channels, broad-casting them in the intervening swamps, 6 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. and, as tlie time of subsidence came on, leturnini; them, greatly diminished by evaporation, in dark, wood-stained, and shiggish, but clear streams. The whole system was one primarily of irrigation, and only secondarily of drainage. On the banks of this immense fretwork of natural dykes and sluices, though navigation is still slow, circuitous, and impeded with risks, now lie hundreds of miles of the richest plantations in America; and here it was that the French colonists, first on the Mississippi and later on the great bayous, laid the foundations of the State's agricul- tural wealth. The scenery of this land, where it is still in its wild state, is weird and funereal ; but on the banks of the large bayous, broad fields of corn, of cotton, of cane, and of rice, open out at frequent intervals on either side of the bayou, pushing back the dark, pall-like curtain of moss-draped swamp, and presenting to the passing eye the neat and often imposing residence of the planter, the white double row of field-hands' cabins, the tall red chimney and broad gray roof of the sugar-house, and beside it the huge, square, red brick bagasse-burner, into which, during the grinding season, the residuum of crushed sugar-cane passes unceasingly day and night, and is consumed with the smoke and glare of a conflagration. Even when the forests close in upon the banks of the stream there is a wild and solemn beauty in the shifting scene which appeals to the imagination with special WHO AKE THE CREOLES? 7 strength when the cool morning lights or the warmer glows of evening impart the colors of the atmosphere to the surrounding wilderness, and to the glassy waters of the narrow and tortuous bayous that move among its shadows. In the last hour of day, those scenes are often illuminated with an extraordinary splendor. From llie boughs of the dark, broad-spreading live-oak, and the phantom-like arms of lofty cypresses, the long, motionless pendants of pale gray moss point down to their inverted images in the unruffled waters beneath them. Nothing breaks the wide-spread silence. The light of the declin- ing sun at one moment brightens the tops of the cy- presses, at another glows like a furnace behind their black branches, or, as the voyager reaches a western turn of the bayou, swings slowly round, and broadens down in dazz- ling crimsons and purples upon the mirror of the stream. Now and then, from out some hazy shadow, a heron, white or blue, takes silent flight, an alligator crossing the stream sends out long, tinted bars of widening ripple, or on some high, fire-blackened tree a flock of roosting vul- tures, silhouetted on the sk}', linger with half-opened, unwilling wing, and flap away by ones and twos until the tree is bare. Should the traveller descry, first as a mote intensely black in the midst of the brilliancy that overspreads the water, and by-and-by revealing itself in true outline and proportion as a small canoe con- taining two men, whose weight seems about to engulf it, and by whose paddle-strokes it is impelled with 8 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. such evenness and speed that a long, glassy wave gleams continually at either side a full inch higher than the edge of the Loat, he will have before him a picture of nature and human life that might have been seen at any time since the French fathers of the Louisiana Creoles colonized the Delta. Near the southeastern limit of this region is the spot where these ancestors first struck permanent root, and the growth of this peculiar and interesting civilization bearan. 11. FRENCH FOUNDERS. T" ET us give a final glance at the map. It is the general belief that a line of elevated land, now some eighty or ninety miles due north of the Louisiana coast, is the prehistoric shore of the Gulf. A range of high, abrupt hills or bluffs, which the Mississippi first en- counters at the city of Yicksburg, and whose southwest- ward and then southward trend it follows thereafter to the town of Baton Rouge, swerves, just below this point, rapidly to a due east course, and declines gradually until, some thirty miles short of the eastern boundary of Louisiana, it sinks entirely down into a broad tract of green and flowery sea-marsh that skirts, for many leagues, the waters of Mississippi Sound. Close along imder these subsiding bluffs, where they stretch to the east, the Bayou Manchac, once Iberville River, and the lakes beyond it, before the bayou was artificially obstructed, united the waters of Mississippi River with those of Mississippi Sound. Apparently this line of water was once the river itself. Xow, however, the great flood, turning less abruptly, takes a southeasterly course, and, gliding tortuously, wide, yellow, and sunny, 10 TIIK ("KEOLES OF LOUISIANA. between low sandy banks lined with endless brakes of Cottonwood and willow, cuts off between itself and its ancient channel a portion of its own delta formation. This fragment of half-made country, comprising some- thing over seventeen hundred square miles of river-shore, dark swamp-land, and bright marsh, was once widely known, both in commerce and in international politics, as Orleans Island. Its outline is extremely irregular. At one place it is fifty-seven miles across from the river shore to the eastern edge of the marshes. Near the lower end there is scarcely the range of a " musket-shot " between river and sea. At a point almost midway of the island's length the river and Lake Pontchartrain approach to within six miles of each other, and it was here that, in February, 1718, was founded the city of New Orleans. Strictly, the genesis of Louisiana dates nineteen years earlier. In 1691), while Spain and Great Britain, each for itself, were endeavoring to pre-empt the southern out- let of the Mississippi Valley, France had sent a small fleet from Brest for the same purpose, under command of the brave and adventurous Canadian, D'Iberville. This gal- lant sailor was the oldest living member in a remarkably brilliant group of brothers, the sons of M. Lemoyne de Bienville, a gentleman of Quebec, who had been able, as it appears, to add to the family name of Lemoyne the title of a distinct estate for six of his seven sons. With D'Iberville came several remoter kinsmen and at FRENCH FOdNDEKS. 11 least two of his brothers, Sanvolle and Bienville. The eldest of the seven was dead, and the name of his estate, Bienville, had fallen to the youngest, Jean Baptiste by name, a midshipman of but twenty-two, but destined to be the builder, as his older brother was the founder, of Louisiana, and to weave his name, a golden thread, in- to the history of the Creoles in the Mississippi delta. D'Iberville's arrival in the northern waters of the Gulf was none too soon for his purpose. He found the Span- 12 THE CKEOLES OP LOUISIAISrA. iards just establishing tlicinselves at Pensacola with a tieet of too nearly his own's strength to be amiably crowded aside, and themselves too old in diplomacy to listen to his graceful disshnulations ; wherefore he sailed farther west and planted his colony upon some low, infertile, red, sandy bluffs covered with live-oaks and the towering yellow-pine, on the eastern shore of a beautiful, sheltered Avater, naming the bay after the small tribe of Indians that he found there, Biloxi. The young Bienville, sent on to explore the water-ways of the country westward, met a British officer ascending the Mississippi with two vessels in search of a spot fit for colonization, and by assertions more ingenious than candid induced him to withdraw, where a long bend of the river, shining in the distant plain, is still pointed out from the towers and steeples of New Orleans as the English Turn, The story of the nineteen years that followed may be told almost in a line. Sauvolle, left by D'Iberville in charge at Biloxi, died two years after and was succeeded by Bienville. The governorship of the province thus assumed by the young French Canadian sailor on the threshold of manhood he did not finally lay down until, an old Knight of St. Louis turning his sixty-fifth year, he had more than earned the title, fondly given him by the Creoles, of " the father of Louisiana." He was on one occasion still their advocate before the prime minister of France, when bowed by the weight of eighty- six winters, and still the object of a public affection that seems but his just due FRENCH FOUNDERS. 13 when we contemplate in his portrait the broad, calm fore- head, the studious eye, observant, even searching, and yet quiet and pensive, the slender nostrils, the firm-set jaw, the lines of self -discipline, the strong, wide, steel-clad shoulders and the general air of kind sagacity and reserved candor, which it is easy to believe, from his history, were nature's, not the i)ainter's, gifts. It was he who projected and founded l^ew Orleans. The colony at Biloxi, and later at Mobile, was a feeble and ravenous infant griped and racked by two internal factions. One was bent on finding gold and silver, on pearl-fishing, a fur trade, and a commerce with South America, and, therefore, in favor of a sea-coast establishment ; the other advocated the importation of French agriculturists, and their settlement on the alluvial banks of the Mississippi. Bienville, always the foremost explorer and the wisest counsellor, from the beginning urged this wiser design. For years he was overruled under the commercial policy of the merchant monopolist, Anthony Crozat, to whom the French king had farmed the province. But when Crozat's large but unremunerative privileges fell into the hands of John Law, director-general of the renowned Mississippi Company, Bienville's counsel prevailed, and steps were taken for removing to the banks of the Mississippi the handful of French and Canadians who were struggling against starvation, in their irrational search after sudden wealth on the sterile beaches of Mississippi Sound and Massacre Island. 14 TJIE CKKOLKS OF LOUISIANA. The year before liieiiville secured this long-sought authorization to found a new post on the Mississippi he had selected its site. It was immediately on the bank of the stream. iS'o later sagacity has ever succeeded in pointing out a more favorable site on which to put up the gates of the great valley ; and here — though the land was only ten feet above sea-level at the M-ater's edge, and sank (juickly back to a niininniiii height of a few inches; though it was almost wholly covered with a cypress swamp and was visibly subject to frequent, if not annual overflow ; and though a hundred miles lay between it and the mouth of a river whose current, in times of flood, it was maintained, no vessel could overcome — here Bienville, in 1718, changed from the midshipman of twenty-two to the frontiersman, explorer, and commander of forty-one, placed a detachment of twenty-five convicts and as many carpenters, who, with some voyageurs from the Illinois Kiver, made a clearing and erected a few scattered huts along the bank of the river, as the beginning of that which he was determined later to make the capital of the civili- zation to whose planting in this gloomy wilderness he had dedicated his life. III. THE CREOLES' CITY. Ql CARCELY had the low, clay chimneys of a few woods- ^-^ men's cabins sent np, through a single cliacge of seasons, their lonely smoke-wreaths among the silent wil- low jungles of the Mississippi, when Bienville began boldly to advocate the removal of the capital to this so-called " New Orleans." But, even while he spoke, the place suffered a total inundation. Yet he continued to hold it as a trading post of the Mississippi Company, and, by the close of 1720, began again, in colonial council, to urge it as the proper place for the seat of government ; and though out-voted, he sent his chief of engineers to the settlement " to choose a suitable site for a city worthy to become the capital of Louisiana." Thereupon might have been seen this engineer, the Sieur Le Blond de la Tour, in the garb of a knight of St. Louis, modified as might be by the exigencies of the fron- tier, in command of a force of galley-slaves and artisans, driving stakes, drawing lines, marking off streets and lots, a place for the church and a middle front square for a place-d'armes ; day by day ditching and palisading ; 18 THH CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. tlirowing up a rude levee along the livei-front, and gradu- ally gathering the scattered settlers of the neighborhood into the form of a town. But the location remained the same. A hundred frail palisade huts, some rude shelters of larger size to serve as church, hospital, government house, and company's warehouses, a few vessels at anchor in the muddy river, a population of three hundred, mostly men — such was the dreary hunter's camp, hidden in the stifling undergrowth of the half-cleared, miry ground, where, in the naming of streets, the dukes of Orleans, Chartres, Maine, and Bourbon, the princes of Conti and Conde, and the Count of Toulouse, had been honored ; where, finally, in June to August, 1722, the royal commissioners con- senting, the company's effects and troops were gradu- ally removed and Bienville set up his head-quarters ; and where this was but just done when, in September, as an earnest of the land's fierce inhospitality, a tornado whisked away church, hospital, and thirty dwellings, prostrated the crops, and, in particular, destroyed the priceless rice. The next year, 1723, brought no better fortune. At home, the distended Mississippi Bubble began to show its filminess, and the distress which it spread everywhere came across the Atlantic. As in France, the momentary stay-stomach was credit. On this basis the company's agent and the plantation grantees harmonized ; new in- dustries, notably indigo culture, were introduced ; debts THE CREOLES' CITY. 19 were paid with paper, and the embryo city reached the number of sixteen hundred inhabitants ; an agricul- tiu-al province, whose far-scattered plantations, missions, and military posts counted nearly five thousand souls, promised her its commercial tribute. Then followed collapse, the scaling of debts by royal edict, four repetitions of this gross expedient, and, by 1726, a sounder, though a shorn, prosperity. The year 1728 completed the first decade of the town's existence. Few who know its history will stand to-day in Jackson Square and glance from its quaint, old-fashioned gardening to the foreign and antique aspect of the sur- rounding architecture — its broad verandas, its deep ar- cades, the graceful patterns of its old wrought-iron balco- nies, its rich effects of color, of blinding sunlight, and of cool shadow — without finding the fancy presently stirred up to overleap the beginning of even these time- stained features, and recall the humbler town of Jean- Baptiste Lemoyne de Bienville, as it huddled about this classic spot when but ten years had passed since the first blow of the settler's axe had echoed across the waters of the Mississippi. This, from the beginning, was the Place d'Armes. It was of the same rectangular figure it has to-day : larger only by the width of the present sidewalks, an open plat of coarse, native grass, crossed by two diagonal paths and occupying the exact middle of the town fi-ont. Behind it, in the mid-front of a like apportionment of ground 20 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. reserved for ecclesiastical uses, where St. Louis Cathedral now overlooks the square, stood the church, built, like most of the public buildhigs, of brick. On the chui-ch's right were the small guard-house and prisons, and on the left the dwelling of some Capuchins. The spiritual care of all that portion of the province between the mouths of the Mississippi and the Illinois was theirs. On the front of the square that Hanked the Place d'Armes above, the government-house looked out upon the river. In the corresponding s(piare, on the lower side, but facing from the river and diagonally opposite the Capuchins, were the quarters of the government employes. The grounds that faced the upper and lower sides of the Place d'Armes were still unoccupied, except by cordwood, entrenching tools, and a few pieces of parked artillery, on the one side, and a small house for issuing rations on the other. Just off the river front, in Toulouse Street, were the smithies of the Marine ; correspondingly placed in Du Maine Street were two long, narrow buildings, the king's warehouses. Ursulines Street was then Arsenal Street. On its first upper corner was the hospital, with its grounds extending back to the street behind ; while the empty square oppo- site, below, reserved for an arsenal, was just receiving, in- stead, the foundations of the convent-building that stands there to-day. A company of IJrsuline nuns had come the year before from France to open a school for girls, and to attend the sick in hospital, and were quartered at the other end of the town awaiting tlie construction of their THE CKEOLES' CITY. 23 nunnery. It was finished in 1730. They occupied it for ninety -four years, and vacated it only in 1824 to remove to the larger and more retired convent on the river shore, near the present loM^er limits of the city, where they remain at the present day. The older house — one of the oldest, if not the oldest building, standing in the Missis- sippi Valley — became, in 1831, the State House, and in 1834, as at present, the seat of the Archbishop of Louisiana. For the rest, there was little but forlorn confusion. Though the plan of the town comprised a parallelogram of five thousand feet river front by a depth of eighteen hundred, and was divided into regular squares of three hundred feet front and breadth, yet the appearance of the place was disorderly and squalid. A few cabins of split boards, thatched with cypress bark, were scattered con- fusedly over the ground, surrounded and isolated from each other by willow-brakes and reedy ponds and sloughs bristling with dwarf palmetto and swarming with reptiles. Xo one had built beyond Dauphine Street, the fifth from the river, though twenty-two squares stood empty to choose among ; nor below the hospital, nor above Bienville Street, except that the Governor himself dwelt at the extreme upper corner of the town, now the corner of Customhouse and Decatur Streets. Orleans Street, cutting the town transversely in half behind the church, was a quarter fa- vored by the unimportant ; while along the water-front, and also in Chartres and Royale Streets, just behind, rose 24 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. the lionies of tlic colony's officiien- ville at its head, removed tu the new settlement of New Orleans, and so made it the colony's capital. In 1 r23, it was exercising powers of police. It was by this body that, in 17*24, was issued that dark enactment which, through the dominations of three successive national powers, reniainod on the statute-book — the lilack Code. One of its aiticles forbade the freeing of a slave without reason shown to the Council, and by it esteemed good. In 172G, its too free spirit was already receiving the repri- mand of the home government. Yet, in 1T28, the king assigned to it the supervision of land titles and power to appoint and remove at will a lower court of its own mem- bers. AVith each important development in the colony it had grown in numbers and powers, and, in 1748, especially, had been given discretionary authority over land titles, such as must have been a virtual control of the whole ag- ricultural comnmnity's moral suppoi-t. Al)0ut 1 752 it is seen resisting the encroachments of the Jesuits, though these were based on a connnission from the Bishop of Quebec; and it was this body that, in 17G3, boldly dis- possessed this same order of its plantations, a year before the home government expelled it from France. In 1758, with Kerlerec at its head, this Council had been too strong for Ilochemore, the intendant-commissary, and too free — ULLOA, AUBRY, AND THE SUPERIOR COUNCIL. 59 jostled him rudely for three years, and then procured of the king his dismissal from oflfice. And lastly, it was this body that d'Abbadie, in another part of the despatch already quoted from, denounced as seditious in spirit, urging the displacement of its Creole members, and the filling of their seats with imported Frenchmen. Ulloa, the Spanish governor, stepped ashore on the Place d'Armes in a cold rain, with that absence of pomp which characterizes both the sailor and the recluse. The people received him in cold and haughty silence that soon turned to aggression. Foucault, the intendant-commis- eary, was the first to move. On the very day of the gov- ernor's arrival he called his attention to the French paper money left unprovided for in the province. There were seven million livres of it, worth only a fourth of its face value. "What M'as to be done about it ?" The governor answered promptly and kindly : It should be the circulat- ing medium at its market value, pending instructions from Spain. But the people instantly and clamorously took another stand : It must be redeemed at par. A few days later he was waited on by the merchants. They presented a series of written questions touching their commercial interests. They awaited his answers, they said, in order to know lioiu to direct their future actions. In a despatch to his government, Ulloa termed the address " imperious, insolent, and menacing." The first approach of the Superior Council was quite as offensive. At the head of this body sat Aubry. He was 60 Tin-: niEOLKs ok Louisiana. loyal to his king, brave, and iletcrniined to execute the orders he held to transfer the province. The troops were under his command. But, by the rules of the Council it was the intendant, Foucault, the evil genius of the hoin-, M'ho performed the functions of president. Foucault ruled the insurgent Council and signed its ])ronuncianiien- tos, while Aubry, the sternly protesting but helpless governor, filled the seat of honor. And here, too, sat Lafreniere, the attorney-general. It was he who had harangued the notables and the people on the Place d'Arnies when they sent Milliet to France. The petition to the king was from his turgid pen. lie was a Creole, the son of a poor Canadian, and a striking type of the people that now looked to him as their leader : of com- manding mien, luxurious in his tastes, passionate, over- bearing, ambitious, replete with wild energy, and equipped with the wordy eloquence that moves the ignor- ant or half-informed. The Council requested Ulloa to exhibit his commission. He replied coldly that he would not take possession of the colony until the arrival of ad- ditional Spanish troops, which he was expecting ; and that then his dealings would be with the French gov- ernor, Aubry, and not with a subordinate civil body. Thus the populace, the merchants, and the civil govern- ment — which included the judiciary — ranged themselves at once in hostility to Spain. The military soon moved forward and took their stand on the same line, refusing point-blank to pass into the Spanish service. Aubry ULLOA, AUBRY, AND THE SUPERIOR COUNCIL. 61 alone recognized the cession and Ulloa's powers, and to him alone Ulloa showed his commission. Yet the Span- ish governor virtnally assumed control, set his few Span- ish soldiers to building and garrisoning new forts at im- portant points in various quarters, and, with Aubry, endeavored to maintain a conciliatory policy pending the arrival of ti'oops. It was a policy wise only because momentarily imperative in dealing with such a people. They were but partly conscious of their rights, but they were smarting under a lively knowledge of their wrongs', and their impatient temper could brook any other treat- ment with better dignity and less resentment than that which trifled with their feelings. Ill-will began, before long, to find open utterance. An arrangement by which the three or four companies of French soldiers remained in service under Spanish pay, but under French colors and Aubry's command, was fiercely denounced. Ulloa was a man of great amiability and enlighten- ment, but nervous and sensitive, l^ot only was the de- fective civilization around him discordant to his gentle tastes, but the extreme contrast which his personal char- acter offered was an intolerable offence to the people. Yet he easily recognized that behind and beneath all their frivolous criticisms and imperious demands, and the fierce determination of their Superior Council to resist all con- tractions of its powers, the true object of dread and aver- sion was the iron tyrannies and extortions of Spanish 02 TlIK CKEOLES OF LOUISIANA. colonial revenue lawti. This feeling it was that had pro- duced the offensive memorial of the merchants ; and yet he met it kindly, and, only two months after his arrival, began a series of concessions lookinu- to the j»reservation of trade with France and the French West Indies, which the colonists had believed themselves doomed to lose. The people met these concessions with resentful remon- strance. One of the governoFs proposals was to fix a schedule of reasonable prices on all imported goods, through the appraisement of a board of disinterested citi- zens. Certainly it was unjust and oppressive, as any Spanish commercial ordinance was likely to be ; but it was intended to benefit the mass of consumers. But con- sumers and suppliers for once had struck hands, and the whole people raised a united voice of such grievous com- plaint that the ordinance was verbally revoked. A further motive— the fear of displacement — moved the oflice-holders, and kept them nuiliciously diligent. Every harmless incident, every trivial mistake, was caught up vindictively. The governor's " manner of liv- ing, his tastes, his habits, his conversation, the most triv- ial occurrences of his household," were construed offen- sively. He grew incensed and began to threaten. In December, 1767, Jean Milhet returned from France. His final word of ill-success was only fuel to the fire. The year passed away, and nine months of 176S followed. UUoa and Aubry kept well together, though Aubry thought ill of the Spaniard's administrative powers. In ULLOA, AUBKY, AlVD THE SUPERIOR COUNCIL. 63 their own eyes they seemed to be having some success. They were, wrote Anbry, " gradually molding Frenchmen to Spanish domination." The Spanish flag floated over the new military' posts, the French ensign over the old, and the colony seemed to be dwelling in peace under both standards. But Ulloa and the Creoles were sadly apart. Kepeated innovations in matters of commerce and police were only so many painful surprises to them. They M'ere embar- rassed. They were distressed. What was to become of their seven million livres of paper money no one yet could tell. Even the debts that the Spaniards had assumed were unpaid. Values had shrunk sixty-six per cent. There was a specie famine. Insolvency was showing it- self on every hand ; and the disasters that were to follow the complete establishment of Spanish power were not known but might be guessed. They returned the gov- ernor distrust for distrust, censure for censure, and scorn for scorn. And now there came rumor of a royal decree suppress- ing the town's commerce with France and the West Indies. It was enough. The people of Kew Orleans and its adjacent river " coasts," resolved to expel the Span- iards. IX. THE INSURRECTION. "VTEW ORLEANS, in 1768, w'as still a town of some thirty-two hundred persons only, a third of whom were black slaves. It had lain for thirty -five years in the reeds and willows with scarcely a notable change to re- lieve the poverty of its aspect. During the Indian wars barracks had risen on either side of the Place d' Amies. When, in 1758, the French evacuated Fort Duquesne and floated down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Or- leans, Kerlerec added other barracks, part of whose ruin still stands in the neighborhood of Barracks Street. Sa- lients had been made at the corners of its palisade wall ; there was " a banquette within and a veiy ti-itling ditch without." Just beyond this wall, on a part of the land of the banished Jesuits, in a large, deeply shaded garden, was a house that had become the rendezvous of a con- spiracy. Lafrcni^re sat at the head of its board. His majestic airs had got him the nickname of "Louis Quatorze." Foucault was conspicuous. Ills friendship with Madame Pradal, the lady of the house, was what is called notor- THE INSURRECTION". " 65 ions. Jean Milhet and a brother, Joseph Milhet, and other leading merchants, Caresse, Petit, and Poupet, were present ; also Doncet, a prominent lawyer, and Marquis, a captain of Swiss troops ; with Balthasar de Masan, Hardy de Boisblanc, and Joseph Yillere, planters and public men, the last, especially, a man of weight. And, as if the name of the city's founder must be linked with all patriotic disaster, among the number were two of Bien- ville's nephews — Noyan, a young ex-captain of cavalry, and Bienville, a naval lieutenant, Koyan's still younger brother. On the 25th of October, ITCS, the mine was sprung. From twenty to sixty miles above New Orleans, on the banks of the Mississippi, lies the Cote des Allemands, the German coast, originally colonized by John Law's Alsa- tians. Here the conspirators had spread the belief that the Spanish obligations due the farmers there would not be paid ; and when, on the date mentioned, Dlloa sent an agent to pay them, he was arrested by a body of citizens under orders from Yillere, and deprived of the money. Just beyond the German coast lay the coast of the " Acadians." From time to time, since the peace with England, bands of these exiles from distant IvTova Scotia bad found their way to Louisiana, some by way of the American colonies and the Ohio River, and some — many, indeed — by way of St. Domingo, and had settled on the shores of the Mississippi above and below the mouth of La Fourche and down the banks of that bayou. Hardships 66 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. and afflictions had come to be the salt of their bread, and now a last hope of ending their days under the Hag for which they had so pathetic an affection depended njxjn the success of this uprising. They joined the insurgents. On the 27th, Foucault called a meeting of the Superior Council for the 2Sth. In the night, the guns at Tchou- pitoulas gate — at the upper river corner — were spiked. Farther away, along a narrow road, with the wide and silent Mississippi now hidden l)y intervening brakes of cotton-wood or willow and now broadening out to view, but always on the right, and the dark, wet, moss-draped forest always on the left, in rude garb and with rude- weapons — nmskets, fowling pieces, anything — the Ger- mans and Acadians were marching upon the town. On the morning of the 2Sth, they entered Tchoupi- toulas gate. At the head of the Acadians was Xoyan. A'illeru led the Germans. Other gates were forced, other companies entered, stores and dwellings were closed, and the insurgents paraded the streets. "All,'' says Aubry, "was in a state of combustion." The people gathered on the square. " Louis Quatorze " harangued them. So did Doucet and the brothers Milhet. Six hundred persons signed a petition to the Superior Council, asking the official action wliicli the members of that body, then sit- ting, were ready and waiting to give. Aubry had a total force of one hundred and ten men. What he could do he did. lie sent for Lafreniere, an-d afterward for Foucault, and protested bitterly, but in vain. THE INSURRECTION. 67 Under liis protection, Ulloa retired with his family on board the Spanish frigate, which liad slipped her cables from the shore and anchored out in the river. The Span- ish governor's staff remained in his house, which they had barricaded, surrounded by an angry mob that filled the air with huzzas for the King of France. The Council met again on the 29th. A French flag had been hoisted in the Place d'Armes, and a thousand insurgents gathered around it demanding the action of the Council. As that body was about to proceed to its final measure, Aubry ap- peared before it, warning and reproaching its members. Two or three alone wavered, but Lafreniere's counsel pre- vailed, and a report was adopted enjoining Ulloa to " leave the colony in the frigate in which he came, with- out delay." Aubry was invited by the conspirators to resume the government. His response was to charge them with re- bellion and predict their ruin. Ulloa, the kindest if not the wisest well-wisher of Louisiana that had held the gu- bernatorial commission since Bienville, sailed, not in the Spanish frigate, which remained " for i-epairs," but in a French vessel, enduring at the last moment the songs and jeers of a throng of night roysterers, and the menacing presence of sergeants and bailiffs of the Council. X. THE PRICE OF HALF-CONVICTIONS. n^IlE next move on the part of all concerned was to hurry forward messengers, with declarations, to the courts of France and Spain. The colonists sent theirs ; Aubry and Ulloa, each, his ; and Foucault, his — a paper characterized by a shameless double-dealing which leaves the intendant-commissary alone, of all the participants in these events, an infamous memory. The memorial of the people was an absurd confusion of truth and misstatement. It made admissions fatal to its pleadings. It made arrogant announcements of unap- plied principles. It enumerated real wrongs, for which France and Spain, but not Ulloa, were to blame. And with these it mingled such charges against the banished governor as : That he had a chapel in his own house ; that he absented himself from the French churches ; that he enclosed a fourth of the public common to pasture his private horses; that he sent to Havana for a wet-nurse ; that he ordered the abandonment of a brick-yard near the town, on account of its pools of putrid water ; that he re- moved leprous children from the town to the inhospitable THE PRICE OF HALF-CONVICTIONS. 69 settlements at the mouth of the river ; that he forbade the public whipping of slaves in the town ; that masters had to go six miles to get a negro flogged ; that he had landed in New Orleans during a tlmnder-and-rain storm, and under other ill omens ; that he claimed to be king of the colony ; that he offended the people with evidences of sordid avarice ; and that he added to these crimes — as the text has it — "many others, equally just [!] and terrible!" Kot less unhappy were the adulations offered the king, who so justly deserved their detestation. The conspira- tors had at first entertained the bold idea of declaring the colony's independence and setting up a republic. To this end Noyan and his brother Bienville, about three months before the outbreak, had gone secretly to Governor El- liott, at Pensacola, to treat for the aid of British troops. In this they failed ; and, though their lofty resolution, which, by wiser leaders, among a people of higher disci- pline or under a greater faith in the strength of a just cause, might have been communicated to the popular will, was not abandoned, it was hidden, and finallv suffocated under a pretence of the most ancient and servile loyalty : " Great king, the best of kings [Louis XV.], father and protector of your subjects, deign, sire, to receive into your royal and fraternal bosom the children who have no other desire than to die your subjects," etc. The bearers of this address were Le Sassier, St. Lette, and Milhet. They appeared before the Due de Choiseul unsupported ; for the aged Bienville was dead. St. Lette, 70 THE CIIEOLKS OF LOUISIANA. t'liosen because lie liad once been an intimate of the duke, was cordially recei\'ed, I]nt the deputation as a body met only frowns and the intelligence that the King of Spain, earlier informed, was taking steps for a permanent occu- pation of the refractory province. St. Lette remained in the duke's bosom. Milhet and Le Sassier returned, carry- ing with them oidy the cold comfort of an order refund- ing the colonial debt at three-fifths of its nominal value, in five per cent, bonds. It was the fate of the Creoles — possibly a climatic re- sult — to be slack-handed and dilatory. Month after month followed the October uprising without one of those incidents that would have succeeded in the history of an earnest people. In March, 1TG9, Foucault covertly de- serted his associates, and denounced them, by letter, to the French cabinet. In April the Spanish frigate sailed from New Orleans. Three intrepid men (Loyola, (^ay- arre, and Navarro), the governmental staff which Ulloa had left in the province, still remained, unmolested. ]^ot a fort was taken, though it is probable not one could have withstood assault. Kot a spade was struck into the ground, or an obstruction planted, at any strategic point, throughout that whole " Creole " spring time which stretches in its exuberant perfection from January to June. At length the project of forming a republic was revived and was given definite shape and advocacy. But priceless time had been thrown away, the opportune moment had THE PEICE OF IIALF-CO]NrVICTIONS. 71 passed, an overwhelming Spanish array and fleet was approaching, and the spirit of tlie people was paralyzed. The revolt against the injustice and oppression of two royal powers at once, by " the first European colony that entertained the idea of proclaiming her independence," M-as virtually at an end. It was the misfortune of the Creoles to be wanting in habits of mature thought and of self-control. They had not made that study of reciprocal justice and natural rights which becomes men who would resist tyranny. They lacked the steady purpose bred of daily toil. With these qualities, the insurrection of 1768 might have been a revolution for the overthrow of French and Spanish misrule and the establishment and maintenance of the right of self-government. The Creoles were valorous but unreflecting. They had the spirit of freedom, but not the profound principles of right wdiich it becomes the duty of revolutionists to assert and struggle for. They arose fiercely against a confusion of real and fancied grievances, sought to be ungoverned rather than self-governed, and, following distempered leaders, became a warning in their many-sided short-sighted- ness, and an example only in their audacious courage. They had now only to pay the penalties ; and it was by an entire inversion of all their first intentions that they at length joined in the struggle which brought to a vigorous birth that American nation of which they finally became a part. XI. COUNT O'REILLY AND SPANISH LAWS. /~\iS"E morning toward the end of July, ITGO, the peo- ^■^^ pie of New ( )rleiins were brought suddenly to their feet by the news that the Spaniards were at the mouth of the river in overwhelming force. There was no longer any room to postpone choice of action. Marquis, the Swiss captain, with a white cockade in his hat (he had been the leading advocate for a republic), and Petit, with a pistol in either hand, came out upon the ragged, sunburnt grass of the Place d'Armes and called upon the people to defend their liberties. About a hun- dred men joined tliem ; but the town was struck motion- less with dismay ; the few who had gathered soon disap- peared, and by the next day the resolution of the leaders was distinctly taken, to submit. But no one fled. On the second morning Aubry called the people to the Place d'Armes, promised the clemency of the illustrious Irishman who commanded the approachiiig expedition, and sent them away, connnanding them to keep within their homes. Lafreniere, Marquis, and Milhet descended the river. COUNT o'KEILLY AND SPANISH LAWS. 73 appeared before the coinniander of the Spaniards, and by the mouth of Lafreniere in a submissive but brave and manly address presented the liomage of the people. The captain-general in his reply let fall the word seditious. Marquis boldly but respectfully objected. He was ans- wered with gracious dignity and the assurance of ultimate justice, and the insurgent leaders returned to Xew Or- leans and to their liomes. The Spanish fleet numbered twenty-four sail. For more than three weeks it slowly pushed its way around the bends of the Mississippi, and on the 18th of August it finally furled its canvas before the town. Aubry drew np his French troops with the colonial militia at the bottom of the Place d'Armes, a gun was fired from the flagship of the fleet, and Don Alexandre O'Reilly, accompanied by twenty-six hundred chosen Spanish troops, and with fifty pieces of artillery, landed in unprecedented pomp, and took formal possession of the province. On the 21st, twelve of the principal insurrectionists were arrested. Two days later Foucault was also made a prisoner. , One other, Braud, the printer of the seditious documents, was apprehended, and a proclamation an- nounced that no other arrests would be made. Foucault, pleading his official capacity, was taken to France, tried by his government, and thrown into the Bastile. Braud pleaded his obligation as government printer to print all public documents, and was set at liberty. Yillere either " died raving mad on the day of his arrest," as stated in 74 TIIK (liKOLES OF LOI'ISIANA. tlio Spaiiisli official report, or met his end in the act of resisting the gnurd on board the frigate where he liad been placed in continenient. Lafr6niere, Noyan, Caresse, Marquis, and Joseph ^lilhet were condemned to be lianged. The sui)plieations both of colonists and Spanish officials saved them only from the gallows, and they fell before the iii-e of a tile of Spanish grenadiers. The volley made at least one young bride at once an orphan and a widow. For the youthful DeKoyan had been newly wed to the daughter of J.afreniere. Judge Gayarre, in his history of Louisiana, tells, as a tradition, that the young chevalier, in prison awaiting execution, being told that his attempt to escape would be winked at by the cruel captain-general, replied that he would live or die with his associates, and so met his untimely end. Against his young brother, Bienville, no action seems to have been taken beyond the sequestration of his prop- erty. He assumed the title of his unfortunate brother, and as the Chevalier de Xoyan and lieutenant of a ship of the line, died at St. Domingo nine years after. But Petit, Masan, Doucet, Boisblanc, Jean Milhet, and Pou- pet were consigned to the Morro Castle, Havana, where they remained a year, and M'ere then set at liberty, but were forbidden to return to Louisiana and were deprived of their property. About the same time Foucault was re- leased from the Bastile. The declaration of the Superior Council was burned on the same Place d'Armes that had COUNT O EEILLY AND SPANISH LAWS. 75 seen it first proclaimed. Aubry refused a liigli cominis- sion in the Spanish army, departed for France, and had ah-eady entered the River Garonne, wlien he was ship- wrecked and lost. " Cruel O'Reilly " — the captain-gen- eral was justly named. " Cruel O'Reilly." (From a miniature in possession of Hon. Charles Gayarre, of Louisiana.) There could, of course, be but one fate for the Superior Council as an official body, and the Count O'Reilly, armed with plenary powers, swept it out of existence. The ccibildo took its place. This change from French rule to Spanish lay not principally in the laws, but in the redistribution of power. The crown, the sword, and the 7C THE CUKOLES OF LOUISIANA. cross absorbed tbe lion's sbare, leaving but a morsel to be doled out, with much form and pump, to the cah'ddo. A'ery (piaint and redolent witli Spanish romance was this body, which fur the third j)art of a century ruled the pettier destinies of the Louisiana Creoles. Therein sat the six n'(/i'(lors, or rulers, whose seats, bought at first at auction, were sold from successor to successor, the crown always coming in for its share of the price. Five of them were loaded down with ponderous titles; the alferez real or royal standard bearer ; the alcalih-maijor-jyrovin- cial, who overtook and tried offenders escaped beyond town limits ; the alyuazil-tnayor, with his eye on police and prisons ; the depositario-general, who kept and dis- pensed tlie public stores ; and the recihidoi' de 2)enas de cdmara, the receiver of fines and penalties. Above these si-K sat four whom tlie six, annually passing out of office, elected to sit over their six successors. These four must be residents and householders of Kew Orleans. Xo of- ficer or attache of the financial department of the realm, nor any bondsman of such, nor any one aged under twenty-six, nor any new convert to the Catholic faith, could qualify. Two were alcaldes ordinarios, common judges. In addition to other duties, they held petty courts at evening in their own dwellings, and gave nn- written decisions ; but the soldier and the priest were be- yond their jurisdiction. A third was sindico-jyrociirador- general, and sued for town revenues ; and the fourth was town treasurer, the mayor-domo-de-jpro^rios. At the bot- COUNT o'KEILLY AND SPANISH LAWS. 77 torn of the scale was the escrihmio, or secretary, and at the top, the governor. It was like a crane, — all feathers. A sample of its powers was its right to sell and revoke at will the meat monopoly and the many other petty mnnicipal privileges which characterized the Spanish rnle and have been handed down to the present day in the city's offensive license system. The underlying design of the cabildo's creation seems to have been not to confer, but to scatter and neutralize power in the hands of royal sub-ofl5cials and this body. Loaded with titles and fettered with minute ministerial duties, it was, so to speak, the Superior Council shorn of its locks ; or if not, then, at least, a body whose members recognized their standing as fjuardians of the people and servants of the king. O'Reilly had come to set up a government, but not to remain and govern. On organizing the cabildo, he an- nounced the appointment of Don Louis de Unzaga, colonel of the regiment of Havana, as governor of the province, and yielded him the chair. But under his own higher commission of captain -general he continued for a time in control. He had established in force the laws of Castile and the Indies and the use of the Spanish tongue in the courts and the public offices. Those who examine the dusty notarial records of that day find the baptismal names, of French and Anglo-Saxon origin, changed to a Spanish orthography, and the indices made upon these in- stead of upon the surnames. 78 tup: Creoles of Louisiana. So, if laws and i^oveninient eoukl have done it, Loui- siana would have been made Spanish. But the change in the laws was not violent. There was a tone of severity and a feature of arbitrary surveillance in those of Spain ; but the principles of the French and Spanish systems had a common origin. One remotely, the other almost di- rectly, was from the Homan Code, and they were point- edly simjlar in the matters Mhich seemed, to the Creole, of supreme importance, — the nuxrital relation, and inheri- tance. But it was not long before he found that now under the Spaniard, as, earlier, under the French, the laws themselves, and their administration, pointed in very different directions. Spanish ride in Louisiana was better, at least, than French, which, it is true, scarcely deserved the name of government. As to the laws themselves, it is worthy of notice that Louisiana " is at this time the only State, of the vast territories acquired from France, Sj^ain, and Mexico, in which the civil law has been re- tained, and forms a large portion of its jurisprudence." On the 29th of October, 1770, O'lteilly sailed from Xew Orleans with most of his troops, leaving the Spanish power entirely and peacefully established. The force left by him in the colony amounted to one thousand two hun- dred men. lie had dealt a sudden and terrible blow; but lie had followed it only with velvet strokes. His sugges- tions to the home government of commercial measures advantageous to Kew Orleans and the colony, were many, and his departure was the signal for the com- COUNT O'REILLY AND SPANISH LAWS. 79 mencement of active measures intended to induce, if possible, a change in tlie sentiments of the people,— one consonant with the political changes he ' had forced upon them. Such was the kindlier task of the wise and mild Unzaga XII. SPANISH CONCILIATION. /^ROZ AT— Law-Louis XV.— Charles IIL— wlioever at one time or another was tlie transatlantic master of Louisiana managed its affairs on the same bad prin- ciple : To none of them had a colony any inherent rights. They entered into possession as cattle are let into a pas- ture or break into a field. It was simply a commercial venture projected in the interests of the sovereign's or monopolist's revenues, and restrictions were laid or indul- gences bestowed upon it merely as those interests seemed to require. And so the Mississippi Delta, until better ideas could prevail, could not show other than a gaunt, ill-nourished civilization. The weight of oppression, if the governors and other officers on the spot had not evaded the letter of the royal decrees and taught the Creoles to do the same, would actually have crushed the life out of the province. The merchants of Xew Orleans, when Unzaga took the governor's chair, dared not import from France anything but what the customs authorities chose to consider articles of necessity. AVith St. Domingo and Martinique they SPANISH CONCILIATION. 81 could only exchange lumber and grain for breadstuffs and wine. Their ships must be passported ; their bills of lading were offensively policed ; and these " privileges " were only to last until Spain could supplant them by a commerce exclusively her own. They were completely shut out from every other market in the world except certain specified ports of Spain, where, they complained, they could not sell their produce to advantage nor buy what was wanted in the province. They could employ only Spanish bottoms commanded by subjects of Spain ; these could not put into even a Spanish- American inter- mediate port except in distress, and then only under oner- ous restrictions. They were virtually throttled merely by a rigid application of the theory which had always op- pressed them, and only by the loose and flexible adminis- tration of which the colony and town had survived and grown, while Anthony Crozat had become bankrupt. Law's Compagnie d'Occident had been driven to other fields of enterprise, and Louis XV. had heaped up a loss of millions more than he could pay. Ulloa's banishment left a gate wide open which a kind of cattle not of the Spanish brand lost no time in enter- ing. "I found the English," wrote O'Reilly, in October, 1769, " in complete possession of the commerce of the colony. They had in this town their merchants and traders, with open stores and shops, and I can safely as- sert that they pocketed nine-tenths of the money spent 82 THE ciip:oli:s of Louisiana. liere. ... 1 drove off all the English traders and the other individuals of that nation whom I found in this town, and J shall admit here none of their vessels." l>ut lie recommended what may liave seemed to him a liberal measure, — an entirely free trade with Spain and Havana, and named the wants of the people : " Hour, wine, oil, iron instruments, arms, amnnmition, and every sort of manufactured goods for clothing and other domestic pur- poses," for which tliey could pay in "timber, indigo, cot- ton, furs, and a small quantity of corn and rice." Unzaga, a man of advanced years and a Spaniard of the indulgent type, when in 1770 he assumed control, saw the colony's extremity, and began at once the old policy of meeting desirable ends by lamentable expedients. His method was double-acting. He procured, on the one hand, repeated concessions and indulgences from the king, while on the other he overlooked the evasion by the people of such burdens as the government had not lifted. The Creoles on the plantations took advantage of this state of affairs. Under cover of trading with the British posts on the eastern bank of the Mississippi above Orleans Island, the English traders returned and began again to supply the Creole planters with goods and slaves. Busi- ness became brisk, for anything offered in exchange was acceptable, revenue laws were mentioned only in jest, profits were large, and credit was free and long. Against the river bank, M'here now stands the suburb of Gretna, lay moored (when they were not trading up and down the SPANISH CONCILIATION. 8S shores of the stream) two large floating warehouses, fitted up with counters and shelves and stocked with assorted merchandise. The merchants, shut out from these con- traband benefits, complained loudly to Unzaga. But they complained in vain. The trade went on, the planters prospered ; the merchants gave them crop-advances, and they turned about and, ignoring their debt, broadened their lands and bought additional slaves from the British traders. Hereupon Unzaga moved, and drawing upon his large reserve of absolute power, gently but firmly checked this imposition. The governor's quiet rule worked another benefit. While the town was languishing under the infliction of so-called concessions that were so narrowed by provisos as to be almost neutralized, a new oppression showed itself. The newly imported Spanish Capuchins opened such a crusade, not only against their French brethren, but also against certain customs which these had long allowed among the laity, that but for Unzaga's pacific intervention an exodus would have followed which he feared might even have destroyed the colony. The province could not bear two, and there had already been one. Under O'Reilly so many merchants and me- chanics had gone to St. Domingo that just before he left he had ceased to grant passports. Their places were not filled, and in 1773 Unzaga wrote to the Bishop of Cuba that, " There were not in Xew Orleans and its environs two thousand souls (possibly meaning whites) of all pro- 84 TIIK CKEOLES OF LOUISIANA. fessions and conditions," and that most of these were ex- tremely poor. But conciliation soon be^^an to take effect. Commis- sions were eagerly taken in tlie governor's " regiment of Louisiana," where the pay was large and the sword was the true emblem of power, and the offices of rey'ulor and alcalde were by-and-by occupied by the bearers of such ancient Creole names as St. Denis, La Chaise, Fleurieu, Forstall, Duplessis, Bienvenue, Dufossat, and Livaudais. In ITTG, Unzaga was made captain-gcnei-al of Caracas, and the following year, left in charge of Don Bei'nardo de Galvez, then about twenty-one j-ears of age, a people still French in feeling, it is true, yet reconciled in a measure to Spanish rule. XIII. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION ON THE GULF SIDE. "^TOW, at length, the Creole and the Anglo-American were to come into active relation to each other — a relation which, from that day to the present, has qualified every public question in Louisiana. At a happy moment the governorship of Unzaga, a man advanced in life, of impaired vision and failing health, who was begging to be put on the retired list, gave place to the virile administration of one of the most brilliant characters to be seen in the history of the Southwestern United States. Galvez was the son of the Viceroy of Mexico and nephew of the Spanish secretary of state, who was also president of the council of the Indies. He was barely grown to manhood, but he was ardent, engag- ing, brave, fond of achievement and display, and, withal, talented and sagacious. Says one who fought under him, " He was distinguished for the affability of his manners, the sweetness of his temper, the frankness of his charac- ter, the kindness of his heart, and his love of justice." A change now took place, following the drift of affairs in Europe. The French, instead of the English, mer- 86 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIAT^A. chants, coimuandcd the trade of tlie ]\Iissisi«ippi. The Britisli traders found tlicinselves suddenly treated with great rigor. Eleven of their ships, richly laden, -were seized by the new governor, while he exceeded the letter of the Franco-Spanish treaty in bestowing privileges upon the French. iS'ew liberties gave fresh value to the trade with French and Spanish- American ports. Slaves were not allowed to be brought thence, owing to their insurrec- tionary spirit ; but their importation direct from Guinea was now specially encouraged, and presently the prohibi- tion asainst those of the West Indies was removed. Galvez was, as yet, only governor ad interim • yet, by his own proclamation, he gave the colonists the right to trade with France, and, a few days later, included the ports of the thirteen British colonies then waging that war in which the future of the Creoles was so profound- ly, though obscurely, involved. Xew liberties were also given to traders with Spain ; the government became the buyer of the tobacco crop, and a French and French- West Indian immigration was encouraged. But these privileges were darkly overshadowed by the clouds of war. The English issued letters of marque against Spanish commerce, and the French took open part in the American revolution. The young governor was looking to his defences, building gun-boats, and awaiting from his king the word which would enable liim to test his military talents. Out of these very conditions, so disappointing in one THE AMERICAN KEVOLUTION ON THE GULF SIDE. 87 direction, sprang a new trade, of tlie greatest possible significance in the history of the people. Some eight years before, at the moment when the arrival of two thousand six hundred Spanish troops and the non-appear- ance of their supply-ships had driven the price of pro- visions in Kew Orleans almost to famine rates, a brig entered port, from Baltimore, loaded with flour. The owner of the cargo was one Oliver Pollock. He offered to sell it to O'Reilly on the captain-general's own terms, and finally disposed of it to him at fifteen dollars a bar- rel, two-thirds the current price. O'Reilly rewarded his liberality with a grant of free trade to Louisiana for his life-time. Such was the germ of the commerce of New- Orleans with the great ports of the Atlantic. In 1Y76, Pollock, with a number of other merchants from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, who had established themselves in New Orleans, had begun, with the counte- nance of Galvez, to supply, by fleets of large canoes, arms and ammunition to the American agents at Fort Pitt (Pittsburg). This was repeated in 1777, and, in 1778, Pollock became the avowed agent of the American Gov- ernment. Here, then, was a great turning-point. Immigration became Anglo-Saxon, a valuable increase of population taking place by an inflow from the Floridas and the United States, that settled in the town itself and took the oath of allegiance to Spain. The commercial acquaint- ance made a few years before with the Atlantic ports was 88 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. HOW extended to the growing Wtjst, and to be cut off from European sources of supply was no longer a calamity, but a lesson of that frugality and self-help in the domestic life which are the secret of public wealth. Between St. Louis and iS'ew Orleans, xsatchitoches and Xatchez (Fort Pannnire), there was sufficient diversity of products and industries to complete the circuit of an internal com- merce ; the Attakapas and Opelousas prairies had been settled by Acadian herdsmen ; in ITTS, immigrants from the Canary Islands had founded the settlement of Vene- zuela on La Fourche, Galveztown on the Amite, and that of Terre aux Bceufs just below New Orleans. A ])a])er currency supplied the sometimes urgent call fo^* a circu- lating medium, and the colonial ti-easury warrants, or lih- eranzas, were redeemed by receipts of specie from Vera Cruz often enough to keep them afloat at a moderately fair market value. Were the Ci-eoles satisfied ? This question was now to be practically tested. For in the summer of 1779 Spain declared war against Great Britain. Galvez discovered that the British were planning the surprise of Xew Or- leans. Under cover of preparations for defence he made •haste to take the offensive. Only four days before the time when he had appointed to move, a hurricane struck the town, demolishing many houses, ruining crops and dwellings up and down the river " coast," and sinking his gun riutilla. Xothing dismayed, the young connnander called the people to their old rallying ground on the THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIOIS' ON THE GULF SIDE. 89 Place d'Armes, and with a newly received commission in one hand confirming him as governor, and his drawn sword in the other, demanded of them to answer his chal- lenge : " Should he appear before the cabildo as that commission required, and take the oath of governor? Should he swear to defend Louisiana ? Would they stand by him ? " The response was enthusiastic. Then, said he, " Let them that love me follow where I lead," and the Creoles flocked around him ready for his behest. Re- pairing his disasters as best he could, and hastening his ostensibly defensive preparations, he marched, on the 22d of August, 1779, against the British forts on the Mis- sissippi. Llis force, besides the four Spanish officers who ranked in turn below him, consisted of one hundred and seventy regulars, three hundred and thirty recruits, twenty carbineers, sixty militia men, eighty free men-of- color, six hundred men from the coast (" of every condi- tion and color "), one hundred and sixty Indians, nine American volunteers, and Oliver Pollock. This little army of 1,430 men was without tents or other military furniture, or a single engineer. The gun fleet followed in the river abreast of their line of march, carrying one twenty-four, five eighteen, and four four-pounders. On the 7tli of September Fort Bute on Bayou Manchac, watli its garrison of twenty men, yielded easily to the first as- sault of the unsupported Creole militia. The fort of Baton Rouge was found to be very strong, armed with thirteen heavy guns, and garrisoned by five hundred men. 90 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. The troops Legged to be led to the assault ; l)ut Galvez landed his heavy artillery, erected batteries, and on the 21st of September, after an engagement of ten hours, re- duced the fort. Its capitulation included the surrender of Fort Panmure, with its garrison of eighty grenadiers, a place that by its position would have been very difficult of assault. The Spanish gun-boats captured in the Mis- sissippi and Manchac four schooners, a brig, and two cut- ters. On lake Pontchartrain an American schooner fitted out at I^ew Orleans captured an English privateer. A party of fourteen Creoles surprised an English cutter in the narrow waters of Bayou Manchac, and rusliing on board after their first fire, and fastening down the hatches, captured the vessel and her crew of seventy men. The Creole militia won the generous praise of their com- mander for discipline, fortitude and ardor ; the Acadians showed an impetuous fury : while the Indians presented the remarkable spectacle of harming no fugitives, and of bearing in their arms to Galvez, uninjured, children who with their mothers had hid themselves in the woods. In the following February, reenforced from Havana, and commanding the devotion of his Creole militia, Gal- vez set sail down the Mississippi, with two thousand men, — regulars, Creoles, and free blacks — and issued from that mouth of the river known as the Balize or Pass d I'Outre, intending to attack Fort Charlotte, on the Mobile River. His fleet narrowly escaped total destruction, and his landing on the eastern shore of Mobile River was at- THE AMEKICAlSr KEVOLUTION ON THE GULF SIDE. 91 tended with so much confusion and embarrassment that for a moment he contemplated a precipitate retreat in the event of a British advance from Pensacola. But the British for some reason M'ere not prompt, and Galvez pushed forward to Fort Charlotte, erected six batteries, and engaged the fort, which surrendered on the 14th of March, to avoid being stormed. A few days later, the English arrived from Pensacola in numbers sufficient to have raised the siege, but with no choice then but to re- turn whence thej had come. Galvez, at that time twenty- four years of age, was rewarded for this achievement with the rank of major-general. lie now conceived the project of taking Pensacola. But this was an enterprise of altogether another magni- tude. Failing to secure reenforcements from Havana by writing for them, he sailed to that place in October, 1780, to make his application in person, intending, if successful, to move thence directly upon the enemy. Delays and disappointments could not baffle him, and early in March, 1781, he appeared before Pensacola with a ship of the line, two frigates, and transports containing fourteen hun- dred soldiers, well furnished with artillery and ammuni- tion. On the 16th and 17th, such troops as could be spared from Mobile, and Don Estevan Miro from New Orleans, with the Louisiana forces, arrived at the western bank of the Perdido River ; and on the afternoon of the 18th, though unsupported by the fleet until dishonor was staring its jealous commander in the face, Galvez moved 92 THE ruEOLKs of Louisiana. under hot fire, through a passage of great peril, and took lip a besieging position. The investing lines of Galvez and Miro began at once to contract. Early in April, their batteries and those of the fleet opened fire from every side. But the return fire of the English, from a battery erected mider their fort, beat off the fleet, and as week after week wore on it began to appear that the siege might be unsuccessful. However, in the early part of May, a shell from the Spaniards having exploded a magazine in one of the Eng- lish redoubts, the troops from Mobile pressed quickly for- ward and occupied the ruin, and Galvez was preparing to storm the main fort, when the English raised the white flag. Thus, on the 9th of May, ITSl, Pensacola, with a garrison of eight hundred men, and the whole of West Florida, was surrendered to Galvez. Louisiana had here- tofore been" included under one domination with Cuba ; but now one of tlie several rewards bestowed upon her governor was the captain-generalship of Louisiana and "West Florida. He, however, sailed from St. Domingo to take part in an expedition against the Bahamas, leaving Colonel Miro to govern ad intei^im, and never resumed the governor's chair in Louisiana. In 1TS5, the captain- generalship of Cuba was given him in addition, and later in the same year, he laid down these offices to succeed his father, at his death, as Viceroy of Mexico. He ruled in this oflice with great credit, as well as splendor, and died sud- denly, in his thirty-eighth year, from the fatigues of a hunt. THE AMERICAN EEVOLUTIOX ON THE GULF SIDE. 93 Such is a brief summarj — too brief for full justice — of tlie achievements of the Creoles under a gallant Spanish soldier in aid of the ^va.v for American independence. Undoubtedly the motive of Spain was more conspicuous- ly and exclusively selfish than the aid furnished by the French ; yet a greater credit is due than is popularly ac- corded to the help afforded in the brilliant exploits of Galvez, discouraged at first by a timid cabildo, but sup- ported initially, finally, and in the beginning mainly, by the Creoles of the Mississippi Delta. The fact is equally true, though much overlooked even in Xew Orleans, that while Andrew Jackson was yet a child the city of the Creoles had a deliverer from British conquest in Bern- ardo de Galvez, by whom the way was kept open for the United States to stretch to the Gulf and to the Pacific. XIV. SPANISH NEW ORLEANS. "TN that city you may go and stand to-day on the spot — still as antique and quaint as the Creole mind and heart which cherish it, — where gathered in 1705 the motley throng of townsmen and planters whose bold re- pudiation of their barter to the King of Spain we have just reviewed ; where in 1768 Lafreniere harangued them, and they, few in number and straitened in purse but not in daring, rallied in arms against Spain's indolent show of authority and drove it into the Gulf. They were the first people in America to make open war distinctly for the expulsion of European rule. But it was nut by this epi- sode — it was not in the wearing of the white cockade — that the Creoles were to become an independent republic under British. protection, or an American State. "We have seen them in the following year overawed by the heavy hand of Spain, and bowing to her yoke. We have seen them ten years later, under her banner and led by the chivah'ous Galvez, at INfanchac, at Baton Bouge, at Mobile, and at PensacoLa, strike victoriously and " wiser than they knew " for the discomfiture of British power in SPANISH NEW ORLEANS. 95 America and the promotion of American independence and unity. But neither was this to bring them into the union of free States. For when the United States became a nation the Spanish ensign still floated from the flag-staff in tlie Plaza de Armas where " Cruel O'Keilly " had hoisted it, and at whose base the colonial council's declaration of rights and wrongs had been burned. There was much more to pass through, many events and conditions, before the hand of Louisiana should be unclasped from the hold of distant powers and placed in that of the American States. Through all, Xew Orleans continued to be the key of the land and river and of all questions concerning them. A glance around the old square, a walk into any of the streets that run from it north, east, or south, shows the dark imprint of the hand that held the town and province until neither arms, nor guile, nor counterplots, nor bribes, could hold them back from a destiny that seemed the- ap- pointment of nature. 96 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. For a wliilc, under Unzaga and Galvez, the frail wooden town of thirty-two hundred souls, that had been the cap- ital under French domination, showed bat little change. ]]ut 1783 brought peace. It brought also Miro's able ad- ministration, new trade, new courage, " forty vessels [in the river] at the same time," and, by 1788, an increase in number to tifty-three hundred. In the same year came the great purger of towns — fire. Don Vicente Jose Kunez, the military treasurer, lived in Chartres Street, near St. Louis, and had a ])rivate chapel. On Good Friday, the 21st of March, the wind was very high and from the south, and, either from a fall- ing candle of the altar, or from some other accident or inadvertence, not the first or the worst fire kindled by Spanish piety flared up and began to devour the in- flammable town. The people were helpless to stop it. The best of the residences, all the wholesale stores, fell before it. It swept around the north of the plaza, broad- ening at every step. The town hall, the arsenal, the jail — the inmates of which were barely rescued alive — the parish church, the quarters of the Capuchins, dis- appeared. In the morning the plaza and the levee were white with tents, and in the smoldering path of the fire, the naked chimneys of eight hundred and fifty- six fallen roofs stood as its monuments. The buildings along the immediate river-front still remained ; but nearly half the town, including its entire central part, lay in ashes. SPANISH NEW ORLEANS. 99 Another Spaniard's name stands as the exponent of a miniature renaissance. Don Andreas Almonaster y Roxas was the royal notary and alferez real. As far back as 1770 the original government reservations on either side the plaza had been granted the town to be a source of perpetual revenue by ground-rents. Almonaster be- came their perpetual lessee, the old barracks came down, and two rows of stores, built of brick between wooden pillars, of two and a half stories height, with broad, tiled roofs and dormer windows and bright Spanish awnings, became, and long continued to be the fashionable retail quarter of the town. Just outside the " Rampart," near St. Peter Street, the hurricane of 1779 — Galvez's hurricane, as we may say — had blown down the frail charity hospital which the few thousand livres of Jean Louis, a dying sailor, had founded in 1737. In 1784-8G Almonaster replaced it with a brick edifice costing $114,000. It was the same institution that is now located in Common Street, the pride of the city and State. In 1787 he built of stuccoed brick, adjoining their con- vent, the well-remembered, quaint, and homely chapel of the Ursulines. And now, to repair the ravages of fire, he in 1792 began, and in two years completed sufficiently for occupation, the St. Louis Cathedral, on the site of the burned parish church. Louisiana and Florida had just become a bishopric separate from Havana. All these works had been at his own charge. Later, by contract, 100 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. he filled the void made by the burning of the town hall — which had stood on the south side of the church, facing the plaza — erecting in its place the hall of the cabildo, the same that stands there still, made more outlandish, but not more beautiful, by the addition of a French roof. The Capuchins, on the other side of the church, had already replaced their presbytery by the building that now serves as a court-house. The town erected, on the river-front just below the plaza, a halle ties houeheries — the " old French market."' But, except for these two structures, to the hand of the old alferez real, or royal standard-bearer, belongs the fame of having thrown together around the most classic spot in the Mississippi Valley, the most picturesque group of fa9ades, roofs, and spires in picturesque New Orleans. But fate made room again for improvement. On the Sth of December, ITQi — the wind was this time from the north — some children, playing in a court in Roy ale Street, too near an adjoining hay-store, set fire to the hay. Gov- ernor Carondelet — Colonel Fran9ois Louis Hector, Baron de Carondelet, a short, plump, choleric Fleming of strong business qualities, in 1792, when he succeeded Miro, had provided, as he thought, against this contingency. But, despite his four alcaldes de harrio, with their fire-engines and firemen and axmen, the fire spread ; and in three hours — for the houses were mere tinder — again burned out of the heart of the town two hundred and twelve .stores and dwellings. The new buildings at the bottom ■' Gratings, balconies, and lime-washed stucco." SPANISH NEW ORLEANS. 103 of the plaza escaped ; but the loss was greater than that of six years before, Avhich M'as nearl}' $2,600,000. Only two stores were left standing ; the levee and the square again became the camping-ground of hundreds of inhab- itants, and the destruction of provisions threatened a famine. So shingles and thatch and cypress boards had cost enough. From this time the tile roof came into general use. As the town's central parts filled up again, it was with better structures, displaying many Spanish- American features — adobe or brick walls, arcades, inner courts, pon- derous doors and windows, heavy iron bolts and gratings (for houses began to be worth breaking into), balconies, portes-cocheres, and white and yellow lime-washed stucco, soon stained a hundred colors by sun and rain. Two-story dwellings took the place of one-story, and the general ap- pearance, as well as public safety, was enhanced. The people were busy, too, in the miry, foul-smelling streets, on the slippery side-walks and on the tree-planted levee. Little by little the home government, at the inter- cession of the governors — old Unzaga, young Galvez, the suave and energetic Miro — had relaxed its death-grip. A little wooden custom-house, very promptly erected at the upper front corner of the town, had fallen into signifi- cant dilapidation, though it was not yet such a sieve but it could catch an export and import duty of six per cent. on all merchandise that did not go round it. The conces- sions of 1778, neutralized by war and by English block- 104 TIIK CKEOLES OF LOUISIANA. ade, had been revived, enlarged, ;uul extended ten years. Moored against the grassy bank of the brinnning liver, the bhick ships were taking in hides and furs, bales of cotton, staves, and skins of indigo for the Spanish market, box-shooks for the West Indian sugar-makers, and to- bacco, bought by the Ciovernment ; and wore letting out over their sides maehineiy and utensils, the red wines of Catalonia, and every product of the manufacturer, — be- sides negro men and women, girls and boys, for sale singly or in lots on the landing. On the other side of the town, also, there was, by and by, no little activity. A lake and bayou business was asking roon), and a question of sanitation was demanding attention, and in 1704-90 the practical Carondelet gath- ered a large force of slaves, borrowed from their town and country owners, and dug with pick and shovel in the reeking black soil just beyond the rear fortifications of the town, the "Old Basin" and canal that still bear his name. The canal joined the Bayou St. John, and thus connected ten thousand square yards of artificial harbor with Lake Pontchartrain and the sea-coast beyond. , The lands contiguous to this basin and canal were covered with noisome pools, the source of putrid fevers, and, some years later, as Carondelet had urged from the first, the cabildo divided them into garden lots and let them out at low ground-i'cnts to those who would destroy their in- salubrity by ditching and draining them into the canal. They began soon to be built on, and have long been en- SPANISH NEW ORLEANS. 107 tirely settled up ; but their drainage can hardly be con- sidered to have been thorough and final, as, during an in- undation eighty years afterward, the present writer passed through its streets in a skiff, with the water as high as the gate-knobs. By such measures it was that the Spanish king sought " to secure to his vassals the utmost felicity.'' This was much more than the possession of Louisiana afforded the king. The treaty of peace, signed in 1783 by Great Britain, the United States, France, and Spain, had made the new American power his rival. The western bound- ary of the States was fixed on the Mississippi from the great lakes to a point nearly opposite the mouth of Ked River, and the fortified points along that line, which had fallen so short a time before into the hands of Galvez, ■were required to be yielded up. Such was the first en- croachment of American upon Spanish power in the great basin. Another influence tending to turn the scales in favor of the States was a change in the agricultural products of the Delta, giving to the commerce of New Orleans a new value for the settlers of the "West and the merchants of the Atlantic seaports. XV. HOW BORE MADE SUGAR. n^IlE planters of the Delta, on their transfer to Span- ish domination, saw indigo, the chief product of their lands, shut out of market. French protection was lost and French ports were closed to them. Those of Spain received them only into ruinous com]>etition with the better article made in the older and more southern Spanish colonies. By and by kinder commercial regula- tions offered a certain relief ; but then new drawbacks began to beset them. Season after season was unfavor- able, and at length an insect appeared which, by the years 1793-04, was making such ravages that the planters were in despair. If they could not make indigo they knew not what to do for a livelihood. They had tried myrtle-wax and silk, and had long ago given them up. Everybody made a little tobacco, but the conditions were not favorable for a large crop in the Delta. Cotton their grandfathers had known since 1713. The soil and climate above Orleans Island suited it, and it had always been raised in moderate quantity. M. De- breuil, a wealthy townsman of New Orleans and a laud- HOW BORE MADE SUGAR. 109 holder, a leading mind among the people, had invented a cotton-o'in effective enouorh to induce a decided increase in the amount of cotton raised in the colony. Yet a still better mode of ginning the staple from the seed was needed to give the product a decided commercial value. There was some anticipation of its possible importance, and certain ones who gave the matter thought had, in 1760, recommended the importation of such apparatus as could be found in India. In ITGS cotton had become an article of export from Xew Orleans, and in the manifesto with M'hich the insurgents banished Ulloa it is mentioned as a product whose culture, " improved by experience, promised the planter the recompense of his toils." At the time of the collapse in the indigo production, the Creoles were still experimenting M'ith cotton ; but the fame of Eli Whitney's newly invented cotton-gin had probably not reached them. There must have been few of them, indeed, who supposed that eight years later the cotton crop of Louisiana and export from 'New Orleans would be respectively 20,000 and 31,000 300-pound bales. They turned for a time in another direction. The lower Delta was a little too far south for cotton as a sure crop. They would try once more, as their fathers had tried, to make merchantable sugar. On a portion of the city's present wholesale business district, near Tchoupitoulas Street, this great staple had been first planted in Louisiana by the Jesuit fathers in 1751. They had received their seed, or rather layers. 110 TIIK (^lUOOI.KS OF LoriSIAXA. from St. Domingo. It liad been grown in the town's vicinity ever since, but there only, and in trivial quantity. Nothing more than syrup, if even so much, was made from it until in 1758 M. Debreuil, the same who had ex- ])erimented with cotton, built a sugar-mill on his planta- tion — now that part of the third district adjoining the second, on the river-front — and endeavored to turn a large crop of cane into sugar. Accounts of the result vary. Sugar, it seems, however, was made, and for a time the industry grew. J hit the sugar was not of a sort to ship to the world's markets ; it was poorly granulated and very wet, and for several years was consumed within the province. In 17G5 the effort was at length made to export it to France ; but half the lirst cargo leaked out of the packages before the vessel could make port. Then came the cession to Spain, and with it paralysis. The half-developed industry collapsed. Ihit in 1791 the blacks of St. Domingo rose in rebellion. Refugees liew in every direction. A few found their way to Louisiana. They had been prosperous sugar-makers, and presently the efforts that had ceased for twenty-five years came again to life. Two Spaniards, Mendez and Solis, in that year erected on the confines of New Orleans, the one a distillery and the other a battery of sugar-kettles, and manufactured rum and syrup. Still the Creoles, every year less able than the year be- fore to make rash experiments, struggled against the mis- HOW ]?OKE MADE SUGAR. Ill fortunes that multiplied around the cultivation of indigo, until 1794 found them without hope. At this juncture appeared Etienne de Bore. He was a man of fifty -four, a Creole of the Illinois district, but of a distinguished l^orman family ; he liad lived in France from the age of four to thirty-two, had served with the king's mousquetwires, had married a lady whose estate was in Louisiana near New Orleans, and returning with her 112 THE niKOLKS OF LOUISIANA. til tlie province, had becuiue an iiulii;-(» jilanter. The Year ITOi foimd liini iace to face with ruin. His father- in-law, Destrehan, had in former years been one of tlie hist to abandon sugar culture. His wiie and friends Marned him against the resolution he was taking ; but he persisted in liis determination to abandon indigo, and risk all that was left to him on the chance of a success which, if achieved, would insure deliverance and fortune to hi)n- self and the connuunity. He bought a quantity of canes from Mendez and ISolis, planted on the land where the Seventh District (late C'arrollton) now stands, and while his ci-op was growing erected a mill, and prepared liiniself for the momentous season of " grinding." His fellow-planters looked on with the liveliest — not always with the most hopeful — interest, and at length they gathered about liini to see the issue of the experi- ment in which only he could be more deeply concerned than they. In the whole picturesque history of the Loui- siana Creoles few scenes offer so striking a subject for the painter as that afforded in this episode : The dark sugar- house ; the battery of huge caldrons, with their yellow juice boiling like a sea, half-hidden in clouds of steam ; the half-clad, shining negroes swinging the gigantic uten- sils with M'hich the seething flood is dipped from kettle to kettle; here, grouped at the end of the battery, the Creole planters with anxious faces drawing around their central figure as closely as they can ; and in the midst the old inoust/uekiifi', dipping, from time to time, the thick- HOW BORE MADE SUGAR. 113 ening juice, repeating again and again his simple tests, until, in the moment of final trial, there is a common look of suspense, and instantly after it the hands are dropped, heads are raised, the brow is wiped, and there is a long breath of relief — " it granulates ! " The people were electrified. Etienne de Bore mar- keted $12,000 worth of superior sugar. The absence of interdictions that had stifled earlier trade enabled him to sell his product to advantage. The agriculture of the Delta was revolutionized ; and, seven jears afterward, New Orleans was the market for 200,000 gallons of rum, 250,000 gallons of molasses, and 5,000,000 pounds of sugar. The town contained some twelve distilleries — probably not a subject for unmixed congratulation — and a sugar refinery which produced about 200,000 pounds of loaf sugar ; while on the other hand the production of indigo had declined to a total of 3,000 pounds, and soon after ceased. 8 XVI. THE CREOLES SING THE MARSEILLAISE. ^r^lJE Spanish occupation never became more than a conquest, Tlie Spanish tongue, enforced in the courtt^ and principal public offices, never superseded the French in the mouths of the })eople, and left but a few words naturalized in the corrupt French of the slaves. To African organs of speech cocodr'u\ from cocodrilo, the , crocodile, was easier than caiman, the alligator ; the terrors of the calaboza, with its chains and whips and branding irons, were con- densed into the French tri-syllabic calaboose; while the pleasant institution of fiajja — the petty gratuity added, by the retailer, to anything bought — grew the pleasanter, drawn out into Gallicized lagnappe. The only newspaper in the town or province, as it was also the first, though published under the auspices of Car- In the Cabildo. THE CKEOLES SING THE MARSEILLAISE. 115 ondelet, was the "Moniteur cle la Louisiane," printed entirely in French. It made its first appearance in 1794. Spanish Ursulines, sent from Havana to impart their own tongue, had to teach in French instead, and to con- tent themselves with the feeble achievement of extorting the Spanish catechism from girls who recited with tears rolling down their cheeks. The public mind followed — though at a distance — the progress of thought in France. Many Spaniards of rank cast their lot with the Creoles. Unzaga married a Maxent ; Galvez, her sister — a woman, it is said, of extraordinary beauty and loveliness; Gay- arre wedded Constance de Grandpre ; the intendant Od- vardo, her sister ; Miro, a de Macarty. But the Creoles never became Spanish ; and in society balls where the Creole civilian met the Spanish military official, the cotil- lon was French or Spanish according as one or the other party was the stronger, a question more than once decided by actual onset and bloodshed. The Spanish rule was least unpopular about 1791, when the earlier upheavals of the French revolution were regarded distantly, and before the Republic had arisen to fire the Creole's long-sup- pressed enthusiasm. Under Galvez, in 1779-82, they ral- lied heartily around the Spanish colors against their hered- itary British foe. But when, in 1793, Spain's foe was republican France, Carondelet found he was only holding a town of the enemy. Then the Creole could no longer restrain himself. " La Marseillaise ! La Marseillaise ! " he cried in his sorry little theatre ; and in the drinking- 116 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. shops — that were thick as antiimn leaves — he sang, de- fiantly, " pa i'/'rt, ga ira, les arlstocrates cp la lanterned'' though there was not a lamp-post in his town until three years later, when the same governor put np eighty. Meantime Spain's hand came down again with a pres- sure that brought to ndnd the cruel }):ist. The people were made to come np and subscribe themselves Span- iards, and sundry persons were arrested and sent to Havana. The baron rebuilt the fortifications on a new and stronger plan. At the lower river corner was Fort St. Charles, a five-sided thing for one hundred and fifty men, with brick-faced parapet eighteen feet thick, a ditch, and a covert way ; at the upper river corner was Fort St. Louis, like it, but smaller. They were armed with about twelve eighteen- and twelve-pounders. Between them, where Toulouse Street opened upon the river-front, a large battery crossed fires with both. In the rear of the town were three lesser forts, mere stockades, with fraises. All around from fort to fort ran a parapet of earth sur- mounted with palisades, and a moat forty feet wide and seven deep. "These fortifications," wrote Carondelet, '• would not only protect the city against the attack of an enemy, but also keep in check its inhabitants. But for them," he said, " a revolution would have taken place." This was in 1794. Tlie enemy looked for from with- out was the pioneers of Kentucky, Georgia, etc. The abridgment of their treaty rights on the Mississippi had fretted them. Instigated by Genet, the French minister THE CREOLES SING THE MARSEILLAISE. 117 to the United States, and headed by one Clark and by Auguste de la Chaise, a Louisiana Creole of powerful family, who had gone to Kentucky for the purpose, they were preparing to make a descent upon New Orleans for its deliverance ; when events that await recital arrested the movement. iV ' ; '. V" A Royal Street Corner. XVII. THE AMERICANS. /^ARONDELET had strengtlieiied the walls that im- nmred tlie Creoles of isew Orleans ; but, outside, the messenger of their better destiny was knocking at the gate witli angry impatience. Congress had begun, in 1779, to claim the freedom of the Mississippi, The treaty of 1783 granted this ; but in words only, not in fact. Spain intrigued, Congress menaced, and oppres- sions, concessions, aggressions, deceptions, and corruption lengthened out the years. New Orleans — " Orleens " the Westerners called it — there was the main difficulty. Every one could see now its approaching commercial greatness. To Spain it was the key of her possessions. To the AVest it was the only possible breathing-hole of its commerce. Miro was still governing ad interim^ when, in 1785, there came to him the commissioners from the State of Georgia demanding liberty to extend her boundary to the Mississippi, as granted in the treaty of peace. Miro an- swered wisely, referring the matter to the governments of America and Spain, and delays and exasperations con- THE AMERICANS. 119 tinned. Bv 1786, if not earlier, the flat-boat fleets tliat came floating ont of the Ohio and Cumberland, seeking on the lower Mississippi a market and port for their hay and bacon and flour and corn, began to be challenged from the banks, halted, seized, and confiscated. The exasperated Kentuckians openly threatened and even planned to descend in flat-boats full of long rifles instead of breadstuffs, and make an end of controversy by the capture of New Orleans. But milder counsels restrained them, and they appealed to Congress to press Spain for the commercial freedom which they were determined to be deprived of no longer. Miro, and Navarro, the intendant, did well to be alarmed. They wrote home urging relief through cer- tain measures which they thought imperative if Xew Orleans, Louisiana, the Floridas, or even Mexico, was to be saved from early conquest. " No hay que j)erder tiemjpo " — " There is no time to be lost." They had two schemes : one, so to indulge the river commerce that the pioneers swarming down upon their borders might cross them, not as invaders, but as immigrants, yielding alle- giance to Spain ; the other, to foment a revolt against Con- gress and the secession of the West. These schemes were set on foot ; a large American immigration did set in, and the small town of Kew Madrid still commemorates the extravagant calculations of Western grantees. There had lately come to Kentucky a certain man whose ready insight and unscrupulous spirit of intrigue 120 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. had promptly marked the turn of events. This was Gen- eral James AVilkinson, of the United States service, a man early distrusted by President "Washington, long sus- pected by the people, and finally tried for treasonable designs and accpiitted for want of evidence which the archives of Spain, to wliich access could not at that time be obtained, have since revealed. This cunning schemer and speculator, in June, 1787, sent and followed to Xew Orleans a large fleet of flat-boats loaded with the produce of the AVest, and practising on the political fears of Miro, secured many concessions. By this means he made way for a trade which began at once to be very profitable to New Orleans, not to say to many Spanish officials. But it was not by this means only. At the same time, he entered into a secret plot with Miro and Spain for that disruption of the West from the East which she sought to effect. " The delivering up of Kentucky into his Majesty's hands, which is the main object to which Wilk- inson has promised to devote himself entirely," so M-rote Miro to the Spanish Secretary of State, January 8, 1788, and AVilkinson's own letters, written originally in cipher, and now in the archives of Spain, reduced to the Spanish tongue, complete the overwhelming evidence. " When this is done, ... I shall disclose so much of our great scheme," etc. " Be satisfied, nothing shall deter me from attending exclusively to the object we have on hand." " The only feasible plan " — this was a year later — " . . . was . . . separation from the United THE AMERICANS. 121 States, and an alliance with Spain." Such was the flat- boat toll paid by tliis lover of money and drink. But, neither for the Kentuckian nor the Creole was an export trade more than half a commerce. Philadelphia partly supplied the deficiency, though harried by corrupt double-dealings. Miro and Navarro favored and pro- moted this trade ; but Gardoqui, the Spanish minister at Philadelphia, not sharing in the profits, moved vigorously against it, and there was dodging and doubling— all the subterfuges of the contrabandist, not excepting false ar- rests and false escapes. The fire of 1788 gave Xavarro excuse to liberate a number whom fear of the king had forced him to imprison, and to give them back their con- fiscated goods. Such was one branch of the academy that, in later years, graduated the pirates of Barataria. The scarcity of provisions after the fire was made to help this Philadelphia trade. Miro sent three vessels to Gardoqui (who was suddenly ready to cooperate) for 3,000 barrels of flour, and such other goods as the general ruin called for. And here entered Wilkinson, and in August, 1788, received through his agent, Daniel Clark, in Kew Orleans, a cargo of dry goods and other articles for the Kentucky market, probably the first boat-load of manufactured commodities that ever went up the Missis- sippi to the Ohio. Others followed Wilkinson's footsteps in matters of trade, and many were the devices for doing- one thing while seeming to do another. A pretence of coming to buy lands and settle secured passports for their 122 THE fKEOLES OF LolISlAXA. fiat-boats and keel-boats, and the privilege of selling and buying free of duty. A profession of returning for fam- ilies and property opened the way back again up the tor- tuous I'iver, or along the wild, robber-haunted trails of the interior. So the Creoles, in their domestic commerce, were strik- ing hands with both the eastern and western "American." As to their transatlantic commerce, the concessions of 1782 had yielded it into the hands of the Fi'ench, and there it still remained. " France," wrote Miro in 17UU, " has the monopoly of the commerce of this colony." It suited him not to mention Philadelphia or the Ohio. But war presently brought another change. XVIII. SPAIN AGAINST FATE. ^T^IIE port of Kew Orleans was neither closed nor open. Spain was again in fear of Great Britain. The United States minister at Madrid was diligently pointing to the possibility of a British invasion of Louisiana from Canada, by way of the Mississippi ; to the feebleness of the Spanish foothold ; to the unfulfilled terms of the treaty of 1783 ; to the restlessness of the Iventuckians ; to everything, indeed, that could have effect in the effort to extort the cession of " Orleans " and the Floridas. But Spain held fast, and Miro, to the end of his governorship, plotted with Wilkinson and with a growing number of lesser schemers equally worthy of their country's execra- tion. Difficulties were multiplying when, at the close of 1791, Miro gave place to Carondelet. Some were in- ternal ; and the interdiction of the slave-trade with re- volted St. Domingo, the baron's fortifications, the banish- ment of Yankee clocks branded with the Goddess of Liberty, etc., were signs of them, not cures. In February, 1793, America finally wormed from Spain a decree of 124 Tin-: ckeoles of Louisiana. open coinincrce, for her colonics, witli the ['nited States and Europe. Tliereupon Phihidelphians began to estab- lish commercial houses in New Orleans. On the side of the great valley, the Kentuckian was pressing with all the strength of his lean and sinewy shoulder. "Since my taking possession of the govern- ment," wrote Carondelet, in 1794, " this province . . . has not ceased to be threatened by the ambitious designs of the Americans." " A nation," as Kavarro had earlier called them, " restless, proud, ambitious, and capable of the most daring enterprise." Besides them, there were La Chaise, also, and Genet, and the Jacobins of Phila- delphia. It was to President Washington's vigilance and good faith that the baron owed the deliverance of the province from its dangers ; not to his own defences, his rigid police, nor his counter-plots with Thomas Power and others. These dangers past, he revived the obstruction and op- pression of the river trade, hoping, so, to separate yet the "Western pioneers from the union of States, to which they had now become devoted. But events tended ever one way, and while Carondelet was still courting Wilkinson through Power, a treaty, signed at Madrid October 20, 1795, declared the Missis- sippi free to the Americans, ]S'ew Orleans was made a port of deposit for three j'ears, free of all duty or charge, save " a fair price for the liire of the store-houses." The privilege was renewable at the end of the term, unless SPAIN AGAINST FATE, 125 transferred by Spain to some " equivalent establishment " on the river bank. Still Carondelet held the east bank of the river, tem- porizing with the American authorities through his col- league, General Gayoso de Lemos, the Spanish commis- sioner, for making the transfer. He spent bribes freely, and strengthened his fortifications, not against Federal commanders only, but against the western immigrants who had crowded into the province, and against the re- newed probability of invasion from Canada. He made two other efforts to increase his strength. At the request of the cabildo he prohibited, for the time, the further importation of slaves, a plot for a bloody slave insurrection having been discovered in Pointe Coupee, a hundred and fifty miles up the Mississippi from ]^ew Orleans, and put down with much killing, whipping, and hanging. And he received with extrava- gant hospitality certain noble French refugees, who had sought asylum from the Reign of Terror on the wild western border of the United States. They were fur- nished with transportation from New Madrid to the AVashita, and were there to receive two hundred acres of land and one hundred dollars in money for every mechanic or farmer brought by them into the projected colony. The grant to the Marquis of Maison Rouge under these conditions was to embrace thirty thousand acres. That to the Baron de Bastrop was to cover one hundred and eight square miles, and there were others 126 THE CKEOLKS OF LOUISIANA. of less imperial extent. The royal approval was secured upon these i^rants, but the grantees never fulfilled the conditions laid u]k»ii them, and these great enterprises melted down to famous lawsuits. French e/zi/^ms, never- theless, did and had already settled in Louisiana mider more reasonable grants got with more modest promises. The town of St. ^lartinsville, on the Bayou Teche, was settled by them and nicknamed le jx^tit J^iris — the little Paris ; and a chapter might well be devoted to this episode in the history of the Creoles. Xew Orleans even had the pleasm-e at length of entertaining for many weeks, with great gayety and social pomp, the Duke of Orleans, afterward King Louis Philippe, and his two brothers, the Duke of Montpensier and the Count of Peaujolais. Bore and the Marquis Marigny de Mande- ville were among their entertainers. The Creoles' republican enthusiasm found vent in a little patriotic singing and shouting, that cost six of them twelve months each of Cuban exile ; otherwise they remained, through all, i)assive. We have seen how they passed through an agricultural revolution. But they were no more a writing than a reading people, and what tempests of emotion many of them may have concealed while war -was being waged against France, while the(4uif was being scoured by French privateers, and when one of these seized, and for eight days held, the mouth of the Mississippi, may only be conjectured. AVe know that Etienne de Bore escaped arrest and transportation only by ' N ffr— ~' l _iL— B B ^" SPAIN AGAINST FATE. 129 reason of his rank and the people's devotion to him as a public benefactor. In 1797 Carondelet gave place to Gayoso de Lemos. Wilkinson, who was in chief command of the Ameri- can forces in the West, grew coy and cold. The en- croachments of the double-dealing general's subordinates could be resisted by the Spaniard no longer, and in March, 1798, he abandoned by stealth, rather than sur- rendered, the territory east of the Mississippi, so long unjustly retained from the States. All the more did the Creole city remain a bone of con- tention. On the close of the three-years' term named in the treaty of 1795, the intendant. Morales, a narrow and quarrelsome old man, closed the port, and assigned no other point to take its place. But the place had become too important, and the States too strong for this to be endured. The West alone could muster twenty thousand fighting men. John Adams was President. Secret preparations were at once set on foot for an expedition against Xew Orleans in overwhelming force. Boats were built, and troops had already been ordered to the Ohio, when it began to be plain that the President must retire from office at the close of his term, then drawing near ; and by and by Spain disavowed her intendant's action and reopened the closed port. Meanwhile another eye was turned covetously upon Louisiana, and one who never moved slowly was about to hurry her fate to a climax. XIX. NEW ORLEANS SOUGHT— LOUISIANA BOUGHT. '* "TpUAXCE has cut the knot," wrote Minister Living- ston to Secretary Madison. It is the word of Bonaparte himself, that his lirst diplomatic act with Spain had for its object the recovery of Louisiana. His power enabled him easily to outstrip American negotia- tions, and on the 1st of October, 1800, the Spanish King entered privately into certain agreements by which, on the 21st of March, ISOl, Louisiana, vast, but to Spain un- remunerative and indefensible, passed secretly into tlie hands of the First Consul in exchange for the petty Italian "kino-dom of Etruria," When Minister Livinc;- ston wrote, in Xovember, 1802, the secret was no longer unknown. On the 26th of March, 1803, M. Laussat, as French Colonial Prefect, landed in Xew Orleans, specially cum- missioned to prepare for the expected arrival of General Victor with a large body of troops, destined for the occu- pation of the province, and to arrange for the establish- ment of a new form of government. The Creoles were filled with secret consternation. Their fields, and streets, NEW ORLEANS SOUGHT — LOUISIANA BOUGHT. 131 and dwellings were full of slaves. Tliey had heard the First Consul's words to the St. Domingans : " Whatever be your color or your origin, you are free." But their fears were soon quieted, when Laussat proclaimed the de- sign of their great new ruler to " preserve the empire of the laws and amend them slowly in the light of experience only." The planters replied that "their long-cherished hope was gratified, and their souls filled with the delir- ium of extreme felicity ; " and the townsmen responded : "Happy are the colonists of Louisiana who have lived long enough to see their reunion to France, which they have never ceased to desire, and which now satisfies their utmost wish." Governor Gayoso had died of yellow fever in 1799 — it is said shortly after a night's carousal with Wilkinson. He had been succeeded by the Marquis of Casa Calvo, and he, in 1801, by a weak, old man, Don Juan Manuel de Salcedo. The intendant Morales had continued to hate, dread, and hamper American immigration and com- .merce, and in October, 1802, had once more shut them out of Xew Orleans until six months later again discoun- tenanced by his king. In Congress debate narrowed down to the question whether New Orleans and the Floridas should be bought or simply swept down upon and taken. But the execu- tive department was already negotiating ; and, about the time of Laussat's landing in Louisiana, Messrs. Livingston and Monroe were commissioned to treat with France for 132 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIAXA. a cession of Xcw Orleans and the Floridas, '• or as nuich thereof as the actual j)roprietor can be prevailed on to ])art "vvith." Bonaparte easily saw the larger, hut nnconfessed wish of the United States. Louisiana, always light to get and heavy to hold, was slipping even from his grasp. He was about to rush into war with the English. '' They have," he exclaimed passionately to his ministei's, "twenty ships of war in the Gulf of Mexico. ... I have not a moment to lose in putting it [his new acquisition] out of their reach. They [the American commissioners] only ask of me one town in Louisiana ; but I already consider the colony as entirely lost." And a little later, M-alking in the garden of St. Cloud, he added to Marbois — whom he trusted rather than Talleyrand — " Well ! you have charge of the treasury; let them give you one hundred million francs, pay their own claims, and take the whole country." When the minister said something about the rights of the colonists, "Send your )ua.\ims to the London market," retorted the First Consul. The price finally agreed npon was eighty million francs, out of which the twenty million francs of American citi- zens' claims due by France M-ere to be paid, and Loui- iana was bought. Monsieur Marbois and Messrs. Living- ston and Monroe signed the treaty on the 30th of April, 1803. As they finished, they rose and shook hands. " We have lived long," said Livingston, " but this is tlie noblest work of our lives." NEW OKLEAISrS SOUGHT — LOUISIAjSTA BOUGHT. 133 About the last of July, when Casa Calvo and Salcedo, Spanish commissioner and governor, had proclaimed the coming transfer to France, and Lanssat, the French pre- fect, was looking hourly for General Victor and his forces, there came to Xew Orleans a vessel from Bordeaux with the official announcement that Louisiana had been ceded to the United States. On the 30th of Kovember, with troops drawn up in line on the Place d'Armes, and with discharges of artil- lery, Salcedo, fitly typifying, in his infirm old age, the de- caying kingdom which he represented, delivered to Lans- sat, in the hall of the cabildo, the keys of Xew Orleans ; while Casa Calvo, splendid in accomplishments, titles, and appearance, declared the people of Louisiana absolved from their allegiance to the King of Spain. From the flag-staff in the square the Spanish colors descended, the French took their place, and the domination of Spain in Louisiana was at an end. On Monday, December the 20th, 1803, with similar ceremonies, Laussat turned the province and the keys of its port over to Commissioners Claiborne and Wilkinson. The French tricolor, which had floated over the Place d'Armes for but twenty days, gave place to the stars and stripes, and New Orleans was an American town. AVithin a period of ninety-one years Louisiana had changed hands six times. From the direct authority of Louis XIY. it had been handed over, in 1712, to the com- mercial dominion of Anthony Crozat. From Crozat it i:u TIIK CinCOLES OF LOUISIANA. liad passctl, in 1717, to tlie Compagnie do TOccidcnt ; from the company, in 1731, to the undelegated authority of Louis XV. ; from liim, in 1702, to Spain ; from Spain, "l;**^-^^ Autographs from the Archives. in ISOl, back to France; and at length, in 1803, from France to the United States, finally emancipated from the service and bargainings of European masters. XX. NEW ORLEANS IN 1803. "'VTEW ORLEANS had been under the actual sway of the Spaniard for thirty-four years. Ten thousand inhabitants were gathered in and about its walls. Most of the wliites were Creoles. Even in the province at large these were three in every four. Immigrants from Malaga, the Canaries, and IS^ova Scotia had passed on through the town and into the rural districts. Of the thousands of Americans, only a few scores of mercantile pioneers came as far as the town — sometimes with fam- ilies, but generally without. Free trade with France had brought some French merchants, and the Reign of Terror, as we have seen, had driven here a few royalists. The town had filled and overflowed its orig- inal boundaries. From the mast-head of a ship in the harbor one looked down upon a gathering of from twelve hundred to fourteen hundred dwellings and stores, or say four thousand roofs — to such an extent did slavery multiply outhouses. They were of many kinds, covered with half -cylindrical or with flat tiles, with shingles, or with slates, and showed an endless variety in 136 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. heiglit and in l)riglit confusion of color and form — veran- das and balconios, dormer windows, lattices, and belve- deres. Tender the river bank, "within ten steps of Tclionpitoulas Street," where land has since formed and been covered M'ith brick stoi'cs for several s(juares, the fleets of barges and flat- boats from the AVest moored and un- loaded, or retailed their con- tents at the water's edge. Far- down, immediately abi'cast of the town, between the upper limits and the Place d'Armes, lay the shipping — twenty or more vessels of from 100 to 200 tons ' burden, hauled close against the bank. Still farther on, beyond the Government warehouses, was the mooring- place of the vessels of war. Looking down into the streets — Toulouse, St. Peter, Conti, St. Louis, Poyale, Chartres — one caught the brisk movements of a commercial port. They were straight, and fairl}^ spacious, for the times ; but iinpaved, ill-drained, filthy, poorly lighted, and often im- passable for the mire. NEW ORLEANS IN 1803. 137 The town was fast becoming one of the chief seaports of America. Ah-eadj, in 1802, 158 American merchant- men, 104 Spanish, and 3 French, registering 31,211 tons, had sailed from her harbor, loaded. The incoming ton- age for 1803 promised an increase of over 37 per cent. It exported of the products of the province alone over $2,000,000 value. Its imports reached $2,500,000. Thirty-four thousand bales of cotton ; 4,500 hogsheads of sugar ; 800 casks — equivalent to 2,000 barrels — of mo- lasses ; rice, peltries, indigo, lumber, and sundries, to the value of $500,000 ; 50,000 barrels of flour ; 3,000 barrels of beef and pork ; 2,000 hogsheads of tobacco ; and smaller quantities of corn, butter, hams, meal, laid, beans, hides, staves, and cordage, had passed in 1802 across its famous levee. Everywhere the restless American was conspicuous, and, with the Englishman and the Irishman, composed the majority of the commercial class. The French, ex- cept a few, had subsided into the retail trade or the mechanical callings. The Spaniards not in military or civil service were generally humble Catalans, keepers of shops, and of the low cabarets that occupied almost every street corner. The Creole was on every side — handsome, proud, illiterate, elegant in manner, slow, a seeker of office and military commission, ruling society with fierce exclusiveness, looking upon toil as the slave's proper badge, lending money now at twelve and now at twenty- four per cent., and taking but a secondary and unsympa- 138 THE CREOLES OF LOT'ISIAXA. tlietic part in the commercial life from which was spring- inir the future <;reatiiess of his town. AVhat could he do? The American tilled the upper Mississippi Yalley. Eng- land and the Atlantic States, no longer France and Spain, took its products and supplied its M'ants. The Anglo- Saxon and tlie Irishman held every advantage ; and, ill- equipped and unconnnercial, the Creole was fortunate to secure even a third or fourth mercantile rank in the city of his birth. Ihit he had one stronghold, lie owned the url)an and sul)in-l)an real estate, and presently took high station as the seller of lots and as a rentier. The confis- cated plantations of the Jesuits had been, or were being, laid out in streets. From 1801, when Faubourg St. Mary contained only five houses, it had grown with great rapidity. Other fauboui'gs were about springing up. The high roofs of the aristocratic suburb St. Jean could be seen stretching away among their groves of evergreen along the Bayou road, and clustering presently into a village near where a " JJayou bridge " still crosses the stream, some two hundred yards below the site of the old one. Here gathered the larger craft of the lake trade, M-hile the smaller still pushed its way up Carondelet's shoaled and neglected, yet busy canal. Outwardly the Creoles of the Delta had become a graceful, well-knit race, in full keeping with the freedom of their surroundings, Tlieir complexion lacked ruddiness, but it was free from the sallowness of the Indies. There NEW ORLEAXS I]!^ 1803. 139 was a much larger proportion of blondes among them than is commonly supposed. Generally their hair was of a chestnut, or but little deeper tint, except that in the city a Spanish tincture now and then asserted itself in black hair and eyes. The women were fair, symmetrical, with pleasing features, lively, expressive eyes, well-rounded throats, and superb hair ; vivacious, decorous, exceedingly tasteful in dress, adorning themselves with superior effect in draperies of nuislin enriched with embroideries and much garniture of lace, but with a more mode-rate display of jewels, which indicated a community of limited wealth. They were much superior to the men in quickness of wit, and excelled them in amiability and in many other good (jualities. The more pronounced faults of the men were generally those moral provincialisms which travellers re- count with undue impatience. They are said to have been coarse, boastful, vain ; and they were, also, deficient in energy and application, without well-directed ambition, unskilful in handicraft — doubtless through negligence only —and totally wanting in that community feeling which begets the study of reciprocal rights and obligations, and reveals the individual's advantage in the promotion of the common interest. Hence, the Creoles were fonder of pleasant fictions regarding the salubrity, beauty, good order, and advantages of their town, than of measures to justify their assumptions. With African slavery they were, of course, licentious, and they were always ready for the duelling-ground ; yet it need not seem surprising that 140 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. a people so beset by evil inflnences from every direction were generally unconscious of a reprehensible state of af- fairs, and preserved their self-respect and a proud belief in their moral excellence. Easily inflamed, they were as easily discouraged, thrown into confusion, and overpow- ered, and they expended the best of their energies in trivial pleasures, especially the masque and the dance ; yet they were kind parents, affectionate wives, tractable children, and enthusiastic patriots. Transom in the Pontalba Buildings, Jackson Square. XXL FROM SUBJECTS TO CITIZENS. T~ ITTLE wonder that it is said the Creoles wept as thej stood on the Place d'Armes and saw the stand- ard of a people, whose national existence was a mere twenty-years' experiment, taking the place of that tricolor on which perched the glory of a regenerated France. On that very spot some of them had taken part in the armed repudiation of the first cession. The two attitudes and the two events differed alike. The earlier transfer had come loaded with drawbacks and tyrannous exactions ; the latter came freighted with long-coveted benefits and with some of the dearest rights of man. This second, there- fore, might bring tears of tender regret ; it might force the Creole into civil and political fellowship with the de- tested Ainericain / but it could not rouse the sense of outrage produced by the cession to Spain, or of uniform popular hatred against the young Virginian whom Presi- dent Jefferson had transferred from the Governorship of the Territory of Mississippi to that of Louisiana. O'Reilly, the Spanish Captain-General, had established a government whose only excellence lay in its strength ; Claiborne came 142 TIIJ: CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. to set np a power wliose only strengtli lay in its excel- lence. His task was ditticiilt mainly because it was to be done among a people distempered by the badness of earlier rule, and diligently wrought upon by intriguing Frenchmen and Spanish officials. 11 is wisest measures, ecjually with his broadest mistakes, were wordily resented. His ignorance William Charles Cole Claiborne, Governor of Louisiana fronn 1803 to 1816. of the French language, his large official powers, Wilkin- son's bad habits, a scarcity of money, the introduction of the English tongue, and of a just proportion of American appointees into the new courts and public offices, the use of bayonets to suppress disorder at public balls, a sup- posed partiality for Americans in court, the jiersonal char- FROM SUBJECTS TO CITIZENS. 143 acter of officials, the formation of American militia com- panies and their parades in the streets — all alike fed the flames of the Creoles' vehement indignation. In March, 180-1, Congress passed an act dividing the province into two parts on the present northern boundary of Louisiana, giving each a distinct government, and to the lower the title of the territory of Orleans. This act, which was to take effect the following October, inter- dicted the slave-trade. Then, indeed, anger burned. In- surrectionary sentiments were placarded on the street corners, crowds copied them, and public officers attempt- ing to remove them were driven away. But that was all. Claiborne — ^young, like Bienville and like Galvez, but benevolent, wise, and patient — soon saw it was not the Government, but only some of its measures, that caused so much heat. Tlie merchants, who in 1768 had incited revolt against legalized ruin, saw, now, on the other hand, that American rule had lifted them out of commercial serfdom, and that, as a port of the United States, and only as such, their crescent city could enter upon the great future which was hers by her geographical position. But we have seen that the merchants were not principally Creoles. Although the Creoles looked for a French or Spanish re-cession, yet both interest and probability were so plainly against it that they were presently demanding ini- patientl}', if not imperiously, the rights of American citi- zens as pledged to them in the treaty. They made no 144 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. appeal to that France Mliich liad a secoiul time cast them off; hut at three jmhlic meetings, in June and 'Inly, petitioned Congress not to rescind the cession but to leave Louisiana undivided, and so hasten their admission into the Tniun. This appeal was fruitless, and the territorial government went into operation, Claiborne being retained as governor. The partition, the presidential appointment of a legislative council instead of its election by the peo- ple, tlie nullification of certain Spanish land grants, and an olHcial re-inspection of all titles, were accepted, if not with patience, at least with that grace which the Creole assumes before the inevitable. I>ut his respect was not always forthcoming toward laws that could be opposed or evaded. " This city," wrote Claiborne, " requires a strict police : the inhabitants are of various descriptions ; many highly respectable, and some of them very degenerate.'' A sheriff and posse attempted to arrest a Spanish officer. Two hundred men interfered ; swords were drawn, and resistance ceased only when a detachment of United States troops were seen hurrying to the rescue. Above all, the slave-trade — " all-important to the existence of the coun- try" — was diligently plied through the lakes and tlie in- lets of Barataria. The winter of 1804-05 was freer from bickerings than the last had been. The intrigues of Spanish officials who lingered in the district were unavailing, and the Gov- ernor reported a gratifying state of order. On the 2d of March, with many unwelcome safeguards and limitations, FEOM SUBJECTS TO CITIZENS. 145 the right was accorded tlie people to elect a House of Representatives, and " to form for themselves a constitu- tion and State government so soon as the free population Rev. Father Antonio de Sedella (Pere Antoine). of the territory should reach sixty thousand souls, in order to be admitted into the Union." For a time following there was feverishness rather than events. Great Britain and Spain were at war ; Havana was open to neutral vessels ; the commerce of Xew Or- leans was stimulated. But tlie pertinacious lingering of 10 14G THE CREOLES OT LOl'ISIAXA. Casa-Calvo, Morales, and otlicrs, — wlioiii Claiborne at last had to force away in Fel)ruary, ISO^), — the rumors they kept alive, the fear of war with Spain, doubts as to how the Creoles would or should stand, party strife among the Americans in Kew Orleans, and a fierce quarrel in the Church between the vicar-general and the famed Pere Antttiiie, pastor of the cathedral, kept the public mind in a perpetual ferment. Still, in all these things there was only restiveness and discord, not revolution. The Creoles had at length imdergone their last transplanting, and taken root in American privileges and principles. From the guilt of the plot whose events were now impending the Creole's hand is clean. AVe have Claiborne's testi- mony : " Were it not for the calumnies of some Frenchmen who are among us, and the intrigues of a few ambitious, unprincipled men whose native language is English, I do believe that the Louisianians would be very soon the most zealous and faithful members of our republic." On the 4tli of Xovember, 1811, a convention elected by the people of Orleans Territory met in New Orleans, and on the 2Stli of the following January adopted a State constitution ; and on the 30th of April, 1812, Louisiana entered the Union, >^ XXII. BURR'S CONSPIRACY. /^N one of those summer evenings when the Creoles, in the early years of the century, were wont to seek the river air in domestic and social groups under the willow and china trees of their levee, there glided around the last bend of the Mississippi above ISTew Orleans " an elegant barge," equipped w^ith sails and colors, and im- pelled by the stroke of ten picked oarsmen. It came down the harbor, drew in to the bank, and presently set ashore a small, slender, extremely handsome man, its only passenger. He bore letters from General Wilkinson, in- troducing him in jS^ew Orleans, and one, especially, to Daniel Clark, Wilkinson's agent, stating that " this great and honorable man would communicate to him many things improper to letter, and which he would not say to any other." Claiborne wrote to Secretary Madison, " Col- onel Burr arrived in this city on this evening." The date was June 26, 1805. The distinguished vis- itor, a day or two later, sat down to a banquet given to him by the unsuspecting Governor. He was now in full downward career. Only a few years before he had failed of the presidency by but one electoral vote. Only a few 148 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. luoiitlis had passed since, on completing liis term, he hud vacated the vice-presidency. In tlie last year of that term Alexander Hamilton had fallen by his hand. Friends and power, both, Mere lost. But he yet had strength in the "West. Its people were still wild, restless, and eager for adventure. The conquest of " Orleans •' was a tra- ditional idea. Its banks were full of specie.' Clouds of revolution were gathering all around the Gulf. The regions beyond the lied and the Sabine Kivers invited con- quest. The earlier schemes of Adams and Hamilton, to seize Orleans Island and the Floridas for the United States ; that of Miranda, to expel the Spanish power from the farther shores of the (iulf ; the ])l(tttings of AVilkin- son, to surrender the West into the hands of Spain — all these abandoned projects seem to have cast their shadows on the mind of Burr and colored his designs. The stern patriotism of the older States had Aveighed him in its balances and rejected him. He had turned with a vagueness of plan that waited for clearer definition on the chances of the future, and, pledged to no principle, had set out in quest of aggrandizement and empire, either on the Mississippi or among the civilizations that encircle the (iulf of Mexico, as the turn of events might decree. In the West, he had met AVilkinson, and was now in cor- respondence with him. The Governor M-ho had feasted him moved much in the gay society of the Creoles. It was not giddiness, but anxious thought and care that pushed him into such burr's conspiracy. 149 scenes. Troubles and afflictions marked his footsteps ; liis wife and child stricken down by yellow fever, her young brother-in-law rashly championing him against the sneers of his enemies, fallen in a duel ; but it was necessary to avoid the error — Ulloa's earlier error — of self-isolation. He wisely, therefore, mingled in the gayeties of the touchy people, even took from among them — after a short year of widowhood — a second wife, bore all things without resent- ment, and by thus studying the social side of the people, viewed public questions from behind. The question ever before him — which he was inces- santly asking himself, and which he showed an almost morbid wish to be always answering to the heads of de- partments at Washington — was whether the Creoles over whom he was set to rule were loyal to the government of the nation. It was a vital question. The bonds of the Union, even outside of Louisiana, were as yet slender and frail. The whole Mississippi valley was full of designing adventurers, suspected and unsuspected, ready to reap any advantage whatever of any disaffection of the people. He knew there were such in Xew Orleans. The difficulty of answering this question lay in one single, broad difference between Claiborne himself and the civilization which he had been sent to reconstruct into harmony with North American thought and action. With him loyalty to the State meant obedience to its laws. The Creole had never been taught that there was any necessary connection between the two. The Govern- 150 THE CKE0LE8 OF LOUISIAXA. or's young Virginian spirit assumed it as self-evitlcnt that a man would either keep the laws or overturn them. It \vas a strange state of society to him, where one could be a patriot and yet ignore, evade, and override the laws of the country he loved. " Occasionally, in conversation with ladies," — so he writes — " I have denounced smug- glhig as dishonest, and very generally a reply, in substance as follows, would be returned : ' That is impossible, for my grandfather, or my father, or my husband was, under the Spanish Government, a great smuggler, and he was always esteemed an honest man.'" They might have added, '• and loyal to the king." AVith some men Claiborne had had no trouble. "A beginning must be made," said Poydras, a wealthy and benevolent Frenchman ; " we nmst be initiated into the sacred duties of freemen and the practices of liberty." But the mass, both high and low, saw in the abandonment of smuggling or of the slave-trade only a surrender of ex- istence — an existence to which their own consciences and the ladies at the ball gave them a clean patent. These, by their angry obduracy, harassed their governor with ungrounded fears of sedition. In fact, the issue before governor and people was one to which the question of fealty to government was quite subordinate. It was the struggle of a North American against a Spanish American civilization. Burr must have seen this ; and probably at this date there was nothing clearly and absolutely fixed in his mind but this, that the burr's conspiracy. 151 former civilization had cast liim oif, and that he was about to offer himself to the latter. New events were to an- swer the Governor's haunting question, and to give a new phase to the struggle between these two civilizations in the Mississippi valley. Colonel Burr remained in New Orleans ten or twelve days, receiving much social attention, and then left for St. Louis, saying he would return in October. But he did not appear. During the winter the question of boundaries threat- ened war with Spain, and the anger of Spain rose high when, in February, 1806, Claiborne expelled her agents, the resplendent Casa-Calvo and the quarrelsome Morales, from the Territory. The Spanish governor of Florida retorted by stopping the transmission of the United States mails through that province. Outside, the Spaniards threatened ; inside, certain Americans of influence did hardly less. The Creoles were again supine. Pere An- toine, the beloved pastor of the cathedral, was suspected — unjustly — of sedition; Wilkinson with his forces was unaccountably idle. " All is not right," wrote Claiborne ; " I know not whom to censure ; but it seems to me that there is wrong somewhere." The strange character of the Creole people perplexed and wearied Claiborne. Unstable and whimsical, public- spirited and sordid by turns, a display of their patriotism caused a certain day to be "among the happiest of his life ; " and when autumn passed and toward its close their enthusiasm disappeared in their passion for money-getting, 152 TIIK CREOLES OK LOUISIANA. he "began to tlespair." JUit, alike unknown in the Creole town — to money -getters and to patriots — the only real dan- ger had ])as^t'd. Wilkinson liad decided to betray Burr. Late in JSepteniber the General had arrived at Xatchi- toches, and had taken chief connnand of the troops con- fronting the Spanish forces. On the Sth of October, one Sanuiel Swartwout l)rought him a confidential letter from Colonel Burr, llo was received l)y AVilkinson Avith much attention, stayed eight days, and then left for New Or- leans. On the 21st, Wilkinson determined to expose the plot. lie despatched a messenger to the President of the United States, bearing a letter which apprised him of Colonel Burr's contemplated descent of the Mississippi with an armed foi'ce. Eight days later, the General ar- ranged with the Spaniards for the troops under each flag to withdraw from the contested boundary, leaving its location to be settled by the two governments, and hast- ened toward New Orleans, hurrying on in advance of him a force of artificers and a company of soldiers. Presently the people of New Orleans were startled from apathetic tranquillity into a state of panic. All un- explained, these troops had arrived, others had re-enforced them ; there was hurried repair and ]M-eparation ; and the air was agitated with rumors. To Claiborne, the revela- tion had at length come from various directions that Aaron Burr was plotting treason. Thousands were said to be involved with him ; the first outbreak was expected to be in New Orleans. bukr's conspiracy. 153 "Wilkinson had arrived in the town. In the bombastic stjde of one who plays a part, he demanded of Claiborne the proclamation of martial law, Claiborne kindly, and with expressions of confidence in the General, refused; but the two met the city's chamber of commerce, laid the plot before it, and explained the needs of defence. Sev- eral thousand dollars were at once subscribed, and a tran- sient embargo of the port recommended, for the purpose of procuring sailors for the four gun -boats and two bomb- ketches lying in the harbor. There were others in whose confidence Wilkinson held no place. The acting-governor of Mississippi wrote to Claiborne : " Should he [Colonel Burr] pass us, your fate will depend on the General, not on the Colonel, If I stop Burr, this may hold the General in his allegiance to the United States. But if Burr passes the territory with two thousand men, I have no doubt but the General will be your worst enemy. Be on your guard against the wily General, He is not much better than Catiline, Consider him a traitor and act as if certain thereof. You may save yourself by it." On Sunday, the 14th of December, a Dr. Erick Boll- man was arrested by Wilkinson's order, Swartwout and Ogden had already been apprehended at Fort Adams, and were then confined on one of the bomb-ketches in the harbor. On the 16th, a court officer, armed with writs of habeas corpus, sought in vain to hire a boat to carry him off to the bomb-ketch, and on the next day, when one could be procured, only Ogden could be found. l.")4 THE CRE0L3-:S OF LOri.>IAXA. lie was liljerated, but only to be re-urrcstcd with one Alexander, and lield in the face of the Jiaheas corpus. The court istjued an attachment against Wilkinson. It was powerless, 'riie .Judge — Workman — appealed to Clai- borne to sustain it with force. The Governor promptly declined, the Judge resigned, and AVilkinson ruled. One of Burr's intimates was General Adair. On the 14th of January, 1807, he aj)])cart'd in New Orleans un- announced. Colonel Burr, he said, with only a sei'vant, would arrive in a few days. As he was sitting at dinner, his hotel was surrounded by regulars, an aide of AVilkin- son appeared and arrested him ; he was confined, and presently was sent away. The troops beat to arms, regulars and militia paraded through the terrified city, and Judge "Workman, w'ith two others, Avere thrown into confinement. They were released within twenty-four hours ; but to inten- sify the general alarm, four hundred Spaniards from Pen- sacola arrived at the mouth of Bayou St. John, a few miles from the city, on their way to Baton Rouge, and tlieir commander asked of Claiborne that he and his staff might pass through Kew Orleans. He was refused the liberty. All this time the Creoles had been silent. Now, how- ever, through their legislature, they addressed their gov- ernor. They washed their hands of the treason which threatened the peace and safety of Louisiana, but boldly announced their intention to investigate the " extraordin- ary measures " of Wilkinson and to complain to Congress. Burr, meanwhile, with the mere nucleus of a force, had burr's conspiracy. 155 set his expedition in motion, and at length, after twenty years' threatening by the Americans of the West, a fleet of boats actnally bore an armed expedition down the Ohio and out into the Mississippi, bent on conquest. But disaster lay in wait for it. It failed to gather strength as it came, and on the 2Sth of January the news reached ]^ew Orleans that Burr, having arrived at a point near j^atchez with fourteen boats and about a hundred men, had been met by Mississippi militia, arrested, taken to Xatchez, and released on bond to appear for trial at the next term of the Territorial Court. This bond Burr ignored, and left the Territory. The Governor of Mississippi offered $2,000 for his apprehen- sion, and on the 3d of March the w-elcome word came to N^ew Orleans that he had been detected in disguise and re-arrested at Fort Stoddart, Alabama. About the middle of May, Wilkinson sailed from New Orleans to Virginia to testify in that noted trial which, though it did not end in the conviction of Burr, made final w^reck of his designs, restored public tranquillity, and assured the country of the loyalty not only of the West, but also of the Creoles of Louisiana. The struggle between the two civilizations withdrew finally into the narrowest limits of the Delta, and Spanish American thought found its next and last exponent in an individual without the ambition of empire, — a man polished, brave and chivalrous ; a patriot, and yet a contrabandist ; an outlaw, and in the end a pirate. XXIII. THE WEST INDIAN COUSIN. "DETWEEN 1S04 and ISIO, Xew Orleans douljled its population. The common notion is that there was a large influx of Anglo-Americans. This was not the case. A careful estimate shows not more than 3,100 of these in the city in 1809, yet in the following year tlie whole population, including the suburbs, was 24,552. The Americans, therefore, were numerically feeble. The in- crease came from another direction. Napoleon's wars were convulsing Europe. The navies of his enemies fell upon the French West Indies. In Cuba large numbers of white and mulatto refugees who, in the St. Domingan insurrection, had escaped across to Cuba with their slaves, were now, by hostilities between France and Spain, forced again to become exiles. With- in sixty days, between May and July, 1809, thirty-four vessels from Cuba set ashore in the streets of New Or- leans nearly fifty-eight hundred persons — M'hites, free mulattoes, and black slaves in almost equal numbers. Others came later frum Cuba, Guadaluu^ic, and other THE WEST INDIAN COUSIlSr. 157 islands, until they amounted to ten thousand. I^early all settled permanently in New Orleans. The Creoles of Louisiana received the Creoles of the West Indies with tender welcomes. The state of society in the islands from which these had come needs no de- scription. As late as 1871, '72, and '73, there were in the island of Guadaloupe only three marriages to a tliousand inhabitants. But they came to their better cousins with the ties of a common religion, a common tongue, much connnon sentiment, misfortunes that may have had some resemblance, and with the poetry of exile. They were re- enforcements, too, at a moment when the power of the Americans — few in number, but potent in energies and advantages — was looked upon with hot jealousy. The Anglo-Americans clamored against them, for they came in swarms. They brought little money or goods. They raised the price of bread and of rent. They lowered morals and disturbed order. Yet it was certainly true the Anglo-Americans had done little to improve either of these. Some had come to stay ; many more to make a fortune and get away ; both sorts were sim- ply and only seeking wealth. The West Indians had not come to a city whose civili- zation could afford to absorb them. The Creole element needed a better infusion, and yet it was probably the best in the community. The Spaniards were few and bad, de- scribed by one as capable of the vilest depredations, " a nuisance to the country," and even by the mild Claiborne 158 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. as " for the most part . . . well suited for mischiev- ous and wicked enterprises." The free people of color were ul>out two thonsiind, nii;isj)iring, corrupted, and feeble. The tloating- |M.)pulation was extremely bad. Sailors from all parts of the world took sides, according to nationality, in bloody street riots and night brawls ; and bai'genien, Hat-boatmen, and raftsmen, from the wild banks of the Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland, alxan- doned themselves at the end of their journey to the most shameful and reckless excesses. The spirit of strife ran np into the better classes. A newspaper article reflecting upon Kapoleon all but caused a riot. A public uprising M-as hardly prevented when three young navy officers re- leased a slave girl who was being whipped. In Septem- ber, 1807, occurred the " batture riots.'' The Ijatture was the sandy deposits made by the Mississippi in front of the Faubourg St. Marie. The noted jurist, Edward Living- ston, representing private claimants, took possession of tliis ground, and was opposed by the public in two dis- tinct outbreaks. In the second, the Creoles, ignoring the decision of the Supreme Court, rallied to the spot by thousands, and were quieted oidy by the patient appeals of Claiborne, addressed to them on the spot, and by the recommittal of the contest to the United States courts, in whose annals it is so well-known a cause. Preparations for war with Spain heightened the general fever. Clai- borne's letters dwell on the sad mixture of society. ''England," he writes, '-has her partisans; Ferdinand THE WEST INDIAN COUSIN. 159 the Seventh, some faithful subjects ; Bonaparte, his ad- mirers ; and there is a fourth description of men, com- monly called Burrites, who would join any standard which would promise rapine and plunder." These last had a newspaper, "La Lanterne Magique," whose libels gave the executive nmch anxiety. ''iffsaif^ W3^ ^ In Rue du Maine. Kow, into such a city — say of fourteen thousand inhab- itants, at most — swarm ten thousand white, yellow, and black West India islanders ; some with means, others in absolute destitution, and " many ... of doubtful character and desperate fortune." Americans, English, 100 THE CKKOLES OF LOFISIAXA. Spanish, ciy aloud; the haws forbid the importation of slaves ; Claiborne adjures the American consuls at Ha- vana and Santiago de Cuba to stop the movement ; the free people of color are ordered point-blank to leave the country ; the actual effort is made to put the order into execution ; and still all three classes continue to pour into the streets, to throw themselves upon the town's hospit- ality, and daily to increase the cost of living and the number of distressed poor. They came and they stayed, in Orleans Street, in Du Maine, St. Philippe, St. Peter, Dauphinc, Burgundy, and the rest, all too readily dissolving into the corresponding parts of the native Creole community, and it is easier to underestimate than to exaggerate the silent results of an event that gave the French-speaking Louisianians twice the numerical power with which they had begun to wage theii' long battle against American absorption. XXIV. THE PIRATES OF BARATARIA. XT has already been said that the whole Gulf coast of Louisiana is sea-marsh. It is an immense, wet, level expanse, covered everywhere, shoulder-high, with marsh- grasses, and indented by extensive bays that receive the rivers and larger bayous. For some sixty miles on either side of the Mississippi's mouth, it breaks into a grotesque- ly contorted shore-line and into bright ai-chipelagoes of hundreds of small, reedy islands, with narrow and ob- scure channels writhing hither and thither between them. These mysterious passages, hidden from the eye that overglances the seemingly unbroken sunny leagues of sur- rounding distance, are threaded only by the far-seen white or red lateen-sail of the oyster-gatherer, or by the pirogue of the hunter stealing upon the myriads of wild fowl that in winter haunt these vast green wastes. To such are known the courses that enable them to avoid the frequent culs-de-sac of the devious shore, and that lead to the bayous which open the way to the inhab- ited interior. They lead through miles of clear, brown, silent waters, between low banks fringed with dwarf oaks, 11 162 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. across pale green distances of " qnaking praii'ie," in whose sliallow, winding coolies the smooth, dark, sliining needles of the round rush stand twelve feet high to overpeer the bulrushes, and at length, under the solemn shades of cy- press swamps, to the near neighborhood of the Mississippi, fi-om whose flood the process of delta-growth has cut the bayou off. Across the mouths of the frequent bays that indent this marshy coast-line stretch long, slender keys of dazzling, storm-heaped sand — sometimes of cultivable soil. About sixty miles south from the bank of the Missis- sippi as that river flows eastward by Kew Orleans, lies Grande Terre, a very small island of this class, scarce two miles long, and a fourth as wide, stretching across two-thirds of the entrance of ]3arataria Bay, but leaving a pass of about a mile width at its western end, with a navigable channel. Behind this island the waters of the bay give a safe, deep harbor. At the west of the bay lies a multitude of small, fenny islands, interwoven with lakes, bays, and passes, named and unnamed, affording cunning exit to the bayous La Fourche and Terre Bonne and the waters still beyond. They are populous beyond estimate with the prey of fowler and fisherman, and of the huge cormorant, the gull, the man-of-war bird, the brown pelican and the alba- tross. Here in his time the illustrious Creole nat- uralist, Audubon, sought and found in great multi- tude the white pelican, now so rare, that rose at the sound of his gun and sailed unwillingly away on wings that measured eight feet and a half from tip to tip. THE PIKATES OF BAEATARIA. 163 J^orthwai'd the bay extends some sixteen miles, and then breaks in every direction across the illimitable wet prai- ries into lakes and bayous. Throngh one of these — the bayou Barataria, with various other local names — a way opens irregularly northward. Xow and then it widens into a lake, and narrows again, each time more than the last, the leagues of giant reeds and rushes are left behind, a few sugar and rice plantations are passed, standing, lonely and silent, in the water and out of the water, the dark shad- ows of the moss-hung swamp close down, and the stream's windings become more and more difficult, until near its head a short canal is entered on the right, and six miles farther on the forest opens, you pass between two plan- tations, and presently are stopped abruptly by the levee of the Mississippi. You mount its crown, and see, opposite, the low-lying city, with its spires peering up from the sunken plain, its few wreaths of manufactory smoke, and the silent stir of its winding harbor. Canal Street, its former upper boundary, is hidden two miles and a half away down the stream. There are other Baratarian routes, through lakes Salvador or Des Allemands, and many obscure avenues of return toward the Gulf of Mex- ico or the maze of wet lands intervening. In the first decade of the century the wars of France had filled this gulf with her privateers. Spain's rich commerce was the prey around which they hovered, and Guadaloupe and Martinique their island haunts. From these the English, operating in the AVest Indies, drove 164 THE CREOLES OF LOriSIAXA. tlieiii out, and wlien in February, 181U, Guadaloupc com- pleted tlio list of their conquests, the French privateers were as homeless as Koah's raven. They were exiled on the open Gulf, witli the Spaniards lining its every shore, except one, where American neu- trality motioned them austerely away. This was Louis- iana. But this, of all shores, suited them best. Thou- sands of their brethren already tilled the streets of Xe\v Orleans, and commanded the sympathies of the native Creoles. The tangled water-waj^s of Barataria, so well known to snmgglei's and slavers, and to so few beside, leading by countless windings and intersections to the markets of the thriving city, offered the rarest facilities for their purposes. Between this shelter and the distant harbors of France there could be no question of choice. Hither they came, fortified Grande Terre, built store- houses, sailed away upon the Gulf, and re-appeared with prizes which it seems were not always Spanish. The most seductive auctions followed. All along this coast there are vast heaps of a species of clam-shell, too great to admit the idea of their being other than the work of nature. Great oaks grow on them. The aborigines, mound-builders, used these places for temple-sites. One of them, in Barataria, distinguished from larger neighbors by the name of Petit Temple, "the Little Temple," re- moved of late years for the value of its shells as a paving material, yielded three hundred thousand barrels of them, A notable group of these mounds, on one of the larger THE PIRATES OF BAEATARIA. 165 islands of Barataria, became the privateers' chief place of sale and barter. It was known as the Temple. There was no scarcity of buyers fi'om ]^ew Orleans and the sur- rounding country. Goods were also smuggled up the various bayous, especially La Fourche. Then the cap- tured vessels were burned or refitted, sails were spread again, and prows were pointed toward the Spanish Main. The Baratarians had virtually revived, in miniature, the life of the long-extinct buccaneers. On the beautiful, wooded, grassy and fertile " Grande Isle," lying just west of their stronghold on " Grande Terre," and separated from it only by the narrow jDass that led out to sea, storehouses and dwellings were built, farms and orangeries yielded harvests, and green meadows dotted with wax-myrtles, casinos, and storm-dwarfed oaks rose from the marshy inland side where the children and women plied their shrimp and crab nets, and, running down to the surf- beach on the southern side, looked across the boundless open Gulf toward the Spanish Main. The fame of the Baratarians spread far and wide ; and while in neighboring States the scandalous openness of their traiSc brought loud condemnation upon Louisiana citizens and officials alike, the merchants and pjanters of the Delta, profiting by these practices, with the general public as well, screened the contrabandists and defended their character. Much ink has been spilled from that day to this to maintain that they sailed under letters of marque. But lOG THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. certainly no coniniissioii could Itc Avortli the unrolling mIk'U carried In- men who had removed themselves be- yond :ill the restraints that even seeni to distinguish privateering from piracy. They were often overstocked with vessels and booty, but they seem never to have been embarrassed with the care of prisoners. There lived at this time, in Xew Orleans, John and Pierre Lafitte. John, the younger, l)ut more conspicuous of the two, was a handsome man, fair, with black hair and eyes, wearing his beard, as the fashion was, shaven neatly away from the front of his face. His manner was generally courteous, though he was irascible and in graver moments somewhat harsh, lie spoke liuently English, Spanish, Italian, and French, using them with much af- fability at the hotel where he resided, and indicating, in the peculiarities of his French, his nativity in the cit}' of Bordeaux. The elder brother was a seafaring man and had served in the French navy. He appears to have been every way less showy than the other ; but beyond doubt both men were above the occupation with which they began life in Louisiana. This was the trade of blacksmith, though at their forge, on the corner of St. Philip and Bourbon Streets, probably none but slave hands swung the sledge or shaped the horseshoe. It was during the embaro;o, enforced bv the United States Government in 1S08, that John Lafitte began to be a merchant. His store was in Poyal Street, where, be- THE PIRATES OF BARATARIA. 167 hind a show of legitimate trade, he was busy running the embargo with goods and Africans. He wore the disguise carelessly. He was cool and intrepid and had only the courts to evade, and his unlawful adventures did not lift his name from the published lists of managers of society balls or break his acquaintance with prominent legislators. In 1810 came the AVest Indian refugees and the Guad- aloupian privateers. The struggle between the ISTorth American and the West Indian ideas of public order and morals took new energy on the moment. The plans of the "set of bandits who infested the coast and overran the country " were described by Government as " exten- sive and well laid," and the confession made that " so gen- eral seemed the disposition to aid in their concealment, that but faint hopes were entertained of detecting the parties and bringing them to justice." Their trade was impudently open. Merchants gave and took orders for their goods in the streets of the town as frankly as for the merchandise of Philadelphia or ISTew York. Frequent seizures lent zest to adventure without greatly impairing the extravagant profits of a commerce that paid neither duties nor first cost. John and Pierre Lafitte became the commercial agents of the " privateers." By and by they were their actual chiefs. They won great prosperity for the band ; prizes were rich and frequent, and slave cargoes profitable. John Lafitte did not at this time go to sea. He equipped vessels, sent them on their cruises, sold their prizes and 1G8 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. slaves, and moved liithcr and thither throughout tlio Delta, adininisteriug affairs with boldness and sagacit}-. The Mississippi's "coasts" in the parishes of St. James and St. John the Baptist were often astir with his known presence, and his smaller vessels sometimes pierced the interior as far as Lac des Allemands. lie knew the value of popular admiration, and was often at country halls, where he enjoyed the fame of great riches and courage, and seduced many of the simple Acadian youth to sail in his cruises. His two principal captains were Beluche and Dominique You. "Captain Dominique" was small, graceful, fair, of a pleasant, even attractive face, and a skilful sailor. There were also Gambi, a handsome Ital- ian, wdio died only a few years ago at the old pirate village of Chenicre Caminada ; and Bigoult, a dark Frenchman, whose ancient house still stands on Grande Isle. And yet again Johnness and Johannot, unless — wdiich appears likely — these were only the I'eal names of Dominique and Beluche. Expeditions went out against these men more than once ; but the Government was pre-occupied and embar- rassed, and the expeditions seemed feebly conceived. Tliey only harassed the Baratarians, drove them to the mouth of La Fourche in vessels too well armed to be at- tacked in transports, and did not prevent their prompt re- turn to Grande Terre. The revolution for the independence of the Colombian States of South America beffan. Venezuela declared her THE PIRATES OF BARATARIA. 169 independence in Jnly, 1811. The Baratarians procured letters of marque from the patriots in Carthagena, low- ered the French flag, ran up the new standard, and thus far and no farther Joined the precarious fortunes of the new states, while Barataria continued to be their haunt and booty their only object. They reached the height of their fortune in 1813. Their moral condition had declined in proportion. "Among them," says the Governor, "are some St. Do- mingo negroes of the most desperate character, and no worse than most of their white associates." Their avowed purpose, he says, was to cruise on the high seas and commit " depredations and piracies on the vessels of nations in peace with the United States." One of these nations M^as the British. Its merchant- men were captured in the Gulf and sold behind Grande Ten-e. The English more than once sought redress with their own powder and shot. On the 23d of June, 1813, a British sloop-of-war anchored off the outer end of the channel at the mouth of La Fourche and sent her boats to attack two privateers lying under the lee of Cat Island ; but the pirates stood ground and repulsed them with con- siderable loss. Spain, England, and the United States were now their enemies ; yet they grew bolder and more outrageous. Smuggling increased. The Government was " set at defi- ance in broad daylight." " I remember," reads a manu- script kindly furnished the present writer, " when thi-ee 170 THE CKEOLES OF LOIISIAXA. Spanish vessels were brought in to Caillou Islands. They were laden with a certain Spanish wine, and the citizens of Attakapas went out to see them and purchased part of the captured cargoes. There were no traces of the former crews." In October, 1813, a revenue officer seized some contra- band goods near Jsew Orleans. He was fired upon ]>y a party under John Lafitte, one of liis men wounded, and the goods taken from him. The Governor offered $;500 for Lafitte's apprehension, but without avail. In January, 1814, four hundred and fifteen negroes, consigned to John and Pierre Lafitte, were to be auc- tioned at " The Temple." An inspector of customs and twelve men were stationed at the spot. John Lafitte at- tacked them, killed the inspector, wounded two men, and made the rest prisoners. Still he was not arrested. His island was fortified, his schooners and feluccas were swift, his men were well or- ganized and numbered four hundred, the Federal Govern- ment was getting the worst of it in war with Great Britain, and, above all, the prevalence of West Indian ideas in Kew Orleans was a secure shelter. He sent his spoils daily up La Fourche to Donaldsonville on the Mis- sissippi, and to other points. Strong, well-armed escorts protected them. Claiborne asked the legislature to raise one hundred men for six months' service. The request was neglected. At the same time a filibustering expedi- tion against Texas was only stopped by energetic meas- THE PIRATES OF BARATARIA. 171 ures. The Federal courts could effect nothing. An ex- pedition captured both Lafittes, but thej disappeared, and the writs were returned " not found." But now the tide turned. Society began to repudiate the outlaws. In July, 1814, a grand jury denounced them as pirates, and exhorted the people " to remove the stain that has fallen on all classes of society in the minds of the good people of the sister States." Indictments were found against Johnness and Johannot for piracies in the Gulf, and against Pierre Lafitte as accessory. Lafitte was arrested, bail was refused, and he found himself at last shut up in the calaboza. XXV. BARATARIA DESTROYED. TTTEIGIIIXG all the facts, it is small wonder that the Delta Creoles coquetted with the Baratarians. To say no more of Spanish American or French West Indian tincture, there was the Embargo. There were the war- ships of Europe skimming ever to and fro in the en- trances and exits of the Gulf. Rarely in days of French or Spanish rule had this purely agricultural country and non-manufacturing town been so removed to the world's end as just at this time. The Mississippi, northward, was free ; but its perils had hardly lessened since the days of Spanish rule. Then it was said, in a curious old "West- ern advertisement of 1797, whose English is worthy of notice : " No danger need be apprehended from the enemy, as every person whatever will be under cover, made proof against rifle or musket balls, and convenient port-holes for firing out of. Each of the boats are armed with six pieces, carry a pound ball, also a number of muskets, and amply supplied with plenty of ammunition, strongly manned with choice hands, and masters of approved knowledge." BARATARIA DESTROYED. 173 Scarcely any journey, now, outside of Asia, Africa, and the Polar seas, is more arduous than was then the trip from St. Louis to New Orleans. Vagabond Indians, white marauders, Spanish-armed extortion and arrest, and the natural perils of the stream, made the river little, if any, less dangerous than the Gulf. Culbert and Maglibi-ay were the baser Laiittes of the Mississippi, and Cotton- wood Creek their Barataria. And the labors and privations were greater than the dangers. The conveyances were keel-boats, barges, and jflat-boats. The flat-boats, at l^ew Orleans, were broken up for their lumber, their slimy gunwales forming along the open gutter's edge in many of the streets a narrow and treacherous substitute for a pavement. The keel- boats and barges returned up-stream, propelled now by sweeps and now by warping or by cordelle (hand tow- ropes), consuming " three or four months of the most painful toil that can be imagined." Exposure and bad diet " ordinarily destroyed one-third of the crew." But on the lOtli of January, 1812, there had pushed in to the landino; at New Orleans a skv-blue thing with a O I/O long bowsprit, " built after the fashion of a ship, with port- holes in the side," and her cabin in the hold. She was the precursor of the city's future greatness, the Orleans, from Pittsburg, the first steam vessel on the Mississippi. Here was a second freedom of the great river mightier than that wrested from Spain. Commercial grandeur seemed just at hand. All Spanish America was asserting 174 THE CIIEOLES OF LOUISIANA. its independence ; AVliitney's genius was making cotton tlic world's greatest staple ; innnigi'ants were swarming into the West ; the Mississippi valley would be the pro- vision-house of Europe, the importer of untold millions of manufactures ; New Orleans would keep the only gate. Instead of this, in June, 1812, Congress declared war against Great Britain. Barataria seemed indispensable, and New Orleans was infested with dangers. In 1813, "Wilkinson, still conunanding in the West, marched to Mobile Kiver ; in April he drove the Span- iards out of Fort Charlotte and raised a small fortification, Fort Bowyer, to connnand the entrance of Mobile Bay. Thus the Spanish, neighbors only less objectionable than the British, were crowded back to Pensacola. But, this done, AVilkinson was ordered to the Canadian frontier, and even took part of his few regulars with him. The English were already in the Gulf ; the Indians were growing offensive; in July seven hundred crossed the Perdido into Mississippi ; in September they massa- cred three hundred and lifty whites at Fort Minnns, and opened the Creek war. Within New Orleans bands of drunken Choctaws roamed the streets. The Baratarians ■were seen daily in the public resorts. Incendiary fires be- came alarmingly common, and the hatture troubles again sprang np. Naturally, at such a junction, Lafitte and his men reached the summit of power. In February, 1814, four hundred country militia re- ported at Magazine Barracks, opposite New Orleans. The BARATAKIA DESTROYED. 175 Governor tried to force out the city militia. He got only clamorous denunciation and refusal to obey. The country muster offered their aid to enforce the order. The city companies heard of it, and only Claiborne's discreetness averted the mortifying disaster of a battle without an enemy. The country militia, already deserting, was dis- banded. Even the legislature withheld its support, and Claiborne was everywhere denounced as a traitor. He had to report to the President his complete failure. Still, he insisted apologetically, the people were emphatically ready to "turn out in case of actual invasion." Only so patient a man coiild understand that the Creoles were con- scientious in their lethargy. Fortunately the invasion did not come imtil the Creek war had brought to view the genius of Andrew Jackson. In April, Government raised the embargo. But the re- lief was tardy ; the banks suspended. "Word came that Paris had fallen. Napoleon had abdicated. England would throw new vigor into the war with America, and could spare troops for the conquest of Louisiana. In August the Creeks made peace. Some British officers landed at Apalachicola, Florida, bringing artillery. Some disaffected Creeks joined them and were by them armed and drilled. But now, at length, the Government took steps to defend the Southwest. General Jackson was given the undertaking. He wrote to Claiborne to hold his militia ready to march — an order very easy to give. In September he repaired to Mobile, 17G tup: CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. which Mas ah-eadj threatened. Tlic British Colonel Kicholls liad hindcd at Peiiisacola with some companies of infantry, from two sloops-of-Mar. The officers from Apalachicola and a considerable body of Indians had joined him, Avithout objection from the Spaniards. Suddenly attention was drawn to the I>ai'atarians. On the third of September an armed brii:; had appeared off Grande Terre. She fired on an inbound vessel, forcing her to run aground, tacked, and presently anchored some six miles from shore. Certain of the islanders went off in a boat, ventured too near, and, turning to retreat, were overhauled by the brig's pinnace, carrying British colors and a white flag. In tlie pinnace were two naval officers and a captain of infantry. They asked for Mr. Lafitte, one officer speaking in French for the other. "lie is ashore," said the chief person in the island boat, a man of dignified and pleasing address. The officers lianded him a packet addressed " To Mr. Lafitte, Bara- taria," and asked that it be carefullj'- delivered to him in person. The receiver of it, however, induced them to continue on, and when they were plainly in his power revealed himself. " I, myself, am Mr. Lafitte." As they drew near the shore, he counselled them to conceal their business from his men. More than two hundred Baratarians lined the beach clamoring for the arrest of the " spies," but Lafitte contrived to get them safely to his dwelling, quieted his men, and opened the packet. BAEATAKIA DESTEOYED. 177 There were four papers in it. First, Colonel Nicholls's appeal to the Creoles to help restore Louisiana to Spain ; to Spaniards, French, Italians, and Britons, to aid in abolishing American usurpation ; and to Kentuckians, to exchange supplies for money, and neutrality for an open Mississippi. Second, his letter to Lafitte offering a naval captain's commission to him, lands to all his followers, and protection in persons and property to all, if the pirates, with their fleet, would put themselves under the British naval commander, and announcing the early in- vasion of Louisiana with a powerful force. Third, an order from the naval commander in Pensacola Bay, to Captain Lockyer, the bearer of the packet, to procure res- titution at Barataria for certain late piracies, or to "carry destruction over the whole place ; " but also repeating Colonel I^icholls's overtures. And fourth, a copy of the orders under which Captain Lockyer had come. He was to secure the Baratarians' cqpoperation in an attack on Mobile, or, at all events, their neutrality. According to Lafitte, the captain added verbally the offer of $30,000 and many other showy inducements. Lafitte asked time to consider. He withdrew ; when in a moment the three officers and their crew were seized by the pirates and imprisoned. They were kept in confine- ment all night. In the morning Lafitte appeared, and, with many apologies for the rudeness of his men, con- ducted the officers to their pinnace, and they went off to the brig. The same day he addressed a letter to Captain 13 .178 THE CKKOLKS OF LOUISIANA. Lockycr asking a fortnight to '* put his affairs in order,"' when he would be "entirely at his disposal." It is notice- able for its polished dignity aiul the ])urity of its Eng- lish. AVas this anything more than stratagem ? The Span- iard and Englishman M'ere his foe and his prey. The Creoles were his friends. His own large interests were scattered all over Lower Louisiana. His pati-iotism has been overpraised ; and yet we may allow him patriotism. His whole war, on the main-land side, Avas only with a set of ideas not superficially fairer than his own. They seemed to him unsuited to the exigencies of the times and the country. Thousands of Louisianians thought as he did. They and he — to borrow from a distance the phrase of another — were "polished, agreeable, dignified, averse to baseness and vulgarity." They accepted friendship, honor, an*! party faith as sufiicient springs of action, and only dispensed with the sterner question of right and wrong. True, Pierre, his brother, and Dominique, his most intrepid captain, lay then in the calaboza. Yet should he, so able to take care of himself against all comers and all fates, so scornful of all subordination, for a paltry captain's commission and a doubtful thirty thou- sand, help his life-time enemies to invade the comitry and city of his commercial and social intimates ? He sat down and penned a letter to his friend Blan(pie, of the legislature, and sent the entire British packet, ask- ing but one favor, the " amelioration of the situation of I5AKATAKIA DESTROYED. 179 his unhappy brother ; " and the next morning one of the New Orleans papers contained the following advertise- ment : $1,000 REWARD Will be paid for the appreliending of Pierre Lafitte, who broke and escaped hist night from the prison of the parish. Said Pierre La- fitte is about five feet ten inclies lieight, stout made, light comi^lexion, and somewhat cross-eyed, further description is considered unneces- sary, as he is very well known in the city. Said Lafitte took with him three negroes, to wit : [giving their names and those of their owners] ; the above reward will be paid to any per- son delivering the said Lafitte to the subscriber. J. H. Holland, Keeper of the Prison. On the Tth, John Lafitte wrote again to Blanque, — the British brig and two sloops-of-war still hovered in the oflEing, — should he make overtures to the United States Government ? Blanque's advice is not known ; but on the 10th, Lafitte made such overtures by letter to Clai- borne, inclosed in one from Pierre Lafitte — who had joined him — to M. Blanque. The outlawed brothers offered themselves and their men to defend Barataria, asking only oblivion of the past. The high-spirited periods of John Lafitte challenge ad- miration, even while thej- betray tinges of sophistry that may or may not have been apparent to their writer. "All tlie offence I have committed," wrote he, "I was forced to by certain vices in our laws." He did not say 180 THE CliEOLKS OF LOUISIANA. that these vices consisted iiuiijily of eiuictinents agiiiiist smuggling, piracy, and the slave-trade. The heads of the small naval and military force then near Xew Orleans were Commodore Paterson and Colonel Koss. They had organized and were hnri'iedly preparing a descent npon the IJaratarians. A general of the Creole militia was Villere, son of the unhappy patriot of 1708. Claiborne, with these three officers, met in council, with the Lafittes' letters and the British overtures before themj and debated the question whether the pirates' services should be accepted. Claiborne being in the chair Avas not called upon for a vote. It would be interesting to know, what, with his now thorough knowledge of the Creole character and all the expediencies of the situation, his vote would have been. Villere voted yea, but Ross and Pater- son stoutly nay, and thus it was decided. 2sor did the British send ashore for Lafitte's final answer. They only lingered distantly for some days and then vanished. Presently the expedition of Poss and Paterson was ready. Stealing down the Mississippi, it was joined at the mouth by some gun-vessels, sailed westward into the Gulf, and headed for Barataria. There was the schooner Carolina, six gun-vessels, a tender, and a launch. On the 16th of September they sighted Grande Terre, formed in line of battle, and stood for the entrance of the bay. Within the harbor, behind the low island, the pirate fleet was soon descried forming in line. Counting all, schooners and feluccas, there were ten vessels. Two miles BAllATARIA DESTROYED. 183 from shore the Carolina was stopped by slioal water, and tlie two heavier gun- vessels grounded. But armed boats were launched, and the attack entered the pass and moved on into the harbor. Soon two of the Baratarians' vessels were seen to be on fire ; another, attempting to escape, grounded, and the pirates, except a few brave leaders, were flying. One of the fired vessels burned, the other was boarded and saved, the one which grounded got off again and escaped. All the rest were presently captured. At this moment, a fine, fully armed schooner appeared outside tlie island, was chased and taken. Scarcely was this done when another showed herself to eastward. The Carolina gave chase. The stranger stood for Grande Terre, and ran into water where the Carolina could not follow. Four boats were launched ; whereupon the chase opened fire on the Caro- lina, and the gun-vessels in tui-n upon the chase, firing across the island from inside, and in half an hour she sur- rendered. She proved to be the General Bolivar, armed with one eighteen, two twelve, and one six-pounder. The nest was broken up. " x\ll their buildings and es- tablishments at Grande Terre and Grand Isle, with their telegraph and stores at Cheniere Caminada, were de- stroyed. On the last day of September, the elated squad- ron, with their prizes — seven cruisers of Lafitte, and three armed schooners under Carthagenian colors — arrived in New Orleans harbor amid the peal of guns from the old barracks and Fort St. Charles. 184 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. But among the prisoners the commanding coimtenance of Jolm Lafitte and the cross-eyed visage of liis brother Piei-re were not to Ije seen. Both men had escaped np Bayou La Fourche to the " German Coast." Others mIio had had like fortune by and by gathered on Last Island, some sixty )niles Avest of Grande Terre, and others found asylum in Xew Orleans, M'here they increased the fear of internal disorder. XXVI. THE BRITISH INVASION. TDATEESON and lloss had struck the Baratarians just in time. The fortnight asked of the British by La- fitte expired the next day. The British themselves were far away eastward, drawing off from an engagement of the day before, badly worsted. A force of seven liundred British troops, six hundred Indians, and four vessels of war had attacked Fort Bowyer, commanding the en- trances of Mobile Bay and Mississippi Sound. Its small garrison had repulsed them and they retired again to Pen- sacola with serious loss, including a sloop-of-war grounded and burned. I^ow General Jackson gathered four thousand men on the Alabama Biver, regulars, Tennesseeans, and Missis- sippi dragoons, and early in November attacked Pensacola with great spirit, took the two forts — which the Spaniards had allowed the English to garrison — drove the English to their shipping and the Indians into the interior, and returned to Mobile. Here he again called on Claiborne to muster his militia. Claiborne convened the Legislature and laid the call before it. ISC) THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. His was not the master-spirit to cominand a people so different from himself in a moment of extremity. On every side was discord, apprehension, and despondency that he could not cure. Two committees of safety en- t^aged in miserable disputes. Credit was destroyed. Money connnanded three or four per cent, a month. The Legislature dawdled until the Louisianian himself uttered a nohlc protest. " No other evidence of patriot- ism is to be found," cried Louallier, of Opelousas, " than a disposition to avoid every expense, every fatigue." It was easy to count up the resources of defence : Pat- erson's feeble navy, the weak Fort St. Philip on the river, tlie unfinished Fort Petites Cbquilles on the Rigo- lets, Ross's seven hundred regulars, a thousand militia mustered at last after three imperative calls, a Avretchedly short supply of ammunition — nothing more. " Our situ- ation," says La Carriere Latour in liis admirable memoir, "seemed desperate." Twelve thousand chosen British troops were known to have sailed for Louisiana. But suddenly, one day, the first of winter, confidence returned ; enthusiasm sprang up ; all was changed in a moment by the arrival of one man, whose spare form thrilled everything with its electric energy. He reviewed the Creole troops, and praised their equipment and drill ; he inspected their forts ; he was ill, but he was every- where ; and everyone who saw that intense eye, that un- furrowed but fixed brow, the dry locks falling down over it as if blown there by hard riding, and the two double THE BKITISII INVASION. 187 side lines wliicli his overwhelming and perpetual " must and shall " had dug at either corner of his firm but pas- sionate mouth, recognized the master of the hour, and emulated his confidence and activity. Like the Creoles themselves, brave, impetuous, patriotic, and a law unto himself, and yet supplying the qualities they lacked, the continent could hardly have furnished a man better fitted to be their chief in a day of peril than was Andrew Jack- son. Soon the whole militia of city and State were added to the first thousand, organized and ready to march. There was another spring to their tardy alacrity. Eighty British ships, it was said, were bearing down toward Ship Island. Cochrane, the scourge of the Atlantic coast, was admiral of the fleet. On the 14th of December forty-five barges, carrying forty-three guns and one thousand two hundred British troops, engaged the weak American flotilla of six small vessels near the narrow passes of Lake Borgne. There was a short, gallant struggle, and the British were masters of the lake and its shores. Even then the Legislature pronounced against Clai- borne's recommendation that it declare martial law and adjourn. But Jackson instantly proclaimed it in ringing words. " The district's safety," he said, " must and will be maintained with the best blood of the country," and he would " separate the country's friends from its enemies." Measures of defence were pushed on. Forts and stock- ades were manned, new companies and battalions were 188 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. mustered, among them one of Choctaw Indians and two of free men of color. The jails were emptied to swell the ranks. And hereupon John Lafitte, encouraged by Claiborne and the Legislature, came forward again. Jackson in one of his proclamations had called the Baratarians "hellish banditti," whose aid he spurned. But now these two in- trepid leaders met face to face in a room that may still be pointed out in the old cabildo, and the services of Lafitte and his skilled artillerists were offered and accepted for the defence of the city. All proceedings against them were suspended ; some were sent to man the siege-guns of Forts Petites Coquilles, St. John, and St. Philip, and others were enrolled in a body of artillery under " Cap- tains" Beluche and Dominique. One of the General's later reports alludes to the Baratarians as " these gentle- men." XXVIL THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS. /~\XCE more the Creoles sang the "Marseillaise." The ^"'^ invaders hovering along the marshy shores of Lake Borgne were fom'teen thousand strong. Sir Edward Packenham, brother-in-law to the Duke of Wellington, and a gallant captain, was destined to lead them. Gibbs, Lambert, and Ivean were his generals of division. As to Jackson, thirty-seven hundred Tennesseeans under Gen- erals Coffee and Carroll, had, when it was near Christmas, given him a total of but six thousand men. Yet confi- dence, animation, concord, and even gaiety, filled the hearts of the mercurial people. "The citizens," says the eye-witness, Latour, "were preparing for battle as cheerfully as for a party of plea- sure. The streets resounded with ' Yankee Doodle,' ' La Marseillaise,' ' Le Chant du Depart,' and other martial airs. The fair sex presented themselves at the windows and balconies to applaud the troops going through their evolutions, and to encourage their hus- bands, sons, fathers, and brothers to protect them from their enemies." 100 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. That enemy, reconnoitring on Lake Borgne, soon found in the marshes of its extreme western end the mouth of a navigable stream, the Bayou Bienvenue. Tliis water Howed into the lake directly from the west — the direction of Xew Orleans, close behind whose lower suburl) it had its beginning in a dense cypress swamp. Within its mouth it was over a liundred yards wide, and more than six feet deep. As they ascended its waters, everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, stretched only the unbroken quaking prairie. But soon they found and bribed a village of Spanish and Italian fishermen, and under their guidance explored the whole region. By turning into a smaller bayou, a branch of the first, the Mississippi was found a very few miles away on the left, hidden from view by a narrow belt of swamp and hurry- ing soutlieastward toward the Gulf. F'rom the plantations of sugar-cane on its border, various draining canals ran back nortliM'ard to the bayou, offering on their margins a fair though narrow walking way through the wooded and vine-tangled morass to the open plains on the river shore, just below Xew Orleans. By some oversight, which has never been explained, this easy route to the city's very outskirts had been left unobstructed. On the 21st of December some Creole scouts posted a picket at the fishermen's village. The traveller on the Xew Orleans & Mobile Eailroad, as he enters the southeastern extreme of Louisiana, gliding along the low, wet prairie margin of the Gulf, passes THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEAXS. 191 across an island made bj the two mouths of Pearl River. It rises just high enough above the surrounding marsh to be at times tolerably dry ground. A sportsmen's sta- tion on it is called English Look-out ; but the island itself seems to have quite lost its name. It was known then as Isle aux Poix (Pea Island). Here on December the 21st, ISltt, the British had been for days disembarking. Early on the 22d General Kean's division re-embarked from this island in barges, shortly before dawn of the 23d captured the picket at the fishers' village, pushed on up the bayou, turned to the left, southwestward, into the smaller bayou (Mazant), entered the swamp, disembarked once more at the luouth of a plantation canal, marched southward along its edge through the wood, and a little before noon emerged upon the open plain of the river shore, scarcely seven miles from jSTew Orleans, without a foot of fortification between them and the city. But the captured pickets had reported Jackson's forces eighteen thousand strong, and the British halted, greatly fatigued, lentil they should be joined by other divisions. Xot, however, to rest. At about two o'clock in the afternoon, while the people of the city were sitting at their midday dinner, suddenly the cathedral bell startled them with its notes of alarm, drums sounded the long-roll, and as military equipments were hurriedly put on, and Creoles, Americans, and San Domingans, swords and mus- kets in hand, poured in upon the Place d'Armes from every direction and sought their places in the ranks, word 192 TIIF CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. passt'tl from luoulli to innutli that there had l>c'oii a hhiii- der, and that the enemy was but seven miles away in force — " sur VhabiUition Y'dlere ! " — " on A'illere's planta- tion ! " Put courage Avas in every heart. Quickly the lines were formed, the standards "vvere unfurled, the huzza resounded as the well-known white horse of Jackson came galloping down their front with his staff— Edward Living- ston and Abner Duncan among tliem — at his heels, the drums sounded quickstep and the columns moved down throu2;h the streets and out of the anxious town to meet the foe. In half an hour after the note of alarm the Seventh regulars, with two pieces of artillery and some marines, had taken an advanced position. An hour and a half later General Coffee, with his Tennessee and Missis- sippi cavalry, took their place along the small Kodriguez canal, that ran from the river's levee to and into the swamp, and which afterward became Jackson's permanent line of defence. Just as the sun was setting the troops that had been stationed at Bayou St. John, a battalion of free colored men, then the Forty-fourth regulars, and then the brightly uniformed Creole battalion, first came into town by way of the old Bayou Road, and swept through the streets toward the enemy on the run, glittering with accou- trements and arms, under the thronged balconies and amid the tears and plaudits of Creole mothers and daughters. Night came on, very dark. The Carolina dropped noise- lessly down opposite the British camp, anchored close in shore, and opened her broadsides and musketry at short THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS. 193 range. A moment later Jackson fell upon the startled foe with twelve hundred men and two pieces of artillery, striking them fii'st near the river shore, and presently along their whole line. Coffee, with six hundred men, unseen in the darkness, issued from the woods on the north, and attacked the British right, just as it was trying to turn Jackson's left — Creole troops, whose ardor would have led them to charge with the hayonet, but for the prudence of the Kegular officer in command. A fog rose, the smoke of battle rested on the field, the darkness thick- ened, and all was soon in confusion. Companies and bat- talions — red coats, blue coats. Highland plaidies, and " dirty shirts " (Tennesseeans), from time to time got lost, fired into friendly lines, or met their foes in hand to hand encounters. Out in the distant prairie behind the swamp forest the second division of the British coming on, heard the battle, hurried forward, and began to reach the spot while the low plain, wrapped in darkness, M'as still flashing with the discharge of artillery. The engagement M'as soon over, without special results beyond that prestige which we may be confident was, at the moment, Jackson's main aim. Before day he fell back two miles, and in the narrowest part of the plain, some four miles from town, began to make his permanent line behind Rodriguez Canal. Inclement weather set in, increasing the hardships of friend and foe. The British toiled incessantly in the miry ground of the sugar-cane fields to bring up their ]S)4 TIIH niEOLES OF LOUISIAXA. lieavy artillerv, and both sides erected breastworks and batteries, and hurried forward their re-enforccnients. Skirniisliing was frecjuent, and to Jackson's i"aw levies very vahiable. Red-hot shot iioiu the British works de* stroyed the Carul'tna y but her ariuanicnt was saved and made a shore battery on tliefartlicr river bank. On Kew Year's day a few bales of cotton, forming part of the American fortifications, were scattered in all directions and set on lire, and this was the first and last use nuvde of this material during the campaign. AVhen it had been called to General Jackson's notice that this cotton Avas the prop- ert}' of a foreigner, — " Give him a gun and let him defend it," was his answer. On the -ith, two thousand two hun- dred and fifty Kentuckians, poorly clad and worse armed arrived, and such as bore serviceable weapons raised Jack- son's force to three thousand two hundred men on his main line ; a line, says the Duke of Saxe- Weimar, '• the very fee- blest an engineer could have devised, that is, a straight one." Yet on this line the defenders of ]S'ew Orleans were about to be victorious. It consisted of half a mile of very uneven earthworks stretching across the plain along the inner edge of the canal, from the river to the edge of the wood, and continuing a like distance into the forest. In here it quickly dwindled to a mere double row of logs two feet apart, tilled in between with earth. The entire artil- lery on this whole line Avas twelve pieces. But it was served by men of rare skill, artillerists of the regular army, the sailors of the burnt Carolina, some old French soldiers THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS. 195 under Flaujeac one of Bonaparte's gunners, and Dominique and Beluclie, with tlie tried cannoneers of their pirate ships. From battery to battery the rude lino was filled out with a droll confusion of arms and trappings, men and dress. Here on the extreme right, just on and under the levee, were some regular infantry and a company of " Orleans Rifles,'' with some dragoons who served a how- itzer. Next to them was a battalion of Louisiana Cre- oles in gay and varied uniforms. The sailors of the Caro- lina were grouped around the battery between. In the Creoles' midst were the swarthy privateers with their two twenty-fours. Then came a battalion of native men of color, another bunch of sailors around a thirty-two- pounder, a battalion of St. Domingan mulattoes, a stretch lOG THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. of Line for some regular artillery and the Forty-fourth in- fantry, then Flaujeac and his Francs behind a brass twelve-pounder ; next, a long slender line of brown home- spun liunting-shirts that draped Carroll's lank Tennes- seeans, then a small, bright bunch of marines, then some more regular artillery behind a long brass culverine and a six-pounder, then AdaiFs ]-agged Kentuckians, and at the end. Coffee's Tennesseeans, disappearing in the swamp, where they stood by day knee-deej) in water and slept at night in the mud. Wintry rains had retarded everything in the British camp, but at length Lambert's division came up, Packen- liam took command, and plans were perfected for the final attack. A narrow continuation of the canal by which the English had come up through the swamp to its head at the rear of Yillere's plantation was dug, so that their boats could be floated up to the river front close under the back of the levee, and then dragged over its top and launched into the river. The squalid negresses that fish for crawfish along its rank, flowery banks still call it, "Cannal Packin'am." All night of the Tth of January there came to the alert ears of the Americans across the intervening plain a noise of getting boats through this narrow passage. It was evident that the decisive battle was impending. Packenham's intention was to throw a considerable part of his force across the river to attack the effective marine battery abreast of the American line, erected there by Commodore Paterson, THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS. 197 while he, on the hither shore, unembarrassed by its fire on his flank, should fall furiously upon Jackson's main line, in three perpendicular columns. But the river had fallen. Colonel Thornton, who Avas to lead the movement on the farther bank, was long get- ting his boats across the levee. The current, too, was far swifter than it had seemed. Eight priceless hours slipped awav and onlv a tliii'd of the intended force crossed. Packenham's Headquarters (from -the rear). A little before daybreak of the Sth, the British main force moved out of camp and spread across the plain, six thousand strong, the Americans in front, the river on their left, and the swamp-forest on their right. They had planned to begin at one signal the three attacks on the nearer and the one on the farther shore. The air was chilly and obscure, A mist was slowly clearing off from the wet and slippery ground. A dead silence reigned ; but in that mist and silence their enemy was waiting for 198 THE ClfKOLES OF LOUISIANA. them. Presently day broke ami rapidly brightened, the mist lifted a little and the i-ed lines of the British were fit- fully descried from the American works. Outside the levee the wide river and farther shore were quite hidden by the fog, which now and tlien floated hitherward over the land. Packenham was listening for the attack of Colonel Thornton on the opposite baidc, that was to relieve his main assault from tlie cross-fire of Paterson's marine bat- tery. The sun rose; but he heard iiotliing. J le waited till half-past seven ; still there was no sound. Meanwhile the Americans lay in their long trench, peering over their sorry breastworks, and wondering at the inaction. Put at length Pa6kenhara could wait no longer. A British rocket went np near the swamp. It was the signal for attack. A single cannon-shot answered from the Americans, and the artillery on both sides opened wdth a frightful roar. On Jackson's extreme left, some black troops of the British force made a feint against the line in the swam]) and were easily repulsed. On his right, near the river, the eneniy charged in solid column, impetuously, upon a redoubt just in advance of the line. Twice only the redoubt could reply, and the British were over and inside and pressing on to scale the breastM-ork behind. Their brave and much-loved Colonel Pennie was leading them. But on the top of the works he fell dead with the hurrah on his lips, and they were driven back and out of the redoubt in confusion. Meantime the main attack was being made in the open THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS. 199 plain near the edge of the swamp. Some four hundred yards in front of the American works hiy a ditch. Here the English formed in close column of about sixty men front. They should have laid off their heavy knapsacks, for they were loaded besides with big fascines of ripe sugar-cane for filling up the American ditch, and with scaling ladders. But with nniskets, knapsacks and all, they gave three cheers and advanced. Before them went a shower of Congreve rockets. For a time: tliey. were partly covered by an arm of the forest and by the fog, but soon they emerged from both and moved steadily forward in perfect ordei-, literally led to the slaughter in the brave old British way. " Where are yon going ? " asked one English officer of another. " I'll be hanged if I know." " Then," said the first, " you have got into what I call a good thing ; a far-famed American battery is in front of you at a short range, and on the left of this spot is flanked, at eight hundred yards, by their batteries on the opposite side of the river." ",The first objects we saw, enclosed as it were in this little w^orld of mist," says this eye-witness, " were the can- non-balls tearing up the ground and crossing one another, and bounding along like so many cricket-balls through the air, coming on our left flank from the American batteries on the right bank of the river, and also from their lines in front." 200 THE C'UKOLKS OF LOUISIANA. The musketry lire of tlie Aiuericuns, as well as the ar- tillery, was given with terrible precision. Unhappily for the Enirlish tliev had siiiirltHl (.xit for their attack those homely-clad men whom they had nick-named the " Dirty- shirts,-' — the riflemen of Kentucky and Tennessee— In- dian fighters, that never fired but on a selected victim. Flaujeac's battery tore out whole files of men. Yet the brave foe came on, veterans from the Cape of Good Hope and from the Spanish Peninsula, firmly and measuredly, and a few platoons had even i-eached the canal, when the column faltered, gave way, and fied precipitately back to the ditch where it had first formed. Here there was a rally. The knapsacks were taken oif. lie-enforcements came up. The first charge had been a dreadful mistake in its lack of speed. Xow the start was quicker and in less order, but again in the fatal cohimnar form. " At a run," writes the participant already quoted, " we neared the American line. The mist was now rapidly clearing away, but, owing to the dense smoke, we could not at first distinguish the attacking column of the British troops to our right. . . . The echo from the can- nonade and nnisketry was so tremendous in the forests that the vibration seemed as if the earth were cracking and tumbling to pieces. . . . The flashes of fire looked as if coming out of the bowels of the earth, so little above its surface were the batteries of the Americans." Packeuham led the van. On a black horse, in brilliant THE BATTLE OF NEW OKLEANS. 201 uniform, waving his hat and clieering the onset, he was a mark the backwoodsmen could not miss. Soon he reeled and fell from his horse with a mortal wound ; Gibbs fol- lowed him. Then Kean was struck and borne from the field with many others of high rank, and the column again recoiled and fell back, finally discomfited. " Did you ever see such a scene ? " cried one of Packen- ham's staff. " There is nothing left but the Seventh and Forty-third ! '' The Battle-Ground. " They fell," says another Englishman, " like the very blades of grass beneath the scythe of the mower. Seven- teen hundred and eighty-one victims, including three generals, seven colonels, and seventy-five lesser officers, wei'e the harvest of those few minutes." At length the American musketry ceased. Only the bat- teries were answering shot for shot, when from the further side of the Mississippi came, all too late, a few reports of 202 THE CKKOLES OF LOUISIANA. cannon, a short, brisk rattle of fire-arnis, a liusli, and three British clioers to tell that the few raw American troops on that side had been overpowered, and that Paterson's bat- tery, prevented from defending itself by the bhmdering of the militia in its front, had been spiked and abandoned. The batteries of the British line continned to tire nntil two in the afternoon ; bnt from the first signal of the morn- ing to the abandonment of all effort to storm the American works was bnt one hour, and the battle of New Orleans was over at half-past eight. Genei'al Lambert reported the British loss two thousand and seventeen ; Jackson, the American at six killed and seven wounded. From the 9th to the 18tli four British vessels bom- barded Fort St. Philip without result; on the morning of the 19th the British camp in front of Jackson Avas found deserted, and eight days later the last of the enemies' forces embarked from the shores of Lake Borgne. The scenes of ti'iumplmnt rejoicing, the hastily erected arches in the Place d'Armes, the symbolical impersona- tions, the myriads of banners and pennons, the columns of victorious troo])s, the crowded balconies, the rain of flow«rs in a town where fiowers never fail, the huzzas of the thronging populace, the salvos of artillery, the garland- crowned victor, and the ceremonies of thanksgiving in the solemn cathedi-al, form a part that may be entrusted to the imagination. One purpose and one consummation made one people, and little of sorrow and naught of discord in that hour mingled with the joy of deliverance. XXVIIT. THE END OF THE PIRATES. "^^EW OELEANS emerged from the smoke of battle comparatively Americanized. Peace followed, or rather the tardy news of peace, which had been sealed at Ghent more than a fortnight before the battle. With peace came open ports. The highways of commercial greatness crossed each other in the custom-house, not be- hind it as in Spanish or embargo days, and the Baratari- ans were no longer esteemed a public necessity. Scattered, used, and pardoned, they passed into eclipse — not total, but fatally dark where they most desired to shine. The ill-founded tradition that the Lafittes were never seen after the battle of New Orleans had thus a figurative reality. In Jackson's general order of January 21st, Captains Dominique and Beluche, "with part of their former crew," were gratefully mentioned for their gallantry in the field, and the brothers Lafitte for " the same courage and fidelity." On these laurels Dominique You rested and settled down to quiet life in Kew Orleans, enjoying the vulgar admiration which is o-iven to the survivor of 204 THE ("UF.OLKS OF J.OUISIAXA. lawless adventures. It may seem supcrlluous to add that he hecatne a leader in waid jiolitics. In the spring of 1815, Jackson, for certain imprison- ments of men wlio boldly opposed the severity of his pro- longed dictatorshij) in New Orleans, was forced at length Old Spanish Cottage in Royal Street; Scene of Andrew Jackson's Trial. to regard the decrees of court. It was then that the " hellish banditti," turned " Jacksonites,'- did their last swaggering in the famous Exchange Coffee-house, at the corner of St. Louis and Cliartres Streets, and when he was lined $1,U00 for contempt of court, aided in drawing his carriage by hand through the streets. THE END OF THE PIRATES. 205 Of Belnche or of Pierre Lafitte little or nothing more is known. But John Lafitte continued to have a record. After the city's deliverance a ball was given to oflScers of the army. General Coffee was present. So, too, was La- fitte. On their being brought together and introduced, the General showed some hesitation of manner, where- upon the testy Baratarian advanced haughtily and said, with emphasis, " Lafitte, the pirate." Thus, unconsciously, it may be, he foretold that part of his life which still lay in the future. That future belongs properly to the history of Texas. Galveston Island had early been one of Lafitte's stations, and now became his permanent depot, whence he carried on extensive operations, contraband and piratical. His principal cruiser was the Jupiter. She sailed under a Tex- an commission. Under the filibuster Long, who ruled at Kacogdoches, Lafitte became Governor of Galveston. An American ship was I'obbed of a quantity of specie on the high seas. Shortly afterward the Ju/piter came into Galveston with a similar quantity on board. A Unit- ed States cruiser accordingly was sent to lay off the coast, and watch her manosuvres. Lafitte took offence at this, and sent to the American commander to demand explana- tion. His letter, marked with more haughtiness, as well as with more ill-concealed cunning than his earlier corre- spondence with the British and Americans, was not an- swered. Tu 1818 a storm destroyed four of his fleet. He sent 206 TJIE Cl{ HOLES OF LOUISIANA. one Lafugc to IS'ew Orleans, who l)iouglit out tlicnce a new schooner of two guns, manned hy fifty men. He presently took a juize; but had hardly done so, when he ■was met hy the revemic cutter Alabama, answered lier challenge with a broadside, engaged lier in a hard battle, and only surrendered after lieavy loss. The schooner and prize were carried into Bayou St. John, the crew taken to ?sew Orleans, tried in the United States Court, condemned and executed Once more Lafitte took the disguise of a Coloml^ian commission and fitted out three vessels. The name of one is not known. Another was the General Victoria, and a third the schooner Blank' — or, we may venture to spell it Blanque. lie coasted westward and southward as far as Sisal, Yucatan, taking several small prizes, and one that was very valuable, a schooner that had been a slaver. Thence he turned toward Cape Antonio, Cuba, and in the open Gulf disclosed to his followers that his Colombian commission had expired. Forty-one men insisted on leaving him. lie removed the guns of the General Victoria, crippled her rigging, and gave her into their hands. They sailed for the Mis- sissippi, and after three weeks arrived there and surren- dered to the officers of the customs. The Spanish Consul claimed the vessel, but she was decided to belong to the men who had fitted her out. Lafitte Seems now to have become an open pirate. Vil- lere. Governor of Louisiana after Claiborne, and the same THE END OF THE PIRATES. 2()7 who had counselled the acceptance of Lafitte's first over- tures in 1819, spoke in no measured terms of " those men who lately, under the false pretext of serving the cause of the Spanish patriots, scoured the Gulf of Mexico, making its waves groan," etc. It seems many of them had foun^ homes in j^ew Orleans, making it " the seat of disorders and crimes which he would not attempt to describe." The end of this uncommon man is lost in a confusion of improbable traditions. As late as 1822 his name, if not his person, was the terror of the Gulf and the Straits of Florida. But in that year the United States Navy swept those Avaters with vigor, and presently reduced the perils of the Gulf — for the first time in its history — to the hazard of wind and wave. A few steps down the central walk of the middle ceme- tery of those that lie along Claiborne Street from Custom- house down to Conti, on the right-hand side, stands the low, stuccoed tomb of Dominique You. The tablet bears his name surmounted by the emblem of Free Masonry: Some one takes good care of it. An epitaph below pro- claims him, in French verse, the " intrepid hero of a hun- dred battles on land and sea ; who, without fear and with- out reproach, will one day view, unmoved, the destruction of the world." To this spot, in 1830, he was followed on his way by the Louisiana Legion (city militia), and laid to rest with military honors, at the expense of the town council. Governor Claiborne left the executive chair in 1816 to 208 TIIK CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. represent the State in the United States Senate. His suc- cessor was a Creole, the son, as we have seen, of that fiery Villere who in 17()l> had died in Spanish captivity one of the very earliest martyrs to the spirit of American free- ^:J^ Tomb of Governor Claiborne's Family. [From a Photograph.'] dom. Claiborne did not live out the year, but in the win- ter died. In the extreme rear of the old St. Louis ceme- tery on Basin Street, New Orleans, in an angle of its high brick wall, shut off from the rest of the place by a rude, low fence of cypress palisades, is a narrow piece of uncon- THE END OF THE PIRATES. 209 secrated ground where the tombs of some of New Orleans' noblest dead are huddled together in miserable oblivion. Rank weeds and poisonous vines have so choked up the whole place, that there is no way for the foot but over the tops of the tombs, and one who ventures thus, must be- ware of snakes at every step. In the midst of this spot is the tomb of Eliza Washington Claiborne, the Gover- nor's first wife, of her child of three years who died the same day as she, and of his secretary, her brother, of twenty-five, who a few months later fell in a duel, the rash victim of insults heaped upon his sister s husband through the public press. Near by, just within the pick- eted enclosure, the sexton has been for years making a heap of all manner of grave-yard rubbish, and under that pile of old cofl&n planks, broken-glass, and crockery, tin- cans, and rotting evergreens, lie the tomb and the ashes of William Charles Cole Claiborne, Governor of Louisiana. 14 XXIX. FAUBOURG STE. MARIE. TF one will stand to-daj on the broad levee at Xew Or- leans, with his back to the Mississippi, a short way out to the left and riverward from the spot where the long- vanished little Fort St. Louis once made pretence of guard- ing the town's upper liver cornei-, he will look down two streets at once. They are Canal and Common, which gently diverge from their starting-point at his feet and narrow away before his eye as they run down toward the low, unsettled lots and commons behind the city. Canal Street, the centre and pride of Xew Orleans, takes its name from the slimy old moat that once festered under the palisade wall of the Spanish town, where it ran back from river to swamp and turned northward on the line now marked by the beautiful tree-planted Ttampart Street. Common Street marks the ancient boundary of the es- tates wrested from the exiled Jesuit fathers by confisca- tion. In the beginning of the present century, the long wedge-shaped tract between these two lines was a Govern- ment reservation, kept for the better efficiency of the for- tifications that overlooked its lower border and for a FAUBOURG STE. MAKIE. 211 public road to No-man's land. It was called the Terre Commune. That part of the Jesuits' former plantations that lay next to the Terre Commune was mainly the property of a singular personage named Jean Gravier. Its farther-side boundary was on a line now indicated by Delord Street. When the fire of 1788 laid nearly the lialf of 'New Orleans in ashes, his father, Bertrand, and his mother, Marie, had laid off this tract into lots and streets, to the depth of three squares backward from the river, and called it Villa Gra- vier. On her death, the name was changed in her honor, and so became the Faubourg Ste. Marie. Capitalists had smiled upon the adventure. Julian Poy- dras, Claude Girod, Julia a free woman of color, and others had given names to its cross-streets by buying cor- ner-lots on its river-front. Along this front, under the breezy levee, ran the sunny and dusty Tchoupitoulas road, entei'ing the town's southern river- side gate, where a sentry-box and Spanish corporal's guard drowsed in the scant shadow of Fort St. Louis. Outside the levee the deep Mississippi glided, turbid, silent, often overbrimming, with many a swirl and upward heave of its boiling depths, and turning, sent a long smooth eddy back along this " making bank," while its main current hurried onward, townward, noHhward^ as if it would double on invisible piu'suers before it swept to the east and southeast from the Place d'Armes and disappeared behind the low groves of Slaughterhouse Point. 212 THE CREOLKS OF LOFISTAXA. In the opening years of the eentury only an occasional villa and an isolated roadside shop or two had arisen along the front of Fanbourg Ste, Marie and in the lirst street behind. Calle del Almazen, the Spanish notary wrote this street's name, for its lower (northern) end looked across the Teri-e Commune upon the large Ahnazen or store-house of Kentucky tobacco which Don Estevan Miro thought it wise to keep filled with purchases from the per- fidious Wilkinson. Rue du Magasin, Storehouse Street, the Creoles translated it, and the Americans made it Mag- azine Street ; but it was still only a straight road. Truck- gardens covered the fertile arpents between and beyond. Here and there was a grove of wide-spreading live-oaks, here and there a clump of persimmon trees, here and there an orchard of figs, here and there an avenue of bitter oranges or of towering pecans. The present site of the " St. Charles " was a cabbage-garden. Midway between Poydras and Girod Streets, behind Magazine, lay a camjyo de negroSy a slave camp, probably of cargoes of Guinea or Congo slaves. The street that cut through it became Calle del Campo — Camp Street. Far back in the rear of these lands, on the old Poydras draining canal, long since filled up and built upon — in a lonely, dreary waste of weeds and bushes dotted thick witli cypress stumps and dwarf palmetto, full of rankling ponds choked with bulrushes, flags, and pickerel-weed, fringed by willows and reeds, and haunted by frogs, snakes, crawfish, rats, and mosquitoes, on the edge of the FAUBOURG STE. MAEIE. 213 tangled swamp forest — stood the dilapidated home of " Doctor " Gravier, It stood on high pillars. Its win- dows and doors were lofty and wide, its verandas were broad, its roof was steep, its chimneys were tall, and its occupant was a childless, wifeless, companionless old man, whose kindness and medical attention to negroes had won him his professional title. He claims mention as a type of that strange group of men which at this early period figured here as the shrewd acquirers of wide suburban tracts, leaders of lonely lives, and leavers of great fortunes. John McDonough, who at this time Avas a young man, a thrifty trader in Guinea negroes, and a suitor for the hand of Don Andreas Almonaster's fair daughter, the late Baroness Pontalba, became in after days a like solitary type of the same class. Jean Gravier's house long sur- vived him, a rendezvous for desperate characters, and, if rumor is correct, the scene of many a terrible murder. In the favoring eddy under the river-bank in front of Faubourg Ste. Marie landed the flat-boat fleets from the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland. Buyers crowded here for cheap and fresh provisions. The huge, huddled arks became a floating market-place, with tlie kersey- and woolsey- and jeans-clad bargemen there, and the Creole and his sometimes brightly clad and sometimes picturesquely ragged slave here, and the produce of the "West changing hands between. But there was more than this. Warehouses began to appear on the edge of Tchou- pitoulas road, and barrels of pork and flour and meal to 214 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. mil bickering down into their open doors from the levee's top. Any eve eonkl see that, only let war cease, there would be a wonderful change in the half-drained, sun- baked marshes and kitchen-gardens of Faubourg Ste. Marie. Presently the change came. It outran the official news of ])eace. " Our harbor," wrote Claiborne, the Governor, in March, 1815, " is again whitening with canvas; the levee is crowded with cotton, tobacco, and other articles for exportation." A full sunrise of prosperity shone npon 'New Orleans. The whole great valley above began to fill up with won- derful speed and to pour down into her lap the fruits of its agriculture. Thirty-three thousand people were astir in her homes and streets. They overran the old bounds. They pulled np the old palisade. They shovelled the earth- works into the moat and pushed their streets out into the fields and thickets. In the old narrow ways — and the wider new ones alike — halls, churches, schools, stores, warehouses, banks, hotels, and theatres sprang up by day and night. Faubourg Ste. Marie outstripped all other quarters. The unconservative American was eveiywhere, but in Faubourg Ste. Marie he was supreme. The Western trade crowded down like a breaking np of ice. In 1817, 1,500 flat-boats and 500 barges tied up to the willows of the levee before the new faubourg. Inflation set in. Ex- ports ran up to thirteen million dollars' worth. FAUBOURG STE. MARIE. 215 In 1819 came the collapse, but development overrode it. Large areas of the hatture were reclaimed in front of the faubourg, and the Americans covered them with store buildings. In 1812, the first steam vessel had come down the Mississippi ; in 1816, for the first time, one overcame and reascended its current ; in 1821, 441 flat-boats and 1T4 barges came to port, and there were 287 arrivals of steam- boats. The kitchen-gardens vanished. Gravier Street, between Tchoupitoulas and Magazine, was paved with cobble- stones. The Creoles laughed outright. " A stone pave- ment in JSTew Orleans soil ? It will sink out of sight ! " But it bore not only their ridicule, but an uproar and gorge of wagons and drajs. There was an avalanche of trade. It crammed the whole harbor-front — old town and new — with river and ocean fleets. It choked the streets. The cry was for room and facilities. The Creoles heeded it. Up came their wooden sidewalks and curbs, brick and stone went down in their place, and by 1822 gangs of street paviors were seen and heard here, there, and yonder, swinging the pick and ramming the roundstone. There were then 41,000 people in the town and its suburbs. The old population held its breath. It clung bravely to the failing trades of the West Indies, France, and Spain. Coffee, indigo, sugar, rice, and foreign fruits and wines were still handled in the Rues Toulouse, Conti, St. Louis, Chartres, St. Peter, and Royale ; but the lion's share — the cotton, the tobacco, pork, beef, corn, flour, and north- 21() TIIK CIIKOLKS OF LOTTISIANA. em and British fabrics — poured into and out of Faubourg iSte. Marie tlirough the hands of tlic s\varjiiin<; Americans. "New Orleans is going to be a niiglity city," said tliey in effect, " and we are going to be New Orleans." But the (^reole "was still powerful, and jealous of everything that hinted of American absorption. We have seen that, in ISIO, he elected one of Ins own race. General Yillere, to succeed Claiborne in the governor's chair, and to guard the rights that headlong Americans might forget. " Indeed," this governor wrote in a special message on the " scan- dalous practices almost every instant taking place in New Orleans and its suburbs " — " Indeed, we should be cautious in receiving all foreigners." That caution was of little avail. XXX. A HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE. TTTHAT a change ! The same Governor Villere could not but say, " The Louisianian who retraces the condition of his country under the government of kings can never cease to bless the day when the great American confederation received him into its bosom." It was easy for Louisianians to be Americans ; but to let Americans be Louisianians ! — there was the rub. Yet it had to be. In ten years, the simple export and import trade of the port had increased fourfold ; and in the face of inundations and pestilences, discord of sentiment and tongues, and the sad- dest of public morals and disorder, the population had nearly doubled. Nothing could stop the inflow of people and wealth. In the next ten years, 1820-30, trade increased to one and three-quarters its already astonishing volume. The inhab- itants were nearly 50,000, and the strangers from all parts of America and the commercial world were a small army. Sometimes there would be five or six thousand up-river bargemen in town at once, wild, restless, and unemployed. On the levee especially this new tremendous life and 218 THE rr.EOLEs or lot'isiaxa. energy heaved and pal})itated, JJetween 1831 and 1835, the mere foreign exports and imports ran np from twenty- six to nearly fifty-four million dollars. There were no wharves built out into the liarbor yet, and all the vast mass of produce and goods lay out under the open sky on the long, wide, unbroken level of the curving harbor-front, where Ohio bargemen, (xermans, Mississippi raftsmen, Irishmen, French, English, Creoles, Yankees, and negro and nniiatto slaves surged and jostled ami tilled the air witli shouts and imprecations. Yice put on the same activity that commerce showed. The Creole had never been a strong moral force. The American came in as to gold diggings or diamond fields, to grab and run. The transatlantic immigrant of those days was frecpiently the offseouring of Europe. The West Indian M'as a leader in licentiousness, gambling and duel- ling. The number of billiard-rooins, gaming-houses, and lottery-offices was immense. In the old town they seemed to be every second house. There was the French Evan- gelical Church Lottery, the Baton Rouge Church Lottery, the Natchitoches Catholic Church Lottery, and a host of others less piously inclined. The cafes of the central town were full of filibusters. In 1819, "General" Long sailed hence against Galveston. In 1822, a hundred and fifty men left New Orleans in the sloop-of-war Eureka^ and assisted in the taking of Porto Cabello, Yenezuela. The paving movement had been only a flurry or two, and even in the heart of the town, where carriages sometimes sank A HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE. 219 to their axles in mud, liigliway robbery and murder lay always in wait for the incautious night wayfarer who ven- tured out alone. The police was a mounted gendm^merie. If the Legislature committed a tenth of the wickedness it was charged with, it was sadly corrupt. The worst day of all the week was Sunday. The stores and shops were open, but toil slackened and license gained headway. Gambling-rooms and ball-rooms were full, weapons were often out, the quadroon masques of the Salle de Conde were thronged with men of high standing, and crowds of barge and raftsmen, as well as Creoles and St. Domingans, gathered at those open-air African dances, carousals, and debaucheries in the rear of the town that have left their monument in the name of " Congo " Square. Yet still prosperity smiled and commerce roared along the streets of the town and her faubourgs — Ste. Marie on her right, Marigny on her left — with ever-rising volume and value, and in spite of fearful drawbacks. The climate was deadly to Americans, and more deadly to the squalid immigrant. Social life, unattractive at best, received the Creole and shut the door. The main town was without beauty, and the landscape almost without a dry foothold. Schools were scarce and poor, churches few and ill at- tended, and domestic service squalid, inefficient, and cor- rupt. Between 1810 and 1837 there were fifteen epidem- ics of yellow fever. Small-pox was frequent. In 1832, while yellow fever was still epidemic, cholera entered and carried off one person in every six ; many of the dead 220 THE CRKOLES OF LOUISIANA, were buried where they died, and many were thrown into the river. Moreover, to get to the town or to leave it was a jt»urney famed for its dangers. On one steamboat, three hiuuh-ed lives were lost ; on another, one hundred and thirty ; on another, the same number ; on another, one hundred and twenty. The cost of running a steamer was six times as great as on the northern lakes. Without these drawbacks what would Kew Orleans have been ? For, with them all, and with others which we pass b}', her population between 1830 and 1840 once more doubled its numbers. She M-as the fourth city of the Unit- ed States in the number of her people. Cincinnati, which in the previous decade had outgrown her, was surpassed and distanced. Only New York, Philadelphia, and Balti- more were larger. Boston was nearly as large ; but be- sides these there was no other city in the Union of half her numbers. Faubourg Ste. Marie had swallowed up the suburbs above her until it comprised the whole expanse of the old Jesuits' plantations to the line of Felicity Road. The old Marquis Marigny de Mandeville, whose plantation lay on the lower edge of the town just across the Espla- nade, had turned it into lots and streets, and the town had run over upon it and covered it with small residences, and here and there a villa. The city boundaries had been extended to take in both these faubourgs ; and the three " municipalities," as they were called, together numbei'ed one hundred and two thousand inhabitants. The ends of the harbor-front were losing sight of eacli A IIUNDKED THOUSAND PEOPLE. 221 other. In the seasons of liigh water the tall, broad, frail- looking steamers that crowded in together, " bow on," at the busy leveo, hidden to their hurricane roofs in cargoes Old Bourse and St. Louis Hotel. (Afterward the State House), of cotton bales, looked down upon not merely a quiet little Spanish-American town of narrow streets, low, heavy, rugged roofs, and Latin richness and variety of color peep- ing out of a mass of overshadowing greenery. Fort St. 222 THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. Charles, tlio last fraction of tlio old fortilicatioiis, Avas gone, and the lofty chiiiiney of a I'liited States mint smoked in its jWace. The new liourse, later known as St. Louis Hotel, and yet later as the fame«l State-house of Kcconstruction days, just raised its low, black dome into view above the iutervcninsx piles of brick. A hufje prison lifted its frowning walls aii