Chapter 12

French Settlement

By Stephen Miller

Map:  French Settlements (maps created my M.B. Newton)

The French settlement of Louisiana can be broken into two distinctive periods. The first is the original colonization of Louisiana by Iberville and the ensuing years, and the second period would be the arrival of the Cajuns from Nova Scotia. The French culture that was brought to Louisiana over 300 years ago remains strong today. Most of Louisiana’s present principal cities were locations established by the French as forts as towns.

In 1699, Biloxi was established as the first French settlement in Louisiana, with Mobile (1702) and Natchitoches (1714) following soon behind. New Orleans was established in 1718 to secure the lower Mississippi against France's rival colonial powers, Spain and Great Britain. In 1722, the capital of Louisiana was moved to New Orleans. By then the colony also included several settlements farther upstream along the Mississippi. Louisiana struggled as a royal colony from 1699 to 1712. During the War of Spanish Succession, the colonists were cut off from France for years at a time. In 1712 the financially beleaguered French monarchy gave control of Louisiana to wealthy French financier Antoine Crozat, but the population remained quite small throughout his proprietorship.

In 1717 the Company of the West, run by John Law, took over the slow-growing colony. Law gained great influence at the French court through his establishment of what became the French national bank. Because the bank invested heavily in the Company of the West and because Louisiana was the company's greatest asset, Law needed to develop the colony rapidly to maintain public confidence in the bank. He brought in several thousand settlers through a promotional campaign. Some of these settlers were convicts who were forced to migrate to the colony and many were German indentured workers who gained their freedom after they sold their services for a specified period. According to one company official, 7,020 Europeans went to the colony between October 1717 and May 1721. Law's company acquired the Company of Senegal, which held the French monopoly on the slave trade, and black slaves from Africa were brought to Louisiana in 1719. About 3,000 slaves arrived between 1720 and 1731.

Immigrants anticipated quick profits with little effort or investment due to Law's promotional literature. However, the harsh world they found was dramatically different. The colonial government could not meet their needs for food, clothing, and shelter and so many people died. Most of the survivors stayed because they lacked the means to return to Europe. Most of the immigrants tilled small subsistence farms, sometimes with slave labor, although a few large plantations were established. These farmers engaged in small-scale production of tobacco and indigo for export.

The Mississippi Bubble or Mississippi Scheme, a promotional scheme by Law, fell apart in 1720 as word of the brutal colonial conditions reached France. However, the company continued to administer the colony until 1731. In that year, as a result of French warfare with the Natchez people who lived on the east bank of the Mississippi, Louisiana was returned to the French monarchy.

Louisiana remained a French colony until the early 1760s but was always a heavy economic burden. Louisiana no longer had any strategic value to France once the British conquered the French colonies in Canada during the French and Indian War. In 1762 France transferred the colony to Spain in the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau, to induce Spain to enter the war as a French ally. However, the following year the French and Spanish lost the war, and in the peace treaty Great Britain took nearly all of Louisiana east of the Mississippi. Spain kept the larger western part, along with the Isle of Orleans, the area around New Orleans. The Spanish part alone retained the name Louisiana. The struggle between Great Britain and France for dominance in North America culminated in the French and Indian War. In 1755 British military forces drove thousands of Acadian exiles into France, England, and the English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard. At the end of the war in 1763, the Treaty of Paris granted the exiles an 18-month grace period in which to relocate to France. Between 1764 and 1788, about 2,500 to 3,000 Acadians arrived in the French colony of Louisiana. They settled along the Bayou Teche and Bayou Lafourche, and along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

The Acadians quickly adapted to their new surroundings. Within a decade of their arrival in Louisiana, many achieved a standard of living comparable to that of their former settlements. However, many in the established community of Louisiana-born French-speakers, known as Creoles, did not welcome the Acadian immigrants. The most ambitious Creoles hoped to create a colonial society modeled on French feudalism, in which Creole aristocrats would rule over tenant farmers and slaves. In contrast, the Acadians had attempted to build a democratic society based on equality during their 150-year residence in North America.

Friction between these two groups grew as slavery and the plantation economy took root in the areas originally settled by the Acadian exiles. First-generation Acadian immigrants remained unimpressed by the aristocratic trappings of slave ownership. However, second- and third-generation Acadians envied their affluent Creole neighbors and altered their lifestyles to gain acceptance by them. By 1810 a majority of Acadian households in the original settlements owned slaves, and the children of Acadian planters began to intermarry with the children of the local Creole elite.

Many Acadians who were unable or unwilling to adapt to the rapid transformation of the fertile bayou and river regions migrated to less desirable prairie, swamp, and marsh areas. In these marginal areas, the Acadians continued working as their ancestors had, engaging in small-scale farming and ranching. These farmers and ranchers constituted the majority of the Acadian population at the time of the Civil War. At the beginning of the war, Acadian slave owners flocked to the Confederate cause. Less affluent Acadians were forcibly drafted into the Confederate Army, only to later desert the army in large numbers.

The upper and lower classes developed along different paths after the war. By the 1880s, the assimilation of the Acadian elite into the Creole planter class was largely complete. Common economic circumstances and increasing intermarriage between the two groups blurred the lingering differences between them. Likewise, less affluent Acadians intermarried with poor Creoles, British Americans, and European immigrants. Over time, these non-Acadian groups became completely absorbed by Acadian culture. Outsiders soon came to label all poor, French-speaking whites in southern Louisiana as Cajuns.

Economic circumstances in the late 1800s forced many small landowners in Louisiana to sell their property and rent fields from wealthy landlords. By 1900 nearly half of all Cajun families in southwestern Louisiana were tenant farmers. The resulting economic hardships forced many Cajuns to migrate to the newly established shipyards and refineries in eastern Texas during the early 20th century.