"The Acadian of the Acadians"--Alexandre Mouton of Lafayette
"Here is this one on a smooth green billow of the land, just without the town [of Vermilionville]. It is not like the rest--a large brick house, its Greek porch half hid in a grove of oaks. On that dreadful day, more than a century ago, when the British in far-off Acadie shut into the chapel the villagers of Grand Pre, a certain widow fled with her children to the woods, and there subsisted for ten days on roots and berries, until finally, the standing crops as well as the houses being destroyed, she was compelled to accept exile, and in time found her way, with others, to these prairies. Her son founded Vermilionville. Her grandson rose to power--sat in the Senate of the United States. From early manhood to hale gray age, the people of his State were pleased to hold him, now in one capacity, now in another, in their honored service; they made him Senator, Governor, President of the Convention, what you will."
So writes the bard of the Creoles and Cajuns, George Washington Cable of New Orleans, in his story "Carancro," which appeared in the January and February 1887 issues of the then-popular Century Magazine. He goes on:
"I have seen the portrait for which he sat in early manhood to a noted English court painter: dark waving locks; strong, well-chiseled features; fine clear eyes; an air of warm, steady-glowing intellectual energy. It hangs still in the house of which I speak. And I have seen an old ambrotype of him taken in the days of this story: hair short-cropped, gray; eyes thoughtful, courageous; mouth firm, kind, and ready to smile." [photo]
In the story, Cable is describing a character referred to only as "the ex-governor," but anyone familiar with the southwest Louisiana of that day would know the identity of the character's original. "I am a Creole," a destitute widow says to the ex-governor when she comes to him for assistance. "Yes," he tells her, "and, like all Creoles, proud of it, as you are right to be. But I am an Acadian of the Acadians, and never wished I was any thing else."01
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Alexandre Mouton indeed was an Acadian, a descendant of unprepossessing farmers who had lived in the French colony of Acadie, which in 1713 became the British colony of Nova Scotia. Although Cable's character, the ex-governor, was based on Mouton, the character's genealogy is not quite the same as that of the real former governor of Louisiana.
The Moutons came to Acadia later than most of the families who populated the colony. In 1703, during the early months of France's second long war with England, Jean Mouton of Marseille, age 14, arrived from France and settled in Port-Royal, now Annapolis Royal, the main settlement of the Acadian colony. At age 22, in 1711, the year after the British captured Port-Royal from the French, Jean married Marie Girouard of Port-Royal, a member of one of the first families to arrive in Acadia. The next year he moved with her to Grand-Pre, a thriving Acadian settlement in the Minas Basin that possessed the added virtue of being more distant from the center of British authority, where he earned his living as a surgeon. Sons Jean, Jacques, Charles, and Justinien, and daughters Marie-Josèphe and Marguerite were born at Grand-Pre before the family resettled at the even more distant Acadian community of Chignecto in 1725. Four more children were born to Jean and Marie at Chignecto, sons Pierre, Salvator, and Louis, and daughter Anne.
The Moutons lived at Chignecto for thirty years, their families prospering and growing under distant British rule ... until trouble with the French and Indians erupted in the early 1750s and evolved into a fourth and final struggle between the contending European powers. In the fall of 1755, British forces rounded up the older Mouton sons and their families and deported them along with other Chignecto Acadians to the English colony of South Carolina. The three younger sons, Salvator, Louis, and Pierre, somehow escaped the British roundup and, with Salvator's wife and children, fled to Restigouche at the head of the Baie des Chaleurs, in present-day Québec Province, where Louis married a younger sister of Salvator's wife in 1760. But they did not live there in peace. The war caught up to them the year of Louis's marriage when, in July, the British attacked the fort at Restigouche with overwhelming force. Pierre died in the fight, and Salvator and Louis fell into the hands of the victorious British, who imprisoned them in Fort Edward, Nova Scotia, for the rest of the war.
After the French and Indian War ended in 1763, the surviving Mouton brothers, forbidden by the British to return to their homes at Chignecto, converged on the French colony of Louisiana, where they finally reunited. Charles, Salvator, Louis, and the survivors of their families made their way to New Orleans, now controlled by the Spanish, and settled along the Mississippi River above the city on what came to be known as the Acadian Coast.
Salvator was the grandfather of "the Acadian of the Acadians." Before Le Grand Dérangement, he had married Anne Bastarache of Port-Royal in January 1752. His oldest son Jean, named after Salvator's father, was born at Chignecto in 1754, the year before Le Grand Dérangement began. Reunited with his wife, children, and brothers, Salvator settled in present-day St. James Parish by 1766. Anne died soon after they arrived in Louisiana. Salvator married Anne Foret in New Orleans in 1768, but they had no children. He died in a New Orleans hospital in 1773, when his son Jean was 19 years old.02
Jean served under Spanish Governor Don Bernardo Galvez in the fight against the British during the American Revolution then left the Acadian Coast by the early 1780s, crossed the Atchafalaya Basin, and settled in the Atakapas District, now St. Martin Parish, on Bayou Teche. There, in June 1783, at age 29, he married Marie-Marthe, called Marthe, daughter of a prominent resident of the Atakapas Post, surgeon Antoine Borda, a native of France and second husband of Marguerite Martin dit Barnabé, an Acadian born in Jean's native Chignecto. Jean and Marthe produced a large family: sons Jean-Baptiste, Joseph, Francois, Charles, Louis, Pierre-Treville, Alexandre, Antoine-Émile, and Cesaire, and daughters Marie-Modeste, Marie-Adélaïde, and Marie-Marthe--a dozen children in all. Alexandre was born on November 19, 1804, the year after the United States purchased Louisiana from France. He was born at his father's plantation house on Bayou Carencro in present-day Lafayette Parish, where Jean had become a prominent sugar planter at the northern edge of the Atakapas District.03
Alexandre, like other children of prominent planters, received an elementary education in the local district schools, where he was instructed in his native French. He also learned to speak English fluently, which stood him in good stead when he enrolled in a prominent Jesuit school, Georgetown College in Washington, D.C. Back home in Louisiana, he studied law first in the offices of Charles Antoine, then in St. Martinville with Judge Edward Simon. In 1825, at age 21, he was admitted to the Louisiana bar and began his practice in Lafayette Parish.04
His career in the law was short-lived, however. His father gave him a plantation near the village of Vermilionville, now the city of Lafayette. Alexandre transformed the plantation into a major sugar-producing operation. He would henceforth make his substantial living as a sugar planter, not as a lawyer, and become the quintessence of what a twentieth-century folklorist called a "genteel Acadian." He lived first in a townhouse in Vermilionville that had been built by his father around 1805, when the community was called Grand Prairie. Over the years, Alexandre amassed a plantation of 19,000 arpents, which he ran from the Greek revival home that he built in the 1830s on the banks of the Vermilion, a house he called Ile Copal after the exotic trees that graced the property. By 1860, he owned 121 slaves to work his extensive holdings. No one in Lafayette Parish owned more slaves than ex-governor Mouton.05
Like his grandfather Salvator, Alexandre Mouton also married twice. In 1826, he married Celestine Zelia Rousseau, called Zelia, a granddaughter of Jacques Dupré, one of the wealthiest cattle ranchers in St. Landry Parish who later served briefly as acting governor of the state. Among the four children of Alexandre and Zelia was Jean Jacques Alexandre Alfred, called Alfred, their third child and second son and the only son to survive infancy, born 18 February 1829, in St. Landry Parish. Their other surviving children were daughters Henriette Odeide, Marie Cecilia Arcade, and Marie Céleste Mathilde.06
In the same year of his marriage, at age 22, Alexandre's political career began when he was elected to represent Lafayette Parish in the lower house of the state legislature. He served in that body until 1832 and as its speaker in 1831-32. He was an avid Jacksonian Democrat and served as an elector for that party's national tickets in 1828, 1832, and 1836, the year he was sent back to the state legislature to represent Lafayette Parish again. The following year, in 1837, the state legislature chose him as United States Senator to serve out the term of Alexander Porter, who had resigned. Alexandre was only 33 years old when he assumed this high office, only three years older than the minimum age of 30. At the end of the Senate term, in 1838, he was elected to the United States Senate in his own right and served in Washington until March 1842, when he resigned his senatorial seat to run for governor of Louisiana.
His wife Zelia had died in Lafayette Parish in November 1837, early in his senatorial career. Two months before he left Washington to return to Louisiana to run for governor, in January 1842, at age 38, he married 21-year-old Anne, a daughter of Charles K. Gardner of New York. Gardner had served as adjutant general of the United States Army during the War of 1812 and was at the time of his daughter's marriage to Mouton a clerk in the United States Treasury Department. Alexandre and Emma had seven children, six of whom survived to adulthood: daughters Marie Thérèse and Anne Eliza, and sons Alix Gardner, who died an infant, George Clinton, William Rufus King, Paul Joseph Julien, and Charles Alexandre.
Alexandre Mouton was inaugurated governor of Louisiana in January 1843 and served until February 1846. When he assumed the governorship, the state was deeply in debt, but by the time he left office, most of the state's indebtedness had been liquidated. During his governorship he was active in the 1844 presidential campaign of Jacksonian James K. Polk, helping the Democratic ticket carry Louisiana in the federal election. He promoted the development of railroads in the state and pursued this interest after he returned to private life. He was chosen president of a railroad convention held in New Orleans in January 1852.06a
Though he held no more elective offices after his term as governor, Mouton remained active in Democratic politics. He served as a delegate to the Democratic national conventions at Cincinnati, Charleston, and Baltimore in 1856 and 1860.07
His most interesting public service after his governorship was as president of the 1858 vigilance committee created by prominent local leaders to rid the Lafayette and St. Landry parish region of marauding cattle rustlers. For years these outlaws had raided local cattle herds from their hiding places on the prairies west of Vermilionville. By 1858, their numbers and depredations had increased to the point that local law enforcement officers could not control them. The vigilance committee's armed force, led by the governor's son Alfred, a graduate of West Point, brutally suppressed the band of rustlers, and even hanged some of its leaders without trial.
After Lincoln's election to the Federal presidency in November 1860 and the calling of a convention in South Carolina the following month to consider the fate of the Union, the Louisiana legislature authorized the election of a convention to address the question of secession. Delegates were elected on 7 January 1861 to meet in Baton Rouge on January 23. Lafayette Parish chose Alexandre Mouton as its delegate to the convention. Reflecting the fact that he was still a popular and respected leader in his native state, the convention at its opening session elected the 56-year-old former governor as its president. Mouton openly supported secession, as did a majority of the delegates. After three days of debate and deliberation, on 26 January 1861, the convention voted 113 to 17 to secede from the Union, making Louisiana the sixth state to do so, after South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, who soon formed a southern Confederacy.
The business of secession concluded, Governor Mouton returned to Île Copal to await the consequences of the convention's work. In the weeks following Louisiana's secession, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President of the United States, the Confederates fired on the Federal garrison in Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for volunteers to suppress what he insisted was a Southern rebellion, more Southern states seceded, and the Confederate government that had been formed in February moved its capital from Montgomery to Richmond.08
Always an enthusiastic Confederate, Mouton offered himself as a candidate for a seat in the national senate, but for the first time in his political career he failed to win election.09 "The Acadian of the Acadians" would endure the War Between the States as a private citizen. His son Alfred and thousands of other Louisianans, however, including Acadians like himself, both high and low, would endure the war as soldiers, wearing the gray and butternut uniforms of a new American nation that Alexandre Mouton helped create.
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NOTES
01. Cable, Creoles & Cajuns, 248, 249.
02. Mouton family genealogy is from Arsenault, Généalogie, 403, 702, 1013, 1026-27, 2560-64; Arsenault, History, 165-66; Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, CD, 1-A:585-86 & passim; West, Atlas of LA Surnames, 112-13, 182-83n; White, DGFA-1, 1238-40. Three of the Mouton brothers were married to Bastarache girls, at least two of whom were sisters. Note discrepancies in dates between Arsenault & White. Arsenault, Généalogie, 2561, 2562, gives Jean's birth year as 1755. Jean is buried in St. John Catholic Cemetery, Lafayette; his grave stone says that he died on 22 Nov 1834 at age 80 & gives his birth year as 1754. See [photo]. The grave stone date is followed here. Jean had an interesting nickname or dit--chapeau, or hat. One wonders why. See Hébert, D., 1-A:511.
03. Jean's gravestone holds a plague that calls him a patriot of the American Revolution. See [photo]. Atakapas Post, or Poste des Atakapas, was first settled in the 1750s, a decade before the Acadians arrived, by a hand full of French Creole families, most of whom raised cattle; the church records for the settlement date back to 1756. It was renamed St. Martinville in 1817. See Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, 1-A: 728. The Indian name is pronounced uh-TACK-uh-paw.
To illustrate the point that "all" Acadians are related, Marguerite Martin, Alexandre Mouton's maternal grandmother, is one of the author's ancestors as well! Her first husband was Rene Robichaux, & one of their daughters, Genevieve, married Amand Dugas, father of Rosalie Dugas, who married Pierre Cormier, pere, called Pierre of Opelousas, one of my paternal great-grandfathers. Who knows how many other Cajuns today share blood with Governor Mouton.
04. The principal source used here for the details of Alexandre's life is DAB, 7:295. A word about the spelling of Alexandre Mouton's name: his grave stone and the article in the DAB spell his first name "Alexander," the anglicized spelling of the name. All other sources spell his first name using the French version, "Alexandre," which is used here. See [photo] for his likeness and his gravesite, as well as a portrait of five of his children. Edward Simon was a native of Belgium who served as an associate justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court from 1841-49. Simon died at St. Martinville in 1867. His son, Arthur, served as a major in the Confederate army under Alexandre's son Alfred. See Perrin, SW LA, pt. 2:78.
05. The c1800 town house built by Jean, later called the Sunday House, is still standing in Lafayette as part of the Alexandre Mouton House Museum on Lafayette Street, near downtown. See [photo]. Jean Mouton is celebrated as the founder of Vermilionville/Lafayette. Alexandre Mouton's slave count is from 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Slave Schedules, Lafayette Parish, pp. 53-54. His slaves in 1860, 51 females & 70 males, ranged in age from 2 to 70 years old. For the origin of the term "genteel Acadian," see Dormon, Cajuns, 30, who attributes it to folklorist Patricia K. Rickels. See her essay, "The Folklore of the Acadians," in Conrad, ed., The Cajuns, 223, 229-30, in which she categorizes Cajuns as "Genteel Acadians" and "Just Plain Coonasses."
06. Hébert, D., Southwest LA Records, 2-A:822, her birth/baptismal record, spells her name Celeste Zilia, so there is also confusion in the spelling of Zelia Rousseau Mouton's name. Her tombstone, like her birth record, spells her name "Zilia," but genealogical and family records spell it "Zelia," which is used here. See [photo]
06a. See <sec.state.la.us/33.htm>.
07. Bragg, LA in the Confederacy, 8-10, 12, 14-15.
08. The Louisiana Convention remained in session a little over two months, first in Baton Rouge, convening on January 23 in the state capitol and meeting there until the state legislature convened a few days later. The convention then moved to New Orleans, where it reconvened on January 29, went into recess on February 12, reconvened on March 4, and adjourned on March 26. One of the convention's most significant actions during its session in New Orleans was the ratification of the Constitution of the Confederate States by a vote of 101 to 7 on March 21, 5 days before it adjourned. When the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter on April 12 and the War Between the States commenced 3 days later with Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the Southern rebellion, the Louisiana Convention had been done with its work for two and a half weeks. See Bragg, LA in the Confederacy, 27-46.
09. See Bragg, LA in the Confederacy., 180-81. As in the United States at the time, the Confederate States constitution provided that the state legislators, not the voters, would choose national senators, two per state. The Louisiana state legislature cast ballots for the office on November 28, 1861. Mouton came out sixth of 10 on the first ballot and was not even considered for the second ballot, which elected men from Concordia & Orleans parishes to the national senate, now meeting in Richmond. So one could claim that Alexandre Mouton never lost a popular election.
Copyright (c) 2001-08 Steven A. Cormier