Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, January 27, 1998

Fight between factions nearly lead to area civil war

Gov. W.C.C. Claiborne visited to try to end political feud

by Jim Bradshaw

On Friday, June 17, 1803, Marguerite St. Julien, the wife of a political leader in the Carencro area, Louis St. Julien, was mortally wounded as she sat at her spinning wheel in her home on Bayou Carencro.  She was shot by her husband's political enemies who were gunning for him.

St. Julien unwisely chased after the attackers, and they beat him to within an inch of his life.  He would eventually recuperate from his beating but his wife died on June 25 from her gunshot wound.  St. Julien blamed his bitter enemies, the DeClouets, for the attack.

But St. Julien's adversaries turned the tables on him, accused him of shooting his wife himself, and used their influence with the Spanish governor of Louisiana to have St. Julien hauled to New Orleans and thrown into prison.

The shooting and turmoil that followed were the climax of a bitter fight between political factions that came close to civil war.  W.C.C. Claiborne, the first American governor of the Louisiana territory, had to visit the area to cool things down.  They cooled on the surface, but simmered just below it for years.

Claude C. Robin, a Frenchman who as traveling through Louisiana at the time, devoted a full chapter to the incident in his memoir, Voyage to Louisiana, 1803-1805. According to Robin, the feud began over cattle, but that's putting it far too simply.

Alexandre DeClouet was commandant of the Attakapas region at the time Spain took over Louisiana from France.  According to Robin's account, DeClouet "governed with justice and moderation."

"But," Robin tells us, "one decisive act of his, though necessary, had had the most deplorable results since his death.  Some herds of cattle which had become marrones (that is to say, who had no masters) had obtained considerable size on these fertile prairies.  The colonists used to hunt them, principally for their skins.  These hunts, however, soon led to abuses, because among the wild cattle others were killed belonging to other colonists.  This impelling reason caused the commandant to forbid the hunting of wild cattle.  In spite of this interdiction ... the hunts continued.   The commandant instituted a search, and he found at the home of several of the principal inhabitants piles of skins, easy to recognize as those of wild cattle because they were not marked. as are those of the herds of each individual.

"These prominent inhabitants," Robin continues, "were condemned to a few days in prison, the usual punishment for misdemeanors in the colony. ... Time has not yet extinguished the resentment that this punishment aroused, however just it may have been, and I myself have heard several of the inhabitants still speaking of it with bitterness."

Besides that, Robin reports, DeClouet ruled in land disputes among his Acadian neighbors, with the inevitable result that one side or the other in the dispute would be angry over the decision.  These resentments fanned the fires of the cattle disputes so that "the resentment of those who had been in prison rekindled itself with fury," Robin said.

(Upon his death), DeClouet was succeeded as commandant by Louis Charles DeBlanc, whom Robin says was a nice guy, but "light-minded and weak (and) without wishing it, susceptible to becoming an instrument of evil."

The DeClouet family probably would have been even less charitable in describing DeBlanc.   This was a time when Louisiana was being shuffled from Spain to France to the United States, and administrators of each regime, and their hangers-on, were jealous of their policies and their positions as each new government took charge.

Alexandre DeClouet, the former commandant, and his sons, Alexandre and Louis Brognier, were close allies of the Spanish regime.  DeBlanc was a French royalist, and his appointment as the new commandant greatly disturbed the DeClouets.

According to a 1987 study by Gertrude C. Taylor, "Alexander (the son) ... captain of the militia in the Attakapas, (thought) he should have been chosen to succeed his father.   From that time on, DeBlanc became the DeClouet's mortal enemy, and any act in which he became involved was a major point of opposition from them."

And, if Robin minces few words about DeClouet enemies, Taylor minces few about Robin or his reasons for being in the Attakapas area in 1803.  She says, "Little is known about Robin other than that he was a French royalist and a close friend of Casa Calvo (Spanish governor of Louisiana from 1795 to 1801).  His (Robin's) venture into the Attakapas in the midst of this fracas appears to have been purely political.  His admitted preference for Europeans over Creoles and for those who had fine wines rather than bowls of milk upon their tables seemed to have been the controlling factor in his defense of the DeClouets."

The two bad guys in Robin's scenario were the "weak-minded" Louis DeBlanc and the "adventurer" Louis St. Julien.

"(T)he individual who came to play the greatest role in this party, who brought it blood and tragedy, was Cadet (sic) St. Julien, an adventurer born in the environs of Bordeaux, who arrived in the colony as a sailor," Robin says.  "After having wandered ... in various places he came to the Attakapas, his oar in his hand.   He settled here and married an Acadian girl."

According to Taylor's account, St. Julien was also a French royalist who had come to Louisiana at the time of the French Revolution.  On Aug. 27, 1793, he married Marguerite LeBlanc, the daughter of Simon LeBlanc and Marguerite Guilbeau, according to St. Martin church records.

Robin did not think highly of him: "This Cadet St. Julien knew how to read and write, more or less, and for the Acadians ... this is the nec plus ultra of all learning.  They could conceive of nothing beyond that.  With a great deal of boasting, audacity, and dissimulation, particularly intended to cloak the intentions of his insidious actions, St. Julien soon became the oracle of the neighboring families and their allies; and without the faintest knowledge of these affairs, he was delegated to uphold the families' interests against the Desclouettes (sic) party.  This adventurer, who had arrived a short time ago as an inferior, became the agent, indeed the soul, of the richest, and the most prominent and proud people of the district.  He found himself, thus, necessarily allied with the commandant M. Deblanc (sic), whom he learned how to flatter most adroitly."

When DeBlanc ordered that a census be taken of the region and the job was given to St. Julien, "the Acadians of the Desclouettes party were loud in their outcry, wishing nothing to do with St. Julien, whom they believed to be guilty of grave misdemeanors," Robin reported.

In Taylor's version, "While minor occurrences such as boundary disputes and cattle killing were drawing the inhabitants into two factions, one of which was led by St. Julien, the DeClouets were more closely aligning themselves with the Spanish, particularly the Marquis de Casa Calve.  They lay in wait for any occasion that might be used as a means of removing DeBlanc as commandant and St. Julien as leader of the opposition party.   That occasion came soon enough after Caso Calve's arrival when Commandant DeBlanc ordered a census of the Attakapas, and one of those commissioned to enumerate the census was Louis St. Julien.

"Inflamed because he thought that he ... and not St. Julien should have taken the census, DeClouet related the affair to Casa Calve, who declared that such census was not authorized," Taylor reports.  In early September 1803, the Spanish governor stripped DeBlanc or his post, appointed a Spanish sympathizer, Martin Duralde, in his place, and ordered St. Julien arrested for the murder of his wife.

The census was dated May 23, 1803. St. Julien's wife was shot on June 17.

According to Robin's account of the shooting, "Toward nightfall ... his wife was in the room near one of the doors, occupied in spinning, with her back to the door.   Another woman, who lived with them, was in an alcove in the same room.  Both of them were singing at their spinning wheels.  The husband, stretched out on the plank bed face down in a neighboring room, was listening to them.  He was thus in line with the door behind his wife, perhaps five feet behind her and on a line with the front door to the outside.

"While St. Julien was listening attentively to the songs, which amused him, he heard a noise behind him, and turning his head, saw a man raising his gun to fire.  He struck the gun with a sudden movement.  The shot went off, and the bullet pierced his unfortunate wife's back, coming out of her breast and passing into the room beyond and burying itself in the window frame.  St. Julien attempted to seize the gun of the murderer, who ran away.  St. Julien ran after him and was pursuing him with a pick, that he had picked up as a weapon, when a second shot by a second man rang out, which, however, did not hit him.  A third attacker appears, and all three of them struck St. Julien to the ground with repeated blows of their gun butts, leaving him on the spot for dead.  His brother-in-law and other individuals arriving some time afterwards found him stretched out in the courtyard covered with blood, and they carried him with much difficulty to his bed.

"The news of this double attack spread rapidly among the inhabitants," Robin continued.  "Interest, compassion, curiosity brought together a crowd of persons, regardless of party.  This large crowd stayed for eight or ten days and ate up several oxen.  Syndic Sorel, in the absence of the commandant, was informed of the affair. ... The woman survived a week.  St. Julien, in his statement, implicated his Acadian enemies, especially one named Carmouche and the elder Desclouettes.  Several different versions of this incident were current in the city, but St. Julien's version prevailed. ..."

St. Julien remained in jail in New Orleans until Louisiana was formally transferred from Spain to France.  Pierre-Clément Laussat took over the colony for France on Nov. 20.   On Dec. 5, he released St. Julien from prison, allowing him to return to the Attakapas district on his own recognizance.  Shortly after that, France turned over Louisiana to the United States and the problem became Gov. Claiborne's.