|
a ACADIAN REBIRTH article
Cultures
of Acadiana |
Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, April 27, 1999
French colonists didn't idea of Spanish Government
by Jim Bradshaw
Between 1757 and 1770, about 1,000 Acadians came to Louisiana, most of them after the Treaty of Paris of 1763 that allowed them to leave English settlements where they had lived in exile since their dispersion in 1755.
Most of them had no money to pay their passage to Louisiana, so they sold the few possessions they had been able to keep or to accumulate, and booked passage on British merchant ships that were headed for the Gulf of Mexico. They thought they were coming to French Louisiana. When the first of them arrived, the colony was still governed by a French caretaker government, but France had given it to Spain. The first Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa, arrived in Louisiana on March 5, 1763.
Ulloa came to Louisiana that faced new challenges. By the Treaty of Paris, Great Britain acquired Florida from Spain and from France it took all of Louisiana north of the New Orleans area and east of the Mississippi River.
Great Britain almost immediately began building forts to threaten Spanish Louisiana, and began a campaign to make alliances with Cherokee, Choctaw, and other Indian nations that had been friendly to the French. Spain and Great Britain were at peace, but it was a tenuous peace, and Ulloa was threatened by Britain's aggressive attitude.
He had little to work with if trouble arose. Fewer than 10,000 people were in Spanish Louisiana when Ulloa arrived in 1766. They were established in settlements at New Orleans, Mobile, Natchitoches, and in barely established frontier posts such as those in the Attakapas and Opelousas country. And they were not the best of colonies.
The inhabitants had also lived under the flag of France for 65 years and considered themselves Frenchmen. They were shocked and upset when they were told that France had given their colony to Spain. For one thing, the colony had been loosely governed by France, but Spain has the reputation of keeping a tight rein on her possessions. The people of Louisiana wanted looser reins, not tighter ones.
After a mass meeting in New Orleans, the French Creoles sent Jean Milhet, a wealthy merchant, to France to plead with King Louis XV to reconsider and to keep Louisiana French. He went first to one of the colony's original founders, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, who was then an old man living in Paris.
Although Bienville was a prisoner in establishing the Louisiana colony, he was apparently no favorite at the king's court. When Bienville and Milhet went to plead with the king, he would not see them. They were finally able to see Etienne-Francois Choiseul-Stainville, the prime minister, but he refused to reopen the Louisiana question.
The people of New Orleans were incredulous, then upset, when Milhet returned to report that the king and his ministers were set on giving Louisiana to Spain. But Spain was in no hurry to take over. Some three years elapsed between the signing of the Treaty of Paris and Ulloa's arrival. He wrote from Havana in the summer of 1765 that he had been appointed governor, but did not actually arrive until March 1766.
His first report back to Spain was no more uplifting than Kerlerec's last report to France. Ulloa found that practically every public building in the colony needed substantial repairs. Indeed, it would be "necessary to rebuild the principal church of (New Orleans), as the present one is so threatened with ruin that it has been decided to remove the Holy Sacrament and place it in a guard house." Like his French predecessors, he had little money to work with. He faced a hostile or indifferent population. And he faced a new problem, the arrival of boatload after Acadians who were penniless, sick, French, and a drain on the meager resources available to him.
He tried to do what he could for them. But his plans and their hopes did not mesh. He was soon gone from the colony, but the Acadians eventually established themselves and created a New Acadia in South Louisiana.