USA > Alabama > Memorial record of Alabama. A concise account of the state's political, military, professional and industrial progress, together with the personal memoirs of many of its people. Volume I > Part 3
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MEMORIAL RECORD OF ALABAMA.
as finally settled by the English crown were as follows: beginning at the mouth of the Yazoo, where that river flows into the Mississippi, the north line ran east to the Chattahoochee; thence down that river to the mouth of the Apalachicola; thence westward, along the coast of the gulf, and through lakes Borgne, Pontchartrain and Maurepas, up to the river Amite; then along Bayou Iberville to the Mississippi, and up the channel of that river to the place of beginning. While a large portion of the ter- ritory now embraced within the limits of Alabama fell below the northern line of 32°, 28' as thus established, more than one-half of the state was embraced in the British province of Illinois, which stretched from the line of 32', 28' to Lake Michigan. Under this condition of things while the present site of Montgomery was in British West Florida, that of Wetumpka was in British Illinois. Such was the condition of things, at the time of the revolution, a time at which we must be careful to empha- size the fact that the history of the thirteen colonies that joined in the revolt is one thing, while the history of the vast British domain which stretched in their rear from the great lakes to the gulf is quite another. Loyal to the crown, the provincials of Florida took no part in the move- ment for separation, and gave neither aid nor comfort to the struggling colonies to the north of them. Thus isolated at home and insufficiently defended from abroad, Florida became a comparatively easy prey when in 1779 Spain resolved to reconquer what she felt she never should have lost. In that year, war having been declared between Spain and England, Galvez, the ambitious governor of Louisiana, took Baton Rouge with all West Florida east of Pearl river. In 1780 Fort Charlotte at Mobile, with all the territory to the Perdido river, was surrendered to the Spaniards, who in the next year took Pensacola. Subsequently east Florida yielded to Spain, whose title to the whole province was fully recognized and con- firmed by England in the treaty of 1783, whereby the revolutionary war was terminated. Out of the terms of that treaty grew two serious misun- derstandings, involving both the north and south boundaries of the terri- tory guaranteed to the United States, which became in turn the subjects of numerable diplomatic negotiations. Not until 1842 did the Ashburton treaty finally settle the controversy which grew out of the ambiguity of the treaty of 1783 as to our northwestern boundary; not until 1795 did the treaty signed at Madrid in that year finally settle our southwestern boundary as between Spain and the United States. The character of the controversy last named can only be clearly understood when we recall the fact, heretofore referred to, that, after England had acquired Florida from Spain under the treaty of 1763, the crown defined the northern boundary of West Florida by a line beginning at the mouth of Yazoo and running east to the Chattahoochee river-a line which embraced within it large portions of territory now belonging to the states of Alabama and Mississippi. As Spain re-acquired West Florida by conquest from Eng- land during the progress of the revolution, she naturally claimed that
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POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE STATE.
she thus became possessed of the whole up to the limits as England had previously defined them. Such she claimed was the natural effect of the retrocession of Florida made to her by England, although that retrocession was silent as to the northern boundary. Under that condition of things the treaty of peace between England and the United States was concluded wherein the western boundary of the latter was declared to be the Mississippi river, and the southern the 31st parallel of latitude. Spain protested against the southern line for the reason that it took away from her and vested in the United States a large portion of what she claimed was a part of her province of West Florida. After an angry con- troversy which was protracted for nearly ten years President Washington sent Mr. Thomas Pinckney as minister to Spain for the express purpose of bringing it to a close; and through his efforts it was that the treaty of October 20th, 1795, was signed at Madrid, wherein it was agreed: (1) that the future boundary between the United States and the Floridas shall be the 31st parallel of north latitude, from the Mississippi eastward to the Chattahoochee river; then down that river to the mouth of the Flint river; then along a line running due east from the mouth of the Flint to the head of the St. Mary's river, and thence down the middle of that river to the Atlantic ocean; (2) that the Mississippi shall be the western boundary of the United States from its source down to the southern "line of demarkation " as fixed by the treaty; (3) and that the whole width of said river, from its source to the sea, shall be free to the people of the United States.
GEORGIA AND HER TERRITORIAL CLAIMS.
In the brief statement which has now been made of the origin and set- tlement of the prolonged controversy between this country and Spain touching our southern boundary, no reference has been made to the real party directly in interest in whose behalf the contention was carried on by the United States. The theory upon which the treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States proceeded was that each state should have confirmed to it all lands to which it had a lawful claim under its charter. It was therefore the claim of Georgia which the United States set up against Spain, and which was finally vindicated by the treaty of Madrid. In 1663, by the grant made by. Charles II. to Clarendon, and other proprietors, the territory to the south of Virginia was cut off from it and called Carolina. In 1729 that province was divided into North and South Carolina; and in 1732 Oglethorpe organized out of the southern- most part of it the colony of Georgia. As early as 1717 the proprietors of Carolina had granted the tract between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers, bounded on the west by the Pacific ocean, to Sir Robert Mont- gomery, to be held by him as a distinct province under the title of the margrave of Azilia. As Montgomery failed to comply with the terms of
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MEMORIAL RECORD OF ALABAMA.
the grant as to settlement, it lapsed to the proprietors, who, in June, 1732, granted it to Oglethorpe and others who were about to found a col- ony which was to stand as an asylum for persecuted debtors and protestant refugees, and at the same time serve as a rampart for the Carolinas against invasions from Florida of Spaniards and Indians. Under the grant thus made by the proprietors of Carolina to the founders of Geor- gia, and under the treaty of 1783, it was that that state made claim to all the territory on her western frontier, as far west as the Mississippi. To prevent an appeal to arms, which was threatened by the Georgians in order to expel the Spaniards from what they claimed was their western and southern limits, was concluded the treaty of October, 1795, at Madrid. No sooner had the United States thus perfected the title of Georgia to this splendid district than the necessities of the swelling population of the southwest demanded its organization under a territorial government. Therefore, with the consent of the state of Georgia, the territory finally surrendered by Spain was erected into a territory of the United States by an ast of congress, approved April 7th, 1798, entitled, "an act for the amicable settlement of limits with the state of Georgia, and authorizing the establishment of a government in the Mississippi territory." The original Mississippi territory thus founded was bounded on the north by a line drawn due east from the mouth of the Yazoo to the Chattahoochee river, on the south by the line fixed by the Madrid treaty, on the east by the Chattahoochee, and on the west by the Mississippi. In the organi- zation of this territory it was distinctly understood that Georgia was to suffer no impairment of her right to the soil upon which it was estab- lished-a right which she finally ceded in 1802 to the United States for the sum of $1,250,000, together with all claim to the district north of the territory and south of the state of Tennessee. That district the United ' States soon added to the Mississippi territory by the seventh section of the act supplementary to the "act regulating the grants of land south of Tennessee," approved March 27th, 1804. As thus completed and rounded out the boundaries of the territory now were the thirty-fifth degree on the north, and the thirty first degree on the south, the Mississippi on the west, and the Chattahoochee on the east, comprising the whole territory now embraced within the states of Alabama and Mississippi, excepting the strip of sea-coast lying within the confines of Florida between the Pearl and Perdido rivers, a strip over which the United States was soon to extend its jurisdiction.
LOUISIANA PURCHASE AND SUBSEQUENT BOUNDARY DISPUTES WITH SPAIN.
It was in a spirit of bitterness and humiliation that France, at the end of an ignominious war concluded by a dishonorable peace, consented in the secret treaty ratified in 1762, to deliver to Spain all of Louisana west of the Mississippi, together with the island of New Orleans on the east
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POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE STATE.
side. south of the bayou Marechac. Conscious of the existence of that spirit Napoleon was not slow, when Spain became subject to his dictation, to satisfy the wounded pride of his country by forcing her to restore to France the American province which had been founded by her children. By the third article of the treaty of Ildefonso, concluded in October. 1800, and subsequently ratified at Madrid "in March, 1801, the king of Spain agreed to cede to the French republic the colony and province of Louisiana, with the same limits which had defined it while in the former possession of France. But before Napoleon could press to his lip this fresh cup of glory, it became clear to his far-seeing eye that for Louis- iana to become a province of France would be simply to expose it to British invasion, against which its sparse population had no power to defend themselves without assistance, which he was not then prepared to guarantee. In order, therefore, to save it from the clutches of the Eng- lish Napoleon resolved to throw Louisiana into the hands of the United States, the friend of France and the foe of Great Britain, before his acquisition of it became known to his enemy. Near the close of 1802 Napoleon directed Talleyrand and Marbois to indicate his purpose to Mr. Livingston, American minister at Paris, to whom he declared, in a sub- sequent interview, "that he was compelled to provide for the safety of Louisiana before it should come into his hands, and that he was desirous of giving the United States a magnificent bargain, an empire for a mere trifle." Thus tempted by this splendid opportunity to acquire a domain more than double the area then possessed by the infant republic, Mr. Jefferson, the president of the United States, soon overcame his scruples as to the want of power in the federal government to buy and hold terri tory, and pressed on the momentous negotiation to a prompt and success- ful conclusion. For $15,000,000 the first consul, by a treaty signed on the 30th April, 1803, ceded to the United States the province of Louisiana with the same limits and with the same appurtenaces which the republic had acquired in the grant from Spain. What these limits were had never been expressly defined, and out of that uncertainty at once arose disputes between the United States and Spain, whose Mexican provinces bounded Louisiana on the west, and whose province of Florida bounded it on the east. Prior to the peace of 1763 the western limits of Florida were marked by the Perdido river and bay, while the territory west of the Perdido, and north of the bayou Iberville and lakes was, prior to 1763, a portion of Louisiana under the dominion of France, and was never attached to Spanish Florida. Through the treaty of 1763, Great Britain came into possession of that portion of Louisiana east of the Mississippi and by an order in council it was in 1764 annexed to West Florida, and as such it passed from England to Spain in the treaty of 1783. Such was the basis upon which Spain claimed the strip of gulf coast west of the Perdido river, after the cession of Louisana by France to the United States. The counter-claim of the United States which maintained that Louisiana
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MEMORIAL RECORD OF ALABAMA
extended as far east as the Perdido, and as far north as her southern limits as defined in the treaty of 1783, rested upon the assumption that the United States had purchased Louisiana with the boundaries as fixed while in the original possession of France, prior to the peace of 1763, and with such boundaries as properly pertained to it, after the observance of all subsequent treaties. So positive was Spain in the assertion of her claim that, for many years after the sale from France to the United States, she held possession of the disputed district, as a part of West Florida. Finally, in 1810, the population of the western portion of this territory, lying between the Mississippi and Pearl rivers, which had been erected into the "Government of Baton Rouge," threw off the Spanish yoke. Governor Holmes, under instruction from the federal government, took possession of the district in the name of the United States, and it was subsequently annexed to the territory of Orleans.
ANNEXATION OF THE MOBILE DISTRICT.
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In 1813, the remaining portion of the disputed territory, including the bay and port of Mobile, shared the same fate. During the war with Great Britain the government of the United States claimed that such an import- ant district should not be permitted to remain in the hands of a power unable to maintain its neutrality against her enemy. Congress, there- fore, in February of that year authorized its occupation by the troops of the United States, and the president directed the general in command to take forcible possession of Fort Charlotte together with the district east- ward to the Perdido, an order which was executed on the 13th of April. By an act of congress, approved May 12th, 1813, the Mobile district thus torn from the hands of Spain was annexed to the Mississippi territory.
THE THREE SETTLEMENTS BOUND UP IN THE MISSISSIPPI TERRITORY.
Having now drawn out in some detail the history of the process through which the title to the several districts ultimately combined in the Missis- sippi territory became vested in the United States, the attempt must next be made to give some account of the origin and growth of the. several distinct settlements which were finally bound up, under the territorial organization, in a single political community. In 1813, when the making of the territory was completed by the annexation of the Mobile district, the settlements embraced within it consisted of three distinct groups, each remote from the other, and separated by wide stretches of territory in the possession of the Indian tribes. The principal of these seats of population was to be found in the west upon the banks of the Mississippi, in the Natchez district, which included the counties of Warren, Claiborne, Jefferson, Adams, Wilkinson, Amite and Franklin, with an aggregate population of about twenty-two thousand. In the east were the Tombig-
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POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE STATE.
bee settlements, including the annexed Mobile district, embraced within the counties of Washington, Clarke, Mobile and Baldwin, with an aggre- gate population of about seven thousand. As a part of this second group may be reckoned the four counties to the west of it, Hancock, Marion, Greene and Wayne, containing a sparse population not exceeding five thousand. The third and last important settlement was north of the Ten- nessee river, in the county of Madison, embracing a population of about eight thousand. The oldest of these settlements were those planted in the Mobile district by the French, which have a history of their own at once unique and important.
BIENVILLE, THE FOUNDER OF MOBILE AND NEW ORLEANS.
Although the Spaniards were the first of Europeans to traverse the soil of Alabama, the history of the expedition led by De Soto is devoid of all save romantic interest. As one of our own poetic sons has vividly expressed it, by his military parade, "the dark curtain that had covered her territory was suddenly lifted; a brilliant but bloody panorama passed across the stage; and then all was shrouded in primeval darkness." Not until after the lapse of more than a hundred and sixty years was the cur- tain again lifted, when the French came with their practical and perse- vering hands to lay the foundations of Mobile and New Orleans. During the twelve years which followed the death of the heroic La Salle, who fell upon the soil of Texas murdered by his companions in 1687, no seri- ous effort was made in France to secure the control of the Mississippi, which he was the first to explore from its source to the sea. Not until 1698 was an expedition for the colonization of the lower Mississippi set on foot by the French king, who intrusted its command to Iberville, a native of Quebec, who had won distinction both as a successful founder of colonies in Canada, and as a naval commander in the defense of that province against the English. Iberville, who sailed with his colony from Rochelle in 1698, while in search of the mouth of the Mississippi, arrived in Pensacola bay in 1699, where he was told by the Spanish governor that he could not enter the harbor. Thus repulsed he sailed westward until he touched at Dauphin island near the entrance to the bay of Mobile, whence he proceeded to Ship island, off the mouth of the Pascagoula river. After careful examination, Iberville finally settled his colony on the northeast shore of the bay of Biloxi, where he built a fort as the symbol of French jurisdiction, which was to be asserted from the bay of Pensacola on the east to the Rio del Norte on the west. Having thus established his colony Iberville returned to France, leaving his two brothers, Sauvolle and Baiville, in command as his lieutenants, the former as commandant of the fort, the latter as director of the colony under him. When in 1700 Sauvolle died, the chief command passed to Bienville who was destined, during the next forty years, to indelibly impress himself 3
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MEMORIAL RECORD OF ALABAMA.
upon the history of the country as the founder of Mobile and New Orleans. Early in 1702, war having been declared by England against Spain and France, the king of the latter ordered the commandant to remove his headquarters from Biloxi to the west side of Mobile bay. There at the mouth of Dog river, Bienville founded the first European settlement ever made within the limits of Alabama, which was called Mobile, after the Indian tribe of Mobilians which inhabited the country adjacent thereto. The fortification erected for the defence of the settlement was known as Fort St. Louis de la Mobile. At this time it was, when France and Spain were striving against a common enemy, that the French and Spanish commandants agreed upon the Perdido river as the boundary line between the settlements upon the bays of Mobile and Pensacola. During the ten years which followed the feeble colonies planted at Biloxi and Mobile did not prosper. In 1706, Iberville died of yellow fever at Havana, and in 1711, owing to the floods which inundated the settlement at the mouth of Dog river, Bienville resolved to remove the colony to the present site of the city of Mobile, where he built a new fort, known in French times as Fort Condé, and in English and Spanish times as Fort Charlotte. Thus planted and fostered under the French paternal system, which did little or nothing to develop a hardy spirit of self-reliance in the colonists themselves, the Louisiana colonies which had already involved an expend- iture of nearly two hundred thousand dollars upon the part of the crown, drooped, and became a burden upon the overtaxed exchequer of the mother country. In the hope of relieving this condition of things the king determined to turn over the colony to individual enterprise, and accordingly in 1712 a charter was granted to an opulent merchant, named Antoine Crozat, to whom was granted for the term of fifteen years the exclusive control of the commerce of all the country known as the colony of Louisiana, which, as then claimed by France, embraced the immense region from the Alleghany mountains on the east to the Rocky mountains on the west, and from the gulf on the south northward to the great lakes of Canada. Under this arrangement. which gave to Crozat the virtual appointment of the colonial officers, Bienville, after being superseded in the governorship by Cadillac, was retained by him as his first lieutenant. In that capacity it was that Bienville, in 1714, after making peace with the Creeks, proceeded up the Coosa, on whose east bank, four miles above its junction with the Tallapoosa, he established the Fort Toulouse, which, as fort and trading post, was intended to counteract the growing influence of the Carolinas. Two years later Bienville accomplished an equally important undertaking by settling a difficulty with the Natchez Indians, and by the establishment of a fort on the site of the town by that name, where no permanent settlement had been made up to that time. In 1717 Crozat. disgusted by his losses and disappointments in an enterprise which he thought would make him the richest man in the world, surrendered his charter to the king, who at once granted another to the "Western Com-
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1143050 POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE STATE.
pany," connected with Law's Bank of France, a corporation modeled after the British "East India Company," with similar powers and privileges. In the next year when Bienville was commissioned governor under the new arrangement he deemed it expedient to remove the headquarters of the colonial government from the sterile region of Mobile to the more fertile lands upon the banks of the Mississippi, where, upon the ground now occupied by the French quarter of the present city of New Orleans, he cleared a site for a town to which he gave the name of the regent of France. The director general, M. Hubert, however, refused to remove the offices of the company from Mobile, where they remained until 1720, when they were transferred to what is now known as New Biloxi. Not until 1723 was the advice of Bienville finally accepted, and the seat of the provincial government fixed at New Orleans. During the year which preceded this removal it was that the startling news came from France that Law's financial schemes had failed, and that three comimssioners had been entrusted by the regent with the directorship of the company. It was from these new commissioners that Bienivlle obtained permission to carry out his long cherished wish. Heretofore Louisiana had been gov erned as a mere dependence under the jurisdiction of the governor-general of Canada; but early in 1723 she became a distinct province, and as such was divided into nine districts for civil and military purposes, with Bois- briant as the king's lieutenant, and Bienville as governor and command- ant-general. In this position the latter continued to administer the affairs of the colony with firmness and wisdom until 1724, when he was sumomned to France to answer certain serious charges that had been made against him. But in spite of his great services during a period of twenty-five years, services which have won for him the title of father of the province of Louisiana, he was denied justice by his sovereign, who in 1726 super- seded him by the appointment of M. Perrier as commandant-general of the province. In that position Perrier remained until 1733, when "The Western Company," which for fifteen years had controlled the commerce and mines of the province, obtained permission of the king to give up its charter and retire from the enterprise. In the very next year, when the probabilities on a general Indian war made it necessary to place the lead- ership in the hands of a man of experience and courage, the king again commissioned Bienville as governor, who, early in 1734, returned regard- less of his increasing years to lead his countrymen in fresh warfare with the savage. In 1736 he moved with a large force against the Chickasaws, and after constructing Fort Tombigbee, as a base of operation, he was defeated by them in a severe battle at a place called Ackia, near the present town of Cotton-gin Post in Mississippi. After several more dis- astrous campaigns against the Indians the military career of Bienville closed in failure and disappointment, which he frankly confessed in a touching letter, written to the minister in March, 1742, asking to be relieved from further responsibliity. When in 1743, Vaudreuil. his suc-
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