there also and took part in the battle of New Orleans, as well as many other Frenchmen who were of great aid to Jackson by their military knowledge.

After Waterloo many officers of Napoleon left France, either because they were exiled by the Bourbons or feared their rule. A few escaped who might have shared the fate of the heroic Ney had they remained in France, and among them were the brothers Charles and Henri Lallemand, Lefebvre Desnouëttes, Grouchy and his two sons, and Clausel and Rigaud. Joseph Bonaparte was in New Jersey, and the Napoleonic exiles considered him their chief in America. They were, most of them, without means of subsistence, and they decided to form an agricultural settlement. They obtained from Congress a grant of four townships, each six miles square, for the cultivation of the vine and olive on the Tombigbee in the Mississippi Territory, near Mobile. They gave the name Marengo to a county and began the foundation of the town of Demopolis which they soon abandoned. The agricultural enterprise of the officers of Napoleon was a failure, for in their glorious wars in Europe they had had little time to attend to the cultivation of the vine and olive and were incompetent farmers. Their attempt, however, is a curious incident in history, and although they failed, their lot was not as unhappy as that of their wonderful commander, who, on the rock of St. Helena, had, as Victor Hugo says, "only the picture of a child and the map of the world."

Stranger than the settlement of "the vine and olive" and still more unsuccessful was the colony on the Trinity River in Texas, which Generals Rigaud and Lallemand endeavored to found in 1818. The Champ d'Asile of the French soldiers was invaded by the Spanish garrison at San Antonio and

at La Bahía and had to retreat before overwhelming numbers. They took refuge at Galveston, where Jean Lafitte had established himself after the battle of New Orleans, in which he and his Baratarian smugglers or pirates had rendered great services to the Americans. Lafitte received kindly the unfortunate companions of Napoleon and helped them to go to New Orleans, where they were hospitably received by the Creoles of Louisiana. The story of the Napoleonic exiles in America has been admirably told by Dr. Jesse S. Reeves in the Johns Hopkins Historical Studies (1905).

The Frenchman Lafitte and his pirates were chased from Galveston and the Mexican Gulf by an American ship. Louis Aury had also, shortly before Lafitte, to surrender Amelia Island, near Galveston, to American forces. French settlements in the South, in the Nineteenth century, were not successful, but the Frenchmen who have come to our Southland, from the Seventeenth century to the Twentieth, carried with them the admirable qualities of their race: their sociability, their sense of the esthetic, their chivalric courage; and their coming has been a notable contribution to the civilization of the United States. See THE HISTORY OF LOUISIANA (Vol. III.); also LOUISIANA'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE LITERATURE OF THE UNITED STATES (Vol. VII.).

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Baird, Charles W.: History of the Huguenot Emigration to America; Fortier: Louisiana Studies, History of Louisiana; Reeves, Jesse S.: The Napoleonic Exiles in America, in Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science (1905); Rosengarten, J. G.: French Colonists and Exiles in the United States. ALCÉE FORTIER,

Professor of Romance Languages, Tulane University;
Author of History of Louisiana, etc.

S

CHAPTER III.

THE SPANISH IN THE SOUTH.

Spain's Great Opportunity.

O full is our early history of the struggle between the English and the French for the mastery of the region between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes that it is hard for us to realize how near Spain came to possessing in perpetuity the vaster region between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Before either England or France had set foot on the continent, Ponce de Leon had penetrated into Florida, Pineda had found the mouth of the Mississippi, De Soto had traversed the South from Florida to Arkansas, Coronado had pressed forward from Mexico beyond the Red, and Menéndez had founded the oldest city in our land.

All this was in the Sixteenth century when Spain was the greatest European power both by land and sea It was not until the beginning of the Seventeenth that the first French and English colonies were planted. But for her arduous efforts in the Old World to maintain her supremacy during that century, she might easily have extended her colonies in the New over both continents. Even with the great struggle before her against the genius of William of Orange, Henry of Navarre, and Elizabeth of England, she did ultimately settle Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California.

But her colonies were from first to last under military and ecclesiastic rule. Self-government never could develop. Their governors were sent out from Spain. Their commerce was directed by the House of Trade at Seville.

Discovery of Florida.

To the Spaniards the name Florida originally meant the whole eastern half of the present United States. This conception was in time limited by the successive successful settlements of the French and the English. It was discovered by accident. Juan Ponce de Leon, governor of Puerto Rico, setting out in search of the fountain of perpetual youth reported to be on the island of Bimini, was driven by a tempest to the coast of the mainland. Arriving there on Palm Sunday, March 27, 1513, he named the country Florida-Pascua Florida being the Spanish name of the day. Going to Spain, he got leave from the emperor Charles the Fifth to conquer it. This he attempted to do, but was repulsed by the natives. Expedition after expedition failed, Ayllon's along the Atlantic coast as far as the James, Narvaez's to Tampa Bay, De Soto's from Tampa Bay to the Washita, that of the Dominican Balbastro to convert the natives. Meanwhile the French intruded.

Menéndez Succeeds.

At last a colony was really planted by Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who founded in 1565 the town of Saint Augustine after destroying the French Huguenot colony planted by Laudonnière on the River May, as the French called the St. John's. Ayllon's first expedition sent by him to investigate was driven by storm to the South Carolina coast and anchored in the mouth of the Combahee, calling it the Jordan. Here the Spaniards kidnapped Indians and left among the natives a reputation for perfidy. The expedition then made by Ayllon himself paid the penalty. Perfidy met perfidy, and the Spaniards were massacred. The expedition of Narvaez was of value, on account of the adventures of Cabeza de Vaca, one of its few survivors, since he

finally wandered through the southwest to Culiacan in Mexico. That of De Soto was of immense importance, since it gave Spain her claim to the whole region touching on the Gulf and the Mississippi. He did in fact march as a conqueror through Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and even into Arkansas. But rich in incident and exploit as it is, the scope of this paper does not permit a detailed account of his expedition. The survivors, led by Moscoso, built brigantines and sailed down the Mississippi, finding their way at last to Mexico after three years' wanderings in our Southland.

Destruction of the French Colony.

Menéndez sailed from Cadiz on his enterprise, which had the double purpose of ousting the French and establishing a Spanish colony, about the same time that Ribaut left Dieppe on his second voyage. Soon after the destruction of Fort Caroline, he succeeded in capturing the shipwrecked forces of Ribaut who had come to succor the garrison, and massacred them all. The deed was avenged by a private gentleman of Gascony, the Chevalier Dominique de Gourges, who with the Indians for his allies took three forts erected by the Spaniards and hanged his prisoners on the trees Menéndez was believed by the French to have used. He put up over them the inscription: "I do this not as to Spaniards, but as to traitors, thieves, and murderers," the report in France being that Menéndez had hung up his victims under a placard reading: "I do this not as to Frenchmen, but as to Lutherans." However, the ruthless ability of Menéndez foiled the magnificent plan of Coligny to give the Huguenots a home in the New World.

East Florida.

Menéndez planted his principal colony at St. Augustine, so named from its being founded on that