9/11-THE ROYAL PAGES OF THE ACT OF ST. THOMAS-SMITH ACT:Information about Alexandre Mouton, 9th Governor of Louisiana
Alexandre Mouton, 9th Governor of Louisiana (b. November 19, 1804, d. November 12, 1885)
Alexandre Mouton, 9th Governor of Louisiana (son of Jean Mouton, Founder of Lafayette Parish and Marie Marthe Bordat) was born November 19, 1804 in ATTAKAPAS DISTRICT, LAFAYETTE PARISH, LOUISIANA, UNITED STATES, and died November 12, 1885 in LAFAYETTE PARISH, LOUISIANA, UNITED STATES.He married (1) Emma Kitchell Gardner.He married (2) Celestine Zilia Rousseau on October 07, 1826.
Notes for Alexandre Mouton, 9th Governor of Louisiana:
"The Acadian of the Acadians"--Alexandre Mouton of Lafayette
The title, from George W. Cable's story in Century Magazine, January 1887,
refers to Alexandre Mouton, former U.S. Senator and governor of Louisiana,
who was elected chairman of the Louisiana Convention in Baton Rouge that led
the state out of the Federal Union on January 26, 1861.
Mouton was an Acadian, a descendant of unprepossessing farmers who had lived
in the French colony of Acadia, which in 1713 became the British colony of
Nova Scotia.The Moutons came to Acadia later than most of the families who
eventually settled in Louisiana.In 1703, 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, 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, another settlement in
the colony, where he earned his living as a surgeon.Sons Jean, Jacques,
Charles, and Justinien, and daughters Marie-Josephe and Marguerite were born
at Grand-Pre before the family resettled at the more distant Acadian
community of Beaubassin in 1725.Four more children were born to Jean and
Marie at Beaubassin, sons Pierre, Salvator, and Louis, and daughter Anne.
The Moutons lived at Beaubassin for thirty years, their families prospering
and growing under British rule ... until the French and Indian War erupted
in 1754 and spread to other parts of North America.In the fall of 1755,
British forces rounded up the older Mouton sons and their families and
deported them along with other Beaubassin 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 Ristigouche on the Baie des Chaleurs in present-day New Brunswick,
where Louis married a younger sister of Salvator's wife in 1760.The war
caught up to these Moutons that same year when, in July, the British
attacked the fort at Ristigouche.Pierre died in the fight, and Salvator
and Louis fell into the hands of the victorious British, who imprisoned them
in Fort Edward at present-day Windsor, Nova Scotia, for the rest of the war.
After the French and Indian War ended in 1763, the surviving Mouton
brothers, unable to return to their homes at Beaubassin, reunited in the
former French colony of Louisiana.Jacques, Charles, Salvator, Louis, and
the survivors of theirfamilies 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 Alexandre Mouton.Before the Exile,
Salvator had married Anne Bastarche of Port-Royal in January 1752.His
oldest son Jean, named after Salvator's father, was born at Beaubassin in
1754, the year before the Exile.After the British released Salvator from
captivity at Fort Edward, he reunited with his wife and children and joined
his brothers in Louisiana, where he settled in present-day St. James Parish
in 1767.Anne died soon after they arrived in Louisiana.Salvator married
Anne Forest in New Orleans in 1758, but they had no children.He died at a
New Orleans hospital in 1773, when his son Jean was 19 years old.01
Jean, who served under Spanish Governor Bernardo Galvez in the American
Revolution, left the Acadian Coast by the early 1780s, crossed the
Atchafalaya Basin, and settled at Attakapas Post, now St. Martinville, on
Bayou Teche.There, on June 22, 1783, at age 29, he married Marie-Marthe
Borda, daughter of a prominent resident of the post, surgeon Antoine Borda,
a native of France.Borda was married to Marguerite Martin, an Acadian born
in Jean's native Beaubassin.Jean and Marie-Marthe produced a large family:
sons Jean-Baptiste, Joseph, Francois, Charles, Louis, Pierre-Treville,
Alexandre, Antoine-Emile, and Cesaire, and daughters Marie-Modeste,
Marie-Adelaide, 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 edge of the Attakapas District.02
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
Edward Simon.In 1825, at age 21, he was admitted to the Louisiana bar and
began his practice in Lafayette Parish.03
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,
which he transformed into a major sugar-producing operation.He would
henceforth make his substantial living as a sugar planter, not as a lawyer.
He lived first in a townhouse in Vermilionville that had been built by his
father around 1805.Over the years he 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 Bayou Vermilion, a house he called Ile Copal.By 1860, he
owned 121 slaves to work his huge plantation.04
In 1826, he married Celestine Zelia Rousseau, called Zelia, a granddaughter
of Jacques Dupre, one of the wealthiest cattle ranchers in St. Landry Parish
who later served as acting governor of the state.Among the four children
of Alexandre and Zelia was Jean Jacques Alexandre Alfred, their third child
and second son and the only son to survive infancy, who was born February
18, 1829, in St. Landry Parish.Their other surviving children were
daughters Henriette Odeide, Marie Cecilia Arcade, and Marie Celeste
Mathilde.05
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.Mouton 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
unexpired Senate term, in 1838, he was elected to the U.S. 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 Parishin November 1837, early in his
Senate term.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
Emma Gardner, a daughter of Charles K. Gardner of New York, who 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 U.S.
Treasury Department.Alexandre and Emma had seven children, six of whom
survived to adulthood:daughters Marie Therese 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.
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 and Charleston in 1856 and
1860.
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 January 7, 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
January 26, 1861, the convention voted 103 to 17 to secede from the Union,
making Louisiana the sixth state to do so, after South Carolina,
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia.
The business in Baton Rouge concluded, Governor Mouton returned to Ile Copal
to await the consequences of the convention's work.In the weeks that
followed, Texas joined the other Gulf coast states in creating a new
Southern Confederacy, Lincoln was inaugurated, 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.
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."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, would endure the war as soldiers,
wearing the gray and butternut uniforms of a new American nation that
Alexandre Mouton helped create.
[to CHAPTER ONE]
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NOTES
01.Mouton family genealogy is from Arsenault, Genealogie, 403, 702, 1013,
1026-27, 2560-64; Arsenault, History, 165-6; White Dictionnaire Acadiennes,
1238-40; D. Hebert, Southwest La. Records, CD.Note discrepancies in dates
between Arsenault & White.Arenault, Genealogie, 2561, 2562, gives Jean's
birth year as 1755.Jean is buried in St. John Catholic Cemetery,
Lafayette; he gravestone says that he died on 22 Nov 1834 at age 80 & gives
his birth year as 1754.See [photo].The gravestone date is followed here.
02.Jean's gravestone holds a plague that calls him a patriot of the
American Revolution.See [photo]
03.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.
04.The c.1800 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.
05.There is also confusion in the spelling of Zelia Rousseau Mouton's
name.Her tombstone spells her name "Zilia," but genealogical and family
records spell it "Zelia," which is used here.See [photo]
More About Alexandre Mouton, 9th Governor of Louisiana:
Baptism: October 08, 1805, FR. MICHEL BERNARD BARRIERE.
More About Alexandre Mouton, 9th Governor of Louisiana and Celestine Zilia Rousseau:
Marriage: October 07, 1826
Children of Alexandre Mouton, 9th Governor of Louisiana and Emma Kitchell Gardner are:
- Alix Gardner.
- Marie Therese Mouton, b. June 28, 1851, d. August 13, 1925.
- Paul Joseph Julien Mouton, b. November 02, 1848, d. February 15, 1916.
- George Clinton Mouton, b. September 30, 1853, d. October 25, 1911.
- William Rufus King Mouton, b. January 03, 1857, d. 1890.
- Charles Alexandre, b. 1849, d. September 27, 1900.
- Anne Eliza Mouton.
Children of Alexandre Mouton, 9th Governor of Louisiana and Celestine Zilia Rousseau are:
- +Jean Jacques Alexandre Alfred Mouton, General, b. February 18, 1829, OPELOUSAS, ST. LANDRY PARISH, LOUISIANA, UNITED STATES, d. April 08, 1864, BATTLE OF MANSFIELD, MANSFIELD, LOUISIANA, UNITED STATES.
- Marie Cecelia Mouton.
- Henriette Odeide Mouton.