"The Acadians are the descendants of French colonists, transported from the province of Nova Scotia. The character of their fore-fathers is strongly marked in them; they are rude and sluggish, without ambition, living miserable on their sorry plantations, where they cultivate Indian corn, raise pigs, and get children. Around their houses one sees nothing but hogs, and before their doors great rustic boys, and big strapping girls, stiff as bars of iron, gaping for want of thought, or something to do, at the stranger who is passing.
"The Germans are somewhat numerous, and are easy to be distinguished by their accent, fair and fresh complexion, their inhospitality, brutal manners and proneness to intoxication. They are, however, industrious and frugal."
A small Spanish settlement, New Iberia, was made in 1779 of colonists largely from Andalusia and the Canary Islands. At least the former element doubtless contained Moorish blood.
Finally, there was an immigration from the American colonies which had been coming in for a generation previous to the Purchase. One of the first groups was from North Carolina. From time to time other small bodies of settlers crossed the mountains to the Tennessee River, where they constructed flat boats and floated down to the Ohio and thence to the Mississippi. A few years later a group of Scotch Highlanders from North Carolina arrived, settling near Natchez. The early American immigration to Louisiana came on the whole from the upland parts of the Southern States, and was therefore Scotch and English. After the Purchase a similar immigration increased greatly in numbers.
The census of 1860, which credited the State with 708,002 people, revealed that only 81,000 of these were foreign-born, the Germans and Irish being in about equal numbers. Nearly all of the remainder who were not natives of the State were born in adjacent States of the Mississippi Valley, the Whites being made up in about equal proportions of native-born and those born in nearby States. The former contained much of the old French and mixed stock; the latter was almost entirely of British antecedents.
Arkansas, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, did not contain 500 white people. The current of immigration down the Mississippi had gone past the Post at the mouth of the Arkansas River without taking the trouble to turn aside. Settlement can scarcely be said to have begun before 1807, and at the census three years later there were only 1000 people in the territory.
It was not until after the passage by Congress in 1818 of the Land Act that the pioneers, each carrying in a leather wallet a certificate which entitled him to a homestead, began to work their boats up the current of the Arkansas River. There was a steady though not rapid arrival of settlers from Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, and particularly Tennessee—which has often been regarded as the original parent of Arkansas.
Attempts have been made to trace a line of migration from the first settlement in North Carolina, the undesirable character of which was mentioned earlier, through Tennessee and down into Arkansas, and to attribute to this element of the population the backwardness of some parts of the last-named State. A few settlers came from Georgia or Alabama up the Mississippi River but this involved a long struggle with a strong current and it was easier for them to settle in the blacklands of Mississippi or Louisiana.
There were about 14,000 persons in Arkansas in 1817 when it was created a Territory. Thereafter it made a steady growth, derived generally from all the Southern States of the Mississippi Valley, until nearly the time of the Civil War when Indiana and Kentucky began to contribute some settlers. Its population therefore was in general made up almost wholly of British stock. Its 1860 population of 435,350 was one-fourth black, the Whites being almost wholly native-born, a thousand Germans and a thousand Irish being lost in the mass.