Subsequently a colony was located at Boloxy, on the shore of the lake, and thence was transferred to New Orleans. Mobile, soon after, was made the nucleus of another colony, and from these two points had proceeded the pioneers of the different settlements along these rivers—the Tombigbee and the Mississippi. It was to these settlements or posts, or their neighborhoods, that these refugees from the Revolutionary war in the colonies had retired. Natchez and St. Francisville, on the Mississippi, and St. Stephen's and McIntosh's Bluff, on the Tombigbee, were the most populous and important.
About these, and under the auspicious protection of the Spanish Government, then dominant in Louisiana and Florida, commenced the growth of the Anglo-Norman population, which is now the almost entire population of the country. There proceeded from South Carolina, about the time mentioned above, a colony of persons which located near Natchez. They came down the Holston, Tennessee, and Mississippi Rivers, on flat-boats; and after many escapes from the perils incident to the streams they navigated, and the hostility of the savages who dwelt along their shores, they reached this Canaan of their hopes. They had intended to locate at New Madrid. The country around was well suited for cultivation, being alluvial and rich, and the climate was all they could desire; but they found a population mongrel and vicious, unrestrained by law or morals, and learning through a negro belonging to the place of an intended attack upon their party, for the purpose of robbery, they hastily re-embarked what of their property and stock they had debarked. Under pretense of dropping a few miles lower down the river for a more eligible site, they silently and secretly left in the night, and never attempted another stop until reaching the Walnut Hills, now Vicksburg. A few of the party concluded to remain here, while the larger number went on down; some to the mouth of Cole's Creek, some to Natchez, and others to the cliffs known by the name of one of the emigrants whose party concluded to settle there.
These cliffs, which are eighteen miles below Natchez, have always been known as Ellis' Cliffs. In their rear is a most beautiful, and eminently fertile country. Grants were obtained from the Spanish Government of these lands, in tracts suited to the means of each family. A portion was given to the husband, a portion to the wife, and a portion to each child of every family. These grants covered nearly all of that desirable region south of St. Catharine's Creek and west of Second Creek to the Mississippi River, and south to the Homochitto River. Similar grants were obtained for lands about the mouth, and along the banks of Cole's Creek, at and around Fort Adams, ten miles above the mouth of Red River, and upon the Bayou Pierre. The same authority donated to the emigrants lands about McIntosh's Bluff, Fort St. Stephens, and along Bassett's Creek, in the region of the Tombigbee River. Here the lands were not so fertile, nor were they in such bodies as in the region of the Mississippi. The settlements did not increase and extend to the surrounding country with the same rapidity as in the latter country. Many of those first stopping on the Tombigbee, ultimately removed to the Mississippi. Here they encountered none of the perils or losses incident to the war of the Revolution. The privations of a new country they did, of necessity, endure, but not to the same extent that those suffer who are deprived of a market for the products of their labor. New Orleans afforded a remunerative market for all they could produce, and, in return, supplied them with every necessary beyond their means of producing at home. The soil and climate were not only auspicious to the production of cotton, tobacco, and indigo—then a valuable marketable commodity—but every facility for rearing without stint every variety of stock. These settlements were greatly increased by emigration from Pennsylvania, subsequently to the conclusion of the war, as well as from the Southern States.
Very many who, in that war, had sided with the mother country from conscientious, or mercenary views, were compelled by public opinion, or by the operation of the law confiscating their property and banishing them from the country, to find new homes. Those, however, who came first had choice of locations, and most generally selected the best; and bringing most wealth, maintained the ascendency in this regard, and gave tone and direction to public matters as well as to the social organization of society. Most of them were men of education and high social position in the countries from which they came. Constant intercourse with New Orleans, and the education of the youth of both sexes of this region in the schools of that city, carried the high polish of French society into the colony.
Louisiana, and especially New Orleans, was first settled by the nobility and gentry of France. They were men in position among the first of that great and glorious people. Animated with the ambition for high enterprise, they came in sufficient numbers to create a society, and to plant French manners and customs, and the elegance of French learning and French society, upon the banks of the Mississippi.
The commercial and social intermingling of these people resulted in intermarriages, which very soon assimilated them in most things as one people, at least in feeling, sentiment and interest. From such a stock grew the people inhabiting the banks of the Mississippi, from Vicksburg to New Orleans. In 1826, young men of talent and enterprise had come from Europe, and every section of the United States, and, giving their talents to the development of the country, had created a wealth, greater and more generally diffused than was, at that time, to be found in any other planting or farming community in the United States. Living almost exclusively among themselves, their manners and feelings were homogeneous; and living, too, almost entirely upon the products of their plantations, independent of their market-crops, they grew rich so rapidly as to mock the fable of Jonah's gourd. This wealth afforded the means of education and travel; these, cultivation and high mental attainments, and, with these, the elegances of refined life. The country was vast and fertile; the Mississippi, flowing by their homes, was sublimely grand, and seemed to inspire ideas and aspirations commensurate with its own majesty in the people upon its borders.
In no country are to be found women of more refined character, more beauty, or more elegance of manners, than among the planters' wives and daughters of the Mississippi coast. Reared in the country, and accustomed to exercise in the open air, in walking through the shady avenues of the extensive and beautifully ornamented grounds about the home or plantation-house; riding on horseback along the river's margin, elevated upon the levee, covered with the green Bermuda grass, smoothly spreading over all the ground, save the pretty open road, stretching through this grass, like a thread of silver in a a cloth of green; with the great drab river, moving in silent majesty, on one side, and the extended fields of the plantation, teeming with the crop of cane or cotton, upon the other. Their exercise, thus surrounded, becomes a school, and their ideas expand and grow with the sublimity of their surroundings. The health-giving exercise and the wonderful scene yields vigor both to mind and body. Nor is this scene, or its effects, greater in the development of mind and body than that of the hill-country of the river-counties of Mississippi.
These hills are peculiar. They are drift, thrown upon the primitive formation by some natural convulsion, and usually extend some twelve or fifteen miles into the interior. They consist of a rich, marly loam, and, when in a state of nature were clothed to their summits with the wild cane, dense and unusually large, a forest of magnolia, black walnut, immense oaks, and tulip or poplar-trees, with gigantic vines of the wild grape climbing and overtopping the tallest of these forest monarchs. Here among these picturesque hills and glorious woods, the emigrants fixed their homes, and here grew their posterity surrounding themselves with wealth, comforts, and all the luxuries and elegances of an elevated civilization. Surrounded in these homes with domestic slaves reared in them, and about them, who came at their bidding, and went when told, but who were carefully regarded, sustained, and protected, and who felt their family identity, and were happy, served affectionately, and with willing alacrity, the master and his household. In the midst of scenes and circumstances like these grew women in all that constitutes nobility of soul and sentiment, delicacy, intelligence, and refined purity, superior to any it has ever been my fortune to meet on earth.
Here in these palatial homes was the hospitality of princes. It was not the hospitality of pride or ostentation, but of the heart; the welcome which the soul ungrudgingly gives, and which delights and refines the receiver. It is the welcome of a refined humanity, untainted with selfishness, and felt as a humane and duly bound tribute to civilization and Christianity; such hospitality as can only belong to the social organization which had obtained in the community from its advent upon this great country.
The independence of the planter's pursuit, the institution of domestic slavery, and the form and spirit of the Government, all conduce to this. The mind is untrammelled and the soul is independent, because subservient neither to the tyrannical exactions of unscrupulous authority, or the more debasing servility of dependence upon the capricious whims of petty officials, or a monied aristocracy. Independently possessing the soil and the labor for its cultivation, with only the care necessary to the comforts and necessities of this labor, superadded to those of a family, they were without the necessity of soliciting or courting favors from any one, or pandering to the ignorant caprices of a labor beyond their control. Independence of means is the surest guarantee for independence of character. Where this is found, most private and most public virtues always accompany it. Truth, sincerity, all the cardinal virtues are fostered most where there is most independence. This takes away the source of all corruption, all temptation. This seeks dependence, and victimizes its creatures to every purpose of corruption and meanness.