Prisoners of Chance

It has been written by conscientious historians that commercial interests, not loyalty to French traditions, were the real cause of this struggle of 1768. Be that as it may, its leaders were found in the Superior Council, a body of governors older even than New Orleans, of which the patriotic Lafrénière was then the presiding officer, and whose membership contained such representative citizens as Foucault, Jean and Joseph Milhet, Caresse, Petit, Poupet, a prominent lawyer. Marquis, a Swiss captain, with Bathasar de Masan, Hardy de Boisblanc, and Joseph Villere, planters of the upper Mississippi, as well as two nephews of the great Bienville, Charles de Noyan, a young ex-captain of cavalry, lately married to the only daughter of Lafrénière, and his younger brother, a lieutenant in the navy.

On the twenty-seventh of October, 1768, every Frenchman in Louisiana Province was marching toward New Orleans. That same night the guns at the Tehoupitoulas Gate--the upper river corner--were spiked; while yet farther away, along a narrow road bordering the great stream, armed with fowling pieces, muskets, even axes, the Arcadians, and the aroused inhabitants of the German coast, came sweeping down to unite with the impatient Creoles of the town. In the dull gray of early morning they pushed past the spiked and useless cannon, and, with De Noyan and Villere at their head, forced the other gates and noisily paraded the streets under the fleur de lis. The people rose en masse to greet them, until, utterly unable to resist the rising tide of popular enthusiasm, Ulloa retired on board the Spanish frigate, which slipped her cables, and came to anchor far out in the stream. Two days later, hurried no doubt by demands of the council, the governor set sail for the West Indies, leaving the fair province under control of what was little better than a headless mob.

For now, having achieved success, the strange listlessness of the Southern nature reasserted itself, and from that moment no apparent effort was made to strengthen their position--no government was established, no basis of credit effected, no diplomatic relations were assumed. They had battled for results like men, yet were content to play with them like children. For more than seven months they thus enjoyed a false security, as delightful as their sunny summer-time. Then suddenly, as breaks an ocean storm, that slumbering community was rudely aroused from its siestas and day-dreaming by the report that Spaniards were at the mouth of the river in overwhelming force.

Confusion reigned on every hand; scarcely a hundred men rallied to defend the town; yet no one fled. The Spanish fleet consisted of twenty-four vessels. For more than three weeks they felt their uncertain way around the bends of the Mississippi, and on the eighteenth of August, 1769, furled their canvas before the silent batteries. Firing a single gun from the deck of his flag-ship, the frigate "Santa Maria," Don Alexandro O'Reilly, accompanied by twenty-six hundred chosen Spanish troops and fifty pieces of artillery, landed, amid all the pomp of Continental war, taking formal possession of the province. That night his soldiers patrolled the streets, and his cannon swept the river front, while not a Frenchman ventured to stray beyond the doorway of his home.