Prisoners of Chance | Page 3

protests crossed the Atlantic. Both were alike returned, disregarded by the French King. Where it is probable that a single word of wise counsel, even of kindly explanation, might have calmed the rising tumult, silence and contempt merely served to aggravate it.
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.
Within the narrow space of two days the iron hand of Spain's new Captain-General had closed upon the leaders of the bloodless insurrection, his judgments falling with such severity as to earn for him in the annals of Louisiana the title of "Cruel O'Reilly." Among those of the revolutionists before mentioned, Petit, Masan, Doucet, Boisblanc, Jean Milhet, and Poupet were consigned to Moro Castle, Havana, where they remained a year, and then were stripped of their property and forbidden ever again to enter the province of Louisiana. The younger Bienville escaped with the loss of his fortune. Foucault met his fate resisting the guard on board the "Santa Maria," where he was held prisoner; while Lafrénière, De Noyan, Caresse, Marquis, and Joseph Milhet were condemned to be publicly hanged. The earnest supplication, both of colonists and Spanish officials, shocked by the unjust severity of this sentence, sufficed to save them from the disgrace of the gallows, but fated them to fall before the volley of a file of grenadiers.
With the firing of the sunset gun the evening of their last earthly day, the post-captain visited the condemned men, and spoke with each in turn; they numbered five. All through the dark hours of that night heavily armed sentries stood in the narrow passageway before nail-studded doors, while each hour, as the ship's bell