ALABAMA'S VINE AND OLIVE COLONY

Alabama Heritage, Summer 2006 by Blaufarb, Rafe

Although the reasons for creating the Vine and Olive Colony are numerous, another possibility is that Congress granted the Alabama territory in hopes of achieving U.S. self-sufficiency in wine production. The War of 1812 had revealed U.S. vulnerability in the area of transatlantic trade. In the event of another war, America would be at the mercy of the British navy for obtaining luxuries such as wine.

In the spring of 1817, an advance party of settlers sailed from Philadelphia to Mobile. After a slow trip upriver, during which they were feted by local notables such as Judge Harry Toulmin and General Edmund Gaines, they finally arrived at the grant. They reported back favorably about conditions there. Thus encouraged, General Lefebvre-Desnouettes decided that the time was right to lead a larger party of colonists to Alabama. They left Philadelphia by sea in August 1817 and arrived at Mobile after an uneventful voyage. The colony seemed to be taking shape as planned. But Lefebvre-Desnouettes had made a critical error before departing: he had neglected to distribute allotments among the individual members of the grant.

This task fell to General Charles Lallemand, who was elected President of the Colonial Society soon after Lefebvre-Desnouettes's departure. Former commander of a mounted regiment of Napoleon's famed Imperial Guard (at whose head he had been wounded in a desperate charge at the Battle of Waterloo), Lallemand had no intention of giving up the life of action and adventure he had led since 1791, when he had joined the French Revolutionary army at the age of seventeen. Fleeing France after Napoleon's fall in 1815, Lallemand had taken stock of the turbulent state of American affairs-then dominated by the wars of Latin American independence-and concluded that they offered richer opportunities for a man of his character than the backbreaking drudgery of clearing virgin forests in a remote wilderness. During the fall of 1817, he began to organize an expedition to invade Texas, ownership of which was then disputed by Spain and the United States. Such an undertaking required substantial funds, and Lallemand knew just where to get them: through the sale of Vine and Olive lands. He proceeded to strike a secret deal with a small group of St. Domingan merchants prominent in the Colonial Society. They agreed to elect Lallemand president of the society; in return, he would have his followers, mainly junior officers discharged from Napoleon's armies, sell their lands to the merchants at the bargain-basement price of one dollar per acre. Thus, the merchants would be able to acquire cheaply thousands of acres of Vine and Olive land, and Lallemand would gain the funds he needed for his expedition. The plan was carried out smoothly in early December. Sixty Vine and Olive grantees, for the most part military men, sold their shares. The merchants, among whom figured names which would become prominent in the Vine and Olive Colony-Fontanges, Frenaye, Duval, Ghapron, Nidelet, Curcier, Newman, Villars, Ravesies, Teterel-thus acquired over eleven thousand acres of grant lands, and Lallemand's war chest was no longer empty.