ALABAMA'S VINE AND OLIVE COLONY

On December 17, 1817, a small boat named the Huntress left Philadelphia. It carried the bulk of Lallemand's followers-about eighty or ninety junior officers under the command of General Antoine Rigau. Thus began the ill-fated Bonapartist expedition to Texas. Although it became an international cause célèbre-especially as it was rumored to be part of a plot to rescue Napoleon from captivity on St. Helena and crown him King of Mexico-it ended in failure. It did, however, affect the Vine and Olive Colony by diverting most of the Napoleonic officers from Alabama, concentrating the land allotments in the hands of a few Domingan merchants, and casting a cloud of suspicion over the Alabama settlement.

In 1818 the first two contingents of grantees who had come to Alabama the previous year were reinforced by a slow trickle of settlers who traveled independently to the grant. Many of the 347 original Vine and Olive grantees never came to Alabama and probably never intended to. In addition to the sixty officers who had sold their shares in late 1817 to join Lallemand, another seventy-four grantees who were not involved in that venture also sold out. Most were immigrants from France and St. Domingue-innkeepers, confectioners, hairdressers, bakers, and tailors-who were well-established in Philadelphia and other East Coast cities. They were uninterested in uprooting their businesses and families to travel to the Alabama wilderness, but were not averse to earning a little easy money by selling their allotments. Most of these were purchased by the same Philadelphia-based Domingan merchants-notably Newman, Fontanges, Frenaye, Teterel, Ravesies, and Duval-as had purchased Lallemand's allotments. Their dealings were so blatant that U.S. Treasury secretary William Crawford denounced them to Congress as "sheer speculation."

While 134 of the original grantees quickly sold out, about an equal number eventually came to Alabama. Most sailed to the port of Mobile and then continued upriver by barge, horseback, or on foot. The journey was long, uncomfortable, and perilous. Madame ThérèseAntoinette-Margueritte Frenaye's sea voyage lasted an agonizing seventy days and then culminated in a shipwreck at the entrance to Mobile Bay. She lost all her possessions and was lucky to escape with her life. The trip from Mobile to the grant could be even more hazardous. There were no roads or bridges, and heavy streams had to be forded at great peril. Isaac Butaud fell into a rapid stream, which swept away his horse and nearly took his life. Others were not so lucky. Traveling with the first contingent of settlers, Pierre-Ange-Chevalier Stollenwerk died of disease somewhere between Mobile and the grant. As the first Vine and Olive colonist to perish, he was eulogized in the pages of Chaudron's Abeille. But as the death toll mounted, Chaudron stopped this practice, which was giving readers the (correct) impression that Alabama was unhealthy. Fever periodically swept through the colony. By 1825 at least twenty-two of the grantees-more than twenty percent of the total who ever set foot in Alabama-had died from various accidents and disease.