Black and white sketch of Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac by Charles A. Barker, circa 1930. Image courtesy the Detroit Historical Society.
He arrived in the spring of 1713, his vessel booming salutes off Dauphin Island. Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac was French Louisiana’s newly appointed governor, his charge to implement sweeping change. Louis XIV’s reign was ending, and the monarch was tired, in debt and disgruntled with the costly colony. Hoping to turn things around, he granted the fabulously wealthy merchant Antoine Crozat a 15-year charter with a trade monopoly. Crozat’s business partner, Cadillac, acted as the man on the ground.
Cadillac was no stranger to North America. He founded Detroit in 1701 and had traveled the Eastern Seaboard from New England to the Carolinas. He was remarkably energetic, working as a cartographer, merchant and explorer. A tireless self-aggrandizer, he invented a noble lineage for himself complete with a colorful coat of arms. Unfortunately, he was arrogant and argumentative. France’s Minister of Marine, the Comte Pontchartrain, admitted that he sent the fussy faux nobleman to Louisiana in part “to get rid of him.”
As the new governor, Cadillac planned to import more colonists and slaves, initiate trade with Spanish Mexico and exploit mining opportunities in the upper Illinois country. Unfortunately, he knew nothing of the Gulf Coast realities, extolling the region as a land of milk and honey to potential newcomers. Judging by his entourage and his baggage, Cadillac appears to have thought he was traveling to a little Paris rather than a howling frontier. Along with him came his wife and several grown sons and daughters, a score of marriageable young women, and bulky crates filled with gilded furniture and useless parlor trappings.
Dauphin Island provided the first sobering corrective to Cadillac’s lofty expectations. Fewer than 20 men and women lived there in rude dwellings scattered amid the scrub. After wandering about and taking it all in, Cadillac wrote to Pontchartrain in high dudgeon, “The wealth of Dauphine Island consists of a score of fig trees, three wild palm trees, and three apple trees … a dwarfish plum tree three feet high with seven bad looking plums, thirty plants of vine, with nine bunches of half-rotten and half-dried-up grapes, forty stands of French melon and some pumpkins.” In conclusion, he huffed: “This is the terrestrial paradise of which we had heard so much! Nothing but fables and lies!” Doubtless Pontchartrain chuckled when he read those lines since no one had spread those “fables and lies” more enthusiastically than Cadillac himself.
The disillusioned governor arrived at Mobile, the colony’s capital, shortly thereafter and paid his respects to the now ex-governor Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Moyne de Bienville. Surprised, and perhaps irked, Bienville had no choice but to accept the situation and pledge his cooperation. Unfortunately, Cadillac heightened tensions when he appropriated a vacant two-story house for himself and his family. The residence belonged to Chateaugué, one of Bienville’s brothers, who complained but had no recourse. Bienville returned the insult later by refusing the proffered hand in marriage of one of Cadillac’s daughters.
By January of 1714, Cadillac had spent enough time in Mobile and its immediate environs to fully observe its situation and people. Neither impressed him. The land was “wretched” and “good for nothing,” he declared. As for the people, they were no better than the country. Once again taking poison pen in hand, he denounced them to Pontchartrain as “the very scum and refuse of Canada, ruffians who have thus far cheated the gibbet of its due.” Overall, he declared, “The colony is not worth a straw for the moment; but I shall endeavor to make something of it, if God grants me health.”
Though healthy enough, Cadillac proved incapable of working productively with anyone. He lectured the soldiers and common people on manners and procedures, argued with Bienville, the army officers, minor officials and even the priests. When the latter asked him to expel two “immoral” women, he refused, explaining that “if I sent away all the women of loose habits, there would be no females left.”
The governor could not hold his tongue, even when it came to more powerful higher-ups. In another letter to Pontchartrain, he ridiculed plans to establish trading posts along the upper Mississippi River: “I have seen Crozat’s instructions to his agents. I thought they issued from a lunatic asylum, and there appeared to me to be no more sense in them than the Apocalypse.” He thought it absurd to expect trading vessels to run upstream against the current, “One might as well as try to bite a slice off the moon!”
Not surprisingly, Cadillac’s tenure proved a dismal failure. The colony grew but fitfully, the Spanish refused to trade and the upper Illinois country’s vaunted mines were a chimera. Even worse, the governor’s high-handedness provoked a disastrous war with the Natchez Indians, which cost French lives and took Bienville’s personal intervention to end.
By 1717, Crozat blamed Cadillac for the colony’s “frightful disorder,” admitted defeat and resigned his charter. The Scottish rogue and gambler John Law’s Company of the West took over the struggling enterprise with a 25-year charter. Ever patient and present, Bienville returned to command at Mobile. A French carpenter remarked that the change “gave general satisfaction, as no one knew better the wants and resources of the colony.” As for Cadillac, when his ship hove away from Dauphin Island with his large family, gilded furniture and useless knickknacks, no doubt he received the requisite honors and salutes, but no one lamented his departure.
John S. Sledge’s “Mobile and Havana: Sisters Across the Gulf” with coauthor Alicia García-Santana and photographers Chip Cooper and Julio Larramendi is now available wherever books are sold.
