blaufarb2005

@Book{ blaufarb2005,
    author = {Rafe Blaufarb},
    title = {Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815--1835},
    address = {Tuscaloosa},
    publisher = {University of Alabama Press},
    year = 2005,
}

The idea of the Vine and Olive colony in Alabama, also discussed by saugera2011, began to be promulgated in 1816 in the pages of L’Abeille Américaine, a French-diaspora newspaper published in Philadelphia by a refugee from Saint-Domingue. On November 14, 1816, “readers learned that a ‘Colonial Society’ composed of ‘some of the most enlightened men of the century’ had been formed in Philadelphia with the aim of ‘forming an establishment on the banks of the Ohio or Mississippi’” (44). By 1817, it was referred to the “Colonial Sociey of French Emigrants” and was gathering shareholders—who definitely included people in Kentucky. An unnamed resident of Louisville was even the person who “recommended [in January 1817] that the society ask for a grant in the territory recently conquered from the Choctaw and Creek Indians, between the Mississippi and Tombigbee rivers, in what would become the state of Alabama” (46).

Intensive lobbying of Congress by the group ultimately led to the approval of an “Act to set apart and dispose of certain public lands, for the encouragement of the cultivation of the vine and olive,” which was signed by Madison on “his last day in office” (48). It gave four townships in the Creek Cession to the society virtually as a “free gift” (49), though certain stipulations applied.

p. 117: “By 1822 close to 70 of the original grantees had spent some time on the grant—a figure nowhere near the 347 who had received allotments. … By the mid-1820s many had abandoned their grants.” The most determined were refugees from Saint-Domingue.

p. 134: “By the early 1820s many had already sold their allotments and left Alabama.”

p. 199: Shows that Antoine Dumenil (who owned land in Lexington Kentucky in 1812 and did business with Henri Guibert) was one of the grantees; saugera2011, p. 120, identifies “Antoine Dumesnil” as a silversmith and real estate owner in Lexington who new Guillaume Cirode. The latter was also the receipient of a 120-acre allotment in the Vine and Olive Colony, according to a list provided to the Secretary of the Treasury at the end of 1818; Blaufarb says Cirode is “believed to be in New Orleans in 1822” and, like Dumenil, never set foot on his land (see p. 181, 194).