at The University of Southern Mississippi

The French Colonial Site of Moran (22HR511),
Harrison County, Mississippi

Historical Background of the Region

In 1699, French Canadian commandant Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, and his garrison of approximately 200 sailors, soldiers, laborers, and artisans set foot on land that has come to be known as Biloxi, named after its indigenous inhabitants (Usner 1992:1,32-36; Blitz and Mann 2000:63). Thus, it became the first French colony along the northern coastline of the Gulf of Mexico in the territory that almost two decades earlier had been claimed for France and named Louisiana in honor of the king (Galloway 1982:11).

These early settlers constructed a fort, now known as Fort Maurepas, on the eastern shore of the Biloxi Bay (present-day Ocean Springs, Mississippi (Giraud 1974:34). Conditions in this New World settlement proved bleak. The sandy soils were poorly suited to agriculture, and the area was prone to fluctuating, unpredictable weather conditions, sporadic flooding, and seasonal hurricanes. Supplies from the motherland were sparse. Starvation and disease were taking their toll, and immigration was slow, which seriously thwarted the growth of the labor pool and advancement of the colony. In short, conditions were desperate.

As a result, d’Iberville moved the nascent Biloxi colony in 1702 to Mobile (Giraud 1974:44), a location more amenable to provisioning through trade with the Spanish in Pensacola and the Indians along the Mobile River (Giraud 1974:170; Usner 1992:18). With a treasury drained by the expenses of war and with depleted stores, the French Crown finally realized its inability to adequately provision its fledgling colony, both the occupants of its new capital at Mobile and the few who stayed behind at Biloxi (Giraud 1974:245,356)

In 1712, it transferred proprietary control to Antoine Crozat, the financial backer of the Company of Louisiana. Crozat’s charter required that he send two ships a year to Louisiana with adequate provisions and “ten young men or women” colonists aboard. In return, he possessed a monopoly on the commerce of the colony for fifteen years (Giraud 1974:250). In 1717, Crozat, unable to garner the profits from colonial trade that he had envisioned, returned the Louisiana colony to the French Crown, who subsequently transferred control to John Law and the Company of the West (Conrad 1995:130).

The availability of money is directly related to the ability to trade, and Law’s plan was to bring about the recovery of France’s war-ravaged economy by replacing gold and silver specie with bank notes, credit, and stock, thereby increasing the money supply (Blake 2001:17). This, in turn, enhanced France’s ability to trade with its colonial empire. Trade is dependant on surplus, and surplus is dependant on the availability of labor. After Crozat ceded the Louisiana colony back to the Crown, John Law, by charter dated September 6, 1717, was granted monopolistic control over trade, mineral rights, and other economic interests in the colony of Louisiana in exchange for his commitment to recruit large numbers of immigrants, namely, 6,000 settlers and 3,000 slaves (Arnold 1995:148; Blake 2001:19).

The years following the move of the French colonial capital back to Biloxi -- in 1719, to Vieux Biloxi, the site of d’Iberville’s first settlement on the eastern shore of Biloxi Bay, and then to Nouveau Biloxi on the western side of the bay in 1720 (Giraud 1966:312-313) -- witnessed an unprecedented influx of European immigrants and African slaves as they arrived in Biloxi and then dispersed to land grants along the shores of the northern Gulf of Mexico and along the course of the Mississippi River (Usner 1992:32-33). Sometimes these new arrivals were stranded for up to a year at Law’s concession on the banks of the Mississippi Sound while awaiting transportation to their final destination (Memoir of Charles Le Gac, trans. Conrad 1970:43), under the most adverse conditions: inadequately supplied, malnourished, ill from the long, arduous voyage from the motherland, and disillusioned. Many perished.

The slow development of the beleaguered Louisiana colony weighed heavily on the success of Law’s enterprise. Known as the Mississippi Bubble, the initial phase of astonishing commercial growth and euphoric optimism led to frenzied speculation, inflation, and ultimately shattered public confidence, until the bubble burst, leading to large-scale financial collapse in France (Garber 2000). Bankrupt and disgraced, Law went into exile in 1720 (Blake 2001:23). Despite the implosion of Law’s precarious ventures, his Company of the Indies persisted under the administration of the French government, and the settlement of the Louisiana colony continued, albeit at a much slower pace. Eventually the capital was moved to its final location at New Orleans in 1722.

In sum, between 1699 and 1722, gentry folk attracted by land grants (concessions), mercantilists, laborers, and debtors, vagrants, and criminals exiled from the motherland settled amidst the Indians of the Gulf Coast and Lower Mississippi Valley. Finding themselves on unfamiliar terrain, scantily provisioned by the Crown, hungry, and unaccustomed to agricultural pursuits, these early settlers looked to the Indians who traded them food for European goods. Contact with these Indians gradually led to the acquisition of knowledge of their surroundings and increased self-sufficiency. With increasing adeptness at New World agriculture and the assistance of African slaves familiar with planting in intractable, sandy soils, the plight of the colonists improved, and food surpluses, along with tobacco and indigo, began to swell the coffers of entrepreneurs and opportunists who delivered these products to European markets. By the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1756, the Louisiana colony was moderately successful (Walthall 1991:10). Crossing ethnic borders and cultural interaction among the common folk led to increased productivity, and French Louisiana endured.
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