[Footnote 36: Savannah _Museum_, April n, 1804.]

[Footnote 37: Reprinted in the _Farmer's Gazette_ (Sparta, Ga.), April 11,
1807.]

Coincident with the rise of cotton culture in the Atlantic states was that
of sugar in the delta lands of southeastern Louisiana. In this triangular
district, whose apex is the junction of the Red and Mississippi rivers, the
country is even more amphibious than the rice coast. Everywhere in fact the
soil is too waterlogged for tillage except close along the Father of Waters
himself and his present or aforetime outlets. Settlement must, therefore,
take the form of strings of plantations and farms on these elevated
riparian strips, with the homesteads fronting the streams and the fields
stretching a few hundred or at most a few thousand yards to the rear; and
every new establishment required its own levee against the flood. So long
as there were great areas of unrestricted flood-plain above Vicksburg to
impound the freshets and lower their crests, the levees below required no
great height or strength; but the tasks of reclamation were at best arduous
enough to make rapid expansion depend upon the spur of great expectations.

The original colony of the French, whose descendants called themselves
Creoles, was clustered about the town of New Orleans. A short distance up
stream the river banks in the parishes of St. Charles and St. John the
Baptist were settled at an early period by German immigrants; thence the
settlements were extended after the middle of the eighteenth century, first
by French exiles from Acadia, next by Creole planters, and finally by
Anglo-Americans who took their locations mostly above Baton Rouge. As to
the westerly bayous, the initial settlers were in general Acadian small
farmers. Negro slaves were gradually introduced into all these districts,
though the Creoles, who were the most vigorous of the Latin elements, were
the chief importers of them. Their numbers at the close of the colonial
period equalled those of the whites, and more than a tenth of them had been
emancipated.

The people in the later eighteenth century were drawing their livelihoods
variously from hunting, fishing, cattle raising and Indian trading, from
the growing of grain and vegetables for sale to the boatmen and townsmen,
and from the production of indigo on a somewhat narrow margin of profit as
the principal export crop. Attempts at sugar production had been made in
1725 and again in 1762, b