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Introduction In 1817 the Congress of the United States granted four townships— 144 square miles of recently conquered Indian lands near the con®uence of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior rivers—to a group of several hundred French expatriates based primarily in Philadelphia. In return, the group was to plant the grant with grape vines and olive trees, thereby forming (it was hoped) the nucleus of a domestic American wine industry. The story of this settlement, best known as the Vine and Olive colony, provides one of the most colorful chapters in the history of antebellum Alabama and, indeed, of the entire Old South. Although the majority of the colonists were actually middle-class refugees from the slave revolt of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), some of whom eventually established successful cotton plantations on the grant, popular accounts of the colony tell a very different tale. Composed of aristocratic Napoleonic of¤cers and their elegant ladies, the story goes, Vine and Olive shone brie®y as a center of sophistication and grace. But dash, wit, and re¤nement alone could not tame the wilderness. More at home on a battle¤eld or the parquet of a palace ballroom , the French exiles made little headway in their agricultural endeavors. Lacking the experience of their Anglo-American neighbors, these aristocratic pioneers soon gave up in frustration. A tourist brochure in Demopolis, the city originally founded by the colonists, relates the story succinctly. “Romance, adventure , and politics ¤rst put Demopolis on the map. Napoleonic refugees came here in 1817 with land grants to establish a ‘Vine and Olive Colony.’ These French of¤cers and their ladies were ill-suited to the cultivation of grapes and olives, as were the soil and the climate. The colonists left, but they are remembered .”1 What requires explanation is not why the Vine and Olive colony has been remembered but rather why it has been remembered in this particular way. Why has its story centered on the failure of exiled Napoleonic aristocrats to introduce viticulture to the Deep South instead of the successful efforts of refu- gee merchants from Saint-Domingue to become cotton planters? While there is a grain of truth in the popular account—a number of senior Napoleonic of¤cers (and even one marshal) did receive land shares in the colony—it is but a grain. Only one of these distinguished military men ever settled on the grant, and he stayed a mere two years. It is true that a number of these generals bore titles of nobility, but these had been minted only a few years earlier by Napoleon in his attempt to build a hereditary elite attached to his dynasty. Although they may have been called knight, baron, or count, the exiled generals—with just one exception—had been born in modest, even plebeian circumstances and risen to high rank thanks only to the French Revolution’s abolition of noble privilege, its seemingly endless wars, and their almost feral courage. Even if all the generals had come to Alabama, it would still be a stretch to style such battle-hardened soldiers aristocrats. My intention here is not to denounce the popular account of the Vine and Olive colony as a fabrication. Instead, it is to recognize the tale of exiled French aristocrats for what it was, a myth that—like all myths—works to create meaning . Speci¤cally, the Vine and Olive story belongs to the broader process of southern mythmaking that transformed planters into genteel aristocrats.2 The story, however, has a distinctive twist that may re®ect white southerners’ unvoiced anxieties about their social status, their repugnance for the authoritarian political culture of the French exiles, their distaste for Catholicism, or even all these concerns together. Even as it highlights the exiles’ illustrious standing, the popular account of the Vine and Olive colony brings them back to earth by emphasizing their inability to master the Alabama wilderness. That the French ultimately failed where the Anglo-Americans—the storytellers—eventually succeeded allows them to reclaim for themselves a sense of superiority, one based on a certain inner fortitude and true nobility of character lacking in the decadent scions of Old Europe. In addition to the ambiguous appeal of aristocracy so evident in the popular account, another factor tends to magnify the role of the Napoleonic of¤cers while diminishing that of the Domingans who actually formed the backbone of the colony. Given that the Domingans came to the United States as refugees from...

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