Jacques Villeré: The First Creole Governor and the Plantation Where the Battle Began

The First Creole Governor of Louisiana

Jacques Philippe Villeré was born on a plantation near present-day Kenner in 1761, which means he was born a French colonial subject, grew up under Spanish rule, lived to see Napoleon sell the whole territory to Thomas Jefferson, and then became governor of a brand-new American state. That's four flags in one lifetime, which is about as Louisiana as it gets.

His family had been in Louisiana since the early colonial days, and they paid dearly for it. His father, Joseph Antoine de Villeré, had served as a French Navy official and militia captain. When the Spanish took over Louisiana in 1769, Joseph was among the Creole rebels who refused to accept the new regime. Governor Alejandro O'Reilly — the same O'Reilly who gives his name to history as "Bloody O'Reilly" — sentenced Joseph to death. He died before the execution could be carried out, but the message to the Villeré family was clear: resistance has consequences.

Young Jacques grew up in the shadow of that history. He inherited the family plantation, married Jeanne Henriette de Fazende in 1784, raised eight children, and became exactly the kind of Creole planter-aristocrat that the Americans who poured into Louisiana after the Purchase looked at with suspicion. The Creoles and the Americans didn't trust each other. The Creoles thought the Americans were crude newcomers. The Americans thought the Creoles were decadent relics. Louisiana politics in the early 1800s was essentially a cold war between these two groups.

Villeré fought in that cold war and won. When Louisiana became a state in 1812, the first governor was William C.C. Claiborne, an American appointed by Jefferson. But by 1816, the Creole political establishment had organized enough to elect one of their own. Jacques Villeré became the second governor of Louisiana and the first native-born Louisianian — the first Creole — to hold the office. It was a statement: this was still their home.

But before the governorship came the war, and the war is where the Villeré story gets dramatic. During the War of 1812, Jacques served as a major general commanding the Louisiana militia. On December 23, 1814, British forces landed near the Villeré plantation below New Orleans, using it as a staging ground for their advance on the city. They captured Jacques's son Gabriel. But the younger Villeré escaped — some accounts say he jumped out a window — and raced to tell Andrew Jackson that the British were coming.

Jackson's famous response was immediate. He launched a night attack on December 23rd that stopped the British advance and set the stage for the decisive Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815. The Villeré plantation was literally the ground where the battle began. Without Gabriel's escape and warning, Jackson might not have had time to prepare his defenses. The American victory that made Jackson a national hero started with a Creole kid jumping out of a window on his family's land.

As governor from 1816 to 1820, Villeré pushed for practical reforms: bankruptcy protection for debtors, making death-by-duel a capital offense — which tells you something about how common dueling was in early Louisiana — and reducing the state's debt. He governed during a period when New Orleans was transforming from a colonial outpost into an American boomtown, and he did it as a bridge between the old Creole world and the new American one.

Jacques Villeré died in 1830. The street that bears his family name — Villeré Street in the Tremé — runs through one of the oldest neighborhoods in America. His plantation site in what's now Chalmette is part of the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park. And his legacy is the legacy of Creole Louisiana itself: a people who were here before America arrived, who fought to keep their place, and who shaped the state into something that neither France nor Spain nor the United States could have built alone.