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Book Review
| Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835. By Rafe Blaufarb. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. xxii, 302 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-8173-1487-3.)
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| In 1817, Congress granted the Society for the Cultivation of the Vine and Olive the use of 144 square miles of land on the Tombigbee River in Alabama, territory recently seized in a war with the Creeks and Choctaws. If the 347 members of the society established grape and olive production within fourteen years, they could obtain full title to the land for a mere $2 per acre. Since the society's leadership consisted of important French refugees and immigrants who had arrived in the wake of Napoleon's fall in 1815, the project appeared to have promise. Some naysayers in the old eastern states doubted the sincerity of the grantees, and their suspicions were soon confirmed. |
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