Considerant, as a leader of the Fourieristic socialists, had always refused to combine the teaching or propagandizing of the movement with any attempt to put the phalansterian organization of society into operation. He thought that the proper promotion of either problem would require too large an outlay of energy and money ever to combine the two into one undertaking, and consequently the teaching of Fourierism and the colonization which would naturally grow out of it should be separate undertakings. However, Considerant’s ideas changed after his first visit to the United States in 1852; that is, he was willing to merge the two in a very limited manner.[1] Considerant’s departure to the United States on his first visit seemed to have been hurriedly made, for he said that he left so quickly that he did not have time to write to any one concerning his proposed trip. At first, the trip was planned as only a four months’ tour of the United States, but it later developed into a search for a location suitable for the establishment of a colony.[2] On November 28, 1852, he left France and sailed to Liverpool, from whence he sailed for New York on December 1, and reached that port about two weeks later. No one met him at the port and, as Brisbane was in Detroit, he spent the time visiting some phalanges near New York. Among these were Lowell’s and Lawrence’s colonies near Boston, and the North American Phalanx in New Jersey. The latter was the most successful and enduring of all the phalanges established in North America. Considerant, after a six weeks’ visit, pronounced the colony a failure in one sense of the word: the co-operative efforts in economic and social life were carried out very successfully, but serial development of other phalanges had been totally abandoned by the colony. This he regretted very much.[3] When Brisbane returned to New York from Detroit, he immediately got in touch with Considerant, and they began to discuss what was best to advance Fourierism in the United States. Brisbane apparently proposed the founding of a big paper that would literally cover the United States with propaganda. Considerant, however, urged that the day of education had passed and proposed immediate founding of a colony that would show what actually could be done with Fourierism at work. The idea of disseminating propaganda should be secondary to the project itself. Agreed on this part of the program, the two men began to seek a location for the proposed colony. Brisbane proposed that lands in Ohio or Illinois be chosen, but the project was subsequently rejected both by him and by Considerant along with many other places. Finally, the following was urged: first, that the northern, eastern, and western states should be excluded because of the length and severity of the winters, the short seasons and the excessive heat in summer, and by the high price of land in the Ohio Valley; second, the citizens of the proposed colony should be of both American and European stock, out of which Considerant expected the development of a super-race; and third, the colony must be located in the United States and east of the Rocky Mountains. They thought of going to Santa Fe, but on the advice of Captain Macy abandoned this plan because it was too far from the Gulf of Mexico through which the colonists would have to ship their goods and produce. Thus, the only possible solution was to locate the colony somewhere in the South or in Texas. The latter place was finally agreed upon, and a trip was immediately planned for investigation of the territory and the location of the colony.[4] Considerant and Brisbane left Lake Erie April 30, 1853, where ice was still floating in the lake and the trees had not yet budded, for Texas. The first day they went to Cleveland, from there to Wellsville, to Canton, and then to Cincinnati. Here their arrival was announced in the papers in the following way: Albert Brisbane and Victor Considerant, two of the most eminent living Socialists, of the Fourier school, were in Cincinnati on the 5 inst. Both of these Gentlemen are able, popular advocates of the Phalansterian system of the great French associationists above named. They are on their way to Northern Texas and the Red River country, for the purpose of selecting from twelve to fifteen thousand acres of good land, with a view to the importation of a colony of French and American Socialists.[5]
It was here, also, that they met several of their old friends. Considerant refers to “our good and old friend Gingembre,” who was living in a small house surrounded with large trees, which had been built in eight days by Gingembre and his two sons. The house was dubbed “Gingembree—Box.” John Allen, another leading socialist, met them and promised to sell everything within eight days after he had received notification of the location of the new colony and with his sons join them immediately.[6] From Cincinnati their journey led them to Patriot, where they bade farewell to the last friends they were to meet, as they thought, until they returned to New York. Carrying with them only saddles and the barest necessities of a horseback journey to Texas, they embarked on a steamship for Fort Smith. They sailed down the Mississippi river to the mouth of the Arkansas and up the Arkansas to Little Rock, and later continued to Fort Smith, where they purchased horses. Considerant was amazed at the vast spaces of the West. Again and again he breaks his narrative to tell of the seemingly impossible stretches of forest, stream, and mountains. At the frontier, he is charmed by the contrast between society of the fort and that of the surrounding country. He says, Three social periods could not have been traversed more quickly. At two o’clock that afternoon we were still in the pleasant town which lies beneath Fort Smith.... Less than two hours afterwards, our horses were floundering along in the mire, among dead branches and rotten trunks, through which we traced with great trouble a kind of a road in the primitive forest, whose dense vaults anticipated night upon the swampy bottom lands. It was utterly wild, a deep silent virgin solitude, exhaling rank perfumes, the compact and luxuriant vegetation of arborescent masses, and gigantic vines embracing the large trees in one inextricable network, vegetable generations rising without the interruptions of time and space upon the secular ruins of their dying and dead predecessors.[7]
At the Choctaw Agency he had supper, consisting of “A piece of fish perfectly burnt on one side, but, in compensation uncooked on the other,” onions, and corn. Considerant reported that a negro slave was the instructor of the Indians in the Choctaw country, teaching them the crude elements of agriculture, how to play on the fiddle, and minor industries. Here at the agency he apparently became exhausted by the long rides and was somewhat discouraged over the whole proposition, but Brisbane soon overcame his discouragement and they went on. Eight days out of Fort Smith the two travellers came to Preston, located on the bluffs of the Red River. On approaching the town, Considerant describes the surrounding country and his personal reactions in the following manner: The landscape was classic and charming; its character surprised us beyond all expression. In all civilized and cultivated America, I have seen nothing so sweet, so bewitching, so ornate and complete as these solitudes by which we entered the high basin of the Red River. Brisbane and I were struck with the same idea; we seemed to behold, transported into this rich climate and under the splendid firmament of latitude 34, those admirable parks, created and sustained at so great an expense by the high aristocracy of England.... Nature has done all. All is prepared, all is arranged: we have only to raise those buildings which the eye is astonished at not finding; and nothing is appropriated nor separated by the selfish exclusiveness of civilized man; nothing is cramped. What fields of action! What a theatre of manoeuvres for a great colonization operating in the combined and collective mode! What reserves for the cradle of Harmony, and how powerful and prompt would be its developments, if the living and the willing elements of the World of the Future were transported there! A horizon of new ideas, new sentiments and hopes, suddenly opened before me, and I felt baptized in an American faith.[8]
Considerant does not describe the town of Preston and his reaction to frontier life as exhibited there. The town was full of rough and crude fellows, hijackers, murderers, and adventurers of all types. An army officer, passing through the country about the time the above named travelers were there, reported that the town was one of “bad repute.”[9] From other sources it is learned that Considerant and Brisbane remained in the vicinity of Preston for a few days and then went on toward Clarksville. A letter from Bourland and Manion, a commercial company out from Preston, to a Major de Morse says: Sir: Messrs. Albert Brisbane of New York, and Victor Considerant of France, got to our house a few days ago, coming into Texas at Preston, and thence to our bend. They are on their way through northern Texas for the purpose of selecting some several thousand acres of land, with a view to the settlement of a French Colony. They are well pleased with what they have seen. They remained with us a day and night, and we sent a guide with them on their way to Gainesville. They are fine looking, intelligent gentlemen. Their purpose, when they left our house, was, to examine the Cross Timbers country, and on to Fort Worth.[10]
Having reached Texas, Considerant immediately began to write his reactions. “I was expecting something wild and rude, coarse grasses and weeds of enormous height, etc.” However, he was astonished when he found a “superior richness” of the soil, wild oats, numerous tender grasses, large forests, and many prosperous, cultivated fields. Even the land which the Americans rejected as poor, rocky, and of thin soil, which they refused to cultivate, was exactly what the French needed to grow their vines. Grapevines grown on such soil were of “lower growth and much less run to wood and leaf, than the kind which overspreads the bottoms. The latter reaches forth on all sides its gigantic branches and climbs to the summit of the largest trees, balancing between them its clusters of black grapes.”[11] Near Dallas, at the junction of the forks of the Trinity river, Considerant and Brisbane met M. Gouhenans, chief of the first Icarian vanguard, who gathered these wild grapes and made wine out of them, which he sold for a dollar a bottle.[12] The people classified the soil into four kinds: black sandy, red sandy, mulatto, and black sticky. Considerant explains that the latter is difficult to work and is more appropriate for cotton than for anything else. The reports he gave concerning the crops were very enthusiastic. For instance, he mentions that he saw beets grown in unfertilized land that measured two feet six inches in circumference, and tomatoes that put forth shoots from ten to twelve feet in length.[13] At Fort Worth and Fort Graham gardens which the soldiers had prepared were very prolific. Within a few months after they were planted, there were beans of all kinds, green peas, melons, sweet potatoes, and twenty other plants of the kitchen garden, which were succeeding perfectly.[14] All of this was accomplished without manuring the land, an absolute necessity in Europe. There was no weeding necessary and only one or two plowings were required. The garden in Fort Worth, so he reported, had been planted and no further attention given to it, yet it was in very neat order.[15] From the very first day of their trip, when they left Lake Erie, both men had feared the Texas climate. They were afraid of the sub-tropic summers, the fevers, langour, and sun-stroke; consequently, they were surprised at the favorable reports they received wherever they went. In Fort Worth, Major Merrill, who commanded the fort, told them that the winters in Texas were so little feared “that he was in the habit of making excursions of 15 days, sometime of a month, into the prairie or forest, without serious inconvenience, and that he and his men did not often even give themselves the trouble of erecting tents for the night.”[16] On inquiry they found that the soldiers of Fort Worth were comprised of English, French, Irish, Spaniards, Russians, Swedes; in fact, a very large portion of all the soldiers was European. However, there was no complaint of climate—“one perfect accord, not a complaint, not a regret.” The soldiers were happy and well, in spite of the not very hygienic life and the sudden long and dangerous expeditions made into the prairies and forests after the Indians. The settlers, exposed as they were in cabins open to the wind and rain, were in good health, and no serious illness was observed, except a few cases of fever in the district along the coast. Nevertheless, this is not surprising when one realizes that there are never more than thirty days of really cold weather in the winter and that the hot summer days not tempered with the Gulf breeze are few. Reflections of the climatic conditions were noticeable in the habits of the live stock. There was an utter lack of shelter for the stock. Horses, cows, sheep, and goats all wandered in the woods or on the prairies the entire year without forage or shelter being furnished them. The fowls around the houses had to be fed to keep them from going “wild,” and effort had to be made to raise them, but not so with the livestock. Considerant’s estimate of the settlers is worth considering. When a new settler came, he reported, his nearest neighbors, living anywhere from six to fifteen miles from him, asked him on what day he desired to raise his building, and at that time they all came to aid him in constructing his modest home. In the meantime, the family camped in the open in their covered wagon, the means of transportation used to get to Texas. At first the settlers intended for the log cabin to be only a temporary home, but the climate was so mild that they soon forgot to build more commodious or permanent buildings until a growing town forced them to do so. Examples of these settlers becoming financially independent in a very short time are given by Considerant; for example, One had come with his wagon, his family, two horses and four or five dollars; another had only a pair of oxen, a third nothing at all, and the greater part of the immigrants were in this plight. We saw it everywhere, and yet everywhere at the end of some years, these families, so lately destitute, were surrounded with oxen, with cows, with horses, with hogs and fowls of their own, amid their fields which ripened abundant crops of corn, wheat, Irish and sweet potatoes, etc., and gardens where ever they chose to make them. We saw a man who had thus come without any means, working with a settler, to earn the team of oxen and the seed with which, three months later, he was going to commence his farming; we saw the father of a family already aged, who having begun five years ago with one cow, had hitherto provided for twelve children, the eldest of whom was hardly sixteen, and for two women, without other help than his brother-in-law. Beautiful cattle, horses and fields in full culture were the conquests of these five years. A young French wagon maker arrived two years since on the upper Trinity with a dollar in his pocket for all his worldly wealth; he is now proprietor of the finest workshop in Dallas, which he has built at his own cost, and has an industrial capital of $1200....[17]
He characterizes the settlers as ignorant, destitute, without capital, without instruments of labor, and without reciprocal ties. The social conditions cannot be matched anywhere else in the world; in fact, In its elements, its action and effects, it is doubtless superior to the Savage state, since it is a seed of civilization that germinates very fast. But in its form, it is inferior, for the Indians at least unite in hordes, in camps or in tribes, while among the settlers, the principle of separation is pushed to the extreme degree.[18]
From Fort Graham Considerant and Brisbane returned by the way of the Colorado River to Austin, perhaps to San Antonio and thence to New Orleans, and Havana, reaching New York August 5. Considerant immediately sailed for Europe, reaching Ostend, Belgium, August 29, 1853, having had in all a nine-months’ trip of exploration and investigation. With great faith in his glowing reports of Texas, and with a firm belief that he could offer to the colonists the fullest economic liberty and opportunity, Considerant began to gather his forces from a Europe, blind, “timorous and enslaved to routine ... despotic even in its aims of liberty and life.” “We have never been, in Europe, the abettors of disturbance, or the creators of disorder. We have there been diligent laborers in the good cause, the devoted soldiers of the interests of humanity. America! Free and Republican! was it a crime in us to have wished for Liberty and a Republic for Europe? And would it not be monstrous, should she repel us because we have been, at home, the martyrs of the very cause of which she bears the glorious banner in the face of the world?” Victor Considerant, European Colonization in Texas, p. 27.
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