Background
Mouton, Alexander, , Louisiana 1804 1885 Male Governor (State) Senator governor of Louisiana and senator, was born on the Bayou Carencro, in Attakapas County, now Lafayette Parish, La. , the son of Jean and Marie Marthe (Bordat) Mouton and the descendant of Acadian exiles on both sides of his family.
He soon gave up practice, however, to manage a plantation given him by his father near Vermilionville, the present town of Lafayette, La. , where he became one of the more prosperous sugar planters of the state.
Education
He received his elementary education in the district schools of his county and later attended Georgetown College in the District of Columbia.
He studied law in the offices first of Charles Antoine and later of Edward Simon of St. Martinville, La. , in 1825 was admitted to the bar, and began to practise in Lafayette Parish.
Career
He was named presidential elector on the Democratic ticket in the elections of 1828, 1832, and 1836.
In 1836 he was again elected to the state legislature, which, in 1837, chose him to the United States Senate to fill out the unexpired term of Alexander Porter, who had resigned.
At the end of that term he was reelected and served from Jan. 12, 1837, to Mar. 1, 1842, when he resigned to campaign for the governorship of Louisiana on the Democratic ticket.
They had six children.
He was very active in the presidential campaign of 1844 in behalf of Polk and Dallas and contributed effectively toward carrying the state in their behalf.
In 1861 he was a delegate to the Louisiana secession convention, served as president of that body, and voted for secession.
He was subsequently a candidate for the senate of the Southern Confederacy but was defeated.
During the Civil War he sustained heavy losses both in his family and in his fortune.
To the end of his life he remained a picturesque type.
[Alcée Fortier, Louisiana (1909), vol.
II and A Hist.
of La. (4 vols. , 1904); W. H. Perrin, Southwest La. , 1891; Biog.
and Hist.
Memoirs of La. , 1892, vol.
II; Biog.
Dir.
Am.
Cong.
of Cong. ]
Politics
He is said to have been the original for George W. Cable's brief description, in "Carancro" (Century Magazine, Jan. 1887, p. 355), of "the Acadian of the Acadians, " the grandson of the Acadian widow who took refuge in Louisiana, whom the people of Louisiana made "Senator, Governor and President of the Convention. "
