The engagement with the Choctaw Indians was not altogether successful for the French.  Disaster succeeded disaster, and the day closed with the French army deeply humiliated, and making a retreat as dignified as possible under the circumstances.  A number of the French officers, as Gayarre tells us, stood under the shade of a gigantic oak discussing the defeat, and with them Simon, a free black, the commander of the troop of Negroes.  He was deeply vexed because his troops had not stood fire, and expressed himself with so much freedom and disgust, that the French officers kept bantering him without mercy at the timidity of his soldiers, soothing their own wounded pride by laughing at his mortification.  Stung to the heart, Simon finally exclaimed wrathfully, “A Negro is as brave as anybody and I will show it to you.”  Seizing a rope which was dangling from one of the tents, he rushed headlong toward one of the horses which were quietly slaking their thirst under the protection of the Indian muskets.  To reach a white mare, to jump on her back with the agility of a tiger, and to twist around her head and mouth the rope with which to control her, was the affair of an instant.  But that instant was enough for the apparently sleeping Indian village to show itself awake, and to flash forth into a hail of bullets.  Away dashed Simon toward the Indian village, and back to the French camp where he arrived safe amid the cheering acclamations of the troops, and without having received a wound from the shots of the enemy.[31] This feat silenced at once the jests of the French officers, of which Simon thought himself the victim.[32]

The beginning of the Revolutionary war in 1776 found Louisiana a Spanish province and the natives of the colony beginning to tolerate and even to like their erstwhile hated Spanish masters.  Don Bernardo de Galvez was governor of the colony.  His administration has a peculiar interest to us, because it was during his rule that the Court of Madrid, fully alive to the policy of extending the agriculture of Louisiana, issued a decree permitting the introduction of Negroes into Louisiana by French vessels, from whatever ports they might come.[33] This was the beginning of the rapid migration from the West Indian islands.

While Andrew Jackson was still a child, Louisiana had a deliverer from the British in the person of this brave Gov.  Galvez.  The strategical importance of the Mississippi River and of New Orleans was at once apparent to the British commanders, and Louisiana, being neutral territory, offered a most fascinating field of operation.  Galvez, in July, 1777, had secured declaration of neutrality from the 25,000 or more Creeks, Choctaws and Chickasaws, but even this did not seem to satisfy the combatants.  New Orleans was at the mercy of first the American troops and then the British.  The mediation of Spain between France and England having been rejected in the courts of Europe, Spain decided to join France