The average free family of color, often headed by a single woman, had four to five members, and most free people of lived alone
with theirchildren, where as slave families were extensions of white households in which they served.  European men traditionally did not marry until their early thirties, and premarital relations with chaste and chaperoned white
girls were unthinkable. It was accepted that white men in Louisiana would spend thier youthful years in the company of a young black girl of their liking, to have children with her and to support, at least minimally, such families.

    Court records up to the 1850's contain numerous successions of white men, some of them top officials, where illegitimate children of color are acknowledged and given an inheritance from their fathers. Some of these men were lifelong bachelors with no legitimate heirs. African slaves under the French and Spanish were permitted to keep and use their native tribal names.

   Property records reveals that in 1803 in New Orleans more than a quarter of houses and estates along the main streets of the city were owned by free blacks, the large majority of them single women. All this spelled decadence to the statesmen from other parts of the South where British laws and Puritanical ideals viewed slaves as mere chattel and severely restricted the freeing of Africans.