Creole Facts

"THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR OF NEW ORLEANS"

  


Credits:
THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR OF
NEW ORLEANS:
By: Mary Gehmen 1994



                  

   It was during this thirty-year span of rapid development in the city that a significant number of free blacks appeared and the term les gens de couleur libre of free people of color was first used. the term free black was also known, but it generally referred to a person of African descent recently freed, whereas free people of color meant those persons who were born into freedom, either as the second generation of free blacks of Louisiana of having entered the colony from the Caribbean as already free people.

   T
he earliest record in Louisiana of a manumission procedure, or legal freeing of a slave by a master, was in 1733 when Bienville, the city's founder, freed his slaves Jorge and Marie who had served him for twenty-six years. This means they must have been in Bienville's household since 1707 when he lived in Mobile, well before the founding of New Orleans.

   There is no evidence of the radical exclusiveness and contempt that characterizes more recent times... no evidence that white settlers and French officials considered the Africans and their descendants uncivilized people.The Spanish period gave slaves and free people of color more security and rights than under any other regime. Many Spaniards with thick black hairs and ruddy complexions looked like brothers of Creole blacks.

   T
he 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.




















Sara Gorée
(people of colour)

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.



Fred Gorée
(people of colour)


  
 The group of indigenous people that remained in the shadow is the middle group, called les gens de colour shortened today to simply Creoles. The Majority came after 1716 (2,083 slaves from 1719-1723) on trading ships directly from West Africa, most through the Senegal concession held by the Company of the Indies until 1730.

   There was a scarcity of women, African or French, and single men of both races spent long periods of time with Indian     tribes where they were fed and clothed. There they also found Indian women whom they frequently brought back to New     Orleans to keep house for them and bear their children.
       
   From the very beginning of New Orleans there were some free blacks who came either from the Caribbean or via France. A few are believed to have come as servants with the French families who settled in the city in the late 1720's; others found their way along the trade routes from the West Indian record of a free man of color, Laroze, appears in New Orleans in a case of the colonial court.

I
t was during this thirty-year span of rapid development in the city that a significant number of free blacks appeared and the term les gens de couleur libre of free people of color was first used. the term free black was also known, but it generally referred to a person of African descent recently freed, whereas free people of color meant those persons who were born into freedom, either as the second generation of free blacks of Louisiana of having entered the colony from the Caribbean as already free people.