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