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