1
Cécile Vidal, EHESS, MASCIPO
“The 1769 Oath of Fidelity and Allegiance to the Spanish Crown of the French
‘Company of the Free Mulattoes and Negroes of This Colony of Louisiana’: Dual
Genealogy of a Social Event”i
When the new governor Alejandro O’Reilly re-established the authority of the
Catholic Monarchy in Louisiana after its cession to Spain at the end of the Seven Years Warii,
he asked every constituted group to take an oath of fidelity and allegiance to the king of
Spainiii. These groups were distinguished from one another by residence, juridical status,
functions as God or king’s servants, occupation and profession, and ethnic and racial originsiv.
Such distinctions demonstrate how multiple dynamics informed the way this new colonial and
slave society was structured and how a new social hierarchy developed that was based both
on values and beliefs inherited from European corporate societies and on new representations.
Among these groups was the “Company of the free mulattoes and negroes of this
colony of Louisiana” (“Compagnie des mulatres et nêgres libres de cette colonie de la
Loüisianne”). Thirty-four free men of color signed or made their mark to take the oathv.
Because this 1769 document is the first to mention this military institution, historians of
Louisiana have concluded that its creation was the work of O’Reilly, who had played a crucial
role in the reforms of the free-colored militia companies in Havana in 1763-64, who landed in
New Orleans with 80 pardos and morenos militiamen among other Cuban troops, and who
was responsible for the constitution of four lists of free people of color in the Louisiana
capital and its surroundings in 1770vi. They have documented the previous circumstantial
military use of enslaved and free blacks by the French against the Natchez and the Chickasaw
in the 1730s, but they have not found any material to document what happened between 17391740 – the date of the last expedition against the Chickasaw – and 1769. While they have
2
insisted on the continuity between the French and the Spaniards in their lack of reluctance to
use soldiers of African descent, they have also presented the transfer of sovereignty from
France to Spain as a turning point in the military and social history of free people of colorvii.
New evidence, however, testifies that the free-colored militia company was in fact organized
by French local authorities in the last years of the Seven Years War before the cession of the
colony, and that there was an even greater continuity between state policies towards free
blacks under French and Spanish domination than it has been previously assumed.
The creation of the free-colored militia company by French officials transformed the
position of free men of color and their families within Louisiana society. Their participation
in the colony’s defense gave these men access to material advantages and the honor
associated with military service for the king. This social promotion translated into the oath
which likewise acknowledged their honor by giving credit to their word. It was also revealed
by their signatures or marks on the documentviii. While all along the French period free
persons of African or mixed descent were nearly always nominally identified with only a first
name like slaves, 31 out of the 34 signatories identified themselves with both a first and a last
name. Carrying a surname helped them to obliterate their servile origins because it signaled
them as potential owners able to pass on their name and property within their family, unlike
chattel slaves. Hence, the oath allowed each militiaman to claim a new individual social
identity publicly and officially. Together, they also endorsed a collective socio-racial identity
as a group of “free negroes and mulattoes” in the public sphere for the first timeix.
The public signing of these oaths constituted a political event since they ended the
revolt against the Spanish Crown. In the case of the free people of color’s oath, it also
represented a social event, in the sense proposed by the sociologist and social historian,
William Sewell:
“Eventful temporality recognizes the power of events in history. Social life may be conceptualized
as being composed of countless happenings or encounters in which persons and groups of persons
3
engage in social action. Their actions are constrained and enabled by the constitutive structures of
their societies. Most happenings reproduce social and cultural structures without significant
changes […]. Events might be defined as that relatively rare subclass of happenings that
significantly transform structures. An eventful conception of temporality, therefore, is one that
takes into account the transformation of structures by events. […] in general events bring about
historical changes in part by transforming the very cultural categories that shape and constrain
human action. Because the causalities that operate in social relations depend at least in part on the
contents and relations of cultural categories, events have the power to transform social causality” x.
Following William Sewell’s view on the relations between event, cultural categories
and social change, it is possible to view the 1769 oath as a founding event in the process of
racialization of this new colonial and slave society. Less than two generations after the
creation of the colonial capital in 1718xi, what was initially only a legal and administrative
category which was imposed by the state to exclude free blacks from benefiting the same
rights than the whites, became a social category which could be embraced and invested by the
social actors themselves because it could give them advantages, privileges and rightsxii. This
shows that the struggle over classifications at the heart of the genesis and transformation of
collective identities in the social space is not only a fight between competing systems of
representations and taxonomies, with the related question of who has the power to name and
to classify, but also a fight over the meanings of dominant categories. However, this struggle
over classifications could have paradoxical results. What could be viewed as a social victory
for free men of color was also what made race not only one collective category among others
– class, gender, nation, age, etc – but the most important one used by institutional and
individual actors to assign an identity or to self-identify, to situate themselves or others within
the social space, and make sense of the social order. The creation of the free-colored militia
company allowed free black men to regain a civic identity (a last name) and an honor which
were denied to slaves, but it was at the price of their segregation from whites, which means
that race had become more important than class or statusxiii.
4
This article is thus first a reconsideration of the importance of the French period in the
historiography of free people of color in colonial and antebellum Louisianaxiv. More
importantly, it is a contribution to the discussions on the meanings and effectiveness of
categories, the role of the various actors – institutional and individual actors – in the political
and social construction of categories with which they viewed and shaped their social world,
and the complex relationship between the processes of categorization and group-makingxv. As
such, it proposes to break away from the traditional historiography on comparative slave and
race studies in two important ways. First, it does not presume that free people of color
immediately formed a social group and developed a collective identity, while the
historiography often tends to reify and naturalize the group of free blacks, using alternatively
the concept of caste, class or community to describe it as a givenxvi. Then, instead of
considering the emergence of an intermediate racial category as a sign of the fluidity of race
relations, while the most rigid systems of racial slavery would be the ones where most persons
of African descent could only be slaves, the few free people of color having so limited rights
that they were “slaves without masters”xvii, the essay demonstrates that New Orleans society
was racialized very early on, but that race, in conjunction with class and gender, worked in a
different way than in a slave society without an incorporated group of free black men.
To fulfill these goals, the article offers a dual genealogy of the emergence of the
“company of free mulattoes and negroes”. It will explain how the state and some free men of
color came to cooperate to create this fascinating institution which constituted a compromise
between those two sides at the end of the French Regime. Both could gain some advantages
from it, even if they were not moved by the same motivations and representations or even had
contradictory ones. First, the category of free blacks as it was imposed by the state – that is
both the central power in Versailles and local officials who were the representatives of the
king in the colony – will be deconstructed in order to demonstrate how free blacks became
5
both a problem and an instrument of imperial and colonial policy. The evolution, ambiguity
and particularity of the state’s attitude towards free blacks in Louisiana will be explained by
the tensions between the influence of a broader racial imperial culture and the necessary
adaptation to specific local circumstances. Then, the category of free blacks will be
“individualized” with the reconstitution of as many life trajectories as possible among the 34
militiamen who took the oath in 1769 in order to analyze the complex relationship between
individual and collective identities and to understand their strategies in joining the freecolored militia companyxviii. The creation of this military institution would not have been
possible without the emergence of an embryonic elite of free men of color. Thus, if the freecolored-militia company will later be used as a basis for collective political action to defend
common interests, the motivations of the first militiamen had to do initially with processes of
differentiation and power relationships related to class and gender within the free population
of color. This shows how racial categorization and group-making should be studied both from
the outside and the inside.
*
Whatever the period under consideration –French, Spanish, Territorial or Antebellum–
the historiography on Louisiana most always refers to the “free people of color”, using an
historical expression which appeared very late, first in the French Antilles and then in
Louisianaxix. In 1806, the first American census for the Territory of Orleans had a single
heading for the “free people of color” instead of the two columns for “pardos” (light-skinned)
and “morenos” (dark-skinned) in the Spanish censusesxx. Two years later, territorial
legislation decreed that free persons of African of mixed descent had to be referred as a “free
man of color” or a “free woman of color” in all public documentsxxi. But in the sacramental
records of New Orleans, the expression became common only from 1820xxii. This coincided
with the introduction of the category “free colored persons” in the federal census the same
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yearxxiii. The anachronistic use of the expression “free people of color” by historians thus
gives a false impression of historical continuity and tends to reify the category, while its
simultaneous or successive names highlight that its definitions and boundaries not only
always aroused conflicts and negotiations at a particular moment, but also did not cease to
evolve over time. At stake were different systems of representations of the social and racial
orderxxiv.
In French Louisiana, the expressions employed to designate the group of free blacks
were: “affranchis” (“freedmen or women”), “noirs libres” (“free blacks”), and “nègres et
mulâtres libres” (“free negroes and mulattoes”); those to identify individuals were:
“nègre/négresse libre” (“free negro”), “mulâtre/sse libre” (“free mulatto”), “quarteron/ne
libre” (“free quadroon”) and so on, with the various categories of color or degree of métissage
becoming more numerous and complex over time, especially in the sacramental recordsxxv.
The first term, “affranchis”, was used in a generic way to designate both freedmen and
women and their descendants even when they were free-born. Related to status, it insists upon
servile origins. The other collective and individual designations mixed a specific label of
color or degree of métissage with a term related to status. Behind them was the idea that most
people of African descent were or should be slaves. In the documentation, slaves were usually
designated as “enslaved negro/mulatto/quadroon” (“nègre esclave”, etc.). Sometimes the
slave status was not mentioned, in which case the color term alone “negro/mulatto/quadroon”
always implicitly indicated an enslaved person. Thus it was necessary to specify, when these
“negroes”, “mulattoes”, and so forth were free, if that was indeed the case. Conversely, when
a free person of color had to be identified, their color was sometimes not mentioned, the
individual being only designated as “free”. Since people of European descent were never
individually identified as “free” or “white”xxvi, the use of the adjective “free” to categorize a
person meant that she or he was not white and could have a pejorative connotation.
7
Hence, although the expression “free people of color” was not yet in use, the racial
idea it conveys already informed juridical practices and social relations in the first half of the
eighteenth century. During the Antebellum period, it was a kind of oxymoron that combined
two concepts that were seen as antithetic: freedom and color. Together, they contradicted the
association between freedom and whiteness, on the one hand, and slavery and blackness, on
the other hand, and the opposition between these dual phenomena around which the slave
society was organized. However, while “color” in “free people of color” put the emphasis
only on the phenotype, the variety of racial labels in the eighteenth century indicated both a
degree of métissage and a color. They reflected an obsession for genealogy and miscegenation
and a desire to measure the distance or proximity with whites. Nevertheless, although a term
to designate all people of African and mixed descent and thus to posit them as the only mixed
race in order to preserve the purity of the white race had not yet been invented, which became
the case with “colored”, the systematic combination of “mulattoes” and “negroes” under
French rule reveals that “mulattoes” remained closely associated with people of African
descent despite their “white blood”: they were not considered as a distinct racial group – the
third one besides whites and blacks, Indians being apartxxvii.
Very early on free blacks were apparently systematically identified as such, with these
diverse labels, in all the social situations documented by the various archives (the
administrative correspondence, notarial deeds, court proceedings, sacramental records, and
censuses), since they constituted a legal category from the outset of colonization. Louisiana
distinguished itself from all other French colonies because it did not experience a long period
of legal vacuum regarding slavery. In the Caribbean islands, first settled in the seventeenth
century, the legislation on slavery developed several decades after the introduction of the first
African slaves. By contrast, the Mississippi colony inherited a Code Noir from the Lesser
Antilles only a few years after the arrival of the first slave ships from Africa in 1719.
8
Promulgated in 1724, the Louisiana ordinance replicated most of the French West Indian
legislation, apart from a few major differencesxxviii.
Already, the 1685 Code Noir had been conceived in reaction to the rise of métissage
and to the debate that had developed on the status of individuals born from mixed unions
between free whites and black slaves in the Islands. It made provisions of sanctions against
free men who had children with enslaved women, but it automatically granted freedom to
enslaved women who married free men. It also authorized and regulated the manumission of
slaves and conceded French citizenship and the same rights to the freedmen and women as to
free-born people. However, the freedmen and women and the “other free men and women”
(that is the free men and women of European descent) were not considered equal, since the
freedmen and women were expected to exhibit special respect to their former masters. They
were also punished like the slaves in case of qualified theft and more severely than the whites
if they provided assistance to runaway slaves.
Subsequently, in reaction to the situation in the Antilles where the population of free
blacks was quickly rising, the Louisiana Code Noir further reinforced the legal distinctions
between whites and free persons of African or mixed descent who were called “freed or freeborn negroes” or “blacks” in the ordinance: slaves could not be manumitted without the
prerequisite authorization of local authorities; marriages between whites and blacks were
prohibited; donations from whites to free people of color were also outlawed; and, finally,
free blacks convicted for assistance to runaway slaves could be re-enslavedxxix. Thus, before
there was even time for a significant population of free people of color to emerge, law there
almost immediately conferred a specific juridical status to free blacks. Moreover, even though
not all the articles of the Code Noir were fully enforced, the legal distinctions among free
persons were not only provisioned by law, but were also used against free colored people. For
instance, the prohibition of mixed marriages was strictly respected in all but one casexxx, and
9
at least two free blacks prosecuted for theft were re-enslaved by decision of the Superior
Council of Louisianaxxxi.
If “free blacks” constituted a legal category used to identify individuals from the
outset of colonization in Louisiana, it did not become an administrative and statistical
category, in an attempt to manage and control this population and organize the social world
hierarchically, before the last years of the French Regimexxxii. Six censuses were taken for
French colonial New Orleans. The third census in 1732 identified some free men or women of
color in the general list of householders, but it did not provide a specific rubric with which to
count this populationxxxiii. After the 1730s, the population was not counted again until
1763xxxiv, when for the first time the long-awaited census included a category, subdivided into
several sub-categories, for free people of colorxxxv. While for the slaves the sub-rubrics had to
do with age, gender, and race, a distinction being made between “negroes”, “mulattoes” and
“natives” (“sauvages”), the sub-rubrics for freedmen and women concerned only “negro”
men, women, boys and girls in most of the censusxxxvi. It was only at the English Turn, a small
outpost downriver, that the freed “negroes” and “mulattoes” were counted separately; but,
even when there were no specific columns for freed “mulattoes”, it was noted, within the
column counting the “negroes” according to age and gender, when the person was a freed
“mulatto”. If the racial sub-categories reveal a preoccupation for métissage, the expression
used to designate the group was not “free mulattoes and negroes”, but “freed people”
(“affranchis”), most of the time, and in one case, at the English Turn, “free negroes and
freedmen”. The rubric was also located at the next to last position, between those related to
slaves and cattle. This collective designation was a reminder of their slave origins and thus
reinforced the barrier between them and the whites, not only by the color line but with the
servile stain which allegedly persisted well over the first generationxxxvii.
Since the 1763 census comprised only 85 free people of color out of a population of
10
2441 inhabitants in New Orleans and its immediate surroundings, their number does not fully
explain why the state’s representatives felt the need to count them separately and thus to
constitute them as a special group to administer. To understand their motivations, it is
necessary to take into account the imperial framework. At the same time, in the French
Antilles, in a context of slave upraises, the local authorities were trying to control the growth
of the population of free people of color by the illicit integration of those who were called
libres de fait or libres de savanexxxviii, and started demanding their manumission papers. In
1758 the Superior Council of Cap français and then in 1761 the governor and intendant of
Martinique ordered the free people of color of their island to present their manumission
papers to a specially-appointed official within a three-month period, and threatened that those
who could not do it would be sold as slavesxxxix. Likewise in Louisiana in 1763-64, Nicolas La
Frénière, the first Creole king’s prosecutor, launched a repressive campaign against runaway
and thief slaves who survived in New Orleans by passing as free blacks. While the Superior
Council condemned several slaves to have their arms and legs broken alive on the wheel,
local authorities also promulgated ordinances which reminded masters to declare their
runaway slaves to the clerk’s office, and which planned the expulsion of vagrants and “gens
sans aveu” from the cityxl. The state thus displayed a new willingness to impose closer
surveillance and more severe discipline on slaves, and to better control the labile frontiers
between slavery and freedom in the whole empire.
The comparison between the 1763 and 1766 censuses and the four lists of free people
of color drawn in 1770 by O’Reilly demonstrates that runaways were not the only problem in
the Mississippi Valley, and that quietly manumitted free people of color were an important
social reality not only in the Antilles, but also in Louisiana. It has been possible to find at least
two men, Charles Derneville and Noël Carrière, who were listed respectively in the “roll of
the free mulattoes of New Orleans” and in the “list of free negroes […] in New Orleans”,
11
while the reconstitution of their life trajectories over the French and Spanish periods
demonstrates that in fact in 1770 they had not yet been officially manumitted: instead their
master let them live as libres de faitxli. Very likely, this situation was shared by many other
men listed in 1770. Although many of those quasi-free probably lived with their (former)
masters like some legally freed people of color, they had not been declared in the censuses for
obvious reasonsxlii. This arrangement provided former slaves with protection and security, and
former masters with cheap labor. Such practices were also present in the Antilles: article
seven of the 1786 ordinance on censuses dealt with the non-declaration of the “libres de fait”
to the census takers with the complicity of their “patrons”, as these former masters were
calledxliii. Kept hidden by the documentation, the importance of “libres de fait” in French
Louisiana could explain the low number of recorded manumissions and the variations in
numbers between the 1760s censuses, the 1769 oath, and the 1770 listsxliv.
As well as a willingness to control the growth of the free people of color population
and the various paths to freedom, the state also had military motivations to count them
separately. The need to evaluate military forces was always an important reason to take
censuses, but it was particularly the case in 1763. This census was taken at the end of the
Seven Years War, just after the arrival of d’Abbadie in Louisiana, who was in charge of the
colony’s transfer to Britain and Spain. The 1763 census was indeed part of the administrative
transfer: taken by the French but given to the Spaniards, it was intended to evaluate the
demographic and military forces of the conceded territoryxlv. Thus, the census was organized
around the different white militia companies. It did not record any free-militia colored
company. Nonetheless, it mentioned the “district of the free negroes under the Fort St. Leon”
(“canton des nègres libres sous le fort St Léon”) at the English Turn. This outpost was located
downriver, eight miles from New Orleans. Local authorities had started to fortify it and to
settle it in order to transform it into a crucial element of protection for the capital during the
12
War of Austrian Succession, because the fortifications at La Balise, the outpost which
controlled the mouth of the river, fell into ruin. “Free negroes” had been specifically
mentioned by governor Vaudreuil, beside troops, settlers (“habitants”) and Indian volunteers
(“volontaires sauvages”), as categories of inhabitants which could be gathered and settled
there in 1747xlvi. In both the 1763 and 1766 censuses, besides the names of the heads of two
families of free people of color living in this district, Jacques Zacarie dit Grand Jacquot and
Thomas Haultz, the document indicates that they were respectively “brigadier” and “sousbrigadier”, which were ranks of military non-commissioned officers. The first name does not
appear on the list of the 34 men who took the oath of fidelity to the king of Spain in 1769; but
the “Pierre fils de Thomas” (“Pierre son of Thomas”) who put his mark on the 1769 oath is
very likely the same “Pierre Haultz”, 26 year old, who lived next to his father, Thomas
Haultz, 70 year old, at the English Turn in the 1760s. Moreover, between 1763 and 1766, a
man named Simon Calfatxlvii also settled at the English Turn, in the “district of the free
negroes”. The Simon Calfat who appears as “capitán de los negros libres” in the 1766 census
is certainly the same man who commanded the temporary company of free men of color in the
expeditions against the Chickasaw in the 1730s and who was the first to sin the 1769 oath as
captain of the militia companyxlviii.
Since they had already used free men of color in their conflicts against the Natchez
and the Chickasaw in the 1730s, local officials naturally turned to them once again when
imperial wars renewed in the 1740s. In 1730, they had even considered the possibility of
creating a permanent free-colored militia company, like those which had been established
very early in the Antillesxlix, but they had abandoned this idea, because some slaves had
fought alongside the Natchez and a plot lead by a Bambara slave was discovered in New
Orleansl. During the War of Austrian Succession, faced with a chronic shortage of men and
money, local authorities started to organize free blacks for military purposes on a more
13
permanent basis, granting them some land near the Fort St. Leon. According to a series of
maps, the “district of the free negroes”, was located downriver from the fort. It was also
clearly separated from the whites’ plantations and circumscribed by woodsli. This means that
free people of color were used as a kind of human shield in case enemy forces tried to move
upriver to attack New Orleans. It is impossible to know, however, exactly when the colored
militia company was created: it may have been as soon as during the War of Austrian
Succession, or not until at the end of the Seven Years War, after the British took Quebec and
Montreal in 1759-1760 or Havana in 1762, when the officials and the whole population in
Louisiana expected them to then try to take New Orleans. At that time, the governor could not
form more than one company for the entire colony, as its title clearly indicates, or at least its
lower part. The militiamen had to be recruited in New Orleans and in the smaller settlements
surrounding the city, at the Chapitoulas, the English Turn and on the German Coast,
according to the 1770 lists. This would explain why the free-colored militia company was not
mentioned in the 1763 census divided according to these various outposts. Another reason is
that the free colored militia company was probably one of the five companies of coastguards
existing in 1762, beside the four (white) companies of “milice bourgeoise” in the capitallii.
The creation of this permanent free-colored militia company instituted the group of
free blacks as a corporate body, that is, a group defined in corporate societies by privileges,
although this would become more obvious only under Spanish ruleliii. However, at the same
time that they were conceding some privileges to free men of color, French local authorities
were clearly striving to reinforce the racial system which until then rested mainly on the
regulation of marriage and sexuality. They began to count them separately in censuses; they
started to grant them land segregated from whites’ plantationsliv, which were moreover
swampy and vulnerable to floodinglv; and they created this distinct militia company.
Significantly, Simon, who for more than thirty years had a plantation upriver from New
14
Orleans, below the Chapitoulas, among white people, moved downriver to the “district of the
free negroes” at the English Turn when he became the captain of the colored militia
companylvi. Moreover, officials did not only try to enforce a strict color line between the
whites and the free people of color: they also tried to maintain a racial division within the
group of free people of color. If Spanish officials were responsible for the creation of the two
distinct militia companies of “pardos” and “morenos”, the French authorities revealed their
preoccupation with racial divisions between “negroes” and “mulattoes” as testified by the title
of their militia company and the identification of individuals in censuses and in front of
judges, notaries or priests. These various racial labels could reflect both a strong anxiety about
métissage and an attempt to undermine the power that could be achieved by a united and
homogeneous group of free people of color.
Thus, the state policy towards free people of color was characterized by a strong
ambivalence. Demographic and geopolitical circumstances forced local authorities to resort to
free black men for the military defense of the colony. In so doing, they opened up for them a
path to social mobility and consideration, allowing free men of color to distance themselves
from slaves. However, while they instituted free blacks as a corporate body within the
corporate society of privileges, they tried to further segregate them from whites. This
differentiated incorporation respected the dual logic of Old Regime societies, which were
both integrative and unequal while establishing race as the most important hierarchical factor
over status and class.
*
[To be continued].
i
This essay has been presented in seminars at Stanford University in February 2011, Brown
University in March 2011, and Duke University in March 2012. I would like to thank very
much the participants of these seminars for their valuable comments, especially Tamar
15
Herzog and Richard White. It has also been discussed at great length with Sylvia Frey, Emily
Clark, Jean Hébrard, and Maud Mandel. Many thanks for their close readings, comments, or
for sharing with me some evidence.
ii
At the end of the Seven Years War, New Orleans and the western bank of the Mississippi
River were given to Spain by the treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762. Britain obtained the eastern
part of the colony, the capital excepted, by the treaty of Paris in 1763. If the English quickly
settled in their new colony, it was only in March 1766 that the first Spanish governor, Ulloa,
arrived. Lacking sufficient military forces, he did not take immediately possession of the
colony officially. Thus, for two years, Louisiana was governed by a French officer in the
name of the king of Spain. For political and economical reasons, the French inhabitants of
Lower Louisiana rose in revolt against Ulloa, who was expelled in October 1768. However, in
August 1769, the new Spanish governor, O’Reilly, imposed the order and sovereignty of the
Spanish Crown for good. On the 1768 revolt, see Marc Villiers du Terrage, Les dernières
années de la Louisiane française (Paris: E. Guilmoto, 1905); John Preston Moore, Revolt in
Louisiana: The Spanish Occupation, 1766-1770 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1976); Carl A. Brasseaux, Denis-Nicolas Foucault and the New Orleans Rebellion of
1768 (Ruston: La, McGinty Publications, 1987).
iii
On the common practice of taking an oath of allegiance in exchanged territories on both
sides of the frontier in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth-century, see Daniel
Nordman, Frontières de France. De l’espace au territoire, XVIe-XIXe siècle (Paris:
Gallimard, nrf, 1998), 415-42.
iv
Records of the Superior Council of Louisiana (hereafter RSCL) 1769/08/26/01,
1769/08/26/02, 1769/08/26/03, 1769/08/26/04, 1769/08/26/05, 1769/08/27/01, 1769/08/28/01,
1769/08/99/01, 1769/09/09/01, 1769/09/18/01, 1769/09/18/02, 1769/09/28/01, 1769/10/15/01,
1769/10/15/02, 1769/11/19/01, 1769/11/22/01, 1769/11/22/02, 1769/12/09/01; Henry P. Dart,
16
ed., “The Oath of Allegiance to Spain”, Louisiana Historical Quarterly, 4, 2 (1921), 205-15;
O’Reilly to Munian, August 31, 1769, in Annual Report of the American Historical
Association for the Year 1945. Volume II: Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765-1794, (PT. I)
The Revolutionary Period, 1765-1781, ed. Lawrence Kinnaird (Washington: United States
Government Printing Office, 1949).
v
RSCL 1769/09/20/01.
vi
Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Correspondencia de los Gobernadores de la
Luisiana y la Florida Occidental, Años 1766-1824, Session Papeles de Cuba, legajo 188-A,
“État des mulâtres et nègres libres”, “Liste des nègres libres établis tant à quatre lieues de
cette ville en remontant le fleuve, que ceux de la ville dénommés cy-après comme suit”, “Rôle
des mulâtres libres de La Nouvelle-Orléans”, “Liste de la qualité des nègres libres de La
Nouvelle-Orléans fait par moi Nicolas Bacus capitaine moraine”, 1770.
vii
Donald E. Everett, “Emigres and Militiamen: Free Persons of Color in New Orleans, 1803-
1815”, Journal of Negro History, 38, 4 (1953), 377-402; Roland C. McConnell, Negro Troops
of Antebellum Louisiana: A History of the Battalion of Free Men of Color (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 16-7; Roland C. McConnell, “Louisiana’s Black
Military History, 1729-1865”, in Louisiana’s Black Heritage, eds. Robert R. Macdonald, John
R. Kemp, and Edward F. Haas (New Orleans: Louisiana State Museum, 1979), 32-62;
Kimberly S. Hanger, “A Privilege and Honor to Serve: The Free Black Militia of Spanish
New Orleans”, Military History of the Southwest, 21, 1 (1991), 59-86; Kimberly S. Hanger,
Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997),109-35; Sylvia Frey, “The Free Black Militia of New
Orleans in the Mississippi River and Gulf Coast Campaigns of the American Revolution”,
unpublished paper, SAR Annual Conference on Slavery and Liberty: Black Patriots of the
American Revolution, Baltimore, June 2011.
17
viii
On the association of oath with honor and its function of incorporation, see Raymond
Verdier, “Présentation: Sacramentum… Juramentum, Serment… Jurement”, in Le serment, 1.
Signes et fonctions, ed. Raymond Verdier (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1991), xv-xix.
On the necessity to connect “the study of collective identities with that of public spheres”,
ix
see Luis Roniger and Tamar Herzog, eds., The Collective and the Public in Latin America:
Cultural Identities and Political Order (Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press,
2000), 4 for the quotation. On the public dimension of the process of categorization and
group-making, see also Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups”,
Theory and Society, 14, 6 (1985), 723-44., especially 729.
x
William H. Sewell Jr., “Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology”, in Terrence J.
McDonad, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1996), 245-80 (262-3 for the quotation). For groupness as event, see Rogers Brubaker,
“Ethnicity without Group”, Archives of European Sociology, 43, 2 (2002), 168-9.
xi
The colony of Louisiana was founded by the French in 1699. New Orleans was established
in 1718, but it became the colonial capital only in 1722. For the best general history of French
Louisiana, see Marcel Giraud, Histoire de la Louisiana française (Paris: Presses universitaires
de France, 1953-1974), 4 vol.; A History of French Louisiana, Vol. V: The Company of the
Indies, 1723-1731 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991).
xii
Ben Vinson develops a similar argument in the case of the free-colored militia companies
in New Mexico. Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in
Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). For other examples of case
studies linking black social mobility and the internalization of racial categories through
confraternities, see Mariana L. R. Dantas, “Humble Slaves and Loyal Vassals: Free Africans
and Their Descendants in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil”, in Imperial Subjects:
Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, eds. Andrew B. Fischer and Matthew D. O’Hara
18
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 115-40; Nicole Von Germeten,
“Colonial Middle Men? Mulatto identity in New Spain’s Confraternities”, in Black Mexico:
Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times, eds. Ben Vinson III and Matthew Restall
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), 136-54.
xiii
For works which address the question of competing systems of representations and
taxonomies during the early modern period, see Roger Chartier, “Le monde comme
représentation”, Annales E.S.C., 44, 6 (1989), 1005-20; Fanny Cosandey, ed., Dire et vivre
l’ordre social en France sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales, 2005). For a very important work on the issue of categories in American
colonial and slave societies, see Andrew B. Fischer and Matthew D. O’Hara, “Introduction:
Racial Identities and Their Interpreters in Colonial Latin America”, in Imperial Subjects, 137.
xiv
The historiography on free people of color in colonial Louisiana is huge. For works
focusing on free people of color, see Alice Dunbar Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana”,
Journal of Negro History, 1, 4 (1916), 361-76; Donald E. Everett, “Free Persons of Color in
Louisiana”, Ph.D. dissertation (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1952); Laura Foner, “The
Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two ThreeCaste Slave Societies”, Journal of Social History, 3, 4 (1970), 406-30; Gary B. Mills, The
Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1977); Thomas Marc Fiehrer, “The African Presence in Colonial Louisiana: An Essay
on the Continuity of Caribbean Culture”, in Louisiana’s Black Heritage, eds. Robert R.
MacDonald and John R. Kemp (New Orleans: Louisiana State Museum, 1979), 3-31; Thomas
N. Ingersoll, “Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718-1812”, William and Mary
Quarterly, 48, 2 (1991), 173-200; Carl A. Brasseaux, Keith P. Fontenot, and Claude F. Oubre,
Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994);
19
James H. Dormon, ed., Creoles of Color of the Gulf South (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1996); Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places; Emily Clark and Virginia
Meacham Gould, “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727-1852”,
William and Mary Quarterly, 59, 2 (2002), 409-448; Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution,
Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2004); H. Sophie Burton, “Free People of Color in Spanish
Colonial Natchitoches: Manumission and Dependency on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 17661803”, Louisiana History, 45, 2 (2004), 173-97; Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard,
Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2012). For important books which include developments on free people of
color: Gwendolyn M. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole
Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992);
Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in
the Deep South, 1718-1819 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999); Shannon Lee
Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2008); Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New
Orleans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
xv
For three important essays which understand groups “as will and representation” or
distinguish categories and groups, see Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of
Groups”; Brubaker, “Ethnicity without Groups”; Rogers Brubaker, Mara Loveman, and Peter
Stamatov, “Ethnicity as Cognition”, Theory and Society, 33, 1 (2004), 31-64.
xvi
The use of “class”, “community” or, even more often, “caste” is universal in the
historiography. For a discussion about the definition of the free people of color as either a
“community”, a “class” or a “caste”, in relation with the apparition of a specific collective
consciousness or identity as a group distinct both from the whites and the slaves, see David
20
W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, “Introduction”, in Neither Slave nor Free, Neither Slave nor
Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, eds. David
W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 11-7. For
exceptional essays questioning the concept of “caste” or “three-caste society”, see Ingersoll,
“Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718-1812”, 174, note 4; Emily Clark,
“Atlantic Alliances: Marriage among People of African Descent in New Orleans, 1759-1830”,
and Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard, “Two Households and a Marriage: Color and Status in
New Orleans, 1809-1840”, unpublished papers, Workshop “Louisiana and the Atlantic World
in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, New Orleans, Tulane University, April 2008.
xvii
Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: A. A.
Knopf, 1947); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro,
1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Ira Berlin, Slaves without
Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Philip
D. Morgan, “British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 1600-1780”, in
Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, eds. Bernard
Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 157219; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
(Cambridge: Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Ira Berlin, Generations of
Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge: Belknapp Press of Harvard
University Press, 2003).
xviii
The expression is borrowed from Bernard Lahire, “Catégorisations et logiques
individuelles: Les obstacles à une sociologie des variations individuelles”, Cahiers
internationaux de sociologie, 110, 1 (2001), 59-81 (75 for the quotation).
xix
The expressions “gens de couleur” and “gens de couleur libres” apparently first appeared
in the Lesser Antilles and in Saint-Domingue in the early 1760s, in the aftermath of the Seven
21
Years War. The appellation “gens de couleur” was very ambiguous because it was used to
designate both the slaves and the free people of African or mixed descent, or only the latter,
or only the free people of mixed descent, the “sang-mêlé”. This could also imply a pejorative
connotation or, on the contrary, be used by the free people of color themselves positively in
the defense of their rights. However, this designation was only used in ordinances,
administrative correspondence, juridical treatises, philosophical or historical essays, and
political pamphlets, while in front of judges, notaries and priests, free people of African or
mixed descent were never identified individually as “homme/femme de couleur (libre)”
(“(free) man/woman of color”), but always, as “nègre/mulâtre/quarteron, etc. libre” (“free
negro/mulatto/quadroon, etc.”). For the first time in 1782, it was used in the summary of a
census for the West and South provinces in Saint-Domingue to designate only the “mulattoes”
and other people of mixed descent. The multiple definitions and boundaries given to the
category reflect a tension between two visions of the social world as a tri-racial or biracial
society. For examples of the use of the expression, see Auguste Lebeau, De la condition des
gens de couleur libres sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris : Guillaumin & Cie, 1903); Léo Elisabeth,
“The French Antilles”, in Neither Slave nor Free, 135; Dominique Rogers, “Les libres de
couleur dans les capitales de Saint-Domingue: Fortune, mentalités et intégration à la fin de
l’Ancien Régime (1776-1789)”, Ph.D. thesis (Bordeaux: Université Michel de Montaigne,
1999), section II, chapter 4; John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French
Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 19, 142, 163, 168.
xx
Paul Lachance, “The Louisiana Purchase in Demographic Perspective”, in Empires of the
Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase, eds. Peter J. Kastor and
Francois Weil (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 145.
xxi
“An Act to prescribe certain formalities respecting Free Persons of Colour”, in Louis
Moreau Lislet, ed., A General Digest of the Acts of the Legislature of Louisiana, passed from
22
the year 1804, to 1827, inclusive, and in force at this last period (New Orleans: Benjamin
Levy, 1828), I, 499.
xxii
Libro primero de Matrimonios de Negros y Mulatos en la Parroquia de Sn. Luis de la
Nueva-orleans.
xxiii
Paul Schor, Compter et classer. Histoire des recensements américains (Paris: Éditions de
l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2009), 40.
On the necessary “social etymologies” of categories in imperial formations, see Ann Laura
xxiv
Stoler and Carole McGranahan, “Refiguring Imperial Terrains”, in Imperial Formations, eds.
Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue (Santa Fe: School of American
Research, 2007), 4; Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and
Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 35.
xxv
Cécile Vidal, “Caribbean Louisiana: Church, Métissage and the Language of Race in the
Mississippi Colony during the French Period (1699-1769)”, Workshop “Louisiana and the
Atlantic World in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, New Orleans, Tulane University,
April 2008.
xxvi
The documentation sometimes refers to the “libres” (free men and women) or, most often,
to the “whites” as a group, but in the sacramental records, for instance, it was never
mentioned that a specific named individual of European descent was “free” or “white”. On
whiteness, see Cécile Vidal, “Francité et situation coloniale: Nation, empire et race en
Louisiane française (1699-1769)”, Annales HSS, 63, 5 (2009), 1019-50.
xxvii
On the US biracial system, see Schor, Compter et classer, 75-6, 145-58.
xxviii
Archives des Colonies (hereafter AC), B, 43, fol. 388-407, March 1724, Versailles,
“Code Noir ou Édit du roi servant de règlement pour le gouvernement et l’administration de
la justice, police, discipline et commerce des esclaves nègres de la province et colonie de la
Louisiane”.
23
Thomas N. Ingersoll, “Slave Codes and Judicial Practice in New Orleans, 1718-1807”,
xxix
Law and History Review, 13 (1995), 23-62; Vernon V. Palmer, “The Origins and Authors of
the Code Noir”, Louisiana Law Review, 56 (1995), 363-90; Bernard Vonglis, “La double
origine du Code Noir”, in Les abolitions dans les Amériques. Actes du colloque organisé par
les Archives départementales de la Martinique, 8-9 décembre 1998, ed. Liliane Chauleau
(Fort-de-France: Société des amis des archives et de la recherche sur le patrimoine culturel
des Antilles, 2001), 101-7. For a new interpretation of the 1685 and 1724 Codes, see
Guillaume Aubert, “’To Establish One Law and Definite Rules’: Race, Religion, and the
Transatlantic Origins of the Louisiana Code Noir”, Workshop “Louisiana and the Atlantic
World in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, New Orleans, Tulane University, April
2008.
xxx
Vidal, “Caribbean Louisiana”.
xxxi
RSCL 1743/09/14/06, 1747/04/11/01. This sanction was also reiterated in the local
ordinance of police promulgated by Vaudreuil and Michel in 1751. AC, C13A, 35, fol. 3952v, February 28– March 1st, 1751, New Orleans, “Règlement sur la police des cabarets, des
esclaves, des marchés en Louisiane”.
xxxii
On the role of censuses in imperial contexts, see the special issue “Compter l’autre –
identification, négociation, appropriation”, Histoire et Mesure, 1998, 13, 1-2, 3-223. For a
different analysis of censuses in French Louisiana, see Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire,
153-8.
xxxiii
AC, G1, 464, “Recensement général de la ville de la Nvelle Orléans tant des hommes
portant armes, femmes, enfants, nègres, négresses, négrillons ou négrittes, sauvages,
sauvagesses, mulatres, mulatresses, que des chevaux, bœufs, vaches, écroys et armes fait au
mois de janvier 1732”.
xxxiv
It is possible that between 1732 and 1763 other censuses were taken, but they have
24
disappeared from the archives.
xxxv
Interestingly, the specific columns for “affranchis” disappeared in the census taken in
1766 at the arrival of Ulloa in the colony. But, for the English Turn, where a group of free
blacks lived in a separate district, the census taker added “las familias de blancos y total de las
otras classes (sic)”. Although the 1766 census was written in Spanish, except for a summary
in French, and kept in the Spanish archives, it was obviously taken by the French, according
to the information on the census itself and in the administrative correspondence. AC, F3, 25,
fol. 243-244, March 10, 1766, Letter of Mr. Foucault to the minister. After 1766, all the other
Spanish censuses in 1769, 1777 and 1788, counted the free blacks in distinct columns.
Lachance, “The Louisiana Purchase in Demographic Perspective”, 145.
xxxvi
The censuses counted slaves of both African and Native descent, but there was no such
distinction for the free people of color, whose related rubrics concerned only people of
African or mixed descent. Enslaved Natives were never very numerous in New Orleans, and
their number quickly dropped during the French Regime: they accounted for only 2% of the
population in the entire Lower Mississippi Valley in 1763. See Paul Lachance, “The Growth
of the Free and Slave Populations of French Colonial Louisiana”, in French Colonial
Louisiana and the Atlantic World, ed. Bradley G. Bond (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2005), 222, 232. Moreover, when Indian slaves were manumitted, unlike the
freedmen and women of African descent, they could leave much more easily the colonial and
slave society to join the Natives living freely in their villages in Indian country, even if they
could not always go back to their own tribe. Consequently, the number of freed Indians in
New Orleans was probably not significant. Indeed, they are very few references to
“sauvages(se) libre” (“free Indian man/woman”) or “métis(se) libre” (“free male/female
metis”) in the whole documentation. See Sacramental Records of New Orleans (hereafter SR)
11/11/1731, 10/07/1760, 26/02/1764, 02/11/1764, 13/06/1768, 09/02/1769, 02/07/1769,
25
01/09/1769; RSCL 1764/07/10/02. Since the norm for Natives in the Mississippi valley was to
be free and to live outside the colonial and slave society, the state was never concerned with
the emergence of a significant population of freed Indians within the colonial and slave
society and never created a specific category for them. On the status of Indians within the
French Empire, see Gilles Havard, “’Les forcer à devenir Cytoyen’: État, Sauvages et
citoyenneté en Nouvelle-France (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle), Annales H.S.S., 5 (2009), 985-1018.
xxxvii
In the case of Saint-Domingue, John Garrigus has underlined that from the 1770s free
people of color were very often called freedmen and women (“affranchis”), even when they
were free-born. Garrigus, Before Haiti, 4, 167, 170.
xxxviii
In the Antilles, the “libres de fait”, “libres de savane” or “soi-disant libres” (quasi-free)
were former slaves who lived as if they were free without having been freed officially. They
could be runaway slaves passing as free people of color or slaves who had received from their
masters their certificate of manumission, but whose manumission tax had not been paid or
freedom had not been confirmed by the governor and the intendant. In Louisiana, the
manumissions also had to be confirmed by the top officials, but there was no manumission tax
to pay. See Elisabeth, “The French Antilles”, in Neither Slave nor Free, 145-6; Bernard
Moitt, “Les femmes et l’affranchissement aux Antilles françaises: Les libres de fait”, in Les
abolitions dans les Amérique, 133-7; Bernard Moitt, “In the Shadow of the Plantation:
Women of Color and the Libres de fait of Martinique and Guadeloupe, 1685-1848”,
in Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas, eds. David Barry Gaspar and
Darlene Clark Hine, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 37-59;
Dominique Rogers, “Statu Liberis: Une condition intermédiaire dans les Antilles françaises
esclavagistes (XVIIIe-XVIIIe siècles)”, Colloque “Cadre juridique et pratiques locales de
l’esclavage du XIVe au XIXe siècle”, University Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar (Senegal), April
2010.
26
xxxix
Lebeau, De la condition des gens de couleur libres sous l’Ancien Régime, 61-2 ;
Garrigus, Before Haiti, 167.
xl
AC, C13A, 43, fol. 304-307, April 6, 1763, New Orleans, “Arrêt du Conseil supérieur de La
Nouvelle-Orléans sur les esclaves marrons”; AC, C13A, fol. 310-313, September 3, 1763,
“Arrêt du Conseil supérieur de La Nouvelle-Orléans sur les gens sans aveu”; RSCL
1763/09/03/01; Carl A. Brasseaux, “The Administration of Slave Regulations in French
Louisiana, 1724-1766”, Louisiana History, 21, 2 (1980), 156-8; Ingersoll, Mammon and
Manon in Early New Orleans, 89-91; Cécile Vidal, “Private and State Violence Against
African Slaves in Lower Louisiana During the French Period, 1699-1769”, in New World
Orders:Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas, eds. Thomas J.
Humphrey and John Smolenski (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 1026.
xli
Charles Derneville’s mother was a “mulato slave” named Charlotte. The first allusion to
Charlotte can be found in the archives for the 1750s, on the occasion of a conflict and trial
between her owner, the military officer Derneville, and a ship captain from the French
Antilles, named Batard. The latter was accused of having tried to kidnap Charlotte, with
whom he had a love affair, to take her to Martinique. When the commissaire-ordonnateur
Michel told this story to the ministry of the Navy he reported the rumor that Charlotte was
Derneville’s daughter. Because Michel had a conflict with a group of officers including
Derneville, he had a vested interest in trying to discredit him. However, the rumor was
confirmed much later by Charlotte herself in her will, recorded in 1801. She claimed that she
was the daughter of Derneville and an enslaved woman named Jeanneton. Charlotte herself
had a son in 1754. She then reappeared in the documentation, in the 1766 census, as a slave
living alone in a New Orleans house which belonged to Derneville, at a time when the officer
was away in the metropole. In 1771, Derneville promised her to manumit her before he died.
27
Tied of waiting, Charlotte redeemed herself in 1773. However, her son was still officially
enslaved. Thus, in 1775, she signed a contract with a man named Landreau: she agreed to
work for him with no wages against the payment of 600 livres to Derneville to purchase her
son’s freedom. In his own will, Derneville left Charlotte a small legacy, but did not fail to
mention that she still owed him some money for Charles’s purchase. RCSL 1751/06/15/01,
1751/06/15/02, 1751/06/24/01, 1751/06/24/02; AC, C13A, 35, fol. 287-316, July 15, 1751,
Michel to the minister; AC, F3, 243, fol. 91-98, documents attached to Mr. Michel’s letter of
July 15, 1751; AC, B, 120, August 10, 1764, Choiseul to Kerlérec; Hanger, Bounded Lives,
Bounded Places, 65; Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans, 82-4, 89.
Noël Carrière was the natural son of Marie Thérèse Carrière and Joseph Leveillé, who at the
time of his birth, probably around 1745 or 1746, were both enslaved and belonged to two
different masters. From his early teens, he served thirteen times as godfather. He became a
skilled tanned and cooper. When his master, Madame Carrière, died in 1769 he was
apparently living with her. However, it seems that he already owned slaves at the time. It is
only in 1771 that he was officially manumitted. In 1778, he married SR, Baptisms in which
Noël Carrière served as godfather, 11/06/1755, 04/10/1757, 10/02/1757, 06/02/1759,
11/04/1759, 07/21/0763, 03/18/1764, 03/08/1764, 03/18/1764, 05/25/1764, 06/03/1764,
09/08/1765, 06/06/0767; SR, Baptisms in which Noël Carrière’s slaves served as godparents,
06/24/1764, 11/18/1764, 03/16/1768. Louisiana State Historical Center, Succession of Veuve
Carrière, Estate #03-F-217-017-1769; NONA, Almonester, Sale, September 4, 1771;
Manumission, December 30, 1771; SR, Libro Primero, Novembre 16, 1778, Marriage of Noël
Carrière and Marianne Thomas.
xlii
In the 1763 census, four households headed by a white settler in New Orleans, two at the
English Turn, two below the city, and one in the Chapitoulas district included one or two
freed men or women.
28
xliii
Élisabeth, La société martiniquaise, 431-2.
xliv
For deeds of manumission, see RSCL 1729/10/22/01; 1735/06/04/01, 1735/06/04/02;
1735/10/09/01; 1736/03/28/01; 1737/07/11/01; 1738/02/15/03; 1740/02/24/02,
1742/05/24/01; 1743/07/16/01; 1743/11/30/02; 1744/07/14/01, 1744/07/14/02;
1745/11/14/01; 1746/02/01/03; 1747/06/20/01; 1757/07/01/01; 1758/07/01/01;
1762/01/22/01; 1762/01/22/02; 1762/02/08/02; 1762/04/10/01; 1767/07/20/03. See also
Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans, 85-92.
xlv
The 1763 census is kept in the Archivo General de Indias. AGI, Audiencia de Sto
Domingo, Luisiana y Florida, Años 1766 a 1770, 2595 – 589, “Recensement général 1763”.
xlvi
AC, C13A, 30, fol. 3-9, November 24, 1746, New Orleans, Vaudreuil and Le Normant to
the minister; AC, C13A, 31, fol. 13-16, February 1747, memo to the king; AC, C13A, 31, fol.
87-92, May 15, 1747, New Orleans, Vaudreuil to the minister (fol. 91 for the quotation); AC,
C13A, 32, fol. 72-76, May 26, 1748, New Orleans, Vaudreuil to the minister.
xlvii
His name was either spelled Calfa, Calfat, Calpha, Calfat or even once Galfa. In the
article, I have used the uniform spelling of Calfat.
xlviii
On Simon’s heroïc behaviour during the Natchez war, see Mémoires historiques sur la
Louisiane, [..] Composés sur les Mémoires de M. Dumont par M. L. L. M(ascrier) (Paris: Cl.
J. G. Bauche, 1753), II, 225-6.
xlix
On the very early use of slaves and free people of color in specific military expeditions and
on the permanent employment of free people of color in the maréchaussée (a rural police
force), militia companies and special regiments in the army in the Antilles, see Gwendolyn M.
Hall, “Saint-Domingue”, in Neither Slave nor Free, 173-5; Élisabeth, La société
martiniquaise, 52, 57, 66-7, 427; Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People
of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001),
52-77; Stewart R. King, “The Maréchaussée of Saint-Domingue: Balancing the Ancien
29
Régime and Modernity”, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 5, 2 (2004); Garrigus,
Before Haiti, 42-3, 95-108.
l
McConnell, Negro Troops of Antebellum Louisiana, 3-14.
li
In the maps, the expressions are “déserts et habitations des nègres libres” (“vacant lands
and plantations of the free negroes”) or “habitations des nègres libres” (“plantations of the
free negroes”). Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (hereafter ANOM), 04DFC 55A, New
Orleans, May 9, 1757, Devergès, “Carte du cours du fleuve Saint-Louis au Détour des
Anglois avec les plans et les profils des fortifications projetés à y faire”; ANOM, 04DFC 64B,
November 3, 1745, Devergès, “Carte de la partie du fleuve St Louis nommée le Détour aux
Anglais avec les plans de deux batteries de canons”. In the 1766 census, the term “canton”
(“district”) disappeared, but the free men of color who held plantations were counted
separately, after the white heads of households, and were gathered behind a brace as “negros
libres”.
lii
AC, C13A, 37, fol. 224, June 25, 1762, New Orleans, extract from a letter from Fremeur.
liii
Later, under Spanish domination, free-colored militiamen would be granted “the right to
the fuero militar which protected them from criminal prosecution by civil courts”. Hebert S.
Klein, “The Colored Militia of Cuba: 1568-1868”, Caribbean Studies, 6, 2 (1966), 17-27 (17
for the quotation); Allan J. Kuethe, “The Status of the Free Pardo in the Disciplined Militia of
New Granada”, Journal of Negro History, 56, 2 (1971), 105-17; Hanger, Bounded Lives,
Bounded Places, 111-2.
liv
On governmental attempts early in the 1770s to segregate the free colored residents of Port
Louis in Mauritius in ethnically organized camps (“camp des malabars et lascars, “camp des
noirs libres”), see Richard B. Allen, “Creating Undiminished Confidence: The Free
Population of Colour and Identity Formation in Mauritius, 1767-1835”, Slavery and
Abolition, 32, 4 (2011), 519-533.
30
lv
AC, C13A, 36, fol. 226, 18 janvier 1752, Michel; AC, C13A, 37, fol. 35r-36v, 8 mars 1753,
La Nouvelle-Orléans, Kerlérec ; AC, C13a, 43, fol. 378r-379r, Plan pour rendre la Louisiane
la plus riche et la plus puissante de toutes les colonies françaises, par Redon de Rassac, 15
août 1763.
lvi
AC, G1, 464, fol. 26-27v, “Recensement des habitations le long du fleuve Mississippi,
1731”; AC, F3, 243, fol. 75, 76 et 79, 15 January 1751. However, Simon Calfat’s new
plantation might have also been located among plantations belonging to whites.