Louisiana

Crossroads of the Atlantic World

Cecile Vidal, Cécile Vidal, Cecile Vidal, Cécile Vidal, Cécile Vidal

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812245516, 9780812245516
• eBook ISBN: 9780812208733
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Located at the junction of North America and the Caribbean, the vast territory of colonial Louisiana provides a paradigmatic case study for an Atlantic studies approach. One of the largest North American colonies and one of the last to be founded, Louisiana was governed by a succession of sovereignties, with parts ruled at various times by France, Spain, Britain, and finally the United States. But just as these shifting imperial connections shaped the territory's culture, Louisiana's peculiar geography and history also yielded a distinctive colonization pattern that reflected a synthesis of continent and island societies. Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World offers an exceptional collaboration among American, Canadian, and European historians who explore colonial and antebellum Louisiana's relations with the rest of the Atlantic world. Studying the legacy of each period of Louisiana history over the longue durée, the essays create a larger picture of the ways early settlements influenced Louisiana society and how the changes in sovereignty and other circulations gave rise to a multiethnic society. Contributors examine the workings of empire through the examples of slave laws, administrative careers or on-the-ground political negotiations, cultural exchanges among landowners, slave holders, and slaves, and the construction of race through sexuality, marriage, and household formation. As a whole, the volume makes the compelling argument that one cannot write Louisiana history without adopting an Atlantic perspective, or Atlantic history without referring to Louisiana. Contributors: Guillaume Aubert, Emily Clark, Alexandre Dubé, Sylvia R. Frey, Sylvia L. Hilton, Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, Cécile Vidal, Sophie White, Mary Williams.

PART I

EMPIRES

CHAPTER 1

“To Establish One Law and Definite Rules”: Race, Religion, and the Transatlantic Origins of the Louisiana Code Noir

Guillaume Aubert

In 1724, the Superior Council of Louisiana registered one of the lengthiest and most comprehensive royal edicts ever promulgated in a French Atlantic colony. As stated in its preamble, the Edict of March 1724, soon to be known as the Code Noir de Louisiane, was intended to “maintain the discipline of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church” in the colony and “to establish one law and definite rules” regarding “the status and condition” of the “enslaved negroes” used by “our subjects [for] the cultivation of the land.”¹ In fifty-five articles, the Louisiana Code Noir declared Catholicism the unique religion of the colony, enjoined colonists to have their slaves instructed, baptized, fed, and clothed, defined slaves as movable property and slave status as an inherited condition, prohibited concubinage and interracial marriage, and imposed restrictions on slaves’ movement, property ownership, and ability to testify against abusive masters and overseers but ordered the latter “to govern their slaves as bons pères de famille,” since the torture, maiming, and execution of slaves remained the prerogative of colonial judges. Finally, the Louisiana Code Noir required masters to obtain the permission of the Superior Council before manumitting their slaves. Once freed, former slaves were ordered “to show the utmost respect to their former masters, to their widows and children” but were nevertheless granted “the same rights, privileges and immunities enjoyed by…our other subjects.”²

The promulgation of the Louisiana Code Noir followed an established legal pattern in French Atlantic colonies. In 1685, the royal government had issued a first version of the Code Noir for its Caribbean colonies. First registered in Martinique and Guadeloupe, the 1685 Code Noir was also adopted in the new colony of Saint-Domingue in 1687 and extended to Guiana in 1704. Just one year before the promulgation of the Louisiana Code Noir, a revised version of the 1685 text was sent to the French Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean. Thus, by the time the Superior Council of Louisiana registered the latest inception of the Code Noir, the French Empire became the first European overseas empire where slave law emanated from a metropolitan edict, and while the Louisiana Code Noir differed from its Caribbean predecessor on certain issues, fifty-one of its fifty-five articles were taken from the original Code.

The fact that the various versions of the Code Noir were issued from Versailles has led some scholars to argue that metropolitan legal traditions rather than colonial circumstances shaped its form and content. Laurent Dubois and John Garrigus, for instance, have recently introduced the 1685 Code Noir as a text “drafted by European legal scholars who knew far more about ancient Roman jurisprudence than about New World plantations.”³ Indeed, certain provisions of the Code Noir, such as the possibility for slaves to receive a peculium or the granting of citizenship rights to freed slaves, undoubtedly derived from Roman law. Yet the legal filiation of the Code Noir seems to have been a bit more complex since much of the final text was also based on colonial reports synthesizing decades of Caribbean jurisprudence, which itself occasionally invoked Roman law. Emphasis of the Roman filiation of the Code Noir has occasionally led to peculiar interpretations of the Code's relationship to the elaboration of racial hierarchies in the French Atlantic. According to Alan Watson, a scholar of Roman law and author of several works on American slave laws, the influence of Roman law transcended Caribbean racial hierarchies and contributed to produce a text in which “the concept that slaves are intrinsically inferior because of their race [is] surprisingly absent.”⁴

If historians of Atlantic slavery are well aware that the Code Noir was intended to regulate the enslavement of people of African ancestry, they too seem reluctant to acknowledge its racial underpinnings. For John Garrigus, the granting of citizenship rights to former slaves and their children indicates that at the time of its original promulgation the Code Noir “defined slavery as a legal, not a racial, condition.”⁵ Presumably focusing on provisions imposing colonial and slave Catholicity, Ira Berlin writes that the Code Noir “exhibited greater concern with heretical Jews and Protestants than with race and slavery.”⁶ Since, unlike its predecessor, the 1724 Code Noir prohibited marriages between “white subjects” with blacks and envisaged the reenslavement of free people of color convicted of certain crimes, such characterizations of the Code may be less tenable for the version of the Code Noir promulgated in Louisiana than for its Caribbean counterpart. With few exceptions, however, Louisiana historians have been unwilling to view the Code Noir as an expression of racial ideology.⁷ To varying degrees, the Code's provision ordering masters to have their slaves instructed and baptized in the Catholic religion has been the linchpin of this peculiar interpretation. By promoting enslaved Africans’ “right” to become Christians, the argument goes, the Code Noir recognized them as “members of the Christian community.” As such, slaves were provided with a degree of legal protection and spiritual entitlement that set French Louisiana apart from the supposedly harsher slave regimes of British North America.⁸

These interpretations of the Code Noir do raise important questions about the impact of Catholicism on French slave regimes and the transatlantic dynamics shaping metropolitan and colonial law, but their inclination to sever these issues from transatlantic constructions of race is misleading. Indeed, this essay suggests that the original issuance of the Code Noir should be understood within the context of intensifying transatlantic religious controversies over the legitimacy of racial slavery in the Catholic Atlantic.⁹

Moreover, if the metropolitan drafters of the Code Noir found some of their inspiration in race-blind Roman law, they also relied heavily on colonial jurisprudence positing a direct connection between African ancestry, perpetual servitude, and social inferiority.¹⁰ When the monarchy decided to issue a new version of the Code Noir for the emerging slave colony of Louisiana, it again turned to colonial jurisprudence. From 1685 to 1724, Caribbean officials had become increasingly anxious about the preservation of the colonial racial order. The perceived threat of a growing population of free people of color led Caribbean courts to issue local rulings that curtailed masters’ ability to grant manumissions, imposed new restrictions on the “privileges and immunities” theoretically bestowed upon free people of color by the 1685 Code, and denied titles of nobility to colonists married to women of African ancestry. The metropolitan drafters of the Louisiana Code Noir integrated this piecemeal jurisprudence into the new law, even taking the unprecedented step of banning interracial marriages altogether. The 1724 Code Noir thus constituted the most racially exclusive colonial law of the French Empire.

Evangelization and Enslavement in the French and Catholic Atlantics

The importation of enslaved Africans into the new French West Indian colonies starting at the beginning of the seventeenth century coincided with the emergence of metropolitan and transatlantic discourses that challenged the legitimacy of the slave trade and colonial slavery. By questioning the compatibility of the evangelization and enslavement of African populations, metropolitan jurists and Catholic missionaries operating within and beyond the French Atlantic sphere spurred seventeenth-century French colonial secular and religious authorities to justify slavery on religious and racial grounds and eventually led the monarchy itself to settle the issue through the promulgation of a general slave code.

Until the beginning of the seventeenth century, French slavers were mostly individual merchants, sometimes organized in joint stock companies, engaged in isolated and private commercial ventures operating independently from the international and commercial interests of the French state.¹¹ Subsequently, the desire to bolster France's international standing through the development of an Atlantic colonial empire prompted the royal government to foster the development of French slave trading ventures. In the 1630s, Louis XIII issued letters patent to Norman, Breton, and Parisian joint stock companies trading along the west coast of Africa.¹²

Most of the slaves bought by the French slave trading companies of the early seventeenth century were destined for the newly founded French colonies of the Caribbean. Shortly after a Norman sailor named Belain d'Esnambuc established a settlement on the small island of Saint-Christophe (now St. Kitts) in 1625, he traveled back to France and obtained a royal charter creating the Compagnie de Saint-Christophe et îles adjacentes.¹³ By 1635, one observer noted, “French and Dutch ships” had brought so many “esclaves mores,” bought in “Guinée” or “taken from the Spaniards along the coasts of Brazil,” that the Compagnie resolved to establish new colonies in the neighboring islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Dominica.¹⁴ Twenty years later, the black slave population of the French islands reached 10,000.¹⁵

The importation and use of African slaves in territories under French authority represented a significant departure from sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century French legal and philosophical principles. According to some of the most prominent French thinkers of the period, human bondage was both a legal and moral aberration. In 1576, for instance, leading French political theorist Jean Bodin expressed his strong disapproval of all forms of slavery past and present, by drawing upon philosophy, history, and French jurisprudence. “Although there is some remembrance of old servitude [in France],” he claimed, “yet it is not lawful there to make any slave, or to buy any of others: Insomuch that the slaves of strangers so soon as they set their foot within France become frank & free.” According to Bodin, France's free soil principle came from an “old decree of the court of Paris [which] determined against an Ambassador of Spain, who had brought a slave with him into France.” This principle, he continued, had recently been upheld in a case presented to the Parlement of Toulouse in which a Genoa merchant reluctantly agreed to free the slave he had brought with him from Spain.¹⁶

Although the ethnicity of the slaves thus freed was not specified, Bodin indicated that he disapproved of the enslavement of Africans in the Iberian Atlantic world. Apparently unaware of the nascent Norman slave trade or of the presence of African slaves in various parts of southern France, Bodin deplored the fact that both Portuguese and Spaniards, “having brought the Negroes into the Christian religion, keep them nevertheless and all their posterities for slaves.”¹⁷ The qualifier Bodin added to his explicit opposition to the enslavement of Africans by Spaniards and Portuguese is noteworthy, for it indicated that it was not so much the enslavement of Africans Bodin found objectionable but that of Christians.¹⁸ Indeed, the incompatibility of Christianity and slave status stood at the core of French legal discourse about France's free soil principle during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.¹⁹ In his compilation of French customary laws and jurisprudence, for instance, Antoine Loisel, one of the most prominent French legal scholars at the turn of the seventeenth century, declared in 1607 that “all persons are free in this Kingdom, and as soon as a slave reaches its borders [marches] and is baptized, he is manumitted.”²⁰

The opposition to the enslavement of Christianized populations expressed by Bodin and Loisel was far from an exclusively French concern. Since the early sixteenth century, Catholic theologians and missionaries on both sides of the Iberian Atlantic had been debating the compatibility of evangelization and enslavement. And although such debates often concerned the enslavement of indigenous populations, the means through which Africans were enslaved could also become a recurring source of controversy.²¹ Starting in the 1640s, Catholic missionaries in the Christianized kingdom of Kongo repeatedly denounced the negative impacts of the European enslavement of African populations on their evangelizing efforts.²² In 1645, and again in 1652, the Prefects of the Capuchin missions virulently condemned the practices of European slave traders at the port of Mpinda who customarily embarked baptized Africans as slaves, thus causing the dramatic diminution of the Christianized population of Kongo and impeding the progress of missions as the local population lived in constant “fear of being enslaved by the whites.”²³ In 1660, the Holy See's central agency in charge of promoting and coordinating all missionary activities, the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide, organized a special congress to examine the Capuchins’ grievances and agreed to interfere.²⁴ As a result of its deliberations, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, Propaganda's secretary general, issued two letters. The first urged “The People of Congo” to refuse to sell their children as slaves, and the second ordered the Capuchin missionaries of Kongo to preach against the enslavement and deportation of baptized Africans.²⁵

While Propaganda cautiously limited its denunciation of the enslavement of Christianized Africans to Kongo and seemed reluctant to challenge the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery directly, some Capuchin missionaries were not so guarded. As early as the 1640s, the Capuchins based in Saint Christophe had been echoing the concerns of their colleagues in the midst of the emerging French Caribbean slave system, preaching that baptism conferred freedom to the Africans who had been forcibly transported to the French colonies. “It is an unworthy thing,” they claimed, “to use one's Christian brother as a slave.”²⁶ The response of French colonial authorities was swift. In 1646, Commandeur Blondel de Longvilliers de Poincy issued an ordinance to confirm that the Christian “Negroes” and their descendants were to be maintained in perpetual bondage. Poincy also expelled the Capuchins from Saint-Christophe, therefore leaving the evangelization of slaves to more compliant religious orders.²⁷

Indeed, to argue that the Dominican and Jesuit missionaries who served in the French islands did not share the qualms of their Capuchin colleagues would be an understatement. While the latter had insisted that conversion to Christianity should procure Africans with the double benefit of eternal salvation and temporal freedom, the former saw enslavement as a precondition to Africans’ salvation.²⁸ In his 1655 Relation of the Jesuit missions in the French islands, Father Pierre Pelleprat developed the same argument, reporting a conversation he had had with “a young Negro” in Martinique in which the latter had allegedly explained that he “preferred his captivity to the liberty he had enjoyed in his country, because if he had remained free he would be a slave of Satan, while as a slave of the French he had become one of God's children.”²⁹

Not all metropolitan readers seem to have been convinced by this argument. Fifteen years after the publication of Pelleprat's relation, Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre still felt the need to “justify” French colonists in their use of Africans slaves, and to defend them against the “injurious reproaches” of “several persons displaying more piety than knowledge” who maintained that the “laws of France” precluded the treatment of Christians as slaves.³⁰ The enslavement of Africans, he insisted, had its origin in Africa itself where “despotic” African lords willingly sold “men, women, and children of all ages” to European traders. While Du Tertre expressed some empathy toward the “poor wretches” thus sold, he nevertheless specified that most of them were “criminals,” and that the enslavement and deportation of “innocents” by “unjust” European merchants, a charge that had been repeatedly formulated by a number of Capuchin missionaries, only occurred occasionally. Reprising a familiar theme, Du Tertre asserted that the establishment of slavery in the French islands had led to the conversion of “fifteen thousand slaves, who would never have had any knowledge of God in their country, and who would have died miserably in the impieties and errors of Mahomet, which infect those brought from Africa.” Echoing Pelleprat and others, Du Tertre adamantly argued that Africans’ servitude in the French islands “is the principle of their happiness, and that their disgrace is the cause of their salvation, because the faith they embrace in the islands prepares them to know God, and to love and serve him.”³¹

As Du Tertre concocted his religious apology of colonial slavery, the French monarchy eagerly encouraged its expansion. From 1664 to the early 1680s, three slave trading companies were established under the direct patronage of the Crown.³² From 1670 to 1672 alone, 9,000 African slaves were transported aboard French ships to the French Caribbean.³³ In Martinique alone, the number of African slaves rose from 2,642 to 10,656 between 1660 and 1684 while the French colonial population only doubled during the same period, from 2,489 to 4,857.³⁴ The dramatic increase of the slave population also coincided with an important reorganization of the colonial infrastructure of the French Antilles. In 1664, the Crown put an end to the rule of the seigneurs-propriétaires and placed all the French islands under the administrative responsibility of the newly created Compagnie des Indes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction. Louisiana in Atlantic Perspective
• Part I. Empires
• Part II. Circulations
• Part III. Intimacies
• Conclusion. Beyond Borders: Revising Atlantic History
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments