Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868

Caryn Cossé Bell

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 1997
• eBook ISBN: 9780807153451
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

With the Federal occupation of New Orleans in 1862, Afro-Creole leaders in that city, along with their white allies, seized upon the ideals of the American and French Revolutions and images of revolutionary events in the French Caribbean and demanded Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Their republican idealism produced the postwar South's most progressive vision of the future. Caryn Cossé Bell, in her impressive, sweeping study, traces the eighteenth-century origins of this Afro-Creole political and intellectual heritage, its evolution in antebellum New Orleans, and its impact on the Civil War and Reconstruction.

1

Revolution and the Origins of Dissent

In the summer of 1804, New Orleans officials demanded that Louisiana’s territorial commissioner, William C. C. Claiborne, punish and banish black leaders who had attempted to assert the rights of free people of color. Instead, Claiborne met quietly with representatives of the free black community and insisted they abandon their plan to draft a petition to Congress. It seemed to the commissioner that “in a Country where the negro population was so great the Less noise that was made about this occurance [sic] the better.” The anger of the “white inhabitants was so roused” that he feared violence and recalled “that the events which have Spread blood and desolation in St. Domingo originated in a dispute between the white and Mulatto inhabitants, and that the too rigid treatment of the former, induced the Latter to seek the support and assistance of the Negroes.” The peculiar nature of conditions within the territory prompted Claiborne to gloomily predict that at some point in the future “this quarter of the Union must (I fear) experience in some degree, the Misfortunes of St. Domingo.”¹

The political and social complexity of the newly acquired territory forced Commissioner Claiborne to proceed cautiously. For over a decade, revolutionary upheaval in France and the Caribbean had contributed to volatile conditions. While white radicals from Bordeaux and Saint Domingue agitated against the American regime after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, an influx of free people of color, refugees of the Haitian Revolution, fueled tensions. Even as the territorial commissioner forwarded his dispatches to Secretary of State James Madison in 1804, the discovery of a Haitian soldier, Marseille, among the new immigrants intensified fears of a slave uprising. The concern that Haiti’s free black emigrés would infect the slave population with notions of freedom prompted city officials to discourage free black immigration. Ultimately, such fears and the discovery two years later of a plot by armed free people of color to overthrow the American regime prompted state legislators in 1806 to forbid entry to free black males from the French West Indies.²

In 1789, Saint Domingue, with a population of 30,000 whites, approximately 28,000 free people of color, and some 465,000 slaves, was France’s largest and most prosperous Caribbean colony. With the onset of the French Revolution, the colony’s free people of color, who possessed one-third of the plantation property, one-quarter of the real estate, and one-quarter of the slaves, demanded political equality and threatened to rebel. Rebuffed by the colonial plantocracy and assaulted by white reactionaries, prominent free black leaders organized an attack on Cap Français (present-day Cap-Haitien), a key colonial stronghold in the north, in October, 1790. When the uprising failed, leading free men of color in the south fortified their estates and armed their slaves. The ensuing turmoil sparked a massive slave uprising in the north in August, 1791, involving as many as 20,000 rebels in the plantation zone surrounding Cap Français. Black rebellion spelled the ruin of the slaveholding regime. By 1795, the French government had conceded racial equality and slave emancipation. In 1799, as the black revolutionaries moved toward independence, a civil war erupted. In the conflict, Toussaint Louverture overwhelmed the mulatto-led proponents of republicanism and forced large numbers of people of color into exile. Finally, on January 1, 1804, after expelling French forces, black revolutionaries proclaimed the independent nation of Haiti.³

In view of events in the French Antilles, New Orleans’ free black militia was of great immediate concern to American authorities when they assumed control of the territory at the end of 1803. Like free men of color in the former French colony of Saint Domingue, many free men of color in New Orleans were armed. As members of the colonial militia, slave and free black soldiers had played a significant role in the defenses of Louisiana. During the revolutionary era, they had absorbed republican principles. With Louisiana’s transfer to the United States, they pointed to American revolutionary ideals and demanded equal citizenship. The assertiveness and status of these men stemmed from their historical experience in colonial Louisiana.

The free black community had emerged from a frontier society characterized by a high degree of social and economic fluidity. In New Orleans, as will be shown, a Latin European religious ethic, an unbalanced sex ratio, and a shortage of skilled laborers and soldiers contributed to the city’s fluid milieu and opened the way to freedom. Colonial policies designed to build a more rigid social order fueled the racial flux. By the end of colonial rule in 1803, there were 1,335 free blacks in New Orleans in a total population of 8,050 residents, of whom 2,775 were slaves. During the eighteenth century, the city’s Latin European religious culture helped shape the outlook and character of native-born Creoles of color.⁴

Throughout the colonial era, Capuchin friars (members of the Franciscan order) dominated church affairs in Louisiana. Committed to missionary work and the rule of poverty, French and Spanish Capuchins devoted considerable attention to Louisiana’s slave and free black populations. Latin European slave laws assured them of an important role in eighteenth-century New Orleans.

Under the French regime, the period from 1718 to 1763, the Code Noir of 1724 had subordinated all settlers to Catholic precepts. Rooted in a legal and religious tradition that recognized the moral personality of the slave, the code required that bondsmen be instructed in the Catholic religion and administered the sacraments of baptism, marriage, penance, and extreme unction. Other provisions forbade the separation of a married couple and their children under fourteen years of age and prohibited slaves from laboring on Sundays and other Catholic holy days. The code sought to ensure social and political stability by assimilating slaves and free blacks into the Christian community.⁵

Sustained by the Code Noir, Capuchin missionaries incorporated black New Orleanians into the life of the church. Catholicism’s doctrinal commitment to the spiritual equality of all Catholics informed their efforts. All of the city’s inhabitants, regardless of race or condition, received the Catholic sacraments in the same place of worship, St. Louis Church. Capuchin friars baptized negritte and negrillon slave infants while their white slaveholding godparents bore witness to the sacred rites. In a baptismal ceremony in 1729, some of the city’s most prominent leaders, including Bienville and De la Chaise, appeared as sponsors for their adult slaves.⁶

The church’s inclusive religious practices applied to free blacks as well as slaves. In August, 1725, Father Raphael de Luxembourg, the new vicar general of the Capuchin mission in Louisiana, officiated at the wedding of Marie Gaspar, a free woman of color and the daughter of a drummer in Bienville’s army, and Jean Baptiste Raphael, a free man of color from Martinique.⁷

Church policies designed to assimilate the black population into the dominant social order were not intended to promote interracial intimacy. Nonetheless, frontier conditions forced the church to adapt to the social realities of an emergent slave society. In 1722, in New Orleans and the surrounding area, the population of 514 black slaves was nearly as large as the white population of 293 men, 140 women, and 155 engagés (French laborers). The scarcity of white women led the predominantly male population of French soldiers and adventurers to establish extramarital liaisons with slave women. Though the Code Noir and church doctrine forbade interracial marriage and concubinage, colonists ignored attempts by the clergy to halt the spread of such practices. By the middle of the eighteenth century, interracial liaisons were commonplace, and parish registers indicated the church’s acceptance of social patterns within the city.⁸

In April, 1729, Jacques, an infant slave owned by Etienne Boucher de Périer, the governor of the colony, and the son of the slave woman Françoise, was baptized. The ceremony was the first recorded instance in which church transcribers publicly noted the absence of a known father. During the 1740s, the term d’un père inconnu (father unknown) appeared frequently in the baptismal records; in 1763, every page of the baptismal register contained at least one entry accompanied by the phrase. By the 1790s, many inhabitants of the city openly acknowledged their illegitimate, mixed-blood children in the church registry. In 1799, the Spanish minister, Joseph Antonio Caballero, reported that military officers lived “openly with their mulatto concubines as do many of the people, and they are not ashamed to name the children in the parish registers as their natural children.”⁹

While the church’s accommodation to interracial unions contributed to the city’s fluid social milieu, conditions in the Capuchin friary suggested the ways in which close personal relationships developed. After France’s cession of Louisiana, the Spanish, who governed the colony from 1763 to 1800, sent a small group of Capuchins to join the existing community of French missionaries. On their arrival in New Orleans in 1772, the Spanish friars viewed the conduct of their French counterparts with extreme alarm. Contrary to the teaching of St. Francis and the spirit of Franciscan poverty, the Spaniards complained, the French clergymen owned a plantation and slaves and used silverware, porcelain, and snuff. Father Cirilo de Barcelona, the superior of the small group of Spanish friars, reported on “the indecency with which, in sight of the exposed Host, these priests demean themselves in the choir, where they are seen stuffing their noses with tobacco … scandalizing the people, and moving the very angels to wrath.”¹⁰

Cirilo found living arrangements in the friary deplorable. Eighteen slaves—ten women, four men, and four children—lived in the friars’ home. The Spanish governor, Luis de Unzaga, attributed the presence of the “young blackwomen and mulattresses, who are their [the Capuchins’] slaves, and who were born on their plantation” to the “excessive kindness of Father Dagobert [Dagobert de Longuory, head of Louisiana’s Capuchin mission].” Father Cirilo, however, offered a far less charitable explanation for living arrangements in the friary:

What is most deplorable is to see in the convent the concubine of the friars, for such is the reputation she bears. She has three sons, although who her husband is God only knows. They eat at our table and off the plates of Father Dagobert, who, without shame, or fear of the world at least, if not of God, permits them to call him papa. She is one of the mulattresses who are kept in the house. She is the absolute mistress of the whole establishment, and the friars have for her so much attachment, that they strive who shall send to the cherished paramour the best dish of the table, before any one of us is allowed to taste it.¹¹

The woman’s unmarried and pregnant sister also lived in the friary, and Cirilo had observed “a white man sallying out of the chamber of this mulattress” at four o’clock in the morning. Furthermore, “persons of high standing” had informed the Spanish friar that “the young negresses and mulattresses, immediately after having attended us at supper, go out of the convent to meet their lovers, and spend with them the greater part of the night.”¹²

Determined to impose a stricter religious discipline in the colony, Cirilo demanded that Dagobert correct conditions in the friary. Though the Spanish priest was of the opinion that “to expel these women from the convent, would be to inflict too painful a blow on Father Dagobert,” Cirilo insisted that they be banished to the Capuchin plantation, where, if necessary, they could be sold. In the ensuing dispute, the Spanish governor sided with Dagobert. Determined to maintain peace in the colony, Governor Unzaga defended the popular spiritual leader in dispatches to colonial officials. In 1773, Unzaga explained Dagobert’s continued refusal to expel the slave women. The friar refused to “throw out of doors a set of people whom he has raised and kept about him from the cradle.”¹³

Practices within the friary surely typified the complex nature of race relations in the city. Clearly, the church’s assimilationist policies reinforced the city’s lax social regimen and guaranteed black New Orleanians a measure of acceptability that eased the transition to freedom. The city’s Latin European religious culture and the racial makeup of the city’s slave and free black populations provided the basis for the emergence and empowerment of an aspiring class of free people of color. Other colonial policies enhanced the relative status and social mobility of slaves and free blacks.

Under both the French and Spanish regimes, the city suffered a shortage of white skilled laborers. During the 1720s, the French colonial government addressed this shortfall by apprenticing slaves to experienced tradesmen. By 1732, slave artisans participated in a wide range of occupations. The presence of skilled black artisans in the urban workforce promoted a greater degree of occupational and personal contact between whites and blacks. Such interaction produced opportunities for many slaves to purchase their freedom.

After 1763, the Spaniards continued channeling black workers into the ranks of the skilled labor force. In their roles as commandeurs (slave foremen), masons, metalworkers, carpenters, and other craftsmen, many black laborers advanced to positions of authority and prestige. By the end of the Spanish domination, slaves and free men of color monopolized many of the skilled trades. Other colonial policies also facilitated the emancipation and upward mobility of black New Orleanians.¹⁴

Throughout the eighteenth century, Louisiana’s colonial militia suffered high rates of desertion and death. French authorities strengthened their forces with enslaved black soldiers and laborers. A number of these men earned their freedom on the battlefield, and military service became an important means of manumission. Bondsmen who acquired their freedom in this way became esteemed members of the black community.

During the Natchez War of 1730–1731 and the campaigns against the Chickasaw Indians between 1739 and 1740, French authorities created a permanent free black military force. By 1740, the Louisiana militia possessed a separate company of fifty free black soldiers, and after 1763, the Spanish government incorporated these soldiers into their military forces. The Spaniards divided free black soldiers into separate military units on the basis of color as part of a general policy of creating more rigidly defined racial categories. They separated dark-complexioned free black soldiers (morenos) from lighter-complexioned soldiers (pardos) in segregated companies.

Spanish officials awarded free black soldiers silver medals, cash bonuses, and military pensions for exemplary service. The Spaniards also advanced black soldiers to positions as commissioned and noncommissioned officers. Membership in the Spanish corps was considered a mark of high status by the city’s Creoles of color. The free black officer Francisco Dorville proudly appended the title commandante de mulatos to his signature. At baptisms, weddings, and other social gatherings, a great deal of importance was attached to the presence of black officers. In Louisiana, as in other Spanish colonies, military service functioned as a principal means of free black advancement. By the time Spain ceded Louisiana to France in 1800, the three companies of free black officers and soldiers comprised more than two hundred men.¹⁵

Although a shortage of white manpower had prompted the initial deployment of black soldiers, another important consideration persuaded colonial officials to arm black Louisianians. The plan to build a successful plantation society in lower Louisiana hinged on the white regime’s ability to manipulate the region’s large and diverse populations of African slaves and Native Americans. In 1731, after suffering a devastating Indian attack on Natchez (present-day Natchez, Mississippi), Governor Périer summed up French concerns: “The greatest misfortune which could befall the colony and which would inevitably lead to its total loss would be a union between the Indian nations and the black slaves, but happily there has always been a great aversion between them which has been much increased by the war, and we take great care to maintain it.”¹⁶

As Périer’s comments indicated, French administrators placed a high priority on encouraging antagonism between Indians and slaves. In 1729, with this policy objective in mind, Périer had dispatched a contingent of armed black slaves to destroy an Indian village downriver from New Orleans. Still, the divide-and-rule strategy involved concessions. At the time of the Natc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Revolution and the Origins of Dissent
• 2 The Republican Cause and the Afro-Creole Militia
• 3 The New American Racial Order
• 4 Romanticism, Social Protest, and Reform
• 5 French Freemasonry and the Republican Heritage
• 6 Spiritualism’s Dissident Visionaries
• 7 War, Reconstruction, and the Politics of Radicalism
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Membership in Two Masonic Lodges and Biographical Information
• Bibliography
• Index