Mixed Race Studies

The People of Frilot Cove: A Study of Racial Hybrids

The American Journal of Sociology
Volume 57, Number 2 (September 1951)
pages 145-149

J. Hardy Jones, Jr.

Vernon J. Parenton

Frilot Cove is a color-conscious, semi-isolated rural community of 302 persons with an ante bellum cultural background, who, though they approximate Nordic and Mediterranean types, are classified as Negroes. Criteria of upper-class status are light skin, income, and family background. Discrimination by whites draws them to the Negro, but their concern is not with their personal, but with their group, situation.

This paper summarizes certain findings of a more comprehensive studyI which analyzed some sociologically important elements of a hybrid racial community of St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. The purpose of that study was to analyze social organization and social change in a semi-isolated hybrid rural community: Its historical origin; its population characteristics; its social, cultural, and economic characteristics; and the attitudes of its inhabitants to race. The principal sources of data were schedules, interviews, informal conversation, personal observations, attitude inventories, written materials obtained directly from community members, microfilm copies of old United States census records, and pertinent published materials.

The history of this community, Frilot Cove, is part of the long and interesting history of the state of Louisiana. The first explorers in Louisiana were the Spaniards, who were seeking riches; but they failed to establish themselves permanently in the country of the great Mississippi. Francewas the first to succeed in establishing colonies. Through the efforts of such men as De la Salle, D’Iberville, and De Bienville, Louisiana became an important part of the New World, Although Louisiana was returned to Spain for about forty years (prior to 1803, when the territory became a part of the United States), the French culture was predominant and is still much in evidence in the southern parts of the state.

In 1765 a military and trading post was established at Opelousas. The fertile prairie land surrounding the post soon attracted many settlers. In 1807, St, Landry Parish was formed and Opelousas became the seat of parish government. According to the United States marshal of the Western District, which included St. Landry Parish, there were 532 free colored persons and 4,680 white persons in this area in 1840. The census shows that there were among the free colored only thirty-three males to fifty-nine females in the twenty-four- to thirty-six-year age group. On the other hand, in the white group from twenty to forty years of age there were 835 males to 295 females—an extreme shortage of females. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that some of the white men took their wives from the free colored class.

By the end of the nineteenth century the parish had a population of 52,170 inhabitants, slightly over half of whom were counted as Negroes. This increase of the Negro population came about largely as a result of the many cotton plantations throughout the area.

Among these Negroes were many mulattoes, primarily the descendants of white men and colored women. Of the parents of these people, many were “free men of color” during ante bellum days and owned plantation…

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Cast From Their Ancestral Home, Creoles Worry About Culture’s Future

New York Times
2005-10-11

Susan Saulny, National Correspondent

NATCHITOCHES PARISH, La., Oct. 9 – It is peaceful here on the Cane River, beyond the fluffy tops of high cotton and towering magnolia trees, but it is not home. For the New Orleans Creoles living in exodus here and elsewhere around Louisiana, their city was far more than home – it was homeland, the capital of an ethnic nation unique in this country.

“New Orleans was our womb and for most of us, it was going to be our grave,” said Timothy Bordenave, who is living in a cottage here, a five-hour drive away from the city, describing the deep sense of lifelong connection felt to New Orleans by many of the city’s Creoles, the population of mixed-race families who trace their roots to the city’s French and Spanish colonial era…

…Many Creoles trace their roots to immigrants and slaves from the former French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, particularly Cuba and what is now Haiti. Historians say it was New Orleans’s position as a crossroads and port town that allowed for the easy mingling of races and nationalities that in turn gave birth, in the 18th century, to a part-European, part-Afro-Caribbean society that grew to an estimated 20,000 people in Louisiana by the mid-1800’s.

The Creole culture that developed over generations—known for a distinctive cuisine, language and music—contributed to New Orleans’s singular identity and helped define Louisiana to the world. Before Hurricane Katrina, experts estimated that 10 to 20 percent of black people in New Orleans—30,000 to 60,000 people—considered themselves Creole by way of ancestry, but even more lived lives influenced by the culture because of their proximity to it…

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Making Race: The Role of Free Blacks in the Development of New Orleans’ Three-Caste Society, 1791-1812

University of Texas, Austin
May 2007
219 pages

Kenneth Randolph Aslakson, Assistant Professor of History
Union College, Schenectady, New York

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2007

“Making Race: The Role of Free Blacks in the Development of New Orleans’ Three-Caste Society, 1791-1812” excavates the ways that free people of African descent in New Orleans built an autonomous identity as a third “race” in what would become a unique racial caste system in the United States. I argue that in the time period I study, which encompasses not only the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but also the rise of plantation slavery and the arrival of over twelve thousand refugees from the revolution torn French West Indies, New Orleans’s free blacks took advantage of political, cultural and legal uncertainty to protect and gain privileges denied to free blacks elsewhere in the South. The dissertation is organized around three sites in which free blacks forged and articulated a distinct collective identity: the courtroom, the ballroom, and the militia. This focus on specific spaces of racial contestation allows me to trace the multivalent development of racial identity. “Making Race” brings together the special dynamism of the Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution with the ability of individuals to act within structures of power to shape their surroundings. I show that changing political regimes (in the time period I study New Orleans was ruled by the Spanish, the French and the Americans) together with the socio-economic, ideological and demographic impact of the Haitian Revolution created opportunities for new social and legal understandings of race in the Crescent City. More importantly, however, I show how members of New Orleans’s free black community, strengthened numerically and heavily influenced by thousands of gens de couleur refugees of the Haitian Revolution, shaped the racialization process by asserting a collective identity as a distinct middle caste, contributing to the creation of a tri-racial system.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Free Blacks in Slave Societies
  • Race and Revolution in the Atlantic World
  • The Laws and Legal Systems in Racially Based Slave Societies
  • Organization of the Dissertation
• Chapter 1 Racial Identity Formation in a Burgeoning Port City
• Chapter 2 “When the Question is Slavery or Freedom:” The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans
  • New Orleans in the Age of Slavery and Revolution
  • Making Slavery: The Precariousness of Freedom
  • Making Freedom: Status Suits in the New Orleans City Court
  • Making Race: The Legal Resolution of the Slave-Free Paradox
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3 The Power of Weakness: Free Black Women in the New Orleans City Court
  • Black Litigation in Spanish Louisiana and the Impact of the Louisiana Purchase
  • Escape From Marriage Law: The Litigiousness of Free Women of African Descent
  • The Power of Weakness: Fraud and Assault Cases in the New Orleans City Court
  • The New Racial Order: Changing Color and Changing Laws
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4 The Politics of Dancing: Control, Resistance, and Identity in the Early New Orleans Ballroom
  • Fear of Black Dancing and the Origins of the Public Ball
  • Vice, Violence, and the Origins of the (Tri-) Colored Balls
  • The Great Purchase, Immigration, and the Segregation of Dancing Centers
  • Control, Resistance, Identity and the Origins of the Quadroon Balls.143
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5 “We Shall Serve with Fidelity and Zeal:” The Citizen-Soldiers of the Free Colored Militia
  • The Demographics of Defense: Free Colored Militias in New World Slave Societies
  • Fear and Opportunity: the Free Colored Militia in Spanish Louisiana During the Age of Revolution
  • “Free Citizens of Louisiana:” The Free Colored Militia in Territorial New Orleans
  • The Militia’s Swansong: Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans
  • Conclusion
• Conclusion “In [and Outside] the Eye of Louisiana Law:” Creole of Color Identity Before and After Plessy
• Bibliography
• Vita

Introduction

In October of 2003, having recently arrived in New Orleans to do research for this dissertation, I attended the “Creole Studies Consortium” held at Tulane University. Most of the people attending this gathering (which was part academic conference, part genealogical convention, and part family reunion) called themselves “Creoles of color” or simply “Creoles,” though it soon became clear to me that there was some disagreement as to the precise meaning of this term. For some, a Creole is someone whose ancestors were free people of color when slavery still existed in Louisiana. For others, the European ancestors of Creoles must have been of Spanish or (preferably) French descent. The most exclusive definition holds that a true Creole can trace his or her French and African ancestry back to the colonial period in Louisiana before the Louisiana Purchase. Nevertheless, all agreed that a Creole is a person whose ancestors were free and of mixed European and African descent with roots in pre-Civil War Louisiana. While they do not deny their partial African ancestry, most of Louisiana’s present day Creoles do not self identify as “black” or even “African-American,” even though most people from outside of the state Louisiana (and many within) would consider them to be such.

This dissertation examines the origins of the distinct racial identity of the group of people who today call themselves Louisiana “Creoles” (or “Creoles of Color”) by excavating the ways in which free people of color in early New Orleans built an autonomous identity as a third “race” in what would become a unique racial caste system rise of plantation slavery and the arrival of over twelve thousand refugees from the revolution-torn French West Indies, New Orleans’s free people of color took advantage of political, cultural and legal uncertainty to protect and gain privileges denied to free blacks elsewhere in the South. I show that changing political regimes (in this time period New Orleans was ruled by the Spanish, the French and the Americans), a transforming economy, and the ideological and demographic impact of the Haitian Revolution combined to create opportunities for new cultural and legal understandings of race in the Crescent City. More importantly, however, I show how members of New Orleans’s free colored community, strengthened numerically and heavily influenced by thousands of gens de couleur refugees, shaped the racialization process by asserting a collective identity as a distinct middle caste, contributing to the creation of a tri-racial system. In other words, the emergence of a three tiered racial caste system in the Crescent City was not the necessary product of global structures. Rather, the free people of color of New Orleans made their own distinct racial identity, and protected the relative rights and privileges that went with it.

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Segregation of the Free People of Color and the Construction of Race in Antebellum New Orleans

Southeastern Geographer
Volume 48, Number 1, May 2008
pages 19-37
E-ISSN: 1549-6929
Print ISSN: 0038-366X
DOI: 10.1353/sgo.0.0010

Amy R. Sumpter, Instructor of Geography
Georgia College and State University

Louisiana and the city of New Orleans have a complicated colonial and racial history. A large free population of color living amidst enslaved people of color attests to fluidity in racial constructions present in the colonial period in Louisiana. Throughout the French (1682–1763) and Spanish (1763–1803) colonial periods and the first five decades of U.S. statehood (1803–1850), racial constructions changed remarkably. Cultural conflict, an increasing number of American whites, and fear of insurrection contributed to growing hostility toward the free people of color and remaining colonial racial practices. Historical evidence, state and municipal legislation, and 1850 U.S. Census data show that free people of color tended to reside in specific “Creole” areas within the city, demonstrating that free people in the city were segregated by race.

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Black Female Agency and Sexual Exploitation: Quadroon Balls and Plaçage Relationships

Ohio State University
May 2008
81 Pages

Noël Voltz
The Ohio State University

A Senior Honors Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for graduation with research distinction in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University

In 1805, a New Orleans newspaper advertisement formally defined a new social institution, the infamous Quadroon Ball, in which prostitution and plaçage–a system of concubinage–converged. These elegant balls, limited to upper-class white men and free “quadroon” women, became interracial rendezvous that provided evening entertainment and the possibility of forming sexual liaisons in exchange for financial “sponsorship.” It is the contention of this thesis such “sponsored” relationships between white men and free women of color in New Orleans enabled these women to use sex as a means of gaining social standing, protection, and money. In addition, although these arrangements reflected a form of sexual exploitation, quadroon women were able to become active agents in their quest for upward social mobility.

Until recently, historians have overlooked the lives of Louisiana’s free women of color during the colonial and antebellum eras. My research, therefore, expands historical knowledge about the unique social institution of Quadroon Balls and plaçage relationships in order to give greater breadth to scholarly understandings of quadroon women’s sexual and economic choices. This research formally began in summer 2006, during my participation in the Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) at the Ohio State University. Through this experience, I was able to begin analyzing the institution of Quadroon Balls and I have discovered the immense possibilities of this topic. While there are many directions that this research can take, I have decided to focus my undergraduate research and honors thesis on the history of the balls and quadroon women’s agency in antebellum New Orleans. In order to research these concepts, I have utilized a combination of primary sources and secondary sources written about women of color. In winter 2006, I was awarded an Undergraduate Research Scholarship and, with this money, I visited New Orleans and Baton Rouge to conduct archival research. My most recent trip to New Orleans and Baton Rouge has augmented my understanding of the topic by providing a large quantity of primary source materials, including court cases and other legal documents, as well as affording me an opportunity to experience archival research first hand in the actual historical environment in which the balls took place. Ultimately, I plan to continue my current research as my dissertation topic.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Abstract
“The Quadroon Ballroom” Poem by Rixford J. Lincoln
Introduction and Historiographic Review
Chapter 1. A Historical Background of New Orleans’ Free Women of Color
Chapter 2. Plaçage Relationships
Chapter 3. Quadroon Balls
Chapter 4. Case Study: Five Generations of Women
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography

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“They Call It Marriage”: the Louisiana Interracial Family and the Making of American Legitimacy

Book Manuscript In Progress

Diana Irene Williams, Assistant Professor of History, Law and Gender Studies
University of Southern California

Winner of the 2008 William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize in Legal History.

“They Call it Marriage” examines interracial marriage between black women and white men in nineteenth-century Louisiana. It explores how broad political and social struggles affected the ways white men and black women related to each other. And it considers why mid-nineteenth-century Louisiana was such an important setting for national struggles over race, gender, legitimacy, and power.

After the Civil War, Louisiana authorities repealed the interracial marriage prohibition and permitted retroactive legitimation of “private religious” marriages. In doing so, they exposed an obscure past in which many had refused to submit to the law as authoritatively given. Some people laid claim to the language of legitimate matrimony in defiance of state law, demanding justice on their own terms and with a keen awareness of competing regional, religious, and civil jurisdictions. In highlighting the perspective of those outside the legal profession, I focus on law as a terrain of struggle rather than a fixed set of rules.

The use of interracial marriage laws to regulate the inheritance of both property and social status dated back to Louisiana’s earliest French colonial government. Mandating that mixed-race children inherit the status of their (black) mother only, these regulations established the parameters of enslaved and racialized populations. Because legal kinship affected titles to household property in Louisiana, these laws encouraged distant kin and creditors to monitor interracial families’ internal affairs…

…The disputed illegitimate past of Louisiana interracial families had significance beyond the state’s borders. This manuscript traces the rhetoric of interracial genealogy and racial indeterminacy in antecedents of Plessy v. Ferguson. Louisiana authorities’ persistence in invoking racial fluidity well into the 1890s complicates historians’ efforts to locate a transition point at which the region exchanged a fluid Latin racial system for a strictly binary American one. In this regard, “They Call it Marriage” explores the gendered history of private life in order to offer a means of reconsidering the nature of Jim Crow segregation.

Chapters

1. Licensing Marriage in Early Louisiana
2. “Religion Law” vs. Civil Law
3. Quadroon Balls, Plaçage, and Consensus Narratives
4. Concubinage and Legal Narratives
5. Forced Heirs and Family Drama
6. Interracial Marriage and the Law in Post-emancipation Louisiana
7. “Bastards Begat by their Masters”

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Commentary: Living in a Mixed-Race America

Essence.com
Essence Magazine
2009-10-20

June Cross, Assistant Professor of Journalism
Columbia University

As if being married had anything to do with Blacks and Whites producing mixed-race children.

That was my first thought upon reading that an elected official in Louisiana had refused to marry a Black man and a White woman out of concern for what might happen to the children.

Ever since African-Americans landed on these shores in chains, Black women carried the offspring of their White masters. And indentured women servants, often of Irish descent, bore the children of Black men back in the seventeenth century before Virginia became the first state in the union to make interracial marriage illegal in 1691…

…Where did a quarter million mixed race people go? Geneologists think they decided to pass as White and mixed themselves right into the great American melting pot. Of course, in Louisiana, where race-mixing has been going on since before the birth of the nation, all you had to do was cross the county lines to disappear…

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Written Out of History

Pomona College Magazine
Pomona College, Claremont, California
Fall 2002
Volume 39, Number 1

Michael Balchunas

Spurred by a glimpse of family history, Professor Sid Lemelle is bringing to light a little-known aspect of the African Diaspora.

When the new people moved in, all eyes were upon them. There were comments about the way they looked, how much money they might have, what kind of work they did, their morals, their customs and their character. At first, it was all good. The newcomers, who were farmers, engineers, mechanics and other workers, wrote to friends left behind and extolled the virtues of their new home. That stirred pangs of fear among some residents, and a newspaper ran an editorial. More of these people might come, it said, and “since the Negro is a creature of imitation and not invention…they will degenerate…and [become] vicious…a nuisance and pest to society.”

The year was 1857, and the newcomers, from Louisiana, had settled near Coatzacoalcos, Mexico, about 50 miles inland from the Caribbean port of Veracruz. Their history, like much of the history of the African Diaspora, is virtually unknown.

Sidney Lemelle is working to change that…

…Another misperception is that the U.S. South was a strictly bipolar society of white masters and black slaves, he says. In antebellum Louisiana, a significant number of white planters, businessmen and government officials fathered mixed-race offspring, who became part of a stratum more privileged than slaves, other free blacks or poorer white residents, according to Lemelle. He is particularly intrigued by how race and racial identity issues were connected to property rights and ownership in Louisiana and Mexico in the 19th century. Building on the theories of UCLA legal scholar Cheryl Harris, he believes that “whiteness” was constructed by mixed-blood people and became the basis of racialized privilege; that “whiteness” was legitimized as a form of status property, which gave some individuals rights over others, even though both possessed African blood…

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Legal Transplants: Slavery and the Civil Law in Louisiana

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series
Working Paper 32
May 2009
37 pages

Ariela J. Gross, Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California Law School

Can Louisiana tell us something about civil law vs. common law regimes of slavery? What can the Louisiana experience tell us about a civil law jurisdiction “transplanted” in a common-law country? Louisiana is unique among American states in having been governed first by France, then by Spain, before becoming a U.S. territory and state in the nineteenth century. Unlike other slave states, it operated under a civil code, first the Digest of 1808, and then the Code of 1825. With regard to the regulation of slaves, these codes also incorporated a “Black Code,” first adopted in 1806, which owed a great deal to both French and Spanish law. Comparisons of Louisiana with other slave states tend to emphasize the uniqueness of New Orleans’ three-tier caste system, with a significant population of gens de couleur libre (free people of color), and the ameliorative influence of Spanish law. This reflects more general assumptions about comparative race and slavery in the Americas, based on the work of Frank Tannenbaum and other historians of an earlier generation, who drew sharp contrasts between slavery in British and Spanish America. How does the comparison shift if we turn our attention away from slave codes, where Tannenbaum focused, to the “law in action”? At the local level, one can see the way slaves took advantage of the gap between rules and enforcement, and to fathom racial meanings at the level of day-to-day interactions rather than comparisions of formal rules. This essay surveys three areas of law involving slaves – manumission, racial identity, and “redhibition” (breach of warranty) – to compare Louisiana to other jurisdictions, and particularly to its common-law neighbors.

…The first major slave codes in the North American colonies date to 1680-82. They draw numerous distinctions on the basis of race rather than status, including laws against carrying arms and against leaving the owner’s plantations without a certificate. A penalty of thirty lashes met “any Negro” who “lift up his hand against any Christian.” In 1691, English women were fined for having a bastard child with a negro. In 1705, all mulatto children were made servants to the age of 31 in Virginia; Maryland and North Carolina adopted the same rule within the next several decades.

By the time the U.S. became a republic, only those of African descent were slaves, and all whites were free. Yet there were a significant number of individuals and entire communities of mixed ancestry with ambiguous racial identity along the Eastern seaboard. In the southeast, Indian tribes both absorbed runaway slaves and, in the late eighteenth century, adopted African slavery. In addition to the 12,000 people designated in the Census as “free people of color” in Virginia, there were 8000 in Maryland in 1790, 5000 in North Carolina, 1800 in South Carolina, and 400 in Georgia…

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The Two Lives of Sally Miller: A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity in Antebellum New Orleans

Rutgers University Press
2007-03-28
168 pages
9 b&w illustrations
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4058-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4057-3

Carol Wilson, Arthur A. and Elizabeth R. Knapp Professor of American History
Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland

In 1843, the Louisiana Supreme Court heard the case of a slave named Sally Miller, who claimed to have been born a free white person in Germany. Sally, a very light-skinned slave girl working in a New Orleans cafe, might not have known she had a case were it not for a woman who recognized her as Salom Muller, with whom she had emigrated from Germany over twenty years earlier. Sally decided to sue for her freedom, and was ultimately freed, despite strong evidence contrary to her claim.

In The Two Lives of Sally Miller, Carol Wilson explores this fascinating legal case and its reflection on broader questions about race, society, and law in the antebellum South. Why did a court system known for its extreme bias against African Americans help to free a woman who was believed by many to be a black slave? Wilson explains that while the notion of white enslavement was shocking, it was easier for society to acknowledge that possibility than the alternative-an African slave who deceived whites and triumphed over the system.

Comments by Carol Wilson from her website:

…My book on the case of Sally Miller looks at a similar issue of status. As a society we have recently begun openly acknowledging that many people in the United States are of mixed racial background. The restrictive categorization of people as either white or black has begun to collapse. Many people assume, however, that this is the result of relaxing of racial barriers over the last few decades. Scholars of pre-Civil War American history, however, are well aware of the extensiveness of racial mixing in our nation’s past, albeit a practice usually illegal and denied. Because of the not uncommon existence of enslaved mulattoes, antebellum Americans were not unused to seeing slaves who looked “white.” With racial identity a feature imposed by those in power in society, it was only a matter of time before “whites” (people of European ancestry) found themselves illegally enslaved. Because white status was impossible to prove, some whites did find themselves in slavery…