Mixed Race Studies

Creole Angel: The Self-Identity of the Free People of Color of Antebellum New Orleans

University of North Texas
August 2006
136 pages

Ben Melvin Hobratsch

Thesis Prepared for the Degree of Masters of Arts, University of North Texas, August 2006

This thesis is about the self-identity of antebellum New Orleans’s free people of color. The emphasis of this work is that French culture, mixed Gallic and African ancestry, and freedom from slavery served as the three keys to the identity of this class of people. Taken together, these three factors separated the free people of color from the other major groups residing in New Orleans—Anglo-Americans, white Creoles and black slaves.

The introduction provides an overview of the topic and states the need for this study. Chapter 1 provides a look at New Orleans from the perspective of the free people of color. Chapter 2 investigates the slaveownership of these people. Chapter 3 examines the published literature of the free people of color. The conclusion summarizes the significance found in the preceding three chapters and puts their findings into a broader interpretive framework.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• Chapters
  • 1. THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR’S ANTEBELLUM NEW ORLEANS
  • 2. THE SLAVEHOLDING OF NEW ORLEANS’S SLAVEHOLDING FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR, 1820-1840
  • 3. THE LITERATURE OF NEW ORLEANS’S FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR, 1837-1845
• CONCLUSION
• Appendices
  • A. CENSUS SLAVE SCHEDULES, 1820-1840
  • B. EMANCIPATION PETITIONS, 1814-1843
• BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Free people of color, or gens de couleur libres, were men and women of either African or mixed African and European ancestry that were legally free from slavery, yet were proscribed in their social condition by the law. These men and women had always played a significant role within New Orleans. This was due, in part, to their sheer numbers. In New Orleans in 1840, for instance, free people of color numbered 19,226 of a total population of 102,193 or 18.8% of the population. Only Baltimore, Maryland could claim relatively similar numbers of free people of color. Of Baltimore’s total population of 102,313 in 1840, 17,967 or 17.5% were free people of color. Other southern cities did not even come close to approaching such levels. In the same year, in Charleston, another southern city in which a significant population of free men and women of color resided, only 5.4% of the population or 1,588 of a total population of 29,261 were free people of color.

The important role of free men and women of color within New Orleans was also due to the fact that until the implementation of American order in Louisiana in 1803, there had existed a tripartite socioracial stratification within the city, along the Latin model. This non-Anglo socioracial stratification allowed the gens de couleur libres to enjoy more social rights than free people of color in any other area of North America, in addition to near-equality with whites in regards to legal rights. In the Anglo-dominated United States, a binary socioracial hierarchy existed that placed free people of color at the same level as enslaved men and women of color.

The tripartite socioracial stratification of colonial New Orleanian society was one of fracture and fragmentation (see Table 0.1). One’s place in society was determined by economic and racial factors. As with most societies, individuals in antebellum New Orleans were categorized based upon their economic status. Individuals were wealthy, poor, or somewhere in between.

Factors of racial ancestry complicated a purely economic classification. Individuals, regardless of their economic status, were labeled white, black or “of color” (somewhere in between). In antebellum New Orleans, an individual’s racial phenotype took precedence over wealth. As a result New Orleanian society was first ordered by skin color, then, within each of the three separate racial groups, by economic condition. Within this Latin-style tripartite social stratification, the free people of color occupied the middle strata. As occupants of the middle strata, free people of color were viewed as socially “below” whites (of whatever economic condition) and “above” all black slaves…

Read the entire thesis here.