Early Days: Colonial Louisiana, 1718-1803

Ironically, given its later history, there was one place where free people of color enjoyed a relatively high level of acceptance and prosperity during the eighteenth century: Louisiana. Although Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania all had larger free black populations, their influence and social significance were arguably greatest in Louisiana.

The first free blacks in Louisiana were probably slaves who escaped and lived with American Indian tribes. A court case from 1722 is the first record of a free man of color in the struggling colony. Two years later, a free black man filed suit against a white man. The earliest record of a marriage between two free people of color dates from 1725. Louis Congo, Louisiana's first executioner, was a free black man. Another, Jean Congo, is listed in the 1726 census as a toll collector and keeper of the High Road along Bayou St. John, documenting that some people of color in colonial Louisiana held professional positions. In the winter of 1729-30, the Natchez Indians laid siege to Fort Rosalie at what is now Natchez, Mississippi. Many of the slaves that fought with the French relief force were given their freedom in reward for their service. The earliest surviving record of a slave manumission dates from 1733, when Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, New Orleans's founder, freed two slaves who had been in his service for twenty-six years. It became common practice in Louisiana for elderly slaves to be freed and also for masters, in their wills, to free individual slaves or entire families.

In 1763, France ceded Louisiana to Spain to compensate it for its losses in the Seven Years' War. The colony's transfer marked the beginning of the most liberal period in Louisiana's history in regard to free people of color.  The Spanish enacted a new set of laws called Las siete partidas. These laws offered slaves greater protection from mistreatment by whites and made it easier for them to acquire their freedom. Blacks who were already free could now serve in the militia, buy and sell their own slaves, and were protected from arbitrary police searches. Although the law forbidding mixed-race marriages remained, it was frequently ignored. Free people of color were able to live lives not remarkably different from those of whites of similar social and economic status.

In addition to marriages, extramarital relationships between the races existed. It became an accepted practice in Louisiana for white men (married and unmarried) to take black paramours. These relationships were often longstanding. Some historians have argued that free women of color desired to be the mistresses of white men because it improved their status and security as well as their children's. Dozens of these women in the late eighteenth century acquired valuable property through their relationships with their white partners or fathers.  By one estimate, a quarter of the houses along the main streets of New Orleans were owned by free blacks, many of whom were single women. At Natchitoches in central Louisiana, Marie Thérèse Metoyer (better known as "Coincoin") managed several large estates given to her by a French official with whom she had a 25 years-long liaison and ten children. (Her offspring formed the basis of the large settlement of free people of color that lived along the Cane River.) Successions of prominent white men as late as the 1850s acknowledge and bequeath property or money to their illegitimate children of color.  Historians have also argued that, in other instances, it was the woman who had the economic upper hand in such arrangements when the white man enjoyed lesser financial means than she.