Golden Age: The Early Antebellum Era, 1812-1830

Despite the restrictions imposed during the territorial period, the granting of statehood in 1812 coincided with the beginning of the "golden age" of free people of color in Louisiana. Though many left for Europe, the Caribbean, or Latin America, others stayed behind, lured by Louisiana's booming economy (at the outbreak of the Civil War, the state was the richest in the Union and New Orleans the third largest city). Free colored men and women could own, inherit, and sell property, including slaves. Large plantations on the outskirts of New Orleans were sold off and subdivided to form new neighborhoods where free blacks purchased plots of land alongside whites. Many became involved in important New Orleans social and cultural institutions such as opera, theaters, balls, benevolent groups, and the church. Louisiana's free black population rose from just under 11,000 in 1820 to about 25,000 in 1840, keeping pace with the rise of white and slave populations and representing about seven percent of the state's total population.

Free people of color worked in many of the trades that white people worked in, ranging from shopkeeping and general unskilled labor to more specialized lines of work such as carpentry, stonecutting, and metalworking. Historian David Rankin determined from the 1850 census that of all American cities, New Orleans "had the highest percentage of free black males employed as artisans, professionals, and entrepreneurs, and the lowest in 'low opportunity' occupations like laborer, mariner, gardener, servant, and waiter. New Orleans also contained more than a quarter of all free men of color employed as professionals, managers, artists, clerks, and scientists in the fifteen largest cities in the United States."

It is for their contributions to the arts that Louisiana's free people of color have come to be best known. Many distinguished themselves as authors. Armand Lanusse published Les Cenelles, an anthology of poetry by free men of color, in 1845. One contributor to the work, Victor Séjour, is regarded as Louisiana's greatest French-language playwright. Jules Lion, one of Louisiana's first lithographers, was a native of France who came to New Orleans around 1830; he is thought to have introduced photography to the state. Eugène and Daniel Warburg, sons of a German-Jewish real estate speculator and his slave, became highly regarded sculptors and marble workers, carving many of the elaborate tombs for which New Orleans is so well known. Although the composers Basile Barès and Edmond Dédé would write their finest works after the Civil War, they grew up during the "golden age" of free people of color in New Orleans and were influenced by the city's mixture of African, Caribbean, and European cultural traditions. Barès also published works as a slave, only gaining his freedom shortly before his master's death, after which Barès continued to run the music business his former master had owned.

A few free people of color were highly successful in business. The merchant and real estate broker Bernard Soulié doubled his capital from $50,000 to $100,000 in the 1850s. A decade earlier, Eulalie de Mandeville Macarty acquired her personal fortune of $150,000 through a combination of gifts from a white lover, her family's wealth, and her own dry goods business. Pierre Casanave, the Haitian-born clerk of Jewish businessman and philanthropist Judah Touro, used the $10,000 legacy that his employer left him to set himself up as a commission merchant and undertaker. By 1864, he was said to be worth $100,000. Thomy Lafon amassed perhaps the greatest fortune of all—half a million dollars—through brokering and property speculation and was among Louisiana's most prominent philanthropists, contributing to charities, schools, hospitals, and antislavery societies. Another philanthropist, Marie Couvent, the African-born widow of the wealthy black businessman Bernard Couvent, left money in her will when she died in 1837 that was used to found the Institute Catholique, one of the first schools in the United States to provide a free education to children of African descent.  The daughter of one of the oldest families of free people of color in New Orleans, Henriette Delille, made a name for herself as the foundress of the Sisters of the Holy Family, the second oldest Catholic religious order for women of color. The Sisters worked with the poor, the sick, the elderly, and among slaves, founded a school for girls in 1850, and opened a hospital for needy black Orleanians.

Louis Charles Roudanez, trained as a doctor in France and New England, owned a successful medical practice in New Orleans in the 1850s, treating both white and black patients. In 1864, he began publishing the French-language La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orleans, the nation's first African-American daily newspaper. Norbert Rillieux, though not a businessman, made an important contribution to the business life of Louisiana when he invented, in 1843, a new technique of sugar refining that revolutionized the industry.

In recent years, historians have begun to look beyond New Orleans at free black populations in other parts of Louisiana, where, by all accounts, they were just as successful. The first record of a free black living on the prairies of southwestern Louisiana is from 1766. The 1774 census of the Opelousas district indicates that this same man owned two slaves and fifty cattle, a notable fact at a time when, according to historian Carl Brasseaux, only 22 percent of households in this part of Louisiana owned slaves and only 18 percent of freeholders possessed fifty cattle. In 1810, white males in the area around Opelousas outnumbered white females by a margin of almost 500, resulting in liaisons with slaves that evolved into common-law marriages in which the female was eventually emancipated.

Many free black households were controlled by matriarchs. Marie Simien, in 1818, owned nine slaves and more than 7,500 acres of land, including 1,400 acres of prime farmland in St. Landry Parish. The largest family of free black planters and merchants outside of New Orleans was the Metoyer family of Natchitoches Parish, which intermarried with other black planters. In 1830, the family owned nearly eight percent of the slaves in Natchitoches Parish. Some individuals owned no land or slaves but worked as plantation overseers. Aaron Griggs, for example, worked on Antonio Patrick Walsh's plantation in West Feliciana Parish in the 1820s. Others lived in towns, typically working as builders. Free blacks were living in Baton Rouge at least as early as 1782. In 1850, eighty of the 159 free blacks in Lafayette Parish were living in Vermilionville (now Lafayette), and nearly half of the free black population of St. Martin Parish lived in the towns of St. Martinville and New Iberia. Much of the free black population of the "bayou country" fled in the 1850s as racial tensions mounted, and many of those who remained were driven out in 1859 by bands of white vigilantes.