Transition: Louisiana's Territorial Period, 1803-1812

At the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, at least one in six of the roughly 8,000 people living in New Orleans was a free person of color. The city's population, both white and black, increased significantly between 1791 and 1810 due to an influx of émigrés displaced by the Haitian Revolution (led by Toussaint Louverture, a free man of color). The first official U. S. census of Orleans Territory in 1810 counted 7,585 free persons of color, compared to 34,311 whites and a total population of 76,556.

The influx of black refugees from Haiti heightened anxieties among Louisiana's white population. Over the previous twenty years, the colony/territory had only narrowly escaped several slave rebellions. Free people of color, it was argued, would only incite further unrest. The situation was made worse by the departure in 1803 of the Spanish, who had treated the group, for the most part, with a liberal hand. Territorial governor William C. C. Claiborne was pressured not only by President Thomas Jefferson's administration, but also by Louisiana's French-speaking white inhabitants to reduce the number of free men of color who served in the  militia. Some wanted to see a reduction in the size of the free black population altogether.

In 1806, the territorial legislature passed an act (never fully enforced) prohibiting free black males from entering Louisiana and ordering those over the age of fifteen who had been born elsewhere to leave (Louisiana's native free people of color had been granted U. S. citizenship in 1803). In 1812, one year after the failed German Coast uprising (the largest slave rebellion in U. S. history), free black men were denied the right to vote. Throughout this period and until the abolition of slavery made their separate legal status obsolete, free persons of color were required to carry passes, observe curfews, and to have their racial status designated in all public records.