Mixed Race Studies

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…

Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country

University Press of Mississippi
1994
192 pages
Paper ISBN: 0878059490, ISBN 13: 9780878059492

Carl A. Brasseaux, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Cultural and Eco-Tourism
University of Louisiana, Lafayette

Claude F. Oubre

Keith P. Fontenot

Creoles of Color are rightfully among the first families of south-western Louisiana. Yet in both antebellum and postbellum periods they remained a people considered apart from the rest of the population. Historians, demographers, sociologists, and anthropologists have given them only scant attention.

This probing book, focused on the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, is the first to scrutinize this multiracial group through a close study of primary resource materials.

During the antebellum period they were excluded from the state’s three-tiered society–white, free people of color, and slaves. Yet Creoles of Color were a dynamic component in the region’s economy, for they were self-compelled in efforts to become and integral part of the community.

Bayou Folk

Prometheus Books
Originally Published by Houghton Mifflin in 1894
Pages: 286
Paperback ISBN: 1-57392-975-1

Kate Chopin

The author who today is probably best known for her novel The Awakening initially established her literary reputation with short stories about life in rural Louisiana during the late nineteenth century. Born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri, she later married Oscar Chopin, a Creole cotton trader and commission merchant, and lived in and around New Orleans for more than a decade until her husband’s death. During these years, while raising six children on a Southern plantation, Chopin became acquainted with Creoles, Cajuns, and newly freed blacks. After her husband’s death she returned to St. Louis and began writing, drawing from her recent experience in Louisiana to create her fiction.

The stories collected in Bayou Folk present remarkably vivid snapshots of daily life in a now vanished world. Many of them highlight the relations between blacks and whites in a society where the rules of engagement still reflected the entrenched patterns of slavery some two decades after the Civil War. As she was ahead of her time regarding women’s rights in The Awakening, where she depicted a woman unafraid to throw off traditional restraints, Chopin was also farsighted about race relations in Bayou Folk. Perhaps the story Désirée’s Baby about the birth of a mixed-race baby to two ‘white’ parents best expresses the uneasy relationship between blacks and whites in the old South, and the moral outrage of its strict codes against miscegenation.

Chopin’s gifts for capturing the dialects of the region and for telling a compelling story in memorable vignettes provide the reader with a richly rewarding experience.

Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity (review)

The American Indian Quarterly
Volume 33, Number 4
Fall 2009
E-ISSN: 1534-1828
Print ISSN: 0095-182X
DOI: 10.1353/aiq.0.0078

Gary C. Cheek Jr.

Jolivétte, Andrew J., Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity, Lexington Books, 2006.

“Who is white?” Jolivétte asks in the first chapter of his recent Louisiana Creoles, posing a controversial question that concerns both racial and ethnic identity. Part of the issue, he states, is a matter of family history, and the other is based on choice. Here he explores ideas about racial and ethnic identity, mixing and definition. At its core the book discusses the internal struggle of Louisiana Creoles with mixed heritage to define themselves among family and friends, within local communities, and among Americans at large. The author then explores how members of Creole communities have fought to acknowledge their unique blend of cultural traditions and heritage, particularly by including Native American lineage, to forge a multiracial ethnic identity and why they choose to define themselves as such.

The study approaches questions about race, ethnicity, and choice both sociologically and anthropologically. Jolivétte includes portions of his research tools in the appendices. These include a survey, interview questions, and a list of Creole organizations, periodicals…

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