Mixed Race Studies

The Free People of Color In Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Slave Societies

Journal of Social History
Volume 3, Number 4 (1970)
pages 406-430
DOI: 10.1353/jsh/3.4.406

Laura Foner

Recently historians of slavery in the Americas have been engaged in a heated debate over the widely differing racial patterns that emerged in the slave societies of this hemisphere. Despite their often bitter disagreements over the origins of these patterns, most agree that it was the treatment and position of the ex-slave in these societies which distinguished one racial pattern from another.

In Portuguese and Spanish America the racial and social pattern allowed the ex-slave to gain acceptance in free society and even to move from a lower to a higher social level through economic advancement. Such a change in social status was possible even in a system of racial ranking that placed whites on top and blacks on the bottom, because of the absence of a strict color line. Not only did these slave societies have many racial categories between black and white, but also a man’s status in society was not as much defined by membership in one of these racial groups as by his economic success.

In the British and French West Indies the racial lines were more sharply defined, and the same kind of racial mobility did not exist. Yet there the ex-slave could fit into a three-caste pattern which allowed a substantial group of free mixed bloods with many privileges to exist as an intermediate caste between whites and blacks.

Although in all these societies the enslavement of an easily distinguishable racial grouping produced certain racial distinctions between white and colored free men, in the United States these distinctions took on a form unique in the hemisphere. There all Negroes—free and slave—were cut off from the rest of society and confined to a distinctly separate and lower caste. This was accomplished both by increasing restrictions on manumission, which confined the Negro as much as possible to a slave status, and by a whole series of legal and social restrictions which rigidly excluded the free Negro from white society. Almost everywhere in the United States even the smallest amount of Negro blood was enough to make a man a Negro and therefore a member of a subordinate caste.

Unsuspecting travelers in the antebellum South were therefore startled to find that the deep South state of Louisiana had a large and privileged free colored community, not unlike the free colored communities of many West Indian islands. Louisiana’s free colored community was not only the biggest in the deep South. but its members had a social, economic, and legal position far superior to that of free Negroes in most other areas of the South, even whose in which the free Negro population was substantial. Travelers were struck by the unusual degree of wealth, education, and social standing of the Louisiana free Negro. They noted “Negroes in purple and fine linen,” “pretty and accomplished young women,” and ‘”opulent, intelligent colored planters.” It was not only this elegant elite which distinguished the free colored population, as only a minority belonged to it, for although they did not live in luxury the typical members of the free colored community nevertheless generally found employment at some skilled occupation. In 1860 only one tenth of the free colored population of New Orleans were classified as common laborers” In fact the free Negroes had a near monopoly of certain trades, including those of mechanic, carpenter, shoemaker, barber, and tailor…

…In 1850 the mulattoes and others of mixed blood formed about eighty percent of Louisiana’s total free Negro population.” Some of them came from stable families which had been free for generations,” But almost all had their origins in some extramarital union (by this time perhaps quite far removed) between a white man and a black woman. The beginnings of this long-established practice dated back to the early eighteenth century when Louisiana was first being settled by the French. The small group of early settlers consisted mostly of those “in the pay of … the King” and especially garrison soldiers. Among the hardships faced by these men in their pioneering work of founding a colony was a scarcity of women. They solved the problem, according to the French Governor Bienville, by running “in the woods after Indian girls.”…

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The “Quadroon-Plaçage” Myth of Antebellum New Orleans: Anglo-American (Mis)interpretations of a French-Caribbean Phenomenon

Journal of Social History
Published Online: 2011-11-13
DOI: 10.1093/jsh/shr059

Kenneth Aslakson, Assistant Professor of History
Union College, Schenectady, New York

Although Thomas Jefferson’s likely affair with his slave, Sally Hemmings, has sparked controversy since James Callender first made it public in 1802, no place has attracted more attention with regard to miscegenation than Louisiana, and particularly its chief city of New Orleans. The general consensus holds that the inhabitants of New Orleans were unusually open about interracial relationships (or at least heterosexual ones in which the man was white), due to the cultural influence of the French and Spanish, and nothing epitomized this more than the city’s famed “quadroon balls,” dances open to young free women of mixed ancestry and white gentlemen of means. According to lore, the “lovely and refined” quadroon woman came to the ball “dressed in the most fashionable gown and chaperoned by her mother” looking for a wealthy white gentleman. “After dancing with a man, if the girl were attracted, he would be allowed to speak with her mother to make ‘arrangements’… [which] would include a furnished home that [the woman of color] would own and financial arrangements for her and any children.” The relationship thus established was called plaçage and the woman une placée. The relationship was temporary and ended when the man took a white wife. Nevertheless, a woman of color greatly benefitted from the patronage of an elite white man and often used the money bestowed upon her to establish herself in business “usually as a dressmaker, milliner, or by operating a boarding house.” Thus, the “quadroon balls” and plaçage relationships “provided a comfortable lifestyle for the quadroon ladies who had very limited options during the period.”

While this story of the quadroon balls and plaçage is enticing, it is based on scanty evidence, and, therefore, this paper will refer to it as the quadroon-plaçage myth. To be sure, something like the…

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Mulatto: Less than Human

Indian Country Today
2012-01-16

Julianne Jennings
Arizona State University

Race is not simply about the physical description of human variation. Since its origin in Western science in the eighteenth century, race has been used both to classify and rank human beings according to inferior and superior types. Although race as a concept developed in the West during the age of Enlightenment, prominent Enlightenment thinkers—Carolus Linnaeus, Johann Blumenbach, Lewis Henry Morgan and Samuel George Morton, among others—greatly influenced European ideas about economics, government and science as well as race. Concepts of race eventually spread to many parts of the non-Western world through international commerce, including the slave trade, and later colonial conquest and administration—which have used it as a tool of social division, even among “mixed-race” peoples.

For centuries, a great amount of blood-mixing has occurred, creating “Creole,” “Mestizo,” and other “colored” populations of the New World colonies and possessions of Europe. But what do these labels mean? Haitian anthropologist, Antenor Firmin observes “that human beings have always interbred whenever they came in contact with one another, so that the very notion of races is questionable. Indeed, if not for this fact of the essential unity of humanity, it would be difficult to explain the eugenic crossbreeding that have made the planet sparkle with more human colors than there are nuances in a rainbow”…

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Derek Jeter embodies MLK’s dream

ESPN New York
2012-01-16

Wallace Matthews

Biracial Yankees captain a symbol of the America Martin Luther King once envisioned

When the average person thinks of Derek Jeter, he or she is likely to think of the 3,000 hits, or the five World Series rings, or the highlight reel full of great plays he has made over the past 16 years for the New York Yankees.

They are likely to linger on the countless clutch hits he has delivered in key moments, or the 2000 World Series MVP, or the fact he has been captain of the Yankees for nearly a decade and the face of the franchise for considerably longer than that.

It is a safe bet that for most people, one of the last things they think about when they think about Derek Jeter is his race. Or, more correctly, his races.

To all the remarkable accomplishments Jeter has achieved in his Cooperstown-bound baseball career, add one that few of us ever bother to think about—that Jeter is the product of a mixed-race marriage, a happenstance that at one time would have caused him to suffer hardship, if not scorn, from many, but now is just another fact in the Derek Jeter biography.

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, it is important to understand that of all the things Derek Jeter is, one of the most significant is that he is a symbol of the kind of America Dr. King hoped one day to live in…

…Jeter, always wary of discussing topics outside of his comfort zone—the baseball diamond—declined a request to be interviewed for this story.

 But Dr. Harry Edwards, a sociologist and black activist of the 1960s who has spoken and written extensively on the subject of race and professional athletics, explained Jeter’s appeal as a combination both of his unique attributes as an athlete and individual, and as a sign that the United States, throughout its history often bitterly divided along racial, ethnic and territorial lines, is moving toward an era of diversity and inclusion.

“I think it’s absolutely appropriate in the 21st century that a Derek Jeter should be the face of the premier baseball team in this country,” Edwards said. “When you talk about leadership and production and consistency and durability over the years, what he has achieved and what he has accomplished, and more than that, the way that he has done it is just absolutely phenomenal. He is one of our real athletic heroes and role models to the point that his race or ethnicity does not matter.”…

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