Free people of color

By the late 18th century prior to the Haitian Revolution, Saint-Domingue was legally divided into three distinct groups: free whites (who were divided socially between the plantation-class grands blancs and the working-class petits blancs); freedmen (affranchis), and slaves. More than half of the affranchis were gens de couleur libres; others were considered freed black slaves. In addition, maroons (runaway slaves) were sometimes able to establish independent small communities and a kind of freedom in the mountains, along with remnants of Haiti's original Taino people. A large group of surviving Native Taino's also supported the Haitian Revolution, they were known as "indien esclaves" which numbered about 5,000. In a 1780 census, there was also a group listed as “indiens sauvages”, which Haitian historians believe were the native Arawak and Taïno that were known to live in tiny reclusive mountain communities at this point.

Dessalines talked about people whom he called “Rouges” (reds), or sometimes “Incas” in his letters. When they were spoken about in context of the war, he makes mention of cooperation between Africans and Natives in maroon communities that plotted against colonists on the southern peninsula. He’s also spoken about “Incas among his men” showing him secret burial quarters in the Artibonite valley that could be used by rebels as shelter and storage. There were 3,000 known Native peoples (both “esclaves” and “sauvages”) living in Haiti in the years before independence, according to a 1802 colonial census.

Dessalines did not forget these people and their sacrifices against Spain and now, France. He named the Haitian army “the Incas”, “the Army of the Sun” and eventually “the Indigenous Army” in honor of them. He also renamed the island “Ayiti,” its pre-Columbian name.

When slavery was ended in the colony in 1793, by action of the French government following the French Revolution, there were approximately 28,000 anciens libres ("free before") in Saint-Domingue. The term was used to distinguish those who were already free, compared to those liberated by the general emancipation of 1793. About 16,000 of these anciens libres were gens de couleur libres. Another 12,000 were affranchis, black slaves who had either purchased their freedom or had been given it by their masters for various reasons.

Free people of color were an important part generally in the history of the Caribbean during the period of slavery and afterward. Initially descendants of French men and black (African and Indian primarily) slaves (and later French men and free women of color), and often marrying within their own mixed-race community, some achieved wealth and power. By the late eighteenth century, most free people of color in Saint-Domingue were native born and part of colored families that had been free for generations.[3]

Free people of color were leaders in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which achieved independence in 1804 as the Republic of Haiti. In Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and other French Caribbean colonies before slavery was abolished, the free people of color were known as gens de couleur libres, and affranchis. Comparable mixed-race groups became an important part of the populations of the British colony of Jamaica, the Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Portuguese colony of Brazil.

Free woman of color with quadroon daughter. Late 18th-century collage painting, New Orleans.

Free people of color played an important role in the history of New Orleans and the southern area of New France, both when the area was controlled by the French and Spanish, and after its acquisition by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase.

When French settlers and traders first arrived in these colonies, the men frequently took Native American women as their concubines or common-law wives (see Marriage 'à la façon du pays'). When African slaves were imported to the colony, many colonists took African women as concubines or wives. In the colonial period of French and Spanish rule, men tended to marry later after becoming financially established. Later, when more white families had settled or developed here, some young French men or ethnic French Creoles still took mixed-race women as mistresses, often known as placées.

Popular stereotypes portray such unions as formal, financial transactions arranged between a white man and the mother of the mixed-race mistress.[4] Supposedly, the young woman of mixed European and African ancestry would attend dances known as "quadroon balls" to meet white gentlemen willing to provide for her and any children she bears from their union. The relationship would end as soon as the man married properly. According to legend, free girls of color were raised by their mothers to become concubines for white men, as they themselves once were. [5]

However, evidence suggests that on account of the community's piety[6] by the late 18th century, free women of color usually preferred the legitimacy of marriage with other free men of color. [7] In cases where free women of color did enter extramarital relationships with white men, such unions were overwhelmingly lifelong and exclusive. Many of these white men remained legal bachelors for life. This form of interracial cohabitation was often viewed as no different than the modern conception of a common-law marriage.[8][9]

As in Saint-Domingue, the free people of color developed as a separate class between the colonial French and Spanish and the mass of enslaved black African workers. They often achieved education, practiced artisan trades, and gained some measure of wealth; they spoke French and practiced Catholicism. Many also developed a syncretic Christianity. At one time the center of their residential community in New Orleans was the French Quarter. Many were artisans who owned property and their own businesses. They formed a social category distinct from both whites and slaves, and maintained their own society into the period after United States annexation.[10]

Some historians suggest that free people of color made New Orleans the cradle of the civil rights movement in the United States. They achieved more rights than did free people of color or free blacks in the Thirteen Colonies, including serving in the armed militia. After the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory, Creoles in New Orleans and the region worked to integrate the military en masse.[11] William C. C. Claiborne, appointed by Thomas Jefferson as governor of the Territory of Orleans, formally accepted delivery of the French colony on 20 December 1803.

Free men of color had been armed members of the militia for decades during both Spanish and French rule of the colony of Louisiana. They volunteered their services and pledged their loyalty to Claiborne and to their newly adopted country.[12] In early 1804, the new U.S. administration in New Orleans under Governor Claiborne was faced with a dilemma previously unknown in the United States, the integration of the military by incorporating entire units of established "colored" militia.[13] See, e.g., the 20 February 1804 letter from Secretary of War Henry Dearborn to Claiborne, stating that "it would be prudent not to increase the Corps, but to diminish, if it could be done without giving offense." [14]

A decade later during the War of 1812, the militia which consisted of free men of color volunteered to join the force mustered by Andrew Jackson in preparation for the Battle of New Orleans, when the British began landing troops outside the city in December 1814 in preparation for an invasion of the city. The battle resulted in a decisive American victory, in which black soldiers played a crucial part. However, many black troops who had been promised freedom in exchange for service were forcibly returned to slavery after the battle's conclusion.[15]

Free West Indian Dominicans, c. 1770

There was relatively little manumission of slaves until after the revolution. Throughout the slave societies of the Americas, some slave owners took advantage of the power relationships to use female slaves sexually; sometimes they had extended relationships of concubinage. However, in the Thirteen Colonies, the children of these relationships were not usually emancipated.

South Carolina diarist Mary Chesnut wrote in the mid-19th century that "like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children ..."[16] In some places, especially in the French and Spanish Caribbean and South American slave societies, the ethnic European father might acknowledge the relationship and his children. Some were common-law marriages of affection. Slaveholders were more likely to free their mixed-race children of these relationships than they were to free other slaves. They also sometimes freed the enslaved women who were their concubines.

Many slave societies allowed masters to free their slaves. As the population of color became larger and the white ruling class felt more threatened by potential instability, they worked through their governments to increase restrictions on manumissions. These usually included taxes, requirements that some socially useful reason be cited for manumission, and a requirement that a newly freed person demonstrate a means of independent support. Masters might free their slaves for a variety of reasons, but the most common was a family relationship between master and slave.

Slaves sometimes gained a measure of freedom by purchasing themselves, when allowed to save some portion of earnings if leased out or selling produce. The master determined if one had to pay market or reduced value. In other cases, relatives who were already free and earning money purchased others. Sometimes masters, or the government, would free slaves without payment as a reward for some notable service; a slave who revealed slave conspiracies for uprisings was sometimes rewarded with freedom.

Many people who lived as free within the slave societies did not have formal liberty papers. In some cases these were refugees, who hid in the towns among free people of color and tried to maintain a low profile. In other cases they were "living as free" with the permission of their master, sometimes in return for payment of rent or a share of money they earned by trades. The master never made their freedom official.

By the early 19th century, Maryland had numerous free blacks, some freed after the American Revolution because of their masters' ideals. Maryland bordered the free state of Pennsylvania, which had passed gradual abolition. The Morgan family consisted of Margaret, her husband Jerry, and their two children who lived in Maryland. The family was free, but Margaret did not have papers or documents verifying her freedom. This did not stop her from enjoying the freedom she was given by her parents, who were free when she was born. According to Patricia Reid in the journal Slavery & Abolition: "Margaret openly exercised freedom by living independently, traveling freely and, most importantly, controlling her reproductive capacities and familial responsibilities."[17] Despite their relative freedom, the Morgan family had to move to Pennsylvania to avoid the laws enacted in Maryland. The laws in Maryland required free blacks to register with the court to prove they were free. The only choice the Morgans had was to leave the state. The Morgans enjoyed life in Pennsylvania, which was a free state. Slave catchers became common after years of free blacks and fugitive slaves escaping to Pennsylvania. Many slave catchers would kidnap free blacks whether they were fugitive slaves or not, taking them back to Maryland as they did with the Morgan family. The family was kidnapped, but Jerry was released due to his deed of manumission from Maryland. Margaret and the children were taken to Maryland to be tried. Reid notes: "In Harford County, Margaret and the children were tried and found to be fugitive slaves."[17] Margaret and the children were sold further south.

If women had children, it was hard for them to be as mobile as men. Women like Margaret were sometimes captured and arrested whether they were free or not. Reid writes: "Southern laws allowed jailers to sell the suspected runaway who failed to prove his or her free status to the Deep South."[18] Margaret and her children were sold deeper into the South, far away from her husband. Jerry tried to get his family back by asking the governor of Pennsylvania for help. When he boarded a ship to travel to Columbia, the whites on the boat harassed him. He tried to escape them. He died after hitting the wall since he was tied up and fell under the boat. There were no criminal charges against the whites on the boat. Reid again: "The discriminatory Pennsylvania state laws had stripped free blacks from bringing criminal charges against whites in court."[19] Free states sometimes also had discriminatory restrictions and laws against free blacks.

Free people of color filled an important niche in the economy of slave societies. In most places they worked as artisans and small retail merchants in the towns. In many places, especially in the American South, there were restrictions on people of color owning slaves and agricultural land. But many free blacks lived in the countryside and some became major slaveholders. In the antebellum years, individual slaves who were freed often stayed on or near the plantations where they or their ancestors had been slaves, and where they had extended family. Masters often used free blacks as plantation managers or overseers, especially if the master had a family relationship with the mixed-race man.[20]

In the early 19th century, societies required apprenticeships for free blacks to ensure they developed a means of support. For instance, in North Carolina, "By the late 1830s, then, county courts could apprentice orphans, fatherless or abandoned children, illegitimate children, and free black children whose parents were not employed.[21]

However, the number of apprenticeships declined as the number of free blacks increased. In some Southern states after the Nat Turner slave rebellion of 1831, the legislatures passed laws that forbade the teaching of free blacks or slaves to read and write, which was a requirement for having an apprenticeship. There was fear if blacks could read and write, they might start slave revolts and rebellions. Blacks were not allowed to apprentice as an editor or work in a printing press. Despite the restrictions of some apprenticeships, many free blacks benefited from their time as an apprentice.

In Caribbean colonies, governments sometimes hired free people of color as rural police to hunt down runaway slaves and keep order among the slave population. From the view of the white master class in places such as Saint-Domingue or Jamaica, this was a critical function in a society in which the population of enslaved people on large plantations vastly outnumbered whites.[22]

In places where law or social custom permitted it, some free people of color managed to acquire good agricultural land and slaves, and become planters themselves. Free blacks owned plantations in almost all the slave societies of the Americas. In the United States, free people of color may have owned the most property in Louisiana, as the French and Spanish colony had developed a distinct creole or mixed-race class before its acquisition by the United States. A man who had a relationship with a woman of color often also arranged for a transfer of wealth to her and their children, whether through deed of land and property to the mother and/or children under the system of plaçage, or by arranging for an apprenticeship to a trade for their mixed-race children, which provided them a better opportunity to make a skilled living, or by educating sons in France and easing their way into the military. In St. Domingue by the late colonial period, gens de couleur owned about one-third of the land and about one-quarter of the slaves, mostly in the southern part of the island.[23]

When the end of slavery came, the distinction between former free coloreds and former slaves persisted in some societies. Because of advantages in the social capital of education and experience, free people of color often became leaders for the newly freed people. In Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture had gained freedom before he became a leader in the slave rebellion, but he is not believed to have been of mixed race.

In the United States, many of the African Americans elected as state and local officials during Reconstruction in the South had been free in the South before the Civil War.[24] Other new leaders were educated men of color from the North whose families had long been free and who went to the South to work and help the freedmen. Some were elected to office.

Many descendants of the gens de couleur, or free people of color, of the Louisiana area celebrate their culture and heritage through a New Orleans-based Louisiana Creole Research Association (LA Créole).[25] The term "Créole" is not synonymous with "free people of color" or gens de couleur libre, but many members of LA Créole have traced their genealogies through those lines. Today, the multiracial descendants of the French and Spanish colonists, Africans, and other ethnicities are widely known as Louisiana Creoles. Louisiana's Governor Bobby Jindal signed Act 276 on 14 June 2013, creating the "prestige" license plate, "I'm Creole," honoring Louisiana Creoles' contributions and heritage.[26]

The terms "Créole" and "Cajun" have sometimes been confused in Louisiana, as members of each group generally had ancestors who were French-speaking; but the terms are not synonymous. The Cajuns are descendants of French colonists from Acadia (in eastern Canada) who were resettled to Louisiana in the 18th century, generally outside the New Orleans area. Generations later, some of their culture relates to that of the Louisiana Creoles, but they are distinct. Members of each group may be multi-ethnic.

• Anne Rossignol (1730-1810), African, Caribbean and American slave trader, referred to as the first free colored voluntary immigrant to the United States
• Barzillai Lew (1743-1822), born free in 1743, served in the Continental Army
• Julien Raimond (1744–1801), leader from Saint-Domingue of the campaign in France and the colony to extend full citizenship to free men of color following the French Revolution
• Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–1799), composer and swordsman in late 18th-century France
• Salem Poor (1747-1802), born a slave in 1747; purchased his freedom and joined the Continental Army
• Peter Salem (с. 1750-1816), born a slave c. 1750 in Massachusetts; freed by his master to fight for the Patriot cause in the American Revolutionary War
• Vincent Ogé (1755 – 1791) was a wealthy free man of mixed-race descent who instigated a revolt against white colonial authority in French Saint-Domingue.
• André Rigaud (1761 – 1811) was the leading mulatto military leader during the Haitian Revolution.
• Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (1762-1806), father of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, was the son of a noble French general in Saint Domingue and a slave woman. His father took him to France at age 14 and gave him an education, helping him enter the military
• John Chavis, (с. 1763-1838), born free c. 1762 in North Carolina, a teacher and preacher among both white and free people of color until the mid-19th century, when laws restricted free people of color
• Alexandre Pétion (1770 – 1818), President of the Republic of Haiti from 1807 until his death in 1818.
• William Costin (c. 1780-1842), born c. 1780 Fairfax County, Virginia; lived in Washington, D.C.; in 1821 brought legal challenge to African surety bond laws.
• Zabeau Bellanton (fl. 1782), businesswoman of Saint-Domingue and one of the richest free people of color in the colony
• William Ellison (c. 1790-1861), born a slave c. 1790; became a wealthy businessman and slaveholder
• Richard Hill (Jamaica) (1795-1872), Jamaican lawyer, naturalist, politician, educator and administrator
• Louis Celeste Lecesne (1796/8-1847), campaigner for equal rights for free people of color in Jamaica
• Elisabeth Dieudonné Vincent (1798-1883) Haitian-born free woman of color and businesswoman
• Edward Jordon (1800-1869), Jamaican campaigner for equal rights, newspaper editor, mayor of Kingston
• Aspasia Cruvellier Mirault (1800 - 1857), American entrepreneur
• Eliza Seymour Lee (1800-1874), American pastry chef and restaurateur
• Robert Osborn (Jamaica) (1800-1878), co-founder of The Watchman with Jordon, politician, campaigner for equal rights
• Marie Laveau (1801-1881), early 19th-century Voodoo practitioner
• Thomas Day (c. 1801-1861), born free c. 1801 in Virginia. Famous furniture maker/craftsman in Caswell County, North Carolina
• Mary Seacole (1805-1881), Jamaican nurse who served in the Crimean War
• Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894), American-French engineer and inventor
• William Gustavus Brown (1809-1883), Jamaican-born general, who commanded British forces in China and Hong Kong
• Robert Purvis (1810-1898), born free in Charleston, became active abolitionist in Philadelphia, supported the Underground Railroad and used inherited wealth to create services for African Americans
• Charles Henry Langston (1817-1892), abolitionist and activist in Ohio and Kansas
• George William Gordon (1820-1865), Jamaican politician and campaigner for the rights of black people
• Edmond Dédé (1827-1901), Louisiana-born French composer
• John Mercer Langston (1829-1897), abolitionist, politician and activist in Ohio, Washington, DC; and Virginia, first dean of Howard University Law Department, first president of Virginia State Univ., first black elected to US Congress from Virginia (1888)
• Jennie Carter (c. 1830–1881), American writer
• Cubah Cornwallis (d. 1848), Jamaican "doctress", who nursed Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson back to health
• Amanda America Dickson (1849-1893), 19th-century heiress through her white father, socialite and estate owner in Georgia

• Affranchi
• Mulattoes
• Free Negro
• Colored
• Creoles of color
• Louisiana Creole people
• Mulatto Haitian
• Mulattoes
• Signare

• Sister Dorothea Olga McCants, translation of Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire
• Mary Gehman, The Free People of Color of New Orleans: An Introduction (New Orleans, 1994)
• John Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860–1880 (Chicago, 1973)
• New Orleans Architecture: The Creole Faubourgs (Gretna, 1984), Sally Kittredge Evans

• The Feast of All Saints is a historical novel by Anne Rice, focusing on the gens de couleur libres in New Orleans. The novel was adapted as a TV mini-series of the same name.
• The Benjamin January mysteries is a series of historical murder mystery novels by Barbara Hambly set in and around New Orleans whose main character, the eponymous Benjamin January, is a free man of color.

• Feast of All Saints, IMDb
• Digital Library on American Slavery: Browse Subjects – Free People of Color The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• Free Men of Color Leave Indelible Mark on New Orleans Culture (FrenchQuarter.com)
• Gens de Couleur Libres (New Orleans Public Library)
• Gens de Couleur Libres (Frenchcreoles.com)
• Le Musée de f.p.c. (The Museum for Free People of Color)