Free people of color

[1] They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique.

These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry.

[2] The term gens de couleur libres (French: [ʒɑ̃ də kulœʁ libʁ] ("free people of color") was commonly used in France's West Indian colonies prior to the abolition of slavery.

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.

In a 1780 census, there was also a group listed as "indiens sauvages", which Haitian historians believe were the native Arawak and Taino that were known to live in tiny reclusive mountain communities at this point.

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of independent Haiti and a leader of the Revolution, 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.

Also often working as artisans, shopkeepers or landowners, the gens de couleur frequently became quite prosperous, and many prided themselves on their European culture and descent.

Most gens de couleur libres were reared as Roman Catholic, also part of French culture, and many denounced the Vodoun religion brought with slaves from Africa.

Under the ancien régime, despite the provisions of equality nominally established in the Code Noir, the gens de couleur were limited in their freedoms.

With growing resentment, the working-class whites monopolized assembly participation and caused the free people of color to look to France for legislative assistance.

By doing this, the feud helped to disintegrate class discipline and propel the slave population in the colony to seek further inclusion and liberties in society.

After their loss in that conflict, many wealthy gens de couleur left as refugees to France, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the United States and elsewhere.

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.

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').

[7] 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.

[10] In cases where free women of color did enter extramarital relationships with white men, such unions were overwhelmingly lifelong and exclusive.

[11][12] As in Saint-Domingue, the free people of color developed as a separate class between the colonial French and Spanish and the mass of black slaves.

[13] Some historians suggest that free people of color made New Orleans the cradle of the civil rights movement in the United States.

After the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory, Creoles in New Orleans and the region worked to integrate the military en masse.

[14] William C. C. Claiborne, appointed by Thomas Jefferson as governor of the Territory of Orleans, formally accepted delivery of the French colony on December 20, 1803.

[citation needed] Free men of color had been armed members of the militia for decades during both Spanish and French rule of the colony of Louisiana.

[16] See, e.g., the February 20, 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.

[citation needed] 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 ..."[19] 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.

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.

The master never made their freedom official, as in the case of Margaret Morgan, who had been living as a free person in Pennsylvania but was captured in 1837 and sold together with her children under claims that they were still slaves according to the laws of Maryland.

[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.

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.

The Cajuns often have some ancestry tracing back to French colonists who were expelled from Acadia (in eastern Canada) and resettled in Louisiana in the 18th century, generally outside the New Orleans area.