Plaçage

Plaçage was a recognized extralegal system in French and Spanish slave colonies of North America (including the Caribbean) by which ethnic European men entered into civil unions with non-Europeans of African, Native American and mixed-race descent.

[1] It also took place in the Latin-influenced cities of Natchez and Biloxi, Mississippi; Mobile, Alabama; St. Augustine and Pensacola, Florida;[2] as well as Saint-Domingue (now the Republic of Haiti).

[3][4] Genetic evidence strongly supports the historical record of mass intermarriages between white men and women of color in New Orleans.

[8] The custom of sending brides from France was therefore discontinued in the French West Indies in the mid-18th century, which benefitted the development of a placage system there.

[8] France also relocated young women orphans known as King's Daughters (French: filles du roi) to their colonies for marriage to both Canada and Louisiana.

Historian Joan Martin maintains that there is little documentation that "casket girls", considered among the ancestors of white French Creoles, were brought to Louisiana.

White male colonists, often the younger sons of noblemen, military men, and planters, who needed to accumulate some wealth before they could marry, had women of color as consorts before marriage or in some cases after their first wives died.

Particularly during the Spanish colonial era, a woman might be listed as owning slaves, who were sometimes relatives whom she intended to free after she had earned enough money to buy their freedom.

[11][12] The women in those relationships often worked to develop assets: acquiring property, running a legitimate rooming-house, or a small business as a hairdresser, marchande (female street or country merchant/vendor), or a seamstress.

They wrote that the French Creoles, in the sense of having long been native to Louisiana, were ethnic Europeans who were threatened, like other Southern whites, by the spectre of race-mixing.

She was born at the frontier outpost of Natchitoches on Cane River in August 1742 as a slave of the post founder, the controversial explorer Louis Juchereau de St. Denis.

In 1778, he freed her after the parish priest filed charges against Coincoin as a "public concubine" and threatened to have her sold at New Orleans if they did not end their relationship.

In setting Coincoin aside, Métoyer donated to her his interest in 80 arpents, about 68 acres (28 ha) of unpatented land, adjacent to his plantation, to help support their free-born offspring.

She also manufactured medicine, a skill shared by her formerly enslaved sister Marie Louise dite Mariotte and likely one acquired from their African-born parents.

With this money, she progressively bought the freedom of four of her first five children and several grandchildren, before investing in three African-born slaves to provide the physical labor that became more difficult as she aged.

On that piney-woods tract of 800 arpents (667 ac) on Old Red River, about 5 mi from her farmstead, she set up a vacherie (a ranch) and engaged a Spaniard to tend her cattle.

Shortly before her death in 1816, Coincoin sold her homestead and divided her remaining property (her piney-woods land, the three African slaves, and their offspring) among her own progeny.

A mid-nineteenth century dwelling, now dubbed the Coincoin-Prudhomme House although it was not the actual site of her residence, commemorates her within the Cane River National Heritage Area.

[13][14][15] There were many other examples of white Creole fathers who reared and carefully and quietly placed their daughters of color with the sons of known friends or family members.

Marie Laveau (also spelled Leveau, Laveaux), known as the voodoo queen of New Orleans, was born between 1795 and 1801 as the daughter of a mulatto business owner, Charles Leveaux, and his mixed Black and Native American placée Marguerite Darcantel (or D'Arcantel).

Paris either died, disappeared or deliberately abandoned her (some accounts also relate that he was a merchant seaman or sailor in the navy) after she produced a daughter.

Laveau was styling herself as the Widow Paris and was a hairdresser for white matrons (she was also reckoned to be an herbalist and yellow fever nurse) when she met Louis-Christophe Dumesnil de Glapion and in the early 1820s, they became lovers.

Marie was just beginning her spectacular career as a voodoo practitioner (she would not be declared a "queen" until about 1830), and Dumesnil de Glapion was a fiftyish white Creole veteran of the Battle of New Orleans with relatives on both sides of the color line.

In an unusual decision, Dumesnil de Glapion passed as a man of color to live with her under respectable circumstances—thus explaining the confusion many historians have had whether he was truly white or black.

The "quadroon balls" were social events designed to encourage mixed-race women to form liaisons with wealthy white men through a system of concubinage known as plaçage.

[18] The origin of quadroon balls can be traced to the redoutes des filles de couleur in Cap-Français in the French colony of Saint Domingue.

This was a common background for free colored businesswomen,[21] among whom the most famous were Nanette Pincemaille (d. 1784), Anne Laporte (d. 1783), Simone Brocard, and Julie Dahey.

The principal desire of quadroon women attending these balls was to become placée as the mistress of a wealthy gentleman, usually a young white Creole or a visiting European.

[25] Guillory posits the quadroon balls as the best among severely limited options for these near-white women, a way for them to control their sexuality and decide the price of their own bodies.

She contends: "The most a mulatto mother and a quadroon daughter could hope to attain in the rigid confines of the black/white world was some semblance of economic independence and social distinction from the slaves and other blacks".