Free people of color made different political choices, however, and Élisabeth insisted that these were determined more by circumstances than by whether they owned slaves. The gens de couleur abandoned planter royalists at the end of 1792 when the new Republic offered a surer guarantee of equality. After Martinique and Guadeloupe learned of the revolution’s outbreak in France, gens de couleur supported the colonies’ planter “aristocrats” in their political struggle against the petit Blanc “patriots.” This alliance resulted from autonomy rather than passivity, according to Élisabeth, and free-colored support for slavery was not unconditional. If the demands of free people of color in these colonies before 1789 seemed negligible compared to those of Saint-Domingue, Léo Élisabeth argued that was only because of their smaller numbers: they were aware of the ideological debates in metropolitan France over slavery and recognized the connection to their own status. Recent scholarship has emphasized the independent agency of both slaves and gens de couleur in the Îles du Vent, but there has been less consensus on the extent to which demands for equal rights overlapped with the struggle for freedom. The French Revolution nonetheless represented an opportunity for free people of color not only in Saint-Domingue but also in the Îles du Vent, the smaller islands in the Eastern Caribbean, of which the most important French colonies were Martinique and Guadeloupe. Despite the new law French colonists in the Caribbean, particularly the poor whites or petits Blancs, were even more reluctant than metropolitan deputies to consider free men of color their equals because this threatened the strict racial hierarchy on which colonial society was based. When the Legislative Assembly overcame this reluctance on 28 March 1792 and declared that free men of color must be treated as equal citizens, its deputies hoped that Saint-Domingue’s gens de couleur, many of whom owned slaves themselves, would assist colonial authorities there in suppressing the slave revolt which had begun the previous August. Despite lobbying by wealthy gens de couleur, metropolitan legislators feared that recognizing free-colored equality would undermine slavery and thus jeopardize the system of commodity production and overseas commerce which was so important to the French economy. Further contributing to the diversity of free people of color, while Francophone and free blacks of French descent (“ gens de couleur libres”) predominated the population, there were also many English-speaking free blacks who either moved to Louisiana from elsewhere or had Anglo-Saxon heritage.The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, adopted by the deputies of the French National Assembly on 26 August 1789, proclaimed that, “Men are born free and equal in rights.” In practice, however, the Assembly did not apply the Declaration’s principles to France’s Caribbean colonies which continued black slavery and excluded the gens de couleur, a heterogeneous class of free blacks and mulattos, from the benefits of citizenship. It is for their contributions to the arts that Louisiana’s free people of color have come to be best known, with many distinguishing themselves as authors. Some were plantation owners and slaveholders. Landry Parish, and the Natchitoches area also had significant numbers. They were most heavily concentrated in New Orleans, where they often worked as artisans and professionals. In Louisiana, free people of color enjoyed a relatively high level of acceptance and prosperity during the antebellum period, a legacy from the state’s French and Spanish antecedents, but their position and opportunities decreased as the American Civil War approached. Inhabiting this place in between made their ambiguous and incongruent status one of the most talked about “problems” of the first half of the nineteenth century, yet their story has been largely overshadowed by the harsh story of slavery. The Cathedral of New Orleans/La Cathedrale lithograph by Jules Lion 1842 THNOC bequest of Richard Koch (1971.32)įree people of color-people of African descent who lived in colonial and antebellum America and were born free or escaped the bonds of slavery before it was abolished in 1865-made significant contributions to the economies and cultures of the communities in which they lived but held an anomalous status in the racial hierarchy of the day.
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