Metis on the Frontier of French Colonial Louisiana, and The

Home , French and Indian Wars, French Louisiana, Godless Men, Governor of New France, History of New Orleans, Louisiana (New France)

METIS ON THE FRONTIER OF FRENCH COLONIAL LOUISIANA,

AND THE INCEPTION OF NEW WORLD MODERNITY

IN COLONIAL NEW ORLEANS

______

A Thesis

Presented

to the Faculty of

California State University Dominguez Hills

______

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

Humanities

______

Dennis Bordelon, B.S.E.E., M.S.E.E.

Fall 2018 Copyright by

DENNIS BORDELON, B.S.E.E., M.S.E.E.

2018

This work is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Cajun-French and

Scotch-Irish, New Orleaneans both. And to the City of New Orleans, on this

three-hundredth year from her founding, beloved city of my birth, and the

birthplace of America’s greatest contribution to modernity, jazz.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Lyle Smith, for his

mentorship during my academic career at California State University,

Dominguez Hills, and for his patience in seeing this thesis to its conclusion.

I wish especially to thank my sister, Karen Bordelon Hartwell, for her intrepid assistance in hunting down books and articles without which my studies could not have been completed. It is her fate to have a scholar-brother who is

“never satisfied.”

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

DEDICATION ...... iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... v

ABSTRACT ...... vii

CHAPTER

1. TOWARD AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF NEW ORLEANS ...... 1

Katrina...... 1 Histories of New Orleans...... 5 A Revisionist Approach and Viewpoint...... 9 Modernity and Double-Consciousness...... 16 Scope of Thesis...... 19

2. THE THINGS THEY CARRIED IN THEIR HEADS: EUROPEAN AND AFRICAN CONSCIOUSNESS...... 21

Comparative Histories of French-English Social Ethos...... 22 French Social Consciousness in the Ancien Régime...... 26 Genealogy of French Thought and Discourse on Africa and Africans...... 34 Collective Identity and Social Consciousness Brought from West Africa to America...... 45

3. INTERLUDE IN NEW FRANCE: METIS ON THE CANADIAN FRONTIER...... 56

4. THEY COME INTO AMERICA: AFRICANS ON THE LOUISIANA FRONTIER...... 66

The Terror of the African Diaspora...... 67

v CHAPTER PAGE

Contingent Factors Influencing Metis in French Louisiana...... 73 The Louisiana Code Noir of 1724 and the Attempt to Control Slave Lives...... 77

5. SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS, AND PLAN FOR FURTHER STUDY...... 100

WORKS CITED...... 114

vi ABSTRACT

In this tricentennial year of the founding of New Orleans, the city and its people of color deserve a revisionist meta-narrative of the Crescent City’s contribution to new world modernity. This thesis takes as its structure the three elements of Bernard Bailyn’s historical revisionism: new facts that change our story; other viewpoints from the marginalized; and other ways of understanding how we got to where we are. Interpreting the story of slavery from the viewpoint of the African leads to that revisionist history.

Using the influential work of Paul Gilroy, two heuristic devices he employs, the African diaspora and double-consciousness, are applied to the process of metis in the frontier of the Lower Mississippi in the early French colony of Louisiana. These heuristics show how metis and creolization took place to form the celebrated New Orleans Creole culture. 1

CHAPTER 1

TOWARD AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF NEW ORLEANS

To write history, is to narrate events, and to show their philosophy when they are susceptible to any such demonstration. When the subject is worthy of it, this is a kind of composition of the highest order. Charles Gayarré

Katrina

New Orleans, August 29, 2005–Millions of American television viewers, fascinated by natural disasters and human suffering, tune in as Hurricane Katrina, a category five storm, wreaks havoc on a city accustomed to hurricanes. This one is different. Birthed in the Caribbean, Katrina blows up “Hurricane Alley,” the man-made shipping channel cut out of the natural cypress swamp, directly into the heart of the city with unabated fury. The days after landfall, Katrina leaves in its wake massive tidal surges, inundating the streets of the city with waters from the Mississippi River and Lake

Ponchartrain, breaching the levees lining the canals crossing between river and lake and linking with the Gulf. Several areas of the city, home to both wealthy and poor, flood to the second stories and attics of houses. The combination of wind, water, poverty and panic result in the loss of nearly 1,800 lives, and more than $100 billion in property loss.

The flooding displaces nearly 300,000 residents, mostly black, from their homes, dispersing them throughout the Southern states, the latest iteration of the African diaspora.

The human misery revealed by television cameras is horrid, like images of war: 2 drowned corpses floating in city streets; survivors on roofs airlifted by helicopters; multitudes sheltered in the Superdome and Convention Center, suffering from a scarcity of floor space, bedding, clothing, food, and water. But worse than this reality is the fiction spread by excited, ratings-hungry cable news networks and mass media: accounts of widespread looting; robbery, murder, and rape; reporting that is inaccurate, exaggerated, and full of misleading accounts, rumors and outright lies from city and state officials. According to these sources, New Orleans is a site of anarchy and chaos. The police chief and mayor go on the air to describe the people they were sworn to represent, serve and protect, as “monsters.” The governor publicly suggests that troops should shoot to kill the “hoodlums” on the street. Police and vigilantes oblige by shooting in the back a dozen unarmed black people fleeing to safety and dry land.

Anarchy and chaos prove to characterize the law-and-order element, not the supposed criminal element nor victims of Katrina. The two weeks following the storm see multiple violations of civil liberties: the pursuit and roundup of “terrorists”–a fantasy perpetrated by the Department of Homeland Security; suspects imprisoned in makeshift, chain-link-fence outdoor detention facilities, like the barracoons holding African captives awaiting embarkation to America in the slave trade; suspension of rights of due process, evidential grounds for detention, representation by counsel, and arraignment before a judge. To add further insult to injury, state and federal government institutions, particularly the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), show ineptitude and apathy about rebuilding and repopulating the city. As a result, waterlogged New Orleans lays fallow for a year while elites debate the city’s future complexion and priorities for its

3 redevelopment. The priorities are top-down, rather than bottom-up, for rebuilding a better, whiter New Orleans. Meanwhile, scores of residents are housed in the infamous

FEMA trailers, which exude noxious formaldehyde fumes, while they await funds to rebuild their homes.

It appears that the mass media, reflecting the opinions of the nation, are blaming the victims of Katrina, mostly poor and lower- to middle•class black residents, for their own distressed and depraved condition, a typically prejudiced opinion harking back to justifications for slavery three centuries ago. What is not reported, and thus not made known to the rest of the nation, is that decent, ordinary people in the affected neighborhoods and from outside the city save thousands of lives, rescuing residents from flooded homes and taking them to relief facilities. Ad hoc groups of volunteers and mutual-aid societies organize rescue and relief operations. One of these, the New

Orleans Cajun Navy, launches hundreds of their members' private craft, from canoes to rowboats to fishing boats. These volunteers rescue twenty-one thousand people; the Lake

Charles Cajun Navy rescues another thousand. Typical is the lone man responsible for saving three hundred victims. Another man is shot in the back by police in the midst of his hundredth rescue of residents from flooded homes and taking them to relief facilities.

This Dunkirk-like civilian operation greatly exceeds the spare efforts of federal agencies.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency launches only sixty boats, while the U.S. Coast

Guard ferries people to transportation centers, where buses depart the city with survivors.

Also not reported are the hundreds of tourists and “looters” who bring provisions at great peril to old and young alike in the Superdome and Convention Center–not raping them,

4 but helping them. When the true stories of private citizens rescuing and assisting one another come to light in the months and years after Katrina, cable TV outlets are uninterested, moving along to other calamities. Newspapers print retractions and corrections, if at all, in the back pages. America only remembers the sensationalistic accounts of New Orleans during Katrina (Solnit 127-132).

The purpose of recounting the tragedy of Katrina is not to cast moral opprobrium on or judge the actors involved. Rather, the purpose is to demonstrate the nexus of reprehensible actions, false representations and negative discourse that was Katrina. This discourse is emblematic of the deep animus toward New Orleans and its people of color, the historical contempt and disregard the city has received from its founding as a French colonial capital in 1718. It has been a marginal city in a marginal state of the Union, known for its poverty, for the highest per capita incarceration rate and the lowest educational spending and achievement. Sure, New Orleans is celebrated for its exotic,

European flavored French Quarter, for Mardi Gras, for its general inebriation. It retains its early, salacious reputation as the Great Southern Babylon, the Big Easy, where prostitution was legal and rampant in the Storyville District before World War I. The city’s motto, l’aissez les bon temps roulez (let the good times roll), typifies its freewheeling, anything goes nature. This attitude about New Orleans is derisive, not a serious discourse.

What New Orleans needs and deserves is a serious discourse that expands upon the many narrative histories of the city, one that includes an intellectual, cultural history that demonstrates the city’s contribution to today’s pluralistic modern society in America.

That discourse is not generally found in the bibliography of academic works by historians of the Deep South, Lower Mississippi Valley, Louisiana, and New Orleans. This year,

2018, the tricentennial of New Orleans’ founding, presents an opportunity to rediscover this cosmopolitan city, to see it with new eyes. This would invest the existing bibliography with a more nuanced social and cultural history so that we can understand how we as a nation got to where we are today with the influence of New Orleans and its people.

Histories of New Orleans

The historiography of New Orleans spans more than its three hundred years of existence, coming from the journals of sixteenth and seventeenth century explorers and naturalists to the most recent popular and scholarly narrative histories. These publications are numerous. For example, a recent narrative history, The Accidental City by Tulane’s

Lawrence Powell, on the city’s colonial era, references around 140 unique citations. But the bibliography on New Orleans pales in comparison with the much more vast histories of the English colonies and of the French and English Caribbean Island colonies, which number in the tens of thousands. The first comprehensive narrative of New Orleans’ colonial history appeared in the 1850s, History of Louisiana by Charles Gayarré, whose quote serves as the epigraph to this chapter. Interest in early Louisiana history heightened in the first half of the twentieth century when archivists undertook a vast project to collect primary source material in France and the United States. These archives include official correspondence between the colony and the mother country, colonial government records and court proceedings, census data, ship manifests, birth and

6 baptismal records, trade receipts and bills of lading, and other minutia. By the middle of the century, these sources were made available to researchers, many in English translation, in New Orleans and Southern university libraries, at the Historical New

Orleans Collection and the New Orleans Public Library, and in the academic journals

Louisiana Historical Quarterly and Louisiana History, both of which unfortunately have ceased publication. From these sources grew a crop of monographs, essay collections, and journal articles, which pieced together a mosaic of life in the colonies and in the city and state. Very few contemporary accounts from those “on the ground” exist from early colonial days, except letters and journals from those literate elites and clergy at leisure to correspond with their European families.

These histories of New Orleans and Louisiana are virtually all interpretive narratives, conditioned largely on European and Euro-American values and standpoints.

The exceptions include one seminal monograph on Africans in New Orleans (Hall), and an essay collection by Louisiana university professors (Hirsch and Logsdon).

Interpretations of the social and cultural lives of early New Orleaneans, especially of people of color, vary widely among scholars, resulting in sometimes contradiction and heated controversy. These competing discourses continue to the present day because any history of New Orleans, of the South, and of America must deal with the issue of slavery, an issue that Americans and the world have yet to reckon with. It is impossible to deal with the fact of the slave trade and chattel slavery, and the consequent problems of racism, discrimination, segregation, and identity politics in a disinterested, dispassionate manner. These issues divide the nation, and influence the common and scholarly

7 discourse on race relations in the United States, and particularly in New Orleans, as during Katrina. What is needed is a cognitive approach that combines methods of the humanities and the human sciences: an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates philosophy, religion, aesthetics, social and cultural theory, anthropology, and psychology.

This approach must avoid polemics, eschewing moral standards to valorize or condemn any one side in the debate.

One of the most contentious debates between writers in America is that between traditionalists and revisionists. Renowned early American historian Bernard Bailyn characterizes traditionalists as “objective” and “impersonal” in describing historical events and actors (13). They view the past from a distance, as a foreign country in the context of its place and time. They avoid presentism and anachronism, or making moral judgments in their interpretations conditioned upon present-day social or cultural values

(22-25). Bailyn calls this tradition “normalization by contextual analysis,” in that it can excuse egregious behavior as normal in the context of the past (35). Traditionalism in history does little to advance what progressive historians describe as the “special function” of the historian: “to promote social understanding of how the community has got to where it is” (44). Revisionists believe, they say, that getting the facts right is only half the story. Combining facts with insightful analysis, juxtaposing facts with values learned from studying histories of culture, is the only way to promote social understanding and contribute to the nation's well-being (45).

Slavery is not distant or foreign. Rather, “it is buried in our consciousness and shapes our view of the world. Its sights, symbols, its clues lie all about us” (Bailyn 16).

These clues confront visitors to New Orleans with the site of the largest slave market in the country. Confederate statues celebrating accomplishments of generals in the Civil

War and promoters of slavery, another major controversy in modern times, reside in public squares and parks, including Jackson Square. The shallowly buried consciousness of slavery necessitates a more insightful treatment of New Orleans history that does not dismiss slavery as irrelevant, a barbaric pre-modern aberration, fundamentally incompatible with enlightened rationality and Western civilization. The introductory essay, “The Deforming Mirror of Truth,” to the 1990 Reissued Edition of Nathan Irvin

Huggins’ classic Black Odyssey, traces the genealogy of American historians grappling with the issue of slavery from Ulrick Phillips in 1918, to Stanley Elkins, Eugene

Genovese and Edmund Morgan in the 1970s, the high priests of traditionalism in histories of slavery. New Orleans’ historical association with slavery and racism is an exemplum in which to analyze the historical contribution of the black “race” to modernity.

The concept of race as a category of difference of the Other, the non-white, non-

European member of society, is another contentious issue. Race is both an ascribed public identity, an external assessment based upon visible biological markers, and a self- identity of Americans of African descent, with prescribed behavioral characteristics determined by communal identity (Wayne ix). But today, “Sixty-nine percent of physical anthropologists and eighty percent of cultural anthropologists” conclude there are no biological races in the species Homo Sapiens (Wayne 204, n.4). Instead, “race” is a misnomer which “may well reflect important social differences and cultural identity,” in other words, a purely social representation of the underclass (Wayne 3). Examples

9 include such non-racial underclasses as the serfs in medieval Europe and the untouchables in India, both identified as servile castes. Nevertheless, race was and still is used by the Anglo-American and Euro-American “white race” to assume hegemony over the Other, especially of the black “race.” For example, Spanish and Portuguese colonial elites equated “Negro” with slave, as did English colonists in the Chesapeake region of

Maryland and Virginia (Wayne 6). Similarly, the French in the Caribbean and Louisiana colonies equated “négre” with “esclave.” Historians by the 1980s abandoned the

(mis)conception of race as a meaningful and useful way of understanding the slavery problem and its explanation of difference (Wayne x). Instead, they turned to social and cultural history.

A Revisionist Approach and Viewpoint

What, then, can a scholar use as a guide to explaining difference that sheds light on the issue of slavery and race? According to Bailyn, revisionists and their engaged readers understand that “facts may be uncovered that will change our stories. Other viewpoints may turn us away from [what we thought was relevant] to what we now think is relevant. Other ways of understanding may make us reconsider everything” (15).

These three elements of revisionism serve as a starting point to an historical metanarrative.

First, recent historians of slavery in early America have uncovered new facts which change the story of Louisiana slavery. The Du Bois Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

Database holds the most current and thorough quantitative analysis of more than eight million Africans transported to America between 1514 and 1866, on thirty-five thousand

10 slave ship voyages (Bailyn 3-9). Based on the data, scholars can not only map the routes

Africans took in the Middle Passage, but also analyze qualitatively “highly specific

African ethnicities, languages, and behavior patterns . . . in terms of creolization, family and gender structures, and spiritual life” (Bailyn 11). Specifically, in Louisiana and New

Orleans, it has been discovered that three ethnic groups from West Africa predominated among its slave population. This mapping of routes to roots, of American modern culture to

African ethnic cultures, is an example of how historians who once regarded Africans as one race, as the ones in Huggins’ genealogy, now understand cultural differences in different ethnicities. In turn, this new data can lead to new understandings of regional cultural differences in European-American colonies.

Secondly, changing the viewpoint from that of European colonists and their Euro-

American progeny to that of the oppressed and enslaved peoples of America and their creole descendants–that is, the Other–is the project of social history. Changing the viewpoint from the center to the margins provides enhanced understanding of modernity.

Finally, recent historians have devised other ways of understanding to reconsider the ways in which encounters between Europeans, Native Americans, African slaves and free men and women of color, contribute to that modernity. Therefore, it is appropriate to use the various epistemic methodologies of recent historians of slavery and black culture to study how New Orleans, and its people of color, contributed to modernity.

Historians of New World culture who study encounters between Europeans,

Natives, and Africans use several terms to describe this unique meeting of peoples from three continents. Many of these terms, as are all terms describing New World mixed-race

11 cultures, are vigorously contested. Linguists have determined that the French and Spanish terms métissage and mestizaje have as their root the Greek word mētis. From the Greek, the French coined métis to connote, in their North American colonies, a mixed French-

Native American union, either by cohabitation or marriage, and the issue from that union.

Social historians and cultural anthropologists studying early North American settlements have given metis (its Anglicized form) a deeper meaning than just “mixture,” a reductive racial mongrelization. One author cites "cunning and craft" as a nuanced meaning from the Greek (Dawdy 5). Another redefines metis as “practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability” in the struggle for survival in the untamed wilderness (qtd. in Dawdy 235). Colonial theorist Frederick

Cooper glosses this definition further by interpreting metis as “a mixture of ideals for change, a more personal sense of human relations” (141), that is, cognitive viewpoints which actuated a new way of thinking. The word can be further defined as an improvised synthesis of cultures and communities in a Hobbesian state of nature, the largely classless, pre-racial, cooperative society in a frontier “in which no culture is dominant, creating some mixing [métissage] and accommodation between diverse peoples” (Cumfer 14). In the face of adversity, French Canadian pioneers sought the assistance of the Native tribes, and vice versa. The same occurred in the early English colonies of Pilgrims and Puritans. The French

Canadians who founded and first populated New Orleans were able to leverage their knowledge of the ways and cultures of Indians in establishing diplomatic relations with

Louisiana tribes. Later, imported African slaves joined this cooperative, classless

12 community of metis.

The French word créole derives from the Spanish criollo and the Portuguese cruillo, and ultimately to the Latin creāre, to create. Its original meaning when used as a noun to describe a person is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “a person born or naturalized in the country [of colonial settlement] but of European (usually French or

Spanish) or of African Negro race; the name having no connotation of color” (“creole”).

“Native-born” is the meaning of creole insisted upon by New Orleans historian

Joseph Tregle, Jr., who has compiled documentary evidence that throughout Louisiana history in the colonial and antebellum periods, all persons born in Louisiana, from descendants of Africans, mixed-race Afro-Europeans, and white French and Spanish purebreds, were known as creole (Tregle, “Creole” 193-98). Another author traced the use of the word to a Spanish historian, who found that its meaning vacillated between black, mixed-race, and white, until the closing of the Atlantic slave trade by the United

States, after which all slaves were born in America, and criollo came to mean “white”

(Miller 95 n.15). Yet another disagrees that it referred to African or mixed-race African persons–that is, persons of color–during the creole golden age of antebellum New

Orleans (Cooper 84). However, all agree that after the Civil War, Emancipation,

Reconstruction, and the latter’s failure around the turn of the century, its exclusive referent was to “coloreds,” the designation former white creoles gave to their colored creole cousins and half-brothers, lest they be accused of having even one drop of African blood. Finally, its use is circumscribed mostly to the French and Spanish world of

Louisiana and the Caribbean islands, and of English Jamaica, less so to the mid-Atlantic

Chesapeake and Carolina colonies, and never to New England.

In a broader sense, “creole” as an adjective refers to a culturally cohesive community, a language (patois), or a cultural type of literature, music, food, and other performative acts. In its abstract meaning, it has been used to create a false, wistful memory of Louisiana plantation times, when masters were paternalistic and darkies were happy and ignorant. “Creole became an idea to shape Louisiana’s past, a conception indicating social and cultural exceptionality in the present, and a birthright conferring dominion over New Orleans’s future,” writes Rien Fertel in his recent book on white creole culture just after Louisiana's statehood (10).

“Creolization” also has an abstract significance in New World culture. It represents a new way of thinking, talking and acting among the creole descendants of

African slaves and their European masters, a new world view that has influenced and even changed the American cultural landscape. Creolization differs from metis. It represents the evolution from a frontier society bent on mere existence into a porous borderland, “where autonomous peoples of different cultures are bound together by the presence of more than one imperial power” (Cumfer 14). In the case of New Orleans, this signifies the milieu of the Spanish era, when France ceded all of its North American territory in Canada and east of the Mississippi River to England at the end of the Seven

Years War (French and Indian Wars), and ceded to Spain the Île d'Orléans (the east bank of the lower Mississippi one hundred miles up and downriver from New Orleans), and the west bank of the Mississippi. The former French colony now was a Spanish colony, with England on the border, soon to be the Anglo-American border. With the influx of

Spanish, Saint-Dominguean, Cuban, English, and American peoples, the city's population ballooned, becoming a cosmopolitan center nurtured by trade with other empires. As

David Usner and Shannon Lee Dawdy have shown, this trade was frequently illicit, characterized by smuggling, piracy, commandeering of supplies, profiteering, “The

Devil’s Empire” (as Dawdy titles her book), a rogue colony and territory (Dawdy 11).

New Orleans during creolization was where Indians from various tribes, Spanish and

French pirates, bondsmen and -women of all complexions, quadroons and octoroons kept as mistresses by wealthy planters in French Quarter pieds-à-terre (the practice known as plaçage), and other men and women of disrepute all roamed the city.

The key word that best describes metis and creolization is improvisation. This word is particularly applicable to New Orleans, as Tulane historian Lawrence Powell notes in the subtitle of his book. Metis and creolization were the common experience of all nations’ imperial ventures in the New world that led to modernity–all empires, that is, that imported slaves from Africa to the North and South Atlantic littoral, the Caribbean, the Gulf Coast, and the frontiers and waterways from Canada to Brazil. Other authors use other terms to describe the process of metis and creolization: cultural syncretism, hybridity, trans-culturalization, and re-traditionalization (Cumfer 6-7), all of which denote the ideals for change in human relations, in imagining a New World modernity of disparate races.

Although it has been established that race does not serve as a meaningful category of identity, the use of various terms to describe people of color in racial terms is inescapable. Africans, négres, gens de couleur libre (free people of color), coloreds,

Negroes, mulattoes, African Americans, and blacks are words used in historical works.

In the French colony, creoles were differentiated by the terms “white creoles” or “creole

élites,” and “creole slaves” and “Afro-Creoles.” French census-takers only recorded the population as slave or free, with no designation of color, one piece of evidence that metis was pre-racial. After Emancipation, African descendants preferred the term “colored.”

During and after the Civil Rights era, African American and black were the preferred usage. Native Americans are universally misnamed Indians, a usage that predominates today.

Lastly, it must be explained what is meant by modernity in the context of New

World culture. This is another subject that has a vast and contentious literature. Cooper has collected a variety of meanings of modernity that demonstrate that its meaning is relative to whoever is using the term, much like the term “creole.” For example, the traditional, Eurocentric concept relative to colonialism is “an imperial construct, a global imposition of specifically Western social, economic, and political forms” (113). Indeed, one of the justifications for imperial conquest was to bring modern (European) civilization and Christianity to indigenous savages and idolaters–in other words, to assimilate them to Western norms and beliefs. Cooper adds that this imperial modernity

“tames and sterilizes the rich diversity of human experience . . . and diverse forms of community” (113), in other words, homogenizes a “white bread” culture. On the other hand, Charles Taylor, a critic of modern authoritarian states, sees modernity as a “critique of post-Enlightenment rationality . . . and [of] the use of reason to understand the world and change it” (qtd. in Cooper 121-22). As can be seen, the traditional use of the word is

16 diametrically opposed to metis and creolization, where Old World cultures are not stripped from indigenous or immigrant people, as assimilationists desire, but where pluralism and multiculturalism are valorized for common purpose.

Cooper calls this an “alternative modernity” to differentiate it from the traditional,

Eurocentric meaning. This alternative modernity is a different way of understanding the world, according to Bailyn’s method of revisionism. It sees the world from the viewpoint of the Other, the marginalized African and Afro-European product of métissage and creolization. This is a modernity that affects the way we talk, act, think and imagine, regardless of our cultural roots and routes (Cooper 114). Not one of assimilation, but of integration, celebrating cultures of the Other, and amalgamating them into a pluralistic hybrid culture. New Orleans was a prime locus of alternative modernity, during metis in the frontier and creolization in the borderland, that flowered in the golden age of antebellum city life and into the twentieth century. From its beginnings up to the present,

New Orleans evolved a uniquely, alternatively modern culture that its people, especially people of color, bequeathed to the world.

What is needed is a formulation of the elusive cognitive viewpoint of Africans in the New world vis à vis the dominant ruling class culture, a formulation that leads to a new way of understanding how this meeting of minds led to New World modernity. No author to date has attempted a “rethinking of modernity” as a “creole counter-discourse” to traditional understandings of the Crescent City’s contribution to modernity–that is, until now.

Modernity and Double-Consciousness

The above quotations are from Paul Gilroy’s seminal 1993 work The Black

Atlantic (31, 42). His text has been referenced, reviewed and critiqued by scholars who examine the intellectual context in which disparate races, in their encounters in the New

World, produced the hybrid cultures and pluralism of modernity. Gilroy focuses on the

English, Anglo-Caribbean, and Anglo-American colonial and postcolonial empires, but his heuristic devices prove to be eminently applicable to the Franco-Caribbean and

Franco-American realms in an analysis of New Orleans’ creole culture.

His title reveals one of his organizing principles. Gilroy builds on the work of historians such as Bailyn and Cooper, who use the Atlantic world to inscribe an area of study. Atlantic Studies comprises a vast bibliography of texts and journal articles.

Cooper describes the Atlantic world as “an intercontinental zone in which cultural inventiveness, synthesis, and adaptation took place, both reflecting and altering power relations” (100). These terms–inventiveness, synthesis, and adaptation–have been used above to describe metis and creolization in Louisiana. The modifier “Black” in Gilroy’s title denotes the point of view of the Africans whose “bifocal cultural forms” represent a new way of thinking and understanding their “structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering” in the New World (Gilroy 3). Gilroy overlays different black perspectives, those of the African, Afro-European and -American, creole,

Negro, and mulatto, onto the container of the Atlantic Triangle, drawing from black intellectuals and social historians. One reviewer assesses the influence Gilroy’s text has had on this area of study: “It is difficult to conceive of American, African, transatlantic,

18 or cultural studies without recognizing the importance of the Black Atlantic” (Robinson

136). For the purposes of this study, the container of the Atlantic Triangle is extended to include the Caribbean, the Gulf, and the Mississippi, without any alteration of meaning.

The reference to cultural bifocality leads Gilroy to a second heuristic, the concept of double-consciousness. This term was used by W.E.B. Du Bois in his autobiographical collection The Souls of Black Folk, first published in 1903. In that work, Du Bois terms double-consciousness as “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, a twoness–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unrecognized strivings . . . in one body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”

(2). Here we see both an ascribed and inner identity that the African felt in his struggle of mind to retain autonomy in the white man’s world. Twoness, double-consciousness, what

Richard Wright calls “double vision,” are metaphors of being “inside and outside of our culture at the same time” (qtd. in Gilroy 244, n.44, original emphasis). Double- consciousness, Gilroy says, is what structures blacks’ feelings, communications and aesthetic productions in the New World to which they were forcibly brought, tempered with memory of the homeland even though their roots are spatially, temporally and generationally distant.

Consciousness serves as a better representation than identity of modernity, a more intellectual way of understanding the viewpoint of the Other in the dynamics of his and her interactions in metis and creolization in Louisiana.

Gilroy’s third heuristic in understanding structures of feeling in The Black

Atlantic is the feeling of disruption, the African diaspora. Using diaspora as a method of analysis counters the traditional formula of history as linear, teleological, and causative. 19

Instead, it proposes discontinuity, rupture, violence in the African's separation from his and her homeland. This was the experience of African slaves and their creole descendants, dispersed people who “carried their culture in their heads,” in the apt observation of historian Alan Rice. Clutching to their traditions, rituals, customs and memories in the “survival of African culture,” Rice adds, allowed the African to transmit that culture forward generationally, while also integrating with European culture (qtd. in

Elmer 161). The result in Louisiana, many historians concur, was the most Africanized culture in North American colonies (Hall 186). Also, the parallel with the Jewish diaspora is apparent. Both dispersed African slaves and Jews were peoples without a nation and were oppressed, despised, terrorized, as were their descendants until recently.

For New Orleans’ people of color throughout the American south during the Second

Great Awakening, the metaphor became even more relevant.

The following chapters apply Bailyn’s revisionist formula in examining new data, other perspectives, and other ways of understanding, to New Orleans and its people of color. Gilroy’s heuristic devices of double-consciousness and African diaspora serve to understand how metis took place in early French colonial Louisiana. And, as outlined in the final chapter, Gilroy’s methodology can be extended to subsequent periods in the history of New Orleans, periods this work does not address.

Scope of Thesis

The scope of this thesis is necessarily limited to the early French colonial era of

New Orleans. A treatment considering the three hundred years of the city’s existence would require a much larger work. A plan for that larger study, using the same

20 framework employed herein, is presented in the final chapter. Also, this work does not incorporate a chronology of events and description of eventful actions by the founders of the city, as many narrative histories do. Readers are directed to the many narrative histories of this period of French rule, such as Lawrence Powell’s. Also, the website of the Historical New Orleans Collection contains excellent resources for the reader wishing to become familiar with the city’s history.

Finally, the following chapters use as reference materials only secondary sources in the literature. Primary source material from archival research was not available to the author. The final chapter describes how a further research effort could expand the scope and provide original, more nuanced interpretations of sources. In all, the expanded project would accomplish a fuller understanding of the intellectual history of New

Orleans’ three-hundred-year existence.

CHAPTER 2

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED IN THEIR HEADS: EUROPEAN AND AFRICAN CONSCIOUSNESS

In coming to the New World and the frontier of America, peoples from three continents and Old World cultures rediscovered themselves and remade themselves in a new, unfamiliar, natural environment and amidst different cultures, cultures they had never experienced before. Each person carried within him and herself a native identity and collective consciousness nurtured over centuries in their lands of origin. This consciousness consisted of a self-awareness and awareness of others just like themselves, exhibiting the same presumptions, prejudices, social norms, proprieties, and customs that the French call mouers. On the frontier, people had of necessity to reconcile that native consciousness they carried in their heads with that of other peoples, and as a consequence to make a new, hybrid culture. This cognitive process is one aspect of metis, that multiply entangled consciousness of plural viewpoints and different ways of understanding the world. Metis is dynamic and improvisational. Only those flexible and resilient enough to give and take, to set aside accepted beliefs and prejudices, and to integrate their minds with those of other peoples survived to forge a colony together in the face of danger and unpredictability.

No one can ascertain what was in the minds of European settlers, Native

Americans and Africans in the frontier setting of Louisiana, or how and to what degree the integration of consciousness took place. Their cognitive states can only be inferred at any particular time indirectly, by examining the actions and behaviors of the characters. 22

In turn, these actions and behaviors are reported only anecdotally in the few accounts of persons on the ground, in correspondences between colonial officials and royal ministers in the metropole, and in documents and records of the colonial administration. Those historical records of early America are elusive and slippery for interpreters seeking truth, a knotty problem for historians. Thus, they are subject to various conflicting, controversial and contradictory interpretations. No single interpretation can be claimed as authentic. However, as researchers discover new facts that were overlooked or newly found, historians realize that other viewpoints can change the story that has been told and provide new insight and ways of understanding. This certainly is the case with the historical record of Louisiana, and interpretations made from it over the centuries.

Comparative Histories of French-English Social Ethos

Virtually all histories written by Anglophone authors are Eurocentric in viewpoint. They traditionally downplay the roles of Native Americans and Africans in the colonial project. One nineteenth-century U.S. historian, Frederick Jackson Turner for example, chose to portray the “rugged individualism” of white pioneers, a typical founding story of American exceptionalism. However, recent studies, like that of

Cynthia Cumfer, “challenge the Turnerian notion of American exceptionalism by showing . . . settler communities in their attitudes and policies toward native people”

(6).The plural consciousness that developed from European-Indian interactions, Cumfer continues, constitutes the “articulation of cultural differences in which people utilize elements of both societies to create new values and practices” (6). This articulation of

23 cultural differences defines the cognitive process of metis. Further, her quote infers that, without the native consciousness of the Indians, their practical knowledge of survival in the wilderness, the white settler would not have survived. Rugged individualism is a non- starter.

Writing of French colonial history in New France (Canada) at the same time as

Turner, Francis Parkman offers an equally romantic founding story of French exceptionalism. From his European standpoint, he developed for the first time a comparative interpretation of the attitudes and policies toward the Indians among three imperial powers, valorizing the French. “Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him,”

Parkman concludes, in a paraphrase by author Guillaume Aubert (441).

Similarly, the mid-twentieth-century historian Frank Tannenbaum applies a reductive-comparative interpretation to European-African encounters in the New World.

“[The] South American colonies of French, Spanish, and Portuguese origin recognized the moral worth of the slave,” whereas British colonists were particularly brutal and severe, “ignoring the personality of the slave, denying him basic human rights.”

Tannenbaum concludes that it was “the beneficent impact of the Roman Code, the

Catholic church, and the Latin character" that explains the difference in attitude toward and treatment of slaves in the colonies of France, Spain, and Portugal from that of the

English. Furthermore, he says, the French “never considered [the slave as] a mere chattel, never defined [him] as inanimate property” (qtd. in Rankin 6).

Parkman’s and Tannenbaum’s theses, valorizing French moral consciousness and

24 condemning that of the English, were very influential in overturning the previously held nineteenth-century understanding that “all slave societies were equally oppressive”

(Rankin 5). These two historians’ interpretations were thus revisionist for their time.

Many subsequent authors repeated this revisionist, comparative interpretation of French and English differences, making it the new mainstream in Francophilic colonial histories.

In the 1970s, well-respected historian Stanley Elkins glosses Tannenbaum’s thesis, stating, “Louisiana, least American of the southern states, was least inhumane

[toward the slaves]” (Rankin 6). Many other adherents to the Tannenbaum-Elkins thesis called the French experience in the colony sui generis in interpreting the treatment of slaves and freedmen of color in creole New Orleans as in a class by itself. Recent historians like David Rankin and Guillame Aubert have explored the bases for Parkman’s and Tannenbaum’s theses, and found them wanting. Hence, there was created a “major historical controversy” over just how much, or even if, French native consciousness differed from that of the English and whether their attitudes toward and treatment of indigenous peoples and imported slaves were different (Rankin 6). Much of the controversy over French and English consciousness with regard to Natives and Africans is chronicled by Nathan Irving Huggins in “The Deforming Mirror of Truth.”

The first text to provide a cultural history of New Orleans and her people is

Hirsch and Logsdon’s much-cited essay collection Creole New Orleans. Jerah Johnson’s essay in this edited volume, “Colonial New Orleans: A Fragment of the Eighteenth

Century French Ethos,” was “the first attempt to explore the motives of the French founders of Louisiana” (Hirsch and Logsdon, “Introduction” 9). Johnson purported to

25 derive his interpretation of the French ethos, that is, social consciousness, from social histories of French and English societies and cultures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In doing so, he perpetuates the Parkman and Tannenbaum theses, interpreting the French ethos as tolerant and inclusive, that of the English as intolerant and exclusive toward the Other, the Native American in Canada and the African in Louisiana. Johnson reduces their respective ethos as “assimilationist” and “segregationist” (13-17). His essay finds causation for the different attitudes toward the Other in the native identity, national culture and collective consciousness of Europeans: the French being Catholic, Romantic, communal, absolutist; the English Protestant, rational, individualistic, constitutional.

Comparative history of this sort is problematic in several ways, as is seen in the controversy it has caused. First, new information has been presented in recent texts and articles that show the French and English colonists were more symmetric than divergent in attitudes toward and treatment of Natives and Africans, a counter-revision to Parkman,

Tannenbaum and Johnson. Second, some authors see not causation but contingent factors, explaining any differences to contingent factors such as geography, climate, demographics, and the whims and wiles of imperial powers. The tendency of historians to privilege European ethos as the dominant sociopolitical force in the colonies denies that the Other’s consciousness and cultures had any relevance to the cognitive process of metis. Eurocentrics ignore the things Africans carried in their heads, a culture that was eminently adaptable to their new surroundings, with practical knowledge that contributed to the survival of the French colony. And to state that contingencies were mostly responsible for making Louisiana sui generis among American colonies relegates the

26 cultural impact of the Other to an historical footnote, or to oblivion.

The purpose is not to dismiss the work of mainstream historians on the comparative ethical question. Instead, this chapter uses the interpretation of Johnson's essay as a point of departure in answering the following question. What were the cultural factors, the collective identities, and native consciousnesses that French colonists and

African emigrants carried in their heads to the New World, that, when recombined into the plural consciousness of metis, forged a colony and a town out of the wilderness? The epistemic devices of Bailyn and Gilroy are employed in the following sections to study bibliographic sources on: (1) French social consciousness in the Ancien Régime; (2) the genealogy of French thinking on Africa and Africans in the Ancien Régime, and (3)

African tribal society and ethnic culture brought to Louisiana in the African diaspora. In this way, we reexamine the bases for Johnson's interpretation of the French ethos.

French Social Consciousness in the Ancien Régime

“Central to an understanding of colonial New Orleans is a basic understanding of early modern French social structure and social theory,” begins Johnson in his investigation of the French mindset (19). His comment invites and challenges historians to investigate for themselves the basis for his interpretation of that social structure and social theory. From his reading of mostly secondary source material on European social history, Johnson finds French society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to be

“assimilationist” (16), “tolerant” (17), and ”inclusive” (18). Without referring to them directly, he seems to provide evidence to bolster the theses of Parkman and Tannenbaum.

Johnson’s assertion of an assimilationist impulse in Ancien Régime society (pre-

Revolutionary France) requires a close examination of his sources, with three questions in mind. First, do these sources in fact show evidence for Johnson's conclusions?

Second, is Johnson perhaps conflating idealistic goals of crown ministers to unify and homogenize the kingdom with the actual collective ethos of the French people? And third, does this assimilationist impulse find expression in the attitudes, policies and behaviors of colonists on the ground in French Louisiana? Or was there another sort of impulse, one not of assimilation but of unconcern for the community, an insular attitude that was expressed in the colony? This section attempts to find evidence to answer these questions.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution is used to address the first question. Although Tocqueville wrote his interpretive social history in the middle of the nineteenth century, he thoroughly researched the archives of the previous centuries relating to social behaviors in the Ancien Régime. This is the same time frame during which the French were colonizing parts of the New World, so his work should shed light on the first and third questions.

Tocqueville describes the sociopolitical environment of the Ancien Régime as a

“tangle of powers” (46). Many other historians use other similes of confusion and chaos.

For example, Johnson quotes a modern historian’s assertion of French society as a “sum of disunities” (qtd. in 13). Another historian sees in that society “a feudal web of laws and taxes” (qtd. in David Bell 69). Such descriptions depict the complex, multilayered nature of French society: an inhomogeneous, immiscible substance comprising multiple ancient orders of commoners, nobles and clergy, along with the rising bourgeoisie.

Peasant farmers, many of them serfs, and urban poor were a large underclass. Remnants of medieval feudalism persisted in the provinces right up to the Revolution. It was a supremely class-conscious society, despite the crown’s efforts to level the classes in order to better control and rule them.

The idealistic goal of Bourbon monarchs and their ministers to achieve a more homogenous society, rather than an assimilationist impulse of the people, may be at the root of Johnson’s contradiction between tangles and disunities on the one hand and tolerance and inclusiveness on the other. Centralizing the administration of the country through the Intendant system and expanding the bureaucracy through the venal system brought control directly under the monarchy and stripped the old blood nobles of authority in their fiefdoms. The venal system also diluted the nobility by appointing commoners to positions in the bureaucracy, and conferring titles of nobility upon them.

These parvenus created a new middle class of minor nobles, who, along with the bourgeoisie of traders, merchants and artisans, formed a coalescence of small, exclusive groups that precipitated out of the mixture. Each of these groups was exclusive, devoted to their particular interests, without regard for the larger community. “Our ancestors had no word for individualism. . . . In their time, there was no individual who did not belong to a group . . . [which] thought only of itself,” Tocqueville finds (102, original emphasis).

Out of this solipsistic “collective individualism,” there arose a social consciousness of atomism and particularism (102). These atomistic groups erected “an extraordinary collection of minor barriers,” according to Tocqueville, “limiting entry by individuals of other groups, and limiting cooperation between them” (85). To use an

29 analogy from biochemistry, these atoms lacked valence with which to form covalent bonds with other atoms, in turn preventing them from growing into large organic molecules and eventually living organisms. Granted, venality and centralized administration did make France somewhat more homogeneous than in medieval times.

But it cannot be said, as does Johnson, that “the assimilationist impulse in France offered far greater freedom for individuals to associate . . . with members of other groups” (16).

French history provides further evidence to refute Johnson’s claim and to answer the second question. The French monarchy’s attempt at national reform, to unite the nation and make it more homogeneous–what Johnson terms its “social engineering program” (16)–did not percolate down to the people to any great extent. Ministers’ attempts at unification from the top down–as opposed to reforms from the bottom up–did not result in any assimilationist instinct in the French people as a whole. Thus Johnson seems to conflate idealistic and theoretical principles by reformers with realities and practicalities on the ground.

According to Johnson, England’s social impulse was different from that of

France, in that it was “exclusive” and “segregationist” (16). He presents as evidence the

English colonists’ attitudes toward the Natives of the Atlantic seaboard, leading eventually to the United States’ Indian removal policy (25). It is true, as will be seen in the French experience in New France, that French colonists were more open to Indian culture than the English, and did not attempt to drive them out of their ancient communal hunting grounds. But this was the result of differences in frontier conditions, of demographics and economics, not a result of any innate sense of inclusion or exclusion

30 on the part of the French or the English. As for societal atomism and particularism,

Tocqueville finds that English society was more open to social mobility and cooperation between groups, especially in democratic participation in government–a more organic substance, in terms of the analogy used above (95). Each country had its hierarchical vertical social structures, the orders, with barriers to horizontal movement and interactions. Johnson quotes respected social historian Robert Palmer, who terms

England's society as “segregationist,” referring to her vertical and horizontal stratification

(qtd. at 15). But Palmer’s characterization of social stratification in England should not be extrapolated and applied to Indian removal policies of late English colonialism in

America, and to U.S. expansionism after Independence. Many historians show that early

English colonists were just as eager to trade with and obtain succor from Indians as were the Canadian and Louisiana French.

Finally, Johnson pronounces that French kings, as opposed to English monarchs,

“granted religious toleration . . . to nearly ten percent of [Protestant] subjects” (15).

Certainly this cannot be ascribed to all, or even many, French kings. Johnson’s example is Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes, conferring citizenship on Huguenots after thirty years of religious wars, and after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Louis XIV, on the other hand, revoked his ancestor’s Edict, and forbade Protestants from residing in France or her colonies. Even within the Catholic Church intolerance prevailed. For example, the

Gallican church split from the Roman Church in administrative and some dogmatic matters. Battles between Jansenists and ultramontane Jesuits resulted in the expulsion of first the former, then the latter. Anti-Semitism pervades all of French history, despite the

31 fact of the National Assembly’s conferring civil rights on the nation’s Jews during the

Revolution. Further examples of intolerance include the Dreyfus Affair in the Third

Republic and the Vichy regime during World War II. The French are a wonderful, sophisticated, creative people, but tolerant they are not.

In contrast, Johnson says, the English imposed norms and forced conformity upon her citizens in her Protestant reformation (14). But it was certainly not a smooth reformation, with Anglican and Catholic monarchs and ministers alternately persecuting one and the other’s faithful until Queen Elizabeth’s religious compromise of latitudinarianism (Grayling 313).

How did these various traits of the French correlate with behaviors of colonists in the New World, the third question raised by Johnson's analysis of French social consciousness? Many authors find that the French brought the same prejudices in their heads of social stratification and of atomistic particularism to the colonies of New France and Louisiana. In the former colony, they enacted the same tripartite system of orders in

Montreal (Eccles 54). In New Orleans, the regime was oligarchic and corrupt. Dawdy calls it a “rogue colony” (l3), a “savage otherworld that fell off the map of modernity”

(27). She refers, as many other Louisiana historians do, to the feudal-like plantation fiefdoms of privileged élites where no laws were found, except the absolutist law of the master/planter. Administration of the colony was centralized in the Superior Council consisting of rich landholders and traders. “Historians of Louisiana have used a language of disorder, misrule, and failure to describe the colony’s social, political, and economic conditions” (Dawdy 28). This condition reflects the society of Ancien Régime France

32 that Tocqueville refers to: solipsistic and insular. These privileged people, in particular the founder and first governor Bienville, commandeered supplies to sell at exorbitant prices to other colonists. Even in times of short supply and famine, French élites preferred to see settlers perish from hunger or abandon their habitations to live in Indian villages than to sustain the settlers for whom they were responsible.

What is the original source of selfishness and unconcern for the community in

Ancien Régime France? Tocqueville finds the answer in the lifestyles of the privileged.

He finds that nobles were obsessed with luxury and displays of wealth, vainglory and haughtiness–that is, mouers–toward the lower classes, the better to disassociate themselves from commoners and noble parvenus (88). Tocqueville further finds that

“[m]en of the eighteenth century [had a] passion for material comfort . . . the mother of servitude, a feeling, flabby yet tenacious,” which interfered with humanistic virtues of

“faith, family,” and integrity (122). In other words, French élites, both in France and in

America, lacked common decency. The hedonistic lifestyle they carried in their heads resulted in the abuses they perpetrated upon fellow Frenchmen and African emigrants to

Louisiana, only concerned with accumulating material possessions and slaves, rather than pursuing enterprise.

In contrast, Tocqueville notes that the English were more industrious, emulating, for example, Dutch capitalist practices such as credit leverage and private/public joint- stock investment in colonial enterprises. “The English are . . . naturally inclined to take an interest in matters of government, whereas the French stand at a distance from them,” concludes Tocqueville (179). This can be attributed to the two countries’ sociopolitical

33 structures. And critically, from the colonial standpoint, the English were hungry for land to extend their successful commodity crop enterprise, possibly a reaction from the disappearance of land in England due to enclosure (Tocqueville 37). English land- grabbing is what drove the Indians from their lands.

The French élite, Usner shows, had no such ambitions of land acquisition. Their land, for one thing, was granted by concession from the Crown or Company. No one in the French colonies amassed great wealth in acquiring land or speculating in land (89-

90). This is another reason they were not hostile to neighboring Indians in Canada. In

Louisiana, they had another way to display wealth: buying slaves for material comfort, the flabby, tenacious feeling of servitude.

Tocqueville in several places characterizes French Ancien Régime culture as decadent, corrupt and divisive (31, 57, 100, 137-139). This theme of degeneracy is found in many social histories of France. One author finds that “[f]or most of the eighteenth century, French writers warned that decadence, effeminacy, corruption, and low morals had weakened the French state, society and army” (Osman 426). The prime example of admonitory writers in that era is Francois de Fénelon. He wrote his tutelary work

Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, a best-seller in 1699, to warn his charge, the heir apparent

Duc de Bourgnone, about his grandfather Louis XIV’s decadent reign. In the book,

Fénelon envisions a utopian land, Salentum, without “effeminate men, devoted to pleasure, [who] lack courage to face danger” (49). Unfortunately, the young Duc died before ascending the throne, felling “Fénelon’s hopes for a renewed France . . . like a house of cards” (Riley, “Introduction” xv).

In conclusion, it seems that Johnson’s analysis of early modern French society, which purports to describe the collective identity and moral consciousness that colonists brought in their heads to the New World, does not bear out from Tocqueville’s authoritative account. Rather, neither the French nor the English ethos can be called strictly assimilationist nor inclusive, segregationist nor exclusive, tolerant nor intolerant.

Both societies contained hierarchies and groups that did not form organic structures laterally. Their social structures were more symmetric than dissimilar. There did exist a difference in lifestyle, temperament and motivation that found expression in their colonial enterprises. So far, Parkman’s and Tannenbaum’s facile schema describing attitudes toward and treatment of Indians and Africans cannot be confirmed using Johnson’s analysis of French Ancien Régime ethos. There was a marked difference between the social engineering program of royal ministers and the realities of society on the ground, both in the home country, and in the Canadian and Louisiana frontiers.

Genealogy of French Thought and Discourse on Africa and Africans

Just as an understanding of French social structure in the Ancien Régime may lead to an understanding of the mindset of colonists in Louisiana, so may an analysis of the evolution of French attitudes toward Africa and Africans provide insight into attitudes of colonists toward the Africans they imported into Louisiana. This genealogy of prejudices and assumptions has been explored in a recent work by Andrew S. Curran, The

Anatomy of Blackness, which forms the framework for studying the French viewpoint.

Reports from early French explorers of the Dark Continent portrayed a “positive,

35 even quite laudatory” image of black Africa, its sub-Saharan region, in the sixteenth century. These explorers were “open minded” in assessing the cultures of the various ethnicities found there (Curran 34). For example, the Moroccan Muslim Leo Africanus, who wrote the first encyclopedia of African geography and ethnology, noted the

“erudition and sophistication” of many African tribes, especially of the Malians, who displayed “wit, civility, and industry . . . which excelled all others” (qtd. in 36-37). The next section of this chapter shows that the majority of Africans taken in the French slave trade were descendants of the Malians.

In the early French Enlightenment, philosopher Michel de Montaigne reflects in his essay, “On the Cannibals,” the moral relativism of his past. Writing of the Indians brought to France from Brazil, his comments also apply to increasingly denigrating discourses on so-called African barbarians. He writes, “Those peoples, then, seem barbarous only in that they are still governed by laws of Nature,” and thus spared the corruptions of western civilization (231). “Every man calls barbarous,” he adds,

“anything he is not accustomed to,” a prescient description of the increasingly prejudicial sentiments of the age. “In comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism,” they are instead the noble savages of later Enlightenment thought (236).

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the period during which New Orleans was founded, Curran finds that many writers turned toward sensationalistic, fantastical reports of explorers, who relayed their prejudicial fictions to a gullible French public (7).

For example, in an updated edition of Africanus’ great work, an editor appended his comments that Africans were hideous, black barbarians and idolaters, proving

Montaigne’s point. Indeed, natural historians and scientists began to display an increasingly prejudicial tone in Africanist discourse from all the imperial powers. During this period, these powers were seizing the islands of the Caribbean, and the North and

South Atlantic seaboard, and initiating the African slave trade to their colonies. It is easy to see a strong correlation between Europeans’ encounters with Africa and the Africans they were capturing at the time in the slave trade, and racist accounts about the Africans they enslaved. It seems that Europeans were developing the consciousness of racism in order to justify retroactively their importation of African slaves, a rationalization for their actions that is instead a form of self-delusion. This was the opening chapter in the representation in France of Africa and Africans that was to be called scientific racism.

The most influential contributors to the denigration of the African race during the early French slave trade were French clerics. Three stand out as particularly prejudiced: the Jesuit Dictionary of Trevoux, an encyclopedic work of 1704; the Dominican friar

Jean-Baptiste Labat’s treatise Voyage to the Islands of America 1673-1705, and the sequel New Voyage to the Islands of America, a 1722 best-seller among a French public anxious to hear about the exotic land and peoples of Africa, and of colonists’ growing enterprise in the New World; and the Jesuit Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix’s three- volume Journal of 1730 (Curran 9-61).

The Dictionary of Trevoux was the first to state that Africans were “responsible for their own enslaved condition and subsequent misery” (qtd. in 9), a trope that would be repeated endlessly throughout the centuries. This text repeated those sensationalized accounts of explorers about African cannibalistic tribes, tales of idolatry, as well as many 37 physiological defects and depravity, such as selling their own wives and children. These descriptions continued to be increasingly reductionist and essentialist–that a négre is identical with, and nothing other than, a slave; and that all négres are behaviorally the same–promoting a negative discourse and consciousness of prejudicial attitudes of the age toward Africa and Africans.

The Dominican Labat wrote his New Voyage two decades after he returned to

France from Martinique, where he owned a sugar plantation worked by several dozen slaves. He matter-of-factly illustrates the punishments meted out to recalcitrant slaves, at first sympathizing with their plight. “But,” he adds parenthetically, “one gets used to it”

(qtd. in Curran 58). In this way, Labat normalized the torture of African slaves on plantations, fixing that consciousness in the minds of his readers. Curran also describes how Labat, like virtually all clerics, believed that baptizing slaves and instructing them in the Catholic faith would redeem their souls in eternity. Labat further noted that the Faith made them more tractable, a utilitarian use of the sacrament to better maintain order.

Finally, the paternalistic benevolence of French masters suited their childish mentality

(60). “This chronicle [of Labat] tells a tale of theologically guaranteed progress” for the slaves, concludes Curran, further justification and rationalization for enlightened imperialists (58). Labat also maintained that the French treated the slaves on their island plantations much better than those “English brutes” on Barbados and Jamaica, a dubious statement of national pride, and perhaps a source for Tannenbaum’s thesis (qtd. in Curran

61).

Pére Charlevoix was an observer commissioned by the king to travel throughout

-the colonies in New France and Louisiana. He ended his voyage at New Orleans. Thus,

his comments have great weight on French attitudes toward African slaves in the

southern Louisiana colony. He promoted the antinomian justification for slavery, that the

Africans’ condition in the New World was far better than their primitive, idolatrous life

in Africa. This antinomian standpoint found great favor among clerics. It further enhanced

the Dictionary of Trevoux's assessment that slaves were suited for slavery: they are able to

endure “unimaginable amounts of suffering and torture,” and could labor “as much as six

[times the rate] as [one] Indian,” probably referring to the Carib Indians and the Louisiana

Indian slaves he encountered. Finally, Charlevoix concludes with the common trope that

they were “born [to] slavery” (qtd. in Curran 53). In addition to the essentializing of Labat

and Charlevoix and reducing the négre to only a slave, they were the first writers since

Africanus to note ethical differences among African tribes. But their findings related to

utilitarian ontology rather than cultural. They determined from experience that certain

ethnicities were suitable for hard labor, others were good for domestic duties and farming,

and others were good for nothing. Thus arose the reduction of African ethnicities to

suitability for different kinds of labor, an idea that was not lost on planters who would

specify to slave traders which ethnic group they were to capture in raids. Also, these men of

the cloth commented on the beauty, vibrancy and promiscuousness of Wolof women, one of

the tribes that make these négresses attractive to Frenchmen (Curran 54).

At least these theories and observations by the clerics were “empirically

grounded,” writes Curran ironically (54). Many other clerics and religious laity grounded

their theories in biblical arguments. One of these arguments is the Old Testament story

of the curse of the son of Ham (Genesis 9:21-25). In this tract, Noah, after surviving the

39 flood with his family, was relaxing under the influence when his son Ham accidently caught his father in a drunken and disorderly state of nakedness. A piqued Noah decreed that Ham’s eldest son, Canaan, would be “servant of servants” to his brothers.

Subsequent exegeses of the tract have Canaan’s progeny migrating to Ethiopia, where their skins blacken and they become the fated servants of the curse, that is, slaves (Curran

76-77). This Son of Ham myth became a popular religious justification for African slavery, especially during the Great Awakening in antebellum America.

It was the French men of science that had the greatest influence on racism. The natural historian George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was renowned among English and French Enlightenment-era intellectuals as being the authority on biological determinants of racism. His multi-volume Natural History resided on the shelves of men of the eighteenth century, including Thomas Jefferson. Buffon endorsed the theory of monogenesis, a vaguely biblical single creation of man, a white prototype. From original sameness, different “varieties” of men dispersed into different parts of the globe, such as

Africa and other antipodes of the earth. While Europeans remained as white as they were in antiquity, others experienced changes in physiognomy, in particular, different skin colors. His theories refute the essentialism of other naturalists, and offer an environmental or accidentalist account of adaptation that, in Africa, produced black skin, nappy hair, and limited intelligence. He surmised that an African transplanted into

Europe would find his skin whiten and intelligence restored, and vice versa for the

European transplanted to Africa. His pre-Darwinian theory of adaptation, more epigenetic than evolutionary-genetic, conformed to religious beliefs of single, Adamic

40 creation. Proof for Buffon that the négre was a variety of Homo, not a separate species, was the fact, observed in the colonies, that the product of a white and black union was not sterile, as are mules (yet mixed-race people are still called mulattoes) (Curran 107).

Buffon’s theory promulgated two new corollaries of eighteenth-century Africanist discourse: degeneration and climate theory.

To Show Buffon’s influence on political thinkers of the time using degeneracy and climate theory, one need only look to Montesquieu. The Baron de Montesquieu’s

Spirit of the Laws was the major sociopolitical work of the Enlightenment. In Book XIV

§2-7 (221-40), he asserts that men in northern climates are more vigorous, have greater strength, boldness, and courage, and especially a greater sense of superiority over those of lower climes. He infers that these northern peoples (English?) and their leaders are amenable to democratic government. Those in warmer southern climates (French, Italian,

Iberians) are better governed by monarchies. He admires the English parliamentary system, but perhaps out of political expediency during the reign of Louis XV, prefers enlightened monarchy for his countrymen. For those people in the hottest climes, he sees them as enervated, indolent and sexually passionate. “The heat of the climate may be so excessive,” Montesquieu states, “that the faintness is communicated to the mind; there is no curiosity, no enterprise” (222). For these people, “Slavery is . . . less unbearable than the force of mind necessary to conduct oneself” (232).

While he coyly refuses to be specific, he is clearly referring to equatorial

Africans, who are like the children Labat compares them to, and for whom slavery is better than a life of indolence and thoughtlessness. This is the typical view of

Eurocentrists, that Africans lack autonomy and agency–he traditionalist’s New World history. Montesquieu essentializes Africans when he claims that, if a natural-born slave existed, he would be found in a hot clime, where he degenerates into a lazy, senseless automaton, who will labor only when forced by violence. Therefore, he concludes,

“natural slavery . . . is to be limited to some particular parts of the world” (240). His coyness in not explicitly identifying Africa and Africans is telling of his anxiety over being accused unenlightened, or of his fear of taking a critical stand on the issue of slavery.

His conflict over slavery is apparent. Montesquieu confesses, “I know not whether this article be dictated by my understanding or my heart” (241). He seems to condemn slavery for the effect it has on French planters: “the master, because by having unlimited authority over the slaves, . . . [he] thence becomes fierce, hasty, severe, voluptuous, and cruel” (235), using the most opprobrious terms of his time. But despite averring that “the state of slavery is in its own nature bad,” an unconvincing condemnation, he nevertheless launches a barrage of justifications for its practice.

In his most infamous passage (XV §5), he writes, “If I were to support the right we have had of judging the négres slaves, here is what I would say.” With this supposedly counterfactual apologia, Montesquieu proceeds to outline those justifications

French colonists “have had”: (1) having exterminated the natives, Africans were needed to clear the vacated land; (2) sugar cultivated in the French Caribbean islands would be too expensive for Europeans if wage labor was used; (3) blacks are ugly and despicable–

God would surely not put a soul in such a body; (4) negative physical features such as

42 skin color and hair caused the ancient Persians and Turks to make them eunuchs; (5) they do not appreciate the value of money or private property; (6) they couldn't be men, or else we couldn't call ourselves Christians for abusing them; and (7) the injustices we inflict on them must be exaggerated, because we are merciful and just (238-39).

Since Montesquieu never set foot in the slave colonies, he must have compiled this incredible inventory from French clerics’ and natural historians’ accounts with which he was familiar when he wrote the Laws in 1750. Montesquieu’s work was very influential on the Founding Fathers when they were debating the constitutional framework of the country, as is well known. Montesquieu’s discourse on Africans and justifications for slavery must also have influenced the Founders to not take a stand on the issue, and to institute slavery in the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the

State of Virginia has been cited by revisionist historians as a prime example of American duplicity over slavery. Jefferson writes: “I advance it as a suspicion only that the blacks . . . are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind” (150-51).

Jefferson was as conflicted as Montesquieu over the morality of slavery. In parts of the

Notes, he alternately fears emancipating the slaves because “of the injuries they have sustained” and the possible “extermination of one or the other race.” So he leaves it up to

“the rising generation, and not to the one now in power,” to confront the issue of emancipation (145).

An objection may be raised that emphasizing Montesquieu’s and Jefferson’s similar conflictions over slavery is a case of presentism, the anachronistic fallacy of applying modern norms and morals to past actors. However, the argument presented

43 above is not that Montesquieu and Jefferson should have known better, but that they did know better. It seems the truth was self-evident–of slavery as evil–in their hearts, if not in their minds.

Not to be forgotten among the philosophers is Voltaire. He believed in a polygenetic theory of racial difference, as opposed to Buffon's monogenesis.

Polygenesis is the theory that there were multiple creations in which all the animals were formed in their present state on earth (Curran 140). Although polygenesis was a minority opinion because it contradicted the Bible and Adamic theory, Voltaire, perhaps because of his animosity toward the Church, adhered to his opinion, and led many followers to it.

“Just as,” he says in his Metaphysical Treatise, “there are different kinds of trees . . . [that] do not come from the same tree, . . . there are different kinds of men.”

These different kinds of men are “the bearded whites, the wooly-haired négres, the horse- haired yellows, and the beardless men” (qtd. in Curran 141). These last two kinds refer to the Chinese and the Native Americans. These are the same taxonomies that Carl

Linnaeus identified in his canonical classification system, except he did not identify these kinds as separate species, but as varieties of Homo. Voltaire misapplies Linnaeus’ scientific taxonomy, ignoring the latter’s conclusion that all human species have the same origin. However, Curran states that, in other of Voltaire’s philosophical treatises, he

“contributed to one of the major transformations . . . in European thought in the eighteenth century, that is, the sub-humanity of Africans” (147). He may also have contributed to the following century’s scientific racism, which claimed polygenesis to relegate Africans to the animal kingdom.

But many readers of Voltaire point to his famous passage in Candide about the partially dismembered négre he encounters in Dutch Surinam. When Candide asks the reason for his missing hand and leg, the négre states that his master cut them off to prevent his stealing and running away. “This is the price of the sugar you eat in Europe,” the négre says ruefully (Voltaire 40). Candide’s empathy with the slave and outrage at this “abomination” (40) has been used to mitigate Voltaire’s inhumane views on

Africans. However, one commits the biographical fallacy by equating the fictional character with the author. Candide is a Mennipean satire meant to mock Panglossian optimism that this is the best of all possible worlds, as well as Candide’s naive belief in man’s humanity to man, especially to the Other.

These are the elements of the native social consciousness in which the French colonists of America were nurtured: lack of concern for the community; social stratification and class insularity; atomism and particularism. These are not elements of an assimilationist, inclusive ethos. Further, deep-seated animus toward the Other, that is, the African, does not make for an ingredient necessary for a colonial planter to recognize the moral worth of his slave, to not consider him mere chattel bereft of personality.

Tannenbaum’s thesis, and Johnson’s more recent corroboration of that thesis, do not stand up to scrutiny of French mouers that colonists brought in their heads to the New

World. It was predictable that the élite class in Louisiana and New Orleans, who had grown up in France imbibing Ancien Régime consciousness of this sort, would have become selfish, cruel, heartless men who established a confused, chaotic regime. This is the fragment of eighteenth-century French ethos that colonists brought to the New World.

Collective Identity and Social Consciousness Brought from West Africa to America

Now, as Gilroy writes, “the time has come for the primal history of modernity to be reconstructed from the slaves’ point of view” (55). In other words, he infers, writing a revisionist history that takes the viewpoint of the Other into consideration, as Bailyn suggests, will show how the primordial native consciousness of the African, entangling with that of the European, could have formed the modern, hybrid, pluralistic culture of

New Orleans in metis.

The most erudite and exhaustive treatment of the society and culture coming out of Africa to Louisiana is Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana. Hall’s work was groundbreaking, like Curran’s, in combining evidentiary research and interpretive history to provide a mosaic of life, of social consciousness and cultural intelligence, of the Africans who came to the New World. Using her text, it is possible to refute the prejudicial, essentialist and reductive accounts of European naturalists and clerical observers on African slaves. The book also shows how the African could adapt, in both body and mind, to a new, unfamiliar environment, and could reconcile him and herself with the Native American and European mind in the process of metis. The native culture and society of west Africa in the eighteenth century, and how it related to colonial

Louisiana, is examined in the following segments: (1) the contingencies of geography and climate; (2) the condition of African slavery; (3) cultural, social, and intellectual consciousness; (4) agricultural and artisanal skills; and (5) aesthetics, worldview, religion, and oral tradition.

Geography and Climate

Two-thirds of the almost six thousand Africans that landed in Louisiana came from the region of West Africa known as Senegambia (Hall 35). During the French slave trade, the Company of the Indies held the monopoly for trade in that region. The

Senegambian River Valley is dominated by the Senegal and Gambia Rivers. The rivers and their tributaries course like veins throughout this fertile region. The coastline from

Cap Vert (present-day Dakar) to Sierra Leone is etched with deltas formed by these river systems emptying into the Atlantic. Thus, a contingency of similar geographies appears in the fact that Senegambia closely resembles the Lower Mississippi Valley and the delta region of that river emptying into the Gulf of Mexico.

In fact, Senegambians found a familiar setting when landing in Louisiana. They were familiar with a humid, hot, wet, tropical environment. River and waterway transportation had dominated commerce in Senegambia, so they were able to adapt to that same type of transportation in Louisiana. Skilled boatmen in their own land, they were prized in Louisiana for transporting goods all the way up the Mississippi to Illinois country. Further, the bayous, canals and swamps that define the Lower Mississippi provided great opportunities for slaves’ clandestine mobility by water, an opportunity they took to expand their liberty. Finally, once landed in Louisiana and restored to full health after the debilitating Middle Passage, these Africans had a greater survival rate from tropical diseases than Europeans.

The Condition of Slavery in Senegambia

As many justifiers of slavery have pointed out, slavery was part of African culture from ancient times. “Slave-raiding in [Senegambia] was well organized and institutionalized,” Hall notes, long before the commercial slave trade (44). Europeans starting taking captives from these African slave raids for shipment to the New World.

One warlike tribe, the Bambara, were especially skilled at hunting humans, capturing their prizes in internecine and intertribal warfare. These warriors were themselves

“slaves of the tribal king and his lords,” according to Hall (44). Thus, the social structure of the Bambara formed a hierarchical, feudalistic system (41), like that in Ancien Régime

France and her colonies.

In several respects, however, slavery in Africa was different from slavery in

America. Slaves in Africa were not denigrated, considered subhuman, or outcasts of society. Slavery resembled Roman slavery during the Roman Empire, a non-racial institution. Slaves were members of a household, owned by the master, yet not considered chattel: they could not be sold or separated from their masters’ family. Often they intermarried with members of their owners’ family. The condition of the children from these marriages followed the condition of the mother. The Senegambians who came to Louisiana thus were familiar with the institution of slavery, except for the racial element. They could understand a servile relationship between master and slave, but only up to a certain point: slaves were not beaten severely or tortured in Africa.

African tribal wars made the Bambara good fighters in their kingdom, Hall states.

Their enslaved condition “was moderated, and the sense of their power enhanced,

48 by . . . their access to weapons and military training” (54). This military tradition, and the fierce pride of the Bambara, would be carried in their heads to Louisiana, resulting in their autonomy and agency, creating for themselves a similar moderation of their condition. This tradition would be critical to the survival of the colony in wars with

Native Americans. Metis would depend to a great extent on these Africans. It would also be a great concern for their white masters, fearing slave insurrections.

Cultural, Social, and Intellectual Consciousness

The three principal peoples of Senegambia, the Bambara, Mandinga and Wolof, formed “a region of homogeneous culture and a common . . . history,” writes African scholar Phillip Curtin (qtd. in Hall 29). These peoples’ history is rooted in the medieval empire of Mali. The Malians are the people Leo Africanus described as intelligent and sophisticated. The people dispersed after the downfall of the Malian empire formed a common language group in Senegambia. This language community was transplanted to

Louisiana, forming a strong cultural network among the plantations around New Orleans

(Hall 111). Through their interactions with French masters and other elites, they incorporated French, along with bits of Spanish and Portuguese picked up in the slave trade, to form the unique Louisiana Creole patois (289). Besides becoming the lingua franca of commerce, spoken by both Africans, their descendants, and French élites and commoners in Louisiana, this common lingual base produced the cohesive community of

Afro-Creole slaves and later the gens de couleur libre in New Orleans, one of the factors making the city sui generis among other colonies and American cities. In the English colonies, incompatible African languages prevented an Africanized creole language and

49 community from forming.

The Senegambian social network was cohesive, homogeneous, communitarian, non-materialistic, and multiply-interconnected through fictive kinships, Hall shows. It was unlike the society of Ancien Régime France, in that it “did not consist of vast, centralized, hierarchical, despotic institutions.” Commoners in Africa “enjoy[ed] a high level of participatory democracy . . . [and] participated in organized groups from early childhood” (52). Thus, these groups, unlike the isolated and particularist groups

Tocqueville found in Ancien Régime France, possessed high valency to form an organic structure, a living organism of native African identity and social consciousness. Hall concludes that this social organization “travelled well,” being “adaptable” and

“acculturable” (52, 55). In other words, West Africans were conditioned by their native culture and social network, consisting of different ethnicities, to assimilate those different identities into one cohesive identity, and to form the double-consciousness that made them a major factor in metis, and establish that pluralistic form of Afro-Creole modernity for which New Orleans is famous.

Two other ethnic groups from West Africa–the Mandinga and

Wolof–contributed in their own ways to metis, and to New Orleans’ Afro-Creole culture.

Recognition of cultural differences between ethnicities refutes essentialist views that all

Africans are alike. The Mandinga were Muslim, not “idolaters,” for example. They continued the Malian tradition of scholarship. “Almost all of them could read and write.

They had public schools [where] they taught children to read and write the Arab language

. . . and used Arabic characters to write the Mandinga language” (Hall 38). Some of their

50 scholars must have been familiar with the literature and science of Middle Eastern and

African Muslim intellectuals from the Middle Ages. They were “fine, witty, polite, and clairvoyant . . . and worked hard, their land was well cultivated,” Hall writes, and practiced good animal husbandry. “They loved and helped each other, and never captured [and enslaved] each other” (38). Hall is clearly enamored of the Mandinga. Her descriptions, gleaned from modern histories of the Upper Guinea Coast, read very differently from those of French historians and French Caribbean and Louisianan slave owners, showing rather a high moral consciousness and work ethic.

The Wolof, whose women Frenchmen were especially attracted to, were enslaved in Africa as domestic servants to company employees, and later became domestics in

Louisiana. Company director Le Page du Pratz noted that “they are very appreciative . . . and serve their masters [well],” apparently in more ways than one, infers

Hall (qtd. at 36). Thus, the first African creoles were produced in Africa, notes African-

American Studies scholar Ira Berlin, who calls them “Atlantic Creoles” in his essay

“From Creole to African.” These creoles formed part of the company’s workforce, transporting captives by boat or on foot to captiveries (holding pens) on the Atlantic shore, and serving in other duties, as well as domestics. Du Pratz adds, “They are good commanders of other négres . . . because they seem to be born to command” (qtd. in Hall

41). Wolof men and women had penetrating minds, could easily learn new skills, and had a high status in Senegambia, as well as in Louisiana, because of their pride, confidence and assertiveness (Hall 41). Wolof women were possibly the lead organizers of the slave subsistence trade in early New Orleans. They also probably bore the

51 majority of Afro-French creole children in Louisiana, being that they were so attractive to and had such close association with the master in his plantation house, where she was typically a domestic servant.

Agricultural and Artisanal Skills

Senegambians brought practical skills to metis in Louisiana, which proved crucial to the survival and the building of the colony. The culture that “turned out to be the most adaptive” was agricultural technology (Hall 2). “All the major crops of eighteenth- century Louisiana were grown in this area” of West Africa, Hall finds (35). Among these crops, rice was the principal staple. African paddy rice had been grown in Senegambia for more than three thousand years, in the flood plains of the great rivers. The technology of rice cultivation required great skill and knowledge. A complex system of dikes, dams and water-actuated valves had to be built to keep tidewaters in and seawater out, and to keep the water level of the paddies constant. Several Africans with this knowledge, along with rice seed, were brought to Louisiana as slaves for the purpose of recreating this cultivation system on the levees of the Mississippi River, which often flooded naturally into the lowlands. Rice cultivation and the paddy system built by Africans saved the colony from starvation many times when rains or drought ruined other crops. Later, surplus rice became an export crop, shipped to the West Indies and the Atlantic colonies.

It also became the staple of Louisiana and Caribbean cuisine (Hall 59, 121-22).

Corn, tobacco, indigo and cotton, along with other vegetable crops like peas, squash and gombo (okra) were abundant in Senegambia. How Africans cultivated these crops was noticed by a director of the company. He described gangs of workers in the

52 fields wielding their implements, plowing the earth or harvesting the crops, swaying in rhythm to the drums and chants of the griots, the field foremen of the lord. “They behave like they are possessed, making movements and contortions more or less extreme in accordance with how vehement was the song of the griots” (qtd. in Hall 36). Observers of field workers in Louisiana were to make similar comments about plantation slaves in the antebellum years. The comment of the Senegal official shows that the practice of working in gangs to the rhythm of drums and chants on Louisiana plantations originated in Africa, as a means by which field workers ameliorated the drudgery of hard labor.

Those same field shouts, drums and chants on the plantations of Louisiana would engender a New Orleans musical culture, evolving into the blues, spirituals, gospel, ring dances in Congo Square, and ultimately jazz.

Artisans were highly skilled and valued in the native land. Metalworkers of gold, silver and copper, blacksmiths, tool and arms makers, as well as iron mongers, were highly praised in Senegambia for their skills. They would also be valued in New Orleans as artisans, making them the principal skilled workers in the colony, replacing the engagés, indentured servants brought from France. The slaves’ art provided occupations for them after they were emancipated (Hall 37). In Africa, artisans worked in a “relaxed, informal manner, making of labor a social and ceremonial occasion,” adds Hall. While working in front of their houses, African artisans entertained friends while carefully and laboriously working on their creations (37). For some European observers, such as

Labat, this relaxed labor practice convinced them that Africans were lazy and would only work hard when forced through violence.

Aesthetics, Worldview, Religion, Oral Tradition

Spirituality imbued the lives and worldview of Senegambians and inspired all their activities. Their idea of nature was Platonic in essence, perfect and ideal. There was “no separation between artisanship, artistic creation, and religious service.” Each artisan’s creation, whether an implement, ornament, musical instrument or article of clothing, was a religious object (Hall 49). Their religion (save for the Muslim Wolofs) was animistic and pantheistic. Africans believed God was a spiritual being that pervades nature and the world (Hall 411 n. 47). For example, “The Bambara believe that all animals and plants have souls” (Hall 52). Ethical and moral consciousness included

“reverence for all forms of life,” and an aesthetic “search for simplicity, [and] for the elegance of science” (45-47). Performance of music was also a religious activity (50).

Drums, flutes, harps, shakers made from gourds, and other instruments, were used in ceremonies such as the ring dance. Again, the musical tradition would be replicated in

New Orleans’s Congo Square, the only place in America where such performance was permitted for slaves.

Literary culture was brought in their heads to Louisiana, in the form of myths, legends, and stories, via a strong oral tradition. Like the ancient Greeks, Africans conveyed their ethical and moral consciousness in parables and lessons, often featuring animal spirits. Hall notes “the frequent citing of proverbs in ordinary conversation” to illustrate this oral tradition (46). Several of these proverbs and parables are sprinkled throughout her text in the Louisiana Creole language, whose onomatopoeic and alliterative verse shows its African origin. Ethnographers and folklorists have compiled

54 anthologies of Louisiana Creole poems and songs, stories, and proverbs that provide a window into African aesthetic consciousness.

The religious consciousness and animistic spirituality that Senegambians carried in their heads would prove to be assimilable and adaptable to Native American spirituality. Both were animistic, and both cultures were naturalist, non-materialist communitarian societies. While the congruence between African and Indian religious outlooks is easily conceivable, that between African and Catholic religions is not.

However, as will be seen, this amalgamation did take place in Louisiana, showing the adaptability and assimilationist impulse of Africans for cultures other than their own, an important development for New Orleans.

In all their aesthetic productions, in their cosmology and religion, Hall concludes, the African way of life “demonstrates a flexible approach: the ability to be comfortable with duality and seeming contradiction” (49). She affirms that the Senegambians were able to form a double-consciousness of perceiving and understanding the antinomies of slave life. One of the contradictions was being forced through violence to do work that was a natural part of their spiritual essence as Africans. And the duality of being a man or a woman, a spiritual being and part of the human race on the one hand, and a slave, a commodity, chattel, on the other hand, is similar to the duality in Du Bois’ articulation.

These considerations of Senegambian society and collective identity refute the essentializing and reductive characterizations of Africans by French clerics and natural historians of the eighteenth century. A century earlier, Leo Africanus had discerned the vibrant cultures of various ethnicities in Africa, but his work was overshadowed by

55 prejudicial and sensationalistic accounts published for the popular market. These prejudicial accounts arose, it seems, to justify ex post facto the forced migration of

Africans to America as slaves. Religious arguments and antinomian justifications deluded French élites and commoners alike, specifically in this case the colonists who would come to America, into thinking négres were born slaves, were indolent and thoughtless, and would only work when forced. One theory of scientific racism, monogenesis, maintained that accidents of climate degenerated the black man and woman from a white, European ideal into a négre, a barbarian and idolater. At least this theory was more egalitarian than polygenesis, which denied a common origin of Homo, and relegated the African to a different species altogether.

But in considering the viewpoint of the African in his and her native land in

Senegarnbia, their work ethic, pride in accomplishment, practical knowledge and skill, moral intelligence, and the spiritual nature of all their activities, along with their flexibility in dealing with contradictions and duality, it is entirely possible that the

African emigrants would have worked as indentured servants more efficiently and productively, if only they had been treated as men and women of God, and guaranteed freedom after their term of service to return to their homeland or to remain in America.

Thousands of European workers had emigrated to Louisiana under these terms, but

Africans out-worked and out-produced them two- or three-to-one. Counterfactuals like this are the dreams of idealists who wish a different outcome from the reality of slavery and its discontents. Still, an alternative modernity did evolve in New Orleans, hampered by slavery’s discontents, but perhaps stronger and more pluralistic because of them.

CHAPTER 3

INTERLUDE IN NEW FRANCE: METIS ON THE CANADIAN FRONTIER

Johnson points out that “most of colonial Louisiana’s history is best understood against its Canadian background” (19). He is referring to France’s first colonial experiment in North America, New France, in present-day Canada. It was here that the

French first encountered the Other, in the person of the Native American, and it was here that they formed a partnership, metis, with the red man. This experiment relates to metis in Louisiana in two ways. First, the founders of the Louisiana colony grew up in that frontier of New France, and had vast experience in dealing with the Natives. They brought that consciousness of Native American ways, of Indian language and culture, of the intricate customs and formalities of Indian diplomacy, with them in their heads to

Louisiana. That consciousness served them well in relations with Canadian Natives; it would serve them in Louisiana as well, for the security of the colony. Second, an analysis of the relationship between the French and Indians in Canada will serve to test Parkman’s thesis that French civilization “embraced and cherished” the Indian. Johnson further amplified Parkman’s romantic notion of French-Indian relations by finding an assimilationist ethos in those relations with Indians that carried over into their relations with not only Indians, but also Africans in Louisiana. His thesis will be tested also.

To analyze these assertions by Parkman and Johnson, the text by Canadian scholar W.J. Eccles, The French in North America, is used to discover the facts on the ground. He finds that the ambition of the French crown in New France was, first, to 57 discover the fabled Northwest Passage to the Far East, and second, to exploit the natural resources of the land by finding and mining precious metals–the equally mythical El

Dorado. The French, like the English, were attempting to duplicate the success of Spain, whose vast riches found in New Spain and in Peru filled the royal coffers. Thus, it was the greed of European imperialists for the rich spices of Cathay via the Northwest

Passage, and for the rich lodes of gold and silver fabled to be just beneath the ground, that was the impetus for invading North America, not settling the land for the increasingly land-poor farmers of Europe. Settlement was only necessary to stake a valid claim to the territories (Eccles 1-5).

Since the point of settlement was only to land enough Frenchmen to claim the territory of New France, the crown sent the dregs of French society as the first settlers: criminals, vagabonds, beggars, galley slaves, and street people from Paris and the port cities of France. The crown did not wish to waste a good population of farmers, artisans and workers from France on such a speculative venture. None of these waste people, forçats (forced emigrants) and engagés (indentured servants), had any experience in clearing land for farming, nor with defending themselves against an indigenous, red- skinned people who were not happy to have their lands invaded. Thus, it is an inconvenient truth about the New World and America that not rugged individuals but the white trash of Europe first came to this vast wasteland (as Europe saw it), making of the

New World a penal colony built upon their expendable carcasses. The exportation of

France’s poor and unfortunate people is another indication of French disregard and contempt for the lower classes. French élites were not troubled by the fact that they were

58 essentially sentencing forçats to death. This practice is no different than eugenics, of ridding the population of its undesirables.

With hopes of finding the Northwest Passage and the mother lode dashed, royal ministers turned to the indigenous people of New France for an alternative source of wealth. Early explorers had reported that the Indians were anxious to trade beaver pelts with Europeans in return for imported goods such as firearms, metal implements, and cloth. The trade in furs was to establish in New France a valuable mercantile economy with the metropole, just as tobacco cultivation in England’s Chesapeake colonies had established her mercantile economy. Here we see the Europeans’ lust for luxury. Beaver pelts were used to trim wide-brimmed hats, a fashion accessory for wealthy Europeans

(Eccles 12). Furs and tobacco were commodities valued by the upper classes as hedonistic pleasures, those that Fénelon and Tocqueville decried. Traders in furs and tobacco would become the wealthy upper class in America, dealing in such ephemeral commodities, rather than in serious enterprise that would benefit all classes. It was for establishing the fur trade that the three ministers of Bourbon France, the Cardinals

Richelieu and Mazarin, and Finance Minister Colbert, would promote permanent settlements in New France. Natives traded many millions of beaver pelts to French traders by the time of the Seven Years’ War, when England took over the trade. In order to establish this lucrative commerce, Canadians had “of necessity . . . to maintain good relations with the Indians” (Eccles 12).

It was to strengthen this economic symbiosis that Richelieu proclaimed his assimilation policy for the Natives of New France. First, he wished the Indians to be

59 converted to the Catholic faith and to inspire in them the great benefits of European civilization. Richelieu promised that, when the Canadian Natives lived among French settlers, came to know French culture, and embraced the Catholic faith, these former

“savages will be considered natural Frenchmen” and royal subjects. Moreover, they were invited “to come and live . . . in France and there acquire property . . . just as if they had been born in France” (qtd. in Aubert 452). The Indians were not impressed with the moral character of the forçats and engagés, barely surviving in the wilderness, impious and irredeemable trash. Nor were they impressed with the haughtiness of élites intent on getting rich in the fur trade. Neither could they fathom the necessity of staking out a small piece of the vast land they lived in and ending their nomadic lifestyle to become sedentary farmers. They much preferred their way of life and were satisfied only to trade with the French rather than assimilate with them.

The early settlers in New France were thus totally dependent on the Indians for trade, as well as for mere survival. Conditions were harsh, with cold winters and lack of a subsistence crop reserve forcing settlers to live in Indian villages, an ironic reversal.

“The Indians were the masters in the colony,” writes Eccles, “and the French did their bidding” (25). The Indians told them where they could settle and determined the terms of trade. The French were “grateful for any small concessions the Indians deigned to give them,” adds Eccles. His analysis shows that it was the Indians who had the upper hand in the colony, displaying their autonomy and agency, rather than dominating Europeans.

With his assimilation policy rejected by the Indians, Richelieu encouraged frontiersmen to find mates among the Indian tribes, since reputable French women did

60 not immigrate in any great number to New France. The governor of New France relayed the royal proclamation to a gathering of Indian chiefs: “Our young men will marry your daughters, and we shall be one people” (qtd. in Eccles 22). This policy of mixed marriages, métissage, was reinforced during Colbert’s ministry under Louis XIV. He instructed his colonial administrators to “try to attract [the Indians] . . . in the vicinity of our habitations . . . so that, after some time, having one law and one master, they may form one people and one blood” (qtd. in Aubert 452). This “one blood” policy and the failed assimilation policy before it have “often been cited as evidence of a peculiar

French cultural ethos deprived of the prejudices one finds in contemporary English perceptions of Indians,” writes Aubert (452-53). He is referring to, without naming, the theses of Parkman and Johnson, the former who states that the French cherished the

Indian, whereas the English scorned him; and the latter, who states the French were inclusive of the Other, the English segregationist. In particular, for Johnson, the one blood policy is the foundation for building his case for French inclusiveness, tolerance, and assimilationist instinct. That foundation is losing strength.

Aubert continues to weaken the foundation: “Hierarchical and segregationist notions pervaded the early modern French ethos” (442), reaffirming Tocqueville’s analysis of Ancien Régime society. Regarding mixed marriages, French élites’ mouers and obsession with proper social ordre proscribed the mixing of blood between higher and lower orders. The term mésalliance refers to a marriage of a commoner or a new noble to a blood noble, an anathema to propriety. Aubert finds that, in Ancien Régime

France, mésalliance “threatened the integrity, the ‘blood purity,’ of the best ‘races’ or

61 families of the kingdom” (442). Whether Aubert uses scare quotes or quotes from sources he read, they signify that the term “race” was applied to social inferiors, the lower classes. And the “blood purity” of France expresses the hereditary lineage, dating back to the ancient Franks, of the best families. This use of the term “race” to denote family lineage is another example of applying anthropological characteristics to social class. In Cardinal Richelieu’s own words, these mésalliances “cause noble families to degenerate and only produce Métis, as far removed from the generosity of their ancestors as their faces often are” (qtd. in Aubert 449).

This quote reveals several prejudicial social instincts. First, it appears that the term Métis signified, in Ancien Régime France, racial degeneracy, with those physiological markers usually assigned to the Other, the red-skinned and black-skinned peoples. No wonder this term was used for French-Indian unions. Second, the Cardinal displays hypocrisy in condemning the practice of mixed marriage in France, yet promoting it in New France. What is the reason for his hypocrisy? The reason is economic and demographic. The crown could not afford to ship good men to Canada, paying their passage and depleting the home population of desirables. Further, riots were convulsing Paris and the port cities with the arbitrary exiles of undesirables. But the most egregious reason, as Aubert points out, was the hope of royal ministers that through these mixed marriages, not only would the population expand from within, but also racial mixing would dilute the alien blood of the savages over several generations. Aubert shows his outrage at this policy, likening it to “ethnic cleansing” (452).

However, “it [proved] a difficult thing, to Frenchify or civilize [the Indians],” one

Ursuline nun found (qtd. in Aubert 453). The Natives of Canada did not consider French culture superior to their own–in fact, just the opposite was true. It is an ironic twist of fate and history that the youth of New France, the second and subsequent generations born in New France–Creoles they would have been called in Louisiana–found the Indian way of life far superior to that of their parents, many of them, like the Le Moyne family, nobles. The Indians were more or less accommodating to these young men living in their villages with their daughters (Eccles 47-48).

Much romance has been spun about these coureurs de bois (literally runners of woods, or woodsmen) who assimilated into half-Indian/half•French, learning Indian ways, cohabiting with the Indian girls they once played with as children, hunting, fishing and trapping with the girls’ brothers in the wilderness. Among these coureurs de bois were the aforementioned Le Moyne brothers, the future founders of the Louisiana colony.

They were toughened by living in the wilderness, canoeing along the waterways, trading furs with the Indians, or trapping their own beaver. French colonial governors’ proprieties were offended as much as their peers in France were about mixed-race unions.

They noted “serious defects in the Canadian character” in these backwoodsmen, degeneracy from living in open sin with Indian women; independent, without respect for authority, dressing and eating like Indians; in other words, more Indian than French

(Eccles 141-42).

One can imagine the discourse surrounding the issue of the union of Frenchmen and Indian women, their faces displaying the racial degeneracy of Métis. Colonial governors, blood nobles all, considered them inferior stock; they labeled the Indian

63 women “whores” for seducing the young men with their loose morals (Aubert 455). The increasing rate of ensavagement was draining the colony of its youth. Colonial governors implored ministers to halt the assimilation and “one blood” policies, and forbid clerics from blessing these unions in the Church. Neither were the Indians happy to see their young girls mate with Frenchmen rather than their own braves.

Settlers dispersed throughout the vast wilderness from the St. Lawrence River, through the Great Lakes, and as far west as modern-day Wisconsin, found themselves amidst hostile Indian tribes not happy with encroachment on their hunting grounds. The most warlike and brutal were the Five Nations of Iroquois, who raided indefensible

French settlements, slaughtering men, women, and children, often torturing them before killing them. There were not enough soldiers to protect these spread-out settlements. As a result, young men in the colony were required to join the militia and receive military training in guerilla warfare, the same technique of warfare that Indians used. As a result, the “military tradition early became one of the dominant features of the emerging

Canadian society,” writes Eccles (41). This tradition would be replicated in Louisiana, where a militia was formed from the start to defend against hostile Indian tribes menacing the young colony.

It was Colbert who successfully transplanted a small unit (read “fragment”) of seventeenth-century French society into Canada (Eccles 54). With that one-word interpolation, Eccles writes a nearly identical statement as Johnson in his essay “A

Fragment of the Eighteenth French Ethos,” but not in the way Johnson intended. True to form, Canadian society became a hierarchy of insular classes and atomistic groups. The

64 higher classes displayed “conspicuous consumption, lavish hospitality . . . of the nobility,” rather than investing in enterprises other than the fur trade (Eccles 127). These are the same concerns Fénelon and Tocqueville noted in their criticism of the decadent nature of French elite classes. Habitants (nominally the workers of the land) would enrich themselves in the fur trade and receive titles, living in splendor in Quebec and

Montreal. Among these were the now grown-up Le Moyne brothers.

This interlude in New France is important for understanding the process of metis in Louisiana. On a positive note, the future founders and leaders of the southern French colony in North America grew up among Indians, absorbing Native customs and culture, becoming hardened frontiersmen and guerilla warriors. They would bring their diplomatic skills and military knowledge with them to a new frontier on the lower

Mississippi Valley and found a new bastion of French civilization in New Orleans. On a negative note, the Le Moyne brothers, enriched and ennobled, would assume the trappings and attitudes of French élites, of disdain for lower classes, of unconcern for the community, only concerned with their particularist interests in maintaining and displaying wealth, just as their ancestors had in France.

Both policies of royal ministers, the assimilation and “one blood” policies, had failed. Indians were autonomous in preferring their own civilization and animistic religion to that of Europeans. Indians displayed agency by calling the shots in the frontier colony. Rather than the French being dominant in metis and showing largesse toward the Indian, metis was one-sided, the Indian side. French youths fled in droves to the easy, natural lifestyle of the Indian, and into the reluctant arms of Indian girls,

65 forming a nearly independent “Métis Nation of the Northwest Plains” (Eccles 163).

Due to the failure of assimilation, this idealistic policy was not replicated toward

Louisianan Indians. Instead, Johnson claims, the policy was “transferred” to Africans, where the regime in New Orleans “forged a social consciousness premised upon assimilation of the African population as members of the community, with social rights and defined limits to their subjugation to their masters” (40). This remarkable statement is based on his reading of Francophilic traditionalist historians, that the French displayed benevolence toward the Africans they forcibly transported to America and enslaved.

Based upon what was learned in Ancien Régime France and Canada about French disregard for the Other, of lower classes, his statement is doubtful at best. The next chapter tests his assertion.

CHAPTER 4

THEY COME INTO AMERICA: AFRICANS ON THE LOUISIANA FRONTIER

Now, after having examined the native consciousness of peoples from two ancient cultures, the French and Native Americans, and how they interacted in the process of metis on the Canadian frontier, it is time add a third people from an ancient culture, and to “pay careful attention to the complex intermixture of African and European philosophical and cultural systems and ideas” (Gilroy 44), this time on the Louisiana frontier. It is the study of the hybrid culture that formed in the interactions between

Louisiana French, Native Americans, and African slaves–that is, metis–that is the subject of this chapter.

There were equal contributions from three mindsets or native consciousnesses to the process of metis in Louisiana, not an exclusively French one. The alternative modernity that grew out of the early French colony, centered in New Orleans, reflects a

“decentered and inescapably plural view of modern subjectivity and identity” (Gilroy 46).

Gilroy urges historians to move the center of subjectivity, that is, the epistemological standpoint, from the European center to the African and Afro-Creole margins, in the hopes of accomplishing Bailyn’s goal of considering the viewpoint of the Other and finding new ways of understanding our modern, multilayered culture.

The event that starts this modern story is the African diaspora. It is the story of

"the distinctive historical experience of the [African] population," that is, of the African slaves and their Afro-Creole descendants who were slaves. The experience of disruption, 67 of movement from a familiar, organic culture and society to an alien, chaotic, slave society is one focus of Gilroy’s book. Displaced onto a different continent, meeting for the first time a people much different from their own, the African drew upon innate cognitive abilities of resilience and adaptability to change, along with practical knowledge and skill, to face new realities, and to form what Du Bois characterizes as double-consciousness. On the frontier of Louisiana, Africans found commonalities of language and culture among their brethren, improvising a new social network and collective identity. An oral tradition perhaps helped them to cope with contradiction and duality in the form of parables and stories. In the process, they invented the Louisiana

Creole language, still found today among creoles, and transmitted that African imagination to their multiracial creole children. These adaptations constituted the stew of

Afro-Creole society in New Orleans. Europeans enacted slave laws in an attempt to control their slaves and prevent African social networks from forming. But contingent factors in Louisiana, along with Senegambian autonomy and agency, combined to form one of the most de facto liberal slave societies in the New World. This liberality was certainly not derived from Enlightenment ideas of human rights and natural law, nor from some peculiar instinct of the French for inclusiveness and benevolence toward the Other, but from Afro-Creole inventiveness.

The Terror of the African Diaspora

The first taste of modern European culture that Africans who came into America experienced was of terror, of cruelty and mortality. These were the defining elements of the Atlantic slave trade, of slave raids on helpless villagers in Africa, the death march to

68 the sea, and embarkation on ships crossing the Middle Passage to the New World. The concept of diaspora, disruption, and discontinuity became part of the new experience of

African Americans, as historians like Ira Berlin have written. Berlin counts four major dislocations–migrations–in the lives of African Americans, the Atlantic crossing being the first (Berlin, African America 15). To his count can be added another: the mostly

African-American diaspora caused by Katrina.

Hall has meticulously compiled a quantitative history of the French slave trade to

Louisiana, using primary source material: ship manifests, pilots’ logs, census records, and other contemporaneous records. Her database prefigures the Pan-American and Pan-

African Du Bois Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database by many years. She finds that

Senegambians who were captured in intertribal warfare were, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no longer slaves of the victorious tribal leader, but were sold to slavers in exchange for European goods (Hall 33). The pretense of war captivity was abandoned when French and African mercenaries conducted raids on whole villages, capturing their men, women and children, rounding up thousands for the slave trade.

It can be imagined there was fierce resistance against the raiders, especially among the Bambara. But they were no match against the French and African mercenaries' strength of numbers, clubs, whips, chains and machetes. Regardless of how they were rounded up, in war or in raids, these unfortunates were called captifs (captives) right up until the time they were sold in Louisiana as slaves, a “legalistic fiction,” Hall calls it

(33), but more likely another case of self-delusion to justify the enslavement of Africans.

Chained together in a herd, or loaded aboard open wagons for the long journey to the sea,

69 they were off-loaded along the way in barracoons (open-air corrals), awaiting the next part of the journey.

The Bambara, who lived far inland near the source of the Senegal River, were loaded into boats manned and piloted by fellow Africans in the employ of the company down the river to its mouth. The journey could take weeks or months (Hall 76). Once deposited at the ports of embarkation on the coast that supported the slave trade, they were imprisoned in captiveries–dungeon-like holding pens, with scarcely any food, water, sanitary and hygienic facilities. Hall finds that the descriptions used for these captives represent their depersonalized capital value: they comprise an “inventory” of

“merchandise” which may “spoil” or become “shopworn” during transport to the sea

(Hall 57-95). These disparaging words again show the self-delusion of treating captives as subhuman and the inhumanity toward and disregard for African lives on the part of the

French.

Bailyn estimates, using the Du Bois database, that about half of the sixteen million Africans rounded up in slave raids on African villages never made it to America.

That is, eight million perished in the first of Berlin’s great migrations. Of those eight million total who died, half that number perished in the march to the sea before stepping aboard ship (6). Some of these may have escaped the chains of the slave gangs or died while resisting. These were most likely the Bambara. Hall finds that the Bambara were particularly troublesome in captivity. In Africa, Bambara were notoriously rebellious, revolting during the Senegal River trip to ports on the Atlantic coast, within those captiveries, and on the shore of West Africa waiting to be loaded onto the slave ships

(68-69). Bailyn confirms Hall’s finding: “Shore-based attacks on European slave ships were twenty times more likely in the Senegal and Gambia River areas than elsewhere in

Atlantic Africa” (6). He is almost certainly referring to the rebellious Bambara influence.

Furthermore, this rebellious nature of the Bambara was noted by French directors of the company in Africa and in Louisiana. Hall writes: “Bambara slaves remained particularly defiant during the French colonial period” (102). She provides quantitative data: Bambara constituted only about fifteen percent of adult slaves in Louisiana in 1731, yet they accounted for sixty-six percent of all crimes, mostly from the crime of running away

(102, 112-113 Table 5). Having been weakened by the long journey, wounded in their struggles with captors, captives were required to wait in squalid conditions in the captiveries for a slave ship to arrive, or for a sufficient number of captives to be imprisoned to fill a slave ship. This wait could last weeks or months. As a result, captives who survived long enough to board ship were greatly weakened for the Atlantic crossing, causing high mortality at sea (Hall 76).

Continuing his death toll, Bailyn estimates another half of deaths in the slave trade took place at sea (6). Hall has qualified this estimate of mortality aboard ship by examining the logs of every ship that left West Africa for Louisiana. Seventeen ships sailed from Senegambia between 1719 and 1731, the extent of the French slave trade sponsored by the company. Another slave cargo was privately financed by planters in

1743. The seventeen ships landed 5,797 men, women and children in Louisiana. Using available embark/disembark numbers for these slave ships (not all recorded embarkation numbers), Hall estimates a mortality rate aboard ship of 15.7 percent (35, fig. 2; 73-77,

Tables 3 and 4). Dysentery due to cramped conditions with little hygiene, poor food resulting in scurvy, lack of ventilation on lower decks to which slaves were fastened with ankle irons–all contributed to mortality. Particularly heartbreaking are reports in pilots’ logs of infant deaths, some of whom had been baptized (Hall 73-82).

Newly-landed captives had to be disembarked at the mouth of the Mississippi at the fortification named Balize because the large-draft slave ships were unable to navigate to New Orleans through the shallow, swiftly-flowing river current. In Balize, captives might wait days or weeks waiting for smaller boats to take them upriver. Enduring extreme heat and humidity in the summer, cold and wind in the winter with no warm clothing, and being fed little or no food, many died of starvation or exposure. Those who landed on the dock at New Orleans were hurriedly sold to eager habitants before they could expire. A great many died within hours, weeks or months after being sold.

The numbers who died after landing are approximate, due to incomplete records.

Hall has verified 5,797 captives landed by the time the last (but one) ship reached

Louisiana (10 fig. 1). Anecdotal evidence has 3,600 slaves residing in Louisiana in 1732, one year after the last slave cargo arrived. This leaves 2,197 slaves unaccounted for.

Surely, in the ten years from the first to the last ship, there occurred some slave births counted among the 3,600, so many more than 2,197–closer to 3,000–disappeared from rolls. Some of the missing may have been runaways or killed in Indian raids or even from severe beatings. But Hall states most died from effects from the African diaspora, from long-term malnutrition, exposure, and sheer exhaustion (175). So Bailyn’s estimate of fifty percent mortality in the crossing, when qualified by considering those dead

72 shortly after landing, seems about right.

It is difficult to understand in hindsight how such a valuable “commodity” as an

African captive, let alone a human being, could be so mishandled and neglected when slaves were so scarce in Louisiana and so needed by company and settlers to develop

New Orleans and clear land for plantations. Comparing the situation in France’s

Caribbean colonies, to which millions of slaves were imported, losses of fifty percent or more were less of a concern in the islands due to such a large “inventory.” Perhaps because Louisiana was so late to the slave trade and because France had a monopoly to the Senegambian slave trade, slavers were conditioned to treating Africans as plentiful and cheap commodities. They were also confident the slave trade to Louisiana would continue for many more decades. That it ended so abruptly is a contingent factor discussed below.

However, if one takes into account French attitudes toward Africa and Africans in the Ancien Régime, it is easier to see how French slavers could have acted with such disregard. Nurtured in the dogma about African ignorance, indolence, idolatry and sub- humanity, Frenchmen considered their captives as worth less than cattle. White men were devils, godless men, to the African consciousness. This was not an auspicious beginning to metis in Louisiana. The rebellious Bambara who attacked their captors in the ports of embarkation of Africa would prove to be just as rebellious as slaves in

Louisiana.

Contingent Factors Influencing Metis in French Louisiana

Various contingent factors contributed to the complexities and complexion of metis in Louisiana. The factors partially explain how and why New Orleans’ history and culture is considered one of its kind among other colonial societies in the south. Powell’s text focuses to a great degree on these contingencies. His text sets the scene that Africans arriving in Louisiana found on that frontier. It also describes the environment in which their creole children were born and raised.

Initially, Louisiana, like New France, was never intended as a settlement to establish a civilian population nor as a locus of mercantile capitalism. Its purpose was militarily strategic, to serve as the southernmost outpost of the series of forts positioned like beads on a string along the Mississippi River, from the Illinois territory to the

Arkansas River. The crown wished to prevent England from menacing its New France colony from the south by navigating up the river and to prevent Spain from connecting its two colonies in Florida and New Spain. Accordingly, the Minister of Marine, le Comte de Ponchartrain, acting under the authority of Louis XV’s Regent, le Duc d’Orléans, ordered the Le Moyne brothers, Pierre, Sieur d’Iberville, and Jean-Baptiste, Sieur de

Bienville, to “locate the mouth [of the Mississippi] . . . select a good site that can be defended with a few men, and block entry to the river by other nations” (qtd. in Powell

11). It was Bienville who found an appropriate site on a crescent-shaped bend in the river, its banks elevated fifteen feet above sea level by a natural levee, one hundred miles upriver from the mouth. With this minimal investment in strategic empire-building, for six decades Louisiana policy was one of “aimlessness and drift” (Powell 18), while

France had greater priorities on the Continent and on the seas. For most of the French regime, the colony was left to its own devices, with little intervention by crown officials, to survive in the frontier of Louisiana.

With his attention directed elsewhere, the Duc d’Orléans was persuaded by the unscrupulous, scheming Scottish entrepreneur John Law to cede the colony, as well as all of the crown’s finances, to himself. His goal was to establish a vast tobacco plantation on the stretch of land on the east bank of the lower Mississippi, called the Île d'Orléans. The idea of competition with Virginia for the lucrative tobacco trade must have resonated with the Duc, anxious to infringe on England’s monopoly. Law chose Bienville’s site as the company headquarters. Overnight, the minimalist military outpost became a corporate town named La Nouvelle Orléans (Powell 24-42). France sent her royal engineers to lay out an orthogonal grid of streets on the levee, with a church and government buildings on the waterfront surrounding a central plaza. This was a colonial capital city design borrowed from baroque Spain and her coastal towns such as Havana

(57-63). Thus, the beginnings of a French town on Spanish architectural precepts is the first of many ironies about cosmopolitan New Orleans. For example, its French Quarter

(le Vieux Carré) and French Market were built or rebuilt during the Spanish regime, and display Spanish-Moorish architecture, especially in the ironwork on balconies, fences and gates.

Thousands of concessionaires, habitants, engagés, and forçats were sent to New

Orleans as, respectively, large plantation owners, tobacco farmers, indentured servants, and peon workers. The Duc apparently learned nothing from Colbert’s experience with

New France, that engagés and forçats from the streets, jails and poorhouses of France made very poor farmers or laborers. Also not apparent to those involved in Law’s scheme was the reality that the marshy, miasmatic, mosquito-infested milieu of the lower

Mississippi was not a land that could easily support tobacco cultivation. Contingencies of climate, ecology and geography doomed the venture from the start. Hurricanes and floods destroyed any crops that could be coaxed out of the soil. Mosquitoes were vectors of pathogens such as malaria and yellow fever. Attempting to plant a cash crop before planting a sustaining food crop and storing it for extreme emergencies resulted in famine, sending supplicant settlers to Indian villages for sustenance in the interim. Ships carrying needed supplies from France were undependable, arriving sporadically or not at all, due to wars on the seas between France, Spain, and England. Well over half of the white population, including nearly all of the forçats, perished from hunger or disease, or turned tail and sought better conditions in English or Spanish settlements. One of the casualties was Iberville, the older brother of Bienville, who died of yellow fever. The hard work of clearing the cypress and pine forest and draining the swamps to effect the crown engineers’ plans for the town and establish the terrain for plantations, was beyond the endurance and skill of habitants and engagés, who were mostly urbanites in France, not hard laborers or farmers. New Orleans élites demanded African slaves (Powell 68-71).

There are several reasons Africans were the only solution for supplying a labor force to Louisiana. First is the similar geography and ecologies between West Africa and lower Louisiana. Both have semitropical climates and are dominated by great river systems, as described above in Chapter 2. The strength and resiliency of Africans from

Senegambia, especially the Bambara, made them ideal workers in all necessary fields of labor, from boatmen to cultivators of crops, and as artisans (Powell 74-76). Finally, an accident of evolutionary genetics made Africans virtually immune to mosquito-borne diseases. Epidemiologists assign that immunity to sickle-cell anemia, a disease that helps prevent blood-borne infections from causing harm (Usner 34). For these and many other reasons, Senegambians were crucial partners, even the dominant partners like the

Canadian Indians in New France, in metis on the Louisiana frontier. It is an unfortunately forgotten fact that New Orleans’ “early infrastructure, its network of streets and drainage canals, was built by slaves from Africa” (Powell 73).

The other partners in metis with the French were the Natives of Louisiana, also crucial to the colony’s survival. As shown above, Bienville was an expert in Indian affairs, their languages and customs. A fur trader in Canada, he resumed trading with

Indians in Louisiana, this time for deerskins, which became a valuable export commodity

(Usner 31). His diplomatic skills enabled him to secure one warlike tribe, the Choctaws, as an ally and proxy army against the English-allied Chickasaw tribe. His military training in guerilla warfare made him an ideal commander of the Indian and French militia, protecting the plantations near the town from incursion by hostile tribes, but not able to defend remote outposts in the wilderness from Indian raids. These raids, and the increasingly unstable Indian situation caused by Carolinian provocations, made the frontier around New Orleans dangerous and insecure.

A final factor was the demographic contingency, that is, the unbalanced sex ratio between Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, a common occurrence in all European colonies. 77

As it was in New France, so it was in Louisiana that mésalliance, illicit sexual relations according to French proprieties, were a frequent event. Metis led to métissage and the plural mixed-race population in the creole generations. The presence of Indian slaves in company quarters and planters’ households provided an opportunity for red and black slaves to commingle and collaborate, not only sexually but also in dangerous liaisons

(Usner 3).

Powell’s emphasis on these and other contingent factors in his text infers that his explanation of New Orleans’ sui generis nature is “accidental,” that it tends toward chance rather than agency. Similarly, another Louisiana scholar comes to the conclusion that “geography counted far more than culture in determining the nature of slavery”

(Rankin 17). It will be shown in the next section that it was craft and perceptiveness–that is, practical intelligence–that enabled slaves to leverage these contingencies to their advantage in finding greater liberty for themselves and to ameliorate their lives and their families’ lives in slavery.

The Louisiana Code Noir of 1724 and the Attempt to Control Slave Lives

It was shown above how Parkman and Johnson interpret the “one people and one blood” policy toward the Native Americans of New France as evidence of a peculiarly

French assimilationist instinct toward the Other. Tannenbaum claims, it will be recalled, that French masters never considered their slaves as mere chattel and instead ascribed a juridical and moral personality to him and her. Johnson declares that, after the Indians in

New France rejected overtures by the French Canadians to accept European civilization,

78 to give up their nomadic way of life and embrace the Catholic faith, the French founders of Louisiana replicated that same policy, conferring “corporate status” on the African slaves to protect them and control them (38-39). This is the greatest controversy among historians of Louisiana, between revisionists and Eurocentric traditionalists. Revisionists insist it was African agency, their craft and cunning, one of the very definitions of metis, that resulted in the liberty and autonomy of Louisianan slaves and their creole progeny, not the benevolence of Church and State. Traditionalists use as evidence for their position the Louisiana Code Noir of 1724. This document containing the slave laws for the colonies, they say, gave slaves unprecedented privileges and protections in colonial

North America.

The Louisiana Code Noir, like other slave laws and codes in the North American colonies of England, set out to define the political, legal, and social status of bondsmen and -women and to codify their treatment by masters. More important, the French Code inscribed the liberties and restrictions afforded slaves and their progeny. Whereas English colonial codes were ad hoc measures, the French Code in contrast was carefully thought out on both sides of the Atlantic as the defining document of slave life. Nevertheless, the letter of the law was recognized “more in the breach than the observance” (Rankin 9); just like the assimilation and “one blood” policy in New France, it proved ineffective.

Historians writing in the twentieth century see the liberal policies of the French

Code as resembling, and using as its basis, Roman slave law. Roman code, they say, was a feature of Catholic nations like France, the Italian States, and the Iberian Peninsula.

During the Roman conquests of her neighbors during both Caesars’ conquests of much of

Europe in the Republic and Empire, conquered peoples were human booty of war that became incorporated into the Roman slave culture. This slave culture was very similar to what Hall found in Senegambia: slaves were not denigrated; they were part of a household, not to be sold to others; they were companions to their masters; they frequently married into the household; children of unions followed the condition of the mother. One can see how easy it is to connect the dots between Roman slave code,

African slave culture, and slave culture in French colonies. However, legal expert Robert

Palmer, writing recently in the Louisiana Law Review, takes exception to this “just so” story of liberal, Roman-inspired bases for the Louisiana Code. He has traced the provenance of the French Code to find that it has a more modern origin.

The first code appeared in 1685, as the defining document for regulating the plantation slave system in the sugar economy of the French Caribbean. Historians previously were unanimous in believing that Colbert, chief minister to Louis XIV, was its sole author, part of his overall architecture of the French colonial enterprise. But not only was the code not based on Roman Code, neither was Colbert its author, Palmer finds. He was only the redactor, the editor and arbiter, of draft policies that administrators of the islands had formulated based on their experiences with plantation slavery. The French metropole had had no experience with slaves (Palmer 368).

Colbert collected the draft policies that he had ordered his mercantile officers to solicit from those on the ground, and issued the Code Noir of 1685 in fifty-nine articles.

Almost forty years later, Colbert reissued, just before his death, the fifty-four articles of the Louisiana Code Noir of 1724, with minor changes from the previous Code (Palmer

368-69). There was no recourse to Roman Code: “Where slave law was concerned,

Louisiana was more the heir of Martinique and St. Domingue than of Rome” (390).

Far from being issued for humanitarian reasons, the Louisiana Code Noir represents the commercial and economic interests of Colbert’s mercantilism, Rankin finds (8). Nevertheless, historians point to several articles of the Code that they say show benevolence toward slaves and ameliorated their enslaved condition as the basis for their sui generis characterization of New Orleans. These articles can be organized into categories of religious, civil, social, and political “spheres” or “rights,” with concomitant restrictions on slave rights and restrictions and duties on the part of masters. In the sections below, seven general categories of the Louisiana Code Noir are used as a guide to mapping the society that the slaves and their masters created for themselves in French

Louisiana.

Religious Code

The very first articles of the Code dealing with religion are the source of much of the controversy over slave life in Louisiana. They have been used as evidence for the uniquely humanitarian and benevolent character of the Catholic Church. The Code stipulates that all négres be baptized by clergy in St. Louis Church and that they receive

Catholic instruction from their masters (“Louisiana's Code Noir of 1724” Articles 2 and

3). They were to be given the day off from work on Sundays and church holidays (5), for the purpose, it can be inferred, of attending Mass. The very first article (1), in a remarkable non-sequitur, demands needlessly that all Jews be expelled from the colony, another indication of French religious intolerance in the Ancien Régime. The English, in

81 their Atlantic seaboard colonies, had a similar religious category in their slave codes, scholars have found. Two recent books, Nicholas Guyatt’s Bind Us Apart and Nancy

Isenberg’s White Trash, report that English slave-owners had similar duties to baptize their slaves, for many of the same reasons as the French. The Anglo-American codes, even the baptismal requirement, were hardly ever observed. However, here is an example of the symmetry between French and English treatment of slaves.

In Louisiana, there were very few Capuchin monks and Jesuit priests to serve their community over such a large area. As a result of her failed assimilation and “one blood” policy in New France, France sent clergy to Louisiana in few numbers; proselytizing was not a priority. However, despite the few clerics, they were astonished, it can be imagined, how African slaves were so favorably inclined toward the Christian message, and particularly African women. This was true despite the ineffectiveness on the part of clerics to intervene with colonial officials to enforce Articles 2 and 3. These officials considered clerics a nuisance; planters were not inclined to allow them on their property for fear of slave insurrection by baptized slaves demanding better treatment

(Clark 416 n. 8); colonial officials were preoccupied with profit rather than piety. It was on deaf ears that one cleric complained, “Most [slaves] die without baptism [nor] with knowledge of the true God, although they welcomed instruction” (qtd. in Cossé Bell 7).

And they displayed hypocrisy by the fact that the Capuchins, the Jesuits and the Ursulines combined owned three hundred slaves, two hundred of them on the Jesuits’ plantation just on the outskirts of town. Despite all these negative factors, African slaves were indeed drawn toward the Faith. How was this so? And for what reason? 82

It is not difficult to understand how Africans could have been attracted to the

Catholic faith. First, several tribes, such as the Wolof, who lived near the Atlantic coast in Africa, were familiar with the Faith due to the large presence of French employees of the company at the ports of embarkation, among whom priests must have been included.

This may be the reason so many baptized infants were counted among the dead on slave ships in the Crossing. Second, Catholic Tridentine teachings included a pantheistic Holy

Spirit in the Trinity, to which the animistic, pantheistic Africans could relate. Also touching on their own experience was the example of the second member of the Trinity, who was persecuted under a foreign imperial regime and was publicly humiliated and tortured in front of his own people. The story of the Resurrection must have inspired hope in the African breast that they, too, could be resurrected to a just reward in heaven and possibly to freedom in this life. This last hope for freedom would especially resonate with African Americans in the antebellum South.

Powell enumerates the many similarities between the practices and beliefs of

Catholicism and those of African religion: belief in life after death; reverence of a pantheon of saints, compared with African ancestor worship and naming; sacramental rites, rituals and colorful vestments in the Mass likened to rites of passage and shamanism in Africa; the universality of all God’s children with spiritual souls (264-65). The

Africans’ embrace of Catholicism in Louisiana is a further example of an assimilationist impulse to absorb new ideas in an alien culture, creating a syncretic religion, mixing pagan and Muslim gods, prophets, and spiritual beliefs with European Christian ones. It is also another example of double-consciousness, in which a New World culture was

83 hybridized out of two Old World cultures, in the minds of Africans and Afro-Creoles.

Hall ascribes this assimilationist instinct toward Catholicism to her finding that African religious knowledge, beliefs and practices were “easily transportable” to the New World

(49). Yet it is still difficult to see how the African mind could reconcile the contradiction of Catholicism’s universality of all humans with the reality of slavery.

But another, more compelling reason for Africans and Afro-Creoles to embrace the Faith was the possibility of advancing their social position. Powell relates how slaves prevailed upon their masters and mistresses to stand as godparents to their infants in the baptismal ceremony in St. Louis Church. Besides the church recognizing the infant – and by association his or her parents–as members of the Catholic community, god-parenting across racial lines represented an élite sponsorship of the slave family that might prove advantageous (269). Clientism is a valuable strategy among oppressed people for social and career advancement. Besides, it seems that it would be difficult for a slave master to beat or severely punish his godchild’s parents, let alone his godchild, when he made this emotional commitment.

God-parenting is another example of what social scientists refer to as forming fictive kinships. Creating interracial ties with whites expanded slaves’ social network, just as creating intertribal ties in Africa had created that multiply connected, organic social network in the homeland. And perhaps it was hoped that slaves’ embrace of

Catholicism and their masters’ god-parenting role would favorably incline masters to emancipate their godchildren. That this did not happen was due, in part, to restrictions in the Code on emancipation, which will be shown.

The extent to which masters followed the baptismal code, instructed their slaves in the Faith, and saw that they attended Mass is a debatable subject requiring more research. Data is sparse on these subjects, and much of what exists is anecdotal. One journal article by Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould establishes one data point based on baptismal records in St. Louis Cathedral. During the years 1731 to 1733, 285 slave infants were baptized, giving an average of 95 baptisms per year (415). Culling data from Hall’s mostly anecdotal research into slave births during that period results in an average of 115 births per year. The inference is that a large majority of slave infants were baptized and god-parented by masters and mistresses, as Church law and the Code required. A good number of whites did perform their duty in this regard. But after that, it is unclear to what extent they instructed their slaves in the Faith, or ensured they attended Mass. While none of the secondary sources cite data on Church attendance, or whether it is even available, Powell concludes that attendance among négres was high, or at least higher than white attendance, “for Catholicism in New Orleans was first and foremost black Catholicism” (127).

Clark and Meacham corroborate Powell’s conclusion, but add that black

Catholicism was predominantly female. “Women of color dominated Catholic congregations,” they observe (413). The reason for this is clear. A group of Ursuline nuns emigrated early in the colony’s life. Their mission, which was very successful, was to educate girls and women of all races, not only in the Faith, but also in the rudiments of reading and writing. Whereas this same order in Canada had despaired of civilizing and

Christianizing Native girls and women, they found success in New Orleans.

Circumventing the social mouers of French élites, the nuns’ schools were open to white, red and black girls and women, emphasizing “education, sociability, and good works,” that resulted in the formation of a “vibrant female community” (Powell 125). This provided several opportunities for négresses and négrittes to raise their social and economic status. They formed cross-racial ties within the Catholic community; they gained confidence and assertiveness; they formed an Afro-Creole female collective identity and consciousness; and, as an aside, they became the leading entrepreneurs in the slave exchange market (Powell 114, 125-27).

One of these markets was conducted just after Mass on Sunday on the Place d’Armes, the public square in front of the Church. French élites must have been scandalized by this sacrilege, because the Sunday market moved to the back of town, toward the swamp, in a former Indian trading area called the Place Publique, and later the

Place des Négres (Powell 88-89). Because of the assertiveness and confidence gained in the convent of the Ursulines, African and Afro-Creole women defended their rights and dignity in the face of white elites’ oppression.

Interpretations of the Church’s effect on Afro-Creole slaves’ lives take many sides in the controversy. The cynical reading is that of Labat’s, that baptism and instruction in the Catholic faith made African slaves more “tractable.” However, the premise that the religious code was an attempt at “coercive social control” on the part of

French elites (Clark and Gould 425) is diluted by the anecdotal evidence that, outside of god•parenting, whites mostly ignored Articles 2 and 3. Further, French priests were more concerned with owning and working slaves on their own plantation than in caring for 86 slaves’ souls. The only clear evidence of benevolence is from accounts of the work of

Ursuline nuns, who displayed concerns for colored women’ souls and well-being. Their evangelizing activities and good works, all part of the Tridentine tradition, not only produced a devout group of women of all colors, but also increased by geometric progression the Afro-Catholic community. In the creole generations, wives and mothers were the responsible ones, not white masters, for bringing their families to Church. St.

Louis Church now counted African men and children in the congregation and saw infants being baptized by members of their own creole network standing as godparents (Clark and Gould 413-28). These are factors in the cognitive role of Africans in metis.

Marriage and Family Code

African and Afro-Creole slaves wishing to be married needed permission from their master(s) (7), and could not be forced to marry against their wills (8). Further, all marriages were to be blessed by the clergy “in the sacrament of matrimony” (8), and slave burials were to take place on consecrated ground (11). Creole children issuing from the union became property of the mother’s master (9), and the child followed the condition of the mother, slave from a slave, even if the father was free (10). These stipulations of marriage codes were included in all colonial slave laws, English and

French, just as were the religious codes. What was unique in the Louisiana Code Noir was the protection of the slave family.

Article 43 of the Louisiana Code Noir states: “Husbands and wives shall not be seized and sold separately when belonging to the same master; and their children, when under fourteen years of age, shall not be separated from their parents.” This Article has

87 been argued by historians as showing the sanctity of the family in Catholic French culture applied to slaves. Again, a cynical view argues that this protection of the family was more for economic reasons than religious or humanitarian ones. With a limited population of slaves and the halt of the African slave trade, colonists were eager to increase the “stock” of valuable slaves and to encourage the remarkable fecundity of

African women (Hall 168). Johnson concurs in this assessment: “A stable slave society and slave families offered the only possibilities for an increased labor force” (41). That this article of the code was never enforced in the French sugar islands, and not even considered in the Atlantic seaboard colonies, is a result of those colonies’ priority on production rather than procreation.

Slaves on the Caribbean sugar cane fields and on Chesapeake tobacco fields were worked virtually to death to produce those valuable commodity crops. As we will see, in

Louisiana, there was no such labor-intensive industry after the collapse of the company, so the priority was on procreation, on increasing the “stock” through breeding (Hall 169,

186). On the other hand, Hall notes the maternal and paternal instincts of African parents, part of the consciousness they brought with them to Louisiana. “In French

Louisiana, creole slave children grew up in tightly knit, nuclear families headed by both

African parents,” Hall writes admiringly (168). For these reasons, the rate of natural increase among slaves in Louisiana was two-and-one-half times that of the French island colonies and of the English colonies.

Political Status of Slaves

Article 40 of the Code states, “Slaves shall be held in law as movables, and as such, they shall be part of the acquests [sic] between husband and wife.” This article clearly states that slaves were by law moveable property belonging to the master and mistress in common, heritable equally among co-heirs of the estate. In so explicitly defining their status in this way–that is, as chattel–it is difficult to understand how

Tannenbaum could insist slaves were never considered chattel or inanimate property.

Certainly a slave was animate, like cattle, but he and she could be, and were, sold to other masters. Entire families were sometimes sold in bankruptcy, for example, in order to satisfy Article 40, as Hall documents throughout her work.

Further articles of the Code stipulate that slaves could have no role in public functions, give testimony in court, or act as witnesses against whites (24), nor hold any kind of property (22). With these political and legal limits on a slave’s status, it is again difficult to understand how Tannenbaum finds a juridical persona in slaves of the French colony.

Penal Code and Ineffective Deterrence

Several articles define criminal acts on the part of slaves that were deserving of punishment. Slaves could not carry offensive weapons of any kind unless for hunting purposes, and only with the master’s permission (12). They could not congregate at any time with slaves belonging to another master, either secretly (in the woods and swamps) or on plantation property (13). Selling of any goods or produce without permission of the master was forbidden (15). Other criminal acts were the striking of slaves’ masters, 89 mistresses or children (27); committing any outrage or act of violence toward any white person (28); stealing livestock (29); and running away (32). Any freed or free-born négres were forbidden from harboring fugitives (34). That slaves regularly and systematically violated these proscriptions, especially the Bambara, was the result of contingencies that will be shown.

Punishments for these crimes ranged from the mild (monetary fine), to corporal

(lashes of the whip, branding with the fleur-de-lis, ears cut off, hamstrung and suspended from a height), to capital punishment for major crimes of battery on masters, and repeated flight. Freed or free-born coloreds could be returned to slavery as punishment.

Punishments were meted out with arbitrary severity by masters without interference or investigation by officials (Hall 154). Hall concludes that the brutality of owner upon slave was not just tolerated but “functional” as the normative practice in French colonies

(155). Other writers comment frequently in the literature that the French regime was especially brutal. “Abolitionists and slaves alike portrayed Louisiana slavery as exceptionally vicious” (Rankin 17). At least one author surmises that the French were worse than the English in their treatment of slaves. Hall concedes that “[i]t is not possible to paint an accurate picture of the treatment of slaves based on the particular cases that appear in the documents,” but she finds in those documents that “most of the violence was white on black,” as is expected (150). Her astuteness regarding the elusiveness of finding truth in documents of the early French colony reflects the observation noted above in the introduction to Chapter 2.

The articles of the Code restricting the lives of slaves, especially Articles 12, 13,

15, 22, 29, and 32, were the most ignored and unenforced in the French colony. This is mainly due to contingencies of nature and of misdirected ambitions of John Law's company to establish a tobacco plantation economy. In fact, a stable plantation system never materialized during the entire period of French rule in Louisiana. It was only during the Spanish regime, and after the Louisiana Purchase in the antebellum period, that a profitable plantation system growing cotton and sugar was established in

Louisiana. Then, new slave laws were promulgated and enforced, severely restricting slaves’ lives. During the French regime, no master could prevent his slaves from congregating with slaves from other plantations. This is because each plantation fronting the Mississippi River was only cleared for a few hundred feet from the bank; the rest of the plantation disappeared into the cipriére, the cypress swamp which comprised most of the terrain. From their experience with similar terrain in Africa, slaves could navigate within the swamp to find high ground on which to meet.

As a result of the failure to establish a tobacco crop, planters’ hopes of a rich reward from that cash crop were dashed. They needed to find an alternative crop in order to make a living, one that could survive the harsh ecology of the lower Mississippi.

Indigo was that crop. Slaves were familiar with the indigo plant, which grew wild in

Senegambia. Some were expert in planting, harvesting and processing the plant, from which a rich purple-blue dye was extracted. This dye had been used to color fabric in

Africa. As a Louisiana export commodity, indigo dye was used by European cloth manufacturers to make denim fabric (Usner 159). The processing of indigo dye, while laborious, was seasonal.

With meager profits from indigo, rice, and the very little tobacco exported, masters could barely keep their own kitchen pantries supplied, let alone feed their slaves.

With a lot of time on their hands, slaves took the liberty, with the encouragement of masters, to fend for themselves. They roamed freely through the woods, hunting with firearms, trapping and fishing, remarkably like the woodsmen in New France. Almost certainly, friendly Indians taught them where to find game, how to trap fowl, how to fish for crab, shrimp and crawfish. Slaves farmed garden plots next to their cabins to grow produce. In this way, slaves fed their families; and with surplus produce they could not eat, and foodstuffs from land and sea, they earned money by selling their wares in the slave market, the Place de Négres and even on the streets of le Vieux Carré. From this modest beginning came the creole cuisine of Louisiana. As Powell remarks, “the kitchens may have been French, but the cooks were slaves” (97). The African cooks shopped at the slave market, introducing into the stew pot “culinary ingredients plucked from three continents.” As the slave tradesmen’s profits grew, they bought farm animals and cleared more land for grazing. Powell again remarks on the irony of “property owning property” (95)–garden plots, chickens and hens, and livestock.

With their owners’ permission, slaves hired themselves out to work in whatever trade they were familiar with: clearing land, building levees, canals, and ditches to drain the swamps, cultivating rice, and especially artisanal skills. “Slaves without masters,” as

Berlin calls them in the title of one of his books, diffused throughout the colony. With their artisanal skills, slaves came to dominate the crafts in New Orleans, underselling and overproducing the talents of white workers. “Thus was born,” Powell says of the French

92 period in New Orleans, “a regime of customary rights, which Louisiana slaves learned to defend with guile and tenacity” (95). Here we see the important part of African and Afro-

Creole slaves in the process of metis, helping to sustain the community not only of fellow slaves, but also the entire colony. Despite Powell’s breezy treatment of the “accidental” colony, it was African autonomy and agency, the creation of double-consciousness, melding native intelligence and practical skills with harsh realities in Louisiana, that accounted for their de facto liberty and success in the colony.

There were also some de jure rights afforded to slaves in Article 20 of the

Louisiana Code Noir. This Article allowed slaves to appeal to the authorities if they were not given sustenance in food, clothing or shelter, or if they experienced “barbarous and inhumane” treatment from their masters. It is not clear to what extent slaves had recourse to this statute, since Hall finds no record of charges being brought to the Superior

Council, meaning that such matters were settled extra-judicially. Also, members of the

Superior Council were themselves planters and slave-owners, so they must have turned a blind eye to any barbarity. Nevertheless, Hall and other writers state that slaves were familiar with the Code Noir, that they had “a strong sense of justice” and “demanded their rights within the framework of slavery” (Hall 128), another benefit of double- consciousness.

The combination of slave autonomy and agency with contingent factors enabled a vibrant and cohesive slave community to form (Hall 202). Hall debunks traditional historians’ assumption that slaves could not form social bonds nor could remake themselves in the New World in common language groups and in kinship networks (both

93 natural and fictive). Instead they did form that multiply-connected organic social structure and consciousness they brought with them from Africa. Their “easy mobility” through the swamps and wilds of Louisiana on the waterways and in the town

“contributed to an unusually cohesive and heavily Africanized culture” in Louisiana (Hall

160). Here is the sui generis nature of New Orleans modernity that Eurocentric historians have been struggling for decades to define.

Marronage and Revolt

Article 32 of the Code deals with runaways. This Article was especially difficult to enforce because of slaves’ easy mobility within the frontiers around New Orleans. Its thick forests and pervasive swamps created a serious problem for French colonists: maroon colonies of runaway African and Indian slaves. Marronage would cause a crisis in St. Domingue, with thousands of slaves forming maroon colonies in the hills and backcountry of that island. The slave revolt led by Toussaint de l’Ouverture and his maroon army defeated all European armies set against it. The result was the independent black nation of Haiti.

In lower Louisiana, a similar situation was looming as hundreds of slaves fled from their masters into the wilds, individually or in entire family groups. The maroons built “secret networks of cabins” along waterways defended by armed guards, in the terrain between river and lake, and in the downriver Bas de Fleuve (Hall 202, 212-36).

They survived by guile and lawlessness, not only by foraging and hunting, but also by stealing supplies, produce and livestock from nearby plantations, sometimes from their own masters. They also earned money from unscrupulous white manufacturers by felling

94 cypress trees, crafting the timber into masts and planks for shipbuilders, fashioning vats and troughs for indigo processors, and selling squared logs to sawmills in the area (Hall

202). Thus, these maroons were like independent contractors for industrialists, who paid them by the piece in cash (Hall 212). Maroons established a high degree of autonomy for themselves, and also for their fellow slaves who threatened to “go maroon” if their masters mistreated them.

The greatest threat to the security of the colony was the alliance between African and Indian slaves. Newly landed Africans found hundreds of Indians in bondage in

Louisiana. It is a little known fact that the first slaves in English and French North

America were Natives. They were reported by observers in the Louisiana colony to be a troublesome lot, disinclined toward hard labor. They were mostly found in domestic roles. A common bond formed between red and black, as can be imagined due to their similar animistic belief systems and worldview, but more ominously through their bondage to white masters. Usner notes the “great potential” for Africans and Indians to collaborate. Indians knew the terrain and neighboring tribes, and which ones could be relied upon to join any revolt. “Given their knowledge, runaway Indian slaves held the key to unlocking mass rebellion against slavery and colonial rule” (Usner 58).

Indeed, rebellion was unleashed in several cases during French rule. The greatest was the Natchez Massacre. When Law's company attempted to seize land far upriver from New Orleans in Natchez Indian territory, a more suitable terrain for cultivating tobacco, the Natchez encouraged settlers’ Indian and African slaves to join them in rebellion. Many of the two-hundred-eighty slaves on the Natchez Plantation, most of

95 them Bambara, were involved in the massacre. The French men, women and children and loyal African slaves who survived the onslaught were captured as booty and sold to the

Chickasaws, the proxy war tribe of the English Carolinians’ (Hall 100-101). A retaliatory force of French militia and loyal Africans nearly wiped out the entire Natchez nation and freed the captives. Due to the debacle, Law’s company called it quits, ceding the Louisiana colony back to the crown, and declared bankruptcy, wiping out investors in the company and ending the Senegambian slave trade to Louisiana. The event is still known today as the “Great Mississippi Bubble” (Powell 52).

Less than two years after the Natchez Massacre, New Orleans officials discovered a conspiracy near the city led by four hundred Bambara slaves allied with Natchez Indian survivors to plot a coup against French rule (Hall 106). This second rebellion could very well have wiped out French Louisiana: the white population at a little over 1,700 men, women and children was half that of the slave population. The coup would have snowballed given the presence of Chickasaw allies of the English nearby. The plot was discovered by an inadvertent warning from a négresse alerting officials to the near disaster. Several other rebellions continued to be felt throughout French rule. Because of the constant threat of insurrection, the Bambara were able to hold a Sword of Damocles over the colony. Hall declares that they “maintained their own agenda . . . building upon their tradition of alliances” (112), a tradition brought from Africa. The fear of Indian-African insurrection pervaded the dangerous frontier of Louisiana. This was the result of the barbarity perpetrated upon Africans in the slave trade, and under the lash of their masters.

Métissage

Another Article of the Code that proved unenforceable was Article 6, which forbade marriage between whites and slaves, and prohibited concubinage between any free person, white or black, with slaves. It was inevitable, given the lopsided ratio between women and men of all colors, that mixed-race unions–white/black, white/red and black/red–would result. The close proximity of French concessionaires, habitants, and engagés in company quarters and on plantations to the beautiful Wolof women, who served mostly as domestics, led Nature to take Her course. Also, the presence of a multiracial labor force of white workers, African and Indian slaves, typical of the metis frontier, fostered illicit, casual, and forced unions. In particular, African and Indian unions, called grif, “emerged as a distinctive, self-conscious group among slaves” (Hall 118). From such beginnings of métissage, producing creoles of every shade of white, black, and red, grew the multiracial and multicultural creole society of New Orleans.

Manumission

The last articles of the Code, and the last category considered regarding the impact of the Louisiana Code Noir on slaves’ lives, deals with the granting of freedom upon slaves. These articles are another source of contention between Francophiles, who cites examples of benevolence toward slaves, and revisionists. It is true that in the Code

Noir of 1685 for the Caribbean island colonies, masters had a wide scope in deciding to free their slaves. That resulted in thousands of colored creoles populating St. Domingue,

“where it was common practice for [slave] concubines, and their children, to be granted manumission” (Eccles 170). As the number of free people of color threatened to equal

97 the number of whites in St. Dominque, other problems arose. Most of the engagés lost their livelihood when colored creole laborers and artisans performed better and for less wages than their white counterparts. Creoles became plantation foremen and saved enough money to purchase land and slaves and start their own plantations. Élites recognized that manumission was “creating a dangerous social and economic problem”

(Eccles 170). The social problem, of course, was colored creoles accumulating wealth to equal or surpass that of white creole élites, and presuming they had equal status with their cousins.

When it came time to consider the Code for Louisiana, the rules on manumission were severely constricted. Any owner wishing to free a slave had to obtain permission from the Superior Council (Article 50), a permission that was rarely granted. Slaves were only manumitted who performed exemplary service in the militia in the Indian wars. As a result, there were very few slaves freed, compared to St. Domingue. Census records and other sources vary on the actual number, but between one hundred and two hundred free people of color are reported at the end of French rule in 1763, out of a total slave population of 4,598, and a free population of 3,654 (Hall fig. 10; Berlin, Slaves Without

Masters 46 table 2). Those slaves freed for their military service were mostly Bambara.

French officials recognized early on that the Bambara were good fighters, as they had been in Africa, and as they had proved to be in their resistance to capture in the diaspora and rebellious nature in Louisiana. Loyal slaves were recruited by Bienville to join his militia in defending against Indian raids. He formed a company of about fifty

Bambara to fight alongside the French military, the latter a very ragtag army. This

98 company participated in the retaliation operation against the Natchez. Bambara fighters also assisted in breaking up slave maroon camps forming in the swamp that concerned officials felt were a danger to the colony. According to Hall, many hundreds perished in

Indian wars in the middle of the slave trade into Louisiana, contributing to the mortality of newly arrived slaves (171). But survivors of Indian wars who displayed courage became the first of the “affranchis,” Powell states (89). Thus was formed the military tradition “to which ex-slaves and descendants of ex-slaves could point, with equal measures of self-confidence and pride, when demanding further rights and privileges”

(Powell 87-89). Indeed, during the Spanish era, the free black militia received the right to be commanded by their own black officers, wear uniforms of their own choosing, and march under their own colors. This unit even fought with Andrew Jackson’s army in the

Battle of New Orleans in 1814 (Powell 300-02, 313), before being disbanded by the new

American rulers in the decades after the Louisiana Purchase.

The Code Noir of 1724, which attempted to control the Louisiana colony’s slave population, turned out to be largely ineffectual due to contingencies of nature, blunders by capitalists, and neglect by crown ministers. Instead, African slaves’ comprehension of the instabilities in the frontier environment, the rule of law embodied in the Code, and their craft and cunning in circumventing the law, resulted in a strong and cohesive

African society and culture in the most Africanized of all North American colonies, despite the small number of African and Afro-Creole slaves in French Louisiana. The slaves’ success in accomplishing a high degree of liberty and mobility within the institution of slavery points to their ability to assimilate alien cultural elements into those they brought

99 with them. In this way, they developed several aspects of double-consciousness, enabling them to absorb Catholic religious precepts, create cross-racial ties with whites, grow economically and socially in the exchange market, acquire property, form stable family groups, ally with Indians, find freedom in the swamps–all cognitive attributes that ameliorated their lives from mere submission and servitude. This cognitive process of metis in the frontier of Louisiana originated a modernity that differed from that of the enlightened

Europeans’ modern concept, an alternative modernity where descendants of African slaves could claim cultural parity, if not political and social equality, with whites in the uniquely

African-American city of New Orleans.

100

CHAPTER 5

SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS, AND PLAN FOR FURTHER STUDY

Traditional historians have generally sidelined the Deep South from the teleological march of progress in American exceptionalism. Anglo-European histories of the U.S. see Louisiana and its people, especially its people of color, as backward, a marginal state of the Union, and New Orleans as a marginal city in that marginal state.

The idea of New Orleans being a locus of modernity is risible for them.

Since New Orleans’ founding as the corporate town of the French mercantilist colony of Louisiana, it has been a thorn in the side of every government that ruled it: the

French metropole; the Spanish crown, to whom it was ceded after fifty years of misrule; and the U.S. government, upon the Louisiana Purchase. Louisiana was the first state emancipated from the Confederate regime and from slavery, yet it was the most segregated and oppressive Jim Crow site after Reconstruction. The latest insult New

Orleans received was Hurricane Katrina, not only for the injury from loss of life and property, but also for the nation’s denigration of the storm’s victims, mainly people of color, who deserved their misery and poverty, some would say.

Yet New Orleans has been a locus of an alternative modernity, a modernity that can only be recognized using a revisionist historical approach that is non-Eurocentric.

The purpose of this thesis has been to discover that alternative modernity of New Orleans and Louisiana. To explore the origins of this alternative modernity emanating from New

Orleans, the tripartite schema of revisionist history, as outlined by Bernard Bailyn, is 101 introduced: (1) new facts may be uncovered, (2) that revise the viewpoint from what was relevant in traditional history to a more relevant viewpoint, and (3) that may provide new ways of understanding our modern condition.

New facts about the history of Louisiana have been uncovered that shed light on the circumstances of slavery during the French regime and on the meeting between

Africans, Indians, and the French on the frontier surrounding New Orleans. This meeting on the frontier is termed metis, a nonhierarchical, pre-racial social process that typically existed in all North American colonial frontiers. It is the participation of the Other, the

African slave, in metis, that is the subject of this thesis. This change in viewpoint, from the European center in most traditional histories to the margin–that is, the viewpoint of the Other–satisfies Bailyn’s second part of the schema.

Writing an intellectual history of the peoples who participated in metis on the

Louisiana frontier three hundred years ago requires exploring their cognitive states. We can only ascertain how they thought from accounts of how they acted. It is first necessary to understand how they thought and acted before coming to America–their beliefs, assumptions, prejudices, and norms of behavior–that they brought with them to

America. This is the goal of social and cultural history, the study of collective identity and collective social consciousness.

Several of these social histories are consulted to determine the collective consciousness of the French during the Ancien Régime, of French thought on Africa and

Africans prior to coming to America, and of African culture and social consciousness before their fateful meeting with the French in metis. Alexis de Tocqueville’s work is

102 used to ascertain the collective identity and social consciousness in the Ancien Régime.

He finds that French society was insular, atomistic and particularistic, a far cry from what historian Jerah Johnson describes, the latter arguing that the French ethos was inclusive, tolerant and open to other cultures–in his reductive term, assimilationist. His opinion affirms the Tannenbaum thesis, that the French ethos created a much improved condition for slaves in Louisiana, compared, for instance, to the English in their colonies.

A recent study by historian Andrew Curran on the genealogy of French thought on Africa and Africans is next used to show that colonists who came to America carried with them a collective prejudiced opinion of the Other. They imbibed this standpoint from reading accounts of clerics and natural scientists who concluded that Africans were degenerate, indolent, unintelligent, childish people, who required a superior culture to save them from their barbaric condition in a New World based on European

Enlightenment ideals.

The natural scientist Buffon was the leading proponent of the accidentalist, or climate theory, in which a white prototypical man turns into a dark-skinned, soft-minded human from the extreme heat of Africa. This theory was challenged by a different theory that concluded, as a result of separate creations of all animals on earth, the African was a different species altogether of man. Lastly, there was the biblical exegesis of the myth of the son of Ham and Noah’s curse on his progeny to become “servants of servants.” All these false theories were formulated at the beginning of the slave trade to French and

English colonies in America, so they look suspiciously like retroactive justifications of

103 slavery, a self-delusional rationalization of African essentialism: the African was born a slave.

To refute this European essentializing of the Other, Hall’s history of the social structure and culture of the Africans who came to Louisiana is examined. She finds that the Africans forced to migrate to Louisiana comprise three major ethnic groups. In

Africa, they formed a cohesive language and cultural group, interacting through kinship networks with other tribes, thus creating an organic social structure. Their collective social consciousness was predicated upon spirituality, animistic worldview, pride in accomplishment, and a rich oral tradition. Hall concludes that this ethos was easily transportable in their heads, along with practical skills and knowledge, enabling the

African slave to acculturate with French and Indian partners in metis while retaining their strong cultural tradition.

Now the problem remains, after examining the native consciousness of the partners in metis, of how to understand the cognitive viewpoint of the Other, of what it was like to be an African, yet a slave, in a strange land with strange people. Atlantic

Studies author Paul Gilroy employs a heuristic device borrowed from W.E.B. Du Bois’ autobiography–double-consciousness–to describe how the black man and woman feels about being both inside and outside–an Other–in the Atlantic world. This epistemological device is eminently applicable to ascertaining the cognitive viewpoint of the African slave in America and to the process of metis in conjunction with the French.

Double-consciousness enabled the African slave to embrace Catholicism in order to further his and her social standing in the white community. The Code Noir of

104

Louisiana’s first requirement was that all slaves be baptized. Slaves formed cross-racial ties when masters and mistresses stood as godparents to their creole children’s baptisms.

Other articles of the Code Noir, which were intended to severely restrict slaves’ rights and privileges in the French colony, were breached more than they were observed.

Because of contingent factors based on geography, ecology, and failed mercantilist- capitalist ambitions, slaves were able to self-emancipate, to find liberty in the swamps around New Orleans. They cultivated gardens and fished and hunted; and with the surplus they roamed throughout the town of New Orleans selling their wares.

They also hired themselves out as laborers and artisans, replacing the white workers sent to Louisiana at great expense. Berlin calls them “slaves without masters,” a unique slave culture compared to the rest of colonial America. Traditional historians do recognize this unique feature of New Orleans’ slave culture, but attribute it to European agency, in liberal slave laws and a peculiar French ethos of openness. The main point of this thesis, the revision of Eurocentric histories of Louisiana, is that it was African autonomy and agency, of craft and cunning, not the beneficence of Church and State, that characterized the slaves’ role in metis.

Bailyn's third part of his schema calls for a new understanding of how modern society got to where it is, given new data and different viewpoints. First, it must be noted how difficult and messy it is to write any history that deals in part or in whole with the issue of African slavery. Generations of historians have grappled with this issue with no consensus of opinion in sight. Specifically, in relation to the historiography of Louisiana and the process of metis, it is a history of entanglements; of competing, contradictory,

105 conflicting, overlapping views, of ironies upon ironies. For instance, the Francophilic view that Louisiana was a much better place for slaves than other parts of colonial

America has so permeated mainstream Louisiana history that it is difficult, even in the presence of conflicting data, to dissuade proponents of the Tannenbaum thesis from their belief that it is more right than wrong in accounting for the unique nature of French colonial Louisiana. Interpretive social and intellectual history, even when scientifically and evidence-based, can only be speculative, never authoritarian, never the final word on the subject.

As another example, it is clear that Parkman, Tannenbaum and Johnson see the

French in a special, humanistic light. On the other hand, this thesis has used extensively the work of Hall, who is just as enamored of the Senegambians who came to Louisiana.

Her conclusions have been taken mostly as the final word in this thesis, that it was

African cunning and craft that contributed to the nature of metis in French Louisiana, that

Africans had much more autonomy and agency than traditionalists and Francophiles give them credit for. But her word must be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism until it can be corroborated by examining her references, as was done in the case of Johnson, and through original research, which was not available to this writer. There were surely some

French slave owners with the common decency to treat their slaves with dignity, as surely as there were African slaves who did not deserve common decency. Hall does, for balance, recount some episodes depicting both these situations, but they remain outliers in her work.

How has changing the epistemological standpoint from the European center to the

106

African and Afro-Creole margins enhanced an understanding of alternative modernity arising from metis in Louisiana? The answer involves Gilroy’s use of Du Bois’ concept of double-consciousness. Rather than the African being assimilated into a European ideal, being stripped of his and her native culture, like crown ministers imagined for the natives of Canada, he and she amalgamated African tradition with European values to form a hybrid culture, an improvised way of talking and acting and of seeing the world, not in black and white, but in colorful, musical harmony.

One example of this is what Powell calls black Catholicism, consisting mostly of black and colored women and girls who gained confidence and assertiveness in their communities, a confidence and assertiveness which was seen in the aftermath of Katrina, demanding the government keep its promise to rebuild that community of theirs.

“Culturally,” Hall writes, “all Americans owe a deep debt of gratitude to Africa” (xiv).

Although metis in French Louisiana is generationally distant from today’s culture, that improvised culture still remains in New Orleans today. This is the plural, multicultural environment of immigrant societies, including descendants of involuntary immigrants, that is such a divisive issue in today’s society, a nation of immigrants.

As for examples of the ironies exhibited in the French colonial enterprise, there are several. One of them is the French youth of New France, the creole generation, turning to the Indian way of life, those coureurs de bois (woodsmen) who rejected French culture and French wives. They completely assimilated into Indian culture, an exact reversal of French ministers’ desire to assimilate the Natives into Frenchmen.

107

Another irony, as Powell terms it, is of “property owning property,” that is, slaves’ cunning and double-consciousness to embrace the foreign concept of private property, unheard of in communitarian Senegambia. In metis in Louisiana, it was not race or class which was the essential quality that determined status, but usefulness, economic gain, and social ties to community that were determinants. These enabled clever and intelligent slaves to feel a sense of parity, economically if not politically, with white laborers and artisans, raising their status above mere servitude.

Finally, the most tragic irony of all can be stated as follows. Native Americans, whom the French, English and Anglo-American governments alike sought to assimilate into European culture, refused to do so, preferring their own way of life to Enlightenment ideals of private property, sedentary farming, monotheism, and rational self-interest. This refusal resulted in their near extinction by means of Indian removal policies and the reservation system. On the other hand, African slaves, who through resiliency, openness to other cultures, double-consciousness, did all they could to assimilate into those

European ideals the Indians rejected, yet were and still are rejected by that Euro-

American society because of the prejudice justified by centuries of pseudo-scientifically based racial theories.

This new understanding of New Orleans’ past demonstrates how history tends to repeat itself in the present. French and English colonists denigrated Africans as responsible for and deserving of their own servile state, just as New Orleans elites blamed the mostly black victims of Katrina for their own suffering. Fear of black anarchy, robbery and rape caused trigger-happy militia to shoot to kill supposed looters, of which

108 there were very few. Most murders were of unarmed black people running to safety or saving other victims of the floods. Similarly, the fear of slave insurrections in the colonial era caused masters to whip and torture their slaves in order to control them and prevent rebellion.

The more salutary lesson from Katrina is of strangers helping strangers in this dangerous situation, without regard for race, class or social status. This is a modern example of metis, of how Americans can come together without prejudice to help the community in the midst of danger and want. It is a shame that it takes a crisis for a metaphorical process of metis to take place in today’s society.

This thesis has only scratched the surface of a more complete account of how

New Orleans and Louisiana conceived and transmitted an alternative modernity to the country and the world. There is much more of the story to tell. But first, any one of the preceding chapters and sub•chapters could be fleshed out and improved through original research into those topics touched on, resulting in one or more journal articles or monographs.

There seem to be one or two books on New Orleans and Louisiana history published each year. These are, for the most part, breezy narrative histories describing some aspect of New Orleans’ unique nature, written for a popular audience. Journal articles are few as a result of the ceasing of publication of Louisiana’s two leading journals. Moreover, the existing intellectual, scholarly work on Louisiana has aged considerably. What is needed are updates of many of those journal articles to include new data that has been uncovered in the last fifty years. A dissertation- or book-length

109 treatment of New Orleans history, based on the foundation of Bailyn’s and Gilroy’s epistemological criteria, is conceivable; it would be a work including topics which are still unexplored or are still raising controversy and contention among historians. Some of these topics are outlined below.

The creolization of New Orleans after the French era of metis, when the frontier became stabilized and the society gelled into a more organic whole, needs to be addressed. A new book by Faber, a narrative history concentrating on the late Spanish period through the Louisiana Purchase, does little to describe the creolization process for the newly manumitted Afro•Creole population, a very meager population of a little over one thousand, but it has the benefit of an extensive and up-to-date reference section and bibliography.

With the slave trade reopened by the Spanish, a “re-Africanization” as Hall terms it, took place. Topics in this era could include the impact of re-Africanization on both the

Afro-Creole slave community and the free people of color, both groups who resented the newcomers as, ironically, primitive and barbaric. Here was the early formation of the colored creole “caste,” as Berlin and Foner termed it decades ago. The use of the term

“caste” infers insularity and endogamy, an hereditary distinction. But other authors say that the boundary into and out of the caste was porous, with mobility into the creole class through cross-racial métissage and out of the class through “passing,” where African physiognomy was diluted enough to pass for white.

Another related topic is the denial of many creole élites that they contained even one drop of African blood. This was the irony of the French assimilationist “one blood”

110 policy morphing into the dreaded “one drop” stigma. Many traditionalist creole (white) authors, most notoriously Charles Gayarré, have attempted to whitewash the stigma from those creole elites who claim the pure bloodline from that old plantation order of paternalism toward their slaves.

Another auspicious event in New Orleans history is the French Revolution and the repercussions felt in “three-caste” St. Domingue (Foner). A white diaspora from France, consisting of first royalists, then Jacobins and Girondins that survived the Terror, then

Bonapartists after the Restoration, and again royalists in the Second Empire, flowed into

New Orleans for fifty years. But it was another African diaspora from St. Domingue, this time of Afro-Caribbean creoles, and white planters and their slaves, fleeing Toussaint’s revolution that doubled the city’s population. This event has been called the “re-

Frenchification” of New Orleans caused by the influx of “foreign French” (Lachance). It ushered in the golden age of New Orleans’ Creole culture. These foreign French were much more sophisticated, cosmopolitan and educated than the provincial white and colored creoles.

A recent book by John Baron recounts the glamour of concert life in New

Orleans, of opera houses, concert halls and ballrooms opening up throughout the city.

The issue is if and to what degree colored creoles participated in this golden age; that is, the amount of segregation enforced by American rulers in this antebellum period.

Rodolphe Desdunes shows that the colored population counted several dozen reputable and intelligent writers, musicians, playwrights and orators among the colored creole community, just as Fertel recounts white creole literati in the city in the golden age.

111

Lachance and Tregle created a controversy within the covers of the same book in their assessment of the intelligence and education level of the white and colored creoles just after the Purchase and during re-Frenchification. Tregle is the traditionalist, recounting how the new American rulers, especially Governor Claiborne, proclaimed to

Jefferson that “our fellow citizens are indeed involved in great ignorance” (qtd. in Tregle,

“Creoles and Americans” 142), which delayed statehood for Louisiana for ten years, a probationary period for this foreign, Catholic community. Lachance revises the American sentiment as overblown; instead he quantifies, albeit in a very small sample, that literacy was far greater than supposed. Their debate, of course, revolves around white Creole literacy rates. The same needs to be done for the colored creoles as well, who indeed set up academies for their sons. Also unknown is the participation in concert life of the colored Creole class, who, according to Baron, were relegated to separate sections of the house.

Important for the African slave community during this golden age is the old Place des Négres, the marketplace of the slave exchange in the French era, renamed Congo

Square. The square, where ring dances were performed by newly arrived slaves that were sent down the river to labor on cotton and sugar cane fields, was the primary container of

African culture and traditions. Johnson’s excellent but chronologically confusing and dated essay “Congo Square” describes how these Sunday events, consisting of ecstatic dancing in circles around musicians wielding homemade drums, banjos, violins, flutes, and Jew’s harps, kept alive African music and dance. Such activities would influence future New Orleans music and dance forms. Congo Square, in its fifty-year-or-so

112 existence, was the only place in America where such performance by Africans was allowed. A reassessment of Congo Square’s importance to the African community needs to be written. Also, the neighborhood that grew up around the Square, the Fauborg

Tremé, where colored creoles created that unique, syncopated musical style based on ragtime, a precursor to jazz, needs to be revived after its brief treatment on television after Katrina.

Finally, what this author considers the culminating event of New Orleans’ cultural and intellectual history is the birth of jazz. There has been much written about this unique American art form, including two new books by musicologist Thomas Brothers, who also incorporates the intellectual and philosophical side of Louis Armstrong’s life and performance style, the seeming last word on the subject. But a new intellectual treatment of Armstrong’s musical invention, drawing from his autobiography and applying Bailyn’s and Gilroy’s heuristics, would be of interest to social historians.

Culturally, Louis Armstrong belongs to those Anglo-African descendants of field hands imported from the Atlantic seaboard colonies in the second of Berlin’s great emigrations.

His primitive, early New Orleans style derived from the field shouts of foremen, the modern version of African griots, through the blues those field hands sang after hours, to spirituals and gospel songs in sanctified Baptist churches, to the blues-like dirges a teenaged Armstrong played on his cornet in honkytonks for down-and-dirty dancing. On the other side of town from Armstrong’s uptown black neighborhood was Sidney Bechet, an example of the Afro-Creole Tremé style of playing his clarinet. His autobiography is different from Armstrong’s ebullient, joyful story–more philosophical and subdued.

113

Both these musicians’ stories show how double-consciousness, resilience, openness to change, and ability to improvise with borrowed art forms led to the creation of jazz. Armstrong’s move to Chicago in 1922, where he joined his old mentor Joe

“King” Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band, is part of that marvelous year that poet Ezra

Pound termed “annus mirabilis” and “Year One of a new era” (qtd. in Jackson 3), that is, year one of modernity. Contemporary with Armstrong’s arrival was the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. This is the reason for this thesis’ dedication to New Orleans as the birthplace of America’s greatest contribution to modernity. WORKS CITED 115

WORKS CITED

Armstrong, Louis. Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. Facs. ed. NY: Prentice Hall, 1923. Print.

Aubert, Guillaume. “The Blood of France: Race and Purity of Blood in the French

Atlantic World." William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, 61 (July 2004). Jstor.

Web. 20 May 2017.

Bailyn, Bernard. Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History. NY: Knopf, 2015. Print.

Bell, Caryn Cossé. “French Religious Culture in Afro-Creole New Orleans, 1718-1877.”

U.S. Catholic Historian 17:2 (Spring 1999), 1-16. Jstor. Web. 2 June 2017.

Bell, David A. Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present. NY:

Oxford UP, 2016. Print.

Berlin, Ira. “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origin of African-

American Society in Mainland North America.” William and Mary Quarterly

55:2 (April 1996), 251-88. Jstor. Web. 28 June 2017.

---. The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations. NY: Viking, 2010.

Print.

---. Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. 1974. Oxford:

Oxford UP, 1981. Print.

Brothers, Thomas. Louis Armstrong's New Orleans. NY: Norton, 2007. Print.

---. Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernity. NY: Norton, 2014. Print. 116

Clark, Emily, and Virginia Meacham Gould. “The Feminine Face of Afro•Catholicism

in New Orleans, 1727-1852.” William and Mary Quarterly 59:2 (April 2002),

409-48. Jstor. Web. 12 June 2017.

Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: U

of California P, 2007. Print.

“creole.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Web. 10 April 2018.

Cumfer, Cynthia. Separate Peoples, One Land: The Mind of Cherokees, Blacks, and

Whites on the Tennessee Frontier. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007.

Print.

Curran, Andrew S. The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of

Enlightenment. 2011. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. Print.

Dawdy, Shannon Lee. Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Print.

Desdunes, Rodolphe Lucien. Our People and our History: Fifty Creole Portraits. Sister

Dorothea Olga McGints, trans. and ed. Baton Rouge: LSU P, 1973. Print.

Du Bois, W .E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. NY: Cosimo Classics, 2007. Print.

Eccles, W.J. The French in North America 1500-1783. Rev. ed. Ontario: Fitzhenry &

Whiteside, 1998. Print.

Elmer, Jonathan. "The Black Atlantic Archive." American Literary History 17:1 (Spring

2005), 160-170. Jstor. Web. 20 June 2017.

Faber, Eberhard L. Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation

of Early America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016. Print.

117

Fénelon, Francois. Telemachus, Son of Ulysses. French ed. 1699. Patrick Riley, ed. and

trans. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.

Fertel, Rien. Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-

Century New Orleans. Baton Rouge: LSU P, 2014. Print.

Foner, Laura. “The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative

Portrait of Two Three-Caste Systems.” Journal of Social History 3:4 (Summer

1970). Jstor. Web. 22 January 2017.

Gayarré, Charles. History of Louisiana. 4th ed. 4 vols. 1854-1868. Reprint. Gretna,

Louisiana: Pelican, 1974. Print.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge:

Harvard UP, 1993. Print.

Grayling, A.C. The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern

Mind. NY: Bloomsbury, 2016. Print.

Guyatt, Nicholas. Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial

Segregation. NY: Basic, 2015. Print.

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-

Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: LSU P, 1992. Print.

Hirsch, Arnold R. and Joseph Logsdon, eds. Creole New Orleans: Race and

Americanization. Baton Rouge: LSU P, 1992. Print.

---. “Introduction.” Creole New Orleans, 3-11.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. “The Deforming Mirror of Truth.” Black Odyssey, iii-lxxxi.

---. Black Odyssey: The African-American Ordeal in Slavery. 1977. Re-issued ed. NY:

118

Vintage, 1990. Print.

Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The Four Hundred Year Untold History of Class in

America. NY: Penguin, 2016. Print.

Jackson, Kevin. Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One. NY: FSG, 2013.

Print.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1785. Frank Shuffleton, ed. NY:

Penguin, 1999. Print.

Johnson, Jerah. “Colonial New Orleans: A Fragment of the Eighteenth-Century French

Ethos.” Creole New Orleans, 12-57.

---. “New Orleans’s Congo Square: An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Culture

Formation.” Louisiana History 32:2 (Spring 1991). 117-57. Jstor. Web. 16

September 2016.

Lachance, Paul F. “The Foreign French.” Creole New Orleans, 101-30.

“Louisiana’s Code Noir of 1724.” The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed. Web.

19 May 2017.

"metis." Oxford English Dictionary. 2017. Web. 12 May 2018.

Miller, Christopher L. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1985. Print.

Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays. M.A. Screech, ed. and trans. NY: Penguin,

1991. Print.

Montesquieu, Charles Baron de. The Spirit of Laws. French ed. 1750. Thomas Nugent,

trans. NY: Cosimo Classics, 2011. Print.

119

Osman, Julia. “Cincinnatus Reborn: The George Washington Myth and French Renewal

during the Old Regime.” French Historical Studies 38:3 (August 2015), 421-26.

Print.

Palmer, Vernon Valentine. “The Origin and Authors of the Code Noir.” Louisiana Law

Review 56:2 (Winter 1996), 363-90. Web. 19 May 2017.

Powell, Lawrence N. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. 2012. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard UP, 2013. Print.

Rankin, David C. “The Tannenbaum Thesis Revisited: Slavery and Race Relations in

Antebellum Louisiana.” Southern Studies 18 (1979), 5-31. Facs. Print.

Riley, Patrick. Introduction. Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, v-xxv.

Robinson, Owen. Rev. of Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic by Alan Rice.

Journal of American Studies 39:1 (April 2005), 136-37. Jstor. Web. 22 June

2017.

Shuffleton, Frank. Introduction. Notes on the State of Virginia, vii-xxxii.

Solnit, Rebecca, and Rebecca Snedeker. Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas.

Berkeley: U of California P, 2013. Print.

Solnit, Rebecca. “Snakes and Ladders: What Rose Up, What Fell Down, During

Hurricane Katrina.” Unfathomable City, 127-32. Print.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. The Ancien Régime and the Revolution. French ed. 1856.

Gerald Brown, trans. NY: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Tregle, Joseph G., Jr. “Creoles and Americans.” Creole New Orleans, 131-88.

120

---. “On That Word ‘Creole’ Again: A Note.” Louisiana History 23:2 (Spring 1982), 193-

98. Jstor. Web. 15 July 2017.

Usner, Daniel H., Jr. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The

Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992.

Print.

Voltaire. Candide, Or Optimism. Robert M. Adams, trans. and ed. New York: Norton,

1992. Print.

Wayne, Michael. Imagining Black America. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014. Print.