the Baron de Carondolet, and Attorney General Don Pedro Dulcido Barran to shut down numerous gambling halls and taverns. By 1797, only ten out of a previous several dozen taverns were still operating, and potential tavern owners required a license from the mayordomo de proprios to operate a bar. After Carondolet left Louisiana in 1798, the number of drinking and gambling establishments began to increase again. Beginning in the 1790s, residents of New Orleans also had an opportunity to experience “high culture.” The first public ballrooms began operating in 1792, the same year New Orleans’s first theater (known as the Coliseo) was built. New Orleans was also home to the first opera house in what is now the United States, which opened its doors in 1796.77
By the time Louisiana became a state in 1812, New Orleans was home to several dance halls. Two blocks upriver from the cathedral, at the corner of Rue Conde (today Chartres Street) and Rue Dumaine, stood the Conde Street Ballroom, a “whites only” ballroom that opened in October 1792. One more block upriver and one block closer to the river, Bernard Coquet offered dances for free people of color in his home at 27 Rue St. Phillipe. The dances at “la Maison Coquet” began in 1799 and immediately attracted both whites and enslaved blacks as well as the intended patrons. The house also hosted the first quadroon ball in 1805, when August Tessier rented Coquet’s home for this purpose and renamed it La Salle de Chinoise. In 1808, Coquet opened La Salle de Spectacle, a “magnificent building of Philadelphia brick,” located several more blocks away from the river at 721 Rue St. Phillipe. This building, later renamed the Washington Ballroom, hosted free colored balls and quadroon balls throughout most of the antebellum period. The Anglo-American perceptions of all these interracial gatherings and the government’s attempts to regulate intimate relations across the color line are discussed in greater detail in chapter 4.
One block back from the Conde Street Ballroom, at the corner of Royal and Dumaine, stood a small building that operated as a courthouse in the early years of American rule. According to an early historian of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson was tried here for contempt of court in 1815.78 This may have been the building that housed the New Orleans City Court for part or all of its eight-year tenure (1806–13). The City Court was probably the most influential site at which free people of color asserted and protected their status and rights. In eight years, this court heard around 350 cases involving free colored litigants (about 10 percent of the total number of cases it heard), including the cases that begin chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6.
Another site that was equally if not more influential in shaping New Orleans’s society in this period was the slave market.79 It stood where the French Market is today, just on the other side of the levee from the Mississippi River on the downriver end of the Vieux Carré. Adjoining the levee at the lower end of town, “the flesh market [was] entirely enclosed, each separate stall, of which there [were] about 7 or 8—being a distinct apartment with a door & window.” According to John Pintard in 1801, the New Orleans slave market was “the most filthy” of its kind he had ever seen, and he could not say “whether it be ever hoed out or not.”80 Yet, by the time Louisiana became a state in 1812, the slave market in New Orleans was on its way to becoming North America’s largest. The slave market showed that whatever its similarities to the great port cities of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, and whatever its economic ties to the grain- and livestock-producing Northwest, New Orleans remained a slave society and, in fact, the main supplier of enslaved labor to the cotton South. The slave market served as an ominous symbol for free people of color as well. It reminded them that because of their African ancestry, partial or not, they always risked enslavement themselves, whether this be actual (if illegal) enslavement through kidnapping or fraud, or virtual enslavement through restrictive black codes.
* * *
As the St. Domingan refugees disembarked in New Orleans, whether at the port of New Orleans on the Mississippi River, the depot at Bayou St. Jean, or the Carondolet Canal basin, they were entering a world that was both different and familiar. On the one hand, the region was the territory of an English-speaking republic rather than a colony of a French- or Spanish-speaking empire. If St. Domingue had been the “jewel of the Antilles” due to its unprecedented production of cash crops, the lower Mississippi valley was still on the American frontier. And New Orleans, though seemingly destined for commercial greatness, was much less refined than the well-established port cities of the Caribbean such as Le Cap, Port-au-Prince, Havana, or even St. Iago de Cuba. On the other hand, these differences were small compared with the similarities. Although officially inhabitants of the United States, most of the residents in New Orleans spoke French as their primary language—there was no language barrier for the refugees. Indeed, because the refugees themselves made up a significant portion of the population in the late territorial period, many of the sights and sounds would have been familiar. Most important, however, the refugees’ new home in New Orleans, like their previous homes in St. Domingue, Jamaica, and Cuba, was a slave society. Once they had been in the city for a few days, possibly even a few hours, they would have likely encountered both the slave market and the courthouse. The slave market was symbolic of the material structure that dominated the lower Mississippi valley—the commerce in slaves and slave-grown products. The courthouse was symbolic of the legal structure that supported this material structure. The legal structure is the subject of the next chapter.
2
A Legal System in Flux
When Jean Baptiste sued for his freedom in the New Orleans City Court in 1811, he was invoking Spanish law before a francophone judge in an American court. The petitioner, a thirty-year-old black man, admitted to being a slave but claimed a legal right to purchase his own freedom based on a contract formed when Louisiana was still a Spanish colony. His petition alleges that on July 4, 1789, Andres Almonaster, his master, contracted with Coffi, his father, to grant liberty to all four of Coffi’s children for a total sum of 2,400 pesos.1 Coffi had paid a total of 316 pesos before he died in the late 1790s. Shortly thereafter, Almonaster also died. In 1811, Jean Baptiste asked the City Court to order Almonaster’s widow, Louise Laronde Castillon, to accept the sum of 284 piastres and grant him his freedom.2 Thus, the case involved complex issues of not only contract law but also slave law, estate law, and conflict of laws from different jurisdictions. More important for Jean Baptiste, it would determine whether or not he would legally gain his freedom.3
The judge in the case, a white refugee of the Haitian Revolution named Louis Moreau-Lislet, denied Jean Baptiste’s claim. Although he did not provide a written rationale for his decision, Moreau-Lislet could have based his judgment on any number of factors. Jean Baptiste did not provide the original contract or proof of the payments made by Coffi but instead had the agreement’s terms and the payment schedule transcribed in the petition. He also did not offer a reason as to why he deserved the entire credit of 316 piastres—he never explained what happened to his three siblings who also stood to gain their freedom. The defendant’s lawyer, a former congressman from the Orleans Territory and future justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court named Pierre Derbigny, answered the petition by claiming that Louise Laronde Castillon did not inherit the obligation of her late husband. Perhaps most important, Jean Baptiste claimed his right to freedom by virtue of the Spanish policy of coartacion, which had been expressly overturned by the territorial legislature. Whatever his reasoning, the judge was well equipped to deal with all the complicated issues in Jean Baptiste’s case. Since he arrived in New Orleans from revolutionary St. Domingue after the Louisiana Purchase, Moreau-Lislet had spent a good part of his time familiarizing himself with both the laws of Spanish Louisiana and the legal system of Anglo-America.
This chapter examines the legal structure of New Orleans in the years following the Louisiana Purchase. It explores
