travelers during the period wrote explicitly and more extensively about the city’s population of African descent. French traveler Perrin du Lac spoke of the “badly fed” Negro slaves who were “naturally crafty, idle, cruel, and thieves; I need not add, that in their hearts they are all enemies to the Whites. The serpent endeavors to bite him that tramples him under his feet; the slave must hate his master.”27 Du Lac divided free people of African descent into several categories based upon their perceived degree of African blood. In reference to the attitudes that free blacks had about enslaved blacks, du Lac wrote, “It is difficult to account for the brutality and aversion of the free Blacks to those of their own species. They [the slaves] are treated by them [the free blacks] worse than by the Whites.” Yet, according to the Frenchman, free blacks were “far from being as dangerous as the Mulattoes. These seem to participate as much in the vices of both species as of their color; they are vindictive, traitors, and equal enemies to the Blacks and Whites.” The “men of color” (by which term Du Lac probably meant “quadroon” or “octoroon” men) were “still more dangerous” and responsible, in part, for the “intemperate conduct of the whites towards their slaves.”28 Du Lac, like several other European travelers to New Orleans at the time, supported slavery but opposed its excesses, and believed in the superiority of the European “race” while opposing, in theory, intimate relations across the color line.
While travelers to the city commented on the many distinctions within New Orleans’s heterogeneous population in the early nineteenth century, the census makers and government officials divided the people into three main groups: whites, slaves, and free people of color, reflecting a tripartite society that had developed during the Spanish colonial period. This method of categorization acknowledged the dominating influence of racial slavery in the region, but it did not reflect a three-race society. The distinction in the census between whites and free people of color was one of race, while the distinction between free and enslaved people of African descent was one of status. Whites were presumed to be free (and did not require a status descriptor), while slaves were presumed to be black (and did not require a racial descriptor). The term “free person of color,” which identifies both status and race, conveys the seemingly exceptional nature of this group of people.29
The refugee immigration bolstered this tripartite social hierarchy while also altering it. Following the lead of the census, city officials categorized the refugees into three groups based on status and race, something that was familiar to both the then-existing population in Louisiana and the refugees themselves. Official records produced at the time show the immigrants to have been roughly evenly divided between whites, slaves, and free people of color, as illustrated in table 1.1. But these numbers invite criticism and deserve deeper analysis. First of all, as Rebecca Scott has astutely observed, depending on when and the circumstances under which those classified as slaves left the island of Hispaniola, many had been freed by colonial officials, the French National Convention, invading armies, and/or their own martial efforts. Thus, potentially thousands of men, women, and children who had been freed in St. Domingue were reenslaved in Cuba and/or Louisiana.30 In the four decades following the immigration, the various courts of New Orleans heard dozens of lawsuits in which the status of refugees of African descent, as enslaved or free, was disputed.31 Therefore, the numbers assigned to each “category” of people coming from the West Indies to New Orleans were both dubious and temporary.
One of the most noticeable aspects of the refugee immigration from Cuba is the imbalance of the sexes. As shown in table 1.1, among whites there were far more men than women, while among both slaves and, especially, free people of color, there were far more women than men. This is not surprising, however, when viewed in the context of the sex demographics of colonial St. Domingue and the results of the Haitian Revolution. Due to the harsh environment of the French colony, relatively few white women ever settled in colonial St. Domingue. The male-to-female ratio of the white refugee immigrants, therefore, reflected the ratio of the colony before the revolution.32 On the other hand, due to the gendered dimensions of warfare, formerly enslaved men and free men of color were much more likely to stay behind and fight rather than flee.
Table 1.1. Refugee Immigration from Cuba through August 1809
Many of the white refugees had aspirations to be sugar planters, so few of them stayed in the city for long. Anglo-American city and state officials, most of whom were slaveholders themselves, sympathized with their plight but worried that the “preponderance of French influence” would make it much more difficult to Americanize the city.33 Yet none of the white refugees from 1809–10 made as notable an impact on New Orleans as some of the white refugees who had arrived earlier, such as Moreau-Lislet.
Of the three groups, the free colored refugees had the most significant impact on the demography of the city. First of all, free people of color saw the largest percentage increase in New Orleans during the Age of Revolution, primarily as a result of the refugee immigration. Free people of color accounted for 11 percent of the population in 1785, rising to 16.5 percent in 1803, and then to 27 percent in 1810. Refugees accounted for the great majority of New Orleans’s free colored community in 1810. Moreover, the immigration greatly exaggerated the preexisting numerical dominance of women and children over adult men within the free colored community.34 As table 1.1 illustrates, adult men made up less than 14 percent of the 3,102 free colored refugees arriving through July 1809. Because more than 40 percent of the free colored refugees were children under the age of fifteen, the immigration ensured a strong presence of refugees throughout most of the antebellum period.35
The demographics of the immigration had two other important consequences for New Orleans society throughout the antebellum period. First, it further skewed the already imbalanced sex ratios among both whites and free people of color in New Orleans. As late as 1820, men made up almost 60 percent of the white population in New Orleans, while women constituted more than 60 percent of the free colored population.36 These skewed sex ratios among the two groups contributed, in part, to the large number of intimate relationships between white men and women of color in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, a subject that chapter 4 covers in greater depth. Second, as shown in chapter 6, women and, especially, children of African descent were more vulnerable than men of African descent to illegal enslavement. In response to the unusual number of female and minor refugees who brought suits against their enslavers, the courts developed the Adele rule. In making “people of color” a racial category separate from “Negroes” with different presumptions as to status, the courts did something the census makers did not—they made race.
Before the Adele decision, however, anxious white officials in New Orleans had mixed feelings and sent mixed messages about the free colored refugees. In 1806, the territorial legislature passed a law creating a presumption of enslavement for all “free people of color from Hispaniola [then] residing” in New Orleans. While the legislature repealed this act less than a year later, it replaced it with a law that prohibited “the emigration of free Negroes and Mulattoes into the Territory of Orleans.” This act imposed a penalty on free colored violators “in the amount of $20 a day for every day past two weeks” that they remained in the territory and stated that “failure to pay such fine will result in commission to jail and [the violator] may be sold for a time sufficient to pay the fine.”37 During the 1809–10 immigration, however, the government in New Orleans appeared powerless to enforce the law. Claiborne first attempted to selectively enforce it against men of color above the age of fifteen, but even this proved unsuccessful. He then resorted to pleading with American diplomats in Jamaica and Cuba for assistance. In separate letters to
