Chapter 2: A Class all their Own: Economic and Educational Independence of Free People of Color in Antebellum Louisiana

From the time of French and Spanish rule in the eighteenth century to the onset of the Civil War, relations between Black and White societies in southern Louisiana, particularly in the city of New Orleans, have presented a contradiction to the common narrative characteristic of southern race relations of the period. Due to civil structures and social conditions unique to the region the port town of New Orleans, and its surrounding parishes, came to be home for a sizable population of Free People of Color who, for a time, lived within a particular space of economic and educational freedom. This free class, collectively known as gens de couleur libres, or Free People of Color, consisted of Creoles of Color who were, “the free mixedblood, French-speaking descendants of immigrants from Haiti” and other French parentage, Creoles of Color with Latin blood, and various other free Blacks.² The particular French and Spanish cultural origins of this group established them in a circumstance that treated race quite differently from conceptions exemplified throughout the regions of the nation colonized by the British. In 1866, Nathan Willey pointed out the unique way in which Louisiana’s forbearers viewed slavery: