Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:25:10.516Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Formation of a Three-Caste Society: Evidence from Wills in Antebellum New Orleans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Extract

In the Americas, two types of racial systems developed at the confluence of migration streams from Europe and Africa. In the Caribbean, free persons of color emerged as an intermediary group between whites and large populations of Negro slaves. In British mainland colonies, whites came to treat all blacks, whether free or enslaved, mulatto or Negro, as a single social category (Hoetink 1967; Mörner 1967: 136–38).

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1994 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alegre, L. (1805) Will dated 25 July 1805, in the records of Narcissus Broutin, notary public, 10: 566. New Orleans: Notarial Archives, Civil District Court, New Orleans.Google Scholar
Laussat, Arrêté de, le 24 frimaire an XII (17 December 1803) pour rétablir le Code noir en Louisiane (n.d.). New Orleans: Imprimerie du Moniteur.Google Scholar
Berlin, I. (1976) Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Berquier, H. (1809, 1810) Wills dated New Orleans, 24 August 1809, and Philadelphia, 2 May 1810, in Recorder of Wills, Will Book 1: 403f. City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans.Google Scholar
Blassingame, J. (1973) Black New Orleans, 18601880. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Boze, J. (1830) Letter to Henri de Ste. Gême, 10 March 1830. Henri de Ste. Gême Papers, item 156, MSS. 100, Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans.Google Scholar
Cable, G. (1885) The Creoles of Louisiana. London: John C. Nimmo.Google Scholar
Census of New Orleans (1791). City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans.Google Scholar
Census Sample (1860) Stratified random sample of 391 households containing 500 families in the eighth census of the United States, 1860, free schedules for Orleans Parish and the City of New Orleans. National Archives Microcopies, M653, rolls 415–22.Google Scholar
Code noir de la Louisiane (1816 [1806]), in Martin, F.-X. (comp.) A General Digest of the Acts of the Late Territory of Orleans and of the State of Louisiana. New Orleans: 1: 600691.Google Scholar
Le Code Noir ou Edit du Roi (1724). Versailles.Google Scholar
Code noir, ou loi municipale, … entreprit par Delidération [sic] du Cabildo en vertu des Ordres du Roi … consignés dans sa Lettre faite à Aranjuez le 14 de Mai 1777 (1778). New Orleans: Imprimerie d’Antoine Boudousquié. Copy in Parsons Collection, Humanities Research Center Library, University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Cohen, D., and Greene, J. (1972) Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, W. (1980) The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 15301880. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Curry, L. (1981) The Free Black in Urban America, 18001850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dargo, G. (1975) Jefferson’s Louisiana: Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
A Digest of the Civil Laws Now in Force in the Territory of Orleans (1808), in Louisiana Legal Archives. Vol. 3, pt. 1, Compiled edition of the Civil codes of Louisiana (1940). Baton Rouge: State of Louisiana Printing Office.Google Scholar
Dominguez, V. (1986) White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Duprateau, B. (1806) Will dated 6 March 1806, in Recorder of Wills, Will Book 1: 35. loc>City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans.City+Archives,+New+Orleans+Public+Library,+New+Orleans.>Google Scholar
Elkins, S. (1959) Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Everett, D. (1952) “Free persons of color in New Orleans, 1803–1865.Ph.D. diss., Tulane University.Google Scholar
Flannery, M. (1805) Census of New Orleans (5 August 1805). Reprinted in New Orleans in 1805: A Directory and a Census (1936). New Orleans: Pelican Gallery.Google Scholar
Foner, L. (1970) “The free people of color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A comparative portrait of two three-caste slave societies.Journal of Social History 3: 406–30.Google Scholar
Frederickson, G. (1971) The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Genovese, E. (1976) Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Gould, V. (1991) “In full enjoyment of their liberty: The free women of color of the gulf ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola, 1769–1860.Ph.D. diss., Emory University.Google Scholar
Hall, G. (1992) Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Hanger, K. (1990) “Avenues to freedom: Growth of the free population of color in Spanish New Orleans, 1769–1803.” Paper presented at the meeting of the American Historical Association, New York, December.Google Scholar
Hobbs, R. (1850) Will dated 14 August 1850, Inventory dated 1 October 1850, in Recorder of Wills, Will Book 9:33. City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans.Google Scholar
Hoetink, H. (1967) The Two Variants in Caribbean Race Relations: A Contribution to the Sociology of Segmented Societies. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Holmes, J. (1983) “Do it! Don’t do it! Spanish laws on sex and marriage,” in Haas, Edward (ed.) Louisiana’s Legal Heritage. Pensacola, FL: Perdido Bay Press: 1942.Google Scholar
Ingersoll, T. (1991) “Free blacks in a slave society: New Orleans, 1718–1812.William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 48: 173200.Google Scholar
Inventories (1804-60). City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans.Google Scholar
James, C. (1989 [1963]) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Johnston, J. (1970) Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776–1860. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Jordan, W. (1969) White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Baltimore: Penguin.Google Scholar
Kinnaird, L. (1946) Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1945. Vol. 2, pt. 1, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765–1794. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Kitchen, D. (1992) “Interracial marriage in the U.S., 1900–1980.” Paper presented at the meeting of the Social Science History Association, Chicago, 5–8 November.Google Scholar
Kotlikoff, L., and Rupert, A. (1980) “The manumission of slaves in New Orleans, 1827–46.Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 19: 172–81.Google Scholar
Kulikoff, A. (1986) Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Lachance, P. (1982) “Intermarriage and French cultural persistence in late Spanish and early American New Orleans.Histoire sociale—Social History 15: 4781.Google Scholar
Lachance, P. (1985) “L’effet du désèquilibre des sexes sur le comportement matrimonial: Comparaison entre la Nouvelle-France, Saint-Domingue et la Nouvelle-Orléans.Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 39: 211–31.Google Scholar
Lachance, P. (1992) “The 1809 immigration of Saint-Domingue refugees to New Orleans: Reception, integration, and impact,” in Brasseaux, C. and Conrad, G. (eds.) The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792–1809. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies: 245–84.Google Scholar
Lacour, A. (1816) Will dated 27 March 1816, in the records of Marc Lafitte, notary public, 8: 138. New Orleans: Notarial Archives, Civil District Court.Google Scholar
Louisiana Civil Code (1825), in Louisiana Legal Archives. Vol. 3, pt. 1, Compiled edition of the Civil codes of Louisiana (1940). Baton Rouge: State of Louisiana Printing Office.Google Scholar
Mörner, M. (1967) Race Mixture in the History of Latin America. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Newton, L. (1929) “The Americanization of French Louisiana: A study of the process of adjustment between the French and the Anglo-American populations of Louisiana, 1803–1860.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Rankin, D. (1976) “The Forgotten People: Free People of Color in New Orleans, 1850–1870.” Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University.Google Scholar
Recorder of Wills (1805-63) Will Books 1 (1805-15), 3 (1817-24), 4 (1824-33), 5 (1833-37), 6 (1837-42), 8 (1844-50), 11 (1857-60), and 12 (1860-63). City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans.Google Scholar
Robin, C. (1966 [1807]) Voyages to Louisiana, 1803–1805. New Orleans: Pelican.Google Scholar
Schafer, J. (1987) “‘Open and notorious concubinage’: The emancipation of slave mistresses by will and the Supreme Court in antebellum Louisiana.Louisiana History 28: 165–82.Google Scholar
Schweninger, L. (1990) Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Sickels, R. (1972) Race, Marriage, and the Law. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Spickard, P. (1989) Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Sterkx, H. (1972) The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum Louisiana. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.Google Scholar
Tannenbaum, F. (1946) Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Taylor, J. (1963) Negro Slavery in Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Tregle, J. (1952) “Early New Orleans society: A reappraisal.Journal of Southern History 18: 2036.Google Scholar
Tregle, J. (1972) “Political reinforcement of ethnic dominance in Louisiana, 1812–1845,” in Ellsworth, L. (ed.) The Americanization of the Gulf Coast, 1803–1850. Pensacola, FL: Historic Pensacola Preservation Board: 7887.Google Scholar
Tregle, J. (1992) “Creoles and Americans,” in Hirsch, A. and Logsdon, J. (eds.) Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press: 131–85.Google Scholar
Watson, A. (1989) Slave Law in the Americas. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Williamson, J. (1980) New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Wood, P. (1974) Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Norton.Google Scholar