History
Free people of color, or gens de couleur libre, played an important role in the history of New Orleans and the southern part of the state, former Louisiana Territory. When French settlers and traders first arrived in the colony, the men took Native American women as their concubines or common-law wives; and when African slaves were imported to the colony, they took African women as wives.
As the colony grew and more white women arrived from France and Germany, some French men or ethnic French Creoles still took mixed-race women as mistresses or placées before they officially married. In the period of French and Spanish rule, the free people of color had developed formal arrangements for placées, which the young women's mothers negotiated, often to include a kind of dowry or property transfer to the young women, freedom for them and their children, and education for the children. The French Creole men often paid for education of their "natural" (illegitimate) mixed-race children from these relationships, especially if they were sons.
Free people of color developed as a separate class between the colonial French and Spanish and the enslaved black African workers. They often achieved education and some measure of wealth; they spoke French and practiced Catholicism, although there was also development of syncretic religion. At one time the center of their residential community was the French Quarter. Many were artisans who owned property and their own businesses. They formed a social category distinct from both whites and slaves.
Free people of color were also an important part of the history of the Caribbean during the period of slavery and afterward. Again as the descendants of French men and African slaves, they achieved wealth and power, particularly in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. It achieved independence as Haiti in 1804. In Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and other French Caribbean colonies before slavery was abolished, the free people of color were known as gens de couleur libres, and affranchis. They were also an important part of the populations of British Jamaica, the Spanish Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and Portuguese Brazil.
Read more about this topic: Free People Of Color
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)