Free people of color
In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color (French: gens de couleur libres; Spanish: gente de color libre) were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily of black African descent with little mixture.[1] They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America.
"Gens de couleur libres" redirects here. For the Matana Roberts album, see Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres.
A freed African slave was known as affranchi (French: "freed"). The term was sometimes meant to include the free people of color, but they considered the term pejorative since they had been born free.[2]
The term gens de couleur libres (French: [ʒɑ̃ də kulœʁ libʁ] ("free people of color") was commonly used in France's West Indian colonies prior to the abolition of slavery. It frequently referred to free people of mixed African and European ancestry.[3]
In British North America, the term free Negro was often used to cover the same class of people—those who were legally free and visibly of African descent.
Caribbean[edit]
Free people of color were an important part generally in the history of the Caribbean during the period of slavery and afterward. Initially descendants of French men and African and Indian slaves (and later French men and free women of color), and often marrying within their own mixed-race community, some achieved wealth and power. By the late eighteenth century, most free people of color in Saint-Domingue were native born and part of colored families that had been free for generations.[6]
Free people of color were leaders in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which achieved independence in 1804 as the Republic of Haiti. 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. Comparable mixed-race groups became an important part of the populations of the British colony of Jamaica, the Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dutch colony of Suriname and the Portuguese colony of Brazil.
Military service[edit]
Free men of color had been armed members of the militia for decades during both Spanish and French rule of the colony of Louisiana. They volunteered their services and pledged their loyalty to Claiborne and to their newly adopted country.[15] In early 1804, the new U.S. administration in New Orleans under Governor Claiborne was faced with a dilemma previously unknown in the United States, the integration of the military by incorporating entire units of established "colored" militia.[16] See, e.g., the 20 February 1804 letter from Secretary of War Henry Dearborn to Claiborne, stating that "it would be prudent not to increase the Corps, but to diminish, if it could be done without giving offense."[17]
A decade later during the War of 1812, the militia which consisted of free men of color volunteered to join the force mustered by Andrew Jackson in preparation for the Battle of New Orleans, when the British began landing troops outside the city in December 1814 in preparation for an invasion of the city. The battle resulted in a decisive American victory, in which black soldiers played a critical role. However, many black troops who had been promised freedom in exchange for service were forcibly returned to slavery after the battle's conclusion.[18]
Economic influence[edit]
Free people of color filled an important niche in the economy of slave societies. In most places they worked as artisans and small retail merchants in the towns. In many places, especially in the American South, there were restrictions on people of color owning slaves and agricultural land. But many free blacks lived in the countryside, and some became major slaveholders. In the antebellum years, individual slaves who were freed often stayed on or near the plantations where they or their ancestors had been slaves, and where they had extended family. Masters often used free blacks as plantation managers or overseers, especially if the master had a family relationship with the mixed-race man.[20]
In the early 19th century, societies required apprenticeships for free blacks to ensure they developed a means of support. For instance, in North Carolina, "By the late 1830s, then, county courts could apprentice orphans, fatherless or abandoned children, illegitimate children, and free black children whose parents were not employed.[21]
However, the number of apprenticeships declined as the number of free blacks increased. In some Southern states after the Nat Turner slave rebellion of 1831, the legislatures passed laws that forbade the teaching of free blacks or slaves to read and write, which was a requirement for having an apprenticeship. There was fear if blacks could read and write, they might start slave revolts and rebellions. Blacks were not allowed to apprentice as an editor or work in a printing press. Despite the restrictions of some apprenticeships, many free blacks benefited from their time as an apprentice.
In Caribbean colonies, governments sometimes hired free people of color as rural police to hunt down runaway slaves and keep order among the slave population. From the view of the white master class in places such as Saint-Domingue or Jamaica, this was a critical function in a society in which the population of slaves on large plantations vastly outnumbered whites.[22]
In places where law or social custom permitted it, some free people of color managed to acquire good agricultural land and slaves and become planters themselves. Free blacks owned plantations in almost all the slave societies of the Americas. In the United States, free people of color may have owned the most property in Louisiana, as the French and Spanish colony had developed a distinct creole or mixed-race class before its acquisition by the United States. A man who had a relationship with a woman of color often also arranged for a transfer of wealth to her and their children, whether through deed of land and property to the mother and/or children under the system of plaçage, or by arranging for an apprenticeship to a trade for their mixed-race children, which provided them a better opportunity to make a skilled living, or by educating sons in France and easing their way into the military. In St. Domingue by the late colonial period, gens de couleur owned about one-third of the land and about one-quarter of the slaves, mostly in the southern part of the island.[23]