In 1724, the Superior Council of Louisiana registered one of the lengthiest and most comprehensive royal edicts ever promulgated in a French Atlantic colony. As stated in its preamble, the Edict of March 1724, soon to be known as the Code Noir de Louisiane, was intended to “maintain the discipline of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church” in the colony and “to establish one law and definite rules” regarding “the status and condition” of the “enslaved negroes” used by “our subjects [for] the cultivation of the land.”¹ In fifty-five articles, the Louisiana Code Noir declared Catholicism the unique religion of...

“If I have proposed augmentations of expenditures, it is because I have found them indispensable.”¹ Thirty-two years of service for the king had made Honoré-Gabriel Michel de Villebois de la Rouvillière bold. The peremptory conclusion to his otherwise impassioned plea for increased credits for Louisiana would seem to brook no opposition, even if addressed to his ultimate superior, the minister of the navy. Thirty-two years of service. Seventeen in Canada. The rest spent in various ports of France. Michel had brought his experiences to bear on the quality of his budgetary analysis of the colony he had under his care....

Between 1763 and 1803, the Mississippi Valley stood at center stage in that long historical process described by Jeremy Adelman as the “pan-Atlantic struggle for mercantilist control, political loyalty, and ultimately for military alliance that brought about the crisis of the old régime.”¹ A tightly woven web of interconnected interests, processes, and events linked Spanish Luisiana to larger Atlantic worlds.² Foremost among these links was an imperial defense strategy that, in the face of increasing international threats, prioritized the conservation of the colonies of greatest economic potential such as Mexico. That priority obeyed Madrid’s view that Spain’s American resources were...

One September day in 1764, Foÿ, a thirty-five-year-old Bambara (non-Muslim) slave was sitting in front of the entrance to the poor hospital in New Orleans. He was cutting out shirts and breeches from a length of linen sail cloth and readying to sew the panels together with a borrowed needle. The eyewitness describing this scene, Mama Comba, the fifty-year-old enslaved Mandinga woman who had lent him the needles and who lived at the hospital, added with emphasis that Foÿ had done his sewing in the open, and that “he did not hide.”¹

A number of points can be inferred from...

In 1795, a slave named Lubin, along with five other African slaves, was put up for sale by Guillaume Despau. Despau was a French man of modest origins from Libourne, an inhabitant of New Orleans at least part of the year, the owner of several farms or plantations in Opelousas, and the husband of Marie Sophie Carrière—the daughter of Jean Carrière, a French man, also from Libourne, a merchant and planter based apparently in Opelousas.¹ Antoine de Saint Amand, the commandant of St. Charles Parish, recorded the sale on January 18. Lubin, who would have been in his late...

Over the Spanish and early American periods, the slave trade from Jamaica, Dominica, and Martinique was very important, as Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec has highlighted in the previous chapter. This testifies to the centrality of the connections with the Caribbean, in addition to transatlantic migrations, in shaping Louisiana society and culture. Already during the French regime, these intercolonial relations between Louisiana and the West Indies, in particular with the French Antilles, were essential, and might have been even more intense than those with metropolitan France. In 1979, Thomas Fiehrer underlined that colonial Louisiana was “an appendage of the French and Spanish...

Few choices seem more personal than the decisions to have sex, to marry, or to bear a child, and yet those choices have long been subject to regulation through laws, religious doctrine, and social mores. For quite some time, historians have examined these forms of regulation to learn more about particular societies and how those societies developed hierarchies of gender, race, and class. In studies of the American colonies, whether French, Spanish, or English, a focus on the regulation of sexuality has provided new information about the development of the idea of race within the Atlantic world and how it...

The traveling German aristocrat Karl Bernhard was the first to publish a description of the custom that came to be known as plaçage, and to pronounce it to be the typical mode of sexual partnership for free women of color in New Orleans. On the basis of nine weeks in New Orleans in the late winter of 1826, Bernhard etched an archetype for the city’s femmes de couleur libres, of the “quadroon balls” where they met wealthy white suitors, and of the illicit concubinage to which they were driven by their refusal to mix with men of African descent. His...