Both Creoles and Americans had slave and free people of color who shared their respective cultures, identities, and communities. The French and Spanish administrators forbade the practice of any faith besides Roman Catholicism (read: Protestantism) and all Francophone, Creolophone and Hispanophone slave owners had the legal duty to baptize and acculturate their slaves in the Roman Catholic Church. After 1812, the new Louisiana civil code seems to have exempted slave owners of this duty, but Louisiana Creole slave owners continued the tradition until the Civil War. Harriet Martineau also noticed this during her visit to the city in 1835: “within the edifice, there is no separation. […] Kneeling on the pavement, [one can find] a multitude of every shade of complexion from the fair Scotchwoman or German to the jet black African.” These mixed arrangements persisted after the Civil War, also. In 1880, a Methodist minister witnessed “lips of every shade by [the] hundreds [kissing] the same crucifixes, and fingers [of every color dipped] in the [same] ‘holy water’.” The tradition would effectively resist change until the creation of the Catholic Diocese of Lafayette in 1918, when new church-parishes and Catholic parochial schools were built and staffed by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, Holy Ghost Fathers, Sisters of the Holy Family, and other religious communities who only catered to nonwhite Catholics.¹Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, 2 vols. (London: Saunder and Otley, 1838),1:259, in Slawson, “Segregated Catholicism,” 75, 147; Charles B. Rousseve, Negro in Louisiana (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1937), 40-41; Landry, “A Creole Melting Pot,” pp. 9-10, 102-29.

Although many historians and ordinary people today assume that all free people of color in Louisiana were Creoles, it is ahistoric to assume so. In the Summer of 1812, the Louisiana legislature, in its first session as a state, enacted the incorporation of state militias, composed of “certain free men of color, to be chose from among the Creoles.” The provision excluded Americans who were free people of color. Free African Americans and Melungeons had been in Louisiana for three decades by 1812. In New Orleans, these free people of color can be found in the American municipalities “uptown.” In 1825 or 1826, Asa Goldsbury founded the First African Baptist Church in New Orleans with 20 members. Goldsbury’s congregation grew out of an earlier Baptist congregation in New Orleans with a white and a nonwhite minister catering to each separately.²Acts Passed at the First Session of the First General Assembly of the State of Louisiana, chapter 23 (27 July 1812), pp. 72-3, available online here. On New Orleans Baptists, see http://www.christiantimelines.com/aa_church.htm; Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), lxxxii; Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude, African American Religious Thought (Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 19.

In the rural setting, a large number of American free people of color had arrived around 1790 from Virginia, North and South Carolinas and settled all over south Louisiana.  Their families had intermarried for generations and knew one another before arriving in Louisiana, ensuring continued endagomy in rural south Louisiana. The Chavises (now, Chévis), Drakes, Sweats, Gibsons, Nelsons, Johnsons, Ashworths, and others, were among these American free people of color families. John Chavis, free mulatto, native of North Carolina appears in the 1792 colonial census of the Opélousas District. But he and his wife, Rachel Keys, also appear in Catholic parochial records in the Lafourche District in this same decade. Unlike most members of this American free people of color community, John and Rachel’s children left their parents’ community to marry into local Creole communities. Aaron Drake of Elizabeth County, Virginia, and his two sons Paul and John, all free mulattoes, registered cattle brands in the Attakapas District in 1807. In 1811, George Nelson, a free man of color from Bladen, North Carolina, married a free woman of color named Elizabeth “Betsy” Carter, widow of Robert Sweat, in Opélousas. Betsy was a native of Casswell, North Carolina. Frances “Fanny” Nelson and Gilbert Taylor Nelson, two children of George by his first marriage to Delaney Taylor married Johnson siblings David and Rebecca, natives of the Edgefield District, South Carolina, children of Gideon Johnson and Nancy Sweat. By 1830, we find this nucleic community living huddled together on Bayou Têche near Grand Côteau, on the Mermentau River, and on the Calcasieu River. Thus, Creoles and Americans of various degrees of African descent shared the same land, but separate cultural milieux and residential settlement patterns.³Le District-des-Attacapas, or Attakapas District in English, corresponded to present-day St. Martin, Lafayette, Iberia, Vermilion, and St. Mary Parishes in southwest Louisiana. For cattle brands, see http://www.mylhcv.com/attakapas-cattle-brands-fpoc/. John Chavis Jr married 15 July 1826 Silésie Pierre-Auguste, Creole femme de couleur libre, daughter of Pierre-Auguste Mallet – nègre libre and Gabrielle Tessier – métisse: Opelousas (La.) Courthouse, marriages, no. 52. Mary Polly Chevis, native of the Lafourche District, married 1 April 1824 Joseph Élie Victorian, Creole homme de couleur libre, son of Victariano Ramos of Texas and Marie-Thérèse Don Manuel de Soto, Creole négresse libre of Natchitoches Parish: Opelousas Courthouse, marriages, no. 14. Mary Jane Nancy Chevis married 1 November 1857 Louis Honoré Gradenigo, Creole homme de couleur libre, son of Joseph Bonaparte di Gradenigo and Marie-Jeanne – mulâtresse: St. Landry Catholic Church (Opélousas, La.), marriages, bk. 1, p. 302.

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