Categories: Free People of Color (FPOC), Identity, Law

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The very first state legislative session in Louisiana passed this act in New Orleans on 27^th July 1812. It formed the legal basis for the organization of militias composed of free men of color (of all complexions)–who were Creoles–after Louisiana’s entry into the union of states in 1812. American Louisiana inherited this tradition of militias of free men of color from the Spanish colonial period, which, in practice, ended in 1803.

The act is equally significant in that it refutes any later mythologies set forth “defining” who or what constitutes or has constituted a Creole in Louisiana. Here, legislators consciously and deliberately specified membership of Louisiana Creoles for a few reasons. First, Louisiana Creoles, by virtue of their Louisiana birth, were made citizens of the United States after 1803. This initially included citizenship for those Louisiana Creoles who were free people of color; later legislative acts would renege on the 1803 sale/purchase which protected the citizenship of French colonial Louisiana’s gens de couleur libres (free people of color). Louisiana’s free people of color understood their inclusion in the citizenship provisions and, as Emily Clark shows in American Quadroon, Maurice Populus and other free people of color, who were Louisiana Creoles, petitioned territorial governor William Charles Cole Claiborne early after the 1803 sale/purchase to ensure that the American government intended to honor the provisions. General Andrew Jackson seems to have expressed his willingness and intention to treat the free men of color militias on equal footing with white volunteers. Claiborne did, however, warn Jackson in October 1814 that “this mode of reasoning makes no impression upon some respectable citizens here.” Despite reservations, concerns, prejudice, the state formed the militia through legislative act in Summer 1812, the year Louisiana entered the union as a state. For the time being, the state honored the legislative act and Louisiana Creole free men of color statewide militias showed proudly at the War of 1812 and Battle of New Orleans.¹Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 86; Kenneth R. Aslakson, Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans (New York: New York University Press, 2014),95 as found in John Spencer Bassett, ed., Correspondence of Andrew Jackson (Washington, D.C., 1926-33), 2:75-76; 

Honoring the citizenship of Louisiana Creole free men of color fell far from the only concern. The newly independent Haiti, established from a successful slave revolt ousting the French, factored much more prominently. The significance of Haitian independence cannot be understated. Saint-Domingue, called Haïti after independence, was the most successful sugar producing island on Earth. It was the French crown’s colonial glory. The prospect of black revolution spreading throughout the Americas left colonists on all shores aghast. Americans were among them. Many free Saint-Domingans and their slaves had settled in British, French, and Spanish North America in the 1790s. But they paled in comparison to the 10,000, or so, who were expelled from Spanish Cuba by the crown in 1809, who found refuge in New Orleans between 1809 and 1811. These refugees doubled the population of New Orleans and tripled the size of New Orleans’s free people of color population. The idea of Haitians encouraging rebellion in colonial and territorial Louisiana was not so far a stretch: at present-day Narco near Destréhan, Louisiana, Charles Deslondes, a Haitian-born slave who had witnessed the Saint-Domingue revolution, launched what Daniel Rasmussen termed “America’s largest slave revolt.” State legislators found a free men of color militia composed uniquely of Louisiana Creoles critical in weeding out the specter of additional Haitian-inspired slave rebellions.²Clark, American Quadroon, ibid.; Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: the Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (HarperCollins, 2012. See also Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2009).

But perhaps most useful here, to illustrate the degree of later mythologizing about who Creoles are and have been, is the wording of the act. In English, with the rare occasional debate in French, Americanized Creoles place primacy on race and genealogy for being Creole. In New Orleans around the time of the Civil War, those identifying with whiteness came to ahistorically assert that Creoles were only white descendants of Latin Europeans. Again in New Orleans, this time in the late 19^th century, those identifying with mixture of European, African, and American Indian ancestry eventually began to claim that Creoles must be mixed, French-speaking, with a French or Spanish surname, and have a complexion lighter than the color of wheat, in order to be Creole. Later, in the 1980s, southwest Louisiana Creoles of brown complexions began to blacken Creole. Each of these different generations of Creoles articulated these racial ideas about Creole in English for an Anglophone audience. They all have felt “when in Rome, do as the Romans do” since American identity and citizenship has been predicated on race (white, mulatto, Indian, black) since before 1803. Americans did not define Créolité. Creoles did not define American. Both only knew that their identities depended on distinguishing one from the other. And that is and has always been solidly cultural and locational.³Creoles speak Latin-based languages, historically profess faith in Francophone and Hispanophone Roman Catholicism (or are influenced by it), and tend to practice assimilation and identify based on culture and locality. Americans are English-speakers, historically Protestant, and tend to prefer segregation and identify with race. Since World War 2, these distinctions have eroded immensely, and one now finds Creoles who only speak English, whose identity is based entirely or mostly on race, and who profess faith in many different religions, or who attend protestantized Roman Catholic church-parishes. Similarly, American-identified citizens often speak French, Spanish, Choctaw, German, practice traditional Roman Catholicisim, and disidentify with race. Creoles have changed. Americans have changed.

Note that this legislative act of 1812, however, called for the organization of a militia of free men of color “among the Creoles.” That preposition “among” holds clues to how Creoles historically have viewed themselves. “Among” suggests that there were other Creoles who were not men, not free, and not of color. Of course this makes perfect sense to anyone familiar with Louisiana civil and Catholic parochial records, newspapers or Creoles who still speak our ethnic group’s historic languages. My ancestor, Robert Talon, died in Mobile, Alabama on 24^th May 1745. His death record indicated that he was “the first Creole born in the colony.” He had been born, at sea, between Galveston Bay and old Biloxy, in 1684 or 1685. His mother was a fille du roi named Isabelle Planteau, born in Paris. His father, Lucien Talon, was born in the Catholic diocese of Beauvais, Picardy, France. To use preferred racial terms today, Robert was white. His identity was Louisiana Creole. People inclined to racialize Créolité today are free to indulge opinions. But one thing no one can refute is the centuries long pattern that demonstrates, without fail, that Creole, for Creoles ourselves in our own languages, never has had anything to do with race, phenotype, complexion, hair, or genealogy. As Col. Williams, a New Orleans Creole put it best in 1858: it’s all about the locally-rooted Latin culture and local birth and acculturation within that culture.⁴Virginia Meacham Gould, “In Full Enjoyment of their Liberty: the Free Women of Color of the Gulf Ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola, 1769-1860,” Doctoral dissertation, Emory University, 1996, 36-37. For the Williams observation, see “The word Creole,” Nebraska Advertiser, 15 July 1858, p. 1. I have not verified the sources, but here are some useful starting points on the Talon family: (1) http://friedman.cs.illinois.edu/genealogy/Talon.htm; (2) pdf – http://habitantheritage.org/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/The_Incredible_Adventures_of_the_Family_Talon_-_Colby.10431405.pdf.

– Christophe Landry

Image source: Acts Passed at the First Session of the First General Assembly of the State of Louisiana, chapter 23 (27 July 1812), pp. 72-3.