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any popular ideas about Africa’s multitude of distinct peoples emerged at some point in Western history and memory. One such idea homogenized the physique or phenotype of the highly diverse populations that inhabit the continent, and has led ordinary Westerners (in Europe and the Americas) to believe that the varied phenotypes we now see in the Americas and Indian Ocean islands among people of African descent emerged as a result of biological mixing with Europeans and Native Americans.Though many other factors exist, Hollywood reels like Alex Haley’s “Roots” and “Birth of a Nation,” as well as popular 19th and 20th century caricature traditions, helped to forge a permanent image and memory in the minds of Westerners that the slaves brought to European colonies in the Americas were archetypically dark brown and black in complexion, with kinky hair, broad noses, thick lips and big mouths.
I first realized that this may be deceptive when I obtained the slave inventory of my 7th-great-grandfather, Jean-Baptiste-Honoré d’Estréhan de Beaupré de Tours, who died in New Orleans in 1765. His slave inventory revealed that my 6th-great-grandmother, Catherine d’Estréhan, or Caux, a mulâtresse, was inventoried with her husband, Solimane, also known as Antoine, who was also mulâtre. Solimane is a common given name among Muslims, and uncommon to Christians of any denomination. He was born around 1735, in the heyday of the importation of slaves to New Orleans by the Compagnie des Indes. Slaves baptized as Catholic in the colony commonly were given a Christian name (as all baptized Catholics were, regardless of their origin), which explains Antoine. And Creole slaves (those who were born in the colony and practiced indigenous colonial culture), although the vast majority were known by a Catholic name, sometimes retained a name that their African-born parents gave them. The now-famous Marie-Thérèse, also known as Coincoin, of Cane River in Natchitoches Parish, is a good example of this. But few slaves retained Muslim names alongside their Christian names if born in the colony. This buzzed in my ear the possibility that Solimane may have been born on the continent of Africa someplace and arrived already with physique otherwise reserved for admixed slaves or freed slaves in the colonies.1Orleans Inventories, Garic, 26 Feb 1765, #148.
I then searched Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s colonial and early national Louisiana slave database and federal censuses and what I discovered fascinated me. Hall’s team found that 233 African-born slaves were described as “mulatto,” “mulatto rouge,” or “griffe,” and that these slaves’ African ethnic group was equally present in the same document. In other words, in 1789, at the German Coast’s St. John the Baptist Parish, an 18-year-old Arada young lady named Charlotte, described physically as a mulâtresse, was inventoried on the estate of Keller and Wagguerly, and valued at 300 pesos. This may seem erroneous at this point, but page 2 of this article will show why Charlotte’s description is hardly surprising. In 1870, ten Louisiana residents were described as mulatto in color with Africa as their birthplace.
Rodney Sam, one of the blog authors on this site, posed a question in a research group the other day along these lines. More specifically, he queried whether, or not, slaves brought to colonial Louisiana may have arrived in Louisiana with some of the features we tend to associate with mixing in the colonies, a reason that Latins in the Americas seem to have more physical diversity than African Americans. The Latin Americas obviously include Creole Louisiana culturally, historically, genealogically, and legally.
Rodney is on to something. African Americans, though physically diverse, tend to lack some common occurrences in the Latin Americas, such as dark brown- and black-skinned people with fine hair, and “keen features.” It’s in part why so many African Americans vacation in the Caribbean and Brazil – “the people are so beautiful.” It’s not only that Brazil, for instance, still has a vibrant and visible African culture in some states, and many “black people.” It’s a particular kind of “black person”–usually brown-skinned with fine or curly hair, or cinnamon-skinned with the same hair–that lures many African American men to the Latin Americas. These types of preferences are taboo among African Americans, because black-identified Americans will not hesitate to accuse you of being “color struck,” and you may suffer some mild to serious form of condemnation for it. So public discussions of the sort tend to be shunned.
But privately, the discussion is alive in well among African Americans and Louisiana Creoles, alike. Two years ago, a cousin in Louisiana made the observation that dark-skinned African Americans in Southern states have “hard features.” In other words, she was saying that dark-skinned African Americans tend to look like they have undiluted African genealogies whereas in Creole Louisiana, people of that same hue range often have features associated with Europeans and Native Americans. My cousin, who is a lovely Ebony hue with “soft features,” was not the first to make that observation in my presence. On a separate, but related topic, I explored African phenotypical diversity in this mosaic here (opens in a new window).
I decided to think more seriously about the topic after Rodney’s query. And I turned to the one source from the colonial period that I had in my possession. It is not on slaves in colonial Louisiana, but like Louisiana, it too was a French colony and its slaves came from many of the same African populations as those in Louisiana. In 1797, Louis Élie Médérique Moreau de Saint-Méry, a native of Martinique but longterm resident of Saint-Domingue, published an 800-tome on Saint-Domingue while in Philadelphia. He is only one man and his depiction of the island, its landscape, politics, culture, and peoples, are not without issues. To be sure, more exhaustive research is desperately needed. But his firsthand descriptions of African-born slaves there in the 18th century offer, at the very least, some kind of idea of what slaves from Africa in Saint-Domingue (and consequently in sister-colony, Louisiana) may have looked like.
I’ve translated the text from French and have paraphrased. I also have eliminated his descriptions of the personalities or temperaments and traditions of the slaves he describes. For the purposes of this article, I only name the largest groups of African slaves on Saint-Domingue that he described.
Click below to go to page 2.
References
| 1. | ↑ | Orleans Inventories, Garic, 26 Feb 1765, #148. |
Do you mean French speaking / Caribbean slaves were only bought in Louisiana, though? My ancestors bought Caribbean and French speaking slaves regularly, but took them to Maryland. (It was actually one of the reasons they resented having to put up the Cajuns while they were homeless in the 18th century — they were worried they would encourage them in French speaking, Catholicism, and desire for freedom.) I thought N.O. was a huge slave port and people came from all over to buy there. I further thought that with the difficulties in transatlantic slave trade in 19th century, more and more had to be brought in from the Caribbean. ?
There were 3 separate waves of slave importation in Louisiana. From 1718-1935/40, the Compagnie des Indes, under John Law, enjoyed a trade monopoly in the French colonies, and this was most manifested in the slave trade from Senegambia and Guinea. The Compagnie imported the same ethnic groups from those French comptoirs in west Africa to Mauritius and Louisiana during that period. They also imported to other French colonies.
During the Spanish period, the orientation shifted from upper west Africa’s muslim population to regions from present-day Ghana all the way to present-day Congo. A majority of all slaves imported during the Spanish period came from the vast region including today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Congo, and parts of Angola. A number of these slaves from the Congo and Angola arrived already Catholic.
When looking at colonial ecclesiastic and parochial records in, say, 1790, on individual plantations, the difference in the slave arrivals per colonial period is pretty clear: Congos dominate in young ages, and Wolof, Bambara, Mandingos, Senegalese, Fulani, Soso, Kisi, et al. dominate in the older generation of the slaves.
Few of these slaves, in either period, came from the Caribbean. In 1706, at old Mobile, the first slaves attested were from St. Kitts. I wrote about them here: http://www.mylhcv.com/louisiana-st-kitts-nevis/
After 1803, the U.S. began to halt the importation. The importation of slaves directly from Africa ended in 1807: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/slavery/europe/abolition.aspx
American administrators in Louisiana were extremely concerned about the situation in Saint-Domingue already upon arrival in December 1803. Emily Clark has a great study on how Americans reacted to the S-D revolution in her 2013 study American Quadroon. She demonstrates how that impacted territorial Louisiana (1803-1812). Gary B. Mills and Elizabeth Shown Mills’s Forgotten People (LSU Press: 2013) and Judith Kelleher Schafer’s two legal studies are the best out there on how the S-D revolution and growth of American legislators in the Louisiana legislature impacted slavery during the Antebellum period.
But to sum up the Antebellum period: there were no (legal) importation of slaves to Louisiana from Africa or the Caribbean. Saint-Domingue and Cuban refugees who arrived between 1809 and 1810 in New Orleans did bring slaves with them. But they remained mostly in New Orleans and to a lesser extent in Pointe-Coupée, the Acadian and German Coasts (all along the Mississippi River). Nathalie Dessens’s study (From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans) as well as Emily Clark’s discuss this. The vast majority of slaves entering Louisiana during the Antebellum period entered New Orleans slave market by way of the US interstate market, mostly from Virginia, with smaller numbers from Kentucky, Maryland, and Tennessee. This is why so many Creoles in Grand Côteau and Sunset have English surnames – the Jesuits were ousted from Maryland in 1821 and they established a colony, with their slaves, at Grand Côteau that year. That colony became Sacred Heart Convent, Sacred Heart Church (now St. Charles Borromeo) and St. Charles College school for (white) boys.
So by 1860, on all Creole plantations, there was a mixture of Creole, American, and really old African slaves; whereas on American plantations in Louisiana, virtually all slaves were Americans, with few Africans.
Hope that helps.