Between Slavery and Freedom Read Online Free Page A

American “wives.” Others took enslaved women as their “housekeepers,” and in some instances they freed them. And, like the Spanish, the French recognized the wisdom of employing black men as soldiers, and granting them freedom for their service.
    In 1729, the French in and around New Orleans began freeing some of their slaves and arming them to help repel attacks by the Natchez Indians. The black soldiers met a vital need and fought well. Yet the French were no more committed to freedom than the Spanish, but did what they had to for their own security. As the influence of the black troops increased with every challenge to French power in the region, the authorities found they could not do without them. Eventually French colonial administrators followed the lead of the Spanish and organized the soldiers into military companies commanded by their own officer corps. The soldiers, and especially their officers, became not only free but in some instances wealthy.
    Once France began acquiring colonies and importing black people to labor in them, the French king and his ministers crafted a series of laws that set down the rights and obligations of masters and slaves. The so-called Code Noir (Black Code) concentrated power in the hands of white slaveholders and made slaves subservient in basically every aspect of their lives. Theoretically, there were two classes in the colonies, white slave owners and black slaves, but the Code Noir did not entirely ignore the presence of a third class, the gens de couleur libres , or free people of color.
    Although the Code Noir forbade interracial cohabitation and marriage, the authorities in France tacitly admitted that white men were living with black and mixed-race women and that those relationships were producing children whom their fathers might, if they were so inclined, set free. They also acknowledged that slaves were finding other ways to get their freedom. A free population existed and they needed to determine the status of that population.
    Not surprisingly, the Code Noir tried to prevent free blacks from aiding and abetting slaves in rebelling or escaping. Gens de couleur who sheltered runaway slaves risked heavy fines, and if they could not pay them they could lose their own freedom. The Code Noir instructed former slaves always to show great respect to the white family that had been kind and generous enough to free them and warned them that any sign of disrespect would result in harsh punishment. However—and this was a provision unlike thatin any of the other European colonies in North America—the Code Noir also declared that the King of France granted “to manumitted slaves the same rights, privileges and immunities . . . enjoyed by free-born persons . . . not only with regard to their persons, but also to their property.” 1 The Code Noir at least implied that ex-slaves would enjoy a certain measure of equality with whites once they ceased to be slaves.
    It was one thing for the king across the ocean to declare what should and should not happen in his distant colonies. It was quite another to put those declarations into practice. Despite what the Code Noir said, one’s “rights, privileges and immunities” often depended on the color of one’s skin. Full equality did not prevail throughout the Louisiana Territory, although it is fair to say that in some of the French settlements free people of African ancestry did enjoy a higher status than their brothers and sisters in the British colonies. However, it would be incorrect to claim that the situation of free people of color in French North America was better than it was anywhere else or that white racial attitudes were any more benign.
    In the colonial era time and place determined just what free black people could do and indeed what opportunities they had to become free. That was not only the case in French and Spanish territories, but in all of the thirteen British colonies. The