Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans

Epilogue

On January 1, 1832, Alexis de Tocqueville was in New Orleans. He included the city on his tour of the United States in 1831–32 precisely to contrast its racial order with Anglo-America’s, although perhaps a desire “to enjoy the pleasures so celebrated of New Orleans” tempted him as well. Like most European and EuroAmerican male visitors during the antebellum era, Tocqueville attended a “ball of the quadroons” during his short stay. It was, he noted, a “strange sight: all the men white, all the women colored or at least with African blood. . . . A sort of bazaar.” Feeling as if he were “a thousand miles from the United States,” Tocqueville observed “faces with every shade of colour” and voices speaking “French, English , Spanish, Creole,” all together composing a population “just as mixed” as the city’s architecture with its Spanish roofs, English bricks, and French carriage entrances. Focusing in particular on the gens de couleur libre, Tocqueville noted there was a “multitude of coloured people at New Orleans. Small number in the North. Why?” The answer for Tocqueville lay in both “national character and temperament” and the material circumstances of colonization. Whereas he was struck by “incredible laxity of morals” in New Orleans, at least among “colored women” and their white consorts, he repeatedly characterized (Anglo-)Americans as “very chaste” and even credited this characteristic as one of the reasons for the success of democratic governance in the United States. The English, he believed, were “the one [race] that has most preserved the purity of its blood,” in part because “they belong to a Northern race.” In contrast, “immorality between the races” prevailed in New Orleans. His assumption that the southern “races” of Europeans who colonized New Orleans were less virtuous, and therefore engaged in more interracial sex, goes unstated. Although Tocqueville asserted that these contrasting traits were “strong reasons ” for the different rates of racially exogamous sex, he also credited demography: Epilogue 216 Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans “Spanish America was peopled by adventurers drawn by thirst for gold, who, transplanted along to the other side of the Atlantic, found themselves in some sort forced to contract unions with the women of the land where they were living. The English colonies were peopled by men who escaped from their country for reasons of religious zeal, and whose object in coming to the New World, was to live there cultivating the land. They came with wives and children, and could form a complete society on the spot.”1 Leaving aside for a moment Tocqueville’s selective presentation of the history of New England as that of colonial Anglo-America writ large, he did presciently expound the cultural and materialist interpretations of sex and racial formation that would be put forward by later generations of historians.2 But neither of these explanations, alone or together, accounts for the rise and decline of racially exogamous relationships in early New Orleans. Although demography played its part, economic and pragmatic considerations promoted relationships between Indian women and French men during the first decades of the eighteenth century. Those between women of African ancestry and European men were few during the French era but greatly increased in number during the last third of the eighteenth century for reasons that do not fit the usual demographic and cultural explanations. Sex ratios, which earlier in the century had been skewed heavily toward Euro-Louisianan men and slightly toward Afro-Louisianan women, slave and free, leveled out somewhat at the same time that relationships between Euro-Louisianan men and women of color became more frequent.3 They also became more public and apparently more acceptable. Increasing numbers of EuroLouisianans , from wealthy merchants and government officials to lowly soldiers and laborers, openly acknowledged their nonwhite families. Although some of this might have been due to the arrival, after 1763, of Spanish immigrants, whom Gilberto Freyre and others have described as being more open to intimate relations with women of color, the men who formed families with women of color included secondand third-generation French creoles as well as the occasional immigrant from Anglo-America and elsewhere. A better explanation for the growing numbers of these relationships lies in the creolization of both Franco- and Afro-Louisianans whose parents and grandparents had arrived in the colony mostly in the 1710s and 1720s. By the mid- to late eighteenth century, many of those born locally shared, to a great extent, a culture, a...