In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In 1736, Marie, a young slave woman, ran away, claiming she was being “cruelly treated without cause.” Marie’s legal owner was Françoise Larche, who had recently inherited her father’s estate. However, Françoise was a minor and Marie was under the control of Françoise’s uncle and guardian, Joseph Chaperon and his wife, Louise Le Coq, who used her to nurse their young child. Marie first fled to the Jesuit priests who had hired many of the other slaves from the Larche estate and then, when the priests said they could not hire her without informing Chaperon, to Jacques Larche, the deceased’s brother. “Fearing . . . Chaperon’s fury,” Marie hoped that Jacques would hire her out to someone else as “she could not return to Chaperon as she would die.” Having previously seen how hired slaves were mistreated by people “who were not their real masters,” Jacques filed a declaration with the Superior Council. In response, Le Coq declared that Marie had run away and that Jacques himself had “influenced her to desert her post,” and the council ordered Marie to return to Chaperon.1 The following year, Chaperon came to the attention of the Superior Council again when it was notified that a fifteen-month-old child of an unnamed slave woman (perhaps Marie again, as the woman was identified as belonging to the Larche estate) was “unable to stand, slightly swollen, and affected with diarrhea,” a condition the investigating doctor diagnosed as brought on by “bad food and neglect.”2 Chaperon’s violence was well known and was directed toward Euro-Louisianans in addition to slaves, both those under his command and those belonging to others .3 He even makes a cameo appearance in Jean Bernard Bossu’s account of midcentury Louisiana, where Bossu wrote that Chaperon “forced one of his Nègres into a hot oven, where this wretch expired, and as his jawbones had been drawn back, the barbarous Chaperon said: I believe that he is still laughing, and he took up a pitchfork to stir up the fire. Since then, this habitant has become the bugbear [épouvantail] of the Slaves, and when they are disobedient to their masters, they c h a p t e r t w o LegislatingSlaveryinFrenchNewOrleans Legislating Slavery in French New Orleans 53 threaten them by saying: I will sell you to Chaperon.”4 Notwithstanding this widespread knowledge of Chaperon’s violence toward Afro- and Euro-Louisianans alike, there is no clear evidence that Chaperon was ever punished for his mistreatment of the enslaved, despite provisions in the Code Noir of 1724 that criminalized “barbarous and inhumane” treatment of slaves. The case of Chaperon clearly illustrates that the metropolitan-authored code was not simply accepted by either the colony’s ruling elite, who adapted metropolitan policies to suit themselves, or its ordinary residents, who often ignored both metropolitan and local policies governing slavery.5 The Code Noir was the metropole’s response to the emergence of slavery in lower Louisiana. By the early 1720s, it became clear that the region’s economy was moving away from that of New France, with its dependence on Indian trade and family farms, toward the Caribbean model of plantation agriculture and enslaved labor. As such, the Crown looked to the islands to determine how to govern Louisiana , and in 1724, it rewrote the Code Noir that had been implemented there in 1685 to regulate the relationships between slaves and their masters, the enslaved and the free, and those of African and of European descent. These 1724 regulations would shape how racial identities—with their particular rights and obligations— emerged in lower Louisiana, but they were, to a great extent, defined by a distant metropole that was responding to situations within Louisiana, elsewhere in its colonial empire, and in France itself, as it sought to regulate racially exogamous relationships, manumission, and the status of free people of African ancestry. Codifying status and ancestry as important determinants of rights, privileges, and obligations, the 1724 Code Noir reflected the transition from a status-based hierarchy to one rooted in race, thus creating a niche for free people of African ancestry, albeit one that few were able to take advantage of during the French era. While metropolitan officials attempted to clarify and codify social relationships from a distance, local officials and elites had to live in and attempt to rule over a fragile colony in which hunger...

Share