Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World

Chapter 8. Atlantic Alliances: Marriage among People of African Descent in New Orleans

Chapter 8 Atlantic Alliances: Marriage among People of African Descent in New Orleans Emily Clark As the quadroons on their part regard the negroes and mulattoes with contempt, and will not mix with them, so nothing remains for them but to be the friends, as it is termed, of the white men. The female quadroon looks upon such an engagement as a matrimonial contract, though it goes no farther than a formal contract by which the “friend” engages to pay the father or mother of the quadroon a specified sum. The quadroons both assume the name of their friends, and as I am assured preserve this engagement with as much fidelity as ladies espoused at the altar.1 —Karl Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar Eisenach (1828) The traveling German aristocrat Karl Bernhard was the first to publish a description of the custom that came to be known as plaçage, and to pronounce it to be the typical mode of sexual partnership for free women of color in New Orleans. On the basis of nine weeks in New Orleans in the late winter of 1826, Bernhard etched an archetype for the city’s femmes de couleur libres, of the “quadroon balls” where they met wealthy white suitors, and of the illicit concubinage to which they were driven by their refusal to mix with men of African descent. His portrait was retraced, often word for word, in dozens of subsequent travel accounts, newspaper stories, and literary fiction.2 166 Chapter 8 The popular poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow contributed to the canon with his moonlit tribute to “The Quadroon Girl” in 1842, and so did Harriet Beecher Stowe when she created the character of Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The public ball that Bernhard attended became the iconic setting for the New Orleans free woman of color. The private social occasions at St. Louis Cathedral that presented a very different tableau would have been inaccessible to such visitors, but they were arguably equally representative of the lived reality of the city’s free people of color. The Catholic nuptial festivities that united Baltasar Noel Carriere and Maria Scipion Sarpy on a late summer day in 1822 were not unusual during the decade of Bernhard’s visit. The parents of the bride and groom looked on as their children made their vows, along with the crowd of friends and relatives, black and white, who filled the nave. The officiating priest, Antonio Sedella, carefully recorded the details of the occasion in the sacramental register that held the records of Baltasar’s parents’ wedding, his grandparents’ wedding, and the sacramental unions of hundreds of other people of African descent.3 Historians of New Orleans and its free people of color have generally accepted the plaçage paradigm that emerged from the antebellum torrent of literary production that followed in the wake of Bernhard. And they have generally embraced its corollary, a self-conscious, racially and socially exclusive , free black community that is supposed to have upheld a “three caste society” in the city.4 The sacramental and notarial records exploited in this essay and Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard’s new book contest the hegemony that plaçage has exercised over the history of the free women of color in New Orleans.5 Scott and Hébrard’s research uncovers patterns of life partnership between free women of color and men of European descent of modest means, quasi-marriages that bear little resemblance to the transitory arranged concubinage with elite whites that was supposed to have been ubiquitous among the city’s free women of color. This essay explores another pattern of sexual association that chips away at the plaçage paradigm: sacramental marriages between free women and men of African ancestry.6 The sacramental registers of New Orleans between 1759 and 1830 reveal marriage to have been a common practice among people of African descent throughout the seventy-year period. Within that continuous phenomenon, shifting patterns suggest that marriage was a protean medium of expression and action that served a variety of functions over time, shaped by historical realities as well as by the identities and values that people of African descent claimed for themselves and their children. Although marriage was by no Atlantic Alliances 167 means the norm for people of African descent throughout these seven decades , by the 1820s the gap in the marriage rates between people of...