Colonial Natchitoches: A Creole Community on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier

Chapter Three. Slavery in Colonial Natchitoches: The African Creole Community

55 chapter three Slavery in Colonial Natchitoches The African Creole Community Slaves arrived in Natchitoches soon after the town’s founding and formed a large proportion of the settlement’s population quickly thereafter. Native Americans, mostly acquired through warfare, were the first slaves to appear in Natchitoches. In 1706, St. Denis and twenty fellow Canadians, including his trusted lieutenant François Derbanne, had joined warriors from allied tribes on the Gulf Coast in a campaign to destroy a Chitimacha Indian village in retaliation for the killing of a Catholic priest. The French Canadians took about eighty prisoners , mainly women and children, and sold them to settlers at Mobile and Biloxi. A decade later, following his return to Mobile after he had established the French presence on the Louisiana-Texas frontier, St. Denis and another Frenchman brought five Chitimacha slaves to Natchitoches. Soon thereafter, Derbanne brought three more indigenous slaves to town, one of whom was his wife, a Chitimacha captive named Jeanne de la Grand Terre. In 1719, the first two slave-trade ships from West Africa landed at the French settlements along the Gulf Coast. Within three years, twenty enslaved Africans had been brought to Natchitoches.1 Despite the subordinate status that Native American and African slavesshared,theyformedtwodifferentgroupsinNatchitoches.Indian slaves made up only a small proportion of the settlement’s enslaved population throughout the colonial period, and females heavily outnumbered males among Indian bondspeople. In addition, few children were born to the Indian slaves, most of whom were acquired through trade with other tribes. As a result, the town’s small number of indigenous slaves, predominantly female adults, resided among individual French households. More frequently than their black counterparts, Indian slaves became part of a slaveowner’s family. In contrast, more African men than women were sold in Natchitoches during the first two decades of the town’s existence. To be sure, enough women were brought from Africa to allow the black population to increase rapidly through reproduction. By the 1780s, the black slaves of Natchitoches, who were overwhelmingly creole, outnumbered the French settlers. 56 chapter three Most of them were concentrated in large numbers on the tobacco plantations that were established, for the most part, downstream from Natchitoches.Intheserichbottomlands,theslaveswereabletocreatea creole community that combined various African and French elements within the loose confines of the paternalistic colonial slave system. The numerous French-speaking black creole slaves, however, came to pose only a slight threat to the hegemonic French creole control of Natchitoches , as they were allowed to establish their own families and were co-opted into the Roman Catholic Church.2 Although Native Americans were the first slaves brought to Natchitoches , the French settlers turned to African slaves as soon as they became available in the early 1720s. As a result, the amount of enslaved Indians remained small throughout the French period and into the early Spanish era (Table 3.1). While the numbers of indigenous slaves rose from eight to forty-four between 1722 and 1776, the final year in which they were counted, the proportion of Indians among the entire slave population dropped from slightly above one-fourth (28.6%) to only about one-tenth (10.5%).3 Indian slavery in Natchitoches, introduced by French Canadians, had more in common with the type of bondage practiced along the St. LawrenceRiverthanwiththeAfricanslaverythatflourishedthroughout LouisianaandtheFrenchCaribbean.Duringthelatterhalfoftheseventeenth century, French officials in Canada began to accept their native allies’ offer of Indian captives as a symbol of their partnership. Many coureurs de bois acquired slaves as a means of strengthening trade relations and securing valuable laborers. By the end of the century, Indian captives became increasingly available in Canada as the exchange grew morecentraltothemaintenanceofthealliancesystem,andmoreFrench familiespurchasedthemaslaborers.In1709,colonialofficialsissuedan ordinancelegalizingIndianslaveryinordertoprotecttheseinvestments andtoputanendtodisputesoverthecaptives’legalstatus.Althoughthe French Canadians often employed the captives as workers, Indian slavTable 3.1. Natchitoches Indian Slave Population, 1722–1776 Year Indian Slaves Pct. of Slaves Pct. of Total Population 1722 8 28.6% 13.8% 1726 3 8.6% 2.2% 1737 14 11.6% 6.0% 1765 30 11.2% 5.1% 1774 41 10.6% — 1776 44 10.5% 4.7% 57 slavery in colonial natchitoches ery along the St. Lawrence differed from the plantation-based chattel slaverythatwasdevelopingatthesametimeontheCaribbeanislandsof Guadeloupe, Martinique, and St. Domingue. Whereas plantation owners in the West Indies defined slaves of African descent as property and condemnedtheiroffspringtoinheritslavestatus,Canadiansmoreoften than not accepted the native practice of captive adoption that integrated theIndiansassubordinatemembersofFrenchfamilies...