Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans

1 Indian Women, French Women, and the Regulation of Sex

In March 1745, a dying Charles Egron dit Lamothe appeared before the New Orleans curé, Father Dagobert, to make a will. Born in Quebec in 1677, Egron had arrived in Louisiana with founder Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d’Iberville, in 1700 and had lived in various French settlements along the Gulf Coast, eventually settling in Mobile. Like many of his fellow male colonists—whether from Canada or France—Egron established a household with an Indian woman, Françoise, who may have at one point been his slave; unlike most others, however, Egron married Françoise and it was to her and their two children that he sought to leave his property . Consisting of a habitation in Mobile, some cattle, and a few slaves, Egron’s property was to be divided, with one half going to Françoise, “his wife and Legitimate spouse,” and the other to Marie Magdeleine and Charles, the children “from his legitimate marriage.” In confirming the will, the Superior Council followed metropolitan practice by assigning the minor Charles a tutor to look after his interests. But it also followed local practice by appointing a curator for Françoise, who as an Indian woman was deemed incompetent to manage her own interests.1 The seemingly intimate decisions that men like Egron made—with whom to establish a household, to marry, and to have children and to whom to leave one’s property—were in fact matters of great interest to colonial and metropolitan authorities . Authorities struggled, as the French began to colonize Louisiana in the early eighteenth century, to create a settler colony that would anchor French sovereignty over a vast area. They needed to establish small but stable settlements that were clearly under French control, a difficult endeavor when immigration was limited , often entailing unwilling colonists who sought to return to France as soon as possible and others who preferred to roam the colony seeking profits from furs rather than settling and engaging in sustainable agriculture. As the authorities saw it, the solution to their problems was marriage. It was only through the reproduction of c h a p t e r o n e IndianWomen,FrenchWomen, andtheRegulationofSex 18 Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans French social institutions, particularly marriage and family, that the colony could be established on a secure enough footing to become economically self-sufficient and no longer fiscally burdensome to the metropole. As Commissaire Ordonnateur Jean-Baptiste Martin d’Artaguiette wrote in 1710 to Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain, the minister of the marine, “There are here . . . young men and soldiers who are in a position to undertake farms; it is necessary for them to have wives. I know only this one way to settle them.”2 Although secular and religious authorities alike agreed that marriage—as a relationship legitimated by church and state—was central to family, household, and social formation, and thus to colonial development, they disagreed about who would make suitable brides for French male colonists. The nature and contours of this disagreement can be seen most clearly in a decade-long debate between Henri Roulleaux de La Vente, the curé at Mobile, and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, governor of Louisiana for much of the colony’s French period.3 Given the lack of French women in the colony and his aversion to nonmarital relationships between French men and Indian women, La Vente engaged in a campaign to legitimate these relationships. In doing so, he was advocating an older official policy of Frenchification in New France that had been sanctioned at the highest administrative levels, a policy that sought to Christianize and “civilize” native women, who would then marry French men, thus colonizing the vast regions of French North America with a limited number of metropolitan French bodies. Bienville and other secular colonial administrators, however, saw Indian-French relationships turning into marriages as itself detrimental to colonial development. Although they were not unconcerned with “concubinage among the coureurs de bois and soldiers ” with Indian women, these secular authorities believed that only marriage to French women would facilitate their goals.4 As they argued, La Vente, Bienville, and others characterized Indian women, French men, and the influence of marriage in ways that bolstered their own points of view. While La Vente perceived differences between Indians and French as fluid and mutable, Bienville saw Indians as fixed in their ways, even as he feared that French men...