There is quite an extensive literature about free people of color in 18th-century Louisiana - and of course in St. Domingue (now Haiti). Three titles that would be the best place to start are:

Kimberly Hanger's Bounded Lives / Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803 (Duke Univ Press 1997)

Paul F. LaChance, “The 1809 Immigration of Saint-Domingue Refugees to New Orleans: Reception, Integration and Impact,” Louisiana History 29 (1988): 109-141

and

James H. Dorman ed Creoles of Color of the Gulf South (Univ of Tennessee Press, 1996)

For Haiti a good starting place is Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Univ of Tennessee Press, 1990)

The situation of Louisiana's free people of color figures in portions of my forthcoming A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (Knopf, April 2003)

By 1803 Spanish Louisiana and especially New Orleans already reflected the distinctive three-caste society (White, Free People of Color, Slave) of the contemporary Caribbean. The principal effect of the arrival of 10,000 refugees from St. Domingue by way of Cuba in the winter of 1809-10 (referred in the recent communication) was to offset the influx of a similar number of Anglo-Americans.

During the antebellum period, Louisiana's free people of color were increasingly pressed into the familiar black/white dichotomy of the east coast - a story well treated by Ellen Holmes Pearson, "Imperfect Equality: The Legal Status of Free People of Color in New Orleans, 1803-1860, in Warren M. Billings and Mark F. Fernandez eds A Law Unto Itself: Essays in the New Louisiana Legal History (LSU Press 2001).

There were, of course, free blacks and mulattoes in the eastern colonies/states (very notably in antebellum Baltimore and Maryland) but in general they did not have the societal impact of the more Caribbean pattern evident in New Orleans and southern Louisiana.

Jon Kukla

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I'm very suspicious of references to colour in the history of New Orleans once the Americans got there. By my reading, the people of colour who owned slaves were, to some extent, mulatto refugees from events in Haiti and would not have considered themselves 'Negroes', but to the incoming White American settlers anyone with a touch of African blood was Not White, hence Black or Negro. . . .

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