Thanks, Patrick and Jon for that lovely little gloss. It will be very
useful.
-- Stephan
on 5/12/02 10:17 AM, Jon Kukla at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Re: the article's statement that
> ' The Code Noir stated that "slaves can have no right to any kind of
> property," but this apparently was ignored.'
> Louisiana's Code Noir is a complex subject - the laws themselves have many
> internal contradictions, on this property matter and many other details, and
> their application varied (after all we're talking about a nearly 3 centuries
> and 3 different national administrations). In short, both elements of the
> sentence - what WAS the law? and how was it applied - were variable in time
> and place and specific situation.
> Coincoin and Cane River are fascinating - and btw the adjacent town of
> Natchitoches is a wonderful place to visit - Melrose Plantation and other
> sites are well preserved - the B&Bs are plentiful and the food superb. Its 4
> hours NW of New Orleans (close the Shreveport) but well worth the trip.
> Jon Kukla
>
> Patrick G Wamsley wrote:
>
>> 2.) Can anyone provide any additional material on free black ownership
>> of slaves.
>>
>> *** Here's an article from today's Washington Post. ***
>>
>> "Up Through Slavery" by Ken Ringle, at F1, F3
>>
>> Marie Therese Coincoin was in bondage for 44 years. Yet she freed her
>> children and became a slave owner herself . . .
>>
>> "It's a very American story," says Elizabeth Shown Mills, the uncredited
>> co-author of her late husband Gary Mills's "The Forgotten People" (LSU
>> Press), the still-definitive and meticulously documented 1977 study of
>> Coincoin and her descendents . . . As University of Maryland historian
>> Ira Berlin notes in his masterful 1998 slavery study "Many Thousands
>> Gone" (Harvard University Press), the differences were not merely from
>> plantation to plantation, but from region to region . . . Slavery in
>> Louisiana, however, was unique . . .
>>
>> Louisiana's Code Noir specified that slave families were to be kept
>> together when possible and all slaves instructed in the Catholic church .
>> . . [A]ny master who fathered children by his own slave was to lose both
>> slave and child . . . [Coincoin] caught the eye of a well born Frenchman
>> . . . Metoyer was so taken with her beauty that he arranged with her
>> owner to live with her for 19 years in defiance of church and political
>> censure. He fathered 10 children by her and ultimately set her free with
>> 68 acres of land . . . In 1796, Coincoin's second son was granted 912
>> acres . . . [even though] he was still a slave at the time. The Code
>> Noir stated that "slaves can have no right to any kind of property," but
>> this apparently was ignored. It would be five more years before his
>> father set him free . . .
>>
>> The 1830 U.S. Census documented 3600 "Negro slaveholders" . . . [but] the
>> vast majority of those "owners" were holding as slaves spouses or
>> relatives they were forbidden by their state's law from formally setting
>> free . . . By 1810 Coincoin's seven sons had accumulated 58 slaves,
>> according to Mills's census research in "The Forgotten People" . . . The
>> only families [in the census area] to own more slaves than Coincoin's
>> sons were the families of Metoyer's white children . . .
>>
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