The African American Experience in Louisiana

Coartación seems to have been assiduously guaranteed by Spanish officials and produced
1,490 manumissions during the Spanish period. This figure includes 1,330 self-purchases and
160 purchases by friends or family members. 26 The fact that slaves were able to take advantage
of the law of coartación as early as 1769 affirms that the restrictions of property ownership
among slaves had not been enforced during French rule. Slaves were able to hire themselves out
and to sell various commodities and save the cash profit. Enslaved people residing within or in
close proximity to a city had an advantage in earning money to purchase their freedom, while
this was more difficult for people in sparsely settled outlying areas. Thomas Marc Fiehrer paints
a picture of slaves at work in the colonial city:
From before dawn the muddy streets of the Vieux Carré in New Orleans teemed with
sweating slaves who fetched water, brought firewood, rolled wine barrels, and stoked the
farriers’ anvils. Squads of slaves who hired themselves out, returning a percentage to
their owners, filled the narrow corridors of the town, moving furniture and building
materials, going to and from daily service in the brickyards, wax factory, powder factory,
cotton mill, sugar refinery, ropewalk, munitions factories, brewery, and dozen or so
aguardiente (cheap rum) distilleries that formed the manufacturing section of the port. 27
The provision for self-purchase was not a humanitarian effort of the part of Spain, but
rather a policy which had the distinct economic benefit of producing a solid working class that
the colonies otherwise lacked. Enslaved people possessing the skill, industry, and thrift to save
the sizable sum of their market value could be expected to become productive free citizens.
They worked as carpenters, joiners, masons, caulkers, shoemakers, seamstresses, laundresses,
retailers, butchers, tavernkeepers, wood dealers, agricultural laborers, managers and overseers,
militiamen, merchant marine officers, and other occupations. 28 Although it was unusual for Free
People of Color to be employed in a professional occupation, a notable example was Santiago
Derom, who purchased his freedom in 1783 and became a physician specializing in throat
ailments. 29 Some free people outside of New Orleans became landowning planters and
slaveholders themselves; a fact that reveals the deep complexities and contradictions of life with
a racially based system of enslavement. Even within the city, it was not unusual for free blacks
to own slaves.
Relationships between white men and enslaved black women have been given much
attention in histories of Louisiana and are often pointed to as the origin of free persons of color.
While the emancipation of the mixed race children and their mothers by white fathers does
account for part of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, and was a more common means of
manumission in outlying areas like the Attakapas and Opelousas frontier where economic
conditions limited self-purchase, it was not the single most important factor in the growth of this
26 Thomas Ingersoll, “Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718-1812,” in The African American
Experience in Louisiana: Part A, ed. Charles Vincent (Lafayette: University of Southwestern, LA, 1999), 161, first
published in William and Mary Quarterly, 48 (1991): 173-200.
27 Fiehrer, in MacDonald et al, 19.
28 Ingersoll, in Vincent; Kimberly S. Hangar, “’Almost All Have Callings’: Free Blacks at Work in Spanish New
Orleans,” in The African American Experience in Louisiana: Part A, ed. Charles Vincent (Lafayette: University of
Southwestern, LA, 1999), first published in Colonial Latin American Historical Review, 3, no. 2 (1994): 141-64;
Everett, 40.
29 Hangar, in Vincent, 208-211.
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