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Most heavily concentrated in New Orleans, many worked as artisans and professionals.

One such place was Louisiana.ĭuring the antebellum period, Louisiana's free people of color enjoyed a relatively high level of acceptance and prosperity, a legacy of the state's French and Spanish founders, but as the American Civil War approached, white society increasingly turned against them. If most Americans today are aware that some black men and women, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, were able to escape from southern plantations and live in freedom in the North, few realize that free African Americans also lived in and occasionally prospered in places where slavery was so deeply rooted that it took a war to abolish it. Many histories of America have failed to tell the story of these resilient and fascinating people.

At the nexus of slavery and freedom were free people of color, the tens of thousands of people of African descent who overcame incredible odds and lived free in the most unlikely of places-the slave societies of the South, the Caribbean, and Latin America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And yet while we celebrate freedom as the founding tenet of our nation, the great paradox of America is the long existence and influence of slavery. Those who were successful in their search have come to be seen as quintessential American heroes. Legacies: Louisiana's 'Creoles of Color' after the Civil Warįor more than five hundred years, America has been a land where people have sought, if not always found, freedom. Golden Age: The Early Antebellum Era, 1812-1830 Transition: Louisiana's Territorial Period, 1803-1812

Contexts: Free People of Color in the Americas, 1492-1830Įarly Days: Colonial Louisiana, 1718-1803

All civil war black regiments all civil war black navy