Historical Background

From wars between European empires, the entanglement of African slavery and Indigenous dispossession, to the abolition of the slave trade and rise of the domestic slave trade, the dynamism of Black culture, continental expansion and connections to the Caribbean, massive historical events and historiographic questions turn on history of slavery and colonialism in Louisiana.¹ And yet, so little is known about how Africans in Louisiana lived, loved, resisted bondage, used the law, organized institutions, and created cultural traditions before 1803. What is known is considered niche or specific to the Gulf Coast’s context or exceptional to the history of the rest of the country when, in fact, it is foundational to how the U.S. South took shape and therefore how the United States came into being. The list of major historical events these documents impact is endless-the Louisiana Purchase, the Haitian Revolution, the Seven Years War, Plessy vs. Ferguson, the founding of the first Black newspaper (The Tribune/L’Tribune), the largest slave revolt on U.S. Soil (the 1811 Revolt), the Battle of New Orleans, and the domestic slave trade to name a few.² While the post-1803 era is a critically important period in American history, the foundation of Black resistance to slavery, African culture in the Americas, and connections between the United States and the Caribbean, as well as West Africa, lie in the eighteenth-century period. Not having access to the century of Black life before 1803 creates a structural flaw in how we tell our history.

In recent years, scholarly research and interest in the history of Black Louisiana has expanded even further. Emily Owens’s work on the law, consent, and the sex trade in New Orleans is shifting the history of slavery and the law in the United States. Stephanie Jones-Rogers’s award-winning study of slaveowning women necessarily focuses on the slave trade through New Orleans as a vector for white women’s economic growth in the early nineteenth century. Jennie Williams’s recent launch of the “Oceans of Kinfolk” database of maritime trade in enslaved people to and through New Orleans is also generating new interest in historical and genealogical communities in the routes of what Ira Berlin described as the Second Middle Passage–the slave trade between the Upper and Lower South before the Civil War.[^3] However, this work often still fails to reach deeper into the eighteenth-century period of Louisiana history, as scholars grapple with language, access, and interpretation issues in regards to these earlier documents.

The eighteenth-century material documenting the everyday lives of Africans in the Americas and the evolution of Black society is immense, but no documentary editions exist, in digital or print form, that offer both access to the full text of colonial manuscript sources and an organization of those documents that centers Black Louisiana life and culture. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy Database provides names, biographical information, and citations to documents, but not the text itself. The Louisiana Historical Quarterly republished the Louisiana Works Progress Administrations abstracts of French Superior Council and Spanish Cabildo records (between 1917 and 1961) in English, French or Spanish, but these are often flawed. As a result, the history of Gulf Coast Black life and resistance during slavery has often focused on the nineteenth century, when the purchase of the region by the newly formed United States shifted documentation to the English language.

During the French and Spanish eras, Africans and people of African descent in Louisiana lived and loved, resisted bondage, used the law, organized institutions, and created cultural traditions. Providing access to that history, with care and intention, will not only add to the historical record a resource that it desperately needs, it will also fundamentally reshape how African American, African, African diaspora, hemispheric American, and United States history is told. What does the history of Black protest in the United States look like, for instance, when told from the perspective of Charlotte, an enslaved runaway, who, when caught, demanded to speak to the governor’s wife.³ Or from the perspective of Etienne La Rue, a Senegambian sailor, who was not only free but traveled back and forth across the Atlantic as a member of his father’s fleet of commercial vessels.⁴ The Louisiana colonial archive offers stories like these and more, stories that have the potential to change and enrich what we think we know about Africans and people of African descent.

Notes

[^3]: Emily A. Owens, Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023); Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019); Jennie K. Williams, “The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation,” Journal of Slavery & Data Preservation 4, no. 3 (July 2023). See also Jamelle Bouie, “Opinion

We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was,” The New York Times, January 28, 2022.