In an edict that the king announced in March 1685, which concerned how order was to be enforced in “the French American islands,” Louis XIV asserted that the purpose of the Code was to provide comfort to French officers living in colonies who were said to “need our authority and our justice…[in order] to regulate the status and condition of the slaves.” As the majority of those living in the colonies were enslaved, the king meant for his white subjects to feel at ease.
In the security regime of the mercantilist period, the colonists’ sense of safety was related to the way their mother country regulated and surveilled enslaved people, who were central to their nation’s ambitions to conquer the globe. Louis XIV’s attempts to “assist” his French officers living in the Americas, in other words, were inextricably bound to the process by which Spanish and European nations enlarged their power at the expense of rival nations through wars, purchases, treaties, and the enforcement of codes.
A remote part of the French Empire, Louisiana, was settled in 1699, though its most famous city—New Orleans—did not come under French control until 1718. The Code Noir was applied to Louisiana six years later, in 1724. Though Louisiana would eventually come under Spanish rule and then French rule again before being purchased by the United States, the territory was still controlled by the French in 1729 when John Mingo, a Black man who was enslaved in South Carolina, escaped to New Orleans. When Mingo arrived, a colonist granted his freedom, and he worked the land that the colonist hired him to break. Before long Mingo had saved enough money to purchase an enslaved woman, Therese, who also lived and worked on the plantation. John Mingo and Therese then moved in together and made a living by farming another colonist’s land, for which they were granted a “salary and a portion of the yield.”
As free Black people, John and Therese Mingo were rare but not completely alone. They joined the small population of free Black servants, drivers, hunters, artisans, and domestics who had accompanied French colonists when they arrived from Europe. The public record does not mention any Mingo children, but if Therese gave birth, her offspring were subject to the 1685 Code Noir. If John and Therese Mingo had a boy, they might have warned him that marrying an enslaved woman would turn his offspring into slaves. If they had a girl, they might have warned her about the perils of marrying an enslaved man. Having children with a white man was also dangerous under the Code, as both mother and child could become property of the New Orleans hospital. Since sexual relations with a white man could endanger her freedom and since marrying someone white was outlawed, it would have been reasonable for John and Therese to encourage their daughter to marry another free Black person.
Informed by the Code, their advice might have sounded something like this:
Don’t marry a slave; if you marry a slave, your life will be full of worry: if your slave husband were to carry a weapon, or even a large stick, you may find him flogged with his back bleeding at your doorstep; you would not be able to invite other slaves to your wedding; your husband could not sell sugar or fruits or vegetables or firewood or herbs at the market, and he could not travel without a written note; if you or your husband were to be violated in any way he could never win a judgment; and if he were to strike his master, his mistress, or their children, his punishment would be death; know that if you were to save your money and purchase your husband’s freedom, he would still have to maintain respect for his former master and his former master’s family; rest assured, your children would be free despite the condition of their father; but for you, free girl, best not marry a slave at all.
In the system of chattel slavery from which Europe benefited, Black people were considered the property of colonists. However, they never stopped imagining ways to be free. Precisely because Black girls, in particular, were devalued, they were most likely to have their freedom purchased by family members. That is, “since girls and women had lower market values, they were more likely to be freed.”
Despite the fact that free Blacks in New Orleans were a relatively large group compared to those living in other American cities, the legacy of the 1685 Code Noir should not be mistaken for a mythical story of progress in which the document traveled out of France and paved the way for freedom purchases, creating space for the emancipation of all Blacks. That mythology covers over the backlash to free Blacks in New Orleans under U.S. rule when the white planter class systematically excluded them from the halls of power. The legacy that I want to resurrect, rather, is the way that this piece of legislation helped colonial officers govern through enforcing and exploiting a society’s racial divisions. What might be reduced to anti-Black sentiment or self-hate, in those imagined words of advice to a free Black girl, accurately reflect codified law that inscribed a racial caste system within New Orleans civil society.
In this way, our imagined advice given to the Mingo daughter also echoes the enduring dialogue about the law and the police that Black parents and their children have had for generations. (I am speaking of that coming-of-age conversation about racial awakening, commonly referred to as “the talk.”) And thus, although one would never be able to prove it definitively, it would likewise be impossible to deny that the control, regulation, vigilance, and surveillance indicative of the 1685 Code Noir are still embedded in the place where the Mingos gained their freedom: New Orleans, the U.S. city that recently possessed the highest rate of incarceration.
1689–1694
THE GERMANTOWN PETITION AGAINST SLAVERY
Christopher J. Lebron
The idea of “allies” often comes up in our current resistance struggles. The #MeToo movement would do better if men were good allies in fighting the sexual predation of women; Black Lives Matter would benefit if whites were good allies in resisting racism and racist institutions; the queer movement would be stronger if cis-normative people were good allies in promoting understanding of gender fluidity and combating both ignorance and damaging public policies that limit access to traditionally gender-normed spaces.
But what makes a good ally? As it is used these days, it means someone who is not being directly harmed by the injustice in question yet who stands with those being harmed, even if it’s against the self-interest of their identity privilege. In many ways, it asks more of the privileged than they are often willing to give but less than what those of us on the other side of that privilege need.
This was not the case in 1683, when thirteen families founded Germantown, a neighborhood in what would become the city of Philadelphia. Quakers were prominent among the founding families and, from this base, established a long-term presence in the city. History celebrates those of the Quaker faith as being reliably antislavery. But there were differences between early Quaker groups, as the 1688 Germantown petition shows.
In addition to being at the historical forefront of abolitionist tracts, the German Quaker petition represented a position that was importantly different from that of English Quakers. Although the English Quakers resisted the presence of slavery, their concern tended to focus on the inconsistency that slavery presented to the ostensible principles of this still-forming new country—a free land for free people. Thus for them, slavery was wrong because it impeded those of African descent from partaking of the bounty of the land as a reward for hard work and from participating in the processes that were collectively shaping the nascent nation.