New Orleans's freemen of color: a forgotten generation of cabinetmakers rediscovered

Magazine Antiques, May, 2007 by Margo Preston Moscou

On the second floor of the Louisiana State Museum, just off the famed Jackson Square in New Orleans's French Quarter, stands a simple chest of drawers--a semainier--beautifully handcrafted of yellow pine with mahogany veneer (Fig. 1). (1) It was constructed in New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century and represents a form that was not commonly made there in the antebellum period. A trained eye will immediately note the skilled craftsmanship and Biedermeier influence it exhibits.

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But the real story of this particular piece of furniture is not its characteristics, but rather the craftsman who made it--Dutreuil Barjon Jr., a "free man of color." Over the years historians interested in the material culture of the lower Mississippi River valley have catalogued the region's furniture extensively, yet few efforts have focused on the products of New Orleans and its environs, with the exception of Stephen Harrison's definitive 1997 thesis on the New Orleans furniture trade. (2) And even fewer include the work of the little known but highly influential group of freemen of color who worked as cabinetmakers in New Orleans before the Civil War.

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To begin exploring this lost generation requires first shedding the conception that the racial divisions and institutional slavery of the day were simple issues of black and white. In some regions of the American South, albeit very few, free people of color lived in an economic, cultural, and social realm somewhere between the brutality of slavery and a semblance of daily freedom. "There is no state in the Union," Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935), a Creole descendant, wrote of Louisiana, "where the man of color has ... made so much progress, been of such historical importance and yet about who so comparatively little is known." (3)

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The beginnings of that progress are located in the city's colonial roots. In 1717 Philippe, duc d'Orleans (1674-1723), regent for France's young Louis XV (r. 1715-1774), turned to John Law (1671-1721), a Scottish financier, and his Compagnie d'Occident and charged him with the task of making Louisiana profitable. Law was also ordered to colonize Louisiana by transporting six thousand whites and three thousand blacks there. (4) Law's business scheme failed miserably, but it did plant the seeds--white settlers, African slaves, and a small group of free blacks--for what was to become one of the most vibrant places in the new world. (5) New Orleans was officially founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne (1680-1767), sieur de Bienville, but when the first census of Louisiana was taken on January 1, 1726, fewer than three thousand inhabitants were recorded. (6) Undoubtedly, some early settlers had returned to Europe and many had died. (7)

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During the next thirty years, the term gens de couleur libres, or free people of color, was typically used to denote people who arrived in New Orleans from the Caribbean already free or who were born into freedom as the second generation of free blacks. (8) From the outset free people of color were detached from their ancestors' experiences of slavery and African identity. The community thrived in New Orleans. Free blacks were assimilated into the dominant French culture; many were slave owners themselves; many were well-educated business owners and professionals; and many were craftsmen. (9) As early as 1724, Bienville published the Code Noir, or Black Code, which regulated the behavior of both slaves and slave owners, (10) and influenced the behavior and treatment of free blacks, with manumitted slaves enjoying the same rights given to those born free:

It is our pleasure that their merit in having acquired their freedom
shall produce in their favor, not only with regard to their persons, but
also to their property, the same effects that our other subjects derive
from the happy circumstance of their having been born free. (11)

By the 1740s, New Orleans was a complex, multifaceted society. Nonwhites outnumbered whites, and the middle stratum of free blacks was poised to become the artisans and tradesmen on whom New Orleans would come to depend. (12) In 1763, after the Seven Years' War, colonial Louisiana was transferred to Spain by the Treaty of Paris. Initially free people of color and slaves feared Spanish rule, but this fear proved unfounded. Under the Spanish, free blacks were given even more security and rights than they had previously enjoyed.

Spain, like France, was unsuccessful in making Louisiana profitable, but it did actively revive the slave trade. After twenty years of Spanish control, Louisiana's population in 1788 had grown from just over eight thousand to more than forty thousand, of which 19,737 were free persons (white and black) and 20,673 were slaves. (13) After the region briefly returned to French control in 1802, Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to the young United States in 1803. By this point, it was estimated that as much as 30 percent of the city of New Orleans was gens de couleur libres, and others continued to immigrate there. In 1809 nearly three thousand highly skilled free black refugees from the slave revolts in Haiti arrived in New Orleans by way of Cuba, and over the next thirty years the free black population grew steadily. (14)