The American soldiers on the field aggregated 3,600, among whom were 430 colored. The first battalion of men of color was commanded by Major Lacoste, a wealthy white planter. In reviewing the troops, Gen. Jackson was so well pleased with Major Lacoste's battalion, that he deemed it prudent to levy a new battalion of the same description. Jean Baptiste Savary, a colored man who had fled from Santo Domingo during the struggle there, undertook, therefore, to form a battalion of his countrymen. Savary obtained the rank of captain, and was remarkably successful.[70] The new battalion was put under the command of Major Jean Daquin, also a native of Santo Domingo. Whether or not Major Daquin was a white man as Gayarré tells us, or a quadroon as other writers assert, is a disputed question.[71]
But not only was this regiment of free men of color to have all the honor of the struggle. The colored men were enlisted in more ways than one. Slaves were used in throwing up the famous entrenchments. The idea of a fortification of cotton bales, which we are told practically saved the city, was that of a colored man, a slave from Africa, who had seen the same thing done in his native country. It was the cotton breastworks that nonplussed the British. Colored men, free and slave, were used to reconnoitre, and the pirate Lafitte, true to his word, to come to the aid of Louisiana should she ever need assistance, brought in with his Baratarians a mixed horde of desperate fighters, white and black.
On the British side was a company composed of colored men, and historians like to tell of their cowardice compared with the colored men of the American side.[72] Evidently a scarlet coat does not well fit a colored skin. To the eternal credit of the State troops composed of the men of color, not one act of desertion or cowardice is recorded against them. There was a most lamentable exhibition of panic on the right bank of the river by the American troops, but the battalion of the men of color was not there. They were always in the front of the attack.[73]
In the celebration of the victory which followed in the great public square, the Place d'Armes, now Jackson Square, where a statue of the commander rears itself in the center, the colored troops came in for their share of glory.[74] The train which brought in the four hundred wounded prisoners was met by the colored women, the famous nurses of New Orleans, who have in every war from the Revolutionary until the Spanish-American held the reputation of being some of the best nurses in the world.
The men of color were apparently not content with winning the victory; they must furnish material for dissension for many days afterwards. When the British army withdrew from Louisiana on January 27, 1815, they carried away with them 199 slaves, whom they had acquired by the very easy method of taking them willy-nilly. The matter of having these bondmen restored to their original owners, of convincing the British that the Americans did not see the joke of the abduction caused one of the most acrimonious discussions in the history of the State. The treaty between the two countries, England and America, was distorted by both sides to read anything they wished. The English took a high stand of altruism, of a desire to free the oppressed; the Louisianians took as high a stand of wishing to grow old with their own slaves. It was an amusing incident which the slaves watched with interest. In the end the colored men were restored, and the interpretation of the treaty ceased.[75]
Following the War of 1812 the free people of color occupied a peculiar position in Louisiana, especially in New Orleans. There were distinct grades of society. The caste system was almost as strong as that of India. Free people of color from other states poured into Louisiana in a steady stream. It was a haven of refuge. Those were indeed halcyon times both for the Creole and the American, who found in the rapidly growing city a commercial El Dorado. For the people of color it was indeed a time of growth and acquisition of wealth. Three famous streets in New Orleans bear testimony to the importance of the colored people in the life of the city. Congo Square, one of the great open squares in the old Creole quarter, was named for the slaves who used to congregate in its limits and dance the weird dances to the tunes of blood-stirring minor strains. Those who know the weird liet-motif of Coleridge-Taylor's Bamboula dance have heard the tune of the Congo dance, which every child in New Orleans could sing. Gottschalk's Danse des Nègres is almost forgotten by this generation but in it he recorded the music of the West Indians. Camp Street, to-day one of the principal business streets in the city, was so called because it ran back of the old Campo de Negros.[76] Julia Street, which runs along the front of the so-called New Basin, a canal of great commercial importance, connecting, as it does, the city with Lake Pontchartrain, and consequently, the greater gulf trade, was named for one Julia, a free woman of color, who owned land along the banks.[77] What Julia's cognomen was, where she came from, and whence she obtained the valuable property are hidden in the silent grave in which time encloses mere mortals. Somewhere in the records of the city it is recorded that one Julia, a F. W. C. (free woman of color), owned this land.
The minor distinctions of complexion and race so fiercely adhered to by the Creoles of the old regime were at their height at this time. The glory and shame of the city were her quadroons and octoroons, apparently constituting two aristocratic circles of society,[78] the one as elegant as the other, the complexions the same, the men the same, the women different in race, but not in color, nor in dress, nor in jewels. Writers on fire with the romance of this continental city love to speak of the splendors of the French Opera House, the first place in the country where grand opera was heard, and tell of the tiers of beautiful women with their jewels and airs and graces. Above the orchestra circle were four tiers, the first filled with the beautiful dames of the city; the second filled with a second array of beautiful women, attired like those of the first, with no apparent difference; yet these were the octoroons and quadroons, whose beauty and wealth were all the passports needed. The third was for the hoi polloi of the white race, and the fourth for the people of color whose color was more evident. It was a veritable sandwich of races.
With the slaves, especially those outside of New Orleans, the situation was different. The cruelty of the slave owners in the State was proverbial. To be "sent down the Mississippi" became a by-word of horror, a bogie with which slave-holders all over the South threatened their incorrigible slaves. The slave markets, the tortures of the old plantations, even those in the city, which Cable has immortalized, help to fill the pages of romance, which must be cruel as well as beautiful.
The reaction against the Negro was then well on its way in Louisiana and evidences of it soon appeared in New Orleans where their condition for some time yet differed much from that of the blacks in the parishes. Moved by the fear of a rising class of mixed breeds resulting from miscegenation, the whites endeavored to diminish their power by restraining the free people of color from exercising influence over the slaves, who were becoming insurrectionary as in the case of those of the parish of St. John the Baptist in 1811. The State had in 1807 and 1808 made additional provisions for the regulation of the coming of free Negroes into Louisiana, but when there came reports of the risings of the blacks in various places in the Seaboard States, and of David Walker's appeal to Negroes to take up arms against their masters, it was deemed wise to prohibit the immigration of free persons into that Commonwealth. In 1830 it was provided that whoever should write, print, publish or distribute anything having the tendency to produce discontent among the slaves, should on conviction thereof be imprisoned at hard labor for life or suffer death at the discretion of the court. It was further provided that whoever used any language or became instrumental in bringing into the State any paper, book or pamphlet inducing discontent should suffer practically the same penalty. Any person who should teach or permit or cause to be taught, any slave to read or write should be imprisoned not less than one month nor more than twelve.[80]
Under the revised Black Code of Louisiana special care was taken to prevent free Negroes from coming in contact with bondmen. Free persons of color were restricted from obtaining licenses to sell spirituous liquors, because of the fear that intoxicants distributed by this class might excite the Negroes to revolt. The law providing that there should be at least one white person to every thirty slaves on a plantation was re-enacted so as to strengthen the measure, the police system for the control of Negroes was reorganized to make it more effective, and slaves although unable to own property were further restricted in buying and selling. Those taken by masters beyond the limits of the State were on their return to be treated as free Negroes. But it was later provided on the occasion of the institution of proceedings for freedom by a slave who had been carried to the Northwest Territory[81] that "no slave shall be entitled to his or her freedom under the pretense that he or she has been, with or without the consent of his or her owner, in a country where slavery does not exist or in any of the States where slavery is prohibited."[82]