Free persons of color

The term free people of color (French: gens de couleur libres), in the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, at first specifically referred to persons of mixed African and European descent who were not enslaved. The term was especially used in the French colonies, including La Louisiane and settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Guadeloupe, and Martinique. Freed African slaves were included in the term affranchis, but historically they were considered as distinct from the free people of color. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America.

In the Thirteen Colonies settled by the British, and later in the United States, the term free negro was often used to cover the same class of people – those who were legally free and visibly of ethnic African descent. It included persons of mixed race as well as freed African slaves.

Free people of color played an important role in the history of New Orleans and the southern area of La Louisiane, both when the area was controlled by the French and Spanish, and after acquisition by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. They were also important in forming an educated class of people of color in French colonies of the Caribbean islands.

When French settlers and traders first arrived in these colonies, the men frequently took Native American women as their concubines or common-law wives (see Marriage 'à la façon du pays'). When African slaves were imported to the colony, the colonists took African women as concubines or wives. In the period of French and Spanish rule, men tended to marry later after becoming financially established. As the German Coast colony grew and more white women arrived from France and Germany, some French men or ethnic French Creoles still took mixed-race women as mistresses, known as placées, before they officially married. The free people of color developed formal arrangements for placées, which the young women's mothers negotiated. Under the system of plaçage, often the mothers negotiated a kind of dowry or property transfer to their daughters, including freedom for them and their children, and education for the children. The French Creole men often paid for education of their "natural" (illegitimate) mixed-race children from these relationships, especially if they were sons, generally sending them to France to be educated.

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