St. Augustine in 1565.  The ambitious schemes in France of the great adventurer, John Law, and especially the design of the Mississippi Company (chartered 1717) included an agreement for the importation into Louisiana of six thousand white persons and three thousand Negroes, the Company having secured among other privileges the exclusive right to trade with the colony for twenty-five years and the absolute ownership of all mines in it.  The sufferings of some of the white emigrants from France—­the kidnapping, the revenge, and the chicanery that played so large a part—­all make a story complete in itself.  As for the Negroes, it was definitely stipulated that these should not come from another French colony without the consent of the governor of that colony.  The contract had only begun to be carried out when Law’s bubble burst.  However, in June, 1721, there were 600 Negroes in Louisiana; in 1745 the number had increased to 2020.  The stories connected with these people are as tragic and wildly romantic as are most of the stories in the history of Louisiana.  In fact, this colony from the very first owed not a little of its abandon and its fascination to the mysticism that the Negroes themselves brought from Africa.  In the midst of much that is apocryphal one or two events or episodes stand out with distinctness.  In 1729, Perier, governor at the time, testified with reference to a small company of Negroes who had been sent against the Indians as follows:  “Fifteen Negroes in whose hands we had put weapons, performed prodigies of valor.  If the blacks did not cost so much, and if their labors were not so necessary to the colony, it would be better to turn them into soldiers, and to dismiss those we have, who are so bad and so cowardly that they seem to have been manufactured purposely for this colony[1].”  Not always, however, did the Negroes fight against the Indians.  In 1730 some representatives of the powerful Banbaras had an understanding with the Chickasaws by which the latter were to help them in exterminating all the white people and in setting up an independent republic[2].  They were led by a strong and desperate Negro named Samba.  As a result of this effort for freedom Samba and seven of his companions were broken on the wheel and a woman was hanged.  Already, however, there had been given the suggestion of the possible alliance in the future of the Indian and the Negro.  From the very first also, because of the freedom from restraint of all the elements of population that entered into the life of the colony, there was the beginning of that mixture of the races which was later to tell so vitally on the social life of Louisiana and whose effects are so readily apparent even to-day.

[Footnote 1:  Gayarre:  History of Louisiana, I, 435.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., I, 440.]

5.  The Wake of the Slave-Ship