Cordovell was representative of the advance of the people of mixed blood in the South.  The general status of these people was better in Louisiana than anywhere else in the country, North or South; at the same time their situation was such as to call for special consideration.  In Louisiana the “F.M.C.” (Free Man of Color) formed a distinct and anomalous class in society.[1] As a free man he had certain rights, and sometimes his property holdings were very large.[2] In fact, in New Orleans a few years before the Civil War not less than one-fifth of the taxable property was in the hands of free people of color.  At the same time the lot of these people was one of endless humiliation.  Among some of them irregular household establishments were regularly maintained by white men, and there were held the “quadroon balls” which in course of time gave the city a distinct notoriety.  Above the people of this group, however, was a genuine aristocracy of free people of color who had a long tradition of freedom, being descended from the early colonists, and whose family life was most exemplary.  In general they lived to themselves.  In fact, it was difficult for them to do otherwise.  They were often compelled to have papers filled out by white guardians, and they were not allowed to be visited by slaves or to have companionship with them, even when attending church or walking along the roads.  Sometimes free colored men owned their women and children in order that the latter might escape the invidious law against Negroes recently emancipated; or the situation was sometimes turned around, as in Norfolk, Va., where several women owned their husbands.  When the name of a free man of color had to appear on any formal document—­a deed of conveyance, a marriage-license, a certificate of birth or death, or even in a newspaper report—­the initials F.M.C. had to be appended.  In Louisiana these people petitioned in vain for the suffrage, and at the outbreak of the Civil War organized and splendidly equipped for the Confederacy two battalions of five hundred men.  For these they chose two distinguished white commanders, and the governor accepted their services, only to have to inform them later that the Confederacy objected to the enrolling of Negro soldiers.  In Charleston thirty-seven men in a remarkable petition also formally offered their services to the Confederacy.[3] What most readily found illustration in New Orleans or Charleston was also true to some extent of other centers of free people of color such as Mobile and Baltimore.  In general the F.M.C.’s were industrious and they almost monopolized one or two avenues of employment; but as a group they had not yet learned to place themselves upon the broad basis of racial aspiration.

[Footnote 1:  See “The F.M.C.’s of Louisiana,” by P.F. de Gournay, Lippincott’s Magazine, April, 1894; and “Black Masters,” by Calvin Dill Wilson, North American Review, November, 1905.]

[Footnote 2:  See Stone:  “The Negro in the South,” in The South in the Building of the Nation, X, 180.]