An enfranchised slave shall enjoy the same rights, privileges, and immunities as if he had been born free.  The King desires that he may merit his acquired liberty, and that it may confer upon him, as well in his person as estate, the same effects which the blessing of natural liberty confers upon French subjects.

* * * * *

The last article, and all that related to enfranchisement, are notable for their political effect upon the colony.  The free mulattoes interpreted the liberal clauses of the Code into an extension of the rights of citizenship to them, as the natural inference from their freed condition.  The lust of masters and the defencelessness of the slave-woman sowed thickly another retribution in the fated soil.

The custom of enfranchising children of mixed blood, and sometimes their mothers, commenced in the earliest times of the French colonies, when the labor of engages was more valuable than that of slaves, and the latter were objects of buccaneering license as much as of profit.  The colonist could not bear to see his offspring inventoried as chattels.  In this matter the nations of the South of Europe appear to atone for acts of passion by after-thoughts of humanity.  The free descendants of mulattoes who were enfranchised by French masters in Louisiana, and who form a respectable and flourishing class in that State, now stand beneath the American flag at the call of General Butler.  But the Anglo-American alone seems willing to originate a chattel and to keep him so.  His passion will descend as low for gratification as a Frenchman’s or a Spaniard’s, but his heart will not afterwards mount as high.

Acts of enfranchisement required at first the sanction of the Government, until in 1682 the three sovereign courts of St. Christophe, Martinique, and Guadeloupe offered the project of a law which favored enfranchisements; it led to the articles upon that subject in the Edict of 1685, quoted above, which sought at once to restrain the license of masters and to afford them a legal way to be humane and just.[Q]

[Footnote Q:  Other motives became influential as soon as the slaves discovered their advantages.  A master in want of money would offer emancipation for a certain sum; the slave would employ every means, even the most illicit, to raise the amount upon which his or her freedom depended.  A female slave would demand emancipation for herself or for some relative as her price for yielding to a master; attractive negresses wielded a great deal of power in this way.  A great evil arose from testamentary acts of enfranchisement, or equivalent promises; for the slave in question would sometimes poison his master to hasten the day of liberty.  On the other hand, many masters of the nobler kind emancipated their slaves as a reward for services:  the rearing of six living children, thirty years of field or domestic labor without marooning, industry, economy, attachment, the discovery of a poisoning scheme or of an emeute, saving the life of a white person with great risk,—­all these were occasional reasons for enfranchisement.]