[22] Ibid., II, 251.

[23] Journal, IX, 87.

[24] Proceedings of the S.P.G., 1723, p. 47.

[25] Ibid., 1737, 50.

[26] Ibid., 1737, p. 41.

[26a] Pennsylvania Magazine of History, XXIV, 467, 469.

[27] Pascoe, “Digest of the Records of the S.P.G.,” p. 38.

[28] Ibid., 39.

[29] Proceedings of the S.P.G., 1736.

[30] Pascoe, “Digest of the Records of the S.P.G.,” 55.

[31] Ibid., 56.

[32] Ibid., 57, and “Special Report of U.S.  Com. of Ed.,” 1871, 362; and “An Account of the Endeavors Used by the S.P.G.,” pp. 6-12.

[33] Pascoe, “Digest of the Records of the S.P.G.,” p. 58.

[34] Ibid., Journal, I, Oct. 20, 1710.

[35] “Special Report of U.S.  Com. of Ed.,” 1871, p. 362.

[36] Pascoe, “Digest, etc.,” p. 59.

[37] Journal, III, Oct. 15, 1714.

[38] Humphreys, “Historical Account of the S.P.G.,” 243.

[39] Pascoe, “Digest, etc.,” p. 65.

[40] Ibid., 66.

[41] Proceedings of the S.P.G., 1737.

[42] Pascoe, “Digest, etc.,” p. 68.

[43] Proceedings of the S.P.G., 1723, p. 50.

[44] Journal, XIX, 452-453.

[45] Ibid., January 21, 1715.

[46] Pascoe, “Digest of the Records of the S.P.G.,” p. 67.

[47] Ibid., 46.

[48] Ibid., 47.

[49] Proceedings of the S.P.G., 1737 and 1738, p. 39.

[50] Ibid., p. 40.

[51] Proceedings of the S.P.G., 1723, 51.

[52] Ibid., 1723, p. 52.

PEOPLE OF COLOR IN LOUISIANA

PART I

The title of a possible discussion of the Negro in Louisiana presents difficulties, for there is no such word as Negro permissible in speaking of this State.  The history of the State is filled with attempts to define, sometimes at the point of the sword, oftenest in civil or criminal courts, the meaning of the word Negro.  By common consent, it came to mean in Louisiana, prior to 1865, slave, and after the war, those whose complexions were noticeably dark.  As Grace King so delightfully puts it, “The pure-blooded African was never called colored, but always Negro.”  The gens de couleur, colored people, were always a class apart, separated from and superior to the Negroes, ennobled were it only by one drop of white blood in their veins.  The caste seems to have existed from the first introduction of slaves.  To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were gens de couleur.  Among themselves, however, there were jealous and fiercely-guarded distinctions:  “griffes, briques, mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, each term meaning one degree’s further transfiguration toward the Caucasian standard of physical perfection."[1]