Negro slavery in Louisiana seems to have been early influenced by the policy of the Spanish colonies.  De las Casas, an apostle to the Indians, exclaimed against the slavery of the Indians and finding his efforts of no avail proposed to Charles V in 1517 the slavery of the Africans as a substitute.[2] The Spaniards refused at first to import slaves from Africa, but later agreed to the proposition and employed other nations to traffic in them.[3] Louisiana learned from the Spanish colonies her lessons of this traffic, took over certain parts of the slave regulations and imported bondmen from the Spanish West Indies.  Others brought thither were Congo, Banbara, Yaloff, and Mandingo slaves.[4]

People of color were introduced into Louisiana early in the eighteenth century.  In 1708, according to the historian, Gayarre, the little colony of Louisiana, at the point on the Gulf of Mexico now known as Biloxi, in the present State of Mississippi, had been in existence nine years.  In 1708, the population of the colony did not exceed 279 persons.  The land about this region is particularly sterile, and the colonists were little disposed to undertake the laborious task of tilling the soil.  Indian slavery was attempted but found unprofitable and exceedingly precarious.  So Bienville, lacking the sympathy of De las Casas for the Indians, wrote his government to obtain the authorization of exchanging Negroes for Indians with the French West Indian islands.  “We shall give,” he said, “three Indians for two Negroes.  The Indians, when in the islands, will not be able to run away, the country being unknown to them, and the Negroes will not dare to become fugitives in Louisiana, because the Indians would kill them."[5]

Bienville’s suggestion seems not to have met with a very favorable reception.  Yet, in 1712, the King of France granted to Anthony Crozat the exclusive privilege for fifteen years of trading in all that immense territory which, with its undefined limits, France claimed as Louisiana.  Among other privileges granted Crozat were those of sending, once a year, a ship to Africa for Negroes.[6] When the first came, is not known, but in 1713 twenty of these Negro slaves from Africa are recorded in the census of the little colony on the Mississippi.[7]

In 1717 John Law flashed meteor-wise across the world with his huge scheme to finance France out of difficulty with his Mississippi Bubble.  Among other considerations mentioned in the charter for twenty-five years, which he obtained from the gullible French government, was the stipulation that before the expiration of the charter, he must transport to Louisiana six thousand white persons, and three thousand Negroes, not to be brought from another French colony.  These slaves, so said the charter, were to be sold to those inhabitants who had been two years in the colony for one half cash and the balance on one year’s credit.  The new inhabitants had one or two years’ credit