Gov.  Perier succeeded Bienville as Governor of Louisiana.  His task was not a light one; the colony staggered under “terror of attack from the Indians, sudden alarms, false hopes, anxious suspense, militia levies, colonial paper, instead of good money, industrial stagnation, the care of homeless refugees, and worst of all, the restiveness of the slaves.  The bad effects of slave-holding began to show themselves.”  Many of the slaves had been taken in war, and were fierce and implacable.  Some were of that fiercest of African tribes, the Banbaras.  A friendliness, born of common hatred and despair, began to show itself between the colored people and the fierce Choctaw Indians surrounding the colony, when Gov.  Perier planned a master-stroke of diplomacy.  Just above New Orleans lived a small tribe of Indians, the Chouchas, who, not particularly harmful in themselves, had succeeded in inspiring the nervous inhabitants of the city with abject fear.  Perier armed a band of slaves in 1729 and sent them to the Chouchas with instructions to exterminate the tribe.  They did their work with an ease and dispatch that should have been a warning to their white masters.  In reporting the success of his plan Perier said:  “The Negroes executed their mission with as much promptitude as secrecy.  This lesson taught them by our Negroes, kept in check all the nations higher up the river."[24] Thus, by one stroke the wily Governor had intimidated the tribes of Indians, allayed the nervous fears of New Orleans, and effected a state of hostility between the Indians and the Africans, who were beginning to be entirely too friendly with each other.  Then Perier used the slaves to make the entrenchments about the city.  Thus we have the first instance of the arming of the Negro in Louisiana for the defense of the colony.  On the 15th of January, 1730, Gov.  Perier sent a boat containing twenty white men and six Africans to carry ammunition to the Illinois settlement up the Mississippi river whence tales of massacre and cruelty by the Indians filtered down.[25]

The arming of the slaves in defense of the whites gave impetus to the struggle for their own freedom.  In the massacre of the French by the Natchez, at the village of that name, over three hundred women and slaves were kept as prisoners, and in January of the same year which witnessed the massacre of the Chouchas, the French surprised the Natchez Indians with the intention of recovering their women and slaves, and avenging the death of their comrades.  Some of the Africans who had been promised their freedom if they allied themselves with the Natchez Indians, fought against their erstwhile masters, others were loyal, and helped the French.  The battle became an issue, as it were, between the slaves.  Over one hundred of them were recovered from the Indians.[26]

The first tribute we have paid to the black man as a soldier in Louisiana was paid by Gov.  Perier in this war in his dispatch to the French government.  “Fifteen negroes,” he wrote, “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."[27]