But the tiger had tasted blood.  Perier’s cruel logic was reactionary.  Since he had used blacks to murder Indians in order to make bad blood between the races, the Indians retaliated by using blacks to murder white men.  In August of that same fateful year, the Chickasaws, who had given asylum to the despoiled Natchez in order to curb the encroachments of the white men, stirred the black slaves to revolt.  We have noted before the prevalence of the Banbara Negroes in the colony.  It was they who planned the rebellion.  Their plan was, after having butchered the whites, to establish a Banbara colony, keeping as slaves for themselves all blacks not of their nation.  The conspiracy was discovered by the hints of a woman in the revolt before it had time to ripen, and the head of the revolt, a powerful black named Samba with eight of his confederates was broken on the wheel, and the woman hanged.[28]

Gov.  Perier’s administration did not lack interest.  The next year, in 1731, we find him still struggling with his old enemies, the Natchez.  His dispatches mention that a crew under one De Coulanges, with Indians and free blacks had been massacred by the Indians.  One dispatch has the greatest interest for us, because of the expression “free blacks"[29] used.  Here is one of the great mysteries of the person of color in Louisiana.  Whence the free black?  We are told explicitly that up to this time all Negroes imported into Louisiana were slaves from Africa, for the West Indian migration did not occur until a half century later.  This dispatch from Gov.  Perier recalls articles in the Black Code of 1724, where explicit directions are given for the disposition of the children of free blacks.  In the regulations of police under the governorship of the Marquis of Vandreuil, 1750, there is an article regulating the attitude of free Negroes and Negresses toward slaves.  Here is the very beginning of that aristocracy of freedom so fiercely and jealously guarded until this day, a free person of color being set as far above his slave fellows as the white man sets himself above the person of color.  Three explanations for this aristocracy seem highly probable:  Some slaves might have been freed by their masters because of valor on the battlefield, others by buying their freedom in terms of money, and not a few slave women by their owners because of their personal attractions.  It makes little difference in this story which of the three or whether all of the three were contributors to the rise of this new class.  It existed as early as 1724, twelve years after the first recorded slave importation.  It was in 1766 that some Acadians, complaining of their treatment to the Governor Ulloa, represented that Negroes were freemen while they were slaves.

Bienville returned to the colony as its governor in 1733, after an absence of eight years, and it is recorded that in 1735, when he reviewed his troops near Mobile while making preparations for an Indian war, he found that his army from New Orleans consisted of five hundred and forty-four white men, excluding the officers, and forty-five Negroes commanded by free blacks.[30] Here we note free black officers of Negro troops in 1735.  If not actually the first regular Negro troops to appear in what is now the United States, they were certainly the first to be commanded by Negro officers.