The settlers of Louisiana had an active trade with the West Indies, and a percentage of the population was composed of West Indians, a people then notorious for their lack of moral restraint.  The traders travelling between Louisiana and these islands were frequently unprincipled ruffians, and their companions on shore were commonly sharpers, desperadoes, pirates, and criminals steeped in vice.  Tiring of the raw life of the sea or sometimes fleeing from justice in northern cities, such men looked to New Orleans for that peculiar type of free and easy civilization which most pleased their nature.  Hence, although some better class families of culture and refinement resided in the city, there was but little in common, socially at least, between it and such centers as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.  As a sea-port looking to those eighteenth century fens of wickedness, the West Indies; as a river port toward which traders, trappers, and planters of the Mississippi Valley looked as a resort for relieving themselves of accumulated thirst and passion; as the home of mixed races, some of which were but a few decades removed from savagery; this city could not avoid its reputation for lax principles, and free-and-easy vice.

Berquin-Duvallon, writing in 1803, gave what he doubtless considered an accurate picture of social conditions during that year, and, although this is a little later than the period covered in our study, still it is hardly likely that conditions were much better twenty years earlier; if anything, they were probably much worse.  Of one famous class of Louisiana women he has this to say:  “The Creoles of Louisiana are blond rather than brunette.  The women of this country who may be included among the number of those whom nature has especially favored, have a skin which without being of extreme whiteness, is still beautiful enough to constitute one of their charms; and features which although not very regular, form an agreeable whole; a very pretty throat; a stature that indicates strength and health; and (a peculiar and distinguishing feature) lively eyes full of expression, as well as a magnificent head of hair."[227]

Such women, as well as the negro and mulatto girls, were an ever present temptation to men whose passion had never known restraint.  Thus Berquin-Duvallon declares that concubinage was far more common than marriage:  “The rarity of marriage must necessarily be attributed to the causes we have already assigned, to that state of celibacy, to that monkish life, the taste for which is extending here more and more among the men.  In witness of what I advance on this matter, one single observation will suffice, as follows:  For the two and one-half years that I have been in this colony not thirty marriages at all notable have occurred in New Orleans and for ten leagues about it.  And in this district there are at least six hundred white girls of virtuous estate, of marriageable age, between fourteen and twenty-five or thirty years.”