Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, September 30, 1997

Blacks came to parish with first Europeans

by Jim Bradshaw

In the early 1700s, when the coureurs de bois Joseph LeKintreck and Joseph Blanpain formed a partnership to handle trade with the Opelousas Indians, they were accompanied by three black slaves. They could have been the first Africans to arrive in the Opelousas area. By 1796, there were 779 slaves in Opelousas and by 1803 the slave population numbered more than 1,000.

In order to encourage settlement of the newly acquired colony, Spanish Gov. Alejandro O'Reilly issued a land ordinance in 1770. Under the terms of the ordinance, settlers could acquire liberal grants of land, particularly in the frontier areas of the Opelousas, Attakapas, and Natchitoches districts. It was during this time that many of the gens de couleur libres (free people of color) came to the Opelousas district from the New Orleans area.

According to a study by Claude Oubre and Roscoe Leonard published in "Louisiana Tapestry: The Ethnic Weave of St. Landry Parish" " ..... the black experience on (the Opelousas prairies devoted to cattle) differed significantly from that which existed where cultivation rather than grazing dominated. Slaves in this type of economy probably worked as hard as, if not harder than, those on plantations. They nevertheless had considerably more freedom and responsibility. Also, the possibility of being owned by members of their own race or by persons of mixed racial ancestry increased. Although slave ownership by Negroes or free persons of color existed in a limited degree in other slave holding states, this practice was far more prevalent on the Louisiana frontier. Even during the French period free Negroes and free people of color had exercised their citizenship rights to own property, both real and chattel. Their ownership of both forms of property increased as they and their progeny moved to the Opelousas, Attakapas, and Natchitoches frontiers."

The black people coming to Opelousas as a result of the liberal settlement grants joined free black people who had come to the Opelousas district as early as 1740. These people were free because of the Code Noir that was written for Louisiana by John Law in 1724. That code granted to "manumitted slaves the same rights, privileges, and immunities which are enjoyed by freeborn persons." The freedom was extended to their offspring.

During the antebellum period, free people of color were a separate class from slaves and free blacks. Three of the families to arrive during this time were the Lemelles and the Donatos, who were gens de couleur libres, and the Simiens, who were free Negroes. The most influential of these early families were the three Donato brothers, who had extensive holdings in St. Landry Parish and who were themselves slave holders during the antebellum period.

According to Carl Brasseaux and his fellow writers in "Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country," by the middle of the 19^th century, "the Simiens, Lemelles, Donatos and other economically successful families had come to share, to a considerable degree, the culture of the white Creole elite ....

"This drive toward cultural amalgamation began in the earliest days of the Creole communities' development in the prairie region, when most first-generation free blacks voluntarily abandoned their African names .... Creoles of color also became almost universally Roman Catholic and French-speaking, in emulation of their white counterparts. Most slaves in the region ... were Protestant and English-speaking."

Oubre and Leonard report that "the pattern of slave ownership changed rather gradually throughout the Spanish period" at the Opelousas post. "Of the 139 families listed in the 1777 census of the Opelousas district only 39 owned slaves while only 15 of these owned more than four slaves. Seven of the 139 families were either free Negroes or free people of color. By 1788 the Opelousas post numbered 1,983 individuals: 1,194 whites; 55 free Negroes and free people of color; and 734 slaves. By 1796 the population of the district was 2,124. There were 20 free families of mixed racial ancestry and 9 free Negro families. These 29 families, consisting of 83 individuals, owned 42 of the 779 slaves in the district."

The Lemelle family traces its ancestry to a free mulatto woman named Marie-Jeanne Lemelle, a native of St. Charles Parish on the German Coast who came to the Opelousas district in the early 1770s as the wife of Francois Lemelle. She acquired more than 800 acres of land along Bayou Courtableau in the Prairie Lemelle area southeast of Washington. She and her five sons and 15 slaves gradually cleared the land and made it productive.

Another matriarch was Marie Simien, a free black woman who first appears in the records of the Opelousas district in 1796. She had four sons at the time, aged 1 to 15. Old records show that she eventually owned property in at least four different townships, including nearly 1,500 acres at Bellevue (between Opelousas and Church Point), some 6,350 acres at Bayou des Cannes (west of Eunice), and undefined property at Prairie Lemelle. She also owned nine slaves, 40 horses and mules, and 300 head of cattle. By 1818, she had also established her son George on another 800 acres at Bayou Mallet (between Opelousas and Eunice).

The Donato family consisted of the children of white militia officer Donato Bello and Marie Jeanne Talliaferro, a free mulatto woman: Marie Celeste, Victoria, and Martin Donato Bello. Marie Celeste married Baptiste Meullion and became the matriarch of the Meullion clan that held considerable property at Bayou Mallet. Victoria married Jean Baptiste Guillory and became the matriarch of the dominant family of the Bois Mallet area.. Martin, who later dropped Bello from his name and called himself Martin Donatto, became the patriarch of the entire community of free people of color on the Opelousas frontier. He married Marie Duchesne, and they would own substantial land at Bois Mallet and a tract, referred to as his "plantation and residence" at Leonville. At the time of his death in 1848, he owned 88 slaves.

Oubre and Leonard tell us, "The master/slave relationship, as well as the black/white relationship, remained relatively fluid during the colonial period and the first decade of the American period, largely because most slave holders owned relatively few slaves. As late as 1817 there were only 2,507 slaves in the entire district. In addition, as late as 1817, wealth and property could move a person into a higher class in the eyes of his neighbors."

But times changed. As the national debate over slavery began to become more heated, so also did relations between the races here and elsewhere began to harden, until, as Brasseaux reports, racial tensions were strained to the breaking point in the years preceding the Civil War.

"Crystallizing in the late 1850s, white hostility to local free blacks (was seen in) the form of legal and extralegal efforts to eradicate the free black population--by intimidation if possible, violence if necessary," Oubre and Leonard report. "Responding to the escalating threat, many free blacks fled the prairies for Latin America."

As early as 1832, members of the Donato family were creating cultural and economic ties with Veracruz, Mexico. They were the vanguard of a score of families that would leave St. Landry to farm corn, quite successfully, in the Veracruz region. The exodus grew from a trickle to a stream as white efforts to remove the gens de couleur libres from the prairies intensified.

"The initial attempt to eradicate free Negroes from south Louisiana had consisted of the peaceful efforts of the Louisiana Colonization Society to 'repatriate' free persons of color to their African 'fatherland,"' Brasseaux reports. "At the height of the society's repatriation activities ... however, few free blacks now firmly established second- and third-generation Louisianians for the most part -- expressed any interest in leaving ... despite the rising racial tensions in the prairie parishes during the 1840s and 1850s. ...

"The resistance to Liberian colonization among the state's free blacks ... caused Louisiana's advocates of black colonization to laud Mexico's virtues as a potential site .... The vanguard of this colony consisted of an undetermined number of St. Landry Parish expatriates, led by members of the Donato family, who reportedly carried with them 'a considerable fortune and technical equipment which promised to make their experiment a success."

"Settling along the Popolopan River, these colonists proved so successful at growing Indian corn that they soon began to invite relatives to join them in a country where, they claimed, there was less racial animosity," according to the Brasseaux account. "Few Louisiana relatives ... heeded this call to migrate until 1859, when numerous armed bands of vigilantes began their reign of terror in southwest Louisiana.

"... Many ... free blacks of the Attakapas and Opelousas districts were (then) forced to abandon their homes ... most of them ... (making) their way to (New Orleans). Among the first emigrants to reach the city were one hundred exiles from St. Landry Parish ..."

Some of these exiles, lured by promises of political freedom and free transportation by the Haitian consul in New Orleans, would move to that island republic for a short while. At least 150 free blacks from St. Landry Parish traveled there in one expedition. Another carried 195 exiles from St. Landry and East Baton Rouge parishes. A few of these stayed in Haiti. Most came back to Louisiana, but they still had problems.

"Though disillusioned by the Haitian experiment, the emigrants were unable to return to their home parishes because of the continued vigilante activity," according to "Creoles of Color." At least 80 gens de couleur libres stayed in Haiti until July 1870, when they returned to New Orleans, and eventually came back to St. Landry. On Aug. 6, 1870, the editor of the Opelousas Journal reported that these exiles, though "in impoverished circumstances," had begun to reestablish themselves in the home parish. Others continued their travels, moving to the colony at Veracruz.

The emancipation of slaves at the time of the Civil War did not erase class lines among the black community in south Louisiana. In some ways, it reinforced those distinctions.

Brasseaux reports: "Compounding the devastating economic impact of the war was the sudden dissolution of the legal and social systems underpinning the privileged social position of the free blacks .... The emancipation of Negro slaves eradicated the legal distinctions that helped to set the gens de couleur libres apart. Local black codes, such as the one adopted, but only briefly enforced, in Opelousas in July 1865, treated blacks as if they were a monolithic group ....

"Most of the former members of the free black community rebelled against this loss of status .... To distinguish themselves from their social inferiors, the former free blacks began to identify themselves locally as Creoles, their former self-identification - gens de couleur libres - no longer being a valid designation for their ethnic identify and special social status. Creole enclaves in the prairie parishes - at Palmetto, Leonville, Opelousas, Lawtell, Grand Prairie, Plaisance, Washington, Frilot Cove (Plaisance area), Rideau (Bayou Petite Prairie) and Mallet in St. Landry Parish ... used every means possible to preserve the social distance between themselves and their black neighbors."

These Creoles formed the backbone of the Republican Party in south Louisiana during the Reconstruction era, a time when white and black struggles for political domination often became rancorous, sometimes violent. In Opelousas, in September 1868, between 25 and 50 blacks were victims of a riot cited as one of the worst examples of Reconstruction violence in south Louisiana.