"Making Race: The Role of Free Blacks in the Development of New Orleans' Three-Caste Society, 1791-1812" excavates the ways that free people of African descent in New Orleans built an autonomous identity as a third "race" in what would become a unique racial caste system in the United States. I argue that in the time period I study, which encompasses not only the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but also the rise of plantation slavery and the arrival of over twelve thousand refugees from the revolution-torn French West Indies, New Orleans's free blacks took advantage of political, cultural and legal uncertainty to protect and gain privileges denied to free blacks elsewhere in the South. The dissertation is organized around three sites in which free blacks forged and articulated a distinct collective identity: the courtroom, the ballroom, and the militia. This focus on specific spaces of racial contestation allows me to trace the multivalent development of racial identity. "Making Race" brings together the special dynamism of the Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution with the ability of individuals to act within structures of power to shape their surroundings. I show that changing political regimes (in the time period I study New Orleans was ruled by the Spanish, the French and the Americans) together with the socio-economic, ideological and demographic impact of the Haitian Revolution created opportunities for new social and legal understandings of race in the Crescent City. More importantly, however, I show how members of New Orleans's free black community, strengthened numerically and heavily influenced by thousands of gens de couleur refugees of the Haitian Revolution, shaped the racialization process by asserting a collective identity as a distinct middle caste, contributing to the creation of a tri-racial system. / text

Visitors to Antebellum New Orleans rarely failed to comment on the highly visible population of free persons of color, particularly the women. Light, but not white, the women who collectively became known as Quadroons enjoyed a degree of affluence and liberty largely unknown outside of Southeastern Louisiana. The Quadroons of New Orleans, however, suffered from neglect and misrepresentation in nineteenth and twentieth-century accounts. Historians of slavery and southern black women, for example, have written at length on the sexual experiences of black women and white men. Most of the research, however, centers on the institutionalized rape, victimization, and exploitation of black women at the hands of white males. Even late into the twentieth century, scholars largely failed to distinguish the experiences of free women of color from those of enslaved women with little nuance in regard to economic, educational, and cultural differences. All women of color -- whether free or enslaved -- continued to be viewed through the lens of slavery. Studies that examine free women of color were rare and those focusing exclusively on them alone were virtually nonexistent. As a result, the actual experiences of free women of color in the Gulf States passed unnoticed for generations. In the event that the Quadroons of New Orleans were mentioned at all, it was normally within the context of the mythologized balls or in scandalous tales where they played the role of mistress to white men, subsequently resulting in a one dimensional character that lived expressly for the enjoyment of white males. Due to the relative silence of their own voices, approaching the topic of New Orleans’ Quadroons at length is difficult at best. But by placing these women within a wider pan-Atlantic framework and using extant legal records, the various African, Caribbean, French, and Spanish cultural threads emerge that contributed to the colorful cultural tapestry of Antebellum New Orleans. These influences enabled such practices as placage and by extension, the development of an intellectual, wealthy, vibrant Creole community of color headed by women.

In the last twenty years, recent scholarship has opened up fresh inquiry into several aspects of New Orleans society during the late nineteenth century. Much work has been done to reassess the political and cultural involvement, as well as perspective of, the black Creoles of the city; the successful reordering of society under the direction of the Anglo-Protestant elite; and the evolution of New Orleans's social conditions and cultural institutions during the period initiating Jim Crow segregation. Further exploration, however, is necessary to make connections between each of these avenues of study. This thesis relies on a variety of secondary sources, primary legal documents, and contemporary newspaper articles and publications, to provide connections between the above topics, giving each greater context and allowing for the exploration of several themes. These include the direction of black Creole public ambition after the end of that community's last civil rights crusade, the effects of Democratic Party strategy and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy movement on younger generations of white residents, and the effects of changing social expectations and increasing segregation on the city's diverse ethnic immigrant community. In doing so, this thesis will contribute to enhancing the current understanding of New Orleans's complex and changing social order, as well as provide future researchers with a broad based work which will effectively introduce the exploration of a variety of key topics and serve as a bridge to connect them with specific lines of inquiry while highlighting the above themes in order to make new connections between various facets of the city's troubled racial history.