The 1769 Oath of Fidelity and Allegiance to the Spanish Crown of the French "Company of the Free Mulattoes and Negroes of This Colony of Louisiana": Dual Genealogy of a Social Event

When the new governor Alejandro O’Reilly established the authority of the Catholic Monarchy in French Louisiana after its cession to Spain at the end of the Seven Years War, he asked every constituted group to take an oath of fidelity and allegiance to the king of Spain. Among these groups was the “Company of the free mulattoes and negroes of this colony of Louisiana”. This essay demonstrates that this free-colored militia company was established by the French before the end of the Seven Years War and not by the Spaniards when they took over Louisiana in 1769 as historians previously assumed. Furthermore, it argues that its creation represented a founding event in the process of racialization of this new colonial and slave society because it made race more important than class or status. It thus offers a dual genealogy of the emergence of the company in order to explain how the state and some free men of color came to cooperate to create this fascinating institution which constituted a compromise between those two sides at the end of the French Regime. Both could gain some advantages from it, even if they were not moved by the same motivations and representations or even had contradictory ones.