Of Two Serial Runaways and Their Swindling Master: A Microhistory of Marronage in French Colonial New Orleans, 1738–48

Baptiste and Marianne, two Chickasaw siblings enslaved in eighteenth-century New Orleans, may have run away more frequently than anyone on record in colonial America. From 1739 to 1747, they absconded at least sixty times, for a total of three and a half years on the run between them. Their master never denounced them, but he eventually documented their repeated escapes as evidence in a probate case filed before the Superior Council of New Orleans, the highest court in French Louisiana. His account listed, along with other expenses, the dates and duration of Baptiste and Marianne’s absences, the rewards paid to those who returned them, and the items stolen by the fugitives.

This unique document offers an unusual perspective on the history of marronage or slave desertion, an endemic yet especially elusive phenomenon in French Louisiana. In the absence of plantation records, slave narratives, and printed runaway advertisements, much of the rich scholarship on slavery in the colony relies on judicial sources. Moreover, the changing political geography of the Lower Mississippi has encouraged historians to compare the implementation of successive legal regimes. Whether French institutions, starting with the infamous Code Noir, offered slaves better prospects than their Iberian or Anglo counterparts remains a deeply contested question.

This paper will analyze marronage not only as an instance of slave resistance, but also as the product of a particular legal and financial environment. By running away, the siblings stole themselves and literally robbed their master in the process. Yet the latter managed to manipulate a system akin to “probate racketeering,” and in fact only recorded their absences in order to maximize his dubiously legal profits. Marronage was a dramatically underreported crime in French New Orleans, one that reflected the indomitable humanity of the enslaved but that occasionally benefitted some cunning masters.