metimes at the point of the sword, oftenest in civil or criminal courts,
the meaning of the word Negro. By common consent, it came to mean in
Louisiana, prior to 1865, slave, and after the war, those whose complexions
were noticeably dark. As Grace King so delightfully puts it, "The
pure-blooded African was never called colored, but always Negro." The _gens
de couleur_, colored people, were always a class apart, separated from and
superior to the Negroes, ennobled were it only by one drop of white blood
in their veins. The caste seems to have existed from the first introduction
of slaves. To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were
_gens de couleur_. Among themselves, however, there were jealous and
fiercely-guarded distinctions: "griffes, briques, mulattoes, quadroons,
octoroons, each term meaning one degree's further transfiguration toward
the Caucasian standard of physical perfection."[1]

Negro slavery in Louisiana seems to have been early influenced by the
policy of the Spanish colonies. De las Casas, an apostle to the Indians,
exclaimed against the slavery of the Indians and finding his efforts of no
avail proposed to Charles V in 1517 the slavery of the Africans as a
substitute.[2] The Spaniards refused at first to import slaves from Africa,
but later agreed to the proposition and employed other nations to traffic
in them.[3] Louisiana learned from the Spanish colonies her lessons of
this traffic, took over certain parts of the slave regulations and imported
bondmen from the Spanish West Indies. Others brought thither were Congo,
Banbara, Yaloff, and Mandingo slaves.[4]

People of color were introduced into Louisiana early in the eighteenth
century. In 1708, according to the historian, Gayarre, the little colony of
Louisiana, at the point on the Gulf of Mexico now known as Biloxi, in the
present State of Mississippi, had been in existence nine years. In 1708,
the population of the colony did not exceed 279 persons. The land about
this region is particularly sterile, and the colonists were little disposed
to undertake the laborious task of tilling the soil. Indian slavery was
attempted but found unprofitable and exceedingly precarious. So Bienville,
lacking the sympathy of De las Casas for the Indians, wrote his government
to obtain the authorization of exchanging Negroes for Indians with the
French West Indian islands. "We shall give," he said, "three Indians for
two Negroes. The Indians, when in t