een the Indians and the Africans, who were beginning to be
entirely too friendly with each other. Then Perier used the slaves to make
the entrenchments about the city. Thus we have the first instance of the
arming of the Negro in Louisiana for the defense of the colony. On the 15th
of January, 1730, Gov. Perier sent a boat containing twenty white men and
six Africans to carry ammunition to the Illinois settlement up the
Mississippi river whence tales of massacre and cruelty by the Indians
filtered down.[25]

The arming of the slaves in defense of the whites gave impetus to the
struggle for their own freedom. In the massacre of the French by the
Natchez, at the village of that name, over three hundred women and slaves
were kept as prisoners, and in January of the same year which witnessed the
massacre of the Chouchas, the French surprised the Natchez Indians with the
intention of recovering their women and slaves, and avenging the death of
their comrades. Some of the Africans who had been promised their freedom if
they allied themselves with the Natchez Indians, fought against their
erstwhile masters, others were loyal, and helped the French. The battle
became an issue, as it were, between the slaves. Over one hundred of them
were recovered from the Indians.[26]

The first tribute we have paid to the black man as a soldier in Louisiana
was paid by Gov. Perier in this war in his dispatch to the French
government. "Fifteen negroes," he wrote, "in whose hands we had put
weapons, performed prodigies of valor. If the blacks did not cost so much,
and if their labors were not so necessary to the colony, it would be better
to turn them into soldiers, and to dismiss those we have, who are so bad
and so cowardly that they seem to have been manufactured purposely for this
colony."[27]

But the tiger had tasted blood. Perier's cruel logic was reactionary. Since
he had used blacks to murder Indians in order to make bad blood between the
races, the Indians retaliated by using blacks to murder white men. In
August of that same fateful year, the Chickasaws, who had given asylum to
the despoiled Natchez in order to curb the encroachments of the white men,
stirred the black slaves to revolt. We have noted before the prevalence of
the Banbara Negroes in the colony. It was they who planned the rebellion.
Their plan was, after having butchered the whites, to establish a Banbara
colony, keeping as slaves for themselves all blacks not of thei