free
blacks.[30] Here we note free black officers of Negro troops in 1735. If
not actually the first regular Negro troops to appear in what is now the
United States, they were certainly the first to be commanded by Negro
officers.

The engagement with the Choctaw Indians was not altogether successful for
the French. Disaster succeeded disaster, and the day closed with the French
army deeply humiliated, and making a retreat as dignified as possible under
the circumstances. A number of the French officers, as Gayarre tells us,
stood under the shade of a gigantic oak discussing the defeat, and with
them Simon, a free black, the commander of the troop of Negroes. He was
deeply vexed because his troops had not stood fire, and expressed himself
with so much freedom and disgust, that the French officers kept bantering
him without mercy at the timidity of his soldiers, soothing their own
wounded pride by laughing at his mortification. Stung to the heart, Simon
finally exclaimed wrathfully, "A Negro is as brave as anybody and I will
show it to you." Seizing a rope which was dangling from one of the tents,
he rushed headlong toward one of the horses which were quietly slaking
their thirst under the protection of the Indian muskets. To reach a white
mare, to jump on her back with the agility of a tiger, and to twist around
her head and mouth the rope with which to control her, was the affair of an
instant. But that instant was enough for the apparently sleeping Indian
village to show itself awake, and to flash forth into a hail of bullets.
Away dashed Simon toward the Indian village, and back to the French camp
where he arrived safe amid the cheering acclamations of the troops, and
without having received a wound from the shots of the enemy.[31] This feat
silenced at once the jests of the French officers, of which Simon thought
himself the victim.[32]

The beginning of the Revolutionary war in 1776 found Louisiana a Spanish
province and the natives of the colony beginning to tolerate and even to
like their erstwhile hated Spanish masters. Don Bernardo de Galvez was
governor of the colony. His administration has a peculiar interest to us,
because it was during his rule that the Court of Madrid, fully alive to the
policy of extending the agriculture of Louisiana, issued a decree
permitting the introduction of Negroes into Louisiana by French vessels,
from whatever ports they might come.[33] This was the beginning of the
rapid migr