A wife is sought for her virtue; a concubine for her beauty. – Chinese proverb
Since the dawn of civilization it has been the practice of wealthy men to take official mistresses or concubines, chosen for their beauty and charm from the classes below that acceptable for wives; this arrangement allowed a man the sexual variety he desired and the concubine to rise above the socioeconomic level at which she was born. In polygamous societies concubines were officially recognized and often lived in the same house as the wife, but in later, officially monogamous societies such as ours the mistress or “kept woman” generally lives in a different place and the relationship is usually clandestine. Usually we think of concubinage as having died out in the West by the early part of the Christian Era, but in actuality it continued to exist among Europeans living in Asia because those cultures still practiced it, and in the 17th century it was revived in a widespread form called plaçage (from the French placer, to place with) among the French and Spanish colonists in Africa and the New World.
As I discussed in my column of September 3rd, few women were interested in emigrating from France to New Orleans, and this also held true for other French and Spanish colonies from the time of the conquistadores on. “Suitable” European women had no trouble finding husbands or patrons among the men who remained in Europe, so there was a chronic shortage of marriageable women in the colonies; the male colonists therefore took native women as mistresses. Inevitably these relationships produced children, and by the early 18th century the plaçage system was developed to define the legal ramifications of these relationships, including the inheritance and other rights of the offspring. Since New Orleans had particular difficulty in attracting marriageable women even by French colonial standards, a very large community of mixed-blood “Creoles of color” arose, forming the foundation of New Orleans’ free Creole society; in later times most placées (as the concubines were called) were “quadroons” (¼ black) or “octoroons” (1/8 black), but in earlier times many were mulatto, black or Indian.
Though the system was widespread throughout the French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and along the Gulf Coast (including Haiti, Martinique and Florida), it was most highly-developed and formally organized in New Orleans and reached its height during Spanish rule of the city (1769-1801). Though plaçage was not legally recognized as marriage by the authorities, Creoles considered the arrangements honorable and referred to them as mariages de la main gauche (left-handed marriages). Though in the earliest days most placées were slaves, this later became unusual and most were drawn from the free Creole community. In 1788 it was estimated that there were about 1,500 placées in New Orleans, and they were the most influential members of the Creole community; their children were often educated in France, and some even owned houses, businesses, plantations and slaves of their own.
A wealthy man would usually reside with his wife and her children at his plantation, but maintain a townhouse in New Orleans where his placée and her children lived; he stayed in this house when in town for business or used it for entertaining other city businessmen, and when he was out of town his placée and her children participated in free Creole society. A man’s relationship with a placée often predated his marriage because he did not seek a white wife until he had established himself in business; thus, his children by the placée were often older than those by the legal wife, and some men actually named their Creole children as primary heirs over their “legitimate” children. Normally, however, the placée could expect one-third of her husband’s property upon his death. But if he died intestate or was forced by his legal wife to abandon his placée and her children, she got nothing more than her house (and sometimes not even that). If she was still young and attractive she might enter into plaçage with another white man, or marry a Creole man; if not she might open a boarding house or seek employment as a merchant, hairdresser or seamstress. And it was very likely she would bring her own daughters up to become placées.
By the time New Orleans became American in 1803, the usual means by which such mothers introduced their eligible daughters to wealthy white men were the Quadroon Balls. These elegant, elaborate affairs were held every week by the owners of dance halls, and only white men and Creole women were permitted to attend. Creole debutantes were accompanied to the balls by their mothers, and when a white gentleman found such a girl attractive and wished to take her in plaçage he had to negotiate the terms with the elder lady. Typically, the mother would insist that the details of her daughter’s housing and upkeep be specified in writing, and that children produced by the union be recognized; these wise women wanted to be sure that their daughters would not be left without support as they had been, and if the daughter was particularly beautiful and/or the gentleman particularly generous the mother could include in the bargain a lump-sum payment or even an allowance for herself.
By the time of the War Between the States, the plaçage system was starting to become less common for both positive and negative reasons. New Orleans’ Creole community had grown large both from the many children produced by such arrangements and by intermarriage among the Creoles themselves, and since their economic status had grown to be comparable with that of whites the system was less necessary than it once had been. At the same time, institutionalized racism in New Orleans had grown under American rule, and both laws and social customs made social race-mixing more difficult; for a white man of this period to actually cohabit with a Creole woman as his grandfather had became nearly impossible. The relationships became much more clandestine, and since they were no longer officially sanctioned it became easier for an embittered wife or greedy half-siblings to cheat a placée and her children out of their inheritance.
After the war, things became much worse for the Creoles; the Carpetbaggers, unscrupulous Northern businessmen who arrived to take advantage of the South’s depleted economy, were far more racist than any native New Orleanian had ever been, and by the end of the Reconstruction many once-prosperous Creole families, descended from wealthy colonials through generations of plaçage, had fallen into ruin due to the refusal of the Carpetbagger merchants and federally-controlled puppet government to do business with them. With plaçage gone, the beautiful and well-educated daughters of impoverished Creole families had few options; white men could not legally marry them, ruined Creole or free black men could not afford to support them, and former slaves were too far beneath their social and educational level even to be considered. Given the circumstances, it should come as no surprise that many of them turned to high-class prostitution in the city’s booming brothel industry, where their looks and education could earn them $10/hour in a time when the average laborer made 22¢/hour. Many of the most sought-after courtesans and wealthiest madams in Storyville were Creole beauties whose great-grandmothers had been placées.
The mixed-race descendants of plaçage made up a large and independent Creole community in New Orleans well into the 20th century, but once the racial controversy of the 1960s and ‘70s had come and gone this community began to break up; after laws about ancestry were swept away most Creoles (some of whom were as little as 1/16 black) chose to identify as white, while others called themselves black. Some even changed their minds over the course of their lives; two late 20th-century mayors of New Orleans, both born into respected Creole families, called themselves white on their Army induction papers but later found it politically expedient to identify as black when seeking election in a majority-black city. Sadly, the last descendants of Western Civilization’s last officially-recognized concubines will soon disappear into one race or the other, taking the last traces of their unique culture with them except for those portions which have become a part of the greater culture of New Orleans.
See, this is what I meant.
Old school clear arrangements where people acknowledged what they were doing, knew(relatively) what they were getting, and it was(relatively) above board. Based on your race, wealth, and social status, men knew what their options were; same with women.
Now all of that’s been shot to shit.
I see more & more why you have such issues with women who are whores in practice but not in name, and I know you’ve seen for a while why I have issues with modern marriage.
It’s like we traded the truth(beautiful young pussy in exchange for financial security & social status) for…what exactly? Because it’s still true, but somehow men & women get punished for it now.
Not to split hairs, but actually it isn’t the women I have issues with; it’s the system which criminalizes honesty. If I were allowed to honestly practice my honest profession I really wouldn’t give a damn about gold diggers and party girls.
For the pretense of universal equality, which many people seem to prefer to personal freedom for everyone to do what’s right for herself or himself.
“Not to split hairs, but actually it isn’t the women I have issues with; it’s the system which criminalizes honesty.”
I see. Makes sense.
“If I were allowed to honestly practice my honest profession I really wouldn’t give a damn about gold diggers and party girls.”
Yeah, but men have to, because they’re expensive and don’t have to take any responsibility. When we think with the little head, context doesn’t matter, it’s just when the credit card bill comes, or the child support and alimony payments do, the big head takes over again, we’re like….wtf just happened?
“For the pretense of universal equality, which many people seem to prefer to personal freedom for everyone to do what’s right for herself or himself.”
It is indeed a pretense. Equality of opportunity is somewhat feasible, but equality of outcomes is flat out impossible.
God bless Amerika.
That’s true, but inevitable; a man has to take responsibility for his own actions regardless of the law.
Absolutely right, and what’s more equality of opportunity is freedom, while the attempt to enforce equality of results is tyranny. Ever heard the Rush song “The Trees“?
A History of Sex episode on the History Channel stated that some poorer white women would tan themselves and then market themselves as octoroons.
Hoping to send you something for the anthology tonight or tomorrow night.
Gotta love that entrepreneurial spirit. 😉
The Empress Josephine was born in Martinique to what is described as a white Creole family. In recent years there have been attempts to claim her as black although she doesn’t appear so in contemporary paintings. However, in contemporary writings she was said to have a rather sallow complexion.
Although twice married her life-style was more that of a high-class courtesan.
I’ve always admired Josephine; she was a survivor and never whined, even when things were going badly for her.
It’s interesting how some things never change; the old Jim Crow laws classified people as black on the strength of tiny percentages of Negro blood, and now modern Afrocentrists want to do exactly the same thing for opposite reasons. It all seems absurd to me; if we must classify people by race (which seems rather unnecessary nowadays for any but possible medical reasons), I think we can safely say that anyone who is 3/4 or 7/8 of one race and raised in the majority-blood culture can safely be considered a member of that culture. Grace is 1/4 Choctaw, but since she was raised in a white community under white cultural norms, what is to be gained by attempting to classify her as Indian despite the lack of any cultural connection to an organized tribe?
[…] Marigny – and indeed Marigny street – was in the mid to late 1800’s the prime area for staging plaçage, the custom in which rich white gentlemen housed their Creole mistresses and second families well […]
I’m not sure about your portrayal of the Carpetbaggers or Reconstruction. It sounds like how the Dunning School (1900-1950) portrayed the Reconstruction Era. New scholarship portrays the Carpetbaggers in a better light — as idealists who went to teach blacks, establish charitable institutions, and found businesses. Historians now portray the Reconstruction Era as one of idealism and improving racial relations.
I don’t think the plaçage system collapsed because of Northerners’ refusal to do business with them — more likely the economic devastation and political exclusion of their left-hand husbands lead to the collapse of the system plus terrorism by the White League, the KKK, and other white supremacist terrorist societies.
James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me includes a chapter on race relations in America.
New scholarship is, alas, also the handmaiden of political correctness. To show negative effects of the War Between the States is now incorrect; all must be portrayed as positive. Also, as a whore I have a very different view of the results of middle-class “idealism” imposed on other people; the same “social crusade” you speak of was also responsible for the War on Whores and later, Prohibition. The fact of the matter is that many Northerners were (and many still are) hostile to Southern traditions and often cloak their campaigns against the South in moralistic garb; the current “red state-blue state” mythology is just a continuation of it.
I agree with Maggie on the whole. From family anecdotes (I have Creole ancestors from New Orleans), a lot of Creole families encountered financial stress and ruin with the arrival of the Northerners and their binary racial caste mentality which did not exist before then in Louisiana or many other parts of the South. Despite what the very PC “history” says. And as Maggie points out, the Northerners were and still are hostile to many local traditions of Southerners and particularly in Louisiana, that of Creoles (whether mixed, white, or black Creole).
Back In Tyme has essays talking about the changes that occurred during this era with regard to racial-social interaction in the southern states. In particular, these essays by Frank W. Sweet:
1. The One-Drop Rule Arrives in the Postbellum Lower South
2. The Invention of the One-Drop Rule in the 1830s North
3. Antebellum Louisiana and Alabama: Two Color Lines, Three Endogamous Groups
This essay by Mary Gehman about Creole emigres who fled (primarily to Mexico) after the Louisiana Purchase is also a good source to read: The Mexico-Louisiana Creole Connection. Though Gehman tends to say “whites” in general, taking into account the dates of the changes in racial-social-economic interactions, it coincides with the influx of Northerners into the area (who immediately set about “changing” things), proving Maggie’s point.
All these essays are very well footnoted and well researched.
Maggie wrote: “Northerners were (and many still are) hostile to Southern traditions and often cloak their campaigns against the South in moralistic garb”
Maggie, if you are dismissing the North’s fight against slavery as nothing more than a “campaign against the South” in “moralistic garb”, then you lose your credibility as an advocate of individual freedom.
I agree that many Northerners have a generalized hostility to anything Southern, but in some specific respects, that hostility was justified.
I’m not talking about the abolitionist movement but rather the war on Southern traditions which had nothing to do with it, which took place during Reconstruction and continues (in greatly subdued form) in many circles to this day.
That having been said, it’s a fact that many abolitionists were not interested in freeing the slaves due to the moral right of human beings to be free of coercion, but because they felt slavery contributed to the moral turpitude of the slaves. There are many surviving abolitionists tracts which focus not on the abomination of slavery itself, but what those abolitionists viewed as the real damage of slavery: that it made slaves lazy and unproductive, and allowed them to “live in sin” and produce bastard children. Many of these essays are cited and quoted in Russell’s Renegade History of the U.S.. That’s why many followers of abolitionism turned to the temperance, anti-masturbation and anti-prostitution crusades after the eradication of slavery in the United States; it’s no accident that the social purity movement started when it did.
In some ways, anti-prostitute crusaders are right to call themselves “abolitionists”; they rail about coercion and slavery, but they think it’s perfectly OK for them to coerce others, and no matter what their verbal claims their real concern is that prostitutes are “lazy” and give men more opportunity to “fornicate”. As in the 19th century, they use the campaign against an obvious wrong (slavery) to disguise an agenda which has nothing to do with individual rights and everything to do with enforcing their own ideas about morality.
Speaking of that abolitionist connection, on my former blog I highlighted a particular problem Frederick Douglas ran into with the abolitionists of his time and how they preferred for former slaves to speak about their experiences. Historian David Blight talked about the racism within the 19th century abolitionist movement and in my post I emphasized this statement:
“Many white abolitionists had certain expectations of what black abolitionists were to provide or to perform within this movement. Very often, black abolitionists had different, very different, perceptions of what their role ought to be. So, there was a struggle among white and black abolitionists about just what the proper role of a black abolitionist was in this movement.”
Replace “white abolitionist” with radical feminist and “black abolitionist” with sex worker and the parallels are stunning. These abolitionists love to grab hold of the 19th century anti-slavery movement and claim it as their own, but the mentality they mimic the most is the one Blight is talking about in that second link.
Maggie, I agree with what you have said to a limited extent. It’s true that some anti-slavery abolitionists were simply crusading puritans who didn’t really care about the right to freedom – but they were not the majority of abolitionists. There is also plenty of surviving evidence that Northerners were willing to go to war to end what they considered an extreme, systematic human rights violation.
“Northerners” were no more a unified block in this regard than were “Southerners” – and it bears remembering that the social and racial history of New Orleans and Louisiana is a lot more complex and nuanced than that of, say, East Tennessee or northern Georgia, or even tidewater Virginia or the Carolinas. In reality, most “Northerners” were emphatically NOT willing to go to war to abolish slavery, no matter how much they personally may have abhorred it as individuals (and there is ample evidence that many, many people in the North simply could not have cared less as long as it didn’t affect them personally).
Although it doesn’t get a lot of coverage in history books, there were Union regiments who simply laid down their arms and mutinied at the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation since, almost to a man, they were willing to fight for the Union but “not for the nigger.” There were others who gained additional energy and motivation to fight harder knowing that they were fighting to end slavery. However, although slavery was certainly the proximate cause of the War, it was most certainly not fought to end slavery by almost anyone, including most especially the leaders of the US Government and armed forces. “The North” did not fight against slavery, and it’s a third-grade textbook interpretation of American history to assert that it did.
Yes, I agree Maggie. And I agree with your perception of this, although I have never really explored the possibility that this might be because I am a whore…(although I have long realized that the good girl bad girl bullshit is so extreme as to be Victorian)
Wouldn’t that have been nice if the abolitionists actually thought the slaves were actual human beings. Slavery as an institution was just being dismantled in favor of new government. Abolitionists were largely rapists and no black girl or woman was safe.
Many of the Creole descendents did not get into prostitution, but had marketable skills, mostly as a seamstress or hairdresser, and most of their customers were from the white sections. Some became teachers of black children in one-room schools that were built from their own funds. Until the 1980’s, there was a stereotype in black communities that black teachers were all light-skinned with long hair and eyeglasses.
Some descendents of the placage have only married with other Creoles in Louisiana and Texas. To this day, they identify as Creole and most feel superior to those of more African blood, while all living in the same neighborhoods. They don’t care that the government had designated them as black. The ones that didn’t ‘pass’ before the 1960’s still don’t see themselves as truly black or white.
A fascinating discussion, from points of view I have not yet encountered. Thank you, all!
The photograph you’ve identified as women at the last “Octoroon Ball” are probably students not concubines. It was taken on the steps of Atlanta University in Georgia around 1900.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95507098/
Thank you for sharing this! A thorough and thoughtful post on an oft-forgotten piece of American history. Well done!
Thank you for this! I am doing some creative work that dives into the bitter beauty of Creole culture. This helps me so much. I enjoyed reading it as well.
PLEASE CORRECT THE CAPTION
The photograph you’ve identified as women at the last “Octoroon Ball” are students not concubines. It was taken on the steps of Atlanta University in Georgia around 1900.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95507098/
My grandmother was in a placage contract in Louisiana . I would like to quote some of your material in my next book. Thanks ahead.