That's right! One of the wealthiest slave owners in Louisiana history at the turn of the 18th century was a black woman.
Born in August of 1742 in the French outpost of Natchitoches, Louisiana to Francois and Marie Francois who named her "Coincoin", she was the fourth of eleven children.
They worked as slaves for the post's founder and commandant Louis Juchereau de St. Denis. She worked as a planter as a young girl and was educated in nursing and pharmacy skills.
These skills were necessary so when slaves would eventually buy their freedom, they would have the skills to make a good living. She at a young age already had five children from different men that records show ranged from full African descent to Native American.
Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer was a young French merchant who fought in the revolutionary war. He frequented the French outpost of Natchitoches on business many times, to visit the St. Denis household and eventually developing a relationship with Coincoin over time.
Her mistress was said to have "loaned" her to Claud on one occasion. As they become more involved with each other, a parish priest tried to break up their union by threatening to have her sold to New Orleans.
That was what prompted Claud to purchase and free her and her children in 1778 but they never married. Together they moved away from the outpost to a very rural area until about 1778 when Claude went back to France after the children matured and married off and eventually died in 1815.
As a free woman Marie exploited a variety of economic enterprises. She manufactured medicine, planted tobacco, trapped wild bears and turkeys, she also traded fur and shipped oil and Indigo to New Orleans.
She was very successful and quickly became a land owner and tax payer when she purchased 67 acres of land to build a plantation on. Then purchased over 100 slaves to work the fields!
Marie Therese Metoyer died in 1816 dividing her property, including her slaves between her surviving children. By 1830 her empire grew, some sources say to about 12,000 acres where the Metoyer family were on record as having more slaves than anyone else in her county with a total of 287 slaves.
Her oldest son Augustin donated some land by the isle of Brevelle for a Church he commissioned his brother Louis to build. It was named St. Augustine and was said to have been the very first black church built by black creoles for freed slaves. A creole is a French person born in the French colonies and not from France.
note: Claude appeared to have Afrocentric features and hair. In the paintings both were painted the same color. French does not mean only white. Artist depictions of black slave masters were painted to look more European as they did William Ellison Jr. and like Claude, who in my opinion was a black man.
Multiple sources use the phrase "loaned" when they mentioned how Coincoins Mistress "loaned" her to Claude on one occasion. With just a minimal amount of research, it was clear that there was already an ongoing relationship between them. The phrase "loaned" in a proper historical context was the mistress describing Coincoin as her property being allowed to go with Claude on a date.
I also doubt that they owned as much as 12,000 acres as some speculate. If it took 100 slaves to farm 67 acres and they ended up with 287 slaves, that number was probably a typo. 1,200 acres sounds more reasonable when you look at how they calculate acreage by man power.
We've all heard about the black slave owner's in early America. Why hasn't anyone expanded on that subject? Now our history has been reduced to (white)= slavemaster and (black)= slave.
There are plenty of sources about black slave owners that is readily available online, but you have to sift through it and compare details and learn how to recognize solid information and IGNORE those that emotionalize it, to steer your opinion. Book's written in the period a mile high.
There's so much information that's already confirmed and documented without un necessarily emotionalizing it as well. Whenever I see writing like that, I scroll up immediately and look at the name. Just like I thought, a chick wrote it.
I was curious about the facts, not the journalist's feeling's about them. It was interesting that when I searched her name, most search results have her listed as a business woman.
So, slave ownership is only (business) if your black, but if you're white, then you are a stain on history? Eternally evil? Am I getting this right? Got it! I finally had grown tired of waiting for someone else to put a finer point on this subject, so I decided to do it myself.
The easy part was the names because they're all well documented. The devil is in the details on this one, right there in plain sight but there is very dated terminology that you need to understand for proper context. See my blog on Colonial Language Defined for clarity.
There are many interesting threads that surface here and there that paint a far bigger and clearer more accurate picture of that point in history. Stories pieced together from letters and other correspondence gathered and archived by historians. For those of us that actually read books and know our history, white America right now is having a bulls eye painted on our backs over their revisionist history.
I decided to jump down a rabbit hole or two to get my facts straight so I could correct the record when the opportunity arises. Almost immediately I discovered that not only was there compensation, they learned other skills as well.
They were able to purchase their own freedom and eventually open their own successful businesses. They eventually saved up and bought up some land of their own, only to fill their fields with slaves. It's a good thing that the Government got involved right? We abolished slavery by the way, so to those of you who didn't know? You're welcome.
This blog is the first of many more to come in my new series on "Black slave owners of the early America's. See you in my next black history lesson.
Sincerely,
Lonnie T. Locke LMT
Your friendly neighborhood, loud and proud,
straight white conservative Christian and
heavily armed therapist.
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