D'Iberville, when on his expedition "to plant a colony 
on the Mississippi,"- made a stop at San Domingo. There he "took 
on board M. de Grave, a famous bucaneer, who some years before 
had surprised and pillaged the town of Vera Cruz." San Domingo 
in later years furnished slaves to the new colony, and I think it 
more than possible that some were brought on this first voyage of 
DTberville's. However that may be, there were in the colony, in 
May, 1713, "four hundred persons, including twenty negroes." 3 
Then it was that Cadillac, the founder, in July or August, 1701, 
of Detroit, arrived in the new colony to serve as governor general. 
The entire province, including all the region "between Carolina on 
the east and Old and New Mexico on the west," had, by royal 
decree dated 14th September, 1712, been transferred, as far as com- 
mercial, mining and certain other privileges were concerned, to Sieur 
Antoine Crozat. Permission was granted him, "if he find it proper 
to have blacks in the said country of the Illinois," to "send a ship 
every year to trade for them directly upon the coast of Guinea, taking 
permission from the Guinea company to do so." But "before Crozat's 
plans were fairly organized, the operations of the treaty of Utrecht 
debarred him from the importation of Africans. Its provisions 
had, in fact, transferred the control of the slave trade to England. 
a plan far-reaching enough to make the mother country responsible 
for the long bondage of the negro in America." 

Nevertheless it must be said that though Crozat's plans in regard 
to the importation of negroes from Africa were defeated, it must 
have been for reasons that do not appear in the treaty, for designs 
of the same sort were successfully carried out by the man} r -named 
company of which John Law was, at first, the controlling spirit. 
"On the 6th of June," 1719, two vessels "arrived from the coast of 
Guinea with five hundred negroes. * * In the beginning of July, 
1720, "the ship l'Hercule, sixteen guns, arrived at Dauphin [Ship] 
Island from Guinea, with a cargo of negroes for the colony. * * On 
the 17th [of March, 1721], the frigate l'Africain arrived with one 
hundred and eighty negroes, being the remains of two hundred eighty 
which had embarked on board in Africa. On the 23d, le Due du 
Maine, thirty-six guns, arrived with three hundred and ninety-four 
negroes, being the remains of four hundred and fifty-three who had 



2. The colony, however, was not planted on the Mississippi but at Biloxi. 

3. La Harpe's "Establishment of the French in Louisiana," French's "Historical, 
lions of Louisiana," Part III., p. 39. 



NEGRO SLAVERY IN WISCONSIN. 5 

-sailed from Africa about the same time. On the 4th of April, M. 
Berranger was sent to Cape Francais to purchase corn for the negroes, 
who were dying with hunger at Biloxi (Fort Louis). * * On the 
20th, the frigate la Nereide * * arrived with two hundred and 
ninety-four negroes, being the remains of three hundred and fifty 
which had been put on board. 4 He reported that the frigate le Charles. 
with a cargo of negroes, had been burnt at sea within sixty miles of 
the coast." We need not continue the dismal story— told by Benard 
-de La Harpe — any farther to be reminded of the fact that the mon- 
opoly granted to England by the 12th article of the treaty of Utrecht 
related to Spanish and not to French America. 

The royal proclamation creating Law's company gravely states 
that "in the settlement of the lands granted to the said company by 
these present letters, we have chiefly in view the glory of God, by 
procuring the salvation of the savage Indian and Negro inhabitants 
whom we wish to be instructed in the true religion." Perhaps this 
explains the seeming absurdity of beginning a decree (issued in 1724) 
regulating slavery with the command: "We enjoin the directors gen- 
eral of said company, and all our officers, to remove from said country 
[of Louisiana] all the Jews who may have taken up their abode 
there — the departure of whom, as declared enemies of the Christian 
name, we command within three months, including the day when 

■ presents are published, under pain of forfeiture of their bodies 
and estates." With the exception of this first article and a part of 
Article III., 5 the decree is devoted to slavery, and the treatment of 
es and other negroes. In regard to these matters the decree is 
quite as humane as we could expect. I fear that later slave codes 
would suffer in comparison. To be sure, the slave who ran away for 
the second time might be "hamstrung" and for the third offense 
of the sort be put to death. "A slave who. having struck his master, 
his mistress, or the husband of his mistress, or their children, shall 



4. The official estimate [of the population of Louisiana] in 1721. was 5,420, of 
whom six hundred were negroes. — Winsor, Vol. V., p. 49. 

5. "We prohibit any other religious rites than those of the Apostolic Roman 
Catholic church; requiring that those who violate this shall he punished as rehels 
disobedient to our commands." In mournful accord with this is a remark of La 
Harpe's. He has been speaking of the English ship found by Bienville in the 
Mississippi, 1699, September 16th. "On board of this vessel," he says, "was M. 
Secon, a French engineer, who gave secretly to M. Bienville a petition addressed to 
the king, professing to his majesty that if he would grant religious liberty to 
the colony, he would settle more than four hundred families on the Mississippi. 
This petition was forwarded to the minister. M. de Ponchartrain, who replied that 
the king would not suffer heretics to go from his kingdom for the purpose of forming 

In contrast with this unhappy policy we notice the fact that non- 
adherents of the church of England have been the very backbone and strength of the 
Jiritish colonies. 



6 NEGRO SLAVERY IN WISCONSIN. 

have produced a bruise, or the shedding of blood in the face, shall 
suffer capital punishment." But slavery must needs he cruel. '"The 
power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of 

the slave perfect." 11 

Whatever else, under the decree of 1724, might be done or left 
undone, we may be sure that slavery would spread as widely as 
seemed advantageous to the slaveholders. 7 For herein is ihe econom c 
danger of slavery, as in the making and selling of intoxicants, .that 
what is most hurtful to the community as a whole is immediately 
profitable to individuals. Accordingly, we are not surprised to learn 
that slavery was firmly established, under French authority, in the 
Illinois country. In 1721, according to Winsor, perhaps, however, in 
1726, Phillippe Francois Renault brought to Kaskaskia, or at leasl 
to the region above the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, 
"some two hundred miners and live hundred slaves." In 1750 a 
Jesuit missionary, probably Father Vivier, quoted by Chief Justice 
Sidney Breese, found eleven hundred whites and three hundred blacks 
in five Illinois villages. When, in October, 1705, the British, under 
Thomas Stirling, afterward general and knight, came to the Illinois 
country to take possession there according to the treaty of Paris, [763, 
February 10th, the non-Indian population, estimated at five thousand. 
included, perhaps, five hundred slaves. Whatever the number, it was 
soon reduced by emigration into the Spanish country across the 
Mississippi. Thus it was that St. Genevieve. Missouri's oldest town, 
became a place of relative importance. And it was from St. Genevieve, 
in later years, that there came part of the blot of slavery as we find 
it on early pages of Wisconsin's history.