94 QUADROONS. [CHAP. XXVlt. 



black or white, descended from old-world parents, for they would 

 not call the aboriginal Indians Creoles. It never means persons 

 of mixed breed ; and the French or Spanish Creoles here would 

 shrink as much as a New Englander from intermarriage with 

 one tainted, in the slightest degree, with African blood. The 

 frequent alliances of the Creoles, or Louisianians, of French ex 

 traction, with lawyers and merchants from the northern states, 

 help to cement the ties which are every day binding more firmly 

 together the distant parts of the Union. Both races may be im 

 proved by such connection, for the manners of the Creole ladies 

 are, for the most part, more refined ; and many a Louisianian 

 might justly have felt indignant if he could have overheard a 

 conceited young bachelor from the north telling me &quot;how much 

 they were preferred by the fair sex to the hard-drinking, gambling, 

 horse-racing, cock-fighting, and tobacco-chewing southerners.&quot; If 

 the Creoles have less depth of character, and are less striving and 

 ambitious than the New Englanders, it must be no slight source 

 of happiness to the former to be so content with present advant 

 ages. They seem to feel, far more than the Anglo-Saxons, that 

 if riches be worth the winning, they are also worth enjoying. 



The quadroons, or the offspring of the whites and mulattoes, 

 sat in an upper tier of boxes appropriated to them, When they 

 are rich, they hold a peculiar and very equivocal position in so 

 ciety. As children, they have often been sent to Paris for their 

 education, and, being as capable of improvement as any whites, 

 return with refined manners, and not unfrequently with more 

 cultivated minds than the majority of those from whose society 

 they are shut out. By the tyranny of caste they are driven, 

 therefore, to form among themselves a select and exclusive set. 

 Among other stories illustrating their social relation to the 

 whites, we were told that a young man of the dominant race 

 fell in love with a beautiful quadroon girl, who was so light- 

 colored as to be scarcely distinguishable from one of pure breed. 

 He found that, in order to render the marriage legal, he was re 

 quired to swear that he himself had negro blood in his veins, 

 and, that he might conscientiously take the oath, he let some of 

 the blood of his betrothed into his veins with a lancet. The 



