I read about the slave ships that came from Senegal on these websites the story links to a few years ago, and afterwards only found out through genetic testing that the first ancestor I can trace who came to “America,” actually was a black woman from Senegal who came to Louisiana on one of those 22 voyages (I forget the exact number I read but it is relatively low). One practical reason for these one was labor, or course, but later efforts by the Catholic Church that brought in more of these a slaves Africans reveal another underlying facet—to serve as “wives” or “second wives.” These were marriage like and allowable but not officially recognized. The issue was that white women from France could not be “convinced” to leave for Louisiana swamps and humid bog lands to “serve” the French explorers who were hunters and explorers, trading fur and other items with “Indians” up and down the Mississippi through the massive territory France claimed. It was thus a lot mixed race people came to be and it appears to have been quite common.
The first evidence was the certificate I got from database of documents that show the “product” of this marriage, a part French and part-Senegalese woman who married an American Revolutionary agent of English descent who came to the state to working with the French military. These two married in 1778 officially. One of their children, who thus was a direct descendant of this Senegalese enslaved woman, born in the later 1700s fought freely in the 1812 war and with a native “black militia. Before that he married a “mulatto” mixed woman of direct African descent as well. This man of direct African descent then became Governor of Louisiana in 1850-1853, Joseph Walker. My father had that portrait hanging on his wall in Newark, which his father, my grandfather, brought up New Orleans. This Governor was his grandfather.
But Governor Walker’s wife had died and he had another “illegitimate” child from African woman, presumably an enslaved woman on his plantation late in life. That woman became by grandfather’s mother, carrying Bantu-Aka-Xhosian ancestors in her genes and blood. She married a man of Irish descent with my last name, who got his law degree from Tulane in 1887, as I saw the original record. I still find it interesting to have “accidentally” uncovering this history before doing the genetic test on Black Friday in 2022 that I got back in February 2023, during black history month. My father had always said that his dad and aunt were of “Spanish-French” descent, explaining the slightly darker complexion. It not Spanish or French as I discovered, but passing the figurative and literal color-line.
It’s rather odd that I can now trace my first “American ancestor” to pre-Revolutionary times to this Senegalese woman arriving in New Orleans. But when the Anglo-Saxon “chattel” system of slavery arrive after 1803, greater laws restricted the permission given to intermarry or to self-manumit through a purchase of freedom, which was allowable under the French-Spanish Catholic version, that allowed for a chance at freedom that the Anglo-Saxon version ended more strictly after Bacon’s rebellion in 1676. The Catholic Church actually had some wiggle rooom to still view an enslaved person as human and to covert to Christianity, since converts were not allowed to be enslaved. It was only non-Christians or heathens.
Great discussion on this King cake with many new facts and insights.