Well, you might be wrong here. My grandfather’s grandfather, Joseph Walker, a mulatto, was governor of Louisiana from 1850-1853. My DNA test this confirmed this historical fact. The picture you see of him on Wikipedia and other sources says as much, but masks the issue that it is was grandmother who was brought as a slave from Senegal, according to the genetic calculations I didn’t. The portrait is actually a painting that hung on the wall in my father’s home in New, New Jersey in the 1930s and 40s. My grandfather, also a quadroon mulatto (creole was the original term replace by “French-Spanish”) brought the portrait with him from Louisiana around 1917, after graduating from Tulane with a law degree, like his father. History isn’t so (ahem!) black and white but contains many shades. Governor Walker was not young when he had an illegitimate daughter with black woman, and that woman gave birth to my grandfather. Interestingly, the portrait looks like my father a good deal.
Some estimates say there were upwards of a hundred thousands of freed “creoles” and blacks after the Louisiana purchase, making it hard from the America’s to shove the genie back in the bottle, given they were outnumbered. Hence many “passed” and were re-labeled “creoles,” as the word “mulatto” was a legal term in the South denoted an absence of civil rights. Since “creoles” owned 20 percent of New Orleans and sizable amounts of land and power, the state did not “instantly” turn into a US slave state with the stricter British Anglo-Saxon laws the US had from after Bacon’s Rebellion. The Americans had to work with that they bought from the French of the Spanish controlled territory. The original 2,000 or so slaves the French brought Senegal were many women to look after the white men, who were more like explorers, fur catchers, etc. They had “agreements” to marry the slaves women, unofficially, who served the men in many ways.
There was no real sugar caning, which came as a result of the French and their slaves escaping Haiti from the Revolution. Louisiana is actually a state that contained a lot of freedom by 1800, with women marrying white men legally. This Senegalese female slave brought during that time of the 1740s and “mated” with a white man, gave birth to a female mulatto girl, who was actually the first generation of my ancestors born on what is today US soil.