Doubtless to some extent in their lodges, and certainly to a great degree in their daily affairs, the lives of the free colored and the slaves intermingled.  Colored freemen, except in the highest of their social strata, took free or slave wives almost indifferently.  Some indeed appear to have preferred the unfree, either because in such case the husband would not be responsible for the support of the family or because he might engage the protection of his wife’s master in time of need.[87] On the other hand the free colored women were somewhat numerously the prostitutes, or in more favored cases the concubines, of white men.  At New Orleans and thereabouts particularly, concubinage, along with the well known “quadroon balls,” was a systematized practice.[88] When this had persisted for enough generations to produce children of less than octoroon infusion, some of these doubtless cut their social ties, changed their residence, and made successful though clandestine entrance into white society.  The fairness of the complexions of some of those who to this day take the seats assigned to colored passengers in the street cars of New Orleans is an evidence, however, that “crossing the line” has not in all such breasts been a mastering ambition.

[Footnote 87:  J.H.  Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, pp. 130-133.]

[Footnote 88:  Albert Phelps, Louisiana (Boston, 1905), pp. 212, 213.]

The Southern whites were of several minds regarding the free colored element in their midst.  Whereas laboring men were more or less jealously disposed on the ground of their competition, the interest and inclination of citizens in the upper ranks was commonly to look with favor upon those whose labor they might use to advantage.  On public grounds, however, these men shared the general apprehension that in case tumult were plotted, the freedom of movement possessed by these people might if their services were enlisted by the slaves make the efforts of the whole more formidable.  One of the Charleston pamphleteers sought to discriminate between the mulattoes and the blacks in the premises, censuring the indolence and viciousness of the latter while praising the former for their thrift and sobriety and contending that in case of revolt they would be more likely to prove allies of the whites.[89] This distinction, however, met no general adoption.  The general discussion at the South in the premises did not concern the virtues and vices of the colored freemen on their own score so much as the influence exerted by them upon the slaves.  It is notable in this connection that the Northern dislike of negro newcomers from the South on the ground of their prevalent ignorance, thriftlessness and instability[90] was more than matched by the Southern dread of free negroes from the North.  A citizen of New Orleans wrote characteristically as early as 1819:[91] “It is a melancholy but incontrovertible fact that in the cities of Philadelphia, New York and Boston, where the blacks are put on an equality with the whites, ... they are chiefly noted for their aversion to labor and proneness to villainy.  Men of this class are peculiarly dangerous in a community like ours; they are in general remarkable for the boldness of their manners, and some of them possess talents to execute the most wicked and deep laid plots.”