he islands, will not be able to run
away, the country being unknown to them, and the Negroes will not dare to
become fugitives in Louisiana, because the Indians would kill them."[5]

Bienville's suggestion seems not to have met with a very favorable
reception. Yet, in 1712, the King of France granted to Anthony Crozat the
exclusive privilege for fifteen years of trading in all that immense
territory which, with its undefined limits, France claimed as Louisiana.
Among other privileges granted Crozat were those of sending, once a year, a
ship to Africa for Negroes.[6] When the first came, is not known, but in
1713 twenty of these Negro slaves from Africa are recorded in the census of
the little colony on the Mississippi.[7]

In 1717 John Law flashed meteor-wise across the world with his huge scheme
to finance France out of difficulty with his Mississippi Bubble. Among
other considerations mentioned in the charter for twenty-five years, which
he obtained from the gullible French government, was the stipulation that
before the expiration of the charter, he must transport to Louisiana six
thousand white persons, and three thousand Negroes, not to be brought from
another French colony. These slaves, so said the charter, were to be sold
to those inhabitants who had been two years in the colony for one half cash
and the balance on one year's credit. The new inhabitants had one or two
years' credit granted them.[8] In the first year, the Law Company
transported from Africa one thousand slaves, in 1720 five hundred, the same
number the next March, and by 1721 the pages of legal enactments in the
West Indies were being ransacked for precedents in dealing with this
strange population. But of all these slaves who came to the colony by June,
1721, but six hundred remained. Many had died, some had been exported. In
1722, therefore, the Mississippi Company was under constraint to pass an
edict prohibiting the inhabitants of Louisiana from selling their slaves
for transportation out of the colony, to the Spaniards, or to any other
foreign nation under the penalty of the fine of a thousand livres and the
confiscation of the Negroes.[9]

But already the curse of slavery had begun to show its effects. The new
colony was not immoral; it may best be described as unmoral. Indolence on
the part of the masters was physical, mental and moral. The slave
population began to lighten in color, and increase out of all proportion to
the importation a