actically foreign country to American ideals of government but of
wrestling with the color problem. Slowly and insidiously it had come
to dominate every other problem. The people of color had helped to
settle the territory, had helped to make it commercially important,
had helped to save it from the Indians and from the English, and they
seemed likely to become the most important factors in its history.

The Louisianians were greatly mortified at the enforcement by
Claiborne of the law against the importation of slaves. They were
undecided whether to blame Claiborne for enforcing the law or to blame
Philadelphia for harboring the first Abolition Society which met in
1804 and promulgated doctrines as dangerous as those of Napoleon
regarding human slavery. Slaves were daily smuggled into the territory
by way of Barataria Bay, the lakes, and all the innumerable outlets to
Spanish possessions.[56] Claiborne was alternately accused of
conniving at this smuggling and abused for trying to suppress it. Jean
and Pierre Lafitte, infamous in history for their feats of smuggling
and piracy, made capital of the slave trade, and but for their
stalwart Africans would have been captured and hung long before
Louisiana had suffered from their depredations and the bad reputation
which they gave her. The Lafittes appealed to the romantic temperament
of the French, and the fact that the American governor, Claiborne, had
set a price upon their heads was almost sufficient in itself to
secure them immunity from the Creoles.[57]

"Americans," says Grace King, "were despised and ridiculed." Men,
women and children of color, free and slave, united to insult the
American Negro or--"Mericain Coquin," as they called him. The French
and the Spaniards, moreover, united in using the people of color to
further their own interests, or to annoy the new American government
while the intrigues of Spain and France weakened the feeble territory.
It was difficult to know how to treat this almost alien people.
Governor Claiborne found the militia in the territory entirely
inadequate for the purposes of protection, should Spain make an
attempt to wrest the land back from the United States. In one of his
anxious despatches to headquarters he says plaintively: "With respect
to the Mulatto Corps in this city, I am indeed at a loss to know what
policy is best to pursue."[58] The corps, old and honorable, as it
was, had been ignored by the previous Legislative Counc