ctoroons,
apparently constituting two aristocratic circles of society,[78] the
one as elegant as the other, the complexions the same, the men the
same, the women different in race, but not in color, nor in dress, nor
in jewels. Writers on fire with the romance of this continental city
love to speak of the splendors of the French Opera House, the first
place in the country where grand opera was heard, and tell of the
tiers of beautiful women with their jewels and airs and graces. Above
the orchestra circle were four tiers, the first filled with the
beautiful dames of the city; the second filled with a second array of
beautiful women, attired like those of the first, with no apparent
difference; yet these were the octoroons and quadroons, whose beauty
and wealth were all the passports needed. The third was for the hoi
polloi of the white race, and the fourth for the people of color whose
color was more evident. It was a veritable sandwich of races.

With the slaves, especially those outside of New Orleans, the
situation was different. The cruelty of the slave owners in the State
was proverbial. To be "sent down the Mississippi" became a by-word of
horror, a bogie with which slave-holders all over the South threatened
their incorrigible slaves. The slave markets, the tortures of the old
plantations, even those in the city, which Cable has immortalized,
help to fill the pages of romance, which must be cruel as well as
beautiful.

The reaction against the Negro was then well on its way in Louisiana
and evidences of it soon appeared in New Orleans where their condition
for some time yet differed much from that of the blacks in the
parishes. Moved by the fear of a rising class of mixed breeds
resulting from miscegenation, the whites endeavored to diminish their
power by restraining the free people of color from exercising
influence over the slaves, who were becoming insurrectionary as in the
case of those of the parish of St. John the Baptist in 1811. The State
had in 1807 and 1808 made additional provisions for the regulation of
the coming of free Negroes into Louisiana, but when there came reports
of the risings of the blacks in various places in the Seaboard States,
and of David Walker's appeal to Negroes to take up arms against their
masters, it was deemed wise to prohibit the immigration of free
persons into that Commonwealth. In 1830 it was provided that whoever
should write, print, publish or distribute anything havin