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"The variety," say they, "of complexion presented to us was quite an object of curiosity. Some were of a jet black, others with their braids of soft black hair, one and a half, or two feet in length , might be easily mistaken for quadroons." The New American Encyclopedia treating of the Mandingoes, a West African race, says: "They are remarkable for their industry and energy.
The European Spaniards, and Spanish creoles and mestizos, do not exceed 4,000 persons, of both sexes and all ages, and the distinct castes or modifications known in America under the name of mulattos, quadroons, etc., although found in the Philippine Islands, are generally confounded in the three classes of pure natives, Chinese mestizos, and Chinese.
The Louisianians are prohibited by law from marrying with quadroons, although this caste is free, and many of them have been educated in France, and are highly accomplished. In the south, slavery exists in its most unqualified condition, wanting those milder modifications which serve to dress and decorate the person of this ugly fiend.
And for once we saw an officer of the Louisiana Regiment resplendent in a uniform that might have served at court. Ay, and there was yet another sort. Every flatboatman who returned to Kentucky was full of tales of the marvellous beauty of the quadroons and octoroons, stories which I had taken with a grain of salt; but they had not indeed been greatly overdrawn.
He took toll of the solitary in the brown and pathless woods, of the boatmen upon fifty rivers, of the Indian braves about the council-fire, of hunters, trappers, traders, and long lines of Conestoga wagons, of soldiers on frontier posts, Jesuit missionaries upon the Ohio, camp-meeting orators by the Kentucky and the upper James, martial emissaries of three governments, village lawyers, gamblers, dealers in lotteries, and militia colonels, Spanish intendants, French agents, American settlers, wild Irish, thrifty Germans, Creoles, Indians, Mestizos, Quadroons, Congo blacks, from the hunter in the forest to the slave in the fields, and from the Governor of the vast new territory to the boatman upon a Mississippi ark, not a type of the restless time but imparted to Adam something of its view of life and of the winds that vexed its sea.
Some of the gentlemen remained with the bottle, while others, among whom I was one, followed the ladies.... We had waltzing until 10 o'clock, when we went to the masquerade in the theater in St. Philip street.... The female company at the theater consisted of quadroons, who, however, were masked.
"You know how common it is for quadroons to accede to such double arrangements," rejoined the Signor. "Of course I am well aware of that," she replied; "but they are educated, from childhood, to accommodate themselves to their subordinate position, as a necessity that cannot be avoided. It was far otherwise with Rosa.
The quadroons are certainly the handsomest race of the whole: some of the women are really beautiful; their hair is long and perfectly straight, their eyes large and black, their figures perfection, and you can see the colour mantle in their cheeks quite as plainly, and with as much effect, as in those of an European.
Urban freemen had on the average a somewhat higher level of attainment than their rural fellows, for among them was commonly a larger proportion of mulattoes and quadroons and of those who had demonstrated their capacity for self direction by having bought their own freedom.
Frowenfeld did not answer hastily. "The quadroons," said he, "want a great deal more than mere free papers can secure them. Emancipation before the law, though it may be a right which man has no right to withhold, is to them little more than a mockery until they achieve emancipation in the minds and good will of the people 'the people, did I say? I mean the ruling class." He stopped again.
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