By 1793 Coincoin's plantation was successful enough that she could petition the Spanish colonial government for an additional grant of land. Such grants cost only the price of a survey but entailed laborious improvements and were given only to those of proven responsibility. Coincoin received 500 acres. She used it for grazing cattle.
During the next 10 years, she and Metoyer worked out a series of agreements whereby he freed their remaining children. In return she gave up her annuity. But those documents, like so many others in Louisiana, underline how malleable the institution of slavery could become in the hands of those determined to exploit its loopholes. Even before they were freed, documents show, Coincoin and her descendants acted like anything but victims of the chain and lash.
Coincoin's eldest son, Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, founded the Church of St. Augustine near Melrose. Whites sat in back.
(Northwestern State University of Louisiana - Watson Memorial Library, Cammie G. Henry Research Center)
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In 1796, for example, Coincoin's second son, Louis, was granted 912 acres of Cane River bottomland. He was still a slave at the time. The Code Noir stated that "slaves can have no right to any kind of property," but that apparently was ignored. It would be five more years before his father set him free. Coincoin's fourth Metoyer son, Pierre, received a similar grant in 1798, four years before he, too, was freed.
Yet those acquisitions pale beside the acts of Marie Therese Metoyer, Coincoin's youngest daughter. In 1810 and again in 1811 she purchased two male slaves. At the time, documents show, she was still a slave herself. She wouldn't gain her formal freedom until her father's death in 1815.
Slaves' Slaves
Few aspects in history confound our present understanding of slavery as much as African American slave owners, though they existed for almost the entire history of slavery in North America.
The 1830 U.S. census documented 3,600 "Negro slaveholders," but like so many racial ironies and contradictions, the figure is deceptive. The vast majority of those "owners" were holding as slaves spouses or relatives they were forbidden by their state's law from formally setting free.
Like thousands of free Negroes of her era, Mills wrote in 1984, Marie Therese Coincoin "saw no conflict between her own love of freedom and the slave system in which she lived. Slavery not only existed in the white world she knew, but in the [Native American] world with which frontier whites rubbed shoulders, as well as in the African land" of her parents, of which she had only heard.
Slavery was very much the way of her world. But there were occasional cracks in the institution through which, with opportunity, industry and luck, clever blacks could maneuver from one side of bondage to the other. Once free in a frontier area like Natchitoches, slave ownership was virtually the only proven path to economic security and advancement.
But free blacks who worked scores of slaves on their own plantations often bought, sold and employed them -- like their white counterparts -- for other than economic reasons.
Coincoin's eldest son, Augustin Metoyer, bought his first slave from a neighbor to help clear his plantation. But his second purchase was his wife's 8-year-old sister. His third was the young daughter of his still-enslaved brother Louis, and his fourth was a 15-year-old who would marry his brother Pierre. The last three he immediately set free.
Augustin later bought an 18-year-old with an infant as a wife for his first slave; a male slave who was his wife's brother (allowed to work his way to freedom), and two more slaves, one of whom he freed four years later. And so on.
By 1810 Coincoin's seven sons had accumulated 58 slaves, according to Mills's census research in "The Forgotten People." Of the 259 households in their census area, only 166 owned any slaves at all. The only families to own more slaves than Coincoin's sons were the families of Metoyer's white children.
Working the System
Nonwhite slave owners, however, were in something of a bind. If they treated their slaves too leniently, they risked being lumped by their white neighbors with a lower racial class. If they treated them too severely, they risked feeding the widespread white suspicion that blacks were incapable of exercising the judgment and responsibilities of freedom.
Coincoin and her descendants apparently treated their slaves much as others in the area were treated, but generally a little better. Mills found that Coincoin was meticulous in having each slave born on her property baptized and raised Catholic. He documented numerous stories from her descendants that she never used bodily punishment, but would discipline unruly slaves by locking them up in a "jail" on her property. Now standing at Melrose, the mushroom-roofed little building with barred lower windows is thought to be the only example of native-built African architecture in the United States.
