On November 21, 1725, African slave Louis Congo was freed and made a salaried public executioner in Louisiana by the Company of the Indies. The corporation chose him because French colonists considered executions carried out by a “negro” the most effective and debasing punishment white criminals could receive in the “wild” and “unruly” colony. For twelve years Congo served as New Orleans’ public executioner in which he whipped, tortured, amputated, and executed anyone sentenced to physical punishment or death by the justice system. Although there are few details about Congo’s life found in archival records, historians do know that he was physically attacked and beaten at least twice because of the position he held. Nevertheless, Louis Congo may have risen up from slavery, but as public executioner he was ensnared in a profession that made him a pawn of a violent carceral system and offered him a lifetime of ridicule, intimidation, and death threats from the public he disciplined.
Eighteenth-century Louisianan society was an eclectic mixture of different races, cultures, and traditions but also a male-dominated, race and class-based hierarchy. Following the uprooting and displacement of indigenous peoples, the territory was held by the French from 1699-1731, possessed by Creole Louisianans from 1732-1768, and occupied by the Spanish from 1769-1803. During Louis Congo’s lifetime, the demographics of the colony consisted of Native Americans of Chickasaw and Illinois extraction living in proximity to colonists from France, Switzerland and Germany, and free and enslaved Black people who were from the French West Indies, Senegambia and Congo, or native-born Louisianans. Most French men were indentured servants, while others were soldiers, tradesmen, traders, overseers of plantations, and planters. Soldiers protected French colonists from Indian attacks in the colony. Traders bartered and sold goods like beaver skins and deer pelts. A small number of French women immigrated to Louisiana during the eighteenth century when King Louis XIV not only sent ordinary women to marry soldiers in Louisiana to increase the colony’s population, but also women from the Paris prison, La Salpetrière who were despised in France for allegedly being felons and sex workers. Regarding the colony’s slavocracy, major planters owned plantations in the country that were farmed by slaves and run by overseers. Although the majority of enslaved people were of African descent, few indigenous people were enslaved and also working on the plantations of white people.