BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY: FRENCH SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE :

In the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade, the French turned four times as many Africans into Slaves than the Americans and they used them far more brutally, and French Slaves not only got a head-start on the Americans, they continued the Slave Trade-legally-untill 1830 long after the rest of Europe had given it up and they kept it clandestinely untill after the American Civil War. France officially abolished slavery in its colonies only 14 years before Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation, and then only under pressure from Slave Uprising in their colonies.

The French New World settlers outstripped the Americans in their greed for slave labor. When the U.S. acquired Louisiana from France the first Governor sent from Washington reported back that no subject seems to be so interesting to the needs of the inhabitants of all parts of the state of Louisiana which he visited as that of the importation of Brute Negroes from Africa, white labor they say cannot be had in this unhealthy climate. The French Interlopers had jumped into the Atlantic African Slave Trade in the early 16th century a century before the first American set sail for Africa. Nearly 200 ships bound for Sierra Leone sailed from three Norman ports between 1540 and 1578  and a Portuguese renegade sailing under the French Flag as Jean Alphonce  was one of the pioneers of "The Triangle Trade" between Africa and the New World and Europe.