1787 while a party of 351 freed Negroes was aboard ship at Portsmouth, England, enroute to Sierra Leone, West Africa, the authorities brought on board sixty-two white women, prostitutes and others, whom they wished to get rid of, and married them to as many men, and sent them off to be the future mothers of the colony. In the 1850’s, Mrs. Leybonn, an Englishwoman, was “Queen of the Slave-traders,” at Rio Pongo, one of the principal slave posts in West Africa. She had a fort armed with cannon and armed by 300 devoted blacks. She had three mulatto children by a Negro, a boy and two girls. One of the latter married a white slave-trader, and the other, a British Consul.” ~ J.A. Rogers “Regarding Louise-Marie, the mulatto daughter of Maria Theresa, Queen of France, there is indisputable record of her birth in the diary of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, the King’s first cousin. She says, “The child that the Queen had just given birth to resembled the little dwarf that M. de Beaufort had brought from a foreign country; that he was well-formed in his race of dwarf and Negro; and that the child did not seem that it would live.” (Memoires de Mlle. de Montpensier, Tome V, pp. 118-19, Paris, 1728.) The Duke de St. Simon says: “It is said that she was the daughter of the King and the Queen, that her color had caused her to be hidden there, and after her disappearance, to be published that the Queen had a miscarriage. Many of the people of the court believe this. But whatever it be it remains a mystery.” (Memoires, Vol. I, p. 258, years 1697-98.) Voltaire declared that he visited the convent where this girl was imprisoned and that he saw her. Her picture hangs now in the Library of St. Genevieve, Paris, France. It represents a Negro woman with bright eyes, a long, fleshy nose, thick lips and a long face. The documents concerning her disappeared mysteriously. Today only the cover for them remains. But it bears the title, “The Princess Louise-Marie, daughter of Louis XIV and Maria-Theresa.” Victor Hugo believed that the Negro was the father of Louise-Marie. The writer who said that the color of the child was due to the mother’s fondness for chocolate was La Marquise de Sevigne. Maria Theresa ate so much chocolate that it blackened her teeth. But it was not to the Queen that La Marquise de Sevigne referred. It was to another noble lady, who had a similar accident. “The Marquise de Coetlogen,” says Mme. de Sevigne, “ate so much chocolate, being big with child, that last year she gave birth to a little boy, black as the devil.” (Lettres de Mme. de Sevigne, Oct. 25. 1671, Vol. III, p. 10, Paris, 1818.) The noble ladies of France, Germany and England had coal-black pages about them “to set off the whiteness of their skin.” They, too, seemed to have been very fond of “chocolate.” The same was true of the American ladies in slavery days. It is a well-known fact in Chicago that the daughter of that city’s once leading millionaire eloped with a “chocolate.
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