FAUBOURG TREMÉ: Community in Transition Part IV: The Fall of Tremé If we can point to the trend set by Nathaniel Banks’s refusal to draw a line between the free men of color and the recently emancipated Negroes, we must also consider the attitudes of men like young François Boisdoré when he asserted in 1863, “we have never been slaves.” Boisdoré, an embalmer and mortician by profession, was the son of a wealthy free Black family, situated until 1844, in a large house at 1260 Esplanade Avenue (between Tremé and Marais streets.) The family was well established in real estate and land development, and the overall cultural life of the Faubourg. Records show that in 1836, François Sr. paid taxes on property valued at about $25,000. Several years earlier, he and another free Black man, Louis Dolliole, had prevented the City from plowing under their neighboring homes in what was ostensibly a plan to widen the Esplanade. When François Jr. made a point of distinguishing between himself and the enslaved, it was not mere rhetoric. His family, in fact, owned slaves. He belonged to a long line of free Blacks of lighter complexion who had achieved social and economic ascendancy not only though business and land transactions but through intermarrying with other business- , land- and slave‑holding, lighter-skinned free families, namely the Hazeurs (relatives of Henriette Delille of the Sisters of the Holy Family), the Morands (very likely descendants through plaçage of the white Charles Morand who established the brickyard in the Faubourg’s formative years), the Cordeviolas (a family of Italian and Guinean/W. African parentage) and others. Thus, while it is true that Boisdoré was one man, it is clear that he was a member of a large, wealthy and powerful slave-holding free Black family. He was active in Faubourg Tremé circles and in Civil War/Reconstruction era politics, and would continue to be politically active in the years ahead.