1738 06-14 French Superior Council Record. (Petition for cemetery burial of baptized female slave, age 13 years, body to be exhumed from grave outside cemetery.)

The importance with which burial within the consecrated ground of the cemetery was held is seen in a 1738 case involving a petition to the Superior Council, in which an enslaved girl was to have her body exhumed and reburied at the site.  In it, Father Mathias reported that Monsieur Loquet de la Pommeraye, the Treasurer General, had his slaves bury “the body of a negress of twelve or thirteen years, out of the cemetery, contrary to the ordinance of the King in the Code Noir, by which His Majesty wills and intends that the masters be obliged to inter the bodies of their baptized slaves in the cemetery, with the ceremonies of the Church.”  The girl was exhumed and reburied in the cemetery, and Loquet de la Pommeraye was fined of thirty livres to be applied to fencing the cemetery (Cabildo Archives 293; transcription of documents available at http://www.mylhcv.com/colonial-treasurer-general-of-new-orleans-sued-by-vicar-general from Louisiana Historical Quarterly, October 1920).