In New Orleans and other French-dominated cities, numerous mixed-race women and their children had achieved freedom or social status through the system of "plaçage", which had become institutionalized among the ethnic French and Spanish colonists, in which slave or free women of color were mistresses for a time to French Creoles. They often gained freedom, education or property from the arrangement. New Orleans had a high proportion of free people of color, who intermarried with each other as a class. Their numbers had increased in the early nineteenth century with the arrival of thousands of refugee free people of color fleeing the disruption of the revolution in Haiti. Now known as Louisiana Creoles, the mixed-race residents then constituted a separate class between the European-Americans and the large majority of mostly black African slaves.