You think the play, which opened in 1859, and which is about how people used the word octoroon in connection to slavery, invented the word first? That they named the play a brand-new-word that no one would have heard before? To protest society defining people as Octoroons, a concept and word somehow invented at that moment?
You demand evidence it was in use earlier? What about Two Years Before the Mast?
Also:
You think those are unrelated lexicons? How could you think those are non-overlapping lexicons? ? ?
Now, Octoroon wasn’t a chosen or professed identity, it was always a racial construction policed by white people and used in english to describe slaves, so I don’t know how it could be an either/or situation.
