scholarly journals Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 1061-1087 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Scott
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
National Convention ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Vieux Carre ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free People

In the summer of 1809 a flotilla of boats arrived in New Orleans carrying more than 9,000 Saint-Domingue refugees recently expelled from the Spanish colony of Cuba. These migrants nearly doubled the population of New Orleans, renewing its Francophone character and populating the neighborhoods of the Vieux Carré and Faubourg Marigny. At the heart of the story of their disembarkation, however, is a legal puzzle. Historians generally tell us that the arriving refugees numbered 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color, and 3,226 slaves. But slavery had been abolished in Saint-Domingue by decree in 1793, and abolition had been ratified by the French National Convention in 1794. In what sense and by what right, then, were thousands of men, women, and children once again to be held to be “slaves”?

From “Louisians” to “Louisianais”

2019 ◽  
pp. 444-497
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Free People ◽  
The City

This chapter traces the emergence of a sense of place among French New Orleans residents of all conditions through the analysis of the uses of ethnic and national categories. It demonstrates that the French Regime did not witness the birth of a single “Creole” identity that united all historical actors across racial boundaries. Racial formation prevented the development of a shared relationship to the city between settlers, slaves, and free people of color. Nevertheless, after the succession of two generations by the end of the 1760s, as the elite fought to keep the colony within the French Empire during the 1768 revolt, New Orleans emerged as a distinctive place in relation to both the metropole and Saint-Domingue.

Atrocity, Race, and Region in the Early Haitian Revolution: The Fond d’Icaque Rising

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Geggus
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Men Of Color ◽  
Grande Anse ◽  
Unique Experience ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free People ◽  
The Revolution

Set within a larger analysis of class relations in the Haitian Revolution, this is a microhistory that intersects with several important themes in the revolution: rumor, atrocity, the arming of slaves, race relations, and the origins and wealth of the free colored population. It is an empirical investigation of an obscure rebellion by free men of color in the Grande Anse region in 1791. Although the rebellion is obscure, it is associated with an atrocity story that has long resonated in discussion of the revolution. Formerly the least-known segment of Caribbean society, research has shed much new light on free people of color in recent decades, but much remains to be clarified. In certain ways, they are the key to understanding the Haitian Revolution, because of their anomalous position in Saint Domingue society and the way their activism precipitated its unraveling. The Grande Anse region had a unique experience of the revolution in that white supremacy and slavery were maintained there longer than in any other part of the colony. Based primarily on unexploited or little-known sources the article demonstrates the range and depth of research that remains possible and suggests that a regional focus is best way to advance current scholarship on the Haitian Revolution.

The Borders of Citizenship in the Haitian Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 009059172097534
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Ravano
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
The Political ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Plantation Labor ◽  
Free People

This essay surveys the appropriations and transformations of the modern concept of citizenship by the actors of the Haitian Revolution, analyzed through the intertwining of race, plantation labor, and the postcolonial state. The concept of citizenship is interpreted as an instrument of emancipative struggles as well as of practices of government. The reconstruction is focused around four moments: the liberal critique by free people of color of the racial boundaries of French citizenship; the strategic uses of citizenship by the insurgent slaves to secure their freedom; the inclusion of former slaves into citizenship to preserve the plantation system within the republican order; and postcolonial Haitian citizenship. By analyzing the constitutional shifts and the political thinking of different figures, such as Julien Raimond, Georges Biassou, Jean-François, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the essay shows the conceptual originality of Haitian political thought and its relevance for the history of modern political concepts.

Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crystal Nicole Eddins
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Slave Rebellion ◽  
Racial Solidarity ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Free People

The Haitian Revolution was perhaps the most successful slave rebellion in modern history; it created the first and only free and independent Black nation in the Americas. This book tells the story of how enslaved Africans forcibly brought to colonial Haiti through the trans-Atlantic slave trade used their cultural and religious heritages, social networks, and labor and militaristic skills to survive horrific conditions. They built webs of networks between African and 'creole' runaways, slaves, and a small number of free people of color through rituals and marronnage - key aspects to building the racial solidarity that helped make the revolution successful. Analyzing underexplored archival sources and advertisements for fugitives from slavery, Crystal Eddins finds indications of collective consciousness and solidarity, unearthing patterns of resistance. Considering the importance of the Haitian Revolution and the growing scholarly interest in exploring it, Eddins fills an important gap in the existing literature.

Claiborne

2018 ◽  
pp. 78-96
Author(s):  
Jason Berry
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Slave Revolt ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
Free People ◽  
White Elite ◽  
The U.S

In the 1790s, as planters sold off land for faubourgs, or neighborhoods, New Orleans branched out. One such neighborhood was founded by Claude Tremé. Antonio de Sedella clashed with the vicar Rev. Patrick Walsh and his replacement Rev. John Olivier. Sedella became the elected pastor of St. Louis Cathedral, leading the one institution where people voluntarily gathered across the color line. Governor William C.C. Claiborne, a lawyer-turned-politician, governed a divided city. Conflicts arose between the French and American cultures, the black militia and white elite, and between Claiborne himself and his opponents. Faced with an influx of Haitian refugees, including whites, free people of color, and slaves, Claiborne faced the challenge of providing for the refugees deemed free while establishing the status of those the refugees considered as slaves. Many refugees who were legally free in Haiti became slaves in New Orleans. A slave revolt, with an estimated 500 rebels, broke out in 1811. Claiborne sent the local militia to put down the insurrection. Close to 100 of the rebels were killed. Advocates for statehood argued that Louisiana should join the U.S., and by admitting Louisiana in 1812, the U.S. cemented itself to a slave economy.

Beyond Freedom's Reach: An Imperfect Centering of Women and Children Caught within Cuba's Long Emancipation and the Afterlife of Slavery

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 122-144
Author(s):  
Karina L. Cespedes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
African Women ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Sexual Deviancy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Free People

AbstractThis article examines Cuba's long process of gradual emancipation (from 1868–1886) and the continual states of bondage that categorize the afterlife of Cuban slavery. The article addresses deferred freedom, re-enslavement, and maintenance of legal states of bondage in the midst of “freedom.” It contends with the legacy of the casta system, the contradictions within the Moret Law of 1870, which “half-freed” children but not their mothers, and it analyzes the struggle for full emancipation after US occupation, with the thwarted attempt of forming the Partido Independiente de Color to enfranchise populations of color. The article argues that the desire to control the labor of racialized populations, and in particular the labor of black and indigenous women and children, unified Cuban and US slaveholders determined to detain emancipation; and provides an analysis of the re-enslavement of US free people of color at the end of the nineteenth century, kidnapped and brought to the Cuba as a method of bolstering slavery. The article draws on the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman and Shona Jackson to provide an assessment of the afterlife of Cuban slavery, the invisibility of indigenous labor, the hypervisibility of African labor in the Caribbean deployed to maintain white supremacy, and it critiques the humanizing narrative of labor as a means for freedom in order to address the ways in which, for racialized populations in Cuba, wage labor would emerge as a tool of oppression. The article raises an inquiry into the historiography on Cuban slavery to provide a critique of the invisibility of indigenous and African women and children. It also considers the role and place of sexual exchanges/prostitution utilized to obtain freedom and to finance self-manumission, alongside the powerful narratives of the social and sexual deviancy of black women that circulated within nineteenth-century Cuba.

The Haitian Revolution in Atlantic Perspective

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Geggus
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free People ◽  
North And South America ◽  
North And South

Of all the Atlantic revolutions, the fifteen-year struggle that transformed French Saint-Domingue into independent Haiti produced the greatest degree of social and economic change, and most fully embodied the contemporary pursuit of freedom, equality, and independence. Between 1789 and 1804, the Haitian Revolution unfolded as a succession of major precedents: the winning of colonial representation in a metropolitan assembly, the ending of racial discrimination, the first abolition of slavery in an important slave society, and the creation of Latin America's first independent state. Beginning as a home-rule movement among wealthy white colonists, it rapidly drew in militant free people of colour who demanded political rights and then set off the largest slave uprising in the history of the Americas. Sandwiched between the colonial revolutions of North and South America, and complexly intertwined with the coterminous revolution in France, Haiti's revolution has rarely been grouped with these major conflicts despite its claims to global significance.

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