Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution

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.

The Tumultuous Island

The years following Sarah and Isaac’s conversion were ones of great change on the island, rife with controversies and rebellion. On the one hand the Brandon-Lopez-Gill clan was prospering, with both Brandon cousins and Lopez-Gill uncles making important marriages. Yet the synagogue was in disarray, with interracial sex often at the center of controversies. While unmarried Jewish men like Sarah and Isaac’s father suffered no penalties for extramarital affairs, married Jews and religious leaders found themselves repeatedly sanctioned by the synagogue, their intimate affairs laid open. Racial tensions on the island reached a peak in 1816 when a slave revolt broke out near the southern coast. In the years following the revolt, free people of color would seek compensation for their support in suppressing the insurrection. Petitions and religion, rather than open rebellion, became the new path to power.

This Liberal City

In July of 1820, Isaac Lopez Brandon and his mother landed in Philadelphia, where they joined the growing community of wealthy free people of color who flocked to the northern city from the South and the Caribbean. As in New York, in Philadelphia gradual emancipation led to new opportunities and instigated a racial backlash. While some Jewish Philadelphians worked on behalf of abolition, others owned the print shops and newspapers that published articles fomenting anti-Black ire. Money would ease the Brandons’ path. Philadelphia would be the first place that Isaac’s mother positioned herself not as Lopez or Gill, but as Mrs. Brandon, despite the fact there is no evidence she married Abraham Rodrigues Brandon. Behind the scenes, Abraham helped his niece’s husband secure a job as hazan (religious leader) of the congregation. As in New York, Sarah’s in-laws helped smooth their transition into Jewish life.

One and Indivisible?

Histories of the French Revolution usually locate the origins of the “one and indivisible Republic” in a strictly metropolitan context. In contrast, this article argues that the French Revolution's debates surrounding federation, federalism, and the (re)foundation of the French nation-state were interwoven with colonial and transimperial matters. Between 1776 and 1792 federalism in a French imperial context went from an element of an academic conversation among bureaucrats and economists to a matter of violent struggle in Saint-Domingue that generated new agendas in the metropole. Going beyond the binary language of union and secession, the article examines the contest over federation and federalism in Saint-Domingue between free people of color and white planters who, taking inspiration from both metropolitan and non-French experiences with federalism, sought to alter the colony's relationship with the metropole while also maintaining the institution of slavery. Revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, unsure which direction to take and without the benefit of hindsight, used the language of federalism to pursue rival interests despite a seemingly common vocabulary. This entangled history of conflicts, compromises, and misunderstandings blurred ideological delineations but decisively shaped the genesis of the French imperial republic. Généralement, les histoires de la Révolution française placent les origines de la « République une et indivisible » dans un contexte strictement métropolitain. Cet article soutient en revanche que les débats de la Révolution française sur la fédération, le fédéralisme et la (re)-fondation de l'Etat-nation français étaient liés à des questions coloniales et transimpériales. Dans le contexte impérial français, entre 1776 et 1792, le fédéralisme ne fut plus seulement un objet de débats académiques entre bureaucrates et économistes, mais devint un élément central dans une lutte violente à Saint-Domingue qui contribua à infléchir les choix politiques faits en métropole. Au-delà du langage binaire de l'union et de la sécession, l'article examine les conflits cristallisés par les notions de fédération et de fédéralisme entre des libres de couleur et des planteurs blancs qui, s'inspirant d'expériences fédéralistes métropolitaines et étrangères, cherchèrent à modifier la relation de la colonie avec la métropole tout en maintenant l'institution esclavagiste. Des deux côtés de l'Atlantique, les révolutionnaires, qui ne savaient quelle direction emprunter, employèrent le langage du fédéralisme pour défendre des intérêts contradictoires malgré l'usage d'un vocabulaire apparemment commun. Cette histoire faite de conflits, de compromis et de malentendus contribua à brouiller les partages idéologiques mais n'en influença pas moins la genèse de la République impériale française.

Re-Visiting the Creole Myth: Race and Ethnicity on the New Orleans Stage

Scholars who have studied the contested meaning of “creole” in Louisiana have typically maintained that the “Creole myth,” that is the strategic redefinition of the term “creole” to refer to the white descendants of Louisiana’s original French and Spanish settlers, emerged during or shortly after the Civil War. Drawing on a newspaper article and two case studies related to the New Orleans theatre, this essay proposes a new periodization for the emergence of the “Creole myth” and a re-evaluation of the cultural and political work it was doing. I want to suggest that conceiving of the Creole myth as an antebellum phenomenon (rather than examining it in the context of the postbellum era) allows us to see that its creation was not just motivated by French Louisianian concerns about cultural integrity and ethnic survival but also by this population’s anxiety about race and the status and mobility of free people of color. As a rhetorical tool that gained traction in the 1830s, the strategic redefinition of “creole” to exclude all people of African descent operated in tandem with other attempts to curtail the rights of free people of color, preventing their social, economic, and political ascent during the antebellum period. Ceux qui ont étudié le sens contesté du terme « créole » en Louisiane ont typiquement maintenu que le « mythe créole », c’est-à-dire, la redéfinition stratégique du terme « créole » à ne comprendre que les descendants blancs des colons d’origine française ou espagnole est apparu pendant ou peu après la guerre de Sécession. S’appuyant sur un article de journal et sur deux études de cas du théâtre à la Nouvelle-Orléans, cet article propose une nouvelle périodisation de l’émergence du « mythe créole » ainsi qu’une réévaluation du travail politique et culturelle qu’il exerçait. Je veux suggérer qu’en concevant le mythe créole comme phénomène d’avant la guerre de Sécession (plutôt que de l’examiner dans le contexte de l’après-guerre), nous comprenons que sa création a été motivé non seulement par des préoccupations d’intégrité culturelle et de survie ethnique de la part des Franco-louisianais, mais aussi par leur anxiété raciale par rapport à la mobilité des gens de couleur libres. Comme outil rhétorique qui a gagné du terrain dans les années 1830, la redéfinition stratégique de « créole » afin d’exclure tous ceux d’ascendance africaine fonctionnait en combinaison avec d’autres tentatives à restreindre les droits des gens de couleur libres, empêchant leur ascension sociale, économique et politique pendant l’ère d’avant la guerre de Sécession.

Racial Segregation under Slavery

Social demographers and historians have devoted extensive research to patterns of racial segregation that emerged under Jim Crow and during the post-Civil Rights era but have paid less attention to the role of slavery in shaping the residential distribution of Black populations in the United States. One guiding assumption has been that slavery rendered racial segregation to be both unnecessary and impractical. In this study, I argue that apart from the master–slave relationship, slavery relentlessly produced racial segregation during the antebellum period through the residential isolation of slaves and free people of color. To explain this pattern, I draw on racial threat theory to test hypotheses regarding interracial economic competition and fear of slave mobilization using data from the 1850 Census, as well as an architectural survey of antebellum sites. Findings suggest that the residential segregation of free people of color increased with their local prevalence, whereas the segregation of slaves increased with the prevalence of the slave population. These patterns continue to hold after controlling for interracial competition over land or jobs and past slave rebellions or conspiracies.

“Your Views Cross the Atlantic”

Chapter 5 examines the overwhelming rejection of colonization by free people of color in the United States, the evolution of the colonization societies, and the agency of the settlers in enacting these changes. For the majority of African Americans rejected colonization’s principal arguments. Those few who saw potential in Liberia emphasized the performative possibilities of the colony, the ability to act in ways previously denied to them on account of race. Significantly, the small number of African Americans who willingly chose to emigrate to Liberia were often racially ambiguous. They saw opportunity in the undefined and evolving racial identities offered by moving to Liberia. The chapter also examines the settlers’ roles in changing the colonization societies. For many settlers, there was no difference between abolition and colonization. Settlers worked with colonizationists committed to black uplift and attempted to drive out those who did not favor such reforms; they changed how the societies’ governed their colonies.

Introduction

The introduction summarizes the content of the chapters and places the research in a broader context. This book focuses on the experiences and beliefs of the African American settlers and Africans in the colony of Liberia and on its earliest years as a republic after independence in 1847. Readers will notice that while Murray examines Liberia and Liberians broadly, he often focuses his analytical gaze upon the independent colony of Maryland in Liberia, established by the Maryland State Colonization Society (MSCS) in 1834. The MSCS desired to shift colonization in a more antislavery direction and did not believe it could accomplish this goal within the confines of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color (the American Colonization Society or ACS).

Atlantic Passages

Established by the American Colonization Society in the early nineteenth century as a settlement for free people of color, the West African colony of Liberia is usually seen as an endpoint in the journeys of those who traveled there. In Atlantic Passages, Robert Murray reveals that many Liberian settlers did not remain in Africa but returned repeatedly to the United States, and he explores the ways this movement shaped the construction of race in the Atlantic world. Tracing the transatlantic crossings of Americo-Liberians between 1820 and 1857, in addition to delving into their experiences on both sides of the ocean, Murray discusses how the African neighbors and inhabitants of Liberia recognized significant cultural differences in the newly arrived African Americans and racially categorized them as “whites.” He examines the implications of being perceived as simultaneously white and black, arguing that these settlers acquired an exotic, foreign identity that escaped associations with primitivism and enabled them to claim previously inaccessible privileges and honors in America. Highlighting examples of the ways in which blackness and whiteness have always been contested ideas, as well as how understandings of race can be shaped by geography and cartography, Murray offers many insights into what it meant to be black and white in the space between Africa and America.