Freedom papers : an Atlantic odyssey in the age of emancipation / Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hebrard.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Scott, Rebecca J. (Rebecca Jarvis), 1950-

Contributor:

Hébrard, Jean M. (Jean Michel), 1944-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Creoles--Atlantic Ocean Region--Migrations.

Creoles.

Creoles--Atlantic Ocean Region--Social conditions.

Creoles--Atlantic Ocean Region--Biography.

Black people--Atlantic Ocean Region--Migrations.

Black people.

Black people--Atlantic Ocean Region--Social conditions.

Black people--Atlantic Ocean Region--Biography.

Tinchant family.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (288 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family's quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States. Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant. In the 1830's, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana's state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie's great-great-granddaughter Marie-José was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium. Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

Maps

Prologue: The Cigar Maker Writes to the General

1. "Rosalie, Black Woman of the Poulard Nation"

2 "Rosalie ... My Slave"

3. Citizen Rosalie

4. Crossing the Gulf

5. The Land of the Rights of Man

6. Joseph and His Brothers

7. "The Term Public Rights Should Be Made to Mean Something"

8. Horizons of Commerce

9. Citizens beyond Nation

Epilogue: "For a Racial Reason"

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND COLLABORATIONS

INDEX

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674065161

0674065166

9780674068407

0674068408

OCLC:

794004263