Rebecca J. Scott

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

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 Carre 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”?

Public rights and private commerce: A nineteenth-century Atlantic creole itinerary

Tracing the history of a family across three generations, from enslavement in eighteenth‐century West Africa through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution and subsequent resettlement in New Orleans, then France, then Belgium, can shed light on phenomena that are Atlantic in scope. A business letter written in 1899 by the cigar merchant Edouard Tinchant to General Máximo Gómez in Cuba frames an inquiry that opens out onto a family itinerary that spanned the long nineteenth century. Rosalie Vincent’s achievement of freedom in the shadow of slavery in Saint‐Domingue in 1793–1803 can be seen as linked to her grandson Edouard Tinchant’s participation as a delegate in the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1867–68. Together, the experiences of the Vincent/Tinchant family illuminate an Atlantic and Caribbean rights‐consciousness that crossed the usual boundaries of language and citizenship. Uncovering these experiences suggests the value of combining the close focus displayed in Sidney Mintz’s Worker in the Cane with the Atlantic approach of his later Sweetness and Power.

The Atlantic World and the Road to Plessy v. Ferguson

The Gulf of Mexico has long been open to the movement of individuals and information as well as hurricanes. Throughout the nineteenth century, people circulated around the Caribbean Sea and the gulf in pursuit of work, security, and political alliances. During Reconstruction and its aftermath, some of those migrants helped frame the struggle against caste in the state of Louisiana in an innovative way. Their conceptual language and their experiences are worth recovering?to broaden our picture of southern history and perhaps also to enrich our thinking about constitutional frameworks of antidiscrimi nation.

The Abolition of slavery and the aftermath of emancipation in Brazil

In May 1888 the Brazilian parliament passed, and Princess Isabel (acting for her father, Emperor Pedro II) signed, the lei aurea, or Golden Law, providing for the total abolition of slavery. Brazil thereby became the last civilized nation to part with slavery as a legal institution. The freeing of slaves in Brazil, as in other countries, may not have fulfilled all the hopes for improvement it engendered, but the final act of abolition is certainly one of the defining landmarks of Brazilian history.The articles presented here represent a broad scope of scholarly inquiry that covers developments across a wide canvas of Brazilian history and accentuates the importance of formal abolition as a watershed in that nations development.

Explaining Abolition: Contradiction, Adaptation, and Challenge in Cuban Slave Society, 1860–1886

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as slavery was disappearing elsewhere in the New World, slave-based plantation production of sugar in Cuba reached remarkable heights of technological sophistication and output. In 1868 Cuba produced 720,250 metric tons of sugar, more than 40 percent of the cane sugar reaching the world market in that year. Yet just as production reached these levels, the abolition of slavery in Cuba was initiated, beginning a process of slave emancipation that was to last nearly twenty years. This concurrence of events raises the question, What was the relationship between slavery and the development of sugar production, and why did emancipation in Cuba take place when and as it did? My analysis of this question will take a comparative perspective in two respects. First, it is partly in implicit comparison to other New World slave societies that the very late abolition of slavery in Cuba-1886-poses a problem of explanation. Second, and more important, an explicitly comparative analysis of the course of emancipation in distinct regions within Cuba can help to identify the forces that advanced, and those that retarded, emancipation, and thus contribute to a fuller interpretation of the causes and nature of abolition.

Slavery and the Law in Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, and Justice

The four articles in this special issue experiment with an innovative set of questions and a variety of methods in order to push the analysis of slavery and the law into new territory. Their scope is broadly Atlantic, encompass ing Suriname and Saint-Domingue/Haiti, New York and New Orleans, port cities and coffee plantations. Each essay deals with named individuals in complex circumstances, conveying their predicaments as fine-grained microhistories rather than as shocking anecdotes. Each author, moreover, demonstrates that the moments when law engaged slavery not only reflected but also influenced larger dynamics of sovereignty and jurisprudence. Natalie Zemon Davis, exploring criminal justice in colonial Suriname, seeks to unravel the processes by which guilt was determined and punish ment imposed, both through the draconian systems controlled by slave holders, and through alternative systems developed by men and women who were themselves held as slaves. In practice, although not in theory, enslaved African-born diviners and their African and Creole neighbors could deliberate and pronounce sentence upon members of their own

Social Facts, Legal Fictions, and the Attribution of Slave Status: The Puzzle of Prescription

doi:10.1017/S0738248016000560 Rebecca J. Scott is Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan . She thanks Leonardo Barbosa, Bethany Berger, Richard Brooks, Kathryn Burns, Ananda Burra, Bridgette Carr, John Cairns, Sidney Chalhoub, Adriana Chira, Brian Costello, Alejandro de la Fuente, Sam Erman, Hussein Fancy, Bruce Frier, Malick Ghachem, Thavolia Glymph, Allison Gorsuch, Ryan Greenwood, Keila Grinberg, Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, Ariela Gross, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Hendrik Hartog, Jean Hébrard, Marial Iglesias Utset, Martha S. Jones, Steven Kochevar, Noel Lenski, Beatriz Mamigonian, Olivier Moréteau, Mariana Dias Paes, Agustín Parise, Edgardo Pérez-Morales, Vernon Palmer, Lawrence Powell, Claire Priest, Peter Railton, Dominique Rogers, Michael Ross, JeanFrédéric Schaub, Thomas Scott-Railton, Scott Shapiro, Kimberly Welch, John Witt, and participants in seminars at Stanford University, the Radcliffe Institute, Yale University, and the University of Toronto for suggestions and feedback. She also thanks Juliet Pazera and Sybil Thomas at the New Orleans Notarial Archives Research Center; Irene Wainwright and Greg Osborn at the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library; Florence Jumonville at the University of New Orleans Library; and the staff of the Office of the Clerk of the Court, Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana, for being generous with their time; and Jeanette Diuble, Bryan LaPointe, and Andrew Walker for helping to transcribe case files. Finally, she gives special thanks to the anonymous reviewers of Law and History Review.

ROSALIE NAÇÃO POULARD: LIBERDADE, DIREITO E DIGNIDADE NA ERA DA REVOLUÇÃO HAITIANA

The essay explores the links between the equal-rights convictions of Edouard Tinchant, a young activist in post-Civil War New Orleans, and the deep Atlantic background of his family of origin. His grandmother, Rosalie, had been made captive in Senegambia in the 1780s and deported as a slave to the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where she eventually achieved her freedom during the Haitian Revolution. Rosalie gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth, during that Revolution, and fled with her to Cuba as a war refugee. In New Orleans decades later, Elisabeth embarked on her own search for security and standing, using a local notary to record her claim of a paternal surname from the French father who had never married her mother. When, in the political ferment of 1867-68, Elisabeths son Edouard Tinchant called for legislation to recognize the civil rights of all women, independent of color, he was thus seeking to write into law the right to respect that his grandmother and mother had been obliged to struggle for on their own.