Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation

by Scott, Jean M. Hebrard

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 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 1830s, 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, African American, France, Womens, Gender, Grad School

288 pages, Paperback

First published February 27, 2012

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Freedom Papers is a fascinating historical read. It would be of great interest not only to scholars of African American history and Atlantic studies alike, but, in my opinion, also to both amateurs and specialists in the fields of economics, law, and diplomatics. Additionally, this book is sure to strike a certain cord with cigar aficionados.
I personally found the book to be a compelling historical account which really represents the latest historiography in the area of Atlantic studies. The story of Rosalie’s daughter and her progeny, a family of French, Afro-Caribbean, Creole entrepreneurs, reveals the profound complexity of social and ethnic hybridity. The authors account, in many ways, challenges our current of understanding of globalization as being a distinctly recent phenomenon. This challenge is delivered in the exceedingly detailed stories of the Tinchant brothers, which makes up most of the content; and it is one that is progressively unveiled with each transnational exploit. If there is any criticism I have encountered concerning the work, it is that the most fundamental figures in the text, the matriarch Rosalie and her daughter Elizabeth, fade out of the account without sufficient resolution. To me it seems this is likely a result of the superseding account of the brothers and their exploits which is comparatively more comprehensive in its coverage. Nevertheless, I still hold this book in very high regard.

[Blessy Abraham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing describes this book and its massive historical vision better than the quote by French historian, Arlette Farge, at the end of this book.
"One does not bring back to life those whom we find cast up in the archive. But that is no reason to make them suffer a second death. The space is narrow within which to develop a story that will neither cancel out nor dissolve these lives, that will leave them available so that one day, and elsewhere, another narrative may be built from their enigmatic presence."

The book traces the inter-generational history of the enigmatic and enterprising Tinchant family across Haiti, Louisiana, Mexico, France and Belgium, through a long timeline that spanned the Haitian Revolution, the Civil War, attack of Napoleon III in Mexico and finally down to the antifascist struggles against the Nazis in Belgium. It is also very much a micro historical project in motion across space and time.

Despite the large historical and geographical scope of the book, this is very much a personal history that discusses the struggles of a group of people at the margins of society and whose complicated racial and parental status allowed them some of the permissibility to blur segregated spaces and even gain some form of acceptable legitimacy over time through issuing/signing of various documents that could both guarantee and threaten this delicate claim for public rights and equality.

Definitely a must read for many historians who are interested in exploring the transnational and connective histories of archives, and in essence, revival of many such lost narratives that we can resurrect from the binds of our lost social memories.

[Grant Turnage · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting way of going about history. Atlantic history, slavery, racism, and military and economic affairs. This book has got it all. It's a short book and covers almost two-hundred years of a particular family. It's a good read.

[Alexander Jolley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors, using the actions of a family during the Cuban revolution and before, argue for the utility of microhistory to help us understand the larger dynamics of events.

There are a few ways the authors demonstrate this. Discussing the heritage of individuals can reveal the dynamics of nations and governments, such as Tinchant's Haitian heritage, which places the events in context with the wider concerns and memory of the region. Roasalies claimed designation of being a part of the Poulard Nation, which places her within a political and cultural entity, as well as coming with the rights of the name. This not only reveals a lot about her as an individual, but also acts as a signal to others. The reconstruction of the paths and itineraries of the individual helps us understand the knowledge that these figures likely brought to the table, and reveals more broadly some of the dynamics that local traditions could have added to our context.

The authors do not feel the need to define or explain what a microhistory is too much, only having a short description. This could be due to the acceptance that microhistory had achieved in the field since Levi 20 years prior. Looking at the struggles of Haiti, Saint-Domingue, and the colonists and slaves through the lens of an individual and her relationships with others certainly makes the wider events more graspable, more human. The authors really demonstrate what is possible, and have built from Levi and Ginzburg substantially, in such a way that the microhistory method is very familiar, demonstrating its importance today.

[Fernanda Ferreira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uma investigação de fôlego. Escrito de modo que muitas vezes se coloca mais como uma narrativa instigante da afro-diáspora do que uma pesquisa e suas estruturação e vocabulário acadêmico. Isso pessoalmente me incomoda um pouco, fico temerosa de ser levada pela narrativa e me perder no conteúdo, mas não cria falsos encaixes, demonstra as contradições com nitidez, mas com certa ludicidade. Essa escrita também possibilita que esse livro seja muito mais lido do que só por aqueles que se inserem no mundo acadêmico.
Páginas e páginas de referência documental e bibliográfica, realmente uma volta ao mundo seguindo o desenrolar dessa trajetória.

[Geraldine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good theory poorly executed. The history was good, but too much jumping around, and too much academic jargon. I understand it is mostly an academic text, but it still is an interesting topic so could have been better written.

[Mike Emett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Required reading for Atlantic History graduate P.h.D. reading seminar

[Barbara Gregorich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two years ago I heard Rebecca J. Scott, co-author of this book, talk on the subject matter at the Chicago Humanities Festival. Of all the talks I heard that year, hers was the one which stayed with me. She spoke of the subject matter of this book and how she and Jean M. Hebrard came to research it.

This is the story of an African woman captured in West Africa somewhere along the Senegal River, enslaved, and taken to the French colony of Saint-Domingue (which would soon rebel against both French colonialism and slavery), some time in the mid 1780s. Freedom Papers tells the story of this woman, called Rosalie, and her daughter, Elizabeth, who traveled with a godmother to New Orleans at the age of ten. The story continues with Elizabeth, her husband, and their six sons. The authors' thesis is that Rosalie and her descendants learned how to use the power of written documents to achieve what levels of freedom or near-freedom that they could: papers of manumission, marriage, baptisms, citizenship, and others.

Reading the book refreshed my memory of the talk, and provided details that the talk couldn't. I found this a worthwhile read, though the writing is dry. And I was disappointed that the story stopped in 1945, even though numerous descendants of Rosalie live in many different parts of the world today. I wanted to know why the story stopped, but the authors didn't address that issue.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not totally sure how much non-historians (i.e. most people) would love this book, but I found it pretty fascinating. It's a tour de force of micro-history: using one story to explore greater themes in a society, or in this case, the Atlantic World in the nineteenth century. Scott and Hebrard trace one mixed-race family across multiple generations and many countries. Beginning with Rosalie, enslaved in Senegal in the late 18th century, who is sold in Saint Domingue, which then becomes Haiti, the authors trace Rosalie's mixed-race child to Cuba, then New Orleans, then France, and her children who return to New Orleans, move to Mexico, and end up in Belgium. One descendant is part of the Belgian resistance in WW II and becomes a political prisoner under the Nazis, meeting her death in Ravensbruck. Scott and Hebrard were lucky in finding a couple of the documents that allowed them to tell this story, but they must also have been incredibly dogged researchers in multiple languages. They also had to cover the history of about six different countries to flesh out the context. Bottom line: impressive.

[Fran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book that traces a mixed race family that lived in the US, France and Belgium during the nineteenth century from the matriarch, a freed slave from what is now Haiti. Given the importance of documents to freed slaves and their descendants during the nineteenth century, the authors were able to trace much of the family's history. Content is fascinating, but the writing style is dense, why four stars, not five.

[Sandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

A dense book with lots of names and dates and document references. Quite a thorough history, but not suitable for leisure reading.

*Required reading for History 227 (race and ethnicity)

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Microhistory as it should be done. I want to write this sort of book someday.