The greatest change in the legal documents Rebecca Scott covers in Freedom Papers is their authorship. People in power wrote the earliest documents over the family members, either owners during their enslavement, or authorities during their migration. Beginning with Rosalie, Scott writes, “Reconstructing the life story of a woman considered by law to be without rights requires turning to written records generated by those who laid claim to a property interest in her person. For Rosalie of the Poulard nation, five documents attest to her existence in Saint-Domingue.” Rosalie’s descendants were able to take more control over their legal identities, not only writing their own documents, but defining their racial identities on their own terms. While not a legal document, Rosalie’s grandson Édouard Tinchant’s article in La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orléans was a public letter in which he “crafted a claim to a U.S. citizenship of his own imagining” in which “citizenship should carry with it not only the full political rights that were being refused by the 1864 Louisiana Constitutional Convention, but also a version of the ‘public rights’ invoked by liberal constitutional theorists in Europe.” Both the legal and public documents spoke to the creation of identity, whether based on race or nationality.
Broadly speaking, each of Rosalie’s descendants immigrated to other countries for increased social mobility or economic opportunity. Rosalie first joined those fleeing the chaos in Saint-Domingue and landed in Cuba before returning to Saint-Domingue, now known as Haiti, due to Cuban fears surrounding refugees importing revolutionary ideas from the new republic. From there, Rosalie followed family to Louisiana. They found a lack of opportunity, leading Rosalie’s grandson Édouard to describe his father’s relocation to France, where, “in sharp contrast to Louisiana’s multiple restrictions on persons of color, the French Civil Code of 1804 and its 1814 Constitutional Charter established the formal legal equality – within metropolitan France – of all citizens.” Later, a fungal infiltration that affected their crops drove Rosalie’s daughter and son-in-law to return to the United States, where they developed a cigar-making business, capitalizing on family connections to “the Gulf and the Caribbean for the tobacco, Europe for the consumers and perhaps later the manufactory.” A later move to Veracruz also served to create more economic opportunities for the family.
Scott and Hébrard often have to fill in the gaps in the public record with a discussion of the general conditions in a country at a specific time or examples from other people’s lives who were in similar situations as the various members of the Vincent/Tinchant family. While this does represent a measure of educated guessing, without it, the story would take no more than fifty pages to tell. In the case of Rosalie, the authors themselves admit that only five documents attest to her existence in Saint-Domingue. If they only followed her immediate family’s movements, Scott and Hébrard could not introduce background on Europe and the Gulf Coast that shaped how certain opportunities became available for Rosalie’s children and grandchildren. The authors themselves characterize the monograph “as micro-history set in motion.” Though Scott and Hébrard follow this one family, they seek to examine the dynamic changes occurring in the Caribbean, along the Gulf Coast, and in Europe and how all of these were connected. By that measure, they were successful. ( )