Rebecca J. Scott

In Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery, Rebecca Scott writes that at the most basic level, violence played a key role in the transition from slavery to freedom in Louisiana through the Civil War. While Louisiana was under Union occupation, the presence of black soldiers played a key role in encouraging freedpeople to agitate for their rights. Later, freedpeople insisted on their public rights in order to assert themselves after years in which white authorities denied them. Even in the face of armed resistance and massacres, like that at the Colfax Courthouse, African Americans remained committed to asserting their basic rights in a free Louisiana. Finally, the elections of 1874 and 1876 demonstrated the deeply partisan nature of Louisiana politics through intimidation and opportunism.
Scott writes, “In central Cuba, the interplay of free, enslaved, and smei-enslaved (including indentured Chinese workers) was almost continuous.” Slaves were in constant contact with “Chinese contract laborers who worked at the same tasks but under different rules.” Later, during the Ten Years’ War, the Spanish military treated free blacks and indentured Chinese equally, as a force for labor or a “runaway” group to be captured and put to work. Later, the 1887 census included the Chinese as persons of color. By the very presence, Chinese laborers offered an alternative to slave labor and the roles available to free blacks. Following emancipation, Chinese Cubans could act as electors in the new post-slavery society, demonstrating their assimilation.
Scott writes, “The key legacy in both Cuba and Louisiana was a contest over the right to respect and resources, which increasingly encompassed a contest over the boundaries of citizenship…Louisiana is distinguished from Cuba by the ways in which the scope of this contest came to be successively narrowed.” In Louisiana, “the effects of constitutional disenfranchisement were at once practical, symbolic, and punitive, and they were deigned to undercut alliances along and across class lines – permanently.” African Americans’ political gains resulted from a war that divided the white citizens of Louisiana and the nation, so their disenfranchisement helped to reunify whites in the North and South. In Cuba, the dominant national narrative of a raceless society worked to undermine attempts to unify along racial lines. While this limited Cubans of color from forming their own alliances, as in the case of the Independent Party of Color, “voting and officeholding by men of color were now commonplace” after 1898. Scott writes, “The official ideology of the rebels portrayed racism as a legacy of slavery and colonialism, destined to be eliminated in a democratic Cuban republic.”… (more)

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.… (more)