They Wouldn’t Allow Us to Use Daddy’s Last Name: A Family Historian’s Curiosity Leads to Revolutionary Results

Posted in Articles, History, Louisiana, Media Archive, United States on 2013-07-29 01:20Z by Steven

They Wouldn’t Allow Us to Use Daddy’s Last Name: A Family Historian’s Curiosity Leads to Revolutionary Results

Bayou Talk Newspaper
Volume 25, Number 7 (July 2013)
pages 1-8

Anita R. Paul

Most family history researchers know that surnames are an important key to finding ancestors. They also know that names can often lead to dead ends due to misspellings and other misinformation. For Michael N. Henderson, a retired Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy, the spelling of a family surname sparked his curiosity and eventually led to a nearly 30-year journey to uncover a hidden truth about his Louisiana roots.

“It all began when I was a kid,” recalls Henderson, a native of Algiers—a neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana—who now lives near Atlanta, Georgia. “I asked my mom why her mother’s maiden name was spelled Mathieu instead of Matthew.” She credited it to the family being Louisiana Creole and simply chose to spell the surname that way. Fortunately for Henderson, that answer did not satisfy him, so he sought a more suitable explanation. In the midst of his searching, which became a hobby and eventually an obsession during much of his naval career, he uncovered one fact after another about his family’s history and soon became the family historian, a role that did not always meet with genuine excitement from his relatives.

“When you start digging into the past, some family members get nervous. They’re afraid you might uncover some deep, dark secret that’s been buried for generations,” Henderson explains. Others, mostly those of the younger generation, simply shrugged off Henderson’s many attempts to share his findings. “My nieces and nephews have never been keen on listening to my ancestral stories, except, of course, when the time came for a school project.”

As his genealogy research continued, a conversation with a distant cousin opened a genealogical can of worms that caused Henderson to delve deeply into the unique three-tiered social structure of French and Spanish colonial Louisiana. He studied the Code Noir (Black Code) that regulated relationships between Europeans, Native American and African enslaved people, and the distinct class of free people of color…

…Uncovering this relationship revealed the answer to a haunting statement that had been in Henderson’s family for generations: “They wouldn’t allow us to use Daddy’s last name.” As Henderson discovered, Agnes assumed the first name of her French consort, Mathieu, as her own surname and passed it on to their mixed-race children and the generations following. This answered the question about the spelling of Henderson’s maternal grandmother’s surname and consequently exposed the answer to the generations-long lament about not being able to use “Daddy’s last name.”…

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Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World

Posted in Anthologies, Books, History, Louisiana, Slavery, United States on 2013-06-24 20:28Z by Steven

Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World

University of Pennsylvania Press
November 2013
304 pages
6 x 9; 3 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-4551-6
E-book ISBN: 978-0-8122-0873-3

Edited by:

Cécile Vidal, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for North American Studies
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Located at the junction of North America and the Caribbean, the vast territory of colonial Louisiana provides a paradigmatic case study for an Atlantic studies approach. One of the largest North American colonies and one of the last to be founded, Louisiana was governed by a succession of sovereignties, with parts ruled at various times by France, Spain, Britain, and finally the United States. But just as these shifting imperial connections shaped the territory’s culture, Louisiana’s peculiar geography and history also yielded a distinctive colonization pattern that reflected a synthesis of continent and island societies.

Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World offers an exceptional collaboration among American, Canadian, and European historians who explore colonial and antebellum Louisiana’s relations with the rest of the Atlantic world. Studying the legacy of each period of Louisiana history over the longue durée, the essays create a larger picture of the ways early settlements influenced Louisiana society and how the changes of sovereignty and other circulations gave rise to a multiethnic society. Contributors examine the workings of empires through the examples of slave laws, administrative careers or on-the-ground political negotiations, cultural exchanges among masters, non-slave holders, and slaves, and the construction of race through sexuality, marriage and household formation. As a whole, the volume makes the compelling argument that one cannot write Louisiana history without adopting an Atlantic perspective, or Atlantic history without referring to Louisiana.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction. Louisiana in Atlantic Perspective—Cécile Vidal
  • PART I. EMPIRES
    • Chapter 1. “To Establish One Law and Definite Rules”: Race, Religion, and the Transatlantic Origins of the Louisiana Code Noir—Guillaume Aubert
    • Chapter 2. Making a Career out of the Atlantic: Louisiana’s Plume—Alexandre Dubé
    • Chapter 3. Spanish Louisiana in Atlantic Contexts: Nexus of Imperial Transactions and International Relations—Sylvia L. Hilton
  • PART II. CIRCULATIONS
    • Chapter 4. Slaves and Poor Whites’ Informal Economies in an Atlantic Context—Sophie White
    • Chapter 5. “Un Nègre nommè [sic] Lubin ne connaissant pas Sa Nation”: The Small World of Louisiana Slavery—Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec
  • PART III. INTIMACIES
    • Chapter 6. Caribbean Louisiana: Church, Métissage, and the Language of Race in the Mississippi Colony during the French Period—Cécile Vidal
    • Chapter 7. Private Lives and Public Orders: Regulating Sex, Marriage, and Legitimacy in Spanish Colonial Louisiana—Mary Williams
    • Chapter 8. Atlantic Alliances: Marriage among People of African Descent in New Orleans—Emily Clark
  • Conclusion. Beyond Borders: Revising Atlantic History—Sylvia R. Frey
  • Notes
  • List of Contributors
  • Index
  • Acknowledgments
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Louisiana Repeals Black Blood Law

Posted in Articles, Law, Louisiana, Media Archive, United States on 2013-06-05 15:18Z by Steven

Louisiana Repeals Black Blood Law

The New York Times
1983-07-06

Frances Frank Marcus, Special to the New York Times

NEW ORLEANS, July 5—  Gov. David C. Treen today signed legislation repealing a Louisiana statute that established a mathematical formula to determine if a person was black.

The law establishing the formula, passed by state legislators in 1970, said that anyone having one thirty-second or less of “Negro blood” should not be designated as black by Louisiana state officials.

The legislator who wrote the law repealing the formula, Lee Frazier, a 34-year-old Democrat representing a racially mixed district in New Orleans, said recently that he had done so because of national attention focused on the law by a highly publicized court case here.

The case involves the vigorous but thus far unsuccessful efforts of Susie Guillory Phipps, the wife of a well-to-do white businessman in Sulphur, La., to change the racial description on her birth certificate from “col.,” an abbreviation for “colored,” to “white.”…

…Mr. Frazier said that in the future it would be possible for a person to change birth records by sworn statements from family members, doctors and others.

He said his research showed that the designation of race on official documents in this area from the late 1700’s and that its purpose was “to keep control over land ownership, to keep the landowner from having to share his land with his illegitimate children who were family members.”

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What Makes you Black?

Posted in Articles, History, Law, Louisiana, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-06-05 14:12Z by Steven

What Makes you Black?

Ebony Magazine
Volume 38, Number 3 (January 1983)
pages 115-118

Vague definition of race is the basis for court battles

Imagine going to get a passport so you and your spouse can take a vacation in South America. Its all a formality, you reason; people just want to make sure you’re who and what you say you are. You fill out the form and, to your bewilderment, a clerk tells you she can’t give you the passport because you’re of a different race than what you claim to be.

It happened to 48-year-old Susie Guillory Phipps, who lives in Sulphur, La. She had been thinking all along that she was White, but her birth certificate indicated she was “Colored.”

“I was sick,” she later told reporters. “I couldn’t believe it.” She said she went home crying and told her husband she didn’t want to take the trip. It was the beginning of a 5-year court battle to get the State of Louisiana to change her birth certificate and the certificates of her six brothers and sisters. She also wants the states racial classification law declared unconstitutional. The law, approved by the Louisiana legislature in 1970, states that a person is Black if he or she has “1/32 Negro blood.” Louisiana is the only state with a race classification law.

So far, Mrs. Phipps has spent some $20,000 to change her racial status to White. A genealogist hired by the state has concluded she is 3/32 Black.

Mrs. Phipps’ case (Susie Smith vs. the State of Louisiana), which might be decided very soon, is the latest of a number of similar cases that have occurred over the years. A celebrated case developed during the 1920s when Leonard Kip Rhinelander failed to get an annulment of his marriage to Alice Jones, who admitted to having “some Negro blood.” Rhinelander, the son of millionaire society leader Philip Rhinelander, contended his wife deceived him about her race before their marriage. In a later case, Ralph Dupas, a prizefighter who fought and lost to Sugar Ray Robinson in 1963, was barred from fighting Whites in Louisiana in the late 1950s when word surfaced that he was Black. (Louisiana at that time didn’t allow interracial athletics). He failed in his bid to prove he was White. Earlier, another Louisiana prizefighter, Bernard Docusen, wasn’t allowed to fight Whites in Louisiana because of reports that his mother was Black. He was later recognized as White when it was discovered his mother was White.

Just what does make a person Black? The fundamental problem here, according to experts interviewed for and cited in this article, is that there is no generally accepted scientific definition of race. Another related problem is the inconsistency in the classification of people in the three traditional racial groupings — Negroid, Caucasoid and Mongoloid. In current practice, Black genes define and dominate White genes. One Black ancestor, for example, makes an Anglo-Saxon or a Chinese person “Black.” But, for some strange reason, the rule doesn’t work the other way, and one Chinese or Anglo-Saxon ancestor doesn’t make a Black person Chinese or Anglo-Saxon. And it is interesting to note that if the “one-Black” rule were applied to the other races, the racial composition of the United States would change markedly. Dr. Munro Edmonson, a professor of anthropology at Tulane University, says the average American White person has five percent traceable Black genes and the average American Black person has 25 percent traceable White genes…

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Mixed Breeds Are Not Negroes and May Mingle With Whites

Posted in Articles, Law, Louisiana, Media Archive, United States on 2013-06-05 04:39Z by Steven

Mixed Breeds Are Not Negroes and May Mingle With Whites

The Weekly Messenger
St. Martinville, Louisiana
1910-04-30
page 3, column 2
Source: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

The Daily Picayune

The Supreme Court of Louisiana by a vote of three to two, Justices Nicholls and Land dissenting, has decided that the state law prohibiting concubinage between the races in Louisiana affects only pure-blooded whites and pure-blooded blacks. Where either party is of mixed blood there is no prohibition under the law. It follows under this decision that were persons are charged with concubinage, and either pleads in defense that he or she is of mixed blood, which would bar prosecution, it will be incumbent on the state to prove the purity of the race, a problem vast more difficult than the proving of race mixture.

Justice Land, in his dissenting opinion, declares that under the decision of the court, the Gay-Shattuck law, which forbid whites and negroes to be served with liquors at the same bar, can apply to whites and blacks, and the prohibition does not extend to mulattoes to griffes, who are the offspring of negroes and mulattoes, and they have a right to be served at the same bars and tables with whites. Obviously between whites and griffes is entirely lawful under the decision of the court. Justice Land takes occasion to express bit gratification that the Legislators of Louisiana will be in session in the course of a few days and indulges the hope that the limitations imposed in these laws, which seek to distinguish between the races, will so define and establish the distinguishing terms as that nothing will be left to interference or conjecture.

It is inevitable that confusion must occur when the law forbidding the inter marriage of the races makes use of the terms “white” and “colored” while the statute prohibiting concubinage employs the distinctions “white” and “negro.” There seems to be no agreement by the lexicographers in the matter of distinctions. Webster, edition of 1910, use “negro” and “colored” indifferently, and the Century, while defining the negro race according to specific physical characteristics, uses the word “colored” with apparent indifference, as does also the Standard Dictionary. There are more negroes in the Southern part of the United States than in any other country on the globe which has a propendorating white population, and here, in all political and social distinctions, the negros and the mixed blood have always been reckoned together, and if these conditions are to be changed there should be fixed and definite terms by which these new conditions are to be established, and not left to the inferences and conjectures of a judicial tribunal, do matter how able and learned in the law its members.

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My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civil War Era

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Louisiana, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2013-06-04 20:42Z by Steven

My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civil War Era

LSU Press
April 2001 (Originally published in 1872)
184 pages
5.50 x 9.00 inches
3 halftones
ISBN10: 0807126896, ISBN13: 9780807126899

Jean-Charles Houzeau (1820-1888)

Edited by David C. Rankin
Translated by Gerard F. Denault

When Belgian scientist Jean-Charles Houzeau arrived in New Orleans in 1857, he was disturbed that America, founded on the principle of freedom, still tolerated the institution of slavery. In late 1864, he became managing editor of the New Orleans Tribune, the first black daily newspaper published in the United States. Ardently sympathetic to the plight of Louisiana’s black population and reveling in the fact that his dark complexion led many people to assume he was black himself, Houzeau passionately embraced his role as the Tribune’s editor and principal writer. My Passage at the New Orleans “Tribune,” first published in Belgium in 1872, is Houzeau’s memoir of the four years he spent as both observer and participant in the drama of Reconstruction.

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Louisiana’s “Creoles of Color”: Ethnicity, Marginality, and Identity

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, History, Louisiana, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-06-04 18:44Z by Steven

Louisiana’s “Creoles of Color”: Ethnicity, Marginality, and Identity

Social Science Quarterly
Volume 73 Issue 3, September 1992
pages 615-

James H. Dormon, Alumni Distinguished Professor of History and American Studies
University of Southwestern Louisiana

This article traces the ethnohistory of Creoles of color, beginning with an examination of the social-historical order out of which they emerged, and argues the case that Creole marginality has been the major determinant of the Creole ethnic experience. While it is impossible to pinpoint the precise timing of the ethnogenesis of the group, it was certainly in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, during which years the group emerged as part of what the historian Laura Foner has termed a “three-caste social system” in colonial Louisiana. In the eighteenth century the dominant Louisiana population–the “hegemonic” population in current usage–was that of the white European elites (or those descending directly from such elites): large landowners and planter/merchants along with colonial officials, both civil and military. The increasingly large slave population, normally perceived by Europeans as African provided the agricultural labor deemed essential to staple crop production. Within the colonial social order, blacks were separated from the white population by caste lines written into law and generally enforced by social as well as legal sanctions. Yet from the beginning, and despite legal provisions forbidding the practice, whites and blacks established sexual contact, producing offspring that shared the genes of both parents.

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The House on Bayou Road: Atlantic Creole Networks in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Posted in Articles, History, Louisiana, Media Archive, United States on 2013-06-04 18:18Z by Steven

The House on Bayou Road: Atlantic Creole Networks in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

The Journal of American History
Volume 100, Issue 1 (June 2013)
pages 21-45
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jat082

Pierre Force, Professor of French and History
Columbia University

n 1813 a free man of color named Charles Decoudreau living in New Orleans went to court to repossess a house on the edge of town he had sold two years before to Charles Lamerenx, a white man from Saint Domingue. Despite being on opposite sides of a racial divide, the men and their families had much in common as “Atlantic creoles.” In this study, I test the meaning and explanatory power of Ira Berlin’s concept of “Atlantic creole” by telling the story of two families, one “black” and one “white,” whose paths briefly crossed in New Orleans in 1811.

Berlin’s work on “Atlantic creoles” is a powerful intervention in this field because it begins by telling a familiar story and proceeds with a much less familiar one. The familiar story is that of Africans being forcibly taken to America and stripped of their African identities, and developing a new creole or African American culture that was the product of their experience as slaves working in the plantations. Important as this story is, it captures “only a portion of the history of black life in colonial North America, and that imperfectly.” The story as usually told begins with an unadulterated “African” identity that was somehow erased or transformed by the experience of slavery and gave way to a creole identity that was a mix of various African, European, and Native American components. Inverting this story of origins, Berlin shows that the Africans of the charter generations were always already creole: their experiences and attitudes “were more akin to that of confident, sophisticated natives than of vulnerable newcomers.” Atlantic creoles originated in the encounters between Europeans and Africans on the western coast of Africa, starting in the fifteenth century, well before Christopher Columbus sailed to America. In a few coastal enclaves, …

Read or purchase the article here.

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The Reading Life: Authors Emily Clark, Bill Loehfelm And Dennis Formento

Posted in Audio, History, Interviews, Louisiana, Media Archive, United States on 2013-05-11 21:38Z by Steven

The Reading Life: Authors Emily Clark, Bill Loehfelm And Dennis Formento

The Reading Life
WWNO 89.9FM
University of New Orleans
2013-04-23

Susan Larson, Host

Emily Clark, Clement Chambers Benenson Professor of American Colonial History; Associate Professor of History
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana


Emily Clark

This week on The Reading Life, Susan talks with Tulane professor Emily Clark, whose new book is The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World, and novelist Bill Loehfelm, whose amazing new thriller, set in New Orleans, is The Devil in Her Way.

Listen to the interview with Dr. Clark  (00:00:50-00:12:06) here. Download the interview here.

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The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World

Posted in Books, History, Louisiana, Media Archive, Monographs, United States, Women on 2013-05-05 23:21Z by Steven

The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World

University of North Carolina Press
April 2013
296 pages
6.125 x 9.25
16 halftones, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4696-0752-8

Emily Clark, Clement Chambers Benenson Professor of American Colonial History; Associate Professor of History
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Exotic, seductive, and doomed: the antebellum mixed-race free woman of color has long operated as a metaphor for New Orleans. Commonly known as a “quadroon,” she and the city she represents rest irretrievably condemned in the popular historical imagination by the linked sins of slavery and interracial sex. However, as Emily Clark shows, the rich archives of New Orleans tell a different story. Free women of color with ancestral roots in New Orleans were as likely to marry in the 1820s as white women. And marriage, not concubinage, was the basis of their family structure. In The Strange History of the American Quadroon, Clark investigates how the narrative of the erotic colored mistress became an elaborate literary and commercial trope, persisting as a symbol that long outlived the political and cultural purposes for which it had been created. Untangling myth and memory, she presents a dramatically new and nuanced understanding of the myths and realities of New Orleans’s free women of color.

Contents

  • PROLOGUE: Evolution of a Color Term and an American City’s Alienation
  • CHAPTER ONE: The Philadelphia Quadroon
  • CHAPTER TWO: From Ménagère to Placée
  • CHAPTER THREE: Con Otros Muchos: Marriage
  • CHAPTER FOUR: Bachelor Patriarchs: Life Partnerships across the Color Line
  • CHAPTER FIVE: Making Up the Quadroon
  • CHAPTER SIX: Selling the Quadroon
  • EPILOGUE: Reimagining the Quadroon
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Acknowledgements
  • Index

PROLOGUE: Evolution of a Color Term and an American City’s Alienation

Let the first crossing be of a, pure negro, with A pure white. The unit of blood of the issue being composed of the halt of that of each parent, Will be a/2 + A/2. Call it, for abbreviation, h (half blood).

Let the second crossing be of h and B, the blood of the issue will be h/2 + B/2 or substituting for h/2 its equivalent, it will be a/4 + A/4 + B/2 call it q (quarteroon) being ¼ negro blood.

Thomas Jefferson, 1815

Travelers have long packed a bundle of expectations about what they will encounter when they visit New Orleans. Long before jazz was born, another presumably native-born phenomenon drew visitors to the Crescent City and preoccupied the American imagination. The British traveler Edward Sullivan observed succinctly in 1852,”I had heard a great deal of the splendid figures and graceful dancing of the New Orleans quadroons, and I certainly was not disappointed.” Sullivan’s fellow country-woman Harriet Martineau provided more-disapproving intelligence on New Orleans quadroons some fifteen years earlier: “The Quadroon girls of New Orleans are brought up by their mothers to be what they have been; the mistresses of white gentlemen.” Frederick Law Olmsted observed of the city’s quadroon women just five years before the outbreak of the Civil War that they were “one, among the multitudinous classifications of society in New Orleans, which is a very peculiar and characteristic result of the prejudices, vices, and customs of the various elements of color, class, and nation, which have been there brought together.”

The Civil War did not much alter advice to visitors about New Orleans quadroons. The “southern tour” in a guidebook published in 1866 includes New Orleans quadroons in its itinerary. Admitting that “the foregoing sketch of society and social life in New Orleans, I need hardly remind my reader, was penned long before the late rebellion had so changed the aspect of every thing throughout the South,” the entry reassures its readers that they may nonetheless expect to encounter survivals of the quadroon in the postbellum city. “The visitor will, however, be surprised as well as delighted at the extent to which the manners and customs of ‘the old regime’ are still perpetuated among the descendants of the early settlers in the Crescent City.” Twenty-first century travel literature upholds the practice of enticing tourists to New Orleans with tales of the quadroon. “The quadroons (technically, people whose racial makeup was one-quarter African) who met here were young, unmarried women of legendary beauty,” a popular travel website explains. “A gentleman would select a favorite beauty and, with her mother’s approval, buy her a house and support her as his mistress, ‘the entry continues, concluding with a guarantee that traces of this peculiar tradition could be found only in one place in America. “This practice, known as plaçage, was unique to New Orleans at the time.”

Passages like these give the impression that New Orleans was the sole place in America where one could encounter beautiful women produced by a specific degree of procreation across the color line, women whose sexual favors were reserved for white men. The reality was, of course, more complicated than that. Women whose racial ancestry would have earned them the color term quadroon lived everywhere in nineteenth-century America.‘ Today, the most well known of them is undoubtedly Virginia-born Sally Hemings, who bore her owner, Thomas Jefferson, seven children. Sally Hemings was the daughter of white planter John Wales and an enslaved woman he owned named Betty Hemings. Betty was the daughter of an enslaved woman named Susannah and a white slave-ship captain named John Hemings. Sally Hemings came to Monticello as the property of Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wales Skelton, who was, like Sally, the daughter of John Wales.

Sally Hemings ancestry qualified her as a quadroon under Thomas Jefferson’s own rubric, but when he sat down in 1815 to clarify to an acquaintance the legal taxonomy of race in his home state of Virginia, he did not take the living woman best known to him as his example. Instead, he eschewed the vivid register of language and enlisted the symbolic representation of algebra to illustrate the genetic origins of the physical and legal properties of the woman who bore most of his children and was his deceased wife’s half sister. In a virtuosic and bizarre display of what one scholar has called a “calculus of color,” Jefferson presented a tidy mathematical formula to define the race and place ot the quadroon. The complicated, messy identity and status of Sally Hemings were tamed by the comforting discipline of symbolic logic. Flesh and blood, love, shame, and fear were safely imprisoned within the cold confines of mathematics. Unnamed, Sally Hemings mother was reduced to a/2 + A/4 = h (half-blood). Sally herself was a/4 + A/4 + B/2. “Call it q (quateroon) being ¼ negro blood,” Jefferson instructed (see Figure 1).

This formulaic representation renders race as a kind a chemical compound comprising elements that act on one another in ways that multiply, mix, or cancel one another out to produce predictable results. Just as the combination of the elements of hydrogen and oxygen in the proportions represented by the formula 2H2 + O2 = 2H2O will always produce H2O—water—Jefferson’s calculus of race was meant to be precise, immutable, reliable, knowable. With detached precision, Jefferson produced theoretical mulattos and quadroons devoid of the untidy human elements of desire and power that destabilized the living expressions of his mathematical calculations. He may have been driven to abstraction by the disturbing situation of his own reproductive life, but larger historical currents probably played as important a role in his recourse to symbolic logic.

More than two decades before he drafted the chilling equations of 1815, Jefferson produced his well-known observations on race in Notes on the State of Virginia. The black people Jefferson references in Notes are not abstract symbols but corporeal examples, their differences from “whites” mapped on their bodies and projected onto their sensibilities. The observations in Notes are evocative, almost sensual passages, dense with palpable detail. Here, race is human, organic, expressive, a thing whose qualities can be described, but whose essence cannot be defined. Race slips the porous boundaries of words and threatens to overwhelm with its immeasurable meaning. Jefferson’s calculus of 1815, by contrast, imprisons race within the abstract forms and structures of mathematics, subjecting it to universal rules that prescribe and predict comforting certainties that can be anticipated, managed, even controlled.

The dissonance between Jefferson’s qualitative disquisition on blacks in Notes on the State of Virginia and his algebraic calculations of 1815 begs questions about more than the incongruities in the mind and life of one man. It points to a widespread and enduring tension in the American imagination over the symbolic expression and meaning of race that intensified and accelerated with the outbreak of widespread, violent slave rebellion in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791. Jefferson’s own disquiet over the events that convulsed Saint-Domingue for the next thirteen years is clear in his correspondence, public and private. He spared his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph none of his fearful assessment in the early months of the violence. “Abundance of women and children come here to avoid danger,” he told her in November of 1791, having written to her earlier that the slaves of Saint-Domingue were “a terrible engine, absolutely ungovernable.” He gave lull vent to the enormity of his fears to his colleague James Monroe two years later. “I become daily more and more convinced that all the West India Island will remain in the hands of the people of colour, and a total expulsion of the whites sooner or later take place,” he wrote in the summer of 1793. “It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of the Potomac), have to wade through and try to avert them.” Later that year he wrote to Governor William Moultrie of South Carolina to warn him that “two Frenchmen, from St. Domingo also, of the names of Castaing and La Chaise, are about setting out from this place [Philadelphia] for Charleston, with design to excite an insurrection among the negroes.” These men were neither former African captives nor French émigrés dedicated to the cause of racial equality, but the products of sexual relations between the two. “Castaing,” Jefferson advised Moultrie, “is described as a small dark mulatto, and La Chaise as a Quarteron, of a tall fine figure.”

Jefferson and his contemporaries did more than worry about the Haitian Revolution and the mixed-race people who seemed bent on spreading it. They acted with new urgency to insulate themselves from the threat of slave rebellion and racial reordering in the Atlantic world by means of policy and ideas. The revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that culminated in the establishment of the slave-free black republic of Haiti in 1804 produced a new urgency in attempts to define and manage race throughout the Atlantic world. Race was the basis for the system of chattel slavery that fueled the Atlantic economy. If if could not be imaginatively codified and its mechanism understood, manipulated, controlled, slavery was imperiled. Jefferson’s algebra was one of a range of symbolic strategies Americans deployed in response to racial anxieties magnified by the Haitian Revolution. The American quadroon was another. Both were equally fanciful reductions of a complex reality.

The term quadroon was primarily descriptive for most of the eighteenth century, a color term applied to people whose genetic makeup was imagined to have been one-fourth African. Spanish and Spanish colonial artists began to attach qualitative meaning to the color terms in the second half of the eighteenth century in a genre known as casta painting. Casta paintings comprise multiple panels, usually in multiples of four, in each of which a man and woman of different races are shown with their child or children. Each scene is labeled with the color terms for the racial taxonomy being depicted. For example, a panel portraying a Spanishman and a black woman with their child is labeled “de Español y Negra: nace Mulata.” Such couplings between people imagined as occupying racial extremes were rendered in pejorative ways. As one scholar has noted, “The message is clear: certain mixtures—particularly those of Spaniards or Indians with Blacks—could only lead to the contraction of debased sentiments, immoral proclivities, and a decivilized state” (see Figure 2).

Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, a jurist and naturalist from the French Antilles, betrayed his anxiety over the uncontrollable nature of interracial procreation in a spectacularly detailed 1796 racial taxonomy that provides twenty combinations that produce a quadroon (see Figure 3). Elsewhere, he portrayed mixed-race women as dangerous beauties who seduced French men away from their proper loyalties and paved the way for the overthrow of the plantation regime in Saint-Domingue. Other late eighteenth-century writers likewise gendered the term quadroon and linked it to irresistible beauty. In his 1793 account of Surinam, John Gabriel Stedman succumbs to the powerful charms of a “young and beautiful Quadroon girl” and fathers a son on her.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Americans imagined the beautiful, seductive quadroon as a foreigner in the Caribbean who did not occupy American territory. In fact, of course, the quadroon was already well established in the bosom of the young republic under circumstances such as those at Monticello. This homegrown American quadroon was unacknowledged, however, both literally and figuratively. She, like Sally Hemings, remained in the shadows for nearly two centuries while Americans developed a complex symbolic strategy that kept her at an imaginative distance from the nations heart and heartland. When the Haitian Revolution drove thousands of mixed-race women from the Caribbean to American shores, the figure of the quadroon supplied something more accessible than algebraic abstraction to neutralize the threat embedded in mixed-race people. The foreign female of color who migrated to the United States from the blood-soaked shores of Haiti could be mastered and controlled by white American men. This fantasy of sexual triumph supplied an antidote to the terror inspired by the image of Haiti’s virile black men poised to export their war on slavery to the American mainland.

The émigré quadroon offered other advantages in the symbolic management of Americas mixed-race population. She was more easily contained and controlled than her domestic counterpart could be. The endemic American quadroon was geographically pervasive, but a limited range could be imaginatively imposed on the invader, quarantining the threat she posed. Anxiety over the destabilizing potential of procreation across the color line was assuaged if America ignored its own interracial population and practices, preoccupied itself with the migrant quadroon, and found a way to cordon off the newcomer from the rest of the nation. When the Haitian Revolution first drove the quadroon from the Caribbean to the United States, she surfaced in Philadelphia and created quite a stir. By the 1810s, however, she had migrated away from the city so closely associated with America’s founding and attached herself to a site comfortingly located on the geographic margins of the young republic: New Orleans.

Sequestering the quadroon figuratively in the Crescent City shaped American identity and historical narrative in subtle but powerful ways, effectively turning New Orleans into a perpetual colonial space in the national imagination. The subjection of eroticized women of color by white men is one of the key mechanisms and metaphors of colonialism. Historians and theorists have disputed the view of colonialism as a project limited to the empires of Europe and Asia, exposing the colonial enterprises of the United States not only in overseas sites such as the Philippines but within the nation’s continental borders. Native Americans and Mexican-descended inhabitants of the American West and Southwest are now widely recognized as the objects of episodes of domestic colonialism. In such instances, “mainstream” America defined itself and its values against an “other,”—usually a feminine, colored other. Slavery and racism, too, fit easily into the concept of domestic colonialism. The nation’s symbolic use of the figure of the quadroon has produced yet another instance of domestic colonialism, rendering New Orleans an internal alien barred by this presumably exceptional feature of its past from claiming a comfortable berth in the national historical narrative.

The acceptance of New Orleans as exceptional and its exclusion from the normative common history imagined to have been shared by the rest of America paradoxically secure some of the most prominent building blocks of American exceptionalism. The presumption that the history of New Orleans and its quadroons is unique diverts the gaze of the rest of the nation away from its own unattractive Atlantic past, allowing it to remain firmly fixed on less-troubling founding scenes played out on the Mayflower and in Independence Hall. Americans have used the figure of the quadroon for more than two centuries not just to explain and explore race but to delineate an American past and polity that is as sanitized—and as unsatisfying—as Thomas Jefferson’s equation. The pages ahead tell the intertwined stories of the quadroon as symbol, the flesh-and-blood people this symbol was supposed to represent, and New Orleans, the city long imagined as Americas only home to both.

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