Claiming Gregoria Quesada’s mule: the meaning of freedom in Arimao and Caunao valleys, Cienfuegos, Cuba (1880- 1899)

A partir del litigio establecido a finales del siglo XIX entre Ciriaco Quesada, un esclavo emancipado, y Constantino Pérez, administrador del ingenio Santa Rosalía (en la región de Cienfuegos, Cuba), en este artículo nos adentramos en la microhistoria del mundo esclavo en conexión con la independencia cubana. Plantaremos la relación que se plantea entre autonomía personal e independencia nacional a la hora de analizar tanto los procesos de emancipación como los apoyos a la lucha por acabar con la dependencia colonial.From the trial established at the end of the 19th century between Ciriaco Quesada, an emancipated slave, and Constantino Pérez, administrator of Santa Rosalía mill (Cienfuegos region, Cuba), we consider from a microhistorical perspective the slave world in connection with Cuban independence. We will explore the relationship between personal autonomy and national independence when analyzing both the processes of emancipation and support for the struggle to end colonial dependence

The Provincial Archive as a Place of Memory: Confronting Oral and Written Sources on the Role of Former Slaves in the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98)

Few questions of historical interpretation are more passionately debated than those that have become intertwined with a national narrative and with the definition of how a country came to be what it is imagined to be. For the island nation of Cuba, political independence was forged in a lengthy series of wars against Spanish colonial rule, ending in a direct encounter with U.S. expansionism. Those wars began in 1868 and concluded in 1898 with the departure of Spanish troops, followed by a military occupation of the island by U.S. forces. In 1902 the arst Cuban republic emerged, but it was bound by the infamous Platt Amendment, which guaranteed to the United States a right of renewed intervention. The wars themselves were thus both a triumph and a defeat, a touchstone for national pride, and—in the outcome—a source of nationalist disappointment

\u27Stubborn and Disposed to Stand Their Ground\u27: Sugar Workers and the Dynamics of Collective Action in the Louisiana Sugar Bowl, 1863-87

There are several ways to fit these events into narratives of southern history in this period. The presence of black and white Knights of Labor organizers encourages one to view the strike as an unusually bold instance of the cautious policy of cross-racial alliance followed by the Knights in this period. The failure of the strike, and the inability of the Knights to protect their members from repression, might be seen to illuminate the limits of that policy. Alternatively, one can situate this conflict in the story of modernization and consolidation of industry, a Sugar Bowl variant on the Gilded Age pattern of large-scale capital investment and large-scale labor repression. On this view, the breaking of the strike eliminated an obstacle to the hegemony of a particular elite vision of the organization of production and of labor relations. Finally, one can understand the Thibodaux Massacre alongside the 1873 Colfax Massacre and the 1874 Battle of Canal Street in New Orleans, Louisiana\u27s macabre and outsized contributions to the violent imposition of white supremacy through a combination of local white mobilization and what Lawrence Powell calls silk-stocking vigilantism . This chapter is somewhat less ambitious. Rather than situate the events of November 1887 in one or another story about where Louisiana was headed, it will ask a different pair of questions: How could a strike of this magnitude ever get off the ground in a setting as hostile to African-American mobilization as the Louisiana sugar parishes in the 1880s; and what might we learn about the politics of freedom by looking at the decades that separated the end of slavery from the events of 1887? These questions are addressed on three levels: the structure of production on sugar estates; patterns of mobilization by African Americans in these parishes in the 1870s; and the social geography of the bayou country, with its implications for networks of support and points of vulnerability

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, encompassing 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

Under Color of Law: Siliadin v. France and the Dynamics of Enslavement in Historical Perspective

When is it appropriate to apply the term ‘slavery’—a concept that appears to rest on a property right—to patterns of exploitation in contemporary society, when no state extends formal recognition to the possibility of the ownership of property in a human being? Historians, who generally position themselves as enemies of anachronism, may be particularly resistant to the use of an ancient term to describe a twenty-first century reality. And jurists have often been understandably reluctant to employ a word whose historical meaning was so closely tied to a specific property relationship that has long since been abolished in Europe and the Americas

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

Discerning a Dignitary Offense: The Concept of Equal \u27Public Rights\u27 during Reconstruction

The mountain of modern interpretation to which the language of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution has been subjected tends to overshadow the multiple concepts of antidiscrimination that were actually circulating at the time of its drafting. Moreover, as authors on race and law have pointed out, Congress itself lacked any African American representatives during the 1866–68 moment of transitional justice. The subsequent development of a “state action doctrine” limiting the reach of federal civil rights enforcement, in turn, eclipsed important contemporary understandings of the harms that Reconstruction-era initiatives sought to combat. In contrast to the oblique language of the Fourteenth Amendment, a dignity-based legal theory of affirmative equal rights had by 1867 taken center stage in the cosmopolitan city of New Orleans. Activists formulated the concept of “public rights” as a claim to participation without discrimination in the entire sphere of “common life.” Elections for delegates to Louisiana\u27s Constitutional Convention of 1867–68, held under the broad suffrage mandated by the Military Reconstruction Acts, yielded a convention in which half of the members were men of African descent. Seeking the “impartial treatment of all men” in “[c]hurches, hotels, cars, steamboats, theaters, stores, even schools,” the convention crafted a Bill of Rights that affirmatively guaranteed to all of the state\u27s citizens “the same civil, political, and public rights,” independent of race or color. These innovations in the defense of human rights under law drew from a deep well of anti-caste thinking developed in domestic and transnational discussions conducted in both French and English, with participants from both sides of the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Cosmopolitan progressives such as Edouard Tinchant and Jean-Charles Houzeau worked with Louisiana-born activists including Louis Charles Roudanez, Simeon Belden, and Paul Trévigne to develop and advance the idea of public rights. Legislators crafted and passed state statutes that provided for civil penalties for violation of these rights, along with a private cause of action that could yield both actual and exemplary damages. Throughout the 1870s, however, advocates met a fierce white-supremacist counterattack, one that fused obstructionist litigation, vote suppression, and vigilante violence. A claim to equal treatment under the 1868 constitution was won in the state courts by Josephine Decuir, but was overturned in 1877 at the United States Supreme Court. With the ascent of the Democratic Party, white supremacists–including the lawyer/vigilante Robert Hardin Marr-took their seats on the state Supreme Court. By 1879, the public rights guarantees had been expunged from the state\u27s constitution. Nonetheless, for a crucial decade, the cross-racial politics of Louisiana had overcome many of the deficits of legitimacy that often undercut moments of transitional lawmaking. Delegates to the 1867–68 Constitutional Convention took the opportunity to spell out specific positive rights that they saw as essential to full civil freedom. And at the center, they placed their insistence that the state had an obligation to assure that men and women of color would not be subjected to forced indignity in the public sphere

Degrees of Freedom: Building Citizenship in the Shadow of Slavery

By seeing events in the past as part of a dynamically evolving system with a large, but not indefinite, number of degrees of freedom, we can turn our attention to the multiple possibilities for change, and to the ways in which societies that are initially similarly situated may go on to diverge very sharply. Thus it is, I will argue, with societies in the 19th century that faced the challenge of building citizenship on the ruins of slavery

She...Refuses to Deliver Up Herself as the Slave of Your Petitioner\u27: Émigrés, Enslavement, and the 1808 Louisiana Digest of the Civil Laws (Symposium on The Bicentennial of the Digest of 1808--Collected Papers)

Philosophically and juridically, the construct of a slave-a person with a price --contains multiple ambiguities. Placing the category of slave among the distinctions of persons established by law, the 1808 Digest of the Civil Laws Now in Force in the Termtoiy of Orleans recognized that slave is not a natural category, inhering in human beings. It is an agreement among other human beings to treat one of their fellows as property. But the Digest did not specify how such a property right came into existence in a given instance. The definition of a slave was simply ostensive, pointing toward rather than analyzing its object: A slave is one who is in the power of a master and belongs to him in such a manner, that the master may sell him... . In other words, the slave is the one who is held as a slave.\u2