Free Communities of Color and the Revolutionary Caribbean

Overturning, or Turning Back?

Robert D. Taber, Charlton W. Yingling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351168984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The tumult of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions provided new opportunities for free communities of color in the Caribbean, yet the fact that much scholarship places an emphasis on a few remarkable individuals—who pursued their freedom and respectability in a high-profile manner—can mask as much as it reveals. Scholarship on these individuals focuses on themes of mobility and resilience, and can overlook more subversive motives, underrepresent individuals who remained in communities, and elide efforts by some to benefit from racial hierarchies. In these free communities, displays of social, cultural, and symbolic capitals often reinforced systemic continuity and complicated revolutionary-era tensions among the long-free, enslaved, and recently-freed.

This book contains seven fascinating studies, which examine Haiti, Caracas, Cartagena, Charleston, Jamaica, France, the Netherlands Antilles, and the Swedish Caribbean. They explore how free communities of color deployed religion, literature, politics, fashion, the press, history, and the law in the Atlantic to defend their status, and at times define themselves against more marginalized groups in a rapidly changing world.

This volume demonstrates that problems of belonging, difference, and hierarchy were central to the operation of Caribbean colonies. Without recalibrating scholarship to focus on this, we risk underappreciating how the varied motivations and ambitions of free people of color shaped the decline of empires and the formation of new states. This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

Networks, tastes, and labor in free communities of color: Transforming the revolutionary Caribbean

Robert D. Taber and Charlton W. Yingling

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on free people of color in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions has focused on themes of mobility and resilience, with emphasis on the few remarkable individuals who pursued their freedom and respectability in imperially visible registers. These themes sometimes mask as much as they reveal. Mobility ignores those individuals who remain in place in families and communities, and resilience elides efforts by some free people of color to secure the benefits of the slave economy for themselves and their descendants. Often figures are assigned subversive motives or subaltern potential they perhaps would not recognize, when in fact their actions sometimes served to legitimate colonial order and strengthen racial divides by distancing themselves from more marginalized groups. Possible displays of respectability complicated revolutionary-era negotiations among the long free, the enslaved, and recently freed. Free people of color frequently defined margins from the enslaved rather than subvert them, including through largely unconsidered realms of taste or conspicuous consumption. This examination raises questions regarding extant conceptions of how Caribbean free people of color acquired and wielded social, cultural, and symbolic capitals. Perhaps more often than operating on socially progressive or latent revolutionary positions they evinced concern for systemic continuity. This essay, which introduces the following research that explores this topic, suggests new avenues of investigating these overlooked complexities in motivations and actions by free people of color, a population of disproportionate importance in the cultural politics of the revolutionary Caribbean. Without this recalibration, we risk underappreciating the legacy of late Caribbean colonialism, minimizing the context of revolutionary change and state formation, and misunderstanding the ambitions and centrality of free communities of color to these processes.

In the 45 years since Jack Greene and David Cohen published Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, scholarship on free people of color in the Caribbean has focused on themes of social mobility, political resilience, and economic opportunity.¹ These questions became sharper in the latter part of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (1763–1830), the period between the declaration of abolition in Saint-Domingue (1793) and three key moments: France’s recognition of the Haitian state (1825), the publication of David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in the United States (1829), and the dissolution of Gran Colombia and the death of Simón Bolívar (1830). During this period, the contested fact of Haitian independence loomed large in the Atlantic imagination, suggesting novel possibilities for people of color, but also prompting renewed reaction throughout the Atlantic.² Families and communities of color navigated these competing forces to provide for the next generation and to protect (not always successfully) often-modest civil rights victories. As the following analyses demonstrate, the monumental and the mundane, including efforts to secure gains through state recognition, reinforcement of color lines and colorisms, and the deployment – at times subversively, sometimes less so – of Eurocentric norms, shaped the tactics deployed by free families and communities of color during this time. These investigations, along with the analytical points in this introduction, suggest commonalities and their important variations among communities of color in the late revolutionary Atlantic, including their boundaries, their desires, and their complicated relationships with retreating Atlantic monarchies and with emerging states.

Discussion of free people of color during the Age of Revolutions has traditionally centered on a few remarkable individuals who pursued freedoms and respectability in imperially visible arenas such as the courtroom, church, press, and battlefield.³ As a few scholars have noted recently, singular cases of advancement sometimes masked as much as they revealed, in that such upward mobilities were not representative of improvements in group status and sometimes even led to the reinforcement of racial hierarchies. Not only do instances of mobility overshadow the more numerous individuals who remained in their communities, these individuals are often assigned analytical tones of subversive or subaltern potential. Such resilience might also elide the efforts by some free people of color to secure the benefits of colonialist culture or the slave economy for themselves and their descendants.⁴

Between 1793 and 1830, free people of color in the greater Caribbean and across the Atlantic played crucial roles on varying sides of debates over the future of slavery, the slave trade, paths to manumission, and political representation. At the same time, they participated in markets, fashions, religious observances, and circulations of Atlantic print culture.⁵ In the aggregate, the studies included here reevaluate the motivations, communities, possibilities, and constraints for free people of color during the late revolutionary period. This volume reconsiders free people of color in the Caribbean during the late Age of Revolutions to highlight themes of politicization in the wider Atlantic, including the Spanish Americas, the Netherlands Antilles, France, Haiti, Jamaica, and the United States, and linkages from these better-known locales to the underappreciated Swedish Caribbean. We contend that examining the mobilities of free people of color in and between their respective communities illuminates the opportunities of revolution, and that exploring the boundaries of revolutionary possibility clarifies the choices made by free people of color to fashion life for themselves, their families, and their neighbors. This examination raises questions regarding extant conceptions of how Caribbean free people of color acquired and wielded social, cultural, and symbolic capitals. This analysis also sheds light on the transition from cosmopolitanism to romanticism in the nineteenth-century Atlantic. We pursue these questions simply to better understand the complexities of this era, not to cast aspersions on those individuals and communities under analysis nor on those who have studied them.

Many scholars have turned their attention to “Atlantic Creoles,” Africans and people of African descent who adapted to European colonialist dicta as part of their navigation of structural constraints and their pursuit of personal benefit, subversion of the racial hierarchy, or mediation among cultural groups. Pioneered by Ira Berlin as people of “linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility,” the category “Atlantic creole” has been most developed in the scholarship of the eminent historian Jane Landers. Landers argues that their fluid identities and mutability were especially invaluable tools amid the political upheaval of the Age of Revolutions, that Atlantic Creoles were, “extraordinarily mobile, both geographically and socially,” and were neither defined or fully constrained by race and slavery.⁶ James Sweet praised this approach as having added to our understanding of African-descendants’ contributions to ideas and processes of revolution, enlightenment, independence, and society writ large. However, Sweet also criticized this approach as having conflated deeply ingrained African ethnicities of “Atlantic creoles” into an admittedly more nuanced narrative of “Western democratic triumphalism” and “Americanization” in which “Africans are often mechanically inserted in historical processes that are predetermined by the boundaries of European empire and colonialism.”⁷ While some of the historical figures that appear in this forum might meet the litmus for having been “Atlantic Creoles,” we argue that these figures might also fit on a range of free people of color who not only utilized but embraced and embodied European imperial, religious, economic, and cultural norms, all the while subverting those norms by expanding their inclusivity. In doing so for their own benefit, they at times risked legitimizing the colonialist societies in which they lived and latently reinforcing extant exclusionary practices against more marginalized sectors of color, and particularly the enslaved.

In fact, these forms of participation often served to strengthen and legitimize colonial orders. Possibilities for individual liberty and respectability masked the complicated revolutionary-era negotiations between those who had long been free and the enslaved or recently freed. Tactically speaking, some communities of color fashioned new narratives critical of these Eurocentric histories, while others had to navigate exclusionary state policies. Free people of color who were born free, or had long been emancipated, frequently sought to enhance distinctions and margins between slavery and their freedom rather than subvert them, including through the heretofore largely unconsidered realms of taste and conspicuous consumption.⁸ They did so through the same imperial channels that some scholars have, at times, cited as evidence of socially subversive positions. Recent advances in scholarship highlight revolutionary potential from these communities without adequately balancing that some communities of color also displayed a distinct concern for systemic continuity and the maintenance of profit, piety, and/or imperial protections of civil rights.

However, other communities faced more constrained opportunities, placing them in counter-point to Eurocentric norms. Many élite free people of color in the Caribbean adapted European hierarchies and sociocultural attitudes even as European societies retrenched from the limited cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century into the romanticism of the nineteenth century. In prevalent social history traditions influenced by structuralism or Marxian thought, free people of color perhaps appear more subversive and in common cause with their class rights or transgressing racial constraints. The lenses of post-structural, post-colonial, cultural studies, and micro-historical analyses complicate our understandings of personal choice, identity, and rational action.⁹

These complications raise several questions. How did the Age of Revolutions present an opportunity for turning over European domination, while turning back to convenient symbols and ingrained structures of European norms, whether as complicity, subversion, or some aspect of both? How did these groups refract a colonialist mentalité through language, education, literacy, dress, craftsmanship, residences, music, civic engagement, and militia service? And finally, did eighteenth-century cosmopolitanisms decline in reaction to the Haitian Revolution?

To pursue answers for these questions, we tip the historiographical pendulum toward analyses of cultural, social, and symbolic capitals. These free people of color under consideration – despite having been blocked from certain career paths due to their race – possessed a skillset, literacy, knowledge, or trade as bureaucrats, authors, artisans, musicians, and soldiers that distinguished them professionally and culturally from more oppressed groups of color. These successes facilitated contacts and the construction of networks among similarly distinguished free people of color through familial ties, churches, civic societies, commerce, and guilds. This mutual acquaintance and community recognition was at many times deliberate to their collective social benefit that implicitly reproduced inequality and exclusion across generations. In such cases, free people of color earned imperial protections often by cultivating connections and earning respect from white élites at the latent exclusion of more marginalized sectors of color – primarily slaves – against whom they contrasted their own trappings of “civility.” These individuals often exhibited their distinctions through a performance of European tastes and meanings, and rejection of black or African cultures, through their dress, residences, consumption, music, and language.¹⁰

The case studies presented here also call into question more specific political ramifications of a retreat from cosmopolitanism in France and the connections between the Napoleonic regime and the rise of Romanticism in the Atlantic. On an individual level, cosmopolitan attitudes in Europe enabled a few ambitious free people of color from the Caribbean to migrate to Europe and experience social mobility. For instance, Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was born on Guadeloupe to Nanon, an enslaved woman, and became a distinguished classical composer and soldier in Europe. This cosmopolitan space for individuals paved the way for the metropole welcoming colonials at a national level during the revolution. Jean-Baptiste Belley, an ex-slave born in Senegal, was elected from Saint-Domingue’s North Province to sit in the National Convention as French citizenship, built on cosmopolitan principles, reached its most universal rendering early in the revolution.¹¹ The rise and conquests of Napoleon triggered renewed feelings of patria in Spain and connections to the volk in Germany, and a significant tightening of requirements for French citizenship. The French state retrenched from cosmopolitanism and emancipation, barring free people of color from becoming citizens and bolstering pre-1794 laws policing their mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Networks, tastes, and labor in free communities of color: Transforming the revolutionary Caribbean
• 2 “A true vassal of the King”: Pardo literacy and political identity in Venezuela during the age of revolutions
• 3 Crafting freedom: Race and social mobility among free artisans of color in Cartagena and Charleston
• 4 Smugglers before the Swedish throne: Political activity of free people of color in early nineteenth-century St Barthélemy
• 5 Revolutionary narrations: Early Haitian historiography and the challenge of writing counter-history
• 6 A case of hidden genocide? Disintegration and destruction of people of color in Napoleonic Europe, 1799–1815
• 7 West meets east: Mixed-race Jamaicans in India, and the avenues of advancement in imperial Britain
• 8 “A mass of mestiezen, castiezen, and mulatten”: Contending with color in the Netherlands Antilles, 1750–1850
• Index