The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
The Books
Ramusio Map (1534). Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library
Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012)
By Kai Butler and CC Groves
From Rosalie, the enslaved African woman, to Edouard Tinchant, a Belgium-based cigar maker and Rosalie’s grandson, Freedom Papers tells the multi-generational story of a family whose members learned how to persevere in the face of slavery and racial discrimination. Rosalie was enslaved in Senegambia during the second half of the eighteenth century and taken to Saint-Domingue. She engaged in a relationship with a white Frenchman, Michel Vincent, and the two had a daughter, Elisabeth. As many residents of Saint-Domingue, Rosalie, Michel Vincent, and Elisabeth traveled to Cuba in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. Despite the fact that Rosalie was in possession of manumission papers signed by the late Michel Vincent, because the papers were not officially notarized her freedom was “paper thin.” Persecution of refugees in Cuba, forced Rosalie and Elisabeth to flee. Hoping to ensure Elisabeth’s future as a free woman, Rosalie sent her daughter to live in Louisiana with her godmother, the widow Aubert. Rosalie returned to Saint-Domingue.
In Louisiana, Elisabeth married Jaques Tinchant, a free man of African and European descent. The couple went on to have six sons and when discrimination and economic prospects in Louisiana brought hardship to the family, they moved to France to make their living as farmers and to be with Jacques Tinchant’s maternal family. Their eldest son stayed in Louisiana to maintain the family’s holdings. In France, the Tinchants found relative success in their agricultural endeavors until a succession of crop failures pushed them to move once again, this time to Antwerp, Belgium. The transatlantic careers of the Tinchant brothers took them to Louisiana, Belgium, Catalonia, and even Mexico. One of them, Edouard, the youngest and only son born in France, is Freedom’s Papers’s central character.
After he found himself involved in a few scandals in France, Edouard crossed the Atlantic to Mexico. From there, he went to Louisiana to work with his eldest brother, Louis. In Louisiana, Edouard found his footing as a political activist who fought for the Union army during the Civil War and spoke out against racial discrimination. Economic success, however, was evasive. His shortcomings in the cigar-making business forced him to relocate to Mobile, Alabama, where he finally became a successful cigar entrepreneur.
At this point, most of the Tinchant family resided in Belgium, and Edouard made a final Atlantic crossing to return to Antwerp after his father’s death. This is where the family’s story comes full circle, with Edouard writing a letter to famous Cuban General, Maximo Gomez, asking for his permission to put the General’s picture on his Belgium cigars. In his letter, Edouard hearkened back to his family’s history in Saint-Domingue and to his time fighting racial injustice in Louisiana. The odyssey of the Tinchant/Vincent family from slavery in Saint-Domingue to cigar-based prosperity in Antwerp, as exceptional as it may be, opens a window to the crucial importance of documentation (i.e. freedom papers) for freed slaves and their ancestors.
The Atlantic odyssey of the Vincents/Tinchants. Image from Scott and Hebrard, Freedom Papers.
The Vincent/Tinchant family tree. Image from Scott and Hebrard, Freedom Papers.
Letter from Édouard Tinchant to Máximo Gómez. Image from Scott and Hebrard, Freedom Papers.
As Rosalie’s experience showcases, manumission papers were incredibly difficult to acquire and even more difficult to authenticate. And yet, as the Tinchant family exemplified, the possession of these papers in no way guaranteed freedom and prosperity. The threat of re- enslavement always loomed near and discrimination was the norm despite the presence of freedom papers. Retaining freedom and financial and social security often meant manipulating personal identity and using the papers strategically, as demonstrated by Edouard Tinchant’s dual identities as both an American and Frenchman. He hid his French identity while living in Mississippi but when the time came and he needed to lay claim to his French identity, he was able to do so via his French papers. The Tinchant’s saga is remarkable and certainly far from ordinary, but their story offers a window to a past when freedom and success for many were contingent on a single sheet of paper. As far many today, for the Tinchants producing the right papers at the right time, could become a matter of life and death.