Content area
Full text
In 1867 the newspaper La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orléans, the mouthpiece of black New Orleans in the years following the Civil War, published a short story by Joanni Questy entitled "Monsieur Paul."1 Questy was a prominent poet and educator in the New Orleans Creole community who contributed to Les Cenelles (1845).2 In Questy's melodramatic story, which is set in antebellum New Orleans, a white Creole named Monsieur Paul marries a free woman of color and is later killed in a duel by his wife's lover. Monsieur Paul reveals in his will that his slave and butler Georges is in fact his nephew. He frees Georges and encourages him to move to Haiti because Georges has "such a profound love of freedom." Georges follows his former master's advice, boards the Laura, a ship bound for Port-au-Prince, and "swears never to return to his native land until the 'Peculiar Institution' is overturned."3
Questy's story illustrates the important place that the Haitian republic held in the imagination of antebellum Louisiana's Creole of color community. Haiti was a beacon of liberty and freedom in the New World, an oasis of hope in the slaveholding Caribbean. In as much as they looked to Haiti as a model, the New Orleans Creoles of color were engaged in a struggle for freedom that differed from the abolitionist movement in Anglophone America. While not opposed to Garrisonian abolitionism, New Orleanians of color were also encouraged by the politics of Hugo and Lamartine, the reforms of the Second Republic in France, and the example of the Haitian Revolution - particularly the military role played by Haiti's free people of color and the exploits of the revolutionaries Ogé and Chavannes.4 It was, therefore, towards France, Haiti and other Caribbean countries that Louisiana's gens de couleur libres - or free people of color - fled to escape the mounting racism and oppression of late 1850s Louisiana. During the three years preceding the Union occupation of New Orleans at least 681 gens de couleur left Louisiana for Haiti, most of them on board the Laura, the same ship that Questy mentions in his story.5
While the promise of freedom certainly attracted Louisiana refugees to the "Black Republic," Creoles of color in Louisiana no doubt felt a strong...