Freedom papers

Sometime around 1785, a young woman was seized in Senegambia and shipped to Saint-Domingue, where her enslavers gave her the name Rosalie. Her attempts to win her freedom launched a search for dignity and equality that would stretch across five generations of her descendants and three continents. Rather than tell this story in isolation, the book places it within three nineteenth-century struggles against racial injustice: the Haitian Revolution, the revolution in France in 1848, and the American Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed.

After gaining freedom during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth escaped to Cuba in 1803. Elisabeth later moved to New Orleans, where she wed Jacques Tinchant, a carpenter. As hostility toward free people of color grew in the 1830s, the family relocated to France. Later Tinchants served in the Union Army, took part in the debates over equal rights at Louisiana's constitutional convention, and built a tobacco trade linking Europe and the Atlantic, one that drew on their Creole heritage as a source of business value.

The family's security proved fragile. A century after Rosalie's first struggle, her great-great-granddaughter Marie-Jose was detained by Nazi forces occupying Belgium. Throughout, the Tinchants relied on documents, and the authority they carried, to pursue freedom and recognition. The methods they devised to get around the limits imposed by slavery, war and colonial rule offer a window onto the experiences of people of color across the Atlantic world in this turbulent era.