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The Atlantic World and the Road to Plessy v. Ferguson
Rebecca J. Scott
| The Gulf of Mexico has long been open to the movement of individuals and information as well as hurricanes. Throughout the nineteenth century, people circulated around the Caribbean Sea and the gulf in pursuit of work, security, and political alliances. During Reconstruction and its aftermath, some of those migrants helped frame the struggle against caste in the state of Louisiana in an innovative way. Their conceptual language and their experiences are worth recovering—to broaden our picture of southern history and perhaps also to enrich our thinking about constitutional frameworks of antidiscrimination. |
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The first step in taking a Caribbean perspective on Louisiana is to situate the United States South within a regional variant of the "long nineteenth century." Scholars of slavery have helped integrate the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 into analyses of the antebellum South, and specialists on voting rights have noted that the formal disfranchisement of black voters corresponded to the moment of U.S. expansion into Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines at the end of the century. The continuing challenge is to understand the mechanisms by which such internal and external phenomena were linked.1 |
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The city of New Orleans was at the center of what Shannon Dawdy has characterized as three overlapping areas of circulation of people and goods—one stretching up the Mississippi River, one reaching across the Atlantic Ocean to France and Europe, one spreading across the Gulf of Mexico to Havana, Veracruz, Port-au-Prince, and various smaller ports of the Caribbean.2 If we pay particular attention to the Atlantic and Caribbean circuits, we can see how a vernacular anticaste ideology developed as people moved from experience to experience and found new names to describe the freedoms that they gained or lost at each step of the way. |
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At a crucial moment in Reconstruction New Orleans, one such set of beliefs was formulated as the entitlement of all citizens to the same "public rights." Public-rights thinking took shape in the 1867–1868 Louisiana Constitutional Convention and was written into the state's new constitution through fragile cross-racial and cross-ethnic electoral alliances. The construct of public rights anticipated many aspects of what we now recognize as the dignitary component of claims to equal access to public accommodations and public transportation. Moreover, it adroitly circumvented the efforts of white supremacists to characterize claims to equal rights as impermissible pretensions to "social equality."3 |
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Early forms of public-rights thinking were visible among some of the thousands of migrants who arrived in New Orleans from Saint Domingue in 1809, after being expelled from their first refuge in Cuba.4 Whatever their positions on slavery and the Haitian Revolution, the men and women of color among the émigrés brought a strong tradition of claiming equal rights for themselves. At Mirebalais in Saint Domingue in 1791, for example, "citizens of color" had signed a "Concordat" with white colonists, repudiating "the progress of a ridiculous form of prejudice" and obliging the colonists to recognize the "violated and misunderstood rights" of free people of color. The demands of free men and women of color had evolved quickly from political rights to a general exemption from markers and distinctions that conveyed social stigma or forced separation.5 |
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