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Reviews
| From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences. By Nathalie Dessens. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. xiv + 257 pp. Maps, photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth).
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In the twenty years straddling the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, New Orleans underwent incredible change. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and the development of new sugar production methods in 1795 encouraged the rise of plantation slavery in the lower Mississippi Valley that spurred the rapid growth of New Orleans as a leading commercial center. The acquisition of the Louisiana Territory by the United States not only instituted political changes but also initiated important legal, demographic, and cultural transformations. Concurrently, as Paul Lachance documents elsewhere, close to 15,000 refugees from the revolution-torn French West Indies, including thousands of slaves, free people of color, and whites, arrived in New Orleans. |
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In this new book, Nathalie Dessens examines the role of these refugees in shaping the socioeconomic structure, politics, legal system, and culture of the Crescent City in the Age of Revolution. In assessing their influence, Dessens argues that despite differences in race and status, the refugees developed "instinctive feelings of solidarity" (p. 47) and formed a common ethnic identity that "strengthened the visibility and significance of their influence" (p. 139). Rather than showing how slaves, free people of color, and whites interacted with each other, as other historians have done, Dessens views the refugees as a community brought together by a "symbolic ethnicity" in interactions with their host, Louisiana (chapter 3). |
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Dessens structures her book into three parts. Chapters 1 and 2 survey the specific conditions in Saint-Domingue that led to various waves of emigration and the ambivalent reception that the migrants received in Louisiana. Chapter 3 argues that common conditions of flight and shared feelings of estrangement brought together the enslaved, free colored, and white refugees into one cohesive group. According to Dessens, "there was among the three groups—despite the obvious differences due to the various statuses—a community of spirit originating from common background" (p. 63). Moreover, "because they were, beyond the racial and social divisions, a community, their influence was stronger" (p. 139). Finally, chapters 4 through 7 examine the impact of the refugees on New Orleans's economy, society, politics, and culture. |
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From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans is the first comprehensive study of these migrants' influence on New Orleans and is strongest in its synthetic qualities. Dessens integrates the work of historians of France, the Caribbean, Louisiana, the American South, and the Atlantic World while providing archival detail about specific refugees. This book will make valuable contributions to the growing scholarship on the impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. |
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While it is valuable as a synthesis, however, the book's thesis is both overstated and unnecessary. Since Dessens maintains that all refugees shared a common "symbolic ethnicity," she repeatedly attempts to minimize the impact of African slavery on the identity of the refugees, even when her own evidence would suggest otherwise. White slaveholders of all backgrounds controlled the government and enacted laws and policies designed to protect the rights of slaveholders; refugee slaves, together with African and Creole slaves, resisted these policies when and how they could; and free people of color (Louisiana- and Saint-Domingue-born) negotiated a middle ground, most often using venues such as the militia to prove their loyalty to the slaveholding regime in order to protect and gain privileges as free people (pp. 112–18). Nevertheless, this inconsistency of argument and evidence does not detract from the book's value as a thorough investigation of the specific contributions of the Haitian refugees, of all three groups, to New Orleans's society, politics, and culture.
Kenneth Aslakson
Union College
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