Free People of Color in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: From Class Consciousness to Radical Atlantic Activism

1In 1864, Louis Charles Roudanez, a free New Orleanian of color of Saint-Domingue descent, founded the bilingual newspaper La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orléans. Born in St. James Parish, Louisiana, in 1823, Roudanez had sailed to France in 1844. After obtaining a Bachelor of Letters in 1847 and a Bachelor of Science in 1849, he had received a doctorate in medicine from the Sorbonne in 1853. He could probably have settled in France but chose to return to his native Louisiana where he opened a medical practice. He could have chosen to remain a successful medical practitioner but decided that defending the rights of his fellow New Orleanians of color was a just cause that he needed to embrace. He dedicated his savings to founding two extremely militant newspapers, the first black newspapers in the South, L’Union and La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orléans.1

2At a time when free New Orleanians of color were struggling to defend their status and when the Southern Confederacy was still fighting to defend the persistence of slavery, the January 24, 1865 issue of La Tribune opened with a few lines that proclaimed the necessity to grant all men the same access to freedom:

Liberty must be the same for all men, if liberty is qualified, those who possess the least rights are not really free, we demand therefore, like all other citizens:
The right to come and go
The right to vote
The right to public instruction
The right to hold public office
The right to be judged, treated, and governed according to the common law.

3In the context of the Civil War South, these were undoubtedly bold demands. They were published by free people of color, mostly of Saint-Domingue descent, living in New Orleans who had become the uncompromising defenders of the rights of all Blacks, free and still enslaved. Their fight had started in the last decade of the Antebellum period and, for almost fifty years, these politically conscious and highly educated men led a relentless fight for the abolition of slavery wherever it existed, the granting of black franchise, and the end of racial discrimination and segregation. Despite its originality and strength, this early Southern black activism remained largely unstudied for almost a century and a half. In the last decades of the twentieth century, historians of nineteenth-century Louisiana started uncovering this early militancy for black rights, unheard of in the rest of the South. In the past three decades, a new Franco-Atlantic approach has started highlighting the strong intellectual and ideological connections these free people of color had developed mainly with France, but also with the French Caribbean and Haiti. Interestingly, this new approach has remained limited to Louisiana historiography and its connection to the American abolitionist movement remains to be established. Reassessing the role of free New Orleanians of color in the American fight against slavery and in favor of equal rights for African Americans requires taking a sidestep from the context of the young American republic, and examining their movement in a transnational, especially Atlantic, context. This chapter argues that the Atlantic lens, or more specifically the Franco-Atlantic lens, enables new interpretations of the early militancy for the abolition of slavery in Louisiana and is a new step towards integrating it in the national narrative of antislavery movements in the United States.

4Due to its French and Spanish colonial history, early nineteenth-century New Orleans counted a numerically small but socially and culturally significant group of free people of color. When the United States took possession of New Orleans through the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, the group counted some 1,500 persons, which represented about 18% of the city’s population.2 The arrival, at the turn of the nineteenth-century, of a large influx of free refugees of color from the Haitian Revolution tripled the size of this group.3 This numerical reinforcement was crucial at the exact moment when the takeover of Louisiana by the United States threatened to disrupt New Orleans’s three-tiered order and advance the Anglo-American biracial order prevailing in the rest of the young American republic.4 It was also crucial in initiating a strong movement of defense of black rights. Throughout the antebellum period, indeed, although they were denied citizenship and franchise, could not have access to some professions, and were not eligible to hold any office, the free New Orleanians of color displayed uncommon intellectual, artistic, and political dynamism and fought not only to keep the rights they had acquired under French and Spanish rule, but also to gain more leverage in the political life of their new home.5

5Despite this uncommon dynamism, the historiography of nineteenth-century America overlooked their fight for over a century. This may be accounted for by the relative invisibility of Louisiana in the national narrative. Louisiana was a thorn in the United States’ attempt to achieve national harmonization. Largely populated by Catholics who spoke mainly French, it displayed many differences with the rest of the country, and even the rest of the South, with which it shared the peculiar institution and plantation economy. The fight against slavery in the United States has been studied, since the late twentieth century, in an Atlantic perspective, taking into account the numerous connections between the American opponents to slavery and their British counterparts. Yet the Louisiana fight has generally been overlooked because it was entirely foreign to the Northern abolitionist struggle. It was foreign because it involved Francophones, who wrote and published almost exclusively in French;6 foreign because their intellectual and political contacts resided in the francophone world, in France, in the French West Indies, or in Haiti; foreign also because their fight had a global scope that was not limited to an attempt to change the institutions of the United States. This Louisianan invisibility was reinforced by that of the Blacks in the nation: in the South, of course, where they were mostly reduced to the enslaved status, but even in the North where, although free, they were more often than not discriminated against and segregated. Finally, their fight was obscured by the twentieth century fight for equal rights that was both generalized over the entire South and victorious. As their early struggle was geographically limited and ultimately unsuccessful, it remained mostly undetected until the late twentieth century. There were a few early mentions (see, among others, Blassingame 1973), but the first scholarly works focusing on its importance did not appear until the late 1990s (see, among others, Bell 1997).

6Since then, Louisiana historiography has highlighted the importance of the activism of New Orleans’s free people of color, adopting a transnational approach, establishing a strong connection with French romanticism and republicanism, but also, more recently, with Haiti and the legacy of the Haitian revolution. The progressive exploration of the migration of Saint-Domingue refugees to New Orleans has paved the way for a closer focus on the movement as most activists of the late nineteenth century were Saint-Domingue refugees or were descended from refugees. Roudanez, Trévigne, Desdunes, Lanusse, Séligny, and many more members of refugee families that had settled in New Orleans at the turn of the nineteenth century, were the leaders of the movement for abolition and equal rights for all.7

7The militancy of these politically conscious men found a natural outlet in their fiction and non-fiction writings. They wrote extensively (poems, essays, novels, and articles) to denounce the injustice of their situation. Because their publications were all in French, however, they remained unstudied for over a century, which largely explains the historiographical silence surrounding them and their non-inclusion in the abolitionist movements of the young American republic. They also mostly published in newspapers in New Orleans and even, sometimes, in France, which made access to their publications difficult.8 Republication of their works at the turn of the twenty-first century, in French or in bilingual versions, in Louisiana or Canada, gave historians easier access to their writings. Their grouping in anthologies and translation into English, for some of them, made their access still easier to non-Francophone historians.9 The recovery, in 2001, by A.P. Tureaud Jr. and Elise Turaud Nicholls of hundreds of pages of handwritten poems, letters, and commentaries written by Creole poet Pierre-Aristide Desdunes also gave access to new sources that have triggered new interpretations of the intellectual and literary black movements of 19th-century New Orleans.10

8In the wake of this anthologizing and of the discovery of new primary sources, the first two decades of the twentieth century have witnessed the development of new interpretations of the actions and writings of New Orleans’s free activists of color. In 2000, for instance, Caroline Senter already argued that ‘the Creole poets employed radical literary traditions from the French and Haitian Revolutions’ to put forward their claim for equal rights.11 Clint Bruce’s 2013 dissertation set an extremely efficient theoretical framework for the transnational interpretation of American francophone literatures.12 More recently, relying on the ‘common wind’ image of English poet William Wordsworth’s tribute to Toussaint Louverture, Caryn Cossé Bell reinterpreted the activism of Creole poet Pierre-Aristide Desdunes, showing how ‘an exploration of the Caribbean and Atlantic influences that shaped Desdunes’s world view, his education to the empowering ethics of literary Romanticism, and his deep ideological ties to Haiti offer unique insights to that legacy’ (Bell 2014: 284). She used the same efficient metaphor to explain the involvement of Louis Charles Roudanez in the defense of the rights of the free people of color in Civil War New Orleans (Bell 2014).

9These first studies have already accomplished much to uncover the fight for black rights in mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, insisting on the importance of reconnecting this struggle to the French Atlantic. The movement still needs to be reintegrated in the general fight against slavery and the limitation of black rights in the United States. The role of British Atlantic connections in the American abolitionist movement has been explored in depth. That of the French Atlantic is still largely understudied. Focusing on the literary production and journalistic ventures of the free New Orleanians of color is a first step towards this recognition.

10The free New Orleanians of color’s creative activity was ceaseless. They wrote poems and short stories, set in Louisiana or the Caribbean, which they published mostly in the New Orleans newspapers. Although the main New Orleans newspapers (L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans, for instance) occasionally published their poems, the black press was a natural outlet for their literary production. As early as 1843, they founded the first black literary journal in the United States, L’Album littéraire : Journal des jeunes gens, amateurs de littérature. The short-lived journal organized literary protest against the racism they were subjected to, the eroding civil liberties of their group, and the lack of recognition they faced in spite of their unfailing dedication to their city, state, and country. In the early 1860s, L’Union and La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orléans became their main organs of expression.

11In 1845, a testimony of their intellectual and creative ferment was produced in the form of an anthology of poetry, written exclusively by free intellectuals of color, gathered together by Armand Lanusse, and entitled Les Cénelles. Few of the poems included in the anthology openly voice militant views. They are mostly elegiac, nostalgic love poems, expressing, through their tone, the unhappiness of these poets in the society of their hometown. More than an open criticism of nineteenth century Louisiana society, Les Cénelles is sometimes a pledge of allegiance to France, for instance Victor Séjour’s ‘Le retour de Napoléon’ which celebrates the grandeur Napoleon conferred to the nation (Lanusse 2003: 55–58). Lanusse’s publication is, per se, a sign of militancy, an attempt at highlighting the literary talents of the free people of color and at stating their strong filiation with France, restoring a pride which racial prejudice prevented in antebellum Louisiana.

12These early poems unmistakably reveal a strong class consciousness. So does the fiction produced by the Louisiana authors. In his short story, entitled Souvenirs de 1815, Michel Séligny voices his discouragement at seeing the heroes of the Battle of New Orleans at best forgotten, at worst set aside. His remembrance of happier days opens on very somber notes concerning the present and future condition of free people of color in the Crescent City: ‘Attristé du présent, inquiet de l’avenir, j’avais inutilement lutté contre un dégoût invincible des choses actuelles, et dans mon découragement profond, je me pris à évoquer les souvenirs du passé’ (53).13 These happy memories are of times when heroism made all citizens equal (‘la triomphante histoire de cette campagne fabuleuse où chaque citoyen fut un héros !’ (PH 55).14 The fiction produced by these men often denounced the social inequalities of New Orleans, especially those affecting them, and criticized the ‘quasi-citizenship’ they were subjected to.

13In the anthology of short stories and novellas collected and edited by Chris Michaelides, Paroles d’honneur: Écrits de Créoles de couleur néo-orléanais, the injustice of prejudice against racially mixed people appears as these writers’ first target. The terrible fate of star-crossed lovers belonging to different racial categories, and thus unable to be united, is a common trope. From Mlle de Sauillac, in love with her racially mixed childhood friend, Clément, in Adolphe Duhart’s ‘Simple histoire’ (1865), to the love story between Charles Beaufort and Lydia in Duhart’s ‘Trois amours’ (1865), to Amélie and Edouard’s love in F.M.S’s ‘Souvenir de Bonfouca’ (1865), the short stories show that love knows no racial barriers, whether the white lover is a man or a woman. The stories generally stage childhood friends who were raised together, their friendship and proximity erasing the necessary distance imposed by racial prejudices.15 Most often, they declare their flame to each other after attempting to hide their feelings, aware of the racial prejudices that reign in slave societies.16 They mourn the unjust laws that prevent them from seeing their love fulfilled,17 and most stories end with the death of one of them, a death provoked by their impossible love. There is one exception: ‘Trois amours’ ends with the union of Charles and Lydia, maybe because the young man, although raised by the Duménils, rich Louisiana Creoles, is an orphaned boy from Bordeaux and because Lydia, M. Duménil’s illegitimate child whom his wife raises as her daughter, is not marked by the seal of infamy and passes for white.

14The second main recurring theme found in the free Creoles of color’s antebellum fiction is the fate of free women of color falling madly in love with their white protectors, naively believing that ‘un mariage de conscience,’ a secret wedding celebrated by a priest to circumvent the Louisiana law that prevented marriage across racial barriers, would protect their honor forever. In Armand Lanusse’s short story ‘Un mariage de conscience,’ the abandoned woman yields to madness and commits suicide by throwing herself in front of her former lover and his new wife’s carriage. In ‘Marie,’18 the heroine commits suicide and her tombstone reads: ‘Ici repose une victime de l’honneur’ (PH 99).19 Some stories are slightly less straightforward: the main character of Joanni Questy’s ‘Monsieur Paul,’ for instance, is abandoned by the free woman of color with whom he had contracted such a ‘mariage de conscience,’ which suggests the uselessness of these illegal, secret unions. Nonetheless, racial mixing, the racial prejudices and legal limitations of Louisiana society are undoubtedly these writers’ primary focus.

15The writings all aim to defend the rights of free New Orleanians of color and to denounce prejudice against racially mixed people. In the later period, they are also, more often than not, a very strong plea against the evils of slavery. In ‘Simple histoire’ (1865), Durhart criticizes the men who fled destitution in France and became immensely rich through the exploitation of poor Africans (‘au prix du sang des malheureux Africains’ (PH 81)).20 Mlle de Sauillac, educated in France, comes back with very bold antislavery views which explain her refusal to submit to the racial prejudice of the Saint-Domingue society she has returned to.21 Dedicated to Louis Charles Roudanez, ‘Simple histoire’ ends up celebrating the Haitian revolution to come:

L’heure n’avait point encore sonné à l’horloge de l’humanité, pour la délivrance d’Haïti. D’autres crimes devaient ensanglanter cette terre infortunée, avant que ses descendants, héritiers de sa force d’âme et de son énergie, ne jetassent les premiers ce cri de liberté, qui doit retentir de contrée en contrée et de siècle en siècle, partout où il y aura des esclaves, et ne conquissent au prix de leur sang l’indépendance sous laquelle vivent maintenant les enfants d’Haïti. (PH 83)22

16In ‘Souvenirs de Bonfouca’ (1865), the narrator, rendered desperate by the news of his beloved’s impending marriage into white society, narrates his strong emotion at hearing a sad song sung by a slave. The song tells the story of the slave’s forced labor and of the master’s lust for the slave’s beloved Denise. He sings of the happiness he would feel if he had children with Denise but, thinking of their potential sale to a faraway country, he exclaims: ‘L’esclave n’a pas de famille ! Ses enfants ne sont pas à lui : ils appartiennent à leur maître’ (PH 159).23 The racially mixed narrator acknowledges that it took him time to feel for the fate of the slaves, and that it may have been his own unhappiness that made him suddenly sympathize with them. The emotion and empathy he experiences and the many tears he sheds make him feel better, as if this realization had a cathartic and redeeming value.24

17In Le Mulâtre, a novella written by Victor Séjour, and published by Cyril Bissette in La Revue de Colonies in 1837, the message is extremely clear as well.25 Set in Saint-Domingue, the novella can only be considered as an important contribution to the abolitionist fight against slavery. The story stages a racially mixed slave whose master, whom he has just saved from assassination by other slaves, attempts to rape the mulâtre’s wife who resists his assault. In the fight that ensues, she wounds him and is then sentenced to death for the unforgivable crime she has committed in physically injuring her master. The latter refuses to pardon her and she is hanged. The mûlatre flees the plantation with their child, joins a maroon community, and patiently awaits his revenge, a terrible one, against his master. Learning, from his master’s last words, that the latter is his father, he commits suicide after killing his master and his wife. Séjour criticizes the violence and injustice of the system, the corruption of mores it provokes in masters. He also highlights what the system does to the enslaved, who cannot but turn to crime, faced with the utmost violence and degradation slavery imposes on them. The narrator, a presumably white visitor new to a slave society, who holds out his hand to an old slave he meets, is rapidly informed about the prejudices of the society he discovers. The dignified old man responds, in a language that shows he has integrated the debasement slavery has imposed on him:

Maître, dit-il, c’est d’un noble cœur ce que vous faites là. . . ; mais ne savez-vous pas qu’un nègre est aussi vil qu’un chien. . . ; la société le repousse ; les hommes le détestent ; les lois le maudissent. . . . Ah ! c’est un être bien malheureux, qui n’a même pas la consolation d’être toujours vertueux. . . Qu’il naisse bon, noble, généreux ; que Dieu lui donne une âme loyale et grande ; malgré cela, bien souvent il descend dans la tombe les mains teintes de sang, et le cœur avide encore de vengeance ; car l’expérience lui a appris que ses bonnes actions n’étaient pas comptées, et qu’il ne devait aimer ni sa femme, ni ses fils ; car un jour la première sera séduite par le maître, et son sang vendu au loin malgré son désespoir. (PH 58)26

18If literature was obviously a means to assert the intellectual capacities of the free people of color, especially in a New Orleans literary landscape that was entirely dominated by these writers of color, journalism was another organ of protest that was aptly invested by members of the free group of color. In 1862, Jean-Baptiste and Louis Charles Roudanez, free Creoles of color of Saint-Domingue descent, founded L’Union. They chose Paul Trévigne, another free Creole of color with Saint-Domingue origins, to edit it, and made this triweekly, published in French, the spearhead of their fight in favor of the free people of color. Most of this militant activism against structural racism was still often spurred by the feelings of injustice felt by the free people of color, rather than a cogent appeal for abolition. In 1864, for instance, the free New Orleanians of color, as if heedless of the ongoing abolitionist attempts to dispose of slavery, started campaigning nationally to obtain franchise for their group. They sent Jean-Baptiste Roudanez and Arnold Bertonneau to Washington, where they met Abraham Lincoln and handed him a petition bearing 5,000 signatures requesting franchise for free people of color. They must have been very persuasive given that, the very next day, Lincoln wrote to the governor of Louisiana, Michael Hahn, asking him in vain to enfranchise those men who owned property, had an education, or had served in the Union army. To give another striking example of the fight they led for their own rights, in February 1863, 18 Louisiana officers of color who had enrolled in the United States army resigned from the Union ranks to protest against the ‘scorn and contempt’ white officers had displayed towards them.27

19The struggle of the free New Orleanians of color was thus, early on, motivated by class consciousness and the defense of their class prerogatives. They had not initially fought against slavery, some of them even owning slaves. Their militant ‘stance,’ however, rapidly turned to a fight in favor of total abolition in the United States, and beyond. Some of the literary pieces already cited are good indicators of the political evolution of these men, whose ancestors were slaves, sometimes not very long before they themselves set pen to paper. In a poem anonymously published in La Tribune on November 8, 1864, the poetic persona cries out:

Mais à ces oppresseurs une voix plus humaine
Une voix qui flétrit et le fouet et la chaîne
Dit: ‘Ces noirs Africains qu’ici vous maudissez,
Ces esclaves soumis que vous avilissez,
Ne sont-ils pas aussi de Dieu l’œuvre sublime,
Des hommes, vos égaux, qu’un noble cœur anime ?
Tous frères vous naissez’ (Bruce 2020: 168)28

20The war years indeed gave a new impulse to their movement and, as soon as the Union took possession of New Orleans, in 1862, they started advocating for total racial equality. Although early on, their fight had more readily focused on obtaining rights for their own group, they went from protecting their class prerogatives to elaborating an uncompromising ideology of liberation. Their fight expanded to obtaining freedom for all and, after the end of the war, to getting both franchise and racial equality for all, members of their class but also formerly enslaved persons.

21This ‘abolitionist turn,’ so to speak, is best understood when analyzed in a transnational perspective. A reappraisal of the part played by the free New Orleanians of color in the abolitionist movement requires moving away from traditional American historiography. The first important factor in this reappraisal is the crucial influence of the Haitian revolution in structuring their fight. These men had been raised in the knowledge of the Haitian precedent. They knew of the Saint-Domingue free people of color’s attempts to obtain the rights owed to all French citizens in the early days of the Haitian Revolution. Haiti had also proved that black men could fight to the end to gain their freedom. Most of the free New Orleanians of color were descended from families who had had to flee Saint-Domingue, faced with slave violence against those people who were assimilated to the Whites because they shared blood and family ties with them, and because they had owned large amounts of property, including slaves, in the late 18th century. Nevertheless, they were acutely aware that they also shared blood with the slaves who had fought for their liberty. Their connection with Saint-Domingue/Haiti was thus a first factor that accounts for the abolitionist turn they took.29 Their Caribbean connection was strong, and it is not fortuitous that many of their works of fiction were set in the Caribbean instead of New Orleans. Séjour’s Le Mûlatre, as well as Durhart’s ‘Simple histoire’ take place in Saint-Domingue, while Séligny’s ‘Le Pêcheur de la Guadeloupe,’ as its title indicates, is set in Guadeloupe. The common fate of the enslaved and of the free people of color, in Louisiana and the Caribbean, triggered their desire to fight against the institution that had shaped their lives.

22Their connection with the French Caribbean was understandably strong but France was another essential factor in their radical militancy. Many of these men—Victor Séjour, Camille Thierry, Pierre Dalcour, and Bernard Valcour, to name just a few—had been educated in France in the 1830s and 1840s, at a time when a second strong revolutionary ferment agitated the country and when abolitionism was at its climax. The transatlantic mobility that brought free New Orleanians of color to Paris played a major role in introducing them with more radical positions than those they had developed in their native city and connected them with the French abolitionist circles. That Victor Séjour’s Le Mulâtre was published by Bissette shows the strong connections the Louisianans established with French abolitionists.30 The comments they make in their writings also indicate that their literary and intellectual references were the French radical thinkers and writers. Lanusse’s introduction to Les Cénelles, citing Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, is filled with echoes of the most celebrated authors of French literature. Although he acknowledges that the Louisiana poets will never reach these masterly writers’ talent, he equates the Louisianans’ fate to that of these renowned writers (ils ‘sont pourtant en butte à toutes les tracasseries que ces génies transcendants éprouvèrent au commencement de leur vie littéraire’ Lanusse 2003: 14).31 This filiation with the French literary geniuses is a way of connecting their destiny to that of France which had abolished slavery in 1848.

23Between the Caribbean and France, their fight is thus best understood if we shift the lens and adopt an Atlantic perspective. The leaders of this fight—the Roudanez, Trevignes, and Desdunes, among many others—had been educated in the memory of the struggle of the free people of color of Saint-Domingue in the early days of the Haitian Revolution, before the slaves’ rebellion took over.32 All these men had met with abolitionist leaders of France, first among them Cyrille Bissette and Victor Schoelcher, and were infused with the revolutionary ideas of nineteenth century France. Louis Charles Roudanez, when studying for his medical degree at the Sorbonne, stood on the Parisian barricades in 1848. From defending the rights of their class, they thus rapidly moved to defending the rights of all Blacks, whatever their pre-war status. When his first newspaper, L’Union, folded in 1864, Louis Charles Roudanez founded La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orléans, investing 35,000 dollars of his own personal money in this venture. He placed at its head an extremely radical editor, Belgian journalist Jean-Charles Houzeau, thus showing their connection to the most enlightened European intellectuals.33 Bilingual, in order to reach Anglo-America and the mostly Anglophone freed slaves, the newspaper became the first black daily in the United States. It published the most radical columns, demanding racial equality for all.34

24The intellectual connections of these Atlantic Francophones were, however, not only to be found in Europe. They were also intimately connected to Haitian poets, thinkers, and journalists. They endorsed the struggle and words of these artists, as shown by the poem ‘Les pensées d’un esclave soldat’, until recently attributed to Pierre Aristide Desdunes, which was, in fact written by Haitian poet Tertulien Guilbaud.35 The poem expresses the degradation and humiliation of the slave. The connection Desdunes felt with the words expressed by the Haitian poet were such that he copied the poem in his manuscripts and even retitled it, as a way of endorsing the Haitian poet’s thoughts:

Pleurer lorsque tout rit, pleurer lorsque tout chante;
Comprimer dans son cœur les grands, les fiers élans;
Sentir toujours du fouet la morsure à ses flancs,
Sous la main du bourreau si froidement méchante.

Pleurer en étouffant jusqu’au moindre sanglot,
Car du maître la joie en fut empoisonnée:
De l’esclave africain telle est la destinée
Et—je m’en souviens bien—tel fut aussi mon lot !36
(Desdunes 2010: 129)

25The first issue of L’Union, on 27 September 1862, also perfectly illustrates this Haitian connection. On the left side of the page, is a long letter from Eugène Heurtelou to Victor Hugo, alongside the latter’s response on the occasion of the death of John Brown, considered by Heurtelou as one of the martyrs of black liberation in the United States. Both letters had been published in the Haitian newspaper Le Progrès and Victor Hugo had granted Roudanez permission to reproduce them. This unmistakably showed that the New Orleans civil rights activists were in contact with the intellectual and artistic elite of France, but also with the Haitian press and politicians. Heurtelou’s message is clear: all the enslaved peoples must be freed everywhere around the Atlantic. The ideals of the French Revolution ‘Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité’ must apply to all. And if Heurtelou concludes that Victor Hugo’s words on slavery have moved the whole of America, the latter replies that Haiti is the light that shines on the Atlantic. Reading the rest of this first page of La Tribune also confirms that the Atlanticism of these men went even further. The newspaper announces the marriage of two persons of color by the bishop of Sierra Leone. It also advertises a book entitled Les Richesses du Mexique, indicating where to obtain it, including at the headquarters of the newspaper. It adds that potential migrants may find useful information in it about this country, thus endorsing the migration of free people of color from the Gulf Coast to Mexico in the second half of the nineteenth century.

26The free Creoles of color of New Orleans had developed deep knowledge of the various struggles led against slavery in the Atlantic, and, contrary to many of their Northern counterparts, their struggle did not stop at the borders of the United States. They fought for the abolition of slavery in any form and anywhere. Durhart’s short story ’Simple histoire’ makes the radical character of this fight explicit, when he says that Haitian freedom must resonate from country to country and from century to century, everywhere there are slaves. In his ‘Les Voeux d’un jeune soldat,’ Pierre-Aristide Desdunes also calls for Haiti to beckon universal liberty:

L’auguste mer, alors, embrassera plus tendre
Ce monde renaissant
D’où nul fleuve en son sein ne viendra plus répandre
Des flots rougis de sang.
Alors noble Haïti ; pour jamais libre et pure
Sous le regard des Cieux,
Tu pourras justement étaler la parure
De ton sol orgueilleux.
(Desdunes 2010: 143)37

27To return to the quotation that opened the present chapter, the free New Orleanians of color’s ‘abolitionist turn’ was the beginning of another fight, that of a worldwide equality of all men, black and white, as ‘Liberty must be the same for all men, if liberty is qualified, those who possess the least rights are not really free.’ The Reconstruction period as a whole was marked, in New Orleans, by the free Creoles of color’s attempts to obtain franchise and civil equality for all Blacks, formerly free and enslaved. In January 1865, the activists organized the Convention des Hommes de Couleur, gathering former free people of color and freed slaves. The 107 delegates issued a petition requesting the desegregation of streetcars and demanding franchise for all black men. The 1867 Louisiana Constitutional Convention, composed of equal numbers of black and white delegates (100 each) wrote one of the most progressive state constitutions in the United States, granting franchise to all black men, guaranteeing free access for all to an integrated system of public education, and containing a formally organized citizens’ bill of rights. It repealed the Black Codes of 1865 and census suffrage, while disenfranchising former Confederates. Although this Constitution was replaced, in 1879, by a much less progressive one, Louisiana was clearly a pioneer in Blacks’ rights. The state even sent John Willis Ménard to the House of Representatives, in 1868, making him the first Black to ever deliver a speech in Congress.38

28The free Creoles of color also founded organizations aimed at helping the freed slaves, for instance, the New Orleans Freedmen’s Aid Association and the Louisiana Holmstead Association, as well as political associations like the Friends of Universal Suffrage. Despite this dynamism, Louisiana could not prevent the return of white supremacy and was unable to stop the spread of segregation in public transportation and public places. The promise of universal suffrage vanished from official discourse and Whites regained control of the state.

29This was the beginning of a new battle, brilliantly staged by the New Orleans Creoles of color. The Citizens’ Committee (Comité des Citoyens), founded by Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, tirelessly fought for desegregation. In 1872, they obtained the integration of 19 public schools, principally in the 2nd Municipality, the one including the French Quarter. They obtained the desegregation of public transportation in New Orleans, before trying to expand their fight outside the city limits. A first struggle, staging Daniel Desdunes, the son of the founder of the Citizens’ Committee, obtained the desegregation of interstate railroads. Desdunes sat in a car reserved for whites, was indicted, but the Supreme court of Louisiana invalidated the conviction, arguing that interstate transportation was ruled by federal law and could thus not be submitted to state regulations. After this first victory, they tried in vain to obtain the same ruling on intrastate railroads. This new struggle opposed Homer Plessy to the railroad authorities and ended in the institutionalization of segregation for the next six decades. If the 1896 Supreme Court decision is well known, few people know that Plessy’s arrest was carefully planned and staged by a powerful militant group of New Orleans Creoles of color, not unlike Rosa Park’s act of resistance sixty years later.39

30The uncommon activism and radicalism of the Creoles of color of New Orleans was clearly connected with Franco-Atlantic fights against slavery and in favor of racial equality. Understanding it better most certainly requires changing the lens, moving away from the strict perspective of the national narrative of the United States and adopting a larger Atlantic perspective. Because they wrote in French, because their connections were with the French-speaking world, the free people of color’s struggle for universal freedom is part of a different historiography. Atlantic history, which has progressively reinterpreted the abolitionist fight, gives historians a new key to complexify the narrative of this struggle in the United Sates by integrating into it the only movement that emanated from the American South in the late Antebellum period and expanded over the three decades that followed the Civil War.