A Divided Community: The Haitian Refugees of 1809 and New Orleans Free People of Color

More than 3,000 free black refugees of the Haitian Revolution migrated to New Orleans over a few months in the spring and summer of 1809, most of them women and children.  Their arrival challenged the tenuous position of the city's established free people of color, whose rights had already been reduced by the adoption of a new legal code in 1808.  Fearing the contagion of black rebellion, many white Orleanians imagined the city's ancien population of free people of color would make common cause with the newcomers.  In fact, Orleanians of color circled their wagons and kept to themselves after the influx, watching as the emigrées changed the world's image of the city's gens de couleur libre.  Many of the features associated with New Orleans free people of color originate in the demographic and cultural redefinition of this population after the influx of 1809.  Most notably, the refugees were the antebellum source of the term and arrangement known as plaçage, an agreement between a free woman of color and a white man for sexual favors in return for material support.  Drawing especially on notarial and sacramental records, this paper interrogates the presumption of political, racial, and social solidarity among free people of African descent in the circum-Caribbean.