Impossible, Imperial Freedoms: Ex-Slave Migration from Louisiana to Trinidad following the War of 1812

Andrew Jackson’s victory in the Battle of New Orleans transfixed and transformed the U.S. nation, ushering in an unprecedented era of U.S. imperial and economic expansion into the Deep South and beyond. In the aftermath of the War of 1812, settlers from diverse backgrounds set out to “fulfill the slave country,” domesticating the Louisiana territory through capital and violence. But for those enslaved in Lower Louisiana, the young nation’s second victory over the British promised only heightened exploitation in the service of sugar and King Cotton. To avoid this destiny, enslaved persons across the U.S., numbering into the thousands, harnessed what might be considered a black radical freedom vision or else a realpolitik forged in repression, in either case inspiring them to exchange guaranteed slavery in the U.S. for an uncertain, imperial freedom in the British Caribbean. This presentation highlights the lived experiences of one sub-stream of the larger migration, drawing on archival and other sources to follow the several hundred ex-slaves who fled Louisiana for Trinidad in 1815. The stages of their transnational and trans-imperial stories— “seduction” by the British, raced and gendered journeys aboard British vessels, and instrumental resettlement in Trinidad’s Company Towns—illuminate the fundamental workings of the modern Atlantic World, including the intersections of power, race, privilege, and mobility; the manipulation of gender, sexuality, and domesticity in the furtherance of political projects; and ultimately the impossibility of spatial fixes to structural hierarchies in the Global South.