“In Search of Employment”: Age, Gender, and Conceptualizations of a “Laborer” in Haiti and the US after Emancipation

This paper examines how elites in Haiti and the United States used normative discourses around work and education to naturalize the perpetual marginalization of young emancipated individuals as “laborers” years after the end of slavery. The “post-emancipation period” in Haiti and the U.S. South began at markedly different times, 1804 and 1862-5. In Haiti, slavery ended even before the nation’s founding, and in the U.S. South, wartime emancipation emerged nearly six decades later during a moment of national fracture. Despite these differences, this paper highlights the overlap between elite U.S. and Haitian elites’ narratives about “the ideal laborer” in both places after emancipation. Specifically, this paper examines how ideas about “laborers” focused on the regulation of certain youths, especially young girls, even as this impulse proved to be in tension with the increasingly dominant notions of childhood and gender emerging in both countries. In Haiti and the United States, powerful interests propagated labor discourses that attempted to frame societal hierarchies as innate, naturalizing the subordination. This paper will look at two archival moments in detail – the crafting of Haiti’s Code Rural under President Jean-Pierre Boyer in 1825 and the actions of organizations during the end of the American Civil War which arranged the migration of recently emancipated children to work in Northern homes – analyzing their language about gender, age, and labor. By looking at both Haiti and the U.S. over different periods, this paper will explore how elites throughout the post-emancipation Americas attempted to reconcile “free labor” ideologies, or other related doctrines of freedom, with the continuation of pre-abolition social hierarchies.