Pub Date : 2019-06-17DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0009
Cécile Vidal
This chapter looks simultaneously at the evolution of the language of race and at the racialization of both the judicial and military systems to analyze how racial categories were formed, inhabited, and transformed over time in French New Orleans. The representations of the social order that fueled the language of race both informed and were shaped not only by a discriminatory and violent royal justice that increasingly targeted slaves as the main offenders but also by the exclusion of free blacks from and then by their segregation within permanent militia units. When the Spanish took over the colony, they found a society in which race was more firmly embedded than at the beginning of the French period while fostering more tensions and contradictions.
{"title":"Lash of the Tongue, Lash of the Whip","authors":"Cécile Vidal","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter looks simultaneously at the evolution of the language of race and at the racialization of both the judicial and military systems to analyze how racial categories were formed, inhabited, and transformed over time in French New Orleans. The representations of the social order that fueled the language of race both informed and were shaped not only by a discriminatory and violent royal justice that increasingly targeted slaves as the main offenders but also by the exclusion of free blacks from and then by their segregation within permanent militia units. When the Spanish took over the colony, they found a society in which race was more firmly embedded than at the beginning of the French period while fostering more tensions and contradictions.","PeriodicalId":109080,"journal":{"name":"Caribbean New Orleans","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130300054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-17DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0003
Cécile Vidal
This chapter shows that racial formation was also shaped by the relationships French New Orleans maintained with its hinterland. Racial tensions were instrumental in developing a sense of collective belonging among urban dwellers of European descent that was defined in confrontation with the world beyond the city’s imaginary walls. The Natchez Wars in 1729–1731 and slave unrest afterward played a crucial role in the construction of the Louisiana capital as a white civic community. In contrast, for the slaves living on the plantations nearby, the urban center increasingly symbolized both a place of greater autonomy and a place of repression.
{"title":"The City with Imaginary Walls","authors":"Cécile Vidal","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter shows that racial formation was also shaped by the relationships French New Orleans maintained with its hinterland. Racial tensions were instrumental in developing a sense of collective belonging among urban dwellers of European descent that was defined in confrontation with the world beyond the city’s imaginary walls. The Natchez Wars in 1729–1731 and slave unrest afterward played a crucial role in the construction of the Louisiana capital as a white civic community. In contrast, for the slaves living on the plantations nearby, the urban center increasingly symbolized both a place of greater autonomy and a place of repression.","PeriodicalId":109080,"journal":{"name":"Caribbean New Orleans","volume":"120 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121950931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-17DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0011
Cécile Vidal
The conclusion explains how this book, by reconsidering the interplay of slavery and race in French New Orleans under the influence of Saint-Domingue, has proposed an alternative way of understanding how an urban slave society operated and what it meant for a slave society to become racialized. It has also tried to better fulfill the promises of Atlantic history. Like other kinds of transnational history, Atlantic studies were conceived of as a way to move away from the primacy of the present-day nation state as a unit of analysis and from the tendency toward exceptionalism inherent to national history, but this historiographical field has not yet succeeded in fully escaping from a North-American-centric perspective. At stake is the recovery of the place the Caribbean occupied within the early Atlantic world as well as the development of a comparative and connected history of racial formation as a sociopolitical process in the Americas.
{"title":"From Louisiana to Saint-Domingue and from Saint-Domingue to Louisiana","authors":"Cécile Vidal","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"The conclusion explains how this book, by reconsidering the interplay of slavery and race in French New Orleans under the influence of Saint-Domingue, has proposed an alternative way of understanding how an urban slave society operated and what it meant for a slave society to become racialized. It has also tried to better fulfill the promises of Atlantic history. Like other kinds of transnational history, Atlantic studies were conceived of as a way to move away from the primacy of the present-day nation state as a unit of analysis and from the tendency toward exceptionalism inherent to national history, but this historiographical field has not yet succeeded in fully escaping from a North-American-centric perspective. At stake is the recovery of the place the Caribbean occupied within the early Atlantic world as well as the development of a comparative and connected history of racial formation as a sociopolitical process in the Americas.","PeriodicalId":109080,"journal":{"name":"Caribbean New Orleans","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121925728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-17DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0005
Cécile Vidal
This chapter contends that the household needs to be considered as a crucial category of analysis to determine how French New Orleans society became racialized. As censuses demonstrate, the urban milieu brought people of all conditions and backgrounds together within small residential units. This intimate coexistence tempered the slave system which always involved personal interactions in the city. This closeness, however, did not entirely protect urban slaves from exploitation and violence. In both domestic households and residential institutions such as the hospitals and the Ursuline convent, various mechanisms were used to create social distance and maintain the racial divide. As for the soldiers who lived in the only residential institution which did not rely on slave labor—the barracks—they fought hard not to be confused with the enslaved.
{"title":"“The Mulatto of the House”","authors":"Cécile Vidal","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter contends that the household needs to be considered as a crucial category of analysis to determine how French New Orleans society became racialized. As censuses demonstrate, the urban milieu brought people of all conditions and backgrounds together within small residential units. This intimate coexistence tempered the slave system which always involved personal interactions in the city. This closeness, however, did not entirely protect urban slaves from exploitation and violence. In both domestic households and residential institutions such as the hospitals and the Ursuline convent, various mechanisms were used to create social distance and maintain the racial divide. As for the soldiers who lived in the only residential institution which did not rely on slave labor—the barracks—they fought hard not to be confused with the enslaved.","PeriodicalId":109080,"journal":{"name":"Caribbean New Orleans","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126266489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-17DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0004
Cécile Vidal
This chapter investigates how the ancien régime culture, with which officials and settlers came to French Louisiana and which made them highly sensitive to the issue of maintaining their rank in public, intersected with the process of racialization. As the urban milieu facilitated cross-racial encounters and exchanges of all kinds in public civic and religious ceremonies, drinking houses, and street encounters, most whites quickly became aware of the need to maintain some appearance of social superiority and to display and instill the socio-racial hierarchy by their exclusive and violent behaviour in the public space. Still, people of African descent never ceased to fight against their domination, invisibility, and segregation.
{"title":"The Hustle and Bustle of City Life","authors":"Cécile Vidal","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter investigates how the ancien régime culture, with which officials and settlers came to French Louisiana and which made them highly sensitive to the issue of maintaining their rank in public, intersected with the process of racialization. As the urban milieu facilitated cross-racial encounters and exchanges of all kinds in public civic and religious ceremonies, drinking houses, and street encounters, most whites quickly became aware of the need to maintain some appearance of social superiority and to display and instill the socio-racial hierarchy by their exclusive and violent behaviour in the public space. Still, people of African descent never ceased to fight against their domination, invisibility, and segregation.","PeriodicalId":109080,"journal":{"name":"Caribbean New Orleans","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115620362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-17DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0010
Cécile Vidal
This chapter traces the emergence of a sense of place among French New Orleans residents of all conditions through the analysis of the uses of ethnic and national categories. It demonstrates that the French Regime did not witness the birth of a single “Creole” identity that united all historical actors across racial boundaries. Racial formation prevented the development of a shared relationship to the city between settlers, slaves, and free people of color. Nevertheless, after the succession of two generations by the end of the 1760s, as the elite fought to keep the colony within the French Empire during the 1768 revolt, New Orleans emerged as a distinctive place in relation to both the metropole and Saint-Domingue.
{"title":"From “Louisians” to “Louisianais”","authors":"Cécile Vidal","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter traces the emergence of a sense of place among French New Orleans residents of all conditions through the analysis of the uses of ethnic and national categories. It demonstrates that the French Regime did not witness the birth of a single “Creole” identity that united all historical actors across racial boundaries. Racial formation prevented the development of a shared relationship to the city between settlers, slaves, and free people of color. Nevertheless, after the succession of two generations by the end of the 1760s, as the elite fought to keep the colony within the French Empire during the 1768 revolt, New Orleans emerged as a distinctive place in relation to both the metropole and Saint-Domingue.","PeriodicalId":109080,"journal":{"name":"Caribbean New Orleans","volume":"107 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123202684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-17DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0007
Cécile Vidal
This chapter unravels another paradox: that the relatively slow demographic and economic growth of French Louisiana did not accentuate the segmentation of the labor force between workers of various statuses. On the contrary, as local authorities and settlers were influenced by the Saint-Domingue model, they quickly became convinced that the only way they could succeed in developing the Lower Mississippi Valley would be to rely mainly on slaves of African descent. Their commitment to racial slavery never waned despite unfavorable circumstances. Consequently, heavy labor came to be reserved for slaves of African descent while slaveownership became the ultimate social fault-line among whites, including within New Orleans.
{"title":"“American Politics”","authors":"Cécile Vidal","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter unravels another paradox: that the relatively slow demographic and economic growth of French Louisiana did not accentuate the segmentation of the labor force between workers of various statuses. On the contrary, as local authorities and settlers were influenced by the Saint-Domingue model, they quickly became convinced that the only way they could succeed in developing the Lower Mississippi Valley would be to rely mainly on slaves of African descent. Their commitment to racial slavery never waned despite unfavorable circumstances. Consequently, heavy labor came to be reserved for slaves of African descent while slaveownership became the ultimate social fault-line among whites, including within New Orleans.","PeriodicalId":109080,"journal":{"name":"Caribbean New Orleans","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128900527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-17DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0002
Cécile Vidal
This chapter argues that racial formation did not take place in French New Orleans in isolation from the rest of the Atlantic world and that imperial rather than trans-imperial relationships were the most influential in shaping the way the local society developed. Within the imperial framework, connections between the colony and the metropole were increasingly replaced by intercolonial exchanges. Saint-Domingue, in particular, was a model to be emulated. What gave New Orleans its Caribbean character was, not its participation in smuggling, but racial slavery.
{"title":"A Port City of the French Empire and the Greater Caribbean","authors":"Cécile Vidal","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter argues that racial formation did not take place in French New Orleans in isolation from the rest of the Atlantic world and that imperial rather than trans-imperial relationships were the most influential in shaping the way the local society developed. Within the imperial framework, connections between the colony and the metropole were increasingly replaced by intercolonial exchanges. Saint-Domingue, in particular, was a model to be emulated. What gave New Orleans its Caribbean character was, not its participation in smuggling, but racial slavery.","PeriodicalId":109080,"journal":{"name":"Caribbean New Orleans","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122155662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-17DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0006
Cécile Vidal
This chapter explores how the slave system weakened the European religious and moral ideal that restricted sexuality and the family to Christian marriage in French New Orleans. Yet, it challenges the common view according to which the prevalence of métissage was the sign of a lenient racial regime. Sexual relationships across the racial line did not undermine racial formation; on the contrary, they contributed to reinforcing the system of racial domination. Rather than a general moral and religious disorder, what developed was a plural set of sexual and family values and practices that differed according to status, gender, and race.
{"title":"“A Scandalous Commerce”","authors":"Cécile Vidal","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores how the slave system weakened the European religious and moral ideal that restricted sexuality and the family to Christian marriage in French New Orleans. Yet, it challenges the common view according to which the prevalence of métissage was the sign of a lenient racial regime. Sexual relationships across the racial line did not undermine racial formation; on the contrary, they contributed to reinforcing the system of racial domination. Rather than a general moral and religious disorder, what developed was a plural set of sexual and family values and practices that differed according to status, gender, and race.","PeriodicalId":109080,"journal":{"name":"Caribbean New Orleans","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128048862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-17DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0008
Cécile Vidal
This chapter claims that commerce contributed more than any other activity to alleviating the racial divide in French New Orleans. On the one hand, participation in the market was to a large extent determined by status, race, class, and gender; on the other, the surge in commercial exchanges provided a set of circumstances in which social and racial boundaries were more easily negotiated. Yet whites were the ones who benefited the most from this situation: by the end of the French period a powerful corporate body of self-identified merchants and traders of European descent had emerged, and they were able to challenge the traditional conception of commerce as an infamous occupation. In contrast, whereas a few slaves managed to purchase their freedom thanks to their participation in an informal economy, they were unable to weaken the long-lasting association whites made between slavery and dishonor.
{"title":"“Everybody Wants to Be a Merchant”","authors":"Cécile Vidal","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter claims that commerce contributed more than any other activity to alleviating the racial divide in French New Orleans. On the one hand, participation in the market was to a large extent determined by status, race, class, and gender; on the other, the surge in commercial exchanges provided a set of circumstances in which social and racial boundaries were more easily negotiated. Yet whites were the ones who benefited the most from this situation: by the end of the French period a powerful corporate body of self-identified merchants and traders of European descent had emerged, and they were able to challenge the traditional conception of commerce as an infamous occupation. In contrast, whereas a few slaves managed to purchase their freedom thanks to their participation in an informal economy, they were unable to weaken the long-lasting association whites made between slavery and dishonor.","PeriodicalId":109080,"journal":{"name":"Caribbean New Orleans","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132210950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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