Elisabeth Dieudonné Vincent
Elisabeth Dieudonné Vincent was a Haitian-born free woman of color, businesswoman and international migrant. Born in 1798 in Saint-Domingue to a former slave and French father, she was illegitimate, although her father acknowledged her. In 1803, the family fled from the violence of the Haitian Revolution to Santiago de Cuba, where they completed paperwork to show that they were free. In 1809, when the Spanish authorities expelled French colonists because of the Peninsular War in Europe, she moved to New Orleans in the Antebellum South.
Vincent married in 1822 and with her husband, Jacques Tinchant, operated a business in New Orleans. The couple also earned money by renting out Vincent's slaves. In 1835 she amended her original marriage record in order to acquire a surname, removing the double stigma of illegitimacy and slave ancestry. Experiencing racial inequality and increasing restrictions as a result of the demanding Black Codes, they moved with their family to France, where they operated a dairy and vineyards in Gan. Poor economic conditions and violence during the French Revolution of 1848 prompted the family to relocate to Antwerp in 1857, where they invested in their sons' new tobacco business.
Vincent's history highlights the fluidity of identity and migration of people during the period spanning from the 1802 Saint-Domingue revolution to the French Revolution of 1848. It confirms the crucial importance of literacy and the documentation required for black and free colored people to maintain their civil and social rights and freedom. The documentation available on Vincent and her family dispel the myth that the history of the African diaspora depends on oral accounts.
Early life and family
Elisabeth Dieudonné was born in 1798 in Jérémie, Saint-Domingue to a former slave woman, Rosalie of the Poulard nation, and her partner, Michel Étienne Henry Vincent, a Frenchman who had at one point owned the royal monopoly for the sale of meat in Les Cayes. She was baptized in Cap-Dame-Marie and though her parents were not officially married, her father acknowledged her as his child.Elisabeth's mother was from an area bordered on the east by the Senegal River valley and the Guinea coastline, stretching westward to Mali and encompassing the territory where the Pulaar language is spoken. She arrived in Saint-Domingue just prior to the Haitian Revolution. Slaves from Senegambia were rare in Saint-Domingue and records confirm that the Poulard woman Rosalie was owned in the early 1790s by a freedman, Alexis Couba, who sold her to the merchant Marthe Guillaume. In 1793, Guillaume sold Rosalie to Jean-Baptiste Mongol, the local butcher, but within two years, she had been returned to Guillaume. In December 1795, Guillaume manumitted Rosalie, but because of the British occupation during the French Revolutionary Wars, the British Colonial Governor Adam Williamson refused to ratify the official paperwork.
As Rosalie was technically free, but had no official papers to prove it, her status was ambiguous until the British forces withdrew in 1798. The following year, she appeared in the baptismal records as "Marie Françoise, called Rosalie, free black woman" and christened her daughter as a free-born child. By 1802, the French had restored slavery in Martinique and there were rumors that it would be reasserted over blacks in Saint-Domingue. To prevent that from happening to his family, Michel Vincent drafted a document in 1803 declaring that Rosalie and her children Juste Theodore, Marie Louise, Etienne Hilaire and Elisabeth, were all his slaves and were proclaimed free. Within months, the town of Jérémie was under siege by French troops and Rosalie, Michel and Elisabeth fled to nearby Santiago de Cuba. The other three children disappear from the records and it is unknown whether they were captured, went into hiding in Saint-Domingue, or managed to slip into Cuba, avoiding the record keepers.
Arriving in Santiago de Cuba with some 18,000 other refugees, Michel began working as a farrier and Rosalie raised livestock. As there were no French officials on the island, the Agence des Prises de la Guadeloupe, charged with selling plundered ship property and funneling the proceeds from the sales to French troops, acted as an unofficial court of equity for French refugees. On 14 March 1804, an ailing Michel Vincent filed his last will and testament with the agency for validation. Three days later, Rosalie paid the officials of the agency to register the manumission document for the entire family that Vincent had prepared before they fled Saint-Domingue. Within days Vincent died, but as his estate was insolvent, his property was sold to cover his obligations.
In the United States
In 1809, during the Peninsular War in Europe, the governor of Cuba ordered all French refugees to leave. As neither was sure of their status, mother and daughter split up, with Rosalie returning to a now independent Haiti and Elisabeth traveling with her godmother, Marie Blanche Peillon and her consort Jean Lambert Détry, a Belgian carpenter, to New Orleans. Buying land in Faubourg Marigny, the couple each developed businesses. Détry worked as a contractor, hiring out sawyers, and Peillon traded in land and slaves. When Détry died in 1821, he left an inheritance of $500 to Elisabeth, and she decided to marry. A marriage contract was prepared for her to wed Jacques Tinchant, son of a free woman of color called Suzette Bayot, another refugee from Saint-Domingue, and her former partner Joseph Tinchant. The contract was prepared without a surname and listed Elisabeth's name as Marie Dieudonné, her mother's first name and her own middle name.The couple married in 1822 and quickly established a business in which Tinchant worked as a builder and carpenter. To provide monthly income, they also hired out their slaves, Gertrude and her daughter Marie Louise, who had been given to them as a wedding present from Peillon. They lived with Peillon, but the relationship was difficult because of her controlling and litigious nature. She refused to give Elisabeth her inheritance from Détry, claiming to have settled their room and board costs with it. After a year, the couple moved out, and on 1 January 1825 they baptized their first child, François Louis Tinchant at the St. Louis Cathedral, in New Orleans. He was shown as a legitimate, free quadroon. That year, statutes were passed which forbade interracial marriage and laws were increasingly passed in Louisiana to restrict the freedom of people of color. Other children followed, including Joseph, Pierre, Jules, and Ernest. In 1833, they manumitted Gertrude and acquired another slave in her stead, a black man named Giles.
By 1835, Tinchant and his half-brother, Pierre Duhart, formed a company in which they developed land and built houses for resale. In November, hoping to erase the stigma of illegitimacy and slave ancestry enshrined in her marriage record, she asked a notary to correct her given name in the marriage record to Elisabeth and to show her surname as Vincent. As documentation, they provided a copy of Elisabeth's baptismal certificate, which was most likely brought by her mother on a visit she had made in April. Though the acknowledgement by her father that Elisabeth was his daughter did not technically confer the right for her to use his surname, the notary, who had a long business relationship with Tinchant, agreed to accept the document and correct the marriage record. Over the next few years, legislation in Louisiana imposed ever harsher restrictions on free people of color, including limits on schooling and requirements for annual registrations to prove their free status. Many of Tinchant's family members left the United States for France, and the couple followed them in 1840 after arranging to sell Marie Louise to Gertrude for $800.
In France
In 1840, leaving their oldest son Louis in New Orleans, the couple settled in the Basses Pyrenees region, where Tinchant's brother, Pierre Duhart, and parents had already established themselves. They bought a farmhouse with furnishings, of land, two barns, and livestock in Gan for F27,000. In the village was an elementary school, but Tinchant and Vincent chose to send their children to the nearby collège royal in Pau as it offered a better curriculum. Shortly after they arrived, Tinchant's mother died. The following year, the couple had their last child, Edouard. Though he was born in France, because his father was American-born and his mother lost her nationality upon her marriage, Edouard was not entitled to French citizenship, though the couple registered his birth.With no prior experience in farming, the couple employed sharecroppers to tend their dairy, grain fields, and vineyards. Failed harvests, government rigidity, and poor economic conditions led to the spread of republican ideals in schools from Paris to more rural locations. In 1848, growing opposition to France's constitutional monarchy led to upheaval in nearby Pau, where all of the couple's sons were in school. In 1851 the coup d'état of Louis-Napoleon turned the country away from republicanism. Although the children remained in school through 1854, the family began making plans to leave. They sold their farm for less than they had paid for it and temporarily moved to Jurançon. The proceeds from the farm were loaned to the couple's eldest two sons, Louis and Joseph, who set themselves up as cigar makers in New Orleans. Searching for a European trading partner, the brothers chose to settle in Belgium, which had no state monopoly on tobacco production.
In Belgium
In 1857, the family relocated to Antwerp, where Tinchant and Louis worked to establish a cigar store and manufacturing firm, which they called Maison Américaine. One by one, the brothers went to the United States, where they created a successful international tobacco business, with Joseph in New Orleans; Pierre working along the Gulf Coast; and eventually Edouard settling into the business in Mobile, Alabama. Jules operated from Veracruz, Mexico and Ernest was located in Antwerp. Tinchant died in 1871 and Vincent survived him by over a decade. Elisabeth Vincent died in Antwerp on 29 November 1883. She and Tinchant were buried in the Schoonselhof cemetery along with three generations of their family.Legacy
Vincent's sons Joseph and Edouard both served in the 6th Louisiana Regiment of the Union Army during the American Civil War. At the end of the conflict, Edouard was a delegate to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1867, where he proposed equal civil rights for women and without regard for race. Three generations of the family worked in the tobacco trade, but the business finally collapsed as a result of disruptions caused by World War II. Several family members fought in the resistance and Joseph's granddaughter died at Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she had been sent for her political activities.The story of Vincent and her family add to the history of statelessness and citizenship, as well as the impact of legal status and paperwork on people of color. Literacy and an understanding of the importance of documentation were crucial to maintaining the status of her family and ensuring their freedom. Despite the political unrest of her lifespan, the family was able to successfully negotiate differing racial divides and varied legal systems, which challenged their ability to attain equal civil status. According to historian Afua Cooper, Vincent's history confirms that through shifting ethnic and national identities in the 19th century, black and free colored people were able to pursue economic success, freedom, respectability, and security across numerous international boundaries. Historian James Sidbury notes that the "micro-history" of Vincent's family confirms that previous historical narratives have distorted understandings of the complex experiences of the African diaspora. The many documents relating to Vincent dispel the notion that their stories lie only in oral histories.