The essay explores the links between the equal-rights convictions of Edouard Tinchant, a young activist in post-Civil War New Orleans, and the deep Atlantic background of his family of origin. His grandmother, Rosalie, had been made captive in Senegambia in the 1780s and deported as a slave to the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where she eventually achieved her freedom during the Haitian Revolution. Rosalie gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth, during that Revolution, and fled with her to Cuba as a war refugee. In New Orleans decades later, Elisabeth embarked on her own search for security and standing, using a local notary to record her claim of a paternal surname from the French father who had never married her mother. When, in the political ferment of 1867-68, Elisabeth's son Edouard Tinchant called for legislation to recognize the civil rights of all women, independent of color, he was thus seeking to write into law the right to respect that his grandmother and mother had been obliged to struggle for on their own.
slavery; freedom; Atlantic; Saint-Domingue; Haiti