A Genealogist of Slavery Confronts the Archives
Records of the Jamaican Prospect Estate: plantation ledgers, 1785-1817. Bodleian Library
Historians of slavery need genealogy. The genealogist studies what Foucault called the “details and accidents” of history that shaped the values, ideas, and institutions that humans once thought were immutable and now know aren’t. It’s not that we use genealogy in order to arrive at a critical stance toward slavery—that part is obvious. We use genealogy to address a problem of slavery’s sources. Our archives themselves need a genealogy. This is because historical archives are not repositories of facts from the past but rather institutions that preserve a particular narrative about the past.
For historians of slavery, the first problem of the archives is obvious: the archives containing records of enslaved people were produced and preserved by slave societies, slave owners—in other words, the “victors” of history. The documents produced by these people and their institutions describe enslaved people and their descendants as commodities (literally, piezas [pieces] or negros), contagious filth, dangerous violent rebels, lesser Catholics, non-citizens. The historian must adopt a hostile position toward the archive in order to write about humans—that is, enslaved men, women, and children rather than “slaves.”
Archives are not just inanimate places that hold partial truths, but also tools designed to help institutions reinforce their authority and contain disorder, people, revolt. For historians of slavery, the next problem of the archives, therefore, is one of interpretation, because the activities of slavery’s institutions are intertwined with the archival process. For example, the boiler plate within legal documents, the transportation and tracking of paper trails, the categorization of documents all confirm the status of enslaved people as commodities. In these instances, documents served as tools: of the merchant companies that sold slaves, the Church that denied them equal access to communion, or the colonial government requiring emancipated people to continue living under their former masters. The historian of slavery reads documents “against the grain” (asking, what hidden human moment does this document record?) but also “with the grain” (that is, acknowledging that the physical page itself built up slavery).
From The World in Miniature: Africa, written and illustrated by Frederic Shoberl
Finally, archives preserve particular moments, ideas, and pathways to the exclusion of others. Historians of slavery must confront gaps (where in any archives could I read the history of friendship, childhood, motherhood under slavery?) and emphases (accounts of violent punishment, enslaved people as brutes). Our writing can tell stories other than slavery’s violence, but does that extend dignity to enslaved, brutalized humans? Does a story “against the grain” face down the thing the archive does (that is, preserving violence and creating race)? Or does a story about the violence memorialize violence?
I sympathize most with historians of the details. We write closely on everything we can find—yes, on the violence, labor, scarce manumissions, forced migrations, and rebellions, but also on enslaved people’s families, desires, memories of the past, past times, investments, and beliefs. For example, my collaborator and I have scoured the last wills/testaments of freed African-born women for their memories of the Atlantic passage and of emancipation. We wring our documents dry in order to find and tell stories that our protagonists would actually recognize as theirs.
TRACING MONSTROSITY
Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot Original illustration by Auguste Raffet, engraving by Hébert.
Once we have studied our archives and we know what they are doing even into the present, we can enter them. And just as genealogy helps us confront the problem of the archives, the genealogical method of inquiry also reveals how our historical subjects have warped over time. In my case, I entered the archives of the Haitian revolution in order to study the revolution’s emancipations and its Catholicism. I had to understand the revolution at specific moments and places, but also across time to the present, finding all those details and accidents that have attached new meanings onto this historical event.
Even before Haiti was born, it had inherited a reputation for monstrosity, backwardness, and poverty. The things that made it revolutionary—casting off French colonial order and abolishing slavery—were ignored or lay buried under tales of the revolution’s atrocities. How is this possible? During the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), free white and free black colonists fled the colony expecting that they would return once France (or Spain, or even Britain) quelled the diverse revolts which consumed plantations, towns, ports, and roads. The fact that they expected to return is important; they could not believe that the plantation rebellions, arson, amassing of arms, and murder could make a successful “slave revolution.”
Haiti’s disavowal continued after independence. Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haitian sovereignty in 1804. In my own research in notarial archives, I found ex-pats in neighboring Santo Domingo who continued to claim land and people in Haiti as their property. The French also mocked the early Haitian state, memorializing the ex-colony as a ridiculous experiment in Black (read, backwards) rule. Americans, the French, the British, the Spanish, the Vatican, all under the grip of slavery, refused Haiti diplomatic recognition. Closer to home, in the neighboring Dominican Republic (which was under Haitian rule), wealthy Hispano-philes revolted against Haitian rule and later tried to re-instate Spanish colonial rule and slavery. In the twentieth century, the US military occupied both sides of the island and capitalized on this vision of the Dominican Republic, presenting the Dominican Republic as “Hispanic, Catholic and white” under the threat of aggressive Haitian Blackness and vodou. These twin images justified American intervention on both sides of the island.
ANTIQUARIANISM AND HAITI
The genealogical method has helped historians reveal the colonial, racist constructions that still hang over Haiti. Genealogical work can also mislead us, however. Scholars of Haiti arrived at a logical conclusion which was not a fetishized future (the thing that tempts most genealogists) but rather a memorialized, antiquarian’s past. The thing that gripped our imagination, and which shimmered with the light of freedom and modernity, was the idea of a Black state of two hundred years ago buried underneath layers of intentional misremembering. In this vision, Haiti is the Atlantic world’s first Black state, first emancipationist state, the beginning of the end of Atlantic slavery everywhere, and thus the origin of true freedom everywhere. The other two, more famous liberal revolutions, American and French, were theoretical. What is political freedom compared with actually freeing people from chains and sugar mills? The Haitian Revolution did what the other revolutions only talked about: ruptured race relations, imperial power, and definitions of freedom. This is modernity, and it was created by freed African and African-descent Haitians. It is a modernity, however, that existed only briefly and does not exist today, since genealogists have yet to free contemporary Haiti from the myth that still persists about its anti-modern backwardness, a myth created by the slave-holding west and ex-pats in denial.
Toussaint Louverture by John Kay in 1805
Starting around twenty years ago, scholars of Haiti began to recognize that their own genealogical yearnings had created their own, different fantasy, the myth that early Haiti arrived at freedom and modernity. We then looked closely at the early Haitian state and found all sorts of un-modern things. Haiti’s Black and mulatto elites recycled much of colonialism into its governance. They circulated new strains of racism, legislated new forms of un-free labor, and downplayed their own emancipation of the Dominican Republic. Haiti also tied its freedom to seemingly un-modern things. As an example from my own research, “modern” Haiti embraced an intriguing liberalism interwoven with the Catholic Church. In this case, young Haiti’s leaders were not so naïve as to reproduce colonial Catholicism entirely—they pursued a Haitian, national Catholicism based on a native clergy, local liturgies, and patriotism. Given these new data, historians of Haiti have distanced themselves from the thing once fetishized.
Historians excavated the archives of Haiti and revealed what had been hidden, a brief modernity based on freedom from the most horrific institution that humans ever made. After a brief infatuation with revolutionary Haiti, historians did not like the Haitian modernity we found, so we disavowed that too. We are left with the tool we started, tearing the past down, imagining that we have nothing but our present and future selves to yearn for.
HISTORY AS COMMUNION
I am convinced that historians need genealogy to break slavery’s archival chains and to know our subjects as we receive them across time. I am not convinced by the power genealogy apparently gives to its user, the distance it presumes to create from the past. So far I have offered my thoughts on genealogy. Genealogy helps historians free the present from past events, institutions, and, yes, even traditions.
What about a Christian excavation of the past? I’ve shared some of my own archival practices. As I enter an archives with destructive tools, I also encounter a past that envelops me, a past that I never wish to be apart from. I find timeless, unseen traces of God, beginning with the people described in my documents, people who possess eternal souls. It is my Christian duty to acknowledge my historical subjects as still-present and to pray for their rest. I also feel compelled to write entire lives, histories with detail, to acknowledge my protagonists’ eternity. A Christian historian does not look to the past or the future for Eden—we look to heaven.
Maria Cecilia Ulrickson is Assistant Professor in American Church History in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at Catholic University. She studies slavery and Catholicism in the Caribbean and wider Americas.