‘In A State Of Flight’: Mobility, Freedom, And The Law In The Haitian Revolutionary Diaspora, 1791-1830

Between 1791 and 1810, roughly 20-25,000 people traveled from revolutionary Haiti to the United States, fleeing the events that would become known as the Haitian Revolution. Of these, an estimated ¼ were enslaved, traveling with enslavers from a site of nascent emancipation to jurisdictions where their legal enslavement seemed secure. This dissertation traces these individuals’ journeys, focusing on their encounters with the legalities of slavery and their efforts to achieve freedom at the intersection of legal status and mobility. At the moment of departure from revolutionary Haiti, the legal status of enslaved and formerly enslaved Haitians was often ambiguous. Chapters One and Two of this dissertation examine the circumstances of these departures, and the legal significance of travel at sea for free or enslaved Black passengers from revolutionary Haiti to the United States. Once in the U.S., however, Saint-Dominguan enslavers often acted as though the people whom they held were unambiguously enslaved, retaining control over their labor and affirming their enslavement through legal acts. Chapters Three, Four, and Five shift to examine enslaved Haitians’ efforts to seek legal and extra-legal freedom in three different jurisdictions in the U.S – Philadelphia, Charleston, and Baltimore – using methods that were informed both by local cultures of freedom-seeking and by the broader context of the Haitian Revolution. This dissertation makes two key interventions. First, it argues that flight from emancipation, and the forced movement of enslaved people from sites of emancipatory possibility, was a central feature of the Haitian Revolution. I term this process of forced movement “recaptive mobility.” While recaptive mobility began when Saint-Dominguan enslavers moved their households from revolutionary Haiti to the U.S., it continued on a smaller scale after their arrival. The second intervention of this dissertation is to argue for the necessity of understanding enslaved people’s struggles for freedom in the revolutionary Atlantic as struggles for control over their own mobility. After arriving in the United States, enslaved Haitians sought freedom and autonomy by seeking greater control over their own movement through place, whether to access legal institutions and claim legal freedom or by evading capture and seeking extra-legal autonomy. In response, their enslavers sought to control their movement through recaptive mobility and imprisonment in order to prevent freedom-seeking. At every stage of this diaspora, enslaved Haitians and their enslavers recognized that struggles over freedom were inseparable from struggles over one’s own mobility.