A Woman Of Saint-Domingue: Intimacy, Endurance and the Perpetuation of Saint-Domingue’s Class-Based Social Order in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

This microhistory follows Eugenie Peneault (1774-1853) by means of a journal she kept during the Haitian Revolution and her subsequent relocation to New Orleans. Born the daughter of a baker, Peneault advanced through personal connections within the Creole elite to marry a member of the island-born planter class with ties to the minor nobility. With her fellow emigres, she recreated the patriarchal slave society of Saint Domingue in Cuba, then adapted its values to an urban setting in New Orleans, where she and her husband connected with local elites. This woman’s journal sheds light on experiences of pregnancy and childcare central to Peenault’s existence. After her husband’s death, Peneault cultivated respectability to preserve her husband’s status for the sake of her son, a strategy that made her utterly dependent on the labor of people she enslaved but also allowed her to pave her son’s way into an emerging political class.