Bequests to mixed-race children created a propertied free-colored class

Evidence

“These first whites,” Raimond explained, “lived with these women as if they were married” and had children with them. Some freed the women and married them, as the Code Noir stipulated whites who had children with slaves should do. Many whites left land and slaves to their partners and children. Indeed it was generally expected that they would do so, and Saint-Domingue whites resisted royal attempts to institute laws outlawing such bequests. As a result, a class of property-owning free people of color emerged in the colony. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 220

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the arc: this property-owning free-colored class is exactly who Raimond petitioned to defend, and whose political exclusion fueled the colony’s conflicts. — connects to: A racial hierarchy can be vertically ordered without collapsing into a flat white-versus-Black binary — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 66