Freed people adopted French official rhetoric to secure their freedom under reoccupation

Evidence

In July 1802, from Le Cap, Marie-Rose Masson wrote to her former master the marquis de Gallifet, the onetime owner of the richest plantations in the colony. Masson had purchased her freedom from Gallifet’s manager, Odeluc, but the transaction was not made official before he was killed in the 1791 insurrection. Masson feared that if the old order returned, she would again be a slave. She pleaded with Gallifet to acknowledge the freedom she had gained before emancipation. “The time of error is finished,” she announced, and those with “bad intentions” would no longer be able to “anchor their destructive influence” in Saint-Domingue, for a “protective government” was “working to reestablish order.” Soon, she promised Gallifet, “the arms among your property that still exist will, voluntarily or by force, have to return to their useful work.” In her bid to preserve her own freedom, Masson used a language similar to that of many French officials, suggesting that the time of freedom had been an aberration, a period of tumult and violence that was best left behind. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 985

Categorization

• QUESTION: Masson purchased freedom but the transaction was never made official — a fragile legal status typical of the pre-emancipation period. Worth noting how tenuous free status could be.