Interracial unions with enslaved women created the free-colored class.
Evidence
What had driven the transformation of Saint-Domingue from a relatively open society into one saturated with racial discrimination? For Raimond, the response was simple: sex. Early in the colony’s history, he argued, the European men who came to the colonies “burning with the desire to make a fortune” but “weakened by the heat of the climate, often sick, and deprived of the aid wives of their own color could have given them,” turned to “African women.” These slave women cared for them assiduously, hoping to gain “the greatest recompense, their liberty.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 219
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
Related
- Bequests to mixed-race children created a propertied free-colored class (similarity 0.83)
- Economic incentives outweighed official pressure for white men to marry free women of color (similarity 0.82)
- Economic motives kept white men marrying into the free-colored elite (similarity 0.82)
- Raimond blamed white men’s sexual desire for colonial racial hierarchy (similarity 0.82)
- Policing slaves by free coloreds deepened the rift between the two groups. (similarity 0.80)
- Whites sustained intimate family ties to people of color they legally degraded (similarity 0.80)
- The slave uprising in Saint-Domingue shifted the French revolution into granting racial equality (similarity 0.80)
- Saint-Domingue’s racial law contradicted its pervasive interracial family ties. (similarity 0.79)
- Wealth passed through free women of color, not their white husbands. (similarity 0.79)
- Free-colored activists radicalized French abolitionists into demanding all nonwhites’ equality (similarity 0.79)
- Racist marriage laws drove free women of color into concubinage (similarity 0.78)
- Saint-Domingue whites built a racist democratization that excluded free people of color (similarity 0.78)