Saint-Domingue’s racial law contradicted its pervasive interracial family ties.

Evidence

At the heart of such arguments, and of the discrimination they justified, was a profound contradiction. Even as racist laws meant to limit the power and numbers of free people of color proliferated, whites continued to have sexual relationships with women of African descent, both slave and free, and to give their partners and children property and slaves. On the eve of his wedding to a white woman in 1781, Moreau gave slaves and money as gifts to a free woman of color, Marie-Louis Laplaine, who had been his housekeeper for several years, and to her daughter, Amenaide. Laplaine was described as a “mulâtresse,” and her daughter was described as a “quarteronne” (three-quarters white); she was probably Moreau’s daughter. Whites were connected to free people of color by a complex web of familial and social ties; men of European and African descent were, often literally, “sons of the same father.” And yet the law created a difference between them, defining them as members of two separate social classes, with their destinies shaped by their ancestry. Saint-Domingue was a schizophrenic society in which the law attacked relationships between those of European and African descent even as the whites who supported such laws continuously flouted them. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 244

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did free people of color reconcile being legally defined by ancestry with webs of white kinship, and did this contradiction fuel their later political claims?
• XREF: The “sons of the same father” split echoes class/identity stratification dynamics like those later traced in free-colored revolt.