Dessens examines the legacy of approximately 15,000
Saint-Domingue refugees--whites, slaves, and free people of
color--who settled in Louisiana between 1791 and 1815.
Forced to flee their French Caribbean colony following a
slave rebellion that gave birth to the Haitian Republic in
January 1804, they spread throughout the Caribbean and
along the North American Atlantic coast. Forming a
relatively coherent diaspora for at least two decades, they
concentrated in New Orleans. In this first comprehensive
study of the Saint-Domingue influence, Dessens brings to
light a refugee community composed in almost equal
proportions of three population groups, yet completely
forgotten by Louisiana historiography for more than 150
years, despite its arrival during a crucial historical era,
its participation in the economic, social, and political
life of a new homeland, and its cultural legacy to the
“Creole capital.”
A few pioneer historians of Louisiana raised the
Saint-Domingue refugees from oblivion in the mid-20th
century, but only one collection of articles, The Road
to Louisiana, has ever been published about them.
Dessens finds that the new arrivals established New
Orleans’ first newspapers and many of its oldest schools
and left their cultural influence on the city’s music and
architecture. The immigrants also brought with them
inclusive ideas about people of African descent that helped
shape local race relations. The children of these refugees
carefully orchestrated shoemaker Homer Plessy’s vain
attempt to outlaw segregation.
Drawing on sources in France and the United States, as well
as civic, church, and other primary documents in New
Orleans, Dessens examines the salient features of the
refugees’ former society, the reasons they left, the
migration itself, and their reception and integration into
New Orleans society. Revealing a better understanding of
migratory movements and of Louisiana’s exceptionalism in
the United States, this study will be of special interest
to historians of the South, Gulf South, Louisiana, and New
Orleans, as well as African American, Latin American, and
Caribbean history, migration, and genealogy.