Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation by Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard (review)

In Freedom Papers, Scott and Hébrard use five generations of the Tinchant family genealogy as a lens for understanding the complex Atlantic web of national and imperial power from the late eighteenth century to World War II. The saga begins in Senegambia with a woman "of the Poulard nation" who was later called Rosalie. A captive of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a resident of revolutionary Saint-Domingue, and a temporary exile to Spanish Cuba, Rosalie was able to achieve a tenuous and contestable freedom. Her efforts launched her family on a trajectory through an "unknown zone of changing law" (46)—a phrase that sets the tone for subsequent chapters that follow Rosalie's descendants into the interstices of various internally contradictory national and imperial systems.

The authors describe their book as a "micro-history set in motion" (4). Structured around arrivals and departures, the book charts the circulation of the Tinchants through far-flung yet interconnected locales, including most prominently the port cities of New Orleans, Veracruz, and Antwerp. With a truly transnational (rather than a simply comparative) approach, Scott and Hébrard mine public and personal documents retrieved from archives and private collections on three continents. In an instructive and unconventional "acknowledgements and collaborations" section, they demystify the process of archival research (243-252). They track the efforts of this family of African descent to secure recognition and protection within the flows of revolution and repression encompassing the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction. They also detail the family's participation as aspiring proprietors in the tobacco industry's sprawling "commodity chain."

As its title suggests, the book focuses on documents and their power within the bureaucracies of nation, church, and empire. The Tinchants were keenly aware that official papers—such as marriage certificates, bills of sale, formal declarations of citizenship, recognitions of paternity, and the like—mattered. Hence, they filed, concealed, and deployed these documents in creative and unexpected ways. The authors bring these shards of evidence together in the final chapter, which shows the Tinchants attempting to express their identities as "citizens beyond nation."

Scott and Hébrard enact a methodology that bridges various sub-fields of history—cultural, economic, political, intellectual, and legal. In a number of exemplary close readings, they also engage techniques of literary scholarship. Not only do they place these "freedom papers" in the swiftly moving currents of history; they also discern subtle shifts in form and language, allowing readers to glimpse the intent of the people involved. As a result, the authors parse the language of rights, terms of citizenship, and "various elements of freedom" with uncommon historical and philosophical precision (45). Witness, for example, their discussion of Édouard Tinchant's insertion of "public rights," a notion forged in the French republican context, into U.S. political discourse (Chapter 7).

In short, Freedom Papers is an important contribution to historical, philosophical, and literary scholarship on the age of revolution and emancipation. Groundbreaking in its scope and methodology, it is well written, holding an almost novelistic suspense, especially its final pages, in which the family story culminates in Nazi-dominated Europe.