Intersectionality Theory in Historical Research: Telling Different American Stories

In The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World, Emily Clark seeks to correct several myths: one is that New Orleans was the primary home of the “quadroon.” Another unfolds from her deconstruction of the fictionalized and pseudoscientific written accounts that have been uncritically recycled in popular and scholarly literature. The image of the quadroon as concubine to white men emerged from the convergence of cultural practices: one in Haiti, of the ménagère; and the other, in late colonial New Orleans, of the “bachelor patriarch.” These seemed to solidify in the imagination of whites a belief in the immorality of people of African descent. Clark's corrective to this damning stereotype is to trace the rise of monogamous Christian-style marriages among people of African descent from the French colonial period to the mid-1830s against the backdrop of the evolution of the quadroon concubine narrative. Another intervention occurs in her contrast of stereotypes with the actual variety of relationships that occurred for women of color in antebellum New Orleans. While her work is based in the antebellum era, she explores the profit motive that drove the “fancy trade” and the “quadroon balls,” with their links to the tourist industry that survived after Reconstruction. These practices were precursors to the notorious Storyville, which featured sex across the color line with light-skinned prostitutes.

The threatening image of the quadroon first entered American discourse as a weapon in a feud of rivals in Thomas Jefferson's political party. The label of quadroon was used with success to stigmatize those pushing the extension of democratic principles further than many white Philadelphians were willing to go. The “ugly rhetoric” between the rival factions was over whether a moderate or a radical (that is, mixed-race) interpretation of democracy would flourish in the new nation. The shape of the myth of the quadroon concubine that would come to dominate tourist discourse and expectation in New Orleans—for experiencing “exotic” sexuality—originated in Saint Domingue. The demographic ratios of white woman to free women of color as available sexual partners for the white men on the island gave rise to the commingling of the races and the birth of mixed-race children. This practice caused some Europeans born on the isle to attribute their loss in status as French citizens to miscegenation. They railed against the free mûlatresse, whom they characterized as using sexual prowess to extract men's wealth from their French families. They also denounced her power to manumit her children and to set up their white men for potential defeat by the African-descended majority. This image of the conniving free woman of color was transported to New Orleans and presented as a threat to “forging a stable American polity” (p. 53). Clark asserts that the myth served a number of functions: it taught white Americans “what to expect and what to fear” (p. 54) from the Haitian refugees; it provided a trope for Northern antislavery fiction and organizing; “it guarantee[d] the sexual privilege of white men to black women's bodies” (p. 96); and “the mûlatresse drew attention away from the more terrifying danger of the black rebellion that might escape the island's boundaries to far more devastating effect” (p. 53).

Refugee women were at a disadvantage as their sexual/life partners could not accompany them and were not allowed to enter Louisiana. Some “resorted to transitory relations or even prostitution as economic...