The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World by Emily Clark (review)

When NBC anchor Brian Williams first visited New Orleans, the cockpit announcement on landing “welcomed . . . passengers to New Orleans by noting that they’d just left the United States” (193). Many attribute New Orleans’s sultry and decidedly exotic ambience to its French and Spanish colonial origins. What Emily Clark shows in her important new book, however, is that excluding the story of New Orleans from that of mainstream America has been a deliberate process, facilitated by the creation, manipulation, and commercialization of a fascinating figure: the mixed-race quadroon woman, whose seductive and wanton character has become synonymous with the city itself. By sequestering New Orleans as the place where the “linked sins of slavery and interracial sex” were committed, the rest of the country conveniently elides its own problematic racial history (194).

Quadroons were not always exclusively New Orleanian. In what Clark dubs the “quadroon press war,” which broke out in Philadelphia in the fall of 1807, the squabbling factions of the Democratic Republican Party used the word “quadroon” to smear their opposition, explicitly challenging the legitimacy—indeed, the very humanity—of the other. Philadelphia had a history of contact with the Haitian term, which emerged when Haitian refugees, white and black, poured into the city in the 1790s. But whatever early sympathy Philadelphians may have had for the republicanism of the black Haitian rebels had well and truly vanished by 1807, as the hurling of racial epithets made clear.

It was the second wave of Haitian refugees, all of whom headed to New Orleans in 1809, from which the stereotype of the quadroon emerged. Nine thousand strong, the refugees did not disperse over the eastern seaboard as had those of the earlier migration; rather, they overwhelmed the tiny city of ten thousand. At least a third of the migrants were free people of color, doubling the existing population of three thousand already there. Marriage was their preferred family pattern, but for the refugees, that option was defeated by demographics and a lack of wealth. By 1829, Clark calculates, there were 2.2 free women of color to every free man of color. Unable to compete with Creole women better endowed with dowries, refugee women adopted the Dominguan role of ménagère, in which a free woman of color managed a white man’s household and frequently became his life partner. This too was a common family pattern in Saint-Domingue, but refugee women were unable to reproduce this system exactly in America. Instead, Clark explains, “exigency nudged many of them toward survival strategies that recapitulated the stereotype’s features [of seductive mûlatresse], reinforced its mythology, and transferred [its] primary site” from Saint-Domingue to New Orleans (63). In the process, the stable, contractual role of the ménagère of Saint-Domingue devolved to New Orleans plaçage, a liaison between a white man and a free woman of color that was a lifeline of support for the woman but lasted only until the man found a suitable wife.

This practice was, Clark stresses, an “improvisational response of the refugee generation” (100). The problem was that visitors to New Orleans in the 1820s and 1830s, such as Karl Bernhard, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and Harriet Martineau, thought they were observing a long-standing tradition. They knew nothing of the colonial demographics of the city in which it had been a statistical impossibility for everyone to marry within their racial category. They missed the strategies white fathers had pursued to claim paternity of their mixed-race children in sacramental registers, to ensure the proper disposition of inheritances. They missed the 1808 code, forbidding interracial marriages, that the paternal strategies were designed to circumvent. They missed the fact that the norm in the colonial period for free women of color was a long-term relationship with a...