Two French doctors try to expose a New York physician's Haitian past

In 1818 two French medical writers, Fournier and Begim, published an attack on Felix Pascalis of New York. They called him a man who had never really been a doctor at all. Then they went further and named his connection in Saint-Domingue with the insurgent leader they called the pious Romain and with the camp at Trou Coffy, accusing him of presiding over the killing of white civilians and the mutilation of their bodies. Pascalis demanded two thousand dollars in damages. He also wrote to Jean Deveze in Paris, who had run the fever hospital at Bush Hill in Philadelphia in 1793, and obtained from him a signed declaration in February 1820 that his conduct during the Trou Coffy affair had deserved glory. To make his case he set down in 1821 a long memoir of what he had seen, the Anecdote historique. That document, written to save a medical reputation in Manhattan, is one of the fullest eyewitness accounts of any 1791 insurgency in the colony.

Dupuy describes the post-independence state as divided from the start between the older property-owning and slave-owning affranchis, usually called mulattoes although the group included Black members, and a newer Black property-owning class formed during Louverture's rule and after independence. Their fight for control of the state produced fourteen years of civil war before Boyer reunited the country. Dupuy's argument is about consequences rather than personalities. The factional conflict blocked any developmental project, and the class structure it left behind, a dominant class living off commerce, finance and import and export tied to the world market and the state, and a peasantry growing food and some export crops, made industrialisation impossible in the nineteenth century. That weakness is what let French, English, German and later American capital take a dominant position by the end of the century, in what he calls a neocolonial turn.

France abolished slavery in its colonies in February 1794 without ever stating plainly that the slave trade was over. Napoleon Bonaparte restored both in 1802 and 1803. The traffic then became a theoretical question, because once war with Britain resumed the French lost Martinique and Santo Domingo in 1809 and Guadeloupe in 1810, and the Royal Navy blockaded the French coast. At the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815 the European powers declared their opposition to the trade while stopping short of prohibiting it. Bonaparte, briefly back in power during the Hundred Days, issued a decree of abolition in 1815 that had no effect on anything. The prohibition that finally held was a law of 15 April 1818, passed under the restored Bourbon monarchy. Even then several more years went by before agreements with Britain on searching suspect ships at sea gave that law any force in French waters.

The federal census of 1820 counted twenty seven thousand one hundred and seventy six people in New Orleans, of whom thirteen thousand five hundred and eighty four were white and six thousand two hundred and thirty seven were free people of colour. Perhaps eight to nine thousand of the whites and four and a half to five thousand of the free people of colour belonged to the French speaking part of the city. Newcomers from Saint-Domingue by way of Cuba made up close to a fifth of the white French speakers and about a third of the French speaking free people of colour. That puts roughly seventeen hundred white and sixteen hundred free coloured arrivals still living in New Orleans eleven years after they landed, which is close to two thirds of the whites and half of the free people of colour the mayor had counted in 1809. The marriage registers of the cathedral point the same way. Most of them stayed.