Born: 1798, Haiti
Died: 29 November 1883
Country most active: United States
Also known as:
Elisabeth Dieudonné Vincent was a Haitian-born businesswoman and international traveller, born the illegitimate child of a former slave and a Frenchman.
Elisabeth’s mother Rosalie was taken from Africa and arrived in Saint-Domingue just prior to the Haitian Revolution. In December 1795, merchant Marthe Guillaume manumitted Rosalie, but the British colonial governor refused to ratify the official paperwork during the British occupation of Haiti during the French Revolutionary Wars. As Rosalie was technically free, but had no official documents to prove it, her status remained ambiguous until the British withdrew in 1798. The following year, she was listed in the baptismal records as “Marie Françoise, called Rosalie, free black woman” and christened her daughter as a free-born child. By 1802, the French had reinstated slavery in Martinique and there was concern that it would be reasserted over blacks in Saint-Domingue. To prevent that from happening to his family, Vincent’s father Michel drafted a document in 1803 declaring that Rosalie and her four children, including Elisabeth, were all his slaves and were proclaimed free. Within months, French troops besieged the town of Jérémie and the family fled to nearby Santiago de Cuba with 18,000 other refugees. Elisabeth’s siblings disappear from the records and it is unclear whether they were captured, went into hiding in Saint-Domingue or were able to slip into Cuba, avoiding the record keepers.
In 1804, Vincent’s father died, and the family’s property was sold to pay debts. Though Elisabeth and Rosalie were legally freed, with ever-changing colonial powers, it was a tenuous position for mother and daughter. In 1809, when the Spanish expelled French colonists because of the Peninsular War in Europe, Vincent moved to New Orleans in the South, decades before the US Civil War. Her mother returned to the now independent Haiti.
Vincent travelled to New Orleans with her godmother, Marie Blanche Peillon and her consort Jean Lambert Détry, a Belgian carpenter. Détry worked as a contractor, while Peillon traded in land and slaves. When Détry died in 1821, he left Vincent $500, but her godmother later refused to give Vincent the inheritance, claiming it as the cost of room and board for Vincent and her husband.
Vincent married Jacques Tinchant, a builder and carpenter, in 1822. The marriage contract was prepared without a surname for Vincent and listed her name as Marie Dieudonné, her mother’s first name and her own middle name. In 1835 she amended her original marriage record to add a surname, removing the double stigma of illegitimacy and slave ancestry. In addition ot Tinchant’s business, which Vincent helped manage, the couple made money renting out Vincent’s slaves, Gertrude and her daughter Marie Louise, who her godmother had given to her as a wedding present. They freed Gertrude in 1833, replacing her with another slave, a man named Giles (also known as Clark).
Their first child, François, was born in 1824, followed by Joseph (1827), Pierre (1833), Jules (1836), Ernest (1839) and Edouard (1841). By 1835, Tinchant and his half-brother formed a company developing land and building houses for sale. In the following years, legislation in Louisiana imposed ever harsher restrictions on free people of color, such as limits on schooling and requirements for annual registrations to prove their free status. Like many of Tinchant’s relatives, the couple left the United States for France in 1840, after arranging to sell Marie Louise to Gertrude for $800.
In France, they operated a dairy and vineyards in Gan, near where Tinchant’s brother and parents had already established themselves. With no experience in farming, the couple used sharecroppers to work their dairy, grain fields, and vineyards. In 1848, growing opposition to France’s constitutional monarchy led to unrest in nearby Pau, where Vincent’s sons were in school. The family began making plans to leave. They sold their farm for less than they had paid for it and loaned the proceeds to the couple’s eldest two sons, Louis and Joseph, who began a business as cigar makers in New Orleans. Looking for a European trading partner, the brothers chose to settle in Belgium, which had no state monopoly on tobacco production. In 1857, the family relocated to Antwerp, where Vincent and her husband invested in their sons’ new tobacco business and lived out the remaining decades of their lives.
Vincent’s history illustrates the fluidity of identity and the migration of people from the 1802 Saint-Domingue revolution to the French Revolution of 1848. It shows the vital importance of literacy and the documentation required for black and free colored people to maintain their civil and social rights and freedom.