Slavery’s Cohabitation and the Marriage Crisis in 19th Century Haiti
by Maria Cecilia Ulrickson And Andrew Walker
The civil record of a newborn in Croix de Bouquets. Note his status as a “fils naturel” (a son born outside of wedlock) at the end of the fourth line. The overwhelming majority of Haitians in the Port-au-Prince civil registration book of 1834 were described as “naturels.”
In 1834, a priest visiting Haiti wrote to Rome describing a crisis in the local institution of marriage. “The cohabitation that always accompanies slavery, alongside the disorder, the license, and the ignorance, were everywhere: legitimate matrimony was hardly known.” The visitor was John England, an American archbishop, on a Vatican mission to newly-independent Haiti. His letter now sits in the archive of the Propaganda Fide, the missionary arm of the Catholic Church in Rome. England’s eye caught something significant, a puzzle that becomes clear with a double take. In another archive in Haiti, civil officers of the state left records of the births, deaths, and marriages of Haiti’s citizens. They show that almost uniformly, Haitians on the west side of the country were legally “illegitimate,” born to unmarried parents. This means that in 1834 and in the preceding decades, Haitians in the west did not formalize unions in either churches or civil offices.
John England looked around Haiti and made several assumptions based on his experience as the archbishop of Charleston, South Carolina. First, he assumed that enslaved people did not marry, that cohabitation “always accompanies slavery.” In the United States south, the institutions of slavery and marriage were incompatible. Slave status was inherited through the mother’s line. Slave owners in the United States denied their slaves access to legal marriage as a means of preserving slave status across generations. Having established that slaves did not marry, John England secondly assumed that marriage in 1834 Haiti looked the same as it had under slavery.
John England’s comment was not very attentive to either time or place. First, consider that Haiti was not always the same. After the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) that cemented independence and emancipation, the leaders of Haiti formed new state institutions, including nationalized religions (in Port-au-Prince, Catholicism) and a form of revolutionary secular marriage that extended divorce rights to both spouses. Second, consider place: Haiti was once a French colony. Until the late eighteenth century, enslaved and free people of African descent did have access to marriage in the Catholic Church. These sacramental unions held civil weight according to French law, and formalized marriages across color line were common in Saint Domingue.
So what happened on Haitian soil that inclined Haitians of the nineteenth century to reject marriage? Another Catholic priest also blamed slavery’s aftereffects. The abbé Grégoire (a close friend of Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer) speculated in 1823 that Haiti’s “marriage crisis” grew out the prohibitions against “mixed” marriages that were promulgated in the eighteenth-century French Antilles that encouraged informal unions. Saint Domingue local law beginning in 1777 also denied all slaves and people of color access to sacramental marriage without legal proof of freedom, although Grégoire’s treatise on Haitian marriage did not consider this point. Grégoire also found no fault in the fact that the state had recently “secularized” the institution of marriage; in 1819, the President eliminated clerics’ civic functions and split marriage into civil and sacramental spheres. This one reform was accompanied by other projects to nationalize Haiti’s Catholic clergy and calendar. None of these reforms made it into Grégoire’s treatise-- slavery was just too convenient a scapegoat for Grégoire to lay the blame anywhere else. Yet his solution to widespread cohabitation—one, to eliminate legal divorce and two, to reserve inheritance only for legitimate children—had nothing to do with slavery or its aftereffects.
Haitian intellectuals in the press also viewed the prevalence of unmarried couples as a serious “problem.” Instead of pointing to past slavery, this forum cited the “youth of our country, where civilization has yet to reach its full development.” These citations come from a February 1837 issue of the Port-au-Prince-based scientific and literary journal Le Républicain, where lawyer Dumai Lespinasse published an essay on the “utility” of marriage as “a moral and political bond,” illustrating the numerous advantages that married individuals enjoyed over those who maintained unmarried status (célibat). Lespinasse criticized out-of-wedlock unions because they had not been formalized according to civil law. He exhorted women above all to awaken to “the dignity of their nature” in order to “legitimate and validate” their unions. Lespinasse concluded that while some individuals might achieve stable partnerships without marrying, they would more likely realize the “work of human propagation” if they consented to “the most legally constituted bond” of marriage. Although Lespinasse did not invoke Christian duties in his argument, the Haitian civil law he referenced had never been more religious, given President Boyer‘s program of creating a national Catholic Church.
When we first approached John England’s notes on Haiti, we asked, how did slavery shape the institution of religious and civil marriage? Our larger project offers a deep historical narrative of people’s daily experiences of marriage in post-revolutionary Haiti. We consider, who married in early Haiti, and what kinds of alternatives to marriage existed alongside sacramental marriage? Did people of African descent marry differently than other citizens, and if so, was it because of the now-broken institution of slavery? What about the conditions of the present—did they matter? Once we placed several archives together, we realized that Haiti’s institution of marriage offers an ideal case study of how religious commitment, practice, and ideas transform under state religions. We were confronted with new questions for the study of secularization (how did Haiti’s state religion accelerate or retard the process of secularization? how is the secularization of the nineteenth-century Americas unique?). We now turn to these questions in Haiti, a place that was more secular and more religious than we imagined.
John England to Propaganda, 9 June 1834, Archivio Storico de Propaganda Fide: Scritte riferite nei Congressi: America Antille 5 (1834-1836), Exp. 55-58.
Maria Cecilia Ulrickson is Assistant Professor of American Church History at Catholic University of America. Her research focuses the Church and slavery as well as Black Catholicism in the Caribbean and the Americas. Maria Cecilia has worked in archives in the US, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Vatican and elsewhere in the Atlantic world. She is finishing her first book on slave emancipation in the Dominican Republic, Freed Four Times in Santo Domingo, 1795-1822. She received her PhD from the University of Notre Dame in 2018.
Andrew Walker (Ph.D. History, University of Michigan, 2018) is the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Caribbean Studies at Wesleyan University. His book manuscript in progress, entitled Strains of Unity, explores how local residents of the former Spanish colony of Santo Domingo shaped the making and unmaking of the 1822-1844 Haitian Unification of Hispaniola. Andrew is working on a separate project about the admiralty courts of post-revolutionary Haiti and their visions of enforcement of antislavery law. At Wesleyan, he teaches courses on Caribbean history, slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World, and Afro-diasporic music in the Americas.