Abstract
In February 1771, Philippe Fossé known as Bonhomme, or “Goodfellow,” returned home to Aquin on military leave. A free, legitimately born quarteron, Fossé appears to have been the kind of sturdy, responsible man royal officers believed was Saint-Domingue’s best defense against a British attack. His reputation in Aquin was solid enough that in 1769 a white widow had hired him and another man of color to guard her goddaughter from a persistent suitor. When the girl ran off with her paramour during the night, Fossé and his colleague pursued the white couple to the plantation gate, but no further.1 Sometime after this incident, “Goodfellow” Fossé joined the military and moved away, probably to Cap Français.
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Notes
Jacques Houdaille, “Trois paroisses de Saint-Domingue au xviiic siècle: Étude demographique,” Population 18 (1963), 101. Rogcrs, “Lcs librcs dc coulcur” (2005), 557; shc found 24 out of 67 free colored marriages in Port-au-Prince in the years after 1776 involved a slave but only 13 out of 108 in Cap Français.
Blanche Maurcl, Le vent du large, ou le destin tourmenté de Jean-Baptiste Gérard, colon de Saint-Domingue (Paris: La nef de Paris, 1952), 56, 58, 71. Maurcl notcs that Gérard gave 8,000 livres of his own moncy to thc mulatto woman Zabct and hcr seven children, who were freed from slavery by the testament of one of his estate overseers.
André Maistre de Chambon, “Acte notarié relatif aux doléances des ‘gens de couleur’ de Saint-Domingue (29 juillet 1789),” Mémoires de la Société archéologique et historique de la Charente (June, 1931), 7–8.
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© 2006 John D. Garrigus
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Garrigus, J.D. (2006). Proving Free Colored Virtue. In: Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. The Americas in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403984432_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403984432_8
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