A woman produces a sixty eight year old paper to prove she is free

On 18 August 1807 a woman called Louise dite Letort came into a notary’s office in Santo Domingo city carrying a manumission act from the year 1739. The clerk recorded it as extremely damaged. It had freed her and her mother Rose sixty eight years earlier, and it stood between her and a government that was putting people back into slavery. She was not alone in making that calculation. Henriette dite Pommeau deposited papers on 28 June 1805 reconstructing a manumission granted around 1787, after losing her originals when rebels destroyed her home town. Margueritte Bonne went to a notary in Le Cap in December 1801 to certify an act of 1790 whose copy had burned in the great fire there in June 1793, then carried that certificate to Santiago and deposited it in August 1803. Freedom in this colony depended on whether a sheet of paper had survived a fire, a war and a sea crossing.