Skip to content
🇭🇹   BETA  ·  9,776 entries published  ·  90,224 entries away from the 100k milestone.       🇭🇹   BETA  ·  9,776 entries published  ·  90,224 entries away from the 100k milestone.       
You are offline — some content may not be available
1771-05-27

LETTER from the Minister to the Administrators, on people of mixed blood

Haitian

I have reported to the King the letter of MM. de Nolivos and de Bongars of April 10, 1770, containing their reflections on the request made by the sieurs…., for Letters patent declaring them descended from the Indian race. His Majesty has not judged it fitting to grant it to them. He has thought that such a favor would tend to destroy the difference that nature has placed between Whites and Black people, and that political prejudice has taken care to maintain as a distance that people of color and their descendants should never reach; and finally that it matters to good order not to weaken the state of humiliation attached to the race in whatever degree it is found, a prejudice all the more useful because it is in the very heart of the enslaved, and because it contributes principally to the peace of the Colonies. His Majesty has accordingly approved that you refused to solicit for the sieurs…. the favor of being declared descended from the Indian race, and he recommends that you favor under no pretext the marriages of Whites with women of mixed blood.

Source  ·  p. act 05:326 Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises de l'Amérique sous le Vent (Vol. 5) (1784-1790), p. act 05:326