Elisabeth Dieudonné Vincent (1798 – 29 November 1883) was a Saint Dominican Creole, businesswoman and international migrant. Born in 1798 in Saint-Domingue to an affranchi and French father, she was illegitimate, although her father did acknowledge her. In 1803, the family fled from the violence of the Haitian Revolution to Santiago de Cuba, where they completed paperwork to show that they were free. In 1809, when the Spanish authorities expelled French colonists because of the Peninsular War in Europe, she moved to New Orleans in Louisiana.
Vincent married in 1822 and with her husband, Jacques Tinchant, operated a business in New Orleans. The couple also earned money by renting out Vincent's slaves. In 1835 she amended her original marriage record in order to acquire a surname, removing the double stigma of illegitimacy and slave ancestry. Experiencing racial inequality and increasing restrictions as a result of the demanding Black Codes in the United States, they moved with their family to France, where they operated a dairy and vineyards in Gan. Poor economic conditions and violence during the French Revolution of 1848 prompted the family to relocate to Antwerp in 1857, where they invested in their sons' new tobacco business.
Early life and family
Elisabeth Dieudonné was born in 1798 in Jérémie, Saint-Domingue to a former slave woman, Rosalie of the Poulard nation, and her partner, Michel Étienne Henry Vincent, a Frenchman who had at one point owned the royal monopoly for the sale of meat in Les Cayes. She was baptized in Cap-Dame-Marie and though her parents were not officially married, her father acknowledged her as his child.
Elisabeth's mother was from an area bordered on the east by the Senegal River valley and the Guinea coastline, stretching westward to Mali and encompassing the territory where the Pulaar language is spoken. She arrived in Saint-Domingue just prior to the Haitian Revolution. Slaves from Senegambia were rare in Saint-Domingue and records confirm that the Poulard woman Rosalie was owned in the early 1790s by a freedman, Alexis Couba, who sold her to the merchant Marthe Guillaume. In 1793, Guillaume sold Rosalie to Jean-Baptiste Mongol, the local butcher, but within two years, she had been returned to Guillaume. In December 1795, Guillaume manumitted Rosalie, but the British colonial governor Adam Williamson refused to ratify the official paperwork (this was during the British occupation of Haiti during the French Revolutionary Wars).
As Rosalie was technically free, but had no official papers to prove it, her status was ambiguous until the British withdrew in 1798. The following year, she appeared 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 restored slavery in Martinique and there were rumors that it would be reasserted over blacks in Saint-Domingue. To prevent that from happening to his family, Michel Vincent drafted a document in 1803 declaring that Rosalie and her children Juste Theodore, Marie Louise (known as Resinette), Etienne Hilaire (called Cadet) and Elisabeth, were all his slaves and were proclaimed free. Within months, the town of Jérémie was under siege by French troops and Rosalie, Michel and Elisabeth fled to nearby Santiago de Cuba. The other three children disappear from the records and it is unknown whether they were captured, went into hiding in Saint-Domingue, or managed to slip into Cuba, avoiding the record keepers.
Arriving in Santiago de Cuba with some 18,000 other refugees, Michel began working as a farrier and Rosalie raised livestock. As there were no French officials on the island, the Agence des Prises de la Guadeloupe (Guadeloupean Prize Agency), charged with selling plundered ship property and funneling the proceeds from the sales to French troops, acted as an unofficial court of equity for French refugees. On 14 March 1804, an ailing Michel Vincent filed his last will and testament with the agency for validation. Three days later, Rosalie paid the officials of the agency to register the manumission document for the entire family that Vincent had prepared before they fled Saint-Domingue. Within days Vincent died, but as his estate was insolvent, his property was sold to cover his obligations.