Lafayette The Abolitionist

In 1785 Lafayette acquired a clove and cinnamon plantation called “La Belle Gabrielle,” along the Oyapok River in present day French Guiana. Here, he accomplished the “gradual emancipation” of nearly seventy slaves aged between 1 and 59, whom the administrator of Guyana helped to select. They were paid for their labor, were provided with education, and punishment for them was no more severe than for white employees. Lafayette hoped to show that productivity and the birth rate would rise and infant mortality would decrease under these “humanitarian” conditions, thus demonstrating the inutility of slave trade for economic exploitation.

French lawyer, journalist and political activist Jacques Pierre Brissot met with Lafayette in the mid-1780s in Franz Mesmer’s pseudo-scientific sect, whose members sought to “recreate the natural man” and “destroy the obstacles to universal harmony”. When he launched the Society of the Friends of Blacks in 1788, Gilbert and Adrienne de Lafayette joined the activist group, which had 141 members in 1789, including Lavoisier and several prominent financiers. As its president, Brissot toured the United States in 1788 and 1791 to promote the anti-slavery cause, and spent three days at Mount Vernon with Washington. Afterwards, he became a vocal supporter of the French revolutionary war, and denounced his former friend Lafayette as a traitor. Increasingly challenged by the left, he was guillotined in 1793.

This letter mentions slavery twice: Jefferson’s Monticello is to be sold “negroes included”; and Frances Wright, the thirty-one year-old daughter of a Scottish linen manufacturer, acquired 4,000 acres near Memphis and gave them to slaves bought from local farmers. This was inspired to a certain extent by what Lafayette (a man she admired so much that she called him “father” and sought adoption by him) had experienced in Guyana. Yet Wright’s promotion of “free love” was highly controversial, and the co-op did not last (1825-1828). The former slaves were re-settled in Haiti.

Lafayette could not have known the Rotunda, an infamous slave auction block described by the English journalist Buckingham (with whom he began corresponding in 1830), for it was built in 1838. Yet he witnessed similar scenes: “One was selling pictures; another was disposing of some slaves, an unhappy family exposed to the hammer at the same time. Their good qualities were enumerated in English and in French, and their persons were carefully examined by prospective purchasers.”

In this letter, Lafayette refers to the contribution of American Indians and African-Americans against Britain, which was forced to recognize claims on Louisiana and West Florida in January 1825. This achievement helped the abolitionist cause that Lafayette supported as Vice-President of the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, founded in 1816 “to help Blacks return to the land of their fathers.” Co-founders like Rev. Finley and Chief Justice Bushrod Washington saw the transportation of former slaves to Liberia as a charitable work that would both promote a gradual end to slavery and spread Christianity in Africa. Lafayette thought that Haiti, which had been “the first Negro state” since 1804, was another potential destination.