The Volunbrun Affair: Denouement

During the period September–October 1801, a newspaper war, centering on the appropriate fate of Volunbrun’s enslaved “servants,” ensued between the NYMS’s antislavery writers, “A Friend to Justice” and “A Philanthropist,” and the proslavery representative of the émigré white Haitian slaveholders, “A Friend to Order.” The NYMS demanded the slaves be freed, but the slaveholders’ spokespersons insisted that Volunbrun’s slaves were already free, but that they chose to remain her servants. The Quaker abolitionists who controlled the NYMS argued that New York’s 1799 gradual Emancipation Act abolishing slavery for those born after 1799 once they reached age twenty-five (for females) and twenty-eight (for males), but permitting slaveholders to retain their slaves until then, did not protect Volunbrun and other French émigrés. Charging that the NYMS had arrogated the right to make and enforce laws of its own creation concerning the Haitian Blacks, “A Friend to Order” professed shock that the organization intended to enforce the French National Convention’s 1794 decree emancipating the slaves in France’s overseas possessions. During its meetings in the last half of 1801 and early 1802, the NYMS devised its most important attempts to liberate Haiti’s ex-slaves, but Hamilton refused to participate in them when its members requested his legal help.