A Letter from Pierre Cangé (Nov. 1802)

Whilst perusing Slave revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents, edited by Laurent Dubois and John Garrigus, we came across a short letter penned by Pierre Cangé. A member of a family from our region of the island, we found his letter fascinating as it captured that solidarity felt by former slaves and people from families that were free before the Haitian Revolution. Addressed to Delpech, Cangé endeavored to convince the former to abandon the French. It demonstrates quit clearly how white French hostilities and racism actually united, for a time at least, those from free people of color families and former slaves. Cangé himself had fought alongside Gilles Bambara and other former slaves, so we assume his words here are sincere. 

Pierre Cange

 

Checking Saint-Domingue's press also included some surprising finds of free people of color families. One of them, a large one whose surname is borne by many Haitians today, appear in this article from the 1780s. Apparently he sired 10 children. 

Pierre Celin dit Cangé

The signature of Jean Pierre Cangé appears here, when he became the godfather to a Jean Joseph Stanislas in 1781. 

What makes trying to piece together the origins of the Cangé in the 18th century so difficult is their large numbers and the repetition of the same names (Jean, Pierre, etc.). One glaring example is the appearance of at least two people with Pierre Celin as part of their full name. Both were supposedly the sons of Jean Cangé and Marguerite Butet, but they married different women and were not the same person. Our tentative reconstruction of our great-great-grandmother's father's family assumes descent from one of them, the younger one not born in 1729. 

In 1755, Pierre Louis Celin Cangé married Marie Therese Petit.

Our Cangé ancestry appears to derive from the Pierre Celin dit Cangé, who was the father of Jean Pierre, baptized in 1760. That Jean Pierre went on to marry a Saugrain and became the father of Jean Charles, the man we suspect was the grandfather of our great-great-grandmother. From what I could gather, the Pierre Louis Cangé who married Marie Therese Petit (the woman whose family suddenly became "Indians" later in the 18th century) was actually the father of the general who went on to fight at the Battle of Savannah and became a general during the Haitian Revolution. That Pierre Cangé later fell in disgrace after the 1805 Santo Domingo campaign and was killed by order of Henri Christophe in 1806, according to Histoire de Toussaint Louverture by Pauléus Sannon.

So, there appear to have been two men brothers named Pierre, children of the free people of color Marguerite Butet and Jean Cangé. Pierre Celin dit Cangé had a number of children with a Françoise or Marie Françoise Geoffroi or Geffroy, before he married her in 1770. The other one, Pierre Louis Celin, married a Petit and sired a number of children. If our theory is correct, our great-great-grandmother was a descendant of the Pierre Celin dit Cangé. As mentioned in our previous speculative posts about her origins, we are still lacking a birth record for her father and would like some information on her Alexandre mother. However, it does seem likely that her father was a descendant of the Jean Charles born in the 1780s. We also know that Jean Pierre Cangé was still living in the Valley of Bainet in the 1790s, and it is likely that his son remained in the same area. Unfortunately, we still couldn't identify any of the African-born forebears of these free people of color or figure out the origins of the Geoffroy before Pierre Geoffroy.