When an Afro-Caribbean American Took Up Both Arms and a Pen to Fight Slavery
By Gretchen Blackwell Black Members of the 1868 Louisiana Constitutional Convention.1 In 1861, Eduoard Tinchant left his family home in Antwerp to begin a new life in the Americas. Tinchant, who was of Afro-Haitian descent, had been born and raised in Pau, France, where he was exposed to the volatile French politics of post-Revolution and Napoleonic era. In 1857, his family moved to Antwerp to begin a transatlantic cigar business in partnership with his brothers living in New Orleans. Then, at 21 years old, Tinchant decided to join his brothers, ending up in New Orleans in 1862 amid the Civil War. Tinchant, charged with the revolutionary energy of the opportunity to shape a new way of governance in Louisiana, and the United States as a whole, took up both arms…