I have always known Gilbert E. Martin to be a painfully honest and forthright Creole man. His answers to my questions and his encouragements within the darkness of "Creole Invisibility", were and shall always be priceless to me right now and in the future. He was an honorable warrior of his people at all times and in all places. He was never afraid to stand alone. I personally know that his eyes did NOT close without knowing that he never really was alone. Our people heard his voice, long before we knew his name.It was with very much grief and sadness that I learned from my dear friend Marion that Gilbert Martin passed away on 19th November 2005. While many would say that the Creole community have seen many militants among its ranks, among whom your obedient servant, I would, without reserve and hesitation admit that that I am a baby as compared to the way Gilbert Martin fought to position the Creole culture in the USA and on the world stage.
While many would associate Louisiana with the birth and development of Creolism in the USA , the history of Creolism cannot be written without a special mention to Gilbert Martin. Gil was born and grew up in the seventh ward of New Orleans and spent most of his adulthood there. He saw the city grew up and even participated in its development having been in the construction industry. Even though he was a black man, he always assert himself as a French Creole and maintain that black, white or colored Creoles have always been a free and much a l’avant garde of the other communities. He advocated that the USA government should recognize the identity and uniqueness of the Creole people and that the Louisiana Purchase Treaty was fraud and illegal as it did not respect some of its clauses when it relates to the people. If the Treaty was to be enforceable it should have compensated for the lost of all privileges that the Creoles enjoyed prior to the American taking over the state of Louisiana. (Please see his article on LPT).
Gilbert has, throughout his life, and until his death, defied the USA establishment that Creoles should still feel free and not abide to the USA laws as they are still an independent nation. He set the example by going as far suing the USA government for breach of the LPT contract and asking for compensation.
Well before any structure was set up in Louisiana, Gilbert created the International French Creole society. When I asked him why “international” he explained that he knew that Creoles did not only exist in the USA only, but that there were creoles in Haiti and in the West Indies. He was expecting to connect with them one day. His wishes and dream started to materialize when I met Mario for the first time at the 2004 Creole convention organized by the CHC of Natchitoches in Las Vegas. Marion who saw my sincerity and dedication said that I should meet her friend Gilbert Martin, a Creole pioneer who is unfortunately old and living in a nursing home in California. I was overwhelmed but as I was already scheduled to go to New Orleans, I postponed that appointment for later. As soon as I got back to Australia , Gilbert and I started to communicate via e-mail. I was surprised how he so skillfully mastered the communication technology and how his mind was still very alert; I discovered a man of high intellect and sincerity. There was no doubt for me that that I had to meet that man and wanted more people to know about him and hear what he had to say. This was to be realized with the Symposium of Las Vegas. It was on 18th May 2005 at Tuscany Hotel that we met for the first time and I could not describe how I was pleased to dinner with him and we talked and talked. Gilbert was indeed an old and frail man but he still spoke with much conviction and told me that we creoles should never give in and that we have to keep our culture alive. I was never tired of listening to all these anecdotes and how he always rocked the boat and always told them an African American but a French Creole. He was not happy to see that the Cajuns had highjacked the Creole cuisine and music. He always talked about the LPT and the book of Grace King or how he dragged, nurtured and educated Terrell Delphin into Creolism. He had great dream for a Creole institute which was to be set up in California. He drew a parallel with the fight of the Red Indians and that Creoles should also have the land and a big casino. He had a dream for the Creoles of the USA and the world to be a great nation where the other civilizations and culture would recognize us as well.
These words are just a few as there could be enough to say about his life which could be a best seller, but as he has always been humble and fought alone most of the time against all odds, even against the critics of Creoles like him who might have misinterpreted his action or again did not give him much consideration because he was black, but all I can assure Creoles al over the world that I have been close enough to him to know that he was never a racist and has always thought of Creole as a Cultural entity and a people regardless of colour or class.
May he rest in peace but let his legacy lives on.
Louis G de Lamare Lamvohee
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The Louisiana Purchase Treaty, the ramifications.
For all those who are interested in the history of the Creoles of the Unites States and particularly how Creolism developed in the state of Louisiana, it is imperative to understand how the Louisiana Purchase Treaty came into effect and under what circumstances. The LPT is often said to be a turning point in the history of the Louisiana State and its integration into the United States of America. However, not much attention was given to the people of that state at the time the treaty in that process. A people with a unique history and culture different from the rest of the United States: The Creoles of Louisiana, which was made up of Free people of Colour (gens de couleurs libres) as well as black of African and Haitian origins. No compensation, consideration or respect were given to the right and freedom of these people to continue to enjoy their unique culture, instead followed a period of outright discrimination which caused many Creoles to flee to other parts of the States, to France and even to Mexico as Mary Gehman found out in her research. To understand fully the ramifications of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, I urge you to read carefully and critically the following article by Gilbert E Martin.
Louis G delamare
The Louisiana Purchase Treaty
Napoleon’s Justifiable Revenge on the U.S.A
Narrated by
Gilbert E. Martin
It was no secret that Napoleon Bonaparte desired to have a French empire in America. But his ego coupled with his envy of Toussaint L’Ouverture destroyed his dream, and cost France her most profitable colony, and the Louisiana Territory to boot. On April 27, 1803, nine months after his abduction, Toussaint died in a dungeon in the Alps. At that time, two Americans, R. R. Livingston and James Monroe, were in Paris pestering Napoleon to give his final approval of sale of the vast Louisiana Territory. The wily Napoleon, however, was down but not out. He knew that the Americans had supplied the black revolutionaries in St. Domingue (now Haiti), with supplies and ammunition to help break the French power in the Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, the two Americans had mentioned to Napoleon that he didn’t have much choice because, as they put it, the United States was powerful enough to take the territory by force.
With Toussaint’s death on his mind, and pressure coming from Livingston and Monroe, revenge took control of his thoughts, which prompted the great Napoleon Bonaparte to devise his very own Trojan horse. Playing upon American greed, bigotry and ignorance of human innate Intelligence, this man took 70 simple words and concocted what I believe to be one of the most impregnable articles ever to be found in any document pertaining to the rights of a nation of people with lineage to Africa. After toying with the Americans who were extremely anxious to get the treaty signed, Napoleon finally gave his approval. The American representatives hurried their signatures on the document and were off to the United States to brag about closing the biggest real estate deal in history (908,380 square miles) for only $15 million. Nobody bothered to simply pay a little attention to the conditions under which the sale was made. Those conditions can be found in Article III of the LPT, which is the Trojan horse mentioned above. Article III clearly reads as follows:
The inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States, and admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the Federal Constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and immunities, of citizens of the United States; and in the meantime, they shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the religion which they profess.
On page 254 of a document entitled The Treaty between the United States of America and the French Republic, there’s an indication of a footnote behind Article III. At the bottom of the page it reads, "Said to have been drawn by Napoleon himself." I located that document in the main Public Library in New Orleans.
Assuming that every educated person in the civilized world has some knowledge of the black man’s plight in the Southern parts of the United States, it can readily be seen that Article III was not an American design. Also, everybody knows that blacks did not benefit from Article III as Napoleon intended. Approximately forty thousand Frenchmen with lineage to Africa were among the "inhabitants" of the "ceded territory." By knowingly depriving us and our posterity of the stipulated benefits, mentioned above, the United States clearly committed a material breach of the LPT. Consequently, we suffered much devastation of our culture, and irreparable damages to the growth and development of our nation.
However, to fully appreciate and understand the ramifications of the breaching of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, and in order to attempt to assess the consequential damages inflicted upon both, our French Creole nation and the United States as well, we need a bit of history. So, we shall begin in St. Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791. From there we shall proceed to Louisiana 1803. In August of that year, prior to the slave uprising, St. Domingue was the richest colony in the Western Hemisphere. Our colony did more business with Europe than all of the thirteen newly formed United States combined. The population of our colony consisted of 32,000 rich white planters, 30,000 rich Mulatto planters (of all shades and colors), and 500,000 thousand slaves, of which the Mulattos held 125,000.
The slaves revolted in August of 1791. Consequently, thousands of our people emigrated to the Louisiana Territory, and settled in and around the city of New Orleans. This was twelve years before Napoleon sold the territory to the Americans. At that time, however, the territory was then a Spanish colony under Spanish government. Grace King described our emigration, which began in 1791, in her 1895 book, New Orleans: The Place and the People. King wrote: "Besides the white and slave immigration from the West Indian Islands, there was a large influx of free gens de couleur into the city, a class of population whose increase by immigration had been sternly legislated against. Flying, however, with the whites from massacre and ruin, humanitarian sentiments induced the authorities to open the city gates to them, and they entered by thousands. Like the white emigres, they brought in the customs and manners of a softer climate, a more luxurious society, and a different civilization…they represented a distinct variety, a variety which their numbers made important, and for a time decisive in its influence on the home of their adoption."
Now, from the above quotation we find that three classes of people fled the turmoil in the West Indies. There hasn’t been any other time in the history of mankind, when whites, thousands of free people of color and African slaves fled en masse from a catastrophic situation. Literally speaking, they were all together in the same boats. Furthermore, prior to the revolution, we had already experienced more than one hundred years of black slavery and black freedom coexisting. As an effort to ameliorate racial conditions in the French colonies, in 1685, Louis XIV promulgated the very first equal rights edict ever written that included people of African lineage. It was called the Code Noir, or the Black Code. The king proclaimed that all free and freed Mulattos and Africans were to be regarded as free citizens of France. That code was written 106 years before the Haitian Revolution of 1791.
Now, at this point, we can take the liberty of using a little common sense. We can assure ourselves that when the Black Code was written, it was not written for a population of free little black or mixed blood babies. There had to be adults to warrant such concern. So, with that in mind, I am saying that black freedom and black slavery coexisted in St. Domingue for at least one hundred and twenty-five years before the Haitian Revolution, and twelve additional years longer, in Louisiana, before the signing of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty. And afterwards, that coexistence lasted for another 62 years until slaves were freed in America. When it all adds up, we have approximately 200 years of black freedom and black slavery coexisting. All of this is important in order to understand the differences in attitudes between the Creoles of Southern Louisiana, those of Northern Louisiana, and African Americans. With so many rich and cultured Creoles (Mulattos and Africans) then it was virtually impossible for the slaves (Mulattos and Africans) to develop an inferiority complex. Even, if black and/or Mulatto slave owners were cruel, as some have asserted, at least they were black or Mulatto, and had their known ancestry rooted in Africa and/or in slavery. Now, with that backdrop we return our attention to Napoleon’s Justifiable Revenge on the United States of America — the LPT.
On top of all of the above, in May of 1791, three months before the Haitian Revolution, news reached St. Domingue that the National Convention in Paris had decreed Mulattos must be allowed to represent themselves by participating in the colony’s government. Moreover, French Creoles from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, had served with distinction in Napoleon’s racially integrated armies, in every category from buck privates all the way up to the highest official positions. Therefore, it would be absolutely ludicrous to even hint that Napoleon was the least bit unaware of what the Americans would encounter when making contact with the nonwhites already planted in the ceded territory. Our people, from the highest in society down to the lowly slaves, possessed educational power, moral strength, and more than enough tenacity to endure and resist American racism. Yes! Napoleon knew perfectly well what he was doing when he carefully crafted Article III of the LPT.
Now, enter the Americans. On December 20, 1803, William C. C. Claiborne, Louisiana’s first governor and General James Wilkinson arrived in the colony to take possession of Louisiana for the United States. That was eight months after the treaty was signed. Still the U. S. had not prepared its citizens to accept and comply with Article III of the LPT. In fact, by Claiborne’s first letter to Thomas Jefferson, president of the U. S., one could easily conclude that the Americans had absolutely no intention to comply. I see Claiborne’s letter as evidence that the United States intended to defraud. In his letter, Claiborne said to Jefferson; "My principal difficulty arises from two large companies of people of color, who are attached to the service, and were esteemed a very serviceable corps under the Spaniards. On this particular corps I have reflected with much anxiety." ‘To keep them, said Claiborne, would offend the Union and particularly the rest of the South…’ "outrage the feelings of a part of the Union;" ‘not to recommission the colored troops,’ he said, "would disgust" ‘the Negroes, and’ "be productive to future mischief; while to disband them would be to raise an armed enemy in the heart of the country, and to disarm them would savor too strongly of that desperate system of government which seldom succeeds."
Apparently, as indicated above, Napoleon anticipated the material breach of the LPT. And since the United States committed the material breach, it has forfeited every bit of the limited jurisdiction it would have had over our nation. And legally speaking, according to America’s own law, the United States does not legally own as much as a shovel full of the 908,380 square miles of land that composed the original Louisiana Territory. There you have it as I see it. You have before you, Napoleon's Justifiable Revenge on the United States of America.
Our treaty has seniority over all treaties made with the Indians, excepting those made in the 13 original states before the LPT. However, on this issue, the French Creoles of Louisiana are still asleep. Shame! Shame! Shame!
There's a very simple question here. Is Gilbert E. Martin right or is he wrong? Or, did the United States breach the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, yes or no. I don't believe that the United States Government will ever raise the issue and volunteer the answer to either of those simple questions. Do you?
