Louisiana’s acquisition by the United States, much less formal statehood. Another likewise located Audubon’s birth in Louisiana, in 1775, and insisted that “Audubon was a native of this country, and not an adopted citizen.”9 Whatever questions might remain about the exact date or location—New Orleans, somewhere else in Louisiana, or in the United States, at any rate—written accounts had made him a fully naturalized native of the nation, and any suggestion of his origins in Saint-Domingue never appeared in print.
Origin Stories
Before we allow Audubon or any of the contemporary sources to tell more of his origins, we might well turn to more recent writers. By the twentieth century, the story of Audubon’s background had become clearer, and his modern biographers reached a reasonable measure of agreement on most—but still not all—of the basic details of his birth. In 1917, Francis Hobart Herrick, one of the earliest and most thorough of the twentieth-century Audubon biographers, wrote that Audubon was born on April 26, 1785, in Saint-Domingue; on that there now seems to be no modern scholarly dispute. Unfortunately, there was no birth certificate or baptismal record to document his birth, because Audubon was born out of wedlock—an important issue in itself—and local officials did not give formal sanction to such births. The only documentary evidence for his birth, then, comes from the records of the doctor who attended Audubon’s mother, Jeanne Rabin (also spelled Rabine), who was ailing with some sort of tropical sickness during the last days of her pregnancy. On April 26, the physician’s entry showed that Jeanne Rabin had delivered a child—but only that, with no name or even description of the child. Still, Herrick safely asserts that the child must have been the future avian artist. Indeed, the baby was her last child; soon after giving birth to the infant son, she died, but as a result of sickness and not, as Audubon would later tell it, at the hands of rebellious slaves. As Herrick explains, “Much other documentary evidence which also has recently come to light is all in harmony with these facts.”10
Herrick also devotes a good deal of space to the identity of Audubon’s father, Jean Audubon: He was a Frenchman, born in 1744 in a village on the Bay of Biscay, who rose from being a cod fisherman to a sailor to a ship captain. But Audubon père’s most important career move proved to be his marriage, in 1772, to Anne Moynet, a prosperous widow nine years older (or twelve or fourteen, according to other sources), whose wealth and wifely indulgence allowed him to spend months at a time at sea or, increasingly, on a sugar plantation he purchased in Aux Cayes (now Les Cayes), a port town on the southern coast of Saint-Domingue, which had become the largest sugar-producing island in the world.11 There he, like so many other Europeans, took full financial advantage of the enormous economic opportunities of the West Indies, turning enough profit to provide quite a comfortable living, albeit one built on the infamous brutality and misery inflicted upon Saint-Domingue’s rapidly rising slave population.12 Jean Audubon came to describe himself as a négociant, a merchant, but in addition to trading in sugar and a variety of wares, he also traded in slaves, sometimes dozens at a time. “Great numbers of negroes must have passed through Jean Audubon’s hands,” Herrick observes, “which strangely reflect the customs of a much later and sadder day on the North American continent.” Herrick later adds, with considerable charity, “Jean Audubon, who spent a good part of his life at sea and in a country almost totally devoid of morals, must be considered as a product of his time.”13
And like other powerful European inhabitants of this “country almost totally devoid of morals,” Jean Audubon also took sexual advantage of the dependent women in Saint-Domingue, a highly sexualized society that one scholar has described as a “libertine colony.”14 The elder Audubon maintained a long-standing domestic relationship with a mixed-race woman variously described as a creole or a quadroon and variously called Catharine or Marguerite or, more commonly, “Sanitte” Bouffard, who bore him three children, all girls. Sanitte, the ménagère (housewife) of Audubon’s household, apparently accepted the entrance of another woman into the domestic scene: Jeanne Rabin, who moved in with Captain Audubon and Sanitte in 1784 and who, two years later, became the mother of Jean Audubon’s only son. Or so documentary evidence for Audubon’s birth story seemed to suggest. But as Herrick observed, the birth story had long seemed murky: “Much of the mystery which hitherto has shrouded the early life of John James Audubon is involved in the West Indian period of his father’s career”—and, one might add, his father’s relationships with women in Saint-Domingue.15
By 1788, the stability of Jean Audubon’s island estate may have begun to seem much less secure. Even though Les Cayes seemed safe for the time being, Jean Audubon sent his three-year-old son, originally called Fougère (French for “fern”), to France for safekeeping. In 1789, the elder Audubon signed up as a soldier in the Les Cayes troop of the National Guard, but before he had to face the prospect of real service, he left Saint-Domingue, first to do some business in the United States, then to go back to France, where his toddler son was awaiting him. He would also have his and Sanitte’s daughter, Rose, or Muguet, brought to France in 1791, when the slave insurrection began. He would, however, leave behind Sanitte and the other offspring he had had with her to face their fate on the island.
Back in France, Jean Audubon would find another eruption of unrest, the dramatic revolution that toppled the monarchy, divided the people, and cast the country into carnage. In 1793, his particular part of the country, the Vendée, which included Nantes and its environs, became hotly contested between supporters of the revolution and counterrevolutionary royalists, and the bloodshed continued throughout most of the 1790s. Jean Audubon once again joined the local National Guard, this one organized to defend the revolution against its reactionary enemies in the Vendée. He remained a solid ally of the new French republic, serving on local revolutionary committees and enlisting once again in the navy; as his son later wrote, Jean Audubon “continued in the employ of the naval department of that country” throughout the 1790s and on into the new century.16 Even with the roiling violence of the revolution, France seemed safer ground for the Audubon family than Saint-Domingue.
It also seemed a safer starting place for family-friendly Audubon biographies. In 1954, for instance, two children’s books opened Audubon’s boyhood story when he was already in the comparative familiarity of France. Margaret Kieran and John Kieran’s John James Audubon, a Landmark Book, opens the story on “a warm May afternoon in 1793” in Nantes, which was “beginning to show the beauty of spring.” Readers first see young Audubon, still called Fougère at this point, out enjoying the birds and flowers, but as every youngster must know, such freedom has to come to an end with the inevitable call to dinner. “Around the table that night it was a typical family gathering,” the story continues, with Fougère and his younger stepsister, Muguet, seated with their kindly and beloved stepmother and the sterner-seeming Captain Audubon. After grilling his young son about his studies and fretting to his wife that the boy “needs careful watching,” the captain let his attention drift with “a faraway expression in his eyes … thinking, no doubt, about his stay in Santo Domingo where young Audubon was born and where the boy’s mother had died not long afterward.” Bringing him back to France, he provided Fougère with a new stepmother, Madame Audubon, who “lavished as much affection on him as though he had been her own son,” making sure the boy had everything he could want: “his own room, his own nurse, and the finest clothes she could buy.” The chapter then concludes on a note of erasure: “Soon he had forgotten all about that far-away tropical island.” Whether the “he” in the sentence refers to Captain Audubon or young Fougère remains, however, unclear.17 Joan Howard’s The Story of John J. Audubon begins almost a year later, in March 1794, on a “cold bleak day” when the weather seems as ominous as the revolutionary political situation in the Vendée region. As the menace of violence swirls around the Audubon household, Madame Audubon again appears as a source of comfort and kind support. Still, young Fougère “wished he could remember who his real mother was.” Staring into a flickering fire, struggling to make sense of stories his father has told him about “the island of Santo Domingo,” with its tall mountain, fields of sugarcane, and brightly colored birds, Fougère also flashes on the image of a woman: “There was a lady who was so much different
