Engagé
From the 18th century, an engagé (French: [ɑ̃ɡaʒe]; also spelled engagee) was a French-Canadian man employed to canoe in the fur trade as an indentured servant.
He was expected to handle all transportation aspects of frontier river and lake travel: maintenance, loading and unloading, propelling, steering, portaging, camp set-up, navigation, interaction with Indigenous people, etc.
The planters of Saint Domingue were eclipsed in their profits by enterprising businessmen; they no longer had a guarantee on their plantation investment, and the slave-trading economy came under increased scrutiny.
[2][3] Saint-Domingue gradually increased its reliance on indentured servants (known as petits blanchets or engagés) and by 1789 about 6 percent of all white St. Dominicans were employed as labor on plantations along with slaves.
[1] Many of the indentured servants in Saint-Domingue were German settlers or Acadian refugees deported by the British from old Acadia during the French and Indian War.
[4][5][failed verification] Despite signs of economic decline, Saint-Domingue continued to produce more sugar than all of the British Caribbean islands combined.
[6] The following passage is the conversation between two Creole planters on the emancipation of slaves: -D'après ce que j'entends... on trouverait en vous, tout propriétaire d'esclaves que vous êtes, un chaud partisan de l'émancipation des noirs?-Sans doute, répondit M.Melvil, si cette émancipation, sagement calculée, et progressivement amenée, fournit des citoyens paisibles et non des malfaiteurs de plus à nos États du Sud, si vastes que, pour les peupler, nous recevons, sans leur demander aucune exhibition de papiers, tous les fugitifs, qu'ils soient poursuivis ou condamnés par la vangeance des souverains, ou la justice des tribunaux européens.-Mais, objecta le créole, sans esclaves que deviendraient nos plantations?-Les affranchis les cultiveraient moyennant un salaire.-L'expérience a démontré que les nègres libres sont les ouvriers les plus paresseux de la terre.-Ils cesseront de l'être quand ils seront familiarisés avec la civilisation.
-Without a doubt, responded Mr.Melvil, if this emancipation, wisely calculated, and brought about progressively, furnished peaceful citizens and not more wrong-doers to our Southern States, so vast are they that, to populate them, we receive, without asking any show of papers, all fugitives, whether they be condemned by revenge from their rulers, or from the law of European councils.
The desire to satisfy them will open their eyes to the necessity of work, which perhaps shall bring them softly to the state of freedom rather than remaining in that of slavery, but more efficiently than these engagés (indentured servants) who arrive from Europe in boatloads, and of whom barely ten out of forty are capable of surviving the vexatious and often deadly influences of our climate.Creoles often referred to engagés as "white slaves", and especially Germans were commonly sold as "white slaves" in Louisiana.
[citation needed] One of the most famous contemporary stories of these children was that of Sally Miller, the daughter of German engagés who was sold into slavery on a sugar cane plantation.
