While Beard, Brown, and Redpath may have all, in their own ways, ensured the transatlantic circulation of the trope we have come to recognize as the “colored historian,” continuing to trace the genealogical relationship of this nineteenth-century trope to the ‘mulatto legend of history’ and, specifically, to the part of Nicholls's claim that involves discussing how ‘mulatto histories’ were legendary because they could ‘explain and justify the predominant position of the mulatto elite’ (1979, 86), leads us to the world of the French abolitionist, Victor Schoelcher. Like the Anglophone abolitionists studied in the previous chapter, Schoelcher was one of the most visible contributors to the literary history of the Haitian Revolution in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World. Through his discussions of Haiti in his Colonies étrangères et Haïti (1843), Schoelcher would play an enormously prominent role in the dissemination of the trope of the “colored historian.” In fact, Schoelcher was probably the first of the nineteenth-century contributors to the literary history of the Haitian Revolution to suggest that Boyer-era Haitian writers had created a legendary history designed to legitimate their own rule. If you recall, Nicholls had defined the histories created by Ardouin and Saint-Rémy as legendary because this ‘version of the past,’ he said, had been presented for its ‘exemplary value’ in the present. Nicholls explained that the ‘mulatto histories’ of Ardouin and Saint-Rémy could be called legendary precisely because, ‘The past is being used as a weapon in the present’ (1979, 86).