Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (7 page)

producing refined sugar; 443 indigo plantations; and more than 2,000

coffee plantations. The population included 16,000 whites and at least

160,000 slaves. Among the latter were many who would participate in the

24

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

“Veue en perspéctive du Cap François,” 1717. This watercolor was done by an

artist looking west across the water toward Le Cap. The bay was an ideal sanctuary for ships, a fact that propelled the town’s rapid development into the colony’s leading port.
Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

“Vue du Port au Prince,” late eighteenth century. The colony’s second-largest port developed on this protected bay.
Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de
France.

s p e c t e r s o f s a i n t - d o m i n g u e

25

uprising of 1791. The province was also home to several free men of Afri-

can descent who would become important revolutionary leaders. Vincent

Ogé, a free man of color, lived in the town of Dondon; a decade before the

revolution Toussaint Bréda, once a slave and now a free man, rented a

small property near the plantation where he had been born.38

Saint-Domingue contained two other provinces—the Western and the

Southern. They were separated from the North, and from one another, by

high mountain ranges. Only in 1751, when Port-au-Prince—the largest

town in the Western Province—became the island’s capital, was a passage

cut across these mountains. The royal government paid for the road, but

slaves built it, carving a 100-foot stairway into the rock. Not until 1787,

however, was it possible to travel from Le Cap to Port-au-Prince by car-

riage. Each region had its mountains, its plains, and its port towns. For

most of the colony’s history, people and goods moved from region to region

by sea.39

The Western Province was the second in the colony in population and

wealth. Its capital, Port-au-Prince, was the second-largest town in Saint-

Domingue. One man who traveled to Saint-Domingue in the 1780s made

fun of the grand idea French planters had of Port-au-Prince, which they

described as a “throne of luxury and voluptuousness” and considered their

“Jerusalem.” Having heard their tales, he wrote, he approached the town

with “that vague anxiety that precedes admiration and prepares enthusi-

asm,” only to find himself in front of “two rows of cabins” arranged around

“dusty air they call a street.” Port-au-Prince had the look of a “tartar camp,”

though the presence of the government, garrisons, and the port made it an

active city and the “rendezvous for all conspirators and fortune-seekers” in

the colony.40

There are two plains in the Western Province: the Cul-de-Sac surround-

ing Port-au-Prince and, to the north, a plain traversed by the snaking

Artibonite River bordered by the port towns of Gonaïves and Saint-Marc.

Both plains were dry, the Artibonite plain so much so that one writer de-

scribed it as “Egypt.” During the second half of the eighteenth century,

government-sponsored irrigation projects put slaves to work building ca-

nals that ultimately irrigated nearly half of the land on the Cul-de-Sac.

Consequently, sugar production in the area boomed. In 1789 there were

314 sugar plantations in the Western Province, more than in the north, al-

though many of them were smaller and produced unrefined sugar. Indigo

26

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

“Plan de la ville des rades et des environs de Port-au-Prince,” 1785. Port-au-Prince was less densely constructed than Le Cap. Irrigation works channeled water from the surrounding mountains through a reservoir and into the town. The map is drawn with North to the left.
Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de
France.

cultivation was much more important in this region than in the north, in-

volving over 1,800 plantations. There were more than 500 cotton planta-

tions and more than 800 coffee plantations. Slaves were again the largest

group in the province.41

On a long peninsula to the south and west was the Southern Province,

whose capital was Les Cayes. It was both cut off from the Western Prov-

ince and divided internally by the highest mountains in the colony—in-

deed in the Caribbean. The province included two plains that surrounded

Les Cayes, and another smaller plain around the town of Jerémie. It was

s p e c t e r s o f s a i n t - d o m i n g u e

27

the least developed of the colony, with only 191 sugar plantations, most of

them making unprocessed sugar, and approximately 300 coffee plantations

and 900 indigo plantations. It had the smallest population of the three.42

Moreau noted that the customs in this region were different from those

elsewhere in the colony, as was the creole spoken there. The clothes of the

residents had changed little since the first European settlers had arrived.

The Southern Province was the last to be fully settled by the French, and

remained the most isolated from Atlantic shipping and from the rest of the

colony. It was in many ways more connected to the nearby British colony of

Jamaica than it was to France, and something of an “English enclave.” The

inhabitants of the region traded consistently and illegally with the British, as well as with ships from Spanish Cuba, Curaçao, and other areas. Contraband trade was carried on throughout the colony, but it was particularly de-

veloped in the south. Huge quantities of indigo were traded to the British,

although in official statistics they made up only a tiny portion of the exports of Saint-Domingue. Many free people of color profited from this expanding trade, including a man named Julien Raimond. One day he would carry

the demands of this group to Paris.43

“Geography,” writes one historian, was in Saint-Domingue “the mother

of history.” Each region had its own landscape, customs, and demography,

and these would shape the revolution to come. The geographic location of

the colony in the wider world would likewise profoundly shape its political

history. Saint-Domingue was at the heart of the Americas, connected in

many ways to the empires that surrounded it, and quite far from the nation

that governed it. It was part of an evolving Atlantic world, one in which

many of the subjects of empires gradually came to dream of one day being

citizens of their own nations.44

In 1777 a crowd gathered in the main plaza of Le Cap to watch the hang-

ing of a ship captain convicted of stealing. But when the executioner

opened the trap below his feet, the rope snapped, and the captain found

himself sprawled on the ground. He cried “grace,” and several people in

the crowd repeated the word. The executioner, unmoved by the miracle,

prepared to hang the captain again. The man resisted, wrapping his feet

around the ladder and refusing to move, and the crowd erupted and at-

tacked the executioner. Mounted policemen tried to stop the crowd but

were showered with rocks and fled. The executioner dragged the captive

away down the street, but two big sailors—perhaps from his ship—at-

28

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

tacked him and freed the captain. As the executioner returned toward the

Place des Armes, he was attacked by a group of blacks, who pummeled

him with stones until he was dead. “I saw the corpse of this unfortunate

under a pile of stones,” Moreau wrote of the murdered executioner; “his

head was completely flattened.” There was one unlikely survivor from the

incident: “a little mouse,” which the executioner had adopted, “was in his

pocket” and “found living and unharmed.”45

The port towns of the Atlantic world were notorious for their unruly

crowds of sailors, slaves, market-women, small-time crooks, prostitutes,

and others who were scraping by on the margins of their colonial socie-

ties. They were also, of course, prone to more widespread sedition and re-

volt on the part of wealthier individuals who, having left their European

homes, came to have very different perspectives and interests from those

of their European governors. Saint-Domingue was no exception. In its

short history it saw two major uprisings before the one that ultimately de-

stroyed it.

In November 1723 a crowd of a hundred women attacked the Maison

de l’Afrique, the island seat of the powerful Company of the Indies. Led by

a onetime actress named Sagona, owner of a bar in the town, they smashed

the windows of the building, broke in, and threw furniture, books, and pa-

pers into the street. They tracked some of the company’s officials down to

a nearby house, where Sagona placed a gun against the throat of one of

them and said, “Drink, traitor, it’ll be your last.” Reportedly he was saved

just in time by the intervention of an officer. The next night the rioting continued as a larger crowd again attacked the Maison de l’Afrique and then

set fire to a plantation owned by the company at La Fossette. In the crowd

were 60 men, armed and dressed like women, and more than 300 women,

some covered in flour and others wearing fake moustaches. The uprising,

triggered by the granting of trading privileges to the company, lasted sev-

eral months. Although many of the participants were poor whites, some

wealthy men in the colony supported it, with one declaring that if the re-

bels won there would be open commerce “with all nations,” “Republican

liberty,” and no more taxes. The revolt was so widespread that the governor

briefly considered offering freedom to those slaves “who abandoned their

masters and gathered under the flag of the king.”46

Such revolts were a part of a broader refusal by many in Saint-

Domingue to accept the plans of the royal administrators for the colony.

Wealthy slave owners also consistently flouted and opposed the royal laws

s p e c t e r s o f s a i n t - d o m i n g u e

29

and regulations imposed on them. In doing so they took advantage of the

division of administrative power in Saint-Domingue between a governor-

general, who was in charge of the military aspects of colonial governance,

and the intendant, who was in charge of civilian life. However, their pow-

ers overlapped considerably, and they were often at odds with each other, a

circumstance that suited many planters as it made the application of royal

policies difficult. Moreover, laws passed in the metropole had to be regis-

tered in the colony by the local
conseils,
or courts, which sometimes refused to do so in protest.47

This administrative structure was similar to that of many provinces of

France, but there was much that made Saint-Domingue unique. It was,

first and foremost, a slave colony, one in which white settlers and other free people were a minority of the population. In 1789, according to official figures, there were roughly 465,000 slaves in the colony, 31,000 whites, and

28,000 free-coloreds. Masters, who were taxed on the basis of the number

of slaves they owned, had an interest in underreporting the true numbers,

so that it is likely that the slave population was higher, probably near a half-million. (The United States, in contrast, had a total population of 700,000

slaves in 1790.) Furthermore, the towns harbored 26 percent of the col-

ony’s whites, who made up only 4 percent of the rural population. A few

examples from the northern plain highlight the startling imbalance in the

population. In the parish of Limbé there were 300 whites, 200 free-

coloreds, and 5,000 slaves, while in the neighboring parish of Acul, where

the 1791 insurrection would begin, there were 3,500 slaves and 130

whites.48

Masters and colonial administrators agreed that it was vital to contain

this slave population. But they often disagreed vehemently about how to

do it. The King’s 1685 Code Noir laid out detailed regulations regarding

the treatment of slaves—their hours of labor, food, housing, clothes, and

punishment—as well as related issues such as the process of emancipation.

For the next century slave masters brazenly, openly, and consistently broke

almost every provision of this code. As one planter activist, Tanguy de la

Boissière, wrote in 1793, the Code Noir was always “judged absurd” and its

implementation “never attempted.” Indeed, over the course of the eigh-

teenth century, local legislation as well as new royal legislation reversed

many of its key provisions, particularly those relating to the status of emancipated slaves. Masters in Saint-Domingue, as in North America, re-

30

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

sponded to any attempt to interfere with their power over slaves with vio-

lent hostility and stubborn resistance.49

In the mid-1780s reform-minded administrators in the Colonial Minis-

try in Paris, driven in part by reports of small uprisings on plantations,

passed two royal decrees meant to improve the condition of the slaves in

the Caribbean. Many of their provisions were aimed at curbing the auton-