Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (6 page)

moving the molasses and turning it into an edible (though still brown)

sugar, which could be sold at a higher price. The number of plantations re-

moving molasses grew; in 1730 there were 5 in the north, but by 1751

there were 182, compared with 124 that did not refine sugar. In 1790 there

were 258 of the former and only 30 of the latter.27

Sugarcane production required good land, irrigation, a large labor force,

and expensive equipment. It promised major profits, but it required an ini-

tial investment far greater than tobacco or indigo. Once the sugar boom hit

Saint-Domingue, there was a rush to purchase the best land and a vertigi-

nous rise in prices. The governor wrote in 1700 that a plantation that had

sold for 70 écus eighteen months earlier could now not be purchased for

2,000, even when nothing was being cultivated there.28

As the fertile land in the colony was bought up for sugar plantations,

some whites were left behind. Many retreated to the interior, scraping by

farming small plots of land. Others turned to crime: throughout the eigh-

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

19

teenth century, the colony’s mountains were home to armed bands of

whites who preoccupied administrators. Along the coasts, other small com-

munities existed outside the world of the plantations. Moreau described

a group in the south as “amphibious beings” whose lives as farmers and

sailors recalled those of the colony’s early settlers. At the estuary of the

Artibonite River there was a “kind of Republic” composed of men who

worked as saltmakers and had renounced marriage, and whose property

could not be inherited by their offspring but must instead be returned to

the community. In the late eighteenth century local plantation owners, dis-

gruntled by the presence of a community that “was a source of problems

for the discipline of their negroes,” managed to expel the saltmakers from

their land, to which they had no official title. A governor, however, inter-

vened when the saltmakers threatened to leave the island forever.29

Such holdouts were a small minority. Most whites on the island, many of

them recent arrivals from Europe, wanted a plantation and the profits that

came with it. But even with good land still available, such a goal was hard

to achieve. Most plantation owners took out loans from merchant houses in

France to get started. If all went well, these loans could be paid off over

time and the planter could grow wealthy. But in many cases the planters

failed, and the merchant houses acquired the plantations that had been the

collateral for their loans. By the end of the eighteenth century, many mer-

chant houses in France’s major port towns of Bordeaux, Nantes, and La

Rochelle owned plantations in Saint-Domingue. These were managed by

salaried administrators and overseers. Many young men came to the col-

ony seeking such positions, but despite the booming economy there were

not enough of them, and those who failed swelled the ranks of poor and

unemployed whites. In 1776 one observer noted the “great misery” of

many whites on the island and opined that those who came to the colony

with no useful skills were likely to end up dead on the side of the road. This was the fate of one “unknown white man, aged 14 or 15, without a beard,”

who was found by police in 1779; a surgeon determined that he had died of

misère
—poverty—and he was buried anonymously in a local graveyard.30

The second half of the eighteenth century saw Saint-Domingue’s popu-

lation and economy expand dramatically. With France’s cession of Canada

to the British in 1763, the Caribbean became the main destination for

Frenchmen seeking their fortune in the Americas. Saint-Domingue, with

its reputation for transforming colonists into rich men, was the most attrac-

tive in the region. During these decades a new plantation crop boomed:

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

coffee. Coffee plantations were less expensive to start up and maintain

than sugar plantations, and they had another important advantage: they

could be established in the mountainous regions of Saint-Domingue,

where there was still land available. Mountainous terrain, accounting for

60 percent of the colony, was useless for cultivating sugar. Thus the coffee

boom did not compete with the continuing sugar boom. Instead, it added

to the already enormous wealth produced in the colony. By the eve of

the revolution Saint-Domingue was “the world’s leading producer of both

sugar and coffee.” It exported “as much sugar as Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil

combined” and half of the world’s coffee, making it “the centerpiece of the

Atlantic slave system.”31

Three-quarters of sugar and coffee produced in the colonies and sent

to France was reexported to other countries in Europe. Because restrictive

French trade policies kept the prices planters could demand for their

products down, metropolitan merchants in the port towns made extraordi-

nary fortunes from this business. The livelihood of as many as a million

of the 25 million inhabitants of France depended directly on the colo-

nial trade. The slave colonies of the Caribbean were an engine for eco-

nomic and social change in metropolitan France. The historian Jean Jaurès

pointed out the “sad irony” that the fortunes created in Nantes and Bor-

deaux during the eighteenth century were a crucial part of the struggle

for “human emancipation” that erupted in the French Revolution. Many

among the bourgeoisie who were frustrated with the limits placed on them

by the Old Regime system were wealthy thanks to the sugar and coffee

produced by slaves in the Caribbean. In 1789, 15 percent of the 1,000

members of the National Assembly owned colonial property, and many

others were probably tied to colonial commerce. The slaves of Saint-

Domingue who had helped lay the foundation for the French Revolution

would ultimately make it their own, and even surpass it, in their own strug-

gle for liberty.32

A passenger arriving by ship from France in the late eighteenth century

would generally journey along the coast, first of Spanish Santo Domingo,

and then of the French colony. If it was night there would be lights shin-

ing from the plantation houses and flames dancing in the mills, where,

wrote Moreau, “the sugar crystals that are the principal richness of the col-

ony, and which bring us so much enjoyment, are being prepared.” Aboard

ship, everyone would be changing into clean clothes saved for the landing.

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

21

Reaching the port of Le Cap, the ship would anchor, and the passengers

would descend into small boats to be carried into the harbor: “What a

spectacle! How different from the places left behind! One sees four or five

black or darkened faces for every white one. The clothes, the houses . . .

have a new character.”33

For residents of Le Cap, a ship from France meant the arrival of goods

and news from across the Atlantic. On Sundays, in the area called the

“marché des blancs” (the “white market”), sailors trying to supplement

their meager salaries offered for sale treasures they had brought from

France: dry goods, pottery, porcelain, jewels, shoes, hats, parrots, mon-

keys. Efforts by the administration to stop this practice failed, and the market was very popular with townspeople. “It is fashionable,” wrote Moreau,

“to take a turn in the
marché des blancs,
even if one has nothing to buy there.” The trading of the ship’s actual cargo occurred along the Rue du

Gouvernement, where merchants and naval captains had shops. In front of

each store was a board, usually decorated with a drawing of the ship whose

cargo it advertised. In a matter of a few steps, one could “journey through

the whole of France,” hearing Gascon, Normand, and Provençal accents.

Slaves constantly brought goods back and forth from the port.34

Ships brought something else of great value: news. Residents gathered

in houses near the port to speak to new arrivals or to pass along what they

had heard to one another. Arriving news found its way into a newspaper

called
Affiches Américaines
. Starting in 1788, where the wealthier residents of Le Cap could gather in a
cabinet littéraire,
a club whose members paid annual dues for access to an “elegantly furnished” room with a

library containing “all the interesting newspapers” along with a billiard

room. The same building was home to the Cercle des Philadelphes, the

scientific society that supported Moreau’s work on his
Description.
Its members pursued a wide variety of intellectual pursuits, from botanical experiments to the ill-fated attempt by one plantation owner to introduce

camels from Africa.35

Le Cap was the size of Boston. It had a population of 18,850, though

several thousand of these were soldiers and the majority of the rest were

slaves. Its fifty-six streets were organized in a grid, marked with signs and street numbers, and in the wealthiest part of town close to the port were

partially paved. There were imposing buildings scattered throughout Le

Cap: Le Gouvernement—the house of the administration—which had

been the home of the Jesuits until their expulsion from the colony in 1763;

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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 du Cap François,” 1789. By 1789 Le Cap was a thriving town, its well-ordered pattern of streets a contrast to the surrounding mountains. The map is drawn with North to the right.
Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de
France.

the military barracks behind it, which could house more than a thousand

soldiers; a convent; a large church with an imposing facade; a prison that

held (separately) both black prisoners, often runaway slaves, and white

criminals and debtors; and several hospitals. There were twenty-five baker-

ies and, on the outskirts of town, a slaughterhouse. An elaborate municipal

water system fed several fountains that provided “fresh and limpid water”

from the “neighboring mountains” in public squares. To the south, in a

neighborhood called “Petite Guinée,” free people of color were concen-

trated, although others lived elsewhere in the town. In contrast to the

other cities of the colony, notably Port-au-Prince, most of Le Cap’s 1,400

houses were built of stone. They had “gardens or thick trellises shading

them from the sun,” and many were inhabited by exotic birds from Sene-

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

23

gal, Guiana, and the Mississippi. Those from Senegal had the striking abil-

ity to “change in color without changing their feathers.”36

Le Cap, which one resident called “the Paris of our island,” was a lively

cultural center, one of the most important in the eighteenth-century Amer-

icas. It boasted a theater with a 1,500-person capacity, where Molière’s
Le
Misanthrope
was performed in the 1760s. In 1784
Le Mariage de Figaro
opened there soon after its premiere in Paris. A local play,
Monday at the
Cap, or Payday,
was also performed. Racial segregation was strictly maintained in the theater, where the ten boxes at the top were reserved for free

people of African descent, three for “free blacks” and the rest for “mulat-

tos.” As a result, many mothers could not sit with their daughters. Free-

coloreds were also banned from participating in the dances at the theater,

though they were allowed to watch from their boxes. Le Cap was also full

of “cabarets,” some legal and many more not, where liquor and gam-

bling were available. There were other forms of public entertainment,

such as a traveling wax museum where visitors could see Voltaire and

Rousseau, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and, in 1789, George Wash-

ington in his uniform. Le Cap’s public bathhouses, unlike those in France,

did not separate men and women, so that “husband and wife, or those who

considered themselves as such, could go to the same bath and the same

bathtub”—an arrangement that, Moreau mused, was probably what made

them so popular.37

Le Cap was built on an extensive and protected bay, and its large and

well-constructed port was the most important in Saint-Domingue. It was

the first port of call for most ships arriving in the colony, and the easiest from which to join the transatlantic convoys. There were roughly a hundred larger ships in the harbor at any given time, and sometimes as many

as six hundred. A visitor in 1791 described workmen “busy with all kinds of

labor” at the port, loading “hogsheads of sugar or kegs of indigo.” Another

later recalled that the harbor was “filled with merchandise being shipped,”

where “all was bustle, noise, and cheerful labor.” The port was fed by the

thriving plantation region that surrounded it. The northern plain, traversed

by streams from the mountains, was an ideal place for sugar plantations.

In 1789 the Northern Province, which included Le Cap, the plain, and

the surrounding mountains, contained 288 sugar plantations, most of them