Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (8 page)

omy of plantation managers—and therefore their power to abuse their

slaves—by requiring them to keep careful registers of the work and pro-

duction on the plantations. The reforms also improved the provisions of

the Code Noir by granting slaves not only Sundays but also Saturday after-

noons off, limiting the hours of work that could be demanded, and guaran-

teeing improvements in food and clothing. Slaves were given the right to

complain about abuses against them, and severe punishments were pro-

vided for masters and managers convicted of murdering slaves.50

The masters of Saint-Domingue and some merchants in France pub-

licly attacked the new regulations. One merchant who owned property

in Saint-Domingue argued that they would make the work of plantation

managers impossible. “How can we contain the negroes if they can accuse

whites?” he asked. “To believe the accusations of the slaves is to open the

door to revolt and arm them against the whites.” He saw in the royal de-

crees a sinister goal, that of “emancipating the negroes and placing the

whites in chains.” An officer in the colony who admitted that slavery was

“terrible” nevertheless wrote that the decrees were an attack on “the sa-

cred right of property.” By placing their work regime and discipline under

the control of people “other than their masters,” the decrees put a “dagger

in the hands of the slaves.” The court in Le Cap refused to register the or-

dinance, setting off a battle between the local administrators and Versailles that led to a 1787 royal edict shutting down the rebellious court and transferring its powers to Port-au-Prince. In the same year, while Martinique

and Guadeloupe were granted the right to create colonial assemblies,

Saint-Domingue was not. Moreau was in Saint-Domingue at the time,

and he and his colleagues in the Cercle des Philadelphes openly attacked

these decisions and the “despotic” administration that passed laws without

consultation with the colony. In the process they helped lay the foundation

for the demands for self-government that would later explode into open

rebellion.51

Another bone of contention between planters and French officials was

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

31

the economic policies of the royal government. In the late seventeenth

century, under the leadership of the administrator Jean-Baptiste Colbert,

the
exclusif,
or monopoly, was put into place. The monopoly meant that only ships from French ports could trade with the colonies. From the

perspective of the royal government, the colonies existed to contribute to

the economy of the metropole, and it was therefore perfectly logical that

the planters should be constrained in this way. France, after all, protected

the colonies with its navy, supported their growth with its slave and mer-

chant ships, and supplied settlers and government. It was to be a monoga-

mous relationship of control and support in which colony and mother

country would expand in power and wealth together. French ships would

buy slaves in French ports in Africa, bring them to French colonies in

the Caribbean, and bring back plantation commodities to Europe to be

sold by French merchants. The money and the profits would stay within

the family.52

This was the theory. In practice, of course, things were very differ-

ent. First of all, French ships consistently failed to deliver sufficient supplies—notably provisions and slaves—to the rapidly expanding colony. The

planters contributed to their own problems by focusing obsessively on pro-

ducing commodities for export, making it necessary to import provisions.

French merchants, meanwhile, paid less for colonial commodities than the

planters thought they should. It was an illogical system in many ways.

Saint-Domingue was next to the thriving British colony of Jamaica, near

Spanish Cuba, and quite close to both the North and South American

mainlands. There were markets all around. But trade with these prosper-

ous neighbors was prohibited; everything had to travel thousands of miles

across the Atlantic.

The
exclusif
was consistently honored in the breach. Pirates, the midwives of the French colonies, had woven links among various Caribbean is-

lands and with the nearby mainlands, and there were always individuals

happy to make a profit transporting contraband from one colony to the

next. To acquire slaves, planters, especially in the Southern Province close

to Jamaica, developed an ingenious system that allowed them to circum-

vent French merchants in two ways. British traders would bring slaves

from Jamaica, and French planters would purchase them with barrels of

sugar and coffee. Among the slaves the Jamaicans sold this way were some

they especially wished to get rid of because they were rebellious. One slave

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

who probably came from the British West Indies, Boukman, would lead

the 1791 slave revolt in the colony.53

In addition to nearby British and Spanish colonies, not to mention Dutch

traders, the inhabitants of Saint-Domingue found other willing partners

in crime among the merchants of New England. The “subproducts” of

sugar—particularly rum and molasses—were traded for a wide variety of

provisions. (In the early 1790s U.S. ships brought “flour, corn, oats, rice,

biscuits, salt beef, salt cod, herring, mackerel, salmon, fish, oils, peas, potatoes, onions, and apples,” as well as “live animals including pigs, cows,

sheep, and turkeys.”) Although many North American merchants came to

Saint-Domingue, often the trading took place on small islands such as the

Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas, where there was little imperial control.

New England merchants in turn traded rum with Native Americans or

used it to purchase slaves in Africa. Although their empires were often at

war during the eighteenth century, the colonies of North America and the

French Caribbean depended on one another as they grew.54

Saint-Domingue’s economy was sustained by the contraband trade. Small

boats plied the shores, buying and selling illegally, and even the leading citizens of the colony participated. It was impossible for the colonial govern-

ment to repress this trade; harsh legislation against such dealings only

highlighted the royal government’s impotence. “I am alone against the en-

tire colony” lamented one governor in 1733 when he was criticized for hav-

ing been too lenient in his punishment of planters convicted of participat-

ing in the contraband trade. In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, and again

after the American Revolution, which opened the way for more intensive

trade between North America and Saint-Domingue, administrators made

concessions to planters and loosened monopoly regulations, allowing for-

eign ships to trade certain goods in certain French Caribbean ports. But

they excluded some products, and levied heavy import taxes, so the contra-

band trade continued. The dependence on illegal trading enticed settlers

with the possibility that their profits would be greater in a context of lesser imperial control. Many French planters, furthermore, envied the boister-ous assemblies of the British colonies. Indeed, as early as the Seven Years’

War, some openly supported British attempts to take over the colony, be-

lieving their interests would be better served within a different empire.55

Saint-Domingue, like all the other colonies of the Atlantic world, was an

evolving paradox. While it held out the promise of wealth to its white set-

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

33

tlers, it also disappointed many of their hopes. As an extension of the

mother country, it was meant to contribute to its power and expansion, and

many whites who migrated to Saint-Domingue retained close ties with

France and sought to return as soon as they had made their fortunes. But

many settlers stayed, as did their children, and in the process they devel-

oped new ways of living and seeing the world. Saint-Domingue survived

and thrived because its settlers flouted the regulations imposed on them

from Paris, trading consistently with their British and Spanish neighbors—

especially during times of war. Colonists had different interests from those

of the royal governments that controlled them and the metropolitan mer-

chants with whom they traded. They had more in common with British

sugar planters in Jamaica than with their cousins in Paris or Bordeaux. The

term “creole”—a descriptor that referred to something that was born in

the Americas, and could be applied as much to animals and plants as to

people, and as well to those of European descent as to those of African de-

scent—captures this difference.

Some writers explained the difference of white Caribbean creoles in ra-

cial terms. The English-born planter Bryan Edwards, for instance, identi-

fied two physical differences from the “natives of Europe”: their “consider-

ably deeper” eye sockets guarded them “from those ill effects which an

almost continual strong glare of sunshine might otherwise produce,” and

their skin felt “considerably colder than that of a European; a proof, I

think, that nature has contrived some peculiar means of protecting them

from the heat.” Others fixated on the corruption fostered in the personali-

ties of creoles by the limitless power they had over their slaves. Moreau de-

scribed dangers faced by creole men who never left the colony, shaped by

their constant ability to turn their “will into law for the slaves,” and who

ended up abandoning themselves to music and dance and existing “only

for the voluptuous pleasures.” The naturalist Michel Etienne Descourtilz,

who visited Saint-Domingue in the late 1790s, similarly blamed the cli-

mate for corrupting the “virtue” of creole women, whose “sedentary life”

excited their “voluptuous affections.” He claimed that although creoles

were born good and virtuous, they were corrupted by the fact that they

were destined to command slaves, and developed a “savage, ferocious, ego-

tistical and dominating instinct.” He blamed the looseness of their up-

bringing, in which every “extravagant desire” was entertained by their par-

ents, and so created men who were the “burden of European societies who

disdain the ridiculous.” Viewing the colonies as distant realms of excess

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

and violence, and their inhabitants as fundamentally different, served to

create a distance between slavery and the Europeans who profited from it

and consumed what it produced.56

Fantasies of depravity and rapid evolutionary adaptation among the

creoles were a skewed response to the fact that settlers did create societies distinct and different from those of their fellow nationals across the Atlantic. This circumstance was something the creoles of the Caribbean shared

with those of the mainland to the north and south. But their destiny would

be quite different. When the thirteen colonies revolted, the wealthiest col-

onies of the British empire—those of the Caribbean—did not join them,

in part because concern about controlling their slaves overshadowed a de-

sire for independence. While slaves played a major role in the American

Revolution, primarily by escaping to join the British, who held out the

promise of freedom, in the new United States slavery was ultimately con-

solidated rather than destroyed. In contrast, the victorious struggle for na-

tional independence that soon followed in Saint-Domingue became a suc-

cessful struggle against slavery. And its major protagonists were not slave

owners but slaves themselves.57

The creoles of Saint-Domingue, after all, were a tiny minority sur-

rounded by a vast population with their own interests and interpretations

of the world. The enslaved were “omnipresent and attentive observers”

who had an astute sense of the divisions among their oppressors and devel-

oped a rich vocabulary to describe it. They referred to the newly arrived

whites who often served as their overseers as
moutons France
—French

sheep. (The term would be used later to refer to the French troops that

arrived, and were decimated, in 1802.) They coined the term
petit

blancs
—little whites—to refer to those who did not own land, contrasting them to the
grand blancs
(big whites), also called
Blancs blancs,
or

“White whites,” whose ownership of property made them true whites.

The vocabulary of the slaves was eventually adopted by everyone on the is-

land, and in turn helped to “aggravate the tensions between whites.” In this

way, slaves’ interpretations of the fissures in their masters’ society provided categories that deepened them, laying kindling that would help set the

colony alight.58

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