Читать книгу A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution - Jeremy D. Popkin - Страница 16

Although they were heavily outnumbered by the enslaved population, until 1791, Saint-Domingue’s minority of white colonists seemed solidly in control of the island. Although the French government kept only a small garrison in the island, the 30,000 white inhabitants in 1789 used the constant threat of force and the resources of European technology to dominate the far more numerous blacks. Trained troops armed with European weapons, supplemented by local police forces, helped deter black resistance. European ships capable of crossing the oceans made the import of enslaved captives and supplies and the export of plantation products possible. Loans from France financed the slave trade and the expansion of colonial plantations. Whereas most enslaved blacks were illiterate, whites used written letters and printed documents to maintain communication between the colony and the metropole. After 1764, the Saint-Domingue newspaper, the Affiches américaines, printed notices describing escaped blacks, helping their masters to track them down. Few of the enslaved blacks in Saint-Domingue in 1791 had ever seen Europe, but all of them understood that the white colonists’ connection with France made them formidable adversaries.

By 1791 a few of the whites in Saint-Domingue could claim several generations of ancestry in the island, but most of them, like the bossales on their plantations, had in fact been born on the other side of the Atlantic. Throughout the eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue was France’s land of opportunity, a new frontier where enterprising individuals could hope to escape the restrictions of aristocratic society and make their fortunes. Even the high rate of mortality for new arrivals – whites were as vulnerable to tropical diseases as the blacks – did not discourage ambitious immigrants. The memoirs of one settler who arrived in the colony in 1785 are typical of those who crossed the ocean, looking for possibilities they could not find in Europe. Eager to escape from his domineering parents, this anonymous author enlisted in one of the French army’s colonial regiments. Army discipline in Saint-Domingue was lax, and he was able to spend much of his time doing odd jobs to earn extra money. After a few years, he deserted his regiment and went to work as an économe or assistant overseer on a coffee plantation. He was soon making a salary of 3,000 livres a year, along with room and board, at a time when an ordinary worker’s wages in France were about a sixth as much. He succeeded in winning the trust of the elderly plantation-owner he worked for; when that man died, he left his former employee 6,000 livres and “a young American-born black woman, eighteen years old, for whom he knew I had affection.” Using this money, the young man acquired more enslaved blacks of his own and established a coffee plantation in the southern part of the colony.⁶

Whereas newcomers from France had to struggle to establish themselves and were often referred to, even by the blacks, as petits blancs, “little whites” whose only asset was their skin color, the most successful grands blancs achieved fortunes that few Frenchmen at home could dream of. Itemizing his losses in the Haitian Revolution, one man listed a sugar plantation with 342 captive laborers, a coffee plantation with 46 others, a stud farm with 48 mares and 148 mules, and a lime-making establishment employing 25 enslaved blacks; he was by no means the wealthiest of Saint-Domingue planters.⁷ Prosperous planters built large houses on their plantations and filled them with expensive furnishings imported from Europe. Freed from having to do any physical labor themselves, the colonists were known for their hospitality and their lavish spending, which often left them heavily in debt. Merchants in the colony’s cities and in France’s ports enriched themselves by supplying these free-spending customers, many of whom spent most of their time in town or left to live in France, appointing hired managers or gérants to run their properties. Critics of the slavery system claimed that these managers treated the blacks harshly and skimmed off money that should have been spent on their care, in order to accumulate as much money as possible for themselves, in hope of either buying their own plantations or of returning to France with their profits.

Separated from France by the Atlantic Ocean, the white colonists in Saint-Domingue resented the metropolitan government’s attempt to regulate their lives. From the point of view of the distant authorities in Versailles, Saint-Domingue existed in order to enrich the mother country and help France compete with the other European imperial powers. France’s navigation act, the exclusif, required the colonists to buy their supplies only from French merchants and to sell their products only in the mother country. Colonists complained that the merchant houses of Bordeaux, Nantes, and Le Havre overcharged them for products shipped from Europe and underpaid them for their sugar and coffee; especially in the South Province, colonists reacted by carrying on a lively smuggling trade with other Caribbean islands and Britain’s prosperous North American colonies. The white colonists also resented the authority of the military governors and civil intendants sent from France to govern them. Wealthy and self-confident, the island’s plantation-owners wanted to run their own affairs, as colonists in the nearby British colonies usually did. After the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, the French administration tried to tighten its control over its most valuable colony, just as the British were doing in North America. While Britain’s colonists demonstrated against measures like a new stamp tax, the Saint-Domingue colonists went further: in December 1768 they staged an outright rebellion which was not brought under control until the following summer. It was a warning of the independent spirit that the colonists would show when revolution broke out in France in 1789.

In the colony’s main city, Cap Français, the white population recreated the features of modern European life. Le Cap, as it was commonly called, had a rectangular grid of streets, much easier to navigate than the crooked alleyways of Paris. A large and imposing building housed the colonial administration. The city, with a population of around 18,000 in 1789, was built largely of stone. In addition to its 1,500-seat theater, it boasted separate hospitals for men and women, elegant public squares, and a large barracks complex for the military garrison that protected the colonists from foreign invasion and the threat of a slave uprising. Le Cap’s whites considered themselves full participants in the Enlightenment culture of France. The city had bookstores, Masonic lodges, and in 1784 it became the third community in the western hemisphere, after Philadelphia and Boston, to have a learned society, the Cercle des Philadelphes. Saint-Domingue’s other cities were less impressive. Port-au-Prince, in the west, was the official capital, even though its population was smaller than Le Cap’s. Most of its buildings were made out of wood and its streets were still unpaved at the time of the revolution. The smaller ports scattered along the colony’s coastline served primarily as places where ships could anchor to take on the produce from local plantations.