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CHAPTER 3

Urban Life

The sugar plantation was the most remarkable institution in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. Nevertheless, both colonies were also home to lively cities in which a much greater percentage of the population lived than was usual for British and French North America. The “generative fusion,” or creative adaptation, that Philip Morgan argues was characteristic of eighteenth-century Caribbean culture was most apparent in these dynamic urban places. It was in cities and towns that some of the transformations in race, and indeed gender, that we will be concerned with in this text were most obvious.¹

Towns in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were not mere appendages to the plantation world. They were “electric transformers,” to employ Fernand Braudel’s metaphor for early modern towns, places that “increase[d] tension, accelerate[d] the rhythm of exchange and constantly recharge[d] human life.”² Colonists in these cities found few if any of the institutions that controlled the sexual, economic, or religious behavior of European urban residents. Urban spaces were also liberating places for free and enslaved people of color, who often found more autonomy, a wider set of social relationships, and greater earning power than in rural areas. Free women, both black and white, found it easier in towns to re-create themselves as people of cultural and economic importance.

These New World towns were part of a general urbanizing trend in the eighteenth-century British and French Atlantic Worlds.³ Like provincial towns in Britain and France, they had shops and theaters, markets and commercial exchanges, and new housing developments. Yet these places were even more dynamic than their European counterparts. They had high mortality rates and a constant flux of migrants, merchants, soldiers, and slaves. The pulse of the Atlantic trade made the towns of Saint-Domingue and Jamaica into sites of continual reinvention, as new arrivals struggled to adapt to a new and sometimes bewildering environment.

Late eighteenth-century maps of Saint-Domingue’s chief cities, like René Phélipeau’s 1785 map of Cap Français and its surroundings, reveal an extraordinary vision of rectilinear order and social sophistication (Figure 9).⁴ Such images make it easy to remember that Port-au-Prince, Saint-Domingue’s capital, was a critical stop for Charles Marie de La Condamine’s 1735 expedition to determine the shape of the earth, and that the first hot air balloon ascension in the Americas occurred in Cap Français, the colony’s major port city. Descending closer, the image of enlightened urban sociality becomes more impressive. Cap Français had a theater that could seat fifteen hundred spectators. Cap Français was, moreover, just one of the eight towns in Saint-Domingue with theaters. Actors and musicians from Europe regularly toured the colony, performing the latest plays from Paris. Cap Français and Port-au-Prince had full-time professional troupes and orchestras. Saint-Domingue was also blessed with many booksellers, forty-four Masonic lodges, several public parks and squares, five subscription-based reading clubs, three Vauxhalls (or pleasure gardens), and a scientific academy that included corresponding members like Benjamin Franklin.⁵

Figure 9. “Plan de la Ville du Cap François et de ses Environs Dans l’Isle St. Domingue, Nicolas Poncé.” © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.

But this portrait of the colony as a center of Enlightenment activity is misleading. For one thing, urban sociability came late to Saint-Domingue. Many of these institutions were established in Saint-Domingue as an attempt by French authorities after 1763 to create “civilized” public spaces binding Saint-Domingue’s colonists closer to France. Second, the colony’s towns became sizeable only in the 1770s and 1780s. Cap Français, for example, had around forty-four hundred residents in 1771, including slaves, and tripled to fifteen thousand by 1788, still counting slaves.⁶ Third, although Saint-Domingue had three regional capitals—Cap Français, Port-au-Prince, and Les Cayes, on the southern coast—it was no more extensively urbanized than Jamaica. This proliferation of capitals was largely a function of how difficult it was to travel around the colony and in particular reflected the military vulnerability of the northern coast. Counting the population of these regional capitals, about 5 to 6 percent of Saint-Domingue lived in cities, a number about half of the 10 to 12 percent of Jamaica’s population that lived in towns by the middle of the 1780s. When Saint-Domingue’s roughly fifty parish towns are counted, with populations of about three hundred apiece, however, the two colonies are roughly equivalent in people in urban or semiurban settings, with about 10 to 12 percent of people living in urban or semiurban places.⁷

It was only in the middle of the eighteenth century that France began to spend large sums mapping and planning its colonial cities.⁸ The case of Port-au-Prince illustrates this process. In 1749, when the Crown officially designated it as the site for Saint-Domingue’s new colonial capital, Port-au-Prince was a plantation. Religious services were held for a while in the estate’s sugar refinery, while the colony’s governor-general lived in the main plantation house. In November 1751 royal authorities were still granting land and laying out the city when an earthquake struck and destroyed three-quarters of the one hundred houses that had been built there. The city was a cesspool, until 1770, when the residents began filling in the rutted-out and overly wide streets between houses.⁹ In 1770 another earthquake hit. After this, administrators decreed that all houses were to be built in wood, or masonry between posts, rather than stone, to minimize earthquake damage. A decade later Port-au-Prince had few buildings with a second story. Even in the late 1780s, Moreau de Saint-Méry observed that “nothing about it is reminiscent of a large city.”¹⁰ On the north coast, by contrast, Cap Français was a larger, older, and more architecturally sophisticated city than Port-au-Prince, with many two-story stone and masonry buildings. In 1756, however, it had only few of the dance halls, public gardens, fountains, coffee houses, print shops, and bookstores that would later lead travelers to describe it as the Paris of the Antilles. These buildings and public spaces were mostly erected in the 1770s and 1780s. The theater, discussed below, was an exception, having first made its appearance in 1740.¹¹

At midcentury, colonists in Saint-Domingue and Jamaica were already beginning to argue that these places had moved past their buccaneering origins.¹² In 1750, for example, Emilien Petit, a judge and planter born in the former pirate town of Léogane, argued that “this country is no longer, as in its origin, inhabited almost entirely by crude, unknown, undistinguished people … seeking refuge in another world from the consequences of their crimes.”¹³ This conviction that Saint-Domingue had attained a new stage of development grew stronger after the Seven Years’ War, as royal authorities began to increase the size of the colonial bureaucracy, allowed the establishment of a printing office, and established regular transatlantic and intracolonial mail service.¹⁴

These post-1763 changes in the colony’s urban culture were so noticeable that in 1769 the planter G. Lerond proposed that Saint-Domingue have its own literary academy. Sophisticated gentlemen, he claimed, had replaced illiterate buccaneers: “All fashions are found in the colony today: plays, concerts, libraries, sumptuous parties where gaiety and wit oppose irksome boredom…. Pirates have given way to dandies with embroidered velvet jackets…. A love of learning accompanies this love of luxury. Those who previously could not read or write are today poets, orators, and scientists.” But an anonymous critic pointed out that the new breed of colonists were obsessed with making money, not polite conversation: “many intelligent people will be found in Saint-Domingue but I repeat that they will justly be too jealous of their time to attend literary conferences.”¹⁵

It was in the cities that European visitors were most struck by colonists’ relentless materialism, for they expected that the Church would be at the center of urban life. This was true only in a spatial and legal sense. Saint-Domingue’s towns were built, as in Europe, around parish churches. The Catholic Church was an important part of French colonial ideology, and parishes served as the fundamental unit of local government. As the Code Noir of 1685 proclaimed, all religions besides Catholicism were illegal, though there were a small number of Protestant and Jewish families in the colony. The code specified that all slaves were to be baptized and instructed in the Christian faith. Few planters followed this aspect of the slave law, but the Jesuit order did baptize and catechize slaves.¹⁶ The powerful symbolism of the church meant that all towns and cities had sanctuaries of some kind.

Yet colonists were notoriously irreligious. In 1768, Lieutenant Desdorides, an artillery officer recently arrived in the colony, wrote his father: “Religion, which everywhere consoles the just and slows the wicked, enflames or restrains almost no one in Saint-Domingue. Priests, by their bad conduct … lose much of the merit [by which] they will persuade [congregants] of the maxims they are charged with teaching. They assemble a very small number of faithful; thus one sees deserted churches…. Without religion … one sees the continual victory of error and disorder.”¹⁷

In the 1780s, Cap Français was the largest French city in the Americas, with fourteen hundred houses and seventy-nine public buildings. In 1748 the Jesuits built a two-story masonry residence there, but in 1763 the town’s only church could still be described as “wooden shack ready to collapse.” A proper stone church was not in place until 1774. Few residents attended services, except during major feast days.¹⁸ Moreau de Saint-Méry illustrated the religious climate by describing how the parish of Cap Français raised funds. Every year the parish, just as in France, named two sextons to administer parish property and other financial matters. In France local notables pulled strings and made donations to be nominated to this prestigious office. In Cap Français, however, the parish deliberately nominated men who had no interest in church affairs, then informed them that they could escape the duty by making a large donation to the church. The nominee usually complied, and the committee went on to another victim. In some years they tapped two or three of these reluctant sextons in a single day.¹⁹

Royal government, like the Church, was another metropolitan institution that looked more important on late eighteenth-century maps than was actually the case. In theory, Saint-Domingue was under absolutist rule from the 1660s. But it had little in the way of centralized royal administration until 1763. The Superior Council of Cap Français met in the royal storehouse for twenty-four years.²⁰ Not until December 1763 did the Crown convert the former headquarters of the Jesuit order into a proper “Government House,” with meeting rooms and offices for the Council, the lower royal courts, and naval administrators.²¹

The colonial capital, Port-au-Prince, was the official residence of Saint-Domingue’s governors and their staffs. The end of the Seven Years’ War marked the beginning of a bureaucratic and mercantile influx that doubled the size of Port-au-Prince to 683 houses and then to 895 in 1788. This made it about the size of Kingston twenty-five years earlier.²² In the 1780s, Port-au-Prince had a total population of ninety-four hundred, but it was still smaller than Cap, which had between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand people. Despite its status as capital, it had few free residents able to participate fully in civic life. Most of its population consisted of soldiers and sailors (thirty-two hundred) and slaves (four thousand), leaving eighteen hundred whites and four hundred free people of color.²³ The city had a theater and, after 1782, a fashionable Vauxhall, though it eventually dissolved because of gambling disputes. Indeed, Moreau claimed that in Port-au-Prince, unlike Cap Français, male colonists gathered only to gamble. In this respect it resembled St. Jago de la Vega, the small inland capital of Jamaica.²⁴ Cap Français had three charity hospitals, but Port-au-Prince did not get such an institution until 1787, when the governor-general brought state financing to the project.²⁵

Saint-Domingue’s towns were also the site of its military garrisons, which added both a leavening of high status officers to complement the existing elite of merchants and planters and also a larger number of men of lower status. European troops, however, died quickly in the Greater Antilles. Records from Saint-Domingue in 1765 show a minimal annual death rate of 21 percent among rank-and-file soldiers.²⁶ It did not help that rank-and-file soldiers in the colony were given poor rations and shoddy clothing and were forced to do manual labor outside their military function.²⁷ Slaves and free people of color referred to them as “white slaves” (nègres blancs). Many deserted, often in groups of five or six at a time. In 1766, for example, two weeks after a contingent of 647 soldiers debarked at Cap Français, forty-four of them had already deserted, swelling the growing petit blanc class.²⁸

Towns were also important in Jamaica, although the English colony had only one large urban area, Kingston. Even the capital, St. Jago de la Vega, also called Spanish Town, was a hamlet, not a substantial town. Kingston was the island’s major port, and trading was so important in Jamaica that in the mid-1750s that Governor Charles Knowles tried unsuccessfully to move the capital there, arguing it was illogical to make ship captains and merchants trek thirteen miles to Spanish Town to conduct business. Knowles also hoped to build a wedge of merchant support in the Assembly against politically powerful planters, who wanted the capital to remain inland. He lost that political battle, but Kingston’s economic and cultural importance remained intact.²⁹

Kingston may have been an important place of business, but it was, like Port-au-Prince, an unprepossessing place. It was built around a Spanish plan, which placed the formal center of the town—a large square with the parish church at its center and public buildings dotted around it—at some distance from the commercial district. That was Kingston’s real heart, full of bustling streets lined with shops and warehouses, located around a magnificent natural harbor. A map produced in 1745 by Michael Hay shows Kingston when it was probably at the height of its influence (Figure 10). Hay showed a town, dominated by merchants and mercantile houses, which was beginning to expand east of the harbor. The cartographer highlighted that commercial identity in his map by featuring sketches of the houses of four prominent merchants—Edward Gardiner, Robert Turner, Alexander Macfarlane, and Robert Duckinfield. He also outlined, to the southwest of the town, the location where “strangers” and “negroes” were buried and showed the location of the hospital, in “Cheapside,” in the southeast.³⁰

Figure 10. “[Plan of Kingston] to His Excellency Edward Trelawny, esqr., captain, general governor & commander in chief of His Majesty’s island of Jamaica & the territories …; this plan of Kingston is humbly dedicated by His Excellency’s most humble & most obedient servant, Mich. Hay.” [Kingston, n.d. (1745)]. © Library of Congress, Geography and Maps Collection.

Kingston was a practical town, built for business rather than aesthetics, but parts of it were pleasing. In his history of 1774, Long praised the houses in Kingston for their construction and sturdiness, noting they were “mainly of brick, raised two or three stories, conveniently disposed, and in general well-furnished; their roofs are all shingled; the fronts of most of them are shaded with a piazza below, and a covered gallery above.”³¹ Lord Adam Gordon on a trip to British America in 1764 thought the town “very considerable, being large and well Inhabited, the Streets spacious and regularly laid out,” as befitted “the most … trading Town on the island.”³² But against this were less positive comments. Gordon also noted that Kingston was “a very unwholesome place,” “often visited by sickness.” Long blamed the mortality on the “loathsome practice” of using human excrement to pave the roads and on burying people in too shallow graves near the middle of the town.³³ Thomas Hibbert, the town’s greatest merchant, gives some credence to Long’s views. In his notably deist will of 1780 he instructed his executors that “in order to show my detestation and abhorrence of the prevailing superstitious custom of Interning dead bodies in Churches and Church yards and to prevent mine being added to the noxious Mass that is daily Corrupting in the Centre of the Town, I desire that my executors will see it placed in the deep Vault which I have provided for that purpose in the Garden belonging to my House in Kingston with the least expense consistent with decency.”³⁴

We don’t have a census for 1745 for Kingston, but extrapolating from a census of 1730, when it had 4,461 residents (1,468 whites, 269 free people of color, and 2,724 slaves) and assuming modest growth per annum suggests that by 1745 the town had somewhere between five thousand and six thousand people. There were 844 householders in the town in 1745, suggesting that the average household size was very small—probably not much more than two whites or six free people and slaves per household. Nevertheless, Kingston accounted for 7 percent of Jamaica’s population in 1774. By this time it was the third largest town in British America, with around 14,200 people, more than twice the size of contemporary Cap Français, which had only 6,143 people in 1775.³⁵ More important, just under one-third of white Jamaicans dwelt in Kingston, and 40 percent of free people of color lived there. In contrast, 25 percent of Saint-Domingue’s whites lived in the three largest cities, and less than 10 percent of the free people of color were urban residents.³⁶ Kingston’s population increased rapidly after the American Revolution. By 1788, its 26,478 people meant that it had 12 percent of Jamaica’s population, including 6,539 whites and 3,280 free people of color. Most slaves lived in the countryside, but with 16,659 slaves, Kingston accounted for 7 percent of Jamaica’s enslaved population. Kingston had more slaves and free people of color combined than in all the urban centers of British North America.³⁷

It was a heterogeneous place. The cacophony of voices and jumble of complexions in Kingston struck observers forcefully. Curtis Brett, a Dubliner from a middling commercial background, who arrived in Kingston from London in 1748, wrote vividly about the heterogeneous character of the town’s population, noting upon arrival, “Instead of the Morning London Cries, of Old Clothes, Sweep, &c. my Ears were saluted with Maha-a, Maha-a, the Cries of Goats, kept in Most Houses for their Milk. And presently I heard called the Names of Pompey, Scipio, Caesar &c. and again those of Yabba, Juba, Quasheba (Negro Boys and Girls, Slaves in the Family) which first raised an Idea of being in old Rome; & then again of my being transported suddenly to Africa.” He thought “the Inhabitants very open, courteous, lively & very ready to serve and assist a stranger. But how different did everything appear to me…. People of almost all colours! White, black, yellow, in abundance. Many pale white, and great Variety in the Shades of Black and Yellow. Very few, not one in a Thousand, of a ruddy Complexion.”³⁸

Kingston’s great merchants were very wealthy, with the largest leaving estates of more than £100,000 or 230,000 livres. They made their fortunes in several ways. Kingston’s principal business was the importation of African slaves into the Americas, the largest and most complex international business of the eighteenth century.³⁹ Between 1700 and 1758 the city was the sole port of entry for Africans shipped into Jamaica and the major port for such shipments between 1758 and 1807. During this time nearly 830,000 slaves were imported into Jamaica. The total value of this trade amounted to nearly £25 million. Perhaps £200,000 per annum passed through the hands of Kingston merchants. Henry Bright, a Bristol factor resident in Kingston, called the trade to Africa the “chief motive of people venturing their fortunes abroad.”⁴⁰

Many of those African captives did not stay in Jamaica but instead were reexported from Kingston as part of the Asiento, or legal slave trade with Spanish America. Richard Sheridan estimates that between 1702 and 1808, 193,597 Africans landing in Jamaica, or 24.4 percent of all captives landed on the island, were immediately shipped onward to Spanish America. The peak years of exportation were between 1710 and 1740, when 42 percent of slaves were reexported. Saint-Domingue had no such reexport sector, and its local merchant class was consequently far less wealthy.

A well-informed account of Britain’s American colonies in the mid-1740s thought that Jamaica was the most substantial financial contributor to the British Empire, with its trade to Spanish America worth £900,000 sterling per annum in 1745, making its total trade worth £1.5 million, compared to New England’s £1 million.⁴¹ James Abercromby, a Scottish imperial thinker who had lived in the colonies, argued in a similar vein in 1752. He ranked twenty-three colonies in British America in terms of their worth to the empire. Jamaica ranked thirteenth in fighting men but second in value of produce and first in value of the British goods it imported.⁴²

As this data suggests, the wealth of Kingston’s merchants continued after the Asiento ended in 1740. The most recent estimate of intercolonial slave departures from Jamaica (mainly from Kingston) suggests that between 1741 and 1790, 62,600 Africans were exported from Jamaica to foreign markets with a further 11,075 leaving in the same period for other British colonies. It was the most active such entrepôt in British America. Cuba was a popular destination, as was Cartagena, with the southern regions of Saint-Domingue also attracting considerable illegal smuggling. By the 1760s, Kingston merchants had begun to expand their trade in slaves and other goods to other places, such as the Bahamas and Honduras, as well as to familiar Spanish American and North American destinations. The American Revolution was a blow to such trade, but it quickly picked up again in the 1780s.⁴³

Kingston merchants also made substantial sums from money lending. Planters approached them for credit to acquire slaves, livestock, land, and mill equipment as well as to fund conspicuous consumption and to pay out family inheritances. The biggest moneylenders provided large sums to their clients. Fifteen Jamaican colonists (eight of whom were Kingston merchants) left inventories showing they lent out more than £60,000 or 138,000 livres to creditors. To keep this in perspective, only one man in British North America—Charles Carroll of Annapolis—lent money on the Jamaican scale, with £57,400 out on loan in 1776.⁴⁴

Located on the Atlantic coast, the “French Cape” was, like Kingston, a major location for the arrival of Africans in the New World, and a significant site for the transculturation that created a creole society in Saint-Domingue. Although it did not dominate colonial commerce like Kingston did, Cap Français received roughly half of Saint-Domingue’s incoming African slave ships; Port-au-Prince, the colony’s second slave port, received only 30 percent. While eighteenth-century Jamaica received slave ships coming from fifty-eight sites on the African coast, according to surviving records Saint-Domingue received human cargoes from seventy-six African ports. Even more than Kingston, therefore, Cap Français was a place where different African peoples became Americans.⁴⁵

Unlike Kingston, however, Saint-Domingue did not reexport its African captives. Rather, the French colony received slaves from other empires, often illegally. Saint-Domingue, as one expert describes it, was continually in the grip of a terrible labor shortage. Planters blamed imperial restrictions on foreign trade, though the real culprit was the relentless work regime on many plantations, and the ongoing expansion of those plantations. David Geggus estimates that in one region of Saint-Domingue’s southern peninsula, between 10 and 15 percent of slaves there had been purchased from British traders, probably sailing out of Kingston.⁴⁶

By the end of the colonial period, the ten thousand enslaved people living in Cap Français made up 67 percent of the city’s population. Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes had similar compositions. Thus slaves, who made up 90 percent of the overall colonial population, were underrepresented in the cities.⁴⁷ But their labor and actions determined cities’ character. David Geggus has summarized what little we know about the 4 or 5 percent of slaves in Saint-Domingue who lived in towns, villages, or hamlets.⁴⁸ Their characteristics resembled, in exaggerated form, those of the slave population as a whole. They were mainly male, African, and overwhelmingly adult: 65 percent of slaves in Cap Français were adult males, and only 13 percent were children, compared to 41 and 23 percent on sugar estates in the northern province. Nearly two-thirds of urban slaves were not locally born, the great majority being born in Africa. A few were described as “foreign creoles,” and they tended to be slaves transported for being troublesome in other places like Martinique, Guadeloupe, or the Mississippi. They continued to be troublesome in their new homes, being disproportionately represented in fugitive slave advertisements.⁴⁹

The lives of urban slaves, while hard, were probably better than the lives of rural slaves. Colonists certainly believed they were better fed and healthier, and had more personal property. Indeed, their clothes, which seemed to some whites like gaudy finery, gave them away as relatively privileged, at least compared to slaves on distant plantations, who often went about nearly naked or dressed in rags.⁵⁰ As in Kingston, they had more opportunities than rural slaves to establish independent lives where they hired themselves out and, after paying a portion of their wages to their owners, lived separately. Colonists found such independence disturbing, seeing these slaves as “thieves and receivers of stolen goods.”⁵¹ They warned that these hired-out urban slaves encouraged rebellious thoughts and rebellious actions in the plantation workers who flocked to the cities every Sunday to sell their produce. Moreau, for example, was highly critical of the ribaldry, breaking of laws, potential for clandestine gathering, and unwelcome practice of subversive religion that went on at these markets, or elsewhere. He described how slaves gathered together for dances in an old cemetery at the edge of Cap Français contemptuously, as “a spectacle of fury and pleasure.”⁵²

A remarkable report by the Chamber of Agriculture in 1785 gave voice to white fears of slave depravity in Cap Français and to its potential consequences. Bemoaning that “the Negroes are so open in their insubordination that the line of demarcation between whites and slaves has almost vanished,” the authors of the report predicted “grave events” if no one “put an end to this evil.” They urged that the town authorities put a stop to their tolerance of slaves’ “nightly gatherings and gambling dens, their nocturnal dances, associations, and brotherhoods.” What particularly disturbed the chamber was how slaves insolently refused to give way to whites on the street—they gave several horrified accounts of such insolence. They were even more concerned at slaves’ tendency to travel at all times “with a large stick.” On holidays, they lamented that “you find 2,000 of them gathered at La Providence, La Fossette and Petit Carénage [neighborhoods on the edge of the city] all armed with sticks, drinking rum and doing the kalinda.”⁵³ Nevertheless, despite these provocations and despite the potential for riot that large gatherings of armed and drunk young adult men provided, urban slaves were remarkably politically quiescent. There were no urban revolts in any of Saint-Domingue’s towns before the start of the French Revolution and little involvement by urban slaves in the initial stages of the Haitian Revolution. David Geggus argues that while towns facilitated social flux and opportunities for subversive gatherings, they were also places full of whites, including a concentration of soldiers and sailors, thus making armed uprisings difficult.⁵⁴

Another critical group in Saint-Domingue’s cities, indeed in all Caribbean cities, was free people of color. On islands where whites controlled most arable land, ex-slaves and their descendants tended to gravitate toward the cities to find work. In late eighteenth-century Barbados, for example, free coloreds were about 6 percent of the residents of Bridgetown, but only 3 percent of the total colonial population.⁵⁵ In Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, however, vacant rural land was available. In Saint-Domingue specifically, a system of royal land grants made it possible for free coloreds to become peasants, market farmers, and ranchers. A small but significant minority became indigo, cotton, and coffee planters.⁵⁶ As we explore in Chapter 6, in Jamaica colonial elites took measures after Tacky’s Revolt in 1760 to prevent whites from bequeathing land and slaves to free people of color. In Saint-Domingue such laws were discussed but never implemented, making it possible for free families of color to eventually accumulate enough land and enslaved workers to establish plantations.⁵⁷

One consequence of the economic opportunities available in Saint-Domingue’s countryside was that free people of color were not especially concentrated in the cities, unlike whites and unlike their counterparts in Jamaica. They were only 6 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes, while they were 5 percent of the overall colonial population. Cap Français was unusual in that 10 percent of its population was free colored by the 1780s.⁵⁸ Seen another way, about 10 percent of Saint-Domingue’s free population of color lived in the three capital cities, while 40 percent of Jamaican free coloreds lived in Kingston.

In the cities or in the country, most Dominguan free people of color were quite poor. But the vibrant urban economy of the 1770s and 1780s did allow the emergence of a small population of free colored merchants and property owners. The most prominent among these was the quadroon Vincent Ogé the younger, who claimed to have been worth 350,000 livres or £15,000 by the early 1780s. This was a large sum, two to three times as much as the net worth of a wealthy Parisian merchant at the same time.⁵⁹ Ogé’s case was unusual, because he was from a mixed-race coffee-planting family, was educated in Bordeaux, and had an uncle who was a merchant in Cap Français. In the 1780s, Ogé sold French cargos around the colony, was part owner of a schooner, and leased and subleased apartments in Cap Français. Another man of one-quarter African descent whom contemporaries described as a large-scale merchant (négociant) was Joseph-Charles Haran, born in the town of Léogane around 1744. In 1785 he subleased a property in Port-au-Prince that included a shop, twenty-seven slaves, a flat-bottomed boat, eight carts, twenty-four mules, and three horses. Unfortunately the lease fell through, and by 1787 he owed his creditors 440,000 livres or £19,000 while his assets were worth 215,000 livres.⁶⁰ Such possibilities were also open to a few exceptional free women of color. Indeed, two-thirds of the clients of color who appeared before notaries in Cap Français or Port-au-Prince to buy or sell property between 1776 and 1789 were women. The most successful was Zabeau Bellanton of Cap Français, who bought and sold over 100,000 livres or £4,300 worth of slaves and real estate.⁶¹ Dominique Rogers has found considerable numbers of women of color in Cap Français and especially in Port-au-Prince who lived on profits from rental properties.⁶²

But it was unusual for free colored people to be wealthy, even in Saint-Domingue, which had the wealthiest free population of color in the Americas in the eighteenth century. The poverty of most urban free coloreds can be seen in the 1776 cadastral census of Cap Français. Free colored properties were on the outskirts of town and at the ends of streets that ran up into the hills in a region named Petit Guinée. Other cities and towns—Les Cayes, Saint-Marc, Port-de-Paix—had similar districts.⁶³ This segregation was based on economics, not formally on race. While free coloreds accounted for 10 percent of Cap Français’s population in 1775 and owned 16 percent of its houses, their property was only 5 percent of the total value of city residences. The census shows that free women of color were far more active within their class than were white women; 42 percent of free colored proprietors were women; only 14 percent of white owners were women. The average value of property that these white women owned was equivalent to the average value of property owned by white men, a rental value of 2,600 livres per year, equal to the purchase price of an adult male slave. Free women of color, on the other hand, owned property that was on average valued far less than this, with an annual rental value of 636 livres, or £27.5, compared to 798 livres for free men of color. Free colored property like this was typical of those recorded in the Cap Français census: “one-fifth of a city lot on which there are several wooden shacks belonging to Pierre known as Beau Soleil, free black, and occupied by him.”⁶⁴

Saint-Domingue’s whites, as in Jamaica, lived disproportionately in the cities. They made up 5 percent of the colony’s overall population, but they were 22 percent of the population of Cap Français and nearly 30 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince.⁶⁵ Some of these were administrative personnel and local merchants, but many were involved in transatlantic commerce. The 1776 census of Cap Français shows that approximately two-thirds of the city’s houses were leased to tenants.⁶⁶ While Jamaica’s eighteenth-century sugar planters paid to ship their produce back to Britain to be sold by merchants, a practice some Dominguan planters followed, many Saint-Domingue planters expected metropolitan merchants to come to colonial ports and to buy their produce there. Because British sugar colonies imported their food from North America, ships sailing from Britain to the Caribbean often did not have full cargoes. But French merchants held tight to their monopoly system, which prohibited colonial planters from buying foreign supplies. French ships, therefore, sailed to the Saint-Domingue full of wheat, dried beef, and other provisions, which their captains expected to sell for a good profit to the colonial market. They then bought sugar, coffee, and other crops to carry back to Europe.⁶⁷

As in Jamaica, therefore, Saint-Domingue had a class of wealthy urban merchants, though they were more likely than their Kingston counterparts to be affiliated with metropolitan firms. They occupied the most desirable real estate in Cap Français. The median rent for the city’s nine hundred plus houses or plots was 2,000 livres per year, strikingly higher than in central Paris, where in the same period 500 livres would rent a ground-floor apartment of three or four rooms for a year.⁶⁸ A few streets between the sea and the cathedral square in Cap Français had rents of 6,000 to 9,000 livres per annum, the value of two to three skilled slaves. Some houses near the harbor rented for as much as 15,000 livres.⁶⁹ The profit that merchants reaped from the commercial monopoly also explains the deep tension between metropolitan merchants and colonial planters over the future of this system, as described in Chapters 7 and 8.

A key aspect of the mercantile life of Cap Français was the exchange of information in new kinds of public spaces. In addition to its various open-air markets, its theater, and the fountains, squares, and gardens that proliferated after 1763, the city had literary societies, book stores, and a biweekly broadside, the Affiches américaines.⁷⁰ From 1761 to 1778, it had a commercial exchange, a space devoted to the buying and selling of letters of change and other instruments of credit. Yet colonial commerce did not lend itself to sociability. Cap was full of men who came to make their fortune, or who were tied to merchant houses in France. As Martin Foäche informed a young friend due to arrive in Cap Français in 1760, “There is little or no custom [here] of going to eat [with colleagues] at the inn, even those with whom one is doing business. When mid-day strikes, everyone goes in his own direction.”⁷¹ He told his friend to seek out guest tables instead of eating at his inn during his first six months in the city. This would allow him to meet people and gain information about the colony. Meeting like-minded people was especially important, as travelers to Saint-Domingue stressed the lack of connection that many colonists felt to any country. In his 1754 Essai sur les colonies françaises Pierre-Louis de Saintard wrote, “The Europeans who live in the colonies, having become by voluntary transplantations outsiders everywhere, no longer pretend to have a fatherland.”⁷²

The pervasive notion of rootlessness and of the lack of connections among colonists also explains why Saint-Domingue was probably the most heavily “masonized” society in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. In France in 1789, Freemasonry involved less than 1 percent of the eligible male population.⁷³ It was at least five times more popular in Saint-Domingue, where there were around one thousand Freemasons, in a population of roughly twenty thousand white men. Not all men had the money or education to be a Freemason. James McClellan estimates that about 25 percent of “sociologically eligible white men” in Saint-Domingue were Freemasons.⁷⁴

In France, Freemasonry was imported from England in 1725, and this pattern was duplicated in Saint-Domingue. In Bordeaux and other French Atlantic ports, English or Irish merchants often organized early lodges.⁷⁵ Jamaica opened its first masonic lodge in 1739, and English merchants involved in contraband trading brought the new institution to southern Saint-Domingue sometime before 1747. The names of many of the Jewish trading families active around the southern port of Les Cayes can be found among lodge members in Jamaica.⁷⁶

In Europe and in the Atlantic World, eighteenth-century Freemasons consciously thought of themselves as part of a diaspora.⁷⁷ A network of correspondence joined lodges on a national or geographic basis. Such a web of connections was especially useful for transatlantic merchants. Masons developed what have been called “management tools of mobility”—initiation certificates, interlodge affiliations, passwords, and maps of lodge locations, all designed to insure that a traveling mason could find a friendly lodge in a new city.⁷⁸ While most of Saint-Domingue’s lodges were part of a French Atlantic network, some stretched farther. One of Cap Français’s leading lodges was part of a network centered on the St. Jean d’Ecosse lodge of Marseilles, which also had an affiliated lodge in Martinique. But this network was primarily invested in creating fraternal and commercial connections in the Mediterranean, with affiliates in Naples, Sicily, and the Ottoman Empire.⁷⁹

Jamaica also had a lively Freemasonic culture, with more than a dozen lodges listed in the Jamaica Almanac by 1789.⁸⁰ But we know more about Freemasonry in Saint-Domingue, where its extraordinary popularity reflected the colony’s cosmopolitanism, its lack of established social institutions, its network of provincial cities, and the absence of a well-established French religious culture. It is likely that for some colonists Freemasonry provided a way to forge new communities within a highly mobile population, and to structure those associations around something besides wealth. The popularity of so-called Scottish Rite Freemasonry in Saint-Domingue, with its elaborate hierarchy of over two dozen levels of initiation, is an example of that desire to negotiate new hierarchies. Established in Bordeaux in 1743, the Scottish Rite by 1762 had twenty-five degrees and was very complex in ways that seem to have appealed to colonists wanting new forms of distinction.⁸¹ The Scottish Rite came to Saint-Domingue with the wine merchant Etienne Morin, who had been one of its founding members in Bordeaux. A traveling salesman who also sold religious books and Sèvres porcelain, Morin is said by some historians to have been in Saint-Domingue in the 1740s, perhaps making multiple trips establishing lodges.

At some point around midcentury, he returned to France, where the leaders of the Scottish Rite were in the process of forming a kingdom-wide organization. This group gave Morin some kind of credential to establish new lodges in the Americas. But during the Seven Years’ War the British captured Morin on his return voyage to the Caribbean. Imprisoned in Great Britain, the salesman established contact with Freemasons in England and even is said to have visited Scotland. In 1763 he returned to Saint-Domingue. He landed in Jacmel, a port on the southern coast, which suggests he had come from Jamaica. Morin quickly went to work founding new “Scottish” lodges in Saint-Domingue, but by 1766 masonic authorities in France accused him of exceeding his authority to grant higher degrees. They especially criticized him for deputizing others to do the same. Although Bordeaux sent an inspector to Saint-Domingue to investigate his activities, Morin continued to establish lodges in Saint-Domingue and eventually returned to Jamaica, where he died around 1772.⁸²

Morin’s career illustrates the entrepreneurial and cosmopolitan side of Freemasonry, which was certainly part of its success in Saint-Domingue. But some of Freemasonry’s colonial popularity stemmed from the reasons it was popular in France. Lodges provided a setting for elite sociability, and masonic doctrines dovetailed with enlightenment ideas of improvement, self-government, and “public” discussion. Despite its universalist ideals, Freemasonry was based on a dichotomy between the mystical brotherhood and the “profane” world, between “light” and “darkness,” between civilization and barbarity. Despite historians’ suggestions that Toussaint Louverture was a Freemason in Saint-Domingue, there is very little evidence that he or any other free man of color was permitted to become a masonic brother. The colony’s lodges were fiercely discriminatory against people of African descent, even removing white members from leadership positions because they had married women of color.⁸³

While the hierarchical and closed social aspects of Freemasonry were well suited to Saint-Domingue, this was also true in France’s coastal cities, like the port of Le Havre in Normandy, where Freemasonry had a very different political and social profile from that of the freethinking lodges of Paris.⁸⁴ The relative cultural conservatism of Le Havre’s Freemasons made it quite common, Eric Saunier finds, for them to also be members of religious confraternities, which were part of the rich associational life of many French cities.⁸⁵

Given the institutional weakness of the Catholic Church in Saint-Domingue, it is not surprising that the colony appears to have had no confraternities. It seems likely that in Saint-Domingue some men were attracted to Freemasonry because it offered a spiritual context they remembered from France. One of the leading figures of French esoteric Freemasonry, Martinès de Pasqually, died in Saint-Domingue, where his followers had established at least two lodges. In France, Martinès had founded the Elus de Cohen order, which overlaid Christian mysticism and elements of the Jewish kabbala tradition over Scottish Rite Freemasonry. One of his leading followers, Bacon de la Chevalerie, spent much of his military career in Saint-Domingue. Martinès claimed his rites could bring forward angels or other spiritual beings who could guide men toward a reintegration with the Deity, essentially restoring them to spiritual status that Adam had enjoyed before falling from grace.⁸⁶ Indeed, some of the spiritual figures or loas in Haitian Vodou were masons, suggesting that there was an overlap of spiritual ideas from these different traditions.⁸⁷

The Freemason’s Hall was a gendered place, a center of a particular kind of male sociability. But West Indian towns were not exclusively male. Indeed, they were places in which enslaved women but also white women and free women of color were prominent. As in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue generally, the majority of the urban population was male, but the percentage of women in towns was much greater than the percentage of women in the countryside.

The principal determinant of gender relations in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue was the demographic lottery that governed white life. As in Saint-Domingue, Jamaica’s high mortality rates made family life something of a game of chance. Multiple marriages were common, so much that some contemporaries described these relationships as a series of fleeting encounters. The bewildering uncertainty of life in the tropics and the failure of Jamaicans to establish a settler society on the model of settler societies in British North America meant that Jamaica came to be seen by metropolitans as a vortex of social disorder.⁸⁸ Similar conditions existed in Saint-Domingue. For Moreau de Saint-Méry, “there is perhaps no country in which second marriages are as common as in Saint-Domingue, and there have been women there who have had seven husbands.”⁸⁹

Slavery and racial categories caused another set of problems. White men and women lived irregularly, with concubinage as common as marriage. In Jamaica, marriage between whites and free people of color was always regarded as illegal. Nevertheless, colonial authorities seem to have allowed the relatively small number of free colored women who were sought as brides by white men to “pass” as whites.⁹⁰ After 1761, as part of new racial laws examined in Chapter 6, the Jamaica Assembly made passing much more difficult and thus interracial marriage became close to impossible. In early eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue passing was also possible: before the 1760s notaries and clergy often did not describe the color or ancestry of wealthy free women of color in official documents but did give them courtesy titles like “Madame” or “Demoiselle,” suggesting that they were white.⁹¹ Even at the end of the century, when stricter laws governed racial categories, unions between white men and free colored women were never outlawed. The percentage of religious marriages celebrated between white men and free women of color reached 17 percent in some parishes.⁹²

Before midcentury, in both colonies the policing of boundaries between whites and free coloreds was done very loosely, if at all. In Jamaica, for example, it was not that marriages between whites and free coloreds were banned as that social convention stopped people from even thinking that such unions were possible. Jamaican patriots proudly declared that they maintained their Britishness by preserving a “marked distinction between the white inhabitants and the people of colour and free blacks.” But sexual contact between white men and women of color was very common in Jamaican households.⁹³ Unlike British North America, where interracial sex was frowned on and kept out of the public sphere, in Jamaica such practices were highly public. Gossip about rich married men and their mulatto mistresses was commonplace, and white bachelors lived openly with their “housekeepers.” The purported lines of division between whites and blacks, however enshrined in law and ideology, were nevertheless violated every day in the household.⁹⁴

The Jamaican family was not the British family, just as the Saint-Dominguan family was very different from the French family. It was customary for white men to cohabit outside marriage, both with white women and also with black or colored women. Few white families lasted long or produced surviving children. As the prevalence of venereal disease in the white male population graphically showed, social constraints against the free exercise of white male sexual power were virtually nil.⁹⁵ The inability, or unwillingness, of white Jamaicans to establish flourishing family lives and regular marriages was a serious reputational problem for colonists within the empire well before the Seven Years’ War.⁹⁶ The same was true of Saint-Domingue, where since the late 1600s the French government had tried in vain to bring in European women to marry male colonists. In 1750 Emilien Petit still believed the problem of creating stable white households in Saint-Domingue was the lack of European women.⁹⁷ Metropolitan governments were very concerned about observing and regulating familial relationships and sexual behavior. They saw population, security questions, and racial purity in colonial settings as indelibly linked together. As Kathleen Wilson asserts, “the fate of nation, colony, and empire was tied to individual sexual choice; the well-governed colony and the self-governing individual went hand in hand.”⁹⁸

Contemporary commentators in both societies described the black or mulatto mistress as morally subversive.⁹⁹ British West Indians were occasionally moved to write verse celebrating the beauty of black women; the most famous being the “Ode to the Sable Venus,” composed by the Reverend Isaac Teale in 1765 and published in Bryan Edwards’s 1793 history. For Teale, the black woman represented forbidden but easily accessible sensual pleasures. In his heavily eroticized prose, the white man sought the “sable queen’s … gentle reign … where meeting love, sincere delight, fond pleasure, ready joys invite, and unbrought rapture meet.” Other writers saw that beauty in more threatening terms. Edward Long, for example, recognized that many white men found black women intrinsically erotic, but this recognition filled him with disgust, given his shrill belief that there was something essentially animalistic about black women. Famously, he opined that black women were attracted to white men for the same reasons that he believed orangutans supposedly lusted after black men. In this reading, Long argued that black women and female orangutans sought to improve themselves by attaching themselves to a superior species. Clearly in Long’s mind the gap between the most advanced animals—great apes—and the least advanced humans—sub-Saharan Africans—was not at all that great, placing him—as a potential believer in polygenesis rather than the conventional Christian belief in monogenesis—as both a progenitor of early forms of pseudoscientific racism and also beyond the pale for most thinkers wedded to ideas of a single human origin.¹⁰⁰

For all their differences, Long and Teale shared a conviction with nearly all contemporary observers that sexual relations between black women and white men were inevitable, regardless of slavery. When white writers condemned Jamaican men for not marrying and for attaching themselves to colored mistresses, they couched their reproaches in terms of white male weakness and black female aggressiveness. Edward Long’s argument was typical: when a white man, through weakness of flesh, succumbed to feminine charms, he became an “abject, passive slave” to his black mistress’s “insults, thefts, and infidelities.”¹⁰¹ White men, masterful everywhere else, were powerless when in the clutches of conniving mulatto and black women. Black women were scheming Jezebels, “hot constitution’d Ladies” possessed of a “temper hot and lascivious, making no scruple to prostitute themselves to Europeans for a very slender profit, so great is their inclination to white men.”¹⁰²

White colonists and travelers in Saint-Domingue described women of color in the same hypersexualized images and just as often portrayed themselves as under the erotic power of these women.¹⁰³ Girod-Chantrans observed that “these women, naturally more lustful than Europeans, and flattered by their power over white men, have, in order to keep that power, gathered all pleasures to which they are susceptible. Sensual pleasure is for them the subject of a special study.”¹⁰⁴ Hilliard d’Auberteuil, moreover, claimed that “mulatto women are much less docile then mulatto men, because they have acquired a dominion over white men based on debauchery.”¹⁰⁵

Just as in Saint-Domingue, Jamaican white men blamed their indiscretions on white women’s deficiencies. White men had a schizophrenic attitude to white women. They alternated between praising them for their fidelity, attractiveness, and devotion to maternal duties and lambasting them for their lack of education, poor manners, unpleasing appearance, and violent temper toward their slaves. John Taylor in 1688 denigrated white women as “vile strumpets and common prostitutes” who so “infect” Port Royal “that it is almost impossible to civilise it” and who “trampass about their streets, in this their warlike posture and thus arrayed they will sip a cup of punch rum with anyone.” William Pittis in 1720 proclaimed that the climate so affected people that “if a woman land there as chaste as a Vestal she becomes in forty eight hours a perfect Messalina and that it is as impossible for a woman to live at Jamaica and preserve her Virtue as for a Man to make a Voyage to Ireland and bring back his Honesty.” By the late eighteenth century even the agency that was afforded by being a whore or a petty criminal was denied to ordinary white women, who were regarded as constant and affectionate but also as inordinately lazy and small-minded. William Beckford of Hertford Pen wrote in his 1788 history of Jamaica that white women were a sex that “suffers much, submits too much and leads a life of toil and misery.”¹⁰⁶

The same progression of images also was something that occurred in Saint-Domingue. The practice of sending women from French poor houses to the Antilles did not succeed in balancing the gender ratio in seventeenth-century Saint-Domingue as it did in Martinique.¹⁰⁷ Throughout its colonial history, Saint-Domingue had far more white men than white women, despite royal efforts to provide additional female colonists. Recent historians have argued that these women were from respectable households, but the contemporary image of these filles du roi in the Caribbean was overwhelmingly negative: they were troublemakers, prostitutes, and poorly suited for marriage.¹⁰⁸ In the 1780s the Baron de Wimpffen relayed this common image of the first female migrants, noting that “they sent whores from the Salpêtrière [prison], sluts picked up in the gutter, cheeky tramps.”¹⁰⁹ Other women may have been put off coming to Saint-Domingue by the negative representations made about women who were already there. In 1713 the colony’s administrators informed Versailles, “We need at least 150 girls, but we ask you not to take any from the bad parts of Paris as usual; their bodies are as corrupted as their morals, they only infect the colony and are not at all good for reproduction.”¹¹⁰ The complaints about the morals and health of white female colonists continued in 1743 when Saint-Domingue’s governor complained that France was sending women “whose aptitude for reproduction is for the most part destroyed by too much use.” As he put it a few months later, “Real colonists are only made in bed,” referring to the need for an island-born population.¹¹¹ In the same vein, in 1750 Emilien Petit, who was himself a creole, advocated that the Crown send more single women to Saint-Domingue to attach male colonists to the colony permanently.¹¹²

After midcentury, however, French officials and visitors gave up on the idea of using marriage between white men and women to repopulate and stabilize the colony. In 1779, Desdorides described relations between men and women in Saint-Domingue as completely different from France. He commented that “men here pay all their attention to their financial interests. Their passion for wealth weakens their desire to be loved. Therefore between them and women there are none of those sweet sentimental emotions that bind two honest hearts…. Those wives who come to America … have little to do and are relegated to their plantations.”¹¹³ Baron de Wimpffen described white women as living in decadence and boredom and agreed with Girod-Chantrans that they were crueler to their slaves than were most men.¹¹⁴ Thus, the same assumptions and stereotypes that operated in Jamaica were also working in Saint-Domingue.

Moreau de Saint-Méry agreed with de Wimpffen: “The state of idleness in which creole women are raised, the heat they are accustomed to experiencing, the indulgence perpetually extended to them; the effects of a vivid imagination & an early development, all produces an extreme sensitivity in their nervous system. It is this very sensitivity that produces their indolence which pairs with their vivacity to create a temperament that is fundamentally a little melancholy.” He continued, “Who would not be disgusted to see a delicate woman who cries over the story of the slightest misfortune preside over a punishment she ordered! Nothing can equal the anger of a creole woman who punishes the slave that her spouse may have forced to soil the marriage bed.”¹¹⁵

This succession of stereotypes from both colonies illustrates that white men did not see white women clearly. They tended to describe women’s differences in terms of race rather than social class, a tendency that has been replicated by most modern historians. Edward Long and Moreau de Saint-Méry, among others, divided women in their societies among consuming white women, producing black women, and parasitical brown women. Long condemned white women for their “constant intercourse from their birth with Negroe domestics whose drawling, dissonant gibberish they insensibly adopt,” meaning that their “ideas are narrowed to … the business of the plantation, the tittle-tattle of the parish, the tricks, superstitions, diversions and profligate discourses of black servants.” Moreau followed a similar line but with more analytical reasoning and a more interesting conclusion. He argued that white women were removed from the processes of production almost completely by black women and that they had lost their sexual role within the planter household to brown mistresses. All that was left for them, he suggested, was a largely symbolic role as the keepers of racial purity, achieved through their reproductive function as the producers of white children.¹¹⁶ Yet white women were not merely present in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. They were active agents in urban life.¹¹⁷ There is no reason why we need to accept as true the gendered inaccuracies put forward by contemporary male observers in both colonies who saw women as dangerous strumpets in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and as redundant ornaments by the late eighteenth century.

The best example of a white woman as active agent in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica was Teresia Constantia Phillips.¹¹⁸ A famed beauty, as her portrait by Joseph Highmore in 1748 reveals, she cut a swathe through fashionable society in Britain as a participant in the demimonde of Augustan London, first as the mistress (shamefully abandoned, she argued) of the future fourth Earl of Chesterfield and then as the wife and lover of numerous other rich and fashionable men. A colossal spendthrift, a lover of theatre and social assemblies, she ended up cutting her losses in love and money and moving to Jamaica around the year 1751 in order to be with her wealthy Jamaican lover, the Clarendon planter Henry Needham. There, she continued her scandalous life as a courtesan, arbiter of social life in the capital, St. Jago de la Vega, and devoted self-fashioner. She was singular as a woman in Jamaica in having an official government post, as Mistress of the Revels, a largely invented position given to her by Needham’s friend, Governor Henry Moore. She received a small government stipend for this role and presided over Jamaica’s small but flourishing dramatic scene. In her official capacity, she oversaw and orchestrated all events involving the governor, such as the balls, assemblies, and entertainments held in the governor’s honor. More significantly, she gave official approval to all theatrical productions, earning herself 200 guineas for this task.¹¹⁹ It was a perfect position for her, as her life was as theatrical as a life could be in a mid-eighteenth-century British colony.

Figure 11. Teresia Constantia Phillips by John Faber Jr., after Joseph Highmore, mezzotint, 1748. © National Portrait Gallery.

Phillips’s theatrical and ceremonial responsibilities made her a figure to be reckoned with.¹²⁰ To an extent, she demonstrated the “cultural heteroglossia” of mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica, where multiple displaced, avaricious, and exiled people created a syncretic culture, although Phillips did not show any interest in non-British theater or revelry. But she demonstrated how Jamaica manifested a particular kind of Englishness, an aspect of metropolitan culture that disturbed contemporaries with its materialism, and acceptance of all kinds of transgressions—financial, ethical, and sexual.¹²¹ As Kathleen Wilson notes, Phillips “appreciated her cachet as an émigré who could perform the role of the poised and witty English lady with considerable aplomb.” She mixed with leading planters and denigrated creole women, whom she thought immodest, dull, and crass with tongues that expressed “the meanest satire.” She made a great deal of her Englishness and her patriotism, even writing an anonymous letter published in the Kingston Journal that condemned the overly exuberant celebrations of planters in Spanish Town following their defeat of Governor Knowles in 1756 when he attempted to transfer the capital to Kingston. The planters, in their enthusiasm, burned not just an effigy of Knowles but also an effigy of his royal vessel, including its flag. Phillips (ungallantly outed as the author by the printer when he was taken to task by an outraged House of Assembly) declared this action “a most atrocious mark of their ingratitude to his majesty, as well as a very impudent insult upon the gentlemen of the Navy.”¹²²

Thus, Phillips adopted the role of grand English lady, albeit one of dubious reputation, bringing English culture and English standards of behavior to less culturally advanced creoles. Her promotion of theatre was part of her educative mission in Jamaica: to transform the colony into a place where English values could flourish and where unlearned creoles could be exposed to English cosmopolitan manners. That seems to have been her intention as Mistress of the Revels. In particular, her oversight of elaborate gubernatorial “performances” was designed to enhance the authority of executive office by implanting in Jamaica the symbols and practices that linked politics with theatre. She was not averse to lecturing Jamaicans about their lack of patriotism and to pronounce against Scots and Irish merchants, whom she thought were in a perpetual power struggle to dispossess English landed gentlemen from their rightful place as rulers of the island.¹²³

In England, Phillips was a symbol of the dangerous and rebellious woman, as willing to sleep with Catholics as with Protestants and entirely removed from the maternal realm. In Jamaica, she was a symbol of a different kind, one usually associated with free women of color in the historical literature, rather than with white women. She was especially resourceful, even though reliant on female charm rather than inherited advantage to make her way in the world, declaring in her memoir that “My Beauty, while it lasted, amply supplied the Deficiencies of my Fortune.”¹²⁴ As Wilson comments, “her extravagant lifestyle, proclivity for vulgar display, recurrent overwhelming debts and lavish attention to her own natural resources made it clear that she had taken the laws of imperial mercantile capitalism to heart … [she was] an excessively consuming female” with a “taste for the sensual, the sensational and the luxurious.”¹²⁵ These were the types of terms in which writers like Long and Moreau deplored the lifestyles of free women of color. The towns of Jamaica, like towns and cities in France and Britain, offered opportunities, social and economic, for those women enterprising enough to challenge social conventions and willing to accept the risks that independence brought. That was as true for white women as it was a fact for free women of color. White women in Jamaica did not necessarily lead as cloistered lives as Long and other defenders of patriarchal order imagined.¹²⁶

Despite Phillips’s rackety private life and unusual public career, some aspects of her sui generis Jamaican experience illuminate the workings of gender in the colony. In this respect, the most salient fact about her was that she was childless. White women in Jamaica were not defined by maternity. Few women had children, and even fewer had surviving children. Most marriages were short and were interrupted by the sudden death of one partner. For many women, such childlessness and the experience of fragile marriages was undoubtedly a tragedy, especially if they needed to eke out an uncertain living in fickle urban economies. But some women, such as Teresia Phillips, developed personas that fit well with the frenetic hedonism and risk-taking character of Jamaican and Dominguan society.¹²⁷

Phillips was no simpering, uneducated, and passive white woman in thrall to African vices like those Edward Long denigrated. She was indeed a “consuming” woman, but her consumption—of goods, ideas, and new modes of behavior—was active rather than passive and marked her out as a principal agent in fashioning slave societies into new and disturbing places where traditional gender roles came under considerable stress and sometimes alteration. What Teresia Phillips resembled most was the popular characterization of the alluring free colored woman—the mulâtresse, usually depicted by travel writers and colonial authors as avaricious, alluring, sensuous, and highly disruptive.¹²⁸

If the reality of white women’s lives in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue was more varied than the stereotype put forward by commentators like Long and Moreau, so too was the stereotype of free colored women at variance with the lives they actually lived. As we have seen, for observers in both societies, the hypersexuality of women of color, free and enslaved, was one of the most enduring tropes of colonial life. This trope was especially well expressed in accounts of the urban environment, where the overwhelmingly male colonial population plus the thousands of European sailors and soldiers based in its cities created a lively sexual marketplace. Enslaved prostitutes earned money for their masters and mistresses—and male colonists sought free or enslaved women of color as housekeepers, a position that was widely considered to involve sexual services. In 1776 Hilliard d’Auberteuil estimated that of 23,100 free people living in Saint-Domingue’s cities, there were two thousand married white women and one thousand married free mulatto or black women. He also noted a slightly larger population of thirty-two hundred “prostitutes or women living as concubines” comprising twelve hundred whites and two thousand free mulattos or blacks.¹²⁹ These numbers may not be accurate, but they reveal the highly charged sexual atmosphere of Saint-Domingue’s towns.

Yet this sexualized image of free women of color is incorrect, for they occupied a variety of economic niches besides sex work. Surviving leases, receipts, and inventories reveal that free women managed slaves and business interests; they built networks of patronage and affection with whites that did not involve sex, as business clients, neighbors, landlords, tenants, employers, and employees. Because many free women of color never married, especially those in the cities, some were able to escape male control and direct their own business interests.¹³⁰ Being a housekeeper or concubine to a male colonial was often just one stage of a woman’s life. Many women used these positions to acquire real estate and slaves, which they then used in their own businesses. Although white male colonists created a narrative in which they used and discarded women of color as objects of pleasure, there is ample evidence that such men formed valuable partnerships and emotional relationships with concubines and mistresses, as well as with free colored neighbors, business partners, and friends.¹³¹

Saint-Domingue’s lively theater scene, the area of colonial life in which Phillips made her mark in Jamaica, illustrates how free women of color operated in spaces in which they were a sometimes conspicuous minority. Besides Freemasonry, theater was Saint-Domingue’s other distinctive urban institution. In Bordeaux and Paris in the 1780s, the ratio of theater seats to city residents was one to forty-six. In Saint-Domingue, Lauren Clay calculates, the comparable ratio was one to seventeen, including whites and free people of color. She also notes that colonials in the parterre paid five times what Frenchmen in the provinces would have paid; free colored theatergoers paid twice the price they would have paid in French provincial cities for equivalent seats.¹³² Cap Français and Port-au-Prince alone had more than twelve hundred theatrical and musical performances in the 1780s, according to surviving newspaper accounts.¹³³ Actors and touring groups from Europe arrived regularly. Like theaters in provincial French cities, these colonial playhouses received many of the most popular plays from Paris soon after their premiers. In 1765, for example, after the Seven Years’ War, Saint-Domingue’s governor arranged for the patriotic play The Siege of Calais to be performed in Saint-Domingue, just four months after it debuted at the Comédie Française.¹³⁴ Although there were performances in creole, and companies sometimes adapted European scenes to colonial settings, performances in Cap Français remained closely aligned with French metropolitan styles.¹³⁵

Like Freemasonry, theatrical performances provided an occasion for socializing in an urban society marked by individualism and a scramble for wealth. For Moreau de Saint-Méry, “one cannot miss a show at Cap Français, especially since [attending] has become the custom. There is little social life in this city and [at the theater] we are at least assembled if not united.”¹³⁶ Unsurprisingly, the board of directors of the Cap Français Comédie touted the business advantages this sociability created for the colony: “A harmony of minds and an agreeable ease of conducting business, the custom of seeing and talking to one another prevents and dissipates personality [clashes] and often gives rise to new projects and new business which favors the growth of the country and the advantage of its residents.”¹³⁷

The theater was such a central institution in the social lives of colonial cities that after 1770 it became a prominent site for attempts to segregate whites and free people of color, a phenomenon whose political context is described in Chapter 6. The Cap Français theater admitted free men and women of mixed race, who sat in the upper lodges. After 1775 free black women obtained a legal ruling allowing them to attend the theater as well. Mixed-race women refused to sit with them, however, so the petitioners were assigned their own separate section.¹³⁸ Most theater attendees, however, were white men. Moreau described as extraordinary a performance during the carnival season attended by as many as 130 women, this in a room with 1,500 seats. Moreover at Cap Français there were only 60–80 places out of 1,500 for people of color, compared with 90–120 out of 750 in Port-au-Prince and 7 out of 400 in Léogane.¹³⁹ Racial borders were thus drawn carefully in this later period.

The appearance of women in the theater audience, especially, was very sexualized, as was fitting for the town where the redoutes des filles de couleur were invented. These dances, where white men could enjoy the charms of seductive women of color, were later translated to New Orleans, becoming the famous “quadroon balls” of the nineteenth century.¹⁴⁰ Moreau emphasized how the public display of feminine beauty at the theater overcame even the color line that had become so important by the 1780s. Writing about both white and mixed-race women, he observed, “They go to the show to parade their charms and their suitors; one notes that nearly all women dress with the same elegance, which shows that in the colony the charming sex is divided into only two classes, those who are pretty and those who are not.”¹⁴¹ Indeed, the Comédie was just one of those public spaces in which the city’s role as a sexual marketplace was on full display: “Publicity, I will repeat, is one of their greatest pleasures and it is to this pleasure that we owe the custom that every night at bedtime, one sees the girls of color leave their homes, often lit by a lantern carried by a slave, to go to spend the night with the man they love the best or who pays them the most.”¹⁴² Yet Moreau condemned the sexuality of street life in Cap Français and praised the public decorum of women of color in the much smaller port city of Saint-Marc. He observed that “the small number of colored courtesans and the way they dress show that Saint-Marc has not arrived at that excess of civilization where there is a kind of pleasure in offending public decency.”¹⁴³

Because women of color were on display for white males in the audiences of colonial theaters, as well as on the streets, it is interesting that in the 1780s an actress of color emerged as one of Saint-Domingue’s best-known performers, mentioned some forty times in the colonial press during in a nine-year career. Minette, whose real name was Elizabeth Alexandrine Louise, was born in 1767. Although most free people of color in Saint-Domingue’s cities were poor, Minette’s grandmother was a propertied free woman of color, and her mother, described sometimes as a free quadroon, sometimes as a “mestive,” meaning her ancestry was mostly European, had a widely acknowledged concubinage relationship with Minette’s father, a white naval accountant in Port-au-Prince. The couple had two girls, both of whom had elite white godparents. In 1770 the colonial governor and intendant granted permission for Minette’s mother to accompany her father back to France, though it isn’t clear if the couple also took their daughters there.¹⁴⁴

Trained to sing and act by a white actress named Mme. Acquaire, Minette first appeared on stage in 1780 at the age of fourteen to sing arias in a Christmas performance in Port-au-Prince. Two months later, the director of the city’s theater hired her for 8,000 livres or £347 per year, a sizeable sum for a beginning performer in this colony where singers regularly earned between 3,000 and 12,000 livres annually. Although free colored and enslaved musicians and singers did perform in colonial theaters, Minette’s leading roles on the stage were still controversial. Moreau de Saint-Méry, despite his opinions about the dangers free colored courtesans posed to the colonial public, celebrated Minette’s “triumph” over colonial prejudices.¹⁴⁵ We know little about Minette’s private life. Like most free women of color she did not marry. In 1786 a French mapmaker in Port-au-Prince gave her two enslaved girls in his will, specifying that “she was the only person who helped me in this country where I had no family [and] where I would have certainly died given the nature of my illness.”¹⁴⁶ But there is no other suggestion that this was a concubinage relationship like that between her mother and father.

Like Constantia Phillips in Jamaica, Minette called on Saint-Domingue’s public to embrace its European identity. In a 1782 newspaper advertisement she decried “those ephemeral productions that bastardize and degrade the lyric stage, which are only local and which very often only address the everyday events of private society.”¹⁴⁷ This statement was not merely a reference to the widespread use of tropical sets, costumes, and creole dialog and lyrics.¹⁴⁸ Minette was also criticizing the racial stereotypes that increasingly defined even freeborn people of color like her as part of the enslaved population. For example, in 1786 the husband of her former acting teacher produced a pantomime entitled Arlequin mulâtresse sauvé par Macandal (Arlequin, Mulâtresse Saved by Macandal).¹⁴⁹ The text no longer exists, but Macandal was an escaped slave said to be the mastermind of a poisoning conspiracy, an episode we examine in Chapter 5. Minette’s sister Lise appears to have performed in such plays, for example, as in the 1786 performance of Les Amours de Mirebalais (The Loves of Mirebalais),¹⁵⁰ a colonial adaption of Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du village (The Village Soothsayer).¹⁵¹ Minette’s public defense of the French theatrical tradition against ephemeral colonial productions shows that she rejected being defined solely by her race or sexuality, even if she worked in an occupation and in a space that was highly sexualized. Minette seems to have wanted to highlight the theater, as Lauren Clay puts it, as “an imaginary … that represented … a world in which free people of color could be fully and equally French.”¹⁵²

The lives of Teresia Phillips and Minette show that we need to be skeptical about descriptions of women in these societies. Their admittedly extraordinary careers belie the sharp contrasts that Long and Moreau made between passive but consuming white women and passionate but corrupting free women of color. These were working women, who defined themselves by what they did as actresses and devotees of the theater, rather than by their maternal role or even by their relation to white men. The distance between what white women and free women of color actually did was not that great in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. Colonial ideologies stressed the distance between the two, especially after the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, as efforts to make racial categories more distinct took hold in both colonies. What the lives of both women outlined in this chapter show is that, for freeborn people, urban society was a place of opportunity and, to some extent, liberation. While the mix of people and cultures, the lack of conventional religious institutions, and the prevailing materialism bewildered commentators, this “chaos of men” or “excess of civilization” provided a way for women like Phillips and Minette to construct identities that defied stereotypes.

By the start of the Seven Years’ War, both Saint-Domingue and Jamaica had moved past the frontier stage of their development. They had established themselves as conspicuously successful plantation societies. They were culturally vibrant, dynamic, and economically valuable imperial possessions. Commentators new to West Indian mores and West Indian slavery found them disturbing places, where much of quotidian existence seemed immoral or at least dysfunctional. The harshness of slavery contrasted strongly with white peoples’ devotion to pleasures of the flesh; the colonies had become vital imperial possessions, but colonists were only partially attached to European norms. White elites rejected religion, paid little attention to social rank, and embraced money as the measure of all things.

In the next forty years, these characteristics became more firmly entrenched as Jamaica and Saint-Domingue entered into the period of their greatest prosperity. It was also a period in which Jamaica and Saint-Domingue became important within the geopolitics of the French and British Atlantic empires. That geopolitical importance became clear during the Seven Years’ War, despite the fact that it was largely fought outside the Greater Antilles. It is to this conflict we now turn.