A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution. Jeremy D. Popkin
of the Christian practices with which some of them had come into contact. Out of this fusion of elements there emerged in the course of the eighteenth century a distinctive religion, vodou, in which worshipers went into trances in which they were seized by the spirits of various African spirits or lwa, whom the blacks often identified with particular Catholic saints. Vodou ceremonies helped unify an enslaved population drawn from many different African ethnic groups. Individual enslaved blacks were sometimes able to build up a small pécule of personal savings by selling part of the crops they raised in their private food plots or by persuading their masters to let them hire themselves out; in certain cases, individuals were able to purchase their own freedom with these earnings.
The prerevolutionary life of the future Toussaint Louverture, then known as Toussaint Bréda because he lived on the Bréda plantation, is an example of the way in which one exceptional individual born into slavery in Saint-Domingue was able to gain free status during the colonial era. Claims that Louverture was descended from a West African king are probably unfounded, but stories passed down in his family that his intelligence, his determination, and his ability to work with animals distinguished him even as a youth are more plausible. He managed to learn to speak and read French; analysis of his largely phonetic spelling suggests that he acquired the accent of the colonists from southwestern France who were numerous in the colony. He became a devout Catholic and remained loyal to that religion throughout his life, although, like many blacks, he may also have practiced vodou. Even before he gained his own freedom, he formed a first marriage with a free woman of color, an unusual opportunity for an enslaved man. He became the coachman for the manager of the Bréda plantation on which he lived, and it was probably through this connection that he obtained his legal freedom in the 1770s. After his emancipation, he briefly owned a small plantation with several enslaved laborers, but this venture does not seem to have succeeded and he returned to work on the Bréda population, where his second wife Suzanne and several other relatives were among the enslaved population. Unlike enslaved blacks, Louverture was able to move around freely, which gave him the opportunity to build up a network of friends and contacts, many of whom would be useful to him when he emerged as a leader of the Haitian Revolution.5
Very few enslaved blacks were able to escape the limits imposed on them in colonial Saint-Domingue, but whenever they could, they expressed their opposition to their treatment through various forms of individual and collective resistance. What masters saw as the blacks’ inherent laziness was undoubtedly a deliberate response to a system in which they were denied any benefits from their labor. Rather than bear children who would grow up under slavery, women used plants and herbs to induce abortions; like most enslaved populations in the Americas, the captive workforce in Saint-Domingue required constant importations from Africa to maintain its numbers. Marronnage or escape from the plantations was another common form of resistance. In some cases, it was a way for blacks to protest against a particularly cruel overseer or commandeur, and runaways might negotiate their return to the plantation in exchange for a promise of better treatment. Some groups of marrons succeeded in fleeing into the mountains and established independent bands; one group in a remote area along the border with Spanish Santo Domingo maintained itself for nearly a century, although its numbers were relatively small. Runaways could also take refuge in the colony’s cities, where they might be able to pass themselves off as freedmen and make a living as day laborers.
Although they normally claimed that they could easily manage their enslaved workforces, masters lived in fear that the blacks might turn against them. Plantation-owners blamed any unexplained illnesses or deaths among their captives or their livestock on poisoning, which the colony’s whites claimed was the blacks’ main weapon. In 1757–8, the entire colony was swept by fear of a conspiracy, supposedly organized by an enslaved black man named Makandal, to poison all the whites and take over the island. The deaths attributed to Makandal were all among enslaved blacks, and it is not clear that they were due to poison rather than to disease, but he was tortured and burned alive in Cap Français in 1758. According to legend, he turned himself into a fly and escaped from his executioners. Even today, Makandal’s name is remembered in Haiti as a symbol of resistance to oppression. Despite the whites’ fears, overt collective resistance to the slavery system was rare: unlike the neighboring British island of Jamaica or the Dutch mainland colony of Surinam, for example, Saint-Domingue experienced no major slave revolts in the decades prior to 1791. This was certainly not because the blacks found their situation acceptable, but until 1791 they did not see any realistic prospect of changing it through collective violence.
The White Colonial Order
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