A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution. Jeremy D. Popkin
on the commandeurs: even though the commandeurs were enslaved themselves, plantation-owners and managers treated them with respect to maintain their authority over the rest of the workforce. While most enslaved workers on the plantations worked in the fields or processed sugar and coffee, some were used as domestic servants for the masters and their families. The one skilled job usually reserved for women was the direction of the infirmary; supervising the care of the sick and ferreting out malingerers who were trying to escape work was an important task in the overall management of a plantation.
Caribbean sugar plantations were notorious for the demands they placed on their captive work force and the cruelty with which they were treated (see Figure 1.1). A French observer in the 1780s described the scene he witnessed in Saint-Domingue’s sugar fields: “The sun blazed down on [the enslaved blacks’] heads; sweat poured from all parts of their bodies. Their limbs, heavy from the heat, tired by the weight of their hoes and the resistance of heavy soil, which was hardened to the point where it broke the tools, nonetheless struggled to overcome all obstacles. They worked in glum silence; all their faces showed their misery.”2 Sugar cane had to be processed as soon as it was cut, before the precious juice began to turn to starch and lose its sweetness. During the long harvesting season, from January to July every year, cane was cut in the fields and immediately fed through the heavy rollers of the crushing machine. The extracted juice then had to be boiled for hours in large cauldrons, while enslaved laborers stirred the syrup in the sweltering heat; it was then poured into molds so that the sugar could crystallize. The same workers who had toiled in the fields during the day were forced to work making sugar long into the night, and accidents caused by exhaustion were frequent; women who had to feed the cane stalks into crushing machines often lost arms that got caught in the machinery. Work on coffee plantations was not driven by the same need for haste as that involved in sugar production, but the endless routine of planting and caring for the trees, harvesting the beans, spreading them out to dry in the sun, and processing them kept enslaved workers equally busy. In addition to working for their masters, black captives were responsible for producing most of their own food: masters usually gave them small private plots to raise yams, beans, and other vegetables for themselves. In theory, they were supposed to be guaranteed one day a week to cultivate these gardens, but masters never hesitated to commandeer them for other tasks; the enslaved blacks had to make do with whatever free time they could find to tend their crops.
Figure 1.1 Plantations and enslaved labor. An image commissioned by a French plantation-owner around 1780 shows the “purgerie,” where enslaved blacks worked to refine sugarcane juice into sugar for export. In the foreground, a black woman on the right carries cane stalks to be processed, while on the left, a man with a raised whip chases another woman. Even at the height of the Enlightenment period, European whites were not embarrassed by the cruelty and the exploitative nature of the slavery system.
Source: © RMN-Blérancourt, Musée franco-américain du château de Blérancourt.
Living conditions for enslaved blacks on the plantations were harsh. Although Europeans considered blacks uniquely suited to work in the hot Caribbean climate because it resembled the weather in Africa, newly arrived captives fell victim to unfamiliar diseases in their new environment or succumbed to depression resulting from the traumatic ordeal they had been through; as many as a third of them died in their first year in the colonies. The average life expectancy of a enslaved black after arriving in Saint-Domingue was no more than seven to ten years. Most of them suffered from chronic malnutrition: the system of private plots rarely sufficed to provide enough food, and above all they were deprived of meat, a basic element of their diet in Africa. Slaveowners were theoretically obliged to supply their captives with adequate clothing, but few of them paid attention to this rule, and blacks often had only rags to wear or were forced to go around half-naked. Left to themselves, they tried to build huts similar to those familiar to them from Africa, but masters often preferred to force them to live in larger buildings where they could be supervised more easily. Masters discouraged marriages among their captives, for fear that having their own families would give them a sense of independence. Newly arrived blacks, called bossales, were sometimes put under the supervision of veterans who spoke their native language, but they still had to learn Kreyol, a combination of elements of French and various African languages that served as the general medium of communication in the colony. At the time of the revolution, African-born bossales made up at least half of the Saint-Domingue population. Many of the newly arrived captives at the time of the revolution had military experience, having been taken prisoner in wars in the Congo region of Africa; they would make an important contribution to the uprising that began in 1791.3 Masters considered enslaved blacks born in the colony, known as creoles, easier to manage than the bossales; the creoles s grew up speaking the local language and had never known any life outside of the slave system.
Hanging over the enslaved workers at all times was the threat of brutal physical punishment if they angered their masters. Slaveowners and their hired managers routinely whipped them to force them to work and to punish them for any sign of insubordination. To make it easier to identify them if they tried to run away, enslaved blacks were branded with their owners’ initials or other marks. Those who were caught after escaping were often forced to wear chains or iron collars, and might be shackled to a post at night. Masters were also legally permitted to cut off disobedient blacks’ ears or to cut their hamstrings as punishment. Slaveowners often built private prisons or cachots, where enslaved blacks were locked up in the dark for various offenses. In theory, masters were not supposed to execute their captives, but in practice the authorities rarely intervened to protect them. In 1788, charges were brought against a Saint-Domingue master named Lejeune, who had tortured two enslaved women to death because he suspected them of poisoning other blacks on his plantation. Although Lejeune was initially convicted, other slaveowners protested so strongly against the verdict that it was overturned.
In theory, the treatment of slaves was regulated by the Code Noir or “Black Code” issued in 1685 by the French king Louis XIV. The Code Noir provided a legal basis for slavery in the French colonies, even though the institution was officially barred from the metropole where French judges had laid down the principle that “there are no slaves in France” in 1571. Although the Code Noir was meant to uphold the authority of slaveowners over their human property, it did include some provisions meant to prevent the worst abuses of slavery. Masters were made responsible for providing their captives with adequate rations, they were supposed to furnish them with two new sets of clothing every year, and they were encouraged to provide for their instruction in the Christian religion. In extreme circumstances, the code permitted enslaved blacks to appeal to the royal authorities for protection from their masters. In practice, however, both colonial plantation-owners and French administrators ignored these clauses of the code: enslaved workers were left to furnish most of their own food, clothing was distributed erratically, and little effort was made to Christianize the blacks, for fear that this would require recognizing that they had at least some minimal rights. Few among the enslaved population even knew that they were supposed to be able to protest about extreme mistreatment, and colonial officials rarely paid any attention to their complaints. Nevertheless, blacks who did become aware of the protections they were supposed to enjoy under the Code Noir began to think of themselves as having at least a minimum of rights. In this way, historian Malick Ghachem has suggested, the legal code that defined slavery served, paradoxically, to spread ideas that could ultimately undermine it.4
The Culture of the Black Population
Forced to live under the harsh discipline of their masters, the enslaved blacks in Saint-Domingue nevertheless managed to develop some communal life and to find ways to oppose the worst forms of oppression. Although captives from different plantations were not supposed to mix, masters, knowing that a few concessions made them less likely to revolt against their situation, looked the other way when they gathered for meetings and dances on their weekly days off. When black captives came together they would often hold religious ceremonies