The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard
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