The Common Wind. Julius S. Scott
described the adjacent settlements of Falmouth and Martha Brae in 1794 as comprising between them “from 700 to 800 White Inhabitants, besides the People of Colour, who are pretty numerous,” but so rapidly had the plantations of their hinterland expanded that officials predicted “in due course there will be more Sugar & Rum shipped there, than at any other Port.” Martha Brae’s application for free port status therefore received very serious consideration despite the town’s diminutive size.30 But when officials in Kingston and Port Royal spoke about the north coast of the island, they stressed the region’s vulnerability as much as its commercial progress. Defenseless against “the frequent Depredations made by the Spanish Boats from Cuba,” residents of the northern ports also lived under the long shadow of “cockpit country” and the maroon towns. For all these reasons, reported Governor Williamson in 1792, “the Spirit of discontent has usually first shewn itself” among the slaves of the north coast.31
Just fourteen leagues, or about forty-two miles, southeast of Spanish Cuba lay Môle Saint-Nicolas on the coast of Saint-Domingue, the strategic key to the vital Windward Passage, and only one among a dozen equally vibrant coastal towns of varying sizes dotting the jagged coast of the rich French colony.32 Sandwiched in a strip of land between the mountains and the coast, the colony of Saint-Domingue showed an even stronger orientation toward its cities and the sea than either Cuba or Jamaica. Like Santiago de Cuba, Montego Bay, and their smaller satellites, the cities of Saint-Domingue’s western and southern provinces owed their development and outlook as much to intra-Caribbean factors as to metropolitan intervention. Isolation from Cap Français because of the rugged mountains of the interior often left the cities of western and southern Saint-Domingue to their own devices; residents of Gonaïves, Saint-Marc, and Port-au-Prince in the west, and Jérémie, Cayes, and Jacmel in the south might easily have felt closer, both geographically and otherwise, to Cuba, Jamaica, and the northern coast of the South American mainland than to the Cap or to France. Largely ignored by vessels from France and accustomed to looking to foreign colonies for supplies in lean times, merchants and planters in these cities would raise the loudest cries for commercial and political independence in the early years of the French Revolution.
Even before revolutions in North America, France, Saint-Domingue, and Spanish America drew these cities into struggles for independent home rule, Caribbean port cities were natural magnets for all types of people seeking personal independence. Colonial authorities were ever mindful of the many invitations to masterlessness which the cities held out but also of the difficulties attached to regulating life in the towns. By comparison, life in the country, even with the many problems associated with controlling slave labor, was idyllic, ordered, and properly regimented. Whereas country life revolved around the predictable and steady regimen of the plantation, cities turned these work values on their heads in ways most inimical to the slave system. An 1801 visit to busy Kingston moved one British traveler to remark that “the desire of acquiring wealth without adequate exertion is a most vituperative and pernicious passion. Hence in all depots of trade we find a greater proportion than elsewhere of gamblers, swindlers, thieves, beggars, mountabanks and 33 pedlars.”33 White observers already familiar with this diverse panorama worried that the masterless tenor of life in the towns posed ever-present dangers of sedition. The governor’s description of the same city a year earlier accurately reflected the agonies and fears of planters all over Afro-America. “Every kind of Vice that can be found in Commercial Towns,” wrote Lord Balcarres in 1800,
is pre-eminent in Kingston: here the imagination of Pandora’s Box is fully exemplified. Turbulent people of all Nations engaged in illicit Trade; a most abandoned class of Negroes, up to every scene of mischief, and a general levelling spirit throughout, is the character of the lower orders in Kingston … Should there be at any time an Insurrection among the Slaves
he projected, “here is not only a place of refuge in the first instance, but in a moment the Town might be laid in ashes.”34
As Balcarres knew very well, cities had furnished places of refuge for plantation dissidents for generations. By mid-century, the larger towns attracted many runaway slaves from the surrounding countryside. In 1744, police authorities in Kingston attacked this problem by restricting the huts in outlying areas of the city, inhabited by free Negroes and the runaways they protected, to only one door, and compounds of more than four huts to one common entrance.35 The earliest runaway notices for Saint-Domingue, printed in the newly founded Gazette de Saint Domingue in 1764, show that runaway slaves in the northern parishes of the French colony sensed a greater prospect of making a successful escape in Cap Français and its environs than either in the mountains or near the beckoning border of the neighboring Spanish colony.36
As the Caribbean’s port towns grew in size, their attraction for runaway slaves increased apace. In the 1790s reports from the Spanish colonies confirm the active presence of bands of runaways in and around the coastal cities. In Caracas, such groups inhabited the vast plains, or llanos, which fanned out from the capital city. A conservative estimate placed the number of runaway slaves living and operating in the Caracas vicinity at around three hundred in 1791, and the number climbed rapidly over the next decade. The make-up of these groups probably included both fugitives from plantations and cattle farms and others who worked in the city itself.37 Similar contingents centered around the Havana district in Cuba, where runaways were as active as they were in the mountains of the Santiago de Cuba region at the other end of the island. In June of 1791, problems in the “rounding up of fugitive blacks, so necessary to their owners, in the capturing of deserters, who fill up the countryside, and finally, in containing the disorders carried out all over by the malefactors sheltered in the mountains” severely stretched the capacities of municipal officials in Havana to deal with them.38 Less than a year later, the alcalde of Jaruco, a sparsely populated satellite of Havana on Cuba’s east coast, requested government aid in suppressing the recurrent “robberies and other scandals” perpetrated by fugitive slaves in the area.39 By 1798, new regulations drawn up for controlling runaways from Cuba’s rapidly expanding slave economy recognized both the problem of slaves running to cities as well as that of keeping the urban slaves themselves from absconding, as “most of the runaway slaves belong to residents of the city of Havana.”40
Runaway slaves were also active in and around the cities of the French and British colonies in the 1790s. Between October 1790 and August 1791, French authorities apprehended 500 runaways in the vicinity of Cap Français alone. Figures recording the numbers of recaptured slaves and the place of their arrest seem to indicate that fugitives who found their way to the city proper eluded the authorities more successfully than those who roamed outlying districts.41 In Jamaica, runaways crowded into busy Port Royal in the 1790s. Citing “the number of runaway negroes with which [the town] is infested,” white inhabitants petitioned the Assembly in 1801 for funds to erect “a place of confinement” to control this population and to discourage others from coming.42
In addition to providing some unique opportunities for runaway slaves, Caribbean cities also held special attraction for free blacks and browns, the most marginal of the various groups comprising the masterless Caribbean. Whether plying trades, seeking work, or living by their wits, free nonwhites tended to settle in the towns, and the number of urban free people of color increased steadily during the period of the French Revolution. Always feared for their abilities to move about and disrupt the smooth functioning of the plantation economy, urban communities of free coloreds and free blacks imbibed the egalitarian spirit of the times and rapidly assumed a political voice which emerged and matured during the 1790s.
Free people of color were most numerous in the Spanish Caribbean, where they occupied a prominent demographic niche in urban areas. Free coloreds comprised twenty-two percent of the population of Havana and its suburbs in 1791. The populations of the towns along the Caribbean-oriented east coast contained even higher percentages of free black and brown residents. In Santiago de Cuba, figures from 1791 listed 6,698, or thirty-four percent, of the city’s 19,703 residents as either free “Negroes” or free “mulattoes.” A census taken the following year showed a similar pattern for Bayamo, where half the black population was free, and free nonwhites accounted for more than thirty-seven