The Common Wind. Julius S. Scott
after 1791, the urban concentration of this population expanded significantly. Alexander von Humboldt, visiting Cuba in the early years of Haitian independence, commented at great length upon the recent increase in the size of the free Negro population in urban Cuba. Because “Spanish legislation … favors in an extraordinary degree” their aspirations for freedom, he remarked, “many blacks (negros) acquire their freedom in the towns.” Humboldt also cited an 1811 population study conducted by the ayuntamiento and consulado of Havana which found the black population, both free and enslaved, more thoroughly urbanized than ever. In the Havana district, where the number of free Negroes equaled the number of slaves, blacks and browns in the countryside outnumbered those in the towns by a slim ratio of three to two. On the east coast, fully half of all blacks and browns lived in the towns, and free people of color dominated some of the more sizable settlements. “The partido (district) of Bayamo,” recorded Humboldt, “is notable for the large number of free colored (forty-four percent), which increases yearly, as also in Holguin and Baracoa.” Indeed, he concluded, with a note of warning to Caribbean slavocracies, “since Haiti became emancipated, there are already in the Antilles more free negroes and mulattoes than slaves.”44
Even before the watchwords of the French Revolution reached their ears, urban free coloreds in Spanish territories tested the limits of their masterless status and pressed for certain types of equality. This spirit surfaced most visibly within the ranks of the military. Since incorporation of free men of color into separate but ostensibly equal militia battalions began in the 1760s, the assertive behavior of these armed troops had drawn steady complaint from civil authorities. When officers of pardo and moreno militia units in Caracas demanded the same funeral observances and ceremonial garb as white officers early in 1789, Spanish officials worried that such attacks against the structure of inequality in the military would lead inevitably toward more general attacks on the structure of colonial society. This latest episode, feared the captain-general, represented the dangerous thin edge of an egalitarian wedge—or perhaps the sharp blade of a two-edged sword. “As much as I am aware of the grave difficulties which every day of this so-called equality will bring,” he wrote in April, “I also fear other evil consequences if their pretensions are denied. In the first case there is the risk of more haughtiness and audacity on the part of the officers; in the second … disloyalty, the spirit of vengeance, and sedition.”45 Crown policy took a hard line against all evidence of such restiveness. In Cuba, just days before the first plantations were burned in neighboring Saint-Domingue, Luis de las Casas, governor and captain-general, received instructions from the Crown to silence the “old complaints” against white officers levelled by officers of the pardo and moreno units at Havana.46
In the British and French colonies, free people of color were considerably fewer in number than in Cuba and the other Spanish possessions, a fact which ironically underscored even more strongly their visibility as a masterless urban presence. Though rarely counted as carefully in population censuses, free blacks and browns seemed to cause much greater day-to-day concern among government officials and white residents in both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue than in the Spanish colonies. Jamaica’s free people of color migrated to the area around Kingston. Almost sixty percent of the 3,408 “black and coloured” persons taking out certificates of freedom under a 1761 legislative act calling for the registration of all free persons in the island resided in Kingston and Spanish Town, the nearby capital city. In 1788, more than one-third of all the island’s free colored people lived in Kingston alone, compared to twenty-two percent of all whites and seven percent of all slaves.47
By 1788, white Jamaicans were sufficiently troubled about both the growth of this population and its mobility to bring such persons under more careful scrutiny. Concerned that the line between slavery and freedom should remain clearly demarcated to foil the efforts of slaves sliding imperceptibly into the free colored caste, the Assembly called upon “justices and vestry” from all parishes to
cause diligent inquiry to be made within their respective parishes, as to the number of negroes, mulattoes, or Indians of free condition, and cause them to attend at their next meeting, and give an account in what manner they obtained their freedom, that their names and manner of obtaining their freedom may be registered in the vestry books of such parishes.48
But even this effort to weed out the slaves from the ranks of the masterless did little to check the tremendous growth of the free nonwhite population during the ensuing decade. As in Cuba, these numbers swelled during the period of the Haitian Revolution, as large numbers of free coloreds, many of them immigrants from Saint-Domingue, crowded into Kingston. When parish officials in Kingston petitioned for incorporation in 1801, they referred pointedly to the fact that “the population has of late greatly increased, and particularly as to foreigners and free persons of color,” and called for more stringent law enforcement and “an efficient and strict police” to minimize the dangers posed by these masterless immigrants.49
In Saint-Domingue, free blacks and browns of the cities actively identified with the ideas of the French Revolution in an effort to improve their status, and in doing so unwittingly opened the door for the slave revolt of 1791. The presence of mulattoes and free blacks in the cities was causing increased concern and comment as early as the 1770s. In addition to the brown artisans who were familiar fixtures, wrote one observer in 1775, “there are now in the Cities Mulattoes and Negroes, calling themselves free, who have no known means of subsistence.” Questions concerning the loyalty of this class complicated the earliest efforts to regiment free colored men into police units to keep them off the streets. Opponents of such a measure reasoned that since “public tranquillity is assured, why give arms to the only men who might disrupt it?”50 Such confidence in uninterrupted “public tranquillity” eroded quickly in the years leading up to the arrival of the French Revolution. By the 1780s, white observers saw free nonwhites in cities as sources of sedition to be carefully watched and controlled, and government functionaries took extra care to count the numbers of urban affranchis in their occasional censuses. For example, official figures noted only 195 free colored residents in 1775 in Cap Français, but in 1780, in what was apparently a more careful count, almost 1,400 people appeared in this category, ample testimony both to an expanding presence and to a mounting concern.51 By the time the drama of the early French Revolution gripped Saint-Domingue’s coastal cities, planters all over the island were expressing fears that agitation in the towns might spread to plantation areas through the agency of the blacks and mulattoes in nearby cities. “The idle negroes of the cities are the most dangerous,” wrote a typical sugar planter from the western parish of Arcahaye in 1790. Moves were already under way “to expel from the towns all the vagrants, people who had nothing to lose,” and who were at the center of all the agitation.52
Such concerns were not misplaced. Throughout the eighteenth century, planters found the links between city and country both vexing and essential. Acutely aware that cities with their free populations loomed as ever-present enticements to desertion for dissident slaves, they also recognized that the survival of their plantations depended upon the access to markets and the sea which port cities provided. Therefore, they actively worked to assure the free flow of goods between the interior and the coast, even though its potential costs to their social regime were obvious.
The growth of internal marketing systems in Caribbean societies, an eighteenth-century phenomenon closely tied to the growth of cities, presented further opportunities for individual mobility even as it brought the worlds of town and country closer together. In both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, masterless people of all descriptions controlled in large measure the movement of foodstuffs and cheap consumer goods between cities and outlying areas. In the British colony, the practice of slaves raising their own fruits and vegetables on garden plots set aside for that purpose was well established throughout the island by mid-century. As the free population of the cities expanded, slaves found ready markets for their produce, which they exchanged for money or other items.53
From its inception, the Jamaican marketing system involved slave women and their free black and brown counterparts as the key agents. The Jamaican “higgler,” a social type prominent in the society to the present day, became the broker in the lively commerce between country and city. Attracted by the profits to be