The Common Wind. Julius S. Scott
fled plantations to pursue higgling on a full-time basis. Phebe, a seamstress who left her Kingston plantation in 1787, was still at large and “passing” for free five years later. She was “said to be living either at Old-Harbour, Old-Harbour market, or in their vicinity, and to be a higgler.”54 Planters and town merchants tried hard to control these “wandering higglers,” who “fore stal so many of the necessaries of life that are sold in our markets,” and who brought news from the city to slaves on the plantations.55 For both economic and security reasons, therefore, higglers and other itinerant traders and peddlers found their chosen professions severely circumscribed by law, especially in times of tension like the early revolutionary era in the Caribbean. “No character is so dangerous in this Country as that of a Pedlar,” reported a group of north coast planters in 1792, “and perhaps there was never a rebellion among the Slaves in the West India Islands which was not either entirely, or in part carried on through this Class of People.”56
In Saint-Domingue, internal marketing played the same role in linking the plantations with the cities. The opportunities within the domestic economy of the French colony attracted all types of people: poor urban whites out of work, free blacks and mulattoes, and privileged slaves, all dealing in produce and small European manufactures. In the cities themselves, free black and brown women took the central roles; many of them owned commercial “houses” and slaves of their own. And like the higglers of Jamaica, country women rose early to travel from plantation to plantation and buy produce from slaves to sell in city markets. Planter concern with the mobility of all these wandering buyers and sellers involved not only their pesky ability to control a large share of internal markets, but extended to their larger social role as well. The legendary maroon leader called Mackandal, who led a campaign to poison all the whites of the northern province in the 1760s, made brilliant use of a network of itinerant traders to predict and control events at long distances, thereby enhancing his status as a powerful religious mystic among his slave followers.57 These intermediaries would play a pivotal role in bringing from the cities to the plantations news of the excitement brewing after 1789.58
A wide variety of masterless types joined the slaves, runaways, and free blacks in Caribbean towns. Colonial governments experienced as much difficulty controlling many of the European immigrants as they did managing slaves. From early in the eighteenth century, for example, white immigrants in search of fortune or imported for the purpose of moderating the widening black/white population imbalance proved troublesome to the authorities in the British and French Caribbean. A 1717 experiment of the British Parliament that shipped convict laborers to the colonies as indentured servants soon backfired. Just months after the arrival of the first wave of bonded immigrants, Jamaica’s governor reported that
so farr from altering their Evil Courses and way of living and becoming an Advantage to Us, … the greatest part of them are gone and have Induced others to go with them a Pyrating and have Inveigled and Encouraged Severall Negroes to desert from their Masters … The few that remains proves a wicked Lazy and Indolent people, so that I could heartily wish this Country might be troubled with no more of them.
Just as displeasing to government officials were the results of the so-called Deficiency Laws, annual acts dating from 1718 which stipulated that plantation owners maintain fixed ratios of whites to blacks and livestock or pay fines. Governor Robert Hunter complained in 1731 that the whites introduced under this plan, many of them Irish Catholics, were liabilities to the community, “a lazy useless sort of people” whose loyalties were always suspect.59 By the 1780s, however, the planter class had swallowed at least some of its distaste for whites of lower station, though the price for this precarious white solidarity seemed a bit high for some. Planter-historian Bryan Edwards described the white commoner who “approaches his employer with an extended hand, and a freedom, which, in the countries of Europe, is seldom displayed by men in the lower orders of life towards their superiors;” Edwards found these pretensions to equality almost as disturbing as he later would find those of the free coloreds.60
French officials in Saint-Domingue echoed the same sentiments in the 1770s and 1780s, when the fabled “prosperity” of the colony attracted large numbers of European immigrants seeking to carve out a share of the profits for themselves. According to one observer, the new arrivals consisted largely of sturdy artisans, including “carpenters, joiners, masons, coopers, locksmiths, wheelwrights, saddlers, coach-builders, watchmakers, goldsmiths, jewelers, and barbers,” seeking to escape tough economic conditions at home.61 But a Cap Français police report of 1780 speaks anxiously of the “people arriving daily from Europe, who, for the most part, have crossed the ocean to flee their families and their country, and have come to America in order to escape the reprisals of relatives and of the law.”62 Distinctly multinational in character, the wave of immigration of these ambitious and often desperate people, mostly young men, brought to Saint-Domingue’s cities a new and restless population of “petits blancs” of boundless mobility and suspect loyalties. When British forces invaded Saint-Domingue in 1793, remembered a colonel involved in that effort, they encountered considerable resistance from urban whites whom he could only describe as “adventurers from every part of Europe” who had come to the Caribbean “in quest of fortune.”63
Like the free Negroes, mulattoes, and runaway slaves with whom they came into contact upon their arrival, unruly European immigrants soon found themselves unwelcome guests in a society where the power of masters depended to such a degree on the maintenance of social order. Hilliard d’Auberteuil reflected the prevailing sentiment of Saint-Domingue’s establishment when he referred contemptuously to this vicious “mob of vagabonds and adventurers hurling themselves upon these shores … without trade or property … No citizen or inhabitant dares to trust them.”64 They shared equally with the free people of color in the blame for a rise in urban crime, and authorities at the Cap accused them of bringing with them all the vices of the European urban proletariat, among them “robberies, brawls, gambling, libertinism, mutinies, even sedition.”65 The governor of Martinique, another French Caribbean colony, even breathed a sigh of relief when large numbers of restless urban whites departed his island for Saint-Domingue, “where they may give themselves up to hunting and disorder, and where licentious liberty is complete.”66 A lieutenant in the French navy who saw service in the Caribbean in 1790 and 1791, presciently predicted that the urban petits blancs, this “refuse of all nations,” would become “one of the best elements of propaganda for revolutionary agitation.”67
The lower orders of whites in the cities consisted of more than just poor adventurers. A substantial number of them were deserters from the military, masterless men by choice whom colonial authorities mentioned in the same breath with runaway slaves. All over the Caribbean, commanders of colonial regiments complained both about the quality of the men sent out from home and of the willingness of their charges to shirk their prescribed duties in favor of the chance for independence. The British governor of St. Vincent expressed this frustration in 1777, calling the latest crop of recruits “the very scum of the Earth. The Streets of London must have been swept of their refuse, the Gaols emptied … I should say the very Gibbets had been robbed to furnish such Recruits, literally most of them fit only … to fill a pit with.”68 The unenviable reputation of European servicemen posted to the West Indies as “undisciplined men” of “irregular habits” stalks them in the recent literature as relentlessly as it did in the eighteenth century.69
Rates of desertion climbed when war and rumors of war drove soldiers away from the barracks and sailors off the ships, but, like all the other forms of popular resistance present in the Caribbean, desertion was a time-honored tradition in both war and peace by the close of the eighteenth century. Invitations to desert were not lacking. Discipline in colonial regiments was rigid and uncompromising; frequent epidemics ravaged the ranks of newly arrived troops, confined as they often were in close and unsanitary quarters; and many opportunities to participate in local cultures beckoned. Deserters from Spanish regiments enjoyed the unique option of taking refuge in churches, where law and custom protected them from apprehension. But others of all nationalities eagerly shipped themselves aboard small merchant or contrabanding vessels, lost themselves in cities, or wandered from place to place as vagrants.
In