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Saint-Domingue
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Saint-Domingue |
Saint-Domingue was a French colony from 1659 to 1804, when it became the independent nation of Haiti.
Saint-Domingue is the French version of the Spanish name Santo Domingo. Spain controlled the entire island of Hispaniola (also called Santo Domingo or San Domingo) from the 1490s until the 17th century, when French pirates began to establish bases on the western portions of the island. In the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Spain formally recognised French control of the western third of the island.
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French buccaneers established a settlement on the island of Tortuga in 1625. They survived by pirating Spanish ships, eating wild cattle and hogs, and selling hides to traders of all nations. Although the Spanish destroyed the buccaneers' settlements several times, on each occasion they returned due to abundance of natural resources viz. hardwood trees, wild hogs and cattle, and fresh water. The first official settlement on Tortuga was established in 1659 under the commission of King Louis XIV.
In 1664, the newly established French West India Company took control over the colony, which it named Saint-Domingue, and France formally claimed control of the western portion of the island of Hispaniola. In 1670, they established the first permanent French settlement on the mainland of Hispaniola, Cap François (later Cap Français, now Cap-Haïtien). Under the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, Spain officially ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France. By that time, planters outnumbered buccaneers and, with the encouragement of Louis XIV, they had begun to grow tobacco, indigo, cotton and cacao on the fertile northern plain, thus prompting the importation of African slaves. Slave insurrections were frequent and some slaves escaped to the mountains where they were met by what would be one of the last generations of Taíno natives. After the last Taíno died, the full-blooded Arawakan population on the island was extinct.
In the mid-1700s, Acadians, French settlers from what is now the Maritime Provinces of Canada, sought refuge in Saint-Domingue following the Great Expulsion ordered by the British government. Acadians found themselves, however, existing as second-class citizens[citation needed].
Prior to the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the economy of Saint-Domingue gradually expanded, with sugar and, later, coffee becoming important export crops. After the war, which disrupted maritime commerce, the colony underwent rapid expansion. In 1767, it exported 72 million pounds of raw sugar and 51 million pounds of refined sugar, one million pounds of indigo, and two million pounds of cotton.[1] Saint-Domingue became known as the "Pearl of the Antilles" — one of the richest colonies in the 18th century French empire. By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue produced about 40 percent of all the sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe. This single colony, roughly the size of Maryland or Belgium, produced more sugar and coffee than all of Britain's West Indian colonies combined.
The labor for these plantations was provided by an estimated 790,000 African slaves (accounting in 1783-1791 for a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade). Between 1764 and 1771, the average importation of slaves varied between 10,000-15,000, by 1786 about 28,000 and, from 1787 onward, the colony received more than 40,000 slaves a year. However, the inability to maintain slave numbers without constant resupply from Africa meant the slave population, by 1789, totaled 500,000, ruled over by a white population that, by 1789, numbered only 32,000.[2] At all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born, as the brutal conditions of slavery prevented the population from experiencing growth through natural increase[1]. African culture thus remained strong among slaves to the end of French rule, in particular the folk-religion of Vodou, which commingled Catholic liturgy and ritual with the beliefs and practices of Guinea, Congo and Dahomey.[3] Slave traders scoured the Atlantic coast of Africa, and the slaves who arrived came from hundreds of different tribes, their languages often incommensurable. The majority came from the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast (present day Nigeria), followed by Bantus from Congo and Angola[citation needed] The least common and most prized were the Senegalese and Tuareg,[citation needed] while the Hausa from North Nigeria and Niger were most equally prized.[citation needed]
To regularise slavery, in 1685 Louis XVI had enacted the code noir, which accorded certain human rights to slaves and responsibilities to the master, who was obliged to feed, clothe and provide for the general well-being of their slaves. The code noir also sanctioned corporal punishment, allowing masters to employ brutal methods to instill in their slaves the necessary docilitiy, while ignoring provisions intended to regulate the administration of punishments. A passage from Henri Christophe's personal secretary, who lived more than half his life as a slave, describes the crimes perpetrated against the slaves of Saint-Domingue by their French masters:
- "Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man eating-dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?"[4]
Thousands of slaves found freedom by fleeing into the mountains, forming communities of maroons and raiding isolated plantations. The most famous was Mackandal, a one-armed slave, originally from Guinea, who escaped in 1751. A Vodou Houngan (priest), he united many of the different maroon bands, and spent the next six years staging successful raids and evading capture by the French, reputedly killing over 6,000 people, while preaching a fanatic vision of the destruction of white civilization in St. Domingue. In 1758, after a failed plot to poison the drinking water of the plantation owners, he was captured and burned alive at the public square in Cap-Français.
Saint-Domingue also had the largest and wealthiest free population of color in the Caribbean, a group also known as the gens de couleur. The royal census of 1789 counted roughly 25,000 such persons. While many free people of color were former slaves, most members of this class appear not to have been free Africans, but rather people of mixed European and African ancestry, or mulattoes. Typically, they were the descendants of the enslaved women that French colonists took as mistresses; through plaçage, a type of common-law marriage planters enjoyed with their slave mistresses, many were able to inherit considerable property. As their numbers grew, they became subject to discriminatory legislation. Statutes forbade gens de couleur from taking up certain professions, marrying whites, wearing European clothing, carrying swords or firearms in public, or attending social functions where whites were present. However, these regulations did not restrict their purchase of land, and many accumulated substantial holdings and became slave-owners. By 1789, they owned one-third of the plantation property and one-quarter of the slaves of Saint-Domingue.[5] Central to the rise of the gens de couleur planter class was the growing importance of coffee, which thrived on the marginal hillside plots to which they were often relegated. The largest concentration of gens de couleur was in the southern peninsula, the last region of the colony to be settled, owing to its distance from Atlantic shipping lanes and its formidable terrain, with the highest mountain range in the Caribbean. In the parish of Jérémie, they formed the majority of the population.
A 1791 slave rebellion began the Haitian Revolution, which culminated with the establishment of the independent Republic of Haiti in 1804.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American and British authors often referred to Saint-Domingue as "St. Domingo" or "San Domingo," which can lead to confusion with its neighboring former Spanish colony (called Santo Domingo in colonial times) which is today the Dominican Republic.
The name was changed to Haiti when Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence from the French in 1804. Like the term Haiti itself, Saint-Domingue may sometimes be used to refer to all of Hispaniola, but more frequently to the western part now occupied by the Republic of Haiti.
- ^ C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins (Vintage Books: New York, 1963) Pg. 45
- ^ C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins Pg. 55
- ^ Vodou is a Dahomean word meaning 'god' or 'spirit'.
- ^ Robert Heinl, Written in Blood: The History of the Haitian People (University Press of America: Lantham, Md., 1996)
- ^ http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/chap8a.html
- The Louverture Project: Saint-Domingue - Saint-Domingue page on Haitian history Wiki.
- The Louverture Project: Slavery in Saint-Domingue
Categories: Former countries in North America | Former colonies of France | Former monarchies of North America | 1659 establishments | 1804 disestablishments | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | Articles with unsourced statements since October 2007 | History of Haiti | Abolition of Slavery | 1697 establishments