colonists were notoriously irreligious. In 1768, Lieutenant Desdorides, an artillery officer recently arrived in the colony, wrote his father: “Religion, which everywhere consoles the just and slows the wicked, enflames or restrains almost no one in Saint-Domingue. Priests, by their bad conduct … lose much of the merit [by which] they will persuade [congregants] of the maxims they are charged with teaching. They assemble a very small number of faithful; thus one sees deserted churches…. Without religion … one sees the continual victory of error and disorder.”17
In the 1780s, Cap Français was the largest French city in the Americas, with fourteen hundred houses and seventy-nine public buildings. In 1748 the Jesuits built a two-story masonry residence there, but in 1763 the town’s only church could still be described as “wooden shack ready to collapse.” A proper stone church was not in place until 1774. Few residents attended services, except during major feast days.18 Moreau de Saint-Méry illustrated the religious climate by describing how the parish of Cap Français raised funds. Every year the parish, just as in France, named two sextons to administer parish property and other financial matters. In France local notables pulled strings and made donations to be nominated to this prestigious office. In Cap Français, however, the parish deliberately nominated men who had no interest in church affairs, then informed them that they could escape the duty by making a large donation to the church. The nominee usually complied, and the committee went on to another victim. In some years they tapped two or three of these reluctant sextons in a single day.19
Royal government, like the Church, was another metropolitan institution that looked more important on late eighteenth-century maps than was actually the case. In theory, Saint-Domingue was under absolutist rule from the 1660s. But it had little in the way of centralized royal administration until 1763. The Superior Council of Cap Français met in the royal storehouse for twenty-four years.20 Not until December 1763 did the Crown convert the former headquarters of the Jesuit order into a proper “Government House,” with meeting rooms and offices for the Council, the lower royal courts, and naval administrators.21
The colonial capital, Port-au-Prince, was the official residence of Saint-Domingue’s governors and their staffs. The end of the Seven Years’ War marked the beginning of a bureaucratic and mercantile influx that doubled the size of Port-au-Prince to 683 houses and then to 895 in 1788. This made it about the size of Kingston twenty-five years earlier.22 In the 1780s, Port-au-Prince had a total population of ninety-four hundred, but it was still smaller than Cap, which had between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand people. Despite its status as capital, it had few free residents able to participate fully in civic life. Most of its population consisted of soldiers and sailors (thirty-two hundred) and slaves (four thousand), leaving eighteen hundred whites and four hundred free people of color.23 The city had a theater and, after 1782, a fashionable Vauxhall, though it eventually dissolved because of gambling disputes. Indeed, Moreau claimed that in Port-au-Prince, unlike Cap Français, male colonists gathered only to gamble. In this respect it resembled St. Jago de la Vega, the small inland capital of Jamaica.24 Cap Français had three charity hospitals, but Port-au-Prince did not get such an institution until 1787, when the governor-general brought state financing to the project.25
Saint-Domingue’s towns were also the site of its military garrisons, which added both a leavening of high status officers to complement the existing elite of merchants and planters and also a larger number of men of lower status. European troops, however, died quickly in the Greater Antilles. Records from Saint-Domingue in 1765 show a minimal annual death rate of 21 percent among rank-and-file soldiers.26 It did not help that rank-and-file soldiers in the colony were given poor rations and shoddy clothing and were forced to do manual labor outside their military function.27 Slaves and free people of color referred to them as “white slaves” (nègres blancs). Many deserted, often in groups of five or six at a time. In 1766, for example, two weeks after a contingent of 647 soldiers debarked at Cap Français, forty-four of them had already deserted, swelling the growing petit blanc class.28
Towns were also important in Jamaica, although the English colony had only one large urban area, Kingston. Even the capital, St. Jago de la Vega, also called Spanish Town, was a hamlet, not a substantial town. Kingston was the island’s major port, and trading was so important in Jamaica that in the mid-1750s that Governor Charles Knowles tried unsuccessfully to move the capital there, arguing it was illogical to make ship captains and merchants trek thirteen miles to Spanish Town to conduct business. Knowles also hoped to build a wedge of merchant support in the Assembly against politically powerful planters, who wanted the capital to remain inland. He lost that political battle, but Kingston’s economic and cultural importance remained intact.29
Kingston may have been an important place of business, but it was, like Port-au-Prince, an unprepossessing place. It was built around a Spanish plan, which placed the formal center of the town—a large square with the parish church at its center and public buildings dotted around it—at some distance from the commercial district. That was Kingston’s real heart, full of bustling streets lined with shops and warehouses, located around a magnificent natural harbor. A map produced in 1745 by Michael Hay shows Kingston when it was probably at the height of its influence (Figure 10). Hay showed a town, dominated by merchants and mercantile houses, which was beginning to expand east of the harbor. The cartographer highlighted that commercial identity in his map by featuring sketches of the houses of four prominent merchants—Edward Gardiner, Robert Turner, Alexander Macfarlane, and Robert Duckinfield. He also outlined, to the southwest of the town, the location where “strangers” and “negroes” were buried and showed the location of the hospital, in “Cheapside,” in the southeast.30
Figure 10. “[Plan of Kingston] to His Excellency Edward Trelawny, esqr., captain, general governor & commander in chief of His Majesty’s island of Jamaica & the territories …; this plan of Kingston is humbly dedicated by His Excellency’s most humble & most obedient servant, Mich. Hay.” [Kingston, n.d. (1745)]. © Library of Congress, Geography and Maps Collection.
Kingston was a practical town, built for business rather than aesthetics, but parts of it were pleasing. In his history of 1774, Long praised the houses in Kingston for their construction and sturdiness, noting they were “mainly of brick, raised two or three stories, conveniently disposed, and in general well-furnished; their roofs are all shingled; the fronts of most of them are shaded with a piazza below, and a covered gallery above.”31 Lord Adam Gordon on a trip to British America in 1764 thought the town “very considerable, being large and well Inhabited, the Streets spacious and regularly laid out,” as befitted “the most … trading Town on the island.”32 But against this were less positive comments. Gordon also noted that Kingston was “a very unwholesome place,” “often visited by sickness.” Long blamed the mortality on the “loathsome practice” of using human excrement to pave the roads and on burying people in too shallow graves near the middle of the town.33 Thomas Hibbert, the town’s greatest merchant, gives some credence to Long’s views. In his notably deist will of 1780 he instructed his executors that “in order to show my detestation and abhorrence of the prevailing superstitious custom of Interning dead bodies in Churches and Church yards and to prevent mine being added to the noxious Mass that is daily Corrupting in the Centre of the Town, I desire that my executors will see it placed in the deep Vault which I have provided for that purpose in the Garden belonging to my House in Kingston with the least expense consistent with decency.”34
We don’t have a census for 1745 for Kingston, but extrapolating from a census of 1730, when it had 4,461 residents (1,468 whites, 269 free people of color, and 2,724 slaves) and assuming modest growth per annum suggests that by 1745 the town had somewhere between five thousand and six thousand people. There were 844 householders in the town in 1745, suggesting that the average household
