goods.”51 They warned that these hired-out urban slaves encouraged rebellious thoughts and rebellious actions in the plantation workers who flocked to the cities every Sunday to sell their produce. Moreau, for example, was highly critical of the ribaldry, breaking of laws, potential for clandestine gathering, and unwelcome practice of subversive religion that went on at these markets, or elsewhere. He described how slaves gathered together for dances in an old cemetery at the edge of Cap Français contemptuously, as “a spectacle of fury and pleasure.”52
A remarkable report by the Chamber of Agriculture in 1785 gave voice to white fears of slave depravity in Cap Français and to its potential consequences. Bemoaning that “the Negroes are so open in their insubordination that the line of demarcation between whites and slaves has almost vanished,” the authors of the report predicted “grave events” if no one “put an end to this evil.” They urged that the town authorities put a stop to their tolerance of slaves’ “nightly gatherings and gambling dens, their nocturnal dances, associations, and brotherhoods.” What particularly disturbed the chamber was how slaves insolently refused to give way to whites on the street—they gave several horrified accounts of such insolence. They were even more concerned at slaves’ tendency to travel at all times “with a large stick.” On holidays, they lamented that “you find 2,000 of them gathered at La Providence, La Fossette and Petit Carénage [neighborhoods on the edge of the city] all armed with sticks, drinking rum and doing the kalinda.”53 Nevertheless, despite these provocations and despite the potential for riot that large gatherings of armed and drunk young adult men provided, urban slaves were remarkably politically quiescent. There were no urban revolts in any of Saint-Domingue’s towns before the start of the French Revolution and little involvement by urban slaves in the initial stages of the Haitian Revolution. David Geggus argues that while towns facilitated social flux and opportunities for subversive gatherings, they were also places full of whites, including a concentration of soldiers and sailors, thus making armed uprisings difficult.54
Another critical group in Saint-Domingue’s cities, indeed in all Caribbean cities, was free people of color. On islands where whites controlled most arable land, ex-slaves and their descendants tended to gravitate toward the cities to find work. In late eighteenth-century Barbados, for example, free coloreds were about 6 percent of the residents of Bridgetown, but only 3 percent of the total colonial population.55 In Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, however, vacant rural land was available. In Saint-Domingue specifically, a system of royal land grants made it possible for free coloreds to become peasants, market farmers, and ranchers. A small but significant minority became indigo, cotton, and coffee planters.56 As we explore in Chapter 6, in Jamaica colonial elites took measures after Tacky’s Revolt in 1760 to prevent whites from bequeathing land and slaves to free people of color. In Saint-Domingue such laws were discussed but never implemented, making it possible for free families of color to eventually accumulate enough land and enslaved workers to establish plantations.57
One consequence of the economic opportunities available in Saint-Domingue’s countryside was that free people of color were not especially concentrated in the cities, unlike whites and unlike their counterparts in Jamaica. They were only 6 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes, while they were 5 percent of the overall colonial population. Cap Français was unusual in that 10 percent of its population was free colored by the 1780s.58 Seen another way, about 10 percent of Saint-Domingue’s free population of color lived in the three capital cities, while 40 percent of Jamaican free coloreds lived in Kingston.
In the cities or in the country, most Dominguan free people of color were quite poor. But the vibrant urban economy of the 1770s and 1780s did allow the emergence of a small population of free colored merchants and property owners. The most prominent among these was the quadroon Vincent Ogé the younger, who claimed to have been worth 350,000 livres or £15,000 by the early 1780s. This was a large sum, two to three times as much as the net worth of a wealthy Parisian merchant at the same time.59 Ogé’s case was unusual, because he was from a mixed-race coffee-planting family, was educated in Bordeaux, and had an uncle who was a merchant in Cap Français. In the 1780s, Ogé sold French cargos around the colony, was part owner of a schooner, and leased and subleased apartments in Cap Français. Another man of one-quarter African descent whom contemporaries described as a large-scale merchant (négociant) was Joseph-Charles Haran, born in the town of Léogane around 1744. In 1785 he subleased a property in Port-au-Prince that included a shop, twenty-seven slaves, a flat-bottomed boat, eight carts, twenty-four mules, and three horses. Unfortunately the lease fell through, and by 1787 he owed his creditors 440,000 livres or £19,000 while his assets were worth 215,000 livres.60 Such possibilities were also open to a few exceptional free women of color. Indeed, two-thirds of the clients of color who appeared before notaries in Cap Français or Port-au-Prince to buy or sell property between 1776 and 1789 were women. The most successful was Zabeau Bellanton of Cap Français, who bought and sold over 100,000 livres or £4,300 worth of slaves and real estate.61 Dominique Rogers has found considerable numbers of women of color in Cap Français and especially in Port-au-Prince who lived on profits from rental properties.62
But it was unusual for free colored people to be wealthy, even in Saint-Domingue, which had the wealthiest free population of color in the Americas in the eighteenth century. The poverty of most urban free coloreds can be seen in the 1776 cadastral census of Cap Français. Free colored properties were on the outskirts of town and at the ends of streets that ran up into the hills in a region named Petit Guinée. Other cities and towns—Les Cayes, Saint-Marc, Port-de-Paix—had similar districts.63 This segregation was based on economics, not formally on race. While free coloreds accounted for 10 percent of Cap Français’s population in 1775 and owned 16 percent of its houses, their property was only 5 percent of the total value of city residences. The census shows that free women of color were far more active within their class than were white women; 42 percent of free colored proprietors were women; only 14 percent of white owners were women. The average value of property that these white women owned was equivalent to the average value of property owned by white men, a rental value of 2,600 livres per year, equal to the purchase price of an adult male slave. Free women of color, on the other hand, owned property that was on average valued far less than this, with an annual rental value of 636 livres, or £27.5, compared to 798 livres for free men of color. Free colored property like this was typical of those recorded in the Cap Français census: “one-fifth of a city lot on which there are several wooden shacks belonging to Pierre known as Beau Soleil, free black, and occupied by him.”64
Saint-Domingue’s whites, as in Jamaica, lived disproportionately in the cities. They made up 5 percent of the colony’s overall population, but they were 22 percent of the population of Cap Français and nearly 30 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince.65 Some of these were administrative personnel and local merchants, but many were involved in transatlantic commerce. The 1776 census of Cap Français shows that approximately two-thirds of the city’s houses were leased to tenants.66 While Jamaica’s eighteenth-century sugar planters paid to ship their produce back to Britain to be sold by merchants, a practice some Dominguan planters followed, many Saint-Domingue planters expected metropolitan merchants to come to colonial ports and to buy their produce there. Because British sugar colonies imported their food from North America, ships sailing from Britain to the Caribbean often did not have full cargoes. But French merchants held tight to their monopoly system, which prohibited colonial planters from buying foreign supplies. French ships, therefore, sailed to the Saint-Domingue full of wheat, dried beef, and other provisions, which their captains expected to sell for a good profit to the colonial market. They then bought sugar, coffee, and other crops to carry back to Europe.67
As in Jamaica, therefore, Saint-Domingue had a class of wealthy urban merchants, though they were more likely than their Kingston counterparts to be affiliated with metropolitan firms. They occupied the most desirable real estate in Cap Français. The median rent for the city’s nine hundred plus houses or plots was 2,000 livres per year, strikingly higher than
