apartment of three or four rooms for a year.68 A few streets between the sea and the cathedral square in Cap Français had rents of 6,000 to 9,000 livres per annum, the value of two to three skilled slaves. Some houses near the harbor rented for as much as 15,000 livres.69 The profit that merchants reaped from the commercial monopoly also explains the deep tension between metropolitan merchants and colonial planters over the future of this system, as described in Chapters 7 and 8.
A key aspect of the mercantile life of Cap Français was the exchange of information in new kinds of public spaces. In addition to its various open-air markets, its theater, and the fountains, squares, and gardens that proliferated after 1763, the city had literary societies, book stores, and a biweekly broadside, the Affiches américaines.70 From 1761 to 1778, it had a commercial exchange, a space devoted to the buying and selling of letters of change and other instruments of credit. Yet colonial commerce did not lend itself to sociability. Cap was full of men who came to make their fortune, or who were tied to merchant houses in France. As Martin Foäche informed a young friend due to arrive in Cap Français in 1760, “There is little or no custom [here] of going to eat [with colleagues] at the inn, even those with whom one is doing business. When mid-day strikes, everyone goes in his own direction.”71 He told his friend to seek out guest tables instead of eating at his inn during his first six months in the city. This would allow him to meet people and gain information about the colony. Meeting like-minded people was especially important, as travelers to Saint-Domingue stressed the lack of connection that many colonists felt to any country. In his 1754 Essai sur les colonies françaises Pierre-Louis de Saintard wrote, “The Europeans who live in the colonies, having become by voluntary transplantations outsiders everywhere, no longer pretend to have a fatherland.”72
The pervasive notion of rootlessness and of the lack of connections among colonists also explains why Saint-Domingue was probably the most heavily “masonized” society in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. In France in 1789, Freemasonry involved less than 1 percent of the eligible male population.73 It was at least five times more popular in Saint-Domingue, where there were around one thousand Freemasons, in a population of roughly twenty thousand white men. Not all men had the money or education to be a Freemason. James McClellan estimates that about 25 percent of “sociologically eligible white men” in Saint-Domingue were Freemasons.74
In France, Freemasonry was imported from England in 1725, and this pattern was duplicated in Saint-Domingue. In Bordeaux and other French Atlantic ports, English or Irish merchants often organized early lodges.75 Jamaica opened its first masonic lodge in 1739, and English merchants involved in contraband trading brought the new institution to southern Saint-Domingue sometime before 1747. The names of many of the Jewish trading families active around the southern port of Les Cayes can be found among lodge members in Jamaica.76
In Europe and in the Atlantic World, eighteenth-century Freemasons consciously thought of themselves as part of a diaspora.77 A network of correspondence joined lodges on a national or geographic basis. Such a web of connections was especially useful for transatlantic merchants. Masons developed what have been called “management tools of mobility”—initiation certificates, interlodge affiliations, passwords, and maps of lodge locations, all designed to insure that a traveling mason could find a friendly lodge in a new city.78 While most of Saint-Domingue’s lodges were part of a French Atlantic network, some stretched farther. One of Cap Français’s leading lodges was part of a network centered on the St. Jean d’Ecosse lodge of Marseilles, which also had an affiliated lodge in Martinique. But this network was primarily invested in creating fraternal and commercial connections in the Mediterranean, with affiliates in Naples, Sicily, and the Ottoman Empire.79
Jamaica also had a lively Freemasonic culture, with more than a dozen lodges listed in the Jamaica Almanac by 1789.80 But we know more about Freemasonry in Saint-Domingue, where its extraordinary popularity reflected the colony’s cosmopolitanism, its lack of established social institutions, its network of provincial cities, and the absence of a well-established French religious culture. It is likely that for some colonists Freemasonry provided a way to forge new communities within a highly mobile population, and to structure those associations around something besides wealth. The popularity of so-called Scottish Rite Freemasonry in Saint-Domingue, with its elaborate hierarchy of over two dozen levels of initiation, is an example of that desire to negotiate new hierarchies. Established in Bordeaux in 1743, the Scottish Rite by 1762 had twenty-five degrees and was very complex in ways that seem to have appealed to colonists wanting new forms of distinction.81 The Scottish Rite came to Saint-Domingue with the wine merchant Etienne Morin, who had been one of its founding members in Bordeaux. A traveling salesman who also sold religious books and Sèvres porcelain, Morin is said by some historians to have been in Saint-Domingue in the 1740s, perhaps making multiple trips establishing lodges.
At some point around midcentury, he returned to France, where the leaders of the Scottish Rite were in the process of forming a kingdom-wide organization. This group gave Morin some kind of credential to establish new lodges in the Americas. But during the Seven Years’ War the British captured Morin on his return voyage to the Caribbean. Imprisoned in Great Britain, the salesman established contact with Freemasons in England and even is said to have visited Scotland. In 1763 he returned to Saint-Domingue. He landed in Jacmel, a port on the southern coast, which suggests he had come from Jamaica. Morin quickly went to work founding new “Scottish” lodges in Saint-Domingue, but by 1766 masonic authorities in France accused him of exceeding his authority to grant higher degrees. They especially criticized him for deputizing others to do the same. Although Bordeaux sent an inspector to Saint-Domingue to investigate his activities, Morin continued to establish lodges in Saint-Domingue and eventually returned to Jamaica, where he died around 1772.82
Morin’s career illustrates the entrepreneurial and cosmopolitan side of Freemasonry, which was certainly part of its success in Saint-Domingue. But some of Freemasonry’s colonial popularity stemmed from the reasons it was popular in France. Lodges provided a setting for elite sociability, and masonic doctrines dovetailed with enlightenment ideas of improvement, self-government, and “public” discussion. Despite its universalist ideals, Freemasonry was based on a dichotomy between the mystical brotherhood and the “profane” world, between “light” and “darkness,” between civilization and barbarity. Despite historians’ suggestions that Toussaint Louverture was a Freemason in Saint-Domingue, there is very little evidence that he or any other free man of color was permitted to become a masonic brother. The colony’s lodges were fiercely discriminatory against people of African descent, even removing white members from leadership positions because they had married women of color.83
While the hierarchical and closed social aspects of Freemasonry were well suited to Saint-Domingue, this was also true in France’s coastal cities, like the port of Le Havre in Normandy, where Freemasonry had a very different political and social profile from that of the freethinking lodges of Paris.84 The relative cultural conservatism of Le Havre’s Freemasons made it quite common, Eric Saunier finds, for them to also be members of religious confraternities, which were part of the rich associational life of many French cities.85
Given the institutional weakness of the Catholic Church in Saint-Domingue, it is not surprising that the colony appears to have had no confraternities. It seems likely that in Saint-Domingue some men were attracted to Freemasonry because it offered a spiritual context they remembered from France. One of the leading figures of French esoteric Freemasonry, Martinès de Pasqually, died in Saint-Domingue, where his followers had established at least two lodges. In France, Martinès had founded the Elus de Cohen order, which overlaid Christian mysticism and elements of the Jewish kabbala tradition over Scottish Rite Freemasonry. One of his leading followers, Bacon de la Chevalerie, spent much of his military career in Saint-Domingue. Martinès claimed his rites could bring forward angels or other spiritual
