status that Adam had enjoyed before falling from grace.86 Indeed, some of the spiritual figures or loas in Haitian Vodou were masons, suggesting that there was an overlap of spiritual ideas from these different traditions.87
The Freemason’s Hall was a gendered place, a center of a particular kind of male sociability. But West Indian towns were not exclusively male. Indeed, they were places in which enslaved women but also white women and free women of color were prominent. As in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue generally, the majority of the urban population was male, but the percentage of women in towns was much greater than the percentage of women in the countryside.
The principal determinant of gender relations in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue was the demographic lottery that governed white life. As in Saint-Domingue, Jamaica’s high mortality rates made family life something of a game of chance. Multiple marriages were common, so much that some contemporaries described these relationships as a series of fleeting encounters. The bewildering uncertainty of life in the tropics and the failure of Jamaicans to establish a settler society on the model of settler societies in British North America meant that Jamaica came to be seen by metropolitans as a vortex of social disorder.88 Similar conditions existed in Saint-Domingue. For Moreau de Saint-Méry, “there is perhaps no country in which second marriages are as common as in Saint-Domingue, and there have been women there who have had seven husbands.”89
Slavery and racial categories caused another set of problems. White men and women lived irregularly, with concubinage as common as marriage. In Jamaica, marriage between whites and free people of color was always regarded as illegal. Nevertheless, colonial authorities seem to have allowed the relatively small number of free colored women who were sought as brides by white men to “pass” as whites.90 After 1761, as part of new racial laws examined in Chapter 6, the Jamaica Assembly made passing much more difficult and thus interracial marriage became close to impossible. In early eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue passing was also possible: before the 1760s notaries and clergy often did not describe the color or ancestry of wealthy free women of color in official documents but did give them courtesy titles like “Madame” or “Demoiselle,” suggesting that they were white.91 Even at the end of the century, when stricter laws governed racial categories, unions between white men and free colored women were never outlawed. The percentage of religious marriages celebrated between white men and free women of color reached 17 percent in some parishes.92
Before midcentury, in both colonies the policing of boundaries between whites and free coloreds was done very loosely, if at all. In Jamaica, for example, it was not that marriages between whites and free coloreds were banned as that social convention stopped people from even thinking that such unions were possible. Jamaican patriots proudly declared that they maintained their Britishness by preserving a “marked distinction between the white inhabitants and the people of colour and free blacks.” But sexual contact between white men and women of color was very common in Jamaican households.93 Unlike British North America, where interracial sex was frowned on and kept out of the public sphere, in Jamaica such practices were highly public. Gossip about rich married men and their mulatto mistresses was commonplace, and white bachelors lived openly with their “housekeepers.” The purported lines of division between whites and blacks, however enshrined in law and ideology, were nevertheless violated every day in the household.94
The Jamaican family was not the British family, just as the Saint-Dominguan family was very different from the French family. It was customary for white men to cohabit outside marriage, both with white women and also with black or colored women. Few white families lasted long or produced surviving children. As the prevalence of venereal disease in the white male population graphically showed, social constraints against the free exercise of white male sexual power were virtually nil.95 The inability, or unwillingness, of white Jamaicans to establish flourishing family lives and regular marriages was a serious reputational problem for colonists within the empire well before the Seven Years’ War.96 The same was true of Saint-Domingue, where since the late 1600s the French government had tried in vain to bring in European women to marry male colonists. In 1750 Emilien Petit still believed the problem of creating stable white households in Saint-Domingue was the lack of European women.97 Metropolitan governments were very concerned about observing and regulating familial relationships and sexual behavior. They saw population, security questions, and racial purity in colonial settings as indelibly linked together. As Kathleen Wilson asserts, “the fate of nation, colony, and empire was tied to individual sexual choice; the well-governed colony and the self-governing individual went hand in hand.”98
Contemporary commentators in both societies described the black or mulatto mistress as morally subversive.99 British West Indians were occasionally moved to write verse celebrating the beauty of black women; the most famous being the “Ode to the Sable Venus,” composed by the Reverend Isaac Teale in 1765 and published in Bryan Edwards’s 1793 history. For Teale, the black woman represented forbidden but easily accessible sensual pleasures. In his heavily eroticized prose, the white man sought the “sable queen’s … gentle reign … where meeting love, sincere delight, fond pleasure, ready joys invite, and unbrought rapture meet.” Other writers saw that beauty in more threatening terms. Edward Long, for example, recognized that many white men found black women intrinsically erotic, but this recognition filled him with disgust, given his shrill belief that there was something essentially animalistic about black women. Famously, he opined that black women were attracted to white men for the same reasons that he believed orangutans supposedly lusted after black men. In this reading, Long argued that black women and female orangutans sought to improve themselves by attaching themselves to a superior species. Clearly in Long’s mind the gap between the most advanced animals—great apes—and the least advanced humans—sub-Saharan Africans—was not at all that great, placing him—as a potential believer in polygenesis rather than the conventional Christian belief in monogenesis—as both a progenitor of early forms of pseudoscientific racism and also beyond the pale for most thinkers wedded to ideas of a single human origin.100
For all their differences, Long and Teale shared a conviction with nearly all contemporary observers that sexual relations between black women and white men were inevitable, regardless of slavery. When white writers condemned Jamaican men for not marrying and for attaching themselves to colored mistresses, they couched their reproaches in terms of white male weakness and black female aggressiveness. Edward Long’s argument was typical: when a white man, through weakness of flesh, succumbed to feminine charms, he became an “abject, passive slave” to his black mistress’s “insults, thefts, and infidelities.”101 White men, masterful everywhere else, were powerless when in the clutches of conniving mulatto and black women. Black women were scheming Jezebels, “hot constitution’d Ladies” possessed of a “temper hot and lascivious, making no scruple to prostitute themselves to Europeans for a very slender profit, so great is their inclination to white men.”102
White colonists and travelers in Saint-Domingue described women of color in the same hypersexualized images and just as often portrayed themselves as under the erotic power of these women.103 Girod-Chantrans observed that “these women, naturally more lustful than Europeans, and flattered by their power over white men, have, in order to keep that power, gathered all pleasures to which they are susceptible. Sensual pleasure is for them the subject of a special study.”104 Hilliard d’Auberteuil, moreover, claimed that “mulatto women are much less docile then mulatto men, because they have acquired a dominion over white men based on debauchery.”105
Just as in Saint-Domingue, Jamaican white men blamed their indiscretions on white women’s deficiencies. White men had a schizophrenic attitude to white women. They alternated between praising them for their fidelity, attractiveness, and devotion to maternal duties and lambasting them for their lack of education, poor manners, unpleasing appearance, and violent temper toward their slaves. John Taylor in 1688 denigrated white women as “vile strumpets and common
