by fugitive slaves in the area.39 By 1798, new regulations drawn up for controlling runaways from Cuba’s rapidly expanding slave economy recognized both the problem of slaves running to cities as well as that of keeping the urban slaves themselves from absconding, as “most of the runaway slaves belong to residents of the city of Havana.”40
Runaway slaves were also active in and around the cities of the French and British colonies in the 1790s. Between October 1790 and August 1791, French authorities apprehended 500 runaways in the vicinity of Cap Français alone. Figures recording the numbers of recaptured slaves and the place of their arrest seem to indicate that fugitives who found their way to the city proper eluded the authorities more successfully than those who roamed outlying districts.41 In Jamaica, runaways crowded into busy Port Royal in the 1790s. Citing “the number of runaway negroes with which [the town] is infested,” white inhabitants petitioned the Assembly in 1801 for funds to erect “a place of confinement” to control this population and to discourage others from coming.42
In addition to providing some unique opportunities for runaway slaves, Caribbean cities also held special attraction for free blacks and browns, the most marginal of the various groups comprising the masterless Caribbean. Whether plying trades, seeking work, or living by their wits, free nonwhites tended to settle in the towns, and the number of urban free people of color increased steadily during the period of the French Revolution. Always feared for their abilities to move about and disrupt the smooth functioning of the plantation economy, urban communities of free coloreds and free blacks imbibed the egalitarian spirit of the times and rapidly assumed a political voice which emerged and matured during the 1790s.
Free people of color were most numerous in the Spanish Caribbean, where they occupied a prominent demographic niche in urban areas. Free coloreds comprised twenty-two percent of the population of Havana and its suburbs in 1791. The populations of the towns along the Caribbean-oriented east coast contained even higher percentages of free black and brown residents. In Santiago de Cuba, figures from 1791 listed 6,698, or thirty-four percent, of the city’s 19,703 residents as either free “Negroes” or free “mulattoes.” A census taken the following year showed a similar pattern for Bayamo, where half the black population was free, and free nonwhites accounted for more than thirty-seven percent of the city’s population of 22,417.43 During the revolutionary period after 1791, the urban concentration of this population expanded significantly. Alexander von Humboldt, visiting Cuba in the early years of Haitian independence, commented at great length upon the recent increase in the size of the free Negro population in urban Cuba. Because “Spanish legislation … favors in an extraordinary degree” their aspirations for freedom, he remarked, “many blacks (negros) acquire their freedom in the towns.” Humboldt also cited an 1811 population study conducted by the ayuntamiento and consulado of Havana which found the black population, both free and enslaved, more thoroughly urbanized than ever. In the Havana district, where the number of free Negroes equaled the number of slaves, blacks and browns in the countryside outnumbered those in the towns by a slim ratio of three to two. On the east coast, fully half of all blacks and browns lived in the towns, and free people of color dominated some of the more sizable settlements. “The partido (district) of Bayamo,” recorded Humboldt, “is notable for the large number of free colored (forty-four percent), which increases yearly, as also in Holguin and Baracoa.” Indeed, he concluded, with a note of warning to Caribbean slavocracies, “since Haiti became emancipated, there are already in the Antilles more free negroes and mulattoes than slaves.”44
Even before the watchwords of the French Revolution reached their ears, urban free coloreds in Spanish territories tested the limits of their masterless status and pressed for certain types of equality. This spirit surfaced most visibly within the ranks of the military. Since incorporation of free men of color into separate but ostensibly equal militia battalions began in the 1760s, the assertive behavior of these armed troops had drawn steady complaint from civil authorities. When officers of pardo and moreno militia units in Caracas demanded the same funeral observances and ceremonial garb as white officers early in 1789, Spanish officials worried that such attacks against the structure of inequality in the military would lead inevitably toward more general attacks on the structure of colonial society. This latest episode, feared the captain-general, represented the dangerous thin edge of an egalitarian wedge—or perhaps the sharp blade of a two-edged sword. “As much as I am aware of the grave difficulties which every day of this so-called equality will bring,” he wrote in April, “I also fear other evil consequences if their pretensions are denied. In the first case there is the risk of more haughtiness and audacity on the part of the officers; in the second … disloyalty, the spirit of vengeance, and sedition.”45 Crown policy took a hard line against all evidence of such restiveness. In Cuba, just days before the first plantations were burned in neighboring Saint-Domingue, Luis de las Casas, governor and captain-general, received instructions from the Crown to silence the “old complaints” against white officers levelled by officers of the pardo and moreno units at Havana.46
In the British and French colonies, free people of color were considerably fewer in number than in Cuba and the other Spanish possessions, a fact which ironically underscored even more strongly their visibility as a masterless urban presence. Though rarely counted as carefully in population censuses, free blacks and browns seemed to cause much greater day-to-day concern among government officials and white residents in both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue than in the Spanish colonies. Jamaica’s free people of color migrated to the area around Kingston. Almost sixty percent of the 3,408 “black and coloured” persons taking out certificates of freedom under a 1761 legislative act calling for the registration of all free persons in the island resided in Kingston and Spanish Town, the nearby capital city. In 1788, more than one-third of all the island’s free colored people lived in Kingston alone, compared to twenty-two percent of all whites and seven percent of all slaves.47
By 1788, white Jamaicans were sufficiently troubled about both the growth of this population and its mobility to bring such persons under more careful scrutiny. Concerned that the line between slavery and freedom should remain clearly demarcated to foil the efforts of slaves sliding imperceptibly into the free colored caste, the Assembly called upon “justices and vestry” from all parishes to
cause diligent inquiry to be made within their respective parishes, as to the number of negroes, mulattoes, or Indians of free condition, and cause them to attend at their next meeting, and give an account in what manner they obtained their freedom, that their names and manner of obtaining their freedom may be registered in the vestry books of such parishes.48
But even this effort to weed out the slaves from the ranks of the masterless did little to check the tremendous growth of the free nonwhite population during the ensuing decade. As in Cuba, these numbers swelled during the period of the Haitian Revolution, as large numbers of free coloreds, many of them immigrants from Saint-Domingue, crowded into Kingston. When parish officials in Kingston petitioned for incorporation in 1801, they referred pointedly to the fact that “the population has of late greatly increased, and particularly as to foreigners and free persons of color,” and called for more stringent law enforcement and “an efficient and strict police” to minimize the dangers posed by these masterless immigrants.49
In Saint-Domingue, free blacks and browns of the cities actively identified with the ideas of the French Revolution in an effort to improve their status, and in doing so unwittingly opened the door for the slave revolt of 1791. The presence of mulattoes and free blacks in the cities was causing increased concern and comment as early as the 1770s. In addition to the brown artisans who were familiar fixtures, wrote one observer in 1775, “there are now in the Cities Mulattoes and Negroes, calling themselves free, who have no known means of subsistence.” Questions concerning the loyalty of this class complicated the earliest efforts to regiment free colored men into police units to keep them off the streets. Opponents of such a measure reasoned that since “public tranquillity is assured, why give arms to the only men who might disrupt it?”50 Such confidence in uninterrupted
