French Revolution. By the 1780s, white observers saw free nonwhites in cities as sources of sedition to be carefully watched and controlled, and government functionaries took extra care to count the numbers of urban affranchis in their occasional censuses. For example, official figures noted only 195 free colored residents in 1775 in Cap Français, but in 1780, in what was apparently a more careful count, almost 1,400 people appeared in this category, ample testimony both to an expanding presence and to a mounting concern.51 By the time the drama of the early French Revolution gripped Saint-Domingue’s coastal cities, planters all over the island were expressing fears that agitation in the towns might spread to plantation areas through the agency of the blacks and mulattoes in nearby cities. “The idle negroes of the cities are the most dangerous,” wrote a typical sugar planter from the western parish of Arcahaye in 1790. Moves were already under way “to expel from the towns all the vagrants, people who had nothing to lose,” and who were at the center of all the agitation.52
Such concerns were not misplaced. Throughout the eighteenth century, planters found the links between city and country both vexing and essential. Acutely aware that cities with their free populations loomed as ever-present enticements to desertion for dissident slaves, they also recognized that the survival of their plantations depended upon the access to markets and the sea which port cities provided. Therefore, they actively worked to assure the free flow of goods between the interior and the coast, even though its potential costs to their social regime were obvious.
The growth of internal marketing systems in Caribbean societies, an eighteenth-century phenomenon closely tied to the growth of cities, presented further opportunities for individual mobility even as it brought the worlds of town and country closer together. In both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, masterless people of all descriptions controlled in large measure the movement of foodstuffs and cheap consumer goods between cities and outlying areas. In the British colony, the practice of slaves raising their own fruits and vegetables on garden plots set aside for that purpose was well established throughout the island by mid-century. As the free population of the cities expanded, slaves found ready markets for their produce, which they exchanged for money or other items.53
From its inception, the Jamaican marketing system involved slave women and their free black and brown counterparts as the key agents. The Jamaican “higgler,” a social type prominent in the society to the present day, became the broker in the lively commerce between country and city. Attracted by the profits to be gleaned as a go-between and by the measure of freedom and mobility which the life of the higgler promised, many women fled plantations to pursue higgling on a full-time basis. Phebe, a seamstress who left her Kingston plantation in 1787, was still at large and “passing” for free five years later. She was “said to be living either at Old-Harbour, Old-Harbour market, or in their vicinity, and to be a higgler.”54 Planters and town merchants tried hard to control these “wandering higglers,” who “fore stal so many of the necessaries of life that are sold in our markets,” and who brought news from the city to slaves on the plantations.55 For both economic and security reasons, therefore, higglers and other itinerant traders and peddlers found their chosen professions severely circumscribed by law, especially in times of tension like the early revolutionary era in the Caribbean. “No character is so dangerous in this Country as that of a Pedlar,” reported a group of north coast planters in 1792, “and perhaps there was never a rebellion among the Slaves in the West India Islands which was not either entirely, or in part carried on through this Class of People.”56
In Saint-Domingue, internal marketing played the same role in linking the plantations with the cities. The opportunities within the domestic economy of the French colony attracted all types of people: poor urban whites out of work, free blacks and mulattoes, and privileged slaves, all dealing in produce and small European manufactures. In the cities themselves, free black and brown women took the central roles; many of them owned commercial “houses” and slaves of their own. And like the higglers of Jamaica, country women rose early to travel from plantation to plantation and buy produce from slaves to sell in city markets. Planter concern with the mobility of all these wandering buyers and sellers involved not only their pesky ability to control a large share of internal markets, but extended to their larger social role as well. The legendary maroon leader called Mackandal, who led a campaign to poison all the whites of the northern province in the 1760s, made brilliant use of a network of itinerant traders to predict and control events at long distances, thereby enhancing his status as a powerful religious mystic among his slave followers.57 These intermediaries would play a pivotal role in bringing from the cities to the plantations news of the excitement brewing after 1789.58
A wide variety of masterless types joined the slaves, runaways, and free blacks in Caribbean towns. Colonial governments experienced as much difficulty controlling many of the European immigrants as they did managing slaves. From early in the eighteenth century, for example, white immigrants in search of fortune or imported for the purpose of moderating the widening black/white population imbalance proved troublesome to the authorities in the British and French Caribbean. A 1717 experiment of the British Parliament that shipped convict laborers to the colonies as indentured servants soon backfired. Just months after the arrival of the first wave of bonded immigrants, Jamaica’s governor reported that
so farr from altering their Evil Courses and way of living and becoming an Advantage to Us, … the greatest part of them are gone and have Induced others to go with them a Pyrating and have Inveigled and Encouraged Severall Negroes to desert from their Masters … The few that remains proves a wicked Lazy and Indolent people, so that I could heartily wish this Country might be troubled with no more of them.
Just as displeasing to government officials were the results of the so-called Deficiency Laws, annual acts dating from 1718 which stipulated that plantation owners maintain fixed ratios of whites to blacks and livestock or pay fines. Governor Robert Hunter complained in 1731 that the whites introduced under this plan, many of them Irish Catholics, were liabilities to the community, “a lazy useless sort of people” whose loyalties were always suspect.59 By the 1780s, however, the planter class had swallowed at least some of its distaste for whites of lower station, though the price for this precarious white solidarity seemed a bit high for some. Planter-historian Bryan Edwards described the white commoner who “approaches his employer with an extended hand, and a freedom, which, in the countries of Europe, is seldom displayed by men in the lower orders of life towards their superiors;” Edwards found these pretensions to equality almost as disturbing as he later would find those of the free coloreds.60
French officials in Saint-Domingue echoed the same sentiments in the 1770s and 1780s, when the fabled “prosperity” of the colony attracted large numbers of European immigrants seeking to carve out a share of the profits for themselves. According to one observer, the new arrivals consisted largely of sturdy artisans, including “carpenters, joiners, masons, coopers, locksmiths, wheelwrights, saddlers, coach-builders, watchmakers, goldsmiths, jewelers, and barbers,” seeking to escape tough economic conditions at home.61 But a Cap Français police report of 1780 speaks anxiously of the “people arriving daily from Europe, who, for the most part, have crossed the ocean to flee their families and their country, and have come to America in order to escape the reprisals of relatives and of the law.”62 Distinctly multinational in character, the wave of immigration of these ambitious and often desperate people, mostly young men, brought to Saint-Domingue’s cities a new and restless population of “petits blancs” of boundless mobility and suspect loyalties. When British forces invaded Saint-Domingue in 1793, remembered a colonel involved in that effort, they encountered considerable resistance from urban whites whom he could only describe as “adventurers from every part of Europe” who had come to the Caribbean “in quest of fortune.”63
Like the free Negroes, mulattoes, and runaway slaves with whom they came into contact upon their arrival, unruly European immigrants soon found themselves unwelcome guests in a society where the power of masters depended to such a degree on the maintenance of social order. Hilliard d’Auberteuil reflected
