Saint-Domingue was a
French colony on the Caribbean
island of Hispaniola
from 1659 to 1804, when it became the independent
nation of Haiti
.
Saint-Domingue is the
French version
of the
Spanish name
Santo Domingo. The
Arawak,
Carib and
Tainos people occupied the island before the arrival
of the Spaniards. When
Christopher
Columbus took possession of the island on December 5, 1492, he
named it
La Española, meaning "The Spanish (Island)". The
Latin translation
Hispaniola was soon in common use.
Spain
controlled
the entire island of Hispaniola (also called Santo Domingo
or San Domingo) from the 1490s until the 17th century,
when French pirates began to establish bases
on the western portions of the island. In the
Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Spain formally
recognized French control of the western third of the island.
Spain called the
island Santo Domingo. The western part of Hispaniola being
neglected by the Spanish colonists, French buccaneers settled there, first on the Ile de la Tortue
(Tortuga, Tortoise), then on Grande Terre (mainland
West Hispaniola).French called the western part
Saint-Domingue.
In 1804, Saint-Domingue became the
independent nation of Haïti
.
Establishment
French
buccaneers established a settlement on the
island of Tortuga in 1625
before going to Grande Terre (mainland). They survived by
pirating Spanish ships, eating wild cattle and hogs, and selling
hides to traders of all nations. Although the Spanish destroyed the
buccaneers' settlements several times, on each occasion they
returned due to an abundance of natural resources: hardwood trees,
wild hogs and cattle, and fresh water. The settlement on Tortuga
was officially established in 1659 under the commission of
King Louis XIV.
Among the buccaneers was Bertrand d'Ogeron, who played a big part
in the settlement of Saint-Domingue. He encouraged the planting of
tobacco, which turned a population of buccaneers and freebooters,
who had not acquiesced to royal authority until 1660, into a
sedentary population. D'Orgeron also attracted many colonists from
Martinique and Guadeloupe, including
Jean
Roy, Jean Hebert and his family, and Guillaume Barre and his
family, who were driven out by the land pressure which was
generated by the extension of the sugar plantations in those
colonies.
But in 1670, shortly after Cap François
(later Cap Français, now Cap-Haïtien
) had been established, the crisis of tobacco
intervened and a great number of places were abandoned.
The rows
of freebooting grew bigger; plundering raids, like those of Vera
Cruz in 1683 or of Campêche in 1686, became increasingly numerous,
and Jean-Baptiste Colbert,
Marquis de Seignelay
, elder son of Jean Baptist Colbert and at the time
Minister of the Navy, brought back some order by taking a great
number of measures, including the creation of plantations of
indigo and of cane
sugar. The first sugar windmill was built in 1685.
Under the
1697 Treaty of Ryswick,
Spain officially ceded the western third of Hispaniola to
France.
Thriving colony
Prior to the
Seven Years' War
(1756-1763), the economy of Saint-Domingue gradually expanded, with
sugar and, later, coffee becoming important export crops. After the
war, which disrupted maritime commerce, the colony underwent rapid
expansion. In 1767, it exported 72 million pounds of
raw sugar and 51 million pounds of
refined sugar, one million pounds of
indigo, and two million pounds of cotton.
Saint-Domingue became known as the "Pearl of the
Antilles" — one of the richest colonies in the
18th-century
French empire.
By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue produced about 40 percent of all the
sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe.
This
single colony, roughly the size of Maryland
or Belgium
, produced more sugar and coffee than all of the
British West Indies colonies
combined.
The labor for these plantations was provided by an estimated
790,000 African slaves (accounting in 1783-1791 for a third of the
entire Atlantic
slave trade). Between
1764 and 1771, the average annual importation of slaves varied
between 10,000-15,000; by 1786 it was about 28,000, and from 1787
onward, the colony received more than 40,000 slaves a year.
However, the inability to maintain slave numbers without constant
resupply from Africa meant the slave population in 1789 totaled
500,000, ruled over by a white population that numbered only
32,000. At all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were
African-born, as the brutal conditions of slavery and
tropical diseases such as
yellow fever prevented the population from
experiencing growth through
natural
increase [30248].
African culture thus remained strong among
slaves to the end of French rule, in particular the folk-religion
of Vodou, which commingled Catholic liturgy and ritual with the
beliefs and practices of the Vodun religion of Guinea
, Congo and Dahomey. Slave traders scoured the Atlantic
coast of Africa, and the slaves who arrived came from hundreds of
different tribes, their languages often mutually incomprehensible.
The majority came from the
Gold
Coast and the
Slave Coast, followed
by
Bantus from
Congo and Angola .
To regularise slavery, in 1685 Louis XIV had enacted the
code noir, which accorded certain
human rights to slaves and responsibilities to the master, who was
obliged to feed, clothe and provide for the general well-being of
his slaves. The
code noir also sanctioned corporal
punishment, allowing masters to employ brutal methods to instill in
their slaves the necessary docility, while ignoring provisions
intended to regulate the administration of punishments. A passage
from
Henri Christophe's personal
secretary, who lived more than half his life as a slave, describes
the crimes perpetrated against the slaves of Saint-Domingue by
their French masters:
- "Have they not hung up men with heads
downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them
to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them
alive to be devoured by worms, or onto
anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured
by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown
them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put
men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them
down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these
miserable blacks to man eating-dogs until the latter, sated by
human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with
bayonet and poniard?"
Thousands of slaves found freedom by fleeing into the mountains,
forming communities of
maroons and
raiding isolated plantations. The most famous was
Mackandal, a one-armed slave, originally from
Guinea , who escaped in 1751. A
Vodou Houngan
(priest), he united many of the different maroon bands, and spent
the next six years staging successful raids and evading capture by
the French, reputedly killing over 6,000 people, while preaching a
fanatic vision of the destruction of white civilization in
Saint-Domingue. In 1758, after a failed plot to poison the drinking
water of the plantation owners, he was captured and burned alive at
the public square in Cap-Français.
Saint-Domingue also had the largest and wealthiest
free population of color in the
Caribbean, a group also
known as the
gens de
couleur. The royal census of 1789 counted roughly 25,000
such persons. While many free people of color were former slaves,
most members of this class appear not to have been free Africans,
but rather people of mixed European and African ancestry, or
mulattoes. Typically, they were the
descendants of the enslaved women that French colonists took as
mistresses; through
plaçage, a
type of common-law marriage planters enjoyed with their slave
mistresses, many were able to inherit considerable property. As
their numbers grew, they became subject to discriminatory
legislation. Statutes forbade
gens de couleur from taking
up certain professions, marrying whites, wearing European clothing,
carrying swords or firearms in public, or attending social
functions where whites were present. However, these regulations did
not restrict their purchase of land, and many accumulated
substantial holdings and became slave-owners. By 1789, they owned
one-third of the plantation property and one-quarter of the slaves
of Saint-Domingue. Central to the rise of the
gens de
couleur planter class was the growing importance of coffee,
which thrived on the marginal hillside plots to which they were
often relegated. The largest concentration of
gens de
couleur was in the southern peninsula, the last region of the
colony to be settled, owing to its distance from Atlantic shipping
lanes and its formidable terrain, with the highest mountain range
in the Caribbean.
In the parish of Jérémie
, they formed the majority of the
population.
End of colonial rule
On the evening of August 22, 1791, a widespread slave rebellion
began the
Haitian Revolution,
which culminated with the establishment of the independent Empire
of Haiti in 1804.
Note: In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American and British
authors often referred to Saint-Domingue as "Santo Domingo" or "San
Domingo", which can lead to confusion with its neighboring former
Spanish colony, which was called Santo Domingo during the colonial
period.
Today, the former Spanish possession is the
Dominican
Republic
and its capital is Santo Domingo
. The name of Saint-Domingue was changed to
Haiti when
Jean-Jacques
Dessalines declared
independence from the French in 1804.
Like the
name Haiti itself, Saint-Domingue may sometimes
be used to refer to all of Hispaniola, but more frequently to the western part now
occupied by the Republic of Haiti, while the Spanish version
Santo Domingo is often used to refer to the Dominican
nation as a whole.
See also
Footnotes
- Haiti, 1789 to 1806
- C.L.R.
James The Black Jacobins (Vintage Books: New York,
1963) Pg. 45
- C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins Pg. 55
- Vodou is a Dahomean word meaning 'god' or 'spirit'.
- Robert
Heinl, Written in Blood: The History of the Haitian
People (University Press of America: Lantham, Md., 1996)
- Chapter 8 Page 1
- A Brief History of Dessalines from 1825 Missionary
Journal
Resources
- Paul Butel, Histoire des Antilles Françaises XVIIe - XXe
siècle, Perrin 2002 ISBN 2-262-01540-6
- Jack Claude Nezat The
Nezat And Allied Families 1630-2007 Lulu 2007 ISBN
978-2-9528339-2-9, ISBN 978-0-6151-5001-7
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