Toussaint Louverture Read Free

“the so-called.” Colored men could not carry arms in town and were forbidden to mingle with whites in situations like church or the theater. A dress code existed for both sexes, though it was much relaxed for colored women following a strike by the notorious courtesans.
    At the same time, colored men were a large majority in all branches of colonial military service. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, service in the militias and the
marechaussee
(a sort of police force that devoted much time to the capture of runaway slaves) was seen as onerous by the whites of Saint Domingue, who assiduously sought to evade it. But the military was embraced by the
gens de couleur.
For freedmen it was a way of earning respect; for others (including some slaves of undiluted African blood) it was a pathway to freedom. Though not uncommon, the freeing of slaves was frowned on by the government and discouraged by a manumission tax of between five hundred and two thousand colonial livres—a very substantial sum, payable by the slave owner. Those who served in special military missions (including support of the American Revolution at the battle of Savannah in 1779) could earn a waiver of this tax, and the
marechaussee
offered such waivers even in peacetime. An unintended and unexamined consequence of these practices was that much of the defense of the colony was placed in the hands of a race and class which the whites of Saint Domingue were determined to oppress.
    The labor-intensive plantation system of French Saint Domingue required extraordinary growth of the slave population, mainly through importation rather than new births. As many as thirty thousand new slaves arrived from Africa every year. Some slaves were able to earn their freedom, through military service, as with the
gens de couleur,
or the exercise of some particular skill which might pay down their price totheir masters. In the records of the time, free blacks are hard to distinguish from free
gens de couleur;
their legal status was the same, though their social situation was not, and often the two groups are amalgamated under the designation
affranchis,
or freedmen.
    Conditions for Saint Domingue's slaves were unusually harsh. The colony's geography encouraged escape. At the edge of every cane field was likely to be found the first of a seemingly infinite series of mountains, covered with near-impenetrable jungle, with rain forest at the greatest heights. It was easy enough to snatch up one's cane-cutting machete and bolt, difficult to be recaptured. The colony distinguished between
petit marronage,
where a slave might go AWOL for just a few days to visit neighboring plantations, carry out personal business, or just enjoy a taste of freedom, and
grand marronage,
where escape was permanent, or intended to be. The number and size of maroon communities in the mountains have been disputed by late-twentieth-century scholarship, but certainly there were more than a few of them. Some were quite sizable, and some, like the large group at Bahoruco, southeast of the capital of Port-au-Prince, had their independence and freedom formally recognized by the colonial government. In the beginning, some maroon groups joined Hispaniolas last surviving few Arawaks, and though the Indian bloodline was soon invisibly submerged in the African, some Indian religious and cultural practices were absorbed by the maroons. Meanwhile, the demand to recapture runaway slaves, and the need for defense against bands of maroon raiders who sometimes pillaged outlying plantations, required both the maroons and the
marechaussee
to develop a certain expertise at jungle warfare.
    The American Declaration of Independence began with the famously resonant claim of natural human rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Everyone tacitly understood, however, that these rights belonged to white men, only. Thomas Jefferson believed that the right to vote should be limited to significant