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Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, May 25,1999
Saint-Domingue was jewel of colonial France
Sugar island once was most coveted colonial possession
by Jim Bradshaw
Saint-Domingue, now known as Haiti, was the richest and most populated French colony in the 18th century, evolving from an informal colony set up by Frenchmen who hunted herds of wild pigs and goats on Tortuga, a small island just off the Haitian coast.
Reportedly expelled by the Spanish from Saint Christopher (Saint Kitts), the original French residents of Tortuga Island sustained themselves mostly in two ways. The first was by curing the meat and tanning the hides of wild game. The second was by pirating Spanish ships.
The first permanent settlement on Tortuga was established in 1659 under the commission of French King Louis XIV. French Huguenots had already begun to settle the north coast of Hispaniola by that time. The establishment in 16664 of the French West India Company for the purpose of directing the expected commerce between the colony and France underscored the seriousness of the enterprise. Settlers steadily encroached on the northwest shoulder of the island and took advantage of the area's relative remoteness from the Spanish capitol of Santo Domingo. In 1670, the French established their first major community. Cap Francois (now Cap-Haitien). During this period, the western part of the island was commonly referred to as Saint-Domingue, the name it bore officially after Spain turned over the area to France in 1697.
Saint-Domingue did not become a French possession until the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, but then, as historian Thomas Fiehrer reports, "from that date until the demise of colonial rule in 1803, population growth was steady, particularly in slaves. The French court stimulated settlement with propaganda advertising the West Indies as salubrious and fertile. ... By the mid-18th century, large sections of Saint-Domingue were under production in units of varying sizes.
...Sugar, cotton, tobacco, indigo, cacao, and coffee estates dotted the (region). A booming agro-export economy...exchanged materials...with Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Nantes, and Marseilles, via a series of stateprotected monopolies. Timber, barrel staves, furs, and rice arrived from Louisiana, and from France came crude machine parts, housewares, and luxuries. ...Cap-Francis...the leading urban center, could support French theatre, learned societies, an active press, European entertainments, a wide range of public merriments; such as fetes, bals masques, charivaris, and a stream of distinguished 'tourists.'"
By the middle 1700's, a territory largely neglected under Spanish rule had become the richest and most coveted colony in the Western Hemisphere. By the eve of the French Revolution, Saint-Domingue produced about 60 percent of the world's coffee and about 40 percent of the sugar imported by France and Britain. Saint-Domingue played a pivotal role in the French economy, accounting for almost two-thirds of French commercial interests abroad and about 40 percent of French foreign trade. But the system that provided such luxury to the planters, and so many jobs in France had a fatal flaw: Slavery.
Conflict and resentment permeated the society of Saint-Domingue. Beginning in 1758, the white landowners or grands blancs tightened their control of the life of Saint-Domingue through 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. The restrictions eventually became so detailed that they essentially defined a caste system. However, the regulations did not restrict the gens de couleur's ability to purchase land, and some of them acquired substantial holdings. Others accumulated wealth through another permitted activity, which historian C.L.R. James described as "the privilege of lending money to white men." The mounting debt of couleur provided further motivation for racial discrimination.
According to Fiehrer, the French Revolution, other upheavals in Europe, and a slave uprising on the island itself undid this society and sent French speakers of all shades of black and white fleeing from the island, many of them to Louisiana. Uprisings in Europe caused political reprecussions in America that were felt in the Caribbean. Then, between 1791 and 1804, black revolutionaries won control of the colony and renamed it Haiti. It became the first independent nation of former slaves in the Americas.
Fiehrer writes in his essay "From La Tortue to Louisiane: An Unfathomed Legacy," "The French Revolution shook the foundations of Western Europe and reverberated in the West Indies, whence the inhabitants of Saint-Domingue, France's colonial jewel, got themselves to Cuba, Jamaica, the United Sates and Europe. Eventually, Cuba and Louisiana wound up with the lion's share of Saint-Domingue dispossessed. ...By 1815, well over 11,000 refugees ... had regrouped (in Louisiana) from disparate points in Europe and the Americas."
According to Paul F. Lachance's essay, "The Foreign French," the most spectacular exodus of French colonials from Saint-Domingue occurred on June 23, 1793, when ten thousand civilians and soldiers were literally pushed into the sea by slave rebels. Most of them scrambled aboard ships and sailed to ports on the Atlantic seaboard.
In the summer of 1798, British-owned Jamaica received a large contingent of refugees. Then, Lachance says, "The last and largest of the mass departures took place in 1803. With the defeat of the army sent by Napoleon to restore French authority, practically all of the remaining whites, many free persons of color, and some slaves, altogether 30,000 individuals fled to neighboring Cuba."
In 1809, because of the Napoleonic wars, Cuba deported many of the French colonials who had settled there six years earlier.
"Louisiana was the preferred destination of those leaving from the ports of Baracoa and Santiago de Cuba," according to Lachance. He cites a special report from the mayor of New Orleans between May 1809 and January 1810. Additional arrivals in the first months of 1810 pushed the total to more than 10,000.
"All three castes were well represented in the influx of 1809: 2,731 whites, 3,102 free persons of color, and 3,226 slaves," according to Lachance.
The Courrier de la Louisiana characterized the white refugees as "for the most part rich planters driven from their property in Saint-Domingue by a bloody revolution, who carried to Cuba the devris of their forture, their industry, and their activity...(who because of political problem were forced) to search again (for) a friendly shore where they might finally rest."
The slaves who came with them, according to the newspaper, where "faithful servants who preferred all the horrors of exile and proverty to the idea of separation from their masters."
Those who migrated from Cuba in 1809 chose Louisiana in part because there was nowhere else for them to go.
By 1809, France had lost all of its Caribbean colonies except Guadeloupe, which fell to the British in February of 1810. France was at war with England, so that ruled out British colonies as likely places for Frenchmen to settle. Spain and her American colonies were in revolt against Napoleon, eliminating those places as havens for the refugees.
The United States Consul in Santiago de Cuba reported that most of the French inhabitants banished from Cuba looked to the United States as "the only one capable of affording them a safe and peaceful asylum."
White and mulatto planters also came to Louisiana because they hoped that a law passed in 1808 banning the importation of slaves into the United States would not be enforced in Louisiana, which had not yet been accepted, into statehood. Indeed, it wasn' t, and the planters were thus able to bring with them large numbers of their "faithful servants."
Until forced from the Caribbean by revoltion and uprising, few slaves came to Louisiana from the West Indies. When the Company of the Indies ruled in Louisiana, slave ships sailed directly for Louisiana. According to Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's research, when the slave ships did stop in the West Indies, the demand for slaves there was "so desperate" that the ships sometimes did not reach Louisiana with their cargoes intact.
"While there was some trade in the 1720s between Louisiana and the French islands," Hall reports, "...there were never any plans to import slaves from these islands." In fact, she says, "Serious Obstacles were placed in the path of anyone wishing either to export slaves from the French islands to Louisiana or to emigrate from the French islands to Louisiana with their slaves."
According to Fiehrer. "The total influx (of refugees) doubled the (New Orleans) population and most sought immediately to find work or rural properties to resume economic activity. The number who located in the rural south and center of Louisiana (is not known), but their presence is indicated in all the sugar parishes and as far out as Natchitoches. ...(T)he frequency of spoken Creole in St. Martinville, Napoleonville, Henderson, and other areas may indicate aggregations of refugees. Even today, Creole surnames exceed those of any other group of French origin in the state."
At the time that the refugees began arriving in large numbers in New Orleans, new American immigrants threatened to gain the upper hand in politics, business, and the social life of the city. As a result, Fiehrer notes , "The francophone population, once in fear of economic competition from the new wave of American migration into Orleans Territory, avidly received the newcomers, and intermarriage was frequent . Local institutions like newspapers, opera, theaters, pharmacies, music schools, and the book trade all flourished for a time, and Creole political ascendancy, or at least group preservation, seemed assured until the Civil War. The caste systems and civil law of Louisiana and Saint-Domingue were identical, and all racial groups ... were augmented by the refugees. Saint-Domingue slaves represented almost a third of the 1810 slave population of New Orleans and its precincts and 10 percent of the slaves of Orleans Territory."
Fiehrer continues, "During that formative 18th century, Louisiana and Saint-Domingue were interdependent, sharing everything but the island's mountain vistas. Consequently, a large percentage of South Louisianans... descend to some degree from these refugees -white, colored, and black-who departed the civil conflict and eventually settled in our midst."