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Chapter five The Slaves and Free People of Color of Cap Français David Geggus For most of the eighteenth century, Cap Français was the largest town in the Caribbean’s wealthiest colony, French Saint Domingue. At the height of its commercial importance in the late 1780s, it was home to about 15,000 permanent residents. Two-thirds were slaves and about one-tenth were free people of color. Its resident white population of 3,600 was reinforced by the presence of 1,000 or so soldiers stationed in the city barracks and, intermittently , by some 2,500 transient seamen who spent up to several months in the city each year. Even counting these outsiders, more than 60 percent of its inhabitants were of African descent.1 Founded in the late seventeenth century, Le Cap had grown rapidly in the 1750s and still more in the 1770s and 1780s. Scarcely two thousand people lived there before 1730 and fewer than five thousand in 1770. The town occupied an area of less than half a square mile, hemmed in between the Morne du Cap and the broad bay that formed its harbor. It extended just over a mile from north to south and measured more than a half mile at its widest point. On the eve of the Haitian Revolution of 1789–1803, most of its 1,361 houses were built of stone with slate or tile roofs; one-quarter had two stories. Among the seventy-nine public buildings were some impressive structures, notably the government house and the convent that were set in their own gardens, the huge barracks and arsenal, the royal warehouse, the hospital, and the prison. The presence of church and state was slightly less visible than in a typical Iberian colony—such as those covered in this volume by Landers, Chapter Five 102 Childs, Reis, von Germeten, and Soares—but considerably more so than in a British colonial town. Le Cap’s Frenchness could be seen in its tree-lined squares centered on large ornamental fountains, its numerous cafés and billiard halls, its bath houses, and a theater that seated fifteen hundred people, the largest in the Caribbean.2 Cap Français had only one-third of the population of Havana, Rio, and Philadelphia, and was smaller, too, than Charleston and Boston, and even Kingston, Jamaica, and St. Pierre, Martinique. Although Saint Domingue exported more than the United States, or all the British Caribbean colonies combined, its peculiar geography had given rise to a dozen transatlantic ports. Whereas the other port cities explored in this volume generally served as the single entrepôt for an entire colony or region, the abundance of shipping points in Saint Domingue reduced Cap Français’s local salience, as did the fact it was never (apart from a couple of years in the 1760s) the colonial capital. Le Cap handled only 35 percent of Saint Domingue’s export trade in the late 1780s and had only 45 percent of its urban population, which was itself very limited; merely 7 percent of the colony’s inhabitants were urban dwellers.3 Cap Français was nevertheless bigger than 90 percent of French towns. Visitors from Europe and North America considered it an elegant and bustling city of sizeable proportions.4 The town was an administrative and ecclesiastical center, a place of entertainment and of considerable strategic importance, but its primary function was commercial. It was a point of transshipment and a market for a very rich agricultural hinterland that exploited the labor of some 200,000 slaves. Sharing with the minor ports of Fort Dauphin and Port de Paix the trade of the entire North Province of Saint Domingue, Le Cap serviced the needs of nearly 2,000 coffee plantations, several hundred indigo and cotton plantations, and more than 260 sugar estates. It also acted as an entrepôt for several other of the colony’s ports. Excluding contraband, its annual exports on the eve of the French Revolution were worth more than ten million dollars.5 Whereas Port-au-Prince, the colonial capital that Le Cap overshadowed, has been the subject of a multivolume history, Cap Français has been very little studied. Dominique Rogers’s richly detailed dissertation on these two towns’ free populations of color constitutes the major exception.6 Urban slavery in Saint Domingue remains almost entirely unresearched, and sources for its history are not abundant. Only 4 or 5 percent of the colony’s slaves...

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