Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (review)

Despite the important role of free persons of color in the Haitian Revolution, and their reputation for attaining a level of wealth and education prior to the revolution far surpassing that of the same group in any other colonial society, they are the subject of only a handful of scholarly studies. John Garrigus has made the most important contributions to date, focusing on the free colored elite in the southern province of Saint Domingue. Now Stewart King, another student of Robert Forster at Johns Hopkins University, has published his dissertation on free persons of color in the northern and western provinces. It is based, like Garrigus's work, primarily on notarial records, among the richest sources for French colonial social history.

King's sample consists of 3,520 notarial acts in which a free person color was a major actor, drawn from six parishes, including the major towns of Cap Français and Port-au-Prince, supplemented by 522 entries in sacramental records, 182 in census enumerations, and 5 in military criminal reports (p. 8). These records contain mention of approximately 4,000 distinct free individuals, three-fourths of them persons of color, and 4,197 slaves. According to the author, the notarial acts examined are about 4 percent of all those preserved in the archives for the period of his study, 1776-91. Unfortunately, he does not explain how he derived this figure. One wonders what percentage of notarial records from Saint Domingue are still extant. Yet more problematic are inferences drawn from the 4 percent estimate. King calculates that free persons of color owned around 30 percent of slaves in the colony in 1786 by dividing the 4,197 slaves in his sample by 0.04, for a total of 104,925 (p. 84). This presupposes that most records are extant, not that the method would be valid even if they are. By the same logic, the 3,000 distinct free persons of color in his sample would represent an estimated population of 75,000 in the entire colony, which is over three times the 21,813 free persons actually reported in the 1788 census. King's 4 percent estimate, dubious for more reasons than I have the space to explain in my review, is symptomatic of the problematic statistical reasoning throughout the monograph. Percentage differences used to support generalizations about characteristics of subgroups of the free colored population are sometimes as small as the 40 percent of 87 planter marriages that would have produced "whiter" offspring compared to 38 percent of all 253 marriages (p. 223). No effort is made to evaluate the statistical significance of such differences. On an even more basic level, numbers on one page are sometimes inconsistent with those on another page. To support his claim that free persons of color experienced relatively high fertility rates, King calculates 257 births per 1,000 women per year in Cap Français between 1777 and 1784, when annual baptisms ranged between 84 and 156 and the number of free colored women averaged 431 (p. 43). Then, three pages later, he tells us there were 36 baptisms of free colored babies in Cap Français in 1777. Moreover, children represented only 4 percent of Cap Français's free colored population in 1775 (1777?), 29 percent in 1780, and 11 percent in 1788, hardly proportions consistent with the earlier generalization about high fertility.

The book is much more about elite members of free colored society than about other elements. It argues there was a fundamental difference between the planter elite and the military leadership group. The planter group, on the one hand, was tied by genealogy and patronage to whites, with a certain aloofness towards free persons of color of...