"Le Sens Commun": Atlantic Pathways and Imagination in Saint-Domingue's Affiches Américaines

"A pamphlet circulates in the colonies of America with the title 'Common Sense.' Mister Adams, one of the delegates to Congress, happens to be the author. This work entirely erases the idea of reconciliation and excites the Colonies to independence."¹

One of the most prominent historiographic conversations regarding the Haitian Revolution is the Revolution's impact on slaveholding societies elsewhere in the Americas.² One of the most recent works, Dun's Dangerous Neighbors, raises a provocative thesis: that the consumption of news about the Haitian Revolution pushed Philadelphians to define and limit the changes proposed by the ideals of the American Revolution.³ While the thesis merits extended conversation among historians of the early American republic, this study inverses Dun's question. The political and social rebellions of the American Revolution took place during the height of the colonial productivity of Saint-Domingue (colonial Haiti). In contrast to the British colonies or metropolitan France, the colony had a mere two printing presses, one in Cap Français and the other in Portau-Prince, and the one newspaper was not merely published under the aegis of the colonial state, but the editor was a state employee. Yet, the newspaper Affiches Américaines regularly published dispatches regarding other colonies in the Americas. Dominguans (residents of Saint Domingue) who read the newspaper- or heard it being read-would have been aware of political and, to a lesser extent, social and cultural changes elsewhere in the Americas, but particularly British North America, including the reprinting of excerpts from "patriot" pamphlets, as discussed below. This initial analysis finds that news traveled to Saint-Domingue through official and unofficial routes, provided raw material for colonists across the color line and any enslaved who had access to literacy in French or conversation to shape their geographic imaginings and political views in the decades immediately prior to the French and Haitian Revolutions, and served as a significant aspect of the public sphere in late colonial Saint-Domingue.⁴

Saint-Domingue had only recently established a newspaper. Official proclamations would be printed and posted in broadsheet and read at mass, but the project to create a colonial newspaper appears to have not begun until after the Seven Years' War, a century after Versailles dispatched the first French governor. While it is unclear if the government of Saint-Domingue created the newspaper in response to demand from colonists, it was founded by an incoming intendant in 1764 as part of a post-war effort to foster the colony's commercial viability. Printed on a state press, it would reflect state needs that would also "be to the Colony's advantage." The first editor of the paper received two instructions: print names of captured slaves sitting in the colonial jail and print the names of recently deceased owners of plantations and "other notable persons," "immediately after their death." The newspaper therefore began in the colony as an engine for regulating labor and clarifying inheritance.⁵ Royal attorneys, in charge of monitoring town jails, were supposed to alert the paper about captured slaves.⁶ With two months' notice "unclaimed" slaves would be auctioned off by the state.⁷ The paper, therefore, began and served as an official vehicle for the planter class and the colonial state.⁸

However, Affiches Américaines was not a simple propaganda organ, but rather fostered public conversation regarding the needs of the colonists. Writers from Port-au-Prince kept the rest of the colony abreast of the spread and impact of disease during the first half of 1766. "The death that we thought had stopped, took 60 persons from us last month . . . Our Spectacle, almost fallen, was raised by the Citizens with a praiseworthy zeal; but we are not better off, many Actors being sick."⁹ Local doctors would respond with advertisements for remedies. A naval surgeon working in Saint-Marc announced that he had a medicine to treat the "diarrhea, the most common, most obstinate, and most terrible sickness in this climate": "A stomachic, absorbent, aperitif & antiscorbutic Opiate" that had proven its efficacy...