Cultivators, Domestics, and Slaves: Slavery in Santo Domingo Under Louverture and Napoleon, 1801–1803

On January 13, 1803, the French notary Derieux visited the first of several estates owned by Domingo Rodríguez, recently deceased. Rodríguez’s property lay in the environs of Santiago de los Caballeros, a town in the north-central valley of Santo Domingo on eastern Hispaniola (today, the Dominican Republic). Over a three-week period, Derieux traveled with a team of witnesses and assessors to properties as far away as coastal Puerto Plata in order to assess the value of Rodríguez’s cloth store, home, cabins, pasture land, livestock, cane and foodstuff fields, and sugar-processing equipment. Two of the three plantations also included a different kind of asset. At the sugar estate Gourave, Derieux wrote down the names of the 35 cultivateurs, cultivatrices, and enfants, that is, male and female agricultural workers and their children.¹

At that moment, in Santiago, two “nègresses qui dépendent également de l’habitation” (black women who were also dependents of the estate) were serving Rodríguez’s widow, Juana de Roxas. At the cattle and pig ranch Yacica, Derieux noted the names of three more “cultivateurs attachés au service de la hatte” (cultivators attached to the service of the ranch): the mayoral (foreman) Gregoire, Batiste, and Fernand. Although Derieux assigned every other line item on the inventory an assessed value, he gave none of these cultivators a price.²

The notary, the cultivators, and the towns and plantations where they lived had recently been caught up in an Atlantic storm over territory and the future of slavery. Just a few years earlier, Derieux was living and working in Fort Dauphin, in the French colony of Saint Domingue on western Hispaniola (contemporary Haiti).³ Following the transfer of the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo to the emancipationist French Republic (1795), its annexation by Toussaint Louverture, revolutionary leader and governor of Saint Domingue (1801), and an occupation led by first consul of the French Republic Napoleon Bonaparte (1802), Derieux traveled across the border to work in Santo Domingo. His clients were Spanish-speaking inhabitants from Santo Domingo and French-speaking refugees from Saint Domingue. These refugees carried rumors and news of the movement of troops, the destruction of plantations and crops, and the freedom of slaves in what had been the sugar-producing center of the French Caribbean.⁴ Freedom’s shadow fell over Santo Domingo’s slave owners, too; once the French Republic confirmed universal emancipation in its empire and Louverture crossed Hispaniola’s border to claim Santo Domingo, the French Republic’s emancipation and Louverture’s emancipation legally extended to the Spanish colony. Even as Napoleon’s forces tried to wrest control of the island from Louverture, they promised to respect emancipation.⁵

Santo Domingo residents under French rule turned to French notaries like Derieux to organize their local economic transactions, but also to protect their claims to human property and impede the potential emancipation of their unfree labor. Within six months of his visit to Rodríguez’s properties, the notary Derieux conducted and transcribed inventories for four more Santiago residents; these included laboring individuals described as cultivateurs and domestiques (domestic servants). Derieux’s inventories never stated the precise status of these laboring men, women, and children. He described them variously as persons attached to, or dependent on the land and in the land’s service, or listed them after the matter-of-fact statement, “suivant les cultivateurs” (here follow the cultivators), or before the conclusion: “qui sont tous les biens composant la dite habitation/hatte/guildive” (which are all the goods that make up the said plantation/ranch/rum house). These laborers were never themselves assigned a monetary value, but they always appeared alongside evaluated property. In fact, in most of Derieux’s inventories, they appeared in the place traditionally filled by a list of slaves—immediately following a list of livestock. In a few instances, Derieux linked the cultivateurs and domestiques to color, race, or nation, like the two unnamed “nègresses” in Juana de Roxas’s service, a cultivateur...