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ONE ST. DOMINGUE AND THE CARIBBEAN After Columbus landed near Mole St. Nicolas in 1492,, the Spanish government hoped that the island he named Hispaniola would be the center of a vast, opulent empire in the West. But the colony's potential as a source of surface wealth proved disappointing and Spanish attention shifted to more exciting conquests on the American mainland. Spanish colonial administrators moved to Santo Domingo in the eastern part of the island, and the western part remained virtually uninhabited except for French freebooters and buccaneers who roamed the area during the seventeenth century. Spain officially acknowledged this casual French presence by ceding the western part ofthe island to France in 1697 under the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick. Santo Domingo continued to be an underdevelopedcolony in the vast Spanish empire, but St. Domingue flourished as the most important of the French colonies in the West Indies.1 By the time of the French Revolution (1789), St. Domingue had assumed a position of importance unsurpassed in the history of European colonialism. In about eighty years the western portion of the island had been transformed into the busiest colony in the Western Hemisphere. The steady importation of black slaves from Africa helped establish a plantation system that in turn stimulated a trade estimated at over 200,000 tons annually, worth some $130 million. In 1788 alone, ninety-eight vessels carried 29,506 black slaves from Africa to work in the sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo fields of the French colonists in St. Domingue. One contemporary historian of the prerevolutionary French West Indies estimated the population to more than one-half million—40,000 whites, 28,000 affranchis (free blacks), and 452,000 slaves. They worked chiefly in the production of plantation staples for export, i. For a full account of the French buccaneers' role in settling St. Domingue, see James Burney, History of the Buccaneers of America (London, 1816); and Nellis Grouse, The French Struggle for the West Indies, 1665-1715 (New York, 1966). Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made no distinction between the two parts of the island, constantly referring to "Saint Domingue" as "St. Domingo," probably because the older Spanish version was easier to pronounce and spell. 9 IO HAITI'S INFLUENCE ON ANTEBELLUM AMERICA primarily to France. Over five hundred vessels traded with that country, and another seven hundred foreign carriers combined to import large amounts of flour, wine, butter, salt, pork, soap, oil, dry goods, and slaves in exchange for large quantities of sugar and coffee and lesser amounts of cotton and indigo. In 1788, the livestock on the island numbered roughly 245,000, and none of the animals was indigenous.2 St. Domingue was not only a prosperous island that offered planters the opportunity to make their fortune in the Caribbean and return to Franceas parvenus, it was also a strategically important colony and port for France. Fifty miles across the Windward Passage from Mole St. Nicolas was Cuba, the center of Spain's Caribbean empire. Spain and France, fearing the ubiquitous British presence in the Caribbean, allied themselves in a mutual defense pact to counter any British attempt to control this important passage between the British colonies of Jamaica and the Bahamas. St. Domingue was also a thorn in the British side because British trade suffered from the French colony's sugar production and its well-known illicit trade with Britain's American colonies. St. Domingue is the most mountainous area in the Antilles, and its io,ooo-square-mile area is mostly untillable except for several highly productive belts scattered through the western portion ofthe colony.Understandably,Frenchcolonial administrative departments and the major commercial activity were located in these agricultural areas. The northern plain, verdant because of favorable winds and the absence of mountain obstructions, was the center of St. Domingue's staple-crop production at the timeof the revolution, and was dominated by the entrepot of LeCap Francois (CapHaitien).In the west, Port-au-Prince and St. Marc domi2 . Philadelphia Gazette of the United States and Daily Advertiser, May 21, 1795; Ludwell L.Montague, Haiti and the United States (Durham,N.C., 1940), 5. For contemporary sources, see Bryan Edwards,An Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo,- Comprehending an Account of the Revoltof the Negroes in the Year 1791 . . . (3 vols.; London, 1819), III, 218-20; M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Mery, DescriptionTopographique, Physique, Civile, Politiqueet Historique de la Partie...

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