Saint-Domingue: Difference between revisions
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==Establishment== |
==Establishment== |
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French [[buccaneer]]s established a settlement on the island of [[Tortuga]] in 1625. They survived by pirating Spanish ships and hunting wild cattle. Although the Spanish destroyed the buccaneers' settlements several times, on each occasion they returned. The first official settlement on Tortuga was established in 1659 under the commission of [[ |
French [[buccaneer]]s established a settlement on the island of [[Tortuga]] in 1625. They survived by pirating Spanish ships and hunting wild cattle. Although the Spanish destroyed the buccaneers' settlements several times, on each occasion they returned. The first official settlement on Tortuga was established in 1659 under the commission of [[King Louis XIV]]. |
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In 1664, the newly established [[French West India Company]] took control over the colony, which it named Saint-Domingue, and [[France]] formally claimed control of the western portion of the island of Hispaniola. In 1670, they established the first permanent French settlement on the mainland of Hispaniola, Cap François (later Cap Français, now [[Cap-Haïtien]]). Under the 1697 [[Treaty of Ryswick (Haiti)|Treaty of Ryswick]], [[Spain]] officially ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France. By that time, planters outnumbered buccaneers and, with the encouragement of |
In 1664, the newly established [[French West India Company]] took control over the colony, which it named Saint-Domingue, and [[France]] formally claimed control of the western portion of the island of Hispaniola. In 1670, they established the first permanent French settlement on the mainland of Hispaniola, Cap François (later Cap Français, now [[Cap-Haïtien]]). Under the 1697 [[Treaty of Ryswick (Haiti)|Treaty of Ryswick]], [[Spain]] officially ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France. By that time, planters outnumbered buccaneers and, with the encouragement of Louis XIV, they had begun to grow [[tobacco]], [[indigo]], [[cotton]] and [[cacao]] on the fertile northern plain, thus prompting the importation of [[slave trade|African slaves]]. Slave [[insurrections]] were frequent and some slaves escaped to the mountains where they were met by what would be one of the last generations of Taíno natives. After the last Taíno died, the full-blooded Arawakan population on the island was extinct. |
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In the mid-1700s, [[Acadian]]s, French settlers from what is now the [[Maritime Provinces]] of [[Canada]], sought refuge in Saint-Domingue following the [[Great Upheaval|''Great Expulsion'']] ordered by the British government. Acadians found themselves, however, existing as second-class citizens{{Fact|date=February 2007}}. |
In the mid-1700s, [[Acadian]]s, French settlers from what is now the [[Maritime Provinces]] of [[Canada]], sought refuge in Saint-Domingue following the [[Great Upheaval|''Great Expulsion'']] ordered by the British government. Acadians found themselves, however, existing as second-class citizens{{Fact|date=February 2007}}. |
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Prior to the [[Seven Years' War]] (1756-1763), the economy of Saint-Domingue gradually expanded, with sugar and, later, coffee becoming important export crops. After the war, which disrupted maritime commerce, the colony underwent rapid expansion. In 1767, it exported 72 million pounds of [[raw sugar]] and 51 million pounds of [[refined sugar]], one million pounds of [[indigo]], and two million pounds of cotton.<ref>[[C.L.R. James]] ''The Black Jacobins'' (Vintage Books: New York, 1963) Pg. 45</ref> Saint-Domingue became known as the "Pearl of the [[Antilles]]" — one of the richest colonies in the 18th century [[French colonial empires|French empire]]. By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue produced about 40 percent of all the sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe. This single colony, roughly the size of [[Maryland]] or [[Belgium]], produced more sugar and coffee than all of [[British West Indies|Britain's West Indian colonies]] combined. |
Prior to the [[Seven Years' War]] (1756-1763), the economy of Saint-Domingue gradually expanded, with sugar and, later, coffee becoming important export crops. After the war, which disrupted maritime commerce, the colony underwent rapid expansion. In 1767, it exported 72 million pounds of [[raw sugar]] and 51 million pounds of [[refined sugar]], one million pounds of [[indigo]], and two million pounds of cotton.<ref>[[C.L.R. James]] ''The Black Jacobins'' (Vintage Books: New York, 1963) Pg. 45</ref> Saint-Domingue became known as the "Pearl of the [[Antilles]]" — one of the richest colonies in the 18th century [[French colonial empires|French empire]]. By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue produced about 40 percent of all the sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe. This single colony, roughly the size of [[Maryland]] or [[Belgium]], produced more sugar and coffee than all of [[British West Indies|Britain's West Indian colonies]] combined. |
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The labor for these plantations was provided by an estimated 790,000 African slaves (accounting in 1783-1791 for a third of the entire Atlantic [[slave trade]]). Between 1764 and 1771, the average importation of slaves varied between 10,000-15,000, by 1786 about 28,000 and, from 1787 onward, the colony received more than 40,000 slaves a year. However, the inability to maintain slave numbers without constant resupply from Africa meant the slave population, by 1789, totaled 500,000, ruled over by a white population that, by 1789, numbered only 32,000.<ref>C.L.R. James ''The Black Jacobins'' Pg. 55</ref> At all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born, as the brutal conditions of slavery prevented the population from experiencing growth through [[vegetative growth|natural increase]][http://www.africanaonline.com/slavery_colonial_era.htm]. African culture thus remained strong among slaves to the end of French rule, in particular the folk-religion of [[Vodou]], which [[syncretism|commingled]] Catholic liturgy and ritual with the beliefs and practices of [[Guinea]], [[Kingdom of Kongo|Congo]] and [[Dahomey]].<ref>Vodou is a Dahomean word meaning 'god' or 'spirit'.</ref> Slave traders scoured the Atlantic coast of Africa, and the slaves who arrived came from hundreds of different tribes, their languages often incommensurable. The majority were |
The labor for these plantations was provided by an estimated 790,000 African slaves (accounting in 1783-1791 for a third of the entire Atlantic [[slave trade]]). Between 1764 and 1771, the average importation of slaves varied between 10,000-15,000, by 1786 about 28,000 and, from 1787 onward, the colony received more than 40,000 slaves a year. However, the inability to maintain slave numbers without constant resupply from Africa meant the slave population, by 1789, totaled 500,000, ruled over by a white population that, by 1789, numbered only 32,000.<ref>C.L.R. James ''The Black Jacobins'' Pg. 55</ref> At all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born, as the brutal conditions of slavery prevented the population from experiencing growth through [[vegetative growth|natural increase]][http://www.africanaonline.com/slavery_colonial_era.htm]. African culture thus remained strong among slaves to the end of French rule, in particular the folk-religion of [[Vodou]], which [[syncretism|commingled]] Catholic liturgy and ritual with the beliefs and practices of [[Guinea]], [[Kingdom of Kongo|Congo]] and [[Dahomey]].<ref>Vodou is a Dahomean word meaning 'god' or 'spirit'.</ref> Slave traders scoured the Atlantic coast of Africa, and the slaves who arrived came from hundreds of different tribes, their languages often incommensurable. The majority were Guineans from the [[Gold Coast (British colony)|Gold Coast]] and the [[Slave Coast]], followed by [[Bantus]] from the [[Kingdom of Kongo|Congo]] and [[Angola]]. Least common and most prized were the [[Senegalese]] and [[Tuareg]], while the [[Arada]]s of [[Dahomey]] were almost equally prized. |
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| ⚫ | To regularise slavery, in 1681 Louis XVI had enacted the ''[[code noir]],'' which accorded certain human rights to slaves and responsibilities to the master, who was obliged to feed, clothe and provide for the general well-being of their slaves. The ''code noir'' also sanctioned corporal punishment, allowing masters to employ brutal methods to instill in their slaves the necessary docilitiy, while ignoring provisions intended to regulate the administration of punishments. A passage from [[Henri Christophe]]'s personal secretary, who lived more than half his life as a slave, describes the crimes perpetrated against the slaves of Saint-Domingue by their French masters: |
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Upper Guinea: Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia |
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The Windward Coast: Present day Cote d'Ivoire |
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The Gold Coast: Ghana |
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The Bight of Benin or the Slave Coast: Togo, Benin and Nigeria west of the Benue River |
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The Bight of Biafra: Nigeria south of the Benue River, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea |
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West Central Africa (sometimes called Kongo in slave ship logs): Gabon, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola |
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Southeast Africa: Mozambique and Madagascar. The Least common and most prized were the Tuaregs. |
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| ⚫ | To regularise slavery, in 1681 |
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:"Have they not [[hanging|hung up]] men with heads downward, [[drowning|drowned]] them in sacks, [[crucifixion|crucified]] them on planks, [[buried alive|buried them alive]], [[crushing|crushed]] them in mortars? Have they not forced them to [[eat shit]]? And, having [[flaying|flayed]] them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or [[death by ants|onto anthills]], or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not [[boiling to death|thrown them into boiling cauldrons]] of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women [[death by barrel|inside barrels studded with spikes]] and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks [[death by dog|to man eating-dogs]] until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?"<ref>[[Robert Heinl]], ''Written in Blood: The History of the Haitian People'' (University Press of America: Lantham, Md., 1996)</ref> |
:"Have they not [[hanging|hung up]] men with heads downward, [[drowning|drowned]] them in sacks, [[crucifixion|crucified]] them on planks, [[buried alive|buried them alive]], [[crushing|crushed]] them in mortars? Have they not forced them to [[eat shit]]? And, having [[flaying|flayed]] them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or [[death by ants|onto anthills]], or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not [[boiling to death|thrown them into boiling cauldrons]] of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women [[death by barrel|inside barrels studded with spikes]] and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks [[death by dog|to man eating-dogs]] until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?"<ref>[[Robert Heinl]], ''Written in Blood: The History of the Haitian People'' (University Press of America: Lantham, Md., 1996)</ref> |
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Revision as of 05:50, 25 August 2007
Saint-Domingue | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1659–1804 | |||||||
 | |||||||
| Status | French colony | ||||||
| Capital | Cap Français¹ | ||||||
| Common languages | French | ||||||
| Government | Monarchy | ||||||
| King | |||||||
| History | |||||||
• Settlement | 1625 | ||||||
• Official settlement | 1659 | ||||||
• Recognized | 1697 | ||||||
• Independence | January 1 1804 | ||||||
| Area | |||||||
| 27,750 km2 (10,710 sq mi) | |||||||
| Currency | Haitian livre | ||||||
| ISO 3166 code | HN | ||||||
| |||||||
¹ In 1770 moved to Port-au-Prince where it remains until today. | |||||||
| History of Haiti |
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| Pre-Columbian Haiti (before 1492) |
| Captaincy General of Santo Domingo (1492–1625) |
| Taíno genocide |
| Saint-Domingue (1625–1804) |
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| Republic of Haiti (1820–1849) |
| Second Empire of Haiti (1849–1859) |
| Republic of Haiti (1859–1957) |
| Duvalier dynasty (1957–1986) |
| Anti-Duvalier protest movement |
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| Timeline |
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 Haiti portal |
Saint-Domingue was a French colony from 1659 to 1804, when it became the independent nation of Haiti.
Saint-Domingue is the French version of the Spanish name Santo Domingo. Spain controlled the entire island of Hispaniola (also called Santo Domingo or San Domingo) from the 1490s until the 17th century, when French pirates began to establish bases on the western portions of the island. In the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Spain formally recognised French control of the western third of the island.
Establishment
French buccaneers established a settlement on the island of Tortuga in 1625. They survived by pirating Spanish ships and hunting wild cattle. Although the Spanish destroyed the buccaneers' settlements several times, on each occasion they returned. The first official settlement on Tortuga was established in 1659 under the commission of King Louis XIV.
In 1664, the newly established French West India Company took control over the colony, which it named Saint-Domingue, and France formally claimed control of the western portion of the island of Hispaniola. In 1670, they established the first permanent French settlement on the mainland of Hispaniola, Cap François (later Cap Français, now Cap-Haïtien). Under the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, Spain officially ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France. By that time, planters outnumbered buccaneers and, with the encouragement of Louis XIV, they had begun to grow tobacco, indigo, cotton and cacao on the fertile northern plain, thus prompting the importation of African slaves. Slave insurrections were frequent and some slaves escaped to the mountains where they were met by what would be one of the last generations of Taíno natives. After the last Taíno died, the full-blooded Arawakan population on the island was extinct.
In the mid-1700s, Acadians, French settlers from what is now the Maritime Provinces of Canada, sought refuge in Saint-Domingue following the Great Expulsion ordered by the British government. Acadians found themselves, however, existing as second-class citizens[citation needed].
Thriving colony
Prior to the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the economy of Saint-Domingue gradually expanded, with sugar and, later, coffee becoming important export crops. After the war, which disrupted maritime commerce, the colony underwent rapid expansion. In 1767, it exported 72 million pounds of raw sugar and 51 million pounds of refined sugar, one million pounds of indigo, and two million pounds of cotton.[1] Saint-Domingue became known as the "Pearl of the Antilles" — one of the richest colonies in the 18th century French empire. By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue produced about 40 percent of all the sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe. This single colony, roughly the size of Maryland or Belgium, produced more sugar and coffee than all of Britain's West Indian colonies combined.
The labor for these plantations was provided by an estimated 790,000 African slaves (accounting in 1783-1791 for a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade). Between 1764 and 1771, the average importation of slaves varied between 10,000-15,000, by 1786 about 28,000 and, from 1787 onward, the colony received more than 40,000 slaves a year. However, the inability to maintain slave numbers without constant resupply from Africa meant the slave population, by 1789, totaled 500,000, ruled over by a white population that, by 1789, numbered only 32,000.[2] At all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born, as the brutal conditions of slavery prevented the population from experiencing growth through natural increase[1]. African culture thus remained strong among slaves to the end of French rule, in particular the folk-religion of Vodou, which commingled Catholic liturgy and ritual with the beliefs and practices of Guinea, Congo and Dahomey.[3] Slave traders scoured the Atlantic coast of Africa, and the slaves who arrived came from hundreds of different tribes, their languages often incommensurable. The majority were Guineans from the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast, followed by Bantus from the Congo and Angola. Least common and most prized were the Senegalese and Tuareg, while the Aradas of Dahomey were almost equally prized.
To regularise slavery, in 1681 Louis XVI had enacted the code noir, which accorded certain human rights to slaves and responsibilities to the master, who was obliged to feed, clothe and provide for the general well-being of their slaves. The code noir also sanctioned corporal punishment, allowing masters to employ brutal methods to instill in their slaves the necessary docilitiy, while ignoring provisions intended to regulate the administration of punishments. A passage from Henri Christophe's personal secretary, who lived more than half his life as a slave, describes the crimes perpetrated against the slaves of Saint-Domingue by their French masters:
- "Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man eating-dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?"[4]
Thousands of slaves found freedom by fleeing into the mountains, forming communities of maroons and raiding isolated plantations. The most famous was Mackandal, a one-armed slave, originally from Guinea, who escaped in 1751. A Vodou Houngan (priest), he united many of the different maroon bands, and spent the next six years staging successful raids and evading capture by the French, reputedly killing over 6,000 people, while preaching a fanatic vision of the destruction of white civilization in St. Domingue. In 1758, after a failed plot to poison the drinking water of the plantation owners, he was captured and burned alive at the public square in Cap-Français.
Saint-Domingue also had the largest and wealthiest free population of color in the Caribbean, a group also known as the gens de couleur. The royal census of 1789 counted roughly 25,000 such persons. While many free people of color were former slaves, most members of this class appear not to have been free Africans, but rather people of mixed European and African ancestry, or mulattoes. Typically, they were the descendants of the enslaved women that French colonists took as mistresses; through plaçage, a type of common-law marriage planters enjoyed with their slave mistresses, many were able to inherit considerable property. As their numbers grew, they became subject to discriminatory legislation. Statutes forbade gens de couleur from taking up certain professions, marrying whites, wearing European clothing, carrying swords or firearms in public, or attending social functions where whites were present. However, these regulations did not restrict their purchase of land, and many accumulated substantial holdings and became slave-owners. By 1789, they owned one-third of the plantation property and one-quarter of the slaves of Saint-Domingue.[5] Central to the rise of the gens de couleur planter class was the growing importance of coffee, which thrived on the marginal hillside plots to which they were often relegated. The largest concentration of gens de couleur was in the southern peninsula, the last region of the colony to be settled, owing to its distance from Atlantic shipping lanes and its formidable terrain, with the highest mountain range in the Caribbean. In the parish of Jérémie, they formed the majority of the population.
End of colonial rule
A 1791 slave rebellion began the Haitian Revolution, which culminated with the establishment of the independent Republic of Haiti in 1804.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American and British authors often referred to Saint-Domingue as "St. Domingo" or "San Domingo," which can lead to confusion with its neighboring former Spanish colony (called Santo Domingo in colonial times) which is today the Dominican Republic.
The name was changed to Haiti when Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence from the French in 1804. Like the term Haiti itself, Saint-Domingue may sometimes be used to refer to all of Hispaniola, but more frequently to the western part now occupied by the Republic of Haiti.
See also
External links
- The Louverture Project: Saint-Domingue - Saint-Domingue page on Haitian history Wiki.
- The Louverture Project: Slavery in Saint-Domingue
- ^ C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins (Vintage Books: New York, 1963) Pg. 45
- ^ C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins Pg. 55
- ^ Vodou is a Dahomean word meaning 'god' or 'spirit'.
- ^ Robert Heinl, Written in Blood: The History of the Haitian People (University Press of America: Lantham, Md., 1996)
- ^ http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/chap8a.html