Blue coat or powdered wig : free people of color in pre-revolutionary Saint Domingue

355 Pages·2001·6.773 MB·English

by  King, Stewart R.

^B/ue £oat
or ^Powdered Wig
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Blue Coat
or Powdered Wig
FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY
SAINT DOMINGUE
Stewart R. King
THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS
ATHENS AND LONDON
© 2001 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
All rights reserved
Designed by Betty Palmer McDaniel
Set in 1O/13 Caslon
by G&S Typesetters, Inc.
Printed and bound by McNaughton & Gunn
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for
permanence and durability of the Committee on
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Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Stewart R., 1960–
Blue coat or powdered wig : free people of color in pre-
revolutionary Saint Domingue / Stewart R. King.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8203-2233-4 (alk. paper)
1. Saint-Domingue—History—18th century. 2. Free Blacks—
Saint-Domingue—History. 3. Free Blacks—Saint-Domingue—
Economic conditions—18th century. 4. Free Blacks—Saint-
Domingue—Social conditions—18th century.
F1923.K56 2001
972.94'00496—dc21 00-56782

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8203-4235-1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Part One. The Colony and Its People
Chapter One. The Notarial Record and Free Coloreds 3
Chapter Two. The Land 16
Chapter Three. The People 42
Chapter Four. Free Coloreds in the Colonial Armed Forces 52
Part Two. The Free Colored in Society and the Economy
Chapter Five. Slaveholding Practices 81
Chapter Six. Landholding Practices 121
Chapter Seven. Entrepreneurship 142
Chapter Eight. Non-Economic Components of Social Status 158
Chapter Nine. Family Relationships and Social Advancement 180
Part Three. Group Strategies for Economic and Social Advancement
Chapter Ten. Planter Elites 205
Chapter Eleven. The Military Leadership Group 226
Chapter Twelve. Conclusion 266
Appendix One. Family Tree of the Laportes of Limonade 275
Appendix Two. Surnames 276
Appendix Three. Incorporation Papers of the Grasserie Marie Josephe 281
Appendix Four. Notarized Sale Contract for a House 283
Notes 287
Works Cited 315
Index 321
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Acknowledgments
The research on which this book was based was made possible primarily by fund-
ing from the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Research in
France was generously supported by the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of the Johns
Hopkins University, through its Collections Division; I am especially grateful to
Thomas Izbicki, director of that division, for his assistance with this project. The
staff of Clackamas Community College, particularly its interlibrary loan division,
were very helpful during the writing.
My editor, David Des Jardines, was very supportive and encouraging during the
long process of turning the dissertation that was into the book that is. Jane Curran
did signal service as copyeditor, greatly improving some rather rough prose. This
work would not have been possible without the guidance, suggestions, detailed
comments, and careful editing, throughout the process of research and writing,
of my adviser at Johns Hopkins, Franklin Knight. In addition to Dr. Knight, Rob-
ert Forster, Philip Curtin, Dominique Rogers, Anne King, and John Garrigus
read sections of the work, and their commentary was invaluable. David Geggus,
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Carolyn Fick all gave me exceptionally useful ad-
vice about preparing for my research trip to France. The staff of the Archives
d'Outremer in Aix-en-Provence were most welcoming and professional to me
during my stay there. The photographic staff in particular was especially helpful.
My warm thanks to the director and staff of the archives for their very welcoming
attitude toward foreign scholars working in their facility. Jean and Anne Durand-
Rival were my hosts during my stay in Aix-en-Provence. Without their kind hospi-
tality, my stay there would have been much less pleasant as well as less productive.
They have been hosts to the American student population of Aix-en-Provence
for three decades, and I join their other "adoptive children" in thanking them and
wishing them well on the occasion of their retirement.
The staff of the United States Information Service in France provided very
useful logistical support to my mission. USIS Marseilles Public Affairs Specialist
Danielle Gallo was especially helpful and lived up to the best traditions of the For-
eign Service in assisting this American student. I regret very much the closure of
the United States Consulate in Marseilles and hope that the State Department
vii
viii • Acknowledgments
and Congress will reverse this penny-wise, pound-foolish decision. The staff of
USIS Paris and Deputy Public Affairs Officer James Hogan provided important
assistance and access to records during the first days of my mission in Paris. Jean-
Luc Bechennec, my host in Paris, went far out of his way, motivated entirely by
friendship, to help me get my feet on the ground in a strange city.
My parents, Anne and Donald King, are to a greater extent than anybody else
responsible for what I am intellectually. Their support—emotional, personal, in-
tellectual, and financial—was crucial to the production of this book. Finally, no
part of this work would have ever seen the light of day without the assistance of my
microfilm photographer, mistress of the darkroom, and darling wife, Kadijatou, to
whom I owe everything.
Introduction
On 9 August 1780, in the bustling colonial city of Cap Fran9ais, a young free black
couple, Sergeant Pierre Augustin and his wife, Marie Janvier Augustin nee Ben-
jamin, visited a notary. They had come to offer a house in the town as security to
one of their neighbors, a woman of mixed race, for a loan of 9,000 livres.1 (All
amounts of money in this book are denominated in livres colonial unless otherwise
stated. The colonial livre was worth two-thirds of a livre Tournois. Each livre was
subdivided into 20 sols, and in turn each sol was worth 12 deniers. It was apparently
a money of account rather than an actual coin, with a dizzying variety of Spanish,
English, and French currency actually circulating in the colony, helpfully trans-
lated by the notaries into livres colonial in almost all notarial acts.) The amount of
the loan to the Augustins was about four times what a newly arrived African male
slave cost at the time. The loan was the price, apparently, of a small coffee farm in
the countryside of Saint Domingue, for it is from this date forward that Augustin
began to style himself habitant, or gentleman farmer, instead ofperruquier, or wig-
maker. He also changed his official residence from the city to the outlying district
of La Souffrière in the parish of Limbé.
He was born, apparently, in Africa and brought to the colony as a slave while
very young. He was freed by an unknown master, who had trained him as a wig-
maker—it is possible that he purchased his freedom out of the proceeds of this very
lucrative trade. He married a free black woman with some resources and parlayed
military service, valuable trade, rural and urban landholdings, and apparently con-
siderable personal gifts into a position of some importance in free colored society
of Cap Français in 1780. Racially, he was a black and, worse yet, probably a bossale,
or African-born black, and thus he was at the bottom of the racial hierarchy of the
colony. He started as a slave laborer but by the 1780s was clearly in the upper
reaches of the free colored aristocracy. The house he pawned in 1780 adjoined an-
other one, of more or less equivalent value, owned by him and leased to a white
man. The 1776 cadastral survey of Cap shows him or his wife as proprietors of four
lots in Cap Français. The one apparently described as rented to a white in this act
was evaluated at that time as having a potential rental income of 1,500 livres per
year (somewhere in the vicinity of what Pierre Augustin himself must have cost
ix