Saint-Domingue

Saint-Domingue
Division of New France
← 1625–1804 →
Flag
Capital	Cap Français¹
Language(s)	French
Government	Monarchy
King	See List of French monarchs
History
- Official settlement	1625
- Recognized	1697
- Independence	January 1, 1804
Area	27,750 km2 (10,714 sq mi)
Currency	Saint-Domingue livre
Today part of	Haiti
¹ In 1770 moved to Port-au-Prince where it remains until today.

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Saint-Domingue was a French colony on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola from 1659 to 1804. France controlled the entire island of Hispaniola, from the 1795 until 1804. The Frenchs were established on the western portion of the Hispaniola and Tortuga islands in 1659. In the Treaty of Ryswick, Spain formally recognized French control of Tortuga island and the western third of the island of Hispaniola and in 1795 the whole.

Overview

French called his hispaniola island colony Saint-Domingue. Saint-Domingue is the French version of the name Saint Dominic. The more important city in Hispaniola island since Christopher Columbus took possession on December 5, 1492.

Since 1650 the Antilles were spread corresponding some Greater Antilles, like Jamaica to England and Saint-Domingue, a very important colony, to France. Dutch, Frenchs and Brithish received some islands more.

In 1804, the Hispaniola island became of second independent American state, Haïti. Later Haiti was invaded by Spain, that cannot control the whole island again. The resting portion back to Spain, now comprises the Dominican Republic. The resting Saint-Domingue became the independent nation of Haiti, after Spain government reconquered most of Hispaniola island supported by local plantation owners.

Spain called the island Santo Domingo. Spain controlled the entire island of Hispaniola, from the 1490s until the 17th century, when French pirates began to establish bases on the western portions of the island. the official name was La Española, meaning "The Spanish (Island)" it was also called Santo Domingo or San Domingo. The Latin translation Hispaniola was in common use but eclipsed by Saint Dominic city. As the western part of Hispaniola being neglected by the Spanish colonists, French buccaneers settled there, first on the Ile de la Tortue (Tortuga, Tortoise), then on Grande Terre (mainland) and later Spain ceded whole to France.

Establishment

French map of Saint-Domingue French colony in Hispanola island, by Nicolas de Fer

As Spain conquered new regions on the mainland of the Americas, its interest in Hispaniola waned, and the colony's population grew slowly. By the early 17th century, the island and its smaller neighbors, notably Tortuga, became regular stopping points for Caribbean pirates. In 1606, the king of Spain ordered all inhabitants of Hispaniola to move close to Santo Domingo, to avoid interaction with pirates. Rather than secure the island, however, this resulted in French, English and Dutch pirates establishing bases on the now-abandoned north and west coasts of the island.

French buccaneers established a settlement on the island of Tortuga in 1625 before going to Grande Terre (mainland). At first they survived by pirating Spanish ships, eating wild cattle and hogs, and selling hides to traders of all nations. Although the Spanish destroyed the buccaneers' settlements several times, on each occasion they returned due to an abundance of natural resources: hardwood trees, wild hogs and cattle, and fresh water. The settlement on Tortuga was officially established in 1659 under the commission of King Louis XIV.

In 1665, French colonization of the island Hispaniola and Tortuga was on farms, cattle, and slave agricultural holdings, plantations and coffee plantation. It was officially recognized by King Louis XIV. Just this French colony was given the name Saint-Domingue, near present-day Haiti. In the 1697 by Treaty of Ryswick, Spain formally ceded the western third to France.

The French already controlled the western part of Hispaniola and Spain officially ceded the western third of the island to France in 1697,signing the Treaty of Ryswick.

On July 22, 1795, Spain ceded to France the resting Spanish part of the island of Hispaniola, the spanish colony named Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic. The treaty of Peace of Basel was the emergence of revolutionary France as a major European power. In the part of the treaty of France with Spain, represented by Domingo d'Yriarte, on 22 July, they were ending the War of the Pyrenees. In the second 1795 Treaty of Basel (22 July) Spain ceded the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola. Previously for decades, the French settlers had been colonizing and occupying the Spanish side territory towards east since. In throughout the archipelago is established the French colony named Saint-Domingue. The French also came at exercise during those years the slave trade in Saint-Domingue, which focused in slave agricultural plantations. Saint-Domingue increases soon after black population. They took example of neighboring Caribbean colonies, in coercive treatment in the slaves. More cattle, and slave agricultural holdings, cofee plantations and spice plantation were implemented, fishing, cultivation of cocoa, coconut and snuff culture. Saint-Domingue quickly came to overshadow the previous colony in both wealth and population. Nicknamed the "Pearl of the Antilles," Saint-Domingue became the richest and most prosperous French colony in the West Indies, cementing its status as an important port in the Americas for goods and products flowing to and from France and Europe.

Among the first buccaneers was Bertrand d'Ogeron, who played a big part in the settlement of Saint-Domingue. He encouraged the planting of tobacco, which turned a population of buccaneers and freebooters, who had not acquiesced to royal authority until 1660, into a sedentary population. D'Orgeron also attracted many colonists from Martinique and Guadeloupe, including Jean Roy, Jean Hebert and his family, and Guillaume Barre and his family, who were driven out by the land pressure which was generated by the extension of the sugar plantations in those colonies. But in 1670, shortly after Cap François, later Cap Français, now Cap-Haïtien, had been established, the crisis of tobacco intervened and a great number of places were abandoned. The rows of freebooting grew bigger; plundering raids, like those of Vera Cruz in 1683 or of Campêche in 1686, became increasingly numerous, and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay, elder son of Jean Baptist Colbert and at the time Minister of the Navy, brought back some order by taking a great number of measures, including the creation of plantations of indigo and of cane sugar. The first sugar windmill was built in 1685.

The Saint-Domingue's people was opposed to the arrangements and hostile toward the Frenchs. The slave population had severe food shortages and forced labor. The islanders revolted against their new masters and a state of anarchy ensued, leading more French troops. An early death among Europeans was very common, due to diseases and conflicts, the Cultural advantage could not be enough, the French soldiers from Napoleon sent in 1802 to quell the revolt in Saint-Domingue were attacked by Yellow fever during the Haitian Revolution, and more than half of the french army died because of disease.

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. Saint-Domingue became known as the "Jewel 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 the British West Indies colonies combined.

Thousands of slaves were imported from Africa to work on the tobacco, cocoa, cotton and indigo farms. By the mid eighteenth century Saint-Dominique had become the most lucrative colony in the Caribbean. Over 40 percent of all European sugar and 75 percent of all European coffee as well as much of France's eighteenth century wealth and glory came from the slave labour in the plantations of ‘la perle des Antilles’, Saint-Dominique.

 Centre for Research on Globalization

The labour 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 annual importation of slaves varied between 10,000-15,000; by 1786 it was 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 in 1789 totalled 500,000, ruled over by a white population that numbered only 32,000. At all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born, as the brutal conditions of slavery and tropical diseases such as yellow fever 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 the Vodun religion of Guinea, Congo and Dahomey. Slave traders scoured the Atlantic coast of Africa, and the slaves who arrived came from hundreds of different tribes, their languages often mutually incomprehensible. The majority came from the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast, followed by Bantus from Congo and Angola^{[citation needed]}.

To regularise slavery, in 1685 Louis XIV 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 his slaves. The code noir also sanctioned corporal punishment, allowing masters to employ brutal methods to instil in their slaves the necessary docility, 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 consume faeces? 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?"

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 (region), 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 Saint-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.

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

Jean Jacques Dessalines

Since 1758 white homeowners in Hispaniola island begin to restrict rights and creating the laws to exclude the mulattoes and blacks, by a rigid class system. There were ten black people for every white one. In France, the majority of the Estates General, an advisory body to the King, constituted itself as the National Assembly, made radical changes in French laws, and on 26 August 1789, published the Declaration of the Rights of Man, declaring all men free and equal. The French Revolution shaped the course of the conflict in Saint-Domingue and was at first widely welcomed in the island. At first, wealthy whites saw it as an opportunity to gain independence from France, which would allow elite plantation-owners to take control of the island and create trade regulations that would further their own wealth and power.

Between 1791 and 1804, the leaders François Dominique Toussaint-Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines led the revolution against the slave system established on the island, slavery in Saint-Domingue along with other Caribbean colonies from French colonial empire were the third source of income France. They were inspired by the houngans, sorcerers or priests Voodoos, Dutty Boukman and François Mackandal.

The French Civil Code of Napoleon affirmed the political and legal equality of all adult men and established a merit-based society in which individuals advanced in education and employment because of talent rather than birth or social standing. The Civil Code confirmed many of the moderate revolutionary policies of the National Assembly but retracted measures passed by the more radical Convention. The code restored patriarchal authority in the family, for example, by making women and children subservient to male heads of households or excluding slaves. Slaves and mix race people not improved their situation. On the evening of August 22, 1791, a widespread slave rebellion began the Haitian Revolution, which culminated with the establishment of the independent Empire of Haiti in 1804. The Haitian Revolution culminated in the elimination of slavery in Saint-Domingue and the founding of the Haitian republic in whole Hispaniola. France were weakened by a British naval blockade, and by the unwillingness of Napoleon to send massive reinforcements. Having sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States in April 1803, Napoleon began to lose interest in his failing ventures in the Western Hemisphere.

A minority of state officials and civil servants were employed, who were exempt from manual labor, included some freed colored Haitians. Many slaves had a hard work to survive, and they became increasingly motivated by their hunger. As slaves the population was uneducated and largely unskilled. Instead, they were receiving iron-fisted control with which they were kept as rural laborers in line. White residents felt the sting most sharply. While Toussaint, a former privileged slave of a tolerant white master, had felt a certain magnanimity toward whites, Dessalines, a former field slave, despised them with a maniacal intensity. A firm hand was used in resistance to slavery.

For a few months, the island was quiet under Napoleonic rule. But when it became apparent that the French intended to re-establish slavery, because they had done so on Guadeloupe, Dessalines and Pétion switched sides again, in October 1802, and fought against the French. In November Leclerc died of yellow fever, like much of his army.

His successor, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, fought an even more brutal campaign. His atrocities helped rally many former French loyalists to the rebel cause. Mackandal like others black slaves was captured by the French army, and burned alive at the stake. The Saint-Domingue's people were hostile toward abuse by the Frenchs. The slave population had severe food shortages and brutal forced rural labor. The islanders revolted against their new masters and a state of anarchy ensued, leading more French troops.The people beginning a series of attacks on the owners of sugar plantations and coffee. The French soldiers from Napoleon were sent in 1802 to quell the revolt in Saint-Domingue. the french soldiers were attacked by Yellow fever during the Haitian Revolution, and more than half of the french army died because of disease. The british naval blockade to France persisted, and besides Napoleon, involved in several wars need every French soldier.

Dessalines led the rebellion until its completion, when the French forces were finally defeated in 1803. Accordingly, whites were slaughtered and massacred wholesale under the rule of Dessalines. The brutality toward whites shocked foreign governments and prevented assimilation of the dreaded Haitians later.

Haitians made no overt effort to inspire, to support, or to aid slave rebellions similar to their own because they feared that the great powers would take renewed action against them, as was the case a few later of Spain.

The last battle of the Haitian Revolution, the Battle of Vertières, occurred on 18 November 1803, near Cap-Haïtien.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American and British authors often referred to Saint-Domingue period as "Santo Domingo" or "San Domingo", which can lead to confusion with the former Spanish colony period, and neighboring later the contemporary Spanish colony established Santo Domingo during the colonial period. Today, the former Spanish possession contemporary with early period of French colony correspond mostly with the Dominican Republic and its capital is Santo Domingo. The name of Saint-Domingue was changed to Hayti (Haïti) when Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence of whole Hispaniola island from the French in 1804. Like the name Haiti itself, Saint-Domingue is used to refer to all of Hispaniola, or the western part in the French colonial period, while the Spanish version Hispaniola or Santo Domingo is often used to refer to Spanish colonial period or the Dominican nation.

See also

• List of French Governors of Saint-Domingue
• History of Haiti
• French colonization of the Americas
• Spanish Colony of Santo Domingo

References

• Butel, Paul (2002) (in French). Histoire des Antilles françaises: XVIIe-XXe siècle. Collection "Pour l'histoire". Paris: Perrin. ISBN 2262015406. OCLC 301674023. 
• Nezat, Jack Claude (2007). The Nezat and Allied Families 1630–2007. United States?: J.C. Nezat. ISBN 9782952833929. OCLC 227000253. 
• Garrigus, John (2002). Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in Saint-Domingue. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. ISBN 0230108377. OCLC 690382111. 

External links

• The Louverture Project: Saint-Domingue - Saint-Domingue page on Haitian history Wiki.
• The Louverture Project: Slavery in Saint-Domingue