The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard

Seen another way, about 10 percent of Saint-Domingue’s free population of color lived in the three capital cities, while 40 percent of Jamaican free coloreds lived in Kingston.

      In the cities or in the country, most Dominguan free people of color were quite poor. But the vibrant urban economy of the 1770s and 1780s did allow the emergence of a small population of free colored merchants and property owners. The most prominent among these was the quadroon Vincent Ogé the younger, who claimed to have been worth 350,000 livres or £15,000 by the early 1780s. This was a large sum, two to three times as much as the net worth of a wealthy Parisian merchant at the same time.⁵⁹ Ogé’s case was unusual, because he was from a mixed-race coffee-planting family, was educated in Bordeaux, and had an uncle who was a merchant in Cap Français. In the 1780s, Ogé sold French cargos around the colony, was part owner of a schooner, and leased and subleased apartments in Cap Français. Another man of one-quarter African descent whom contemporaries described as a large-scale merchant (négociant) was Joseph-Charles Haran, born in the town of Léogane around 1744. In 1785 he subleased a property in Port-au-Prince that included a shop, twenty-seven slaves, a flat-bottomed boat, eight carts, twenty-four mules, and three horses. Unfortunately the lease fell through, and by 1787 he owed his creditors 440,000 livres or £19,000 while his assets were worth 215,000 livres.⁶⁰ Such possibilities were also open to a few exceptional free women of color. Indeed, two-thirds of the clients of color who appeared before notaries in Cap Français or Port-au-Prince to buy or sell property between 1776 and 1789 were women. The most successful was Zabeau Bellanton of Cap Français, who bought and sold over 100,000 livres or £4,300 worth of slaves and real estate.⁶¹ Dominique Rogers has found considerable numbers of women of color in Cap Français and especially in Port-au-Prince who lived on profits from rental properties.⁶²

      But it was unusual for free colored people to be wealthy, even in Saint-Domingue, which had the wealthiest free population of color in the Americas in the eighteenth century. The poverty of most urban free coloreds can be seen in the 1776 cadastral census of Cap Français. Free colored properties were on the outskirts of town and at the ends of streets that ran up into the hills in a region named Petit Guinée. Other cities and towns—Les Cayes, Saint-Marc, Port-de-Paix—had similar districts.⁶³ This segregation was based on economics, not formally on race. While free coloreds accounted for 10 percent of Cap Français’s population in 1775 and owned 16 percent of its houses, their property was only 5 percent of the total value of city residences. The census shows that free women of color were far more active within their class than were white women; 42 percent of free colored proprietors were women; only 14 percent of white owners were women. The average value of property that these white women owned was equivalent to the average value of property owned by white men, a rental value of 2,600 livres per year, equal to the purchase price of an adult male slave. Free women of color, on the other hand, owned property that was on average valued far less than this, with an annual rental value of 636 livres, or £27.5, compared to 798 livres for free men of color. Free colored property like this was typical of those recorded in the Cap Français census: “one-fifth of a city lot on which there are several wooden shacks belonging to Pierre known as Beau Soleil, free black, and occupied by him.”⁶⁴

      Saint-Domingue’s whites, as in Jamaica, lived disproportionately in the cities. They made up 5 percent of the colony’s overall population, but they were 22 percent of the population of Cap Français and nearly 30 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince.⁶⁵ Some of these were administrative personnel and local merchants, but many were involved in transatlantic commerce. The 1776 census of Cap Français shows that approximately two-thirds of the city’s houses were leased to tenants.⁶⁶ While Jamaica’s eighteenth-century sugar planters paid to ship their produce back to Britain to be sold by merchants, a practice some Dominguan planters followed, many Saint-Domingue planters expected metropolitan merchants to come to colonial ports and to buy their produce there. Because British sugar colonies imported their food from North America, ships sailing from Britain to the Caribbean often did not have full cargoes. But French merchants held tight to their monopoly system, which prohibited colonial planters from buying foreign supplies. French ships, therefore, sailed to the Saint-Domingue full of wheat, dried beef, and other provisions, which their captains expected to sell for a good profit to the colonial market. They then bought sugar, coffee, and other crops to carry back to Europe.⁶⁷

      As in Jamaica, therefore, Saint-Domingue had a class of wealthy urban merchants, though they were more likely than their Kingston counterparts to be affiliated with metropolitan firms. They occupied the most desirable real estate in Cap Français. The median rent for the city’s nine hundred plus houses or plots was 2,000 livres per year, strikingly higher than in central Paris, where in the same period 500 livres would rent a ground-floor apartment of three or four rooms for a year.⁶⁸ A few streets between the sea and the cathedral square in Cap Français had rents of 6,000 to 9,000 livres per annum, the value of two to three skilled slaves. Some houses near the harbor rented for as much as 15,000 livres.⁶⁹ The profit that merchants reaped from the commercial monopoly also explains the deep tension between metropolitan merchants and colonial planters over the future of this system, as described in Chapters 7 and 8.

      A key aspect of the mercantile life of Cap Français was the exchange of information in new kinds of public spaces. In addition to its various open-air markets, its theater, and the fountains, squares, and gardens that proliferated after 1763, the city had literary societies, book stores, and a biweekly broadside, the Affiches américaines.⁷⁰ From 1761 to 1778, it had a commercial exchange, a space devoted to the buying and selling of letters of change and other instruments of credit. Yet colonial commerce did not lend itself to sociability. Cap was full of men who came to make their fortune, or who were tied to merchant houses in France. As Martin Foäche informed a young friend due to arrive in Cap Français in 1760, “There is little or no custom [here] of going to eat [with colleagues] at the inn, even those with whom one is doing business. When mid-day strikes, everyone goes in his own direction.”⁷¹ He told his friend to seek out guest tables instead of eating at his inn during his first six months in the city. This would allow him to meet people and gain information about the colony. Meeting like-minded people was especially important, as travelers to Saint-Domingue stressed the lack of connection that many colonists felt to any country. In his 1754 Essai sur les colonies françaises Pierre-Louis de Saintard wrote, “The Europeans who live in the colonies, having become by voluntary transplantations outsiders everywhere, no longer pretend to have a fatherland.”⁷²

      The pervasive notion of rootlessness and of the lack of connections among colonists also explains why Saint-Domingue was probably the most heavily “masonized” society in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. In France in 1789, Freemasonry involved less than 1 percent of the eligible male population.⁷³ It was at least five times more popular in Saint-Domingue, where there were around one thousand Freemasons, in a population of roughly twenty thousand white men. Not all men had the money or education to be a Freemason. James McClellan estimates that about 25 percent of “sociologically eligible white men” in Saint-Domingue were Freemasons.⁷⁴

      In France, Freemasonry was imported from England in 1725, and this pattern was duplicated in Saint-Domingue. In Bordeaux and other French Atlantic ports, English or Irish merchants often organized early lodges.⁷⁵ Jamaica opened its first masonic lodge in 1739, and English merchants involved in contraband trading brought the new institution to southern Saint-Domingue sometime before 1747. The names of many of the Jewish trading families active around the southern port of Les Cayes can be found among lodge members in Jamaica.⁷⁶

      In Europe and in the Atlantic World, eighteenth-century Freemasons consciously thought of themselves as part of a diaspora.⁷⁷ A network of correspondence joined lodges on a national or geographic basis. Such a web of connections was especially useful for transatlantic merchants. Masons developed what have been called “management tools of mobility”—initiation certificates, interlodge affiliations, passwords, and maps of lodge locations, all designed to insure that a traveling mason could find a friendly lodge in a new city.⁷⁸ While