The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard

graphically showed, social constraints against the free exercise of white male sexual power were virtually nil.⁹⁵ The inability, or unwillingness, of white Jamaicans to establish flourishing family lives and regular marriages was a serious reputational problem for colonists within the empire well before the Seven Years’ War.⁹⁶ The same was true of Saint-Domingue, where since the late 1600s the French government had tried in vain to bring in European women to marry male colonists. In 1750 Emilien Petit still believed the problem of creating stable white households in Saint-Domingue was the lack of European women.⁹⁷ Metropolitan governments were very concerned about observing and regulating familial relationships and sexual behavior. They saw population, security questions, and racial purity in colonial settings as indelibly linked together. As Kathleen Wilson asserts, “the fate of nation, colony, and empire was tied to individual sexual choice; the well-governed colony and the self-governing individual went hand in hand.”⁹⁸

      Contemporary commentators in both societies described the black or mulatto mistress as morally subversive.⁹⁹ British West Indians were occasionally moved to write verse celebrating the beauty of black women; the most famous being the “Ode to the Sable Venus,” composed by the Reverend Isaac Teale in 1765 and published in Bryan Edwards’s 1793 history. For Teale, the black woman represented forbidden but easily accessible sensual pleasures. In his heavily eroticized prose, the white man sought the “sable queen’s … gentle reign … where meeting love, sincere delight, fond pleasure, ready joys invite, and unbrought rapture meet.” Other writers saw that beauty in more threatening terms. Edward Long, for example, recognized that many white men found black women intrinsically erotic, but this recognition filled him with disgust, given his shrill belief that there was something essentially animalistic about black women. Famously, he opined that black women were attracted to white men for the same reasons that he believed orangutans supposedly lusted after black men. In this reading, Long argued that black women and female orangutans sought to improve themselves by attaching themselves to a superior species. Clearly in Long’s mind the gap between the most advanced animals—great apes—and the least advanced humans—sub-Saharan Africans—was not at all that great, placing him—as a potential believer in polygenesis rather than the conventional Christian belief in monogenesis—as both a progenitor of early forms of pseudoscientific racism and also beyond the pale for most thinkers wedded to ideas of a single human origin.¹⁰⁰

      For all their differences, Long and Teale shared a conviction with nearly all contemporary observers that sexual relations between black women and white men were inevitable, regardless of slavery. When white writers condemned Jamaican men for not marrying and for attaching themselves to colored mistresses, they couched their reproaches in terms of white male weakness and black female aggressiveness. Edward Long’s argument was typical: when a white man, through weakness of flesh, succumbed to feminine charms, he became an “abject, passive slave” to his black mistress’s “insults, thefts, and infidelities.”¹⁰¹ White men, masterful everywhere else, were powerless when in the clutches of conniving mulatto and black women. Black women were scheming Jezebels, “hot constitution’d Ladies” possessed of a “temper hot and lascivious, making no scruple to prostitute themselves to Europeans for a very slender profit, so great is their inclination to white men.”¹⁰²

      White colonists and travelers in Saint-Domingue described women of color in the same hypersexualized images and just as often portrayed themselves as under the erotic power of these women.¹⁰³ Girod-Chantrans observed that “these women, naturally more lustful than Europeans, and flattered by their power over white men, have, in order to keep that power, gathered all pleasures to which they are susceptible. Sensual pleasure is for them the subject of a special study.”¹⁰⁴ Hilliard d’Auberteuil, moreover, claimed that “mulatto women are much less docile then mulatto men, because they have acquired a dominion over white men based on debauchery.”¹⁰⁵

      Just as in Saint-Domingue, Jamaican white men blamed their indiscretions on white women’s deficiencies. White men had a schizophrenic attitude to white women. They alternated between praising them for their fidelity, attractiveness, and devotion to maternal duties and lambasting them for their lack of education, poor manners, unpleasing appearance, and violent temper toward their slaves. John Taylor in 1688 denigrated white women as “vile strumpets and common prostitutes” who so “infect” Port Royal “that it is almost impossible to civilise it” and who “trampass about their streets, in this their warlike posture and thus arrayed they will sip a cup of punch rum with anyone.” William Pittis in 1720 proclaimed that the climate so affected people that “if a woman land there as chaste as a Vestal she becomes in forty eight hours a perfect Messalina and that it is as impossible for a woman to live at Jamaica and preserve her Virtue as for a Man to make a Voyage to Ireland and bring back his Honesty.” By the late eighteenth century even the agency that was afforded by being a whore or a petty criminal was denied to ordinary white women, who were regarded as constant and affectionate but also as inordinately lazy and small-minded. William Beckford of Hertford Pen wrote in his 1788 history of Jamaica that white women were a sex that “suffers much, submits too much and leads a life of toil and misery.”¹⁰⁶

      The same progression of images also was something that occurred in Saint-Domingue. The practice of sending women from French poor houses to the Antilles did not succeed in balancing the gender ratio in seventeenth-century Saint-Domingue as it did in Martinique.¹⁰⁷ Throughout its colonial history, Saint-Domingue had far more white men than white women, despite royal efforts to provide additional female colonists. Recent historians have argued that these women were from respectable households, but the contemporary image of these filles du roi in the Caribbean was overwhelmingly negative: they were troublemakers, prostitutes, and poorly suited for marriage.¹⁰⁸ In the 1780s the Baron de Wimpffen relayed this common image of the first female migrants, noting that “they sent whores from the Salpêtrière [prison], sluts picked up in the gutter, cheeky tramps.”¹⁰⁹ Other women may have been put off coming to Saint-Domingue by the negative representations made about women who were already there. In 1713 the colony’s administrators informed Versailles, “We need at least 150 girls, but we ask you not to take any from the bad parts of Paris as usual; their bodies are as corrupted as their morals, they only infect the colony and are not at all good for reproduction.”¹¹⁰ The complaints about the morals and health of white female colonists continued in 1743 when Saint-Domingue’s governor complained that France was sending women “whose aptitude for reproduction is for the most part destroyed by too much use.” As he put it a few months later, “Real colonists are only made in bed,” referring to the need for an island-born population.¹¹¹ In the same vein, in 1750 Emilien Petit, who was himself a creole, advocated that the Crown send more single women to Saint-Domingue to attach male colonists to the colony permanently.¹¹²

      After midcentury, however, French officials and visitors gave up on the idea of using marriage between white men and women to repopulate and stabilize the colony. In 1779, Desdorides described relations between men and women in Saint-Domingue as completely different from France. He commented that “men here pay all their attention to their financial interests. Their passion for wealth weakens their desire to be loved. Therefore between them and women there are none of those sweet sentimental emotions that bind two honest hearts…. Those wives who come to America … have little to do and are relegated to their plantations.”¹¹³ Baron de Wimpffen described white women as living in decadence and boredom and agreed with Girod-Chantrans that they were crueler to their slaves than were most men.¹¹⁴ Thus, the same assumptions and stereotypes that operated in Jamaica were also working in Saint-Domingue.

      Moreau de Saint-Méry agreed with de Wimpffen: “The state of idleness in which creole women are raised, the heat they are accustomed to experiencing, the indulgence perpetually extended to them; the effects of a vivid imagination & an early development, all produces an extreme sensitivity in their nervous system. It is this very sensitivity that produces their indolence which pairs with their vivacity to create a temperament that is fundamentally a little melancholy.” He continued, “Who would not be disgusted to see a delicate woman who cries over the story of the slightest misfortune preside over a punishment she ordered! Nothing can equal the anger of a creole woman who punishes the slave that her spouse may have