The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard

9. “Plan de la Ville du Cap François et de ses Environs Dans l’Isle St. Domingue, Nicolas Poncé.” © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.

      But this portrait of the colony as a center of Enlightenment activity is misleading. For one thing, urban sociability came late to Saint-Domingue. Many of these institutions were established in Saint-Domingue as an attempt by French authorities after 1763 to create “civilized” public spaces binding Saint-Domingue’s colonists closer to France. Second, the colony’s towns became sizeable only in the 1770s and 1780s. Cap Français, for example, had around forty-four hundred residents in 1771, including slaves, and tripled to fifteen thousand by 1788, still counting slaves.⁶ Third, although Saint-Domingue had three regional capitals—Cap Français, Port-au-Prince, and Les Cayes, on the southern coast—it was no more extensively urbanized than Jamaica. This proliferation of capitals was largely a function of how difficult it was to travel around the colony and in particular reflected the military vulnerability of the northern coast. Counting the population of these regional capitals, about 5 to 6 percent of Saint-Domingue lived in cities, a number about half of the 10 to 12 percent of Jamaica’s population that lived in towns by the middle of the 1780s. When Saint-Domingue’s roughly fifty parish towns are counted, with populations of about three hundred apiece, however, the two colonies are roughly equivalent in people in urban or semiurban settings, with about 10 to 12 percent of people living in urban or semiurban places.⁷

      It was only in the middle of the eighteenth century that France began to spend large sums mapping and planning its colonial cities.⁸ The case of Port-au-Prince illustrates this process. In 1749, when the Crown officially designated it as the site for Saint-Domingue’s new colonial capital, Port-au-Prince was a plantation. Religious services were held for a while in the estate’s sugar refinery, while the colony’s governor-general lived in the main plantation house. In November 1751 royal authorities were still granting land and laying out the city when an earthquake struck and destroyed three-quarters of the one hundred houses that had been built there. The city was a cesspool, until 1770, when the residents began filling in the rutted-out and overly wide streets between houses.⁹ In 1770 another earthquake hit. After this, administrators decreed that all houses were to be built in wood, or masonry between posts, rather than stone, to minimize earthquake damage. A decade later Port-au-Prince had few buildings with a second story. Even in the late 1780s, Moreau de Saint-Méry observed that “nothing about it is reminiscent of a large city.”¹⁰ On the north coast, by contrast, Cap Français was a larger, older, and more architecturally sophisticated city than Port-au-Prince, with many two-story stone and masonry buildings. In 1756, however, it had only few of the dance halls, public gardens, fountains, coffee houses, print shops, and bookstores that would later lead travelers to describe it as the Paris of the Antilles. These buildings and public spaces were mostly erected in the 1770s and 1780s. The theater, discussed below, was an exception, having first made its appearance in 1740.¹¹

      At midcentury, colonists in Saint-Domingue and Jamaica were already beginning to argue that these places had moved past their buccaneering origins.¹² In 1750, for example, Emilien Petit, a judge and planter born in the former pirate town of Léogane, argued that “this country is no longer, as in its origin, inhabited almost entirely by crude, unknown, undistinguished people … seeking refuge in another world from the consequences of their crimes.”¹³ This conviction that Saint-Domingue had attained a new stage of development grew stronger after the Seven Years’ War, as royal authorities began to increase the size of the colonial bureaucracy, allowed the establishment of a printing office, and established regular transatlantic and intracolonial mail service.¹⁴

      These post-1763 changes in the colony’s urban culture were so noticeable that in 1769 the planter G. Lerond proposed that Saint-Domingue have its own literary academy. Sophisticated gentlemen, he claimed, had replaced illiterate buccaneers: “All fashions are found in the colony today: plays, concerts, libraries, sumptuous parties where gaiety and wit oppose irksome boredom…. Pirates have given way to dandies with embroidered velvet jackets…. A love of learning accompanies this love of luxury. Those who previously could not read or write are today poets, orators, and scientists.” But an anonymous critic pointed out that the new breed of colonists were obsessed with making money, not polite conversation: “many intelligent people will be found in Saint-Domingue but I repeat that they will justly be too jealous of their time to attend literary conferences.”¹⁵

      It was in the cities that European visitors were most struck by colonists’ relentless materialism, for they expected that the Church would be at the center of urban life. This was true only in a spatial and legal sense. Saint-Domingue’s towns were built, as in Europe, around parish churches. The Catholic Church was an important part of French colonial ideology, and parishes served as the fundamental unit of local government. As the Code Noir of 1685 proclaimed, all religions besides Catholicism were illegal, though there were a small number of Protestant and Jewish families in the colony. The code specified that all slaves were to be baptized and instructed in the Christian faith. Few planters followed this aspect of the slave law, but the Jesuit order did baptize and catechize slaves.¹⁶ The powerful symbolism of the church meant that all towns and cities had sanctuaries of some kind.

      Yet colonists were notoriously irreligious. In 1768, Lieutenant Desdorides, an artillery officer recently arrived in the colony, wrote his father: “Religion, which everywhere consoles the just and slows the wicked, enflames or restrains almost no one in Saint-Domingue. Priests, by their bad conduct … lose much of the merit [by which] they will persuade [congregants] of the maxims they are charged with teaching. They assemble a very small number of faithful; thus one sees deserted churches…. Without religion … one sees the continual victory of error and disorder.”¹⁷

      In the 1780s, Cap Français was the largest French city in the Americas, with fourteen hundred houses and seventy-nine public buildings. In 1748 the Jesuits built a two-story masonry residence there, but in 1763 the town’s only church could still be described as “wooden shack ready to collapse.” A proper stone church was not in place until 1774. Few residents attended services, except during major feast days.¹⁸ Moreau de Saint-Méry illustrated the religious climate by describing how the parish of Cap Français raised funds. Every year the parish, just as in France, named two sextons to administer parish property and other financial matters. In France local notables pulled strings and made donations to be nominated to this prestigious office. In Cap Français, however, the parish deliberately nominated men who had no interest in church affairs, then informed them that they could escape the duty by making a large donation to the church. The nominee usually complied, and the committee went on to another victim. In some years they tapped two or three of these reluctant sextons in a single day.¹⁹

      Royal government, like the Church, was another metropolitan institution that looked more important on late eighteenth-century maps than was actually the case. In theory, Saint-Domingue was under absolutist rule from the 1660s. But it had little in the way of centralized royal administration until 1763. The Superior Council of Cap Français met in the royal storehouse for twenty-four years.²⁰ Not until December 1763 did the Crown convert the former headquarters of the Jesuit order into a proper “Government House,” with meeting rooms and offices for the Council, the lower royal courts, and naval administrators.²¹

      The colonial capital, Port-au-Prince, was the official residence of Saint-Domingue’s governors and their staffs. The end of the Seven Years’ War marked the beginning of a bureaucratic and mercantile influx that doubled the size of Port-au-Prince to 683 houses and then to 895 in 1788. This made it about the size of Kingston twenty-five years earlier.²² In the 1780s, Port-au-Prince had a total population of ninety-four hundred, but it was still smaller than Cap, which had between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand people. Despite its status as capital, it had few free residents able to participate fully in civic life. Most of its population consisted of soldiers and sailors (thirty-two hundred) and slaves (four thousand), leaving eighteen hundred whites and four hundred free people of color.²³ The city had a theater and, after 1782, a fashionable Vauxhall, though it eventually dissolved because of gambling disputes. Indeed, Moreau claimed that in Port-au-Prince, unlike Cap Français, male colonists