Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois Read Free Book Online

maintained in the theater, where the ten boxes at the top were reserved for free
    people of African descent, three for “free blacks” and the rest for “mulat-
    tos.” As a result, many mothers could not sit with their daughters. Free-
    coloreds were also banned from participating in the dances at the theater,
    though they were allowed to watch from their boxes. Le Cap was also full
    of “cabarets,” some legal and many more not, where liquor and gam-
    bling were available. There were other forms of public entertainment,
    such as a traveling wax museum where visitors could see Voltaire and
    Rousseau, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and, in 1789, George Wash-
    ington in his uniform. Le Cap’s public bathhouses, unlike those in France,
    did not separate men and women, so that “husband and wife, or those who
    considered themselves as such, could go to the same bath and the same
    bathtub”—an arrangement that, Moreau mused, was probably what made
    them so popular.37
    Le Cap was built on an extensive and protected bay, and its large and
    well-constructed port was the most important in Saint-Domingue. It was
    the first port of call for most ships arriving in the colony, and the easiest from which to join the transatlantic convoys. There were roughly a hundred larger ships in the harbor at any given time, and sometimes as many
    as six hundred. A visitor in 1791 described workmen “busy with all kinds of
    labor” at the port, loading “hogsheads of sugar or kegs of indigo.” Another
    later recalled that the harbor was “filled with merchandise being shipped,”
    where “all was bustle, noise, and cheerful labor.” The port was fed by the
    thriving plantation region that surrounded it. The northern plain, traversed
    by streams from the mountains, was an ideal place for sugar plantations.
    In 1789 the Northern Province, which included Le Cap, the plain, and
    the surrounding mountains, contained 288 sugar plantations, most of them
    producing refined sugar; 443 indigo plantations; and more than 2,000
    coffee plantations. The population included 16,000 whites and at least
    160,000 slaves. Among the latter were many who would participate in the
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    av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
    [To view this image, refer to
    the print version of this title.]

    “Veue en perspéctive du Cap François,” 1717. This watercolor was done by an
    artist looking west across the water toward Le Cap. The bay was an ideal sanctuary for ships, a fact that propelled the town’s rapid development into the colony’s leading port. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
    [To view this image, refer to
    the print version of this title.]

    “Vue du Port au Prince,” late eighteenth century. The colony’s second-largest port developed on this protected bay. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
    s p e c t e r s o f s a i n t - d o m i n g u e
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    uprising of 1791. The province was also home to several free men of Afri-
    can descent who would become important revolutionary leaders. Vincent
    Ogé, a free man of color, lived in the town of Dondon; a decade before the
    revolution Toussaint Bréda, once a slave and now a free man, rented a
    small property near the plantation where he had been born.38
    Saint-Domingue contained two other provinces—the Western and the
    Southern. They were separated from the North, and from one another, by
    high mountain ranges. Only in 1751, when Port-au-Prince—the largest
    town in the Western Province—became the island’s capital, was a passage
    cut across these mountains. The royal government paid for the road, but
    slaves built it, carving a 100-foot stairway into the rock. Not until 1787,
    however, was it possible to travel from Le Cap to Port-au-Prince by car-
    riage. Each region had its mountains, its plains, and its port towns. For
    most of the colony’s history, people and goods moved from region to region
    by sea.39
    The Western Province was the second in the colony in