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

population and
    wealth. Its capital, Port-au-Prince, was the second-largest town in Saint-
    Domingue. One man who traveled to Saint-Domingue in the 1780s made
    fun of the grand idea French planters had of Port-au-Prince, which they
    described as a “throne of luxury and voluptuousness” and considered their
    “Jerusalem.” Having heard their tales, he wrote, he approached the town
    with “that vague anxiety that precedes admiration and prepares enthusi-
    asm,” only to find himself in front of “two rows of cabins” arranged around
    “dusty air they call a street.” Port-au-Prince had the look of a “tartar camp,”
    though the presence of the government, garrisons, and the port made it an
    active city and the “rendezvous for all conspirators and fortune-seekers” in
    the colony.40
    There are two plains in the Western Province: the Cul-de-Sac surround-
    ing Port-au-Prince and, to the north, a plain traversed by the snaking
    Artibonite River bordered by the port towns of Gonaïves and Saint-Marc.
    Both plains were dry, the Artibonite plain so much so that one writer de-
    scribed it as “Egypt.” During the second half of the eighteenth century,
    government-sponsored irrigation projects put slaves to work building ca-
    nals that ultimately irrigated nearly half of the land on the Cul-de-Sac.
    Consequently, sugar production in the area boomed. In 1789 there were
    314 sugar plantations in the Western Province, more than in the north, al-
    though many of them were smaller and produced unrefined sugar. Indigo
    26
    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.]

    “Plan de la ville des rades et des environs de Port-au-Prince,” 1785. Port-au-Prince was less densely constructed than Le Cap. Irrigation works channeled water from the surrounding mountains through a reservoir and into the town. The map is drawn with North to the left. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
    cultivation was much more important in this region than in the north, in-
    volving over 1,800 plantations. There were more than 500 cotton planta-
    tions and more than 800 coffee plantations. Slaves were again the largest
    group in the province.41
    On a long peninsula to the south and west was the Southern Province,
    whose capital was Les Cayes. It was both cut off from the Western Prov-
    ince and divided internally by the highest mountains in the colony—in-
    deed in the Caribbean. The province included two plains that surrounded
    Les Cayes, and another smaller plain around the town of Jerémie. It was
    s p e c t e r s o f s a i n t - d o m i n g u e
    27
    the least developed of the colony, with only 191 sugar plantations, most of
    them making unprocessed sugar, and approximately 300 coffee plantations
    and 900 indigo plantations. It had the smallest population of the three.42
    Moreau noted that the customs in this region were different from those
    elsewhere in the colony, as was the creole spoken there. The clothes of the
    residents had changed little since the first European settlers had arrived.
    The Southern Province was the last to be fully settled by the French, and
    remained the most isolated from Atlantic shipping and from the rest of the
    colony. It was in many ways more connected to the nearby British colony of
    Jamaica than it was to France, and something of an “English enclave.” The
    inhabitants of the region traded consistently and illegally with the British, as well as with ships from Spanish Cuba, Curaçao, and other areas. Contraband trade was carried on throughout the colony, but it was particularly de-
    veloped in the south. Huge quantities of indigo were traded to the British,
    although in official statistics they made up only a tiny portion of the exports of Saint-Domingue. Many free people of color profited from this expanding trade, including a man named Julien Raimond. One day he would carry
    the demands of this group to Paris.43
    “Geography,”