The law that defined a person as movable property

The Code Noir settled the legal question of what an enslaved person was. The answer was movable property, meuble in French law, which placed a human being in the same column as furniture and cattle: bought, sold, mortgaged, seized for debt, divided among heirs. Baptism was compulsory and certain punishments were formally prohibited, and in Saint-Domingue neither provision was enforced. What the colony did enforce was output. Someone landed there from a slave ship could expect roughly seven years of life, and the whip, the branding iron and the mutilation of runaways were ordinary instruments of labour discipline. This is the law the rising of 1791 set out to destroy, and it explains why the destruction went further than a change of government. A people defined in statute as property does not finish the job by capturing a treasury. The Haitian declaration of independence answers a legal claim about what human beings are, which is why the document still reads as philosophy.

The San Antonio made port at Veracruz on 24 May 1687 with 580 enslaved Africans in its hold. Margarita de Robles, Paula Matias and Maria de Pares came ashore quietly from the captain's cabin. They had been taken in the raid of 1683, held at Petit-Goave, and had worked their way back through Baracoa in eastern Cuba and Havana. On the last leg they travelled as free women and Spanish subjects, seasick and dependent on other passengers for food, but with their status unquestioned. The people below them were about to be branded, quarantined and measured. Matias later gave her age as twenty two and called herself a free mulata. She said the pirate Lorenco had taken her prisoner with other women and carried her to Petit-Goave, where she remained. She named no owner, no husband and no companion, and said nothing of how she had survived four years among the French.

Two Capuchins of the Flanders province, Celestin de Bruxelles and Benedict de Hulst, embarked for Whydah late in 1681. Celestin wrote home in November 1682 that the king had given him a house beside the palace, received him often in private, and handed over his elder sons to be taught. Accounts gathered in Whydah a generation later go further. A number of local people were instructed, and some could still recite parts of the scriptures decades afterwards. The king himself and several of his chiefs agreed to be baptised and, as a condition, to give up all but one wife. The night before the ceremony the mission chapel burned down. One version has the king reading the fire as punishment from the gods he was about to abandon. Another has him seeing human hands behind it and fearing a rising that would cost him his throne. He dropped the plan and his people followed him. Benedict died inland in November 1683 and Celestin died in Europe in 1684.

A census of Suriname in 1684 counted 4,137 enslaved Africans and creoles of African descent, 81 per cent of the population, along with 144 enslaved Indians. At the height of the English colony in 1663 the comparable proportion had been 55 per cent. The census of 1701 recorded 8,500 enslaved people and roughly a thousand maroons against 700 Europeans. Large sugar estates began pushing out the smaller ones in the middle of the 1680s, the enslaved population doubled again across the 1690s, and coffee added its own demand in the 1720s. By 1752 there were 37,835 enslaved people and they made up 95 per cent of everyone in the colony. The earliest surviving poison trial in the Suriname court records dates from 1731, and from 1735 to 1739 poison accounted for a tenth of all trials. The arithmetic of the plantation and the arithmetic of the poison docket moved together.