Istwa Nou

A census in May 1681 recorded 10,000 enslaved people in Saint-Domingue. The official figure for 1791 was 500,000. The Haitian historian Thomas Madiou argued the true number ran above 700,000, because planters concealed workers from the rolls to avoid the annual head tax charged on each one. By 1789 the colony held 60 percent of all the enslaved people France owned in the Americas, and two thirds of them had been born in Africa. Their origins were mixed. A Bantu majority came from Congo and Angola, with large numbers from the Guinea coast, and Senegalese captives whom the planters called warlike and priced accordingly. Aradas from Dahomey were also sought after, and Henry Christophe would later recruit Aradas into the royal police of his kingdom and call them Dahomets. Two thirds African born is the figure to hold. The revolution of 1791 was made largely by people who remembered another country.

Louis XIV issued the Code Noir in March 1685 to regulate labor in the French island possessions. On paper it granted things: the right to marry, the right to a formal trial, mandatory Catholic baptism and religious instruction, limits on punishment. Read the omission instead of the grants. There is no provision for education anywhere in it, and that was deliberate, because planters held that a literate enslaved population was an ungovernable one. The Code also defined enslaved people as movable property, meubles, which is the legal category you use for furniture. So the same document that requires a soul be baptized classifies the body carrying it as a chair. In Saint-Domingue the protective articles were ignored as a matter of routine and the property articles were enforced with absolute rigor, which tells you which half the state actually meant.

Louis XIV issued the Code Noir in March 1685 to put the labour force of his island colonies on a common legal footing. It granted the enslaved a short list of things that read like rights: permission to marry, a formal trial before punishment, baptism and instruction in religion. Schooling was left out, and the omission was deliberate. Planters held that white safety depended on keeping the people in the fields unable to read, so the same law that ordered a priest into the quarters kept a teacher out of them. The code also opened a door out of slavery through manumission, and the mixed race affranchis who came through it formed a permanent third group, free by statute and abused in practice by the whites above them. The Heinls judge that planters breached the code far more often than they kept it. What those planters used instead included burying a man alive, crushing him in a mortar, and staking him in a swamp for the insects. The grievance of the affranchis ran straight into 1791.