| Conventional long name | Saint-Domingue |
|---|
| Common name | Saint-Domingue |
|---|
| Continent | North America |
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| Region | Caribbean |
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| Status | Division of New France |
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| Empire | France |
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| Government type | Monarchy |
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| Event start | Official settlement |
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| Year start | 1625 |
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| Event2 | Recognized |
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| Date event2 | 1697 |
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| Year end | 1804 |
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| Date end | January 1 |
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| Event end | Independence |
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| P1 | Captaincy General of Santo Domingo |
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| Flag p1 | Flag_of_New_Spain.svg |
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| S1 | Empire of Haiti (1804-1806) |
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| Flag s1 | Flag of Haiti 1964 (civil).svg |
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| Capital | Cap Français¹ |
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| Common languages | French |
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| Leader1 | See List of French monarchs |
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| Title leader | King |
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| Currency | Saint-Domingue livre |
|---|
| Stat area1 | 27750 |
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| Footnotes | ¹ In 1770 moved to Port-au-Prince where it remains until today. |
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Saint-Domingue was a
French colony on the
Caribbean island of
Hispaniola from 1659 to 1804, when it became the independent nation of
Haiti. The eastern portion, later returned to Spain, ultimately became the
Dominican Republic.
Establishment
French
buccaneers established a settlement on the island of
Tortuga in 1625 before going to Grande Terre (mainland). They survived by pirating Spanish ships, eating wild cattle and hogs, and selling hides to traders of all nations. Although the Spanish destroyed the buccaneers' settlements several times, on each occasion they returned due to an abundance of natural resources: hardwood trees, wild hogs and cattle, and fresh water. The settlement on Tortuga was officially established in 1659 under the commission of
King Louis XIV.
Among the buccaneers was Bertrand d'Ogeron, who played a big part in the settlement of Saint-Domingue. He encouraged the planting of tobacco, which turned a population of buccaneers and freebooters, who had not acquiesced to royal authority until 1660, into a sedentary population. D'Orgeron also attracted many colonists from Martinique and Guadeloupe, including Jean Roy, Jean Hebert and his family, and Guillaume Barre and his family, who were driven out by the land pressure which was generated by the extension of the sugar plantations in those colonies. But in 1670, shortly after Cap François (later Cap Français, now Cap-Haïtien) had been established, the crisis of tobacco intervened and a great number of places were abandoned. The rows of freebooting grew bigger; plundering raids, like those of Vera Cruz in 1683 or of Campêche in 1686, became increasingly numerous, and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay, elder son of Jean Baptist Colbert and at the time Minister of the Navy, brought back some order by taking a great number of measures, including the creation of plantations of indigo and of cane sugar. The first sugar windmill was built in 1685.
Under the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, Spain officially ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France.
Thriving colony
Prior to the
Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the economy of Saint-Domingue gradually expanded, with sugar and, later, coffee becoming important export crops. After the war, which disrupted maritime commerce, the colony underwent rapid expansion. In 1767, it exported 72 million pounds of
raw sugar and 51 million pounds of
refined sugar, one million pounds of
indigo, and two million pounds of cotton. Saint-Domingue became known as the "Jewel of the
Antilles" — one of the richest colonies in the 18th-century
French empire. By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue produced about 40 percent of all the sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe. This single colony, roughly the size of
Maryland or
Belgium, produced more sugar and coffee than all of the
British West Indies colonies combined.
The labour for these plantations was provided by an estimated 790,000 African slaves (accounting in 1783-1791 for a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade). Between 1764 and 1771, the average annual importation of slaves varied between 10,000-15,000; by 1786 it was about 28,000, and from 1787 onward, the colony received more than 40,000 slaves a year. However, the inability to maintain slave numbers without constant resupply from Africa meant the slave population in 1789 totalled 500,000, ruled over by a white population that numbered only 32,000. Slave traders scoured the Atlantic coast of Africa, and the slaves who arrived came from hundreds of different tribes, their languages often mutually incomprehensible. The majority came from the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast, followed by Bantus from Congo and Angola.
To regularise slavery, in 1685 Louis XIV had enacted the code noir, which accorded certain human rights to slaves and responsibilities to the master, who was obliged to feed, clothe and provide for the general well-being of his slaves. The code noir also sanctioned corporal punishment, allowing masters to employ brutal methods to instil in their slaves the necessary docility, while ignoring provisions intended to regulate the administration of punishments. A passage from Henri Christophe's personal secretary, who lived more than half his life as a slave, describes the crimes perpetrated against the slaves of Saint-Domingue by their French masters:
:"Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to consume faeces? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man eating-dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?"
Thousands of slaves found freedom by fleeing into the mountains, forming communities of maroons and raiding isolated plantations. The most famous was Mackandal, a one-armed slave, originally from Guinea (region), who escaped in 1751. A Vodou Houngan (priest), he united many of the different maroon bands, and spent the next six years staging successful raids and evading capture by the French, reputedly killing over 6,000 people, while preaching a fanatic vision of the destruction of white civilization in Saint-Domingue. In 1758, after a failed plot to poison the drinking water of the plantation owners, he was captured and burned alive at the public square in Cap-Français.
Saint-Domingue also had the largest and wealthiest free population of color in the Caribbean, a group also known as the gens de couleur. The royal census of 1789 counted roughly 25,000 such persons. While many free people of color were former slaves, most members of this class appear not to have been free Africans, but rather people of mixed European and African ancestry, or mulattoes. Typically, they were the descendants of the enslaved women that French colonists took as mistresses; through plaçage, a type of common-law marriage planters enjoyed with their slave mistresses, many were able to inherit considerable property. As their numbers grew, they became subject to discriminatory legislation. Statutes forbade gens de couleur from taking up certain professions, marrying whites, wearing European clothing, carrying swords or firearms in public, or attending social functions where whites were present. However, these regulations did not restrict their purchase of land, and many accumulated substantial holdings and became slave-owners. By 1789, they owned one-third of the plantation property and one-quarter of the slaves of Saint-Domingue.
Central to the rise of the gens de couleur planter class was the growing importance of coffee, which thrived on the marginal hillside plots to which they were often relegated. The largest concentration of gens de couleur was in the southern peninsula, the last region of the colony to be settled, owing to its distance from Atlantic shipping lanes and its formidable terrain, with the highest mountain range in the Caribbean. In the parish of Jérémie, they formed the majority of the population.
End of colonial rule
On the evening of August 22, 1791, a widespread slave rebellion began the
Haitian Revolution, which culminated with the establishment of the independent Empire of Haiti in 1804.
Note: In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American and British authors often referred to Saint-Domingue as "Santo Domingo" or "San Domingo", which can lead to confusion with its neighboring former Spanish colony, which was called Santo Domingo during the colonial period. Today, the former Spanish possession is the Dominican Republic and its capital is Santo Domingo. The name of Saint-Domingue was changed to Hayti (Haïti) when Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence from the French in 1804. Like the name Haiti itself, Saint-Domingue may sometimes be used to refer to all of Hispaniola, but more frequently to the western part now occupied by the Republic of Haiti, while the Spanish version Santo Domingo is often used to refer to the Dominican nation as a whole.
See also
List of French Governors of Saint-Domingue
History of Haiti
French colonization of the Americas
Spanish Colony of Santo Domingo
Notes
References
External links
The Louverture Project: Saint-Domingue - Saint-Domingue page on Haitian history Wiki.
The Louverture Project: Slavery in Saint-Domingue
Category:History of Hispaniola
Category:Former colonies of France
Category:History of Haiti
Category:Abolitionism in France
Category:States and territories established in 1659
Category:States and territories disestablished in 1804
Category:French colonization of the Americas
Category:Former countries in the Caribbean
