by Tom Reiss
Until the mid-1400s, nearly all slaves imported into Europe were ethnic Slavs. The very word “slave” derives from this connection. “Slav markets” were found across Europe, from Dublin to Marseille, where the people being bought and sold were as fair-skinned as those buying and selling them. By the 1400s, white slaves were being used in the Mediterranean to harvest cane as part of the late-medieval sugar industry.
The rise of Islam had led to a vast expansion of slavery, as conquering Arab armies pulled any and every group of “unbelievers” into bondage. Arab slave traders captured whites from the north via sea raids on European shipping, and they acquired blacks from the sub-Saharan kingdoms. Over time, the Muslim slave trade focused increasingly on black Africans. Yet there was still no fixed biological marker for bondage. When Ottomans captured Constantinople, they diverted Europe’s supply of white slaves to the Middle East instead.
Europeans began looking to Africa for slaves when Portugal created a new sugar empire on African coastal islands. Thousands of blacks were bought and sold to harvest sugar, and age-old negative stereotypes about them began to coalesce into a virulent new strain of racism. In European eyes, blacks now came to be considered uniquely destined for slavery, created by their white master’s God for a life of permanent chattel servitude.
The Portuguese had first taken blacks to Madeira to cut sugarcane because the island was off the coast of North Africa and the Muslim traders there happened to deal in African slaves. When they sailed down the Guinea Coast, the Portuguese found the black African kingdoms were willing to supply them with slaves directly: the Africans did not consider they were selling their racial brothers to the whites. They did not think in racial terms at all but only of different tribes and kingdoms. Before, they had sold their captives to other black Africans or to Arabs. Now they sold them to whites. (The African kingdoms and empires themselves kept millions of slaves.) As time went on, Africans would learn of the horrors awaiting black slaves in the American colonies, not to mention on the passage over, yet they continued to export ever greater quantities of bois d’ébène—“ebony wood,” as the French called their cargo. There was no mercy or morality involved. It was strictly business.
Spain laid the foundations of this great wealth and evil in the Americas, then quickly became distracted and forgot about it. After introducing the plants, the technology, and the slaves into Santo Domingo, the Spanish dropped the sugar business in favor of hunting for gold and silver. They moved on to Mexico and South America in search of the precious metals, leaving the island to languish for nearly two centuries, until the French began to harness its true potential.
BY the mid- to late eighteenth century, the Saint-Domingue colony, situated on the western end of Hispaniola, where Haiti is today, accounted for two-thirds of France’s overseas trade. It was the world’s largest sugar exporter and produced more of the valuable white powder than all the British West Indian colonies combined. Thousands of ships sailed in and out of Port-au-Prince and Cap Français, bound for Nantes, Bordeaux, and New York. When the British, after winning the Seven Years’ War, chose to keep the great swath of France’s North American colonies and instead return its two small sugar islands, Guadeloupe and Martinique, they unwittingly did their archrival a favor.
Saint-Domingue was the most valuable colony in the world. And its staggering wealth was supported by staggering brutality. The “pearl of the West Indies” was a vast infernal factory where slaves regularly worked from sunup to past sundown in conditions rivaling the concentration camps and gulags of the twentieth century. One-third of all French slaves died after only a few years on the plantation. Violence and terror maintained order. The punishment for working too slowly or stealing a piece of sugar or sip of rum, not to mention for trying to escape, was limited only by the overseer’s imagination. Gothic sadism became commonplace in the atmosphere of tropical mechanization: overseers interrupted whippings to pour burning wax—or boiling sugar or hot ashes and salt—onto the arms and shoulders and heads of recalcitrant workers. The cheapness of slave life brushed against the exorbitant value of the crop they produced. Even as the armies of slaves were underfed and dying from hunger, some were forced to wear bizarre tin-plate masks, in hundred-degree heat, to keep them from gaining the slightest nourishment from chewing the cane.
The sugar planter counted on an average of ten to fifteen years’ work from a slave before he was driven to death, to be replaced by another fresh off the boat. Along with malnutrition, bugs and diseases could also eventually do in someone working up to eighteen hours a day. The brutality of the American Cotton Kingdom a century later could not compare to that of Saint-Domingue in the 1700s. There would be no shortage of cruel overseers in the United States, but North American slavery was not based on a business model of systematically working slaves to death in order to replace them with newly bought captives. The French sugar plantations were a charnel house.
Because Versailles loved laws and orders, France was the first country to codify colonial slavery. In doing so, King Louis XIV passed a law, in 1685, that changed the history of both slavery and race relations.
Le Code Noir—the Black Code. Its very name left no doubt about who were to be the slaves. It elaborated, point by point, the many ways in which black Africans could be exploited by their white masters. The Code sanctioned the harshest punishments—the penalty for theft or attempted escape was death—and stated that slaves could not marry without their master’s consent or pass on property to their kin.
But the very existence of a written legal code—a novelty of the French colonial empire—opened the way for unexpected developments. If there were laws governing slavery, then slave owners, at least in some instances, could be found in violation of them. By articulating the rules of white domination, the Code—theoretically, at least—limited it, and gave blacks various opportunities to escape from it. It created loopholes. One of these was on the issue of sexual relations between masters and slaves, and the offspring resulting from such relations.
CHARLES Davy de la Pailleterie became an established sugar planter on Saint-Domingue in fine aristocratic fashion—by marrying into money. His union with Marie-Anne Tuffé brought a half stake in a plantation near Cap Français, the colony’s busiest port, on the rich northeastern plains where sugarcane grew best. His mother-in-law held on to the other half stake, waiting to see how Charles managed his new responsibilities.
In an age when most industry was confined to small-scale or home-based labor, a sugar plantation was a huge undertaking, costly and exacting: sugarcane takes anywhere from nine to eighteen months to ripen, depending on various factors, and must be harvested at precisely the right time or it will dry out. Cut cane must be taken straight to a mill, to be crushed, pressed, or pounded to extract its juice before it rots or ferments. Then, within twenty-four hours, the juice must be boiled to remove its impurities and boiled again. While cooling and crystallizing, the mixture becomes molasses. Further processing produces a less dark, more chemically pure sugar—a gold liquid, resembling honey. Still further processing makes the white granules most prized by Europeans. A planter might use one hundred slaves for the brute fieldwork, and dozens more with artisanal expertise for the equally grueling work of boiling and refining. The production line was kept going nonstop—cutting, grinding, boiling, potting.
Sugar planting was the preserve of the great French families—rich aristocrats and grands bourgeois who could afford to invest vast sums and hire professional managers. The largest sugar plantations on Saint-Domingue employed several hundred field slaves. In addition, the planter needed mills, boiling houses, curing houses, and distilleries, along with storehouses to hold the sugar for shipping.
Without his advantageous marriage, Charles would have had to content himself with growing tobacco or coffee or indigo, none of which held sugar’s promise of wealth and power. These less labor-intensive crops were the basis of most of the colony’s smaller plantations or farms, some of them owned
by free people of color (mulattos) and even by freed blacks.
Charles and his young bride had been married only a few months before they were surprised by Charles’s brother Antoine standing on their doorstep, after a six-week passage from Le Havre and a daylong coach ride up from Port-au-Prince. Antoine told them he meant to stay temporarily. He would live with them for the next decade.
French aristocrats got mixed messages about work in the eighteenth century. The old line was that profiting by any sort of commerce was beneath them; the new line encouraged French aristocrats to grow wealthier through business and trade, although, in contrast to their English colonial counterparts, performing any manual labor was still out of the question. The Saint-Domingue slave economy suited the highborn French entrepreneur perfectly, allowing him to exercise the principles of political economy and wealth accumulation without getting his hands dirty.
On the surface, Charles satisfied every contemporary notion of aristocratic self-improvement: he married money and seemed to increase it through careful management. And unlike Antoine, he was energetic as well as greedy. Charles drove his slaves hard and the plantation prospered, so much so that after a few years he bought out the Widow Tuffé’s half stake. He grew rich to the point where his estates dwarfed the family holdings in Normandy and he was able to send money home to his parents, the marquis and marquise, to support their last years in high style. The old marquis swore before a notary that Charles would get all his money back from the estate at the time of their death.
Antoine was cut from a different kind of noble cloth, a more traditional one in that he preferred to avoid productive work altogether. Indolent and carefree, he appears to have gone to Saint-Domingue intending to sponge off the industry of his younger brother indefinitely.
“A stay in Saint-Domingue is not at all deadly; it is our vices, our devouring vexations that kill us,” wrote a young Frenchman returning after an eleven-year stay there. Everywhere in the sugar colony he had witnessed dangerous “excesses of pleasure,” and confessed himself lucky to have survived. The climate and the constant search for profit, he observed, led to “violent and irascible” behavior among both old and new arrivals. “Burdened by troubles and work, the colonists surrender themselves to vice, and death strikes them down like the scythe mows down ears of corn.”
The mother of one wealthy young Creole man§ complained that her son was “given to amusement and a life of debauchery. He has fostered a harem of black women who control him and run the plantation.” It was certainly common for white men in Saint-Domingue to take slave mistresses. In his Voyage à Saint-Domingue, the itinerant German Baron de Wimpffen describes interracial relationships as being visible everywhere, winked at by the most respectable members of the community. The baron even accuses a parish priest he encounters of “contributing to the population of the parsonage” by producing mixed-race children with his black mistress; the reason is not only lust, the priest explains, but the desire to increase his flock.
The French administration had tried to prevent this situation. One of the first laws in the colonial penal code, issued in 1664, forbade masters “to debauch negresses, on pain of twenty lashes of the whip, for the first offense, forty lashes for the second, and fifty lashes and the fleur-de-lis branded on the cheek for the third.” But the rapid increase of the mulatto population over the next century spoke for itself.
Critics of interracial sex on Saint-Domingue mainly worried about its potential to break down respect for whites. Baron de Wimpffen bemoaned the “abuse of intimacy between master and slave,” whose “great evil” lay in its altering “the first principle of subordination, the respect of the subordinated.” Sex across color lines made maintaining strictly racist attitudes difficult: “The colonist who would be ashamed to work alongside the negress,” wrote Wimpffen, “would not blush at living with her in the degree of intimacy that necessarily establishes relations of equality between them, which prejudice would challenge in vain.”
It wasn’t long before the Pailleterie brothers began to quarrel, sometimes violently. The diligent, pious Charles resented supporting his older brother, who took advantage of his hospitality, kept serial slave mistresses, and treated his plantation as the Saint-Domingue branch of the Pailleterie estates.
Antoine, for his part, must have despised his younger brother at least as much. Humiliation would have been unavoidable, with Charles accepting IOUs from their father, the marquis, while Antoine, as eldest son, had barely a thousand livres to his name.
One day in 1748, the brothers’ quarreling took a dangerous turn. As a royal prosecutor later reported, Charles, “full of honor and feeling,… employed methods that were, truth be told, a little violent and … could have caused the demise of his older brother, if they had had their effect.” (Since the prosecutor was moonlighting at the time as a private investigator hired by a member of Charles’s family, we can assume that this conclusion was an understatement.)
Although Antoine was a soldier and could defend himself, on his own plantation Charles was absolute judge of life and death. Did he have his brother whipped, or subject him to one of the tortures used to put slaves in their place? Did Antoine’s constant association with slaves finally make his brother decide to treat him like one?
Whatever occurred, it was severe enough to bring the brothers to a “rupture,” as the investigating attorney wrote, which would end their relations forever. The night of the incident, Antoine fled Charles’s plantation, taking three slaves with him—Rodrigue, Cupidon, and Catin, his latest mistress—and disappeared into the forest. He would not be heard from again for nearly thirty years.
* Clausewitz meant that if you can’t site a fortress directly on a river, you should site it far from one. Placing the Philipsburg fortress merely near the river had exposed it to every possible means of attack.
† The novelist Alexandre Dumas would dine out on the story throughout his life. He recounts it in his memoirs, writing that the name Richelieu “appears so often in … my novels that it seems almost my duty to explain to the public how I came to have such a predilection for it.”
‡ See Dr. Frederick Slare’s 1715 “A Vindication of Sugars Against the Charge of Dr. Willis, Other Physicians, and Common Prejudices: Dedicated to the Ladies,” which prescribed as a treatment for ocular illness “two drams of fine sugar-candy, one-half dram pearl, one grain of leaf gold; make into a very fine and impalpable powder, and when dry, blow a convenient quantity into the eye.”
§ In the eighteenth century “Creole” had a different meaning than it does today, and signified white colonists who were born or at least significantly raised in the colony, rather than in Europe. To designate what we often mean by “Creoles” now, “people of mixed race”—part African and part European or Indian or Native American—the eighteenth-century French term was gens de couleur, literally “people of color.”
2
THE BLACK CODE
CHARLES sent mounted slave hunters after his brother and the missing blacks. He himself rode with them and hired a ship to comb the coast. “Charles Edouard searched all the French possessions in the archipelago of America,” a legal statement recorded. “It was in vain.” As often happened in Saint-Domingue, once escaped slaves put some distance between themselves and the plantation, they were gone, vanished in the island’s vast wilderness.
What was unusual in this case was that the slaves were in the company of a white man, a highborn one at that. The peculiar situation scandalized Saint-Domingue society: the ne’er-do-well brother of a respected planter had fled into the jungle with three slaves. One of the greatest concerns the authorities had about fugitive slaves was that they would join marron communities, encampments of runaways and their descendants who lived in the mountains and remote coves of Saint-Domingue, outside the influence of whites. (The word marron derived from the Spanish cimarrón—“wild, untamed”—first used to describe cattle that turned feral after getting away from Columbus’s men shortly afte
r they landed.) The densely wooded terrain sheltered the marrons—for Saint-Domingue was as thick with trees as modern Haiti is barren of them, another of history’s surreal reversals—and made their capture nearly impossible. From their rugged camps, the marrons could prey on local towns and plantations, and the royal mounted police preferred to negotiate peace treaties with them rather than try to arrest them, which was too costly in men and arms, if it was even possible. Fugitive whites were also taken in.
Charles could only wonder if such was the case with his brother. If he were living in a town or on a plantation, wouldn’t Charles’s agents or those of the authorities have found him by now? Had Antoine boarded a ship to Martinique or Guadeloupe—or perhaps to Jamaica, to hide out among the English? Antoine had left no trace.
In 1757, Charles and Antoine’s mother died; in 1758, the old marquis, their father, followed her, on Christmas Day. A French tax official tried to investigate the whereabouts of the family’s oldest son, the heir, but eventually threw up his hands, writing that “it is not known where he lives, what he does and if he is married or not. The rumor is that he is living abroad, but it is a mystery.” In another report, the tax official wrote that some people said Antoine “had married a wealthy woman in Martinique.” Yet others said that Antoine was dead.
BUT Antoine was not dead and had not gone to Martinique or to live with the marrons, though he had been across their land. He and Rodrigue, Cupidon, and Catin had walked for weeks across the densely wooded mountains, more than seven thousand feet high, that separated central Saint-Domingue from the long southwest peninsula. They had arrived in the highlands region called Grand Anse (“Great Cove”).
