The World's Richest Colony

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, the French colony of Saint-Domingue occupied the western third of the island of Hispaniola — a territory roughly the size of Maryland that produced more wealth than any comparable piece of land in the world. Forty percent of all the sugar consumed in Europe and fifty percent of its coffee came from this single island, tended by the hands of half a million enslaved Africans. French merchants, planters, and the Crown grew fantastically rich from this arrangement. The port of Bordeaux, the grandeur of Versailles, the salons of Enlightenment Paris — all of it rested, in part, on the labor of people who were legally classified as property.

The colony's social structure was a rigid hierarchy of three castes that were in constant tension with one another. At the top were the grands blancs — the great whites, the sugar planters and wealthy merchants who owned the plantations and the enslaved people on them. Below them were the petits blancs — small white traders, artisans, overseers — who owned less property but shared the racial privileges of whiteness. And then came the affranchis: free people of color, numbering about 30,000, who occupied a paradoxical middle position. Many affranchis were prosperous — some owned large plantations and enslaved people themselves — but they were denied political rights, forbidden from sitting at the same table as whites, required to wear distinctive clothing, and subjected to a thousand daily humiliations that reminded them of their subordinate status regardless of their wealth.

Below all of this, holding up the entire edifice with their bodies and their labor, were the 500,000 enslaved Africans who produced the colony's wealth. Saint-Domingue's plantation system was among the most brutal in the hemisphere — more brutal even than the American South, because the economics were different. In Saint-Domingue, the death rate among newly imported Africans was so high and the birth rate so low that the colony had to import approximately 40,000 new enslaved people every year simply to maintain the existing population. The planters calculated, correctly, that it was cheaper to work people to death and replace them than to allow for natural reproduction. The conditions that produced this mathematics — 18-hour days in cane fields, systematic torture as discipline, deliberate destruction of African culture and family structures — were known to every person who benefited from the colony's products.

The Code Noir — France's legal code governing slavery, first promulgated in 1685 — theoretically provided some protections for enslaved people: masters who killed slaves could be punished; enslaved families could not be separated; Sundays were to be free. In practice, enforcement was virtually nonexistent. Planters developed baroque systems of torture that stayed just within the letter of the law while violating every human principle behind it. The burning of cane juice was poured on wounds. People were buried to their necks in the ground and left to the insects. The lash was applied with a frequency and force that shocked even visitors from other slaveholding colonies.

The spark that ignited this powder keg was lit not by the enslaved majority but by the free people of color. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, the affranchis saw their opportunity. The Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaimed that all men were born free and equal — and they intended to hold France to that promise. Vincent Ogé, an educated affranchis merchant who had met Parisian abolitionists, returned to Saint-Domingue in 1790 and led a small uprising demanding political rights for free people of color. His uprising was crushed, and Ogé was publicly broken on the wheel in February 1791 — his bones methodically shattered while he was alive. The execution, intended to deter further resistance, instead created a martyr and radicalized the entire affranchis community.

Eight months after Ogé's execution, on a stormy night in August 1791, the revolution took the form that no one in France had imagined. In a forest clearing called Bois Caïman in the Northern Province, the houngan Boukman Dutty led hundreds of enslaved people in a Vodou ceremony that sealed a collective oath of rebellion. They chose a date. They chose a signal. And on the night of August 22, 1791, the people that Saint-Domingue's planters had never imagined could organize, coordinate, and fight began one of the most extraordinary uprisings in human history. Within days, a thousand plantations were burning, and the light could be seen from ships at sea.