Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue. (Reviews).

Paquette, Robert L.

Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue. By Stewart R. King (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. xxvi plus 323 pp. $45.00).

France acquired title to the western third of the island of Hispaniola in 1697. As the colony of Saint Domingue, this seductive land of rugged mountains and fertile coastal plains became in the eighteenth century one of the most densely populated spots on earth and the most precious jewel in France's imperial diadem. Before transformation by slave revolution into the nation-state of Haiti in 1804, Saint Domingue led the world in sugar and coffee production and served as a locomotive, powering a dramatic expansion in France's foreign trade. No country absorbed more of France's overseas investments; only England surpassed Saint Domingue in absorbing the exports of the fledgling United States. Slave traders from such booming ports as Nantes and Bordeaux responded to the colony's voracious demand for labor by supplying enslaved Africans in numbers that peaked at about 40,000 annually. By the census year of 1788, Saint Domingue, although only twice the size of Jamaica, had thousands of plantations and more than 40 0,000 slaves, more slaves than the contemporaneous states of Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina combined.

At the same time, however, the free population amounted to little more than ten percent of the total, and a rapidly growing minority of free people of color was closing in on parity with the 28,000 or so white inhabitants. Stewart King's book concentrates on elite elements within this free-colored class as revealed largely through an exacting and imaginative analysis of 3250 notarial acts. These records represent the work of eight notaries from 1776 to 1789 in six parishes (Cap Francais, Fort Dauphin, Limonade, Port-au-Prince, Croix des Bouquets, and Mirebalais), located in two of Saint Domingue's three provinces. The free people of color merit attention because they not only predominated in building the colony's coffee industry, they also exerted disproportionate economic influence in urban trades and crafts and filled the ranks of the colonial militia and rural constabulary. When the slaves of the North Province revolted in 1791, free people of color owned about one-quarter of the colony's slaves and about one-third of the land in plantations.

King points out in the first of twelve chapters that Saint Domingue's free coloreds had more reason than whites to legitimate their lives by availing themselves of the costly services of notaries, for a rising tide of legally-sanctioned discrimination was attempting to regulate, among other things, what clothes they could wear, what jobs they could hold, and even what surnames they could use. Based on his sampling of the notarial acts, King proceeds to argue for the existence in prerevolutionary Saint Domingue of two distinctive free-colored elites: one, a mixed-race planting elite, had close ties to big whites and owned substantial property in land and slaves; the other, a phenotypically darker military elite, also more entrepreneurial and urban oriented, advanced largely without white support but benefited from networks forged with other people of color. In devoting most of the rest of the book to comparing these groups to whites and to each other, King has many fresh things to say about free-colored marria ges and families, manumission practices, entrepreneurship, housing, religiousness, color consciousness, godparenthood, status aspirations, social mobility, and sexual behavior. He explores the vital role of free-colored women in the accumulation of property that sustained many of the elite families. He also adds to and revises portraits of three free-colored notables: Julian Raimond, the loudest free-colored voice in the momentous debates about human rights in the French National Assembly in 1789; Vincent Oge, a mulatto plutocrat who died in Saint Domingue one year later leading a free-colored revolt against the whites; and Toussaint Louverture, the most famous leader of the slave revolution, who before 1791 owned and managed slaves as a freedman in an extended family of slaveholders.

King stresses the economic and demographic success of Saint Domingue's free coloreds. But the lives of these three individuals and others like them also bespeak the existence of an emergent and related tropical patriotism born of a creolized commitment to place that was lacking in whites, who when not absentee proprietors were thinking and acting like sojourners. Free people of color aspired to be habitants, gentleman farmers, and in transforming peasant households into commercialized farms, they clearly transacted business with a time horizon that was much longer than that of their white neighbors. Free people of color, more resistant to the disease environment than whites, lived longer than they did. They had more equal sex ratios and higher fertility rates. They held on to their land longer than whites did, were less encumbered by debt, and, by being resident managers of their own property, eliminated a costly overhead expense typically incurred by white planters. If King is correct, then a most ominous de velopment was occurring in the prerevolutionary decades, particularly for lower-class whites, as free coloreds were acquiring an ever-increasing proportion of the value of Saint Domingue's capital goods.

Although free people of color owned fewer slaves in smaller holdings than did their white counterparts, they owned a higher proportion of female and African-born slaves. King identifies a business strategy by which enterprising free coloreds, women as well as men, purchased the more debilitated from among the stock of recently imported Africans, distributed the risk of seasoning death by pawning them, and then, if they survived and regained health, repaying for them so that they could be profitably marketed to a needy planter. A generational strategy, familiar to students of Latin American peasants, also existed by which single, young adult free coloreds from rural families left home to seek their fortune in urban areas and, if successful, they then married and returned to the countryside. King concedes that free-colored slaveowners may have bettered white slaveowners in their treatment of slaves, but they did so because of economic interest not racial solidarity. He seems less persuasive in claiming that Sai nt Domingue's free coloreds were little concerned about skin color "except in an instrumental fashion," given what is known about the political behavior of such light-skinned leaders as Raimond and Oge as well as King's own evidence on the "ideology of whitening" and on the tensions between mulatto and black militiamen.

Saint Domingue produced one of the wealthiest classes of free-colored slaveholders in the history of the Americas. In this assiduously researched volume, King succeeds admirably in achieving a stated goal of bringing depth and complexity to a subject too easily ignored or glossed over by historians of slavery in the Americas. Still, as King himself would be among the first to admit, much work remains to be done. Saint Domingue's free-coloreds need to be compared with their counterparts in other slave societies. Out of deference to an important forthcoming book by John Garrigus, King neglects the South Province, where mulatto slaveholders probably outnumbered whites. One wonders whether his elite categorizations hold up there. The end of King's book would also seem to demand a political narrative as a sequel: How did these free colored elites respond to the revolutionary process in both metropolis and colony?