Julius S. Scott

The Common Wind


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fierce tracking dogs and chasseurs to bring the rebels under control, they complied with uncharacteristic dispatch.18

      During this uncertain and active period, mobile cobreros built a network of news and rumor which stretched even across the Atlantic. In the 1780s, Spanish authorities could not control rumors that the king had finally granted freedom and land to the cobreros only to have his wishes thwarted by the resistance of local officials. Convinced that slaves should have independent sources of transatlantic information, a small group of cobreros delegated Gregorio Cosme Osorio to travel to Spain in order to represent the interests of the descendants of El Cobre’s runaway slaves at court. Osorio’s reports helped to keep the spirit of resistance alive into the mid-1790s. By 1795, Juan Baptista Vaillant, the governor of Santiago de Cuba, reported that a new wave of liberation rumors was sweeping the east coast of Cuba and that slaves were deserting plantations in disturbing numbers. Governor Vaillant blamed the wide circulation of several recent letters from Osorio for these developments.19

      The geography of Saint-Domingue, with its rugged and majestic mountain ranges rimming the colony’s long and jagged eastern border, also presented mobile slaves ample opportunity for escape. After 1700, maroon activity grew and expanded as rapidly as plantation slavery itself. Early in the century, bands of maroons inhabited the region surrounding the rich northern plain. By mid-century, the center of maroon activity had shifted southward along the rim of mountains overlooking the new boom areas of Mirebalais, Cul-de-Sac, and Anse-à-Pitre. Though marronage was a significant factor affecting the character of the slave system throughout Saint-Domingue, the east-central region between the Cul-de-Sac and the Spanish border would continue into the era of the Revolution to be the locus of the most stable maroon societies as well as the scene of continuous warfare between maroons and government-sponsored expeditions. As the rule of the slavocracy entered its final days in the 1780s, maroon groups of various sizes and descriptions stretched in a broken line from the northernmost reaches of Saint-Domingue all the way to its southern tip. The role of these Haitian maroons in advancing the coming revolution remains a topic of intense debate.20

      The activities of Saint-Domingue’s maroon societies focused greater planter concern, but the tradition of short-term individual desertion was arguably of more consequence in the day-to-day functioning of plantations and among the slaves themselves. Whether visiting relatives, escaping an impending punishment, or engaging in trade and other proscribed activities, slaves who left for absences of short duration and distance bedeviled managers on every plantation. Proprietors and overseers became so accommodated to short-term absences from their plantations and so powerless to control them that they often did not even bother to delete the names of absent slaves, especially those of habitual leave-takers, from current plantation lists.21 In addition, overseers frequently reported finding runaways from other area plantations hiding out in the quarters of their slaves. In 1790 the overseer of one plantation in the Cap Français district arrested twenty-seven fugitive slaves in his vicinity within a short time, “as many in the slave huts as in the hills.”22 Already, however, the relaxed attitude of the days before the arrival of the news of the French Revolution had begun to give way to new fears about what this news might mean to plantation slaves. By 1790, whites recognized the possibility that rebellion might spread easily to the countryside, and that they could ill afford to ignore even these short-term migrants any longer.23

      While the mountains and backwoods with their maroon communities provided hope in the popular imagination regarding individual escape and collective resistance throughout the eighteenth century, the growing coastal cities nurtured the most complex patterns of mobility and presented the most vexing problems of control for all the colonial powers. Caribbean cities were more than centers of commercial exchange, population, and government; they were in a real sense centers of education. Towns provided anonymity and shelter for a wide variety of masterless men and women, including but by no means restricted to runaway slaves, and they offered unique opportunities for these people to rub shoulders, share experiences, and add to their knowledge of the Caribbean world and beyond. By the 1790s, larger cities like Kingston, Cap Français, and Havana could properly be termed capitals of Afro-America, and dissidents in dozens of smaller coastal centers were engaging in the kinds of transactions which would play a crucial role in spreading the excitement of the Age of Revolution in the Caribbean.

      At the start of the eighteenth century, however, these cities presented a very different picture. In 1700, Havana, with its impressive stone cathedrals and fortifications, had few rivals in the region. The future urban centers of the British and French Caribbean were fledgling settlements more closely resembling the “overgrown villages” of the eastern seaboard of British North America than the established capitals of the Spanish and Portuguese. Only about two thousand people inhabited Kingston, the city founded to replace Port Royal in 1692, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Similarly, Cap Français, destined to become Saint-Domingue’s most important city and later the revolutionary capital of the Caribbean, had only recently inherited its role as a locus of settlement from buccaneering La Tortue across the channel. At the time of the founding of Kingston, “le Cap” was home for only 160 white men, sixty-three white women, and thirty-four black slaves, and twenty years later the town still contained barely a thousand residents.24

      The progress of cash crop agriculture in the region between 1700 and 1790 transformed these settlements in both size and function. Surviving periodic natural disasters and incessant warfare, these and other coastal centers had grown significantly by the era of the Haitian Revolution. A generation of intense economic activity and reform after 1763 found Havana by 1791 a teeming entrepôt whose population, including the web of surrounding suburbs, ranged somewhere between 44,000 and 50,000. The city continued to expand during the years of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, doubling in size between 1791 and 1810. Other Spanish-American cities, most notably Caracas, whose population almost doubled between 1772 and 1812, and Buenos Aires, experienced similar rapid development as population and trading centers.25 By 1790, Kingston was the hub of overlapping networks of regional and transatlantic trade in the British orbit; of all the cities in English-speaking America, only New York and Philadelphia had more people.26 Official figures issued in 1788 listed the population of Cap Français at 12,151 in the city proper, a statistic which did not include the tens of thousands of people living on plantations in the immediate highlands whose lives were intimately connected to the city.27

      In addition to the maturation and growth of the region’s largest cities, several smaller coastal centers also elbowed their way to a kind of urban status by the late eighteenth century. Whereas the largest cities dominated transatlantic trade, their aggressive competitors provided outlets for the produce of local plantations through a thriving coastal and short-distance regional trade of small locally built vessels. Unlike Havana and the surrounding cities of the western coast of Cuba, which dominated the Straits of Florida and faced outward toward the Atlantic, the arc of towns encircling the island’s eastern region, from Trinidad and Puerto Príncipe on the south coast to Holguin on the opposite side, focused inward toward the Caribbean. Older even than Havana and the site of the island’s first colonial capital because of its proximity to the coast of Hispaniola, Santiago de Cuba was only slightly smaller than Kingston in 1791, with a total population of 19,703 residents.28

      From its well-protected harbor, Santiago de Cuba looked out upon a system of smaller port cities in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, linked by trade and geographical proximity. Barely twelve hours’ sail to the southwest lay the excellent harbors of the north coast of Jamaica. As Jamaica’s “North side” developed in the eighteenth century, they served as outlets to the sea for the northern tier of sugar-producing parishes—Hanover, St. James, Trelawny, St. Ann, St. Mary, and Portland. At the same time, these cities, situated close to foreign colonies and surrounded by “numerous creeks and bays, where small-decked vessels may run in at any time,” provided staging areas for Jamaica-based smugglers and ports of call for their counterparts from Cuba, Saint-Domingue, and elsewhere.29 By 1758, two of the busiest of these ports, Montego Bay and Port Antonio, had achieved sufficient stature to be named, along with Kingston and Savanna-la-Mar, official ports of entry and outfitted with proper courts and customs apparatus. The other northern towns—St. Ann’s Bay, Falmouth, Martha Brae, and Lucea—became centers of