For nearly a hundred years the western half of Santo Domingo had been held by France, and to every outward appearance it had enjoyed such unbounded and steadily increasing prosperity that it was regarded with envy on every side; in fine, it seemed to be one of the richest and most desirable colonies in the whole world. Historians, said an observer of a later day,[30] were "never weary of enumerating the amount of its products, the great trade, the warehouses full of sugar, cotton, coffee, indigo and cocoa; its plains covered with splendid estates, its hillsides dotted with noble houses; a white population, rich, refined, enjoying life as only a luxurious colonial society can enjoy it." Few could then see the foul blot beneath so fair a surface, or realize that what had been bought by the misery and blood of a prostrate race would demand an equivalent, and that a settlement might be forced.
Negroes had been imported into Santo Domingo from the African coasts in incredible numbers, first by Spain after she had succeeded in exterminating the inoffensive native Caribs, and later by France. One hundred thousand blacks of all ages were entering the colonies each year, and to secure this number of bossals, as the native Africans were called, involved the death of nearly as many more, either through the fighting that preceded their capture on land, or from the terrors of pestilence or shipwreck that awaited them at sea. By 1790 the blacks of Santo Domingo outnumbered the whites sixteen to one, and the number of blacks then in the island was estimated at 480,000, in contrast to 30,800 whites, and about 24,000 free mulattoes or "people of color."
Under French rule the blacks had been subjected, as many believed, to a system of slavery unsurpassed for cruelty and barbarity. No doubt there were Frenchmen who, in their fierce struggle to become rich, worked their slaves beyond human endurance and did not hesitate to terrorize them with the severest punishment upon the first symptoms of revolt; but, on the whole, such sweeping denunciations were probably unjust. An impartial observer and historian of that day, himself an Englishman,[31] declared that the French treated their slaves quite as well as the English did theirs, and clothed them better. He believed that the lot of the Santo Domingo blacks at the period of which we speak would compare favorably with that of the peasantry of Europe, a comment made familiar to American ears when applied to the slave population of the South. The real trouble came from the more enlightened disaffection of the mulattoes and free negroes, fanned by the fanatic zeal of abolitionists abroad, particularly of those who formed the society of Les Amis des Noirs in France, who were determined to carry out their policies by any means and at whatever cost.
The mulattoes were really in worse plight than the actual slaves, for they were virtually slaves of the State and had no master to whom they could appeal, being subject to military service without pay, to the corvée or labor upon the highways, the hardships of which were insupportable, as well as to a constant and galling tyranny. The law was invariably framed in favor of the white man, who, if he struck a mulatto, was subject to a trivial fine, while retaliation by the man of color might cost him his right hand. It should be added, however, that custom was usually more lenient than the law, and that such atrocious enactments were generally a dead letter.
As might have been expected in the circumstances, the mulattoes took their revenge on the despised blacks, whom they were permitted to hold as slaves. They were notoriously the hardest taskmasters in the island, and in return they were naturally envied and hated by the ignorant mass of black humanity. The whites, to complete the discord, were divided among themselves, the Frenchmen from Europe affecting a superiority over the white Creoles, the seasoned natives of the island, a condition that never made for good feeling. Moreover, the white planter, who endeavored to gain a foothold by producing sugar, cotton or coffee, seems to have had a just grievance against the merchants whom the law favored and who set the price for negroes and all other commodities that had to be bought in exchange for produce. Such at least was the conviction and experience of a keen observer, Francis Alexander Stanislaus, Baron de Wimpffen,[32] who went to Santo Domingo in 1788, tried to establish himself as a coffee planter at Jaquemel, on the southern coast not far from Les Cayes, and after three years of fruitless effort, gave up the attempt in disgust, glad to escape, as from the flames of purgatory, to the United States, where he settled in Pennsylvania. Baron de Wimpffen's lack of success no doubt colored his impressions of the country to some extent, but after making due allowance on this score, we find in his letters, beyond a doubt, an essentially true picture of Santo Domingan society and plantation life at the very time and place with which our story is most intimately concerned. A sketch of the picture which the Baron has drawn, though in brief outline, will enable us better to understand the real condition of affairs.
The prevailing taste in Santo Domingo, according to this observer, was creolian tinctured with boucan, or with the characteristics of the buccaneers. White society on the island was divided into governmental or town officials, merchants, and planters, the several classes having their own interests, which were often conflicting. The planters were concerned only with negroes, their sugar, their cotton or their coffee, and could talk of nothing else; values were reckoned in negroes, or in sugar, for which slaves were commonly exchanged. The laxity of morals, the absence of schools, and the total lack of books were patent on every hand. After sunset dancing was the chief form of amusement in the towns, and handsome mulattoes were the acknowledged Bacchantes of the island. It was from this class that housekeepers were usually chosen by the greater part of the unmarried whites. They had "some skill," said Baron de Wimpffen, "in the management of a family, sufficient honesty to attach themselves invariably to one man, and great goodness of heart. More than one European, abandoned by his selfish brethren, has found in them all the solicitude of the most tender, the most constant, the most generous humanity, without being indebted for it to any other sentiment than benevolence."
Expense of cultivation at this time is said to have risen out of all proportion to the value of the product. While negro service was a prime necessity to the planter, the African mine was becoming exhausted; even then slave dealers were penetrating a thousand leagues or more from the Guinea coast. Added to the cost of slaves, which was yearly increasing and had already reached to 2,000 or even 3,000 francs per head, the Government exacted a ruinous capitation tax, which bore with special weight on the planter.[33] Physicians and lawyers, however ignorant, exacted exorbitant fees; masons and carpenters, however inefficient, demanded an unreasonable wage; they, we are told, with the merchant and official governmental class, were the only money makers on the island. The merchant whom we have seen taking the planter's produce at his own price, in exchange for slaves again at his own price, had the advantage in every business transaction; the planter, as a result, was his chronic debtor, and at usurious rates.
Subject to an enervating climate, which Europeans with their intemperate habits could seldom endure for long, the planter, though weak and sick himself, was often obliged to be overseer, driver, apothecary, and nurse to his negroes, the slave of his slaves. In spite of every care, out of one hundred imported negroes the mortality was nearly twenty per cent in the first year. Where less oversight was given to their food, the slightest scratch was likely to degenerate into a dangerous wound, while the most dreaded disease, then known in English as the "yaws" and in French as la grosse vérole (to distinguish it from the smallpox, la petite vérole), was a scourge for which no remedy had then been found. Every slave was branded with a hot iron on the breast, with both the name of his master and that of the parish to which he belonged, but notwithstanding such precautions desertions were far from uncommon.
The Santo Domingan blacks were put to work in the morning with a crack of the arceau, a short-handled whip, delivered on their backs or shoulders, and so accustomed had they become to the regularity of this stimulus that they could hardly be set in motion without it. How to manage the true bossal, as distinguished from the African creole, with humanity and success was a problem to which many considerate planters must have addressed themselves in vain, if, as this one declared, the black's ruling passion was to do nothing, and he was by nature a thief, to whom indulgence was weakness and injustice a defect of judgment that excited both his hatred and his contempt.
Stanilaus further observed that the soil of Santo Domingo was then already becoming exhausted, and he believed that the day of rapid fortunes for the planter had passed. "Calculate now," said he, "the privations of every kind, the commercial vicissitudes, the perpetual apprehensions, the disgusting details, inseparable from the nature of slavery; the state of languor or anxiety in which he vegetates between a burning sky, and a soil always ready to swallow him up, and you will allow with me that there is no peasant, no day-labourer in Europe, whose condition is not preferable to that of a planter of San Domingo." "I never met," he adds, "a West Indian in France who did not enumerate to me with more emphasis than accuracy, the charms of a residence at Saint Domingo; since I have been here, I have not found a single one who has not cursed both Saint Domingo, and the obstacles, eternally reviving, which, from one year to another, prolong his stay in this abode of the damned."