The Common Wind

Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution

Julius S. Scott

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781788732482
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788732499
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of official eighteenth-century records in Spanish, English, and French, Julius S. Scott has written a powerful "history from below." Scott follows the spread of "rumors of emancipation" and the people behind them, bringing to life the protagonists in the slave revolution.
By tracking the colliding worlds of buccaneers, military deserters, and maroon communards from Venezuela to Virginia, Scott records the transmission of contagious mutinies and insurrections in unparalleled detail, providing readers with an intellectual history of the enslaved.
Though The Common Wind is credited with having "opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words," the manuscript remained unpublished for thirty-two years. Now, after receiving wide acclaim from leading historians of slavery and the New World, it has been published by Verso for the first time, with a foreword by the academic and author Marcus Rediker.

1.

“Pandora’s Box”

The Masterless Caribbean at the
End of the Eighteenth Century

Late in the seventeenth century, the European colonizing nations briefly put aside their differences and began a concerted effort to rid the Caribbean of the buccaneers, pirates, and other fugitives who had taken refuge in the region. This move to dislodge the “masterless” people of the West Indies signaled the transformation of the islands from havens for freebooters and renegades into settler colonies based on plantations and slave labor. The same offensive that had given large planters the upper hand in Barbados in the 1670s had gained irreversible momentum throughout the Caribbean by the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The steady rise in sugar prices on the world market after about 1740 favored the expansion of plantation monoculture into areas where cattle and pigs had grazed, and where hide hunters, logwood cutters, runaway slaves, and other Caribbean dissidents had found shelter.

Barely a half century after an earthquake in 1692 destroyed Port Royal, Jamaica, a longstanding outpost for pirates from all over the region, the Caribbean had already become a vastly different place from what it had been during the heyday of the buccaneers. Not only had their old haunts disappeared; older images of “enchanted” islands liberated from the hierarchies of the Old World were difficult to sustain as plantations hungrily gobbled up what was once frontier land. As planters gained control over the land, so they tightened their control of labor. The trade in African slaves steadily increased as the century progressed, and the common scene of slave ships unloading their human cargoes turned on its head in the most graphic of ways earlier dreams of a “masterless” existence. By century’s end, the fluid pre-plantation economy and society had long since given way to an ominous landscape of imperial soldiers and warships, plantations and sugar mills, masters and slaves.¹

Even during such a period of advance and consolidation, however, planters and merchants encountered pockets of resistance to their drive for absolute authority. In fact, employers on both sides of the Atlantic, though flushed with economic prosperity, still worried about the many ways which individuals and groups found to protect and extend masterless existences. In both the Old World and the New, these concerns centered upon the persistent problem of the “seething mobility” of substantial sectors of the laboring classes. In eighteenth-century England, according to E. P. Thompson, masters of labor complained about bothersome aspects of the developing “free” labor market—about “the indiscipline of working people, their lack of economic dependency and their social insubordination”—which resulted from labor’s mobility.² Planters echoed similar concerns in the Caribbean region, where buccaneers and pirates, the old scourges of the planters and traders, had been effectively suppressed, but where a colorful assortment of saucy and insubordinate characters continued to move about and resist authority. Masters and employers in industrializing Old World economies based on “free” labor felt only mildly threatened by such mobility. In the plantation-based societies of the Caribbean, however, where the unfreedom of the vast majority of the labor force was written into law and sanctioned by force and where “free” workers were the anomaly rather than the rule, the persistence of labor mobility called forth an anguished response from the ruling class. For the same reasons, the prospect of a masterless, mobile existence outside the plantation orbit held an especially seductive appeal for disenchanted people casting about for new options. In England, masters begrudged a certain amount of uncontrolled movement among their workers. In the Caribbean, masters resorted to a profusion of local laws and international treaties to keep this mobility within the narrowest of possible limits.

Though the planters’ efforts to curtail freedom over the course of the eighteenth century placed severe restrictions on mobility, these measures never succeeded completely in keeping people from pursuing alternatives to life under the plantation system. At the close of the eighteenth century, as at its beginning, people of many descriptions defied the odds and attempted to escape their masters. Slaves deserted plantations in large numbers; urban workers ducked their owners; seamen jumped ship to avoid floggings and the press gang; militiamen and regular troops grumbled, ignored orders, and deserted their watch; “higglers” left workplaces to peddle their wares in the black market; and smugglers and shady foreigners moved about on mysterious missions from island to island. Furthermore, the very commercial growth which planters and merchants welcomed opened new avenues of mobility. Cities grew and matured, attracting runaway slaves and sheltering a teeming underground with surprising regional connections. Expanding commercial links sanctioned the comings and goings of ships of all sizes and nations. Island ports required pilot boats with experienced navigators to guide the incoming merchantmen to safe anchorages, and they needed a network of coastal vessels and skilled sailors to support their busy markets. This web of commerce brought the region’s islands into closer and closer contact as the century progressed, providing channels of communication as well as tempting routes of escape.

On the eve of Caribbean revolution, most English, French, and Spanish planters and traders in the region rode the crest of a long wave of prosperity. Nevertheless, they continued to grope, much as they had at the end of the last century, for common solutions to the problem of controlling runaways, deserters, and vagabonds in the region. As long as masterless men and women found ways to move about and evade the authorities, they reasoned, these people embodied submerged traditions of popular resistance which could burst into the open at any time. Examining the rich world which these mobile fugitives inhabited—the complex (and largely invisible) underground which the “mariners, renegades, and castaways” of the Caribbean created to protect themselves in the face of planter consolidation—is crucial to understanding how news, ideas, and social excitement traveled in the electric political environment of the late eighteenth century.³

All of the West Indies felt the effects of the sugar boom of the mid-eighteenth century, particularly the Greater Antilles—Jamaica, Cuba, and Hispaniola, the larger islands of the northwestern Caribbean. In the century after 1670, though at different speeds and by different historical processes, the expansion of sugar cultivation transformed these three islands from sparsely populated frontier outposts to plantation societies based on captive African labor.

British growth centered in Jamaica. After 1740 the planter class had managed to contain the intense factionalism and black rebelliousness of the previous decade enough to attract white settlers, drawn in large part from the stagnating islands to the east. They began to clear and cultivate new lands in the north and west of the island, and to purchase hundreds of thousands of Africans to work the new plantations. By 1766, Jamaica had bolted well past the other British possessions in the West Indies in its importance both as a commercial entrepôt and as a staple-producing economy. Some 200,000 people, half the population of Britain’s sugar colonies, resided there, and its busy ports controlled half the British trade in the region. Despite setbacks encountered during the period of the American Revolution, the rapid extension of sugar monoculture in Jamaica continued through the 1780s.⁴

As sugar came to dominate the economy of Jamaica, the demographic balance between black and white Jamaicans shifted decisively in favor of the African population. Slave imports into the island rose steadily throughout the eighteenth century, surpassing 120,000 for the twenty-year period between 1741 and 1760, totaling nearly 150,000 in the subsequent two decades, and increasing at an even faster rate after 1781. As early as 1730, nine of every ten Jamaicans were black slaves, and by the eve of the American Revolution almost ninety-four percent of the population of the island was of African ancestry.⁵

Cuba’s move toward massive investment in the sugar industry, as well as its demographic absorption into Afro-America, occurred both later and more abruptly than in Jamaica. Crucial to the expansion of sugar in this Spanish colony was the British occupation of Havana in 1762. Over a period of eleven months, the British introduced some 10,000 slaves into the island, breathing life into the sugar industry which Cuban planters sustained after the British departure. The Cuban share in the African slave trade, while still miniscule relative to its more thoroughly developed neighbors, increased markedly after 1763. Almost 31,000 Africans were imported between 1763 and 1789, and by 1792 data from the island’s second official census revealed that the white population of Cuba had slipped below the numbers of non-whites for the first time in the history of the island.⁶

But nowhere was society transformed more quickly or completely than in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The progress of sugar in Jamaica and Cuba paled next to the economic explosion in this mountainous strip of land comprising the western third of the island of Hispaniola. Even as French fortunes waxed and finally waned in the intense imperial competition leading up to the Seven Years’ War, the sudden emergence of Saint-Domingue was astonishing. Still a buccaneering outpost upon its cession to France in 1697, by 1739 Saint-Domingue was the world’s richest and most profitable slave colony. Already the number of sugar mills had reached 450, up from just thirty-five at the turn of the century, and there were more enslaved Africans—over 117,000—working in Saint-Domingue than in Jamaica or in any other Caribbean island. Three years later Saint-Domingue produced more sugar than all the British sugar islands combined. During the American Revolution, French planters took advantage of famine and economic dislocation in the British territories to carve out an even bigger slice of the world sugar market. The increased volume of the slave trade to Saint-Domingue reflects the new boom of the 1770s. In 1771, traders brought slightly more than 10,000 new Africans to Saint-Domingue; five years later, the number had more than doubled. The expansion of the French colony continued through the 1780s. In the ten years preceding the French Revolution, Saint-Domingue’s booming economy was primarily responsible for tripling the volume of the French slave trade over the previous decade, and official figures showed annual African imports to rival consistently the size of the colony’s entire white population year after year, reaching a dizzying total of 30,000 at least as early as 1785. By 1789, Saint-Domingue was the world’s largest producer of sugar and coffee; its plantations produced twice as much as all other French colonies combined; and French ships entering and leaving its ports accounted for more than a third of the metropole’s foreign trade.⁷

While the decisive economic expansion after 1700 sounded the death knell, both in image and reality, of the masterless Caribbean of an earlier time, it also produced new strata of disaffected individuals who continued to strive to place themselves outside the plantation orbit and survive. In addition, forms of resistance already endemic to the region continued to thrive and spread. The practice of Africans fleeing their enslavers, for example, was already a tradition of long standing at the turn of the eighteenth century. As sugar production expanded and regional demography tilted dramatically in favor of Africans, the problem of controlling runaway slaves became one of the paramount concerns of Caribbean planters, colonial officials, and other whites. Workers fleeing plantations and attempting to set up communities of their own provided both concrete alternatives to the plantation regime and a powerful metaphor informing other forms of mobility and resistance in the region.

Africans in Jamaica achieved notable success in their efforts to become independent. The rugged “cockpit country” in the northwest of the island and the Blue Mountains in the east harbored refugees from slavery from the earliest years of Spanish control; these groups of outlying runaway slaves constituted the region’s first “maroons.” As slave imports soared after 1700, Africans followed the well-worn paths of their forebears, leaving plantations for expanding maroon communities in the parishes of Trelawny, St. James, St. Elizabeth, and St. George. As these communities grew, so did their contacts with the plantations, for maroons and slaves carried on a clandestine trade in ammunition and provisions, and maroons staged periodic raids. During the 1730s, a period of slave unrest throughout the Caribbean, the related problems of slave desertion and the hostile activities of communities of runaways became particularly acute, driving the planter class into open warfare with the maroons. A decade of conflict finally forced the government to recognize by treaty the semi-independent status of several maroon towns in 1739. By these treaties, the British government agreed to allow these maroon towns to exist under limited self-government, but at the same time enlisted their aid in policing the island. In return for official recognition, the maroons promised to discourage, apprehend, and return future runaways. Designed to drive a wedge between the maroon towns and nearby plantations, laws passed in the aftermath of the rebellion threatened maroons guilty of “inveigling slaves” from plantations or “harbouring runaways” with banishment from the island.⁸

Not surprisingly, conflict and ambiguity complicated the history of this arrangement between the planter class and the maroons in the half century after 1740. On occasion, residents of the maroon towns faithfully outfitted parties to track down runaways in their areas, and the accounts brought back to the estates by recaptured runaways produced a marked animosity in the slave huts.⁹ Such examples of loyalty led Governor Adam Williamson to assert hopefully in 1793 that “the Maroons are well affected, and would exert themselves either in the defence of the Island or quelling internal Insurrections.”¹⁰ The planters themselves, however, apprehended danger in the carefree mobility of ostensible black allies, and their concerns surfaced time and again. They observed that the laws restricting the movements of the maroons were indifferently enforced, and they watched as the maroons wandered about with ease in the towns and through the countryside, where they had extensive contact with plantation slaves. The men of Trelawny Town, the largest of the maroon settlements, fathered “numerous Children by Female Slaves, residing on the Low Plantations” of the surrounding parishes, and, concluded a 1795 report, “the Nature of their Connections was alarming.” When the Trelawny maroons took up arms against the government that same year, officials moved quickly to isolate the rebels by cutting off such communication, fully expecting their “Search for concealed Arms in all the Negroe Huts over the Island” to uncover and foil their networks.¹¹

Finally, critics of the government’s treaties pointed out, the agreement with the maroons hardly deterred groups of new runaways from seeking even greater independence and taking to the woods and mountains to establish towns of their own. Well known from estate to estate, the daring exploits of leaders of runaway groups sparked excited conversation among Jamaican slaves and constantly reminded them of both the hazards and the promise of such activity. Market days, dances, horse races, and other public occasions attracting large gatherings of slaves allowed news of these developments to circulate. When Mingo, a fisherman and former driver on a large Trelawny estate, “made a Ball … after the Conclusion of Crop” in the fall of 1791, slaves from neighboring estates who attended were astonished to see Brutus present. An incorrigible runaway serving a life term in the parish workhouse at Martha Brae for his role in organizing unauthorized maroon towns in the 1780s, Brutus had recently escaped and had already set about his old ways. At the ball, Brutus scoffed at his owner’s attempts to recapture him and affirmed rumors spread by recently returned runaways that he, together “with about eighteen other Negroes men slaves and three women of different Countries and owners” from Trelawny, Runaway Bay, and Clarendon, had established an impregnable new town in the backwoods of the parish. Many of those attending Mingo’s ball must have already known of Brutus Town; its residents had planted provisions and through “correspondence” with trusted plantation slaves kept the settlement stocked with “Rum, Sugar, Salt and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Map
• 1. “Pandora’s Box”: The Masterless Caribbean at the End of the Eighteenth Century
• 2. “Negroes in Foreign Bottoms”: Sailors, Slaves, and Communication
• 3. “The Suspence Is Dangerous in a Thousand Shapes”: News, Rumor, and Politics on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution
• 4. “Ideas of Liberty Have Sunk So Deep”: Communication and Revolution, 1789–93
• 5. “Know Your True Interests”: Saint-Domingue and the Americas, 1793–1800
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index