Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Haiti: Historical Setting
Saint-Domingue, some because of the island's tropical heat,
humidity, and diseases, and others as the result of brutal treatment
by plantation owners. Statistics show that there was a
complete turnover of slaves every twenty years. In 1789 twothirds
of all the slaves in the colony had been born in Africa.
The colony was hierarchically structured, based on color,
class, and wealth. At the bottom of the social ladder were the
slaves who had just arrived in Saint-Domingue and spoke only
African languages. As field laborers, they had the hardest work
and were despised by everyone else. On the next rung were the
Creole slaves, Africans whose source of pride was that they had
been born in the New World. Above them came the mulatto
slaves, who often worked in the plantation house and viewed
themselves as superior to the freed black slaves because of their
indoor work and lighter skin color. At the top were the affranchis,
usually mulattoes, or people of color (gens de couleur) , neither
whites nor slaves. Whites were on a separate social ladder;
at the bottom were the shopkeepers, referred to as the small
whites (petits blancs) . At the top were the plantation owners,
wealthy merchants, and high officials, who were known as the
big whites (grands blancs) .
Social and racial dissatisfaction and tensions among planters,
free blacks, and slaves became widespread in Saint-
Domingue in the last years of the colony. In addition, the planters
chafed at regulations imposed by the mother country.
France appointed the colonial governors, quartered militia in
the colony, and required that all cargo travel on French ships.
The free blacks protested their second-class status. Beginning
in the 1770s, the white colonists imposed laws that precluded
blacks from being called "mister," from wearing certain
clothes, or from sitting wherever they liked in churches and
theaters. The free blacks wanted equal rights with whites, and
most of all the right to hold citizenship and to own slaves.
The slaves on Saint-Domingue, who were badly mistreated by
the planters, became increasingly restive, spurred on by the
French Revolution, with its endorsement of freedom and
equality and by campaigns by British and French anti-slavery
organizations. Violent conflicts between white colonists and
black slaves were common in Saint-Domingue. Bands of runaway
slaves, known as maroons (marrons), entrenched themselves
in bastions in the colony's mountains and forests, from
which they harried white-owned plantations, both to obtain
provisions and weaponry and to avenge themselves against the
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