Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [4]
Some mulattoes remained in slavery, but more were freed by their fathers and became property and slave owners themselves. By 1789, the population of African slaves was estimated at 500,000 or more. A decade following the American Revolution, and just as the French Revolution began, the slaves of Saint Domingue outnumbered the white master class by at least twelve to one, and they outnumbered the combined white and colored population by at least seven to one.
Most of the wealthiest sugar planters had become absentee owners, living in France on income produced by slaves governed by professional plantation managers on site. Owners of not-quite-so-profitable plantations of indigo, cotton, or (increasingly) coffee were more likely to live in the colony, with their white families, mixed-blood families, or often enough some uneasy combination of both. These plantation owners, the cream of colonial society, were commonly called grands blancs, or “big whites.” Even before the whole situation was polarized by the French Revolution, there was a degree of class tension between this group and the “little whites,” or petits blancs, a population of merchants, artisans, sailors, international transients, and fortune seekers who mostly lived in the rapidly expanding cities and towns along the coast. The entire white community was united by fervent racism and by a mutual investment in the slave system (most petits blancs hoped and intended to evolve into grands blancs), but divided by differences of economic status and interest.
The free gens de couleurvrere socially and politically excluded by the whites (their parents) and at the same time given very considerable educational and economic support. The luckiest had been sent to France for their schooling (the home government, wary of trends that might lead to an independence movement in the colony, forbade the establishment of colleges for anyone in Saint Domingue) and owned plantations and slaves themselves. Others belonged to the artisan and petty merchant class. Colored women included a famous community of courtesans; mistresses to the most powerful white men of the colony, they were renowned for their grace, beauty, charm, and finely honed professional skill. Most gens de couleur, whatever their walk of life, counted relatives among both the African slaves and the European slave masters.
The gens de couleur outnumbered the whites in two of Saint Domingue's three provinces, and were an economic force to be reckoned throughout the colony, but regardless of their status within their group, they were all subject to the same vicious racial discrimination. As of 1789, the colored people had no political rights whatsoever, and were subject to numerous humiliating little rules. Their surnames, usually derived from white parentage, were required to carry the phrase le dit—a derisive “the so-called.” Colored men could not carry arms in town and were forbidden to mingle with whites in situations like church or the theater. A dress code existed for both sexes, though it was much relaxed for colored women following a strike by the notorious courtesans.
At the same time, colored men were a large majority in all branches of colonial military service. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, service in the militias and the marechaussee (a sort of police force that devoted much time to the capture of runaway slaves) was seen as onerous by the whites