10
The revolutionary crisis not only brought Saint-Domingue’s prosperity to an end. It halted the migration from Europe which had built up the colony’s white population across the previous decades, and made many of those who had settled on the island fearful for their future. A huge exodus of colons followed—of planters and commercial agents, soldiers and administrators, artisans and tradesmen of all kinds, along with their wives and children—effectively ending France’s presence on an island that had accounted for more than three-quarters of the country’s colonial trade just a few years previously.1 Just when they left and where they chose to go depended on individual circumstance, but they left because of fear, fear of racial attacks and murders, of property-burning, or slave insurrection. From 1790 and the initial campaign for civil rights by men of colour, the white colons had felt reason to fear, since from the outset the insurrections in Saint-Domingue always had a racial character and were directed principally against them. As revolutionary tracts arrived from France urging the enslaved population to seize their civil rights, their anxieties grew more pressing. Crisis point was reached in August 1791, when, following a nocturnal oath-taking at Bois-Caïman, a strike was called on the plantations that unleashed a wave of slave violence. The brutality of the attacks that followed shocked and terrified the colons; it demonstrated as never before the collective power of the black community; and it was murderous. By the end of the year, more than 1,000 sugar and coffee plantations had been destroyed, and around 400 white colonists had been slaughtered.2 The French government had been unable to save their lives or their properties, and many colonists, among them some of the very richest, were driven to seek shelter elsewhere.
This would prove to be the first of a number of key moments in the revolutionary decade which persuaded the colons that the time was right to leave. It was not only those who lived on rural plantations who felt vulnerable to attack. The insurgents turned against the white population in the towns and cities, too, and there was widespread panic, notably in 1793, when the torching of Port-au-Prince led to the evacuation of 10,000 people to Norfolk, Virginia.3 Outside events could also drive settlers to abandon their properties and flee: for some it was the arrival of a French expeditionary force on the island, for others the threat of invasion by Britain or Spain. A succession of panics spread among the white population during the 1790s, leading to the flight and migration of large numbers of people. Not all of those who left intended leaving for good. Some hedged their bets, entrusting their estates to managers in their absence, still dreaming of a time when revolution and insurrection would be a thing of the past. But with the passage of the years these hopes faded, and the colons were forced to accept that they would not and could not return.
There were a number of turning-points, when Saint-Domingue seemed to slip ever further from their grasp. The proclamation of abolition was one, the ending of the slave economy without which many thought colonial culture impossible. The British invasion was another, though some viewed the British as the least bad of the options available, offering the possibility of working again with slave labour. For that reason, too, the return of the French in 1798 was not seen as reason for rejoicing. They did not trust the government to look after their interests, or the army to help restore their privileged position in society, as they saw increasing numbers of black troops deployed, both in the colonies and in mainline regiments. Their distrust was especially reserved for the National Guard which dealt with policing on the island. At one time it had been the preserve of white colonists, but as the political and military crisis evolved, it was opened up to all ethnic groups, including the former slaves, while the demands of the war led to the withdrawal of regular units of the army for service in Europe.4 But it would be the failure of Leclerc’s expedition to retake Haiti in 1802 and the subsequent racial purge that Dessalines unleashed which convinced even the most resolute that they had no choice but to leave. The carnage was not restricted to the white settlers: between 1791 and 1804 some 60,000 French soldiers had been killed on Saint-Domingue, along with up to a third of the black population of the island.5 The colons may have left with feelings of relief, but few did so joyously. Especially for those Creoles who had lived all their lives on Saint-Domingue, leaving was seen as a personal loss, as a defeat that for many meant abandoning the only lifestyle they had known.
But if they were to seek refuge elsewhere, where could they go? The decision was often forced on them by the emergency they faced and the possibilities for escape. But in general terms, they had three alternatives, as Madeleine Dupouy explains when discussing the papers of three families who faced exactly this dilemma. They might head for the United States and make their way in the dynamic economy of the eastern seaboard; they might seek out another Caribbean island with a plantation economy and climate similar to those of Saint-Domingue; or they might return to France, a nation in the midst of revolution and now ravaged by war, a country very different from the one they had known. It was not an easy choice, as any course of action involved change and adaptation.6
For those who had families back in France and who accepted that their colonial adventure was behind them, there might seem to be only one answer: they would buy a passage on a ship from Nantes or Bordeaux and return home to France. And many did. But it was not always as simple as that. Some of the planters were men of strongly royalist views, who regarded the Revolution with unabated horror, or scions of noble families for whom a return to France in the years of the republic would constitute a threat, perhaps to life itself. Others, the many artisans and craftsmen who had sought their fortune in the Islands, might have grounds of their own to make them hesitate. Some had left home through poverty, or were orphaned and without a close family to return to; or they might have signed on as indentured workers in the service of others to get the price of their passage to the colonies.7 Besides, not all had grown prosperous during their years in the Caribbean, and many had emerged burdened with debts which they could not easily repay. In Bordeaux the merchant Lorenz Meyer describes the lot of 600 refugees who had arrived in the city piled one on top of another in the hold of a ship, and who were now kept at government expense in the buildings of a bare, unfurnished convent. He draws an unsparing picture of their misery—of men, women, and children who had lost everything and were cooped up in sordid cells, black and white alike, living, as he puts it, ‘like animals’. They were given only the minimum food rations needed if they were to avoid dying of starvation, and they complained of being left without bread for several days. ‘I shall never forget,’ he writes, ‘the distressing sight of these miserable people covered in filthy rags, nor the awful feeling I had when I realised my powerlessness to relieve their suffering.’8 For many refugees from the islands, if they had no families to return to, this was the welcome that awaited them when they docked in a French port.
Not all were reduced to such conditions, of course, but for those who came to France as refugees from Saint-Domingue there might be little choice. The lucky ones were those who planned in advance, or the women and children sent home to France before violence broke out and they were forced to flee. The early arrivals included unaccompanied children whom merchant firms in Nantes or Bordeaux had agreed to evacuate at their own expense.9 Less fortunate were those who remained behind on the island, only to be driven out by massacres or by disasters like the burning of Port-au-Prince in June 1793 or Dessalines’s purge of the white population ten years later. They were forced to evacuate their homes and leave all their valuables behind as they boarded ships to the nearest safe haven, often to the ports of the eastern seaboard of the United States. For the first time in their lives they found themselves reduced to penury and dependent on public charity, and they often discovered that they were not welcome in the United States. White colons were condemned for their failure to hold and protect the colony, which Americans were liable to ascribe to moral failings and depravity.10 Indeed, the American authorities, unsettled by the incursion of French planters and their families in 1793 and fearful lest they spread revolutionary contagion, hastened to put them on ships and to send them in convoys, under escort, to Europe. They arrived, in Brest or Nantes or Bordeaux, in the midst of a war, having escaped the dangers of the Atlantic crossing and the attentions of British warships, fugitives from slave violence.11 Smaller numbers arrived from France’s other Caribbean islands, Guadeloupe and Martinique, after the British invaded.12 Some were bewildered by what they found: for many it was the first time they had set foot on French soil; and while others may have been born in France, often in the west and south-west to which they now returned, they had left for the New World several decades previously and had few real contacts to which to turn. They had little conception of the changes which the Revolution had wrought, and they found the country they returned to very different from the one they had left behind.
At first the French responded by offering public assistance to those arriving from the Caribbean and supplying them with basic necessities, food and simple accommodation, but as the numbers arriving continued to rise, especially with the defeat of Leclerc’s mission to Saint-Domingue, the authorities imposed restrictions in a bid to limit their own exposure to the crisis. It was recognized that immigration was a regional problem, largely limited to the west-coast ports. In July 1802, the government decreed that state assistance to refugees from the colonies should cease except in the five cities where they were most concentrated—Bordeaux, Marseille, Nantes, Lorient, and La Rochelle. Others would have to make their way to these cities if they hoped to receive money from the state, which, of course, exacerbated the problem for the cities concerned. In the case of Bordeaux, the mayors of the three municipal authorities were allocated funds to relieve hardship among former colons, both those who had fled slave insurgency in the Caribbean and those who had been captured by the British and had been returned as prisoners-of-war from British gaols or from prison hulks moored in naval ports like Portsmouth and Chatham. Among the refugees were mothers with small children, who were given priority. But funds were limited. Those without lodging were interned in institutions, often in buildings that had previously been used by the army; and they were provided with a soup kitchen, with a budget to cover 4,000 rations of soup. Distinctions began to be drawn between claimants: only white settlers would be helped, and those who could demonstrate that they had been proprietors in Saint-Domingue.13 For black refugees and men of colour, the conditions imposed were much harsher. They were not allowed to re-embark for the colonies; they were kept out of Paris; and the government proposed to incorporate the able-bodied males among them in military units whom they would send under white commanders to islands off the French coast, the Îles d’Hyères, the Île d’Oléron, and the Île d’Aix.14
Petitions flowed in from former colonists who now found themselves destitute and unemployed, their lives seemingly without purpose, abandoned by a government to which they claimed to have remained loyal. They had been men of substance, landowners and merchants, before misfortune struck; and they now suffered from boredom, a sense of uselessness and waste. Though they petitioned for alms, what many really wanted was to get out of France, to return home to the Antilles, the place they still thought of as home. And indeed, when names were removed from the list of colons in receipt of assistance, the reason most commonly given was not death or sickness, but the decision, once they were able to believe that peace had been restored, to leave France to resume the life they had left behind in the Caribbean. Entry after entry tells the same story: ‘left for Saint-Domingue with his wife and three children’, ‘left for the colonies’, ‘embarked for the Antilles’. Some, at least, prepared to pursue their dream until the bitter end.15 They did not stay in France long enough to benefit from the 150-million franc indemnity which the French sought from Haiti in 1825 to reimburse them and their descendants. Those eligible for compensation included not only white colonists but also planters and slave-owners of colour who had remained loyal to France and has passed into exile. In all, around 12,000 people benefited, at great cost to the Haitian economy.16 Payments to individuals were still being made in Bordeaux well into the Third Republic. A list drawn up by the Prefect in 1876 of those entitled to such payments contained thirty-eight names, thirty of them women, most often widows living on modest investments and trying to maintain a degree of demure respectability in their old age.17
Not all of those who arrived from the colonies in metropolitan France were white; among them were mulattoes threatened by insurrection, and black servants who had either fled aboard ship or had come to France with their masters or as servants to ships’ captains. There was nothing new, of course, in seeing Africans in the Atlantic port cities; they had been a familiar sight for much of the previous century. And though many then moved on to Paris, it was through the ports of the Atlantic coast that more than nine-tenths of them had come to France.18 But attitudes changed dramatically after the violence in Saint-Domingue, and those fleeing from the island were often met with suspicion by the French authorities, who saw them as a possible source of further trouble. Black immigrants were supervised; some found themselves the victims of false denunciations. From the moment they landed they were under surveillance, with Napoleon’s government insistent that steps be taken to prevent their illegal entry into France. In 1807, the Prefect of the Gironde was ordered to find secure accommodation for any new arrivals from French colonies landing without express permission from the colonial governor, and to intern any blacks arriving in the city other than by sea.19 To do this, he required accurate information about the numbers who had arrived in Bordeaux from the Caribbean since the first risings on Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue, information that was meticulously collated by the administration in October 1807. In all there were 164 names on the list, ninety of them black, the others mulattoes. They had come to Bordeaux at different moments in the Revolution in response to different crises across the Antilles, from Saint-Domingue and Martinique, Guadeloupe, St Lucia, and Marie-Galante. They included widows, men of working age, and mothers with small children: the oldest was sixty-eight, the youngest no more than one year old. They worked in the professions open to people of colour in the French colonies: carpenters, painters, stonemasons, manservants, farm workers, and day labourers among the men, seamstresses, laundresses, and domestic servants for the women. They posed no threat to the people of Bordeaux, but events in the Caribbean had aroused suspicions and anxieties, making the city a far less welcoming place.20
Some colons, of course, had no wish to move to Europe in the first place, or to make peace with a France which they held responsible for so many of their woes. They preferred to remain in the Americas, hoping to maintain the colonial lifestyle they had become used to. To this end, they tended to avoid other French islands like Guadeloupe or Guyane, where they imagined themselves threatened by the same social threats as in Saint-Domingue and the same loss of privilege that they had already suffered. They preferred to seek a new life on other islands, where slave societies still flourished, uncontaminated, as they saw it, by the germ of anti-colonial revolt. Some went straight to the new United States, to the coastal towns of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, or Louisiana, in the last of which they could also hope to mingle with local people who spoke French. But French culture was not everything. These years also saw colonies of exiles from Saint-Domingue springing up on English and Dutch sugar islands in the Caribbean like Trinidad, Jamaica, Saint-Martin, and Curaçao, as well as in the Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo and Cuba. These were territories that had not previously had a significant French presence, but which now held out a double promise. They were defended by foreign navies, which offered protection against any French attack, a quality that was especially valued by those planters looking for a temporary shelter before returning—as many still imagined they would—to Saint-Domingue. And for those who were contemplating a more permanent exile, these territories offered many of the benefits they had once enjoyed: they had plantation economies, they grew sugar and coffee, and, most important of all, they tolerated slavery. They were places where a colon could hope to live out his life in peace, unencumbered by French egalitarian doctrines or by the threat of slave revolts, and hope to enrich himself as he had previously done in Haiti.21
Jamaica was Britain’s most significant rival to Saint-Domingue, a prosperous colony with a long-established settler community and two important, yet contrasting, urban centres in Kingston and Spanish Town. Kingston was a thriving seaport, a commercial city which was at once a major entrepôt for the African and British trades, a destination for slavers from West Africa, and a staging point for European merchants trading with South America.22 Among the urban centres in the British American colonial world, it ranked behind only Philadelphia and New York for most of the eighteenth century, and ahead of Boston: the figures produced by Jacob Price give its population in 1790 as 26,000, at a time when Philadelphia, the largest city in the United States, had around 42,000 inhabitants, New York a little more than 33,000, Boston around 18,000, and Charleston some 16,000. As a measure of comparison, Le Cap had around 15,000 inhabitants on the eve of the Revolution, and Havana, the capital of plantation-rich Cuba, more than 40,000.23 But in terms of commercial wealth Kingston surpassed all its rivals, and it was the dream of sharing in this wealth that continued to lure merchants, including some of the refugees from Haiti, to settle there.
Jamaica’s capital and second city, Spanish Town, had a very different appeal. It was the centre of colonial administration, the place to which ships arriving and leaving the island had to report, though it was sited back from the coast and had little commerce of its own. But its best days were behind it, and by the 1790s it was a city visibly in decline, with few new public buildings under construction, little private investment, and no military presence once the island’s garrison was redeployed to Kingston in response to the needs of war.24 It had the air of a cultured administrative centre, home to Jamaica’s government and law courts, a place to which the richer planters came to take the air and mix with high society.25 In his Account of Jamaica and its Inhabitants, published in 1808, John Stewart pointed to the dignity of its public buildings, describing Spanish Town as ‘the genteelest and handsomest town in the island’.26 But it was a fading glory, one that appealed mainly to army officers and royalist planters looking for a refuge abroad, and it was in Kingston that the majority of the French émigrés congregated, a city that had welcomed Frenchmen fleeing from religious persecution in the past and where Creole refugees mingled easily with French royalists and revolutionaries and with immigrants and seamen of many nations.27 Being French did not result in social exclusion. They received a warm welcome in Jamaica, with their families and their households, and were not impeded in any way. When, for instance, Madame Fourche, a rich plantation owner from the southern part of Saint-Domingue, crossed to Jamaica in late 1791 ‘for fear of brigands’, as she put it, she was admitted to Kingston with around twenty of her slaves.28 It was not seen as a problem.
That warmth quickly dissipated, however, once Britain and France were at war, and after news arrived of slave insurrections and the torching of plantation houses on Saint-Domingue. At a stroke the presence of French Creoles became a source of panic, as they were associated in Jamaican minds with what they feared most, dangerous revolutionary ideas from France and a cruel and vengeful black population that risked spreading anarchy among Jamaica’s slaves. The free access that had previously been accorded to them was quickly removed, and the island’s borders were more closely policed. From April 1793 new arrivals were treated with suspicion: those intending to stay in Jamaica were questioned by magistrates and they had to produce certificates of previous good conduct, with the sole exception of those who had already sought and been granted British citizenship.29
Despite these precautions, there were moments when the authorities risked being overwhelmed: in 1796 following the evacuation of the population of Port-au-Prince; or in 1798, when, following the departure of French troops, waves of refugees arrived from Saint-Domingue, doubling overnight the numbers living in Jamaica. The governor’s report on 29 October 1798 put the influx at 900 white settlers, 317 people of colour, and around 1,600 slaves.30 The situation would soon be further complicated, as the return of French refugees to Haiti was discussed during trade negotiations with Toussaint Louverture, and then the failure of Leclerc’s expedition led to the evacuation of French troops to Jamaica and the presence of many French prisoners-of-war on the island. Moreover, the refugees included free people of colour and slaves, whose presence was seen by the Jamaican authorities as a major security problem. Increasingly tight regulations were imposed on the French as the planter assembly in Jamaica barely concealed its feelings of hysteria.
Sir George Nugent, the governor from 1801 to 1806, expressed particular alarm. A number of French prisoners-of-war, officers in the army sent to Saint-Domingue, were living freely on parole in Kingston and Spanish Town, and Jamaican planters worried that French revolutionary agents might be at work among their slaves. Nugent wanted French prisoners to be returned to Europe and free people of colour and black slaves without masters to be sent back to Haiti, while he encouraged white planters among the refugees to migrate to New Orleans or to Cuba. Like many of those he administered, he believed that Jamaica would be better rid of them.31 From a purely policing point of view, he may have been right, though there is very little evidence that such ideas ever entered their minds. Almost as soon as they had escaped Saint-Domingue, indeed, many of the planters were already scoping the territory to see where they might hope to buy land or establish new plantations. If they looked with favour on Jamaica, it was as a colony where slave-holding was still legal and where they could hope to maintain their accustomed lifestyle. Some had chosen to settle there only because it had seemed to offer safety from slave insurrection at home; large numbers of them believed that, in the dire circumstances they faced, the English fleet provided the best protection. After the wars were over, that protection was no longer a priority, and when, in 1833, slavery was abandoned in Britain’s colonies, their interest in Jamaica largely ceased. Many of them left for good, generally for Louisiana, where they started afresh on new plantations which they could resettle with their slaves.32
Jamaica was always a minority choice for refugees from Saint-Domingue, however, and it benefited from relatively little long-term settlement. Rather it was seen as a place to which to retreat in periods of violence, from which a judicious return might be made when conditions allowed. In the early years of the Revolution, that was generally true of Cuba, too, a nearby island which could offer a short-term refuge before returning to the place they still thought of as home. Indeed, it could be argued that for many French planters, Cuba might seem a more intimidating environment: unlike the islands of the British Caribbean, Cuba was a place where little French was spoken, where there was no tradition of Huguenot migration or of cooperation between the two colonial powers. The small groups of colons from Saint-Domingue who crossed to Cuba in 1791 almost certainly thought of it as a safe haven where they would stay until they could return home, but as the war dragged on and the Revolution in Saint-Domingue became more intolerant, they came to see Cuba as a place for permanent settlement, where they would establish a thriving French planter community, growing coffee and bringing more productive farming methods and increased levels of mechanization to Cuba’s plantations. They were welcomed as innovators who would boost coffee production and contribute to the island’s prosperity.
They came in large numbers, some directly from the plantations of Saint-Domingue, others by way of Jamaica and Santo-Domingo, to Havana in the first instance, though many then headed for the relatively undeveloped east of the island around Santiago de Cuba. The French migration formed distinct waves, especially in the years from 1799 to 1804 when, encouraged by the ambitions of the enlightened Spanish governor of Cuba’s eastern province, Sebastian Kindelán, more than 19,000 colons were admitted.33 In 1799, after the English evacuated Saint-Domingue, few Frenchmen followed them to England, most preferring to try their luck in Cuba while they waited to see what settlement Toussaint would offer. They came as temporary migrants, many intending to return, and though they built new fortunes in Cuba, many held on to their property, in both land and people, in the territory they still refused to call Haiti.34 But with the years their optimism faded, and following the failure of Leclerc’s expedition any hopes of a return were dashed, with the consequence that most elected to stay. They were by then well established on the island, in contrast to those who, in 1803, after the defeat of the French and the evacuation of Port-au-Prince, followed the refugee route to Cuba. Many of these people were desperate, leaving the bulk of their possessions behind when they fled. They stepped on shore in total disarray: seamen and soldiers, white colons and men of colour, merchants and colonial administrators, coffee planters and slave-owners, tradesmen, clerks, seamstresses and bartenders all disembarked in Havana, bringing the myriad problems of people stripped of their livelihoods and of everything they owned.35 But a number of them came with money, and were able to prosper, buying land for a fraction of its cost in Saint-Domingue and working it with slave labour, turning the empty lands around Santiago into flourishing coffee plantations like the ones they had left behind. It was a remarkable transformation: if in the months before the French influx eastern Cuba had a total of eight coffee farms, in 1804 alone fifty-six new ones were established.36
Of course, not everything was simple. The planters faced new challenges, not least a shortage of labour in a country which had relatively few slaves, a fraction of the number available in Saint-Domingue. Cuba did not seem like an island paradise. Pierre Collette, a coffee grower who arrived in 1803, described some years later what he had to cope with in the hinterland of Santiago. ‘Thrown upon Cuba with only a few domestics as my only resource,’ he wrote, ‘uncertain that I would keep them, seeing how easily negroes here leave their masters, the cost of living, as miserable as it seems, is very expensive. Rent is sky-high due to the number of refugees.’37 Moreover, while the Cuban authorities were eager to welcome more white colonists, they categorically refused to admit slaves from Saint-Domingue, because they, like the Governor in Jamaica, had deeply held suspicions that slaves who had lived through the turbulence of the Haitian revolution would go on to import seditious views into Cuba. Keeping them out altogether proved impossible, however, and what Rebecca Scott has called ‘a delicate game of cat-and-mouse’ developed between the authorities and ships’ captains intent on disembarking their cargoes of black fugitives for sale into slavery.38 Many were sent ashore secretly along the shoreline, often under cover of darkness. Wherever they went in the Americas, it seemed, a reputation for being uniquely disruptive preceded them.
In official documents in Cuba, the colons were generally listed as émigrés or refugees from Saint-Domingue, and their occupation was commonly given as planter or landowner on the coffee plantations. Not all were rich. On the list of men taking the oath of loyalty to the Spanish crown in Santiago de Cuba in 1808, a wide variety of trades and professions was represented: carpenters and stonemasons, schoolmasters and shoemakers, sailmakers and shopkeepers. Whole communities had been forced to flee, and in Cuba they tried to carry on their lives. Less frequent are specific indications of their birthplace in France, though it is clear that a high percentage of them had been born in Europe before coming out to the Caribbean. And where we do know their place of origin, it is often in the west or south-west of France, either the port cities from which they had sailed or the provinces that lay behind them. Le Havre, Saint-Malo, Nantes, and Bordeaux all figure, unsurprisingly; but they also came from small towns and villages from Brittany to Poitou and Saintonge to Languedoc.39 Frenchmen who had already migrated to the French colonies in the Caribbean had been forced to move on, an itinerant population in search of stability across the Atlantic world. Their movements are reflected in Santiago’s population statistics for these years. At the end of the 1790s, the city’s population stood at just more than 20,000, including 6,100 white settlers; by 1803 these figures had risen to 29,596 and 13,865, with the number of slaves also increasing. Five years later, in 1808, when many of the French colons were expelled, the white population fell to 10,797. But the number of black slaves continued to rise, doubling from 1792 to stand at 10,459 in 1808, and changing the ethnic balance of the city for all time.40
Among those whose odyssey had started in the west of France were men whose fortunes placed them among the elite, the grands blancs of the plantations or of merchant capitalism who often acted as intermediaries with the island authorities. The most famous is probably Prudencio Casamayor, who rapidly became one of the wealthiest and best-known figures in Santiago society. He had been born in the Béarn, had come to Saint-Domingue in 1785 at the age of twenty-two to work as registrar to one of the big estates, and, like many others, he sought refuge in Cuba in 1798. In Santiago he set up in business, investing in coffee estates and making loans and money advances to French settlers when they experienced cash-flow difficulties. He carried out official business, too, negotiating over the rights of neutral shipping and acting as an official translator for the Spanish authorities.41 Of the early arrivals in Cuba, some were army officers and administrators, often royalists, who had deserted from the republican cause as they lost faith with the Revolution. They were easy to integrate, as were the richer planters, anxious for their future, who had left Saint-Domingue at the first sign of trouble. Typical of this wave of refugees was Jean Delaunay, originally from Bordeaux, who fled Saint-Domingue in 1791 to establish a coffee plantation at Callajabos.42 A later arrival was Jacques-Philippe-Guillaume Tornézy from La Rochelle, who as a young man had settled with his family in Saint-Domingue, where they lived through the horrors of the 1790s. Using his correspondence, Gabriel Debien has followed his wanderings through the Atlantic world. In 1802 he reported that his life’s work in Cul-de-Sac was at risk because of the wanton violence of maroons on the plain around his property. In the following year he was forced to flee with his wife and young family to start afresh in Cuba, determined ‘to get back to work in this country until the fate of the colony in Saint-Domingue is settled, one way or another’. He found the land he required without much trouble; more difficult was the search for men to work it. Interestingly, he did not look to newly arrived slave ships from Africa, but to his own community, other French plantation owners who, like himself, had fled from Saint-Domingue. And by 1808 he was beginning to exude confidence as he noted the beginnings of something approaching prosperity.43
The French had been well received in Cuba, not least in their destination of choice, Santiago de Cuba, which had shown itself appreciative of the economic benefits which their presence bestowed. For Santiago owed a lot to French settlers, a debt that exceeded the injection of wealth from the new coffee plantations and that reflected its transformation from a rural city into a sizable colonial capital. The arrival of the French coincided with two major building projects that reflected the city’s new status: the construction of a colonial governor’s residence and of a new cathedral to replace the one destroyed in the earthquake of 1766. The French played their professional part, too, with men from Bordeaux and the south-west, like Lestapis, Chaigneau, and Casamayor, prominent in every aspect of the city’s life, commercial and cultural, as well as contributing to its architecture and town planning.44 Their arrival coincided with a renaissance of taste and refinement and a new consciousness of their heritage and their eastern Cuban identity. They ensured that their children were taught by tutors from Caen and Bordeaux; they decorated their houses with doors and windows of neo-classical design and with iron balconies reminiscent of those in Bordeaux; they even founded a theatre and a café-concert like those to be found in French cities. The civilization they brought was nostalgically French in style and symbolism.45 Their presence was seen as a benefit by the Spanish-speaking majority, especially by the richer Cuban planters, but there were political motives for receiving them, too. Some among the Cuban leadership had not abandoned the hope that by weakening Saint-Domingue they could make Cuba the richest plantation state in the Caribbean. A few may still have dreamt of recovering Haiti for the Spanish crown.46 When the Haitian republic was declared, Cuba made no move to give it official recognition.
In 1808, however, politics intervened incisively when Napoleon declared war on Spain and invaded the Iberian Peninsula, forcing the Bourbon king from the throne and replacing him with his brother Joseph, and forging a new alliance between the Spanish Bourbons and Great Britain. When news of Napoleon’s invasion reached Havana, and of the reprisals that had followed the massacre of French soldiers in Madrid on the Dos Maios, the warm welcome that had been extended to the French suddenly dissipated, as the presence of 10,000 enemy nationals in Cuba’s second city became seen as a threat and anti-French rhetoric and patriotic sentiment quickly surfaced. The French, it seemed, were incapable of good, and the same authorities who had welcomed them as slave-owners on the plantations now attacked them for the mistreatment of their slaves. They were attacked for their lack of Christian piety, their atheism, and their contempt for marriage. They represented a threat to moral values, men who, in the words of the Havana governor, ‘make slaves work on festival days, do not baptise them, or instruct them in our holy religion’.47 And though many were induced to take loyalty oaths to the Spanish Crown, they were suspected of undermining Spain’s authority on the island. In March the Captain-General informed people in Havana of the French invasion of Spain, and warned of its consequences for Cuba. Some French immigrants, he claimed, had assumed ‘the arms of seduction and corruption…to facilitate their infernal plans for the island’; and three days later, in response to popular anger, he ordered the expulsion of the French from Cuba. Rioting and looting followed, as excited mobs in Havana and across Cuba gathered to taunt and abuse French settlers at their homes and in bars and workshops. Families to whom they had offered protection were now, because of events across the Atlantic world, threatened and intimidated, and Cubans of Spanish origin raised funds to help fight Napoleon back home. The French were obvious and accessible targets. By the end of 1809, the French émigrés in Cuba’s eastern province had largely left the island, leaving those who remained to blend in as best they could with Cuban society and culture.48
If they were to stay, they had to pass various tests imposed by the authorities and answer to the surveillance committees (juntes de vigilance) that were set up in all towns with sizable French populations. Those who had become naturalized, or who had married Cuban women and had children by them, had little trouble in establishing their right to stay. Frenchmen who had been in Cuba since before the Revolution were favourably treated. They were deemed to have residency rights, as were soldiers who had fought with the British against revolutionary France. The others—and they were the great majority of the colons—were ordered to leave, even if not all were thrown out immediately. Some looked for ways of changing their status by seeking last-minute naturalization or taking an oath of loyalty to the Spanish monarchy in the hope of being granted a stay of execution. But for the majority, as the papers of the vigilance committee in Havana make clear, there was to be no reprieve: of 482 French applicants, only 106 were given permission to stay. Some 90 per cent of those whose cases were reviewed had come from Saint-Domingue during the years of troubles, mostly from the north of the island, but of their place of origin in France we know much less. If they mentioned a birthplace it was at their own discretion, and only sixty-three in this sample did so. Many were just marked as being from ‘France’; but we know a more precise place of origin in a few cases (five were from Nantes, four each from Paris and Bordeaux, two from Marseille). To the Cuban authorities it was a more recent identity—their link with Haiti and its turbulent past—that mattered most.49
Forced to move on yet again, the wandering French population had to decide where to move next. Some, once again, were tempted back to France, disillusioned by the vagrant lifestyle that had been forced upon them. But most preferred to stay in the Americas, and for them the most obvious destination was the United States, and especially Louisiana, the former French colony which Napoleon had sold to the US government six years earlier. As a French and Spanish possession in the later eighteenth century, Louisiana had attracted relatively few settlers, and the territory was eager for economic development, welcoming the idea of an influx of French planters who could help grow its population and open up the lands along the Lower Mississippi valley. In the 1780s it had rarely been the first choice of French refugees fleeing Saint-Domingue. They had preferred to move to other destinations; Santiago de Cuba, Kingston, Santo Domingo in the Caribbean, or to cities along the eastern seaboard of the United States.50 But after 1803 Louisiana’s moment appeared to have come, generally as a second destination for French families who had already spent several years of exile elsewhere. In 1809 especially, migrants flocked in to New Orleans, many from Santiago de Cuba, and they made the city the pivotal point of a Saint-Domingue diaspora across the Atlantic world.
In this spirit the governor, William Claiborne, welcomed the refugees from Cuba who flocked to Louisiana in 1809, chartering ships to bring them from Havana to New Orleans and agreeing with the US President that they be viewed as a special case in view of the miseries they had suffered.51 But he was soon overwhelmed by numbers, with at least 6,000 Creoles descending on the city within a few weeks, and in August 1809 he wrote to the Mayor of New Orleans, James Mather, to express his alarm. Though French refugees had been warmly received, he noted, ‘their number is becoming so considerable as to embarrass our own citizens’, adding that he would ‘render a service to such of the French as may not yet have departed from Cuba by advising them to seek an asylum in some other district of the United States’. There was another problem, too, and one that would be replicated in all the states to which migrants came. The migrants they were happy to receive were white, and preferably affluent, with money to invest. ‘As regards the people of colour who have arrived hence from Cuba,’ wrote Claiborne, ‘the Women and Children have been received. But the males above the age of fifteen have…been ordered to depart. I must request you, Sir, to make know this circumstance, and also to discourage free people of Colour of every description from migrating to the Territory of Orleans. We have already a much greater proportion of that population than comports with the general Interest.’52 Just as in Cuba, the reputation of ‘men of colour’ for violence and insubordination made them unwelcome in Louisiana, as it did throughout the states of the eastern seaboard.
The sheer scale of the migration and the suddenness with which refugees arrived in New Orleans posed problems for the authorities. In the course of 1809, fifty-five vessels arrived from Cuba loaded with refugees: forty-eight of them were from Santiago, six from Baracoa, the other from Havana. Between them they brought at least 6,060 French refugees, all expelled at short notice from Cuba and many of them destitute.53 In June the Secretary of State, Robert Smith, reported that on a single day a fleet of vessels had arrived from Santiago with nearly 2,000 refugees on board, who, after escaping from Saint-Domingue, now found themselves forced to seek sanctuary once more. In all, there were 1,975 people, 666 of them white settlers and their wives and children, 626 free people of colour, and 683 slaves. It was an enormous number to assimilate at one time, especially since many would be dependent on local charities for weeks, sometimes months, after reaching the United States.54 The arrival of so many slaves from another colony created legal dilemmas, too.
The United States had abolished the slave trade, but not the institution of slavery, in 1807, which caused some consternation among the Louisiana officials. In the states of the eastern seaboard it was left to the state authorities to decide their fate, but Louisiana was still a ‘territory’ and had not yet been incorporated as a state, and the territorial legislature had not yet made any provisions for implementing the law.55 It was therefore left to the federal government to decide what the law meant for the migrants from Cuba. The legal situation here was further complicated by Spanish legislation in the 1790s, when the New Orleans Cabildo had expressly forbidden the import of slaves from the French sugar islands. But the law had been widely ignored, and had been revised in 1800; but now that Louisiana was American, did this have any relevance?56
Black slaves arrived with their masters in large numbers in 1809, and some among them were alone and without resource. Should they be admitted? How should they be looked after? And whose responsibility should they be? Smith pointed to a decision by Congress that seemed to allow for them to be returned to their masters, but where masters were unable to prove their ownership of the slaves, their future was uncertain, and many were held captive in the holds of the ships until decisions could be taken on their future. Even where the masters could legitimately prove ownership, uncertainties remained, and the relative silence about the attempts of white exiles to bring their slaves to the colony is striking.57 The slaves themselves were often aware of the tenuous legal position, and some petitioned for their freedom, arguing that since their servitude had been legalized under French or Spanish law, nothing had been determined about the terms of enslavement that should apply in Louisiana. A simple transfer was not a foregone conclusion. And where the exiles appeared to be benefiting from advantageous conditions, this caused anger among the American population. As Claiborne noted in a letter to Smith, ‘if you should give yourself the trouble to read the newspapers of this place, you will perceive that the asylum afforded here to the unfortunate exiles from Cuba continues a cause of great complaint against me.’58 Whatever it did, it seemed, the legislature risked unleashing a hostile reaction.
There was, of course, a settled Francophone population in Louisiana, many of them of long standing, having arrived around 1755 from Acadia and the St Lawrence estuary to escape persecution. Frenchmen had also arrived during the Revolution, both directly from France and from Saint-Domingue, although their motives and political persuasions—ranging from extreme radicalism to visceral royalism—had made them a problem for the authorities and for the French consular service in Philadelphia and across the nation.59 Some did not hide their disappointment on seeing New Orleans for the first time: the city’s population in 1803 was no more than 8,000, education and cultural provision were underdeveloped, and there was little of the urbanity that characterized life in Le Cap. The new wave of migrants had to adjust to a city undergoing rapid expansion and plagued with disease and crime; as the twenty-year correspondence of Jean Boze and his fellow-refugee Henri de Sainte-Gême makes clear, they faced constant dangers and threats to health and life: ‘extreme climatic conditions, disease and mortality, fires, criminality, violence, and the many accidents the city endured’.60 Or else they moved out of New Orleans to the rural hinterland, where many established plantations and bought slaves, and settled into a distinctly French style of living. They remained intensely conscious of their French identity, but also of shared roots in Saint-Domingue, corresponding with friends across the Caribbean and with refugees elsewhere in the United States, and holding regular meetings in bars and cafés, like the fittingly named Café des Réfugiés in New Orleans, which they made their own.61
In official registers, a number made specific reference to their place of origin, a place where they still had family and may still have thought of as home. A few examples will suffice to illustrate the wide range of trajectories they had followed. Jean Langouran was from Bordeaux and for some years traded with Saint-Domingue, where he acquired a plantation employing forty slaves; in 1785 he had moved with his wife and family to New Orleans in the hope of greater commercial success, but had been forced on again, this time to Honduras.62 Another Bordelais, Pierre-Louis Berquin-Duvallon, had come to the Americas to claim the family plantations in southern Saint-Domingue, where he became royal prosecutor in the seneschal court at Le Cap. He moved subsequently to Louisiana to escape the violence on the island, but immediately hit problems when he tried to bring his slaves. They were promptly arrested, as it was against the law to bring slaves from Haiti into America, and Berquin-Duvallon found himself facing financial ruin and unwanted judicial entanglements.63 The transfer to the mainland United States was not always problem-free.
If New Orleans was the most popular destination for French migrants in the early nineteenth century, it was far from alone in welcoming French refugees during the years of turbulence in Saint-Domingue. From the early 1790s, the United States was seen as a land of refuge for Frenchmen, both those fleeing the Revolution at home and those under attack in the French Caribbean. Colonies of French exiles formed in a number of east-coast ports, some setting up in commerce or shipping, but the majority forced to seek employment in manual trades or throwing themselves on the charity of local people. Charleston, Savannah, Baltimore, and Norfolk Virginia all had important French-speaking communities, as did the capital, Philadelphia, cities that became natural choices for those fleeing murder and civil strife in Saint-Domingue. Many knew little English and craved conversation in French; in Charleston we know that there were five separate attempts in these years to set up French-language newspapers, though two of them seem never to have appeared, and ultimately they all failed. Those editors about whom something is known were themselves former colons in Saint-Domingue who sought support from fellow refugees; but they failed to find enough subscribers, itself a symptom of the transient nature of their stay in Charleston.64
For many the voyage to America, whether directly from Saint-Domingue or after an interlude in Cuba, was the final segment of a tortured journey that had begun on a ship on the Loire or the Garonne. Those who settled in Charleston may be taken as typical in this regard: among the merchants, ships’ captains, administrators and their wives who formed the majority of their number, recent research has identified twenty-six whose place of birth is given as one of the port cities of France’s west coast. Twelve had been born in Bordeaux, seven in Nantes, and a further seven in La Rochelle. The oldest had been born in 1726, the youngest in 1786, sixty years later. A few had arrived as prisoners from Saint-Domingue, victims of the state of war in the Caribbean. And they had entered the United States by very different routes, through New Orleans, Philadelphia—at the time the country’s temporary capital—or in one case, Providence, as well as directly into Charleston itself.65 For the majority of those who had begun their odyssey in Nantes or Bordeaux, the United States was the end of a long, often turbulent passage.
Their challenge, of course, was now to make their way in America, and to provide financial independence for themselves and their families in a new environment to which they had not intended to come. Many found it difficult, and they were often seen by those already resident in the ports where they landed as a target for charity rather than a source of commerce. Like any refugees, they were distressed people in need of help, with harrowing tales to tell. Marie Sauton, for instance, had suffered at every stage of a traumatic journey that had started in Lyon. With another Lyonnais, Jean-Baptiste Audin, she had come to Port-au-Prince to go into business, setting up a shop selling perfumes, ladies’ dresses, and other luxury articles before disaster struck. Audin had gone on ahead to Havana with the most valuable articles from the shop as a precaution against attack, and she had intended to follow. But on his return journey the ship on which he was a passenger had been captured by ‘the black brigands of Saint-Domingue’, and all the passengers, Audin among them, had been massacred. She had then left Saint-Domingue in panic, taking the rest of her stock with her, on a Spanish schooner bound for Cuba, but it had been captured by an English frigate, and, she claimed, ‘we were all inhumanly despoiled and robbed of all we possessed’.66 In Santiago she had met and married another French exile, Jean Augustin, a coffee planter originally from Chinon, near Tours. Now in the United States, she sought, for a second time, to make a fresh start.67
The first response of American cities to the arrival of French refugee families was often the offer of alms. As early as February 1794 Congress allocated 10,000 dollars ‘for the relief of certain inhabitants of Santo Domingo’, suggesting that each state should set up a committee of ‘humane persons’ and others of a philanthropic disposition to allocate the money to ‘such of the inhabitants of St. Domingo resident within the United States as shall be found in want of support’.68 But it did not take Congress to get the process started; the sight of suffering had already moved local people to charitable activity. In Charleston Daniel DeSaussure assured Edmund Randolph in Philadelphia that they had already established a local committee, and had collected 12,500 dollars for charitable giving (the allocation from Congress added a further 1750 dollars for the state of South Carolina). This, he told Randolph, ‘has been nearly distributed amongst about 430 people, in supplying them with clothing, blankets and firewood during the winter and in a regular distribution of a certain weekly allowance in money according to the number in families and circumstances’. The people currently in receipt of charity, he added, were around a hundred women and children, as well as ‘a few old and sick men’ who had first call on funds.69 Their problems would not be resolved overnight, and the challenge of providing relief for French refugees who arrived penniless in the Carolinas would last well into the nineteenth century. In 1816, a Société Française de Bienfaisance was founded by concerned citizens, men who were themselves in many cases refugees from Saint-Domingue or whose families had come as Huguenots at the end of the seventeenth century. The record books of the society continue until 1994, by which time it had evolved into a friendly society for the French community in Charleston.70
Some did more than give money, especially during the 1790s when alarmist tales reached America about the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue. A Baltimore merchant, Duncan McIntosh, who had become rich trading with the French army in the Caribbean, was honoured by the émigré community in the city for his success in bribing black officials in Le Cap to enable Creole planters to escape.71 Various land schemes were devised that sought French refugees to open up territory in the interior, some of them of a charitable nature. But not all went as planned. The ill-fated village of Azilum in the Susquehanna valley in Pennsylvania, for example, was the brainchild of General Louis de Noailles, the brother-in-law of Lafayette, who saw it as a refuge for royalists and liberals fleeing the vengeance of French Revolutionary justice. But over time its focus changed, as many of the royalists returned to France to serve Napoleon and Azilum became a refuge for planters’ families from Saint-Domingue.72 In 1794 it had become an incorporated company, the Azilum Company, backed by two of Pennsylvania’s foremost politicians, John Nicholson and Robert Morris; as the articles of agreement make clear, the parties had ‘entered into an association or company with the purpose of settling or improving one or more tracts of country within the state of Pennsylvania’.73 The project, not untypically, ended in failure when it emerged that the company that was selling the shares had not established its rights to the land in law, and the scheme became mired in allegations of corruption.74
The most famous champion of refugees from Saint-Domingue was the Philadelphia banker and philanthropist, Stephen Girard, who maintained an assiduous correspondence with other families from the colony, offering them assistance, advising them on trading conditions, helping them find work, and offering loans from his bank so that they could set up in business. Girard was himself from Bordeaux, a ship’s captain who had served his apprenticeship on merchantmen between Bordeaux and Le Cap and who—as Etienne Girard—had become American almost by chance when his ship was forced aground at the mouth of the Delaware River by a British cruiser in 1776.75 By the time of the Napoleonic Wars, he was a successful merchant and ship-owner in Philadelphia and had taken American citizenship, had established a huge fortune in trade with the West Indies and Northern Europe, and would go on to be heavily involved in America’s lucrative far eastern trade.76 For French exiles in Philadelphia, he was more than a source of information about the state of Saint-Domingue and of advice on when it might be safe for them to return.77 He was, more generally, a friend and benefactor to the exile community in America, and a founder member of the Philadelphia branch of the Société Française de Bienfaisance.78 By the time of his death in 1831, he had become one of the richest men in America, but he remained staunchly loyal to his roots and to his friends. Acquaintances from Bordeaux would seek his assistance when they first arrived in America, and he gave what help he could, employing his ships’ captains, plying to and from ports across Europe and the Caribbean, as a rich source of news.79 And so, when Saint-Domingue went up in flames, Girard sent ships to the island to bring the survivors to the United States, contributing to the flotilla of more than forty vessels that cleared Philadelphia alone in May and June 1794.80 Though fully immersed in the world of American commerce, he remained well integrated in a wider Francophone community. Even in 1805 he still noted, approvingly, and with just a suggestion of nostalgia, that in Philadelphia ‘one would find, daily, opportunities to speak French’.81
1 François Crouzet, ‘Wars, blockade and economic change in Europe, 1792–1815’, Journal of Economic History, 24 (1964), 569.
2 Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2.
3 Natalie Dessens, ‘Napoleon and Louisiana: new Atlantic perspectives’, in Christophe Belaubre, Jordana Dym, and John Savage (eds), Napoleon’s Atlantic: The Impact of Napoleonic Empire in the Atlantic World (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 66.
4 Bernard Gainot, Les officiers de couleur dans les armées de la République et de l’Empire, 1792–1815 (Paris: Karthala, 2007), 73–4.
5 Annie Jourdan, Nouvelle histoire de la Révolution (Paris: Flammarion, 2018), 492.
6 Madeleine Dupouy, ‘La diaspora transatlantique des familles dominguoises Droüillard, D’Espinose et Lamaignère’, in Éric Dubesset and Jacques de Cauna (eds), Dynamiques caribéennes: Pour une histoire des circulations dans l’espace atlantique, 18e–19e siècles (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2014), 116.
7 Corinne Janin, ‘Les engagés pour les Antilles à partir des rôles d’armement nantais, 1722–1772’ (mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Nantes, 1971), 2.
8 Louis Desgraves, Voyageurs à Bordeaux du dix-septième siècle à 1914 (Bordeaux: Mollat, 1991), 100.
9 Marcel Grandière, ‘Les réfugiés et les déportés des Antilles à Nantes sous la Révolution’, Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 33–4 (1977), 25–44.
10 Ashli White, ‘The Saint-Dominguan Refugees and American Distinctiveness in the Early Years of the Haitian Revolution’, in David Geggus and Norman Fiering (eds), The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 249.
11 A list of the colonists who arrived in Nantes from Saint-Domingue across the decade can be found in Grandière, ‘Les réfugiés et les déportés des Antilles’, 75–159.
12 Shorter lists of deportees from Guadeloupe and Martinique can be found in ibid., 161–4, 165–8.
13 AD Gironde, 4M 908, letter from Minister of the Interior to Prefect of the Gironde, 5 ventôse 12.
14 AD Gironde, 4M 908, letter from Minister of the Marine and Colonies to the Préfet Maritime in Rochefort, 3 messidor 10.
15 AD Gironde, 4M 908, Third arrondissement of Bordeaux, lists of colons in receipt of assistance, 21 vendémiaire 10 and 15 pluviôse 10.
16 Ana Lucia Araujo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 87.
17 AD Gironde, 8M 18, Secours accordés aux descendants des colons de Saint-Domingue, 1870–1899.
18 Erick Noël, Être noir en France au 18e siècle (Paris: Tallandier, 2006), 106.
19 AD Gironde, 1M 332, letter from the Minister of Interior to the Prefect of the Gironde, 4 August 1807.
20 AD Gironde, 1M 332, ‘État des Noirs, Mulâtres et autres Gens de Couleur existant à Bordeaux’, 5 October 1807.
21 Gabriel Debien, ‘Les colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés à Cuba, 1793–1815’, Revista de Indias, 14 (1954), 560.
22 Jack P. Greene, Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: a Social Portrait (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 153–4.
23 Jacob M. Price, ‘Economic function and the growth of American port towns in the eighteenth century’, Perspectives in American History, 8 (1974), 126; Price, ‘Summation: The American Panorama of Atlantic Port Cities’, in Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (eds), Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850 (Knoxville, TN; University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 263.
24 James Robertson, Gone is the Ancient Glory: Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1534–2000 (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2005), 137–42.
25 B.W. Higman, ‘Jamaican Port Towns in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Knight and Liss, Atlantic Port Cities, 117–18.
26 John Stewart, An Account of Jamaica and its Inhabitants, by a Gentleman, Long Resident in the West Indies (London: Longman, 1808), 12–13; Robertson, Gone is the Ancient Glory, 143.
27 Higman, ‘Jamaican Port Towns’, 141.
28 Philip Wright and Gabriel Debien, ‘Les colons de Saint-Domingue passes à la Jamaïque, 1792–1835’, Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 26 (1975), 21.
29 Ibid., 85.
30 Ibid., 89.
31 Sir George Nugent, correspondence with Admiral Sir John Duckworth, summarized in Kenneth Ingram, Sources of Jamaican History, 1655–1838: a bibliographical survey with particular reference to manuscript sources (2 vols, Zug: Inter Documentation Company, 1976), vol. 1, 385.
32 Wright and Debien, ‘Les colons de Saint-Domingue passés à la Jamaïque’, 198.
33 Maria Elena Orozco Lamore and Maria Teresa Fleitas Monnar, Formation d’une ville caraïbe: Urbanisme et architecture à Santiago de Cuba (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2011), 51.
34 Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 182.
35 Gabriel Debien, ‘The Saint-Domingue Refugees in Cuba, 1793–1815’, in Carl A. Brasseaux and Glenn R. Conrad (eds), The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792–1809 (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1992), 38–9.
36 Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 181.
37 Debien, ‘The Saint-Domingue Refugees in Cuba’, 85–6.
38 Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 52.
39 List of those taking the oath of loyalty in the Eastern Province of Cuba (Santiago de Cuba), 1808, reproduced in Alain Yacou, ‘L’émigration à Cuba des colons français de Saint-Domingue au cours de la Révolution’ (thèse de 3e cycle, Université de Bordeaux-3, 1975), 624–44.
40 Agnès Renault, D’une île rebelle à une île fidèle: les Français de Santiago de Cuba, 1791–1825 (Rouen: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2012), 475.
41 Ibid., 105.
42 Alain Yacou, ‘Francophobie et francophilie au temps des révolutions française et haïtienne’, in Cuba et la France: Actes du Colloque de Bordeaux (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1983), 64.
43 Gabriel Debien, ‘De Saint-Domingue à Cuba avec une famille de réfugiés, 1800–1809’, Revue de la Faculté d’Ethnologie de Port-au-Prince, 8 (1964), 18–20.
44 Lamore and Monnar, Formation d’une ville caraïbe, 12.
45 Ibid., 60–2.
46 Yacou, ‘Francophobie et francophilie’, 60.
47 Matt D. Childs, ‘“The Revolution against the French”: Race and Patriotism in the 1809 Riot in Havana’, in Christophe Belaubre et al., Napoleon’s Atlantic, 127.
48 Ibid., 136.
49 Gabriel Debien, ‘Réfugiés de Saint-Domingue expulsés de La Havane en 1809’, Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 35 (1978), 571.
50 Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 21.
51 Ibid., 582.
52 William Claiborne, letter to James Mather, mayor of New Orleans, 9 August 1809, in Dunbar Rowland (ed.), The Official Letterbook of W.C.C. Claiborne, 1801–1816 (6 vols., Jackson MS, 1917), vol. 4, 401–2.
53 Winston C. Babb, ‘French refugees from Saint-Domingue to the southern United States, 1791–1810’ (PhD, University of Virginia, 1954), 76.
54 AD Gironde, 73J 44, letter to Claiborne from Robert Smith, Secretary of State, 20 June 1809.
55 Ashli White, ‘A flood of impure lava: Saint-Dominguan refugees in the United States, 1791–1820’ (PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2003), 255.
56 Babb, ‘French refugees from Saint-Domingue’, 73.
57 White, ‘A flood of impure lava’, 253.
58 William Claiborne, letter to Robert Smith, 5 August 1809, in Rowland (ed.), The Official Letterbook of W.C.C. Claiborne, vol. 4, 400.
59 Laurent Letertre, ‘Le consulat de Philadelphie et la question de Saint-Domingue, 1793–1803’ (mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Nantes, 2000), 16.
60 Historic New Orleans Collection, MSS 100, Sainte-Gême Family Papers; Nathalie Dessens, Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 30–1.
61 Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans, 49.
62 Gabriel Debien and René Le Gardeur, ‘The Saint-Domingue refugees in Louisiana, 1792–1804’, in Brasseaux and Conrad, The Road to Louisiana, 140.
63 Ibid., 167.
64 James W. Hagy and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, ‘The French refugee newspapers of Charleston’, South Carolina Historical Magazine, 97/2 (1996), 139–44.
65 I wish to express my gratitude to Syrine Farhat, who kindly allowed me to cite these conclusions from her research on French immigration into Charleston.
66 Tulane University, MS 223, Augustin, Wogan and Labranche Family Papers, extract from the records of the Secretariat of the French Government in Santiago de Cuba, 15 ventôse 12.
67 Tulane University, MS 223, contracts of sale for Augustin’s coffee plantations in Santiago de Cuba, 9 July 1809.
68 South Carolina Historical Society, MS 1022/11/121/5, DeSaussure Family Papers, letter from Edmund Randolph to Daniel DeSaussure, 27 February 1794.
69 South Carolina Historical Society, MS 1022/11/121/5, letter from Daniel DeSaussure to Edmund Randolph, 9 April 1794.
70 South Carolina Historical Society, MS 0294.00, Records of the Société Française de Bienfaisance, Charleston, 1816–1994.
71 Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic, 83.
72 Elsie Murray, Azilum: French Refugee Village on the Susquehanna (Athens, PA: Tioga Point Museum, 1956), 20.
73 Historical Society of Pennsylvania, AM 820, Asylum Company minute book, 1794, share certificate dated 9 June 1794.
74 Historical Society of Pennsylvania, MSS 21, Asylum Company, 1794, correspondence.
75 Max Dorian, Un Bordelais: Stephen Girard, premier millionnaire américain (Paris: Éditions Albatros, 1977).
76 Donald R. Adams Jr, Finance and Enterprise in Early America: A Study of Stephen Girard’s Bank, 1812–31 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 6.
77 American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Stephen Girard Papers, letters 1793: 305, 311, 349.
78 Stephen Girard Papers, letters 1805: 295; 1807: 299.
79 Stephen Girard Papers, letters 1801: 164; 1804: 383.
80 James Alexander Dun, Dangerous Neighbours: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 7.
81 White, Encountering Revolution, 38.