Posted by As more and more tales of extreme barbarity were heard by visitors to the colonies, the Spanish crown decided that their governors were now out of order. But rather than replace them, they decided to draft a set of new laws known as the Laws of Burgos codified in 1512. These laws regulated interactions between the Spaniards and their natives.
But the Laws of Burgos were a real mixed bag of humanitarian successes and failures, and while they called for a more humane treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of the New World, they also made it much easier for them to be exploited. They were to move into Spanish townships for use in the Encomienda labor system—whereby a person was granted a specified number of natives for whom they were to take responsibility—the crown believing that this would quell the violence from their governors. Catholicism was also forced upon the colonized; and those who did not attend mass were barred from any rest on the next working day.
The laws were near impossible to enforce because of the distance between Spain and her colonies, but at the same time, they also enshrined certain humanitarian regulations including, standards of hygiene, regular working hours, pay, and minimal living quarters. Even pregnant women were given time off rather than forced to work during their pregnancy. Yet in practice, the Spanish colonialists simply kept the parts they liked and dismissed the rest with impunity.
Having almost completely eliminated the Amerindian population, they now began importing kidnapped Africans as early as 1501 under the rule of Nicolás de Ovando; thus making him the first enslaver of both the Americas and Haiti. This process introducing shackled-slaves to the island would later give Haiti its unique and distinctive racial characteristic as the remaining Amerindians, Spaniards, Africans, and eventually the French, intermixed. Africans had filled the population vacuum that the Amerindians left behind in their demise, and soon outnumbered their white overlords by twelve to one. Gold, while still sought after, became much less important to the Spanish, who had already mined most of it. Sugar cane, and other cash rich crops, became the main source of income generation.
As time passed, Spain moved its interest from Hispaniola to larger mainland colonies. Seeing greater profits to be made in the mainland, especially from gold—the legend of El Dorado was still taken seriously by many conquistadors and officials. Interest in Haiti and activity on the island declined. Its population growth was also slowed due to a disproportionate male to female ratio. As piracy began in the early seventeenth century, the island and its neighbors became regular stopping points for pirates.
The first recorded of a settlement by French pirates was on Tortuga in 1625. The abundance of natural resources on this island; wild hogs, lumber, and fresh running water made settlement here idea. King Louis XIV of France recognized it as a French colony in 1659. The Spanish did their best to root out piracy for two reasons; pirates were capturing their ships and looting treasures meant for the Old World, and secondly, wherever they established settlements, the monarchy of France would not fail to seize an opportunity to recognize it as their own.
The Spaniards, however, could not hold back the tides. Pirates started landing on Haiti itself. In a panicked, the King of Spain warned colonists that they should withdraw close to the capital of Santo Domingo for their own safety, being unable or unwilling to send soldiers from his other interests to protect that island nation. This ensured that English, Dutch, and French pirates quickly established bases on the now abandoned Northern and Western parts of the isle. The French became the dominant group and, under the leadership of Bertrand d’Ogeron, established a permanent settlement there. Bertrand d’Ogeron encouraged the planting of tobacco, a cash crop that made the roving bands of pirates, bootleggers and brigands much more sedentary in their habits, and turned their pirate base into an unofficial ‘free’ French colony to which others of their countrymen flocked. Desperately wanting a hand in the growing economy of this island, the French crown recognized the new Colony in 1665, naming it Saint-Dominigue, which would become present day Haiti. Finally, Spain itself ceded some kind of defeat in 1669, and under the Treaty of Ryswick, it officially recognized the western third of the island as French.
The economy of Saint-Domigue expanded exponentially. In later years, sugar and coffee would become the most important export crops. By 1767, Saint-Domigue alone was responsible for exporting up to 72-million pounds of raw sugar; 51-million pounds of refined sugar; one million pounds of indigo; and two million pounds of cotton each year. But the new found sources of wealth exacted a terrible price in blood. In order to produce to the growing demands of Europeans, Saint-Domigue required more enslaved Africans. By the 1780’s, this single colony, roughly the size of Maryland in the United States, produced upwards of 40 percent of all the coffee and sixty percent of all the sugar used in Europe.
Saint-Domigue produced more coffee than all of the British West Indies. Conditions on the island were so harsh that a third of the people imported there died within a year of their arrival. It required some 800,000 kidnapped Africans to keep up with demands and production. From 1764 to 1786, the numbers of enslaved Africans imported fluctuated between ten and twenty-eight thousand people each year. An inability to meet French demands for more enslaved Africans saw to it that the island’s population declined and steadied-off at around 500,000 inhabitants. The population had fallen between two and three per cent each year for many reasons, including malnutrition, over-exposure, exhaustion, and a severe imbalance between the sexes. Five hundred thousand African men and women were ruled over by a population of barely 32,000 white French people.
So, what created the harsh environment that killed so many? Tropical diseases like Yellow Fever swept through the colony and killed several thousands. These illnesses affected more enslaved Africans much more than they affected the French, this in part, due to poor sanitation, poor health and poor hygiene conditions. The brutal treatment by their captors was also a major factor in the staggering numbers of deaths. This passage by Henri Christopes’ secretary, who lived more than half of his life as a slave, depicts the savage crimes perpetrated:
“Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man eating-dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?”
Few direct quotations from former enslaved Africans exist in this era. When they do appear, they are as poignant as any words from the Diary of Anne Frank. But one was not doomed to die in these retched conditions. For some, there was escape and hope. Thousands of Africans fled to the mountainous regions of Haiti, where they banded together as Maroons. From under the cloak of safety in the treacherous hills, they raided isolated plantations, destroyed sugar and coffee crops, and tried to free others who were enslaved just as they had been. The most famous among them was Mackandal--a one armed voodoo priest who escaped into the mountains in 1751, and banded together with several of the Maroons to wage war on their former enslavers. For six years, he staged many successful raids against plantations and avoided capture by the French, killing over five thousand people in a quest for freedom. In 1758, while trying to poison the water wells of the French nobility, he was captured and burnt alive at the stake.
Just like the Spanish before them, French colonialists also wrote a document intended to reel in control of the harsh treatment inflicted on enslaved peoples of the colonies. Le Code Noir was established by King Louis XIV. The Black Code, as it became known in English, immediately displaced all Jews from all French colonies, and established the Roman Catholic faith as the only practiced religion. Below you’ll find a few excerpts from Le Code Noir:
Related Reading:
- HAITI: The Revolution Now
- HAITI: The Destroyers of Worlds
- The Hate and the Quake – Rebuilding Haiti
- Goodbye Uncle Tom: Most Perverted Film Ever?
- We Are Africans (Review)
