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“Empire Ex Nihilo: French Ambition and Acadian Labor in the , 1762-1767”

Christopher Hodson, Northwestern University “Lost ” Conference, March 26-27, 2004

(Please do not cite, quote, or circulate without written permission from the author)

At the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, geopolitical equilibrium gave way to grotesque imbalance. Great Britain had become a leviathan, acquiring , several key islands in the , Senegal in , French possessions in the Mediterranean, India, and on the East Indian island of Sumatra, while crushing Gallic pretensions to the Valley. For Louis XV and his cast of ministers, utter defeat had raised the stakes of the imperial contest; Britain’s near-global dominance demanded a rapid, thorough response. The integration of ’s remaining overseas territories into a militant, economically competitive polity became the penultimate projet in a kingdom bursting with les hommes à projets.1 Draped in the rhetoric of progress, the plans that emerged from this hothouse of patriotism and personal ambition marked an extension of imperial authority unlike any France had ever seen.2 Mercifully, few of these bizarre proposals ever came to fruition. This essay, however, examines two that did. The first, a along the River in Guiana, failed in spectacular fashion only months after its foundation. Thousands of migrants died, and destitute survivors scattered throughout and the Caribbean. The second, a smaller settlement on the northern coast of Saint Domingue, commenced early in 1764. It proved a disappointment, lapsing into obscurity over the next two years. Settlers died or filtered to greener, if equally fetid pastures in . Both projects shared a unique trait. In the Caribbean, where the trade in African slaves thrived like few places on earth, these colonies were built by an unlikely workforce: Acadian refugees.

1 I have borrowed the term “hommes à projets” from the work of Robert Darnton, especially The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 78. 2 Prior to 1763, only a scattered few French officials envisioned the kingdom’s overseas possessions as an integrated “empire.” See Kenneth Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763 (: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 7. 402

These men, women, and children hailed from the tidal inlets of what had once been the French colony of , transformed into the British province of by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. After living in uneasy coexistence with their would-be governors for forty years, they endured a remarkable misfortune as the Seven Years’ War opened. In the fall of 1755, the British military captured and deported seven thousand “neutral French,” scattering those who escaped their grasp deep into the wilderness. Fearful of their ability to recombine and commit what one Briton described as “some signal Mischiefs,” officials scattered the prisoners from Boston to Savannah, scandalizing the colonial governments charged with their maintenance.3 Assaults continued as the war progressed. Fresh from the conquest of in 1758, British troops captured three thousand on Ile St. Jean (now ), most of whom had taken refuge from the initial forays of the 1755 deportation. Packed aboard leaky transports, these unfortunates were sent to seaports along the northern and western coasts of France.4 At the signing of the Treaty of , ten thousand Acadians across the Atlantic littoral bided time in a kind of legal limbo. While officials in the had, in the words of Governor Francis Bernard of , “always considered these people as British subjects,” the expulsion had rendered such claims hollow.5 Like the Israelites “in Egypt, under Pharaoh, and in Babylon, under Nebuchadnezzar,” those held in Philadelphia could not say “whether we are Subjects, Prisoners, Slaves, or Freemen.”6 Many wanted reunion with France, but obstacles littered the path. Acadians in feared that Louis XV, whose debt had mounted, would neither “reclaim them as subjects…[nor] redeem them as captives.”7 For those already ensconced in French ports, an uncertain future awaited. From to Dunkerque, three thousand refugees lived on government charity and clung to promises of resettlement, they knew not where.

3 Boston Gazette, August 23, 1756. 4 See D.C Harvey, The French Régime in Prince Edward Island (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926); J.M. Bumsted, Land, Settlement, and Politics on Eighteenth-Century Prince Edward Island (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987); Earle Lockerby, “The Deportation of the Acadians from Ile St. Jean, 1758,” Acadiensis, vol. 27, no. 2 (1998), 45-94. 5 Francis Bernard to House of Representatives, January 1765, in Placide Gaudet, ed., Rapport Concernant les Archives Canadiennes pour l’année 1905, vol. II (Ottawa: 1909), 150-1. 6 Petition of Oliver Tibaudat, et al., to the Assembly of , February 8, 1757, in Pennsylvania Archives, series 8, vol. 6, 4509-10. 7 Duc de Nivernais, “Mémoire sur les Acadiens,” 17 February 1763, London, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (hereafter AMAE), Correspondance Politique, Angleterre, vol. 449, 77. 403

By 1763, however, handwriting had appeared on the wall. Faced with a spendthrift crown bent on revenge, Caribbean projects loomed on the Acadians’ horizon.8 This essay treats the Acadians’ tropical misadventures as social manifestations of this radical moment in French and political economics. Like most colonial powers, France relied on enslaved Africans to create wealth. During the early eighteenth century, planters and merchants had little choice – efforts to induce Frenchmen to migrate had floundered, as had attempts to use engagés and prisoners, notably in John Law’s Louisiana.9 Amplified by the prescient antislavery thought of the Physiocrats, the outcome of the Seven Years’ War prompted many in the Francophone world to question the composition of their colonial population. If, as the politics of the day seemed to warrant, the crown took control of overseas development in response to the British threat, slaves were far too expensive. Prices had skyrocketed, and would rise by 1789 to over two thousand livres for a healthy African in the French Caribbean.10 Worse, a slave’s loyalty could be purchased or stolen along with the body, rendering Africans unreliable in time of war. With armed conflict woven into the fabric of past experience and expected in France’s near future, the idea of an “empire without slaves” – or, at the very least, an empire with fewer completely unfree workers than ever before – gained a brief hearing immediately after 1763.11 This, then, is a story of a world in which prosperous, acquisitive peasants actually replaced African slaves, working to their deaths in imperial experiments thousands of miles from their homes. As historians are now apt to tell us, displacement, movement, and interaction shaped all sorts of lives in all sorts of places in the – Irish servants in Williamsburg, Africans quantified in Barbados, British sailors impressed in

8 Acadians who took refuge in France were also employed in a settlement on the Falkland Islands, and were proposed as settlers for Corsica, Ile de France, Ile de Kerguelen, several agricultural colonies within France itself, and were even tapped to work in French mines. For a review of some of these projects, see Ernest Martin, Les exilés acadiens en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1936). 9 Peter Moogk, “Reluctant Exiles: Emigtrants from France in Canada before 1760,” William and Mary Quarterly 10 James E. McClellan III, and Science: Saint Domingue and the Old Regime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1992), 53-4. 11 I have, of course, cribbed this term from Christopher L. Brown, “Empire Without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Era of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 2 (April 1999), 273-306. For a good summary of French criticisms of slave labor that emerged during the 1780s, see especially Laurent Dubois, “’The Price of Liberty’: Victor Hugues and the Administration of Freedom in , 1794-1798,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 2 (April 1999), 363-392. 404

the taverns of Plymouth, the Greeks of Florida’s New Smyrna, and Acadians, hapless everywhere. Yet in this historiography, the effects of incessant motion – transnational identities, diasporic hybridity, and the like – often overshadow the forces that compelled it. Read in light of present-day multiculturalism, the sheer human diversity of the entire system has become mesmerizing and familiar. As NGOs, multinational corporations, and digitized bits of subversive information gnaw at the integrity of our political borders, scholars have found common cause with those who transcended the strictures of empire. In effect, we have found the early modern Atlantic World, and it is us.12 Models that privilege Atlantic movement and interaction, however, should not obscure coercion and commodification, even among once-peaceful groups from the wilds of Canada. Although removed from their “ancient habitations,” the Acadians’ tale is not one of simple expropriation. The refugees were, after all, given land in both Guiana and Saint Domingue. But the use of farmers like Acadians to satisfy the new French empire’s demographic ends – what might, in a vile neologism, be termed “re-propriation” – proved just as oppressive as their 1755 expulsion, or the enclosure of English commons in the previous century. The Acadians’ “Atlantic World” was characterized less by “a vast interaction….between two old worlds that…integrated them into a single ” than by the violent consignment of human beings into two categories – resources and their consumers.13 As the global capitalism of European “civil society” thrust Africans into , political processes that echoed its logic ensnared people like Acadians in a similar, if slightly less repugnant manner.14 In the recruitment and settlement of Acadians in Guiana and Saint Domingue, we may read the French state’s attempt to condense the social complexities of empire to a set of easily manipulated labor relations. Such reductionism was common. Acadians in the Caribbean endured treatment not unlike that meted to French journeymen, as shopowners and factory bosses attempted to disengage custom from production, forging a malleable

12 See, for example, Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New : 1996); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 13 D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. I, Atlantic America, 1492-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 65. 14 For the former argument on the origins of colonial slavery, see Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (: Verso, 1997). 405

new kind of worker.15 In the New World, a mirror-image version of the same process shaped slave life. Owners of Africans in Saint Domingue split their chattel into twenty different nations and “mulattos” into no fewer than one hundred twenty eight varieties. The products consumers desired and the work planters wanted – the refinement of sugar, domestic servitude, the cultivation of testy coffee plants – demanded that such intricacy be maintained, even alongside the sameness of race and the brutality of slave discipline.16 By contrast, with the French empire as their employer and raw demographic increase the desired product, Acadians in the Caribbean became no more than brute hands. Refugees resisted in vain. Their struggle reminds us that power coursed through the interconnected “Atlantic World,” and that it touched the most unlikely people in terrible ways.17 II To understand how peasants from the north came to labor in the Caribbean, we must begin far from the din of Parisian bureaucrats and the soft rhythms of Nova Scotia. In , things had gone badly for the French. High hopes that attended the seventeenth-century colonization of Guiana had evaporated, leaving what observers later called an “unknown country” notable only for the volume of “ooze” produced by its salt marshes.18 Expedition after expedition ended in ruin. Tales of heat and pike-wielding African terrified the Parisian public, prompting would-be migrants to reconsider the comforts of home. In 1743, a botanist named Pierre Barrère provided a fresh litany of horrors, including constant rain and “crocodiles” lurking in quiet riverbeds. Urban life in the settlement was muted. The fortified town of Cayenne was so deserted that one could “kill a person in broad daylight, so to speak, without the risk of being seen by anyone.”19 Such encomia hardly constituted an endorsement. Nevertheless, in 1763 Guiana boasted

15 Leonard N. Rosenband, Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France: Management, Labor, and Revolution at the Montgolfier Mill, 1761-1805 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 16 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 22. 17 On the relationship between power and Atlantic history, see Jack P. Greene, “Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Re-Creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Jack P. Greene, Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville, VA: University of Press, 1996), 17-42. 18 Edward Bancroft, An essay on the natural history of Guiana, in South America (London: 1769), i; Richard Rolt, A new and accurate history of South America (London: 1756), 498. 19 Pierre Barrère, Nouvelle relation de la France équinoxiale (Paris: 1743), 7, 39, 46, 70. 406

nearly six hundred whites, who owned seven thousand slaves.20 The relied on cocoa, coffee, sugar, and indigo sold to French, British, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch merchants. For Louis XV, the settlement was a mere annoyance; for its residents, it was a lonely charnel-house. The loss of Canada in 1763 made Guiana relevant again. Whether out of genuine conviction or, as the enlightened imperial critic Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal later believed, a cynical ploy to “amuse the people, and silence their clamours,” the colony’s rebirth became a ministerial priority.21 Soon proposals engulfed Versailles from Parisian garrets and colonial farms, each claiming the formula for turning Guiana’s resources to the exclusive good of the French state. Some tilted toward the quixotic. For example, Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Fusée Aublet, director of the tiny botanical garden at Cayenne, asked to take a trip. As he explained to the Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s new Secretary of State for the Marine, his itinerary was simple. If given a canoe, he would “ascend the Amazon, cross Peru to Mexico, there to embark for Manila in the Philippines, stop at , and from there sail to Ile de France [present-day ] on [the] way back to Cayenne.” He sought a rich treasure. Upon his return, Aublet promised a bounty of “plants, such as nutmeg and clove trees.”22 In the botanist’s mind, these leafy prizes contained the seeds of France’s renewal. Placing slave-tended spices throughout Louis XV’s equatorial colonies, he reasoned, would generate an unmatched commercial empire, cornering the world market on exotic foodstuffs and filling coffers at the expense of allies and enemies alike.23 Aublet’s idea received praise from at least one official in Cayenne, an intendant who advised that the bankroll the voyage “no matter what it may cost,” but

20 This figure excludes the population of the garrison at Cayenne. “Etat de la population de Guyane pour 1763,” reproduced in Jacques Michel, La Guyane sous l’Ancien Régime: Le désastre Kourou et ses scandaleuses suites judiciaries (Paris: Harmattan, 1989), 165. 21 Abbé Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, vol. III, (Dublin: 1776), 304-5. 22 Brulletout de Préfontaine, “Réponse à la lettre du Sr. Aublet dattée de Cayenne du 16 Mars 1763,” n.d., Archives des Colonies (hereafter AC), série C14, régistre 26, 349. 23 The idea of “economic botany” had inspired France to construct of a series of linked botanical gardens throughout the world, beginning with an outpost in Guadeloupe founded in 1716. Each of these stations was in turn connected to the venerable Jardins du Roi in Paris, established in 1635. Aublet had directed the garden at Réduit on Ile de France between 1753 and 1761. See James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 147-9, 151. 407

was met with bemused apathy in Paris.24 Always officially taboo but often winked at by Louis XV, international commerce of the kind Aublet seemed to advocate was simply out of fashion. Trade with foes had become “a veritable theft from the Metropolis,” draining the kingdom of specie and forcing the monarch to crush his subjects with onerous taxes.25 On a separate level, one critic bent Choiseul’s ear with particularly acerbic remarks. The Chevalier Brulletout de Préfontaine suggested that Aublet could not succeed. Long years of military service in Guiana, which included expeditions against armed maroons in the unmapped interior, had taught him what resources one needed to survive. Botanists, he reasoned, were unlikely to have them. While Aublet was a “zealous Citizen…eager to make use of his knowledge,” his ability to evade Portuguese enemies on the Amazon, or to climb the , or even to find the correct boat in Acapulco’s teeming harbor was in serious doubt. These, however, were but the most minor concerns. At issue was the character of labor in France’s empire. “To succeed,” Préfontaine wrote, “we must conduct ourselves as…in war, when we wish to penetrate an enemy’s land.” Guiana’s revival would depend not on nutmeg, nor the expensive slaves who grew it, but on “daring men…transplanted in the midst of the woods or on the banks of a navigable and fish-laden river.” Préfontaine left little doubt that these would be free whites. Linked to posts dotting the colony, their settlements would eliminate “the fear of famine,” a bugbear that had long weakened French colonies. The settlers would do so by growing food. Gardens, Préfontaine predicted, would foster attachment to new homes, just as they had with slaves. “I have almost never seen a Negro run away,” he wrote, “if he has a cultivated garden near his hut, a pig, some fowl, and other comforts…it costs them too much to lose these advantages.”26 Agriculture thus not only created political bonds, but became a mode of warfare, creating a breastwork of loyal communities across the globe.27 In a decision that portended evil days for Acadian refugees, Choiseul attached himself to the idea of an empire without slaves. He rejected Aublet politely, dispatching

24 Morisse to Choiseul, 27 March 1763, Cayenne, AC, C14, régistre 26, 205; Bombarde to Choiseul, 13 May 1763, AC, B, vol. 117, 189. 25 Journal de l’Agriculture, du Commerce, et des Finances, December 1765, 92. 26 Brulletout de Préfontaine, La Maison Rustique, à l’usage des habitans de la partie de la France équinoxiale, connue sous le nom de Cayenne (Paris: 1763), 105. 27 Brulletout de Préfontaine, “Réponse à la lettre du Sr. Aublet dattée de Cayenne du 16 Mars 1763,” n.d., AC, C14, régistre 26, 349-350v. 408

him not south to the Amazon, but north to “Galibi Creek.” The unhappy scientist was to “traverse Guiana and discover what advantageous things of all kinds it offers us.”28 Not coincidentally, Galibi Creek fed into the Kourou River, one proposed site for a project to be led by none other than Brulletout de Préfontaine. His colony would replicate the best aspects of Britain’s victorious empire. “[T]he English made their conquests,” Préfontaine wrote, “solely by the means of their northern colonies, which are almost entirely populated by whites.”29 With Choiseul’s blessing and an extraordinary dispensation of 1,500,000 livres at his fingertips, Préfontaine intended to do the same. Cultivated by up to fifteen thousand subjects for whom marronage held no allure and whose harvests could feed an army, his muscular Guiana promised “to procure for the State a degree of strength.”30 Of all potential colonists, Acadians most intrigued Choiseul. His ideas of colonial life led him to cast the three thousand refugees in France as perfect pioneers; although “naturally indolent,” Acadians were “very laborious, good farmers, in general proper for anything as they were obliged to do everything in their country,” including “building their own houses, chopping down trees, milling them, [and] constructing fishing boats.”31 So valuable were their talents that France’s allies and rivals came to covet them. The Spanish longed to use Acadian labor either on experimental farms in the Sierra Morena mountains of Andalusia or in newly acquired Louisiana. In 1763, a British agent had already contacted the Acadians living in the Norman port of Cherbourg, offering “a happy lot in Acadia” accompanied by “Irish Priests for the exercise of the Catholic Religion.”32 Influenced by ideologies that equated population with strength, Louis XV sought to stop the flow. “It is important for the State not to lose this people,” Choiseul wrote to Controller-General Jean Bertin, “which would augment…the English; you feel the consequences of this as well as I do.”33

28 Ibid., 351v; see also Aublet’s account of his journey up Galibi Creek in his “Voyage fait par le Sr. Aublet de Cayenne à la Crique Galibi par la rivière d’Oyac,” AC, C14, régistre 27, 213-7. 29 “Instructions données par Sa Majesté au sieur chevalier Turgot, gouverneur et lieutenant general de la Guyane, art. 35” cited in Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies, Précis Historique de l’éxpédition de Kourou (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1842), 4. 30 Ibid., 4. 31 Choiseul to M. Ribot, 12 September 1763, Versailles, AC, B, vol. 117, 507. 32 M. de la Rue DeFrancy to Choiseul, 3 March 1763, Cherbourg, Archives de la Marine, Port de Cherbourg (hereafter AMPC), 4P1-A, fol. 2, 3. 33 Choiseul to M. le Controlleur-General, 4 April 1763, Versailles, AC, B, vol. 117, 218. 409

In addition to these positive reasons for attaching Acadians to Guiana, Choiseul harbored a darker motivation: the Acadians were bleeding his treasury bone-dry. Upon arriving in France between 1758 and 1761, refugees from Ile St. Jean and Nova Scotia were settled in seaports and given a royal allowance of six sols per day, or slightly more than a laborer’s average wage. Compassion was not at the measure’s root. Louis XV responded to the hated British, who had offered “sixpence per day for their Subsistence, and…to each what may be reasonable for Lodging” to those Acadians exiled to their metropolitan ports.34 Like much in the ancien régime’s financial apparatus, the precise amount paid to Acadians remains shrouded in a mist of venality and grift, but costs likely rose to more than two and a half million livres per annum – a steep price for loyalty.35 Institutions across the kingdom shrunk from the burden. In 1761, officials in Cherbourg employed many of the town’s three hundred Acadians on public works, withholding their allowance as they toiled.36 The crown legitimized this cost-cutting effort, declaring that “persons unmarried and in condition to work, those that while married…can procure a living, and finally artisans” should be removed from the list of those receiving crown money.37 Local leaders continued to bear the brunt of poor relief, and their complaints spurred Choiseul to consider Préfontaine’s plan as a solution. For refugees on the dole, recruitment for Guiana represented less a courtship than a shotgun wedding. In Cherbourg, for example, Acadians had grown dependent on the government’s assistance, biding time until a French conquest might return them to their old homes. Even men like François Arbourg, a freebooter noted for “tavern debts,” and Aimable Henry, who left Cherbourg in 1758 for the “Guinea coast…aboard a ,” used the allowance to get by.38 After Versailles cut them off, they begged. “[I]nhabitants of this town who…have given them food, clothing, and other needs,” a nervous local official named De Francy worried, “have begun to refuse them.” With the Acadians’

34 Naomi E.S. Griffiths, “Acadians in Exile: the Experiences of the Acadians in the British Seaports,” Acadiensis, vol. 4, no. 1 (1974), 70. 35 I hazard this estimate based on LeMoyne to DeBoynes, December 1772, in Manuscript 1480, “Recueil des pieces concernants les acadiens,” in the Bibliothèque Municipale de Bordeaux, in which it is estimated that 354 persons pretending to be Acadians cost the crown 38232 livres per year, leaving 2370 Acadians on the crown’s master list. 36 Choiseul to M. les Maire et Echevins de Cherbourg, 28 September 1761, AC, B, vol. 117, n.p. 37 Choiseul, “Circulaire,” 14 November 1761, AC, B, vol. 117, 312. 38 De Francy to Glien, 24 May 1765, AMPC, 4P1-B, fol. 54v; De Francy to Choiseul, 13 September 1765, AMPC, 4P1-B, fol. 64. 410

fortunes at a new low, De Francy pitched Préfontaine’s colony to an assembled group in the fall of 1763, using incentives that had worked well in the past: a single payment of fifty livres for each family, plus ten livres per child and land in Guiana.39 Seventy-five out of about two hundred accepted, then reneged.40 Although he exempted Acadia’s nobility (cast as unaccustomed to the “painful work of their hands” needed to survive in Guiana), Choiseul declared that others refusing transport were “free to become what they wished,” having misused the ’s “support and kindnesses.”41 Jobless and deracinated, their bargaining power ebbed. Resistance to the verbal press gang ended in calamity. Two women, Marie Henry and Nastazie Doré Gaudet accepted the crown’s offer in the spring of 1764, then gave their fifty livres back. De Francy then “threatened to make them leave by force.” Henry melted into Cherbourg’s alleyways, while Gaudet endured more frustration. Convinced that her fiancée had signed on for Guiana, she approached De Francy and asked to leave once again, only to discover that the young man in fact had no intention of parting. She “kept herself hidden” for weeks thereafter.42 In June, nine final Acadians struck from the welfare rolls agreed to go to Préfontaine’s colony, bringing the number of immigrants to one hundred. Others languished around the town’s docks, or tried to demonstrate nobility by showing De Francy “excerpts of titles.”43 By mid-summer, one hundred emigrants waited aboard a ship at Le Havre, while dozens more prepared to depart from St. Malo and Boulogne. For Choiseul, the affair was a coup. By reattaching a severed member of the French body politic through economic servility, he could now wield it as he pleased. When these Acadians arrived at the Kourou in the fall of 1764, they disembarked into disaster. Préfontaine had arrived eighteen months earlier with a boatload of settlers. After choosing the Kourou for its proximity to the ill-defined, poorly defended border with Dutch Surinam, they started work on a fort, drained marshes, and planted gardens. Counting on a “gradual peopling” that would eventually bring fifteen thousand colonists to his imperial hub, Préfontaine took his time surveying the river and portioning out

39 Choiseul informed the Acadians of Cherbourg, Boulogne, and Le Havre about the Guiana project prior to notifying those in St. Malo, La Rochelle, and Brest. 40 De Francy to Mistral and Choiseul, 30 December 1763 to 27 February 1764, AMPC, 4P1-A, fol. 79v-93. 41 De Francy to Choiseul, 16 March 1764, AMPC, 4P1-B, fol. 3v; De Francy to Mistral, 13 April 1764, AMPC, 4P1-B, fol. 11v. 42 De Francy to Mistral, 29 March 1764, AMPC, 4P1-B, folio 7, 7v. 43 De Francy to Choiseul, 16 March 1764, AMPC, 4P1-B, fol. 4. 411

farmland. The first months went well. Arriving in November of 1763, Jean-Baptiste Thibault de Chanvalon, the colony’s new intendant, struggled to control his surging enthusiasm. The soil drove him to rapture. “Never, since the discovery of America,” he wrote to friends, “has there been an enterprise so grand, so well supported…executed with more zeal, toil, and fidelity!”44 Chanvalon was wrong. The colony’s destruction had little to do with Acadians; nevertheless, the human wave that engulfed the Kourou colony had its origins in the same effort to create a pliable workforce for the French empire. In February of 1763, Choiseul had dispatched agents to the Holy Roman Empire’s western fringes. Bearing a handsome woodcut of Guyanese homes, agents offered German Catholics the usual terms, plus the cost of their journey overland to the Atlantic port at Rochefort and a troupe of musicians and comedians at sea. Recruiters, however, misinterpreted Choiseul’s calculations. First five thousand, then three thousand more took the offer, and a town-sized group of hungry Germans tore across central France to the sea late in 1763, begging, getting drunk, and sleeping in churches along the way.45 Choiseul tried to stagger their departure, but gave up as the migrants clogged Rochefort’s center and crippled the port. In 1764 and 1765, over eleven thousand people – mostly Germans, but also Acadians, , soldiers, and French bastards – arrived at the Kourou’s mouth, exchanging one Malthusian trap for another. Smallpox swept through makeshift barracks set up on the nearby Iles du Diable (helpfully renamed the Iles du Salut) and starvation decimated the survivors. By 1766, Chanvalon awaited trial in the royal prison on Mont Saint Michel while Préfontaine had retreated to his plantation, far from the nearly eight thousand graves that littered the Atlantic shore. The failure of “La Nouvelle Colonie” cemented the Acadians’ subservient role in France’s imperial future. A few survivors fled the Kourou, building a village along the Sinnamary River in 1765, where they enjoyed mild success. Doctor Artur, a physician from the metropolis, captured the mood of most who saw their settlement: “Blacks, given to the inhabitants of Cayenne and their children…would have produced a thousand times

44 Cited in Précis Historique, 48. 45 Choiseul to the Bishops of France, 25 October 1763, AC, B, vol. 117, 570. 412

more good.”46 Many refugees fled back to communities like Cherbourg. There, Choiseul completed the Acadians’ transformation from rustic colonials into readymade laborers. Although still technically in effect, the royal allowance ceased. Those claiming nobility suffered like all others; doubly so, remarked De Francy, as they faced “the humiliation of seeing themselves confused with the others, who were once their vassals or servants.”47 When “Madame Marie Joseph Dantremont…daughter of M. Abraham Demius Dantremont, Esquire, Baron of Pabamcour [sic], the Four Sables, and of Marguerite de St. Etienne de la Tour, and commander of Port Royal and all Acadia” pled in 1766 for a royal pension, the Duc de Praslin, Choiseul’s cousin and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, denied the request. He then cut the Acadians’ non-existent allowance to five sols per day.48 The refugees received little sympathy. “[A]s much for the present as for the future,” De Francy remarked, “we would do more good…to force them to take and cultivate lands.”49 Trapped in a singular political moment, the Acadians had become a resource. For the historian Robin Blackburn, African slaves underwent “instrumentalization rather than simple suppression or exclusion,” a process of social redefinition that corresponded to the flow of consumer markets to which masters were beholden.50 At the hands of imperial France, something very much like this happened to Acadians – in reverse. As they dealt with national leaders like Choiseul and functionaries like De Francy, their relationships with authority, work, and even each other were flattened from complexity into utter dependence. Such laborers had once built empires, and France’s ministerial elite hoped they would do so again. II From destitute Acadians we may turn to another laborer whose lot had worsened with France’s fortunes. Still in his garden at Cayenne, the botanist Aublet felt slighted. He had followed Choiseul’s orders, taking his lone slave up Galibi Creek, where he found

46 Cited in Michel, La Guyane, 65. 47 De Francy to Mistral, 19 December 1766, Cherbourg, AMPC, 4P1-C, fol. 70. 48 De Francy to Guillot, 19 December 1766, Cherbourg, AMPC, 4P1-C, fol. 67v. 49 De Francy to Mistral, 18 July 1767, Cherbourg, AMPC, 4P1-C, fol. 120. 50 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 22. 413

land for the cultivation of sugar and a grove of rubber trees.51 His report generated no response, and he feared that his research, “pursued while fending off death,” was lost on lackeys at Versailles. Aublet questioned the morality of a state that paid such dullards but failed to reward his important work. With bread at twelve sous per livre, he had no money for meat. Perhaps it was hunger and an overdeveloped sense of devotion that led to his strange actions. “A Negro does nothing without demanding recompense,” he told a metropolitan official, “and I have taken to paying those who bring me a stone taken at random, in the fear of losing the one that might indicate riches.”52 For this impossibly odd man, a change was in order. In July of 1764, Aublet sailed from Cayenne bearing two hundred plants for Louis XV’s personal garden at Trianon and the compliments of the colony’s new governor, who implored Choiseul to receive the tortured scientist. He never had the chance. As Aublet later wrote, his vessel began to take on “eight thumbs of water per hour” after departure from Cayenne. Thus, in September of 1764, he found himself in Port-au-Prince, the administrative hub of Saint Domingue. In a dockside crowd, he sprinted after Charles Théodat, Comte d’Estaing, the newly appointed governor-general of the Iles Sous Vent whom he had known “in .”53 Not surprisingly, he was too slow to catch him. Aublet then placed himself at the government’s service, which dispatched him on a mission. “I am leaving for the town of Môle to visit the Acadians,” he informed an uninterested Choiseul, “to provide them with necessary agricultural implements.”54 His destination was, more precisely, Môle St. Nicolas, a nascent settlement on the tip of peninsular northwest Saint Domingue. Although the island colony as a whole was well on the way to becoming, in the words of a present-day scholar, “the single richest and most productive colony in the world,” the around Môle lagged behind.55 By the mid-eighteenth century, a north-south axis of communication and trade had developed between four towns; Cap François and Port-de-Paix on the northern coast, and Port-au- Prince and Jacmel to the south. Paradoxically, these routes acted both as a circulatory

51 “Voyage fait par le Sr. Aublet de Cayenne à la Crique Galibi par la rivière d’Oyac,” AC, C14, régistre 27, folios 213-6. 52 “Mémoire du Sr. Aublet addressé à Accaron,” 18 July 1763, AC, C14, carton 88, no. 7. 53 D’Estaing to Choiseul, 21 September 1765, Cap Français, AC, C9A, vol. 124, n.p. 54 Aublet to Choiseul, 11 September 1764, Port-au-Prince, AC, C9A, vol. 125, n.p. 55 McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 2. 414

system and a tourniquet, choking off development in outlying areas. On the peninsula that jutted out past Tortuga into the Windward passage, almost no roads existed because there were so few villages to link together. It was a place that gave Choiseul headaches: ripe for invasion, a breeding ground for marronage. After 1763, a monarchy once content to skim the colony’s profits sought to make Saint Domingue an imperial centerpiece through two changes in policy, each of which would have a great impact on the destiny of Môle St. Nicolas. First, the crown renewed its commitment to , prohibiting trade with foreign merchants. For planters, this meant an unsure economic future; for others, however, it meant an increased naval presence in the waters around Saint Domingue. Second, the milices bourgeoises that had long defended colonial towns were abolished. The successes of British regulars against untrained men in – which, during the war’s crucial battles, had included the vaunted Compagnie Royal-Syntaxe, a force composed of scholars from Québec’s Jesuit seminary – had convinced Versailles of the need for a centralized system of defense.56 Although many in Saint Domingue saw regulars as an unwanted burden, the new military régime portended growth. Soldiers needed bases and food, assuring a boom in trades and agriculture. It was a good a time to be a worker – as an observer later recalled, “the year that followed the publication of the Peace [of Paris] was when the Agriculturalist began to harvest the fruits of his labors.”57 Just as in Guiana, slaves struck French administrators as ill-suited for the state’s new vision. In addition to their expense, they caused problems of defense. Since the late seventeenth century, a band of maroons had lurked in the colony’s mountains, recruiting or capturing slaves and sapping military resources. More soldiers to fight the ex-slaves and fewer slaves to join them, some argued, might shutter this “theater for…terrible brigandage.”58 Even more bothersome were the effects of racial ambiguity. In 1764, a lawyer named Borthon complained that “the mass of people…arrived in Saint Domingue over the last few years has polluted the country.” Although the Edict of 1685, better

56 French had performed poorly, for example, during the sieges of Québec in 1758 and Montréal in 1760. See Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in (New York: Knopf, 2000), 359, 404. 57 Hillard d’Auberteuil, Considérations sur l’Etat Présent de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue (Paris: 1776), 52. 58 See Médéric Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Mèry, Description Physique, Civile, Politique, et Historique de la Partie Française de l’Isle de Saint-Domingue (Philadelphia: 1797-8), vol. II, 497-9. 415

known as the , had given free blacks the same “rights, privileges, and immunities” as whites, Borthon complained that mimicry had confused the social order.59 “Well-dressed, [slaves] arm themselves with machetes,” Borthon wrote, noting that “[t]here are even those who have the audacity to carry a Pistol…to represent themselves with the greatest surety as free blacks.” This mix of slaves, freemen, and “mulatto mistresses” infiltrated white society, drawing “men without scruples” into an interracial realm of horse-stealing, gambling, and libertinage. Economic stagnation resulted. “We live differently now than we once did,” Borthon lamented, demanding that the French crown solve the problem by striking a medallion to act as “Signum Libertatis” for Saint Domingue’s free blacks.60 Choiseul and others at Versailles prepared to do Borthon one better. A dramatic influx of white labor, they predicted, would untangle the webs of experience and racial association that slowed the colony’s economy. Môle St. Nicolas appeared a good place to commence such a bold experiment. First, it suited the designs of the imperial elite. Ships destined for any port in Saint Domingue had to pass by the mouth of the River St. Nicolas, as would foreign vessels bound for Jamaica or Cuba. A naval base would allow France to dictate both terms of trade to its own, sometimes rebellious merchants, but to British enemies and ostensible Spanish allies as well. As D’Estaing remarked, “Môle St. Nicolas…seems placed by nature to belong to the dominant naval power in the seas of America.”61 In addition, the soil would allow for a self-sustaining community, a hybrid species of military encampment and agricultural village that could run on its own power. The geographer Jacques-Nicolas Bellin described the area as ideal for the cultivation of “vegetables and cotton,” excellent for raising livestock, and populated by “wild bulls, pigs…pigeons, turtledoves, and a few guinea-fowl” that roamed the river bottom.62 It was a fine setting for a fresh start. Early in 1764, the Chevalier de Montreuil, a commandant at Cap Français, and the Chevalier de Clugny, the royal intendant at Port-au-Prince, laid out plans for a handsome

59 See Gabriel DeBien, Les Colons de Saint-Domingue et la Révolution: Essai sur le Club Massiac, Août 1789 – Août 1792 (Paris: Colin, 1953), 33. 60 Borthon, “Mémoire,” 1764, AC, C9A, vol. 120, n.p. 61 D’Estaing to Choiseul, 21 September 1765, AC, C9A, vol. 124, n.p. 62 Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Description des Débouquemens qui sont au nord de l’isle de Saint-Domingue (Versailles: Imprimerie du Département de la Marine, 1773), 7-9. 416

colony. No detail escaped their notice: as soon as settlers had disembarked at the “Baye St. Nicolas,” leaders would lay out a campsite with “tents, covers, and hammocks such as those given to Negroes.” Workers would then erect buildings, including “barracks, a blockhouse, a hospital, and the officers’ quarters.” Once finished, colonists would next cut a road leading from the sea to the river’s head, “to transport by coach…the supplies and tools necessary for the Settlement.” A surveyor then walk the path, marking plots of “ten carreaux” along the river as the “certain and incontestable property” of those who had helped build the base. The colonists would farm the land, selling their produce and wares to the military – dependents, in every sense of the word, of the French state. Those who “refused to give themselves to the operations of the settlement” at Môle St. Nicolas risked confinement in a prison to be constructed by their own hands. 63 Not surprisingly, Acadians became the first choice of Saint Domingue’s leaders. As many had already declared their willingness to come, it seemed a natural match. In 1763, word had reached Acadians from to Massachusetts that Louis XV would soon redeem them. Letters brimming with the “meager thanks, although badly spelled, of your poor servants the neutral inhabitants of Acadia” arrived at Versailles, each pleading for aid.64 Choiseul earmarked the refugees for the Caribbean, and Acadians responded. In , a group tried to send representatives to Saint Domingue early in 1763, there to ask D’Estaing’s “assistance…to draw us nearer to him.” Their voyage was cut short by “bad winds,” but others succeeded.65 All indicators pointed to a happy marriage between Acadian needs and imperial dreams. From , an official predicted that these “robust, extremely laborious” colonists would run to the Caribbean, if only out of “discontent…with English rule.”66 By late 1763, many had arrived at Cap Français on the colony’s northern coast. To aid others, Choiseul and D’Estaing hired a New York merchant named John Hanson, instructing Acadians throughout the colonies to find him

63 “Mémoire de Messrs. Le Chevalier de Montreuil et de Clugny pour l’Etablissement du Môle St. Nicolas,” 27 January 1764, AC, C9A, vol. 122, n.p.; “Mémoire de M. le Chevalier de Montreuil sur l’Etablissement du Môle St. Nicolas,” 24 January 1764, Cap Français, AC, C9A, vol. 122, n.p. A “carreau” contained between 2.79 and 3.0 English acres. McClellan, Colonialism and Science, xvii. 64 Acadians of to the Duc de Nivernais, 7 July 1763, AMAE, Correspondance Politique, Angleterre, vol. 450, 438. 65 Balthazzard Corne, Marain Le Blanc, Jacque Hugond to Nivernais, 12 August 1763, Charleston, AMAE, Correspondance Politique, vol. 451, 62. 66 Monthardé, “Mémoire concernant l’Ile de Cayenne et la Louisiane,” 1 August 1763, New Orleans, AC, C14, carton 88, no. 10. 417

on the city’s docks. The circular announcing the scheme proclaimed that the Acadians “will be maintained by the King during the first months of their stay, that they may be able to earn a living themselves.”67 This statement masked an exploitative reality. On February 2, 1764, an écrivain de la Marine – a glorified clerk – known only as Saltoris led four hundred Acadians from the relative comfort of Cap Français into a harsh environment. At the river’s mouth, he found no place for construction “that did not require clearing with a hatchet.” Eager to make an impression, he penned his first report to Clugny “on a knee,” his desk still in the ship’s hold. He raved about the colony’s prospects.68 The Acadians were “the best people in the world,” especially when given some wine to “refresh their blood, corrupted by too much salted meat.” In spite of their meager rations, none misbehaved. Saltoris’s decision to ban hunting, fishing, and washing in the river excited some murmurs, but no real discontent.69 “The Acadians love me and fear me,” he wrote, promising to redouble his efforts “to inspire in them these two feelings at once.”70 Aside from a few gingerly negotiated cases of diarrhea, the first week at Môle St. Nicolas passed quietly. A series of calamities, however, led the Acadians to ask uncomfortable questions of Saltoris about their relationship to empire. First, a rainstorm left settlers “flooded in our tents,” smashing one of Saltoris’s boats against the rocks and ruining much of the colony’s hardtack.71 The downpour prompted Saltoris to explore the river, hoping to portion out land to the Acadians sooner than planned. What he saw puzzled him. Broken by fetid pools of stagnant water, the soil was vile and muddy. The very sight “sorrowed” Acadians who looked upon it. To find the cause, Saltoris trekked upstream, “walking not on the banks but in the middle, in boots.” Fallen trees blocked the current, rendering the banks “spongy.” He recommended that for the good of their harvests, the Acadians dredge the river and divert it to a healthy course – and that they do so free of charge.72 As a surveyor, an obscure écrivain, and a few poor colonists stared at the dirt alongside a stream, contradictory notions of labor, freedom, and obligation upon which

67 D’Estaing to Acadians, 26 June 1764, Cap François, in Gaudet, Rapport, 148. 68 Saltoris to Clugny, 2 February 1764, AC, C9A, vol. 123, n.p. 69 Saltoris to Clugny, 8 February 1764, AC, C9A, vol. 123, n.p. 70 Saltoris to Clugny, 11 February 1764, AC, C9A, vol. 123, n.p. 71 Saltoris to Clugny, 15 February 1764, AC, C9A, vol. 123, n.p. 72 Saltoris to Clugny, 19 February 1764, AC, C9A, vol. 123, n.p. 418

the French empire was to be built came into sharp relief. For Saltoris, the dredging project was inseparable from cultivation, which was in turn connected to the military future of Saint Domingue and, not insignificantly, the advancement of his own career. It was thus in everyone’s best interest that Acadians perform the work without complaint. Given their isolation, there was no other choice. Although rumors had spread that slaves from the corvée of a nearby town might be employed, they never materialized. Free workers from elsewhere in Saint Domingue demanded high wages; in Port-au-Prince, officials lamented that “the journée of a white…has risen to ten sols per day.”73 A private contractor offered to do the job for three hundred thousand livres, but, as Saltoris later boasted, the Acadians could perform the same work for peanuts – eighteen hundred livres in food and incidentals.74 The refugees at Môle St. Nicolas employed a subtle combination of collaboration and resistance to combat conditions of labor that closely resembled enslavement. In a bold move, they demanded to be paid additional money. “Our Acadians are murmuring,” he reported to Clugny, “and I do not believe it will be possible to make them work in the riverbed without paying them.” Writing from his office in Cap François, the Chevalier de Montreuil suggested that the recalcitrant laborers might be contented with “some goods” instead of a wage. Saltoris disabused him of the notion, revealing in the process the Acadians’ view of their own predicament. “These people are absolutely persuaded that the King should feed and clothe them,” he remarked, “and whatever I tell them on this subject, I cannot dissuade them.”75 Two conceptions of imperial labor – one in which the Acadians had a certain level of oversight and rights to wages, the other in which the goals of empire separated workers from the world of goods and money they helped create – collided in “the desert corner of an island.”76 The Acadians lost. Between February and July, they dredged the River St. Nicolas and received nothing but a daily ration. Saltoris maintained a cheery disposition, describing his charges as “angels.” When D’Estaing and a new intendant, René Magon,

73 Entry for April 27, 1764, Journal of René Magon, Royal intendant at Port-au-Prince, AC, C9A, vol. 121, n.p. 74 “Dossier Saltoris,” AC, E30, cited in Gabriel Debien, “The Acadians in Santo Domingo: 1764-1789,” in Glenn R. Conrad, ed., The : Essays on Their History and Culture (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwest Louisiana, 1978), 93. 75 Saltoris to Clugny, 19 February 1764, AC, C9A, vol. 123, n.p. 76 Saltoris to Clugny, 12 March 1764, AC, C9A, vol. 123, n.p. 419

trekked to Môle in July, they expected to encounter a town of “several hundred Acadian cultivators; hardworking, happy, and who cherished those who administered to them.” As he walked through their camp, what D’Estaing saw pierced him to the core: I found a few scattered men, without shelter, dying beneath the Bushes, supplied in abundance with hardtack and salted meats they could not eat, as well as tools they were in no state to use; they cursed an Existence that, out of discouragement, they did not care to preserve….[T]he greatest criminal would have preferred the Galleys to a torture-session in this plague-stricken place.77

Magon described the scene in equally disturbing terms. “We found the settlement in the worst condition,” he wrote. “Of 556 Acadians sent here, 104 had already died,” while the rest were ill. Magon immediately saw a profound weakness of political economy. “Men in a condition to work should have been sent,” he complained, “who would have been helped by a few blacks.” 78 Built cheap, Saltoris’s experiment was over. The end of the Acadian phase in the history of Môle St. Nicolas – and along with it, a broader retreat from the idea of white labor in France’s new empire – came swiftly. Saltoris was jailed and replaced by a ship’s captain named Salomon, a man “accustomed to risking his life for little, and used to the kind of harshness needed to inspire today the man who will seemingly die tomorrow.”79 He frittered away time and stole provisions, and the job eventually fell to Aublet. When the botanist reached Môle St. Nicolas in the fall of 1764, some familiar faces greeted him – nearly a thousand Germans in flight from Guiana. He placed them in a separate village south of Môle, baptizing the settlement Bombardopolis in honor of the Sieur de la Bombarde, an embarrassed scientific patron. The Germans survived, but Acadians struggled. In the winter of 1764 officials opened the port at Môle to Anglo-American ships, doubling back on their mercantilist intentions. Seizing an opportunity, Acadians headed for Louisiana in droves. Those who stayed obtained land elsewhere, fleeing Môle for more settled areas of Saint Domingue. And yet the project they had started lingered. To finish the naval base, grow crops, and cut roads, “indispensable so that this peninsula may be linked to the rest of the colony,” Magon

77 D’Estaing to Choiseul, 21 Septamber 1765, AC, C9A, vol. 124., n.p. 78 Entry for July 7, 1764, Journal of René Magon, AC, C9A, vol. 121, n.p. 79 D’Estaing to Choiseul, 21 September 1765, AC, C9A, vol. 124. n.p. 420

purchased slaves. To make clear their status as “Negroes of the King,” D’Estaing burned a fleur de lys into their cheeks. III In the final analysis, Acadians circulated in an “Atlantic World” very different from the one presented in current scholarship. To be sure, the many glowing passages on the subject in recent literature reflect a powerful reality – spanning the ocean there truly was, in the words of J.H. Elliott, a “relatively homogenous unit, moving in common response to common requirements and pressures.”80 What made this wide world tick – or, in the parlance of Atlantic history, what “integrated” the – was commerce built around the consumption of New World goods and the profits to be made by selling them. French leaders sought to remove Acadians from this world of goods, choices, and possibilities. Making employees out of rootless refugees, Louis XV’s administrators stumbled upon a perfect system of labor; cheaper than slavery and shorn of the military limitations of the “peculiar institution.” And it nearly worked. That colonies in Guiana and Saint Domingue failed should not be surprising. The usual suspects – rapacious leaders, overcrowding, and disease – were all present. Most observers assigned blame to the weaknesses of men. For an anonymous Parisian author of the 1780s, Préfontaine’s plan had simply been “the most harmful to humanity and the most poorly conceived” in recent history.81 Had he known of Saltoris, Salomon, or even the luckless Aublet, by then dead and forgotten, the author probably would have censured them as imbeciles. By contrast, the abbé Raynal placed Préfontaine and his ilk within a broader framework. The “proprietors and mercenaries” of the Kourou, he argued, were innocent of ineptitude, but guilty of malice. They had perverted the proper evolution of societies. While divisions between leaders and laborers were “established in Europe,” the economic divide had been the result of “the progress of sociability, not the basis and foundation of society.” New colonies, he argued, required an initial period of leveling, “that all her members should partake of her property.”82 Raynal’s clipped denunciation was, it seems, too soft. France’s attempt to reverse its Caribbean fortunes with Acadian

80 J.H. Elliott, “Introduction: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World,” in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 4. 81 Réflexions sur la colonie Françoise de la Guyane (Paris: 1788), 2. 82 Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History, vol. III, 309. 421 labor – to make an empire where none had existed before – revealed that in competitive political contexts, even the gift of land could become an instrument of oppression.