23 Facts About Saint-Domingue

Saint-Domingue quickly came to overshadow the previous colony in both wealth and population.

Saint-Domingue encouraged the planting of tobacco, which turned a population of buccaneers and freebooters, who had not acquiesced to royal authority until 1660, into a sedentary population.

The people of the eastern part of Saint-Domingue were opposed to the arrangements and hostile toward the French.

Saint-Domingue became known as the "Pearl of the Antilles" – one of the richest colonies in the world in the 18th-century French empire.

Saint-Domingue had the largest and wealthiest free population of color in the Caribbean; they were known as the gens de couleur .

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Saint-Domingue gradually increased its reliance on indentured servants and by 1789 about 6 percent of all white Saint Dominicans were employed as labor on plantations along with slaves.

Many of the indentured servants in Saint-Domingue were German settlers or Acadian refugees who had been deported by the British from old Acadia during the French and Indian war.

Thousands of slaves escaped into the mountains of Saint-Domingue, forming communities of maroons and raiding isolated plantations.

Saint-Domingue preached a radical vision of killing the white population of Saint-Domingue.

Saint-Domingue was a French Girondist and abolitionist during the French Revolution, and closely associated with the Societe des amis des Noirs .

Sonthonax believed that all of Saint-Domingue's whites were Bourbon royalist or rebel separatist conservatives attached to independence or joining Spain.

Saint-Domingue stripped away all of the military power of the white Saint Dominicans, and by doing so, he alienated them from the Republican government.

Saint-Domingue believed that Saint-Domingue would need slave soldiers among the ranks of the colonial army if it was to survive.

Saint-Domingue created a new civil code; the French Civil Code of Napoleon affirmed the political and legal equality of all adult men; it established a merit-based society in which individuals advanced in education and employment because of talent rather than birth or social standing.

Louverture as Saint-Domingue's Governor-General-for-life enacted forced plantation labor to prevent the collapse of the Saint Dominican economy.

Many of Saint-Domingue's whites fled the island during the Saint Dominican Civil War.

Saint-Domingue gave property settlements and indemnities for war time losses, and promised equal treatment in his new Saint-Domingue; a good number of white Saint Dominican refugees did return.

The refugees who came back to Saint-Domingue and believed in Toussaint Louverture's rule were later exterminated by Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

Saint-Domingue's atrocities helped rally many former French loyalists to the Haitian rebel cause.

In 1804, all remaining whites in Saint-Domingue were slaughtered and massacred wholesale under the orders of Dessalines.

Saint-Domingue decreed that all those suspected of conspiring in the acts of the expeditionary army should be put to death, including Creoles of color and freed slaves deemed traitors to Dessalines' regime.

Saint-Domingue's forces were strict in enforcing this, to the extent that some black subjects felt they were enslaved again.

The name of Saint-Domingue was changed to Hayti when Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the independence of all Hispaniola from the French in 1804.