The coffee and sugar plantation system in Saint-Domingue was more profitable than anywhere else in the Atlantic world — and more violent. The Code Noir regulated every aspect of enslaved people’s lives; the plantation owners, both grands blancs (wealthy white planters) and gens de couleur libres (free people of colour, some of whom owned enslaved people themselves), lived in constant fear of the majority they depended on.
The man on the dock that our sailor glimpses may be Toussaint Louverture. Freed in 1776, he would go on to lead the only successful slave revolution in history, creating the state of Haiti in 1804. His father’s lineage traced to the Kingdom of Benin, connecting the Haitian Revolution to the same West African societies from which the enslaved were taken. As the Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James chronicles in Black Jacobins, Louverture was inspired by the same Enlightenment ideals — liberty, natural rights, the consent of the governed — that justified the American and French Revolutions. He turned those ideals, with devastating force, against the planters who had invoked them for themselves.
Smith would not live to see this revolution, but he knew that he was living in a revolutionary age and could see its hypocrisy. In a letter to a friend, he noted, “If it be just to emancipate the Continent of America from the dominion of every European power, how can it be just to subject the [Caribbean] islands to such dominion?”
In the 19th century, post-revolutionary France would make Haiti pay for “property” (slaves) lost during the revolution in exchange for diplomatic recognition. Independent Haiti did not fully pay off this debt – $560 million, including interest – until 1947, contributing significantly to the country’s poverty.