Jérémie Papers

The Jérémie Papers encompasses the notarial and administrative archives of the municipality of Jérémie, located on the northern coast of present-day Haiti's southern peninsula. Under the French colonial regime, the jurisdiction of Jérémie (also known as la Grand'Anse) encompassed two parishes, Saint-Louis de Jérémie and Notre Dame du Cap Dame Marie, which were both civil and ecclesiastical divisions. Several bourgs, or small towns, existed in the outlying districts, or cantons. During the 1770s and 1780s, Jérémie experienced a coffee boom, as did many other parts of Saint-Domingue that contained highlands not suitable to sugar cultivation. In addition to coffee, many of these highland plantations grew cacao and cotton as secondary crops. A handful of sugar plantations existed on the coast near the town of Jérémie.

Although no full census of the Grand'Anse exists for the pre-revolutionary period, it is clear that newly arrived Africans were exceptionally numerous in the region's slave population. Most slaves were common laborers on highland coffee plantations, but some had more dignified positions as slave drivers, or commandeurs, or as artisans. Older women were often assigned to be medical practitioners, particularly midwives. A small percentage of slaves also worked in a variety of occupations in the town of Jérémie and in the hamlets of the jurisdiction.

Free persons of mixed race, variously described as mulâtres, quarterons, tiercerons, and mestifs, and free Blacks constituted a middle stratum in society in Jérémie, as they did elsewhere in the colony. Membership in this class included both those born free and those who had been awarded their freedom. These gens de couleur libres, as they were known, were varied in economic standing, and many owned their own plantations. They were less common in Jérémie than in many other parts of Saint-Domingue.

Whites born in the colony (creoles) or in France formed the top of the racial hierarchy. They were divided along economic lines between grands blancs, including government bureaucrats, large plantation owners, and merchants engaged in large-scale commerce, and petits blancs, who included white European and Creole artisans, wage-earners, and small landowners. The racial hierarchy did blur at various points, and ecclesiastical and notarial records attest to occasional marriages between whites and free people of color. Apparently more common were marriages between free Blacks and their slaves, which freed the latter and legitimized their offspring.

For much of Saint-Domingue, the French Revolution shook the racial hierarchy, as the gens de couleur began to demand civil rights to match their economic power and contributions to the defense of the colony. In la Grand'Anse, the grands blancs called in the British to occupy their region, thus preserving the status quo. Documents for the early 1790s reveal evidence of the arming of slaves by the whites to defend against the revolutionaries they termed "brigands." The full story of the revolution in la Grand'Anse has yet to be told, and the Jérémie Papers provide an ample documentary base for such a study.

Following the abandonment of Jérémie and their other positions in western Saint-Domingue in 1798, the British left the colony to the French Republican forces. The documents reflect this change in government, notably in the use of the term as citoyen (citizen) and of the French Republican calendar. This second revolutionary period lasted until 1803. Haiti declared its independence from France the following year.

Sources and recommended reading: 1) Fick, Carolyn. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. 2) Geggus, David Patrick. Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. 3) Geggus, David Patrick. "Unexploited Sources for the History of the Haitian Revolution." Latin American Research Review 18, No. 1 (1983), pp. 95-103.