By Jannik Keindorf

This article is part of our series entitled “Exiled: Identity and Identification,” which explores the semantic evolution of exile and the lived experiences of people seeking refuge across the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century. It was presented originally at the conference “Who is a Refugee? Concepts of Exile, Refuge and Asylum, c.1750-1850”, which took place on 30 June – 1 July 2022 at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

This publication is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 849189).

The outbreak of a slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791 triggered a brutal revolutionary conflict that only came to an end in 1804, when the former colony declared its independence as the republic of Haiti. Tens of thousands of refugees fled Saint-Domingue during this period, from planters and proprietors to lower-class whites, the enslaved and free people of color. This diaspora spread across the whole Atlantic, but a significant number of refugees ended up in neighboring Caribbean islands, which for many were the very first places of refuge. Here, the years of the Haitian Revolution were those of a lively mobility posing a challenge to local authorities, who had to deal with a sudden and unprecedented influx of people in a time of deep political uncertainty.

Among the main destinations was the British colony of Jamaica, where about 4,000 people sought refuge.^[1] This was mostly a conscious decision. Most refugees hoped to be able to return as soon as practicable and therefore sought refuge in geographical proximity.^[2] Furthermore, those who had lived under British occupation had developed strong ties to the Empire.^[3] Gordon Forbes, governor of the British-occupied Mole in southern Saint-Domingue, reported in 1796, “There is not a man […] who does not declare that the full and entire protection […] of Great Britain, can alone reestablish their unfortunate […] Island.”^[4] Many of the elites had already become naturalized during the British occupation.^[5] Accordingly, among those seeking refuge in Jamaica were a significant number of royalists, planters, and military officials who hoped to see their social status preserved in a like-minded plantation society.^[6]

These elites were also the ones who could expect generous expressions of solidarity. However, even though the Earl of Balcarres, governor of Jamaica, was willing to offer support to refugees for reasons of “humanity,” it was clear that this would only last “until Peace shall be declared.”^[7] Their reception oscillated between solidarity with planters and the nervous observation of citizens of the enemy nation. During the Age of Revolutions, Jamaican elites feared foreigners, especially the enslaved and free people of color, might bring revolutionary contagion with them.^[8] Against this background, the 1790s saw the implementation of a wide repertoire of surveillance measures.^[9] Foreigners had to declare themselves to local customs officers.^[10] This was ensured through a ticketing system limiting movement around their place of arrival.^[11] Since the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, Jamaican authorities had taken especially great pains to limit the movement of people of color. Orders were issued in the 1790s prohibiting the “importation of French Slaves” in general without exception, and in 1803, an act was passed enabling colonial authorities “to take up all suspicious Foreigners & transport them out of the Island in a summary Manner, without regard to the Interests of the Proprietors.”^[12] For all these measures, Jamaican authorities could tap into the framework of the 1793 British Alien Act, which granted officials the ability to deport aliens as an emergency measure and, in the process, define who posed a threat to the state.^[13] Crucially, however, there was no imperial legal framework for defining what distinguished a refugee from other aliens, and who would be entitled to assistance on what grounds.^[14]In practice, such questions lay in the hands of local administrators, who worked them out at the imperial periphery. The labels authorities used to classify foreigners therefore reveal the principles they applied in deciding who was entitled to support and who was not.

What makes the story of Saint-Dominguan refugees in Jamaica unique is that two labels were used for categorization, with different implications attached to them: “emigrants” and “prisoners of war.” The former was reserved for white planters and officials and mostly used in tandem with expressions of deservingness: these people were described as “unfortunate Emigrants” and “unhappy meretorious [sic] Colonists,” and relied on this language of destitution themselves when making claims for assistance.^[15] Accordingly, representatives of the French planters reminded Balcarres of “the Interest your Lordship never ceased to manifest towards the unfortunate French Emigrants” when they beseeched him to forward a petition on their behalf to the King in 1798, hoping that “so many misfortunes […] intitle us to merit your patronage and your protection.”^[16]

In correspondence with London, the Jamaican government seemed to consciously set apart such deserving “emigrants” from people of color, which is both testament to the desire to keep them from taking refuge in Jamaica, and to an institutionalized presumption that Black people’s mobilities were unfree in nature.^[17] “The French Emigrants […] are constantly importing their Slaves from St. Domingo, who are of the worst Description,” governor George Nugent wrote in 1803.^[18] It was the “prisoner of war” label, however, that caused the greatest confusion for authorities. Since the beginning of the revolutionary war, British ships had been patrolling the traffic routes around Saint-Domingue. A great number of ships were captured for sailing in contested waters, and the people on board, who often were not soldiers, but rather civilian refugees, were transported to Jamaica as prisoners of war.^[19] They were handed over to officials from the Admiralty, who oversaw their management and sorted them according to rank, before sending them to forts or prison ships, releasing them on parole, or exchanging them for British prisoners. The “prisoner of war” label was therefore referring to a group ranging from soldiers and officers to civilians who had been captured by privateers.^[20] It was this civilian group that caused administrative problems, since two different systems of financial support were attached to the labels: Emigrant families were entitled to lodging money, while prisoners of war were paid out a sum of subsistence money proportional to their rank.^[21] In 1795, however, Jamaican authorities discovered that the two systems had become mixed up: Subsistence money had been paid and parole passes granted to people who should have been categorized as “emigrants.”^[22] William Parker, the officer in charge at the Admiralty’s Jamaica Station, was furious of this “greater abuse in the ravishment of the publick [sic] Money than ever was known,” in which “every Person that has had a plea of being French, Men, Women or Children of every description of Colour, no matter upon what ground, have been receiving Money”.^[23] The extent of this fraud was considerable, even involving possible corruption on the part of the Commissary for Prisoners of War responsible for the payment of subsistence money.^[24]Governor Balcarres discharged him in 1795 on orders from the Secretary of State for the Home Department in London, who made very clear that “the Commissary […] neither can, nor ought to have any Concern with those Frenchmen who are not Prisoners of War; and much serious Mischief […] appears to have arisen from so incongruous a mode of Proceeding.”^[25]

In a second step, Parker would discharge people “undeservedly eating the Bread of Government” from the payment lists.^[26] Here, once again, support would be stratified according to class, political affiliation, gender, and, most importantly, race. Parker was especially quick to discharge people of color.^[27] However, he also conceded that “the Parties be involved into immediate distress I must let remain”, even though they should not have received allowances in the first place. He especially singled out women “decent in their original situation […] that will be reduced to misery if this bounty which they’ve been enjoying is stop’t.”^[28] This is reflecting of a tendency to consider women, especially widows, as particularly deserving objects of charity, partly due to their perceived vulnerability, partly due to them being less suspected of political activity than men.^[29]

This case also demonstrates that refugees were aware of the different support systems and were able to hijack them to secure an allowance, maybe also to avoid expulsion if they managed to get their hands on a parole pass. As Parker put it: “they go & come from St. Domingo to suit their convenience.”^[30] The lack of a legal framework for defining who was entitled to support not only meant that these decisions depended on the deliberations of local administrators, but also made the system exploitable. Working out questions of entitlement to refuge and humanitarian assistance at the imperial periphery was thus not a top-down process, but rather one in which refugees themselves were actively involved.

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Jannik Keindorf is a PhD researcher at the University of Tübingen, Germany, as part of the ERC Project Atlantic Exiles: Refugees and Revolution in the Atlantic World, c.1780-1820. He works on Kingston, Jamaica, as a hub of refugee movements during this period, focusing on American Loyalists, refugees from French Saint-Domingue, and from the Spanish American wars of independence.

Title Image: Print depicting the Slave revolt on Haiti. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Further Readings:

Burnard, Trevor, and John Garrigus. The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Jansen, Jan C. “Aliens in a Revolutionary World: Refugees, Migration Control and Subjecthood in the British Atlantic, 1790s-1820s,” Past and Present 255, No. 1 (2022): 189-231. 

Jan C. Jansen, “Registration and Deportation: Refugees, Regimes of Proof, and the Law in Jamaica, 1791–1828,” in Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, ed. Jan C. Jansen and Kirsten McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

Morieux, Renaud. The Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Endnotes:

^[1] Philip Wright and Gabriel Debien, Les colons de Saint-Domingue passés à la Jamaïque (1792-1835) (Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1975), 70.

^[2] R. Darrell Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue, 1750-1804: Migration and Exile in the French Revolutionary Atlantic” (PhD diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2004), 153.

^[3] Wright and Debien, Colons de Saint-Domingue, 20, 31; Oliver Gliech, Saint-Domingue und die Französische Revolution: Das Ende der weißen Herrschaft in einer karibischen Plantagenwirtschaft, (Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2011), 461, 467; David Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue 1793-1798, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 46, 87.

^[4] British Library, Add. MS. 39824, 32v-33.

^[5] Archives nationales d’outre-mer, COL F3 285, 66v.

^[6] Gliech, Saint-Domingue, 361, 496f.; Meadows, “Planters,” 153; Jacques de Cauna, “La diaspora des colons de Saint-Domingue et le monde créole: Le cas de la Jamaïque,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 304 (1994), 342.

^[7] The National Archives [TNA], CO 137/100, 175; CO 137/101, 100.

^[8] Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, (London/New York: Verso, 2020), 145; de Cauna, “Diaspora des colons,” 345; Julia Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, No. 3 (2012), 590.

^[9] Jan C. Jansen, “Aliens in a Revolutionary World: Refugees, Migration Control and Subjecthood in the British Atlantic, 1790s-1820s,” Past & Present 255, No. 1 (2022): 189-231.

^[10] Wright and Debien, Colons de Saint-Domingue, 85f; David Geggus, “Jamaica and the Saint-Domingue Slave Revolt, 1791-1793,” The Americas 38, No. 2 (1981): 219-233.

^[11] Scott, Common Wind, 155.

^[12] TNA, WO 1/70, 142; TNA, CO 137/110, 58v.

^[13] Jansen, “Aliens”; Shaw, Caroline, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 29, 40.

^[14] Delphine Diaz, Laurent Dornel, and Hugo Vermeren, “Taking In and Casting Out,” in Banished: Traveling the Roads of Exile in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Delphine Diaz and Sylvie Aprile (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), 43.

^[15] TNA, CO 137/101, 33 and 98v; TNA CO 137/98, 57. On the emergence of a humanitarian language of destitution, see Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace, 24.

^[16] TNA, CO 137/100, 187. See also CO 137/101, 57, for a similar petition.

^[17] Rebecca J. Scott, “Was Freedom Portable? Wartime Journeys from Saint-Domingue to Jamaica to Cuba to Louisiana” (Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture, Kingston, 2013), 6. See also Rebecca J. Scott and Jean Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012).

^[18] TNA, CO 137/110, 57.

^[19] Wright and Debien, Colons de Saint-Domingue, 33; Geggus, “Jamaica and the Saint Domingue Slave Revolt,” 228.

^[20] Scott, “Was Freedom Portable,” 6.

^[21] TNA, CO 137/98, 56-60; CO 137/101, 346f. See also Wright and Debien, Colons de Saint-Domingue, 94f.

^[22] TNA, CO 137/101, 342.

^[23] TNA, CO 137/95, 213v.

^[24] Wright and Debien, Colons de Saint-Domingue, 96.

^[25] TNA, CO 137/95, 194vf.

^[26] TNA, CO 137/95, 213v.

^[27] ibid.

^[28] TNA, CO 137/95, 214.

^[29] See de Cauna, “Diaspora des colons,” 339; Sylvie Aprile et al., “Gender and Exile,” in Banished: Traveling the Roads of Exile in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Delphine Diaz and Sylvie Aprile (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), 175-204

^[30] TNA, CO 137/95, 213v.