7. Haiti Was Primed for an Explosion as Its Slave Population Mushroomed
Haiti’s system of soul-crushing slavery could be maintained only with brutal methods of compulsion. Especially in the light of the numerical disparity between slaves and whites, which reached 17:1 in the late eighteenth century. In theory, slavery was subject to the Code Noir – French laws that accorded the slaves some basic rights, even as they authorized their masters to use corporal punishments to enforce compliance. In practice, the masters were free to do with their human property as they would, and Haiti’s slaves were routinely subjected to unrestricted and sadistic levels of violence.
By the late 1780s, Haiti was a powder keg waiting for a spark as the numbers of newly imported slaves steadily rose, from about 10,000 to 15,000 a year in the 1760s to about 25,000 a year by the early 1780s, to over 40,000 a year by 1787. By the time of the French Revolution in 1789, there were over 500,000 African slaves in Haiti, ruled by a white population of about 30,000. In addition, there were about 24,000 free mulattos (people of European and African blood) and blacks, known as affranchis.