“A mass of mestiezen, castiezen, and mulatten”: Contending with color in the Netherlands Antilles, 1750–1850
ABSTRACT
This article shows that the boundaries between free people of color and enslaved people were blurry on the Netherlands Antilles from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. This blurriness stemmed from a few factors. One factor was the predominantly urban slavery system, in which enslaved people were hired out to work for others. Urban slavery allowed for a relative degree of liberty for enslaved people to move about the islands, and a concomitant freedom to determine the course of their days – with whom they associated, where they worked, and, most importantly, the chance to earn money with which to buy their freedom, thereby increasing the number of freed people of color. This system, in turn, also made it harder to differentiate who was enslaved and who was free, thus scrambling entrenched categories between enslaved and free people. Another related factor was demographic. In part due to the possibility to buy freedom afforded by urban slavery, in part due to the recurring periods of economic malaise in the Netherlands Antilles, which made it attractive for slave owners to manumit their chattel, free people of color made up a large percentage of the total free population of the Dutch islands, sometimes more than 70%. However, unlike in the Spanish, British, and, especially, the French Atlantic, free people of color did not form a sort of intermediary middle class to any great degree, which further lessened the perceived difference between the two groups. Lastly, free people of color fell into a sort of “legal limbo” on the Dutch islands, with no clear distinction between the rights of the enslaved and the free.
Trouble seems to have followed John Francis, a free black porter who resided on the Dutch side of the island of St. Maarten.1 In 1861, he was arrested for beating up his mistress’s husband, and later, in 1870 for public drunkenness.2 But it was his conflict with Mr. A.A. van Romondt, scion of the most prominent family on the island, and holder of various public positions, including a seat on the Island Council, that caused the biggest stir.3 On Tuesday 26 and Wednesday 27 August 1856, A.A. van Romondt approached John Francis and a man named Travis, also a free black porter, presumably near the harbor of the island. Van Romondt claimed Travis owed him money. Words were exchanged, and, according to Van Romondt, he “gently” took John Francis’ hat as a security for Travis’ debt, at which point John Francis tried to hit Van Romondt.4 John Francis was charged with assault, but Van Romondt was not pleased with the rather mild reaction of the Lt. Governor who had sentenced the porter to several days in jail, and he appealed directly to the Governor of the Netherlands Antilles in Curaçao. In his appeal, he claimed that,
Every Negro in this town [Philipsburg] seems identified with the case; the exultation and the most aggravating remarks were made, some stating that the day had arrived when any negro could strike a white man and that this Colony would shortly become a second St. Domingo.
That “St. Domingo,” as the people of St. Maarten referred to Saint-Domingue [Haiti], could loom large in the rhetoric used by both free blacks and the whites, even more than half a century after the Haitian Revolution, illustrates a few important points about the role of free blacks in the Netherlands Antilles, particularly the Dutch Leeward island of St. Maarten and the Dutch Windward island of Curaçao, which this article will discuss.6Clearly, it shows the enduring place of the Haitian Revolution in the imagination of Caribbean people. It was a source of fear and insecurity for whites, while serving as a vivid reminder of power and the possibility of (full) freedom for enslaved people and free blacks alike.
As this article will show, the boundaries between free people of color and enslaved people were blurry on the Netherlands Antilles between in the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries.7 This stemmed from a few factors. One factor was the predominantly urban slavery system, in which enslaved people were hired out to work for others. Urban slavery allowed for a relative degree of liberty for enslaved people to move about the islands, and a concomitant freedom to determine the course of their days – with whom they associated, where they worked, and, most importantly, the chance to earn money with which to buy their freedom. This system, in turn, made it harder to differentiate who was enslaved and who was free, thus scrambling entrenched categories between enslaved and free people. Another related factor was demographic. In part due to the possibility to buy freedom afforded by urban slavery, in part due to the recurring periods of economic malaise in the Netherlands Antilles, which made it attractive for slave owners to manumit their chattel, free people of color made up a large percentage of the total free population of the Dutch islands, sometimes more than 70%. However, unlike in the Spanish, British, and, especially, the French Atlantic, free people of color did not form a sort of intermediary middle class to any great degree, which further lessened the perceived difference between the two groups. Lastly, free people of color fell into a sort of “legal limbo” on the Dutch islands, with no clear distinction between the rights of the enslaved and the free.
The Netherlands Antilles: an overview.
Except for the years 1828–1845, the Dutch possessions in the Caribbean – Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire, St. Maarten, Saba, and St. Eustatius, and, in South America, Suriname – never formed a single political unit.8 This is hardly surprising. Suriname was a relatively profitable plantation colony hanging on to the mainland of the South American continent. In contrast, the so-called Benedenwindse Eilanden (Windward) islands of Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire, largely lived up to their Spanish moniker of islas inútiles (useless islands), which is no doubt one of the reasons the Spanish did not put up much of a fight when the Dutch West India Company (WIC) seized Curaçao in 1634. Likewise, although Columbus first sighted the Bovenwindse Eilanden (Leeward Islands) of Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Maarten in 1493, settlement began only after the British arrived in the seventeenth century. Though the various Leeward Islands changed hands frequently through the centuries, their dry climate meant that their economic importance was small in comparison to Barbados and Saint-Domingue and mainland territories on the Caribbean rim such as Suriname and Guyana. Nevertheless, the Dutch, British, French, Danes, and Swedes maintained their Leeward island colonies for strategic reasons.9
In any case, the Dutch Leeward islands were 900 km away from the seat of colonial power, which was vested in Curaçao beginning in 1845, English-speaking, oriented towards the Anglo-American world, and economically marginal by the early nineteenth century, with comparatively small populations of enslaved people. In contrast, Papiamentu, an Iberian-based creole was, and still is, the lingua franca on the Dutch Windward islands, and historically they have been focused on the Spanish-speaking South American mainland, particularly Venezuela and Colombia. What all the Netherlands Antilles have in common is the arid conditions and the concomitantly relatively small enslaved population, certainly in comparison with islands such as Jamaica, Cuba, and Saint-Domingue. This, in turn, meant that on both Curaçao and St. Maarten, urban slavery became predominant. Due to the dynamics of urban slavery, as well as the economic and geographic contexts, free people of color made up 45% of the total free population of Curaçao in 1789, while, in Jamaica, they were 30% of the free population.10Slavery was not abolished in the Dutch Atlantic possessions until 1863, more than three decades after abolition in British territories, and more than a decade and a half after the French, Swedes, and Danes ended slavery in their Atlantic possessions.
Urban slavery and the paradox of profit
Curaçao was not a typical Caribbean plantation colony due to its arid climate that made it unsuited for the cultivation of tropical cash crops. What plantations there were on the island hardly deserved to be called as such, certainly as the term is generally understood. These hacienda-type estates mainly concentrated on the production of subsistence food crops and on cattle ranching. They were largely a symbol of status and prestige for their owners rather than profit-making enterprises. The island’s favorable location close to the colonies on the Spanish main, its role as an important regional slave market during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, its excellent natural harbor, and its status as a free port, all contributed to its development into a busy trade hub, rather than a plantation colony. In 1789, the only year for which there was a reliable census in the eighteenth century, more than half of the population, both enslaved and free, lived in Willemstad, the only urban center of any real importance on the island, and its environs. It was a small walled city, which barely contained its inhabitants and, by the mid-eighteenth century, had begun to spill beyond its gates and into neighborhoods such as Otrabanda.
Although St. Maarten was less mercantile and more focused on agriculture than was Curaçao, the general characteristics were similar. St. Maarten never became a large-scale plantation colony. The plantations that were on the island were decidedly modest in comparison with the size of estates in other plantation colonies. For example, a sugar plantation in Suriname produced an annual average of 158,058 kg around 1836, and 187,566 kg around 1853. In comparison, the average annual sugar production of the 18 largest plantations on St. Maarten taken together was 155,981 kg.12 M.D. Teenstra, who visited the Dutch Leeward islands in the 1830s, remarked on the pervasive poverty on the island. As Teenstra noted, the common slave lived in “A miserable hut, with walls made of twigs, smeared with mud, and roofs covered with leaves of sugarcane.”13 These dwellings were occupied by family units and were usually grouped in small settlements on the modest plantations. The whites, though certainly better off, also lived in comparatively modest dwellings.
Travelers noted the relative freedom of enslaved people on Curaçao and on St. Maarten. They thought this meant that enslaved people were better off than in the Guianas, but actually they were probably worse off due to periodic shortages of food. Slave owners saved on feeding their enslaved people during times of economic hardship. During the economic crisis in the mid-1700s, for example, Curaçaoan slave owners started giving their enslaved people two or three days a week off from their work for their masters to earn money. This regulation freed the masters from their obligation to feed their enslaved people on those days.
It is not known if there was a similar practice on St. Maarten. It is known, however, that enslaved people on St. Maarten were also rarely confined only to the plantations on which they labored. As agriculture declined on the island in the early part of the nineteenth century, more and more enslaved people were sent to sell produce in the local markets, as well as to hire themselves out as day laborers, often loading and unloading the small crafts that came into the small harbors of the islands, and, in some cases, serving as sailors on the vessels that plied the routes between the islands.15 A list of occupations of enslaved people from 1854 showed that field work was still the most common job for both men and women, but 27% were domestic servants, there were also masons, carpenters, cobblers, and tailors who were hired out.16 Women often worked as laundresses, seamstresses, and market vendors, as well as domestic servants.17 A bondsman or woman would have had to have worked a long time to free him or herself. A male field hand was sold for f 400 in 1843 on St. Maarten.18 Moreover, enslaved people were sent to work in St. Maarten’s saltpan. In 1789, there were more than 1000 laborers working in the pan, and it was an important source of income for whites, free people of color, as well as enslaved people.
According to historian and anthropologist Harry Hoetink, the process was similar on Curaçao, with a great deal of freedom of movement for enslaved people. Moreover, the mercantile character of the Curaçaoan economy had important consequences for the frequency of slave manumission. Many of the enslaved people were in fact “luxury servants,” acting as gardeners, house servants, or coachmen.20 A high percentage of enslaved people in Curaçao were seamen (16%), carpenters (9.4%), and fishermen (6.4%), while 17.6% of women were laundresses, 14% seamstresses, and over 10% vendors.21The money that they earned could be used to free themselves. A field worker had to pay 300 pesos or approximately f 750 to free him or herself.22 This was no small mount. The average price for a slave in Curaçao between 1740 and 1795 was f 233 or 93 pesos. 23Despite these barriers, of the total number of manumissions in the period between 1737 and 1800, 10–15% were made by free colored men and, even more so, women.
Of course, slave owners were the main source of manumissions on Curaçao, just as they were on St. Maarten.25 Sometimes this manumission was less an act of charity on the part of their masters than a convenient way for the latter to free themselves of the legal responsibility for feeding and caring for their enslaved people in periods of economic depression. Plantation owners on Curaçao were known to manumit old, unproductive enslaved people in times of prolonged drought and general poverty.26 In the middle of the eighteenth century, recurrent periods of commercial depression had caused a relatively large number of manumissions on Curaçao.27 In fact, in the 1750s attempts were made to reduce the number of manumissions with a stipulation that an amount of money (50–100 pesos) was to be paid for each slave who was officially freed.
This was similar to what happened on St. Maarten. When the British abolished slavery in their possessions in 1834, the ownership of enslaved people became increasingly unprofitable on St. Maarten. This was because the British had put a stranglehold on selling enslaved people onwards, as well as because of the ease with which enslaved people on this island could escape to British territory and, therefore, be free due to so-called free soil principles.29 Emancipations grew apace. There were 685 letters of manumission issued between 1806 and 1845, and more than 202 between 1846 and 1853.30 In fact, many slave owners turned a blind eye to their enslaved people escaping to nearby British possessions, so that they would not have to feed extra mouths, nor pay the high costs of legal emancipation.31 The fact that there were not more manumissions likely had to do with the, as it turned out, erroneous expectations for the quick abolition of slavery in the Dutch possessions, which many slave owners were actually agitating for.
Though slavery was not officially abolished in the Dutch possessions until 1863, enslaved people in St. Maarten were treated de facto, if not de jure, as free beginning in 1848. After a series of urgent meetings in the immediate aftermath of French emancipation, the planters of the island wrote to the governor in Curaçao that from 1 August of the same year they would treat their enslaved laborers as hired workers. They had decided on this because they feared losing not only their property but also their lives.33 In the words of one desperate missive, “The spirit of insubordination rules and they are guilty of rebellion.”34 The white residents wrote an urgent letter to the colonial government about the
highly excited feelings of all the Slaves in this colony, loudly and vehemently demanding to be placed on a footing of freedom, with their neighbors, proof of which, that the gangs of several estates of Cul de Sac in the Dutch part of this Island, are now in the public roads and have struck work.
That the enslaved people of St. Maarten had, essentially, freed themselves meant that on that island, at least, there was even less of a real difference between free people of color and those who were officially enslaved than there had been before. Moreover, the fact that these enslaved people could exercise enough power to affect their own emancipation no doubt heightened the whites’ feelings of insecurity.
Even without such an upheaval, due to manumissions, the total number of free people of color increased rapidly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on Curaçao until, as the following figures demonstrate, they came to be twice as numerous as whites; and at some point between 1817 and 1833, they even surpassed the total number of enslaved people. That there were “twenty Blacks to a single White” on Curaçao as was contended time and again, was clearly an exaggeration.36 But the argument does show that free people of color and enslaved people were conflated in the rhetoric used by whites, and, moreover, that both free and enslaved people were perceived by the white population as threatening. A little over half of the total population at that time lived in Willemstad and its immediate surroundings; 42% of the enslaved people, 95% of the Whites, and nearly 90% of the free people of color were town dwellers, making the perceived threat from the non-white group, particularly the predominant free people of color, especially acute in the tightly packed city of Willemstad.
As historian Linda Rupert points out, Curaçao, in general, and Willemstad, specifically, was a contradictory place, at once bound by the conventions of a colonial American slave society, while also supported by an economy that was based on intercolonial trade – a trade requiring the free movement of commodities, vessels, and workers, many of whom were enslaved.38 Residents of Willemstad from every socioeconomic sector depended on trade for their very survival, and the city and its port drove the entire island economy. Rather than a landed gentry or planter class, the island’s most powerful citizens were urban merchants. Similarly, slavery centered on maritime commerce, and many enslaved me were freed temporarily in order to sail with their owners’ ships, a legal situation which further blurred the boundaries between enslaved and free people of color.
When A.A. van Romondt sent his letter to the Governor of the Netherlands Antilles in 1856 complaining about the light punishment meted out to John Francis, his arguments echoed those made on Curaçao. He wrote that he lived on a part of the island on which there were “only eight white men to a negro population of two-fifths of the Island.”40Amid the fading sugar economy on St. Maarten, economic malaise, and a perception of dwindling prestige, Van Romondt’s statement exemplifies what was for whites a disquieting change in the island’s population composition. By the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, whites had seen within their lifetimes their own numbers shrink alarmingly, and a formerly relatively insignificant population group loom large. The free colored group had more than doubled in a little over 50 years, while the number of whites had shrunk by two-thirds. Small wonder, then, that whites on St. Maarten and on Curaçao were, and would continue to be, fearful of both the free people as well as the enslaved people.
An extremely destructive hurricane ravaged St. Maarten in 1819. Reports made from directly after the hurricane detailed the devastation. Over two hundred people and countless animals were killed, 384 houses were destroyed, while 76 houses were damaged.41 When Reverend Bosch visited the island in 1828–1829, a decade after the storm had struck, his descriptions would seem to show that the island had not really recovered. Not only had the population declined, as Table 2 shows. It would seem that the urban centers, such as they were, had also struggled to rebuild. Bosch remarked that Philipsburg, the only city of any real size on the island, was “Nothing more than a gathering of wooden houses which for the main part looked like sheds, and which appeared to me to be badly kept and painted.”42 M.D. Teenstra, who visited the islands at around the same time as did Bosch, reported that islanders told him that, after the hurricane, only 26 houses in Philipsburg were still habitable. There were a few other tiny villages on the Dutch side of the island, such as Simpson Bay, though they were little more than conglomerations of shacks in which fishermen lived. After the hurricane, Simpson Bay became isolated because the connection with the rest of the island was flooded. In 1829, there were “twelve houses that hardly deserved the name, 24 negro huts in this miserable place, around which piles of trash lay.
Clearly, then Philipsburg had little in common with Willemstad, with its dense population, walls surrounding the city, and vibrant street and port culture. Moreover, the difference between maritime and trade focused Curaçao with its panoply of languages, particularly the creole language of Papiamentu, predominantly Catholic majority amongst the people of color, enslaved and free, and its distinctly Latin culture was different than that of the rather sleepier St. Maarten, where English was spoken, and most of the enslaved and free people of color were Methodists. Therefore, we must be careful in exaggerating the similarities. Nevertheless, the comparison between these two islands is useful. Of course, they were both ruled by the Dutch, which led to more or less the same legal structures and governmental institutions. Both islands, as has been shown in Tables 1 and 2, had very large percentages of free people of color. Moreover, on both islands enslaved people had a relative freedom of movement, and many enslaved people were hired out, or hired themselves out, within the urban slavery system which predominated on Curaçao and St. Maarten. This meant that the boundaries between the enslaved and free were ever more blurred, which led to the same sorts of concerns on the parts of whites on both islands about this ever-growing population of people of color.
“The riotous state, and demoralizing influence, exercised by the negroes generally is to be feared”
Enslaved people hiring themselves out and a degree of spatial mobility within and even across the Netherlands Antilles was quite similar to urban slavery in colonial Latin America.44 It certainly did not mean that slavery had vanished, but it does imply that the contours of slavery were different. This, in turn, illustrates that, to paraphrase Rebecca Scott, slavery and freedom had different gradations of gray.45 In fact, the relative freedom with which the enslaved people on the Dutch islands moved around alarmed some colonial officials, and led them to issue proclamation after proclamation demanding that the enslaved people carry passes, to be renewed daily, from their owners to show they were authorized to travel away from their homes.46 The multitude of proclamations issued demonstrates just how ineffective they were on these relatively small islands.
On Curaçao, largely as a result of the earliest of the periodic economic recessions that plagued the economy of the island, by the 1740s there were so many free people of color that a large volume of complaints began to appear about their behavior. Many of them had organized into two gangs.47 The conflicts between the groups resulted in a 1741 ordinance that was directed exclusively against the free people; it prohibited them from participating in any meeting of more than six persons, including weddings and burials, even though as free people, such ordinances should not have been applicable to them. A 1745 decree prohibited both enslaved people and freedmen from walking on the streets after 9 pm without a lantern, an ordinance which shows that the groups were lumped together legally, though enslaved people also needed night permits from their masters. Enslaved people and freedmen were not allowed to carry sticks or other weapons, nor could they make music or buy liquor after that hour, again demonstrating that the boundaries between enslaved and free were virtually non-existent and, instead, color was the determinant factor on Curaçao.
These ordinances were very similar to the ones passed on St. Maarten. No blacks or mulattoes (generally the term used for free people of color) were allowed out after 8 pm.49 It was prohibited to “sell strong drink to soldiers, blacks, or mulattoes.”50 There were continual attempts, all futile, to limit enslaved people and free people of color traveling back and forth between the French and Dutch sides of the island.51 Intriguingly, an ordinance from 1806 stated that all free people of color must wear a red ribbon on their chests to “prove their freedom,” which would seem to illustrate the concern with maintaining social distinctions, as well as the general porousness of the boundaries between enslaved and free people on the island.52 There was also concern for their physical safety. Neither enslaved people nor freed people of color were allowed to approach “gentlemen” with rakes, hoes, or anything else that might be used as a weapon, which demonstrates that both groups were viewed as potentially threatening.
This fear of the free people of color manifested itself in repeated complaints about their undisciplined behavior and social intractability.54 In 1789, a report written by Dutch commissioners W.A. Grovestins, W.C. Boey, and R. van Suchtelen observed that
a mass of mestiezen, castiezen, and mulatten can be found, as well as many free Negroes and free maids, all of whom have lost completely the highly necessary ties of discipline; also, the undersigned can testify that they have never visited any colony where the Negroes are as impertinent as here in Curaçao
The wording of this claim makes clear that all people of color were grouped indiscriminately together. Similarly, on St. Maarten, in 1803 there were complaints made about the “obstinate character” of the free people of color. Their “undisciplined and proud” behavior to whites was decried, and it was ordered that all people of color, whether enslaved or free, must remove their hats when they saw a white person.56Whites could not be approached with any implement that might be used as a weapon including sticks and brooms, again showing both the perception of threat and the lack of delineation between enslaved and free people of color.
A 1791 report to the States General complained about the “unruliness” of the slave population on Curaçao, but added that because of the limited natural resources on this “barren rock,” there was always a scarcity of food and hence the enslaved people were materially worse off than elsewhere in the Caribbean.58 The report worried about the enslaved people's “insolence.” Likewise, European contemporaries visiting the colony expressed concern about the independence of the free colored segment.59 The 1791 report urged the authorities to instill more discipline in this group, clearly in reference to the troubling situation in French Saint-Domingue.
And, indeed, there was a slave revolt on Curaçao. It broke out on 17 August 1795 when around 50 enslaved people on the De Knip plantation apparently protested against some alteration in their daily routine, refused to work, and marched off to neighboring plantations.60 At its height, the revolt comprised 2000 enslaved people out of a total slave population of some 12,000 (see Table 1), and became an island-wide revolution inspired by the ideals and example of the Haitian revolt. The leader of the Curaçaoan revolt, Tula, also went by the name of Rigaud, a reference to the mulatto general, Benoit Joseph Rigaud, who was a military leader of the uprising in Saint-Domingue.61 Some scholars believe that Tula had ties with the Saint-Domingue rebels, but this is difficult to ascertain with any degree of certainty.62 What is clear is that there was a very clear understanding of the geopolitical context in which the Curaçao rebellion had taken place, including the French and Haitian revolutions and the French invasion of the Netherlands in January 1795. Father Schink, a Roman Catholic priest whom local authorities sent to negotiate with the rebels reported that Tula said, “The French blacks have their freedom. Holland has been taken by the French, thus we should also be free here.” Schink also reported that the rebels sang French freedom songs.
By late August, however, the rebellion had been crushed, and dozens of enslaved people were executed on the spot. The official reports about the 1795 on rebellion on Curaçao gave considerable attention to the numerous free people of color who maintained close contacts with the rebels and kept them informed of the moves and plans of their adversaries.64 Yet free blacks were also involved in suppressing the uprising. A corps of free blacks, albeit under white command, forced the rebels to disperse. In fact, almost half of the two hundred troops that attacked and captured the rebels were blacks or mulattoes.65 This fact alone illustrates the contradictory position of free people of color in the society. The reports also emphasized that free people from the French islands had taught revolutionary ideas to the enslaved people and had made them aware of the dramatic events in Saint-Domingue.66 Phillip Troutman describes how enslaved peoples throughout the Atlantic world acquired, disseminated, and applied geographic and geopolitical knowledge in a process he calls “geopolitical literacy,” and this was certainly the case for free people of color in the Netherlands Antilles.67 In fact, the Curaçaoan government was worried about enslaved people from Saint-Domingue being sold on the island, an eyewitnesses to the revolt on the island testified that he heard the rebels singing French revolutionary songs, and one of the rebel leaders was nicknamed Toussaint.68.
Not much had changed in the new century. An 1802 report by the British interim governor (the island was under British rule between 1800–1803, and 1807–1816), Carlyon Hughes, reported a lack of discipline in the militias, both white and colored.69 This was a complaint echoed by the militia commander on St. Maarten, who despaired of the lack of professionalism of the troops, and also wondered how wise it was to have so many blacks, presumably free people of color, serving “when the enslaved people are so restive,” showing that he believed all people of color would be allies.70 Visitor to Curaçao M.D. Teenstra wrote in 1830 that,
The colored men mostly are lazy and dirty drunkards, and exceptionally bold, so that the sensible thing to do is to avoid them [ …] The colored are treated with much greater contempt in Curaçao than in Surinam; with regard to the Negroes, however, the situation is the reverse.
These ordinances, travel accounts, and reports sent back to the Netherlands illustrate both the lack of distinction made between enslaved people and free people of color in the legislation and ordinances promulgated on the islands, which will be discussed below, but also the pervasive fear of free people of color. This fear stemmed, of course, from their high percentage of the total free population. It also resulted from their presumed lack of respect to whites, as was illustrated above. People of color were not doffing their hats to whites, were using foul language, and were not acknowledging the social position whites felt was theirs to enjoy.
These examples clearly show that whites were afraid for their physical safety, and that that fear did not seem to materially differentiate between enslaved and free people. Rather, it seemed to be based solely on color. It was ominously predicted that the enslaved and free people of color would rise up in rebellion if they were not forced to pay proper respect towards whites for, as one Curaçaoan official stated,
This sort of people is always out to dominate the Whites … and in the end it will come to a situation where no white person will dare to go out in the streets for fear of being molested or attacked.
On St. Maarten, a similar fear was expressed quite forcibly. The signatories of the petition in support of A.A. van Romondt’s call for John Francis’ punishment warned that, “This Wanton, and Unprovoked assault, petitioners affirm, is only the prelude to Similar Acts of Aggression, which will inevitably follow, and no peaceful inhabitants, will henceforth be safe from the Attacks of the Negro population.
It also would seem to show that whites needed to assert their difference from the free coloreds in order to maintain what may have been perceived to be a rather tenuous social distance. As the visiting Dutch Reverend G.B. Bosch remarked, the whites felt that the coloreds on Curaçao were “already too pretentious” as it was.75 For example, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some free colored people owned enslaved people, which set them up as social equals to whites.76 In fact, despite the restrictions imposed on free people of color, and the overall poverty of most of them, some individuals did quite well. For example, Gaspar Antonio Quirigazo was one of several free black captains who made a good living off of contraband.77 Thus, it is not surprising that there were legal measures implemented specifically aimed at curbing the economic opportunities of the free people of color, likely in order to maintain a social distance. Free people of color were barred from keeping shops.78 There was an ordinance passed on St. Maarten to keep free people of color from engaging in retail trade.
Sections of the white elite on Curaçao and, less so, on St. Maarten were worried about the frequent occurrence of intermarriage between whites and people of color. There were complaints that the free people of color managed to “tempt” whites into marriage, and that they were also becoming so self-assured that they even imagined themselves “to be the equals of Whites.”79 Around the middle of the eighteenth century, several white Curaçaoans petitioned the States General to issue a ban on the solemnization of marriages between whites and people of color. It was stated in the petition that under the then prevailing marriage regulations it was more difficult to prevent mixed marriages and it was feared that “pure white families, which until now are free of such unions, are exposed daily to the danger of being contaminated with this stain.”80 Moreover, whites on both Curaçao and St. Maarten openly stated in petitions to government authorities that, “Associating too closely with them [free coloreds] was to be avoided in order to prevent them from becoming too self-assured.
This concern was likely exacerbated because the economic position of many whites was not particularly good. For example, in 1816, the newly appointed Governor, Albert Kikkert, would report that the enslaved people of Curaçao were treated very well and that urban enslaved people were better off than the poor whites and people of color living in Willemstad.82 He went on to exclaim at the number of impoverished whites, an observation other visitors to the city had also made.83 The whites on St. Maarten were not necessarily much better off. As was already mentioned, the plantations were not large, and there were many small farms. The impressive plantation houses built in classic style such as on Jamaica and Guadeloupe were not to be found on St. Maarten. Even one of the largest estates, Belvédère, was quite basic by the standards of other Caribbean islands.84 When Reverend Bosch visited the island after his stay in Curaçao, he remarked that Philipsburg, the only city of any real size on the island, was “Nothing more than a gathering of wooden houses which for the main part looked like sheds, and which appeared to me to be badly kept and painted.”85 After 1848, the value of plantations on St. Maarten was estimated to have been about a quarter of what it had been only a few years before.
Thus, the whites of Curaçao and St. Maarten seem to have felt an economic and social threat to their dominant position. This perceived peril was at the root of an urge to keep both the enslaved and the free people of color under strict control. The alleged dangers to social stability posed by a numerically superior non-white population constituted the recurrent argument used to defend oppressive and restrictive measures towards the free and enslaved people of color which, in turn, perpetuated this ever-growing body of locally issued legislation.87 That this legislation could be made locally illustrates the confusion around the actual status of free people of color, and illustrates the legal limbo in which they lived their lives.
“Free enslaved people” and the confusion of color.
The legislation or ordinances issued on Curaçao and St. Maarten were designed to keep the entire non-white population under strict control. Very few of the ordinances made any distinction between free and enslaved people of color. Take, for instance, the proclamation made in 1773 on St. Maarten against “serving drink to blacks.” The ordinance states that white innkeepers were not to serve drink to “blacks, enslaved people as well as free people.”88 On Curaçao, the same grouping of all people of color, whether enslaved or free, was also the norm. Local legislative authority on both islands was used to issue proclamations on, as was described above, everything from people of color gathering together, playing loud music, being out on the streets after dark unless carrying a lantern, or carrying sticks or anything else that might be construed to be a weapon. In fact, the only real differentiation that was made on either island was that enslaved people had to carry a note from their owners if they were out and about, a regulation that was pointless for free people. That said, free people of color were often asked to show papers proving that they were, in fact, free.
That “blacks, enslaved people as well as free people” was the phrasing almost always used in any locally issued legislation in the Netherlands Antilles shows clearly that there was a conflation of racial categorization. When they were not ‘blacks, enslaved people as well as free people’ they were called “free enslaved people” whether they were born free or not – a contradictory term that speaks volumes. And herein lay the crux of the matter. As historian Han Jordaan points out, though in the metropolitan Netherlands there was no legal differentiation between free and enslaved people based on color, this was a distinction that was made in the Netherlands Antilles.89 “Blacks, enslaved people as well as free people” were grouped together based on race in the colonies, not on their legal status as free or enslaved, despite the shaky judicial foundations for such categorizations. Thus, there was a clear divergence in the application of law between the metropolitan Netherlands and the colonies when free people of color were involved – a divergence that illustrates how deeply entrenched racially based attitudes were, as well as the great latitude whites in the colonies had for the application of justice.
The treatment of free people of color in the Netherlands Antilles brings to light an interesting tension. Dutch law was based on Roman law. As Alan Watson in his analysis of slave law in the Americas shows, in ancient Rome, slavery was not based on race, which is reflected in the law: slaveholding was strictly considered a matter between master, and slave and manumission by the owner was relatively unrestricted. Citizenship was also generally easily granted to a freed slave. Although in the Dutch (and French, Spanish, and Portuguese) American colonies slavery was based on race, each colony had received a system of law based on Roman law when it was founded, and, insofar as slave law remained unchanged or developed from its European tradition, the law remained nonracist in its rules. Law for the colonies was primarily made in the mother country, and hence nonracist in character.90 Thus, for example, when a young public prosecutor, Hubertus Coerman, arrived on Curaçao from the Netherlands in 1766, he was shocked by the practice of distinguishing between whites and non-whites, regardless of whether or not they were free.91
Yet this was a deeply entrenched practice on the Dutch islands, and Coerman created quite a stir with his attempts to bring the practice of law on the islands in line with the letter of the law in the Netherlands. He was accused of “favoring mulattoes to the detriment of whites.”92 When Coerman brought up standardizing laws regarding people of color in one of the Island Council meetings, it immediately led to clashes with the Captain of the Militia, who openly declared that he would never permit one of his citizens, tellingly equating citizenship with being white, to receive any corporal punishment for any wrongdoing against “some negro or Mulatto,” a statement condoned by the Governor.93In this sense, the actual application of laws in the Dutch colonies were closer to that of the English American colonies based on common law, and in which law was racially based from the start.
These lopsided legal relations between whites and people of color had even come to a point that when a white person killed a person of color, irrespective of whether the latter was free or enslaved, punishment would usually only consist of a fine. Whites were allowed to punish by wielding a single blow of a cane on black or colored persons for behavior that they considered impertinent. Some of these regulations were repeated on several occasions, which no doubt explains A.A. van Romondt’s outrage when John Francis struck him back on that fateful day at the end of August 1856 on St. Maarten. Not only had he been within his rights to strike the black porter, regardless of the fact John Francis was a free man, but local custom dictated that the Lt. Governor and police should have acted swiftly and forcefully to punish him, preferably corporally and in a very public manner. As Van Romondt’s supportive petitioners so eloquently put it, “[We] do not pretend to be Analysts of these Conflicting Opinions, as regards Caste or Color. But [we] foresee the most disastrous, and pernicious effects likely to occur from this transaction […]”94
The legal asymmetry on the Netherlands Antilles went so far as to prohibit the calling of a witness of color, regardless of whether he or she were free or not, because their testimony lacked any legal recognition. A white witness was allowed, however. If a white person was found guilty of a crime, publicity was limited. If a person of color was determined to be guilty, the punishment was made as public as possible. And perhaps most damaging to people of color, as was seen in the case of John Francis, if a person of color wounded or insulted “a white person of irreproachable conduct,” no judicial inquiry was opened, but the white man was simply taken at his word, and the alleged colored aggressor was exiled or received corporal punishment.95
The fact that the Lt. Governor on St. Maarten did not punish John Francis – at least not as severely as, apparently, local custom demanded – shows that there were also limits to how much local authorities could translate racially based attitudes into regulations restricting the freedom of free people of color. Firstly, there were limits to local legislative powers; only by-laws with a public function could be issued. For instance, it was not possible for colonial administrators to fundamentally change regulations regarding manumission, inheritance, or marriage law to the disadvantage of free people of color. Secondly, the very existence of a large number of free people of color meant that local officials did not have free reign. This limitation on local officials was not due just to the demographic prominence of free people of color; it also had to do with the economic and social importance of some of these people, particularly on Curaçao. Moreover, there were often long-standing blood ties between white and non-white families. Lastly, the military importance of free people of color in the local militias as a whole forced the (Lt.) Governor and Councilors to be careful not to alienate the free people of color.
Conclusion.
he petitioners who lobbied for a harsher punishment for the free man of color, John Francis’, offense of striking a notable white resident of the island of St. Maarten claimed that they were “Activated by a love of Justice, but are not desirous of having the barriers of Society Annihilated, and surely the introduction of the Wild, and extravagant tenets of the French Revolution established among them – A System of Equality.”97 Yet John Francis hit A.A. van Romondt more than 50 years after the French and Haitian Revolutions. Despite the passage of half a century, the fear and insecurity these revolutions caused whites reverberated through the Caribbean and through time, while serving as a rallying point for enslaved and free people of color alike. This was especially poignant in the Netherlands Antilles, where slavery was only abolished in 1863, far later than in the British, French, Swedish, and Danish colonies.
Perhaps whites on the Netherlands Antilles knew of the vital role free people of color had played in the Haitian Revolution, and this might explain their particular fear of the free people of color on the islands of Curaçao and St. Maarten. We have no evidence to prove that point, but it is clear that between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries boundaries between free and enslaved people of color were blurred. The two groups were often conflated in the minds of whites, as well as in the legislation and ordinances promulgated on the islands. These blurred boundaries were the result of a combination of factors. The system of urban slavery in which enslaved people were hired out to work for others allowed for a relative degree of liberty for enslaved people to move about the islands, and a concomitant freedom to determine the course of their days – with whom they associated, where they worked, and, most importantly, the chance to earn money with which to buy their freedom. This system, in turn, made it harder to differentiate who was enslaved and who was free, thus scrambling easy entrenched categories between enslaved and free people. Another related factor was demographic. Sometimes more than 70% of the total free population of the Dutch islands was composed of free people of color – a presence that struck fear in the hearts of white residents. This high percentage was due to a few reasons. One was the possibility to buy freedom afforded by urban slavery. Another was how attractive it was for owners of slaves to manumit their chattel due to the recurring periods of economic malaise in the Netherlands Antilles. Lastly, free people of color fell into a sort of “legal limbo” on the Dutch islands, with no clear distinction between the rights of the enslaved and the free, leading to confusion and mistrust on both sides.
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