Introduction
In March 1794, Adam Williamson, the governor of the British colony of Jamaica, sent a letter to Henry Dundas, the secretary of state for the Home Department in London, forwarding with it a petition to the king. François Belloc, the petitioner, was a planter from Léogâne, a port city in the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the neighbouring island of Hispaniola. After the Haitian Revolution had broken out in the colony in 1791, “the People of Colour took possession of his house and plundered most of his Effects.” He was imprisoned, and after several months of negotiation given leave to embark on the brig Defiance bound for Baltimore, “with a Prohibition ever to return to the Colony until the War and internal Commotions should subside.” His itinerary would take an unexpected turn, however, when the Defiance was captured by a British privateer and brought to Kingston, Jamaica. The ship and its cargo were claimed as a prize, and the passengers made prisoners of war. Among the cargo had been the last remaining personal property of Belloc, who now, “after having lived in affluence” was “reduced to the greatest want.” He therefore petitioned the king for an indemnity. His case, as curious as it sounds, was not unique in the slightest. As Williamson noted in his letter to Dundas, “many of the captures made here since the commencement of the War are in many respects attended with the same circumstances.”Footnote 1
After the revolt of enslaved people had broken out in the northern part of Saint-Domingue in 1791, and until the colony declared its independence as the Black Republic of Haiti in 1804, tens of thousands of refugees fled from Hispaniola across the Caribbean. The seas, however, were contested waters during the revolutionary wars, and the journeys of many refugees were interrupted, taking unexpected turns like that of François Belloc.Footnote 2 What set Belloc’s case apart, however, is that he claimed his property had been taken as a prize unlawfully, given that he had spoken to the governor and convinced him of “considering him not as a prisoner, but as a refugee.”Footnote 3 This short sentence encapsulates a crucial differentiation between a person entitled to assistance and one deemed dangerous, and therefore kept in confinement. This poses a lot of questions. How was it possible for François Belloc to change his status in this manner? How did the authorities involved go about these deliberations, and how did they arrive at such conclusions? Who did they deem entitled to support from the government – and who did they not?
These questions are at the core of this article. Its goal is to analyse how local colonial administrators dealt with a sudden and unprecedented influx of foreign people in a time of deep political uncertainty. The tools they relied on in this process were an array of surveillance measures aimed at aliens, haphazard categorisations of people arriving, and a language of deservingness. This article will show that loopholes in this system for managing arrivals of French refugees in Jamaica opened up spaces for the negotiation of these categorisations, making them exploitable for the people who were registered under them. Surveillance and management of refugees during the revolutionary era was thus not a top-down process, but rather one in which they were actively involved. This article builds upon sources from British and French archives that give insights into the administration of mainly three consecutive Jamaican governments during the time of the Haitian Revolution: Adam Williamson (1791–5), the Earl of Balcarres (1795–1801), and George Nugent (1801–5).
By tracing negotiations of refuge and deservingness in the Jamaican colonial setting, I aim to contribute to two strands of scholarship. First, the article sheds light on processes of colonial state formation mainly through the lens of “legibility” and security. Making sense of the people arriving by fitting them into certain categorisations required a massive administrative apparatus resting on paperwork. The emergency situation of revolutionary warfare thus triggered a process of colonial state expansion, mainly in the form of regimes of proof.Footnote 4 Crucially, however, the state apparatus formed here was haphazard, and far from the well-oiled machinery state officials envisioned. Second, in the context of the history of the Haitian Revolution and its regional repercussions, the article shows how these regimes of proof and surveillance ran alongside frameworks of solidarity and support. Existing literature has largely focused on the spread of fear and uncertainty, yet the colonial reaction to the arrival of refugees from revolution was much more complex than that, and also came to include timid imperatives of compassion and sympathy.Footnote 5
Fleeing Revolutionary Saint-Domingue
Refugee movements from Saint-Domingue spread across the whole Atlantic, but for many refugees, the neighbouring islands of the Caribbean were the very first sites of refuge.Footnote 6 Among the main destinations in the Greater Caribbean were the United States, French Louisiana, and Cuba.Footnote 7 Jamaica has also been the subject of several studies in this context, with the most extensive work being that of Gabriel Debien and Philip Wright.Footnote 8 The focus of the majority of these studies have been the colonial elites, namely, planters, proprietors, and military officials.Footnote 9 At least in part, this is due to a relative abundance of sources that have survived on these groups, whereas we are often left with mere glimpses into the refugee experiences of others. In recent years, more works have come to also investigate the refugee experiences of enslaved people and free people of colour.Footnote 10
Jacques de Cauna has argued for a periodisation of refugee movements from Saint-Domingue towards Jamaica into four phases, in parallel to key events of the Haitian Revolution.Footnote 11 The first colonists started to leave for the neighbouring island in 1791 and 1792, after the French National Assembly had decreed equal rights for people of colour born to free parents in the colonies on 15 May 1791, and the first uprisings in the north of Saint-Domingue ushered in the Haitian Revolution in August 1791. Even before these events, a few individuals had already left Saint-Domingue after they had learned of the outbreak of the French Revolution in the metropole, though this did not constitute a large-scale migration.Footnote 12 With the execution of Louis XVI, and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War between France and Great Britain in 1793, a second wave of political refugees arrived in Jamaica. With warfare in the Caribbean also came the presence of large numbers of prisoners of war. However, these years were equally characterised by back-and-forth migrations. The British became militarily involved into the revolutionary conflict in 1793 and took possession of the western and southern provinces of Saint-Domingue in response to appeals from the colonists for their intervention.Footnote 13 As a result, many refugees flocked to the British-occupied provinces, and some who had left the colony earlier returned.Footnote 14 Nevertheless, the British occupation was an ill-fated project that came to an end in 1798. The ensuing evacuation constituted the third big influx of refugees towards Jamaica. And finally, a last wave arrived in 1803 in the aftermath of the disastrous Leclerc expedition, an attempt by Napoleon to regain political hegemony over Toussaint Louverture–led Saint-Domingue, and in 1804, when Haiti declared its independence and it became clear to many French refugees that they would not be able to return.
For many of these political refugees, leaving for Jamaica was a conscious decision. For one, seeking refuge in geographical proximity seemed opportune for those who hoped to return to Saint-Domingue as soon as practicable, especially in the early years of the revolution.Footnote 15 In addition, during the British occupation the ties between the islands had grown stronger. A significant portion of French planters and colonial administrators looked to the British as saviours of their Creole slaveholder society.Footnote 16 Gordon Forbes, the commander at the British-occupied Môle-Saint-Nicholas, reported that “a Government on the English system is the sincere desire of every one, and there is not a man of consideration who does not declare that the full and entire protection & Government of Great Britain, can alone reestablish their unfortunate … Island.”Footnote 17 Most of these elites had already become naturalised as British subjects during the occupation, well aware that pledging their loyalty to the British crown meant “se donner aux Ennemis de la France” (to give oneself over to the enemies of France), which amounted to “haute trahison” (high treason).Footnote 18 Accordingly, these “counter-revolutionary traitors” had no choice but to leave the island with the British evacuation in 1798.
The preference for British rule also becomes evident in the socio-political composition of the diaspora in Jamaica. A significant number of refugees were royalist planters and high-ranking military officials who hoped to see their social status and prestige preserved in a like-minded plantation society.Footnote 19 Well into the late 1790s, the migration of these elites was usually well-prepared in advance, as they could rely on contacts and friendships in Jamaica built through business and trade.Footnote 20 By contrast, refugees from the lower colonial estates and people of colour more often than not ended up in Jamaica by chance, as they had been made prisoners of war by British privateers who captured them on their way out of Saint-Domingue. However, as the cases of François Belloc and other families demonstrate, even well-off planters could become engulfed in the uncertainties of naval warfare and end up prisoners of war. This should warn us not to overstate planned migrations of the elites.
The scope of migration from Saint-Domingue to Jamaica waxed and waned and is therefore difficult to pin down. The numbers of refugees and prisoners of war reached into several thousand, but Jamaica also was a more transient destination due to its close proximity to Saint-Domingue, while Louisiana and Cuba would eventually crystallise as the main destinations for French refugees.Footnote 21 The British evacuation of 1798 probably marked the largest single wave of refugees towards Jamaica, and at least 4,000 French people lived in the island after its conclusion.Footnote 22 The numbers of prisoners of war reached even higher, with the aftermath of the failed French Leclerc campaign bringing them to more than 7,000, more than double the size of troops in the island.Footnote 23 While concrete numbers are hard to assess, the impact of this migration on Jamaica was tangible, especially in Kingston, the island’s main port of call and biggest city with some 27,000 inhabitants in the 1790s.Footnote 24 As the colonial government attempted to centralise the process of registration as well as the internment of prisoners in Kingston and its harbour in an effort to keep aliens from roaming free in the plantation sector of the island, the thousands of Saint-Domingue refugees and prisoners of war became concentrated in the city, therefore constituting at least a seventh of its population at the turn of the century. After the 1798 evacuation, the Earl of Balcarres informed his superiors in London that “the Numbers of French, who have arrived at Kingston …, has increased every necessary of Life to … an enormous height,” an issue he illustrated with the rise in prices of lodging in the city, which had risen “not much less than ten-fold” as a consequence of so many people arriving and seeking accommodation.Footnote 25 In what follows, I will analyse how colonial authorities attempted to manage this mass of emigrants and prisoners through a system built on three interdependent tools: measures of surveillance, regimes of registration, and a language of deservingness.
Registration and Surveillance of “Aliens” in Age-of-Revolutions Jamaica
At the end of the eighteenth century, Jamaica was part of an extensive local network of trade and mobility spreading from the Spanish Main across the Lesser Antilles and the surrounding islands of Cuba and Hispaniola all the way to the United States. In the Caribbean, such local networks and interests criss-crossed and undermined imperial boundaries on an everyday basis.Footnote 26 These connections also brought with them a high degree of mobility of so-called masterless people, who regularly came and went between the Caribbean islands: privateers, smugglers, sailors, traders, and vagrants.Footnote 27 To colonial authorities, this was a source of constant uncertainty, which in Jamaica was mainly directed at Kingston. The city was among the most important global trading hubs of the Caribbean, the biggest port of the Atlantic slave trade in the Americas, and the largest British city beyond the Atlantic after American independence. This made Kingston the centre of Black and free-coloured urban life in Jamaica. In the 1790s, two-thirds of the city’s 27,000 inhabitants were enslaved.Footnote 28 Colonial authorities had always feared this urbanity. Balcarres saw in Kingston “the imagination of Pandora’s Box … fully exemplified.” He was especially wary of the “lower orders,” those “turbulent peoples of all Nations engaged in illicit Trade; [and] a most abandoned class of Negroes, up to every scene of mischief.” Kingston, to him, was a powder keg on the brink of explosion. “Should there be at any time an Insurrection among the slaves,” he warned, “in a moment the Town might be laid in ashes.”Footnote 29
During the time of the Haitian Revolution, these anxieties about foreign “masterless” people and the presence of a large enslaved population in an urban environment were further exacerbated with the massive influx of refugees. The authorities reacted with a series of measures and orders for the surveillance of aliens on an unprecedented scale. This system of surveillance served three main purposes: registering foreigners upon their arrival, regulating their movements within Jamaica, and enabling their extrajudicial deportation.Footnote 30 It rested on a massive apparatus of paperwork and manpower. The legislative and executive power to put these measures into action lay in the hands of the governor and the assembly of Jamaica. For most of the period of the Haitian Revolution, Jamaica remained under martial law, enabling the colonial government to expand its regime of registration and to imprison and deport people according to a logic of emergency and security, in some instances without conviction.Footnote 31
Against this background, the management of refugees largely took place through a series of general orders and proclamations given out by the colonial governors. With the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1793, the presence of French refugees in Jamaica triggered a need for heightened security. By proclamation, Governor Williamson enabled “all our magistrates, ministers, and officers whomever” to arrest French people “found at large” within the island and to bring them before a justice of the peace for interrogation.Footnote 32 Similarly, a “plan of police” presented by Balcarres in 1799 required all French people residing in Jamaica to carry police tickets with them at all times – a paper slip confirming that their stay in the colony was not considered dangerous to its security. All those found without such a ticket would be arrested.Footnote 33 Furthermore, towards the end of the 1790s, the government had moved towards strongly regulating the landing of aliens in the island. Balcarres’s “plan of police” also required all incoming vessels to land in Port Royal first, a naval base across from Kingston at the other side of the harbour and the entry point into Jamaica. There, police officers would investigate the ship’s crew, passengers, and cargo before it would be allowed to sail on to Kingston.Footnote 34
These measures of security therefore required the cooperation and coordination of several actors on the ground, ranging from judges to local city magistrates and police officers. Police tickets would be handed out in Kingston by commissioners at the police office upon application by refugees, who were required “to lay before the Board, in writing, their name, age, quality of occupation, time of arrival in this island, and from whence, their place of abode, and the name of their landlord.”Footnote 35 In amassing these data and lists, the administration also depended on the cooperation of intermediaries from amongst the refugees. The planter De La Villeon, for instance, would compile lists to send to the commissioners for the issuing of police tickets, and had an office for that purpose in Kingston.Footnote 36 Paul de Cadusch, who was well known and respected among the refugee community as the president of the assembly in Le Cap before the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, played a key role in administering payments of relief among the refugees, and drew up a list of those receiving money for the governor.Footnote 37
Finally, the governor himself could issue a “licence of permission to remain” that would override all other administrators and processes of registration, but direct contact with him was open mainly to the more privileged and well-connected refugees, namely, the military and political elites, and planters.Footnote 38 Pierre Albert, for instance, who had served for the British during the occupation of Saint-Domingue as an officer, received such a licence from Balcarres in 1800. It simply read, “Mr. Pierre Albert has my permission to remain in Jamaica.”Footnote 39 It is likely that François Belloc had received a similar slip of paper from the governor. One sentence and the governor’s signature decided whether refugees would be subjected to internment and deportation.
The main targets of Jamaican measures of security were people of colour. Possibly the earliest instance of refugee management, even before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War and the launch of the British occupational campaign, dates from 1792, when Adam Williamson ordered a ban on the landing of “all free people of colour, and free negroes,” unless they could find “two substantial house-keepers, white persons resident here” who would vouch for their “good behaviour.”Footnote 40 More sweeping measures were made possible by the Intercourse Act passed by the assembly in 1799, which sought to prevent “any intercourse and communication between the slaves of this island and foreign slaves.”Footnote 41 Tapping into this act, the Kingston magistrates formed a police board that had the authority to attest a “most reputable character” to French slaveholders, so that they would be allowed to keep “six domestic slaves” with them, and to inquire into “the behaviour and character of French Free People of Colour, and French Free Negroes,” and to issue police tickets to those whose presence in the colony it deemed not to be at odds with its security. All others would be deported to Martinique.Footnote 42 In 1803, the Assembly passed a further act enabling the governor “to take up all suspicious Foreigners [i.e., enslaved people] & transport them out of the Island in a summary Manner, without regard to the Interests of the Proprietors.”Footnote 43
All these measures were rooted in the belief that Saint-Dominguan enslaved people and free coloureds would bring revolutionary ideas with them and incite revolt among Jamaican enslaved people if they would get in contact with them.Footnote 44 Whenever revolts broke out during the time of the Haitian Revolution, authorities were quick to blame this “spirit of insurrection” on French influence.Footnote 45 Accordingly, the governors prided themselves in saving the island from certain ruin whenever they got rid of such people “of the worst Description.”Footnote 46 But even white French refugees could be a source of uncertainty, and the government sought to rid itself of most of them as soon as practicable. Financial incentive was given to them to “remove themselves, their Families, and their Negroes” to the United States or other neutral countries during the Revolutionary War by paying for their passage.Footnote 47 The presence of too great a number of French people was seen as a considerable security risk at a time when Britain was at war with their mother country. Authorities were of the opinion that the “despair” of former French military officials and colonial administrators who had taken refuge in Jamaica without any “means of subsistence” made them susceptible to becoming agents for a French invasion.Footnote 48
As a result, when conspiracies to incite revolts were discovered, Jamaican authorities did not just suspect French people of colour to be behind them, but French refugees in general. In 1809, two enslaved people named Peter Watkins and Sambo John were arrested in Kingston. They were the leaders of a plot to set fire to the city, allegedly claiming at a meeting of the conspirators that they would “soon have this place like St. Domingo.”Footnote 49 The Assembly of Jamaica installed a committee to investigate how this conspiracy came about and what the consequences of its discovery meant for the island’s security. A series of witnesses and officials were questioned. One of them, D. P. Molony, a soldier of the Kingston militia, when asked “Do you think the city of Kingston in danger now; By whom, and for what cause?” replied with the following: “I consider it in danger from the general and easy admission of St. Domingo negroes, who communicate the state of affairs at St. Domingo among our negroes; secondly, I consider it in danger from the immense influx, and the easy transmission through Kingston to the heart of the country, of Frenchmen, … whose number I think, must … be so increased, as speedily to out-number the white British inhabitants.”Footnote 50
Molony’s testimony echoes not only fears of revolutionary contagion from the arrival of “St. Domingo negroes” communicating ideas of freedom among Jamaican enslaved people, but also of a French takeover as a threat to the island’s white British elites. An earlier case of a conspiracy showcases the concrete consequences of these fears for the fate of refugees. In December 1799, a group of Haitian agents and French Republicans had tried to incite a revolt in Kingston.Footnote 51 In the aftermath of this conspiracy, Governor Balcarres yet again turned to the French who had taken refuge in Jamaica. On 31 December 1799, he gave out a general order commanding “all French people of colour” and “all French free male negroes” above the age of twelve to leave the island. Furthermore, all other “French Gentlemen” who had not been naturalised but were “actually fixed in industrious pursuits” were required to appear before two magistrates, “who on approving of the general good conduct of such persons” would countersign their police tickets. “All other Frenchmen” had to depart from Jamaica on or before 20 January.Footnote 52
In such moments of crisis, the tolerance of a French presence in the island was radically constrained, with the only real factor of safety from the government’s mobility control being naturalisation as a British subject, and the more abstract notion of “general good conduct.”Footnote 53 Naturalisation versus alienness was the crucial first line of division upon which all measures of surveillance and registration were built. All proclamations given out by Jamaican governors during the period of the Haitian Revolution included a passage making clear that they would refer only to French people who had not become naturalised.Footnote 54
For all these measures of surveillance and expulsion, Jamaican authorities could tap into the framework of the 1793 British Alien Act, which granted governments the ability to deport aliens as an emergency measure and, in the process, define who posed a threat to state and society.Footnote 55 All across Europe and its colonial overseas territories, the 1790s saw the implementation of legislation aimed at controlling the movement of foreigners on a large scale.Footnote 56 These efforts were rooted in earlier legal traditions. At least since the Middle Ages, states had begun to impose regimes of registration and control to keep the movements of vagrants, beggars, and “wayfaring foreigners” in check.Footnote 57 In Jamaica, the system of passports and police tickets had its origins in the monitoring of the mobility of enslaved people.Footnote 58 In the 1790s, these practices saw a reapplication in the surveillance of aliens, while the purpose stayed the same: limiting and controlling the mobility of people the authorities considered to be a security risk. In the process, states sorted individuals into supposedly clear-cut and unambiguous categories: in Jamaica, these categories would be aliens, subjects, enslaved people, free coloureds, prisoners of war, etc.Footnote 59 The development of these sweeping regimes of registration at the close of the eighteenth century has often been viewed as a decisive move towards knowledge centralisation characterising the modern state as an entity creating and controlling a “legible people.”Footnote 60
In this context, the state becomes an actor that imposes its categorisations and makes them stick.Footnote 61 This notion has also been crucial for refugee studies: the categorising (or labelling) of individuals tends to be framed as a non-participatory process of control and stereotyping, in which the registering state imposes clear-cut, standardised labels onto a vulnerable group of people.Footnote 62 Simon Szreter and Keith Breckenridge have pointed out how this idea of state legibility tends to obscure and disregard the agency of those being registered. As a result, how registration systems could become an empowering and useful resource for both sides involved in them – the “registering agent” and the “registered agent” – has received scant attention.Footnote 63
Furthermore, scholars of early modern state formation have shown how regimes of registration and categorisation were operating within a mere “fiction of oversight.”Footnote 64 Legislations were ad hoc, haphazard, oftentimes overlapping and contradicting, and thereby liable to mistakes and manipulation.Footnote 65 In Jamaica, authorities oftentimes had to come to the realisation that their system of surveillance had failed. In 1804, it was brought to Nugent’s attention that prisoners were passing between Kingston and Spanish Town, the capital of Jamaica, “either without Passes, or with Passes not signed” by an official.Footnote 66 The government was even less in control of those who had come to the island as refugees, let alone had a clear impression of how many there were. In 1794, a public notice ordered all “dépendants de gouvernement français” (dependents of the French government) to register with the office of the commissary for prisoners, as authorities did not know “exactement ceux qui habitant Kingston comme Réfugiés” (exactly who lives in Kingston as a refugee).Footnote 67
Moreover, colonial alien legislation was far from centralised, but lay in the hands of several local administrators and other individuals playing a role in the process of categorisation and registration: privateers taking prisoners at sea, agents interacting with the government on behalf of prisoners or emigrants, police officers issuing and countersigning passports and tickets, all the way to the governor himself, who could change the status of individuals like François Belloc from that of prisoner to a refugee.Footnote 68 Categorisations were therefore heavily influenced by the deliberations and convictions of local administrators, who worked them out at the colonial periphery.Footnote 69 And yet, the gaps in the system hint at spaces of ambiguity in Jamaica’s regime of registration. The discourse around notions of deservingness brings these ambiguities further to light and tells us a lot about the principles applied at the colonial periphery for deciding who was entitled to support and who was excluded on the grounds of posing a possible threat.
“Persons of the Most Meritorious Description”: Patterns of Deservingness
In contrast to the widespread development of alien legislation on an imperial scale aimed at casting out foreigners, in the 1790s, and well into the nineteenth century, there existed no legal framework for defining a refugee as an alien taken in on the basis of an entitlement to assistance from the state.Footnote 70 This meant that in practice, the figure of the refugee was defined ex negativo in terms of exclusion: arriving foreigners were considered a threat until they could prove otherwise.Footnote 71 In Jamaica, this was most clearly expressed in the colonial government’s desire to rid itself of all French aliens as soon as possible. Nonetheless, the early modern era did also see the emergence of considerable public commitment to early forms of “humanitarian” assistance and moral imperatives of charity towards refugees.Footnote 72
Jamaican authorities wrestled with these opposing notions. Nugent wrote in 1804 that following instructions from London, he would cut off financial support granted to French emigrants from Saint-Domingue in an attempt to convince them of leaving Jamaica, but at the same time noted that “their Misfortunes have entitled them to the Considerations of the British Governments,” and warned against “suddenly depriv[ing] [them] of their sole support,” as their return to Saint-Domingue was impossible, and they otherwise would only subsist “upon the casual Charity afforded to them in Kingston.”Footnote 73
What unfolds here is a language of deservingness directed at a specific group of people: French “emigrants.” This categorisation was at the heart of Jamaican systems of relief and support for refugees during the time of the Haitian Revolution. It evolved out of the French émigré as a term for political refugees from the French Revolution. As opposed to the term refugee, which still carried a religious connotation and emphasised persecution and violence, emigrant stressed the political dimension of exile during the time of the revolution, as well as its temporality: French emigrants would remain French during their time in exile, and eventually return to their home country.Footnote 74 As Juliette Reboul has shown, emigrant was the term most frequently used in the British discourse around “naming the alien” during the time of the French Revolution.Footnote 75 The same holds true for Jamaica: the great majority of sources refer to the Saint-Domingue refugees as emigrants, thereby putting an emphasis on their decision to leave as a counter-revolutionary political gesture.Footnote 76 The term refugee rarely features in these discussions, and if it does, it is mostly used as a self-description emphasising one’s experience of violence and persecution rather than political allegiances. François Belloc is a case in point: it is very likely that the governor did not categorise him as a refugee but rather as an emigrant, yet Belloc chose to call himself the former to underline his situation of being “reduced to the greatest want.”Footnote 77 The use of “refugee” on the part of Jamaican authorities would be very untypical here, as this notion of deservingness was also encompassed by the “emigrant” categorisation, in which persecution and suffering, as well as counter-revolutionary politics and a commitment towards the institution of slavery fell into one.
Accordingly, “emigrant” mainly referred to a very concrete and limited group of people: white French planters. The “principal Object” of granting asylum and assistance in Jamaica, as Nugent put it, had always been “to preserve the white Population of St. Domingo.”Footnote 78 Against this background, “Emigrants,” according to Balcarres and the Assembly of Jamaica, were “avowed Friend[s] to the British Government” who “never served under the republican Stay of France” but remained committed to “Monarchy, and the good order of civil society,” and for those reasons were “persons of the most meritorious Description” entitled to assistance.Footnote 79 The solidarity extended to this group was also manifested in an equation of emigration and suffering. The sources abound with expressions like “unhappy Colonists,” “unfortunate Emigrants,” or “very great sufferers.”Footnote 80
The “emigrants” in question invoked this language of destitution themselves when making claims for assistance. In 1798, 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 to the King on their behalf, hoping that “so many misfortunes … intitle [sic] us to merit your patronage and your protection.”Footnote 81 François Belloc had also stressed his destitute situation, as well as his former status as a coffee planter in his petition, which had led Williamson to consider him an emigrant. Another strategy was to underline a counter-revolutionary political stance. The planter de la Villeon wrote to Balcarres that the emigrants’ attachment to the colonial order should be beyond doubt, given that all their misfortunes had been caused by ideas of the French Revolution.Footnote 82
Adopting this language was deliberate. Refugees carefully worded their letters and petitions and were aware of how the system of relief functioned. Their “good conduct” in the sense of a commitment to “order,” their loyalty to the British cause in Saint-Domingue, and their engagement in “industrious pursuits” within a slavery-based plantation society formed the dividing line between those being allowed to stay and those who were ordered to leave Jamaica in moments of crisis like the 1799 Sasportas conspiracy.Footnote 83 Taking up arms for the British as a precursor for relief clearly emerges in a list of three hundred persons receiving relief payments from the government that Cadusch drew up on behalf of Balcarres in 1795. In his comments to the list, Balcarres noted down the “quality” of the persons included in it. Most of the men had served with the British campaign in Saint-Domingue. The women, meanwhile, are characterised in relation to men – as wives, widows, or daughters of officers. Tellingly, the list does not include any people of colour.Footnote 84
The subsistence payments granted by the Jamaican colonial state for “emigrants” were labelled as “lodging money.” The costs of this system of allowance were subject to constant debate between colonial officials and the metropole: the secretaries of state demanded to keep the expenses as low as possible and ordered to remove people from the lists if necessary.Footnote 85 Balcarres expressed his affection at more than two hundred families, amounting to more than six hundred persons, being “thrown upon me having expended their last Shilling,” but followed the orders and reformed the system of distribution so those families in greatest distress and with the largest number of children would be prioritised.Footnote 86 In 1804, under Nugent’s administration, only sixty-six people remained on the allowance list. He had reservations about ending financial support for them, as the list consisted “almost entirely of old infirm Men & Women, & Children, unable to earn their Bread.”Footnote 87 Illness, old age, widowhood, and unemployment were particularly “hard cases” of relief that gave the government cause for concern. Such passages are therefore indicative of the emergence of a general moral obligation to offer assistance and relief to refugees in need.Footnote 88 Certain groups of people were perceived to be exceptionally vulnerable, and thereby as particularly deserving objects of charity: the sick and elderly, children, and women, especially widows.Footnote 89 Emigrants making petitions for assistance were aware of these patterns, and put an emphasis on them to further strengthen their case. To return to François Belloc once again: not only had he lost all his property, but he also singled out that he was “of a far advanced age.”Footnote 90
This did not mark the birth of a “modern,” impartial system of refugee relief, however. Instead, the Jamaican administration was preoccupied with balancing out the moral imperative to help those in need with financial and security concerns.Footnote 91 In practice, access to relief was stratified according to estate, degree of deservingness expressed through categorisation into one of the “vulnerable” groups mentioned above, political affiliation, and, most crucially, race. People of colour were mostly excluded from being categorised as emigrants altogether.Footnote 92 In correspondence with London, the Jamaican government consciously set apart deserving emigrants from them, which is testament both to the desire to keep people of colour from setting foot in Jamaica in the first instance and to a widespread institutionalised presumption that their mobilities were unfree in nature.Footnote 93 Authorities were trying to keep people of colour away from their systems of relief altogether; part of this was fitting them into categories that were unmistakably linked to skin colour and would mark them as property.Footnote 94 Upon applying for police tickets in Kingston, the refugees were also required to give an “account of their slaves, specifying their name, sex, age, and country.”Footnote 95 In 1803, Nugent organised funds and ships to embark the remaining French refugees for New Orleans. Those joining these convoys would receive passports for “themselves and their Slaves.”Footnote 96 Such passages illustrate how state actors drew a dividing line between the refugees and the slaves, who would migrate to and from Jamaica not from their own agency, but merely as property.
Relief, and the categorisations it was built on, were constantly (re-)negotiated and went hand in hand with solidarity towards certain groups. Those were mainly the (formerly) rich white planters and proprietors. Refugees themselves played an active part in this process and could influence it by tapping into certain patterns of deservingness to strengthen their claims to assistance.Footnote 97 At the same time, however, it was clear that all assistance would only be temporary. Even though support had been granted to emigrants for reasons of “humanity,” it would only last “until Peace shall be Declared.”Footnote 98 This echoes the security concerns the government had about hosting such a large group of subjects of the enemy nation during the Revolutionary Wars. Against this background, in moments of crisis, being allowed to stay in Jamaica became a bottleneck. Belonging narrowed down to the malleable notion of “good conduct,” and subjecthood in the form of naturalisation as the only guarantee against falling victim to the government’s sweeping alien legislation.Footnote 99
“Improper Principles within My Government”: Prisoners of War and the Breakdown of Registration and Surveillance
Let us return to François Belloc one more time and turn our attention to the other categorisation that he initially fell under upon his arrival: prisoner of war. As Williamson mentioned when forwarding Belloc’s petition to London, most captures of prisoners were “attended with the same circumstances.”Footnote 100 This, essentially, was a paradox: Belloc, as the countless others like him who shared his fate, were not soldiers or military officials, but civilians. How, then, could they be considered prisoners of war? Renaud Morieux has shown how this question was subject to debate during the eighteenth century: “Local circumstances and military necessity” rather than “legal theory” were decisive in determining the fate of non-combatants. This applied all the more at sea, where the line between combatant and non-combatant was blurred.Footnote 101 Since the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, British ships had been patrolling the main Caribbean traffic routes around Saint-Domingue in order to interrupt the stream of supplies towards the French colony.Footnote 102 The main actors here were privateers, who acted in the interest of the state while enriching themselves through the capture of enemy cargo. They seized ships and took them as a prize to their port of origin, where the ship and cargo would be sold. The passengers and crew, meanwhile, were handed over to the state as prisoners of war.Footnote 103 Accordingly, in this context the very first act of categorisation of refugees did not take place in Jamaica at all, but at sea, where they were at the mercy of their captors. For free people of colour, even if they were soldiers and sailors or had documents confirming their freedom, this often meant re-enslavement.Footnote 104 The presumption that people of colour on board captured ships were enslaved rather than free is hinted at in the files of the Jamaican Court of Vice-Admiralty, which was in charge of settling prize cases. The preparatory examinations of non-white crew members often comment on them “calling [themselves] free,” while in most cases, people of colour do not come to speak for themselves in the prize papers, but are merely listed as “cargo,” or as “slaves who were the property of the … White Passengers.”Footnote 105 It is likely that the white refugees simply claimed them as their property in the moment of capture.
The Jamaican state was thus confronted with an unusually high influx of people taken as prisoners, whose number went far beyond that of the “emigrants” authorities were willing to support. It was customary practice to exchange prisoners according to their rank through local, semi-formal cartel systems. During the 1790s, however, these cartels began to break down as both Britain and France feared that exchanges would strengthen the enemy’s war effort, while calculating that the high costs of maintaining prisoners would weaken its finances.Footnote 106 The ensuing long-term presence and management of a worrying number of soldiers and civilians of the enemy nation became a bone of contention. The imperial state conveniently considered the costs for maintaining prisoners as part of the colonies’ defence and argued that local populations would have to carry them.Footnote 107 In the face of ever-rising expenses for detention, the different institutions involved tried to disavow responsibility and pass it on to one another. In principle, the Admiralty’s Transport Board oversaw the management of prisoners of war, but colonial governors in the Caribbean were expected to carry the financial burden, and as a result demanded to have a say too, mainly to rid themselves of the prisoners as soon as possible by transporting them to other islands or the metropole.Footnote 108
In Jamaica, the responsibility for prisoners of war was split mainly between three officials: the governor, the commander in chief at the Admiralty’s Jamaica station, and a commissary for prisoners. The commissary’s responsibilities were the payment of “subsistence money” to the prisoners proportional to their rank and the raising of parole passes to high-ranking officials. These passes granted their bearer the freedom to travel freely within a clearly delineated space in a city or village.Footnote 109
During the Revolutionary Wars, however, these authorities faced a twofold problem. On the one hand, they had no capacities to safely confine a tremendous number of prisoners. In 1803, the number was so overwhelming that Nugent inquired from London whether it would be possible “to delay the total Evacuation of St. Domingo.”Footnote 110 The government’s solution to this problem was to confine people on prison hulks in Kingston harbour, both because the prisons on land were overcrowded and because authorities feared that these “enemies” would incite revolt and spread revolutionary ideas if allowed to set foot on land.Footnote 111 These hulks were overflowing with people, sickness, and death.Footnote 112
The number of prisoners was so great that the Jamaican system of surveillance essentially collapsed as the government struggled to keep their mobilities under control. Even through the confinement on prison hulks, escapes were common.Footnote 113 D. P. Molony, the soldier of the Kingston militia who was questioned after the discovery of the 1809 conspiracy among enslaved people, told the committee of the widespread practice “of employing Frenchmen or French subjects of all colours, taken on board privateers, in the prison-ship or hospital boats, for a limited time, as the consideration of their being set at large in the community.”Footnote 114 Furthermore, as has been mentioned, prisoners on parole frequently went beyond the limits of their passes without consequences.Footnote 115 Others were not even registered at all. Nugent complained to the Admiralty’s commander in chief in 1803 that prisoners had been landed “at the most convenient Places without delivering them over to the Troops, … in consequence of which [they] frequently went at pleasure in all Directions across the Island.”Footnote 116
The second problem authorities faced were the non-combatants. In principle, as civilians, they were not eligible for receiving subsistence money or parole passes, but they had been brought to Jamaica as prisoners. The people arriving ranged from emigrants to others of doubtful political allegiance, as well as well as refugees simply fleeing from war.Footnote 117 This led to an immense confusion in the distribution of assistance, as the accounts of lodging money for emigrants and subsistence money for prisoners became mixed up. This was how refugees like Belloc saw their categories change, or even fell into both simultaneously. When Balcarres came into office in 1795, he discovered that in multiple cases, “the same individual Frenchman” had been “receiving the money of Government in the Two Capacities of Friend [i.e., “emigrant”] & Foe [i.e., “prisoner of war”].”Footnote 118 The even greater scandal, however, was that payments of subsistence money had been made to “every Person that has had a plea of being French, Men, Women or Children of every description of Colour, no matter upon what ground,” as William Parker, the Admiralty’s commander in chief, informed Balcarres in 1795.Footnote 119
The number of civilians arriving as prisoners was so great that authorities simply lost track of where and to whom assistance went. In 1800, the commander found that some people had been on the payment list for seven years, and even had managed to have their children who had been born during this time included in it.Footnote 120 Balcarres saw the root of this problem in “improper Principles within my Government,” namely, in the person of William Innes, the commissary for prisoners.Footnote 121 Balcarres accused him of corruption. Innes had been giving out payments of subsistence money and parole passes to emigrants, as well as other (in the eyes of the government) less honourable individuals, and unlawfully taken their money in exchange for passports to America.Footnote 122 Following this complaint, Innes was discharged and put under arrest, although at this point, he had already left Jamaica.
In a second step, Parker went over the payment list and discharged people “undeservedly eating the Bread of Government.”Footnote 123 In this process, he relied on the established patterns of (un-)deservingness. His list, counting sixty-seven families, is a unique document in which the prisoner’s own account of how and why they came to Jamaica is put against information Parker had collected on them. It demonstrates how relief was stratified in practice according to estate, infirmness, gender, political affiliation, and most importantly, race. Monsieur Dujardin was struck off the list for being fit for military service; Madame Voissin’s husband was still in Saint-Domingue, which led Parker to remark that she should return to him so that he could support her. Madame Guichon and her son, meanwhile, were suspected to be on the side of the French Republic. He was a prisoner on the hulks in Kingston.Footnote 124 Finally, Parker wrote to Balcarres in advance that he had given orders for all people of colour to be taken off the subsistence list without discrimination.Footnote 125 The established conceptions of solidarity towards certain groups of people were crucial in gauging deservingness. Once again, nevertheless, the most vulnerable would be exempted. Parker conceded that those who were “involved into immediate distress” would remain, especially “women decent in their original situation … that will be reduced to misery if this bounty … is stop’t.”Footnote 126 As with the relief granted to “emigrants,” concerns of security and solidarity with fellow white planters were balanced against imperatives of charity.
This story, however, is also a testament to the agency of refugees in the process of categorisation. Parker complained that people “go & come from St. Domingo to suit their convenience,” and that once they were “so bountifully supplied with Money as they are,” even if peace was restored “many would never leave this Island.”Footnote 127 This indicates that refugees were aware of the loopholes and inconsistencies involved in the distribution of subsistence money to prisoners of war. To those for whom categorisation and recognition as an “emigrant” was far out of reach, the “prisoner of war” category was the much more accessible system of relief. As a result, here we find most of the people we would, from a contemporary standpoint, consider to be refugees and particularly deserving: people of little to no property, the impoverished and sick, and those fleeing the terrors of war. Most crucially, to some, “being a prisoner of war opened new futures,” as Renaud Morieux has analysed.Footnote 128
This was especially true for people of colour: the registration as a prisoner opened up a space of autonomy and could even imply the recognition of freedom when the alternative was to be labelled a slave.Footnote 129 Here unfolded a dynamic in which the registration system became “a legal technology and resource which can be empowering and of high economic and social utility” to those it registered.Footnote 130 It is no coincidence, in particular, that Parker singled out women of colour as a group of people who benefitted from the confused labelling and played the system to get access to the subsistence funds.Footnote 131 Gender was a decisive category for how the colonial government managed the mobilities of people of colour. Men were more likely to be suspected of political activism and therefore more likely to be deported, while enslaved and free coloured women came under far less scrutiny and oftentimes could stay in Jamaica comparatively unbothered.Footnote 132 When Nugent put his plans for the transfer of French refugees to New Orleans into practice in 1803, the city of Kingston set up a police committee to inquire into the presence of French people in the city who had not become naturalised. Only a group of refugees “recommended by two freeholders,” whose residence in the island the committee found would “not be inconsistant [sic] with its safety and tranquillity” would be allowed to remain in Jamaica. The list in question also included the names of “female French slaves” that the refugees in question would be allowed to keep as domestics.Footnote 133
Within the logic of refuge, security, and relief, race therefore intersected in crucial ways with gender. As a result, many French women of colour were able to establish themselves in the urban fabric of Kingston as owners of shops, restaurants, and lodging houses.Footnote 134 This was also true for many of the refugees from among the petits blancs who settled in Kingston as shopkeepers, carpenters, surgeons, distillers, or in similar professions.Footnote 135 In many ways, therefore, the lower ranks of French colonial society were much more integrated and present in Jamaican everyday urban life than the elites. Many of them had first come to the island as prisoners of war.
Conclusion
All throughout the Age of Revolutions, but during the Haitian Revolution in particular, the reception of refugees in Jamaica took place in the shadow of deep political uncertainties and fears of revolutionary contagion. The colonial state’s regime of refugee registration and assistance was thus birthed in tandem with and under the influence of alien legislation. Against this background, “keeping out” always came first as relief was weighed against security concerns. The key categorisations this system relied on – “emigrant” and “prisoner of war” – were born more out of the necessity to make sense of the people arriving and fit them into supposedly clear-cut administrative categorisations than out of a “humanitarian” impetus to help refugees in need. Tendencies towards such a moral obligation do still surface occasionally, but never developed enough to change a system of assistance that was expected to be economically efficient and went hand in hand with solidarity towards selected groups of people, disproportionately benefitting affluent, white emigrant planters. The only “true” instance of suffering Jamaican authorities recognised unconditionally was inscribed into the “emigrant” category. Thus, relief always hinged on a socio-political commitment to Jamaican slaveholder society and the British crown.
Refugee recognition and refugee relief in Jamaica were therefore highly ambiguous, and were characterised by the constant attempt by actors of the colonial state to balance out protection with security, or relief for people in need with the “abuse of … indulgence.”Footnote 136 While fears of revolutionary contagion and security concerns dictated the logic of refugee management, the actors involved in it exhibited a strong sense of affection and responsibility for people in need arriving on their shores. The Caribbean world of the Haitian Revolution was therefore not just one of warfare and fear, but also of solidarity, although that solidarity was a far cry from universalist notions of humanitarianism and was highly contingent on boundaries of class and race.
Finally, deservingness and the categorisations it was built on were subject to constant negotiation from both sides. On the one hand, patterns of deservingness were shaped by local administrators in charge of registration and the distribution of relief. The scope of assistance was therefore constantly shifting. In moments of crisis, it became radically restricted to only apply to naturalised British subjects and propertied classes who had means of subsistence. On the other hand, the colonial state in Jamaica was not all-knowing, nor was it a flawlessly functioning machine. Categories like “prisoner of war” were porous, and the same person could be labelled differently at different times and different places. Some corrupt administrators would allow relief and freedom of mobility for ineligible persons. Refugees were very much aware of these weak spots in the system and knew how to exploit them to their advantage. They tailored their stories to fit the patterns the administration relied on in gauging deservingness and deliberately aimed to be registered under one category rather than the other. In the process, they carved out spaces of autonomy for themselves right under the nose of a restrictive and rigid colonial administration.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the participants of the 2022 workshop “Who is a Refugee? Concepts of Exile, Refuge, and Asylum, c. 1750-1850” at the University of Duisburg-Essen, out of which this special issue emerged, as well as the editors and the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this contribution.
Funding Information
This research has been supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) as part of the project Atlantic Exiles – Refugees and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1770s-1820s under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 849189).
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