“Five or Six French Guinea Men Have Lately Gone Down There from Hence”: Slave Trading in the Time of the Haitian Revolution

The slave trade to and from Saint-Domingue continued and transformed as the Haitian Revolution unfolded. However, existing historical databases on human trafficking downplay this counterintuitive fact. The paper will first explain why that reality has been almost invisible in data and much of the scholarship. On the one hand, French metropolitan records usually employed to measure the slave trade are misleading since they only provide information on transatlantic voyages involving Nantes, Bordeaux, and other Atlantic ports. On the other hand, war and revolution put local customs in disarray; official documents are either nonexistent or scattered and difficult to handle. The paper will argue that shifting the focus to different sources, such as merchants’ business correspondence, journals, and diaries, consular reports, and prize papers, provides new insights into the slave trade on a Caribbean scale. As U.S. traders exchanged goods with French, British, Spanish, and Danish merchants, they also enabled the persistence of human trafficking in Saint-Domingue. The use of fragmentary evidence sheds light on the adaptations of Caribbean capitalism and untold stories of suffering and resilience.