[SAINT-DOMINGUE - HABITATION LA BOURDONNAYE] Manuscrit intitulé : Compte de dépense & de recette pour l’habitation de Monsieur le Vte de La Bourdonnaye

Four-page manuscript in black ink on a folio bifolium (31.9 x 20.1 cm), entitled Compte de dépense & de recette pour l'habitation de Monsieur le Vte de La Bourdonnaye and, on the verso, Etat des naissances de Nègres et mortalités & crues et déficits d'animaux, together with Etat des revenus fabriqués sur l'habitation de Monsieur le Vte de La Bourdonnaye. Signed Pérès and Grasset frères, Pitteu & Cie, certified at Verrettes and Saint-Marc on 30 June 1785.

A few contemporary filing folds, with no impairment to the legibility of the text; well preserved for a working estate document of this nature.

Drawn up for the first half of 1785, the account concerns a sugar plantation at Verrettes, in the Artibonite plain near Saint-Marc. The proprietor identified as “Monsieur le Vte de La Bourdonnaye” was very probably Anne-François-Augustin de La Bourdonnaye, the future Revolutionary general, who in 1778 had married Élisabeth-Joséphine de Mauger, born at Verrettes into a family with substantial landed interests in this part of Saint-Domingue. Later archives confirm the transmission of Artibonite properties through their descendants.

The opening pages follow the plantation’s routine expenditure in considerable detail: the steward’s salary, gratuities paid to the sugar master, supplies, repairs to buildings and mills, and provisions for those employed on the works. Such accounts formed part of the system of estate management through which administrators of large plantations reported to often absentee proprietors on expenditure, work undertaken, labour and production.

Work on the two mills appears in an entry dated 20 March, distinguishing the carpenter Dussolier from the various groups of labourers employed alongside him:

“Food for Dussolier junior during the 80 days he remained on the estate making the two mills, at 5 livres per day, 400. For the same for four mulatto labourers employed by him during 80 days, at 30 sols each per day, 480. For the same for six Black labourers employed by him during 80 days, at 15 sols each per day, 360.”

Nothing is elaborated beyond what the account requires; for that very reason, the entry records with unusual precision the duration of the work, the number of men, the categories under which they were entered and the daily cost of their food. A further entry dated 30 June records 7,000 livres paid to Dussolier “for the construction of an animal-powered mill, including the supply of timber”.

Amid these routine transactions, the name of Charles appears twice. An enslaved man described in the manuscript as “mulatto”, he had fled the plantation. On 8 March, the expenses of the man sent in search of him were entered as follows:

“Paid to Francisque for his food and that of his mule during his journey to Mirebalais to look for Charles, a mulatto who had run away.”

A second entry, dated 16 May, reveals that Charles had crossed the colonial frontier and been arrested in the Spanish part of the island:

“For the price paid and gaol fees for the mulatto Charles, arrested in the Spanish territory, and for his passage from Port-au-Prince here, the said parties paid 535 livres 10 sols.”

From two lines of bookkeeping, part of his route can be reconstructed: flight from the plantation, pursuit towards Mirebalais, passage into the Spanish colony, arrest and imprisonment, followed by transportation through Port-au-Prince back towards Saint-Marc. No narrative account of the episode is offered; marronage and its repression enter the plantation records only when they generate expenses to be charged to the estate.

Grasset frères, Pitteu & Cie, a merchant house established at Saint-Marc, appears in connection with the estate’s payments; at the close of the half-year, 6,897 livres were received from the firm to balance the account. Behind the daily management of the sugar plantation, the manuscript thus also affords a glimpse of the role played by colonial merchants in financing estates and connecting their production to wider commercial networks.

On the verso, financial entries give way to movements in the human population and livestock. Three births during the half-year are individually recorded, together with one death; the enslaved population is then enumerated according to the categories used by the plantation administration: “84 Black men, 93 Black women, 41 boys, 17 girls”, a total of 235 enslaved people as of 30 June 1785.

Within the same document, and under the same administrative logic, the account continues with 92 beasts of burden and 51 head of cattle before turning to the proceeds of the sugar crop. The arrangement of the sheet itself shows how plantation management simultaneously monitored changes in the enslaved population, the animals required for production and the financial yield of the estate.

The final page values the sugar produced and sold during the half-year at 208,538 livres. Salaries and gratuities, repairs to the mills, food for labourers, Charles’s flight and recapture, births and deaths, human numbers, livestock and sugar income are thus brought together within the four pages of a single instrument of estate management.

Later archives provide a remarkable continuation of this 1785 statement. Dominique Pérès appears there as manager of properties belonging to the Mauger family, and three revenue accounts drawn up by him in 1787, 1788 and 1789 were preserved among the documents used to establish their value; his identification with the “Pérès” who signs the present manuscript two years earlier is therefore highly plausible, though not absolutely proven. The same records mention 229 enslaved people belonging to the combined workforces of two family properties. Those two estates cannot be identified with certainty with the single plantation described here; the continuity between management accounts, population returns and statements of production is nonetheless striking.

Dated 30 June 1785, the manuscript predates the general uprising in Saint-Domingue by six years; it still belongs entirely to the ordinary workings of the colonial slave system and records its everyday mechanisms without commentary.

A rare first-hand document relating to an Artibonite sugar plantation, bringing together on four pages operating expenses, the pursuit and recapture of an enslaved man who had fled, three births and one death, a census of 235 enslaved people, livestock and 208,538 livres in sugar proceeds; production, coerced labour and the administration of the enslaved population are here recorded within the same accounting system.