The Caisse des Libertés and the Case for Liberties in Saint Domingue

In eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, peculiar colonial financial institutions emerged from the politics of colonial emancipation. In 1711, a local administrative ordinance established the Caisse des libertés, or “freedom fund,” which would collect manumission payments on a per-person basis. Over the subsequent decades, the cost of freeing enslaved people rose and fell with shifting administrative priorities. By 1781, when the number of free people of color grew increasingly dangerous to colonial officers, these administrators proposed raising the tax from 1,000 livres for enslaved men and 2,000 livres for enslaved women to as high as 3,600 livres. By the 1780s, Saint Domingue’s manumission rates had halved compared with those of the 1760s. Still, the Caisse des libertés had nonetheless become a significant source of revenue, with an estimated 18,700 livres entering royal coffers annually.

With every proposed tax, debates over the price of liberty – understood both as a duty imposed by a sovereign and as a consequence of libertinage, or the sexual relations with an enslaved woman that might result in her emancipation following childbirth – the petitions published on behalf of planter interests debated the legitimacy of the manumission fees. In the eyes of the planters, fiscal calculations and the public desire for profits were to blame, and there were murmurs about what justified the king’s right to wield power above the laws and free will of his subjects. While colonial subjects questioned their privileges as subjects of the sovereign, the royal administration subjected the duties of emancipators to a higher fiscal and political power.

This paper will examine debates over the Caisse des libertés in the context of periods of revolutionary upheaval in Saint-Domingue, focusing on how colonial taxation intersected with the material realities of commerce, money, and slavery across the long eighteenth century.