Runaway slave advertisements such as the one transcribed above contain valuable information as well as critical silences about maroons and their intentions. The advertisements are a snapshot of a moment in time and reveal little about the maroons’ past or future beyond the date of publication. This particular advertisement does not indicate what tasks most of the 12 bondspeople performed on the Raar plantation in Borne. It is unclear how and why they migrated to the Millot plantation, or how and why they ended up on the Cochon plantation in Plaisance, from where they left as maroons. Besides brothers Julien and Kepel, and Nanette, her daughter Marie, and Marie’s one-month-old baby girl, the nature of relationships between the absconders is obscure. We do not know how and when they decided to escape together, nor can we elucidate more of their biographical details, such as for how long they had been enslaved in the colony or if they all spoke Kreyol. We cannot know their innermost thoughts, fears, or ambitions. It is not presently possible to find out what happened after their November 23 escape or what happened after the advertisement appeared in Les Affiches américaines on December 15, 1790. They may have been captured, jailed, and returned to Jean Cochon, or they could have remained at large and relocated to another existing maroon community.

Though we do not know for certain the circumstances of Raar plantation runaways’ immediate past and future, the contents of this and similar advertisements reveal insights that help us speculate about enslaved people’s racial and ethnic identities, their inner social world, and their inter-personal relationships. This unlikely group of 12 enslaved people escaped together on November 23, 1790, seemingly after having been sold or leased to a new owner, M. Jean Cochon. Most were branded RAAR, the name of their first owner. There were five women and girls, including Marie’s baby, but most of the fugitives in this case – and those who took part in marronnage overall – were men. One was Kongolese and two were Mondongues of West Central Africa, three were Aradas from the Bight of Benin, four were creoles born in Saint-Domingue, and two were of lesser-known African origins, Monbal and Moncamba. There were two groups of biologically connected individuals. Some were survivors of smallpox and bore scars from other illnesses or injuries; others bore the distinctive cultural markings of their nations. Some were darker skinned, while others had a “reddish” complexion. One was described as having a specialized position, that of a cart driver, and was familiar with Le Cap, where he often worked. Yet, the differences between these bondspeople did not overshadow their shared social conditions and collective decision to engage in marronnage, despite the deadly obstacles they inevitably faced.

How can we understand this small but diverse maroon group as a type of network engaged in collective action? Maroons’ identities and social network ties are lenses through which we can examine “the interaction mechanisms by which individual and sociocultural levels are brought together (Gamson Reference Gamson, Morris and Mueller1992: 71)” during the act of escaping slavery. This chapter relies on protest event content analysis (Koopmans and Rucht Reference Koopmans, Rucht, Klandermans and Staggenborg2002; Hutter Reference Hutter and della Porta2014) of thousands of runaway slave advertisements placed in Les Affiches américaines and other colonial-era newspapers and focuses on two major aspects of how maroons’ socio-cultural realities both shaped and were shaped by their social interactions. I argue in two parts that: (1) racially or ethnically homogenous group escapes reflected and maintained pre-existing collective identities, while racially or ethnically heterogeneous group escapes indicated and helped forge a sense of racial solidarity; and (2) wider networks of resistance were built from runaways’ forms of human capital and their pre-existing social network ties to enslaved people, maroons, and free people of color. These patterns of interaction around identity and solidarity helped shape mobilizing structures during the Haitian Revolution. Moreover, they informed post-independence era modes of identity at the micro- and macro-levels: the formerly enslaved masses organized themselves socially, economically, and religiously around kinship and African ethnicity, while the Haitian state characterized citizenship in racial terms. The formation of these identity- and state-making processes can be traced to the colonial period as enslaved people navigated the boundaries of bondage using their social and human capital.

Micromobilization processes draw on aspects of individuals’ identities and the social network ties that existed prior to mobilization, particularly during exceptionally high-risk collective actions such as marronnage. Network ties can influence multiple aspects of the social construction of mobilization, including an individual’s decision to engage in collective action or not, their assessment of the nature and extent of that participation, their awareness of opportunities to participate, and critical comprehension of the reasons for mobilization (Fantasia Reference Fantasia1988; McAdam Reference McAdam1988; Gamson Reference Gamson, Morris and Mueller1992; Taylor and Whittier Reference Taylor, Whittier, Morris and Mueller1992; Hunt and Benford Reference Hunt, Benford, Snow, Soule and Kriesi2004; Ward Reference Ward2015, Reference Ward2016). Chapter 3 explored ritualist networks that, in enhancing collective consciousness about the unjust nature of racial slavery in Saint-Domingue, used sacred technologies to rectify those imbalances. In addition to ritual spaces, linkages between enslaved people from various birth origins – Saint-Domingue, the Bight of Benin, or West Central Africa for example – were cultivated as people interacted with each other and learned to communicate in the Kreyol language within spheres of labor such as plantation work gangs, in housing quarters and family units, and at weekend markets. These settings foregrounded patterns of interaction in maroon groups by allowing enslaved people to safely query, discuss, plan, and strategize the dynamics of their efforts to self-liberate.

Marronnage was a dangerous endeavor – runaways rarely had access to food or clothing, were chased by hunting dogs and the maréchaussée fugitive slave police, and had to navigate the colony’s complex terrain oftentimes alone. Those who were caught faced punishments such as having limbs cut off, whippings, or being chained or executed. Therefore, taking part in marronnage was not an easy decision, and choosing to do so with others in some ways only heightened the risk of capture. Enslaved people with knowledge of who had escaped, when, why, or where maroons were located could be tortured for that information, or they could be incentivized with money, their freedom, or other material goods to turn in maroons. Trust was of paramount importance when a runaway involved other people in their escape, and their sense of collective identities helped facilitate a “cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution” (Polletta and Jasper Reference Polletta and Jasper2001: 285). Collective identity in mobilization processes were especially complex in Saint-Domingue. Most of the enslaved population were Africa-born, so the most sensible option for strategizing escape within a group was to turn to one’s “countrymen” who shared linguistic, religious, and cultural identities and affinities. The runaway advertisements’ descriptions of African ethnicities are not much more precise than the labels that derive from slave trading records regarding the specific ethnonyms that Africans would have used, the exact geographic location of their birth, or even the correct port from which they embarked. Still, the ethnonyms in the advertisements give a sense that runaways who were described in similar terms were at most countrywomen and men who may have lived in close proximity or had real connections prior to capture. At a minimum, they were regional neighbors who shared linguistic, religious, or political commonalities, making it likely that these groups mobilized alongside members of their regional background. Findings from content analysis of the Les Affiches advertisements prove most runaway groups were racially or ethnically homogeneous, which further supports the salience of pre-existing collective identities among people of the same racial or ethnic designation in the practice of resistance to “New World” slavery (Thornton Reference Thompson1991; Reis Reference Reis1993; Barcia Reference Barcia2014; Rucker Reference Rucker2015).

While ethnic identification can be an important organizing principle, racial formations can similarly play a role in African Diaspora collective actions (Butler Reference Butler1998). Through geographic proximity, commercial networks, language, and other factors, the conditions of capture and enslavement explicated a “latent potential of ethnicity … even among those who were not consciously so disposed prior to their capture” (Gomez Reference Gomez1998: 7), adding a secondary layer of solidarity building that was at work through heterogeneous group escapes. Constructing a collective identity around Africanness may have been a primary step toward developing a broader sense of blackness. This chapter also aims to make sense of heterogeneous group escapes such as the Raar plantation maroons who were described as Kongo, Mondongue, Monbal, Moncamba, Arada, and Saint-Domingue creole, and explains the broader implications of these types of network formations. New identities and social network ties can form during, and because of, mobilizations like marronnage as disparately identified insurgents developed a sense of solidarity, or shared identification with and loyalty toward each other and a common fate or destiny (Melucci Reference Melucci1989; Gamson Reference Gamson, Morris and Mueller1992; Taylor and Whittier Reference Taylor, Whittier, Morris and Mueller1992; Diani Reference Diani1997; Kuumba and Ajanaku Reference Kuumba and Ajanaku1998; Hunt and Benford Reference Hunt, Benford, Snow, Soule and Kriesi2004). The transAtlantic slave trade, the Code Noir policy on French Caribbean slavery, and colonial plantation regimes forcefully imposed a “flattened” black identity onto the masses of enslaved Africans (Robinson Reference Robinson1983: 99–100; Bennett Reference Bennett2018). However, I argue that maroons and their enslaved or free co-conspirators autonomously socially constructed racial consciousness and racial solidarity through mobilization.

For example, Senegambians and Kongolese captives probably never would have come into contact on the African continent because of the distance between the two regions, thus their only commonalities were their shared survival of the Middle Passage and the status of being enslaved in a foreign environment. As these groups endured colonial structures in the Americas that categorized and exploited people because of their blackness rather than their ethnic, religious, or political origins, inter-ethnic solidarity between enslaved Africans and African descendants became increasingly important (Gomez Reference Gomez1998; Borucki Reference Borucki2015). Moreover, given the sheer size of the Africa-born population in the colony – two-thirds of the enslaved – it is fair to assume that most creoles and mixed-race individuals had direct parentage or other kinship ties to an African, despite claims from early sources that Africans and colony-born creoles were socially distant from each other. There were instances where it was more advantageous for runaways to compose groups that were racially and ethnically heterogenous – such as the Raar maroons. The racial and ethnic groups represented by the Raar maroons might have been able to marshal a wide range of knowledge pools, techniques, and tactics to better strategize escape. But to overcome the boundaries of their birth origins, cultures, religions, and languages, heterogeneous groups of absconders had to develop a certain level of depth in their relationships to establish trust and solidarity. They would have had to cultivate some understanding of their shared positionality of experiencing enslavement based on their blackness, rather than their respective heritages or other aspects of fragmentation among the enslaved population, making racialized experiences the basis for their marronnage.

The colonial newspapers Les Affiches américaines, Gazette de Saint Domingue, and the Courrier Nationale de Saint Domingue published the runaway slave advertisements. Les Affiches (hereafter LAA) was published in Cap Français (Le Cap) and Port-au-Prince beginning in 1766, three years after widespread printing operations were introduced to Saint-Domingue, until 1791, the year the Haitian Revolution uprisings began.² In the weekly papers, planters advertised sales or rentals of their goods, land, animals, as well as enslaved women and men. Separate listings of advertisements were placed for runaways who escaped enslavement, some for as short as three days, others for over ten years. Planters’ sole intention for placing runaway advertisements was to locate and re-capture fugitives to restore the economic losses of the enslaved people – who as chattel slaves were one of the colony’s foremost forms of capital – and the value of their labor productivity. It was not in planters’ immediate financial interest to provide full narrative accounts of fugitive escapes, since the advertisements themselves cost money to publish; nor was it within the realm of their ontological reality to consider runaways as strategic thinkers who planned their escape. The advertisements contain the implicit and explicit biases of slave owners who viewed enslaved people’s agency as an impossibility, and therefore inscribed into the advertisement texts the impossibility of accessing the full scope of the runaways’ lives. Despite the omissions, deliberate silences, violence, and virulently racist language that are embedded in the texts, there are also elements of enslaved people’s lived reality that can help expand our understanding of their inter-personal relationship dynamics and collective intentionality. To identify and relocate slaves and recoup their lost funds, planters had to provide some modicum of accurate information – however speculative – when placing the advertisements, making them a strong source for demographic representations of the escapee population.

The advertisements present general information including the escapee’s name, age, gender, and birth origin. It was also important for the planter, or plantation lawyer or manager, to identify themselves and provide contact information for where they could be reached and the bounty they were willing to pay as a reward for capture. Typically, the advertisements also included distinctive characteristics such as bodily scarring, the owner’s brand and other physical traits, personality disposition, or the person’s labor skills as a means of locating the escapee. Frequently, the advertisements contain an indication of the duration of time the self-liberated person had been missing, the area from which they had escaped and with whom they fled, and where or with whom they were suspected of hiding. These and other characteristics, such as the maroons’ linguistic skills, are helpful for studying the role of race and ethnicity, gender, and social ties in marronnage. The following section revisits the question of stratification among the enslaved and maroon populations with discussion of the demographics of the 12,857 runaways described in the Les Affiches advertisements.

Fragmentation: race, ethnicity, and gender

Individual and Group Escapes

Most escapees ran away by themselves, accounting for 60.5 percent of runaways, while a total of nearly 40 percent escaped in a group of two or more people (Table 4.3 and Figure 4.1). Though most fugitives escaped alone, focusing on group escapes helps us understand how oppositional consciousness was operationalized beyond one person’s pursuit of freedom and extended to small-scale groups and bands. Not only were they family units, runaway groups were comprised of shipmates bound together by chains and regional origin, artisanal laborers and members of the same work gangs who fled together, and even strangers with a shared goal of freedom in mind. Homogeneous group escapes, meaning each runaway in the advertisement was described in the same racial or ethnic terms, indicated that a collective identity existed among the cohort; and heterogeneous group escapes, or escapes among runaways from different racial or ethnic backgrounds, demonstrated some sense of racial solidarity between individuals. Cultural and linguistic similarities made it easier for people of similar African heritage to collaborate and escape together, thus homogeneous group escape accounts for 24.4 percent of the sample. It was more difficult for groups comprised of different races and ethnicities to escape together because of cultural and linguistic differences. This can help account for why heterogeneous group escapes were less common, at 15.2 percent.

Figure 4.1. Rates of group and individual escapes over time (N = 12,857)

At a rate of 74.6 percent individual escapes, boys were more likely than girls and adults of both sexes to flee by themselves (Table 4.4). Girls, on the other hand, ran away by themselves less often than anyone else at a 48.6 percent rate of individual escapes; therefore, they fled in groups at the highest rate. More specifically, girls escaped in a homogeneous group 6 percent more often than boys and 3 percent more often than adult women. Girls fled in a heterogeneous group 33 percent of the time, which was more often than anyone else. Since African girls were the minority group in the slave trade and the colony, they would have had a harder time finding someone of a similar background to join in absconding. For example, an eight or nine year old Arada girl named Félicité seems to have fled from Le Cap without an adult in 1768.¹⁷ Men were more likely than women or children to escape in homogeneous groups, suggesting men had an easier time identifying and forging relationships with men of a similar background. This is probably because men were the majority in both the slave trade and the colony; indeed, adult women escaped by themselves more than adult men (Table 4.4).

Saint-Domingue-born and other Atlantic creoles were more likely to escape individually, averaging 78.8 percent and 81.98 percent respectively, while Africans overall had higher levels of group escapes (see Tables 4.4 and 4.9). Few African ethnic groups escaped individually at the same rates as creoles – only “Miserables” (which was possibly an aspersion cast either by their neighbors or French traders),¹⁸ Taquas, Capelaous, Cramenties, and Mesurades escaped by themselves over 75 percent of the time (Table 4.6). I have argued elsewhere that Africans were more likely to collaborate in marronnage because they needed to work together to navigate an unfamiliar landspace during their escapes.¹⁹ When people did escape in groups, they were more likely to do so with a cohort composed of a cohesive language, culture, race, or ethnicity. However, with time spent in the colony, acquisition of the Kreyol language, and participation in shared rituals, African and creole runaways could form alliances around their shared blackness and enslaved status.

Analysis of homogeneous and heterogeneous group escapes over time helps to reveal observable changes that might indicate growing solidarity among Africans and creoles of diverse backgrounds around a sense of racial identity or whether people clung to their disparate racial or ethnic identities of origin. Homogeneous groups were predominant over heterogeneous groups, reaching their height in 1768, representing 36.5 percent of all escapes then decreasing until the lowest point of 7.7 percent in 1781 and then increasing steadily until 1791 (Figure 4.2). Heterogeneous group escapes were less prevalent overall and were at their highest point in 1766 with 23.9 percent; however, they did outpace homogeneous escapes between the years 1779 and 1784. These years coincide with the decline of group marronnage overall (Figure 4.1), and the American independence-era British blockade on Saint-Domingue’s ports that prevented new slave ships from arriving. Therefore, enslaved people were forced to either escape alone or build new relationships with people of diverse backgrounds due to the lack of newly imported Africans. From 1784, heterogeneous group escapes increased steadily, albeit at a slower pace than homogenous group escapes, until 1791. While shared African ethnicity remained a significant aspect of group escapes, it was also becoming common for runaways to take flight in a group of people from diverse backgrounds. This indicates that a growing sense of racial solidarity was forming within rebellious activities during the pre-revolutionary period.

Figure 4.2. Homogeneous and heterogeneous group escape rates over time (N = 12,857)

Intra-American Slave Trade Captives in Saint-Domingue

When discussing the notion of an emerging racial solidarity, it is also important to consider the presence of African descendants who were enslaved on other islands within the circum-Caribbean and then re-sold to Saint-Domingue. Julius Scott’s (Reference Scott2018) renowned The Common Wind: Afro-American Communication in the Age of the Haitian Revolution brings attention to the intricate interconnectedness of the Caribbean by way of trade and communication networks. Enslaved and free African descendants who worked as sailors, soldiers, and traders traveled the high seas and transported with them news of events from across the islands. Similar to figures like Olaudah Equiano and Denmark Vesey, exposure to and experience with different imperial structures, plantation regimes, and African ethnic groups helped to cultivate a sense that blackness, not ethnicity, was the basis for enslavement across the Americas. The vast experiences of these “Atlantic creoles” and their observations of black people’s shared circumstances across the Caribbean gave them leadership qualities that could bring together masses from disparate groups. Henry Christophe, who had been part of the siege of Savannah during the American War of Independence and who later became King of northern Haiti in the post-independence era, is said to have been born in either Grenada or Saint Christopher; and “Zamba” Boukman Dutty was brought from Jamaica on an illegal ship in the years before the Revolution. Indeed, English-speakers from Jamaica seem to be the largest enslaved Caribbean group brought to Saint-Domingue. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has recently included findings from the intra-American trade, displayed in Table 4.7.

The French royal government banned most of these intra-American trades, so there is an incomplete picture of the full population of enslaved people from across the Caribbean. However, the runaway slave advertisements help to fill in those gaps and demonstrate that captives arrived not only from Jamaica, Dominica, or the Dutch Caribbean, there were also many from Spanish colonies, other French colonies, and North America. Enslaved people brought to Saint-Domingue through the circum-Caribbean trade had experiential knowledge and consciousness that they brought from their perspective locations. They spoke several languages, most commonly English, Spanish, Dutch (and the Dutch creole Papiamento), and French, and some were reading and writing proficiently in those languages. These “creoles” had exposure to information that circulated the Atlantic world via news reporting and interactions at major ports. Not only would they have known of events related to European-Americans, they also would have known about enslaved people’s rebellions that occurred throughout the Caribbean. The largest number of Atlantic-zone runaways were those brought from other French colonies, especially Martinique and Guadeloupe. This is closely followed by the 1.7 percent of escapees who were formerly enslaved in colonies under English rule, mostly Jamaica and including some from Mississippi. At 1.1 percent, the third largest group of Caribbean-born runaways were from Dutch-speaking locations, mainly Curaçao, and a smaller number from Surinam (Table 4.8).

There also were AmerIndians and East Indians enslaved in Saint-Domingue, making it additionally difficult to ascribe identity in instances of missing data, which accounts for 5 percent of the sample. Fifty-three runaways were described as indigenous Caraïbes or Indiens. These included Joseph, a Caraïbe with “black, straight hair, the face elongated, a fierce look,” who escaped in December 1788; or Jean-Louis, a Caraïbe who escaped with two Nagôs, Jean dit Grand Gozier and Venus, in July 1769.³² An Indien named Andre, a 30-year-old cook who spoke many languages, escaped Le Cap in July 1778; and another named Zephyr, aged 16–17, escaped the same area in late August or early September of 1780.³³ Caraïbes were native to the Lesser Antilles and perhaps were captured and enslaved in Saint-Domingue as part of the inter-Caribbean trade.³⁴ The origin of other Indiens, however, is less straightforward. Scholars generally believe that the Taíno population had completely disappeared by the eighteenth century, but this may not be entirely true. Recent developments indicate the Spanish underestimated sixteenth-century census data due to the numbers of Taíno who escaped, oftentimes with Africans, and those who were of mixed heritage.³⁵ Moreau de Saint-Méry witnessed indigenous people’s ritual ceremonies and saw their remains and artistic artifacts throughout the north. However, he used “Indiens Occidentaux” to describe Caraïbes and other indigenous peoples brought from Canada, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Other Indiens were black or dark-skinned sub-continental Asian Indians, or what he called “Indiens Orientaux.”³⁶ For example, there was Zamor, a “nègre indien … creole of Bengale … having freshly cut hair,” who at age 25 escaped the Aubergiste plantation in Mirebalais in August 1783.³⁷ Moreau de Saint-Méry distinguished two types of East Indians: one he perceived as similar to Europeans, with straighter hair and narrow noses. The other he likened to Africans, stating they had shorter, curlier hair and were closer in relation to blacks in Saint-Domingue. Further research is needed on the enslavement of non-Africans in the French colonies, and the possible connections to the African presence in India and the Middle East.³⁸

Spanish-speaking runaways escaped by themselves most often; this is perhaps an indication of their small numbers in the colony and lack of contact with others from their language group (Table 4.9). The fugitive migration trail typically tended to go from west to east, so very few escaped from the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo into Saint-Domingue. Yet, in October 1789, the commandant of St. Raphael in Santo Domingo Montenegro reported nine Kongolese men and four women missing.³⁹ Several other “Espagnols” listed in the advertisements were fugitives who were brought from Puerto Rico and Cuba. Small numbers and language barriers did not necessarily preclude non-Saint Dominguans from escaping with others. “Portuguese” (probably Brazilian) captives escaped in heterogeneous groups more often than in homogeneous groups, as did fugitives from Dutch, French, and English colonies. At a rate of 12.2 percent for heterogeneous group escapes, Dutch-speakers were much more likely to run away in a diverse group than a homogenous one. In 1770, a group of six escaped the island in a boat – they were Basile, a mulâtre from Curaçao; Tam, a Kongolese who spoke the Curaçaoan patois “Papimento”; Louis, a creole from Guadeloupe; François from Curaçao; Jean-Baptiste dit Manuel from Curaçao, and Baptiste from Curaçao.⁴⁰ English colony-born absconders had the highest rate of heterogeneous group escape. On the other hand, English-speaking runaways also escaped with each other the most. French colony runaways escaped alone at the second-highest rate, 89.4 percent, even though they had the linguistic benefit of being able to escape with Saint-Domingue-born runaways. Their French- language skills may also have been to their advantage in passing as free or cultivating relationships with free people of color.

Social Network Ties and Destinations

Alberto Melucci’s Nomads of the Present (1989) clarifies tensions that exist between individuals and groups as they contend with one another, everyday life, and the processes of identity-making within submerged networks. He defines a “submerged network” as a system of small groups, where information and people circulate freely within the network. These networks operate in public view and are transitory, as members may have multiple memberships with limited or temporary involvement. Like ritual free spaces, submerged networks bring to light the importance of shielding these social spaces and relationships from dominating forces within society in order to maneuver with flexibility. The web of maroons, enslaved people, and free people of color that made up submerged networks created new understandings of social circumstances and circulated ideas, resources, as well as strategies and tactics for collective action. An important part of the knowledge shared among the submerged networks of runaways was where one could hide once leaving the plantation. Sunday markets in the major towns like Cap Français were opportunities for blacks – free, enslaved, and runaways alike – to converge and interact, buying and selling food, exchanging services, and sharing information about issues pertinent to their lives, such as achieving freedom. Planters’ advertisements often speculated about where the runaway was going, based on the enslaved person’s known familial ties or the places they were known to frequent to give further alert to other whites in the areas where a runaway might be hiding. These types of location-based relationship ties from formal and informal social spheres like neighborhoods, work, or family are an influential factor in cultivating collective action participation (McAdam Reference McAdam1986; Gould Reference Gould1995; Diani Reference Diani, Diani and McAdam2003). The current section analyzes five types of social ties and destinations that maroons deployed in their freedom journeys (Table 4.10).

Besides running away in small-to-large groups, fugitives used their human and social capital to flee from bondage. When possible, enslaved people attempted to connect with family members or other known associates on various plantations. Over time, the enslaved cultivated and established relationships – biological or chosen – with other enslaved people or free people of color. I coded familial ties if the advertisement specifically describes the runaway as having a family member in another location. A second common destination for runaways who were sold and taken elsewhere, but who sought to re-connect with social familiars, was the plantation or parish of their birth. Artisanal labor skills were also an important avenue for escape. Most enslaved Africans and African descendants performed hard labor in the fields of sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations – tilling land, cutting cane, tending to animals, etc. However, larger-scale operations, especially sugar plantations, had a wider array of specialized tasks and positions that men mostly occupied, allowing them more daily flexibility than field hands. Sometimes, owners leased these artisanal laborers to other planters, or the artisans leased themselves out to earn money or their freedom. In these instances, quotidian work patterns of unmonitored travel from one plantation to another, or even between different buildings on the same plantation, would have provided narrow but existing windows of opportunity to slip away without immediate detection. I coded labor- and skill-related destinations if the runaway had access to individuals or spaces beyond the location of their captivity because of their specialized occupation. Another common destination that emerged from the advertisements was the sparsely populated Spanish territory, Santo Domingo, to the east of Saint-Domingue. The imaginary border was the cause of friction between the two colonies, which runaways exploited to their benefit. The ongoing tension over the border will be discussed further in Chapter 6. Finally, I coded free communities to include other maroons and free people of color. In Chapters 6 through 8, I discuss in more depth the small-scale communities of runaways interspersed throughout Saint-Domingue’s numerous mountain chains in hard-to-reach areas, living quietly but at times raiding nearby plantations for provisions. Enslaved people knew of these communities – and sometimes neighborhoods designated for free people of color – and were attracted to these spaces, seeking safe haven.

Conclusion

Group escape was one vehicle through which runaways exhibited or cultivated relationships and trust – people decided to escape with familiars from slave ships, living quarters, or work gangs, individuals who were willing to take a life-threatening risk, or were otherwise in their immediate proximity. Over time, group escapes did become more frequent, although not as frequent as individual escapes, and the average group size slightly increased each year. Generally, it was easiest to build ties for marronnage with members of the same ethnic, religious, linguistic, or regional background. This explains why homogeneity remained a prevalent characteristic of most group escapes. These racially/ethnically cohesive mobilization network patterns mirrored those that appeared among rebel bands that were organized by nation during the early years of the Haitian Revolution, such as the Nagô, Gold Coast, Moco (Igbo), or the Kongolese fighters led by Macaya.⁷²

However, by recruiting and mobilizing people of a different racial or ethnic backgrounds, runaways exhibited the growing importance of racial solidarity. Heterogeneous group marronnage increased slowly after 1784, and though the rate was still less than homogeneous group escapes, it was closely associated with longer lengths of escape, which I discuss in Chapter 5. Moreover, longer lengths of escape were reported before the Revolution. Therefore, heterogeneous marronnage has interesting implications for understanding the importance of “weak ties” in successful marronnage leading to the Haitian Revolution. Although previously existing relationships have long been acknowledged as important resources in building one’s social capital, there is also value in transient, “weak” relationships with those outside the scope of one’s immediate trust networks. While homogeneity in a personal network can help foster confidence, trustworthiness, and a sense of cohesion, heterogeneity exposes people to new knowledge, information, resources, and opportunities (Granovetter Reference Granovetter1973). Social ties can lead to participation in mobilization (McAdam Reference McAdam1988), but heterogeneity in those collective action networks also contributes to shared affinity with a cause and the production of a singular identity over time (Melucci Reference Melucci1985, Reference Melucci1989; Taylor and Whittier Reference Taylor, Whittier, Morris and Mueller1992; Diani Reference Diani1997). Diversity of skills and knowledge was beneficial for a dangerous venture such as marronnage, because a mistake or gap in timing, resources, or information could be life-threatening. Though it required a considerable amount of trust among participants, a diverse composition of marronnage groups was a successful strategy for escape.

It is true that colony-born creoles were more likely to escape alone or in homogeneous groups, while Africans escaped in groups more often than did creoles. Also, overall, creoles did not have more social ties and destinations than Africans, except for plantation- and kin-based connections. Women especially used their relationships with family, plantation-based connections, other runaways, and free people of color to facilitate escape. This sheds empirical light on previous speculations that personal networks shaped women’s marronnage. Conversely, Africans were more likely to head to Santo Domingo, to other runaways, and used their labor skills to escape. Chapter 5 will demonstrate that while conventional wisdom suggests that creoles were more “successful” at marronnage because of the social capital afforded by previously existing connections, this may not have been completely true because refuge in Santo Domingo and inter-ethnic group escapes were two of the most effective means of achieving longer lengths of self-liberation. Saint-Dominguan creoles were more likely to pass for free, which was another effective way of staying free. Still, it seems that in marronnage, building weaker ties through reaching out to people from other backgrounds and seeking unfamiliar lands to the east had more pay-off in terms of duration of escape.

Micromobilization theory suggests that temporal stages of participation are important when considering who joins collective action efforts, why they join and when, and what their participation qualitatively looks like (Ward Reference Ward2015, Reference Ward2016). At times, it may not necessarily look like participation at all, particularly if the overall movement is in abeyance. However, awareness of and sympathies for a cause can indirectly or directly contribute to action, given the right timing and circumstances, available resources, and linkages to people who are already involved. Runaways and slaves were not necessarily discrete categories of social actors, they represented different stages of human activity that may or may not have transformed into collective action. We will see repeat absconders discussed in Chapter 5, and in Chapter 8, enslaved people who escaped, were re-captured or returned voluntarily, then escaped again only to bring along others or to become part of a wider uprising. The linkages created or exemplified by runaway groups, and their ongoing contact with plantations – via raids, hideouts, recruiting, or kidnapping – fostered an oppositional consciousness that may not necessarily have manifested itself in an immediate sense, but unfolded over time. Chapter 7 will further engage micro-level and aggregate patterns of marronnage within the historical context to identify factors that contributed to, or hindered, escapes.