Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What was the largest French slave colony of North America?
The North was the center of shipping and trading, and had the largest French elite population, the "grands blancs". The rich white colonists wanted greater autonomy for the colony, especially economically. The Plaine-du-Nord on the northern shore of Saint-Domingue was the most fertile area, having the largest sugar plantations and therefore the most slaves. It was the area of greatest economic importance, especially as most of the colony's trade went through these ports. The largest and busiest port was Le Cap-Français (present-day Le Cap-Haïtien), the capital of French Saint-Domingue until 1751, when Port-au-Prince was made the capital. In this northern region, enslaved Africans lived in large groups of workers in relative isolation, separated from the rest of the colony by the high mountain range known as the "Massif du Nord". These slaves would join with urban slaves from Le Cap to lead the 1791 rebellion, which began in this region.
The decrease in trade indirectly led to the collapse of states like the Edo Empire. Britain withdrew from the slave trade when it was the major transporter of slaves to the Americas. The French had abolished slavery following the French Revolution, although it briefly re-established it in its Caribbean colonies under Napoleon. France sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, the same year that it gave up on trying to regain Saint-Domingue. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it ended slavery in its possessions. Between them, the French and the British had purchased a majority of the slaves sold from the ports of Edo. The economy suffered from the decline in the slave trade, although considerable smuggling of slaves to the Americas continued for years afterwards.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, the French language established itself permanently in the Americas. There is an academic debate about how fluent in French the colonists of New France were. While less than 15% of colonists (25% of the women – chiefly "filles du roi" – and 5% of the men) were from the region of Paris and presumably spoke French, most of the rest came from north-western and western regions of France where regular French was not the primary native language. It is not clearly known how many among those colonists understood French as a second language, and how many among them – who, in overwhelming majority, natively spoke an oïl language – could understand, and be understood by, those who speak French thanks to interlinguistic similarity. In any case, a linguistic unification of all the groups coming from France happened (either in France, on the ships, or in Canada) such that, according to many sources, the then "Canadiens" were all speaking French (King's French) natively by the end of the 17th century, well before the unification was complete in France. Canada's reputation was to speak as good French as Paris did. Today, French is the language of about 10 million people (not counting French-based creoles, which are also spoken by about 10 million people) in the Americas.
Support for abolitionism rose in Great Britain. Slavery was abolished under the French Revolution, for the French Caribbean colonies, (the slavery was abolished in European part of France in 1315 by Louis X) but was restored under Napoleon I. Slaves in Saint-Domingue established independence, founding the republic of Haiti in 1804.
On 16 Pluviôse (4 February 1794), the National Convention decreed that slavery be abolished in all of France and French colonies.
The slave revolt, in the largest Caribbean French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791, was the beginning of what became the Haitian Revolution led by formerly enslaved people like Georges Biassou, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The rebellion swept through the north of the colony, and with it came freedom to thousands of enslaved blacks, but also violence and death. In 1793, French Civil Commissioners in St. Domingue and abolitionists, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, issued the first emancipation proclamation of the modern world (Decree of 16 Pluviôse An II). The Convention sent them to safeguard the allegiance of the population to revolutionary France. The proclamation resulted in crucial military strategy as it gradually brought most of the black troops into the French fold and kept the colony under the French flag for most of the conflict. The connection with France lasted until blacks and free people of colour formed L'armée indigène in 1802 to resist Napoleon's Expédition de Saint-Domingue. Victory over the French in the decisive battle of Battle of Vertières finally led to independence and the creation of present Haiti in 1804.
On 29 August 1793, Sonthonax took the radical step of proclaiming the freedom of the slaves in the north province (with severe limits on their freedom). In September and October, emancipation was extended throughout the colony. The French National Convention, the first elected Assembly of the First Republic (1792–1804), on 4 February 1794, under the leadership of Maximilien de Robespierre, abolished slavery by law in France and all its colonies. The constitution of 1793, which was never applied, and the constitution of 1795, which was put into effect, did both contain an explicit ban on slavery.
In 1860s, Mỹ Tho, along with Saigon, was a major strategic city during the French colonial campaign towards Vietnam. In 1862, France's capture of Mỹ Tho is regarded as the conclusion to the establishment of the French colony of Cochinchina, a development that inaugurated nearly a century of French colonial dominance in Vietnam. During the colonization period, the economy continued to prosper, attracting more immigrants, mainly from Teochew and Minnan.
From 1798-1800, France and the US waged an undeclared war at sea, the so-called Quasi-War which was ended by the Convention of 1800 or Treaty of Mortefontaine. The US viewed French ambitions in North America with great concern, since with British Canada to the north, they wanted to avoid an aggressive and powerful France replacing Spain in the south. For commercial reasons, Napoleon wanted to re-establish France in North America, the November 1801 Saint-Domingue expedition being the first step. The March 1802 Treaty of Amiens ended the War of the Second Coalition and in October, Spain transferred Louisiana to France.
Under Napoleon, France reimposed slavery in most of its Caribbean islands in 1802 and sent an army to bring Saint-Domingue under tighter control. However, thousands of the French troops succumbed to yellow fever during the summer months, and more than half of the French army died because of disease. After the French removed the surviving 7,000 troops in late 1803, the leaders of the revolution declared western Hispaniola the new nation of independent Haiti in early 1804. France continued to rule Spanish Santo Domingo. In 1805, Haitian troops of General Henri Christophe tried to conquer all of Hispaniola. They invaded Santo Domingo and sacked the towns of Santiago de los Caballeros and Moca, killing most of their residents, but news of a French fleet sailing towards Haiti forced General Christophe to withdraw from the east, leaving it in French hands. In 1808, following Napoleon's invasion of Spain, the criollos of Santo Domingo revolted against French rule and, with the aid of the United Kingdom, returned Santo Domingo to Spanish control. Fearing the influence of a society that had successfully fought and won against their enslavers, the United States and European powers refused to recognize Haiti, the second republic in the Western Hemisphere. France demanded a high payment for compensation to slaveholders who lost their property, and Haiti was saddled with unmanageable debt for decades. It became one of the poorest countries in the Americas, while the Dominican Republic gradually has developed into the one of the largest economies of Central America and the Caribbean.
As a result, the first official settlement was not established within Canada until the founding of Quebec by Samuel de Champlain in 1608. The other four colonies within New France were Hudson's Bay to the north, Acadia and Newfoundland to the east, and Louisiana far to the south. Canada, the most developed colony of New France, was divided into three districts, Québec, Trois-Rivières, and Montréal, each with its own government. The governor of the District of Quebec was also the governor-general of all New France.
To strengthen the colony and make it the centre of France's colonial empire, Louis XIV decided to send single women, aged between 15 and 30 known as the King's Daughters or in French, les filles du roi, to New France, paying for their passage and granting goods or money as a dowry. Approximately 800 arrived during 1663–1673. The King's Daughters found husbands among the male settlers within a year or two, as well as a new life for themselves. They came on their own choice, many because they could not make a favorable marriage in the social hierarchy in France. They were from commoner families in the Paris area, Normandy and the central-western regions of France. By 1672, the population of New France had risen to 6,700, from 3,200 in 1663.
With more than 10 million inhabitants, Kinshasa is the second largest francophone city in the world after Paris. It is the capital of the most populous francophone country in the world, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where an estimated 24 million people (40% of the total population) can speak French (essentially as a second language). Contrary to Abidjan where French is the first language of a large part of the population, in Kinshasa French is only a second language, and its status of "lingua franca" is shared with Lingala. Kinshasa French also differs from other African French variants, for it has some Belgian French influences, due to colonisation. People of different African mother tongues living in Kinshasa usually speak Lingala to communicate with each other in the street, but French is the language of businesses, administrations, schools, newspapers and televisions. French is also the predominant written language.
France’s Bernard de la Harpe explored the area of the modern Pushmataha County in 1719, in the era when France was establishing settlements on the Gulf Coast. They had founded New Orleans the year before. De la Harpe’s exploration of the Mississippi River valley was part of an effort to seek trade with the native peoples and also a route to New Mexico. After this time France claimed this region of North America as La Louisiane. It explored Canada to the north from the Atlantic coast along the St. Lawrence River valley, where it founded New France.
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 organized on paper much of the new territorial gains in three colonies in North America—East Florida, West Florida, and Quebec. The rest of the expanded British territory was left to Native Americans. The delineation of the Eastern Divide, following the Allegheny Ridge of the Appalachians, confirmed the limit to British settlement established at the 1758 Treaty of Easton, before Pontiac's War. Additionally, all European settlers in the territory (who were mostly French) were supposed to leave the territory or get official permission to stay. Many of the settlers moved to New Orleans and the French land on the west side of the Mississippi (particularly St. Louis), which in turn had been ceded secretly to Spain to become Louisiana (New Spain). However, many of the settlers remained and the British did not actively attempt to evict them.
Ever since the Seven Years' War of 1756-1763, France's Foreign Ministers, beginning with Choiseul (in office: 1761-1766), had followed the general idea that the independence of Britain's North American colonies would be good for France and bad for Britain, and furthermore that French attempts to recover parts of New France would be detrimental to that cause. When the American Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, the Comte de Vergennes, then the French Foreign Minister, outlined a series of proposals that led to secret French and also Spanish support of the rebel movement, and preparations for war, including expansion of their navies. To further the aim of French participation in the war, Vergennes closely monitored news from North America and from London, and worked to remove impediments to Spanish participation in the war. Vergennes went so far as to propose war to King Louis XVI in August 1776, but news of the capture of New York City by British forces under the command of General Howe in September 1776 delayed that plan.
In December 1801, France despatched the Saint-Domingue expedition to recapture the island, which had been independent since the 1791 Haitian Revolution. This included over 30,000 troops, many experienced and elite veterans but ended in catastrophic failure; by the end of 1802, an estimated 15,000 - 22,000 had died of disease and yellow fever, among them Napoleon's brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc.
When the French took over the region in the early 1900s they had a policy banning the existence of slavery. However local French administrators usually resisted pressure to abolish slavery from the colonial and metropolitan governments. French administrators would take credit for abolishing slavery by simply ignoring its continued existence or claiming that the bonds were voluntary. One local administrator justified such a policy by saying, “I do
not think it is presently possible to eliminate slavery. Our civilization has not penetrated deeply enough for the natives, both masters and slaves, to understand and accept any measures towards the outright elimination of slavery.” The local colonial administrators did however carry out policies to put a stop to slave trafficking and slave markets. During World War I, in order to meet quotas of troops to the French army, traditional chiefs supplied slaves to the colonial administration. In urban areas and settled communities with a strong French administrative presence, slavery and forced servitude were gradually ended, but in the rest of the country the practices remained active.
The article on the Convention in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica concludes, "The work of the Convention was immense in all branches of public affairs. To appreciate it without prejudice, one should recall that this assembly saved France from a civil war and invasion, that it founded the system of public education ("Museum", , , , ), created institutions of capital importance, like that of the , and definitely established the social and political gains of the Revolution." By a decree of 4 February 1794 (16 pluviôse) it also ratified and expanded to the whole French colonial empire the 1793 abolition of slavery on Saint-Domingue by civil commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel, though this did not affect Martinique or Guadeloupe and was abolished by the law of 20 May 1802.
In 17th century New France, now part of Canada, the universally accepted medium of exchange was the beaver pelt. As the colony expanded, coins from France came to be widely used, but there was usually a shortage of French coins. In 1685, the colonial authorities in New France found themselves seriously short of money. A military expedition against the Iroquois had gone badly and tax revenues were down, reducing government money reserves. Typically, when short of funds, the government would simply delay paying merchants for purchases, but it was not safe to delay payment to soldiers due to the risk of mutiny.
The Seven Years' War lasted between 1756–1763, arraying Prussia, Great Britain and Hanover (with the British king as its prince-elector) against Austria, France, Russia, Sweden, and most smaller German states. Spain was drawn into the conflict later in 1761, on the side of France. British colonies in the Americas were on this war, but had to pay long, heavy taxes. In that period, Spain lost control of Florida to Great Britain but recovered the territory years later during the Treaty of Paris 1789, receiving New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi River from the French instead.
New Orleans, where French colonists had established sugar cane plantations and exported sugar as the chief commodity crop, became nationally important as a slave market and port, as slaves were shipped from there upriver by steamboat to plantations on the Mississippi River; it also sold slaves who had been shipped downriver from markets such as Louisville. By 1840, it had the largest slave market in North America. It became the wealthiest and the fourth-largest city in the nation, based chiefly on the slave trade and associated businesses. The trading season was from September to May, after the harvest.
The American and French Revolutions had profound effects on the Spanish, Portuguese and French colonies in the Americas. Haiti, a French slave colony, was the first to follow the United States to independence, during the Haitian Revolution, which lasted from 1791 to 1804. Thwarted in his attempt to rebuild a French empire in North America, Napoleon Bonaparte sold Louisiana to the United States and from then on focused on the European theater, marking the end of France's ambitions of building a colonial empire in the Western Hemisphere.
Other powers to arrive in the Americas were the Swedes, Dutch, English, and French. The Dutch, English, and French all established colonies in the Caribbean and each established a small South American colony. The French established two large colonies in North America, Louisiana in the center of the continent and New France in the northeast of the continent. The French were not as intrusive as the Iberians were and had relatively good relations with the Amerindians, although there were areas of relatively heavy settlement like New Orleans and Quebec. Many French missionaries were successful in converting Amerindians to Catholicism. On North America's Atlantic coast, the Swedes established New Sweden. This colony was eventually conquered by the nearby Dutch colony of New Netherland (including New Amsterdam). New Netherland itself was eventually conquered by England and renamed New York. Although England's American empire began in what is today Canada, they soon focused their attention to the south, where they established thirteen colonies on North America's Atlantic coast. The English were unique in that rather than attempting to convert the Amerindians, they simply settled their colonies with Englishmen and pushed the Amerindians off their lands.
In early 18th-century, states Edward Alpers, the primary demand for slaves out of Makua people, and Mozambique in general, came not from Portugal or its Indian Ocean colonies such as Goa because labor was readily available in South Asia and Portuguese colonial empire in Asia was small. The largest demand came from the 'Umani Arabs seeking slaves for domestic labor and the French who lacked plantation workers but controlled nearby island colonies such as Comoros, Réunion, Madagascar, Seychelles, Isle de France (now Mauritius) and others. With the growth of Portuguese interests in Brazil and of plantation owners from other colonial empires in the Caribbean, North and South America, the demand for slaves grew dramatically. The Makua people were one of the major victims of this demand, slave capture and export that attempted to satisfy this demand.