Mulattos of St. Domingo |
General Advertiser
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Wednesday, 1792-03-14 (Number 455)
Souce: Professor of History John Garrigus (University of Texas, Arlington)
Are the motley breed of landholders, gentlemen adventurers, parsimonious merchants, factors, clerks, managers, and plantation-overseers from Europe. The progenitors of this yellow tribe were generally persons who came out from France and other parts of Europe, to make fortunes rapidly, return, and spend them under their native skies. During their stay in this delightful island, the pursuits of avarice were not sufficiently powerful to restrain them wholly from more natural pursuits. No immediate objects of gratification presented but the enslaved African female, who was therefore adopted vice spousa, and while she planted sugar canes on the mountain, or attended a herd of goats in the valley, contributed to people the island with a progeny, who were neither European or African, and felt no attachment to either, further than the interest or the more immediate prospect of advantage dictated.
Natural affection had still some influence where united paternal fondness had been rendered extremely weak from the unequal condition of the progenitors. Mulattoes were generally excused from the labors of the field. They were housekeepers, and clerks; they were houseboys, and poultry men; they were waiters at tables and taverns: they were fishermen, cooks, and turnspits; they were even bound out to mechanical trades, and in the general everything in the line of domestic employment, except field slaves, who are reckoned one of the most degraded classes in the islands, and absolutely placed on a level with the mules that turn the cattle mills…
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