Léogâne

Where is Léogâne?

Léogâne lies on the north coast of Haiti’s long southern peninsula, facing the Gulf of Gonâve, about 32 kilometres (20 miles) west of Port-au-Prince. Unlike many colonial ports, it kept its name: the town is still called Léogâne today. British writers of the 1790s called this stretch of coast the “Bight of Léogâne”, a bight being a wide bay.

In the game’s years the western third of Hispaniola was the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which became Haiti. Behind the town spread a fertile farming plain, the plain of Léogâne.

Who lived at Yaguana before the French?

Long before Europeans arrived, this coast belonged to Xaragua (also spelled Jaragua), one of the Taíno chiefdoms of Hispaniola. Its main town, Yaguana, stood on or near the site of Léogâne. Anacaona, a Taíno noblewoman who came to lead Xaragua, was born there.

In 1503 the Spanish governor Nicolás de Ovando came to Xaragua and was welcomed as a guest. During the visit his men seized and killed dozens of the chiefs who had gathered to meet him. Anacaona was taken to Santo Domingo and hanged, in 1503 or 1504. The friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who condemned Spanish cruelty, is the main early source for these events.

How did the French build Léogâne?

In the later 1600s French settlers spread from the old buccaneer island of Tortuga onto the coasts of Hispaniola. Bertrand d’Ogeron, later governor of Tortuga, founded the first small settlement at Léogâne, and around 1665 it had at least 120 men. By 1680 a sugar works, a mill for crushing cane and boiling the juice, was already running on the plain.

In 1695 the governor Jean-Baptiste Ducasse chose to live at Léogâne rather than at Port-de-Paix on the north coast. Two years later the Treaty of Ryswick ended a war between France and Spain, and Spain accepted France’s hold on western Hispaniola. After that the French laid out and developed the town.

Was Léogâne the capital of Saint-Domingue?

In practice it was the centre of government around 1715, though sources describe it differently. A dealer’s description of a 1785 town plan calls it “the early capital”, while Britannica calls it simply an administrative centre of the colony.

What the records show is this. Saint-Domingue had two superior councils, high courts that also registered the king’s laws: one at Cap-Français for the north and one in the west. The western council began at Petit-Goâve and took Léogâne’s name in 1697. It moved between the two towns several times: it settled in the present town of Léogâne in March 1713, went back to Petit-Goâve in 1723, and returned to Léogâne in 1738. When a new governor-general, Léon de Sorel, arrived in 1719, he was received first by the council at Le Cap and then by the council at Léogâne.

The colony’s top officials lived and died there. The governor Valernod died at Léogâne in 1711, and the intendant Montholon, who ran the colony’s money and supplies, died there in 1725. So the best short answer is that Léogâne was the governor’s usual home and the seat of the western council, while Le Cap was the leading town of the north.

Who worked the sugar estates around Léogâne?

The wealth of the plain was produced by enslaved Africans, brought across the Atlantic against their will and forced to grow and process sugar under brutal conditions. The historian Jeremy Popkin gives these counts for the whole colony:

• 1715: about 35,500 enslaved people and 6,700 white colonists
• 1730: about 79,500 enslaved people

So in the game’s years the number of enslaved people more than doubled. The sources give no separate count for Léogâne itself.

Under a system called the Exclusif, colonists were meant to buy only from French merchants and sell only to France. Plantations grew crops for sale, so the colony depended on ships for much of its food and building timber, such as lumber. Popkin describes a lively smuggling trade, especially from the south coast, with other Caribbean islands and with Britain’s North American colonies.

Why did Port-au-Prince replace Léogâne?

Neither Léogâne nor Petit-Goâve sat in the middle of the colony, and later accounts say Léogâne was seen as hard to defend. In 1749 the French founded a new town at Port-au-Prince, on the bay to the east, and made it the seat of government. The western council moved there on 3 July 1752.

Léogâne carried on as a farming town and one of the chief towns of the West province. A great earthquake in 1770 destroyed it, and it was rebuilt. A French surveyor mapped the town and its surroundings in 1785, when it lay in one of the colony’s most productive farming districts, and the town was known in that later period for its theatre companies.

What happened at Léogâne in the Haitian Revolution?

After the great uprising of enslaved people in the north in August 1791, fighting spread to the west and south. Near Léogâne, a free person of colour named Romaine Rivière, a coffee grower at Trou Coffy in the hills, became a religious leader known as Romaine-la-Prophétesse. Thousands joined the movement, many enslaved people were freed, and under a treaty of December 1791 Romaine’s followers controlled Léogâne for a time. The movement collapsed in March 1792. The historian Terry Rey has written the main study of Romaine’s life.

In 2010 Léogâne lay close to the centre of the earthquake that struck Haiti, and nearly all of its buildings were destroyed or badly damaged.