Acts of enfranchisement required at first the sanction of the Government, until in 1682 the three sovereign courts of St. Christophe, Martinique, and Guadeloupe offered the project of a law which favored enfranchisements; it led to the articles upon that subject in the Edict of 1685, quoted above, which sought at once to restrain the license of masters and to afford them a legal way to be humane and just.[Q]
[Footnote Q: Other motives became influential as soon as the slaves discovered their advantages. A master in want of money would offer emancipation for a certain sum; the slave would employ every means, even the most illicit, to raise the amount upon which his or her freedom depended. A female slave would demand emancipation for herself or for some relative as her price for yielding to a master; attractive negresses wielded a great deal of power in this way. A great evil arose from testamentary acts of enfranchisement, or equivalent promises; for the slave in question would sometimes poison his master to hasten the day of liberty. On the other hand, many masters of the nobler kind emancipated their slaves as a reward for services: the rearing of six living children, thirty years of field or domestic labor without marooning, industry, economy, attachment, the discovery of a poisoning scheme or of an _émeute_, saving the life of a white person with great risk,--all these were occasional reasons for enfranchisement.]
In 1703 there were only one hundred and fifty freed persons in San Domingo. In 1711 a colonial ordinance proscribed every enfranchisement which did not have the approbation of the colonial government. The King sanctioned this ordinance in 1713, and declared that all masters who neglected the formality should lose their slaves by confiscation.
In 1736 the number of freed slaves, black and mulatto, was two thousand. The Government, alarmed at the increase, imposed a sum upon the master for each act of enfranchisement, in the hope to check his license. But the master evaded this and every other salutary provision; the place and climate, so distant from the Custom of Paris, where men dishonored only complexions like their own, lent occasion and immunity. Colonial Nature was more potent than paper restrictions. In 1750 there were four thousand freed persons.