By the 19th century, slaves made up about 90% of the population, and most of those slaves were African-born because the brutal living and working conditions prevented natural population growth. Like, remember Alfred Crosby's fantastic line, it is crudely true that if man's caloric intake is sufficient, he will somehow stagger to maturity and he will reproduce? Yeah, well, not in 18th century Haiti, thanks to yellow fever and smallpox and just miserable working conditions. So most of these plantations were pretty large. They often had more than 200 slaves, and many of the field workers, in some cases a majority, were women. The French society in San Domingo was divided into four groups, which had important consequences for the revolution. At the top were the big white planters, who owned the plantations and all the slaves.