Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (13 page)

was put on trial on the basis of the slaves’ denunciations. He defended

himself by arguing that if slaves saw planters punished on the basis of their testimony, there would be a breakdown of authority and, ultimately, a slave

revolution. Others agreed, and one man even suggested that each of the

slaves who had denounced Le Jeune should receive fifty lashes. The inves-

tigating officials who took over the case, on the other hand, argued that

punishing brutal planters was the only way to prevent an outbreak of revo-

lution: if the violence of planters was not kept in check, and if slaves found no recourse from the administration, they would have no option but violent vengeance. Ultimately, however, the officials bowed to pressure from

the planters, and Le Jeune was never punished.49

For fearful masters, Makandal came to symbolize the danger of a mass

uprising that would destroy the whites in the colony. One famous account

of his life described a speech he made to slaves, during which he placed

three scarves in a vase full of water—one yellow, one white, and one black.

The first symbolized the original inhabitants of the island, the second the

“present inhabitants.” Pulling out the third, he declared: “Here, finally, are those who will remain masters of the island: it is the black scarf.” A 1779

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memoir presented Makandal as a “Mohammed at the head of a thousand

exiled refugees” who, imagining “the conquest of the Universe,” had

planned to massacre all the whites in the colony. All that was lacking to

bring about a “general massacre” and “a revolution similar to that of Suri-

name or Jamaica” was a leader, “one of those men, rare in truth, but who

can emerge at any moment,” like Makandal, “whose name itself” made the

inhabitants of the Northern Province “tremble.” In 1801, in a “grand new

spectacle” presented in London, the romantic hero was a rebellious slave

named Makandal who declared himself “one unawed by fear.”50

Writers in France also prophesied the imminent emergence of a black

revolutionary leader. In his 1771 fable of time travel, Louis Sebastien

Mercier imagined waking up after a 672-year nap and finding himself in a

changed and perfected world. In one plaza he saw on a pedestal “a negro

his head bare, his arm outstretched, with pride in his eyes and a noble and

imposing demeanor.” Under the statue were the words “To the Avenger of

the New World!” Mercier learned that “this surprising and immortal man”

had delivered the world “from the most atrocious, longest, and most insult-

ing tyranny of all.” He had “broken the chains of his compatriots” and

transformed those “oppressed by the most odious slavery” into heroes. In

an “instant” they had “spilled the blood of their tyrants.” “French, Spanish, English, Dutch, Portuguese all fell prey to iron, poison, and flame. The soil of America avidly drank the blood that it had been awaiting for so long, and

the bones of their ancestors, murdered by cowards, seemed to stand up

and shake with joy.” The “Avenger” became a god in the New World and

was celebrated in the Old. “He came like a storm spreading across a city of

criminals that is about to be destroyed by lightning.” He was an “extermi-

nating angel,” granted power by justice and by God.51

The Abbé Raynal’s famous history of European colonialism, which went

through many printings in the 1770s and 1780s, contained a passage that

drew on Mercier’s vision. After critiquing the institution of slavery, the

work warned readers that the slaves did not need their masters’ “generosity

or advice” to break the “sacrilegious yoke of their oppression.” Already, it

noted, “two colonies of fugitive negroes have been established” in Jamaica

and Suriname and had won recognition of their freedom. These signs were

the lightning that announced the storm. “All that the negroes lack is a

leader courageous enough to carry them to vengeance and carnage,” the

work warned. “Where is he, this great man, that nature owes to its vexed,

oppressed, tormented children? Where is he? He will appear, do not doubt

f e r m e n ta t i o n

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it. He will show himself and will raise the sacred banner of liberty. This

venerable leader will gather around him his comrades in misfortune. More

impetuous than torrents, they will leave everywhere ineffaceable traces of

their just anger.” The “American fields,” the text continued, riffing off

Mercier, would get drunk on the blood that they had been awaiting “for so

long,” while the bones buried over the course of three centuries would

“shake with joy.” Monuments to this “hero who reestablished the rights of

the human species” would be erected in the New World and the Old. But

the Europeans might reap what they had sown: “the
Code Noir
will disappear, and the
Code Blanc
will be terrible, if the victors consult only the law of revenge!”52

The passages in Raynal and Mercier were intended as both indictment

and warning. Mercier appended a note to his powerful portrait of the

“Avenger,” spoken from the eighteenth-century present: “This hero will

probably spare the generous Quakers who have just granted liberty to their

negroes in a memorable and touching era that made me cry tears of joy,

and will make me detest those Christians who do not imitate them.” There,

was, then, a way to avoid carnage and revenge. Slavery must be abolished

by the Europeans, before the slaves abolished it—and their masters—

themselves.53

Such warnings developed out of a complex network of colonial adminis-

trators and Enlightenment intellectuals who came during the last decades

of the eighteenth century to believe that slavery had to be reformed and ul-

timately eliminated. Such thinkers saw clearly that the daily resistance of

slaves through poison, suicide, abortion, as well as
marronage
and revolt, and the violent response of the planters formed a cycle that had to be

stopped before it spun out of control. They were not particularly antiracist, and certainly not anticolonial—Mercier’s ideal world was one in which the

wastefulness of slavery in the Americas had been replaced by an empire in

which Africans grew sugarcane next to their own huts—but they believed

that slavery should be gradually replaced by other forms of labor. Enlight-

enment critiques of slavery attacked the institution as a violation of the natural rights that all human beings shared, and the warnings of Mercier and

Raynal suggested that, like all other oppressed peoples, the slaves had the

right to resist their oppressors violently.54

By the time the French Revolution began, both defenders and enemies

of slavery were evoking the specter of a large-scale uprising. As abolitionist activity accelerated in Paris, planters complained that antislavery writings

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av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

would encourage slaves to revolt by making them think they had allies. Ab-

olitionists retorted that in their cruelty and ignorance the planters were

leaving their slaves no choice but to revolt. The masters of the Caribbean,

wrote the comte de Mirabeau, were “sleeping at the foot of Vesuvius.” In

1789 the Abbé Grégoire echoed Raynal, declaring that “the cry of liberty”

was resounding in both the Old and New Worlds; all that was needed was

“an Othello, a Padrejean”—the latter a seventeenth-century slave rebel—

to awaken the enslaved to an understanding of their “inalienable rights”

and push them to violent revolt. But he backed up his claims about the

danger of slave revolt by quoting the words of a planter, an opponent of the

rights of free-coloreds, who wrote that 400,000 slaves in Saint-Domingue

were awaiting their opportunity to rise up. In the political theater, all sides constantly referred to the potential for revolution among the slaves. Yet despite all the talk of revolution, it was a shock when the slaves actually

launched one.55

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c h a p t e r t h r e e

Inheritance

Whatearthlypowercangiveitselftherightto

create unjust laws, when the Eternal itself has abstained from

doing so?” So asked Julien Raimond in a 1791 pamphlet trac-

ing the “origin and progress” of prejudice against free people of color in

Saint-Domingue. In unveiling this history, Raimond hoped to end it. Free

people of color, many of them wealthy planters, others serving in colonial

military or police units, had proven their value and loyalty to the French

regime, he argued. And yet they were being prevented by whites from par-

ticipating in the political assemblies of the colony. This act of racial prejudice went against everything the French Revolution stood for. Even Louis

XIV’s 1685 Code Noir had recognized that once they were no longer slaves,

free people of color had the “the right to citizenship.” “Will the National

Assembly be less just than a despot?”1

Raimond was educated, wealthy, and passionate in his struggle against

racial discrimination. Starting in the 1780s, he mounted a political struggle on behalf of the free-coloreds of Saint-Domingue by petitioning the head

of the Colonial Ministry in Paris. He remained a major political figure

through the turbulent years of the Revolution. He was also, in his own way,

a despot. Like many of those whose rights he was defending, he owned

slaves. His struggle for rights and the stubborn rejection of his proposals by the white planters of Saint-Domingue show both the absurdity and the

power of racial prejudice in the colony. Raimond and many other planters

had some African ancestry. Economically, culturally, and socially, they and

the white planters were in many ways natural allies. Yet white colonists,

convinced that slavery could be maintained only through discrimination

against free people of color, rejected their requests for political equality.

Julien Raimond’s father, Pierre, was born in the Languedoc region of

France and emigrated to Saint-Domingue in the early eighteenth century.

He settled in the south and married Marie Bagasse, the daughter of a local

planter. Bagasse was of mixed European and African descent, but when

the couple was married in 1726 she was not distinguished from Pierre in

terms of race. Throughout the early eighteenth century, many individuals

of African descent in the Southern Province were counted as white in cen-

suses, and when they drew up legal documents they were rarely described

with racial terms. This state of affairs changed in the 1760s. Bagasse began

to be identified consistently as a
mulâtresse
(mulatto) in notarial documents, while the young Julien Raimond was described as a “quadroon”—a

person of one-quarter African ancestry. In the parish of Aquin, where the

Raimond family lived, there was a remarkable surge in the free-colored

population not because of a baby boom or migration, but because adminis-

trators began applying racial terms where they had not done so before. In-

dividuals and families were in effect transformed from white to mulatto or

quadroon.2

The emergence of racial terminology in the legal sphere was part of

the broader progress of racial discrimination during the decades before

the Haitian Revolution. The 1685 Code Noir declared that emancipation

was the legal equivalent to “birth in our islands,” and therefore granted

the
affranchi
—the freed individual—the same rights as those born in the kingdom, even if they had been born in “foreign lands.” Still, certain stipulations differentiated the
affranchis
from other free individuals. They were enjoined to show respect to their former masters, and they could be reenslaved as punishment for certain crimes. These provisions, however, ap-

plied only to the individual who had been freed, not to his or her children;

they were linked to the person’s legal trajectory from slavery to freedom,

and not to their ancestry. There was, in principle, no discrimination solely

on the basis of African descent or skin color. Although they probably expe-

rienced racial discrimination in their day-to-day lives, free people of Afri-

can descent could buy land and slaves, live in any neighborhood in the

towns, educate themselves in any school, and practice any profession they

wished.3

The Code Noir’s stipulations about emancipation, however, like those