Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (14 page)

regarding the treatment of slaves, were steadily undermined during the

eighteenth century. Attempting to counter the increasing size and power of

communities of free people of color, colonial administrators required mas-

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61

ters who freed their slaves to pay “liberty taxes,” and they gradually made

African ancestry a legal liability. In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, scattered discriminatory legislation against free people of color was system-

atized and expanded. A 1764 royal decree forbade people of African de-

scent to practice medicine, surgery, or pharmacy. The next year another

decree excluded them from working in legal professions or in the offices

of notaries. A 1773 law made it illegal for them to take the names of their

masters or white relatives, on the ground that such a practice destroyed

the “insurmountable barrier” which “public opinion” had placed between

the two communities and which government had “wisely preserved.” Un-

married women of color had to choose for their children names “drawn

from the African idiom, their profession, or color.” (The family of Julien

Raimond complied grudgingly by switching from the “Raymond” of their

French father to “Raimond.”) A 1779 regulation made it illegal for free

people of color to “affect the dress, hairstyles, style, or bearing of whites,”

and some local ordinances forbade them to ride in carriages or to own cer-

tain home furnishings. By the time of the Revolution free-coloreds were

subjected to a variety of laws that discriminated against them solely on the

basis of race.4

What had driven the transformation of Saint-Domingue from a rela-

tively open society into one saturated with racial discrimination? For

Raimond, the response was simple: sex. Early in the colony’s history, he

argued, the European men who came to the colonies “burning with the de-

sire to make a fortune” but “weakened by the heat of the climate, often

sick, and deprived of the aid wives of their own color could have given

them,” turned to “African women.” These slave women cared for them

assiduously, hoping to gain “the greatest recompense, their liberty.”

“These first whites,” Raimond explained, “lived with these women as if

they were married” and had children with them. Some freed the women

and married them, as the Code Noir stipulated whites who had children

with slaves should do. Many whites left land and slaves to their partners

and children. Indeed it was generally expected that they would do so, and

Saint-Domingue whites resisted royal attempts to institute laws outlawing

such bequests. As a result, a class of property-owning free people of color

emerged in the colony.5

From then on, wrote Raimond, the members of this group married one

another, “and the daughters married whites who arrived from France.”

Young white men who came to the colony to make their fortune “preferred

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marrying women of color, who had land and slaves as their dowry.” Julien

Raimond knew about this pattern from the experience of his parents. To

their marriage Pierre Raymond had brought little but his white skin; Marie

Bagasse brought three times more wealth than he did, as well as her exten-

sive family connections. Unlike her French husband, she was educated

enough to sign her name in the wedding contract. It was Bagasse’s eco-

nomic and social power that enabled the new couple to acquire plantations

and begin building the fortune that Raimond and his siblings inherited.6

There were those who were wary of such marriages and other unions

between white men and women of African descent. In 1723 the intendant

of Saint-Domingue wrote to request that French orphan girls be sent to

provide wives for young men who used the “lack of white women” as a

pretext to “stay in their libertinage with the
négresses,
” becoming seditious vagabonds instead of productive settlers. But despite the increasing

presence of European women in the colony over the next decades, there

remained powerful economic motivations for European men to connect

themselves with the free-colored community. “There was no dishonor in

seeing them, frequenting them, living with them, marrying their daugh-

ters,” wrote Raimond, especially the daughters “whose parents had be-

come rich.” But for the increasing number of French women who came to

the colony in the second half of the eighteenth century and were jilted by

white men in favor of women of color, jealousy quickly turned to racial ha-

tred. This animus, he argued, drove the expansion of racist laws.7

There were, according to Raimond, other sources of jealousy. Wealthy

free-coloreds sent their children to be educated in France (the Raimond

family sent several of theirs, including Julien), and when they returned

their refinement represented a sharp counterpoint to the “vices and igno-

rance of the whites of the island.” Educated free-coloreds “were looked

down upon because of their origin, because they could not be looked down

on for anything else.” Although “honest whites” continued to marry free

women of color, during the 1750s and 1760s several of those who did were

divested of positions as administrators or militia officers. Laws discourag-

ing interracial marriages were not uniformly applied, but they discouraged

many whites from marrying women of color, though not from continuing to

live and have children with them.8

Raimond’s brief history of racial prejudice, with its jealous white villains

and unceasingly virtuous free people of color, simplified and sexualized a

complex reality. But it did accurately highlight how economic tensions be-

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tween whites and free-coloreds had helped propel the creation of racist

law in the colony. Especially after the Seven Years’ War, when they came in

increasing numbers, white migrants to the colony found themselves com-

peting with the population of free-coloreds. Seeking to take advantage of

the expanding coffee economy, they often found “that the free-coloreds

were there before them”: many had settled in mountainous areas before

the coffee boom and established plantations on land they already owned.

Free-coloreds were familiar with Saint-Domingue and less prone to the

diseases that wiped out many European colonists within their first year.

When they needed help on their plantations, they drew on extensive fami-

lies rather than turning to paid employees. They invested for the long

term, slowly building up their land holdings, while fortune-seeking whites

often spent their money quickly only to find themselves in bankruptcy.

From generation to generation, many free-colored families secured planta-

tions and grew into wealthy owners of land and slaves, especially in the

south, where the Raimond family lived, and in the west. In Port-au-Prince

free-colored families made fortunes by purchasing seafront lots early on in

the area that became the town’s center. They were among the many suc-

cessful free-colored urban entrepreneurs in the colony.9

Whites and free-coloreds were not always at odds. In both the country-

side and the towns, social and economic relationships continued across the

color line throughout the eighteenth century. As policies of racial discrimi-

nation were put into place, some whites objected strenuously, foreseeing

(correctly, as it turned out) that these policies would weaken rather than

strengthen the colony. But as the eighteenth century progressed, racist

sentiments were increasingly buttressed by colonial administrators who,

driven by a desire to secure the loyalties of white residents of the colony,

encouraged racial division and hierarchy through the complex of discrimi-

natory laws that Raimond railed against. There was, such officials argued,

inevitable solidarity between free people of color and the enslaved, and

only by highlighting the difference between whites and people of African

descent, whatever their legal status, could the hierarchies necessary for the survival of slavery be maintained.10

At the same time colonial officials, confronting the refusal of white resi-

dents to serve in the standing militias, recruited free-coloreds to serve in

both military and police units. Ultimately men of African descent became

the majority in the armed forces of the colony, standing as a bulwark

against both external enemies and those within: the slave majority. The two

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

policies at first sustained each other: excluded from many avenues of eco-

nomic and social advancement, free men of African descent readily took

advantage of the possibilities opened up by service in the military and po-

lice forces. Ultimately, however, they would collide. For as they served as

defenders of the colony and of slavery, free men of color also challenged

and undermined white supremacy. This contradiction, and the ultimate in-

ability of whites to effectively negotiate it, would ignite the first fires of the Haitian Revolution.

In 1780 a 120-year-old man, Captain Vincent Ollivier, died in Saint-

Domingue. His life, an obituary proclaimed, would “serve as proof for

those who need it that a truly great soul, no matter what shell it inhabits,

is visible to all men and can silence even those prejudices that seem neces-

sary.” Ollivier was probably Saint-Domingue’s oldest black veteran. He

had lived through most of the colony’s history, and had gone from being a

slave to being a free man, an officer, and a respected community leader. In

1697 his master had volunteered to join the French expedition against

Cartagena, and had brought his slave Ollivier with him. Like other slaves

who participated in the mission, Ollivier obtained something more pre-

cious than loot: freedom. His journey home was a long one; taken prisoner

by the Spaniards, he was eventually ransomed to France, where he met

Louis XIV and fought in Germany. After returning to Saint-Domingue, he

was appointed captain-general of the colored militia of Le Cap by the gov-

ernor, and for the rest of his life he was called “Captain Ollivier,” appearing with his sword and wearing a feather in his hat. He was a frequent guest

among the high-ranking whites of Saint-Domingue. Moreau de St. Méry

celebrated Ollivier’s achievements, along with those of another ex-slave

veteran of the Cartagena expedition, Etienne Auba, who had been made a

captain of a unit of free blacks in 1723, and in 1779 was granted a military

pension. Like Ollivier, Auba always wore his uniform and sword in public.

He died the year after Ollivier, 100 years old.11

In 1779, a few years before Auba and Ollivier died, a French officer

came looking for recruits in Saint-Domingue. He was a former governor

of the colony, Charles d’Estaing, and was leading a French expedition

to help the rebels of the thirteen colonies on the North American mainland

in their struggle against Britain. The majority of those who ultimately

joined up were men of African descent. Among them were two of Vincent

Ollivier’s sons, and Ollivier enthusiastically supported d’Estaing’s mission

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65

by “recalling his past glories” to the volunteers. The expedition sailed north and attacked the British at Savannah. Although d’Estaing had ordered that

soldiers of African descent “be treated at all times like the whites,” they

were put to work digging trenches for the siege. Nevertheless, the free-col-

ored unit distinguished itself during the campaign, which ended in French

defeat, holding a line against the advancing British troops and defending

the retreat of d’Estaing’s force.12

The free-coloreds who supported the American Revolution were part

of a long military tradition. Like many other provinces of France, Saint-

Domingue had militia units through which inhabitants could be mobilized

for defense, but many whites—“status conscious and notoriously single-

minded in their pursuit of wealth”—resented and resisted militia service.

In the early eighteenth century, segregated free-colored militia units were

formed, and over time administrators came increasingly to depend on

them to assure the defense of the colony. The first free-colored army units

were formed during the Seven Years’ War, and although the several hun-

dred men who joined spent the war quietly along the border with Santo

Domingo, observers noted their value. Whereas many of the fresh French

troops who arrived in the colony during the war succumbed to tropical dis-

eases, the local free-colored troops remained healthy. When d’Estaing ar-

rived as governor a few years after the war, he introduced a plan to make

free-coloreds “the backbone of colonial defense.” All men of African de-

scent would be required to serve in the militia, without the right to pur-

chase exemptions as whites could. At the same time, d’Estaing declared it

would no longer be possible for free-coloreds to serve as officers in their

units—as Ollivier, Auba, and others had done for decades. To soften the ra-