Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (21 page)

that we cannot come to know,” Pierre Mossut wrote to Gallifet of the in-

surgents. “All experienced colonists know that this class of men have nei-

ther the energy nor the combination of ideas necessary for the execution of

this project, whose realization they nevertheless are marching toward with

perseverance.” Although many had been captured and questioned, “all ob-

served obstinate silence when questioned about who armed them and in-

cited this odious trance.” What was happening was impossible, and yet it

was happening before his very eyes. Other masters were also bewildered

by the success of the insurrection. “How could we ever have known that

there reigned among these men, so numerous and formerly so passive,

such a concerted accord that everything was carried out exactly as was de-

clared?” one asked. A revolution was under way, but no one—not its vic-

tims, not those who were marching across the northern plain of Saint-

Domingue seeking freedom and vengeance—knew how far it would go or

where it would take them.12

Just over a week before the insurrection began, on Sunday, August 14, 200

slaves gathered on the Lenormand de Mézy plantation in a parish called

Morne-Rouge. They were delegates from plantations throughout the cen-

tral region of the northern plain, including the parishes of Limbé, Petite-

Anse (where the Gallifet plantations were), Port Margot, Limonade, Plaine

du Nord, and Quartier Morin. There had been meetings like this before,

and in fact they were common enough that several planters had given their

slaves permission to attend what they described as a “dinner.” But this

meeting was special: final plans were made for a mass uprising.13

Most of the delegates at the meeting were privileged slaves, and many

of them were the drivers on their plantations. These men, of necessity

trusted by their masters, had a relative freedom of movement and were

leaders on the plantations. Because of their position, they generally carried swords that, meant to threaten the slaves, could also be used for other pur-f i r e i n t h e c a n e

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poses. Still, they were in a curious position, since while field slaves re-

spected (and also feared) them, they also might well have felt ambivalent

about having them as representatives. Acting as driver in the service of a

master was not the same thing as leading slaves against him, even if both

roles required similar qualities. Yet if anyone was capable of leading slaves in a coordinated and widespread revolt, it was these elite slaves, who came

as representatives of thousands and thousands of others back on their plan-

tations.14

All we know of the meeting comes to us from fragments of testimony.

One participant described how, during the meeting, a man—a “mulatto or

quartaroon”—read a statement announcing that the king and the National

Assembly in Paris had passed a decree abolishing use of the whip by mas-

ters and provided slaves three free days a week instead of two. Local mas-

ters and authorities, the statement added, were refusing to apply the new

decree, but luckily troops were on their way to the colony to force them to

do it. Like the rumor that had circulated in Martinique in 1789, this one

served to inspire and perhaps reassure potential insurgents. It also high-

lighted the possibility that, given the open conflict between local assem-

blies in Saint-Domingue and the National Assembly, the latter might be an

ally in the battle against local slave masters. The rumor was an effective call to arms, and it was productive in its own way. The powers in Paris had in

fact done nothing to improve the lot of the slaves, and were not about to,

but that would change once the slaves took action on their own.15

Several delegates at the meeting argued that they should wait for the ar-

rival of French troops before taking any action themselves. But others ar-

gued that they should rise up immediately. The revolt almost started that

night, but cooler heads prevailed and a more careful plan was finalized. It

required careful coordination among large numbers of slaves, who were to

rise up and start the burning and killing in unison. The date set for the

event was, as best we can tell, the night of Wednesday August 24. It was a

surprising choice; with remarkable consistency, slave conspirators in the

Americas during the eighteenth century planned their uprisings for Sun-

days or holidays, days when it was easier for slaves to circulate without in-

citing suspicion, and when they would not have to fight after a long day of

work in the fields. But on August 25 a meeting of the entire Colonial As-

sembly was scheduled in Le Cap. It would have been, as one historian

notes, “not only a day when the population of Le Cap would have been dis-

tracted by the big event, but also a unique opportunity to eliminate the en-

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tire political elite of Saint-Domingue.” The choice was a measure of their

ambition.16

In the week after the meeting of August 14 some slaves, unable to con-

tain themselves, carried out premature acts of rebellion. On the sixteenth,

for instance, slaves were caught setting fire to a building on a plantation in the Limbé parish, and under interrogation one told the plantation owner

that “all the drivers, coachmen, domestics, and confidential negroes” had

“formed a plot to set fire to the plantations and to murder all the whites.”

He named several slaves on the nearby plantation as fellow conspirators.

All the slaves on this plantation were gathered and asked if there was such

a plot. The slaves answered “with one voice” that this accusation was a “de-

testable calumny” and swore “inviolable attachment” to their manager. He

believed them, and, as one account lamented when it was too late, “his cre-

dulity has been our ruin.” Still, whites were aware that something was

afoot, even if they had no idea how extensive the conspiracy really was. For

the conspirators, weeks of planning, not to mention many lives, were on

the verge of being lost. So, starting with the attack against Mossut at La

Gossette, and then the uprisings in Acul, the revolt was set in motion early.

The insurrection was more fragmented and haphazard than the plan of the

fourteenth had envisioned. The early launching of the insurrection may

have short-circuited a plan for the slaves in Le Cap to rise up on August 25

as insurgents attacked from outside the town. The 1791 insurrection, for all

it ultimately achieved, might have been an even greater success.17

How was it that these slaves, at this time, were able to do what no other

group of slaves had ever done before or would again? What made their in-

surrection so powerful? The success of the insurrection lay in the capacity

of the conspirators to organize across plantations, bringing together slaves

separated by significant distances and working under the watchful eyes of

overseers and masters. The conspiracy required leadership and, just as im-

portantly, trust, for its discovery could have led to the capture and execu-

tion of the participants.

The most visible leader during the first days of the insurrection was

Boukman, who had worked first as a driver and then as a coachman.

Boukman was, it is believed, a religious leader, a role that would have

earned him respect among many slaves. Before the revolt, in the woods at

a place called Bois-Caïman, Boukman led conspirators in a religious cere-

mony. (Various accounts describe him officiating alongside an old African

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woman “with strange eyes and bristling hair” or else a green-eyed woman

of African and Corsican descent named Cécile Fatiman.) Although the ser-

vice is usually described as having taken place after the meeting on August

14, it probably took place on the following Sunday, August 21, at a planta-

tion halfway between those of Gallifet and Le Cap. It was a convenient

gathering place for slaves on their way back from the town’s markets. At

the ceremony Boukman apparently proclaimed: “The god of the white

man calls him to commit crimes; our god asks only good works of us. But

this god who is so good orders revenge! He will direct our hands; he will

aid us. Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our

tears and listen to the voice of liberty that speaks in the hearts of all of us.”

Those assembled took an oath of secrecy and revenge, sealed by drinking

the blood of a black pig sacrificed before them. It was a form of pact proba-

bly derived from the traditions of West Africa.18

Antoine Dalmas, the only person who wrote about Bois-Caïman at the

time, portrayed it as the ultimate expression of African barbarism. Dalmas

had served as a surgeon at the Gallifet plantation and survived the insur-

rection on the northern plain before fleeing into exile to the United States.

There, in 1793 and 1794, he wrote a memoir in which he described how

“before executing” the plan they had made at the August 14 meeting, the

conspirators had a “kind of celebration or sacrifice” in which “a black pig,

surrounded by fetishes, covered with offerings each one stranger than

the next, was the holocaust offered to the genius of the black race.” “The

religious ceremonies that the blacks practiced in slitting the pig’s throat,”

he continued, “the eagerness with which they drank its blood, the value

they placed on possessing some of its hairs—a kind of talisman that, ac-

cording to them, would make them invulnerable—serves to characterize

the African.” He concluded that “it was natural for such an ignorant and

stupid class to take part in the superstitious rituals of an absurd and bloody religion before taking part in the most horrible of assassinations.” Dalmas’s work—which, when it was finally published in 1814 was followed by an

essay arguing that the Haitian Revolution was illegitimate and that the

French should take back their former colony—is the only surviving ac-

count of the event written soon after it took place.19

Dalmas’s account was taken up by another writer, the French abolition-

ist Civique de Gastine, who added the (now canonical) detail that it was a

dark and stormy night. In 1824 a Haitian writer named Hérard Dumesle

penned a poetic description of the ceremony, drawing on oral accounts he

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heard during a journey in the region of Le Cap. Dumesle was a great lover

of classical Greek and Roman culture, and many of the details he ascribed

to the religious practices of the slaves—such as a divination based on

the entrails of the sacrificed pig, performed by a “young virgin”—would

have been more familiar in ancient Rome than in revolutionary Saint-

Domingue. But Dumesle’s text provided the earliest written version of the

speech given at the ceremony, although it did not attribute the speech to

Boukman, as later writers did. Over a decade later, another account of the

ceremony appeared through an interview with a man who recalled his par-

ticipation in it. Incorporated into a famous history of Haiti written by

Beaubroin Ardouin, this account mentioned an “oath” taken during the

ceremony.20

The story of the Bois-Caïman ceremony symbolizes the place religious

practice had in the slave insurrection. The insurrection of 1791 required

community and leaders, and there is little doubt that, in one way or an-

other, religious practices facilitated the process of its organization. Once

the insurrection began, religion helped inspire insurgents, and solidified

the power of certain leaders. One French soldier reported how insurgent

troops advanced to the tune of African music, or amidst a silence broken

only by the “incantations of their sorcerers.” Another contemporary de-

scribed how, as insurgents prepared to fight, religious leaders prepared

ouanga
(fetishes) and so “exalted the imagination of the women and children, who sang and danced like demons.” One young slave, Hyacinthe,

who became a leader in the Western Province, was a religious leader, and

carried a talisman made of horsehair into battle. And when insurgent lead-

ers were killed, ceremonies were held in their honor. One insurgent leader

was buried by the troops who had defeated him, but later “the negroes

took him up and buried him again with great pomp.” The invocation of the

mysterious ceremony at Bois-Caïman serves as shorthand for the complex

and varied presence of religion in the planning and execution of the insur-

rection.21

Though religious practices facilitated and spurred on insurrection, it

was only their combination with careful political organization that made

the 1791 uprising successful. The plantations and towns of the colony had

been the site of a productive and complex encounter between African tra-

ditions and Catholicism throughout the eighteenth century. But the dra-

matic social transformations brought about by the Revolution—the move-

ment away from plantations and into insurgent camps, the encounters

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between groups of slaves from different regions in a context of cultural lib-