Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (24 page)

standard reference for later histories of the revolution. The insurrection,

he wrote, had produced “horrors of which imagination cannot adequately

conceive nor pen describe” and a “picture of human misery” that “no other

country, no former age, has exhibited”: “Upwards of one hundred thou-

sand savage people, habituated to the barbarities of Africa, avail them-

selves of the silence and obscurity of the night, and fall on the peaceful and unsuspicious planters, like so many famished tygers thirsting for human

blood.” Death awaited “alike the old and the young, the matron, the virgin,

and the helpless infant,” and within “a few dismal hours the most fertile

and beautiful plains in the world are converted into one vast field of car-

nage;—a wilderness of desolation!”40

But Edwards also described an “unexpected and affecting” act by a slave

who saved his owners, Mr. and Mrs. Baillon, and members of their family.

This slave, “who was in the conspiracy,” hid them in the woods and brought

them provisions from a nearby insurgent camp during the first days of the

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uprising. After they failed to make it to nearby Port Margot in a canoe he

had found for them, the slave “appeared like a guardian angel” and es-

corted them to sanctuary in the town. In contrast to the stories of black

atrocity, which Edwards presented without indicating from whom they

came, this story of black heroism required a footnote: he explained that he

had learned the story secondhand, from a friend who had heard it from

Madame Baillon herself. This perhaps explains why his version differed

from that presented in another account of the same event, which identified

the insurgent in question as “one of the negro generals,” a man named Paul

Blin. (Blin, an overseer on a plantation in Limbé, did play an important

role in the planning and execution of the insurrection.) In this version, Blin helped the family only at the insistence of his wife (who was the Baillons’

nurse), and led them to a rickety boat only so that they would die in a man-

ner less horrible than that “prepared for the unhappy family” by the insur-

gents. Whatever the truth was, Blin ultimately paid the price for having

gained a reputation for mercy. The notorious insurgent leader Jeannot had

Blin brutally killed under the pretext of treason because he had heard the

story of the assistance he had given to white planters.41

Stories about insurgent slaves saving white masters powerfully high-

lighted the drama of a world turned upside down, and raised the question

of how the contorted human relationships developed in slavery would be

transformed in a new context. Having long justified slavery as a relatively

benign system, and taken comfort in the relations of kindness and charity

they imagined they had with certain privileged slaves, many planters were

shocked by the sudden transformation of these men and women into dan-

gerous enemies. What made the “horrors” of the insurrection even worse

was the betrayal of especially trusted slaves such as drivers and domestics.

One account lamented that it was the slaves “which had been most kindly

treated by their masters” that were “the soul of the Insurrection.” “It was

they who betrayed and delivered their human masters to the assassins’

sword: it was they who seduced and stirred up to revolt the gangs disposed

to fidelity.” It was a “heart-breaking discovery” to the planters, who would

see nothing but despair in the future were it not for certain acts of “invinci-ble fidelity” by certain slaves. Such loyal slaves had received their liberty in thanks, but—and this was crucial—this liberty was “the gift of their masters.” Seeking to hold onto a world that was burning all around them, white

masters sought relief in stories of fidelity that provided the consoling mi-

rage that their world could once again be as it had been.42

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The insurgents of 1791 were enormously diverse—women and men, Af-

rican-born and creole, overseer and fieldworker, slaves on mountain coffee

plantations and sugar plantations—and carried with them many different

motivations, hopes, and histories. Using violence against a violent system,

they shattered the economy of one of the richest regions of the world. Dur-

ing the first eight days of the insurrection they destroyed 184 plantations;

by late September over 200 had been attacked, and “all of the plantations

within fifty miles of either side of le Cap had been reduced to ashes and

smoke.” In addition, almost 1,200 coffee plantations in the mountains sur-

rounding the plain had been sacked. According to one observer, “one can

count as many rebel camps as there were plantations.” Estimates of the

numbers of insurgents varied widely, but by the end of September there

were at least 20,000, and by some estimates up to 80,000, in the insurgent

camps.43

“They are spurred on by the desire of plunder, carnage, and con-

flagration, and not by the spirit of liberty, as some folks pretend,” one white merchant wrote of the insurgents. But plundering masters’ homes, destroying the infrastructure of the plantations on which they were enslaved,

and killing those who had enslaved them were powerful ways to pursue lib-

erty. Indeed, they were the only ways available to most of the slaves. We

can only imagine the exuberance and exhilaration the rebels must have felt

as they took vengeance, turned the tables on their masters, and saw, per-

haps for the first time, the extent of their power. We can only imagine, too, the wrenching pull of divided loyalties that many must have experienced,

between staying with families on plantations and leaving with insurgent

groups, between participating in a revolt that might very well lead to their

brutal execution and trying to stay neutral in the midst of a war, between

serving masters and hoping for rewards and fighting for an uncertain lib-

erty. For what lay ahead was profoundly uncertain. The insurgents knew

they would have to continue to fight French forces in order to hold on to

what they had gained. But what might victory look like? What would it take

to turn Saint-Domingue into a place where they could live with hope and

possibility?44

For one slave of the Gallifet plantation, the insurrection had ironic con-

sequences. In February 1791 Marie-Rose Masson had given Odeluc 3,342

livres. It was what a slave trader would ask for the purchase of two babies,

and it was the price of Masson’s freedom and that of her mother. Masson’s

father was the man who had preceded Odeluc as the manager of the plan-

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tations, and who had died soon after she was born. Odeluc had raised her,

and agreed in 1787 to let her buy her liberty, but it took her four years to

amass the required money. When she paid him in February, he gave her a

receipt but put off signing the emancipation papers. Then, in August, he

was killed at La Gossette. Masson, perhaps because she was so close to

gaining her liberty, did not join the insurrection, and remained in the ser-

vice of Odeluc’s replacement, Mossut. He, however, refused to acknowl-

edge the agreement she had made, and kept Masson and her mother as

slaves. The insurrection, in killing Odeluc, had taken away the purchased

freedom of these two slaves, even as all around her other slaves powerfully

demonstrated the freedoms they had seized from their masters. It is un-

likely that Mossut, Masson, or the insurgents who surrounded them could

imagine that within two years there would no longer be any slaves in Saint-

Domingue.45

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c h a p t e r f i v e

New World

In early september 1791MadamedeRouvraywrotetoher

daughter from a very different world. She was comparatively lucky.

Her slaves had not rebelled, and no insurgents had reached her plan-

tation. Her husband, the marquis de Rouvray, was leading troops that

had kept the insurgents out of the region. Still, Madame de Rouvray an-

nounced resolutely that they would have to leave Saint-Domingue, “for

how can one stay in a country where slaves have raised their hands against

their masters?” They might go to Havana, where they could find land and

rebuild a plantation with their slaves—“if we are lucky enough to preserve

them from the contagion.” If it became impossible to live as slave masters

in Saint-Domingue, Cuba would have to do—even if its customs were

“quite opposed to our own.”1

While the marquis de Rouvray was fighting insurgents in the eastern

part of the northern plain of Saint-Domingue, an officer named Anne-

Louis de Tousard, a veteran of the American Revolution, was leading

troops south of Le Cap. Tousard had led a first attack on two plantations in

Acul on August 24 and 25, though he made little headway against the 3,000

to 4,000 insurgents concentrated there. By late September, however, he

had achieved several victories. On the twenty-third he surprised a group

on one plantation and quickly routed them with “a great slaughter.” A

counterattack by the insurgents, among them “cavalry commanded by king

Jeannot,” was pushed back by “well-directed fire.” Two days later the in-

surgents were again defeated after they charged three times but were

driven back “with great loss.”2

Since the beginning of the insurrection, the main Gallifet plantation had

grown into a fortified base from which frequent raids were launched. In

late September about 900 troops under Tousard’s command attacked be-

fore dawn and soon overran the camp. Most of those who had been living

there had fled a few days before, carrying “an immense quantity of valu-

able effects.” Most of the 2,000 who had stayed behind were old, sick, or

simply wished “for an opportunity to escape; being reduced to an allow-

ance of two bananas a day” in the insurgent camp. The attackers, however,

“had orders to give no quarter to men, women or children,” and once they

took the camp a “horrid carnage ensued.” As the soldiers ransacked and

burnt the buildings, the “many sick, and old negroes” they encountered

“were all either destroyed in the fire or by the sword.” The troops freed

several white prisoners and found proof that the insurgents were receiving

aid from the Spanish: a cannon with a Spanish inscription and a letter from

a commander named Don Alonzo.3

Despite such successful attacks, the insurgents survived. They were “re-

pulsed but not dispersed,” and as they held on to their weapons they

“learned better each day how to use them.” An October report described

how the insurgents, who “in the beginning made their attacks with much

irregularity and confusion,” armed for the most part only with “instru-

ments of labor,” “now come in regular bodies, and a considerable part of

them are well armed with the muskets, swords, &c. which they have taken

and purchased.” They marched “by the music peculiar to the negroes”

and began fighting “with a considerable degree of order and firmness,

crying out Victory!” Before them they flew a “bloody banner” with the

motto “death to all whites!” “We were crushed by this war,” recalled one

soldier.4

It had become an “exterminating war.” Because of the indiscriminate

killing of slaves by French troops, many who might have opted for the rela-

tive safety of their plantations fled to the insurgent camps. There was little room for neutrality. “The country is filled with dead bodies, which lie un-buried. The negroes have left the whites, with stakes, &c. driven through them into the ground; and the white troops, who now take no prisoners,

but kill everything black or yellow, leave the negroes dead upon the field.”

The two sides were at a gory stalemate. “The heads of white prisoners,

placed on stakes, surrounded the camps of the blacks, and the corpses of

black prisoners were hung from the trees and bushes along the roads that

led to the positions of the whites.” And the insurgents were still holding

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out after several months. As Madame de Rouvray wrote: “We kill many of

them, and they seem to reproduce themselves out of their ashes.”5