Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (27 page)

proached individually by the insurgents, responded in a similar vein: “Do

not believe that the whites, and especially the members of an assembly of

representatives from the colony, would lower themselves so far as to re-

ceive conditions dictated and demanded of them by their rebel slaves.” He

demanded, before any negotiation could take place, a complete end to hos-

tilities, the release of all prisoners, the return of all plantation slaves to their plantations, the disarmament of all “negroes,” and the surrender of

all their weapons. As one of the commissioners noted months later, a ma-

jor opportunity to end the slave insurrection was lost. The assembly was

clearly incapable of confronting the actual situation on the island. Hav-

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

ing summarily rejected the entreaties of the “brigands,” and with Saint-

Domingue smoking around them, they engaged in an interminable debate

about whether to call themselves a “General Assembly,” as they had be-

fore, or a “Colonial Assembly,” as they eventually did.28

The commissioners, more receptive to the proposals of the insurgent

leaders, tried to salvage the negotiations. But Jean-François and Biassou’s

letters began to take a harsher tone. They warned the commissioners that

neither “searching for the authors” of the revolt nor “deploying the forces

that the nation has put under your command” would lead to peace in the

colony. Those who had demanded that the rebels return to the plantations

clearly did not understand “the nature of the revolution”: “One hundred

thousand men are in arms,” they declared. “Eighty percent of the popula-

tion” of the north had risen up. Jean-François and Biassou explained that

they were “entirely dependent on the general will” of this mass of insur-

gents. This will was defined by the “multitude” of African slaves. Only the

insurgent leaders and officers selected for either “their influence over the

negroes” or “the fear they inspire in them” would be able to bring these

men back to the plantations. And only they, backed by the presence of

royal troops, could successfully pursue those who refused. If the commis-

sioners agreed to the conditions they had set, however, the fortunes of the

colony could be “reborn out of their ashes.” The commissioners met with

Jean-François to discuss the terms of an agreement. The encounter started

off poorly when a planter accompanying the commissioners stepped for-

ward and struck the resplendent leader as if he were a misbehaving slave.

Jean-François stepped back among his troops, but one of the commission-

ers walked into the group of “irritated blacks” and secured an arrangement

by which white prisoners would be released and brought to Le Cap. Jean-

François asked that his wife, who was imprisoned in the town, be released

in return.29

The original offers made by the insurgent leaders made only vague ref-

erence to a reform in slavery, emphasizing the amnesty and the limited

“liberties” to be granted. But Jean-François and Biassou were clearly un-

der pressure from those in the camps to wrest more significant concessions

from the governors of the colony. In one letter to the commissioners, they

passed on some “representations made to us by the negro slaves,” who em-

phasized that they would not return to the plantations without being prom-

ised significant reforms. They complained of “the bad treatment they re-

ceive from their masters, most of whom make themselves the executioners

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of their slaves, mistreating them with all kinds of torments, taking away

their two hours [of free time], their holidays and Sundays, leaving them na-

ked, with no care when they are sick, letting them die of misery.” Jean-

François and Biassou agreed that there were many “barbarous masters”

who took pleasure in “exercising cruelties on their miserable slaves,” and

administrators and managers who, in order to stay in the good graces of the

plantation owners, committed “a thousand cruelties against the slaves.”

They asked the commissioners to take steps to assure that the slaves would

no longer be treated so poorly, and to abolish the “horrible
cachots
” in which slaves were imprisoned on the plantations. “Try to improve the situation of this group of men who are so necessary to the colony, and we dare

assure you that they will go back to work, and return without resistance to

their duty.” Propelled by the “general will” in the camps, Jean-François

and Biassou asked for minor reforms, similar to those put forth by the royal

government in the 1780s that had been vehemently opposed by planters.

The situation, of course, was different, and they perhaps hoped that, when

faced with a mass uprising, slave masters would be willing to make some

concessions. Although there was already talk of a “general liberty,” Jean-

François and Biassou, like most European abolitionists of the time, pur-

sued the goal of reforming slavery rather than dismantling it.30

They were, however, being carried along by a revolution. As negotia-

tions progressed, many among the “multitude” in the camps became suspi-

cious of their leaders. Some openly menaced the prisoner Gros, knowing

that as Jean-François’s secretary he was facilitating communication with

the whites, while others threatened the “mulattoes” they believed were be-

hind the negotiations. They made clear that they would resist, forcefully if

necessary, any negotiation aimed at making them return to the plantations.

When a delegation of leaders, including Toussaint, marched to Le Cap to

bring the white prisoners to the commissioners, they were stopped on the

way by a crowd of “negroes,” who, as Gros described it, “swords in hand,

threatened to send only our heads to Le Cap, swearing against peace and

against their generals.” Only the firmness of the escorts saved the whites.31

In the end, although the prisoners were exchanged as planned, the ne-

gotiations broke down soon afterward. The September 24 decree made it

difficult for the commissioners who brought it to override the decisions

of the assembly, which technically controlled “internal” affairs in the col-

ony. No deal materialized. If it had, it might in any case have provoked

open hostilities between the “multitude” of insurgents and their leaders.

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By mid-January the insurgents under the command of Jean-François and

Biassou were attacking again. They captured the district of Ouanaminthe,

on the border with Spanish Santo Domingo, and attacked the outskirts of

Le Cap. Biassou attacked the hospital outside the town of Le Cap to free

his mother, who was a slave there. The sick who were left behind were

killed by the attackers. For the time being, there seemed no end in sight to

the “exterminating war.”32

By November news of the slave insurrection was arriving steadily in France

through official correspondence as well as personal letters. Planter repre-

sentatives demanded a massive shipment of troops to suppress the revolt,

and assailed the Société des Amis des Noirs with accusations that it had in-

cited the slaves to revolt. The society’s correspondent in England, Thomas

Clarkson, wrote a pamphlet refuting this idea; slave revolts, he noted, had

existed in every slave society going back to Greece and Rome, long before

there were abolitionists. The “real cause” of the insurrection, he insisted,

was the “Slave Trade.” As long as it continued, revolts were inevitable, and

far from being a reason to stop abolitionist efforts, they were a reason to

“redouble” them. In Paris the revolutionary firebrand Jean-Paul Marat

presented a different kind of defense for the revolt. If the white residents

of Saint-Domingue had the right to reject “laws emanating from a legisla-

tor who was two thousand leagues away” and to proclaim independence, as

he believed they did, the other groups in the colony also had, like all hu-

man beings, the right to resist oppression. The whites had made them-

selves “despotic masters of the mulattoes and tyrannical masters of the

blacks,” and if the latter wished to “overthrow the cruel and shameful yoke

under which they suffer, they are authorized to use any means available,”

even “massacring their oppressors to the last.”33

But the violence of the revolt also repelled some in Paris. Olympe de

Gouges, whose 1789 play had celebrated slave resistance and white-black

friendship, was shocked by the violence of the uprising and admonished

the slaves. When in their “blind rage” they failed to “distinguish between

innocent victims and your persecutors,” they justified their tyrants by imi-

tating them. “Men were not born in irons,” she lamented, “and now you

prove them necessary.” French abolitionists were clearly in a bind: the

group’s careful plans for reform, too much for many whites, were also

clearly too little for the slaves. Superseded by the events in the colonies,

and with many of its members finding themselves in increasing political

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trouble in the midst of the unfolding revolutionary events in Paris, the

Société des Amis des Noirs soon ceased its regular meetings, though its

founder, Brissot, remained active in colonial politics.34

“What will stop the revolt of the slaves in Saint-Domingue?” asked a

deputy in the National Assembly in March 1792. Brissot and other aboli-

tionists had long insisted they had the answer: the free people of color.

With the news of the uprising arriving in Paris, the arguments in favor

of racial equality at last carried the day. Brissot and some of his allies

gained control of the Colonial Ministry. They blamed the planters for the

revolt and, publicizing the overtures some of them had made to the Brit-

ish, painted them as dangerous counterrevolutionaries. The only way to

save the colony, they argued successfully, was to give political rights to the free-coloreds. Their victory was facilitated by the increasingly radical tone of the Revolution in France, and by the looming possibility of war with

Great Britain, but it was driven by the events in Saint-Domingue, and

based on the principle of the “Concordats” signed between whites and

free-coloreds there. The argument about free-coloreds’ political rights, as

Robin Blackburn notes, “had been transformed by the sight of the smoke

rising from burnt-out plantation buildings and cane fields.”35

On April 4, 1792, the National Assembly declared: “the
hommes de

couleur
and the
nègres libres
must enjoy, along with the white
colons,
equality of political rights.” They would be allowed to vote in local elections and be eligible for all positions if they had met the financial criteria for “active” citizenship. The decree was presented as a way of responding

to the “the uprising of the slaves”; it noted that the “unity” of citizens

was “the only thing that can preserve their property from pillage and fire.”

The “odious conspiracy” of counterrevolutionary planters was, the law de-

clared, “linked to the projects of conspiracy against the Nation of France,

which are about to explode simultaneously in the two hemispheres.” But

the Republic would triumph against its enemies by granting equality to

those who had been excluded, and by integrating these “new citizens” into

the nation. From that day forward, there would be only two categories of

people in the colonies, free and enslaved; and there would be no racial dis-

tinctions among the free. It was a dramatic step. In the heart of the slave

societies of the Americas, legal distinctions on the basis of race were out-

lawed. With free-coloreds so numerous in Saint-Domingue, the decree as-

sured that people of African descent would have significant political power.

The slave insurgents of Saint-Domingue had expanded the political hori-

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zon in a paradoxical way, making it necessary to grant racial equality in or-

der to save slavery.36

A new set of commissioners was sent to Saint-Domingue to apply this

decree, and given the power to dissolve the existing assemblies and oversee

the formation of new, racially integrated ones. Like the commissioners sent

in 1791, they faced the daunting task of bringing order to a colony at war

with itself. Unlike those who preceded them, however, they would use

their power against that of the white planters of Saint-Domingue and ally

themselves with the newly enfranchised free-coloreds. But in the end the

commissioners would carry out a mission very different from that which

they had been handed. Accompanied by a law and by a convoy of troops

meant to put an end to the slave insurrection, they would instead end up

embracing it and its demand for liberty.

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