Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (32 page)

lution,” she was inconsolable. She was the mother of three children “of her

color,” a fact that proved not only her “wisdom” but also her “virtue.”

“What
citoyenne
can claim to have, as she has, accepted only the caresses of those similar to her?” Jolicoeur powerfully reversed the common hierarchy of racial terms by calling himself “black” and dismissing the term

citoyen de couleur.
And he based the claim that Zaïre was qualified for freedom by highlighting her refusal to participate in interracial sex, which

he presented as ubiquitous in the old world of the colony. Her loyalty to

her race became proof of her “wisdom” and “virtue.”46

Meanwhile, in March 1793 a boat called
La Nouvelle-Société
came to

anchor in the harbor of Le Cap. Outfitted in Nantes, it had just made

the crossing from the Zaire River, on the “Angola coast,” and had a “beauti-

ful” cargo of 331 slaves for sale. Slave imports into Saint-Domingue had

dropped dramatically since their peak of nearly 50,000 in 1790; fewer than

10,000 were brought in by French slavers during the course of 1792. Yet

even with many of its cane fields turned to ash, there were still African

men and women being brought to the colony in chains.47

d e f i a n c e

151

c h a p t e r s e v e n

Liberty’s Land

Inearly1793anewwarcametoSaint-Domingue:animperialwar.

In January Louis XVI was executed in Paris, and the next month the

monarchies of Spain and Britain declared war against France, joining

Austria, which had done so the year before. All the Republic’s borders

were now battlefields. It was a new kind of war, for the outnumbered

French government responded with a mass mobilization of soldiers. It was

also an Atlantic war, for soon the Caribbean was swept up in the battle over

the fate of the Republic.

Though wounded by slave insurrection and internal warfare, Saint-

Domingue remained an extremely valuable colony. But given the dif-

ficulties of colonial warfare and the susceptibility to disease of European

troops, both Spanish and English military leaders understood that the

best way—perhaps the only way—to conquer Saint-Domingue was to

take advantage of the internal dissension there and to rally part of the pop-

ulation to their side. They hoped to “gain an enormous prize at relatively

little cost.” In another island, or at another time, this objective would have involved inviting the white planters into alliance. But in Saint-Domingue

in 1793, power was fragmented, and the slave insurgents, as well as the

armed free-coloreds, were just as important as potential allies as the di-

vided white population. Indeed, “as soon as war was declared, all parties

immediately looked to the slaves for assistance.”1

For the Spanish, the war presented an opportunity to regain the colony

they had lost a century before. Since 1791, Spanish residents and officers

along the border had been in consistent if informal contact with the slave

insurgents under the command of Jean-François and Biassou. After war

was declared in 1793, officials in Madrid ordered the governors of Spanish

Santo Domingo to recruit slave insurgents as “auxiliary troops,” offering

them freedom and land in return for military service. Although there was a

long tradition of arming slaves in the Spanish Americas, this decision was a

“daring experiment.” Rather than inviting the enslaved to serve for liberty,

the Spanish were calling on “people who had effectively already freed

themselves.” These were experienced and independent bands of fighters,

and they would prove difficult to control and dominate once they had been

recruited. Still, the policy was initially a success. By May and June 1793

Jean-François and Biassou had brought upward of 10,000 soldiers to the

Spanish side. The Spanish were able to keep their own troops in reserve,

stationing them for the most part along the border, while their “auxiliaries”

did the fighting for them. Meanwhile Spanish aid breathed new life into

the insurgent army, helping it to recover from the losses suffered during

the previous months.2

The British cultivated other allies. Since 1791, white planters had made

several overtures to the British government, and some had aired the possi-

bility of handing the colony to an imperial power whose commitment to

maintaining slavery seemed much stronger than that of the French Repub-

lic. The outbreak of war provided an opportunity to concretize these plans.

In late February 1793 a group of French planters in London drew up a de-

tailed proposal offering to transfer their allegiance to the British govern-

ment in return for protection and a suspension of debts. In the Caribbean,

meanwhile, exiled French planters in Jamaica, as well as those chafing un-

der the commissioners’ rule in Saint-Domingue, talked of calling in the

British. Many planters were shocked by the execution of the king, and in

early 1793 a group of refugees in Jamaica publicly burned tricolor symbols

and effigies of Republican leaders. It seemed to many that the French Re-

public, besieged by the great powers of Europe, was doomed, and that

therefore British control would be temporary, with the colony returned to

France once the monarchy was restored there. But what truly tipped the

balance in favor of British intervention for many planters was the fear of

slave liberation. Having experienced, often firsthand, the violence of slave

revolt and the disintegration of slave discipline in general, frustrated by the commissioners’ autocratic ways and their close ties to free people of color,

and most of all deeply suspicious of them and worried that slave emancipa-

tion would soon be decreed, many white planters saw British occupation as

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153

the only hope to preserve a world they once had mastered. Once the war

had begun, the British decided to take advantage of the invitation issued to

them by many French planters.3

Turning to the enemy was a reasonable and a pragmatic choice for the

planters. In the end, however, instead of saving slavery, it created the con-

ditions for its final destruction. In making themselves traitors to the Re-

public, they opened the way for slaves to become citizens and defenders of

France. The planters pushed the beleaguered Republican commissioners

to find new allies. Like the Spanish, the French turned to the rebel slaves.

In February 1793 the colonial minister suggested to Sonthonax that he of-

fer freedom to those insurgents who would fight for France. The commis-

sioners did so, organizing slaves who had been mobilized by whites in the

Western and Southern Provinces into “Legions of Equality,” but at first

they had little success recruiting allies from among the insurgents in the

north. Eventually, however, the Republic outdid its enemies, destroying

the foundations of the old Saint-Domingue in order to save the colony for

France.4

The “slaves of the New World,” Sonthonax wrote in a private letter in

February 1793, were “fighting for the same cause as the French armies.” If

only the National Convention would “do something for the slaves,” they

would stop fighting for the king and join the Republic. France would

gain new and valuable allies if its leaders were courageous enough to admit

that they and the insurgent slaves were fighting a common struggle against

tyranny. In an official letter to the Convention, Sonthonax made the same

point, though more cautiously, arguing that it was “essential” that it “hasten to fix the lot of the slaves” without waiting for the colonial assemblies in

Saint-Domingue. The colony, he insisted, might be lost to France if the

Convention did not act quickly. Preoccupied with war and sedition in

France, however, the Convention provided no response, and no new in-

structions or reforms. Even if it had, they probably would not have arrived

for some time: the war brought communication across the Atlantic to a

near standstill. The commissioners were, as Sonthonax wrote, “the lost sen-

tinels of the Republic.” And they were leading it toward its most radi-

cal act.5

In early May Sonthonax and Polverel issued a proclamation regarding

the treatment of slaves. It was essentially a reiteration of the royal edict

of 1784, which had never been applied in the colony because of planter

154

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

opposition. It protected the slaves from being forced to work on Sundays

and provided for shorter working hours for pregnant and nursing women.

Perhaps most importantly—and most infuriatingly to the planters—it in-

vited slaves to bring complaints against their masters and managers to

the attention of local officials. Especially when those local officials were

part of Sonthonax’s regime, planters could expect that—as had never really

been the case before—slave complaints might be taken seriously and lead

to punishments for violent planters. Indeed, a petition presented several

months later on behalf of the slaves of Saint-Domingue complimented

Sonthonax for having, with this decree, “much diminished the rights our

former masters pretended to have over us.” The regulations still clearly

were meant to enforce slavery. Up to fifty lashes of the whip were allowed

to punish slaves; maroons were still to be punished by being branded

(though no longer, presumably, with a fleur-de-lis) and having their ears

sliced off. But they also included some articles aimed at encouraging insur-

gents to return to their plantations, promising amnesty to those who left

their camps. To make sure slaves understood their new rights and responsi-

bilities, the proclamation was to be translated into Creole, displayed in a

central spot on each plantation, and read aloud to the assembled slaves.6

About the time that these new regulations were issued, a new governor,

François-Thomas Galbaud du Fort, arrived in Saint-Domingue. Born in

Port-au-Prince, he owned property in Saint-Domingue. When Galbaud ar-

rived in Le Cap, Sonthonax was in Port-au-Prince with Polverel. Galbaud

installed himself as governor and named his brother, Cézar—who had

been living in Saint-Domingue and was quite hostile to the commission-

ers—to second him. There was a great deal of discontent against the com-

missioners in Le Cap, and Galbaud got an earful. One planter named

Tanguy de la Boissière, who had advocated autonomy in 1789 and been ac-

tive as a journalist and publisher in the colony since then—and had re-

cently been sniping at the commissioners in Le Cap’s papers—sought to

convince Galbaud to strike out against Sonthonax. He attacked the recent

decree on the management of the plantations, reiterating the old argument

that it was “absolutely against the spirit of slavery for an intermediary au-

thority to place itself between master and slave.” The new proclamation

proved either the “delirium” of the commissioners or their firm commit-

ment to complete the “disorganization of Saint-Domingue.” Resistance

was necessary, as it had been in the 1780s. Now the situation was more

dangerous and called for more dramatic action. The commissioners were

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155

on the verge of making “all the rebel negroes” into “free soldiers” to fight

the “miserable whites.” Galbaud was the only one who could prevent all

the whites from being massacred.7

In Port-au-Prince Sonthonax and Polverel heard the news of Galbaud’s

arrival. They also heard that he had openly claimed that they had been

acting “like dictators,” and that he was hostile to free people of color,

whom he called “mulattoes.” They were certainly disturbed by the simple

fact that Galbaud had established himself as a competing power, and saw

clearly that he would become a rallying point for their enemies. The con-

flict between the governor and the commissioners was a replay of the com-

petition between governors and intendants that had long been a feature of

the administration of Saint-Domingue. But now, in the midst of war and

revolution, with the commissioners involved in a reform of slavery, the

stakes of the conflict were higher than ever.8

Polverel and Sonthonax returned to Le Cap “in a very bad mood.”