Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (38 page)

colony, and without it the “arts” and “industries” of the mother country

would be destroyed. Once the French secured a peace with their Euro-

pean enemies, he asserted, they would turn on their black allies. “They will

arm convoys that will be full of white soldiers, who will reduce you to a

state of servitude.” The liberty that Jean-François and his followers en-

joyed in the Spanish camp, meanwhile, was “very different.” It had not

been granted to them by a benevolent authority; they had won it for them-

selves. “Having already become independent men, we were adopted as

subjects by the kingdom of Spain.”24

“You say the liberty the Republicans offer is false,” retorted Louverture.

But it was not the Republicans who had offered them liberty. “We are Re-

publicans and therefore free by natural laws.” Only kings would dare give

themselves the right to reduce to slavery men who were naturally free. In

fact all those who were “subjects or vassals of kings” were nothing more

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than “vile slaves.” “The only true man is a Republican.” Mocking Jean-

François’s pride in the titles granted to him and his officers by the Spanish, Louverture told him he could keep them: “one day they will be as useful to

you as the luxurious titles of our former aristocrats were to them.”25

In October Jean-François and Biassou attacked troops under Moïse’s

command. Louverture rushed to support him and, leading troops crying

“Long live the Republic!” managed to repel the attack. As he later wrote to

Laveaux, however, many of his courageous soldiers were killed, and “even

though we destroyed many of our enemy, this does not compensate us for

our losses.” But Jean-François’s days were numbered. In June 1795, across

the Atlantic, a defeated Spain signed the Treaty of Bâle with France. One

of the articles ceded Spanish Santo Domingo to the French. Although they

would not act on this cession—it would be Louverture himself who would

finally occupy the Spanish half of the island, and only in 1800—the fighting

between the two colonies was to cease. By late 1795 the news of the treaty

had arrived in Saint-Domingue. “Praise be to God, Jean-François is going

to leave,” Louverture announced joyfully to Laveaux in November. Before

he left, Jean-François sent a parting shot to Laveaux: when he saw “Mister

Laveaux and other French men of his position giving their daughters in

marriage to the negroes,” then he would be convinced that they truly be-

lieved in equality.26

The British sought to recruit Spain’s abandoned auxiliaries, promising

them freedom, and a few accepted and continued to oppose the Republi-

cans under a new banner. Biassou “tried on the red jacket the British sent,”

and seems to have been tempted to continue fighting Louverture. Under

the British, however, he would have had to fight under the command of

white officers, and would have had much less autonomy than he had under

the Spanish. Ultimately Biassou, Jean-François, and many other officers

among the auxiliaries chose instead to leave their homeland under the

protection of the Spanish, who resettled them throughout their empire.

Biassou, a pioneer of slave revolt, became a pioneer of another kind, secur-

ing a retirement in Florida. Others ended up along the coast of Central

America, where they established long-standing communities. Jean-

François and his entourage lived for many years in Spain.27

There was now only one enemy in Saint-Domingue: the British. In Au-

gust 1795 they invaded the Mirabalais region, extending their control east

toward Santo Domingo. Louverture counterattacked and routed a troop

of French planters serving with the British. He wrote with satisfaction

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that the “brave and impertinent” commander of this unit, surrounded,

had jumped off his horse and “ran into the bushes with the debris of his

army, shouting
‘Sauve qui peut!’
” There were, Louverture reported, enemy corpses scattered all along the road where the battle had been fought. With

the recapture of Mirabalais, new allies were won. A man named Mademoi-

selle, chief of a maroon band who had long lived in the area and called

themselves the Doco, led his followers to met with Louverture, and of-

fered to join the Republic side. There were among the Doco several “Afri-

cans of the Arada nation,” and Louverture delighted them by speaking to

them in their native language. In late September, however, the British at-

tacked the region again. Louverture was forced to retreat, and ordered his

troops to burn the plantations and to take the cultivators with them.28

Louverture’s troops were ragged, poorly paid, and often hungry. He reg-

ularly pleaded with Laveaux to send him more guns, more ammunition,

more paper for cartridges. In early 1795, having received powder from

Laveaux, he wrote that it was as if he had received medicine for a sickness.

In late 1795 he noted that his soldiers were “as naked as worms”; three-

quarters of them had no pants or shirts. After one battle in the Mirabalais

region in September 1795, Louverture’s troops found a manual written by

the British to help train the troops of French whites fighting with them. He

sent it to Laveaux for inspection, but asked that he return it so that he

could use it for the “instruction of my troops.” Despite the hardships he

faced, over time Louverture created a daunting and disciplined fighting

force. “It was remarkable to see these Africans, naked, carrying nothing

but a cartridge belt, a saber and a rifle, showing exemplary and severe dis-

cipline,” the French general Lacroix wrote of them. He described how,

having occupied the town of Port-de-Paix in 1798 after months of cam-

paigning with barely anything to eat, they did not loot the town’s stores or

the produce brought to the markets. Such soldiers were the heart of the

army that sealed the defeat of the British occupation of the island and one

day, when Louverture was no longer its leader, the defeat of the French.29

Even as he built his army of ex-slaves, Louverture went to work coaxing

those who were not soldiers back to their plantations. Building on the poli-

cies of Sonthonax and Polverel, Louverture committed himself to forc-

ing former slaves to keep working on the plantations. The decision put him

in conflict with the aspirations of many of the newly freed people of the

colony.

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Since emancipation in 1793, ex-slaves throughout Saint-Domingue had

struggled against the constraints placed on their freedom by administra-

tors. Just as they had contested the power of their masters, they contested

the power of their managers. In doing so they took advantage of the new

rights they had gained. The daily struggles that took place on the planta-

tions during this period were, for the most part, undocumented. But in

February 1794, just a few months after he had emancipated the slaves,

Polverel issued a new set of regulations revising his earlier policies on plantation labor. By looking at what Polverel outlawed, we can gain a sense of

what the former slaves had been doing in the intervening months. On

many plantations abandoned by their former masters, ex-slaves expanded

the size of their garden plots and also took over other parts of the planta-

tion to cultivate for their own subsistence and profit. They felled wood and

gathered fruit in and around the plantations, and many harvested the pro-

duce grown on the provision grounds and sold it in town markets, using

plantation horses and mules to transport it, as well as for “personal plea-

sure.” Some migrated and settled on abandoned plantations. One group

“cut down and burned” a coffee grove in order to “build houses for them-

selves in its place.” Throughout the colony, the former slaves had taken to

heart the idea that they deserved portions of the land. To dispel the confu-

sion that he himself had encouraged the year before, Polverel announced

in his decree: “This land does not belong to you. It belongs to those who

have bought it or inherited it from those who first acquired it.”30

Plantation workers had also protested the terms under which they were

ordered to work. Both Sonthonax and Polverel had decreed that women—

who, as in slavery, had the same work responsibilities as men—were to be

paid less. Many women had clearly protested, for in his February decree

Polverel suggested to the men on the plantations that they should beware

of the “exaggerated pretensions” of their women. He criticized the women

for being unwilling to accept that the “inequality of strength that nature

has placed between them and the men” as well as the “intervals of rest

which their pregnancies, their childbirth, their nursing, oblige them to

make” justified the difference in salaries. He was hoping, it seems, to en-

courage men on the plantations to stifle the resistance of the women. But

women continued to protest on many plantations. When the owner of one

plantation read Polverel’s decree to the assembled workers, a number of

them, led by the women, “openly questioned its legitimacy, saying that it

sounded like a plot against them orchestrated by ‘whites,’ rather than a de-

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185

cree form the official government of the Republic.” They refused to follow

the new regulations until an official came to confirm what the plantation

owner had said.31

From the beginning of the insurrection, many slave insurgents had is-

sued a demand for three free days a week for the slaves. In the wake of

Polverel’s late-1793 emancipation decree, which had maintained the six-

day work week of slavery, many slaves had demanded they be given at least

two days a week, rather than just one, to cultivate their own plots. Polverel sensed that this was an important, and potentially explosive, issue. He gave

plantation workers the choice between a six-day and a five-day work week,

but provided a substantial incentive for them to choose the former: on

plantations where workers chose a six-day work week, they would receive

one-third of the plantation’s production. If they chose to work five days per week, their portion would be cut in half, to one-sixth. It was a dramatic difference for one day a week less of work. But the laborers on several planta-

tions—again led by women—nevertheless chose more free time and less

pay. They had more faith in the revenue they generated themselves from

their garden plots than in the salaries they were promised from plantation

managers. Plantation workers struggled in other ways to maintain control

over some of their own time. Two women laborers refused their manager’s

request that they work at night, announcing that if anyone worked in the

cane fields after dark, it would be he.32

Polverel and Sonthonax used the threat of punishment to contain the

“pretensions” of the former slaves. Indeed the system instituted by

Polverel in February was eerily prophetic of the social formations that

would emerge throughout the Americas in the wake of slavery. No longer

owned as property, laborers were now imprisoned by law and poverty.

When they resisted their plantation managers, they were subject to impris-

onment or forced labor on public works. When found guilty of theft—a

charge leveled against them not only if they took provisions or commodi-

ties produced on the plantations, but even if they took the “spontaneous

fruits of the land” that grew on the property—they were fined. But of

course few had any money to pay the fines, so they usually ended up in

prison. There were some who refused an existence that stank of slavery,

and ran away, as maroons had for decades. Others found a kind refuge—or

at least a broader set of possibilities, along with new dangers—by joining

the military. Women, of course, could not follow this route away from the

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plantations. Their war was the daily struggle over the terms of freedom

that shaped the postemancipation world of Saint-Domingue.33

As he gained control of more and more territory in late 1794,

Louverture confronted same challenges earlier faced by Sonthonax and

Polverel. When he won back British-controlled territory, he brought a sec-

ond emancipation to the men and women who had been reenslaved. In

such areas, however, despite the efforts of the British and the French mas-

ters who lived there, many of the plantations had been left in ruins by years of insurrection and war. In the once-thriving Artibonite region, Louverture

wrote to Laveaux in July 1794, the plantations had “all been destroyed.”

“Everything has been broken and shattered.” In Plaisance only one planta-

tion had escaped burning, and in the nearby plains only a few were still “in-

tact.” Louverture explained that he was unable to follow Laveaux’s instruc-

tions to pay the cultivators because there was nothing to pay them with.

They would first have to produce something. In the meantime Louverture

used his authority—and probably the threat of force—to maintain order.