Read Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Online
Authors: Laurent Dubois
promises. Instead of seeking to resolve the conflicts over land, Louverture
pursued a policy that allowed him to sidestep the problem. He gave plant-
ers signed papers declaring that their properties were no longer under the
control of the state. But when they found themselves powerless to confront
and expel those who occupied and controlled their plantations, he did
nothing to enforce their claims. One planter, after officially regaining own-
ership of his plantation, sought to collect rent from the high-ranking officer Laplume, who had been managing the plantation for the previous years.
Laplume’s response was to claim that the administration had given him a
suspension of rent payments for eight to ten months and to refuse to pay,
and there was little the planter could do. Another planter complained in
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1800 that his property was “in the hands of my former driver,” who, along
with a free-colored man, were doing everything they could to keep hold of
his property and push him out of the colony.43
As he traveled in the Artibonite region, the traveler Descourtilz wrote,
he saw many devastated plantations whose once-resplendent houses were
now denuded and falling apart, seeming to “beg for the return of masters.”
The men and women who occupied them, however, seemed quite content
to be left alone. Descourtilz described a stubborn and brazen refusal on
the part of ex-slaves to give up the gains they had been freed. For many
planters, the tables were turned in a particularly distressing way, for they
found their plantations in the hands of one of their former slaves. As
they waited for the local bureaucracy to consider their requests to take
back their lands, they were at the mercy of those they had once owned.
Descourtilz discovered this firsthand when he traveled to a plantation that
had been owned by members of his family. The former slaves who were
renting the plantation clearly wanted nothing to do with him; they “pushed
their audacious impudence” so far as to refuse to let him and those he was
traveling with forage on the property for a few bits of food. “How many
times during this unfortunate epoch,” he lamented, laying bare his convic-
tion that those who now lived on the plantations were still nothing more
than property, “did we, the owners of five leagues of land and 750 blacks,
have to serve ourselves!” Some former slaves were even more assertive.
In May 1800 one administrator wrote that in certain areas “the cultiva-
tors have expelled the white property owners, claiming that the land be-
longed to them, since they had, as they said, worked it for others for long
enough.”44
Descourtilz was personally involved in one complex struggle for the
control of a plantation in the Artibonite. It pitted Descourtilz’ uncle,
M. Lachicotte, against his “bastard” half-brother, Philippe, both of whom
claimed the inheritance of the property of their deceased father. It was a
classic family drama—a conflict between a legitimate heir and an illegiti-
mate heir—but it took on a particular cast in postemancipation Saint-
Domingue. Philippe was of African descent, and his mother was probably
a slave, but he was able to take advantage of the revolutionary context to
gain the upper hand on Lachicotte. He became an officer in Louverture’s
army, outranking and indeed at one point commanding Lachicotte. Their
father’s property had been declared abandoned by the local administration.
Philippe used his connections and salary to rent the plantation, and was so
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pleased at the reversal of fortune that he announced to Lachicotte: “Your
reign is over.” In 1798, however, Lachicotte managed to get papers from
Louverture ending the state’s sequestration of the plantation and declaring
him its rightful owner. When he and Descourtilz attempted to take posses-
sion of the plantation, however, they found themselves powerless. Expect-
ing a respectful welcome by the plantation residents, they were instead en-
tirely ignored. They were “constrained,” Descourtilz wrote in disgust, to go
to market to buy their own food and to drive their own mules, which the
plantation residents “were not even willing to go get for us in the savanna!”
Clearly, whatever fear the former slaves once had for whites seeking to
master them had evaporated.45
On the plantation, Descourtilz observed, residents had taken over
significant stretches of land to cultivate gardens to which they devoted “all their time.” Philippe, meanwhile, sought to continue the production of
the cotton for which the plantation had once been famous. Descourtilz
described Philippe as a horrid tyrant who terrorized the plantation laborers
and angered them by flooding their gardens in order to irrigate the cotton
fields. They longed, he claimed, for the return of their white masters.
The details Descourtilz provided, however, tell a different story. Plantation workers enticed Lachicotte and Descourtilz to the plantation by telling
them that they wished to help them regain the plantation, but when they
arrived they found that they had been tricked: they were bundled off and
presented to local authorities, accused of stirring up trouble on the planta-
tion. Philippe was steadfast in holding on to the plantation, but also quite
hospitable to the two interlopers. Though he did not grant them any partic-
ular privileges, he did allow them to stay on the plantation and even lent
them his carriage for their errands. He seemed to be willing to have them
return as residents, just not as masters.46
Much had changed in Saint-Domingue since the days of slavery. Whites
and blacks, former masters and former slaves, had redefined their relation-
ships and their place in the social order. The landscape was a patchwork
shaped by intersecting histories of insurrection, war, and negotiation. A
former plantation owner traveling through the colony in 1799 came across
some functioning sugar plantations and a few thriving coffee plantations.
But he focused on the many ruined properties, where “bushes and trees”
had entirely “replaced the houses” and old cane fields were covered with
grass and ivy. His biggest shock came when, from the peak of a mountain
where once “we stopped in ecstasy to see the plain of Le Cap in all its
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splendor,” he could see only “ruins and bushes” where sugarcane had once
covered the land.47
On the plains of Le Cap and throughout the colony, a new kind of life
was taking root, one based on independence and subsistence, one that for
many ex-slaves embodied true freedom. In and around the ruins of old
plantations, men and women cultivated small plots of land, growing crops
for their families and to sell at the markets. They raised chickens, pigs, and cows, often grazing them in abandoned cane fields. Although they were
drawing on traditions developed within slavery, when masters had de-
pended on what slaves produced in garden plots, in the new order they had
greater access to land and greater freedom to grow their crops, raise their
livestock, and market what they produced. The contrast with slavery was
quite clear, and as a result of the better conditions, the number of children seems to have increased among the workers on many plantations. A new
culture was being born, one that would shape rural Haiti in the wake of in-
dependence. But what for ex-slaves was a new beginning was for many
whites, haunted by the specters of the vanished plantations, nothing but
loss and darkness. A Polish soldier sent to Saint-Domingue in 1803 cap-
tured this sense eloquently. “The air here is most unhealthy,” he wrote, “es-
pecially since the time of the black revolt twelve years ago.” It was as if the uprising that had shaken the colony in 1791 had literally transformed the
environment, the very air, making it deadly to Europeans.48
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c h a p t e r e l e v e n
Territory
Injuly1798acarriagebumpeditswayfromPort-au-PrincetoLe
Cap, carrying the two de facto rulers of Saint-Domingue, Toussaint
Louverture and André Rigaud. They were on their way to meet with
Hédouville to discuss plans for British withdrawal from the colony. What
did the two allies—soon to be bitter enemies—discuss on the journey?
Neither left a written account, but oral traditions circulating in the nine-
teenth century asserted that the two men made a pact during the journey:
they would be careful in their dealings with Hédouville and would share
with each other any information they gained from him. If they indeed
made such an agreement, it soon came undone. Hédouville intentionally
treated Rigaud more warmly than he did Louverture, seeking to create
jealousy between the two men. Before he was expelled from the colony a
few months later, Hédouville planted another “seed of contention” be-
tween them. In a letter to Rigaud, Hédouville criticized the “perfidy of
General Toussaint Louverture, who is sold to the English, the émigrés, and
the Americans.” “I absolve you entirely of the authority he was given as
general-in-chief,” he wrote, and invited Rigaud “to take command of the
Department of the South.”1
Louverture and Rigaud had been allies since 1794, and together they
had assured the triumph of the Republic in Saint-Domingue. By 1798, be-
tween the two of them, they controlled all the troops and territory of the
colony. Louverture was technically Rigaud’s superior, but in fact the latter
continued to rule over the Southern Province and to command his army
independently, as he had since 1793. With the end of the war with the Brit-
ish and the expulsion of Hédouville, however, the relationship between
Louverture and Rigaud rapidly soured. Soon the two were waging a brutal
civil war against each other.
The “War of the South,” as the conflict is usually called, is often pre-
sented as a racial conflict pitting Louverture’s black army against Rigaud’s
free-coloreds. Before the revolution the south was a bastion for wealthy
free-coloreds such as the Raimond family, and Rigaud was a member of
this social group. Under his regime free-coloreds had filled posts as officers and had gained access to many of the abandoned properties in the south.
There were, therefore, consistent tensions between the free-coloreds and
the former slaves whose lives they governed and whose labor they often
controlled. Although these tensions were driven primarily by the economic
differences between the groups, given that so many of the wealthy and
powerful in the region were of mixed European and African descent, while
those they controlled were not, it was easy for former slaves to see racism
at work. In the north, meanwhile, most of Louverture’s highest-ranking of-
ficers were entirely of African descent, and many had been slaves when
they revolted in 1791. The contrast between the two leadership groups
makes it tempting to see their conflict as primarily a race war.
In fact, however, there was quite a bit of diversity on both sides. There
were many free-coloreds and whites who fought with Louverture’s forces
during the war, and some of them distinguished themselves for their feroc-
ity against Rigaud’s partisans. And there were also ex-slave leaders who,
disenchanted with Louverture’s regime, and particularly with his close ties
to returning white planters, took advantage of the war to strike out against
his regime. In the north, several ex-slave officers supported Rigaud during
uprisings against Louverture, notably Pierre Michel, who had helped to
suppress the Villatte uprising in Le Cap in 1796. In the west the African-
born Lamour Desrances, who controlled mountain areas around Port-au-
Prince, also sided with Rigaud. The war cannot be explained simply as a
conflict between two racial groups.2
Louverture did use racial appeals in rallying his followers against Rigaud.
Speaking in church in Port-au-Prince in February 1799, Louverture re-
called the abandonment of the “Swiss”—the slaves who supported the
free-coloreds in 1791—and asked the free-coloreds in the audience: “Why