Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (49 page)

through pillage and seizure of lands.14

Before launching his attack, Louverture had assured the governor that,

if he surrendered, the property of the residents would be respected.

He made no mention of slavery. But a few months earlier, in June 1800,

Louverture had discussed the issue with the French officer Pierre Agé,

whom he was sending as an envoy to Santo Domingo. “We have often

talked,” he told Agé, “about the bad way in which general liberty was ap-

plied to the French portion of the colony, and how important it is to rule

wisely in order to make sure it reigns there without causing problems.”

t e r r i t o r y

237

The universal liberty that had been granted to the slaves in the French col-

ony, then, could not be applied: “we must change nothing in the system

that currently exists.” Like many critics of the 1794 decree in Paris,

Louverture seems to have envisioned a process of gradual emancipation

as the ideal. And for the relatively small percentage of the population still enslaved in Santo Domingo, his occupation in 1801 seems not to have

brought immediate liberty.15

With the defeat of Rigaud and the conquest of Santo Domingo,

Louverture controlled the entire island of Hispaniola. “I have taken flight

up high with the eagles,” he was heard to say during this period. “I have to

be careful as I come back to earth.” He needed a rock to set himself down

on, he continued: he needed a constitution that would secure his power.

Louverture and the colony Saint-Domingue were about to enter the final

stage of their history. They would walk part of their journeys together.16

“They go from one plantation to another at will, coming and going, paying

no attention to cultivation,” Louverture complained of the ex-slaves in Oc-

tober 1800. Many “even hide in the cities and towns, and in the mountains,

attracted by people who are enemies of order, busying themselves only

with stealing and libertinage.” The worst of the bunch, he continued, were

those who were too young ever to have labored as slaves, and now refused

to do plantation work. They were vagabonds, providing a bad example for

other cultivators, justifying their behavior by saying that “they were free.”17

Since 1794 Louverture had consistently enforced limits on the freedom

of ex-slaves, arguing that such limits were necessary to consolidate and

protect emancipation. It was the responsibility of the “people of Saint-

Domingue,” as he declared in November 1798, to work to make the col-

ony’s economy flourish; the “safety of liberty,” he explained in 1801, made

the rebuilding of the economy of Saint-Domingue “particularly urgent.” In

seeking to define the colony’s future, he found the past weighing inexora-

bly upon it: Saint-Domingue had developed as a producer of sugar and cof-

fee, and it was difficult to imagine any other role for it in the prevailing Atlantic economy. The colony had long depended on the importation of

provisions, and in the late 1790s, with the Franco-British war dragging on,

foreign trade was more crucial than ever. To attract foreign merchants,

Saint-Domingue had to produce and export its traditional commodities.

This was not just an economic necessity; it was also, as Louverture saw it, a matter of political survival. If they were to have a say in their future, the 238

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

people of Saint-Domingue would need the economic autonomy that could

come only from a strong plantation economy. And achieving it would re-

quire stifling the aspirations of former slaves who envisioned a future be-

yond the plantations. But for Louverture this was a price worth paying, as

he made abundantly clear in October 1800 by consolidating his labor regu-

lations into one draconian decree.18

Louverture militarized plantation labor, applying the ideals of disci-

pline and the methods of punishment used in the armed forces to the col-

ony as a whole. Just as soldiers obeyed their officers, cultivators must obey their superiors. Just as soldiers were court-martialed when they failed in

their duties, those who failed in their plantation labor would be punished.

Just as soldiers had no freedom of movement and could not leave their

units without “the severest punishment,” cultivators who left the planta-

tions without permission would be subject to fines or imprisonment. He

sought to close off all potential routes of escape from the plantations. He

outlawed plantation residents from working as domestics in the towns,

and threatened those who employed them as such with fines. He also in-

sisted that military commanders make sure that there were no women in

the barracks, unless they were married to soldiers, and specified that no

“cultivatrices”—women from the plantations—were to be allowed there

under any pretext. The status of the plantation laborer—a status based on a

past of enslavement on the very plantations where they were now being or-

dered to stay—was rendered immutable and permanent. All efforts to es-

cape this past and to create a different future—other than for service in

Louverture’s army—were criminalized. The plantations were part of the

war to preserve liberty, and their residents must accept their roles as sol-

diers in that war, and the discipline it made necessary.19

In February 1801 Louverture issued another decree that further limited

the possibilities open to former slaves. In various parts of the colony, the

general noted, “one, two, or three cultivators” sometimes joined together

to buy a few acres of uncultivated land, and abandoned their plantations

to settle there. This practice was common in many postemancipation con-

texts as former slaves sought to gain what they saw as the ultimate guaran-

tee of independence. Drawing on the traditions of small-scale farming on

garden plots that had existed in slavery, they hoped to grow enough food

and raise enough livestock to support themselves and sell the excess in lo-

cal markets. Louverture, however, saw such settlements as a threat to his

plan for the plantations. The “agriculture of the colony,” he wrote, was

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239

“very different from that of other lands” because it required the “reunion

of considerable means” in order to be productive. The farming of small

plots of land not only did not contribute to this broader productivity; it actually decreased it, by taking “arms” away from the existing plantations.

Louverture outlawed the sale of small plots of land under fifty carreaux, or

just over three acres. Any sale of larger plots, furthermore, had to be ap-

proved by the local administrations under his control, who were to monitor

how it was used. The decree made it impossible for relatively poor men

and women to acquire land. There were to be only wealthy landowners and

landless workers, with nothing in between.20

What Louverture was proposing was alarmingly similar in many ways to

the old order he was disavowing. There were important differences, of

course, most notably the fact that cultivators were to be paid for their work.

But the unflinching threat of physical punishment issued by Louverture,

finessed by the comparison made to the disciplining of soldiers, meant

that ex-slaves were pushed to work as much through fear of violence as

through the promise of payment. Not surprisingly, some claimed that it

was Louverture’s ultimate intention to reestablish slavery. Indeed, days af-

ter he issued his decree, Louverture learned that it had been misinter-

preted by “badly intentioned people of all colors,” particularly by “old

planters and property owners,” who had gleefully announced to their for-

mer slaves: “You say you are free! But you are going to be forced to come

back onto my property, and there I will treat you as I did in the past, and

you will see that you are not free.” Since such statements would inevitably

“delay the restoration of Saint-Domingue,” Louverture ordered his troops

to arrest and punish any individuals who made them. The leader of Saint-

Domingue was walking a thin line, seeking to contain simultaneously the

aspirations of ex-masters for a return to the old order and the aspirations of the ex-slaves for a fuller freedom.21

In 1801 Louverture embodied his control over the colony in a charter

for his regime: a constitution. The document built on the foundation of his

labor decrees, but it was also a response to dramatic changes taking place

across the Atlantic. The French government was now in the hands of Na-

poleon Bonaparte. Like Louverture, Bonaparte had taken advantage of the

revolutionary period to make a vertiginous ascent from the margins of his

society—he was born in Corsica, an island recently annexed by France—to

its summit. Celebrated as a hero for his brilliant leadership of the armies of the Republic during the 1790s, by the end of the decade he was poised to

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take power. He organized a coup against the parliament and created a new

consular regime, which he dominated. Bonaparte staffed his Colonial Min-

istry with men who had been devoted defenders of slavery and proponents

of colonial autonomy a decade before. Among them was Moreau de St.

Méry, who had recently returned to Paris from exile in Philadelphia.22

In the early 1790s Moreau and his allies had advocated the formation of

“particular laws” for the colonies as a way to prevent the granting of rights to free-coloreds, and the possibility of a reform or elimination of slavery.

They had failed to stop the application of the universalist principles of the Revolution in Saint-Domingue; their political ideology had been roundly

defeated in 1794. In 1800, however, after years of criticizing emancipa-

tion, the planters and their supporters had their revenge. Bonaparte’s new

constitution decreed that because of the difference in the “nature of things

and the climate,” the colonies were to be governed by “special laws.”

Indeed, given differences in “habits, customs, interests,” as well as the “diversity” of agriculture and production, there were to be different laws

applied to the different colonies of France in the Americas, Asia, and Af-

rica. It was a profound shift away from the colonial policy envisioned by

Etienne Laveaux a few years before: the colonies would no longer have

representatives in Paris, as they had during the previous years of Revolu-

tion. Continental France and her colonies, united under a single legal or-

der for years, were again separated. It was a victory for an old tradition of creole legal thinking embodied in the work of Moreau, although it was a

far cry from what many planters had hoped for at the beginning of the rev-

olution: the “special laws” would not be shaped by the residents of the col-

ony, but instead decreed by the metropolitan government.23

Bonaparte understood that in the Caribbean the return of the policy

of “particular laws” would be seen by many as a looming threat to liberty

itself. And so, as they announced their new policy, the consuls also de-

clared to the people of Saint-Domingue that “the sacred principles of the

liberty and equality of the blacks will never suffer, among you, any attack

or modification.” The “brave blacks” should remember that “the French

people are the only ones who recognize your right to liberty and equal-

ity.” In case they forgot, Bonaparte ordered that this statement should be

written “in letters of gold” on the flags of all the military units in Saint-

Domingue. Louverture, who was confirmed by Bonaparte in his rank of

“general-in-chief” of Saint-Domingue, refused to follow this order when

he received it several months later. He probably noted that the consul’s

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241

declaration promised only that liberty and equality would not be touched

“among you,” that is, in Saint-Domingue; aware of the implications of the

idea of “particular laws,” he was also probably aware of the opening the

new policy allowed for the acceptance of slavery in some parts of the em-

pire. “It is not a circumstantial liberty conceded only to us that we want,”

he apparently said; “it is the absolute acceptance of the principle that no

man, whether born red [i.e., mulatto], black, or white, can be the property

of another.”24

Louverture recognized the opportunity created by these new circum-

stances and seized on it to propose his own laws for Saint-Domingue. On

February 4, 1801—the seventh anniversary of the abolition of slavery by

the National Convention—he announced the convocation of a “Constitu-

ent Assembly” that would draft a constitution for Saint-Domingue. The

time had come to “lay the foundations” for the colony’s “prosperity” by cre-

ating “laws appropriate for our habits, our traditions, our climate, our in-

dustry.” He used the language of difference deployed by the French gov-

ernment, but with a different intent. Where it had once served to assert

white supremacy in the colony despite the universalist promises of the

Revolution, Louverture now used it to justify the creation of a body of law

that sanctified and solidified a new regime in which men of African descent