American Uprising (4 page)
Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
T
welve hundred nautical miles east-southeast from New Orleans, the verdant 6,000-foot peaks of the island of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) jut out from the ocean. Freshwater streams flow down from the mountain peaks, forming rivers that fertilize the valleys and plains that lie beneath. The weather of the tropics adds lushness and fertility to the air—greenery bursts out of every crevasse, from under every banana tree, beneath the cloudless blue skies. Mango, orange, and coffee trees grow naturally here. The year was 1791, and the farmland on this tropical island was perhaps the single most valuable property on earth.
Though Haiti is now a very poor country, then the soil of the island yielded untold riches. In 1767 alone, the French colony of Saint Domingue exported 123 million pounds of sugar, two million pounds of cotton, a million pounds of indigo, and vast quantities of hides, molasses, cocoa, and rum. And that was only the start of the island’s agricultural boom. Not even 11,000 square miles, the tiny island was a hub of an Atlantic commerce—the jewel in the crown of the French empire.
The island accounted for over 60 percent of France’s export trade, and more ships docked in its ports than in Marseilles or any other smaller French port. As French ships brought Caribbean sugar and other cash crops to Europe, they brought back with them the processed goods of Europe—salted cod and other meats, brandy and wine, flour and all manner of refined goods. This valuable colony drove a period of rapid economic growth in France and in Europe more broadly, a period of economic growth that laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution. Whole factories—whole towns—grew up to serve this vast New World trade. And as the tall-masted ships sailed back and forth across the Atlantic, Europeans watched their coffers fill with gold and the benefits of trade lift large swathes of the population from peasantry into the middle class.
Yet beneath this story of wealth and riches, behind this tale of progress, lay darker realities. Sugar, cotton, and coffee don’t grow themselves. They demand backbreaking, intolerable labor—labor to which no free man would choose to submit. The task of raising cane in the fields of Saint Domingue and harvesting the lush crops of the island fell on the backs of the Enlightenment’s greatest and most productive laboring class—African slaves.
After decimating the native population, Europeans imported around half a million slaves from the coasts of Africa to this tiny island over the course of just a few decades. In the process of ripping these men and women from their native homes and transporting them by force to a New World where most died within seven years, this Atlantic trade fueled wars across the African continent, cost untold millions of lives, and, of course, brought unprecedented prosperity to the slave traders and the planters and merchants who depended on them.
That raising crops could be so profitable seems very foreign to the modern eye, but in that day and age the production of sugar was the most profitable form of agriculture. Consider the famed Gallifet plantation, where 808 slaves worked to harvest the New World’s most lucrative crop. The master of the plantation once asked, “How can we make a lot of sugar when we work only sixteen hours [per day]?” The answer, he concluded, was “by consuming men and animals.” And indeed, the Gallifet plantation did consume men, quite quickly and efficiently. These colonial plantations were as close to a death camp as one could come in the late eighteenth century. Overseers carried swords and whips to punish recalcitrant slaves. Few slaves lived past forty and most died within a few years of starting plantation work.
But as these complex economic relationships played out on the Atlantic, creating a vast network of death and profit, other forces too were at work—forces not amenable to empire or capitalism. Try as they might, the slave owners could not turn people into machines—and people do not submit easily to cruelty and exploitation. One liberal traveler on the island noted the judgment and resentment that the slaves expressed when by themselves. “One has to hear with what warmth and what volubility, and at the same time with what precision of ideas and accuracy of judgment, this creature, heavy and taciturn all day, now squatting before his fire, tells stories, talks, gesticulates, argues, passes opinions, approves or condemns both his master and everyone who surrounds him,” the traveler wrote.
Had this traveler been an African, he might have discovered much more. He might have known the meaning of the African chant “
Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu! Canga bafio te! Canga, moune de la! Canga do ki la! Canga, li!
” or, in English, “We swear to destroy the whites and all that they possess; let us die rather than fail to keep this vow.” That same traveler, had he been an African, might also have been invited to join certain congresses held late at nights in the woods away from the plantations. For in August of 1791, the slaves were plotting to make their chant a reality. In furtive conversations held far from the planters’ watchful eyes, the slaves decided that this would be their last summer on French-owned plantations. They would start “a war to the death against the whites.” Given all they had suffered, perhaps it was only time.
On the night of August 21, a band of slaves rose up in arms. The first victim was a refiner’s apprentice. They caught him in the sugar factory and cut him into pieces with cutlasses. When his screams awoke the overseer, the slave-rebels shot the overseer dead too, before proceeding to the apartment of the refiner, whom they killed in his bed. From there, they traveled from plantation to plantation, raising a force of nearly 2,000 slaves, setting fire to the cane fields, killing white women and men, and burning houses. The fires were visible for miles and miles. Their attacks, reported one planter, “spread like a torrent.”
The group of slaves who began this revolt must have known the punishment for a suspected rebel: ritual torture and death, combined with dismemberment to ensure that their souls could not pass into the afterworld. But perhaps they also knew that staying and working in the fields would lead to death just the same—though in a few years rather than a few days, and by exhaustion and malnutrition, not violence. But those who made Saint Domingue’s sugar were strong and had inspiring leaders.
The most visible organizer was a coach driver and former slave driver named Boukman, a man known as a religious leader. In the first days of the revolt, Boukman gathered a band of slaves in the woods at a place called Bois-Caiman, where he led the slaves in a religious ceremony. A woman—variously described as having “strange eyes and bristling hair” or having green eyes and being of mixed race—presided with him. “The god of the white man calls him to commit crimes; our god asks only good works of us. But this god who is so good orders revenge,” declared Boukman. “He will direct our hands; he will aid us. Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears and listen to the voice of liberty that speaks in the hearts of all of us.” The conspirators then took an oath of secrecy and revenge, an oath sealed by drinking the blood of a black pig they offered in sacrifice. The revolt had begun.
Setting fire to the sugar fields, the rebel slaves burned and tortured their former oppressors. In the first eight days of their insurrection, they destroyed nearly 200 sugar plantations. By the end of September, the slave army numbered between 20,000 and 80,000. “There is a motor that powers them and keeps powering them and that we cannot come to know,” wrote one planter who had only narrowly escaped death.
They did not know it yet, but these slaves had initiated one of the most radical revolutions in the history of the Atlantic world. Over the next twelve years, these rebels fought and defeated the local white planters, the soldiers of the French empire, a Spanish invasion, and a British expedition of 60,000 men. But their greatest challenge would be the mighty armies of the French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.
In control of France by 1800, the great conqueror of Europe was plotting the creation of a “Republic in the New World,” with Saint Domingue at the center and the North American colony of Louisiana as the breadbasket for the sugar island. In 1800, he ordered Charles Victor Emmanuel LeClerc, his right-hand man and brother-in-law, to subdue Saint Domingue, backed by a force of 42,000 battle-hardened men. These were troops that had defeated the most powerful armies of Europe: Austria, Prussia, Spain, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands.
LeClerc landed in Saint Domingue expecting easy victory. And in the first few months, he obtained it. Within ten days, the French controlled most of the island’s ports and cities. Within three months, the French controlled nearly the entire island and had forced the main Haitian generals—including former slave turned commander of Haiti Toussaint L’Ouverture—to lay down arms.
But the rebels did not give up. French soldiers marched out into the countryside and the slaves melted into the hills, holding out in hopes of outlasting the invading force. Fate came to their aid. Yellow fever was ravaging the French army. And though the French now controlled the island, almost half of their military force died of disease. By the end of 1802, LeClerc himself fell prey to the dread disease. His second-in-command, Rochambeau, took over in his place.
Before he died, LeClerc declared that Saint Domingue could only be secured through a “war of extermination.” He believed he would simply have to kill any black person who had ever been involved with the rebellion.
Thus began perhaps France’s darkest hour. In desperation, in 1802 Rochambeau brought in packs of bloodhounds trained in Cuba to eat human flesh and unleashed them on the battlefield. But the dogs were “ignorant of color prejudice” and ate French soldiers as well. Rochambeau ordered slaves burned alive, drowned in sacks, or shot after digging their own graves. He became legendary for his brutality. But the slaves did not surrender, and by November of 1803 the rebel forces had driven what remained of Napoleon’s soldiers out of the country. Over 80 percent of the French army sent there died on the island.
Amid the blood and destruction, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the leader of the revolt and Toussaint L’Ouverture’s successor, proclaimed the eternal freedom of the Haitian republic. “Let us imitate those people who, extending their concern into the future and dreading to leave an example of cowardice for posterity, preferred to be exterminated rather than lose their place as one of the world’s free peoples,” he declared. Victorious, black Haitians abolished slavery, declared racism illegal, and fought the first successful anti-imperial revolution in the history of the Atlantic. They also forever banned Frenchmen from the colony. “May the French tremble when they approach our coasts, if not by the memory of the cruelty that they have inflicted, at least by the terrible resolution that we are about to take to devote to death, anyone born French, who would dirty with his sacrilegious foot the territory of liberty,” Dessalines said.
The slave-rebels had beaten back the most powerful armies in Europe, overturned the prime economic engine of Enlightenment Europe, and struck the first victory in the war against slavery. And the vast Atlantic world of ships and slaves, of commerce and capital, could not help but take notice. In 1789, Saint Domingue exported 70,000 tons of sugar: by 1801, it exported only 9,000.
* * *
News traveled fast. Upon hearing of his brother-in-law’s defeat in Haiti, Napoleon pounded the table and cursed, “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies.” A strategic mastermind, the emperor knew when to cut his losses—as well as where to focus his energies. While a republic in the New World would have been nice, Napoleon had to focus on Europe and simply could not afford the massive costs in men and pride of subduing Haiti or running sugar colonies in the New World. With Haiti in flames, he saw little use for his other New World colony, Louisiana.
A headache to Napoleon, Louisiana was the apple of young America’s eyes. Louisiana had a strategic place in the North American continent: its capital, New Orleans, controlled the Mississippi River. With a valley double the size of the Egyptian Nile and a drainage basin only slightly smaller than the Amazon, the mighty river loomed as the central artery of the American heartland, embracing 41 percent of the North American continent in its watershed.
As American settlers crossed the Appalachians and began to domesticate the West in the wake of their own successful revolution against the British from 1776 to 1783, they needed an outlet for their goods. The Mississippi River provided the only real channel for moving crops from the center of the continent out into the ocean and around back to the East Coast or to Europe; crossing the mountains by land was too great an obstacle. And just as the Mississippi River was the key to trans-Appalachian commerce, Louisiana—and New Orleans in specific—was the key to the Mississippi River. Guarding the outlet into the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans was the single most important strategic site in North America west of the Appalachians. And Thomas Jefferson and his fellow republicans knew it.
But the demise of Saint Domingue and the rise of a free Haiti had wrought radical change on Louisiana society. Within a few short years, slave-rebels had sent the most profitable produce of the French empire up in smoke. Planters in Louisiana, at the time a military outpost surrounded by cotton, indigo, and sugar plantations, saw an opportunity for profit and rapidly began converting their fields for sugar production. An influx of Haitian refugees only added to the momentum. By 1802, a mere seven years after the first planter converted his entire plantation to sugar, Louisiana boasted seventy sugar plantations producing over 3,000 tons of sugar per year.
While Louisiana’s yield still paled in comparison to what Haiti had produced in its prime, these numbers were enough to attract merchants from all over the eastern seaboard. By the turn of the century, sugar was becoming an increasingly common part of everyday life and demand was soaring. As Americans and Europeans drank more tea, smeared more syrup on their bread, baked more sweet cakes, and mixed more puddings and porridges, they needed more sources of raw sugar. Ships began to flock to New Orleans, where they filled their holds with what was fast becoming a staple of working-class diets. In a few short years after the slaves of Saint Domingue took up arms and formed themselves into a vast army, Louisiana was transformed from a small military outpost with a diverse agricultural mix into the center of the North American plantation world, one that revolved around sugar.
