Read Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Online
Authors: Laurent Dubois
cial discrimination of the plan, he proposed that anyone who had less than
one-eighth African ancestry be decreed officially white. This aspect of the
proposal enraged many colonial whites, and d’Estaing was unable to insti-
tute his reforms, although a ban on free-colored officers was instituted.
When the governors who succeeded him tried to strengthen the militia
units in the colony, they triggered an uprising in which white and free-col-
ored planters in some parts of the colony joined forces in violent protest.
Administrators suppressed the revolt, but they were never able to over-
come white resistance to militia service, and during the decades after the
1760s, men of African descent formed the majority serving in the militias.
A colonial administration that sanctioned racist laws depended on the free-
colored population as allies and protectors.13
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A few white planters openly admired the military prowess of the free-
coloreds and argued against their legal exclusion. Laurent François Lenoir,
the marquis de Rouvray, who was a veteran of the Seven Years’ War and an
officer in d’Estaing’s 1779 mission, encouraged potential free-colored re-
cruits to say to themselves: “I must make the whites blush for the scorn
they have heaped on me . . . and for the injustices and tyrannies they have
continually exercised over me with impunity. I must prove to them that as a
soldier I am capable of at least as much honor and courage and of even
more loyalty.” A few decades later revolutionary activists such as Julien
Raimond and Abbé Grégoire would similarly evoke their service in the mi-
litias and their bravery at Savannah in arguing that free men of color were
capable and deserving of Republican citizenship. Though it is not certain,
some historians have suggested that several of the free-colored leaders
who emerged in the revolution—notably André Rigaud—were veterans of
the Battle of Savannah.14
In addition to assuring colonial defense, free men of color played a cen-
tral role in defending Saint-Domingue against its dangerous internal ene-
mies: the slaves. The colony had a special police force, the
maréchaussée,
whose task was to monitor slaves on plantations and in towns and to pursue
runaways and attack maroon communities. By the 1730s the
maréchaussée
regulations stipulated that the rank-and-file troops were to be free peo-
ple of color, while the officers were to be whites, though a reform in 1767
allowed free men of color to be noncommissioned officers. Those who
served in these units—often drawn from local militias—received relatively
low pay but were given rewards for capturing runaway slaves. Masters who
wanted to free a male slave were granted an exemption from “liberty taxes”
if they enlisted them in the
maréchaussée,
and as a result many in the force were themselves still enslaved, serving for their liberty.15
The service of free people of color in such units obviously cultivated
tension and distrust between them and the slaves. It also strengthened the
case that the only way to prevent a slave insurrection would be to assure
the loyalty of the free people of color by granting them rights. In 1785 the
marquis de Rouvray noted that these men were vital allies in a slave colony
that was like a “besieged city,” whose inhabitants were walking on “barrels
of powder” that might explode at any time. Other prominent figures in
Saint-Domingue concurred. This argument was later advanced by advo-
cates for free-colored rights. The Abbé Grégoire wrote in 1789 that the
group’s “bravery is well known” from their success in capturing maroons.
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Bringing together whites and free people of color, “cementing the mutual
interests of these two classes,” would create a stronger “mass of force” for
containing the slaves. In another pamphlet he asked how France could re-
place the free people of color as a security force in a colony that devoured
“effeminate Europeans and overworked negroes.”16
Despite various countercurrents on both sides of the Atlantic, how-
ever, a majority of planters and officials believed that maintaining racial
distinctions toward free-coloreds was vital to preserving slavery in Saint-
Domingue. A 1767 ministerial directive declared that, for those whose an-
cestors had come from Africa, the “first stain” of slavery extended to “all
their descendants” and could not be “erased by the gift of freedom.” In
1771 administrators in Saint-Domingue argued that in order to maintain a
feeling of inferiority in the “heart of slaves” it was necessary to maintain racial distinctions “even after liberty is granted,” so that they would under-
stand that their “color is condemned to servitude,” and that nothing could
make them “equal” to their masters. One of the justifications for policies
aimed at limiting the number of free-coloreds was that runaway slaves
could easily blend into such communities, and indeed might find sympa-
thizers within them.17
At the heart of such arguments, and of the discrimination they justified,
was a profound contradiction. Even as racist laws meant to limit the power
and numbers of free people of color proliferated, whites continued to have
sexual relationships with women of African descent, both slave and free,
and to give their partners and children property and slaves. On the eve of
his wedding to a white woman in 1781, Moreau gave slaves and money as
gifts to a free woman of color, Marie-Louis Laplaine, who had been his
housekeeper for several years, and to her daughter, Amenaide. Laplaine
was described as a “mulâtresse,” and her daughter was described as a
“quarteronne” (three-quarters white); she was probably Moreau’s daugh-
ter. Whites were connected to free people of color by a complex web of
familial and social ties; men of European and African descent were, often
literally, “sons of the same father.” And yet the law created a difference between them, defining them as members of two separate social classes, with
their destinies shaped by their ancestry. Saint-Domingue was a schizo-
phrenic society in which the law attacked relationships between those of
European and African descent even as the whites who supported such laws
continuously flouted them.18
A clever solution to this hypocrisy was to portray women of African de-
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scent, and particularly free women of color, as seducers of hapless white
men. One officer wrote that women of color in Saint-Domingue were
“idols” at the feet of which European men deposited their fortunes. Such
women made themselves the “absolute masters of their conquests.” It was
as if, he continued, nature had responded to the “state of slavery in which
the men of color live” by granting such women “the power of their charms
over the whites.” The baron de Wimpffen described them as “the most fer-
vent priestesses of the American Venus,” who made “sensual pleasure a
kind of mechanical skill which they have brought to its ultimate perfec-
tion.” Moreau, who theorized that the mix of African and European ances-
try caused heightened sexual appetites, was similarly obsessed with the
dangerous sexuality of these “priestesses of Venus” whose “entire being”
was “given over to sensual pleasure.” “Her sole vocation is to bewitch the
senses, deliver them to the most delicious ecstasies, enrapture them with
the most seductive temptations; nature, pleasure’s accomplice, has given
her charms, endowments, inclinations, and, what is indeed more danger-
ous, the ability to enjoy such sensations even more keenly than her part-
ners, including some unknown to Sappho.” They were, he added “both the
danger and delight of men.”19
Michel Etienne Descourtilz, a naturalist who lived in Saint-Domingue
in the late 1790s, proposed a more sinister theory for why creole men were
drawn to slave women—whom he called “animated machines”—and threw
themselves into relationships driven by base instinct rather than reason. As
soon as creole boys were born, he suggested, their irresponsible mothers
gave them to slave wet-nurses. These “libertine” slaves, tricking their mas-
ters, continued their illicit sexual affairs even as they gave their milk to
their master’s children. Black women fed “corrupted milk” to the white
boys, and this “pernicious drink” communicated the “germ” of “impudent
desires.” Creole mothers were to blame for instilling in their boys a lust for slave women by handing them over to them at a young age rather than
breast-feeding them themselves as they should have.20
Such febrile talk was a way to finesse the contradictions produced by
white patriarchy, of abstracting these relationships from the complicated
and contorted relations of power that defined them. Sex was enmeshed
with racism and slavery, and racist laws shaped the relationships they
sought to outlaw. Moreau admitted that many free women of color were
“condemned” to “the state of being a courtesan,” but claimed that this re-
sult was unavoidable and even had the laudable effect of keeping masters
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from forcing themselves on their slaves. But, as Julien Raimond pointed
out, it was racist laws that forced free women of color “to prostitute them-
selves to whites” rather than marry them. Some free women of color found
a new way to formalize the relationships they had with white men by taking
on the title of
ménagère,
combining the roles of “professional manager and personal companion.” Many white migrants depended on
ménagères
to establish social and business contacts in the colony and to manage their af-
fairs. Women involved in such relationships, whose terms were often laid
out in a legal contract, could sometimes make enough money to become
independent entrepreneurs in towns like Le Cap. Indeed free women of
color were a major economic, social, and cultural force.21
Over the eighteenth century, law, economy, and discourse worked to-
gether to produce a set of racist practices that, once in place, appeared to
many as both natural and permanent. Yet this system of racial hierarchy,
which most whites saw as necessary for the survival of the colony, was satu-
rated with contradictions and dangerous fissures. Many free people of
color, particularly those who were slave owners, looked down not only on
slaves but also on poorer whites. Some free people of color referred to
white soldiers derisively as “white negroes,” thus insulting both groups at
once. Skin color played a role in determining status as well, and many free
people of color, like whites, differentiated between those with different de-
grees of European ancestry. Such distinctions were eventually institution-
alized in the colony; the census of 1782 divided free people of color into
two categories: “gens de couleur, mulâtres, etc.,” who had European an-
cestry; and “free blacks,” who did not. The latter were likely to have been
freed in their lifetimes rather than born of free parents. Some writers then
and since have drawn sharp distinctions between these two groups, but in
reality the differences were blurred: there were many slaves of mixed an-
cestry who had been freed, and second-generation free people who had no
European ancestry.22
Moreau sought to order this world by producing a phantasmagoric racial
cosmology: a “scientific” formula based on the division of individuals into
128 parts, all either European or African, with different combinations cre-
ating different racial identities. He wrote that even after several genera-
tions in families that appeared white, there might appear “indiscreet appa-
ritions of an African character” that belied the family’s origin, and that even if certain “quadroons” were whiter than a Spaniard or Italian “no one
would confuse them.” But his certainty in racial identification was mis-
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placed. Families like that of Raimond had long “passed” as white before
the latter half of the eighteenth century, and there was often no way to dis-
tinguish those with African ancestry from those without. One British of-
ficer serving in the colony in the mid-1790s would write that he had “seen
many
Mulattresses
as white, if not whiter, than the generality of European women.” In 1792, when two rebel envoys presented themselves in front of
the Colonial Assembly of Le Cap, they were asked, “Are you white?” While
“the face” of one “provided his answer,” the other responded simply that
he was the son of an unknown father. The question was unanswerable.23
Some revolutionaries would ask the same question of planters who de-
fended racial hierarchy. In a 1789 pamphlet the Abbé Grégoire demanded
of white planters who their fathers and mothers were, suggesting that
many of them were probably descended from men of African descent who
had declared themselves “Caribs.” It would be impossible for the planter
delegates to prove that they were not of African descent, since sometimes