Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (25 page)

Le Cap had been preserved from the insurgents, but much of the property

in the northern plain had been destroyed. Sugar production, the lifeblood

of the region, was at a standstill. And for many planters the government of

France, prey to a powerful revolutionary movement, was almost as danger-

ous and unpredictable as the slave insurgents themselves. For some, exile

was the only choice. One man announced his departure for New England

with a poem that began “Adieu France.” A woman “recently arrived from

France” had soon seen enough, and offered her services as a chambermaid

to anyone headed back across the Atlantic.6

Others stayed, hoping to resolve the situation, or at least to survive it.

Administrators sought aid from nearby Jamaica, whose governor sent sev-

eral ships with provisions and ammunition, though no troops. The planter

Bryan Edwards, who joined the convoy, described how as the ships arrived

in Le Cap townspeople “assembled on the beach” and “with uplifted hands

and streaming eyes, gave welcome to their deliverers (for such they con-

sidered us).” The white population, he claimed, was unanimous in its “out-

cry against the National Assembly, to whose proceedings were imputed all

their disasters.” Indeed many were ready to “renounce their allegiance to

the mother country,” and “without scruple or restraint” declared that they

wished the British would “conquer the island, or rather receive its volun-

tary surrender from the inhabitants.” One prominent planter sent a letter

to British prime minister William Pitt requesting an English occupation

of the colony, which he saw as the only way to preserve the institution of

slavery.7

But in the end the aid provided by the British was, as one embit-

tered colonist wrote, “limited to sterile wishes and useless demonstra-

tions.” Pitt apparently responded to the news of the insurrection by com-

menting dryly: “It seems the French will be drinking their coffee with

caramel.” Whatever sympathies the white slave owners of the Caribbean

might have for one another, the competition between empires was ulti-

mately more important to the British, and when they finally did come to

Saint-Domingue, it would be as invaders seeking internal allies in a war of

conquest rather than as friends providing aid.8

Without troops from the British, and with months to wait before any

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troops could arrive from France, the governors of Saint-Domingue faced a

serious problem. How could the fight against the insurgents be sustained?

The available soldiers had been sent into the field, along with many civil-

ians recruited into this desperate war. But by early November the two most

important officers leading the campaign were convinced that this would

not be enough. The only way to assure a victory, they argued, was to enlist

the support of the free-coloreds. “What is the white population compared

to the multitude of rebel slaves?” asked Rouvray in a speech to the assem-

bly in Le Cap. “Isn’t this enemy enough, without continuing to provoke

the free-coloreds?” Invoking the “authority of history”—and drawing on

his experience as a commander of free-colored troops during the American

Revolution—he reminded his audience that these troops were superior to

soldiers arriving from Europe, who were always decimated by disease.

Tousard seconded Rouvray, pointing out that the only way to win the war

against the insurgents was to harass and pursue them continually. Where

were the soldiers—men “used to the climate”—who could carry out such a

war? “Do you have any other than the mulattoes? No.” Why, then, did the

assembly persist in refusing their help, pushing them into the camp of the

enemy rather than welcoming them as allies?9

Since many of them had served in the militia and in the pursuit of ma-

roons in the
maréchaussée,
the free-coloreds indeed seemed the ideal soldiers for fighting the insurgents. Although there were some among the in-

surgent camps, many free-coloreds had already shown their willingness

to combat the insurrection. In the first days of the uprising a group of free-coloreds in Le Cap had formed a troop to fight the rebels. During the

attack on the Gallifet plantation, the first to enter the camp were “the free mulattoes and negroes, chiefly mounted.” Nevertheless, the assembly rejected the interventions of the veteran officers, deferring any discussion

of the status of the free-coloreds until after the insurrection was de-

feated. Having successfully held the free-coloreds at bay through violence

in Saint-Domingue and lobbying in Paris, they were unwilling to relent,

even in the dramatic situation that surrounded them. “One day,” Rouvray

warned them, “the pitying laughs with which you greet the important

truths I share with you will turn to tears of blood.”10

Not all whites in the colony were as intransigent. Some saw that the

threat of sharing political power with a small group of free-coloreds was

nothing in comparison to the threat of losing everything. During Septem-

ber and October several local administrators signed a remarkable series of

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treaties with groups of free-coloreds. This happened not in the Northern

Province, but rather in the west (and subsequently in the south), where

free-coloreds were armed and well organized, and where the slaves were

relatively contained even after August 1791. While the slave insurrection

was the major force shaping events in the Northern Province, then, the

vexed relationship between free-coloreds and whites took center stage in

other regions of the colony.

Early in August 1791 free-coloreds organized a mass political assembly

in the town of Mirabalais. A well-respected, French-educated man named

Pierre Pinchinat was elected president, and forty delegates were chosen to

address demands for political rights to the National Assembly, as well as to

local assemblies and the colony’s governor. Just as the revolt began in the

Northern Province, however, the governor responded by ordering them to

dissolve their “illegal” assembly. The angry free-colored assembly soon de-

cided to take up arms. Among their leaders was André Rigaud, a goldsmith

who had been educated in Bordeaux and had a long military career that,

according to many accounts, stretched back to the siege at Savannah dur-

ing the American Revolution. He was at the beginning of an illustrious po-

litical career that would ultimately lead him into a brutal conflict with

Toussaint Louverture. But all that was still far in the future.11

The free-coloreds of the Western Province, expecting open warfare with

their white enemies, were eager for military allies. They found them in a

several groups of rebellious slaves who were active in the region. The free-

coloreds promised these slaves—who became known as the Swiss (a refer-

ence to the Swiss mercenaries who served the French king)—that they

would receive freedom in return for their service. The “Confederates,” as

the alliance of the free-coloreds and the Swiss called themselves, quickly

proved to be a daunting military force. In early September a troop of

whites from Port-au-Prince attacked them near Croix-des-Bouquets. The

Confederates pushed many of their white opponents into the nearby cane

fields. It was not a good place to take refuge; as they should have known by

then, sugarcane burns all too easily. The Confederates set fire to the cane

fields, and the whites trapped in them were burned to death.12

In the wake of this victory, a wealthy planter from the town named

Hanus de Jumecourt stepped forward with an audacious plan. At odds with

the radical whites of Port-au-Prince, many of whom came from the class of

“petits blancs,” and intent on preventing slave rebellion from breaking out

in the region, he decided to make peace with the free-coloreds. He led the

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administrators of Croix-des-Bouquets and Mirabalais in signing an agree-

ment with the Confederates, promising to abide by the decrees of the

French National Assembly, including that of May 15, 1791, which had

given political rights to some free-coloreds. This first agreement became

the template for another signed soon afterward between representatives

from Port-au-Prince and the “citizens of color,” as the Confederates point-

edly named themselves. It began with a history lesson. The “citizens of

color” declared that the provisions “passed in their favor” in the 1685 Code

Noir had been “violated by the progress of a ridiculous form of prejudice,”

which had continued when the assemblies in the colony denied them the

vote, and they had therefore been compelled to take up arms to defend

their “violated and misunderstood rights.” Having set the record straight

on their own actions, they noted (undoubtedly with considerable satisfac-

tion) that it was good to see the “return of the white citizens to the true

principles of reason, justice, humanity, and healthy policies.”13

The “citizens of color” presented themselves as defenders of the Na-

tional Assembly, and the whites as rebels against its authority. They de-

manded the “literal execution of all the points and articles of the decrees

and instructions of the National Assembly,” insisting, as Ogé had the year

before, that these had granted them political rights. Since they had been il-

legally excluded from voting, furthermore, they declared that all the as-

semblies then in existence were illegitimate and must be replaced through

new, racially integrated elections. Whites in the region had been furiously

resisting any grant of political rights to free-coloreds for years, but with

slave revolt looming to the north, times had changed. The Port-au-Prince

delegates accepted all the free-coloreds’ demands. Another “Concordat”

signed in October 1791 added more provisions, ordering the integration of

local militia units and abolishing the use of racial distinctions in public discourse. All free men would simply be “citizens.”14

A procession and a mass were organized in Port-au-Prince to celebrate

the agreement. Alongside the victorious free-coloreds were the Swiss—

several hundred rebel slaves turned victorious soldiers—whose presence

thrilled slaves in the town and galled many whites. They walked, wrote one

observer, “with the assurance of free men,” and reportedly told urban

slaves: “If you had done like us, the country would be ours!” There had

been no mention of the Swiss in the numerous agreements signed during

the previous month, but there had been a debate among the free-coloreds

about what to do with them. Many free-coloreds supported a proposal by

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which the Swiss would be freed but forced to serve eight years in the

maréchaussée.
But the white patriots in Port-au-Prince were against any such action, convinced that rewarding rebellious slaves with freedom was

a bad precedent. Although a number of free-coloreds, including André

Rigaud, spoke out in defense of the Swiss, the free-colored leadership, led

by their more conservative leaders such as Pierre Pinchinat, acquiesced in

the decision of the administrators of Port-au-Prince: the Swiss were to be

deported. “I knew all along that the blacks would get screwed,” one dis-

gusted slave in Port-au-Prince exclaimed. He was right: the Swiss were to

be sent to the Mosquito Coast of Central America, a place where, as one

planter wrote, “even the devil couldn’t survive.” In fact, though, they suf-

fered a worse fate. The captain who was supposed to bring them to the

Mosquito Coast tried, and failed, to sell them in Belize, then dumped them

along the shore of Jamaica. The British, alarmed at the prospect of having

such slaves in their colony, shipped them back to Saint-Domingue. There,

imprisoned in a boat in a remote harbor under the watch of French sol-

diers, sixty were executed, and most of the rest died of sickness and starva-

tion. It was a tragic betrayal that would not be forgotten, and a taste of the internal conflicts among different groups of African descent in the colony

that were to come.15

Meanwhile the brief period of cooperation and peace between the free-

coloreds and whites ended in a new outbreak of violence. On the day the

municipality was scheduled to ratify the Concordat, a black Confederate

soldier named Scapin was insulted in the street by a white soldier. They be-

gan to fight, and when the police arrived they arrested Scapin. News of the

incident spread, and an angry white crowd pushed the police aside and

lynched him. Enraged free-coloreds responded by shooting down a white

“patriot.” A battle broke out in the streets of Port-au-Prince. The outnum-

bered free-colored soldiers retreated from the town, but whites killed free-

colored civilians in the streets and murdered them in their homes. As the

killing progressed, a devastating fire broke out in the city. Eight hundred

houses were burnt to their foundations, and the city reduced to a “mound

of ashes.”16