Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (28 page)

c h a p t e r s i x

Defiance

Inlate1792theslavePhilipeauwroteagaintohisowner,Madame

de Mauger, in France. “I am black, but, my dear mistress, I am true

and loyal,” he declared. He was raising his children to love and fear

God, he announced, and to faithfully respect their masters. Philipeau did

not complain about the plantation manager, as he had years before. In-

stead, he wrote to Mauger of the profits “I made this year.” He was now—

as he had long argued he should be—the manager of her indigo planta-

tion. It was not, however, Mauger’s generosity or farsightedness that had

brought this about. Indeed, although he must have assumed she knew

what had happened, Philipeau was reticent about announcing the change

too openly. His new power had come from revolt: sometime during the

previous months, he and other slaves had risen up and forced their hated

manager off the plantation.1

In a world overshadowed by the smoke of the slave revolt in the north,

slaves throughout the colony were emboldened to speak and strike out

against the hierarchies of slavery. Indeed Mauger had, within a few

months, completely lost control of both of her plantations. Early in 1792

the slaves on her sugar plantation had risen up against their manager. “Your

blacks have forced me out of your plantation, having pillaged and stolen

everything and threatened to kill me,” the deposed manager wrote in May.

“Right now they are doing as they please.” Even before this had happened

things were difficult on the plantation; it had been impossible to build a

needed mill because the carpenter had been killed fighting the insurgents.

“The colony is depopulated of whites,” the manager lamented. He had

seen enough. Fearing for his safety, he left for France.2

Mauger’s slaves presented their demands with a confidence that

shocked those who confronted them. When a group of whites from Saint-

Marc, acting on Mauger’s behalf, went to her sugar plantation two months

later to replace the expelled manager, the slaves responded unequivocally.

“Our surprise was extreme,” wrote the visitors, “to hear them all shout that

they didn’t want any more whites.” It turned out that a free man of color

named Enard had “taken over the management of the plantation without

anyone asking him to.” When Mauger’s representatives came to the planta-

tion, the slaves announced they were quite happy with Enard’s services and

wanted “no others.” The visitors explained that Enard was less qualified

than the white manager they had chosen. They had every legal right to

choose who would manage the plantation, and the slaves had, in principle,

no right to refuse. But when Mauger’s representatives insisted, the assem-

bled slaves made “murmurs and threats” and showered them with jokes

and insults, and the whites retreated.3

Faced with such united resistance, whites found they had little power to

respond. Mauger’s representatives asked local administrators to punish the

rebellious slaves. But with so few troops at their disposal in front of widening slave resistance, there was little they could do. A month later Mauger’s

administrators named another man, a sugar refiner, to take control of the

plantation, but the slaves expelled him too. In the end, Mauger’s represen-

tatives accepted Enard’s presence, and even paid him and sent food to the

plantation. “Men are vindictive, and we are in a century in which it seems

everything is permitted,” they wrote apologetically to Mauger. Only the de-

feat of the slave insurgents of the north could bring the slaves of the West-

ern Province back under control. Although on many plantations slaves re-

mained “tranquil,” they were not “working too hard.” “We are forced to

close our eyes and reward them anyway. It is quite cruel, but the hope of a

different future gives us patience.”4

These events paralleled those on Mauger’s indigo plantation, where

Philipeau had taken charge. In his letter to Mauger, Philipeau at first dis-

tanced himself from what had happened: he wrote that the slaves had

“taken advantage of the revolution to fire your manager.” But then he

made clear that he had both approved and participated: “You know that if I

had been master, he would have been kicked out of here six years ago for

his bad behavior.” He assured Mauger: “We did nothing bad to him. We

did not hurt him.” And then he gave her an order of his own. Rather than

being angry with her slaves, he told Mauger to “bless God that this man is

no longer on your property.” She could depend on him to keep things run-

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ning on the plantation, he insisted. The slaves had not left, and they had

not killed or hurt anyone. Indeed, “since the revolution” there had been

three “little creoles” born. Her property was increasing under his care.5

In his letters Philipeau presented himself as his mistress’ humble ser-

vant. He declared he would be happy to accept a new manager, whether

“white” or “mulatto.” In a letter they wrote several months later to Mauger,

a group of other slaves from the plantation declared they were repentant

about what they had done. “All the subjects in Saint-Domingue have felt

the loss of reason,” they noted. But at the same time they justified their behavior, describing how the old manager had “tyrannized” them, and point-

ing, as Philipeau had years before, to the financial losses she suffered as

proof of this. “We are slaves and your subjects, and we give ourselves over

to work as we should, but humanity must interest itself in our fate.” They

had a right to be treated according to certain rules, they asserted, and to

take action when they were wronged by those in power. Philipeau had

taken a bold step years before in writing to his mistress to ask her to intervene on behalf of her slaves. In the new context created by the insurrection

of 1791, he and the other Mauger slaves had gone further, using their num-

bers and their determination to take over the plantation themselves. They

understood that those in charge had little power to resist and would ulti-

mately be forced to negotiate with them over the terms of their labor. Like

slaves elsewhere in the Artibonite region, and throughout the Western

Province, they did not destroy or abandon the plantations, but they began

to make them their own.6

At the beginning of 1792, while much of the Northern Province had been

overtaken by slave revolt, the west and the south were still relatively un-

touched by open insurrection. During the year, however, the compass of

slave action expanded dramatically in these regions. Some slaves attacked

their masters and took control of their plantations, and by the end of the

year independent bands of insurgent slaves had established themselves in

parts of the south. Slave revolution, initially limited to the Northern Prov-

ince, now engulfed much of the colony. It was groups of whites and free-

coloreds—many of them plantation owners—who laid the foundation for

this expansion of slave revolution by arming slaves to fight alongside them

in their violent battles against one another.

Free-colored leaders had initially shied away from using this tactic. In

his 1790 revolt Vincent Ogé refused to mobilize slaves, as some suggested

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he should. And in the south in January 1791 free-coloreds turned down an

offer of support from a group of several hundred conspiring plantation

slaves. These insurgents, like those who would set in motion the revolt in

the north several months later, were inspired by the rumor of the king of

France’s grant to plantation slaves of three free days per week; they were

determined to force the local administration to enforce the decree. The

free-coloreds, though they promised to issue such a demand, were not will-

ing actually to join forces with the slave conspirators. Although the latter

decided to go ahead with their revolt anyway, their plans were discovered

and their leaders arrested and imprisoned before they could act. The slaves

of the south would have to wait for the slaves of the north to open the way.7

A year later most of the slaves of the south were still on their planta-

tions. But male slaves increasingly found opportunities for individual free-

dom. As their battles with local whites continued, some free-coloreds con-

cluded that they could not win without slave recruits. Bands operating

in the countryside held out the promise of liberty to men from the planta-

tions who would join them in fighting the whites. Slaves had reason to be

wary of such promises. Many probably knew of what happened to the

Swiss—the slave insurgents who had joined with the free-coloreds in

the early 1790s—most of whom had found death instead of liberty. Never-

theless many slaves responded. Sometimes they were given little choice.

Troops of free-coloreds occupied plantations, seeking to win over the

drivers on plantations abandoned by their owners. If the driver resisted,

they sometimes cut up his whip—a symbol of his power—or, worse, shot

him. In some cases these bands also pillaged and burned the houses of

the slaves. Once the free-coloreds were drawing recruits from among the

slaves, whites had little choice but to respond in kind or be overwhelmed.

By the end of 1791 whites in several parts of the south had freed their own

slaves and made them soldiers. Les Cayes passed a decree ordering that

one-tenth of the local slaves be recruited to fight the free-coloreds.8

Most free people of color (many of whom, like the Raimond family,

owned plantations in the area) shared with whites a desire to see slavery

maintained in the area, and assumed—reasonably enough, given the long

history of slave recruitment in Saint-Domingue and elsewhere in the

Americas—that the granting of freedom to some slaves in return for their

service would not fundamentally undermine their own power or wealth.

But, called on to be auxiliaries in a war that was not their own, slaves

gained military experience and new political perspectives. Once they were

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serving “as equals in arms” they took “as an accomplished fact the freedom

they were promised.” As one planter wrote, the slaves who had left planta-

tions for military camps had “lost the habit of working” and in the process

became “accustomed to thinking.” Once the war between the whites and

free-coloreds came to an end, many of them began fighting their own war.9

In the west, where conflicts between whites and free-coloreds had been

raging since the disintegration of the various “Concordats” signed in 1791,

slaves were also increasingly recruited as auxiliaries. Port-au-Prince, still the stronghold of the white radicals, was under siege by the troops of free-coloreds. But the latter had enemies outside the town as well. In the

Artibonite region a planter named Claude Isaac Borel—who was a repre-

sentative in the Colonial Assembly—turned his plantation into an armed

camp and, fighting under a red flag, launched attacks against free-coloreds

in the area. He transformed the community of white saltmakers who lived

in the region into an armed band to fight with him. In the face of Borel’s

successes, free-coloreds in the region began recruiting slaves from local

plantations. As in the south, when the slave drivers on certain plantations

refused to cooperate, the free-coloreds sometimes killed them. The civil

war profoundly undermined the authority of masters in the Artibonite

plain and created new fissures in the system that held slaves in check.10

The white radicals of Port-au-Prince, too, began recruiting slaves to

fight for them. Jean-Baptiste de Caradeux, a planter who had previously

armed his own plantation slaves, created the “Company of Africans,” re-

cruiting among urban slaves. They carried out raids on the Cul-de-Sac

plain and in March 1792 joined with troops of white patriots in attack-

ing the free-colored stronghold at Croix-des-Bouquets. As these troops

marched across the plain, they raided plantations, taking the pigs and

chickens of many slaves, and forced some to join their ranks. The fortu-

itous arrival of a solar eclipse as they marched added to the terror they in-

spired in their opponents. Although slaves on one plantation fought back,

for the most part the Port-au-Prince troops encountered little resistance

from them or the outnumbered free-coloreds, who retreated from Croix-

des-Bouquets. Soon, however, the tide turned. An army of slaves, angered

by the depredations against them and encouraged by emissaries from the

free-coloreds, rose up on the plantations of the plain and converged on

Croix-des-Bouquets. Ten to fifteen thousand strong, armed with sticks and

machetes, they marched into battle behind Hyacinthe, who waved a horse-

hair talisman meant to protect them from enemy fire. “Don’t be afraid; it’s

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only water coming out of the cannon,” he called as they charged. Although

many fell, others braved the murderous artillery to meet the Port-au-