Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (29 page)

Prince troops in hand-to-hand combat and retook Croix-des-Bouquets.

In the process they faced off against the Company of Africans: during

the battle thousands of slaves fought one another in a war that was not

their own.11

The mass mobilization of slaves severely disrupted slavery and encour-

aged new uprisings throughout the region, but the leadership of Hyacinthe

shaped and limited slave action. He established himself on a plantation,

promising to bring his followers back to the plantations. Hyacinthe invited

the planter Hanus de Jumecourt—the architect of the first Concordat

between whites and free-coloreds, signed in 1791—to return to Croix-des-

Bouquets and head the police force there. Using his considerable influ-

ence and the threat of violence, Hyacinthe oversaw the partial reestablish-

ment of sugar production on the plain and helped preserve the plantations

of the west from the destruction that had occurred in the north.12

The slaves who had risen up in Cul-de-Sac had saved the free-

coloreds—something their leader Pierre Pinchinat would recall when he

wrote that the blacks had served as a “rampart” against the whites—and in

doing so they opened the way for the final defeat of the white radicals of

Port-au-Prince. After the free-colored victory at Croix-des-Bouquets, the

Republican commissioners in Le Cap decided to seek peace in the west.

Under the leadership of Pinchinat, the free-coloreds demanded the arrest

of the leaders in Port-au-Prince and dissolution of the local assembly, and

the commissioners agreed. With the administration and many whites in the

west turned against them, the radicals fell into disarray. Caradeux left the

colony, carrying fifty of his slaves to the United States; Borel was arrested and soon left Saint-Domingue. In early July the army of free-coloreds, led

by André Rigaud and Louis-Jacques Bauvais, entered Port-au-Prince. The

remaining radical leaders were arrested; one of the most hated was exe-

cuted in secret. Rigaud and Bauvais, having proved themselves as the

military leaders of the free-colored insurgents, became French Republican

officers.13

Meanwhile, by May 1792 news had arrived from France about the April

4 decree granting full political rights to free-coloreds. The looming danger

of slave revolt and the turnabout in Paris combined to weaken the political

will of those whites who still resisted the demands of the free-coloreds.

The first stage of the Haitian Revolution was coming to a close. The free

d e f i a n c e

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people of color had taken advantage of the opening provided by slave re-

volt and, through effective lobbying in Paris and armed struggle in Saint-

Domingue, unraveled the racial hierarchy that had oppressed them for

decades. In the process they had become essential allies for the Republi-

can administrators from France in Saint-Domingue. Many of them would

embrace this role in the coming year, and in so doing would break with

those among their white planter allies who turned against the Republic.

General Bauvais would explain that the free-coloreds had never been the

“dupes” of the wealthy planters, having joined with them only because they

needed “auxiliaries” as they struggled for their rights. “If the devil had presented himself, we would have recruited him,” he declared. The free-

coloreds, in any case, no longer needed their local white allies, for they had gained an even more powerful ally: the metropolitan government, which

increasingly came to depend on them as its base of power in the colony.14

There was, of course, one problem: what to do with the slaves who had

been central in securing victory? Most free-coloreds, as well as their white

allies, wanted the slaves who had risen up to return to their plantations.

Having at last realized that times had changed, however, they made an im-

portant concession to the slave insurgents, granting freedom to several

hundred of their leaders. This promise came with one condition: that the

leaders allow themselves to be organized into a police unit to keep order

on the plantations from which many of their followers had come. Among

those included was Hyacinthe, whose success in keeping order in Cul-de-

Sac highlighted the effectiveness of employing formerly enslaved leaders

to contain slave resistance. The Republican commissioner Philippe Rose

Roume de Saint-Laurent noted with satisfaction that these slaves-turned-

police spread out among the plantations like “preachers,” and that their

success in restoring order amply justified the decision to grant them free-

dom. Men who had led slaves into war now helped lead them back to work.

Still, a precedent had been set, one that in the words of one contemporary

provided a “dangerous example for all thinking blacks”: insurrection and

war against whites could lead to an officially sanctioned freedom.15

In the Southern Province many slaves who had fought for the free-

coloreds resisted attempts to bring them back to work. In mid-July 1792

the local commander invited two leaders of bands of armed slaves, Armand

and Martial, to a conference with their masters to work out a return to the

plantations. Martial wore a uniform with epaulets and carried a sword and

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

a gun to the meeting. Armand, dressed less impressively, sat across the ta-

ble from his own master, who had owned him for twenty-five years, and

who just as the revolution began had promised him his freedom. The two

men refused the whites’ entreaties to surrender and bring their followers

back to the plantations. They left the meeting as they had arrived, as political leaders who no longer felt any allegiance to the men who still techni-

cally owned them. A few days later they riposted with their own demands:

three free days a week for all slaves, liberty for several hundred leaders,

and the abolition of whipping. White authorities refused to negotiate, and

Armand and Martial retreated to a mountainous region called the Platons,

where they were joined by other bands and new recruits from plantations.

Elsewhere in the south, in Port-Salut, one of the leaders of the January

1791 conspiracy, who had managed to escape from prison, led a new slave

revolt. The Southern Province, like the north, was gradually being taken

over by strong bands of rebel slaves.16

The governor, Philibert François Rouxel de Blanchelande, arrived in

late July and offered Armand and Martial an amnesty for all their follow-

ers who returned to their plantations. Unimpressed, the slaves responded

by attacking the plantations around Les Cayes. In the midst of a storm

Armand led troops onto his master’s plantation and burned it to the

ground. The revolt in the north was his model; he told one slave that at Le

Cap “the slaves did not leave a single structure standing” and that “the

same must happen here.”17

Blanchelande sent white troops and a regiment of free-coloreds com-

manded by Rigaud against the insurgents. As the columns marched up

into the mountains, they were “assailed from all sides by blacks they

could not see,” who shot at them and rolled rocks down from above. Two

hundred white soldiers were killed and several captured. Blanchelande

watched in horror as the head of one of his officers—recognizable from a

distance because of his white hair—was lifted on a pike above the insur-

gent camp. The victorious rebels shouted “Long live the king!” and “Long

live Blanchelande!” in order to make the whites think there were “traitors

among them.” The expedition was an embarrassing and costly failure. “The

blacks remained the absolute masters of the Platons.”18

In the wake of this victory the rebel band sent a new set of demands to

Les Cayes: freedom for the all insurgent slaves in the group, and three free

days per week for all slaves in the region. In another missive they went fur-

ther, asking for territorial rights over the Platons. As had been the case in d e f i a n c e

139

the north, there were tensions within the band itself about the negotia-

tions, and some criticized Armand for trusting Rigaud, who was acting as

an intermediary between them and the officials at Les Cayes. The whites

balked at any concessions, but when Armand threatened to attack Les

Cayes and burn the city down, the Provincial Assembly offered to grant

freedom to several hundred slaves.19

The freedom papers were signed by Rigaud and the Provincial Assem-

bly, and some slaves were suspicious of their validity because they had not

been signed by their masters. Furthermore, freedom was granted only to

those who had been armed by free-coloreds, and not to those who had

been armed by whites or who had risen up independently. Only a little

more than half of the eligible 700 accepted the offer. The others stayed at

Platons, trusting their weapons rather than the papers offered to guarantee

the freedom they had claimed for themselves. New recruits streamed up

toward Platons. Although they lacked weapons, and were forced to fabri-

cate poison arrows and to use pots filled with stones to add to the noise of

their attacks, they defended themselves successfully. They were building a

new life in the mountains. They had several camps protected by entrench-

ments built on the edges of cliffs, each with 800 to 900 cabins, as well as

hospitals for the sick. The residents called their home the “kingdom of the

Platons,” and chose a king to govern them. They descended to raid planta-

tions, stealing mules and horses and attacking army camps. In the plain,

meanwhile, most slaves “simply stopped working altogether.” By late 1792

one-third of the plantations in the south had been burnt, and all of the

nearly 100 sugar plantations on the once-thriving Plaine des Cayes had

been destroyed or damaged.20

To fight the rebels, the government deployed troops recently arrived

from France, many of them poor rural men unprepared for the difficulty

of the fighting. As one soldier wrote, it was “brigandage” rather than war,

for the soldiers “killed without seeing the enemy,” who approached them

in the bushes “without being seen” until they were in pistol range. The

French had some successes against the insurgents, and took brutal revenge

when they could. In one engagement in the south near the end of 1792,

100 insurgents were gunned down in a cane field, where the white troops

found the dead and the wounded “lying like dogs.” “We cut off their heads

and ears to bring them back to our camp,” announced once soldier. “It was

a real joy for us.” Another bragged to his girlfriend about the “pleasure” he took in carrying the head of a slave back to his camp. But such victories

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came at a steep cost. Prone to tropical disease, exhausted during difficult

missions against the mountain strongholds, lacking meat and other provi-

sions even when they were in their garrisons because of the destruction on

the plain, many died within months. “This is the graveyard of the French,”

wrote one soldier. “We die here like flies.”21

In the north the tone of the insurgents was changing. Jean-François and

Biassou, who in late 1791 had negotiated for a small number of emancipa-

tions and limited reforms in slavery, joined with a young leader named

Charles Belair and issued a letter to the Colonial Assembly and the com-

missioners. The French, they pointed out, had “formally sworn” to follow

the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This declaration, they continued,

pronounced that “men are born free and equal in rights” and that their

“natural rights were liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppres-

sion.” In resisting slavery, then, the insurgents were clearly “within their

rights” as stipulated in the Declaration. Nevertheless, there were French

officials who had “crossed the oceans” to combat them. In place of such

hypocritical behavior, the insurgents suggested an alternative. They would

lay down their arms if two major demands were met: “general liberty for all

men retained in slavery” and a “general amnesty for the past.” The leaders

would then oversee the return of the insurgents to the plantations, where

they would go back to work not as slaves but as laborers receiving a yearly

salary. With a keen awareness of the political forces that might shape the

future of the colony, the insurgent leaders requested that the plan be pre-

sented to both the king and the National Assembly and be guaranteed by

the Spanish government. Nothing came of this proposal at the time. But it

stands as a testament to the expanding goals and ambitions of the insur-

gents. A year later, in August 1793, another insurgent leader named Jean

Guyambois approach Biassou and Jean-François with a more radical plan

by which the slaves would be freed and given land ceded by the Spanish.22

Over a year after the uprising had started in the northern plain, much of

Saint-Domingue was beset by powerful groups of insurgents with no inten-

tion of laying down their weapons, and some of their most powerful leaders