Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (31 page)

if the rights of men could be claimed in a land of slavery.”35

Sonthonax struck out against the racial segregation in the army.

With the support of Rochambeau and another officer, Etienne Laveaux, he

placed at least one officer of color in each of the army units stationed in

the town. The local Regiment du Cap, however, boldly refused to accept

any such officers. Sonthonax commanded that they assemble, along with

other units, on the town plaza to take an oath declaring they would obey

the April 4 decree. The troops assembled, but, as several hundred free-

coloreds led by Pierre Pinchinat watched, they refused to take the oath.

Soon afterward Sonthonax announced that he would deport the entire reg-

iment. The city erupted: as rumors spread that the free-coloreds were

planning to massacre the whites, the Regiment du Cap took over the arse-

nal and attacked free-colored troops, who retreated to the edge of the

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town. But Sonthonax, aided by Rochambeau and Laveaux, rallied the loyal

white troops, turned the tables on the rebels, and managed to arrest sev-

eral of them and take back control of the town. The free-colored troops,

led by Pinchinat, marched back triumphantly. A few weeks later Sonthonax

created several new regiments of free men of color in Le Cap. He had sur-

vived a violent challenge to his authority. It would not be the last such challenge; and the next time, Sonthonax would take more dramatic measures

to ensure his survival.36

From outside Le Cap, bands of slave insurgents were watching. Although

the April 4 decree was passed with the explicit intention of defeating the

slave uprising, the commissioners had made little progress in doing so in

the months after they arrived. Many of the French troops that accompa-

nied them succumbed to disease; by one account half of them died within

two months. In late October and early November 1792 a large and well-

armed expedition led by Rochambeau flushed insurgent bands out of the

northern plain and captured their stronghold at Ouanaminthe, along the

border with Santo Domingo. But most of the insurgents simply retreated

into the mountains, and in the end the mission did little but “inflame the

pride of the enemy,” who had realized that they could survive even when

an impressive army was sent against them. The rebels remained “masters

of the mountains, from which they could, at will, bring fire and iron to the

plains.” With the majority of troops back in Le Cap, the insurgents ad-

vanced across the plain again, and by December some bands were once

more camped close to the town.37

After Rochambeau left to take up his post in Martinique, now back

in the hands of the Republicans, the task of fighting the insurgents fell

to Etienne Laveaux. The tide of the war began to change under his

command. In mid-January Laveaux unleashed a well-coordinated attack

against the insurgents on the northern plain. His soldiers charged Biassou’s

troops, gathered in the town of Milot on the southern edge of the plain.

They took refuge in a fort in the hills nearby, and Biassou led the defense

courageously, marching around on the ramparts in view of the French at-

tackers. But Laveaux’s troops took a hill above the fort, and after a unit

of free-coloreds scaled the walls, the insurgents retreated into the moun-

tains.38

In early February Sonthonax wrote that Laveaux had “performed mira-

cles.” A song published in a newspaper promised the women of the colony

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that their “lovers would defend them” and soon they would no longer hear

the drums of war. During February the residents of Le Cap could read

many accounts of victories over the insurgents. Several strongholds around

Grande-Rivière, in the center of the northern plain, had been destroyed.

Attacked at night by “brigands” who came on with an “incredible ferocity,”

one unit nevertheless pushed the insurgents back and killed five of their

“chiefs.” Soon afterward the commander of this unit, General

Desfourneaux, captured an insurgent camp near Sainte-Suzanne and

killed several of the “most feared chiefs.” He had burned everything he

found to the ground, as he did in another nearby camp, destroying several

hundred
ajoupas
—huts—built by the insurgents. Their blood, he wrote,

was so thick after the battle that it covered the soles of his boots. He was

fighting a war against the land as well, uprooting provisions and cutting

down banana trees. Doing so, he declared, would hurt the insurgents

“more than our guns.” Elsewhere free-colored troops carried out night-

time attacks on camps built by slaves who had left their plantations. They

shot those who tried to escape. Many frightened slaves, the newspaper de-

clared, were returning to their masters. And there was reportedly disarray

in the insurgent camps, with Jean-François and Biassou no longer coordi-

nating their attacks. Jean-François narrowly escaped capture several times.

Sonthonax declared that victory was near: the insurgent slaves, “those mis-

erable varlets,” appropriate soldiers for “royalism and its agents,” would

soon suffer the fate of their “wicked protectors.”39

There were victories in the south as well. In early January Polverel

sent a new expedition against the “kingdom of the Platons.” The insur-

gents fought back once again, setting up ambushes against the approaching

troops. They were short on ammunition, however, and as the columns ap-

proached, Armand and Martial decided to evacuate their camps for higher

ground. Several hundred residents in the camp, “mostly women, children,

the aged and the sick,” stayed behind, as had been the case at Gallifet in

late 1791. They were too tired or weak to run, and perhaps ready to go

back to the plantations. They weren’t given the chance. The attacking

troops massacred everyone they found at Platons and destroyed the insur-

gent town. The attack was celebrated as a “tremendous victory.”40

The success of the mission against Platons depended on the service of

several hundred slaves led by a charismatic leader named Jean Kina, a

slave who had made a name for himself serving whites against the free-

coloreds starting in early 1792. Kina’s ragged, barefoot soldiers—who were

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later described as attacking to the sound of African music—played a cru-

cial role in shoring up slavery in the Southern Province. Kina himself, ulti-

mately freed for his services, remained loyal to the whites, going on to

serve the British when they invaded the colony. The whites in the south

also had the support of a Mandingo slave named Coacou. According to one

French soldier, Coacou had “given himself the title of general” and wore a

French general’s uniform. (The unanswered question of where he had

got it should probably have suggested the need for some suspicion about

where his loyalty ultimately lay.) His hat and his swordbelt were decorated

with the red, white, and blue of the Republic. Coacou carried out night-

time attacks against insurgent camps, and sometimes captured, tortured,

and killed rebels who were raiding plantations. In the north, too, slaves

played a crucial role in attacks against insurgent camps. One group of sol-

diers noted the crucial role played in a recent victory by slave recruits who

“seconded us” in pursuing “the enemies of our species, and not of theirs,”

suggesting that they deserved to be rewarded.41

Even with such allies, the victories against the insurgents were only

partial. Attacked in one area of the plains, insurgents spread out as they

retreated, “burning and bringing terror” to surviving plantations. Insur-

gents frequently retreated before they could be captured or massacred,

creating new camps higher in the mountains, which became the “boule-

vards of liberty.” Although French officers continually declared they had

killed several “important chiefs,” there always seemed to be others to take

the place of the dead. In fact, despite the campaigns against them, the

insurgents operated with impunity in many parts of the colony. One frus-

trated writer in the town of Limonade saw several hundred members

of an insurgent camp under the command of the leader Sans-Souci

unworriedly gathering salt along the coast near the town. It was vital, he insisted, to deprive them of this “necessity,” and also to prevent them from

communicating and trading with the canoes that met them along the coast.

The insurgents had developed networks of communication that stretched

across the colony and beyond. The general Joseph, forced to retreat from

his camp in February 1793, left behind letters sent to him by an insurgent

chief in another part of Saint-Domingue, as well as one sent to him from

a correspondent in Philadelphia. Indeed the currents of communication

among slave communities in the Americas buzzed with news of the upris-

ing in Saint-Domingue.42

Free-colored recruits to the French side played an important role in the

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campaigns against the insurgents. But there were still never enough of

such troops to assure a final victory. General Desfourneaux criticized local

whites who were shirking their duty to fight the insurgents. Many residents

were, understandably, doing their best to stay away from fields of battle.

The Intermediary Commission proclaimed in early March that many in-

habitants of the northern plain had retreated to Le Cap, where they were

“vegetating with an insouciance that was as revolting as it was unaccept-

able, safe from the fatigues and dangers of the war,” and ordered that they

all report to military duty in their rural parishes. But many whites flouted

such orders, leaving many areas depopulated and essentially in the hands

of the insurgents.43

Some whites sold their belongings and left the colony, harboring little

hope for the return of peace and prosperity. A newspaper advertisement

offered a coffee plantation several miles from Le Cap for sale, seeking to

make the best of a relatively unattractive proposition: all the buildings had been destroyed, although a few walls were still standing; of the forty-eight

“heads of negroes” that were to be included in the sale, thirty were off

fighting the insurgents; the remaining slaves, including seven that were

“lost with the brigands,” would be included on the off chance they ever re-

turned. Some planters, having lost their workforce, sought to rent gangs of

slaves for the time it took to complete the harvests on their plantations.

One wanted ten to twelve slaves to bring to a region “that had not been

burnt,” while another was seeking twenty to twenty-five slaves to harvest

coffee for a few months. One desperate planter who had “armed the few

negro males who had not joined the brigands” to defend his property, only

to have most of these recruited for missions against the insurgents, offered

money to any men who were willing to go back to his plantation with him.44

In the meantime, in Le Cap there were still simple pleasures to be

had, such as a crate of 1788 Médoc, as well as some Bordeaux, recently ar-

rived from France. One merchant offered a locally made chocolate made

of pure cocoa that he claimed was superior to chocolate that arrived from

France, which was “falsified” with nuts and therefore prone to infestation

by worms. There were unexpected dangers, too. One writer wrote indig-

nantly that each Sunday, citizens of Le Cap were beaten up by drunken

North American soldiers from the merchant boats that were regularly

anchoring in the harbor. For those who were not tired of hearing about—

and fearing—the slave insurrection, there was literature to be purchased:

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Gros’s account of his time as a prisoner among the insurgents in 1791 went

into its second printing.45

In the midst of war and revolution, society was being transformed. The

historian Thomas Madiou noted that by 1792 in the Southern Province,

“everything was changed: habits, customs, many new words in the lan-

guage.” Relationships between slaves and masters were being reshaped.

One “free black” slave owner had read the Declaration of the Rights of

Man to his slaves—a crime for which he was imprisoned in Le Cap until

the commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel released him. There were

new ways of speaking about race and community. A man named Laurent

Jolicoeur presented a petition to the administration in Saint-Marc, intro-

ducing himself as “formerly described as a
citoyen de couleur,
but emphasizing the accuracy of the term by noting that he was in fact “as black as the white is white.” He was seeking freedom for one of his slaves, Zaïre, a

woman of the Ibo nation, asking the administrators for “your benevolence,

or rather your justice,” in taking her “out of captivity.” “Zaïre is no common subject,” Jolicoeur wrote, “and if she were not in servitude, she could rival any
citoyenne
with the elevation of her sentiments.” Because of this, however, her state made her deeply miserable, and, “especially since the Revo-