Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (35 page)

a shot—a victory “announced to the British public by the cannon of the

Tower of London.” The British then turned their attention to a greater

prize: the control of the productive plantation regions of the colony, nota-

bly those of the west. There, too, they were hoping that their advance

would be facilitated by defections.30

In much of the west, notably in Saint-Marc, free people of color domi-

nated political life. Like white planters, most free-colored property owners

were infuriated by the emancipation decree and sought a solution that

would allow them to remain masters. At the same time, however, they did

not want to give up the right to racial equality they had gained through the

April 4 decree. When, in February, Saint-Domingue planters in London

had offered to hand over Saint-Domingue to the British, they proposed

that propertied free people of color retain “the same rights as the whites.”

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This initial proposition for equality was “whittled down,” however, and

the articles of capitulation agreed upon in September by Saint-Domingue

planter representatives and the British stipulated that free-coloreds would

be given “all the rights given to this class in the English colonies.” This was a major step backward from the full equality they currently enjoyed.31

Some free-colored leaders insisted that they should accept emancipa-

tion and remain loyal to the Republic. Others, unwilling to accept emanci-

pation, favored siding with the Spanish, who retained slavery but had rela-

tively liberal traditions regarding free people of African descent. In Saint-

Marc the leading free-coloreds crafted a compromise. At a town meeting

the majority voted to accept British occupation on the “condition that ra-

cial equality be maintained.” By late December the Union Jack was flying

over the port that had once been the home of the colony’s seditious assem-

bly. Next came the town of Arcahaye, farther south toward Port-au-Prince.

There the free-colored mayor declared that France would not blame those

residents of Saint-Domingue who turned to the British seeking to preserve

the “unfortunate remains of the men and the property of this colony.” “If

ever there is a case in which it is excusable to abandon one’s flag,” it was

this one. Arcahaye was soon placed in British hands. “You forget that you

have African blood in you,” the free-colored Pierre Pinchinat declared in

disgust to those who had defected. Even if the “voice of humanity” found

no place in their “hardened hearts,” they should save the blacks from slav-

ery out of gratitude for the services they had rendered them against the

white planters. For with British occupation came the return of the slavery

that had been abolished just a few months before.32

One great prize remained: Port-au-Prince. But there the Republicans—

who had renamed the city Port-Républicain—managed to hold on.

Sonthonax had come to join Polverel to direct the defense of the town, and

the commissioners strengthened their forces as they had in Le Cap by re-

cruiting soldiers from among the bands of insurgents in the surrounding

plain. In his bid to secure the loyalty of such ex-slaves, Sonthonax an-

nounced in late February that the National Convention had abolished slav-

ery in all the French colonies. He was, of course, guessing—there was no

way that he could have known of the decree passed several weeks before in

Paris—although, as it turned out, he was right. He also crafted personal

connections with certain leaders. He invited the leader Alaou, who had

been born in West Africa, to enter the town with several thousand of his

followers, and treated him to a “magnificent meal.” “It would be hard to

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portray the joy, the pride, the enthusiasm of these bands of Congos, Ibos,

Dahomeys, Senegalese,” wrote one nineteenth-century historian, “as they

watched their supreme chief, nearly naked, covered in fetishes, hold a

white cock at his side, sitting next to the representative of France, covered in tricolor ribbons.”33

The commissioners had left the north in the hands of Etienne Laveaux.

He put free-colored officer Jean-Louis Villatte in charge of Le Cap and

moved his headquarters to Port-de-Paix, on the front lines facing the Brit-

ish. “Even if the entire colony hands itself over to the English,” he com-

manded, “let us hold fast, and conserve for the Republic a place where

the forces it will send can disembark and find an immediate welcome.” If

they could not defend Port-de-Paix, they would destroy it and retreat from

“hill to hill,” fighting until reinforcements arrived. The desperation of the French created a kind of equality: most of the white troops were serving

“with bare feet, like the Africans.” Laveaux himself, the child of the French aristocracy, had nothing he could claim as his own. When the British noted

that if he surrendered he could keep all his possessions, he shot back that

“the only loot I have is my uniform, which is that of a soldier.” Villatte, too, responded defiantly to calls to surrender, answering one Spanish summons

to put down his weapons by sending, in place of a written letter, a packet of cartridges and bullets. Le Cap and Port-de-Paix became the “boulevards of

liberty” in the north. And they would hold fast, though the saviors they

were awaiting would not come from across the ocean, but from among the

slave insurgents of Saint-Domingue.34

Slavery had been abolished in Saint-Domingue. But would it be defeated

in Paris? How would the independent, unsanctioned, and boldly creative

decisions taken by Sonthonax and Polverel be greeted by the Republic

they represented? The mission of carrying the news of emancipation across

the Atlantic, and of convincing the National Convention of the action’s wis-

dom, fell to three men: one white, one of mixed European and African de-

scent, and one born in Africa and raised in slavery, the officer Jean-Baptiste Belley. They had been elected in Saint-Domingue in September 1793 and

had left the colony for Paris, with two others, soon afterward.35

It was not a comfortable journey. Crossing the Atlantic in the midst of

a war against the greatest naval power on earth, Great Britain, was dif-

ficult enough for a French delegation. But the British were not their only

enemies. The delegates left Saint-Domingue on a ship packed with whites

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fleeing into exile, who were openly hostile to the delegates and to the

regime they represented. The ship took them to Philadelphia, a city

thronged with the refugees from Saint-Domingue who had left with

Galbaud’s convoy. As soon as they anchored there, they were accosted by

French sailors who shouted that the delegates should be hung or shot. One

of the white delegates, Louis Dufay, entered the town and was immedi-

ately surrounded by a murderous crowd, surviving thanks to the protection

of a woman who led him through the side streets of the city. Another crowd

boarded the ship and attacked the other delegates. They were particularly

brutal to Belley. They took his sword, his watch, his money, and his papers,

and attacked him for “daring” to serve as an officer and “commanding

whites.” Belley responded that if he knew how to “save whites and defend

them” there was no reason he could not command them. The crowd de-

manded that he remove his tricolor cockade, shouting that a black man

should not be allowed to wear one. When he refused, they tore it off.

The crowd then pillaged the quarters of the absent Dufay, declaring that

“whites who sided with blacks were the guiltiest of all.” One of the five delegates was spirited off the ship by the crowd and taken hostage, though

he managed to escape and rejoin the delegation later in New York. To

make sure that some of them made it to Paris, the delegates split into two

groups. Three of them—Belley, Dufay, and Jean-Baptiste Mills—finally

made it to Bordeaux and, after being briefly imprisoned by local authori-

ties, arrived in Paris in mid-February.36

When the men entered the Convention, a deputy rose and announced

that it was a great day. While the “aristocracy” of both nobility and church

had been destroyed by the Revolution, the “aristocracy of the skin” had re-

mained strong. All that, however, had just changed. “Equality is conse-

crated; a black, a yellow [i.e., mulatto], and a white have taken their seat

among us, in the name of the free citizens of Saint-Domingue.” The Con-

vention erupted with applause, and another deputy asked that particular

recognition be given to the two free men of color—Belley and Mills—

whose class had been oppressed “for so many years.” The next day Dufay

stood before the Convention and delivered a powerful speech describing

the events that had transformed Saint-Domingue. He recounted how the

slaves in Le Cap and on surrounding plantations had come to the rescue of

the Republican commissioners when they were attacked by the counter-

revolutionary Galbaud. “‘We are negroes, and French,’ they said . . . ‘we

will fight for France, but in return we want our freedom.’ They even

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169

added: our
Droits de l’Homme.
” Dufay argued that the commissioners

had taken the only reasonable course of action in creating “new citizens

for the Republic in order to oppose our enemies.” Immediately after his

speech, a deputy rose and asked that the National Convention declare that

slavery was abolished throughout the Republic. There was no opposition,

and the law was quickly written and voted: “The National Convention de-

clares that slavery is abolished throughout the territory of the Republic; in consequence, all men, without distinction of color, will enjoy the rights of

French citizens.”37

Belley shouted: “I was a slave during my childhood. Thirty-six years

have passed since I became free through my own labor, and purchased my-

self. Since then, in the course of my life, I have felt worthy of being

French.” “It is the tricolor flag that has called us to our liberty,” he continued, and vowed “on behalf of my brothers” that it would fly upon the

shores and mountains of Saint-Domingue “as long as there is a drop of

blood in our veins.” “This is the death of the English!” the famed revolu-

tionary leader Danton proclaimed. The colony would have a powerful

army born out of emancipation and ready to die to defend it.38

The dramatic decision made by Sonthonax and Polverel in Saint-

Domingue had become the law of the French Republic. Throughout this

empire, whose prosperity rested on a foundation of slavery, there would be

no more masters and no more slaves, only citizens. It was a truly radical

change, the most dramatic of the many inaugurated by the French Revolu-

tion. It took individuals who had been stripped of all human rights and

made them members of a democratic republic. French colonial slavery

had, at the onset of the Revolution, been at its height, and within five years it had been destroyed. The emancipation decreed in 1794 was major step

in the long, contorted journey that would ultimately lead to the elimination

of slavery in the Americas. But for the people of Saint-Domingue, it was

only the end of the beginning of a long struggle for freedom.

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c h a p t e r e i g h t

The Opening

Toussaintlouverturewaswaiting.Partofthetorrentof

revolution that had swept away slavery in Saint-Domingue since

1791, serving under the command of Jean-François and Biassou,

he was by 1793 a powerful and independent leader in the insurgent camps

allied with the Spanish. By the beginning of 1794 he was still leading his

troops against the Republic in Saint-Domingue. That situation, however,

was about to change.

When he joined in the insurrection in 1791, Toussaint was already a free

man. He had been born in slavery just outside Le Cap on a plantation

owned by the Bréda family. He worked as a coachman and took care of

livestock on the plantation. Sometime in the 1770s the plantation manager,

Bayon de Libertat, emancipated Toussaint. Within a few years Toussaint