Read Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Online
Authors: Laurent Dubois
He noted with satisfaction that the “workers” from Plaisance, who had fled
during the fighting, had all “returned to the plantations” under his orders.34
In November 1794, when Laveaux went to visit the lands under
Louverture’s command, he was delighted to see that reconstruction of
the plantation economy was under way. “All the inhabitants,” he wrote, “es-
pecially the whites,” never tired of “honoring the virtues of Toussaint.” He
helped those of all “colors” and “opinions.” Many white planters had
returned to their plantations, and many white women talked about the as-
sistance they had received from this “surprising man.” In Petite-Rivière,
15,000 cultivators had come home. They were, Laveaux gushed, grateful to
the Republic that had made them free, and worked assiduously thanks
to Louverture. “Whites, blacks, mulattoes, soldiers, cultivators, property
owners, all bless the virtuous chief whose care maintains order and peace
among them.”35
Looking back in the middle of 1795, Louverture remembered how with
all the mountains “in rebellion” and the plantations “abandoned,” he had
been forced to use all his “patience and activity” to bring the cultivators
back to work. He had also, however, used threats. The French constitution,
declared Louverture in a March 1795 proclamation, assured the “conser-
vation of the property of citizens,” and his officers would make sure that
property was respected. The propertyless ex-slaves, meanwhile, were or-
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dered to return to their plantations within twenty-four hours. They would
be paid a salary for their work, but they did not have the freedom to say no.
“Work is necessary, it is a virtue,” Louverture announced. “All lazy and er-
rant men will be punished by the law.” Writing to Laveaux a few months
later, Louverture noted that he was “busy gathering the cultivators, the
drivers, and the managers, exhorting them to love work, which is insepara-
ble from liberty.”36
Louverture was, from the start, generous and forgiving toward white
planters in the regions he captured from the British. Although he knew
that many of them had actively supported the British occupation and even
carried arms against the French, he showed little interest in punishing
them for their treason. In this he went against the grain of French policy,
which was often quite harsh to those deemed traitors to the Republic;
in 1794 in Guadeloupe, for instance, several hundred French planters
who had fought for the British were executed and buried in mass graves
by order of the Republican commander of the island, Victor Hugues.
Louverture’s own experience suggested the benefits of forgiving and for-
getting; he had, after all, been greeted with open arms by the Republic in
1794 despite the fact that he had been fighting for the Spanish enemy for
nearly a year. But he also believed that the colony needed these former
masters in order to rebuild the plantation economy.
When in August 1795 Louverture captured the Mirabalais region from
the British, he found “magnificent plantations” in the “best possible state”
where the ex-slaves were “working well.” In the town were several hun-
dred white planters from other parts of Saint-Domingue who had gathered
under the protection of the British. Louverture gave them passports to re-
turn to their homes and wrote to Laveaux requesting permission to give
them back their properties, which had been sequestered by the Republic.
Such abandoned properties, as Louverture saw it, were more likely to be
rebuilt if they were put in the hands of their former owners, who had the
expertise necessary to rebuild them, than if they were kept in the hands of
a strained administration. Louverture was confident enough in his own
power not to fear that these planters would challenge the order of emanci-
pation from within. Indeed many of the planters who returned, seeing that
the likelihood that slavery would be restored was diminishing day by day
with Louverture’s conquests, were willing to accept the new order, which
offered them continuing, if somewhat diminished, possibilities for enrich-
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ment. The planters’ return home was not always easy. Often, facing bu-
reaucratic hurdles and the resistance of the managers put in charge of their
plantations by the local administration, they were unable to reestablish
ownership of their lost estates. Nevertheless many returned. Louverture
pursued his policy of welcoming returning planters throughout his career
in Saint-Domingue, generating both allies and enemies in the process.37
Louverture was comfortable working with former masters as a way of
maintaining and rebuilding the shattered plantation order. Indeed, in 1795
he became a property owner himself, acquiring a plantation at Ennery, in
the mountains above Gonaïves, which provided him with a refuge through-
out the next years. By 1799 Louverture owned several plantations; an arti-
cle published in France in early 1799 described one as being in the “best of
condition,” with a house where “everything exuded order and decency”
surrounded by the “houses of the cultivators” and thriving groves of coffee
trees. In the new regime, of course, property owners did not have the un-
fettered power over their laborers they had enjoyed under slavery. The co-
lonial state was committed to emancipation. But it was also committed to
making the former slaves stay on their plantations and forcing them to
work at the same tasks they had before they were free. With their choices
circumscribed by the policies of Louverture’s regime—enforced by “agri-
cultural inspectors” appointed in the areas under his command—ex-slaves
did what they had in 1793 under Polverel’s regulations, expanding their
garden plots as much as they could, negotiating the terms of their labor,
and sometimes illegally leaving the plantations to seek something better.38
Some plantation workers rose up against Louverture, claiming that his
goal was nothing less than the resurrection of slavery. As early as January
1795 one of his officers, Blanc Cazenave, rallied cultivators in the
Artibonite to rise up by claiming that Louverture intended to reinstitute
the “old regime.” In June, in the parish of Marmelade, another man en-
couraged cultivators to rebel by announcing that Louverture was “making
them work” in order to return them to the “slavery of the whites.” Several
plantation managers whom Louverture had installed were killed. “I went
myself to preach” to the rebellious laborers, wrote Louverture, but “in
thanks for my pains I received a bullet in the leg, which is still causing me a great deal of pain.” Much of the region’s harvest had been lost to fire during the insurrection. Louverture used his disciplined troops of ex-slaves to
repress these revolts. But rumors that he was preparing a restoration of
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slavery haunted him continually throughout the next years. Facing such ru-
mors, and the revolts they helped stir up, Louverture defended his policies
by insisting that it was necessary to limit liberty in order to sustain it.39
In February 1796 plantation workers in the mountains above Port-de-
Paix, in the Northern Province, rose up in revolt. Several whites were
killed. Louverture rode all night from the west to confront the rebels
personally, demanding that they explain why they had risen up. He sum-
marized the conversation he had with the rebels in a letter to Laveaux.
Though the exchange was probably more complicated, and tendentious,
than Louverture described it, his letter provides insight into the leader’s
evolving political philosophy. He had, he explained, criticized the rebels
for the killings they had committed, and told them that “if they wanted to
conserve their liberty they must submit to the laws of the Republic, be
docile, and work.” “God has said: ask and you shall receive, knock on my
door and it shall be opened,” he told them. “But he never said to commit
crimes to ask for what you need.” The rebels told Louverture they knew he
was “the father of all the blacks” and had been working hard for their “hap-
piness and liberty.” But, the rebels insisted, they had good reasons for tak-
ing up arms. Etienne Datty, who “from the beginning of the revolution”
had always been their leader, and had “always eaten misery with us so we
would win our liberty,” had been dismissed by local officials, and they
did not understand why. Triggered by Datty’s dismissal, the uprising was
nourished by a broader set of grievances against the local administration.
“They want to make us slaves; equality does not exist here,” the rebels ex-
plained. Where Louverture was in command, “whites and men of color”
were “united with the blacks.” All seemed “like brothers, born of the same
mother.” “That, my general, is what we call equality.” In Port-de-Paix, how-
ever, things were different. The blacks were disdained and mistreated.
Those who worked on the plantations were not given a large enough share
of what they produced. And they suffered daily, and potentially devastat-
ing, harassment. “They make us give them our chickens and our pigs when
we go to sell them in town, and if we try to complain, we are stopped by the
police, and they put us in prison and don’t feed us and we have to pay to
get out.” This, the insurgents declared, was “not liberty.”40
Louverture responded gravely that although all the reasons they had
given him seemed justified, they were wrong to have risen up. They had
put him in an impossible position. He had just dispatched emissaries to
the National Convention to “thank them in the name of all the blacks for
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the benevolent decree that had given them liberty,” and to “assure them
that they would work hard” to prove to France, and to all other nations,
that they deserved their freedom. He had triumphantly declared that, with
the aid of France, the people of the colony would demonstrate to the “en-
tire universe” that a colony “worked by free hands” could flourish. What
would the Convention think when it learned what the insurgents of Port-
de-Paix had just done? “Tell me,” he demanded. He would be “shamed”
and proven wrong. The French government would accept the arguments
of the enemies of liberty, who had argued that “blacks are not made to be
free, that if they become free they will no longer want to work, and will do
nothing but steal and kill.” They would demand that Louverture make sure
the blacks remained obedient from then on.41
A few months later Louverture issued a similar proclamation to rebel-
lious cultivators in the nearby parish of Saint-Louis du Nord. What would
the French people say, he demanded, when they learned that rather than
being thankful for freedom, the ex-slaves had “soaked their hands in the
blood” of France’s children? How could they dare claim that France
wanted to reestablish slavery when the nation had sacrificed its flourishing
commerce and its most prosperous factories to bring them liberty? “Be
very careful, my brothers; there are more blacks in the colony than there
are men of color and whites combined, and if there are disorders it is
against us that the Republic will act,” he warned. He demanded that all
“good citizens” denounce those who “blasphemed against the French Re-
public.”42
Louverture sought to placate the rebels, notably by naming Etienne
Datty to a local military post. But his interventions ultimately had little effect. In May Datty took arms once again. “All the cultivators of the moun-
tains have risen up,” Louverture wrote; they were “destroying provisions”
and refusing to deliver what was produced on the plantations. Rumors
were circulating that Louverture was planning to “give the country over to
the British and return them to slavery,” and some claimed that the French
government intended to reestablish slavery. He sent Dessalines to the area
with 500 soldiers, who restored order in the area, at least for a time.43
In the end, if Louverture kept having to send troops to Port-de-Paix it
was because he had provided no concrete response to the rebels’ eloquent
complaints that what they were living was “not liberty.” His reply was sim-
ply that they had to live according to the rules of the Republic if they
wanted to keep liberty at all. They should be grateful to France, and had to
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demonstrate that they deserved their freedom. Such statements, of course,
obscured a great deal. For the liberty of the ex-slaves of Saint-Domingue
had not been a magnanimous gift from a benevolent Republic. The Na-
tional Convention had taken the important step of ratifying and sanctify-
ing the principle of emancipation, and in so doing had courageously put
principle before profit. They had done so, however, following the lead of
Sonthonax’s emancipation decree, which was a response to the powerful
bid for liberty by the insurgents of Saint-Domingue. It was these insur-