Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (40 page)

gents—those who had “eaten misery” in pursuit of liberty, who were the

real authors of abolition. Having suffered years of slavery at the hands of a French colonial regime, they had finally won emancipation through two

years of war. Why, then were they indebted to France? Why, now that they

were free, did they owe the nation the very same obedience and work that

had previously been expected of slaves?

Louverture had been at the heart of the insurrection, and knew well

enough that liberty had been won, not given. His concern, however, was

how to preserve that liberty. He understood that, however principled

France’s leaders had been in 1794, ultimately the French nation would

stick to the principle of emancipation only if Saint-Domingue continued to

send the commodities it had produced for the past century across the At-

lantic. Freedom was sweet, but it had a cost. France still needed the sweet-

ness of sugar, and the coffee to go with it. According to one contemporary,

Louverture’s dictum was: “The liberty of the blacks can be consolidated

only through the prosperity of agriculture.” There was, perhaps, an alter-

native to maintaining plantation agriculture. The abolitionist Condorcet

had suggested that as slavery was dismantled, small plots of land could be

distributed to the former slaves, who would grow cane individually, and

then bring it to state-run mills for processing and export. Louverture, how-

ever, like other French administrators, never truly considered this alterna-

tive, which certainly would have involved both costs and risks that perhaps

seemed too much to bear. Instead he decided that it was vital to rebuild

the plantation economy, whatever the costs, for the costs of not doing so

would be even greater. As Louverture knew, the enemies of liberty were

active, in the camps of the British in Saint-Domingue that he confronted

each day, as well as in exile in the United States and in Paris. They had long argued that abolition would be a disaster, and would eagerly put to use any

information they got that confirmed their suspicions about the incapacity

of the slaves to be free. Emancipation was a fragile thing. To save liberty,

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Louverture decided, was to accept that it might be something less than

what slaves had dreamed it would be.44

Some ex-slaves garnered enough money to purchase land outside their

plantations, or else headed into the hills and simply claimed it for them-

selves. But many—probably the majority—toiled away as laborers on the

plantations where they had once been slaves. In the 1950s the ethnogra-

pher Odette Menesson-Rigaud recorded a Vodou song, a lament that

seems to date from the period of the Haitian Revolution, probably from

1800. At the time Saint-Domingue was in the midst of a civil war, and

Louverture’s general Dessalines was leading troops against André Rigaud

in the south. The two enemies had something in common: both were

leaders of militarized labor regimes in the areas they controlled. Indeed,

Dessalines himself, a former slave, controlled several large plantations. If, in much of Saint-Domingue, the old white masters had gone, the vast majority of ex-slaves still had no claim to the land that they, and often their ancestors, had worked. The Vodou song recorded in the 1950s perhaps

provides us with a trace of the irony the ex-slaves registered about the situation, and the sorrow they felt as they came to see that the land they

worked was not to be theirs. “Mister Rigaud, Mister Dessalines,” the song

announced, “this land is not for us. Understand? It’s for the whites.”45

t h e o p e n i n g

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c h a p t e r n i n e

Power

Do you believe, citizens and colleagues,” Jean-Baptiste

Belley asked the National Convention in early 1795, “that nature

is unjust, that she has, as the planters assert, made some men

to be the slaves of others?” Belley had been serving as one of Saint-

Domingue’s representatives since the year before, when he and his col-

leagues had precipitated the vote abolishing slavery throughout the French

empire. Already, however, some of the men who served alongside him

were clamoring against the liberty decree. A representative from the In-

dian Ocean colony of Ile de France, the planter Marie-Benoît-Louis

Gouly, delivered a speech to the Convention portraying the ex-slaves of

Saint-Domingue in starkly racist terms.1

It was absurd, Gouly insisted, to grant freedom and citizenship to peo-

ple whose souls were accessible “only through the organ of hearing,” ani-

mated only by the “loud sounds of a drum or a voice expressed with force,”

whose eyes had no “vivacity,” and whose very “figure” presented “the im-

age of stupidity.” “He acts and does not reflect; he seldom speaks and often

sings; never does a profound sentiment of pain or pleasure cause tears to

stream from his eyes.” “He suffers and never complains,” Gouly continued.

“He has no desires, loves repose, and absolutely hates work; his pleasure is

to do nothing, and he finds all his happiness in sleeping.” Such individuals

had, in short, none of the capacities required for citizenship. Having made

this argument, Gouly reiterated the arguments made before emancipation

by thinkers like Moreau de St. Méry, asserting that the colonies must be

governed by particular laws different from those applied in the metropole.2

Gouly’s racism was nothing unique; it was part of a proslavery tradition

that would haunt the Atlantic world for a long time to come. What was

unique was the presence, at the heart of France’s government, of a former

slave who could counter these assertions through his words and his very

presence. “I was born in Africa,” Belley announced proudly in response to

Gouly’s “bizarre portrait” of the ex-slaves. Although the blacks had been

brutalized by their masters, he explained, they had remained men. Their

insensitivity was not an essential attribute, but the result of the degradation they had experienced at the hands of “cruel masters” like Gouly, “a tiger

who for twenty-five years devoted himself to torturing Africans” while

making his living “on the sweat and blood” of slaves.3

Belley explained how, brought “as a child to a land of tyranny,” he had

gained his liberty thirty years before through “hard work and sweat.” Since

that time, he announced, “I have always loved my country.” The same was

true of the blacks recently made “free and French” in Saint-Domingue,

who “bravely” defended “the rights of the Republic.” The white slave mas-

ters—“born dominators”—had, in contrast, busily handed over as much of

the colony as they could to the British. The ex-slaves were clearly quite ca-

pable of serving France. It was the disloyal planters who were undeserving

of citizenship. Gouly wished to see only “chains, slaves, and tyrants” in the Caribbean, and his “negrocidal” ideas were a threat to France and to the

Rights of Man.4

“Let it no longer be said that the African cannot be submitted to disci-

pline,” demanded another representative in the National Convention a few

months later. “The love of liberty makes him capable of anything, and the

strikes he has made against the Spanish and the British are incontestable

proof of his courage.” He was speaking on behalf of the powerful Commit-

tee of Public Safety, which had just completed a report about the situation

of the colonies. It confirmed many of Belley’s claims. The white planters of

Saint-Domingue were as “attached to slavery as nobles were to their vas-

sals,” “blinded by prejudice,” and guilty of choosing to “throw themselves

under foreign tyranny rather than give up their slaves.” But where slavery

had been abolished, all colors—Africans, whites, “yellows” (“mulattoes”)—

were fighting “with equal devotion for the cause of liberty.” The threats of

defenders of slavery, who had always claimed that without slavery there

would be no work, had been proven wrong. “Let us no longer speak of the

necessity of slavery for cultivation,” the speaker demanded. Ex-slaves were

working on many plantations as they had before, but were paid a salary in-

stead of being forced to work for nothing. Any decrease in the productivity

of the colony was a result of the “torrent of the revolution.” Soon “new cul-

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tivators, assured of their liberty,” would return to the plantations and “de-

vote themselves to work.” Freedom would give them “an energy that is

never found in men burdened with slavery.”5

These speeches were part of a larger battle over the consequences, and

future, of emancipation that raged throughout 1795. While planters re-

worked their proslavery arguments in the new context, portraying the ex-

slaves as lazy and barbarous, defenders of emancipation presented the ex-

slaves as ideal Republicans, courageous soldiers, hard-working laborers,

and loyal citizens. The two sides faced off in the lengthy trial that pitted

Sonthonax and Polverel against a committee dominated by planters, who

painstakingly attacked the actions of the commissioners during their stay in

Saint-Domingue. As the trial wore on, Polverel fell ill and died. Sonthonax

continued on alone, responding to his accusers and accusing them in turn.

In the end he vindicated himself and the decree of general liberty. For the

time being, the critics of emancipation were kept at bay.6

In the middle of 1795 a new constitution was passed in France. It re-

placed the National Convention with a Corps Législatif (Legislature) com-

posed of two parliamentary bodies—the Conseil des Anciens (Council of

the Elders) and the Conseil des Cinq-Cents (Council of the Five Hun-

dred)—overseen by an executive branch called the Directoire (Directory).

The constitution institutionalized a retreat from the more radical phase

of the French Revolution, but it also confirmed the decree of emancipa-

tion, and declared that the colonies were an “integral part” of the French

Republic. There were no legal or political distinctions between the depart-

ments of France and those of Saint-Domingue. In early 1796 the Direc-

tory appointed a new set of commissioners to bring the constitution to

Saint-Domingue. Among the five appointed were Philippe Rose Roume de

Saint-Laurent, who had served as a commissioner in 1791; the free-colored

activist Julien Raimond, returning to the colony after a decade of exile; and Léger Félicité Sonthonax. Even he, who had been absent from Saint-Domingue for the shortest time of the three, would find a colony pro-

foundly different from the one he had known.7

Eighteen months of war had produced a new group of military lead-

ers of African descent. The four most important—André Rigaud, Louis-

Jacques Bauvais, Jean-Louis Villatte, and Toussaint Louverture—had been

rewarded for their service in early 1795 by the National Convention, which

had promoted them to the rank of brigadier general. They loyally served

the Republic by fighting against the British, but in the regions they com-

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manded they operated autonomously, acting as both military leaders and

local administrators, cultivating a political and social power that depended

on their ability to mobilize and control the citizens of Saint-Domingue.

Among the four there was one who would emerge, at the expense of the

other three, as the central political figure in the colony. Having joined

the revolution, Toussaint Louverture was busily making it his own. And

he would prove himself ready and able to push aside all those who stood

in the way.8

Unlike Louverture, André Rigaud had never fought against the Republic.

Since 1792, when he and Louis-Jacques Bauvais had led the free coloreds

of the Western province to victory and been named officers by Sonthonax,

he had been fighting in the French army. The next year, when Sonthonax

and Polverel fled the colony, they placed Rigaud in command of the South-

ern province. Alongside Bauvais, who controlled nearby parts of the West-

ern province, he fought steadfastly against the British invasion in the name

of the Republic. But, cut off almost entirely from the north, and therefore