Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (44 page)

supporters of emancipation in Paris, this group refounded the abolitionist

Société des Amis de Noirs and began an energetic campaign to defend

emancipation.8

In a November speech to the Council of the Five Hundred, Laveaux

set out to dispel the “mistaken impressions” the “enemies of liberty”—

who were also “enemies of the Republic”—had promulgated about Saint-

Domingue and about Louverture himself. Louverture, Laveaux admitted,

had indeed fought against France until 1794, but only because he was

fighting for liberty. Having rallied to the French side, he had demonstrated

his military skills—it was primarily thanks to him that the colony was still in French hands—and his humanity. He had helped destitute white women,

Laveaux explained, and these grateful women called the black general

their friend and their father. He had been forgiving of whites, even those

who had betrayed the Republic, asking of them nothing more than that

they take an oath of loyalty to France. “You are French,” Louverture had

reportedly declared; “I must show you the generosity of a black man who

was once a slave.” “This is the Republican some call a drinker of blood!”

Louverture, along with his officers Moïse and Dessalines, had estab-

lished order and rebuilt the plantations, and yet, Laveaux mused, “These

are the men some would like to see enslaved once again!” Laveaux, like

Louverture, insisted that any attempt to reverse emancipation would be di-

sastrous. “The black citizens, at least as passionate as all other Frenchmen

in pursuit of their liberty,” he declared, were willing to die rather than to

“renounce a single article of the Rights of Man.” Any who attacked emanci-

pation, he predicted, would “be defeated.”9

Critics of emancipation had put forth a number of justifications for de-

nying ex-slaves full access to citizenship. Hoping to “diminish the num-

ber of citizens among the blacks,” as Laveaux put it, they had declared that

the majority of them, because they had not been born in the Americas,

were “foreigners” who should have to go through naturalization to become

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French. Laveaux argued, however, that those who had been “wrenched

from their native country and transported to Saint-Domingue” should not

be considered foreigners. Because they had been taken across the Atlantic

against their will, the colony became a “new place of birth.” How could

planters—who had “fertilized their sugar plantations” with the work of

black men, having stolen them from their wives, children, and homeland,

and who had “fattened” their fields with the “corpses of their predeces-

sors”—have the audacity to consider these men foreigners? These were

the men who had made the colony grow through their labor. “They have

therefore done more for France than all the French who have settled in

the islands.”10

Granting citizenship was not only just; it was also the only way to pre-

serve the colony. In war, the black citizens would be “soldiers, and valiant, because they will be defending their rights and their country.” “In peace,”

they would be “the cultivators of the colony.” They were the only ones,

Laveaux insisted—echoing, ironically enough, the arguments of proslavery

thinkers—who could do the harsh work on the plantations. “In the colo-

nies, there is only one mode of cultivation: to make a lot of sugar, coffee,

cotton, and indigo.” But the way to keep them working was not to use coer-

cion, but to reward them for their labor. The government should “honor

the cultivators” by giving them the rights of citizens, not harass and oppress them. The former masters would indeed be getting off cheaply by rewarding the ex-slaves with citizenship, Laveaux insisted. For those they had op-

pressed could easily demand much more. Indeed, Laveaux suggested, lay-

ing out perhaps for the first time the argument for reparations for slavery,

the plantation workers might well say: “Now that the laws have given us

back to ourselves, now that, following the example of the French of Eu-

rope, we have conquered our liberty, we demand payment for all the time

we worked for you, and damages for all the bad treatment we suffered.”11

Laveaux and his allies succeeded in passing a new law that sanctified the

principle of emancipation: “All black individuals,” it declared, “born in Af-

rica or in foreign colonies, brought to the French islands, will be free as

soon as they set foot on the territory of the Republic.” Those who had been

“abducted from their homeland” were to enjoy the same rights as those

born in France—at least as long as they were working either as cultivators

or in a trade, or else enlisted in the army. Furthermore, an exemption from

the poll tax was to be granted to all those who had served in the Republican

army—though not, as Laveaux had argued it should be, to plantation work-

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ers. Thus in Saint-Domingue the many thousands of ex-slaves serving as

Republican soldiers were assured the right to vote.12

In his November speech Laveaux had predicted that under the rule of

Louverture, Saint-Domingue would soon be as “prosperous as it was in

1788,” cultivated by “hands forever freed from slavery.” To some extent

he was right. Louverture would soon bring the imperial war for Saint-

Domingue to a close, and in the next years oversee an impressive rebuild-

ing of the economy. But there would not be peace in Saint-Domingue.

Soon another war would pit Louverture against Rigaud’s power in the

south. And when this war ended, another would begin. For if Laveaux had

courageously stalled the advance of the enemies of liberty in Paris, he had

not stopped them. The 1798 law he crafted, a charter for a multiracial de-

mocracy in the New World, would ultimately be swept away by worshipers

of the past.13

“I found, my dear general and good friend, the colony dismembered, ru-

ined, sacked, occupied by the rebels, the émigrés, the Spanish, and the

English,” a triumphant Louverture wrote to Laveaux in September 1798.

“I am leaving it peaceful, purged of its external enemies, pacified, and ad-

vancing toward its restoration.” During 1798 Louverture oversaw the with-

drawal of the British from Saint-Domingue and the extension of emancipa-

tion to the entire colony. It was a major diplomatic and military triumph.14

In May 1797 Louverture had written optimistically to Laveaux that

Saint-Domingue would soon be “purged of the tyrannical hordes who

have infested it for too long.” Soon, however, the British drove him out of

the Mirabalais region. He counterattacked at Saint-Marc, but as they at-

tempted to take the major fort guarding the town, Louverture’s troops

found their ladders were too sort to scale the walls, and tried to take the

fort by standing on one another’s shoulders at the top of the ladders, while

“their dead piled up around them.” Despite such bravery, the British re-

pelled the attack. The purging of the colony was again delayed, and the war

dragged on.15

In such engagements black troops faced off against one another, for

starting in 1795 the British, who rarely received reinforcements from

across the Atlantic, had armed slaves in the regions under their control to

buttress their strength. Planters were required to hand over a certain num-

ber of male slaves from their plantations, and since they preferred to keep

their more experienced workers on plantations, the black units were made

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up almost entirely of African-born men. One-third of them were from the

Kongo. Like the insurgents a few years before, these troops drew on Afri-

can military traditions of “surprise and ambush” as they fought the Repub-

licans. In addition to pay and food, the slaves were promised freedom in

return for their service, an inducement enticing enough that it drew some

deserters from the Republican side. By 1798 there were 6,000 locally re-

cruited black soldiers fighting for the British.16

The arming of slaves helped shore up the British occupation, but it did

so at a cost to the plantation regime, and ultimately did not resolve the ba-

sic problem: Saint-Domingue was devouring British money and troops and

providing little reward in return. As the fighting continued, occupying

troops garrisoned in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere were decimated by dis-

ease. A British officer wrote of the horror of soldiers “drowned in their own Blood”: “some died raving Mad, others formed Plans for attacking, and

others desponding.” “Death,” he lamented, “presented itself under every

form an unlimited Imagination could invent.” Furthermore, though many

French planters and free-coloreds remained loyal to the British, by 1798

there were increasing complaints, and defections to the Republican side.

Many British officials in London and the Caribbean were convinced that

the best course would be to evacuate most, if not all, of Saint-Domingue.

Although there were some who remained committed to capturing Saint-

Domingue, skepticism about the wisdom of continuing the occupation

largely permeated the British military command. Among the skeptics was

the young General Thomas Maitland, who took over the British army in

Saint-Domingue early in March 1798.17

When General Maitland arrived, Louverture and Rigaud were in the

midst of a “concerted attack” against British positions, and as he watched,

the Republicans took a series of important mountain forts built by the

British. Slaves in the region under British control escaped to join the ar-

mies of Louverture, and, more ominously, some soldiers in the black corps

deserted, for the first time, to the Republican side. The prospect of im-

mediate rather than deferred freedom, as well as of serving under black

rather than white officers, perhaps drew the deserters. Victor Schoelcher

wrote that “at the sight of the tricolor flag,” black soldiers serving the British went to the other side, “happy” to be serving under a “general of their

race.” But these soldiers probably also could see the writing on the wall,

and wisely chose to end the war on the winning side. Smelling defeat,

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Maitland soon concluded that a withdrawal from most of Saint-Domingue

was the only reasonable course of action.18

Soon after Maitland came to Saint-Domingue, another newcomer ar-

rived: Gabriel Marie Theodore Joseph d’Hédouville, the new representa-

tive of France’s Directory regime. He was an officer famous for being the

“pacifier” of the Vendée, a French region in which a strong counterrevolu-

tionary movement had been crushed. Although he had left Paris at a time

when Laveaux and his allies were in power, he had been chosen for the

mission when the planters, including Vaublanc, were still in control of colo-

nial matters. This fact doubtless made Louverture somewhat suspicious of

him. Soon after Hédouville arrived in Saint-Domingue, Louverture of-

fered him a bit of pointed advice. “There are men who talk as if they sup-

port general liberty,” he explained, “but who inside are its sworn enemies.”

“What I tell you is true,” he added. “I know from experience.”19

Hédouville had been given a difficult mission: to reassert metropolitan

control in the colony, wresting it from Louverture and Rigaud. He was

make himself their commander, supervising and coordinating their mili-

tary activities, and take over the colony’s administration. He had been

given some leeway as to how to approach the two men. Rigaud’s rebellion

against the commissioners in 1796 concerned officials in France, and the

Directory had issued an order for his arrest. But the possibility of reconciliation and an alliance had been left open. Hédouville’s attitude toward

Louverture, meanwhile, had been shaped by the negative attitudes about

him still prevalent in Paris.20

Hédouville was in a delicate situation, however, as he had no French

troops accompanying him. He disembarked at Santo Domingo, on the

Spanish half of the island (which was nominally under the control of a few

French administrators stationed there), presumably out of fear of the re-

ception he would receive in Le Cap. During his stay there, the French of-

ficer François Kerverseau counseled Hédouville that the only way for him

to carry out his mission was to secure the forces he lacked by creating an

“intimate link” with Louverture. “With him, you can do everything; with-

out him, nothing.” But Hédouville did not follow this advice. In 1798, as so

many times before, metropolitan plans were undone in Saint-Domingue.

Hédouville’s mission, meant to bring peace, prosperity, and metropolitan

control to the colony, instead helped trigger a brutal war and paved the way

for the final step in Louverture’s vertiginous ascent.21

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General Maitland knew of Hédouville’s arrival in the colony, but he also

knew that although the agent had the “paper authority,” it was Louverture

who held the real power. He therefore approached Louverture, rather