Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (9 page)

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Yourmisfortuneisthatiamblack,”wrotetheslave

Philipeau to his owner, Madame de Mauger, in 1784. “I am black;

that is my only fault. If I could whiten myself you would see, with

the will of God, an increase in your wealth.” Philipeau lived on a plantation located in the rich Artibonite plain of Saint-Domingue. He had been born

there, and had served as Madame de Mauger’s domestic slave until the

1760s, when she and her husband left to settle permanently in France. By

the next decade Philipeau had become the
commandeur
—slave driver—

on the plantation. He was its most important slave: he oversaw the daily

work in the fields, made sure the other slaves were fed and taken care

of, and punished those who failed in their duties. He took his orders not

directly from Madame de Mauger, but from the salaried manager she

had hired to oversee her properties in the colony. Under pressure to de-

liver profits to their distant bosses, and eager to gain a foothold in the

colony through the commissions they received on plantation production,

such managers were often brutal to the slaves, stinting their food and med-

icine, forcing them to work on Sundays, and punishing them with great

violence.1

This, Philipeau warned Madame de Mauger, was what was happening

on her plantation. “Your manager is killing your negroes,” he announced.

“He is working them too hard.” Four had run away, including one old man

named Lamour who had always been a faithful worker, and who left be-

hind his four children. The manager, furthermore, was making the slaves

work on his own crops, for his own profit, taking them away from the work

of the plantation. Philipeau pleaded with Mauger to believe him: “I speak

to you as if I were explaining myself in front of God.” He also pleaded with

her to keep his letter a secret. If the manager of the plantation found out

that he had written to her, he would be “mistreated.” He signed the letter

“your very humble and obedient slave.” Madame de Mauger did not re-

spond to his entreaties.2

Philipeau’s letters highlight the paradoxes of life on the plantations of

absentee owners. Although such plantations were not the majority—in

the north, where they were most numerous, slightly less than half of those

producing processed sugar were owned by absentees—they were among

the largest and wealthiest. Absentee owners generally had a
procureur

in the colony to whom they had given their power of attorney to oversee

their plantations, and who hired the
gérants,
or managers. The
procureurs
rarely visited the plantations, leaving the managers with enormous autonomy, which many exploited. One planter opined that of 100 plantations be-

ing run by managers, 95 were in ruins, while their managers had grown

rich. Managers could steal plantation commodities, use the slaves for their

own profit, and often get away with it. Slaves sometimes protested, as did

Philipeau, and one group of slaves on a sugar plantation in the south de-

clared in creole to an official: “We know we have to work for our master on

his plantation, but we don’t have to work on our manager’s plantation.” But

it took courage to complain, for masters were all too likely to take the word of a manager over that of a slave, and a manager who discovered such complaints had little to restrain him from inflicting brutal punishment. Slaves

on larger plantations also had to contend with
économes
(overseers) hired by managers or plantation owners to monitor the slaves in the fields and

track their sicknesses, deaths, and infrequent births. These men at the bot-

tom of the hierarchy of white society were paid poorly, hired and fired eas-

ily because many were looking for such work, and had fewer possibilities

for self-enrichment.3

Just below the overseers and at the top of the slave hierarchy were driv-

ers like Philipeau. These slave drivers were, according to one planter, the

“soul of the plantation.” Masters, managers, and overseers were extremely

dependent on them. Drivers were consistently valued very highly on the

slave market, and could be worth twice as much as a slave of similar age.

Most drivers, like Philipeau, were creoles—they had been born in the col-

ony. They quite literally drove the work of the plantation. A half-hour be-

fore sunrise, they woke up the slaves with the crack of a whip or by ringing

f e r m e n ta t i o n

37

a bell or blowing a conch shell. They spent the day in the fields with the

slaves and reported any misbehavior. They usually inflicted whippings.

Their masters rewarded them with better food, clothes, and housing in or-

der both to increase their prestige among the slaves and to secure their loy-

alty. They were collaborators with the master, playing a central role in the

management of the plantations.4

At the same time they were community leaders among the slaves. Often

chosen because of the respect they already enjoyed on the plantation, as

drivers they achieved more power, adding fear to this respect, as well as the ability to help weak or sick slaves and to allow some to leave the plantations at night or on weekends. A manual for prospective plantation masters advised them to be wary of their drivers, who excelled at maintaining an illu-

sion of perfect devotion to the whites but were also close to the most rebel-

lious of the slaves on the plantation, whom they spared from punishment.

The author wrote this manual in the wake of the slave revolts of the 1790s,

which had probably shaped his perspective on the matter. Indeed to the

surprise of many masters, drivers took a leading role in organizing and car-

rying out the insurrection of 1791.5

Revolution was still years away when Philipeau wrote again to Madame

de Mauger in 1787. He complained again about the “abominations being

committed” by a new manager assigned to the plantation, who took little

interest in the work of the slaves and spent his days entertaining in his

house. He was selling cotton grown on the plantation, along with lumber

cut from the Mauger lands, for his own profit. “Your manager will grow

rich at your expense,” Philipeau warned. The slaves, meanwhile, were “dy-

ing of hunger” even though the warehouses of the plantation were full of

food. The manager kept it to feed his personal slaves and his pigs.6

This time Mauger wrote back, but her response disappointed Philipeau.

We cannot know exactly what she wrote; after reading her letter, the

woman who had helped Philipeau write to Mauger burned them, as he had

asked Madame de Mauger to do with his. But his response suggests the

content: “There is no need to advise me, dear mistress, to make sure the

plantation is productive,” he wrote. Mauger apparently encouraged him to

work harder but ignored his urgent pleas; the plantation manager would

not be removed. “You do not want to listen to us. What will we do?” he

wrote despairingly. The friend who wrote for him added in a postscript that

as he heard her response, the “miserable” Philipeau cried and said that “he

would no longer work with the same courage to expand the fortune of a

38

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

stranger.” But the story was not over. In a few years the loyal Philipeau

would have his revenge.7

For those Africans who survived the horrors of the middle passage, arrival

in Saint-Domingue was followed by another torture: branding. Masters

marked their ownership by burning their initials into the flesh of their hu-

man property. For some, this was a second branding, as slave traders some-

times branded the captives loaded onto their ships. And each time a slave

was sold, the process was repeated. According to one seventeenth-century

priest, one man “who had been sold and resold several times was in the

end as covered with characters as an Egyptian obelisk.” Newspaper adver-

tisements for some runaway slaves described the many brands on top of

one another. Some Africans, however, had knowledge of herbs that could

erase the scars caused by burning—an old art that took on a new value in

the context of American slavery. During the revolution, observers noted

that many former slaves had managed to render the old brands on their

bodies unreadable.8

From its founding as an illegal settlement in the 1600s until the aboli-

tion of slavery in 1793, hundreds of thousands of slaves were led off slave-

trading vessels onto the shores of French Saint-Domingue. According to

the most exhaustive inventory of slave-trading journeys, 685,000 slaves

were brought into Saint-Domingue during the eighteenth century alone.

Over 100,000 slaves were reported to have died during the middle passage,

and many more deaths probably went unrecorded. Starting in the late

1730s, between 10,000 and 20,000 African men, women, and children

were imported to Saint-Domingue each year. By the middle of the 1780s

that number had risen to 30,000 to 40,000. Imports reached their peak in

1790, when nearly 48,000 Africans were disembarked in the colony. This

number does not include the slaves imported into the colony before the

eighteenth century, nor does it account for the constant influx of slaves

brought in via the thriving contraband trade, which naturally left few writ-

ten traces. We will never know exactly how many slaves were brought to

Saint-Domingue. Estimates range from 850,000 to a million. Even though

it became a full-fledged plantation society later than other Caribbean colo-

nies and was destroyed decades before the end of the Atlantic slave trade,

Saint-Domingue accounted for perhaps 10 percent of the volume of the

entire Atlantic slave trade of between 8 and 11 million.9

The fact that in 1789 the slave population numbered 500,000 highlights

f e r m e n ta t i o n

39

the brutality of slave life. “They are always dying,” complained one woman

in 1782. On average, half of the slaves who arrived from Africa died within

a few years. Children also died at incredible rates, reaching nearly 50 per-

cent on some plantations. Each year 5 to 6 percent of the slaves died, and

the situation was worse during the frequent epidemics in the colony. Birth-

rates, meanwhile, hovered around 3 percent. Focused on short-term gain

and for the most part unburdened by humanitarian concerns, many mas-

ters and managers in Saint-Domingue coldly calculated that working slaves

as hard as possible while cutting expenses on food, clothing, and medical

care was more profitable than managing them in such a way that their pop-

ulation would grow. They worked their slaves to death, and replaced them

by purchasing new ones.10

As a result, by the late eighteenth century the majority of the slaves in

Saint-Domingue were African-born. They came from homelands through-

out the continent. Early on, many slaves came to Saint-Domingue from

Senegambia, home to fledgling French slave ports. During the first quarter

of the eighteenth century, the major source of arrivals shifted to the Bight

of Benin. Some of these slaves were captured in wars initiated by the

Yoruba Kingdom of Oyo, others in raids carried out by the kingdom of Da-

homey. A third source was a series of ports along the lagoons of West Af-

rica. The most important was the port of Allada, which came to control a

cluster of nearby ports. In Saint-Domingue the complexities of African

identifications were often simplified and distorted, and most of the slaves

from this region were called “Arada,” a version of Allada, or Ardra as it was called by the French. Those from Yoruba kingdoms, meanwhile, were

sometimes called “Nago.”11

As the Atlantic slave trade expanded over the eighteenth century, west-

central Africa became the largest source of slaves deported to the Ameri-

cas. These slaves were supplied through Portuguese raids into the inte-

rior from the port of Luanda, from civil wars in the kingdom of the Kongo,

and from kingdoms that captured slaves or received them as tribute from

regions in the interior. In Saint-Domingue, these slaves were categorized

under the generic term “Kongo” (which at the time was usually spelled

“Congo”). They made up the majority of the slaves imported into the

colony, accounting for 40 percent of the imports during the eighteenth

century.12

Planters placed great importance on the origins, or “nations,” of slaves

and used an “elaborate lexicon” that was “the product of both African and

40

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

European observation” to categorize them. Although many planters, espe-

cially those without access to the larger ports, had little choice in purchasing slaves, those who could expressed preferences for certain “nations” of

slaves. Many sugar planters preferred the Arada, whom they saw as good

agriculturalists. Some noted that Kongo women had traditionally been

given the task of working in the fields, and so were more desirable for

fieldwork than the men. The small number of slaves from the cattle-herd-

ing Fulbe of West Africa were disproportionately assigned to herding live-