FIVE
Mobility incited rebellion in the ever-changing and volatile Caribbean. Outnumbered, the whites who controlled the plantations and colonial administrators who profited from slave labor in Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, and Guadeloupe felt surrounded and constantly under siege. News arrived with an irregular rhythm dictated not by politics or newspaper coverage but by unpredictable travel. Rumors and the fear they stoked, though, flowed as freely as people through the islands.
Events in the metropole have excited significant fermentation in the Windward Islands,” a French agent in Saint Lucia warned the minister of the marine in October 1789.1 Principally in the French colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue, but also on the Caribbean islands colonized by British, Spanish, and Dutch planters, momentous discussions of liberty circulated with the ocean currents. Slaves worked to death on colonial plantations kept alive traditions of insurrection, some based on memories of African unrest, others indigenous to the colonies. Among the islands of the Caribbean, where 80 percent of the population was enslaved, liberty and citizenship took on new meaning. That did little to allay the suspicions rampant among white officials and planters that a vast network of clubs and their printed propaganda were the agents carrying the revolutionary contagion to the colonies from the metropole.
Vessels carried newspapers and correspondence into the Caribbean harbors, where black and white sailors transmitted tales aloud to a population denied literacy. A British traveler visiting Barbados reported the throngs of men and women meeting a packet ship arriving from England: “Each wishing to be first, and all eager to learn the reports, the vessel was beset on every quarter before she could come to anchor, and the whole bay became an animated scene of crowded ships and moving boats.”2 The harbors launched waves of rumor and intrigue that traveled inland. The informal markets that flourished on the docks brought sailors into regular contact with slaves working locally. Rumors of liberty granted abroad coursed through markets, dances, and horseraces. In Sunday gatherings on plantations, slaves heard tales of colonial masters’ denial of that freedom and of brazen escapes from plantations. White masters and their overseers testified to the transmittal of rumors based on news from Europe. They knew less about the heritage of freedom and rebellion carried from Africa or engendered by conditions on their own plantations.
In 1788, more than five hundred ships manned by nine thousand seamen carried goods and people in and out of Jamaica, while more than seven hundred ships with almost twenty thousand sailors traded in Saint-Domingue. The French minister of the marine, César Henri de la Luzerne, complained that the colony teemed with troublesome outsiders, “Majorcans, Minorcans, Italians, Maltese and other seafarers.”3 Sailors preparing for return voyages across the Atlantic or recovering from illness contracted at sea typically outnumbered rooted residents in port cities, their disorderly behavior the subject of frequent complaint.
The relaxation of commercial restrictions and opening of colonial ports in the late eighteenth century encouraged not only trade in goods but also the dissemination of information among the colonies. Illegal trade flourished, eluding all attempts at control. So did stowaways, often finding a freedom at sea denied them on land. Language differences that limited intercourse between Europeans posed less of a barrier to the men and women transported from Africa and accustomed to communicating across linguistic divides.
Slaves vastly outnumbered the white planters and colonial officials on every island in the Caribbean. The slave population of Saint-Domingue, for example, had almost doubled between 1770 and 1790, increasing from 379,000 to 650,000.4 That raised not only the profits of colonial plantations and France’s economic dependence on them but also the threat of insurrection. “Thousands of slaves” imported into the “disorder” of a decade of revolution portended trouble.5 Male slaves and sailors accused of disorderly conduct were routinely rounded up in coastal cities.
MAP 5.1
Map of “the West Indies exhibiting the English, French, Spanish, Dutch & Danish settlements. Collected from the best authorities by Thomas Jefferys, geographer to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales,” London, 1760. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
Free men and women of color on whom the plantations depended were even more worrisome than the slaves. The free population of color had grown significantly: in the poorest of the French colonies, Guadeloupe, increasing from 10 to 18 percent of the free population between 1687 and 1789; in wealthy Martinique from 7 to 33 percent; and in the more heavily populated Saint-Domingue, from 6 to 40 percent.6 Traders and peddlers, they supplied plantations with market goods. They carried produce harvested by the slaves back to the markets, as well as news of insurrections. Often raised by at least one white parent, these free men and women of color moved more easily among the white population than their unequal legal status would suggest. To white planters, they always seemed on the edge of rebellion. In addition, almost every free man between the ages of sixteen and sixty was armed, which gave the authorities reason to worry.
Slaves in port cities slipped into the ranks of free blacks and mulattoes employed as artisans in the harbors. Inland, individual slaves freed themselves by fleeing plantations. They established their own communities in rugged mountainous regions throughout the Caribbean, often trading arms and provisions with slaves on plantations. Lines demarcating race and freedom were always slipping in this fluid region.
“We love the Revolution,” a veteran of the War for American Independence from Martinique wrote, “but we must tell you frankly that the colonies will be lost, … if you do not maintain the line of demarcation that separates the recently emancipated from the free man and the slave from the emancipated.”7 He feared the promise of liberty would echo too loudly in the colonies. A white deputy from Saint-Domingue sitting in the National Assembly in France went farther, arguing that the “absolute difference between the society of France and the colonies” meant the rights of man should be suspended in the colonies.8 Georges Danton therefore urged the French National Assembly “not to exceed the boundaries of wisdom” and to filter the news headed to the colonies. The Committee of Public Safety and Committee of the Colonies would be advised to limit the transmission of information across the Atlantic to those revolutionary principles “useful for humanity without endangering it.”9 That proved impossible.
Word of the meeting of the Estates General in Versailles in May 1789 did not arrive in Saint-Domingue until the autumn of 1789. The slaves and free people of color heard what they expected to hear, that the king of France had abolished slavery. For decades, slaves in Saint-Domingue had looked to the king for protection. Based on the provisions of the century-old Code Noir, he could restrain renegade masters.10 Masters and colonial authorities tried in vain to set the story of the revolution right. That rumor would not be silenced. And anticipation of revolutionary rights could be quelled no more than could patterns of trust. The promise of liberty flowed in with the tide; threats of insurrection flowed out just as regularly.
Ships carried news of revolts in the Caribbean back to North America and Europe. Unlike their American and European contemporaries, few of these Caribbean revolutionaries left behind written records. Talk may have flowed easily in the colonies, but it was rarely recorded, and when it was, the person was usually in authority. In Saint-Domingue, only a few dozen slaves could read and write; in Guyana only one slave in 1794 was literate. None of them had the luxury of time to compose their memoirs or to write letters, especially the literate slave in Guyana; he was executed in 1796.11 That most of the slaves in Saint-Domingue spoke Creole, not a written language before the mid-twentieth century, meant that only a few proclamations and even fewer letters were written in the language of the majority of the population. British, Spanish, and French colonial officials sent “distressing accounts” of “the disorders,” often in an attempt to counter “the false rumors” that had arrived with other travelers ahead of them.12 Read between the lines, the rumors relayed by white officials and plantation managers testify to their own fears, and to the revolutionary aspirations of the vast populations of enslaved and freed men and women of color of the Caribbean.
Rumors on Jamaica: “The Disaffected amongst us”
In July 1776, just days after the American Congress endorsed the Declaration of Independence, white masters in the British colony of Jamaica uncovered plans for an insurrection on their plantations. Their trusted drivers, craftsmen, and domestic servants, in league with their field slaves, were allegedly plotting to claim their own freedom. British troops had abandoned the garrison to quell rebellion in the North American colonies at the same time that the commercial fleet sailed to England with the annual harvest. Before the rebels could load their guns and set fires on the hilltops to signal the launching of the insurrection, an attentive overseer, suspicious of a slave fingering his master’s guns, forced a confession that led to the plot’s unraveling. Fear escalated as news of the foiled insurrection spread amid the vastly outnumbered population of white masters and colonial officials.
The whites did not hesitate. The colonial government identified forty-eight slaves as miscreants and rounded them up. The Jamaican government tried the ringleaders, including the notorious three-fingered Jack, and executed them two days later. Within the week, another twenty to thirty conspirators, slaves and free men of color, were seized, along with a large quantity of guns and ammunition. In trials that stretched into September 1776, 135 slaves from forty-three plantations, including some of the most trusted domestic workers, were accused of plotting to slaughter their overseers and to set fire to their plantations. It appeared to the whites in power that the rebels were alarmingly well organized.
Rumors of a plot to poison the water supply at Montego Bay coursed through the colony before the end of the summer. Investigations implicating 8,618 slaves reached all the way inland to the isolated Maroon settlement at Trelawny Town.13 A British officer told the governor that he had heard from a free man of color that the Maroons, the escaped slaves who had carved out their own communities in the mountainous interior of the island, “had invited the Coromantee Negroes in the Neighbourhood to join them” in rebellion. The governor called up the colonial militia to march with British troops. Although it turned out to be “all a Made up Story, not containing a Syllable of Truth,” the governor cautioned, “there is now an apparent Spirit of insolence among the Slaves, over the whole Island, and in several Parishes.”14 He called a war council, declared martial law over the whole island, and summoned British war ships to show force along the coast, confirming the worst fears of the plantation overseers scattered around the colony. “Our apprehensions are great,” because “we know not where it will end,” General John Grizel of the Hanover militia reported to England.15 It took little to set off fresh rounds of rumors that further escalated fears.
While the North American colonies chafed under British rule, the Caribbean colonies requested additional British troops to be stationed among them. The West Indies remained loyal to the British, on whom they depended for protection. With more than 200,000 slaves and free people of color on the island and only 12,737 white residents, maintaining order was a constant struggle.16 To minimize the threat of insurrection, the Jamaican Assembly called for closer white oversight over all the plantations, inspection of fortifications, and a strengthening of the colonial militia. Maroons found guilty of encouraging slaves to escape from their plantations were to be deported.17 The Assembly forbade slaves from keeping horses, hoping to limit the spread of conspiracies beyond the distance that could easily be walked.
Jamaica housed half of all the inhabitants of the British West Indies, and its ports controlled half of the trade. Planters there had cleared and cultivated vast plots of land by importing shiploads of slaves from Africa. Ninety-four percent of its population came from Africa. In 1739, colonial officials had signed a treaty allowing Maroon communities in the interior mountains to govern themselves in return for their assistance in rounding up runaway slaves who headed in their direction in search of freedom. Plantation owners, few of whom considered the islands their true home, assumed that they could trust these independent blacks, who enjoyed some rights and shared in the relative prosperity of the bountiful sugar trade. That uneasy trust evaporated in 1776.
That the slaves and free people of color would have imbibed the spirit of revolution rampant in the Americas seemed obvious in retrospect to whites in the British colony. They feared that Jamaican merchants’ petitions in support of their trading partners, the American revolutionaries, had encouraged slaves to revolt against their petitioning masters. “Dear Liberty has rang in the heart of every House-bred Slave, in one form or other for these Ten years past,” a Jamaican doctor wrote a friend in Edinburgh. The moment the masters joined the revolution, they found their slaves “fast at our heels. Such has been the seeds sown in the minds of our Domestics by our Wise-Acre Patriots.”18 He blamed the slave insurrections of 1776 on white Jamaicans who had “been too careless of Expressions, especially when the topic of American rebellion” was raised by “the Disaffected amongst us,” often in earshot of the domestic workers and slaves serving dinner.19 He did not see the conditions on Jamaican plantations that had given rise to slave revolts since 1673, including Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760, when slaves wrested control of a number of plantations before they were subdued several months later.
Contributing to the Jamaican unrest in the 1770s, but also largely unacknowledged by contemporaries, was a shortage of food, a result of drought and the American war. In the second half of 1776, the price of essential food rose dramatically in the British West Indies.20 Starvation stalked the islands. American privateers who disrupted Atlantic shipping added to the economic distress of the trade-dependent Caribbean colony. The combination of island populations deprived of basic necessities by a war-torn Atlantic, but regularly nourished by word of insurrections for freedom around the Atlantic, proved potent.
The newly arrived governor, Lord Effingham, cautioned whites about “what the gossiping of Idle Folks may produce.”21 Overheard table conversation was the alleged cause of the Jamaican uprising in 1776. Other British officials worried that literate domestic slaves had intercepted and opened letters. It was especially alarming that their slaves seemed to hear the news before their masters. The owner of a remote plantation realized that his slaves knew of an uprising in Montego Bay, some thirty miles away, even before the rider on horseback arrived to relay information to him. Somehow his slaves had learned every detail of the insurrection. How was this intelligence possible? His plantation lay off of the public roads and he kept his own slaves under close supervision within the bounds of his plantation. What, he wondered, was this “unknown mode of conveying intelligence amongst Negroes?”22
He might have learned from observing Mingo, a fisherman and driver sentenced to life in prison for instigating rebellion in the 1780s. Mingo escaped in 1791 and hosted a dance to confirm the rumors of his free state. Mingo not only was at liberty but had established a community “with about eighteen other Negroes men slaves and three women of different Countries and owners,” a slave boasted. “All the Negroes know of this Town,” he reported, alluding to the multitude of surreptitious gatherings unseen and undetected by whites.23 Their network flourished in ways that whites could not even imagine.
An upholsterer in Montego Bay, Robert Parker, reported that he awakened one night, looked out his bedroom window, and was alarmed to see “four Negroes … very earnest in discourse.” He overheard them talking in hushed voices with “two more Negroes that were on the other side of the Bridge,” speculating on the number of guns and soldiers the white planters could mobilize against them.24 The slaves, it seemed, had a formidable chain of oral communication, even if it had produced little actual unrest.
After the defeat of the British in America, thousands of white loyalists and their slaves flooded into the nervous peace of Jamaica. They were followed by the less welcome ships carrying at least a thousand black loyalists from Savannah. Landing in Jamaica, free blacks such as George Liele, a Baptist minister, made clear that they had no intention of challenging the British Empire. Even though he professed his loyalty to the king, Liele was regularly harassed, forbidden to preach, and imprisoned on charges of sedition.25
No significant insurrections troubled the calm of Jamaica over the next decade, but white planters were nevertheless convinced that the slaves were plotting, stirred by discussions of the slave trade in Parliament in London. The British abolitionists had published their parliamentary testimony in booklets said to be carried by ship to the Caribbean, obvious fodder for the revolutionaries of color in Jamaica. After the debates over abolition of 1788 in London, the governor of Jamaica paid “particular attention to prevent any disturbance in Consequence of the rumours which must necessarily be spread among the Negroes.”26 An aborted uprising in April 1788 confirmed the planters’ fears of a universal conspiracy to free the slaves. After 1789, French ships allegedly brought revolutionary printed materials that were supposed to be distributed hand to hand through the island.
Rumors fanning Caribbean revolutions did not proceed along a direct path. Otherwise, Jamaica, with its busy ports, would have been more vulnerable to the spread of slave revolts. Since Jamaican planters focused their fears not on insurrections bred by the harsh regime of plantation slavery but on “the contagion of revolutionary principles,” they could not relax if there was revolution anywhere in the Atlantic.27 By word of mouth, slaves, “immediately informed of every kind of news that arrives,” knew all about the August 1791 uprising in Saint-Domingue, the military commander in Jamaica reported.28 It took less than two weeks for that news to arrive. Planters reported overheard talk among their slaves affirming that “Negroes in the French country were men” with rights just like the whites.29 Although white correspondents consciously limited explicit references to riots or emancipation decrees in their letters, slaves were heard adding verses to folk songs to celebrate the uprising of the “Negroes in the French Country.”
Instead of igniting a slave revolt, however, the French Revolution had the opposite effect in Jamaica. It actually bolstered the institution of slavery in the British colonies. The curtailing of French trade in the Caribbean allowed the British West Indies to recover from the damages imposed by the American Revolutionary War. As the Jamaican economy prospered, it soaked up thousands of new slaves; twenty-five thousand unwilling laborers sailed into Kingston in 1793. English-language newspapers, including theSavanna-la-Mar Gazette and St. George’s Chronicle and New Grenada Gazette, featured the French Revolution with large headlines, but other than the revolt of the Trelawny Maroons in 1795–96, the British colony remained quiet in the years after the French Revolution, in marked contrast to its French neighbors of Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe.30
The “cauldron of insurrection”: Saint-Domingue
In the winter of 1788–89, Louis XVI ordered that every press in Saint-Domingue be dismantled “in order to keep the flame of liberty from spreading to the Colonies” from revolutionary France.31 Newspapers had sprung up to cover not only the National Assembly in Versailles but the two colonial assemblies in Saint-Domingue, and the king’s ministers worried that the ever-smoldering discontent among slaves needed little encouragement to ignite. Throughout the French Caribbean, the French revolutionary decrees of liberty accorded well with the emancipation struggles indigenous to the plantation colonies dependent on slave labor.32
Unfortunately for the king’s ministers, news traveled on and off the island without newspapers and pamphlets. Seamen, “well fed on the incendiary slogans of the clubs” in France, transmitted tales in harbor taverns and on docks, where they labored alongside slaves and free men and women of color in this simmering “cauldron of insurrection.”33 Stories spread quickly inland in Saint-Domingue, as in Jamaica.
Alexandre Stanislas Wimpffen, a French aristocrat who had fought under the comte de Rochambeau, commander of French forces in America, traveled to the Caribbean on the eve of the French Revolution. He complained upon landing in Saint-Domingue of the heat: “The smallest effort here is exhausting, the least exertion is real work.”34 Strategically located at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico, the mountainous island supported 120 sugar plantations in 1710.35 The conversion of the economy to sugar plantations depended on slaves, whose population rose from just over three thousand in 1690 to half a million in 1789. Wimpffen acknowledged that although he “shared the sentiments of writers who denounced the loathsome traffic conducted on the coast of Africa,” after a month in Saint-Domingue, it was clear to him that the colonies “could not exist without slaves.”36
Slave uprisings had traditionally been a problem in the colony, but there was relatively little violence in the 1770s and 1780s. On the eve of the French Revolution, however, Saint-Domingue was anything but a unified society. Lines of allegiance were not necessarily defined by wealth or race. The island’s free people of color on Saint-Domingue, many of them slave owners, numbered almost thirty thousand in 1789, roughly equal to the number of whites. While they owned one-third of the plantations and controlled substantial wealth, they did not enjoy equality with the island’s whites. European-educated Julien Raimond had represented their commercial interests in Paris since 1783. The son and grandson of indigo planters, he owned hundreds of slaves and an impressive plantation house but was considered a man of color because one of his four grandparents was an African.37 Excluded from white society, the free people of color did not necessarily empathize with the plight of the slaves, either. Raimond identified himself as a Frenchman.
Word that the Estates General had been called to Versailles transmitted excitement to the French colonies. Propertied free persons of color petitioned to claim their rights, too. Only after the Third Estate named itself the National Assembly in June 1789 did the free people of color hear that their petitions for representation had been denied. By then, six white delegates had made their way to Versailles intent on securing colonial independence from France. They would follow the example of American independence from the European metropole. The philosopher Mirabeau challenged their legitimacy, reminding the National Assembly that slaves and free people of color had been denied the right to participate in elections. The white delegates were more concerned by the rumors, printed in the Journal de Paris, that the king had contested the validity of their credentials.38
Word of the 14 July storming of the Bastille did not reach Saint-Domingue until the fall of 1789. When it did, crowds swarmed onto the streets of Le Cap. The national guard, composed of Patriot planters, arrested François Barbé-Marbois, the French agent appointed by the king before the revolution. Previously stationed in Philadelphia, Barbé-Marbois was known to whites in the Caribbean for his alleged leniency toward people of color. In 1788 he had called a slave owner to account for the torching of two of his slaves, appealing to “considerations of humanity.”39 The planters dispatched him on a boat for France. The revolutionary whites in Saint-Domingue also made sure that they alone wore revolutionary cockades.
Fear of a slave insurrection gripped the colony. In response to reports that four French abolitionists had landed in Saint-Domingue and assembled three thousand slaves above Le Cap, French troops were sent to disperse the gathering. They found empty fields. White planters called for the lynching of a judge of mixed race, and several whites were imprisoned for harboring abolitionist sentiments. “Never has a more general fermentation reigned in the spirits here; it is to be feared that it will be communicated to our most distant possessions, especially in this colony under my command,” a colonial agent warned in his letter to Paris.40
Abolitionists and their opponents, slaves and their masters, all anxiously awaited news of the contentious debates over slavery in the National Assembly in the autumn of 1789. Initially deferred to a committee, the first decree touching on rights for persons of color was passed by the Assembly on 8 March 1790 and granted significant autonomy from French authority to the colonial assemblies, institutions elected by whites intent on maintaining the status quo. In its instructions, the Assembly gave the right to vote and hold office to all property-owning “persons” at least twenty-five years of age who met tax and property requirements. The Assembly left the definition of “person” to the colonial assemblies, an obvious opening for trouble in Saint-Domingue.
While rumors seemed to fly, substantiated news and official proclamations lumbered slowly over more restricted routes. The delay in relaying decrees to the colonies and reports back to France presented few problems in normal times. During a revolution, much could change in the months it took agents and news to travel across the Atlantic. In the summer of 1789, while Parisians stormed the Bastille and inaugurated the National Assembly, oblivious French colonial agents carried on trade as before, under the terms of the Old Regime.41 News going to Paris from Saint-Domingue arrived just as sporadically, with opposing officials often sending conflicting accounts. French agents in Port au Prince consequently advised the minister in Paris not to act precipitously based on partial information spread by travelers but rather to wait for the rumors to dissipate.42 That would have required more patience than was to be found in revolutionary Paris.
When the March decrees granting some colonial autonomy finally arrived in Saint-Domingue in the spring of 1790, the colonial assembly meeting of the Western Province that had already drawn up its own set of decrees called a whites-only election. Free people of color audacious enough to demand inclusion were arrested. The assembly of the Northern Province sent its militia to disperse the rogue assembly. Their meeting surrounded, in August 1790, eighty-five delegates from the assembly seized a ship, theLéopard, anchored in the Port au Prince harbor, and sailed to France with their archives, some printers, and the national guard, to plead their case for complete colonial autonomy. They renamed their rogue vessel The Savior of the French. When they arrived after weeks at sea, the National Assembly refused them a hearing, but their presence in France called attention to the disorder in France’s richest colony.43
Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, a prominent Parisian lawyer representing Martinique as a deputy to the Assembly, urgently proposed that no further legislation be considered by the French unless the colonial assemblies themselves formally requested it, leaving the colonies to deal with their slaves and free people of color as they saw fit. Robespierre responded indignantly. “Perish the colonies if they are to be maintained at the cost of your freedom and glory.” He asked “the Assembly to declare that the free men of color shall enjoy all the rights of active citizens.”44 Camille Desmoulins put it more succinctly: “Perish the colonies before the principle.”45 A decree granting citizenship to some free persons of color passed in May 1791. Only free persons of color who had been born to two free parents were granted their rights. The compromise angered Robespierre and the Abbé Gregoire because it was so restrictive. The planters who gathered at the Massiac Club in Paris were not happy, either. They feared that any change threatened slavery on which the colonies’ economy was based. The decree was never officially sent to the colonies.
Slaves living on the two hundred sugar plantations in the Southern Province of Saint-Domingue, near the port city of les Cayes, got word of this much debated French decree. What they heard was not that rights had been granted only to free persons of color born to free parents but that the king had granted all slaves their freedom for three days a week. This persistent rumor assumed mythic proportions in the Caribbean, where slaves for decades had looked to royal authority as the only possible restraint on overreaching masters.46 When they did not get the three days allegedly promised in the king’s emancipation decree, the slaves blamed their masters. This was not the first time the slaves had heard of royal benevolence blocked by intransigent planters. In the summer of 1791, plantation managers wrote the Club Massiac from Saint-Domingue that even the sight of the revolutionary cockade set off slave rebellions.47 Two hundred slaves had reportedly taken up arms and threatened to kill their masters who denied them their three days of liberty.
The liberty espoused by the French further fueled the yearning of the slaves for freedom. Slaves had traditionally congregated Sunday nights on plantations, some with permission from their managers, others with forged passes. In the summer of 1791, a white planter overheard the assembled slaves discussing the premise of Louis XVI’s proclamation that freed them from labor. Unable to believe that slaves could organize an insurrection on their own, he suspected that abolitionist pamphlets and engravings from France had been smuggled from the ports, infecting slaves on his and surrounding plantations. Other planters claimed that they had actually discovered texts in the hands of their slaves. Even if few slaves were literate, all it took was one person to read aloud to spread the idea that European revolutionaries had acted to alleviate the plight of slaves in the Caribbean.
“Listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us,” Boukman Dutty, a coachman, is said to have proclaimed in August 1791 at Bois-Caïmen, halfway between Gallifet and Le Cap, to two hundred delegates, two from each of the plantations in the central region of the Northern Province.48 In a raging storm, a tall black woman wielding a long knife danced and sang an African chant repeated by the assembled masses. She stabbed a pig and passed around its blood in a wooden bowl. A document, allegedly signed by the king, that granted slaves freedom three days a week and banned the use of whips was read aloud. White masters and colonial authorities were said to have refused to comply with the royal decree, but it was rumored that royalist troops were on their way from France to the island to enforce it. The only account of this gathering was written by Antoine Delmas, a surgeon on the Gallifet plantation who emigrated to the United States. He claimed to have seen the slaves slaughter a pig, drink its blood, and swear to secrecy. Before they dispersed, Boukman gave the signal for slaves throughout the region to rise up and set their plantations on fire, according to Delmas.49
In the middle of the night on 21 August, a group of slaves woke the manager of the La Gossette plantation, whispering that they had come to talk with him. As he rose from his bed, they assaulted him. Wounded in the arm, the manager escaped and got word to the larger Gallifet plantation. The next morning, a band of whites, backed up by a judge from Le Cap, interrogated the slaves. Under pressure, the slaves divulged plans for a rebellion against whites suspected of denying them the promised freedom.
Knowledge of the plot was of little help in preventing an insurrection.50 The next day, slaves deserted their plantations in Acul. A band of slaves led by Boukman attacked an apprentice guarding a refinery, shot the overseer, and then massacred the refiner in his bed. Slaves from the neighboring Flaville-Turpin estate set the Clément plantation on fire, sparing only the doctor and his wife. Armed with torches, guns, and sabers, the rebellious slaves moved on to surrounding plantations. The next night, the revolt spread westward to the Limbé parish. The insurgents, reported to be two thousand strong, roamed from one plantation to the next, burning buildings, killing whites, and setting the cane fields aflame. They established military camps on each plantation they overran.
News of the revolt traveled rapidly, just ahead of the insurgents. A white merchant compared the fear that gripped whites on the surrounding plantations to “the effect of epidemical disease.”51 No precaution would assure immunity. The violence that the Abbé Raynal had predicted for the Americas if they did not abolish slavery had come to pass. Just as Raynal had foreseen, the black masses were wreaking vengeance on the whites who had kidnapped them from their homes in Africa and enslaved them. The overwhelming majority of slaves had arrived in Saint-Domingue less than ten years before the insurrection, and many had fought in African armies. They had been captured by British and French slavers from the Angola coast and Lower Guinea, both regions at war. Their military prowess stunned whites guarding plantations in their path.52
FIGURE 5.1
“Révolte des Négres à St. Domingue.” Engraving of the August 1791 slave revolt by G. Jacowick, depicting the ferocity of the slaves setting fire to the plantations of Saint-Domingue. Published by J. Chateigner between 1796 and 1798 in Brussels at the time of a widespread revolt by Belgian peasants. With permission from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Clutching a sword, a lone sentry rode bareback into Le Cap to spread the alarm. “To arms, citizens, our brothers are being slaughtered and our properties are being burned,” he alerted anyone on the streets. “All the slaves of the plain are advancing with fire and iron in hand!”53 Few of the residents of the capital believed the messenger at first, having heard false cries before. Soon enough, the stream of refugees from burning plantations corroborated his story. Terror escalated with each new rumor of plots to burn the capital itself to the ground. As the insurgents drew closer, residents could smell the fires. Smoke stoked the rumors.
To keep sailors in the capital for defense against the insurgents, municipal officials banned ships from leaving port. They stationed cannons around the perimeter of the city, but these proved ineffective against the insurgents, estimated to be ten thousand strong.54By nightfall, the streets of the capital were deserted, but the dread penetrated the homes of terrified whites. “One feared being slaughtered by one’s servants,” a resident of Le Cap testified.55 All suspects of color were summarily executed, whether they were captured insurgents or domestic slaves overheard predicting “that soon the blacks would put the whites in their place.”56 By September, all of the plantations within fifty miles of Le Cap had been reduced to ashes, but the capital was spared. Sugar production ceased.
White planters dispatched desperate pleas to Jamaica, Cuba, Santo Domingo, and the United States for military aid.57 A member of the colonial assembly even wrote William Pitt, inviting the British to invade and secure the property rights of white plantation owners. The besieged plantation dwellers subsequently welcomed a British warship into the harbor at Le Cap. The slave revolts obviously worried French colonial officials, but it was the link with the separatism encouraged by the British that bore ominous, if ironic, echoes of the Americans’ appeal to the French against their British enemies. They hoped the British would help to preserve the institution of slavery on which their plantation economy was founded. In the end, little foreign aid arrived in Saint-Domingue, other than from a few American ships anchored in the harbor.
The effect of the August 1791 insurrection in the Caribbean, especially the French colonies, but throughout the Spanish and English islands and into Latin America as well, was incendiary.58 What might otherwise have passed in the Spanish colonies as local uprisings that could easily be put down by masters reinforced by troops were exaggerated by officials alleging connections with the French Revolution.59
In the region, instead of dampening the sugar trade, the insurrection had just the opposite effect. The burning of sugar cane on Saint-Domingue, the island with a virtual monopoly on sugar production, opened up trade of the commodity. The slave trade expanded dramatically throughout the Spanish Caribbean even as violence threatened to spread from Saint-Domingue. In 1794, the discovery of four passportless French sailors in the port of Rio de Janeiro caused the viceroy Conde de Rezende to order deportations and searches to squelch “the pernicious consequences of the present revolution.”60 He informed Lisbon that his agents had found a cache of French revolutionary pamphlets and anonymous correspondence warning of slave insurrection. Spanish translations of the Declaration of the Rights of Man were burned in public, as were pamphlets proclaiming “Viva la Libertad.”
Stories of the revolt traveled to France along the slow route of official reports, but were also relayed in private correspondence. Jacques-Pierre Brissot questioned the veracity of the “disastrous news.” Despite rumors of revolt, “the implausibility of the details, the immense discrepancy in the number of revolting blacks, the silence of the French agents, the refutations given by people who have received subsequent letters all cause us to dismiss the exaggerated scenes that terror has spread,” he testified.61 Who could imagine in a colony divided into plantations that fifty thousand slaves could coalesce? Was it not suspicious, he suggested, that the news came from an English ship at the moment when Frenchmen were preparing to emigrate to the colony? Like the whites who spread and believed rumors in the colonies, Brissot was skeptical that the slaves could act for themselves. He counseled prudence and trusted that the free men of color would maintain the peace.
Planters’ representatives in Paris loudly demanded that French troops be sent to quell the slave revolt that they blamed squarely on revolutionary abolitionists in France, refusing to believe that the initiative for the revolts came from the slaves themselves. Abolitionists not only had goaded the slaves to rebel with their arguments against slavery, the planters charged, but had actually led the insurgents into battle. The violence and terror seemed to escalate with every retelling. A description of the rebels’ attack on the Gallifet plantation presented to the National Assembly in France in November 1791 and translated into English in a pamphlet in 1792 pictured an impaled white child carried aloft on a stake by the insurgents. The child symbolized the destruction of the insurrection, even though neither of the two eyewitness accounts of the attacks contained such an image. This same report described other horrors—a carpenter tied between two boards and sawed in half, a woman raped on the body of her dead husband, and a policeman nailed to the gate of his plantation, his limbs chopped off one by one with an axe. Another letter from Saint-Domingue described a rebel captured by soldiers with French pamphlets in his pocket alongside tinder, phosphate, and lime. He wore a sack of hair, herbs, and bits of bone from a voodoo ceremony around his chest. What better proof could there be that the incendiary slogans of the French Revolution had ignited the insurrection in Saint-Domingue, the correspondent asked. What better proof that insurgent slaves were heathens and barbarians?
Interrogated about their motivation for revolting, captured slaves declared that like the revolutionaries in France, “they wanted to enjoy the liberty they are entitled to by the Rights of Man.”62 They had heard of the storming of the Bastille and of decrees granting all men their rights. Some insurgents claimed the king of France as their revolutionary ally. Others spoke of royal promises to free the slaves, whether they harkened back to the images of glorious African kings or had heard rumors of the French king’s support of a reform of the labor conditions on the Caribbean plantations. The few leaders of the revolt who left written accounts referred to reforms in the implementation of slavery on the plantations. That the insurgents killed masters and burned their plantations suggests that the majority of the insurgents, who left no records, expected to free themselves.63
Moreau de Saint Méry was shocked that the slaves had the audacity to insinuate that the liberty and equality proclaimed in France applied to them. It was all part of a “so-called plan of true happiness that would end up setting the whole world ablaze.” The free men of color, including Vincent Ogé and Julien Raymond, had all been indoctrinated by Jacques-Pierre Brissot and the Society of the Friends of Blacks in collusion with the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, Moreau charged. Their incendiary speeches to the National Assembly, reprinted as pamphlets and carried aboard ships to Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, threatened “the public fortune, the tranquility, and the grandeur of France,” Moreau complained.64 The ominous “concordance” in the actions of the English and French abolitionists, he prophesied, would destabilize the once flourishing French colonies, all to England’s economic gain.
Thomas Clarkson defended the Society from the charge of rabble rousing, laying the blame for the 1791 uprising in Saint-Domingue on the slave trade itself. The French Jacobin Jean-Paul Marat tried to help by championing the slaves’ right “to overthrow the cruel and shameful yoke under which they suffer,” even if that meant “massacring their oppressors to the last.”65 While Clarkson’s intervention stoked fears of international conspiracy, Marat’s words corroborated planters’ claims that the radical French revolutionaries were fomenting a slave insurrection. Even the playwright Olympe de Gouges, who had celebrated slave resistance in her play Zamore et Mirza ou l’heureuse naufrage (Zamore and Mirza, or the fortunate shipwreck), was alarmed. “Men were not born in irons and now you prove them necessary,” she wrote upon hearing of the violence that wracked Saint-Domingue.66
Through it all, the colonial administration continued to function. Civil commissioners had sailed from France before news of the August insurrection reached Paris. They carried a decree passed by the French Assembly on 24 September 1791 giving local assemblies control over internal colonial questions, including the rights of slaves and free men of color. In November 1791, they arrived to a maelstrom in Saint-Domingue. They were shocked by the killing and recriminations that confronted them. The commissioners set about interviewing slaves and masters and collecting evidence to take back to France. They made speeches, too, though the colony in upheaval proved an awkward stage for announcing the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in France and the granting of a general amnesty to all the French revolutionaries. Leaders of the slave insurrection wanted to know whether the amnesty applied to the colonies. The commissioners did not have the luxury of sending the question to France and awaiting a response. After the colonial assembly asserted preemptively that amnesty was intended only for true revolutionaries—meaning whites, not people of color—the commissioners tried, without success, to negotiate a compromise between the insurrectionaries and the colonial assembly.
Events were happening so quickly, the governor of Saint-Domingue acknowledged, that he would need daily ships sailing for France to keep the minister apprised. Most of the news, he apologized, was alarming. Two hundred white soldiers had been killed, “assailed from all sides by blacks they could not see,” leaving the insurgents as “the absolute masters of the plateau.”67 Governor Blanchelande blamed the climate for fueling the “effervescence” of the “rebels” who continued to destroy the “tranquility” of the once prosperous colony.68
In March 1792, planters in the Southern Province fled their homes as their plantations fell to armed bands of slaves. Ten thousand to fifteen thousand slaves had reportedly joined the insurrection in the Cul de Sac plain, inspired by the August 1791 uprising. Most frightening to the masters was the alliance of slaves and free men of color. Together they posed an unimaginable threat to the outnumbered whites on the plantations and in the towns. “For too long France has endured innumerable troubles that have devastated the most flourishing and the richest colony in the universe,” a group of French merchants cried out from the Caribbean. “Saint-Domingue has become a vast furnace for burning fortunes.”69 The commissioners who returned to France transmitted eyewitness accounts of the revolts and chaos that had engulfed the whole colony and threatened to spread throughout the Caribbean.
“What will stop the revolt of the slaves in Saint-Domingue?” a deputy asked the National Assembly.70 Brissot and his allies in the colonial ministry gave an answer their questioners did not like. The colony would be saved only by giving free people of color their rights. On 4 April 1792, the National Assembly decreed that “men of color and free blacks must enjoy, with white colonists, equality of political rights.”71 The debates over slavery would take another two years; events in the colonies would finally force the hand of the French revolutionaries.
Guadeloupe: “Noises of seditious proposals”
The fear of “explosions” had preoccupied colonial authorities in Guadeloupe after the population of slaves more than doubled between 1750 and the 1770s. By 1790, out of a total population of 107,226 residents, 90,130 were slaves.72 Anxiety increased again when unrest in Saint-Domingue redirected the French slave trade from the prosperous island to its more economically marginal neighbor, further exacerbating white fears.
In the autumn of 1789, the first French ship to arrive in Pointe à Pitre at the end of the stormy season at sea brought news of the transformation of the Estates General into a National Assembly from Versailles. So many French colonial officials were stationed in Guadeloupe that official information was more quickly imported and exported onto the island than on the larger Saint-Domingue. Here too, rumors traveled faster. Youths took to the streets and men donned the revolutionary cockades carried by ship from France. They foisted the revolutionary symbol on all local officials. The governor gave free people of color permission to wear cockades, but slaves wearing revolutionary insignia were to be whipped.
News of the French Revolution spread from the harbor inland to the sugar-producing regions in North Grande-Terre and sparked insurrections in the capital of Guadeloupe, Basse-Terre. Whites led these first demonstrations. The emancipatory language of the French Revolution resonated among the poorer whites, predominantly clerks from the colonial administration and soldiers, but also young white overseers from the surrounding plantations, dockers, and seamen, who had been denied representation in the colonial assembly of Guadeloupe. Their grievances were heard by a colonial government that counted on them to help maintain order, and they were included in an enlarged white constituency in December 1789. The first act of their assembly was writing a new constitution, completed in August 1790. It protected the rights of plantation owners. Free men of color had also petitioned parish assemblies in Guadeloupe for the right to vote. In 1791, in another concession prompted by fear of slave revolts, the colonial assembly accepted their offer to help white property owners maintain order in exchange for the right to vote.
Anxious informants warned the governor, Charles François de Clugny, in April 1790, that slaves in Trois Rivières had been overheard saying that since the French had dethroned their king, they too should overthrow their masters. White masters in Guadeloupe complained, as they had in Jamaica, that domestic slaves heard the word “liberty” idly exchanged between careless white patriots. As in Saint-Domingue, the governor blamed the unrest on “the philanthropists,” abolitionists who “beguile slaves with the false idea of liberty.” To halt “the plot,” the governor sent troops to Trois Rivières to round up the alleged insurgents. Hundreds of slaves were condemned to hard labor; six free men of color were singled out as organizers and executed. The governor assured the minister in France that he had no doubt that rigorous interrogation would “yield further details.”73
On the island of Marie Galante, a dependency of Guadeloupe to the southeast of Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre, Bonhomme, a free man of color, warned an Englishman that blacks would “take power and replace the whites.”74 Bonhomme, a native of Saint-Domingue who had been educated in France, cited the Abbé Raynal’s legendary prediction that if the French did not abolish slavery, a black Spartacus would seize power in the Caribbean. Based on the Englishman’s report, Bonhomme’s house was searched, charts detailing the number of slaves and free people of color on each of the Caribbean islands were seized, and Bonhomme was tried and executed.
In March 1791, Governor Clugny received news of an uprising of “negroes” in Sainte-Anne. Blaming this plot, too, on loose talk by whites, he decided it would be wise not to disseminate any French decrees that could be overheard or misconstrued by people of color.75 The news blackout seemed to work. In June, he reported to France: “Calm is restored again.”76 The relative tranquility allowed the French commissioners stationed in Guadeloupe to reflect on the unrest in long reports sent to Paris. From the moment they arrived, the commissioners had heard from the governor of plots fomenting within the military and “noises of seditious proposals” on the plantations and in the cities.77 The problem appeared to be Governor Clugny’s runaway imagination. Given his close relations with white planters, he repeatedly jumped to the conclusion that the slaves were on the verge of revolting. Any time persons of color spoke, the commissioners reported, the governor expected plantations to be burned and their masters murdered in their sleep. In fact, trouble arrived from a different direction.
In the summer of 1792, encouraged by rumors of the victory of the counterrevolutionaries and the king in Paris, royalists in Guadeloupe armed free people of color and slaves in the colony. Slaves had often looked to the king as an ally, so it seemed natural that they would support the royalists. Naval officers loyal to the king allied with colonial separatists sitting in the assemblies of Guadeloupe and Martinique took over both colonies. In August 1792, they replaced the revolutionary tricolor with the white flag of royalty. From France, an expedition of two thousand troops sailed on 10 August 1792 to extinguish the royalists’ rebellion in Guadeloupe. They embarked just hours before crowds dethroned the king in Paris, so would not learn that France was a republic until long after they landed in Guadeloupe.
Word of the September decrees abolishing the monarchy and establishing the new French republic did not reach Guadeloupe until December 1792. The news arrived aboard ships bearing additional troops under the command of Jean-Baptiste Lacrosse, who launched his assault on Guadeloupe with pamphlets. Revolutionary decrees proclaiming “The name of citizens unites us all” were posted for all to see. Free men of color responded by joining the militias and voting in the elections of 1793 for a new colonial assembly. Local officials replaced the white flag of royalty with the tricolor and reported the victory to the National Convention. Lacrosse added, without modesty, “I dared to do everything and I succeeded.”78
Lacrosse planted trees of liberty, and the citizens of Guadeloupe swore an oath of loyalty to the French republic. He also reestablished the Jacobin societies disbanded by the royalists, adding men of color who promised to keep a vigilant eye on the colony. In March 1793, “the new citizens of Guadeloupe” praised Lacrosse, named provisional governor of Guadeloupe. “An odious faction, enemy of the French Revolution, misled us about the extent of our rights. You have raised your voice, you have shown us in full light the favor that our mother country has bestowed on us; you have made us conscious of our rights.”79 Lacrosse was convinced that the era of rumors was over, at least in Guadeloupe. Addressing himself to “Citizens of all colors,” he vowed to print and circulate all the news that he could verify to be read by every revolutionary and to discredit the counterrevolutionaries.80 Decrees dispelled rumors.
The widely disseminated words of the philosophes meant something quite different in Guadeloupe than in France, the procureur to the Conseil Souverain of Guadeloupe responded in alarm. He complained of the French revolutionaries who “talk of freeing the slaves and have applied the ideas of Montesquieu, the Abbé Raynal and others, but who did not understand the inherent danger lurking in discussions of rights and freedom on islands inhabited predominantly by slaves.81 Plantation owners lived in fear, convinced that armed slaves would butcher all the whites on the island, as it was rumored they were doing throughout the Caribbean.
In April 1793, two hundred fifty slaves from Trois Rivières, allegedly armed by their masters to march against the republicans in Basse-Terre, instead turned against their masters. Word of the planned insurrection traveled through Basse-Terre, readily traversing the property lines drawn by whites that separated one plantation from the next.82 A contingent of “assassins,” still covered in blood and fully armed, approached the new governor, Victor Collot, a veteran of the American Revolution. The governor threatened to arrest the insurgents, but the Assembly of Guadeloupe refused, grateful for the protection of the slaves against royalist plots. Sailors arriving in Baltimore in May 1793 reported that “the Negroes had killed a number of whites of that island a few days before the brig [left] that place.”83 It was rumored that in a rural section of the parish, slaves led by “an unknown individual who was seen walking around saying that since a liberty tree had been planted, there should be no more slaves” had indiscriminately massacred all the whites.84 In fact, the slaves had attacked only the known royalists, bypassing the plantations of revolutionary patriots. They trusted white patriots and free men of color, even if they were skeptical about the frequently repeated, yet unfulfilled, promises of freedom.
White republicans on Guadeloupe were not as ready to trust their slaves, especially with insurrection brewing in Saint-Domingue and with England at war against France. Few whites in the Caribbean were as convinced as their compatriots in France that armed service to the nation “would awaken honor in the souls of these new men, and would prepare them by degrees to be admitted into the class of free men.”85 In July and August 1793, municipalities in the sugar-producing area around Sainte-Anne and Point à Pitre reported another wave of rumors alleging that French decrees were being withheld from the slaves by their masters. “Walk with us; blacks are free,” free men of color had been overheard whispering to slaves.86 It seemed to whites only a matter of time before slaves in Guadeloupe rose up as they had done in Saint-Domingue. After receiving word of “an insurrection of blacks in the heights surrounding Sainte-Anne, who are heading downtown,” the mayor sounded the alarm.87 White planters fled their plantations for the safety of the reinforced forts, where they told tales of rebels who stopped them en route and demanded their guns. Commissioners reported that alarms spread easily, preying upon the fears of “weak” whites and “ignorant” blacks.88
News traveled too slowly across the Atlantic for revolutionary times, the new French administrator, Victor Hugues, complained when he arrived in Guadeloupe from France. “None of the laws emanating from the National Convention are known here, other than the abolition of slavery.”89 The English filled the vacuum, “corrupting the public spirit by spreading distrust and fanning the winds of false news to alarm the feeble, timid citizen and the peaceful farmer.”90 Hugues, who had sailed in the Americas, worked as a merchant in Port au Prince, and served as a judge of the French revolutionary tribunal in Rochefort, dispatched three commissioners to Paris to retrieve a printed set of laws from France. But white émigrés got to Paris first and relayed stories of Hugues’s reign of terror. Hugues countered with his own reports to convey his “exact and sincere description of events.”91 The conflicting accounts collided in Paris.
Hugues had arrived in Guadeloupe with French republican troops and called on citizens of all colors to enlist in his army. After the British surrendered, Hugues promised to pay slaves salaries if they would return to their plantations, where they were to sing the Marseillaise and shout “Long live the Republic.” In response to the widely circulated rumors about days free from work offered by royal decree, Hugues granted the ninth day of the revolutionary French week to slaves to attend to their own private affairs and the tenth day as a day of rest.
A gradual abolitionist, Hugues tried to strike a compromise between reinstating slavery and declaring freedom. He ended up alienating both plantation owners and French abolitionists, each suspecting him of siding with their opponents. Hugues did not believe that the Directory’s constitution of 1795 could be applied to the colonies; social equality there would lead to laziness and violence. “Who will be able to contain 90,000 strong and robust individuals, embittered by long suffering, terrible tortures, and horrible punishments?” he asked, refusing to give the right to vote to freed slaves as in Saint-Domingue. “Who will be able to contain the natural ferocity of the Africans when it is compounded with their desire for vengeance?”92 He also promised white émigrés who had fled to the United States that he would respect their property rights if they returned.
Revolutionary Reform: “The lost sentinels of the Republic”
In the summer of 1792, Governor Blanchelande urged the newly appointed French commissioners sailing to Saint-Domingue to suspend the publication of all newspapers in the colony.93 Political gazettes such as L’Ami de la Liberté: Ennemi de Licence (The friend of liberty: Enemy of license) were corrupting public opinion and leading the people daily to new excesses. L’Ami de la Liberté “was not only read with avidity by free people of colour,” according to the editor of a competing paper, “but Negro Slaves were Subscribers to it, and it is well known that Negroes on a Sunday have frequently clubbed together a quarter dollar to purchase it, in order to have it read to them.”94 That could only lead to more trouble. After a year of insurrection, the king lamented that Saint-Domingue, “once the object of envy among all the nations of Europe … now offers the eye only a vast field of disorders, of pillage, fire, carnage, crime, and revolutions.”95
The new French commissioners, Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, ignored the governor’s warnings. Outspoken abolitionists as well as experienced journalists, they arrived in Saint-Domingue with their own printing press and the April decree guaranteeing full rights to free men of color. The reputations of the new commissioners preceded them to the French colony.96 Sonthonax had supported seating the deputation of the men of color in the place of planters in the National Assembly, and Polverel had proclaimed that nature had made all men equal. As Sonthonax and Polverel understood their mission, they had been charged by the assembly with restoring political tranquility and enforcing existing laws so that political equality would reign in “this unfortunate colony.”97
The commissioners’ problems began with their landing in the colony. Colonial officials, who would have been happy had their ship gone missing at sea, neglected to tell them which ports were in revolt and which well disposed to receive them.98 Accompanied by a convoy of six thousand soldiers, the commissioners tried in vain to reassure the whites that they intended only to grant rights to the free people of color, not to destroy slavery. The violence of 1792 had linked these two revolutionary outcomes in the minds of whites as well as persons of color.
Planters not only feared talk that flowed so freely but were concerned about “that guilty silence” that might shroud new slave plots.99 They worried about rumors and the lack of rumors, too. Silence could signal tranquility, but it could also mean that slaves had effectively muffled their plots. The whites were on edge, threatened by their own slaves and by the free people of color who might align with them. “The most ghastly plot” often lurked, yet unknown, in the shadows.100
From their vantage point on the ground in Saint-Domingue, the commissioners cautioned the French National Convention that something needed to be done for the slaves or the French would lose Saint-Domingue. Either their pleas for further reform sank somewhere in the mid-Atlantic or the Convention simply ignored them, preoccupied by more pressing questions in the metropole. Feeling completely cut off from France, Sonthonax cast the French agents in the colonies in 1793 as “the lost sentinels of the Republic.”101 On their own authority, Sonthonax and Polverel issued a proclamation in May protecting slaves from Sunday work, a lingering demand, and inviting them to submit complaints about harsh treatment at the hands of their masters to local officials. To ensure that it would be observed throughout the French colony, the proclamation was translated into Creole, read to the slaves, and posted in a central spot on each plantation.
The governor who replaced Blanchelande, François Thomas Galbaud du Fort, had no sooner landed in May than he was besieged by planters complaining of the emancipators, Sonthonax and Polverel. Their stories confirmed the preconceptions of the absentee landowner, who was no friend of the abolitionists. The governor called the commissioners to meet him in Le Cap. That encounter spawned radically divergent accounts that echoed through the colony and eventually made their way to France. In one frequently recounted story of the meeting, Galbaud reprimanded the commissioners for their leniency, telling them their souls were as black as the slaves they intended to free. It was not only what happened in the closed meeting between the governor and the commissioners that was in dispute, but whether they actually met at all. In a very different version, the commissioners refused to come to Le Cap. Galbaud’s wife allegedly advised the governor to return to Paris to unmask the commissioners before the National Convention and raise troops to avenge the insults suffered by the whites at the hands of men of color and their insolent commissioners.
Whatever happened, the commissioners imprisoned the governor, who was to be deported to France on a ship anchored in the harbor. Tensions simmered between the white sailors on the hundred ships anchored in the harbor and the free people of color in town. The crews complained of armed attacks on shore by men of color whose “words smell of revolt.”102 Galbaud did not wait for word from Paris. Backed by prisoners and sailors, he attacked Le Cap on 20 June. They rowed from ship to ship in the harbor, rallying support. Shops in town closed, their owners having heard “that the sailors were going to land, and that it was going to be quite a show, that they wanted to kill all the mulattoes, and send the commissioners to the National Convention.”103 The white sailors’ attack on Government House was unsuccessful. They were beaten off by forces led by Jean-Baptiste Belley, a free black officer. In their attempt to invade the upper town, they were ambushed at every building, “every window a hostile gunport,” one white volunteer reported.104 Galbaud’s forces did capture the arsenal. The outcome of the battle was uncertain at the end of the first day.
Rumors of emancipation ran rampant in the chaos. On 21 June 1793, Polverel and Sonthonax, backed by black troops, proclaimed the French republican commitment to shattering “all chains.”105 In a carefully worded proclamation, the commissioners offered freedom and citizenship to all “black warriors” who would “fight for the Republic” against its enemies. One of Galbaud’s supporters cited the proclamation as “the decisive blow” that turned the battle. For the first time, European officials offered freedom to all male insurgents willing to join them.106
On the morning of 21 June, prisoners and sailors, thousands strong, attacked the city again. Galbaud’s forces had sounded the general alarm, but only fifty whites showed up to join them. In the chaos, prisons were flung open and emancipated insurgents from 1791 took up arms on the side of the commissioners. The commissioners escaped from the besieged Government House to Haut du Cap. Even though that left the city open to victory for Galbaud, rumors that “thousands of blacks were coming from Haut-du-Cap and that they were going to exterminate all of us” swept through Galbaud’s forces who ran for the ships.107 Galbaud reportedly had been seen jumping into the harbor shouting frantically for assistance.
Whether set by sailors or slaves, fires, fueled by the sugar and coffee stored in the harbor, consumed Le Cap, the richest city in the colony. Against orders from Sonthonax and Polverel, but claiming that they were cut off from French authority, ships made ready to sail, carrying off the frightened whites. The streets of Le Cap, barely “recognizable between the ruins that were still smoldering, were filled with bodies of all colors,” a white resident still in the city reported.108 To restore order, Sonthonax and Polverel promised to liberate the families of soldiers in July. Rumors of general emancipation circulated widely.
On 24 August 1793, fifteen thousand people assembled at an open-air meeting in Le Cap and voted to emancipate slaves in the Northern Province of Saint-Domingue. A witness reported that the assembly presented its proclamation to Sonthonax, who received it “as the expression of justice and humanity.”109 On 29 August, echoing the popular vote, Sonthonax proclaimed: “Men are born and live free and equal in rights.” In the words of a new citizen, “General Liberty has just been proclaimed in the island.” Together all races on Saint-Domingue would “live free or die.”110 Polverel, stationed in the Western Province, had also freed soldiers. He was surprised to receive unofficial word of the general emancipation by Sonthonax in the North. Petitions demanding freedom, spurred by news of emancipation in the North, spread through the West and the South and ignited new slave insurrections, leaving Polverel with little choice. He followed Sonthonax and freed slaves in the regions under his control. Both of the commissioners cautioned freed slaves, however, that they would have to prove themselves worthy of their freedom and citizenship by laboring for a share of the produce on their plantations.
Shortly thereafter, Sonthonax organized the election of a tricolor delegation including three white deputies, three deputies of mixed European and African descent, and three deputies born in Africa and raised in slavery. The delegation set off for Paris with the news of the slaves’ emancipation. They sailed by way of Philadelphia, a city full of former governor Galbaud’s supporters, who swarmed the docks when they landed. The crowd threatened Louis Dufay, a white delegate, who was spirited to safety through side streets by a woman sympathetic to their cause. Before the former slave Jean-Baptiste Belley could disembark, members of the crowd boarded the ship and wrested his sword, watch, papers, and money from him. They tore the cockade from his hat, protesting that revolutionary insignia were to be worn only by whites. The rest of the delegation made it to New York, where they boarded two separate ships bound for France, hoping that at least one would make it to Paris with the news of the emancipation of slaves in Saint-Domingue. Three deputies did. While anchored in Bordeaux, they were imprisoned briefly, but they finally reached Paris in February 1794. News took time to travel its often circuitous route, depending on travelers who could be held up.
At the Convention, a deputy proclaimed to loud applause: “Equality is consecrated: a black, a yellow [mulatto], and a white have taken their seat among us, in the name of the free citizens of Saint-Domingue.”111 The next day, in a speech to the Convention, Louis Dufay told the story of the battle of Saint-Domingue. That news was a long time in coming. On 4 February 1794, the Convention declared “slavery is abolished throughout the territory of the Republic; in consequence, all men, without distinction of color, will enjoy the rights of French citizens.”112 One of the most outspoken of the abolitionists, the Abbé Grégoire, recalled the “sudden emancipation pronounced by the decree of 16 pluviôse An II” as “the political equivalent of a volcano.”113 After years of discussion of gradual emancipation and its deleterious economic consequences, it had taken revolutions in the Caribbean to abolish slavery. Decreed by the French Convention, for the first time on either side of the Atlantic, citizenship knew no color line.
“The cruel period of waiting and anxiety”
The day that the printed version of the National Convention’s abolition decree finally arrived in Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture, a free man of color who commanded four thousand troops, abandoned the Spanish to fight for the French. Louverture had issued his own proclamation of liberty and equality on the same day that Sonthonax abolished slavery in the Northern Province of Saint-Domingue, both in advance of the French Convention. “We are Republicans and therefore free by natural laws,” Louverture assured skeptical soldiers who had heard rumors that white commanders would force them back into slavery at the end of the fighting.114 It was said, and often repeated, that Louverture had read the passage written by the philosopher Denis Diderot in the Abbé Raynal’s History of Two Worlds that predicted a black Spartacus would rise up to avenge the enslavement of Africans in the Caribbean. Observers claimed they had seen black sailors carrying the works of Raynal, presumably bought from abolitionists sailing ships from Bordeaux.115
The ship that transported the first copy of the French emancipation decree to Saint-Domingue also conveyed an order recalling the commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel to France to face charges levied by white planters. Such were the entangled politics of the colonies and the metropole, each reacting to the other with a time delay. While the commissioners had been working in Saint-Domingue to establish order by imposing the policies decided in Paris, the white Colonial Assembly had sent its own deputation to Paris to argue that the colony would not thrive without the institution of slavery. Each set of commissioners almost succeeded in its cause, and both were arrested by the Committee of Public Safety.
Rumors were fed by what a French commissioner in Guadeloupe identified as “the cruel period of waiting and anxiety” that separated events from correspondents eager for news in this unstable revolutionary world.116 Necessarily, it was itinerants, not always the most trusted and reliable of agents, who passed along the fragments of information. In the summer of 1793, for example, the colonial assembly in Saint Lucia waited with “unperturbable tranquility” for the arrival of enemies they heard from sailors were gathering in Martinique to lay siege to their island.117 They waited for nearly a year. Throughout the Caribbean, threats of invasion from without and insurrection from within were exacerbated by the lack of reliable news and cross-cutting allegiances of empire, race, and class.
Rumors worked both ways. They justified the often-exaggerated precautions taken by whites in the government and on the plantations to protect the colonial order. Read against the grain, white accounts also suggest that rumors kept alive the promise of revolution for slaves throughout the Caribbean.118 The rumors, which replaced reliable information, contributed to the revolutionary transformation of the Caribbean on currents that flowed in and out along the channels between the islands, but also back and forth between the metropolitan governments in Europe and their slave-dependent plantations in the New World.
To colonial officials and planters, anything out of the ordinary appeared an ominous signal of insurrection. Revolutionary city councilors in Havana interpreted the shortage of pigs as a sign that Cuban slaves had heard of the insurrection in Saint-Domingue and stopped work. The Cuban authorities assumed that a lively communications network linked the slaves.119 The cause of the pork shortage was much more mundane, but everyday events assumed legendary proportions in a time of heightened anxieties. For example, a Capuchin friar named Jean Baptiste, “the curé des nègres,” was said to have prophesied the coming of the king of Angola at the head of an African army ready to free the slaves of Martinique and take them home to Africa. Throughout the revolutionary period, his preaching was blamed for violence, whether a convenient scapegoat for anxious whites or the source of an oral lore that spread and incited slave insurrection.120
War further intensified the tensions and amplified the rumors. The guillotining of Louis XVI and consequent European war severed the already unreliable official communications networks linking the colonies to the metropole. The imperial wars of the 1790s continually reshuffled Caribbean identity. Territories were handed from one power to another. The English occupied Tobago; they captured Martinique in March 1794, Saint Lucia in April, and Guadeloupe in June, before news of the French abolition of slavery reached the Caribbean. The next year, French troops regained control of Guadeloupe and Saint Lucia with the aid of free colored and slave support. Thereafter, little news made it across the Atlantic, a vast battlefield in the war between France and its neighbors Britain and Spain. In June 1795, Spain signed the Treaty of Basel, ceding Spanish Santo Domingo to the French. News of the transfer did not reach the colonies until the end of the year, and Louverture did not occupy the territory until 1800. Although the Spanish agreed to disband their black fighting forces, the “valiant warriors” decided on their own to sail in four ships for Havanna. Cuba, not anxious to have former slaves tainted by French ideals of liberty and equality at large, sent them on to the Isle of Pines off shore to be “civilized.”121
Warships and privateers, especially the French corsairs, subsequently almost completely disrupted the commercial trade that carried news with it. The tensions were many and cross-cutting: royalists vs. republicans, whites vs. people of color, masters vs. slaves, and colonies vs. the metropole. In the minds of revolutionaries in power, counterrevolutionaries infested the Caribbean. Royalists from Guadeloupe and Martinique were said to have signed an agreement promising to turn the two colonies over to the British if the Bourbons could be restored to the French throne. From Guadeloupe, the commissioners lamented, “Government doesn’t even exist here and the Military interferes in everything.”122 Beset, these colonial correspondents attacked their enemies as the most “perverse leaders” who spread “disastrous anarchy.”123
Sonthonax and Louverture competed to represent themselves as the force responsible for abolishing slavery, each claiming to have been “the first to dare proclaim the Rights of Man in the new world.”124 The tales they told collided with stories disseminated by other itinerants, the white planters who had taken refuge in Kingston, Philadelphia, and Paris. Governor Collot, who was deported from Guadeloupe to Philadelphia by the British in 1794, had no sooner arrived in America than he delivered a report indicting his successor, Commissioner Hugues. He accused Hugues of spilling the blood Collot had spared as a governor. Collot boasted that he alone had maintained order in the Caribbean “without money, troops, a navy, laws, a guide in the midst of hatred and passions at an immense distance from the foyer of the enlightenment, in a country without any public spirit other than that of interests, and where there were as many different opinions as nuances of skin color.”125 Injustice had many voices, he declared to the Americans, but the truth just one.
Leonora Sansay, the wife of a Saint-Domingue planter who also sought refuge in the United States, chose a different vehicle for conveying this truth, the “desolation” and “distress of the unfortunate people” inflicted on whites in the Caribbean. In her semiautobiographical epistolary novel The Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo, she described events that she knew “would fill with horror the stoutest heart, and make the most obdurate melt with pity.”126 Lending credence to the stories recounted by other white refugees from Saint-Domingue, she stoked her readers’ imaginations with accounts of sexual intrigue and racial violence. “Unfortunate were those who witnessed the horrible catastrophe which accompanied the first wild transports of freedom!” she concluded.127