Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (15 page)

cial discrimination of the plan, he proposed that anyone who had less than

one-eighth African ancestry be decreed officially white. This aspect of the

proposal enraged many colonial whites, and d’Estaing was unable to insti-

tute his reforms, although a ban on free-colored officers was instituted.

When the governors who succeeded him tried to strengthen the militia

units in the colony, they triggered an uprising in which white and free-col-

ored planters in some parts of the colony joined forces in violent protest.

Administrators suppressed the revolt, but they were never able to over-

come white resistance to militia service, and during the decades after the

1760s, men of African descent formed the majority serving in the militias.

A colonial administration that sanctioned racist laws depended on the free-

colored population as allies and protectors.13

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A few white planters openly admired the military prowess of the free-

coloreds and argued against their legal exclusion. Laurent François Lenoir,

the marquis de Rouvray, who was a veteran of the Seven Years’ War and an

officer in d’Estaing’s 1779 mission, encouraged potential free-colored re-

cruits to say to themselves: “I must make the whites blush for the scorn

they have heaped on me . . . and for the injustices and tyrannies they have

continually exercised over me with impunity. I must prove to them that as a

soldier I am capable of at least as much honor and courage and of even

more loyalty.” A few decades later revolutionary activists such as Julien

Raimond and Abbé Grégoire would similarly evoke their service in the mi-

litias and their bravery at Savannah in arguing that free men of color were

capable and deserving of Republican citizenship. Though it is not certain,

some historians have suggested that several of the free-colored leaders

who emerged in the revolution—notably André Rigaud—were veterans of

the Battle of Savannah.14

In addition to assuring colonial defense, free men of color played a cen-

tral role in defending Saint-Domingue against its dangerous internal ene-

mies: the slaves. The colony had a special police force, the
maréchaussée,
whose task was to monitor slaves on plantations and in towns and to pursue

runaways and attack maroon communities. By the 1730s the
maréchaussée

regulations stipulated that the rank-and-file troops were to be free peo-

ple of color, while the officers were to be whites, though a reform in 1767

allowed free men of color to be noncommissioned officers. Those who

served in these units—often drawn from local militias—received relatively

low pay but were given rewards for capturing runaway slaves. Masters who

wanted to free a male slave were granted an exemption from “liberty taxes”

if they enlisted them in the
maréchaussée,
and as a result many in the force were themselves still enslaved, serving for their liberty.15

The service of free people of color in such units obviously cultivated

tension and distrust between them and the slaves. It also strengthened the

case that the only way to prevent a slave insurrection would be to assure

the loyalty of the free people of color by granting them rights. In 1785 the

marquis de Rouvray noted that these men were vital allies in a slave colony

that was like a “besieged city,” whose inhabitants were walking on “barrels

of powder” that might explode at any time. Other prominent figures in

Saint-Domingue concurred. This argument was later advanced by advo-

cates for free-colored rights. The Abbé Grégoire wrote in 1789 that the

group’s “bravery is well known” from their success in capturing maroons.

i n h e r i ta n c e

67

Bringing together whites and free people of color, “cementing the mutual

interests of these two classes,” would create a stronger “mass of force” for

containing the slaves. In another pamphlet he asked how France could re-

place the free people of color as a security force in a colony that devoured

“effeminate Europeans and overworked negroes.”16

Despite various countercurrents on both sides of the Atlantic, how-

ever, a majority of planters and officials believed that maintaining racial

distinctions toward free-coloreds was vital to preserving slavery in Saint-

Domingue. A 1767 ministerial directive declared that, for those whose an-

cestors had come from Africa, the “first stain” of slavery extended to “all

their descendants” and could not be “erased by the gift of freedom.” In

1771 administrators in Saint-Domingue argued that in order to maintain a

feeling of inferiority in the “heart of slaves” it was necessary to maintain racial distinctions “even after liberty is granted,” so that they would under-

stand that their “color is condemned to servitude,” and that nothing could

make them “equal” to their masters. One of the justifications for policies

aimed at limiting the number of free-coloreds was that runaway slaves

could easily blend into such communities, and indeed might find sympa-

thizers within them.17

At the heart of such arguments, and of the discrimination they justified,

was a profound contradiction. Even as racist laws meant to limit the power

and numbers of free people of color proliferated, whites continued to have

sexual relationships with women of African descent, both slave and free,

and to give their partners and children property and slaves. On the eve of

his wedding to a white woman in 1781, Moreau gave slaves and money as

gifts to a free woman of color, Marie-Louis Laplaine, who had been his

housekeeper for several years, and to her daughter, Amenaide. Laplaine

was described as a “mulâtresse,” and her daughter was described as a

“quarteronne” (three-quarters white); she was probably Moreau’s daugh-

ter. Whites were connected to free people of color by a complex web of

familial and social ties; men of European and African descent were, often

literally, “sons of the same father.” And yet the law created a difference between them, defining them as members of two separate social classes, with

their destinies shaped by their ancestry. Saint-Domingue was a schizo-

phrenic society in which the law attacked relationships between those of

European and African descent even as the whites who supported such laws

continuously flouted them.18

A clever solution to this hypocrisy was to portray women of African de-

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scent, and particularly free women of color, as seducers of hapless white

men. One officer wrote that women of color in Saint-Domingue were

“idols” at the feet of which European men deposited their fortunes. Such

women made themselves the “absolute masters of their conquests.” It was

as if, he continued, nature had responded to the “state of slavery in which

the men of color live” by granting such women “the power of their charms

over the whites.” The baron de Wimpffen described them as “the most fer-

vent priestesses of the American Venus,” who made “sensual pleasure a

kind of mechanical skill which they have brought to its ultimate perfec-

tion.” Moreau, who theorized that the mix of African and European ances-

try caused heightened sexual appetites, was similarly obsessed with the

dangerous sexuality of these “priestesses of Venus” whose “entire being”

was “given over to sensual pleasure.” “Her sole vocation is to bewitch the

senses, deliver them to the most delicious ecstasies, enrapture them with

the most seductive temptations; nature, pleasure’s accomplice, has given

her charms, endowments, inclinations, and, what is indeed more danger-

ous, the ability to enjoy such sensations even more keenly than her part-

ners, including some unknown to Sappho.” They were, he added “both the

danger and delight of men.”19

Michel Etienne Descourtilz, a naturalist who lived in Saint-Domingue

in the late 1790s, proposed a more sinister theory for why creole men were

drawn to slave women—whom he called “animated machines”—and threw

themselves into relationships driven by base instinct rather than reason. As

soon as creole boys were born, he suggested, their irresponsible mothers

gave them to slave wet-nurses. These “libertine” slaves, tricking their mas-

ters, continued their illicit sexual affairs even as they gave their milk to

their master’s children. Black women fed “corrupted milk” to the white

boys, and this “pernicious drink” communicated the “germ” of “impudent

desires.” Creole mothers were to blame for instilling in their boys a lust for slave women by handing them over to them at a young age rather than

breast-feeding them themselves as they should have.20

Such febrile talk was a way to finesse the contradictions produced by

white patriarchy, of abstracting these relationships from the complicated

and contorted relations of power that defined them. Sex was enmeshed

with racism and slavery, and racist laws shaped the relationships they

sought to outlaw. Moreau admitted that many free women of color were

“condemned” to “the state of being a courtesan,” but claimed that this re-

sult was unavoidable and even had the laudable effect of keeping masters

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from forcing themselves on their slaves. But, as Julien Raimond pointed

out, it was racist laws that forced free women of color “to prostitute them-

selves to whites” rather than marry them. Some free women of color found

a new way to formalize the relationships they had with white men by taking

on the title of
ménagère,
combining the roles of “professional manager and personal companion.” Many white migrants depended on
ménagères
to establish social and business contacts in the colony and to manage their af-

fairs. Women involved in such relationships, whose terms were often laid

out in a legal contract, could sometimes make enough money to become

independent entrepreneurs in towns like Le Cap. Indeed free women of

color were a major economic, social, and cultural force.21

Over the eighteenth century, law, economy, and discourse worked to-

gether to produce a set of racist practices that, once in place, appeared to

many as both natural and permanent. Yet this system of racial hierarchy,

which most whites saw as necessary for the survival of the colony, was satu-

rated with contradictions and dangerous fissures. Many free people of

color, particularly those who were slave owners, looked down not only on

slaves but also on poorer whites. Some free people of color referred to

white soldiers derisively as “white negroes,” thus insulting both groups at

once. Skin color played a role in determining status as well, and many free

people of color, like whites, differentiated between those with different de-

grees of European ancestry. Such distinctions were eventually institution-

alized in the colony; the census of 1782 divided free people of color into

two categories: “gens de couleur, mulâtres, etc.,” who had European an-

cestry; and “free blacks,” who did not. The latter were likely to have been

freed in their lifetimes rather than born of free parents. Some writers then

and since have drawn sharp distinctions between these two groups, but in

reality the differences were blurred: there were many slaves of mixed an-

cestry who had been freed, and second-generation free people who had no

European ancestry.22

Moreau sought to order this world by producing a phantasmagoric racial

cosmology: a “scientific” formula based on the division of individuals into

128 parts, all either European or African, with different combinations cre-

ating different racial identities. He wrote that even after several genera-

tions in families that appeared white, there might appear “indiscreet appa-

ritions of an African character” that belied the family’s origin, and that even if certain “quadroons” were whiter than a Spaniard or Italian “no one

would confuse them.” But his certainty in racial identification was mis-

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placed. Families like that of Raimond had long “passed” as white before

the latter half of the eighteenth century, and there was often no way to dis-

tinguish those with African ancestry from those without. One British of-

ficer serving in the colony in the mid-1790s would write that he had “seen

many
Mulattresses
as white, if not whiter, than the generality of European women.” In 1792, when two rebel envoys presented themselves in front of

the Colonial Assembly of Le Cap, they were asked, “Are you white?” While

“the face” of one “provided his answer,” the other responded simply that

he was the son of an unknown father. The question was unanswerable.23

Some revolutionaries would ask the same question of planters who de-

fended racial hierarchy. In a 1789 pamphlet the Abbé Grégoire demanded

of white planters who their fathers and mothers were, suggesting that

many of them were probably descended from men of African descent who

had declared themselves “Caribs.” It would be impossible for the planter

delegates to prove that they were not of African descent, since sometimes