Read Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Online
Authors: Laurent Dubois
The initial face-off between planters organized in the Club Massiac—
and their port-town allies—and the Société des Amis des Noirs resulted in
a clear defeat for the latter. Discussion of slavery and the slave trade was
effectively tabled in the assembly, and the society was saddled with a pow-
erful accusation: that its activities might set in motion another, much more
dangerous, revolution in the colonies.
“People here are drunk with liberty,” wrote the Saint-Domingue deputies
in Paris to their constituents in August 1789. “The peril is great; it is near.”
If they even said the word “slavery,” they complained, the abolitionists
might seize the opportunity to demand emancipation. The population in
the colony must be extremely vigilant, seizing “writings in which the word
‘Liberty’ appears,” increasing their guard in plantations and towns, and
watching for free-coloreds arriving “from Europe.” Julien Raimond inter-
cepted this letter and gave it to Mirabeau, whose used it to expose the
planters as enemies of the Revolution, men afraid of the word “liberty” it-
self. In response, the Saint-Domingue delegates published their own anno-
tated version of the letter in 1790, pointing out that it advocated wariness
only of writings dealing with the “liberty of the slaves.” They included a
“post-scriptum” to the letter, which they claimed was written and inter-
cepted at the same time, but never published, in which they advocated a
rapprochement between free-coloreds and whites in the colony as the sur-
est way to maintain peace. This suggestion was probably shaped by one of
the delegates who signed the letter, the marquis de Rouvray. The dele-
gate’s warnings and the abolitionist’s response were the opening skirmishes
in a war whose battlefields would stretch from Paris and Bordeaux to the
plains of Saint-Domingue. It was a war over the meaning of the Revolution
itself, over whether the laws of a regenerated France would be applicable
76
av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
in the colonies as well as the mother country, over the very question of
whether rights were universal.35
What was so dangerous about what might be brought from Europe to
Saint-Domingue? A few weeks after the letter was written, the National
Assembly wrote and adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, whose
first article declared that “men are born and remain equal in rights.” One
newspaper proclaimed that its principles would be applicable in the colo-
nies as well as in metropolitan France. This was precisely what the planters
who had eschewed representation in the Estates General had feared: that
revolutionary principles accepted in Paris would be applied to the slave so-
cieties in the Caribbean. Despite provisions accepting “social distinctions”
and declaring property a “sacred and inviolable right,” many planters saw
the universalist Declaration as a clear threat to slavery, reacting as if it were a disease to be quarantined. Already in July 1789, several slave women who
had arrived in a French port from Saint-Domingue had been detained and
sent back to the colonies by port authorities concerned about what they
might learn in continental France and communicate back to the colony. In
August one member of the Club Massiac proposed that all “blacks or mu-
lattoes” arriving from Europe be banned from entering Saint-Domingue,
and in September the club wrote to merchants in the port towns asking
them to prevent individuals of African descent from embarking for the
colonies. Several ship captains sent assurances that they would do so. At-
tempts to control the flow of information would continue: in April 1790
local officials directed Le Cap’s postal director “to stop all arriving or departing letters that are addressed to mulattoes or slaves and to deliver
these letters to the municipality.” They were to keep this procedure a se-
cret, presumably so that officials could use this surveillance to uncover evidence of sedition or conspiracy.36
Of course there was no way to control the circulation of information
and the many hopes and fears it raised. Even as attempts were being made
to prevent information and people from moving across the Atlantic, many
whites responded with excitement to the revolutionary changes. They
“spoke loudly of liberty in front of slaves,” according to the surgeon
Antoine Dalmas, and “bitterly attacked privileges, prejudice and despo-
tism.” The poor landless whites of Saint-Domingue—overseers and man-
agers, small-time merchants, unemployed wanderers—saw the Revolution
as an opportunity to express grievances against wealthy whites. When news
i n h e r i ta n c e
77
of the fall of the Bastille arrived in the colony, some celebrated by pillaging and setting fires in the towns; many created and joined political clubs.37
Property-owning whites, too, jumped at the opportunity to gain local
control over economic policy, and lost no time grabbing political power.
The committees that had elected representatives for the Estates General
created provincial assemblies in the north, west, and south that declared
war against the “ministerial despotism” of the colonial governor and the
Colonial Ministry in Paris. The assembly of the Northern Province granted
itself full legislative and executive power and in early 1790 reopened the
Conseil Supérieur of Le Cap, whose closing by the royal government
in 1787 had enraged many planters. Fearing for his life, the colony’s un-
popular intendant fled. With the old administrative structures of Saint-
Domingue severely weakened, a new network of provincial assemblies and
municipal governments under popular control now governed the colony.
In January orders from the colonial minister arrived calling for the forma-
tion of a short-term, consultative assembly in the colony; whites in Saint-
Domingue instead held elections for a permanent assembly. Elections took
place in February 1790, with the vote granted to all whites who had lived in
the colony for at least a year. This policy was more liberal than the one currently in place in France (which had economic requirements for suffrage),
and helped assure a tenuous unity between white property owners and
poorer whites. It was a democratization based on racism: property-owning
free people of color were again excluded from political participation. In-
deed poor whites in the colony quickly came to exert much of their politi-
cal energy and violence against wealthy free-coloreds.38
When the assembly met in the port town of Saint-Marc in April 1790,
the motto hanging in the meeting hall declared, “Notre union fait notre
force.” (This motto, “Our unity is our strength,” would one day be adopted
by the Haitian Republic.) The group chose the title General Assembly,
pointedly refusing the term “Colonial.” Many of those who sat in the Saint-
Marc assembly were planters involved in coffee or indigo production who
depended on contraband trade and were particularly eager to see an end
to the constraints of the monopoly regulations. The majority of the plant-
ers who had been serving in the provincial assemblies in the west and
south were elected to Saint-Marc, and these local assemblies essentially
stopped meeting after the elections. Things were different in the north.
There the Provincial Assembly included a significant proportion of mer-
78
av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
chants and wealthy planters who were connected through family and busi-
ness to France and were close to the colonial administration. While many
of the more radical representatives from the north left for Saint-Marc, the
Provincial Assembly remained in the hands of these more conservative
men. From then on, the two assemblies were on a collision course.39
While the whites of Saint-Domingue were busy carrying out their revo-
lution, they reacted violently to the possibility of another, more radical,
revolution that could turn their world upside down. Already in May 1788,
the arrival of copies of a French paper that included articles attacking
the slave trade and discussing abolitionist movements in England had cre-
ated a “great sensation” in Saint-Domingue. In the next year news of the
activities of the French Société des Amis des Noirs reached the island.
Fearing the power of the abolitionists, planters inflated it. Indeed, they
gave the society an unlikely ally: Moreau de St. Méry. In June 1789 a man
named Louis Charton had published a pamphlet in Paris alleging that
Moreau had demanded the abolition of slavery in the colonies. Although
Moreau confronted Charton and forced him to admit his accusations were
false, he was unable to stop the rumor that he had “adopted the maxims of
the Amis des Noirs” from spreading to Saint-Domingue. In October 1789
Moreau’s brother-in-law “narrowly escaped lynching,” while “calls rang
out” for the hanging of the “great creole judge himself.” This and other
events drove constant talk about the looming possibility of abolition. In late October, in the midst of widespread reports about “movements among the
slaves,” several whites were imprisoned for harboring abolitionist senti-
ments. It was said that four emissaries of the Société des Amis des Noirs
were about to arrive in the colony, and commissioners were named in Le
Cap to question arriving passengers and search their luggage.40
By late October fears of slave insurrection had mushroomed. It was an-
nounced one day that 3,000 rebel slaves were gathered above Le Cap wait-
ing to attack the town. A detachment of soldiers sent to disperse the gath-
ering found nothing, although they accidentally shot one member of their
own party. They were guided by a slave named Jeannot who, two years
later, would be one of the earliest and most brutal leaders of the slave in-
surrection; perhaps his own rebellion began with the wild goose chase out-
side Le Cap. The whites who imagined masses of slaves gathering outside
the town were not completely deluded—simply premature. In fact a few
months before, in August 1789, slaves had risen up in Martinique, having
i n h e r i ta n c e
79
been told by their leaders that the king of France and his “distinguished”
friends had abolished slavery but that the local government and planters
were conspiring to squelch the decree. Masters and slaves shared news
about the power of the abolitionists, and while masters sought to imprison
and repress those who advocated an end to slavery, many slaves spoke
about an imminent freedom. Both groups overestimated the power of the
Société des Amis des Noirs, but what they feared and hoped drove them to
action.41
Whites were also quick to respond to the threat posed by free people of
color, who saw in the Revolution an opportunity to ratchet up their protests
against their oppression. During 1789 delegations of free men of color had
repeatedly demanded inclusion in local political assemblies. Except in rare
cases, whites overwhelmingly rebuffed them, and soon began responding
with violence. In November 1789, in the town of Petit-Goâve in the South-
ern Province, an elderly white man named Fernand de Baudière was ac-
cused of being the author of a petition written by the free-coloreds in the
town. He was arrested and put into prison, but a crowd overpowered the
local magistrates and lynched him. Elsewhere in the south, a group of
whites broke into the house of a wealthy free man of color, beat him, tied
him to a horse, and dragged him down the road. Some friends intervened
and saved his life, but one of his sons was killed. In Le Cap a man named
Dubois “not only declared himself an advocate of the mulattoes, but with a
degree of imprudence which indicated insanity, sought occasions to de-
claim publicly against the slavery of the negroes.” He was arrested and put
in prison, and would probably have been lynched had the governor not in-
tervened and expelled him from the island. Soon free men of color were
responding by arming themselves. The first skirmishes in the war were un-
der way.42
In Paris the battle over the rights of free people of color was raging as
well. In October 1789 a delegation of free men of color, including Julien
Raimond and Vincent Ogé, appeared in the National Assembly. They pre-
sented a petition opining that “there still exists in one province of this Empire a race of men debased and degraded; a class of citizens consigned to
contempt, to all the humiliations of slavery.” These men, though “born citi-
zens and free,” lived as “foreigners” in their own land; they were “slaves in the land of liberty.” They demanded an end to racist laws and the right for
80
av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
free men of color to vote in local assemblies in Saint-Domingue and have
representatives in the National Assembly. The assembly agreed to consider
their request, and the president declared that “no citizen will demand his
rights . . . in vain.”43
Both Raimond and Ogé had begun this crusade for rights by presenting
their demands to the planters of the Club Massiac. Raimond had spoken of