Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (23 page)

three days per week to the slaves,” and that they would feel betrayed if

they were not granted them. In another letter they noted their “obstinacy”

in expecting the favors they had been told they would receive from the

king. Three days of freedom a week was not complete liberty, but as a

change that carried the seeds of a more autonomous existence it would

have been an inspiration for many slaves. In some parts of the colony,

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meanwhile, insurgents passed on the news that the king had abolished slav-

ery completely. Not unlike the peasant rebels in France during the Great

Terror of 1789, the slave insurgents of Saint-Domingue invoked a powerful

and distant figure—who they rightly understood might have the power to

counteract the assemblies of the colony—against their all-too-local ene-

mies. As Garran-Coulon noted in his report, the evocation of the king was a

logical political strategy. Even if the royal government protected them very

little against their masters, it was the only protection they could “invoke

against the tyranny of their masters.” “Is it surprising that in such circum-

stances, the negroes tried to take advantage of the division of the whites,

and even to increase it as much as they could in order to diminish the

strength of their enemies, and gain the support of those they considered

their [the whites’] enemies?” The insurgents of Saint-Domingue evoked

the king in pursuit of concrete political goals that were, in the local context, quite revolutionary.31

Evocations of the king did not imply a rejection of the language of Re-

publicanism. By mid-1791, despite the increasing radicalization of events

in France, the country was still nominally a constitutional monarchy, not a

republic, and many did not see the Rights of Man and the authority of

the king as mutually exclusive. The rumored decree discussed at the meet-

ing of August 14, after all, was said to have been passed by the king
and
the National Assembly. Later in 1791, Biassou wrote of his readiness to “serve

his king, the nation, and its representatives.” Such ideological syncretism

continued in Saint-Domingue even after the break between the Republic

and the royalty was accomplished in France. In early 1793 one insurgent

leader named Joseph flew a tricolor flag decorated with three fleur-de-

lis, freely mixing Republican and royalist symbols. Later that year the

Republican commissioner Léger Félicité Sonthonax recalled that some in-

surgents who had been recruited to the Republican side had proposed

to make him “king in the name of the Republic” as a way of ending the

war against their enemies. But when the conflict between republicanism

and royalty finally became a clear conflict between slavery and freedom,

many—though not all—former slaves threw in their lot with the

Republic.32

Insurgents had a powerful incentive to take a “royalist” tone: the collab-

oration, and ultimately alliance, they developed with the Spanish across

the border in Santo Domingo. The Spanish had “an open market with the

brigands,” who arrived with money, but also with dishes, jewels, furniture,

f i r e i n t h e c a n e

107

and animals taken from plantations to buy supplies, as well as weapons and

ammunition to supplement those they took on plantations or during bat-

tles. This trade, as well as some direct military aid given by the Spanish,

provided crucial support for the insurgent army, and indeed was probably

one reason it succeeded as well as it did. Insurgent leaders traveled to the

border, and Spanish officers visited their camps. The insurgents cultivated

such contacts, adopting an “extravagantly royalist rhetoric” and “posing as

defenders of church and king” at least in part to encourage the Spanish to

support them.33

Insurgents also often described their own leaders as kings. In the South-

ern Province in early 1792, a group of insurgents ultimately created

the “kingdom of the Platons” and chose a king to be their leader. Romaine

la Rivière had, according to one observer, the ambition to become the

“king of Saint-Domingue.” In the north, too, certain leaders were elected

as kings. On a Sunday two weeks after the revolt began, insurgents who

had taken over Acul celebrated two weddings in the town’s church with an

imprisoned Capuchin priest officiating. “On the occasion, they assumed ti-

tles, and the titled blacks were treated with great respect.” “Their colours

were consecrated, and a King was elected”—a free black named Jean-

Baptiste Cap. A few weeks later, after a clash between insurgents and

French troops, “a negro superbly dressed and decorated, with a crown on

his head, was found upon the field of battle.”34

For the majority of the population of the island who were African-born,

the form and content of kingship were probably defined by the traditions

of their homelands. Garran-Coulon attributed the royalism of the insur-

gents in part to their “ignorance,” since “in Africa as well as in Saint-

Domingue, they knew only royal government.” The Republican commis-

sioner Légér Félicité Sonthonax similarly wrote in late 1793 that “the most

stupid of Africans” could understand the “simple” idea of a king, while

“even the most sophisticated of them” could not “conceive of the idea of a

republic.” Such interpretations and oppositions were of course misleading.

Kingship meant something quite different in Africa—for instance, in the

Kongo, whence many slaves had come in the decades before the revolu-

tion—than it did in Europe. In Kongolese political culture, there was a

long-standing conflict over the nature of kingship, between traditions that

emphasized a more authoritarian form of rule and others that limited the

power of kings and provided for more democratic forms of rule. Such tra-

ditions drove conflicts in which many of those enslaved in Saint-Domingue

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would have participated. Indeed, the Kongo might even “be seen as a

fount of revolutionary ideas as much as France was.” As with so much of

the insurrection of 1791, the only evidence we have of the transcultural de-

velopment of insurgent political ideologies is extremely fragmented, but

the naming of “kings” among the insurgents likely involved a transcultural

dialogue between European and African visions of leadership and govern-

ment.35

African slaves from the Kongo arrived with another kind of experience

that they made useful in Saint-Domingue. Many of them had been soldiers

fighting in the civil wars that ripped apart the kingdom of Kongo before

they had been captured and sold into slavery. They were “African veter-

ans,” who had knowledge and experience of warfare and knew how to use

firearms. The warfare practiced in the Kongo was quite different from that

of European armies, involving organization in small, relatively autonomous

groups, repeated attacks and retreats aimed at confusing the enemy, and

firing from a prone position and, when possible, from behind shelter. Sol-

diers in Saint-Domingue consistently described similar tactics among the

insurgents. One contemporary wrote that instead of exposing themselves

as a group like “fanatics,” they fought “spread out and dispersed,” and posi-

tioned themselves in places that made them seem ready “to envelop and

crush their enemies by their numbers.” They were careful in their obser-

vations of the enemy. “If they encounter resistance, they don’t waste their

energy; but if they see hesitation in the defense, they become extremely

audacious.” A report from 1793 described how a group of insurgents, sur-

prised by an attack, took refuge behind rocks and, “following their cow-

ardly custom,
hidden,
fired on us.” As the French troops charged the insurgents, they retreated “from ambush to ambush until they had reached

some inaccessible rocks.” These tactics were successful; the “inaccessible”

rocks were clearly accessible to the insurgents, who escaped the attack,

though they left behind their dead and paths of blood. The insurgent lead-

ers Jean-François and Biassou made the importance of African military

tactics clear in a letter they wrote late in 1791, in which they asserted that most of their followers were “a multitude of
nègres
from the coast”—that is, from Africa—“most of whom can barely say two words of French but

who in their country were accustomed to fighting wars.”36

African veterans were not the only ones who brought military experi-

ence to the insurgents. Although they were a minority, there were also free

people of African descent in the insurgent camps, some of whom had expe-

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109

rience of serving in the French colonial militia or the
maréchaussée
. Many of them brought more than just experience. In late September a group of

“mulattoes and free negroes” who had been serving against the insurgents

deserted “with arms, baggage, and military stores” and “joined the rebels.”

The towns of Fort-Dauphin and Ounaminthe, near the Spanish border,

were taken over by the insurgents thanks to the desertion of Jean-Baptiste

Marc and Cézar, two “free blacks” who had fought for several months

against the “brigands” before joining them, bringing ammunition and can-

non. Slaves who had been employed hunting for their masters had experi-

ence with firearms. One visitor to the colony in the late 1790s described

some hunters, who seem to have developed their skills as slaves before

emancipation, who each week were given enough powder for seven shots.

With this they were to provide enough food for a week. They hunted birds

by crawling through the lagoons with their rifles over their heads, until

they found several birds “living in society,” killing several with a single shot.

Such skills could be put to use in other kinds of ambushes as well.37

When they lacked weapons, as they often did, the insurgents used star-

tling “ruse and ingenuity.” “They camouflaged traps, fabricated poisoned

arrows, feigned cease-fires to lure the enemy into ambush, disguised tree-

trunks as cannons, and threw obstructions of one kind or another into the

roads to hamper advancing troops.” Some insurgents advancing on Le Cap

stood firmly up to three volleys of shot, each of them “wearing a kind of

light mattress stuffed with cotton as a vest to prevent the bullets from pen-

etrating.” Some demonstrated a suicidal courage when they “suffocated

the cannon of the enemy with their arms and bodies, and so routed them.”

Although at first many insurgents did not know how to use the cannon they

captured, loading them improperly, they soon learned. One group took

control of a battery along the coast, and when a French ship fired on the

battery to dislodge them, they braved a barrage of 250 cannon shots. They

then used the cannon balls that had landed around them to fire back at

the ship, which was seriously damaged before its crew managed to sail it

away.38

Violence, in the form of military engagements with French troops and

the massacre of white planters and their families, was a central part of

the insurrection. Many of the accounts of the event that were soon pro-

duced and disseminated throughout the Americas and Europe presented

tales of savage and unthinkable atrocities committed by the slaves. One

well-known account—presented to the National Assembly in France in

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November 1791 and quickly published in English translation in 1792—in-

cluded a description of the attack on the Gallifet plantations that claimed

that the insurgents carried as their “standard the body of a white child im-

paled upon a stake.” This detail was not mentioned in the descriptions of

the attack on Gallifet by Pierre Mossut or Antoine Dalmas, neither of

whom would have been likely to suppress so memorable an image had they

been aware of it. But it was accepted as true by many readers, and often re-

peated as a symbol, and condemnation, of the insurrection. In Paris the

famed revolutionary Camille Desmoulins used the potent image when he

declared that his political enemy, the abolitionist Brissot, was to blame “if so many plantations have been reduced to ashes, if pregnant women have

been eviscerated, if a child carried on the end of a pike served as standard

of the blacks.”39

The same account described many other horrors—a carpenter named

Robert tied between two boards and sawed in half, husbands and fathers

killed and their wives and daughters taken by the insurgents and “reserved

for their pleasures,” one woman raped on the body of her dead husband.

Drawing on this text, and on what he heard during his stay in Saint-

Domingue in 1791, Bryan Edwards embellished some of these horrors

(the carpenter Robert was sawed in half because his assassins declared that

“he should die in the way of his occupation”) and provided descriptions of

others (a policeman was nailed to the gate of his plantation and his limbs

chopped off “one by one with an ax”) when he wrote what would become a