Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (26 page)

“Only a perfect union between the white citizens and the citizens of

color,” officials from the nearby town of Saint-Marc wrote to the governor,

“can preserve the colony from dangers that may bring about its complete

ruin.” But the possibility of an alliance had gone up in smoke with Port-au-

Prince. The brutality of the clashes there left the free-coloreds enraged,

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and several issued open declarations of war against the whites. One called

on his brethren to besiege Port-au-Prince and to plunge their “bloody

arms” into the bodies of these “monsters from Europe.” It was time to up-

root “this tree of prejudice” and “avenge God, nature, the law, and human-

ity, outraged for so long in these terrible climates.” André Rigaud issued a

similar call to his followers in the Southern Province: the free-coloreds

must respond to the brutality of the whites by killing, pillaging, and burn-

ing in turn, seeking vengeance against the “barbarians” who wished to

slaughter them and reduce them to slavery. By late November the Western

and the Southern Provinces were, like the north, in a state of war. The

slaves had not started the war there, but they were a part of it. In the next months both sides in the conflict increasingly recruited slaves to fight for

them. They assumed that once the conflicts were over, slavery could be re-

built. In this expectation they were sorely mistaken. For a time the slaves

would serve the white and free-colored armies, learning how to fight, bid-

ing their time. But in the end many would choose to leave these masters,

and all masters, behind.17

In late October 1791 elderly slaves gathered at the gates of their planta-

tions on the northern plain to enjoy a novel sight. Down the road marched

a group of white prisoners, flanked by insurgent soldiers who were hitting

them with sticks. The “old negroes and negresses humiliated us with their

words,” recalled one of the prisoners, a local official named Gros, “and cel-

ebrated the exploits of their warriors.” For nearly a century, escaped slaves had been similarly captured and marched off to prison. Now the roles were

reversed.18

Gros and the other prisoners had been guarding a post outside their

town when they were attacked and captured by a group of insurgents. As

they were marched away they saw their houses and fields go up in flames.

They were first brought to a camp under the command of Sans-Souci (“a

very bad subject”), where they were insulted and given only “a few drops”

of
tafia
—rum—to drink. A white priest in the camp frightened them by

announcing that “one must know how to die.” For the next part of their

journey the prisoners were carried in carts, in which they were so thor-

oughly jolted about that they would have preferred to walk. They were

brought to a camp under the command of a slave named Michaud, who,

according to Gros, had “a great deal of sensitivity,” and who helped the

prisoners as best he could.19

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Michaud, however, was outranked by a leader notorious for his brutal-

ity: Jeannot. He kept the white prisoners chained, giving them only a glass

of water and three bananas per day, supplemented only rarely by a piece of

“beef’s ear.” The residents of the camp surrounded them, and although a

few “seemed pained” by their situation, most jeered and “rejoiced.” At

night, remembered Gros, “our terror worsened because of the speeches

that we heard; and their sad songs, accompanied by instruments, seemed

to be a prelude to new tortures.” Then Jeannot announced to the prisoners

that two of them would be killed every twenty-four hours, “to prolong his

enjoyment.” One white prisoner received “over 400” strikes of a whip, and

gunpowder was rubbed into his bleeding wounds. Other prisoners, es-

corted out of their prison to the sound of a drum, were chopped to pieces

or strung up and bled to death. One was executed by his own domestic

slave. The whippings and executions described by Gros were a terrifying

mirror image of the tortures long inflicted by white masters upon slaves.

But Jeannot was not brutal only to whites; he also imprisoned slaves “who

were still loyal to the whites.” A group of free-coloreds operating in the

area lamented that “his only joy was spilling blood” of whites and blacks.

“If on earth there are two principles,” they wrote, “Jeannot was animated

only by that of evil.”20

One day, as Gros and the remainder of the prisoners awaited their

promised execution (they were, apparently, to be roasted alive), they heard

shots in the distance, and mounted troops led by Jean-François, who was

Jeannot’s superior, arrived in the camp. He arrested Jeannot and, after a

quick military trial, had him tied to a tree and shot. Jean-François prom-

ised the white prisoners that their tortures were over and that they would

be treated humanely from then on. The prisoners were “walking ghosts”:

“pale and disfigured, attacked by vermin who were spread over all parts of

our bodies, covered with blood and dust.” But they were treated more

kindly from then on. As they marched some insurgents dismounted from

their horses and let the exhausted prisoners ride. At the next camp, where

the insurgents’
salle du gouvernement
—the central seat of the insurgent government—was located, they were greeted by a man named Jean-Louis,

a domestic slave who had lived for several years in France and for this rea-

son was nicknamed “the Parisian.” He fed them and provided them with

“an excellent mattress,” and they rested well.21

From then on the prisoners were allowed to circulate freely in the

camps, and Gros was recruited to be Jean-François’s secretary. Many of the

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“mulattoes” in the camp, he reported, felt ambivalent about being a part of

the revolt. A small number of them, who had been partisans of Ogé in

1790, were active participants, even instigators, of the insurrection, while

others saw in it an opportunity to fight for their own rights once it began.

But many, he claimed, were kept in the camps under duress, constantly

watched to prevent them from leaving. Even Jean-François—who may

have been a slave, and a maroon, before the Revolution—presented him-

self to Gros as a kind of hostage to the mass of the insurgents. He told Gros that he had been made “general of the negroes” by the masses of the insurgents, but that unlike them he was not fighting for “general liberty,” which

he believed was an impossible goal and would have been dangerous for the

“uncivilized hordes” that surrounded him. He had lesser ambitions: he

railed against plantation managers and wanted them banned from Saint-

Domingue. Most of the insurgents, however, were committed to the “com-

plete destruction of the whites.” Among them, Gros wrote, the women

were much “more insolent, harsher,” and less disposed to return to their

plantations than the men. The insurgent leader Georges Biassou con-

curred, singling out the “negresses of the plantations” as a particularly re-

bellious and recalcitrant group.22

By late November Jean-François and Biassou were the most important

insurgent leaders in the northern plain. They had survived as other leaders

had fallen. Jean-Baptiste Cap, who was elected king of Limbé and Port-

Margot in late August, had been captured trying to recruit slaves on a plan-

tation and broken on the wheel. And in mid-November Boukman was sur-

rounded by a troop of cavalry and gunned down during a battle. He was

decapitated, his body burned by the French troops in view of the insurgent

camps, and his head displayed on a stake in the main plaza of Le Cap. The

man who killed him was awarded the large bounty promised to anyone

who brought in the “heads of the different chiefs of the rebels.” The death

of the man who had set the uprising in motion made a deep impression in

the rebel camps, where insurgents launched into a three-day
calenda
—

dance—during which they taunted white prisoners (whom some wanted to

put to death in revenge for their leader’s death) and told stories of their exploits in the war.23

Several months of war had taken their toll. Many thousands of insur-

gents had died in the fighting. Those who had survived were often hungry

and sick. How long could the insurrection hold out if troops arrived from

France? What, ultimately, was to be gained? Jean-François and Biassou

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decided it was time to sue for peace. Other officers, including one who

went by the name Toussaint, agreed. It would be a test of their leadership

and of the extent of their power, for many in the insurgents’ camps were

determined never to return to the old world.

In late November three civil commissioners sent by the National Assembly

arrived in Saint-Domingue. When they had left France, no one there had

yet learned of the 1791 slave insurrection, so they were not armed with an

official response to the event. Instead they brought a decree that deepened

the impasse in the colony. On September 24 the National Assembly had

proclaimed that whereas it and the king would have control over the “exte-

rior regime” of the colonies, notably trade policies, the “laws concerning

the state of unfree persons and the political status of men of color and free blacks” would be established by the local assembly. The law of May 15,

which had incited such protest among the whites of Saint-Domingue, had

been overturned by the very authority that had decreed it a few months

before. The news overjoyed many whites, but it was a bitter disappointed

for the free-coloreds. After several years of struggle, the death of Ogé and

Chavannes, months of killing in Port-au-Prince, they were in the same

place they had started: with no political rights and no recourse against the

local assemblies.24

The commissioners also brought other news. France had a new consti-

tution, which had, as the commissioners put it, destroyed “stone by stone”

the “edifice of the Old Regime” and created a constitutional monarchy.

The king had accepted the constitution and proclaimed hopefully that the

Revolution was over and that it was time to bring peace to the nation. In

this spirit the National Assembly had decreed a general amnesty for “acts

of revolution,” and this decree had been extended to the colonies. Those

who “returned to order” would be forgiven for any acts of war or violence

they had committed.25

“We must be included in the general amnesty pronounced for all indis-

criminately,” argued Jean-François and Biassou in a letter to the commis-

sioners. But others disagreed. A deputy from Le Cap serving in the assem-

bly argued that the amnesty did not apply to those in rebellion in the

colony. It was for those who had committed “acts of revolution,” and “cer-

tainly the crimes committed in Saint-Domingue must be considered dif-

ferently.” Granting amnesty to the “free-coloreds and free blacks” would

establish “a perfect equality between them and the whites.” Extending it to

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the slaves would have an even more disastrous effect: it would free them

from their dependence on their masters and make it impossible to guaran-

tee their future subordination. To accept the insurrection as an “act of rev-

olution” was, this deputy recognized, to legitimize it. It meant defining

their struggle as politics rather than as “crime,” and recognizing them as

revolutionaries rather than as “brigands.” If amnesty was granted, slavery

would never be secure again.26

In fact the insurgents had already profoundly undermined slavery, free-

ing tens of thousands of slaves from their (often dead) masters through

violence. They had won the right to be treated as a political force. As the

commissioners realized, there was little choice but to offer them amnesty

in the hope of ending a conflict that could not be won by military means.

Jean-François and Biassou took advantage of the opportunity presented

them and put forth a plan to end the insurrection. The assembly would

grant several hundred “liberties” to the insurgent leaders, who would dis-

tribute them among their officers. The mass of the insurgents who were

not granted freedom would be granted an amnesty from punishment. In

return, the leaders would end the war and bring them back to their planta-

tions. Jean-François and Biassou presented themselves as leaders eager to

contain their more radical followers, and recommended that a proclama-

tion be issued to the slaves assuring them that the assembly would “take

care of their situation.” But they also threatened that if their proposals

were refused, “a horrible carnage” might ensue, including the death of

“the white prisoners, and white women.”27

The planter-dominated assembly, however, refused to deal with “rebel

negroes.” Speaking as if they were still powerful masters, they told the

insurgents that if they returned to their plantations and showed them-

selves to be repentant, they might be forgiven. Tousard, who had been ap-