Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (39 page)

He noted with satisfaction that the “workers” from Plaisance, who had fled

during the fighting, had all “returned to the plantations” under his orders.34

In November 1794, when Laveaux went to visit the lands under

Louverture’s command, he was delighted to see that reconstruction of

the plantation economy was under way. “All the inhabitants,” he wrote, “es-

pecially the whites,” never tired of “honoring the virtues of Toussaint.” He

helped those of all “colors” and “opinions.” Many white planters had

returned to their plantations, and many white women talked about the as-

sistance they had received from this “surprising man.” In Petite-Rivière,

15,000 cultivators had come home. They were, Laveaux gushed, grateful to

the Republic that had made them free, and worked assiduously thanks

to Louverture. “Whites, blacks, mulattoes, soldiers, cultivators, property

owners, all bless the virtuous chief whose care maintains order and peace

among them.”35

Looking back in the middle of 1795, Louverture remembered how with

all the mountains “in rebellion” and the plantations “abandoned,” he had

been forced to use all his “patience and activity” to bring the cultivators

back to work. He had also, however, used threats. The French constitution,

declared Louverture in a March 1795 proclamation, assured the “conser-

vation of the property of citizens,” and his officers would make sure that

property was respected. The propertyless ex-slaves, meanwhile, were or-

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dered to return to their plantations within twenty-four hours. They would

be paid a salary for their work, but they did not have the freedom to say no.

“Work is necessary, it is a virtue,” Louverture announced. “All lazy and er-

rant men will be punished by the law.” Writing to Laveaux a few months

later, Louverture noted that he was “busy gathering the cultivators, the

drivers, and the managers, exhorting them to love work, which is insepara-

ble from liberty.”36

Louverture was, from the start, generous and forgiving toward white

planters in the regions he captured from the British. Although he knew

that many of them had actively supported the British occupation and even

carried arms against the French, he showed little interest in punishing

them for their treason. In this he went against the grain of French policy,

which was often quite harsh to those deemed traitors to the Republic;

in 1794 in Guadeloupe, for instance, several hundred French planters

who had fought for the British were executed and buried in mass graves

by order of the Republican commander of the island, Victor Hugues.

Louverture’s own experience suggested the benefits of forgiving and for-

getting; he had, after all, been greeted with open arms by the Republic in

1794 despite the fact that he had been fighting for the Spanish enemy for

nearly a year. But he also believed that the colony needed these former

masters in order to rebuild the plantation economy.

When in August 1795 Louverture captured the Mirabalais region from

the British, he found “magnificent plantations” in the “best possible state”

where the ex-slaves were “working well.” In the town were several hun-

dred white planters from other parts of Saint-Domingue who had gathered

under the protection of the British. Louverture gave them passports to re-

turn to their homes and wrote to Laveaux requesting permission to give

them back their properties, which had been sequestered by the Republic.

Such abandoned properties, as Louverture saw it, were more likely to be

rebuilt if they were put in the hands of their former owners, who had the

expertise necessary to rebuild them, than if they were kept in the hands of

a strained administration. Louverture was confident enough in his own

power not to fear that these planters would challenge the order of emanci-

pation from within. Indeed many of the planters who returned, seeing that

the likelihood that slavery would be restored was diminishing day by day

with Louverture’s conquests, were willing to accept the new order, which

offered them continuing, if somewhat diminished, possibilities for enrich-

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ment. The planters’ return home was not always easy. Often, facing bu-

reaucratic hurdles and the resistance of the managers put in charge of their

plantations by the local administration, they were unable to reestablish

ownership of their lost estates. Nevertheless many returned. Louverture

pursued his policy of welcoming returning planters throughout his career

in Saint-Domingue, generating both allies and enemies in the process.37

Louverture was comfortable working with former masters as a way of

maintaining and rebuilding the shattered plantation order. Indeed, in 1795

he became a property owner himself, acquiring a plantation at Ennery, in

the mountains above Gonaïves, which provided him with a refuge through-

out the next years. By 1799 Louverture owned several plantations; an arti-

cle published in France in early 1799 described one as being in the “best of

condition,” with a house where “everything exuded order and decency”

surrounded by the “houses of the cultivators” and thriving groves of coffee

trees. In the new regime, of course, property owners did not have the un-

fettered power over their laborers they had enjoyed under slavery. The co-

lonial state was committed to emancipation. But it was also committed to

making the former slaves stay on their plantations and forcing them to

work at the same tasks they had before they were free. With their choices

circumscribed by the policies of Louverture’s regime—enforced by “agri-

cultural inspectors” appointed in the areas under his command—ex-slaves

did what they had in 1793 under Polverel’s regulations, expanding their

garden plots as much as they could, negotiating the terms of their labor,

and sometimes illegally leaving the plantations to seek something better.38

Some plantation workers rose up against Louverture, claiming that his

goal was nothing less than the resurrection of slavery. As early as January

1795 one of his officers, Blanc Cazenave, rallied cultivators in the

Artibonite to rise up by claiming that Louverture intended to reinstitute

the “old regime.” In June, in the parish of Marmelade, another man en-

couraged cultivators to rebel by announcing that Louverture was “making

them work” in order to return them to the “slavery of the whites.” Several

plantation managers whom Louverture had installed were killed. “I went

myself to preach” to the rebellious laborers, wrote Louverture, but “in

thanks for my pains I received a bullet in the leg, which is still causing me a great deal of pain.” Much of the region’s harvest had been lost to fire during the insurrection. Louverture used his disciplined troops of ex-slaves to

repress these revolts. But rumors that he was preparing a restoration of

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slavery haunted him continually throughout the next years. Facing such ru-

mors, and the revolts they helped stir up, Louverture defended his policies

by insisting that it was necessary to limit liberty in order to sustain it.39

In February 1796 plantation workers in the mountains above Port-de-

Paix, in the Northern Province, rose up in revolt. Several whites were

killed. Louverture rode all night from the west to confront the rebels

personally, demanding that they explain why they had risen up. He sum-

marized the conversation he had with the rebels in a letter to Laveaux.

Though the exchange was probably more complicated, and tendentious,

than Louverture described it, his letter provides insight into the leader’s

evolving political philosophy. He had, he explained, criticized the rebels

for the killings they had committed, and told them that “if they wanted to

conserve their liberty they must submit to the laws of the Republic, be

docile, and work.” “God has said: ask and you shall receive, knock on my

door and it shall be opened,” he told them. “But he never said to commit

crimes to ask for what you need.” The rebels told Louverture they knew he

was “the father of all the blacks” and had been working hard for their “hap-

piness and liberty.” But, the rebels insisted, they had good reasons for tak-

ing up arms. Etienne Datty, who “from the beginning of the revolution”

had always been their leader, and had “always eaten misery with us so we

would win our liberty,” had been dismissed by local officials, and they

did not understand why. Triggered by Datty’s dismissal, the uprising was

nourished by a broader set of grievances against the local administration.

“They want to make us slaves; equality does not exist here,” the rebels ex-

plained. Where Louverture was in command, “whites and men of color”

were “united with the blacks.” All seemed “like brothers, born of the same

mother.” “That, my general, is what we call equality.” In Port-de-Paix, how-

ever, things were different. The blacks were disdained and mistreated.

Those who worked on the plantations were not given a large enough share

of what they produced. And they suffered daily, and potentially devastat-

ing, harassment. “They make us give them our chickens and our pigs when

we go to sell them in town, and if we try to complain, we are stopped by the

police, and they put us in prison and don’t feed us and we have to pay to

get out.” This, the insurgents declared, was “not liberty.”40

Louverture responded gravely that although all the reasons they had

given him seemed justified, they were wrong to have risen up. They had

put him in an impossible position. He had just dispatched emissaries to

the National Convention to “thank them in the name of all the blacks for

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the benevolent decree that had given them liberty,” and to “assure them

that they would work hard” to prove to France, and to all other nations,

that they deserved their freedom. He had triumphantly declared that, with

the aid of France, the people of the colony would demonstrate to the “en-

tire universe” that a colony “worked by free hands” could flourish. What

would the Convention think when it learned what the insurgents of Port-

de-Paix had just done? “Tell me,” he demanded. He would be “shamed”

and proven wrong. The French government would accept the arguments

of the enemies of liberty, who had argued that “blacks are not made to be

free, that if they become free they will no longer want to work, and will do

nothing but steal and kill.” They would demand that Louverture make sure

the blacks remained obedient from then on.41

A few months later Louverture issued a similar proclamation to rebel-

lious cultivators in the nearby parish of Saint-Louis du Nord. What would

the French people say, he demanded, when they learned that rather than

being thankful for freedom, the ex-slaves had “soaked their hands in the

blood” of France’s children? How could they dare claim that France

wanted to reestablish slavery when the nation had sacrificed its flourishing

commerce and its most prosperous factories to bring them liberty? “Be

very careful, my brothers; there are more blacks in the colony than there

are men of color and whites combined, and if there are disorders it is

against us that the Republic will act,” he warned. He demanded that all

“good citizens” denounce those who “blasphemed against the French Re-

public.”42

Louverture sought to placate the rebels, notably by naming Etienne

Datty to a local military post. But his interventions ultimately had little effect. In May Datty took arms once again. “All the cultivators of the moun-

tains have risen up,” Louverture wrote; they were “destroying provisions”

and refusing to deliver what was produced on the plantations. Rumors

were circulating that Louverture was planning to “give the country over to

the British and return them to slavery,” and some claimed that the French

government intended to reestablish slavery. He sent Dessalines to the area

with 500 soldiers, who restored order in the area, at least for a time.43

In the end, if Louverture kept having to send troops to Port-de-Paix it

was because he had provided no concrete response to the rebels’ eloquent

complaints that what they were living was “not liberty.” His reply was sim-

ply that they had to live according to the rules of the Republic if they

wanted to keep liberty at all. They should be grateful to France, and had to

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demonstrate that they deserved their freedom. Such statements, of course,

obscured a great deal. For the liberty of the ex-slaves of Saint-Domingue

had not been a magnanimous gift from a benevolent Republic. The Na-

tional Convention had taken the important step of ratifying and sanctify-

ing the principle of emancipation, and in so doing had courageously put

principle before profit. They had done so, however, following the lead of

Sonthonax’s emancipation decree, which was a response to the powerful

bid for liberty by the insurgents of Saint-Domingue. It was these insur-