Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (4 page)

men of the colony.

s p e c t e r s o f s a i n t - d o m i n g u e

9

Through his work as a lawyer in Saint-Domingue, Moreau became irri-

tated about something he would harp on for most of the rest of his life: no

one, especially the administrators on both sides of the Atlantic who gov-

erned the Caribbean colonies, knew anything about them. He decided

to try to solve the problem, and, working with other members of a local

scientific society called the Cercle des Philadelphes, he began to gather

information on Saint-Domingue’s law, history, environment, and economy.

It was a classic Enlightenment project, based on the idea that knowl-

edge would promote better governance. Because many of the archives he

needed to consult were in Paris, he returned there in 1783. The Colonial

Ministry provided him with an allowance and access to its archives. In 1784

he published the first part of what became a six-volume history of colo-

nial legislation. He returned to Saint-Domingue, where he continued his

research and his struggles with the royal administration. In 1788 he again

left the colony for Paris. He was poised to produce his
Description
of the Spanish and French colonies when the French Revolution began. Moreau

quickly became active in politics. He was chosen as the president of the

electors of the city of Paris and participated in the raging debates about

colonial policy. Meanwhile his project languished. There was little time to

write history as he tried to survive it. Like many political moderates, he

ended on the wrong side during the Jacobin Terror and had to flee for

his life.2

He ended up in Philadelphia and returned to his writing. He published

a
Description
of Spanish Santo Domingo in 1796, but faced a peculiar problem with regard to the French colony: in the years he had been away

from it, much of what he had known there had been destroyed or irrevoca-

bly transformed by revolution. Moreau worried that the story of Saint-

Domingue, the “most brilliant” of the colonies of the Antilles, might be

forgotten if he “did not hurry to offer a truthful portrait of its past splendor.” At the same time, he imagined “a crowd of people” accusing him of

doing “useless work or hoping to excite regrets for which there was no

longer any remedy.”3

But it was worth telling the story of Saint-Domingue, Moreau insisted.

If there was to be a reconstruction of the colony, as he firmly hoped, it

would have to be based on knowledge of what the ruined plantations and

towns had once been, and an understanding of how the colony had func-

tioned, and why things had ultimately gone so wrong. It was possible,

Moreau believed, to make the colony once again “a source of riches and

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av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

power for France. In these fields still smoking with blood and carnage, we

must bring back abundance.”4

In its “short existence,” Moreau wrote, Saint-Domingue was “a colony

whose nature, splendor, and destruction” were unique in “the annals of the

world,” and a part of the “History of Nations,” like the great civilizations of Greece and Italy. His book, Moreau hoped, might encourage people to

“meditate on Saint-Domingue,” and to draw as much from this act of con-

templation as they would from looking at the “debris of Herculaneum.” A

century and a half later, another Martinican, Aimé Césaire, would similarly

insist that “to study Saint-Domingue is to study one of the origins, one of

the sources, of contemporary Western civilization.” Both writers insisted

that rather than being seen as a place on the margins of Europe and its de-

velopment, Saint-Domingue must be seen as central to this history.5

Curiously, Moreau shied away from one aspect of Saint-Domingue’s

history. “Has the time come to write on the colonial revolution? . . . I

think not.” That was why his book, as he announced, represented Saint-

Domingue as it was “on the first day the revolution appeared there.”6 And

it was why “1789” was repeated throughout the text, often simply as “this

year.” Like many exiles, Moreau sought to return home by writing about it.

That home had been completely transformed by slave revolution, and his

work was a walking tour of a vanished world. But, harboring hope that the

colonial world might be rebuilt, the exile was also calling up specters of the past in an effort to exorcise the present. In the process he left a remarkable snapshot of the brilliant and brutal colony of Saint-Domingue.

“One good white is dead. The bad ones are still here.” This, Moreau wrote,

was what the blacks of Le Cap heard in the melody of the funeral bells of

the church. It was, perhaps, a subtle way of saying that the only good white

was a dead one. Each time the bells rang, another corpse joined the gener-

ations of the dead haunting Saint-Domingue. The colony was a graveyard

for its original inhabitants, decimated by Spanish colonizers; for its Euro-

pean settlers and soldiers, who succumbed in large numbers to fevers; and

of course for the many slaves who died there from execution, overwork,

sorrow, or (though rarely) the weight of years.7

The dead were divided as the living were. Some whites—individuals of

importance in the colony, or those rich enough to pay the 3,000-livre

charge for this honor—were still buried near the church, in a single tomb

built for the purpose. (In France they would have been placed under

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11

the church itself, but this practice had been given up in the heat of the

tropics to spare worshipers from the stench of rotting corpses under their

feet.) In the tomb were the bodies of two governors of the colony, as

well as the bones of the Jesuits who had died there during the first half of

the eighteenth century. When Moreau visited in 1777, he noticed some

bones sticking out of the ground in the tomb, but doubted what some said

about them—that they were the remains of those Jesuits, miraculously

preserved.8

The church graveyard was small, however, and most whites were buried

in a cemetery at La Fossette, on the outskirts of Le Cap. La Fossette

had first been used as an overflow cemetery during an epidemic in 1736,

receiving the bodies of two ill-respected groups: blacks and sailors. A few

decades later, with the cemetery surrounding the Le Cap church too

full, it became the official town cemetery. La Fossette—originally called

L’Afrique by the Company of the Indies when it occupied the area as part

of its slave-trading operations—also had a cemetery for non-Christians.

Unbaptized African slaves—called
bossales
—who had died soon after their arrival were buried around the “Croix bossale.” (The 1685 Code Noir,

which governed the treatment of slaves in the French colonies, stipulated

that unbaptized slaves be buried “at night in a field near the place where

they died.”) It was perhaps these graves that brought slaves to the area for

“dances” on Sundays and holidays. Outside the second-largest town in the

colony, Port-au-Prince, African slaves were buried in a swampy site also

called “Croix bossale.” Animals, however, often disinterred the corpses.

Local officials, worried about the “exhalations” through which the “dead

seemed to menace the living and punish them for their disregard for hu-

manity and morality,” established a better-placed cemetery for slaves.9

Throughout Saint-Domingue the enslaved often created their own cem-

eteries by taking over those no longer used by whites. In one town in the

Northern Province an abandoned cemetery was still “recognized by the su-

perstitious veneration of the negroes.” In the parish of Aquin, in the

south, slaves buried their dead near the ruins of the chapel on the site of an early settlement. Attempts to force them to use the official cemetery failed; the slaves just waited until night to bury their dead. So the bodies of those once enslaved were buried alongside the bodies of those once free. Elsewhere the dead of both groups were united for other reasons. Moreau

noted with disgust that in one small town “white and
homme de couleur,

and free and slave” were all buried together because there was no tradition

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av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

of registering the burials. In another, little-populated part of the colony a small cemetery, marked by a cross, indiscriminately welcomed the bodies

of “the whites and negroes.” Natural forces sometimes also brought the

dead together. In 1787 a ravine overflowed during a powerful tropical

storm, drowning two slaves, sweeping away carriages and furniture, ex-

huming the corpses from a small cemetery, and carrying them into the

ocean—itself a giant cemetery for those Africans who had not survived the

middle passage.10

The dead were inescapable in Saint-Domingue, as Moreau lamented in

describing the entrance to one town where the sight of a pleasant fountain

was offset by the cemetery beside it. It was as if a vow had been taken al-

ways to strike travelers with the “lugubrious” presence of the departed. At

the same time, Saint-Domingue was a powerful life-source for the boom-

ing Atlantic economy, generating fortunes for individuals on both sides of

the ocean. Its plains were covered with sugarcane cultivated on well-or-

dered and technologically sophisticated plantations, supported by efficient

irrigation works. The mountains were full of burgeoning coffee planta-

tions, and the towns bustled with arriving and departing ships, passengers,

and goods of all kinds. Within a century it had grown from a marginal

Caribbean frontier into the most valuable colony in the world. In the pro-

cess it had welcomed a bewildering mix of people—Gascons, Bretons,

Provençals from France; Ibo, Wolof, Bambara, and Kongolese from Africa.

On the verge of a revolution, it was a land of striking contrasts.11

Christopher Columbus landed on the island during his first voyage, in

1492. The indigenous Taino seem to have called it Ayiti, but Columbus

gave it a new name: La Española. On the northwest coast of the island, Co-

lumbus left behind a small group of sailors in the care of a local Taino

chief. He returned the following year to find the settlement abandoned

and destroyed, with most of those he had left behind buried nearby. The

chief he had entrusted with his men claimed that a group of Caribs from

another island had attacked and he had been powerless to defend the

Spaniards. It is more likely that (not for the last time) the initial peace between Europeans and the indigenous peoples had devolved into violence.12

This first European settlement in the Americas had failed, but more fol-

lowed, and quickly. Española—or Hispaniola, as it came to be known in

the Anglophone world—was the ground zero of European colonialism in

the Americas. The brutal massacre and bewildering decimation of indige-

nous people that took place there would be repeated again and again in the

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13

following centuries, though rarely with the same startling speed. Under the

encomienda
system, settlers were granted the right to the labor of indigenous people in order to mine for precious metals. It was not technically

slavery—workers were not owned by the settlers—but in practice it was lit-

tle different. Overworked, attacked by diseases against which they had no

immunity, executed as punishment for revolt, and often committing sui-

cide to escape their brutal conditions, the indigenous population declined

precipitously within the first few decades of Spanish colonization. By 1514,

of a population estimated to have been between 500,000 and 750,000 in

1492, only 29,000 were left. By the mid-sixteenth century the indigenous

population of the island had all but vanished.13

The “devastation of the Indies” was chronicled by Bartolomé de Las

Casas, who arrived in Hispaniola as a young settler in 1502, and was trans-

formed by what he saw. Within a decade he became the first priest or-

dained in the Americas, and a harsh critic of the brutal treatment of the

Taino by the Spaniards. He decried those who justified Spanish brutality as

a necessary response to the barbarism and violence of the natives: “our

work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder,

then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then.” He documented horrify-

ing acts of violence meant to terrorize the population. “It was a general

rule among the Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily

cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from dar-

ing to think of themselves as human beings or having a minute to think

at all.”14

In Moreau’s Saint-Domingue there were many reminders of this history.

Workers building a canal on a plantation in Limonade discovered, along

with several Spanish coins, the bodies of twenty-five Spaniards who had

been buried in a traditional Taino manner. They were, Moreau believed,

the corpses of those left behind by Columbus in 1492. And the anchor

found buried in the dirt on a plantation near the ocean was, he wrote, that