Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (47 page)

Read Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Online

Authors: Laurent Dubois

promises. Instead of seeking to resolve the conflicts over land, Louverture

pursued a policy that allowed him to sidestep the problem. He gave plant-

ers signed papers declaring that their properties were no longer under the

control of the state. But when they found themselves powerless to confront

and expel those who occupied and controlled their plantations, he did

nothing to enforce their claims. One planter, after officially regaining own-

ership of his plantation, sought to collect rent from the high-ranking officer Laplume, who had been managing the plantation for the previous years.

Laplume’s response was to claim that the administration had given him a

suspension of rent payments for eight to ten months and to refuse to pay,

and there was little the planter could do. Another planter complained in

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1800 that his property was “in the hands of my former driver,” who, along

with a free-colored man, were doing everything they could to keep hold of

his property and push him out of the colony.43

As he traveled in the Artibonite region, the traveler Descourtilz wrote,

he saw many devastated plantations whose once-resplendent houses were

now denuded and falling apart, seeming to “beg for the return of masters.”

The men and women who occupied them, however, seemed quite content

to be left alone. Descourtilz described a stubborn and brazen refusal on

the part of ex-slaves to give up the gains they had been freed. For many

planters, the tables were turned in a particularly distressing way, for they

found their plantations in the hands of one of their former slaves. As

they waited for the local bureaucracy to consider their requests to take

back their lands, they were at the mercy of those they had once owned.

Descourtilz discovered this firsthand when he traveled to a plantation that

had been owned by members of his family. The former slaves who were

renting the plantation clearly wanted nothing to do with him; they “pushed

their audacious impudence” so far as to refuse to let him and those he was

traveling with forage on the property for a few bits of food. “How many

times during this unfortunate epoch,” he lamented, laying bare his convic-

tion that those who now lived on the plantations were still nothing more

than property, “did we, the owners of five leagues of land and 750 blacks,

have to serve ourselves!” Some former slaves were even more assertive.

In May 1800 one administrator wrote that in certain areas “the cultiva-

tors have expelled the white property owners, claiming that the land be-

longed to them, since they had, as they said, worked it for others for long

enough.”44

Descourtilz was personally involved in one complex struggle for the

control of a plantation in the Artibonite. It pitted Descourtilz’ uncle,

M. Lachicotte, against his “bastard” half-brother, Philippe, both of whom

claimed the inheritance of the property of their deceased father. It was a

classic family drama—a conflict between a legitimate heir and an illegiti-

mate heir—but it took on a particular cast in postemancipation Saint-

Domingue. Philippe was of African descent, and his mother was probably

a slave, but he was able to take advantage of the revolutionary context to

gain the upper hand on Lachicotte. He became an officer in Louverture’s

army, outranking and indeed at one point commanding Lachicotte. Their

father’s property had been declared abandoned by the local administration.

Philippe used his connections and salary to rent the plantation, and was so

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pleased at the reversal of fortune that he announced to Lachicotte: “Your

reign is over.” In 1798, however, Lachicotte managed to get papers from

Louverture ending the state’s sequestration of the plantation and declaring

him its rightful owner. When he and Descourtilz attempted to take posses-

sion of the plantation, however, they found themselves powerless. Expect-

ing a respectful welcome by the plantation residents, they were instead en-

tirely ignored. They were “constrained,” Descourtilz wrote in disgust, to go

to market to buy their own food and to drive their own mules, which the

plantation residents “were not even willing to go get for us in the savanna!”

Clearly, whatever fear the former slaves once had for whites seeking to

master them had evaporated.45

On the plantation, Descourtilz observed, residents had taken over

significant stretches of land to cultivate gardens to which they devoted “all their time.” Philippe, meanwhile, sought to continue the production of

the cotton for which the plantation had once been famous. Descourtilz

described Philippe as a horrid tyrant who terrorized the plantation laborers

and angered them by flooding their gardens in order to irrigate the cotton

fields. They longed, he claimed, for the return of their white masters.

The details Descourtilz provided, however, tell a different story. Plantation workers enticed Lachicotte and Descourtilz to the plantation by telling

them that they wished to help them regain the plantation, but when they

arrived they found that they had been tricked: they were bundled off and

presented to local authorities, accused of stirring up trouble on the planta-

tion. Philippe was steadfast in holding on to the plantation, but also quite

hospitable to the two interlopers. Though he did not grant them any partic-

ular privileges, he did allow them to stay on the plantation and even lent

them his carriage for their errands. He seemed to be willing to have them

return as residents, just not as masters.46

Much had changed in Saint-Domingue since the days of slavery. Whites

and blacks, former masters and former slaves, had redefined their relation-

ships and their place in the social order. The landscape was a patchwork

shaped by intersecting histories of insurrection, war, and negotiation. A

former plantation owner traveling through the colony in 1799 came across

some functioning sugar plantations and a few thriving coffee plantations.

But he focused on the many ruined properties, where “bushes and trees”

had entirely “replaced the houses” and old cane fields were covered with

grass and ivy. His biggest shock came when, from the peak of a mountain

where once “we stopped in ecstasy to see the plain of Le Cap in all its

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229

splendor,” he could see only “ruins and bushes” where sugarcane had once

covered the land.47

On the plains of Le Cap and throughout the colony, a new kind of life

was taking root, one based on independence and subsistence, one that for

many ex-slaves embodied true freedom. In and around the ruins of old

plantations, men and women cultivated small plots of land, growing crops

for their families and to sell at the markets. They raised chickens, pigs, and cows, often grazing them in abandoned cane fields. Although they were

drawing on traditions developed within slavery, when masters had de-

pended on what slaves produced in garden plots, in the new order they had

greater access to land and greater freedom to grow their crops, raise their

livestock, and market what they produced. The contrast with slavery was

quite clear, and as a result of the better conditions, the number of children seems to have increased among the workers on many plantations. A new

culture was being born, one that would shape rural Haiti in the wake of in-

dependence. But what for ex-slaves was a new beginning was for many

whites, haunted by the specters of the vanished plantations, nothing but

loss and darkness. A Polish soldier sent to Saint-Domingue in 1803 cap-

tured this sense eloquently. “The air here is most unhealthy,” he wrote, “es-

pecially since the time of the black revolt twelve years ago.” It was as if the uprising that had shaken the colony in 1791 had literally transformed the

environment, the very air, making it deadly to Europeans.48

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c h a p t e r e l e v e n

Territory

Injuly1798acarriagebumpeditswayfromPort-au-PrincetoLe

Cap, carrying the two de facto rulers of Saint-Domingue, Toussaint

Louverture and André Rigaud. They were on their way to meet with

Hédouville to discuss plans for British withdrawal from the colony. What

did the two allies—soon to be bitter enemies—discuss on the journey?

Neither left a written account, but oral traditions circulating in the nine-

teenth century asserted that the two men made a pact during the journey:

they would be careful in their dealings with Hédouville and would share

with each other any information they gained from him. If they indeed

made such an agreement, it soon came undone. Hédouville intentionally

treated Rigaud more warmly than he did Louverture, seeking to create

jealousy between the two men. Before he was expelled from the colony a

few months later, Hédouville planted another “seed of contention” be-

tween them. In a letter to Rigaud, Hédouville criticized the “perfidy of

General Toussaint Louverture, who is sold to the English, the émigrés, and

the Americans.” “I absolve you entirely of the authority he was given as

general-in-chief,” he wrote, and invited Rigaud “to take command of the

Department of the South.”1

Louverture and Rigaud had been allies since 1794, and together they

had assured the triumph of the Republic in Saint-Domingue. By 1798, be-

tween the two of them, they controlled all the troops and territory of the

colony. Louverture was technically Rigaud’s superior, but in fact the latter

continued to rule over the Southern Province and to command his army

independently, as he had since 1793. With the end of the war with the Brit-

ish and the expulsion of Hédouville, however, the relationship between

Louverture and Rigaud rapidly soured. Soon the two were waging a brutal

civil war against each other.

The “War of the South,” as the conflict is usually called, is often pre-

sented as a racial conflict pitting Louverture’s black army against Rigaud’s

free-coloreds. Before the revolution the south was a bastion for wealthy

free-coloreds such as the Raimond family, and Rigaud was a member of

this social group. Under his regime free-coloreds had filled posts as officers and had gained access to many of the abandoned properties in the south.

There were, therefore, consistent tensions between the free-coloreds and

the former slaves whose lives they governed and whose labor they often

controlled. Although these tensions were driven primarily by the economic

differences between the groups, given that so many of the wealthy and

powerful in the region were of mixed European and African descent, while

those they controlled were not, it was easy for former slaves to see racism

at work. In the north, meanwhile, most of Louverture’s highest-ranking of-

ficers were entirely of African descent, and many had been slaves when

they revolted in 1791. The contrast between the two leadership groups

makes it tempting to see their conflict as primarily a race war.

In fact, however, there was quite a bit of diversity on both sides. There

were many free-coloreds and whites who fought with Louverture’s forces