The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (14 page)

The Boston
Columbian Sentinel,
like the London
Times,
traced the cause of the “calamity” to the
French Assembly’s decision to grant the rights of citizenship to the free coloreds.
⁵⁵
While this explanation oversimplified an extraordinarily complex revolution, the conflict over freedmen’s civil rights clearly aggravated the struggles involving royalists, Jacobins, secessionists, and French officials. Alarmed by the danger of continuing
slave revolts, white colonial leaders finally negotiated a series of concordats with the
gens de couleur,
or
affranchis,
confirming or extending the rights guaranteed by the May 15 decree. But then the
Constituent Assembly tried to backtrack again and renounced jurisdiction over the “status of persons” in the colonies. This regression encouraged local racism, infuriated the coloreds, and provoked savage racial warfare that persisted into the early summer of 1792, when Saint-Domingue learned that on April 4 the new
French Legislative Assembly had decreed equal rights and citizenship for all free persons, regardless of color, and had resolved to send civil commissioners and six thousand troops to enforce the law and restore peace.

In 1792 the French free blacks and coloreds finally won the civil rights for which other New World freedmen would long struggle. The law of April 4 appeared for a while to strengthen the slave regime. For the most part, whites and
affranchis
joined in a common effort
to suppress slave
rebellions and restore plantation discipline. But the vacillating policies of the National Assembly had alienated the
white leaders of Saint-Domingue, who increasingly called for
Spanish or English intervention as the only means of preserving colonial slavery. The whites feared that the
French commissioners, backed by a Jacobin army, would emancipate the slaves. This nightmare became, in effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When, after much delay, the commissioners finally arrived in Saint-Domingue, they faced hostile white leaders, some of them royalists, who were actively promoting secession. While trying to purge what they saw as counterrevolutionary treason, the commissioners turned to the “citizens of April 4” for support. By no means did all free coloreds rally to the Republican side, but those who did were often rewarded with unprecedented positions of authority. Military needs continued to erode racial barriers. After France declared war on England and Spain, early in 1793, all the Caribbean combatants recruited slaves as military manpower.
Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, the leading French commissioner, promised freedom to any rebel slaves in the North who would join the Republican cause. On August 29, 1793, two months after the black insurgents had stormed the port city
Le Cap, forcing thousands of terrified whites to evacuate by sea, Sonthonax finally issued a general emancipation decree as a last desperate measure to win black support. Sonthonax had neither the legal authority nor the effective power to enforce such a measure, but the alliance of
blacks with Spanish invaders made his situation so perilous that any means seemed justified to keep Saint-Domingue French. As the planters had originally feared, France’s attempt to enforce the racial equality of all free persons had led to an emancipation proclamation—although the planters themselves bore a heavy responsibility for this outcome. The
affranchis,
enhanced in power by the exodus of thousands of whites, would now play a critical role in the preservation or destruction of black bondage.
⁵⁶

But the
affranchis
were no less divided than the whites. A few of them, along with an even fewer number of
petits blancs,
joined groups of rebellious slaves. Some of the wealthier free coloreds sided with the white planters, some fought against slaves who had been armed by white planters, and others incited slaves to revolt. Alliances kept shifting and differed dramatically from one locality to another. Colored soldiers, some of them veterans of the
American War of Independence,
led the forces of the
French Republic. Others welcomed the invading armies of Spain and Britain. (It is well to remember that Toussaint Louverture, the black general and former slave, fought originally on the
side of the
Spanish.) Whatever their immediate objectives, the
gens de couleur
were eager to preserve their civil rights and superiority over the mass of black slaves. These goals might have been achieved by an alliance with the
British, who landed in Saint-Domingue in September 1793 and who soon occupied one-third of the colony. Sir
Adam Williamson, the British governor, was convinced that with the coloreds’ support he could easily conquer the West and South provinces and pacify the slaves. But such support, he informed London, would depend on his authority to abolish legal distinctions of color.
⁵⁷

In Britain, however,
racial dogma took precedence over military strategy. Refugee French royalists and proprietors, reinforced by British West Indian planters, convinced the government that the color line was an indispensable foundation of the slave system. If equality of color were granted in Saint-Domingue, how could it be withheld in neighboring
Jamaica? Curiously, this was an issue to which British abolitionists paid little if any attention. The official propositions worked out to govern British occupation of foreign West Indian territories specified that the free coloreds would have the same status as the free coloreds in the British colonies. In Saint-Domingue the
affranchis
refused to accept this provision in the capitulation agreements, and British commanders promised for a time to maintain equal rights. But by the summer of 1794 British policy had encouraged white racism and growing discrimination in the occupied zones. Some whites talked openly of exterminating the free coloreds or of deporting them to
Botany Bay. Dismayed by this turn of events, the
affranchis
plotted rebellions and wavered uneasily between the British and French sides. Toussaint, who had also wavered and who had finally committed himself to the Republicans when the French Convention decreed the emancipation of slaves, deeply mistrusted the
gens de couleur.
But he succeeded in skillfully undermining their alliance with the British.
⁵⁸

Free coloreds throughout the West Indies had tried to keep their aspirations distinct from those of slaves. But events in Saint-Domingue suggested that agitation for racial equality could provide slaves and freedmen with a common enemy and destroy the most successful slave regime in the Americas. It made little difference for planters in other countries that the slaves had revolted well before the
affranchis
were granted equal rights, or that the British might well have subdued Saint-Domingue if they had reaffirmed this policy and had mobilized the free
colored forces. Most slaveholders believed that black slavery would be untenable if free blacks and coloreds were accorded equal status with whites. In the eyes of British leaders,
Jacobin and abolitionist principles threatened by 1795 to subvert the entire
West Indian world. In Saint-Domingue, Toussaint’s ex-slaves had won brilliant victories and were closing in on Britain’s disease-ridden troops; armies of ex-slaves and free coloreds had expelled the British from
Guadeloupe and
Saint Lucia; racial warfare raged in
Grenada and
Saint Vincent;
French free colored agents were blamed for inciting the
Maroon War in Jamaica. As we have seen, the British responded by recruiting their own slave troops with promises of eventual freedom. In Saint-Domingue thousands of blacks fought for the British and thus for the maintenance of the slave regime until 1798, when many joined the evacuation to Jamaica. It is significant that Sir
Adam Williamson defended the recruiting and freeing of male slaves on the ground that they would mostly die or reenlist and would not add to the long-term growth of the
affranchi
population.
David Geggus, in the most exhaustive study of the British occupation, concludes that British intervention weakened the
gens de couleur,
contributed to the growing power of the blacks, and helped to destroy the slave regime the British were trying to preserve.
⁵⁹

The defeat of the Spanish, British, and French armies of occupation is especially remarkable in view of the persistent division between blacks and
mulattoes, which continued to dominate the history of independent Haiti. The distinction of color partially overlapped the distinction between the
anciens libres,
those who owed their freedom to prerevolutionary acts of manumission, and the
nouveaux libres,
the recently emancipated slaves. Color and the timing of freedom both symbolized the degree by which a person was removed from the degradation and humiliation of bondage. The
anciens libres
included large landholders who had themselves owned slaves. Their interests and outlook were often at odds with those of the black military elite associated with Toussaint Louverture. Toussaint did not win mastery of Saint-Domingue until he had crushed mulatto resistance and defeated the mulatto general,
André Rigaud.

On the other hand, Toussaint himself was an
ancien libre
who had owned land and slaves and had become reasonably affluent.
⁶⁰
His ex-slave lieutenants,
Henri Christophe and
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, made fortunes from Toussaint’s reinstitution of the plantation system.
⁶¹
Black and mulatto leaders shared a common interest in encouraging exports that could pay for the arms and supplies, mostly imported from the United States, needed for the island’s defense. Their experiences with white oppression also gave them the sense of sharing a common African heritage. Although Toussaint was willing to acknowledge nominal French sovereignty and even tried to induce refugee white planters to return to Saint-Domingue, he and his black and mulatto followers were determined to prevent the restoration of either slavery or the color line. Toussaint’s
constitution of
1801 abolished slavery forever, prohibited distinctions according to color, and affirmed equal protection of the law—measures that were appended to the United States Constitution in compromised form only after the Civil War.
⁶²

General
Charles Leclerc, whom
Napoleon dispatched with some ten thousand troops to subjugate Saint-Domingue as soon as Europe was at peace, knew he would have to pledge support for these high principles. Yet Napoleon had secretly resolved to restore colonial slavery, the African slave trade, and white supremacy. Leclerc hoped to deceive and divide the blacks and mulattoes while wooing their leaders, pacifying the countryside, and reestablishing French sovereignty. Leclerc was wholly unprepared for the skillful and heroic resistance he encountered. But, after incredibly bloody warfare, the French succeeded in enlisting the services of Christophe and Dessalines, and in seizing Toussaint by a ruse after first negotiating a surrender. But Leclerc’s army, though reinforced by more than thirty thousand men, could not subdue the black guerrillas in the hills.
⁶³

In the summer of 1802, when Napoleon’s veterans were being decimated by
yellow fever and
malaria, news arrived that slavery had been restored in
Guadeloupe. Leclerc complained in frantic letters to Napoleon and the minister of marine that “the moral force I had obtained here is destroyed. I can do nothing by persuasion.” Just when a political settlement seemed in sight, Leclerc wrote, his work was undermined by the revelation of French intentions and by the return from exile of planters and merchants who talked only of slavery and the slave trade. As blacks took up arms to defend their
freedom, Leclerc reported to
Napoleon that “these men die with an incredible fanaticism; they laugh at death; it is the same with the women.…” Thousands of mulattoes joined the rebel forces when they learned that the French had reestablished the color line in Guadeloupe. The defectors included
Alexandre Pétion, a mulatto officer who had fought Toussaint and had then joined Leclerc’s expedition in France. In the fall of 1802, when Leclerc died of yellow fever while pleading to Napoleon for more troops,
Christophe and
Dessalines deserted the French. Leclerc’s successor, General Rochambeau, then resorted to a policy of virtual genocide. The French concluded that Saint-Domingue could be pacified only by exterminating most of the existing black and mulatto population, which could later be replaced by African slaves.
⁶⁴

The race war of 1802–3 carried profound implications for every black and mulatto in the New World. Napoleon’s reversal of French policy showed that a white nation could reinstitute slavery, strip the free descendants of slaves of their rights, and kill even children of the stigmatized race if they had been contaminated with ideas of liberty. The rebels’ response showed that blacks and mulattoes could unite and defeat a professional European army. White commentators insisted that the army had really been defeated by disease and by the naval blockade the
British imposed when war resumed in 1803. It was difficult to deny, however, that the blacks won battles and knew how to make the most of the yellow fever and British blockade. The blacks turned the entire white cosmos upside down when they forced the French to evacuate Saint-Domingue and when Dessalines and other former slaves then proclaimed the
independence of Haiti. Every New World society was familiar with slave rebellions; some
maroon communities, established by escaped slaves, had resisted conquest for many decades and had even negotiated treaties, as in Jamaica, with colonial authorities. But no slaves in history had ever expelled their former masters and established their own nation-state.

The very existence of Haiti
challenged every slaveholding regime in the New World (and for that matter in the
Cape Colony and
Indian Ocean colonies). As the London
Times
put it, “a Black State in the Western Archipelago is utterly incompatible with the system of all European colonisation.”
⁶⁵
Hoping to allay white fears and ease the way for diplomatic recognition, Dessalines and his successors disavowed
any interest in interfering with the domestic institutions of neighboring countries. Except for invading and annexing Spanish Santo Domingo, the eastern part of the island from which various enemies could threaten
Haitian independence, Haiti posed no military danger to slaveholders.
⁶⁶
Despite temporary panic over reports of Haitian agents inciting slaves in the Caribbean colonies and southern United States, slave revolts were never again so
frequent as in the 1790s. There is fragmentary evidence, however, that slaves in various localities were well aware of the Haitian Revolution and of the possibility of actually destroying the system to which they were violently subjected. Even in 1791, Jamaican slaves sang songs about the Saint-Domingue insurrection within a month after the uprising began.
⁶⁷