Setting fire to the sugar fields, the rebel slaves burned and tortured their former oppressors. In the first eight days of their insurrection, they destroyed nearly 200 sugar plantations. By the end of September, the slave army numbered between 20,000 and 80,000. “There is a motor that powers them and keeps powering them and that we cannot come to know,” wrote one planter who had only narrowly escaped death.
They did not know it yet, but these slaves had initiated one of the most radical revolutions in the history of the Atlantic world. Over the next twelve years, these rebels fought and defeated the local white planters, the soldiers of the French empire, a Spanish invasion, and a British expedition of 60,000 men. But their greatest challenge would be the mighty armies of the French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.
In control of France by 1800, the great conqueror of Europe was plotting the creation of a “Republic in the New World,” with Saint Domingue at the center and the North American colony of Louisiana as the breadbasket for the sugar island. In 1800, he ordered Charles Victor Emmanuel LeClerc, his right-hand man and brother-in-law, to subdue Saint Domingue, backed by a force of 42,000 battle-hardened men. These were troops that had defeated the most powerful armies of Europe: Austria, Prussia, Spain, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands.
LeClerc landed in Saint Domingue expecting easy victory. And in the first few months, he obtained it. Within ten days, the French controlled most of the island’s ports and cities. Within three months, the French controlled nearly the entire island and had forced the main Haitian generals—including former slave turned commander of Haiti Toussaint L’Ouverture—to lay down arms.
But the rebels did not give up. French soldiers marched out into the countryside and the slaves melted into the hills, holding out in hopes of outlasting the invading force. Fate came to their aid. Yellow fever was ravaging the French army. And though the French now controlled the island, almost half of their military force died of disease. By the end of 1802, LeClerc himself fell prey to the dread disease. His second-in-command, Rochambeau, took over in his place.
Before he died, LeClerc declared that Saint Domingue could only be secured through a “war of extermination.” He believed he would simply have to kill any black person who had ever been involved with the rebellion.
Thus began perhaps France’s darkest hour. In desperation, in 1802 Rochambeau brought in packs of bloodhounds trained in Cuba to eat human flesh and unleashed them on the battlefield. But the dogs were “ignorant of color prejudice” and ate French soldiers as well. Rochambeau ordered slaves burned alive, drowned in sacks, or shot after digging their own graves. He became legendary for his brutality. But the slaves did not surrender, and by November of 1803 the rebel forces had driven what remained of Napoleon’s soldiers out of the country. Over 80 percent of the French army sent there died on the island.
Amid the blood and destruction, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the leader of the revolt and Toussaint L’Ouverture’s successor, proclaimed the eternal freedom of the Haitian republic. “Let us imitate those people who, extending their concern into the future and dreading to leave an example of cowardice for posterity, preferred to be exterminated rather than lose their place as one of the world’s free peoples,” he declared. Victorious, black Haitians abolished slavery, declared racism illegal, and fought the first successful anti-imperial revolution in the history of the Atlantic. They also forever banned Frenchmen from the colony. “May the French tremble when they approach our coasts, if not by the memory of the cruelty that they have inflicted, at least by the terrible resolution that we are about to take to devote to death, anyone born French, who would dirty with his sacrilegious foot the territory of liberty,” Dessalines said.
The slave-rebels had beaten back the most powerful armies in Europe, overturned the prime economic engine of Enlightenment Europe, and struck the first victory in the war against slavery. And the vast Atlantic world of ships and slaves, of commerce and capital, could not help but take notice. In 1789, Saint Domingue exported 70,000 tons of sugar: by 1801, it exported only 9,000.
* * *
News traveled fast. Upon hearing of his brother-in-law’s defeat in Haiti, Napoleon pounded the table and cursed, “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies.” A strategic mastermind, the emperor knew when to cut his losses—as well as where to focus his energies. While a republic in the New World would have been nice, Napoleon had to focus on Europe and simply could not afford the massive costs in men and pride of subduing Haiti or running sugar colonies in the New World. With Haiti in flames, he saw little use for his other New World colony, Louisiana.
A headache to Napoleon, Louisiana was the apple of young America’s eyes. Louisiana had a strategic place in the North American continent: its capital, New Orleans, controlled the Mississippi River. With a valley double the size of the Egyptian Nile and a drainage basin only slightly smaller than the Amazon, the mighty river loomed as the central artery of the American heartland, embracing 41 percent of the North American continent in its watershed.
As American settlers crossed the Appalachians and began to domesticate the West in the wake of their own successful revolution against the British from 1776 to 1783, they needed an outlet for their goods. The Mississippi River provided the only real channel for moving crops from the center of the continent out into the ocean and around back to the East Coast or to Europe; crossing the mountains by land was too great an obstacle. And just as the Mississippi River was the key to trans-Appalachian commerce, Louisiana—and New Orleans in specific—was the key to the Mississippi River. Guarding the outlet into the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans was the single most important strategic site in North America west of the Appalachians. And Thomas Jefferson and his fellow republicans knew it.
But the demise of Saint Domingue and the rise of a free Haiti had wrought radical change on Louisiana society. Within a few short years, slave-rebels had sent the most profitable produce of the French empire up in smoke. Planters in Louisiana, at the time a military outpost surrounded by cotton, indigo, and sugar plantations, saw an opportunity for profit and rapidly began converting their fields for sugar production. An influx of Haitian refugees only added to the momentum. By 1802, a mere seven years after the first planter converted his entire plantation to sugar, Louisiana boasted seventy sugar plantations producing over 3,000 tons of sugar per year.
While Louisiana’s yield still paled in comparison to what Haiti had produced in its prime, these numbers were enough to attract merchants from all over the eastern seaboard. By the turn of the century, sugar was becoming an increasingly common part of everyday life and demand was soaring. As Americans and Europeans drank more tea, smeared more syrup on their bread, baked more sweet cakes, and mixed more puddings and porridges, they needed more sources of raw sugar. Ships began to flock to New Orleans, where they filled their holds with what was fast becoming a staple of working-class diets. In a few short years after the slaves of Saint Domingue took up arms and formed themselves into a vast army, Louisiana was transformed from a small military outpost with a diverse agricultural mix into the center of the North American plantation world, one that revolved around sugar.
Haiti had affected not merely the world of European diplomacy, but the vast underworld of sailors, slaves, and debtors that made up the Atlantic underclass. Stories of the revolution, violent political ideals, and a commitment to freedom at all costs were spreading like a contagion from person to person—creating an epidemic that the planters of Louisiana could barely begin to understand. To the planters, the Haitian rebels were like rabid dogs. They saw insanity and bloodlust, rather than any political vision or humanistic ideal.
As aristocratic French planters like Jean Noël Destrehan worked to build a new Saint Domingue on the shores of the Mississippi, they did not realize the extent to which they were also creating the conditions that allowed the Haitian revolution to occur. More than any other place in North America, Louisiana was becoming known for its brutal conditions. When slaves across the
United States spoke with dread of being “sold south” or “sold down the river,” they were speaking of the slave plantations around New Orleans. Nowhere in America was slavery as exploitative, or were profits as high, as in the cane fields of Louisiana. Slaves worked longer hours, faced more brutal punishments, and lived shorter lives than any other slave society in North America.
But as planters and government officials raked in the profits from this exploitative situation, they could not quiet the revolution the black Haitians had unleashed. Neither the American immigrants who rushed into Louisiana nor the long-settled French planters they met there fully realized the dangers that threatened the new order they hoped to establish. Unbeknownst to them, the slaves who labored on the region’s sugar plantations were preparing to stage the greatest challenge to slave power in the history of North America.
Chapter Four
Empire’s Emissary
In 1803, keenly observant of Napoleon’s preoccupied state, Jefferson sent a representative, Robert Livingston, to negotiate for the acquisition of New Orleans and its environs. Despite his discomfort with purchasing a colony, Jefferson authorized Livingston to pay up to $10 million for the city—believing the acquisition of the port essential to national security. Upon hearing of Livingston’s offer, Napoleon saw a chance to finally get rid of his troublesome American colonies and to make some money to fund his European wars at the same time. He offered to sell the United States all of Louisiana for only $15 million in cash. Without waiting for Jefferson’s approval, after just nineteen days of negotiation, Livingston accepted the offer on behalf of his nation.
It was a massive purchase at a bargain price. The new territory doubled the young republic’s size. Jefferson’s $15 million bought what comprises about a quarter of the current geography of the United States—all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, parts of Minnesota, most of North Dakota, nearly all of South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, and portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. It was a diplomatic coup of gigantic proportions, a significance not lost on Jefferson and his contemporaries. “We have lived long, but this is the noblest work of our whole lives,” said Livingston. “From this day the United States take their place among the powers of the first rank.”
But what the Americans did not realize was just how foreign Louisiana was—and the host of difficulties they would face in taking control over this strange new land. Colonized by the French and controlled at times by the Spanish, Louisiana was more Caribbean than American—a place more similar to Haiti than to Virginia.
The boom in sugar plantations and the need to administer what had become a real slave colony made Louisiana even more problematic for an American government inexperienced with the problems of empire. Jefferson and his government quickly demonstrated the degree to which they underestimated the difficulties of governing Louisiana. To administer this vast area, Jefferson turned to William C. C. Claiborne, a fellow Virginian and political disciple distinctly lacking in qualifications.
Not even Jefferson thought first of Claiborne as governor. When he acquired Louisiana from Napoleon in 1803, he had first sought out the Marquis de Lafayette and then James Monroe. After both declined, he turned to William Claiborne—a “secondary character” whom Jefferson appointed at first on an interim basis. Claiborne arrived in New Orleans with a force of 350 volunteers and eighteen boats—a “puny force” that his top general described as “a subject for ridicule.”
Claiborne had his work cut out for him. Only about 10 percent of the residents of New Orleans were Anglo-American; the rest were French, Spanish, African, Native American, or Creole (a person of foreign ancestry born in the New World). These residents did not look fondly upon Anglo-American outsiders like Claiborne. “The prejudices of these newly acquired citizens [are] against every thing American,” wrote a correspondent to the Orleans Gazette for the Country. Yet American it was, a new national territory devoted to a single, slave-made staple crop.
When the United States took power in 1804, Claiborne spoke and advised the residents of New Orleans to “guide the rising generation in the paths of republican economy and virtue.” He imagined he could transform this land into a new Virginia. He believed the power of the principles of self-government would naturally create a governable republic. But the simplicity of his scheme did not match the complexities of this wild city, with its proud and autonomous French planters, its anarchistic borderlands, and its dark and mysterious underworld of African slaves.
Looking back, such dreams might have seemed ignorant at best and arrogant at worst, but Claiborne’s beliefs fell into neither category. Claiborne was a romantic in love with the ideology of the American Revolution. His father was a veteran of the American Revolution, and Claiborne had early internalized his father’s love of country.
Growing up in Virginia, young Billy Claiborne (as he was known to his family and friends) used to listen raptly as his father spoke in “glowing colours” against the horrors and brutality of the British. Colonel Claiborne would rail about the “do nothings,” the “armful of sulking slackers who cowered on the side-lines and cheered whichever team seemed to be winning.” For the colonel, the foundation of liberty and the creation of the American Republic were the greatest and proudest moments of his life. And he cast constant denunciations on anyone who might dare to “raise a parricidal hand to destroy the fair fabric of American liberty.” Evidence suggests Billy internalized these early lessons. When only eight years old, he turned in a Latin composition that read, “Dear my country, dearer liberty—where liberty is, there is my country.” Young Claiborne did not consider that the massive slave population might feel the same way; his conception of liberty extended only to white males.
Moreover, perhaps ironically, Claiborne believed liberty could be imposed from above. Like Thomas Jefferson, he saw Louisiana as an imperial colony of alien people who needed to be Americanized with a firm hand. Claiborne wanted the new territory of Louisiana to become American, not merely be an American colony with a French culture. Claiborne had little regard for Europe in general, or France in specific. He dismissed the “corrupt governments of Europe” and expressed no interest in learning European languages. He was a son of Virginia and that was where his heart lay. “The very trees that had shaded him from a summer’s heat, were with him objects of veneration,” wrote Claiborne’s brother. He worshipped the “everlasting marble records the names of the first proprietors.” He was, to say the least, an unlikely ambassador to the proud Frenchmen of New Orleans.
In the first decade of American occupation, Claiborne had to form a government, bring order to a wild frontier zone, and confront the dangers of a sugar colony that relied on the forced labor of a slave population. New Orleans was the most diverse, cosmopolitan, and European city of North America, but Claiborne intended to rapidly make it American. Jefferson’s initial plan was to pay for 30,000 Americans to immigrate into the new territory and “amalgamate” with the French residents. “This would not sweeten the pill to the French,” Jefferson wrote, “but in making that acquisition we had some view to our own good as well as theirs.” Governor William Claiborne, who spoke neither French nor Spanish, would be in charge of this grand task, assisted by a top general, the questionably loyal James Wilkinson.
New Orleans society did not look favorably on the newcomer’s attempts to instill American values in a much older and longer-established French society. “All Louisianians are Frenchmen at heart!” wrote one French official. The French Creoles formed an aristocracy of the blood, impenetrable to outsiders and marked by snobbery. Tracing their ancestries back to French nobility, the planters condemned lesser families as chacas, catchoupines, catchumas, and kaintucks—referring in order of social status to tradesmen, peasants, people with African blood, and Americans.
The planters were more interested in parties than in the blessings of republican self-government. When Claiborne arrived in January 1804, the French planters informed him th
at a celebration was absolutely necessary to win their support and ensure American control. Some 196 gallons of Madeira, 144 bottles of Champagne, 100 bottles of “hermitage” wine, 67 bottles of brandy, 81 bottles of porter, 258 bottles of ale, and 11,360 “Spanish Segars” later, an exasperated Claiborne offended the entire French population by publicly declaring that the French planters would never understand what it meant to be American. In a letter to President James Madison, Claiborne wrote that the greatest of the planters’ “mischiefs” was moral depravity. Their love of money, luxury, and debauchery “had nearly acquired the ascendancy over every other passion.”
Destrehan and his social circle soon taught Claiborne the consequences of interfering with their long-established culture. At a dance that same year, a self-righteous Claiborne ordered the assembly to dance an English dance before the French dances began. The French planters began to raise a hullabaloo, shouting and carrying on. General Wilkinson attempted to address the planters in broken French, but that only made matters worse. To drown out the uproar, Claiborne and the American officers with him started singing “Hail Columbia,” but the Creoles responded with “La Réveil du peuple” and shouts of “Vive la République.” Tension soon bubbled into open brawls. Fearful of what might happen next, Claiborne and some of his officers beat a hasty retreat out the back door. Claiborne wrote that from the balls “have proceeded the greatest embarrassments which have hitherto attended my administration.”
After this catastrophic event, recriminations flew in the local newspapers. “Does [Claiborne] think he is among Indians or Yahoos?” wrote one newspaper columnist, accusing Claiborne of being an “uncouth and ignorant intruder” into New Orleans society. Another columnist attacked the American governor for his inability to speak French, his unfamiliarity with French dances, for being embarrassed by “the insignificant part he acted in the circle,” and for sneaking home at sunrise after losing at the gambling tables. Claiborne, in turn, believed the French planters were unfit for self-government.
American Uprising Page 4