A Wilderness So Immense

by Jon Kukla

  On February 1 and March 7, 1793, France declared war against Great Britain and Spain respectively. Spain responded with a counter-declaration of war against France on March 23. Within two weeks “their Britannic and Most Catholic Majesties,” traditional enemies since 1585, were negotiating a military alliance against France, signed on May 25. At first the war went well for Godoy. Spanish armies drove far into France, while Austria advanced from the north. Then the tide turned. By the spring of 1795 French armies had punished the Spanish in a series of resounding victories, captured Bilbao and Vitoria in the Basque country, and were marching into Castille. Godoy sued for peace.26

  “We need peace,” Godoy whispered to his chief negotiator, “whatever the price.” Ignoring Spain’s treaty obligations to Great Britain, Godoy signed the Treaty of Basle in the nick of time on July 22, 1795. “The French armies,” said one Spanish observer, “would soon have paid a visit to Carlos at Madrid if his favorite minister, with more address than he ever discovered in his subsequent management of political affairs, had not concluded and ratified the peace of Basle.” Spain, for the moment, was safe. Graced by his thankful patrons with the title of Prince of the Peace, Godoy boasted that his “glorious treaty did not cost Spain a single tree of her soil.” Godoy gave some thought to bartering away Louisiana in exchange for peace, but he held back, and in the end Spain lost only its brief alliance with Great Britain and the Caribbean colony of Santo Domingo (the eastern part of Hispaniola, now the Dominican Republic) in exchange for the return of territory captured by France south of the Pyrenees.27

  As a result of the Treaty of Basle, France in 1795 gained nominal possession of the entire island of Hispaniola. An island the size of Ireland, about fifty miles east of Cuba, Hispaniola was divided by a nearly impassable range of mountains into the tropical plantation colony of St. Domingue (now Haiti) and the arid colony of Santo Domingo, where cattle ranchers and subsistence farmers predominated. Visited by Columbus in 1492, the native Arawak tribe of Hispaniola had been quickly exterminated by European diseases and exploitation, and equally quickly replaced with African slaves. “I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe,” a Frenchman wrote in 1773,

  but I know well that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world: America has been depopulated so as to have land on which to plant them; Africa has been depopulated so as to have the people to cultivate them.28

  French sugar planters regarded St. Domingue as the finest colony in the world. When the Bastille fell in Paris, trade with St. Domingue engaged seven hundred fifty French ships, employed twenty-four thousand sailors, and was valued at £11 million a year. France consumed one third of the island’s exports, and the rest were processed in France and shipped abroad by a workforce estimated at several million Frenchmen.29

  As an economic entity, St. Domingue thrived by importing slaves from Africa and working them to death in order to supply Europe’s insatiable demand for sugar, coffee, and cocoa. St. Domingue imported thirty thousand African slaves a year, expendable replacement parts for the grim machinery of its sugar plantations. Each year, French merchants invested about 8.5 million livres to organize an average of three hundred African slaving expeditions. Nearly half of the French slaving fleet sailed from Nantes, “the City of Slavers.” Most of the rest sailed from Bordeaux, La Rochelle, or Le Havre—but British and American traders smuggled slaves into St. Domingue as well.30

  So lucrative were the island’s exports that, in addition to clothing and manufactured goods, St. Domingue’s large plantation owners found it cost-effective to import such basic necessities as food, firewood, and barrel staves rather than divert land or labor from the production of sugar, coffee, and cocoa. As a society, St. Domingue presented a grim caricature of eighteenth-century America: half a million slaves (two thirds of them African-born), thirty thousand mulattoes (including some of the island’s wealthiest plantation owners and slaveholders), and thirty thousand whites, either very rich (the grands blancs) or very poor (the petit blancs)—all inclined to hate and fear one another.31

  Liberty, equality, and fraternity were inherently hostile to the institution of slavery, and in 1791 the revolutionary banner of blood brought the world’s most perfect plantation economy a great slave revolt that lasted a dozen years. “In its spectacle of disintegration,” the Haitian Revolution pitted “grand blanc against petit blanc, white against mulatto, mulatto against black.” The Haitian Revolution was more vicious and bloody—and more frightening to its American neighbors, especially to slaveholders in Louisiana and the American south—than the Reign of Terror in France. Refugees scrambled with their slaves to Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, Cuba, or Jamaica at the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, bearing tales of incredible horror: men and women hacked to death with cane knives, pregnant mulatto women cut open and their unborn children thrown into fires, and severed heads mounted on pikes at every burned plantation.32

  The extraordinary violence of the Haitian Revolution was rooted in the gruesome history of what once had been the perfect French colony. “I have reached the stage of believing firmly,” a French colonial governor had informed the minister of marine and colonies, “that one must treat the Negroes as one treats beasts.” The governor’s standard would have seemed progressive on St. Domingue, where domestic animals were never subjected to the punishments routinely inflicted on human beings. Long before the revolution, barbarity and sadism were commonplace on the island (as was often the case where vastly outnumbered slaveholders lived in constant fear, sleeping with loaded pistols under their pillows while gangs of hopeless slaves were crushed by the relentless demands of tropical agriculture).33

  As regulated by the French Code Noir, a disciplinary whipping was not to exceed thirty-nine lashes (or later, fifty) with a whip of woven cord. But planters of St. Domingue who preferred the cowhide rigoise or the lianes (made of stiff island reeds supple as whalebone) seldom kept count. Slaves were whipped to death, and the everyday vocabulary of plantation discipline on St. Domingue described a brutal range of punishments: “The four post,” in which the slave’s hands and feet were tied to posts on the ground; “the hammock,” in which the slave was suspended by four limbs; and “the torture of the ladder.” Mutilations were common, and other outrageous punishments seemed torn from the pages of medieval martyrologies. Slaves were burned alive, roasted to death on grills over slow coals, scalded with wax or boiling cane sugar, or stuffed with gunpowder and ignited—a practice common enough to have its own vicious phrase: “to burn a little powder in the arse of a nigger.”34

  Notices for runaway slaves from the Gazette Genérale de Saint-Domingue and the Moniteur Colonial bear candid testimony to the horrors of the slave regime:

  Louis, 35 years old, who has scars all over his face and whose body is covered with welts from whippings.

  Mathieu, 14 or 16 years of age, whose left hand is missing and whose right hand is crippled as a result of burns.

  Joseph, a Negro from the Congo, who has been branded with the Jesuit cross on his chest.

  Desire, the slave from Fort Dauphine, who can be recognized easily from the chain that ties his left arm to his left leg.

  John Baptiste, whose body is covered with recent wounds and whose nails are all missing.35

  The grisly realities behind these advertisements for runaways were not forgotten when the revolution came to St. Domingue. The slaves who fought for their freedom sang “Ça Ira” and “La Marseillaise,” but they still remembered the words of an ancient voodoo song invoking the Congolese rainbow serpent, Mbumba, for protection against European slave traders and the coastal African tribe, Ba Fioti, who did business with them and were dreaded for their witchcraft:

  Eh! Eh! Bomba! Hen! Hen!

  Canga bafio té!

  Canga moun de lé!

  Canga do ki la!

  Canga li!

  Eh! Eh! Rainbow spirit serpent / Tie up the Ba Fioti / Tie up
the whites / Tie up the witches / Tie them.36

  When Governor Carondelet landed at New Orleans in December 1791, he found local Jacobin clubs distributing revolutionary pamphlets throughout the capital and he heard French residents singing “Ça Ira” and later “La Marseillaise.” In the theaters, taverns, and coffeehouses of New Orleans, rowdy punsters dubbed the new governor “cochon du lait” (suckling pig) in their adapted version of the “Carmagnole”:

  When we will be republicans,

  When we will be republicans,

  We will hang all the rascals,

  We will hang all the rascals.

  Quachondelait will be the first,

  Will be the first to be guillotined.

  Clearly, the situation terrified Carondelet. He quietly packed up his baroness, María de la Concepción Castaños y Aragorri, and their two small children, Luis Angel and María Felipa Cayetana, and shipped them off to the safety of Havana. Then he turned his attention to the presumed Jacobins of New Orleans, many of whom seem to have been newly arrived “businessmen,” including two that he described as “talented men, very astute, and the wealthiest men in the capital.”37

  Never one to underestimate the dangers at hand, the new governor was suspicious but also gullible, and he was temperamentally inclined toward dramatic, expensive, and contradictory measures. When it came to handling a crisis, the contrast between Carondelet and Miró could not have been more stark.

  In June 1791, for example, the summer before Carondelet arrived, five fires were started deliberately in various parts of New Orleans (two of them “on the fence of the very same house”) and a sixth at the suburban home of Lorenzo Sigur. Having witnessed the great conflagration of 1788, Miró was all too familiar with the threat of fire, but his response was measured and effective. Without indulging in alarmist rhetoric about the possibility of Jacobin saboteurs, Miró increased the number of nightly patrols as a precautionary measure, and then (like a Neighborhood Watch program) he appealed for assistance to the city’s merchants and traders, asking them to “keep watch with their friends … either walking or on horseback.” Each evening, Miró gathered a group of municipal and colonial officials to ride with him “in the night on horseback with [the] dragoons,” visibly reassuring the populace while also raising the morale of his patrols. The culprits were believed to be three prison escapees, “among whom is a real bad one … seen in the woods nearby,” so Miró sent search parties into the woods, initiated random patrols outside the city after dark, and offered “two prisoners of good faith who had never committed a serious crime”—trusties, in modern parlance—“their freedom if they should catch the main one.”38

  While Miró calmly monitored the danger, he described the situation to Luis de Las Casas, the captain-general at Havana, “so that Your Excellency may not have any extra worries … because things are always exaggerated as they travel from one to another.” By the end of August Miró could report “the apprehension of the suspected negro, whose trial is now being prepared,” and assure his superior that “fears that the city might be set on fire are gradually ceasing.”39

  A year later, Governor Carondelet reacted very differently to reports of “seditious people” in the colony. He deported Jean Dupuy a French trader, “for having made remarks suggestive of a revolution in this province,” as he did a man named Bujeac, “one of the most fanatical of all the partisans of the revolution.” Carondelet complained that Bujeac, despite his warnings and threats of banishment, was “always on the lookout for dangerous news which he was spreading with the greatest effrontery in the most public places against the monarchical government.” On another occasion Carondelet banished a free black tailor, newly arrived from St. Domingue, because he was “a native of that part of Santo Domingo that belongs to the French and is mixed up in all the intrigues and harassments of the French colony, besides being ungovernable and audacious. Having such a character around under the present circumstances,” Carondelet explained, “might produce bad results.”40

  Oblivious to the fact that deportations were as likely to arouse as to curb seditious talk, Carondelet eventually banished sixty-eight men to Cuba. Some of them were heads of families, and all of them were people whom the governor regarded as having “no respect for anyone, nor any law nor duty.” The captain-general of Havana, Luis de Las Casas (who was Carondelet’s brother-in-law), was not so sure. “Real traitors,” Las Casas cautioned Carondelet in June 1795, were more likely to be “adventurers” than merchants, “since men of property are not going to risk their investments with this nonsense. After all, by reuniting with France”—where slavery had been abolished in 1794—“they automatically forfeit their slaves.” The greater danger, Las Casas warned his impulsive brother-in-law (with an eye toward the situation in St. Domingue), was “that the free men of colour and the slaves will allow themselves to be tempted by the corruption of French government… with the desire which they so much value—to possess liberty”41

  The revolutionary ideals that especially appealed to free people of color in Louisiana, as in St. Domingue, were equality and fraternity. Many of them accepted the existence of slavery, and Louisiana’s more successful free men of color (none of whom achieved the grandeur of St. Domingue’s wealthy mulatto class) commonly owned slaves themselves. What they wanted was respect. Respect from their white property-owning neighbors, and respect from the officers of government.42

  Among the more vocal of Louisiana’s ambitious free men of color was Pedro Bailly, a mulatto lieutenant in the free-colored militia. Bailly had an instinct for business. Starting as a blacksmith, carter, and wood dealer after his manumission in 1776, Bailly had become a comfortable self-made entrepreneur trading in slaves and real estate. He had purchased his mother’s freedom in 1781, kept at least five slaves for his household, and acquired hundreds of pesos to lend at interest. As was often the case in Spanish society, his good fortune accompanied a steady rise in the ranks of the militia, which also excited jealousy among those who owed Bailly substantial amounts of money. Playing to Carondelet’s paranoia with exaggerated or fabricated testimony, two fellow officers testified, falsely, that Bailly shirked his responsibilities as an officer. They also claimed, probably truthfully, that when the militia was sent to repair cracks in the levee, Bailly sent a slave in his place—a common practice among wealthy white militiamen that caused deep resentment among the colored militia, even when the man who could afford it was one of their own.43

  In March 1794 Governor Carondelet deported Lieutenant Bailly to Cuba for his “diabolical ideas of freedom and equality” and for “having made remarks against the Spanish government… showing himself to be inclined to the principles of the French rebels.” Bailly was basically guilty of advocating social equality between whites and free men of color, both in Louisiana society and in the colony’s militia—opinions that only made the example of St. Domingue loom larger in the governor’s mind. The testimony of Luis Declouet, a white militia lieutenant and tobacco merchant, offers a clear glimpse of Bailly’s expressed sentiments—opinions quite beyond the reach of men of color in Virginia and other American slave states.44

  In November 1793, anticipating a French invasion from the Gulf of Mexico during the short-lived Spanish-English alliance, the two men had accompanied their militia unit to Fort St. Phillip, in Plaquemines Parish on the Mississippi River below New Orleans. In a conversation while waiting for an attack that never came, Lieutenant Declouet described the French as enemies of the state and of religion and foes to all humanity.

  “Humanity! Humanity!” Bailly replied. “I am going to speak frankly to you, sure that you are a man of honor. … It is true that they have done wrong by murdering their king, but sir, the French are just; they have conceded men their rights.”45

  Declouet asked Bailly which rights he referred to. “A universal equality among men, us, people of color,” Bailly replied.

  We have on the Island of Saint-Domingue and other French islands the title ciudadano act
ivo [i.e., participatory citizen]; we can speak openly, like any white person and hold the same rank as they. Under our [Louisiana] rule do we have this? No, sir, and it is unjust. All of us being men [rather than slaves] there should be no difference. Only their method of thinking—not color—should differentiate men. Under these circumstances of war … Senor Maxant politely received us here at Fort Placaminos, telling us that on this occasion there would be no difference between us and the whites, implying at other times there are distinctions. Every day Senor Maxant invites officers of the white militia to eat at his table. And why are we not paid the same attention? Are we not officers just as they are?46

  Whether Bailly’s actions deserved two years’ imprisonment in Cuba may be doubted, but Carondelet (like Miró before him) had reason to be concerned about the opinions Bailly so eloquently expressed. They and everyone else knew that from 1791 through 1793 the Haitian Revolution had begun not as a slave uprising but as a conflict between propertied, slaveholding whites and propertied, slaveholding mulattoes. For decades, in St. Domingue, in Louisiana, and in other Caribbean colonies, French and Spanish royal officials had nurtured the three-tiered societies of whites, free mulattoes, and slaves, playing each group off the others as a strategy to strengthen their own imperial authority.