Sugar in the Blood

by Andrea Stuart

  Another potent weapon was slave testimonials. The most famous of these, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was published in 1789. The story of Equiano’s capture as a child in Africa and subsequent travails as a slave captured the public’s imagination. The erstwhile slave promoted his seven-shilling pamphlet with such panache that the historian Adam Hochschild has described it as “the first great political book tour.” The abolitionist movement quickly began to gather momentum and in 1792 alone, 519 petitions on slavery were handed in to the House of Commons.

  Inevitably, the Society of West India Planters and Merchants fought back, mobilizing their considerable economic power to wangle seats in the English Parliament. They also discharged their own salvos in the propaganda war. One pro-slavery tract, composed by a Barbadian curate, was published in 1788 in the hope of dispelling “the prejudices which had been hastily taken up” against the West Indians. He felt that outsiders were “totally unacquainted with the customs and manners of these distant colonies” and argued that slave labour was essential to their economic survival. It offered a relentlessly sunny representation of slavery, and suggested that those in England had no understanding of “the real and actual condition of the black race.” He claimed slaves were “Well fed and clothed” and that their daily work “was not so laborious as hath been represented.” Slavery, he also argued, provided an opportunity to Christianize the heathen slaves. Indeed, he concluded the slaves in the West Indies “may be said to enjoy more of the sweets of life than many of the whites themselves.”

  But the times were against him, and within a few years the abolitionists were ready to make their assault on Parliament. William Pitt’s speech on the Proposed Abolition of the Slave Trade 1792, in which the ailing parliamentarian spoke late into the night, was a turning point in the fortunes of the abolitionist movement. Pitt’s views on what to do about “the barbarous traffic in slaves” were unequivocal: “I trust we are now likely to be delivered from the greatest practical evil that has ever afflicted the human race, from the severest and most extensive calamity recorded in the history of the world.”

  While debate raged and public sympathies shifted in Britain, visiting merchants and other travellers brought reports of the abolitionist campaigns to the Caribbean, and this news naturally filtered down to the slave community. The excited slaves pieced together the fragments of information they gleaned from dockside conversations and careless table talk, and surreptitiously read newspapers and discussed them feverishly. It was no surprise if they sometimes put together this mosaic inaccurately, or that they believed that emancipation would take place sooner than it really did. But whatever the facts, they were nonetheless emboldened and optimistic. For the first time in centuries, there appeared to be a chink in the armour of the mighty slave system and a tiny ember of hope began to glow in their collective hearts. By the early 1790s colonial whites had begun complaining that Caribbean blacks exhibited a “new temper and ideas,” or were “no longer the same people.”

  And so it proved: the greatest coup of the abolition movement was the one carried out by the slaves themselves. Unfolding over twelve years, the revolution in the French Caribbean colony Saint-Domingue would be a roller-coaster ride of blood and tears, glory and desolation. At one time or another all three of the great powers that dominated the region—France, Spain and England—would become embroiled in the conflict. And it would produce not just one but a whole series of leaders, some now forgotten, others immortalized, who would defy the ideas promulgated by the racist societies of the Atlantic world, and would display a bravery, intelligence and military brilliance that would surprise and captivate the world.

  The catalyst was the French Revolution, which began in 1789. As one historian noted: “In few other societies can the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity have seemed as dangerous as in these plantation systems founded on bondage, inequality and prejudice.” Not only were slaves stirred by its ideals, but the revolution, which generated widespread conflict, also weakened the white establishment throughout the colonies. As a result, the number of slave revolts and conspiracies rose sharply in the Greater Caribbean, reaching at least two per year between 1789 and 1815. In many of these rebellions the leaders had mobilized the population by manufacturing rumours of emancipation—and they were believed.

  Saint-Domingue was the western part of the island of Hispaniola, which Christopher Columbus had claimed for Spain way back in 1492. It came into French hands in 1697 under the Treaty of Ryswick, when Spain ceded it to France. Despite its late entry into the sugar industry, Saint-Domingue’s rate of growth was phenomenal. Where not a single sugar plantation existed in 1689, within fifteen years there were 120. The island eventually became known as “the Pearl of the Antilles” and, at its most productive, it exported 60 per cent of the coffee and 40 per cent of the sugar consumed in Europe: more than all the British West Indian colonies combined.

  But as Saint-Domingue’s production rose, so too did the demand for slaves. Between the moment of French colonization in 1697 and the eve of the French Revolution in the late 1780s, slave numbers increased by over 100 per cent to around half a million, dwarfing the “free coloureds,” the term used to describe the free people of colour, and white population, which each equalled around 30,000. The slave population on the island—and in certain circumstances the free coloureds—were treated appallingly. For many years the life expectancy of a slave in the colony was a paltry twenty-one years. One slave, recollecting their sufferings, declared:

  Have they not hung men with heads down-ward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed in mortars … Have they not forced them to eat excrement? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss?

  In this violent and uneasy society, in which each of the groups—whites, browns and blacks—had such contesting, even conflicting interests, the guiding principles of “liberty, equality and fraternity” struck a deep chord. The white planter elite dreamt of independence from the mother country, which would give them the freedom to manage local affairs and to avoid the mercantile controls France placed on their economy. The “free coloured” population, which owned a third of the country’s plantations and a quarter of its slaves, dreamt of receiving the full civil and political rights that their colour still denied them. And the slaves dreamt of freedom and some opportunity to live an independent and comfortable life. The very sight of visitors to the island sporting the tricolour cockade thrilled them. “The white slaves in France,” they were reported as saying, “had licked their masters and, now free, were governing themselves and taking over the land.”

  On 28 March 1790, the French National Assembly decreed that the right to vote and hold office was to be granted to all property owners of twenty-five years or older. However, when it came to applying this law to the colonies, they left the definition of who was a “person” to the whites, who predictably chose not to extend these rights beyond their own circles. Furious, a faction of free coloureds petitioned for what they saw as their rights, and this movement quickly escalated into armed rebellion. Outnumbered and outgunned, the rebels were defeated, and their leaders, Vincent Ogé and Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, were brutally punished. The former had his legs and ribs crushed by hammer blows before being tied to a wheel and left under the brutal sun until he died. The severed heads of Ogé and his accomplices were displayed on spikes as a warning to the populace.

  The treatment of Ogé and Chavannes provoked an outcry in revolutionary France. Maximilien Robespierre declared it was better the colonies perish than the revolution’s ideals be compromised, and concluded that the “free men of colour shall enjoy all the rights of active citizens.” But the National Assembly, frightened of jeopardizing the colony’s contribution to national prosperity, settled for a compromise. Rather than extend ri
ghts to the island’s entire mixed-race population, only those who were born of “legally free parents,” a tiny minority, would be given their freedom. The law was passed, but the blacks and “coloureds,” whose expectations had been raised, were not appeased. Nor were they placated when modifications were made to the Code Noir, which claimed to limit the brutality of slave punishments and allowed slaves to give testimony in court.

  These new rights were promptly tested in the case of Nicolas Lejeune, a coffee planter who put to death four of his slaves because he suspected them of poisoning. Two other females whom he believed to have withheld information he then tortured so terribly that they died soon after. Encouraged by the new legislation, a group of his slaves brought the case to court. Despite the incontrovertible evidence against him, Lejeune, who potentially faced the death penalty, was cleared.

  Realizing that they still could not rely on the protection of the law, the slaves began to organize. Not long after, on a hot and humid night in mid-August 1791, slaves, who had eluded the authorities in their thousands, gathered in the Bois Caman, an enormous forest full of sacred trees, for a great voodoo ceremony. It was presided over by a Jamaica-born slave called Boukman. Here, amidst the drumming and the chanting, he declaimed: “The God who creates the sun which gives us light, he will arm and aid us … Throw down the pictures of the White God, who thirsts for our tears, and hear the sound of liberty in all our hearts.”

  His cry for revolt was heeded on 22 August in the dark hours before dawn, when 100,000 slaves, emboldened by the spirits, descended on the plantations of the Plaine du Nord. Invisible at first among the cane fields, the warriors emerged smeared in soot and armed with machetes, knives, cudgels and chains. Their goals were straightforward: to devastate the plantations on which they had suffered so terribly. And “Vengeance! Vengeance!” was their war cry.

  At first they fired the cane, and when the conflagration was at its height the rebels descended on the great houses, breaking down doors, clambering through windows and gutting the beautifully decorated rooms. Soon the bells usually used to call the slaves to work rang piercingly, guns were fired off in the distance to warn of rebellion and panic spread across the plantations. Planters and their families, some still in their nightclothes, fled to the safety of Cap François.

  Within a few days much of this verdant and undulating island was a charred wasteland; its beautiful coffee copses that looked like sea foam when they were in flower, and became a blanket of purple when the berries emerged, had been destroyed. Such was the quantity of smoke and cane ash that for three weeks it was impossible to distinguish day from night. Soon more outbreaks were occurring in the west and south of the country, and the slaves won a number of convincing battles against the maréchaussée (the colonial militia). By the time the authorities finally gained some control, 180 plantations had been reduced to ash and 2,000 whites had been killed. Unsurprisingly the reprisals were swift and terrible. Over 10,000 blacks were hanged from trees along the entire length of the road leading to Cap François, where their dangling black bodies were left to rot under the torrid sun. And this was just the opening act.

  When news of the popular uprising of August 1791 first arrived in France, the most common reaction was disbelief. The stereotypes so carefully nurtured by the planters simply did not allow for such a development. Surely it was impossible for a gang of ignorant and unruly negroes to organize a campaign such as this? And how were they able to act so effectively in concert? Rather than give the slaves any credit, they chose to believe that the blame must lie with outside agitators and miscalculations by the planters. But on the other Caribbean islands, where the news arrived first, the responses were altogether more complex. They too did not want to believe that this sort of thing could happen, but everyone knew someone who had seen the smoke and the flames or talked to a survivor. And they knew that their own slaves had the intelligence—and the motivation—to launch such an attack themselves. And so they fretted, fearful that the dissent would spread and inspire their own slaves to rebellion.

  Boukman, who had led the first phase of the slaves’ struggle, had been killed shortly after the first skirmishes, but a number of other agitators soon emerged to take his place, not least a forty-five-year-old slave called François Dominique Toussaint Bréda, who had served as a livestock steward on the De Libertas plantation. After protecting his master and mistress from the rebels and dispatching them to the safety of the capital, he joined the rebel slave forces.

  His extraordinary intellectual and physical abilities, as well as his strategic genius, made his rise through the rebel ranks inevitable. These qualities were exceeded only by his charisma, for this small, ugly man was an inspired speaker, moving his fighters into battle with the cry, “We have come here to win or to die!” Over time he became known as Toussaint L’Ouverture (The Opener) and was described by the Caribbean historian C. L. R. James as the most remarkable figure of his era, with the possible exception of his nemesis Napoleon Bonaparte.

  The slaves’ ambitions in Saint-Domingue were aided by wider developments. By early 1793 revolutionary France was at war with both Britain and Spain, and factions of the rebellious slaves on the island were formalizing alliances with the latter. The French government, fearing that it would lose control of the colony altogether and, worse still, that it might fall into the hands of their enemies, decided to abolish slavery on the island on 29 August 1793. By the following February, France extended this policy to all its colonies.

  The success of the black revolt in Saint-Domingue caused aftershocks throughout the Atlantic world. It went on to inspire a failed rebellion in the neighbouring island of Grenada the following year, and Barbadians were aware of a new insolence among their own slaves too. For planters across the region the Saint-Domingue slaves’ revolution was an apocalyptic development that threatened to wipe out their entire way of life.

  Although Robert Cooper was not caught up in these developments directly, his early life and education were informed by the ideology that underwrote the sugar industry and its investment in slavery. The wealthiest of the island’s planters sent their children off to England to be taught at the best schools, where they gained a reputation for squandering their parents’ sugar fortunes “in drinking, gaming and wenching.” This was not an option for less affluent families like the Ashbys, so Robert Cooper would have been educated at one of the island’s local schools, which at that time all catered exclusively for the white male population. The teaching was often indifferent, mainly supplied by “half-educated adventurers” eager to jump on the sugar train. For those families with greater cultural pretensions, the island’s capital had a goodly selection of dancing masters, music teachers and painting instructors. It is unlikely that the Ashbys could afford these opportunities to supplement their children’s education, but Robert Cooper certainly received some tutoring; his correspondence was fluent and grammatically correct and he penned an elegant hand.

  Education in the Caribbean was not just about giving planters’ children the three Rs: it was also about inculcating their society’s values. In neighbouring Martinique, for example, the founder of one school, Father Charles François, described his institution’s raison d’être as being a way to counter the “indolence” and “depravity” inspired by too much proximity to black people and to prepare his pupils to become the masters and mistresses of plantations.

  By this time the crude racism of the early years of slavery had been overlaid with competing pseudo-scientific theories about race and the nature of the “Negro.” Two years before Robert Cooper’s birth, the virulently racist planter Edward Long published his History of Jamaica, in which he used the concept of the Great Chain of Being to justify his racial views. A popular hypothesis of the time, this idea posited the existence of a hierarchy “the most simple forms of life, through to the most intelligent animals including man, and continued further upward to the myriad ranks of celestial creatures until, finally it reached its summit in God.”
The white man was in the middle of this hierarchy. (Angels, of course, were above them.) But blacks were not just lower down the chain, “they were a separate species all together.” To Long, they were a distinct species of human most analogous to the monkey and related genera, with whom, he claimed, “some races of black men are intimate”; African slavery was therefore natural and acceptable, the product of a divinely ordained pecking order.

  Unlike Long, the French naturalist the Comte de Buffon believed that blacks were part of the same species as whites (the monogenist argument), but he argued that they were situated at “the bottom of the human hierarchy.” In 1775, the year after Long’s book was published, the term “Caucasian race” was coined by the zoologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. He believed that the Caucasus was the cradle of human civilization and that all intelligence and beauty originated there. To prove his thesis, he collected a selection of 245 skulls which he duly examined and measured. After this analysis, he created a theory of a five-storey racial pyramid with whites at the top. On the next three levels were Australian Aborigines, American Indians, and “yellow-skinned” Asians. At the bottom were blacks originating in Africa. Against all scientific reason the term “Caucasian” remains in use to this day, synonymous with the white minority that Blumenbach claimed sat at the summit of humanity’s hierarchy.