Yet the revolution in Saint-Domingue was making a modern world. Today, Saint-Domingue is called Haiti, and it is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. But Haiti’s revolutionary birth was the most revolutionary revolution in an age of them. By the time it was over, these people, once seemingly crushed between the rollers of European empire, ruled the country in which they had been enslaved. Their citizenship would be (at least in theory) the most radically equal yet. And the events they pushed forward in the Caribbean drove French revolutionaries in the National Assembly to take steadily more radical positions—such as emancipating all French slaves in 1794, in an attempt to keep Saint-Domingue’s economic powerhouse on the side of the new leaders in Paris. Already, however, the slave revolution itself had killed slavery on the island. An ex-slave named Toussaint Louverture had welded bands of rampaging rebels into an army that could defend their revolution from European powers who wanted to make it disappear. Between 1794 and 1799, his army defeated an invasion of tens of thousands of antirevolutionary British Redcoats.12
By 1800, Saint-Domingue, though nominally still part of the French Republic, was essentially an independent country. In his letters to Paris, Toussaint Louverture styled himself the “First of the Blacks.” He was communicating with a man rated the First in France—Napoleon Bonaparte, first consul of the Republic, another charismatic man who had risen from obscure origins. Napoleon, an entrepreneur in the world of politics and war, rather than business, used his military victories to destroy old ways of doing things. Then he tried to create new ones: a new international order, a new economy, a new set of laws, a new Europe—and a new empire. But after he concluded the Peace of Amiens with Britain in 1800, the ostensible republican became monarchical. He set his sights on a new goal: restoring the imperial crown’s finest jewel, the lost Saint-Domingue. In 1801, he sent the largest invasion fleet that ever crossed the Atlantic, some 50,000 men, to the island under the leadership of his brother-in-law Charles LeClerc. Their mission was to decapitate the ex-slave leadership of Saint-Domingue. “No more gilded Africans,” Napoleon commanded. Subdue any resistance by deception and force. Return to slavery all the Africans who survived.13
Napoleon had also assembled a second army, and he had given it a second assignment. In 1800, he had concluded a secret treaty that “retroceded” Louisiana to French control after thirty-seven years in Spanish hands. This second army was to go to Louisiana and plant the French flag. And at 20,000 men strong, it was larger than the entire US Army. Napoleon had already conquered one revolutionary republic from within. He was sending a mighty army to take another by brute force. As for the third republic, when his second army landed in Louisiana, its presence at the head of the Mississippi would destabilize the United States along the fracture line that divided west and east.14
In Washington, Jefferson heard rumors of the secret treaty. To keep alive his utopian plans for a westward-expanding republic of independent white men, he was already compromising with slavery’s expansion. Now he saw another looming choice between hypocritical compromise and destruction. No memory rankled Jefferson more than a humiliation he had endured back in 1786, when he and John Adams had been presented to the British royal court as the rebel republic’s ambassadors. When a periwigged herald had brayed out the American envoys’ names, George III, still furious, ostentatiously turned and waddled away as courtiers snickered. And yet, as Jefferson now instructed his envoy to Paris, Robert Livingston, “there is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.” Jefferson had to open the Mississippi one way or another. Should a French army occupy New Orleans, wrote Jefferson, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”15
Napoleon had his own visions. He ignored Jefferson’s initial offer for the city at the mouth of the Mississippi. So the president sent future president James Monroe with a higher bid: $10 million for the city and its immediate surroundings. Yet, in the end, Paris would not decide this deal. When LeClerc’s massive army had disembarked in Saint-Domingue, the French found Cap-Français a smoldering ruin, burned as part of scorched-earth strategy. LeClerc successfully captured Toussaint by deception and packed him off to France to be imprisoned in a fortress in the Jura Mountains. Resistance, however, did not cease. The army Louverture had built began to win battles over the one Napoleon had sent. French generals turned to genocide, murdering thousands of suspected rebels and their families. The terror provoked fiercer resistance, which—along with yellow fever and malaria—killed thousands of French soldiers, including LeClerc.
By the middle of 1802, the first wave of French forces had withered away. Napoleon reluctantly diverted the Louisiana army to Saint-Domingue. Then this second expedition to the Caribbean was also destroyed. So even as Toussaint Louverture shivered in his cell across the ocean, the army he left behind became the first to deal a decisive defeat to Napoleon’s ambitions. “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies,” the first of the whites was heard to grumble into his cup at a state dinner. On April 7, 1803, Louverture’s jailer entered the old warrior’s cell and found the first of the blacks seated upright, dead in his chair. The same day, Monroe’s ship hove into sight of the French coast. And on April 11, before Monroe’s stagecoach could reach Paris, a French minister invited Livingston to his office.16
Napoleon’s minion shocked Livingston almost out of his knee breeches with an astonishing offer: not just New Orleans, but all of French Louisiana—the whole west bank of the Mississippi and its tributaries. Now the United States was offered—for a mere $15 million—828,000 square miles, 530 million acres, at three cents per acre. This vast expanse doubled the nation’s size. Eventually the land from the Louisiana Purchase would become all or part of fifteen states. It still accounts for almost a quarter of the surface area of the United States. By the late twentieth century, Jefferson’s windfall would be feeding much of the world. One imagines that Livingston found it hard to hold his poker face steady. He immediately agreed to the deal.17
So it was that as 1804 began, two momentous ceremonies took place. Each formalized the consequences of the successful overthrow, by enslaved people themselves, of the most profitable, most fully developed example of European imperial sugar slavery. One of the ceremonies took place in Port-au-Prince and was held by a gathering of leaders who had survived the Middle Passage, slavery, revolution, and war. On January 1, they proclaimed the independence of a new country, which they called Haiti—the name they believed the original Taino inhabitants had used before the Spaniards killed them all. Although the country’s history would be marked by massacre, civil war, dictatorship, and disaster, and although white nations have always found ways to exclude Haiti from international community, independent Haiti’s first constitution created a radical new concept of citizenship: only black people could be citizens of Haiti. And who was black? All who would say they rejected both France and slavery and would accept the fact that black folks ruled Haiti. Thus, even a “white” person could become a “black” citizen of Haiti, as long as he or she rejected the assumption that whites should rule and Africans serve.18
Not only did Haitian independence finish off Napoleon’s schemes for the Western Hemisphere, but it also sounded the knell for the first form of New World slavery. On the sugar islands, productivity had depended on the continual resupply of captive workers ripped from the womb of Africa. Many Europeans who had not been convinced of the African slave trade’s immorality were now convinced that it had brought destruction upon Saint-Domingue, by filling it full of angry men and women who had tasted freedom at one point in their lives. British anti-slave-trade activism, frightened into a pause in 1791 by heads severed by the Saint-Domingue rebels and Paris guillotines, became conventional London wisdom. In 1807, the British Parliament passed a law ending the international slave trade to its empire. In the near future, Britain’s government and ruling class, confident that their own abolition of the trade had provided them with what historian Ch
ristopher Brown has aptly called “moral capital,” would use the weight of their growing economic influence to push Spain, France, and Portugal toward abolishing their own Atlantic slave trades.19
Meanwhile, the US Congress had already been pushing forward its own bill to ban the international slave trade to the United States—starting in 1808, the first year that the Constitution permitted it. But this slave-trade ban, urged by Thomas Jefferson in his 1806 annual message to Congress, was a political possibility in part because the Middle Passage was no longer seen as an economic necessity. Feet marching west, south, and southwest enabled slaveholders in the new western districts of South Carolina, Georgia, and elsewhere to buy from an endless coffle of people like Charles Ball. Thus, the bill’s passage did not mean that the southern representatives who voted for it believed that slavery was wrong. As one of them insisted proudly, “A large majority of people in the Southern states do not consider slavery as a crime.”20
In any case, the Haitian Revolution had already made it possible for the United States to open up the Mississippi Valley to the young nation’s internal slave trade. About ten days before the declaration of independence in Port-au-Prince, on December 22, 1803, Louisiana’s new territorial governor had accepted the official transfer of authority in New Orleans. American acquisition depended on the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of African men, women, and children who in Saint-Domingue rose up against the one social institution whose protection appeared to be written into the US Constitution—the enslavement of African people. This reliance on the success of the Haitian Revolution was a profound irony. Jefferson, whose argument for “diffusion” relied in part on exploiting white fears of slave revolt, did not acknowledge that Toussaint’s posthumous victory made the nation’s—and slavery’s—expansion possible. The only voice pointing out that the republican president was an emperor without clothes came from Jefferson’s old rival Alexander Hamilton, who wrote that “to the deadly climate of St. Domingo, and to the courage and obstinate resistance made by its black inhabitants are we indebted. . . . [The] truth is, Bonaparte found himself absolutely compelled”—and not by Jefferson—“to relinquish his daring plan of colonizing the banks of the Mississippi.”21
Even today, most US history textbooks tell the story of the Louisiana Purchase without admitting that slave revolution in Saint-Domingue made it possible. And here is another irony. Haitians had opened 1804 by announcing their grand experiment of a society whose basis for citizenship was literally the renunciation of white privilege, but their revolution’s success had at the same time delivered the Mississippi Valley to a new empire of slavery. The great continent would incubate a second slavery exponentially greater in economic power than the first.
SO THE MAN IN the iron collar was a sign not of the passing of an old forced migration, but of the conception of a new one. Yet acquisition of territory doesn’t automatically translate to control. Potential wealth doesn’t translate automatically into floods of money. To convert possibility into reality in the Mississippi Valley, enslavers would have to work together across linguistic and cultural difference; find new sources of slaves, especially after 1807; and defeat challenges to their power. And had we been able to interview William C. Claiborne, governor of the Orleans Territory, on May 15, 1809, he might have had a pessimistic assessment of their chances. On that day, he was frantically scrawling a letter from his desk in the Cabildo, a white stone structure that stood on the Place d’Armes in New Orleans. Built by the Spanish, the Cabildo now houses the Louisiana State Museum, but in the years after the 1804 “change of flags” it was the nerve center of government on the frontier of empire.
Claiborne was a man in a hurry. The breakneck pace of his political career had rushed forward frenetically with the expansion of the new United States. Born in Virginia in 1775, he had moved to Tennessee and was in 1795 elected the youngest US representative in history. Powerful Virginia allies had secured him the appointment as federal governor of the newly acquired Orleans Territory, as present-day Louisiana was then termed. But here everything he wanted to accomplish seemed to run aground. Some of it was his fault. He refused to learn French, for instance. He was brusque and tactless, in an existential hurry like his nation. Even now he leapt up from his seat to look out the window toward the river, then strode hastily back to the desk to scribble, twitching, again.22
For the governor had just received the troublesome news that ships full of slaves had arrived from Cuba and were trying to dock at the port of New Orleans, in contravention of the ban on importing slaves into the United States. The question of importing slaves threatened to amplify rivalries inherent to the nature of this territory. French-speaking residents, conscious of cultural difference, fought in the New Orleans streets with English-speaking Protestants about which dances should be performed at a ball—the ones fashionable in England or the ones popular in France. “American” women (and a few men) complained that here, wealthy white men sometimes lived with mulatto women until it came time to marry a respectable white one. Such things happened in Virginia—Claiborne knew Thomas Jefferson quite well—but they were usually kept under wraps. Meanwhile, new American arrivals used capital from outside the territory to dominate business that came from New Orleans’s now-unimpeded access to the products and profits of the interior. French Louisianans could only fall back on their control of the territory’s fixed capital, and some tried to shut out American emigrants by refusing to sell them land.23
Cultural conflict kept alive uncertainty about the loyalties of the newly incorporated peoples of Louisiana. The Spanish Empire still loomed on both the western and eastern frontiers, refusing to give up West Florida. Rumors of plots to detach the Mississippi Valley from Washington’s control implicated Spain, French Louisianans who were disloyal to the United States, and overambitious English-speakers. The most notorious was the 1806 scheme supposedly organized by former vice president Aaron Burr and General James Wilkinson—a plan to establish a breakaway republic in Louisiana. Although Wilkinson was a paid agent in the service of Spain, he was not arrested. Burr was, but his subsequent trial for treason devolved into a disaster for Jefferson. The president came out looking like a man eager to twist evidence in order to inflict revenge on a rival (the junior partner on Jefferson’s 1800 ticket, Burr had allegedly tried to steal the presidency by cooperating with Federalists to drive the election into the House of Representatives).24
Most uncertain of all in the wake of the revolution in Saint-Domingue was the future of slavery in Louisiana. The legal records of the Orleans Territory from 1804 through 1810 show a count of 15,927 enslaved people, and scholars have found enough information to make an ethnic identification in 5,527 of the cases. Of those, 61 percent seem to have been born in Africa, 27 percent in Louisiana, 6 percent in the Caribbean, and 6 percent in Anglo North America (see Table 2.1). Ears in New Orleans marketplaces heard dozens of African tongues. Eyes there noted strange “country marks,” tribal scarifications carved in the faces of men and women coming in from the cane fields. “Strange negroes” from Africa seemed particularly prone to resistance. “Our Quondam friend Mandingo Charles alias Goliah has again absconded from the plantation[;] also an Ebo man named Cracker,” wrote John Palfrey in 1810 from his property Cannes Brûlées (Burnt Cane) in St. Charles Parish, fifty miles upriver from New Orleans. Palfrey, a merchant from Massachusetts, had moved to Louisiana in the 1790s to take over his brother-in-law’s sugar operation. At the end of 1810, unable to pull the enterprise out of debt, he sold out to New Orleans entrepreneurs William Kenner and Stephen Henderson and launched a cotton-growing operation in the Attakapas region of Louisiana. Cracker stayed in the St. Charles woods.25
TABLE 2.1. ORIGINS OF ENSLAVED PEOPLE FOUND IN NEW ORLEANS RECORDS, 1804–1810
Source: Hall Database, www.ibiblio.org/laslave/.
* Search on variable “Origin,” except for number of African groups, in which variable “Birthplace” was used.
Saint-Domingue was pr
esent, in spirit, in the Louisiana that Claiborne was trying to govern. Most of the white constables in the streets of New Orleans had been born on the French island. Sugar and sugar specialists had come to Louisiana from the burned colony, too. In 1794, refugee sugar artisan Antoine Morin helped Etienne Boré become the first Louisiana planter to granulate sugar from cane. A little Saint-Domingue sprang up along the great river’s “German Coast,” which stretched from St. James Parish down to the city itself. Fields of cane replaced fields of corn. Seventy-five sugar mills were in operation by 1804. Along these one hundred miles of development, army officer Amos Stoddard saw “scenes of misery and distress.” He added, echoing Jefferson, “Wounds and lacerations occasioned by demoralized masters and overseers, most of whom exhibit a strange compound of ignorance and depravity, torture the feelings of the stranger, and wring blood from his heart. . . . Good God! Why sleeps thy vengeance!”26
Seemingly unable to think beyond a playbook that had already ended in vengeance, Saint-Domingue refugees and their French- and Spanish-speaking compatriots demanded more slaves. From their perspective, the Louisiana colony had been long starved of enslaved Africans, having imported fewer than 2,000 in the decade before American acquisition. When Claiborne arrived in 1804, bringing the news that Congress would probably block the international slave trade to the territory, he discovered “an almost universal sentiment in favor of this inhuman traffic.” “The prohibition thereof,” he reported, was “a great source of discontent” among French-speakers, but even English-speaking residents agreed that “they must import more slaves or be ruined forever.”27
The Half Has Never Been Told Page 9