The gens de couleur soon found unexpected allies among the Amis des noirs, a humanitarian and Anglophile association that had followed the lead of British reformers in attacking the slave trade and preparing the way for the gradual abolition of slavery. The Amis, like the British abolitionists, had earlier shown no interest in freedmen’s rights, which they considered a subsidiary issue that might distract attention from the horrors of the African slave trade. Moreover, the gens de couleur repeatedly professed their support for colonial slavery and agreed only reluctantly to oppose the African slave trade. But both groups shared an interest in circumventing the obstructionist tactics of the colonial deputies and in bringing colonial issues to the floor of the Constituent Assembly. The Abbé Grégoire, who sat on the Assembly’s credentials committee and who championed the rights of freedmen as well as the rights of Jews, became a spokesman for both the gens de couleur and the abolitionists.46
This fortuitous alliance carried momentous implications for free blacks and coloreds throughout the New World. Grégoire and the gens de couleur continued to insist that freedmen could be enfranchised without endangering the slave system. Yet Grégoire, in an impassioned tract defending the rights of the gens de couleur, condemned the slave trade, praised pioneer abolitionists, and envisioned a millennial emancipation as “a general insurrection in the universe, extinguishing tyranny and resurrecting liberty.”47 Colonial propagandists had already charged that the Amis des noirs, instigated by the visiting English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, were plotting to incite slave insurrections and to destroy the French colonies. Clarkson’s close ties with Grégoire and with colored leaders seemed to confirm the suspicion that abolitionist conspirators had chosen freedmen’s rights as a battleground that could lead to victory on all fronts. In an early version of the domino theory, the proprietors and colonial deputies made a defense of the color line a defense of slavery and thus of France’s most vital colonial interests.
In the fall of 1790 an abortive rebellion in Saint-Domingue reinforced the view that the gens de couleur had become the agents of an abolitionist conspiracy orchestrated by perfidious Albion. Vincent Ogé, a colored merchant and goldsmith who owned part of a Saint-Domingue plantation, had been a leading spokesman for freedmen’s rights before becoming involved with Grégoire and especially Clarkson. The Club Massiac, which warned officials in Saint-Domingue that Ogé had embarked on a revolutionary mission, claimed that Clarkson had raised funds in England that enabled Ogé to purchase arms and munitions in the United States. The intentions of Ogé’s backers remain obscure but there is no evidence that they envisioned a racial war or slave insurrection.48
In March the Constituent Assembly had granted colonists the right to draft their own constitutions, subject to metropolitan approval, and had stipulated that the initial colonial assemblies should be elected by “all persons” over twenty-five who owned landed property or paid taxes. The ambiguous phrasing provoked sharp debate but was generally interpreted to mean that the existing colonial assemblies could define “all persons” as they saw fit without requiring the National Assembly to sanction racial exclusion. Ogé, however, was determined to force the white authorities of Saint-Domingue to accept a literal reading of the disputed article. Presenting himself as a spokesman for French law, he tried to negotiate with the authorities at Le Cap and pledged his support for the slave system. Although some free coloreds had already taken up arms to resist the growing racial tyranny, Ogé failed to consolidate this potentially rebellious mass. After his small force was defeated and dispersed, Ogé fled to Spanish Santo Domingo. He was then extradited, tried, broken on the wheel, and executed. For the freedmen and French abolitionists, Ogé had become a martyr to liberty. For white colonists, Ogé symbolized the danger of free colored subversion. When the Constituent Assembly ordered the dissolution of colonial legislatures, in response to continuing white rebellion and the collapse of French authority, it also promised, as a conciliatory gesture, that France would never intervene with respect to the status of persons unless requested to do so by the colonies.49
In May 1791, when the Assembly debated a proposed constitution for the colonies, the West Indian deputies demanded a confirmation of this self-denying pledge.50 By then, however, it was impossible to separate the colonial question from the theatrical politics of the French Revolution. In a flaming oration, Robespierre exposed the national disgrace of officially sanctioning slavery and ominously linked the enemies of freedmen’s rights with the enemies of the constitution. The Assembly now listened to the testimony of free colored colonists, who described the humiliations suffered by respectable planters, merchants, and professionals who were descended, however distantly, from a black slave. Julien Raimond, the freedmen’s leading spokesman and pamphleteer, assured the Assembly that only the free coloreds could keep the slaves subdued.
On May 15, the Assembly finally adopted a compromise amendment pledging that France would enact no law on the status of “persons not free, other than those born of free mothers and fathers.” The decree sent to the colonies reaffirmed the colonists’ autonomy in defining the status of slaves and the vast majority of freedmen, but insisted that the children of two free parents, regardless of color, should enjoy the full rights of citizenship. The compromise betrayed the prevalent fear that the immediate descendants of slaves might in a crisis identify with slaves. For the colonial deputies, however, the May 15 decree was a fatal breach in the color wall that opened the way to slave emancipation and racial war. The Assembly had set a precedent for direct intervention to enforce inalienable rights. The same reasoning could be used to defend the rights of all freedmen and slaves, and French opinion was turning strongly in favor of equal rights for all free coloreds. Indeed, the debates over freedmen’s rights had already elicited proposals for gradual slave emancipation. The West Indian deputies encouraged colonial resistance by denouncing the decree and walking out of the Assembly. White colonists saw the proceedings as a betrayal of the Assembly’s earlier promise that it would pass no laws on the status of persons. They refused to accept the new measure, arguing that France could not enfranchise the descendants of slaves without destroying slavery itself. There was open talk of political independence or an alliance with England.51
There is no need here to describe the conflicts that divided the colonial whites, that forced the free coloreds to fight for their rights, and that led in August 1791 to a massive slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue’s North Province. The origins of this great revolt are still obscure and hot with controversy, but it is clear that the thousands of slaves who suddenly began to kill whites and set fire to the estates and cane fields were a truly revolutionary force, capable of devastating guerrilla warfare even after the black generals had capitulated. No doubt the objectives of the slaves were at first ambiguous; it took years for them to unite in a struggle for freedom and independence. But contemporary commentators, like many later historians, only obscured the central message when they pointed to outside abolitionist agitators, to the “tragic” division between whites and mulattoes, and to the yellow fever, which, as David Geggus has observed, became unbearable only when most of the blacks refused to tolerate slavery.52 The inescapable fact, which jolted the administrations of George Washington and William Pitt as well as the French National Assembly, was that the blacks themselves had seized the initiative and were destroying the plantation regime that oppressed them.
This message was conveyed in the most negative way by widely publicized descriptions of a white infant impaled on a stake and of white women being raped on the dead bodies of their husbands. As American newspapers printed the most recent tales of black atrocities recounted by refugees and the captains of ships returning from Saint-Domingue, the white public recoiled in horror and anxiously scrutinized the faces of the blacks in their midst. A few brave radicals like Abraham Bishop, a Yale classmate in the 1770s of Joel Barlow and Noah Webster, pointed out that the Dominguan blacks were fighting for the same principles Ameri
cans had consecrated in their own revolution. After mocking the hypocrisy of most Americans, including abolitionists, Bishop sadly concluded that “from us the blacks had a right to expect effectual assistance. They are pursuing the principles which had taught them, and are now sealing with their blood, the rights of men: yet Americans are sending assistance to their enemies.”53 The Washington administration was so convinced that the black revolution threatened vital American interests that it advanced the white colonists $726,000 for the purchase of arms, munitions, and supplies. The legislatures of Pennsylvania and South Carolina also voted to extend aid, and a few American volunteers fought on the planters’ side. The desirability of suppressing the black insurgents was one objective on which Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were in complete accord.54
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 “HORRORS OF HAITI”
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.
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 10