38. Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté: le jeu du critère ethnique dans un ordre juridique esclavagiste, vol. I: L’affranchi dans les possessions françaises de la Caraïbe, 1635–1833 (Paris: Dalloz, 1967), 80; Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 405n3; Cohen and Greene, Neither Slave nor Free, 4, 6,10, 194, 218–20; Heuman, Between Black and White, 7. Popkin, You Are All Free, 12.
39. Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 46–47, 136–37; Richard S. Dunn, “Black Society in the Chesapeake, 1776–1810,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 74–82. In Virginia the proportion of blacks who were free reached 10 percent in 1840; in Louisiana the proportion declined from 18 percent in 1810 to 13.2 percent in 1820 and 5.3 percent in 1860. In Maryland the figure rose gradually to 49.1 percent in 1860, but there was a large difference between the northern and southern counties of the state. In Jamaica the proportion of blacks who were free rose from 3 percent in 1800 to something over 10 percent in 1834. In Barbados the comparable increase was from 3 percent to over 7 percent.
40. Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 39, 43–45; Sidney Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770–1800 (Greenwich, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), 11–14, 26–27, 186–90; Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 101–02, 110–17; Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 291; William Alan Muraskin, Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 31–34; Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 3–6; Sheldon H. Harris, Paul Cuffe: Black America and the African Return (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 159–61.
41. Jordan, White Over Black, 328–30, 409; Heuman, Between Black and White, 23–24; Annals of Congress, 6th Cong., 1st Sess. (1800), 229–45. The debate took place on January 2 and 3, 1800. After much dispute over wording, the motion to refer the petition to a committee was passed but amended with the following sentence: “And that the parts of the said petition which invite Congress to legislate upon subjects from which the General Government is precluded by the Constitution, have a tendency to create disquiet and jealousy, and ought therefore to receive no encouragement or countenance from this House.” George Thatcher argued that the petition contained no such propositions; he cast the only negative vote against the amendment.
42. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 6; Robert I. Rotberg, with Christopher K. Clague, Haiti: The Politics of Squalor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 32.
43. Debbasch, Couleur et liberté, 53–59, 97–98, 118–22; Pierre de Vaissière, Saint-Domingue: la société et la vie créoles sous l’ancien régime, 1629–1789 (Paris: Perrin, 1909), 221–24; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 36–42; Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 20–22; John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 40–41; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 60–71.
44. Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 110–12; Gabriel Debien, Les colons de Saint-Domingue et la révolution: essai sur le club Massiac, Août 1789-Août 1792 (Paris: Librarie Armand Colin, 1953), 63–78, 140–52; Debbasch, Couleur et liberté, 134–50.
45. Mitchell Bennett Garrett, The French Colonial Question, 1789–1791 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: G. Wahr, 1918), 19–26; Debbasch, Couleur et liberté, 123–24, 149–51. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 75–82.
46. Ruth F. Necheles, The Abbé Grégoire, 1787–1831: The Odyssey of an Egalitarian (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971), 53–66; Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 111; Debbasch, Couleur et liberté, 154–55.
47. [Henri-Baptiste] Grégoire, Mémoire en faveur des gens de couleur ou sang-mêlés de St.-Domingue, et des autres Isles françoises de l’Amérique, adressé à l’Assemblée Nationale (Paris, 1789), 34–35. According to the abolitionists’ journal, Patriote françois, it was the freedmen’s enemies who constantly confused freedmen’s rights with slave emancipation; the freedmen sympathized with the plight of the slaves but fully understood the danger of innovative action. Patriote françois, no. 594 (March 25, 1791): 319–20.
48. Clarkson told the Plymleys that Ogé had returned to Saint-Domingue to report the National Assembly’s actions “to his constituents,” that he had then been attacked by the whites and had been treacherously given up by the Spaniards after he had fled to the Spanish part of the island. Both Clarkson and Grégoire defended Ogé as a martyr who had fought for the freedmen’s legitimate rights. Katherine Plymley Diaries, Feb. 9 to 24, 1792, book 5: 13–14; Archives parlementaires 25 (May 11, 1791): 737–41. See also Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), 36–39. But, as John Garrigus has shown, colonial whites had good reasons to think that the abolitionists had a hand, at least, in Ogé’s rebellion. For example, two ceramic (presumably Wedgwood) medallions depicting a chained African were found in Ogé’s bags by colonial authorities, likely a gift from Clarkson, which seemed ample proof of premeditation and an abolitionist conspiracy. Garrigus argues, however, that Ogé’s preeminent revolutionary act was to bring the new Parisian idea of militiaman-as-citizen to Saint-Domingue, forcing the colonial authorities either to bring more regulars to replace the free coloreds, or to extend citizenship across the color line. John Garrigus, “ ‘Thy coming fame, Ogé! is sure’: New Evidence on Ogé’s Revolt (1790) and the Beginnings of the Haitian Revolution,” in Assumed Identities: Race and Identity in the New World, ed. John Garrigus and Christopher Morris (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010), 37–38.
49. Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 140–41; Debbasch, Couleur et liberté, 172–82; Julien Raymond, Réflexions sur les véritables causes des troubles et des désastres de nos colonies, notamment sur ceux de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1793), 33–35; James, Black Jacobins, 72–75. For the rebellious, buccaneer spirit of Saint-Domingue’s whites, see Charles Frostin, Les révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: l’École, 1975).
50. Popkin, You Are All Free, 36–37.
51. Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 142–44; Debbasch, Couleur et liberté, 61–62, 184–86; Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, The French Revolution in San Domingo (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 119–27; Debien, Les colons de Saint-Domingue, 262–90.
52. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 122. See also Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, 87–88; and Ott, Haitian Revolution, 47–52.
53. J. P. Martin [Abraham Bishop], American Museum 12 (Nov. 1792): 299–300; Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 327; Tim [sic] Matthewson, “Abraham Bishop, ‘The Rights of Black Men,’ and the American Reaction to the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 67 (Summer 1982): 148–53. Matthewson prints the text of Bishop’s articles, which appeared originally in the Boston Argus in November and December 1791. White, Encountering Revolution, 57.
54. Timothy M. Matthewson, “George Washington’s Policy Toward the Haitian Revolution,” Diplomatic History 3 (Summer 1979): 321–36; Donald R. Hickey, “America’s Response to the Slave Revolt in Haiti, 1791–1806,” Journal of the Early Republic 2 (Winter 1982): 364–65; Hunt, “Influence of Haiti,” 27–30. Hamilton did object to subsidizing French radicalism with funds set aside to pay the American debt to France. The Washington administration would probably have given much more aid to the French planters if it had not had to deal with the intrigue of the French ministers, Jean-Baptiste de Ternant and Edmond Gen
êt. The American army, as Matthewson points out, was preoccupied with hostile Indians on the western frontier.
55. Columbian Centinel, Sept. 2, 1791, 10; Geggus, “British Opinion,” 124. Some antislavery papers attributed the revolt to the slave system and used it as an argument against the continuation of the slave trade.
56. Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 146–47; J. Saintoyant, La colonisation française pendant la révolution, 1789–1799, 2 vols. (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1930), 2:115–36; Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 42–65; James, Black Jacobins, 126–29; Ott, Haitian Revolution, 69–72; Popkin, You Are All Free, 376.
57. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 39–41, 68, 70, 105, 114, 126.
58. Ibid., 84–85, 124–29; James, Black Jacobins, 164–66.
59. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 150–61, 182–84, 313–23, 388–90. Many of the blacks who joined the British evacuation were over sixty, under fifteen, or disabled.
60. Gabriel Debien, Jean Fouchard, and Marie Antoinette Menier, “Toussaint Louverture avant 1789, légendes et réalités,” Conjonction, Revue Franco-Haitienne 134 (June–July 1977), 67–77.
61. Mats Lundahl, “Toussaint L’Ouverture and the War Economy of Saint-Domingue, 1796–1802,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Comparative Studies 6 (Sept. 1985): 130.
62. Constitution de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue, du 17 Aout 1801 (29 Thermidor an 9), reprinted in La révolution française et l’abolition de l’esclavage (Paris, n.d.), 11, no. 18. Though Toussaint had conquered Spanish Santo Domingo and won complete power over the island, he refrained from proclaiming independence from France, partly because of waning British and American support. Ott, Haitian Revolution, 119–20.
63. Ott, Haitian Revolution, 139–61. David Geggus estimates that the French sent a total of 44,000 troops to Saint-Domingue (private communication to author). Further work on estimating the numbers on both sides of the conflict has been done by Phillipe Girard. Girard puts the number of French soldiers sent to Saint-Domingue at 43,800, but “only 7,000 made it to the pontoons of Jamaica.” The death toll topped 50,000, and even more if you add the people of color who fought for France. And these losses are staggering compared to the 10,000 French deaths early in the Haitian Revolution. Bonaparte, Girard notes, was utterly oblivious to loss of life and treasure in his attempt to restore the colony to absolute French control. As for the Haitians, the numbers are even more sobering. Girard notes that “there is good reason to believe that the country’s population which had neared six hundred thousand in 1789, had dropped by half by 1804, and that the Leclerc expedition itself is responsible for the deaths of one hundred thousand Haitians. The rebellious slaves of 1791 had pledged to live free or die; in the end, they did both in roughly equal numbers.” Philippe R. Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801–1804 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 343–44.
64. James, Black Jacobins, 322–62; Stoddard, The French Revolution in San Domingo, 303–46; Ott, Haitian Revolution, 170–82.
65. Quoted in Geggus, “British Opinion,” 136.
66. One should note, however, that in 1816, Alexandre Pétion furnished arms and supplies to Simón Bolívar on the secret condition that Bolívar would promote the cause of slave emancipation in South America. Although Bolívar offered freedom to slaves willing to fight the royalists, at the Congress of Panama in 1825, from which Haiti was excluded, he called for ruling-class unity in freeing Latin America from the fear of “this tremendous monster which has devoured the island of Santo Domingo.” Quoted in David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 63. Also, more recent scholarship has looked at the more expansive diplomatic vision of Dessalines, in particular, and his attempt to maintain links in diplomacy, labor, and capital across the Atlantic world. Philippe R. Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (July 1, 2012): 549–82.
67. Geggus, “Enigma of Jamaica,” 282–84, 292–99. David Geggus, “Slave Rebellion During the Age of Revolution,” in Curaçao and the French and Haitian Revolutions, ed. Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie (Leiden: KITLV, 2011). Geggus presents convincing evidence that British slaves were aware of the strength of colonial military garrisons during the prolonged period of warfare with France and that insurrections were most likely when the garrisons were reduced.
68. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 260–61; Hunt, “Influence of Haiti,” 39, 41–78, 114, 118, 123–29; Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 124–25.
69. Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 38–41; Hunt, “Influence of Haiti,” pp. 128–30. Hunt reports that in Virginia some ads for runaways said that the fugitive might try to head for the West Indies (243n49).
70. Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery, Kindle Edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), loc. 2522–2555.
71. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 55, 125–26; Brathwaite, Development of Creole Society, 246–48, 251–59; Mavis Christine Campbell, The Dynamics of Change in a Slave Society: A Sociopolitical History of the Free Coloreds of Jamaica, 1800–1865 (Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), 32–33; Heuman, Between Black and White, 33–41. In 1829, the Colonial Office extended legal equality to all freedmen in the crown colonies; hoping to unite the entire free population against slave emancipation, the Jamaican Assembly granted equal civil rights in 1830. See also Childs, 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba.
72. Robert S. Starobin, ed., Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970); Richard C. Wade, “The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Southern History 30, no. 2 (1964): 143–61; John Lofton, Denmark Vesey’s Revolt: The Slave Plot That Lit a Fuse to Fort Sumter (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983); Robert L. Paquette and Douglas R. Egerton, “Of Facts and Fables: New Light on the Denmark Vesey Affair,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 105, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 2004): 8–48; James O’Neil Spady, “Power and Confession: On the Credibility of the Earliest Reports of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 2 (April 1, 2011): 287–304.
73. Julie Winch, “The Leaders of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1787–1848” (Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1982), 12–13, 235; Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 314–15; David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, ed. Charles M. Wiltse (1829; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 20–21; Iain McCalman, “Anti-Slavery and Ultra-Radicalism in Early Nineteenth-Century England: The Case of Robert Wedderburn,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Comparative Studies 7 (Sept. 1986): 100–115. Walker associated Haiti with ancient Carthage and with “that mighty son of Africa, HANNIBAL,” but the lesson he drew from both histories was that internal division led to the slaughter of blacks by their “natural enemies.”
74. Geggus, “British Opinion,” 137–39.
75. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 151.
76. Ibid., 140–49; Geggus, “Haiti and the Abolitionists: Opinion, Propaganda and International Politics in Britain and France, 1804–1838,” in Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790–1916, ed. David Richardson (London: F. Cass, 1986), 113–17. While I have borrowed extensively from Geggus’s masterly studies, I am skeptical about his conclusion that the British abolitionists won the argument regarding Haitian violence. They may have persuaded the public that emancipation in the British colonies would not lead to Haitian-like massacres, but they hardly overturned the dominant im
ages of the Haitian Revolution. In the 1830s, French officials, American observers, and even Thomas Fowell Buxton expressed surprise that British emancipation proceeded without undue violence.
77. Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, 65.
78. See especially Geggus, “Haiti and the Abolitionists,” 117–37; Hunt, “Influence of Haiti,” 166–83.
79. See, for example, The Liberator, April 25, 1845, 67. See also White, Encountering Revolution, 207–11.
80. Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, 45; Pompée Valentin de Vastey, Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, ex-colon français (Cap-Henri, Haiti, 1816), 14. Contrary to Nicholls, Vastey’s text does not explicitly point to Haiti “as the first fruit of a great colonial revolution”; he rather quotes Rousseau and asserts that all Europe repudiates the racist aspersions of the former French colonists.
3. COLONIZING BLACKS, PART I: MIGRATION AND DEPORTATION
1. E. W. Blyden to the Rev. John B. Pinney, July 29, 1859, New York-Colonization Journal 9 (Oct. 1859): 3. Delany had bitterly denounced the American Colonization Society and belittled Liberia for more than twenty years. When greeted with enthusiasm by the Liberian people, however, he dramatically changed his views. See Richard Blackett, “Martin R. Delany and Robert Campbell: Black Americans in Search of an African Colony,” Journal of Negro History 62 (Jan. 1977): 15. It should be noted that the ACS, which had always publicly disavowed coercion, had also come to accept the black emigrationists’ goal of limited, selective emigration.
2. More recent works on the ACS, which have shed light on the movement’s complexity while still taking a critical view, include Beverly C. Tomek, Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Nicholas Guyatt, “ ‘The Outskirts of Our Happiness’: Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 95 (March 2009): 986–1011; Eric Burns, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); Kenneth C. Barnes, Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Lamin O. Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 47