Freedom
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The Slave Owners’ Nightmare: Haiti
THE SIMMERING PROBLEM of slave defiance was utterly transformed by the French Revolution. In 1789 St-Domingue was the most valuable of all the slave colonies in the Caribbean. The colony’s luxuriant plains and coastal stretches were ideal for sugar, while the fruitfulness of its higher altitude was perfect for coffee. Plantations had quickly transformed this tropical lushness into profitable tropical commodities. In little less than a century since its acquisition by France in 1697, the western part of Santo Domingo (the rest was Spanish) had outstripped France’s other major slave islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique and even Britain’s Caribbean jewel, Jamaica. Half of the world’s sugar and coffee, along with an abundance of cotton and indigo, flowed from St-Domingue. On the eve of the Revolution, St-Domingue yielded more than the combined exports of Brazil and Mexico, and twice as much as the entire British Caribbean. France derived huge economic benefit from the colony, and it created employment for hundreds of thousands of French people.[1]
The entire system depended, of course, on African slave labour. By 1789 about 600,000 were at work in the colony: over the previous century some 800,000 Africans were landed there. In recent years, Africans had been arriving in huge numbers: almost a quarter of a million in the six years between 1784 and 1790. Sometimes 30,000 or 40,000 Africans disembarked in a single year. Large numbers of them were young men – and many had been prisoners of war in Africa, i.e. they had military experience. Slaves now greatly outnumbered the French troops based in the colony, and it was the European military, their offshore navies and their colonial garrisons, that formed the ultimate guarantee of security against dangers posed by the enslaved.[2]
What lay behind these remarkable figures was not simply the massive expansion of the economy, but the failure of the colony’s slaves to reproduce. The traumas of enslavement and months on the slave ships clearly damaged the fertility of many African women. On coffee plantations, men greatly outnumbered women. In sugar, the excessive work and unhealthy locations had a similar lowering impact on fertility, and contemporaries regularly pointed to the extreme work regime, problems of diet and general social welfare. What made these conditions worse was the slaves’ exposure to arbitrary and capricious violence and maltreatment. For all they knew, life’s indignities were endless. Until, that is, events in Paris changed everything – for black and white.
The colony’s slaves lived and worked alongside a white population of 30,000, and a similar number of people of mixed race (gens de couleur). This huge numerical imbalance was much sharper than we find in other slave societies in the Americas, and it revealed the vulnerability of the whites and the gens de couleur. Both these groups yearned for political and social stability, but they developed an oppressive culture, which left the slaves in no doubt what would happen to those who threatened the system – on the plantations, in the towns or in face-to-face encounters.
The colony’s 7,000 or so plantations accounted for 40 per cent of France’s foreign trade and, as French investment flowed in, the colony’s ports – and especially Cap-Français (Le Cap, now Cap-Haitien) – became hives of expansive trade and social life. Le Cap was the centre of an astonishingly rich social and cultural life. The bigger planters and merchants were not to be outdone by other arrivistes in the Americas (nor even by their contemporaries in the homeland) and tried to create a life in exile that reflected, at a distance, the culture of eighteenth-century France. There were the latest Parisian fashions, theatres, newspapers and even a learned society. The colony’s capital, Port-au-Prince, may have been thought of by visitors as a rough, ill-built frontier town, especially when compared to Le Cap, but it still had bookshops, social clubs, a bath house and a theatre for 750 people. The colony’s grand blancs, not unlike wealthy planters in Britain, held themselves in high social and cultural esteem, and also knew that France relied on the prosperity disgorged by the efforts of their slaves. They viewed themselves as ‘fully fledged participants in Enlightenment culture’.[3]
For all that (and like most colonial slave owners), the elite did not regard St-Domingue as home. They lived an exiled tropical existence, which, if they survived, might yield a prosperous return to France. In the meantime, and despite the sophisticated society centred on Le Cap, planters spent most of their time in tedious isolation on remote rural properties. And it was there, deep in the country, that they relied on the company of female slaves, on the generally raw masculine companionship of plantation neighbours – and on the bottle. There too – at the very centre of the colony’s wealth – the colony’s whites found themselves greatly outnumbered and surrounded by Africans.
By 1789, one-third of St-Domingue’s slave population had been born in the colony had grown up speaking local creole, had developed family ties, and tended to occupy the skilled or domestic jobs. The field hands – the brute labour in sugar and coffee – were mainly Africans, from a variety of backgrounds: a plantation of 200 slaves might have people speaking a dozen different languages. Life was harshest in sugar, with its regime of arduous work by day in the fields and by night in the sugar works, and it was here that stories of regular brutality and violence were commonplace (and not solely in St-Domingue, of course). The men in charge – planters, managers, overseers – felt that only the most draconian control could keep the slaves at work and hold in check the violence that seemed to simmer just below the surface. Many properties, however, were in the hands of managers working for absentee planters, and it was in the managers’ interests to maximise production, no matter how harsh the working regime. Conditions seem to have been most oppressive on the sugar plantations in the Northern Plain, and it was there, in 1791, that the slaves revolted. On the coffee plantations – housing an average of forty to fifty slaves – life was different: the work less onerous than in sugar and the management less aggressive.
One-third of St-Domingue’s slaves were owned by the 30,000 gens de couleur, who ranged from freed African slaves to landowners. What made this group unusual was that many of them were prosperous planters, and some had been educated in France. They also held positions of authority (in the police or militia, for example). In a colony dominated by African slavery, the gens de couleur led an ambiguous life. Many had both slave and free white relatives and were often torn between an awareness of family links to the slave quarters and their status as people of property with a stake in the enslaved system. For all that, and despite their prosperity, the free coloured residents were discriminated against, notably by the law. Whatever their wealth, they could all recite a list of grievances about the way they were treated.[4] Not surprisingly then, there was a volatility at the very heart of life in St-Domingue, and even those who has escaped the formal bonds of slavery as gens de couleur harboured deep-seated grievances against their social and racial superiors. But the most persistent and inescapable threat to the colony came, of course, from the very people who made everything possible: the enslaved Africans.
Few slave owners worried more about slaves than whites living on remote sugar plantations where they faced hundreds of recalcitrant Africans kept at their arduous work by threats and by the lash. On the eve of the French Revolution, it was widely accepted in St-Domingue that ‘the good master was regarded as an eccentric who could not interfere outside his own estate’. There is a chorus of agreement from contemporary writers, visitors and modern scholarship that severity was the daily lot of the enslaved. A harsh labouring culture was blended with brutal management and all spiced by random acts of capricious sadism. In the words of Justin Girod-Chantrans, a French scientist who served in the military in St-Domingue, After a certain time in the new world, the European becomes a different man.’[5]
For all that, the French slave system worked – for the time being. It yielded handsome returns, provided a substantial part of France’s overseas trade and profits, employed huge numbers of Frenchmen, and enhanced the material wellbeing of a number of French port cities (Bordeaux a
nd Nantes most notably). It also provided, along with Guadeloupe and Martinique, an important military base in the Americas. This French slave economy had by the 1780s outstripped British colonial production of sugar, coffee and indigo. Whatever the concerns of whites and gens de couleur about the delicacy of their position in St-Domingue, it was hard to deny that the colony was a source of great material wellbeing. Except, of course, for the slaves.
What made the slaves’ lot all the more onerous was the nature of colonial administration in the colony. Anxious above all to maintain peace and tranquillity, French colonial officials inevitably sided with the slave owners, especially with the planters. This involved supporting racial ideas that targeted both slaves and people of mixed race, even those who were prosperous slave owners themselves, while the gens de couleur were keen to be distinguished from the ranks of black slaves toiling beneath them.
Colonial officials sided with the planters’ repressive ways of running the system. Official reports to Paris regularly confirmed the widespread use of atrocities against slaves. There were, it is true, efforts at amelioration in the 1780s, and many planters came to accept that better treatment, rather than unrelenting brutality, made economic and social sense. But French legislation designed to help went largely unnoticed. Like other slave colonies, St-Domingue had experienced periodic alarms about slave defiance, though curiously – and unlike neighbouring Jamaica – it had few slave rebellions before 1791. Much more common was marronage: the escape of slaves from plantations into the wilderness or, where possible, over the porous mountainous border into Spanish Santo Domingo. There had been a mid-century panic about slaves poisoning their masters, and by the 1780s there were nervous complaints about the dangers of knots of slaves in towns refusing to make way for white people, while others retorted with insolence (and even blows) to commands barked at them by passing white people. Slave holders displayed a thin-skinned edginess whenever they faced slave defiance or whenever things went wrong. Sudden death and illness (both of them plentiful in the tropical climate), slaves assembling off the plantations or slaves meeting without slave owners’ knowledge or consent – all and more worried slave owners.
Nothing concerned them more than clandestine slave gatherings for religious ceremonies. They called it voodoo, a name that has stuck in popular memory, with images of ceremonies and beliefs that were utterly unlike any form of Christianity. Slave owners were reluctant even to consider the slaves’ beliefs and practices as religion: they were, at best, superstitious practices rooted in an African past. What we now call Haitian Vodou was a blend of African customs and others developed in the colony, and all mixed with traces of Christianity. In the years before 1791, Vodou played an important role in bringing together Africans of very different backgrounds and providing an opportunity for the emergence of slave leaders. It seems also to have reflected the growing Congolese influence in the slave population at large.[6]
Slaves had, of course, tried to flex their collective muscles long before 1791, sometimes withdrawing their labour in protest or as part of a bargaining for improvement, especially on the Northern Plain. French colonial reforms of 1784 and 1786 allowed slaves to register complaints with government officials about abuses by their owners, but these measures were predictably denounced by slave owners as the cause and occasion of most of their subsequent troubles. Slaves in St-Domingue, like slaves everywhere, ran away from the plantations, mostly on their own, escaping from the harshness of life or, as likely, seeking a loved one held on a distant property. The colony’s slaves also struggled against their bondage in less obvious, more humdrum (and sometimes unrecognised) ways. As mentioned, they went slow at work, they feigned ignorance and stupidity, they undermined the very work they undertook, they damaged property and animals. They also displayed a sullenness that slave owners everywhere complained about. It was, however, a dangerous game. All this (in effect, the story of slavery itself) was only as common in St-Domingue as it was in Jamaica or Barbados, but everything changed in 1789 and the revolutionary years that followed.
In the light of what followed, it is ironic that criticisms of slavery and the slave trade were more advanced and more widespread in Britain than in France before 1789. Though slavery had long been a target of French Enlightenment philosophers, their criticisms had little or no popular support. Voltaire, who mocked slave owners in Candide (1759), was only one of a number of French intellectuals who pointed to the ethical and economic irrationalities of the slave system. Yet even the Société des Amis des Noirs, founded in February 1788, remained an exclusive gathering of influential and propertied politicians and intellectuals. By then, in Britain, by contrast, abolition had developed a nationwide popular base. Yet it was French slavery that was to be undermined in the next year, suddenly and unexpectedly. The French Revolution was to destroy the Ancien Régime, of which colonial slavery was an integral feature.
The political turmoil in France after 1789 had profound consequences for the distant colonies. Serfdom in France itself was abolished in August 1789, but, more disruptive still, the National Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man that same month. Though passed without any thought for the colonies’,[7] it was to resonate louder in the enslaved Caribbean than anywhere else. Deputies from St-Domingue were alarmed to see the Revolution begin to undermine the very basis of colonial slavery.
Although whites in the colony had long resented the role of royal government in the colony’s affairs, the language of liberty had a natural appeal to colonial whites (as had the impact of the American breakaway from Britain in 1783). Now, however, they found themselves in a dilemma. Supporting the rights of man in a slave society created unpredictable and volatile difficulties. The gens de couleur, on the other hand, realised the significance of revolutionary ideals for their own claims to equal political representation. They formed their own political club in Paris, and petitioned for equality with whites. What most alarmed colonial whites, however, were the outbursts against slavery – as well as against racial discrimination – in the political turmoil after 1789. Some even considered independence from France. The whites’ trump card was the value of the enslaved system to the French economy. Any change that jeopardised that arrangement could be rebuffed. When news arrived of a slave revolt in Martinique, the French National Assembly turned its back on demands from the free gens de couleur, their protests in St-Domingue itself were met with violence and intimidation. In this swirl of political and racial discussion, the gens de couleur ‘had difficulty separating their cause from that of the enslaved’.[8]
Prominent among the free coloured representatives in Paris was Vincent Ogé, a wealthy merchant, who had openly advocated liberty and equality in Paris. Should liberty ‘be given to all men?’ he asked. ‘I believe so.’ But he also made a chilling prediction: ‘If we sleep for an instant on the edge of the Abyss . . . Blood will flow, our property will be invaded, the fruits of our labor destroyed, and our homes burned.’
Frustrated by events in Paris, Ogé returned to St-Domingue in October 1790, determined to force matters in the colony. He gathered a rebellious band of 300 in the north in the hope of imposing the liberty and equality he had failed to secure in Paris. But Ogé had also predicted his own fate: ‘If I risk my personal interest, my life itself is a sacrifice.’[9]
And so it proved to be. His rebellious band were defeated and fled to Santo Domingo, but were handed back by duplicitous Spanish authorities. Nineteen were hanged, and Ogé and another leader were executed by being broken on the wheel in Le Cap. When news of the revolt reached Paris, and under pressure from the Amis des Noirs, the Assembly (in a decree of May 1791) granted a restricted franchise to gens de couleur. This infuriated the colonial whites; Paris had breached the racial distinctions that were essential to the functioning of society in St-Domingue. Worse perhaps, the whites feared that this concession, however small scale and limited, was the first step towards the emancipation of the slaves. It could only stir the brew of racial trouble
in the colony.[10] There was good cause to fear the consequences of Ogé’s rebellion and its aftermath. Although that rebellion was not designed to end slavery (indeed, many of his followers were themselves slave owners), it was the first major armed attack to use the vernacular of the French Revolution against the colonial system of racial discrimination.
Frustrated by failures in the colony and Paris, in August 1791, free men of colour rebelled in the west and the south of the colony (where they were most numerous). At the same time, there was a massive slave rebellion across the Northern Plain. Though the two revolts were not connected, they obliged local whites to fight on two fronts. The much-feared slave revolt had happened.
Between 1789 and 1791, while Paris was convulsed by political and revolutionary change, the slaves in St-Domingue had remained relatively quiet. But that had been the case for many years. Whatever the cause, contemporaries agreed that, before 1789, African slaves proved the most loyal, and creolised slaves (i.e. local born) the most unreliable and dangerous, in the unfolding of the colony’s troubles. The answer to this conundrum may be simple: creole slaves, often working close to white people (as domestics or skilled workers), were the ones most exposed to the news and the arguments flowing back from Paris. In towns, on docksides, in homes and taverns, in plantation houses and sugar factories, angry political disputes, careless gossip at the table – all and more caught the attention of slaves close by. News from Paris, gossip that the slaves had friends in Paris (and in Britain), the late-evening shouting of angry planters and merchants about the hazardous discussions taking place in both France and the colonies, all caught the attention and may have encouraged slaves in close attendance.