The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (13 page)

For the Western world, as we have already begun to see, Saint-Domingue was a crucial test of reform—of the possibility of elevating
freedmen to the status of citizens without jeopardizing the richest plantation regime the world had yet seen (in 1789 the colony accounted for roughly 40 percent of the total value of France’s
foreign trade and by some estimates was responsible for the livelihood of more than one-sixth of the French
population).
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Since the Haitian Revolution involved the issue of freedmen’s
rights and also became the most terrifying paradigm of slave emancipation in human history, it is essential to review the sequence of events that were later interpreted in such contradictory ways.

Of all the freedman groups in the New World, the
gens de couleur
were in the best position to redress their grievances in a revolutionary crisis. No legal restrictions had curbed their acquisition or inheritance of property, and in Saint-Domingue a small minority had prospered at the cultivation of
coffee,
cotton, and
indigo, which unlike sugar required relatively little capital investment.
Julien Raimond and other colored representatives in France claimed that the freedmen owned more than one-quarter of Saint-Domingue’s slaves and between one-quarter and one-half of the productive land. They outnumbered whites in the South and West provinces and even in the North were
indispensable as the managers of sugar estates. In the militia and especially the rural police they provided the security forces that captured runaway slaves, kept the maroons at bay, and preserved the colony’s peace.

But from the mid-eighteenth century to the Revolution, white colonists expressed increasing alarm over the growth and power of these “dangerous people.” The
French
mulattoes were accused of fraternizing with slaves and sheltering fugitives while also aping the manners and customs of whites, forgetting their dishonorable origins, and aspiring to intermarry with the best white families. As the racist reaction progressed, the
gens de couleur
were prohibited from holding meetings or assemblies, from sitting with whites at meals or in church or the theater, from wearing European dress or playing European games, from taking the title of Monsieur or Madame, from traveling to France without special authorization, and from entering the professions and more prestigious trades. Although many of these laws and customs were not strictly enforced—for example, the colored elite continued to seek education and a less hostile environment in France—no other freedman population had achieved such economic power while being proscribed as a contemptible caste.
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At the beginning of the French Revolution, the white West Indian proprietors and investors who lived in France organized an influential lobby, the
Club Massiac, to defend West Indian interests. The proprietors hoped to prevent a reckless French Assembly from interfering with colonial affairs. They particularly feared that the
Constituent Assembly, intoxicated by the
Declaration of the Rights of Man, would decree equal rights to all colored citizens if the question ever reached the floor. The Club Massiac knew that the
gens de couleur
then living in Paris had formed their own
Société des colons américains
(“American” being reserved to describe colonists of mixed blood, as distinct from “Europeans” and “Africans”), and that Julien Raimond was haunting the corridors of the Assembly as well as the antechambers of the royal ministry. Some of the proprietors and West India merchants thought that direct concessions to the
gens de couleur
would be a way to bypass the Constituent Assembly and to unite property owners of both races against the radical demands of colonial
petits blancs.
But the ensuing discussions between the
gens de couleur
and the Club Massiac came to naught. At best, the absentee proprietors could offer no more than support for future concessions from colonial assemblies.
And most proprietors knew that the white colonists, already in rebellion against royal officials and absentee control, would never tolerate outside infringements on white supremacy. While the white colonial interests were divided by various commercial and political disputes, they were able to join in a campaign to prevent the
gens de couleur
from winning an official hearing that could easily lead the colonies to secession and civil war.
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Although the
gens de couleur
resented the high-handed treatment they received from the Club Massiac, they shared the whites’ uncertainties over the wisdom of consigning colonial questions to an unpredictable National Assembly. For a time some of the coloreds continued to hope that the ministry or absentee white planters would support full citizenship for the lightest-skinned
gens de couleur
who, being farthest removed from a
slave ancestor, had superior claims to honor and respectability, to the status of “new whites.” But by October 22, 1789, when a delegation of
gens de couleur
appeared before the bar of the National Assembly to petition to be seated as colonial deputies, they demanded equal citizenship for all free persons, blacks as well as coloreds.
Mirabeau had earlier challenged the credentials of white deputies elected in the
West Indies. He had not only questioned the logic of counting slaves in apportioning representation but had also asked how the deputies could claim to represent a large population of free coloreds who owned property and paid taxes but were not allowed to
vote. Members of the Assembly were generally sympathetic to the freedmen’s grievances, and their petition and credentials were accepted for future consideration. But the Assembly faced the urgent need to draft a constitution for France and feared taking any precipitous actions that might risk losing the colonies.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Americans 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.”
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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.
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