A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution. Jeremy D. Popkin
members of the group in France objected. Initially, the Parisian spokesmen for the free people of color thought they might be able to make an agreement with the whites, who had organized themselves in the Club Massiac to defend their interests. Representatives of the free men of color addressed the group in August 1789, arguing that all of them shared a common interest in protecting slavery. The Club Massiac members rejected these overtures, however, insisting that only the white colonists in Saint-Domingue could make any changes in the colony’s racial system. Raimond and his supporters then turned to the Friends of the Blacks, persuading Brissot and his colleagues that the granting of rights to the free men of color would be a blow against racial prejudice and a first step toward the eventual abolition of slavery. Until 1793, debates about the colonies in France focused on the issue of the rights of the free men of color, rather than on slavery itself. In March 1790, the National Assembly passed two decrees promising that the colonies would be allowed to regulate their own internal affairs and authorizing “citizens” in the colonies to elect assemblies for this purpose. The language of these decrees did not specify whether free men of color were included in the category of citizens, as many French reformers demanded. The white colonists, however, interpreted the laws of March 1790 as giving them the right to decide on the matter, and they excluded the free men of color from the new political assemblies created in Saint-Domingue.
A Colonial Revolution
In Saint-Domingue itself, the collapse of royal authority after the storming of the Bastille allowed the white population to realize its dream of governing itself. The royal intendant François Barbé-Marbois, who had closed down the court in Cap Français in 1787, was forced to flee the island in October 1789. Colonists chose new local governments and imitated the revolutionaries in France by creating a National Guard made up of armed white citizens. Uncensored newspapers appeared in the colony’s major cities, and local “patriots” established political clubs like those that had sprung up in France in 1789. In April 1790, an all-white Colonial Assembly convened in the western port city of Saint-Marc, at a safe distance from the royal army garrisons in Port-au-Prince and Le Cap. Although some of its members warned against taking steps that the metropolitan government might interpret as a claim of independence, the majority decided on a confrontational course. On 28 May 1790, they passed a colonial constitution asserting their right to decide on all laws concerning the internal affairs of the colony. When news of the Colonial Assembly’s actions reached France, it provoked an uproar: supporters of the revolution denounced a plot to make Saint-Domingue independent of France, and possibly even to turn it over to France’s main rival, Britain. In the colony, the royal governor, backed by those whites who had opposed the Colonial Assembly’s actions, used force to disperse the deputies. Sailors on the French warship Leopard, stationed in Saint-Marc’s harbor, however, mutinied in support of the assembly; they seized control of the ship and took 85 of the white colonists back to France, where they denounced the governor’s actions. Although the National Assembly sternly rebuked these “Leopardins” for undermining metropolitan authority, they were allowed to stay in France, where they joined the Club Massiac in denouncing the danger of allowing revolutionary principles to spread to the colonies.
While the whites in Saint-Domingue disputed among themselves in 1789 and 1790, other parts of the colony’s population were also recognizing that the revolution in France might change their lives. How much the enslaved black population heard about the revolution and how they interpreted the news is hard to measure. Despite the ban on French newspapers, reports about events there circulated widely in the colony, and some blacks undoubtedly heard their masters using the new language of freedom and natural rights. In October 1789, Julien Raimond’s brother told him that blacks had heard that the red, white, and blue cockade or ribbon being worn by many whites stood for “liberty and equality,” and that they had threatened to rise up for their own freedom.14 The number of new black captives imported to the colony reached its all-time peak in those years, with more than 30,000 being brought from Africa in 1790 alone; these new arrivals could hardly have mastered Kreyol, let alone French, before the start of the slave uprising in 1791. The free population of color had better access to information. Julien Raimond wrote regularly to an extensive network of correspondents in the island, telling them about his efforts on their behalf. Some members of this group took initiatives of their own to try to obtain the rights that the new French principles seemed to guarantee them. In November, 1789, a white local official in the town of Petit Goâve was lynched by other whites when he helped the local free men of color draw up a petition on their own behalf.
Matters took a more explosive turn in October 1790, when Vincent Ogé, a free man of color who had been in Paris in 1789, returned secretly to Saint-Domingue and organized an armed revolt among members of his group in the mountains south of the Northern Plain, the richest sugar-growing area of the North Province (see Figure 1.2). Prior to the revolution, Ogé had been one of the most prosperous free men of color in Le Cap: he owned extensive property in the city and was accustomed to dealing with whites on a basis of equality. Ogé was convinced that the National Assembly’s decrees of March 1790 had been meant to grant rights to his group; when he learned that the colony’s whites had continued to exclude them, he decided to act. In his call for insurrection, which attracted only a few hundred followers, Ogé was careful to make it clear that he was not seeking the abolition of slavery, but he warned some of the whites he encountered that he might do so if his demands were rejected. White forces soon dispersed Ogé’s movement. He and a few associates fled across the border into the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, but the Spanish authorities turned them over to the French. After a quick trial in Cap Français, Ogé was tortured to death in Le Cap in February 1791, and over 20 of his supporters were also executed.
Figure 1.2 Vincent Ogé calls on the free men of color to demand their rights. This nineteenth-century illustration shows Ogé, carrying the French flag and wearing the uniform of the French revolutionary National Guard, being welcomed by a group of free men of color on his return to Saint-Domingue in October 1790. Ogé and his supporters, many of them slaveowners themselves, did not call for the emancipation of the slaves, but they were the first group to resort to force to challenge racial hierarchy in the colony.
Source: Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, Cabinet des Estampes.
Although Ogé’s insurrection was quickly put down, it had major effects throughout Saint-Domingue and in France. For the first time, the colony’s whites’ greatest fear – a violent insurrection against the system of racial hierarchy – had materialized. Ogé’s threat to offer freedom to the blacks in order to gain enough support to defeat the whites raised the stakes in the island’s racial conflict to a new level, and the whites’ brutal response made the free people of color realize that they were not likely to obtain the rights they sought peacefully. In the South Province, more than 600 armed free men of color, including André Rigaud, who would eventually become the group’s main leader, gathered on a plantation outside the capital city of Cayes and beat off an armed attack from local whites.15 As agitation among the free people of color increased, some of the colony’s enslaved blacks also began to organize against the whites. In January 1791, a conspiracy involving several hundred blacks was discovered in the Port-Salut district in the South Province.
The impression that only force would lead to any change in the colony’s racial order was strengthened by the violence with which some white colonists denounced the members of the colony’s other racial groups. In 1790 the chevalier de Beauvois, a member of Cap Français’s science academy, published a pamphlet asserting that “nature has created several species of men, as she has created several species of animals.” Blacks, he claimed, were little better than apes, and they could never be part of a civilized society. As for people of mixed race, Beauvois insisted they should be kept in a subordinate position, forced to work for the benefit of the whites, and forbidden from owning land or having whites working for them.16 Beauvois’s pamphlet was one of the first expressions in print of the pseudo-scientific racism that would become widespread in the western world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.