Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [454]
Throughout the north and the west, unrest among the slaves is observed. News of the French Revolution in some form or other is being circulated through the Vodou congregations. Small armed rebellions pop up in the west and are put down by the maréchaussée.
AUGUST 11: A slave rising at Limbé is put down by the maréchaussée.
AUGUST 14: A large meeting of slaves occurs at the Lenormand Plantation at Morne Rouge on the edge of the Bois Cayman forest. A plan for a colony-wide insurrection is laid. The hûngan Boukman emerges as the major slave leader at this point. The meeting at Bois Cayman is a delegates convention attended by slaves from each plantation at Limbé, Port-Margot, Acul, Petite Anse, Limonade, Plaine du Nord, Quartier Morin, Morne Rouge and others. The presence of Toussaint Bréda is asserted by some accounts and denied by others. In the following days, black prisoners taken after the Limbé uprising give news of the meeting at Bois Cayman, but will not reveal the name of any delegate even under torture.
AUGUST 22: The great slave rising in the north begins, led by Boukman and Jeannot. Whites are killed with all sorts of rape and atrocity; the standard of an infant impaled on a bayonet is raised. The entire Plaine du Nord is set on fire.
There follows a war of extermination with unconscionable cruelties on both sides. Le Cap is covered with scaffolds on which captured blacks are tortured. There are many executions on the wheel. During the first two months of the revolt, two thousand whites are killed, one hundred eighty sugar plantations, and nine hundred smaller operations (coffee, indigo, cotton) are burnt, with twelve hundred families dispossessed. Ten thousand rebel slaves are supposed to have been killed.
During the initial six weeks of the slave revolt, Toussaint remains at Bréda, keeping order among the slaves there and showing no sign of any connection to the slave revolt.
In mid-August, news of the general rebellion in Saint Domingue reaches France. Atrocities against whites produce a backlash of sympathy for the colonial conservatives, and the colonial faction begins to lobby for the repeal of the May 15 decree.
SEPTEMBER 24: The National Assembly in France reverses itself again and passes the Decree of September 24, which revokes mulatto rights and once again hands the question of the “status of persons” over to colonial assemblies. This decree is declared “an unalterable article of the French Constitution.”
OCTOBER: Expeditions begin to set out from Le Cap against the blacks, but illness kills as many as the enemy, so the rebel slaves gain ground.
In France this month, radicals in the French Assembly suggest that the slave insurrection is a trick organized by émigrés to create a royalist haven in Saint Domingue. The arrival of refugees from Saint Domingue in France over the next few months does little to change this position.
NOVEMBER: Early in the month, news of the decree of September 24 (repealing mulatto rights) arrives in Saint Domingue, confirming the suspicions of the mulattoes.
Toussaint rides to join the rebels, at Biassou’s camp on Grande Rivière. For the next few months he functions as the “general doctor” to the rebel slaves, carrying no other military rank, although he does organize special fortifications at Grand Boucan and La Tannerie. Jeannot, Jean-François, and Biassou emerge as the principal leaders of the rebel slaves on the northern plain—all established in adjacent camps in the same area.
NOVEMBER 21 : A massacre of mulattoes by petit blancs in Port-au-Prince begins over a referendum about the September 24 decree. Polling ends in a riot, followed by a battle. The mulatto troops are driven out, and part of the city is burned.
For the remainder of the fall, the mulattoes range around the western countryside, outdoing the slaves of the north in atrocity. They make white cockades from the ears of the slain, rip open pregnant women and force the husbands to eat the embryos, and throw infants to the