Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [6]
In 1791 what would become known as the Haitian Revolution began as a rebellion of African slaves against their white masters in the French colony of Saint Domingue. Ripples expanding from the French Revolution had begun reaching Saint Domingue two years before. The whites of the colony, who numbered some forty thousand, were bitterly divided between Jacobin Revolutionaries of the lower economic classes and the large property holders, who were more likely to be royalists and who hoped to make Saint Domingue a refuge for the ancien régime. These two classes agreed only on the absolute necessity of denying political rights to the people of mixed European and African blood who inhabited the colony. Many of these gens de couleur, as they were called, had been educated in Europe; many owned property and slaves themselves. Recognized as a third race under the French slave system, this group had begun, on the eve of the French Revolution, to agitate for political privileges to match its already considerable economic power. Repression from the whites (who had fathered this third race) was extraordinarily vicious. The first genocidal pogroms in Saint Domingue were conducted by whites against mulattoes in the mid-1780s. In 1790 a final mulatto uprising ended with the ringleaders, Ogé and Chavannes, being tortured to death in a public square in the town of Cap Français.
In 1791 there were about twenty-eight thousand free persons of color in Saint Domingue, or a little less than the number of whites. Both groups depended for their prosperity—in what had become France’s richest colony and the source for much of Europe’s sugar and coffee— on the labor of at least seven hundred thousand black slaves, of whom over half had been born in Africa. The conditions of slavery in Saint Domingue were so atrocious that the slave population did not reproduce itself—an importation of more than twenty thousand per year was necessary to maintain a stable work force. The fighting of the white slave masters among themselves and against the mulattoes took place within their view, while the revolutionary events in France and Europe were discussed within their hearing. The carelessness of the whites in this hazardous situation can only be explained by their belief that their slaves were something other and less than human.
The slaves set out to prove them wrong. By the autumn of 1791 most of the colony’s vast sugar plantations had been destroyed by fire, a great many white colonists had been massacred, and many more had fled. Those who held on were isolated in the cities of the coast; the interior had become an anarchy traveled by roaming bands of rebel slaves. Over the next several years the situation of Saint Domingue degenerated into a three-way genocidal race war in which each race did everything in its power to exterminate the other two. Meanwhile the European powers— England, Spain, and France—circled the perimeter, hoping to regain a foothold.
On August 29, 1793, the same day that the French Revolutionary Commissioner Léger Félicité Sonthonax proclaimed the abolition of slavery in Cap Français, another proclamation issued from the camps of the rebel slaves in the mountains: “Brothers and Friends, I am Toussaint Louverture. My name is perhaps not unknown to you. I have undertaken to avenge you. I want liberty and equality to reign throughout Saint Domingue. I am working toward that end. Come and join me, brothers, and fight by our side for the same cause.”
Since the fall of 1791, the man formerly known as Toussaint Bréda had been among the armed bands of rebel slaves in the interior—bands that were nominally in the service of the Spanish government in the eastern half of the island, though not under much actual Spanish control. Toussaint was over fifty years old when the first uprisings broke out. Born in slavery, he could read and write, had served as an overseer on Bréda