Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [15]
For the slave states of the southern United States, the insurrection in Saint Domingue was their worst nightmare made real. The tabloid newspapers were full of horror stories, some exaggerated or fabricated outright for propaganda purposes, but many of them true enough. The panoramic destruction of the plantations of the Northern Plain was practically impossible to exaggerate. In Charleston and other slave-trading ports, there was a move to stop importation of West Indian blacks. But aside from the very real concern that the rebellious contagion might spread from Saint Domingue to the plantations of the American South, the greatest U.S. interest in Saint Domingue was trade. Despite the monopolistic French trade policy, Saint Domingue was already a significant trade partner for the United States, thanks to a few small relaxations of the French exclusifsmd still more to widespread, vigorous smuggling. And for the duration of the American Revolution, trade with the United States had been legalized by the French.
There were fifty American merchantmen in the Cap Francais harbor when the insurrection first broke out on the Northern Plain, so it was not long before the United States began to receive frantic requests for supplies and military aid from the besieged French colonists. The official response was hesitant at first. The fledgling United States was short of cash and wary of being drawn into bewildering French internal conflicts. Two years of strife among Saint Domingue's blancs had not gone unnoticed by American tradesmen in the ports. In general, American officials and diplomats were having a hard time formulating a coherent attitude toward events in France and her colonies— understandably, since the most drastic differences between the American and the French revolutions had not yet become obvious. But despite some ambivalence of the U.S. government, unofficial shipments to Saint Domingue soon hit a high enough level to make the French representative in the United States worry that the French exclusif be completely shattered.
A one-way voyage from France to Saint Domingue took six weeks, more or less, depending on the weather. Reaction of the home government to events in the colony could never be rapidly expressed. On May 15,1791, the French National Assembly had passed a hotly contested piece of legislation which granted civil rights and the vote to gens de couleur born of free parents. In July, the colored men in Saint Domingue's Western Department, the area surrounding Port-au-Prince, raised a clamor for enforcement of the new law. Denied, they then raised an armed rebellion commanded by Louis-Jacques Beauvais, who like so many leaders of the Haitian Revolution was a veteran of the siege of Savannah during the American Revolutionary War. In late August and early September, as the fires of the black rebellion were sweeping the Northern Department, Beauvais's troops won a couple of engagements with French troops and colonial militias.
In the meantime, a clash between royalist grands blancs and revolutionary petits blancs in Port-au-Prince had ended with the slaying of the Chevalier de Mauduit, the ranking regular army officer there. His royalist partisans retreated to the village of Croix des Bouquets, a few miles inland from the capital. By then, news of the huge slave rebellion to the north had begun to filter through the mountains that separated the Cap Francais region from Port-au-Prince. At Croix des Bouquets, the grands blancs suddenly thought it best to recognize their colored relatives as equals. A mutual defense pact was struck—the Concordat of Croix des Bouquets—by whose terms the whites recognized the law of May 15, with its extension of civil rights to mulattoes. In the Southern Department,