Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [16]
Word of the slave rebellion in the Northern Department and the general unrest in the Western Department had not yet reached Paris when on September 24,1791, the National Assembly passed yet another law. This one abrogated all the terms of the decree of May 15 and threw the question of mulatto civil rights back to the white colonists. Three civil commissioners—Edmond de Saint-Leger, Frederic Ignace de Mirbeck, and Philippe Roume de Saint Laurent—were quickly dispatched to deliver the new decree to Saint Domingue. They also brought news of a general amnesty declared by the National Assembly for “acts of revolution.” Of course the amnesty was meant to settle conflicts among whites, but the black rebel leaders in the Northern Department were quick to claim a share in it.
In fact, the rebel leaders had made efforts to open negotiations before the commissioners ever arrived, writing to Governor Blanchelande, and to the Chevalier de Tousard, a senior officer of the Regiment du Cap; the latter responded, “Do not believe that the whites … would lower themselves so far as to receive conditions dictated and demanded of them by their rebel slaves.”8 Unconditional surrender of the rebels was the only solution that the whites would even consider, though they were in no position at all to enforce it. However, after all the damage the whites on the Northern Plain had suffered, emotions among the survivors inevitably ran high. The commissioners (who did not know the full extent of the disaster before they arrived in Cap Francais on November 22) did their best to calm them, though with small success. Unfortunately, the Colonial Assembly took the position that the commissioners should not be involved in negotiations with the rebel slaves at all, since the commissioners themselves had just delivered a decree from the home government giving the assembly an overarching authority to decide “the fate of the slaves.”9 This controversy over jurisdiction crippled all the commission's efforts to resolve the crisis.
Freeing the slaves of Saint Domingue was not the original goal of the rebellion in the north. According to the rhetoric of the political seg-ment of the meeting at Bois Cai'man, the slaves were to revolt not for their freedom but to demand an end to whipping and other abuses, to gain three free days per week, and to win enforcement of some other provisions of the official Code Noir which were generally ignored by plantation owners. Throughout the summer of 1791, rumors had circulated through the whole colony's slave population that King Louis XVI had already granted the three free days but that the slave masters of Saint Domingue had refused to implement his order. This rumor inspired a plot for rebellion in the area of Les Cayes in the Southern Department, which was discovered and snuffed out some weeks before the mass insurrection exploded in the north.
The slaves who gathered at Bois Cai'man were given to understand that King Louis XVI wished them well and had created the Code Noir for their benefit, but that he himself was being held hostage by evil white men who surrounded him (a distorted but not entirely groundless view of what was actually going on in France). This understanding explains, at least in part, why so many bands of rebel slaves used royalist flags and insignia and declared that they were fighting for the king.
Perhaps a hundred thousand slaves had risen in arms in August, but on December 4, the leaders (including Jean-François, Biassou, and by this time Toussaint) offered to return them peaceably