Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [19]
The letter goes on to demand that all the white colonists evacuate the Northern Department and Le Cap itself; they might depart unmolested if they left the country to the former slaves—”we are only after our dear liberty.” The letter concludes by swearing a third time “to win or to die for liberty”17
This letter was never sent, however, unless leaving it to be found in the routed camp could be considered away of both sending it and not. And hard-pressed as the white colonists might have been in 1791, they were a long way from considering evacuation of the north. By the summer of 1792, the goals of the rebel leaders were changing again, in the direction of conciliation and settlement.
That spring, when it had become clear that the members of the first commission were having no success at all in resolving the crisis in Saint Domingue, the French National Assembly also decided to change tactics. French legislators were inclined to believe, without much other basis than the colonists' propaganda, that the gens de couleur were behind all the disturbances in the colony, not only those in which they themselves took part but also the hugely destructive slave rebellion in the Northern Department. No one was quite ready to believe that the black slaves could have organized and carried it out all on their own. This suspicion was reinforced by Procurator Gros after his release; he had enjoyed a privileged view of the rebel organization and insisted that it was manipulated by hommes de couleur and by free blacks—two racially and socially different groups which were easy to confuse and commingle on paper. So the comte de Guiton, addressing the National Assembly, was referring mostly to the mulattoes when he said, “We are without the means to resist them. Their progress is frightening. So we will have to treat with them; nothing is more immediate than this necessity.”18
On April 4, 1792, the National Assembly, increasingly radicalized and now influenced by an organization called Les Amis des Noirs, a French society advocating mulatto rights and with strong abolitionist leanings, passed a law guaranteeing civil and political rights to all free men, regardless of their race, or parentage, or status at birth. Still more alarming to Saint Domingue's white colonists was the term that all elected bodies formed without the participation of voters recognized by the law of April 4 were void and must be dissolved, pending new elections. Saint Domingue's Colonial Assembly accepted the new law as regards the rights of free men of color, but quickly decreed, on the 12th of May, that slavery would be perpetual in the colony.
On the strength of the law of April 4, Governor Blanchelande toured the Western and Southern departments, where he had some success in reconciling the confederations of grands blancs and gens de couleurthsit occupied most of the countryside with the petits blancs who had occupied Port-au-Prince and the other port towns, often with the support of sailors from ships in the harbor; these sailors were more and more inclined to identify themselves with the Jacobin revolutionaries in France. Meanwhile, the Northern Plain and the mountains surrounding it remained very much a no-go area for colonials of any faction. What the rebel slaves were actually doing up there, no one could know for certain. But they had at least temporarily eliminated slavery in a large swath of territory, creating a sort of free zone that included Dondon, Grande Riviere, Valliere, and the border town of Ouana-minthe on the Massacre River, and they had a wide open line of communication with Spanish Santo Domingo.
In July 1792, a wonderfully eloquent letter emerged from this quarter, addressed by the “Chiefs of the Revolt” to the General Assembly and the national commissioners (though