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By Root 917 0

in the summer of 1791, with the approval of Governor Blanchelande. The petit blancs faction, commonly called Pompons Rouges for the red cockades they wore in support of the French Revolution, now two years under way, had taken over the Colonial Assembly at Le Cap. The grands blancs, of a generally royalist disposition and wearing white cockades to show their loyalty to the king, were looking for a strategy to put the petit bL·nc canaille back in its place. Their notion, wild though it seems, was that a manufactured and secretly controlled uprising of the slaves on the Northern Plain could frighten the petit blancs faction back into submission to the Pompons Blancs, according to the old sociopolitical rules of the ancien regime.

It seems likely that the delegation to Breda included either Cambefort or Tousard, if not both of them. Since both men were very familiar with Toussaint, it is not so incredible that one of them should have, in the words of Haitian historian Celigny Ardouin, “let slip a few words regarding that project for a rising of the slaves; too perspicacious not to recognize right away the opportunity for the future of his class in a general insurrection, Toussaint hazarded a few words in favor of the project; and added that the promise of three free days per week and the abolition of the punishment of the whip would suffice to raise the work gangs; but also, he demanded freedom for the slaves principally in charge of moving the others to action, as the price of their submission to the benevolent will of those who would deign to look after their well-being.”25

Celigny Ardouin goes on to describe Toussaint as being the chief, though hidden, instigator and organizer of the meeting at Bois Caiman, to which he invited “his most intimate friends, Jean-François Papillon, Georges Biassou, Boukman Dutty and Jeannot Billet,” all of whom were, like Toussaint, commandeurs on their respective plantations. Since Toussaint was already well known and well traveled all over the Northern Department, this mission would have been easy for him and would have attracted no unusual attention, though Blanchelande supposedly furnished him a special safe-conduct for these very special errands. “The conspirators met and distributed roles. Slyer than the others, Jean-François obtained the highest rank, Biassou the second; Boukman and Jeannot, being more audacious, charged themselves with directing the first movements. Toussaint reserved for himself the role of intermediary among the conspirators and secret movers of the insurrection: in any case he did not want to declare himself until he could be sure of the success of the enterprise.”26

Though all the historians close to the events adopt it, the theory that the great slave uprising of 1791 had its origin in a white royalist plot has been dismissed and discredited by scholars of the late twentieth century, in part because it seems to belittle the achievement of Saint Domingue's revolutionary slaves in winning their own freedom and founding their own nation. However, if the grands blancs actually did light the fuse to the bomb that blew up their whole society, that is simply one of history's most magnificent ironies—it takes nothing at all away from the achievement of the black revolutionaries and their leaders, who almost immediately wrested control of the scheme away from the original plotters and took it over for themselves. Toussaint, especially, was always adept at redirecting the energy of others to serve his own ends.

Meanwhile, the strongest argument against the royalist conspiracy theory is its sheer preposterousness. The grands blancs had been in terror of a massive slave insurrection for at least a generation. What consequences could they possibly have expected if they started one themselves? What possible advantage could they have seen in the devastation of the plantations of the Northern Plain and the massacre of so many white inhabitants: men, women, and children, all members of their own class? How could they possibly have imagined that they could keep a general insurrection