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  Even if the slaves had not grasped the significance of French debates about the rights of man, their owners had, and they protested long and loud in the colony and, via their representatives, in France. For years there had been regular warnings of potential slave trouble, and a variety of voices had predicted it (though this had been a mournful refrain in all slave colonies). But when slave trouble came to St-Domingue, it fell upon the slave owners with catastrophic force.

  Between 1789 and 1791, slaves had been political bystanders to the growing friction between colonial whites and the free coloured. At the same time, the white population was itself divided. After the Ogé revolt, whites disarmed some of the free coloured (despite their importance in suppressing slave unrest) and they repudiated measures to secure racial equality. All this aggravated the deep-seated feeling among slaves that efforts to improve their lot were being thwarted by local men of property. Just as slave owners were susceptible to paranoid rumours about slave unrest, slaves themselves readily believed speculation that their slave owners and their friends were out to deny them any improvement. Rumours – often ill-founded, partial or simply untrue – became a critical element in what followed. Indeed, rumours were to become a stock-in-trade of Haitian politics for decades. There was no doubt that abolition was on the march in Europe, and the debates about abolition in London, Paris and St-Domingue were easily reduced in the minds of the enslaved into a conflict between their friends and their enemies. Then, in August 1791, Louis XVI fled Paris, was arrested and imprisoned.

  As unlikely as it now seems, the king appeared to be the slaves’ ally. Measures under the king seeking to ameliorate slave conditions had been rebuffed by colonial planters. In a world of transatlantic rumour and overheard gossip, Louis seemed like a distant friend in a sea of slave-owning enemies. On 21 August, slaves in St-Domingue rebelled, claiming they were seeking the freedom granted by the imprisoned monarch. Rebellions erupted in the Northern Plain, with authority there weakened by the removal of a mutinous regiment, and in the midst of rising friction between whites and the free coloured. The rebels planned to kill the politicians gathering at Le Cap for the Colonial Assembly, and launched an unprecedented wave of murder and mayhem. Led and organised by elite creole slaves, tens of thousands of rebel slaves spilled out from Le Cap across the Northern Plain and into the surrounding mountains. Their demands were confused (initially that whites leave the colony) and they made no claims for universal freedom for all the slaves. Colonists refused to negotiate, and rebel leaders were in no position to order a ceasefire. So, the rebellion continued. Planters contained its spread by the most brutal of reprisals, and France dispatched 12,000 extra troops (though these, like so many before them, quickly succumbed to tropical illness).

  Adding to the complexity, free men of colour revolted in other parts of the colony and persuaded planters to make concessions – but resistance from Paris and among local poor whites prolonged the fighting, and unrelated rebellions erupted across the colony. Free men of colour rebelled in the west and south. In the north-west, the free coloured joined the whites in suppressing slave rebels. Elsewhere, free coloured landowners joined the slaves. It was a devil’s brew of racial and sectional conflicts, of personal and communal antagonisms, of score-settling and local vendettas – often under the banner of ideals forged in France.

  Everywhere, the conflict was a confusion of changing alliances between the various groups (enslaved, free coloured, whites and the French military). Freemen, some of them black, fought alongside slaves. In places, small bands of slaves were given arms and used as mercenaries. In isolated mountainous regions, armed bands took on a life of their own and survived like guerrillas groups. But the worst – most destructive, widespread and uncontrollable – of slave upheavals was in the north. Whites fled in terror, seeking the relative security of the towns, leaving their properties at the mercy of the insurgents who torched and pillaged the plantations. Throughout, the fighting and its suppression were characterised by extreme brutality, torture and mutilations.

  Violence flared in different parts of the colony, often at the same time. Viewed from Paris – itself in the middle of revolutionary upheavals – it seemed that the entire colony was being consumed by rebellion. No French government, whatever its political shade, could allow its most valuable colonial asset to be torn apart in this fashion, and even the most unreconstructed of planters recognised that they needed help – from freemen of colour and from the French. But France sometimes stoked the flames. France’s decree of April 1792 banning racial discrimination, and the appointment of new, hardline French commissioners to impose the decree, led to the deportation of whites who resisted. Having purged the whites, the commissioners turned to rebellious slaves and were initially successful. But then, in 1793, events in France changed the entire story.

  The execution of Louis XVI and the outbreak of war in Europe pitched St-Domingue into further chaos and confusion. The British in particular were keen to add the wealth of St-Domingue to their own lucrative portfolio of Caribbean possessions; so too Spain (poised just over the border in Santo Domingo). France herself was stymied: she needed troops in Europe, and colonial whites seized the opportunity to reverse the recent changes imposed by Paris. Spain, keen to grab the rest of the island, offered freedom and land to existing slave insurgents. In reply, and in a desperate move to try to save the colony for France, the twenty-eight-year-old commissioner, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax (acting with no authorisation except his own secret abolition sentiment – and hoping for the best), abolished slavery on 29 August 1793.

  The French Convention, hoping to undermine British power in the Caribbean, followed Sonthonax’s emancipation of slaves in St-Domingue by freeing slaves throughout French colonies – and giving them the rights of citizens. It was, as David Geggus reminds us, one of the most radical acts of the French Revolution.[11] There was resistance in some colonies, but the outcome was freedom for 600,000 people. It was a stunning turn of events: a transatlantic blend of French revolutionary fervour and colonial mayhem, which inspired and horrified in equal measure. It offered hope to slaves elsewhere in the Americas, while petrifying slave holders everywhere.

  This first slave emancipation in the Americas was a stunning bolt from the blue, as unexpected as it was bewildering: its consequences – despite all the subsequent reverses, violence and obstacles – were to be felt clean round the Atlantic. Black freedom had suddenly emerged (albeit temporarily) in the midst of a devastating revolution and massive slave insurgency. The slaves had rattled their cage, and it had apparently fallen to pieces.

  Even before that act of emancipation, the shockwaves from the turmoil in St-Domingue had sent thousands of people fleeing from the colony. Slave violence and the threat of further insurgency turned thousands of people into refugees. Planters and free people of colour scurried to neighbouring islands – Jamaica was only a day’s sailing away – many taking their slaves with them. Others fled to North America, especially to New Orleans (where their expertise helped the subsequent Louisiana sugar industry), Charleston and Philadelphia. To this day, the graveyards of Catholic churches in those cities provide ample testimony to this Haitian refugee presence.

  Wherever they landed, these émigrés were understandably objects of deep suspicion. In the heady mix that was politics in St-Domingue, who could tell an insurgent from a loyalist, a Jacobin from a Royalist? Nonetheless, their gruesome accounts of events in the colony chilled people to the marrow, not least because slave holders across the Americas were primed to fear the worst, and were always ready to believe the most lurid of tales about slave rebels. The refugees had no need to exaggerate: the simple truth, agreed by all sides, was enough to terrify any slave holder. As if to underline those fears, slaves everywhere picked up the news, the hard evidence and the gossip, about what their fellow slaves had done in St-Domingue. Slaves everywhere seemed naturally jubilant about the news of emancipation.

  Within months of the first revolutionary tr
emors in St-Domingue, enslaved people throughout the hemisphere responded – and white observers were alarmed by their reactions. In the Jamaican capital, Spanish Town, a body of negroes’ calling themselves ‘the Cat Club’ met in 1791 and secretly toasted the health of ‘King Wilberforce’, drinking from a cat’s skull in honour of the leader of the British anti-slavery movement. The island’s Assembly blamed such troubles on the rise of British abolition – but their fears were made much worse and more immediate by the arrival of refugees from St-Domingue. By the end of 1791, an anonymous colonist in Jamaica feared that ‘the Ideas of Liberty have sunk so deep in the minds of all Negroes that whenever the greatest precautions are not taken they will rise’.[12] Not surprisingly then, officials and planters throughout the region feared the arrival of refugees – but especially their slaves – from St-Domingue. The prospect, for example, of the arrival of slaves who had witnessed the fighting or, worse still, of black troops (ex-slaves recruited to fight for Spain or France in St-Domingue) terrified officials in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

  As David Geggus records: ‘Wretched slaves yesterday, they are today the heroes of a revolution, triumphant, wealthy and decorated. Such things should not be seen by a population composed primarily of people of color oppressed by a small number of whites.’[13]

  War came to St-Domingue not merely in the wake of the slave revolt but as one corner of the complex conflict that centred on revolutionary France. France had been at war against Prussia and Austria from April 1792: Spain and Britain joined the conflict in February 1793, and both sent armies to St-Domingue hoping to acquire that fruitful colony. It was to prove an ill-fated invasion; though the military losses were never close to those in warfare in Europe, they were heavy. Most were caused by tropical disease rather than combat.

  The consequences of French emancipation were soon felt elsewhere. The French tried to use the example of black freedom to turn the slaves against their colonial masters in the British islands. In St-Domingue, it served to rally insurgents – some fighting for the Spanish – to the French Republic and to confront the British invaders. From this political and racial confusion there emerged a military force of ex-slaves, headed by black military leadership, that was to forge an independent black republic. The most famous leader was Toussaint L’Ouverture.

  Born to African parents, Toussaint became a free man who owned land and slaves of his own. Involved in the rebellion of 1791, he fought on before siding with the Spanish; he took the name L’Ouverture in 1793 – but refused to side with the French. On the emancipation of the colony’s slaves in 1794, Toussaint changed sides and helped drive the Spanish from lands they had conquered. Spain, defeated in Europe and St-Domingue, signed a peace treaty with France. The British hung on in the west and south of St-Domingue, though they were crippled by tropical disease, and were forced to use slaves to fight for them. The real military power was now Toussaint’s army, which consisted mainly of Africans led largely by creole officers. Conflicts flared across the colony, each with its own leader, rank and file, and allegiances, but gradually, by force of personality, shrewd military intervention and clever gathering of political loyalties, Toussaint rose to colony-wide prominence. He became commander-in-chief of the colonial army, negotiated the withdrawal of the British and oversaw the freeing of the colony’s surviving slaves. It was an astonishing story, which established Toussaint’s name as one of the great leaders of the enslaved (despite the fact that he had been a slave owner himself). In 1798, however, he was faced by the need to salvage some material wellbeing for St-Domingue from the ravages of the past decade.

  Toussaint now acted as the head of state of an independent nation, making peace with Britain and the USA, and pursuing whatever course seemed to be in the country’s best interests (even warning Jamaica of a threatened slave revolt there). Although slaves were now freed workers, they were employed as forced labour – with pay. Toussaint persuaded absentees to return to their lands, while ex-soldiers took over abandoned estates, all with the aim of reviving the economy. In the process, a new black landowning class emerged. Bitter fighting continued between followers of Toussaint and of his rival, André Rigaud (another free man of colour), both sides using former slaves, and both sides using terror and mass killings to impose their will in the contested region of the south. Helped by the military victories of his commander, Jean-Jacques Dessalines (a former slave born in St-Domingue), by the summer of 1800 Toussaint had effectively conquered the entire colony. A year later he was named governor for life, annexing Santo Domingo and declared ‘slave emancipation inviolable’.[14] Yet beneath the surface of these grand achievements there simmered a very different story: of military leaders skimming off the profits while ordinary, unpaid soldiers pillaged the countryside for their sustenance and pay. Toussaint had also permitted the purchase of fresh slaves to replenish the labour force. His foes regarded him as an unprincipled, self-serving hypocrite: his admirers viewed him as a pioneer forging freedom and independence from the wreckage of slavery and French colonial control.

  This new post-slavery nation was in a fragile state, dangerously weakened by racial divides and antagonism, and prone to outbursts of violence, notably between workers and colonists. Toussaint had no hesitation in suppressing such troubles with brutality. Once again, however, events in France determined affairs in St-Domingue. Napoleon’s rise to power in 1799 and his ambition to revive French colonial authority faced a unique – and highly volatile – problem in St-Domingue. Napoleon decided both to remove Toussaint and to reintroduce slavery.

  European armies traditionally fared badly when dispatched to the Caribbean but, this time, the French did better. For a start, there was a period of peace and the major maritime powers were generally agreed that firm colonial control was better than government by ex-slaves. An experienced army under Charles Leclerc sailed for St-Domingue with British and American approval, and with Dutch and Spanish help. They took with them many who had fled the colony and were now seeking lost lands – and revenge. Three months of yet more savage fighting led to the surrender of Toussaint and Dessalines in May 1802. The French now promised that slavery would not be restored, and Toussaint was shipped to France – where he died in prison in April 1803. Disease intervened, decimating the French army, and the country once again slid into open rebellion, primarily to maintain racial equality and to resist Napoleon’s desire – contrary to his earlier promises – to reimpose slavery.

  This was now a war for independence, and it proved, even by local standards, especially brutal. When Dessalines inaugurated the new state of Haiti on 1 January 1804 (the name derived from the island’s traditional Indian name), it shook off its colonial past and created a new American identity for a population consisting overwhelmingly of people of African descent. Political independence was promptly followed by the mass slaughter of many remaining colonists: all political and human traces of France were effectively purged. In the words of David Geggus, ‘Haiti’s independence was achieved among apocalyptic destruction.’[15]

  The upheavals of the past thirteen years had left Haiti in a parlous condition. The population had fallen by a third – a decrease of 180,000 people – in addition to the deaths of 70,000 European troops and untold numbers of sailors. The economy was in ruins, plantations destroyed, the workforce decimated, and the educated classes exiled to Europe and North America. A mere generation earlier, the colony had been the Caribbean’s major producer and exporter of tropical produce, and had been the source of much of France’s trading prosperity. Now, at independence in 1804, Haiti was fast becoming a poor nation of peasant smallholders. Yet for all the suffering, and despite the death and destruction on an epic scale, Haiti was the first nation in the Americas to both overthrow slavery and abolish racial discrimination. It was the first independent black republic outside the continent of Africa.

  It was many years before other nations fully recognised Haiti’s nationhood. France, determined to make its former colony pay dearly for its independen
ce, waited until 1825 – and only then at the cost of enormous reparations paid to France. Those reparations shackled the new nation to crippling debt repayments, which lasted into the twentieth century and became a major cause of Haiti’s chronic and persistent indebtedness and poverty.

  Slave defiance – ubiquitous across the Americas – had taken on a new threat and significance (for both slaves and masters) after 1789. What had happened in Haiti provided, by turns, inspiration and alarm: inspiration for the slaves, alarm for the slave owners. As long as Africans continued to spill from the slave ships (to Brazil and Cuba) that defiance would find an African expression and energy that directed itself at local grievances.

  Black freedom in Haiti had been won at a terrible human cost for all the sides involved in the prolonged and complex conflict. For slaves, and freed slaves, the complexities were easily distilled into a simple issue. Black freedom had been achieved by the defeat of a colonial system and its imperial armies. Whatever the cost, and however flawed the leaders who emerged from the conflict, Haiti offered an example: a beacon of hope and inspiration for millions of others across the Americas who continued to yearn for freedom. But it also stood as a cautionary tale for slave holders everywhere. Whatever its cruelties and brutality, slavery was a volatile force; tamper with it at your peril. The subsequent suppression of slave unrest by slave owners, from Brazil to the USA, was profoundly influenced by the memories of Haiti. The determination not to make concessions and to curb slave defiance with an iron fist was the pre-eminent lesson that slave owners derived from the story of Haiti. It proved to be a nightmare from which they never really escaped.