An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom

Revolution, Emancipation, and Reenslavement in Hispaniola, 1789-1809

Graham T. Nessler

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781469626871
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'America Latina e dei Caraibi

Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution as both an islandwide and a circum-Caribbean phenomenon, Graham Nessler examines the intertwined histories of Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti, and Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony that became the Dominican Republic. Tracing conflicts over the terms and boundaries of territory, liberty, and citizenship that transpired in the two colonies that shared one island, Nessler argues that the territories' borders and governance were often unclear and mutually influential during a tumultuous period that witnessed emancipation in Saint-Domingue and reenslavement in Santo Domingo. Nessler aligns the better-known history of the French side with a full investigation and interpretation of events on the Spanish side, articulating the importance of Santo Domingo in the conflicts that reshaped the political terrain of the Atlantic world. Nessler also analyzes the strategies employed by those claimed as slaves in both colonies to gain liberty and equal citizenship. In doing so, he reveals what was at stake for slaves and free nonwhites in their uses of colonial legal systems and how their understanding of legal matters affected the colonies' relationships with each other and with the French and Spanish metropoles.

Chapter One: I Am the King of the Counter-Revolution

Revolution and Emancipation in Hispaniola, 1789–1795

My lord: If something has moved me, to place in your hands the present letter, it is not for any other end than to manifest the truth, and [to] affirm religion. I have directed these Arms for two years now, and it has been two more years since I have undertaken to detain the progresses [of the] one thousand two-hundred criminals that there were, seeking to transform the entire World; and that without flattering myself I dare to say that I am the king of the counter-revolution… that I undertook a war, almost without arms, without munitions, without provisions, and in the end without any means.

—Georges Biassou (1793)

With these words, Georges Biassou, “General of the Conquered Part of the North of [Saint-Domingue],” opened a letter that affirmed his passionate defense of the Spanish king and his willingness to “shed [his] last drop of blood” for his sovereign.¹ Biassou was in fact only one of several prominent former slaves who ironically helped to bring about the most radical act of the French Revolution through their seemingly counterrevolutionary discourses and allegiances. Indeed, even as Biassou proclaimed his unswerving commitment to serve the Spanish king, his letter represented a demand for greater political representation on the part of individuals of African descent who had long been subjected to servitude and disfranchisement in Hispaniola.

Why did Biassou depict the Western Hemisphere’s greatest slave rebellion as a “war to save my King” and to “liberate such a great King from the tyranny to which he was reduced?”² Why did he and many other onetime slaves in the Haitian Revolution fight under the banners of Spanish royalism against a French Republic that came to espouse universal liberty and equal citizenship? Any answer must involve decoupling dyads that pervade modern thought, such as slavery-racism and republicanism-liberty, in favor of an interpretation grounded in the uncertain and highly complex political context of Hispaniola in the 1790s. Both the political discourses that Biassou and other freed military leaders crafted and the militancy of the thousands of slaves who had risen against their masters in French Saint-Domingue in August 1791 were indispensable in forcing the new French Republic to move beyond what Fernando Coronil termed the “provincial universalism” of a polity that professed the Declaration of the Rights of Man for the metropole and slavery for the colonies.³ The heterogeneous political ideas of those such as Biassou who had helped carry out this insurrection were, moreover, not simply reactionary aberrations from a story of revolution and emancipation. Instead, they represented articulations of distinct concepts of liberty that had emerged in part from the history of the island of Hispaniola.

Less than two years after the August 1791 slave revolt, unforeseen geopolitical and internal events would transform the unsuccessful military campaigns undertaken by French forces aiming to crush this insurgency. In 1793, when France went to war against Spain and Britain, both of the latter powers invaded French Saint-Domingue. In this conflict, all three belligerents attempted to enlist the slaves-in-arms as soldiers and officers in their armies, promising freedom in exchange for military service. In their efforts to win over these insurgents, these powers competed to offer them a superior version of liberty. For their part, Biassou and other rebel leaders who embraced the monarchical Spanish appealed both to slaves’ aspirations for freedom and to the royalist sentiments that many appear to have held; indeed, these leaders posited intimate connections between the two. These efforts helped to persuade thousands of bondsmen to take up arms in the service of Spain. In their attempts to defuse the potency of these appeals, key French Republican leaders on the island portrayed both African and European monarchs as enslavers and as implacable enemies of liberty, juxtaposing these monarchs with a Republic whose Declaration of the Rights of Man now extended to all who lived in French territories. This ideological warfare helped to bring about the proclamations of general emancipation in Saint-Domingue that the French civil commissioners Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel issued in the latter half of 1793.

These emancipation decrees, along with the sweeping emancipation act proclaimed by the French National Convention in 1794, occupy a central place in the historical literature. This has in turn led to a tendency to privilege the story of Toussaint Louverture, who for nearly a decade claimed the mantle of primary defender of emancipation in Hispaniola, over that of Biassou, who never allied with the French Republic. One prominent scholar has argued that Biassou and other freed leaders who rejected the Republic “ended up on the wrong side of history,” as their story “has found little room in the master narrative of the Haitian Revolution.”⁴ Yet slaves and freed individuals who articulated ideas associated with monarchism contributed in their own way to the discourses of rights and citizenship that were at the center of the French and Haitian Revolutions.

From the start of the French Revolution in 1789 to the cession of Santo Domingo to France in 1795, these emerging liberation discourses intersected with political, economic, and social forces that had developed over the course of Hispaniola’s “long” eighteenth century. Patterns of diplomacy between the island’s two colonial regimes and the racial history of Spanish Santo Domingo influenced racial conflicts in French Saint-Domingue, particularly the infamous episode that resulted in the execution of Vincent Ogé, a businessman-turned-activist who championed the rights of fellow free persons of African descent. Then, long-standing quarrels and irregularly enforced treaties between the two governments shaped the Spanish regime’s response to the 1791 slave revolt across the border. Finally, upon the outbreak of open hostilities between France, Spain, and Britain in 1793, the political discourses of Biassou and other ex-slaves contributed to the emergence of radical new political possibilities in a world that had been largely defined by racial subjugation and the reduction of human beings to units of labor—possibilities epitomized by former slaves’ reworkings of the images and ideas of colonialism to create new spaces of liberation and political participation.

Santo Domingo and the Ogé “Revolt”

On 23 February 1791, several men working in the service of the French colonial regime in Saint-Domingue tortured and executed Vincent Ogé and Jean-Baptiste Chavanne. After each victim had taken his final breath, their persecutors placed their heads on pikes as grisly warnings to those who would dare emulate them. In spite of the brute simplicity of this spectacle, it was the culmination of a complex series of events related to the tumult in revolutionary Paris and struggles over the rights of free individuals of African descent in both French Saint-Domingue and the neighboring colony.

Vincent Ogé, a wealthy merchant from the northern Dominguan town of Dondon, was part of the most economically influential “free colored” group in the history of the colonial Americas. Known in local parlance as gens de couleur libres (free people of color), this group encompassed a great degree of economic diversity. Among its upper ranks were numerous planters and slaveholders, while others occupied a range of artisan trades or served in colonial military or police forces. Nevertheless, in the wake of the disastrous French defeat in the Seven Years’ War in 1763, a confluence of forces produced a racist backlash against this group. The most visible and powerful manifestation of this backlash was a series of laws that ranged from restrictions on interracial dining to prohibitions on nonwhites holding public office. These laws had several interrelated aims: to ensure the political disfranchisement of free persons of African descent; to curb their economic power; to weaken the familial, social, and economic ties that many whites shared with many gens de couleur libres; and to limit the latter’s numbers by means of taxes and other hindrances to manumission.⁵

While authorities had passed these racist laws in late colonial Saint-Domingue largely in response to perceived nonwhite mobility, in Spanish Santo Domingo the disjuncture between state-sanctioned racism and relative social advancement by those deemed negro (black), pardo (brown), mulato (mixed race), or another nonwhite designation stemmed from a much longer racial history that was shaped by the early rise and fall of the hemisphere’s first sugar boom in the sixteenth century. Long before the Haitian Revolution, the decline of the Dominican plantation economy, which in turn led to a relative scarcity of capital and white immigrants, had produced a situation that would set the Spanish colony apart from its neighbor: a free African-descended majority carved out lives in the sparsely populated countryside as ranchers and farmers, while the colony’s few productive plantations (along with many smaller enterprises) exploited an unfree labor force that constituted a small fraction, in relative and absolute terms, of that on the French side of the island.⁶

The early collapse of the sugar plantation complex, the relative weakness of the colonial state and the white elite, the success of many slaves in winning their freedom, and numerous other forces forged what Richard Turits terms a “powerful heritage of contradictions” that “combined racial hierarchy and a significant degree of racial integration, racist laws with relatively fluid practices, as well as racial slavery…with a deracialization of certain forms of liberty.”⁷ Over the course of several centuries, a complicated racial order had emerged in Santo Domingo in which many free nonwhites attained important positions in the military, church, government, and other institutions in defiance of laws that barred such individuals from these posts.⁸ These developments did not eliminate racism but rather led to a situation in which, according to Silvio Torres-Saillant, the “social distance between blacks and whites shrunk significantly” as substantial numbers of people of African descent became “decolorized in the eyes of the ruling class.”⁹

This comparative mobility seduced some foreigners into imagining that Spanish Santo Domingo was a relative bastion of racial equality. The chronicler M. L. E. Moreau de St Méry, for instance, insisted that the numerous discriminatory laws in the Spanish colony, which formally barred “freed people” from most key positions and stipulated other indignities such as a ban on freed women wearing precious metals, were now “in absolute disuse.” “Color prejudice,” Moreau argued, “so powerful in other nations, where it establishes a barrier between the white and the freed person or his descendants, is almost nonexistent in the Spanish part [of Hispaniola].”¹⁰ In the late 1790s, a veteran French colonial officer named Charles Vincent likewise remarked that many of the most distinguished residents of the Dominican city of Santiago had “a little of that which one calls mixed blood.” “Considerably wiser than us, the Spanish never hesitate to admit in all employment, good and talented men who are not of rigorously white origin; they even accord the distinction of Don to men of a very pronounced color provided that they possess good manners and wealth,” opined Vincent. Vincent cited the specific examples of Manuel Constanza, the “Black Captain of the Company of Blacks of Santiago”; Diego Silverio, a marine entrepreneur; and Carlos de Rosas, who may have been a signatory to the constitution promulgated by Haitian Revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture in 1801.¹¹

Among these foreign observers of Santo Domingo’s racial order, those targeted by racial repression in Saint-Domingue possessed a particularly strong incentive to paint the Spanish colony as a foil for the rising tide of racism in the French part of the island. In one extended argument against racist legislation written to the French minister of the navy in 1786, Julien Raimond, a prominent homme de couleur (man of color), had contended that the inhabitants of Spanish Santo Domingo did not share the “contempt” that the French whites in Saint-Domingue held toward free people of African descent, who “enjoy in this part of the island [Santo Domingo] the consideration that every honest citizen ought to expect from society.”¹²

As a wealthy indigo planter and slaveholder of French and African ancestry from the southern part of Saint-Domingue, Raimond became a leader of the movement aiming for the repeal of the colony’s racist laws and the restoration of equal rights for the gens de couleur libres in line with the provision in the Code Noir (the comprehensive slave code for the French colonies promulgated in 1685) granting ex-slaves “the same rights, privileges and liberties that persons born free enjoy.”¹³

An alliance forged between Raimond and Vincent Ogé in Paris in the late 1780s, coterminous with the initial stirrings of what would become known as the French Revolution, gave new impetus to the struggles of the gens de couleur libres. Ogé, who had initially traveled to France on business, eventually returned to Saint-Domingue, where he became involved with the efforts of activists such as the militia officer and American Revolutionary War veteran Jean-Baptiste Chavanne to pry open the doors to participation by black and mixed-race men in the colonial assemblies formed by whites in the wake of the upheaval in France. Following an unsuccessful petition by Ogé and Chavanne to the provincial assembly in Cap Français (also known as Le Cap) and to Governor Philibert François Rouxel de Blanchelande demanding inclusion in these assemblies and the enforcement of an ambiguously worded 28 March 1790 French law on voting rights, colonial authorities dispatched troops from Le Cap to suppress what these officials deemed to be an armed uprising. The evidence suggests that Ogé himself did not actually raise an armed rebellion or take on any military leadership role—indeed, he apparently rejected Chavanne’s advice to enlist slaves in the “revolt”—but when confronted by a large colonial force in late October 1790, the 300 men allied with Ogé and Chavanne held their ground in a battle and then dispersed before the arrival of a second force.¹⁴

Following their confrontation with the French colonial troops, Ogé, Chavanne, and their contingent of survivors (who numbered twenty-six according to a 15 July 1791 report by the Council of the Indies, Spain’s principal governing body on colonial matters) crossed the border into Santo Domingo in early November 1790. The idea to leave their post in Grande-Rivière, Saint-Domingue, in favor of traveling to the Spanish colony may have come f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Maps and Figures
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: I Am the King of the Counter-Revolution
• Chapter Two: The Courage to Conquer Their Natural Liberty
• Chapter Three: Santo Domingo and the Rise of Toussaint Louverture, 1795–1801
• Chapter Four: Uprooting the Tree of Liberty?
• Chapter Five: The Shame of the Nation
• Chapter Six: They Always Knew Her to Be Free
• Epilogue
• Glossary of French and Spanish Terms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index