August 22nd, 1791. North Province, Saint-Domingue. A dog barks, waking the plantation manager.
He tells the mutt to quiet down and drifts back to sleep. Minutes later, there's another noise. He rises and goes to the window, where he then sees that his house is surrounded by the plantation slaves, carrying machetes and torches.
"Who goes there" he calls. A voice like thunder answers. "It is Death!
" "Birth of the People" by HydroCarboM Across the North, the cane fields burned so fierce that the smoke could be seen in Le Cap. The revolt had come with such precise timing and explosive force that it stunned the plantation owners and the French authorities. Indeed, it was so well planned that most of the various factions in Saint Domingue thought that the enslaved couldn't possibly be the ringleaders and they openly accused each other.
White militias attacked and killed several Free People of Color, who they accused of masterminding the rebellion as revenge for the death of O'Shea. Plantation owners besieged the Royal Governor with requests for protection and ultimately accused him of intentionally letting the rebellion continue. The Free People of Color often said that it was actually the Big Whites, who'd whipped up the rising as a way to take control of the colony.
The irony, of course, was that all of these groups were pro-slavery, and if they had set their differences aside, they may have successfully suppressed the uprising. But instead, the plantations burned, Rebel militias moved from plantation to plantation, liberating the enslaved and burning every physical representation of their oppression: cane fields, coffee plants, mills, and refineries. This also meant violence against the people who had oppressed them, and there were a number of overseers and platation owners killed in retribution for centuries of oppression.
Gangs of women found the plantation overseers, who had coerced or assaulted them, beating their tormentors unconscious. But this rebellion was not indiscriminate. Most often, the rebels attacking a plantation had worked there, and it was common for men or women to step in and save an overseer thought to be a fair man, or to smuggle out women and children.
In fact, the scene that started this episode comes from a first-hand account of the rebellion, and the reason that overseer lived to tell his story was that one of the rebels, a man who had been enslaved on that very plantation, stepped forward to demand the overseer safety. Who was that man? Dutty Boukman, who had triggered the rising with his ceremony.
Propagandistic descriptions of the rising, sent back to France, claimed that thousands of white men, women, and children were killed in the initial rebellion. While this image is stuck, it's inaccurate. A commission at the time counted 400 whites dead in the first 4 months, including those killed trying to put down the uprising.
The toll on the rebels ran much higher. Most of them were armed with only machetes and agricultural tools. Only one in five had a firearm.
But they did have other advantages. Many had been sold into slavery as Prisoners of War. Veterans of tribal conflicts, who were adept at guerrilla warfare.
Their raids, heralded with the blast of a conch shell, became infamous among their enemies. Even professional soldiers marveled at the rebels bravery in the face of the superior firepower. Due to a belief that the spirits of those killed returned to Africa, They attacked with a relentless courage, literally throwing themselves on cannons, jamming their arms into barrels and wheel spokes, so the guns could not be reloaded or withdrawn.
They suffered terrible casualties in pitched battles. 4,000 died in the August rising alone, roughly 10 for every enemy killed. But they didn't lose morale.
They did, however, start losing commanders. Boukman was killed in early November. Infighting claimed others.
And as the first set of leaders fell and factions splintered, the violence grew worse. All sides committed massacres. To approach Le Cap, one of the richest cities in the colony, meant passing a wall of heads on stakes, including that of Boukman.
But amidst the swelling chaos, new leaders rose. In the Western Province, near the city of Port-au-Prince, a separate uprising was happening among the Free People of Color. There, they managed to sign a treaty with many rural plantation owners, recognizing their shared interests as property and slave owners.
They dismissed their all-white governments and installed representatives of both groups instead. After all, the National Assembly had made them free citizens with the May 15th decree. They were only good, revolutionary patriots following the law.
Those Big & Small Whites in Le Cap and Port-au-Prince, they were the counter-revolutionary royalist traitors, talking about independence. Except then a messenger came with the news that there had been a change in power and the National Assembly had changed its mind. The May 15th decree, making a small number of free people of color full citizens, had been repealed.
The plantation owners' rebellion had made the Assembly gun-shy, worried that they'd upset an economy that was help propping up French finances. This alliance with the whites was not to last. In November, after a long siege, the army of the Free People of Color finally entered the provincial capital of Port-au-Prince.
Once inside, though the treaty broke down as a personal brawl between one of the Little Whites and a Free Man of Color descended into street fighting that burned 27 square blocks of the city. The alliance was dead. This same thing will happen basically every time the Whites and the Free People of Color tried to form an alliance.
Everything will be agreed between the plantation-owning Big Whites & the Free People of Color, and then the Small Whites will come along and muck it up. And this is when one of the key figures of the revolution emerged: a free black man named Toussaint Louverture. Louverture's background, including any early involvement in the uprisings, is a bit mysterious.
He was born in slavery, but gained freedom long before 1791, staying to help manage the plantation where his family was still enslaved. He was also unusual in that he had no white ancestry, like most Free People of Color, and owned no property. Perhaps this fact, the sense that he was of two worlds, was why he was chosen to broker peace between the Big Whites and the black rebels in the Northern Province.
Because you see, by late November, It was a stalemate. The rebel army held much of the countryside, but the whites and government forces controlled the cities. In addition, a commission had just arrived from France with news that the country had a new constitution, one that granted amnesty for actions committed during the initial revolution.
Louverture helped the rebel generals create terms, then carried them to the Big Whites, and get this! Here are the terms that the generals of the rebellion offered: The enslaved would return to the plantations and the generals would get freed. Yeah, you heard that right!
The leaders go free and everyone else goes back into slavery! See, here's another major theme to keep your finger on: Over and over again, we'll see the leaders of the Haitian Revolution make decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of the movement. Now, it's unclear if the generals could even have gotten their troops to accept these terms, but we'll never know, because the Big Whites, once again, completely refused to compromise, rejecting even these terms.
The only winner was Louverture, who gained major respect among the generals. In fact, he was soon one of them, a fellow general in the rebellion, and like many of the other generals, both of the rebels and the Free People of Color, he settled into living in a large house, giving orders in the little jigsaw piece of the north he controlled, and that's when Louverture began showing himself to be an exceptionally able statesman. On the battlefield, he brought an organization and discipline to his forces that was previously missing in the rebel armies, and his political talents too were exceptional.
He was excellent at striking compromise, bringing opposing sides together, and finding a situation all could live with. While the fighting was at a low ebb, and in control of the countryside, the rebels went about creating a black society, with black leaders, courts, and administrations, which is incredible when you think that they had just been enslaved months before. but this was also a society headed by military officers, with peasants farming whatever land they could.
To buy weapons from Spanish Santo Domingo, the generals often forced people to grow sugar on the old plantations, and at times, even sold subordinates into slavery, a practice Louverture refused to take part in, because the revolution to this point was about better working conditions and more power rather than abolitionism. But that would soon change because a ship was coming. On it were several commissioners from France carrying a newly signed law, granting full civil and political rights to the Free People of Color in the colonies.
Oh, that's right! The government had reversed itself again, going from some Free People of Color having rights to none, to then everyone all in about 4 months. But the Commission also carried orders to crush the white extremist dreams of independence, integrate the local assemblies, and end the slave insurrection.
They came with six thousand soldiers, But they would need more. Because within 6 months of the Commission's arrival, other ships would be arriving in Saint Domingue. Ships from Britain and Spain.
France was at war, and the war in Saint Domingue was going international. Special thanks to our Educational-Tier patrons Ahmad Ziad Turk, Joseph Blaim, and Dominic Valenciana! Support: patreon.
