The revolution began as a challenge to French imperial authority by colonial whites, but it soon became a battle over racial inequality, and then over the existence of slavery itself. The slaves who revolted in 1791 organized themselves into a daunting military and political force, one ultimately embraced by French Republican officials. Facing enemies inside and outside the colony, these Republicans allied themselves with the insurgent slaves in 1793. They offered freedom in return for military support, which quickly led to the abolition of slavery in the colony. The decision made in Saint-Domingue was ratified in Paris in 1794: the slaves of all the French colonies became citizens of the French Republic.

Ultimately, while emancipation had been won through an alliance with the French Republic in 1794, it was preserved by the defeat of the French army in 1804.

The goal of the slave insurgents during this first phase of the Haitian Revolution was not to break away from France. Indeed, at the time it was slave owners, not slaves, who clamored most for autonomy and even for independence. And along the way the slave rebels became the allies of imperial power and helped preserve the colony against France’s enemies, gaining freedom and citizenship in the process.

The people of the new nation of Haiti avoided the tragic fate of those on another French island, Guadeloupe, where most of the population was reenslaved in 1803.

To preserve emancipation, Louverture decided that he must preserve the plantation economy and encourage the return of white planters who had fled. Locked in conflict with ex-slaves who had a very different vision of what freedom should mean, he maintained and perfected a coercive system that sought to keep them working on plantations.

The Haitian Revolution deserves a reading that places the violence in context, acknowledges its complexity, and does not use it as a way to avoid confronting the ideological and political significance of the ideals and ideas it generated.

Abolition in Saint-Domingue took place abruptly, with no period of transition of the kind that was then under way in the northern United States, and which most abolitionists advocated. Faced with a dramatically new situation, administrators in Saint- Domingue had to invent a regime for containing and channeling the impact of emancipation.

The indigenous Taino seem to have called it Ayiti, but Columbus gave it a new name: La Española. On the northwest coast of the island, Columbus left behind a small group of sailors in the care of a local Taino chief. He returned the following year to find the settlement abandoned and destroyed, with most of those he had left behind buried nearby. The chief he had entrusted with his men claimed that a group of Caribs from another island had attacked and he had been powerless to defend the Spaniards. It is more likely that (not for the last time) the initial peace between Europeans and the indigenous peoples had devolved into violence.

Under the encomienda system, settlers were granted the right to the labor of indigenous people in order to mine for precious metals. It was not technically slavery—workers were not owned by the settlers—but in practice it was little different. Overworked, attacked by diseases against which they had no immunity, executed as punishment for revolt, and often committing suicide to escape their brutal conditions, the indigenous population declined precipitously within the first few decades of Spanish colonization. By 1514, of a population estimated to have been between 500,000 and 750,000 in 1492, only 29,000 were left.

Las Casas had, ironically, advocated the importation of African slaves to save the brutalized indigenous population. Soon imported slaves replaced the rapidly dying indigenous ones, serving as laborers in a new industry that supplemented that of mining.

The defeat suffered by the Spanish in Cartagena contributed to their decision to cede the western portion of the colony of Hispaniola to the French with the 1697 Treaty of Rhyswick.

A passenger arriving by ship from France in the late eighteenth century would generally journey along the coast, first of Spanish Santo Domingo, and then of the French colony. If it was night there would be lights shining from the plantation houses and flames dancing in the mills, where, wrote Moreau, “the sugar crystals that are the principal richness of the colony, and which bring us so much enjoyment, are being prepared.”

Sugar was the economic miracle of the eighteenth century. Originally from the Middle East, sugarcane had been cultivated on Spanish and Portuguese islands of the eastern Atlantic for centuries. The Spanish in Hispaniola and the Portuguese in Brazil pioneered cane cultivation in the Americas, and the French and English drew on their examples and on the knowledge and finances of the Dutch in establishing their plantation societies in the Caribbean. These colonies both depended on and drove the expansion of the emerging capitalist system of the Atlantic world. Starting in the seventeenth century a remarkable spiral of cause and effect transformed sugar from a luxury enjoyed by only the wealthiest Europeans to a necessity that was a central part of many Europeans’ diets.

By the eve of the revolution Saint-Domingue was “the world's leading producer of both sugar and coffee.” It exported “as much sugar as Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil combined” and half of the world's coffee, making it “the centerpiece of the Atlantic slave system.”

At first many plantations were worked by a combination of African slaves and white indentured laborers. In Saint-Domingue in 1687, whites outnumbered slaves, 4,411 to 3,358. But by eighteenth century, labor in the Caribbean had been deliberately and obsessively racialized. With the exception of a few managers and overseers, plantation workforces were entirely of African descent. In Saint-Domingue by 1700, the population of slaves had grown to 9,082, while the population of whites had decreased by several hundred. As sugar plantations proliferated over the next decades, the numbers of enslaved increased dramatically; by midcentury there were nearly 150,000 slaves and fewer than 14,000 whites, and on the eve of the revolution, 90 percent of the colony's population was enslaved.

The historian Jean Jaurès pointed out the “sad irony” that the fortunes created in Nantes and Bordeaux during the eighteenth century were a crucial part of the struggle for “human emancipation” that erupted in the French Revolution. Many among the bourgeoisie who were frustrated with the limits placed on them by the Old Regime system were wealthy thanks to the sugar and coffee produced by slaves in the Caribbean. In 1789, 15 percent of the 1,000 members of the National Assembly owned colonial property, and many others were probably tied to colonial commerce. The slaves of Saint- Domingue who had helped lay the foundation for the French Revolution would ultimately make it their own, and even surpass it, in their own struggle for liberty.

Saint-Domingue contained two other provinces—the Western and the Southern. They were separated from the North, and from one another, by high mountain ranges. Only in 1751, when Port-au-Prince—the largest town in the Western Province—became the island's capital, was a passage cut across these mountains. The royal government paid for the road, but slaves built it, carving a 100-foot stairway into the rock. Not until 1787, however, was it possible to travel from Le Cap to Port-au-Prince by carriage.

In 1789, according to official figures, there were roughly 465,000 slaves in the colony, 31,000 whites, and 28,000 free-coloreds. Masters, who were taxed on the basis of the number of slaves they owned, had an interest in underreporting the true numbers, so that it is likely that the slave population was higher, probably near a half-million. (The United States, in contrast, had a total population of 700,000 slaves in 1790.) Furthermore, the towns harbored 26 percent of the colony's whites, who made up only 4 percent of the rural population. A few examples from the northern plain highlight the startling imbalance in the population. In the parish of Limbé there were 300 whites, 200 freecoloreds, and 5,000 slaves, while in the neighboring parish of Acul, where the 1791 insurrection would begin, there were 3,500 slaves and 130 whites.

For the next century slave masters brazenly, openly, and consistently broke almost every provision of this code. As one planter activist, Tanguy de la Boissière, wrote in 1793, the Code Noir was always "judged absurd" and its implementation "never attempted." Indeed, over the course of the eighteenth century, local legislation as well as new royal legislation reversed many of its key provisions, particularly those relating to the status of emancipated slaves.

Slaves were given the right to complain about abuses against them, and severe punishments were provided for masters and managers convicted of murdering slaves.50 The masters of Saint-Domingue and some merchants in France publicly attacked the new regulations. One merchant who owned property in Saint-Domingue argued that they would make the work of plantation managers impossible. "How can we contain the negroes if they can accuse whites?" he asked. "To believe the accusations of the slaves is to open the door to revolt and arm them against the whites." He saw in the royal decrees a sinister goal, that of "emancipating the negroes and placing the whites in chains." An officer in the colony who admitted that slavery was "terrible" nevertheless wrote that the decrees were an attack on "the sacred right of property." By placing their work regime and discipline under the control of people "other than their masters," the decrees put a "dagger in the hands of the slaves." The court in Le Cap refused to register the ordinance, setting off a battle between the local administrators and Versailles that led to a 1787 royal edict shutting down the rebellious court and transferring its powers to Port-au-Prince.

And its major protagonists were not slave owners but slaves themselves.57 The creoles of Saint-Domingue, after all, were a tiny minority surrounded by a vast population with their own interests and interpretations of the world. The enslaved were "omnipresent and attentive observers" who had an astute sense of the divisions among their oppressors and developed a rich vocabulary to describe it. They referred to the newly arrived whites who often served as their overseers as moutons France—French sheep. (The term would be used later to refer to the French troops that arrived, and were decimated, in 1802.) They coined the term petit blancs—little whites—to refer to those who did not own land, contrasting them to the grand blancs (big whites), also called Blancs blancs, or "White whites," whose ownership of property made them true whites.

The vocabulary of the slaves was eventually adopted by everyone on the island, and in turn helped to "aggravate the tensions between whites." In this way, slaves' interpretations of the fissures in their masters' society provided categories that deepened them, laying kindling that would help set the colony alight.

Masters, managers, and overseers were extremely dependent on them. Drivers were consistently valued very highly on the slave market, and could be worth twice as much as a slave of similar age.

And each time a slave was sold, the process was repeated. According to one seventeenth-century priest, one man “who had been sold and resold several times was in the end as covered with characters as an Egyptian obelisk.” Newspaper advertisements for some runaway slaves described the many brands on top of one another. Some Africans, however, had knowledge of herbs that could

For those Africans who survived the horrors of the middle passage, arrival in Saint-Domingue was followed by another torture: branding. Masters marked their ownership by burning their initials into the flesh of their human property. For some, this was a second branding, as slave traders sometimes branded the captives loaded onto their ships. And each time a slave was sold, the process was repeated. According to one seventeenth-century priest, one man “who had been sold and resold several times was in the end as covered with characters as an Egyptian obelisk.”

The Ibo were good fieldworkers but also believed in “the doctrine of the transmigration of souls”; they often killed themselves so that their souls would return to Africa. To dissuade others, planters sometimes cut off or mutilated the head of an Ibo who had committed suicide, reasoning that the Ibo would not want to appear in their homeland disfigured.

One of the enduring cultural legacies of the process of encounter and transformation that took place in the cauldron of the colony is Haitian Creole. In parallel with the different creoles that developed in other colonial societies, this language emerged through the mingling of dialects of French with African languages.

The majority of slaves spent their entire lives doing harsh and difficult labor in the fields. On sugar plantations they were organized into several ateliers, or work-gangs, each under the command of a driver. The strongest slaves were assigned the hardest agricultural tasks: digging canals, tilling the soil, planting cane, and harvesting it.

This task, usually assigned to women, was particularly dangerous. If the slave was tired or distracted, and allowed even a finger to be pinched in the grinders as she guided a stalk into the mill, “the finger goes in, then the hand, then the arm and the whole body except the head.”

Relatively quickly, however, many masters began using a practice borrowed from Dutch colonies, in which slaves were given a small plot of land to cultivate rather than being given weekly provisions.

Some slaves collaborated in the master's violence, driven by the fear of becoming its target or by the hope of channeling it elsewhere. Many other slaves simply avoided it and survived as best they could, following orders and trying desperately to work tiny plots of land to feed themselves and their families, crafting small spaces of comfort and community. Some, however, responded by sowing terror among their masters.

Makandal was a slave on a plantation in the parish of Limbé in the Northern Province, where he lost one of his arms while working in a sugar mill. … He knew how to make it from harvested plants, and coordinated its use against livestock, slaves who were deemed enemies, and masters. In order to carry out his attacks, Makandal developed an extensive network among the slaves of the Northern Province, including those who worked as merchants traveling from plantation to plantation.

Makandal was not the first or the only slave rebel who used poison in Saint-Domingue. But the extent of his activities and the publicity they gained helped set in motion a cycle of paranoia and violence that continued in Saint-Domingue for decades.

On absentee-owned plantations, mass marronage was sometimes used as a form of protest against a manager. On a plantation in the Cul-de-Sac plain in 1744, for instance, sixty-six slaves left the plantation during the day but came back to sleep in their quarters at night, demanding the removal of the overseer. … Two months later the slaves surprised him, carried him away, and executed him. They were condemned to death, but the governor intervened on their behalf, recognizing that their actions were justified by the particular brutality of their overseer. Such strikes occurred with some regularity and often led to the negotiated return of the slaves.

Indeed it may have been the limits on the expansion of maroon communities that propelled slave revolution, since those who wished to escape slavery had to develop a direct and systemic attack against the world of the plantations rather than seeking a refuge outside it.

What had driven the transformation of Saint-Domingue from a relatively open society into one saturated with racial discrimination? For Raimond, the response was simple: sex.

The 1685 Code Noir declared that emancipation was the legal equivalent to “birth in our islands,” and therefore granted the affranchi—the freed individual—the same rights as those born in the kingdom, even if they had been born in “foreign lands.” Still, certain stipulations differentiated the affranchis from other free individuals. They were enjoined to show respect to their former masters, and they could be reenslaved as punishment for certain crimes. These provisions, however, applied only to the individual who had been freed, not to his or her children; they were linked to the person’s legal trajectory from slavery to freedom, and not to their ancestry. There was, in principle, no discrimination solely on the basis of African descent or skin color.

This state of affairs changed in the 1760s. Bagasse began to be identified consistently as a mulâtresse (mulatto) in notarial documents, while the young Julien Raimond was described as a “quadroon”—a person of one-quarter African ancestry. In the parish of Aquin, where the Raimond family lived, there was a remarkable surge in the free-colored population not because of a baby boom or migration, but because administrators began applying racial terms where they had not done so before. Individuals and families were in effect transformed from white to mulatto or quadroon.

When d’Estaing arrived as governor a few years after the war, he introduced a plan to make free-coloreds “the backbone of colonial defense.” All men of African descent would be required to serve in the militia, without the right to purchase exemptions as whites could. At the same time, d’Estaing declared it would no longer be possible for free-coloreds to serve as officers in their units—as Ollivier, Auba, and others had done for decades. To soften the racial discrimination of the plan, he proposed that anyone who had less than one-eighth African ancestry be decreed officially white.

But, as Julien Raimond pointed out, it was racist laws that forced free women of color "to prostitute themselves to whites" rather than marry them.

At the heart of such arguments, and of the discrimination they justified, was a profound contradiction. Even as racist laws meant to limit the power and numbers of free people of color proliferated, whites continued to have sexual relationships with women of African descent, both slave and free, and to give their partners and children property and slaves. On the eve of his wedding to a white woman in 1781, Moreau gave slaves and money as gifts to a free woman of color, Marie-Louis Laplaine, who had been his housekeeper for several years, and to her daughter, Amenaide. Laplaine was described as a "mulâtresse," and her daughter was described as a "quarteronne" (three-quarters white); she was probably Moreau's daughter. Whites were connected to free people of color by a complex web of familial and social ties; men of European and African descent were, often literally, "sons of the same father."

Despite provisions accepting “social distinctions” and declaring property a “sacred and inviolable right,” many planters saw the universalist Declaration as a clear threat to slavery, reacting as if it were a disease to be quarantined. Already in July 1789, several slave women who had arrived in a French port from Saint-Domingue had been detained and sent back to the colonies by port authorities concerned about what they might learn in continental France and communicate back to the colony. In August one member of the Club Massiac proposed that all “blacks or mulattoes” arriving from Europe be banned from entering Saint-Domingue, and in September the club wrote to merchants in the port towns asking them to prevent individuals of African descent from embarking for the colonies.

Masters and slaves shared news about the power of the abolitionists, and while masters sought to imprison and repress those who advocated an end to slavery, many slaves spoke about an imminent freedom. Both groups overestimated the power of the Société des Amis des Noirs, but what they feared and hoped drove them to action.

The alliance gave new energy to the abolitionists and helped to radicalize the demands of the free-coloreds. The cahier des doléances presented to the National Assembly by the Société des Colons Américains demanded “equality for all nonwhites and freedom for mulatto slaves.”

Although there were many limits placed on citizenship during the early years of the Revolution (women, servants, and many poorer men could not vote), the justification for such exclusions—that only those who were financially independent could be politically independent as voters and representatives—could not be applied to the educated and wealthy free men of color petitioning in Paris. The only justification for excluding them was race. For many thinkers influenced by Enlightenment universalism and revolutionary egalitarianism, the “aristocracy of the skin” that the planters were defending was a clear violation of everything the Revolution stood for.

Planters took advantage of such statements—and of fragmentary and exaggerated reports about slave unrest in the colonies, particularly the 1789 revolt in Martinique—to paint Grégoire and his allies as advocates, and even instigators, of slave revolt. One newspaper article proclaimed that Brissot would not stop “intriguing” until there were “five or six children of the Congo sitting in the French National Assembly.”

The National Assembly had abandoned the free people of color, leaving them “facing their enemies” in the colonies. “It was in Saint-Domingue that everything would be decided.”

The execution of Ogé transformed him into a “martyr for liberty” among the free-coloreds and heightened the conflict between them and the whites. Although “nature united them” through family, and they shared interests as property owners, “hate and vengeance” had now “forever shattered these connections.”

Once the term “slave” was replaced with the euphemism “unfree person” the decree was passed. After two years, all attempts to end the slave trade and slavery in the National Assembly had failed. Had it not been for the revolt that soon erupted in Saint-Domingue, the French Revolution would probably have run its course, like the American Revolution, without destroying the massive violation of human rights at the heart of the nation’s existence.

As they watched the balloon ascend, noted Moreau de St. Méry, the “black spectators” could not stop talking about “the insatiable passion” men had to “exert power over nature.” They were perhaps thinking of their own condition. Odeluc may have been a scientific man, but he was also a slave driver.

With these words the marquis de Gallifet learned of the destruction wrought on his plantations by the August 1791 slave insurrection. The writer of the letter, Millot, owned a neighboring plantation that had suffered a similar fate. Writing from Le Cap, he described an “immeasurable” devastation and lamented that the colony, “once flourishing,” now was nothing more than “ashes and rivers of blood.”

Founded in the early eighteenth century by a colonial governor, the Gallifet plantations were so famous by the second half of the century that to describe something sweet, people in Saint-Domingue said “as sweet as Gallifet sugar.” And to describe utmost happiness, they said “as happy as a Gallifet negro” (although the question remains: “Who said this, the planters or the slaves?”).

So, starting with the attack against Mossut at La Gossette, and then the uprisings in Acul, the revolt was set in motion early. The insurrection was more fragmented and haphazard than the plan of the fourteenth had envisioned. The early launching of the insurrection may have short-circuited a plan for the slaves in Le Cap to rise up on August 25 as insurgents attacked from outside the town. The 1791 insurrection, for all it ultimately achieved, might have been an even greater success.

As Jean-Philippe Garran-Coulon, author of a long official report on the “troubles” of the colonies published in the late 1790s, argued, the slaves of Saint-Domingue (like those who followed Spartacus in Rome) had been moved to action not by the actions of instigators but rather by the “genius of liberty,” which had incited them to “break their chains.” If they had been encouraged by the talk of liberty in the colony, and by the “unthinking” statements of some whites, the slaves had no “instigator” other than “the love of liberty and hatred for their oppressors.”

In a few cases, slave insurgents explicitly phrased their demands in the language of Republican rights. When a group of slaves were questioned about the meetings they had attended just before the insurrection began, they declared that “they wanted to enjoy the liberty they are entitled to by the Rights of Man.” The next day several “leaders of those mobs” were “taken and interrogated,” and their answer “was like the first received.”

But insurgent leaders more commonly called on the authority of the king of France himself. This was the case of a remarkable free-colored man who took on the name Romaine la Rivière (also known as Romaine-laprophetesse), who emerged as a leader in the Southern Province of Saint- Domingue in late 1791. Having established himself in an abandoned church, he conducted mass before an upside-down cross and claimed to be “inspired by the Holy Spirit and in direct communication with the Virgin Mary, his godmother, who answered his solicitations in writing.” He repeatedly told slaves that the king had already freed them, but that their masters were refusing the decision, using this assertion to encourage them to join his armed band.

Not unlike the peasant rebels in France during the Great Terror of 1789, the slave insurgents of Saint-Domingue invoked a powerful and distant figure—who they rightly understood might have the power to counteract the assemblies of the colony—against their all-too-local enemies. As Garran-Coulon noted in his report, the evocation of the king was a logical political strategy. Even if the royal government protected them very little against their masters, it was the only protection they could “invoke against the tyranny of their masters.”

Only in the early nineteenth century did a true war of national liberation begin in Saint-Domingue. Ultimately, while emancipation had been won through an alliance with the French Re- public in 1794, it was preserved by the defeat of the French army in 1804.

When they lacked weapons, as they often did, the insurgents used startling “ruse and ingenuity.” “They camouflaged traps, fabricated poisoned arrows, feigned cease-fires to lure the enemy into ambush, disguised treetrunks as cannons, and threw obstructions of one kind or another into the roads to hamper advancing troops.” Some insurgents advancing on Le Cap stood firmly up to three volleys of shot, each of them “wearing a kind of light mattress stuffed with cotton as a vest to prevent the bullets from penetrating.”

What made the “horrors” of the insurrection even worse was the betrayal of especially trusted slaves such as drivers and domestics. … It was a “heart-breaking discovery” to the planters, who would see nothing but despair in the future were it not for certain acts of “invinci-ble fidelity” by certain slaves. Such loyal slaves had received their liberty in thanks, but—and this was crucial—this liberty was “the gift of their masters.” Seeking to hold onto a world that was burning all around them, white masters sought relief in stories of fidelity that provided the consoling mirage that their world could once again be as it had been.

Using violence against a violent system, they shattered the economy of one of the richest regions of the world. During the first eight days of the insurrection they destroyed 184 plantations; by late September over 200 had been attacked, and “all of the plantations within fifty miles of either side of le Cap had been reduced to ashes and smoke.” In addition, almost 1,200 coffee plantations in the mountains surrounding the plain had been sacked. According to one observer, “one can count as many rebel camps as there were plantations.” Estimates of the numbers of insurgents varied widely, but by the end of September there were at least 20,000, and by some estimates up to 80,000, in the insurgent camps.

Because of the indiscriminate killing of slaves by French troops, many who might have opted for the relative safety of their plantations fled to the insurgent camps. There was little room for neutrality. “The country is filled with dead bodies, which lie un-buried. The negroes have left the whites, with stakes, &c. driven through them into the ground; and the white troops, who now take no prisoners, but kill everything black or yellow, leave the negroes dead upon the field.”

The only way to assure a victory, they argued, was to enlist the support of the free-coloreds. “What is the white population compared to the multitude of rebel slaves?” asked Rouvray in a speech to the assembly in Le Cap. “Isn’t this enemy enough, without continuing to provoke the free-coloreds?”

Nevertheless, the assembly rejected the interventions of the veteran officers, deferring any discussion of the status of the free-coloreds until after the insurrection was defeated. Having successfully held the free-coloreds at bay through violence in Saint-Domingue and lobbying in Paris, they were unwilling to relent, even in the dramatic situation that surrounded them. “One day,” Rouvray warned them, “the pitying laughs with which you greet the important truths I share with you will turn to tears of blood.”

In late October 1791 elderly slaves gathered at the gates of their plantations on the northern plain to enjoy a novel sight. Down the road marched a group of white prisoners, flanked by insurgent soldiers who were hitting them with sticks. The "old negroes and negresses humiliated us with their words," recalled one of the prisoners, a local official named Gros, "and celebrated the exploits of their warriors." For nearly a century, escaped slaves had been similarly captured and marched off to prison. Now the roles were reversed.

As the killing progressed, a devastating fire broke out in the city. Eight hundred houses were burnt to their foundations, and the city reduced to a "mound of ashes."

Although a number of free-coloreds, including André Rigaud, spoke out in defense of the Swiss, the free-colored leadership, led by their more conservative leaders such as Pierre Pinchinat, acquiesced in the decision of the administrators of Port-au-Prince: the Swiss were to be deported. "I knew all along that the blacks would get screwed," one disgusted slave in Port-au-Prince exclaimed. He was right: the Swiss were to be sent to the Mosquito Coast of Central America, a place where, as one planter wrote, "even the devil couldn't survive." In fact, though, they suffered a worse fate. The captain who was supposed to bring them to the Mosquito Coast tried, and failed, to sell them in Belize, then dumped them along the shore of Jamaica. The British, alarmed at the prospect of having such slaves in their colony, shipped them back to Saint-Domingue. There, imprisoned in a boat in a remote harbor under the watch of French soldiers, sixty were executed, and most of the rest died of sickness and starvation.

The "citizens of color" presented themselves as defenders of the National Assembly, and the whites as rebels against its authority. They demanded the "literal execution of all the points and articles of the decrees and instructions of the National Assembly," insisting, as Ogé had the year before, that these had granted them political rights. Since they had been illegally excluded from voting, furthermore, they declared that all the assemblies then in existence were illegitimate and must be replaced through new, racially integrated elections. Whites in the region had been furiously resisting any grant of political rights to free-coloreds for years, but with slave revolt looming to the north, times had changed. The Port-au-Prince delegates accepted all the free-coloreds' demands.

To accept the insurrection as an "act of revolution" was, this deputy recognized, to legitimize it. It meant defining their struggle as politics rather than as "crime," and recognizing them as revolutionaries rather than as "brigands." If amnesty was granted, slavery would never be secure again.

But they also threatened that if their proposals were refused, "a horrible carnage" might ensue, including the death of "the white prisoners, and white women."27 The planter-dominated assembly, however, refused to deal with "rebel negroes." Speaking as if they were still powerful masters, they told the insurgents that if they returned to their plantations and showed themselves to be repentant, they might be forgiven. Tousard, who had been approached individually by the insurgents, responded in a similar vein: "Do not believe that the whites, and especially the members of an assembly of representatives from the colony, would lower themselves so far as to receive conditions dictated and demanded of them by their rebel slaves." He demanded, before any negotiation could take place, a complete end to hostilities, the release of all prisoners, the return of all plantation slaves to their plantations, the disarmament of all "negroes," and the surrender of all their weapons. As one of the commissioners noted months later, a major opportunity to end the slave insurrection was lost.

In the end, although the prisoners were exchanged as planned, the negotiations broke down soon afterward. The September 24 decree made it difficult for the commissioners who brought it to override the decisions of the assembly, which technically controlled “internal” affairs in the colony. No deal materialized. If it had, it might in any case have provoked open hostilities between the “multitude” of insurgents and their leaders.

The argument about free-coloreds’ political rights, as Robin Blackburn notes, “had been transformed by the sight of the smoke rising from burnt-out plantation buildings and cane fields.”

On April 4, 1792, the National Assembly declared: “the hommes de couleur and the nègres libres must enjoy, along with the white colons, equality of political rights.” They would be allowed to vote in local elections and be eligible for all positions if they had met the financial criteria for “active” citizenship. The decree was presented as a way of responding to the “the uprising of the slaves”; it noted that the “unity” of citizens was “the only thing that can preserve their property from pillage and fire.”

In a letter they wrote several months later to Mauger, a group of other slaves from the plantation declared they were repentant about what they had done. “All the subjects in Saint-Domingue have felt the loss of reason,” they noted. But at the same time they justified their behavior, describing how the old manager had “tyrannized” them, and pointing, as Philipeau had years before, to the financial losses she suffered as proof of this. “We are slaves and your subjects, and we give ourselves over to work as we should, but humanity must interest itself in our fate.”

It was groups of whites and freecoloreds—many of them plantation owners—who laid the foundation for this expansion of slave revolution by arming slaves to fight alongside them in their violent battles against one another.

Still, a precedent had been set, one that in the words of one contemporary provided a “dangerous example for all thinking blacks”: insurrection and war against whites could lead to an officially sanctioned freedom.

The whites balked at any concessions, but when Armand threatened to attack Les Cayes and burn the city down, the Provincial Assembly offered to grant freedom to several hundred slaves.19 The freedom papers were signed by Rigaud and the Provincial Assembly, and some slaves were suspicious of their validity because they had not been signed by their masters. Furthermore, freedom was granted only to those who had been armed by free-coloreds, and not to those who had been armed by whites or who had risen up independently. Only a little more than half of the eligible 700 accepted the offer. The others stayed at Platons, trusting their weapons rather than the papers offered to guarantee the freedom they had claimed for themselves.

Jean-François and Biassou, who in late 1791 had negotiated for a small number of emancipations and limited reforms in slavery, joined with a young leader named Charles Belair and issued a letter to the Colonial Assembly and the commissioners. The French, they pointed out, had "formally sworn" to follow the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This declaration, they continued, pronounced that "men are born free and equal in rights" and that their "natural rights were liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression." In resisting slavery, then, the insurgents were clearly "within their rights" as stipulated in the Declaration. Nevertheless, there were French officials who had "crossed the oceans" to combat them. In place of such hypocritical behavior, the insurgents suggested an alternative. They would lay down their arms if two major demands were met: "general liberty for all men retained in slavery" and a "general amnesty for the past." The leaders would then oversee the return of the insurgents to the plantations, where they would go back to work not as slaves but as laborers receiving a yearly salary.

Their actions in Saint-Domingue would show a remarkable courage and commitment to those radical ideals. But the transformation they oversaw in the colony was determined less by what they brought from Europe than by their encounter with the power and political vision of the slave insurgents who had begun their war for freedom in 1791.

Sonthonax declared that the colonial assemblies were the only bodies with "the right to rule on the lot of the slaves" and that slavery was "necessary to the cultivation and prosperity of the colonies." It was neither his nor the National Assembly's intention to attack the rights of the planters in this regard. (Several months later, in a private letter to Brissot, Sonthonax noted his opposition to any sudden emancipation, which would "undoubtedly lead to the massacre of all the whites.")

Though wounded by slave insurrection and internal warfare, Saint- Domingue remained an extremely valuable colony. But given the difficulties of colonial warfare and the susceptibility to disease of European troops, both Spanish and English military leaders understood that the best way—perhaps the only way—to conquer Saint-Domingue was to take advantage of the internal dissension there and to rally part of the population to their side.

In late February 1793 a group of French planters in London drew up a detailed proposal offering to transfer their allegiance to the British government in return for protection and a suspension of debts. … It seemed to many that the French Republic, besieged by the great powers of Europe, was doomed, and that therefore British control would be temporary, with the colony returned to France once the monarchy was restored there.

But what truly tipped the balance in favor of British intervention for many planters was the fear of slave liberation. … Turning to the enemy was a reasonable and a pragmatic choice for the planters. In the end, however, instead of saving slavery, it created the conditions for its final destruction. In making themselves traitors to the Republic, they opened the way for slaves to become citizens and defenders of France. The planters pushed the beleaguered Republican commissioners to find new allies. Like the Spanish, the French turned to the rebel slaves.

The descent of these new recruits into the town turned the tide of the battle. Outnumbered, Galbaud’s followers retreated to their ships. As the Republic’s new allies spread through the city, looting and burning continued. … They would settle in towns like Philadelphia and Charleston, and many would never return to Saint- Domingue.

“I am the subject of three kings: of the king of Congo, master of all the blacks; of the King of France, who represents my father; of the king of Spain, who represents my mother,” he announced. Invoking the biblical magi, he wrote: “These three kings are the descendants of those who, led by a star, came to adore God made man.” If he “went over to the Republic,” he concluded, he might be “forced to make war against my brothers, the subjects of these three kings to whom I have promised loyalty.”

Finally, on August 29, when Sonthonax issued a decree that began “Men are born and live free and equal in rights,” all who were “currently enslaved” in the Northern Province were declared free. They would “enjoy all the rights attached to the quality of French citizenship.” Slavery had been abolished in the richest region of Saint-Domingue, on the plains out of which the revolt of 1791 had emerged, in the mountains that had served as “boulevards of liberty” to the insurgents.

Perhaps the most radical part of their proclamations was the granting not just of liberty but also of citizenship to the slaves. The new order was, in principle, to be based on uncompromising equality. Race was to have no l i b e r t y ’ s l a n d 165 place within it. This, too, was a dramatic challenge, not only to the pathologically stratified society of Saint-Domingue, but to the forms of democracy that reigned in the Americas and in Europe. The promise of 1793—a transracial citizenship in which ex-slaves and ex-masters would live together as political equals—was a great step forward, indeed in many ways out of its time.

When, in February, Saint-Domingue planters in London had offered to hand over Saint-Domingue to the British, they proposed that propertied free people of color retain “the same rights as the whites.” … This initial proposition for equality was “whittled down,” however, and the articles of capitulation agreed upon in September by Saint-Domingue planter representatives and the British stipulated that free-coloreds would be given “all the rights given to this class in the English colonies.” This was a major step backward from the full equality they currently enjoyed.

When he joined in the insurrection in 1791, Toussaint was already a free man. He had been born in slavery just outside Le Cap on a plantation owned by the Bréda family. He worked as a coachman and took care of livestock on the plantation. Sometime in the 1770s the plantation manager, Bayon de Libertat, emancipated Toussaint. Within a few years Toussaint had acquired his own slave, an African-born man named Jean-Baptiste, whom he freed in 1777. Toussaint tried his hand at agriculture, renting a small coffee plantation near the town.

Perhaps, though, rather than tracing its origin to the comment of a white administrator, it is safer to assume that the man who ultimately made it famous chose it for himself and that, with “its cryptic connotations of a new beginning,” it had a particular, still hidden, meaning for him.

Louverture’s extensive correspondence allows us to explore his actions and ideals. These letters were not written by his hand. Indeed, Lacroix recalled that he “spoke French poorly” and often turned to creole in communicating his ideas. “Nevertheless a divine instinct enlightened him about the value of words” in French. He kept his secretaries working constantly, with several of them writing different versions of a letter until they had found “the turn of phrase that was the appropriate expression of his thought.”

In fact, however, there simply is no concrete trace of what he put forth in 1793. All we know is that there was, in 1793, no reconciliation. It would be another year before Laveaux and Louverture would become allies instead of enemies.

Louverture had good reasons to be suspicious of the solidity of the Republic and its policy of emancipation. Sonthonax's hold on the Northern Province was tenuous, and, like many others in mid-1793, Louverture probably thought that the French Republic was heading toward defeat in Europe as well. There was no reason to join the losing side.

The same boat that had carried the official news of the abolition of slavery to Saint-Domingue had also, ironically, brought an order for the commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel to report back to Paris. There they would have to face charges levied by exiled planters who were set on taking revenge against them. For Sonthonax, a "more curious mixture of triumph and humiliation could scarcely be imagined." His actions in Saint- Domingue had been vindicated by the Convention, but he was being called back to stand trial in front of the "aristocrats of the skin" whose power he and Polverel had destroyed by proclaiming emancipation.

The defeated Jean-François took a curious revenge, one that reflected the unraveling of Spanish designs on Saint-Domingue. In the town of Fort- Dauphin, while an "immobile" Spanish garrison looked on, he had his troops slaughter 700 of the French planters who had rallied to the Spanish side. The brutal act made clear that the alliance the Spanish had tried to build between exiled white planters and black auxiliaries drawn from slave insurgents was untenable.

To take the town, he set in motion a complicated ruse. In mid-August he announced to the British officer Brisbane that he intended to surrender, and had two of his loyal officers go over to the other side with their troops. They were in fact infiltrators whose mission was to "spread disaffection" within the British camp. Having gained the trust of Brisbane, Louverture's agents turned on him and nearly managed to assassinate him.

In October Jean-François and Biassou attacked troops under Moïse's command. Louverture rushed to support him and, leading troops crying "Long live the Republic!" managed to repel the attack.

In June 1795, across the Atlantic, a defeated Spain signed the Treaty of Bâle with France. One of the articles ceded Spanish Santo Domingo to the French. Although they would not act on this cession—it would be Louverture himself who would finally occupy the Spanish half of the island, and only in 1800—the fighting between the two colonies was to cease.

The British sought to recruit Spain's abandoned auxiliaries, promising them freedom, and a few accepted and continued to oppose the Republicans under a new banner. Biassou "tried on the red jacket the British sent," and seems to have been tempted to continue fighting Louverture. Under the British, however, he would have had to fight under the command of white officers, and would have had much less autonomy than he had under the Spanish. Ultimately Biassou, Jean-François, and many other officers among the auxiliaries chose instead to leave their homeland under the protection of the Spanish, who resettled them throughout their empire.

From the beginning of the insurrection, many slave insurgents had issued a demand for three free days a week for the slaves. In the wake of Polverel's late-1793 emancipation decree, which had maintained the sixday work week of slavery, many slaves had demanded they be given at least two days a week, rather than just one, to cultivate their own plots.

Polverel sensed that this was an important, and potentially explosive, issue. He gave plantation workers the choice between a six-day and a five-day work week, but provided a substantial incentive for them to choose the former: on plantations where workers chose a six-day work week, they would receive one-third of the plantation's production. If they chose to work five days per week, their portion would be cut in half, to one-sixth. It was a dramatic difference for one day a week less of work. But the laborers on several plantations—again led by women—nevertheless chose more free time and less pay. They had more faith in the revenue they generated themselves from their garden plots than in the salaries they were promised from plantation managers. … Two women laborers refused their manager's request that they work at night, announcing that if anyone worked in the cane fields after dark, it would be he.

Gouly's racism was nothing unique; it was part of a proslavery tradition that would haunt the Atlantic world for a long time to come. What was unique was the presence, at the heart of France's government, of a former slave who could counter these assertions through his words and his very presence.

In late 1795 the tensions between Dieudonné and Rigaud and Bauvais reached a breaking point. Dieudonné complained of their discrimination against black officers, pointing out that there were none in the towns under their command. Fed up, he opened negotiations with the British in Portau-Prince. During the previous years his army had besieged the city by damming up the streams that brought water from the mountains to the city. Now, as a goodwill gesture, his troops let the water flow down once again.

Louverture sent two emissaries to carry this letter to Dieudonné. He also gave them secret instructions: if Dieudonné was unwilling to come over to their side, they should encourage his followers to rise up against him. As Louverture reported with satisfaction to Laveaux days later, his plan worked beautifully. Dieudonné refused Louverture's entreaty, but one of his lieutenants, Laplume, led an uprising that brought the several thousand troops who followed him to the Republican side. Dieudonné was imprisoned and died soon afterward.

The combined threat of Pierre Michel's nearby troops and the imminent arrival of Louverture sowed fear among the rebels in Le Cap. On March 22 they released Laveaux and Perroud, and Villatte fled. Six days later Louverture marched into Le Cap at the head of a large troop.

In August 1796 Louverture had written to Laveaux, whom he addressed (as he often did) as "my father," that he worried that some "unfortunate event" might befall the Frenchman and his family in the "unhappy land" of Saint-Domingue. He suggested a solution: Laveaux could be elected as a deputy for the colony and return to his "true homeland." Louverture and "all his brothers" would have a "zealous defender" of their cause in Paris, since, among France's many men, Laveaux was the most steadfast "friend of the blacks." Laveaux agreed, and Louverture announced that he would send "trustworthy men" to convince the electors that Laveaux's election would assure the "happiness of the blacks," though he did not specify which methods of pressure they would use. "You will be elected," Louverture announced confidently, and correctly. Laveaux soon left for Paris. Most have interpreted Louverture's support of Laveaux's candidacy as a cynical ploy to rid the colony of a political competitor. Although this may be true, it is worth noting that Laveaux never complained about Louverture's actions and that, once in Paris, he did precisely what he had been asked to do, mounting a spirited—and necessary—defense of emancipation.

The renting of abandoned plantations therefore incited the "transfer of colonial property" and began a "radical social revolution": it "gave birth to a new property-owning class, and therefore a new managerial class" made up of individuals of African descent. The conflict over plantation labor thus grew more complicated, for it now often involved a struggle between ex-slave workers and ex-slave managers and owners. The seeds of new kinds of social conflict that would haunt postindependence Haiti had been planted.

If Louverture's accusations that Sonthonax advocated independence were true, perhaps Sonthonax saw—prophetically, as it turned out—that with such enemies consolidating their power in France, in the end the only way to preserve the Rights of Man in Saint-Domingue would be for the ex-slaves to proclaim independence. Louverture seems to have used a different, more subtle, tactic. He offered up Sonthonax as a sacrifice to liberty: by handing him over to the planters, he hoped to sate them for a while.

Louverture wrote an impassioned response to Vaublanc's speech. If the ex-slaves of Saint-Domingue were ignorant, Louverture argued, it was former slave owners like Vaublanc who were to blame. Furthermore, lack of education did not signify an incapacity for moral and political activity. "Are only civilized people capable of distinguishing between good and evil, of having notions of charity and justice?" The "men of Saint-Domingue" had little education, but they did not deserve to be "classed apart from the rest of mankind" and "confused with animals."

Louverture predicted that calls for limits on freedom, which inevitably raised fears of a return to the old order, would set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating the very defiance and rebellion they were meant to destroy.

Moreover, he warned, any project to reestablish the old order would require a massive army, for the people of Saint-Domingue would have no choice but to “defend the liberty that the constitution guarantees,” even if it meant fighting France itself. Would not the French take up arms if their freedom was threatened? What would the white planter Vaublanc do, Louverture wondered, if he was, “in his turn, reduced to slavery”? “Would he endure without complaint the insults, the miseries, the tortures, the whippings? And if he had the good fortune to recover his liberty, would he listen without shuddering to the howls of those who wished to tear it from him?” Defending freedom, Louverture suggested, was a universal and inalienable right. And those who fought for it in Saint-Domingue would have little choice but to win, or to die trying. Louverture reminded the French government that there were maroons in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica who had forced the English to grant them “natural rights.”

In his November speech Laveaux had predicted that under the rule of Louverture, Saint-Domingue would soon be as “prosperous as it was in 1788,” cultivated by “hands forever freed from slavery.” To some extent he was right. Louverture would soon bring the imperial war for Saint- Domingue to a close, and in the next years oversee an impressive rebuilding of the economy. But there would not be peace in Saint-Domingue.

Laveaux argued, however, that those who had been “wrenched from their native country and transported to Saint-Domingue” should not be considered foreigners. Because they had been taken across the Atlantic against their will, the colony became a “new place of birth.” How could planters—who had “fertilized their sugar plantations” with the work of black men, having stolen them from their wives, children, and homeland, and who had “fattened” their fields with the “corpses of their predecessors”—have the audacity to consider these men foreigners? These were the men who had made the colony grow through their labor. “They have therefore done more for France than all the French who have settled in the islands.”

Indeed, Laveaux suggested, laying out perhaps for the first time the argument for reparations for slavery, the plantation workers might well say: “Now that the laws have given us back to ourselves, now that, following the example of the French of Europe, we have conquered our liberty, we demand payment for all the time we worked for you, and damages for all the bad treatment we suffered.”

Hédouville’s mission, meant to bring peace, prosperity, and metropolitan control to the colony, instead helped trigger a brutal war and paved the way for the final step in Louverture’s vertiginous ascent.

General Maitland knew of Hédouville’s arrival in the colony, but he also knew that although the agent had the “paper authority,” it was Louverture who held the real power.

General Maitland knew of Hédouville’s arrival in the colony, but he also knew that although the agent had the “paper authority,” it was Louverture who held the real power. He therefore approached Louverture, rather than Hédouville, as he began to negotiate the British withdrawal.

In July Hédouville ordered all cultivators to sign three-year contracts with those in charge of the plantations to which they were "attached." Louverture would later write that many in Saint-Domingue were surprised to see that the principles of Vaublanc, defeated in Paris, were nevertheless being applied in Saint-Domingue. But initially Louverture seems to have approved of the agent's regulations.

Louverture had kept control over the negotiations with the British for a very specific reason. He wanted them to withdraw from Saint-Domingue, but he also wanted their help in rebuilding the colony's economy. Even as he negotiated the withdrawal of the British with Maitland, therefore, he signed a secret treaty with the British general. Louverture promised not to attack or encourage sedition in Jamaica, and in return Maitland agreed to end the British blockade of the island. It was a bold step. France and Britain were still at war, and yet with this agreement—along with a second he signed in 1799 expanding its provisions—he was promising peace between French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica. And he was agreeing to—indeed encouraging—trade between British merchants and the French Caribbean's major colony. Louverture was making sure that he would have a mechanism to export the coffee and sugar it produced and a source for what it needed to survive. But he was also doing more. He was preparing for the possibility of open conflict with the French government.

Publicly accepting such a provision would have been a provocation to the French government, for it was essentially a declaration of independence: even as armed U.S. and British ships would be entering the ports, French ships arriving from elsewhere would be turned back. But, as Stevens assured Secretary of State Pickering in May 1799, Louverture "privately" agreed to this demand. During the next year, of the nearly 1,800 ships that came in and out of Saint-Domingue for trade, only 15 were French, while most of the rest were British and North American. The trade with the United States was particularly important to Louverture because, unlike the British, whose merchants were primarily supplying provisions, the merchants from the north were a source of guns and ammunition.

Like the planters, he envisioned a thriving plantation economy. But unlike them, he sought to construct an order without slavery. In a curious reversal of the situation in 1793 and 1794, when the planters sought autonomy to save slavery, Louverture sought it in order to save emancipation.

For many planters, the tables were turned in a particularly distressing way, for they found their plantations in the hands of one of their former slaves. As they waited for the local bureaucracy to consider their requests to take back their lands, they were at the mercy of those they had once owned.

The details Descourtilz provided, however, tell a different story. Plantation workers enticed Lachicotte and Descourtilz to the plantation by telling them that they wished to help them regain the plantation, but when they arrived they found that they had been tricked: they were bundled off and presented to local authorities, accused of stirring up trouble on the plantation. Philippe was steadfast in holding on to the plantation, but also quite hospitable to the two interlopers. Though he did not grant them any particular privileges, he did allow them to stay on the plantation and even lent them his carriage for their errands. He seemed to be willing to have them return as residents, just not as masters.

On the plains of Le Cap and throughout the colony, a new kind of life was taking root, one based on independence and subsistence, one that for many ex-slaves embodied true freedom. In and around the ruins of old plantations, men and women cultivated small plots of land, growing crops for their families and to sell at the markets. They raised chickens, pigs, and cows, often grazing them in abandoned cane fields. Although they were drawing on traditions developed within slavery, when masters had depended on what slaves produced in garden plots, in the new order they had greater access to land and greater freedom to grow their crops, raise their livestock, and market what they produced. The contrast with slavery was quite clear, and as a result of the better conditions, the number of children seems to have increased among the workers on many plantations.

Hédouville intentionally treated Rigaud more warmly than he did Louverture, seeking to create jealousy between the two men. Before he was expelled from the colony a few months later, Hédouville planted another “seed of contention” between them. In a letter to Rigaud, Hédouville criticized the “perfidy of General Toussaint Louverture, who is sold to the English, the émigrés, and the Americans.” “I absolve you entirely of the authority he was given as general-in-chief,” he wrote, and invited Rigaud “to take command of the Department of the South.”

In June 1800 an emissary from France arrived in Saint-Domingue, carrying a series of proclamations from First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte. One of these confirmed that Louverture was still the “general-in-chief” of the army of Saint-Domingue. Since Rigaud had justified his revolt in part by declaring Louverture's authority illegitimate, this news undermined his position substantially. Sensing that the momentum of the war was on his side, Louverture soon declared a general amnesty for all those who surrendered. In late July, Rigaud fled the colony with his family, and soon afterward Louverture entered Les Cayes.

In seeking to define the colony's future, he found the past weighing inexorably upon it: Saint-Domingue had developed as a producer of sugar and coffee, and it was difficult to imagine any other role for it in the prevailing Atlantic economy. The colony had long depended on the importation of provisions, and in the late 1790s, with the Franco-British war dragging on, foreign trade was more crucial than ever. To attract foreign merchants, Saint-Domingue had to produce and export its traditional commodities.

But Saint-Domingue's constitution carried within it particularly powerful contradictions. On the one hand, the project that all the people of Saint- Domingue were called on to support was a project of emancipation, of freedom from racial hierarchy, of liberty for all in a land once dominated by slavery. At the same time, ex-slaves were given very particular responsibilities that were defined by their old status: those who had once worked as slaves were now free, but they were required to work as cultivators. To defend freedom, they had to surrender their freedom to the new state.30 This state was literally embodied in one person, Toussaint Louverture, who was declared governor of Saint-Domingue for “the rest of his glorious life.”

A note at the end of the decree explained that by “creole” the government meant “any individual born in the colony or in Africa.” This was a departure from the traditional use of the term, generally used to refer only to American-born and slaves. It was an important step, for it in essence identified the majority in the colony who had come from Africa as natives of Saint-Domingue. It did so, however, not to grant them rights as citizens but to limit those rights.

But the strictness of Louverture's November 1801 decree highlighted the strain of the balancing act he had been sustaining for years. Committed to defending liberty at all costs, Louverture had turned himself into a dictator, and the colony he ruled over into a society based on social hierarchy, forced labor, and violent repression. The proclamation was a measure of Louverture's failure to find a middle way by which a true liberty could coexist with the plantation economy. When, a few months later, ships arrived from France to crush Louverture, he would find that among his officers and soldiers, not to mention the cultivators and city-dwellers of Saint- Domingue, there were many who were unwilling to fight to save him.

In one way, the draconian regime whose consolidation it articulated turned out to be quite a success: Louverture oversaw a remarkable revival of the shattered plantation economy in Saint-Domingue. By 1801, according to official reports, coffee exports had risen from almost nothing to twothirds of their level in 1789. Improvements in the sugar industry, where damages were more difficult to repair, were smaller, and included little of the more profitable refined sugar, but by 1802 exports were at one-third those of 1789.

There had been not only a “revolution” in their habits, but a dramatic transformation in their “ideas.” The French general Pamphile de Lacroix would write in a similar vein that the great failure of Bonaparte and his advisers, most of them former planters, had been failing to see that the blacks were not “as they had left them,” and underestimating the profound political consequences of “ten years of revolution” in Saint-Domingue.

Perhaps even in late 1801 Bonaparte sincerely intended to craft a compromise colonial regime in Saint-Domingue. His public decision to reestablish slavery there did not come until late 1802, after news of Louverture’s open resistance to Leclerc had arrived in France.

Louverture was receiving fragments of information about the Leclerc expedition, and even as he publicly expressed disbelief that France would attack him, he began preparing for war. He increased the size of his army, doing so according to one report by pressing individuals who had recently arrived in the colony—including many creole whites returning from Europe—into service on the pretext that they did not have their required “security cards.” With the addition of these new recruits, he had 23,000, and perhaps up to 30,000, regular troops under his command by early 1802. He also had at his disposal local militias numbering 10,000.

Throughout Saint-Domingue the enslaved often created their own cem- eteries by taking over those no longer used by whites. In one town in the Northern Province an abandoned cemetery was still “recognized by the su- perstitious veneration of the negroes.” In the parish of Aquin, in the south, slaves buried their dead near the ruins of the chapel on the site of an early settlement. Attempts to force them to use the official cemetery failed; the slaves just waited until night to bury their dead. So the bodies of those once enslaved were buried alongside the bodies of those once free.

Christophe made good on his threat and ordered his soldiers to set the town alight. For the second time in a decade, it was devoured by flames. It was February 4—eight years to the day since the abolition of slavery had been decreed in Paris. Despite all the protestations made by Leclerc and Bonaparte, many in Saint-Domingue believed that liberty itself was at stake.

Louverture explained that, as they waited for the “rainy season that will rid us of our enemies” through disease, their only “resource” was “destruction and fire.” It was crucial that “the land bathed in our sweat” not afford any provisions to the invading army. Dessalines should destroy the roads, order that “corpses and horses” be thrown into springs, and “annihilate and burn everything” so that “those who have come to put us back into slavery will always find in front of them the image of the hell they deserve.”

His troops also confronted a new and difficult style of warfare. “This is a war of Arabs,” Leclerc complained to Bonaparte. “We have barely passed before the blacks occupy the woods surrounding the road and cut off our communication.” His troops suffered at the hands of “rebels” who “hide themselves in the bushes” and in the “impenetrable woods that surround the valleys.” When they were repelled, they retreated to safety in the hills.

War brought with it an old question, one that had split the slave insurgents in 1791: What was to be done with the whites? For nearly a decade an uneasy peace had existed in Saint-Domingue between white and black soldiers who served side by side, and between white and black plantation managers and the plantation laborers. Tensions had simmered, and sometimes exploded, as they had in the October 1801 insurrection on the northern plain, but generally whites in the colony were safe under Louverture's regime. With the arrival of the Leclerc expedition, however, many whites soon found themselves hostages of the rebels.

By the time Dessalines had reached the mountains, he had very few white prisoners with him. Questioned by Louverture, he claimed they had been captured by French troops, been killed in combat, or had escaped. Descourtilz wrote that he had witnessed them being slaughtered by the hundreds under Dessalines's direct orders. His account was corroborated by Lacroix, who described finding 800 corpses in the town of Verrettes as he pursued Dessalines's retreating troops, and coming across other piles of bodies along the route they had taken into the mountains.

The French troops could see, on the plantations near the roads, “cultivators with their families who were observing our movements.” Some shot at the soldiers who guarded the flanks of the unit. They fled as soon as detachments of soldiers were sent after them, but when these detachments returned they appeared and started firing again. “It was evident,” wrote Lacroix, “that we no longer inspired any moral terror, which is the worst thing that can happen to an army.” As a later chronicler wrote: “Everywhere the land harbored enemies—in the woods, behind a rock; liberty gave birth to them.”

His recollection of the speech, published years later, was probably shaped by later events, but it remains one of the few surviving records of the general’s words. “Take courage, I tell you, take courage,” Dessalines commanded. “The whites from France cannot hold out against us here in Saint-Domingue. They will fight well at first, but soon they will fall sick and die like flies.” He warned them not to misunderstand some of the actions he might take along the way to the ultimate defeat of the French. “Listen well! If Dessalines surrenders to them a hundred times, he will betray them a hundred times.” They would see that “when the French are reduced to small, small numbers, we will harass them and beat them; we will burn the harvests and then take to the hills. They will be forced to leave.” “Then,” announced Dessalines, “I will make you independent. There will be no more whites among us.”

Leclerc also felt that Louverture’s very presence in the colony was a threat. In this belief he was not alone. “Toussaint and the other leaders only appear to have surrendered,” wrote one French officer, “and only sought to give their troops an entry into your ranks so that they can surprise you at the first appropriate moment.”

The rebels at Mapou defended their camp skillfully, using the old tactics of the slave insurgents of 1791. They surrounded the approaches with traps: pits covered with branches, and boards studded with nails and covered over with leaves, which as one officer wrote pierced not just “bare feet”—of which there were many among Leclerc’s troops— but shoes. The rebels added the “barbarous refinement,” in the words of one French officer, of putting “a few rocks or pieces of wood” in front of them, requiring advancing soldiers to leap or jump down into the thin layer of vegetation they took for solid ground.

In mid-1803 two regiments of Polish troops disembarked in the town of Tiburon; ten days later more than half were dead of fever. “They fell down as they walked,” a planter noted, “the blood rushing out of their nostrils, mouths, eyes.” By late 1802, “an average of one hundred men a day died.” The disease killed the entire crew of a Swedish ship harbored in Le Cap, with the single exception of a young cabin boy, and the empty ship was put up for sale.

Of the tens of thousands who had arrived a few months before, there were only 10,000 European troops left who could still fight. “Half of the officers in this army are dead” from either battle or disease, he announced weeks later. … As Leclerc wrote in early June, “the blacks” still fighting against him were “increasingly audacious.” In mid-July there were “nighttime meetings” in the northern plain and even in Le Cap itself, animated by conspirators planning “the massacre of the Europeans.” With resistance continuing, he found himself in a bind: in order to keep his mission afloat he had to defer, and indeed contradict, its ultimate goal: the destruction of the black army.

The process of taking weapons away, however, confirmed the suspicions many had about the intentions of the French: both Sonthonax and Louverture had warned that the rifle was the guarantor of liberty in Saint-Domingue.6 The disarmament process, meant to destroy the population's capacity to defend itself, backfired. It incited uprisings in several parts of the colony, including Port-de-Paix and the island of Tortuga, and helped to propel a series of defections among the colonial troops in the north.

Naturally, French brutality ultimately made the decision to change sides easier for those who had remained loyal. Fearing the worst, the French helped bring it about by acting the part of an army bent on destruction.

The disarmament alarmed many in Saint-Domingue, and news arriving in the colony from across the Atlantic and from other parts of the Caribbean soon confirmed their fears about Leclerc's ultimate mission.

In May 1802 Bonaparte signed a decree that publicly declared what had been decided the year before: in colonies such as Martinique that had been returned to France by the Treaty of Amiens, slavery would be "maintained in conformity with the laws and regulations anterior to 1789." The transatlantic slave trade would once again be open to French ships.

His colonial minister, Decrès, wrote: "I want slaves in our colonies. Liberty is a food for which the stomachs of the negroes are not yet prepared. We must seize any occasion to give them back their natural food, except for the seasonings required by justice and humanity."

Too many now understood that this was a war between slavery and freedom. In October 1802 Leclerc would make this fact unmistakably clear with a proclamation offering liberty to all those individuals freed in the colony by the emancipation decrees of 1793 who joined the French in fighting the insurgents. Planters promised to draw up notary acts assuring freedom to any of their former slaves who volunteered. These declarations made it undeniable that slavery was on the horizon, since otherwise no one in the colony would have any use for the individual freedoms that were being promised.

In Le Cap, meanwhile, more extensive reprisals were under way. Leclerc ordered the immediate arrest of all the remaining colonial troops in Le Cap and had 1,000 of them loaded on ships in the harbor. Weighted down with sacks of flour tied to their necks, they were all pushed overboard. During the next few days their bodies were washed ashore along the beaches of the town, where "to the disgust and horror of the town's inhabitants" they rotted, untouched, in the equatorial sun. The cycle of revenge continued: insurgents "executed a number of white hostages within view of the city gates."

Dessalines attacked the garrison at Gonaïves, sending the French soldiers into retreat to their ships in the harbor. He wrote to the French officer commanding in nearby Saint-Marc, explaining that the people of Saint-Domingue had come to see clearly the "intentions" of the Leclerc mission, which were "openly manifested" by officers serving under him who "fiercely massacre all the blacks and mulattoes." "I am French, a friend of my country and of liberty," Dessalines continued. "I cannot watch such atrocities with a serene eye." He announced his intention to take Saint-Marc, demanding that the French officers retreat and "return to Europe."

To the dismay of the crowd, the dogs showed little interest in attacking the servant until his master intervened, slicing open the domestic’s stomach to draw them into devouring him. … His brutality, like Leclerc’s terror, proved counterproductive: it helped expand and cement the alliance that proved crucial for the final victory of the revolutionary army in Saint-Domingue. Just as French killings of colonial troops had united Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Jacques Dessalines—who just a few years before had faced off against each other during the brutal war between Louverture and Rigaud—Rochambeau’s actions alienated the most steadfast supporters of the French: portions of the communities of color in the west and south who powerfully resented Louverture and who initially viewed the French as saviors. Witnessing and suffering from the racial violence of Rochambeau, most of these supporters realized that their only hope for survival was to join the revolution. Racist delirium shattered the last fragments of moral authority the French had in Saint-Domingue.

One French officer recalled an “African ruse” that was used again and again and “constantly succeeded.” “An entirely naked negro appeared in front of one of our posts, a short distance away; he approached, clowning around to amuse the soldiers with his grimaces; then he started making fun of us and provoking us with outrageous gestures.” When the French troops, “their patience soon exhausted,” fired at him, he dove out of the way. “Irritated,” the soldiers approached to fire at him, and soon a group of soldiers enticed into pursuing him ran headlong into an ambush. At one point in 1803, French sentries outside Les Cayes “sighted a magnificent horse, riderless but carrying a saddle and a saber, prancing through the nearby fields.” The “gullible” captain offered a reward to any soldier who would capture the horse; four volunteered, but as they sought to approach the horse, they fell into an ambush and were all captured by a group of insurgents.

“Seeing myself surrounded by more than 3,000 negroes,” the desperate officer in command of the unit wrote, “I see no prospect of holding out with such a small detachment, and rather than fall into the hands of this savage people fighting for its own freedom, I am taking my own life.” Some Polish soldiers made an equally daring choice: they switched sides, joining the rebels. In October 1802 Dessalines had noted that he was joined in his defection by “many European soldiers who are concerned, loyal, and tormented because they are men who, like me, have taken up arms for their own liberty, and they are considered as my friends.” He was referring, it seems, to Polish troops with whom he had made connections during his service in the colonial army. The Poles had, years before, enlisted in Bonaparte’s army in the hope that the French would support their own bid for national independence.

The message of the new flag was clear: through their brutality, the French whites had forfeited their right to be included in the new political community being forged in the colony. Black and colored residents were united in opposition to the whites.

Two months later, in Saint-Domingue, a judge in Saint-Marc condemned Louverture for having defrauded a group of planters in 1799 by paying them too little for some of their properties in the Artibonite. The planters were invited to take back the properties, while the defendant, having “failed to appear,” was condemned to pay the court costs incurred by the planters. It was a gesture in futility on two counts. Louverture, of course, was not going to pay his fine, and there was little hope that the planters would recover their land.

Dessalines, however, felt that it lacked the “heat and energy” required for the occasion. A young officer of color named Louis Félix Boisrond- Tonnerre declared: “In order to draw up our act of independence, we need the skin of a white to serve as a parchment, his skull as an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.” Dessalines concurred, and put the task of writing a new version of the declaration of independence in Boisrond- Tonnerre’s hands. The latter stayed up all night writing the proclamation for the next day’s ceremony. The more moderate one it replaced was lost, leaving behind only the trace of its rejection.

The choice of the name Haïti, then, infused the declaration of independence with a broader historical significance. Haiti was to be the negation not only of French colonialism, but of the whole history of European empire in the Americas. The new nation was to channel the centuries of suffering of those pushed to the margins by the official activity of colonialism into a new political community meant to guarantee the eternal freedom of its scarred constituency.

The years of conflict left other, more enduring scars: impulses toward democracy would long run up against autocratic and militaristic political traditions, and the social and racial conflicts of the revolutionary years would continue unabated. While some elites rebuilt parts of the colony's plantation economy, producing and profiting from coffee during the nineteenth century, many ex-slaves and their descendants chose what they saw as the true independence of peasant agriculture over the limits of wage labor.

There was little peace in the years after independence. Dessalines's short reign ended with his assassination in 1806, and the young nation again found itself in a civil war pitting the south, under the command of Alexandre Pétion (who hosted a beleaguered Simón Bolívar, encouraging him to abolish slavery in his pursuit of independence in South America), against the north, ruled by Henri Christophe, who crowned himself king.

Some exiled planters sought to erase what had happened: in 1806 one of them, exiled in Louisiana, noted as part of his property his "Negroes remaining in Saint-Domingue." Many governments reacted similarly. The refusal of diplomatic relations with Haiti pioneered by Jefferson would last until 1862, when Confederate secession made it possible for the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner to lead the way to opening relations with Haiti.

In it Dessalines declared that “no white, no matter what his nation,” could come to Haiti as “master or property owner,” but he exempted those who had been naturalized. He also singled out two special groups who were not included in the ban: the Poles who had deserted or remained in the colony after the evacuation, and a group of Germans who had been settled in the colony before the revolution. The constitution went on to declare that, in the interest of eliminating all distinctions of “color” in the nation, all Haitians would henceforth be known as “black.” Haiti was a black nation, but those who embraced its creed of rejecting France and the slavery it had propagated were welcome to change their official identity and become a part of it, and therefore of the black race.

Even as Haiti struggled, the ramifications of its revolution reshaped the world around it. The victory of the black troops of Saint-Domingue paved the way for the Louisiana Purchase. Bonaparte's mission to the colony had been the centerpiece of a new colonial policy aimed at reinvigorating the French presence in the Americas—Louisiana was meant to supply food for the reconstructed plantation society of Saint-Domingue—and when it was crushed he had little choice but to give up his ambitions, to the profit of an expanding United States. As a result slavery thrived and expanded in North America during the next decades.

In the nineteenth century sugar plantations sprang up throughout Cuba, sometimes staffed by exiles from Saint-Domingue, and worked by African slaves. The latter were imported into the colony in massive numbers: between 1790 and 1867 nearly as many were introduced to Cuba as had been imported to Saint-Domingue in the entire eighteenth century.

In Rio de Janeiro in 1805, soldiers of African descent wore "medallion portraits of the emperor Dessalines." In Cuba a free black named José Antonio Aponte, who was accused of conspiring to revolt in 1812, had portraits of Henri Christophe, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-François, and Dessalines in his home. Rebels who conspired with Aponte described having been shown these images "in what probably amounted to lessons in the history of the Haitian Revolution."

While Haiti represented a nightmare to many slave masters, it was a source of inspiration for slaves throughout the Americas. "Within one month after the 1791 uprising, slaves in Jamaica were singing songs about it," and within a few years masters "from Virginia to Louisiana to Cuba and Brazil were complaining of a new 'insolence' on the part of their slaves, which they often attributed to awareness of the successful black revolution."

The fact that in 1789 the slave population numbered 500,000 highlights the brutality of slave life. “They are always dying,” complained one woman in 1782. On average, half of the slaves who arrived from Africa died within a few years.

By the late eighteenth century many plantations in Saint-Domingue had significant concentrations of slaves from particular African regions. The slave population of one indigo plantation in the Western Province reflected the broader history of the slave trade: among its 92 slaves were 10 older Arada and 29 recently purchased Kongos.

The fact that slaves were leading Catholic ceremonies bothered some authorities, and indeed the accusation that Jesuits had encouraged such independent worship helped propel the expulsion of the order from Saint-Domingue in the 1760s.

But the extent of his activities and the publicity they gained helped set in motion a cycle of paranoia and violence that continued in Saint-Domingue for decades.

The only person they spared was the plantation’s surgeon, whom the slaves took with them, “with the idea that they might stand in need of his professional assistance.”

In October 1792 startling news arrived in the colony: an August uprising in Paris had led to the suspension of the king by the National Assembly.

And as he sought to assure the preservation of liberty in Saint-Domingue, he had to navigate a complicated set of imperial conflicts and relationships that placed constraints on his social and economic policies.

With these words, Louverture announced his emergence as an independent political force in Saint-Domingue. He issued the proclamation on August 29, 1793, the very day Léger Félicité Sonthonax abolished slavery throughout the Northern Province. Although he was calling for liberty, he was not announcing his alliance with the Republic. Instead, he was positioning himself against Sonthonax as the true defender of liberty in Saint-Domingue.

Laveaux argued, however, that those who had been “wrenched from their native country and transported to Saint-Domingue” should not be considered foreigners. Because they had been taken across the Atlantic against their will, the colony became a “new place of birth.”

Leclerc ordered the immediate arrest of all the remaining colonial troops in Le Cap and had 1,000 of them loaded on ships in the harbor. Weighted down with sacks of flour tied to their necks, they were all pushed overboard.