Good Morning POU!
In 1789, Saint-Domingue produced 60% of the world’s coffee and 40% of the sugar imported by France and Britain. The colony was not only the most profitable possession of the French colonial empire, but it was the wealthiest and most prosperous colony in the Caribbean.
The colony’s white population numbered 40,000; mulattoes and free blacks, 28,000; and black slaves, an estimated 452,000. This was almost half the total slave population in the Caribbean, estimated at one million that year. Enslaved blacks, regarded as the lowest class of colonial society, outnumbered whites and free people of color by a margin of almost eight to one.
Two-thirds of the slaves were African born, and they tended to be less submissive than those born in the Americas and raised in slave societies. The death rate in the Caribbean exceeded the birth rate, so imports of enslaved Africans were necessary to maintain the numbers required to work the plantations. The slave population declined at an annual rate of two to five percent, due to overwork, inadequate food and shelter, insufficient clothing and medical care, and an imbalance between the sexes, with more men than women. Some slaves were of a creole elite class of urban slaves and domestics, who worked as cooks, personal servants and artisans around the plantation house. This relatively privileged class was chiefly born in the Americas, while the under-class born in Africa labored hard, and often under abusive and brutal conditions.
Onset of the revolution
Guillaume Raynal attacked slavery in the 1780 edition of his history of European colonization. He also predicted a general slave revolt in the colonies, saying that there were signs of “the impending storm”. One such sign was the action of the French revolutionary government to grant citizenship to wealthy free people of color in May 1791. Since white planters refused to comply with this decision, within two months isolated fighting broke out between the former slaves and the whites. This added to the tense climate between slaves and grands blancs.
Raynal’s prediction came true on the night of 21 August 1791, when the slaves of Saint-Domingue rose in revolt; thousands of slaves attended a secret vodou ceremony as a tropical storm came in — the lightning and the thunder were taken as auspicious omens — and later that night, the slaves began to kill their masters and plunged the colony into civil war. The signal to begin the revolt had been given by Dutty Boukman, a high priest of vodou and leader of the Maroon slaves, and Cecile Fatiman during a religious ceremony at Bois Caïman on the night of 14 August. Within the next ten days, slaves had taken control of the entire Northern Province in an unprecedented slave revolt. Whites kept control of only a few isolated, fortified camps. The slaves sought revenge on their masters through “pillage, rape, torture, mutilation, and death”. The long years of oppression by the planters had left many blacks with a hatred of all whites, and the revolt was marked by extreme violence from the very start. The masters and mistresses were dragged from their beds to be killed, and the heads of French children were placed on pikes that were carried at the front of the rebel columns. In the south, beginning in September, thirteen thousand slaves and rebels led by Romaine-la-Prophétesse, based in Trou Coffy, took supplies from and burned plantations, freed slaves, and occupied (and burned) the area’s two major cities, Léogâne and Jacmel.
The planters had long feared such a revolt, and were well armed with some defensive preparations. But within weeks, the number of slaves who joined the revolt in the north reached 100,000. Within the next two months, as the violence escalated, the slaves killed 4,000 whites and burned or destroyed 180 sugar plantations and hundreds of coffee and indigo plantations. At least 900 coffee plantations were destroyed, and the total damage inflicted over the next two weeks amounted to 2 million francs. In September 1791, the surviving whites organized into militias and struck back, killing about 15,000 blacks.
By 1792, slave rebels controlled a third of Saint-Domingue. The success of the rebellion caused the National Assembly to realize it was facing an ominous situation. The Assembly granted civil and political rights to free men of color in the colonies in March 1792. Countries throughout Europe, as well as the United States, were shocked by the decision, but the Assembly was determined to stop the revolt.
Britain and Spain enter the conflict
Meanwhile, in 1793, France declared war on Great Britain. The grands blancs in Saint-Domingue, unhappy with Colonel Sonthonax, pleaded with British authorities in Jamaica for assistance against the Republican commissioners. The first Pitt ministry of Great Britain, in particular Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and Secretary of State for War Henry Dundas, made plans to invade Saint-Domingue. Both men recognized the financial value of the colony and its status as a useful bargaining chip in possible peace negotiations with France. Furthermore, they were concerned the ongoing slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue could lead to similar unrest in the British West Indies. Dundas instructed Sir Adam Williamson, the lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, to sign an agreement with representatives of counterrevolutionary French colonists in the colony which promised to restore the régime, discrimination against free people of color and protect slavery. The troops who came to Saint-Domingue from Britain had an extremely low survival rate, often dying to diseases such as yellow fever. The British government would send less trained adolescents to maintain strong regiments. The incompetence of the new soldiers, combined with the ravaging of disease upon the army, led to a very unsuccessful campaign in Saint-Domingue. The American journalist James Perry notes that the great irony of the British campaign in Saint-Domingue was that it ended as a complete debacle, costing the British treasury millions of pounds and the British military thousands upon thousands of dead, all for nothing.
Spain, which controlled the rest of the island of Hispaniola (Santo Domingo), also joined the conflict and fought with Britain against France. The proportion of slaves was not as high in the Spanish portion of the island. Spanish forces invaded Saint-Domingue and were joined by the rebels. For most of the conflict, the British and Spanish supplied the rebels with food, ammunition, arms, medicine, naval support, and military advisors. By August 1793, there were only 3,500 French soldiers on the island
French declare slavery abolished
To prevent military disaster, and secure the colony for republican France as opposed to Britain, Spain, and French royalists, separately or in combination, the French commissioners Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel offered freedom to the slaves who would agree to fight alongside them. Then, under pressure, they gradually emancipated all the slaves of the colony. On 29 August 1793, Sonthonax proclaimed the abolition of slavery in the northern province. On 31 October, Étienne Polverel did the same in the other two western and southern provinces.
Sonthonax sent three of his deputies, namely the colonist Louis Duffay, the free black army officer Jean-Baptiste Belley and a free man of color, Jean-Baptiste Mills, to seek the National Convention’s endorsement for the emancipation of slaves near the end of January 1794. On 4 February, Dufay gave a speech to the convention arguing that abolishing slavery was the only way to keep the colony in control of the French, and that former slaves would willingly work to restore the colony. The convention deputies agreed and made the dramatic decree that “slavery of the blacks is abolished in all the colonies; consequently, it decrees that all men living in the colonies, without distinction of color, are French citizens and enjoy all the rights guaranteed by the constitution”.
The National Convention abolished slavery by law in France and all its colonies, and granted civil and political rights to all black men in the colonies. The French constitutions of 1793 and 1795 both included the abolition of slavery. The constitution of 1793 never went into effect, but that of 1795 did; it lasted until it was replaced by the consular and imperial constitutions under Napoleon Bonaparte. Despite racial tensions in Saint-Domingue, the French revolutionary government at the time welcomed abolition with a show of idealism and optimism. The emancipation of slaves was viewed as an example of liberty for other countries.