by
C.L.R. James
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Mulattoes educated in Paris during the Seven Years’ War had come home, and their education and accomplishments filled the colonists with hatred and envy and fear. It was these last years that saw the fiercest legislation against them. Forbidden to go to France, where they learnt things that were not good for them, they stayed at home to increase the strength of the dissatisfied.
With the growth of trade and of profits, the number of planters who could afford to leave their estates in charge of managers grew, and by 1789, in addition to the maritime bourgeois, there was a large group of absentee proprietors in France linked to the aristocracy by marriage, for whom San Domingo was nothing else but a source of revenue to be spent in the luxurious living of aristocratic Paris. So far had these parasites penetrated into the French aristocracy that a memoir from San Domingo to the King could say: ‘Sire, your court is creole,’ without too much stretching of the truth.
The prosperity affected even the slaves. More of them could save money, buy their freedom, and enter the promised land.
This was the San Domingo of 1789, the most profitable colony the world had ever known; to the casual eye the most flourishing and prosperous possession on the face of the globe; to the analyst a society torn by inner and outer contradictions which in four years would split that structure into so many pieces that they could never be put together again.
The taking of the Bastille on July 14th had done more than intimidate the King and the Court. It had frightened the bourgeoisie, who hastened to form a National Guard, strictly excluding the poor. But the bourgeoisie hastened also to profit by the blow against the monarchy. It drew up the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, claiming that all men were born free and equal, and abolishing the caste distinctions of feudalism for ever. The Constituent voted the final draft almost unanimously, but the King would not sign and secretly prepared the counter-revolution. News of this reached Paris and the masses, chiefly the women, marched to Versailles. Still trusting in the King, they brought him to Paris (away, as they thought, from his evil counsellors) and the Assembly came with him. Beaten again, and again not by the bourgeoisie but by the people, the King signed. This was early in October and a fortnight later, on October 22nd, the Mulattoes appeared at the bar of a House still echoing with the famous declaration, and claimed the Rights of Man. The bourgeoisie did not know what to do, did not know what to say. Raimond, the leader, was a distinguished Parisian lawyer, Ogé was a member of the Friends of the Negro and a friend of the Abbé Grégoire, Brissot, the Marquis de Condorcet, and all that brilliant band. Such were his talents that it was said of him that there was no position to which he could not aspire. How could an Assembly which had just passed the Rights of Man refuse to relieve these men from the injustices under which they suffered? They based their claim not only on abstract grounds but on their wealth, and offered six millions as security for the National Debt. It was an unanswerable case, and the president gave them his cordial if careful welcome. But the colonists in Paris would have none of it. They threatened the bourgeoisie with the spectre of a slave revolt on the one hand and their own independence on the other, and the maritime bourgeois, frightened for their millions of investments and their trade, went red in the face and put the Rights of Man in their pockets whenever the colonial question came up. [...]
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On the other side were the radicals, humanitarians and philosophers, the intellectuals of the day, led by the Friends of the Negro. Looked upon as dreamers and unpractical men, the solution they proposed, rights to Mulattoes and gradual abolition of slavery, would have best served the interests of France, and, as time proved, the interests of the colonists themselves. But when did property ever listen to reason except when cowed by violence? Against the wealth, the connections and the unscrupulous intrigues of the vested interests, even the radical propagandists were helpless. Their strength was in the masses, and the Paris masses were not yet interested in the colonial question, though they gave a general support to the demands of the Mulattoes.
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The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labour on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them. From their masters they had known rape, torture, degradation, and, at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind. For two centuries the higher civilization had shown them that power was used for wreaking your will on those whom you controlled. Now that they held power they did as they had been taught. In the frenzy of the first encounters they killed all, yet they spared the priests whom they feared and the surgeons who had been kind to them. They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. ‘Vengeance! Vengeance!’ was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white child on a pike as a standard.
And yet they were surprisingly moderate, 1 then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them. They did not maintain this revengeful spirit for long. The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased. As the revolution gained territory they spared many of the men, women, and children whom they surprised on plantations. To prisoners of war alone they remained merciless. They tore out their flesh with red-hot pincers, they roasted them on slow fires, they sawed a carpenter between two of his boards. Yet in all the records of that time there is no single instance of such fiendish tortures as burying white men up to the neck and smearing the holes in their faces to attract insects, or blowing them up with gun-powder, or any of the thousand and one bestialities to which they had been subjected. Compared with what their masters had done to them in cold blood, what they did was negligible, and they were spurred on by the ferocity with which the whites in Le Cap treated all slave prisoners who fell into their hands.
To deceive the Mulattoes the planters were trying tricks, but against the slaves they knew only one weapon – terror. The blacks had their stockades covered with the heads of white victims. The Colonial Assembly stuck the heads of Negroes on pikes placed all along the roads leading to Le Cap. When Boukman was killed (fighting bravely) the Assembly stuck up his head in Le Cap with a placard: ‘This is the head of Boukman, chief of the rebels.’ The whites built three scaffolds in Le Cap and broke twenty or thirty blacks on the wheel every day. With their usual disregard of the slave even as property they massacred all they met, even those on plantations which had not yet revolted. Masters denounced those who had helped them to escape. Slaves presenting themselves to their masters seeking refuge from the devastation of the countryside or merely because they were afraid or tired of revolution, were killed at sight. The result was that all, timid as well as bold, soon understood that there was no hope except with the revolution, and they flocked to join its ranks. In a few weeks the insurgents had grown to nearly 100,000.
[...] Toussaint had plenary powers, and in a vain attempt to break down the pride of the colonists he secretly reduced the number to be freed from 400 to 60.9 The colonists would not hear of it. Then and only then did Toussaint come to an unalterable decision from which he never wavered and for which he died. Complete liberty for all, to be attained and held by their own strength. The most extreme revolutionaries are formed by circumstances. It is probable that, looking at the wild hordes of blacks who surrounded him, his heart sank at the prospect of the war and the barbarism which would follow freedom even if it were achieved. He was ready to go a long way to meet the colonists. He probably hoped for some attempt at better treatment. But having been driven to take his decision, as was his way, he never looked back. [...]
Whatever the reservations they had made when they formed this pact with the bastard Mulattoes, the whites were now eager to cement the alliance and Roume was overwhelmed by the number of these appeals. Revolution, says Karl Marx, is the locomotive of history. Here was a locomotive that had travelled at remarkable speed, for in April 1792, not yet three years after the fall of the Bastille, the white Patriots in Port-au-Prince were being besieged by a composite army of royalist commandants, white planters, brown-skinned Mulattoes, and black slaves, none of them constrained but all for the time being free and equal partners. No doubt most of the rich were only awaiting the restoration of ‘order’ to put the slaves back in their places again, but the mere fact of the revolutionary association and the temporary equality meant that the old spell was broken and things would never be the same again.
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[...] The monarchy in France had to be torn up by the roots. Those in power never give way, and admit defeat only to plot and scheme to regain their lost power and privilege. Had the monarchists been white, the bourgeoisie brown, and the masses of France black, the French Revolution would have gone down in history as a race war. But although they were all white in France they fought just the same. The struggle of classes ends either in the reconstruction of society or in the common ruin of the contending classes. The French Revolution laid the basis of modern France, the country as a whole being strong enough to stand the shock and profit by it, but so corrupt and rotten was the slave society of San Domingo that it could not stand any strain and perished as it deserved to perish.
That was the style, the accent of Toussaint and his men. The British and the Spaniards could not defeat it. All they could offer was money, and there are periods in human history when money is not enough.
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