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Chapter Title: Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins 1791–1793

Book Title: Confronting Black Jacobins Book Subtitle: The U.S., the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic Book Author(s): GERALD HORNE Published by: NYU Press, Monthly Review Press. (2015) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15zc5jc.4

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins 1791–1793

GE o R G E WA S H I N G T o N WA S E L AT E D .“I am happy,” he rhapsodized in September 1791, weeks after a trans-forming Caribbean eruption, about “how well disposed the United States are to render every aid in their power to our good friends and Allies [the French] to quell ‘the alarming insurrection of the Negroes in Hispaniola’ ” Signaling the urgent importance of this fraught matter to his own slave-holding republic, President Washington added, “I have not delayed a moment since the receipt of your commu- nications.”1 Quickly, the president advanced French planters on the island a size- able amount that was to come to $726,000 within months, a sum drawn against the formidable debt incurred by the United States during the anti-London revolt. This is a telling indicator of how the fiscal crisis in Paris, leading to revolt in France and the island alike, was driven in part by the rebellion led by Washington.2

The president’s alacrity was comprehensible in that on 22 August 1791 at least 1500 Africans acted in concert on the island, an assemblage that dwarfed compa- rable revolts in South Carolina in 1739 and Jamaica in 1760. It was a grim situa- tion that could be readily envisioned on the mainland. This thought had occurred to Governor Charles Pinckney of South Carolina who, just after the revolt was launched, remarked that it represented a “flame which will extend to all the neigh- boring islands and may eventually prove not a very pleasing or agreeable example to the Southern states.”3

Capable of teasing out the abolitionist implications of the revolt, South Carolina—where the African majority had proven to be difficult to control in a manner not unlike Hispaniola—was the first state to take legislative steps to abolish the slave trade when in 1792 it sought to bar the importation of this troublesome

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins, 1791–1793 31

property. Neighboring Georgia and North Carolina quickly followed in 1793 and 1794 respectively. It was no secret that the fires of Hispaniola aided immeasurably in assisting enslaving republicans in seeing the light. During a contemporaneous congressional debate concerning taxation imposed on imported Africans, Willis Alston of North Carolina reminded the House that Negroes from the Caribbean were one hundred times more dangerous than slaves imported directly from Africa.4 The implications for the continent were unpropitious.

The exigency of Washington’s response was also driven by the immediacy of the desperation experienced by island settlers. Within hours of the August 1791 turbulence, dire letters were sent northward to the slave-holding republic request- ing munitions, troops, and food. The United States was closer to the island than France, a factor that had shaped the island for some time and was to continue.5 This closeness, in the real and figurative senses, also serves to explain why when frantic messages were sent in the immediate aftermath of August 1791 to Jamaica, Cuba, and the United States for military aid, it was the latter republic that responded with eagerness.6

of course, this reflected enlightened self-interest on the part of the chief execu- tive. Not only were the properties—and lives—of his compatriots in jeopardy on the island,7 raising searching questions about a similar conflict detonating on the mainland, but also Jefferson already had raised an alarm about the possibility of an “American Algiers” arising nearby. As early as 1580, the notorious Sir Francis Drake himself had found and freed Turks, North African Moors, and even a few Frenchmen and Germans among the Spanish galley slaves toiling ignominiously in Santo Domingo and Cartagena.8 Who was to say if the future held the pros- pect of finding Euro-Americans among these island mudsills, but this time with revenge-seeking Africans wielding the whip-hand? In the midst of the “quasi-war” between the United States and France, a few years after Washington’s elation, a U.S. Navy man exclaimed, “Look out! United States of America! or you will share the fate of the Swedes at Tripoli—the Danes at Tunis—and of many other Nations at Algiers.”9

Jefferson was fixated on this idea, reminding Albert Gallatin in mid-1801 to “expect pirates from St. Domingo.” This may have been doubtful but, neverthe- less, the possibility was “not peculiar to Charleston but threatens all the Southern states.”10

Even if this chilling dystopia were ruled out, there were continuing repercus- sions that proved hard to ignore. The alliance of the North American rebels with Paris effectively had meant an alliance with France’s richest—nearby—colony. Just weeks after the hinge moment that was August 1791, complaints were pouring forth

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from the mainland about the rise in prices of sugar, coffee, and similar articles, too often sourced from the fortress of slavery that was Hispaniola. Elizabeth Drinker, the prim Philadelphia Quaker, after making note of the inflation in the prices of these commodities in her diary, then added “cloudy this evening.”11 Given the cir- cumstances, this appears more like a historical prediction than a weather report.

As President Washington was told subsequently, there was yet another and more frightening deficit that had appeared on the mainland concomitant with the upheaval on the island: Charleston merchants—who shared uneasily a land with often rambunctious Africans—were “deeply impressed with the deplorable condi- tion in which many of the inhabitants of St. Domingo, now residing in this City with their families, have been reduced, from Affluence to Want of the necessaries of life.”12 Was the stark reality of these families a presentiment, perhaps, of what these now affluent merchants might themselves face within decades? And how would they react—not least in their now quotidian maltreatment of Africans—to this potential likelihood?

W H AT H A D AT T R A C T E D M E R C H A N T S T o Hispaniola was the wealth there. Gold, silver, copper, mahogany, and iron ore were among the bounty. “Haiti,” according to indigenes, was the “mother of nations,” but their numbers, estimated to be in the millions on the island before contact with Europeans, had dwindled tre- mendously by 1791. The soak of bloodletting served to create the harsh conditions that greeted enslaved Africans who were dragged there by the tens of thousands as the numbers of indigenes were dwindling.13

By the late 17th century, the island had been split effectively between French colonizers (on the west) and Spanish (on the east)—though what was to mark Hispaniola to this day is that Madrid seized the lion’s share, perhaps two-thirds of the territory. Both “Catholic” powers proved to be instrumental in seeking to oust their mutual adversary—“Protestant” London—from its mainland colonies, with Hispaniola being critical to this powerful new reality. As evidenced by the fact that English and Spanish remain the dominant languages of the hemisphere, France wielded less influence in the Americas, which serves to explain why so much Parisian capital flowed into the island. But from the viewpoint of the nascent United States, France’s relationship with New orleans—emerging in the early 18th century was critical.

Certainly the tie between the western portion of the island and the mouth of the Mississippi was close from an early stage. The 1724 Code Noir in Louisiana was borrowed with only slight modification from the island’s 1685 slave code,14 both of which were—in a sense—more “liberal” than their counterparts under the Union

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins, 1791–1793 33

Jack.15 The 1724 code, for example, forbade masters from breaking up families by selling spouses or children below the age of puberty to different masters. The British retained this regime after 1763, when they formally asserted their claim to Illinois.16 This did not endear them to settlers on the verge of rebellion—as evidenced by their junking of this blatant restriction on “free trade” upon asserting control over what was to become a powerful midwestern state.

As early as 1763, mainland slaveholders were expressing trepidation about the importation of Africans from the island because of their supposed sinister reputa- tion for revolting, particularly their demonstrated skill in dispensing poisons. This was a reaction to the so-called Mackandal Conspiracy of 1755, when the Africans on the island contemplated poisoning the entire settler population, which was followed in succeeding years by yet another wave of poisonings.17

Given the violent ructions that rocked the mainland periodically, it was—in a sense—comprehensible why settlers found it necessary to assume a stance of hawk- ish vigilance. The Natchez Massacre of 1729 featured a ferocious revolt, against set- tlers principally led by indigenes—though Africans were involved. The seizing of hundreds of the leading indigenous rebels and their sale into slavery in Hispaniola was guaranteed to bring the two oppressed groups closer together.18

In response to such far-reaching plots, French settlers were fleeing to Charleston and other mainland sites too but often continued to hold interests in the Caribbean. This meant that their reaction—or overreaction—to slave conspiracies there could redound to the detriment of enslaved mainland Africans, a trend that was to continue for decades to come.19 Suggestive of why there was flux in jurisdictions administered by Paris was a comprehensive legal code drafted in France in 1777 that brazenly mandated that “in the end, the race of Negroes will be extinguished in the kingdom,”20—this was akin to an invitation to Africans to rebel in response.

Ironically, the man given credit for arriving at the mouth of the Chicago River in 1779 and founding a leading metropolis was thought to be a man of color— with a Gallic name: Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable.21 It was also not without irony that as this town was being founded, the famed Marquis de Lafayette—still cel- ebrated on the mainland—was happily telling Benjamin Franklin that Senegal had been “taken by our troops” in West Africa. It was “previously in the enemy’s hands” and this, he noted, was “preventing the Nigro [sic] trade,” which had been benefiting “the Southern Gentlemen of America.” Thus, he concluded with effer- vescence, “I believe our conquest will be pleasing to them.”22 What neither cor- respondent was able to envision was that their energetic enchaining of Africans, who were then dumped in Hispaniola, was to create a demographic nightmare for slavery.

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Nonetheless, the developing difference between French and British slavery was then parlayed into a developing abolitionist movement in Paris, which then influ- enced both the island and the mainland.23 Nevertheless, it did seem that as Frenchmen came into closer contact with the rougher mainland settlers24 a coarsening took place, driving them closer to the latter’s often harsher modes. This, however, was unsustain- able on the island in light of the demographic imbalance. Yet the anti-monarchism of the mainland and the resultant close contact with Paris that led to the founding of the new republic doubtlessly influenced the July 1789 emergence of revolution.

But there were contradictory trends—contrary to and constitutive of the rise of revolution. It was necessary to regulate slavery for the simple reason there were so many enslaved Africans being driven into the Mississippi River basin, not least given the inferno of slave plots that the Caribbean was becoming. This too was connected to Hispaniola insofar as African slavery in Missouri dates at least from 1719 when a Frenchman known as Renault purchased 500 Africans in Hispaniola and brought them to the mainland to work in mines. Yet, again, the ascendancy of the Stars and Stripes marked a qualitative—and quantitative—transformation of slavery, with numerous consequences, often dimly understood. By 1803, as the loss of Hispaniola was influencing Paris to abandon what became known as the Louisiana Purchase, there were almost 3000 enslaved Africans in Missouri—but by 1860 there were 114,931 of this debased group and 3572 free Africans.25

There was also a gravitational pull that drove Hispaniola and erstwhile British settlers into a warm embrace: Paris was far away.26 Though London was driving Paris out of North America during the Seven Years’ War of 1756–1763, which— inter alia—would have removed the rear base from which Africans and other antag- onists of British settlers could harass Massachusetts and New York from Quebec,27 these same British settlers continued to trade profitably with the French.28

Both Paris and the settlers under British rule on the mainland had grievances with London, which drove the former two closer together. The Sugar Act of 1764, London’s handiwork, was an attempt to curb trade between the thirteen colonies and Hispaniola—a bill that contributed to the urgency of mainland revolt, insofar as it was intended to disrupt the mutually profitable relationship between island and mainland.29 Thus, the influential Carolinian Ralph Izard, born in 1742, eventually owned 594 Africans. He moved to France in 1777 because of his inability to abide British rule and his family lived there until 1783 when the Union Jack was lowered. Izard expired conspicuously enough in 1804, as the emergence of Haiti marked a new stage in the devolution of African slavery.30

This mutually beneficial commerce between Hispaniola and the mainland decidedly included trafficking in Africans. By 1784 Paris made official what was

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins, 1791–1793 35

evident when—as relations between London and its former mainland colonists reached a new nadir—it formally opened its ports to foreign commerce, putatively violating the leading practices of colonialism, a policy that benefited the infant United States. Predictably, island planters were then incentivized to emulate their mainland counterparts by leaning toward independence themselves, a spark that was to explode shortly thereafter.31

By 1785 Charles Pettigrew was journeying regularly from the mainland to the island for slave purchases—though he found “it not a good place to sell Negroes,” perhaps because the market had been flooded by his countrymen. Since “they were too suspicious of their morals when brought from the continent,” the devious slave dealer sought to “propose to replace in New Negroes if I can,” the presumably surly Africans with those who had been acculturated, perhaps from the mainland. The well-connected Pettigrew was in a position to execute his far-reaching plan: “I am to preach in town during my stay at the request of the Governor,” he confided to “my dear Polly,” writing from the island. The popular flesh peddler was “invited to dine out among [the elite] almost every day”; and “living is high,” he also noted, as “I am favored & I have take[n] a private lodging upon a hill above the town.”32

By 1787, the island was dominating the lucrative business of sugar production, generating a whopping 131 million pounds in that single year, a good deal of it end- ing up on the delicate palates of Euro-Americans.33 one observer pointed out that the “number of foreign ships, principally American, which in 1788 assisted in fur- nishing Saint Domingo with provisions, was considerable.” If this had not been the case, said Francis Alexander Stanislaus, the island “would have been in absolute want of many articles of the first necessity.”34 By 1789 an estimated 20% of the ves- sels arriving in Philadelphia from foreign harbors originated in Saint-Domingue; seven years later, at the height of the revolution, the figure had jumped to more than a third.35

A telling vignette also occurred in 1789—days after the storming of the Bastille in Paris—when pirates, infamously disquieting, murdered a captain and cook, who were heading from Port-au-Prince to South America, and they then sailed to the mainland before being jailed in virginia. This gave U.S. nationals a possible fore- taste of what could be expected from an independent Haiti.36

Maritime traffic between the island and the mainland was sufficiently intense to attract pirates of various stripes. Just before August 1791, recalled Henry Adams, “such a swarm of Yankee skippers frequented the ports of Saint-Domingue that the trade of the United States with this colony became second only to that with England.”37 Besides the wealth brought by slaves and sugar, there was another rea- son for mainlanders to keep a close eye on Hispaniola. Early in the 20th century, one

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U.S. strategist acknowledged what had been true for some time. “Next to Mexico,” said William A. MacCorkle, a former U.S. governor, “this island republic”—Haiti, that is—“is fraught with the greatest importance to the United States in our rela- tion to the Southern and Central American republics, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.” Why? “It is directly on and commands the two great passages of the Atlantic ocean into the Caribbean Sea from the eastern coast of the United States to and from . . . Panama. . . . It thus practically controls the great bulk of the commerce of the United States to the East and the Pacific ocean. This island has within its shores more natural wealth than has any other territory of similar size in the world.” This island, he continued, “is more capable of supporting life in all its phases, more able to create wealth and diffuse happiness to its people, than any other land of its size on the face of the earth. Its harbours are incomparable and will float the navies of the world. Its atmosphere is salubrious and its climate healthy.” Hispaniola sat astride “the two great twin seas, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea,” and both were seen as being “more important than the Mediterranean in their effect upon the commerce of the world.” Hence, a “fundamental principle of the United States,” he stressed in words that were perhaps even truer for the federal union in 1791, is that “we should control the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. This control should be absolute and exclusive.”38

It was the 20th century Trinidadian intellectual, C. L. R. James, who referred to Môle St. Nicholas, a landmark on the island, as the “Gibraltar of the Caribbean Sea.”39 As early as 1810, an analyst concluded that Samaná, on the northern coast of the island, was a “bay” with “incalculable advantages” on a landmass that was “key to the Mexican gulph [sic].”40

This is a compelling picture that suggests why so many mainlanders were to be found on the island in 1791. A great uncle of the late 19th century writer, Samuel G. Perkins was born in Boston in 1767 and by 1785 was toiling in Hispaniola with the mainland firm Perkins, Burling & Co. He stayed until 1794—abandoning the island as flames leapt ever higher.41 The connection between the island and the enslaving republic had become so close that even as Africans were plotting dis- ruption in 1791, Nathan Cutting, a Massachusetts merchant who had moved to Hispaniola to speculate in the slave trade, suggested that his new homeland would join the United States.42

But this luscious status quo grounded in flesh peddling was to be disrupted by August 1791—and before that in July 1789.43 By mid-1790 Pierce Butler of Carolina was thanking one Founding Father, George Mason, for informative news about France, as he hoped—with a hint of wish fulfillment—that the “French Nation will accomplish their object & secure to themselves & their posterity the equal operation

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins, 1791–1793 37

of Laws”44—though, like many others in his state, he may have been disappointed by the emerging results. For the French Revolution too sent shock waves coursing to the mainland. Coincident with the latter, debates over slavery commenced, and this along with the debates about rights in the hexagonal nation led directly to a fierce melee on the island.

Thus, the roseate dreams of the merchants of odiousness were too to be dis- mantled. Fleeing alongside the Perkins scion were others of French surname; some were royalists upset with regime change in Paris and the seismic results on the island, others nested with the Huguenots, who since the late 18th century had flocked to the mainland and had become prominent in the slave trade. Their helter- skelter retreat to the mainland was tangible evidence of a new world birthing at the same time that the newly born mainland republic was moving in an opposing direction. The undulating waves from Hispaniola reached its neighbors, particu- larly Martinique, where African activism compelled Emmanuel Parius Pons and his brother to abandon their large plantation and scurry to New orleans, bringing along a large number of enslaved Africans, who carried along startling scenes of presumed superiors bolting for their lives. There in St. James Parish they all settled in the so-called “Maison Blanche” plantation, which was by most measures the most significant plantation Louisiana ever had.45

Given the arrival of the likes of Pons, this Caribbean turmoil was not all bad news for the slave-holding republic for such planters had well-developed slave trad- ing networks that arrived with their presence. Thus, between 1790 and 1800, the population of European descent in a key region of the Carolinas—near Andrew Jackson’s hometown, the Waxhaws—declined while the population of enslaved Africans nearly doubled; more than half of all households of the former now owned one or more of the latter.46

The size and suddenness of this influx of Africans into New orleans was vir- tually without precedent on the mainland, with an estimated 9000 arriving there between 1763 and 1796 and an additional estimated 8000 before 1808; most had come from Jamaica and Charleston though many could be traced back to the desta- bilization of slavery in Hispaniola. That most were male—by a three-to-one ratio by one estimate—did not bode well for the future stability of mainland slavery.47 Surely, the arrival of island planters, Africans in tow in the thousands, helped to buoy the overall market in Africans.48

on the one hand, the United States was wading more deeply into the choppy waters of mass enslavement as Hispaniola was emitting a loudly different signal. This did not augur well for slavery’s future given the ability of the island Africans to maneuver diplomatically among the major powers—especially London—to the

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disadvantage of the enslaving republic. on the other hand, doubling down on slav- ery by attracting Frenchmen with capital from the Caribbean, in a sense, mirrored the growth of the European population on the mainland before 1776 when settlers fled African unrest in Jamaica and Antigua in the 1730s.

Thus, ultimately the U.S. claim to Alabama was strengthened when the Chapron family of Hispaniola fled in horror to yet another citadel of French cul- ture, the region stretching from Mobile. That the matriarch and male heirs of this clan had barely eluded what the patriarch described as “the torch & the daggers of assassins & Plunderers”49 insured that their allegiance to a slave-holding republic would not be easy to dislodge. A similar allegiance probably lodged in the breast of Mederic-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery, who was about to be arrested on the island and narrowly escaped the guillotine before this relative of Empress Josephine landed in Philadelphia.50

The southern neighbor of the then capital of the republic was also deluged with panicked and terrified settlers abandoning the island. As African control of the island was accelerating, a large band of bedraggled refugees decamped to Baltimore from Hispaniola, bearing frightful memories; this party included 1000 described as “white” and 500 denoted as “mulatto.” Looking back from 1929, an observer pointed out that this group formed a “rather large percentage of Baltimore’s citi- zenry, just as though 150,000 were to come in upon us” and “never did our quiet homes hear more fearful stories” than during dramatically chilling fireside chats with these refugees.

The volcanic outburst of human passions and hatreds from which they had just fled was said to have been ignited by “Robespierrean words of freedom.” Readers of the local press learned that what was at play was not merely the already dreadful “conflict of class against class, but also the much more embittered one of race against race.” “They massacred nearly every white person who fell into their power,” said one still shocked speaker. “Within two months after the revolt first began, upward of 2000 white persons of all ages had been massacred”; in sum, “1200 Christian families” were instantaneously “reduced from wealth to the necessity of depending altogether on charity,” an awful sight to some. At once, this spectacle would deepen allegiances to the slave-holding republic that offered refuge, while causing others to reconsider if the price of slavery was too steep to pay.51

It was the latter idea that increasingly was taking hold in London and once implanted there it could only deepen the widening chasm with its former mainland colonies.52 For ever more frantic accounts of the insurrection on the island were making their way to redoubts of slavery and the slave trade raising ever more search- ing questions about the ultimate viability of the worst of human bondage.53

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins, 1791–1793 39

It did appear that virtually with the moment of the August 1791 devastation of the island, abolitionist voices became ever more insistent. Charges of the “immo- rality” of slavery and the understandable desire to prevent one’s throat from being slit seemed to merge effortlessly in the surging flow of abolition.54 Inspired explic- itly by the Hispaniola rebellion, Percival Stockdale informed Granville Sharp, the veteran abolitionist, that “it appears, even from Liverpool evidence, that if mankind, in general, were to die, in proportion to the mortality of the Slaves dur- ing their transportation to the Colonies, the human race would be extinct in ten years.”55

This hastening velocity of abolitionism was conspicuously the case in London,56 which soon was to crown itself as the cop-on-the-beat seeking to suppress a slave trade now captained by its former charge in the enslaving republic. Even on the mainland—Newport in this case—by 1792 there was a stern warning about the “doctrine of retribution” being visited upon the flesh peddlers who thickly popu- lated Rhode Island; this was “the only reason of hope” it was further stressed.57

Jamaica, where great fortunes (for the British) and great revolts (by Africans) were part of the landscape, paid close attention to the Hispaniola revolt from the beginning, a fact facilitated by proximity. It was a “most dreadful calamity” unfold- ing, it was reported there as early as 1 September 1791, with a “great number of white people . . . butchered.”58 It did not take long for Jamaica to be even more influenced by what was to become Haiti.

Such was the race between two contradictory trends that greeted and, at times, confounded the slave-holding republic: increasing investments in human chattel at home and abroad and, along with it, opening the floodgates to admit more “whites” to overawe growingly restless indigenes and Africans or bowing to the logic of 1791. Would, instead, the growing number of enslaved Africans (and their indigenous comrades) overawe those defined as “white” before reinforcements from Europe would arrive?

As early as 1790, as the waves of change from Paris crossed the channel, grave note was taken in London of debates in France about abolishing the slave trade.59 Alert investors in the slave-holding republic should have taken heed when testify- ing before the House of Commons in London in 1790 and 1791 on the increasingly conspicuous matter of abolition was George Baillie, who had resided twenty-five years in South Carolina and Georgia, first as a merchant, afterwards as a planter. William Beverley, born in virginia and resident there for the first sixteen years of his life, also testified, as did John Clapham, who had spent two decades in Maryland, and Robert Crew, a native of virginia.60 Abolitionist tracts reflecting this London debate were also appearing on the mainland with increased frequency.61

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William Wilberforce, soon to be hailed as the doyen of abolitionism, was instru- mental in the April 1791 debate in Parliament on the slave trade. At the same time, Whitehall, in the person of Lord Grenville, worried that the impassioned words coming from London would have the “effect of increasing . . . discontent or dis- satisfaction which may at present prevail among the slaves.” Thus, he said—under- lining the intimate tie between African uproars and reform—planters should seek “mild and gentle treatment of these People,” so as to “reconcile them as much as possible to their situation.”62

Meanwhile in Louisiana, soon to be part of the enslaving federal union, as early as 1792, Africans were seeking to emulate their counterparts on the island.63 This was not the end of imported trends, thanks to this Caribbean disturbance. As well, tensions accelerated between major political factions, i.e. the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. This was particularly unsettling since the conflict infused the entire realm of foreign policy and, thereby, national survival in that the “quasi- war” with France was part of this equation, as well as the seemingly perpetual row with Britain.64 Certainly, as the slave-holding republic came to recognize that oust- ing France from North America was sufficiently important that it could even mean countenancing—or even aiding—armed Africans in Hispaniola, slave traders and slaveholders could conclude more easily that leading republicans did not have their best interests at heart.

To make things worse, also arriving in port cities proven to be frail—Norfolk, for example—were a sizeable number of refugees from the island that could be described as “black,” but who were not unwilling to back slavery. Still, they too had seen the unraveling of slave society and it was not unreasonable for onlookers to suspect that their allegiance to the status quo was unsteady. Given the primary role played by those regarded as “mulatto” on the mainland in pushing for rights on the island that then led to Africans too revolting, it was understandable why virginians were nervous about the arrival of these refugees.

Such suspicions were buoyed by the miasmic atmosphere delivered by the radi- cal doctrines of the French Revolution, which did not rule out rights for those with a complement of melanin.65 How to sideline—or incorporate into the elite—gens de couleur and/or “mulattoes” would bedevil the mainland republic until they all were frog-marched into the bottom rung of society, i.e. “blackness” with the arrival of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.66

It was not as if the gens de couleur in Guadeloupe and Martinique, for example, during the earliest years of the final decade of the 18th century were gung-ho about general emancipation of the enslaved: au contraire. Actually, in mid-May 1791, Julien Raimond, leader of those often described as “mulatto,” argued before the

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins, 1791–1793 41

National Assembly in France that granting full political rights to his people would help guarantee the subjugation of the enslaved.67 But as the mainland republicans saw things, it was Raimond’s group who brought down the temple of slavery by making special claims and they balked at igniting a similar process in their back- yard. At the same time, the enslaving republic could hardly ignore that in investigat- ing the causes of unrest in Hispaniola, there quickly emerged a focus on the alleged “arrogance” of those seeking to discriminate against those in Raimond’s category. By February 1792 already there was serious discussion about granting equality in Paris to “People of Colour and Free Negroes”68—a trend that would be resisted on the mainland with ferocity, tearing at the fabric of society in one more step toward civil war.

The problem for the slave-holding republic was that its parlous diplomatic posi- tion suggested it could hardly afford to alienate potential allies, even gens de couleur. Months before August 1791, the elite Elias Ball of South Carolina was being told that sooner rather than later his nation would be warring with Spain,69 while even sooner there would be a “quasi-war” with France combined with the seemingly perpetual tensions with Britain. Pierce Butler of the same state unctuously sought to convince Don Diego de Gardoqui of Spain that “we ought to be good neigh- bours”70—but the very utterance betrayed its possible opposite.

Complicating relations between the major powers was the frequent assertiveness of Africans, for as they barged onto the stage, their presence had to be accounted for, which could allow—as was to happen with London—a power to creep toward abolition thereby gaining an advantage over competitors. Still, as African rebel- liousness reached the mainland, this also had the potential to unite the major pow- ers on the altar of slave-holding.

Anticipating a larger revolt in 1795, by 1792 Pointe Coupee in Louisiana was afire. Julien Poydras with roots in Nantes—which happened to be a major slave port—was targeted. Though it was alleged he owned a staggering 3700 slaves, another source avers the figure was “only” about 570, still making him one of the largest slaveholders on the mainland; he also had extensive holdings in Bordeaux. This man of French origin was in a territory with close ties to Spain that was about to become a part of the United States, while owning Africans on the verge of seek- ing to eliminate them all—which could have brought these oppressors together in nervousness.71 Poydras had departed Hispaniola for Louisiana in 1768 and, thus, was prone to know about the impact of island restiveness on his own riotous “pos- sessions.” There was also the possibility, as was happening on the island, that a door could have been opened for a Spanish competitor to destabilize his enterprise by allying with Africans.72 Poydras was understandably irate when in April 1795

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“his” Africans rose as one, spurred on by the victories in Hispaniola. “Sixteen of my best Negroes of the plantation were hung,” he griped, “which causes me a loss of thirty thousand piastres in one lump sum.”73

Louisiana was far from being singular. As soon as the authorities in Missouri recieved word of the 1791 revolt, they anxiously moved to curtail the slave trade with the islands for fear of contagion and opened this hateful commerce with Africa. As well, they moved to assuage the enslaved by guaranteeing them certain rights and immunities. one official acknowledged that “contented subordination” was his goal, which would “prevent” the enslaved “from desiring a liberty which had cost so much blood in Santo Domingo.”74

The competition among the major powers was made to order for Africans will- ing to engage in arbitrage, leaning toward one power and against another. Arguably, the increased ability of Africans to engage in arbitrage heightened tensions between and among the “white” powers, as they scrambled hectically to either retreat from— or bolster—slavery, seeking to either take advantage of the debilitated posture of a fellow power or crackdown more mercilessly on invigorated Africans, both of which had a painful downside. This was occurring as a 1792 writer penned an “ode” to the “Insurrection of the Slaves at St. Domingo,” urging that the rebels “bathe thy sword in Christian blood!”75—suggesting that bolstering enslavement came with a heavy price.

Unfortunately for mainland settlers, their concern had to veer far beyond the import of inflamed poetry. As this ardent ode was being drafted, the thought of such a bloodbath had occurred to Africans in virginia independently of these pas- sionate words.76 By May 1792, the governor of virginia was told by a concerned Smith Snead in Northampton that “people of this county are very much alarmed with the apprehension of the insurrection of the slaves,” bringing manifold “dan- gers,” especially since there was “no public ammunition in the county.”77 A neigh- bor there, Henry Guy, concurred, as he too wrung his hands about the “intended insurrection of our slaves” in a “plot [that] seems to have been general.”78 Then in Portsmouth there was an “intended insurrection” of “our slaves.” It was said regretfully, “their conduct has long since warranted the suspicion.” A “supply of arms” was requested “speedily” in order to “alleviate the fears” now raging.79 That same day, Thomas Nelson of Norfolk too was worrying about the “intentions of our slaves” since “we are totally unprepared for such an event, having very few arms in the hands of our militia.”80

Yet another startled virginian complained that “the Negroes” were sponsor- ing “very large night meetings” where they began to “talk of Chewsing [choosing] Delegates & a High Sheriff,” as if, like on the island, state power was on their mind.

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins, 1791–1793 43

“In case of invasion,” moaned Holt Richardson, “we are totally unprepared.”81 By July 1792, Smith Snead—at least—had not calmed down, warning again of yet another “insurrection,” while noting reassuringly that “no white persons”—perhaps presumed sympathizers with the French Revolution—were involved.82 During that time, the diminutive and bookish James Madison found time to observe incisively that the news from the island “paints the distress of the Island in the most gloomy colours,”83 a matter of obvious consequence for his commonwealth.

It did not require an oracle to see that if mainland slaveholders could help to squash African rebellion on the island, it could remove any inspiration these rebels supplied to Africans on the mainland. So motivated, it did not take long for U.S. residents on the island to join the fray, taking an active part in the struggle against the enslaved. They were to be found in scouting parties and expeditionary troops dispatched to confront the Africans with lethal force. U.S. seafarers in island ports pitched in, too. In Cap-Français, not only resident U.S. merchants but also such crews were called on to defend against marauding Africans. In a display of class— and “race”—unity, the South Carolina legislature quickly chipped in with a hefty donation of 3000 pounds to the besieged islanders.84

What may have influenced the lawmakers was the presence in their state of the likes of Auguste de Grasse, who told President Washington directly of the “great distress” of those like himself who had fled the island one step ahead of angry Africans. He confessed that “after having lost a commodious dwelling & 200 Negroes,” he was now drowning in misery.85 De Grasse’s homeland—France— shortly after the igniting of the island revolt had contacted the federal authorities on the mainland, delivering the disturbing news that plantation owners had been killed, plantations immolated, and other Europeans were strangled. An estimated 100,000 armed Africans were said to be on the march, as they enacted a bloody drama of human horrors. French settlers were not simply calling upon altruism for, it was said with some accuracy, this destruction could easily spread. Yet, despite these anguished pleas and the mortal threat articulated to the mainland itself, by 26 January 1792, Paris’s man on the mainland was told that the response from the United States was inadequate.86

What was not said was that the United States was torn between the felt desire to quell African unrest and the larger desire to weaken France in the hemisphere. Still, the new republic may have thought that Paris was ungrateful for seemingly ample aid was sent, not only by the federal union but by states like South Carolina and Pennsylvania too,87 who had their own unique foreign policy interests. “Dispensing with their usual procedures,” concludes one scholar, “the Assembly” in the keystone State, “fashioned a bill within a single day which authorized . . .

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provisions for the relief of Cap-Français” and provided vessels to transport “any colonists who wished to flee the violence.”88 Another scholar has estimated that the United States supplied island planters with hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid, arms, ammunition, food and the like—after all, it was not preordained that this would always be a French colony and self-interest and buying goodwill among besieged island planters was as good a reason as any to bail out class comrades.89

Paris may have not have been wholly aware of the sweeping challenges to North American national security posed by domestic Africans and indigenes, a challenge that had hardly ceased since 1776.90 But Paris may have known, as early as october 1790, that a number of those from the island described as “mulatto” had gone to the mainland to purchase arms and ammunition in anticipation of taking advantage of the flux brought by July 1789 and visiting the same upon Hispaniola. Some of these men had fought alongside the victorious rebels in their triumph over London a few years earlier. Yet it was dangerous for slave-holding republicans to conspire with Frenchmen sympathetic to revolution since some of the latter also had noticed the odiousness of mainland slavery—and then repaired to Paris to form abolitionist societies.91

Such far-sighted attitudes shed light on why some mainland republicans were to find France so distasteful, anti-monarchism aside. one high-level U.S. diplomat, Gouverneur Morris, was horrified upon arriving in a Paris torn by revolution. It was, he thought, “perhaps as wicked a Spot as exists. Incest, Murder, Bestiality, Fraud, Rapine, oppression, Baseness, Cruelty”—and that was among his milder complaints. How could such a din of iniquity step “forward in the sacred Cause of Liberty”?92

Morris was not singular in mainland republican distaste for France and De Grasse was not alone either, though he may have felt that way as he huddled in suf- ferance in South Carolina. In short, he—and other Parisians and island settlers— may have grasped the ambivalence in the United States about their plight, which may have heightened their already escalating hysteria about what was occurring. At the same time, as Paris itself was enduring a bout of radicalism, often denoted as “terror,” their representative in Charleston was plotting as busily as island Africans—invasions of Spanish Florida and Louisiana in his case, and who was to say he would simply stop there?93 Surely, Paris knew of the fright in Charleston in light of the island frenzy94 and the spread of this furor to Maryland and virginia— and what that could portend in terms of destabilizing an infant republic.95

Thus, there may not have been much surprise in Paris when General Toussaint, midway during the 1791–1804 epoch, was able to subdue André Rigaud, a leader of both French forces and those of the gens de couleur, with ample aid from the

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins, 1791–1793 45

mainland. U.S. ships were accused credibly of going so far as to ferry General Toussaint’s troops to a strategic point behind Rigaud’s lines.96 of course, such assistance could easily lead Dixie to conclude that the federal union viewed with insouciance the unique challenges to security within the Slave South, hastening the onset of civil war.

But that was to come years after the commencement of revolt. In the immediate aftermath of August 1791, the great uncle of Samuel Perkins, then on the island, recalled that “the Americans had a guard house assigned to them . . . the guard was commanded by my brother James and I acted as his lieutenant. We drew our forces from the American shipping [community] as well as from the residents . . . the arms and ammunition were kept at our house.” The critical “Northern Department” of the island was “commanded by General Galbaud,” while “the troops had been fed principally by the American merchants at the Cape”—soon to gain notoriety as the site of a major massacre of settlers. Perkins’s great uncle was witness to and partici- pant in bloody warfare aimed at quashing African revolt.

This was not simply a matter of survival but a recognition that if the ramparts were breached on the island, the same could occur on the mainland. This was a gift of prophecy for as things turned out, the Haitian Revolution marked the onset of a general crisis of the entire slave system, unleashing a chain of events that could only eventuate in this system’s collapse.

But those Yankees fighting a losing war on the island may not have had the time to reflect upon the world historic meaning of their combat. For, as was reported, “the shock they had received by seeing their companions killed before their eyes, without even a question being asked . . . left them no doubt that equal dispatch would be made with them.” “We are Americans,” exclaimed this motley mob, as— once again—national identity merged with the imperative to combat the revolt of Africans. Supposedly, one of the Africans who knew enough English to understand their patter, cried out naively: “Stop comrades they are not French; they are from America—a country of liberty.” But he was quickly rebuked by another combatant far more attuned to the confluence of class and “race” that had marked colonial slav- ery: “No matter,” he said, “they are whites and that is enough; shoot them like dogs.”

Some were so dispensed, others were merely jailed. While incarcerated, com- miserating comrades visited and remonstrated with the jailer, who was seen as a “mulatto,” for placing them in a confined space with a number of African con- victs. Ever alert to the protocols of racism, they extracted a promise that this affront would cease. 97

Such protocols were slated for the dustbin of history, though this was not evi- dent in 1791. In July of that fateful year, Sylvanus Bourne, who helped to shape

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mainland policy toward the island, was informed that a countryman in Aux Cayes was “apprehensive.” Already, he was envisioning the “shedding of blood” and, like the great-uncle of Samuel Perkins, this correspondent found that “the Americans who have resided here four to five months are in a military capacity” and are “con- sidered citizens” but are not granted any greater rights.98 By early 1792, Jacob Mayer of New England found himself in Cap-Français, where, unlike in the period before the onset of the French Revolution, there were “few American vessels” pres- ent and “only two from Connecticut.” More concerning was that “Negroes and Mulattoes still bear arms against the white people” and, similarly, “everyday you see their fires from the town.” Pressure was rising for foreign intervention to save the slave system since “out of the 6000 troops expected from France, 1100 have as yet arrived.”99 Then Mayer’s correspondent—Thomas Allen—was told of the “dis- agreeable intelligence” that “Negroes had arisen in the quarter near Leogane” on the island, “destroying all the plantations adjacent & half of the town.”100

The contradiction here was that though the enslaving republic was understand- ably flummoxed by the island revolt, weakening France—which the Africans were perceived as doing—was also a priority. Paris was writhing too and happened to control—or influence—a good deal of North America that the mainland repub- licans thought should belong to them. The militant self-assertion of the island Africans warped the existing diplomatic chessboard and brought into sharp relief potential alliances and relationships theretofore not foreseen. Months after the turn- ing point that was August 1791, Africans were dickering with the Spanish in Santo Domingo while planters were extending feelers to London and gens de couleur were negotiating with the French.101 The slave-holding republicans had problems with each of these parties and were now forced to reassess. ousting European powers from the hemisphere was still a top priority, but did that take precedence over the immediate alarm of squashing armed Africans, particularly as the failure to do so would elicit the the most fearful of all outcomes?

Thus, when in october 1791 the colonial satraps on the island requested the urgent assistance of sixty U.S. sailors on shore to participate in an expedition assaulting rambunctious Africans in L’Acul and Haut-du-Cap, far-sighted seafar- ers may have hesitated, not only due to fear of what the rebels had in store but also due to slyness about the possibility of weakening France’s hemispheric position.

As things turned out, only one settler—formerly of Philadelphia—escaped alive from Haut-du-Cap. In fact, the contradiction was so sharp that either way mainland republicans turned, they were bound to be bloodied. Thus, gens de couleur were bound to arrive on the mainland, irrespective of who triumphed on the island or irrespective of who sailors ashore leaned toward. And as gens de couleur flooded into

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins, 1791–1793 47

Philadelphia, it meant that by the end of 1792 equality for them was now conceiv- able, a shift in the slave-holding republic with as much consequence as their push for equality on the island. Likewise, when some Philadelphians argued that slavery was a mark of modern democracy while it was monarchy that was inimical to this praxis, it heightened contradictions among abolitionists who thought otherwise.102

Greeted uneasily in Philadelphia in September 1791—in many ways the main- land’s leading city—was the shocking news from France that lawmakers had given “free Negroes and people of color the same rights and the same weight in govern- ment as belong to the white people.” Readers of a Jamaican newspaper were told that the latter “almost universally revolved to oppose” this radical measure, guaran- teeing enhanced conflict. Similarly shocking was the news item that “vessels with Negroes from Africa are to be sent directly to Bordeaux, where it is supposed the National Assembly will treat them with civility and grant them the rights of citi- zens”103—news designed to arouse racist passions.

The Moline family was among those straggling into Philadelphia in the after- math of the wrathful ferment, bringing with them from the island enslaved Africans. But influenced by the growing abolitionist fervor—and perhaps now more keenly aware of the wrath that accompanied enslavement—they freed this disturbing chat- tel upon arriving in the keystone State.104

As suggested by the fact that a periodical in Jamaica was reporting anxiously about how Philadelphians were responding to turmoil in Hispaniola, there was a slave system in the hemisphere, albeit with different masters in different jurisdic- tions. Yet these slaveholders—at least the perspicacious ones—knew that a chal- lenge to one part of this system could easily materialize in another, making it neces- sary to pay careful attention to the overall project. This also meant that as slavery was debilitated on the island, it was bound to have similar consequences on the mainland.

Hence, mainland slaveholders interested in perpetuating their hateful system may have noticed—as London did—when as revolt quickened in Paris in late 1790, runaway slaves hastened from Trinidad to Grenada.105 London’s man in Grenada, aware of a growing restiveness regionally, desired that the Carolina Corps—African refugees from Dixie now fighting for Britain—and “volunteer Free Blacks or Mulattoes” be mobilized in response. “Louis La Grenade, a mulatto of the colony, of considerable property,” said Edward Matthew, was “well known for many years for his activity against the Runaway Negroes” and should be enlisted.106 But did not this understandable response feed the regional concern about the growing demands of the “mulatto” that was to singe and sear Hispaniola rather shortly, then leap to the North American mainland to rile Dixie?

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There was “discontent among the Negroes of Dominica,” it was reported with gross understatement in January 1791. A “serious disturbance” was in the offing, an “insurrection” even, linking the “particularly formidable” indigenous “Charibs [sic]” and “Slaves,” necessitating reliance upon the “Black Corps” who were “much better qualified than European Troops for the fatiguing duty of searching out the Fugitives in the interior of the country.” Reassuring was the alleged fact that “our late Guardian Act has been generally productive of a milder treatment” of these rebels—a postu- late that reality itself contradicted.107 What was occurring—even before the spark- ing of the Haitian Revolution—was that “present unhappy disturbances” in the sur- rounding “French Colonies” were riling islands that London claimed.108 In response, the British were “avoiding every interference in their disputes”—but was that wise considering that these islands claimed by Paris were not necessarily reciprocating? For, contemporaneously, Edward Matthew was expressing “much concern that the unhappy disturbances at Martinique are not subsided”109—and could spread easily.

Thus, even before August 1791, the Caribbean was in an uproar. A plot in Tortola and an insurrection in Dominica were attributed by London in 1790 to the influence emanating from Paris.110 Inauspiciously for the major powers, Africans in Dominica had taken advantage of seemingly perpetual London-Paris conflict to seek to upset the entire order. “Depredations” mounted, said one witness, that were “serious,” as Africans “robbed and destroyed the property and at length killed some of the English inhabitants.” They were “greatly encouraged” by the Marquis Duchilleau of France, who “had actually engaged with them,” and “gave them the muskets and bayonets which he took from the English inhabitants,” along with “powder and balls” and, amazingly, the “same provisions as [were] allowed to the French soldiers.” These Africans had “the audacity to kill and carry away the cattle; and to plunder and set fire to the buildings of the estates,” which, inexorably, meant “alarm” at the “daring wickedness of the runaway Negroes.”

The accused French officials called “the runaways . . . his friends,” as they marauded in “large bodies” with “conk shells blowing and French colours flying.” Desperate British planters were reduced to appealing to the French governor in Martinique to little avail, as Africans “retired to the dwelling house on the estate, where they regaled on the stock, provisions, and liquors they found in plenty, their chiefs being served in the silver vessels of the Lieutenant-Governor.” others had “retired among the Carribbees [sic] at Saint vincent,” known to be ferocious fight- ers with close ties to Africans. All were acquainted with “poisonous herbs that grow in the West Indies” and “by this poison many white people have been killed by poison,” with more assuredly facing a similar fate. This was all “occasioned by the revolution in France.”111

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins, 1791–1793 49

Articulating what was painfully apparent, Major General Adam Williamson admitted that he was “convinced” that the “disturbances at Dominica . . . originated from. . . . the islands of Martinique & Guadeloupe on each side of it, where there were thousands of blacks & people of colour in arms, many of whom crossed over to Dominica.” In Jamaica, the colonial prize, the “principal Gentlemen” did not— then—have the “least apprehension of any insurrection or disturbances amongst the slaves,” but this may have been an elaborate exercise in calming jangled nerves.112

“Disturbances” in Dominica were propelling abolitionist debates in London, complained Lord Grenville, since this uprising brought the “serious alarm” of “con- tagion” spreading to other islands. More military force was being considered, but London was facing overstretch given its commitments in India and elsewhere. This was a “considerable . . . expense,” he carped, both to the “islands and to the mother country”113—a cost that would eventuate ultimately in abolition, placing concomi- tant pressure on the slave-holding republic.

By 1790, it was not just Carolina planters who were agitated about a possible conflict with Spain that too could roil the waters.114 War with Spain, said Henry Hamilton in Bermuda, could wrack this island and curtail needed supplies— a reality that would be hard to hide from arbitraging Africans,115 not to mention their nearby comrades in the Carolinas. Soon London was “informed” that “there appeared in the Negroes” of Bermuda a “manifest disposition to revolt.”116 By early 1791, London was frantically searching for “fugitive slaves throughout the Spanish provinces,”117 as, dismissing solidarity, Madrid’s emissaries were providing “protec- tion” to “fugitive slaves.”118

By June 1791, London was told of the “late turbulent spirit” among the Africans, which was said to be “confined to Dominica”—others were not so sure. There was edgy reassurance that the debate in the House of Commons “relative to the slave trade” had “not caused any alteration in their [Africans’] behavior,” as “no revolts were apprehended”—but, again, others were not as certain. Telling was that “during the height of the insurrection at Dominica the Council of Assembly of Montserrat was fearful lest the slaves might become infected, and as their Militia was without firearms, they applied” for more arms—not exactly a vote of confidence.119

That is, even before August 1791, there was an unfurling contagion, forcing London to rely more heavily on the dubious remedy of African troops and “mulat- toes” in a manner that would strain the redcoats as Hispaniola exploded, instigat- ing even more intense debates in the House of Commons about barring the slave trade—which like falling dominoes would lead to debates about barring slavery itself, which would then put more pressure on a slave-holding republic to contradict its recently concluded founding.

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It was also in June 1791 that Edward Matthew noticed that “armaments arrived at Martinique from France,” which meant the “inhabitants of St. Domingo would not receive the four battalions of troops” promised, with untoward consequences soon to be evident. Anyway, since the “two battalions formerly sent there [had] created disturbances rather than quieted them,” this dispatching was of doubtful utility in any case.120

By late July—like a firefighter besieged by determined pyromaniacs—Matthew’s gaze had shifted to Barbados. A “coup de main” from an unnamed “neighboring enemy” was not expected, so it should be seen as a “proper place for a military depot.” But since similar advice was provided to St. vincent and Dominica—both then on fire—this consel too was of doubtful utility.121

By September 1791, the Earl of Effingham was distraught: he was “very sorry” to hear of “so melancholy an account as I have to given of the situation of our neigh- bours in St. Domingo.” French officials were now there pleading for aid, “cra[ving] assistance on account of a terrible insurrection among the Negroes, who have burnt and destroyed all the plantations for 50 miles in length on both sides of [the] Cape.” The untrustworthy “mulattos who were at open violence with the whites have joined them from a sense of common danger and 15,000 of them with 30,000 blacks who remain faithful are crowded in the town of the Cape, almost starving.” The benign peer “sent them 500 muskets and 1500 lb. of ball and allowed them to purchase provisions and powder.”122

Days later, the earl heard that the Hispaniola settlers had “attacked the insurgent Negroes & gained a considerable advantage,” though he sensed this was “exagger- ated” (and it was). Actually, the “massacres” were “much greater” than imagined, as suggested by the fact that Jamaica was being overrun by distressed Europeans. “My chief care,” he said knowingly, “will be to prevent their Negroes from coming to mix with ours” for fear of what the former could impart to the latter about planter vulner- ability. For he knew that it was “very possible” that “disturbances might arise here” though he had “endeavoured” strenuously “to avoid such appearance of preparation as might put mischief into people’s heads”—which was hardly enough to dissuade the awe-inspiring Maroons of Jamaica, who had almost collapsed the colonial proj- ect decades earlier. “What the gossiping of Idle folks may produce I can’t tell,” he added, but it was not gossip but raging fire, sharp daggers, and hot lead that were more of a concern.123 Thus, troops were shifted from Barbados to Jamaica, combined with an “augmentation of naval force”124—but the shedding of blood and treasure this maneuver portended was hardly the stuff of confidence.

London may have known that by September 1791 enslaved Africans in Jamaica were singing songs about the uprising in Hispaniola and soon slaveholders from

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins, 1791–1793 51

virginia to Louisiana and from Cuba to Brazil were muttering about an energized insolence now embedded deeply in the hearts of “their” Africans that was inspired by Hispaniola.125

By late october of 1791, Stephen Fuller in England was “struck with horror” by what he had heard about Hispaniola. As for London’s enslaved in that vicinity, he counseled “keeping them constantly at home, disarming them, preventing cabal- ling, drumming, sounding conch horns, securing the rum & strong liquors, and also ammunition”—but this was easier to articulate from cosseted Southampton than the frontlines of battle. This he sensed since he also stressed that of late “several canoes had arrived at the [east] end of Jamaica with Negroes from Hispaniola”126— with unclear intentions.

Fuller may have known that in Spanish Town, Jamaica, a settler had found that the “head Negroes” of “plantations there not only discussed very unreserv- edly about the rebellion in Hispaniola but declared”—with emphasis—“that the Negroes in the French Country (such is their expression) were Men” and a “simi- lar revolt would soon take place in Jamaica. They went so far as to anticipate the destruction of the whites and to dispute about the distribution of their estates.” on the mainland, republicans were busily importing more “whites” so as to overwhelm uproarious Africans and indigenes, but in Jamaica such options did not seem as readily available. Instead, the debate was whether the authorities should “stop the further importation of Negroes from Africa” or increase their number, as some planters suggested. Yet it was known that “no circumstance in life is so pleasing to them [Jamaican Africans] as the addition of new Negroes,” so they could better overwhelm the settlers—“which every planter knows to be true.”127

By 1 November, Matthew had learned from a “gentleman . . . from Spanish St. Domingo” that “there had been an insurrection on several estates at the Cape; that the slaves had killed the proprietors and all the white people on them, to the amount of some hundreds.”128 By 6 November, Major General Williamson, reporting from Jamaica, was seeking to assure a comrade in the now deteriorating Hispaniola by suggesting that “every thing” might be “again quiet.” However, he could not help but reveal that the “same spirit of revolt should take place” where he was sited, as “there is no doubt that there are thousands of slaves who would willingly enter into a rebellion if they thought they could succeed,” especially since “the greater part of this island is certainly in a very defenceless state.”129

By mid-November, Fuller demanded that more “small arms” be made available in Jamaica, since it was during the Christian holidays upcoming when “Negroes are most likely to break out, as the white people upon the estates are then all separated.” What to do?130

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52 C o N F R o N T I N G B L A C k J A C o B I N S

By December, Whitehall itself had begun to snap out of bureaucratic inertia, detailing the “commotions” and the “disasters” in Hispaniola, while offering the anodyne advice of “caution” and “circumspection.”131 An official report demanded that the Carolina Corps be augmented in response. Yes, it was said, “an objection may be made to arming of blacks as soldiers,” but this understandable concern “has no weight”132—though skeptics might well have pondered the viability of a project based on the enslavement of Africans that was then to be policed by Africans.

It was during this tempestuous era that London began frantically “raising Blacks” for the military. The “purchasing of Negroes to be attached to the regiments not exceeding ten percent [of the] company” was recommended. As well, it was rec- ommended to “purchase them from . . . different plantations.”133 The “subject of the Black Troops,” said Whitehall, “will have an early consideration; at this moment no plan has been fixed upon.” It was also observed that both options—i.e. “embodied as a separate corps or to be attached to the strength of different regiments on duty in Jamaica”—were problematic in their own ways, particularly when discussed—as they were—in the context of Spain providing nearby refuge to “fugitive slaves.”134

on cue, abolitionist voices became louder and more insistent. By october 1791, one inspired crusader opined that one “cannot look upon a piece of Sugar without conceiving it tainted with spots of human blood.” The “iniquity of the Africans Slave Trade,” he thundered, “is so glaring that it has met with scarcely any but anonymous defenders,” who were mostly grotesquely self-interested, “African mer- chants and West India planters,” sadly, a “numerous body of men.”135 “Resolved” it was declaimed in the House of Commons on 2 April 1792, “that the trade carried on by British Subjects for the purpose of procuring slaves from Africa ought to be gradually abolished.”136

That is, as of April 1792, motions advocating the abolition of the slave trade were being debated accusingly in the House of Commons with events in Hispaniola fueling the flames. Listeners were told in excruciating detail of “rapes, massacres, of conflagrations, of impaled infants, and acts of parricide”—though this was said in favor of pursuing an untenable status quo, it could just as well be heard as advocat- ing the exact opposite. A “Colonel Tarleton” had just heard from a “respectable offi- cer at Antigua, describing the sickly situation of the king’s troops” and wondered whether they were now sufficient to “awe or suppress insurrections amongst the Negroes, throughout the different islands”—a worry that proved to be prophetic.137 Pro or con, Hispaniola haunted this debate.

There was no unanimity—as of yet—about barring the slave trade. Stephen Fuller, with wide interests in Jamaica, insisted that “the only effectual method to guard us against the evils we have too much to reason to dread, will be by putting

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Confronting the Rise of Black Jacobins, 1791–1793 53

an immediate & decisive stop to the impracticable projects of abolishing the African trade.” All such inflammatory debates in Parliament did, he huffed, was cre- ate a “state of suspense so inviting to the Negroes and so dangerous to the white inhabitants.”138

But within 48 hours, another Jamaican settler had made an implicit rebuke of Fuller’s bold words. This anxious colonist was “diligently preparing for the worst; our Negroes are perfectly acquainted,” he said disconsolately, “with everything that has been doing at Hispaniola.” Thus, to “ensure the peace of the country it will be absolutely necessary for us to go the expense of at least 100,000 [pounds] in making inlands stations & roads” and also to “double” the “force to be in future stationed here.” Why such expenditures and deployments? “I am convinced,” he said, “that ideas of Liberty have sunk so deep into the minds of all the Negroes that, wherever the greatest precautions are not taken, they [Africans] will rise.”139

The tides of history—and Africans—were buoying the latter and foiling Fuller. Initially, Fuller had the better of the argument in London—but a massive British intervention in Hispaniola led to the most stinging and decisive defeats in the empire’s checkered history, helping to convince even the most stubborn that only abolition offered a graceful exit.140

The vaunted Founding Fathers then administering the slave-holding repub- lic seemed incapable of comprehending the world historic forces that were being unloosed at that time. Thus, the slave-holding republic would then have to contend with an abolitionist London and Haiti, a mighty force that would be difficult to thwart.

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