Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois Read Free Book Online Page B

writes one historian, was in Saint-Domingue “the mother
    of history.” Each region had its own landscape, customs, and demography,
    and these would shape the revolution to come. The geographic location of
    the colony in the wider world would likewise profoundly shape its political
    history. Saint-Domingue was at the heart of the Americas, connected in
    many ways to the empires that surrounded it, and quite far from the nation
    that governed it. It was part of an evolving Atlantic world, one in which
    many of the subjects of empires gradually came to dream of one day being
    citizens of their own nations.44
    In 1777 a crowd gathered in the main plaza of Le Cap to watch the hang-
    ing of a ship captain convicted of stealing. But when the executioner
    opened the trap below his feet, the rope snapped, and the captain found
    himself sprawled on the ground. He cried “grace,” and several people in
    the crowd repeated the word. The executioner, unmoved by the miracle,
    prepared to hang the captain again. The man resisted, wrapping his feet
    around the ladder and refusing to move, and the crowd erupted and at-
    tacked the executioner. Mounted policemen tried to stop the crowd but
    were showered with rocks and fled. The executioner dragged the captive
    away down the street, but two big sailors—perhaps from his ship—at-
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    av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
    tacked him and freed the captain. As the executioner returned toward the
    Place des Armes, he was attacked by a group of blacks, who pummeled
    him with stones until he was dead. “I saw the corpse of this unfortunate
    under a pile of stones,” Moreau wrote of the murdered executioner; “his
    head was completely flattened.” There was one unlikely survivor from the
    incident: “a little mouse,” which the executioner had adopted, “was in his
    pocket” and “found living and unharmed.”45
    The port towns of the Atlantic world were notorious for their unruly
    crowds of sailors, slaves, market-women, small-time crooks, prostitutes,
    and others who were scraping by on the margins of their colonial socie-
    ties. They were also, of course, prone to more widespread sedition and re-
    volt on the part of wealthier individuals who, having left their European
    homes, came to have very different perspectives and interests from those
    of their European governors. Saint-Domingue was no exception. In its
    short history it saw two major uprisings before the one that ultimately de-
    stroyed it.
    In November 1723 a crowd of a hundred women attacked the Maison
    de l’Afrique, the island seat of the powerful Company of the Indies. Led by
    a onetime actress named Sagona, owner of a bar in the town, they smashed
    the windows of the building, broke in, and threw furniture, books, and pa-
    pers into the street. They tracked some of the company’s officials down to
    a nearby house, where Sagona placed a gun against the throat of one of
    them and said, “Drink, traitor, it’ll be your last.” Reportedly he was saved
    just in time by the intervention of an officer. The next night the rioting continued as a larger crowd again attacked the Maison de l’Afrique and then
    set fire to a plantation owned by the company at La Fossette. In the crowd
    were 60 men, armed and dressed like women, and more than 300 women,
    some covered in flour and others wearing fake moustaches. The uprising,
    triggered by the granting of trading privileges to the company, lasted sev-
    eral months. Although many of the participants were poor whites, some
    wealthy men in the colony supported it, with one declaring that if the re-
    bels won there would be open commerce “with all nations,” “Republican
    liberty,” and no more taxes. The revolt was so widespread that the governor
    briefly considered offering freedom to those slaves “who abandoned their
    masters and gathered under the flag of the king.”46
    Such revolts were a part of a broader refusal by many in Saint-
    Domingue to accept the plans