Race Wars in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue

Still during the eighteenth century, two other major slave rebellions broke out in the British colony of Jamaica and in the Dutch colony of Berbice, both colonies where slaves largely outnumbered white settlers.

In contrast with the previous rebellions in colonial North America involving dozens of bondspeople, Tacky’s Revolt gathered more than 1,000 enslaved persons and continued for nearly eighteen months. During the rebellion, whereas the insurgents killed 60 white people, British forces killed 500 Black men and women. On February 27, 1763, just three years after Tacky’s Revolt started, a slave revolt broke out in Berbice, a Dutch colony on South America’s Caribbean coast in the region of today’s Guyana. Burning plantations and scaring away white settlers, the insurgents gathered nearly all the colony’s enslaved population, at the time composed of between 4,000 to 5,000 individuals, who controlled Berbice for more than one year. The rebellion’s leader, Coffij van Lelienburg, as suggested by his first name, was once again a West African–born Akan speaker.

This long series of slave revolts in societies where many enslaved people were born in Africa and outnumbered European and locally born white settlers eventually culminated with a major slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue in 1791. A French colony located on the western part of the island of Hispaniola, Saint-Domingue was the richest European colony in the Americas by the time of the uprising, which is inseparable from the larger Atlantic repercussions of the French Revolution that broke out in 1789 and led to a decade of political and social change. Taking down the rigid structure of the ancien régime that maintained the majority of the population as members of the third estate (all those below the aristocracy), the revolution propelled ideas of freedom and equality. More important, the Saint-Domingue slave revolt is also part of the long history of slave resistance and rebellions in the Americas during the eighteenth century.

Like Jamaica, Saint-Domingue had a huge Black population that clearly outnumbered the white population at the end of the eighteenth century. On the eve of the French Revolution, about two-thirds of Saint-Domingue’s enslaved population, estimated at half a million individuals, were born in Africa.²² Although smaller than in the Spanish colony of Cuba, Saint-Domingue also had its own population of freed and freeborn people of color (gens de couleur). Among the gens de couleur who were formerly enslaved, some had been emancipated by their owners. However, more likely, most of them were able to purchase their own freedom with their own resources at some point in their lives.

When the members of the third estate in France formed the National Assembly in 1789, the colonial delegates, planters, and merchants obviously opposed the end of slavery simply because the institution generated immense profits. These groups feared the end of slavery and took measures aimed at preventing news about the French Revolution from reaching the colonies in the Americas. For example, as the revolution unfolded in 1789, enslaved people from Saint-Domingue were prohibited to disembark in continental France because they could bring back to the colony ideas promoting insurrection and emancipation.²⁵ But obviously, the goals of these colonial measures were unsuccessful.

The “common wind” of rebellion, as the historian Julius S. Scott called it, quickly reached Saint-Domingue.²⁶ As the revolution progressed, the political disparities between the white and free population of color became even more explicit. Despite France’s National Constituent Assembly in August 1789 having adopted of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, affirming the equality of rights among all men, the populations of color were not given the same rights as white people.

In March 1790, the National Assembly approved the creation of a Colonial Committee that established that French colonies would be ruled by their own legislation, therefore protecting slavery and the planters’ interests. The committee also determined that only individuals who owned property could vote in the colonial elections, but it failed to explicitly mention the gens de couleur, giving them the ability to demand voting rights. As the legal routes closed, the populations of color decided to take up arms to fight for their rights in an anticolonial rebellion. In 1791, a decree by the National Assembly eventually gave voting rights only to gens de couleur who owned property and were born from free parents. But by that point, the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue had already been greatly affected by the news of rapid changes brought by the French Revolution. In August 1791, a slave revolt broke out in Saint-Domingue. Thousands of insurgents marched through Saint-Domingue’s northern plain. Burning down plantations, big houses, and slave quarters, and killing slave owners, managers, and overseers, they gradually attracted even more insurgents. The rebellion continued for several months and progressively spread over the rest of the colony. At first, the population of color was willing to fight the slave rebels. But as their demands for political rights to the French National Assembly were denied, they decided to fight the white planters and took the slave rebels as their allies.²⁷

On September 3, 1791, France adopted a new constitution that ended the ancien régime and established a constitutional monarchy. Despite providing amnesty for revolutionary acts, there was no consensus as to whether insurgent actions by gens de couleur and enslaved peoples in the colonies should be pardoned.

After the suspension of the National Assembly and the establishment of a National Convention in France, King Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. The end of the monarchy led Spain and Britain to declare war against France, complicating Saint-Domingue’s position in the international arena. The Spanish offered Saint-Domingue’s insurgents the option to join their troops in exchange for freedom. Meanwhile, the British obtained support from white planters. Later on, they also recruited African-born soldiers to join their ranks.²⁹ To counteract the British and the Spanish interventions, the French offered freedom and land to slave rebels who would join the French army. Two freedmen, Toussaint Louverture and AndrĂ© Rigaud, joined the forces that fought against the British invaders until their defeat in 1798.³⁰ French commissioners who had been in Saint-Domingue since 1792 to oversee the application of the decree giving political rights to the populations of color started freeing the enslaved persons in 1793 by gradually abolishing slavery in the colony. Eventually, on February 4, 1794, the National Convention finally approved the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, even though it was only implemented in Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Guiana, leaving out the colonies of Senegal, Île de France (Mauritius), Reunion Island, French India, and Martinique, which by that time was under British control.

As the revolution continued in Saint-Domingue, in 1799, Napoléon Bonaparte led a coup d’état that overthrew the Directory of France and replaced it with the Consulate (the revolutionary governing council), which he headed as first consul. In March 1801, seven years after the abolition of slavery by the National Convention, Louverture called a Constituent Assembly to draft Saint-Domingue’s constitution. Promulgated in July 1801, the new constitution affirmed that the entire island of Hispaniola was part of the French empire, including Santo Domingo, the eastern portion formerly under Spanish control but by then controlled by Louverture. Moreover, the constitution also determined that henceforth the island would be ruled by its own legislation. Even more important, the new constitution affirmed the prohibition of slavery in Saint-Domingue.

Relying on the military forces under his command, Louverture named himself governor for life. But his rule did not last long. Napoléon Bonaparte rejected Saint-Domingue’s autonomy. In February 1802, he sent an expedition of twenty-two thousand soldiers to the insurgent colony to fight Louverture. In May 1802, Bonaparte issued a decree reestablishing slavery in the French colonies. But the measure had no effect on Saint-Domingue, where insurrection persisted. French troops captured Louverture, imprisoning him and then deporting him to France, where he died one year later. But the rebels continued to fight. As thousands of soldiers of Bonaparte’s men succumbed to an epidemic of yellow fever, the slave rebels eventually defeated the French army. On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Saint-Domingue an independent nation.

Saint-Domingue was the first colony in the Americas to abolish slavery altogether, while simultaneously breaking its colonial ties with France. The new nation was renamed Haiti, and Dessalines appointed himself first as “governor for life” and then emperor.³¹ Although the victory of Saint-Domingue’s slave rebellion can be explained by specific internal factors and the international context propelled by the French Revolution, the revolt was marked by three elements previously found in other revolts. First, Black, enslaved, freed, and free people greatly outnumbered the white population. Second, a significant number of Saint-Domingue’s Black population was born in Africa and had recently arrived in the colony. Several of these newly arrived Africans had previous experience in warfare in their homelands. Third, despite their diverse origins and legal statuses, Black people joined ranks to fight the French colonizer. In the decades that followed the birth of Haiti, slavery would never be the same in the Americas.