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Christophe,
Rochambeau, Dessalines
Defeat of French, the Birth of Haiti
The Human Cruelties of Repression & Revolution
The unsuccessful attacks on Le Cap and
Christophe's defeat by Lacroix had shown the Black leaders that,
as in Toussaint's time, they were still unable to meet French
troops in pitched battles. Dessalines decided to concentrate
most of his attacks in the West and South, where Rochambeau's
persecutions of the mulattos had brought many allies, and to
reorganize and train his troops and build up his supplies,
leaving the brigand chieftains to carry on guerilla warfare in
the North.
Rochambeauu, unable to bring his enemy to
battle yet also prevented from establishing strong points in the
interior because of the constant raids and ambushes, decided to
copy the Jamaican planters who had used 100 Cuban man-hunting
bloodhounds in putting down the Maroon rising of 1795. He
imported several couples from Havana, where dogs were bred
specially to track down runaway slaves, intending to use them to
smell out ambushes, but they prove to be unsatisfactory.
They were difficult to control (the British
had engaged expert handlers, as well as dogs) and their
operational range was less than that of a trained infantrymen.
Rochambeau, whose mind was ingenious in evil, decided to use
them instead as a new form of punishment, a new instrument of
torture. The dogs should be used not to track the rebels down,
but to tear them to pieces after they were captured.
The training of the animals was offered as a
spectacle for privileged guests and first tried out in an arena
constructed on the Charrier plantation near Le Haut-du-Cap. Four
couple of dogs were to be set upon a Negro who was stripped
naked and whose hands were tied behind his back.
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After being excited, the animals were
loosed and flung themselves ferociously on their prey
[one eye witness wrote]. His flesh torn in shreds, the
Negro fell to the ground. . . . Suddenly the dogs
halted, formed a circle round the victim, stiffened
their forelegs, and began to bay. The exercise had
failed -- for this is the way these animals behave when
they are overcome by fear.
One might have expected this lack of
success to discourage the executioners, but that would
be to misjudge the characters of the monsters who
presided over these ceremonies. they picked up the
Negro, now covered with bites, untied his hands and gave
him a hunting crop. With a bayonet in his back, he was
forced to advance on the dogs to get himself devoured by
them. . . . The dogs, more humane than the humans, fell
back and then ran yelping away. . . . The victim
was carried off to hospital . . . and reprieved. |
Despite the failure of this experiment, there
were others held in the presence of distinguished audiences,
which included women as well as men. At one staged in an arena
built in front of Government House at Le Cap, Rochambeau's
chief-of-staff offered one of his young Negro servants as a
victim. As at the Charier plantation, the dogs were so
intimidated by their prey, despite the fact that he was naked
and tied to a post, that they did no more than gather in a
circle, snarling at him.
The chief-of-staff, blushing with annoyance
and embarrassment, jumped into the arena, drew his sword, and
ripped up his servant's belly, whereupon the dogs gathered
sufficient courage to leap upon the Black and tear him to
pieces.
The monstrous inhumanities practiced by Black
and white alike were as futile as they were horrible. Hatred
beyond normal human limits bred a superhuman contempt for the
most atrocious pain. The eye witness of the blooding of the dogs
at the Charrier plantation -- himself no Negrophile but a
planter and confirmed partisan of slavery -- described "a
new punishment which they said would succeed in intimidating the
Blacks."
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Three Black deserters [he continued]
were recaptured in the act of setting fire to a house;
they had, in addition, disemboweled a pregnant woman and
torn out the eyes of one of our soldiers with a bullet
extractor. they were condemned to be burned alive.
On the Place Saint-Louis, at Le Cap,
at the right hand corner of the well, a pyre was built
and covered with bagasse (the fibrous residue of
sugarcane); three stakes set in the triangle, with a
sliding collar on each, held the three Negroes back to
back facing the onlookers.
The centre of the pyre was lighted
and the flames quickly reached the two men who were down
wind. in less than two minutes their bodies swelled up,
the skin slit, the fat dripping from their flesh, gave
fresh life to the flames that devoured them. their arms
and legs contracted, and, after some terrible screams, a
white froth came from their mouths, cavernous sounds
from their chests -- and all was ended. the silence of
death reigned over the crowd, which was witnessing this
sort of torment for the first time.
The third Negro, however, an
eighteen-year-old, had been shielded from the flames. he
could not see his comrades, but he heard their cries.
These, far from intimidating him, stimulated him, and he
shouted in Créole: Zautes, pas connait mouri;
guettez comment yo mouri! (You don't know how to die
-- watch how I die!) By a superhuman effort, turning his
neck in the collar, he faced the stake, sat down, placed
his legs in the fire and allowed himself to be burned,
motionless, without betraying any anguish, without
allowing the slightest groan to be heard, without
uttering the faintest cry. . . . |
The same insane hatred marked the actions of
the leaders on each side. Rochambeau, having made five hundred
prisoners in one battle against Dessalines, ordered them to be
put to death
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Dessalines had his men erect five
hundred gallows during the night and, in full sight of
the French lines, hanged five hundred Frenchmen at dawn.
Rochambeau again economised his ammunition by sending
Black prisoners out to sea to be drowned instead of
shot. The skipper of the barge that took them out,
pinioned ready to be thrown overboard, fancied himself
as a wit and, when challenged by the sentries at For
Picolet, would invariably reply, "I'm just off to
soak some cod." They had sandbags tied around their
necks as sinkers; when the bags or the ropes rotted, the
corpses rose to the surface and floated ashore.
Rochambeau
(1755-1813) |
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Senseless evil was matched by insensate heroism
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I have seen them marching against a
redoubt [wrote one Frenchmen] in a tight column, raked by
grapeshot from four cannon, and never taking a step
backwards. The more of them fell, the more it seemed to
stimulate the courage of the others; and they came on
singing, for Negroes sing everywhere and make songs about
everything. This was the hero's song: Grenadiers, à
l'assault! Ça qui mouri zaffaire à yo Qu'y a point papa,
Qu'y a point mamam! Grenadiers, à l'assault! Ça qui
mouri zaffaire à yo!
Three times these brave men, their
weapons at the shoulder, advanced without firing a shot;
and thrown back each time, they did not retire until
three-quarters of their number were strewn upon the
glacis. You could form no idea of this cold courage
without having seen it. . . . That black rectangular mass,
marching to death, singing, under a magnificent sun,
stayed long in my memory; and even today, more than forty
years later, the impressive, grandiose picture returns as
vividly to my imagination as in those first moments. |
But blind courage was not enough against
military skill. Bonaparte, at last awakened to the necessity of
repairing the blunders he had made, decided to provide substantial
reinforcements. the survivors of Leclerc's men would be immune to
fever for at least five years. By husbanding his resources,
gradually building up his strength, Rochambeau might in time
achieve Leclerc's dream of destroying most of the Black
population.
Unluckily for him, the uneasy peace in Europe
did not last. on May 16, 1803, war between France and Britain
began again, and with it came the end of all French hopes of
holding Saint-Domingue. The realisation may have provided some
bitter consolation for Toussaint, held prisoner at the fortress of
Jouy, shivering in a damp cell at the beginning of another insipid
alpine summer, and now within a few weeks of death from
consumption and pneumonia.
Rochambeau, who took twelve thousand men down
to port-au-Prince in March to deal with the troubles in the West
and South (and, it was said, to renew acquaintance with the ladies
of his harem), received orders from Bonaparte to return at once to
Le Cap. From July onwards the British blockade was reestablished
and the rebels, scenting the kill, pressed back the French troops
now devoid of all hope of reinforcement. Their triumphant,
menacing fires lit the hills and plains around the French-occupied
towns, whose inhabitants cowered in fear of bestial torture and
rape to come.
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As soon as the news of war reached
Dessalines he wrote to Lieutenant-General Nugent, Governor
of Jamaica, offering preferential terms to British
merchants if Nugent would give him military supplies and
support against the French. This was a matter on which
Nugent had not yet had instructions from Whitehall and, as
Admiral Duckworth pointed out to the Admiralty, "the
Lieut.-Governor, like me, felt the greater embarrassment
in promoting the views of the Blacks against the
Whites." |
They agreed between them to offer Dessalines
enough arms and ammunition to drive the French army out of Saint-Domingue,
on condition that he gave the British two ports to be used as
trading posts, allowed them to occupy the fortified bases of Môle
Saint-Nicolas and Tiburon, and promised protection of white
civilians and restitution of property to white owners.
Captain James Walker of the Vanguard and Hugh
Cathcart, the Jamaican trader who had formerly been British agent
at Port-au-Prince, presented these proposals to Dessalines and
Christophe -- whom Dessalines had promoted to lieutenant-general
-- at Les Gonaïves, on Monday, August 28. Dessalines gave
assurances that he would protect white inhabitants, though he said
that he could not answer for the consequences if towns had to be
taken by assault (a traditional and not outrageous reservation,
within a decade of Badajos).
The reinstatement of white planters in their
estates he rejected as "too strong a dose," since many
of the whites who had been helping the French -- with a view of
reducing the Blacks to slavery again -- were the same men to whom
Toussaint had given their plantations back after they had deserted
once before and fought for the British.
He said he would never trust them, recalling
the meetings of Leclerc's advisory council, at which some
colonists had suggested "extirpating the Negroes in toto
should they find it impracticable to reduce them to slavery . . .
Himself and his generals had come to the determination . . . that
in future the whites should be confined to the different towns in
the colony -- that the soil should e exclusively possessed by the
natives (Blacks and mulattos)."
This was the first open statement of the
rebels' new resolution: to make the colony not only independent
but also exclusively coloured, barring all whites from office and
from the ownership of land. For this reason Dessalines flatly
refused even to consider the proposal that the British navy should
be given the use of Môle Saint-Nicolas and Tiburon.
The French suspected, and frequently openly
alleged, that the British government betrayed the Treaty of Amiens
by supplying the rebels with arms and ammunition. It seems clear
from Cathcart's confidential reports to Duckworth that there was
no truth in this, though weapons may well have been sold to them
by British and American merchants. Earlier, when a member of
Leclerc's staff had complained to a British officer that there
were Briton had replied:
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Good heavens, don't you know we're a
nation of merchants? Those muskets probably left Kingston,
Jamaica, in an armed convoy guarded by our fleet and
carrying our troops to fight against Toussaint. Our
traders could sell only muskets from our own factories; it
was a good opportunity; and I understand that Toussaint
bought fifteen or twenty thousand of them -- to use
against us. We always combine business with politics. |
On this occasion, however, since the truce was
over and Dessalines had impressed both Cathcart and Walker with
his willingness to cooperate with the British, Walker agreed to
let him have ten barrels of gunpowder and forty muskets -- which
he had taken from a French prize -- so that Christophe could
attack a group of a thousand "Congos" in the mountains,
who were sending supplies to Rochambeau at Le Cap.
"Congo," still a term of disparagement, was now used by
the rebels who had formerly been in the French army to describe
those who had from the earliest days been members of irregular
bands.
Shortly afterwards Dessalines sent a message to
"the Admiral commanding His Britannic Majesty's forces
cruising off the Cape," telling him that Clervaux was
attacking the Congos, Christophe was marching on le Cap, and that
Dessalines himself would begin the siege of Port-au-Prince with in
a few days." If it should please you to order one of the
vessels under your command to cruise off that town, Your
excellency would be rendering my army a signal service for which I
should be particularly grateful."
The Royal Navy cooperated closely, the British
ships blockading the ports to prevent supplies getting in and
gleaning where the rebels reaped, waiting for the fall of each
town to seize the escaping vessels and troops and escort them to
Jamaica. Captain Walker took off the French garrison from
Saint-Marc in September. On October 12 Brunet and the Negro
general Laplume surrendered Les Cayes, capital of the South
Province, to Captain Cumberland of the Pique. On November
11, with 20,000 men against Rochambeau's 5,000, Christophe
established himself on the heights commanding the Plaine du Cap
while Dessalines advanced via Le Limbé.
Rochambeau went to meet them at the head of his
men. As always in pitched battles, the Blacks suffered very heavy
casualties and had little in the way of artillery to reply to the
fire from the French fortified positions. The fighting continued
all day and was halted only by a tempest of rain that fell in such
torrents that it was impossible to see. The storm continued almost
without abatement for three weeks, battering and soaking the
flagging morale of the French troops who had been reduced to
eating their horses, mules, donkeys, even Rochambeau's imported
Negro-hunting dogs.
The civilian population of Le Cap, sullen under
Rochambeau's brutalities and exactions (one of them had recently
been shot out of hand for not producing a large sum of money that
the general demanded from him and that he did not possess) had
lost all heart for the fight.
On November 19 Rochambeau capitulated to
Dessalines, agreeing to hand over the forts and artillery
undamaged within ten days provided he and his troops were allowed
to embark on the ships in the harbour with all their baggage and
the honours of war. On November 22 Dessalines, Christophe and
Clervaux signed a proclamation promising justice to all men of
good will, including former white property-owners -- a reversal of
the policy announced to Walker and Cathcart only a few weeks
before.
Rochambeau sent his chief-of-staff to open
negotiations with Captain Loring, commanding the British squadron
patrolling off the Cape. He secretly hoped that the weather,
continuing bad, would drive the British away for long enough for
his own ships to get clear, but Loring was tenacious. Negotiations
dragged on until November 30, when Loring was surprised to see the
blue and red flag of the rebels hoisted on Fort Picolet. Captain
Bligh, whom Loring sent into the harbour to speak with Dessalines
and discover what was going on, was intercepted by a French naval
attaché and taken aboard the frigate La Surveillante,
where he found Rochambeau at last ready to come to terms.
He had embarked his troops five days before,
hoping to slip out of the harbour during a squall, but a head-on
wind had prevented them for moving. Dessalines, tired of waiting,
had entered the town that morning and threatened t sink the
French ships with a red-hot shot if they did not leave the harbour
at once.
Bligh went ashore to inform Dessalines that the
French were now British prisoners, and shortly afterwards the wind
changed sufficiently for the vessels to leave: three frigates and
seventeen smaller ships carrying 8,000 men, firing a token
broadside and lowering their colours as they went. At Jamaica the
ships were sold as prizes and the men interned in prison hulks.
Rochambeau's infamous conduct was well enough
know for Duckworth to refuse to meet him. As Christmas approached
the Governor of Jamaica grew apprehensive that the high spirits of
the season and an excess of drink might prompt some of the Negroes
to lynch the Frenchman. He was sent to England in the
Révolutionnaire and remained a prisoner there until he was
exchanged in 1811. Two years later he was killed at the battle of
Leipzig. Source: Hubert Cole. Christophe: King of Haiti. New
York: The Viking Press, 1967.
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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