Geographically, Haiti lay near the center of a galaxy of slave systems that depended on the fiction that slaves were incapable of acquiring or exercising power. Slaveholders needed to interpret their slaves’ powerlessness as a natural condition, as the result of inherent limitations. Throughout the ages, the behavior of slaves of all races had normally lent support to this interpretation. By definition a “slavish” person was a cringing Sambo, degraded and dependent, totally lacking in manly or womanly honor. Even the children of Israel, in their paradigmatic exodus from bondage, cried out to Moses that they would have preferred to serve the Egyptians than to be slain by Pharaoh’s pursuing army.14 On rare occasions, circumstances encouraged seemingly docile slaves to cut their masters’ throats. But throughout the New World, the same whites who armed themselves to suppress possible insurrections spoke with contempt of the blacks’ cowardice and contentment. As Douglass intimated, when the Dominguan slaves vindicated the honor and true character of the black man, the message was as important for self-doubting blacks as for arrogant and self-deluding whites.
FREEDMEN AND SLAVES
Since the Haitian Revolution was precipitated by a demand for freedmen’s rights, the cataclysm drew attention to the anomalous condition of the free black and colored populations of the New World.15 Did the presence of such people breed unrest among slaves and pose a danger to the slave system? Would planters be more secure if they widened or narrowed the distinctions between freedman and slave status? What did the behavior of freedmen suggest with respect to the slaves’ capability for eventual freedom and “civilization”? If racial slavery was dangerous to the long-term safety and virtue of any social order, as many political leaders agreed, did the condition of freedmen provide a preview of post-emancipation society or suggest that slavery could not be abolished without producing even worse social problems?
The Age of Revolution, roughly defined as the half-century between the onset of the American Revolution and the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars and Latin American struggles for independence, marked a dramatic growth in the free black and colored populations of the New World. In colonial Brazil and Spanish America, this was part of a long-term trend encouraged by sexual intermixture and relatively frequent manumission, especially of women and small children. By the late eighteenth century, free African Americans outnumbered slaves in most of Spanish America; even in Cuba over 45 percent of the African American population was free.16
In regions where manumission had always been extremely rare, such as the British mainland and Caribbean colonies, the number of free nonwhites now multiplied at an unprecedented rate. Some of this growth was attributable to natural reproduction at a time when most slave populations were not self-sustaining. Various slaveholding societies, including Saint-Domingue, sought to restrict manumissions, which were increasingly seen as a threat to white supremacy. But military needs reinforced religious zeal, paternal goodwill, and revolutionary ideology, inducing many masters to free their slaves during the American and French revolutions and then in the Hispanic wars of independence. Thousands of North American slaves won their freedom by joining forces with the British army or British loyalists. The British, during their protracted struggle with France for control of the Caribbean, found it necessary to enlist thousands of African slaves in special West Indian regiments and by a single legislative act to free some ten thousand of these veterans.17 The disruptions of war and revolution enabled untold numbers of slaves to escape and find precarious niches where they could at least pass as freedmen. The fluidity and uncertainties of the Age of Revolution provided blacks with opportunities to take new initiatives and to express their own values and aspirations, though often in contradictory and self-divisive ways.
We are not concerned here with the impact of revolution on the economics of slavery. Our point of departure is the relevance of the rapidly expanding free black and colored populations to subsequent debates over the feasibility and probable consequences of general emancipation. As we shall see, the volcanic upheavals in the French colonies were widely attributed to the free coloreds’ struggles for equal rights. In the United States, the large-scale emancipations that resulted from the American Revolution evoked a backlash of racial discrimination that increased support for plans to colonize free blacks in West Africa or other refuges. And it was the militant reaction against colonization, initiated by blacks themselves, that gave a distinctive stamp to American abolitionism. In the United States, far more than in any other New World society, the condition of free blacks as the beneficiaries of “the first emancipation” set the framework for later debates over the abolition of slavery.
At the outset it is important to clarify the relationship between manumission and slavery. Throughout history slaveholders have used manumission as a reward for faithful and diligent labor, for heroic acts or military service, for favored concubines and children. In some societies slaveholders enhanced their profits by allowing enterprising slaves to purchase their freedom in installments and by using the proceeds to buy new and younger laborers. From comparative studies of slave societies, we know that the frequency of manumission proves nothing about the relative harshness of slave treatment or the strength of a slave regime. In regions where masters could rely on a continuing supply of fresh slaves, as in ancient Rome and colonial Brazil, frequent manumissions probably strengthened slavery as a social and economic system. Whether freedmen and their descendants were assimilated within a few generations or were consigned to a stigmatized caste, their status had little effect on the fate of the mass of slaves. This is not to say that manumission and the status of freedmen were unrelated to the total pattern of variables that defined a given slave system. But the history of slavery gave no support to the assumption, widely held after the American Revolution, that an increasing incidence of manumission would lead automatically to universal emancipation.18
It is true that the Age of Revolution heightened fears that freedmen would ally themselves with slaves and encourage slave discontent, resistance, and revolt. But here one is easily misled by the later example of black abolitionists and fugitive slaves in the Northern United States and Brazil. The relations between freedmen and slaves were always complex and varied according to demographic and racial patterns, economic opportunities for freedmen, white acceptance of racial intermixture, and other factors.19 Making allowance for the immense variations in slave societies, it is clear that freedmen were characteristically torn between a sense of loyalty to slave friends and kin and a more powerful drive to distance themselves from all reminders of their former degradation. Manumission was generally an individual and divisive act, a transfiguring gift of life or rebirth that transformed a person’s status while preserving the status quo. Unlike an act of general emancipation, manumission implied no prior or universal right to liberty. It was a reward, granted at the discretion of a master, judge, or government to a slave who had been selected for some reason from the corporate mass. The process of selection favored slaves who were most likely to identify their interests with the master class that freed them. Yet this very dependence, especially when aggravated by a continuing stigma of inferiority and dishonor, generated resentments that could lead backward to an identification with slaves.
In the Southern United States as well as the British West Indies, slaveholders listened attentively to the warnings of white refugees from the French colonies. The French planters insisted that their slaves had been docile and content until the free coloreds began agitating loudly for equality and natural rights. When freedmen succeeded in winning a hearing and in elevating themselves to the level of whites, the slaves inevitably followed suit and vowed to break their chains.20 In an era of egalitarian rhetoric, it appeared that the racial subordination of all African Americans was an essential bulwark of slavery. On the other hand, in Saint-Domingue, the free colored population had owned slaves and generally supported the slave system. They had first taken up arms against rebellious white colonists who sought to depriv
e them of property and elemental rights. The gens de couleur libres, who included blacks as well as mulattoes, fought to suppress the slave insurrection in the North Province and limited their own demands to the guarantee of full legal equality with whites. What plunged Saint-Domingue into anarchy and civil war was the growing racism of whites, especially poor whites, who were determined to maintain their superiority over all descendants of slaves and to prevent the revolutionary government of France from responding to the grievances of colored citizens.21
This lesson was not wholly ignored in other slaveholding societies. In 1803, for example, when the Barbadian Assembly and Council debated a bill to limit the property rights of freedmen, a prominent member of the council pointed out that the free coloreds’ property holding, including slaveholding, helped to preserve public security by uniting the interests of freedmen and whites. “But if we reduce the free coloured people to a level with the slaves,” he predicted, they must unite with them, and will take every occasion of promoting and encouraging a revolt.” Similarly, a few delegates to the Tennessee and North Carolina constitutional conventions in the mid-1830s opposed disfranchising free blacks on the ground that deprivation of the free coloreds’ traditional liberties had sparked the revolution in Saint-Domingue.22 In the United States, however, this argument carried little weight.
Southern slaveholders were particularly prone to see subversive freedmen behind every suspected slave conspiracy. Freedmen often had the opportunity to assimilate revolutionary ideology and they sometimes assumed leading roles in slave conspiracies or insurrections: one thinks of Toussaint Louverture in Saint-Domingue, Alexandre Pétion in Curaçao, José Chirino in Venezuela, José Antonio Aponte in Cuba, Denmark Vesey in South Carolina, and Joseph Pitt Washington Franklin in Barbados.23 On the other hand, freedmen also won praise from whites by exposing a conspiracy, as in the case of Vesey’s plot in 1822, or by helping to suppress an insurrection, as in Louisiana in 1811 and Barbados in 1816. In eighteenth-century Jamaica, even the maroons, the fiercely independent black fugitives and descendants of fugitives who struggled to preserve their own de facto freedom, cooperated with white authorities by catching runaway slaves and helping to put down slave revolts. And in 1795 the Accompong Maroons, aided by slave rangers and free colored militiamen, played a central part in defeating the rebellious Trelawny Town Maroons, who, when finally transported to Sierra Leone, dutifully put down an insurrection there.24 Rebels do not necessarily ally with other rebels.
Slaveholders everywhere would have preferred restricting arms to white troops and militia, although black soldiers had established an impressive record of loyalty and courage from the time of the first New World settlements. Given the large white population of the northern mainland colonies at the time of the Revolution, it was at least conceivable that a war against Britain could be fought without enlisting black troops. This was the policy agreed upon late in 1775 by Washington’s officers and a delegation from Congress. But when the Northern states found it difficult to meet enlistment quotas, they soon began accepting blacks who volunteered or were offered as substitutes for their white owners. By 1779, when the military situation was becoming desperate in the Deep South, even South Carolinians—including Governor John Rutledge and the Laurens family—were calling on Congress to mobilize an army of black slaves. Unfortunately, though Congress offered to compensate slave owners in Georgia and South Carolina in order to raise a force of 3,000 black troops, it had no way of overriding the resistance of the Georgia and South Carolina legislatures.25
In 1795 the Jamaican legislature mounted similar resistance to Britain’s proposal to enlist thousands of slaves and free coloreds in permanent West Indian regiments. Demographic realities had long reconciled West Indian whites to the use of blacks for military labor and even combat, though for limited periods and under strict local control. The Caribbean colonies simply could not attract enough whites for self-defense; the white troops sent from Europe died in appalling numbers from yellow fever and other tropical diseases. By 1795, after two years of warfare with France, it was clear that Britain could not send out sufficient reinforcements to conquer Saint-Domingue, reconquer Guadeloupe, suppress rebellions in Grenada, Saint Vincent, and Jamaica, and defend all the colonies against French agents who were trying to use France’s emancipation decrees as a means of inciting slave insurrections against the British. Jamaican whites thought it madness, in such an inflammatory environment, to raise regiments of armed slaves. Planters, like those in the American South, also resisted even the compensated loss of their most valuable property, since any appreciable drain of manpower could destroy the value of their estates. The British government therefore resorted to the policy of buying thousands of Africans from the slave ships, outfitting them with red coats and arms, and mustering them in special regiments. And surprisingly, the planters’ fears proved to be ill-founded. For the rest of the long war, Britain relied on a largely Africanized military force to defend and garrison the West Indian colonies. Although white colonists were shocked by the sight of black troops fraternizing with slaves and of black noncommissioned officers commanding white soldiers, the West Indian regiments helped to preserve the slave system even in the conquered French islands. It was the French, with their emancipation decrees, who lost an empire.26
West Indian whites had wanted to avoid a dependence on black military power that inevitably eroded the racial boundaries of caste. In every New World society, African ancestry was a visible badge of slave origin and thus dishonor. Free blacks and coloreds everywhere occupied a marginal and ambiguous status, neither slave nor genuinely free; disdained by whites and often by privileged slaves, they were circumscribed by legal disabilities and barred from the more prestigious occupations and professions. But in regions where slaves outnumbered freedmen and free blacks were almost as numerous as whites, it was impossible to maintain a rigid color line that equated all the privileges of freedom with white skin. In describing Latin American and Caribbean slave societies, historians have referred to a three-tiered or three-caste system in which a free colored population, composed largely of mulattoes and lighter-skinned African Americans but including dark blacks, served as a protective buffer between a small white minority and a black slave majority. Freedmen and their descendants, however marked off as a separate caste, were often related to white families by ties of kinship, concubinage, and clientage. Such connections were far more manifest in the Caribbean and Latin America than in the United States, where racial intermixture was generally concealed and saturated in guilt. While no single determinant can begin to explain the complex variations in the way freedmen were defined and treated, it is clear that demography—and the socioeconomic forces that shaped demography—were of central importance.27
For example, in 1810, Jamaica contained well over 300,000 slaves, who accounted for some 86 percent of the colony’s total population. This was a fairly characteristic proportion in the British and French Caribbean. While the Upper South held over twice as many slaves as Jamaica, they constituted in 1810 only 31 percent of the population; the comparable figure for the Lower South was 45 percent, though the density of slaves in some local regions was similar to that in the Caribbean. In the South as a whole, about 63 percent of the population was white; in the British West Indies the proportion of whites ranged in 1810 from a high of 17 percent in Barbados to 5 percent in Nevis, 2.6 percent in Grenada, and 1.7 percent in Berbice. Obviously the small white minorities in the British and French Caribbean faced a very different world from that found in the slave states of North America. By coincidence, the proportion of black and colored freedmen was very similar in the total populations of Jamaica, Barbados, and the Upper South. The more significant figure, however, was the free black and colored percentage of the total free population. In 1810 this ranged from some 56 percent in Demerara-Essequibo to 14 percent in Barbados, 6 percent in the Upper South, and 3 percent in the Lower South. In Jamaica the proportion of free blacks and coloreds continued to inc
rease until the 1820s, when nonwhites clearly formed a majority of the free population.28
As one might expect, freedmen were most sharply distinguished from slaves in colonies like Jamaica, which also gave informal recognition to a hierarchy of color ranging upward from free blacks and sambos (the offspring of a black and a mulatto), to mulattoes, quadroons, mustees, and persons deemed white because of being four generations or more removed from a black ancestor.29 While the freedmen were divided among themselves by color, wealth, occupation, and town or rural residence, they shared a common quest for equality with whites and an orientation to white values. They were “eager for honor,” to use the words of a Spanish priest referring to the free colored in Puerto Rico, and they were quick to take affront if anyone implied that they were darker in color than their own self-image. Since Jamaican society openly sanctioned informal conjugal unions between white men and black women, some of the most respectable and refined colored women thought it more honorable to be the mistress of a white man, and to bear children who might be considered white or near-white, than to marry a colored husband.30 This general pattern prevailed through much of the Caribbean and Latin America, where white males greatly outnumbered white females and where generations of intermixture had produced a large class of free coloreds.31
Similar racial distinctions could be found in parts of the Lower South, especially in Charleston, which absorbed many free colored refugees from the French West Indies, and in Louisiana, which also became a haven for refugees and which had acquired under French and Spanish rule a tradition of open racial intermixture. The Lower South was relatively flexible in its treatment of freedmen, at least until the later antebellum period. Despite restrictions on manumission, South Carolina and the Gulf states made room for a small number of privileged free mulattoes, some of whom became slaveholding planters.32
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