Coercion

To purge lands of maroons in the south and central plain at the beginning of the eighteenth century, troops under the command of Saint-Domingue’s governor Galliffet responded to various reports of runaways. Maroons were known to have elected leaders from within their groups and collaborated with enslaved people who fed them information on how to organize plantation raids for food and other resources. In June 1700, a letter was sent to Brach d’Elbos complaining that the number of runaways that resided in the mountains was still considerable, despite efforts to hunt them – indeed, houses and crops belonging to approximately 50 maroons were found in the countryside surrounding Léogâne. Then, in August, other complaints from Petit Goâve stated that runaways were escaping to the mountains in dyads and triads, then eventually in larger groups. A planter in Nippes claimed to have lost ten slaves and only recaptured three; five out of seven slaves slipped away from a plantation manager named Castera; and an official named Bricot lamented that six to eight people fled from his property. For the next two years, Galliffet continued to pursue runaways in the Baoruco mountains, at Jacmel, and at Cayes de Jacmel, but had little success extracting them from the caverns, caves, and tunnels. Later, in 1703, four blacks ran away from a Galliffet plantation, prompting him to report their escape. In the west, Galliffet and a crew of 15 men spent over two months in the woods – at times going for days without water – pursuing a runaway band. On the expedition, Galliffet destroyed the maroons’ food resources and plantations; he killed three fugitives and captured eleven, while 30 others escaped.³

Defections from plantations and plots to overthrow enslavers further inflamed efforts to repress rebellion and to punish maroons. For example, in 1717 the Council of Le Cap issued a bounty for a runaway from Port-de-Paix named Joseph, who was accused of stealing, attempting to form a rebel band, and conspiring to kill his owners.⁴ Reports of a large assembly of nearly 1,000 gathered in Ouanaminthe and Cul-de-Sac, and 600–700 heavily armed women and men living at the Montagnes Noires northeast of Port-au-Prince, prompted the formation of the maréchaussée fugitive slave police force in March 1721 in order to chase maroons and other rebels.⁵ Mass desertions of enslaved people were becoming more and more common, and, in July 1721, colonists expressed their fears of financial ruin in the event of awaking to hundreds of laborers having escaped overnight.⁶ These fears may not have been unfounded, as three months later the court of Le Cap condemned twenty-one people for organizing a revolt at Saint-Louis, charging five of the conspirators with being armed. The others had taken arms with them to desert to Santo Domingo. The court identified Alexandre, César, Bozat, Jasmin, Francœur, Louis, Marion, and Thérese as the major conspirators of the rebellion. Colonial officials executed Alexandre and César – the primary leaders – by strangulation, and then decapitated them and displayed their heads at their owner’s plantation as an example to others. They also forced Bozat, Jasmin, Francœur, Louis, Marion, and Thérese to watch Alexandre and César’s execution before sending them back to the Saint-Louis prison, where, on their first day, prison officials flogged then branded them with a hot iron in the shape of the fleur-de-lys to prevent them from escaping again.⁷

Enslaved people who managed to repeatedly escape their owners were seen as particularly threatening, such as a runaway named Claude, who colonial officials imprisoned in Léogâne in September 1724 for repeated marronnage.⁸ Other maroons who remained at-large and accumulated followers became infamous in their neighboring communities, making them targets. One notable figure in this regard was Colas Jambes Coupées, who officials captured and executed in 1723 at Bois-de-Lance, between Grande Rivière and Limonade. For four to five years, Colas was known for attacking whites throughout Bois-de- Lance and Morne à Mantègre in Limonade, the home base of a known runaway settlement. The courts of Le Cap deemed him the “chief of the cabales,” or conspirators, who was

From the above passage, it seems possible that Colas collaborated with the same Cézar and Louis who were part of the 1721 conspiracy and later escaped the Saint-Louis prison. Colas’ capture was not without resistance, as the newly formed free colored corps refused to pursue him.¹⁰ His group is another example of a submerged network with plans to overthrow the social order of enslavement using poison and serves as an interesting predecessor to Mackandal, who is often thought of as the first runaway leader who also was a ritualist (see Chapter 3).¹¹

In response to the rash of maroon activity, the French royal government supported and institutionalized the repressive actions of enslavers and colonial officials to strengthen local efforts in the central plain and the south. The colonial state expanded by order of the king, who, in 1722, appointed Jean-Baptiste Duclos, Sorel, and Montholon as lieutenants of Petit-Goâve specifically to fight against marronnage.¹² The royal and colonial governments aligned in a coercive measure to assign chiefs to lead new branches of the maréchaussée to pursue maroons, especially in the south. On June 7, 1726, maroons in Grand Goâve had caused enough disorder, through killing and thievery the previous February, to warrant a request for the maréchaussée to disperse them.¹³ In 1728, officers at Jacmel were sent into the Baoruco mountains, where they captured 46 runaways; then in 1730, they caught 33. Authorities sentenced this group to the chain gang. This band was particularly mobile, using horses to sack plantations in Saint-Domingue and toward the southern coasts. Along the way, they recruited other runaways by offering to give asylum to those who wanted to join.¹⁴ Areas of the Grand Anse southern peninsula, such as Nippes, had been a stronghold for marronnage since a group of runaways fled there in 1681, because it was sparsely populated and surrounded by mountains and small patches of forest.¹⁵ Plymouth was the leader of a band of runaways from Nippes who destroyed portions of Grand Anse. Mulâtre soldiers captured 30 of his followers, and killed several others, including Plymouth himself in 1730. After his capture, a section of Grand Anse became widely referred to as Plymouth in memory of the maroon.¹⁶ The maréchaussée were re-established in January 1733 to attack the runaway communities who lived in the mountains, and, in October 1733, a fugitive police force, composed of ten men under the leadership of Fayet and Duclos, captured 32 of the many runaways who had taken refuge in the southern quarter of Nippes.¹⁷

While the royal government seemingly supported the colonial regime by appointing new personnel to lead the charge against marronnage, the crown at times seemed to undermine those efforts by withholding funds to compensate for losses incurred during maroon chases. On September 30, 1726, the king cancelled a declaration of Petite-Goâve’s Conseil Superieur from the previous May, which promised a reward of 300 livres for the head of each runaway and the freedom of any enslaved person who helped with chasing the fugitives.¹⁸ On the other hand, offering a financial bounty became a measure used to solicit the help of private actors in capturing well-known and deeply feared maroons, such as Polydor. Five white workers from the Carbon plantation, whom the Conseil du Cap later compensated with 1,000 livres, found Polydor and mostly destroyed his band in 1734 after he and another runaway named Joseph led several incursions in the northern Trou district. Trou, like Fort Dauphin, was a vulnerable area due to its proximity to the Spanish border.¹⁹ Polydor’s capture was a challenge, and was in part facilitated by an enslaved man named Laurent dit Cezar, whom administrators rewarded with his freedom on June 28, 1734.²⁰ Well after his capture, authorities and the enslaved alike remembered Polydor’s exploits – the death toll (presumably of whites) and robbery of plantations – by naming a savanna after him.²¹ Polydor and his considerable following were deemed such a menace to the colony that authorities at Le Cap celebrated François Narp, a planter and militia captain of Le Cap who fought and captured Polydor, as a hero by granting his children an honor in his name some 40 years after the revolt.²² Three years after Polydor, another leader named Chocolat emerged in Limonade. He was described as more skillful and bold than Polydor, plundering white planters’ lands for 12 years.²³ In February 1735, the Conseil du Cap reimbursed a group of private actors responsible for chasing, capturing, and killing three more unnamed rebel leaders.²⁴

After Polydor was captured, the colonial state financially incentivized maroon repression, adding a third layer to the colonial state’s commodification of black people – first their initial capture and enslavement, second their labor value, and third their surveillance and re-capture – to preserve them as property. Racial dynamics shaped repression: free people of color were afforded an avenue for employment and status at the expense of enslaved blacks; and though the freemen were co-opted, they were simultaneously repressed in other ways. For example, a 1705 ordinance threatened to return to slavery any free person of color who helped or traded with fugitives.²⁵ The maréchaussée fugitive slave police were predominantly composed of free people of color, whose service provided them access to social network ties that aided socio-economic mobility; they, and plantation owners, were the primary financial beneficiaries of maroon “hunting.” In 1739, the maréchaussée were re-organized and paid extra for any maroon they could capture in rural places rather than cities (see Table 7.2). Remote places like Dondon, Borgne, or Plaisance demanded riskier expeditions, and thus the colonial regime paid maréchaussée members 48 livres for their work there. They paid 100 livres to those who engaged in challenging chases or joined brigades with training in mountain chases to capture a runaway. Officials later expanded the geographic area in which this 100-livre bounty applied to include the island of Tortuga, just north of the coast of Port-de-Paix.²⁶ Officials recognized that maroon chases in these areas were more dangerous because they were strongholds of runaway communities and thus rewarded private actors to scale. The institutionalization of the maréchaussée as a coercive deterrent to escape was accompanied by violent measures to entrench the domination of enslavement and prevent marronnage altogether. As early as March 1726, the court of Léogâne decided that the punishment for a first offense of repeated marronnage was to cute the maroon’s ears off, and to brand her or him with the fleur-de-lys.²⁷ This policy expanded to other parts of the colony in March 1741, when facial branding and sentencing to chain gangs replaced the death penalty as punishments for repeat runaways. The new punishment regulations reflected the needs of a growing sugar economy that could make more effective use of captured runaways than those who had been sentenced to death.²⁸

Sugar prices doubled between 1730 and 1740 and tripled by 1750, yet prices for enslaved people grew much more slowly, meaning that the actual life values of enslaved people was rapidly decreasing during this time (see Chapter 2).²⁹ But, the demands of sugar production required a labor force that was alive – rather than dead after being executed as maroons – and healthy enough to work long hours on little nourishment. Still, conditions for Saint-Domingue’s enslaved population and maroons remained poor, and even worsened with the expansion of the coffee market. As coffee cultivation expanded to the mountains surrounding the urban plains of Cap Français and Port-au-Prince and the maréchaussée’s reach grew, living in marronnage became a more difficult endeavor. The expansion of plantations toward the colony’s border zones and areas surrounding the Cul-de-Sac plain ignited several conflicts between settlers and the runaways who had staked claim to those lands. Near Dondon, in Port-Margot, the Council of Le Cap compensated a man named Ancel with 1,000 livres after he was crippled during a maroon chase.³⁰ The maréchaussée provost attacked 22 maroons in 1740 at Mirebalais, killing seven, arresting 14, and failing to capture one – all had been born in the forest, attesting to the ongoing presence of maroons possibly from before French colonial rule. The 14 who survived the attack stated that there were still 23 others who had escaped. They appeared later in 1742 at Anses-a-Pitre of Cayes de Jacmel and in 1746 in Jacmel; and 12 maroons were captured again in Jacmel in 1757.³¹ Tensions between enslaved people and cruel enslavers boiled over in 1744, when 66 bondspeople fled a Cul-de-Sac plain plantation in protest, demanding the removal of an overseer who later killed an pregnant woman. After her murder, the maroon group returned to the plantation and kidnapped and killed the overseer. Though they were condemned to death, the governor of Saint-Domingue advocated on their behalf, stating that the overseer’s brutal practices justified the maroons’ actions.³² A royal decree seemed to have supported the governor’s decision by issuing a ban on using public monies to reimburse planters for the death of maroons or other enslaved people sentenced to execution for any reason.³³ While violent coercion was still used, the expansion of the sugar and coffee economies was accompanied by the increased use of channeling repression methods to prevent indiscriminate killings of enslaved people and maroons.

Channeling

Violent repression of maroons and other rebels was costly: the royal and colonial governments spent a significant sum of money sponsoring the maréchaussée and reimbursing enslavers for dead or injured runaways, and enslavers themselves lost the monetary value associated with the fugitive and their surplus value from labor. As the sugar and coffee economies expanded, colonists implemented new measures to suppress marronnage in less violent ways. Though violent, coercive repression undoubtedly continued, rather than rely singularly on brutality, Saint-Domingue introduced forms of “channeling,” which “involves more indirect repression, which is meant to affect the forms of protest available, the timing of protests, and/or flows to resources of movements” (Earl Reference Earl2003: 48). To prevent or restrict marronnage, limits were placed on the types of punishments given to runaways, enslaved people who cooperated with maroon chases were offered manumission, ordinances were passed to restrict enslaved people’s movements and activities, and print media were used as maroon surveillance.

The François Mackandal trial resulted in an April 1758 ruling of the Council of Cap Français that not only targeted Africa-inspired ritual practice but also attempted to limit slaves’ everyday movements in order to prevent marronnage. The articles of the ruling banned enslaved people from carrying any offensive weapons except for when they participated in a maroon chase with the permission of their owners. The ruling also prohibited the enslaved from carrying iron sticks on roads in the cities or parish towns and mandated that they had to have their owner’s written permission to ride horses or mules. Neither could free people of color carry swords, machetes, or sabers unless they were members of the military or the maréchaussée. They also risked losing their freedom for harboring runaways, and after a shoot-out between maroons and the maréchaussée in 1767, free people of color were prohibited from purchasing arms and gunpowder in order to prevent any possible further collaboration with the rebels.³⁴ The ordinance may have been effective at reducing runaways’ ability to obtain weaponry and remain at large for longer periods of time (see Chapter 5). The king of France also gave colonial planters permission to commute death sentences for fugitives in September of 1763, offering cheek branding or perpetual chaining as alternative methods of punishment.³⁵ While the king suggested that these lesser punishments would “conserve” the enslaved workforce, planters rarely adhered to regulations from above and usually dismissed the king’s suggestions. Yet, Africans may have perceived these changes as incentive to escape without fear of deadly consequences.

To further stem the flow of runaways, Saint-Domingue and slave societies throughout the Americas used newly developing print media to publish runaway slave advertisements and parish jail lists, which were among the earliest forms of surveillance technology that continue to inform racialized techniques of social control (Browne Reference Browne2015). On February 8, 1764, the Intendant of Le Cap decided that La Gazette de Saint Domingue would begin to include lists of captive runaways by parish jail. These lists included the name, nation, brand, and age of each runaway, and their respective owners to be subsequently contacted.³⁶ The lists of runaways captured and jailed also provide some insight into the number of people in flight and their destinations. A sample of Saint-Domingue’s two newspapers, La Gazette and Avis divers et Affiches américaines, shows 371 runaways from February to August 1764. Two hundred and five were found in the jail of Le Cap, and 91 came from Fort Dauphin because of its proximity to the Spanish border. Other common destinations were the area surrounding Saint Marc, particularly the frontier behind the mountains, and Port-au-Prince.³⁷

Royal and colonial authorities aimed to repress marronnage through media and policing, and economically benefitted from criminalizing, capturing, and imprisoning maroons. If jailed runaways were not claimed by owners who could show evidence of ownership, the maroons were then sentenced to work on public chain gangs in either Le Cap, Port-au-Prince, or Cayes de Saint Louis. This created both a free source of labor for the state to complete public works projects, such as building galleys, and a means to earn extra revenue by fining negligent owners. Owners who came to reclaim runaways had to repay the jail for providing a month’s worth of food. After a month, if a fugitive was still unclaimed, they would be re-sold as “damaged” in the town centers.³⁸ Later, in November 1767, the king issued an ordinance overturning a previous colonial ruling so that, rather than selling captives after one month, unclaimed runaways would be housed in jail for three months before they were sold, allowing a larger window of time for jailers to expropriate labor from the prisoners.³⁹ These measures may also have subsidized local planters, since Saint-Domingue’s economy suffered during the Seven Years War. The state, rather than the planters themselves, was absorbing the costs of housing, feeding, and providing care, albeit minimal, to enslaved people so they could perform chain gang construction labor. Once the coffee industry expanded and Saint-Domingue’s post-war economy rebounded, the Council of Cap officially released the control of maroon chases and costs associated with deaths of runaways to individual jurisdictions on March 20, 1773. This allowed local parishes to manage the policing of marronnage and to respond to disturbances.⁴⁰

As the policing of runaways became more pronounced at the local level, it seems that enslavers had become reliant on local jails to rid their plantations of rebels. In response, the court of Le Cap made a ruling in July 1774 that prisons would no longer incorporate enslaved people into chain gangs without confirmation from slave owners. Owners were then charged 120 livres for an enslaved person who was on the chain gang without their owner’s authorization. In 1780, planters were sending sick bondspeople to prison, not as discipline for marronnage but to avoid healthcare-related expenditure. Courts decided in May that any new entry to the chain gang had to receive a clean bill of health and readiness for work by a medical examiner.⁴¹ While this measure aimed to keep excessive numbers of enslaved people who were not runaways out of jails and chain gangs, it did not have any measurable impact on marronnage overall. However, the measure may have contributed to the re-cycling of captured runaways into the plantation system rather than their isolation in jail. It was common practice for fugitives to be returned to their plantation of origin, or to a new plantation, taking with them their knowledge, skills, and past experiences of forging a path to freedom. This local “common wind” will be explored further below.

Inter-Imperial Dynamics and the Environment

There was a flurry of activity among armed maroon bands in the mid-1770s and early 1780s, yet the frequency of marronnage reported in the advertisements declined during this same period. The cause for this seeming contradiction may not lie in repression, but with the environmental and economic difficulties the colony faced, which undoubtedly adversely impacted the enslaved population and their decisions about whether or not to escape. People adjust their repertoire tactics in response to the socio-economic, geopolitical, and environmental factors that make up their material conditions (McAdam [1982] Reference McAdam1999; Traugott Reference Traugott1995; Tilly Reference Tilly2006). Those who were participating in or who considered participating in marronnage as a repertoire tactic had to be aware of the conditions they faced in order to best avoid violent repression or death. Conversely, dire conditions may have incited already existing maroon bands to increase their raids on plantations for provisions. During these years, Saint-Domingue was a precarious regime (Boudreau Reference Boudreau, Davenport, Johnston and Mueller2005) that was vulnerable to inter-imperial conflict and natural disasters; this was opportunity ripe for maroon bands to take advantage. Moreover, the need to resort to violent repression in the face of maroon insurgency further signaled to the enslaved population the illegitimacy of white rule (Oliver Reference Oliver2008), which some protested by striking or opposing plantation personnel. Reports of fugitives increased between the years 1766 and 1791, though at a slower pace proportionate the growing enslaved population (Figure 7.1). The lowest frequency of marronnage occurred in the year 1779, when only 290 runaways were reported. The rate of marronnage increased most dramatically between 1779 and 1783, doubling from 290 to 666 yearly runaways. The frequency of marronnage continued to increase to its highest level of 820 and 817 runaways during the years 1785 and 1789, respectively. By 1791, only 238 runaways were reported, however this is likely due to the uprising in the north that ended the publication of Les Affiches américaines. The section that follows introduces social, economic, environmental, and Atlantic world political events, alongside repression at the local level, to contextualize micro-level marronnage trends and highlight the ways in which black resistance shaped and was shaped by the geopolitics of the day.

Although some scholars have argued that hunger was a primary cause for marronnage, the number of runaways did not increase during the droughts in 1775 and 1776 that killed thousands of enslaved people.⁷⁴ Rather, the frequency of marronnage slightly decreased during those years and continued to do so in part because weakness and starvation prevented people from venturing into an even more precarious situation as a runaway (Figure 7.1). Cul-de-Sac officials issued an ordinance forcing planters to grow a certain number of bananas, manioc, or potatoes per slave to prevent further deaths. But food shortages arose when prices for provisions increased again in 1777 under the British blockade. In 1776, North American allies of France declared independence from Britain, and in February 1778, British naval ships anchored in Saint-Domingue’s ports, blocking imports. When France signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, sugar prices dropped rapidly, which may have caused harsher work regimes on plantations in order to produce more and generate more revenue – even under conditions of famine and starvation.⁷⁵ Hunger and fatigue from being overworked in order to meet pre-blockade-level profits may have deterred all enslaved people from facing the uncertainty of life outside the plantation where food rations, however meager, were guaranteed. Additionally, the stark reduction of newly arrived Africans during the blockade contributed to the overall reduction of runaways. The British naval presence at Saint-Domingue’s ports had a direct impact on French traders’ abilities to transport more enslaved Africans to the colony, and those already in the colony would bear the weight of compensating for French losses of labor power and decreasing sugar prices. Between 1779 and 1782, less than ten French slave ships arrived at Saint-Domingue.⁷⁶ The frequency of marronnage was at its lowest in 1779 – 290 runaways reported – because continent-born Africans made up the largest proportion of runaways, as they dominated the enslaved population itself. The lack of incoming Africans forced people to forge relationships across linguistic and cultural boundaries as they sought refuge from bondage, evidenced by higher rates of heterogeneous group escapes during the blockade (Figure 4.1).

The British blockade on Saint-Domingue’s ports during the North American War for Independence had a devastating impact on everyone in the colony. Food was scarce and expensive, exacerbating the malnutrition enslaved people already experienced. Extreme weather conditions, like the droughts of 1775 and 1776, also contributed to a lack of access to locally grown foodstuffs. The dry seasons were followed by flooding four years later when the Artibonite River flooded on October 16–17, 1780, then a hurricane hit in November, sweeping away several plantations and destroying important crops.⁷⁷ Harsh living conditions in the colony kept enslaved people from venturing away from plantations, but those who had already successfully escaped faced an equally dire situation. Maroon bands increased their plantations attacks, in part as retaliation against the maréchaussée and to expropriate food, weapons, tools, and even women during the colony-wide, 18-month dry season and period of widespread malnutrition in 1779 and 1780.⁷⁸ Some individual maroons took the wartime strain as an opportunity to secure their own freedom through military service. In the early 1780s, several runaways attempted to join the ranks of Comte Charles d’Estaing, the former governor of Saint-Domingue and French naval officer who led the siege on Savannah, Georgia in September 1779 with troops of freemen of color including Henry Christophe and Andre Rigaud.⁷⁹ In late July 1781, Jean-Pierre, an 18-year-old creole man, was suspected of having taken refuge in the French king’s ships at harbor after already having attempted to join d’Estaing’s squadron in August 1779. Similarly, Silvain, a 19-year-old Kongolese man, and Michel, a 45-year-old captive from a Dutch colony, escaped their owner on July 25, 1781 wearing iron neck collars, and attempted to embark on the ships of Comte d’Estaing at Le Cap.⁸⁰ Finally, two mulâtre brothers, Jean and Jean-Baptiste Lefevre, escaped Port-au-Prince in July 1783 under the false pretense of having been freed by Comte d’Estaing after serving in the campaign in Savannah.⁸¹

After the North American War of Independence ended, African wars intensified – likely in part because French slave trading resumed to full swing by 1783. Between the years 1781–1785 and 1786–1790, the number of captives shipped to Saint-Domingue nearly tripled (Table 1.2). Conflicts between the Dahomey Kingdom and its neighbors persisted in the 1770s and 1780s, funneling losers on both sides into the slave trade. On the West Central African coasts, former soldiers in the Kingdom of Kongo civil wars of the 1780s also fed the French slave trade thousands of captives. These captives, as well as Africans from other regions, were transported to Saint-Domingue in record numbers, bringing with them cultural, religious, economic, and militaristic knowledge and skills.⁸² As the enslaved population swelled, the frequency of marronnage increased, reaching the highest rates in 1785 and 1789, 820 and 817 respectively (Figure 7.1). Runaways sought out life beyond plantation properties, forming organized settlements, and taking up arms to defend those communities. Additionally, a French royal ordinance of 1784 may have further inspired maroon communities to take on characteristics that indicated organized tactical planning of independent living zones and revised labor practices.

Maroon plunder during wartime had some effect on royal policies. Rebellion, in addition to the food shortages, dry seasons, and flooding, prompted the king of France to impart an ordinance in December 1784 to improve the quality of enslavement in the French colonies. Part of the ordinance also aimed to sever ties between enslaved people and maroons who hid on plantations and joined “fêtes, assemblies, and dances,” implying that maroon agency had some effectiveness in altering the structural ordering of enslavement. Though enslavers largely ignored its requirements, the 1784 ordinance prevented planters from forcing slaves to work on Sundays and during fêtes, or Catholic holidays; it restricted punishments; and it provided enslaved people with the ability to legally denounce abuse by owners. Pregnant women and wet nurses were supposed to receive a midday break from work, and additional clothing was demanded for each enslaved person. Another provision aimed to prevent malnutrition and starvation, and to deter marronnage by urging owners to provide enslaved people with land plots for cultivation.⁸³

But these revised conditions of enslavement not only failed to prevent marronnage, they incentivized demands for better conditions and escape without fear of excessively harsh punishment. Enslaved people at the Foäche merchant house in Le Cap, and on other northern plantations, used marronnage to reclaim their time and labor to protest plantation personnel who were too harsh or whom they did not like. “All of the slaves of the Lombard plantation have marooned, claiming the decree allowed them to choose their manager,” bemoaned the wealthy Galliffet sugar plantation owner. Galliffet’s notes from 1785 and 1789 described several acts of insolence, insubordination, complaints, and marronnage on northern plantations such as the Chastenoy, Montaigue, Choiseuil, and Galliffet’s own La Gossette, as he railed: “the 1784 decree is fatal to discipline and causes insurrections in part of our province.”⁸⁴ The frequency of marronnage reached its peak in 1785 after the ordinance was issued, with 820 runaways reported in Les Affiches américaines (Figure 7.1). Runaways could appropriate food in their newly emerging gardens to trade and sell, and steal weapons and work tools to cultivate production on their isolated plots of land. As Chapter 8 will explain, self-contained maroon settlements emerged in the south, where established maroon settlements pillaged neighboring plantations and outfitted abandoned plantations for crop production.

Still, other maroons did not wait for the 1784 ordinance before striking out on their own; and maroons remained active in the colony’s central regions. In 1784, another proposal was put forward to eradicate maroons in and around Mirebalais, Port-au-Prince, Grand Bois, and Jacmel. This plan included the recruitment of 800 gens du couleur to be divided into 16 units.⁸⁵ Grand Bois was a section of Mirebalais formed by a series of bluffs, rivers, and hills, making it difficult to access from Saint-Domingue but easier to reach from Santo Domingo.⁸⁶ Additionally, there was proximity to runaways in the rural or mountainous areas in the south, such as the Montagnes Noires outside of Port-au-Prince. In the north in 1785, colonists reported that the maroons’ audaciousness was increasing by the day, and they requested reinforcements to chase several maroons that were gathered at Limbé. Though the new governor claimed in September 1786 and August 1787 that marronnage overall was decreasing, rebel activities in Port Margot were reported at the end of 1786 and the number of maroons listed in Les Affiches remained relatively high in the latter years of the 1780s in comparison to the previous decade (Figure 7.1).⁸⁷ As late as 1789, there was a maroon group operating outside Le Cap led by François, who Lieutenant Milscent described as very intelligent and capable of the greatest feats. Milscent, who commanded forces against Noël Barochin and Thélémaque Canga, claimed to have captured 50 rebels and killed 20, including the leader François, after the maroons had killed several French and Spanish planters and plundered their dwellings.⁸⁸

A Local and International “Common Wind”

Political and environmental opportunities were not the only times enslaved people developed consciousness about the possibilities of employing marronnage as a repertoire tactic to seize and define freedom on their own terms. Julius Scott ([1986] Reference Scott2018) has provided a framework for understanding the international “common wind” of circulating ideas, knowledge, information, and rumors; however, there also was a local common wind of stories, rumors, or even lore upon which enslaved people and maroons relied. These deeply cultural insights, social networks, and daily interactions constitute the field of action from which repertoires tactics develop (Tilly Reference Tilly2006). Runaway communities did not completely disappear due to encroaching deforestation for sugar and coffee plantations, but became more creative in locating hiding spots. For example, Morne Bleu, a hill located east of Cavaillon, contained several caves where the maroon Pompey hid until he was arrested in 1747. The cave also held evidence of Taíno presence, noted by their ritual artifacts, supporting Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique’s findings that cave systems provided shelter for Africans and Taínos to collaborate spiritually and in revolt.⁸⁹ An account from a December 1761 expedition exemplifies the creativity maroons used to protect their settlements, and simultaneously shows the nature of ongoing antagonism between them and the maréchaussée. When the maréchaussée encountered the maroons during the search, they were probably perplexed and irritated when the fugitives began to dance as a means of taunting their enemies. When the maréchaussée launched to attack, however, many of them fell into a large ditch that had been dug and filled with pine wood stakes and liana plants. As I argued in Chapter 6, familiarity with the landspace was a key component of enslaved people’s cultural knowledge, and maroons were adept at using their surroundings and flora and fauna to protect their chosen living spaces. Fourteen of the maréchaussée were left maimed after falling into the ditch; however, the maroons were not without casualities and many of them were also killed.⁹⁰

Newly arrived Africans may have encountered these well-hidden maroons and remaining indigenous peoples, or heard stories of them from those who were more knowledgeable about the landscape and the history of maroon presence in the mountains. For example, after François Mackandal was brought to Saint-Domingue in the 1730s where he lived as a fugitive for 18 years, he would have learned about Colas Jambes Coupée, Polydor, Chocolat, and other rebels in the north through word of mouth. Additionally, some locations bore the name of fugitive communities, such as Piton des Nègres, Piton des Flambeaux, Piton des Tenebres, Crete a Congo, Fond des Nègres, and the area named after Polydor. Moreau de Saint-Méry also confirmed that there were free blacks living in Acul de Samedi in Valière.⁹¹ Some of these remote locations appear in Les Affiches advertisements as runaway’s locations of escape or their suspected destinations. Therefore, collective memory of maroon rebels was part of enslaved people’s consciousness, and likely influenced their own desires for freedom and inspired the continuation of marronnage as a repertoire tactic.

It is logical to surmise that enslaved people were just as preoccupied with marronnage as their owners; in fact, they were probably more knowledgeable about maroon leaders and their exploits (Scott [1986] Reference Scott2018). Rather than retreat to the mountains, some fugitives camped out at nearby plantations where friends, family members, or lovers protected them. From Les Affiches advertisements, 153 runaways sought out familiar plantations, allowing them to be in marronnage for an average of 15.68 weeks (Tables 4.10 and 5.6). Alternatively, former members of rebel bands were returned to their respective plantations.⁹² Additionally, captured and jailed runaways sometimes did not know or divulge the names of their owners, therefore they remained in jail unclaimed. In such cases, they were advertised in newspapers like Gazette de Saint Domingue, Les Affiches américaines, and the Courrier Nationale de Saint Domingue as “damaged” or abandoned, then re-sold to planters in the city centers – a convenient way for local jailers to generate revenue, since slave prices increased in the 1760s.⁹³ Fugitives who were captured and re-located to new plantations likely shared their experiences with bondspeople, introducing them to successful and unsuccessful tactics for escape. This internal trade of rebellious enslaved people would have been just as important in raising collective consciousness about marronnage as the rumors about the armed conflicts occurring in the colony’s northeast corner. While individual members of the enslaved population at times took advantage of financial rewards offered to capture rebels, further research on the internal trade of rebels might suggest that mutual support and collusion among Africans and African descendants, enslaved and maroon, was more common than previously understood.

While planters seemed to have had no problem incorporating captured runaways into their workforces, they did worry about the negative influence of factors external to Saint-Domingue. A letter surfaced in 1775 framing marronnage as a pervasive problem that had the capacity to undo the colony. The letter identified several factors that contributed to the unchecked rule of maroons: (1) the Spanish, who provided a safe harbor for Saint-Domingue’s runaways and potentially politicized them against the French; (2) the dense, nearly impenetrable mountains into which the maréchaussée and other hunters attempted and often failed to pursue fugitives; (3) runaways’ propensity to reproduce while at large; and (4) their constant attacks on plantation. These issues exasperated planters who – judging by the number and tone of their letters – were desperate for reinforcements. The combination of these factors also led this writer to compare the problem to those of Jamaica and Surinam, suggesting imminent revolt if marronnage was not contained and eradicated.⁹⁴ Even in Martinique, a priest named Charles-François de Coutances cited the 80,000 maroons in Surinam, troubles in Jamaica, and the “greatest danger” in Saint-Domingue six years earlier – during the Mackandal poisoning scare – as presenting a threat to the Lesser Antilles island.⁹⁵

It is telling that these writers cited two major Caribbean uprisings as legitimation for their fear of marronnage in Saint-Domingue, implying that runaways were inherently ripe for rebellious uprising especially during periods of international conflict like the Seven Years War. In Surinam, failed treaties with the Ndjukas, Saramakas, Matawais, and Boni maroons marked the beginning of a series of wars between them and the Dutch colonists.⁹⁶ Additionally, in 1763, there was a revolution in Berbice (present-day Guyana), directly neighboring Surinam, where Governor Coffij and Captain Accarra led a seven-month hostile takeover of the government by other Gold Coast and Kongolese Africans. Word spread about the Berbice uprising, perhaps from disaffected French mercenaries based in Surinam who fought with the Berbice rebels. Information circulating throughout the Caribbean via sailors, military men, and traders carried the news of rebellions in the Guianas and Jamaica to Saint-Domingue. Edward Long’s History of Jamaica, published in 1774, described the 1760 revolt in Jamaica as an island-wide attempt of Gold Coast Coromantee Africans to overthrow the colonial government.⁹⁷ Long’s account provided awareness of, and insight to, the Jamaican revolt, to which both colonial Europeans and Africans would have paid attention.⁹⁸

Knowledge of these events would not have been isolated to Saint-Domingue’s white planter population; in fact, bondspeople may have learned of the rebellions before their owners. Captives from English-, Spanish-, Portuguese-, and Dutch-speaking colonies were routinely brought to Saint-Domingue through legal and illicit intra-American trade (Tables 4.7 and 4.8; Scott [1986] Reference Scott2018). For example, in 1781 a ship carrying 390 captives sailed from St. Thomas to Le Cap. One of the bondspeople on that ship was a 14-year-old boy known as Télémaque, sometimes called Denmark, who upon being sold in Saint-Domingue began feigning epileptic fits until his previous owner, Captain Joseph Vesey, was forced to take the boy back with him to Charleston, South Carolina. Forty-one years later, Denmark Vesey was a free man who was executed for organizing one of the largest slave conspiracies in North American history, which aimed to return to the free state of Haiti.⁹⁹ Just as Saint-Domingue and the Haitian Revolution directly influenced other Atlantic world rebellions, it follows that during the pre-revolution period, Dutch-speaking maroons in Saint-Domingue perhaps would have been familiar with the Berbice and Surinam rebellions of the 1760s; African-Jamaicans and other English speakers probably knew about Queen Nanny’s Maroon Wars, Tacky’s Revolt, and the black Carib Wars on Saint Vincent island; and before the Haitian Revolution, African-Martiniquans probably knew of the 1789 revolt on the tiny French island. Conversations during Sunday markets, clandestine night-time gatherings in living quarters, and marronnage networks would have informed the local populace about goings on in nearby colonies, heightening their awareness of and strivings for liberation.¹⁰⁰

The South

Though some from the Bight of Benin and West Central Africa who were taken to Saint-Domingue were former soldiers, military slaves, and war captives, the vast majority of slave trade victims were distanced from spheres of economic, political, and military power. Fishermen, gold and salt miners, agriculturalists who cultivated crops that would later become slave society staples, pastoralists, priests, merchants, and textile producers made up a large proportion of Saint-Domingue’s enslaved population. Having access to land through marronnage allowed runaways of African ancestry to reclaim those labor skills – as well as the skills they were forced to acquire on plantations – and use them for subsistence farming and other forms of self-directed work. Maroon communities in the south took up space on abandoned plantations, on the outskirts of larger estates, or on unsettled lands that were largely inaccessible to colonists and enslavers where they enacted their own sense of work, trade, and division of labor. Even a planter named Friedmont acknowledged in 1767 that land ownership for enslaved people would end marronnage by restoring a sense of dignity to enslaved people. He indicated that enslaved people had an attachment to the land and the idea of proprietorship, which led them to escape in search of autonomy.³ For the enslaved, freedom and independence did not necessarily mean a life without labor, but rather subverting colonial enslavement’s violent, involuntary, and unremunerative nature by appropriating oppressive technologies as tools for their sustenance on their own terms. Runaways in Cayes de Jacmel formed their own economic mode of production based on the technologies previously used for their oppression. It is possible that the Cayes de Jacmel maroons sold their products to the Spanish – or to the remaining Neybe maroons nearby – for provisions. Moreau de Saint-Méry claimed that between Cayes de Jacmel, the Baoruco, and Pointe Beate, there were two tracts of land appropriate for cultivation – one measuring over 170 square miles and the other over 270 square miles. He suggested that these lands, both plain and mountainous, could potentially hold several sugar and coffee plantations.⁴ It was in these areas that enslaved Africans from Saint-Domingue organized self-sufficient work regimes away from the domination of white planters.

A group of seven runaways from the Vedel plantation in Sale-Trou, a neighborhood of Cayes de Jacmel bordering the Spanish territory and the Baoruco mountains, escaped in early spring 1787. The fugitives included Valentin, creole; Paul, creole, 26; Jupiter, Kongo, 35; Coacou/Coucou, creole; Lafortune, Kongo, 22; and Andre, a Mina man, and Marianne of Kongo, both aged 55 and in chains. Instructions in the LAA advertisement directed that Lamothe Vedel should be notified if any of the runaways were identified or located.⁵ Four of these fugitives – Paul, Coucou, LaFortune, and Andre – were either captured or returned to Vedel voluntarily; however, they did not remain at his plantation for long. They were part of another group of 16 runaways who escaped Vedel’s plantation on August 16, 1788, during a hurricane: Andre, a Mina; Paul, Coffi, Coucou, Jacob, and Tranquillin, all creoles; Cabi, Valeri, Sans-Nom, Casimir, LaFortune, Basile, Phanor, Hilaire, Catin, and Urgele, all Kongos; and Justine, a creole mulâtresse.⁶ The second group of escapees fled to the heights of Pic de la Selle, one of Saint Domingue’s steepest mountains in the parish of Cayes de Jacmel. Based on what we know about African inter-ethnic solidarity in runaway communities of the Americas, runaways tended to elect representatives from their respective ethnic group who then collaborated on strategies of rebellion. The composition of the Vedel maroons indicates that Paul, Coucou, and Lafortune, part of the 1787 contingency of runaways, acted as representatives who recruited members of their ethnic group to escape again in 1788. Paul and Coucou were both creoles and they brought more creoles with them; and Lafortune was a Kongolese man who mobilized others who also were from the Kongo. The absence of the 16 maroons from the Vedel plantation was causing a delay in productivity; and since the runaways were armed, they posed a threat to Vedel and other planters in Selle and Sal-Trou.

A Kongolese woman named Rose was found on the Lillancourt property after having recently left the runaways led by Andre, Coucou, Lafortune, and Paul. Rose admitted to working with two other women, one named Nangout, under the direction of a black man named Lafoucault at Lillancourt, where she planted coffee, cotton, corn, and other crops. Rose’s testimony confirmed previous suspicions that other enslaved people on the Lillancourt coffee plantation were sheltering the Vedel runaways, but Vedel’s previous attempts to pinpoint their location and return had them somehow failed. The fugitives were growing coffee and cotton, which had become Saint-Domingue’s fourth agricultural crop. Cotton was often illegally sold to Jamaicans, who had begun “free trading” at the ports of Jérémie and Cap Tiburon.⁷ The day after Rose was questioned, Justine was also captured at Lillancourt but quickly escaped again. Another woman, named Heneriette, a maroon for three years, was found during a search of the Lillancourt property; a valet named Zephir had given her shelter. After Henriette was questioned, undoubtedly under duress, and after hearing her statements, Vedel and M. Noel, provost of the maréchaussée, marched off to Lillancourt. The rebel band was angered at the news of Henriette’s capture and prepared themselves for a confrontation with Vedel and Noel. When the two men arrived, they encountered Andre – the Mina man who escaped in the spring of 1787 and again in summer 1788 – armed with a machete and a gun, raising his gun to shoot at Vedel. Unarmed, Vedel called for Noel to retrieve his gun. By the time Noel returned, Andre was already out of sight.⁸

Not far from the mountains where the Vedel maroons settled, the Maniel maroons occupied the Baoruco mountains between the southern and western departments of Saint-Domingue, and leveraged geopolitical tensions between French and Spanish colonists to make their own demands for land, freedom, and independence. After years of negotiations with colonial officials and priests, over 130 members of the Maniel maroons came to a treaty agreement with the French and Spanish to cease their plantation raids and settle on cultivable land in Saint-Domingue. Despite the terms of the agreement, many of the maroons hesitated or outright refused to claim their property due to mistrust of the French and better relations with the Spanish.⁹ Several letters surfaced claiming that these maroons were still problematic; not only were they not cultivating the lands distributed to them, but they were carrying out raids on plantations that required joint military action to address.¹⁰ They spied on and plundered plantations, and other enslaved people, such as in the case of Kebinda and Anne (Chapter 6), were included in the bounty by being held in captivity and subjectivity to the maroons.¹¹ Despite the treaty with the smaller group labelled the “Maniel,” it was reported in August 1786 that there were still maroons living in the Baoruco mountains near Neybe. There were an estimated 1,500 at another site called Christophe, which was outside of Port-au-Prince between the mountains and under Spanish control; Moreau de Saint-Méry also suggested that the number of Maniel maroons was thought to be as high as 1,800.¹² That same month, two other letters – one apparently addressed to the royal government seat in Versailles – appeared, similarly complaining about the maroon problem and stating that fugitives from the Spanish territory were still invading Saint- Domingue.¹³ The Maniel finally agreed to settle at the town of Neybe, just north of the Baoruco mountains, where they would be governed by the Spanish and baptized as Catholics.

The theme of land rights and self-initiated, self-organized work continued to shape revolt, especially in the south, well into the years of the Haitian Revolution and the immediate post-independence era. For example, a maroon-styled insurgency led by Jean-Baptise “Goman” DuPerrier continued at Jérémie until his death in 1820. The Grand Anse region was a base of maroon organizing for livable work conditions and land ownership during the Haitian Revolution. Port-Salut, just southeast of Jérémie, became the site of a large revolt conspiracy in January 1791 when rebels armed with guns, machetes, sticks, and other handheld weapons galvanized forces in the area, and neighboring Les Cayes, to join them. Led by representatives from each plantation, they decided on the night of January 24 to collectively demand the three free days per week they believed the French king promised based on a rumor that had spread through the colony. To further their cause, they kidnapped a commandeur and three other enslaved people from one plantation. This revolt conspiracy was discovered and the leaders were captured and sentenced. One of the leaders, Dominique Duhard, was arrested, whipped, branded, and sent to the galleys for life; but he somehow escaped and went on to become part of the Platons maroon kingdom the following year.¹⁴

Soon after the conspiracy at Les Cayes, hundreds and eventually thousands of enslaved people fled southwestern plantations and formed the Platons Kingdom maroon settlement in the mountains in the summer of 1792. Many enslaved people in the south received arms from free people of color who were fighting for political equality, but after the April 4, 1792, decree granted those rights, the enslaved and maroons continued to take up arms in their own defense. Maroons negotiated with André Rigaud in July 1792, making demands that echoed those of the Port Salut rebels: three free days per week and the abolition of the whip as a means of social control and punishment. Though some members of the Platons community negotiated their own emancipation, many did not accept the terms of manumission and continued to follow Armand, Bernard, Marechal, Formon, Gilles Benech, and Jacques, who led the defensive fight against advances by governor Blanchlande’s troops. The maroons withstood incursions for several months, with the help of plantation slaves, raiding plantations for provisions. Though the vast majority of those at Platons were eventually defeated or gained their freedom through negotiation, maroon leadership outlined terms that predated those issued by the general emancipation in 1793, therefore providing a lens through which we can better understand the ways that rebellion among maroons and their enslaved co-conspirators pushed forward their own notions of freedom in ways the French had not yet conceptualized.¹⁵ Veteran rebels of the Platons Kingdom, like Gilles Benech, Nicolas Regnier, and Jean-Baptise “Goman” DuPerrier, went on to mount the pivotal southern resistance to the 1802 LeClerc expedition, helping to pave the way for Haitian independence from France.¹⁶

The West

In the western department, politics around race led to pre-revolutionary solidarities between free people of color, enslaved people, and maroons. The repeal of the rights and privileges of gens du couleur to hold calendas, to practice law or medicine, to have French citizenship, or even to visit France contributed to an overall sense of dissatisfaction and frustration about discrimination and tightening restrictions on their social mobility and rights in the colony and the metropole.¹⁷ Free people of color traveled to the National Assembly in France in October 1789 to agitate for citizenship, and their ideas were thought to be spreading among the enslaved population; rumors of the “rights of man” swirled the Atlantic world, foreshadowing impending revolt.¹⁸ Some colonists even went so far as to attempt to incite a rebellion in order to justify maintaining enslavement and the colonial order, while another colonial official stated in July 1789 that the denial of legal freedom would contribute to a swell of runaways.¹⁹ Indeed, 1789 saw the highest numbers of marronnage overall and the longest duration of escapes from plantations (Figures 7.1 and 5.1). While some freemen in the north were sympathetic and in favor of abolition, gens du couleur of the west generally sought to protect their interests – which largely included slavery, since many mixed-race individuals were landowners and owned and traded slaves as property. Though most free people of color did not identify with the enslaved population or their African cultures, they were not opposed to mobilizing (and, during the revolution, coercing) slaves for their own benefit.

In early 1791, 35 free people of color – led by Buisson Desmarres, Renaud Robin, the Poissons, and the Bauges, and several of their slaves and family members – were charged and sentenced for the death of three white men.²⁰ Buisson Desmarres and his white neighbor got into an argument about Desmarres’ animals crossing over onto the man’s property and when confronted, Desmarres lost his temper and physically attacked him – a grave mistake for a freeman of color. The white man furiously left for Port-au-Prince and recruited 20 other whites to assail Desmarres for daring to raise his hand to a white person. Knowing that he would soon need to defend himself, Desmarres called his in-laws the Bauges, Renaud Robin, Jean Poisson, several of their slaves, and two other friends and neighbors. The African descendant rebels, free and enslaved, attempted to block the way from Port-au-Prince back to Fonds-Parisien by setting fire to the road. Before the 1,500 strong vigilante band of whites arrived to Desmarres’ house, he and his followers had already abandoned their lands, leaving the whites to burn the plantations owned by Desmarres, the Poissons, and Renaud Robin. The blacks and freemen followed the same path that maroons had taken for generations to find freedom in Spanish Santo Domingo, where they were welcomed in Neybe. They wrote to the governor asking for asylum and were told they could become subjects of the crown if they remained in Spanish territory.²¹

Historian Thomas Madiou suggested that the fugitives remained in Santo Domingo, however other documents indicate they were executed (though possibly in effigy) in Port-au-Prince in February 1791.²² The following were condemned to have their legs, arms, thighs, and kidneys broken alive on a scaffold at the public square: Buisson Desmarres and two of his slaves Jean-François and Jean-Joseph; three men of the Robin family, Renaud, Desruisseaux, and Ferrier; Pierre and Paris Poisson, and two of Paris’ slaves Gabriel and David; Jean-François and Jean-Louis Bauge; someone named Aza; and a Spanish black man named Gustine – perhaps the one who provided them shelter in Santo Domingo. Others who were charged were Emmanuel Gonzal, a free black man and keeper of François Boe’s plantation at Fond Verette; Renaud Robin’s slaves François dit Degage, Fatime dit Faiman, François dit Tout Mon Bien, and Pierre-Louis dit Pompee; Charles and Nago, both slaves of Buisson Desmarres; Jean Poisson and his slaves Marie dit Marinette, Suzon, a young girl named Iphigenie, and Nicolas; Marie, slave of Bauge; Marie dit Gothon, slave of the widow Borno; Joseph dit Boisson, Jean-Joseph dit Boisson, and Denis-Victor dit Boisson Belleroche; and Jacques dit Frere, a free black named Babo, Jacques-Joseph dit Falaise, and a free woman named Emilie.²³

Enslaved blacks and mulâtres again collaborated later that summer in July 1791 at the Fortin Bellanton plantation in Cul-de-Sac near Croix-des-Bouquets when they killed the commandeur for suspecting he was too loyal to whites and likely to betray their plans of a coordinated revolt. This was not the first time the Bellanton bondspeople held a grievance against plantation authorities. Some 20 years earlier, in March 1769, all the people enslaved at Bellenton went to the governor’s residence in Port-au-Prince to file a claim against their white manager.²⁴ After the 1791 killing of the commandeur, the rebels escaped into the woods where they assembled with 50 other bondspeople from five neighboring plantations who had been reported as runaways. The following day, the maréchaussée pursued the band of 60 maroons, all of whom were armed with guns and machetes, following them to the coast. The confrontation between the maréchaussée and the rebel band resulted in the execution of nine rebel leaders, with two being broken alive on a scaffold.²⁵ On July 6, the High Court in Port-au-Prince sentenced six others to hang and have their bodies exposed on the Bellanton property for 24 hours as a warning to others.²⁶

On July 18, the Count of Guitton sent a letter confirming that an armed rebellion was growing in Port-au-Prince, Vases, and Mont-Rouis at the plantations of Fortin Bellanton and Poix and Payen. Additionally, the enslaved workers at Trou-Bordet were demanding extra provisions and more time to rest. These conflicts, or “derangements” according to Guitton, were blamed on the influx of soldiers and French citizens who were supposedly imposing their ideas on the enslaved in the absence of the plantation owners.²⁷ Insurrection was about to engulf the Port-au-Prince area, this time at the Fessard plantation in the Montagnes Noires. Fessard was a lawyer in Port-au-Prince and managed the affairs for several planters in the area, including the recapture of runaways. An advertisement was placed for Coucoulou, a Nagô cook aged 27–30; Marc, aged 20–25, a Kongolese commandeur; Herode, also Kongolese, and a 35-year-old carpenter; and Desire, a 20–22-year-old creole gardener belonging to Sr. Fessard, who fled the plantation on September 1. Before the escape, they destroyed several buildings and pieces of furniture and took with them all the guns and ammunition on the property. The four men had initially led 14 others to escape as well, but those runaways returned to report that Coucoulou, Marc, Herod, and Desire would stay put.²⁸ Though the 14 returned to Fessard’s land, it seems that this was not the only mass desertion in the plantation’s history. On September 17, 1771, almost exactly 20 years earlier, eight men and two women escaped the Montagnes Noires plantation and were suspected of being harbored by free people of color, further suggesting that in the west there had been ongoing collaboration between enslaved people and the gens du couleur.²⁹

In late 1791, in the Cul-de-Sac region surrounding Port-au-Prince, white colonists and gens du couleur who were in conflict with each other both courted dissatisfied maroons – perhaps including those who survived and escaped the Fortin Bellanton conflict – and enslaved people as auxiliary armed forces, promising freedom or minimally better work conditions and a reduced working week.³⁰ The “Swiss,” the Company of Africans, and Hyacinthe’s army fought on both sides of the civil war between the whites and the freemen who took advantage of the already fermenting rebellion among the enslaved people of the region.³¹ Hyacinthe was an Africa-inspired ritual leader whose following was composed of 15,000 people, including lieutenants Garion Santo, Halaou, Bebe Coustard, and Belisaire Bonaire, who emerged at Croix-des-Bouquets in 1792 during the Haitian Revolution.³²

By July 1792, the maroon encampment at Platons in the south was growing larger by the day; and Romaine “la Prophetesse” Rivière, another charismatic leader of a folk Kongo Catholic tradition, and his following of nearly 13,000, had established control over Léogâne and Jacmel.³³ Terry Rey’s The Priest and the Prophetess (2017) has uncovered new biographical information about Romaine Rivière and the rebellion he led in the central department. Romaine was a free man of color from Santo Domingo who at the onset of the rebellion brought together other freemen, slaves, and possibly maroons in their pillage of plantations in Léogâne and Jacmel. A letter from Léogâne, dated September 27, 1791, attests that “there have formed two camps of brigands of color who have pillaged several plantations.”³⁴ For months, Romaine’s band fortified his base at Trou Coffy with arms and spiritual protection from a huge shrine he constructed on his property. Though he was a coffee planter who may have owned slaves, Romaine’s spiritual inclinations led him to build solidarities and seek an end to slavery.

The Northern Insurrection

Throughout Saint-Domingue, the foundation for the Haitian Revolution uprising was laid through maroon reclamation, organization, and the embodiment of a socio-political critique of the plantation system. In the south, marronnage was characterized by runaways creating communal spaces and using their intimate knowledge of land, space, and ecologies for subsistence farming. Western department maroons mobilized in part based on solidarity – however fragile – with free people of color. In the northern plain, where the August 1791 uprising began, maroons and enslaved people deployed transience to organize masses in small-scale and larger insurgencies. As the Haitian Revolution unfolded, their networks also appear to have been connected by women who traversed spaces to cultivate relationships, countered colonial codes by posing as the opposite sex, and performed rituals to cultivate shared consciousness and identity. As Chapter 5 demonstrated, maroons increasingly remained in fugitivity for longer periods of time, reclaiming their time and appropriating other resources during their escapes. Here, we see that acts of oppositional behavior and rebellion spread through pre-existing social ties, interpersonal relationships, and spatial connections (Morris Reference Morris1984; McAdam Reference McAdam1988; Gould Reference Gould1995).

East of Cap Français, rebellion on the Sicard plantation in Fort Dauphin may have been fermenting since an October 1784 ship revolt. Sicard, an old and wealthy planter, was traveling with a colonist named Lavalette from Martinique back to Fort Dauphin, along with a group of Lavalette’s slaves. Sicard’s servant Jean-Pierre, aged 14, and Lavalette’s captives – all of whom were likely French speakers – successfully conspired to kill their owners and throw them overboard before arriving in Fort Dauphin. Their ship landed on the English island Tortol, where the rebels were arrested and sent to Martinique, then back to Cap Français. Later that month, Jean-Pierre was sentenced to be hanged and burned. The other five, Léveillé, Pharaon, Mercure, Luc and Azor, were condemned to publicly apologize by standing with a sign board describing their crime. Afterward, Léveillé and Pharaon had their right hands cut off, and all five were broken alive on the wheel and burned.³⁵

Word of Sicard’s murder and the uprising of his servant Jean-Pierre likely made its way back to Fort Dauphin, which had already been a hotbed for raids by maroon bands. Three years after the 1784 ship revolt, several individuals owned by the Sicard estate, but leased to Madame Sommanvert, escaped; some of them may have fought with the maroon leader Louis Gillot dit Yaya, who, along with several associates, was arrested in February 1787 for pillaging plantations in Fort Dauphin. Yaya’s associates, Pierre Sicard, Jean (Louis or François), and Apollon may have been part of a group of seven absconders who escaped the Sicard plantation in Fort Dauphin in late 1786 or early 1787 and were still at large as late as January 28, 1788, months after Yaya’s execution, possibly passing for free in Haut-du-Trou, Le Cap, or Limbé.³⁶ Yaya had been a maroon for 10–12 years, or perhaps even longer if he was the same Gillot in a 1766 advertisement describing a “very dangerous” creole man who stole horses and mules from Petite-Anse and sold them to the Spanish.³⁷ Yaya was joined by Narcisse, Manuel Damas, Jean François, Pierre Sicard, Pantaleon, Apollon, Dominique, Jean Louis, and an unnamed mulâtre woman. The rebels confronted the maréchaussée armed with machetes, and later several of the accused were interrogated repeatedly and dozens of witnesses were interviewed. Yaya was charged for attacking plantations and receiving arms, pillaging plantations in Trou and Terrier Rouge, and public notoriety, crimes for which he was sentenced to execution in September 1787.³⁸ Public knowledge of this group’s escape and their open attacks on the plantation system may have influenced enslaved people on their respective plantations. On January 1, 1788, probably during or after New Year celebrations, another group of seven ran away from the Sicard plantation: César, Parisien, Jason, and Marie, all Kongolese, and Marie’s creole children Vincent, Scolastique, and Marie-Thérèse.

The influence of Yaya’s confrontation with the maréchaussée – as well as those by earlier maroon bands led by Noël Barochin, Thélémaque Canga, Isaac Candide, and Pirrhus – may have spread beyond the Sicard plantation to other parts of Fort Dauphin. From early 1787 into 1788, letters between Marie Tousard and her husband, career military officer and recent coffee planter Colonel Louis Tousard, reveal that escapes consistently occurred on their Fort Dauphin plantation that Marie managed while Louis traveled. Louis attempted to support to his wife by advising that they use iron collars as punishment, yet bondspeople on the Tousard plantation continued to escape and steal equipment to sell in town. On January 10, 1787, the colonel wrote to his mother-in-law, Madame de St. Martin, assuring her that though several slaves had escaped, among them Pompice (Pompée) and Antoine, they would be captured soon. She responded in February that she was concerned that the runaways had not returned and that they had traveled to the Spanish territory. By June 21, Louis himself began to worry that the four runaways had potentially reached Santo Domingo. He planned to place an advertisement for them and to brand Jean-Louis and Michel as punishment upon their return. By July 26, there was no mention of the runaways in the Fort Dauphin jail. Colonel Tousard did eventually place an advertisement for Pierre Loulou, a driver on this plantation; yet, as Marie’s letters and the November 17, 1787, runaway advertisement claimed, Pierre was “uncontrollable” and was well known in Maribaroux and Ouanaminthe, where he frequented the Philibert, de Pontac, and de Vaublanc plantations.³⁹

Loulou was eventually returned to the Tousards, though his past escape loomed in their minds. On January 17, 1788, the colonel suggested that Loulou should receive a new coat as a gift to keep him obliged to his owner – but sternly reminded Madame St. Martin that Loulou was to be kept under close watch. Tousard also suggested that another foreman, Jean-Baptiste, needed to be kept in his place because his position afforded him the potential to influence others toward chaos and disorder.⁴⁰ The concerns about Loulou and Jean-Baptiste were well-founded, as they seem to have been intent on freeing themselves by repeatedly escaping. After being captured and returned to Tousard, Pierre Loulou escaped again in August 1788; this time he, Pompée, and Jean-Baptiste managed to evade the Tousards until at least February 1789.⁴¹ Marie sent Antoine to find Pompée, who was a Mandingue and had been missing for a year but was never found. These rebels, especially Loulou, demonstrated consistent hostility at the Tousard plantation, which spilled over into the Haitian Revolution when Loulou became part of the insurgency under Jean-François Papillon in 1792.⁴² Ironically, Tousard and Jean-François’ troops became acquainted when the former was dispatched to put down the revolt at Le Cap in the summer of 1791.⁴³ It may be possible that Loulou and Papillon knew each other before the uprising. Two weeks before Loulou’s November 1787 escape, Jean-François, an early leader of the 1791 revolt along with Georges Biassou, fled the Papillon property in Le Cap.⁴⁴ That they escaped within weeks of each other (and around All Soul’s Day on November 1) may hint at a wider gathering that took place among the future insurgents. It took an additional year after the initial revolt for Pierre Loulou to join Jean-François’ ranks. Pierre was a leader in his own right in the areas of Fort Dauphin, Maribaroux, and Ouanaminthe, where he was well known; while Papillon was voted king of the Gallifet plantations closer to Le Cap. During the early years of the Haitian Revolution, Fort Dauphin continued to be an important location for rebels to trade for weapons, food, and resources from the Spanish.⁴⁵

Planters worried that ties forged by runaways could easily facilitate the spread of insurrection from the city to the countryside if measures were not taken to thwart even short-term marronnage. Villevaleix was the lawyer for the Breda plantations surrounding Cap Français, one of which previously held Toussaint Louverture in bondage.⁴⁶ On March 31, 1790, Villevaleix wrote that there had been drought conditions recently and fires started by nearby maroons were destroying plantations in the plain of Le Cap. His account casually acknowleges there was indeed a regular presence of runaway communities just outside the bustling port city. These maroons may have been joined a few weeks later by a young, newly arrived African who escaped the Breda pottery on the night of April 18 or 19.⁴⁷ Nine others escaped Breda after an enslaved man was killed due to violent mistreatment, and they refused to return until they were assured that no punishment would be given. Later in September, the Breda overseer found and arrested 27 runaways at the pottery and others hiding in the slaves’ housing quarters.⁴⁸

Lieutenant Milscent’s account from 1791 corroborates Villevaleix’s mention of maroons gathered around Le Cap to organize a revolt, stating that:

One of these runaways may have been Étienne, a mulâtre carpenter and cook who escaped in the summer of 1790 with a brown horse, a gun, and a machete, claiming to be free. While the advertisement for Étienne was placed by Mr. Archambau in Le Cap, Étienne had been seen in multiple locations, including Port-Margot, Gonaïves, Artibonite, and as far south as Saint-Marc, clearly using the horse to reach different parishes. In Étienne’s case, his self-identification as a free man may not have been only an individualized posturing to “pass,” as was the case for many runaways, but perhaps was a public proclamation and rallying cry to galvanize other enslaved people and runaways in the northern plain for a meeting in or around Le Cap. Étienne’s escape was advertised alongside that of a Senegalese woman named Martonne. She had been leased to a surgeon but eventually escaped and was later seen in Grand-Riviere, Dondon, and at Maribaroux on the Philibert plantation – one of the sites Pierre Loulou frequented while he traversed the north.⁵⁰ The chase that Milscent attempted to organize to re-capture these runaways outside Le Cap never happened, because their camp was informed and scattered before the detachment could reach them.⁵¹

Bwa Kayman and “Zamba” Boukman Dutty

Like calendas and vaudoux ritual gatherings where people like François Mackandal and Dom Pedro were central leaders, the Bwa Kayman ceremony was also a free space where participants assembled outside the scope of colonial surveillance to draw upon spiritual power, strengthen oppositional consciousness, forge solidarities, and incite rebellion (see Chapter 3). There has been some scholarly debate on the validity of the Bwa Kayman ceremony as a historical fact, in addition to some confusion about its actual date and location. While few have argued that the ceremony did not happen, contemporary accounts and oral histories contribute to a consensus that this significant ritual ceremony did take place soon before the Haitian Revolution began and that it was a significant vehicle for mobilizing the enslaved population in the northern plain (Fick Reference Fick1990; Geggus Reference Geggus2002: 81–92; Beauvoir-Dominique Reference Beauvoir-Dominique2010). The Bwa Kayman ceremony is known as an exemplary case within the African Diaspora of ritual influence on impending revolt against enslavement. Less than seven days prior to the August 22, 1791, mass insurgency on Saint-Domingue’s northern plain, two gatherings occurred near the Lenormand de Mezy plantation in Morne Rouge. It is believed that the first gathering was a meeting of creole coachmen, commandeurs, and high-ranking slaves on August 14 to outline the strategy for the revolt, and the other was held on August 21 to summon spirits for protection and sacralize the revolt.⁵² However, we lack clarity about the actual date of the ceremony; although the August 14 meeting may have been an organizing meeting, it also coincides with present-day celebrations for lwa Ezili Kawoulo and was the feast day for the Notre Dame de l’Assomption, patron saint of the colony. This would have been particularly important to free people of color and enslaved Kongo Catholics who followed the cult of the Virgin. Also, August 15 is the date for honoring Kongo lwa in Gonaïves, not far from northern plain.⁵³

Regardless of the ceremony’s date, oral historical evidence suggests that the Bwa Kayman spiritual gathering was the culmination of ritual collaboration between the varying African ethnic groups. Participants sacrificed a pig – which in contemporary Haitian society signifies a militaristic undercurrent of the petwo rite – and drank its blood, indicating a Dahomean oath of secrecy done in conjunction with the orisha Ogou.⁵⁴ Spirits from the Nagô and Rada pantheons held more spiritual capital because Bight of Benin Africans were the first ethnic majority in the colony. These spirits were then paired with and/or transferred to the Kongolese rite.⁵⁵ Ethnographic evidence is supported by historical evidence from the Catholic tradition in the Kongolands, where petitions to the Virgin and Saint James were commonplace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁵⁶ Therefore, we might surmise that a manifestation of the maternal water spirit Ezili, often depicted as the Catholic Virgin Mary, and the orisha of war and iron Ogou, appearing as Saint James, were the main forces called upon at Bwa Kayman. Ezili and Ogou from the Bight of Benin merged with the Virgin Mary and Saint James from the Kongo to reinforce the shared bond of the ritual between the two ethnic clusters.

Antoine Dalmas first detailed the Bwa Kayman ceremony; later, Antoine Metral described a woman who performed significant rituals. Then in the 1950s, the grandson of a mixed-race woman named Cécile Fatiman and former Haitian president Jean-Louis Pierrot confirmed to historian Étienne Charlier that Cécile had been the ceremony’s main presider.⁵⁷ Along with Fatiman, “Zamba” Boukman Dutty orchestrated the ceremony and directed the initial attacks on the northern plantations from August until his death in November 1791. Boukman was brought from Jamaica illegally, and a lawyer in Limbé, named Leclerc, bought him. Boukman was known as a “bad slave” whose frequent marronnage resulted one night in being caught, shot, then sold to the Clement plantation in Acul, where he was for some reason promoted to either commandeur or coachman.⁵⁸ He was reportedly a leader of the ceremony and in Haitian historical memory was a boko(r), someone who does “mystical work through his own strength” rather than through learned rituals.⁵⁹ Further, his experience in an English colony may have contributed to an understanding of inter-imperial geopolitics, providing a basis for knowledge about how to exploit conflicts between the French, English, and Spanish. If a trader brought Boukman from Jamaica during an English blockade against the French, Boukman would have arrived either during the Seven Years War (1754–1763) or during the North American War of Independence (1776–1783). In either case, Boukman probably would have been aware of the Akan-led Tacky’s Revolt in 1760 and the subsequent Coromantee Wars.

Additionally, Boukman would have understood the power of African-based sacred practices in bringing together mobilizers. Tacky’s Revolt was organized by obeahmen who hid the conspiracy using loyalty oaths and employed ritual packets as protective armaments. However, in the aftermath of the revolt, the Jamaican colonial government increased repression against ritualists, which “threw the direct competition among different forms of sacred authority into stark relief.”⁶⁰ Maroons who allied with Anglo-Jamaican planters eventually betrayed Tacky. Given the conflicts between African ritualists and maroons in Jamaica, Boukman would have understood the importance of pan-African alliances and employed these lessons as he organized the August 1791 insurrection. It therefore should come as no surprise that accounts of the Bwa Kayman ceremony indicate the use of symbols and practices from multiple ethnic backgrounds. Further biographical research is needed to identify when Boukman was taken from Jamaica, then brought to Saint-Domingue. If indeed he was brought after the Coromantee Wars, any connection between these events in Jamaica and the beginnings of the Haitian Revolution would prove compelling.

The attempted killing of Galliffet’s manager at La Gossette, the same plantation that experienced marronnage as labor strikes in 1785 and 1789, triggered the northern uprisings in 1791.⁶¹ It seems clear that the masses of northern Saint-Domingue had for some time been planning the revolt that began on August 22. Georges Biassou, Jean-François Papillion, Jeanot Bullet, and Boukman Dutty were the central emerging leaders, while Toussaint Louverture was likely part of the planning but waited until fall to leave the Breda plantation and join the rebel ranks. Boukman Dutty was not the only rebel leader who recruited sacred power to enhance his ability to command thousands of insurrectionists. Georges Biassou was originally an enslaved person from the hills surrounding Cap Français. His mother was a nurse in a Jesuit hospital, where Toussaint Louverture may have also been employed. Louverture and Biassou had familiarity with one another from their early years, and Louverture would later become the doctor for Biassou’s rebel camp. Georges Biassou was considered one of the more colorful revolutionary leaders, particularly because of his open dedication to African-based practices. His war tent was known to include sacred items and animals. At night, he held ceremonies featuring African dances and chants. Additionally, his military cadre included several religious specialists whom he regularly consulted for advice.⁶² By November, Boukman had been killed in battle while defending his post after several attempts to sack Cap Français, and his body was decapitated and burned. Upon learning of Boukman’s death, insurgents in Jean-François’ camp held a three-day calenda in commemoration. The militaristic rituals of the calenda involved mocking enemy forces, as the rebels symbolically proclaimed the death of Colonel Tousard and ridiculed their white prisoners with stories of their battle successes.⁶³ Even after Boukman’s death, fighting in the north continued. On July 2, 1793, Duvallon-L’etang sent a letter from Le Cap to his brother detailing the murder of their parents and the apparent kidnapping of their younger siblings, whose heads and hands were the only body parts that remained.⁶⁴ The rebels’ persistence in fighting – eventually on behalf of the French against British and Spanish forces – and acts of self-liberation were the singular influences that led to the general emancipation of enslaved people later in 1793.

Women Bridge Leaders

Accounts of women ritualists during the early days of the Haitian Revolution uprising demonstrate that “the subversion of cultural expressions, symbols and aesthetics has been a recurrent theme in African women’s resistance across divergent contexts, locations and herstorical moments” (Kuumba Reference Kuumba2006: 116). Enslaved African and African-descended women, like the midwife Marie Catherine Kingué and Cécile Fatiman, deployed their spiritual practices to support the liberation struggle. In the weeks after Bwa Kayman, Boukman went on to lead an insurgency of tens of thousands of slaves in systematically pillaging and burning dozens of sugar plantations throughout the northern plain. Accounts from nuns of the Communauté des Religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame du Cap-Français, an expensive boarding school for black and white girls, claimed that rebel band leader Boukman Dutty attempted to capture Cap Français days after Bwa Kayman.⁶⁵ In their letters describing the insurgency’s destruction, the nuns describe a former student known as “Princess” Amethyste, a young mixed-race woman who had been initiated into the Arada tradition of Gioux or vaudoux and who had persuaded other students to follow her lead. This group was referred to as “Amazons,” to imply that they were female insurgents that actively assisted Boukman in sacking Le Cap, and that they were members of his spiritual sect.⁶⁶

Besides Cécile Fatiman and Amethyste, women’s spiritual role was consistent in facilitating sacred protections for the rebel forces. In February 1792, Colonel Charles Malenfant led a military excursion against a camp in Fonds-Parisien at Cul-de-Sac when he witnessed a vaudoux ceremony led by a priestess who had placed ritual artifacts along the road to the encampment to block foreign entry. Black and white chickens were speared on large stakes and trailed along the road, leading to a set of eight to ten large eggs, which created an entryway to an encampment covered in vines. There, over 200 women and a few men, some of whom were from the Gouraud plantation, were found singing and dancing; the militiamen chased them toward the Santo Domingo border, killing 20 women en route. The leader was described as a finely dressed woman from the Boynes plantation, but Malefant’s troops executed her without due process. Malenfant was particularly annoyed by the premature killing because he was no longer able to obtain information from her about the nearby rebels. Malenfant discovered another vaudoux queen in the Sainte Suzanne mountains of Limonade. She was an Arada woman who had recently arrived in the colony and though she spoke no Kreyol, initiates claimed that she was all-powerful. She was questioned in Cap Français and showed interrogators a secret handshake akin to those of the Freemasons, but she never divulged other secrets that would identify other members of the sect – thereby protecting the rebels and any information they might have.⁶⁷

The fear of marronnage as an organizing principle to build a regional or colony-wide network of rebels was legitimate, especially when considering rebels’ propensity to use women as bridge leaders: couriers, spies, nurses, and smugglers.⁶⁸ After Jean-François escaped the Papillon plantation at Le Cap in November 1787, his girlfriend Charlotte, a Poulard woman, ran away from the same owner in March 1791. She had been missing for five months before an advertisement for her was placed in Gazette de Saint Domingue in early August. It was suspected that Charlotte was abusing the temporary pass she was given and had been moving about in different quarters. By the time the advertisement was published, it was believed that she was in or around Port-au-Prince.⁶⁹ We may never know exactly what Charlotte was doing in those five months, the different parishes she visited, or with whom she was in contact. However, it may be possible that she left in the spring on behalf of Jean-François to help coordinate the rebellions that would begin a few months later. While Charlotte was traveling in the greater Port-au-Prince area, smaller uprisings began there in July that anticipated the August 1791 mass revolt in the northern plain. By September, she was back north with Jean-François, and rebels at the former Galliffet plantation named them king and queen.⁷⁰ The election of kings and queens was common among the rebels in the north and at Platons whenever they gained military control of a parish.⁷¹ There is no direct evidence that Jean-François and Charlotte’s coronation was related to the secret vaudoux gatherings or Kongo-Catholic confraternity celebrations where kings and queens were the central leadership figures; however, we do know that initiates of the former were asked to perform rebellious tasks such as stealing before they could enter the secret organization. In such a case, we might then think of Charlotte’s crowning as a reward for her role in coordinating the northern and western revolts.

Similarly, rebel leader Hyacinthe’s partner Magdeleine escaped enslavement in August 1790 – an advertisement suggests he lured her away to the Ducoudray plantation where he was held.⁷² Magdeleine was described as a creole woman who had free family members in Petit Goâve, and transgressed gender norms by dressing in men’s clothes. Her apparent eschewal of conventionally gendered activity might indicate that Magdeleine was intentionally hiding herself not just as a maroon but as an active participant during the western uprisings. This supports later reports that women in Hyacinthe’s camp commonly ran errands to exchange weapons and food.⁷³ Other women fought and died alongside husbands who were generals in the black military forces. Sanité and Charles Belair, nephew of Toussaint Louverture, were captured during the last days of the Leclerc expedition and were executed together in October 1802. Sanité was known for her hostility toward whites and her fearlessness in facing execution without a blindfold.⁷⁴ At the battle of Crête-à-Pierrot, an important turning point in the final struggle against Leclerc’s forces, Marie Jeanne Lamartinière accompanied her husband “and took her share in the defense [sic].”⁷⁵ On the other hand, Claire Heureuse, wife of Dessalines, was sympathetic toward opposing forces and attempted to save “many of the French he had ordered massacred.”⁷⁶