Your slaves do not need your generosity or your advice to shatter the
sacrilegious yoke that oppresses them. Nature speaks louder than philosophy
or interest. Already two colonies of fugitive negroes have been
established, and they are protected from your attacks by treaties and
by force. These flashes announce the lightning, and all that the negroes
lack is a leader courageous enough to carry them to vengeance
and carnage. Where is he, this great man, that nature owes to its
vexed, oppressed, tormented children? Where is he? He will appear,
do not doubt it. He will show himself and will raise the sacred banner
of liberty. This venerable leader will gather around him his comrades
in misfortune. More impetuous than torrents, they will leave ineffaceable
traces of their just anger everywhere. All their tyrants—Spanish,
Portuguese, English, French, Dutch—will fall prey to iron and
flame. The American fields will be transported to drunkenness from
drinking the blood that they have been awaiting for so long. And the
bones of innumerable unfortunates, piled up over three centuries, will
shake with joy. The Old World will join its applause to that of the
New. Everywhere people will bless the name of the hero who reestablished
the rights of the human species, everywhere monuments will be
erected to his glory. Then the Code noir will disappear, and the Code
blanc will be terrible, if the victors consult only the law of revenge!
Histoire philosophique et politique
des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, Raynal
It was always the burning of the cane fields that was the signal for revolt, the flames engulfing the great expanses of liquid gold watered by the blood of the slaves that stretched between the scattered islands of the plantation houses. When the cane inferno came, the fire of rebellion was not to be quenched save with blood, but it could be staunched with the barrier of the azure waves. But some fires are so great as to leap over any firebreak, to fly from island to island, to make a mockery of attempts to contain it. The dead stalks of cane, the sweet juice of the sugar, the blood of the slaves, had all been piled by the angel of history into fuel for the likes of an inferno which could not be by mortal hands extinguished.
The Caribbean had been a nexus of European power politics for more than a century by the time the French revolution destroyed the old world. During the 17th century it was the infamous abode of pirates and corsairs, preying on Spanish gold as it made its way on the great galleons to the insatiable money pit of His Most Catholic Majesty's tercios. But by the 18th century, commercial development, building off of the late 17th century precedents, shifted the region’s economy away from privateering and small scale tobacco cultivation to massive cultivation of sugarcane and to a lesser extent coffee, indigo, and cotton, fueling an unprecedented economic boom. The colonial trade of maritime powers like France and Britain expanded vastly and France's in particular became heavily based on the huge sugar and colonial trade from the Caribbean, producing a remarkable economic dynamism in Western France. Colonial trade rose to 25% of the total French trade, vital to French mercantile prosperity and the French balance of trade in Europe, and in both France and Britain the West Indies lobby was a potent political force.
This commerce was built on the backs of what became overwhelmingly slave societies. The proportion and number of slaves in the French Caribbean rose massively over the course of the century, fueled by huge imports of slaves, but also increasingly by natural growth as slaves acclimated to the climate and stable societies were brought up. This society was more than simply one of slaves and masters however: there were also the small whites, sometimes poor but often simply not possessing the same social status and power as the grand-blancs possessed, and freed blacks, the gens de couleur, many of whom themselves became increasingly wealthy and often owned slaves themselves, and represented an increasing proportion of the population. There were also marrons in the interior, escaped slaves who constituted their own societies, sometimes fighting against the administration, sometimes allies through returning escaped slaves, but in any case their own power and one with which formal treaties were often made to fit them into the colonial system as slave hunters. The overwhelming majority of society however, was the vast slave population, itself divided between creoles assimilated to the colonies, and more recently arrived Africans who came from a dizzying varieties of homelands in Africa. Society was based on their backs.
So when the French Revolution brought the question of slavery to the fore it was a debate whose outcome was of overwhelming importance to the fate of the entire structure and destiny of these distant French lands, and indeed the entire Caribbean. There was an inherent contradiction between the universal and inalienable rights of man, born free and equal - and the maintenance of hundreds of thousands of people in conditions of slavery. Not only were slaves (and the gens de couleur, the free blacks and mulattos) inspired in hope by the developments in France, they were also confronted by a weakened repressive apparatus, as the authority of royal France began to splinter and collapse. And back in the Metropole, anti-slavery societies, already beginning to develop in the 1780s, received a major impetus, particularly the Société des amis des Noirs. But the first signs of revolt however, ironically came from the Saint-Domingue creoles, who were eager to assert their authority and dominance in the colony with the collapse of royal authority, setting up their own rival government in the “War of the Tassles,” between the red of the local autonomists and the white of royal authority: a war ultimately won by the centralists.
But this petty squabble soon became meaningless as a far more serious contestation developed. The first was the gens de couleur who were rallied by Vincent Ogé who returned to attempt to gain the rights decreed in the home country for the gens de couleur libres. His rebellion was quickly smashed by the reunited whites, but it would not be long for a far more serious threat to emerge, as the slaves rose in revolt, burning plantations and seizing the land for themselves. An obvious solution to the problem of the miniscule white minority retaining control would have been to broaden its base, through the elevation of the maligned and beaten gens de couleur, the free blacks and mulattos. But instead they dug in their heels and refused this, and the situation continued to spiral out of control. Planters looked to foreign, ie. British and Spanish intervention to save themselves and their property: there were landings, crucial ports seized, and the maroons and rebellious slaves of the interior were folded into the Spanish alliance as a force of counter-revolution and revolt.
It would be in this context that Toussaint Bréda rose to power, a freedman planter who realized that the game was up for his old plantation, and instead chose to head to the hills and join the rebel groups present there. Among them, he rapidly rose to become a leader of men, forming a disciplined and capable army of highly motivated soldiers, allied to Spain. But Bréda had the foresight to see that things had changed, and that the days of slavery were over, and that the attempts of the Marron leaders to secure partial emancipation, partial freedom, were doomed to failure. It was in this context that Bréda opened up a communication with the ostensible French governor of the island, and fatefully changed his side: in May, 1794, he suddenly attacked and annihilated the maroon garrisons and drove the Spanish out of Saint-Domingue, soon followed by expelling British expeditionary forces in the ports atrophied by disease and attrition and setting himself on the path to supreme power and a new name: Toussaint-Louverture. This came at the same time as the formal abolition of slavery throughout the entire French empire, decreed by the National Assembly in Paris.
The question was however, whether there would be any colonies left for the decree to be applied. British intervention captured Martinique, St. Lucia, and Guadeloupe, with the support of the French planters, while Saint-Domingue was still in a state of effective civil war with Andre Rigaud leading the mulatto elements and L’Ouverture the blacks, and Spanish and British armies and proxies in operation. The opening of the war had seen the dispatch of a major British expeditionary force to the Caribbean, with powerful contingents of ships of the line and troops. True, it was lacking somewhat in light forces, the cruisers and frigates that would raid trade and deal with light vessels in shallow waters, with these forces bound up trying to halt French raids in the Atlantic and the vicious commerce raiding campaign in the Indian Ocean by French and Mysorean privateers and fleet elements, yet on the offense this would not be a serious problem.
At such a nadir, a singular personality reversed the catastrophe: commissar of the Republic Victor Hughes. Hughes was from a Marseille merchant house family, active in trade, but rallied to the Revolution and the Republic. Appointed as the Republic’s commissar in Guadeloupe, he arrived in early 1794 just after the British captured the island. He carried with him the promise of the abolition of slavery, and he managed to organize a liberating army of slaves and gens de couleur who promptly destroyed a royalist army of some 1,500 and went on to drive the British from the islands. Hughes abolished slavery - although a system of obligatory, forced, labor that freed the slaves but gave them the new status of a (theoretically) paid
cultivateur who was supposed to remain on the plantations and work it is true, meant that the actual change was less dramatic - and from his base in Guadeloupe launched a campaign of very republican credentials: a people’s war for the end of slavery, to set the Caribbean alight and conveniently to strike a blow against the enemies of France. And for those not as motivated by Republican principles and liberty, a privateering campaign which became the bane of British, Spanish, and more inconveniently, American commerce in the region.
Hughe’s forces captured outlying islands of Guadeloupe, such as Marie Galante with small boats, but quickly became more ambitious: they recaptured French Lucia, and went on, in 1795, to capture the British colony of Antigua* - an immense propaganda triumph, with Hughes personally making the voyage to the island (narrowly, it must be said, escaping a British frigate which nearly ran down his ship before he escape under cover of darkness) to preside over a carefully choreographed ceremony of the breaking of chains of the British slaves, the distribution of Phyrgian bonnets to the now free men, and the enrollment of the former slaves into French military units and self-defense forces. It was engraved and illustrated into prints and distributed as propaganda by smuggled all across the Caribbean, and however small the pinprick was against the British Empire, the Committee of Public Safety dramatized it and trumpeted it at a time when there was little other way of striking directly against Britain. Sending the
cultivateurs back to the plantations to get back to work was not trumpeted as much.
Other islands rose up in flame, such as St. Vincent where the Black Caribs alongside the French and slaves seized control of the island, encircling and then capturing Kingstown after reinforcements failed to arrive in time, while in Grenada Julien Fédon seized the island as a black republic. As elsewhere in the Caribbean, this set the stage for future intercine fighting and political tensions, particularly in St. Vincent where the battle lines were drawn between former slaves, Black Caribs, and white smallholders. They had different visions of what they wanted for the island, with the slaves wanting to become peasant farmers in their own rights, the Black Caribs to dominate government and establish themselves as the new ruling elite, and the white smallholders to pick up the place of the former plantation class. It would be an issue which would bedevil them, with only the sword of damocles of British intervention hanging over their head keep them in check. Dominica too saw a combined slave and Carib uprising throw out the British.
This also led to the question: what would be their status? As back in France, French authorities had to deal with the question of what they would do with territory that they declared “liberated.” This was complicated by the fact that a number of the islands that the French had in conjunction with slave revolts seized were prior French colonies, such as Saint Vincent, taken from France some 30 years before in the Seven Years’ War. Ultimately, Hughes opted to pursue a policy of “Sister Republics” similar to that in Europe. These were a mixed bag of democratic and anti-democratic beliefs, similar to Hughes’ own policies in Guadeloupe, with local parliaments, but with elections permanently displaced due to wartime emergency laws, and effectively functioned as French client states. The alternative was to federate them into a single republic, which Hughes viewed as more logical in light of their small size and non-viability as independent states, but he desired to ensure that they stayed firmly under his thumb and feared that a federation would be unwieldy and give rise to excessive independence.
Nevertheless, the Republics of Antigua, Grenada, Saint Vincent, and Dominica constituted the first officially independent nations in the Caribbean, and they did enjoy a real autonomy in drawing up their own constitutions, laws, and were even encouraged in establishing their own military units to assist with the war effort. As in Guadeloupe, this led a bifurcation of the status of the freed slaves in each of the islands, with the majority still tied to their plantations by restrictive policies, but an increasing minority gaining real freedom, arms, fighting experience, and even wealth in the army and as privateers, participating on raids that struck terror into the entire eastern Caribbean.
Hughes’ style of managed democracy however ran into problems on the island of greatest triumph: Antigua, the sole one which had never been a French colony or with a major French population present. While in the rest of the territories, there was a substantial indigenous population (or at least usable native - the ethnogenesis of the Black Caribs was heavily contested, but at any rate they saw themselves as descendants of the Caribs), and most often a significant French group left over from the days when the islands had been French colonies, there was no equivalent to this in Antigua, simply the presence of the British plantation owners and the slaves. Without an intermediary group to work through or different divisions to exploit, the Republic of Antigua had to base its popular support almost entirely on the former slaves, who proved to be unwilling to persist with the status of
cultivateurs as in the other islands. The plantation system broke down in disorder and chaos as the British plantation owners fled the island as best as they could, and the new government had no choice but to accept the fait accompli: citing the abolishment of feudalism in France, they broke up the plantations and distributed the parcels of land to the
cultivateurs, essentially turning them into a class of free peasants. Theoretically at least: the mechanism chosen to try to keep the system from devolving into subsistence agriculture was a system of punishing poll taxes, which in effect would force the new peasants to grow cash crops to pay them. Slaves of the British plantation owners,
cultivateurs of the Republic’s commissars, smallholders of the Antiguan overseers - the work must go on, the sugar must be grown, and the sweat of a man’s brow turned to gold.
Plus ça change? Perhaps, but whatever the limitations of Hughe’s system, what mattered was that the slaves believed in freedom. And be it the talisman of the rights of man and the citizen for the French peasant, the Sonthonax decree of the abolition of slavery, or Tipu Sultan’s calligraphy on soldiers’ turbans that promised protection from bullets, man will die with a ready smile for a belief.
*These are based upon OTL different island offensives which the French came close to pulling off. Historically, the French were either defeated by British naval forces which forestalled them, such as at Antigua, or in the rest of the colonies they went up in revolt but later British reinforcements managed to stabilize the situation, generally around 6 months later. Here, the massive diversion of light ships to other theaters as covered in the Indian Ocean campaign as well as a more active French fleet in the Atlantic sucks up a disproportionate amount of British transport capacity and particularly cruisers which the British needed in order to deal with Hughes’ swarms of light boats and smuggling. As a result these operations are tipped over the edge and instead of narrowly failing they succeed. Antigua is my speculation upon Hughes’ system in conquered territory.
