A Wilderness So Immense (26 page)

Notices for runaway slaves from the
Gazette Genérale de Saint-Domingue
and the
Moniteur Colonial
bear candid testimony to the horrors of the slave regime:

The grisly realities behind these advertisements for runaways were not forgotten when the revolution came to St. Domingue. The slaves who fought for their freedom sang
“Ça Ira”
and “La Marseillaise,” but they still remembered the words of an ancient voodoo song invoking the Congolese rainbow serpent, Mbumba, for protection against European slave traders and the coastal African tribe, Ba Fioti, who did business with them and were dreaded for their witchcraft:

Eh! Eh! Rainbow spirit serpent / Tie up the Ba Fioti / Tie up the whites / Tie up the witches / Tie them.
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When Governor Carondelet landed at New Orleans in December 1791, he found local Jacobin clubs distributing revolutionary pamphlets throughout the capital and he heard French residents singing “Ça Ira”
and later “La Marseillaise.” In the theaters, taverns, and coffeehouses of New Orleans, rowdy punsters dubbed the new governor
“cochon du lait”
(suckling pig) in their adapted version of the “Carmagnole”:

Clearly, the situation terrified Carondelet. He quietly packed up his baroness, María de la Concepción Castaños y Aragorri, and their two small children, Luis Angel and María Felipa Cayetana, and shipped them off to the safety of Havana. Then he turned his attention to the presumed Jacobins of New Orleans, many of whom seem to have been newly arrived “businessmen,” including two that he described as “talented men, very astute, and the wealthiest men in the capital.”
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Never one to underestimate the dangers at hand, the new governor was suspicious but also gullible, and he was temperamentally inclined toward dramatic, expensive, and contradictory measures. When it came to handling a crisis, the contrast between Carondelet and Miró could not have been more stark.

In June 1791, for example, the summer before Carondelet arrived, five fires were started deliberately in various parts of New Orleans (two of them “on the fence of the very same house”) and a sixth at the suburban home of Lorenzo Sigur. Having witnessed the great conflagration of 1788, Miró was all too familiar with the threat of fire, but his response was measured and effective. Without indulging in alarmist rhetoric about the possibility of Jacobin saboteurs, Miró increased the number of nightly patrols as a precautionary measure, and then (like a Neighborhood Watch program) he appealed for assistance to the city’s merchants and traders, asking them to “keep watch with their friends … either walking or on horseback.” Each evening, Miró gathered a group of municipal and colonial officials to ride with him “in the night on horseback with [the] dragoons,” visibly reassuring the populace while also raising the morale of his patrols. The culprits were believed to be three prison escapees, “among whom is a real bad one … seen in the woods nearby,” so Miró sent search parties into the woods, initiated random patrols outside the city after dark, and offered “two prisoners of good
faith who had never committed a serious crime”—trusties, in modern parlance—“their freedom if they should catch the main one.”
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While Miró calmly monitored the danger, he described the situation to Luis de Las Casas, the captain-general at Havana, “so that Your Excellency may not have any extra worries … because things are always exaggerated as they travel from one to another.” By the end of August Miró could report “the apprehension of the suspected negro, whose trial is now being prepared,” and assure his superior that “fears that the city might be set on fire are gradually ceasing.”
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A year later, Governor Carondelet reacted very differently to reports of “seditious people” in the colony. He deported Jean Dupuy a French trader, “for having made remarks suggestive of a revolution in this province,” as he did a man named Bujeac, “one of the most fanatical of all the partisans of the revolution.” Carondelet complained that Bujeac, despite his warnings and threats of banishment, was “always on the lookout for dangerous news which he was spreading with the greatest effrontery in the most public places against the monarchical government.” On another occasion Carondelet banished a free black tailor, newly arrived from St. Domingue, because he was “a native of that part of Santo Domingo that belongs to the French and is mixed up in all the intrigues and harassments of the French colony, besides being ungovernable and audacious. Having such a character around under the present circumstances,” Carondelet explained, “might produce bad results.”
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Oblivious to the fact that deportations were as likely to arouse as to curb seditious talk, Carondelet eventually banished sixty-eight men to Cuba. Some of them were heads of families, and all of them were people whom the governor regarded as having “no respect for anyone, nor any law nor duty.” The captain-general of Havana, Luis de Las Casas (who was Carondelet’s brother-in-law), was not so sure. “Real traitors,” Las Casas cautioned Carondelet in June 1795, were more likely to be “adventurers” than merchants, “since men of property are not going to risk their investments with this nonsense. After all, by reuniting with France”—where slavery had been abolished in 1794—“they automatically forfeit their slaves.” The greater danger, Las Casas warned his impulsive brother-in-law (with an eye toward the situation in St. Domingue), was “that the free men of colour and the slaves will allow themselves to be tempted by the corruption of French government… with the desire which they so much value—to possess liberty”
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The revolutionary ideals that especially appealed to free people of color in Louisiana, as in St. Domingue, were equality and fraternity.
Many of them accepted the existence of slavery, and Louisiana’s more successful free men of color (none of whom achieved the grandeur of St. Domingue’s wealthy mulatto class) commonly owned slaves themselves. What they wanted was respect. Respect from their white property-owning neighbors, and respect from the officers of government.
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Among the more vocal of Louisiana’s ambitious free men of color was Pedro Bailly, a mulatto lieutenant in the free-colored militia. Bailly had an instinct for business. Starting as a blacksmith, carter, and wood dealer after his manumission in 1776, Bailly had become a comfortable self-made entrepreneur trading in slaves and real estate. He had purchased his mother’s freedom in 1781, kept at least five slaves for his household, and acquired hundreds of pesos to lend at interest. As was often the case in Spanish society, his good fortune accompanied a steady rise in the ranks of the militia, which also excited jealousy among those who owed Bailly substantial amounts of money. Playing to Carondelet’s paranoia with exaggerated or fabricated testimony, two fellow officers testified, falsely, that Bailly shirked his responsibilities as an officer. They also claimed, probably truthfully, that when the militia was sent to repair cracks in the levee, Bailly sent a slave in his place—a common practice among wealthy white militiamen that caused deep resentment among the colored militia, even when the man who could afford it was one of their own.
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In March 1794 Governor Carondelet deported Lieutenant Bailly to Cuba for his “diabolical ideas of freedom and equality” and for “having made remarks against the Spanish government… showing himself to be inclined to the principles of the French rebels.” Bailly was basically guilty of advocating social equality between whites and free men of color, both in Louisiana society and in the colony’s militia—opinions that only made the example of St. Domingue loom larger in the governor’s mind. The testimony of Luis Declouet, a white militia lieutenant and tobacco merchant, offers a clear glimpse of Bailly’s expressed sentiments—opinions quite beyond the reach of men of color in Virginia and other American slave states.
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In November 1793, anticipating a French invasion from the Gulf of Mexico during the short-lived Spanish-English alliance, the two men had accompanied their militia unit to Fort St. Phillip, in Plaquemines Parish on the Mississippi River below New Orleans. In a conversation while waiting for an attack that never came, Lieutenant Declouet described the French as enemies of the state and of religion and foes to all humanity.

“Humanity! Humanity!” Bailly replied. “I am going to speak frankly to you, sure that you are a man of honor. … It is true that they have done
wrong by murdering their king, but sir, the French are just; they have conceded men their rights.”
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Declouet asked Bailly which rights he referred to. “A universal equality among men, us, people of color,” Bailly replied.

Whether Bailly’s actions deserved two years’ imprisonment in Cuba may be doubted, but Carondelet (like Miró before him) had reason to be concerned about the opinions Bailly so eloquently expressed. They and everyone else knew that from 1791 through 1793 the Haitian Revolution had begun not as a slave uprising but as a conflict between propertied, slaveholding whites and propertied, slaveholding mulattoes. For decades, in St. Domingue, in Louisiana, and in other Caribbean colonies, French and Spanish royal officials had nurtured the three-tiered societies of whites, free mulattoes, and slaves, playing each group off the others as a strategy to strengthen their own imperial authority.

In 1791, when a slave conspiracy was discovered in Pointe Coupée Parish, in the rich bottomland between the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers about a hundred miles upriver from New Orleans, none other than Pedro Bailly had been hauled into court for talking about “striking a blow like at the Cap”—a geographical reference to Cap Français (now Cap-Haïtien) on the north coast of St. Domingue and a rhetorical allusion to the limited goals of the mulatto party, who sought only equality with whites as citizens and not the abolition of slavery. With Governor Miró presiding, the court had acquitted Bailly in 1791, in part because the evidence against him was all hearsay, in part because he may have done nothing but talk, and in part because the mood of the colony was still calm, for in 1791 the news from St. Domingue was only of discord between elite whites and mulattoes.
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With a full-fledged slave revolt raging in St. Domingue, however, the mood in Louisiana was more apprehensive in 1795, when a second and more serious slave conspiracy was discovered at Pointe Coupée. “If our information is correct,” a Pointe Coupée planter wrote to authorities in New Orleans, “the Saint-Domingue insurrection did not have a more violent beginning.” Although not as severely outnumbered by their slaves as the planters of the sugar islands, Pointe Coupée’s two thousand white residents did live on large isolated plantations stretching for twenty miles along the west bank of the Mississippi River and were outnumbered by their seven thousand slaves. While the Code Noir forbade possession of weapons by slaves, enforcement in Pointe Coupée was lax and many of the area’s slaves had guns. Finally, while there had been no credible evidence of outside agitation in 1791, this time Jacobin provocateurs probably were at work up and down the Mississippi, circulating radical literature, denouncing slavery, and distributing and proclaiming the French National Convention’s declaration of February 4, 1794, “that all men, without distinction of color living in the colonies are French citizens enjoying all rights assured by the Constitution.”
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With France and Spain at war, a French victory could bring a general emancipation, thought Joseph Bouyavel, a French-born teacher who lived on the Goudeau estate at Pointe Coupée. Bouyavel was accustomed to reading revolutionary literature to the slaves, including antislavery passages from the Declaration of the Rights of Man from his copy
of Théorie de l’Impôt.
Bouyavel counseled the slaves “to be patient because slavery would not last very long,” but other whites, including a German-born tailor from Philadelphia and an agitator from the Republic of Raguse, a revolutionary state established in Yugoslavia at the height of the French Revolution, spread a more insidious rumor, fraught with implications of double-dealing on the part of slaveholders.
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Jean Baptiste, one of the principal leaders of the conspiracy, heard the story from a slave from Curaçao, near Venezuela, who recounted that “they are awaiting at the Capital an Order of the King which declares all the slaves free.” Soon thereafter Antoine Sarrasin, the other chief leader of the Pointe Coupée plot, told Jean Baptiste that although “this order of freedom” had been sent to the commandant of a neighboring parish, an overseer at the Poydras estate (where both leaders were slaves) had convinced the commandant not to publish it. Instead, this overseer, named Duffief, had drawn up “a petition for the slaves to sign,” renouncing their freedom, “without telling them what the petition said.” As another slave heard the rumor, “the King had given us our freedom, but the masters made a petition to prevent it” and were forcing their slaves to sign a petition
“renouncing their freedom and saying that they wanted to end their days with their masters.” A foolhardy planter’s wife gave further credence to the rumor when she taunted her slaves for their refusal to plant corn with a threat to send for the petition that Duffief had tricked them into signing so that “when all the nègres will be free, you will never be free here.” “If all this was true,” Jean Baptiste reasoned, the slaves of Pointe Coupée “must oppose it and kill the whites.”
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