Fourteen thousand dollars for the planters, nothing for the black refugees

In 1794 the people of Philadelphia raised fourteen thousand dollars for refugees from Saint Domingue. Thirteen thousand of it paid to send white refugees back to the island. Another four thousand was collected to buy passages to France, and more went to widows of men who had died in the colony. Black refugees were given no relief by the French authorities, by the government of George Washington or by the private donors. At that moment Absalom Jones and Richard Allen were collecting small sums to build the African Church of Philadelphia, which became the first black church erected in the United States. White philanthropy turned toward the fleeing colonists and the church fund stalled. Its organisers had spent two years gathering three thousand five hundred dollars. Twelve thousand was raised in a few days for slaveholders who had just lost the labour of the people they owned.

When Britain and Spain invaded in 1793, neither with any intention of freeing anyone, France's agent in the colony was Sonthonax, who had published antislavery articles in Paris. Facing pockets of slave resistance, a hostile white population and two of Europe's great powers, he announced immediate emancipation, and in 1794 Paris ratified the decision and extended it to Guadeloupe. Girard sets the dates side by side to make his point about sequence. France was the first major power to free its slaves, Britain followed in 1833, the United States in 1865 and Brazil in 1888. He then records what the decree did not achieve. Many free men of colour, slave owners themselves, joined the British in the ports they held, and prominent black commanders including Biassou, Jean-Francois and Louverture went on fighting for monarchist, slaveholding Spain.

British forces completed their occupation of Port-au-Prince, which Woodward calls the capital, with naval support and the help of royalist troops already on the ground. What he underlines is the invitation. Wealthy free men of colour and white planters had asked England into the colony rather than accept the revolutionary settlement coming from Paris, so the occupation began as a bargain among propertied colonists rather than as a straightforward conquest. The British then held the port town while Spanish forces pressed from the east, leaving the republic with almost nothing in the west. Woodward links this moment forward to the alliances Toussaint would later be accused of betraying, since the same men who invited England in were the ones who complained loudest when the black generals negotiated with foreign powers. British troops would remain in parts of the colony for another four years.

Writing to the naval minister on 25 March 1795, the French representative Etienne Laveaux gave figures that explain why emancipation was not optional. Of 10,288 soldiers sent to Saint-Domingue only 990 remained, and of 952 officers only 262. Yellow fever and malaria, not battle, did most of this. Girard notes a French officer's earlier estimate that four white men had to be sent for one to be alive four years later. Former slaves, numbering more than half a million in Saint-Domingue at the start of the revolution and far more resistant to tropical fevers, became the replacement. Regulations required black civilians to keep working on estates even after abolition, so joining the army was a way out of field labour, and the constitution of 1795 reserved the vote to soldiers and the wealthy. By 1796 a third of the officers and seven eighths of the soldiers in Guadeloupe were black.