Paris turns emancipation into an instrument of naval warfare

The Republic's abolition of slavery in February 1794 joined libertarian politics to antislavery and put the resources of a great power behind black self liberation. Geggus stresses the immediate strategic use to which this was put. For several years emancipation became a tool of war directed mainly at Britain's islands, producing the multi class risings in the British Windward Islands that Victor Hugues supported from Guadeloupe and the commissioner Goyrand from Saint Lucia. He suggests the Coro rebellion in Venezuela the same year belongs in this family, given French privateers offshore and the insurgents' call for a republic and for French law, while noting that other historians read the French connection as an alibi invented by Spanish officials to hide their own conduct. He adds that once the Republic adopted emancipation it pushed the policy abroad far more energetically than the black leadership of Saint-Domingue ever did.

The wars that began with the rising of August 1791 broke the plantation economy of Saint-Domingue by destroying the two things it ran on, forced labour and fixed capital. The export figures show the scale. Measured against their levels of 1789, in 1795 sugar exports stood at 1.2 percent, coffee at 2.8 percent, cotton at 0.7 percent and indigo at 0.5 percent. All four except indigo recovered strongly up to 1802, and then the French invasion of that year pushed them down again, leaving 1804 with sugar at 34 percent, coffee at 40, cotton at 43 and indigo at 4 percent of pre revolutionary levels. Reports from 1803 describe burned cities, demolished sugar mills, carbonised beams and plantations reduced to ash, with only the small plots of coffee and food crops showing any life. The population fell from 520,000 in 1790 to 380,000 in 1805.

Reviewing John Garrigus's study of Saint-Domingue's free people of colour, Geggus singles out the parish of Aquin for anticipating post-independence changes in the late 1790s by selling off plantation land in peasant-sized units. He notes that Garrigus's socioeconomic base is nine thousand notarial documents, mostly from three of the colony's fifty-two parishes on the south coast, which lets him measure the rapid ascent of the free coloured elite in the last decades of the old regime. Two findings cut against current assumptions. Modern historians have exaggerated the wealth of the group, which was not made up of the men of immense capital C. L. R. James imagined. And although recent scholarship has popularised a special connection between people of colour and coffee, Garrigus finds indigo and cotton were the main sources of wealth for the people he studied. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus endorses Garrigus's demonstration that the wealth of Saint-Domingue's free coloured elite has been overstated since C. L. R. James, and his scepticism about the recently popular idea that the free coloured population contained a military leadership class.

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.