Haitian privateers named for abolitionists hunt slave ships

After independence, successive Haitian governments commissioned privateers of their own and turned them against the traffic in people. Some of these vessels carried names that announced the purpose. One was the Wilberforce, after the British campaigner against the slave trade. One was the Abolition de la Traite, meaning abolition of the trade. A third was the Philanthrope. They went after slaving ships making for Jamaica and Cuba. Captives taken out of those ships were brought to Haiti, where the constitution granted citizenship to anyone of African descent who arrived. They were then set to work under the labour system the Haitian state had inherited from the colony, which tied cultivators to estates and required them to stay. The men who commissioned these ships were answering the French commander in Santo Domingo, who was seizing young Haitians for sale abroad. Haiti was at once a refuge from the Atlantic trade and a state that still wanted field hands.

De Young singles out a letter from Dessalines to Leclerc held in the Rochambeau collection at the University of Florida. In it Dessalines specifies aggressive military actions taken in his department by himself and his lieutenants and mentions a supporting action by one of his officers, Commandant Gabart, assisting Commandant Petion on his own orders. The letter matters because of what surrounds it. Three days later Leclerc ordered the arrest of Dessalines and wrote to the first consul that Maurepas and Dessalines were deeply involved in the disasters overtaking the French forces. De Young's reading is that French intelligence had begun to see the general not as an officer executing the most hateful commands of his commander but as a patriot building the military basis of the coming war of independence while appearing to serve.

Lartigue accused Dessalines of sending emissaries to St Thomas to raise the Danish islands, and later described a plan to descend on Martinique and Guadeloupe, kill the inhabitants, burn the towns, raise the enslaved and free people of colour and form fourteen regiments. Gaffield traces the chain. An Englishman named Yong told him that at Jacmel General Moreau had said Haiti expected news at any moment that the enslaved of the French islands had risen. From that Lartigue concluded Dessalines was organising the risings, and he began describing passing travellers of colour as emissaries and their meeting place as a Haitian club. Gaffield notes the motive: on 25 September Lartigue had written acknowledging Ferrand's complaint that he had so far been of no use. Geggus treats the expedition as a rumour spread by a colonist; Jenson thinks there is too much smoke for no fire. Where this account departs from the standard one: Gaffield argues the conspiracy theory that Dessalines was exporting revolution originated in one agent's need to prove his own usefulness, and she sets Geggus's dismissal against Jenson's partial defence of it.

From this year ministers in Philadelphia began preaching sermons on the first of January, a date that marked both the abolition of the American slave trade and the declaration of Haitian independence four years earlier. Jackson sets the practice against the mass arrival of refugees from Saint-Domingue in American ports through the seventeen nineties, which brought firsthand accounts of the rebel victory at Cap-Francais into black communities, and against Gary Nash's finding that American born black Philadelphians came to think of themselves differently because of the revolution, as part of an Atlantic African people contesting white supremacy. He notes the contrast in the same city, where white Philadelphians had gathered near Independence Hall on 4 July 1804 to celebrate a very different anniversary, and where the conservative reading of Haiti also had its adherents.