A refugee planter becomes French agent at St Thomas

Arnaud Andre Roberjot Lartigue, a Creole planter who had fled the colony in 1803 and still expected France to retake the whole island, was appointed agent of the Saint-Domingue government at St Thomas. His actual assignment was narrow: French prize cases and the affairs of French citizens arriving on the Danish island. He went well past it. He put to Governor Muhlenfels the question whether a foreign nation had any right to trade with the revolted of Saint-Domingue and answered it himself, arguing that a revolt of Blacks in part of a colony does not interrupt ownership, that the revolt did not repeal the laws barring foreigners from the colony's ports, and that such trade broke France's treaties. He added a warning of self-interest, that what befalls one government today befalls another tomorrow and every slaveholding power should be prohibiting the traffic.

Under French law a child born outside marriage could not inherit, and a parent was not free to leave property as he wished, being obliged to pass it to legitimate heirs. In the new Haitian state an enormous number of children had no standing under any such rule. On 28 May 1805 Jean-Jacques Dessalines issued a law that removed the distinction. There was to be no preference for children born in wedlock. A child's capacity to inherit turned on recognition by a parent. The measure was designed to settle inheritance disputes before they began. Its effect on marriage ran the other way from what the founders intended. A wedding in Haiti cost a civil licence, a payment to the priest and his assistants, clothes bought for the church, a feast afterwards and several days away from work. Once children could inherit without one, the expense had lost its point, and legal marriage stayed rare for the next two centuries.

In 1805, a few months after Dessalines was crowned emperor, free black and mixed race militiamen in Bahia were found wearing medallion portraits of him. Geggus makes the status of these men the point of the story. They were freemen, not enslaved, and he cites Stuart Schwartz to the effect that nothing connects the long cycle of Bahian slave revolts between 1807 and 1835 to either the French or the Haitian revolution, while such external influences are clearly visible among free men, as in the Tailors' conspiracy of 1798. The same holds for the largely African risings in nineteenth century Cuba. Free people of colour had more literacy and more mobility, so foreign news reached them first, which is why Geggus consistently finds Haitian traces in the free coloured layer of these societies rather than in the enslaved population. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus corrects Kenneth Maxwell, who dates to a visitor in Rio de Janeiro in 1792 a remark about the spell of white power being dissolved; the quotation in fact comes from 1806 and referred to the whole of the Americas.

In October 1802 Petion had taken up arms at Haut du Cap and Dessalines was preparing to do the same at Petite-Riviere, after a secret understanding between them. The French had already tried to arrest him at Gonaives, and he had ridden straight at the officer sent to take him and demanded where the slanders about him came from, which was enough to unsettle the men. At Petite-Riviere he pulled down a gallows the French had put up and then went to the presbytery, where the priest Videau had invited him to lunch. Chief of brigade Andrieux was at the table waiting for the moment to have him seized. A woman of colour, Madame Pageot, who worked as Videau's servant, appeared in the doorway opposite Dessalines and made him understand with a movement of her hand that he was about to be bound. He said he saw smoke on the mountain, went out, mounted, and fired the alarm cannon. Three thousand peasants came.