Suzanne Louverture dies in France at sixty seven

Suzanne Simon Baptiste was described by a contemporary as a very large black woman of about forty with the modesty of a girl of twenty, plain in her tastes, who grew coffee with her own hands while her husband governed the colony. Toussaint said he had chosen her himself against the wishes of his owners, who wanted to marry him to younger women, and that before the revolution he had not left her for an hour. On 7 April 1803 her husband died in his cell at the Fort de Joux and she lost any hope of seeing him again. She lived on in France, poor, under a sky that was not hers, for another forty three years, and died on 19 May 1846 at the age of sixty seven. She had held no public office and made no speeches, and her name opens the line of women set beside the men who made the country.

The crisis that ended Boyer's rule opened into peasant insurrection. Jean-Jacques Acaau and Jeannot Moline led risings from 1843 to 1848 known as the war of the Piquets. Their demands were land, better prices for produce and a black man in the presidency. The scale of the fighting pushed the governing groups into alliance against the peasantry. The device they used has a name in Haitian political language, the politique de doublure, the understudy policy. Black men drawn from the ruling strata were placed in the presidency while the mulatto oligarchy governed from behind, smothering the political claims of the men it had installed along with the movements in the countryside. Men handled this way were called kongo, a word still used in Haiti for a black man who has sold himself and collaborates without pride. Acaau is credited with the saying that a rich black is a mulatto and a poor mulatto is a black.

Enumerators began taking a new census of Dominica in the first days of June 1844. Field workers freed six years earlier believed that the writing down of names was preparation for putting them back into slavery. About fifteen hundred people in the countryside walked off, protested and threatened planters, officials and the enumerators themselves. Ten or twelve people were hurt and none of them seriously. The reaction was the event. Four protesters were killed, four were wounded and some three hundred cultivators were jailed. Ninety four were tried and ninety convicted, six of them sentenced to death. The trials showed the rising elite of free coloured men something it had not expected. Witnesses reported that the labourers drew little distinction between white owners and coloured ones, and one man was quoted saying that people of colour would weed the canes and the country would become like Saint-Domingue. The coloured members of the assembly, the grand jury and the bench sided with the prosecutions.

Geggus ends with the only two cases where he thinks slave rebellion demonstrably changed the emancipation timetable. In May 1848 a mass entry into the town of Saint Pierre and the fighting that followed in northern Martinique led the governor to declare slavery abolished at once, roughly three months before the decree issued by the new revolutionary government in Paris would have taken effect. He is careful about causation, noting that the decision to abolish had already been taken and was itself what provoked the risings, so the rebellions fixed the date rather than the outcome. The Martinique declaration had immediate effects in the other French colonies and in the Danish islands, where a large rising on Saint Croix in July 1848 cut eleven years off a plan the Danish government had announced the previous year to end slavery in 1859.