aloft. La Salle examined the slogans with special interest. The flag of one of the battalions read on one side “Virtue in action,” and “I am vigilant for the country” on the other, watchwords which La Salle found acceptable. But the slogan chosen by the Loire battalion caught the general’s discerning eye: “Live Free or Die.”
Concerned that the soldiers may not understand the delicate nature of their errand, the general assembled the troops and explained to them the danger which such words posed “in a land where all property is based on the enslavement of Negroes, who, if they adopted this slogan themselves, would be driven to massacre their masters and the army which is crossing the sea to bring peace and law to the colony.” While commending their strong commitment to the ideal of freedom, La Salle advised the troops to find a new and less provocative way to express that commitment. Faced with the unpleasant prospect of leaving their “richly embroidered” banner behind, members of the battalion reluctantly followed the general’s suggestion and covered over their stirring slogan with strips of cloth inscribed with two hastily chosen new credos of very different meaning: “The Nation, the Law, the King” and “The French Constitution.” In addition, those sporting “Live Free or Die” on their caps promised that they would “suppress” this slogan. To the further dismay of the troops, the general forced other changes on them. Instead of planting a traditional and symbolic “liberty tree” upon their arrival in Saint-Domingue, the battalions would now plant “a tree of Peace,” which would also bear the inscription “The Nation, the Law, the King.” Writing ahead to the current governor-general in Saint-Domingue, La Salle concluded that all that remained was to “counteract the influence of the ill-disposed” and keep the soldiers’ misguided revolutionary ardor cool during the long transatlantic voyage.1
As La Salle recognized, recent developments in the Americas, especially the revolution in Saint-Domingue, had demonstrated convincingly the explosive power of the ideas and rituals of the Age of Revolution in societies based on slavery. For three years, French officials like La Salle had attempted to keep revolutionary slogans and practices from making their way across the Atlantic to circulate in the French islands and inspire slaves and free people of color, but their efforts had failed. Apparently determined to “live free or die,” black rebels in the French colony had initiated an insurrection which, despite the opposition of thousands of troops like those who boarded the ships with General La Salle in July 1792, would succeed in winning the liberation of the slaves and culminate in the New World’s second independent nation in 1804.
Officials in the British, Spanish, North American, and other territories where African slavery existed shared La Salle’s problem. Just as the news and ideas of the French Revolution proved too volatile to contain, accounts of the black rebellion in Saint-Domingue spread rapidly and uncontrollably throughout the hemisphere. Through trade, both legal and illicit, and the mobility of all types of people from sailors to runaway slaves, extensive regional contact among the American colonies occurred before 1790. By the last decade of the eighteenth century, residents of the Caribbean islands and the northern and southern continents alike had grown to depend upon the movement of ships, commodities, people, and information.
Prior to, during, and following the Haitian Revolution, regional networks of communication carried news of special interest to Afro-Americans all over the Caribbean and beyond. Before the outbreak in Saint-Domingue, British and Spanish officials were already battling rampant rumors forecasting the end of slavery. Such reports gathered intensity in the 1790s. While planters viewed with alarm the growing prospect of an autonomous black territory, fearing that a successful violent black uprising might tempt their own slaves to revolt, the happenings in Saint-Domingue provided exciting news for slaves and free coloreds, increasing their interest in regional affairs and stimulating them to organize conspiracies of their own. By the end of the decade, rulers in slave societies from Virginia to Venezuela moved to short-circuit the network of black rebellion by building obstacles to effective colony-to-colony communication.
While General La Salle understood in 1792 the potential impact of the revolutionary currents in the Atlantic world on the minds and aspirations of Caribbean slaves, neither he nor his charges could have anticipated the extent to which the winds of revolution would blow in the other direction. Sweeping across linguistic, geographic, and imperial boundaries, the tempest created by the black revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue and communicated by mobile people in other slave societies would prove a major turning point in the history of the Americas.
Acknowledgements
There are many, many people to thank. I couldn’t possibly thank them all. I thank first of all the people who helped me in graduate school at Duke University. Peter Wood showed us a whole new way of thinking about ourselves and about intellectual history. He taught me to understand enslaved people as thinking people, and this book is a tribute to him. John Jay TePaske, who taught colonial Latin American history, convinced me to go to Seville. Raymond Gavins taught me how to be a citizen in the profession. I learned much from Larry Goodwyn and Bill Chafe.
I am grateful to the fellows and staff of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia and to the late Armstead L. Robinson, head of the Institute at the time, who deserves special thanks. In addition, several people have helped me over the years and have supported the enterprise of The Common Wind: Laurent Dubois, Ada Ferrer, Neville Hall, Tera Hunter, Robin Kelley, Jane Landers, Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker, Elisha Renne, Larry Rowley, Rebecca Scott, James Sidbury, Matthew Smith, Rachel Toor, and Stephen Ward.
Thanks as well go to the staff of the many archives and libraries I visited: The Archivo General de Indias (Seville), the Public Record Office (London, now called The National Archives), the Jamaica Archives (Spanish Town), the National Library of Jamaica (Kingston), the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (London), the John Carter Brown Library (Providence, Rhode Island), the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Massachusetts), the Bibliothèque des Frères (Port-au-Prince, Haiti), and the Bibliothèque de Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague. Special thanks go to the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies community at the University of Michigan. Finally, I would like to thank Ben Mabie and Duncan Ranslem of Verso Books for their careful and kind assistance.
The Masterless Caribbean at the End of the Eighteenth Century
Late in the seventeenth century, the European colonizing nations briefly put aside their differences and began a concerted effort to rid the Caribbean of the buccaneers, pirates, and other fugitives who had taken refuge in the region. This move to dislodge the “masterless” people of the West Indies signaled the transformation of the islands from havens for freebooters and renegades into settler colonies based on plantations and slave labor. The same offensive that had given large planters the upper hand in Barbados in the 1670s had gained irreversible momentum throughout the Caribbean by the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The steady rise in sugar prices on the world market after about 1740 favored the expansion of plantation monoculture into areas where cattle and pigs had grazed, and where hide hunters, logwood cutters, runaway slaves, and other Caribbean dissidents had found shelter.
Barely a half century after an earthquake in 1692 destroyed Port Royal, Jamaica, a longstanding outpost for pirates from all over the region, the Caribbean had already become a vastly different place from what it had been during the heyday of the buccaneers. Not only had their old haunts disappeared; older images of “enchanted” islands liberated from the hierarchies
