The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas

3. “Negroes of the Most Desperate Character”: Privateering and Slavery in the Gulf of Mexico

91 chapter 3 “Negroes of the Most Desperate Character” Privateering and Slavery in the Gulf of Mexico In August 1817, a customs officer in New Orleans named Beverly Chew voiced grave concerns about the smuggling activity occurring in the Gulf of Mexico. In a letter to William Crawford, the U.S. secretary of the Treasury, he wrote: “I deem it my duty to state that the most shameful violations of the slave acts, as well as our revenue laws, continue to be practiced with impunity, by a motley mixture of freebooters and smugglers at Galveston, under the Mexican flag, being in reality little less than the re-establishment of Lafitte’s [sic] Barataria bands, somewhat more out of reach of justice. . . . The establishment was recently made there by a Commodore Aury, with a few small schooners from Aux Cayes, manned in a great measure, with refugees from Barataria, and mulattos. . . . On the part of these pirates we have to contend with, we behold an extended and organized system of enterprise, of ingenuity , of indefatigability, of audacity” (Bollaert 439–40). The details included in the letter are incredibly rich. Chew’s warning encompasses many of the most high-profile actors and events concerning the privateering world in the Gulf of Mexico during the first decades of the nineteenth century.1 While the geographic points named here may now be less well known, Chew’s combination of Spanish, soon to be Mexican Texas (Galveston), the newly admitted state of Louisiana (Barataria), and postrevolutionary Haiti (Aux Cayes) in one breathless litany demonstrates how a transcolonial black market economy thrived between various Gulf Coast communities. The U.S. government had long been 92 | “Negroes of the Most Desperate Character” aware of the activities of these smugglers. For example, in a letter from March 1813, former governor of Louisiana W. C. C. Claiborne cautioned that “an organized plan, for introducing Slaves & Merchandize into this State illegally, was formed on Lake Barataria, & with such combinations as to render Military and Naval aid essential . . .” (Claiborne to Wilkinson, Rowland 6: 216). Claiborne elsewhere expressed great concern about how visitors in New Orleans associated with the Barataria community included “some St. Domingo negroes of the most desperate character, and no worse than most of their white associates” (Claiborne to Andrew Jackson, September 20, 1814, Bassett 2: 56). Due east of these smuggling settlements in Barataria and Galveston Island, the same French commodore Aury was also setting up business in Florida. A contemporary eyewitness of his operations fearfully announced that “his great dependence . . . is upon about one hundred and thirty brigand negroes—a set of desperate bloody dogs. . . . Aury’s blacks make their neighborhood extremely dangerous to a population like ours.” Another observer saw “African rowers ferrying slaves from ship to shore almost continuously,” believing that “Aury sold more than one thousand Africans in less than two months . . .” (Landers, Black Society 245–46). This chapter explores the complex histories that occasioned the “desperate” character of these “brigand negroes.” In them we glimpse the circumscribed choices free people of color made at a moment when revolutionary activity both abetted and hindered their advancement. A hemispheric fear of French negroes simmers in these comments. The idea of desperation likewise provides a glimpse into the needs and fears of black people themselves. Yet what should also draw our attention in the above commentaries is that these black privateers were actively engaged in the most lucrative business of the time: slave trafficking. Hence, as opposed to the usual association of Saint-Domingue with slave revolution, this “motley” group of smugglers was collaborating with infamous privateers such as the Laffite brothers and Louis-Michel Aury to illicitly sell African men and women into bondage. While the changeover from Saint-Domingue to Haiti inevitably invokes a trajectory of slavery to freedom, most studies of the Haitian Revolution show time and again that free people of color and slaves belonged to distinct social castes and that they were often in conflict. The shifting alliances, constant negotiations, and strident violence between black revolutionaries are as critical to our understanding of the revolution as the major conflict between French slaveholders and “Negroes of the Most Desperate Character” | 93 black insurgents. I believe that these struggles are equally important for an examination of the Saint-Domingue diaspora. In many hemispheric American societies, free people of color functioned as a buffer group in a tripartite hierarchy, living in what one...