The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of the Garifuna

6. The Cry of Liberty

115 Chapter 6 The Cry of Liberty “The time has come when . . . the ancient friendship of the French and the Caribs should be renewed; they must exterminate the English, their common enemy.”1 —Victor Hugues, 13 March 1795 Victor Hugues had arrived in the Caribbean in 1794 at the age of about thirty-two. His mission was to spread the fire of revolution through the West Indies and seize whatever British islands he could. The Marseille-born Jacobin2 was armed with the decision of the French National Convention to abolish slavery although he himself had prospered in the slave-based economy of St.-Domingue (Haiti).3 Within five months he had taken Guadeloupe from a superior British force and exacted bloody revenge on those he deemed traitors to the new French republic by means of the guillotine he had brought with him from France. Marie-Galante, Les Saintes, La Désirade, St. Lucia, and St. Martin were reconquered in quick succession. Now he turned his attention to the islands further south, including St. Vincent. Hugues’s success had been based on a strategy of rallying marginalized groups, including slaves who were offered the prospect of freedom, but also free blacks and mulattoes. In St. Vincent, the key constituency for his designs was that of the Black Caribs and there was also a sizeable population of French inhabitants who were believed to be ready to turn on the British. Hugues looked to Chatoyer, as the leader of the Black Caribs, to spearhead the attack on St. Vincent. His message to the war chief mixed an appeal to the longstanding ties between the French and the Caribs with an exhortation to revolutionary unity. Hugues addressed Chatoyer not just as an ally but as a French general and the leader of the insurrection in St. Vincent. To Chatoyer and his brother Du Vallée, Hugues sent a uniform, a saber, and a hat each as a mark of their leadership. He ordered his French infantry commander, Citizen Touraille, to regard Chatoyer “as your leader in everything.”4 The Cry of Liberty 116 Chatoyer, who had previously sworn his allegiance to the Bourbon king,5 now embraced the sanguinary rhetoric of the French revolution. In an appeal to the French inhabitants of St. Vincent drafted on “the twelfth of March and the first of our freedom” at Chateaubelair, he issued a proclamation with the revolutionary fury of a Jacobin: Who is the Frenchman who will not join his brothers at a moment when the cry of liberty is heard by them? Let us then rally citizens and brothers around the flag which flies in this island and hasten to cooperate in the great work already so gloriously begun. But if any timid men should still exist, should any Frenchman be held back through fear, we declare to them in the name of the law that those who are not mustered with us within the day will be regarded as traitors to the country and treated as enemies. We Copy of Chatoyer’s declaration in French to launch the Second Carib War. It is signed with the “marc ordinaire” of the Black Carib leader. The Cry of Liberty 117 swear to them that fire and the sword will be used against them, that we will burn their goods and that we will slit the throats of their wives and children to wipe out their race.6 Liberty, equality, and fraternity—particularly liberty—were concepts that would be sure to appeal to the Black Caribs, who throughout their brief existence as a people had had to fight to be accepted as free agents of their own destiny. But it is unlikely that the new democratic ideology was a key element of their participation in the insurrection. In the triangular balance of forces in St. Vincent the French had long been their natural allies and Hugues was careful to appeal to the “ancient friendship” between the French and the Caribs. For the Caribs the ambition must have been to return the island to the status quo of a dozen years earlier when the French had ruled over the settled areas to leeward but had largely left the Caribs to their own devices. How the French governed themselves would have been a secondary concern. British forces in the West Indies were ill-prepared to meet the challenge. The army had been diminished by sickness, and defense...