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

Preface: The Fear of “French Negroes”

xv Preface The Fear of “French Negroes” Billowing smoke and fire pour from an elegant plantation in ruins. Black figures armed with swords and bayonets battle uniformed soldiers . Women, children, and an infirm elder flee empty-handed as they reluctantly leave their fallen menfolk behind. In the center, a male and female white couple looks back as a black insurgent pursues them; the man’s elegant attire and the woman’s décolletage stand out amid the chaos. Meanwhile, a ship is anchored in the harbor as its passengers engage in battle, and those fleeing for their lives desperately seek passage on the ships that will eventually land them in neighboring Jamaica, Cuba, or one of the port cities of the eastern United States. The image (figure 1) depicts the 1793 conflagration of Cap Français (Le Cap). Known as the “Paris of the Antilles,” Le Cap was the economic and cultural capital of the wealthiest Caribbean colony of the eighteenth century. The racialized class war that pitted French, British, and Spanish imperial armies against hundreds of thousands of slaves and free people of color was in full swing, and the conflagration of the city marked a point of no return. Graphically capturing what the painting’s title notes as the “troubles, ravages, murders, fires, devastations and massacres” of the Haitian Revolution from a blatantly sensationalized perspective of the white elite, the image encapsulates what contemporary audiences came to recognize as the “horrors” of Saint-Domingue as they were perpetrated against white victims. It is a classic example of figure 1. Incendie du Cap; Révolte générale des nègres. Massacre des Blancs. Watercolor. Cover plate of Saint-Domingue, ou Histoire des ses révolutions, contenant le récit effroyable des divisions, des troubles, des ravages, des meurtres, des incendies, des dévastations et des massacres qui eurent lieu dans cette île, depuis 1789 jusqu’à la perte de la colonie (Paris: Chez Tiger, Imprimeur-librairie, 1815). Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Preface | xvii the “white fright” images that circulated in the Atlantic world during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Another image lends a different perspective to the one captured above. At the entrance to a public inn, three white men gesticulate as they watch a fourth figure falling backwards. This collapsing figure is black and is depicted in the act of slitting his throat. A carriage waits in the foreground, and to the far left a black woman and child look back upon the scene (figure 2). Published by the anonymous Humanitas in an 1803 pamphlet, the image comments on events from the previous year, when an inquest was conducted in New York to investigate the sudden death of Romain, a black man from Saint-Domingue. The inquest ruled that it was a case of “Suicide, Occasioned by the Dread of Slavery, to Which the Deceased Knew Himself Devoted.” While Romain’s decision to take his life rather than continue in the custody of his owner falls within the long tradition of slave suicide, the macabre spectacle on a northern urban thoroughfare provoked horrified reaction, and a volley of articles appeared documenting the case. Of the events immediately preceding the suicide, Humanitas writes: And here it may not be unnecessary to reflect on the situation of the unfortunate man’s mind at this moment. He well knew the cruelties inflicted on slaves in the West Indies. . . . He was, therefore, not only unwilling, he was determined not to return. . . . Maddened with the thought, and rendered desperate by the complicated misery of his situation, from which he had now no prospect of release, but still determined to be free, he adopted his dernier resort, took a pruning-knife from his pocket, and dreading a spark of life should remain, whereby he might be restored, he three times cut his throat across, and fell dead on the pavement, thereby emancipating himself from the grasp of avarice and inhumanity. (13–15)1 Inquest records determined that Romain, twenty-seven years of age, had arrived at the hotel under guard, in the company of his wife, Marie, and their young child. They had resided in the environs of Trenton , New Jersey, with their owner Anthony Salaignac since 1795, when the latter had relocated there after leaving Saint-Domingue. Periodicals from the time reveal that Romain had a previous record of resistance and that many of Salaignac’s...