Epidemics and War by Rebecca M. Seaman

Author:Rebecca M. Seaman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2018-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

I had asked you, citizen consul, to do nothing that might make [the blacks] fear for their freedom until I was ready, and I was making rapid progress toward that moment. All of a sudden there arrived the decree that legalizes the colonial slave trade along with letters from merchants in Nantes and Le Havre asking whether they can sell blacks here. . . . Now that your plans for the colonies are known to everyone, citizen consul, if you want to keep Saint Domingue, send a new army here, and especially send money. I am telling you that, if you abandon us to our own devices as you have done up to now, this colony is lost, and once lost, you will never get it back.48

Leclerc’s plea became prophetic as word of France’s resumption of slavery spread alongside yellow fever, with more and more soldiers falling ill.

With a dwindling army, increased desertion of blacks and mulattos among his forces, and shrinking public support, Leclerc changed his approach as summer turned to fall. Yellow fever had robbed him of the forces necessary to hold strategic positions across the island colony. To compensate, Leclerc took what was left of his forces and began a policy of genocide. Writing to Napoleon in October 1802, Leclerc recommended that, “We must destroy all the blacks of the mountains—men and women—and spare only children under twelve years of age.”49 The hope was to eradicate the revolutionary generation and ensure the younger population would be less resistant to renewed slavery.

Leclerc did not survive to see through the attempted extermination of the black adult population. On November 2, 1802, he succumbed to infection by the yellow fever virus. As the brother-in-law of the emperor, Leclerc was the virus’s most high-profile victim, but only one of the estimated 22,000–24,000 troops killed out of the 34,000 sent to Saint Domingue between February and October 1802.50

The genocidal policy continued in its implementation by Leclerc’s successor, General Donatien Rochambeau. Though the yellow fever season had waned, its impact on the French expedition set the course for how the French conducted the remainder of the war. Rochambeau began executing black troops out of fear of betrayal by tying weights around their necks and dumping them into the harbor as well as suffocating prisoners by locking them in ship holds with burning sulfur.51 These acts sought to eradicate the population and to spread a campaign of terror. Ironically, it had the opposite effect; the colony was further galvanized against the remaining French forces. Haitian forces, then under Jean-Jacques Dessalines, vowed to destroy the French. The inhabitants of the colony ground down Rochambeau’s army until it surrendered after the Battle of Vertières, on November 18, 1803. The French atrocities committed after the disease had left the French army so vulnerable drove the rising animosity of the Haitian people and carried them to a military victory. As Dessalines declared Haitian independence on January 1, 1804, part of his proclamation included the eradication of the remaining

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