The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon by Girard Philippe R

Author:Girard, Philippe R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780817385408
Publisher: University of Alabama Press

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Rochambeau and the French Counteroffensive

WINTER 1802/3

At dawn on November 2, 1802, four hours after Leclerc passed away, a ship left Cap for Port Républicain to fetch the new captain general of the army of Saint-Domingue.1 Leclerc's successor was the commander of the western province, Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur de Rochambeau, an aristocrat who bore one of the most illustrious names in the Americas. His father had commanded French forces during the American Revolution, where Rochambeau himself had fought as a young aide-de-camp before serving as governor of the Windward Islands, Saint-Domingue, and Martinique in the 1790s (the son of Admiral François de Grasse, who had commanded French naval forces during the American Revolution, also served in the Leclerc expedition).2 Rochambeau was one of those few individuals who personally witnessed the three great revolutions of the era, in the United States, France, and Saint-Domingue. Judging by his private correspondence, now housed at the University of Florida, the experience had left him with a vast network of friends within the planter milieu.3

Rochambeau had initially been selected as Saint-Domingue's captain general, only to be made Victoire Leclerc's second, possibly because Napoléon Bonaparte preferred not to give the overall command of the expedition to a man who was the epitome of the old colonial order.4 In his reports Rochambeau had a tendency to slip back from the Republican calendar of the French Revolution to the Gregorian calendar of the popes; he also often wrote of Port-au-Prince and Fort Dauphin, when these cities' names had been re-publicanized to Port Républicain and Fort Liberté during the revolution.5 Leclerc had been careful not to chain prisoners for fear of drawing parallels with slavery, but Rochambeau reinstituted the corvée (chain gang) in Cap and under his rule police reports listed the nègres (literally “niggers") who had attacked their maître ("master") as if the year had been 1788, not 1802.6 When a slave belonging to a U.S. merchant had fled to Saint-Domingue in the spring of 1802, Leclerc had insisted that he should be freed; a year later, when a similar incident involved runaways from the Turks and Caicos, Rochambeau ordered them returned to their British owner.7

For Bonaparte and Leclerc, determining whether slavery should be restored in Saint-Domingue had been a long, tortured process; for Rochambeau, determining when it should be restored was the only point in discussion. On the first of January 1803, he enumerated to Denis Decrès the measures he deemed indispensable for the regeneration of Saint-Domingue. Number one on his list of New Year's resolutions was a brutally clear goal: “to proclaim the enslavement of the blacks.”8 Like many conservative thinkers, he thought that blacks preferred the servile state to the uncertainties of freedom, so in his view restoring slavery might even convince some rebels to return to their plantations. Neither Decrès nor Bonaparte ever responded directly to his repeated demands that slavery be restored, but there is little doubt that given the opportunity Rochambeau would have taken that step. In preparation for this moment he personally

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