The Fear of French Negroes

Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas

By Sara E. Johnson

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27112-8

Contents

List of Illustrations, ix,
Acknowledgments, xi,
Preface: The Fear of "French Negroes", xv,
Introduction: Mobile Culture, Mobilized Politics, 1,
1. Canine Warfare in the Circum-Caribbean, 21,
2. "Une et indivisible?" The Struggle for Freedom in Hispaniola, 49,
3. "Negroes of the Most Desperate Character": Privateering and Slavery in the Gulf of Mexico, 91,
4. French Set Girls and Transcolonial Performance, 122,
5. "Sentinels on the Watch-Tower of Freedom": The Black Press of the 1830s and 1840s, 157,
Epilogue, 189,
Notes, 195,
Works Consulted and Discography, 245,
Index, 277,

CHAPTER 1

Canine Warfare in the Circum-Caribbean

As captured in the epigraphs, slavery in the plantation Americas was a "veritable state of war" between opposing factions: masters, whose rights were upheld by a legal, social, and cultural fabric of institutions that guaranteed their dominion over human beings designated as property, and the women and men compelled to work as slaves. Despite the apparent distance suggested by these third-person assessments, Moreau de Saint-Méry and Baron de Vastey were creole intellectuals who were intimately familiar with the system. The first was proslavery, albeit unusual in that he left copious and nuanced ethnographic descriptions of black life. The latter was a former slave who eventually served as a statesman under King Henri Christophe of Haiti, authoring well-known "defenses" of the black race and its possibilities. Both of their statements conjure up graphic images of abuse and excess. Moreau writes of rattling chains and a simmering, omnipresent desire for vengeance on the part of the enslaved. Vastey provides a litany of cruel bodily tortures inflicted upon slaves, tortures reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Spanish Inquisition. In doing so, he rhetorically questions who were the true barbarians of the age. Their remarks capture the perennial violence that was a constitutive element of slave societies, violence that was common to territories across the region regardless of which European metropolis was in charge.

I open the book with an examination of the proslavery dimensions of transcolonial encounters. I do so to provide a context in which to understand one critical dimension of competing inter-Americanisms—the master/slave divide. If we understand that slavery was a state of war, how and when did opposing factions mobilize across colonial frontiers to meet their needs? By focusing on proslavery initially, I demonstrate the international resources (military, diplomatic, intellectual, material) that were mobilized to perpetuate the viability of slave-holding systems. I wish to emphasize that transcolonial, inter-American collaborations were used for decidedly brutal and oppressive purposes. What follows is a story linking colonial Cuba with revolutionary events in Saint-Domingue, colonial Jamaica, and territorial Florida during three of the largest-scale conflicts pitting the white colonial state against African and indigenous combatants from the 1790s to the 1840s. This chapter is about one modality of transcolonial contact that occurred over a fifty-year period in moments of crisis: the use of canine torture.

Uniting across frontiers, French, British, Spanish, and North American slave-holding powers collaborated in subduing nonwhite enemies to ensure their continued hegemony, using warfare techniques that dated back to the Spanish Conquest. Dogs were regularly used as a slave-catching device throughout the region. However, my examples highlight the inter-American networks of trade and terror that employed specially bred dogs to track down and feed upon black flesh. These dogs were raised in Cuba by professional trainers, the chasseurs, and they acquired a reputation for cruelty and efficacy that sent neighboring colonists and their imperial representatives on expeditions to the island to procure their services. While canine warfare has garnered a certain notoriety within the context of specialized national historiographies, a transcolonial methodology brings to light how interimperial cooperation facilitated such atrocities as part of a regional proslavery agenda.

This chapter thus sets the scene by highlighting the violence that black hemispheric populations were up against. It signals the stakes for the engagement of populations of color with modes of struggle and community identification that challenged colonial hierarchies determined to keep them at the bottom of the social order. The content here differs significantly from that of subsequent chapters in that people of color are not subjects. They are acted upon, objectified in arguably the most profound physical and psychological ways possible. Yet the very need for such a dire torture technique circulating among the slave-holding powers demonstrates that black populations across the hemisphere were very much prime movers, formidable combatants that could not easily be subdued. Their subject-hood, what amounted to an affirmation of their humanity within a system that legally counted them as objects, was affirmed by their actions. As insurgent slaves, maroons in revolt, and steadfast native populations resisting relocation, they are driving the narrative that follows, however much the particulars emphasized spotlight different protagonists.

I also wish to foreground the role of culture. This study relies heavily on visual iconography, and I corroborate visual narratives with eyewitness historiographies and to a lesser extent with fiction. I highlight conflicts and continuities across multiple colonial frontiers—political, linguistic, and conceptual. By the latter I refer to frequently invoked categorizations that rely on dichotomies such as enlightened/savage, metropolitan/creole, imperial isolation / transcolonial collaboration. These texts offer a nuanced interpretation of the meanings of such pairings.

CUBAN BLOODHOUNDS AND TRANSCOLONIAL TERROR NETWORKS

A black woman looks on in terror as two large dogs maul her, attacking from both sides. A babe in arms clings to her neck. To her immediate left, a black man is being killed by a third dog, whose jaws are locked around his skull in the final act of execution. His left hand is already missing, and with his remaining hand he clings to the arm of an unconscious male figure barely visible under the skirts of the woman. This victim is likewise being bitten and licked on the head by a vicious hound. In the right background, a bare-chested black man unsuccessfully fends off an assault by a fifth dog who attacks his throat. The idyllic rural setting of the Haitian mornes at sunset belies the expressions of agony and terror depicted on the faces of the well-dressed victims, members of a family surprised by the vicious assault. The image, Blood Hounds Attacking a Black Family in the Woods (figure 6), provides a valuable counterpoint to the scenes of carnage and destruction in the Incendie du Cap painting presented in the preface (figure 1); while women and children remain front and center, in this instance the helpless victims are black.

This disturbing engraving forms part of a series of plates included in Marcus Rainsford's 1805 An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti. Rainsford,...