Thread by @no_slave_coasts, ROLE OF POPULAR INSURRECTIONS & GUERRILLA WARFARE IN THE INDEPENDENCE WAR PHASE [...]

ROLE OF POPULAR INSURRECTIONS & GUERRILLA WARFARE IN THE INDEPENDENCE WAR PHASE OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION

source > The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below > Part Three: The South > Chapter 9: From Civil War to Independence

excerpt 1 > the Corail conspiracy

“Who…were these black masses and their leaders in the South who, on their own initiative and with the meager means at their disposal for effective resistance, fought the French army by themselves,

while Dessalines, Christophe, Laplume, and the other black generals were still cooperating with [french expeditionary force commander Leclerc], and whom Leclerc himself could not deport because he needed them to carry out the repression?

Around the beginning of July [1802], while Leclerc claimed to have succeeded in disarming the South, the first outward signs of organized armed rebellion appeared in the Corail district near Jérémie,

where Dommage had attempted unsuccessfully to resist the arrival of the French expeditionary troops five months earlier.

The military had discovered a coordinated conspiracy between the town and the plantation workers of Corail to promote a general insurrection on all the plantations in the district and to kill off all the whites.

The chief organizer of this insurrectionary movement was an obscure black by the name of Toussaint Jean-Baptiste, familiarly known as Lapaquerie, a butcher by occupation.

He had assembled his fellow conspirators and held meetings at his house to discuss the means and methods by which to execute their project.

In addition to Toussaint Jean-Baptiste, the principal ringleaders included his wife, ‘who fully shared her husband's intentions, had often vociferously manifested her hatred toward the whites, and desired nothing more than to see them all exterminated.’

Two others, Lazare and Malbrouk, both fishermen, were also singled out as principal accomplices. Another was Claude Chatain, a deserter from Jérémie sent as emissary to talk with the plantation workers, to find out their attitudes, and to enjoin them to revolt.

As a cover, Chatain claimed he was operating under instructions from Rigaud. Unfortunately for him, Rigaud had already been deported two months earlier.

Eight more were arrested with no evidence other than a letter from one resident to the local commandant stating that these eight were aware of the preparations and were prepared to participate in the execution of the plot.

According to the local officer, their past acts and attitudes proved their guilt, and, especially since the arrival of the French, they had manifested ‘criminal intentions.’

It was the only evidence the authorities could come by, but it was enough to get them arrested, sent to les Cayes for interrogation, and sentenced to the chain gang.

In all, the group consisted of two butchers, one officer of the national guard, one carpenter, three fishermen, one domestic, one deserter, one individual listed ‘without occupation,’ two others listed by name only, and Toussaint's wife, listed as ‘femme Toussaint.’

At les Cayes, Toussaint Jean-Baptiste, his wife, Lazare, and Malbrouk were executed by a firing squad.

In addition to these individuals…

were six plantation workers, also arrested in connection with this projected rebellion, among them Pierrot, a worker on the Etienne plantation, who was considered to be a most dangerous menace to society since punishments only made him more rebellious.

Several times, he had attempted to assassinate the procureur with a dagger. Pierrot had a history of ‘bad conduct’ and under Rigaud's regime had committed numerous acts warranting severe punishment.

When dragoons were sent at that time to arrest him, he had stabbed one of them in the chest, and when Laplume arrived to investigate, Pierrot was whipped with rods, became all the more enraged, and had incited the workers to revolt.

The full extent of this current insurrection was discovered only a few months after the initial arrests, but there were already indications that the revolt was far from being a localized affair.

Among the five other plantation workers arrested was a black named Cupidon, who had brazenly entered a house in Jeremie, sat himself down at the table beside the occupants, and demanded something to eat.

When the proprietor told him to get out on the porch if he wanted to eat, Cupidon lashed back vociferously with insults and invective and said that soon all the whites would be finished off, and that in three days' time they would all know what he meant.

[…]by this time insurrectionary activities, far from being isolated or local affairs, had spread throughout the department from Jérémie at the west to Miragoâne and the two Goâves at the east,

the rebels in the latter region having made contact with the established bands of the Léogane plain under the maroon leadership of Lamour Dérance.

The increasing desertion of plantation workers, the assassination of a white resident, followed by the total burning of a sugar plantation in Cavaillon, indicated growing tensions and simmering rebellion in an area that had up to now been relatively tranquil.”

excerpt 2 > urban+rural guerrilla warfare and defection of the generals

“The most significant feature of [black revolutionaries in the South of Haiti's] efforts to organize and resist Bonaparte's expeditionary forces is that there was no single leader around whom the movement united,

but literally hundreds of them throughout the department, and hundreds more throughout the colony, for the most part, obscure individuals.

In August, once the news that slavery had been restored in Guadeloupe and the French slave trade reopened, Leclerc remarked, and certainly did not
exaggerate…that it was not enough to have removed Toussaint: ‘[For] here there are two thousand leaders that must be removed.’

We have seen a few of these in the South. There were the urban blacks with a trade, like Toussaint Jean-Baptiste at Corail, butchers, carpenters, fishermen, and others with no occupation at all.

On the plantations, there were domestics and conducteurs, as well as ordinary farm workers, who
acted as spies or agents.

Some of these had deserted, like Samedi Smith and Jean Panier, to become active maroon leaders at the head of insurrectionary bands, whose numbers were drawn largely from the plantations on which they maintained ties with conducteurs and workers.

There were also black officers of the French army like Dommage, who operated jointly and clandestinely with urban blacks, maroons, and plantation conducteurs, like Jean-Louis and Izidor,

to establish points of contact in the cities and on the plantations in order to develop a network of popular resistance. Here…[many] operated under Dommage's instructions to make the rounds of the plantations, distribute arms, and assemble the workers to strike at Fond Rouge.

The whole operation was to be carried out in concurrence with Jean Panier's maroon band. The women, like Toussaint Jean-Baptiste's wife at Corail, or Magdelon, the conducteur Jean-Louis's wife, were equal and active participants in these insurrectionary conspiracies.

In the military, there were other officers, like Charles or Jeudy, who openly deserted the French army with an entire batallion in armed revolt and took to the hills.

In addition, there were the former slave leaders of the first insurrectionary struggles against slavery at Platons in 1792-93, ex-officers of the legion like Gilles Benech, Goman, or Nicolas, who had become hardened warriors and now active maroon chiefs.

[…black revolutionaries] began by building networks of resistance, organized in clandestinity, often in marronage, and finally sustained by guerilla warfare.

It has generally been considered, almost as a detached matter of fact, that the defection of the black and mulatto generals from the French army marked the decisive turning point in this war for independence.

It was a treacherous and an eminently dangerous act, and it was a tremendous blow to Leclerc who, with one or two exceptions, was now left only with European troops, and even some of these were beginning to abandon him.

But to see this phase of the war for independence as having been inaugurated by Dessalines and the other black and mulatto leaders, supported by the armed masses as auxiliaries in a collective military drive toward independence,

is to overlook one of the most profound lessons of the revolution.

For the defection of the generals could only be meaningful or militarily effective, or even possible, because the movements of popular resistance had reached not only an irreversible stage, but a level that involved nearly the entire population.

It was out of individual initiatives that a network of unrelenting popular resistance and insurgency had been formed and had grown to what it was by October, when Dessalines, Clerveaux, Petion, and the other black and mulatto ‘jacobins’ defected.

Actually, their defection was perhaps not even, in and of itself, the turning point; it became a turning point because mass resistance had reached a level that made it clear the French were fighting a lost cause.

The masses had resisted the French from the very beginning, in spite of, and not because of, their leadership.

They had shouldered the whole burden and paid the price of resistance all along, and it was they who had now made possible the political and military reintegration of the leaders in the collective struggle.

Were it otherwise, Dessalines and the generals would have been defecting toward what? Would they, or could they even, have defected? Defection would seem, at best, suicidal under any circumstances other than those that prevailed at the moment they abandoned Leclerc.

In this sense, it may be inappropriate, and almost superfluous, to establish a demarcation that fixes the decisive phase of the war for independence with the defection of the black and mulatto colonial generals.”

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