The plantation system and resistance

If, as several historians argue, the plantation system of America contained within its very structure the seeds of its own destruction, especially in periods of breakneck expansion when slave systems relied on massive importations of slaves from Africa, then planters should have been very afraid of how slaves might use the opportunity afforded by revolutionary conflict to gain liberation.²⁸ It was a matter of faith among imperial officials that planters would not join in revolutions, no matter how much they protested against imperial ‘tyranny’, because when push came to shove their overwhelming fear of slave rebellion would stop them from acting.²⁹ Modern historians have tended to accept the view that enslaved people never accepted their lot, that they resisted and rebelled whenever they could, and that when given half a chance they ‘grasped the opportunity to escape and live in freedom’.³⁰ In this reading, the Age of Revolutions not only placed slavery on the ultimate road to extinction, even if that road was paved with many false turnings before the end was reached.

Moreover, enslaved people, as intensely interested in philosophical and political debates about liberty as were their masters and mistresses, used the opportunity of revolutionary ferment in the Atlantic World to advance their own freedom.³¹

Little evidence exists, however, to support such eschatological readings of the inevitability that slave rebellion at some future time would bring down the plantation structure. For all the historians’ insistence that slave resistance happened continuously, that planters were perpetually afraid of slave discontent and that slave insurrection posed a constant threat, enslaved people were generally ineffectual agents in the destruction of plantation systems. As David Brion Davis states,

How could workers who were relatively free from market forces produce so much or drive such economic growth, especially when historians claim they were engaged in subtle forms of day-to-day resistance? I have seen no satisfactory answers to such questions, but suspect that the negotiating and bargaining between slaves and masters often led to compromises that actually aided productivity.³²

Moreover, as the Caribbean scholar Sidney Mintz reminds us, ‘It is a fact that during the nearly four centuries that slavery flourished in [the western] hemisphere, only a tiny fraction of daily life consisted of open resistance’.³³ Indeed, most of life was spent living in daily, even perfunctory, accommodation with the holders of power.³⁴

Excluding the single, and highly exceptional, case of Saint-Domingue, later Haiti, slave rebellions in the Atlantic World failed in all their objectives, invariably resulting in exposure before implementation and, even if put into action, culminating in the grisly public torture and execution of slave rebels.

What slave rebellions tended to do, however, was to bring before a previously ignorant or complacent metropolitan population the extent to which slave systems relied on brutality. The Demerara rebellion of 1823 in British South America offers a good example of how a slave rebellion did little to stop the smooth running of the plantation system but through excessive planter brutality towards rebels and, in this case, through making a martyr of a white clergyman, alienated metropolitan opinion about the plantation system at a crucial time. Abolitionism was probably fading in Britain in the early 1820s, but scandals like the Demerara rebellion, and even more so the Christmas rebellions in Jamaica in 1831—1832 helped revitalise public opinion and played an important role in preparing the imperial state to force slave emancipation on a recalcitrant planter class.³⁵

What determined whether slavery would or would not survive was the state. The emancipation of slaves, even in Haiti,³⁶ came always from the state. Planters wishing to retain control over slavery therefore took a very sensible decision in supporting colonial revolts in which they would wield disproportionate influence over political decisionmaking. The real threat to planter control was not slave rebellion—planters’ weapons of terror combined with monopoly over coercive force meant that slaves had virtually no chance of causing more than minor stress on the plantation system through rebellion so long as the planter class remained unified and planters did not face opposition from the imperial centre, whether in Europe or, in the case of the antebellum United States from a national political regime hostile to slavery.³⁷ Where planters were vulnerable, as loyalist British West Indian planters found out to their cost in the decade after the American Revolution, when a resurgent British abolitionist movement found great traction among sympathetic politicians, notably William Wilberforce and William Pitt the Younger, was when the imperial centre decided that slave-holder interests were not paramount in imperial discussions.

The shift to liberal empire and to liberal principles of benevolent authoritarian imperial rule that occurred after the American Revolution in both the British and French Empires spelled trouble for planter autonomy. The subsequent histories of the United States and the British West Indies showed that southern slave-holders were right to strike out for independence in 1776 in order to forestall increasing imperial intrusiveness into how planters controlled property holding the ‘status of persons’, as Saint-Domingue planters euphemistically termed slaves in the French National Assembly in 1790.³⁸

Adam Smith recognised the problem early. In a lecture at the University of Edinburgh on 15 February 1763, Smith noted how slavery formed an important institution everywhere outside of Western Europe. Significantly, however, he did not judge the existence of slavery necessarily a sign of political backwardness against European civilisational superiority. Under republican governments, not monarchies or empires, slavery, he argued, historically was most harsh and least likely to be eliminated. In the Roman Republic, for example, ‘the freedom of the free was the cause of the greatest oppression of the slaves’. Without a monarch to control what a slave-owner did with his private property, masters could kill their slaves with impunity, knowing that the state would not hold them accountable. The best source of comfort for slaves was an absolutist monarch who might be swayed by prudential concerns about rebellion in order to restrict the slave-owners’ behaviour. In a monarchical government, Smith continued, ‘there is some greater probability of the hardships being taken off. The king cannot be injured by this, the subjects are his slaves whatever happens; on the contrary it may tend to strengthen his authority by weakening that of his nobles’. If a monarch wanted to diminish over-mighty subjects, he might do so by restricting their power over their slaves, even if in doing so he risked noble insurrection (or colonial revolt in the case of an eighteenth-century plantation colony), for ‘to abolish slavery...

would be to deprive the far greater part of the subjects, and the nobles in particular, of the chief and most valuable part of their inheritance’.³⁹

Slavery, Smith commented, flourished best under weak government. Indeed, the very establishment of plantation colonies in the West Indies was made possible by ‘the weakness of government’.⁴⁰ Only in places with strong, possibly arbitrary, government had slaves obtained some justice because ‘the magistrate, when he protects the slave, intermeddles in some measure in the management of the private property of the master; and in a free country, where the master is perhaps either a member of the colony assembly, or an elector of such a member, he dare not do this but with the greatest caution and circumspection ’.41

If slavery was difficult to abolish under imperial rule, Smith thought, it was impossible under a republican government. His explanation deserves quoting at length, because it explains very well why planters would support changes that would decrease the extent of imperial oversight and would feel resentful of imperial rules even when, as in most plantation societies in the Age of Revolutions, empire meant less a constraint than a benefit to planter power:

In a republican government it will scarcely ever happen that it should be abolished. The persons who make all the laws in that country are persons who have slaves themselves. These will never make any laws mitigating their usage; whatever laws are made with regard to slaves are intended to strengthen the authority of the masters and reduce the slaves to a more absolute subjection. The profit of the masters was increased when they got greater power over their slaves. The authority of the masters over the slaves is therefore unbounded in all republican governments.⁴²

The history of the United States after the adoption of a pro-slavery constitution in 1787 suggests that Smith’s prediction about slavery in a republican country being impossible to dislodge through normal constitutional processes was correct.

Does the Haitian Revolution disprove his case? At first glance, it seems to do so. The advent of republican government in France led in 1794 to the first major general emancipation of slaves anywhere in the world. The formation of the Napoleonic Empire, however, was accompanied in 1802 by the attempted reinstatement of slavery in French America, a policy that was successful in Martinique and Guadeloupe, if not in Saint-Domingue. Nevertheless, the decree of 16 pluviose An II, emancipating slaves in all French colonies, came about through an extraordinary confluence of circumstances that make it hard to see it as a purposeful result of the turn to a republican government. Neither Jacques-Pierre Brissot’s Societe des Amis des Noirs nor the Jacobin commissioners Leger-Felicite Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel contemplated destroying slavery let alone the plantation system before events, notably the riots of 20 June 1793 in which the city of Cap Franqais was destroyed, forced their hand. French abolitionists believed as strongly as their opponents that France’s national interest required the maintenance of the colonial plantation system. They thought slavery needed to be ameliorated, not destroyed. It is conceivable that if events had turned out differently, some sort of accommodation could have been reached between ameliorationists and planters.⁴³ Furthermore, there exists little evidence that the black insurrectionist leaders who fought against France for over a decade between 1793 and 1804 were committed to liberty or equality. Despite anachronistic assertions that the revolution was driven by democracy from the start, the insurrection, as David Geggus asserts, was ‘authoritarian from beginning to end’. As David Nicholls argues in respect to later Haitian history, too much should not be read into the seeming prevalence of democracy in the variety of constitutions Haitians made for themselves, as all Haitian governments have tended to be autocratic, even if some of the early mixed-race leaders, Alexandre Petion and Jean-Pierre Boyer, were politicians in the liberal republican mainstream.⁴⁴

The extent to which slaves were released from enslavement into liberty as a result of the Haitian Revolution is questionable.

It is very difficult to know the intentions of the black leaders and close to impossible to know what ordinary slave rebels wanted. But what little evidence survives suggests that few enslaved people were motivated by Enlightenment ideals of liberty or the ‘rights of man’. What they envisioned was an absolutist monarchy, in which blacks, rather than whites, were on top. A kingdom and an emperor were what they got, first in Haiti as a whole under Jacques Dessalines in 1804 and then in the north of the country under Henri Christophe. Moreover, both Toussaint Louverture and Jacques Dessalines, the key leaders of the revolution in the north, were determined to keep the plantation system going under military rule, forcing black labourers to continue the work they did as slaves, prohibited from leaving their designated workplaces without permission. Henri Christophe did the same, meaning that in that part of the nation where the insurgency aimed at ending slavery had started the great majority of workers remained ‘attached labourers’ controlled by planters in the form of military officers.⁴⁵ It did not work—forced labour provoked rebellion and ex-slaves preferred a peasant economy to a plantation system, even if this destroyed the productivity of the farms and, by extension, the state. But the developments in Haiti suggest that even people committed to anti-slavery found it impossible to imagine plantation work being done except under conditions of brutality and coercion.⁴⁶ The liberty to which Haitian leaders were committed did not always coincide with the liberty that ordinary Haitians imagined.⁴⁷

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Source: Aldrich Robert, McKenzie Kirsten (eds.). The Routledge History of Western Empires. Routledge,2014. — 542 p.. 2014

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