America 749
had learned that the Pope had been ejected from Rome, and that the French were
about to invade England. Some thought that the French would soon reach
Brazil.
On August 12, 1798, proclamations appeared in public places, addressed to the
people of the Citade da Bahia Republicana. They denounced the oppressiveness of
government and taxes, urged that the yoke of Europe be thrown off, demanded
freedom to trade with countries other than Portugal, and specifically with France,
and issued warnings to priests who preached “fanaticism.” They called upon all
soldiers, both white and colored, to work together, as “brothers and equals,” for
Popular Liberty. The outburst was easily put down, and thirty- four persons were
arrested. They were accused of sedition and impiety, and of wanting “the imaginary
advantages of a Democratic Republic in which all should be equal, with access to
public office and representative positions without difference of color or condi-
tion... following the example of the unfortunate and disgraced people of France.”^3
Four persons, all free mulattoes, were hanged and quartered, and several others
transported to Africa.
Brazil, as it turned out, was the last American country to abolish slavery. Haiti
was the first. It was here, in the wealthy French sugar colony of Saint- Domingue,
where 30,000 whites lived among almost half a million slaves, along with some
25,000 free Negroes and mulattoes, that the repercussions of the French Revolu-
tion in America were the most immediate and the most violent. From early in the
Revolution, over protests of the planters, the French had given equal civil rights to
free colored persons in their colonies. When the slaves also were aroused, and
began to rebel, the Convention, in 1794, abolished slavery in all possessions of the
Republic. Most of the whites left the island, and Toussaint l’Ouverture, a Negro,
emerged as the local leader. He worked for several years to maintain the tie with
France, in whose army he was commissioned as a general officer by both the Con-
vention and the Directory. Struggling against chaos, against breakdown in labor,
production, and government, in a turmoil of strife between rivals, and between
mulattoes and Negroes, with threats of Spanish and British intervention, and in
fear of a reimposition of slavery, Toussaint managed to maintain a regime whose
stated ideals at least were those of the European revolution, at the cost of atrocities
that were worse than those of the Vendée or Ireland. In 1802 Bonaparte tried to
regain control for France, capturing Toussaint in the process, and to return the ex-
slaves to the old conditions. The French army perished of disease. Toussaint’s suc-
cessors declared independence.^4
It is hard to estimate the effects in the United States of the revolution in Haiti.
The French consul at Philadelphia estimated in 1797 that there were over 20,000
French refugees in the country. Almost all must have come from San Domingo
3 Ruy, 236.
4 There have been many books on the revolution in Haiti, of which two of the best are by T. L.
Stoddard (the later racist or Anglo- Saxonist) The French Revolution in San Domingo (Boston, 1914),
and by an American Negro, C. L. R. James, The Black. Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Do-
mingo Revolution (New York, 1938). On French refugees, largely from Haiti, see E. Childs, French
Refugee Life in the United States 1790–1800: An American Chapter of the French Revolution (Baltimore ,
1940).