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 An
Historical Account
of the
Black Empire of Hayti
 An
Historical Account
of the
Black EmpirE of Hayti
∂
marcus rainsford
∂

Edited and with an Introduction by

PAul Youngquist And grégorY Pierrot

Duke University Press Durham and London 2013

 This Edition, Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography
© 2013 Duke University Press
Frontispiece: Portrait of Toussaint Louverture. Collection of the
New-York Historical Society, accession number 1956.123.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper ♾
Designed by Cherie Westmoreland
Typeset in Whitman
by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rainsford, Marcus, fl. 1805.
An historical account of the black empire of Hayti / Marcus Rainsford ;
edited and with an introduction by Paul Youngquist and Grégory Pierrot.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5278-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5288-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Haiti—History—To 1791. 2. Haiti—History—Revolution, 1791–1804.
I. Youngquist, Paul. II. Pierrot, Grégory. III. Title.
f1923.r15 2013
972.94′03—dc23
2012044752

PAul Youngquist is a professor of English at the University of Colorado,

Boulder. He is the author of Cyberfiction: After the Future (2010), Monstrosities:
Bodies and British Romanticism (2003), and Madness and Blake’s Myth (1989).

GrégorY Pierrot is a visiting assistant professor of English at Bucknell University.

for CAitlin And Chloë

∂
 ∂
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Chronology xi
Introduction xvii
A Note on the Text lvii

∂
An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti 1

∂
Editorial Notes 277
Bibliography 321
Index 331
 ∂
ACknowledgments

This edition of Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of

Hayti is the work of a crew of formidable sleuths and scholars. Grégory Pier-
rot has been a close friend and collaborator throughout. Without his spirited
conversation and relentless curiosity, Rainsford’s book may have remained
entombed in the mausoleum of history. Annotations by him and Scott Hagle
helped resurrect it. Preparing and correcting the typescript required the
labor of a spirited team: Dana Van Kooy, John C. Leffel, Krystal McMillen,
and Michele Speitz. I received generous support from the Center for Humani-
ties and the Arts at the University of Colorado for travel to collections in
Kingston, Jamaica, and London. In both places I benefited from the immense
cunning of many archivists, researchers, and activists, among them James
Robertson, Julia Gaffield, Kesia Weise, Jillian Pazereckas, Jack and Maren
Youngquist, Charles Campbell, Colonel Frank Lumsden, and Evan Williams.
Timely historical help came from Roger Norman Buckley, David Patrick Geg-
gus, Carolyn E. Fick, and Laurent Dubois. Sara Arnold of the Gibbes Museum
conjured Toussaint Louverture’s miniature image from oblivion. Carol Aiken
made it permanently visible. Ken Wissoker and Leigh Barnwell at Duke Uni-
versity Press gave this book its lease on life. The press’s anonymous reader
brought it strength and beauty. Finally, nothing would ever get done without
the love and support of a few wondrous people: Jeffrey N. Cox, Frances Bot-
kin, Sajay Samuel, Samar Farage, Erika Polson, Joanne Youngquist, and Cait-
lin Rose.—PAul Youngquist

An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti was the topic of countless
conversations with Paul Youngquist before he had the idea to propose this
edition. For this and the journey that followed I am very grateful to him.
Thanks to Aldon Nielsen for his continual and crucial question, “Why is Haiti
always being rediscovered?” Alain Bernheim, Gerard Besson, and Jacques
de Cauna provided invaluable information regarding the intriguing life of
Philippe-Rose Roume and his descendants, who deserve more attention than
we could give them here. Thanks to Marie-Lucie Vendryes for her help in
locating the Toussaint Louverture miniature attributed to Rainsford. Sara
Marzioli’s translation helped us follow Rainsford throughout European news.
In my work for this edition I have been supported by several institutions at
x ACknowledgments
the Pennsylvania State University: I received a research grant from the Afri-
cana Research Center; a travel grant from the Center for American Literary
Studies, and a George and Barbara Kelly Fellowship from the English Depart-
ment. This book would not have seen the light of day without the help of the
librarians of the Rare Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections Library,
Pennsylvania State University Libraries, with a special mention to Sandy
Stelts, and to Curt Krebs at the Digital Preservation Department. Thanks also
to James Capobianco at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for his as-
sistance and diligence. Le meilleur pour la fin: many thanks to Kate and Chloë
Pierrot for putting up with this project and supporting me throughout; to
Germaine and François Pierrot for indulging for so many years my obsessive
and often obnoxious interest in Napoleonic history; and a special dedication
to the late André Guillemin, for teaching me a most crucial lesson in history,
a long time ago.—grégorY Pierrot
 ∂
ChronologY

1492 Christopher Columbus lands on the island called Xaymaca by its

Taíno and Arawak inhabitants. The Spaniards build the fort La
Navidad. Columbus returns a year later to find the fort destroyed and
all Spanish occupants dead.
1502–9 The Spanish governor Nicolás de Ovando arrives on the island with
hundreds of troops and introduces the cultivation of sugar cane from
the Canary Islands. A year later under pretense of a friendly meeting
he massacres many Taíno.
1513 Enslaved Africans are first imported to Jamaica.
1625 French and English buccaneers settle on the island of Tortuga off the
northern coast of Hispaniola, present-day Haiti.
1665 Louis XIV establishes the French colony of Saint-Domingue
(St. Domingo), which includes Tortuga and the western half of
Hispaniola.
1676 The Maroon leader Padrejean incites St. Domingo’s first slave
rebellion near Port de Paix. He is caught and killed by buccaneers.
1697 Spain recognizes French possession of western Hispaniola with the
Treaty of Ryswick.
1743 François Dominique Toussaint de Bréda is born.
1758 Marcus Rainsford is born in Salins, County Kildare, Ireland.
1763 The Treaty of Paris settles the Seven Years War. Great Britain gains
control of French possessions in North America.
1770 The first edition of Guillaume-Thomas Raynal’s Philosophical and
Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East
and West Indies is published.
1773 Rainsford graduates with a Master’s degree from Trinity University,
Dublin.
1775 The American Revolution begins.
1776 The Second Continental Congress approves the Declaration of
Independence.
1779 Rainsford joins Lord Francis Rawdon’s Volunteers of Ireland to fight
in the American War for Independence.
1781 Rainsford is shipped to Jamaica in Lord Montagu’s Duke of
Cumberland Regiment, also known as the South Carolina Rangers.
The unit is disbanded two years later, and Rainsford is released on
half-pay.
xii ChronologY
October 1781 The British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia.
1782 William Hayley publishes An Essay on Epic Poetry, calling for
the revival of epic poetry in Britain.
1783 The Treaty of Paris ends the American War for Independence,
and Great Britain recognizes the United States of America.
1789 Representatives of the clergy and the Third Estate in France
meet in assembly and swear not to disband without a
constitution.
July 14, 1789 The people of Paris storm the Bastille.
1790 The mulatto planter Vincent Ogé leads a failed revolt in St.
Domingo. He is caught, tried by colonial authorities, and
executed at Cape François.
1791 The first canto of Marcus Rainsford’s The Revolution; Or,
Britain Delivered is published anonymously in Edinburgh and
London.
May 1791 The Constituent Assembly in France gives full political rights
to mulattos and free blacks.
August 14, 1791 A voodoo ceremony at Bois Caïman in St. Domingo, led by
Jamaican-born Boukman Dutty, sparks revolution, which
ignites in full on August 21. Cape François burns.
October 1791 Port-au-Prince is burned during the fighting between whites
and mulattos. Toussaint Louverture joins the rebellion, siding
initially with the Spanish.
1792 The French Legislative Assembly grants citizenship to all free
men of color. The commissioners Léger-Félicité Sonthonax,
Étienne Polverel, and Jean-Antoine Ailhaud arrive in St.
Domingo with six thousand troops.
January 1793 Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are executed in Paris. Spain
joins the coalition against France.
February 1793 France declares war on Great Britain. Toussaint and his
troops side with Spain against the French.
August 1793 Sonthonax abolishes slavery in the northern province.
Abolition is extended to the western and southern provinces
by year’s end.
September 1793 British troops land at Jérémie in St. Domingo.
1794 Toussaint and the Spanish gain control over the north of St.
Domingo except Cape François.
February 1794 Slavery is officially abolished by the French National
Assembly.
May 1794 Toussaint changes sides and joins France, becoming a general
in the French Army.
June 1794 British troops take Port-au-Prince.
June 1794 Sonthonax is recalled to France to face trial for treason.
 ChronologY xiii
October 1794 General Étienne Laveaux is appointed the interim governor-
general of St. Domingo. Marcus Rainsford joins the Duke
of York’s expedition in the Netherlands with the Royal York
Fusiliers.
1795 French troops led by Toussaint and André Rigaud fight
the British in the western and southern provinces of St.
Domingo.
1795 Spain cedes eastern Hispaniola to France.
1796 Rainsford arrives in Jamaica with the Third West India
Regiment as a recruiting officer. Lieutenant Governor
Lord Balcarres detains him and other troops meant for St.
Domingo to fight rebellious Maroons.
March 1796 Governor Laveaux is arrested and temporarily jailed in a
failed coup attempt.
April 1796 Laveaux names Toussaint the lieutenant governor of St.
Domingo.
May 1796 The commissioners Sonthonax, Phillipe-Rose Roume, and
Julien Raimond arrive in St. Domingo.
October 1796 Laveaux returns to France to serve as the representative for
St. Domingo.
January 1797 Rainsford returns to England from St. Domingo to recover
from an arm injury and possibly yellow fever.
May 1797 Sonthonax appoints Toussaint the commander in chief of
French colonial forces.
August 1797 Toussaint forces Sonthonax to return to France.
October 1797 Rainsford lands in St. Domingo at Mole St. Nicholas.
1798 Rainsford visits Cape François disguised as an American
sailor. Later he is arrested as a spy, tried, and condemned to
death. His sentence is commuted by Toussaint.
May 1798 The English General Thomas Maitland and Toussaint sign an
armistice. British troops begin evacuating, remaining at Mole
St. Nicholas until October.
April 1799 Rainsford rejoins the Third West India Regiment in
Martinique.
May 1799 The War of Knives begins between Toussaint and Rigaud.
June 1799 Toussaint negotiates a secret convention with Great Britain
and the United States.
November 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte overthrows the Republican government
in the Eighteenth Brumaire coup d’état.
March 1800 Rainsford is released from military service on half-pay. He
returns to England and sells his commission.
July 1800 Toussaint defeats Rigaud, who flees to Guadeloupe.
xiv ChronologY
1801 The second edition of Rainsford’s The Revolution: Or;
Britain Delivered is published in London.
January 1801 Toussaint seizes Spanish Hispaniola and abolishes slavery
there.
July 1801 Toussaint creates a constitution for St. Domingo that
proclaims himself governor general for life.
October 1801 The Treaty of Amiens suspends hostilities between Great
Britain and France. Napoleon appoints his brother-in-
law Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc the chief of an
expeditionary force for regaining control of St. Domingo
and restoring slavery.
January 1802 Rainsford’s Memoir of Transactions That Took Place in St.
Domingo is published in London.
February 1802 Leclerc’s troops land in St. Domingo near Cape François.
Toussaint leads the resistance.
March–April 1802 The Battle of Crête à Pierrot.
May 1802 The generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry
Christophe surrender to Leclerc. Toussaint capitulates and
retires to his plantation in Ennery.
June 1802 Leclerc arrests Toussaint under false pretense and deports
him with his family to France. Two months later Toussaint
is jailed in the Fort de Joux in the Jura Mountains.
August 1802 Rainsford’s St. Domingo; Or, an Historical, Political and
Military Sketch of the Black Republic is published in London,
a second edition of his memoir. A third, containing a
portrait of Toussaint, appears before the end of the year.
October 1802 As the revolution’s final leader, Dessalines renews the fight
against the French.
November 1802 Leclerc dies of yellow fever and is succeeded by General
Rochambeau.
February 1803 William Wordsworth’s “To Toussaint Louverture” is
published in London’s Morning Post.
April 1803 Toussaint dies in his cell in Fort de Joux.
November 1803 Dessalines and Alexandre Pétion defeat French troops at
the Battle of Vertières. Rochambeau capitulates.
January 1, 1804 Dessalines proclaims independence from France and
himself the governor general of the nation of Haiti.
March–April 1804 Dessalines massacres the white colonists remaining in
Haiti.
July 1804 Rainsford writes An Hymeneal on the Marriage of the Right
Hon. Francis, Earl of Moira, etc., to the Right Hon. Flora,
Countess of Loudon; on the 12th Day of July, 1804.
 ChronologY xv
October 1804 Dessalines proclaims himself emperor of Haiti.
December 1804 Napoleon declares himself emperor of France.
1805 Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti
is published in London.
October 1806 Dessalines is assassinated. Christophe is appointed
president.
1807 Haiti is divided into the Northern State of Haiti under
Christophe and the Southern Republic of Haiti under
Pétion.
1807 The British Parliament passes the Slave Trade Act
abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire.
1809 Spain regains Santo Domingo from Haiti with help from
Britain.
1810 Rainsford joins the First Royal Veteran Battalion.
1811 Christophe declares himself King Henry I of the Northern
Kingdom of Haiti.
1813 Rainsford is imprisoned for debt.
April 1814 Napoleon abdicates and is exiled to the island of Elba.
Louis XVIII becomes king of France.
November 1814 The Congress of Vienna authorizes France to resume
the slave trade for five years. Rainsford participates in a
popular campaign of opposition.
1815 Rainsford acts as an agent in London on behalf of King
Henry I.
February 1815 Napoleon escapes Elba and regains control of France.
March 1815 Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, and Austria form the
Seventh Coalition against Napoleon at the Congress of
Vienna.
June 1815 Napoleon is defeated at Waterloo.
1816 Pétion provides Simon Bolivar haven and support in
his expedition against Spanish colonial authorities in
Venezuela.
1816 Rainsford’s Translation of an Official Communication from the
Government of Hayti is published in London.
November 4, 1817 Rainsford is buried at Saint Giles in the Fields, Middlesex.
 ∂
introduCtion
Paul Youngquist and Grégory Pierrot

On October 24, 1797, an aging captain of the Third West India Regiment
stepped ashore from hms Hannibal at Mole St. Nicholas, the “Gibraltar of the
Antilles” and bastion of the British occupation of St. Domingo.1 A sojourn of
several months would change his life and inspire An Historical Account of the
Black Empire of Hayti (1805), the first complete account in English of the Hai-
tian Revolution. Captain Marcus Rainsford had been in St. Domingo before,
in 1796. Then he was mustering black troops for the British army, there to
prop up and grab the colony. Rainsford returned at a difficult time. The occu-
pation had proven a magnificent waste of soldiers’ lives and British pounds
Sterling, and life at the Mole was turning precarious. The “brigands,” as the
British called revolutionary blacks, were pounding at the door. “So closely
were we surrounded by the Brigands, at all points,” wrote Rainsford, “that it
was not possible to move half a mile from the town, without extreme dan-
ger while all within was wretchedness of every description!”2 A hard destiny
came calling. In 1798 those black freedom fighters would evict the British and
with them slavery from the French colony of St. Domingo. Five years later
they would proclaim to the world the free and independent nation of Haiti.

Occupational Hazards

Rainsford’s account of the Haitian Revolution is the creature of a convulsive

period of Atlantic history.3 As the eighteenth century drew to a close Britain
was waging war with Republican France to defend its vaunted liberties and to
buttress its sagging empire. The loss of its thirteen North American colonies
in 1783 had delivered England an economic and moral blow. With the erup-
tion in 1789 of revolution in France, which scattered sparks of insurrection
throughout the Atlantic world, the 1790s would become a time of opportu-
nity for both the empire and its enemies. The West Indies would witness a
struggle between the forces of slavery and freedom. Europe’s great colonial
powers—England, Spain, and France—jockeyed for advantage and superi-
ority. The focus of their rivalry: the sumptuous French colony of St. Domingo
on the island of Hispaniola. The insurrection that blazed up there in August
xviii introduCtion
1791 ignited dreams not just of freedom but of colonial dominion, too. Dur-
ing the thirteen years of fighting that followed, England, Spain, and France
would all make military bids to possess the richest colony in the Caribbean.4
The British bid was driven by economic opportunism. By the late eigh-
teenth century Great Britain seemed to many Britons an island of freedom
in a sea of slavery. The Somerset decision of 1772 had declared it a crime to
return Africans to slavery in the Caribbean colonies against their will. An
insurgent abolitionist movement was gaining popularity, driven by doubts
about empire that came with American independence.5 In the colonies of
the West Indies, however, slavery was still a way of life. In 1791, for instance,
one quarter of a million enslaved Africans inhabited Jamaica. Throughout the
1790s their ratio to whites remained just under ten to one.6 Sugar production
required those numbers. It was labor intensive and uniquely specialized, a
harbinger of a coming industrialization. Along with other exotic commodi-
ties (coffee, indigo, and cotton), sugar was an engine of Britain’s imperial and
cultural expansion.7 Revolutionary unrest in St. Domingo, only 257 nautical
miles east of Jamaica, made the richest sugar colony in the Caribbean seem
ripe for the picking. With Republican France’s declaration of war in 1793, Brit-
ain had the excuse it needed to add this prize to its colonial possessions.
“Rule Britannia! rule the waves: / Britons never will be slaves”: the famous
lines from the de facto anthem of the British empire proclaim its complicated
relationship to African slavery. Britons may never have been slaves, but many
a British merchant bought and sold them, trafficking in Africans across the
Atlantic with the indifference that comes with habit and huge profits. The
years 1793 to 1798 mark a curious interlude in the mythology of British lib-
erty. While abolitionists at home fought to outlaw the slave trade and deal
slavery a deathblow, British soldiers in St. Domingo fought even more fiercely
to perpetuate them. Such was the Janus face of slavery. However question-
able, the slave system appeared too profitable to stop. So when in January
of 1793 French planters from St. Domingo, their fields smoldering and their
future dim, appealed for relief to William Pitt’s government, an opportunity
arose that was too promising to resist. Intervene in St. Domingo. Hoist the
Union Jack over the charred and stubbled cane fields. Enter its ports to tame
a brigand horde bent on destroying property and achieving freedom. Rescue
a desolate plantocracy and replace the rule of France.
A prize beyond imagining: French St. Domingo, jewel of the Antilles, by
far the most opulent colony of the West Indies. There were of course other
motives for intervention: the menace of rebellion in nearby Jamaica, Brit-
ain’s most profitable slave colony, and the necessity of victory in the war
with France. St. Domingo was a chance Pitt and his secretary of state for war
 introduCtion xix
Henry Dundas had to take. When a hundred more French planters joined
the call for aid the British government signed a set of propositions authoriz-
ing the occupation of St. Domingo. By September 1793 redcoats were disem-
barking at Jérémie, welcomed ashore by inspiring strains of “Long live the
English!”8 Britain’s most determined defense of slavery had begun.
At first things went well. Within eight months of landing, the British occu-
pied one-third of the island, securing not only Mole St. Nicholas in the north,
but also the port towns of Saint Marc, Port-au-Prince, Léogane, and Tiburon.
The French colony of St. Domingo wore a fringe of British invaders. Their
hold over this territory was, however, tenuous. In the estimation of J. W.
Fortescue, the invasion force itself “never numbered more than nine hun-
dred effective soldiers.”9 Lacking the numbers needed to secure the colony,
the occupiers played a military shell game, sending troops here and there in
groups of varying size to shore up shaky defenses. The arrival of reinforce-
ments swelled the ranks in Port-au-Prince to 3,500, with 1,800 more soldiers,
mostly cavalry, distributed up and down the coast. But a promise of 2,000
more troops from England failed to materialize until 1796, bad planning and
worse weather hampering their departure.10 Although the redcoats could
boast impressive early success, they remained outnumbered and hemmed
in throughout St. Domingo by a patchwork of determined enemies: French
revolutionaries, Spanish auxiliaries, and those so-called brigands, formidable
black insurgents fighting for a freedom the British had come to deny them.
Events contemporary with the occupation ensured that slavery would be
its raison d’être. Just weeks before the British arrived, the Jacobin commis-
sioner at Cape François, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, issued a decree abolishing
slavery throughout St. Domingo. In February 1794 the National Convention
in Paris followed suit, declaring that “all men, without distinction of color,
domiciled in the colonies, are French citizens, and enjoy all the rights assured
under the Constitution.”11 Blacks were no longer brigands savagely torch-
ing their masters’ property. They were free people fighting for their rights as
French citizens. Armed with musket, bayonet, and cannon, the British stood
between them and liberty, a fortified line dividing slavery from freedom,
black slaves from white masters. That the British government was comfort-
able defending the white side of that line appears most clearly in the notori-
ous fourth clause of the Capitulation that was required signing for all French
who committed themselves to the arms of their protectors: “Men of color will
have all the privileges this class enjoys in English colonies”—which is to say
no privileges at all.12 If that could be said of racially mixed people of color,
then blacks obviously stood beyond the pale of British citizenship. To defend
slavery on St. Domingo was to live or die for white privilege.
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