Guadeloupe 1799-1803: A Haiti Manque
After the French Revolution, the colony of Guadeloupe experienced many upheavals and was, for much of the time, virtually independent. Nevertheless it kept the French flag flying against both Americans and British, its garrison deriving much strength from its newly-freed slaves. When Napoleon came to power, the black population revolted the Black Consul’s racist policies. H.J.K. Jenkins retells the story.
In April, 1799, the US Secretary of State bluntly demanded: ‘There must absolutely be an end to all depredations by French privateers and other French armed vessels belonging or resorting to the ports of Guadaloupe [sic].’ These words encapsulated the irritation and fear occasioned in influential American circles by the near-piratical privateering from this French colony in the Caribbean. With a chart-shape sometimes fancifully compared with that of a butterfly, the island might more properly have been viewed as a voracious and unpredictable moth, ever poised to gnaw at the commercial strands formed by the various shipping-lanes which it dominated.
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