Fighting for "Another Liberty": The Haitian Revolution versus the French Revolution

In June 1793, as he took the first steps toward offering the black population of the French colony of Saint-Domingue their freedom, the French republican civil commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax boasted that he could “create 400,000 soldiers with one whistle.”  Two months later, however, as Sonthonax prepared to issue a decree of general emancipation, the black insurgent leader Toussaint Louverture sent him a furious letter, denouncing his offer and promising to continue the fight against the French in the name of what Toussaint called “another liberty,” one that would truly be meaningful to the former slaves.  And in February 1794, when the French National Convention passed its historic decree abolishing slavery, the metropolitan legislators ignored the detailed 8-page, 38-article emancipation edict Sonthonax had issued on 29 August 1793 and endorsed a two-paragraph motion with an entirely different tone.  The complicated history of the debate about liberty in Saint-Domingue and in France in 1793-1794 raises central questions about the universality of the French revolutionaries’ concept of freedom and the goals of the slave uprising that had begun in the colony in August 1791.  A detailed examination of the struggle against slavery on the two sides of the French Atlantic, based on archival sources, helps explain why most of the black population in Saint-Domingue did respond to Sonthonax’s appeal and why Toussaint Louverture called for “another liberty,” different from the one the French republicans offered him.