Category Archives: Disfavored Minorities

1943: Jarvis Catoe

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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this date in 1943, serial killer Jarvis Theodore Roosevelt Catoe was fried in the federal chair for the murder of Washington D.C. resident named Rose Abramowitz.

The 25-year-old victim, who had married only a month before, had hired Catoe to wax her kitchen floor.

Instead he raped and strangled her, left her sprawled on her bed and made off with $20.

Abramowitz wasn’t Catoe’s first victim and she would not be his last — although she was his first white victim; the previous ones had been black like Jarvis himself. This article summarizes Catoe’s career: homicides in New York City and Washington, beginning in 1935, as well as multiple robberies, rapes, indecent exposures and attempted kidnappings. To add insult to injury, an innocent man, James Matthew Smith, was convicted in his first murder and had already served several years of a life sentence by the time of Catoe’s arrest.

Time magazine called him a “one-man crime wave.” The D.C. police’s failure to catch him resulted in serious public embarrassment for the department and a dressing-down before Congress. Not bad for a killer so obscure his name isn’t even in Wikipedia.

Catoe’s last victim was Evelyn Anderson, a waitress in the Bronx. After he strangled her and left her body in an alley he took her purse and watch and gave it to a lady friend, who gave it to another friend, who gave it to a man who pawned it for $20. The New York Police, who had been checking the local pawn shops, found the watch and traced it through its various handlers, finally landing on Catoe, who had moved back to Washington by then.

He confessed to seven murders that he could remember, but reckoned the real body count was “about ten.” Most, but not all, of his victims had been sexually assaulted. A classic sexual sadist, Catoe stated he suffered from “spells” where he had an uncontrollable urge to kill. These spells tended to happen after he’d been reading detective stories and looking at pornography.

Catoe later retracted all his statements, saying he’d been “sick and weak” and the police and badgered him into making up stories. The jury didn’t buy it: in the Abramowitz trial, they were out for only eighteen minutes before voting for conviction and the death penalty.

He walked into the death chamber singing.

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1908: John Boyd, by John Radclive

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On this date in 1908, John Boyd managed six fitful hours of sleep, had a breakfast of toast, poached eggs and tea, and then went to the Don Jail gallows for murdering his paramour’s rival suitor.

Canada had long before ceased public executions. Prior to Boyd’s execution, Don Jail hangings had occurred in a jail yard — technically behind prison walls, but easily peeped upon by curiosity-seekers willing to obtain higher ground. Boyd’s execution introduced a new privacy measure: it was the first of 26 hangings to occur in an interior chamber completely away from public eyes, the same place where Canada eventually held its last hangings in 1962.

But apart from this minor milestone, we notice on this date the hurried and disturbed departure of prolific hangman John Radclive. “Another poor soul gone,” he was overheard to say as he left.

Radclive is the subject of an empathetic Toronto Star profile that’s well worth the read.

He was Canada’s first professional hangman, with 69 recorded executions and perhaps just as many which the uneven documentation of the day failed to note. Predecessor of the better-known Arthur Ellis, Radclive learned his trade direct from William Marwood, and was put on the federal payroll as a full-time executioner in 1892.

He had a swagger in his ill-starred step back then: he once started a brawl boasting in a pub that he had “come to hang a Frenchman, and hoped it would not be the last.” By the time he got to Boyd and beyond, he was ready for the last. Alcoholism had wasted his nerves (and his liver: he died of cirrhosis in 1911). In 1910 Radclive told a psychiatrist,

“Now at night when I lie down, I start up with a roar as victim after victim comes up before me. I can see them on the trap, waiting a second before they meet their Maker. They haunt me and taunt me until I am nearly crazy with an unearthly fear.”

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1989: Kehar Singh and Satwant Singh, assassins of Indira Gandhi

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On this date in 1989, the last hangings at Delhi’s Tihar Jail dispatched two Sikhs for the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi) was the daughter and political heir of Jawaharlal Nehru and one of the postwar world’s more remarkable political biographies.

Never averse to breaking a few eggs, Gandhi led her country (sometimes autocratically) for four terms from 1966 to 1984, sandwiched around a stint under a legal cloud for political corruption.

She backed East Pakistan’s breakaway from India’s neighbor and rival, but also negotiated a Kashmir settlement with her Pakistani opposite number; oversaw the Green Revolution; pushed ahead with a nuclear weapons program; maneuvered between American and Soviet foreign policy.

The omelet that cost her life was the June 1984 Operation Blue Star, when she had the Indian military storm a Sikh shrine that armed militants had turned into a virtual fortress, even using tanks and artillery in the shrine’s residential area.

Although the operation “worked,” hundreds — maybe a thousand or more — lost their lives and the shrine itself suffered heavy damage.

Sikhs were incensed — including, apparently, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, two Sikh bodyguards of the Prime Minister who probably ought to have been reassigned. Maybe that’s just hindsight speaking, after they took the opportunity afforded by an escort assignment on Halloween 1984 to suddenly gun down their charge.

Beant Singh was shot down on the spot by other guards, but Satwant Singh was arrested.

He and Beant Singh’s uncle and alleged inciter Kehar Singh would later stand trial for their lives — but not before the assassination triggered an apparently government-blessed four-day anti-Sikh pogrom. The disturbing orchestration and four-figure body count of this infamous affair remain sensitive subjects on the subcontinent to this day, especially insofar as nobody has ever been punished for it.

The accused assassins were not so lucky — although they were more than content to accept martyrdom for avenging Operation Blue Star.

I have no hatred for any Hindu, Muslim, Christian, neither hatred for any religion. After my Shaheedi, let no Sikh throw any rock at any Hindu. I am not in favor of any retaliation or bloodshed over my Shaheedi. If we do create bloodshed, then there is no difference between us and Rajiv Gandhi. I am proud of the task that I did! I do ardas in front of Waheguru! If I am blessed with a human life, then give me a death of the brave when I am hanged. Forget one life, if I could I would give up a thousand lives to kill dushts like Indira Gandhi, and laugh as I become Shaheed by hanging.

–Satwant Singh in court

The killers were then and are still held in high regard by many Sikhs. (Satwant’s fiancee even married his picture.)

Indira Gandhi’s son Rajiv Gandhi followed her as head of state — and followed her fate when he was assassinated by Tamil terrorists in 1991. The Nehru-Gandhi family remains a powerful force in Indian politics.

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1943: Rosanna and Daniel Phillips

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Executions on New Year’s Day have not been unheard-of in U.S. history, but it’s been Auld Lang Syne since the last such event — a North Carolina double-gassing on this date in 1943.

The previous year, January 1, 1942, had seen the Tar Heel state host the Rose Bowl at Duke University’s stadium: that was just 25 days after Pearl Harbor, and the California coast was considered a potential target. With war in the Pacific trending America’s way, however, the tournament of Roses — although still not the associated parade — was back in Pasadena on New Year’s 1943. So instead, North Carolina did this.*

Daniel and Rosanna Phillips, black sharecroppers, died consecutively in the Raleigh Central Prison gas chamber for the ax murder of their farm owner a mere five months before.

This laboring couple, lovers living out of wedlock (they married after the murder), seem to have had a violent relationship with one another; their 13-hour trial would feature the defendants’ mutual recriminations of black magic, and allegations by each that the other one was the real killer. (Theft appears to have been the motive.)

(The lengthiest accessible summary of this case that I’ve been able to find is in this pdf of a lengthy journal article, “Black Female Executions in Historical Context” (scroll all the way to p. 77).)

The U.P. wire report (as run in the New York Times, Jan. 2, 1943) says that the pair forgave each other by the end. Still, Daniel was gassed first “at the request of the State Parole Commission, on the possibility that he might make a last-minute statement exonerating his wife,” which would have spared Rosanna. One wonders if she was still in a forgiving mood when she found out that he hadn’t breathed the word that might save her.

At least some newsmen also reported a malfunction in the chair’s cyanide-dropping rack for Rosanna’s execution, which required guards to re-open the chamber after its strapped and hooded subject had been sealed in, and putz about the mechanism while she waited.

* Actual reason to do this on New Year’s Day: the mere happenstance of automatically scheduling execution dates a set number of days after the defendants’ last appeal failed.

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1942: Three Bialystok Jews

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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this day in 1942, three anonymous Jewish residents of the Bialystok Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland were hung in the public square across the street from the Judenrat (Jewish Council) building. The three worked at the ghetto’s oil factory, and had been caught smuggling sunflower seeds.

The residents of the ghetto paid little attention to the execution, accepting it with resignation. It was hardly remarked on.

But this event was yet another small indication of dire events looming in the near future. Compared to those in other Nazi ghettos, such as those at Warsaw and Lodz, the Bialystok Jews had it pretty good. The ghetto, noted Sara Bender in her 2008 book The Jews of Bialystok During World War II and the Holocaust, was “organized, industrious, and even prosperous. Unlike other ghettos, it never experienced starvation or abject poverty.”

And it was seen as relatively safe. This day’s sort of vicious, arbitrary executions for minor rule infractions, which were so common elsewhere, were not at all frequent in Bialystok. Neither were the mass deportations that had by late 1942 decimated almost all the other ghettos.

Well, Bialystok’s turn was coming.

Unbeknownst to the Bialystokers, just as the sunflower seed smugglers were meeting their end, the powers that be in Berlin were debating the future of the ghetto. The Nazis in immediate charge of the ghetto wanted to keep it, and had logical reasons for doing so: namely, that it was a center of great industry, producing all kinds of goods for the German Army at almost no cost.

Killing off tens of thousands of hardworking slaves during wartime makes about as much sense as hanging three people over sunflower seeds, but this is what Berlin decided to do.

In early- to mid-February 1943, there was a surprise Aktion in the ghetto: 2,000 were killed and a further 10,000 deported to the Treblinka Extermination Camp. About 30,000 remained.

Once it was over, most of the surviving Bialystokers breathed a sigh of relief and hoped against hope that the worst was over — while a small underground group quietly organized an uprising for when the time came.

The rebellion, however, never really had time to get off the ground. When the final deportation occurred in August 1943, almost everyone went quietly in shock to their deaths. A cell of less than 100 fighters put up a few days’ struggle, enough to earn a footnote in history, before the last of the ghetto blew away with the ashes.

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1666: Nine Covenanters in Ayr and Edinburgh

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That prospectively apocalyptic year of 1666 saw the onset of the Scottish Covenanters‘ mass martyr-making under the English gallows.

Three dozen or so were put to death in the aftermath of the Battle of Rullion Green. Among them, nine men — seven in Ayr, two in Edinburgh — paid with their necks on this date.

The Covenanter tragedy stretches back to the first English Civil War, when English parliamentarians enlisted the aid of Scottish Presbyterians by agreeing to a covenant guaranteeing presbyterian church governance in Scotland and England. Essentially, that meant representative ecclesiastical authority, rather than top-down power from the king, via bishops.

The Presbyterians took this covenant very seriously indeed.

This expedient political arrangement flew apart post-hostilities, especially when the Presbyterians’ parliamentary faction got on the wrong side of Cromwell‘s New Model Army.* “Pride’s Purge”, the de facto army coup d’etat which made possible the execution of Charles I, essentially consisted of kicking out of Parliament the Presbyterian types who were ready to strike a deal with the king at the army’s expense and then governing with the remainder.

This made Presbyterians, for whom reformed church governance was the issue, amenable to inroads from the royalist camp. As soon as Charles I lost his head, the un-purged Presbyterian Scottish Parliament recognized Charles II … on condition that he get on board.

Charles was not exactly an enthusiastic partner.


A political cartoon shows Scottish Presbyterians literally holding King Charles II’s nose to the grindstone.

Nevertheless, Charles II did sign on the dotted line as the price for a Scottish throne and a play at restoration … but the army stomped that, too. An exasperated Cromwell asked of these quarrelsome Scots with their presbyter hangup,

“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken!”

Mistaken or not, the beaten Presbyterians were optimistic — it’s a ridiculous optimism, in retrospect — that the post-Cromwell Restoration of the exiled monarch would finally Presbyterianize the island. But in 1660, it was Charles wielding the grindstone.

Much to his former allies’ chagrin, Charles rolled back the previous years’ church reforms, booted dissenting clerics, and cemented episcopacy.

The Presbyterian frustration here is understandable; they twice came out on the winning side in the civil war carrying signed pledges from the victors, and were twice balked of their prize. And the balked prize was only God’s work on earth.

In November 1666, a thousand aggrieved Covenanters marched towards Edinburgh in the pitiful and improvised Pentland Rising, which was violently stopped at Rullion Green.

Mass executions of prisoners followed throughout December and into January. (Others not executed were transported to the colonies.)

On this particular date, John Ross and John Shields died in Edinburgh.

The remaining seven executed this date in Ayr are notable in part because they ought to have been eight.


Memorial stone for the Covenanters executed in Ayr on December 27, 1666. Image (c) Stephen Wagstaff and used with permission.

Ayr’s public executioner fled rather than put godly Scotsmen to death. A Highlander named William Sutherland, who served the same office, was retrieved from nearby Irvine, but he too refused even when threatened with torture.**

The beneficiary of these principled refusals, in body if not in soul, was Cornelius Anderson, one of the eight doomed to die in Ayr who was finally prevailed upon to take the job of hanging his fellows in exchange for his life. Faltering spirit fortified with too much brandy, Anderson clumsily dispatched this group; later, since the obdurate Irvine hangman had been sacked, he had to do the same to two more Covenanters there.

Guilt-ridden and reviled, Anderson actually might have been the most miserable man on the scaffold. He came to a miserable end.

His conscience troubling him, he went to Ireland, where he was no better; nobody would either give him work or lodging. He built a little house in some common place near Dublin, where he and it and all were burnt to ashes. (Source)

* Specifically, they wanted to disband said army, and do so without coughing up its back pay.

** Sutherland’s torture included the summoning of a firing squad ostensibly to execute him if he failed to perform the executions. He called that bluff and was not executed, thereby depriving this site of a rare and precious “Executioner executed for failing to execute” entry.

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1872: Du Wenxiu, Panthay rebellion leader

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On this date in 1872, China’s Panthay Rebellion came to an end with the surrender, suicide, and execution — in that order — of Du Wenxiu.

The Panthay Rebellion (also known as the Du Wenxiu Rebellion) was one of several cataclysmic revolts to shake foundering imperial China in the 19th century.

This one was centered in the city of Dali (also known as Talifoo) in the southeastern Yunnan Province, near the Burmese border.* The rebels in question were the Hui people, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group who had been pushed around for years by Qing officials and by the ethnic Han.

The backstory of Han-on-Hui ethnic cleansing in the 1840s makes for harrowing reading, lowlighted by the 1845 massacre of 8,000 Hui in Baoshan.

An even more ambitious operation in May 1856 went down in Kunming, where a massacre — Qing officials publicly posted a directive to “kill [the Hui] one and all”** — claimed several thousand more and razed the city’s mosques. This outburst spawned an attempt at wholesale ethnic cleansing throughout the province … but that attempt blew back on its perpetrators by triggering a rebellion that would require a generation to tame.

The unexpected tenacity of Hui resistance was multiplied by the disadvantages for the Chinese state of operating in a distant and mountainous territory, and its preoccupation with the much larger simultaneous Taiping Rebellion. Though these considerations were not sufficient to dissuade local officials from picking the fight in the first place, they would help them come to regret it.

Hui resistance quickly coalesced into an organized rebellion, and that rebellion overran Dali by the end of the year, establishing itself as the seat of an independent kingdom called Pingnan Guo. Meanwhile, the onset of the Second Opium War left China incapable of contemplating a reconquest.

Du Wenxiu, the half-Han Islamic convert rebel leader acclaimed Sultan Sulaiman of Dali, was therefore left with some operating room to establish a Hui state. He led a pluralistic nation (for the Hui themselves were and are a pluralistic identity) in the western half of Yunnan, stretching from the Tibetan frontier almost to Kunming. (They came close but never quite managed to take this city).

Alas, in due time and with sufficient stability elsewhere in China the Pingnan state came under withering attack from the late 1860s. It sought help from the British as a potential foil against Chinese power, but the aid was not forthcoming and probably would have been too little and much too late. The Pingnan / Panthay / Hui state

ended much as it had begun — in a bloody massacre of the Hui populace. On 26 December 1872, imperial troops surrounded Dali, the Pingnan capital. Du Wenxiu, in a move that he hoped would spare the lives of the city’s residents, made the decision to hand himself over to the Qing general. Swallowing a fatal dose of opium as his palanquin carried him to the Qing encampment, Du was already dead by the time that he was delivered to the Qing commander. Not to be robbed of the gratification of killing him themselves, Qing officials hastily dragged Du before the Qing troops to be decapitated.† According to Emile Rocher, a French adviser to the provincial officials in Yunnan at the time, Du’s head was encased in honey and sent to the emperor.

Du’s sacrifice, however, was in vain. Three days later, imperial troops began a massacre that, according to the government’s own conservative estimates, took ten thousand lives by the time it was concluded — four thousand of the victims were women, children, and the elderly. Hundreds drowned trying to escape from Dali by swimming across Erhai Lake. Others attempted to flee through the narrow passes at either end of the valley. All were chased down and slain by the Qing troops. The imperial soldiers were ordered to cut an ear from each of the dead. These grisly trophies filled twenty-four massive baskets and, together with Du’s severed head, were sent to Beijing, where they served as a silent and unequivocal corroboration of the Pingnan regime’s bloody demise.**

Du Wenxiu was within living memory when the Qing themselves fell; shortly after that happened, an honorary tomb was constructed for the martyred rebel outside Dali.

* “Panthay” is a Burmese word for Chinese Muslims.

** David Atwill, “Blinkered Visions: Islamic Identity, Hui Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Nov. 2003. This article and/or Atwill’s book (review) on the same subject appear to be the ultimate source of nearly every accessible English resource on the Panthay Rebellion.

† According to the London Times (Aug. 27, 1873) the aides and litter-bearers who accompanied the dying Du to the Qin camp were also beheaded for their troubles. It ballparks the ensuing butchery at 40,000 to 50,000 souls.

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Feast Day of St. Anastasia

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Christmas Day is all about that Jesus fellow, but for a break from the usual gold, frankincense, and myrrh, spare a thought for St. Anastasia of Sirmium — whose feast date and purported execution date December 25 also is. She’s the only Christian martyr with a Christmas celebration,* and an apt choice for the depth of winter since her name means “dawn” or “rebirth”.

Byzantine icon of St. Anastasia from the Hermitage, holding a vial that alludes to her antitoxin powers.

Centuries of namesakes have shared that moniker, like the youngest daughter of the executed Romanov family, on the basis of the Great Martyr’s having died during the persecution of Diocletian; though this circumstance scarcely makes her unique, no less a source than the Catholic Encyclopedia avers that the ancient martyrology linking her to St. Chrysogonus “is purely legendary, and rests on no historical foundations.” (It’s possible that multiple historical Anastasias were conflated into a single legendary person.)

Despite later generations’ ignorance of what this early keeper of the faith was really about, she became associated — again, possibly thanks to nothing more sharing the same name as the facility’s local Roman matron — with an early church in Rome, the “titulus sanctae Anastasiae.” Today ruined, this was an important church in the capital of the faith during late antiquity, and helped vault St. Anastasia into the first rank of holy intercessors. She’s even mentioned by name in the Canon of the Mass.

Her celestial department protecting against potions and poisons has, today, a distinctly retro vibe about it; “the last remnant of the former prominence enjoyed by this saint and her church” is the Christmas Dawn Mass, likely the day’s most lightly-attended service at your local Catholic or Anglican parish, wherein Anastasia is invoked by name.


Cathedral of St. Anastasia in Zadar, Croatia, where the saint’s relics repose. (cc) image from Paradasos.

* In western Christendom only.

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1941: Eight Russian POWs at Flossenburg

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Seventy years ago today, eight unknown Russians — prisoners of the Wehrmacht’s ultimately self-defeating thrust into the Soviet Union — hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp.

By way of a moving 1995 New York Times article, these anonymous Red Army men give us a glimpse at the world of the pink triangle.

Between 10,000 and 15,000 homosexuals may have been incarcerated in the camps, Dr. [Klaus] Mulller said, out of approximately 100,000 men who were arrested under Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, which called for the imprisonment of any “male who commits lewd and lascivious acts with another male.” (The law was silent on lesbianism, although individual instances of persecutions of lesbians have been recorded.)

Perhaps 60 percent of those in the camps died, Dr. Muller said, meaning that even in 1945, there may have been only 4,000 survivors. Today, Dr. Mliller knows of fewer than 15.

Their travails did not end at liberation. They were still officially regarded as criminals, rather than as political prisoners, since Paragraph 175 remained in force in West Germany until 1969. They were denied reparations and the years they spent in the camps were deducted from their pensions. Some survivors were even jailed again.

Old enough to be grandfathers and great-grandfathers, the survivors scarcely courted attention as homosexuals, having learned all too well the perils of notoriety. “It is not easy to tell a story you were forced to hide for 50 years,” Dr. Mullers said.

One of the first men to break his silence was the anonymous “Prisoner X. Y.,” who furnished a vividly detailed account of life as a homosexual inmate in the 1972 book, The Men With the Pink Triangle, by Heinz Heger, which was reissued last year by Alyson Publications.

By a coincidence that still astonishes him, Dr. Muller said, Prisoner X. Y. — “the best documented homosexual inmate of a camp” — turned out to be Mr. [Josef] Kohout.


The Men With the Pink Triangle inspired the play Bent, later made into a motion picture.

After his arrest in 1939, Mr. Kohout was taken to the Sachsenhausen camp and served at the Klinker brickworks, which he called “the ‘Auschwitz’ for homosexuals.” Prisoners who were not beaten to death could easily be killed by heavy carts barreling down the steep incline of the clay pits.

In 1940, he was transferred to Flossenburg. On Christmas Eve 1941 inmates were made to sing carols in front at a 30-foot-high Christmas tree on the parade ground. Flanking it were gallows from which eight Russian prisoners had been hanging since morning. “Whenever I hear a carol sung –no matter how beautifully — I remember the Christmas tree at Flossenburg with its grisly ‘decorations,’ ” he wrote.

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1799: Isaac Yeshurun Sasportas, anti-slavery insurrectionist

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On this date in 1799, Portuguese Jew Isaac Yeshurun Sasportas was publicly hanged in Kingston for attempting to incite a slave revolt in the British colony of Jamaica.

Here in a revolutionary age, probably no insurrection could terrify Europe’s ancien regimes like the Haitian Revolution.

History’s most successful slave revolt, the rising that seized Saint-Domingue from the French conceivably threatened — if it should spread — the entire material foundation of Europe’s colonial exploitation, and the racist intellectual superstructure that justified it.

This nightmare of crowned heads was also the dream of the epoch’s visionaries, and the subject of a struggle whose victims included Isaac Yeshurun Sasportas among many, many others.

Domingue if I do

An insurrection of Caribbean slaves against European exploiters had obvious appeal to their brethren groaning at the bottom of the Atlantic economy. In “Saint Domingue in Virginia: Ideology, Local Meanings, and Resistance to Slavery, 1790-1800” (Journal of Southern History, Aug. 1997) James Sidbury explores the (to whites) nerve-wracking arrival in that U.S. state of both news and refugees from revolutionary Saint-Domingue.

In 1793 Willis Wilson complained to Governor Lee of the “defenceless situation” of the town of Portsmouth, whose militia lacked arms and whose streets contained “many hundreds [of] French Negroes” including, Wilson had been “inform’d,” many who “belong[ed] tothe insurrection of Hispaniola.” … a commander at the state arsenal of Point of Fork — located on the James River west of Richmond and southesat of Charlottesville — reported dangerous “conversations amount the “people of colour” … “particularly since the Arrival of the French from C[ap] F[rancois],” Saint Domingue.

While these currents carried along Gabriel Prosser and a young Denmark Vesey, they also swept up men who were not slaves at all.

Isaac Sasportas, the nephew of a prominent Charleston trader (said trader’s 200-year-old home still stands there), was himself a wealthy Caribbean shipper who in the 1790s seems to have taken a nearly professional interest in revolution. After trying and failing to re-ignite a rebellion in Dutch Curacao, he started zeroing in on Haiti’s next-door neighbor, the brutal British sugar colony of Jamaica. Distinguished as it was by a running history of slave revolts, it was a natural target for the fin de siecle‘s savvy revolution-exporter.

Sasportas landed there in 1799 under cover of his gadabout-merchant act to reconnoiter British defenses and make contact with the island’s maroons.

Diplomatic L’Ouverture

The Haitian Revolution’s progress through the 1790s and into the first years of the 19th century was itself a complicated political process entailing the realest of realpolitik. Here was a colony surrounded by rival empires’ outposts, whose home country was itself engulfed in revolution. This could, and did, cut a lot of different ways.

Legendary national liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture agreed to work with the French revolutionary government in April 1793 to repel the inroads of Brits, who smelled an opportunity to swipe the lucrative colony. Alliance with the French (L’Ouverture’s black regiments served under French colors) came in exchange for the French recognizing emancipation. Win-win.

But the script had flipped by the last years of the decade.

Toussaint L’Ouverture reveals to British officer Thomas Maitland papers from the French representative d’Hedouville.

In 1798, the British were evacuating their Saint-Domingue enclaves … and L’Ouverture, now the Bonaparte figure of a somewhat autonomous polity, had to maneuver it regionally vis-a-vis its neighbors.

Fomenting slave rebellions willy-nilly was not on his agenda. Indeed, “one could even describe Louverture, in the diplomatic field, as an active impediment to the spread of emancipation.”*

So far was the former slave L’Ouverture from anti-slavery firebrand that in 1798-99 he made arrangements with the slave powers Britain and the United States, helping them oppose the French. And when the French envoy went to work on the grab-Jamaica scheme with Sasportas as an agent — Paris now being the one to smell an opportunity to steal a rival’s colony — L’Ouverture found it expedient to play along whilst quietly tipping the British to the whole plot. In effect, L’Ouverture shopped Sasportas.

Louverture could have used his newfound power to advocate independence and emancipation across the Caribbean; he decided otherwise.

Napoleon Bonaparte and other French leaders hoped that Louverture would turn Saint-Domingue into the centerpiece of a revolutionary French empire in the Americas. With an army of twenty thousand veteran black soldiers, Louverture could have threatened France’s enemies in North America, most notably British Jamaica and the United States. But Louverture declined the offer, choosing instead to sign secret treaies of nonaggression and commerce with these two countries in 1799 …

That same year, the French agent Roume drafted an ambitious plan to use part of Louverture’s army to invade British Jamaica. After the landing, Roume redicted, Jamaica’s slaves would revolt and join local maroons and Dominguian liberators on a victorious march to Kingston. Dominguian troops would become heralds of freedom, France would acquire a lucrative colony at little cost, and the expedition would deal a mortal blow to British commerce. Louverture acquiesced in public, but in private he notified British and U.S. authorities of Roume’s bellicose plans. England subsequently captured France’s secret agent in Jamaica, a French Jew named Isaac Sasportas, and the entire venture foundered. Having apparently concluded that an expedition would divert key troops and resources that were needed to secure his power base in Saint-Domingue, Louverture chose to sacrifice the Jamaiacans’ freedom on the altar of his own ambitions. Jamaican slaves would remain in bondage until 1834.

– From Haiti: The Tumultuous History — From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation

Haiti the Game

Whether one rates it as dextrous statecraft or unconscionble betrayal, L’Ouverture’s maneuvering to maintain a scope of action for himself and his fledgling nation would continue until 1802. It featured brutal continuation of Haiti’s cash crop plantation economy — now worked by cultivateurs supporting black elites, instead of slaves supporting French elites — rough suppression of labor protests, high-minded assertion of racial equality, and unsentimental diplomatic skullduggery shifting arrangents among France, Britain, and the U.S. He even bought slaves to regenerate the half-island’s labor force, decimated by years of warfare.

In the end, this Bonaparte of Haiti was undone by the Bonaparte of France** in 1802, with the full support of the British. During a lull in those nations’ hostilities, they found frank agreement that “Toussaint’s black empire” was to neither’s liking — and “We both want to destroy Jacobinism, especially that of the blacks”.† L’Ouverture played the diplomatic game very adroitly, but he had no card to match a mutual agreement of white privilege among his opposite numbers.

Toussaint L’Ouverture died of pneumonia in a French dungeon … but his countrymen rallied against the French incursion and completed the Haitian Revolution. Its independence day is January 1, 1804.‡

* Philippe R. Girard, “Black Talleyrand: Toussaint Louverture’s Diplomacy, 1798-1802,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Jan. 2009

** Napoleon’s wife Josephine was herself of Caribbean aristocratic stock: she grew up on her family’s sugar plantation in Martinique.

† Prime Minister Henry Addington, as quoted in The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801-1804. Thomas Jefferson, fretting “another Algiers in the seas of America,” also kinda-sorta went along with the idea, although Jefferson was at least equally concerned about a potential French resurgence keyed by its unruly Caribbean base; for America, this politicking set up the Louisiana Purchase, and that transaction was considerably facilitated by the French failure to re-establish control in Haiti after arresting L’Ouverture.

‡ In one last warped expression of colonialism — and a dreadful preview of the ruinous debt peonage more familiar to our present day — Haiti had to pay “reparations” to France for the loss to the French empire of itself, Haiti. It made these payments until 1947. France has no plans to repair the reparations.

On this day..