Free-colored leaders betrayed their slave allies, the Swiss, to execution and starvation

Evidence

Many free-coloreds supported a proposal by 120 av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d which the Swiss would be freed but forced to serve eight years in the maréchaussée. But the white patriots in Port-au-Prince were against any such action, convinced that rewarding rebellious slaves with freedom was a bad precedent. Although a number of free-coloreds, including André Rigaud, spoke out in defense of the Swiss, the free-colored leadership, led by their more conservative leaders such as Pierre Pinchinat, acquiesced in the decision of the administrators of Port-au-Prince: the Swiss were to be deported. “I knew all along that the blacks would get screwed,” one disgusted slave in Port-au-Prince exclaimed. He was right: the Swiss were to be sent to the Mosquito Coast of Central America, a place where, as one planter wrote, “even the devil couldn’t survive.” In fact, though, they suffered a worse fate. The captain who was supposed to bring them to the Mosquito Coast tried, and failed, to sell them in Belize, then dumped them along the shore of Jamaica. The British, alarmed at the prospect of having such slaves in their colony, shipped them back to Saint-Domingue. There, imprisoned in a boat in a remote harbor under the watch of French soldiers, sixty were executed, and most of the rest died of sickness and starvation. It was a tragic betrayal that would not be forgotten, and a taste of the internal conflicts among different groups of African descent in the colony that were to come. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 409

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• SEED: Angle: how revolutionary coalitions across racial lines fracture over the question of slave emancipation — a pattern that predicts later ruptures between free-coloreds and former slaves in the revolution.
• XREF: Connects to later chapters where the tension between free-coloreds and enslaved insurgents recurs, and recalls the discrimination slave leaders faced from their lighter-skinned allies.

Related

• Rebel slaves who aided free-coloreds were betrayed and massacred (similarity 0.89)
• Free colored leaders had repeatedly betrayed or killed black insurgent commanders (similarity 0.81)
• Free-coloreds recruited rebel slaves, named the Swiss, for military service (similarity 0.81)
• Free-coloreds struck alliances with rebel slaves and burned white troops to death (similarity 0.79)
• Slaves joined free-colored armies despite knowing prior allies had died for nothing (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Free-colored leaders betrayed their rebel slave allies by agreeing to their deportation #corroborates (0.90)