Freed slave leaders were converted into police who returned insurgents to plantations

Evidence

Having at last realized that times had changed, however, they made an important concession to the slave insurgents, granting freedom to several hundred of their leaders. This promise came with one condition: that the leaders allow themselves to be organized into a police unit to keep order on the plantations from which many of their followers had come. Among those included was Hyacinthe, whose success in keeping order in Cul-de- Sac highlighted the effectiveness of employing formerly enslaved leaders to contain slave resistance. The Republican commissioner Philippe Rose Roume de Saint-Laurent noted with satisfaction that these slaves-turnedpolice spread out among the plantations like “preachers,” and that their success in restoring order amply justified the decision to grant them freedom. Men who had led slaves into war now helped lead them back to work. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 474

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The absorption of insurgent leaders into the apparatus of control they had fought against is a dense paradox about how emancipation and containment were braided together from the start.
• SEED: A portrait of Hyacinthe — the slave general made policeman — could anchor an essay on how revolutions co-opt their own vanguard.