Military service transformed former slaves’ status so profoundly that social roles inverted

Evidence

But the rank-andfile soldiers who carried out his orders must have done so with some anxiety. For in Louverture’s order, the only real alternative to military service available to former slaves was plantation labor. After years of war, many soldiers disdained those who worked on the plantations, whom they called “garden negroes,” “poor devils,” and, using the old term for recently arrived Africans in the colony, bossales. One former slave, a captain named 220 av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d Patience, had come so far from the plantation that in 1802 he had his former master serving under him as his lieutenant. Indeed many black officers commanded white soldiers, sometimes former masters, throughout the colony. Soldiers who had seen their lives transformed through military service were understandably anxious that they might be demobilized and have to put down their guns and pick up hoes once again. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 771

Categorization

• XREF: The inversion of master and slave (Patience commanding his former master) resonates with the broader theme of revolutionary social transformation.