Rebel insurgents reused 1791 slave tactics of layered booby traps.

Evidence

The rebels at Mapou defended their camp skillfully, using the old tactics of the slave insurgents of 1791. They surrounded the approaches with traps: pits covered with branches, and boards studded with nails and covered over with leaves, which as one officer wrote pierced not just “bare feet”—of which there were many among Leclerc’s troops— but shoes. The rebels added the “barbarous refinement,” in the words of one French officer, of putting “a few rocks or pieces of wood” in front of them, requiring advancing soldiers to leap or jump down into the thin layer of vegetation they took for solid ground. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 979

Categorization

  • SEED: The continuity of specific insurgency tactics across the 1791 slave revolts and the 1802 resistance is an angle for an essay on how revolutionary military know-how transmitted within a generation.