The colony armed free people of color to police and hunt slaves.

Evidence

The colony had a special police force, the maréchaussée, whose task was to monitor slaves on plantations and in towns and to pursue runaways and attack maroon communities. By the 1730s the maréchaussée regulations stipulated that the rank-and-file troops were to be free people of color, while the officers were to be whites, though a reform in 1767 allowed free men of color to be noncommissioned officers. Those who served in these units—often drawn from local militias—received relatively low pay but were given rewards for capturing runaway slaves. Masters who wanted to free a male slave were granted an exemption from “liberty taxes” if they enlisted them in the maréchaussée, and as a result many in the force were themselves still enslaved, serving for their liberty. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 240

Categorization

• XREF: This institution — enslaved men hunting other enslaved men in exchange for their eventual liberty — parallels the use of enslaved and free Black soldiers in Roman policing and in American slave patrols; also connects to the reader’s larger question of how colonial authorities armed the very group that would later lead the revolution.
• DEFINE: Defines the maréchaussée, the colony’s slave-police force staffed by free people of color and even enslaved men buying their freedom.