The governor’s suppression of free-colored demands drove them to armed revolt

Evidence

Early in August 1791 free-coloreds organized a mass political assembly in the town of Mirabalais. A well-respected, French-educated man named Pierre Pinchinat was elected president, and forty delegates were chosen to address demands for political rights to the National Assembly, as well as to local assemblies and the colony’s governor. Just as the revolt began in the Northern Province, however, the governor responded by ordering them to dissolve their “illegal” assembly. The angry free-colored assembly soon decided to take up arms. Among their leaders was André Rigaud, a goldsmith who had been educated in Bordeaux and had a long military career that, according to many accounts, stretched back to the siege at Savannah during the American Revolution. He was at the beginning of an illustrious political career that would ultimately lead him into a brutal conflict with Toussaint Louverture. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 405

Categorization

• XREF: Rigaud’s origins here prefigure his later rivalry with Toussaint Louverture, a conflict central to the revolution’s arc. — connects to: Georgia’s segregationist governor-elect advocated armed intimidation to suppress black voting in 1946 — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 60