The white-free-colored civil war eroded slave-master authority across the Artibonite

Evidence

In the west, where conflicts between whites and free-coloreds had been raging since the disintegration of the various “Concordats” signed in 1791, slaves were also increasingly recruited as auxiliaries. Port-au-Prince, still the stronghold of the white radicals, was under siege by the troops of free-coloreds. But the latter had enemies outside the town as well. In the Artibonite region a planter named Claude Isaac Borel—who was a representative in the Colonial Assembly—turned his plantation into an armed camp and, fighting under a red flag, launched attacks against free-coloreds in the area. He transformed the community of white saltmakers who lived in the region into an armed band to fight with him. In the face of Borel’s successes, free-coloreds in the region began recruiting slaves from local plantations. As in the south, when the slave drivers on certain plantations refused to cooperate, the free-coloreds sometimes killed them. The civil war profoundly undermined the authority of masters in the Artibonite plain and created new fissures in the system that held slaves in check. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 464