βWalking into a European archive where colonial records are housed is largely like walking into a crime scene, but one where the criminals have unabashedly preserved, cataloged, and organized the evidence of their crimes with the utmost pride. Some of the criminals have even confessed. As I sifted through hundreds of records of plantations at the Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, and voluminous numbers of seemingly unremarkable deeds of plantation sales and exchanges, I gained a key glimpse into the illogic of colonial attitudes toward marronnage, which explains why Raimond believed that the enslaved in rebellion were still actually slaves. Fugitives from slavery who effectively freed themselves were not considered free by authorities unless their liberty was sanctioned by a corresponding deed. Among the list of enslaved people sold along with the land, buildings, equipment, and animals were the names of various βmaroons,β fugitives from slavery, who despite their absence were often included in the price of the sale of the last plantation where they were forced to labor. Consider the 1789 record of one plantation, previously owned by the colonist Clonard and left to his inheritors at his death. After the list of sixty-four men, women, and children, many openly described as being mutilated, ostensibly by their enslavers, and all described by the markings and brandings on their bodies, we observe the following clarification: βIndependent of the negroes who have just been described, there are four others to be named, Jasmin, Belhumeur, Neptune, and Venus, who are engaged in marronnage, to be noted, the negro Jasmin had been so even before his entrance onto the present plantation, and the others for several days.β Although the paragraph following this sentence noted that the above βnegroesβ were not to be considered a part of the inheritance unless they were recovered, the case of Jasmin, who was never enslaved on this plantation, is revealing. He was sold to Clonard even though he was already in a state of marronnage. [84]
βThe characterization of freedom-striving, fugitive, enslaved Africans as being in the wrong forcefully stamped white European, and especially U.S. American, characterizations of the Haitian Revolution as a βwhite massacre.β Writers from Haiti's first state governments were determined to overturn this narrative using documentary evidence. Recall that in Le SystΓ¨me colonial Vastey lamented that for years Haitians were not able to counter those who denounced their revolution as unjustified. [85] In his widely read exposΓ©, Vastey painstakingly described how the colonists of Saint-Domingue practiced some of the cruelest tortures on enslaved people in the Atlantic World. [...] Vastey's descriptions did lead some foreign readers to wonder who would dare plead the cause of the white colonists after the crimes they had committed.β
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