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itself at war with practically all the surrounding European powers, Saint Domingue was almost the only element in the whole national economy that still produced income and generally functioned as it was supposed to. Therefore the slave system in the colony, along with its systematic discrimination against colored and black freedmen, was considered to be a necessary, if evil, exception to the libertarian and egalitarian ideology which drove the revolution at home.
    The French capital, meanwhile, had taken measures to discourage an independence movement. Children of colonists were required to seek their higher education in France, so that their ties to the homeland would be tightened during their formative years. The administration of Saint Domingue was divided between a military governor and a civilian intendant, placed in a situation of natural rivalry where each would serve as a check on the other; both reported, independently, to Paris. Intended to hamper colonial revolt, this deliberately engineered con-flict between the civilian and the military authority actually did a great deal to destabilize the colony during the last ten years of the eighteenth century.
    Conservative representatives of the colonies in Paris negotiated for Saint Domingue and the other colonial slaveholding regimes to be governed by exceptional laws that excluded the leveling terms of documents like the new French Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. At the same time, however, representatives of the free
gens de couleurvrere
lobbying for the right to vote in Saint Domingue, with the support of liberals in the home government, like the Abbe Gregoire. In 1790, what became known as the “decree of March 8” actually did extend the vote to free colored men, but in sufficiently ambiguous terms that the white government in Saint Domingue felt comfortable ignoring it.
    In October 1790, an
homme de couleumamed
Vincent Oge returned from France to Saint Domingue and raised an armed rebellion in Dondon, a town in the mountains east of Cap Francais. With his second in command, Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, and a couple of hundred other supporters, he captured the nearby town of Grande Riviere and from there sent an ultimatum to Cap Francais, demanding that the provisions of the decree of March 8 be honored for all free men of color. Other such risings sprang up here and there across the country, but after some skirmishing the rebellion was crushed. Oge and Chavannes were tortured to death in a public square in Le Cap: broken on the wheel, dismembered, their severed heads mounted on pikes as a warning. A season of equally ugly reprisals against the mulatto population followed.
    To the last, Oge insisted that he had nothing against slavery and had never had any intention to incite the slaves of Saint Domingue to join his rebellion—though some of his co-conspirators felt differently about the latter point. Certainly the Oge revolt would have had a much better chance of success with even a fraction of the great mass of black slaves behind it, but Oge was probably sincere in renouncing that idea; most free
gens de couleurvrere
as thoroughly invested in the slave system as the whites. The failure to enlist the slaves in the mulatto rebellion of 1790 was certainly a strategic mistake, though not so severe as the mis-take made by the whites. What was ultimately fatal to the whites of Saint Domingue was their obstinate refusal to make common cause with the free
gens de couleur,
whom they themselves had engendered.
    In the midst of all these disruptive events, the slave population of Saint Domingue was growing by leaps and bounds, though not because of reproductive success—far from it. For various reasons, abuse of the slaves on the French sugar plantations was extraordinarily severe— much more so than in the African diaspora as whole. The production of sugar requires the milling and refining as well as the cultivation and harvesting of cane, creating a