Saint-Marc. Rising of the Africans of its heights; act of Resistance to Oppression of 17 November.

A few days after Sonthonax’s arrival at Port-Républicain, the Africans of the heights of Saint-Marc rose, burning and sacking everything. They spoke of cutting the throats of the people of color, who, they had been told, did not wish them to be free. This event determined the whites and the old freedmen of the Artibonite to form at once a coalition against the civil commissioners. The inhabitants of Saint-Marc, Les Verrettes and La Petite-Rivière de l’Artibonite, with Gautier and Savary, men of color, at their head, drew up on 17 November an act entitled Resistance to Oppression, by which they abjured the authority of the civil commissioners and devoted them to public execration, while protesting their fidelity to France. They proclaimed that the aim of the coalition was to oppose the general liberty published by the civil commissioners, who, they said, practiced theft, pillage and murder as a duty; that these commissioners had exceeded their powers, and that they wished to take Saint-Domingue from France by peopling it with Africans alone. The act bore 800 signatures. Until then the confederates claimed not to disown the authority of the Convention.