André Rigaud

[close] Benoit Joseph André Rigaud (1761 - 1811) was the leading mulatto military leader during the Haitian Revolution. Among his protégés were Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Pierre Boyer, both future presidents of Haïti.

Rigaud was born in Les Cayes to André Rigaud, a wealthy French planter, and Rose Bossy Depa, a slave woman. His father acknowledged the mixed-race (mulatto) boy as his at a young age and sent him to Bordeaux, where he was trained as a goldsmith.

After returning to Saint-Domingue from France, Rigaud became active in politics. He was a successor to Vincent Ogé and Julien Raimond as a champion of the interests of free people of color in Saint-Domingue, as colonial Haïti was known. Rigaud aligned himself with revolutionary France and an interpretation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen that ensured the civil equality of all free people.

By the mid-1790s, with slave uprisings in the North, Rigaud was leading an army, a force in the Ouest and Sud departments. He was given authority to govern by Étienne Polverel, one of the three French civil commissioners who had arrived in the colony. Rigaud's power came from his influence with the free black and mulatto planters, found mostly in the South. They were fearful of the masses of former slaves, led by the likes of Romaine-la-Prophétesse, with whom Rigaud refused to ally and sided instead with the French commissioners, who abolished slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1793. Rigaud's soldiers included blacks and whites.

In the South and the West, from 1793 to 1798, Rigaud aided in Toussaint Louverture's decision to re-establish the plantation economy (albeit with paid labor as opposed to slave labor). Although Rigaud respected Louverture, the leading general of the former black slaves of the North and his superior rank in the French Revolutionary Army, he did not want to concede power in the South to him. Rigaud continued to believe in Saint-Domingue's race-based caste system, which put mulattoes just below whites and left blacks at the bottom, a belief that put him at odds with Toussaint. That led to the bitter "War of Knives" (La Guerre des Couteaux) in June 1799, when Toussaint's army invaded Rigaud's territory. The Comte d'Hédouville, sent by France to govern the island, encouraged Rigaud's rivalry with Toussaint.

In 1800, Rigaud left Saint-Domingue for France after his defeat by Toussaint. On 1 October 1800, bound for France aboard the French schooner Diana, Rigaud became a prisoner-of-war when the Diana was captured by the USS Experiment. He was detained in Saint Kitts by the Americans and held there until he was released.