Insurrection at Cul-de-Sac, January 1793

On January 25, 1793, an uprising of enslaved people in the Cul-de-Sac plain was directed primarily against men of color rather than against whites, with properties of free coloreds burned and their persons killed while white property was largely left untouched. Ardouin reads the episode not as a general slave insurrection but as part of the political war surrounding Port-au-Prince, in which white faction leaders weaponized the plantation world against their free-colored rivals. One of the most revealing details is the use of maroons from Bahoruco under the chief Mamzelle, whose fighters hated men of color because the latter had often pursued them as part of the maréchaussée — connecting the event to the older coercive history of the colony rather than treating January 1793 as a sudden anomaly.