André Rigaud

Dubois's Avengers of the New World situates André Rigaud as the military commander of the southern free-colored insurgency whose War of Knives against Toussaint L'Ouverture in 1799–1800 represented the sharpest expression of the conflict between the free-colored planters and the formerly enslaved Black military leadership over the direction of the revolution. Dubois reads Rigaud not simply as a mulâtre factional leader but as a figure who embodied the free-colored community's revolutionary trajectory: a Savannah veteran who had fought alongside the French, built an army from the southern free-colored planter class, and consistently refused subordination to a Black general whose base was the formerly enslaved. The War of Knives was, in Dubois's account, as much a class and color conflict as a military campaign — and Toussaint's victory decisively shifted the revolution's leadership toward the formerly enslaved.

Rigaud's War of Knives against Toussaint expressed the free-colored community's refusal of subordination to Black leadership — and Toussaint's victory decisively shifted the revolution's direction toward the formerly enslaved.

Garrigus's Before Haiti reads Rigaud as a product of the southern free-colored planter community whose decades of economic success and transatlantic political organization had formed the class Rigaud came to lead militarily. Garrigus's social history of the South Province's gens de couleur provides the structural context for understanding why Rigaud's army was so cohesive and so resistant to northern Black leadership: it was the military expression of a class that had built fortunes, educated its children in France, and fought at Savannah before the revolution gave them a stage to claim full political power. Garrigus's Rigaud is not a sectarian mulâtre but the military commander of a class with a coherent political vision — inclusion in the republican order without subordination to a leadership that represented those they had formerly enslaved.

Rigaud's army was the military expression of a class — the southern free-colored planter community — that had spent decades building the wealth and organization that the revolution allowed them to translate into political power.