Vincent Ogé

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Vincent Ogé the Younger is remembered as the instigator of a revolt against white colonial authority in French Saint-Domingue that lasted from October to December 1790 in the area outside Cap-Français, the colony's main city. The Ogé revolt of 1790 foretold the massive slave uprising of August 1791 that became the Haïtian Revolution.

[edit] History

Ogé was a free man of color, probably of one-quarter African descent and three-quarters French ancestry. The son of a wealthy white man, he owned valuable urban property and traded coffee and imported French products in the colony. In 1789 he was in Paris on business when the French Revolution broke out. By August of that year he had made a proposal to a group of colonial planters living in Paris to change the racial laws in the colony discriminating against wealthy light-skinned men like Ogé. Independently, Julien Raimond, with a similar background in Saint-Domingue, spoke to this group at about the same time. When their ideas were rebuffed by the colonists, the two men began to attend meetings of a group of Parisian free blacks headed by Dejoly, a white lawyer and a member of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, an anti-slavery society founded in 1788 in Paris by Jacques Pierre Brissot.

Raimond and Ogé quickly became the leaders of this group, along with Dejoly. They began to pressure the French National Assembly to give them representation and to force the colonists to allow voting rights for wealthy members of their class. Both men owned slaves back in Saint-Domingue and both claimed they did not want to weaken slavery. Instead, they said, making free men of color equal to whites would strengthen their devotion to France and make the system of slavery more secure. In October 1790 Ogé returned to Saint-Domingue, convinced that an ambiguous law on colonial voting procedures, passed in Paris the previous March, gave him the right to vote in the colony.

When he arrived back in Saint-Domingue he pressured the colonial governor and other authorities to guarantee the voting rights of wealthy free men of color. When they refused, he gathered about 300 men around him in the parish of Grande-Rivière and successfully defeated several detachments of colonial militia sent out from Cap Français to punish him.

Eventually, however, Ogé and his rebels were flushed out by a larger force of professional soldiers and forced across the border into the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo. Spanish authorities returned him to Saint-Domingue. Ogé and several of his accomplices were brutally tortured on the public square of Cap Français and dozens more men were severely punished in February 1791.