* ‘Every enslaved woman who ever had sex with a white man during slavery in the US’, writes Gordon-Reed, in
* The president and vice-president were separately and indirectly elected by an electoral college; the Senate was indirectly elected by state legislatures; the House of Representatives was directly elected. The system’s noble aspirations and universal male suffrage contained a colossal flaw: slaves had no vote. The slave owners of the south negotiated a double triumph that both protected slavery and yet, for the purpose of the proportional representation of the House of Representatives, made their slaves count in their favour as three-fifths of a person. ‘I’d never have drawn my sword in the cause of America,’ said Lafayette, ‘if I had conceived I was thereby founding a land of slavery.’
* The law of Pennsylvania ruled that any slave resident for over six months was automatically freed. In Philadelphia, Washington was always accompanied by his manservants Billy Lee and Christopher Sheels, his cook Hercules and five other slaves. But he shuttled his slaves back and forth from Mount Vernon, without revealing the real reason. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘to have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them [the slaves] and the public.’ It is notable that slavery was the only matter in which Washington compromised his famous honesty.
* The Romanovs too were ready to destroy the revolution which had thrilled the Poles, hoping to create a strong monarchy and rid themselves of Russian hegemony. The old king Stanisław August placed himself at the head of their own revolution. Catherine the Great was horrified by Paris and Warsaw – ‘Better the tyranny of one man than the madness of the multitude.’ Potemkin planned to become king of Poland, but his dramatic death on a Moldavian steppe left Catherine both heartbroken and flint-hearted. First she cracked down on dissent in Russia, then she bloodily crushed the Polish revolution: 20,000 Poles were killed as Russian troops stormed Praga, a suburb of Warsaw. Shortly before her death, the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns joined her in the final carve-up of Poland. Lvov and Galicia – southern Poland, now western Ukraine – were ruled by Austria for the next two centuries. Three million Jews now found themselves under hostile Russian rule; Potemkin had been a philo-semite but the ageing, repressive Catherine confined the Jews to a ‘pale of settlement’, banned from cities to avoid clashes with her Orthodox subjects. Her successors increasingly repressed the Jews. Poland would not exist again until 1918.
* Fatiman was a central figure in Haitian history: the green-eyed daughter of an enslaved African and a French Corsican who had been a courtier of the adventurer Theodore von Neuhoff, briefly king of Corsica in the 1730s. During the Haitian revolution, she married a general, Jean-Louis Pierrot, raised to baron and prince under King Henry Christophe, before being elected president in 1845 and then appointed grand maréchal under Emperor Faustin. Cécile died at 112 in 1883. Her daughter married Haiti’s war minister and later president Pierre Alexis.
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ANTOINETTE, JOSEPHINE AND THE NATIONAL RAZOR
The night before, Louis XVI – forewarned – told the family that he would say goodbye in the morning, but when the morning came he could not bring himself to see them. His seven-year-old son, the dauphin, sobbed, ‘Let me out!’ The jailer asked him where he wished to go. ‘To talk to the people so they don’t kill my father.’
Robespierre had revealed the Bourbons’ treasonous correspondence with the invaders and called for their execution. Tried before the Convention, Louis answered each of the thirty counts, calling them ‘absurd’, and ultimately declared, ‘I always acted for the people.’ Ironically he was accused of supporting the Saint-Domingue revolution.
