Vincent Ogé

Vincent Ogé was born around 1755 in the parish of Dondon, in the northern hills of Saint-Domingue, the French colony that would become Haiti. His mother, Angélique Ossé, was a free woman of color, and his father, Jacques Ogé, was a Frenchman; the family was tied to the coffee wealth of the region, holding property in Dondon. As a boy he was sent across the Atlantic to Bordeaux to be apprenticed as a goldsmith, and after some seven years he returned to the colony, entering the coffee commerce and rising to become one of the wealthiest men of African descent in Cap-Français.

In 1788 Ogé traveled to Paris, arriving as the French Revolution stirred. There he took up the cause of the gens de couleur libres — the free people of color — joining the circles that pressed the National Assembly for political equality and moving among the abolitionist Amis des Noirs. In March 1790 the Assembly appeared to grant voting rights to propertied free men of color in the colonies, and Ogé returned home to see the promise honored.

The colonial government in Saint-Domingue refused. In October 1790, Ogé, joined by Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, gathered several hundred free men of color and rose in arms to demand the rights the law had named. Defeated, the two crossed into Spanish territory, but the Spanish authorities surrendered them to the French. On 6 February 1791, in the public square of Cap-Français, Vincent Ogé was executed by being broken on the wheel.

His death did not end the struggle; it ignited it. The cruelty of his execution shamed the Assembly toward recognizing free-colored rights and helped kindle the uprising that became the Haitian Revolution months later. We honor Vincent Ogé, who paid with his body for a dignity the law owed his people, and whose blood watered the road to freedom.