Haitian Revolution - 25mm Plantation Workers/Townsfolk

Originally my Haitian Revolution project was gonna be smallish (yeh right, I can hear you laughing already) I planned on painting figures for the early slave rebellion in 1791 and up to the British intervention ending in 1798. But Col Bill changed all that, when I bought loads of unpainted French infantry for the later Wars. Cheers Stu! 

Going back to the early Slave rebellion, the slaves are all done, so I needed their enemy, the Slave owners and white people of the land ( NOT very PC I know) 

I struggled with the idea of these figures and what they'd be dressed like, as nobody actually makes them. But hey, why would they, they're a bit of a strange one. I toyed with the idea of buying some Casting Room French Revolution figures, even getting so far as getting the order into their web browser page. But in the end decided not too. As they're older figures I was a little worried about their size fitting in with Trent minis. In the end I plumped for more Trent minis, buying figures from their Italian range and their Chouans/Vendean range, I wanted 3 units of 8, so were a few figures short. So a dig into the unloved box of doom and I pulled out some Redoubt, FIW 55th foot, a Pirate and a few Foundry AWI figures. The main Plantation owner comes from Perry minis from their AWI collection.

On the night of 21 August 1791, when the slaves of Saint-Domingue rose in revolt; thousands of slaves attended a secret vodou ceremony as a tropical storm came in, the lighting and the thunder was taken as auspicious omens, and later that night, the slaves began to kill their masters and plunged the colony into civil war The signal to begin the revolt was given by Dutty Boukman, a high priest of vodou and leader of the Maroon slaves, and Cecile Fatiman during a religious ceremony at Bois Caiman on the night of 14 August. Within the next ten days, slaves had taken control of the entire Northern Province in an unprecedented slave revolt. Whites kept control of only a few isolated, fortified camps. The slaves sought revenge on their masters through "pillage, rape, torture, mutilation, and death". The long years of oppression by the planters had left many blacks with a hatred of all whites, and the revolt was marked by extreme violence from the very start. The masters and mistresses were dragged from their beds to be killed, and the heads of French children were placed on spikes that were carried at the front of the rebel columns. In the south, beginning in September, thirteen thousand slaves and rebels led by Romaine-la-Prophetesse, based in Trou Coffy, took supplies from and burned plantations and freed slaves and occupied (and burned) the area's two major cities, Leogane and Jacmel.

The planters had long feared such a revolt, and were well armed with some defensive preparations. But within weeks, the number of slaves who joined the revolt in the north reached 100,000. Within the next two months, as the violence escalated, the slaves killed 4,000 whites and burned or destroyed 180 sugar plantations and hundreds of coffee and indigo plantations.[ At least 900 coffee plantations were destroyed, and the total damage inflicted over the next two weeks amounted to 2 million francs  In September 1791, the surviving whites organised into militias and struck back, killing about 15,000 blacks.

The eagle eyed among you might have spotted some jungle terrain in the background, let me tell you, I've been a very busy boy!!!