Vincent Ogé (French pronunciation: [vɛ̃sɑ̃ ɔʒe]; c. 1757 – 6 February 1791) was a Saint-Domingan merchant, military officer and revolutionary who had a leading role in a failed uprising against French colonial rule in the colony of Saint-Domingue in 1790. A mixed-race member of the colonial elite, Ogé's revolt occurred just before the Haitian Revolution, which resulted in the colony's independence from France, and left a contested legacy in post-independence Haiti. Born in Saint-Domingue into a family of the planter class, Ogé was sent at the age of eleven to the city of Bordeaux, France by his parents to be apprenticed to a goldsmith. Returning to the colony after seven years, he settled down in Cap‑Français as a coffee merchant in the employ of his uncle, acquiring partial ownership of his family's plantation. By the 1780s, Ogé's business dealings had made him the richest merchant of African descent in the city. In 1788, Ogé travelled to France to both clear his debts and bring several lawsuits his family was engaged in before the Conseil du Roi. A year later, the French Revolution began, and he joined the revolutionary camp. After absentee white planters rejected his proposals for abolishing discriminatory colonial laws against free people of colour, he joined an advocacy group whose members demanded political representation in the national assembly. In March 1790, deputies of the assembly approved a law granting voting rights to free people of colour in French colonies. In the same month, Ogé returned to Saint-Domingue, where he rebelled against the colonial government after it refused to implement the law. The uprising was suppressed, and Ogé was captured and executed.
Early life Vincent Ogé was born c. 1757 in Dondon, Saint-Domingue. At the time, Saint-Domingue formed the western part of the island of Hispaniola and was under French colonial rule as part of France's colonies in the West Indies. Ogé's parents were Jacques Ogé, a white Frenchman, and Angélique Ossé, a free woman of color; he also had several brothers and sisters. The Ogé family owned a coffee plantation, which was operated by a number of enslaved labourers and provided the primary source of the family's wealth. Ossé also held a contract to supply meat to the Dondon markets. At the age of eleven, Ogé was sent to Bordeaux in France by his parents in 1768. There, he was apprenticed to a goldsmith for approximately seven years, returning to Saint-Domingue in 1775. Instead of returning to Dondon, Ogé settled down in the colonial capital of Cap‑Français, working for his uncle Vincent as a commission agent in the colony's coffee trade. During this period, Ogé acquired partial ownership of his family's slave plantation. In the 1780s, Ogé also became the owner of a merchant schooner operating out of the colony along with three of his business partners. Ogé soon expanded his commercial network, engaging in business deals with merchants in many of Saint-Domingue's major ports and working as a real estate agent in Cap‑Français, subletting valuable properties to the colonial elite. In large part due to his business dealings, Ogé eventually became the wealthiest businessman of African descent who was active in Cap‑Français during the 1780s. However, by 1788 Ogé fell deeply in debt, owing 60,000 to 70,000 livres to his creditors, and decided to relocate to Port-au-Prince with a quantity of trade goods and several slaves.
Revolutionary activities After settling down in Port-au-Prince, Ogé resumed working as a merchant, selling his goods and helping a ship's captain liquidate his cargo. However, he continued to acquire debt, though after six months he had earned 120,000 livres. Around the same time, Ogé made plans to travel to France and purchase goods to resell in Saint-Domingue and pay off his creditors. There was also the issue of construction efforts in Dondon leading to Ogé's family to file a number of lawsuits (over their slaves being injured by falling boulders), which Ogé hoped to bring before the Conseil du Roi. In 1788, he travelled to France for a second time. A year later, the French Revolution began, and Ogé, who was in Paris at the time, embraced the cause of the revolutionaries. In August 1789, he approached a group of absentee planters to discuss proposals for abolishing discriminatory laws against free people of colour in Saint-Dominingue. The planter's rejection of his proposals led Ogé to join a group of free people of colour led by white lawyer Étienne de Joly, whose members demanded representation for mulatto people from the colonies in the National Constituent Assembly. By October 1789, Ogé had enlisted as an officer in the Paris militia, joining the abolitionist Society of the Friends of the Blacks around the same period. Along with Julien Raimond, he quickly became the leaders of de Joly's group, and the public face of the political concerns of free people of colour in France. In their arguments to the National Constituent Assembly, Ogé and Raimond pushed for Black representation and total voting rights for free people of colour in Saint-Domingue. As both men were slaveholders, they expressed support for slavery's continued existence in the colonies. In March 1790, deputies of the National Constituent Assembly approved an ambiguously worded law granting full voting rights to free people of colour in French colonies. After the law had passed, Ogé returned to Saint-Domingue, travelling in secret to avoid attracting attention from hostile planters. During his journey, he made a stop in London to consult with abolitionists in Britain, including Thomas Clarkson. After meeting with Clarkson, who was sympathetic towards Ogé's arguments for rights for free people of colour, he landed in Saint-Domingue via Charleston, South Carolina. In October 1790, in the same month as his arrival in the colony, Ogé met with Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, a non-commissioned officer in the colonial militia. Together, the two men sent a letter to Governor Philibert François Rouxel de Blanchelande and the colony's assembly, demanding that the colonial government grant free people of color the full rights stipulated in the March 1790 law. However, both refused, leading to Ogé and Chavannes to conspire to overthrow the colonial government by force, gathering approximately 300 free men of color 12 miles outside Cap‑Français.
Uprising, capture and execution
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