Assignment 250 words

The Haitian Revolution

Author(s): Franklin W. Knight

Source: The American Historical Review , Feb., 2000, Vol. 105, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 103-115

Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association

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The Haitian Revolution

FRANKLIN W. KNIGHT

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION represents the most thorough case study of revolutionary

change anywhere in the history of the modern world.' In ten years of sustained

internal and international warfare, a colony populated predominantly by plantation

slaves overthrew both its colonial status and its economic system and established a

new political state of entirely free individuals-with some ex-slaves constituting the

new political authority. As only the second state to declare its independence in the

Americas, Haiti had no viable administrative models to follow. The British North

Americans who declared their independence in 1776 left slavery intact, and theirs

was more a political revolution than a social and economic one. The success of Haiti

against all odds made social revolutions a sensitive issue among the leaders of

political revolt elsewhere in the Americas during the final years of the eighteenth

century and the first decades of the nineteenth century.2 Yet the genesis of the

Haitian Revolution cannot be separated from the wider concomitant events of the

later eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Indeed, the period between 1750 and 1850

represented an age of spontaneous, interrelated revolutions, and events in Saint

1 The bibliography on the Haitian Revolution is large and growing. For a sample, see Colin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, 1988); Philip D. Curtin, "The Declaration of the Rights of Man in Saint-Domingue, 1788-1791," Hispanic American Historical Review 30 (May 1950): 157-75; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), 27-179; Alex Dupuy, Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevel- opment since 1700 (Boulder, Colo., 1989); Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Dominglue Revollution from Below (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990); John Garrigus, "A Struggle for Respect: The Free Coloreds in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue, 1760-69" (PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins Univer- sity, 1988); David Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occlupation of Saint Domingue 1793-1798 (London, 1982); Geggus, "The Haitian Revolution," in The Modemn Caribbean, Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer, eds. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), 21-50; Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge,

La., 1979); Franqois Girod, De la societe Creole: Saint-Dorningue au XVIIII siecle (Paris, 1972); Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Stoty of the Haitian People, 1492-1971 (Boston, 1978); Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, 1988); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Oluverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; New York, 1963); David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Cololur and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge, 1979); Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789-1804 (Knoxville, 1973); George Tyson, Jr., ed., Tolussaint L'Ouverture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973); M. L. E. Moreau de Saint Mery, Description topographiqlue, physiqlue, civil, politiqlue et historique de la partie Francaise de l'isle de Saint Domingue (Philadelphia, 1796); P, My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refuigee fiom Two Revolutions, Althea de Peuch Parham, ed. and trans. (Baton Rouge, 1959).

2 See especially Jorge I. Dominguez, Inslurrection or Loyalty: The Breakdown of the Spanish American Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 146-69; Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850 (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 159-77.

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104 Franklin W. Knight

Domingue/Haiti constitute an integral-though often overlooked-part of the

history of that larger sphere.3 These multi-faceted revolutions combined to alter the

way individuals and groups saw themselves and their place in the world.4 But, even

more, the intellectual changes of the period instilled in some political leaders a

confidence (not new in the eighteenth century, but far more generalized than

before) that creation and creativity were not exclusively divine or accidental

attributes, and that both general societies and individual conditions could be

rationally engineered.5

ALTHOUGH THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY was experiencing a widespread revolutionary

situation, not all of it ended in full-blown, convulsing revolutions.6 But everywhere,

the old order was being challenged. New ideas, new circumstances, and new peoples

combined to create a portentously "turbulent time."7 Bryan Edwards, a sensitive

English planter in Jamaica and articulate member of the British Parliament,

lamented in a speech to that body in 1798 that "a spirit of subversion had gone forth

that set at naught the wisdom of our ancestors and the lessons of experience."8 But

if Edwards's lament was for the passing of his familiar, cruel, and constricted world

of privileged planters and exploited slaves, it was certainly not the only view.

For the vast majority of workers on the far-flung plantations under the tropical

sun of the Americas, the revolutionary situation presented an opportunity to change

fundamentally their personal world, and maybe the world of others equally

unfortunate.9 Nowhere was the contrast sharper than in the productive and

extremely valuable French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue between 1789 and

1804. The hundreds of thousands of African slaves and tens of thousands of legally

defined free coloreds found the hallowed wisdom and experiential "lessons" of

Bryan Edwards to be a despicably inconvenient barrier to their quest for individual

and collective liberty. Their sentiments were motivated not only by a difference of

geography and culture but also by a difference of race and condition.

Within fifteen turbulent years, a colony of coerced and exploited slaves success- fully liberated themselves and radically and permanently transformed things. It was

3 See R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1959); Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution; James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of Revolutionary Faith (New York, 1980).

4 For an example, see Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "Regenerating France, Regenerating the World: The Abbe Gr6goire and the French Revolution, 1750-1831" (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1998).

5Franklin W. Knight, "The Disintegration of the Slave Systems, 1772-1886," in General History of the Caribbean, Vol. 3: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, Knight, ed. (London, 1997), 322-45.

6 A case in point is England, where the revolutionary situation was diffused through reformist politics.

7 The phrase is taken from the title of A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds. (Bloomington, Ind., 1997).

8 Quoted in J. H. Parry, Philip Sherlock, and Anthony Maingot, A Short History of the West Indies, 4th edn. (New York, 1987), 136.

9 The quest for individual and collective freedom was widespread among all slaves, and occasionally new views of society and social relations embraced both slave and free, but rarely did these revolts involve the establishment of a state as in the case of Haiti. In Coro in western Venezuela in 1795, a free republic was declared that would have fundamentally altered the social status quo, but it had a very short existence. See Dominguez, Insurrection or Loyalty, 55-56, 151-60.

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The Haitian Revolution 105

a unique case in the history of the Americas: a thorough revolution that resulted in

a complete metamorphosis in the social, political, intellectual, and economic life of

the colony. Socially, the lowest order of the society-slaves-became equal, free,

and independent citizens. Politically, the new citizens created the second indepen-

dent state in the Americas, the first independent non-European state to be carved

out of the European universal empires anywhere. The Haitian model of state

formation drove xenophobic fear into the hearts of all whites from Boston to

Buenos Aires and shattered their complacency about the unquestioned superiority

of their own political models.10 To Simon Bolivar, himself of partial African

ancestry, it was the Euro-American model of revolution that was to be avoided by

the Spanish-American states seeking their independence after 1810, and he

suggested the best way was to free all slaves.1" Intellectually, the ex-colonists gave

themselves a new name-Haitians-and defined all Haitians as "black," thereby

giving a psychological blow to the emerging intellectual traditions of an increasingly

racist Europe and North America that saw a hierarchical world eternally dominated

by types representative of their own somatic images. In Haiti, all citizens were

legally equal, regardless of color, race, or condition. Equally important, the

example of Haiti convincingly refuted the ridiculous notion that still endures among

some social scientists at the end of the twentieth century that slavery produced

"social death" among slaves and persons of African descent.12 And in the economic

sphere, the Haitians dramatically transformed their conventional tropical planta-

tion agriculture, especially in the north, from a structure dominated by large estates

(latifundia) into a society of minifundist, or small-scale, marginal self-sufficient

producers, who reoriented away from export dependency toward an internal

marketing system supplemented by a minor export sector.13 These changes,

however, were not accomplished without extremely painful dislocations and severe

long-term repercussions for both the state and the society.14

10 See John Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, 1808-1826 (New York, 1973). 11 Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 196-200. 12 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). The

idea may also be found in Fick, Making of Haiti, 27: "To assure the submission of slaves and the mastership of the owners, slaves were introduced into the colony and eventually integrated into the plantation labor system within an overall context of social alienation and psychological, as well as physical violence. Parental and kinship ties were broken; their names were changed; their bodies were branded with red-hot irons to designate their new owners; and the slave who was once a socially integrated member of a structured community in Africa had, in a matter of months, become what has been termed a 'socially dead person.'" It is hard to accept such a totally nullifying experience for Africans in the Americas for two reasons. The first is that Africans constructed the new American communities along with their non-African colonists, and permanently endowed the new creations with a wide array of influences from speech to cuisine to music to new technology. The various bodies of slave laws were a patent recognition that although slaves were property, they were also people requiring severe police control measures. Non-Africans established social contacts with them, and their mating produced a melange of demographic hybridity throughout the Americas. In the second place, Africans produced offspring in the Americas, and these formed viable communities everywhere-communities that were duly recognized in law and custom. The development of viable Afro-American communities throughout the Americas does not in any way negate the fact that slavery was a dehumanizing experience permeated with violence and exploitation. Nevertheless, the image of "social death" is greatly exaggerated.

13 Dupuy, Haiti in the World Economy, 55-57. 14 Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fr-agmented Nationalism, 2d edn. (New York,

1990), 196-219.

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106 Franklin W. Knight

IF THE ORIGINS OF THE REVOLUTION in Saint Domingue lie in the broader changes of

the Atlantic world during the eighteenth century, the immediate precipitants must

be found in the French Revolution.15 The symbiotic relationship between the two

were extremely strong and will be discussed later, but both resulted from the

construction of a newly integrated Atlantic community in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries.

The broader movements of empire building in the Atlantic world produced the

dynamic catalyst for change that fomented political independence in the United

States between 1776 and 1783. Even before that, ideas of the Enlightenment had

agitated the political structures on both sides of the Atlantic, overtly challenging the

traditional mercantilist notions of imperial administration and appropriating and

legitimating the unorthodox free trading of previously defined interlopers and

smugglers.16 The Enlightenment proposed a rational basis for reorganizing state,

society, and nation. 17 The leading thinkers promoted and popularized new ideas of

individual and collective liberty, of political rights, and of class equality-and even,

to a certain extent, of social democracy-that eventually included some unconven-

tional thoughts about slavery.18 But their concepts of the state remained rooted in

the traditional western European social experience, which did not accommodate

itself easily to the current reality of the tropical American world, as Peggy Liss

shows in her insightful study Atlantic Empires.19

Questions about the moral, religious, and economic justifications for slavery and

the slave society formed part of this range of innovative ideas. Eventually, these

questions led to changes in jurisprudence, such as the reluctantly delivered

judgment by British Chief Justice Lord William Mansfield in 1772 that the owner of

the slave James Somerset could not return him to the West Indies, implying that,

by being brought to England, Somerset had indeed become a free man. In 1778, the

courts of Scotland declared that slavery was illegal in that part of the realm.

Together with the Mansfield ruling in England, this meant that slavery could not be

considered legal in the British Isles. These legal rulings encouraged the formation

of associations and groups designed to promote amelioration in the condition of

slaves, or even the eventual abolition of the slave trade and slavery.20

Even before the declaration of political independence on the part of the British

North American colonies, slavery was under attack by a number of religious and

political leaders from, for example, the Quakers and Evangelicals, such as William

Wilberforce (1759-1833), Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), and Granville Sharp

15 See Gaspar and Geggus, Turbuilent Time. 16 These changes have been examined more thoroughly in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and

Society in the Atlantic Worild, 1650-1850, Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss, eds. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1991).

17 While there is a wide range of opinion on exactly when the Enlightenment started, there is better consensus on what it was: a major demarcation in the emergence of the modern age and the French Revolution. See Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768-1776: The First Crisis, R. Burr Litchfield, trans. (Princeton, N.J., 1989); Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1967-69).

18 See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavety in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), esp. 391-445.

19 Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713-1826 (Baltimore, Md., 1983), 105-26.

20 Blackburn, Overthr-ow of Colonial Slavety, 99-100.

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The Haitian Revolution 107

(1735-1813). Antislavery movements flourished both in the metropolis and in the

colonies.21 In 1787, Abbe Gregoire (1750-1831), Abbe Raynal (1713-1796), the marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), and others formed an antislavery committee in

France called the Societe des Amis des Noirs, which took up the issue in the

recently convened Estates General in 1789 and later pushed for broadening the

basis of citizenship in the National Assembly.22 Their benevolent proposals,

however, were overtaken by events.

The intellectual changes throughout the region cannot be separated from

changes in the Caribbean. During the eighteenth century, the Caribbean plantation

slave societies reached their apogee. British and French (mostly) absentee sugar

producers made headlines in their respective imperial capitals, drawing the

attention of political economists and moral philosophers.23 The most influential

voice among the latter was probably Adam Smith (1723-1790), whose Wealth of

Nations appeared in the auspicious year of 1776. Basing his arguments on the

comparative costs of production, Smith insisted that, "from the experience of all

ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the

end than that performed by slaves."24 Slavery, Smith further stated, was both

uneconomical and irrational not only because the plantation system was a wasteful

use of land but also because slaves cost more to maintain than free laborers.25

The plantation system had, by the middle of the eighteenth century, created some

strange communities of production throughout the Caribbean-highly artificial

constructs involving labor inputs from Africa and managerial direction from

Europe producing largely imported staples for an overseas market. These were the

plantation communities producing sugar, coffee, cotton, and tobacco.26 Elsewhere, I have referred to this unintended consequence of the sugar revolutions as the

development of exploitation societies-a tiered system of interlocking castes and

classes all determined by the necessities, structure, and rhythm of the plantations.27

French Saint Domingue prided itself, with considerable justification, on being the

richest colony in the world. According to David Geggus, Saint Domingue in the

1780s accounted for "some 40 percent of France's foreign trade, its 7,000 or so

plantations were absorbing by the 1790s also 10-15 percent of United States exports

and had important commercial links with the British and Spanish West Indies as

well. On the coastal plains of this colony little larger than Wales was grown about

two-fifths of the world's sugar, while from its mountainous interior came over half

21 Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolittion (London, 1974). 22 Ruth F. Necheles, The Abbe Gregoire, 1787-1831: The Odyssey of an Egalitarian (Westport, Conn.,

1971), 71-90.

23 See, for example, Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slave!y (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944); Robert Louis Stein, The French Sugar Buisiness in the Eighteenith Centwity (Baton Rouge, La., 1988); and Patrick Villiers, "The Slave and Colonial Trade in France Just before the Revolution," in Slavety ai,.d the Rise of the Atlantic System, Barbara L. Solow, ed. (Cambridge, 1991), 210-36.

24 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), abbrev. edn. (New York, 1974), 184. 25 The debate over relative labor costs of free and enslaved workers has not ended. See Did Slaveiy

Pay? Hugh G. J. Aitken, ed. (Boston, 1971); Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cmoss: The Economics of American Negro Slavey (Boston, 1974).

26 Except tobacco, the primary export crops were all introduced into the Americas by Europeans. Sugar cane came from India via the Mediterranean and the African Atlantic Islands. Coffee was Arabian in origin. Cotton was Egyptian.

27 Knight, Caribbean, 74-82

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108 Franklin W. Knight

the world's coffee."28 The population was structured like a typical slave plantation

exploitation society in tropical America. Approximately 25,000 white colonists,

whom we might call psychological transients, dominated the social pyramid, which

included an intermediate subordinate stratum of approximately the same number of

free, miscegenated persons referred to throughout the French Caribbean colonies

as gens de couleur, and a depressed, denigrated, servile, and exploited majority of

some 500,000 workers from Africa or of African descent.29 These demographic

proportions would have been familiar to Jamaica, Barbados, or Cuba during the

acme of their slave plantation regimes.30 The centripetal cohesive force remained

the plantations of sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo and the subsidiary activities

associated with them. The plantations, therefore, joined the local society and the

local economy with a human umbilical cord-the transatlantic slave trade-that

attached the colony to Africa. Economic viability depended on the continuous

replenishing of the labor force by importing African slaves.31 Nevertheless, the

system was both sophisticated and complex, with commercial marketing operations

that extended to several continents.32

If whites, free colored, and slaves formed the three distinct castes in the French

Caribbean colony, these caste divisions overshadowed a complex system of class and

corresponding internal class antagonisms, across all sectors of the society. Among

the whites, the class antagonism was between the successful so-called grands blancs,

with their associated hirelings-plantation overseers, artisans, and supervisors-

and the so-calledpetits blancs-small merchants' representatives, small proprietors,

and various types of hangers-on. The antagonism was palpable. At the same time,

all whites shared varying degrees of fear and mistrust of the intermediate group of

gens de couleur, but especially the economically upwardly mobile representatives of

wealth, education, and polished French culture.33 For their own part, the free

non-whites had seen their political and social abilities increasingly circumscribed

during the two or so decades before the outbreak of revolution. Their wealth and

education certainly placed them socially above the petits blancs. Yet theirs was also

an internally divided group, with a division based as much on skin color as on

genealogy. As for the slaves, all were distinguished-if that is the proper terminolo- gy-by their legal condition as the lifetime property of their masters, and were

occasionally subject to extraordinary degrees of daily control and coercion. Within the slave sector, status divisions derived from a bewildering number of factors applied

28 Geggus, Slavety, Wat; and Revoluttion, 6. 29 The demographic proportions varied considerably throughout the Caribbean. For figures, see

Knight, Caribbean, 366-67. 30 Knight, Caribbean, 120-58. 31 See Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Censtis (Madison, Wis., 1969); John Thornton,

Africa and Afiicans in the Formation of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680 (Cambridge, 1992); Colin A. Palmer, Human Cazgoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700-1739 (Urbana, Ill., 1981); Herbert S. Klein, African Slaveiy in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York, 1986); Paul E. Lovejoy, "The Volume of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis," Journial of African History 23, no. 4 (1982): 473-501; David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987).

32 See Solow, Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic Systemn; The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economics, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. (Durham, N.C., 1992); The Uncommon Ma-ket: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, eds. (New York, 1979).

33 Garrigus, "Struggle for Respect."

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The Haitian Revolution 109

in an equally bewildering number of ways: skills, gender, occupation, location

(urban or rural, household or field), relationship to production, or simply the

arbitrary whim of the master.34

The slave society was an extremely explosive society, although the tensions could

be, and were, carefully and constantly negotiated between and across the various

castes.35 While the common fact of owning slaves might have produced some

mutual interest across caste lines, that occurrence was not frequent enough or

strong enough to establish a manifest class solidarity. White and free colored

slaveowners were often insensitive to the basic humanity and civil rights of the

slaves, but they were forced nevertheless to negotiate continuously the way in which

they operated with their slaves in order to prevent the collapse of their world. Nor

did similar race and color facilitate an affinity between free non-whites and slaves.

Slaves never accepted their legal condemnation, but perpetual military resistance to

the system of plantation slavery was inherent neither to Saint Domingue in

particular nor to the Caribbean in general.36 So when and where the system broke

down resulted more from a combination of circumstances than from the inherent

revolutionary disposition of the individual artificial commercial construct.

Without the outbreak of the French Revolution, it is unlikely that the system in

Saint Domingue would have broken down in 1789. And while Haiti precipitated the

collapse of the system regionally, it seems fair to say that a system such as the

Caribbean slave system bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction and

therefore could not last indefinitely. As David Geggus points out,

More than twenty [slave revolts] occurred in the years 1789-1832, most of them in the

Greater Caribbean. Coeval with the heyday of the abolitionist movement in Europe and

chiefly associated with Creole slaves, the phenomenon emerged well before the French

abolition of slavery or the Saint-Domingue uprising, even before the declaration of the

Rights of Man. A few comparable examples occurred earlier in the century, but the series

in question began with an attempted rebellion in Martinique in August 1789. Slaves claimed

that the government in Europe had abolished slavery but that local slaveowners were

preventing the island governor from implementing the new law. The pattern would be

repeated again and again across the region for the next forty years and would culminate in

the three large-scale insurrections in Barbados, 1816, Demerara, 1823, and Jamaica, 1831.

Together with the Saint-Domingue insurrection of 1791, these were the biggest slave

rebellions in the history of the Americas.37

In the case of Saint Domingue-as later in the cases of Cuba and Puerto

Rico-abolition came from an economically weakened and politically isolated

metropolis.

34Regardless of the extreme degree of coercion, it is fatuous to insist that slavery obliterated from Africans and their descendants the ability to be creative, socially active, and even to establish some modicum of self-respect and economic status. See Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantationis of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge, La., 1993), especially its excellent bibliography.

35 Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York, 1990), 103-10, 160-69.

36 Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavety in the British West Indies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982).

37 David Patrick Geggus, "Slavery, War and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean," in Gaspar and

Geggus, Turbulent Time, 7-8.

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110 Franklin W. Knight

THE LOCAL BASES of the society and the organization of political power could not

have been more different in France and its overseas colonies. In France in 1789, the

political estates had a long tradition, and the social hierarchy was closely related to

genealogy and antiquity. In Saint Domingue, the political system was relatively new,

and the hierarchy was determined arbitrarily by race and the occupational

relationship to the plantation. Yet the novelty of the colonial situation did not

produce a separate and particular language to describe its reality, and the

limitations of a common language (that of the metropolis) created a pathetic

confusion with tragic consequences for metropolis and colony.

The basic divisions of French society derived from socioeconomic class distinc-

tions. The popular slogans generated by the revolution-Liberty, Equality, Frater-

nity and the Rights of Man-did not express sentiments equally applicable in both

metropolis and colony.38 What is more, the Estates General, and later the National

Assembly, simply could not understand how the French could be divided by a

common language. And yet they hopelessly were.

The confusion sprung from two foundations. In the first place, the reports of

grievances (cahiers de dolances) of the colonies represented overwhelmingly not

the views of a cross-section of the population but merely those of wealthy plantation

owners and merchants, especially the absentee residents in France. Moreover, as

the French were to find out eventually, the colony was quite complex geographi-

cally. The wealthy, expatriate planters of the Plain du Nord were a distinct

numerical minority. The interests and preoccupations of the middling sorts of West

Province and South Province were vastly different. In the second place, each

segment of the free population accepted the slogans of the revolution to win

acceptance in France, but they then particularized and emphasized only such

portions as applied to their individual causes. The grands blancs saw the Rights of

Man as the rights and privileges of bourgeois man, much as the framers of North

American independence in Philadelphia in 1776. Moreover, grands blancs saw

liberty not as a private affair but rather as greater colonial autonomy, especially in

economic matters. They also hoped that the metropolis would authorize more free

trade, thereby weakening the restrictive effects of the mercantilist commerce exclusif

with the mother country. Petits blancs wanted equality, that is, active citizenship for

all white persons, not just the wealthy property owners, and less bureaucratic

control over the colonies. But they stressed a fraternity based on a whiteness of skin

color that they equated with being genuinely French. Gens de couleur also wanted

equality and fraternity, but they based their claim on an equality of all free

regardless of skin color, since they fulfilled all other qualifications for active

citizenship. Slaves were not part of the initial discussion and sloganeering, but from their subsequent actions they clearly supported liberty. It was not the liberty of the

whites, however. Theirs was a personal freedom that undermined their relationship

to their masters and the plantation, and jeopardized the wealth of a considerable

number of those who were already free.39

In both France and its Caribbean colonies, the course of the revolution took

strangely parallel paths. The revolution truly began in both with the calling of the

38 Curtin, "Declaration of the Rights of Man," 157-75. 39 Curtin, "Declaration of the Rights of Man"; Ott, Haitian Revolution, 28-75.

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The Haitian Revolution 111

Estates General to Versailles in the fateful year of 1789.40 Immediately, conflict

over form and representation developed, although it affected metropolis and

colonies in different ways. In the metropolis, the Estates General, despite not

having met for 175 years, had an ancient history and tradition, albeit almost

forgotten. The various overseas colonists who assumed they were or aspired to be

Frenchmen and to participate in the deliberations and the unfolding course of

events did not really share that history and that tradition. In many ways, they were new men created by a new type of society-the plantation slave society. Their

experience was quite distinct from that of the planters and slaveowners in the

British Caribbean. In Jamaica, Edward Long was an influential and wealthy

member of British society as well as an established Jamaican planter. Bryan

Edwards was a long-serving member of the Jamaica Legislature and after 1796 a

legitimate member of the British Parliament, representing simultaneously a met-

ropolitan constituency and overseas colonial interests.41

At first, things seemed to be going well for the French colonial representatives,

as the Estates General declared itself a National Assembly in 1789 and the National

Assembly proclaimed France to be a republic in August 1792. In France, as James

Billington puts it, "the subsequent history of armed rebellion reveals a seemingly

irresistible drive toward a strong, central executive. Robespierre's twelve-man

Committee of Public Safety (1793-94), gave way to a five-man Directorate (1795-99), to a three-man Consulate, to the designation of Napoleon as First

Consul in 1799, and finally to Napoleon's coronation as emperor in 1804."42 In the

colonies, the same movement is discernible with a major difference-at least in

Saint Domingue. The consolidation of power during the period of armed rebellion gravitated toward non-whites and ended up in the hands of slaves and ex-slaves or

their descendants.

With the colonial situation far too confusing for the metropolitan legislators to resolve easily, the armed revolt in the colonies started with an attempted coup by

the grands blancs in the north who resented the petits blancs-controlled Colonial

Assembly of St. Marc (in West Province) writing a constitution for the entire colony

in 1790. Both white groups armed their slaves and prepared for war in the name of

the revolution.43 When, however, the National Assembly passed the May Decree

enfranchising propertied mulattos, they temporarily forgot their class differences and forged an uneasy alliance to forestall the revolutionary threat of racial equality.

The determined desire of the free non-whites to make a stand for their rights-also

arming their slaves for war-made the impending civil war an inevitable racial war.

The precedent set by the superordinate free groups was not lost on the slaves,

40 The French Revolution may be followed in, among others, Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989); Leo Gershoy, The French Revolution, 1789-1799 (New York, 1960); Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787-1799: From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon, Alan Forest and Colin Jones, trans. (London, 1989); Gaetano Salvemini, The French Revolution, 1788-1792, I. M. Rawson, trans. (New York, 1954).

41 On Long and Edwards, see Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (Oxford, 1971), 73-79; Elsa Goveia, A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Mexico City, 1956), 53-63.

42 Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 22. 43 Carolyn Fick, "The French Revolution in Saint-Domingue: A Triumph or a Failure?" in Gaspar

and Geggus, Turbulent Time, 53-55.

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112 Franklin W. Knight

who comprised the overwhelming majority of the population. If they could fight in

separate causes for the antagonistic free sectors of the population, they could fight

on their own behalf. And so they did. Violence, first employed by the whites,

became the common currency of political change. Finally, in August 1791, after

fighting for nearly two years on one or another side of free persons who claimed

they were fighting for liberty, the slaves of the Plain du Nord applied their fighting

to their own cause. And once they had started, they refused to settle for anything

less than full freedom for themselves. When it became clear that their emancipation

could not be sustained within the colonial political system, they created an

independent state in 1804 to secure it. It was the logical extension of the collective

slave revolt that began in 1791.

But before that could happen, Saint Domingue experienced a period of chaos

between 1792 and 1802. At one time, as many as six warring factions were in the

field simultaneously: slaves, free persons of color, petits blancs, grands blancs, and

invading Spanish and English troops, as well as the French vainly trying to restore

order and control. Alliances were made and dissolved in opportunistic succession.

As the killing increased, power slowly gravitated to the overwhelming majority of

the population-the former slaves no longer willing to continue their servility. After

1793, under the control of Pierre-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, ex-slave and

ex-slaveowner, the tide of war turned inexorably, assuring the victory of the concept

of liberty held by the slaves.44 It was duly, if temporarily, ratified by the National

Assembly. But that was neither the end of the fighting nor the end of slavery.

The victory of the slaves in 1793 was, ironically, a victory for colonialism and the

revolution in France. The leftward drift of the revolution and the implacable zeal

of its colonial administrators, especially the Jacobin commissioner Leger Felicite

Sonthonax, to eradicate all traces of counterrevolution and royalism-which he

identified with the whites-in Saint Domingue facilitated the ultimate victory of the

blacks over the whites.45 Sonthonax's role, however, does not detract from the

brilliant military leadership and political astuteness provided by Toussaint Louver-

ture. In 1797, he became governor general of the colony and in the next four years

expelled all invading forces (including the French) and gave it a remarkably modern

and democratic constitution. He also suppressed (but failed to eradicate) the revolt

of the free coloreds led by Andre Rigaud and Alexander Petion in the south,

captured the neighboring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, and freed its small

number of slaves. Saint Domingue was a new society with a new political structure.

As a reward, Toussaint Louverture made himself governor general for life, much to

the displeasure of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Why did the revolution follow such a unique course in Saint Domingue and

eventually culminate in the abolition of slavery? Carolyn Fick presents a plausible

explanation:

It can be argued therefore that the abolition of slavery in Saint Domingue resulted from

a combination of mutually reinforcing factors that fell into place at a particular historical

44 Toussaint Louverture always wrote his name without an apostrophe, although many French and non-French writers have, for reasons unknown, used L'Ouverture.

45 Robert L. Stein, Leger Felicite Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic (Rutherford, N.J., 1985).

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The Haitian Revolultion 113

juncture. No single factor or even combination of factors-including the beginning of the

French Revolution with its catalytic ideology of equality and liberty, the colonial revolt of

the planters and the free coloreds, the context of imperial warfare, and the obtrusive role of

a revolutionary abolitionist as civil commissioner-warranted the termination of slavery in

Saint Domingue in the absence of independent, militarily organized slave rebellion ...

From the vantage point of revolutionary France the abolition of slavery seems almost to

have been a by-product of the revolution and hardly an issue of pressing concerns to the

nation. It was Sonthonax who initiated the abolition of slavery in Saint Domingue, not the

Convention. In fact, France only learned that slavery had been abolished in Saint Domingue

when the colony's three deputies, Dufay, Mills, and Jean-Baptiste Mars Bellay (respectively

a white, a mulatto, and a former free black), arrived in France in January, 1794 to take their

seats and asked on February 3 that the Convention officially abolish slavery throughout the

colonies ...

The crucial link then, between the metropolitan revolution and the black revolution in

Saint Domingue seems to reside in the conjunctural and complementary elements of a

self-determined, massive slave rebellion, on the one hand, and the presence in the colony of

a practical abolitionist in the person of Sonthonax, on the other.46

Such "conjunctural and complementary elements" did not appear elsewhere in the

Americas-not even in the neighboring French colonies of Martinique and

Guadeloupe.

The reality of a semi-politically free Saint-Domingue with a free black population

ran counter to the grandiose dreams of Napoleon to reestablish a viable French-

American empire. It also created what Anthony Maingot has called a "terrified

consciousness" among the rest of the slave masters in the Americas.47 Driven by his

desire to restore slavery and disregarding the local population and its leaders,

Napoleon sent his brother-in-law General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc with

about 10,000 of the finest French troops in 1802 to accomplish his aim. It was a

disastrously futile effort. Napoleon ultimately lost the colony, his brother-in-law,

and most of the 44,000 troops eventually sent out to conduct the savage and bitter

campaign of reconquest. Although Touissant was treacherously spirited away to

exile and premature death in France, the independence of Haiti was declared by his

former lieutenant, now the new governor general, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, on

January 1, 1804. Haiti, the Caribbean, and the Americas would never be the same

as before the slave uprising of 1791.

THE IMPACT OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION was both immediate and widespread. The

antislavery fighting immediately spawned unrest throughout the region, especially in communities of Maroons in Jamaica, and among slaves in St. Kitts. It sent a wave

of immigrants flooding outward to the neighboring islands, and to the United States

and Europe. It revitalized agricultural production in Cuba and Puerto Rico. As

Alfred Hunt has shown, Haitian emigrants also profoundly affected American

language, religion, politics, culture, cuisine, architecture, medicine, and the conflict

46 Fick, "French Revolution," 67-69. 47 Anthony P. Maingot, "Haiti and the Terrified Consciousness of the Caribbean," in Ethnicity in the

Caribbean, Gert Oostindie, ed. (London, 1996), 53-80.

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114 Franklin W. Knight

over slavery, especially in Louisiana.48 Most of all, the revolution deeply affected

the psychology of the whites throughout the Atlantic world. The Haitian Revolution

undoubtedly accentuated the sensitivity to race, color, and status across the

Caribbean.

Among the political and economic elites of the neighboring Caribbean states, the

example of a black independent state as a viable alternative to the Maroon

complicated their domestic relations. The predominantly non-white lower orders of

society might have admired the achievement in Haiti, but they were conscious that

it could not be easily duplicated. "Haiti represented the living proof of the

consequences of not just black freedom," wrote Maingot, "but, indeed, black rule.

It was the latter which was feared; therefore, the former had to be curtailed if not

totally prohibited."49 The favorable coincidence of time, place, and circumstances

that produced a Haiti failed to materialize again. For the rest of white America, the

cry of "Remember Haiti" proved an effective way to restrain exuberant local desires

for political liberty, especially in slave societies. Indeed, the long delay in achieving

Cuban political independence can largely be attributed to astute Spanish metro- politan use of the "terrified consciousness" of the Cuban Creoles to a scenario like

that in Saint Domingue between 1789 and 1804.50 Nevertheless, after 1804, it would

be difficult for the local political and economic elites to continue the complacent

status quo of the mid-eighteenth century. Haiti cast an inevitable shadow over all

slave societies. Antislavery movements grew stronger and bolder, especially in

Great Britain, and the colonial slaves themselves became increasingly more restless. Most important, in the Caribbean, whites lost the confidence that they had before

1789 to maintain the slave system indefinitely. In 1808, the British abolished their

transatlantic slave trade, and they dismantled the slave system between 1834 and

1838. During that time, free non-whites (and Jews) were given political equality

with whites in many colonies. The French abolished their slave trade in 1818, although their slave system, reconstituted by 1803 in Martinique and Guadeloupe, limped on until 1848. Both British and French imperial slave systems-as well as

the Dutch and the Danish-were dismantled administratively. The same could be said for the mainland Spanish-American states and Brazil. In the United States, slavery ended abruptly in a disastrous civil war. Spain abolished slavery in Puerto

48 Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America. 49 Maingot, "Haiti," 56-57.

50 For the "Africanization of Cuba scare," see Philip S. Foner, A History of Cuba and Its Relation with the United States, 2 vols. (New York, 1963), 2: 45-85; Arthur F. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817-1886 (Austin, Tex., 1967), 115-21; Luis Martinez-Fernandez, Torn between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840-1878 (Athens, Ga., 1994), 33-40; Robert L. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, Conn., 1988), 184-86, 265-66; Gerald E. Poyo, "With All and for the Good of All": The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848-1899 (Durham, N.C., 1989), 6-7, 86. For the impact of the Haitian Revolution elsewhere in the Caribbean, see Philip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830-1865 (1952; New York, 1970); H. P. Jacobs, Sixty Years of Change, 1806-1866: Progress and Reaction in Kingston and the Countryside (Kingston, 1973), 12-37; Bridget Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 1 783-1962 (Kingston, 1981), 25-5 1; Hilary Beckles, A History of Barbados (Cambridge, 1990), 78-79; Edward L. Cox, Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada, 1763-1833 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1984), 76-100; Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National History (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1995), 91-164; Valentin Peguero and Danilo de los Santos, Visi6n general de la historia dominicana (Santo Domingo, 1978), 125-78.

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The Haitian Revolution 115

Rico (where it was not important) in 1873. The Cuban case, where slavery was

extremely important, proved far more difficult and also resulted in a long,

destructive civil war before emancipation was finally accomplished in 1886. By then, it was not the Haitian Revolution but Haiti itself that evoked negative reactions

among its neighbors.

Franklin W. Knight is Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History at

Johns Hopkins University and president of the Latin American Studies

Association. Knight's research interests focus on the general history of Latin

America and the Caribbean as well as on American slave systems. His major

publications include Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Centuiy (1970),

The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, 2d rev. edn. (1990),

The Modern Caribbean, co-edited with Colin A. Palmer (1989), Atlantic Port

Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850, co-

edited with Peggy K. Liss (1991), and The Slave Societies of the Caribbean

(1997). He was also co-translator of Sugar and Railroads, A Cuban Histoty, 1740-1840 by Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro Garcia (1998). Knight is currently

writing a monograph, Spanish American Creole Society in Cuba, 1740-1840, and the Rise of American Nationalism. This article is based on a panel presentation

at the Latin American Studies Association Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, in

1997.

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