Haitian Revolutions

By: Douglas R. Egerton

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Haitian Revolutions

The revolution in Saint Domingue began in Paris in 1789. With the calling of the Estates General, a delegation of white Domingan planters—most of them French by birth—sailed for Europe in the hope of reducing the autocratic power of the colony's governor-general. But the delegation arrived only in time to witness the signing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, a document that spoke in the dangerous language of equality. When Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville and other leading members of the Paris Amis des Noirs (Friends of Slaves), the leading French antislavery organization, asserted that the declaration indeed extended to free mulattoes, a colonial power struggle ensued between the planters and the gens de couleur (“people of color”). With the colony's free minority at one another's throats, the door to African freedom was opened, and on the evening of 22 August 1791—later known as the Night of Fire—hundreds of slaves on the northern plain of Saint Domingue rose in revolt and began to put the plantations to the torch. Within one month rebels burned more than two hundred sugar plantations and twelve hundred coffee estates; the value of the former alone amounted to 40 million livres.

Numbers were on the side of the rebels. In 1789 the colony was home to 408,000 slaves, 20,000 free mulattoes, and 24,000 whites. By comparison, in that same year Thomas Jefferson's Virginia had a black minority of 37 percent of the population, and in the United States only South Carolina boasted a black, enslaved majority. Adding to the explosive situation, Louis XIV's Code Noir of 1685 promised the gens de couleur full French citizenship, but even those mulattoes who owned African slaves and land were excluded from the professions and never held important political positions. Many mulattoes, however, served in the colonial militia and the maréchausée, a local police force, which provided them with arms and hence the ability to later enforce their demands.

The revolt's initial leader was Boukman, a commandeur (“head driver”) and coachman on the Clément plantation. Both positions provided him with status in the slave community as well as the ability to travel about the north and spread word of the rising. But it was his role as a Vodun priest that ultimately granted him undisputed command and influence over his recruits. A massive Vodun ceremony held during a torrential rainstorm near BoisCaïman later achieved mythical status and may never have happened. But there can be little doubt that Vodun became a medium through which word of the revolt passed from plantation to plantation. Since the mid-eighteenth century, young slaves initiated into Vodun had been taught that bondpeople should rely on the power of the Supreme Being found within all African animistic faiths, rather than turn to European Christianity. As such, Vodun priests like Boukman encouraged young rebels to look within themselves to find the spiritual force necessary to face down European firearms.

Boukman fell early in battle, his head placed upon a spike as a warning to others. At length, control of the rebel forces fell to Toussaint, a forty-eight-year-old house servant and folk doctor on the Breda plantation. Shortly after Toussaint reached the age of twenty, Bayon de Libertad, the manager of Breda, gave him forty acres and thirteen slaves to manage; although no official document of manumission formally established his liberty, for more than two decades Toussaint, despite his ongoing duties as coachman, functioned as a free man. Even before that, Toussaint had learned to read and write under the tutelage of his godfather, the priest Simon Baptiste. Perhaps it was this unaccustomed access to the news of the Atlantic world that led Toussaint to demand what he regarded as the universal rights of liberty and equality. Whereas most enslaved rebels previously sought to escape the world of their captors by establishing Maroon colonies high in the mountains, Toussaint's soldiers fought to join it on equal terms. The black general, known to his men after 1793 as Toussaint Louverture (“the soldier who always found his opening”), inspired black Americans with an ideology of revolutionary violence that posed a far more dangerous threat to the plantation order than individual acts of running away and forming isolated communities in the hills, known asmarronage.

In June 1793 Louverture's armies fought their way into Le Cap François in a campaign that forced ten thousand colonials to flee Saint Domingue. When slave insurgents reached the outskirts of the city, hundreds of destitute whites boarded ships bound for the Chesapeake Bay region and the Carolinas; over time, white refugees brought no fewer than twelve thousand Domingan slaves into the United States. Within weeks Virginia residents began to worry about the impact of the Domingans on their own bondpeople. Mainland slaves needed little prodding to resist their chains, but undoubtedly Louverture's victories inspired black Americans with a symbol of militant success. Norfolk authorities immediately noticed that “our negro Slaves have become extremely insolent and troublesome” due to the influence of the “French Negroes from St. Domingo.” A resident of Richmond overheard several bondpeople plotting to seize the city in the same way that Caribbean slaves “killed the whites in the French Island and took it a little while ago.” To the north, in Albany, New York, a slave set a blaze that nearly leveled the town, in apparent imitation of the Night of Fire, and in the Brazilian city of Bahia four mulattoes were hanged and quartered for the crime of promoting “the imaginary advantages of a Democratic Republic, in which all should be equal.”

Louverture's successes also worried William Pitt the Younger, the prime minister of Great Britain. Although Great Britain was at war with France and therefore welcoming of any event that served to damage the French economy, Pitt feared that the same revolutionary currents that had reached Richmond and Bahia would infect Britain's Caribbean empire. To secure the British islands and in the hope of seizing the French jewel, General Adam Williamson and an invasion force of five thousand regulars landed in Saint Domingue in September 1793. At the same time, Spanish forces launched an offensive toward Port-au-Prince. Since the Spanish offered freedom to any French black who fought under their flag, several thousand black rebels joined the Spanish, among them, Louverture. Yellow fever and malaria decimated both European armies; to counter their losses, the English, too, promised liberty to black recruits. So many slaves responded that Pitt soon lost the support of the French planters, and as some divisions became more African than English, the entire rationale for invasion was lost.

As a way to try to maintain their hold on the oncelucrative colony, the French National Convention abolished slavery “in all the territory of the Republic” on 4 February 1794. Louverture promptly turned against his Spanish allies and drove them eastward into Santo Domingo, even as his forces also shoved the English toward the sea. By the end of 1796 British casualties approached eighty thousand men, and the war minister Henry Dundas calculated that his government had spent £4.4 million on the invasion. Although Philippe Roume was the agent of the Directory in Saint Domingue, it was General Louverture who signed the articles of peace with the British general Thomas Maitland in August 1798. England promised to vacate the island, and Louverture agreed not to allow Paris to use his black troops against Jamaica.

Louverture understood that British goodwill would last only as long as the war in Europe, yet he was also concerned about the intent of Paris. Since the composition of the Directory changed every year when a new member replaced a departing constituent, France rarely maintained a steady policy on any crucial matter. Louverture needed allies, especially allies with provisions and warships. To that end, in November 1798 he wrote to the U.S. president, John Adams, whose government was then at war with the republic to which Louverture professed loyalty. Adams responded by sending an envoy, Dr. Edward Stevens, to the colony, and in June 1799 the black general signed a secret treaty with Maitland and the United States that banned French privateers from his ports and pledged neutrality in the American-French Quasi War. Shortly thereafter, Congress reopened American trade with the ports under Louverture's control.

Saint Domingue's semi-independent status did not outlast Napoleon Bonaparte's 1799 military coup and Thomas Jefferson's election to the U.S. presidency in 1800. The premier consul wished to end Louverture's obvious moves toward independence, and the Virginia planter sought both to appease Bonaparte, from whom he hoped to purchase New Orleans, and to help crush the Caribbean symbol of black rebelliousness. Jefferson informed the French chargé d'affaires in Washington, D.C., that his government supported Bonaparte's plan “to starve out Toussaint,” and the Republican-dominated Congress reversed course and imposed a trade blockade on the colony. In February 1802 a fleet of twenty-three French ships under the command of Charles-Victor Leclerc reached Le Cap François. Although the Haitians fought well, the French invasion into the interior and Leclerc's duplicitous guarantees of black liberty began to turn the tide. Henri Christophe surrendered and joined the French forces, and Louverture came to terms with Leclerc on 1 May. Aware that the peace of Amiens had temporarily ended the war in Europe, Louverture understood that Bonaparte was free to concentrate on Saint Domingue.

Louverture was seized through treachery and died in a French dungeon at Fort Joux near the Swiss border in 1803. But yellow fever decimated the French forces. By late July 1802 French losses numbered ten thousand, among them Leclerc. In early October the remaining forces evacuated Port-au-Prince and ferried white refugees to Spanish Cuba. Ninety-two whites remained to welcome the black troops into the city, but General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a former slave, ordered them all hanged. One month later Dessalines, and his officers met in Gonaïves, voted for independence, rechristened the nation to its aboriginal name of Haiti, and named Dessalines governor-general for life. Independence took effect on 1 January 1804, and Haiti became the second sovereign republic in the Americas.

Haiti continued to inspire both fear and jubilation among inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. African Americans in New York City and Philadelphia annually celebrated the first day of January with the toast “Liberty to our African brethren in Saint Domingo and elsewhere.” In 1822 the free black abolitionist Denmark Vesey of Charleston planned to sail to Haiti after seizing the city and liberating thousands of Lowcountry slaves. Primarily for that reason, slaveholding nations in the West regarded Haiti as a political plague to be isolated. Despite once having received military aid from President Jean-Pierre Boyer, Simón Bolívar declined to invite Haiti to send delegates to his Panama Conference of 1826 for fear of alienating other Central and South American nations, who feared the spread of black liberty. Not until the Civil War, owing to the prodding of Senator Charles Sumner, did the United States normalize relations with the black republic; Frederick Douglass subsequently served as minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891.

See also Adams, John, on African Americans; Brazil; Caribbean; Denmark Vesey Conspiracy; Maroons; Resistance; Riots and Rebellions; Toussaint Louverture; and Vesey, Denmark.

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