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From The American Historical Review Vol. 105, Issue 1.
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AHR Forum
The Haitian Revolution
FRANKLIN W. KNIGHT
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The Haitian Revolution represents the most thorough case study of revolutionary
change anywhere in the history of the modern world.1 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 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 1
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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. 2
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. 3
Within fifteen turbulent years, a colony of coerced and exploited slaves successfully
liberated themselves and radically and permanently transformed things. It was
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 independent 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 Simón Bolívar,
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.11 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 plantation 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 4
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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. 5
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 unconventional 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 6
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 7
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 (1735–1813). Antislavery movements flourished both in the metropolis
and in the colonies.21 In 1787, Abbé Grégoire (1750–1831),
Abbé Raynal (1713–1796), the marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834),
and others formed an antislavery committee in France called the Société
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. 8
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 9
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 10
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 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
11
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-called petits 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 terminology—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 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 12
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. 13
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, 14
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.
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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.
15
The basic divisions of French society derived from socioeconomic class distinctions.
The popular slogans generated by the revolution—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
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. 16
The confusion sprung from two foundations. In the first place, the reports
of grievances (cahiers de doléances) 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
geographically. 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 17
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 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
metropolitan constituency and overseas colonial interests.41 18
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. 19
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. 20
The precedent set by the superordinate free groups was not lost on the slaves,
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. 21
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. 22
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 Léger
Félicité 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 Louverture. 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 André Rigaud and Alexander Pétion 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. 23
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:
24 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 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 . . . 25
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 26
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. 27
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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 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. 28
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 metropolitan 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 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. 29
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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 Century (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 History, 1740–1840 by Oscar Zanetti and
Alejandro Garc|f8a (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.
Notes
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 Underdevelopment since 1700 (Boulder, Colo., 1989); Carolyn Fick,
The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution 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 University,
1988); David Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of
Saint Domingue 1793–1798 (London, 1982); Geggus, "The Haitian Revolution,"
in The Modern 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); François Girod, De la société Creole: Saint-Domingue
au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1972); Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl,
Written in Blood: The Story 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'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; New York, 1963); David Nicholls,
From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti
(Cambridge, 1979); Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804 (Knoxville,
1973); George Tyson, Jr., ed., Toussaint L'Ouverture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1973); M. L. E. Moreau de Saint Méry, Description topographique, physique,
civil, politique et historique de la partie Française de l'isle de Saint
Domingue (Philadelphia, 1796); P, My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee
from Two Revolutions, Althéa de Peuch Parham, ed. and trans. (Baton Rouge,
1959).
2 See especially Jorge I. Domínguez, Insurrection 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.
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 Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution,
1750–1831" (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1998).
5 Franklin 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 Domínguez, Insurrection or Loyalty,
55–56, 151–60.
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 Fragmented Nationalism,
2d edn. (New York, 1990), 196–219.
15 See Gaspar and Geggus, Turbulent Time.
16 These changes have been examined more thoroughly in Atlantic Port Cities:
Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 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 Slavery 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, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 99–100.
21 Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (London, 1974).
22 Ruth F. Necheles, The Abbé Grégoire, 1787–1831: The Odyssey
of an Egalitarian (Westport, Conn., 1971), 71–90.
23 See, for example, Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1944); Robert Louis Stein, The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century
(Baton Rouge, La., 1988); and Patrick Villiers, "The Slave and Colonial
Trade in France Just before the Revolution," in Slavery and 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 Slavery Pay? Hugh G. J. Aitken, ed. (Boston, 1971); Robert Fogel
and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro
Slavery (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
28 Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 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 Census (Madison, Wis.,
1969); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Formation of the Atlantic World,
1450–1680 (Cambridge, 1992); Colin A. Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British
Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Urbana, Ill., 1981); Herbert
S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York, 1986);
Paul E. Lovejoy, "The Volume of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis,"
Journal 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 System; 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 Market: 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."
34 Regardless 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 Plantations 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 Slavery 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.
38 Curtin, "Declaration of the Rights of Man," 157–75.
39 Curtin, "Declaration of the Rights of Man"; Ott, Haitian Revolution,
28–75.
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.
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, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost
Sentinel of the Republic (Rutherford, N.J., 1985).
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.
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 Martínez-Fernández,
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, 1783–1962 (Kingston, 1981), 25–51; 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, Visión general de la historia dominicana (Santo Domingo,
1978), 125–78.
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