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HAITIAN HISTORY
More is known about the Tainos’ religion because Columbus had appointed father Ramon Pane to
study their belief system. (Irving Rouse, 1992). Tainos had a system of Gods called Zemis. The two
supreme Taino deities were Yucahu, the lord of cassava and the sea and Atabey, Yucahu’ s mother,
the goddess of fresh water and human fertility. Other zemis included ancestor’s spirits and spirits
believed to be living in trees and rocks. The term "Zemis" was applied to the deities themselves and
also to any fetishes representing them. They were made from the remains of ancestors, or some
other natural objects. They believed that powerful spirits inhabited those objects. Those zemis were
kept on tables at their owners’ home. To the Tainos, the zemis controlled various functions of the
universe.
study their belief system. (Irving Rouse, 1992). Tainos had a system of Gods called Zemis. The two
supreme Taino deities were Yucahu, the lord of cassava and the sea and Atabey, Yucahu’ s mother,
the goddess of fresh water and human fertility. Other zemis included ancestor’s spirits and spirits
believed to be living in trees and rocks. The term "Zemis" was applied to the deities themselves and
also to any fetishes representing them. They were made from the remains of ancestors, or some
other natural objects. They believed that powerful spirits inhabited those objects. Those zemis were
kept on tables at their owners’ home. To the Tainos, the zemis controlled various functions of the
universe.
| There were three primary religious practices: the religious worship of the zemis themselves, the services performed by medicine men seeking advice and healing procedures from the zemis. Religious agricultural feasts were offered both in thanksgiving and petition to the zemis. During such feast the Tainos would wear special dresses and they painted their body. The priest would present the carved figures of the zemis. During the ceremonies, the cacique would seat on a wooden stool. During the ceremonies, the singing was accompanied with rhytmic drum beating. As a sign to remove all impurities from the bodies, the people would induced vomiting by "swallowing" a stick. Women would serve bread first to the zemis then to the cacique followed by the other people The Tainos believed in afterlife where the good people would be rewarded. Little is known of the Tainos. Had their civilization not been destroyed, we would have the chance to know more about the specific aspects of their life like the songs they recited and their literature. At this point we only have the testimony of the Spaniards, the Tainos first western contact (who ironically will also be responsible for their extinction) and the scientific research on their culture that thus far has not been able to produce much more than theories. |
| The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804 |
The Haitian Revolution has often been described as the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere. Slaves initiated the rebellion in 1791
and by 1803 they had succeeded in ending not just slavery but French control over the colony. The Haitian Revolution, however, was much more complex, consisting
of several revolutions going on simultaneously. These revolutions were influenced by the French revolution of 1789, which would come to represent a new concept of
human rights, universal citizenship, and participation in government.
In the 18th century, Saint Dominigue, as Haiti was then known, became France's wealthiest overseas colony, largely because of its production of sugar, coffee, indigo,
and cotton generated by an enslaved labor force. When the French revolution broke out in 1789 there were five distinct sets of interest groups in the colony. There
were white planters -- who owned the plantations and the slaves -- and petit blancs, who were artisans, shop keepers and teachers. Some of them also owned a few
slaves. Together they numbered 40,000 of the colony’s residents. Many of the whites on Saint Dominigue began to support an independence movement that began
when France imposed steep tariffs on the items imported into the colony. The planters were extremely disenchanted with France because they were forbidden to
trade with any other nation. Furthermore, the white population of Saint-Dominique did not have any representation in France. Despite their calls for independence,
both the planters and petit blancs remained committed to the institution of slavery.
The three remaining groups were of African descent, those who were free, those who were slaves, and those who had run away. There were about 30,000 free black
people in 1789. Half of them were mulatto and often they were wealthier than the petit blancs. The slave population was close to 500,000. The runaway slaves were
called maroons; they had retreated deep into the mountains of Saint Dominigue and lived off subsistence farming. Haiti had a history of slave rebellions; the slaves
were never willing to submit to their status and with their strength in numbers (10 to 1) colonial officials and planters did all that was possible to control them.
Despite the harshness and cruelty of Saint Dominigue slavery, there were slave rebellions before 1791. One plot involved the poisoning of masters.
Inspired by events in France, a number of Haitian-born revolutionary movements emerged simultaneously. They used as their inspiration the French Revolution’s
“Declaration of the Rights of Man.” The General Assembly in Paris responded by enacting legislation which gave the various colonies some autonomy at the local
level. The legislation, which called for “all local proprietors...to be active citizens,” was both ambiguous and radical. It was interpreted in Saint Dominigue as
applying only to the planter class and thus excluded petit blancs from government. Yet it allowed free citizens of color who were substantial property owners to
participate. This legislation, promulgated in Paris to keep Saint Dominigue in the colonial empire, instead generated a three-sided civil war between the planters,
free blacks and the petit blancs. However, all three groups would be challenged by the enslaved black majority which was also influenced and inspired by events in
France.
Led by former slave Toussaint l’Overture, the enslaved would act first, rebelling against the planters on August 21, 1791. By 1792 they controlled a third of the
island. Despite reinforcements from France, the area of the colony held by the rebels grew as did the violence on both sides. Before the fighting ended 100,000 of the
500,000 blacks and 24,000 of the 40,000 whites were killed. Nonetheless the former slaves managed to stave off both the French forces and the British who arrived in
1793 to conquer the colony, and who withdrew in 1798 after a series of defeats by l’Overture’s forces. By 1801 l’Overture expanded the revolution beyond Haiti,
conquering the neighboring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic). He abolished slavery in the Spanish-speaking colony and declared
himself Governor-General for life over the entire island of Hispaniola.
At that moment the Haitian Revolution had outlasted the French Revolution which had been its inspiration. Napoleon Bonaparte, now the ruler of France, dispatched
General Charles Leclerc, his brother-in-law, and 43,000 French troops to capture L’Overture and restore both French rule and slavery. L’Overture was taken and
sent to France where he died in prison in 1803. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of l’Overture’s generals and himself a former slave, led the revolutionaries at the
Battle of Vertieres on November 18, 1803 where the French forces were defeated. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared the nation independent and renamed it
Haiti. France became the first nation to recognize its independence. Haiti thus emerged as the first black republic in the world, and the second nation in the western
hemisphere (after the United States) to win its independence from a European power.
and by 1803 they had succeeded in ending not just slavery but French control over the colony. The Haitian Revolution, however, was much more complex, consisting
of several revolutions going on simultaneously. These revolutions were influenced by the French revolution of 1789, which would come to represent a new concept of
human rights, universal citizenship, and participation in government.
In the 18th century, Saint Dominigue, as Haiti was then known, became France's wealthiest overseas colony, largely because of its production of sugar, coffee, indigo,
and cotton generated by an enslaved labor force. When the French revolution broke out in 1789 there were five distinct sets of interest groups in the colony. There
were white planters -- who owned the plantations and the slaves -- and petit blancs, who were artisans, shop keepers and teachers. Some of them also owned a few
slaves. Together they numbered 40,000 of the colony’s residents. Many of the whites on Saint Dominigue began to support an independence movement that began
when France imposed steep tariffs on the items imported into the colony. The planters were extremely disenchanted with France because they were forbidden to
trade with any other nation. Furthermore, the white population of Saint-Dominique did not have any representation in France. Despite their calls for independence,
both the planters and petit blancs remained committed to the institution of slavery.
The three remaining groups were of African descent, those who were free, those who were slaves, and those who had run away. There were about 30,000 free black
people in 1789. Half of them were mulatto and often they were wealthier than the petit blancs. The slave population was close to 500,000. The runaway slaves were
called maroons; they had retreated deep into the mountains of Saint Dominigue and lived off subsistence farming. Haiti had a history of slave rebellions; the slaves
were never willing to submit to their status and with their strength in numbers (10 to 1) colonial officials and planters did all that was possible to control them.
Despite the harshness and cruelty of Saint Dominigue slavery, there were slave rebellions before 1791. One plot involved the poisoning of masters.
Inspired by events in France, a number of Haitian-born revolutionary movements emerged simultaneously. They used as their inspiration the French Revolution’s
“Declaration of the Rights of Man.” The General Assembly in Paris responded by enacting legislation which gave the various colonies some autonomy at the local
level. The legislation, which called for “all local proprietors...to be active citizens,” was both ambiguous and radical. It was interpreted in Saint Dominigue as
applying only to the planter class and thus excluded petit blancs from government. Yet it allowed free citizens of color who were substantial property owners to
participate. This legislation, promulgated in Paris to keep Saint Dominigue in the colonial empire, instead generated a three-sided civil war between the planters,
free blacks and the petit blancs. However, all three groups would be challenged by the enslaved black majority which was also influenced and inspired by events in
France.
Led by former slave Toussaint l’Overture, the enslaved would act first, rebelling against the planters on August 21, 1791. By 1792 they controlled a third of the
island. Despite reinforcements from France, the area of the colony held by the rebels grew as did the violence on both sides. Before the fighting ended 100,000 of the
500,000 blacks and 24,000 of the 40,000 whites were killed. Nonetheless the former slaves managed to stave off both the French forces and the British who arrived in
1793 to conquer the colony, and who withdrew in 1798 after a series of defeats by l’Overture’s forces. By 1801 l’Overture expanded the revolution beyond Haiti,
conquering the neighboring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic). He abolished slavery in the Spanish-speaking colony and declared
himself Governor-General for life over the entire island of Hispaniola.
At that moment the Haitian Revolution had outlasted the French Revolution which had been its inspiration. Napoleon Bonaparte, now the ruler of France, dispatched
General Charles Leclerc, his brother-in-law, and 43,000 French troops to capture L’Overture and restore both French rule and slavery. L’Overture was taken and
sent to France where he died in prison in 1803. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of l’Overture’s generals and himself a former slave, led the revolutionaries at the
Battle of Vertieres on November 18, 1803 where the French forces were defeated. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared the nation independent and renamed it
Haiti. France became the first nation to recognize its independence. Haiti thus emerged as the first black republic in the world, and the second nation in the western
hemisphere (after the United States) to win its independence from a European power.
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. 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. 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. 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. These changes, however, were not accomplished without extremely painful dislocations and severe long-term repercussions for both the state and
the society.
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. 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. The Enlightenment proposed a rational basis for reorganizing state, society, and nation. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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. 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. 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." 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.
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.
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." 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. These demographic proportions would
have been familiar to Jamaica, Barbados, or Cuba during the acme of their slave plantation regimes. 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. Nevertheless, the system was both sophisticated and complex, with commercial marketing operations that extended to several continents.
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.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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 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. 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 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.
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. 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.
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." 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. 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, 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 Haitian Revolution |
a portentously "turbulent time." Bryan Edwards, a sensitive English planter in Jamaica and articulate member of the British our
ancestors and the lessons of experience." But if Edwards's lament was for the passing of his familiar, cruel, and constricted world
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 of
privileged planters and exploited slaves, it was certainly not the only view.our ancestors and the lessons of experience." 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.
ancestors and the lessons of experience." But if Edwards's lament was for the passing of his familiar, cruel, and constricted world
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 of
privileged planters and exploited slaves, it was certainly not the only view.our ancestors and the lessons of experience." 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.
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