Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (62 page)

who conspired with Aponte described having been shown these images “in

what probably amounted to lessons in the history of the Haitian Revolu-

tion.” Haiti itself was seen as a source of potential support for rebels.

“Word ran through Havana,” according to one slave in Cuba, that “generals

and captains” from Haiti had come to seek “freedom for all the slaves on

the island.” Years later Denmark Vesey, who had lived for a short time in

Saint-Domingue, would promise “his followers the help of Haitian soldiers

once they had taken over the city of Charleston.” Though Haiti’s rulers

never openly supported revolts elsewhere, some did invite any who es-

caped slavery to take refuge in their land.8

Stories of the Haitian Revolution provided “fuel” for “both sides” in

public debates on race and slavery. Many writers emphasized the barbarity

of the slave insurgents and saw the main result of their emancipation as a

descent into laziness and lawlessness, using such arguments, often effec-

tively, to defend slavery where it still existed. But James Stephen used the

example of Haiti in arguing for abolition, while another British abolitionist, William Wilberforce, corresponded with Henri Christophe. The example

of Haiti reached others as well: as he developed his theory of the master-

slave dialectic, the philosopher Hegel seems to have been influenced by

reading newspaper accounts about the revolution. As time went on, many

were inspired by the story of the Haitian Revolution and of its great leader

Toussaint Louverture, who became “the most widely known and sympa-

thetic black hero in the West.” Frederick Douglass, who served as the U.S.

ambassador to Haiti after diplomatic relations were reestablished, declared

in 1893 that when the “black sons of Haiti” had “struck for freedom,” they

had “struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.” Around the

same time the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, nearing the end of his

life, wrote a biography of Louverture, whose example had inspired him as

he successfully battled slavery in the remaining French colonies. And as

the battle for decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean began, the writer

e p i l o g u e

305

and activist C. L. R. James turned to the example of Haiti to understand

both the possibilities and the dangers of revolution.9

Through such writings, through conversations, through rumors and night-

mares and dreams, those who died for and lived through the Haitian Revo-

lution became part of every society in the Atlantic world. They continue to

speak to us, as founders in a long struggle for dignity and freedom that re-

mains incomplete. In the mountains of Haiti, looming over the northern

plain, over the ruins of Gallifet’s once prosperous plantation, Christophe’s

Citadel is still standing watch.

306

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

n o t e s

i n d e x

n o t e s

p r o l o g u e

1. Beaubrun Ardouin,
Etudes sur l’histoire d’Haïti,
11 vols. (1853–1865; reprint, Port-au-Prince, 1958), 6:9. Little is known about most of the declaration’s signers; a series of biographies was published by S. Rouzier, “Les Hommes de

l’indépendance,”
Moniteur Universelle
34–66, 1 May–18 August 1924. My thanks to Philippe Cherdieu for showing me these articles.

2. Ardouin,
Etudes sur l’histoire d’Haïti;
Thomas Madiou,
Histoire d’Haiti
(1847–48; reprint, Port-au-Prince, 1989).

3. C. L. R. James,
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San

Domingo Revolution
(1938; reprint, New York, 1963); Aimé Césaire,
Toussaint
Louverture: La Révolution et le problème colonial
(Paris, 1981), 24.

4. The major recent studies of the Haitian Revolution in English are Carolyn

Fick,
The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below
(Knoxville, 1990); David Geggus,
Slavery, War and Revolution
(Oxford, 1982) and
Haitian
Revolutionary Studies
(Bloomington, 2002); and Thomas Ott,
The Haitian Revolution
(Knoxville, 1973). The work that best places the Haitian Revolution within the broader history of the Americas is Robin Blackburn,
The Overthrow of Colonial
Slavery, 1776–1848
(London, 1989).

5. M. Dalmas,
Histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue
(Paris, 1814), 1:133.

6. The works that best define the work on “postemancipation” societies in the Americas are Rebecca Scott,
Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free
Labor, 1860–1899
(Princeton, 1985); and Thomas Holt,
The Problem of Freedom:
Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain
(Baltimore, 1992). See also the introduction and essays in Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt, and Rebecca Scott,

eds.,
Beyond Slavery: Explorations in Race, Labor, and Citizenship
(Chapel Hill, 2000).

7. Geggus,
Haitian Revolutionary Studies,
42; John Thornton, “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,”
Journal of Caribbean History
25, 1 and 2 (1991), 58–

80; idem, “I Am the Subject of the King of Kongo: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution”
Journal of World History
4 (fall 1993): 181–214; Gérard Barthélemy,
Creoles, Bossales: Conflit en Haïti
(Petit-Bourg, Guadeloupe, 2000).

8. For a model approach to the problem of writing historically about race in the Caribbean, see Ada Ferrer,
Insurgent Cuba
(Chapel Hill, 1999).

9. See Michel Rolph Trouillot,
Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of
History
(Boston, 1996), chaps. 2 and 3; see also David Barry Gaspar,
Bondsmen
and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua
(Baltimore, 1985); and João José Réis,
Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The 1835 Muslim Uprising of Bahia
(Baltimore, 1995).

1 . s p e c t e r s o f s a i n t - d o m i n g u e

1. Etienne Taillemite, “Moreau de Saint-Méry,” introduction to Méderic-

Louis-Élie Moreau de St. Méry,
Description topographique, physique, civile,
politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue,
3 vols. (1796; reprint, Paris, 1958), 1:xxvii.

2. Malick Walid Ghachem, “Sovereignty and Slavery in the Age of Revolution:

Haitian Variations on a Metropolitan Theme” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2001), chap. 4.

3. Moreau,
Description,
1:3–4.

4. Ibid., 5–6.

5. Ibid., 6–7; Aimé Césaire,
Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution et le problème
colonial
(Paris, 1981), 23.

6. Moreau,
Description,
1:7.

7. Ibid., 340.

8. Ibid., 340–341.

9. Ibid., 2:543–544, 1055; Louis Sala-Moulins,
Le Code Noir, ou le calvaire de
Canaan
(Paris, 1987), 188.

10. Moreau,
Description,
1:142; 3:1237; 1:185–186; 3:1206; 2:536.

11. Ibid., 3:1253.

12. Peter Hulme,
Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean,

1492–1797
(London, 1986).

13. Richard Turits,
Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime,
and Modernity in Dominican History
(Stanford, 2002), 25–26; Noble David Cook,

“Disease and the Depopulation of Hispaniola, 1492–1518,
Colonial Latin American Review
2, 1–2 (1993), 214–220.

14. Bartolomé de Las Casas,
History of the Indies,
trans. and ed. André Collard (New York, 1971), 78, 94.

15. Moreau,
Description,
1:196, 213–215; Richard L. Cunningham, “The Biological Impacts of 1492,” in
The Indigenous People of the Caribbean,
ed. Samuel W. Wilson (Gainesville, 1997), 31–35, 33.

16. Moreau,
Description
1:212, 244, 141; 3:1381–82; 2:1140–41.

17. Turits,
Foundations of Despotism,
27–28.

310

n o t e s t o p a g e s 6 – 1 5

18. Ibid., 29–30; Charles Frostin,
Les Révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue aux
XVIIè et XVIIIè siècles
(Paris, 1975), 40.

19. Pierre Chaunu,
L’Amérique et les Amériques
(Paris, 1964), 113; Kris Lane,
Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750
(London, 1998).

20. Philip Boucher,
Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492–

1763
(Baltimore, 1992); Peter Wood,
Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina
from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion
(New York, 1974).

21. Lane,
Pillaging the Empire,
97; Cunningham, “Biological Impacts of 1492,”

33–34.

22. Pierre Pluchon, “Introduction,” in Alexandre-Stanislas de Wimpfeen,
Haiti
au XVIIIème siècle,
ed. Pluchon (Paris, 1993), 11.

23. Moreau,
Description,
1:186–187, 210, 229; 3:1177, 1183; Christian Buchet,

“L’Expédition de Carthagène des Indes,” in
L’Aventure de la Flibuste,
ed. Michel Le Bris (Paris, 2002), 275–288, quotation 279; Pierre Pluchon, ed.,
Histoire des
Antilles et de la Guyane
(Paris, 1987), 104.

24. Sidney Mintz,
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
(New York, 1985).

25. David Geggus, “Sugar and Coffee Cultivation in Saint Domingue and the

Shaping of the Slave Labor Force,” in
Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the
Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas,
ed. Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan (Charlottesville, 1993), 73–98, esp. 74–75, 84; Mintz,
Sweetness and Power.

26. Frostin,
Les Révoltes blanches,
28. For a comparative history of the expansion of American slavery see Robin Blackburn,
The Making of New World Slavery:
From the Baroque to the Modern
(London, 1997).

27. Frostin,
Les Révoltes blanches,
32–33; Carolyn Fick,
The Making of Haiti:
The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below
(Knoxville, 1990), 22; Jean-François Dutrône de la Coutûre,
Précis sur la canne et sur les moyens d’en extraire le sel
essentiel, suivi de plusieurs mémoires
(Paris, 1791).

28. Frostin,
Les Révoltes blanches,
54.

29. Moreau,
Description,
3:1221; 2:865–867.

30. Françoise Thésée,
Négociants bordelais et colons de Saint-Domingue
(Paris, 1972); Gabriel Debien,
Les Esclaves aux Antilles françaises (XVIIè–XVIIIème
siècles)
(Gourbeyre, 1974), 113; Stewart King,
Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free
People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue
(Athens, 2001), xvi.

31. John Garrigus, “Redrawing the Colour Line: Gender and the Social Con-

struction of Race in Pre-Revolutionary Haiti,”
Journal of Caribbean History
30, 1

and 2 (1996): 28–50, 33; Geggus, “Sugar and Coffee Cultivation,” 73; David Brion Davis, “Impact of the French and Haitian Revolutions,” in
The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World,
ed. David Geggus (Columbia, S.C., 2001), 3–9, 4.

32. Blackburn,
Making of New World Slavery,
431–449; idem,
The Overthrow
n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 6 – 2 1

311

of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1778
(London, 1989), 167; C. L. R. James,
The Black
Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(1938; reprint, New York, 1963), 47–50; Jean Tarrade,
Le Commerce coloniale de la France à la fin
de l’Ancien Régime,
2 vols. (Paris, 1972), 2:754–755; David Geggus, “Racial Equality, Slavery, and Colonial Secession during the Constituent Assembly,”
American
Historical Review
94 (December 1989): 1290–1308, 1291.

33. Moreau,
Description,
1:296.

34. Ibid., 316, 320.

35. Ibid., 155–156, 320, 345; King,
Blue Coat or Powdered Wig,
25–26.

36. James E. McClellan II,
Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the
Old Regime
(Baltimore, 1992), 3, 85–94; Moreau,
Description,
1:301; Althéa de Puech Parham, ed.,
My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions, by a Creole of Saint Domingue
(Baton Rouge, 1959), 20.

37. King,
Blue Coat or Powdered Wig,
23; McClellan,
Colonialism and Science,
94–97; Moreau,
Description,
1:312.

38. McClellan,
Colonialism and Science,
83; Thomas Ott,
The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804
(Knoxville, 1974), 6; Moreau,
Description,
1:119; Parham,
My
Odyssey,
21; Gabriel Debien, Jean Fouchard, and Marie Antoinette Menier,