Haiti, slavery, and the age of the democratic revolution

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 63, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 643-674

  Blackburn, Robin ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

^b NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH   (United States)

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EID: 50549085161     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (96)

1. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1959, 1964). Classical historians of the French Revolution such as Jean Jaurès and Georges Lefevbre included substantial discussions of the momentous events in the Caribbean, but François Furet had little to say on this topic
2. Simon Schama's best-selling Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989) also omitted reference to events in Saint Domingue
3. Yet the appearance of a U.S. paperback edition of C. L. R. James's, The Black Jacobins (New York, 1963), and the retreat of European colonialism rekindled interest in Haiti in the English-speaking world
4. The publication of Eugene D. Genovese's From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World, Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History (Baton Rouge, La., 1979)
5. and Eric Foner's Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy, Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History (Baton Rouge, La., 1983), were important attempts to integrate Haiti into the wider history of slavery and emancipation in the Americas
6. Garry Wills foregrounded Haiti's influence on U.S. politics (Wills, "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power [Boston, 2003], 33-46)
7. and David Brion Davis devotes a chapter to the French and Haitian revolutions in his new book, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford, Eng., 2006), 157-74
8. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London, 1938)
9. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995), 88-107 (quotations, 96). A survey by Joyce E. Chaplin finds that studies of the early U.S. Republic still generally fail to insert this topic in the wider Atlantic framework and display "tentativeness" in reaching outside the traditional bounds of national historiography
10. See Chaplin, "Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History," Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (March 2003): 1431-55 ("tentativeness," 1445)
11. E. J. Hobsbawm, in his masterful but avowedly Eurocentric work, excludes the American Revolution as well as the Haitian from detailed attention; however, his brief passages on Haiti and South America make several essential points (Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848 [London, 1964], 69, 110)
12. A late entrant to the age of revolution literature is Lester D. Langley, who takes the other approach, focusing on the New World and giving little attention to Europe (Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850 [New Haven, Conn., 1996])
13. For Henry Adams's view on Haiti's contribution to Jefferson's Louisiana coup, see Adams, The History of the United States of America during the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1889), 1: 377-98. The language used by Adams when writing about Toussaint-Louverture is patronizing and inaccurate ("the sensitiveness of a wild animal," "the unhappy negro found himself face to face with destruction," "he was like a rat defying a ferret" [ibid., 395, 390, 388], and so forth)
14. For a critique of today's imperial revisionism, see Robin Blackburn, "Imperial Margarine," New Left Review, 2d ser., 35 (September-October 2005): 124-36
15. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 240-46 ("special laws," 241; other quotations, 243)
16. For Haiti's 1805 constitution with a commentary, see Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, N.C., 2004), 227-44, 275-81
17. Núria Sales de Bohigas, Sobre Esclavos, Reclutas y Mercaderes de Quintos (Barcelona, Spain, 1974), 85 ("franceses")
18. I supply a far more detailed account of the sequence in Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, 1988). Here I extend this account in the light of new research
19. Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge, 1979), 18, 34-35, 37, 42. A strand of republican thinking held that, since slaves lived and toiled under the direction of their owner, they displayed a degree of acquiescence in their condition. François Furstenberg argues that American patriots characteristically believed that their liberties were the product of their own virtuous resistance to tyranny and that any slave community not heaving with revolt could be deemed to have condoned the slave regime. The living slave could thus be seen, in this view, as having refused the test of the patriot cry of "liberty or death." He argues that this line of thought furnished a justification of slavery that was internal to liberal-republican ideology, not, as standard references to paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions in the Founders' standpoint suppose, in opposition to it. Furstenberg suggests that even those who deprecated or opposed slavery implicitly subscribed to this reasoning, as in a remark attributed to Samuel Adams by Benjamin Rush: "Nations were as free as they deserved to be
20. See [Abbé Mably], Observations on the Government and Laws of the United States of America, Translated from the French ... (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1784)
21. "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens 1789," in Merryn Williams, ed., Revolutions, 1775-1830 (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1971), 97-99 (quotations, 97, 99)
22. The limits of the French revolutionary concept of citizenship so far as slavery is concerned are explored in Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Les citoyennetés en Révolution (1789-94), Recherches Politiques (Paris, France, 1992), esp. 191-237
23. Yves Bénot, La révolution française et la fin des colonies, Textes à l'appui (Paris, France, 1988), 57-88 (quotation, 76)
24. For the evolution and wider significance of the French revolutionary debate on the colonies, see also Florence Gauthier, Triomphe et mort du droit naturel en Révolution, 1789-1795-1802, Pratiques Théoriques (Paris, France, 1992), 155-239
25. Lynn Hunt, "The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights," in Human Rights and Revolutions, ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Hunt, and Marilyn B. Young (Lanham, Md., 2000), 3-17. The rejection of racial limits on citizenship in French republicanism can also be seen as echoing the French monarchy's universal claim to recognize and protect all subjects, including the free people of color. The radicalism of the Jacobins was thus much more profound than the radicalism of the American Revolution because, though affirming the family, it put other institutions of civil society in question
26. See William H. Sewell Jr., "The French Revolution and the Emergence of the Nation Form," in Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World, ed. Michael A. Morrison and Melinda Zook (Lanham, Md., 2004), 91-125
27. Sewell explores the racial fantasies at work in a key thinker's ideas in Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What Is the Third Estate? (Durham, N.C., 1994)
28. For "aristocracy of the skin," see Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville, Fla., 2000), 112
29. Dubois, Avengers of the New World (quotations, 6, 3)
30. Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004)
31. Fischer, Modernity Disavowed
32. David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, Ind., 2002)
33. Frédéric Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté: La Révolution française en Guadeloupe, 1789-1802 (Paris, France, 2004). Dubois' salute to Haiti's achievement is the more deserved because of the limited and compromised character of French Enlightenment pronouncements on slavery
34. See the occasionally overwritten but still effective critique in Louis Sala-Morins, Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment, trans. John Conteh-Morgan (Minneapolis, Minn., 2006)
35. An extended and important exchange on abolitionism took place in the pages of the American Historical Review in the mid-1980s in articles that together must have referred to mote than a thousand articles and books. Not one of them concerned slave revolt, black abolitionism, or the role of black testimony in the abolitionist movement. See Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, Calif., 1992)
36. Curiously, this debate was initiated by a critique of a brilliant and innovative book, David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), which was marked by no such exclusion. Seymour Drescher has argued that the Haitian Revolution was a setback for abolitionism and that its racial violence was a harbinger of twentieth-century genocide
37. See Drescher, "The Limits of Example," in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David P. Geggus, Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C., 2001), 10-14. It is to the credit of the key abolitionist leaders - William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, William Lloyd Garrison, Victor Schoelcher - that atrocities committed by insurgent slaves in Saint Domingue or elsewhere did not lead them to lessen their hostility to slavery or to scorn the leaders of the Haitian Revolution. It would be a false antithesis to pit Haiti against abolitionism. A recent account, though paying tribute to Drescher's valuable studies, recognizes that the British abolitionist narrative becomes more intelligible if Saint Domingue and Haiti are firmly inserted within it, whether seen as a warning or as a source of encouragement or inspiration
38. See Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (New York, 2005), 280-308. And Drescher is too good a historian to have missed the link between Haiti and the emancipationist turn in British abolitionism in 1823 (to be discussed later)
39. An argument I make in Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 293-330, 419-72
40. but see also Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution
41. Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989)
42. For the revolutionary contribution to gradualism and democracy, see Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966)
43. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975)
44. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, Haymarket Series (London, 1990)
45. Michael Zuckerman, "The Color of Counterrevolution: Thomas Jefferson and the Rebellion in San Domingo," in The Languages of Revolution, ed. Loretta Valtz Mannucci, Quaderno Series (Milan, Italy, 1989), 83-107 (quotations, 91)
46. Winthrop D. Jordan also draws attention to Saint Domingue's effect on Jefferson but does not pinpoint this particular event (Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968], 375)
47. Florence Gauthier, "Conclusion - Richebourg: Comment abolir l'esclavage à Saint Domingue? 1793," in Périssent les colonies plutôt qu'un principe!: Contributions à l'histoire de l'abolition de l'esclavage, 1789-1804 (Paris, France, 2002), 108
48. A point made by Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté, 436
49. The effect of the refugees is brought out vividly in Ashli White, "'A Flood of Impure Lava': Saint Dominguan Refugees in the United States, 1791-1820" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2003)
50. For the major role of the French and Haitian revolutions in shaping the outlook of Southern planters, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (Cambridge, 2005), 11-68
51. "To James Monroe," July 14, 1793, in John Catanzariti, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 26: 503
52. Sometimes the Federalists' moderate antislavery initiatives served to unmask or divide the Republicans. The tentative nationalism of the Federalists was less comfortable with slaveholding than the fierce patriotism of the Republicans. Foreign policy differences were to dramatize this different emphasis. See Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, The Nationalist Ferment: The Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1789-1812, trans. Lillian A. Parrott Columbus, Ohio, 2004), 25-44
53. Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 7
54. See, however, David McCullough, John Adams (New York, 2001), 519-21
55. Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President, First Term, 1801-1805 (Boston, 1970), 4: 252-53
56. Charles Callan Tansill, The United States and Santo Domingo, 1798-1873: A Chapter in Caribbean Diplomacy (Baltimore, 1938), 87
57. For Jefferson's evolving policy toward Toussaint-Louverture and Napoleon, see Tim Matthewson, "Jefferson and Hanti," Journal of Southern History 61, no. 2 (May 1995): 209-48
58. Matthewson, A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic (Westport, Conn., 2003). Matthewson generously credits Jefferson with distaste for slavery, but his own research demonstrates the hollowness of the Virginia planter's occasional wistful expressions of a commitment to emancipation
59. See also Thomas Jefferson to Aaron Burr, Feb. 11, 1799, in Mary-Jo Kline and Joanne Wood Ryan, eds., Political Correspondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr (Princeton, N.J., 1983), 1: 390 ("Cannibals"); Jefferson to James Monroe, Nov. 24, 1801, published as an appendix to Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York, 1999), 276-79 (quotation, 278)
60. Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 366-67 (quotation, 367)
61. For the metropolitan context following Napoleon's seizure of power, see the contributions by Yves Bénot, Marcel Dorigny, Bernard Gainot, Thomas Pronier, and Sabine Manigat in Bénot and Dorigny, eds., Rétablissement de l'esclavage dans les colonies françaises, 1802: Ruptures et continuités de la politique coloniale française (1800-1830) (Paris, France 2003), 7-28, 51-68, 109-28
62. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 260 ("recognize Toussaint")
63. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 255 ("gilded negroes"), 256 ("this black Republic )
64. See Robert L. Paquette, "Revolutionary Saint Domingue in the Making of Territorial Louisiana," in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, Blacks in the Diaspora (Bloomington, Ind., 2003), 204-25. François Furstenberg supplies a fascinating account of the French émigré milieu in Philadelphia in an unpublished seminar paper
65. Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint's Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (Jackson, Miss., 2005), 210-12, 221-22
66. I discuss the reasons for the rapid increase in Virginia's slave population in Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London, 1997), 465-71
67. and the motives that prompted most planters to support the ending of the Atlantic slave trade in Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 286-87
68. See Paquette, "Revolutionary Saint Domingue," 211
69. Matthewson, Journal of Southern History 61: 233
70. Jefferson quoted in Wills, "Negro President," 44
71. See also Donald R. Hickey, "Timothy Pickering and the Haitian Slave Revolt: A Letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1806," Essex Institute Historical Collections 120, no. 3 (July 1984): 149-63
72. Abolitionism was weaker in the United States than Great Britain in the 1780s but recovered a little around the turn of the century. In the 1780s emancipation measures had been voted down in New York and New Jersey. A gradual emancipation measure passed in New York in 1799; it was sponsored by a Federalist yet attracted Democratic-Republican support as well. In 1804 New Jersey followed suit. These measures freed the sons of slave mothers when they reached twenty-eight years of age in New York and twenty-five in New Jersey, with their daughters freed at age twenty-one. To those with no stake in the slave system, such a moderate approach agreed with the spirit of the times and would remove a source of conflict. For the role Haiti and renewed war with France in the resurgence of British abolitionism in 1804 and after, see Chester W. New, The Life of Henry Brougham to 1830 Oxford Eng., 1961), 21-31
73. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (London, 1975), 344-46
74. Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution
75. Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 300-316. For the introduce of slaves in Louisiana, see White, "'Flood of Impure Lava,'" chap. 6. In an earlier chapter, she explains that "French negroes" (210) were widely regarded as unreliable and subversive
76. David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798 (Oxford, Eng., 1982), 311
77. Dubois explains that the first written account of the Bois-Caïman ceremony that launched the 1791 revolt dates from 1814 and the now generally received version stems from an account published in 1824 by Herard Dumesle, a Haitain writer steeped in classical authorities. Herodotus put suitable eve-of-battle speeches into the mouths of barbarian chiefs - "let us die fighting rather than live on our knees" - just as he did with Roman generals. So was the commitment to liberty cited by Pluchon a faithful record of the oral tradition or a classical trope? Historians cannot know for sure, but Dubois argues that the widespread adoption of the Bois-Caïman legend in Haitian voudou is itself historically significant. See Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 432-33
78. For the invocation of "liberty" by a rebel chief, see Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture de l'eslavage au pouvoir (Paris, France, 1979), 26
79. For the quotation from a soldier's letter, see Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990), 156
80. See Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 434-37. In my view Sibylle Fischer goes too far in denying the heavy weight of such economic factors in constraining the outcome of the Haitian Revolution in her valuable study, Modernity Disavowed. Some of Haiti's new rulers later tried to use militarized labor to work the plantations. Henry Christophe, ruler of the short-lived northern kingdom, had some limited success, but after his overthrow in 1820 such efforts were deemed unrealistic. The peasants of Haiti simply refused to be dragooned, and armed irregulars sometimes came to their aid. The revolution persisted, thanks to their tenacity in the struggle for the control of time, land, and movement, through several changes of formal jurisdiction, whatever the stance of the famous leaders
81. Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 415-16. For some reason the planters never succeeded in restoring night work in the sugar mills on Guadeloupe
82. See Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté, 347
83. Carolyn E. Fick, "The French Revolution in Saint Domingue: A Triumph or a Failure?" in Gaspar and Geggus, Turbulent Time, 51-77
84. Sonthonax's antislavery convictions are well documented in Robert Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic (Cranbury, N.J., 1965)
85. But see also Bénot, La Révolution française
86. General Moore is quoted in David Barry Gaspar, "La Guerre des Bois: Revolution, War, and Slavery in Saint Lucia, 1793-1838," in Gaspar and Geggus, Turbulent Time, 102-30, esp. 115-17
87. Bernard Gainot, "La Société des Amis des Noirs et des colonies, 1796-1799" in La Société des Amis des Noirs, 1788-1799, ed. Marcel Dorigny and Bernard Gainot, La Route de l'esclave (Paris, France, 1998), 299-396. Admiral Laurent Jean François Truguet, the colonial minister, was also linked to this neo-Jacobin group. He fostered an alliance with the colored peoples of the Caribbean against the various slave orders
88. Laurent Dubois quotes him as writing to Bonaparte in 1799, defending the emancipation policy and denouncing those who "dared call themselves French" while supporting slavery (Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 352)
89. James, Black Jacobins [1938 ed.], 201
90. Toussaint L'Ouverture to the French Directory, "Letter to the Directory, 28 October 1797," in George F. Tyson Jr., Toussaint L'Ouverture, Great Lives Observed (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973), 43
91. "Declaration of the Independence of the Blacks of St. Domingo," Nov. 29, 1803, repr. in Malick W. Ghachem, ed., The Haitian Revolution, 1789-1804: An Exhibition at the John Carter Brown Library (May to September 2004) (Providence, R.I., 2004), 26-27 (quotation, 26)
92. "Imperial Constitution of Haiti, 1805," in Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 275-81 (quotation, 275). Article 12 declared that whites would not be able to own land, Article 13 that this stipulation did not apply to already-naturalized white women or to naturalized Germans and Poles, and Article 14 that "all distinctions of color will by necessity disappear ... Haitians shall be known from now on by the generic denomination of blacks" (ibid., 276). Though Haiti was an empire, succession was to be "elective and non-hereditary." Any ruler who departed from the constitution was to "be considered to be in a state of war against society" and the Council of State was to remove him (ibid., 277, 238). This constitution limited white access to citizenship to those whites already covered in the 1805 clauses, but since this coverage encompassed all the whites in the country, it should not be equated with the restrictions on black citizenship in the United States. See David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge, 1979)
93. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1770-1860 (New York, 1997), 262-63
94. W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge Mass., 1998)
95. Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, La., 1988)
96. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford tng., 2002), 100-105. Hunt's work gives many examples of Haiti's double influence as warning to some and inspiration to others