Haitian Revolution

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Haitian Revolution

Battle on Santo Domingo, a painting by January Suchodolski depicting a struggle between Polish troops in French service and the Haitian rebels
Date August 22, 1791 — January 1, 1804
Location Haiti
Result Haiti wins independence from France
Belligerents
Flag of Haiti Haiti Flag of France France
Flag of Poland Polish Legions
Commanders
Toussaint Louverture
Jean-Jacques Dessalines		 Charles Leclerc
Vicomte de Rochambeau
Napoleon Bonaparte
Strength
Regular army: <55,000,
Volunteers: <100,000		 Regular army: 60,000,
86 warships and frigates
Casualties and losses
Military deaths: unknown,
Civilian deaths: <100,000		 Military deaths: 57,000 (37,000 combat; 20,000 yellow fever)
Civilian deaths: ~25,000
v • d • e
French Revolutionary Wars
History of Haiti

Before 1492
1492-1791
1791-1804
1804-1843
1843-1915
1915-1986
1986-present

Saint-Domingue
Haitian Revolution
United States occupation of Haiti
2004 Haitian rebellion

Timeline
Military history
Battle at "Snake Gully" in 1802
Battle at "Snake Gully" in 1802

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was the most successful of African slave rebellions in the Western Hemisphere. It established Haiti as a free republic ruled by blacks, the first of its kind. At the time of the revolution, Haiti was known as Saint-Domingue and was a colony of France. Through the revolution, people of African ancestry freed themselves from French colonization and from slavery. Although hundreds of rebellions occurred during the slave era, only the 1791 revolt on Saint-Domingue succeeded in permanently liberating an entire island.[1]

Haiti was the first republic led by people of African descent in modern history. It went directly from being a French colony to self-governance through a process that has had lasting effect on the nation. Slaveholders had established a system using violence and force in controlling the majority. Unfortunately leaders rising in the nascent black republic adopted similar means to keep control. An elite comprised of educated free people of color took control of political and economic power.[2]

Historians traditionally identify the catalyst to revolution as a particular Vodou service in August 1791 performed at Bois Caïman by Dutty Boukman, a high priest.[3] But a number of complex events set the stage that culminated in the most significant revolt in the history of enslaved Africans.

Contents

[edit] Background

The riches of the Caribbean depended on the Europeans' increasing taste for sugar, which plantation owners traded for provisions from North America and manufactured goods from Europe. Starting in the 1730s, French engineers constructed complex irrigation systems to increase sugarcane production. By the 1740s Saint-Domingue, together with Jamaica, had become the main supplier of the world's sugar. Sugar production depended on the extensive manual labor provided by enslaved Africans in the harsh Saint-Domingue colonial plantation economy. The white planters who derived their wealth from the sale of sugar knew they were greatly outnumbered by slaves and lived in fear of slave rebellion.[1]

In 1758, the white landowners began passing legislation that set restrictions on the rights of other groups of people until a rigid caste system was defined. Most historians have classified the people of the era into three groups. One was the white colonists, or blancs. A second was the free blacks (usually mixed-race, known as mulattoes or gens de couleur, free people of color). These tended to be educated, literate and often served in the army or as administrators on plantations. Many were children of white planters and overseers by slave mothers. They often received education or artisan training, sometimes received property from their fathers, and freedom. The third group, outnumbering the others by a ratio of ten to one, was made up of mostly African-born slaves who spoke a patois of French and West African languages known as Creole.[4]

White colonists and black slaves frequently had violent conflicts. Gangs of runaway slaves, known as maroons, lived in the woods away from control. They often conducted violent raids on the island's sugar and coffee plantations. The success of these attacks established a black Haitian martial tradition of violence and brutality to effect political ends.[5] Although the numbers in these bands grew large (sometimes into the thousands), they generally lacked the leadership and strategy to accomplish large-scale objectives. The first effective maroon leader to emerge was the charismatic François Mackandal, who succeeded in unifying the black resistance. A Vodou priest, Mackandal inspired his people by drawing on African traditions and religions. He united the maroon bands and also established a network of secret organizations among plantation slaves, leading a rebellion from 1751 through 1757. Although Mackandal was captured by the French and burned at the stake in 1758, large armed maroon bands persisted in raids and harassment after his death.[6][1]

[edit] Situation in 1789

In 1789 Saint-Domingue, producer of 40 percent of the world's sugar, was the most valuable colony on earth. The lowest class of society were enslaved blacks, who outnumbered whites and people of color by eight to one.[1] The slave population on the island totaled at least 500,000 by 1789, almost half of the one million slaves in the Caribbean.[7] They were mostly African-born. The death rate in the Caribbean exceeded the birth rate, so imports of enslaved Africans continued. The slave population declined at an annual rate of two to five percent, due to overwork; inadequate food, shelter, clothing and medical care; and an imbalance between the sexes, with more men than women.[8] Some slaves were of a creole elite class of urban slaves and domestics, who worked as cooks, personal servants and artisans around the plantation house. This relatively privileged class was chiefly born in the Americas, while the under-class born in Africa labored hard under abusive conditions.

The Plaine du Nord on the northern shore of Saint-Domingue was the most fertile area with the largest sugar plantations. It was the area of most economic importance. Here enslaved Africans lived in large groups of workers in relative isolation, separated from the rest of the colony by the high mountain range known as the Massif. This area was the seat of power of the grand blancs, the rich white colonists who wanted greater autonomy for the colony, especially economically.[9]

Among Saint-Domingue’s 40,000 white colonials in 1789, European-born Frenchmen monopolized administrative posts. The sugar planters, the grand blancs, were chiefly minor aristocrats. Most returned to France as soon as possible, hoping to avoid the dreaded yellow fever, which regularly swept the colony.[10] The lower class whites, petit blancs, included artisans, shopkeepers, slave dealers, overseers, and day laborers. Saint-Domingue’s free people of color, the gens de couleur, numbered more than 28,000 by 1789. Many of them were also artisans and overseers, or domestic servants in the big houses. [11]

In addition to class and racial tension between whites, free people of color, and enslaved blacks, the country was polarized by regional rivalries between the North, South, and West. There were also conflicts between proponents of independence, those loyal to France, allies of Spain, and allies of Great Britain - who coveted control of the valuable colony.

[edit] Impact of French Revolution

Further information: French Revolution

In France, the majority of the Estates General, an advisory body to the King, constituted itself as the National Assembly, made radical changes in French laws, and on August 26, 1789, published the Declaration of the Rights of Man, declaring all men free and equal. The French Revolution shaped the course of the conflict in Saint-Domingue and was at first widely welcomed in the island. So many were the twists and turns in the leadership in France, and so complex were events in Saint-Domingue, that various classes and parties changed their alignments many times.[citation needed]

The African population on the island began to hear of the agitation for independence by the rich European planters, the grands blancs, who had resented France's limitations on the island's foreign trade. This class mostly allied with the royalists and the British, as Africans understood that if Saint-Domingue's independence were to be led by white slave masters, it would probably mean even harsher treatment and increased injustice for the African population as the plantation owners would be free to inflict slavery as they pleased without even minimal accountability to their French peers.[9]

Saint-Domingue's free people of color, most notably Julien Raimond, had been actively appealing to France for full civil equality with whites since the 1780s. Raimond used the French Revolution to make this the major colonial issue before the French National Assembly. In October 1790, Vincent Ogé, another wealthy free man of color from the colony, returned home from Paris, where he had been working with Raimond. Convinced that a law passed by the French Constitutent Assembly gave full civil rights to wealthy men of color, Ogé demanded the right to vote. When the colonial governor refused, Ogé led a brief insurgency in the area around Cap Francais. He was captured in early 1791, and brutally executed.[6] Ogé was not fighting against slavery, but his treatment was cited by later slave rebels as one of the factors in their decision to rise up in August 1791 and resist treaties with the colonists. The conflict up to this point was between factions of whites, and between whites and free coloreds. Enslaved blacks watched from the sidelines.[1]

Leading French writer Count Mirabeau had once said the San Domingue whites "slept at the foot of Vesuvius".[12] An indication of the grave threat they faced should the majority of slaves launch a sustained major uprising.

[edit] 1791 slave rebellion

No one expected the slaves to participate in the rebellion. But suddenly on August 22, 1791, a great slave uprising plunged the country into civil war. Thousands of slaves in the fertile Plaine du Nord region rose up to take vengeance on their masters and to fight for their liberty. Within the next ten days, slaves had taken control of the entire northern province in an unprecedented slave revolt that left the whites' controlling only a few isolated fortified camps. Within the next two months as the violence escalated, the rebellious slaves killed 2,000 whites and burned or destroyed 280 sugar plantations.[1] Within a year, the island was in revolutionary chaos. Slaves burnt the plantations where they had been forced to work, and killed masters, overseers and other whites.[9]

French authorities were initially confident that they could put down the rebellion, as they had put down smaller revolts in the past.[13] Larger disturbances began as leaders Jean François and Georges Biassou led the slave uprising to align with the pro-royalist Spanish authorities in Santo Domingo. The slave rebellion that had begun on the plantations in the north spread chaos across the colony.

Having initially refused to abolish slavery, eventually, on April 4, 1792, the French legislature proclaimed the equality of all free people in the French colonies regardless of color. They sent a commission led by Léger-Félicité Sonthonax to Saint-Domingue to ensure that the colonial authorities complied.[1] The colony's Governer was recalled to France and guillotined.[14]

[edit] Leadership of Toussaint

One of the most successful black commanders was Toussaint L'Ouverture, a self-educated former domestic slave. Under the military leadership of Toussaint, the rebellious slaves were able to gain the upper hand and restore most of Saint-Domingue to France. Having made himself master of the island, however, Toussaint did not wish to surrender power to France, and ruled the country effectively as an autonomous entity. Toussaint overcame a succession of local rivals (including Sonthonax, André Rigaud, and Comte d'Hédouville). Hédouville forced a fatal wedge between Rigaud and Toussaint before he escaped back to France.[15] Toussaint defeated a British expeditionary force in 1798, and even led an invasion of neighboring Santo Domingo, freeing the slaves there by 1801. A French general, Étienne Laveaux, was able to convince L'Ouverture to change sides in May 1794 and fight for the French Republic against the Spanish; meanwhile Sonthonax had proclaimed an end to slavery on 29 August 1793.

In 1801, Toussaint issued a constitution for Saint-Domingue which provided for autonomy and decreed that Toussaint himself would be governor-for-life. In retaliation, Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched an expeditionary force of French soldiers to the island, led by Bonaparte's brother in law Charles Leclerc, to restore French rule, and under secret instructions to later restore slavery. The French soldiers were accompanied by mulatto troops led by Alexandre Pétion and André Rigaud, who had been defeated by Toussaint three years earlier. Some of Toussaint's closest allies, including Jean-Jacques Dessalines, defected to the French. Toussaint was promised his freedom, if he agreed to integrate his remaining troops into the French Army. Toussaint agreed to this in May 1802 but was deceived, and was seized and shipped off to France where he later died while imprisoned at Fort-de-Joux.[6]

Jean Jacques Dessalines
Jean Jacques Dessalines

For a few months the island was largely quiescent under Napoleonic rule. But when it became apparent that the French intended to re-establish slavery, Dessalines and Pétion switched sides again, in October 1802, and fought against the French. In November, Leclerc died of yellow fever, like much of his army, and his successor, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, fought an even more brutal campaign than his predecessor. His atrocities helped rally many former French loyalists to the rebel cause. The French were further weakened by a British naval blockade, and by the unwillingness of Napoleon to send the requested massive reinforcements. Napoleon had sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States in April 1803, and had begun to lose interest in his ventures in the Western Hemisphere. Dessalines led the rebellion until its completion when the French forces were finally defeated in 1803.[6]

The last battle of the Haitian Revolution, the Battle of Vertières, occurred on November 18, 1803, near Cap-Haitien and was fought between Haitian rebels led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the French colonial army under the Viscount of Rochambeau. On 1 January 1804, from the city of Gonaïves, Dessalines officially declared the former colony's independence, renaming it "Haiti" after the indigenous Arawak name. This major loss was a decisive blow to France and its colonial empire.

[edit] Free republic

On January 1, 1804, Dessalines, the new leader under the dictatorial 1801 constitution, declared Haiti a free republic. Thus Haiti became the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States, and the only successful slave rebellion in world history. However, the country had been crippled by years of war, its agriculture devastated, its formal commerce nonexistent, and the people uneducated and mostly unskilled.[16][17]

Haiti agreed to make reparations to French slaveholders in 1825 in the amount of 150 million francs, reduced in 1838 to 60 million francs, in exchange for French recognition of its independence and to achieve freedom from French aggression. This indemnity bankrupted the Haitian treasury and mortgaged Haiti's future to the French banks providing the funds for the large first installment, permanently affecting Haiti's ability to be prosperous.[18]

The end of the Haitian Revolution in 1804 marked the end of colonialism in Haiti, but the social conflict that had been cultivated under slavery continued to affect the population. The revolution left in power an affranchi élite as well as the formidable Haitian army. France continued the slavery system in Martinique and Guadeloupe, but Great Britain was able to abolish their slave trade in 1807 and in 1833 abolished slavery completely in the British West Indies. France formally recognized Haiti as an independent nation in 1834 as did the United States in 1862.[9]

[edit] Impacts

The Haitian Revolution was influential in slave rebellions in America and British colonies. The loss of a major source of western revenue shook Napoleon's faith in the promise of the western world, encouraging him to unload other French assets in the region including the territory known as Louisiana. Many of the freed slaves of Saint-Domingue settled in New Orleans, profoundly influencing the history of that city. Britain became the first major power to permanently abolish the slave trade in 1807. Although many slaves in the United States attempted to mimic Toussaint L'Ouverture's actions in the Haitian Revolution and failed in the end, the Haitian Revolution stood as a model for emancipation. L'Ouverture remains as a hero and still appears in art.

In 2004, Haiti celebrated the bicentennial of its independence from France.

[edit] Literature and art

  • English poet William Wordsworth published his sonnet To Toussaint L'Ouverture in January 1803.
  • In 1938, American artist Jacob Lawrence created a series of paintings about the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, which he later adapted into a series of prints.
  • Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier's second novel, The Kingdom of this World (1949) explores the Haitian Revolution in depth. It is almost universally recognized as one of the novels that inaugurated the Latin American "Boom" in fiction during the middle part of the twentieth century.
  • In 2004 an exhibition of paintings entitled Caribbean Passion: Haiti 1804, by artist Kimathi Donkor, was held in London to celebrate the bicentenary of Haiti's revolution.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Rogozinski, Jan (1999). A Brief History of the Caribbean, Revised, New York: Facts on File, Inc., pp 85, 116–118, 133, 158, 164-167, 169. ISBN 0-8160-3811-2. 
  2. ^ Haiti: Historical Setting. Retrieved on 2006-11-27.
  3. ^ Prelude to the Revolution: 1760 to 1789. Retrieved on 2006-11-28.
  4. ^ Haiti - French Colonialism. Retrieved on 2006-11-27.
  5. ^ The Haitian Revolution - The Slave Rebellion of 1791. kreyol.com. Retrieved on 2007-08-22.
  6. ^ a b c d The Slave Rebellion of 1791. Retrieved on 2006-11-27.
  7. ^ Herbert Klein, Transatlantic Slave Trade, Pg. 32-33
  8. ^ Tim Matthewson, A Pro-Slavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations During the Early Republic, (Praeger: Westport, Ct. and London, 2003) Pg. 3
  9. ^ a b c d Knight, Franklin W. (1990). The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, 2nd, New York: Oxford University Press, pp 204–208. ISBN 0-19-505441-5. 
  10. ^ C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins (Vintage, 1989) Pg. 29
  11. ^ Robert Heinl, Written in Blood: The History of the Haitian People, New York: Lanham, 1996, p. 45
  12. ^ Hochschild, Adam Bury the Chains:The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery (2006)
  13. ^ Hochschild p.258
  14. ^ Hochschild p.267
  15. ^ Review of Haitian Revolution Part II. Retrieved on 2006-11-27.
  16. ^ Independent Haiti. Retrieved on 2006-11-27.
  17. ^ Chapter 6 - Haiti: Historical Setting. Retrieved on 2006-09-18.
  18. ^ A Country Study: Haiti -- Boyer: Expansion and Decline. Library of Congress (200a). Retrieved on 2007-08-30.

[edit] References

  • Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University (2005) ISBN 0-674-01826-5.
  • Dubois, Laurent & Garrigus, John D. Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford/St. Martin's Press (2006) ISBN 0-312-41501-X.
  • Garrigus, John D. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in Saint-Domingue. Palgrave-Macmillan, (2006) ISBN 1-4039-7140-4.
  • Geggus, David P. Haitian Revolutionary Studies. University of South Carolina Press, (2002) ISBN 1-57003-416-8.
  • James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Vintage, 2nd edition, (1989) ISBN 0-679-72467-2.
  • Ott, Thomas O. The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804. University of Tennessee Press, 1973.
  • Peyre-Ferry, Joseph Elysée. Journal des opérations militaires de l'armée francaise à Saint-Domingue,1802-1803 (2006), ISBN 2846210527.

[edit] External links