The Haitian Revolution
FRANKLIN W. KNIGHT
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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....
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).... *****
Yoshie