The Haitian Revolution (Part 2)

[JKSCHW at aol.com]

The Knight article supports my thesis. Why wasn't the US one big Haiti? In 
fact, how was slavery possible at all? In fact, unless they had radical 
justice, most slaves accommodated themselves to slavery. The French 
revolution helped the Carribbean slaves formulate a radical justice. Lacking 
this, American slaves pretty much lived with the constraints that existed, 
more or less unhappily. --jks

In a message dated 10/14/00 5:06:05 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
furuhashi.1 at osu.edu writes:

<< 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.37 >>