Haitian Revolutionary Studies

347 Pages·2002·4.743 MB·English

by  David Patrick Geggus

Haitian Revolutionary Studies
Blacks in the Diaspora
Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey, Jr., and David Barry Gaspar,
General Editors
DAVID PATRICK GEGGUS
Haitian
Revolutionary Studies
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
Orders by e-mail [email protected]
© 2002 by David Patrick Geggus
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, in-
cluding photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions consti-
tutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Infor-
mation Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Geggus, David Patrick.
Haitian revolutionary studies / David Patrick Geggus.
p. cm. — (Blacks in the diaspora)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-34104-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Haiti—History—Revolution, 1791–1804. I. Title. II. Series.
F1923 .G34 2002
972.94′03—dc21
2001006201
1 2 3 4 5 07 06 05 04 03 02
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
part one: overview
1. The Haitian Revolution 5
part two: historiography and sources
2. New Approaches and Old 33
3. Underexploited Sources 43
part three: the seeds of revolt
4. The Causation of Slave Rebellions: An Overview 55
5. Marronage, Vodou, and the Slave Revolt of 1791 69
6. The Bois Caïman Ceremony 81
part four: slaves and free coloreds
7. The “Swiss” and the Problem of Slave/Free Colored
Cooperation 99
8. The “Volte-Face” of Toussaint Louverture 119
9. Slave, Soldier, Rebel: The Strange Career of Jean Kina 137
part five: the wider revolution
10. Racial Equality, Slavery, and Colonial Secession during the
Constituent Assembly 157
11. The Great Powers and the Haitian Revolution 171
12. The Slave Leaders in Exile: Spain’s Resettlement of Its Black
Auxiliary Troops 179
part six: epilogue
13. The Naming of Haiti 207
Chronology 221
Notes 225
Works Cited 305
Index 329

Preface
The few hundred square miles around the modern town of Cap Haïtien have a
special place in both the beginning and the beginning of the end of European
imperialism. The ¤rst revolt against European colonization in the Americas took
place there less than twelve months after Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean.
Three hundred years later, long after the aboriginal Arawaks had vanished and
French rulers, replacing Spanish, had repeopled the land with African slaves, the
same region saw one of the most dramatic challenges ever mounted against a
colonizing power in any age or continent. The 1791 slave insurrection was the
largest in New World history, and in the course of twelve years of desolating
warfare it led to the creation of Latin America’s ¤rst independent state.
The destruction of la Navidad in 1493 and the slave uprising of 1791 took
place in very different societies and were vastly different in magnitude and re-
sult. Some contemporaries of the Haitian Revolution, however, showed a ¤tting
sense of history when they depicted the black slaves in poetry and prose as
avenging the Amerindians who had died three centuries before. More impor-
tant, the leaders of the ex-slaves themselves chose to underline the parallel by
giving back to the land they reconquered from the Europeans the aboriginal
name of “Haïti.” Thus emphasizing the break with European colonialism, they
gave their new state an American identity and expressed solidarity with the
long-dead Amerindians whose patrimony they were then inheriting. It was in
the northern plain of Haiti that non-Europeans made their ¤rst, and ¤rst suc-
cessful, challenges to the European right to rule proclaimed at Tordesillas in
1494 and for ¤ve centuries thereafter.
The subject of this book is the revolution that grew out of that slave uprising
and transformed French Saint Domingue, one of the most productive European
colonies, into an independent state run by former slaves and the descendants
of slaves. The Haitian Revolution of 1789–1803 produced the world’s ¤rst ex-
amples of wholesale emancipation in a major slave-owning society, colonial rep-
resentation in a metropolitan assembly, and full racial equality in a European
colony. It occurred when the Atlantic slave trade was at its peak and when slav-
ery was an accepted institution from Canada to Chile. The slave revolt that laid
waste the immensely wealthy colony between 1791 and 1793 was probably the
largest and only fully successful one there has ever been. Of all American strug-
gles for colonial independence, the Haitian Revolution involved the greatest
degree of mass mobilization and brought the greatest degree of social and eco-
nomic change. In an age of tumultuous events and world war, it seized interna-
tional attention with images of apocalyptic destruction and a new world in the
making.
There has been no shortage of general studies of the revolution in English,
but the quantity of primary research seems remarkably small seen against the
prodigious output of dissertations by U.S. universities. The best recent scholar-
ship (by John Garrigus, Stewart King, Mimi Sheller, and Laurent Dubois) has
concentrated on Haiti before and after its revolution or on the revolutionary
period in other French colonies. Most general histories of the Haitian Revolu-
tion are of a popular or super¤cial nature, and few are the work of specialists
in the history of slavery or the French Caribbean. Even the very best tend to be
their author’s ¤rst publications on the subject—a situation scarcely imaginable
in the historiographies of the French, Mexican, or Russian revolutions. How-
ever, Carolyn Fick’s solidly researched The Making of Haiti (1990) points the
way forward, and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) stands out as an
unquestioned classic, although it was written nearly seventy years ago. Among
French scholars, Pierre Pluchon’s controversial biographies of Toussaint Louver-
ture (1979, 1989) have been the outstanding works of recent years. Charles
Frostin and the proli¤c Gabriel Debien, the leading historians of Saint Domin-
gue, wrote relatively little about the revolution there. More recently, Yves Bénot
and Florence Gauthier have restored the colonial question to French Revolution
studies, but their research has been primarily on metropolitan matters.
This collection brings together thirteen essays that are mainly focused pieces
of primary research. They are intended to widen and deepen knowledge of the
revolution and construct a more accurate history than is currently available.
Based on archival research conducted in a half-dozen countries, they marshal
an unprecedented range of evidence that is used to explore some central issues
and little-studied topics. The chapters are organized into six thematic sections.
The ¤rst provides a narrative overview of the Haitian Revolution, its signi¤-
cance, and its international repercussions. Section II is devoted to recent histo-
riography and to archival sources that have been little exploited in writing on
the revolution. The following section, on the origins of rebellion, surveys de-
bates regarding slave resistance in world history and then examines a long-run-
ning controversy in Haitian studies regarding the contribution to the revolution
of the vodou religion and of fugitive slaves. The following chapter focuses on a
seminal event known as the Bois Caïman ceremony. A vodou ceremony that pre-
ceded the slave uprising has often been viewed as the founding moment of the
Haitian nation, but its nature, signi¤cance, and very existence have been sharply
contested in recent years.
The book’s fourth section is organized around the theme of the problematic
relations between the enslaved and free nonwhite sectors of Saint Domingue
society and their development during the years of revolution. The topic brings
into ¤ne focus the question of race, class, and color as competing categories of
analysis. Chapter 7 is a study of the “Swiss,” a group of slaves armed by free
coloreds in their ¤ght for racial equality who were later deported to Central
America. The episode provides a window on the con®icted nature of free col-
ored politics and has become a symbol of class relations in Haiti. The following
chapter concerns the central ¤gure of the slave revolution and one of its main
viii Preface
turning points. The decision of the freedman Toussaint Louverture to abandon
his Spanish allies in 1794 and lead the slave rebels over to the French Republic
has been cloaked in obscurity and hotly debated ever since. The chapter exam-
ines materialist and idealist interpretations of this episode, which is critical for
assessing the politics of the famous leader and the relationship between the
French and Haitian Revolutions. Jean Kina, the subject of Chapter 9, was an-
other black freedman and military leader whose career, however, followed a
completely different trajectory to Toussaint Louverture’s. An ally of the planter
class, he fought against slave and free colored insurgents in Saint Domingue, but
toward the end of his military service he staged an enigmatic revolt on Marti-
nique, which led to imprisonment ¤rst in England, then in France in the same
jail as the fallen Toussaint.
Section V groups three chapters that explore international rami¤cations of
the Haitian Revolution. The ¤rst of these examines the impact of colonial de-
velopments on the French Revolution and the manner in which white colonists’
pursuit of autonomy, free coloreds’ campaigns for equality, and the slaves’ desire
for freedom interacted with one another and shaped metropolitan policy-mak-
ing. Chapter 11 offers a unique comparative perspective on British, Spanish,
and U.S. policy toward the unfolding revolution in Saint Domingue down to
the achievement of Haitian independence. Particular attention is paid to Spain’s
involvement in the revolution, which has been very little researched. This is es-
pecially true of the Spanish government’s extraordinary experiment in recruit-
ing the slave rebels of 1791 as “auxiliary troops” in its attempted conquest of
the colony. Chapter 12 deals with the resettlement of these men and their fami-
lies after the experiment went awry. It traces their extraordinary odyssey and
continuing struggles in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Florida, and Spain.
By way of an epilogue, the ¤nal chapter investigates why the ¤rst modern
black state was given an Amerindian name. The choice of name raises interest-
ing questions about ethnicity and identity and historical knowledge among the
former slaves and free coloreds who created Haiti. Surveying sources from the
sixteenth to the twentieth century, the chapter traces use of the word “Haiti”
and seeks to understand the meanings attached to it by different sections of
Haitian society.
Chapters 7 and 12 are entirely new pieces of work; the other eleven have been
previously published but have been extensively revised and updated. In all, a
quarter of the text consists of new material. The published pieces appeared in
specialist journals or books in the United States, France, Spain, Trinidad, Ja-
maica, India, and the Netherlands, several of which are not easily accessible even
in research libraries. Assembling them in one volume offers an up-to-date col-
lection that I hope will be useful for students and scholars in Latin American,
African American, and Caribbean history who wish to explore beyond the basic
narrative of the Haitian Revolution.
Preface ix