Reflections on Carolyn Fick's The Making of Haiti

Carolyn E. Fick's excellent analysis of the Haitian Revolution is one of the better books I've had the opportunity to read since the end of Christmas break. Fick focuses on subaltern actors and how they interpreted French Revolutionary rhetoric based on Haitian Vodou, African cultures, and the creolization of slaves. Obviously Creole leaders such as Toussaint, Dessalines, and mulatto leaders like Andre Rigaud and Alexandre Petion receive a lot of attention as well but she demonstrates that their successes was built on popular resistance to slavery.

She also highlights the importance of slave leaders in the August 1791 slave insurrection that sparked the Haitian Revolution in the North province. Led by men such as Boukman, Biassou, and Jean-Francois, mostly commandeurs, or leaders on the plantations who directed other field slaves, they planned the insurrection that would culminate in the abolition of slavery and independence from France. Fick also shows how the revolution that swept the plantations of northeastern Saint Domingue in flames also included free blacks, such as Toussaint Louverture, but the original leadership was entirely black slaves.

Her analysis of the Bois-Caiman ceremony, led by Boukman and calling for the death of all whites and independence, suggests that it actually happened and wasn't a fabrication created by Haitian historians of the 19th century. The Bois-Caiman exhortation, "Coute la liberte li pale coeur nous tous" (Listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the heart of us all), was a call for revolution that successfully convinced slave leaders from different plantations in the North to take the tremendous risk of slave rebellion.

The importance of vodou and religion is also another element of popular culture and the creolization process for the African-born majority in Saint Domingue at the time. Leaders such as Boukman kept houngans, or vodou priests, around them at all times and consulted them for advice. Vodou charms were created for the slave insurgents, who actually believed the talismans would protect them from European gunfire and cannons, thereby increasing their courage and willing to die. Vodou was also used by mulattoes and free blacks to win followers among the slaves and ex-slaves, so its importance for the success of the Haitian Revolution is undeniable.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Fick's analysis, however, was the importance of slave resistance in the South during this period, 1791-1804. The West and South provinces of the colony were known for being heavily mulatto. Indeed, the gens de couleur outnumbered whites in the South province and owned plantations, slaves, and generally opposed general emancipation. White colonial refusal to grant the free people of color political rights such as voting power and representation in the French National Assembly and Colonial Assembly fueled mulatto acts of war and eventually lawlessness throughout the West and South. Mulatto leaders such as Rigaud and even white slaveholders quickly turned to the slave majority for men in their battles.

The fascinating part of slave resistance in the South was that although it did not begin autonomously among the slaves and was led by slaves, like in the North, but that the slaves in the South and West formed their own maroon communities of fugitive slaves during the lawlessness. Taking advantage of the political conflict between the mulattoes and whites, African and Creole slaves abandoned plantations, burned them down, and formed their own communities in the mountainous terrain and forested regions. For example, the "Kingdom of Platons" was one similar settlement that grew to include 10,000-12,000 men, women, and children. They elected their own king, claimed territorial rights to their settlements and the land, and began forming the peasant proprietorship consciousness of later Haitian peasants.

The leaders of Platons participated in the struggle for general emancipation, which was declared first in the North province by Sonthonax. The civil commissioner appointed by Revolutionary France in the South, Polverel, was reluctance to call for emancipation but like Sonthonax, he was forced to do so by the changing international status of Republican France. Once England declared war on France, began invading the colony, and the northern rebels, fighting under the banner of Spain (and therefore royalism and counterrevolutionary forces in France and Saint Domingue) controlled most of the North, it was inevitable that Sonthonax would call for emancipation for all slaves who fought against Britain and Spain.

Naturally the emancipation envisioned by the French Republican commissioners was semi-slave, semi-free, meaning that the freed blacks had to return to the plantations and would collectively be paid 1/3 of revenues from their labor, while the planter and state pocketed the rest. This form of plantation labor required coercion, which in the North and South involved the use of black and mulatto soldiers to police the slaves and excessive laws against slave "indolence" and resistance to slave-like conditions of work. By this time, most slaves wanted their own land and resented the use of force and semi-feudal systems of forced labor, like the French corvee, which had been used to get peasant labor for public projects in France during the Ancien Regime. The slaves themselves and the lesser-known but certainly more popular leaders simply resisted this by forming fugitive slave communities (marronage rears its head once again) and physically resisted with violence or slacking off off to lower production. For example, in many plantations, ex-slaves showed up late for work or never bothered showing up at all, and the conductuers (formerly called commandeurs in the days of legal slavery) facilitated this process.

The mulattoes, under the military leadership of Rigaud, seized control of the South and used the military apparatus to enforce the new agricultural labor system, which ultimately failed due to the increase in abuses committed by the mulattoes against slaves. Indeed, part of the reason for Toussaint's rise in popularity with blacks was his identification with them, unlike the mulatto leaders who considered themselves above the former slaves. I personally enjoyed reading Fick's take on the "War of the Knives" between Rigaud and the mulattoes of the South versus Toussaint (who assumed political leadership of the rebellion in the North and switched his alliance to Republican France from Spain and drove the British out of Saint Domingue) and how the black majority quickly joined Toussaint against Rigaud's regime.

Fick later covers how the popular leaders themselves later resisted totalitarian measures taken by Toussaint and his successors and their exclusion from leadership after the Revolution succeeded. A great example from the text is the case of Dessalines (leader of the Haitian Revolution after the death of Toussaint, and built a coalition between black and mulatto generals which recognized him as supreme commander and eventually "emperor of Haiti") and Goman, one of the maroon chiefs of the South who initiated slave resistance in Platons back in the early 1790s. Goman and other maroon leaders like Gilles Benech and Nicolas Regnier had considered themselves colonels and their decisive guerrilla tactics were what mobilized slaves and led to the defeat of the French in 1803. Instead of promoting and praising these maroon leaders who organized slaves in the 1790s and again during the French military occupation forces sent by Napoleon to restore slavery, Dessalines demoted Goman and Nicolas to batallion leaders. Goman kept repeating to himself and his friends after Dessalines left, "Negre-la dimini moin," "that black has demoted me." Obviously the popular leaders and subaltern actors who supported them with their lives in combat were what made the national leaders even able to reconquer the colony and defeat the remaining French forces, but they were ignored by the black military elite and mulattoes.

Another great thing about the book that I enjoyed was the importance Fick attached to Mackandal's revolt in the 1750s. Saint Domingue was not known for large and violent slave revolts prior to the 1791 insurrection so Mackandal's revolt stands out in 18th century pre-revolutionary Saint Domingue's history. Mackandal, essentially a maroon, had networks of communication connecting him with slaves and free blacks, possessed the stature of a religious cult leader through Vodou, the widespread use of poison to kill whites, and his revolutionary plan to overthrow the white regime and have the blacks seize the land was far more progressive than most maroon communites.

Other maroons in the Caribbean and Saint Domingue often accepted slavery as an institution and did not plan for general emancipation or independence from whites for the black majority. So this illustrates how problematic Eugene Genovese's concept of pre-revolutionary slave resistance and marronage as restorationist and backwards while the Haitian Revolution and succeeding revolutions are part of the "bourgeois-democratic" wave of revolutions associated with the Age of Revolutions. Mackandal and his followers, though stopped from completing their goal, went beyond "restorationist" thinking to include extermination of all whites, national independence, elements of Vodou (which is evidence of creolization for the slaves, not completely African but based on a several African religious traditions and rituals) and an end to slavery. The fusion of African, Creole, and European elements in Mackandal's and future Haitian slave revolts indicates that none of them can be limited as "restorationist" or "bourgeois-democractic" since most slaves did not interpet French republican ideology from a European perspective.

Fick also does a great job showing how marronage was always part of slave resistance in Haiti and throughout the Haitian Revolution. African-born men such as Macaya and Creole slaves resorted to marronage to form their own communities outside of plantations before, during, and even after independence in order to protect their conception of freedom and ensure general emancipation. As Frederick Douglas once said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." The slaves themselves forced the French civil commissioners of the French Republic to call for emancipation and many had already acted like free men by burning plantations, cities, fighting against whites and mulattoes, and forming their own governments and societies, such as the Kingdom of Platons in the South province. Marronage provided one way for this as the maroon communities actively recruited slaves and free blacks from the plantations and cities through various means and together destroyed the sources of their oppression: plantations and whites.


Now I realize that I have left a lot of holes and gaps in this reflection. This is not meant to to be a complete overview of the Haitian Revolution. That would require far more time to complete. One of my earlier posts on the Haitian Revolution was  an essay about African influences on slave resistance in both Haiti and Jamaica, so please take a look at that one for more examples of cultural influences from Africa.  My purpose in writing this was to simply share what I enjoyed or learned from Fick's book. Pick it up if you want to learn more. But don't forget, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing...