To what extent did the success of the Haitian
Revolution impede efforts to end
Slavery in the Caribbean?
The
uprising of nearly 100,000 slaves in Saint-Domingue from 1791-1804 was the
largest insurrection of slaves in history.
The Haitian Revolution resulted in the creation of the first successful
independent freed slave state in the world, a fact that rocked the
socio-political, economic, and moral foundations of the Caribbean.[1] However, in the period following the
Revolution, there is a noted increase of slavery in the Caribbean as a
whole. Did the success of the Haitian
uprising merely serve as a lesson for Caribbean planters and reinforce the
slave society? To answer this question
one must examine the factors that led to the Revolution’s success both externally,
in the European metropoles, and internally, in the psychological and
socio-political dynamics of Caribbean societies. Therefore, the Haitian Revolution appeared to
impede abolition in the Caribbean in the short term because it reinforced white
stereotypes of African savagery and inferiority, convinced planters of the
danger of liberal and abolitionist ideals, and created a large void in the
coffee and sugar markets which other colonies quickly filled by introducing
more slave labor. While these effects
should not be minimized, they were merely the logical aftershock of the
tumultuous events in the established racial hierarchy. Ultimately, the Haitian Revolution was a
major turning point in abolitionist history because it restructured the balance
of power in the Caribbean thereby allowing a political gap for British
abolitionists, the first organized anti-slavery movement from a metropole, to
enter and because it drastically altered the psyche of enslaved Africans
throughout the Caribbean world by proving that the combination of external
pressures and internal uprisings could result in emancipation.
It
was no coincidence that the Haitian Revolution occurred so soon after the
French Revolution. The ideologies of the
French Revolution of 1789 permeated throughout the western world because they
originated in a metropole and because their core was defined by the commitment
to “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” radical
ideas especially in the colonial Caribbean that also became the motto of Haiti.[2] These ideals, which were embodied in the 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man, angered the whites of Saint-Domingue, who
refused to grant any liberties to the wealthy, educated Creole population of
the colony in fear that the racial balance of power would shift. The first clash between the planters and the
metropole occurred when the Constituent Assembly granted citizenship to wealthy
free people of color in 1791, which white planters also refused to accept. This denial ignited the island and led to a
slave insurrection which grew exponentially in a matter of weeks. Internally, this revolt was preceded by one
of the most hierarchical socio-racial structures in the Caribbean in which
whites occupied an extreme minority (they were outnumbered almost eighteen-to-one). While
there had been maroon insurrections in the past (namely that led by Francois
Mackandal from1751-1757) it was not until white elites were pressured by both
the metropole and slave revolts that the revolution actually spread. In a desperate attempt to appease revolting
slaves, France formally abolished slavery in the colonies in 1794. While appearing to support France initially,
after the expulsion of Spanish and British forces Toussaint L'Ouverture,
the leading general and a self-educated former slave, broke away and later
declared Haitian independence in 1801[3].
To
understand the true significance of the Revolution in the colonial Caribbean
one must first understand the prevalence of entrenched socio-political
divisions and constructs. The emergence
of a sugar culture in the Caribbean also meant the emergence of a planation
structure because maximizing profits required a cheap source of labor that
could be controlled by a minority. In
order to ensure dominance over slaves and to secure their power, whites
developed a highly centralized social hegemony.
This was especially prevalent in French colonies, as evidenced by the
refusal of Saint-Domingue planters to relinquish any power even to wealthy
Creoles, many of which owned slaves themselves.
This social division was paired with a moral doctrine of domination that
justified brutal slavery by citing white moral superiority to savage, subhuman
Africans. This social division and moral
justification had been entrenched in Caribbean society for nearly three hundred
years before the Haitian Revolution.[4] Thus, not only was a successful slave
rebellion unconscionable to whites, it also was morally revolting.
This viewpoint was well chronicled by Don Pedro
Irisarri of nearby San Juan, who wrote the Informe communicating
instructions to Puerto Rico’s representative in the Cádiz about the Saint-Domingue uprising. Based on the history of racial division and
subjugation in the Caribbean it is not surprising that Irisarri does not sympathize
with the former slaves but instead notes that “just as it would be impossible
to change their color from black to white it would be less possible that their
corrupt and vicious hearts be innocent during their captivity.” The
lesson Irissari drew from the Revolution was that the slaves’ success was due
to their “numerical superiority.” Thus,
he suggests a more careful use of slavery, not its abolition. This same reaction was held by whites around
the Caribbean. Superficially, the
Revolution strengthened slavery by giving other Caribbean planters an
opportunity to correct the mistakes of the French and reinforced racial
divisions. However, the white response
was merely a predictable reaction to the events, as it reflected the desire by
whites to retain dominance that was molded by centuries of exploitation and
mercantilism, and displays a superficial analysis that does not take into
account the deeper social ramifications of the rebellion.[5] In other words this view did not represent
any fundamental change in how white colonialists viewed people of color.
There other planter response to the success
at Saint-Domingue was not to blame slave labor, “on which the Caribbean
colonies had always depended,” but instead to showcase the dangers of
abolitionist ideals.[6] Slaveholders became extremely suspicious of
the spread of Haitian ideals and actively tried to suppress any information
that contradicted the doctrine of racial hierarchy. Again, while the suppression of information
that opposed the socio-political hegemony would seem to be detrimental to
abolitionism, it in fact had much deeper consequences that ultimately
undermined slavery as an institution, especially in British colonies. According to both Stinchcombe and Sheller,
one of the main causes of slave emancipation was the autonomy of the planters’
government and the strength of its ‘channels’ with the metropole.[7] Thus, by adopting policies that potentially
contrasted with the metropolitan center, planters ran a higher risk of collapse
by being pressured both from the constant threat of slave resistance and from
the metropole. This scenario proved true
for British Jamaica, which was fearful of the spread of the nearby Revolution,
because the rise of the abolition movement in Britain (discussed further below)
ultimately forced the planters to accept emancipation or risk
insurrection.
Next, it is easy
to overemphasize the rise of plantation cultures in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and
Brazil after the Saint-Domingue uprising because while this was a negative
consequence, the same time period also saw the decline of the British
participation in the slave trade. One
reason why Saint-Domingue was so important to the French was because it
produced half of the world’s coffee and nearly as much sugar as Jamaica at the
time of the Revolution and was the most profitable Caribbean colony.[8] The sudden elimination of this exporting
center created a massive demand for sugar and coffee, which spawned huge
increases in slave importation to Spanish and Portuguese colonies; the number
of disembarked slaves in Cuba rose from 21,103 between 1796 and 1800 to 101,002
between 1816 and 1820. However equating
this escalation of the slave trade to the failure of the Haitian Revolution to positively
affect abolition would be an oversight because of the exit of British colonies from
the slave trade. Indeed in the same time
period the number of disembarked slaves in Jamaica dropped from 78,351 to 0 due
to the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which ended British importation of slaves.[9] The fact that this Act occurred in 1807 is
significant because the British abolition movement made its first tangible
gains in 1787 with the creation of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave
Trade and did not achieve success until after the Haitian Revolution. To understand the connection between the
abolition movement and the Revolution we must first examine the societal
changes the Revolution catalyzed in Caribbean culture.
The adoption of
the 1807 Slave Trade Act, which was preceded by more than twenty years of
active abolitionist organizing and lobbying in Britain, could not have occurred
if legislators were worried about French economic competition. Indeed, the abolitionists had successfully organized
millions of citizens around Britain to pressure legislators. However, they were only able to achieve real
success once France was not deemed as an economic threat. The need to remove France was compounded by
the fact that ending the slave trade was actually economic suicide for major
parts of Britain economy.[10] Thus, in order to keep its economic position
in the balance of power the British economy needed to reduce competition. By removing France from Saint-Domingue and
ultimately thwarting its efforts to regain dominance in the Caribbean, the
Haitian Revolution “facilitated Britain’s disengagement from slave-trading in
1807 and from slavery itself in 1833.”[11]
Historian David Davis
states that while “Haiti posed no direct military danger to foreign
slaveholders” (with the possible exception of Louverture’s 1801 foray into
Spanish Santo Domingo) its “very existence…challenged every slaveholding regime
in the New World.” This intangible
threat was evidenced by Haitian inspired slave revolts in Barbados, Maracaibo
in Venezuela, Cartagena in Colombia, Cuba, Louisiana, Charleston, etc. Even in 1791, only one month after the revolt
began, Jamaican slaves sang songs about the insurrection.[12] Eugene Genovese points to the changed mindset
in Caribbean slaves, who heard about the Revolution despite planters’ efforts
to suppress the spread of information: he describes the French and Haitian
Revolutions as critical turning points in the history of slave resistance
because initial maroon uprisings were only acting against direct enslavement
while after the revolutions slave revolts targeted the system of slavery
through revolutionary, egalitarian ideology.[13] In addition to egalitarian ideology the
Haitian Revolution left the legacy of success, which proved to slaves that the
white social hegemony could be reversed.
Frederick Douglass best summarizes this psychological effect in an 1893
speech where he calls Haiti “the original emancipator of the nineteenth
century.”[14] This follows the trajectory of many slave resistance
efforts; in Haiti the early marronage uprisings did not lead to structural
victories while the 1791 Revolution led to independence; in Jamaica the maroon
wars were a constant thorn in the side of the British but they did not succeed until
the revolts of the early 1830s which resulted in the abolition of slavery in
1833.[15] Thus, I reject the totally Eurocentric
theories of Anstey, Craton, and Drescher because they hold slave resistance as
a constant and do not acknowledge the potential of changes in resistance
capabilities and the possibility of self-liberation determining the success of
emancipation.[16]
Therefore, the success of
Haitian Revolution was determined by the tradition of subjugation and racial
hierarchy within Saint-Domingue and by the spread of the ideals of the French
Revolution. Both factors forced the
planter elite to either relinquish some power or risk a violent uprising. This success led to some ostensibly negative
impacts on emancipation efforts but was often outweighed by the positive
ramifications. I have used a combination
of Eurocentric, slave agency, and colonial-metropole channel theories to
demonstrate that the Haitian Revolution had catalyzing effects upon several
arenas that contributed to the emancipation movement.
Bibliography
Brown, Jonathan C. Latin America:
a Social History of the Colonial Period. Fort Worth: Harcourt College,
2000.
Cooper, Anna Julia. Slavery and
the French Revolutionists: 1788-1805. Lewiston: N. Y., 1988.
Davis, David Brion. Inhuman
Bondage: the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford, England:
Oxford UP, 2006.
Drescher, Seymour. Econocide:
British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina, 2010.
Dubois, Laurent. A Colony of
Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean,
1787-1804. Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early
American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North
Carolina, 2004.
Geggus, David P. Haitian
Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Pres, 2002.
Geggus, David Patrick. The Impact
of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia, SC: University
of South Carolina, 2001.
Genovese, Eugene Dominick. From
Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the
Modern World. New York: Vintage, 1981.
Scarano, Francisco. "Sweet
Malefactor: Sugar and Slavery for the First Time in the Americas." 23
Sept. 2010. Lecture.
Sheller, Mimi. Democracy After Slavery:
Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica. Gainesville:
University of Florida, 2000.
Stinchcomb, Arthur L. "Freedom
and Oppression of Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean." American
Sociological Review 59.6 (1994): 911-29.
"Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade Database." Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Emory
University, 2009. Web. 07 Oct. 2010.
<http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces>.
[1] Jonathan
C. Brown, Latin America: A Social History of the Colonial Period (Forth
Worth: Harcourt College Publishers, 2000) 369-385.
[2] Anna
Julia Cooper, Slavery and the French Revolutionists (1788-1805)
(Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988) 100-101.
[3] Brown
376-381.
[4] Francisco
Scarano lecture, “Sweet Malefactor: Sugar and Slavery for the First Time in the
Americas” 9-23-10.
[5] David
P. Geggus The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001)
[6] David
Davis, Inhuman Bondage: the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 170.
[7] Mimi
Sheller, Democracy After Slavery (Gainsville: University Press of
Florida, 2000) 27-31.
[8]
Davis 158.
[9] “Voyages:
The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database,” 2009, Emory University, Oct. 7, 2010
<http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces>
[10] Seymour
Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) 55-65.
[11] David
P Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2002) 178.
[12] Davis
169.
[13] Eugene
Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the
Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1981) 82-84.
[14]
Davis 158.
[15] Davis
217-219.
[16] Sheller
20-29.
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