Pompée-Valentin de Vastey and the Kingdom of Henri Christophe, Part 1

After reading Daut's fascinating essay on the early life and poetry of Vastey, I decided to read some of Vastey's political tracts and writings on Haiti. First of all, of his early life, not much is known, but his mother was a mixed-race woman and relative of Marie-Cesette Dumas, the same African grandmother of Alexandre Dumas (Daut 36). According to Daut, Vastey's work was known in Europe, too. The publishing of "Le système colonial dévoilé, Vastey’s damning exposé of the inhumanity of the “colonial system,” was so well known across the nineteenth-century atlantic World that upon its publication it was immediately reviewed in French, US, German, and British journals and newspapers" (35). However, according to Daut, “Of a few things we can be absolutely certain: someone using the name Pompée Valentin Vastey was living in Paris and publishing poetry in the leading French journals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (37). Daut claims that there is some ambivalence regarding Vastey leaving France and a French identity behind in some of his poetry, but also suggests that the worsening conditions for people of color in France may have been another push for him to return to what would be known as Haiti (39).

According to Gordon K. Lewis's Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society In Its Ideological Aspects, 1492-1900, Vastey's pamphlets and books dealt with 2 things: defense of the Haitian Revolution and defense of the Black race in world history (Lewis 255). This defense argues that Haitian Revolution more important than the American Revolution since the latter was a political revolution and the former a social revolution that reshaped property ownership and property relations in the Haitian economic structure (255). Moreover, he goes back into history to show Africa as crade of civilizations: Carthage, Egypt, Ethiopia (256). Gerarde Magloire-Danton suggests that Vastey may have claimed Egypt as proof of black civilization and capacity due to a notion that Upper Egypt had been a colony of black Ethiopians, based on travel literature and writings of James Bruce and Constantin-Francois Volney, which could have been an influence (Magloire-Danton 157).

Furthermore, David Nicholl's insightful analysis of Vastey's royalist and revolutionary tendencies (though the two are not mutually exclusive) demonstrates how political actions and loyalties in revolutionary Saint Domingue and early Haiti were shaped often more by region than race, since Vastey, from the north, supported Christophe while someone like Goman supported Rigaud's regime (Nicholls 132). Moreover, Vastey saw it as fit for a majority black country to be ruled by a black, and criticized Petion's republic to the south for excluding blacks from official positions, except as cosmetic effect to pretend color prejudice did not dominate the highest posts in the republic (134). Intriguingly, despite becoming a kingdom by 1811 with feudal titles, visitors to Christophe's kingdom remarked upon the egalitarianism of the society, where workman and government minister could chat on a bench and servants would invite themselves into conversations at the dinnertable, which would support Vastey's ideals of a limited monarchy as a more stable government with a monarch ruling by consent of the people (135). According to Nicholls, Vastey, like Christophe, was enraged how the southern republic would entertain talks with France of reestablishing some form of colonial rule or even slavery, although he is quick to note how unlikely it was for Petion to accept a form of colonial rule from France, although he was open to compensation for dispossessed slaveholders (137). Recognizing the integral role of racial slavery and racial theory to cruel and barbaric European colonialism, Vastey declared all humanity equal, asserted the African origins of civilization, and argued that the color prejudice of whites caused their own downfall (138). He also saw to the need for self-sufficiency to ensure Haitian independence would last while taking issue with Dessalines's prohibition of white foreigners from owning property in Haiti (139-140).

Surprisingly, Vastey took issue with the southern republic's upholding of an article in the constitution allowing Africans, Indians and their descendants to settle in Haiti and earn citizenship in 12 months, which he saw as enticing people from other parts of the Americas to settle in Haiti and therefore constitutive of an interference in the affairs of other states (140). That said, he saw Haiti as proof of the capability of African independence and civilization, and revealed some understanding of recent travels into the interior of Africa, from the likes of Mungo Park and others, which proved Africa was not as barbarous or uncivilized as commonly believed in Europe (141). Yet he approved of British colonial policy in Africa and the creation of Sierra Leone, revealing the complexities of his conception of Africa and colonialism's so-called positive aspects (142). To make things even more paradoxical, Vastey foresaw the union of former colonized peoples around the world rising up against European imperialism.

Jonah Zinn's Essay on The Haitian Revolution's Impact on Abolitionism

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>.

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[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.

William Well's Brown's Clotelle

My liberty is as of as much consequence to me as Mr. Wilson's is to him. I am as sensitive to feeling as he. If I mistake not, the day will come when the negro will learn that he can get his freedom by fighting for it; and should that time arrive, the whites will be sorry that they have hated us so shamefully. I am free to say that, could I live my life over again, I would use all the energies which God has given me to get up an insurrection.

William Wells Brown, prominent black abolitionist, novelist, playwright and historian, a self-taught genius who fled slavery, wrote the first published novel by an African-American writer. Clotelle, published in the 1850s while he was living in England, was published in 4 different versions. The version I read features a family of mulatto women named Agnes, Isabella, Marion, and Isabella's daughter, Clotelle, who endure the destruction of their family because of slavery and the massive internal slave trade that brought enslaved blacks to the Deep South from states like Virginia. Brown's novel dramatically reveals how slavery undermines and contradicts American democracy and Christianity with constant examples of slavery's dehumanizing blacks, breaking up families, and emphasizing the threat of sexual violence and exploitation of female slaves, in addition to revealing how blacks, such as the slave Sam, internalize racial oppression through color prejudice against darker-skinned blacks versus lighter-skinned blacks. Brown sounds like Frederick Douglass at many times throughout the book because of his appeals to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and Christianity as reasons why slavery is immoral. Moreover, the tragic mulatto women in Brown's novel here are so light-skinned they could pass for white, but even they are not safe from racial slavery. Brown likely uses these light-skinned women who are still bought and sold at auctions like other slaves to reveal to whites how racial slavery even impacts people who could be perceived as Anglo-Saxon or white by most whites, which would appeal to sympathetic whites and abolitionists in Britain and the United States since those with predominantly European ancestry were treated as poorly and enslaved like dark-skinned, full-blooded "Negroes." Jerome, a dark-skinned slave, and Clotelle, fall in love and are reunited after both escape slavery for Canada and France, respectively. Their marriage, of a dark-skinned black, and a quadroon, and Clotelle and Jerome's meeting with her white, slaveholder father in France, symbolizes racial reconciliation brought by love.

Since Brown's short novel is such an abolitionist piece, it tends to have stereotypical characters who don't seem to reflect real human beings. Nonetheless, its an interesting novel that connects the fictional characters with real events of the antebellum South, such as Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia in the 1830s, the movement of slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South, the widespread rape and sexual molestation of women at the hands of white men, white women's envy and anger toward black men for 'stealing' their husbands, steamboats to traverse across the river, Canada as a safe haven for runaway blacks, etc. So Brown's novel definitely succeeds in capturing, for what were too many slaves, the harsh realities of life in this period. However, Brown's treatment of racial prejudice in 19th century is very flawed, for he argued that racial prejudice is wrought by slavery, and since Europe had so few slaves, racial prejudice was rare. This is why Jerome, a runaway slave from Mississippi was able to travel in Britain and continental Europe, find respectable employment as a clerk and even win over Clotelle's racist, American father. Obviously =racial prejudice in Europe against blacks existed, and Brown lets Europeans get away too easily, likely due to his sojourn in Britain after fleeing the United States because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Regardless, Brown rightly calls out Christianity and American democracy for moral hypocrisy, which he does so well with Mr. Wilson, a Christian minister from Connecticut who moves to the South and establishes a plantation. Wilson's daughter, Gertrude, opposes slavery and alleviates some of the oppressive conditions of slavery on her father's 'property,' but Clotelle and Jerome are still forced to flee the dehumanizing conditions that would not allow their love.

Despite the novel's rather predictable and cliched ending, it's still a tragedy because Clotelle's mother, Isabel, her aunt Marion's children, and her grandmother all die enslaved. Her father, a Virginia slaveholder, who in different versions of the novel is Thomas Jefferson (who had sexual relations with Sally, a black slave), is convinced to free his slaves by his daughter and her dark-skinned husband, Jerome. Liberation for the rest of the African-American population has not been achieved, and Clotelle's own cousins were sold into slavery in New Orleans because their white father forgot to sign documents freeing his wife, Marion. Thus, even those light-skinned, house slave blacks who escape brutal, field hand slavery though marriage or sexual relationships with white men, are still subject to the law of white supremacy. Clotelle's mother, Isabella, a beautiful light-skinned woman, was freed by Linwood and bears his child, but due to his status as a wealthy planter in Virginia, never marries her or acknowledges his daughter publicly. This culminates in the discovery of Isabella and Clotelle by Linwood's mother-in-law, who has the child sold into slavery and separated from the mother, who is sold to someone else. Isabella escapes Southern slavery by disguising herself as a man in the company of a dark-skinned slave mechanic, which allows her to reach the North. Her love for Clotelle brings her back to Virginia, where she is eventually discovered to be a black woman and chooses death in the Potomac over slavery. Her life is truly tragic because she never realizes that Henry Linwood, the white man she loves so much, never stands up for her or protects their child. That is why I find it very hard to believe Clotelle and her father's reunion in Europe decades later is so positive, because surely Clotelle should have preferred to distance herself from this 'father' who allowed the separation of Isabella and her daughter, making him culpable in the death of Isabella as well.

Overall, this is an interesting example of 19th century African-American literature. The first 'novel,' and setting up standards and common themes such as the tragic mulatto, Brown influenced abolitionist and American literature generally. His own background as a biracial slave in Kentucky who was a house slave makes his narrative more believable, especially regarding tension between field hands and domestic slaves, who used skin color and occupation to create slave hierarchies. Furthermore, Brown also foresaw the violent end of slavery in the United States, with articulate characters such as Jerome predicting retribution on Anglo-Saxon America if slavery does not die. Unfortunately, however, Brown's uncritical praise of European race relations and his rather dehumanizing characterization of Africa and African-born slaves does undermine the text. Like most 19th century American writers, there is an assumption of African cultural inferiority. As a result, one of the African-born runaways who leads the Southampton revolt with Nat Turner is disparaged. Interesting fact: Isabella's escape from slavery by dressing as a white man was likely inspired by a historical slave couple, who did the same thing.