26098: Haiti Progres: (news) This Week in Haiti 23:24 8/24/2005 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Haïti Progrès <editor@haiti-progres.com>

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
newsweekly. For the complete edition with other news in French
and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100,
(fax) 718-434-5551 or e-mail at editor@haitiprogres.com.
Also visit our website at <www.haitiprogres.com>.

                        HAITI PROGRES
              "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                     * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                      August 24 - 30, 2005
                        Vol. 23, No. 24



THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION REVISITED:
SELECTIONS FROM "AVENGERS OF THE NEW WORLD"
(The first of two articles)

August was an important month in the early years of the Haitian
revolution.

In August 1791, thirteen years of revolution in the French colony of St.
Domingue began when slaves on the Northern Plain rose up, killing their
masters and burning down plantations.

Two years later, on August 29, 1793, the French Republican commissioner
Léger Félicité Sonthonax and emerging revolutionary leader Toussaint
Louverture simultaneously and independently declared the emancipation of
the slaves in the French colony.

Following the trail blazed by Trinidadian scholar C.L.R. James with his
1938 classic "The Black Jacobins," Laurent Dubois, an associate
professor of history at Michigan State University, published last year
an important new account of revolutionary St. Domingue entitled
"Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution"
(Harvard University Press, 2004).

"By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted
freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the
world," Dubois writes in the book's prologue. "It was a central part of
the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial
moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the
continuing struggles for human rights everywhere."

Dubois's account, broadly researched and beautifully written, is
destined to become a standard reference on the Haitian Revolution
alongside James's masterpiece. Over the next two weeks, we will reprint
selections from Avengers, which details how the "revolution began as a
challenge to French imperial authority by colonial whites, but soon
became a battle over racial inequality, and then over the existence of
slavery itself."

FROM THE CHAPTER "FIRE IN THE CANE":

In August 1791 a series of nighttime meetings of slaves took place in
the northern plain... On the night of August 21 the manager of [the
sugar plantation] La Gossette, Pierre Mossut, was awakened by a group of
slaves who announced that they were "coming to talk to him" and who then
attacked him. Mossut was wounded in the arm but fought back and managed
to escape. He sent word to the main Gallifet plantation, and soon Odeluc
[the administrator of the marquis de Gallifet's three plantations] and
several other whites arrived at La Gossette. The next morning,
accompanied by a judge from Le Cap, they interrogated slaves and
extracted a worrisome confession: there was a plan afoot to start "a war
to the death against the whites." The slave overseer of the plantation,
Blaise, was identified as one of the ringleaders. Blaise, however, was
nowhere to be found.

That night, slaves rose up on several plantations in the nearby parish
of Acul. A band led by a slave named Boukman "spread like a torrent"
through the parish. On one plantation, "twelve or fourteen of the
ringleaders, about the middle of the night, proceeded to the refinery,"
where they seized "the refiner's apprentice, dragged him to the front of
the dwelling house, and there hewed him into pieces with their
cutlasses: his screams brought out the overseer, whom they instantly
shot. The revels now found their way to the apartment of the refiner,
and massacred him in his bed." These slaves were soon joined by a large
troop from two neighboring plantations, and together they burned the
entire plantation to the ground. The only person they spared was the
plantation's surgeon, whom the slaves took with them "with the idea that
they might stand in need of his professional assistance." From there the
insurgent band attacked surrounding plantations, and by early the next
morning all but two of the plantations in the parish had risen in
revolt.

During the morning of August 23 the revolt spread from Acul to the
neighboring parish of Limbé. A troop of nearly 2,000 slaves went from
plantation to plantation, killing whites, burning houses, and setting
cane fields alight. In parishes farther east, meanwhile, slaves rose up
on several plantations. Much of the northern plain was soon engulfed by
the rebellion. "The fire, which they spread to the sugarcane, to all the
buildings, to their houses and ajoupas [huts], covered the sky with
churning clouds of smoke during the day, and at night lit up the horizon
with aurora borealis that projected far away the reflection of so many
volcanoes, and gave all objects a livid tint of blood."

> From the chapter "New World":

Early in August 1791 free-coloreds [the affranchis] organized a mass
political assembly in the town of Mirebalais. A well-respected,
French-educated man named Pierre Pinchinat was elected president, and
forty delegates were chosen to address demands for political rights to
the National Assembly, as well as to local assemblies and the colony's
governor. Just as the revolt began in the Northern Province, however,
the governor responded by ordering them to dissolve their "illegal"
assembly. The angry free-colored assembly soon decided to take up arms.
Among their leaders was André Rigaud, a goldsmith who had been educated
in Bordeaux and had a long military career that, according to many
accounts, stretched back to the siege at Savannah during the American
Revolution...

By late November Jean-François and Biassou were the most important
insurgent leaders in the northern plain. They had survived as other
leaders had fallen. Jean-Baptiste Cap, who was elected king of Limbé and
Port-Margot in late August, had been captured trying to recruit slaves
on a plantation and broken on the wheel. An in mid-November Boukman was
surrounded by a troop of cavalry and gunned down during a battle. He was
decapitated, his body burned by the French troops in view of the
insurgent camps, and his head displayed on a stake in the main plaza of
Le Cap. The man who killed him was awarded the large bounty promised to
anyone who brought in the "heads of the different chiefs of the rebels."
The death of the man who had set the uprising in motion made a deep
impression in the rebel camps, where insurgents launched into a
three-day calenda - dance - during which they taunted white prisoners
(whom some wanted to put to death in revenge for their leader's death)
and told stories of their exploits in the war.

Several months of war had taken their toll. Many thousands of insurgents
had died in the fighting. Those who had survived were often hungry and
sick. How long could the insurrection hold out if troops arrived from
France? What, ultimately, was to be gained? Jean-François and Biassou
decided it was time to sue for peace. Other officers, including one who
went by the name Toussaint, agreed. It would be a test of their
leadership and of the extent of their power, for many of the insurgents'
camps were determined never to return to the old world.

FROM THE CHAPTER "DEFIANCE":

By May 1792 news had arrived from France about the April 4 decree
granting full political rights to free coloreds. The looming danger of
slave revolt and the turnabout in Paris combined to weaken the political
will of those whites who still resisted the demands of the
free-coloreds. The first stage of the Haitian Revolution was coming to a
close. The free people of color had taken advantage of the opening
provided by slave revolt and, through effective lobbying in Paris and
armed struggle in Saint-Domingue, unraveled the racial hierarchy that
had oppressed them for decades. In the process they had become essential
allies for the Republican administrators from France in Saint-Domingue.
Many of them would embrace this role in the coming year, and in so doing
would break with those among their white planter allies who turned
against the Republic. General Bauvais would explain that the
free-coloreds had never been the "dupes" of the wealthy planters, having
joined with them only because they needed "auxiliaries" as they
struggled for their rights. "If the devil had presented himself, we
would have recruited him," he declared. The free-coloreds, in any case,
no longer needed their local white allies, for they had gained an even
more powerful ally: the metropolitan government, which increasingly came
to depend on them as its base of power in the colony.

There was, of course, one problem: what to do with the slaves who had
been central in securing victory? Most free-coloreds, as well as their
white allies, wanted the slaves who had risen up to return to their
plantations. Having at last realized that times had changed, however,
they made an important concession to the slave insurgents, granting
freedom to several hundred of their leaders. This promise came with one
condition: that the leaders allow themselves to be organized into a
police unit to keep order on the plantations from which many of their
followers had come...

FROM THE CHAPTER "LIBERTY'S LAND":

Jean-François and Biassou [allied now with the Spanish] launched a new
round of attacks [in June 1793] and, aided by other defections among the
troops fighting the Republic, made significant advances across the
northern plain... It was, [Sonthonax] declared in early July, "with the
natives of this country, that is, the Africans, that we will save
Saint-Domingue for France." But the liberty Sonthonax was offering the
"Africans" in return for military service was nothing more than what the
Spanish had been offering for several months, and there were few new
converts...

The commissioners, desperate to gain the allegiance of the mass of the
insurgents, understood they had to offer more. As early as July they had
warned a free-colored commander in the north that if the members of his
class resisted their gradual preparation of "an emancipation that is now
inevitable," it would happen "all at once" through "insurrection and
conquest." They challenged the free-coloreds to embrace a "pure
republicanism," reminding them that equality was not "the only
principle," and that liberty preceded it...

On August 24 [1793], at an open meeting in Le Cap, 15,000 "souls" voted
in favor of the emancipation of the slaves of the north. Finally, on
August 29, when Sonthonax issued a decree that began "Men are born and
live free and equal in rights," all who were "currently enslaved" in the
Northern Province were declared free. They would "enjoy all the rights
attached to the quality of French citizenship." Slavery had been
abolished in the richest region of Saint-Domingue, on the plains out of
which the revolt of 1791 had emerged, in the mountains that had served
as "boulevards of liberty" to the insurgents. The specter of liberty
that had loomed over Saint-Domingue for years, haunting and taunting
masters and slaves, had become a reality...

In the next months [Port-au-Prince-based French Republican commissioner
Etienne] Polverel followed suit, though more gradually, in the west and
south... A few weeks later he freed state-owned slaves and - in an
effort to maintain some peace between former masters and former slaves
in the new order - invited whites "penetrated with the principles of
liberty and equality that form the foundation of the French Republic" to
emancipate their own slaves. His proclamations made it clear that there
was ultimately little choice in the matter: "the slavery of a single
individual is incompatible with the principles of the Republic."
Finally, on October 31, Polverel decreed that all "Affricains &
Affricaines" (African men and African women), as well as all descendants
of Africans - and all those who were to arrive in the colony or to be
"born there in the future" - were "free" and "equal to all men." They
would enjoy "all the rights of French citizens and all the other rights
pronounced" in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Declaration
itself was translated into Creole and posted and distributed so it would
be accessible to all. All men over eighteen were to present themselves
to the local administration, where after taking an oath they would
receive a printed declaration of their French citizenship...

There was no precedent for what had happened. The small-scale, gradual
elimination of slavery launched earlier in several U.S. states had
opened the way for what Sonthonax and Polverel did in 1793. But the
scope of emancipation in Saint-Domingue was massive in comparison...

Perhaps the most radical part of their proclamations was the granting
not just of liberty but also of citizenship to the slaves. The new order
was, in principle, to be based on uncompromising equality. Race was to
have no place within it. This, too, was a dramatic challenge, not only
to the pathologically stratified society of Saint-Domingue, but to the
forms of democracy that reigned in the Americas and in Europe. The
promise of 1793 - a transracial citizenship in which ex-slaves and
ex-masters would live together as political equals - was a great step
forward, indeed in many ways out of its time. Undermined and attacked
almost immediately, it produced in later years eloquent defenders of the
principle that all people, of all races, were equal in rights. Distorted
and eventually destroyed during the next decade, it nevertheless
lingered as a fleeting possibility, one that would not find its home
again in the Americas for many years.

(To be continued)



All articles copyrighted Haiti Progres, Inc. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED.
Please credit Haiti Progres.

                             -30-