Reconstructing the history of the Haitian Revolution is a complicated challenge. Participants in the American and French revolutions belonged to civilizations familiar with the written word; they left behind voluminous records from which historians can reconstruct their ideas and actions. The vast majority of the blacks who participated in the Haitian uprising were illiterate; the documents from which we have to piece together what happened between 1791 and 1804 come almost exclusively from whites, almost all of whom were hostile to the movement. The documents that we do have – French official records, letters from white colonists, newspaper articles published in the United States, memoirs by survivors of the revolutionary period – tell us much about the events of the period, but there are many questions about the Haitian Revolution that historians will never be able to fully answer. What did the ordinary members of the black population think they were fighting for? How did they view Toussaint Louverture and the other leaders of the movement, who did, in some cases, leave letters and other documents behind? What was the role of the blacks’ vodou religious beliefs in shaping the insurrection? What influence, if any, did the free population of color exert over the insurgents? Historians disagree on the responses to these and many other questions about the events leading up to Haitian independence; the best we can do is propose answers based on the fragmentary and often one-sided evidence we do possess, knowing that some essential aspects of the past will always escape us.
As an example of the challenges of writing the history of the Haitian Revolution from documents generated by its opponents, let us consider the case of an eyewitness narrative of the early stages of the 1791 uprising that is cited in almost every account of these events, including this one. Gabriel Gros’s Historick Recital, first published in French in Saint-Domingue itself in 1792, then translated into English in Baltimore in 1793 and republished in French in Paris in that same year, is a vivid account by a white colonist who was taken prisoner by the black insurgents in October 1791 and wound up serving as a secretary to Jean-François Papillon, one of the movement’s early leaders. This document is one of the main sources about the events of the first few months of the insurrection, and includes, among other things, the earliest description of Toussaint Louverture’s political actions. In addition to historians, starting with the nineteenth-century Haitian chronicler Beaubrun Ardouin and continuing down to the present day, Gros’s dramatic story has inspired fiction authors, from the early nineteenth-century French novelist Victor Hugo to the contemporary American writer Madison Smartt Bell, who bases many episodes in his All Souls’ Rising on it.
Gros was certainly a partisan witness, who left no doubt about his desire to see the rebellious blacks forced back into submission. Does this mean that we can dismiss everything he says? Even some of the most surprising details he gives, such as his claim that one of the white colonial military leaders fighting the blacks wrote a letter saying that he was prepared to sacrifice the prisoners rather than make any concessions to the insurgents, are confirmed by other documents. He gives a nuanced portrait of Jean-François, saying that he showed “a degree of good sense, a fund of humanity, and a ray of genius, far superior to any sentiment that might have been expected from his kind,” although we must bear in mind the fact that one of the reasons he praised the black leader was that Jean-François proved willing to listen to Gros’s advice.22 On the other hand, Gros unfairly accused the white officials of being counterrevolutionary conspirators who set out deliberately to destroy the colony. In short, there is much to be learned from Gros’s account, both about the black insurrection and about white attitudes, but his story has to be read with his own very obvious prejudices in mind and the assertions it makes have to be carefully compared with those in other sources.
Another issue facing historians of the Haitian Revolution that has taken on increased importance in recent years is what constitutes appropriate language to use in describing these events and the actors in them. Many of us have come to realize that to describe a human being as a “slave” is to accept the status imposed on that person by those who had taken away his or her freedom. The word “mulatto,” routinely used to describe people of mixed racial ancestry even in relatively recent times, is derived from “mule,” a word for animals bred by mating horses with donkeys, and is now recognized as offensive. The historical sources for the reconstruction of the Haitian Revolution routinely use racialized language that is no longer acceptable today. When we quote directly from such documents, however, it is sometimes necessary to reproduce its wording in order to convey the thought of the people who used it. In some cases, it is also difficult to find effective phrasing to replace terms that have been ingrained in the language for generations. In this revised edition of the Concise History of the Haitian Revolution, I have tried to avoid the word “slave” for individuals, but I have continued to use the phrase “slave revolt,” for example, as a clear and direct way of describing collective acts of resistance to the condition of slavery. Some of my fellow historians now replace the name of the French colony of Saint-Domingue with “Haiti,” the name the victors in the Haitian Revolution gave to the territory when they declared its independence in 1804. I continue to refer to “Saint-Domingue” prior to that date, both because it was the name used for the territory by all the actors in these events, including Toussaint Louverture, up to the moment when the Haitian Declaration of Independence was issued, and also because referring to Saint-Domingue as “Haiti” prior to 1804 obscures the fact that history might have gone in other directions. If Napoleon had not ordered his disastrous invasion of the island in 1802, for example, the territory, like the other French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, might be still be part of France.
For Haitians themselves, the story of their ancestors’ struggle for freedom has great symbolic importance, and its heroes remain sources of inspiration to a population facing what often seem like insurmountable challenges. This account, constrained by the guidelines of modern historical research, may strike some readers as less vivid than the colorful scenes of revolutionary events painted by many of Haiti’s talented contemporary artists. Reconciling the living historical memory of the Haitian Revolution with the results of modern historical research is not a simple task. Nevertheless, historians’ attempts to understand the events of the revolutionary period as the outcome of the actions of the men and women who participated in them have their own value, even if the historical record is not complete enough to answer all our questions. The aim of this book is, then, to provide students and general readers with a concise overview of the generally accepted historical facts about the Haitian Revolution, drawing on the scholarship of historians from Haiti itself as well as the research of those in the United States, Europe, and other countries who have contributed to the subject.
For much of the period from the declaration of Haitian independence in 1804 until the last decades of the twentieth century, serious historical scholarship on this subject by scholars outside Haiti remained quite limited. Haitian historians have produced many important works on the subject, despite the fact that most of the surviving documents about the revolution are in archives in France and not in Haiti itself, but their books, usually published in French, are often hard to find except in major research libraries. Outside of Haiti, few historians were attracted to a subject that inevitably raised troubling questions about the policies of the French Revolution and the national hero Napoleon, and that reminded Americans that the United States had refused to recognize Haiti’s freedom for six decades. In recent decades, what the Haitian American scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot eloquently denounced in a famous essay as the “silencing” of the Haitian Revolution for so long has begun to end.3 In writing this short history, I have been able to draw on a rapidly growing body of modern scholarship from both sides of the Atlantic; the recommendations for further reading at the end of this book will point readers to many of the sources I have used. If this book encourages readers to explore the subject further on their own, it will have achieved its purpose.
1 A Colonial Society in a Revolutionary Era
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