Introduction
The Haitian revolution was one of the most important events in the history of the New World as it established the first “political state of entirely free individuals” (Knight 2000). Before the revolution, planters’ prosperity was achieved at a high price. So harsh was the system that slave fertility was well below replacement, which required a constant supply of new imports. There were periodic slave uprisings and escapes. During the Haitian Revolution, Haiti’s cultural identity emerged. Its core elements are the Creole language; Voodoo beliefs and practices; the value attached to individual landholding, no matter how small the land; enthusiasm for trade; cultural creativity; and racial pride.
Thesis
The Haitian revolution was a watershed event in history because Haiti became the first free black republic in the world.
The Haitian revolution
Historians (Knight 2000) admit that the Haitian experience also differs significantly from that of Latin America. Nineteenth-century independence for Latin America was the product of locally born elites outlasting a weakened Spain in war and peace. Independence was not born of slave revolts, populist causes, or popular insurrections. Before the revolution, some blacks were also free because they had bought or had won their freedom. Many of the freedmen and women began to cultivate another crop, coffee, in the hilly regions (Nash 5). They and the white coffee growers staged sporadic uprisings against local sugar-dominated colonial authorities from 1763 to 1770 because they objected to the governor’s decision to reestablish a militia in which the rich sugar plantation owners would be named the officers and because they objected to the colonial government’s constraints on trading with countries other than France.
On the eve of the French Revolution, all was not quiet in Haiti among the nearly 30,000 free mulattoes and blacks, the 40,000 whites, and around a half-million slaves. The storming of the Bastille in Paris unleashed desires and fears of change in the colonies. Freedmen and women desired immediate equality with the whites; slave leaders wished for freedom pure and simple; some whites supported the monarchy in opposition to those who supported changes of various kinds. The clash of interests, due partly to (1) purely local interests, (2) events in France, (3) the declaration of freedom for all slaves in Haiti in 1793, and (4) the British and Spanish invasion, contributed to the confusion and growing conflict on the island. It culminated in a revolution that devastated the countryside and destroyed slavery and the plantation system (Knight 2000).
Revolution began in 1791 with a spontaneous slave insurrection in the north. Boukman, a slave working as a coachman and known to be a Voodoo priest, organized it. He and his followers were captured and killed but not until they W killed many slave owners. Freed blacks and mulattoes began agitating for full rights more peacefully through letters and petitions, but their leaders, Vincent Ogé and Jean-Baptiste Chavannes were tortured and killed by whites blinded by hate and fear of any change. In 1794 he shifted his allegiance to the new French republic fighting against the Spanish and British, who occupied much of the colony. Long campaigns marked by innovative military tactics allowed him to consolidate his forces and to rout the foreigners (Knight 2000). He took the Spanish city of Santo Domingo in 1801, becoming the undisputed leader of the whole island, but he made no declaration of independence. These actions were closely followed by Americans who were happy to see French influence weaken or who, because of their abolitionist ideas, wished to find examples of heroic black leadership and statesmanship (Wesley 2008).
Toussaint organized a military administrative system for the island and called for a constituent assembly in 1801, which prepared a constitution. The document named him governor-general for life. Faced with economic collapse, he arranged for the state to take plantations abandoned by their white and mulatto owners and to lease them to senior army officers and government officials. Guaranteed modest wages, quarters, and medical care, the former slaves were to be refixed as tenants on the land, no longer free to move about at will. In short, he was the first Haitian leader to institute forced labor. The rise of a black leader acting on his initiative was unacceptable to Napoleon, who was preparing to reestablish slavery. Profiting from a momentary peace in Europe, the French emperor launched a massive naval invasion in 1802 to reassert absolute French control over Saint Domingue. At first, the superior French forces rolled back the blacks, and through a ruse, they captured and exiled Toussaint in 1802 (Knight 2000).
Toussaint’s lieutenant, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, took up leadership and at the battle of La Crête-à-Pierrot broke the French stranglehold. The war continued without mercy for black, brown, and white. Yellow fever aided Dessalines and his second in command, mulatto Alexandre Pétion, by killing his French adversary, Admiral Leclerc. The atrocities committed by French troops under Leclerc’s successor, General Donatien Rochambeau, and the dread of re-enslavement brought unity to the blacks and browns. With the decline of the metropolitan settlers who died or fled and the death of 55,000 French soldiers and sailors from the revolutionaries’ weapons and disease, Napoleon’s image of a “New World Empire” was forever shattered. What had begun as a slave uprising ended on 1 January 1804 with the declaration of independence of “Haiti,” the Indian name chosen by Dessalines (who, according to tradition, also created the nation’s new flag by ripping the white from the French Tricolor) (Geggus 5).
Like Haiti, other Caribbean societies were founded through colonization, which destroyed the indigenous pre-colonial peoples. Jamaica and Suriname in particular had a series of slave uprisings that led to communities of freed slaves being established in the interior. “The impact of the Haitian Revolution was both immediate and widespread. The antislavery fighting immediately spawned unrest throughout the region, especially in communities of Maroons in Jamaica, and among slaves in St. Kitts” (Knight 2000). Yet those maroon runaway slave societies never sought or attained national liberation. They remained isolated, remote, rural enclaves of the descendants of freed slaves (Geggus 7).
Conclusion
The Haiti free black republic was an important event because it was not until 1960 that Jamaica gained its national independence, Suriname in 1976. Haiti’s independence in 1804 preceded the other island-states, in some cases by over 150 years. It involved no peaceful or parliamentary transfer of power. The plantation slave economy and society ended bloodily by revolution. Elsewhere, slavery held on until 1832 in the British possessions, 1848 in the French islands, and as late as 1868 in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic (Geggus 8). During the nineteenth century, the first world of the Haitian elites left people in the second world free to till their plots, to worship as they chose, to make their marital arrangements, and to use Creole. The elites created by the revolution were content to extract a share of the peasant’s produce without demanding their loyalty.
References
Geggus, D.P. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World). University of South Carolina Press, 2002.
Knight, F.W. The Haitian Revolution. 2008. Web.
Nash, G.B. Race and Revolution. Madison House Publishers, Inc, 1990.
Wesley, Ch. H. The Struggle for the Recognition of Haiti and Liberia as Independent Republics. 2008. Web.