RBG BLAKADEMICS January, 2010
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HAITI
Slave Revolution200 years after 1804
Lesson design by RBG Street Scholar
RBG BLAKADEMICS January, 2010
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Source of text:http://www.iacenter.org/haiti/ In the richest of the French colonies,St.Domingue,whites had been fathering thechildren of slave women, and by the timeof the French Revolution some sons ofmixed race had become owners of thecolony's sugar plantations, and others ofmixed race were at least free men. Thepeople of mixed race numbered around30,000, while the colony's slavesnumbered around 500,000, about four-fifths of them field hands. In themountains were small villages ofdescendants of slave runaways, who lived from subsistence farming, maintained their Africanculture, occasionally raided a plantation, and banded together to resist planter attempts to re-enslave them. The whites in the colony numbered around 20,000. In addition to the plantationowners and their families, these included shopkeepers, merchants, doctors, craftsmen, wives,teachers, sailors and soldiers.
RBG BLAKADEMICS January, 2010
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Following the proclamation of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789, a delegation of men ofmixed race, called
gens de couleur
, arrived in Paris to ask whether this included them, and theywon assurance that it did. Opposing recognition of equality of the
gens de couleur
were thelower class whites (the
petits blancs
) lower at any rate than the highly born more wealthy whites(the
grands blancs
). The lower class whites wanted to hold onto what ranking was theirs byrace, but also they feared that if the
gens de couleur
were considered equal, soon the blackswould also want to be equal and free.A leader of the
gens de couleur
, Vincent Ogé, brought back from Paris the message that alltaxpayers were to be allowed to vote in elections for colonial legislatures. He petitioned thecolony's governor for recognition of this, but failed. White vigilantes tried to disarm a small armyof his supporters, and a small war erupted. By early 1791, the whites on the island crushed thesmall army of
gens de couleur
. Twenty-two of an army of about 300, including Ogé and aFrench priest who had joined his group, were hanged. And slaves saw Ogé die proclaimingliberty.Some slaves decided to fight for their freedom, and in August, 1791, plantations on the plainaround Cape François (
cap Haitien
), in the north of the colony, burned and around a thousandwhites were slaughtered. Paris sent soldiers to the colony to restore order, and in early 1792 theFrench government decreed that free
gens de couleur
were to have full citizenship. The Frenchauthorities wanted unity between the whites and the
gens de couleu
r for the sake of containingrebellion by the blacks. In Paris there was also concern about the illegal trade that plantationowners were conducting with U.S. merchants and fear that the plantation owners would try tobreak with France and tie themselves commercially with the U.S.After war broke out in 1793, people on St. Domingue anticipated the arrival of the British. Aformer slave and leader of a coalition of
gens de couleur
and slaves, Toussaint L'Ouverture, inAugust 1793, decreed all slaves emancipated, and many slaves joined his rebel army. It wasthe first society-wide emancipation of slavery in history. The British landed on September 19,1793, in the south of the colony. The white plantation owners welcomed them, expecting theBritish to reinstate slavery, make St. Domingue a British colony and strip the
gens de couleur
oftheir citizenship.By June 4, 1794, the British in St. Domingue had moved northward, taking Port-au-Prince and
other towns. Toussaint L'Ouverture fought a guerrilla war while allied with the French againstthe British. The British left, and on July 26, 1801, Toussaint L'Ouverture published aconstitution, which recognized the centrality of sugar plantations in St. Domingue's economyand he accepted Roman Catholicism as the state religion. The plantations were to be workedvoluntarily by free people, to be imported if necessary. According to the constitution, ToussaintL'Ouverture was to be governor-general for life and all men from 14 to 55 years of age were tobe in the state militia. The constitution proclaimed loyalty and subservience to France.Unfortunately for Toussaint L'Ouverture, he had not received approval from France's new headof state, First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte. On February 2, 1802, a French army of 12,000, sentby Napoleon arrived at Cape François, and Toussaint L'Ouverture's military retreated to theinterior to fight another guerilla war. On June 7, Toussaint received a message from a FrenchGeneral, Brunet, to meet for negotiations. Brunet assured Toussaint that he would be perfectlysafe with the French, whom he said were gentlemen. When Toussaint showed up for themeeting, the French took him and shipped him to France, to a cold and damp prison near theSwiss border, where Toussaint withered and died on April 7, 1803.
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