Atlantic Studies

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CARIBBEAN DREAMS, HAITIAN NIGHTMARES

Race and class in the competing visions of Denmark Vesey and Simón
Bolívar

Douglas R. Egerton

To cite this article: Douglas R. Egerton (2005) CARIBBEAN DREAMS, HAITIAN NIGHTMARES,
Atlantic Studies, 2:2, 111-128, DOI: 10.1080/10494820500224145

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CARIBBEAN DREAMS, HAITIAN
NIGHTMARES
Race and class in the competing visions of
Denmark Vesey and Simón Bolı́var

Douglas R. Egerton

Trained, as most of us are, to focus on a small corner of the globe during an equally small
moment in time, historians too often miss the larger interconnections that help explain regional
racial identity and specific types of class formations in the Atlantic world. Denmark Vesey, for
example, is too often depicted merely as an ‘‘enslaved rebel leader’’ (despite being free for two
decades prior to his execution) rather than a black abolitionist, or a man of the black Atlantic. In
the same way, Simón Bolı´var is forced into equally simplistic categories. He is a general and a
politician, but rarely a resident of Paris at the time of Bonaparte’s coronation, or a visitor to
Vesey’s South Carolina, or a refugee in Haiti. However, in their later years, and especially in the
early 1820s, they both thought much about events in Haiti, and their competing views of the black
nation say much about the shifting boundaries of race and class in the western Atlantic.
Conventional wisdom holds that for much of the late colonial era and early national periods in
both North and South America, the connection between race and class can scarcely be
overemphasized. Scholars now acknowledge that racial definitions are always being defined and
redefined, just as class status is never static. Nothing better illustrates this understanding than the
way these two individuals viewed the possibilities, as well as the dangers, inherent in Haiti’s
destruction of old correlations and new perceptions of class structures. If elite whites regarded
Haiti as a terrifying example of a world turned upside down, Vesey evidently regarded the black
nation as the sort of country where bright, aggressive, ambitious men like him could prosper and
advance in rank. Historians, with a few notable exceptions, have been dismissive and patronizing
of post-1804 Haiti, with its governor-generals, emperors, and presidents for life. But as a former
resident of Danish St Thomas, French Saint Domingue, and patriarchal South Carolina (and, most
likely, as the child of West Africans), Vesey had never actually seen a truly egalitarian society. If the
antislavery ever harbored the sort of communalistic ideals that scholars wish to impose upon
black abolitionists, there is now no evidence for it. Vesey appeared to care little about the fact that
post-Louverture Haiti was both politically undemocratic and class based. With Christophe’s
eradication of the blancs and the gens de couleur, race was no longer a component in its class
structure, except to the extent that the old order’s racial structure was turned upside down. For an
exceedingly entrepreneurial businessman like Vesey, Boyer’s country was not just liberty or a
convenient safe haven; it was the very picture of class mobility.

KEYWORDS: Vesey, Denmark; Bolı́var, Simón; Haiti; Boyer, Jean-Pierre

Atlantic Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, October 2005

ISSN 1478-8810 print/1470-4649 online/05/020111-18
– 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/10494820500224145
112 DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

In the first month of 1807, two men waded through the sandy streets of Charleston,
South Carolina. One was a 23-year-old visitor from the Viceroyalty of New Granada, on his
way from Paris back home to Caracas. The other man was older, perhaps 40; like many
people who had once been enslaved, he probably did not know his precise age or date of
birth. The absence of extant data for either man during that year leaves it a mystery as to
whether they passed one another as they walked along East Bay or Meeting Street, or if
they noticed the other as they did. The first, young Simón Bolı́var, was short of stature, yet
he had already adopted the military bearing learned as a cadet in Valles de Arague. His
tanned skin betrayed a hint of the African blood bequeathed by Marı́a Josefa, his great-
great-grandmother and a slave of the powerful Bolı́var family. The older man was Denmark
Vesey, an industrious carpenter who bought his freedom in 1799 with lottery winnings.
The habitually well-dressed Vesey, reputedly of ‘‘Coromantee’’ descent, was as ‘‘large,
stout [and] black’’ as Bolı́var was slight and bronze.1 Bolivar sauntered down the boulevard
slowly, taking in the sights, while Vesey hurried to his next job.
Trained, as most historians are, to focus on a small corner of the globe during an
equally small moment in time, scholars too often miss the larger interconnections that
help make clear regional racial identity and specific types of class formations in the Atlantic
world. Denmark Vesey, for example, is too often depicted merely as an ‘‘enslaved rebel
leader’’ (despite being free for two decades prior to his execution) rather than a black
abolitionist, or a man of the black Atlantic. In the same way, Simón Bolı́var is forced into
equally simplistic categories. He is a general and a politician, but rarely a resident of Paris
at the time of Bonaparte’s coronation, or a visitor to Vesey’s South Carolina, or a refugee in
Haiti. However, in their later years, and especially in the early 1820s, they both thought
much about events in Haiti, and their competing views of the black nation say much about
the shifting boundaries of race and class in the western Atlantic.2
Recent scholarship emphasizes Haiti’s influence on the early nineteenth century
Atlantic world, typically by examining elite white fears of slave rebelliousness within the
United States.3 Given the paucity of evidence, harder to document is how freed slaves and
bondmen regarded the black republic, or the far more complicated ways in which Central
and South American elites dealt with the former French colony’s model of black resilience.
This study uses Denmark Vesey and Simón Bolı́var */two literate and unique men, if
otherwise typical of their race and class */as a method of examining African American and
South American attitudes toward Haiti. Far more complicated than the opinions expressed

1
Masur, Simón Bolı́var , 29 /31; Lydia Marie Child to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 17 March
1860, William Palmer Collection, Western Reserve Historical Collection; Grimké, Right on the
Scaffold , 3. Recently, Johnson, ‘‘Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,’’ 918, suggested that
‘‘[n]o source documents Vesey’s physical size,’’ and Morgan, ‘‘Conspiracy Scares,’’ 161, insisted
that Grimké identified Vesey as a mulatto, although Grimké in fact used only the term ‘‘black’’ in
his pamphlet. It is interesting to note that the same biography ignored by Johnson when it
comes to Vesey’s size is now being wrongly cited by Morgan when it comes to his
pigmentation.
2
The characterization of Vesey as an ‘‘enslaved rebel leader’’ appears in Sale, The Slumbering
Volcano , 263.
3
Two works that examine the impact of the revolt in Saint Domingue on white elites in North
America are Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America , and Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion , ch.
10.
 CARIBBEAN DREAMS: HAITIAN NIGHTMARES 113

by North American white elites, these two individuals serve as a reminder that Haiti hardly
presented a single image to the west. Janus-faced, the black nation terrified powerful
white elites, but for many others around the Atlantic basin, Haiti presented a more
complicated image that reflected shifting attitudes toward race, as well as shifting
geopolitical realities.
Conventional wisdom, for example, holds that for much of the late colonial era and
early national period */designations that apply to both North and South America */the
‘‘correlation between race and social position,’’ as Magnus Mörner bluntly put it four
decades ago, could not ‘‘possibly be overlooked.’’ Scholars now acknowledge that racial
definitions are always being defined and redefined, just as class status is rarely static.
Nothing illustrates this understanding better than the way these two men */and the
groups they represented */viewed the possibilities, as well as the dangers, inherent in
Haiti’s destruction of old correlations between whiteness and liberty. Although historians
tend to denigrate the convoluted, downward political spiral of post-colonial Haiti, for
many enslaved people in the Americas, Haiti presented not merely an image of personal
freedom, but also the very image of class mobility.4
Both Vesey and Bolı́var knew the island of Hispaniola all too well, although they
resided there in slightly different eras. The black carpenter, then an enslaved child whose
birth name is lost to history, briefly labored in the French colony of Saint Domingue during
the last months of 1781 and the early days of the following spring. In September or
October of 1781, the boy was purchased by Bermudian-born slave trader, Joseph Vesey,
together with roughly 390 other slaves from Danish St Thomas for resale in Cap François.
Entrusted to Vesey’s colonial agents of ‘‘Lory, Plombard, and Compagnie,’’ the child found
himself as one of the 400,000 bondpersons who labored in Saint Domingue. Clever
enough to feign ‘‘epileptic fits,’’ the boy was returned to Captain Vesey when the Prospect
again made port on 23 April 1782. Vesey was a hard man but never a fool; he retained the
child, whom he rechristened Telemaque, as a cabin boy even when the seizures ceased as
quickly as they had begun.5
Thirty-three years later, and eight years after Bolı́var and the freedman then calling
himself Denmark Vesey may have passed in the streets of Charleston, a different sort of
survivor washed ashore at Port au Prince in the by-now independent nation of Haiti.
Having failed in his attempt to liberate Caracas from Spanish control, Bolı́var and a nearly a
thousand refugees made landfall first in British Jamaica, where he published his celebrated
‘‘Jamaica Letter,’’ before pushing on for Haiti in search of arms and funding for another
assault on Madrid’s mainland empire. The Haitians were far more supportive than the
English were, preoccupied as the British were with the final moments of the Napoleonic
wars at Waterloo and New Orleans. Anxious to end their diplomatic and economic
isolation, the Haitians promptly offered bread and meat to the starving refugees, and after
only two days on the island, Bolı́var was granted an audience with President Alexandre
Pétion.6
The two men, both desperate for allies, met on 2 January 1816. Born in 1770 before
the Haitian revolution */and hence a young bondman during Telemaque’s brief

4
Mörner, ‘‘Historical Research on Race Relations in Latin America,’’ 199.
5
Hamilton, An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection , 17; Cap François Affiches Americaines ,
24 April 1782.
6
Madariaga, Bolı́var , 268; Angell, Simón Bolı́var , 108; Rourke, Man of Glory , 152.
114 DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

enslavement in the colony */Pétion was then 46, the mulatto son of a French settler and
an African woman. His path to prominence was every bit as unusual as that of Vesey or
Bolı́var. Sent to France to study at the Military Academie , Pétion returned to Saint
Domingue in the 1790s, where he sided first with mulatto general André Rigaud and then
with Charles Victor Leclerc against Toussaint Louverture. However, in late 1802 he led a
mutiny against the French and threw his support behind Henri Christophe and the black
rebels. In 1806, he was elected president. Twice reelected to the position, in 1816, shortly
after he met with Bolı́var, he was named President for Life. With the end of slavery on the
island, the sugar industry had moved on, mostly to Jamaica and Brazil, which had
previously been second and third, respectively, in output behind Saint Domingue. Shortly
thereafter in 1806, Thomas Jefferson and the Republican majority cut off all trade with
Haiti in hopes, as Virginia Congressman John W. Eppes put it, ‘‘that the Negro government
should be destroyed.’’ If anything, Pétion needed allies even more than did Bolı́var, and
the prospect of a New Granada free from the mercantilist grip of Madrid posed a most
seductive gamble.7
To that end, Pétion promised all of the things that had been refused in Jamaica:
arms, ammunition, ships, and even money, a scarce enough commodity in trade-hungry
Haiti. Either willing to overlook race in the name of military expediency, or aware of his
own family’s distant biological connection with Africa, Bolı́var, the nephew of one of the
wealthiest planters in New Granada, was ‘‘very favorably’’ impressed with the president.
‘‘His countenance reflects the kindness of character for which he is well known,’’ Bolı́var
reported that evening to fellow patriot Luis Brión. ‘‘I hope for much from his love of liberty
and justice.’’8
Pétion’s generosity was undoubtedly based primarily on his need to end Haiti’s
diplomatic isolation, yet he nonetheless made one request in exchange for assistance.
Should Bolı́var’s seemingly hopeless crusade against Madrid succeed, Pétion insisted that
he promise to free the slaves in all of the colonies he liberated from Spanish control.
Bolı́var’s biographers disagree as to whether he had already freed the slaves he inherited
from his father, who died when he was two. Gerhard Masur suggested that under the
influence of his radical tutor, Simón Rodrı́guez, Bolı́var ‘‘had long since outgrown any class-
conscious thinking’’ and emancipated his bondpeople. Others insist that it remains unclear
as to precisely when he freed his last domestic slaves, and in any case, the young rebel had
already determined to be a soldier rather than a planter. Whatever the truth was, he
needed arms, and Pétion was his last hope. On 8 February he informed the president that
he was ‘‘overwhelmed by the weight of your kind deeds,’’ adding, ‘‘In my proclamation to
the people of Venezuela and in the decrees which I have devised for the liberty of the
slaves, I do not know if I have expressed the feelings of my heart toward Your Excellence,
or can leave to posterity a monument to your philanthropy.’’9

7
Masur, Bolı́var , 271; Dubois, Avengers of the New World , 234, 254; Ott, The Haitian Revolution ,
113, 147, 176, 193; Klein, African Slavery , 59; Annals of Congress , 9th Congress, 1st Session, 138,
499, 515; Norfolk Gazette , 28 September 1806; Richmond Virginia Gazette and General
Advertiser , 1 March 1806.
8
Simón Bolı́var to Louis Brión, 2 January 1816, Bierck, Selected Writings , 1: 129.
9
Masur, Bolı́var , 272; Simón Bolı́var to Alexandre Pétion, 6 February 1816, reprinted in
Madariaga, Bolı́var , 268.
 CARIBBEAN DREAMS: HAITIAN NIGHTMARES 115

The irony of this bargain was inescapable. The young soldier’s ancestor, Simón de
Bolı́var, had once petitioned King Philip II for permission to import several thousand
Africans into Caracas, and now a former Haitian slave was the politician man willing to
assist that importer’s descendant in his moment of need. The following month, on 22
March, Bolı́var set sail with an expedition of seven ships, 250 men, and muskets enough to
equip nearly 4000 soldiers. However, as historian Marixa Lasso has aptly put it, the
refugees from New Granada ‘‘did not travel alone.’’ An unknown number of the expedition
force were Haitian sailors and soldiers, some of whom had already seen action during the
previous year’s siege of Cartagena (at which point the port city had served as a safe haven
for French and Haitian privateers). Pétion also provided Bolı́var’s expedition with a printing
press, so that he could better spread word of his crusade.10
Yet Bolı́var, like all visionaries, had his pragmatic side. If he had reason to be grateful
to Haiti’s leader, he believed he had even more reason to be concerned about Haiti’s
impact around the Atlantic world. Bolı́var required the support of the powerful planters
and the merchants, the rich white vecinos , whether or not he had actually freed his slaves
years before. Any dramatic move toward social leveling would only alienate wealthy
landlords and add to the already large number of Spanish loyalists. More to the point, if
Bolı́var’s alliance with Pétion, as Eugene Genovese has observed, forced the Venezuelan
‘‘into bolder efforts toward emancipation,’’ he clearly believed that black liberation should
come under controlled, elite auspices. Should conservative reform not be imposed from
above, Bolı́var cautioned, ‘‘the hornets’ nest is stirred up’’ by the slaves themselves and
‘‘the result will be similar to that in Haiti.’’11
Bolı́var had ample evidence to support his fears. In 1799, Spanish authorities in
Cartagena and Maracaibo uncovered slave conspiracies directly tied to Saint Domingue. At
no time, of course, did bondmen in the Americas require outside agitators to remind them
of their misery; servile insurrection, like popular revolts around the Atlantic basin the age
of revolution, typically arose from a set of circumstances unique to each geographic
location. Yet there can be little doubt that the porous Caribbean coast of New Granada,
which stretched for one thousand miles from the Gulf of Urabá to the Guajira Peninsula,
facilitated the flow of information from Cap François to Caracas. In this case, rebel leaders
were two mulatto Domingan brothers, Jean and Augustin Gaspard Boze, who landed with
a black crew in hopes of introducing into the Spanish colony ‘‘the same system of freedom
and equality’’ that then existed under Toussaint Louverture’s government. The governor
successfully mobilized Maracaibo’s defenses against the invaders, arresting 68 men in the
process.12
Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of power later that year and the preliminary Peace of
Amiens in 1801 put a stop to French attempts to revolutionize the Spanish empire. For
those on the bottom, the symbol of Haiti continued to inspire resistance. In the city of
Mompox, nightly broadsides appeared on the walls. Although angry slogans hardly
constituted organized conspiracies, they indicated the sort of broad-based demands for
radical social change that Bolı́var feared would upset his drive for an elite-led

10
Rourke, Man of Glory , 153 /4; Lasso, ‘‘Haiti as an Image of Popular Republicanism,’’ 177 /9;
Geggus, ‘‘Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean,’’ 24.
11
Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution , 120; Simón Bolı́var to Francisco de Paula Santander,
30 May 1820, in Bierck, Writings , 1: 229.
12
Aline Helg, ‘‘A Fragmented Majority: Free ‘Of All Colors’,’’ 157 /60.
116 DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

independence movement. As is the case far too often in history, the unadulterated voice
of the enslaved is lost, but a few anonymous broadsides survived. The ‘‘damn whites’’ fear
‘‘the chop of the machete,’’ one read. ‘‘In the end, you will all be fucked because blood will
run like in Saint Domingue.’’13
As a well-traveled visitor to the several corners of the North Atlantic, the perceptive
Bolı́var almost certainly had caught rumors of other evidence of Saint Domingue’s
influence. Shortly before the conspiracy in Mompox, a series of disturbances shook the
Chesapeake Bay region. Virginian John Randolph overheard several slaves whispering
below the window of his Richmond home. One bondman spoke of fires, adding that was
‘‘how the blacks has killed the whites in the French Island and took it a little while ago.’’
Other Virginia masters worried about the effect of Domingan refugees on their own
laborers. ‘‘Our Negro Slaves have become extremely insolent and troublesome,’’ grumbled
one Norfolk resident. They ‘‘associate with French Negroes from St Doming[ue]’’ and
appeared ‘‘to be rife for insurrection.’’ To the north, in Albany, New York, a slave set a fire
that nearly leveled the town in apparent imitation of the Night of Fire, and in the Brazilian
city of Bahia, four mulattoes were hanged and quartered for the crime of promoting ‘‘the
imaginary advantages of a Democratic Republic, in which all should be equal.’’ When
Bolı́var arrived in Jamaica in his unsuccessful bid for military support, British officials still
bragged of executing Dubuisson, a white Frenchman from Saint Domingue, for allegedly
trying to rally black support for a French invasion.14
Certainly, the slave conspiracy that most clearly illustrated not merely the
inspirational power of Haiti, but demonstrated an actual connection to the black republic,
was that orchestrated in early 1822 by Denmark Vesey of Charleston. By comparison to
other servile insurrections in the age of revolution, which were frequently designed to
force the master class to recognize civil equality as well as physical liberty, Vesey’s plot
constituted a mass escape from South Carolina. Historians who regard his plan to take the
city as doomed to failure mistakenly assume that he planned to remain in Charleston and
fight to the last man. Although city magistrates, for obvious reasons, later downplayed the
importance of Haiti in Vesey’s scheme, the island nation was central to his plot. According
to conspirator Rolla Bennett, a domestic servant to the governor and Vesey’s neighbor on
Bull Street, the rebel army would not linger in Charleston. ‘‘[A]s soon as they could get the
money from the Banks, and the goods from the stores,’’ Bennett insisted, ‘‘they should
hoist sail for Saint Doming[ue]’’ and live in freedom amongst Louverture’s descendants.
For all of his acculturation into Euro-American society, Vesey, as a native of St Thomas and
a former resident of Saint Domingue, remained a man of the black Atlantic.15
Two years previously, Jean-Pierre Boyer, who became president of Haiti following
the death of Pétion in 1818, placed advertisements in mainland newspapers inviting
American freed people to relocate to the black republic. Promising free land and political
opportunity to black settlers, Boyer hoped to recruit skilled labor to his shores, and he
desperately needed just the sort of artisan capacity Vesey’s crowded armada could bring.

13
Lasso, ‘‘Haiti as an Image,’’ 182 /3.
14
Deposition of John Randolph, 22 July 1793, in Flournoy, ed., Calendar of Virginia State Papers ,
6: 452 /3; Daniel Bedinger to unknown, 5 March 1797, Bedinger Letters, Duke University Library;
Nash, Forging Freedom , 174; Palmer, Age of Democratic Revolution , 338; Scott, ‘‘The Common
Wind,’’ 298.
15
Confession of Rolla Bennett, June 25, 1822, in Kennedy and Parker, eds, Official Report , 68.
 CARIBBEAN DREAMS: HAITIAN NIGHTMARES 117

The community of established nations already treated Haiti as an international pariah and
a dangerous symbol of black autonomy, and the administrations of President James
Monroe and Prime Minister Robert Banks Jenkinson might take action if Haiti welcomed
slave rebels. However, Vesey expected to buy his way into exile. Boyer’s embattled
republic required capital fully as much as it required skilled craftsmen, and white
Carolinians echoed Bennett in believing that Vesey planned to ‘‘pillage’’ the ‘‘Banks [with]
which they were immediate[ly] to go off with to St. Doming[ue].’’ What Langdon Cheves,
the president of the Bank of the United States, regarded as ‘‘plunder’’ was for Vesey’s men
nothing less than back pay. For harness-maker Monday Gell, the specie in Charleston’s
vaults was not merely his passport to Haiti; it represented decades of uncompensated
labor.16
Given President Boyer’s understandable reluctance to open his ports to hundreds of
men and women the Euro-American community would regard as murderers and thieves,
Vesey had to prepare Haiti for the eventuality of his arrival fully as much as he had to
prepare his own captains. The plan called for his soldiers to ‘‘put as many’’ aboard as made
it to the Charleston docks and sail for Haiti on Monday, 15 July, only ‘‘one day after [the
rising] had taken place.’’ To alert Boyer, Gell ‘‘wrote more than one letter’’ to Haitian
authorities, which were smuggled out of Charleston by a black ‘‘steward of a Brig lying at
Gibbes and Harpers wharf.’’ If Haiti signaled the promised land for Caribbean blacks, it so
terrified Carolina whites that Anna Haynes Johnson, the daughter of Supreme Court
Justice William Johnson, later believed that Vesey’s followers intended to ‘‘carry us and the
common negro’s to St D[omingue, and] there to be sold as slaves.’’17
If elite whites like Johnson regarded Haiti as a terrifying example of a world turned
upside down, Vesey evidently regarded the black nation as the sort of country where
bright, aggressive, ambitious men like him could prosper and advance in rank. Although
the old myth that Vesey died a rich man worth nearly $8000 was just that, he did throw his
enormous energies into his carpentry business. According to Israel Nesbitt, the great-
grandson of Vesey’s friend Robert Nesbitt, Denmark labored ‘‘every day at de trade of
carpenter’’ and ‘‘soon become much [re]spected’’ and ‘‘esteem[ed] by de white folks.’’
Even James Hamilton later conceded that, as a businessman Vesey was ‘‘distinguished for
[his] great strength and activity.’’ In the eyes of the black community, Hamilton added,
Vesey ‘‘was always looked up to with awe and respect.’’ Yet awe and respect neither paid
the rent nor fed Vesey’s hungry families, and as a free black man in a slave society, his race
set crippling limits on his ability to prosper in South Carolina.18
When explaining class formation and its relationship to political power, modern
scholars instinctively assume a correlation between upward mobility and democratization,

16
Miller, Wolf By the Ears , 272; Plummer, Haiti and the United States , 29; Nash, Forging Freedom ,
243; Mary Lamboll Beach to Elizabeth Gilchrist, 5 July 1822, Beach Letters, South Carolina
Historical Society; John Potter to Langdon Cheves, 10 July 1822, Cheves Papers, ibid.
17
Confession of Smart Anderson, 12 July 1822, Records of General Assembly, Governor’s
Messages, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia; Hamilton, An Account ,
21; Confession of Enslow’s John, no date, William and Benjamin Hammet Papers, Duke
University Library; Anna Haynes Johnson to Elizabeth Haywood, 18 July 1822, Haywood Papers,
Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina.
18
Israel Nesbitt in George Rawick, American Slave , vol. 11: 261; Hamilton, An Account , 17; I
discuss the myth of Vesey’s prosperity in He Shall Go Out Free , 87.
118 DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

and admittedly, in nations like France, the destruction of the ancien regime translated into
greater opportunities for the wealthy bourgeoisie. In the same way, historians, with but
few notable exceptions, have been dismissive and patronizing of post-1804 Haiti, with its
governor-generals, emperors, and presidents for life (typically without noting that such
political disarray was largely the result of long years of colonial misrule, English, Spanish,
and French invasions, and the American trade embargo). Even Bolı́var’s biographer T.R.
Ybarra, having praised Pétion’s considerable military assistance, wrote disparagingly of
‘‘the dusky inhabitants’’ of his undemocratic regime.19 As a former resident of Danish St
Thomas, French Saint Domingue, and patriarchal South Carolina (and, most likely, as the
child of West Africans), Vesey had never actually seen a truly egalitarian society. If the old
abolitionist ever harbored the sort of communalistic ideals that scholars wish to impose
upon black abolitionists, there is now no evidence for it. That is, Vesey appeared to care
little about the fact that post-Louverture Haiti was both politically undemocratic and class
based. With Henri Christophe’s eradication of the blancs and the gens de couleur , race was
no longer a component in its class structure, except to the extent that the old order’s racial
structure was turned upside down, and black Africans were now on top. For an
exceedingly entrepreneurial businessman like Vesey, Boyer’s country was not just liberty
or a convenient safe haven; it was the very picture of class mobility.
By comparison, and again with a few exceptions, scholars have been charitable to
Bolı́var’s efforts to construct an united and democratic republic out of Spanish New
Granada, so much so that they have been willing to ignore the extent to which its
conservative Creole class maintained most of its pre-colonial and racial prerogatives. As
John J. Johnson */one of the few exceptions */writes, the pragmatic Bolı́var was never
one ‘‘to let his own social views,’’ or any promises he made to Pétion, ‘‘override practical
political considerations.’’ One of the lessons he had learned during his travels about the
ostensibly democratic United States, was that independence movements, if properly
controlled by powerful elites, did not have to descend into fratricidal class struggles like
the French and Haitian Revolutions. Certainly one method Bolı́var used to put any
misgivings on the part of the Creole planters to rest, was to point ‘‘to the spectacle of men
like Washington and Jefferson living like patriarchs in comfortable wealth among slaves.’’20
Historians enamored of Bolı´var’s reforms invariably focus on his promise to Pétion
(and if true, this certainly helps to explain why bondmen around the Americas regarded
Haiti as the beacon of liberty). Upon arriving back on the mainland, at Carúpano, one
hagiographer gushed, he issued a proclamation ‘‘emancipating all slaves in Venezuela.’’
Another writer flatly declared that he ‘‘declared the slaves free,’’ while a third mirrored that
assessment by stating that Bolı́var ‘‘declared the freedom of all slaves in the land.’’ Even
Gerhard Masur, usually the most balanced of all of Bolı́var’s biographers, drew
comparisons to Abraham Lincoln and observed that the young soldier ‘‘proclaimed the
application of the principles of liberty and equality to an anonymous host of slaves.’’21
Certainly, Bolı́var’s public statements on unfree labor appear to support such
enthusiastic historiographical endorsements. Writing to General Jean Marión, governor of
the Haitian department of Aux Cayes, in June of 1816, Bolivar flatly stated that he had

19
Ybarra, Bolı́var , 128.
20
Johnson, Simón Bolı´var and Spanish American Independence , 81, 35.
21
Ybarra, Bolı́var , 128; Angell, Simón Bolı́var , 111; Rourke, Man of Glory , 154; Masur, Bolı´var ,
272.
 CARIBBEAN DREAMS: HAITIAN NIGHTMARES 119

‘‘proclaimed the absolute emancipation of the slaves’’ upon conquering the province of
Cumaná. Two months later, he repeated that claim to Juan Bautista Arismendi,
Commander in Chief of the island of Margarita, saying without caveat or qualifier, ‘‘I
proclaimed the general emancipation of the slaves.’’ To the extent that powerful soldier-
politicians like Francisco de Paula Santander, Bolı́var’s sometimes vice president and
constant rival, regarded emancipation as the surest way to destroy both the Granadan
economy and the independence movement, such egalitarian rhetoric was particularly
courageous on his part. Nor were his abolitionist pronouncements reserved for foreign
correspondents (which was invariably the case with North American elites like Thomas
Jefferson). Addressing the opening of the second National Congress in early 1819, Bolı́var
denounced the ‘‘dark mantle of barbarous and profane slavery [that] covered the
Venezuelan earth.’’ Since ‘‘one cannot be both free and enslaved at the same time,’’ Bolı́var
lectured, human bondage ‘‘simultaneously violat[ed] every natural, political, and civil law.’’
Yet like the Virginia revolutionaries of whom he spoke so highly, Bolı́var’s political
behavior */and that of his countrymen */often failed to match his lofty rhetoric. Certainly,
the gradualist legislation passed in Gran Colombia paled by comparison to Denmark
Vesey’s dreams of immediately liberating thousands of enslaved Carolinians in Haiti.22
In fact, the course of black liberation in New Granada was far from simple. In July
1811, when Venezuela became the first province to declare independence, the Spanish
colony was home to between 125,000 and 130,000 slaves. Despite Bolı́var’s numerous
promises and proclamations, the new Republic of Gran Colombia failed to pass a gradual
manumission act until 1821. At the same time, the Congress approved a constitution that
was conservative even by New World standards. Whereas the United States’ constitution of
1787 was silent on citizenship and voting rights (although the assumption was that states
would limit the franchise to propertied white males), the document adopted at Cúcuta
granted full citizenship only to literate men with property worth one hundred pesos .
Instead of liberating all bond people at once, the manumission act freed only those
children born to slave mothers after 1821. As was the case in many parts of the northern
United States, the law also required all emancipados to labor for their mother’s señor (lord
and master) until the age of 18, and then to reimburse their former owner for the cost of
their upbringing. At Bolı́var’s prodding, Congress also established juntas de manumission ,
local emancipation boards, financed by inheritance taxes to purchase the freedom of bond
people born before the enactment of the statute. To borrow the phrase Alfred F. Young
used to characterize the course of abolition in states like Pennsylvania and New York: ‘‘It
was a grudging emancipation.’’23

22
Simón Bolı́var to Jean Marión, 27 June 1816, in Bierck, Writings , 1: 131; Simón Bolı́var to Juan
Bautista Arismendi, 21 August 1816, ibid., 134; Simón Bolı́var, Address at the Inauguration of the
Second National Congress of Venezuela, 15 February 1819, ibid., 194 /5. Johnson, ‘‘Denmark
Vesey,’’ 919, argues that no evidence exists that Vesey planned to escape to the Caribbean with
entire families and that to suggest otherwise is a ‘‘singular defense of the conspirators’ family
values.’’ The theory that Vesey and hundreds of conspirators planned to fight for their liberty
but abandon their wives and their children to the fury of white authorities not only defies
credulity, it raises interesting questions about Johnson’s view of the American slave family.
23
Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery , 349 /50; Young, ‘‘How Radical Was the American
Revolution,’’ 339.
120 DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

Worse yet, as Gran Colombia promptly began to crumble into the three
independent republics of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia (which included present-
day Panama), Bolı́var paid even less attention to emancipation, as holding his nation
together took precedence. Slaveholders lobbied to raise the age of manumission from 18
to 21, and then again to 26, which meant that many young bond persons born after the
law remained enslaved well into the 1840s. Slaves born before 1821, of course, were not
subject to the law and remained human property even later. By 1850, there were still
16,000 slaves in Colombia, 33,000 slaves in Venezuela, and another 2,000 in Ecuador.24
Even then, practical concerns drove Bolı́var’s actions. The young officer desperately
needed soldiers to use against Spanish forces and Granadan loyalists, and like Lord
Dunmore and the English in 1775, Bolı́var’s seemingly egalitarian pronouncements were
motivated as much, if not more so, by the need for soldiers as they were by enlightened
promises made to Pétion. Although he wrote to Pétion only one day after his Carúpano
pronouncement, crowing that he had declared ‘‘the absolute liberty of the slaves who
have groaned beneath the Spanish yoke in the past three centuries,’’ a careful reading of
the actual edict fails to support such an egalitarian interpretation. As David Bushnell has
observed, far from doing away with slavery in one bold stroke, Bolı́var only offered
freedom to those young, strong bondmen who might carry arms against the Spanish.
Although his 1816 proclamation also liberated the families of those men who marched
with him, aged or infirm bondmen were not covered by his decree, and slaves who chose
not to risk life and limb in the military remained in bondage. Although Bushnell rightly
notes that Bolı́var was here converting the ancient practice of freeing small numbers of an
enemy’s slaves for military purposes into ‘‘a general norm,’’ one suspects that Bolı́var had
not made this fine distinction clear when begging the Haitians for guns.25
In fact, the idea of using bondmen as soldiers against Madrid did not even originate
with Bolı́var. Four years before Bolı́var journeyed to Haiti, his onetime leader, Francisco de
Miranda, suggested offering freedom to any slave who would enlist in the patriot army for
ten years. The proposal came to nothing, however, as it enraged many ambivalent
landlords and threatened to actually strengthen the loyalist movement. Slaves were not
merely agricultural workers but a capital investment, and Miranda was silent on how he
might compensate señors for the loss of their human property.26
At the time, Bolı́var had backed Miranda (until he thought him a traitor for
surrendering to Spanish authority), and there can be little doubt that the general’s plan
was well known to his junior officers. As now-President Bolı́var explained it in 1820 to a
doubting Santander, the ‘‘military and political considerations’’ that demanded ‘‘the
drafting of slaves [were] quite obvious.’’ The Colombian army needed ‘‘robust, vigorous
men who are accustomed to hardship and fatigue,’’ and who better knew suffering and
deprivation better than male field slaves? Although Bolı́var began to seize slaves from the
countryside a year before the Manumission Act of 1821, he made it quite clear to the vice
president that his black recruits were not to be given the option of remaining on the
plantations. ‘‘All slaves available for bearing arms shall be assigned to the army,’’ he wrote,
adding that he had ‘‘ordered that slaves available for bearing arms be taken.’’ Admittedly,
Santander was his most vocal critic on emancipation, and undoubtedly political

24
Klein, African Slavery , 251.
25
Bushnell, Bolı́var: Liberation and Disappointment , 77.
26
Racine, Francisco de Miranda , 233.
 CARIBBEAN DREAMS: HAITIAN NIGHTMARES 121

considerations, led Bolı́var to justify liberation in the most practical way possible. Yet never
did he once adopt the language of ‘‘natural rights’’ or even mention the simple justice of
granting citizenship to the ‘‘3,000 unmarried young men’’ who marched into battle in
behalf of his republic.27
In letter after letter, Bolı́var set out the most pragmatic rationale for gradual
emancipation, often employing a negative image of Haiti was an example of what might
go wrong if his republic failed to achieve conservative, elite-led reform. Speaking to
Congress, Bolı́var insisted that he need not explain ‘‘the necessity’’ of emancipation, ‘‘for
you know the history of the Helots, of Spartaco, and of Haiti.’’ Should liberation not come
under government auspices, revolution from below would ultimately be the result. ‘‘[A]ny
free government which commits the folly of maintaining slavery,’’ he argued on another
occasion, ‘‘is repaid with rebellion and sometimes with [economic] collapse, as in Haiti.’’ To
his north in Virginia, as Edmund Morgan noted long ago, revolutionaries like Thomas
Jefferson could speak in egalitarian tones precisely because their working class was
enslaved, but Bolı́var well understood that a society that bragged of liberty and equality
but denied it to many because of race was in special danger. ‘‘Small wonder,’’ Bolı́var
observed, ‘‘that states with moderate governments are often troubled by slave rebellions,
and despotic states only rarely.’’28
If Bolı́var, like many former revolutionaries in the United States, feared that other
Haitis would erupt around the western Atlantic, his thoughts on race were cautiously
progressive when compared to Jefferson’s, if sometimes confused and backward when
contrasted to black abolitionists like Denmark Vesey. Where Jefferson suggested that the
fundamental distinctions between whites and blacks were ‘‘physical and moral,’’ which is
to say biological, Bolı́var adopted the view that cultural factors, rather than nature,
explained black behavior. He once described racial distinctions as a mere ‘‘accident of skin’’
and climate. ‘‘The tyranny of the Spaniards has reduced [slaves] to such a state of stupidity
and instilled in their souls such a great sense of terror,’’ he lamented in 1816, ‘‘that they
have lost even the desire to be free!’’ These differing views, of course, were easily traced to
contextual differences between the Chesapeake and Gran Colombia. Having turned his
back on the leisurely life of a Venezuelan planter in exchange for a highly mobile career as
soldier and nation-builder, Bolı́var had little use for a pastoral existence. Jefferson,
believing that neither his livelihood nor political career could exist without unwaged labor,
forced himself into ‘‘suspicions’’ that Africans were created separately from whites and
they formed a unique and infinitely inferior variety of humankind.29
Like many conservative reformers in the United States, however, Bolı́var’s critique of
slavery included hints that the most egregious moral dilemma regarding unfree labor was

27
Aguirre, ‘‘Working the System,’’ 206; Simón Bolı́var to Francisco de Paula Santander, 20 April
1820, in Bierck, Writings , 1: 222 /3.
28
Simón Bolı́var, Address at the Inauguration of the Second National Congress of Venezuela,
15 February 1819, in Bierck, Writings , 195; Simón Bolı́var to Francisco de Paula Santander, 20
April 1820, in ibid., 223. Morgan’s explication of the connection between racism and
revolutionary republicanism appears in American Slavery, American Freedom , ch. 16.
29
Bushnell, Bolı́var , 111 /2; Simón Bolı́var to Jean Marión, 27 June 1816, in Bierck, Writings , 1:
131; Jefferson, ‘‘Notes on the State of Virginia,’’ 264. The scholarship on Jefferson and slavery is
enormous; one should start with Miller, Wolf By the Ears , especially ch. 7; Finkelman, ‘‘Jefferson
and Slavery,’’ 181 /224; Burstein, The Inner Jefferson , ch. 1, and Burstein, Jefferson’s Secrets , ch. 5.
122 DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

the unhappy impact it had on the master class */a patronizing critique that never much
appealed to radical abolitionists like Vesey, whose first wife and children belonged to
other men. The ownership of human beings, Bolı́var suggested, fostered only cruelty and
mindless brutality, and he had seen enough of both commodities in battle. ‘‘Examine this
crime [of slavery] from every aspect,’’ he lectured the Bolivian Congress, ‘‘and tell me if
there is a single Bolivian so depraved as to wish to sanctify by law this shameless violation
of human dignity.’’ The Liberator’s insistence that to allow an ‘‘image of God [to be]
coupled to the yoke like a beast’’ lacked any ‘‘legal’’ basis was a courageous claim in a
world in which slave law allowed for just that, but the enslaved may be forgiven for not
agreeing with the proposition that slavery was ultimately wrong because it debauched the
morals of Colombian masters.30
For militant abolitionists like Vesey, of course, the very fact of Haitian independence
was a reminder that conventional attitudes toward black achievement */whether born
of scientific racism or based upon explanations tied to the cruelty of slavery */were lies
concocted by white politicians. Where Creole patricians like Bolı́var bemoaned African
‘‘stupidity,’’ Vesey spent his rare free moments pondering racism, rather than race. Words
had always come easily to him, and when he could obtain them, he pored over the
antislavery books and pamphlets that black seamen smuggled into southern ports. One
of his friends, John Enslow, stopped at Vesey’s home to find him reading ‘‘a Book about
the complexion of people.’’ It was ‘‘the climate of Africa’’ that made ‘‘them Black,’’ he
lectured an impressed Enslow, but the rays of the African sun hardly made them ‘‘inferior
to Whites on that account.’’ Most likely, Vesey had obtained a copy of Abbe Henri-Baptiste
Gregoire’s An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Facilities, and Literature of
Negroes . Translated into English by 1810, Gregoire’s monograph found a receptive
audience in the Atlantic free black community; Vesey obviously found the Abbe’s
enlightened theories on ‘‘color and climate’’ a useful antidote to prevailing theories of
black inferiority.31
‘‘[H]e would not like to have a white man in his presence [as] he had a great hatred
for the whites,’’ Vesey once said, and it is hardly difficult to imagine why. Yet for all of
his fears of servile revolt, for all of his dismissive remarks about African Americans
brutalized past the point of insensibility, Bolı́var, at two points in his public career, uttered
statements that might have softened the animosity of the old carpenter and earned him
the enmity of planter-politicians in the United States. In an 1819 address to Congress,
Bolı́var attempted to explain why Gran Colombia was unique even by the standards of
the New World. ‘‘We must keep in mind that our people are neither European nor North
American,’’ he shouted, ‘‘rather, they are a mixture of African and the Americans who
originated in Europe.’’ Jefferson chose to spend his time ruminating about polygenesis
and the possibility that Africans could not be elevated from the low ‘‘rank in the scale
of being which their Creator may perhaps have given them,’’ but Bolı́var insisted that it
was ‘‘impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy where we belong in the human
family.’’ Although he declined to use his own family lineage as an example, he bluntly

30
Simón Bolı́var, Message to Congress of Bolivia, 25 May 1826, in Bierck, Writings , 2: 603.
31
Confession of Enslow’s John, no date, William and Benjamin Hammet Papers, Duke
University Library; Gregoire, Inquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties , 6.
 CARIBBEAN DREAMS: HAITIAN NIGHTMARES 123

observed, ‘‘Spaniards have mixed with Americans and Africans, and Africans with Indians
and Spaniards.’’32
Novelist Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez has made much of the fact that as Bolı́var’s fame
increased, Colombian painters whitened his skin, ‘‘washing his blood’’ in the process, but
Bolı́var had numbers on his side. Vesey’s South Carolina, with its white minority and large
number of free mulattoes, was unique enough in the United States. However, Gran
Colombia’s racial composition both supported Bolı́var’s insistence that their ‘‘fathers, [so]
different in origin and in blood’’ placed upon them ‘‘an obligation of the greatest
importance’’ and forced the new republic to adhere to a course of gradual manumission so
as to avoid an explosion ‘‘similar to that in Haiti.’’ In Colombia’s urban centers, the number
of free blacks, pardos (mulattoes), and mestizos (people of native and European descent)
outnumbered the enslaved population. On the eve of independence, there were as many
as 368,000 mestizos in New Granada, as well as an unknown number of zambos ,
Colombians of native and African ancestry. To the extent that the Haitian revolution began
not with Boukman’s Night of Fire, but when the free gens de couleur challenged the
prerogatives of the white minority, Bolı́var was right to argue ‘‘to draw back [from the path
of racial inclusion] means weakness and the general ruin for all.’’33
Even so, race continued to play a crucial role in Colombia’s class formation, in part
due to the lasting scars of the independence era. As had been the case in South Carolina,
many of the wealthiest landowning families */the Bolı́vars, the Machados, the Toros */
threw their weight behind the revolution, which made it easy for those who had resented
the pretensions of the Creole aristocracy, such as the pardos and those yet enslaved, to
pick up their sword in behalf of Madrid. In the midst of this confusion, loyalist priests and
colonial officials not only backed the pardos , they suddenly found the courage to
denounce the maltreatment of bondmen. Bolı́var was shocked when many slaves refused
to fight for the revolution and instead ‘‘followed the Spaniards or [even] embarked on
British vessels,’’ but as with the Africans who fought beside British forces outside of
Charleston, Colombian workers had good reason to distrust the intentions of patriot
landlords. The wealthy proprietors never abandoned their social conservatism, and the
impoverished freedmen never came to trust their former señors . Small wonder, then, that
Vesey’s armada aimed instead for Haiti, where race was no longer a component in class
structure.34
Charles Dickens famously described the age of revolution as the spring of hope, but
he would have been equally right to call it the season of irony. Nobody had greater reason
than Bolı́var to be grateful to Haiti. Had it not been for Pétion, the Liberator might well
have finished his days as had Miranda, a failed revolutionary aimlessly wandering from
port to port in search of military aid before dying of a violent stroke. However, gratitude

32
Examination of William Paul, 26 June 1822, in Kennedy and Parker, Official Report , 85 /6;
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia , 265; Simón Bolı́var, Address at the Inauguration of the
Second National Congress of Venezuela, 15 February 1819, in Bierck, Writings , 1: 181.
33
Garcı́a Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth , 180; Simón Bolı́var, Address at the Inauguration
of the Second National Congress of Venezuela, 15 February 1819, in Bierck, Writings , 1: 181;
Simón Bolı́var to Francisco de Paula Santander, 30 May 1820, in ibid., 1: 229; Blackburn,
Overthrow of Colonial Slavery , 334 /5.
34
Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery , 343 /4; Simón Bolı́var to Jean Marión, 27 June 1816,
in Bierck, Writings , 1: 131
124 DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

was hard to come by in a world of racial animus and class prerogatives. By 1824, two years
after Vesey swung from a Charleston noose for failing to lead enslaved Carolinians into
freedom in Haiti, Bolı́var came to regard Boyer’s nation, as did most of the Atlantic powers:
an international menace that had to be isolated. At the very least, Bolı́var evidently
believed that to succeed in his plans of protecting Gran Colombia against European
designs, he needed to placate American fears of the black republic. As George Dangerfield
so aptly put it, ‘‘Bolı́var concealed a core of robust eighteenth-century realism beneath his
panoply of romantic attributes.’’ If the price of hemispheric support was the isolation of
Haiti, the pragmatic Bolı́var was willing to pay that fee.35
At issue was the Pan-American Conference to be held in 1826 in the Colombian
province of Panama. With the end of the Napoleonic wars, Madrid once again cast a
covetous eye on its lost empire, and leaders across the Americas feared that France, under
the guidance of the reactionary King Charles X, might help Spain recapture parts of South
America in hopes of securing trading rights in the west. The Holy Alliance had already
intervened to crush Spain’s moderate revolution, and a French army led by the Duc
d’Angoulème had restored King Ferdinand VII to his absolutist throne. Although the
conference, commonly known as the Panama Congress, was not initially Bolı́var’s idea, he
quickly embraced the concept of a continental union of Latin American nations to act as a
counterweight to European designs. ‘‘From the very beginning of the revolution,’’ Bolı́var
wrote, ‘‘I understood that if we could once establish free nations in South America, a
federation among them would be the strongest form of union.’’36
Of all the nations in the western hemisphere, Bolı́var owed the most to Haiti, but
magnanimity was rarely to be found in the world of power politics. When the invitations
went out, two countries were noticeably absent from the list of invitees: the United States
and Boyer’s Haiti. The desire to avoid entanglements with North America was under-
standable. Bolı́var decided early on that the best defense against a possible Franco-
Spanish incursion was the British navy, rather than James Monroe’s toothless doctrine of
separate spheres. Since he intended to invite a British delegation, it made sense not to
invite their recent foe. Moreover, the United States, a prescient Bolı́var confided to the
British chargé d’affaires in Bogotá, ‘‘seem destined by Providence to plague [the rest of]
America with torments in the name of freedom.’’ For their part, the British, who continued
to control the mainland colony of Guiana as well as their Caribbean sugar islands, were
keenly interested in exacerbating the division between the Old and New Worlds while
keeping their North American trading rivals at bay.37
The decision not to invite Haiti was less easily explained away. Hints that the island
republic was not contiguous to the mainland rang hollow, given Bolı́var’s determination to
invite Britain; in any case, Colombian ships could make port in Cap François in half the time
it took to reach Chile, but perhaps that was the point. The harsh reality was that the United
States, who ultimately secured a nomination, was hardly the only western government to
suspect that the Panama Conference would take up the question of emancipation. Of the
North Atlantic states, only France had formally recognized the independence of Haiti, but
only after extorting a crushing indemnity of 150 million francs for property lost to French
investors during the 1790s. Slaveholding Brazil had no desire to treat with Haitian

35
Dangerfield, Era of Good Feelings , 360.
36
Johnson, Simón Bolı́var , 72 /3; Bemis, John Quincy Adams , 544 /5; Masur, Bolı́var , 580 /3.
37
Simón Bolı́var to Patrick Campbell, 5 August 1829, in Bierck, Writings , 2: 732
 CARIBBEAN DREAMS: HAITIAN NIGHTMARES 125

delegates, and worried that Boyer would simply send a small delegation, Brazil eventually
declined to attend, as did Argentina. To placate those countries that did attend */Mexico,
Peru, Guatemala, and Chile */Haiti had to remain diplomatically isolated. Bolı́var even let it
be known that he would not back any attempt to ‘‘liberate’’ Spanish Cuba, ostensibly in
hopes of bribing Madrid into ‘‘mak[ing] peace,’’ although it was also clear that he wished
to show the rest of Latin America that he had no desire to spread abolition. ‘‘I believe our
league can maintain itself perfectly well,’’ he lectured Santander, ‘‘without creating
another Republic of Haiti’’ in Cuba.38
The delegates who met in the old Franciscan monastery in Panama formally
adjourned on 15 July; thereafter it was almost as if a line had been crossed, and from that
point on, Bolı́var’s comments about Haiti grew ever more negative. Perhaps it became
easier to justify his role in helping to isolate further the black republic, having turned his
back on Boyer in Panama. By the summer of 1826, (increasingly weary of the chronic
political instability that would contribute to his premature death at the age of 47) the
Liberator for the first time attributed Gran Colombia’s disorder to its racial ancestry. ‘‘Our
origins have been of the most unwelcome sort,’’ he sighed to Santander. ‘‘We are the
abominable offspring of those raging beasts that came to America to waste her blood and
to breed with their victims before sacrificing them.’’ Since the ‘‘illegitimate offspring of
these unions commingled with the offspring of slaves transplanted from Africa,’’ how
could any leader, he wondered, ‘‘place principles above men?’’ Now convinced that his
country could only be controlled ‘‘through a well-managed, shrewd despotism,’’ Bolı́var
sneered that those who continued to believe in self-government ‘‘shall again witness the
beautiful ideal of Haiti.’’ In his last moments, Bolı́var turned his back even on democracy,
tainted as he believed it to be by the blood of Africa. ‘‘[A]nyone with a white skin who
escapes will be fortunate,’’ he added.39
However, blacks across the Americas, both enslaved and free, never lost their faith in
Haiti as the Promised Land, perhaps because of the way they had seen democracy
practiced by wealthy landlords who called themselves revolutionaries but spent their lives
fighting to maintain their class prerogatives. Nor did they give up the struggle to achieve
what Boukman and Louverture had accomplished years before. One of the Charleston
conspirators who survived the summer of 1822 was Denmark’s son, Sandy Vesey, who was
sentenced to die but ultimately ‘‘respited’’ for transportation by the court. Although the
city authorities never revealed to whom they sold the rebels, some, and perhaps all,
became slaves in Spanish Cuba. In 1825, the year of the Panama Conference, three slaves
expatriated from Charleston for their role in the ‘‘intended insurrection’’ were arrested for
plotting a revolt in the Guamacaro province. Perhaps Sandy escaped the noose in
Charleston only to find it in Cuba. In a final circular irony, Bolı́var had promised his
conservative supporters that he would not try to liberate Cuba because it might become
another Haiti. In the end, the son of the man he may have passed on the streets of
Charleston years before died trying to do so, because Cuba might become just that.40

38
Logan, Diplomatic Relations of the United States and Haiti , 185-200; Frank, Birth of a World ,
318; Simón Bolı́var to Francisco de Paula Santander, 20 May 1825, in Bierck, Writings , 2: 499.
39
Simón Bolı́var to Francisco de Paula Santander, 8 July 1826, in Bierck, Writings , 2: 624 /5.
40
Trial of Sandy Vesey, July 1822, in Kennedy and Parker, Official Report , 123 /4; Charleston
Mercury , 26 July 1822; Escoto Collection, Box 10, Houghton Library, Harvard University. (I am
grateful to Robert Paquette of Hamilton College for the last citation.)
126 DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Douglas R. Egerton is the Joseph C. Georg Professor at Le Moyne College, in
Syracuse, New York. His books include Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave
Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 and He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark
Vesey . His current projects include (with Robert Paquette) Theater of Death: A
Documentary History of the Vesey Conspiracy , A History of the Atlantic World (with
Alison Games, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright), and Death or Liberty: African
Americans and the American Revolution, 1763 /1800 .

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Douglas R. Egerton, Department of History, Le Moyne College, 1419 Salt Springs Road,
Syracuse, New York, 13214 (USA). Egertodr@lemoyne.edu