Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 9: The Haitian Revolution, again

Returning to Gerald Horne's article on the antislavery revolution in Haiti (1791-1804) "The Haitian Revolution and the Central Question of African American History" Journal of African American History 100:1 Winter 2015. Britain didn't have domestic slavery, though obviously it allowed it in its colonies.

But after the Haitian Revolution began, the British government saw how it could use the dilemma the United States faced over its Peculiar Institution against its North American rival, still a minor power in the world. Horne explains:

... London, which bad been ousted from its prime slave trading market in NorthAmerica in any case, prompted by the Haitian Revolution, was busily seizing the moral high ground by turning against this global flesh peddling, placing its erstwhile mainland colony on the defensive and, not coincidentally, winning numerous African adherents, particularly in the United States itself. Certainly, 1791 gave an immeasurable boost to abolitionism.21 The influential Londoner James Stephen declaimed portentously in 1807, as Britain was turning decisively against the international slave trade, "The West Indies have probably cost us more money since 1792 than all our military operations on the continent," jeopardizing national security in the face of France's stiff challenge. Redcoats were futilely seeking to suppress Haiti and slave colonies yearning to be free at an enormous cost of blood and treasure, while a surer path would involve conciliating Africans, which would at once provide a cudgel with which to bludgeon its ascending republican enemy. "[O]ur [ opprobrious] adherence to this [ slave] traffic," Stephen added persuasively, "has added much to the popular prejudice against us. ..."

It would not be the first time a good cause was assisted in some way by old-fashioned international rivalries. And certainly not the last. The King of France had been happy to assist the democratic revolution in the US against Britain during the Revolutionary War. And France had no interest in a democratic revolution at home, or any desire to lose its own colonies.

US leaders in the new Washington Administration, having successfully played this difficult international game against the British, also assumed that the British might encourage an invasion of the US by the Haitian army:

... it was during this turbulent time that Edward Stevens, the U.S. consul on the island, argued that the paramount revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture---commanded an "army" of "55,000 men," while the "largest force" his U.S. commander-in-chief "had ever commanded had not exceeded 20,000. ..." 23 lt was Stevens who in 1799, when control of the island remained unclear, reported that a plan bad been hatched on the island to "invade both the Southern States of America & the Island of Jamaica," a design that was to be bruited repeatedly in coming years.

But it was not only British power politics that the US had to worry about:

A few years after Stevens spoke, Thomas Jefferson observed, "[the inflamed Caribbean] appears to have given a considerable impulse to the minds of the slaves in different parts of the U.S." itself, contributing to a "great disposition to insurgency" that "manifested itself' in his own Virginia in an "actual insurrection." As early as 1793, as terror raged in Paris, [then Secretary of State] Jefferson warned that two reputed Frenchmen - "a small dark mulatto" and a "quarteron"- were headed to Charleston "with a design to excite an insurrection among the Negroes." This was a Parisian plan, he told the governor, "the first branch of which has been carried into execution at St. Domingo ....

And he refers to these events:

But it was not just London that was scrambling to avoid being overtaken by events. In Venezuela in 1795 an enslaved African, Jose Chirino, who had visited Hispaniola, returned with militant demands for imposition of "the law of the French." A few years later another revolt shook the northern coast of South America, as militia leader Francisco Xavier Pirela was said to be in touch with crews of ships from Hispaniola. Then the "Revolt of the Tailors" in Bahia, Brazil, raised the provocative issue of racial equality as well as independence. Even the rebellion in Mexico in 1810 was said to have featured the now ubiquitous hand of Haiti.

Here's where one wishes for specifics. To what extent were the fears just mentioned realistic? How much were they due to caution, suspicion or slaveowners' paranoia and guilty imaginations? How much the result of disinformation efforts by Britain, France or other powers?

No doubt that example of the Haitian slave revolt and successful liberation spurred on antislavery aspirations elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. So did the victorious American Revolution against Britain and the liberal ideals by which they justified it. So did the French Revolution. But what was there in Jefferson's suspicions of a French plan to promote slave insurrection in the US? Was there a "dark mulatto" and a "quarteron" promoting slave revolt in Charleston in 1793? What does it mean that the obscure "militia leader Francisco Xavier Pirela was said to be in touch with crews of ships from Hispaniola"? How much influence in the real world did anyone from Haiti have on the Mexican Revolution of 1810?

The Mexican Revolution of which Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was the most famous leader had an awful lot to do with events in the Iberian Peninsula. Napoleon invaded Spain and made the Spanish king Fernando VII (1784-1833) his prisoner until 1814. During the interim Napoleon installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte (1768-1844) as King Jose I Bonaparte from 1808 to 1813. The Spanish War of Independence against France was famously brutal, as . From 1810, it was led by the Cortes of Cádiz, a council loyal to Fernando VII. This gave Spanish New World colonies the opportunity to declare independence of the Spain of Jose I in the name of loyalty to the imprisoned Fernando VII. And while the example of Haiti was not doubt some influence on Mexican ideas, there was no Cortes of Cádiz in Haiti. Nor did Haitian armies wage a revolutionary war in Mexico on the model of the French wars after the 1789 revolution.

Horne's article unfortunately leaves the reader wondering in places whether we're talking about actual significant political influence by Haiti or Haitians, or whether we're dealing with speculation or just fear.

For the American slaveowners, the fear was highly significant in itself, whether or not it was based on a realistic evaluation of events. Still, a meaningful evaluation of the international influence of the Haitian Revolution requires understanding the factual basis for these fears. It makes a difference whether the real existing Haiti was presenting actual threats or whether it was white Americans' image of "Haiti" that was at work. Horne's references to white refugees from Haiti influencing American attitudes about slavery are more clear:

[T]he European refugees [from Haiti], fleeing in fear from the island and recoiling at the violence inflicted upon so many of them, served to bolster a pre-existing conservatism within the republic, buttressing slavery at a time when abolitionism was rising. Contradictorily, there were other French nationals who had a sense of revulsion upon encountering the pestiferous racism that pockmarked the slaveholding republic. The fire-breathing southerner Edmund Ruffin did not see the gens du couleur [people of color] abandoning the island, at times with human property under their control, as comrades since, he said, "it was not the slaves of St. Domingo but the wealthy and educated class of free mulattoes that commenced the insurrection"; and who was to say they would not seek to do the same on the mainland? The point is there was a regnant worry in slave societies that the lighter skinned and/or "free Negroes" (who often overlapped) would ally with the darker skinned enslaved against the ruling elite, with Haiti cited as exhibit A. Often in Spanish and Portuguese America concessions were made to the lighter skinned persons to win their allegiance to slavery, whereas the United States, buoyed with hardline refugees from Hispaniola, begged to differ, and the tendency was to marginalize mixed-race people too. [my emphasis]

For instance, the following passage would leave the impression with the reader that some Haitian connection was highly likely in the Nat Turner revolt of 1831 (my emphasis):

One of the first scholarly explorations of the epochal Virginia slave revolt, led by Nat Turner in 1831, declared that Haitian fingerprints were everywhere to be found. Given the frequent commerce between the island and the mainland, which preceded 1776 and continued thereafter, said William Sidney Drewry of Johns Hopkins, mainland Africans "had traveled to and from many of the [island] seaports and had ample means of communication with cooks and other servants of the vessels plying between the United States and the West Indies." Moreover, some of the "refugees from St. Domingo settled in Southampton, having brought their Negroes with them" and "recollections of St. Domingo were still vivid in 1831." lt was "probable" that the "reports of this catastrophe"- Africans who "murdered their masters"- were freely available. Like others before and since, he observed further that the conspirators led by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822 "were detected in active communication with St. Domingo .... "

Footnote 72 to that passage reads (my emphasis in bold):

William Sidney Drewry, The Southampton Jnsurrection (Washington, DC, 1900), 121- 123. He wrote that "recollections of St. Domingo were still vivid in 1831" and points to an enslaved African named "Philip" who "may have had communication with some of those who were in ringleaders" in Turner's revolt: he "'came from St. Domingo' before arriving in the commonwealth. The judge presiding in the trial of the conspirators had similar ties to the island via marriage and Africans owned by this family came from the island .... " See also Jackson, "The Origins of Pan-African Nationalism," 127- 128: "Fragmentary evidence ... suggested the Nat Turner rebellion may have been influenced by the Haitian Revolution. Many Haitian refugees and their African slaves settled in the Southampton area." Apparently following the revolt, an African named - impressively - "Nero" came to this still-shaken area and told slaveholders there of his plan to "educate blacks, to spy upon the whites of the South, to disseminate insurrectionistic [sie] pamphlets" and, generally, to wreak ruination. He also detailed the role Haiti "was to play as a site for training the leaders of the approaching insurrection and in raising money for a black college to be built in Boston. Finally, after the rebellion, Haiti would offer 'an asylum for those who survive the approaching carnage. "'

Obviously, word got around about the Haitian Revolution even among slaves. For one thing, they would have overheard fearful slaveowners talking about it. But Horne's account could expresses less caution about sources than one might have wished. On the one hand, slave conspirators were scarcely attempting to leave careful documentation of their plans and motives. On the other, domestic insurrections are always blamed on a Foreign Power by those with a stake in the established order. And the Virginia authorities of 1831 weren't exactly scrupulous in how they compiled incriminating evidence against murderous slave rebels. As Horne notes in his article:

It is possible that it became easier, and less immediately terrifying, for malevolently guilty slaveholders to point the bloody finger of accusation at Haiti when seeking to understand domestic revolts, rather than blame the murderous scheming of those who served them food. Painting Haiti in drastically distorted colors at once allowed slaveholders to rationalize the continuation of a brutal enslavement, while comforting them in the falsehood that it was the Caribbean "vampire" that was singularly responsible for seditious discontent.

But slaveowners' ambitions against Haiti took very public, verifiable form:

But in 1844 tbe United States struck back forcefully by allying with the founders of what became the Dominican Republic, assisting this new nation to independence. The fire-breathing Edmund Ruffin confided to his diary that when his comrade, John C. Calhoun, was Secretary of State in 1844, "[Calhoun] used the secret service fund to supply arms" to Haiti's foes in the east with the ultimate aim being "the conquest of Hayti," a plan that overmatched Port-au-Prince's own capacious ambitions and which did not exclude the possibility of re-enslavement, and rolling back the revolution dramatically.

All in all, Horne is giving the Haitian Revolution more weight in the process that led to the American Civil War than it can bear: "Haiti hailed the raid led by John Brown in Virginia in
late 1859, which portended slavery's collapse, a process arguably set in motion in 1791."

In the article's concluding paragraph, he declares, "discussing U.S. emancipation absent a consideration of the Haitian Revolution is akin to Hamlet without the Prince."

Doesn't this mean that he's holding up the Haitian Revolution was the main actor in the abolition of slavery in the US? Or did he just let a literary simile get away from him?

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 7: Haitian revolution and Slave Power paranoia

Gerald Horne writes on the antislavery revolution in Haiti (1791-1804) and its repercussions in the US in "The Haitian Revolution and the Central Question of African American History" Journal of African American History 100:1 Winter 2015.

Much of the impact was psychological rather than material. In other words, there was no Haitian army of liberation landing on the shores of South Carolina to overthrow the Slave Power. But it scared slaveowners in the United States. A lot.

It's important to keep in mind is that slaveowners suffered from political paranoia, which they spread as widely as possible among nonslaveowning whites, as well. William Freehling talks about the "Cuffee" phenomenon. By which he means that slaveowners were aware at some level that the agreeable face their slaves were expected to present to them was a false one. And they constantly worried that there were hidden threats in everyday interactions with their human property. It created a state of mind that predisposed them to panic over alleged slave revolts. And indeed, there were many more slave panics over slave revolts than there were of the real thing.

But there were real slave revolts. The study of slave resistance has revealed a very complex set of resistance actions and strategies. The Underground Railroad, for instance, was a critical one. Not every one of them involved some kind of uprising. But there were some of those, too.

And the Haitian revolution was a big-time instance of one. Horne call it:

... one of those rare transformative social, political, and economic detonations made all the more remarkable in that it took place in not only the richest and most productive colony of the French Empire, but of any empire. But it also implicated the slaveholding republic in that Paris spent heavily in backing North American rebels opposing their eternal enemy across the channel, which contributed to a crisis in Paris that sparked yet another transforming revolt in 1789, which correspondingly contributed mightily to the radicalization of the island. Correspondingly, revolutionary violence in France and Hispaniola seemed to some U.S. citizens to flow together in a common river of blood that signaled a new departure that could reach the mainland. This was ironic indeed since North American-then U.S.- residents were heavily implicated in the dramatic increase of the slave trade to the island of Hispaniola, which in the 1780s surpassed the British trade, creating a demographic imbalance favorable to a slave revolt. [my emphasis]

Yes, Haiti was "the richest and most productive colony of the French Empire." And the successful slave revolt there scared white slaveowners in the United STates. A lot.

Horne goes further and argues that "the Haitian Revolution created a general crisis for the system of slavery that could only be resolved with its collapse." He even calls it "a central argument of this essay."

That seems a bit of a stretch to me. But there were important international dynamics at work that I'm hesitant to dismiss. Horne cites these events:

But it was in 1795 in Spanish Louisiana - apparently encouraged by the possibility of a French attempt to invade and force retrocession of the former colony - that Africans rose up. This slave conspiracy in Pointe Coupee was blamed by those on the scene on the direct influence of island revolutionaries. There had been an extensive plot in July 1791, days before the ignition in Hispaniola, then again in October when one conspirator was said to have stated that he and his comrades were simply awaiting ward from Hispaniola before deciding to "strike a blow" in concert with islanders. After the uproar of 1795 there were additional slave conspiracies in February, March, and April 1796 in Pointe Coupee and on the German Coast.

Proslavery whites who had emigrated from Haiti brought some of their fear of slave revolts with them:

A contemporary historian has estimated that "over 100,000 whites and 60,000 blacks lost their lives" during the "thirteen year struggle" encapsulated as the Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804. That more defined as "white" perished, though their numbers were considerably smaller than their counterparts-less than 500,000 Africans on the island then- with many survivors fleeing to the mainland imbued with hair-raising tales of woe, was bound to concentrate devilishly in the collective mind of "white" Americans. The revolution posed starkly an existential choice: retreat stolidly from slavery or risk losing everything, including one's life, a la Hispaniola. ...

That so many of these survivors and their relatives wound up playing pivotal roles in maintaining the harshest machinery of slavery on the mainland may not have been accidental. This lengthy list included Judah P. Benjamin, a loyal leader of the Confederate States of America, whose father-in-law fled the island in horror and proceeded to regale many an audience with the alleged perfidy of incited Africans. Louis Tousard, who served in the revolt against British rule in North America, also owned a plantation on the rebellious island, an enterprise that was marred by frequent unrest in the 1780s. He was involved in seeking to suppress the revolt in 1791 before fleeing to the mainland where, tellingly, he was intimately involved in establishing the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, which was to be both the sturdy sword and shield, if plans by vengeful Africans to invade the mainland and ignite the vengeance of the enslaved were to come to pass.

As Horne summarizes it, "These newly minted "white Americans" were hardly in the mood to retreat in the face of African demands, particularly those backed by Haiti (and London)."

Horne notes that "the horrors of St. Domingo" became "a catchphrase summarizing the knife's edge on which slavery rested."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 6: Emancipation in Haiti

"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel." - Abraham Lincoln 04/04/1864

Christopher Colombus landed in Haiti in 1492 and began the European project of slave labor in the New World, which Spain first undertook with the aboriginal inhabitants. African slaves eventually took their place.

France took possession of part of Haiti from Spain according under the terms of the Treaty of Rijswijk (1697) and it became an important French colony. Spain formally ceded authority over the whole island to France in 1795.

The Enlightenment had a deeply contradictory legacy in its effects on white European views of human liberty and the less "civilized" peoples. The best of the liberationist aspect of that legacy arrived in Haiti, known as Saint-Domingue at the time, after the French Revolution when Léger-Félicité Sonthonax (1763–1813) abolished slavery there in 1793 while he was in command of the French forces there on behalf of the revolutionary government. Like most major political decisions, it was done from a mixture of motives. But as Hegel might have said, the World Spirit was pushing history in that direction.

In this case, the real history of the French emancipation in Haiti was preceded by a slave rebellion that began in 1791. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr. write about it in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (8th edition; 2003). The "magnitude and intensity" of the uprising in August 1791 "demonstrated the blacks' determination to secure freedom and equality." After two years of conflict, the French offered freedom to slaves who adhered to the French cause, which Sothonax soon extended to all slaves.

Toussaint Louverture (c. 1743-1803)

Toussaint Louverture (c. 1743-1803) emerged as the main leader, fighting against French forces that he feared would try to restore slavery. He also successfully liberated the remaining slaves by overrunning Santo Domingo, which was still held by the Spanish and where slavery had been maintained. He was eventually captured by France and died in a French prison in 1803. But France was unable to reconquer the island, which became independent and took on the name of Haiti on the first day of 1804.

Franklin and Moss explain the reverberations of these events in the United States:

The effect of these events on the course of American history was extremely important. Of Toussaint, W. E. B. Du Bois said, "He rose to leadership through a bloody terror, which contrived a Negro 'problem' for the Western Hemisphere, intensified and defined the anti-slavery movement, became one of the causes, and probably the prime one, which led Napoleon to sell Louisiana for a song, and finally, through the interworking of all these effects, rendered more certain the final prohibition of the slave-trade by the United States in 1807." Americans were terrified at the news of what was happening in Haiti. For more than a decade beginning in 1791 many Americans were more concerned with events in Haiti than with the life-and-death struggle that was going on between France and England. Despite the fact that Southern states wanted more slaves, they were afraid to import them. In 1792 South Carolina found it inexpedient to allow blacks "from Africa, the West India Islands, or other places beyond the sea" to enter for two years, but many entered illegally. In 1794 North Carolina passed an act "to prevent future importation and bringing of slaves." Virginia and Maryland strengthened their nonimportation laws. Though the Middle Atlantic and New England states did not seem as disturbed over Haiti as their Southern neighbors, there were attempts by Quakers and other humanitarian groups to take advantage of the situation and to strengthen various aspects of antislavery legislation. The revolution in the West Indies did much to discourage the importation of slaves into the United States.

Speaking of mixed motives, even the reduction and eventual prohibition of the international slave trade was being driven by fear as well as love for liberty and humanitarian considerations.