Jeremy D. Popkin

A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution


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volume in the series, Professor Jeremy Popkin provides an interpretation of the Haitian Revolution of 1791, at once a massive slave revolt and the second successful independence movement in the New World. The volume provides a clear and concise introduction to a historical process that, by raising the twin specters of freedom and violence, reverberated through the Atlantic world. Popkin discusses the legacy of the Haitian Revolution in global terms: the movement profoundly shaped other independence movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, and affected the political discourse in early nineteenth‐century Europe. A singular strength of this book is its chronological scope, encompassing the nineteenth century and beyond. The author makes the case that the Haitian Revolution was a process of global historical significance, and that it deserves equal billing with the much more widely studied revolutions in France and British North America.

      Jürgen Buchenau

      University of North Carolina, Charlotte

      Map 1 Saint-Domingue/Haiti and the Caribbean.

      On 16 August 1791, a building on one of the hundreds of sugar plantations in France’s wealthy Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, today’s independent Republic of Haiti, was set on fire. The local white colonists immediately suspected one of the plantation’s enslaved blacks. Under interrogation, he made a startling confession. “The most trusted slaves on the neighboring plantations and those in the adjacent districts had formed a plot to set fire to the plantations and to murder all the whites,”1 he claimed. The authorities in the nearby port of Cap Français, the largest city in the colony, dismissed the idea that uneducated black captives could have conceived such a scheme. For years, a small minority of whites had successfully exploited the labor of a far larger enslaved population; the whites could not imagine that the blacks they had treated with such contempt for so long were capable of organizing themselves to overthrow their oppressors. Less than a week later, on the night of 22–23 August 1791, the white colonists learned how wrong they were. Just as the suspect arrested for arson had said, bands of blacks attacked plantations in Saint-Domingue’s richest sugar-growing area, setting fire to the crops and killing or driving out their white owners and overseers. It was the start of a movement that would culminate almost 13 years later, on 1 January 1804, when a leader who had once been enslaved, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, proclaimed the independence of the nation of Haiti.

      The success of the 13-year-long insurrection in the French half of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, where Christopher Columbus had landed in 1492 and begun the era of European colonialism in the Americas, showed that the movement for freedom in America, begun by the white population of the British colonies in North America in 1776, had leaped across the boundary of race. For the first time, a population of African origin overthrew its white rulers. The main leader of the Haitian movement, Toussaint Louverture, proved that a black man born into slavery could command armies and govern as effectively as any white man. Most importantly for the future of the Americas and the entire Atlantic world, the Haitian Revolution struck a blow against the institutions of slavery and racial hierarchy. The constitution of the United States, drawn up in 1787, spoke of freedom, but left hundreds of thousands of blacks in servitude; even free black people were denied the full rights of citizens. In contrast, the Haitian constitution of 1805 proclaimed that “slavery is abolished forever” and that “all distinctions of color among members of the same family must necessarily stop.” The Haitian Revolution’s stand against slavery and racial discrimination made it the most radical of the American revolutionary insurrections against European rule. No study of the revolutionary era that laid the basis for the modern world can afford to ignore this movement.

      At the moment when the Haitian Revolution began in August 1791, the world’s attention was focused on the revolutionary upheaval in France itself. Two years earlier, after the storming of the Bastille in Paris on 14 July 1789, the legislators of France’s revolutionary National Assembly had issued their famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, proclaiming that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The uprising in Saint-Domingue forced them to consider whether their principles applied to the 800,000 enslaved blacks in France’s overseas colonies. Torn between their assertion that freedom was a universal human right and their equally strong belief that France needed overseas possessions to maintain its own power and prosperity, the French revolutionaries wrestled painfully with the problem of reconciling their principles with their country’s national interest. In 1799 a successful general, Napoleon Bonaparte, seized power in France. In his mind, the liberty the French revolutionaries had proclaimed had proved to be incompatible with political stability and social order. He had even less sympathy for the attempt to build a free multi-racial society in France’s Caribbean colonies. His attempt to reimpose white rule in Saint-Domingue in 1802–3 provoked the most violent phase of the Haitian Revolution. The defeat the island’s population inflicted on his forces foreshadowed the disasters in Spain and Russia that would lead to his downfall in 1814.

      The Haitian Revolution affected the entire western hemisphere, not just the United States. Whether it was an inspiration for the uprisings that led to the independence of other Latin American countries in the early nineteenth century remains a matter of debate, however. Throughout the region, ruling