Jeremy D. Popkin - A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution

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 elites feared the spread of ideas about freedom among their enslaved populations and dreaded the kind of violence that had characterized the Haitian movement. In South and Central America, independence movements in the 1810s and 1820s more closely resembled the movement of the free men of color that developed alongside the slave uprising during the Haitian Revolution, rather than the uprising of the enslaved population, and independence did not immediately bring the end of slavery in many of those countries when they first gained their freedom. The Caribbean islands closest to Haiti proved the most resistant to the Haitian example; slavery was finally abolished in them by their colonial rulers, not through insurrection, and independence came even later. Even today, not all of them are independent: the United States governs Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe are overseas territories of France. In some Latin American countries the Haitian Revolution clearly promoted the growth of slavery rather than hastening its disappearance. White Saint-Domingue refugees brought their highly efficient sugar-growing methods to Cuba and Brazil, creating new centers of production that would make those two countries the last places in the Americas to abolish slavery.

In Europe, intellectuals such as the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel pondered the implications of resistance to slavery, and British abolitionists, many of them motivated by religious principles, cited the Haitian movement as proof of the need to abolish slavery; in 1807 their efforts led the British Parliament to officially prohibit the slave trade. In Africa, the sudden disappearance of what had been the largest single market for black captives profoundly affected the destinies of thousands of men and women who would otherwise have been shipped to the Caribbean. Taught a harsh lesson by the success of the Haitian Revolution, British and French governments and economic interest groups began to think that it might be more profitable to establish colonies in Africa itself, where black labor could be regimented to produce for the European market without the moral stigma associated with the Atlantic slave trade. The Haitian Revolution was thus linked to the beginnings of a new age of European imperialism that would, by the end of the nineteenth century, affect almost the entire continent of Africa and many other parts of the world.

The term “Haitian Revolution” is a relatively recent way of labeling the dramatic events of the years from 1791 to 1804. Historians who use this phrase argue that these events should be put on the same level as the American and French revolutions in discussions of the origins of modern ideas of freedom and equality. The phrase “Haitian Revolution” also suggests, however, that there was a unity to the events from 1791 to 1804 and that their final outcome reflected the accomplishment of a program consciously laid out from the beginning. As we will see, these propositions are not necessarily accurate. The uprising that began in August 1791 affected only one of the colony’s three provinces, for example, and it developed alongside another revolutionary movement, the uprising of Saint-Domingue’s free people of color, that had very different goals. These two revolutionary movements were often in conflict with one another, a conflict that continued even after the declaration of Haitian independence in 1804. Initially, both of them fought against the French colonial government. From 1794 to 1801, however, both movements claimed to be supporting the French, until Napoleon’s intervention in 1802 drove most of the population to turn against them. Waged by a largely illiterate population, the Haitian revolt against slavery never issued a manifesto defining its goals, and its history has to be written almost entirely on the basis of evidence provided by outsiders, most of whom were thoroughly hostile to it. Those events certainly had revolutionary consequences, but trying to force them into a mold derived from American and French models is misleading. Including the Haitian Revolution as one of the modern world’s major revolutions requires us to rethink the very nature of such phenomena, and to recognize, for instance, that a revolution can develop without the leadership of a revolutionary party or movement.

Just as it is misleading to describe the Haitian Revolution as a unified movement with clearly defined and consistent goals, it is difficult to describe its principal leader, Toussaint Louverture, as a revolutionary leader in the mold of Robespierre or Fidel Castro. To this day, it remains unclear whether Louverture actually played any role in starting the slave insurrection in August 1791. When he joined the movement, he did not initially call for the complete abolition of slavery, and he even rejected the first French decree of emancipation in 1793. After he switched from fighting against the French to fighting on their side in 1794, Louverture consistently insisted that he was loyal to the French government, even when his actions appeared to undermine its authority. The laws he imposed on the population of Saint-Domingue during these years, however, were quite conservative and drove many blacks to revolt against him. Toussaint Louverture’s demonstration that a black man could govern a key territory in the Atlantic world had revolutionary implications, but he cannot be seen as a self-conscious, ideologically motivated revolutionary in the mold of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, or the revolutionary French Jacobins.

It has been customary to see the Haitian declaration of independence of 1804 and the promulgation of the first Haitian constitution of 1805 as marking the end of the Haitian Revolution. Slavery, the fundamental institution of colonial society, had been abolished and, with the defeat of the French army and the massacre of the remaining white colonists, the pre-revolutionary ruling class was completely replaced by a new group of rulers. Nevertheless, the outcome of the Haitian Revolution did not become clear until many years after 1804. By the end of 1806, Haiti had split into two rival states that continued to fight each other until 1820. France did not recognize Haiti’s independence until 1825, and it took several decades before the lasting features of post-revolutionary Haitian society became evident. The final chapter of this book outlines the major developments of Haitian history until the crisis of 1843, which may be seen as the last direct confrontation between the democratic and elitist currents coming out of the revolutionary period.

Although people at the time were intensely aware of the importance of the events we now call the Haitian Revolution, outside of Haiti itself that movement has never commanded the same attention as the American and French revolutions of the same period. Whereas the United States rapidly expanded into a continental power, and whereas France remained a major factor in European affairs and ruled over a world empire well into the twentieth century, the small nation of Haiti did not have the same assets. As the only black-dominated country in the Americas, the new nation was treated with hostility by an outside world increasingly under the sway of racial prejudices that have still not disappeared. Lacking natural and cultural resources such as the vast farming regions and the educational institutions the United States inherited from its colonial past, Haiti was unable to follow the same path to prosperity as its northern neighbor. The two American republics born in the revolutionary era were both racked by civil conflicts in the nineteenth century, but the United States emerged from its Civil War of 1861–5 with its democratic institutions and its economy largely intact, whereas Haiti suffered a succession of coups, dictatorships, and foreign interventions that obstructed the development of a strong civil society, stable political institutions, and a diversified economy.