Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection - Softcover

Popkin, Jeremy D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226675831 ISBN 13: 9780226675831

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2008

Synopsis

The only truly successful slave uprising in the Atlantic world, the Haitian Revolution gave birth to the first independent black republic of the modern era. Inspired by the revolution that had recently roiled their French rulers, black slaves and people of mixed race alike rose up against their oppressors in a bloody insurrection that led to the burning of the colony’s largest city, a bitter struggle against Napoleon’s troops, and in 1804, the founding of a free nation.

Numerous firsthand narratives of these events survived, but their invaluable insights into the period have long languished in obscurity—until now. In Facing Racial Revolution, Jeremy D. Popkin unearths these documents and presents excerpts from more than a dozen accounts written by white colonists trying to come to grips with a world that had suddenly disintegrated. These dramatic writings give us our most direct portrayal of the actions of the revolutionaries, vividly depicting encounters with the uprising’s leaders—Toussaint Louverture, Boukman, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines—as well as putting faces on many of the anonymous participants in this epochal moment. Popkin’s expert commentary on each selection provides the necessary background about the authors and the incidents they describe, while also addressing the complex question of the witnesses’ reliability and urging the reader to consider the implications of the narrators’ perspectives.

Along with the American and French revolutions, the birth of Haiti helped shape the modern world. The powerful, moving, and sometimes troubling testimonies collected in Facing Racial Revolution significantly expand our understanding of this momentous event.

About this title

About the Author

Jeremy D. Popkin is the T. Marshall Hahn, Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of several books, including Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799 and History, Historians, and Autobiography.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FACING RACIAL REVOLUTION

EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF THE HAITIAN INSURRECTIONBy JEREMY D. POPKIN

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2007 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-67583-1

Contents

List of Illustrations..........................................................................................ixForeword.......................................................................................................xiINTRODUCTION From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: Eyewitness Narratives of the Haitian Revolution.....................11 Becoming a Slavemaster.......................................................................................372 The Og Insurrection.........................................................................................433 The First Days of the Slave Insurrection.....................................................................494 A Poet in the Midst of Insurrection: "Mon Odysse"...........................................................595 An Expedition against the Insurgents in November 1791........................................................936 Inside the Insurgency: Gros's Historick Recital..............................................................1057 Prisoners of the Insurgents in 1792..........................................................................1568 Fighting and Atrocities in the South Province in 1792-1793...................................................1699 Masters and Their Slaves during the Insurrection.............................................................17410 The Destruction of Cap Franais in June 1793................................................................18011 A Colonist at Sea, 1793.....................................................................................23312 Imagining the Motives behind the Insurrection...............................................................24513 A Colonist among the Spanish and the British................................................................25214 A White Captive in the Struggle against the Leclerc Expedition..............................................27015 A Family Reunion and a Religious Conversion.................................................................31316 A Woman's View of the Last Days of Cap Franais.............................................................31717 A Child's Memories of the Last Days of Saint-Domingue.......................................................32918 A Survivor of Dessalines's Massacres in 1804................................................................33619 The Story of the Last French Survivors in Saint-Domingue....................................................363Notes..........................................................................................................367Bibliography...................................................................................................387Index..........................................................................................................391

Chapter One

Becoming a Slavemaster

The incentive for most of the first-person narratives from the Haitian insurrection was to record the events resulting from the slave uprising. As a result, very few of them say anything about their authors' lives prior to 1791. One exception is the "Manuscrit d'un voyage de France Saint-Domingue, la Havanne et aux Unis tats [sic] d'Amrique," now in the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The unnamed author of this account left France for Saint-Domingue in 1785, when he enlisted in the regiment du Cap, the permanent military unit stationed in the colony's largest city. After a few years, he deserted and began a career as a plantation manager. By 1791, he had risen from working as a hired employee to starting his own plantation. The manuscript as it now stands takes his story up to 1795, before breaking off abruptly in the middle of a sentence. We know from the manuscript's introduction that the author left Saint-Domingue in 1804, after the final defeat of the French, and went to Cuba, where he stayed until February 1808, when he returned to France. He wrote his account in 1816, after the end of the Napoleonic wars, at a time when French hopes of recovering the former colony were high. Much of the manuscript consists of detailed advice for the running of plantations devoted to the various crops that had been grown in Saint-Domingue before the revolution; presumably, the author hoped that a new generation of young Frenchmen would be able to benefit from his experience. Interspersed with this agricultural advice, however, are stories from his life before and during the revolutionary years, from which the following excerpts are taken.

The first sections of this manuscript provide a rare glimpse into the process by which newly arrived whites from France learned to play their roles in the colonial system. They remind us that a high proportion of the white population had not grown up in a slave society. Like the blacks imported from Africa, they found themselves in a new world and had to figure out for themselves how to adapt to it. For this author, colonial Saint-Domingue was a land of opportunity, a place where he was able to escape from oppressive parents and become independent. In four years, he went from being a soldier, to managing a plantation for its owner, and then to setting up a small plantation of his own. He acquired a black concubine and was sufficiently comfortable with his slaves to live alone on an isolated land claim with them. According to his account, however, he did not fully absorb the older whites' violent hatred for the prerevolutionary royal administration or their widespread prejudice against the mixed-race population. In fact, he echoed the claims frequently made by their representatives in France that the white plantation owners were spendthrifts, "all weighed down by debts, and owing French merchants twice the value of their plantations" (pt. 1, p. 173), in contrast to the free people of color, who were less extravagant, and he eventually served under the command of Andr Rigaud, a free-colored general and rival of Toussaint Louverture's in the later 1790s (pt. 1, p. 177).

From his account, one senses that this author was not a particularly reflective man, although there are some Rousseauist elements in the depiction of his revolt against his parents. His concerns were primarily practical, as his careful explanations of plantation techniques indicate. He wrote without any literary pretensions and told his story in a rather disorganized fashion, moving forward and backward in time without explanation. He tells some stories, like the passage about a confrontation with a slave on his plantation, in great detail and with a certain sense of drama but omits other experiences or alludes to them only in passing. He seems to have been essentially an unpolitical man, but he is the only author in this collection who gives a full description of a major atrocity committed by whites against people of color, an action that he strongly condemned, both on moral grounds and because it prevented a united front of slaveowners against their slaves. Although his conscious intent in writing seems to have been to contribute to a restoration of the plantation economy, he nevertheless provides some striking insights into how colonial society had functioned before 1791 and why it had collapsed.

The manuscript begins by explaining how the author, born in France, came to emigrate to Saint-Domingue in 1785. His relations with his parents were strained. They originally wanted him to enter the clergy, then apprenticed him for three years in an unidentified occupation that, he writes, "was beyond my abilities. I had a few ideas about the America that I have lived in for a long time, having read a travel narrative about that country. When I returned to Paris, to the parental house, my only thought and my only desire was to take a ship and go to Cap Franais." His mother approved of the idea, he writes, because "she thought she would succeed better in getting rid of me, than through the idea she had previously had of making me a Capuchin monk." Since his parents were fairly wealthy, the author thought that they could have helped set him up in business in the colonies, but they refused. His mother told him "that since she had a good fortune, she wanted to enjoy it. If I wanted to have one, I simply had to earn it," adding, for good measure: "You won't die from having been a soldier. You need the experience, to make you grow up." As for his father, his brutal behavior had "made me so timid that, at the age of twenty-five, I could hardly speak for myself. When I was in his presence, I was always trembling" (pt. 1, pp. 6-7, 9).

Once in Saint-Domingue, he became more independent. He was assigned to the regiment's band, allowed to live outside the barracks, and permitted to dress in civilian clothes. He earned extra income by copying documents for notaries. After two years, he decided to escape from army discipline altogether: "It was these circumstances that gave me the idea of becoming a plantation owner, although I would have preferred to go into commerce, if that had been open to me, but I had decided, in my head, that I needed to go hide myself in the mornes (the hills) for a couple of years" (pt. 1, pp. 18-19). Although he hadn't initially been interested in agriculture, he grew to love it. Coming on a well-tended coffee plantation, he wrote nostalgically: "Truly one could be in the garden of earthly delights, seeing such a beautiful sight" (pt. 1, p. 34). His first job was with a family named Castillon, where he spent six months learning to grow coffee. His first employers helped him find a more responsible position as the conome (plantation overseer) for a Dutchman, Monsieur Simphe, who had settled in Saint-Domingue. During the eighteen months that he spent working for Simphe, he learned a great deal about the plantation system. His salary rose to 1,000 cus a year, plus room and board, a quite respectable income, but a mere fraction of what a plantation owner could earn. At his death, Simphe left him "a young American-born black woman, eighteen years old, for whom he knew I had affection, and in addition a sum of 6,000 francs, and his watch, which, although old, was quite valuable, being a mariner's timepiece" (pt. 1, p. 38).

The author's descriptions of the whites, people of color, and slaves in the colony are similar to those found in other accounts of the period. He recalled the lives of both the whites and the free coloreds as having been "joyful and unconcerned about spending" (pt. 1, p. 183). He did not embrace the native whites' prejudice against the free-colored population. He favored intermarriage and was indignant about the behavior of the whites toward the other group. "I knew a number of whites, who owed a considerable debt of gratitude to wealthy men of color, who had guaranteed their credit so they could have slaves, without whom they could not have gotten their harvest in, who had even loaned them money when they needed it, and who paid them back by offering them blows from a stick in place of payment" (pt. 1, p. 188), he wrote. But he had no objection to the slave system itself and contended that most masters had been humane toward their slaves. "Those who are honest, who lived in this unfortunate colony, will testify that the slaves were better off than many French peasants" (pt. 1, p. 180), he wrote, echoing a claim frequently made in proslavery propaganda during the period.

This claim is hardly borne out by the most dramatic story the author records about his prerevolutionary experiences, a run-in between himself and the plantation's commandeur (slave foreman). Plantation owners recognized their dependence on their commandeurs, whose cooperation was indispensable in maintaining order among the slaves. "One should think carefully before punishing the commandeurs," one owner wrote to his manager. When a commandeur defied instructions, however, a confrontation was inevitable. To the author, the incident he recorded nearly two decades after it happened dramatized his skill in finding the delicate balance that allowed him to maintain his authority over the slaves without exceeding his own mandate from his employer. The story reveals how the black slaves tried to play on the tensions between the whites with whom they had to deal in order to assert a certain amount of autonomy, and it suggests why many commandeurs, with their experience in leadership, later became key figures in the slave uprising. The account also shows the limits of the author's sympathy, not only for the slave commandeur, who was beaten and humiliated in public, but also for the plantation owner, whom the author regarded as too lenient. In the last few sentences of the passage, the author's clumsy syntax leaves some doubt as to whether he was claiming to have impressed his employer or the slave foreman, but this ambiguity is appropriate: the point of the story is that he had succeeded in proving himself to both of them.

I am going to tell some stories about the personality of the landowner for whom I was the manager, and of his quirks. He paid his conomes very well, and would have given them anything they wanted, as long as they didn't oppose him. Once one had come into conflict with him, he became hostile to those who had displeased him to such an extent that his mind could never be changed. M. Castillon had told me so much about his bizarre character that I never contradicted him, even about the most stupid things. He had at least one hundred blacks, the handsomest and healthiest in the district. Instead of the fifty thousand [pounds] of coffee he made every year, he should have made a hundred thousand, since one always figures that a coffee plantation should produce a thousand pounds per black. It was his folly to spoil them to an unheard-of degree, as will soon be seen. An conome didn't have the right to punish a black without his permission. Thus, the two commandeurs took a malicious pleasure in undermining me; even though I was alert and energetic, I was reduced to suffering.

I never allowed myself to talk back to him in any way; as a result, he thought highly of me. I contented myself with feeling sorry for him in silence. His delight, and his greatest pleasure, was to hear people say that he had the finest work teams in the district. As captain of the district, it was up to him to arrange the annual repairs and work on the main roads, as was the custom throughout the colony. The roads, being neither paved nor metaled, suffered heavily from the rains. Consequently, each plantation owner had his piece to repair, which was assigned according to the number of blacks he had on his plantation. This was the moment my employer enjoyed the most. Avid for recognition to the highest degree, he had the honor of inspecting the work, a task he took very seriously. Another thing that gave him an infinite amount of pleasure was to see his work team outdo all the others: in health, in impressive bodies, and through being well clothed. Things got to the point where a black woman [slave] who didn't have a nice blouse of toile de frise, a skirt of good Indian cotton, a pretty Madras handkerchief of the finest cloth, with a beautiful rock-crystal necklace and gold earrings, would not have been allowed to be seen working on the roads.

The black [slave] men were just as well dressed. But what was strange to see, and made a charming contrast, was to see them barefoot, a hoe in the hand, and covered with earth, or with mud, when they came to a place where the sun didn't shine, and the soil had not had time to dry out after the rains. The two commandeurs, to distinguish themselves, wore pocket watches. These two jokers were extremely arrogant, and I was tempted to blow out the brains of one of them, on the last day of this job. He made trouble for me to the point that I completely lost my patience. I hit him three or four times with a long whip that I had in my hands, solid blows across the shoulders. He reacted by looking as though he was going to strike back at me. I wasted no time: since I was holding my horse by the reins, ready to mount, I put my hand on my saddle horn, and drew one of my pistols. Luckily for him and for me, while I was doing this, and before I had time to aim at him, he was able to escape, because I would have had every possible regret if I had killed him.

Here is what occasioned this scene. It was the last day of work for our work team, and we should have been finished quickly, except for the commandeurs' negligence. Monsieur Simphe had just left me, after having been present all through the early hours of the day. It was almost noon, the time when the blacks got to eat. Looking at his watch, he said to me: "I'm mounting up, I promised our neighbor Castillon to come dine with him, I have no time to lose. You've got at most two more hours to finish our job. Let them keep at it, instead of stopping to eat, until they're finished. They'll eat when they get back to the plantation, and they can have the rest of the day for themselves." As soon as he had left, I called the first commandeur and gave him the master's orders, which I told him to carry out. He replied, with an arrogant tone that he often used, that all that was very well. I thought he was going to obey my orders, when noon was signaled, and I was not a little surprised to hear him crack his whip, the signal to stop for dinner. I was so outraged by this insubordination, that you have heard what extremity I was driven to. After this scene, I mounted my horse, not waiting for them to finish, and I returned to the plantation, determined to quit if M. Simphe didn't stand up for me and render an exemplary punishment for this insult and the disobedience of his commandeur. It wasn't the desire for revenge that made me act this way, but it was necessary if I was going to be respected and obeyed in the future.

As it turned out, on his return to the plantation, he gave me enough satisfaction to ensure that this would never happen again. It is customary on many plantations to have them listen to the evening prayer after work. Monsieur Simphe, a great respecter of customs and laws, although he was not a Catholic, had his blacks do this, since it was the religion of the country. At the moment when the work team was gathered on the glacis [an area near the buildings where the coffee was dried], he took his commandeur by the collar, and, using a piece of vine that he had in his hand, gave him some good ones, and the lecture he gave him in front of the whole work team had more effect on him than the blows he had received. He and the whole work team treated me with unbelievable respect. He had learned that he hadn't, and wouldn't, get rid of me the way he had gotten rid of my predecessors. I had gotten from him something that no other had been able to obtain. He was truly a good man, and he now began to have some respect for the suggestions that I made to him. (pt. 1, pp. 22-29)

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226675831
• ISBN 13: 9780226675831
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416