Haiti

  14. For a vivid narrative of this process, see Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On Sonthonax’s pivotal role, see Robert Louis Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985).

  15. Mats Lundahl, Politics or Markets? Essays on Haitian Underdevelopment (London: Routledge, 1992), chap. 8; Michel Hector, “Problèmes du passage à la société postesclavagiste et postcoloniale (1791–1793/1820–1826),” in Genèse de l’état haïtien (1804–1859), ed. Michel Hector and Laënnec Hurbon (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2009), 93–117.

  16. On the role of women in these assemblies, see Gérard Barthélemy, L’univers rural haïtien: Le pays en dehors (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990), 93–94, and Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, 1st ed. (University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 168–80; for firsthand accounts of the assemblies, see the documents in Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution, 138–44.

  17. The classic study of slave gardens is Sidney Wilfred Mintz, “The Origins of the Jamaican Market System,” in Caribbean Transformations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 180–215.

  18. Jean Casimir, La culture opprimée (Delmas, Haïti: Lakay, 2001). See also the discussion of this broad process in Robert Fatton Jr., The Roots of Haitian Despotism (Boulder Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2007), 62–68.

  19. Dubois, Avengers, 226–30.

  20. On refugees from Saint-Domingue in the United States, see Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

  21. The best study of the 1801 constitution is Claude Moïse, Le projet national de Toussaint Louverture: La constitution de 1801 (Port-au-Prince: Mémoire, 2001).

  22. Lundahl, Politics or Markets?, chap. 8.

  23. Paul Roussier, ed., Lettres du général Leclerc, commandant en chef de l’armée de Saint-Domingue en 1802 (Paris: Société de l’Histoire des Colonies Françaises et E. Leroux, 1937), 263–74, 306–7.

  24. I recount the war of independence in Dubois, Avengers, chaps. 12 and 13; the most detailed history of the war is C. B. Auguste and M. B. Auguste, L’expédition Leclerc, 1801–1803 (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1985).

  25. Deborah Jenson, “From the Kidnapping(s) of the Louvertures to the Alleged Kidnapping of Aristide: Legacies of Slavery in the Post/Colonial World,” Yale French Studies 107 (July 2005).

  26. Antoine Métral, Histoire de l’expédition des français à Saint-Domingue: Sous le consulat de Napoléon Bonaparte, 1802–1803 (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1985), 83; Dubois, Avengers, chap. 13.

  27. Dubois, Avengers, 285–86; Roussier, Lettres, 199–206, 219.

  28. Dubois, Avengers, 288–89.

  29. Ibid., 291–92; Auguste and Auguste, L’expédition Leclerc, 1801–1803.

  30. Dubois, Avengers, 289–92; Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (London: J. Cundee, 1805).

  31. Dayan, Haiti, 40.

  32. Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 3 (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1985), 324.

  33. Ibid., 3:139–91; Philippe R. Girard, “Caribbean Genocide: Racial War in Haiti, 1802–4,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 138–61. Firsthand accounts of the killings are presented in Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

  34. Dubois, Avengers, 1, 300; Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776–1891 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 173.

  35. Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution, 191–96. For examples of a white French officer serving in Dessalines’s regime, see Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 3:367–68.

  36. Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, chaps. 2 and 3.

  37. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, chaps. 4 and 5; Tim Matthewson, A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations During the Early Republic (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003). A detailed analysis of Dessalines’s foreign policy and diplomatic negotiations is presented in the recent work of Julia Gaffield: “‘The good understanding which ought always to subsist between the two islands’: Haiti and Jamaica in the Atlantic World, 1803–1804,” presented at “Haiti’s History: Foundations for the Future” at Duke University, April 22–24, 2010; and “‘Liberté, Indépendance’: Haitian Antislavery and National Independence,” presented at “Anti-slavery in the 19th Century,” a symposium at the University College of Dublin, April 30–May 1, 2010.

  38. On the French occupation of Santo Domingo, see Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, chap. 3.

  39. Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution, 191; Claude Moïse, Constitutions et luttes de pouvoir en Haïti, 1804–1987: La faillite des classes dirigeantes (1804–1915), vol. 1 (Montréal: Éditions du CIDIHCA, 1988), 29–33.

  40. Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 3:351; Gaétan Mentor, Histoire d’un crime politique: Le Général Etienne Victor Mentor (Port-au-Prince: Fondation Sogebank, 1999).

  41. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), chap. 3; Vergniaud Leconte, Henri Christophe dans l’histoire d’Haïti (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1931), 144.

  42. I am indebted to Jean Casimir, who pointed out this feature of the declaration to me and who sees it as an intentional marker of exclusion. For the text of the declaration, see Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution, 188–91.

  43. Moïse, Constitutions, 1:34; Lundahl, Politics or Markets?, chap. 9; Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 3:330.

  44. Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 3:344–45, 349, 368–72, 404–5. On the economic history of the south, see Garrigus, Before Haiti.

  45. Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 3:405; Dayan, Haiti, 39–45.

  46. On Ogou and Dessalines, see Dayan, Haiti, esp. 30–31, and Brown, Mama Lola, chap. 4.

  2: THE CITADEL

  1. Earl Leslie Griggs and Clifford H. Prator, eds., Henry Christophe and Thomas Clarkson: A Correspondence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 88.

  2. Ibid., 134–35.

  3. H. Trouillot, Le gouvernement du Roi Henri Christophe (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Centrale, 1972), 11.

  4. For detailed analyses, see Vergniaud Leconte, Henri Christophe dans l’histoire d’Haïti (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1931), 367–70, and H. Trouillot, Gouvernement, 1–27. One of the best-known literary accounts of the construction of the Citadel is Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World, trans. Harriet De Onís (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).

  5. The Voltaire quote appeared on the masthead of the Gazette Royal d’Hayti for several months in 1807; copies are in the British National Archives, Colonial Office, 137/120.

  6. Claude Moïse, Constitutions et luttes de pouvoir en Haïti, 1804–1987: La faillite des classes dirigeantes (1804–1915), vol. 1 (Montréal: Éditions du CIDIHCA, 1988), 35.

  7. Dantès Bellegarde, “President Alexandre Pétion,” Phylon 2, no. 3 (3rd qtr. 1941): 205–6; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 65–67, 234, 254; Leconte, Christophe, 2; Hubert Cole, Christophe, King of Haiti (New York: Viking, 1967), 31; Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 3 (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1985), 328–29; Claude Moïse, Constitutions et luttes de pouvoir en Haïti, 1804–1987: De l’occupation étrangère à la dictature macoute (1915–1987), vol. 2 (Montréal: Éditions du CIDIHCA, 1988), 29–33.

  8. Cole, Christophe, 31–32; Leconte, Christophe, 1–3.

  9. Moïse, Constitutions, 1:39–44.

  10. Cole, Christophe, 162–90; Leconte, Christophe, 205–45.

  11. Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, vol. 7 (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1856), 14–15, 21, 24.

  12. Ibid., 7:21; George
s Corvington, Port-au-Prince au cours des ans (Montréal: Éditions du CIDIHCA, 2007), 2:50–52.

  13. Ardouin, Études, 7:12, 31–43.

  14. Robert K. Lacerte, “The First Land Reform in Latin America: The Reforms of Alexandre Pétion, 1809–1814,” Inter-American Economic Affairs 28, no. 4 (Spring 1975): 77–85.

  15. William F. Lewis, “Simón Bolívar and Xavier Mina: A Rendezvous in Haiti,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 11, no. 3 (July 1969): 458–60. The most detailed study of the relationship with Bolívar is Paul Verna, Pétion y Bolívar: Cuarenta años (1790–1830) de relaciones haitianovenezolanas y su aporte a la emancipación de Hispanoamérica (Caracas, 1969), quote p. 524.

  16. Moïse, Constitutions, 1:45, 53.

  17. Ibid., 1:53–58. For a comparative analysis of Haiti’s early constitutions, see Julia Gaffield, “Complexities of Imagining Haiti: A Study of National Constitutions, 1801–1807,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 81–103.

  18. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), chap. 3; Leconte, Christophe, 144.

  19. Cole, Christophe, 190–93; Clive Cheesman and Marie-Lucie Vendrynes, eds., The Armorial of Haiti: Symbols of Nobility in the Reign of Henry Christophe (London: College of Arms, 2007), 18.

  20. H. Trouillot, Gouvernement, 61–63; Leconte, Christophe, 397.

  21. Cheesman and Vendrynes, The Armorial of Haiti, 72, 90, 168.

  22. H. Trouillot, Gouvernement, 72–77. On the theater in Le Cap, see Moreau de Saint-Méry’s note from October 19, 1816, in Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, F3 141 bis fol. 316.

  23. Chris Bongie, Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature (Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 115–16.

  24. Cheesman and Vendrynes, Armorial of Haiti, 6.

  25. Aimé Césaire, The Tragedy of King Christophe: A Play (New York: Grove, 1970). The 1997 performance, which I attended, was at the Théâtre de la Colline in the 20th arrondissement of Paris.

  26. Michel Hector, “Une autre voie de construction de l’état-nation: L’expérience christophienne (1806–1820),” in Genèse de l’état haïtien (1804–1859), ed. Michel Hector and Laënnec Hurbon (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2009), 248.

  27. Henry Christophe, “Loi concernant la Culture,” in Code Henry, vol. 7 (Au Cap-Henry: Chez P. Roux, Imprimeur du Roi, 1812), 10, 14, http://www.archive.org/details/codehenry00hait.

  28. Ibid., 5.

  29. Ibid., 5–6.

  30. Ibid., 2.

  31. Ibid., 11; Leconte, Christophe, 322.

  32. Prince Sanders, Haytian Papers: A Collection of the Very Interesting Proclamations and Other Official Documents, Together with Some Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Kingdom of Hayti (Boston: Caleb Bingham, 1818); Griggs and Prator, Christophe and Clarkson, 45.

  33. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 182.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 195–98.

  36. Ibid., 199–206.

  37. Griggs and Prator, Christophe and Clarkson, 70–71. H. Trouillot, Gouvernement, 49, 108.

  38. Job B. Clement, “History of Education in Haiti: 1804–1915,” Revista de Historia de América, no. 88 (December 1979): 35; Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 3:328–29; Hector, “Une autre voie,” 255.

  39. Rayford W. Logan, “Education in Haiti,” Journal of Negro History 15, no. 4 (October 1930): 412–16; Hector, “Une autre voie,” 255; Leslie François Manigat, “Le Roi Henry Christophe et l’éducation nationale 1807–1820,” in Éventail d’histoire vivante d’Haïti, vol. 1, Collection du CHUDAC (Port-au-Prince: CHUDAC, 2001), 293–309; Cole, Christophe, 256–57; H. Trouillot, Gouvernement, 87–91.

  40. Hector, “Une autre voie,” 255; Logan, “Education in Haiti,” 416; Manigat, “Roi Henry Christophe,” 293–309; Cole, Christophe, 256–57; H. Trouillot, Gouvernement, 87–91.

  41. Griggs and Prator, Christophe and Clarkson, 187.

  42. William Woodis Harvey, Sketches of Hayti: From the Expulsion of the French, to the Death of Christophe (London: L. B. Seeley and Son, 1827), 249–51.

  43. Griggs and Prator, Christophe and Clarkson, 162; Sanders, Haytian Papers; Arthur O. White, “Prince Saunders: An Instance of Social Mobility Among Antebellum New England Blacks,” Journal of Negro History 60, no. 4 (October 1975): 526–35. On the history of African American emigration to Haiti, see Chris Dixon, African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000).

  44. Griggs and Prator, Christophe and Clarkson, 162.

  45. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 57–58; François Blancpain, Un siècle de relations financières entre Haïti et la France (1825–1922) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 43–44.

  46. Jean-François Brière, Haïti et la France, 1804–1848: Le rêve brisé (Paris: Kharthala, 2008), 19, 23.

  47. Ibid., 22.

  48. Ibid., 27.

  49. Griggs and Prator, Christophe and Clarkson, 200.

  50. Blancpain, Un siècle, 43–44.

  51. Ibid., 45.

  52. Ibid., 45–46.

  53. Ibid., 46.

  54. Ibid., 47.

  55. Ibid., 49; Brière, Haïti et la France, illustration facing 156.

  56. Griggs and Prator, Christophe and Clarkson, 155, 173.

  57. Ibid., 174–75.

  58. Ibid., 175–76.

  59. Ibid., 196, 202.

  60. Ibid., 202.

  61. Leconte, Christophe, 370; George E. Simpson and J. B. Cinéas, “Folk Tales of Haitian Heroes,” Journal of American Folklore 54, no. 213/214 (December 1941): 176–85.

  62. Cole, Christophe, 260–74; Griggs and Prator, Christophe and Clarkson, 213–19; H. Trouillot, Gouvernement, 168–70.

  63. Griggs and Prator, Christophe and Clarkson, 238; Cole, Christophe, 274.

  64. Cole, Christophe, 274–75; Clement, “History of Education in Haiti,” 38–39.

  65. For a detailed examination of the question of color in Haitian politics, see the classic work by David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), xliii, 1. Nicholls admits that some Haitian friends consider him a bit too obsessed with color; one teased him that he always wore “bi-color” glasses when looking at Haitian history. But he insists, as others have, that the question of color has been a major cause of political conflict in Haiti.

  66. Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 3:330.

  67. Lacerte, “First Land Reform,” 82–83; Ardouin, Études, 7:32, 43; Corvington, Port-au-Prince, 49, 59; Mimi Sheller, Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 93.

  3: STALEMATE

  1. Hérard Dumesle, Voyage dans le nord d’Hayti; ou, révélation des lieux et des monuments historiques (Aux Cayes: Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1824), 2. For biographical details, see Daniel Supplice, Dictionnaire biographique des personnalités politiques de la république d’Haïti, 1804–2001, 1st ed. (Haïti: D. Supplice, 2001), 235.

  2. Dumesle, Voyage, 7–8, 333. On Buffon, see Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 228, 237–40.

  3. For the Dalmas account, which was written in 1793 but not published until 1814, see Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), 89–90. On the different accounts of this ceremony, see Léon-François Hoffman, “Un mythe national: La cérémonie du Bois-Caïman,�
�� in La république haïtienne: État des lieux et perspectives, ed. Gérard Barthélemy and Christian Girault (Paris: Kharthala, 1993), 434–48; the essays in Laënnec Hurbon, ed., L’insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue (22–23 août 1791) (Paris: Kharthala, 2000); and the detailed analysis of the sources provided by David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), chap. 6. For narratives that place the ceremony within the broader context of the 1791 insurrection, see Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 94–102, and Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, 1st ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), chap. 4.

  4. Dumesle, Voyage, 88; Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution, 87–88. Dumesle published two versions of the speech, one in French and one in Kreyòl, which raises complex issues regarding the precise translation of one line. The phrase “Bondié blancs mandé crime, et part nous vlé bienfets” is usually translated as “The God of the whites pushes them to crime, but ours wants good deeds,” suggesting that there are two gods, one white and one black, asking for different things. In the French, however, Boukman is quoted as saying “Leur culte leur engage au crime, et le nôtre aux bienfaits,” which can be translated as “Their religion pushes them to crime, and ours to good deeds.” Rather than suggesting that there are two gods, the French version emphasizes a difference of interpretation of God’s will between two religions—the one practiced by the whites versus that practiced by the blacks. The question of translation is thus also one of theology: in one case there are two gods with different messages, in the other, one god whose message is understood differently by different groups of humans. Since Catholicism and Vodou share a belief in the existence of one God—known as bondyé in Kreyòl—it seems likely to me that Boukman’s speech was meant in the latter sense, contrasting whites using religion to justify slavery and the insurgents drawing on religion to overthrow it. But the exact meaning of this line remains open to debate and interpretation.

  5. For a description of one contemporary Vodou priest’s vision of the Bois Caïman ceremony, see Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 432–34.