The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  Nevertheless, despite the persistence of slavery’s legacy—the continuation of much black deprivation, inequality, and white racism even into the twenty-first century—African Americans have remained steadfast in their loyalty and commitment to a special American identity. The arrival and reelection of a black family in the White House has signified a momentous change and a generational transformation with respect to race. It would not be relevant for a book on slavery and emancipation even to summarize the slow and incomplete erosion of racism in the twentieth century. Yet given my emphasis on dehumanization and psychological parasitism, I want to mention the long-term interactions between white and black cultures, from nineteenth-century white black-face minstrels to the role of blacks in professional and college sports and white responses to black hip-hop. If most whites profited from psychological projection, increasing numbers also succumbed to the appeal of “the Negro Id.” This nineteenth-century opening eventually enabled African American culture to transform popular music and many other aspects of American culture itself.

  Race, as we have seen, came to personify blacks’ supposed incapacity for freedom in the sense of voluntary work, self-discipline, moral responsibility, and civilized behavior. It became the major justification for slavery, often obscuring the actual and indispensable economic value of slave labor. Yet the Haitian Revolution, to which we now turn, shook the entire New World and conveyed two contradictory messages with regard to racial capacity and freedom. As we briefly saw in the introduction, there were images of docile slaves suddenly engaged in beastly slaughter, rape, and unimaginable atrocities. On the other hand, supposedly incapable blacks organized military forces that continued to fight for more than twelve years, creating a new independent nation after defeating not only their white masters but the best armies of France, Britain, and Spain.

  2

  The First Emancipations: Freedom and Dishonor

  SELF-EMANCIPATION: HAITI AS A TURNING POINT

  On January 2, 1893, Frederick Douglass rose to deliver a speech dedicating the Haitian Pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair. Douglass was intimately involved in planning the pavilion. As the recent United States minister and consul general to Haiti and exposition commissioner of the Haitian government, the now elder statesman was pleased with the result. Douglass called the pavilion “a city set upon a hill,” invoking the words of the New Testament, and their use by John Winthrop to Puritan settlers in 1630 on the deck of the Arbella. Douglass took the opportunity of his speech to negate the common stereotype that Haitians were lazy barbarians who devoted their leisure time to “Voodoo” and child sacrifice. But what’s more significant is that Douglass used the speech to reflect back on the past century of slave emancipation. Douglass, after all, was born a slave. And he had won international fame through his writing and oratory in the service of black emancipation. As the most prominent black spokesman and statesman of the New World, Douglass had no difficulty in identifying one of the central events in the history of emancipation:

  We should not forget that the freedom you and I enjoy to-day; that the freedom that eight hundred thousand colored people enjoy in the British West Indies; the freedom that has come to the colored race the world over, is largely due to the brave stand taken by the black sons of Haiti ninety years ago. When they struck for freedom … they struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.1

  Douglass made sure to note that blacks owed much to the American and British abolitionists, including antislavery societies in countries around the world. But blacks, he noted, “owe incomparably more to Haiti than to them all.” It was Haiti that struck first for emancipation; it was “the original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century.” Haiti had instructed the world about the dangers of slavery, and had demonstrated that the latent powers and capabilities of the black race had only to be awakened. Once awakened, the former slaves of Saint-Domingue demonstrated their strength in defeating fifty thousand of Napoleon’s veteran troops. Not only that, but these insurgents turned to establish an independent nation of their own making. The white world could and would never be the same. Until Haiti spoke, Douglass pointed out, “no Christian nation had abolished Negro slavery.… Until she spoke, the slave trade was sanctioned by all the Christian nations of the world, and our land of liberty and light included.… Until Haiti spoke, the church was silent, and the pulpit dumb.”2

  The history, of course, was more complex than Douglass’s depiction. He knew that. For whites, Haiti was “a very hell of horrors.” The “very name was pronounced with a shudder,” as he noted at the beginning of his speech. And indeed the revolution had inevitably had contradictory effects. As an abolitionist from 1841 to 1865, Douglass avoided mention of the Haitian Revolution in his public speeches, debates, and interviews.3 In the ears of his white audiences, the abolitionist Douglass knew the perceptions of the event all too well. For some, the revolution had been an object lesson in the inevitable social and economic ruin that would attend any form of emancipation. For others, it signaled blood—a veritable white massacre, a racial nightmare made real. Yet this did not change Douglass’s conviction that the Haitian Revolution was a watershed event.

  Douglass’s address of 1893 contained an inescapable truth: the Haitian Revolution was a turning point in history. Like 9/11 for modern day Americans, the Haitian Revolution could not be escaped, however much its meaning was rationalized, suppressed, or avoided. The event demonstrated the possible path of any slaveholding society. Therefore, the Haitian Revolution impinged in one way or another on the entire emancipation debate from the British parliamentary move in 1792 to outlaw the African slave trade to Brazil’s final abolition of slavery ninety-six years later. It is helpful, then, to briefly discuss the significance of Haiti’s birth in order to review some of the ways in which New World slavery was being transformed in the Age of Revolution.

  It is important to understand that in the 1780s, the French colony of Saint-Domingue was no backwater of the New World slave system. It was the centerpiece. The colony produced more than half the world’s coffee. In 1787, it exported almost as much sugar as Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil combined. But the “pearl of the Antilles” was destroyed from 1791 to 1804 by revolution and civil war. The slaves and free descendants of slaves shook off not only their masters but the most formidable armies of Spain, Britain, and France. Douglass made the situation clear. Unlike the American Revolution, which had been led by “the ruling race of the world” who “had the knowledge and character naturally inherited from long years of personal and political freedom,” the Haitian rebels represented a race that “stood before the world as the most abject, helpless, and degraded of mankind.”4 Haiti’s freedom “was not given as a boon” by the standing powers “but conquered as a right!” “Her people fought for it. They suffered for it, and thousands of them endured the most horrible tortures, and perished for it.”

  This heroic achievement evoked little applause from whites, even those who rejoiced over other movements of national liberation. For reasons that we shall explore later on, the Haitian Revolution reinforced the conviction that emancipation in any form would lead to economic ruin and to the indiscriminate massacre of white populations. The waves of fear traveled even faster than the Dominguan refugees who streamed westward to Cuba and Jamaica and northward to Spanish Louisiana and the port cities and towns of the United States. Throughout the Americas, planters and government officials learned to live in a state of alert.

  But fear seldom overcomes greed. Planters in Cuba, Brazil, Jamaica, and Trinidad clamored for more African slaves who could help make up the deficit in world sugar and coffee production left by the devastation of Saint-Domingue. In one of the ironies of history, the destruction of slavery in Saint-Domingue gave an immense stimulus to plantation slavery from neighboring Cuba to far-off Brazil. In December 1803, just after the disease-ridden French army had finally capitulated to Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s ex-slaves, South Carolina reopened the slave trade and in the ne
xt four years imported some forty thousand Africans. As Charleston’s merchants well knew, the defeat of Napoleon’s New World ambitions had opened the way for the Louisiana Purchase, which ensured that American slavery could expand westward without foreign interference into the Lower Mississippi Valley.

  On the other hand, even Cuba, South Carolina, and other slave-importing regions sought to exclude bondsmen from colonies in which blacks had been exposed to revolutionary ideas. Although slave insurrections had usually been associated with a labor force containing a high proportion of recently imported Africans, white leaders were now far more fearful of blacks who had been contaminated by French or abolitionist conceptions of liberty. Haiti thus represented the fullest effects of the contagion of liberty among slaves. Measures had to be put into place to stop the spread of people inordinately exposed to the germ of freedom. It could spread.

  In Britain and the United States abolitionists argued that slavery itself was the obvious cause of slave revolts. Early in 1792, Thomas Clarkson insisted that while the French Revolution had presented the slaves with an opportunity to vindicate their humanity, the insurrection in Saint-Domingue could be attributed only to the slave trade and the oppressive system it produced. Far from being an argument against Britain’s antislave-trade petitions, the events in Saint-Domingue showed that it was sheer madness for the British to continue transporting Africans who, having “the passions of men,” would sooner or later avenge their wrongs.5 Such reasoning was clearly influential in the United States, where planters could rely on a rapid natural increase in the slave population and where opposition to further slave importation had won sanction from the War of Independence. The nation as a whole was outraged and alarmed by South Carolina’s reopening of the slave trade in 1803; the Haitian Revolution strengthened the political argument for outlawing the American slave trade in 1808, the earliest date allowed by the Constitution.6 The Haitian example, supplemented by a major slave conspiracy in Virginia, also led to laws restricting manumission and nourished interest in deporting free blacks to some distant colony.

  Haiti’s effects on British policy were more ambiguous. Like their French neighbors, British planters lived as small white minorities surrounded by vast slave majorities. But they were accustomed to risk and were convinced that their fortunes depended on a labor force that would soon die off unless replenished by continuous imports from Africa. The catastrophe in Saint-Domingue, they claimed, showed the dangers of abolitionist agitation, not of a labor supply on which the Caribbean colonies had always depended. Even in 1795–96, when the British colonies were most seriously threatened by racial warfare and by French armies that included large numbers of emancipated slaves, Parliament deferred to the West India planters and merchants and failed to renew a 1792 resolution calling for an end to the slave trade in four years. Indeed, the British successfully defended their slave colonies only by enlisting black troops directly from the slave ships. It would be difficult to show that fear of another Haitian Revolution motivated Parliament’s crucial votes in 1806 abolishing the slave trade to rival foreign markets, and in 1807 abolishing the British slave trade altogether.7

  Yet it cannot be denied that both the government and the British public had learned a lesson from William Pitt’s disastrous attempt to conquer Saint-Domingue, restore slavery, and subdue Toussaint Louverture. In 1796, nearly three years after the first British forces landed in Saint-Domingue, the Pitt administration sent off to the West Indies one of the greatest expeditionary forces in British history. Before the end of the year Edmund Burke heard that ten thousand men had died in less than two months. It was reported in the House of Commons that almost every Briton had a personal acquaintance who had perished in the Caribbean campaigns. Burke wrote caustically of “recruits to the West Indian grave” and of fighting to conquer a cemetery. Although the mortality figures were somewhat exaggerated and British casualties were much heavier in the Windward Islands than in Saint-Domingue, there were good grounds for public outrage and for opposition party attacks on the conduct of the war. The loss in the Caribbean of nearly fifty thousand British soldiers and seamen, to say nothing of the expenditure of more than £16,000,000, underscored the cost of defending colonies that might at any moment become replicas of Saint-Domingue.8 The West Indian “image,” already tarnished by years of antislavery literature and iconography, never recovered from Britain’s defeat in Saint-Domingue.

  In this broad sense the Haitian Revolution surely contributed to the British government’s decisions, beginning in 1797, to limit the expansion of plantation agriculture in Trinidad, an undeveloped frontier that Britain had just seized from Spain. There were many competing political and economic interests involved in the government’s disposition of the rich crown lands in Trinidad, and after 1803 in the conquered Dutch Guianan colonies. But shrewd politicians and reformers were able to dramatize the extreme danger of any policy that would encourage the unlimited importation of slaves. The failure of British and French armies to subjugate Saint-Domingue fostered discussion of alternative forms of labor and made it easier for government leaders to restrict the flow of slaves to Trinidad and Guiana, despite pressure from planters and investors who were eager to profit from the rising world demand for cotton, sugar, coffee, and other plantation staples.9

  In the short run, however, the Haitian Revolution seriously damaged the antislavery movement. As abolitionists were increasingly portrayed as inciters of violence, there was a marked decline in antislavery activity and publication in both Britain and America. In France the movement virtually disappeared. Even after 1815 abolitionists found it difficult to escape the stigma of Saint-Domingue and the need to defend the record of Haiti, as if the rights of every black in the hemisphere depended on the virtue and magnanimity of Haiti’s rulers. As a result of the trauma that swept much of the white world, especially after Dessalines ordered the extermination of the whites remaining in Haiti, abolitionists were long obsessed with disavowing violence or any form of slave resistance. Until the mid-nineteenth century we find few white abolitionists like “Philmore,” who had argued in 1760 that since blacks were held in slavery by unjust force, they may “lawfully repel that force with force, and to recover their liberty, destroy their oppressors”; or Jean de Pechméja, who had written in 1774 that “whoever justifies so odious a system deserves scornful silence from the philosopher and a stab with a poniard from the Negro.”10

  But there was another side to this legacy. Abolitionist literature had tended to portray slaves as passive victims or as sentimental objects of benevolence, typified by Josiah Wedgwood’s famous cameo of the kneeling, chained slave, supplicating the viewer with the inscription Am I Not a Man and a Brother? The emphasis on the slave’s meekness and humility contrasted with a literary tradition descending from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, the heroic African slave rebel, to the Abbé Raynal’s “Black Spartacus,” who would lead the slaves “to vengeance and slaughter” and redeem the honor of the human species. The Haitian Revolution not only brought Oroonoko and Spartacus to life but showed that the slave masses could fight indefatigably for their own liberty. While antislavery writing would continue to invent and reinvent Uncle Toms, the significance of such figures could never be separated from the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of black slaves had won their freedom by force of arms. In their very eagerness to prove the safety of emancipation and the capability of blacks for freedom, abolitionists covertly challenged the claim that black slaves were either so content or docile that they could never seriously threaten a plantation regime.

  Most important was the effect of the Haitian Revolution on blacks themselves, both slave and free.11 In 1893 Frederick Douglass simply reaffirmed an argument that runs through African American culture from the time of Toussaint Louverture’s initial victories. Later on we shall examine some specific black responses to this central liberating event. For now it is sufficient to consider Douglass’s key point. Learned Southerners like Thomas Jefferson had been fond of co
mparing the achievements of white slaves in antiquity with the dismal record of modern Negroes. But where in Greek or Roman history, Douglass asked, could one find an example of nobler daring?

  It will ever be a matter of wonder and astonishment to thoughtful men, that a people in abject slavery, subject to the lash, and kept in ignorance of letters, as these slaves were, should have known enough, or have had left in them enough manhood, to combine, to organize, and to select for themselves trusted leaders with loyal hearts to follow them into the jaws of death to obtain liberty.12

  Black slaves had revolted, of course, from the time of the first New World settlements. But it was only in Saint-Domingue that slaves began to fight against the institution of slavery itself; and there, for the first time, they proved that white power was not invincible.13 It was the example of Haiti, in Douglass’s view, that first “startled the Christian world into a sense of the Negro’s manhood.”