The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  On the other hand, Toussaint himself was an ancien libre who had owned land and slaves and had become reasonably affluent.60 His ex-slave lieutenants, Henri Christophe and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, made fortunes from Toussaint’s reinstitution of the plantation system.61 Black and mulatto leaders shared a common interest in encouraging exports that could pay for the arms and supplies, mostly imported from the United States, needed for the island’s defense. Their experiences with white oppression also gave them the sense of sharing a common African heritage. Although Toussaint was willing to acknowledge nominal French sovereignty and even tried to induce refugee white planters to return to Saint-Domingue, he and his black and mulatto followers were determined to prevent the restoration of either slavery or the color line. Toussaint’s constitution of 1801 abolished slavery forever, prohibited distinctions according to color, and affirmed equal protection of the law—measures that were appended to the United States Constitution in compromised form only after the Civil War.62

  General Charles Leclerc, whom Napoleon dispatched with some ten thousand troops to subjugate Saint-Domingue as soon as Europe was at peace, knew he would have to pledge support for these high principles. Yet Napoleon had secretly resolved to restore colonial slavery, the African slave trade, and white supremacy. Leclerc hoped to deceive and divide the blacks and mulattoes while wooing their leaders, pacifying the countryside, and reestablishing French sovereignty. Leclerc was wholly unprepared for the skillful and heroic resistance he encountered. But, after incredibly bloody warfare, the French succeeded in enlisting the services of Christophe and Dessalines, and in seizing Toussaint by a ruse after first negotiating a surrender. But Leclerc’s army, though reinforced by more than thirty thousand men, could not subdue the black guerrillas in the hills.63

  In the summer of 1802, when Napoleon’s veterans were being decimated by yellow fever and malaria, news arrived that slavery had been restored in Guadeloupe. Leclerc complained in frantic letters to Napoleon and the minister of marine that “the moral force I had obtained here is destroyed. I can do nothing by persuasion.” Just when a political settlement seemed in sight, Leclerc wrote, his work was undermined by the revelation of French intentions and by the return from exile of planters and merchants who talked only of slavery and the slave trade. As blacks took up arms to defend their freedom, Leclerc reported to Napoleon that “these men die with an incredible fanaticism; they laugh at death; it is the same with the women.…” Thousands of mulattoes joined the rebel forces when they learned that the French had reestablished the color line in Guadeloupe. The defectors included Alexandre Pétion, a mulatto officer who had fought Toussaint and had then joined Leclerc’s expedition in France. In the fall of 1802, when Leclerc died of yellow fever while pleading to Napoleon for more troops, Christophe and Dessalines deserted the French. Leclerc’s successor, General Rochambeau, then resorted to a policy of virtual genocide. The French concluded that Saint-Domingue could be pacified only by exterminating most of the existing black and mulatto population, which could later be replaced by African slaves.64

  The race war of 1802–3 carried profound implications for every black and mulatto in the New World. Napoleon’s reversal of French policy showed that a white nation could reinstitute slavery, strip the free descendants of slaves of their rights, and kill even children of the stigmatized race if they had been contaminated with ideas of liberty. The rebels’ response showed that blacks and mulattoes could unite and defeat a professional European army. White commentators insisted that the army had really been defeated by disease and by the naval blockade the British imposed when war resumed in 1803. It was difficult to deny, however, that the blacks won battles and knew how to make the most of the yellow fever and British blockade. The blacks turned the entire white cosmos upside down when they forced the French to evacuate Saint-Domingue and when Dessalines and other former slaves then proclaimed the independence of Haiti. Every New World society was familiar with slave rebellions; some maroon communities, established by escaped slaves, had resisted conquest for many decades and had even negotiated treaties, as in Jamaica, with colonial authorities. But no slaves in history had ever expelled their former masters and established their own nation-state.

  The very existence of Haiti challenged every slaveholding regime in the New World (and for that matter in the Cape Colony and Indian Ocean colonies). As the London Times put it, “a Black State in the Western Archipelago is utterly incompatible with the system of all European colonisation.”65 Hoping to allay white fears and ease the way for diplomatic recognition, Dessalines and his successors disavowed any interest in interfering with the domestic institutions of neighboring countries. Except for invading and annexing Spanish Santo Domingo, the eastern part of the island from which various enemies could threaten Haitian independence, Haiti posed no military danger to slaveholders.66 Despite temporary panic over reports of Haitian agents inciting slaves in the Caribbean colonies and southern United States, slave revolts were never again so frequent as in the 1790s. There is fragmentary evidence, however, that slaves in various localities were well aware of the Haitian Revolution and of the possibility of actually destroying the system to which they were violently subjected. Even in 1791, Jamaican slaves sang songs about the Saint-Domingue insurrection within a month after the uprising began.67

  After the great Barbadian insurrection of 1816, which resulted in the execution of more than two hundred blacks, some of the slave testimony pointed to Haiti as a model. Nanny Grigg, a literate house servant who apparently concluded from news of the parliamentary debates over slave registration that Britain intended to emancipate colonial slaves on New Year’s Day 1816, urged her brethren to fight for the freedom their owners had withheld and to set fires, “as that was the way they did in Saint Domingo.” Earlier, whites had blamed the Dominguan example for slave revolts in such far-flung spots as Maracaibo, in Venezuela, and Pointe Coupée, in Spanish Louisiana. In view of Louisiana’s heavy influx of white, free colored, and slave refugees from Saint-Domingue, it seems almost certain that knowledge of the revolution had spread among the hundreds of slaves who in 1811 rose in rebellion and marched to within eighteen miles of New Orleans before being defeated by an American militia. In this instance Governor William Claiborne shrewdly enlisted as militiamen free colored refugees who had recently fled from revolutionary destruction in the French colonies.68

  Planters and government officials expected Haitian-inspired subversion and were eager to attribute domestic unrest to outside influence. But they also sought to suppress information that might undermine the official doctrine that black slaves were helpless, degraded beings whose servitude was as natural as the force of gravity. It is therefore extremely difficult to assess the actual influence of the Haitian Revolution on the behavior of slaves and free blacks. For example, the arrival in Virginia of a motley assortment of French colonists and their slaves seems to have been related to increasing white complaints about black “insolence” and unrecoverable runaway slaves. But little can be said about the sources of the great Gabriel Prosser slave conspiracy of 1800, except that court testimony indicated that the insurgents planned to spare the lives of Frenchmen and that the Virginia Argus opined that the insurrection had been organized “on the true French plan.”69

  The Haitian inspiration was much clearer in Cuba, where in 1812 José Antonio Aponte and his rebel followers flew the Haitian colors and wore Haitian hats before being defeated, tortured, and put to death.70 Like Cuba, Jamaica simmered with rumors of conspiracy as refugees streamed in from Saint-Domingue and as Jamaican slaves escaped to Haiti. In 1815 an assembly committee reported that young blacks had vowed to kill off the white population if they were not granted their freedom. Although the Jamaican free coloreds generally supported the slave system, by 1823 they began to address their appeals for civil rights to influential Englishmen who were already calling for the gradual abolition of slavery. This reprise of Dominguan events of the 1780s alarmed Jamaican officials. Significa
ntly, they arrested two colored merchants, Louis Lecesne and Edward Escoffery, whose white fathers had much earlier fled to Jamaica from Saint-Domingue. Lecesne and Escoffery were charged with arming and training slaves for a general insurrection, and both men were deported without a trial to Haiti. For white Jamaicans this move proved to be counterproductive since the blatant racial hysteria played into the hands of British reformers. In 1830, Lecesne and Escoffery were repatriated and financially compensated for their losses, a reversal that was part of Britain’s general extension of civil liberties to the colonial free coloreds.71

  Denmark Vesey, the free black leader of the supposedly momentous 1822 slave conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina, had worked as a slave in Saint-Domingue in the early 1780s. After winning his freedom in a Charleston lottery in 1800, Vesey took a lively interest in the Haitian Revolution. In the trials following the exposure of the alleged plot, one rebel testified that Vesey “was in the habit of reading to me all the passages in the newspapers that related to St. Domingo, and apparently every pamphlet he could lay his hands on that had any connection with slavery.” Other slave testimony referred to letters to Haiti requesting aid and to one of Vesey’s followers promising “that St. Domingo and Africa would come over and cut up the white people if we only made the motion here first.” The evidence suggested that Vesey may have hoped to gain assistance from Haiti and the North and to sail to Haiti after exterminating the whites and destroying Charleston. Henry William Desaussure, South Carolina’s leading jurist, spoke of the rebels appealing to the Haitians “as their natural allies.” He predictably used the history of Haiti as an example of the destructive civil wars that would inevitably follow any move toward slave emancipation.72

  While the Haitian example inspired a few violent conspiracies, it had a deeper and more enduring impact on the self-image and nascent national identity of free blacks, especially in the Northern United States. From the outset the Haitian Revolution stirred the free black community of Philadelphia, a port city long involved in West Indian commerce. What impressed a black leader like James Forten, a prosperous sailmaker and entrepreneur, was not the violence that could be attributed to war and to slavery itself. It was rather the providential message that the black people “would become a great nation” and “could not always be detained in their present bondage.” By the 1820s, when blacks in various Northern cities began celebrating the anniversary of Haitian independence, the revolution became a symbolic negation of everything slavery represented. As one speaker in Baltimore put it, Haiti had become “an irrefutable argument to prove … that the descendants of Africa never were designed by their Creator to sustain an inferiority, or even a mediocrity, in the chain of being; but they are as capable of intellectual improvement as Europeans, or any other nation upon the face of the earth.” David Walker, in his revolutionary Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, urged his brethren to read the history of Haiti, which he termed “the glory of the blacks and terror of tyrants.” A decade earlier Robert Wedderburn, a Jamaican mulatto who had emigrated to London, merged the cause of blacks with the cause of Britain’s working class. A member of Thomas Spence’s circle of ultraradicals, Wedderburn appealed to the precedent of Haiti when he called on West Indian blacks to “slay man, woman and child” and exhorted English wage-slaves to revolt against their oppressors.73

  Yet, as a model of liberation, the Haitian Revolution suffered from inherent liabilities. One clue to this no-win dilemma can be seen in the white response to the ex-slaves’ military performance. In popular imagery the blacks were either cowards or fiends, excited barbarians who panicked when hard pressed or demons capable of unthinkable atrocities. Toussaint’s sudden capitulation in 1802 evoked scorn for the blacks and confident reassurances that white discipline could always overcome, as young Henry Brougham put it, “the vast numbers and ferocious strength of a savage people.”74 Racial stereotypes of “savagery” reinforced the fear and contempt that slaves had always aroused among nonslaves. When the French were finally defeated, even abolitionists found it difficult to acknowledge that the degraded blacks of Saint-Domingue had vindicated their honor in a way comparable to the American patriots of 1776 (or the patriots of the later Latin American or Greek struggles for independence).75

  It is true that in the late 1790s, American Federalists became so fearful of the infidel French that they praised Toussaint and provided his army with indispensable supplies and even naval support. After Britain resumed war against Napoleon in 1803, various writers tried to portray the Haitians as heroic allies in a common struggle for freedom. Toussaint, once he had perished in Napoleon’s prison in the Jura mountains, became a legitimate martyr and even a man of honor, largely because he could serve as a foil to the treacherous “Enslaver of Nations.” But since Britain had a compelling self-interest to protect Haitian independence, what is really striking is the relative absence of popular sympathy for the Haitians when compared, let us say, to Napoleon’s Continental subjects or to the Greeks in their later War of Independence. The enduring memory of the Haitian Revolution was not of Toussaint the tragic hero but of Dessalines the butcher of whites. For an age obsessed with the problem of freedom and order, the Haitian Revolution suggested the unleashing of pure Id.76

  Haiti faced a similar double check in the field of political economy. When black leaders beginning with Toussaint sought to revive the export economy by resorting to forced labor on the plantations, they were accused of reinstituting slavery. When they accommodated the peasants’ desires for small plots of land and acquiesced in a sharp decline in exports and the dominance of subsistence farming and local markets, the world perceived Haiti as regressing to savagery. The seeming alternatives of regimented labor or tropical indolence were hailed by proslavery writers as proof of two irrepressible truths: that blacks would not work unless coerced, and that in tropical climates slavery was indispensable for progress. Few commentators questioned the desirability of the plantation system itself.

  British abolitionists were eager to celebrate Haiti’s material and moral progress as proof of the blacks’ capability for freedom and civilization. The very fact that the new nation could be burdened with such momentous expectations meant that the issue of capability was in doubt, that the Haitians’ friends had put them before the bench of world opinion as the defendants of their race. It would have been alien to the age, however, to propose economic aid for a region devastated by thirteen years of civil war. Indeed, beginning with Jefferson’s presidency, the United States quarantined Haiti as a potential source of racial subversion, and England postponed even partial recognition of Haitian independence until 1825—after France finally gave up hope of reconquering the rebellious colony. Even after Napoleon’s fall, Haiti’s leaders faced a genuine danger of French invasion or less direct forms of conquest. In 1825 Haiti’s president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, finally won French recognition only by agreeing to a staggering indemnity of 150 million francs and to reduced customs charges for French ships, concessions that made the republic fatally dependent on foreign credit and foreign economic control.77

  During the first third of the nineteenth century, Haiti stood as the single decisive example of mass emancipation. Britain had established a small colony of freed blacks at Sierra Leone, which helped to inspire the later American settlement of Liberia. But it was difficult to extrapolate any general principles from these faltering experiments. The northeastern states from New Jersey to Vermont might have presented more suitable laboratories if the freedmen had not confronted immense white majorities and an enveloping racism that deprived them of the most elemental rights and opportunities. Abolitionists in both England and America made remarkably few references to the Northern states’ emancipation acts and their consequences. For a time, however, they did pin their hopes on Haiti.78

  In most respects the very existence of Haiti was a godsend for the abolitionists’ opponents. Sanguine accounts of the moral and educational advance of the people, of economic enterprise th
at would soon lead to thriving towns and to Haitian ships entering the harbors of the world, increasingly gave way to reports of political upheaval and hopeless poverty. The tacit comparison with the fruits of North American independence locked the abolitionists into a defensive posture. It became necessary to explain why Henri Christophe’s Anglophile kingdom collapsed, why President Boyer imposed a draconian labor code, why exports plummeted, why the economy stagnated, why the mulattoes and blacks contested for power, why the Haitians should be compared to the British barbarians of Roman times rather than to peoples who had benefited from centuries of progress.79 While it is impossible to measure public opinion on such matters, the negative images of Haiti probably reinforced the conviction, especially among American whites, that free blacks were incapable of civilized life.

  As we have already seen, however, the Haitian Revolution conveyed a different message to free blacks and to a few white abolitionists. For them it was not simply a matter of black power and capability, though the ex-slaves’ creation and governance of an independent nation, however poor and unstable, clearly contradicted the stereotypes of black inferiority. The birth of Haiti was also viewed as an unprecedented and unforeseen historical event, a revelation of God’s will and a harbinger of universal emancipation. Pompée Valentin Vastey, Christophe’s publicist and adviser, wrote of a global liberation in which “five hundred million men, black, yellow, and brown” would reclaim their natural rights and privileges.80 The constitution of Alexandre Pétion’s southern republic invited the black and colored populations of other New World countries to a kind of aliyah that would in effect convert Haiti into a black Israel. In the 1820s, President Boyer’s appeal for African American immigrants stirred the free black communities of the northern American states. Although thousands who emigrated to Haiti became quickly disillusioned and many returned to the United States, Haiti remained a symbol of hope, a historical reassurance, as Frederick Douglass later affirmed, that bondage was not an inevitable or eternal fate.