The Haitian Declaration of Independence : Creation, Context, and Legacy 9780813937878, 9780813937885, 0813937884

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The Haitian Declaration of Independence

Jeffersonian America JAN ELLEN LEWIS, PETER S. ONUF, AND ANDREW O’SHAUGHNESSY, EDITORS

The Haitian Declaration of Independence Creation, Context, and Legacy EDITED BY JULIA GAFFIELD

University of Virginia Press CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press © 2016 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2016 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Haitian Declaration of Independence : creation, context, and legacy / edited by Julia Gaffield. pages cm.—(Jeffersonian America) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8139-3787-8 (cloth : acid-free paper)—isbn 978-0-8139-3788-5 (e-book) 1. Haiti—History—Autonomy and independence movements. 2. Proclamations— Haiti—History and criticism. 3. Liberty—Political aspects—Haiti—History—19th century. 4. Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 1758–1806. 5. Haiti—History—Revolution, 1791–1804. 6. Haiti—History—1804–1844. I. Gaffield, Julia. f1924.h22 2015 972.94⬘04—dc23 2015008544

Publication of this volume has been supported by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: The Haitian Declaration of Independence in an Atlantic Context 1 DAVID ARMITAGE AND JULIA GAFFIELD

PART IWriting

the Declaration

Haiti’s Declaration of Independence 25 DAVID GEGGUS

“Victims of Our Own Credulity and Indulgence”: The Life of Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre 42 JOHN GARRIGUS

The Debate Surrounding the Printing of the Haitian Declaration of Independence: A Review of the Literature 58 PATRICK TARDIEU

Living by Metaphor in the Haitian Declaration of Independence: Tigers and Cognitive Theory 72 DEBORAH JENSON

PART IIHaitian

Independence and the Atlantic

Law, Atlantic Revolutionary Exceptionalism, and the Haitian Declaration of Independence 95 MALICK W. GHACHEM

viCONTENTS

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Norbert Thoret, and the Violent Aftermath of the Haitian Declaration of Independence 115 JEREMY D. POPKIN

Did Dessalines Plan to Export the Haitian Revolution?

136

PHILIPPE GIRARD

PART IIIThe

Legacy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence

“Outrages on the Laws of Nations”: American Merchants and Diplomacy after the Haitian Declaration of Independence 161 JULIA GAFFIELD

The Sovereign People of Haiti during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 181 JEAN CASIMIR

Thinking Haitian Independence in Haitian Vodou

201

LAURENT DUBOIS

Revolutionary Commemorations: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haitian Independence Day, 1804–1904 219 ERIN ZAVITZ

Appendix: The Haitian Declaration of Independence Bibliography

249

Notes on Contributors 267 Index

269

239

Preface

Index and middle finger crossed, the American political commentator Rachel Maddow informed viewers of her April 1, 2010, MSNBC primetime show, “us and Haiti, we’re like this. We always have been.” At first glance, this may seem like a throwaway comment worthy of a raised eyebrow; in fact, Maddow’s reference to the interconnected histories of Haiti and the United States reflects a transformation in the field of Atlantic history.¹ Scholars recognize the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions as part of a broader set of changes occurring across the Atlantic World. This historiographical shift could be seen most explicitly in a recent exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn (November 11, 2011–April 15, 2012), which focused on the material and symbolic connections between the three revolutions. At this exhibition, the Haitian Declaration of Independence was put on display for the first time. The newly independent Haitian government printed this document less than three weeks after Jean-Jacques Dessalines delivered its text as a speech on January 1, 1804. The printed version was to be distributed to the powers of the Atlantic World. “And then, in a very sad twist of fate,” Maddow reported, “every known copy of it disappeared. For the next two hundred years, the Haitian Declaration of Independence was reprinted in newspapers and in handwritten duplicates. But the actual document itself, the actual, original eight-page pamphlet, the physical representation of Haitian independence was lost.” In February 2010, I discovered one of the original government-printed versions of the declaration in the Jamaican records at The National Archives of the United Kingdom in London. At the time, I thought this to be the only extant copy. Just over a year later, however, I discovered another printed copy in the Admiralty records of the same archives. This time the declaration was printed as a broadside. These documents are the only known remaining official copies of the Haitian Declaration of Independence. The text of the docu-

viiiPREFACE

ment was well known, but a signed manuscript original or an official printed copy did not exist in Haiti or elsewhere, historians believed. The presence of the documents in London tells a story of international communication in the early months of Haiti’s independence. The proclamation announced to the nations and empires of the Atlantic World that the territory was no longer under French authority; instead, the new “Haytian” government ruled it. Haitians leaders knew that independence from France could only be complete if foreign governments recognized and supported the new nation. The document circulated around the Atlantic, and portions of it were reprinted in newspapers in cities like Philadelphia and London, and even as far away as Bombay. The international reception of this document, however, was mixed. Some readers were sympathetic and saw Haitian independence as the justifiable reaction to French cruelties. Others, however, were terrified by the implications that this success might mean for their own nation’s colonies and personal property. Would the Revolution spread? was the question on everyone’s mind. Several weeks before I discovered the document, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince and the surrounding area. The world’s attention was on Haiti, as it often is when that nation is in crisis. Media outlets around the world, like the Rachel Maddow Show, published digital copies of the Haitian Declaration of Independence, marking the first time many people read or saw the document. They responded with interest and intrigue— and sometimes with hostility. Much of the hostility came from readers who compared the Haitian document against its American equivalent; the Haitian Declaration of Independence is a call to arms that expresses hatred and eternal vengeance toward the French. Many commenters also wanted to see the roots of Haiti’s contemporary problems in its founding document, particularly in the context of American televangelist Pat Robertson’s claim that Haitians had “sworn a pact with the devil.”² Haiti was one of the first countries in the world to issue a declaration of independence after the United States. The American Declaration of Independence, David Armitage writes, “provided the model for similar documents around the world that asserted the independence of other new states.”³ Indeed, when the revolutionary forces in the French colony of Saint-Domingue defeated Napoléon’s troops, they followed the United States’ lead in proclaiming their determination to “live free or die”—choosing the words “liberté ou la mort” for the state letterhead and the title of their Acte de l’Indépendance. However, while the Haitian leaders drew distantly on Jefferson’s document for inspiration—an earlier draft of the declaration based on his original had

PREFACEix

been rejected as too tame for the task—they tailored their own words to the circumstances at hand. Thus, the two documents are distinctly different yet clearly connected in motivation, meaning, and genre. As part of its Revolution! exhibit, the New-York Historical Society put the Haitian Declaration of Independence on display along with the Stamp Act (1765), John Greenwood’s Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam (1752–1758), Thomas Clarkson’s “African Box,” and other documents, paintings, and objects that symbolized the interconnected Age of Revolution. In conjunction with the exhibit, the society hosted a symposium entitled, “The Age of Revolution: A Whole History,” on January 21, 2012. The goal of this symposium was to better understand the unique characteristics of each revolution as well as the common threads that wove them together. During this conference, I had the good fortune of meeting historian David Armitage, and during our conversation he inspired and encouraged me to pursue a collaborative study of the Haitian Declaration of Independence. With this in mind, on March 7–8, 2013, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies (ICJS), under the direction of Andrew O’Shaughnessy, sponsored and hosted the conference “The Haitian Declaration of Independence in an Atlantic Context.” The ICJS seeks to support the study of Thomas Jefferson and his legacy through interdisciplinary and innovative research. While the US Declaration of Independence was the first of its kind, the Haitian document helped to confirm it as a genre; the Haitian Declaration of Independence, therefore, is a crucial part of the legacy of the American document. The efforts of the ICJS to expand the scope of its research beyond continental early America reflects a series of historiographical interventions that highlight the interconnectedness of the early modern Atlantic World, particularly during the Age of Revolution. Scholars have also begun to situate Haiti at the center of the Age of Revolution and to look beyond its revolution in order to appreciate the context, character, and development of Haiti as an independent nation. The essays in this volume are by leading scholars in the field and aim to provide a better understanding of the internal and external influences that shaped the world’s second successful declaration of independence. How tightly and in what ways was the Haitian Declaration of Independence intertwined with its American predecessor? What shared aspects of the Age of Revolution were articulated in the Haitian document? What distinctive features were added and what elements were omitted? And how can a focus on these documents provide a point of entry for a discussion about the larger questions of meaning and significance in the Atlantic revolutions? As the product of the only successful slave revolution in the world, the Haitian Dec-

xPREFACE

laration of Independence is representative of the turbulent Age of Revolution, and this volume advances our comprehension of its expansive significance in the making of the modern world.

Notes 1. See www.nbcnews.com/id/36148068/ns/msnbc-rachel_maddow_show/#.UWQSda WnukQ (accessed April 8, 2013). 2. See www.cbsnews.com/8301–504083_162–12017–504083.html (accessed April 9, 2013). 3. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 3.

Acknowledgments

This volume originated at a conference sponsored by the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies and held in Charlottesville, Virginia, in March 2013. Andrew O’Shaughnessy, the Saunders Director of the ICJS, was a generous and enthusiastic supporter of the conference, and I am grateful for his delightful collaboration as well as the funding provided by the ICJS. Mary Scott-Fleming, Michele Hammond, and the rest of the ICJS staff were immensely helpful, especially in dealing with the aftermath of a freak snowstorm. The conference would not have occurred without the support and encouragement of David Armitage. The idea emerged during a conversation that we had at Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn, presented by the New-York Historical Society in 2011. David has been a joy to collaborate with and I owe him my deep appreciation for his inspiration and support in this initiative. I am grateful to have been able to collaborate with such a collegial group of scholars, and I would like to offer my sincere thanks to each of the contributors. I am inspired by their dedication to the field and by their enthusiasm for the study of Haitian history. Dick Holway at the University of Virginia Press has contributed much appreciated editorial insight, and I thank him for his enthusiastic support throughout this project. The staff members at the University of Virginia Press have been a pleasure to work with. I am also indebted to the anonymous readers who provided thoughtful and productive feedback. Finally, I would like to thank the Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar at Brandeis University (2013–2014) and the Department of History and the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgia State University for providing me with the time and funding necessary to complete this project.

The Haitian Declaration of Independence

Introduction The Haitian Declaration of Independence in an Atlantic Context DAVID ARMITAGE AND JULIA GAFFIELD

For the New-York Historical Society’s Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn exhibit in 2011–2012, curators Richard Rabinowitz and Lynda B. Kaplan commissioned a miniature sculpture of the Palace of Versailles from artists Martín Ávila and Benita Rodríguez Álvarez of Guanajuato, Mexico. The artists created a desktop-sized palace constructed entirely of sugar tinted with vegetable dyes. Their message was crystal clear; as Rabinowitz explained, the sculpture emphasized that the French Empire “was in some ways a kingdom based on sugar.”¹ Indeed, an estimated 30 percent of France’s wealth in the eighteenth century came from its colonies, especially Saint-Domingue, the Atlantic World’s most wealth-producing colony and one of the richest spots on the face of the earth. This modern sugar sculpture echoed another that had been created just over two hundred years earlier to mark the second anniversary of Haitian independence on January 1, 1806. At Cap Haïtien, the independence celebrations had comprised a military review, a reading of the Declaration of Independence, and a high mass; in Gonaïves later that day, Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines laid on a commemorative feast attended by the leading officers, military and civil, of the infant state. A horrified American visitor reported that, “after dinner, a piece of confectionary in imitation of the skeleton of a white man, was served upon the table. The object in view . . . was no doubt, upon that day of national jubilee, to excite and cherish in the minds of the chiefs, their hatred of the French, by exhibiting to their sight such expressive symbols as could not fail to call to their recollection, the remembrance of their past deeds.”² What better way to remind the victors of their triumph than this macabre effigy of their former masters? And what more appropriate material for its construction than the sugar that had once been grown with their sweat and blood? To mirror that historic confection, Ávila and Álvarez might have tinted their modern sculpture with blood instead of vegetable extract—such a mor-

2DAVID ARMITAGE AND JULIA GAFFIELD

bid touch would have reminded viewers that France’s palatial opulence was shot through with untold suffering and death. Haiti was often called the “Pearl of the Antilles,” but that whitewashed metaphor ignored the massive human price that millions of enslaved men and women paid to slave traders, plantation owners, merchants, and government agents to enable their wealth. The colonial and slave systems in the Caribbean characteristically worked the slaves to death; it was more cost-effective to replace them. Saint-Domingue achieved its status as the Atlantic’s richest colony because slave traders and plantation owners purchased and imported people from West and West-Central Africa and forced them to work as slaves on sugar and coffee plantations. The colony produced other goods such as indigo, cacao, and mahogany, but coffee and sugar were the real moneymakers. Prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue fostered a life-crushing labor system but at the same time provided unique opportunities for the development of an economically and socially rich class of gens de couleurs. Free people of color also lived in other American colonies, but in Saint-Domingue their political and social strength and number made the situation unique.³ The overwhelming majority of the population, however, was enslaved, and an estimated two-thirds of the enslaved population on the eve of the Haitian Revolution was African-born.⁴ Jean Casimir calls these people “captives” to better describe the process through which they were violently removed from their homelands.⁵ Of the estimated five hundred thousand slaves in SaintDomingue in 1791, nearly two hundred and forty thousand had been imported to the colony since 1780. The high mortality rate spurred the continued importation of increasing numbers of African captives: forty thousand captives alone were imported in 1791. The result was that, at the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, it is possible that as many as one hundred and eighty thousand enslaved men and women had arrived in the previous five years, and half of them may have only been in the colony for a very short time. Most of these African captives came from the regions east of the Kingdom of Congo and south of the Congo River.⁶ And, while most came from the same region in central Africa, they were linguistically and culturally diverse. This diversity was layered onto racial, legal, and regional differences within SaintDomingue. The population that would eventually become Haitian citizens, therefore, was heterogeneous, often in conflict, and held distinct and disparate goals in the context of the unfolding revolution. The first attack on the immensely profitable colonial system came in 1789 when free people of color began to agitate for equal rights as French citizens. This battle for full French citizenship sometimes turned violent since the established colonial state did not welcome this challenge to the discriminatory social-racial hierarchy that kept whites in power. Events in Europe, however,

INTRODUCTION3

and especially the publication in France of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), made it increasingly difficult for the colonial elite to justify the subversion of about half the free population in the colony. The spark of discontent soon exploded in Saint-Domingue when enslaved people in the northern part of the colony rose up, set fire to the cane fields, and killed their brutal masters. The plan for the uprising was sealed at a religious ceremony in Bois Caïman in August 1791 under the leadership of an enslaved man named Boukman.⁷ Despite the dubious odds for success, the coordinated uprising across the northern plains initiated the world’s only successful slave revolution. The initial goals of the rebels appear to have been reforms to the institution of slavery, mainly extra time to cultivate their own subsistence crops and less severe forms of punishment—goals inspired by a rumor circulating in the colony that the king of France had in fact granted them these concessions but that the colonists were preventing their implementation.⁸ The small plots of land cultivated by the enslaved would, as Jean Casimir and Laurent Dubois discuss in their essays, form the basis for land tenure and social organization in the independence period as the former slaves developed a “counter-plantation” system.⁹ The rebels achieved some early victories but were not able to attain their desired goal. They received aid, however, from the international war raging throughout the Atlantic. The British and Spanish saw the slave rebellion as an opportunity to acquire another Caribbean colony. These foreign empires vied for control and often enlisted insurgent armies to help their cause. The Haitian Revolution, therefore, was a series of overlapping wars involving enslaved people; free people of color; and French, British, and Spanish colonists in armies composed of a mixture of these groups. Indeed, the many different groups were not always internally united, and the alliances between them changed as each considered how to best achieve their own unique goals. British forces from Jamaica occupied the South and West of Saint-Domingue from 1794 to 1798, and the French secured ownership of the eastern part of the island in 1795 under the Peace of Basel. This international warfare provided openings for the rebellious slaves. Different armies were willing to offer rewards for allegiance. In an extraordinary move, two French commissioners, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, offered freedom and citizenship to those who would fight for the French Republic. These new soldier-citizens pressured the commissioners to expand the scope of their offer of freedom, and the commissioners complied because they desperately needed their loyalty. In August of 1793, Sonthonax and Polverel abolished slavery in the colony of Saint-Domingue. A multiracial delegation of elected representatives carried the document to France to have it ratified in the National Convention. The Convention went one step

4DAVID ARMITAGE AND JULIA GAFFIELD

further and abolished slavery in the entire French Empire and extended citizenship to all men. After the abolition of slavery, Saint-Domingue returned to a level of relative stability under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture. Louverture had previously been enslaved, but at the time of the 1791 uprising he was a free man. He established himself as a leader early in the revolution but spent a significant amount of time fighting for the Spanish. After the 1794 abolition of slavery, Louverture joined the French forces and soon after he was named governor-general of the colony by the French government. Louverture maintained the plantation system and instituted a quasi-slave system in which the laborers, or cultivateurs, were forced to return to the sugar and coffee plantations, many of which they had recently burned to the ground. In 1801, Louverture issued a constitution that maintained a loose alliance to the French Empire but that essentially allowed Saint-Domingue to operate as a sovereign state. Napoléon Bonaparte, recently established as First Consul of France, resented what he perceived as a challenge to his authority and sent an army to disarm, kill, and deport the colonial leadership (meaning Louverture’s government). It is also widely believed that Bonaparte instructed his brotherin-law, General Charles Leclerc, to reinstitute slavery in the colony; at the very least, rumors began to spread in the colony that this was the case.¹⁰ Leclerc’s arrival in Saint-Domingue in February 1802 reignited the smoldering revolution and transformed the conflict into a war for independence. While Louverture had struggled for greater colonial autonomy, the revolution had not been about political independence. The French army’s arrival changed this. Only when it became clear to the former slaves in the colony that their legal freedom could not be assured under French authority did they begin the fight for independence. The period between 1802 and 1803 was characterized by extreme violence on both sides as each sought the complete eradication of the opposing army. Louverture was tricked and deported by Leclerc, and the colonial armies—now labeled “rebels”—fought under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The period after 1802 represents a break in the revolution. Antislavery was still at the core of the movement, but Dessalines and his leading generals knew that liberty and freedom could not be assured under French rule. Leclerc’s army was not able to achieve the swift victory that they anticipated: Dessalines and his troops waited out the battle until the rainy season to take advantage of the Europeans’ susceptibility to yellow fever. Indeed, the guerrilla-style warfare of the rebels and the vulnerability of the French troops to disease put the French in a desperate position. Despite the fact that Britain

INTRODUCTION5

was France’s enemy, Leclerc and his successor, General Donatien Rochambeau, begged the governor of Jamaica to help them. The governor, however, preferred to let the war continue and even supported a rebel victory because it would land an important blow to the French Empire.¹¹ By mid-1803, it was clear to Dessalines that he had the upper hand and he began making preparations for independence. He sent letters, as Philippe Girard shows us in his essay, to the governors of Jamaica and Cuba and to the president of the United States inviting merchants to Saint-Domingue.¹² On November 19, 1803, Dessalines and Rochambeau signed a treaty coordinating the evacuation of the French Army from Cap Français. The articles provided for the safe evacuation of the army and any civilians who wished to follow. The French would have ten days to leave. As Rochambeau’s ships set sail from Cap Français, they faced a fleet of British ships that lay waiting to capture them. The French were then brought to Jamaica as prisoners of war and were eventually sent to Europe. With the French gone from the western side of the island, Dessalines and his leading generals could now prepare for the official independence of the country. On November 29, 1803, Dessalines, Henry Christophe, and Augustin Clervaux issued a proclamation announcing the independence of Saint-Domingue under the authority of the “Black People and Men of Colour of St. Domingo.” They proudly announced the success of their war, raging since 1789, for freedom and dignity. “The frightful veil of prejudice is torn to pieces,” they declared, “and is so forever. Woe be to whomsoever would dare again to put together its bloody tatters.” The proclamation was therefore also a warning; the authors justified preserving the abolition of slavery by any means necessary, “every means are lawful.” They hinted that the fight could erupt into a global war if their liberty was not respected. “Were they [the defenders of liberty] to cause rivers and torrents of blood to run,” they announced, “were they, in order to maintain their liberty, to conflagrate the seven-eighths of the globe, they are innocent before the tribunal of Providence, that has not created men to see them groaning under a harsh and shameful servitude.” With this document, Dessalines, Christophe, and Clervaux vied for the inclusion of Haiti in the community of recognized nations of the Atlantic by emphasizing their goals of peace and organized government. “Now that the calm of victory has succeeded to the troubles of a dreadful war,” they concluded, “everything in St. Domingo ought to assume a new face, and its Government henceforward to be that of justice.”¹³ Even as they jealously protected the hard-won freedom that they had achieved, Dessalines, Christophe, and Clervaux were also careful to ease the anxiety of the international community. They attempted to justify and pardon those who may have been excessive during the revolution and made

6DAVID ARMITAGE AND JULIA GAFFIELD

excuses so as to absolve them of their guilt in the eyes of foreign onlookers. Secondly, they invited French landholders to return to their properties and promised protection. As the essays in this volume highlight, however, the French were not in fact safe in Haiti, and this promise might even have been a set up for the postindependence massacres. The 1803 declaration has occupied a contentious role in the historiography of the revolution, as Patrick Tardieu and David Geggus’s essays highlight, and the details surrounding its creations and dissemination are mostly unknown.¹⁴ Furthermore, the relationship between the November 1803 document and the official Acte de l’Indépendance of January 1, 1804, are murky. Why did the generals feel the need to issue two proclamations? Why is January 1 celebrated as Independence Day and not November 29? What was the motivation in the writing and distribution of the January 1 document in place of the November 29 document? The essays in this volume address these issues in the context of assessing the broader historical significance of the document now canonized as “the Haitian Declaration of Independence.” Throughout this Introduction, and the volume itself, we refer to the document as the Haitian “Declaration of Independence,” even though those words, and that title, never appeared in the original versions of the text. As we shall see, it was in fact an “act” of independence, closer in form and meaning to the parallel, and later, Latin American documents than to the US Declaration of Independence of 1776. To many contemporary commentators it appeared as a “proclamation” of independence, an utterance with the power of the spoken word. The document was as multifaceted as the Haitian Revolution, open-ended and future-oriented but arising from history; innovative and even anomalous, but also recognizably akin to other events and texts of its moment. The recent rediscovery of the “Declaration” by scholars and wider publics closely tracks reconsideration of the revolution itself. The essays collected here contribute to that broader vision through a close focus on a single text and its contexts. In 1995, Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued that the Haitian Revolution had been intentionally “silenced” by historical actors and historians alike, particularly by people outside of Haiti’s borders. There were, however, some notable exceptions; the most important is C. L. R. James’s popular book The Black Jacobins (1938).¹⁵ The attention that Trouillot brought to this purposeful neglect of the world’s only successful slave revolution sparked a small insurgency in the field. Scholars such as Carolyn Fick, Jacques de Cauna, Mats Lundahl, Gérard Barthélémy, David Geggus, Vertus Saint-Louis, John Garrigus, and Laurent Dubois built on the work of James and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century Haitian historians such as Thomas Madiou, Beaubrun

INTRODUCTION7

Ardouin, Claude and Marcel Auguste, Auguste Nemours, Gérard Mentor Laurent, and others to re-evaluate the historical neglect of this momentous event.¹⁶ Because of their groundbreaking work, the Haitian Revolution is no longer at the margins of the Age of Revolution or of Atlantic World history. There is still much work to be done, of course, but this volume is part of a broader movement to research, understand, and explain the Haitian Revolution in Atlantic and global contexts. Recent developments in the historiography of the Haitian Revolution and the early independence period reveal not only the challenges in undertaking archival research on the period but also the many opportunities available because of new archival strategies and methodological innovations. “Many of the original archives of the Haitian state were destroyed over the years,” sociologist Mimi Sheller points out; “thus there is great dependence on the writings of a few Haitian historians like Thomas Madiou or Beaubrun Ardouin, or the records kept by hostile foreign consulates and the (often racist) publications of European visitors.”¹⁷ Indeed, all studies on the Haitian Revolution and the early independence period use the valuable nineteenth-century histories produced by Madiou and Ardouin. These early Haitian historians relied on archival documents—and often reproduced the full documents in their histories—as well as oral histories of veterans of the revolution. They therefore remain, as David Geggus argues, “indispensable sources today.”¹⁸ As scholarly resources, however, they are not without their complications. Madiou and Ardouin both had political, national, and social agendas when they produced their histories. While “both were determined to produce serious works of history that would meet the standards of the leading European scholars of the time,” scholars have criticized their bias in favor of the mulâtre class in their efforts to counterbalance negative portrayals of Haiti and Haitian history.¹⁹ Furthermore, while they should not be dismissed, their sources should be questioned and, when possible, supported with complementary sources. Over the course of the past decade, the scholars responsible for the boom in research on the Haitian Revolution have revealed the possibilities for new archival discoveries in the field and the importance of connecting Haitian history to new methodological and theoretical developments more generally. “Notwithstanding the revolution’s extensive historiography,” Geggus argued in 2002, “much of these sources remains little or entirely unexploited by historians. Moreover, as material continues to pass from private hands into the public domain and finding aids multiply in number, opportunities for research continue to increase.”²⁰ Since then, as can be seen in this volume, scholars have begun to study these unexploited sources, and the field has benefitted immensely from this creative and collaborative undertaking.

8DAVID ARMITAGE AND JULIA GAFFIELD

Newly discovered archival collections in Haiti and throughout the Atlantic World, careful readings of historical secondary sources, and the use of oral histories and contemporary Vodou songs have allowed scholars to gain new insights into a variety of topics related to the Haitian Revolution and the early independence period. The amount of attention that scholars are devoting to the Haitian Revolution and the developments in archival research is also the result of a historiographical shift in Atlantic World history that highlights the multidirectional flows of people, information, goods, ideas, political philosophies, cultural practices, and every other imaginable mode of social, economic, and political interaction. The colonies are no longer thought of as being at the margins of empire or as the passive receivers of metropolitan power structures. Instead, colonial peoples (both subjects and the disenfranchised) are increasingly being understood as active participants in the creation of empires. The Haitian Revolution, therefore, cannot be seen simply as an offshoot of the French Revolution; rather it was an intertwined movement with sometimes independent and sometimes convergent events, goals, and outcomes.²¹ This interconnectedness, too long underemphasized in popular understandings of Haiti’s history as well as in the historiography, has resulted in an emphasis on Haitian exceptionalism in the Americas. This fact is most evident in contemporary descriptions of Haiti in the months following the devastating 2010 earthquake and in the years since then. Most journalists and foreign observers sought to explain how the country came to be nicknamed “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere”—a phrase repeated in the media so frequently after the earthquake that it began to sound like a single, run-on word. This expression set Haiti apart and marked the country as an exception rather than as part of the Americas and the history that the different countries share. The expression also seems to assign ownership of their current troubles to Haiti and Haitians; poverty and distress become their identity and not part of a historical process. While much more attention is being paid to the Haitian Revolution in the historiography, this focus has yet to spill over into the independence period. Scholars still tend to study the revolutionary period, the American occupation, and the Duvalier dictatorships.²² There are, of course, important exceptions that focus on the nineteenth century and the years between the American occupation and the Duvalier era.²³ The overall result, however, is that the traditional image of independent Haiti is oversimplified, often in an attempt to explain “what went wrong.” The narrative tends to emphasize isolation, stigmatization, and internal instability and suggests, sometimes explicitly, that Haiti was doomed from day one. The reality of the early independence period was much more complicated. The entirety of Haiti’s history

INTRODUCTION9

cannot simply be seen as a linear path from celebrated revolution to thirdworld devastation. The valuing of the revolution over the independence period is perhaps because the first decades after January 1, 1804, do not match our idealized version of the Haitian Revolution as a moment when the disenfranchised won, when equality triumphed, and when racial barriers fell. The independence period makes clear that many of the colonial hierarchies remained— sometimes in a reimagined way—after the end of the revolution. There are some aspects of the independence period that we cannot study in the same celebratory way as the revolution. The massacres initiated by Dessalines, the revised labor regime that too much resembled slavery, the militarization of society, the overthrow of one dictator after another—we cannot champion these as the roots of the enlightened modern world as we do the rest of the ideals laid out in the Haitian Revolution. To sharpen our sense of these anomalies and paradoxes arising from the Haitian Revolution, this volume concentrates on a single pivotal document, the text generally known as the Haitian Declaration of Independence. “Take then before him the oath of living free and independent,” Jean-Jacques Dessalines announced to a crowd gathered in the city of Gonaïves on January 1, 1804, “and to prefer death to anything that will try to place you back under the yoke. Swear at last, to pursue forever the traitors and the enemies of your independence.” Dessalines, the leader of the victorious Armée Indigène in Saint-Domingue, proclaimed what was, in effect if not in name, one of the world’s earliest declarations of independence. Before July 1776, no people or nation, country or state, had formally declared its “independence” to the world; adoption of the model for declaring independence created by the representatives of the United States was piecemeal and slow. In the years between American and Haitian independence, there had been only two similar announcements, both patterned after the American template: Vermont’s declaration of independence from the new United States (1777) and the manifesto issued by the Flemish estates when they seceded briefly from the Austrian Empire in 1790. The Haitian “Declaration” was therefore not the first or even the second such pronouncement, either in the Americas or in the Atlantic World more broadly defined; it was not even the first announcement of the independence of Saint-Domingue. However, it was novel in ways that pointed to the future rather than to the past. And it helped to initiate the feverish “contagion of sovereignty” that swept the world, from Latin America to South Asia, in the first half of the nineteenth century.²⁴ While the Haitian declaration did not follow the same style or format as the American Declaration of Independence, it

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helped to solidify the development of a new genre of political writing. The content and tone were quite different from its American predecessor, but the goal was the same: to announce the independence and sovereignty of a territory and its people. Since 1776, more than one hundred similar documents have been issued, and the number continues to grow across the world, from Kosovo to South Sudan.²⁵ Thanks to the work of the scholars assembled in this volume, we now know more about the 1804 Haitian declaration than we do about any other similar document, with the exception of the US Declaration of Independence.²⁶ This fact is all the more striking because the physical document of the Haitian declaration has never been prominent in Haitian history or memory. There is no national shrine to it, as there is to the US declaration in the National Archives in Washington, DC, and at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It was not the subject of popular reproductions or general reverence during the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Attempts to find original copies of it ahead of the hundredth and hundred-and-fiftieth anniversaries of Haitian independence were fruitless.²⁷ Meanwhile, scholarship on the declaration (and the similar document from November 1803) appeared infrequently, initially folded into early histories of Haiti by Ardouin and Madiou in the mid-nineteenth century, but only recently broken out into a handful of separate studies.²⁸ Since the two-hundredth anniversary of independence in 2004—and especially after the earthquake in 2010 and the discovery of the earliest printings of the declaration in The National Archives of the United Kingdom—study of the Haitian declaration has greatly accelerated. We may not know everything we would like about its composition or its circulation, but its meanings and significance are now better understood than at any time since 1804. This volume’s three sections shed light, respectively, on the creation and dissemination of the declaration, on its content and reception, and on its afterlives in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Part I, “Writing the Declaration,” investigates the motivations behind the declaration; the social background of its most likely writer, Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre; the initial printing and circulation of the document; and the psychological implications of its uniquely violent imagery. Part II, “Haitian Independence and the Atlantic,” broadens the frame to illuminate the connections between violence and independence in Haitian history more generally; the meanings of the violence that unfolded after 1804; and the declaration’s implications for neighboring islands and for the international impact of the Haitian Revolution. Finally, Part III, “The Legacy of Haitian Declaration of Independence,” traces the enduring impact of the declaration across Haitian history and its relationship with the outside world: specifically, its role in the recognition of

INTRODUCTION11

Haiti; its role in the creation of a new state and in the elaboration of a new conception of the Haitian people as sovereign; its remembrance and celebration in Haitian Vodou song and ceremony; and its place in the annual celebrations of independence since 1804. Taken together, the book’s essays use new research and novel methods to uncover the intricacies of a document whose importance grows with every new perspective on its complex history. The Haitian declaration itself has three parts—at least, in the versions that have become canonical since 1804—printed as an eight-page pamphlet and as a single-sheet broadside.²⁹ The first, headed “Armée Indigène,” recorded the oath sworn and then signed by Dessalines’s generals to renounce France forever and to die rather than live under its dominion. The second, the longest and most often reproduced section, comprises the proclamation signed by Dessalines and addressed to the people of “Hayti.” It explains why they should definitively cast off their links with France and concludes with an oath “to live free and independent”; this section is closest in substance (if not in form) to the other declarations of independence before and after 1804. The third section records another oath by which the generals of the Haitian army affirmed Dessalines as governor general for life, with sovereign powers to make peace, war, and name his successor. The words “indépendance” or “indépendant” appear eleven times in the document—the three documents mark January 1 as the first day of Haitian independence (l’indépendance d’Hayti, New Year’s Day and a traditional holiday on slave plantations)—but nowhere does the term “declaration” or its synonyms appear. The designation of the document as a “declaration” first came from the English-speaking world. This should not be surprising because it was there that the American declaration was already familiar: thus, when Edward Corbet, the British agent sent to Haiti in early 1804, dispatched a printed copy of the document to George Nugent, lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, in January 1804, he called it “their declaration of Independence.”³⁰ In French documents, it was more often termed a “proclamation” or “acte” of independence rather than a declaration, indicating the distinct genres available within Anglophone and Francophone legal and political culture. As Patrick Tardieu shows in his essay, when Jean-Baptiste Symphore Linstant de Pradine collected Haiti’s laws in 1851, he began with the Acte de L’Indépendance of 1804—year zero of Haiti’s independent, postrevolutionary history.³¹ As a historical record of the proceedings at Gonaïves on the first day of independence, 1804, the declaration was both incomplete and confused. According to Thomas Madiou, that day began with the speech Dessalines delivered in Kreyòl recalling the brutalities of the French and urging his generals to join in defense of the independence of the island territory now called by the indigenous name of “Hayti.”³² The declaration was incomplete because it

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contained no text of that speech, for which we have no other testimony. The declaration was also confused because events must have unfolded somewhat differently from the sequence implied by the 1804 printing. In that version, two separate oaths book-ended Dessalines’s proclamation, but on the day itself the first oath defending Haiti’s independence must have followed Dessalines’s Kreyòl oration. Then, switching to French—a language Dessalines probably knew poorly and certainly could not write—one of his secretaries, Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, read the proclamation in the name and voice of Dessalines, explaining the reasons for renouncing France and for protecting Haiti even unto death: “The Generals . . . have all sworn to posterity, to the whole universe, to renounce France forever, and to die rather than live under its dominion.” Later the same day, the military generals of the Armée Indigène swore the second oath naming Dessalines head of state. There is no evidence that the proclamation was ever issued in Kreyòl: indeed, its first published translation into that language was not until 2011.³³ By then, it had long since taken on a life of its own, separate from the other documents that accompanied its initial dissemination in the Atlantic World. The declaration rested on multiple authorities. The first was the authority of Dessalines himself, as général en chef at the head of his army. The second, derived from the first, was Dessalines’s voice speaking to his people and in their name. In similar contexts—most notably, again, the infant United States in the summer of 1776—the next layer of authority would have been that of manuscript publication, often with affirmatory signatures attached. Although we can infer the existence of such a stage of authority, and authorization, the textual trace of it no longer exists. Finally, the last authority, but most immediately material and most enduring, was the authority of print, which publicly settled and circulated the form and content of otherwise dynamic and shifting texts. There seems to have been no printing press in Gonaïves, and the pamphlet and broadside versions of the declaration appeared from the imprimerie du gouvernement at Port-au-Prince, where they became two in a sequence of public utterances issued in late 1803 and early 1804. Enlightenment ideals of public transparency demanded that such statements be made not just before witnesses but addressed to the wider world of international opinion. It is therefore not at all ironic that the two known remaining copies of the 1804 printings of the declaration were preserved among the papers of a British governor of Jamaica and the British Admiralty and that they can be found at The National Archives of the United Kingdom and not in Haiti. Nor is it surprising to learn that the text of the declaration had reached Venezuela by April 1804 and Bombay by January 1805.³⁴ The text—or portions of the text—also circulated throughout the world with the production of handwritten transcriptions and translations in addition to

INTRODUCTION13

its publication in newspapers. To date, only about half a dozen of these handwritten transcriptions are known to exist, but the newspaper records reveal the document’s widespread distribution beyond the printed and manuscript transcriptions that remain.³⁵ Underlying the authority of print was the authorization for a new distribution of power sanctioned by Dessalines’s generals. Like the US Declaration of Independence, the Haitian declaration derived its force from representation and not from direct, plebiscitary authority. When it spoke in the “name of the people” (au nom du peuple d’Hayti), it did so in the same way it spoke in the “name of liberty, [and] in the name of independence”: abstractly but not directly, on the people’s behalf but not in their voice. The bulk of the declaration spoke in the voice of Dessalines, but this masked a more artful feat of ventriloquism. The proclamation begins with a title, which might also stand as a stage direction—“Le Général en Chef, au Peuple d’Hayti.” It ends consistently with the endorsement, “Signé, J. J. DESSALINES,” even though it was otherwise anomalous for the presumed transcript of a speech to carry any affirmatory signature, as if signaling the hybrid nature of the document as spoken and printed, spontaneous and fixed. But the signature was a mark of authorization, not of authorship—an anachronistic role in this period and certainly in this place, far from the determinants of copyright law, Romantic subjectivity, and the constraining operations of the “author-function.”³⁶ The consensus among scholars is that the proclamation distributed over Dessalines’s name was scripted by Boisrond-Tonnerre, a metropolitan-educated free man of mixed racial ancestry in Saint-Domingue. Behind the fixed text we read today surely lay multiple discussions among Haiti’s leaders as well as many lost drafts and revisions. We should therefore think of it as a collective production, even though it was issued over the name of Dessalines and under the shaping hand of Boisrond-Tonnerre.³⁷ Boisrond-Tonnerre’s family background showed what John Garrigus calls “a successful economic conservatism with a striking degree of political confidence vis-à-vis white society.” The violence of the war of independence determined his allegiances and, as Garrigus argues, may have inflected the notorious violence of the proclamation’s language.³⁸ Deborah Jenson had earlier made a powerful circumstantial argument, which she reaffirms in this volume, that we should think of Dessalines himself as the “author” of the proclamation, and that the document’s imagery provides an index of his “unschooled” poetics and the cognitive style of an unlettered, but not therefore conventionally illiterate, rhetorician. Although other essays (notably those by David Geggus and Garrigus) analyze the declaration primarily as Boisrond-Tonnerre’s text, Jenson’s cognitive linguistic analysis reminds us that the document was the work of many hands, with Boisrond-Tonnerre as

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its literal scribe imaging Dessalines speaking in French and in tune with the passions of his mixed-race audience.³⁹ The many voices of the declaration were expressed in as many languages. The most obvious is its metaphorical freight of violence. The most frequently noted image, analyzed at length here by Jenson, is its figuration of the French as “tigers still covered with [the] blood” of the Haitian people and their families. Tigers are not only carnivorous, threatening, and implacably menacing to weakened human beings: they are also not native to Haiti. Their prominence in Dessalines’s proclamation suggests that Boisrond-Tonnerre was putting a foreign language into Dessalines’s mouth and, more pointedly, that the French were alien creatures from distant climes. This underlined the proclamation’s central claim that the inhabitants of Haiti and the French were now wholly distinct peoples. Unlike the US Declaration of Independence, which still spoke of the former colonists’ “British brethren” even at the moment of separation, the Haitian declaration definitively asserted that French “are not our brothers.” There could be no kinship with such a savage people if the newly liberated Haitians were to live free and independent. The language of freedom and independence derived from widely circulated texts of eighteenth-century natural law, most notably the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel’s hugely popular compendium, Le droit des gens (1758). In that work, Vattel wrote repeatedly of the innate condition of humans in the state of nature as “free and independent” (libre et indépendant), words that rapidly became terms of legal and diplomatic art to describe peoples and states in the international state of nature.⁴⁰ Vattel’s work may have been in the hands of Dessalines’s secretaries—Jeremy Popkin here notes a possible echo of it in Dessalines’s April 28, 1804, proclamation on the massacres of whites— but his language had long since broken away from its immediate source, as in the refrain of the “Hymne Haytiène” (1803): “Vivons, mourons, ses vrais Enfans, / Libres, indépendans.”⁴¹ In natural jurisprudence, the connection between individual freedom and collective independence was metaphorical: humans and states were both perceived as persons, sharing similar characteristics of autonomy and vulnerability to extinction, or unfreedom. In the rhetoric of the Haitian Revolution, the analogy was far more than metaphorical. For the people of Haiti, losing their independence would be more than a return to collective subordination within an empire: it could mean their actual re-enslavement. “Take then before him the oath of living free and independent” (vivre libre et indépendant), “and to prefer death to anything that will try to place you back under the yoke,” urged Dessalines. This double-edged language of freedom and independence suited the multiple purposes of Dessalines’s proclamation. The primary motive at Gonaïves was to forge a sovereign Haitian people. Haiti was not created by Hai-

INTRODUCTION15

tians: the Declaration of Independence began the process of making them into Haitians. As Jean Casimir notes, “the wars of Haitian independence were not the exploits of a preexisting people, but rather the invention of this people as an expression of its sovereignty. Its existence and its sovereignty generated each other reciprocally.”⁴² If that was the domestic aim of the declaration, its outward-facing task was to announce to the existing powers of the earth that a new “free and independent” state had emerged to join them and that it sought their recognition.⁴³ As Philippe Girard argues in his essay, “the declaration was an act of political theater performed on a world stage,” in the full knowledge that the idea of an independent black country led by emancipated slaves and free blacks was deeply threatening to other slave societies in the circum-Caribbean and the Americas. Dessalines may not have intended to export his revolution, but the example of its success resonated long after his death in 1806, even if the declaration itself did not.⁴⁴ The sequence of events in the declaration—from the oath of the generals, via Dessalines’s proclamation, to the appointment of Dessalines as arbiter of the two major prerogatives of international sovereignty, the rights of war and peace (le droit de faire la paix, la guerre)—effectively communicated the revolution’s success to an international readership. However, as would often be the case with unilateral declarations of independence, securing recognition for the claim of independence was much harder than asserting the claim itself. Dessalines’s proclamation was for the most part not cast in the prevailing language of the law of nations nor was it submitted to the wider world in one of the recognized genres of international discourse, as an “act,” “declaration,” or “manifesto,” for example. De facto independence could not lead to independence de jure without foreign recognition. “The Acte” therefore, “has to negotiate the entry of Haitians to the world in the manner of a founding ritual.”⁴⁵ As Julia Gaffield shows in her essay, that ambiguity bedeviled Haiti’s status well into the nineteenth century, Haiti “being neither independent nor part of the mother country,” as the Swiss-American politician and diplomat Albert Gallatin put it in 1815.⁴⁶ The rules for declaring independence were still very much in flux in 1804. If the US declaration stands as the model, then the Haitian declaration deviated from it in almost every respect. In this regard, David Geggus notes that the Haitian declaration signaled the end of the fifteen-year process we know as the Haitian Revolution.⁴⁷ By setting the seal on a series of events, rather than being their trigger or an accelerant for their progress, as most later declarations of independence were, the Haitian declaration was anomalous in its own time and also among most later similar declarations, which often ignited such upheavals. It was also unusual in being proclaimed orally in its first instance. The American declaration had been written for oral deliv-

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ery, but its initial form was in print, not speech.⁴⁸ The Haitian declaration foreshadowed later spoken or shouted declarations in Iberian America, such as Mexico’s Grito de Dolores (1810) or Dom Pedro’s declaration of Brazilian independence, the Grito de Iparanga (1822).⁴⁹ The precedents for Haitian independence before 1804 were hardly encouraging. Of the three previous declarations, only one—the US Declaration of Independence—had led to lasting stability and formal recognition of independence from the powers of the earth, but it did not guarantee sympathy or recognition for other claims to independent statehood. The history of the American declaration’s reception also showed how rapidly even a successful declaration could be forgotten: after Great Britain had formally acknowledged American independence in 1783, the document itself fell into oblivion—little remembered, uncontested, and certainly not mythologized. Its formal work had been done and its intentions achieved. The struggle to affirm Haitian independence and to achieve external recognition would be more drawn out than it had been for the United States: French recognition came in 1825 after the payment of hefty reparations, but the United States waited almost forty years longer, until Abraham Lincoln’s administration confirmed recognition—along with the independence of Liberia—in 1862.⁵⁰ The transformation of the act of independence into the fact of independence would always be fraught. After its initial circulation around the Atlantic World in 1804, the part played by the declaration in that process was hardly minimal, but it joined a repertoire of other symbols and customs that were replayed with variations across two centuries. As Laurent Dubois and Erin Zavitz show in their essays, the afterlives of the declaration, and of the independence celebrations from which it sprang, were deep and continuous across the centuries after 1804. The kinds of legal and political heritages familiar from the United States, for instance, did not project the Haitian declaration into the future. By contrast, commemorative ceremonies on the anniversary of independence and the memories of the war transmitted through traditions of popular song and Vodou ritual were the main vectors of historical memory. The declaration was read annually on January 1 until French recognition in 1825 rendered its reiteration of bloodthirsty imprecations against France impolitic; also, as Zavitz shows, the memory of Dessalines blossomed after a period of oblivion following his murder in 1806. He finally emerged as “the only revolutionary hero to become an lwa, or deity,” in the Vodou pantheon and figured as a central figure in Vodou songs recounting the oral history of violence, loss, trauma, and victory in the Haitian struggle for independence.⁵¹ The Haitian declaration, no less than the revolution from which it arose, was an event within multiple histories—Haitian, Caribbean, hemispheric,

INTRODUCTION17

Atlantic, and global. The essays collected in this volume allow us to see why it so immediately shaped national memory, beginning in 1804, and why it should still be commemorated and studied over two hundred years later. It has taken much of those two centuries to have the Haitian Revolution accepted into the standard narratives of Atlantic revolution structured around the American and French Revolutions. Yet if we take the Haitian declaration as a synecdoche for the revolution itself, it becomes increasingly evident how anomalous it was even in the course of early nineteenth-century Atlantic history. Malick Ghachem argues here that “1804 marked the end of the era of the northern Atlantic revolutions,” because it shared neither the methods nor the aims of the American and French Revolutions.⁵² It might therefore be more productive to see the Haitian Revolution as the first of the Latin American revolutions—American in its origins from a mixed-race plantation society nurtured as a limb of European overseas empire; in its turbulent grapplings with new forms of sovereignty and authority; and even in its passage to military rule, internal conflict, and persistent underdevelopment. The Haitian declaration and the Haitian Revolution cannot be used to support progressivist narratives of unfolding democracy, republicanism, or economic growth. Instead, they challenge historians to rewrite those narratives in order “to find the roots of contemporary forms of inequality, domination, and terror, rather than the origins of freedom, rights, and universal prosperity.”⁵³ The essays collected in this volume render that task more urgent. In their richness and complexity, they do not make it any easier or more reassuring.

Notes 1. New-York Historical Society Museum and Library, Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn, www.nyhistory.org/exhibitions/revolution-the-atlantic-world-reborn; and http://behindthescenes.nyhistory.org/a-kingdom-built-on-sugar/; see also the catalog for the exhibit: Thomas Bender, Laurent Dubois, and Richard Rabinowitz, eds., Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn (New York: D. Giles, 2011). 2. Condy Raguet, “Memoirs of Hayti. Letter XVIII” (February 1806), The PortFolio 5, no. 3 (1811): 246; Erin Zavitz, “Revolutionary Commemorations: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haitian Independence Day, 1804–1904,” p. 223 below. 3. John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 4. John K. Thornton, “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Caribbean History 25, no. 1 (1991): 59, citing David Geggus, “Sugar and Coffee Cultivation in Saint Domingue and the Shaping of the Slave Labor Force,” in Cultivation and Culture: Work Process and the Shaping of Afro-American Culture in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,

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1993); John K. Thornton, “ ‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4, no. 2 (1993): 181–214. 5. Jean Casimir, Pa bliye 1804/souviens-toi de 1804 (Port-au-Prince: Fondation Connaissance et Liberté, 2004). 6. Christina Mobley, “ ‘Kongo, Kongo, Help Me Cry’: Central Africans in Saint Domingue,” presented at “Les résistances à l’esclavage dans le monde atlantique français à l’ère des révolutions (1750–1850),” French Atlantic History Group, Montreal, May 3–4, 2013. 7. Recent scholarship has emphasized the mythical aspects of the Bois Caïman ceremony and highlights our inability uncover the actual events involved in the planning of the initial uprising in 1791. Léon-François Hoffman, “Mythe et idéologie: la cérémonie du Bois-Caïman,” Études Creoles 13, no. 1 (1990): 9–34; David Geggus, “Le soulèvement d’août 1791 et ses liens avec le vaudou et le marronage,” in La revolution française en Haïti: filiations, ruptures, nouvelles dimensions, ed. Michel Hector (Port-au-Prince: Société haïtienne d’histoire et de géographie, Henri Deschamps, 1995), 1:60–70. 8. Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 48. 9. On the “counter-plantation system,” see Jean Casimir, La culture opprimée (Delmas, Haïti: Imprimerie Lakay, 2001); Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Henry Holt, 2011). 10. See Jeremy Popkin’s discussion on Leclerc’s plans in A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 118–20. 11. For more on these negotiations, see Julia Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2012): 583–614. 12. Philippe Girard, “Did Dessalines Plan to Export the Haitian Revolution?,” p. 145 below; see also Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica,” 583. 13. English translation of November 29, 1803, declaration: “St. Domingo,” Times (London), 5938 (February 6, 1804): 3. On the 1803 declaration, see Leslie F. Manigat, “Une brève analyse-commentaire critique d’un document historique,” Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire et de Géographie 221 (2005): 44–56; Deborah Jenson, “Dessalines’s American Proclamations of the Haitian Independence,” Journal of Haitian Studies 15, no. 1/2 (2009): 72–102. 14. Patrick Tardieu, “The Debate Surrounding the Printing of the Haitian Declaration of Independence: A Review of the Literature,” pp. 58–71 below; David Geggus, “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence,” pp. 25–41 below. 15. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1938); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); see also Thomas Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,

INTRODUCTION19

1973); Yves Bénot, La démence coloniale sous Napoléon (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 1992); Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, fils noir de la revolution française (Paris: Ecole des loisirs, 1980); Jean Fouchard, The Haitian Maroons: Liberty or Death (1972; repr. New York: Edward Blyden, 1981); Robert K. Lacerte, “The Evolution of Land and Labor in the Haitian Revolution, 1791–1820,” The Americas 34, no. 4 (1978): 449–59. 16. For example see David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); Jacques de Cauna, Haïti, l’éternelle révolution: histoire d’une décolonisation: 1789–1804 (Monein: PRNG, 2009); Vertus Saint-Louis, Aux origines du drame d’Haïti: droit et commerce maritime, 1794–1806 (Port-au-Prince: Bibliothèque Nationale d’Haïti, 2006); John Garrigus, Before Haiti; Mats Lundahl, “Toussaint L’Ouverture and the War Economy of Saint-Domingue, 1796–1802,” Slavery and Abolition 6, no. 2 (1985): 122–38; Gérard Barthélémy, Créoles, bossales: conflict en Haïti (Petit-Bourg, Guadeloupe: Ibis Rouge, 2000); Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti suivies de la vie du Général J.-M. Borgella (1855; repr. Portau-Prince: F. Dalencour, 1958); Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 8 vols. (Port-auPrince: Imprimerie de J. Courtois, 1847–1848); Claude B. Auguste and Marcel B. Auguste, L’expédition Leclerc 1801–1803 (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1985); Auguste Nemours, Histoire militaire de la guerre d’indépendance de Saint-Domingue, 2 vols. (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1925–28); Gérard Mentor Laurent, Le Commissaire Sonthonax à Saint-Domingue, 4 vols. (Port-au-Prince: La Phalange, 1965–74). For a recent account of the historiography see Philippe Girard, “The Haitian Revolution, History’s New Frontier: State of the Scholarship and Archival Sources,” Slavery and Abolition 34, no. 3 (2012): 485–507. 17. Mimi Sheller, “Sword-Bearing Citizens: Militarism and Manhood in NineteenthCentury Haiti,” in Haitian History: New Perspectives, ed. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (New York: Routledge, 2013), 161. 18. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 31. 19. Popkin, Concise History of the Haitian Revolution, 165. 20. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 32. 21. Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson, eds., The French Revolution in Global Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); David A. Bell, “Questioning the Global Turn: The Case of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 37, no. 1 (2014): 1–24. 22. Melanie Newton, “ ‘We Are All Haitians Now’? The Caribbean, Transna-

20DAVID ARMITAGE AND JULIA GAFFIELD

tional Histories, and Empire,” presented at the American Historical Association, New Orleans, January 4, 2013. 23. For example see: Matthew J. Smith, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Chantalle Francesca Verna, “Haiti’s ‘Second Independence’ and the Promise of Pan-American Cooperation, 1934–1956” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2005); Thorald Burnham, “Immigration and Marriage in the Making of PostIndependence Haiti” (PhD diss., York University, 2006); Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Jean-François Brière, Haïti et la France, 1804– 1848: le rêve brisé (Paris: Karthala, 2008). 24. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 115. 25. Armitage, Declaration of Independence, 104; David Armitage, “Declarations of Independence, 1776–2012,” in Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 215–32. 26. For important comparative studies of declarations of independence, see Alfredo Ávila, Jordana Dym, and Erika Pani, eds., Las declaraciones de independencia: los textos fundamentales de las independencias americanas (México, DF: El Colegio de México/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2013). 27. Julia Gaffield, “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence: Digging for Lost Documents in the Archives of the Atlantic World,” The Appendix 2, no. 1 (2014). 28. Most notably, Manigat, “Une brève analyse-commentaire critique”; Jean François, “Habiter la terre: une lecture de l’acte d’indépendance d’Haïti,” Ethnologies 28, 1 (2006): 119–32; Jenson, “Dessalines’s American Proclamations”; Geggus, “La declaración de independencia de Haïti,” in Las declaraciones de independencia, ed. Ávila, Dym, and Pani, 121–31. 29. The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA), CO 137/111, fols. 113–17. For the broadside version see TNA, MFQ 1/184 (removed from the Admiralty records ADM 1/254). 30. Edward Corbet to George Nugent, January 25, 1804, TNA, CO 137/111. 31. Jean-Baptiste Symphore Linstant de Pradine, Receuil général des lois et actes du gouvernement d’Haïti depuis la proclamation de son indépendance jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: A. Durand, 1851); Tardieu, “The Debate Surrounding the Printing of the Haitian Declaration of Independence,” p. 59 below. 32. For more on the renaming of the territory, see “The Naming of Haiti,” in Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 207–20. 33. Jacques Pierre, “L’acte de l’indépendance d’Haïti en créole haïtien,” Journal of Haitian Studies 17, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 168–80. 34. Alejandro E. Gómez, Le spectre de la révolution noire. L’impact de la révolution haïtienne dans le monde atlantique: 1790–1886 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 41 (Venezuela); The Bombay Courier, XIV, 644 (January 19, 1805), [3–4]. (Our thanks to Mitch Fraas for this reference.)

INTRODUCTION21

35. For manuscript transcriptions see the National Library of Jamaica, MS 72; Archives Nationales, Paris, AB-XIX-3302-15; Duke University Rubenstein Library, RLT Vault 320A, items 1–2; Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, CC9a; for more on the document’s circulation in newspapers see Deborah Jenson, “Dessalines’s American Proclamations of the Haitian Independence,” Journal of Haitian Studies 15, no. 1/2 (2010): 72–102; on newspapers during the Age of Revolution see William Slaughter, “The Paragraph as Information Technology: How News Traveled in the EighteenthCentury Atlantic World,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 2 (2012): 253–78. 36. Roger Chartier, The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014), 12–14, 83–86. 37. Compare the account of the collective and collaborative production of the US Declaration of Independence in Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997), 97–153. 38. John Garrigus, “ ‘Victims of Our Own Credulity and Indulgence’: The Life of Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre (1776–1806),” pp. 44 and 52 below. For more on Boisrond-Tonnerre’s life, see the recently discovered, and digitized, copy of the first edition of his Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire d’Hayti (À Dessalines: De l’Imprimerie Centrale du Gouvernement, 1804), http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/mobile/index. html?id=45983757&n=1. 39. Deborah Jenson, “Living by Metaphor in the Haitian Declaration of Independence: Tigers and Cognitive Theory,” pp. 72–91 below; compare Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative; and Jenson, “Dessalines’s American Proclamations.” 40. Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought, 223–25. 41. Jeremy Popkin, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Norbert Thoret, and the Violent Aftermath of the Haitian Declaration of Independence,” pp. 115–35 below; “Hymne Haytiène” (1803), TNA, CO 137/111. 42. Jean Casimir, “The Sovereign People of Haiti during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” pp. 181–200 below. 43. Eliga Gould’s recent study on the aftermath of the US Declaration of Independence highlights the importance of the foreign audience and foreign recognition in the publication and dissemination of the document: Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 44. Girard, “Did Dessalines Plan to Export the Haitian Revolution?,” pp. 136–57 below. 45. François, “Habiter la terre,” 125. 46. Albert Gallatin (1815), quoted in Julia Gaffield, “ ‘Outrages on the Laws of Nations’: American Merchants and Diplomacy after the Haitian Declaration of Independence,” p. 162 below. 47. Geggus, “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence,” pp. 29–30 below. 48. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 49. Carlos Herrejón Peredo, “Versiones del Grito de Dolores y algo más,” 20/10.

22DAVID ARMITAGE AND JULIA GAFFIELD

Memoria de las Revoluciones de México 5 (2009), 39–53; see Alfredo Ávila and Erika Pani, “De la representación al grito, del grito al acta. Nueva España, 1808–1821”; and Isabel Lustosa, “Cambio y continuidad: monarquía constitucional y república en el procese de independencia de Brasil,” both in Las declaraciones de independencia, ed. Ávila, Dym, and Pani, 275–95 and 383–407, respectively. 50. Jean-François Brière, “La France et la reconnaissance de l’indépendance haïtienne: le débat sur l’ordonnance de 1825,” French Colonial History 5 (2004), 125–38; Gaffield, “ ‘Outrages on the Laws of Nations,’ ” pp. 176–77 below. 51. Laurent Dubois, “Haitian Independence in Haitian Vodou,” pp. 201–18 below; Erin Zavitz, “Revolutionary Commemorations: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haitian Independence Day, 1804–1904,” pp. 219–38 below. 52. Malick Ghachem, “Law, Atlantic Revolutionary Exceptionalism, and the Haitian Declaration of Independence,” pp. 97–98 below. 53. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 259; see also Brown, “A Vapor of Dread: Observations on Racial Terror and Vengeance in the Age of Revolution,” in Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn, ed. Bender, Dubois, and Rabinowitz, 177–98.

PART I

Writing the Declaration

Haiti’s Declaration of Independence DAVID GEGGUS

To redress the biases of earlier generations that either ignored the Haitian Revolution or emphasized its supposedly aberrant peculiarity, recent scholarship on the topic has often sought to integrate it within larger narratives of liberal democracy, Atlantic revolution, or emergent modernity, and thus to stress similarity rather than otherness. If the pioneering works in Atlantic history notoriously neglected the topic, scholars now routinely accord it a place in the Age of Revolution.¹ Historians of the French Revolution similarly have come to acknowledge the colonial dimension of their subject.² Laurent Dubois argues that the slave insurrection that was at the heart of Haiti’s revolution made a major contribution to the development of democracy, and Sibylle Fischer, that it forces us to revise our concepts of modernity and progress.³ Nick Nesbitt claims that the black revolution was an extension of the Radical Enlightenment, indirectly influenced by Spinoza, and devoted to universal human rights.⁴ Although specific arguments may be debatable, this trend toward inclusivity as regards the Haitian Revolution has undoubtedly been salutary. Any focus on Haiti’s manner of declaring independence, however, is likely to take us in a different direction and highlight instead the revolution’s distinctiveness. This is because the Haitian declaration is unusual in a number of respects: 1) it concluded rather than initiated the revolutionary process; 2) it did not establish a republic and makes no mention of rights; 3) it called for the elimination of the former colonizers; and 4) there were, in fact, not one, but two declarations of independence. These differences reflect more general ways in which the Haitian Revolution was unusual. Proclaimed January 1, 1804, in the port city of Gonaïves, a month after the last French troops had left, the text now known as Haiti’s Declaration of Independence marked the end of fifteen years of revolution. The revolution had begun in 1789 as a movement for home rule and free trade among wealthy white colonists. They were quickly challenged by working-class whites and

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free men of color, who each demanded political rights for themselves, and in 1791 a massive slave uprising transformed the scale and scope of the conflict. Between 1793 and 1798, a radical, multiracial regime fought off Spanish and British invasions in the name of the French Republic, but in 1802–3 a French invasion led to a war of independence fought by the population of African descent against a military expedition sent by Napoléon Bonaparte.⁵ In its social and political complexity, the Haitian Revolution resembled the simultaneous revolution in France more than the mainland independence movements. As the white, free colored, and enslaved populations in Saint-Domingue each pursued their own separate struggles, the revolution’s achievements were correspondingly more wide-ranging and included not just decolonization (1803) but colonial representation (1789), the establishment of racial equality (1792), and the outright abolition of slavery (1793). It was the most transformative of the Atlantic revolutions, both because of these multiple achievements and because of the high price paid for them. By the time independence was declared, the former French colony had lost more than one-third of its population and at least three-quarters of its export capacity.⁶ Printed in Port-au-Prince in late January 1804, the Declaration of Independence does not seem to have circulated in large numbers. Only two copies of the original printed version survive.⁷ It is a three-part document. The longest and most important section, “The General in Chief to the People of Haiti,” is known as the “Proclamation.” It functions as a prologue, although in the original printed version it comes after the act of independence.⁸ It has one signatory, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a former slave, who was the insurgent army’s commander. The act of independence itself records, in the name of the Armée Indigène (Native Army), an oath to renounce France taken by thirty-seven military officers.⁹ The third section, signed by seventeen of them, all general officers, names Dessalines head of state.¹⁰ Before an enthusiastic audience on the main square of Gonaïves, Dessalines began the independence-day ceremony with a speech in Haitian Creole that recounted “the cruelty of the French toward the native people” and concluded, “Let us swear to fight to our last breath for our country’s independence.” What else Dessalines said is unknown.¹¹ As, like most former slaves, Dessalines was illiterate and would have spoken little French, one of his secretaries, Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, then read out the proclamation, followed by the act of independence. According to Haiti’s first historian, Thomas Madiou, Boisrond-Tonnerre wrote both texts.¹² Of the thirty-seven signatories of the act of independence, more than twothirds were of mixed Afro-European descent, probably all of whom were freeborn. One, Nicolas Pierre Mallet, was a white creole planter from the south

HAITI’S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE27

coast who had led his former slaves against the French army. Apparently eleven signatories were black, of whom six or seven seem to have been born into slavery. None was African—not even General Yayou—although in 1804 nearly half the adult population of Haiti would have been African-born and barely one in twenty of mixed racial descent.¹³

Authorship Although historians have generally accepted Madiou’s version of the making of the declaration, Deborah Jenson has made an interesting case that Dessalines should be regarded as the document’s “political author” and that Boisrond-Tonnerre’s role was merely “secretarial.”¹⁴ The first proposition seems to me convincing; the second perhaps goes too far. That Dessalines’s “voice” is in some sense heard in this material is surely not controversial; Madiou himself describes the general intervening in the document-making process to reject a first draft drawn up by his secretaries and then reassign the task to Boisrond-Tonnerre alone. This consistent dependence on the writing of others, however, surely diminishes Dessalines’s authorial claims and makes his secretaries less secretarial. If Dessalines were closely engaged with producing the text, he would not have needed to change writers but persisted with his original choice, dictating exactly what he wanted. There is no record of Dessalines interacting with his secretaries to rework prose in the manner that his predecessor Toussaint Louverture is famously described as doing.¹⁵ Nor would one expect it. Louverture could read and write by the early years of the revolution, and he eventually owned a library. Dessalines learned no more than to sign his name late in life. Although he apparently could speak some French, it is highly unlikely he could have matched even the limited command of the language exhibited by Louverture. Dessalines had been a praedial slave, long owned by free blacks, some of whom were illiterate. Louverture was a former domestic servant with French masters who had lived as a freeman and property owner for some twenty years before the revolution.¹⁶ One can call Dessalines author of the declaration in the sense of instigator, and he obviously had veto power over its contents, but as it was written in a language he would have struggled to understand, he seems unlikely to have been author in the sense of composer. Part of Jenson’s argument is that the public documents produced under Dessalines display a common style, irrespective of which of his secretaries signed them. She points to a “singular rhetorical and poetic ferocity,” “shocking symbolism,” and a tendency to recast established political tropes, such as the tree of liberty metaphor. She acknowledges that somewhat similar passages might be found in the later publications of Boisrond-Tonnerre and

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Juste Chanlatte, the government’s most talented writers, but then concludes that the two men’s French education made them less able than Dessalines to “challenge European logic.”¹⁷ Yet it was precisely Juste Chanlatte who had written more than twelve years earlier during the early months of the rebellion of the free people of color “let us plunge our bloodied arms, avengers of perjury and perfidy, into the breast of these European monsters” and, evoking the dechoukaj metaphor, “let us tear up by its deepest roots this tree of prejudice.”¹⁸ An earlier supposed “Declaration of Confederate Freedmen” had described white colonists as “this vermin that gnaws away at the colony.”¹⁹ Indeed, BoisrondTonnerre’s statement that a declaration of independence required a white man’s skin for a parchment famously got him the job of writing it and the enthusiastic approbation of Dessalines: “Yes! That’s exactly what we need. That’s what I want.”²⁰ Thus there is no reason to think Dessalines had a monopoly on “insurgent and vengeful rhetoric.”²¹ Nor is there need to be especially skeptical of Madiou’s rendering of independence day and Boisrond-Tonnerre’s role. His entire history of the revolution drew on participant memories and, in this case, we are concerned with unique, high-profile events with multiple witnesses that had a better chance of being remembered than most of what he recorded. If the story of Boisrond-Tonnerre’s writing the text in a single night strains credulity, we should note that Dessalines’s secretaries, of which he was one, had already been working on the project for several days. Finally, Jenson’s notion that Madiou’s description of the January 1 ceremony was anachronistically “imperial” and, therefore, “propagandistic” seems questionable.²² Beaubrun Ardouin, Haiti’s other great historian, and no admirer of Boisrond-Tonnerre, was happy to correct what he considered Madiou’s errors, but on this topic he tells exactly the same tale. The morning after completing the texts, Boisrond-Tonnerre read them out to Dessalines and his officers. They approved them and signed them “immediately.” Ardouin thought Boisrond-Tonnerre deserved blame for the declaration’s violent and vengeful character but he added that “He merely interpreted in blood-drenched terms the intimate thoughts of his chief and of many of his contemporaries.”²³ Before Madiou wrote his Histoire in the 1840s, Jenson notes, no French or Haitian writer had attributed the Declaration of Independence to BoisrondTonnerre.²⁴ This surely reflects the paucity of French witnesses that survived the transition to independence in Haiti, and also Boisrond-Tonnerre’s unpopularity. After his political murder in 1806 in the wake of Dessalines’s assassination, few in Haiti wanted to sing his praises. But none has ever put forward an alternative author for the declaration. Hence, it seems to me that,

HAITI’S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE29

although he no doubt styled his message in a manner that would please the new head of state, Boisrond-Tonnerre was more than a mere amanuensis and translator of Dessalines’s words.

An Endpoint Not a Beginning Prior to the mid-twentieth century, declarations that marked the end rather than the beginning of a revolutionary struggle were unusual, David Armitage tells us.²⁵ In Haiti’s case this timing points to an important aspect of its revolution. Unlike most other colonial American struggles, in which independence quite quickly became the central issue, this was not so in Saint-Domingue. For slaves, whites, and free people of color, the question of secession was entirely subordinated to those of racial equality and slave emancipation. For easily blockaded Caribbean islands dependent on trade and with small populations, independence was a much less viable proposition than it was for the mainland colonies. Most of Saint-Domingue’s white revolutionaries sought political autonomy, not independence; and Revolutionary France proved willing to grant a good deal of what they wanted. When the revolution in France became in 1791–93 a threat to white supremacy and slavery, the white colonists who favored secession sought, not independence, but a British protectorate.²⁶ The aims of the slaves who rebelled in 1791 are more controversial, but once the French Republic ended slavery in 1793–94, there was a huge incentive for the emancipated in a hostile world to remain colonial subjects.²⁷ It is true that, by the late 1790s, many commentators suspected that the colony’s black governor, Toussaint Louverture, was aiming for independence, and this view is supported by most Haitian historians. It seems more likely, however, that Louverture wanted a de facto, not de jure, independence, as Cyril James and Yves Benot concluded; he was feeling his way toward a sort of associated statehood.²⁸ The free men of color, too, were probably more interested in the substance of independence than its trappings. Whatever their sense of “Americaness,” only their most partisan historians have attributed to them secessionist ambitions.²⁹ Although by 1792 they lived in autonomous fiefs, and in April 1796 they launched a coup against the white governor, increasingly they came to need the French as a counterweight to the growing power of the ex-slaves. After fighting a bitter war with them in 1799–1800, they participated in the French reconquest expedition of 1802. It was only Napoléon Bonaparte’s decision in 1802 to overturn both racial equality and slave emancipation that forced former slaves and free men of

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color into alliance in a joint struggle for independence to preserve the gains of the revolution. The Haitian Revolution, therefore, produced the Americas’ second independent state but decolonization was far from being its primary goal.

Political Content Truly remarkable is the frequency with which historians of all persuasions have written of the founding in 1804 of the “Haitian republic.” Anglophone writers had loosely used the term “black republic” during the governorship of Toussaint Louverture, but it was in an informal manner meant to suggest the colony’s autonomy under the control of former slaves. The new state that Dessalines proclaimed, however, was called l’État d’Haïti (State of Haiti), and there was nothing republican about it. Arrogating all power to himself, Dessalines took the title “governor-general for life,” with the right to name his successor, which had been the position Toussaint Louverture had assumed under his 1801 (colonial) constitution.³⁰ This status was replaced nine months later with the title of “emperor.” The officers who signed the third part of the Declaration of Independence swore “to blindly obey the Laws issued by his authority, the only one we acknowledge,” and the proclamation actually ends with a threat, an injunction to the populace “never to reject or grumble about” whatever laws he will choose to make.³¹ Freedom from slavery is asserted throughout the document, but the word “rights” appears nowhere. This raises an important point that tends to get obscured in recent studies of the Haitian Revolution that link it with “democratic ideals,” “citizenship,” and “republican rights.” What characterizes the black revolution from the slave uprising in 1791 through Toussaint Louverture’s constitution of 1801 to those of Henry Christophe, who in 1811 created an absolute monarchy, is an unabashed authoritarianism.³² Freedom was construed in the profound but narrow sense of freedom from slavery; it had nothing to do with liberalism. Although the Latin American revolutions created a monarch or two, and the French Revolution similarly ended in military dictatorship, this autocratic tradition tends to set the Haitian Revolution apart from the other Atlantic revolutions. In this context, the most radical aspect of Louverture’s constitution was arguably not, as Malick Ghachem proposes, the permanent abolition of slavery, which had been ended eight years before, and had been abolished in France in 1791 and made illegal in all French colonies in 1794, but the general’s seizure of dictatorial powers for life, a full year before Consul Bonaparte followed suit.³³ Of course, it was not the whole revolution. The revolution’s earliest years

HAITI’S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE31

saw the development of a radical democracy, representative and direct, among Saint-Domingue’s white settlers, but because of their hostility to racial equality, it was suppressed in the fall of 1792 by commissars sent from France. It would be the free men of color, until then excluded from political participation, who would develop a liberal republican politics in SaintDomingue. They, including many of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, would go on to found the first Haitian republic, but only after they had assassinated the emperor Dessalines in 1806. The proclamation of independence was addressed to the Haitian people, but its intended audience also included the “Foreign Powers,” as the act of independence states. It assures Haiti’s neighbors that the new state will not try to export its revolution. Like Toussaint Louverture before him, Dessalines opted for a revolution “in one country,” because he had to assuage his British neighbors’ fears of rebellion, as Britain’s navy controlled the sea-lanes.³⁴ In three conciliatory paragraphs that contrast with the strident tone of the rest of the document, and which avoid mentioning slavery, Dessalines calls on his countrymen to “let our neighbors breathe in peace.” Remarkably, those islands are said to “have no vengeance to claim from the authority that protects them,” as their inhabitants had not suffered as the Haitians had.³⁵ This statement should give pause to those who interpret the Haitian Revolution as in some sense universalist. So should the particularist grounds put forward in justification of independence. In writing the declaration, Boisrond-Tonnerre eschewed a language of rights and law for a heroic rhetoric. Calling on Haitians to live independent or die, the document justifies secession as necessary to maintain freedom from slavery and from the inhumane and duplicitous conduct of the French. Referencing the geographical distance between France and Haiti, as well as the cruel character of the French, their different skin color, and their vulnerability to tropical disease, it concludes, “they are not our brothers . . . they will never be.”

Retribution Having noted the different ways in which “the French name still haunts our country”—in laws, customs, the names of towns, and the physical presence of French people—Boisrond-Tonnerre then states that if any French remain in Haiti after independence they will continue to be a source of division and troubles. In a lengthy section that takes up about one and a half of the proclamation’s five pages, he elaborates this indictment of the former colonizers, who are described successively as barbarians, vultures, executioners, murderers, and “tigers still covered with [the] blood [of your wives, your

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husbands, your brothers, and your sisters . . . your children, your suckling babies].” Extraordinary violence had characterized the Haitian Revolution from its early stages, but it attained an almost apocalyptic climax during the final year, when the French army adopted a semigenocidal strategy. The French commander, Leclerc, informed the navy minister, “I will need to wage a war of extermination.” To Bonaparte he wrote, “we must destroy all the blacks in the mountains, men and women, and half of those in the plains, sparing only children under twelve years old.”³⁶ In January 1804, this trauma was fresh in everyone’s minds. After condemning the French for their past cruelty, their anticipated interference, and their alterity, Boisrond-Tonnerre made three further points: a “terrible but just” act of retribution would send a message to France and the outside world that the Haitians would not surrender the freedom they had won; the fruits of their labor should not go to foreigners; and Haiti’s dead needed to be avenged.³⁷ The target of this call for vengeance was the several thousand French people who, encouraged by Dessalines, had chosen to remain behind after the departure of the French troops. Beginning in February, at least two weeks after the declaration was published in Port-au-Prince, most were systematically massacred, men first, women and children afterwards, in two waves that proceeded from the South of the country to the North and then back again.³⁸ Fear of a massacre had already been building among the remaining French, and whites were prevented from emigrating before the declaration, but it must have greatly increased their panic. The massacres lasted until late April or early May. Madiou reckoned the number killed at about three thousand; some eye-witnesses put it much higher.³⁹ The language of Boisrond-Tonnerre’s proclamation thus was not mere rhetoric. Distilling the raw hatred of an epic conflict, it prepared the ground for the bloodbath that formed the revolution’s epilogue. On hearing the declaration’s Francophobe sentiments at a reenactment of the independence day ceremony in Gonaïves on its 150th anniversary, the French ambassador’s wife supposedly fainted into her husband’s arms.⁴⁰ According to Madiou, Dessalines had given the job of writing the proclamation to Boisrond-Tonnerre because he had declared, “To draw up the act of independence we need the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.”⁴¹ Although such quasi-genocidal tensions were echoed a decade later in Nueva Granada and Simón Bolívar’s declaration that he would purge America of Spanish “monsters,” the ethno-national character of the Haitian Revolution, to use Leslie Manigat’s phrase, and the dehumanizing violence that accompanied it constitute another aspect of its distinctiveness.⁴² Despite

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the objections of Robin Blackburn, who minimizes the scale of retribution in 1804, “quasi-genocidal” seems to be the appropriate description for Dessalines’s actions: they were intended to eliminate the French population from the former colony.⁴³ It was one of the new state’s first acts of sovereignty.⁴⁴ During the revolution, including its final phase, the French obviously killed vastly more people than did the insurgents. In discussion of postrevolutionary policy, several leading figures in the new Haitian elite opposed the move to massacre the French and preferred instead to deport them. Many more later helped individuals to escape, and even Dessalines spared a random few. Yet the early historians—Madiou, explicitly, and Ardouin, obliquely—agree that the massacre of at least French men had widespread support in all social classes.⁴⁵ The decision to replace the European name Saint-Domingue with an Amerindian name similarly underlines the revolution’s unusually radical break with the colonial past. It symbolically erased the period of European occupation and declared a determination that the new state should include the entire island the Taínos supposedly had called Ayití. It thus foreshadowed the invasions of Spanish-speaking Santo Domingo in 1804–5 and Boyer’s annexation of it in 1822. Exactly how the name Haïti was chosen remains unknown. It appears without further explanation in the Declaration of Independence. The document’s injunction to “imitate those nations who . . . preferred to be exterminated” rather than lose their freedom is clearly meant to invoke the fate of the aboriginal Taínos. But no one has ever credited Boisrond-Tonnerre with specifically choosing the term; the historian Madiou vaguely affirmed that, by January 1, it was already “on everyone’s lips.”⁴⁶ The somewhat unorthodox French prose of Boisrond-Tonnerre is also often interpreted as a gesture of autonomy, an expression of the writer’s disdain for the colonizer’s language. Whether this is true or not, it is a singular irony that Boisrond-Tonnerre felt compelled, nevertheless, to compose the declaration in that language when it was not understood by the great majority of his fellow citizens, and he himself had a better command of Creole, the indigenous language of the new state. Creole languages enjoyed very little recognition anywhere until the mid-twentieth century, and a cultural nationalism developed in Haiti long after a sense of racial and political identity.⁴⁷

The Other Declaration It is well known that Dessalines entrusted Boisrond-Tonnerre with writing the declaration of January 1 after rejecting an earlier draft that he found uninspiring, which had been drawn up by his other secretaries headed by JeanJacques Charéron. The text has been lost, but it was supposedly very literary

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and based on the US Declaration of Independence.⁴⁸ Much less well known is the fact that Dessalines had already issued a declaration of independence on November 29, 1803, following the French army’s withdrawal. Thomas Madiou printed the document in his Histoire d’Haïti but dismissed it as apocryphal, partly because no text survived in Haiti; Beaubrun Ardouin does not even mention it.⁴⁹ Leslie Manigat, however, historian and former president, made a convincing case in 2005 that the document, which appeared in several foreign newspapers, must have been genuine.⁵⁰ Deborah Jenson has provided extensive background details on its publication in the US press.⁵¹ In his recent American Crucible, Robin Blackburn refers to the text, but confuses it with the January 1 declaration.⁵² Issued in the northeastern town of Fort-Liberté and signed by only three generals and the little-known secretary B. Aimé, this first declaration proclaims the independence of “Saint-Domingue.” The decision to rename the island “Haïti” could not have been taken, therefore, until the following month, December 1803, even though a vogue for Indian symbolism in the Armée Indigène had already appeared a year earlier, when the insurgents had briefly called themselves “Incas” or “children of the sun.”⁵³ Some evidence suggests that, then and later, Haitians of mixed racial descent, and especially southerners (like Boisrond-Tonnerre, Étienne Gérin, and Nicolas Geffrard), were those most attracted to Indian symbolism, so it may therefore be relevant that the three generals who signed this first declaration of independence were primarily of African descent and all from the North.⁵⁴ The narrow, regional character of the document doubtless helps explain why the country ended up with two declarations of independence. In 1799– 1800, a fierce civil war had divided the black elite of the North from the largely mixed-race elite of the South; the start of the war of independence in 1802 had found them on opposite sides, and despite their cooperation in defeating the French, relations between them remained delicate. One can understand that both parties might have decided that a nationally more inclusive document would be desirable. Perhaps the first declaration was intended from the beginning to be spontaneous and provisional, pending the gathering of leaders from all regions for a ceremonial occasion in a more central location. The upcoming start of the New Year, which was a well-established holiday even for most slaves, might have already been the obvious choice for the event.⁵⁵ Alternatively, the November document may simply reflect the inexperience of its authors and the novelty of their situation—at that time, the world had seen only three other declarations of independence. Finally, the significant differences between Haiti’s two declarations suggest that changes in policy might have necessitated a revision of the original text. It is particularly interesting that the declaration begins, “In the name of

HAITI’S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE35

the blacks and men of color.” Drawing attention in this manner to the two rival factions that had recently fought each other was no doubt meant as an expression of solidarity. It contrasts sharply, however, with Boisrond-Tonnerre’s declaration, which avoided such terms in favor of the unitary indigènes (natives), and with Dessalines’s 1805 constitution, which explicitly banned their use. The brief text uses the word “God” (Dieu) three times, and “rights” once, whereas those words are entirely absent from the three January 1 documents. Yet the most striking difference between the two declarations is the attitude they express toward the white colonists. The November text is in fact mainly directed to them. While it vows undying opposition to slavery and prejudice, it apologizes that some “innocent inhabitants” were killed during the revolution by “vengeful laborers and soldiers,” and it extends a fraternal hand to those willing to renounce their old prejudices and be part of the new society. It invites their return from exile. The contrast with the later document could hardly be greater. It weakens Deborah Jenson’s argument about “the unity and singularity of content and the similarly distinctive style of Dessalines’s early independence proclamations,” and it is not easy to explain.⁵⁶ Perhaps we should see in the first declaration a continuation of Toussaint Louverture’s multiracialism and desire to profit from the business skills of white landowners. Perhaps the document was specifically shaped by Henry Christophe or Augustin Clervaux, two of its three signatories, whom whites had previously considered among the most approachable of the generals.⁵⁷ Conversely, it may be that Dessalines was already meditating in November the massacres to come. This would mean that the assurances he made to the whites in his November 19, 1803 proclamation, urging them to stay, were never sincere, and that he was in fact laying a trap for them.⁵⁸ Exactly when their fate was sealed is not entirely certain. Both Madiou and Ardouin depict Dessalines as intent on vengeance from the beginning.⁵⁹ Indeed, although Dessalines had accepted responsibility in the evacuation convention for the eight hundred or so sick and wounded troops the French army left behind, he discreetly had them killed a few days later.⁶⁰ Yet Madiou also depicts disagreements among the elite, rising popular demand for a massacre, and the harmful influence of Dessalines’s advisors.⁶¹ And Ardouin thought (wrongly) that a decree issued February 22, 1804, ordered only a limited massacre that targeted those guilty of complicity in previous killings.⁶² Whatever role there was for contingency in the matter, the two declarations of independence obviously point in two different directions. The question is whether the difference indicates a genuine change in policy or, rather, a longterm and covert preparation of the postindependence massacre.

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Conclusion For most Atlantic World insurgents, slavery was primarily a metaphor, but in Saint-Domingue it became the central issue in the revolution. The Haitian Revolution was not just a revolt against colonial rulers, still less a conflict among people of a shared culture and identity; it was also a war against slave owners who had claimed most of the colonized as their own property and treated them as less than human. This basic fact imparted an extra degree of bitterness to the fifteen-year struggle and shaped its priorities. This distinctiveness is reflected in Haiti’s Declaration of Independence, which was unusual in its timing and political content, its treatment of the former colonizers, and in the fact it was not a single document.

Notes This essay is an expanded version of a paper presented at the Colegio de México in September 2010 and published as “La declaración de independencia de Haití,” trans. Erika Pani, in Las declaraciones de independencia: los textos fundamentales de las independencias americanas, ed. Alfredo Ávila, Jordana Dym, Erika Pani, (Mexico: El Colegio de México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2013), 121–31. 1. Contrast Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959, 1964); Jacques Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799 (New York: The Free Press, 1965); and Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713– 1826 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) with Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and Their Shared History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 2. Most influential in this respect were Yves Benot, La révolution française et la fin des colonies (Paris: La Découverte, 1987); and Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988). 3. 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 by the University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31, no. 1 (2006): 1–14; Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 4. Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).

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5. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Philippe R. Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801–1804 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011). 6. David Geggus, “The Haitian Revolution in Atlantic Perspective,” in The Atlantic World c. 1450–c. 1820, ed. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 7. Both, one a pamphlet, the other a broadside, were discovered by Julia Gaffield in The National Archives of the United Kingdom. See the introduction to this volume. The pamphlet version reached the Colonial Office in London via Jamaica on March 10, 1804: TNA, CO 137/111/1. The Times (London) published the proclamation, in English translation, on April 28. This translation appeared the following year in Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, Comprehending a View of the Principal Transactions in the Revolution of Saint Domingo (London: Albion Press, 1805), 442–46, which is the text used in David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 193–98. Gaffield’s discovery reveals that the English text is more accurate than the better-known French version published in 1848 in Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti (1847–48; repr. Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1989), 3:146–51, where the word fléaux (scourges) is rendered idéaux (ideals), and postérité as prospérité. 8. According to the account of the declaration ceremony in Madiou, Histoire, 3:144–52, the act was signed before the ceremony began but it was read out after the proclamation. 9. This is including Boisrond-Tonnerre, identified only as “secretary.” The document describes those who took the decision for independence as “the generals” but only twenty-four of the signatories held this rank. Two of the signatories were chefs de brigade (colonels), and ten of Dessalines’s secretaries/aides de camp were listed as officiers de l’armée (army officers). No doubt Boisrond also held a courtesy commission. None were “lawyers or journalists,” as stated in Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), 217. 10. The Times (London) reported this only on May 21, almost a month after publishing the proclamation. Deborah Jenson found a similar time lag in the US press: see Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 133. Although the three-part document was complete before late January, it was apparently distributed piecemeal to the foreign press. The third section was perhaps an afterthought. See below, note 30. According to Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti (Studies in Haitian history), 11 vols. (1853–60; Port-au-Prince: Fardin, 2005), 6:9, an eighteenth signatory was accidentally omitted. 11. Madiou, Histoire, 3:146. What Malick Ghachem, in his essay in this volume terms “Dessalines’s speech,” is not the speech he actually gave but the proclamation

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written and read out by Boisrond-Tonnerre. One can only speculate to what extent the two overlapped. 12. Above, note 7. On Boisrond-Tonnerre, see John Garrigus’s essay in this volume. 13. Historians have exaggerated the proportion of Africans in the slave population. In 1789, it was probably less than 55 percent, and it would have fallen considerably during the revolution. 14. Deborah Jenson, “Dessalines’s American Proclamations of the Haitian Independence,” Journal of Haitian Studies 15, no. 1/2 (2009): 72–102; Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 86–90. 15. Michel-Étienne Descourtilz, Voyages d’un naturaliste, et ses observations (Travels of a naturalist and his observations) (Paris: Dufart, 1809), 3:245–46. 16. On Louverture’s literacy, see Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, chap. 1; Philippe Girard, The Memoir of Toussaint Louverture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). On when he was freed, see David Geggus, “Toussaint Louverture and the Slaves of the Bréda Plantations,” Journal of Caribbean History 20 (1985–86): 30–48. On Dessalines: Jacques de Cauna, “Dessalines esclave de Toussaint?” OutreMers: Revue d’Histoire 100, no. 374–75 (2012): 319–22. 17. Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 89–93. 18. Copie d’une lettre des chefs des gens de couleur de la Croix des Bouquets (Copy of a letter by the leaders of the free people of color of Croix des Bouquets) (Portau-Prince, nd), in David Geggus, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2014), 70–71. 19. My translation. Cited in Gaétan Mentor, Histoire d’un crime politique (History of a political crime) (Port-au-Prince: Sogebank, 1999), 23. However, I suspect that this document, which can be found in more than one private collection, belongs to a group of forgeries that have circulated for several decades in Haiti and elsewhere. 20. My translation. Ardouin, Études, 6:7. 21. Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 94. 22. Ibid., 87–88. The author’s translation, “draped in gold cloth,” rather dramatizes Madiou’s description of Dessalines as “couvert d’habits dorés,” which I take to refer to his gold-braided general’s uniform. 23. My translation. Ardouin, Études, 6:7–9. 24. Patrick Tardieu’s essay in this volume documents a slightly earlier attribution, in the newspaper L’Union in August 1839. 25. Armitage, Declaration of Independence, 111. 26. David Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of SaintDomingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 46–78. 27. Compare Yves Benot, “The Insurgents of 1791, Their Leaders, and the Concept of Independence,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 99–110, with David Geggus, “The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” in The Age of Revolutions

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in Global Context, c. 1760–1840, ed. David Armitage and Sanjay Subramanyam (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 95–97. 28. David Geggus, “Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution,” in Profiles of Revolutionaries in Atlantic History, 1750–1850, ed. R. William Weisberger, Dennis P. Hupchick, and David L. Anderson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 115–35; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; 2nd ed. New York: Vintage, 1963); Yves Benot, La démence coloniale sous Napoléon (The colonial insanity under Napoléon) (Paris: La Découverte, 1992). 29. John Garrigus, “Colour, Class, and Identity on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution: Saint-Domingue’s Free Coloured Elite as Colons Américains,” Slavery and Abolition 17 (1996): 20–43. 30. The incompatibility of the title “governor” with national independence is one reason to think that at least the third section of the declaration was accepted as a fait accompli rather than discussed by its signatories, who might have pointed the problem out. 31. Unlike Malick Ghachem (see pp. 107–8 below), I do not think this “elusively” refers to past opposition to unspecified laws; it clearly is a threat regarding the future. I see nothing to support Ghachem’s idea (p. 99) that this was a “temporary necessity,” some sort of emergency declaration. 32. Geggus, “The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” 97–98. 33. See pages 99–100 below. 34. David Geggus, “The Influence of the Haitian Revolution on Blacks in Latin America and the Caribbean,” in Blacks, Coloureds and National Identity in NineteenthCentury Latin America, ed. Nancy Naro (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2003), 46. 35. I use the term “Haitians” for convenience; the text uses the term “indigènes d’Hayti.” 36. Paul Roussier, ed., Les lettres du général Leclerc, commandant en chef de l’armée de Saint-Domingue en 1802 (The letters of General Leclerc, commander-in-chief of the Army of Saint-Domingue in 1802) (Paris: Société de l’Histoire des Colonies Françaises, 1937), 238, 253. 37. Dessalines’s well-known April 28 proclamation, written by Juste Chanlatte, added a fourth factor: a collective act of vengeance would function as a blood pact that would reunite former slaves and anciens libres in an act of national reconciliation: Geggus, Haitian Revolution, xxxi, 169, 180–82. 38. Madiou, Histoire, 3:159–79. Madiou implies the killing began early in the month; other sources, later. 39. Madiou, Histoire, 3:179. The American Condy Raguet, who lived in Haiti at the beginning of the massacres, estimated that nine thousand were killed, twentyfive hundred of them in the city of Cap Haïtien: “Memoirs of Hayti,” in The PortFolio (March 1810), 209, 214; (April 1811), 307. Another Cap resident, Norbert Thoret,

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claimed more than forty-four hundred were killed in the town alone: La vie aventureuse de Norbert Thoret, dit l’Américain (The adventurous life of Norbert Thoret, known as the American), ed. Jean-Claude Nouët (Port-au-Prince: Editions du Portau-Prince, 2007), 35–42. American ships that left Cap Haïtien around April 30 reported in New York that between one and two thousand had perished there, twothirds of them women and children: Maurice Begouën-Demeaux, Stanislas Foäche: négociant de Saint-Domingue, 1737–1806 (Stanislas Foäche: Saint-Domingue merchant) (Paris: Librairie Larose, 1951), 252. Girard, Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon, 321, cites a British estimate of three thousand killed in the town but notes that only seventeen hundred whites had remained there after the evacuation five months earlier. 40. Leslie Manigat, Éventail d’histoire vivante d’Haïti: des préludes à la révolution de Saint-Domingue jusqu’à nos jours (1789–1999) (A panoply of Haiti’s vibrant history: from the eve of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to the present time [1789–1999]) (Port-au-Prince: CHUDAC, 2001), 420. 41. Madiou, Histoire, 3:145. I assume écritoire, sometimes translated as “desk,” referred to the old écritoire à plumes, or inkwell. 42. Leslie Manigat, Évolution et révolutions (Port-au-Prince: Média-Texte, 2007), 87–88. 43. Blackburn, American Crucible, 210–15. Priests and doctors were generally spared, as throughout the revolution. Some give credence to a February 22 (or 29) decree meant to limit the massacre to persons suspected of complicity in mass killings, but it appears to be an after-the-fact justification aimed at international opinion. See Ardouin, Études, 6:14n; Jenson, “Dessalines’s American Proclamations,” 85–86. 44. In James, The Black Jacobins, 370–74, the massacres are attributed to neocolonial manipulation but misdated by a year. James claims that British agents, and “the Americans . . . probably,” made continuation of trade conditional upon massacring all the French. He was unaware of Dessalines’s rejection of a British trade treaty. 45. Madiou, Histoire, 3:165, 177–79; Ardouin, Études, 6:17. Cf. Begouën-Demeaux, Stanislas Foäche, 242–43. 46. David Geggus, “The Naming of Haiti,” New West Indian Guide 71 (1997): 43–68. A French lawyer had already suggested in 1788 renaming the colony “Aïti.” 47. David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 40–46, 130–36. Robin Blackburn errs in suggesting that Louverture and Dessalines issued decrees in Creole: American Crucible, 212; David Geggus, “Rights, Resistance and Emancipation,” in Self-Evident Truths? Essays on Human Rights and the Enlightenment, ed. Kate E. Tunstall (New York: Continuum, 2012), 147. 48. Madiou, Histoire, 3:144. A portion, apparently preserved by Haitian freemasons, appears in Gaétan Mentor, Les fils noirs de la veuve: histoire de la francmaçonnerie en Haïti (The widow’s black sons: a history of freemasonry in Haiti)

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(Pétionville, Haiti: Gaétan Mentor, 2003), 168–69. Like Boisrond-Tonnerre and Chanlatte, Charéron (?–1810) had been educated in France and was a proponent of the massacres. 49. Madiou, Histoire, 3:125n1; Ardouin, Études, 6:6–7. 50. Leslie Manigat, “Une brève analyse-commentaire critique d’un document historique” (A brief and critical analytical commentary on a historical document), Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire et de Géographie 221 (2005): 44–56; Times (London), February 6, 1804. In the 1820s, however, the document was falsified by adding to it the signature of Alexandre Pétion, hero of the mulâtriste (promulatto) faction of the West and South. 51. Jenson, “Dessalines’s American Proclamations,” 82–85. 52. Blackburn, American Crucible, 212. 53. This may have been a reference to the Andean rebellions of 1780–81, but more likely it was due to a local belief that the Taínos were descended from the Incas. See Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 214; and the Times (London), September 1, 1804. 54. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 214–15. The generals were the exslaves Dessalines (1758–1806) and Henry Christophe (1757–1820), and mulâtre libre (free mulatto) Augustin Clervaux (1772–1804). 55. January 1 was the Feast of Circumcision in the Catholic calendar. It was one of the religious holidays retained in Saint-Domingue after the Vatican agreed in 1786 to reduce their number to ten. Surviving collections of plantation papers suggest that most of these holidays were generally observed. 56. Jenson, “Dessalines’s American Proclamations,” 82. 57. For example, on the eve of the French invasion, General Leclerc’s instructions had listed them among the “blacks well disposed toward the whites,” and Clervaux had surrendered without fighting: Roussier, ed., Les lettres du général Leclerc, 90, 270. However, unlike some senior officers, Christophe did not oppose the 1804 massacres, and Clervaux in fact took a prominent part in them. 58. Madiou, Histoire, 3:120. 59. Ibid., 3:125, 141–42, 144, 162; Ardouin, Études, 5:99–100; 6:7, 12. 60. Madiou, Histoire, 3:129. 61. Ibid., 3:152, 159–60, 177. 62. See above, note 43.

“Victims of Our Own Credulity and Indulgence” The Life of Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre JOHN GARRIGUS

We know very little about the life of Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre (1776– 1806), the man who is said to have written the Haitian Declaration of Independence. The question of whether Boisrond-Tonnerre was the intellectual author of this text, or merely the amanuensis for his employer, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, is taken up by Deborah Jenson and David Geggus in their contributions to this volume. The document is notable for the violence of its imagery and tone. It portrays the French as ferocious animals to be expelled from Haitian society, culture, and even history. In the name of the dead— “your wives, your husbands, your brothers, your sisters . . . your children, your suckling babies”—it calls Haitians to an everlasting vigilance against these former oppressors. Writing in the 1840s, Thomas Madiou was the first Haitian historian to publish the story of Dessalines assigning Boisrond-Tonnerre the task of writing a declaration that expressed his thoughts, after hearing the secretary blurt out, “To prepare the independence act, we need the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for a desk, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.”¹ But Madiou says little about Boisrond-Tonnerre’s life before that night. Much of what is commonly cited about his biography instead comes from Joseph Saint-Rémy and Beaubrun Ardouin, Haitian historians publishing in the 1850s, both of them from Boisrond-Tonnerre’s native southern peninsula. Saint-Rémy’s edition of Boisrond-Tonnerre’s 1804 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Haïti, published in 1851, included an introduction about the author with biographical details.² Beaubrun Ardouin published his elevenvolume Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti starting in 1853. For both historians, the declaration was an embarrassing document. In a time when Haiti still had limited diplomatic and commercial relations with the powers of the day, internationally minded Haitians saw the declaration as partially responsible for this outsider status. Its emotional, rather than philosophic, language was a reminder of the violence Dessalines had ordered

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against whites and biracial Haitians in the months and years after proclaiming independence. Saint-Rémy and Ardouin both blamed Boisrond-Tonnerre for inspiring such massacres in 1804 with proclamations that generated mob violence against the French and against prominent Haitians in Les Cayes in January, in Cap Haïtien in April, and in Port-au-Prince and other towns that same month. For Saint-Rémy, Boisrond-Tonnerre was “full of vice, vanity, surreptitious, a treacherous informer and a bad counselor, he became, so to speak, the lost soul of the new government.” He admitted, “I would have preferred to keep silent about a man who was more deadly than useful.”³ Saint-Rémy envisioned a very different Haiti from the isolated vengeful one described in the declaration. As he explained, “We proclaim, to the contrary, for the whole American archipelago . . . that well-being only grows through free trade, that knowledge only deepens through the exchange of ideas, that populations only become more civilized [poli] through contact with each other.”⁴ In closing his introduction, Saint-Rémy declared BoisrondTonnerre’s Mémoires “fit to read and discuss without danger” now that the reader understood the author’s “tempestuous character, his errors, and the importance of avoiding racial categories.”⁵ To portray that “tempestuous character” Saint-Rémy seems to have created the most famous biographical detail associated with Boisrond-Tonnerre, how the French word “thunder” came to be part of his last name. SaintRémy claims that a lightning bolt struck at the very moment of BoisrondTonnerre’s birth, inspiring his father to give him this distinctive name. Similarly, to downplay the mulâtre versus noir racial politics that afflicted nineteenth-century Haiti, Saint-Rémy identified the father, Mathurin Boisrond, as a mechanic-builder “from a family long out of slavery” that had become rich. This description obscured the fact that Boisrond-Tonnerre belonged to at least the third generation of a slave-owning planter family. Saint-Rémy did describe Boisrond-Tonnerre’s connection to his uncle, LouisFrançois Boisrond, who represented Saint-Domingue at the Council of Five Hundred in France after 1796. But he made little of the family’s social identity as members of the mixed-race or “mulatto” class or of their connections to other prominent members of this group.⁶ Beaubrun Ardouin, publishing in 1853, also privileged a psychological rather than social portrait of BoisrondTonnerre, describing him as brilliant but unstable and “dominated by a deadly ambition that would later be his undoing.”⁷ An attempt to reconstruct Boisrond-Tonnerre’s biography, or at least his social background, tests these characterizations and may help us understand how his experiences affected the distinctive tone of the Haitian declaration. Although nineteenth-century historians wrote little about BoisrondTonnerre’s life before or during the Haitian Revolution, French colonial

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records, especially notarized deeds, reveal the social milieu the Boisrond family occupied from the 1750s to the 1790s. Those sources, combined with Boisrond-Tonnerre’s published narrative of the years from 1802 to 1804, support the argument that the incendiary tone of the declaration he wrote for Dessalines was a reaction to the extraordinary violence of those years. There are no sources that would allow us to gauge Boisrond-Tonnerre’s personality or reconstruct his political views about French colonialism before January 1, 1804. But evidence does suggest that he had a close relationship with Julien Raimond, the most prominent free man of color in French Revolutionary politics. Raimond, who inspired French antiracist legislation in 1791 and 1792, was roughly the age of Boisrond-Tonnerre’s father and oversaw his education in the metropole. Both Boisrond-Tonnerre and Raimond were in France through the first half of the Haitian Revolution. Boisrond-Tonnerre probably accompanied Raimond back to Saint-Domingue in 1796. From that point on, I suggest, both men experienced profound changes in their political loyalties to France.

The Boisrond Family to the 1770s Judging from the socioeconomic history of his family, Louis Félix BoisrondTonnerre had an upbringing and social indoctrination nearly identical to that of other wealthy free men of mixed ancestry who became political and intellectual leaders during the Haitian Revolution. That family background, also seen in the well-known cases of Julien Raimond and Vincent Ogé jeune, combined a successful economic conservatism with a striking degree of political self-confidence vis-à-vis white society.⁸ In four ways, the Boisrond family matched other families of color who had reached a notable level of wealth by the end of the eighteenth century. First, they were descended from early eighteenth-century French colonists, men who came to the Antilles at a time when racial categories were far more nebulous than they were in the 1780s. For example Marie Catherine Boisron was the mother of Claude-Charles Gelée, who by the 1760s was a wealthy planter in the Les Cayes Parish in Saint-Domingue’s southern peninsula. Boisron had married Gelée’s father, from Normandy, in the 1720s when he first came to Saint-Domingue. By the 1760s, her son faced rumors that his mother was a woman of color. In a formal investigation, the colony’s highest court found that Boisron’s parents had been married in 1698 in the island of Saint-Christophe, where France had its earliest Caribbean colony. Boisron’s own mother, Claude-Charles Gelée’s grandmother, was a native of that island with no surviving baptismal certificate, which Gelée’s enemies used to support their claim that she was black. Gelée insisted that this undoc-

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umented grandmother was an Indian—a strategy that according to Hilliard d’Auberteuil, many wealthy families used to clear themselves of charges of black ancestry.⁹ There is no evidence that Marie Catherine Boisron was related to BoisrondTonnerre, though she lived in the same region of Saint-Domingue as his grandparents. But the story of her Saint-Christophe origins and the undocumented status of her mother there suggest the family’s deep roots in French Caribbean colonization. Other Boisronds probably also came to SaintDomingue’s southern peninsula as experienced colonists. In 1720, as this region officially opened to settlement, local officials made a detailed census of its residents. This document shows that there were already two Boisrond estates in Torbec Parish, where Boisrond-Tonnerre was born in 1776. Little is known about these early Boisronds except that one of them was half owner of a sugar estate with ninety-nine slaves, the third largest estate in the entire peninsula. The other Boisrond estate was growing indigo, but it had eightynine slaves. To have these large numbers of enslaved workers just as the peninsula opened for settlement suggests that these two Boisronds came to the colony with considerable wealth and/or colonial experience, perhaps from Saint-Christophe.¹⁰ A second characteristic that the Boisronds shared with other propertied free families of color was a strategy of marriage alliances with other propertied people of color. There is no document linking the Boisronds named in the 1720 census with François Boisrond, Boisrond-Tonnerre’s grandfather. However in 1753, when François first appears in the surviving notarial records, identified as a “free mulatto,” he already owned land in the town of Torbec, which suggests that he was the child of a wealthy planter, not an ex-slave.¹¹ By 1762 he was married to Marie Hérard, a free woman of color whose white father left his sugar plantation to be divided up among his five free mixed-race children. In 1761 Boisrond bought his sister-in-law’s share in the sugar estate.¹² This was an expensive purchase, for Boisrond could have used that sum, twenty thousand livres, to buy ten to twenty enslaved African workers. But like other free men of color in this region, including Julien Raimond down the coast at Aquin, François Boisrond understood the importance of improving plantation properties to increase their value. This was the third aspect of the Boisrond family’s success: long-term investments in their estates. François Boisrond was known in Torbec Parish not only as a planter, but also as a skilled builder.¹³ In fourteen years, Boisrond and his slaves transformed his wife’s sugar estate. In 1775, after the couple died, a white planter and royal judge bought their estate, valued at fifty thousand livres in 1761, together with its enslaved workers, for five hundred thousand livres.¹⁴ Although Boisrond’s

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creditors received substantial sums, the profits from this sale helped launch the next generation of five Boisrond children into prosperous lives and marriages of their own. The fourth characteristic that the Boisronds shared with other established free families of color was a high degree of political self-confidence vis-à-vis white society. In February 1769, François Boisrond along with several other free colored planters and members of his extended family in Torbec Parish openly opposed a controversial reform of the colonial militia. The local royal commander had arrested one of the mixed-race planters, and the colony’s governor general ordered the punishment of the other “troublemakers” as well. Boisrond and one of his sons were named in this account.¹⁵ Within a few days, royal spies reported that Torbec’s men of color were planning a raid on the royal jail where one of their former officers was under arrest.¹⁶ The looming reform, which was also deeply unpopular with many rich and poor whites, represented a serious blow to the social status of wealthy men of color. Since before the 1730s, Saint-Domingue’s free men of color had mustered in their own separate militia units, apart from ex-slaves and whites. This separation had allowed them to select their own officers, subject to the approval of royal administrators. This meant that respected men, like Boisrond’s free colored neighbor Jacques Boury, could hold command positions parallel to those held by members of the local white elite. The 1769 reform would change that. The Crown wanted to reserve all officer positions for whites, including command of free colored units. After the reform, no free man of color would be able to serve in a position higher than sergeant or quartermaster.¹⁷ By the end of March 1769, royal troops sent from Port-au-Prince had confronted Torbec’s white and free colored rebels as well as their colleagues in the West Province. Officials arrested and even executed a handful of white and free colored men. All of these men were poor, however, for the government did not want to alienate wealthy planters who were white or free colored. Boisrond was not punished. As I have argued elsewhere, despite its short duration and the authorities’ mild reaction, the militia revolt was a major event in Saint-Domingue’s political and social history, with special significance for elite men of color, whose respected place in society now came under attack in other areas of public life.¹⁸ The fact that royal authorities identified François Boisrond and at least one of his sons among the opponents of the reform suggests that already by mid-century the family saw itself among the leaders of local society. Despite their growing prosperity and careful strategies, the Boisronds were apparently not afraid to take a stance.

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Boisrond-Tonnerre’s Parents: Rising Prominence in the 1780s About 1776, the year that Boisrond-Tonnerre was born in Torbec Parish, François Boisrond died. His grandfather’s death and the profitable sale of his estate prepared the way for the rising prosperity of Boisrond-Tonnerre’s father Mathurin and his four siblings. Boisrond-Tonnerre’s aunt, Marie Françoise Boisrond, married the planter Pierre Braquehais, a free man of color who would be politically active with her brothers in the 1790s.¹⁹ Another aunt, Marie Adelaide Boisrond, married a white planter, Alexis Descoubes.²⁰ Within five years of François Boisrond’s death, all three sons had moved away from Torbec, becoming planters in their own right. That prosperity was not based on the new profits from coffee that excited many of the Europeans coming to Saint-Domingue.²¹ Coffee was not an important aspect of the wealth of Boisronds or their free colored neighbors. Of forty-three contracts involving members of the Boisrond family in the 1780s, only two mentioned coffee.²² The Boisronds were not nouveaux riches, but rather conservative families who built their prosperity over generations. Boisrond-Tonnerre’s father and his two uncles inherited money from their father and married propertied women. Mathurin Boisrond had married Marie Louise Félix, a free woman of color, around 1776, when Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, their oldest child, was born. Just as his father François had done, Mathurin took lands belonging to his wife’s family, improved them, and sold them at a profit. By 1780, when Boisrond-Tonnerre would have been four, Mathurin Boisrond had done this twice.²³ Then, from Les Cayes, he moved his family eastward to Aquin Parish. The Boisronds settled in Aquin at the very moment when that parish’s free colored planters, led by Julien Raimond, were about to begin lobbying Versailles for racial reforms to benefit wealthy men of color. Mathurin’s brother, Louis-François, had already made this move. In 1781 he married Marie Rose Boissé, a wealthy widow who owned an indigo estate in Aquin, not far from Julien Raimond’s land. The Boisrond-Boissé alliance had more than double the average property of other free colored marriages in this region.²⁴ This uncle, Louis-François Boisrond, was also Boisrond-Tonnerre’s godfather. In Aquin he enjoyed the kind of respect that led the local royal judge to summon him with other free colored planters to nominate a guardian for a young orphan.²⁵ In 1784 another uncle, Claude Boisrond, and his wife sold the second of their two plantations in Cavaillon Parish and bought slaves and prime river land in Aquin.²⁶ Within months they traded this property for a larger estate in the upper Aquin plain. That same year, 1784, Mathurin Boisrond, Boisrond-Tonnerre’s father, also purchased a plantation in Aquin.²⁷

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In 1784, Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre turned eight years old. As it turned out, Julien Raimond, who became a close political colleague of BoisrondTonnerre’s uncle and godfather, Louis-François, left Saint-Domingue for France that very year. Raimond’s new wife was a free colored widow whose previous husband, a white man, had left her a seigneurial property in western France to sell on behalf of their children. Raimond himself had been educated in France and for several years he had been writing memoranda to the Naval Ministry at Versailles, arguing for new colonial laws to reduce racial discrimination in Saint-Domingue.²⁸ He had also been raising money for this cause from his free colored neighbors, including the “les trois frères Boisrond.”²⁹ Raimond would educate his new stepchildren in the metropole, and he would eventually oversee the French education of his nieces and nephews as well. There is no evidence of when Boisrond-Tonnerre left the colony for France, but it seems likely that he was among the children who accompanied the Raimond family across the Atlantic. He would have been eight; Vincent Ogé jeune was roughly eleven years old when he traveled to France for school.³⁰ Boisrond-Tonnerre’s French education left almost no documentary evidence. But it seems quite likely that his distinctive surname came from this formative experience. On July 12, 1791, when Boisrond-Tonnerre would have been fifteen, his uncle Louis-François wrote to Julien Raimond asking him to send the Boisrond nieces and nephews back to Saint-Domingue. Given the political chaos of that year, and the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue that started a month after Boisrond posted his letter, it seems unlikely that Raimond complied with this request. The Boisrond children would have stayed in the metropole, where Raimond was also overseeing the education of his own nephews and stepchildren. In 1791 one of those nephews, Pierre Julien Raimond, then in his midtwenties, was living in the village of Tonnerre where he had married a woman. The town, a day or two outside of Paris, was already home to Pierre Simon Jacquesson, a former planter from Torbec or Les Cayes Parish in Saint-Domingue. In 1789 Jacquesson was the lieutenant of the Tonnerre constabulary. The Boisronds might have known this Jacquesson, but they certainly knew his kinsman Henri Jacquesson, who had been a notary in Torbec Parish and had drafted many contracts for the Boisrond family there.³¹ What this suggests is that Julien Raimond installed the young Louis Félix Boisrond in the French town of Tonnerre to attend school in a community that was already home to Raimond’s nephew and other familiar names from Saint-Domingue. Tonnerre was close enough to Paris to be convenient, yet it was largely insulated from the revolutionary events of the capital. The young man seems likely to have styled himself Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre to distin-

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guish himself from his uncle and guardian Louis-François Boisrond, who arrived in France in 1796. During more than a decade, while he was in France, Boisrond-Tonnerre’s relationship with his family would have been largely mediated through Julien Raimond. Raimond’s closest contact among the three Boisrond brothers was Boisrond-Tonnerre’s uncle Louis-François Boisrond, who became an important political figure during the French Revolution. On March 15, 1789, probably acting on Raimond’s advice from Paris, Louis-François Boisrond joined Raimond’s brother François and others from Aquin in petitioning the naval secretary for the right to choose their own representatives for France’s approaching Estates General.³² Later that year, when angry whites tried to lynch Guillaume Labadie, one of Raimond’s free colored supporters in Aquin, a similar group visited Louis-François Boisrond’s home, seizing his papers. Boisrond was not at home because he and François Raimond were in Les Cayes, answering questions from the provincial assembly meeting there.³³ In 1790 he continued be a target as colonial whites grew angrier about Raimond’s actions in Paris. According to Boisrond, whites had intercepted his letters and he was in danger of arrest.³⁴ In 1791, as political events turned in favor of free men of color, LouisFrançois Boisrond was elected president of the town of Saint-Louis. The following year he was one of two men entrusted to collect Aquin’s voluntary patriotic contributions.³⁵ In October 1792 the French commissioner Sonthonax chose Boisrond and François Raimond to sit with other free colored representatives in Cap Français.³⁶ When Sonthonax freed the slaves in the North Province in August 1793, he prevailed on Boisrond, who owned dozens of slaves, to travel throughout the region to announce the news to whites.³⁷ In 1795, Aquin chose Boisrond to represent the parish at a colonial assembly, where other delegates named him to represent Saint-Domingue in Paris at the Council of Five Hundred in August 1796. He left his Aquin plantation with sixty-four cultivators in the hands of his two former head slaves.³⁸ About the time Louis-François arrived in Paris, his nephew Louis Félix was back in Saint-Domingue.³⁹ Sometime around 1796 Louis Félix married Catherine Lamoureux in Aquin. This marriage followed a pattern of intermarriage common among wealthy free people of color in the 1790s. The bride was ten years older than the groom, and the couple were distant cousins, both descended from the Félix family. In 1798 their first child was born in the town of Saint-Louis, not far from Aquin.⁴⁰ The timing of Boisrond-Tonnerre’s reappearance in the colony suggests he returned home with Julien Raimond, who arrived back in the colony in May 1796 as a member of third revolutionary commission to Saint-Domingue. In December 1798 Boisrond-Tonnerre tendered a bid on a sequestered plan-

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tation in Aquin, one taken over by the colony’s revolutionary government because its owner had fled Saint-Domingue.⁴¹ It is telling that this was one of his first surviving deeds in the colony, because Raimond’s work as commissioner was to orchestrate such leases. As Saint-Domingue’s first nonwhite revolutionary commissioner and as a former successful planter, Raimond headed the Bureau des Domaines, leasing out abandoned plantations on behalf of the colonial government, which badly needed the revenue. His enemies accused him of keeping the best properties for himself, family members, or cronies.⁴² Indeed, many of Raimond’s stepchildren, nieces, and nephews, who had been longtime residents of France, returned to SaintDomingue around 1798.⁴³ By September 23, 1799, Boisrond-Tonnerre was himself working in this branch of the government, stationed at Jérémie, near the tip of Saint-Domingue’s southern peninsula.⁴⁴ Boisrond-Tonnerre’s uncle and godfather, Louis-François, died in Paris in 1800, where he had joined the reconstituted Amis des noirs in 1797, participating in its meetings about a new French colonial order based on free labor and racial equality.⁴⁵ We know little about how the rest of the Boisrond family, nearly all of them planters and former slave-owners, survived the end of slavery in 1793 and 1794. However, these events and the associated violence devastated the wealth of Raimond and his brothers, who owned older and more productive properties in Aquin Parish, often close to the Boisronds.⁴⁶ We also know very little about how the Boisrond family fared under the government of André Rigaud, the colored general who had worked closely with Raimond and Louis-François Boisrond in the early 1790s. When Raimond returned to the colony, although he was considered mixed race, he refused to recognize Rigaud’s authority over the southern peninsula, instead throwing his support to Rigaud’s rival, the black general Toussaint Louverture. In 1799 Louverture sent Jean-Jacques Dessalines to invade the southern peninsula and destroy Rigaud’s “separatist” regime. After a year of heavy fighting, the South came under Louverture’s control. Was Boisrond-Tonnerre caught up in these events? He was working in Jérémie for the Bureau des Domaines from September 1799 to September 1801. If he were identified as a client of Julien Raimond, the armies of Louverture and Dessalines might have spared him. His younger brother, Laurent Boisrond, was an army officer who did survive the war between Louverture and Rigaud. By 1801, a year after Rigaud’s defeat, Laurent Boisrond had formed a partnership with Louverture’s commander of the Aquin Parish. The men agreed that their workers would cut timber on Boisrond’s lands and haul it to town. In this case, the commander and the young officer would each provide one-half of the workers.⁴⁷

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Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre and Julien Raimond Given the paucity of sources on Boisrond-Tonnerre in the late 1790s, it is profitable to consider his relationship with Julien Raimond. The older man’s carefully worded proposals for incremental social change in the early 1790s seem quite remote from the vivid imagery and passionate tone of the 1804 Declaration of Independence or of Boisrond-Tonnerre’s Mémoires. Yet Raimond and Boisrond-Tonnerre were both a products of the same economically conservative, legally minded, Francophile social milieu. Setting aside the nineteenth-century notion of Boisrond-Tonnerre’s stormy character, it seems likely that this young man, who had spent half his life in a small French town, may have had a perspective on political events that was similar to that of Raimond, who would have been his main connection with SaintDomingue until both of them returned home.⁴⁸ Despite a thirty-year age difference, both men would have experienced similar shock and disorientation as they reentered colonial life and learned how to survive in the highly charged identity politics of the late 1790s. In 1798 Raimond’s letters to his fellow commissioner Sonthonax resonated with despair and disorientation, emotions that had never been a part of his correspondence, even throughout his long imprisonment during the Reign of Terror. He begged Sonthonax not to return to France and leave him alone in Saint-Domingue, “isolated and surrounded by men who have become my enemies though I do not know how I caused this.”⁴⁹ Absent from colonial politics during the decade that first saw the rise of influential mixed-race generals like André Rigaud and then even more powerful black leaders like Toussaint Louverture, Raimond seems not to have understood how to position himself politically. Although in Paris he had been the very face of SaintDomingue’s free colored class, in Saint-Domingue he eventually sided with Louverture, who appreciated his skill at rebuilding émigré plantations and made him Director of the National Domain in 1800.⁵⁰ Boisrond-Tonnerre’s position was quite similar to that of Raimond. Both men possessed a level of literacy and French cultural knowledge that made them obvious candidates for positions in the colonial government. But that same European education raised questions about their cultural identity and loyalty to Saint-Domingue’s new black leaders. In a similar way, both men’s family experiences in plantation investment and transatlantic commerce suggested they could help rebuild Saint-Domingue. But these credentials may also have produced doubts about their long-term opposition to slavery. What we do possess is Boisrond-Tonnerre’s 1804 Mémoires, probably written in the months after he wrote the Declaration of Independence for Dessalines. In the original 1804 edition, the narrative section of the Mémoires

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consists of ninety pages devoted almost entirely to the events of 1802 and 1803. Boisrond-Tonnerre described his subject as limited to “the brief but unfortunately too long period in which these monsters were in SaintDomingue,” a reference to the Leclerc expedition sent by Napoléon to restore metropolitan control of the colony. He ended his historical account with a single-paragraph description of Dessalines’s victory over Rochambeau at the city of Cap Français.⁵¹ The bulk of the Mémoires, like the declaration, describes the violence committed by the French and their allies in 1802 and 1803. Boisrond-Tonnerre writes mostly in the third person, saying little about his sources. But so much of his narrative is built around events in the southern peninsula that it is clear that he is drawing on his own experiences. In 1802, when the French expedition arrived, he was serving as the local administrator or chef de section in Cavaillon Parish, where his uncles had built and sold valuable estates. According to tradition, in July 1803 as French violence against the local population increased and a resistance force commanded by the mixed-race general Geffrard reached the southern peninsula, Boisrond-Tonnerre left his post in the town of Saint-Louis and joined Geffrard’s forces camped on the nearby Les Cayes plain. When Dessalines, Geffrard’s commanding officer, arrived at the encampment, Boisrond-Tonnerre accepted a position as secretary of this former slave who was leading the fight against the French.⁵² Boisrond-Tonnerre’s description of the months before his meeting with Dessalines suggests he was himself under pressure from the French to help them maintain order. He describes a general hostility among the French towards all former slaves, including those who had become distinguished military officers, prosperous merchants, or farmers. This resulted in mass killings that eventually reached local officials—men like Boisrond-Tonnerre himself. “In Les Cayes, there was killing daily. They had just hanged the commander of Petit-Trou, a young man of color, and Bardet, who had been sent down from battalion head to police captain in the same place as a reward for his attachment to the French, was drowned in the harbor of Les Cayes. [Note: Beware the French, lovers of the whites!]”⁵³ Near this section where he describes the execution of men who held offices like his, Boisrond-Tonnerre inserted a pair of long footnotes that illustrate how personally he was involved in this era. The first note describes the firing squad execution of Charlemagne Hérard, a young man charged with playing a prank against a white planter. Hérard, who was likely BoisrondTonnerre’s cousin, was executed in the central square of Aquin, where Boisrond-Tonnerre had lived as a child.⁵⁴ The execution was ordered by Nérette, a colonial officer of color whose aspirations would have been quite

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familiar to the Boisrond and Raimond families in the 1780s. But now the situation had changed. Nérette, “whose idea of heaven was to go to France and play an important role there because of his wealth, would have hanged his own father with his own hands.”⁵⁵ Then, in the next footnote, now written in the first person, Boisrond-Tonnerre described visiting a naval frigate in the Saint-Louis harbor as twenty-two local officials were brought on board and chained in the ship’s hold. A few days later, under Nérette’s orders, a French port official, Kerpoisson, suffocated the men with sulfur fumes and drowned them. None of them had been charged with any specific crime.⁵⁶ Such experiences had a profound effect on many men who had sided with the French. On November 13, 1802, Pierre Cangé, a mulâtre landowner who had risen to general in the French army wrote a colleague about the atrocities they both had witnessed: “Like me you have seen thousands of black and red [mulâtre] men, women and children drowned and hanged; what have they done? How can they accuse children of crimes deserving death? Such things have never been seen under any government.”⁵⁷ Boisrond’s Mémoires reveal the deep effect that the events of 1802 and 1803 had on his psyche, and perhaps his sense of personal identity. He experienced the war of independence as a minor official and aspiring rebuilder of plantations whose education and family background might have made him naturally sympathetic to the French, at least at first. What he discovered was that men like him would either be victims, like those drowned in the SaintLouis harbor, or perpetrators of these crimes, like Nérette.

Conclusion The little we know about Boisrond-Tonnerre’s life before or during the revolution suggests that nineteenth-century authors exaggerated his personality and downplayed his social status in order to distance themselves from the violent and isolating language of the Declaration of Independence he wrote for Dessalines. The history of the Boisrond family suggests that Boisrond-Tonnerre was raised in an environment that was economically conservative yet politically assertive; and that his family had deep creole roots and saw itself as part of the natural elite of its region. Boisrond-Tonnerre’s connections with Julien Raimond and his years in France might well have amplified these influences. When he returned to Saint-Domingue he appears to have been trying to return to the planting activity that had distinguished his family, bidding on plantations like Raimond himself. At the same time he was taking his place in local government service, as chef de section.

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Raimond, who died before the arrival of the Leclerc expedition, underwent a kind of change of identity as he adjusted to the new racial and economic climate of Saint-Domingue after over a decade in France, a change that led many former admirers to describe him as cynical and ambitious. Boisrond-Tonnerre may have experienced a similar shift, especially in 1803 as the radical aims of the Leclerc expedition and its white supporters became increasingly obvious in the South Province. If Boisrond-Tonnerre had harbored any dream of joining the French colonial elite as a planter or official, the massacres, arbitrary arrests, and executions of his colleagues seem to have changed his mind. These events appear to have convinced him that race, more than economic status or cultural loyalty, was shaping the new French regime. He witnessed events that proved to him that the French were applying a near-genocidal solution to the problem of who would rule SaintDomingue after Toussaint Louverture. This reconstruction of Boisrond-Tonnerre’s pre-1804 experiences suggests that the writer of the Haitian Declaration of Independence was probably not the impetuous figure depicted by nineteenth-century historians, despite the strong, almost racial language he used to describe the French. Instead, a different picture emerges: that of a young man from a privileged, slave-owning family, a figure with deep creole roots who had nevertheless spent his formative years in rural France. He had a stronger connection than previously believed with Julien Raimond, one of the more conservative and prominent of the free colored political elite. And the strong imagery of the declaration may reflect the traumas experienced by an upwardly aspiring planter and minor colonial official, who, despite his deep roots in Saint-Domingue, had never experienced the kind of racial violence that swept through the colony in 1802 and 1803.

Notes My sincere thanks to David Geggus, who helped me correct some important errors in an earlier draft of this chapter. 1. Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti: Tome III, de 1803 a’ 1807 (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1989), 145; the translation used here is from Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 201. 2. Pierre Buteau, “Introduction,” in Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Haïti, by Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, ed. Pierre Buteau (1804; repr. Port-au Prince: Editions Antilles, 1991), 5. 3. Joseph Saint-Rémy, “Etude historique et critique,” in Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Haïti, par Boisrond-Tonnerre, précédés de différents actes politiques dus à sa

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plume et d’une étude historique et critique par Saint-Rémy (Paris: France Libraire, 1851), vii, ix, xi, xv; see also Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti (Paris: Dézobry et E. Magdeleine, 1855), 6:103, 119. 4. Saint-Rémy, “Etude historique et critique,” xxii. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., viii, notes 1 and 2. 7. Ardouin, Études, 5:418. It should be said that Ardouin’s portrait of BoisrondTonnerre is based on more than the text of the declaration. He describes BoisrondTonnerre manipulating Dessalines after independence, provoking massacres of French colonists and even encouraging policies that would cause rebellions. See Ardouin, 6:42–43, 98, 103, 119, 225, 264, 271. 8. John D. Garrigus, “Opportunist or Patriot?: Julien Raimond (1744–1801) and the Haitian Revolution,” Slavery and Abolition 28, no. 1 (2007): 1–21; Garrigus, “Vincent Ogé jeune (1757–91): Social Class and Free Colored Mobilization on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution,” The Americas 68, no. 1 (July 2011): 33–62. While Vincent Ogé’s business strategies in the 1780s were hardly conservative, his family appears to have followed the more measured strategies outlined below. 9. Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue . . . , 2 vols. (Saint-Denis: Publications de la Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-mer, 2004), 1493; Archives Nationales Outre-Mer (henceforth ANOM)M F3273, p. 213; Michel René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue, ouvrage politique et législatif (Paris: 1776), 2:82. 10. ANOM G1509, No. 17. 11. Dépôt des papiers publiques des colonies, Notariat, Saint-Domingue, register (henceforth,. ANOM SDOM) 1600, July 26, 1784. 12. ANOM SDOM 54, September 13, 1787. 13. In 1764 a white planter from a neighboring parish paid one thousand livres to put a young man in a five-year apprenticeship in Torbec Parish with “Sieur François Boisrond and Claude François Boisrond his son both builders.” ANOM SDOM 130, July 29, 1764. 14. ANOM SDOM 1601, January 11, 1785. 15. ANOM F3182, d’Argout to Rohan, February 4, 1769. 16. Ibid. 17. This is the argument of John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 109–40. 18. See chapters four and five in Garrigus, Before Haiti; for a more detailed account that places less emphasis on the racial aspects of this standoff, see Charles Frostin, Les révoltes blanches a’ Saint-Domingue (Paris: l’École, 1975), 297–341. 19. ANOM SDOM 54, September 13, 1787. 20. Ibid.; ANOM SDOM 1601, January 11, 1785. 21. The importance of coffee profits for the rise of free coloredwealth and self-

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confidence is the central argument of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Motion in the System: Coffee, Color, and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue,” Review 5 (1982): 343–48, 354, 364; Stewart King identifies coffee as the main crop of the wealthiest free colored families in Saint-Domingue’s North and West Provinces in Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 123. 22. ANOM SDOM 1465, July 27, 1784. 23. ANOM SDOM 1596, November 21, 1780; ANOM SDOM 1598, December 20, 1782. 24. ANOM SDOM 1464, April 25, 1781; ANOM SDOM 1465, February 15, 1784; ANOM SDOM 1465, December 12, 1785; ANOM SDOM 1464, September 28, 1780. See Garrigus, Before Haiti, 175–88 for a discussion of these larger numbers. 25. ANOM SDOM 1465, April 12, 1784. 26. ANOM SDOM 1465, July 27, 1784; ANOM SDOM 1464, April 25, 1781. 27. ANOM SDOM 1596, June 20, 1780; ANOM SDOM 1600, April 12, 1784; ANOM SDOM 1600, June 28, 1784; ANOM SDOM 1600, July 26, 1784; ANOM SDOM 1465, April 19, 1784; ANOM SDOM 1465, April 9, 1784; ANOM SDOM 1465, July 27, 1784; ANOM SDOM 1465, May 23, 1785; ANOM SDOM 1465, October 14, 1784. 28. Garrigus, “Opportunist or Patriot?,” 2007, 5–6. 29. The money was initially to be used for a patriotic donation to the Crown from Saint-Domingue’s free people of color. However this project turned more explicitly political once Raimond arrived in France. See his 1789 explanation and the names of his donors in André Maistre du Chambon, “Acte notarié relatif aux doléances des ‘gens de couleur’ (29 juillet 1789),” Mémoires de la Société Archéologique et Historique de la Charente (1931): 137. 30. Garrigus, “Vincent Ogé jeune,” 43. 31. Archives Nationales (henceforth AN) Dxxv 111 dr 880 piece 3; ANOM SDOM 1432, January 17, 1791; ANOM SDOM 1596, March 20, 1780. 32. Gabriel Debien, “Gens de couleur libres et colons devant la constituante,” Revue d’Histoire de l’Amérique Française 4, (September 1950): 223. 33. Françoise Thésée, “Les assemblées paroissiales des Cayes à St. Domingue (1774–1793),” Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire et de Géographie 40, (1982): 29; Julien Raimond, Réponse aux considérations de M. Moreau, dit Saint-Méry, député à l’assemblée nationale, sur les colonies (Paris: Imprimerie du Patriote Français, 1791), 21. 34. Julien Raimond, Correspondance de Julien Raimond, avec ses fre’res, de SaintDomingue (Paris, 1794), 14, 25, 27, 39, 44. 35. ANOM SDOM 36, 8 ventôse, Year 3; Raimond, Correspondance, 54. 36. ANOM SDOM 35, March 10, 1794; François Joseph Pamphile de Lacroix, La révolution de Haïti, ed. Pierre Pluchon (Paris: 1819; Karthala, 1995), 153; Julien Raimond, Mémoire sur les causes des troubles et des désastres de la colonie de Saint-Domingue, présenté aux Comités de marine et des colonies . . . par les citoyens de couleur . . . (Paris:

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Impr. du Cercle Royal, 1793), 40, 47, 54; Michèle Oriol, Histoire et dictionnaire de la révolution et de l’indépendance d’Haïti, 1789–1804 (Port-au-Prince: Fondation pour la recherche iconographique et documentaire, 2002), 166. 37. Saint-Rémy, “Etude historique,” in Mémoires, viii, note 2. 38. Marcel Dorigny and Bernard Gainot, La société des amis des noirs 1788–1799: contribution à l’histoire de l’abolition de l’esclavage (Paris: UNESCO, 1998), 333; cite Auguste Kuscinski, Dictionnaire des conventionnels (Société de l’Histoire de la Révolution française, 1917). 39. Saint-Rémy, “Etude historique,” in Mémoires, ix. 40. Thanks to David Geggus for pointing out that this information is contained with the records of the Assocation de Généalogie d’Haïti. “Boisrond-Tonnerre Genealogy,” Association de Généalogie d’Haïti, July 18, 2013, www.agh.qc.ca/indexen.html; John D. Garrigus, “ ‘To Establish a Community of Property’: Marriage and Race before and during the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of the History of the Family 12, no. 2 (2007): 142–52. 41. ANOM SDOM 17 fructidor Year 7. 42. Garrigus, “Opportunist or Patriot?,” 12. 43. Ibid., 12–14. 44. Andrée-Luce Fourcand, “Un Autographe Du Tonnerre!,” 2006, www.roots web.ancestry.com/~htiwgw/autographe_bt.htm. 45. Bernard Gainot, “Introduction,” in La Société des amis des noirs, ed. Bernard Gainot and Marcel Dorigny, 311–13, 317–18, 333. 46. Garrigus, “Opportunist or Patriot?,” 13–14. 47. ANOM SDOM 354, 1 nivôse, Year 9. 48. Raimond returned to France in late 1798 after the collapse of the Third Commission. He then returned to the colony in June 1800 as part of a Fourth Commission. He died in 1802. Garrigus, “Opportunist or Patriot?,” 12–13, 15. 49. AN Dxxv45, dossier 424, pièce 10. 50. Pamphile de Lacroix, La révolution de Haïti, 259. 51. Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire d’Hayti. Par l’adjudant général Boisrond-Tonnerre ([Haiti]: De l’imprimerie central du gouvernement, 1804), http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/45983757, 3, 90. 52. Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1989), 3:63. 53. Boisrond-Tonnerre, Mémoires, 79. 54. Boisrond-Tonnerre’s paternal grandmother was a Hérard and in 1787 and 1788 his uncles had settled some outstanding debts with Hérard descendants living in Aquin. ANOM SDOM 54, September 13, 1787; ANOM SDOM 55, August 8, 1788. 55. Boisrond-Tonnerre, Mémoires, 76, note 1. 56. Ibid., 77, note 2. 57. University of Florida, Rochambeau papers, no. 1331.

The Debate Surrounding the Printing of the Haitian Declaration of Independence A Review of the Literature PATRICK TARDIEU

What happened the day after the victory of the Armée Indigène over the French troops on November 19, 1803? What happened to the three manuscript proclamations that created the Haitian state on January 1, 1804? This essay traces the study of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence in the historiography in order to shed light on the events that transpired between late November 1803 and the end of January 1804. Why is the January 1, 1804, Declaration of Independence considered to be the official document and not the November 29, 1803 document? How was the January 1 document created, proclaimed, and publicized? By analyzing the different publications and the printing customs of the period, we can better understand the development of the state in its infancy. A key document from this time period allows some insight into the fundamental philosophy of the new state. The “Hymne Haytiène” was a song printed in late 1803 or early 1804 and performed on January 25, 1804: What? You are silent Indigenous People! When a Hero, through his exploits, Avenging your name, breaking your chains, And forever ensures your rights? . . . . . . . . . . . . Henceforth Jacques is the Protector Who rejects slavery, United under this good father, Forever united, Let us live, let us die, his true children. Free, independent.¹ This unique song was sung on the battlefields in November 1803 and is of great national importance. Could it be the Marseillaise noire? In this song,

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Jean-Jacques Dessalines is portrayed as being the father of the new nation; the people are his children. The creation of a singular family symbolically united a diverse population. The use of indigène (indigenous) and the label “hero” for Dessalines give legitimacy to the national project; the land was rightfully theirs and their cause was justified. What is most interesting about this song, however, is the use of the term droits (rights). Rights are not discussed at all in the Haitian Declaration of Independence of January 1, 1804. The use of “rights” in this song, however, is subsumed within a hierarchical family structure, and the people are indebted to Dessalines for the privilege of having these rights. In November 1803, as the troops of the Armée Indigène were singing Dessalines’s praises as a national hero, the French army evacuated SaintDomingue in defeat. Shortly after, Dessalines and two other revolutionary generals, Henry Christophe and Augustin Clervaux, issued a declaration of independence. The three generals issued the proclamation “In the Name of the Black People, and Men of Color of St. Domingo.”² The first sentence of the proclamation announced: “The Independence of St. Domingo [SaintDomingue] is proclaimed.” This document, however, has not played the same role in Haiti’s national history as the January 1 document. Early on, its existence was even called into question.

November 29, 1803, or January 1, 1804? In his collection of Haitian laws, Jean-Baptiste Symphore Linstant de Pradine began with the January 1, 1804, Declaration of Independence. His task was to collect all of the laws of Haiti, not Saint-Domingue, and therefore the first legal document, in his opinion, was the Declaration of Independence. This decision laid the foundations for the collective memory by declaring January 1 to be the beginning. Thomas Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin, Haiti’s preeminent historians of the nineteenth century, would follow the same logic. “This collection begins on January 1, 1804,” Pradine declared. “[T]he heroes of Haiti avenging the broken liberty of the children of Africa, chose this date so that when the sun illuminated the renewal of the year, it would at the same time illuminate a new era for the Haitians, and their first steps toward civilization.”³ According to Pradine, the independence leaders chose January 1 for its symbolic meaning; a new year, a new beginning. But while Pradine recognized the symbolism of the new beginning, he also emphasized that the event was a reminder of a tragic past and of the need to remember the sacrifices. “It was a sublime way,” Pradine argued, “to burn into the hearts of their children the memory of the struggles that they endured and the sacrifices that they made in order to give them a homeland.”⁴

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Pradine’s emphasis on the official Declaration of Independence on January 1 was also an attempt to dismiss what he concluded amounted to rumors of a previous declaration of independence on November 29, 1803, from Fort-Dauphin (today Fort-Liberté).⁵ He called this alleged other document a “proclamation” in order to differentiate it from the official Acte de l’Indépendance. This proclamation, he argued, appeared in histories of Haiti, in particular those written by English-speaking authors. What were the motives of the Anglophone historians on both sides of the Atlantic to give credence to the November 29, 1803 proclamation? Pradine dismissed these rumors for two main reasons: first, that the authors of the alleged document, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henry Christophe, and Augustin Clervaux, were known to have been at Cap Français (now Cap Haïtien) on that day, and not at Fort-Dauphin. Second, he argued that “it does not seem reasonable to think that these leaders left the capital of the island to go to a secondary city, that is twelve miles away, to publish an act of this importance.”⁶ In his opinion, therefore, the November 29 proclamation was of little importance to the founding of the new nation. The date lacked the symbolic importance, and the logistics of the event were murky at best. Pradine was entirely justified in beginning his collection of Haitian laws (lois et actes d’Haïti) on January 1, 1804, because it was clearly this date that marked the first law of the new state: “Done at Gonaïves, this January 1st and the 1st year of the independence of Haiti.”⁷ Indeed it was the first time that the name “Hayti” was used in official proclamations.⁸ Pradine concluded that it was unnecessary to include any laws that preceded the Declaration of Independence because he wanted to follow the lead of the dating on the January 1 proclamation.⁹ More recently, however, the issue has been addressed by a new generation of Haitian historians who see validity in the rumored November proclamation. In the mid-twentieth century, the historian Henock Trouillot returned to this question in his chapter on Thomas Madiou and the historiography of Haiti. Trouillot recounted Madiou’s declaration that the document was a fiction, but he also highlighted that other historians, like Pauléus Sannon, disagreed.¹⁰ Trouillot, however, provided convincing evidence to support the thesis that a November 29, 1803, document did exist because “after November 29 and before the proclamation addressed to the new nation, the indigenous generals printed acts stamped: ‘the first year of independence.’ ”¹¹ Historian Gérard Mentor Laurent, author of Six études sur J.  J. Dessalines, showed some of these documents to Trouillot. In the end, Touillot agreed with Laurent’s assessment that “this proves at least that the indigenous considered themselves to be under a new administration.”¹² How then can we not agree with the historian and former president of

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Haiti, Leslie Manigat, who argues that there is indisputable evidence to support the existence of the November 29 proclamation, despite the fact that no original or official copies exist? “I do not understand [the reluctance],” Manigat argues, “given that this foundational text was published on January 4, 1804, in foreign newspapers.”¹³ Manigat criticizes the document’s exclusion from the recent “Calendrier historique.”¹⁴ The content of the document, Manigat argues, also provides clear evidence that it should be considered the country’s official declaration of independence; most obviously, the document begins, “The independence of Saint-Domingue is proclaimed.”¹⁵ Manigat also notes that the two documents differ significantly in tone and highlights that each reads as if it stems from “a different political project, one that changed significantly just one month later.”¹⁶ He suggests that the November 29 proclamation might have been tailored for “foreign consumption” since it was printed in Philadelphia, the site of American independence. This conclusion, however, seems unconvincing since we know that both documents circulated widely in newspapers around the Atlantic. Historian Michel Hector’s research supports the conclusion that the November 29 document did in fact exist, but he highlights the importance of the ceremonial aspects of the proclamation of Haiti’s independence on January 1, 1804. Hector claims that the independence day celebrations began with a speech in Kreyòl by Dessalines, the general-in-chief of the army. This speech, however, has not yet been uncovered in any archive. “We only know,” Hector notes, “that there was historic representation of the barbarism endured by the waves of captives under the colonial regime and especially during the last war against the reestablishment of slavery and for independence.”¹⁷ Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, the secretary that Dessalines commissioned to write the document, then read the official Declaration of Independence. Hector describes the three texts as follows: proclamation by the general-in-chief to the people of Haiti; the “process-verbal” of the proclamation of the independence of Haiti (also known as the Acte de l’Indépendance); and the nomination of the general-in-chief to the government of Haiti.¹⁸ Some of the details surrounding the middle section, however (the procès-verbal or the acte), are unknown. Was it spoken or written? The evidence suggests that the we can conclude that the November 29 document was written, but the issue is not quite as clear with respect to the January 1 document since there is a great deal of emphasis on the public ceremony surrounding its proclamation. Despite this new interest in confirming the existence of the November 29 declaration of independence and in ensuring its rightful place in the chronology of Haiti’s history, no original copies of the proclamation have yet to be found. The only evidence of its existence is found in foreign newspapers in the United States and the British Empire. Marcus Rainsford, the British

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chronicler of the Haitian Revolution, also printed the text in his An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805).¹⁹

Printing in the Era of the Haitian Declaration of Independence The Haitian government was constantly publishing proclamations, and in fact, they never stopped. The documents often included specific instructions to publish and post the printed copies. For example: a) Dessalines’s proclamation of November 19, 1803, to the citizens of the city of Cap Français ends with the following note: “Permis d’imprimer et d’afficher” (permission to print and post up). b) Similarly, the proclamation of the Conseil des Notables of Cap Français on December 5, 1803, ends with: “Fait pour être publié, imprimé et affiché au Cap, le 13 frimaire an XII (5 décembre 1803)” (Made to be published, printed, and posted up in Cap Français). c) At the beginning of 1804, beginning with law No. 5 we see the same instructions: “Directs the principal administrators of the departments to ensure the execution of the present decree, which will be read, published, and posted up wherever necessary.”²⁰ d) Finally, law No. 6 reads as follows: “Art. 2. The present decree will be printed, published, and posted up; and a copy will immediately be sent to the United States.”²¹ Only by taking into account other printings from the time can we discuss the issue of manuscript versus printed version of the January 1, 1804, Acte de l’Indépendance. In February 2010, while working on her doctoral thesis, Julia Gaffield discovered an official printed version of the three texts that make up the Haitian Declaration of Independence. The document was an eight-page pamphlet. Gaffield located it in The National Archives of the United Kingdom, and there does not appear to be a copy in Haiti. Previous Haitian government representatives had attempted to recover one of these printed copies of the Declaration of Independence for anniversary celebrations. Researchers for the centennial and sesquicentennial anniversary of independence were unable to find an official copy to be displayed for the celebrations.²² In February 2011, Gaffield discovered a second printed version, from the same time period, this time in broadside format. For over a century, Haitian historians had not been able to find an official copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence (printed or manuscript)

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despite the fact that the document was widely publicized in Haiti and abroad. Beaubrun Ardouin described the process of the proclamation, publication, and distribution of the declaration: “Nevertheless, the acts published in Gonaïves and then printed, were sent to all the secondary authorities, and occasioned public celebrations: the army and the people, in all of the departments of the former French part of the island, applauded the actions of their leaders.”²³ The announcement of Haiti’s independence would only have been important if the news had been publicized within Haiti. “National independence was therefore ratified,” Ardouin concluded, “consecrated by the agreement and the union of all citizens and the new state.”²⁴ Note the specific language that Ardouin used: actes publiés aux Gonaïves (acts published in Gonaïves) on the one hand, and imprimés de suite (afterward printed) on the other. Printed where? By whom? When? Manuscript and/or printed copy? The government sent copies to all of the authorities of the time. Thomas Madiou’s account, however, is less descriptive. “Dessalines ordered the Acte de l’Indépendance to be published throughout the entire Haitian state,” he reported, “as well as the proclamation that he commissioned from Boisrond-Tonnere and his nomination to the position of Governor General.”²⁵ While publier might have referred to an oral reading of the text, Madiou’s account also emphasizes the importance of the document’s dissemination throughout the country. In a preliminary study of the history of the printing presses in SaintDomingue and Haiti, published in the Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire et de Géographie, I argue that the presses were at the service of the government.²⁶ They could be a tool of methodical repression under the guise of science, and a tool of defense for the interests of the local power structures. Very quickly during the revolution, however, “the presses became a powerful weapon in the hands of the nouveaux libres.”²⁷ Jean Fouchard has similarly argued for the importance of the presses during the revolution. He argues that the leaders of the revolution never destroyed the presses because they were too important.²⁸ With independence, the founding fathers continued to make good use of the printing presses. The printer Pierre Roux, government printer from 1791 to 1815, lived in Cap Français/Cap Haïtien. On December 30 or 31, 1803, Dessalines commissioned a text from Boisrond-Tonnere for immediate publication by the government printing presses.²⁹ The manuscript original of the Declaration of Independence, did it serve as the only source for the printed copy? To this date we have not found evidence that there was a printing press in Gonaïves, the site of the verbal address of the declaration, before 1804. During this period, the printed document was public proof of a new law. This is how new laws were published and made known to the local and in-

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ternational populations. This then begs the question: Was it necessary to preserve the manuscript version of the printed document after the text had been printed by the government printing press and publicized throughout the country? Regardless, we know without a doubt that the three texts were drafted at Gonaïves. They were then printed within a few weeks in Port-auPrince; the printed documents note at the bottom “AU PORT-AU-PRINCE, De l’Imprimerie du GOUVERNEMENT.” It was indeed a printed document that Edward Corbet, on a mission for the British Empire, delivered to the governor of Jamaica, LieutenantGovernor George Nugent. Gaffield, in uncovering this document, discovered not only one of the first printings of the three foundational texts of the first black republic, but also the first documents relating to the diplomatic history of Haiti.³⁰ Ardouin mentioned these documents in his history. In order to obtain recognition of Haiti’s independence, Dessalines undertook great measures: not only did he order the printing of all texts (laws, decrees, and proclamations), he also tried to make known the will of the sovereign people to the nations of the world. He ordered that copies of certain documents to be sent immediately to the United States Congress: DECREE from the governor general that provides a reward to the American ship captains who return Haitians to their homeland. Art. 2. This decree will be printed, published and posted up; and a copy will immediately be sent to the US Congress.³¹ We can clearly see a manifest desire to print, from the very beginning, the official texts of the new government. Today, in addition to the publication in the Journal Officiel, the government also uses radio and television. Decree number 6 in Pradine’s compilation is a document dated January 14, 1804, and its text includes instructions to print; we have to believe that the three foundational texts were printed well before the fourteenth.³² According to Haitian historian Max Bissainthe, author of Dictionnaire de bibliographie haïtienne, between 1837 and 1839 Beaubrun Aroudin wrote the majority of the articles in L’Union that pertained to the history of Haiti. The August 4, 1839, issue of the newspaper L’Union adds a key piece of evidence to the debate.³³ An article, assumed to be by Ardouin, claimed that Dessalines complained to his council about the delays created by Jean-Jacques Charéron, a French-educated, mixed-race leader whom Dessalines commissioned to write a declaration of independence. The article recounts an alleged interaction between Dessalines and Boisrond-Tonnerre in which they both impatiently waited for Charéron to produce a declaration of independence.

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Dessalines wanted to declare independence on the first day of the new year: “The timing could not be better.”³⁴ Boisrond-Tonnerre complained about the tone of Charéron’s proclamation, arguing, “He wants to create something calculated, to write an unemotional work of reflection.”³⁵ What was needed instead, he argued, “at the present moment, was something spontaneous, terrible, a devastating proclamation.”³⁶ To complete this important and tempestuous task, the article reports that Boisrond-Tonnerre declared that “to write this act, we require a bayonet for the pen, the skin of the whites for paper, and their blood for ink.”³⁷ These words convinced Dessalines that Boisrond-Tonnerre was the man for the job. According to this article in L’Union, Dessalines, therefore, on the night of either December 30 or 31 wanted a text for publication on January 1, 1804, in order to proclaim Haiti’s independence with the splendor and formality that the occasion merited. He wanted to give this document full official weight by having the text printed on the government printing presses. What then was Boisrond-Tonnerre’s task on the night of December 31, 1803? To write a manuscript proclamation, or to have the text printed at the press? When Gaffield returned to London in February 2011, she discovered a broadside printing of the 1804 Declaration of Independence. This format was customary for the time because the large, single-page document could be posted in public areas for all to see. The broadside version of the Haitian Declaration of Independence had been acquired by one of the senior officers of the British Admiralty in Jamaica, John Thomas Duckworth. Duckworth then sent the document to his superiors in London.³⁸

Haitian Documents in Foreign Archives The National Archives of the United Kingdom in London are a treasure trove for documents from this era of Haitian history. Along with both copies of the Declaration of Independence, the archives hold the only known copy of the “Hymne Haytiène.” This document, along with a printed copy of Dessalines’s Journal de Campagne, appears to be from the same printer as the pamphlet version of the Declaration of Independence. What other surprises will we find in the archives in London? Do other yet-to-be-found printed copies of the Declaration of Independence exist, buried in the archives or in the depths of a library, in Haiti or elsewhere? Nothing is impossible. A recent dissertation defended in Paris in 2010 and published in 2013 forces us to look for alternative sources. Alejandro E. Gómez takes us to Venezuela and Gran Colómbia and allows us to

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understand the influence of the Haitian Revolution on the former Spanish American colonies.³⁹ His research sheds light on the collective memory of the nation and contributes to our understanding of the official history between Simón Bolívar and Alexandre Pétion and Bolívar’s promises to liberate the slaves in Latin America. Haiti was of great interest to the Spanish Empire (and its soon-to-beformer colonies). Furthermore, the connections were sometimes much more practical: Dessalines and Pétion both provided aid to the independence movements in Venezuela (to Francisco de Miranda in 1806 and to Bolívar in 1816). We therefore cannot write off the Spanish and Latin American archives simply because Haiti was shunned at the 1826 Panama Congress (organized by Bolívar). As Gómez’s research suggests, the leaders in Latin American stayed informed about events in Haiti. In April 1804, the governor of Venezuela received a copy of Dessalines’s January 1 speech, delivered during the declaration of the independence of the new state of Haiti. In a letter written to the metropolitan government, he expressed frustration in not being able to secure any more information on “the unfortunate colony of Saint-Domingue and its inevitable return to the monstrous domination of the Blacks.”⁴⁰ There is nothing to suggest that he was not successful in obtaining a copy (maybe a manuscript copy?).

Conclusion On April 7, 1801, Toussaint Louverture defied Europe by giving the nascent nation of Haiti a sovereign constitution. Napoléon, at the peak of his glory, reacted in defense of the Christian West by reestablishing slavery in the Antilles. The betrayed revolutionary was captured and deported, but his leading generals reorganized the resistance. At the congress of May 18, 1803, the army united and created a new flag; the generals swore to fight (liberté ou la mort) and to remove the French army from the island. The multinational group of former slaves now faced the Atlantic powers and a nineteenthcentury economy that was fueled by the transatlantic slave trade. Nevertheless they established independence on November 29, 1803, and consecrated the event in a solemn act on January 1, 1804, by declaring war against slavery on their territory. The defenders of the slave trade and slavery did everything to isolate the new country. Haiti was put under quarantine, and everywhere in the Americas the syndrome of “Hayti” took hold. For over twenty years, without fail our leaders stood firm; they proliferated and supported the people’s desire for freedom. Haiti, alone, dared to assist Miranda and Bolívar by supplying men and arms to help liberate Gran Colómbia. The eastern part

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of the island of Hispaniola—under the control of France until 1809 when it returned to Spanish control—was later incorporated into Haiti in 1822 and slavery was abolished forever. Could we ask the bossales, newly arrived from Africa, and the newly freed creoles to have a common goal in the construction of a new nation, of a country, or of a state? The abolition of slavery was enough to cement the new nation, both Haiti’s children and the rest of the world saw Haiti as such.

Notes 1. Hymne Haytiène [All spelling errors are in the original; the translation is mine.] Sur l’air: Allons Enfans de la Patrie. Quoi tu te tais Peuple Indigène! Quand un Héros, par ses exploits, Vengeant ton nom, brisant ta chaîne, A jamais assure tes droits? Honneur à sa valeur guerrière! Gloire à tes efforts triomphants! Offrons-lui nos coeurs, notre encens; Chantons d’une voix mâle et fière Sous ce bon Père unis, A jamais réunis, Vivons, mourons, ses vrais Enfans. Libres, indépendans. De nos droits ennemis perfides, Du Nouveau-Monde les tyrans, Déjà les Français homicides, Du Soleil frappaient les Enfans; O ! du Ciel éclatans prodiges! Pour lever nos fronts abattus, Jacque paraît, ils ne sont plus, Et l’on en cherche les vestiges. Sous ce bon Père unis, A jamais réunis, Vivons, mourons, ses vrais Enfans. Libres, indépendans. En mer, en plaine, et sur nos cîmes Écoutez ce bruit, ces éclats; Amis, c’est le cri des victimes

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Dénonçant leurs noirs attentats Du sang d’une horde cruelle, Oui, quand vous arrosez leurs os, Elles font entendre ces mots Du sein de la nuit éternelle, Sous ce bon Père unis, A jamais réunis, Vivons, mourons, ses vrais Enfans. Libres, indépendans. Quel est cet indigène Insulaire, Ce lâche coeur, ce vil soldat Qui, désormais sous sa bannière N’affronterait point le trépas? Qu’il parle; au défaut du Tonnerre, Pour expier cet attentat, Nos bras levés contre l’ingrat, Sauront le réduire en poussière. Sous ce bon Père unis, A jamais réunis, Vivons, mourons, ses vrais Enfans. Libres, indépendans. Amis, que la reconnaissance Consacre ses faits, sa valeur; Nous servirons, sous sa puissance, Le ciel, la justice et l’honneur: Que nos enfans, dès le bas âge, Aiment à bégayer son nom; Désormais Jacque est le Patron De qui repousse l’esclavage, Sous ce bon Père unis, A jamais réunis, Vivons, mourons, ses vrais Enfans. Libres, indépendans. CH . . . FIN The National Archives of the United Kingdom, (TNA) CO 137/111) 2. Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, ed. Paul Youngquist and Grégory Pierrot (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 260. 3. “Cette collection commence au premier janvier 1804,” Pradine declared, “Les héros vengeurs en Haïti de la liberté outragée en la personne des enfants de l’Af-

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rique, ont choisi cette date afin que le soleil qui devait éclairer le renouvellement de l’année, éclairât en même temps une ère nouvelle pour les Haïtiens, et leurs premiers pas vers la civilisation.” M. Linstant Pradine, Recueil général des lois et actes du gouvernement d’Haïti: depuis la proclamation de son indépendance jusqu’à nos jours . . . (Paris: A. Durand, 1886), 1: x. 4. “C’était un sublime moyen,” Linstant Pradine argued, “de graver dans le cœur de leurs enfants le souvenir des luttes qu’ils ont endurées et des efforts qu’ils ont faits pour leur donner une patrie.” Linstant Pradine, Recueil général, 1: x. 5. For more on the November 29, 1803, proclamation see David Geggus’s chapter in this volume. 6. “[I]l n’est pas raisonnable d’admettre que ces chefs laissassent la capitale de l’île pour aller dans une ville secondaire, qui en est éloignée de 12 lieues, publier un acte de cette importance.” Linstant Pradine, Recueil général, 1: ix. 7. “Fait aux Gonaïves, ce 1er Janvier, 1804 et le 1er de l’indépendance d’Haïti.” 8. For more on the name “Hayti,” see David Patrick Geggus, “The Naming of Haiti,” in Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 9. Linstant de Pradine, Recueil général, xi. 10. Catts Pressoir, Ernst Trouillot, and Henock Trouillot. Historiographie d’Haïti. Pan American Institute of Geography and History, No. 168 (México: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, 1953). 11. “[A]près le 29 novembre et avant la proclamation adressée à la nouvelle nation, les généraux indigènes posèrent des actes qui portent: an premier de l’indépendance.” Henock Trouillot, “Historiens qui ont surtout consulté la tradition orale: Thomas Madiou,” in Historiographie d’Haïti, ed. Trouillot, Pressoir, and Trouillot, 151. 12. “[C]ela prouve au moins que les indigènes se considéraient sous une nouvelle administration.” Trouillot, “Historiens,” in Historiographie d’Haïti, ed. Trouillot, Pressoir, and Trouillot, 151. 13. “Je ne comprends pas,” Manigat argues, “étant donné que ce texte fondateur a été publié dès le 4 janvier 1804 à l’étranger dans la presse.” Leslie F. Manigat, “This Year, 2003, Is the True Bicentennial/L’année 1803 en quatre grands faits marquants: brèves réflexions historiques de circonstance d’un politologue,” Haiti Democracy Project, www.haitipolicy.org/content/500.htm?PHPSESSID=6321cf5e7fe78 (accessed February 18, 2013). For more on the printing of the November 29, 1803, proclamation in the British newspapers, see David Geggus’s chapter in this volume. See also Deborah Jenson, “Dessalines’s American Proclamations of the Haitian Independence,” Journal of Haitian Studies 15 (2009): 72–102. 14. Manigat, “L’année 1803.” 15. “L’indépendance de St Domingue est proclamée.” Manigat, “L’année 1803.” 16. “[I]l s’agissait d’un projet politique différent, significativement changé à peine un mois plus tard.” Manigat, “L’année 1803.”

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17. “On en sait seulement,” Hector notes, “qu’il s’agissait d’une évocation historique de la barbarie vécue par les flots de captifs sous le régime colonial et plus particulièrement durant la dernière guerre contre le rétablissement de l’esclavage et pour l’Indépendance.” Michel Hector, “Actes de l’Indépendance,” in Dictionnaire historique de la révolution haïtienne, ed. Claude Moïse (Montreal: Les éditions Images/Cidihca, 2003), 23. Hector is drawing on Thomas Madiou’s account of the events: Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Joseph Courtois, 1843), 3:115. 18. Text taken from Claude Moïse, Dictionnaire historique de la révolution haïtienne, 1789–1804 (Montreal: Les éditions Images/Cidihca, 2003). 19. Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, ed. Paul Youngquist and Grégory Pierrot (1805; repr. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 20. “Enjoint aux administrateurs principaux des départements de tenir la main à l’exécution du présent arrêté, qui sera lu, publié et affiché partout où besoin sera.” Linstant Pradine, Recueil général, xii. 21. “Art. 2. Le présent décret sera imprimé, publié et affiché; et copie en sera immédiatement envoyée au congrès des États-Unis.” 22. Journal Le Soir, 1903, no. 212 and 215; report by Edmond Mangonès, December 31, 1952, La Commission des Sciences Sociales Du Tricinquantenaire de l’Indépendance, located at the Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Pères de Saint-Esprit. “Ce n’est pas seulement l’Acte de l’Indépendance qui est introuvable; ce sont les trois Actes qui font la synthèse de notre Pacte Fondamental, l’Acte de l’Indépendance seul n’aurait pas de valeur sans la glorification à laquelle le “Peuple d’Haiti” fut convié et sans le serment solennel de fidélité qui confère la majesté à l’illustre forgeron de la Nation Haïtienne.” 23. “Quoiqu’il en soit, les actes publiés aux Gonaïves et imprimés de suite, furent expédiés à toutes les autorités secondaires, et occasionnèrent des réjouissances publiques: l’armée et le peuple, dans tous les départements de l’ancienne partie française de l’île, applaudirent aux résolutions des chefs.” 24. “L’indépendance nationale fut ainsi ratifiée,” Ardouin concludes, “consacrée par l’accord et l’union de tous les citoyens du nouvel État.” Pradine, Recueil général, 6:34. 25. “Dessalines fit publier dans tout l’État d’Haïti l’acte de l’Indépendance,” he reports, “sa proclamation au peuple qu’avait rédigée Boisrond-Tonnère, et sa nomination à la dignité de Gouverneur Général.” Pradine, Recueil général, 2:119. 26. Patrick D. Tardieu, “Pierre Roux et Leméry, imprimeurs de Saint Domingue à Haïti,” Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire et de Géographie d’Haiti 79, no. 218 (2004): 1–30. 27. “[E]lle devint une arme puissante aux mains des nouveaux libres.” Tardieu, “Pierre Roux et Lemery,” 6. 28. Tardieu, “Pierre Roux et Lemery,” 6; see also Jean Fouchard, Les marrons de

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la liberté (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps), 1988; Jean Fouchard, Les marrons du syllabaire (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps), 1988; Jean Fouchard, Plaisirs de St. Domingue (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps), 1988. 29. For more on the question of the privileges given to printed documents see Raymond Blanchot, L’art du livre à l’imprimerie nationale (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1951), 11, colo. 1. 30. Julia Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early NineteenthCentury Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2012): 583–614. 31. “DÉCRET du Gouverneur général qui accorde une récompense aux capitaines des bâtiments américains qui ramèneront des Haïtiens dans leur patrie “Art. 2. Le présent décret sera imprimé, publié et affiché; et copie en sera immédiatement envoyée au congrès des Etats-Unis.” 32. Pradine, Recueil général, 7–8. 33. “Anecdotes historiques,” L’Union: Recueil commercial et littéraire, à Port-auPrince, du 4 August 1839 #51, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k580941g/f1.image (accessed February 18, 2013). 34. “Le moment ne pourrait être mieux choisi.” “Anecdotes historiques.” 35. “Il veut faire quelque chose de soigné, d’élaboré une froide œuvre de réflexion.” “Anecdotes historiques.” 36. “[D]ans la conjoncture présente, quelque chose de spontané, de terrible, une proclamation foudroyante.” “Anecdotes historiques.” 37. “Il faut pour écrire un acte semblable, se servir de la baïonnette pour plume, du corps des blancs pour papier et leur sang pour encre.” “Anecdotes historiques.” 38. TNA, ADM 1/256 and MFQ 1/184. 39. Alejandro E. Gómez, Le spectre de la révolution noire. L’impact de la révolution haïtienne dans le monde atlantique, 1790–1886 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013). 40. “Plus tard, en avril 1804, le gouverneur du Venezuela se procura, grâce à un particulier, une copie du discours du 1er janvier de Dessalines, prononcé à l’occasion de la déclaration d’Indépendance du nouvel État d’Haïti. Dans une communication qu’il envoie au gouvernement central, il exprime sa frustration de ne pas avoir été en mesure de se procurer davantage d’informations sur ‘la malheureuse colonie de Saint-Domingue et la fatalité d’être redevenue l’objet de la monstrueuse domination des Noirs.’ ” Alejandro E. Gómez, Le syndrome de Saint-Domingue: perceptions et représentations de la révolution haïtienne dans le monde atlantique, 1790– 1886. (PhD Thesis, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2010), 70; “Le capitaine général de Caracas au ministre d’État (Caracas, 24/04/1804),” Archivo General de Indias, Estado, 68, n°12.

Living by Metaphor in the Haitian Declaration of Independence Tigers and Cognitive Theory DEBORAH JENSON

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first leader of a nation built on the ruins of colonial slavery, emblematizes the contrary cultural poles of violence and poetics.¹ In 1804, Armand Levasseur, who had been a French military hostage in Dessalines’s army camp, called him the “tiger-man” (l’homme tigre), and Antoine-Henri de Jomini further developed the animal/man chimera or the anthropomorphized beast metaphor in describing Dessalines as “the tiger with a human face” (le tigre à figure humaine).² But was Dessalines, as insinuated by his European critics, more tiger than man, or was he what we recognize in the Western print cultural domain as a “man of letters,” and how should we engage with the implications of this question more globally? Dessalines was acknowledged by contemporary observers, without exception, to be unlettered. He did not have the alphabetic magic that Stanislas Dehaene has characterized as the absorption of language through literacy.³ Yet Dessalines is the portal to much of the compelling symbolism by Haitians in the revolutionary and independence eras. Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin wrote that Dessalines was “completely illiterate, it’s true,” yet he saw him as the voice of the nation: “Dessalines . . . for us, as the offspring of those who suffered the humiliating martyrdom of slavery, . . . remains the first manifestation of the spirit of the equality of races, and the symbolic personification of that spirit in Haiti” (“Dessalines [est], complètement illétré, il est vrai, mais. . . . Pour nous, fils de ceux qui ont souffert les humiliations et le martyre de l’esclavage, nous ne pouvons y voir que la première manifestation du sentiment de l’égalité des races, sentiment dont Dessalines est resté la personnification symbolique en Haïti”).⁴ Dessalines not only personified symbolism but generated printed cultural texts through collaborative redactive processes with secretaries and other leaders. He was the producer of a body of important letters: five enduringly significant proclamations, the strikingly innovative 1805 Haitian national constitution, and a host of other documents. Furthermore, he stimulated or solicited early poetic activ-

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ity around the new Haitian state, such as the poem by the soldier Gautarel, “You, O Great Emperor!,” which begins as follows, in Norman Shapiro’s expert translation: You, O great Emperor! You, who laid low French power, restored abundance, let us know Peace’s delights once more; you, whose fair grace Floats you to noble heights to take your place With the immortals! Here, my halting verse Would sing your praise; you, who cast off the curse Of France; you, who alone in memory’s shrine Flout the vile Frenchman’s foul and fell design Ever to shackle you! Ah, but in vain His base desire! For, midst the bale and bane, Mars, god of war, chose you his favorite son!⁵ I have argued previously that formal education in Western alphabetic literacy and putting pen to paper were not the conditions for Dessalines’s authorial role, but rather the shared characteristics and ambitions of a corpus of work produced under his direction by secretaries and military colleagues and issued in his name.⁶ In this essay I explore Dessalines’s engagement with alphabetic and print culture in the Haitian Acte de l’Indépendance, or Declaration of Independence, as an example of how, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have postulated, we “live by” metaphor, and how embodied cognitive models can facilitate the counter-intuitive appreciation of “unlettered” authorial models. My point of departure for Dessalines’s “life by metaphor” is his metaphoric framing of death and death’s agents, notably the colonist as “bloodthirsty tiger.” In the famous “I have avenged America” proclamation of late April 1804, he justifies violence against agents of colonialism as a parallel to reaction to the danger of a prowling tiger: “Who is that Haitian so vile, so unworthy of his regeneration, that he does not believe that he has fulfilled eternal precepts by exterminating these bloodthirsty tigers?” (“Quel est ce vil Haïtien, si peu digne de sa régénération, qui ne croit point avoir rempli les décrets éternels en exterminant ces tigres altérés de sang?”)⁷ Dessalines had first used the metaphor of the tiger in the Acte de l’Indépendance to keep traumatic memories of violence fresh in his compatriots’ memories, and to steel resolve: Native Citizens, men, women, girls and children, cast your gaze on every part of this Island, look for your wives, your husbands, your brothers, and

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your sisters; what do I say, look for your children, your suckling babies? What has become of them . . . I shudder to say it . . . the prey of these vultures. Instead of these precious victims, your saddened eye only sees their assassins; these tigers still covered with their blood, and whose atrocious presence reproaches your insensitivity and your culpable slowness in avenging them.⁸ In this dramatic re-creation of the moment of recognition of the loss of a beloved, such as the breastfeeding mother’s loss of her infant, the community unites in mourning. Dessalines presents to them the spectral vision of the tiger men still living in their midst, dripping with blood. The term dégouttants as a qualifier for bloodthirsty tigers, suggests the homophone gouttes, or “drips,” in dégoûtant, “disgusting”: the French tigers are both disgusting, and dripping, with blood. The sensory richness of the liquidity, the gouttes, reinforces the processing of disgust. Both spellings—dégouttants with one “t” or two—can be found in contemporaneous documents. However, the specific symbolism of dripping blood adds precision to the conventional meaning of “disgusting” and suggests explicit wordplay. Dessalines’s metaphor of the Haitians’ ethical imperative to exterminate the bloodthirsty tiger enraged European audiences. An 1804 poem in a British newspaper blamed the French Revolution for letting the cat out of the bag, unleashing Haitian tigers: St. Domingo’s bloody journal Tells of those who would be free, Points to slaughter heaps diurnal, That is French fraternity. What has France for Europe, done, sir, Set a savage tyger free, Armed the father ’gainst the son, sir, That is—French equality.⁹ Laure Junot d’Abrantès in her Mémoires used Dessalines’s own metaphor to claim that the man himself was a literal, not a metaphorical, bloodthirsty tiger: she identifies Dessalines as “the bloodthirsty tiger, and one can say that without any metaphor” (“ce tigre altéré de sang, et l’on peut le dire sans métaphore”).¹⁰ Of course one cannot say that Dessalines was a bloodthirsty tiger without metaphor, anymore than Dessalines could say without metaphor that the French were bloodthirsty tigers. Abrantès simply reversed the directionality of the metaphor in her allusion, using it to characterize the subject

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of the metaphorical speech rather than the object of the subject’s speech (i.e., “We’re not tigers, you are the tiger”), and further legitimating the correctness of the tiger trope for synthesis of the colonial/anticolonial battle. The tiger is “no metaphor,” because it yields such a perfect mimetic representation of the referent, creating, in Roland Barthes’s terminology, a reality effect (effet de réel) in which the sign appears seamless rather than divided between signifier and signified. The tiger for Abrantès would be like the tree in some category of reality outside of human cognition and history, not the tree that is a contingent cultural product of the semiotic “sound image” (signifier) and the abstract concept (signified). Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson proposed in the 1980 Metaphors We Live By that metaphor “is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action.”¹¹ This has become known as conceptual metaphor theory. In conceptual metaphor theory, knowledge is constructed from metaphorical mappings derived from sensory experience and perceptual simulations. Metaphor may provide spatial or temporal orientation, as in “talking down” or “falling behind.” It undergirds analogy systems that in turn conventionalize or cue interpretations and behaviors, as in the general metaphor that argument is war. (Claims are “indefensible”; one “loses” or “wins” in debate; one “attacks” a position; one “duels” in rap.) In many ways, the “cognitive” approach to language as action, exemplified by “argument as war,” is old news. In the classical era, battlefields, not literary salons, yielded many of the parabolic explanations of rhetorical structures. Quintilian, in Institutes of Oratory, says “Would not the orator whom I am trying to form, too, if he were engaged in the field of battle, and his soldiers required to be encouraged to be engaged, draw the materials for an exhortation from the most profound precepts of philosophy? For how [else] could all the terrors of toil, pain, and even death, be banished from their breasts . . . ?”¹² In this war-sensitive rhetorical tradition, the fear of death is the bar metaphorical persuasion must lift. The secretaries and military colleagues with whom Dessalines worked would certainly have been cued to the age-old Western association of the warrior with rhetoric capable of helping soldiers to turn fight-or-flight reactions to advantage on the battlefield. But there is no reason to look only to the Western tradition, or only to literacy and textual traditions, for examples of priming soldiers to fight by using fighting words. Poetic rhetoric is not specific to privileged literary personae (such as “authors”), products (such as anthologies of poems), milieus (such as literary “schools” or “movements”), or technologies of preservation (such as print culture). The US military tradition of “calling cadence,” in which a call-and-response song unites drill leader and troops in a visceral rhythmic dynamic, relies on poetics for syn-

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chronization of movement and morale-building, often across social boundaries of refined speech.¹³ The motor, sensory, and perceptual viscerality of rhetoric has been associated since Aristotle with the tigerlike pounce of the soldier. Aristotle explains that when Homer described the soldier Achilles pouncing like a lion, he is using simile (or analogy); when the narrative says simply, “the lion pounced,” removing the overtly comparative term, it becomes metaphor.¹⁴ The “pounce” of Achilles, one of the inaugural images of rhetorical study, invokes animal threat to focus the listener’s keen attention on the character of the hero’s valor. Poetry of the battlefield recalls the visceral somatosensory effects and motor priming in the proclamations that Dessalines dictated to and edited with his secretarial teams. In the opening salvo of the Declaration of Independence, Dessalines prepares his countrymen to turn on the group he will de-anthropomorphize as bloodthirsty tigers by evoking enslaved existence as a state of hypnotic torpor. The slaves must be roused from the stupor of captivity by means of a series of metaphors that strongly evoke stillness and contrasting movement. Where an “inhuman government that has for a long time kept us in the most humiliating torpor” (“gouvernement inhumain qui tient depuis longtemps nos esprits dans la torpeur la plus humiliante”), the Haitians must put and end (put on “un frein”) to the French factions who have mocked the phantom of liberty which France exposed to our eyes (“jouaient tour-à-tour du fantôme de liberté que la France exposait à vos yeux”); they must seize from the French (“ravir”) any hope of resubjection. In this passage, from a nearly zombified state of torpor, the Haitians reawaken, ready to lunge—perhaps like a dulled tiger in a cage, teased by a specter of freedom, stirred into action by the identification of the captor as the bloodthirsty tiger, the visceral threat, the analogy to their own anger.

One Declaration, Many Voices As new, contemporaneous copies of the Haitian Declaration of Independence come to light, evidence emerges of a collaborative verbal transmission and preservation process in which citizens worked with Dessalines to declare Haiti’s independence as if it were a well-loved poem. Duke University’s newly acquired copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence is characterized by phonetic spellings—spellings as one might hear a name, for example, rather than how it would be conventionally written in French— and words that blend into one another in one long hybrid, rather than remaining separated by spaces.¹⁵ Punctuation is minimal and different than

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in the government-issued printed text found by Julia Gaffield, and French accents are rare and often wrongly applied. A sentence is missing, and another phrase is repeated. A concluding sentence is phrased slightly differently. Did this manuscript represent a Haitian regional scribe’s transcription from memory of a public reading of the declaration? Such a possibility of a largely verbal dissemination of the text, transcribed from memory by locally educated people of letters, is supported by the existence of another contemporaneous manuscript copy with a different set of irregularities of spelling, spacing, and inclusion, which was certified as a copie conforme by French General Louis Ferrand from the other side of the island of Hispaniola and sent to Napoléon Bonaparte in 1804.¹⁶ A public process of declaring independence verbally, and copying it for the idiosyncratic literary birth of former slaves turned nation builders, presents a moving example of the use of poetics by the unschooled (or the less schooled) in dialogue with and contestation of the revolutionary discourses of Western Europe. In the Duke University copy, the evocation of the mourning Haitians avenging the victims of the French bloodthirsty tigers documents a new national “coming to writing,” so orthographically irregular that one can almost hear in it the hypnotic intonations of an impassioned public reading: Citoyens indigesnes, hommes, femmes, filles, enfants, portés vos regards sur toutes les parties de cette isle, chercsé’y, vous vos épouses, vous vos maris, vous vos peres, vous vos freres, quedije cherese’z -y vos hefants vos enfants ala mamelle . . . que sont ils devenus? Je fremis deledire . . . la proie de ces vautours. aulieu de ces victimes inocentes votre oeil consterné napercois que des assassins que des tigres degoutans encore de leurs sang et dons l’affreuse presence, vous reproche votre insensibilite et votre coupable lenteur ales venger The punctuation-free slide into the next image, of the bones of the ancestors repulsing any unworthy Haitians who would solicit their company in the crypt, serves as a reminder of the declaration’s cultural alterity: que attendé vous pour apaiser leurs masnes sonjé que vous avé voulus que vos restes reposans aupres de ceux de vos perres quans vous avé chassé la tyrannie; dessenderée vous dans leurs tombe sans les avoir vengés non leurs ossements repousseraiens les vostres. The warriors’ cult of the ancestors, and the ancestors’ ghostly agency, are among the literary figures in the declaration that recall the “African char-

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acter” of the Haitian Revolution, and Dessalines’s own rumored African origins.¹⁷ Declaring independence in Haiti involved, despite the American textual model, a distinctly African “American” stance.

Anti-Colonial Tigers In the contest to control figurative identifications, to “brand” insurgencies against slavery as unredeemed violence, tigers were already circulating as critical, as well as colonial, motifs. William Blake’s 1794 poem on the tiger in Songs of Experience may make no direct allusion to the events in SaintDomingue, but scholars have established that Blake in the 1790s was preoccupied by slavery. As Christine Gallant notes in “Blake’s Coded Designs of Slave Revolts,” “Blake’s familiarity with slavery in other colonies of the Americas underlies his 1791–92 engravings for John Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.”¹⁸ Gallant asserts that Blake was “electrified” by the Haitian Revolution, and that complex allegories of plantation agriculture, slave torture, the Middle Passage, and even African Vodou, ran through his oeuvre. Although Gallant does not include “The Tyger” in the body of Blake’s “coded designs of slave revolts,” I will argue that the poem expresses the leap of thought, which Michel-Rolph Trouillot enduringly yet provocatively cast as the unthinkable quality, of the Haitian Revolution.¹⁹ The poem’s opening allusion to Prometheus (“What hand, dare seize the fire”) is contradicted by the location of the fire in the tiger’s own eyes. The tiger surges from the “forests of the night,” which have for centuries been the emblem of symbolic Africa. Although tigers themselves originated among the megafauna of Asia and are not recorded in human memory in Africa, a perceived relative of the tiger, the jaguar (chat-tigre), had been accidentally unleashed on the island of Hispaniola in the colonial era.²⁰ In Blake’s opening stanza the arc of the tiger’s leap challenges the capacity of the immortal, who reigns in distant (Western metaphysical) skies, to invent it, putting to test the symmetrical locations of god and animal, the tropical wilds of the night and winged heaven, divine fire, and human grasping: Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

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On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire? With almost adrenal impact, flashes of heat, distance undone, surprise, and vertical striping combine in Blake’s poetic condensation of the leap as a movement that, like the Haitian Revolution, threatens to devour the reader: the shaking, paltry, white consumer of print messages in the Republic of Letters. The reader, having perceptually processed the winged spring, feels the adrenaline surge of the symmetry framing the tiger’s point of departure and the point to which it “aspires”: its prey. For Blake, the tiger is to the lamb as death is to birth, as infant sorrow is to infant joy, as, for the reader, appetite for vicarious violence is to being consumed. Jaws, fire, speed. The tiger represents sensorial, perceptual, and cognitive processing of the threatening glory of Africa’s vengeance of its travails in the New World. In 1999, Lakoff and Johnson extended their concept of lived metaphors to the notion of embodied cognition, arguing that “abstract concepts are largely metaphorical,” and that “we need a body to reason”: “The same neural and cognitive systems that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanisms of neural binding.”²¹ Cognitive linguists’ research on metaphor has the advantage, for postcolonial or postslavery literary studies, of not tying poetic rhetoric to specific, privileged print culture personae (authors), products (books of poems), or milieus (literary schools); it ties rhetoric to cognition. This universalism issuing from cognitive studies is ripe for comparison with the humanistic universalism that was the banner under which both colonialism and anticolonialism unfurled, through Eurocentric framing of the human and pursuit of negatively rather than positively defined universals. The recent progress of brain science studies on understanding specific problems in figurative language brings us back to Jean-Paul Sartre’s refusal of any abstract humanism positing an “a priori” world, although whether this indicates bona fide potential for what Ralph James Savarese has called a “postcolonial neurology” anchored in challenges to “neurotypicality” remains to be seen.²² A number of subsequent behavioral studies have supported conceptual metaphor theory, notably through confirmation that rhetorical priming does indeed influence sensory perception. Metaphorical anger cues such as “hot-headed,” for example, can raise estimates of room temperature.²³ Lawrence Barsalou developed a transition from conceptual metaphor theory to grounded cognition theory in the early years of the new millennium, focusing on explanations for modal systems, as distinct from amodal sym-

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bols, in the constitution and uses of knowledge. For Barsalou, simulation involving “the reenactment of perceptual, motor, and introspective states acquired during experience with the world, body, and mind” is a holistic structure in which “the brain captures states across the modalities and integrates them with a multimodal representation stored in memory.”²⁴ Barsalou argues that simulated embodiments and other forms of modal symbolism play causal roles in cognition; in other words, representations are not secondary and epiphenomenal, but primary and foundational to cognition. Barsalou’s grounded cognition theory, which I will adapt in this essay to the notion of grounded rhetoric, implicitly situates mimesis—which Erich Auerbach famously defined as the “representation of reality”—not as an aesthetic product of specialized reflective modes, but as a fundamental mechanism of the brain’s ability to synthesize and operationalize diverse sensory, perceptual, motor, and stored traces of the encounter with the world.²⁵ More recent elaborations on grounded cognition as a basic alignment of observation and action execution in neuronal firing include Deborah Jenson and Marco Iacoboni’s theory of “literary biomimesis,” in which ontological representation in the brain models the engineering of literary and artistic representation.²⁶ Neuroscientific research on figurative language is certainly not the only discipline to lend itself to the study of analogical thought as a cognitive universal rather than a particular product of literary print culture. For example, anthropology, like its cousins ethnography, travel writing, and naturalist narrative, also studies meaningful utterances and their rhetorical impact outside of the Republic of Letters as they are mapped and coded in elite intellectual communities. And literary criticism at times has engaged with what the figure Srinivas Aravamudan has defined as the “tropicopolitan,” who could be understood not only as an inhabitant of the tropical cosmopolis, but also as the troping persona/trajectory within that liminal environment—including the paradoxical careers in letters of the unlettered.²⁷ Yet research on metaphor by neuroscientists allows a microscopic look, a close-up, a reading at the neuronal level, of how we live by metaphor, even when we die by the sword, not only in literary movements, but in movements against the deanthropomorphizing system of slavery, and even when illiterate, which was arguably the level on which it interested Dessalines.

Republics of Letters, Hemispheres of Cognition The sensory apprehension of the “dread hand” and “dread feet” in the slave insurgency takes a visceral rhetorical form in Haitian writer Ignace Nau’s 1837 account of the alleged early revolutionary memories of an elderly mill operator, “Old Jerome” (le Vieux Jérome). The short prose piece “Le Lambi”

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(The Conch Shell), published in the Haitian newspaper L’Union, features Jerome opening up to his bon bourgeois (good bourgeois) interlocutor on the startling acoustic poetics of the insurgency.²⁸ After Léger-Félicité Sonthonax had conquered Port-au-Prince and chased away the colonist Borel and his black saliniers, when the country was trembling in every member, Jerome recounts that a man six feet tall, and with the girth of two men, appeared: Halaou. He divided his army into several sections, each with its own chief, most of whom were aligned with African communities or “nations.” One evening Halaou camped on the plantations Meilleur and Laserre. He had a caplata (caprelata, a figure in the non-Catholic priest corps) come to ordain, bless, and make the soldiers invulnerable to their enemies. The caplata gives a white cock for the troops to exhibit and caress, which would serve as a precious talisman and a banner, a coq merveilleux. All the soldiers of Halaou are instructed to run into battle whipping pigs’ and horses’ tails in the air. The enemy canon fire would liquefy in response, and birds would flee from their shelters, terrifying the colonists. Then the caplata would give between seventy and eighty men assotor drums, conch shells, and the debris of sugar cauldrons with which to perform a frightful serenade all around Halaou. Halaou! tym, pan, dam! Canon cé bambou: tym, pan, dam! La poud cé dlau: tym, pan, dam! (Halaou! tym, pan, dam! Canons become bamboo: tym, pan, dam! Gunpowder becomes water: tym, pan, dam!) Halaou walks back and forth among this sonorous army, ravished to ecstasy by this music. Then, to complete this scene, he orders the neighboring huts and buildings to be torched. Amid the roar of the flames, men dance to the beat of the music! The French sentinel of the Croix-des-Bouquets listens with disquiet: “Captain, put your ear to the ground!” The captain responds, “What a truly strange sound! The earth is churning a disturbing music deep in its entrails.” Or as William Blake would put it: What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

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Cauldron beats and talismanic birds, canons magically becoming bamboo through analogy to bamboo, gunpowder becoming water through analogy to water—these were “metaphors we live by,” to return to the lexicon of Lakoff and Johnson. This “disturbing music” represents a poetics of the slaves’ insurgency that was only much later, and much less directly, processed through literacy, in the form of Nau’s pursuit and transcription of an elder’s story in the 1830s. The Halaou story shows an environment in which chanted rhetoric was combined with musical rhythms using “instruments” available from the animal or industrial worlds, like horses’ tails or fragments of sugar cauldrons, to create a powerful incantatory trance effect. “Tym, pan, dam!” Rhetoric and musicality are so “grounded” that one can literally hear it by putting an ear to the ground.

Illiterate Poets of the Western/Left Hemisphere? In modern Western history, poetry has been the provenance of the literate, the poet with quill or pen, connected to literary salons and schools and manifestoes. In neurobiological terms, there is no question but that alphabetic literacy—the capacity to read and write alphabetic texts—bears a left-brain signature. Left hemisphere lesions damage reading capacities; even the majority of left-handed people demonstrate left hemispheric dominance for reading (contradicting the physiological phenomenon of contralaterality).²⁹ When the left hemisphere is isolated through the Wada test, or by a surgical procedure called a commissurotomy, used in the treatment of epilepsy, patients can still produce normal verbal intelligence scores on standardized tests; likewise, right hemisphere neurological damage often has little impact on syntax, phonology, and lexicon.³⁰ The left-brain correlation with alphabetic literacy in print cultures has also extended more broadly, since the late nineteenth century, to a certain understanding of language and logic. The French anthropologist and surgeon Paul Broca (1824–1880) articulated in his posthumously published 1888 Mémoires d’anthropologie that “Just as we direct the movements of writing, drawing, embroidery, etc., from the left hemisphere, we speak with the left hemisphere”; as verbal beings, we are “left-brained.”³¹ In the same era, Karl Wernicke found another left temporal lobe region responsible for the reception rather than the production of language, now called Wernicke’s area. How would anticolonial insurgents like Dessalines, many of whom were kidnapped from Africa in their youth, who transitioned not only from oral to print systems of the preservation of knowledge (and from one set of languages to another), but also (in most cases) from freedom to enslavement,

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be sufficiently attuned to rhetoric to harness poetics effectively in a discourse of vengeance?³² But scholars, including Savarese and Julie Kane, have recently argued that neurotypicality, including left-brain language processing dominance, is partly determined by the privileging of writing and alphabetic literacy, not a precondition for it.³³ People are left-brained, at least once they are acculturated to writing and the texts of the rationalist philosophical and scientific traditions. Nicolas Boileau’s seventeenth-century didactic poem, “On the Poetic Arts” (1674) creates a kind of epigrammatic loop between rational thought and its inscription in writing: Avant donc d’écrire, apprenez à penser Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement, Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément. (Before starting to write, learn to think— Whatever is well conceived is clearly said, And the words to say it flow with ease.) Kane claims that poetry and poetics differ from the “referential” or “technical” speech associated with the left hemisphere, and that “the absence of left-hemispheric dominance for language in the brains of preliterate and illiterate persons may explain why those populations exhibit so-called ‘magical’ thinking rich in right-hemispheric features.”³⁴ As Savarese summarizes: Kane proposes that we think of poetry in precisely this way: as a stubborn holdover from oral culture, a holdover now practiced and consumed in private written form. “To view inanimate objects, plants, and animals as endowed with conscious agency and will,” she explains, “to grasp abstract ideas in the form of concrete images which embody them, is to inhabit the mythic world of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Native Americans, and countless other cultures prior to the introduction of phonetic alphabetic print literacy.” Investigating the role of the non-dominant right hemisphere in the production of poetic language, Kane links poets (who, she believes, partially inhibit the left hemisphere when they write), young children (who have not yet fully lateralized to the left), and pre-literate peoples.³⁵ Poetry is becoming a crucial portal for the identification and cultural valorization of neurodiverse cognitive styles. Recent brain research inspired by the challenge of conceptual metaphor theory and grounded cognition have

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focused precisely on the recruitment of sensory and motor areas of the brain, and the interhemispheric activation suggested by their bilateral distribution, to account for complex metaphorical mappings and simulations in poetry. In 2012, Emory neuroscientists Simon Lacey, Randall Stilla, and Krish Sathian published a study on the neural basis of metaphor processing to better understand why lexicalized metaphors are not limited to classical language areas. Is knowledge “represented in abstract codes, distinct from the sensory modalities through which the knowledge was acquired,” or is it “represented in modal systems derived from perception,” with cognition depending on “perceptual simulations”?³⁶ Metaphor has become a crucial arena for brain science research to determine how knowledge is constituted, stabilized, and communicated. Lacey et al. sought to localize the sensory properties of metaphor by testing texture-based metaphors and their recruitment of domain-specific activity in the sensory cortex. When we speak of having a “rough” day, does the brain react to associations with abrasive texture as well as the notion of unpleasantness?³⁷ Is a “slimy” person likewise processed as unpleasant to the touch as well as morally questionable?³⁸ The sensory cortex refers not only to the bilateral postcentral gyrus that is the home for the primary somatosensory cortex, and to the primary and secondary cortices of the senses in the left and the right hemisphere, but also to the somatosensory association cortex, which integrates sensory information such that the object being sensed and perceived is an object being understood. Texture is perceived haptically— involving the recognition of objects through touch—and visually. Using rapid event-related fMRI to compare the processing of familiar textural metaphors with the processing of literal sentences conveying similar meanings, Lacey and his colleagues gathered “preliminary evidence for the hypothesis that processing textural metaphors activates texture-selective somatosensory areas.”³⁹ This allowed the researchers to described limited evidence for the perceptual comprehension of metaphors, indirectly supporting the culturally embedded philosophy of cognition hypothesis that “knowledge is structured around metaphorical mappings derived from physical experience.”⁴⁰ Anyone with a body can be a poet. Emblems of lettered vocations, from the quill to poetic languor, are historically contingent and socially supplementary to the place of rhetoric in embodied cognition. Rutvik Desai et al. in “The Neural Career of Sensory-Motor Metaphors” have shown that neural responses to literal action, like “The daughter grasped the flowers,” and to metaphorical action, like “The public grasped the idea,” both activated the left anterior parietal lobule involved in action planning, but that the metaphorical action additionally recruited from right hemispheric sensory-motor systems.⁴¹ Michele Diaz and Larson Hogstrom have further-

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more demonstrated that figurative language engages the right inferior frontal gyrus and that the degree of novelty in metaphor especially influences recruitment of the right hemisphere.⁴² Dessalines’s lack of alphabetic literacy, like Toussaint Louverture’s partial or idiosyncratic alphabetic literacy, must be considered in the context of military culture in Saint-Domingue and its fostering of collective speech acts among groups with varied educational training. Should we be theorizing a vicarious or cooperative alphabetization, rather than the absence of alphabetization? Should we consider borrowing the neuroscience metaphor of the “recruitment” of different structures and areas of the brain to describe Dessalines’s—and other Haitian leaders’—“recruitment” of the highly developed alphabetic and printed cultural language centers of their more socioeconomically elite, Euro-educated, mixed-race confraternity, to complement their particular verbal strengths? Beyond the obvious practical outsourcing of the writing of texts, Dessalines had to have had a rhetorical education very different from that of a purely verbal rhetor, or speaker, in that specifically lettered interlocutors were trained and employed in the editing of his thinking, at his behest. Vittorio Gallese’s critique of the solipsistic brain model of an ultimately interpersonal and intermental approach to theory of mind and mind reading, suggests the naiveté of establishing impermeable walls between alphabetized and nonalphabetized cognition in our social lives.⁴³ Even when we raise the issue of brain hemispheres to deconstruct models of literacy-related left-brain dominance, are the notions of right hemisphere and left hemisphere in the brain the latest allegories of torrid zones and Western metropolitan centers? Do we assign biased relegations of magical thinking to non-Western spheres and of rationalism to the West? Should we be considering brain and global hemispheres (currently “North” and “South”) as analogical pairs—left hemisphere is to rationality as right hemisphere is to magical thinking? Are the hegemonic racial divides of the “West and the rest,” or the northern hemisphere and the “Global South,” analogical to the politics of hemispheres in the brain in a world of biased and binaristic associations? Should we be ready to contest literacy and literary achievement as a “fearful symmetry” of colonial thought? Intriguingly, the anthropological relationship to hemispheres is at the very origins of what we now know as neuroscience. Broca, the “discoverer” of Broca’s area, was a physical anthropologist who did some of his pioneering neuroanatomical surgical research in the context of his exploration of presumed racial differences. The nineteenth-century Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin, along with his Haitian colleagues Louis Joseph Janvier and J. B. Dehoux, shared the neuro-anthropological milieu of Broca in Paris, including the Société d’anthropologie founded by Broca in 1859. Firmin refers

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to Broca dozens of times in De l’égalité des races humaines, sometimes positively, but also in terms of the weighing of ethnic brains and other painful reminders of the racially inegalitarian state of many nineteenth-century scientific fields.⁴⁴ Of the eight or more references to Broca in Firmin’s work, many contest classificatory systems: “What should we deduct from this new foundation for classification?”⁴⁵ Debates over the anatomy of the nervous system in geographically far-flung ethnicities are a fundamental preoccupation of Firmin’s book. Firmin affirmed that Broca “was not always deaf to truth” and suggests that Broca only later, regrettably, found himself pulled into debates on monogenesis and polygenesis after studying the métissed offspring of a rabbit and hare; nevertheless, he is part of a key scientific obstacle to Firmin’s goal of the equality of the races.⁴⁶

Animals and A Prioris The Sartrean ideal of a humanism without a prioris contrasts starkly with the comparative evolutionary anthropological epistemologies that attended the genesis of neuroscience as we know it. It was in the context of this nineteenth-century culture of naturalism that the anonymous author of De la gérontocratie en Haïti critiqued the proliferation of animal analogies in the characterization of Haitian leaders. This anonymous author complained that in the work of French writer Gustave d’Alaux, “Affinities abound between negroes and wild beasts: Toussaint is fox-like, Dessalines is like a lion, Christophe is like a tiger, Riché is like a bull; the collection would be incomplete if Soulouque were not charged with representing the gorilla.” (“[E]ntre les nègres et les bêtes féroces, les affinités abondent: il y a du renard dans Toussaint, du lion dans Dessalines, du tigre dans Christophe, du taureau dans Riché. La collection ne serait pas complète si Soulouque n’était pas chargé de représenter le gorille.”)⁴⁷ Not just Dessalines, but all the early Haitian leaders were tigerlike in their threat to a Eurocentric cerebral map of abstract, rational man. François-Richard de Tussac in Cri des colons (1810) likewise separately describes not only Dessalines but also Louverture and Rigaud as tiger men: “[A] tiger unleashed by an imprudent hand will obey nature’s irresistible penchant.” (“[U]n tigre déchaîné par une main imprudente, obéit au penchant irrésistible de la nature.”)⁴⁸ Even the friends of blacks were considered tigerlike, as in this reference to the Amis des noirs in a parliamentary speech by the Earl of Westmoreland, in which he accused the abolitionist group of fomenting revolution in order to take over trade interests: “But is it reasonable to suppose, that whenever peace shall come, and this country shall have engrossed every other trade, those tygers in human frame shall not seize a lucrative trade which we should have relinquished?”⁴⁹ Further-

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more, Henry Christophe himself used the figure of speech to discredit Dessalines after his death. Thus when William Blake asked if the same force could have made both the tiger and the lamb, he indirectly evoked the symmetrical, Manichean typologies of racial species speculations: When the stars threw down their spears And water’d heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

“Novel” Metaphors Kane argues that “though the brain’s left hemisphere is commonly believed to be the ‘seat of language,’ the right hemisphere possesses a number of subtle linguistic functions,” most of them linked to a kind of cognitive synesthesia through the sensory apprehension and perceptual recognition of evoked material properties, as in the analysis by Lacey et al. of the textural properties of the metaphor of a “rough” day.⁵⁰ Some processing of the motoric valences of action-related words also occurs in the right brain. And there is evidence, according to Michael Trimble, that “the links from the limbic structures to the right hemisphere . . . developed to a greater degree than those in the left hemisphere,” suggesting that “language precedes reason.”⁵¹ But Iain McGilchrist suggests that the right hemisphere is above all suited to nonfocal activations of related meanings and to novel figuration—unusual or innovative linguistic usages. These all add up to a series of functions that are, according to Kane, “virtually synonomous with ‘poetry’ or ‘poetic’ speech.”⁵² There is a caveat, however: completely conventional or clichéd figures of speech are still processed in the left hemisphere. Rigid localization of cognitive function in a given part of the brain is not the point of recent neurobiological research on poetics. Epistemologies mapped according to hemispheric localization hold increasingly little credibility in neuroscience. Modulation of hemispheric cognitive specialties by the corpus callosum, which coordinates activity in one hemisphere by inhibiting the activity of the other hemisphere, makes the double negative of disinhibition and inhibition more persuasive than cerebral geographies of thought. Recent neuroscience on right hemispheric poetic activation tells us that poetry is absolutely not the prerogative of the educated. It also reveals that poetry stimulates limbic function, which processes responses related to survival such as fear and pain. The unlettered Dessalines’s rhetorical deployment of the pouncing tiger serves as an iconic reminder that poetics are

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in part a mastering of visceral sensoriperceptual experience, as important to former slaves in their military strategies as to the colonists trying to keep African “tiger men” taboo.

Notes 1. Michel-Etienne Descourtilz called Dessalines the “African tiger” (tigre africain). Descourtilz, Voyages d’un naturaliste, et ses observations (Paris: Dufart, 1809) 3:268. 2. Armand Levasseur, Evénemens qui ont procédé et suivi l’évacuation de SaintDomingue, publiés par un officier de l’état-major de l’armée (Paris: Desprez, 1804), 30; Antoine-Henri de Jomini, Histoire critique et militaire des guerres de la révolution (Paris: Chez Anselin et Pochard, 1824), 15:103. 3. See Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (New York: Viking, 2009). 4. Anténor Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines (anthropologie positive) (Paris: Librairie Cotillon, 1885), 542. 5. Among Dessalines’s legacy are: the November 29, 1803, preliminary proclamation of Haitian liberty, signed by Dessalines, Clervaux, and Christophe, and published in the United States in the first days of January 1804; the January 1804 Declaration of Independence, first published in Haiti in the third week of January and in the US, not as a complete text but in parts, in March 1804; the April 28 “I have avenged America” proclamation, first published in the US in June 1804; the May 8 proclamation to the inhabitants of the Spanish part of Hispaniola; and Dessalines’s late August acceptance of his imperial nomination, first published in the US in October 1804. As examples, see the apparently pre-independence poem that Julia Gaffield uncovered in The National Archives of the United Kingdom; “Hymne Haytiène”; and the poem signed by one of Dessalines’s “grenadiers,” Gauterel, on the occasion of Emperor Dessalines’s feast day, published August 1, 1805, in the Gazette politique et commerciale d’Hayti. This poem appears in Poetry of Haitian Independence, ed. Doris Kadish and Deborah Jenson, trans. Norman Shapiro (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 6. See Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011); and “Dessalines’s American Proclamations of the Haitian Independence,” Journal of Haitian Studies 15, no. 1/2 (2009): 72–102. 7. The translations of the Declaration of Independence match the appendix in this volume; all other translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, “Aux Habitants d’Hayti,” [Commonly known by the phrase “I have avenged America”] April 28, 1804. 8. All references to the Haitian Acte de l’Indépendance or Declaration of In-

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dependence are to The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA) version unless otherwise noted, Colonial Office (CO) 137/111/1. 9. Anonymous, “The British Lion, or the New Viva la,” in The Patriot’s Vocal Miscellany (Dublin: Printed for the Booksellers of Ireland, 1804), 47. 10. Laure Junot d’Abrantès, Mémoires de madame la duchesse d’Abrantès (Bruxelles: Société belge de librairie, 1837), 2:217. 11. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980; repr. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 4. 12. Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory: or, Education of an Orator in Twelve Books, trans. John Selby Watson (London: George Bell and Sons, 1903), book XII, chap. 1, 397–98. 13. See Kent Lineberry, “Cadence Calls: Military Folklore in Action” (Missouri Folklore Society, 2002), http://missourifolkloresociety.truman.edu/Missouri%20Folklore %20Studies/Cadence%20Calls.htm (accessed November 1, 2013). 14. Thomas Hobbes, Aristotle’s Treatise on Rhetoric (Oxford: D.A. Talboys, 1833), 223. 15. See the Duke University Rubenstein Library copy of the Acte de l’Indépendance, http://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2014/01/14/unveiling-the-haitian-decla ration-of-independence/. 16. For more on Ferrand and the “Era de francia” in what is now the Dominican Republic, see Deborah Jenson, “States of Ghetto, Ghettos of States: Haiti and the ‘Era de Francia’ in the Dominican Republic, 1804–1808,” The Global South 106, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 156–71. An image of the manuscript copy certified by Ferrand is on the cover of Yale French Studies, No. 107: The Haiti Issue (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), ed. Deborah Jenson. I found the Ferrand manuscript copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence in the Paris National Archives in 2004: AN AF III 210. 17. See Deborah Jenson, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the African Character of the Haitian Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (July 2012): 615–38. 18. Christine Gallant, “Blake’s Coded Designs of Slave Revolts,” Wordsworth Circle 42, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 211. 19. William Blake, “The Tyger,” Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (London: W. Blake, 1794), www .poetryfoundation.org/poem/172943. 20. The closest thing to a tiger on the island of Hispaniola was the imported jaguar, the chat-tigre. See George Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1761), 9:202. 21. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 3–4. 22. “If my relation with the Other is a priori, it thereby exhausts all possibility of relation with others.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943; repr. London: Routledge, 2003), 273; see Ralph James Savarese, “Toward a Postcolonial Neurol-

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ogy: Tito Mukhopadhyay, and a New Geo-poetics of the Body,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4, no. 3 (2010): 273–89. 23. B. M. Wilkowski et al., “ ‘Hot-Headed’ Is More Than an Expression: The Embodied Representation of Anger in Terms of Heat,” Emotion 9 (2009): 464–77. 24. Lawrence Barsalou, “Gounded Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008): 618. 25. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard J. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953). 26. See Deborah Jenson and Marco Iacoboni, “Literary Biomimesis: Mirror Neurons and the Ontological Priority of Representation,” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sc3j6dj. 27. See Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688– 1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 28. Ignace Nau, “Souvenirs historiques (Le Lambi),” L’Union no. 18, April 20, 1837. 29. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: William Morrow, 1994). 30. J. E. LeDoux and Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Integrated Mind (New York: Plenum Press, 1978); L. I. Benowitz, K. Moya, and D. Levine, “Impaired Verbal Reasoning and Constructional Apraxia in Subjects with Right Hemisphere Damage,” Neuropsychologica 28, no. 3 (1990): 231–41. 31. The anatomical studies of the brains of aphasic patients that yielded the concept of Broca’s area in the posterior portion of the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere began in 1861. Paul Broca and Auguste Broca, Mémoires d’anthropologie (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1888), 5: 90. 32. See Jenson, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the African Character of the Haitian Revolution.” 33. Whether alphabets should be conceptually framed as historically contingent epistemologies and technologies or as a single crucial step in human cognitive evolution and in individual cognitive development, as argued by Stanislas Dehaene in The Reading Brain, is a vexed question. I have argued elsewhere that Dessalines was not only unalphabetized but unconditioned by the discipline (in a Foucauldian sense) of colonial educational systems. 34. Julie Kane, “Poetry as Right-hemispheric Language,” PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts (May 3, 2007), www.psyartjournal.com/ article/show/kane-poetry_as_right_hemispheric_language. 35. Ibid. 36. Simon Lacey, Randall Stilla, and K. Sathian, “Metaphorically Feeling: Comprehending Textural Metaphors Activates Somatosensory Cortex,” Brain & Language 120, no. 3 (2012): 416. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 418. 39. Ibid., 417.

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40. Ibid., 416. 41. Rutvik H. Desai et al., “The Neural Career of Sensory-Motor Metaphors,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23, no. 9 (2011): 2376. 42. Michele T.  Diaz and Larson J.  Hogstrom, “The Influence of Context on Hemispheric Recruitment during Metaphor Processing,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23, no. 11 (2011): 3586–97; Michele T. Diaz, Kyle T. Barrett, and Larson J. Hogstrom, “The Influence of Sentence Novelty and Figurativeness on Brain Activity,” Neuropsychologia 49, no. 3 (2011): 320–30. 43. This would go two ways in colonial societies of slavery or revolutionary societies of decolonization. We note that Broca put embroidery in the language center, and despite the sensory and perceptual involvement of textile production and reception, textile and alphabetic literacies may yet be shown to have deep left hemispheric affinities. If this is the case, the textile (and even scarification and/ or tattooing) traditions among African populations could be seen as adding to the left hemisphere literacies of collaborative text production in emerging Haiti. Text/ texture/textile hold etymological overlap, with these words all further related to the notion of métissage as the genetic interweaving of recognizably different communities, which also deserves further analysis. 44. See, for example, Firmin’s account of the early weighing of brain mass in De l’égalité des races humaines, 146. 45. Ibid., 87. 46. Ibid. 47. Anonymous, De la gérontocratie en Haïti (Paris: E. Dentu, 1860), 12. 48. François-Richard de Tussac, Cri des colons: contre un ouvrage de M. l’évêque et sénateur Grégoire, ayant pour titre de la littérature des nègres (Paris: Chez Delauney, 1810), 121. 49. Earl of Westmoreland, July 5, 1799, The Parliamentary Register; or, History and the Proceedings and Debates of the Houses of Lords and Commons (London: J. Debrett, 1799), 583. 50. Kane, “Poetry.” 51. Michael R. Trimble, The Soul in the Brain: The Cerebral Basis of Language, Art, and Belief (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 198. 52. Kane, “Poetry.”

PART II

Haitian Independence and the Atlantic

Law, Atlantic Revolutionary Exceptionalism, and the Haitian Declaration of Independence MALICK W. GHACHEM

One of the more remarkable images of Haitian independence is a 1999 painting by the Haitian artist Ernst Prophète.¹ Representative of the so-called “naïf” style, Prophète’s great work shows Dessalines at the center of a group of generals, standing on a stone platform in the town square of Gonaïves, reading the text of his January 1 address to a throng of cheering Haitians, their hands raised triumphantly above their heads in pride and joy. To the right, Prophète depicts a group representing the free people of color of SaintDomingue, their reaction to the announcement somewhat obscured by the leaves of the palm trees that tower above the crowd and gesture to the seascape that lies beyond. I begin with Prophète’s image because it captures two elemental truths about the Haitian Declaration of Independence in particular, and the Haitian Revolution more generally, that are sometimes easy to overlook. First, although one of the happier images of the Haitian Revolution, Prophète’s painting also captures some of its grit and sadness as well. An understated ambivalence seems characteristic of his work. In a 1994 interview with Edwidge Danticat, he observed in connection with another of his paintings that “life in Haiti is all about laughter and tears. There is misery in Haiti but the people find a way—and even have the nerve—to laugh. You see people who sing and dance and cry.”² There seems to be quite a lot of singing and dancing in The Haitian Declaration of Independence, but also, if one looks hard, not a few tears as well, if by tears we understand something of the sacrifices that had to be made for January 1, 1804, to come about. The Haitian Declaration of Independence was a triumphant and defiant pronouncement in many respects, but it was also pervaded by a harsh and even menacing awareness of loss, tragedy, violence, and persecution. Dessalines’s rendition of these themes is not the same as Prophète’s, but ambivalence is a common feature of both. Second, Prophète’s painting serves as a reminder that, in the beginning,

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Jean-Jacques Dessalines reads the text of his address, January 1, 1804. Painting by Ernst Prophète, 1999. (From the private collection of Jack Rosenthal and Holly Russell; photo courtesy of Tequila Minsky)

the Declaration of Independence was not originally a text—or at least, it was not only a text. Like its British North American predecessor, the Haitian declaration was both an event and a document.³ But more than either of these, the independence of Saint-Domingue was, first and foremost, an oral proclamation by Dessalines to the community of Haitians gathered around him in the public space at Gonaïves depicted by Prophète. In light of the clearly performative nature of the proclamation, we might well describe it as a “speech” or “illocutionary act,” a way of doing things with words.⁴ One contrast with the American declaration is that nearly all of the military action that gave rise to Haitian independence preceded its proclamation—notwithstanding the very real, persistent, and justified fears of Haitians that another French invasion would someday come. This is, in significant part, a manifesto for

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a cause that, while fragile, has already been won. Another difference is that the formal expression of Haiti’s independence took the form of a live proclamation rather than a written enactment, though Julia Gaffield’s discovery of the original publication of the declaration underscores that Haiti’s leaders wished also to speak to the broader Atlantic World via the medium of print. The Prophète painting and others like it give the Haitian declaration a third lease on life, as art, and so teach us that, for contemporary Haitians as for their founding-era ancestors, both the form and the content of the independence canon are inherently plural. Is the declaration any less an act of “law” that it took the original form of a discourse (to use the eighteenth-century French term) and persists most memorably today as an image? To answer yes requires belief in a mistaken identification of law with written or published instruments of one sort or another. The modern equation of law with print also excludes the largely nonliterate slave populations of the early modern New World from the province of legality and institutional justice, an exclusion that Natalie Zemon Davis and others have explored with great sensitivity and insight.⁵ But what kind of legal pronouncement describes Dessalines’s fulminations against French influence in Saint-Domingue, his emphatic insistence that the era of slavery was finally and forever over in Haiti? That is the question to which this essay seeks an answer. My answer turns on the relationship between two of the central claims made in the declaration, which is more accurately understood as a collection of pronouncements or acts, the centerpiece of which is Dessalines’s speech to the assembled people of Gonaïves. (I refer to these documents collectively as the Haitian independence canon and to Dessalines’s discourse as “the declaration.”) First, Dessalines insisted that independence would effectuate an absolute rupture with the nation’s colonial slaveholding past and with France in particular. Second, and less transparently, the declaration challenged the Enlightenment belief that the period from the 1770s onwards constituted a symbiotic “Age of (northern Atlantic) Revolution” dominated by the American and French revolutions and extending into the events of the Haitian Revolution. In both contexts, Haiti’s Declaration of Independence seems to stand for radical discontinuity. In announcing that “Haitians” were no longer part of France and wanted nothing more to do with slaveholding societies (the United States impliedly if not expressly included), Dessalines was also articulating an independent status for the Haitian Revolution as a transformative and foundational event of the Atlantic World. For the claim of independence from colonial slavery was also a claim that the Haitian Revolution did not and could not share the means and ends of the American and (more particularly) the French revolutions. In this sense, 1804 marked the

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end of the era of the northern Atlantic revolutions—and the beginning of another that looks forward to the early nineteenth-century Latin American revolutions to the south. All sorts of fictions and compromises were embedded in these claims. Indeed Dessalines did not try to disguise all of the evidence that ran against the grain of his assertions of rupture. The traces of French influence, notably French legal influence, remained everywhere to be seen (hence everywhere to be eradicated), he exclaimed. And the legacies of slavery were omnipresent in Saint-Domingue on the cusp of independence, not simply in the form of laws and regulations enacted under both Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines that struck many of the former plantation workers as harbingers of their servile past, but also in the scars inflicted on the physical landscape, in the hostility of the outside world, and in countless other forms. Finally, although the American Revolution’s discernible impact on the Haitian Revolution was indeed negligible, the same could not be said of the French Revolution, which, for much of the 1790s, was so closely connected to parallel events in Haiti that it becomes counterproductive to try to distinguish the two trajectories. By 1804, however, there was enough truth in Dessalines’s claims of independence and Haitian revolutionary particularity to sustain the declaration. Exactly how we characterize those claims remains a matter of contention. In particular, Haitian revolutionary scholarship (as reflected in the contributions by David Geggus and Jeremy Popkin to this volume) continues to frame the particularity of the Haitian declaration in terms that carry traces of American and French exceptionalism. The temptation to treat the American Declaration of Independence as normative because it came first and embodied the Atlantic republican future, whereas Haiti’s declaration pointed forward to Caribbean authoritarianism, must be resisted. There was no single path to independence in the Atlantic World nor any one road out of slavery.⁶ And Haiti’s path, unlike that of either revolutionary America or France, was emphatically a path out of racial plantation slavery for the overwhelming majority of the population. If we must say that Haiti has not managed this transition very well in the years since 1804, we must also say that no other nation, faced with the same challenges, has managed to do much better. Prophète’s painting nicely captures that mix of sentiments.

Of Law and Revolution Like all complex historical documents, Haiti’s declaration is not “about” any one single subject. But what struck me most upon first reading this most

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quintessential of Haitian revolutionary documents, aside from its obvious passion and profound sense of grievance, was the cluster of references to law and legality. In his January 1, 1804, remarks at Gonaïves, Dessalines lamented that “the French name still haunts our land. Everything retraces the memories of the cruelties of this barbarous people: our laws, our habits, our towns, everything still carries the stamp of the French.”⁷ These memories of cruelty made it necessary to consolidate a new regime “with laws that will guarantee your free individuality” (“votre libre individualité”).⁸ That last expression, “free individuality,” is especially revealing, for it suggests that the crime of slavery was not simply the negation of the freedom of a group of people, but also the denial of their status as individuals, each possessing unique attributes. Slavery suppressed this aspect of the human personality—the desire to be different from all other personalities, to lead a life that is truly one’s own—while also violating the collective claims of humanity. (“[A]m I not a man and a brother?”) Framed in these terms, the declaration sounded very much like a (somewhat abstract) manifesto for the abolition of slavery. Elsewhere in his discourse, however, Dessalines noted pointedly that Haiti’s Atlantic neighbors should be left to “live quietly under the aegis of the laws that they have made for themselves.” And he closed the declaration with an awkward reference to the temporary necessity for “laws that the spirit that watches over your destiny dictates to me for your happiness.” The emphasis on law gave Haiti’s declaration at once a forward- and backward-looking character: the imperative of absolute rupture with the colonial slave past competing with acknowledgment that aspects or shadows of the law of slavery would necessarily persist at the level of both foreign and domestic law. To some extent, Dessalines resolved the tension by recourse to a set of compromises and fictions about what it meant for the new Haitian state to “renounce France” at the level of law. To begin with, renunciation emphatically did not entail a policy to undermine slavery in other quarters of the Atlantic World, as some have contended. (Alexandre Pétion’s subsequent embrace of Simón Bolívar on the condition that he support abolition in Spanish America, and his willingness to create a space of asylum for the enslaved inside Haiti, complicated Dessalines’s 1804 assurances, but only subsequently to the declaration itself.) Moreover, the need to subordinate “individual liberty” to the demands of Haiti’s “general liberty”—in Louverture’s terms—meant that whatever guarantees formal independence entailed in the way of “free individuality”—Dessalines’s phrase—would be conditional at best.⁹ From Louverture to Dessalines and beyond, the search for new legal

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foundations was embedded in a larger quest for the “rule of law” that, in the circumstances, seemed to offer only an illusionary promise to the new nation. Yet to characterize some of the more radical claims of the declaration as fictions is not to deny that they served an urgent purpose in their own day. Fictions, whether of a legal or other nature, can be highly consequential.¹⁰ Beyond this general consideration, the mere existence of Haiti, the very fact of its new ruling class, and the act of the declaration itself—all of these were momentously novel forces in the Atlantic World. It is easy to demonstrate that Haiti’s independence was, from the beginning, a legal formalism that could not disguise the nation’s acute vulnerability to the control of foreign powers—France, Britain, and the United States above all. The American, French, and Haitian revolutions clearly did not all act upon the same world-historical stage. But the genius of the Haitian declaration is, in a sense, to pretend that they did. Part and parcel of the same chain of events triggered by the Seven Years’ War, the three revolutions became entities unto themselves after 1804, their characters more clearly delineated by the relationship in which they stood to each other. In that process of demarcating boundaries between revolutions and hence stamping distinctive identities upon them, the legal fiction of Haiti as a sovereign nation acting upon the world stage as other sovereign nations occupied a central place, even as the nation itself became an outcast in a world it had helped to create.

Haiti’s Revolutionary Rule of Law Dessalines’s ability to announce Haiti’s status “among the Powers of the earth” depended critically on the efforts of his predecessor Toussaint Louverture. In particular, Louverture’s 1801 constitution—the first in a long line of written Haitian constitutions, and the first document to codify the abolition of racial slavery, to prohibit racial discrimination, and to guarantee equal protection under the law in the Atlantic World—was instrumental to the course of events that culminated in Haitian independence.¹¹ For it was the 1801 constitution that triggered the “war of independence” of 1802–3, whose raw memories so transparently underlay Dessalines’s searing imagery in the declaration. While the 1801 constitution is now quite familiar to historians of the revolutionary period, its relationship to the tumult of 1802–3 and Haiti’s subsequent efforts to institute a rule of law should not go without comment in a volume dedicated to the Haitian Declaration of Independence. The Haitian crisis of independence that begins with Louverture’s constitution and ends on New Year’s Eve 1803 bore only a passing resemblance to the American imperial crisis of the 1770s. The most obvious similarity may

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be one that, in light of the Haitian comparison, may well seem overstated in recent writing on the American Revolution: the hesitance to seek and declare independence until very late in the process—far later in the Haitian case than the American.¹² Before the 1802–3 war of independence, it could not have been predicted that Haiti’s revolution would culminate in the complete severance of all ties with France for which Dessalines agitated. Napoléon Bonaparte was the first but certainly not the last person to construe Louverture’s 1801 constitution as a de facto declaration of independence, a shot across the bow rather than a coherent attempt to state the principles and rules by which the new Saint-Domingue would be governed. But Louverture seems to have envisioned that those principles and rules could and would operate within a French imperial framework of some sort. For him, and for most others at the time, independence was far from inevitable as of 1801, and may well have been unforeseeable. While his capture and deportation to France in June 1802 put an end to that illusion, they did so a full thirteen years or so after the beginning of the Saint-Domingue revolution, eleven years after the uprising at Bois Caïman. This chronology, in turn, points to a conspicuous difference between the American and Haitian independence crises. To the extent the 1801 constitution was not simply a warning to Napoléon but also the first governing charter of the state that would eventually become Haiti, the Haitian path to statehood was effectively the reverse of the American.¹³ In British North America, the sequence of 1776/1787 amounted to announcing “statehood in the language of independence” (as David Armitage has put it), followed by constituting the union in the language of the state.¹⁴ There is little in the Haitian experience to suggest that Haiti borrowed materially from any aspect of this prior North American history. Most superficially, the sequence of 1801/1804—constitution followed by independence—flipped the American example on its head. In one of his supreme acts of statesmanship, in 1801 Toussaint Louverture attempted to consolidate his rule over the fractured territory of Saint-Domingue by promulgating a constitution over which he himself exercised more or less singlehanded control. The entity to which this constitution applied was, it bears emphasizing, a “French colony,” not a “free and independent state” in the manner of the 1776 declaration.¹⁵ That being the case, the operative question becomes what form of colonial governance Louverture sought to institute in Saint-Domingue in light of the available models and precedents. Here again, the 1801 constitution can be likened only in a very rough sense to either American or French precedents. As was true of its predecessors, the 1801 charter sought to divide authority between the three branches of government: the “legislative,” the “government,” and the “tribunals.” In this respect, Louverture’s handiwork did draw

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vaguely upon American and French notions of the separation of powers. And discrete provisions, such as the guarantee of private property as “sacred and inviolable,” echoed similar statements of principle in the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.¹⁶ But the analogies more or less end there. Notwithstanding a formal commitment to divided government, the new constitution clearly gave the top hand to the governor of the colony (a post to which Louverture appointed himself for life), who possessed the power to propose all measures that the legislature could adopt. And Louverture’s constitution recognized two other forms of jurisdiction that reflected SaintDomingue’s distinctive character as a militarized society of plantations: municipal administration and the armed forces. Yet another pair of the constitution’s titles confirmed this orientation, regulating as they did plantation cultivation, trade, and the management of abandoned and confiscated properties.¹⁷ If these aspects of the constitution point toward its more conservative dimension, other provisions were unequivocally forward-looking and bold in the context of their times. This is true most obviously of the document’s commitment (in Title II) to the abolition of slavery: “Slaves may not exist on this territory, [and] servitude is there forever abolished. All men are there born, live, and die free and French.”¹⁸ In the very same phrase by which the constitution announced an end to slavery, it also portended continuity (in the form of French civic status) with the imperial framework. A separate provision guaranteed something like the equal protection of the laws: “The law is the same for all, whether it punishes or protects.”¹⁹ As David Brion Davis reminds us, abolition and equal protection principles would not make their way into the American constitution until 1865 and 1868.²⁰ The first Haitian constitution, in other words, coupled dramatic innovation at the level of domestic legal principle with maintenance (or, at most, hedging) of the external framework that would oversee this new domestic regime. It was the attempt to combine these two pursuits that made it difficult for Louverture and his successors to adhere successfully to either of them. The compromises and fictions that appear in the text of declaration were already present in Louverture’s project of “general liberty,” of which the 1801 constitution was only a part. That document came sandwiched in time between two other proclamations that sharply curtailed (both before and after the fact) Title II’s guarantees of individual liberty and equality. In his October 1800 plantation labor regulations and a subsequent November 1801 proclamation, Louverture set forth rules that would tie the formally freed slaves to their plantations, punish “vagabonds” who refused to work the land, and

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provide for a system of municipal identification cards that could be held only by those possessed of a “recognized” status or position.²¹ Louverture was hardly the first administrator of Saint-Domingue to insist upon such measures of plantation surveillance and forced labor. The emancipation proclamations of Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel in 1793 and 1794 contained very similar provisions, and indeed it is impossible to trace the history of emancipation in Saint-Domingue in the 1790s without parallel attention to the coercive strictures that went along with liberty. The resultant combination of carrot and stick has been best captured by Claude Moïse: in order to preserve the “general liberty” of the freed slaves as a community in an Atlantic World resolutely hostile to such liberty, Louverture found it necessary to qualify the freedom that each of the individuals making up that community enjoyed to dispose of his own labor as each saw fit.²² As Moïse sees it, the many references in Louverture’s public pronouncements in these years (1800–1802) to the need for a “rule of law” in SaintDomingue speak to this tragically compromised version of liberty, rather than to an innate penchant for authoritarian rule.²³ Others may be more inclined to call the tension between general and individual liberty a contradiction in terms. Whatever the best way of characterizing Louverture’s policies may be, it seems clear that he was following a North American revolutionary star only in the very broadest of outlines. To the contrary, even insofar as the (arguably conservative) dogma of “general liberty” was concerned, the Haitian revolutionary process had come to upend the order of things as established in the Atlantic World by the events of 1776. By 1802–3, a second independent state in the Atlantic World was perforce on its way, but it would be organized on principles very different from those that had served to constitute the first—most notably in respect of the questions of abolition and legal equality.²⁴ This, too, is part of the exceptionalism enshrined in the Haitian independence canon.

Law and Foreign Policy in the Declaration Other than its powerful but abstract references to liberty and to the equality of all human beings at creation, there was nothing in the American declaration upon which to model these quintessential doctrines of the Haitian Revolution. The Haitian declaration reflects that dissonance at several levels, including its statement of the new nation’s foreign policy toward other Atlantic slaveholding powers. A somewhat romantic effort to assimilate the American and Haitian revolutions to one another continues to feed interest in an alleged first draft of the Haitian declaration that was, supposedly, mod-

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eled on Jefferson’s draft—a draft that itself underwent significant revision at the hands of the Continental Congress.²⁵ Perhaps one day the manuscript of this alleged draft will be recovered. In the meantime, there is certainly no evidence to support the assertion, contained in a recent account of the diplomacy of the American Revolution, that “the black republic’s declaration was modeled on the one that Jefferson wrote in 1776.”²⁶ I have argued elsewhere that abolition in revolutionary Haiti was a highly conflicted and ambiguous achievement in its own time, depending as it did on compromises and collaborations with the law and culture of slavery that are not easily captured by the label “abolition.”²⁷ It is also true that the American founders’ failure to abolish slavery in 1787 does not negate the potent ideological tools generated by the American Revolution, tools that would later facilitate the actual liberation of African Americans, women, and others in subsequent generations.²⁸ Even after acknowledging these points, however, it remains the case that the Haitian revolutionary process, alone of the three great revolutions of the late eighteenth-century northern Atlantic, posed a frontal challenge to the domestic relationship between master and slave as it then existed on the territory of a major slave colony. Whether the Haitian Revolution also directly challenged slavery as a system of international commercial relationships is a different matter. David Armitage argues that, in declaring Haiti’s independence, Dessalines was not simply “asserting firmly and clearly the end of slavery” but also “thereby threatening the stability of remaining slave powers like the United States.”²⁹ That last point is far less clear. Louverture’s 1801 constitution expressly authorized the continued importation of “cultivators” and indeed described them as “indispensable” to the rebuilding of Saint-Domingue, in another manifestation of Louverture’s belief that individual liberty could be sacrificed to general liberty where necessary.³⁰ It is true that this limited embrace of the Atlantic slave trade did not find its way into Dessalines’s 1804 independence speech or into the first postindependence Haitian constitution (that of 1805). But to describe Haiti’s Declaration of Independence as a threat to the stability of the Atlantic World’s remaining slave powers is to overlook a very conspicuous passage in Dessalines’s January 1 address at Gonaïves. “Let us ensure however that a proselytizing spirit does not destroy our work,” he intoned. “[L]et our neighbors breathe in peace, let them live quietly under the aegis of the laws that they have made for themselves, and let us not go, as revolutionary firebrands proclaiming ourselves legislators of the Antilles, seek glory by disturbing the tranquility of the neighboring Islands.” Dessalines was undoubtedly speaking to both a domestic and international audience in this passage. Gaffield’s discovery of the original printed edition of the declaration canon is especially

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significant on this point. It seems reasonable to infer from the Haitian government’s decision to publish Dessalines’s speech and then circulate it to the greater Atlantic World that Dessalines meant for this language in particular to reach Jefferson’s America and other New World slave powers. It was not the only pronouncement that Dessalines intended for foreign as well as domestic consumption, but it was a critical statement, and one that complicates the notion that Haiti’s declaration was a radical intervention into the politics of the Atlantic World. Notice one other aspect of this language: its emphasis on law. Dessalines recognized that slavery as a domestic institution was a function of laws that each slave society of the New World developed for itself. To respect those laws was to recognize the juristic boundaries that separated sovereign nations and their colonies from one another. To seek to upend those laws would make the Haitian revolutionaries “legislators of the Antilles,” a role that Dessalines expressly declined because it would endanger the new Haitian state itself by violating the principle of sovereignty to which that new state was now formally committed. The logic of independence, in this sense, entailed at least some compromise with the existing reality of slavery elsewhere in the Atlantic World. The language of the law could be used to sever the ties that bound Haiti to France: that was the point (though not necessarily the effect) of declaring independence. But to participate in the discourse of the law of nations also required an acknowledgement that other societies remained bound to their slaveholding pasts: that was, arguably, a cost of declaring independence. Whether inherent in the logic of the law of nations and the act of declaring independence or merely a precautionary strategy to protect Haiti from external foes, Dessalines’s Gonaïves address struck a distinctly antirevolutionary note regarding slavery outside the boundaries of Haiti. This aversion to intervening in the domestic laws of neighboring states did not long remain a central component of Haitian foreign policy, and its implementation assumed an ability to maintain sharp boundaries between Caribbean colonies that were in practice often porous. Ada Ferrer’s study of President Pétion’s use of free soil principles to project Haiti’s antislavery influence abroad, which focuses on his decision to grant asylum to a group of Afro-Jamaican sailors in 1817, offers a rich account of the inseparability of “domestic” and “foreign” in the post-1804 Caribbean.³¹ One could also cite Pétion’s insistence that Bolívar push for abolition as a condition of the former’s willingness to shelter and support the precursor of Latin American independence. As of 1804, however, these more interventionist aspects of Haitian foreign policy remained several years in the future.

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A Domestic “State of Exception”? Giorgio Agamben’s book State of Exception has served as a touchstone for academic discussion of emergency law since it was published in Italy in 2003 and in English translation in 2005.³² The basic premise of the book is that, since the First World War, the claim of the state to govern on an emergency basis has become a paradigm of “normal” government. While claiming the power to suspend everyday law, in other words, the state of exception operates as itself a form of the rule of law: the negation of law masks law’s reliance on its very negation. This is the paradox that Agamben’s work has popularized in scholarly discourse. It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that Dessalines, again in sharp contrast to the Americans in 1776, was trying to declare something like a “state of exception” in his January 1, 1804, address at Gonaives. The rule of emergency law that he created and announced to the world on that day was exceptional in significant part because Haiti remained highly vulnerable: vulnerable to external aggression and vulnerable also to the legacies of the “war within the war” of 1802–3. The conflict between creole (New World– born) and bossale (African-born) insurgents that Michel-Rolph Trouillot so brilliantly analyzed in Silencing the Past threatened Dessalines’s own position as successor to Toussaint Louverture: both were born in Saint-Domingue and both faced challenges to their authority from the rise of bossale militancy during the war of independence.³³ This is to say nothing of the conflicts between the recently enslaved (whether creole or bossale) and free people of color that would eventually produce the division of Haiti in 1806 (and make possible the divergent foreign policies of Pétion’s free colored republic in the South and Christophe’s black monarchy in the North until 1820). Set against this context, it is hardly surprising that Dessalines would appeal to the emergency conditions facing Haitians both from within and without. Such an appeal served the obvious purpose of facilitating Dessalines’s consolidation of his own power as the head of state. But to be effective, the strategy required some effort along the lines of Louverture’s appeal to the Haitian public interest: an attempted synthesis of individual and general liberty. Dessalines gestured in precisely this direction by highlighting the constraints imposed by the new nation’s own domestic laws of slavery. Haitians needed urgently to emancipate themselves from their own history, in effect. Dessalines evoked the persistence of the colonial past circa 1804 in the language of haunting and memory. “Everything here recalls the memory of the cruelties of those barbarous people; our laws, our manners, our towns, everything still carries the imprint of the French.” What made these memories all the more foreboding and real was that they were

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accompanied by the lingering presence of actual French persons in SaintDomingue. “There are Frenchmen in our Island,” said Dessalines, “and yet you think you are free and independent of that Republic which fought every other nation, it is true; but which has never vanquished those who are determined to be free.” An imminent threat required an immediate response. There was not much that separated this statement from an explicit call to eliminate all remaining white French residents on the soil of Haiti, and Dessalines notoriously would make good on his threat several months later, in a move that reactionary critics of the Haitian Revolution would long exploit as a justification for opposing Haiti’s own right to exist. It would be more difficult to erase the traces of France that remained in the form of depersonalized specters: laws, signs, names, figures of speech (the French language itself), the weight of custom, and all else that “still carrie[d] the imprint of the French.” Dessalines thereby raised a challenge to his countrymen that has still not been met more than two hundred years later, as the single example of continued reliance upon the French language in official and elite culture attests.³⁴ Conceptualizing the task and goal of bona fide independence in terms that made it impossible for Haitians to realize was not exactly sleight of hand. But it did rely on a very ambiguous use of the concept of law in a context that, flowing from the very anarchical period of the war of independence, seemed the very antithesis of law. Dessalines evoked the haunting presence of the French plantation order on the day of independence by referring to laws that continued to embody “the cruelties of those barbarous people.” Declining to specify the exact laws he was describing, Dessalines may well have been referring to the Code noir. But that edict had been impliedly repealed for the last time with Louverture’s 1801 constitution. Most other elements of the colonial legal order remained in place in 1804, and postrevolutionary Haitian law codes would continue to be based in significant measure on French legal precedents, including Napoléon’s 1804 Code civil. Whatever the specific cruelties he had in mind, Dessalines nonetheless had a more immediate and personal reason for emphasizing that the strictures of the law of slavery still echoed in the legal landscape of the new nation. Near the very end of his speech, he awkwardly anticipated some of the discomfort that would soon arise from some of his very own policies: If you ever rejected or grumbled while receiving the laws that the spirit that watches over your destiny dictates to me for your happiness, you would deserve the fate of ungrateful peoples. But I reject this shocking idea; you will be the support of the liberty you cherish, the support of the chief who commands you.³⁵

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Again, the reference is elusive (in part because the translation is inevitably inexact): Dessalines points to laws that have been met with rejection and grumbling without telling us which laws he has in mind. This statement seems to refer to rules yet to be promulgated as of January 1, 1804, as the original French speaks in the future conjunctive tense of “les lois que le génie . . . me dictera pour ton bonheur.” “Your happiness” will require me to dictate to you in ways that will cause protest if not defiance: in this one sentence can be found both the making and unmaking of Dessalines’s short reign. The passage echoes Louverture’s own ambiguous embrace of the rule of law in 1800–1801 on at least two different levels. First, Dessalines continued Louverture’s hybrid policy of a constitutional commitment to abolition and formal equality combined with draconian labor regulations that prompted a series of plantation uprisings in October 1801. Indeed Dessalines’s rise to power depended in no small part on his having been charged by Louverture with the brutal suppression of these very uprisings.³⁶ Not surprisingly, when it came time for him to assume control of the northern insurgent camps, Dessalines found himself in very same position of needing to guarantee a continued flow of money and goods from the once thriving plantations. Second, Dessalines articulated this dilemma in terms that echoed very closely the Louverturian distinction between general and individual liberty, with its emphasis on the need to subordinate the latter to the demands of the former. Dessalines expected his followers to accept with resignation the policies that a higher power would “dictate” to him “for [their] own happiness.” Only an “ungrateful” people could fail to see that in so leading the nation, Dessalines would be acting to “sustain” rather than undermine the liberty henceforth to be commemorated every January 1 in Haiti. This vision of governance sounds like nothing so much as an Atlantic colonial (and imminently postcolonial) version of the state of exception. His protestations about the need to eliminate all French influence from the scene notwithstanding, Dessalines cannot be accused of being overly naïve about the legal fictions that sovereignty would work on Haiti’s future. In contrast to the American Declaration of Independence, there is far less in the Haitian declaration canon on the importance of joining a community of sovereign states. Where the American declaration evokes the drama of “assum[ing] among the Powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s god entitled” the newly United States, the Haitian declaration dwells on the dangers of any continued association with or traces of France.³⁷ Where the American declaration asserts title to the full prerogatives of “free and independent states” to “levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce,” etc., the Haitian declaration emphasizes that “liv[ing] free and independent” means “prefer[ring] death to any-

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thing that will try to place you back under the yoke.” Put simply, the Haitian declaration reads like an enactment of a state of emergency; it burns with a sense of temporal immediacy, compared to which studied consideration of the international legal incidents of statehood seems abstract and remote.

Conclusion What should we make of this compromised language of “liberty” and the “rule of law” in the Haitian independence canon, and of the short reigns of Louverture and Dessalines more generally? It is tempting to see both figures (and particularly Dessalines) as dictators in their own right and precursors of modern Haitian and Caribbean “authoritarianism” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.³⁸ Certainly there was not much in their approach to governance that reflects a commitment to revolutionary-era principles of republicanism, whether at the institutional level (the separation of powers) or at the individual level (the rights of man). Indeed, the thrust of the authoritarianism thesis is precisely to discount the notion that the Haitian Revolution, in its outcomes, represented a uniquely radical form of politics committed to republicanism and modern liberal individualism.³⁹ At that level of generality, however, the thesis and its antithesis both tell us less than meets the eye. The same is arguably true of the related contest over whether the Haitian Revolution in fact abolished “slavery” or simply resulted in the resurrection of older practices of coerced labor under a different guise. Here is where a work of art makes a difference. Missing from these debates, especially in their more polemical versions, is the ambivalence captured in Prophète’s painting. Perhaps it takes a perspective rooted in the naïf tradition to remind us that the mere fact of Haiti’s existence as a separate state in the Atlantic World of 1804 was a tremendous novelty, a revolutionary act in its own right—independent of the character of the political culture that accompanied that act. This novelty is certainly on a par with the “momentous radicalism” that Gordon Wood speaks of when he describes the American Revolution as having ushered in a new era dominated by the “commonplace behavior” and concerns of “ordinary people.”⁴⁰ The very idea of a legitimate black state, a state led by and for persons of African descent, was a deeply revolutionary extension of the “Age of Revolution.” And the image and reality of Afro-Haitians at the head of this new state was inseparable from the novelty of 1804, even though it was not, strictly speaking, unprecedented, given Toussaint Louverture’s de facto leadership of Saint-Domingue as of the late 1790s. The central legal embodiment of this radicalism consisted of the provisions in Louverture’s 1801 constitution and Dessalines’s 1805 constitution

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abolishing slavery “forever” and guaranteeing the equal treatment of all under the law.⁴¹ Dessalines’s promise in the independence discourse to promulgate “laws that will guarantee your free individuality” should be read in this spirit, even though he cautioned that such freedom had to be deferred until the leaders of the revolution had collectively given “the final proof of our devotion.” That proof, an oath “to fight for independence until their last breath,” was the military counterpart to the political and legal promise. And the insistence upon the necessity of severing all ties with France was, in Dessalines’s vision of Haiti’s future, equally inseparable from the bedrock commitment to ending slavery—though it also tragically and ominously crossed over the line separating independence from the extermination of all remaining white French residents in Saint-Domingue. The snare in this vision is not that Dessalines and his fellow leaders imagined themselves to be assuming a fully “separate and equal station” capable of eliciting the same recognition from “the Powers of the earth” that the American republic would eventually win after 1812. It is, rather, that Dessalines’s vision of independence, on the whole, conflated renunciation of France with renunciation of the legacies of the law of slavery. The reverberations of more than one hundred years of life under the rule of the Code noir were not available for “renunciation” in this way, no more than any complex historical legacy can be erased by a single speech or stroke of the pen. Or, for that matter, by an ideology like the rule of law, so prominent a thread in Louverture’s and Dessalines’s thinking about the nature of the new Haitian state and the society that would rise from the ashes of old Saint-Domingue. When it came to the task of replacing the regime of the Code noir with a set of new legal foundations for a Caribbean society that now rejected white supremacy and the ownership of persons as property, the rule of law offered little in the way of a roadmap for practical reform. (To some extent, this is still true of Haiti and the ideology of democracy promotion today.) To describe this predicament in terms of either authoritarianism or a uniquely radical form of late eighteenth-century Atlantic republicanism and human rights misses this point. The emphasis on authoritarianism takes a complicated and indeed profound human dilemma—how to overcome the complex legacies of the law of slavery in a society that had known essentially no other form of government or social organization—and reduces it to a question of political volition, i.e., the willingness of Haiti’s new leadership to assume and carry forward the mantle of 1776 or 1789. The emphasis on construing Haiti’s revolution as a uniquely radical contribution to democratic politics, for its part, gives rise to a different kind of distortion: effectively divorcing political language and constitutional rhetoric from the intractable

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“thickness” of institutional and social arrangements, arrangements that, in the Haitian case, have proven exceptionally difficult to transform and overcome. The Haitian declaration therefore helps us to understand why it is difficult to see the Haitian Revolution as either an authoritarian relapse from or a uniquely radical manifestation of the Age of Revolution. The pronouncements of January 1, 1804, did not succeed in constituting Haiti as a genuinely sovereign nation in the hostile world of its time. But they can be said to have constituted the Haitian Revolution as a distinctive movement in the era of the late eighteenth-century (North) Atlantic revolutions. The Declaration of Independence drew boundaries between events as well as between nations. In its final version, it made clear that the American revolutionary model would not suffice to capture the distinctive demands of the Haitian situation. And, coming as it does at the very end of the complex chain of events that linked the French and Saint-Domingue revolutions throughout the 1790s, Dessalines’s declaration put an end to the idea that these two movements started and ended at the same legal and constitutional points. Plantation slavery was simply too distinctive a form of social and political organization for that sense of shared endeavor and purpose to survive indefinitely. Though it was not inevitable, the war of 1802–3 marks the moment at which the respective custodians of the French and Haitian revolutions came to accept this truth. The Haitian Declaration of Independence therefore permits us, in retrospect, to disentangle the chains of cause and effect that bind the American, French, and Haitian revolutions as successive phases of a single process initiated by the Seven Years’ War and continued by the Latin American revolutions of the early nineteenth century. That the three North Atlantic revolutions were struggles to achieve distinctive ends particular to the respective societies in which they unfolded is perhaps the central teaching of the announcement of Haitian sovereignty in 1804, however much that announcement may have amounted to a legal fiction in its own time. The Haitian declaration of 1804 demarcated the boundaries between 1776, 1789, and all that had transpired in Saint-Domingue in the years thereafter. In so doing, it gave a distinctive meaning and identity not only to the Haitian Revolution, but also to the American and French revolutions.

Notes Many thanks to Julia Gaffield and Andrew O’Shaughnessy for inviting me to the splendid gathering at Monticello in March 2013 at which an earlier draft of this

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essay was first presented. I thank my fellow seminar participants for their stimulating presentations and helpful comments and am grateful for the reports of two anonymous readers for the University of Virginia Press. 1. First published in the November 29, 1999 “Millenium” issue of the New York Times Magazine, the painting is now in the private collection of Jack Rosenthal and Holly Russell. Born near Cap Haïtien in 1950, Prophète moved to Port-au-Prince in 1968 or 1969, amidst the persecutions of the Duvalier era, to finish his high school education. An electrical engineer by training, he learned to paint in Port-au-Prince at l’École Privée Grégoire Eugène and has been doing so ever since. In 1978, he began a very long career with Electricité d’Haïti (the Haitian electric company). See the interview of Prophète by Edwidge Danticat in Jonathan Demme and Kirsten Coyne, eds., Haiti, Three Visions: Etienne Chavannes, Edger Jean-Baptiste, Ernst Prophète (New York: Kaliko, 1994), 45–46. This catalog includes a stirring selection of Prophète’s many other representations of Haitian history and culture. 2. Demme and Coyne, Haiti, Three Visions, 45–46. 3. Less clear is whether the declaration also served as the beginning (or continuation) of a new political genre, as David Armitage has suggested of the American declaration. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13. 4. See James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 8–9. 5. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname,” Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (2011): 925–84. 6. This essay does not attempt to reach into the Latin American revolutions of the early nineteenth century, but the point made here with respect to Haiti applies equally to those movements. Latin American independence and abolition processes further complicate the tendency to read the normativity of the American and French models into a larger “Age of Revolution.” The Haitian Revolution contributed in important ways to those Latin American processes but should not be seen as providing a template for them. 7. Speech of Jean-Jacques Dessalines at Gonaïves, January 1, 1804 (Port-auPrince: L’Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1804), 3, in The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA), CO 137/111/1 [hereafter “Speech of Dessalines”]. 8. This translation differs from the appendix. 9. On Louverture’s distinction between “individual” and “general” liberty, see Claude Moïse, Le projet national de Toussaint Louverture et la constitution de 1801 (Montreal: CIDIHCA, 2001). 10. Cf. Malick W. Ghachem, “The Slave’s Two Bodies: The Life of an American Legal Fiction,” William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2003): 809–42. 11. The only plausible rival for this status is the French constitution of 1795, which explicitly incorporates the National Convention’s February 1794 abolition of slavery in the French colonies. The 1795 constitution also incorporates the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but that document cannot, in any

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straightforward sense, be described as enacting a ban on race discrimination and a guarantee of race-neutral application of the laws. I thank Jeremy D. Popkin for pressing me on these points; see his essay on the 1795 constitution and slavery entitled “Thermidor, Slavery, and the ‘Affaire des Colonies,’ ” French Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (2015): 61–82. 12. On the reluctance of moderates within the Continental Congress to push for independence during the early months of 1776, see Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence (New York: Knopf, 2013), 5. For more analytical detail, see Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York: Knopf, 1979), 84–98. 13. See generally Moïse, Le projet national. 14. Armitage, Declaration of Independence, 23. 15. 1801 constitution of the French Colony of Saint-Domingue (Cap-Français, Saint-Domingue: P. Roux, 1801), 1, available at www.modern-constitutions.de [hereafter “1801 constitution of Saint-Domingue”]; the American Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. 16. 1801 constitution of Saint-Domingue, 3 (Title V, Art. 12). Cf. French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Aug. 26, 1789, Art. 17 (characterizing the right to property as “sacred and inviolable”). 17. 1801 constitution of Saint-Domingue, 3, 11–15 (Titles VI, X–XII). 18. Ibid., 1 (Title II, Art. 3). 19. Ibid., 2 (Title II, Art. 5). 20. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 167. 21. These documents are reproduced in Moïse, Le projet national, 131–57. 22. Ibid., 69. 23. See generally Moïse, Le projet national. 24. Cf. Alexander Tsesis, For Liberty and Equality: The Life and Times of the Declaration of Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), which argues that the language of equality in the 1776 declaration inspired a rhetoric of equal protection in the antebellum period that ultimately became the formal equal protection provision of the 14th amendment in 1868. 25. Armitage, Declaration of Independence, 115; Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997), chap. 3. For an incisive analysis of the respective roles of Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre and Dessalines in crafting the final version of the declaration, see Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 86–91. 26. Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), caption accompanying print depicting the promulgation of the 1801 constitution of Saint-Domingue, between pp. 110 and 111.

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27. Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. chaps. 5–6. 28. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991), 186–87; and The American Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 57. 29. Armitage, Declaration of Independence, 116. 30. 1801 constitution of Saint-Domingue, 4 (Title VI, Art. 17). 31. Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (2012): 40–66. 32. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 33. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), chap. 2. 34. On which see, e.g., Michel DeGraff and Molly Ruggles, “A Creole Solution for Haiti’s Woes,” New York Times, August 1, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/08/02/ opinion/a-creole-solution-for-haitis-woes.html?_r=0. 35. The original (French) text reads as follows: “[S]i jamais tu refusais ou recevais en murmurant les lois que le génie qui vielle à tes destins me dictera pour ton bonheur, tu mériterais le sort des peuples ingrats. “Mais loin de moi cette affreuse idée; tu seras le soutien de la liberté que tu cheris, l’appui du chef qui te commande.” 36. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 247. 37. American Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. On the need that Americans of the postindependence period felt to make the new United States a “treatyworthy” nation, see the brilliant work of Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth. 38. See David Geggus, “The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, ca. 1760–1840, ed. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 95–100; and Robert Fatton Jr., The Roots of Haitian Despotism (Boulder, CO: Lynne Riener, 2007), 60. 39. See, for example, Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); and Dubois, Avengers of the New World, esp. 3, 6–7. 40. Wood, Radicalism, ix. 41. 1801 constitution of Saint-Domingue, 1–2 (Title II, arts. 3–5); 1805 constitution of Haiti (Les Cayes, Haiti: L’Imprimerie Imperiale, 1805), 2–3 (Arts. 2–3), available at www.modern-constitutions.de.

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Norbert Thoret, and the Violent Aftermath of the Haitian Declaration of Independence JEREMY D. POPKIN

Why should the recently discovered personal memoir of Norbert Thoret, a tailor from the small French town of Bourbonne-les-Bains, inspire a new consideration of the Haitian Declaration of Independence?¹ Although his account is one of the most detailed we have of the events in Haiti during the first year after its independence, Thoret does not even mention the issuance of the declaration. He does, however, provide extensive information about the massacre of the French white population carried out on the orders of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in the early months of 1804, from the point of view of one of the few survivors of that action. Among other things, he recorded the sad fate of Louis Dufay, the white deputy from Saint-Domingue whose speech, on February 4, 1794 (16 pluviôse An II), had inspired the French National Convention to pass its historic decree abolishing slavery, and who chose to commit suicide rather than wait to be killed.² Thoret’s memoir reminds us that the proclamation of Haitian independence was indissolubly linked to an episode of shocking violence and challenges us to explain the nature of that connection. Thoret owed his survival to the fact that his tailoring skills made himself useful to Dessalines, the central figure in the story of the Haitian Declaration of Independence and its aftermath. The two men experienced these events in completely different ways, however. In Thoret’s memoir, the Haitian Declaration of Independence did not even merit a mention, and the massacres he barely survived were inexplicable and unjustified. For Dessalines, the achievement of Haitian independence was the great accomplishment of his life, and the massacres were integral to the process of securing that independence. For present-day scholars, particularly those who are eager to fit the story of the Haitian Revolution into a global narrative of the struggle for freedom, neither Thoret’s perspective nor that of Dessalines is fully satisfactory. Unlike Thoret, we cannot see the massacres as inexplicable: they were clearly a reaction against the long history of white violence that he essentially

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excluded from his narrative. On the other hand, however, no one would want to explicitly justify the killing of thousands of defenseless men, women, and children, simply on the basis of their ancestry and skin color. Historians know that the 1804 massacres are among the most sensitive and painful episodes of the Haitian struggle for independence. They have been cited ever since to prove the supposedly barbarous nature of the black population and especially of Dessalines. Most of us do not want to provide ammunition for the revival of these accusations. Nevertheless, these massacres were inextricably connected to the Declaration of Independence, and no full evaluation of that document and its significance is possible without taking them into account. Few historians have written at length about the 1804 massacres. The most detailed historical accounts are not by white authors, but by the nineteenth-century “mulatto” historians who were critical of the first leader of independent Haiti, particularly Thomas Madiou, Alexis Beaubrun Ardouin, and Guy-Joseph Bonnet.³ Twenty-first-century scholars who want to underline the Haitian movement’s contribution to modern ideas of freedom often give these events minimal attention. Laurent Dubois does not comment on the fact that the title of his widely read general history of the Haitian Revolution, Avengers of the New World, is taken from the proclamation in which Dessalines publicly justified the massacres.⁴ The massacres have drawn increased attention in recent years, however. Philippe R. Girard’s 2005 article, “Caribbean Genocide,” has been highly controversial because of his application to them of that emotional label. Robin Blackburn has vigorously contested the appropriateness of the term “genocide,” insisting that the massacres were not racially motivated and explaining them as a reaction to “French massacres on a considerably larger scale,” and Girard has chosen other wording to describe these events in his more recent The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon, even though that book stresses the general violence of the years from 1802 to 1804 more than previous accounts.⁵ Deborah Jenson has insisted on Dessalines’s personal responsibility for the language of the 1804 proclamations, which she calls an “effort to replace Western cultural hermeneutics with those from his own environment and history as a slave in Saint-Domingue.” She refers only briefly to the consequences of Dessalines’s language, which she calls a “traumatic repetition of the violence and low estimation of the value of human life that were hallmarks of colonialism.” Whereas Jenson insists on Dessalines’s importance as a critic of colonialism, Blackburn sees him as an isolated figure, whose justification of violence “stimulated a counter-doctrine of racial and civic harmony” that Blackburn identifies as the real legacy of Haitian independence.⁶ Although historians can hardly ignore a source such as Thoret’s memoir,

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which provides many new details about the events of 1804, there is a question as to whether introducing it into a discussion of the Haitian struggle for independence risks distorting our understanding of that event by putting too much emphasis on the sufferings of what Jenson calls “small groups of remaining whites.” Although he was not particularly well educated, Norbert Thoret was literate and so was able to leave a written account of what he endured. The far more numerous black victims who lost their lives during the Haitian struggle for freedom were not able to do the same thing, compelling us to imagine their experiences on the basis of fragmentary evidence that often has to be combed out of hostile sources. There are a number of reasons why the 1804 massacres are too important to be omitted from any serious consideration of the Haitian Declaration of Independence, however. One is that the massacres had a high price for the newly independent nation. Just as the September prison massacres in Paris in 1792 left a long-lasting stain on the French Revolution and served to justify resistance to that movement, the 1804 massacres deterred other countries from recognizing Haiti’s independence and provided an emotionally powerful argument for those who denounced its population as uncivilized savages. Second, in laying out an argument to justify the massacres, the Haitian Declaration of Independence also set up the framework for a dictatorial regime that would not recognize the individual rights of any of its citizens, whatever their skin color. A third reason for examining them is the fact that sources such as Thoret’s account make it clear that many blacks and people of color disapproved of the decision to kill the whites and did what they could to save some of the victims. To recover these stories of moral courage is to underline an important element of the Haitian past. Finally, the 1804 massacres bring into sharp focus questions about the legitimacy of anticolonial violence that were debated even before the Haitian Revolution and that continue to preoccupy social philosophers today. It is certainly appropriate to bear in mind throughout this discussion that the massacres of whites in 1804 came at the end of a long history of violence in which black people had been far more often the victims than the perpetrators. Slavery was an inherently violent system, and throughout the history of the colony of Saint-Domingue, slave owners had insisted on their right of life or death over their “property.” Prior to the uprising of 1791, the idea of a wholesale massacre of the black slaves contradicted the logic of slavery, which depended on their labor, but whenever whites felt threatened, they never hesitated to resort to arbitrary killings. Whatever inhibitions whites had about mass killings disappeared completely in the face of the 1791 uprising, and there is no doubt that, during the violent periods of 1791–93 and 1802–3, many times more blacks than whites were killed simply because

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of the color of their skin. White military men routinely boasted of killing hundreds or even thousands of “brigands” in their armed encounters. After one slaughter, the author of the first-person account My Odyssey cheerfully reported to a friend, “one could not find a living Negro within a circle of two and a half miles, and the roads were strewn with their bloody remains.”⁷ The atrocities committed under Generals Leclerc and Rochambeau in 1802 and 1803 are well documented. If any group is to be held responsible for introducing the practice of racially motivated mass killing into Saint-Domingue, it is certainly the whites. Norbert Thoret’s memoir says little about this history of violence. Thoret was not a plantation owner, but rather a man for whom the colony had been a land of opportunity. He had first gone there in 1790 at the age of 22. Within a few months, he had opened his own tailoring shop in Cap Français. He does not specify whether the six workers he was soon employing were slaves, although it is not unlikely: other tailoring establishments in the city did use slave labor. He was soon confronted by the violence unleashed by the racial tensions in the colony. His National Guard unit maintained order at the gruesome public execution of the free colored leaders Vincent Ogé and Jean-Baptiste Chavannes in early 1791. “I was so shocked that I turned my head so as not to see, but I heard their horrible cries,” he recalled. Illness and exhaustion led him to return to France in August 1792. He had not given up hope of making his fortune in the colony, however, and in 1802 he and his family came back to Cap Français with the French Leclerc expedition. The officers in the French army provided a steady demand for his services, and within a few months, he was employing forty workers, this time all legally free rather than slaves.⁸ Having grown up in metropolitan France and having spent only a short time in the colony while the slave system was still intact, Thoret probably did not have strong feelings about the institution one way or the other; what attracted him was the fact that he could make money there far more easily than in Europe. In 1804, however, he would learn that even relatively disengaged white colonists like himself could not escape the consequences of the heritage of slavery. Thoret was one of the several thousand white civilians in Cap Français who found themselves trapped in the newly independent Haiti after the surrender of the French army at the end of 1803. They learned of the mortal danger threatening them when a British ship captain who had witnessed the massacre of the whites in Port-au-Prince arrived in their city and secretly offered to help them escape, but most were unwilling to take such a risk. When Dessalines and his troops arrived in the city, Thoret assumed that only adult men would be targeted, so he left his wife and child and attempted to find a hiding place, but he was eventually spotted, imprisoned, and put to work sew-

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ing trousers for black officers. Once Dessalines moved on to Fort-Dauphin, a black servant told Thoret what had happened to the other whites. Contrary to what Thoret had assumed, he learned that women and children had been rounded up, separated from the men, and marched to the city cemetery at La Fossette, where they had been killed. “The men, whose hands had been tied behind their backs . . . put up some resistance and refused to march. They were forced out [of the building in which they had been held], and as soon as they had passed through the door, they were immediately slaughtered.”⁹ Thoret’s wife and daughter had managed to escape the massacre, but he and his family were by no means safe, even though they were assisted by a number of blacks and people of color in the city. The surviving whites remained at the mercy of any mauvais sujet who took it into his head to kill them. Thoret’s close association with Dessalines gave him a certain protection; according to his account, when he visited the palace, he heard the blacks say, “ ‘Be careful not to harm that white man, he’s the tailor of the Emperor Dessalines.’ ”¹⁰ Nevertheless, Thoret’s situation remained precarious, and in his memoir, he did not hesitate to call it “slavery.”¹¹ Eventually, Thoret managed to find a black sailor with a small boat who smuggled him and his family to the former Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, then under the control of the French general Jean-Louis Ferrand. Ferrand was as pleased as Dessalines had been to have a skilled tailor at his service, and Thoret promptly went back into business, eventually employing as many as forty workers. Nevertheless, he could not free himself from the memory of what he had lived through in Cap Haïtien: “For many years, I couldn’t sleep for a single night without my rest being interrupted by horrible dreams in which I relived the dangers I had experienced.”¹² Whereas Norbert Thoret could only represent the 1804 massacres as an inexplicable outburst of violence, Jean-Jacques Dessalines unquestionably considered them as an essential part of the assertion of Haitian independence and the creation of a new society. To read the Haitian Declaration of Independence is to be reminded that the majority of the document is devoted to menaces and imprecations against the French. Whereas the American Declaration of Independence had been careful to lay the blame for oppression on the British government, and indeed specifically on George III, the Haitian document targets the French people, calling for “anathema to the French name, eternal hatred to France”; complaining that “the French name still haunts our country”; warning that “there are Frenchmen in our Island, and yet you think you are free and independent”; demanding to know “When will we be tired of breathing the same air as they do?”; asking “What do we have in common with these executioners?”; and announcing that “they are not our brothers . . . they never will be, and . . . if they find asylum among us,

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they will again be the instigators of our troubles and our divisions.” “What are you waiting for before appeasing [the souls of the ‘indigenous’ population killed by the French]?,” the proclamation asked. “Let us frighten all those who would dare to try to take it from us again: let us begin with the French,” the proclamation concluded. “Let them shudder when they approach our coasts . . . [because of ] the terrible resolution that we shall enter into of putting to death, anyone who is born French, and who would soil with their sacrilegious foot the territory of liberty.” The leitmotifs of the declaration are vengeance, deterrence, and purification, three common motives for mass killings throughout history.¹³ In the name of justice, the declaration repeatedly calls for retribution against those responsible for the crimes committed against the “indigenous citizens.” Just as the white colonists had denounced the black insurgents for destroying families, the declaration insists on the need to avenge the killing of wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, children, and even “infants at the breast.” In addition to revenge, however, the declaration also justifies its calls for action against the French in the name of national security. If any Frenchmen were allowed to remain in Haiti, according to the document, “they will continue to be the plotters of our troubles and our divisions.” The danger was not only a military one; it was also that the population might be taken in by the “misleading eloquence of their agents’ proclamations.” Finally, the declaration clearly reflects a determination to purify the new country of anything that might recall the French presence. The complaint that “the French name still haunts our country” suggests that a French spirit still lingered, even in the absence of French authority. The elimination of the remaining French population would be a form of exorcism, a ritual intended to do away not just with the physical presence of a group of people but with their spirit as well. The content of the declaration and of the two shorter documents published with it make it clear that the anti-French campaign was directly linked to the assertion of the absolute authority of the new head of state. Whereas the first two-thirds of the declaration speak of the people’s common destiny, in the concluding paragraphs, the word “I” appears repeatedly, as Dessalines reminds his audience that “I have stood guard, fought, sometimes alone,” for their liberty, and insists that, as a result, they owe him unquestioning obedience. “If you ever rejected or grumbled while receiving the laws that the spirit that watches over your destiny dictates to me for your happiness, you would deserve the fate of ungrateful peoples.” In a separate document included with the printed version of the declaration, the leading generals who had participated along with Dessalines in the fight against the French signed an oath “to obey blindly the laws issued by his authority, the only one we acknowledge: we give him the power to make peace, war, and to name

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his successor.”¹⁴ Dessalines thus used the declaration and the oath accompanying it to commit both the military and the general population to follow whatever orders he gave regarding the French remaining in the island. As Malick Ghachem has argued in his contribution to this volume, “The Haitian declaration reads like an enactment of a state of emergency,” an assertion that the situation of the newly independent nation was so precarious that its safety could not be assured through ordinary processes of law.¹⁵ In view of the declaration’s denunciation of all lingering French influence in Haiti, it is of course ironic that the document was written in French. Whether and how the document’s language was communicated to the mass of the new nation’s population is unknown. There has been considerable scholarly debate in the past few years about the process of the declaration’s composition, and in particular about the extent of Dessalines’s personal contribution to its phrasing. The declaration had been preceded by an earlier victory proclamation, dated November 29, 1803, and co-signed by Dessalines, Augustin Clervaux, and Henry Christophe, which had had a very different tone: it apologized for the death of innocent whites during the fighting and promised that white property owners would be allowed to return to their plantations, provided that they “acknowledged the lawfulness of the cause for which we have been spilling our blood these twelve years.”¹⁶ The Declaration of Independence, attributed to Dessalines alone, conveyed a radically different message. Dessalines himself had at best a limited command of French. Mid-nineteenth-century authors, starting with Thomas Madiou, attributed the actual wording of the Declaration of Independence to Louis Félix BoisrondTonnerre, a young free man of color educated in France. The most famous version of this story has him announcing that “In order to draw up our act of independence, we need the skin of a white to serve as a parchment, his skull as an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.”¹⁷ More elaborate versions of the story, such as those of Ardouin and Bonnet, state that another man of color, Charéron, had composed a declaration modeled after the American document of 1776. According to Bonnet, Charéron had taken pains to enumerate, with dignity, the grievances we had against France, and thereby to establish naturally the reasons why the Haitian people was proclaiming its independence. Charéron’s work was submitted to Dessalines: this manifesto is not suitable for us, BoisrondTonnerre said, and, with the authorization of the general-in-chief, his secretary produced, in one night, the act that was published the next day, the first of January 1804.¹⁸

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Regardless of who actually put the words on paper, Deborah Jenson has argued that we should regard Dessalines as the true author of the document. “There is abundant literary evidence that Dessalines, not Boisrond, was the crucial conceptual voice of the document in the narrative proclamations . . . from late 1803 through the final months of 1804,” she claims.¹⁹ The document’s language clearly owes more to French revolutionary rhetoric than Jenson acknowledges, however. One has only to recall the words of the “Marseillaise” to be reminded of how violent the language of French revolutionary calls for vengeance against enemies could be. The declaration also borrows from the tropes used by the white colonists in their violent denunciations of the blacks and free men of color who had risen up against them in the early 1790s. In particular, the enumeration of victims in terms of their family relationships to the living, as a way of inciting particularly powerful emotional responses, was a commonplace in the colonists’ propaganda. Jenson is undoubtedly justified in asserting, however, that the declaration and the other documents issued in Dessalines’s name in 1804 “are marked by a singular rhetorical and poetic ferocity.”²⁰ Dessalines’s penchant for violence was not merely rhetorical. Long before 1804, he had made a name for himself as a particularly brutal military leader. His harsh treatment of the enemy in the war against André Rigaud in 1799–1800 supposedly earned him a rebuke from Toussaint Louverture—“I told you to weed the field, but you tore everything out by the roots”²¹—and Philippe Girard has documented both the way in which he eliminated potential black rivals and the extent of his participation in the French campaign against black guerrilla resistance in the summer of 1802, before he somewhat belatedly changed sides.²² The Declaration of Independence forecasts violence that would not take place for several months, and we must be careful about assuming that its phrasing led directly to the 1804 massacres. As David Armitage has noted in his book on declarations of independence, its words appear as if they were addressed primarily to the Haitian population, but its elaborate French vocabulary would have been unintelligible to most of them and it is not clear how widely it circulated within the country.²³ Dessalines subsequently issued several documents explicitly justifying the killing of the white population, however, making it clear that he had no desire to distance himself from the massacres. These proclamations, too, were published in French and circulated abroad. On April 1, 1804, in the middle of the killing campaign, he sent a circular letter to his generals in which he claimed that “the irrevocable resolution that we have taken to exterminate our oppressors” hardly needed any justification, since “our vengeance could never equal the sum of injustices and atrocities of our enemies.”²⁴ Dessalines returned to the subject of the massacres four weeks later, in

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a proclamation issued on April 28, 1804, and written, according to Ardouin, by another of his mixed-race secretaries, Juste Chanlatte. “The hour of vengeance has struck, and the implacable enemies of the rights of man have suffered the punishment they deserved for their crimes,” this document began. Although its wording had Dessalines proclaim, “I raised my arm, which had remained too long suspended above their guilty heads,” it made more use of the pronouns “you” and “we,” associating the other generals and indeed the whole of the population with the killings that had now been largely accomplished. Like an overflowing torrent which roars, tears away, sweeps along, your vengeful fury has carried away everything in its path . . . Where is there a vile Haitian, unworthy of his regeneration, who doesn’t think he fulfilled the eternal decrees in exterminating these blood-crazed tigers . . . [?] Yes, we have given these real cannibals war for war, crimes for crimes, outrages for outrages. Yes, I have saved my country, I have avenged America.” The proclamation took special pains to associate the lighter-skinned people of color with the killings. “Blacks and yellows, whom the duplicity of the Europeans has sought for so long to divide, you who are today only the same thing, only a single family, have no doubt, your perfect reconciliation needed to be sealed in the blood of your torturers.” The proclamation ended with a call for a “war to the death against tyrants! There is my motto. Liberty, independence! There is our rallying cry!,” a phrase that could have come directly from innumerable French revolutionary proclamations, but followed by a distinctively Dessalinian coda: “May my successors follow the line I have traced for them! It is the best system to maintain their power; it is the worthiest homage they could render to my memory.”²⁵ Like the Declaration of Independence, the proclamation of April 28, 1804, expresses a strong personality, but it also has unmistakable echoes of wellknown European texts. Its author might have been familiar with the principle of retaliation outlined in Emer de Vattel’s treatise on the law of nations, a basic handbook respected throughout the world, which noted that “when we are at war with a savage nation, who observe no rules, and never give quarter, we may punish them in the person of any of their people we take . . . and endeavour, by this rigorous proceeding, to force them to respect the law of humanity.”²⁶ Europeans had often cited this principle in conflicts with nonwhites, and it might have struck many of the Haitian combatants as poetic justice to see it applied to the countrymen of Leclerc and Rochambeau. The proclamation of April 28, 1804, has an even closer relationship to the celebrated lines that Diderot inserted into the 1780 edition of Raynal’s His-

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toire philosophique des deux Indes asking, “Where is he, this great man that nature owes to its vexed, oppressed, tormented children?” This passage was certainly known in the colony: when he returned to the burned-out ruins of his home after the insurrection of 1791, one colonist somewhat improbably claimed that he had found his “elegant in-quarto edition of Raynal . . . still on my acajou table, open to the page containing this phrase: ‘And if the blacks take vengeance, the laws for the whites will be terrible.’ ”²⁷ Dessalines’s proclamation had referred to his followers as forming a “torrent”; Diderot had already spoken of a movement “more impetuous than the torrents,” which would “leave everywhere ineffaceable traces of their justified anger.” The proclamation spoke of avenging America; the Diderot passage had promised that “the fields of America will be intoxicated by the blood that they have awaited for so long, and the bones of so many unfortunates, piled up for three centuries, will tremble with joy.” Dessalines had anticipated the homage future generations would pay him; Diderot had forecast that “the name of the hero who reestablished the rights of the human race will be blessed everywhere, everywhere they will put up trophies to his glory.” Finally, Diderot had written, “The Code noir will disappear, and . . . the Code blanc will be terrifying, if the victor is inspired only by the right of reprisal.”²⁸ Chanlatte could well have had this specific passage in mind as he composed his justification of Dessalines’s actions. Whereas the polished rhetoric of these printed proclamations was that of Dessalines’s educated secretaries, we get a sense of his own language from the memoirs of the white planter Peter Stephen Chazotte, which recount Dessalines’s supervision of the killing of the whites in the southern Haitian city of Jérémie on March 9, 1804. Although Chazotte was undoubtedly a hostile witness, his description of the events in Jérémie generally conforms to other evidence, and his depiction of Dessalines is congruent with that in other sources of the period. According to Chazotte’s narrative, Dessalines, after having the city’s whites rounded up and assembled before him under the guard of his own military unit, the 4th demi-brigade, harangued them in Creole. “Wous blancs de Jérémie, moue conne wous hai moue,” he began. [“You white men of Jérémie, I know you hate me.”] Dessalines reproached the whites for their resistance to the abolition of slavery in 1793 and their support for the British during their occupation of the island. He claimed, however, that the whites should have recognized his concern for their interests. Rather than presenting himself as a defender of rights for all, he reminded the whites of actions he had taken against the people of color and the blacks. During the war against Rigaud in 1799–1800, he had “passed through your country, destroying the mulattoes, your enemies.” He also credited himself

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with having “formed black companies of inspectors to compel les citoyens nègres . . . to labor more than they did before.”²⁹ The most serious accusation Dessalines made against the whites, according to Chazotte, was that they had used their wealth to corrupt the general’s own cousin, Domage, whom Dessalines had appointed as commander of the region, and to persuade him to let Leclerc’s forces land without opposition. “I shall be revenged for this! The blood of all of you shall pay for Domage’s treacherous conduct,” Dessalines concluded. According to Chazotte, “at this moment he had worked himself up to the extreme of a maniac’s fury,” and the mixed-race general Geffrard had to intervene to calm him down.³⁰ If Chazotte’s account is basically accurate, we can see that the theme of vengeance, so powerfully expressed in the Declaration of Independence, was also the dominant note in Dessalines’s speech, and that his fear that the whites could seduce blacks to betray their own cause was rooted in concrete events. We can also see that he had no hesitation in expressing his intentions in his own language, and in front of numerous witnesses. Survivors’ accounts such as those of Chazotte and Thoret, as well as other documents such as Guy-Joseph Bonnet’s memoirs, testify to Dessalines’s direct involvement in the massacres, but they also make it clear that many of Dessalines’s fellow military officers and soldiers opposed these killings. General Geffrard, one of the leading free colored officers, personally intervened to save Chazotte. When Dessalines ordered another officer of color, Colonel Gaston, to execute some of the whites in Jérémie, Gaston responded by appearing on the balcony of his own house, in front of a large crowd, and telling the spectators, “I order you to report to Governor Dessalines that I rather die by my own hand than be concerned in, or be guilty of any murder.” He then shot himself.³¹ Numerous memoirs mention the actions of General Diaquoi (or Diakwé), a black officer who intervened to save as many white victims as he could. Madame Dessalines, the dictator’s wife, also appears as a rescuer in a number of accounts. More ordinary blacks and people of color also helped white survivors on many occasions. Among those who aided him in one way or another, Thoret mentions Ferrier, a mixed-race official, and his wife and her mother, as well as a négresse libre; two domestiques; a femme de couleur who knew his mother-in-law; Julien Prévost, later made the Comte de Limonade by Christophe; and the black fisherman who eventually took Thoret and his family to safety. Dessalines’s thirst for violent vengeance was clearly not shared by the whole of the Haitian population. There is thus little doubt that Dessalines was the driving force behind the 1804 massacres and that he saw them as a necessary complement to the Haitian Declaration of Independence and as a demonstration that Haiti had be-

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come a sovereign nation. The massacres were not simply an extension of the violence that had marked the Haitian Revolution since its outset in August, 1791, however. To be sure, violence against the white perpetrators of slavery was a central element of the uprising against slavery. The participants in the August 1791 insurrection understood that they had no other way of changing their situation. The complete intransigence of the slave owners and the colonial government in the face of any proposals for “reform” of slavery, such as the Castries edicts of 1784–85 and the ferocious resistance to even the slightest concessions to the island’s free people of color during the first years of the French Revolution, made it clear that the whites had no intention of peacefully yielding any of their power or privileges. On the whole, however, what is striking about the violence of the first phase of what we now call the Haitian Revolution is how relatively limited it was. The destruction of property through the burning of cane fields and plantations houses was spectacular and imprinted itself deeply in the memories of whites who witnessed it, but the insurgents were not, despite the accusations of the colonists, bent on the wholesale massacre of the white population. Other black leaders themselves quickly eliminated the one member of their group, Jeannot Bullet, whose behavior in torturing and killing prisoners suggested a truly sadistic personality, and the members of the French First Civil Commission estimated that the four months of extensive fighting between August and December 1791 had claimed only four hundred white victims.³² (By comparison, the few days of fighting between Protestants and Catholics in the city of Nîmes in June 1790, the bloodiest episode in the early years of the French Revolution, cost some three hundred lives.) Toussaint Louverture, the most important leader of the Haitian movement, first enters the documented historical record as an opponent of unthinking violence against whites. According to the memoirist Gabriel Gros, when the black leader Georges Biassou, enraged by the breakdown of negotiations with the whites in December 1791, threatened to kill his white prisoners, Louverture, “braving all danger, attempted to save us, though he might have been himself the victim to this monster’s rage. He represented to him, that we could not, and ought not to be thus sacrificed, without being imprisoned, and calling a court martial upon us.”³³ The episode that claimed the largest number of human lives in the Haitian Revolution prior to the Leclerc expedition, the burning of Cap Français in June 1793, was not the result of black revolutionary violence, but rather of a clash between rival groups of free people: French sailors and white colonists on one side, free people of color and white supporters of the republican civil commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel on the other. Most of the city’s white residents managed to escape with their lives, whereas the

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overwhelming majority of the three thousand to ten thousand victims were undoubtedly black.³⁴ The worst episodes of black-on-white violence in SaintDomingue prior to 1802, such as the killing of over seven hundred white colonists in Spanish-occupied Fort-Dauphin in July 1794 and that of at least several hundred whites during the Moyse rebellion in 1801, occurred not in the early period when the slaves had to dramatize their determination to gain their freedom, but in the years after the French authorities had officially recognized the end of slavery; they were usually triggered by rumors about the restoration of slavery, and, once he came to power, Toussaint Louverture acted quickly to stop them.³⁵ The massacres of whites in the Artibonite Valley and other parts of the island that took place in the first weeks after the landing of Leclerc’s troops in 1802, most of them perpetrated by Dessalines’s troops, responded to a certain military logic: whites in other parts of the colony had indeed welcomed the French troops, and, as the black forces prepared to face the invaders, they did not want to leave a potential fifth column in their rear.³⁶ The 1804 massacres differ from all previous episodes of blackon-white violence during the Haitian Revolution because they were carried out on the explicit orders of the head of the newly constituted government, because their targets were completely powerless, and because there was an easily available alternative—deportation—that would have been just as effective in purging Haiti of French presence. The moral problem posed by the 1804 massacres was pondered at length by the two great mid-nineteenth-century founders of Haitian revolutionary historiography, Thomas Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin. As Madiou wrote, “these terrible measures horrify humanity. Seeing that the violence of our political passions made it impossible for the whites to stay among us, they should have been deported; if a large number of them had failed to leave along with the debris of the French army, it was because we had officially promised them security and protection.”³⁷ Similarly, Ardouin wrote, “One can understand vengeance in the midst of fighting, at a moment when the struggle requires extreme measures to intimidate one’s enemy . . . But, after the victory, when justice triumphs, moderation and generous sentiments should prevail over hatred, no matter how justified.”³⁸ Ardouin was particularly eloquent in underlining the negative consequences that the massacres had for the new nation. “It was . . . the only way to guarantee a reaffirmation of colonial prejudices against the black race, to harm the state it was founding, by making its citizens appear, in the eyes of the civilized world, as barbarians, incapable of respecting any moral boundaries, of any sentiment of pity, if not of generosity.”³⁹ As Julia Gaffield’s research has shown, the massacres disrupted the negotiations that British officials in Jamaica had been conducting with Dessalines about a trade treaty and thereby helped

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close off the possibility that Haiti would achieve at least de facto recognition of its independence from the world’s dominant maritime power.⁴⁰ Even in condemning the 1804 massacres, Madiou and Ardouin affirmed their belief in the justice of Haitian independence and in the positive contribution that Jean-Jacques Dessalines had made to the country’s history. “If French historians . . . have been able to consider the September massacres, which make humanity shudder, as necessary for the public security, should one not, with even more justification, throw a veil over the memory of the massacres of 1804, committed by a people that was then almost in a state of barbarism, not only in a physical sense, but also morally and intellectually?” Madiou asked, and Ardouin went even further, insisting that since all Haitians had benefitted from Dessalines’s definitive elimination of white influence in their country, they needed to accept their share of moral responsibility for these actions.⁴¹ Émile Bergeaud, whose Stella, published in France in 1859, is considered the first novel written by a Haitian author, went even further in associating the massacres with the Haitian people, rather than merely with Dessalines, and in insisting on their ultimate justification. According to his vivid and detailed fictional account, the European population “perished beneath the blows of a thousand arms moved by fury.” Nevertheless, Bergeaud concluded, “Despite all the crimes that stained it with blood, this revolution was as great as any other. The people whom it emancipated can now glory in it.”⁴² Even as he wrote his justification of Dessalines, however, Ardouin also acknowledged that the most damaging effect of the massacres, and of the rationale Dessalines had given for them in the Declaration of Independence and his other proclamations, was that they had laid the basis for a dictatorial regime in the country. If they had not been carried out, he wrote, “our interior regime would have reflected this generosity toward our oppressors, instead of which it was immediately given a character of violence whose rapid progression pushed the people to the sacrifice of the chief who had so many rights to their gratitude.”⁴³ As we have seen, the declaration coupled its open threats to the French whites with a demand that the Haitian people give unconditional support to their leader; instead of announcing the government’s dependence on the citizenry, as the American Declaration of Independence had done, the Haitian document proclaimed the citizens’ obligation to their leader. The violence to which Norbert Thoret was subjected threatened not only whites, but the entire population. The Haitian Declaration of Independence of 1804 was a landmark in asserting that national independence was a right of people of color as well as of whites, but it also foreshadowed the sacrifice of individual to national rights that would often characterize the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁴⁴

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In its vehemence and its violence, the Haitian Declaration of Independence undoubtedly reflected some aspects of the character of Dessalines. But its content also reflects a broader discourse about violence and vengeance during the Atlantic revolutionary era. It is possible that some elements of the declaration reflected African traditions of political thought. In a widely cited article, John Thornton has noted that the origin myths of many African kingdoms celebrated a “founder [who] ruled through force and conquest, maintaining his control by violence,” although there were also competing African traditions that praised more moderate forms of leadership.⁴⁵ The notion that a leader needed to demonstrate his willingness to resort to violence in order to establish his authority is, of course, hardly limited to Africa. After ordering the execution of some three thousand Ottoman prisoners in March 1799, Napoléon issued a proclamation urging the remaining garrisons in the region to yield to him, telling them that “the example of what has just happened at Jaffa and Gaza should show you that, although I am terrible to my enemies, I am good to my friends.” After this massacre, Napoléon’s most recent French biographer comments, “He had no further need to show his determination, since the memory of Jaffa was enough to deter many of his rivals and opponents.”⁴⁶ The political logic of Dessalines’s actions was clear, but the tone of the Haitian declaration probably owed most to a French current of melodramatic political rhetoric, exemplified in the “Marseillaise” and in innumerable speeches in the French revolutionary assemblies, clubs, and public festivals. In accordance with the logic of melodrama, revolutionary rhetoric made a sharp division between heroes and villains. As Dan Edelstein has argued in his book The Terror of Natural Right, this kind of binary thinking easily led to the classification of opponents as “enemies of the human species” and to claims that they merited exemplary punishment to avenge the evil they had done.⁴⁷ White French colonists from Saint-Domingue made their own distinctive contribution to this rhetoric, through their impassioned denunciation of the “philanthropists” and the officials they blamed for the collapse of the slave regime in their island. As we have seen, slavery in the colonial world had inspired one of the most powerful prerevolutionary anticipations of this kind of vengeance-laden melodrama. The famous lines the Enlightenment philosophe and dramatist Diderot contributed to Raynal’s Histoire philosophique foreshadow the spirit of the Haitian Declaration of Independence and the bloody scenes that followed it. There are multiple layers of irony in the relationship between Diderot’s prophetic passage and the reality of events in Haiti. As the French philosopher who had never seen the reality of Caribbean slavery imagined how an armed struggle between whites and blacks in the Americas might end, he

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was doing no more than translating into impassioned prose the warnings the colonial slave owners themselves constantly issued in insisting on their need for absolute authority over their chattels.⁴⁸ And as Jean-Jacques Dessalines embarked on his campaign to “avenge America,” he was, wittingly or unwittingly, operating within a framework of melodramatic vengeance all too familiar to Europeans, and especially to the French revolutionaries. Whether or not Dessalines and his scribes were consciously aware of this tradition, it is clear that the policy of vengeance outlined in the Haitian Declaration of Independence was a calculated and premeditated one, not an expression of primitive savagery or of spontaneous emotion. It is undoubtedly true, as Philippe Girard has emphasized, that greed played a certain role in these events; Dessalines appropriated some of the white victims’ property and let his soldiers engage in looting.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, the fundamental motivation for the postindependence massacres was more ideological than pragmatic. Like the twentieth-century theorist of anticolonial violence Frantz Fanon, Dessalines clearly believed that engagement in violence was necessary to forge a new people, freed from the shackles of oppression. “For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler,” Fanon wrote in 1961. “For the colonized people this violence . . . invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning.” In addition to giving the colonized population a new collective identity, “at the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect,” Fanon continued.⁵⁰ Fanon’s book was written primarily to justify the violence of the Algerian independence movement; his essay contains no explicit references to Haiti and only a few hints that he might have been thinking of his own French Caribbean background. At the moment when he wrote, mention of Haiti might have evoked the excesses of the Duvalier dictatorship and undermined his optimistic assertion that collective participation in violence immunized the masses against acceptance of dictatorship. The subsequent evolution of the Algerian regime and of that of Fidel Castro, another of Fanon’s inspirations at the time, remind us that it is not so easy to prevent the evolution of violent revolutionary movements into dictatorships. Nevertheless, the parallels between Dessalines’s proclamations in 1804 and Fanon’s philosophical arguments in 1961 are significant. So long as oppressed populations are denied “the rights of man,” such appeals to violence will continue to have a real attraction and a certain undeniable logic.

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The 1804 massacres in Haiti are now at the center of broader discussions of the meaning of historical violence, as a recent exchange between the philosophers Susan Buck-Morss and Slavoj Žižek shows. Buck-Morss has written an influential argument about the Haitian Revolution’s contribution to modern ideas of freedom, but she is also critical of “defenders of Haiti, their moral sentiment ablaze with enthusiasm, [who] cite Dessalines’s justification of racial slaughter, ‘I have avenged America,’ . . . [and] exonerate the slaves, defending Dessalines for setting out ‘to give as good as he got.’ ” She warns against the dangers that result when “imagination, intending to set the world aright, makes a virtue out of violence against the violator. If enlightened critique stops here, it entrenches itself behind a self-imposed and self-defeating barrier, one that must be dismantled if humanity is to progress beyond the recurring cycle of victim and avenger.”⁵¹ Her position provoked a furious reply from Žižek, who insisted on the need to “distinguish as clearly as possible between two types of violence; radical emancipatory violence against the ex-oppressors and the violence which serves the continuation and/or establishment of hierarchical relations of exploitation and domination.” Žižek would “condemn the elimination of all whites in Haiti not out of humanitarian compassion for the innocent among them, but based on the insight that the true strategic goal of this process was to establish a new hierarchical order among the remaining blacks, justified by the ethnic ideology of blackness.”⁵² As the exchange between Buck-Morss and Žižek demonstrates, the issues posed by the Haitian Declaration of Independence and the massacres that followed it remain as explosive today as they were in 1804. To ignore them in the interest of celebrating the undeniable achievement of the Haitian movement would be to deny a very real aspect of that story, and to obscure the connection between the events of 1804 and the subsequent course of Haitian history. Too often, as the history of so many postcolonial societies has shown, regimes founded through violence turn into dictatorships directed against the populations they initially promised to liberate. The deprivation of rights suffered by Norbert Thoret and the other French whites in Saint-Domingue as a result of the Haitian Declaration of Independence foreshadowed the fate of many other members of the population in subsequent years. In the postrevolutionary era, the massacres that accompanied the Haitian Declaration of Independence would become a pretext for the outside world to deny Haitians, and blacks in general, the status of civilized human beings. In pondering the historical significance of the Haitian declaration, we need to bear in mind both its positive significance for the struggles against slavery and colonialism, and the price of its troubling appeal to vengeance that led to the consequences so graphically depicted in Thoret’s memoir.

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Notes 1. In 2012, Heidi Holst-Knudsen, a lecturer at Columbia, sent me a copy of the edition that Thoret’s descendants had had privately printed in France: Jean-Claude Nouët, Claude Nicollier, and Yves Nicollier, eds., La vie aventureuse de Norbert Thoret dit l’Américain 1767–1850 (Paris: Editions du Port-au-Prince, 2007). I am very grateful to Ms. Holst-Knudsen for making this document available to me and for giving me permission to share it with other scholars. I have not had the opportunity to see the original Thoret manuscript for myself, but Dr. Jean-Claude Nouët, one of Thoret’s descendants, has kindly provided me with a photocopy of it. The manuscript is 173 pages long, all written in a single hand, with a certain number of corrections. The printed edition also includes a genealogical article on Thoret (Robert Duval, “Anciens colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés en Haute-Marne. Norbert Thoret et sa fille Françoise-Félicité,” originally published in Les Cahiers Haut-Marnais no. 125 [2e trimestre 1976]), which confirms the basic outline of his life story. The author of this article was unaware of the existence of Thoret’s memoir. 2. Thoret, Vie, 44. On Dufay’s speech, see Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 357–61. 3. Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 8 vols. (1847; repr. Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1987), 3:140–42, 160–79; [Alexis] Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haiti, suivies de la vie du général J.-M. Borgella (Paris: Dézobry et E. Magdeleine, 1853–60; repr. Port-au-Prince: F. Dalencour, 1958), 6:10–17 (Dalencour ed.); Edmond Bonnet, ed., Souvenirs historiques de Guy-Joseph Bonnet, général de division des armées de la république d’Haiti, ancien aide de camp de Rigaud (Paris: Auguste Durand, 1864), 128–32. 4. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 299–301. Dubois mentions the context of Dessalines’s famous phrase in his article, “Avenging America: The Politics of Violence in the Haitian Revolution,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 111–24. 5. Philippe R. Girard, “Caribbean Genocide: Racial War in Haiti, 1802–4,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 138–61; Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), 213; Philippe R. Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801–1804 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 324. For a critique of Girard’s use of the word “genocide” in his 2005 article, see Alyssa Sepinwall, review of The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon, H-France Review, February 2013, www.h-france.net/vol13reviews/vol13no18sepinwall.pdf. 6. Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in

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the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 94, 96; Blackburn, American Crucible, 215. 7. [Jean-Paul Pillet], My Odyssey, Althéa de Puech Parham trans. and ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), 32. A complete critical edition of the original French text of this important revolutionary-era memoir, which differs substantially from the English translation, appeared in 2015: Anja Bandau and Jeremy D. Popkin, eds., ‘Mon Odyssée’: l’épopée d’un colon de Saint-Domingue, par JeanPaul Pillet. Collection ‘Dix-Huitième Siècle’ (Paris: Société française d’Étude du DixHuitième Siècle, 2015). 8. Thoret, Vie, 7, 10, 12, 22–23. 9. Ibid., 39. Thoret’s account of the details of the massacre, written many years after the event, does not correspond precisely to those given in most historical works on the subject, which usually describe a sequence of events in which the men were killed first, with the women and children being rounded up and killed some days later. The estimates he gives for the number of victims and survivors are impossible to verify and also somewhat contradictory: on page 38 of his memoir, he says that there were only twenty-three survivors out of forty-five hundred whites in the city at the time of the massacres, but on page 43, he mentions a larger number of victims killed some time after the principal massacre, including one hundred nuns from the city’s convent. It is not clear whether the estimate of forty-five hundred, which is higher than the figures for casualties given in most other sources, includes these victims as well. 10. Ibid., 53. 11. Ibid., 56. 12. Ibid., 70. 13. See the discussion in Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley, Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), esp. 19–45. 14. Whether all the officers whose names appeared in the printed version of this document actually signed it is an open question. In the memoirs attributed to him, Guy-Joseph Bonnet, a leading mixed-race military and political figure, writes, “Souvent à la lecture d’un acte public qu’ils voyaient pour la première fois, des officiers étaient étonnés d’apprendre qu’ils y avaient apposé leurs signatures.” Bonnet, Souvenirs, 128. 15. Malick Ghachem, “The End of the ‘Age of Revolution’: Law, Exceptionalism, and the Haitian Declaration of Independence,” p. 109. 16. Cited in Deborah Jenson, “Dessalines’s American Proclamations of Haitian Independence,” Journal of Haitian Studies 15 (2009): 72–102. 17. Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Haïti (1804; repr. Saint-Denis: Prévot et Drouard, 1981), ix; Ardouin, Études, 6:7; translation in Dubois, Avengers, 298.

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18. Bonnet, Souvenirs, 128. 19. Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 89. 20. Ibid. 21. This quotation appears to go back to the French naturalist Michel-Étienne Descourtilz’s memoir, Voyages d’un naturaliste, et ses observations (Paris: Dufart Père, 1809), 3:261. 22. Philippe R. Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System, a Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2012): 549–82. 23. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 116. 24. The document is printed in Ardouin, Études 5:342–43 (Dézobry, ed.). Ardouin does not specify who composed it, how Dessalines obtained a copy, or where Ardouin himself found it. 25. Ibid., 6:66–69. 26. Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, trans. Joseph Chitty (Philadelphia: T. and J. W. Johnson, 1854), 348. 27. Le Clerc, “Campagne de Limbé, et détail de quelques événements qui ont eu lieu dans ce quartier (ou commune) jusqu’au 20 juin 1793, époque de l’incendie du Cap,” n.d. Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence), carton CC 9 A 8, cited in Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 104. 28. G.-T. Raynal, Histoire philosophique des deux Indes, (Geneva: Pellet, 1780), 3:204–5. The mid-nineteenth-century historian Ardouin noted the parallel between the Raynal/Diderot passage and the Dessalines document in his comments on the April 28, 1804, proclamation: Ardouin, Études, 6:70. 29. Peter Stephen Chazotte, Historical Sketches of the Revolution and the Foreign and Civil Wars in the Island of St. Domingo (New York: W. Applegate, 1840), cited in Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 348–49. 30. Chazotte, Historical Sketches, cited in Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 349. 31. Ibid., 355–56. 32. For the execution of Jeannot (described as “Johnny” in the English version of Gros’s memoir), see [Gabriel] Gros, A Historick Recital, of the Different Occurrences in the Camps of Grande-Reviere, Dondon, Sainte-Suzanne, and Others . . . (Baltimore: Samuel and John Adams, 1793), cited in Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 127. For the estimate of white losses in the first four months of the insurrection, see the letter of the First Civil Commission to the Minister of the Navy, December 23, 1791, in AN, D XXV 1, d. 2. A white colonist writing at around the same time estimated the number of blacks killed in the insurrection at four thousand. “Evaluation de la quantité des nègres révoltés dans les dix paroisses en insurrection,” AN, D XXV 113, d. 897. 33. Gros, Historick Recital, cited in Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 150. 34. Popkin, You Are All Free, 242. On the role of white sailors in the violence in

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Saint-Domingue in the early years of the revolution, see Jeremy D. Popkin, “Sailors and Revolution: Naval Mutineers in Saint-Domingue, 1790–1793,” French History 26 (December 2012): 460–81. 35. On the Fort-Dauphin massacre, see the vivid survivor account in Mon Odyssée, in Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 255–64, and the forthcoming work of Graham Nessler, An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom: Revolution, Emancipation, and Reenslavement in Hispaniola, 1789–1809 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming). On white deaths during the Moyse rebellion, see the letter of the British agent Whitfield to Governor Nugent of Jamaica, December 5, 1801, in the Jamaican National Library, Nugent Papers, ms. 72. According to this source, at least two thousand blacks were killed in the repression of the rebellion. 36. Girard, Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon, 126–27. There is a vivid survivor’s account in Michel-Etienne Descourtilz, Voyages d’un naturaliste, 3 vols. (Paris: Dufort, 1809), cited in Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 286–92. 37. Madiou, Histoire, 3:177. 38. Ardouin, Études, 6:10 (Dalencour ed.). 39. Ibid. 40. Julia Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early NineteenthCentury Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2012): 607. 41. Madiou, Histoire, 3:178; Ardouin, Études, 6:74 (Dézobry ed.). 42. Émile Bergeaud, Stella, 2nd ed. (1859; repr. Paris, 1889), accessed via DLOC, February 2013. 43. Ardouin, Études, 6:73 (Dézobry ed.). 44. See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 30. 45. John Thornton, “ ‘I am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4, no. 2 (1998): 190. 46. Patrice Gueniffey, Bonaparte: 1769–1802 (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 419, 420. 47. Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 17, 42, 260. 48. See Malick Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 49. Girard, Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon, 322. 50. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (1961; repr. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963), 93–94. 51. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 142, 144. 52. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2009), 471, 472. I would like to thank Eric Brandom for bringing these passages to my attention.

Did Dessalines Plan to Export the Haitian Revolution? PHILIPPE GIRARD

The Haitian Declaration of Independence was delivered by a Haitian, in Haiti, to Haitians, but its intended audience, arguably, was not only Haitian but international. “You have accomplished nothing,” Jean-Jacques Dessalines admonished the revolutionary veterans assembled on January 1, 1804, “unless you give to the nations a terrible, but just, example of the vengeance that must be wrought.” “Let us swear before the whole universe, to posterity, and to ourselves to renounce France forever,” the text also read. “My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery.”¹ In many ways, delivering the declaration was an act of political theater performed on a world stage. Other clues point to the declaration’s intended audience. “Dessalines never spoke a word of French,” noted a contemporary, because he thought this language was only fit for a “white man.”² And yet, to make it accessible to the world’s diplomats, the declaration was not in Haitian Kreyòl, the language most commonly spoken in Haiti, but in a form of French so formal and legalistic that many contemporaries, Dessalines included, must have struggled to understand it. Translated copies soon appeared in the US press to ensure its diffusion in the English-speaking world as well. This was no isolated example. Haitian revolutionaries, who fully understood the international implications of history’s only successful slave revolt, were eager to present a counter-narrative to the hostile accounts of their enemies. An earlier and lesser known declaration of independence, delivered on November 29, 1803, warned the outside world that Haitian rebels would never allow their rights to be taken away by “any of the powers of the Earth.”³ Like that of January 1, 1804, this declaration quickly found its way into US newspapers.⁴ “We proved the legitimacy of our Rights with our writings,” later boasted Dessalines’s successor.⁵

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A Call to Arms? If the 1804 Declaration of Independence was a message to the world, what was its content? Declaring and justifying Haiti’s independence obviously came first, but the existence of a black state was such a radical notion in a region dominated by colonialism, racism, and slavery that a burning question was preoccupying the Atlantic World of 1804: Would the new regime try to export its slave revolt to neighboring plantation societies? Because Dessalines has a reputation as the most radical of Haiti’s revolutionary leaders, many scholars have concluded that he viewed Haiti’s independence as the first step of an ambitious revolutionary project aimed at ending slavery and white rule in the New World. Proponents of this thesis include Haitian and French Caribbean authors who want their hero to fit a black nationalist model, as well as modern US scholars who rely on contemporary rumors in the US press that Dessalines was actively sponsoring slave conspiracies overseas.⁶ Ultimately, according to the framework proposed by Eugene Genovese in From Rebellion to Revolution (1979), the Haitian and French revolutions “constituted a turning point in the history of slave revolts,” from a period of short-sighted African rebellions to an era of ideologically ambitious revolutions. They “resulted in efforts, often carried by French-speaking blacks, to encourage slave revolts and movements for national liberation. . . . everywhere they became carriers of new doctrines.”⁷ For David P. Geggus, on the other hand, the Haitian Revolution’s impact was more symbolic than tangible. Throughout the Americas, slaves and people of color celebrated the Haitians’ achievements and occasionally tried to replicate them, but evidence for direct Haitian involvement in slave uprisings was tenuous and inconclusive. When such involvement was noticeable, Geggus further argues in contradistinction with Genovese, “it was the freeborn men of mixed racial descent [ from Haiti’s southern province] who sought to internationalize the revolution, not the former slaves” from the North and West like Dessalines.⁸ The Declaration of Independence directly addressed this question, in a manner that must have surprised many of its contemporaries. To those convinced that Dessalines would soon dispatch his black legions across the Caribbean, he offered a two-pronged answer. In Haiti itself, his commitment to national sovereignty and individual freedom was uncompromising; but he saw no reason to interfere with his neighbors’ internal labor system. Liberty in Haiti (by which Dessalines meant independence and emancipation rather than democracy) was non-negotiable. “We must . . . forever ensure the empire of liberty in the country that gave us birth,” he explained in the Declaration of Independence, even if it meant killing “anyone who is

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born French, and who would soil with their sacrilegious foot the territory of liberty.” Proclamations that Dessalines issued in ensuing weeks were in the same jingoistic vein.⁹ He then massacred most French planters still residing in Haiti before announcing on April 28 that “the implacable enemies of the rights of man have suffered the penalty worthy of their crimes.”¹⁰ “Break all alliance with my enemy [France] if you do not want your blood to be mixed with his,” he warned the Spaniards of nearby Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic).¹¹ Finally, in a possibly apocryphal letter to Napoléon Bonaparte, he resorted to biting humor to taunt his French rival. Send along your sister Pauline, Dessalines suggested. He would then marry her, and “this way Corsican blood would unite with negro blood.”¹² And yet, even as he pledged eternal hatred to France, Dessalines insisted that his animosity would not extend to European colonies and the United States—a crucial point that seems to have been missed by the scholars who underline his messianic ambitions. “Let us ensure however that a proselytizing spirit does not destroy our work,” he explained in the Declaration of Independence. “Let our neighbors breathe in peace, let them live quietly under the aegis of the laws that they have made for themselves, and let us not go, as revolutionary firebrands proclaiming ourselves legislators of the Antilles, seek glory by disturbing the tranquility of the neighboring Islands.” Dessalines’s radicalism would be purely defensive. Despite its fiery tone, the proclamation of April 28, 1804, issued after Dessalines massacred most of Haiti’s white planters, embraced the same dichotomy. He promised “a new holocaust” if the French ever invaded Haiti again, but he made no call for a hemispheric war of liberation, limiting himself to lamenting the fate of the “unfortunate Martiniquais” in the Lesser Antilles, to whom, by his own admission, he could offer little more than moral support due to geographical distance: “If only I could fly to help you and break your irons!”¹³ At any rate, Martinique was a French colony, so this show of sympathy posed no threat to non-French actors. One could argue that Dessalines’s policy of self-containment was merely an empty promise to lull his enemies into complacency before he could strike. After all, in their November 29, 1803, preliminary declaration of independence he and fellow generals had promised mercy to French planters to incite them to return from exile, only to massacre them a few months later. Actions speak louder than words, so ultimately Dessalines’s stance on exporting the Haitian Revolution should be deduced from his actual policies rather than his speeches. There is still much research to be done regarding Haitian meddling in neighboring plantation societies, partly because widespread scholarly interest in the Haitian Revolution is little more than two decades old (at least

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outside Haiti), partly because of the field’s intrinsic difficulties. For security reasons, secret plots against Haiti’s neighbors are unlikely to have been documented in detail. Proving that such plots largely did not exist, as this paper will argue, is also a challenge: one can only point to the absence of evidence, which is far less compelling than positive proof yet remains the only way to correct a common misunderstanding about the Haitian Revolution’s global meaning. Researching the international policies of Haitian revolutionaries is also a backbreaking task that requires multiarchival and multilingual research in the Caribbean, Europe, and North and South America. Haitian archival deposits are notoriously incomplete after independence due to political instability and poor recordkeeping; the archives of potential target countries are equally problematic because many documents were authored by planters and officials who were unlikely to be privy to slave conspiracies and who were prone to exaggerate or even manufacture evidence of Haitian involvement to suit their agenda. For lack of better options, Ada Ferrer, who made a thorough investigation of alleged Haitian plots in Cuba, relied extensively on interrogations of suspected ringleaders, even as she lamented the fact that many confessions were obtained under the threat of torture and that all of them were mediated by the captors’ scribes.¹⁴ Which steps, then, did Haitian revolutionaries take to export their revolution? Based on the available evidence, the answer is “quite little” if we define Haitian revolutionaries as former black slaves like Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Many slave revolts or conspiracies were inspired by the Haitian Revolution or involved veterans of the Haitian Revolution, but direct state involvement was exceedingly rare before, during, and after Dessalines’s time. As noted by Geggus, mixed-race Haitians were more entrepreneurial than their black countrymen; so were white idealists (including Jews), a surprising conclusion that will further complicate our understanding of the racial dynamics of the Haitian Revolution.

Exporting the Haitian Revolution: Dominguan Precedents Slave resistance had a long history in Saint-Domingue (Haiti’s name before January 1, 1804), but it was an inward-looking rather than universal struggle. Communities of slave runaways typically aimed at getting their sovereignty recognized by colonial authorities in exchange for a pledge of nonaggression.¹⁵ Theirs was a carefully calibrated act of resistance that did not fundamentally challenge the plantation system of Saint-Domingue or that of its neighbors. When the Haitian Revolution began in 1791, slave rebels concentrated

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their efforts on the daunting task of defeating domestic white planters, not on launching a hemispheric revolution. There has been considerable debate concerning the aims of the rebel leaders in 1791, but worldwide revolution was clearly not on the list. If anything, foreign involvement during the early Haitian Revolution went from the outside in because white planters begged their neighbors for military assistance, which ultimately led to British and Spanish invasions of Saint-Domingue in 1793.¹⁶ The only plan to export the conflict came from France: in 1792, French abolitionist Jean-Pierre Brissot proposed to employ ten thousand free people of color from Saint-Domingue to invade Spanish colonies. But the South American revolutionary Francisco de Miranda, when asked to command the expedition, declined the offer.¹⁷ The 1790s was a most eventful decade, not only in Saint-Domingue but throughout the Caribbean and the Western Hemisphere, where the number and size of slave revolts suddenly spiked. But the fact that such revolts were contemporary with the Haitian Revolution does not prove that they originated in Saint-Domingue. Possible explanations for this restlessness range from the example set by Dominguan rebels to a recent influx of African-born slaves to divisions within colonial powers in the context of the wars of the French Revolution to a decline in the size of European garrisons.¹⁸ Dominguan involvement is particularly difficult to detect before 1798. Rebellions in Pointe Coupée (Louisiana) in 1791 and 1795 involved people who had lived in Saint-Domingue, but there is no evidence that they were acting on orders from leaders of the Haitian slave revolt—most of whom did not even embrace the ideal of general emancipation until 1794.¹⁹ Cuba was hit by conspiracies or actual revolts in 1795 (two cases), 1796 (one case), and 1798 (five), but suspected conspirators, though they often expected help from Saint-Domingue, received no such assistance.²⁰ Three slaves involved in the Boca Nigua rebellion in 1796 in Santo Domingo had apparently served the Dominguan general Jean-François Papillon, but they denounced the plot to authorities, so Antonio Pinto has argued against overanalyzing this revolt as an offshoot of the Haitian Revolution.²¹ Ada Ferrer reached a similar conclusion in the case of the 1806 Güines conspiracy, which Cuban authorities tied to Haiti to hide the fact that local factors, namely planter cruelty, had prompted slaves to revolt.²² Suspected or actual plots were numerous in the United States in the 1790s, but proof of tangible Haitian involvement is again lacking. In 1793 in Charleston, after the arrival of numerous Dominguan refugees and their slaves, a plot was blamed on so-called “French negroes,” but evidence on the identity of the revolt’s backers (or even its existence) is conflicted. Rather than black Frenchmen, the plot might have originated with French-American idealists such as the Jewish merchant Abraham Sasportas, whose nephew Isaac

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later became involved in another conspiracy in Jamaica. Alternatively, French monarchists may have fabricated the plot to discredit their republican opponents by tying them to a cause sure to upset southern planters.²³ The presence of various groups of French refugees such as slaves, republicans, prisoners, and royalist émigrés in New Granada (Venezuela and Colombia) in 1793–95 was worrisome to local Spanish authorities, but these groups “took no part in the development of revolutionary ideas in the creole population,” concluded Ángel Sanz Tapia.²⁴ The Coro revolt of 1795 has been tied to Saint-Domingue but only because its leader, José Leonardo Chirinos, had spent time in the colony, not because he was acting on orders from Dominguan rebel leaders. In 1797 in Cartagena, white and free conspirators of color planned to found a republic modeled on French revolutionary ideals, but help from Saint-Domingue was not forthcoming. A clearer example of a Dominguan connection, though one that still involved enterprising individuals rather than formal top-down planning, took place in 1799 in Maracaibo and Cartagena, where a plot by Dominguan privateering crews was uncovered before it could be set in motion. One of the decade’s largest slave revolts outside Saint-Domingue took place in 1795 in Curaçao. It was clearly inspired by French colonial policies: one rebel explained that “the French blacks have been given their freedom [under the 1794 French law abolishing slavery], Holland has been taken over by the French, hence we too must be free.”²⁵ A leader even took on the name of Toussaint (after the black general Toussaint Louverture) while the other called himself Rigaud (after the mixed-race general André Rigaud). Whether this nominal homage reflected actual ties is another issue. There is no trace of any involvement by Louverture. Rigaud’s involvement is more credible since commercial ties between southern Saint-Domingue and Curaçao were extensive, and rebel leaders, according to the Dutch prosecution, had told the slaves that “a certain Frenchman named Rigeaud [sic] was going to come to set them all free and that they should ready themselves to fight the whites.”²⁶ But Rigaud’s reassurances (assuming that they were not imagined by Curaçaoan rebel leaders to encourage their troops) did not mean active support: no material help came from Saint-Domingue and the Curaçaoan revolt was brutally suppressed. Similarly, members of the Tailors’ conspiracy in 1798 in Bahia, Brazil, made references to French emancipationist ideals and hoped that Napoléon Bonaparte would send some help; but Bonaparte was in Egypt at the time (where, incidentally, he did not abolish slavery), which is revealing of the extent to which talk of French or Dominguan support could be wishful thinking.²⁷ More generally, large-scale Dominguan involvement was unlikely until 1798 because Saint-Domingue was too busy repelling Spanish and British

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invasions to go on the offensive. When a subordinate encouraged the French commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax to mount an invasion of Jamaica in 1796, he replied that this project would have to be put on hold until the military crisis in Saint-Domingue abated.²⁸ Only in 1798 did Louverture negotiate the departure of the last British troops. He then expelled or marginalized French colonial representatives and established himself as the leading political and military figure in Saint-Domingue, first in the northern and western provinces (1798), then in the South (1800), and eventually throughout Hispaniola (1801). Once Saint-Domingue was free from foreign invaders and under the rule of a former slave, it now became theoretically possible for the leaders who had emerged from the Haitian slave revolt to take a proactive role overseas.

Exporting the Haitian Revolution: The Louverture Precedent For Toussaint Louverture to embrace a messianic foreign policy would have been consistent with orders from Paris. After the National Convention abolished slavery in 1794 (a policy that was upheld when the Directory took over in 1795), France saw the spread of emancipation beyond its empire as a way not only to export its ideals, but also to strike a mortal blow at its enemies, most notably Great Britain and its colony in Jamaica. “Let’s toss liberty at the colonies; today, the English are dead,” boasted the deputy Georges Danton on the day the abolition law was passed.²⁹ Unable to ship troops from Europe due to British naval blockades, France also found it convenient to rely on black freedmen, who formed the vast majority of the Caribbean population.³⁰ Plans similar to the one first floated by Brissot in 1792 accordingly began to multiply as Paris instructed French commissioners in Saint-Domingue to go on the offensive by employing black freedmen. Abolish slavery in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and use “the Blacks most fanatic about liberty” to attack Jamaica, wrote the minister of the navy in 1796.³¹ “You must think of attacking [the English] in Jamaica and abolish slavery in the Antilles,” repeated his successor a few years later.³² Napoléon Bonaparte initially embraced the Directory’s emancipationist policy after seizing power in 1799 because “[blacks] will make less sugar, maybe, than they did as slaves . . . but they will serve us, if needed, as soldiers.”³³ “Soon,” he instructed Louverture in March 1801, “a division of the army of Saint-Domingue will help enlarge in your climates the glory and possessions of the Republic.”³⁴ Parisian calls for action had a noted impact in Guadeloupe during the tenure of the French agent Victor Hugues (1794–98). After retaking the colony from Great Britain, Hugues employed French freedmen to target St. Vincent and St. Lucia while Guadeloupe became a nest of privateers.³⁵ Also notable

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was the 1800 invasion of Curaçao by sailors and soldiers of color from Guadeloupe, along with some mixed-race Dominguan officers such as Alexandre Pétion and Rigaud’s brothers.³⁶ In contrast with Guadeloupe, expansionist schemes were surprisingly nonexistent in the much larger colony of Saint-Domingue. Louverture’s opposition largely accounts for this paradox, because French agents were eager to imitate their colleague Hugues. As the Quasi-War between France and the United States took hold in 1797–98, the French commissioner Gabriel d’Hédouville asked: “If the United States was ungrateful enough to declare war against us, would it not be possible to attack them on their own turf ?”³⁷ Rumors of an imminent French-Dominguan invasion accordingly spread through the US South.³⁸ Rather than invading the United States, however, Louverture wrote to President John Adams to offer “protection and security” to US ships coming to Dominguan ports.³⁹ In May–June 1799, he signed formal treaties with British and US envoys under which he promised not to export the Haitian Revolution in exchange for a resumption of commercial ties and US naval support in a civil war against Rigaud, both of which were far more relevant to his immediate policy goals.⁴⁰ Despite Louverture’s lack of enthusiasm, Hédouville’s successor Philippe Roume plowed ahead with plans of expeditions. With the help of the mixedrace general Martial Besse and the Jewish merchant Isaac Sasportas, Roume devised an ambitious plan to invade Jamaica and abolish slavery there.⁴¹ (The governor of Curaçao argued that the plan also included a simultaneous attack on Curaçao, but he probably invented this story to undermine his political rivals.⁴²) The planned invasion of Jamaica was by far the most ambitious overseas venture mounted in Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, but it collapsed when Louverture leaked the plans to British and US authorities.⁴³ According to a claim first made by Louverture’s son and then recycled by historians such as Beaubrun Ardouin and C. L. R. James, Louverture opposed the Jamaican invasion because he had an even grander dream: “to fling himself with a handful of braves on the African continent so as to abolish the slave trade and slavery.”⁴⁴ Louverture actually did the opposite: according to the governor of Jamaica, he asked British slave traders “for the importation of negroes (from the coast of Africa) into Saint-Domingue” because a labor shortage hampered the recovery of the plantation sector.⁴⁵ According to Douglas Egerton, two Frenchmen abetted Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 conspiracy in Richmond, but he identified them as white veterans of the American Revolution and anti-Federalists who were “acting strictly on their own.”⁴⁶ This is consistent with a pattern whereby European idealists inspired by French revolutionary ideals were more entrepreneurial than cau-

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tious rebel leaders like Louverture, who had to juggle multiple domestic priorities and treated overseas ventures as unwelcome diversions. Louverture’s sole foray beyond Saint-Domingue took place in January 1801 when he invaded Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic). But Santo Domingo was the only colony to share a land border with Saint-Domingue, so it did not violate Louverture’s treaties with his Anglo-American partners, which stipulated that he could not send warships more than five leagues from Hispaniola’s shores.⁴⁷ Also, because Spain had officially ceded Santo Domingo to France in 1795 under the Peace of Basel, Louverture was able to present the invasion as a mere administrative takeover of a fellow French territory. Most historians take it for granted that Louverture abolished slavery when he invaded Santo Domingo, which would mark the only instance in which he officially freed slaves beyond Saint-Domingue.⁴⁸ This had indeed been a long-standing aim of Parisian authorities since the Peace of Basel.⁴⁹ The French governor of Saint-Domingue had accordingly sent envoys to Santo Domingo in 1795 to spread the “decree of liberty,” but the Spanish governor had postponed its implementation indefinitely and crushed three attempts by Dominican slaves to free themselves.⁵⁰ “Spanish inhabitants do not want to hear of general liberty,” Louverture had noted at the time.⁵¹ Accordingly, as he prepared to take over Santo Domingo in 1800–1801, Louverture was caught between his desire to expand liberty and his concern that a sudden abolition would incite Spanish planters to flee with their valuable workforce. Santo Domingo “will continue to be treated and governed as in the past,” he instructed a general. “We often talked about the bad manner [i.e., without a transition period] in which general liberty was given in the French part [Saint-Domingue], and how it is important to wisely make it reign without tremors into this part: one should thus not change anything to the system that exists.”⁵² Documents published on Louverture’s orders during the takeover tiptoe around the issue of emancipation, presumably to avoid scaring off Spanish planters, many of whom were threatening to leave with their slaves.⁵³ The printed decree by which Louverture formally abolished slavery in 1801 in Santo Domingo has yet to be found, presumably, one suspects, because there never was one.⁵⁴ Instead, he turned slaves into “cultivators,” a type of quasi-serfdom prevalent in Saint-Domingue at the time. Louverture explained to Dominican slaves that they would now enjoy their “liberty” and be paid a fourth of the crop; but he insisted that cultivators remain tied to their former plantations; “that they work, even more than before; that they remain obedient; that they do their duty with diligence, being fully determined to punish severely those who don’t.”⁵⁵ Unable to tell the difference between

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slavery and Louverture’s free but stern labor regime, Spanish planters later “remembered that general Toussaint Louverture had not proclaimed the liberty of their slaves during the takeover.”⁵⁶ The constitution that Louverture made public in July 1801 strongly reaffirmed that all men were free in Saint-Domingue (art. 3), which theoretically applied to Santo Domingo, conquered earlier that year. In practice, manumission documents examined by Graham Nessler before and after 1801 hint at a chaotic legal situation in which layers of Spanish and French law overlapped while slavery remained the de facto standard.⁵⁷ Another clause of the 1801 constitution is worth mentioning. Under article 52, the Dominguan army could only be employed to maintain public order and to defend the colony, which implicitly banned foreign ventures. “We will not wage war in foreign lands; we will limit ourselves to guarding our coasts,” Louverture instructed his officers.⁵⁸ Domestic tranquility remained his priority until the spring of 1802, when a large expedition sent by Bonaparte brought a sudden end to his reign.

Exporting the Revolution: Dessalines’s Record In many ways, Dessalines was Louverture’s ideological heir. After Louverture was exiled to France in 1802 and Dessalines took over as leader of the rebel army, he embraced many of his predecessor’s policies, including noninterventionism. Letters sent by Dessalines (or on Dessalines’s behalf) to Cuba, Jamaica, and the United States in the summer of 1803 all offered the basic quid pro quo that had underpinned Louverture’s own diplomacy: sell us weapons and buy our tropical crops, Dessalines proposed, and in exchange we will not threaten our neighbors.⁵⁹ “As long as we enjoy our legitimate rights, you have nothing to fear from us,” a rebel officer informed Anglo-American merchants.⁶⁰ The promises made by Dessalines in the 1804 Declaration of Independence must be understood in this historical context. Far from being an aberration or a lie, self-containment was consistent with a strategic compromise that harked back to the Louverture era: since overseas adventures might not succeed for lack of naval means, it was best to adopt a neutral posture so as to cultivate allies at a time when Dessalines was convinced that the French would soon send a new expedition to reconquer Haiti. Dessalines’s diplomacy with British Jamaica in the spring of 1804 has been well documented.⁶¹ In keeping with the views expressed in the Declaration of Independence, Dessalines promised British envoys that he would set limits on his blue-water navy and not invade Jamaica, while adamantly refusing to give away an inch of Haitian national territory.⁶² Declining to de-

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mand the emancipation of Jamaica’s slaves, he limited himself to asking for the repatriation of black Haitians who had become stranded overseas during the course of the revolution.⁶³ Like Louverture before him, he also repeatedly asked that British slave traders import laborers into Haiti to replenish a population halved by a decade of war. (Slavery having been abolished, imported Africans would have become cultivators: semifree field laborers tied to their plantations.)⁶⁴ In 1805, just as Louverture had done in 1801, Dessalines invaded Santo Domingo. Viewing Dessalines as an emancipator, white and black Dominicans either lamented or cheered the invasion.⁶⁵ In fact, Dessalines’s primary goal was not emancipation, which he did not proclaim, but the expulsion of the French troops who had reassembled in Santo Domingo and threatened to attack Haiti. He aborted the invasion after hearing reports that a French fleet was headed for Haiti: as always, defending the homeland remained Haiti’s all-consuming strategic priority. To repopulate Haiti (another important policy goal), Dessalines’s army brought back prisoners of color from Santo Domingo, many of whom were “offered for sale as slaves [cultivators, probably]” according to a US eyewitness.⁶⁶ The constitution issued by Dessalines later in 1805 drew many of its principles from Louverture’s. Like its 1801 precursor, it emphatically stated that slavery was forever abolished in Haiti itself (art. 1 and 2). It also added that “the Emperor [Dessalines] shall never form any enterprise with the views of making conquests, nor to disturb the peace and interior administration of foreign colonies” (art. 36). The most famous case of foreign meddling during Dessalines’s reign took place in March 1806, when Francisco de Miranda stopped in Jacmel, Haiti, on his way to invade South America. According to the Haitian historian Thomas Madiou, Dessalines allowed Miranda to recruit local supporters and, through a subordinate, offered some personal advice on how to win a war of independence: “burn houses and cut off heads.”⁶⁷ If Madiou is correct, one suspects that Dessalines broke his neutrality pledge because the British and US governments had also assisted Miranda (or so claimed Miranda) and he had no diplomatic repercussions to fear. Other sources cast some doubts on the extent of Dessalines’s involvement; a British admiral in Barbados wrote to Miranda that “you have represented to me that in carrying into effect the Expedition under your command, you have met with some difficulty from the defection of the Force you expected to join at St. Domingo [Haiti].”⁶⁸ At any rate, the invasion itself was a disaster. For Deborah Jenson, there is “oblique evidence of Dessalines’s participation in decolonization schemes that did not rely on formal and national military engagement, but on incendiary persuasion and insurrection plotted

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by small numbers of people.”⁶⁹ But the evidence provided to support her theory—a Frenchman’s claim that Dessalines was planning to start a revolt in Martinique and Guadeloupe—seems thin given the propensity of contemporary actors to see Haitian plots everywhere.⁷⁰ Julia Gaffield has shown that the French agent in St. Thomas, Arnaud André Roberjot Lartigue, to whom these rumors can be traced back, was playing up French fears so as to raise his profile in bureaucratic circles and obtain the payment of his salary.⁷¹ Evidence for Dessalines’s involvement in an 1805 conspiracy in British Trinidad also appears incomplete.⁷² Similar rumors disseminated in Spanish colonies are vague and unconvincing, especially those that continued to circulate in 1807, at a time when Dessalines could do no harm for a simple reason: he was dead.⁷³

Exporting the Revolution: After Dessalines Dessalines’s assassination in October 1806 changed nothing within the basic pattern of Haitian foreign relations. Inflated fears of Haitian infiltration continued to trouble foreign slave owners, with the unintended but positive effect of pushing the United States to restrict and then end its involvement in the Atlantic slave trade lest foreign slaves upset the US plantation system.⁷⁴ The example of the Haitian Revolution continued to inspire slaves and free people of color in the Americas, notably in the short-lived republic of Cartagena from 1811 to 1815, but evidence of actual Haitian meddling remained weak.⁷⁵ The German Coast Uprising in 1811 Louisiana, the largest in US history, involved a mixed-race slave originally from Saint-Domingue, Charles Deslondes, but the sources, as is often the case, are too fragmentary to prove that the rebels received direct encouragement from Haiti.⁷⁶ That same year, a plot that was inspired by, but not directed by, Haiti failed in British-occupied Martinique.⁷⁷ In 1812 Cuba, the rebellion of José Antonio Aponte was blamed on Haitian agitators because portraits of Louverture and Dessalines were found in Aponte’s house and because one of Aponte’s seconds pretended to be the (actually deceased) Haitian rebel Jean-François. But rebels were so hopeful to obtain help from Haiti, and authorities so eager to blame their slaves’ discontent on some outside influence, that Haiti’s involvement was likely exaggerated.⁷⁸ Denmark Vesey is usually presented as a rebel who, after spending time in Saint-Domingue, hatched a plot in 1822 to kill Charleston’s whites and then sail to Haiti. But Michael P. Johnson has shown that this narrative is based on a cursory analysis of deeply flawed sources and that the very existence of a conspiracy (and hence any Haitian connections) is in doubt. One of the

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few slaves who cooperated with the prosecution, Monday Gell, explained that “I never wrote to St Domingo or anywhere else on this subject [the alleged plot].” It was only when he was threatened with execution that he changed his story and cited some hypothetical letter by Vesey, “which was directed to president [Jean-Pierre] Boyer [of Haiti].”⁷⁹ Vesey, who had already been executed, could offer no rebuttal. Instead of taking at face value every rumor circulating among white planters or every confession forcibly extracted by suspected conspirators, Haitian policies should be assessed by reading this country’s abundant political literature, which has scarcely been analyzed. Its tone remained remarkably consistent, even after Haiti, in the aftermath of Dessalines’s death, was divided between two rival regimes led by Henry Christophe (in the North) and Alexandre Pétion (in the West and South). In keeping with Haiti’s legal traditions, Christophe’s 1807 constitution reaffirmed the abolition of slavery in Haiti (art. 1 and 2) as well as “its unshakeable decision to not disturb the regime by which [nearby slave colonies] are governed” (art. 36). Similarly, per Pétion’s 1806 constitution (revised in 1816), while slavery was abolished “within the territory of the Republic” (art. 1), “the Republic of Haiti will never form any enterprise with the view either to make conquests or to trouble the peace and internal order of foreign States or Islands” (art. 5). As had been the case under Louverture and Dessalines, the policy did not apply to Santo Domingo, which technically was not a “foreign island.” In 1808, Christophe sent weapons to the Spanish when they expelled the last French troops still present in Santo Domingo. In 1810, Pétion also promised weapons to conspirators aiming to make Santo Domingo independent from Spain.⁸⁰ Only one aspect of Haitian law could be interpreted as an assault, albeit indirect, on foreign slavery: Haiti was a free-soil country, so in theory Haiti could become a haven for foreign runaways, as it had been since commissioner Sonthonax had abolished slavery in 1793.⁸¹ For example, in 1817 seven Jamaican slaves fled to the part of Haiti controlled by Pétion, who refused to extradite them despite the demands of their British owner because article 44 of Pétion’s constitution granted freedom and citizenship to all refugees of color.⁸² One secretary of Christophe, Pompée Valentin Vastey, criticized Pétion’s asylum policy because it “directly tends to upset the peace and the internal regime of these colonies or foreign countries,” but Christophe himself offered refuge to the captives of three slave ships that were intercepted near Cuba in 1810–12.⁸³ Perhaps Christophe, an Anglophile, was willing to welcome runaways as long as they were not British-owned. Ada Ferrer has analyzed Pétion’s free-soil policies and found them to be more “radical” than those of metropolitan France and Britain because Haiti

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was located in the very midst of the Caribbean, making it a tempting haven for local runaways.⁸⁴ But the existence of a “land of the free” could also act as a safety valve for nearby plantation societies, notably the United States, where there were numerous plans in the nineteenth century to send freedmen to Haiti and Liberia because of a reluctance to grant them full citizenship. The efforts by Haitian statesmen to encourage US blacks to come to Haiti, which began under Louverture and Dessalines, continued under Pétion and peaked under the presidency of Jean-Pierre Boyer in the 1820s, were thus not fundamentally incompatible with the existence of nearby slave societies.⁸⁵ Twice in 1816, Pétion offered significant material support to Simón Bolívar on the condition that Bolívar abolish slavery in Venezuela, the clearest case of official Haitian support for regional abolition to date, though he tried to hide his involvement for fear of offending Spain: “I want to free people from slavery,” he wrote Bolívar, “but don’t mention my name in any of your acts.”⁸⁶ But the actual impact for South American slaves was unfortunately limited because Bolívar, who was innately opposed to slavery but also uncomfortable with the racial equality embodied by Haiti and unwilling to confront the South American landed gentry, only issued a conditional and gradual emancipation law, which went largely unenforced; the full abolition of slavery in Venezuela only took place in 1854, long after Pétion and Bolívar’s deaths.⁸⁷ On the other hand, Pétion’s 1816 revised constitution, which balanced republicanism with a strong centralized government, deeply influenced Bolívar’s political thought.⁸⁸ Like Pétion, his successor Jean-Pierre Boyer (ruled 1818–43) was a mixedrace general from Port-au-Prince who displayed some inclination to export Haiti’s ideals. Most notable was Boyer’s invasion of Santo Domingo in 1822, after which he finally ended slavery in this Spanish colony. Full emancipation was a step that neither Louverture nor Dessalines had apparently taken during their 1801 and 1805 invasions, so the invasion marked the only instance when abolition was exported beyond Haiti by force of arms. “God bless / Papa Boyer / Who gave us / La liberté,” remembered a popular black poem.⁸⁹ But Boyer, in a proclamation he issued on February 9, 1822, was careful to emphasize that this did not change Haiti’s noninterventionist stance beyond Hispaniola. “The principles established by articles 40 and 41 of our constitution, which established the Ocean as our border, are as well known as article 5 of the same act, under which we pledged never to trouble the peace of our neighbors.”⁹⁰ Despite countless efforts to placate the fears of Haiti’s neighbors so as to convince them to formally recognize the country’s independence, this essential goal of Haitian foreign policy went unmet. “Our constitution prevents us from ever interfering in the colonial regime of other states,” complained

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François Desrivières Chanlatte in 1822, yet “our enemies insinuated that we might one day threaten the seas that surround our island like Barbary pirates.”⁹¹ We are normal: such was the message that Haitian statesmen hammered repeatedly in the first two decades of the nation’s existence, yet without success. A Cuban spy who visited Haiti in 1841 reported (accurately) that Haitian policies barred foreign interventions and that the Haitian army was incapable of projecting itself overseas; but his prejudices were so ingrained that he nevertheless went on to fantasize about “secret agents,” “simply because Haiti is Haiti.”⁹² Haitian leaders’ policy goals toward the former colonial master, France, were similar: they expressed their preference for a peaceful modus vivendi that would allow Haiti to join the concert of nations in exchange for a nonintervention pledge. After a ten-year standstill, Napoléon’s first exile in 1814 raised the possibility that Haiti could finally reach a settlement with France under the new Bourbon government. Louis XVIII immediately dispatched diplomatic agents, whom Pétion and Christophe welcomed . . . until they chanced upon the envoys’ instructions and realized that they had been instructed to restore slavery and French rule. Pétion kicked out one of the agents while Christophe jailed the other.⁹³ Negotiations with France continued in fits and starts over the ensuing ten years, until a French edict of 1825 finally granted Haiti its independence in exchange for commercial preferences and an indemnity. (Though the idea originated with Pétion, the indemnity has been ever since a source of conflict in French-Haitian relations.⁹⁴) Haiti was now officially sovereign; it had also become so sufficiently weak militarily that the French government did not consider it necessary to demand a nonintervention pledge before recognizing its independence.

Conclusion The promise made by Jean-Jacques Dessalines in the Declaration of Independence not to tamper with the internal regime of his neighbors was not only truthful but also possibly the most momentous decision taken that day: by lessening (though not fully extinguishing) the concerns of Haiti’s neighbors, the pledge helped ensure that Haiti’s experiment with black selfrule would endure. But it also meant that the Haitian Revolution, however impressive an achievement, remained a one-off event. This successful slave revolt was such a powerful precedent that foreign slaves occasionally tried to imitate it; but Haitian inspiration was not the same as Haitian instigation, and these isolated, unsupported uprisings all failed. In the words of Seymour Drescher, “Haiti was both unforgettable and unrepeatable.”⁹⁵

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Dessalines’s vow was not an isolated speech made in the heat of the moment but a well-thought-out policy, which one may dub the “Dessalines doctrine,” that was in line with the policies of Dessalines’s predecessor, Toussaint Louverture, and successor, Henry Christophe. Only in earlier and later periods can one see isolated efforts to export Haiti’s ideals, such as the 1795 uprising in Curaçao (possibly encouraged by André Rigaud), the 1799 Roume-Sasportas plan to invade Jamaica, Alexandre Pétion’s 1816 assistance to Bolívar, and Jean-Pierre Boyer’s 1822 invasion of Santo Domingo, along with the operations mounted from Guadeloupe. These were often masterminded by white and mixed-race activists rather than former slaves, thus upending our traditional understanding of Haiti’s racial politics. Comparisons can be drawn with the other two great Atlantic revolutions of the age. The American Revolution, which also had powerful ideological repercussions in Latin America, was hemmed in by George Washington’s and Thomas Jefferson’s preference for neutrality and nonentanglement overseas. In contrast, the French Revolution aggressively exported the Declaration of the Rights of Man to Europe and beyond. By pursuing revolution “in one country” (to paraphrase Joseph Stalin), Dessalines embraced the isolationist American model, while a few of his countrymen, particularly those of French descent, were more tempted by French-style adventurism. To fully understand Dessalines’s decision, we must stop thinking of him and his fellow black generals as slave rebels, which reduces their identity to their past bondage and the color of their skin. Instead, we should take them seriously as statesmen whose foremost duty was to ensure that Haiti would survive in a hostile environment. As so often in the world of politics, idealism had to yield to pragmatism.

Notes 1. Jean-Jacques Dessalines [and Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre], “Proclamation” (January 1, 1804), dossier 15, AB XIX/3302, Archives Nationales (AN). Emphasis added. The translations of the Declaration of Independence are from the appendix of this volume; all other translations in this chapter are mine, except for from the Dutch. 2. Condy Raguet, “Memoirs of Hayti” (January 31, 1804), The Port Folio 1, no. 5 (May 1809), 480. 3. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Augustin Clervaux, Henry Christophe, “Déclaration préliminaire d’indépendance” (November 29, 1803), in H. Pauléus Sannon, Histoire de Toussaint Louverture (Port-au-Prince: Héraux, 1933), 3:202. 4. National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser no. 504 (January 13, 1804). 5. Henry Christophe, “Proclamation” (January 1, 1815), Tract A17, Boston Athenaeum (BA). See also Tract B795, BA.

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6. Gérard Mentor Laurent, Six études sur J. J. Dessalines (Port-au-Prince: Les Presses Libres, 1950), 70; Jean-Baptiste Saint-Victor, Le fondateur devant l’histoire (1954; repr. Port-au-Prince: Presses Nationales d’Haiti, 2006); Jean Fouchard, “Quand Haïti exportait la liberté aux Antilles,” Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire et de Géographie 143 (1984):41–47; Alain Yacou, “Le péril haïtien à Cuba: de la révolution nègre à la reconnaissance de l’indépendance, 1791–1825,” in Michel Hector, ed., La révolution française et Haïti: filiations, ruptures, nouvelles dimensions (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1991), 2:186–99; Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 179; Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 176. 7. Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), xix, 94. 8. David Geggus, “Slave Rebellion during the Age of Revolution,” in Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, 1795–1800, ed. Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011), 32. See also David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), x. 9. Dessalines, “Proclamation” (February 29, 1804), CC9B/18, Archives Nationales d’Outremer (ANOM). 10. Dessalines, “Liberté ou la mort—Proclamation” (April 28, 1804), dossier 15, AB XIX/3302, AN. 11. Dessalines, “Aux habitants de la partie espagnole” (May 8, 1804), dossier 15, AB XIX/3302, AN. 12. Dessalines to Napoléon Bonaparte (October 9, 1804), 61J25, Archives Départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux. 13. Dessalines, “Liberté ou la mort—Proclamation” (April 28, 1804), dossier 15, AB XIX/3302, AN. Dessalines may have meant to refer to the people of Guadeloupe or French Guiana, where Bonaparte had restored slavery in 1802–3, rather than the people of Martinique, where the abolition of slavery had never taken place. 14. Ada Ferrer, “Speaking of Haiti: Slavery, Revolution, and Freedom in Cuban Slave Testimony,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 229–34. 15. David Geggus, “Le soulèvement d’août 1791 et ses liens avec le vaudou et le marronnage,” in La révolution française et Haïti: filiations, ruptures, nouvelles dimensions, ed. Michel Hector (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1995), 1:61. 16. For requests for help, see José Luciano Franco, ed., Documentos para la historia de Haití en el Archivo Nacional (Havana: Publicaciones des Archivo Nacional de Cuba, 1954), 69; Bryan Edwards, An Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo (London: Stockdale, 1797), 3. 17. Jean-Pierre Brissot to Francisco de Miranda (December 13, 1792), in Coll., Archivo del General Miranda (Caracas: Tipografía Americana, 1938), 15:159.

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18. Geggus, “Slave Rebellion during the Age of Revolution,” 23–56. 19. Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2007), 114–18. On the rebels’ late embrace of emancipation, see Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 135. 20. Ferrer, “Speaking of Haiti,” 228, 235. 21. Antonio J. Pinto, “Santo Domingo’s Slaves in the Context of the Peace of Basel: Boca Nigua’s Black Insurrection, 1796,” Journal of Early American History 3 (2013): 142, 147, 152. 22. Ada Ferrer, “La société esclavagiste cubaine et la révolution haïtienne,” Annales 58, no. 2 (March–April 2003): 354. 23. Robert Alderson, This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions: French Consul MichelAnge-Bernard Mangourit and International Republicanism in Charleston, 1792–1794 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 93–109. 24. Ángel Sanz Tapia, “Militaires royalistes émigrés, prisonniers français et esclaves de Saint-Domingue dans la capitainerie générale du Vénézuela pendant la guerre contre la révolution (1793–1795),” Annales des Antilles: Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Martinique no. 23 (1980): 80. On Venezuela in the 1790s, see also Ramón Aizpurua, “Revolution and Politics in Venezuela and Curaçao, 1795–1800,” in Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, 1795–1800, ed. Klooster and Oostindie, 101–8; Aline Helg, “A Fragmented Majority: Free ‘of all Colors,’ Indians, and Slaves in Caribbean Colombia during the Haitian Revolution,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. Geggus, 157. 25. Gert Oostindie, “Slave Resistance, Colour Lines, and the Impact of the French and Haitian Revolutions in Curaçao,” in Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, ed. Klooster and Oostindie, 9. 26. “Memorie door den raad fiscaal Pieter Theodorus van Teyligen aan gouverneur en raden des ielands Curacao,” in A. F. Paula, ed., De slavenopstand op Curaçao (National Archives of Curaçao, 1974), 206. This document was mentioned to me by Charles Rego and translated by Marjoleine Kars. 27. João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes, “Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Brazil, 1791–1850,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. Geggus and Fiering, 286. 28. Léger-Félicité Sonthonax to Théveneau (October 19, 1796), fr. 8986, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF). 29. “Le débat à la Convention” (February 4, 1794), www.assemblee-nationale.fr/ histoire/esclavage/debats-16pluviose.asp (accessed on June 30, 2013). 30. Philippe Girard, “Rêves d’Empire: French Plans of Expeditions in the Southern United States and the Caribbean, 1789–1809,” Louisiana History 48, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 389–412. 31. Laurent Truguet, “Instructions données par le Directoire Exécutif à ses agens” (February 12, 1796), doc. 212, B277, FM, ANOM.

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32. Eustache Bruix to Philippe Roume (February 22, 1799), CC9A/22, ANOM. 33. Pierre-Louis Roederer, Mémoires sur la révolution, le consulat et l’empire (Paris: Plon, 1942), 131. 34. Bonaparte to Louverture (March 4, 1801), Kurt Fisher Collection, Howard University. Bonaparte’s policies took a conservative turn later that year. 35. Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2004), 222–42. 36. Klooster and Oostindie, eds., Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, 13, 144. 37. Joseph Gabriel d’Hédouville to Directoire Exécutif (c. 1798), CC9A/19, ANOM. 38. Alexander DeConde, The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797–1801 (New York: Scribner’s, 1966), 84. 39. Louverture to John Adams (November 6, 1798), RG 59, Microfilm M9/1, National Archives in College Park. 40. Philippe Girard, “Black Talleyrand: Toussaint Louverture’s Secret Diplomacy with England and the United States,” William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 1 (January 2009): 101. 41. Gabriel Debien and Pierre Pluchon, “Un plan d’invasion de la Jamaïque en 1799 et la politique anglo-américaine de Toussaint Louverture,” Revue de la Societé Haïtienne d’Histoire, de Géographie et de Géologie 36, no. 119 (July 1978): 3–72. 42. Hans Jordaan, “Patriots, Privateers and International Politics: The Myth of the Conspiracy of Jean Baptiste Tierce Cadet,” in Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, ed. Klooster and Oostindie, 141–69. 43. Edward Stevens to Timothy Pickering (September 30, 1799), 208 MI/1, AN; Earl of Balcarres to Duke of Portland (October 28, 1799), CO 137/103, The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA). 44. Isaac Louverture, “Notes historiques sur Toussaint Louverture . . . ,” p. 69 (c. 1819), NAF 12409, BNF. See also Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, suivies de la vie du général J-M Borgella (Paris: Dézobry et Magdeleine, 1853–60), 4:360; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1963; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 265. 45. George Nugent to Portland (September 5, 1801), CO 137/106, TNA. 46. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 115 (quote), and 182–85 (Frenchmen’s background). Michael L. Nicholls, Whispers of Rebellion: Narrating Gabriel’s Conspiracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 189, describes Egerton’s identification of the Frenchmen as “conjecture.” 47. For the treaty, see Thomas Maitland and Louverture, “Convention secrète . . .” (June 13, 1799), ADM 1/249, TNA. On Santo Domingo, see Wendell Schaeffer, “The Delayed Cession of Spanish Santo Domingo to France, 1795–1801,” Hispanic American Historical Review 29, no. 1 (February 1949): 46–68.

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48. Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de J. Courtois, 1847), 2:86; Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 2007), 191; Anne Eller, “ ‘All would be equal in the effort’: Santo Domingo’s ‘Italian Revolution,’ Independence, and Haiti, 1809–1822,” Journal of Early American History 1 no. 2 (2011): 111. 49. Truguet, “Instructions données par le Directoire Exécutif à ses agents” (February 12, 1796), doc. 212, B277, FM, ANOM; Carlos Esteban Deive, Los refugiados franceses en Santo Domingo, 1789–1801 (Santo Domingo: Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña, 1984), 133. 50. “Decree of liberty” from Manlau, Baubert, and Noël Leveillé to Etienne Laveaux (November 13, 1795), fr. 12103, BNF. For the three revolts (Hinche, Sámana, Boca Nigua), see Pinto, “Santo Domingo’s Slaves in the Context of the Peace of Basel,” 131–53. 51. Louverture to Laveaux (December 20, 1795), fr. 12103, BNF. 52. Louverture to Pierre Agé (June 1, 1800), in Ardouin, Études 4:171. 53. Louverture, Proce’s-verbal de la prise de possession de la partie espagnole de SainteDomingue (January 27, 1801), Box L-1801, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 54. Fernando Carrera Montero, Las complejas relaciones de España con La Española: el Caribe hispano frente a Santo Domingo y Saint Domingue 1789–1803 (Santo Domingo: Fundación García Arévalo, 2004), 472. 55. Louverture, “Proclamación” (February 8, 1801), ESTADO, 60, N.3, Archivo General de Indias. 56. François Desrivières Chanlatte, Considérations diverses sur Haïti (Port-auPrince, 1822), 14. 57. Graham Nessler, “ ‘They Always Knew Her to be Free’: Emancipation and Re-Enslavement in French Santo Domingo, 1804–1809,” Slavery and Abolition 33, no. 1 (2012): 89. 58. Pélage-Marie Duboys, Précis historique des annales de la révolution à Saint Domingue 2:190, NAF 14879 (MF 5384), BNF. 59. Dessalines to Jefferson (June 23, 1803), Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1, General Correspondence, Library of Congress; Dessalines to British Minister (September 2, 1803), CO 137/110, TNA; Geffrard to Sebastián Kindelán (September 14, 1803), in Franco, Documentos para la historia de Haití, 152–54. 60. François Capois-la-Mort to captain of British or American vessel (July 4, 1803), ADM 1/253, TNA. 61. See the Dessalines forum in William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (July 2012). 62. Dessalines to John T. Duckworth (February 12, 1804), ADM 1/254, TNA. 63. Dessalines to Nugent (November 6, 1803), CO 137/110, TNA; Dessalines, “Arrêté” (January 14, 1804), AB/XIX/3302/15, AN. 64. Dessalines to Edward Corbet (Febuary 26 and 27, 1804), CO 137/111, TNA. 65. Sara E. Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 52–57.

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66. Condy Raguet, “Memoirs of Hayti” (December 1805), The Port Folio 4, no. 3 (September 1810), 242. 67. Madiou, Histoire, 3:270. 68. Julia Gaffield, “ ‘Liberté, Indépendance’: Haitian Antislavery and National Independence,” in A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William Mulligan and Maurice Bric (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 28. According to Ardouin, Études 6:242–43, Dessalines met Miranda in person but gave him no material assistance. According to Karen Racine, Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003), 160, Miranda’s troops were not even allowed onshore. 69. Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 176. 70. Louis-Thomas Villaret de Joyeuse to Decrès (January 16 and February 10, 1806), folios 36 and 83, C/8a/112, FM, ANOM. 71. Gaffield, “Liberté, Indépendance,” 26. See also David Geggus, “The Slaves and Free Coloreds of Martinique during the Age of the French and Haitian Revolutions: Three Moments of Resistance,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 296. 72. Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2011. 73. Marques de Someruelos to [Sebastián Kindelán?] (February 28, 1807), in Franco, Documentos para la historia de Haití, 161. 74. Alfred Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 110. 75. Marixa Lasso, “Haiti as an Image of Popular Republicanism in Caribbean Colombia,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution, ed. Geggus, 178. 76. Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans, 114–18; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 111–12. 77. Yves Bénot, La démence coloniale sous Napoléon (Paris: La Découverte, 1992), 165. 78. Matt Childs, “A Black French General Arrived to Conquer the Island: Images of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba’s 1812 Aponte Rebellion,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution, ed. Geggus, 137–45; Ferrer, “Speaking of Haiti,” 237. 79. Michael P. Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 4 (October 2001), 949. 80. Eller, “ ‘All would be equal in the effort,’ ” 127, 132. 81. For an early example of a runaway slave seeking asylum in Saint-Domingue, see “Noticia que dà don José López de Gánuza” (March 22, 1796), fr. 12104, BNF. 82. Richard Sheridan, “From Jamaican Slaves to Haitian Freedom: The Case of the Black Crew of the Pilot Boat, Deep Nine,” Journal of Negro History 67, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 332–37.

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83. David Nicholls, “Pompée Valentin Vastey: Royalist and Revolutionary,” in La révolution française et Haïti, ed. Hector, 1:431; Ferrer, “Speaking of Haiti,” 238. 84. Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (February 2012): 50. 85. Louverture to Louis-André Pichon (July 3, 1801), CC9A/28, ANOM; Dessalines, “Arrêté” (January 14, 1804), AB/XIX/3302/15, AN; Loring D. Dewey, Correspondence Relative to the Emigration to Hayti of the Free People of Colour in the United States (New York: Mahlon Day, 1824). 86. Paul Verna, Pétion y Bolívar: cuarenta años (1790–1830) de relaciones haitianovenezolanas y su aporte a la emancipación de Hispanoamérica (Caracas: Oficina Central de Información, 1969), 180. 87. John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 97, 101 (on his stays in Haiti); 151, 288 (on the abolition of slavery); 213 (on his dislike of Haiti). 88. Sibylle Fischer, “Bolívar in Haiti: Republicanism in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” in Haiti and the Americas, ed. Carla Callargé et al. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 25–53. 89. Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes, 71. Original in Spanish and French. 90. Ardouin, Études 9:133–34. 91. Chanlatte, Considérations diverses sur Haïti, 8, 20. 92. Ferrer, “La société esclavagiste cubaine,” 345. 93. Christophe, “Proclamation” (November 11, 1814), Bro. 5 .125, BA; [Rapport] (c. June 23, 1824), CC9A/54, ANOM. 94. On Pétion’s proposal, see Alexandre Pétion to William Wilberforce and James Stephen (December 12, 1815), MS692, National Library of Jamaica (document communicated by Julia Gaffield). On the French-Haitian negotiations, see CC9A/53 and CC9A/54, ANOM; Jean-François Brière, Haïti et la France, 1804–1848: le rêve brisé (Paris: Karthala, 2008), 47–155; François Blancpain, Un siècle de relations financières entre Haïti et la France, 1825–1922 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 46–58. 95. Seymour Drescher, “The Limits of Example,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution, ed. Geggus, 13.

PART III

The Legacy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence

“Outrages on the Laws of Nations” American Merchants and Diplomacy after the Haitian Declaration of Independence JULIA GAFFIELD

On June 23, 1803, the general-in-chief of the Armée Indigène of SaintDomingue, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, advised the US president, Thomas Jefferson, that American ships would find safety and profit in Saint-Domingue’s ports.¹ As the tides seemed to be changing in his war against the French, Dessalines began planning for the island’s independence. To sustain this independence Dessalines realized that the new nation would need trade partners, and he considered the United States of America to be an important possibility since American merchants had been coming to Saint-Domingue throughout the revolution. American merchants from ports like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York had regularly visited the Caribbean during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and had been willing to trade with both Dessalines’s Armée Indigène and the French army. Dessalines was confident that they would continue to visit the island once the French had been expelled. Jefferson never responded to Dessalines’s overtures and began what historian Rayford Logan called “the American policy of ignoring Haiti in diplomatic affairs.”² Nevertheless, after the Haitian Declaration of Independence on January 1, 1804, and despite Jefferson’s silence, American merchants tried to act as if Haiti was an independent nation. Despite the initial diplomatic silence on the part of the US government after the evacuation of the French troops in late 1803, American merchants, as Dessalines had hoped, did indeed continue to visit Haitian ports to bring provisions and war materials in exchange for coffee, cotton, mahogany, and other commodities.³ American merchants clearly saw irresistible opportunity in building on decades of vibrant commercial activity. They set up trading houses and some started families. “Contrary to popular belief,” literary scholar Marlene Daut highlights, “Haiti was not isolated in the first two decades of independence, if by isolation we mean lack of contact.”⁴ These economic opportunities in Haiti were particularly valuable for American merchants since Haiti was no longer

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bound by a mercantilist trade policy and its trade was therefore unrestricted.⁵ In the two years after the Haitian Declaration of Independence, the United States became one of Haiti’s primary trade partners.⁶ The political isolation of Haiti, therefore, did not entail economic isolation. But did the diplomatic silence on the part of the US government affect these trade relationships? How did diplomatic nonrecognition shape the ongoing economic engagement? And how did American trade impact Haiti’s diplomatic status? Scholars have long recognized that the United States’ diplomatic response to Haiti in the first years after January 1, 1804, was complex and indecisive. For his study, Rayford Logan used diplomatic correspondence and congressional records to re-create the attitudes of and conflicts between American and French representatives regarding the issue of economic support and Haitian independence in the first years after 1804. Historians Tim Matthewson and Gordon S. Brown have also undertaken extensive studies of Haiti’s relationship with the United States during the revolution and in the first years after independence.⁷ Histories of US-Haitian relations after the Haitian Declaration of Independence, however, focus on American policy and reactions to Haiti’s independence. As a result, Marlene Daut has recently called for a better understanding of Haitian reactions to American nonrecognition.⁸ This essay expands our understanding of Haiti’s relationship with the United States by systematically analyzing the connections between trade and diplomacy after the Haitian Declaration of Independence and the implications of this ambiguous relationship for the American merchants trading with Haiti. These implications also highlight how the Haitian government used the ongoing economic contact between the two countries as leverage to secure diplomatic recognition. In particular, the focus is on the fact that, according to the American government and judiciary systems, Haiti was not a participating member in the community of nations and therefore could not be considered within the law of nations. What happened, then, when Haitians (allegedly) acted illegally according to the customary practices of international law? This essay uses diplomatic records, merchant correspondence, US court cases, and American merchants’ claims cases against the Haitian government to highlight the tensions inherent in the relationship between American merchants and Haiti, a place that former US Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, argued in 1815, “must be considered as being neither independent nor part of the mother country.”⁹

US-Haiti Trade In partnership with his brother’s company, Elias Kane & Co., Archibald Kane set up a trading house in St. Marc, Haiti, in the years after the Haitian Dec-

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laration of Independence. He married a Haitian woman and lived in Haiti on and off until his death in Port-au-Prince in 1817.¹⁰ Kane was one of many American merchants who visited Haiti after the Haitian Declaration of Independence, and, while the records relating to Kane’s time in Haiti are sparse, a number of letters presented as evidence in the capture of Kane’s ship the Happy Couple shed light on the economic benefits for American merchants in Haiti after the declaration of 1804. When Archibald and Elias Kane formed the New York West India Company, they decided that Haiti was a promising investment worthy of a multiyear commitment. They proposed a contract to the Haitian government “for supplying all the wants of Government for 5 years.” Archibald Kane reported to his other brother, James, with whom he owned a trading store in New York, that they wanted to sign the contract in order to “convince the gov[ernment] that the New York West India Company wished to embrace the commerce of the Island. And that their capital was equal to it.” Moreover, Kane seemed to feel an ideological connection between the revolutionary experiences of the United States and Haiti. “I represented to the Government,” he continued, “that the Spanish Minister had offered our company immense advantage in the South America Business, but from the proximity of this Island to the United States, and a desire to lend a helping hand to the Establishment of the Independence of this island, our comp[any] was induced first to make them the offer.”¹¹ According to Archibald, the Kane brothers signed a trade treaty with the Haitian government because it was both profitable and morally just, perhaps because, like Americans, the Haitians were revolutionary separatists. On January 24, 1805, Archibald Kane proposed a contract on behalf of the New York West India Company to the Haitian minister of finance, General André Vernet, in which “The Trading West India Compan’y propose purchasing from the Government of Haiti, all the coffee, sugar, and cotton that they will have for sale for five years to commence from date of contract, and to supply the Government with every description of articles, that they may require during the said term, and to be delivered at such city in the island of Haiti as the Government shall say.”¹² The actual contract, however, signed on February 4, 1805, stipulated that Kane would be responsible for payment of five hundred thousand dollars in sterling and gold every four months over the course of the next five years. In return, the Haitian government would deliver “prime coffee” to Kane at a rate of “20 sols [under 12 cents] the pound.”¹³ A second contract, signed on the same day, committed Kane and the Haitian government to an ongoing relationship in which Kane would import “all the merchandizes and all other necessary articles for the clothing, equipment and providing the troops &c,” in exchange for “the full returns of the merchandizes &c in sugar, cotton, and cocoa.”¹⁴

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The agreement also reveals how the merchants were well aware of the dangers in trading with Haiti and how they planned to overcome these obstacles. “The Company proposes in order to Insure the regular delivery of their articles and dollars, to have the ships belonging to the ‘Trading West India Company’ convoyed by two armed ships of 36 guns each under such colours as shall be deemed most prudent and proper.” The merchants of the West India Trading Company were prepared to aggressively defend their voyages from New York to Haiti and were also prepared to evade legal constraints by changing the colors under which they were sailing. The practice was evidently so frequent that the governor of Jamaica noted that “the trade between America and St. Domingo is now carried on in well armed vessels mounting from 12 to 18 guns each and manned for the French Privateers from Cuba.”¹⁵ While in Haiti, Kane seems to have cultivated close business relationships with the Haitian community and even Haitian leaders. “The arguments made use of by His Majesty [Dessalines] and minister with their privy council,” Kane wrote from Haiti to his brother Elias in February 1805, “convince me that even among the blackest of creation, wisdom and correctness of view are to be found.” “I never was more surprised,” he continued: “I expected to treat with men who knew little of financing and government, but I found men who had been educated in France, and who would be thought brilliant men in the United States.”¹⁶ Perhaps economic opportunity shaped his views, but Kane’s reports to his brother suggest that he held a drastically different view from that of the French chargé d’affaires, Louis André Pichon, who worked intently to try to convince the US government to prohibit trade with Haiti. “The United States could not place herself on a level with Negroes,” Pichon told US Secretary of State James Madison. “[T]heir position required that the United States as well as all other powers recognize a difference in the application of the law of nations according to the difference in persons and places.”¹⁷ Kane, in contrast, anticipated that Haiti could assume a place in the community of nations of the Atlantic World. His perspective may have been influenced by the favorable treatment that he received by the Haitian government. “At present no one in this island stands better at court than I do,” Archibald reported to Elias. “His Midnight Majesty, is really partial to me.”¹⁸ Other American merchants also appear to have had similarly positive experiences in Haiti and they developed the same respect for Dessalines. Another merchant, William Ely, wrote from St. Marc to a business associate, J. Catling, in Litchfield, Connecticut, at about the same time that Archibald was setting up his family business in Haiti. He recounted the scene of a ball thrown by Emperor Dessalines and his wife. “I neither dined or danced with their Majesties,” he reported. “[T]he Americans here were all disappointed of

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that honor, his majesty being ill and continuing only one night in the place I had but a transient view of him.” But the experience was not a complete disappointment. “[I had a] better one [view] of her [Madame Dessalines],” he wrote with admiration, “as I had the honor of delivering a letter immediately into her fair hand. She rec[eive]d me in a stile [sic] of easy gentility peculiar to the French and those who have been long in the habit of seeing and imitating their manners. She is a large genteel, sociable, affable, agreeable African, and drives a large trade with the Americans to whom she is quite polite.”¹⁹ Yet while Ely had high praise for the leaders of Haiti, he lamented the decline of the island after the revolution and longed for the island’s former glory. “I am anxious to quit this gloomy place,” he wrote in the same letter, “said once to have been one of the handsomest in the West Indies but now almost wholly a pile of ruins, having lately been burned by the French in their attempt to subdue the Island.” The remnants of the revolution were still visible: “the fallen and falling walls,” he exclaimed, “exhibit a melancholy and impressive view of the instability of human affairs. One house in particular almost constantly in my sight, said to have cost 500,000 livres exhibits to my mind legibly written on its walls, superb even in ruins ‘sic transit Gloria Mundi’ [thus passes the glory of the world].”²⁰ While Ely was willing to trade with Haiti and to support Haitian independence, it seems that he still longed for the former grandeur (from his perspective) of colonial Saint-Domingue. These merchants, in addition to developing trade relationships, appear to have participated in the cultural activities of the state and their letters suggest a high level of respect for the Haitian leadership. Their relationships indicate that in some cases the economic activity of American merchants in Haiti went beyond simple commercial transactions. Kane and Ely also engaged in the political culture of the island and sent encouraging reports to their contacts in the United States.

Prohibition on Trade American merchants were legally allowed to trade with Haiti during the first two years after the Haitian Declaration of Independence, but the ongoing trade received opposition from American and foreign government representatives. Indeed, while the US government initially tolerated trade with Haiti, debates in Congress reveal that officials were conscious of the tension that this merchant activity created between their government and that of France.²¹ Rayford Logan argues that Secretary of State Madison was not willing to go to war with France simply to, in Logan’s words, “foster the independence of Haiti.”²² And for this reason, the government was willing to negotiate with

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French Chargé d’Affaires Louis André Pichon, who set out to convince the American government to act with caution when considering a relationship with Haiti. While trade between the United States and Haiti flourished during the first years after the Haitian Declaration of Independence, some members of Congress thought that the trade was too dangerous because it might lead to a slave uprising in the southern states. Not everyone supported economic exchange with former slaves. An incident occurred in mid-1805 that appears to have sparked increased opposition to this trade and reopened the debate in Congress. On June 26, 1805, the Albany Register published an account of a celebration on a ship in the harbor of New York. “Yesterday an elegant dinner [was] given on board the Indostan, by Capt. [Jacob] Lewis, Samuel G. Ogden, and Washington Morton, Esq. to a select party of one hundred of the most respectable characters in this city.”²³ This report did not describe the reason for the gathering but the party received attention in other states. On July 4, 1805, the City Gazette and Daily Advertiser of Charleston, South Carolina, published news that they had received from Boston. “Now let us enquire what was the intention of this nautical gala,” the writer for the City Gazette asked. “[W]e answer, with sorrow and surprise, that it was, according to the evidence and circumstances, a display of mischievous resistance to the wise decrees of the Executive Authority, in regard to the forbidden trade with the brigands of St. Domingo.”²⁴ Indeed the Aurora expanded on this information and noted that Rufus King, a Federalist candidate for vice-president, was on board the ship and that he toasted “the government of Hayti, founded on the only legitimate basis of all authority: the people’s choice! May it be as durable as its principles are pure!”²⁵ Matthewson argues that “King’s toast was a deliberate provocation, aimed at embarrassing the president, and it expressed Federalist contempt for slaveholders who preached the equality of man while holding slaves in bondage.”²⁶ This public banquet renewed French fury at the ongoing trade between the United States and Haiti. In the end, the US government was willing to concede to the demands made by French representatives because of its desire for French support in the acquisition of the Floridas.²⁷ Land acquisition was more valuable to the United States than trade with Haiti. Additionally, the massacres that Dessalines initiated in Haiti during February, March, and April of 1804 contributed to the move from diplomatic silence to legislative action to prohibit trade. Dessalines targeted white French citizens; however, many portrayed the events as ruthless violence by blacks against whites, regardless of nationality.²⁸ A bill originating in the US Senate and signed by President Jefferson

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on February 28, 1806, made trade with Haiti illegal. This bill prohibited all trade from the United States to those ports in “St. Domingo” that were not under the control of the recognized French government. Congress renewed the bill the following year for a term lasting until the tenth session.²⁹ At the end of the renewed bill, however, the policy received little support and Congress did not renew it for another term. The prohibition, however, continued under the Embargo Act (1807) and then the Non-Intercourse Act (1809). It was not immediately apparent, however, whether Haiti fell under the restrictions applied by the Non-Intercourse Act since the Act prohibited trade with any parts of the French Empire, and it was unclear whether Haiti was to be included in that prohibition. The US government did not provide an answer to this pressing question. Some merchants assumed that Haiti was not part of the French Empire and therefore visited the new country to resume the legal trade. Not all ship captains agreed, however, and some of these merchants were captured for violating the Non-Intercourse Act. The prize courts, therefore, had to decide Haiti’s diplomatic fate.

Is “St. Domingo” Still French? The Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, prohibited the importation of goods “from any port or place situated in France, or in any of her colonies or dependencies.”³⁰ While the 1806 law stated specifically that trade with SaintDomingue/Haiti was illegal, this new legislation left unanswered the question as to whether Haiti was included under this prohibition. Yet, because of the demand for this trade, the question needed an answer. The case of Clark v. the United States presented the opportunity for a resolution. Indeed, while the US government remained silent on Haiti’s status, the court systems were forced to decide whether Haiti fell under the prohibitions of the Non-Intercourse Act: “The question is, whether the island of St. Domingo, in October 1809, when the importation charged in this information was made, was a colony or dependence of France, or not?”³¹ Because of this discussion, the Non-Intercourse Act would have lasting implications for Haiti’s diplomatic status, despite the fact that the ban on trade was only in place for one year. The case of Clark v. the United States involved the American ships the Sea Nymph and the Emma; the initial case was heard in October 1809 in the District Court of Eastern Pennsylvania and the decision was appealed in 1811 in the Circuit Court of Pennsylvania on the grounds that the trial should have been by jury and not under admiralty jurisdiction. “On the part of the United States, it is contended,” the records for the appeal report, “that in point of fact, this island, at the time above mentioned, was, and still continues [to be],

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a dependence of France; and that even if this were not the case, according to the principles of the law of nations, still, it is not for this, or any other Court, to decide on the ground of her independence, until the government of the United States has so declared, or France has relinquished her claim.” Since the US government had not expressly acknowledged the independence of Haiti, the courts, argued the defendants, had to assume that the island remained a colony of France. In contrast, the claimants argued that the Haitian government had proved that the island was independent and that it should therefore be treated as such. “On the part of the claimant, it was insisted,” the records report, “that the people of this island had not only declared themselves independent, but have thus far shown themselves able to maintain it; having, ever since the declaration, exercised without interruption from the armed force of France, the rights and powers of self-government, under a constitution framed by themselves.” Since the island was independent, it was their duty to treat Haiti as they would all other neutral nations: “that neutral nations are bound, by the law which ought to govern nations, to consider St. Domingo as a government separate from, and independent of France; and the war, if any there be between them, as being equally just on both sides.” In thinking about this case, the circuit judges considered legal theorist Emer de Vattel’s analysis of civil war in the context of international trade, but argued that it was not applicable since Vattel’s guidance was intended to inform the actions of governments, not court systems.³² “It is for governments to decide,” the judges argued, “whether they will consider St. Domingo as an independent nation; and till such decision is made, or France shall relinquish her claim, Courts must consider the ancient state of things as remaining unaltered, and the sovereign power of France over the colony as still subsisting.” In this he agreed with the argument set forth by the defendants. The question then remained: had any government acknowledged Haitian independence? The judges included the 1801 constitution under Toussaint Louverture as proof of French authority over the island, and they argued that, since this overt declaration of French authority, the island had been consumed by civil war until 1809 when General Louis Ferrand’s French troops evacuated the city of Santo Domingo and the eastern side of the island returned to Spanish control. During that period of civil war, they acknowledged that the rebel armies had declared national independence under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. In the judges’ opinion, Haiti possessed the characteristics of an independent nation. “When the non-intercourse law passed, in February 1806,” they argued, “the island of St. Domingo was in a state of open public war with France; having declared herself independent, framed a Constitu-

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tion of government, and shown herself able to maintain that independence.” Because of these characteristics, they concluded that, “as an independent nation, the United States had an unquestionable right to carry on a commercial intercourse with that island,” and that the government had done so for two years after the Haitian Declaration of Independence. The question at this moment, nevertheless, was whether Haiti fell under the Non-Intercourse Act. Only the US government, the judges argued, had the right to make this decision independently and without foreign influence. “The attempt of any foreign nation to interdict such commerce, and still worse, a demand upon the government of the United States,” they railed, “to enforce such prohibition by law, would have been an insult, to which no nation ought, and to which our government most certainly would not have submitted.” The judges recognized, nevertheless, that such had been the case in the United States and that the government only prohibited the trade because of French pressure and to secure French support in their aspirations of continental land acquisition. While they did not believe that the government was required to have done so, the fact that they had conceded to French demands changed the ability for American merchants to trade with Haiti. “We view the law of 1806,” reported the chief justice for the case, “under the circumstances which produced it, as a clear acknowledgment of the sovereignty of France over the island, which no subsequent act of our government, has in any respect impaired.” The judge assumed that the law prohibiting trade with Haiti in 1806 had been implemented because the US government had decided that the island was still a French colony. The 1806 law did not explicitly state that the trade had been prohibited because of the island’s character as a rebellious French colony, but trade was only prohibited to those ports and places that were not under French control. “All commercial intercourse between any person or persons resident within the United States,” the 1806 bill proclaimed, “and any person or persons resident within any part of the island of St. Domingo, not in possession, and under the acknowledged government of France, shall be, and is hereby prohibited.”³³ The reference to France’s lost control over certain places implied that it was because of this conflict that American merchants could not trade with Haiti. The judges ruling on the case of Clark v. the United States also saw this connection. “When congress,” they argued, “by the law on which this information is founded, interdicted the importation into the United States, of goods, &c., from the colonies and dependencies of France, we feel ourselves compelled to say, that St. Domingo was considered by that body as included.” The 1806 prohibition on trade influenced Haiti’s perceived diplomatic status in the United States because the government had remained silent. “So that the government has not only not acknowledged the independence of this

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island,” they concluded, “but has very plainly declared the contrary.”³⁴ From this perspective, the prohibition on trade with Haiti signified that the island could not be considered independent from France. The economic legislation in the United States focused on banning trade with Haiti and therefore set a precedent for nonrecognition. The circuit court case demonstrates how interpretations of the embargo on trade with the French Empire had implications for Haiti’s status as a country or colony. The relationship between the government and the court systems influenced the practical nature of Haiti’s place as an independent country in the Caribbean. The US court system interpreted diplomatic status through economic policy, and the prohibition on trade with Haiti resulted in a denial of Haiti’s sovereignty. This decision clearly articulated that the United States refused to diplomatically recognize Haiti as an independent nation. Scholars have long assumed that the US government withheld diplomatic recognition from Haiti; however, the case of Clark v. the United States highlights that the silence on the part of the government did not automatically signal nonrecognition but that instead it was economic policy that implied nonrecognition. According to this ruling, Americans would continue to consider Haiti a French colony. The cumulative effect of the various prohibitions on trade was that the US government made trade with Haiti illegal between 1806 and 1810, and it was explicitly stated that the United States was withholding diplomatic recognition. However, two whole years passed after the Haitian Declaration of Independence before the United States officially outlawed trade with Haiti, and this prohibition only lasted for four years. These various prohibitions on trade, however, had a limited effect on American trade with Haiti. Historian Jean-Francois Brière argues that the 1806 bill “was hardly followed, because American merchants did not want to cede the opportunity to the English.”³⁵ The Haitian secretary of state under Henry Christophe argued that “the individuals of this nation [the United States] find in Haiti benefits that are far superior than all other options that despite the prohibitive laws of their government, they are stubbornly determined to continue their shipments to us.”³⁶ At the expiration of the Non-Intercourse Act in 1810, American trade with Haiti was legal again; the government, however, continued to withhold diplomatic recognition. This withholding of diplomatic recognition while Americans were engaged in trade with Haiti meant that Haiti occupied an ambiguous place in American foreign policy. “While the official policy of the U.S. was not to recognize the independence of either Haitian government,” Marlene Daut highlights, “U.S. American journalists and other private individuals discursively recognized the country’s sovereignty on their own, thus accomplishing what their government would not.”³⁷ Merchants could again

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trade with Haiti and their actions implicitly recognized Haiti’s independence from France; however, they did not have the typical diplomatic means to resolve conflicts or disputes that arose during their economic ventures. Diplomatic nonrecognition, therefore, constrained the legal trade between American merchants and Haiti.

Claims against the Haitian Government During the decades after the Haitian Declaration of Independence, a number of American merchants filed claims with the American government against the Haitian government for the illegal seizure of cargo, cash, or ships. They demanded that the US government intervene on their behalf in order to help them recover their investments. The records produced by these claims suggest the complications inherent in economic relationships with Haiti while the US government was withholding diplomatic recognition. On the one hand, American merchants expected to interact with Haitians within the established practices of the law of nations. On the other, the US government did not recognize Haiti as an independent nation. To remedy this dilemma, American merchants encouraged their government to extend full recognition and to support them in their efforts to secure their lost property. In 1811, a group of merchants wrote to President James Madison to complain that they had lost a great deal of property—over 132,000 gourdes worth—to Henry Christophe, the soon-to-be king of the northern part of Haiti. Christophe had confiscated this money and property since one of his shipments of coffee had been, from his perspective, “fraudulently detained” in Baltimore. “The following measure,” argued Christophe’s major general of state P. Romain, “is repugnant to the values in his [Christophe’s] heart and his politics, but that is the only recourse he has left for the recovery of the state’s properties.”³⁸ The American merchants, however, did not appreciate being used as leverage to recoup lost property. “This accumulation of suffering and injustice,” they reported to Madison, “has been borne by Native Citizens of the United States at the hand of a lawless self convicted plunder it has been borne with patience and resolution because they confidently relied upon their own Government when duly informed to obtain indemnity as well as to offer protection.” It appears as though the US government had not provided the necessary support to these merchants. “To a government enlightened in its policy and prompt to redress the wrongs of its subjects,” the American merchants pleaded with their president, “it cannot be necessary to urge the importance of protecting the rights and interests of every class of men in the community against every infringement or outrage committed by any foreign power whether civilized or barbarous.” This characterization

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of Haiti as a “barbarous foreign power” highlights the conflicting roles that Haiti had in the Atlantic World in the early nineteenth century. Haiti’s incongruous status, these merchants argued, made it difficult for them to engage in trade because the typical methods for resolving conflicts were inhibited by the diplomatic limits on the Haitian-American relationships. “Although the law prohibiting all trade with the Island of Saint Domingo has expired and vessels are regularly cleared under the authority of the United States, for the port of that island,” the merchants concluded, “yet as the present existing rival powers are not recognized by our government or by other nations as legitimate, the ordinary course of demanding and obtaining redress for wrongs seems to be impeded.”³⁹ The American diplomatic nonrecognition was, in fact, interfering with trade. The merchants engaged in trade with Haiti as if it was an independent country, but the methods for condemning illegal behavior (from their perspective) could not be pursued because the American president refused to plead their case to the Haitian head(s) of state. The merchants were asking that the US government concede and expand their diplomatic policy to match their economic policy. This might have been exactly the point. The Haitian government, according to these American merchants, refused to take seriously their claims because the US government was withholding recognition of Haiti. The merchants writing in 1811 argued that if the United States conceded, they would be able to protect the investments of Americans. Lauren Benton’s research on José Gervasio Artigas’s privateering strategy in the Banda Oriental only a few years after the incident in Haiti suggests that this might have been a shared tactic in the development of new nations.⁴⁰ “The disputes resulting from privateer raids,” Benton argues, “served . . . as an effective entrée into international diplomacy.”⁴¹ The diplomatic conflicts born out of maritime conflicts imbued the emerging states with sovereign power. It appears as though the Haitian government recognized this fact and used American merchants to put pressure on the US government to extend full recognition to Haiti. The documents in the American claims cases, however, suggest that the Haitian government did not unleash the same intensity of privateering that Artigas did in order to secure foreign recognition. While I do not have the documentation needed to conclude that this was an explicit and coordinated strategy initiated by the Haitian governments, the reactions of American merchants highlight that, as was the case in Benton’s study of the Banda Oriental, “maritime affairs also carried enormous symbolic and practical significance in the construction of new polities.”⁴² The claims cases continued to be an issue in Haitian-American diplomacy until the 1850s and, when the US government tried to collect $130,000 from Henry Christophe

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in 1817, he refused on the grounds that the United States had not yet recognized his government.⁴³ In 1820, another group of merchants requested government backing but, given that formal recognition was the key, the US government declined. In response, Rayford Logan reports that Secretary of State John Quincy Adams “informed Congress on March 27, 1820: ‘A formal recognition of the kingdom of Hayti not being deemed expedient, no further measures have been found practicable on the part of the Executive in the case.’ ”⁴⁴ The merchants were not willing to give up. The next year, Jacob Lewis, the same American merchant who had celebrated and toasted Haitian independence aboard the Indostan in 1805, wrote to Adams to request that the US president write directly to the Haitian government on his behalf in order to help him secure payment for “several hundred thousand dollars” of property that he had delivered to Dessalines under contract. Dessalines had died before he was able to fulfill the contract and Lewis recognized that during the civil war it was “impracticable to obtain payment.” Now that the country was reunited, he hoped that his government would help him secure the payment for his property. “I therefore solicit that you will be pleased to submit these facts to the President of the United States,” Lewis wrote to Adams, “informing him that I have placed my claim under the charge of William Davis Robinson and I request that such a letter be addressed to the Haytian Government as will give him the proper weight to the representation of my agent Mr. Robinson.” About four years earlier, Lewis had been denied an audience with Christophe because his letters did not formally recognize Christophe’s government. “At Jacquemel [sic],” a British admiral reported, “I learnt that the Harnet American Sloop of war had arrived at Cape Henry with Mr. Taylor and Mr. Lewis, but as their letters of credence were directed to General Christophe instead of King of Hayti he would not received them, and ordered them away, they then sailed for Port au Prince.”⁴⁵ Even though in 1821, Christophe was dead and Jean-Pierre Boyer was president of a united Haiti, Lewis knew that labels and titles were of primary importance to the Haitian government. A letter from the US government to the “Haytian Government” and not “St. Domingo” would have been exactly what the Haitian government was fishing for. From Lewis’s point of view, it would help him secure his investment. “I feel persuaded that if the President of the U. States accedes to my wishes,” he concluded, “I shall promptly obtain from the Haytian Government an equitable adjustment and payment of my claim.”⁴⁶ It appears as though Adams partially complied with Lewis’s request. Secretary of State Adams did not have the president write to the “Haytian Government,” but he himself did. On March 13, 1821, Adams wrote to “To his Ex-

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cellency General Boyer President of Hayti” to ask that Jacob Lewis’s claim be fulfilled.⁴⁷ Adams, however, was not willing to explicitly address the issue of recognition. When Boyer’s secretary general, B. Inginac, wrote to Adams in 1823 to explicitly ask that the United States recognize Haiti’s independence, his letter received no response.⁴⁸ The next year, the American agent in Portau-Prince, Andrew Armstrong, wrote to Inginac to explain Adams’s decision not to respond. “The omission to answer that letter,” Armstrong reported, “arose from no disrespect either official or personal to Gen[eral] Inginac, but as its purpose was avowedly to demand of the gov’t of the U. States the formal recognition of the independence of Haiti, and reasons of a conclusive nature forbidding the adoption of that measure, it was thought more advisable to have the letter unanswered, than to enter into a discussion that could not lead to a favorable result.”⁴⁹ Armstrong pointed to unfavorable terms of trade as the reason for the United States withholding recognition. Resistance to extending official recognition to Haiti, however, heightened after the initial period of indecision during 1805 and 1806 as southern planters gained the upper hand in congressional debates about Haiti’s place in the Atlantic World. Gordon Brown also attributes this shift to the decline of American trade with Haiti after Britain became Haiti’s primary trade partner. Perhaps the decline in Haitian-US trade was related to the unfavorable terms of trade cited by Armstrong. Adams had been willing to correspond with the Haitian government regarding the claims cases of American merchants but was unwilling to discuss the issue of recognition. As his position in government changed, however, he had to approach the issue even more cautiously. In 1826, when Adams was president of the United States, Robert Oliver, a merchant from Baltimore, reported that “Mr Adams doubted the propriety of correspondence with the President of Hayti.”⁵⁰ Adams’s office impacted his ability to communicate with the government of Haiti, and he was unwilling to correspond with the Haitian government when he was the head of state.⁵¹ Robert Oliver had been writing to Adams in 1826 in order to recover losses sustained in Haiti in 1804. Over two decades after the initial loss, he had not been successful. Oliver and Lewis’s agent in Haiti, William Davis Robinson, argued that official recognition would help their case. “They are anxious to cultivate the good will of our government,” Robinson reported to Oliver, “and I feel confident that if our cabinet was to offer to acknowledge the independence of Hayti, or to make a commercial treaty with them, we might make our own terms, and at all events obtain payment for every just claim of our citizens, no matter whether they originated under the government of Dessalines, Christophe, Pétion, or the present chief.”⁵² If they failed either to negotiate with the Haitian government or to apply force, Robinson

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concluded that the Haitians would continue their current policy of illegally seizing American goods. He believed that the Haitian government was withholding payment as a way to secure diplomatic recognition. Another claims case brought in 1830 by Clement Coal on behalf of Henry Davies of Baltimore also explicitly dealt with the issue of trade and recognition. Coal argued that the US government’s diplomatic policy paralyzed American merchants when they felt wronged by the Haitian government. “It is understood,” Coal reported, “that the claims have generally been eluded by a preliminary demand for the recognition of the Haitian Governments.” The Haitian government refused to discuss the issue of the claim without first establishing recognition of their government. The only way to secure the property, therefore, would be for the United States to fully recognize Haitian sovereignty. Nonrecognition, Coal argued, provided Haiti with “an immunity for outrage and [shielded] the government of that Island from the responsibility that is exacted from recognized nations.”⁵³ Coal, however, saw inconsistencies in the Haitian government’s policies in their dealings with the American government; he complained that they had received “unofficial agents” of the American government without first demanding recognition, and so he considered the seizure of American goods and vessels to be unique and outrageous even within broader Haitian policy toward the United States. “When considering the large [amount] of claims on the Haytian Government by citizens of the United States,” Coal concluded, “growing out of this and similar outrages on the laws of nations . . . it is confidently hoped by Mr. Davies, that the executive will feel impelled, as well for the vindication of the national dignity as by a just regard for the violated rights of our citizens to grant a favorable attention to his appeal and to make an energetick [sic] demand for reparation on the Haytian Government.”⁵⁴ As late as the 1850s, the US government was still trying to secure payment. Rayford Logan reports, “In April [1850], the American warships, Vixen, Albany, and Germantown arrived in Port-au-Prince for the purpose of collecting the claims dating back to the time of Christophe.”⁵⁵ In the end, they did not use force and they were unable to secure the funds. Diplomatic nonrecognition prevented American merchants from enlisting the help of their government when they felt that they had been wronged in Haiti. Some of these merchants spent decades arguing with the American government in order to obtain official aid. The US government undertook half measures to try to secure the debts (allegedly) owed to the American merchants, but they would not concede what the Haitian government was demanding: diplomatic recognition. In 1816, a Philadelphia merchant, Joseph P. Horner, articulated his frustration with the relationship between the United States and Haiti: “Is such a nation as ours to be thus trampled

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on by the very outcasts of the slaves of the West Indies?”⁵⁶ While this was a rhetorical question, it appears that American merchants felt that the answer, without official diplomatic recognition, was necessarily yes.

Conclusion The evidence reveals that American merchants often found that their hands were tied by their government’s denial of Haiti’s diplomatic privileges. The merchants expected that their Haitian counterparts as well as the Haitian government would act within the established customary practices of the law of nations, despite the fact that their own government was implicitly denying that Haiti was a nation. By examining a number of claims made against the Haitian government, we see that the problems inherent in Haiti’s ambiguous status become obvious. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that the Haitian government may have used American merchants to try to secure official diplomatic recognition. The overall result was that the relationship between Haiti and the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century was layered, complex, and sometimes contradictory with serious consequences for the Haitian government and for the American merchants. Haiti’s relationship with the United States after 1804 highlights the extent to which tensions between official political positions and economic activity undermined the ambitions of both American merchants and the Haitian government. The refusal to recognize Haiti’s Declaration of Independence while also condoning commercial relations meant that American merchants were allowed to trade with an unrecognized country. As a result, the Haitian government used these merchants to contest their diplomatic exclusion from the community of recognized nations in the Atlantic World. The case of Haiti had worldwide implications, as Lauren Benton’s research highlights, since “the question of what to do about semi-state sponsors of privateering raised the problem directly of how to acknowledge confederations, rebellious territories, and even individual ports as international actors. Similar challenges persisted for a long time in the global order.”⁵⁷ The volume of trade between the United States and Haiti during the period of nonrecognition meant that the diplomatic relationship was continually an issue. “By 1821,” Michel-Rolph Trouillot notes, “US merchants were supplying nearly 45 percent of Haiti’s imports; England was in second place, with 30 percent.”⁵⁸ Regional conflicts in the United States prevented the government from extending official recognition but it was also to the detriment of the American merchants. It was not until 1862, in the midst of the American Civil War, that the US government finally extended diplomatic recognition to Haiti. They also

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recognized the independence of Liberia. Recognition came when President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill appointing commissioners to Haiti and Liberia on June 5, 1862.⁵⁹ It took an extraordinarily long amount of time for the United States to extend diplomatic recognition to Haiti; almost four decades longer than France, Haiti’s former metropole. During this period of diplomatic nonrecognition, however, American merchants continued to travel to Haiti to capitalize on the economic opportunities available. Trade with Haiti was legal for the majority of the period of nonrecognition, but American diplomacy limited the merchants’ ability to secure government support for claims against the Haitian government. Haitian presidents and government representatives used the economic relationship to try to expand the relationship to include diplomatic recognition. They did not, however, achieve their main goal and the US government continued to withhold diplomatic recognition until 1862.

Notes 1. Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 233–44. 2. Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776–1891 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 229. 3. For more on Haitian agricultural production after the Declaration of Independence, see Johnhenry Gonzalez, The War on Sugar: Forced Labor, Commodity Production and the Origins of the Haitian Peasantry, 1791–1843 (PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 2012). 4. Marlene Daut, “The ‘Alpha and Omega’ of Haitian Literature: Baron de Vastey and the U.S. Audience of Haitian Political Writing,” Comparative Literature 64, no. 1 (2012): 51. 5. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 195. 6. “Les Américains, particulièrement soucieux de développer leur commerce, devinrent, au cours des deux premières années d’indépendance, les plus importantes partenaires d’Haïti.” David Nicholls, “Race, couleur et indépendance en Haïti, 1804–1825,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 25 (1978): 181. 7. Tim Matthewson, A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations During the Early Republic (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Gordon Brown, Toussaint’s Clause; Ludwell Lee Montague, Haiti and the United States, 1714–1938 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1940). 8. Daut, “The ‘Alpha and Omega,’ ” 52. 9. Albert Gallatin to Alexander J. Dallas, 1815. Albert Gallatin, The Writings of Albert Gallatin, ed. Henry Adams (Philadelphia, 1879), quoted in Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 187.

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10. “At Port-au-Prince (St. Domingo.) Mr. Archibald Kane, Merchant, late of the House of James and Archibald Kane, of this city . . . Died,” Albany Gazette, November 15, 1817, p. 2. 11. Archibald Kane to James [Kane], from St. Marc, Haiti, February 11, 1805, the National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA), HCA 42-426. 12. Archibald Kane, “No. 11, City of Saint Marc,” January 24, 1805, TNA, HCA 42-426. 13. Archibald Kane and André Vernett [sic], “No. 12, Aux Gonaïves,” February 4, 1805, TNA, HCA 42-426; in another letter, Kane noted that “165 Sols is the dollar and 20 Sols is under 12 cents for a French pound is over 8 per cent more than English free dutys.” Archibald Kane to Elias Kane, “No. 15, St. Marc’s,” February 9, 1805, TNA, HCA 42-426. 14. Archibald Kane and André Vernet, “No. 13, Aux Gonaïves, Liberty or Death,” February 4, 1805, TNA, HCA 42-426. 15. George Nugent to John Jeffreys Pratt, 2nd Earl Camden, December 15, 1804, National Library of Jamaica (NLJ), MS 72, box 3, 511N. 16. Archibald Kane to Elias Kane, February 9, 1805, from St. Marc, Haiti, TNA, HCA 42-426. 17. André Pichon, June 6, 1804, quoted in Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 166. 18. Archibald Kane to Elias Kane, February 13, 1805, from St. Marc, Haiti, TNA, HCA 42-426. 19. Extract of a letter from William Ely to Mr. J. Catling, February 20, 1805, from St. Marc, Haiti, TNA, HCA 42-426. 20. Extract of a letter from William Ely to Mr. J. Catling, February 20, 1805, from St. Marc, Haiti, TNA, HCA 42-426. 21. For a detailed account of these debates, see Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 152–87. 22. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 157; Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 23. “New York, June 13,” Albany Register, 25 June 1805, Volume XVII, 1405, p. 3. 24. “Boston, June 17,” City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 4 July 1805, Volume XXIV, 5564, p. 2. 25. Cited in Matthewson, A Proslavery Foreign Policy, 127; and Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 178. 26. Matthewson, Proslavery Foreign Policy, 127. 27. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 169. 28. Matthewson, Proslavery Foreign Policy, 125. For more on the massacres, see Jeremy Popkin’s chapter in this volume; Philippe Girard, “Caribbean Genocide: Racial War in Haiti, 1802–4,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 138–61; and Julia Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 3 (July 2012): 583–614.

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29. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 181. 30. Quoted in Edwin D. Dickinson, “The Unrecognized Government or State in English and American Law,” Michigan Law Review Association 22, no. 1 (1923): 35. 31. Bushrod Washington, Reports of Cases Determined in the Circuit Court of the United States, for the Third Circuit, Comprising the Districts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Commencing at April Term, 1803 (Philadelphia: Philip E. Nicklin, Law Bookseller, 1827), 101. 32. Here the judge referenced another case, Rose v. Himely, from 1804, but argued that it did not apply as precedent. Rose v. Himely, HeinOnline, 9 U.S. (5 Cranch) 313 (1809). 33. Richard Peters, ed., By Authority of Congress, the Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, Vol II, Ninth Congress, Sess 1, CH 6, 7, 8. 1806 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1848), 350. 34. Washington, Reports of Cases, 106. 35. “Ne fut guère suivie d’effet, car les marchands américains ne voulaient pas céder la place aux anglais.” Jean-Francois Brière, Haïti et la France, 1804–1848: la rêve brisé (Paris: Kathala, 2008), 54. 36. “[L]es individus de cette nation trouvent a Hayti un bénéfice si supérieur a celui que leur rapportent toutes leurs autres spéculations que malgré les lois prohibitives de leur Gouvernement, ils s’obstinent a continuer avec opiniâtreté leur envois chez nous.” Rouanez, jeune to Jean-Gabriel Peltier, April 5, 1807, TNA, WO 1/79. 37. Daut, “ ‘Alpha and Omega,’ ” 63. 38. “S.A.S. s’est décidée à la mesure suivante, qui répugne à la vérité à son coeur et à sa politique, mais qui est la seule ressource qu’il lui reste pour le recouvrement des propriétés de l’Etat.” Henry Christophe, “Ordre Général de l’Armée,” October 15, 1810, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), General Claims, ARC Identifier 1174286/MLR Number PI 177 239. 39. Ezra Davis, Oliver Farwell, John W. Quincy, Thomas Capin, Wm Nach , Geo. Burrough, Perry W. Lamb, Stark & McKinstry, Sam Cooper, Henry Burroughs, Jeremiah Thomson, Jen.[?] by his atty., James Cartin, Andrew C. D , Ezra Davis to President James Madison, Boston, January 31, 1811, NARA, General Claims, ARC Identifier 1174286/MLR Number PI 177 239. 40. I would like to thank Lauren Benton for bringing this to my attention. It was through correspondence with her that I became aware of the possibility of this strategy in the early independence period in Haiti. I would also like to thank her for sharing an early English-language version of her article, “Strange Sovereignty: The Provincia Oriental in the Atlantic World” (“Una soberanía extraña: la Provincia Oriental en el mundo atlántico”), México 20/10, La Modernidad en el Atlántico Iberoamericano, 1750–1850, www.20-10historia.com/articulo5.phtml. 41. Benton, “Strange Sovereignty.” 42. Ibid., page 3 in the English translation.

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43. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 189. 44. Ibid., 189–90. 45. C. G. R. Phillott, Captain to Rear-Admiral Sir Home Popham, HM Sloop Primrose Port Royal 10 May 1818, TNA, ADM 1/269; Marlene Daut discusses a similar incident involving two French warships and a letter from the captain delivered to Christophe by an American merchant. Christophe refused to receive the letter on the basis that it was addressed to “General Christophe” instead of “King Christophe.” Daut, “ ‘Alpha and Omega,’ ” 63, n.10. 46. Jacob Lewis to John Quincy Adams, Washington, DC, March 1, 1821: “During the Period that Dessalines was at the head of the government of Hayti I entered into various contracts with him whereby he became possessed of my property to the amount of several hundred thousand dollars, but in consequence of this death, and the civil wars raging in Hayti, it was impracticable to obtain payment.” NARA, General Claims, ARC Identifier 1174286/MLR Number PI 177 239. 47. John Quincy Adams to Jean-Pierre Boyer, March 13, 1821, NARA, General Claims, ARC Identifier 1174286 / MLR Number PI 177 239; Rayford Logan quotes this letter as it appears in the House Documents, 27th Congress, 3rd Session, No. 30m p. 30, in Diplomatic Relations, 215. Logan also notes that Adams gave another agent, Boothroyd, a similar letter in 1824. 48. B. Inginac to John Quincy Adams, Port-au-Prince, July 6, 1823, NARA, Dispatches from United States Consuls in Cap Haitien, 1797–1906, Roll T-5, Volume 5. 49. Andrew Armstrong to B. Inginac, Port-au-Prince, February 13, 1824, NARA, Dispatches from United States Consuls in Cap Haitien, 1797–1906, Roll T-5, Volume 5. 50. Robert Oliver to C. Hughes, March 5, 1826, Baltimore, NARA, General Claims, ARC Identifier 1174286/MLR Number PI 177 239. 51. “It is not surprising, then, that when John Quincy Adams offered in 1843 a resolution in the House Committee of Foreign Affairs for a consular appointment to Haiti, his vote was the only one in favor of it.” Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 235. 52. W. D. Robinson to Robert and John Oliver, Port au Prince, 31 July 1821, NARA, General Claims, ARC Identifier 1174286/MLR Number PI 177 239. 53. Clement Coal to Mr. Van Buren, Secretary of State, July 16, 1830, NARA, General Claims, ARC Identifier 1174286/MLR Number PI 177 239. 54. Ibid. 55. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 249. 56. Joseph P. Horner to John K. West, of New Orleans, Washington City, DC, Philadelphia, May 30 [1816, year taken from previous letter], NARA, General Claims, ARC Identifier 1174286/MLR Number PI 177 239. 57. Benton, “Strange Sovereignty,” page 28 in the English translation. 58. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 53. 59. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 303.

The Sovereign People of Haiti during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries JEAN CASIMIR

The French colonists who established themselves in Saint-Domingue were people of the same birthright, of the same nation. From their point of view, the slaves they brought into the colony were acquired lawfully. In order to survive, these unfortunates had to overcome deprivation, humiliation, and ineffable torture.¹ But by the end of the eighteenth century, political conflicts within France and between this colonial power and its rivals offered the captives the opportunity to break out of this relationship and secure the independence of the territory in which they had accidentally run aground. Inspired by a locally developed vision of the world, these foreigners—by definition an enslaved person is a foreigner—alongside a minority of former slave owners, contributed to the construction of a supposedly national state.² This latter group of Haitian-French—the fiercely Eurocentric sector of the local population—monopolized the administrative machinery, providing no space for the “outsiders” to formalize any project for the future of their society.³ In order to preserve and reactivate the plantation system, the oligarchs took all necessary steps to prevent the working class from expressing its will to survive as it saw fit; but they could not succeed in a context where the military power of the state had to make use of the destitute as troops. The goal of this essay is to follow, from the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick onwards, how popular sovereignty emerged and what its relationship to national independence has been. I will undertake this task by revisiting the colonial plantation system. (I do not reference the group of freed persons living in the seaports alongside several enslaved. Thomas Madiou, quoted at the end of the essay, is of the opinion that they did not differ significantly from the majority of the population “in respect to their manners, to their habits and their aspirations.”) Saint-Domingue’s plantation system was built on two absences, which in turn shaped the ideological thrust of the state after 1804. First, it did not cater to the local regeneration of the population; hence, family and women

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were excluded from its worldview. Consequently, the spiritual and material bases sustaining the community life of the captives and of their descendants were dismissed outright. Second, after 1804 the natural reproduction of the working population and its welfare were a negligible concern of the independent state. From the 1801 constitution onward, political power sidestepped the will of the people in matters relating to the organization of their daily lives. Haiti’s political structure was built to support an economic project centered on the principles of land tenure and land use that characterized the plantation system. The plot of land made available to the worker remained marginal, and his/her domestic life was structured around a family model that the state discriminated against and, after 1860, that was also targeted by the official religious apparatus. During the period of slavery, the scarcity of a labor force made it imperative to import workers. After the revolution, the plethora of potential workers made unnecessary any investment to support spiritually or materially the laboring families. But the conversion of Saint-Domingue, an exploitation colony, into a settlement colony suited to welcome former captives challenged the perceptions held by the state and the political authorities. These entities did their utmost to prevent the people from taking a self-reliant hold on the territory they conquered. The people and the state were striving for different models of society.

The French Revolution and General Emancipation Under the Ancien Régime, Saint-Domingue was inhabited by the subjects of the king accompanied by their slaves. The first settlers were white (so, free) and freed people of color (therefore liberated). The others, the slaves, were black, and from 1793 to 1804 they were variously designated: blacks, Africans, cultivators (cultivateurs). In the framework of the revolutionary transformations of the period, plantation society could not come up with a “revolutionary” name for them, and even during the first decade of independence, it could not decide if they were “active” or “passive” citizens. The privileged classes of Saint-Domingue were French, and the upper strata among the free people of African descent identified themselves as “American settlers,” emphasizing their identity with the French nation. They did not consider themselves a conquered community. So they did not break away from their fatherland by choice. France had to threaten them with deportation or extermination before they cut the umbilical cord. In contrast, the persons deprived of any rights in the colony were not aboriginal and did not come from a single nation in which, or in opposition to

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which, it would be easy to define oneself. They were recruited and socialized individually, without having been vanquished as a structured national whole. Their inclusion in the process of colonization followed the markers of the Code noir, according to the modern racialization of human relations. They became prisoners of a network of empires, where confrontations opposed not only states but also through them a set of stratified races. Agricultural workers on the plantation compound owed their survival to their indomitable wills, by cultivating their awareness of the unbridgeable opposition between the privileges of the king’s subjects and their own absence of rights. Survival in this context began as an individual adventure, which was replaced by a gradual erosion of primary ethnic identities to allow the development of forms of solidarity. Absolute deference to instructions emanating from the colonial state was demanded from all subordinates. But with the impact of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and of the 1789 French Revolution, the state was never able to operationalize its pretentions to total supremacy. Among the privileged strata, interest and pressure groups flourished around objectives bordering on dissidence and even insurrection, while among the enslaved, the era gave rise to the multiplication of what used to be called “bands of maroons.” From the point of view of the colonial empire, both of these formations were of the same nature and were uprooted with distinct repressive measures. While keeping in mind the essence of the social conflicts that prompted the Haitian Revolution, I describe in the following section of my analysis how the privileged strata reacted to the changes in the metropole and how they erected the political structure that followed. Later, I turn to the question of how the oppressed people responded to these changes on the basis of the knowledge they accumulated in dealing with the operations set in motion by the dominant institutions and classes. The conflict the state engendered by proclaiming general emancipation in 1793 could not be resolved within the framework of its established judicial system. The state confronted landowners who had, in good faith, acquired plantations that they equipped with slaves with the state’s blessings. But it then found itself unable to retain sovereignty over its territory and unable to protect private property without emancipating such slaves. By promoting the former slaves’ accession to citizenship, the state amputated landed property owners of their indispensable means of exploitation and provoked a political tragedy. General emancipation was in direct contradiction with the plantation economy and its governance. The United Kingdom progressed in that direction a few decades later only with massive injections of disempowered indentured servants from Southeast Asia. At the end of the eighteenth cen-

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tury, embattled France could not entertain such ideas. Its structural political changes called for violent reactions from its rivals and put in danger its sovereignty over its colonies. In this context, royalist planters distanced themselves from the republican colonial administration, while this regime was at a loss to find a new formula to absorb the labor force. The need for workers stripped of their rights cannot be detached from the slave trade. So the 1801 constitution of Toussaint Louverture proposed simultaneously that “all men were born, live and die free and French” (art. 3), and that “the introduction of rural workers is indispensable to the recovery and growth of the agricultural sector” (art. 17). Indeed the constitution refrained from defining the scope of freedom to be enjoyed by these “nonslaves,” as did subsequent rural codes schooled by Louverture’s example. A nameless actor appeared in all subsequent règlements de culture, and consequently in Haiti’s polity, threading on the nuance between the end of slavery and the end of enslavement. In short, after 1789 Republican France could not assert its sovereignty over the territory without encroaching on the interests of the planters, and it could not reasonably rely on “Africans” or “cultivators” to rescue a plantation system that was unable to survive the end of their enslavement. Self-reliance became the only rational option for the laboring classes’ survival.⁴ But the concept of race, indispensable to justify the slave trade, was not solely France’s invention. The entire Western community generated it. Therefore, self-reliance on the part of former enslaved workers should be viewed as a confrontation with European capital in its entirety, and the defeat inflicted upon the French expeditionary army in November 1803 should be reduced to no more than a skirmish in a titanic confrontation with the architects of the racialization of the human species. The dazzling victories of Napoléon over the royalist states granted him the weapon to confront this Gordian knot: he decided to replace the colonial workforce with new slaves. Once peace was achieved in Europe following Napoléon’s fall, the Restoration would not find a better solution to revamp the colonial plantation economy.⁵ Republican, Napoleonic, or Bourbon, the colony and its plantation system needed a set of labor relations distinct from those of its metropolitan sponsor. Colonial or independent, Haiti would not depart from its customary treatment of the labor force as long as it remained ruled by the heirs of the planters. These heirs, before or after 1804, never imagined an abolition of slavery that would result in universal empowerment of the citizenry, and they never enforced total freedom for the working classes. They relentlessly pursued autonomy or secession on the same foundation: the nullification of the political rights of these classes.⁶

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Given the structure of the modern state, after 1789 neither the colonial authorities nor subsequently the Haitian oligarchs could accommodate popular self-reliance, much less popular sovereignty. Baron de Vastey (Pompée Valentin Vastey), the most forward-thinking ideologue of the Haitian Revolution, advanced only one half of the distance, insisting on the equality of individuals in law while also accepting the inequality of the different civilizations. Conversely, the former enslaved did not have to abide by the strictures of an unwritten European “universal” history. They necessarily acted on the basis of their particular notion of themselves and of society. As far as they were concerned, and irrespective of the quandaries facing the dominant classes, their equality and their popular sovereignty were not negotiable matters. For French planters and Haitian oligarchs, the people’s sovereignty was a threat to the state. And the independent state, by its very existence, was in turn a threat to the emerging international community. How could it claim national sovereignty and how could the plurality of individuals scattered in Saint-Domingue at the end of the eighteenth century coalesce into a nation?

The Plantation System, a Dead-End Street The relationship between the colonial countryside and its cities was structured in accordance with the subjugation of the territory to its metropole. In Saint-Domingue, as in the other exploitation colonies of the Caribbean, rural areas were shaped essentially by European seaport traders indifferent to local well-being.⁷ Saint-Domingue’s original settlement units, slavery-based agricultural complexes, differed slightly from other French-controlled Caribbean settlements with regards to their accelerated pace of exploitation as well as the relatively larger size of the mountainous territory in which they operated. Its compounds resembled more closely military prisons, peopled by inmates and wardens with no contact with one another prior to their initial encounter. The first task for the incarcerated was to learn properly and rapidly the operating rules engineered to exploit them as thoroughly as possible. The institution, anchored in the plundering and looting that was characteristic of the period of primitive accumulation of capital, was alien to any moral norm and principle. Prisoners had to submit to demands inconceivable from the standpoint of their still-vivid original educations. Their otherness, acknowledged through all kinds of pejorative qualifiers and unthinkable slanders, was expressed in the very fact that they needed to be trained into submission and servility. The authorities had to annihilate their individuality at all costs in order to render

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them useful, confronting the impossible task of taming the phantasms they projected onto the captives. The system had to extract profits from the enslaved workforce without reciprocating. “We declare the slaves,” the French Code noir announced, “unfit to own anything that does not belong to their master.”⁸ It then delivered instructions to be followed without educating people so as to integrate its structures willingly. The perverse effect of the omnipotence of the planter undermined the identity and self-esteem of the captives, who, in order to survive in the immediate future, had to assist in the reproduction and perpetuation of the brutalizing power. The slightest increase in their life expectancy required them to adjust to enslavement and to the worldview of the plantation society. Their surrender to brute force and their servile behavior might ensure an entire lifetime pretending cooptation while entertaining a silent desire to escape, whenever possible, the unbearable yoke. State power derived from a relatively integrated metropolitan culture that granted to the colonists the right to own slaves and to treat them as commodities. On the opposite end, the persons taken to fulfill the role of movable goods came from a variety of ethnic cultures and did not share a common set of references. Tensions between masters and slaves and between slaves themselves were supposed to resolve only at the end of the process of learning the operations of the plantation, when the subordinates would realize the unquestioned omnipotence of the landowners and submit to it. A small number of enslaved received their emancipation as a reward for their servility.⁹ Freedom granted in this manner was accurately labeled manumission, highlighting its suitability to the geography of colonialism.¹⁰ The oppressed became simultaneously aware of the knowledge useful to the dominant system and expert in the ways and means of protecting their persons from its misdeeds. The future of the slaves conveyed the designs of their masters, and their days succeeded each other as a string of immediate instants defined by their owners. The sequence of these discontinued moments acquired its meaning within the history and the horizon of the jailers, outside of any project that could be shaped by the will and choices of the enslaved. Stripped of any future they might have drawn themselves, the perfect slaves could be thought of as masterpieces of their owners. Racialized labor relations operating within the plantation economy were institutionalized before the acquisition of the captives. Hence, once apprehended, the victims’ fate was sealed, even before they were introduced to their physical prison. Captives—legally or potentially slaves—were assimilated into actual and functional communities of enslaved people under the

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assumption that the necessary process of production could not fail to be successful. Newly captured and newly arrived captives, captives in rebellion, runaways or deserters, as well as maroons fighting for their freedom, were all lumped into the slave category as defined by the masters. But in an expanding plantation economy, the ever-increasing need for labor required an expanding supply of captives to be groomed into slaves. The multiplication of the potential labor force and its conversion into a usable one made it more and more imperative to eliminate any behavior and any actor that delayed the standardization of the slave workforce, that is, their transformation into robots devoid of self-purpose and free will. A vicious circle of violence created the ideal slaves as automatons, sometimes specialized, but above all subservient in the most remote corners of their souls. A slave—as distinct from the enslaved—could only be emancipated. Emancipation resulted in release, and it should be distinguished from the achievement of freedom. The character with which Europe attempted to replace the “sons of Ham” was a cursed zombie freed from his or her chains, but still a zombie.¹¹ The captives, specific in their origins and their memories, were supposed to vanish behind their slave masks. As bossales, they were the negation of the stylish, Occidentalized servants and should be destroyed. In this context, formulas for agricultural endeavors that differed from the plantation system were anathema. Challenges to the total enrolment of free or enslaved labor forces would provoke brutal responses. Genocide and threats of genocide towards would-be maroons were used to create optimum conditions for the incorporation of newly imported captives. The extermination of Saint-Domingue insurgents was never completed, while the purge of Guadeloupian rebels in 1802 was carried out with sufficient success to break the resistance of the recalcitrant. However, from 1789 onward France had to overcome dangers more imminent than those emanating from its colonial prisoners. Its very property rights over the territory were being challenged. Unable to defend its possessions with the sole use of its armies, it negotiated an arrangement with the embattled captives, offering them partial liberation within the plantation compound in exchange for their support. With this move, France acknowledged the captives’ differences and the power ensuing therefrom. In 1793, its inability to measure up to the conjugated forces of the British and the Spanish—and not a transformation of the economic system—demanded the abolition of slavery. The panic of a sinking empire clinging to the slightest opportunity for salvation put in danger the bona fide investments of the planter class. Slaves and planters were therefore both deprived of self-reliant futures. The plantation compound and plantation society could disappear either as

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a result of a revolution propelled by the enslaved, as in the case of SaintDomingue, or as a consequence of changes in the colonial empire. In the British case, planters became victims of the productive forces propelling the metropolitan country towards industrial development and free trade. At this stage of the global system’s development, the hens laying golden eggs in the Caribbean were reduced to surviving through grants and preferential treatments, going so far as to beg for the destruction of the free trade fetish and for privileged protection against the vagaries of global competition.¹² At the dawn of liberal capitalism, the Caribbean planters took refuge in a form of self rule that allowed for the preservation of their outdated modes of production and the intensification of the exploitation of formerly enslaved and indentured laborers. This evolution is well documented in Barbados and also has been observed in Martinique and Guadeloupe.¹³ In Saint-Domingue, it took the shape of the type of autonomy sought by the richest planters and Toussaint Louverture, while in Haiti, the oligarchs thought they were free to impose Louverture’s caporalisme agraire.¹⁴ With or without slavery, plantation society was a cul-de sac. By ending the slave trade, the United Kingdom forced the world economy to grow out of mercantilist capitalism, to destroy the triangular trade, to abolish slavery, and to endorse liberal capitalism, while still safeguarding the inequities generated during the era of primitive accumulation of capital.

The Reverse of the Plantation Compound The transition from freedom to mercantile slavery exceeded the imaginations of villagers abducted by slave traders. In order to preserve or to recover their sanity, the kidnapped villagers embarked on a process of reeducation which led them to gradually recuperate their personalities and to shield themselves from abuse and harassment by the plantation system. They avoided collapsing mentally and physically in the corset imposed by Europe by discerning among the demands of their jailers those that were not negotiable from those with which it was possible to accommodate. To improve their chances of survival, this collection of newly transported individuals had to discover and deconstruct the logic of their new milieu and to slowly elaborate a coherent set of references for reversing it. Once the critical role of torture in their socialization was acknowledged, they had to realize that it was in their compelling interest to capture and control the elements of the dominant culture that were essential to their survival. The training sponsored by the master was welcomed in relation to this need to be tutored. The planter chose from his cultural framework a set of references with which to inculcate his slaves to ensure that they behaved as useful slaves. For

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the slaves’ part, on the basis of their background knowledge and experiences shared with their peers, they selected from within the dominant culture the traits and norms essential for their survival as they conceived it. The hostages began this journey in deep solitude, since the arbitrariness of their abduction and exploitation had no logic they could understand or share spontaneously. Their fate derived from a series of myths and justifications of racism that could only be perceived as utterly stupid. They built a new reservoir of criteria out of daily practices assessed from the point of view of their peculiar cultural heritages. The introduction of captives on the compound did not happen all at once, and various degrees of acculturation separated successive arrivals of prisoners, complicating the consensus-building process. Everyday life became a breeding ground where prisoners cultivated and harmonized proposals relating to their ways of conceptualizing the plantation compound and of interfacing with each other within it. Conviviality in the work gangs and conflicts between diverse ethnic groups became a laboratory where the captives discovered the principles and rules of solidarity in their opposition to the system and their pursuit of freedom. These interpersonal relations, aimed at managing both exchanges with dominant institutions and with peer groups, gave rise to what was later called family education, an education received from elders and necessarily distinct from instructions handed down by public authorities. Through peer-group education, the person of the captives eluded the planters’ and the state’s hold. There evolved a form of self-reliance, a condensed version of a heritage in constant renewal, whose goal was to salvage their lives, to protect and to conserve their persons. Thomas Madiou referred to this elusive and impregnable person when he wondered, with appropriateness, “the African even though slave, did s/he entirely cease to be free?”¹⁵ These strangers had to combine their familiarity with the rules governing plantation society with the development of a parallel set of knowledge that enabled them to protect themselves in the face of the abusive extraction of their labor potential. With minimal resources, they restructured their individuality even as they failed to discover a meaning and a rationale for the dominant system. Their body of knowledge became the backbone of the world they built, in order to delay or possibly prevent their absorption by the plantation society. Their own system of knowledge/empowerment gradually replaced the captives’ initial ignorance of the rules of the host society.¹⁶ Their comprehension of the new environment grew alongside deepening solidarity with their companions in misfortune. By so assimilating, they managed to master a place for themselves within the plantation compound and to reframe the ab-

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solute mess that served as their welcome, endowing them with the primary tools—language for instance—of a counter-plantation order. By surrounding themselves with “superstitions,” the Africans made clear that the otherness, of which they were aware, and the foundations of their human dignity were not negotiable. They expressed without wavering their refusal to accept the proposals of the colonial state as God’s truth and to bury themselves in the unexplainable dogmas conveyed by the dominant institutions. They lived by values they gave themselves, through processes defined in their traditions and endorsed by their peers. Key to appreciating their social exchanges during this period is not the content of the wanga—of the fetish (and its virtues)—but the simple fact that wanga were brandished as valid or at least plausible solutions. Separate autonomies were being managed within the standards and principles of the plantation compound and were the prelude to a collective and sovereign will imposing itself even in tiny and surreptitious spaces. As a result, in reconditioning themselves in order to destabilize enslavement, the captives enriched the knowledge inherited from their ethnic group by assessing the order of the plantation compound. They designed survival strategies adapted to their new circumstances, and in negotiating their implementation they discovered and recognized fellow sufferers of the concentration camp in which they were confined. At the same time, they codified the markers separating their set of colonized people from the jailers who ran the institution. In this way, networks of people evolved, sharing similar living conditions and behaviors consistent with the experiences to which they were subjected. The dividing lines separating the ethnic groups comprising the oppressed classes were steadily blurred. By integrating themselves into plantation society, the captives reorganized their universe, invented an unprecedented one that both included and outdistanced the African environment from whence they came, and acknowledged the mean-spirited landscape in which the master wanted to enclose them. By so doing, without ever truly leaving the compound, they sidestepped the plantation society, dodging its negative effects. The milieus built by the captives and the standpoints from which they evolved were invisible to their masters. These worlds comprised ideas, meanings, beliefs, patterns of social relations, memories, even beings, totally unknown to these masters. With this unsuspected arsenal, captives strove to reinvent their present by systematically activating the absences produced and reproduced deliberately by the plantation compound. They expanded their actual day-to-day living by exploiting all its avenues, and within this new dimension they learned how to move beyond the dominant system.¹⁷

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Given the diagnostic of savagery issued by their arrogance and obsession with control and exploitation, the masters ignored the emergence of this multifaceted world of experience and knowledge. The swarm of experiments which led the newly arrived to join forces and the logic of the answers they gave to the claims of the plantation system—their education—evaded the field of vision of public and private authorities. The system did not acknowledge its class enemy and remained without answers to its methods of fighting. Unlike the oligarchy’s reservoir of ideas nurtured by its French motherculture, the synchronization of the captives’ defiant behavior relied on some sort of self-management through which the oppressed community shared its experiences and its gradual mastery of the social environment. While the oligarchs could function without an appraisal of the abilities of their captives— by compensating for deficient information with an imposition of the dominant culture—their prisoners could only defend themselves by managing a set of ideas universally shared by their community. In their dejected situation, innovative thoughts could not evade daily empirical verification of their appropriateness. The mastery of the standards and regulations governing plantation society, and of the broader project of Western imperial mercantilism, was only one part of life for captives in the New World. Below the surface, the experience of the oppressed led to the invention of a counter-plantation society: a new narrative fabricated with an appreciation of the contributions made by all actors, without exception, through daily life. When the opportunity arose, the amalgamation of these unexpected forms of social life and solidarity would develop into a revolutionary movement, encompassing practices of larger scope challenging the established order. The historical process suggests that the sedimentation of these practices actually transformed the military victory of 1804 into a broader process of social change, converting Saint-Domingue from an exploitation colony into a settlement colony for former captives. This qualitatively new milieu could not have been foreseen or extrapolated from knowledge accessible to planters and colonial officials.¹⁸ For the planter, the unexpected and unthinkable took hold of reality. It renovated day-to-day living and engendered a new social structure in which its architects could flourish. In the new world that encompassed Haiti after 1804, the original ethnic cultures, transformed both by their confrontations with concrete experiences of plantation society and by ten years of wars of independence, merged into a single oppressed culture common to the insurgent agricultural workers, which offered them the embryo of norms and principles necessary to carry

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out their lives in independent Haiti. From that day forward, the women of the country could raise their children undisturbed, and the population did not have to be recruited on the slave market. The living conditions were modest indeed, but the slave trade and the repugnance it caused became only unpleasant memories, buried in the deepest dungeon of collective memory. These captives joined in solidarity with their companions in misfortune and revived the universe that the colonial state had tried to reduce to silence and annihilate. Gradually, the hostages built their own space in the Americas. In the very boat transporting them, in the slave gangs of the plantation, in the community of captives on same compound, in the lakou (collection of individual farms and extended family groups) of maroon villages, their desire to live fully turned sovereign a community of peers.¹⁹ There evolved new identities, creating new reasons to appreciate oneself, and in the same movement arose new instruments of defense against the abductors. People of like condition, of the same social class, eventually became people of similar birth, that is, of the same nation. The making of the Haitian nation cannot be distinguished from the Haitian Revolution. They produced each other reciprocally. The oppressed class and the emerging nation came into being at the end of the same process. The nation evolved in opposition to the colonial state. It resulted from the conversion of a set of isolated individuals into an organic totality, comprising networks of cohesive groups crucial to the existence and survival of the individuals within them. A culture, the elaboration of the experiences of the oppressed, and the invention of new institutions ranging from groups of peers and families to the lakou and village communities were all structured in response to the misdeeds of the colonial state and of its successors. The nation was an expression of its sovereignty in all areas of social life; it was the sovereign people. For the colonial administration, Saint-Domingue was monolithic, made of networks of slave plantations operating in compliance with the racialization of human relations. But in the interstices of the social fabric that this administration strove to stitch together under the guidance of the metropolitan seaports, the persons living in captivity patiently developed institutions that challenged the external order and allowed for the expression of their awareness of the coloniality in which they were submerged. While the slaves’ master legally owned their bodies, their time and their space, in order to make them useful she/he still had to conquer, to invade, to occupy them and to inculcate in their minds colonial ideas and values. She or he could only make inroads in these areas during periods of peace. And Saint-Domingue had no peace from 1789 onward. The owners of this set of isolated individuals, then, assisted helplessly in the advent of a new nation.

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The only alternative left to them in order to reactivate the plantation system was to exterminate the emerging cohesive grouping. National sovereignty springs from empowerment-oriented knowledge and not from learning colonial regulations. The sovereignty of a state does not fall on it like manna from heaven. It is experienced by its citizens in their daily lives as an internal sovereignty, and hence it translates into political institutions equipped to establish, to negotiate, and to defend its external sovereignty.

Of Freedom and Sovereignty The ideas of secession evolved among the planters of Saint-Domingue when the loss of their slaves became imminent. The encroachment by French revolutionary legislators on the right to own slaves cannot be compared to their parallel seizure of wealth owned by the clergy and the nobility. The slaves represented labor as it operated in the colonies. This strategic position granted them political leverage that the nobility and the clergy lacked. The state could not involve them in its political conflicts without foreseeing a new relation between capital and labor. By applying the progress of their philosophy to their slave colonies, lawmakers highlighted both the sovereignty of the imperial state and the total dependence on slave labor that structured the ventures it sponsored overseas. Their inopportune intrusion in the colonial economic structure added to the severity of the crisis created by the assault on the Bastille. Colonial France declared the abolition of slavery before forbidding the participation of its nationals in the slave trade. The causes and consequences of this measure are not comparable with those surrounding the British abolition. As would seem logical, the British put an end to the slave trade and then abolished slavery. A general emancipation unmindful of economic structural changes and of slave traders’ rights to import “cultivators” was unlikely to convince the victims of the trade to modify their behavior. As for the emancipated blacks and mulâtres of Saint-Domingue, their participation in the struggle conducive to the establishment of the republic was rooted in a quest for the recognition of rights granted in 1793 that superseded the Code noir, which was enacted at the height of the development of slaverybased capitalism. These protesters demanded vehemently the devolution of privileges rooted in a regime the 1789 Revolution was precisely poised to destroy. It is therefore not surprising that at a time when France raised the banner of popular sovereignty and was fighting to secure its primacy over any other source of political power, in the colonies intermediate groups, who shared

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the same mercantilist worldview as the grands planteurs, brandished the sovereignty of the state—and not that of the people—as their political objective. Since the time of pirates and privateers, it had been common to understand sovereignty as being the hold of a state over a territory, its dominion over the local population being taken for granted. From 1789 onwards, with the eruption of popular sovereignty in the political structure, this traditional aspect became secondary in designing institutionalized power. But it is precisely what the colonial authorities and the oligarchy brandished as their contribution to republicanism. Unlike the metropolitan bourgeoisie, the Saint-Domingue oligarchy and colonial authorities did not oppose themselves to the nobility by endorsing the claims of the popular classes. In their journey, the grievances of the masses—les Misérables and sans-culottes of the colony—recovered some legitimacy only belatedly and all too opportunistically. They did not offer a portion of their assets to achieve popular sovereignty, but to defend republicanism and imperial France. Moreover, rather than holding back in the face of the antirepublican rise of Bonaparte and of the lobby of royalist planters, they enlisted in the expeditionary army to pursue their policy. Their “national” identity spared them the need to choose between the Consulate and the Republic. The persons emancipated before Sonthonax’s 1793 proclamation endorsed the demand for abolition of slavery only after the civil commissioners were obliged to resort to this measure in order to prevent the surrender of the colony to its enemies. Thomas Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin attest to their opposition to full equality with the persons emancipated after the 1793 proclamation.²⁰ “The people had been a wild bull that ended up knocking down his master,” Madiou argued. “[T]he point was to civilize it and to make it sociable.”²¹ The French and the Haitian revolutions did not belong to the same family of events, and to conceive of the first one as the inspiration to the second one does not do justice to the latter’s contribution to the history of mankind, namely to the enthronement of popular sovereignty in worldwide political structure. The state in Haiti has not yet reached this stage of republican development, since it has not yet recovered from the fall inflicted upon it by the wild bull: “Few men, even from the elite,” Madiou continued, “felt deeply the principles of 1789, which however had produced freedom and independence, because the traditions of the Ancien Régime had hardly affected their way of living.”²² Similarly, Ardouin argued: In the meantime, they [Dessalines and Pétion] resolved to continue to fight the chiefs of the maroon insurgents who, by the contention of their

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priority in the fight, would be a serious embarrassment for the realization of these projects [of independence]. Indeed, it will be seen that it had been necessary to submit them by force or get rid of some of them, because each of them somehow represented an African tribe, and would only think of organizing the insurgency according to this barbaric manner.²³ It follows that the basic policy of the besieged republican colony was not oriented toward promoting the well-being of the people or of the general population, but toward rescuing the sovereignty of the state as defined at the peak of modern mercantilism. The victorious oligarchs of 1804 acknowledged the right of conquest of France and they endorsed its civilizing mission. The first declaration of independence, made “[o]n behalf of the Black and Colored people of Saint-Domingue” (November 29, 1803), was the first political statement of the Eurocentric oligarchs of Haiti. The grudge of the captives targeted the Code noir itself and the causes of their captivity and their enslavement. For the white planters and the emancipated, republican progress relating to human rights could lead to a kind of limited freedom for former slaves comparable to house arrest and conducive to some form of perpetual salaried work. The prerogatives of the right of conquest, of the sovereignty of the state, could override those of private ownership, a favor granted by the king (read, the state), original owner of the territory on which he authorized the use of slaves. In contrast, almost the entire population of Saint-Domingue was captive. Captivity and enslavement formed an inseparable whole. General freedom, seen as a metropolitan grace, equaled general liberation, safeguarding the political primacy of the conquistador, that is, his/her right to use and abuse his/her property, including slaves. This gratuitous, voluntary act of emancipation could be repealed when it so desired, as the inhabitants of the French Antilles were not allowed to forget. The 1793 general emancipation, examined more closely, should be conceived as a sum of individual emancipations, in spite of its pompous preamble: “Human beings are born and remain free and equal in their rights.” If it were not so, it would not be compatible with house arrest. There could not be a “sovereign people” or an assembly of citizens in the colony, irrespective of the letter of a law, that could not encroach on state rights, that is, on la raison d’état. Within the restraints of the right of conquest they acquired on November 19, 1803, oligarchs could endorse the abolition of slavery and retain the captivity of the labor force as essential to “national” economy. In the minds of the oligarchs, the lifelong engagement of indentured servants could con-

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tinue the agrarian authoritarianism of Toussaint Louverture, and the “newly freed” persons could imprison themselves thanks to a “contract” they had to sign but could not negotiate.²⁴ Political power in the slave plantation amounted to total control of the working population by the conqueror. If such power managed to transform captivity into an unavoidable existence, emancipation became a substitute for freedom, obscuring the role played by the state in the liberation process. Freedom as a favor of the sovereign was deprived of its character as a natural right. Captives and former captives defined themselves, though, according to another framework based on the world from which they were removed and that they stubbornly insisted on re-creating. The self-imposed goal of the conqueror was to turn captivity into a normal way of life for the subordinate and to embed his or her freedom in this jail. Vastey identified this subterfuge at the very beginning of the country’s independent life.²⁵ But irrespective of the idea the sovereign had of his omnipotence, as soon as he had to brandish his right of conquest or la raison d’état to justify his behavior, he acknowledged that beyond the borders of his omnipotence, another power (i.e., another sovereignty), defied him and that his primary task was to prevent this alternative force from expressing itself through the political ladder. As long as the captives did not accept their enslavement as normal, they upheld the right to decide for themselves what was of their concern. They could thus rely on their own wills and make use of their individual sovereignty. By so doing, they consolidated their autonomy in the slave gangs within specific groups of accomplices, captive like themselves, and advanced towards the sovereignty of a whole community. By maintaining their independent memory as free and autonomous human beings, they issued a widespread demand on behalf of the whole population. This is suggested by Madiou, who juxtaposed the “vaudoux” beliefs and the construction of a national outlook at the very beginning of the struggle: During the wars of freedom from 1791 to 1794, the vaudoux had greatly contributed to the success of the insurgent slave, exciting their fanaticism to the highest degree. . . . The masses being black and enjoying all the civil and political rights, were gaining ground on all sides, and with them their manners that were in fact Guinean, were strengthening their roots. Half-breeds, who formed a tenth of the population more or less, were in large number almost identical to the Blacks in respect to their manners, to their habits and their aspirations.²⁶

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Conclusion In their seminal article on “Rosalie from the Poulard nation,” Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard tell us how Rosalie’s husband, Michel Vincent, a white man from the town of Abricots, having to flee to Santiago de Cuba before the arrival of the Armée Indigène in 1803, declared her his slave in order to facilitate the crossing of his family and to protect it from the conflict.²⁷ These historians show us that Rosalie was not simply a captive of a Saint-Domingue colonist or even of the French state. They establish clearly that she owed her chains to the entire Western world and that her personal freedom, regardless of the cost she had to pay for it, remained a favor of “the White public.”²⁸ The colonial plantation compound seeded new categories in the real world. It invented freed persons and modern-day slaves, “whites” and “blacks.” It accomplished the feat of transforming a plural world working without these categories into a binomial one that merged freedom and whiteness and opposed them to slavery and blackness. In the process, it converted the freedman into a second-class person and the mulâtre into a first-class black. The integration of the strangers, the black slaves, into the colonial society is usually studied as an inevitable process of creolization. But it is useful to note, in reading Vastey’s Le système colonial dévoilé, the repugnance and the disgust with which the aliens being kept in captivity became accustomed to during their enslavement.²⁹ And it is comforting to remember that, accompanying their descent into hell, there was also the codification of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos identifies as a new kind of knowledge-empowerment. When we put these together, we can see how painful and how bitter it must have been to realize that there was no future in living helplessly in infinite disgrace and in adjusting to disrespect. Through this burial into enforced destitution emerged a non-negotiable will to extricate oneself from calamity, which explains “live free or die” (swa nou viv lib, swa nou mouri), as translated pointedly by Jacques Pierre—as well as the inescapable dilemma of having to create this life beyond the inadequate means available.³⁰ The naked destitution of the incoming individuals was a product of the slave trade and its sponsors. In Saint-Domingue, this intensive commerce delivered a few years before general insurrection a mass of aliens whose process of creolization could not be completed. Hence, in 1804 a culturally fragmented population became autonomous and responsible for its destiny. Contrary to the Eurocentric segment of the population, these individuals endowed themselves with a voice of their own. Facing a Western world extending and consolidating its global vision, Haiti and the divided Haitians stood, in their singularity, hopelessly vulnerable. Their only shelter in the hostile world surrounding them, their only

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place of rational accountability and of forecasting the future, remained the peer community they had built outside a dependent, dominant, and, from their point of view, totally uncontrollable system. While the 1789 Revolution imposed the sovereignty of the French people in opposition to the divine right of kingship, the wars of Haitian independence were not the exploits of a preexisting people, but rather the invention of this people as an expression of their sovereignty. Its existence and its sovereignty generated each other reciprocally. And the Haitian, as an individual, defined her- or himself in this totality. Outside of it, she or he is a prisoner of the definition of colonial worker, the Nègre, or the black in the sense that modernity affixed to this term, that is, the servant, the stranger, the exception, at best. The proclamation of the independence of Haiti would have been a watershed if it were a statement made by a preexisting nation. In that case, the break with the colonial empire would have become the moment of the creation of a national state: independence and sovereignty of the nation-state would have been one and the same. But since the course of the events proved different, it is necessary to be careful not to exult 1804 to the detriment of the sovereign people and civil society. Looking for this sovereignty, I revisited the colonial plantation compound and showed its operational difficulties within the historical circumstances at the end of the eighteenth century. Important areas of autonomy remained available to the captives, and they only expanded as the metropolitan country tried to solve its uncontrollable emergencies. The instrumentation of these areas of autonomy strengthened the presence of the captives in the colony and accelerated their mutation into a single ethnic group anxious to express its will to live freely. To conceive of the Haitian Revolution as the result of the union between blacks and mulâtres is to subordinate it to the categories invented by the modern Western world to justify its rights to conquer and to enslave the “sons of Ham.” It is hardly better to conceive of 1804 as the first successful slave revolution. Revolutionary “slaves” proved that they did not define themselves as such. To initiate reflection in this manner is to search for this revolution outside its own premises and to inject a new lease on life to the beliefs of those who insisted in dealing in slaves and who tried desperately to recover them through armed conflicts. The truth is that France was defeated and driven out of the colony only in appearance. Eurocentric Haitians stayed there. And to establish their supremacy, they strove and have continued to strive to cancel the most important contribution of the French Revolution to the history of humanity, namely the advent of the sovereign people in the political structure.

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Several intellectuals contemporary of these events (from Abbé Grégoire in France to Vastey in the Haitian universe) were able to depart from the ideas relating to the gap between European civilization and African “savagery” and to recognize the difference between the results obtained by structured communities and the rights and virtues of the individuals who compose them. The revolution of 1804, defined as the advent of an independent state, chose to violate those rights in its laws, even in its constitutional texts, but most blatantly in its agricultural regulations. I have tried to establish that to speak of the independence of Haiti without paying attention to popular sovereignty is to delude oneself.

Notes 1. Pompée Valentin Vastey, Le système colonial dévoilé (Cap Henry: Chez Roux, 1814); Jean Fouchard, Les marrons de la liberté (Paris: Éditions de l’École, 1972). 2. Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie de l’esclavage (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Quadrige, 1986). 3. Julien Raimond, Réponse aux considérations de M. Moreau, dit Saint-Méry, député à l’assemblée nationale, sur les colonies (Paris: Imprimerie du Patriote Français, 1791), 2. 4. Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990). 5. Pompée Valentin Vastey, Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayiti, faisant suite aux réflexions sur quelques ouvrages et journaux français concernant Hayiti (Sans-Souci: Imprimerie Royale, 1819), 307. 6. Alain-Philippe Blérald, La question nationale en Guadeloupe et en Martinique, essai sur l’histoire politique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988). 7. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some Other Applications to Social Philosophy, 5th ed. (London: Parker, Son and Bourn, 1862), 2:243. 8. Code noir, art. 28. 9. Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux Antilles françaises (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Fort-de France: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974), 369. 10. Pompée Valentin Vastey, Réflexions sur une lettre de MAZÈRES, ex-colon français, adressée à M. J.C.L. Sismonde de Sismondi, sur les noirs et les blancs, la civilisation de l’afrique, le royaume d’Hayti; etc. (Cap Henry: Chez P. Roux, Imprimeur du Roi, 1816). 11. Vastey, Réflexions sur une lettre. 12. Jean Casimir, La Caraïbe, une et divisible (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps/ Commission économique pour l’Amérique latine et la Caraïbe [CEPALC], 1991), 213. 13. Hilary Beckles, Black Rebellion in Barbados: The Struggle against Slavery, 1627– 1838 (Barbados: Antilles Publications, 1984); Blérard, La question nationale.

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14. Français Blancpain, La condition des paysans haïtiens, du Code noir aux Codes ruraux (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2003), 38. 15. Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Jh. Courtois, 1847), 1:v. 16. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Una epistemología del sur (México: Siglo XXI y CLACSO, 2009). 17. Sousa Santos, Una epistemología. 18. Jean Casimir, Haïti et ses élites, l’interminable dialogue de sourds (Port-au-Prince: Éditions de l’Université d’État d’Haïti, 2009), 30. 19. Mimerose O. Beaubrun, Nan dòmi, le récit d’une initiation vodou (La Roque d’Anthéron: Vents d’ailleurs, 2010). 20. Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti (Paris: Dézobry et Magdeleine, 1853), 5:275. 21. Madiou, Histoire, 7:111. 22. Ibid., 5:103. 23. Ardouin, Études, 5:261. 24. Casimir, La Caraïbe, 47. 25. Vastey, Réflexions sur une lettre, 74. 26. Madiou, Histoire, 5:107. 27. Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard, “Servitude, liberté et citoyenneté dans le monde atlantique des XVIII et XIXe siècles: Rosalie de nation Poulard,” Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire et de Géographie No. 234 (July–September 2008): 1–52. 28. Vastey, Réflexions sur une lettre, 74. 29. Vastey, Le système colonial dévoilé. 30. Jacques Pierre, “L’acte d’indépendance d’Haïti en créole haïtien,” Journal of Haitian Studies 17, no. 2 (2011): 169.

Thinking Haitian Independence in Haitian Vodou LAURENT DUBOIS

What did Haitian independence mean for the nation’s population in 1804 and in the next decades? How did this population—made up of a majority of ex-slaves and a majority of African-born individuals—interpret its meaning, and its possibilities, as they built communities, networks, and economic structures on the ashes of the plantation system? These are, of course, quite difficult questions to answer. And there is a basic ambiguity about the proclamation of Haitian independence that highlights why. The proclamation was issued in French, in a form ostensibly directed at the Haitian population. It can be read, in fact, as a long letter from Jean-Jacques Dessalines to his people. And yet there is strong evidence that it was largely intended more for outside ears and eyes than for those inside the country. Dessalines, it could be said, was very much hoping that outsiders would listen in to his conversation with the Haitian population. What we know about its dissemination—including the pamphlet-sized format of the government-printed declaration that, thanks to Julia Gaffield, we now have access to, as well as the existence of a number of handwritten copies that seem to have been tailored for mailing or easy transport— suggests that there was a clear intention to make sure the document was read and circulated outside of Haiti. This, as Deborah Jenson argues, was indeed one of the primary preoccupations of the early Haitian leadership.¹ The document was, furthermore, written in French and to our knowledge never translated officially into Creole at the time, or indeed anytime until the late twentieth century.² That contrasts with the practices on the part of French commissioners in 1793, as well as those of Bonaparte’s 1802 mission, both of which took care to translate proclamations into Creole. The discovery of a large-format publication of the proclamation by Gaffield, however, does suggest that the early independence leaders did make an effort—as Léger-Félicité Sonthonax did in 1793—to make the declaration available in public spaces or perhaps to distribute it in the countryside.³ But Commis-

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sioner Sonthonax’s publications of various proclamations were published in Creole and in poster-sized formats, presumably so that literate members of communities could read them aloud to others in order to transmit the information within them. There was, in other words, a well-known precedent within Saint-Domingue for taking steps to make sure that official information was shared with the population in a way that took into consideration the linguistic contexts at work. Yet Dessalines and the early Haitian leaders do not seem to have availed themselves of these approaches. The question of why they did not is worth exploring and debating. The most cynical interpretation—and perhaps also, as is often the case, the best one—was suggested to me by Jean Casimir when we were teaching about this period in 2010. Sonthonax, General Leclerc, and others needed the allegiance of the black population if they were to survive. Dessalines and his leadership did not need them in the same way after independence, and the exclusionary linguistic gesture is just part of a larger set of exclusionary political gestures they took during this period. There are somewhat uncomfortable parallels in contemporary Haitian politics: as Jacques Pierre pointed out in an open letter to Michel Martelly after his election, he had spoken Creole constantly when he was campaigning and then, once he was elected, immediately switched to English and French.⁴ There is, however, another way to read this absence of Creole-language versions of the text. The political elite that created this document was fully bicultural, moving between French and Creole languages. Within Haiti itself, the transmission of the declaration likely took place the way such documents were often disseminated throughout the Americas and Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth: through manuscript copies. The recent acquisition of one such contemporary copy at Duke University gives us an important example of what such internal transmission probably looked like: it seems to have been written down by someone with a good knowledge of French but also recourse to Creole-inflected phonetic spellings of some words and names, probably transcribed based on a reading of the document rather than copied directly. In other words, while French officials like Étienne Polverel and Sonthonax sought recourse in the publication of Creole-language documents, the leaders of postindependence Haiti might have simply had confidence in and depended upon forms of circulation and transmission embedded within their country’s multilingual and textually layered space.⁵ The question of the role of text within Haiti is a complex one, discussed in interesting ways in the other essays of this volume. My focus in this essay, however, is on a slightly different though related question: how might we begin to reconstruct what independence did in fact mean to Haitians during

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the early nineteenth century? Just as the broad exclusion from writing on the part of slaves during the colonial and revolutionary periods creates broad challenges for those seeking to reconstruct the political ideologies of the enslaved, the structures of early nineteenth-century Haiti also create yawning silences in the historical record. In prior work, I have tried to develop some techniques for dealing with this type of problem—one common to many historical contexts—in the Caribbean during Age of Revolution.⁶ In some ways, early Haitian history presents even greater challenges. For the colonial and revolutionary period, the now well-established strategy of what Ranajit Guha described as “reading against the grain” of imperial sources offers many opportunities for historical work.⁷ The problem in this period is not a lack of documentation—far from it—but a rather simpler and even somewhat banal one of texts largely emanating from one side of the war. Even that is too much of a simplification, for during the colonial period there was plenty of internal conflict within the colonial administration, enough to produce court cases, reports, and various first-hand accounts that multiply our perspectives on slave society.⁸ And the Haitian Revolution itself created a new context that also produced a new archive, one in which insurgent voices, even if they remained much rarer than those produced from the other side, nevertheless multiplied. There is still much research to be done in the massive archives generated by these revolutionary transformations. With Haitian independence came a kind of consolidation of a certain type of insurgent voice into the official language of the new state. As Deborah Jenson has explored so richly, Dessalines and other early leaders created a powerful, epochal, at times messianic language that articulated Haiti’s mission to the broader world.⁹ The Declaration of Independence was part of this corpus, which also included the works of Baron de Vastey and others in subsequent decades. That corpus of course in many ways did seek to represent and channel the broader aspirations of the Haitian population. But it also took place in the context of the consolidation of a broadly militarized and authoritarian set of power structures engaged in an intense internal conflict with many within the country over the meaning of freedom and the particular social, political, and economic forms it should take. This conflict was, in the broadest terms, structured by an opposition between two models for how to consolidate independence. One of these, pursued consistently though not exclusively by state leadership, saw the maintenance of the plantation as essentially the best—and perhaps only—solution. The other, constructed around what Jean Casimir has called the “counter-plantation” system, focused on the construction of an autonomous cultural and economic space on the basis of smallscale farming (for a mix of internal consumption and export) often established through the lakou system, which organized individual ownership of

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land within larger family compounds that were then integrated into a rich network of internal markets.¹⁰ The archive of the Haitian state and its plantation model, while itself at times fragmented and scattered, is relatively accessible and is garnering increasing attention by historians. It includes proclamations and extensive legal codes (such as the Code Henry) supplemented by the writings of visitors and correspondents. The archive of the “counter-plantation” system, however, is much more hidden. We might think of it, metaphorically, as being a bit like the corpse of Sans-Souci Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously argued might be buried under the ruins of the Sans-Souci Palace.¹¹ It is present, of course, in long-term social and cultural institutions that continue to shape life in the Haitian countryside. It makes its way into the other archives—whether through bits and pieces we can glean from travelers’ accounts or in the traces it left in Haitian legal codes in their complex engagement with forms of land use, land tenure, and labor. But it is also present in another corpus: that of the massive archive of Vodou songs that makes up the largest body of Creolelanguage material in Haiti. It is to that corpus that I turn in the rest of this essay. The songs of Haitian Vodou number in the tens of thousands and combine long-transmitted texts with frequent transformation and invention. They are sung in ritual contexts but also have, over the centuries, become part of a number of other Haitian musical traditions—notably the “trabadour” music played mostly in rural areas and sometimes at Vodou ceremonies themselves. Among other things, they can be considered probably the largest corpus of Creole-language literature in existence. Recent collections and studies of song have brought increasing attention to the importance of this group of texts.¹² And in their work on Vodou, scholars Colin (Joan) Dayan, Karen McCarthy Brown, and Karen Richman have all offered examples of how such songs both condense historical experience and allow for the articulation of current social and political conflicts.¹³ As texts about history these songs are, of course, to be approached with caution. They should not be approached only, or even chiefly, as historical relics or artifacts and in fact are probably more usefully thought of as a kind of history-writing, though constituted through elliptical and spiritual references. Reading them in this way, however, also requires thinking differently about what we consider as theorization or historicity. In doing so we can build on the classic work of Richard Price, and more recently of Kenneth Bilby, who have made clear the potential for the use of oral history and musical texts as sources for Caribbean history.¹⁴ Africanist scholars—most famously Jan Vansina—have long grappled with the question of how to use sources of oral history, as well as musical

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repertoires, in the writing of history. In an essay about “court songs” in PortoNovo and Abomey, Gilbert Rouget grapples with the question of whether these texts can be considered “historical.” But he falls back on a rather limited definition of what historical discourse might entail. Some songs, he notes, “are not of the historical kind, but of the religious kind,” as if these two modes of reflection and representation are antithetical. He explains that many songs recount stories of the past in a “particular style” that is “deliberatively allusive, even hermetic,” again suggesting that this somehow removes them from the realm of historical reflection. Yet one might well describe many works of history—academic, literary, sung, or spoken—as “allusive” texts, “mainly using images and proverbs, often referring to historical data, and sometimes having an anecdotal content.” In the end, Rouget perhaps unwittingly invites us to precisely the kind of reflection I think is necessary. “Songs, chants, psalmodies, and historical recitations indeed provide the historian of Dahomey with many useful pieces of information,” he notes. “One is tempted to say, however, that in the actual state of things they create more problems than they solve.” If the “actual state of things,” however, is one in which we are still struggling to find ways to write Haiti’s history from the perspective of its majority, then these songs perhaps provide precisely the kinds of productive problems that may hold the key to new theorizing.¹⁵ Songs are, of course, embedded in institutions, in particular the houmfou, or temple, and lakou that carry out ceremonies and initiate members and therefore transmit the corpus of song. Vodou is highly decentralized, and religious practitioners work with a competitive and shifting landscape. A number of lakou around Gonaïves have laid claim to being the oldest in Haiti and present themselves as guardians of tradition. In a recent interview carried out by Duke University students Eric Barstow and Claire Payton, for instance, Dorsainville Estimé, the current head of Lakou Badjo, described the origins of the temple in the revolutionary era. The lakou was founded, he explained, in 1792 by a personaj, or “personality,” named Azo Badi. He was, Estimé explained, of the “first generation.” Founded during the “colonial epoch,” the lakou worked as a way to “go against” the colonists.¹⁶ In Estimé’s telling, the lakou played a critical role in the coming of Haitian independence. After Toussaint Louverture was imprisoned and deported, Jean-Jacques Dessalines came to meet with Azo Badi. Dessalines, Estimé explained, was a Nago, as was Badi. They came to an agreement, and from there, the lakou “accompanied Dessalines until he was able to win independence” for Haiti. Dessalines has the distinction, among the various figures involved in Haitian independence, of having himself become part of the pantheon of lwa (variously translated as either “saints” or “gods”) in Vodou. The Vodou pan-

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theon includes hundreds, even thousands, of different lwa who are largely grouped into various families. Those with the name Ogou are lwa related to war, and the military, and they take many different forms. Some are heroic and dignified, others dangerous and threatening. As such, as Karen McCarthy Brown has argued, Ogou’s various forms represent the dual nature of the country’s soldiers: forces of liberation, they can all too easily suppress the possibilities of the Haitian freedom they are meant to defend. So it is perhaps fitting that Dessalines has found a home in this family, where his many facets—hero and liberator, emperor and autocrat—are embodied in the music, dance, and possession of Vodou ritual. Indeed, he has literally become a lwa himself, in the form of Ogou Desalin.¹⁷ Dessalines is also linked in several songs to another lwa, Loko Atisou. As a lwa, Loko is in some ways less visible than figures like Ogou and Ezili, but is at the core of the religion. As Benjamin Hebblethwaite outlines it, he is associated with leaves, healing, and with the priesthood itself and serves in a number of different rites, including the Nago rite. Often attired in the clothes of a general, he is considered to have played an important role in the Haitian Revolution.¹⁸ One song collected by Milo Marcelin and published in 1950, calls: “Lanperè Desalin o! Kle ounfò a nan men nou.” (“Oh Emperor Dessalines! The temple keys are in your hands.”) And in another explored by Jacques Roumain in his study on the assotor drum, Loko Atisou is linked both to Makandal and with Dessalines, though interestingly he is named here “Jean Pierre Dessalines,” which as I explore below is perhaps an amalgam with another name brought up in several songs about the Haitian Revolution, that of Jean-Pierre Ibo. This song, like a number of others, celebrates the ongoing continuity and re-creation of the religion itself through ceremony—“Ye Voudounsi . . . lanfamni, ou kanni Vodoun.” (“Ye Vodou initiates . . . members of the family, you give birth to Vodoun.”) It describes how Makandal was warned, but “didn’t want to listen,” and as a result was captured and killed. Though the reference is elliptical, the turn to a mention of Dessalines may also be a reference to his own assassination. But the song also makes clear Dessalines still walks: “Nou rive, Jan Pyè Desalin, / nou rive, onon Loko Atisou.” (“We have arrived, Jean Pierre Dessalines, / we have arrived, in the name of Loko Atisou.”)¹⁹ In addition to the associations with Ogou and Loko, Dessalines is also linked to other lwa. One song to Agwe recounts the general’s military exploits: “Agwe Tawayo, Desalin o! / Desalin rete la, / Li tire kanon, se pou Agwe!” (“Agwe Tawayo, oh Dessalines! / Dessalines stays here, / He fires the cannon, it is for Agwe!”) The lwa Agwe Tawayo, also referenced in a song I discuss below, is an interesting case of African place-names being incorporated di-

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rectly into the ritual context, since the name can be roughly translated “Agwe in Oyo,” referring to an important African kingdom in the era of the slave trade.²⁰ One of the better-known Vodou songs relating to independence is one that was written down in 1901 and has been discussed by Colin Dayan. “Dessalines is coming to the north / Come see what he is bringing,” a Haitian Vodou song invites. “He is bringing a ouanga nouveau / he is bringing muskets, he is bringing bullets . . . He is bringing cannons to chase away the whites.” Like many Vodou songs, this one is somewhat elliptical, opening up a range of both emotional and interpretive possibilities. In Haitian Vodou, a ouanga—often translated, though not unproblematically, as “fetish”—is an object that condenses spiritual power. The song might be suggesting that Dessalines’s spiritual power resides in his weapons: in the muskets, bullets, and cannon that will free Haiti from the whites. Yet there is something more here too: the presence of a “new” ouanga in this song is particularly striking. The song hints that Dessalines might have invented a new kind of spiritual power: that the combination of guns and moral leadership has created a potent new weapon, the foundation for the creation of a new order.²¹ Interestingly, the Vodou song corpus is far from unanimous in its evocation of Dessalines, offering counter-narratives and critiques alongside celebrations. In the 1950s, anthropologist Odette Mennesson-Rigaud heard and transcribed a different version of this song, which is in papers now housed in the Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Pères du Saint-Esprit in Port-au-Prince. In it, Dessalines emerges in a very different position: not as a liberator of the country but as a threat to one particular group within it: the Ibo nation. “Dessalines came from France / carrying a ouanga nouveau,” it recalls. The line is striking—Dessalines from France?—but probably refers to the period during the Haitian Revolution when the founder fought, for a significant time, on the side of the French against other insurgents. What is the purpose of the ouanga in this song? “To kill Jean-Pierre Ibo.” As the song goes on, though, it presents Dessalines as the enemy not just of one man but an entire people: he has come “to kill the Ibo nation / to kill my mother’s nation / to kill my father’s nation.”²² One of the values of the Vodou song corpus is that it offers up figures, presented as actors during the Haitian Revolution, who are not present in other types of sources. The figure of Jean-Pierre Ibo appears in several songs. Perhaps this is a reference to a particular individual. But it may also serve as a kind of condensation, or amalgam, of a broader swath of the population at the time of the war of independence—the Ibo, or perhaps even more broadly the African-born. Jean-Pierre Ibo is not always presented as the enemy of Dessalines. Indeed, in one song that powerfully evokes the struggle for inde-

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pendence, they are presented as tight allies. Here is the version of this song presented by Max Beauvoir: Dousouman, Gangan o dousouman . . . Jan Pyè Ibo, Lamperè Desalin o . . . Péyi sa a pa pou blan Péyi sa pou nèg li ye, tande.²³ This can be translated Gently, oungan, o gently Jean-Pierre Ibo, Emperor Dessalines o This land is not for the whites This land is for the whites, you hear?” A slightly different version of the song was sung to me by Erol Josué, a musician and oungan with whom I have been collaboratively studying and writing about Vodou song for the past fifteen years.²⁴ He described it to me as a Kongo song from the Artibonite, and offered a slightly altered set of lines: “Péyi-a pa pou blan / Se péyi nèg ginen / An alé!” (“This land is not for the whites / It’s the land of the Africans / Let’s go!”) In his telling, the final charge of the song—which is accompanied by a literal charge on the part of the dancers when it is sung—is quite clear in its articulation of a demand for independence: “This land is not for the whites / It is the land of the blacks from Africa / Let’s go!” As Josué told me, the same song might be sung today directed at new groups of “invaders” seen as a threat to the community and the nation. The song is obviously a kind of historical amalgam, placing the “Emperor” Dessalines in the midst of the war of independence. More important, however, it seems to evoke a kind of alliance between “Jean-Pierre Ibo”—the very one who in another song Dessalines sought to kill—and Haiti’s founder in pursuit of a clear project of taking over the land. Another song collected by Mennesson-Rigaud in the 1950s offers, in condensed form, a narrative of Haiti’s independence, and of the roles of both Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines within it. Here is the song as transcribed by Mennesson-Rigaud, with my English translation.²⁵

Dessalines Toro d’Haïti Toussaint té mouri mal . . . ooo Li minm’ pas pé mouri mal. Dessalines Toro d’Haïti . . .

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Yacanbanda Moin sans manman Sans papa Yo finn’ touyé tout’ race là Yo pas touyé moin Toussaint té mouri mal . . . ooo Li minm pas pé mouri mal. Dessalines sé Toro d’Haïti Jour-là éh. Parol’la té palé déjà Dessalines Gangan Parol’la té palé déjà Toussaint died badly . . . ooo He wasn’t afraid to die badly. Dessalines is the Bull of Haiti Yacanbanda I’ve got no mother No father They tried to kill my whole race They didn’t kill me Toussaint died badly . . . ooo He wasn’t afraid to die badly. Dessalines is the Bull of Haiti That day This has been said before Dessalines is an oungan This has been said before This might be the best, or at least most powerful, brief history of the final phase of the Haitian Revolution available. It begins by evoking the death of Louverture, dying “badly” but unafraid. And then, in the next line, condenses the historical role played by Dessalines in taking over the struggle, becoming the “Bull of Haiti.” Yet the mention is also shadowed by a dark future: for if they are powerful, bulls are also the great sacrificial offerings made to Ogou in Haitian Vodou. Calling Dessalines a “bull” is also perhaps a way of reminding those who sing and hear this song that ultimately he was sacrificed, quite literally chopped down and into pieces, not long after independence. After vocalizing a bit of langaj—terms whose meaning is often hidden and elliptical, presented as bits of African tongues—with the word “Yacanbanda,” the song then turns into a more individual account. Being mother-

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less and fatherless was, of course, a good description of the condition of the African-born slaves who were everywhere in independent Haiti. Though in this case the loss might also be linked to the war, which is summed up here in what is probably a reference to the brutal final phases of the Haitian War of Independence: “They tried to kill my whole race.” The singer, though, is a survivor, the one who has outlived both Louverture and Dessalines, who can recount their sacrifices. “This has been said before,” is a reminder that the song is an old one, the story is one that has been and will continue to be repeated. And, potently—especially when the song is sung by an oungan who therefore places himself in some way in a venerable lineage—the statement that Dessalines was an oungan, perhaps in some sense the original oungan, helps to deepen what it means for him to the “bull” of the country. Such songs, of course, powerfully evoke what was perhaps the most overriding experience of the period of independence: that of violent loss. The cataclysm of war, hunger, disease, and disruption clearly registered in Vodou, which also became a space through which to respond, process, and heal. The French observer Michel-Etienne Descourtilz, in fact, described an incident in 1803 in which worshippers carrying fruit, meat, fish, milk, and other food gathered around an ancient mapou tree in the Artibonite Plain. A call had gone out from the priests in the area: their “great god, who was fighting for their prosperity and their liberty” had been wounded in the war. He needed food and medicine to help him heal. And so men and women harvested, cooked, and brought what they could to the mapou tree, “happy to be able to do something for their divinity.” In 1949, a century and a half later, Mennesson-Rigaud recorded a song in a Vodou ceremony calling on a lwa named Danhi, who had been “wounded in the war.”²⁶ These traces of specific loss coexist in the Vodou corpus with broader reflections on the larger loss represented by exile from Africa. A number of songs resituate the history of Haiti’s struggle for independence within a larger historical and cultural epic. These are songs that begin not in Haiti but Africa and elliptically speak to the struggles of the slaves as part of a much broader creation of a new culture. Vodou songs include many kinds of references to Africa, both in the form of an ancestral Guinen to which the dead return and in the evocation of specific place names within West and Central Africa. One funerary song, for instance, calls: “M’ap ale Upemba!” (“I’m going to Upemba!”) There are many references more broadly to the “Congo” both as a place and a broader category of Africanness. In one particularly powerful song, for instance, a slave pleads across the Atlantic to the roua-yo—the kings—of the Congo: “Look at what they are doing to me!” These songs also at times take up the complex cultural and social interplay between creoles (born in the colony) and

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African-born. But, interestingly, in contrast to academic interpretations that sometimes reify this interplay into a set of relatively fixed and dichotomous social positions, these songs also offer them as more mutable and shifting categories. “I’m a Creole-Congo,” one song offers simply, and potently.²⁷ The following two songs, however, offer specific narratives that evoke the middle passage as a starting point to a larger story. The first of these was sung to me Erol Josué in February of 2011.²⁸

Depi m soti nan Ginen Depi m soti nan Ginen, moun y ape sonde mwen Se mwen-menm (w osin o) rasin o Depi m soti nan Ginen, moun y ape sonde mwen O se mwen-menm, o gwo wòch o! M soti an ba dlo, mwen vole “dans les airs” dan lèzè (an lè) Kou yo kwè yo pran mwen, m tounen lafimen o Jou yo konnen sa m sèvi, latè va tranble Jou yo konnen non vanyan mwen, loray va gwonde O se mwen-menm, o rasin o! Depi m soti nan ginen, moun y ape sonde mwen O se mwen-menm, O rasin o! M soti an ba dlo, mwen vole “dans les airs” dan lèzè (an lè) Kou yo kwè yo pran mwen, m tounen lafimen o Jou yo konnen non vanyan m, latè va tranble, ey Jou yo konnen sa m sèvi, loray va gwonde Se mwen-menm, O rasin o! M di se mwen-menm, o gwo wòch o. Since I left Africa, people have been testing me I am the root Since I left Africa, people have been testing me I am a great rock I came from under the water, I fly up into the sky When they thought they captured me, I turned to smoke When they find out who I serve, the earth will tremble When they learn my real name, the storm will thunder I am the root Since I left Africa, people have been testing me I am the root Since I left Africa, people have been testing me I am a great rock I came from under the water, I fly up into the sky

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When they thought they captured me, I turned to smoke When they find out who I serve, the earth will tremble When they learn my real name, the storm will thunder I am the root I am a great rock The song is powerful in part for its complex engagement with a longue durée history: “Since I left Africa” evokes a distant time in such a way as to make it recent, even personal, in scope. It also identifies this moment as the beginning of a set of trials and tests, all of which have been confronted in part because the “I” is at once a “root” and a “great rock.” The fact that this “I” comes from “under the water” taps into another web of symbols. In Haitian Vodou, the lwa live under water and are called on and out during ceremonies. But that layers onto another set of symbols: the Atlantic Ocean as a giant graveyard for those lost on the Middle Passage, as a site of ancestral death and memory. In this song, though, an origin in the depths of the water doesn’t preclude a soaring present, uncaptured. The song makes an elliptical reference—though one easily recognized in the Haitian context—to a historical figure, that of the rebel Makandal, who sowed terror among masters in the 1750s through the use of poison. According to contemporary accounts, when he was captured in 1798 and set to be burned at the stake in the main plaza of Cap Français in front of a crowd, he burst open the ropes tying him. The written archive tells that the plaza was then cleared, and Makandal was retied and burned to death. Yet it is another outcome that is more remembered: that Makandal, using an ability to transform into an insect, flew away to lurk and haunt Saint-Domingue from then on. The latter story, in a sense, captures the truth of the matter, since Makandal’s spectral presence had a profound political and social impact in the colony, both among slaves and masters.²⁹ In the song, Makandal’s story takes a slightly different form that also makes it into the story of everyone, of all those who, when masters sought to capture them, “turned to smoke” in one way or another. Finally, the song turns towards a powerful future: when “they” learn the “real name” and the truth of who the singer serves—that is, the lwa of Vodou—the earth will tremble. The song condenses history while also issuing a future prophesy, simultaneously sending those who sing the song backwards into the past and propelling them into a future of triumph and transformation. Something similar happens in another Vodou song that evokes the Middle Passage as a foundation for a long set of ongoing struggles. In this song, the experience of the passage itself, described in detail, becomes a metaphor for the creation of a new culture.³⁰

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Sou Lan Me Sou lan me a n’ap navige Agwet a woyo Gen yon tan ya we nou Sou lan me a n’ap navige Yo pran de pyé-nou Yo enchéné dè ponyet-nou Yo lagè’n anba kal Negriyé sou dlo Lanmè move Batimen krévé Li prèt pou’l koulé Negriyé sou dlo Na fon lanmè Li fè vwal dlo Li prèt pou’l koulé Anba kal batiman Nou tout se youn’n o Anba kal negriyé Sin kité’l koulé Peson p’ap sové Agwet a woyo Nou tout abo W’pa wè nou angagé Nou angagé papa, nou angagé Nou angagé Lasirèn, nou angagé [On the ocean we are sailing Agwe in Oyo There will come a time when they’ll see us On the ocean we are sailing They took our feet They chained our two wrists They dropped us in the bottom Slave ship under the water The ocean is bad

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The ship is broken It’s ready to sink Slave ship under the water At the bottom of the ocean It’s covered in water It’s ready to sink In the bottom of the ship We are all one In the bottom of the slave ship If it sinks No one will be saved Agwe in Oyo We’re all on board Don’t you see we’re trapped We’re trapped, papa, trapped We’re trapped Lasirèn, trapped] Sung in the present tense by an oungan or an assembly in a ceremony, the song places the group back on the slave ship itself. That historical experience becomes the place from which entreaties are issued to the lwa Agwe and Lasirèn. These two control the ocean, ocean crossings, and more broadly travel—in more recent decades they are often invoked by those embarking on the dangerous trip across the ocean to Miami or other parts of the Caribbean. In this song, though, Agwe is also given a specific home in Africa—Oyo. And the song is offered to him, as a plea of sorts, but also as a promise. For in the first verse, from the bottom of the slave ship, comes a kind of threat about the future: “There will come a time when they’ll see us,” which I read as a suggestion that at one point the tables will be turned, and the enslaved will be rising up against their masters. In the context in which the song is sung in today’s Haiti, of course, such a rebellion is established as past rather than future hope. In that sense the singers connect back to ancestors on the slave ship, acknowledging that they were looking ahead to a day of liberation. “In the bottom of the ship / We are all one,” the song announces, summing up in one potent phrase the process of interaction and creolization that would ultimately produce Haiti’s culture—a process that is archived itself in the very structures of Vodou, which organizes the lwa according to “nations” of origin, including Congo and Nago nations. But the most powerful and complex symbolism in the song involves the fact that the ship is sinking. It

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is with the image of being on this doomed ship, one in which the singers are “trapped.” In fact, though, the term angagé is quite polysemic. It may also be a way of saying “enslaved” or “indentured,” as in the engagés, or indentured laborers of early colonial times. But it also can be a way of saying “we are committed” and asking for help from those who command the sea into which they are sinking. If there is one final twist to the song, however, it is that as they are singing it those in the slave ship are decidedly alive, in the present, perpetually trapped and sinking perhaps in new types of subjection, but also still unstoppably present. “Nou led, Nou la,” goes one common Haitian saying: “We may be ugly, but we’re (still) here.” In singing such a song, a return to a long history of trials is also an assertion not just of survival but of power. As in “Depi m soti nan Ginen,” this song also evokes specific historical experiences as a way of capturing broader cultural processes. The image of the slave ship—central to the theorizations of contemporary thinkers like Paul Gilroy—becomes a way of capturing how fragmentation became unity through a certain form of oppression. The mixing of past, future, and present in the song emphasizes certain kinds of connections and continuities in the face of the fundamental rupture of the slave voyage itself. As such, the complexities and dynamics of this experience—of a break with Africa that was never complete, of a process of cultural invention which involves, in part, the invention of a new Africa in the Americas—come through precisely thanks to the ambiguities and multivalent symbolism that the form of the song allows. What can such songs tell us about the vision and experience of Haitian independence? They are partly about reorienting our vision, perhaps pushing us to ask different types of questions. While the political story of independence obviously profoundly shaped this period in Haitian history, an encompassing political history of Haiti itself would need to take into consideration the broader social and cultural experiences which these songs trace and evoke in ritual contexts. The rich corpus of Vodou song offers us insight into how the historical events of the revolution and early independence period were experienced and interpreted at the time and since. But it also, as importantly, offers us the opportunity to take a different interpretive perspective on this history, emphasizing the political centrality of the long-term cultural and social transformations that created Haitian society.

Notes 1. Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011).

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2. Jacques Pierre, “L’acte de l’indépendance d’Haïti en créole haïtien,” Journal of Haitian Studies 17, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 168–80. 3. “Liberté ou la mort,” The National Archives of the United Kingdom, MFQ 1/184. 4. Published in May 2011, the letter in the original Creole, with English translation, is available here: www.defend.ht/blogs/posts/politics-blog/958-respekte-dwa-lengwistik-pep -ayisyen-an-qtet-kaleq-english. 5. This broader alternative interpretation of the role of text in postindependence Haiti was spurred by a conversation with Jean Hébrard. The document “Haiti Declaration of Independence Manuscript” is in Duke University’s Rubenstein Library, RLT Vault 320A items 1–2. My thanks to Deborah Jenson, who did a careful transcription and analysis of the document, for sharing her analysis with me. 6. I discuss these methodological quandaries in Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Re-Thinking the Intellectual History of the French Enlightenment,” Social History 31, no. 1 (February 2006): 1–14; Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2004) is an attempt to reconstruct political perspectives and action in the case of Guadeloupe. These efforts parallel those of other scholars working on the period, including Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); David P. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); and the essays in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Gaspar and David Geggus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). I took inspiration in this work from Julius S. Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1986). The approach taken by Rebecca Scott in her work, including her most recent collaboration with Jean Hébrard, is an obvious model here as well. See Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 7. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 8. Such sources are expertly used, for instance, by Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and by Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of EighteenthCentury Saint Domingue (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 9. Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative. 10. I seek to examine and lay out the terms of this conflict in Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012). The best treatments of this question are Jean Casimir, La culture opprimée (Delmas, Haïti:

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Imprimerie Lakay, 2001); and Georges Anglade, Atlas critique d’Haïti (Montréal: Groupe d’études et de recherches critiques d’espace, UQAM, 1982). 11. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 12. Max G. Beauvoir, Le grand receuil sacré, ou répertoire des chansons du vodou haïtien (Port-au-Prince: Presses Nationales d’Haïti, 2008); Benjamin Hebblethwaite, Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012). I am currently involved in a large collaborative project (supported by the National Endowment for Humanities) called the “Vodou Archive” whose goal is to document many of these songs in audio, video, and textual format. The beginnings of the project can be viewed here: www.dloc.com/vodou. 13. Joan [Colin] Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Karen E. Richman, Migration and Vodou (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). 14. Richard Price, First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Richard Price, Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Kenneth M. Bilby, True-Born Maroons (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008). 15. Gilbert Rouget, “Court Songs of Porto-Novo and Abomey,” in Essays on Music and History in Africa, ed. Klaus P. Wachsmann (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 32, 43–44. 16. The interview was done in the context of the “Vodou Archive” project I am working on with Benjamin Hebblethwaite of the University of Florida (www.dloc .com/vodou). He led a research trip that included the visit to Lakou Badjo in November 2012, with Claire Payton and Eric Barstow carrying out interviews, including the one with Estimé. Their presentation of the video is available at http://sites .duke.edu/vodouarchive/lakou-badjo/. The video by itself is available at http://vimeo .com/55127314#at=44. 17. On Ogou and Dessalines see Dayan, Haiti, History, esp. 30–31; and Brown, Mama Lola, chap. 4. 18. Hebblethwaite, Vodou Songs, 259. 19. Ibid., 65, 79–80. 20. Ibid., 91. 21. Dayan, Haiti, History, 39–40. 22. Odette Mennesson-Rigaud papers, Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Pères du Saint-Esprit (BHPSE), Port-au-Prince. For more on this remarkable collection visit www.fondspatrimoniauxhaiti.org/fonds-omr/. 23. Beauvoir, Le grand receuil sacré, 167–68. 24. Josué is Haitian musician, choreographer, houngan (Vodou priest), and current director of the Bureau National d’Ethnologie in Haiti. For an earlier collabora-

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tion see Laurent Dubois and Erol Josué, “Le vodou, miroir de l’histoire: dialogue,” Tabou: Revue du Musée d’Ethnologie de Genève 5 (2007): 325–40. 25. The song is in the Odette Mennesson-Rigaud papers, BHPSE, page 28. 26. Michel-Etienne Descourtilz, Voyages d’un naturaliste, et ses observations (Paris: Dufart, 1809), 3:209–10; Odette Menesson-Rigaud papers, BHPSE, Box 1, Folder 1, “Chants de Soukri.” 27. I draw these examples both from fieldwork ceremonies in Haiti and France and from the songs gathered by the French ethnographer Odette MennessonRigaud and held in the BHPSE. Some of this collection is available online: http:// fondspatrimoniauxhaiti.org/fonds-omr/index.htm. 28. I recorded Erol Josué singing the song and worked on the translation and transcription with him during a residency at Duke University on February 3, 2011. The video of the song is available here: http://vimeo.com/19707817. Josué and I offer an interpretation of Vodou song in a conversation published in Dubois and Josué, “Le vodou.” 29. On Makandal see Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), chap. 1. 30. This transcription, done in collaboration with Erol Josué, is from a version recorded by Wawa and Rasin Kanga on The Haitian Roots: Volume 1 (2005), part of a series of CDs released by Geronimo Records that offered ceremonial songs to the Haitian diaspora.

Revolutionary Commemorations Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haitian Independence Day, 1804–1904 ERIN ZAVITZ

On the morning of January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, glowing with immortal glory, marched out to Gonaïves’s main square grasping the Declaration of Independence. His generals, heroes of the revolutionary struggle, accompanied him along with Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, his secretary and writer of the act. Soldiers and people from the town and surrounding countryside crowded around the sacred liberty tree and richly decorated altar of the homeland waiting for the pronouncement from their valiant general. Dessalines climbed the altar’s stairs and spoke to the crowd in Kreyòl of the atrocities of the French, concluding with what would become the national oath: “Let us swear to fight for the Independence of our country until our dying breath.”¹ As Dessalines stepped back and made room for BoisrondTonnerre to read the declaration, the generals and crowd enthusiastically repeated the oath. Switching to French, the language of the document, Boisrond-Tonnerre read the declaration and a message to the people from Dessalines. As he pronounced the final words, a reminder to the people to defend their newly granted independence, Dessalines cried, “Long live independence.” Dessalines and his generals descended the altar of the homeland and paraded to the national palace where they continued celebrating their momentous achievements. At some later point they confirmed his position as governor-general for life.² Though written decades after the event by Haitian historian Thomas Madiou, this brief description is one of the few available for the 1804 ceremony. Unfortunately, contemporary accounts that mention the fête have yet to be found. Thus we must rely on later descriptions by Haitian historians to reconstruct the details of Haiti’s founding celebration. For this essay, I have specifically used Madiou’s narrative because he is the most pro-Dessalines of Haiti’s early historians. His text is part of the process of commemorating Dessalines that I examine below. Moreover, the description highlights the central themes of the official memory of the nation’s founding.³

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Fifteen years of revolution, though not all directed towards the goal of independence, had come to an end. Now, facing a war-torn landscape, heterogeneous population, and hostile international environment, the country had to move forward and start the arduous processes of forming a state and nation. The Declaration of Independence and Dessalines’s performance initiated both. First, by naming himself governor-general for life, he established an authoritarian state that relied upon the military leadership of the generals who had fought for independence. Second, the ceremonies combined print and physical performance to evoke memories of the past in order to shape the construction of a new nation and people. Thus, as the officiant of the first civic festival, Independence Day, Dessalines provides an entry point for my investigation of the politics of commemoration in Haiti. Internal and external pressures influenced the celebration of the holiday, which served as a tool to define an official memory of independence— specifically that of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the fête’s creator and only Haitian political leader to be incorporated into the Vodou pantheon. One of many revolutionary figures, Dessalines was a controversial hero in both life and death as the earlier essays in this volume illustrate. Murdered by his own officers in October 1806, heads of state and historians removed the memory of the founder from official commemorations. Nevertheless, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and culminating in the 1904 centennial, Dessalines returned as the father of independence. His journey from creator of official memory to official oblivion and back illustrates the color, class, and regional politics of nineteenth-century Haiti. As unity remained an elusive goal and threats to independence loomed on the horizon, the Haitian state and elite turned to the memory of Dessalines in an attempt to reinvigorate the Haitian nation on its one-hundredth birthday. To trace these memory struggles, I rely primarily on the small but vibrant Haitian press, as well as contemporary Haitian histories and travelers’ accounts. Though Haiti’s literacy rate in the early nineteenth century must have been extremely low, the urban French-speaking elite benefited from a press that included a variety of newspapers.⁴ For example, Le Télégraphe and the Feuille du Commerce appeared regularly from 1813 to 1843 and 1824 to 1860, respectively, which indicates there was a permanent reading public. Even though the majority of journals had a limited circulation and lifespan, David Nicholls points out, “[they] were read by most of those who were in a position to affect the policy of the government, and they were therefore not without significant political influence.”⁵ These publications covered commercial interests; news from Europe, Latin America, and the United States; and events in Haiti, including Independence Day celebrations. Publication extended the life of the holiday; although the fête took place

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between December 31 and January 1, regional commandants sent in reports of local festivities from arrondissements across the island that appeared in the newspaper until as late as March. Reading the accounts served as a form of commemoration. As scholars have shown for celebrations of the American Revolution, reading accounts contributed to the rise of nationalism and bridged geographic gaps by making people feel connected through shared commemorative acts.⁶ The ceremonies and their subsequent descriptions in print redefined the island’s geography as Haitian. Moreover, the reading of these accounts, in public or private, allowed elite Haitians to “imagine” themselves acting in union with the citizens of other towns.⁷ In Haiti’s case, the physical performance of commemoration provided an important supplement to the national community being created in print. The elite, through reading, could envision being part of the Haitian nation; more importantly, illiterate army troops and audience members could participate in this imagining through public performance.⁸ Independence Day suggests the power of these two media, and as art historian Carlo Célius explains, sets up a model “consisting of official speeches, religious and civic events, and popular merrymaking.”⁹

Declaring Independence and Creating National Symbols The pull-out of French troops in late November 1803, following their surrender to the insurgent army of former slaves and freeborn people of color, signaled a de facto independence. Although the insurgent leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines issued a preliminary act of independence on November 29, 1803, an official public declaration would not be pronounced for another month.¹⁰ Dessalines selected January 1, 1804, as the date for celebrating the country’s founding. Symbolically charged as the beginning not just of a new year but of a new era, Haiti’s calendar would be measured in years from independence, thus erasing the French colonial past.¹¹ More important for a new country of former slaves, January 1 traditionally had been a holiday on the plantation. Dessalines thus maintained this designation and redefined it as a moment to celebrate complete liberty. Facing a diverse population, the performance sought to unite a newly formed people around the triumph of the revolution and inspire them in the new project of nation- and state-formation.¹² In contrast to the printed document in French, the physical celebration could cross the linguistic barriers of Haiti’s heterogeneous population of free people of color and American- and African-born former slaves. The performance served to educate this public and to begin the process of constructing a national identity. The setting for this momentous occasion included a liberty tree and an altar of the home-

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land, both direct links to the revolutionary era and the symbolism of the French Revolution. Beginning in 1804, the tree and altar—centerpieces of the event—became redefined as new, national symbols. Describing the altars, art historian Carlo Célius explains, “At first only podiums of wood but later more permanent structures, they were sites of power and of collective memory, sacred ground where people gathered regularly to remember great deeds and renew the civic oath of the founders.”¹³ In addition to the physical landscape, the language of the declaration echoes throughout the later commemorations, specifically the oath to forever renounce France. Beyond declaring independence and attacking the French, the text speaks of freedom from slavery and tyranny but lacks any discussion of rights. Instead, it emphasizes a rhetoric of duty and provides a foundation for authoritarianism. Mimi Sheller points out a similar phenomenon with citizenship in independent Haiti. She argues, “Citizenship was defined by the elements of duty, obedience and obligation (what the citizen owed the state), which far outweighed the rights-based element of what the state owed to its citizens.”¹⁴ The 1804 declaration established a series of revolutionary symbols attached to a vengeful and authoritarian language that called on Haitians to be obedient to the state and forever fight for its independence. The celebration of January 1, 1804, created—de facto—Haiti’s first national holiday. Dessalines officiated festivities the following year in Marchand in the Artibonite Plain, where he established the country’s capital. Celebrations began the night of December 31. The evening was alive with drums, fifes, and “African dances of all kinds.”¹⁵ The following morning, however, the military and the anti-French rhetoric of the previous year took center stage. Five thousand troops gathered around the altar of the homeland, which now contained Dessalines’s imperial throne. In the fall of 1804, Dessalines had declared himself emperor of Haiti. While couplets in the official paper, Gazette Politique et Commerciale d’Haïti, celebrated his nomination, Dessalines’s generals did not all share the same enthusiasm, foreshadowing the growing divisions among Haiti’s new elite.¹⁶ The inclusion of the throne on the altar of the homeland illustrated this shift in government and added an imperial object to Haiti’s revolutionary iconography. After Dessalines greeted the troops, Boisrond-Tonnerre rose and reminded the audience of the French cruelties and noble deeds of the Armée Indigène (indigenous army).¹⁷ While in a new city, Marchand, the repetition of form and language served to link participants with the first celebration.¹⁸ One of Dessalines’s leading generals and a hero of the revolution, Henry Christophe, went a step further and repeated the celebration five days later in his home city, Cap Haïtien. As Haiti’s first newspaper, Gazette Politique reports, the day included its own military procession, reading of the act of

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independence, and swearing of the oath to die rather than fall under French domination again. The repetition of festivities in Cap Haïtien allowed more new Haitians to participate in the de facto holiday. Christophe’s commemoration connected Haitians with the 1805 celebration in Marchand and the first Independence Day in Gonaïves. Equally important, foreigners also viewed the celebration, thus legitimating Haiti’s existence in front of an international audience.¹⁹ Independence Day’s significance continued to increase that summer when Dessalines ratified the first Haitian constitution. Under the heading of “General Dispositions,” article 27 reads: “There shall be national festivals for celebrating independence, the birthday of the emperor and his august spouse, that of agriculture and of the constitution.”²⁰ The 1805 constitution codified the holiday, and it would remain in all subsequent constitutions to the present day. The official pronouncement of January 1 as a national holiday continued the project of merrymaking in the capital and in regional centers across the country. In 1806 Dessalines would oversee his last celebration in Marchand. According to an American residing in Cap Haïtien at the time, “much pomp and splendor was displayed” in the capital.²¹ One can imagine that part of this pomp included the military procession to the altar of the homeland and a series of speeches, both of which had become customary elements of the celebration. While the visitor gave no comment on these activities, he did mention the shocking cake supposedly served during dinner: “[A] piece of confectionary in imitation of the skeleton of a white man [which was] to excite and cherish in the minds of the chiefs, their hatred of the French, by exhibiting to their sight such expressive symbols as could not fail to call to their recollection, the remembrance of their past deeds.”²² Haranguing the French was not enough; eating them was a tasty way to supplement the words of Boisrond-Tonnerre. As Dessalines’s guests dined on sugary skeletons, parallel celebrations took place in Cap Haïtien. Following the constitution and model established by Christophe in 1805, General Capoix organized celebrations for Independence Day.²³ First, several days before the celebration, an edict was read in the streets commanding people to gather at the Champ de Mars. In later years, announcements of the holiday would appear in the state-sponsored paper, but one can imagine these publications were also read out loud in the streets.²⁴ On January 1, the Cap Haïtien festivities included the expected military display and reading of the Declaration of Independence. As Independence Day became codified in the constitution, Dessalines and his generals institutionalized a model of commemoration that stressed the importance of the military in gaining and securing independence and repeated the public

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reading of the declaration to ensure Haitians never forgot the atrocities of the French. Moreover, as an English visitor to Haiti commented, the festivals “afforded the Haytians an opportunity of engaging in their favourite amusements, [and were] no less calculated, by reviving in their recollection the most important and interesting transactions of their history, to keep alive those feelings of attachment to liberty and to their sovereign.”²⁵ While crowds applauded readings of the Declaration of Independence, unrest was building. Dessalines’s generals and the nascent peasantry were growing weary of the new regime.²⁶ In his first two years, Dessalines was unable to make any significant headway on the great economic disparity between the anciens (formerly free) and nouveaux libres (former slaves). On one hand, his policies of forced labor and relocation alienated the nouveaux libres. On the other hand, the state’s accumulation of former French properties angered the nascent Haitian elite (anciens libres) who had held land before or during the revolution. However, they frequently lacked any title to prove their claim. Dessalines used the lack of documentation to expropriate land for the state. In the summer of 1806, after a successful campaign in the North, Dessalines turned his attention to the South and West, prompting a wave of fear among current and aspiring landowners.²⁷ Memories of the 1804 massacres and civil war between regional revolutionary leaders André Rigaud and Toussaint Louverture, which included a suppression campaign led by Dessalines in the southern peninsula, only increased concerns. To put a stop to the “yoke of Dessalines,” military leaders, including Alexandre Pétion, marched on Port-au-Prince.²⁸ Amidst this unrest, the Gazette Politique cheerily reported on the emperor’s name-day fête with no mention of the growing tensions. On October 17, 1806, Dessalines rode to Port-au-Prince to meet the insurgents and, during an ambush, died at Pont Rouge.²⁹ Two weeks after his murder, on November 6, 1806, the paper gave a brief resume of the events. Under the heading “Isle d’Haïti” the report opens explaining the context and justification for Dessalines’s death: “For some time discontent has broken out in several parts of the empire. Bad administration, various injustices and acts against the safety of the first public officials, as well as individuals, had excited general disgust toward the recently overthrown government.”³⁰ The article continues, stating that at nine in the morning on October 17, Dessalines was killed at Pont Rouge in an ambush with men he thought supported him. The use of passive voice avoids any placement of blame. Dessalines’s death is justified by the vague list of his failings. These cover up more specific conflicts over landownership, taxation, and the distribution of power. The report concludes by suggesting a new direction for the future: “Now, it remains for us to expect a wise and suitable Constitution that could, under paternal chief and loyal administrators, make

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us forget the mistakes of the past and lead us to the fortune for which we have longingly hoped.”³¹ A little over two weeks after Dessalines’s assassination, the Gazette’s article illustrates steps to excise the former emperor from official memory. The hero was recast as a tyrant and the generals’ attack as an act of vengeance supported by the people. Dessalines, who had been described as the people’s liberator, the Haitian equivalent to George Washington, became the obstacle blocking Haiti’s progress.³² Fiery proclamations published in the days following October 17 captured this sentiment: “Tyranny is slaughtered . . . Liberty reigns . . . we are finally free.”³³ Dessalines’s removal and new identity as despot rather than liberator gave the generals not only a second chance at the building of a new state and nation but also an opportunity to restart the history of independent Haiti.

From Popular to Official: Evolving Memories of Dessalines In contrast to the memory work of Haiti’s generals and heads of state to forget Dessalines, the people of Haiti continued Dessalines’s memory in an unofficial capacity. Oral histories collected by nineteenth-century Haitian historian Thomas Madiou recount this process. After the Pont Rouge ambush, Dessalines’s body was carried into Port-au-Prince. Along the way the crowd attacked the cadaver, cutting and smashing it until it was unrecognizable. Interrupting this scene of vengeance, an old woman named Défilée gathered the pieces of the emperor’s body and took them to the cemetery.³⁴ Soldiers paid by Pétion helped her bury the remains in an unmarked grave. Contemporary historian Beaubrun Ardouin, who at ten years old claimed to have witnessed the event, contended that Défilée was too weak to carry the sack of Dessalines’s remains. Instead, unable to transport and bury the fallen leader, she took on the emotional duty of mourning him and placing flowers on the grave over the years.³⁵ Perhaps it was also Défilée who placed the candle that, Madiou notes, appeared on the grave every All Saints’ Day.³⁶ Either way, Défilée as a representative of Haiti’s lower classes, suggests that Dessalines remained a figure in popular memory. Vodou histories both further illustrate and complicate popular commemoration. Dessalines is the only revolutionary hero to become a lwa, or deity. His place in the Vodou pantheon, and more specifically his association with Ogou, the African god of iron, blacksmiths, and war, suggests the influence of African traditions in shaping Haitian historical memory.³⁷ However, it is difficult to know when Dessalines became a lwa. Songs about Dessalines enter the written archive in the twentieth century but may have existed in oral tradition long before Haitian intellectuals or foreign scholars started

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recording them. Colin (Joan) Dayan suspects the process of deification occurred before the “literate elite decided it would be wise to resurrect Dessalines as a hero.”³⁸ As sources clearly document the process of resurrection led by Haitian intellectuals in the late 1830s and early 1840s, we could hypothesize that Dessalines’s popular commemoration was established by this time. This would aid in its recuperation by the elite in the second half of the nineteenth century. The process of restoring the memory of Dessalines in official commemorations began with the Revolution of 1843 and overthrow of mixed-race president Jean-Pierre Boyer. Just as Dessalines had performed independence to legitimate the new country, leaders of the 1843 revolution used the holiday and memory of Dessalines to justify their new government. January 1, 1844, ushered in a new era of regeneration that would correct the failures of Boyer and offer the country a chance to begin anew. By Boyer’s downfall in 1843, Independence Day had become an established holiday, but it also had undergone a significant change. In towns across Haiti, troops, dignitaries, and townsfolk gathered in the central square on the morning of January 1 to renew the oath to live free and independent, though now without any mention of France. French recognition of Haiti in the spring of 1825 greatly affected the content and program of Independence Day. In the winter of 1825, Boyer sent out new orders to all district commanders warning against the use of potentially offensive language in Independence Day ceremonies. He explained that because of France’s recognition of Haiti as an independent state, officials should no longer read out the act of independence and should avoid naming any nation in the annual oath.³⁹ Ardouin notes that the new oath was textually different from the 1804 version. He attributed it to the positive change in Haiti’s status as a newly recognized state.⁴⁰ Recognition required Boyer to revise the content of the national celebration and, by extension, to reinvent the official memory of independence by removing the former enemy, France. The Revolution of 1843 and the new era of regeneration maintained Boyer’s removal of France as the enemy, but also began another shift in ceremonial traditions. Dessalines was no longer the tyrant of Haiti’s history; this role fell to the recently deposed Jean-Pierre Boyer. Yet Dessalines’s memory had to be censored. While the Revolution of 1843 contained radical democratic elements, the main leaders were elite mixed-race men from the southern peninsula. Memories of Dessalines’s land expropriation, of the massacres in 1804, and of the civil war during the revolution tempered their commemorations of him. However, regional and color politics were further complicated by the vocal southern black elites who helped propel the remembrance of Dessalines as revolutionary general and emperor.

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The first step was actually to set up a pension for his widow, Marie-Claire Heureuse. A decree from the 1843 provisional government offered a pension in memory of Dessalines’s efforts to break the colonial yoke.⁴¹ Awarding a pension to Heureuse domesticated the memory of Dessalines—he was a husband—and replaced the image of Dessalines’s terror with his wife’s tolerance. Heureuse is remembered in histories and memoirs for saving the lives of multiple Frenchmen whom Dessalines would have murdered.⁴² On January 1, 1844, the new president, Charles Hérard, went a step further and added Dessalines to the official commemoration. He invoked Dessalines in reference to his heroic actions to secure Haiti’s independence, thus creating a link between the Revolution of 1843 and the struggle for independence. Nevertheless, he criticized his style of rule and championed Pétion as the republican hero and model to emulate, a sign of state censorship.⁴³ A return to January 1, 1804, meant commemorating Dessalines the revolutionary hero, not Dessalines the emperor. Post-1843 heads of state continued to officially commemorate the country’s founder beginning with the first official memorial for Dessalines’s death. On October 25, 1845, Le Moniteur Haïtien, the new government-sponsored paper, published a speech given by the director of the national school in Cap Haïtien on the anniversary of Dessalines’s death.⁴⁴ In contrast to Hérard’s invocation of the hero of 1804, the speaker proclaims independence and the 1805 constitution as “the most memorable and glorious [acts] of Haiti’s history.” Moreover, the speaker referenced Dessalines both as a hero of 1804 and as emperor, suggesting that his governing style was not a matter of national shame—at least not in the North, which to that point had given Haiti both of its monarchs.⁴⁵ Though almost four decades late, the speech is the first example of public mourning for the fallen leader. The pronouncements of a local, especially northern, school director are a far step from the head of state celebrating Dessalines, but they do demonstrate a larger grassroots movement that pushed the president to change official commemorations of Dessalines. Earlier in 1845, citizens from cities across the republic sent petitions demanding that the government honor Dessalines.⁴⁶ The president, Philippe Guerrier, who supplanted Hérard, was a former soldier of the revolution and represented one of the dying links to that era. This may help explain why the petitions arrived under his rule and were positively received. More importantly, Guerrier was black and the elite handpicked him as the best choice to placate the masses. He became the first case of politique de doublure. Translated as “the politics of the understudy,” it was a system devised by lighter-skinned politicians to elect black puppet presidents who would support their agenda. Guerrier did not last long in office; he died in April

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1845.⁴⁷ It fell to his successor, Louis Pierrot to respond to “the unanimous public opinion.”⁴⁸ Unlike the aging Guerrier, Pierrot was not a puppet of the mixed-race elite, but a nationalist and noiriste black general from the North like Dessalines. It is not surprising that he supported the petitioners and decreed a national funeral service for Dessalines on October 27, 1845. The decision made Pierrot an inheritor of black power and celebrated noiriste leadership in the face of decades of mixed-race rule. In a speech from the southern city of Les Cayes, Louis Étienne Félicité Lysius Salomon, a member of the southern black elite, eloquently expressed this sentiment. He praised Pierrot for his noble action of honoring the memory of “the avenger of the black race, the liberator of Haiti, a hero of Independence, the famous JeanJacques Dessalines.”⁴⁹ Decades later, as president, Salomon became part of this genealogy of black power he commemorated in 1845. The turbulent 1840s created a rapid cycle of remembering and forgetting the first head of state. An army revolt forced Pierrot out of office in 1846 and Dessalines’s funeral service disappeared from the newspapers, a casualty of the regime change. In another attempt at politique de doublure, Faustin Soulouque was “elected” president in 1847. A member of the National Guard and a former slave, he seemed a viable candidate for the elite. Soulouque was an illiterate sexagenarian and was viewed by the elite as “the dull head of the Guard.”⁵⁰ However, he quickly surprised his “electors” and took control of the government. To consolidate power he attacked his opposition, the predominantly lighter-skinned urban merchants and intellectuals, and pronounced himself emperor. Though he was ridiculed in the international press, historian Murdo MacLeod argues that Soulouque’s coronation and court represented “a symbol of true independence” to former slaves who could now hold titles of their own. An important aspect of this political transformation and independence was the regime’s recuperation of the memory of Dessalines.⁵¹ As emperor, Soulouque revised the 1846 constitution. Among its many changes was the creation of a new holiday, January 2, Jean-Jacques Dessalines day.⁵² Appearing first as a new law in December 1848 and then as part of a constitutional article, the day honored Dessalines for his service to the country. In addition, the 1848 law included a provision for the creation of five paintings of Dessalines that would hang in the National Palace, the Senate, the Chamber of Representatives, and the cathedral in Gonaïves.⁵³ Unanimously adopted by the Chamber of Representatives, important members of Soulouque’s black public also appreciated the new holiday. In a letter to the state paper, Le Moniteur, Dessalines’s children personally expressed their gratitude to the emperor for the official homage to their father. Recognizing Soulouque’s magnanimity, Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s (junior) letter and Soulouque’s celebrations linked the two emperors.⁵⁴ The creation of the

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January 2 holiday, similar to the national day of mourning under Pierrot in 1846, placed Soulouque in the genealogy of Haitian black leaders. Although he was a southerner, as the second emperor of Haiti he was Dessalines’s heir. For the next decade, Dessalines took his place next to Independence Day celebrations. Soulouque’s resurrection of the figure of Haiti’s first emperor and institutionalization of a holiday marked a milestone in the transformation of official memory. Even after the mixed-race leader Fabre Geffrard toppled Soulouque’s government in 1859 and formed a new republic, Dessalines would maintain his spot in the constitutionally sanctioned national holidays.⁵⁵ This commemorative tradition is a curious continuity between two contrasting regimes, monarchy and republic, and two leaders, black and mixed-race. It also illustrates Geffrard’s political skill in maintaining nominal popular support while balancing the demands of the black and mixedrace Haitian elite. Official commemorations beyond the January holidays pushed Geffrard’s ability to appease the fractious elite. In 1860, members of the Haitian elite called for the construction of a statue for Dessalines. Septimus Rameau, a member of the southern black elite and founder of the principally black National Party, proposed the statue as an integral part of Haiti’s regeneration under Geffrard.⁵⁶ Articles by Rameau appeared frequently in the paper L’Union, which represented the views of the southern black elite, including Salomon, the future president who in the 1840s supported Dessalines’s first memorial service. In the capital, the mixed-race editor of Le Progrès, Elie Heurtelou, supported the statue’s construction but only to honor Dessalines’s efforts during the War for Independence (1802–3).⁵⁷ However, other members of the Port-au-Prince elite did not share Heurtelou’s views and fought to block all efforts. They even found support with the British and French consuls who met with President Geffrard about the statue and their concerns over commemorating Dessalines, who had slaughtered French men, women, and children. Geffrard diplomatically responded, explaining that he could personally support the project but that the government would take no part.⁵⁸ Regional differences, color politics, and potential international stigma inhibited the statue’s construction and any official support. Nevertheless, Geffrard’s comment suggests that personal commemorations of Dessalines were permissible. With the fall of Geffrard, the memory of Dessalines disappeared from public, official celebrations. In the words of art historian Carlo Célius, Dessalines was “languishing in the antechamber of Haiti’s national pantheon.”⁵⁹ During preparations for the 1904 centennial, civic groups and the state restarted the official recuperation of the memory of Dessalines. This time, Haiti’s founder would truly enter the national pantheon.

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In the fall of 1891, a group of Haitian intellectuals founded a literary, scientific, and artistic club for the country’s centennial, L’Association du Centenaire de l’Indépendance Nationale.⁶⁰ Many of these men were noiristes and members of the National Party such as the Lhérisson brothers and Massillon Coicou. It is unsurprising that they wished to organize centennial celebrations or that they valued the memory of Dessalines. Up to this point, civic groups or private societies had been absent from planning Independence Day.⁶¹ Mounting state debt and political struggles, along with the increased national significance of 1904, provided a space, which had not been available in annual celebrations, for associations and individuals to work with the government in planning the event. Within months, the association had approval from the president, Florvil Hyppolite, who thanked the founding committee for its actions: “I can only welcome with pleasure the creation of a society whose name alone speaks to its worth.”⁶² From the North, Hyppolite had overthrown the previous president in the name of northern residents who felt exploited by officials in Port-au-Prince.⁶³ His regional and color politics made him amenable to the group’s efforts to commemorate Dessalines and the centennial of independence, which in turn could legitimate his rule as a northern black leader like Dessalines. With official support, the group set about meeting its main goal: “[T]o raise patriotic sentiment for the celebration of the centennial of our Independence.”⁶⁴ With more than a decade to go before the actual celebration, members busied themselves with a variety of activities. Newspaper accounts and speeches capture members reading poetry at social events and attempting to start a night school for workers.⁶⁵ In addition, they led pilgrimages to Dessalines’s grave on the anniversary of his death and raised money for events and masses to be said for the revolutionary heroes.⁶⁶ Unfortunately, preparations for the centennial were interrupted by the civil war between supporters of Joseph Anténor Firmin and Nord Alexis. Both northerners, the men represented divisions not only among regional residents, but also among the intellectual elite of Port-au-Prince who could see an ally in the erudite Firmin.⁶⁷ Therefore, members raised doubts about the possibility of even celebrating the centennial. The press and official correspondence warned that the country faced a crisis that threatened its very independence.⁶⁸ By December 1902, the victorious army of the North proclaimed General Nord Alexis president, and the association quickly reorganized to present the president with the mission of planning for the centennial.⁶⁹ After only a few weeks in office, Alexis granted Justin Dévot, Justin Lhérisson, Dantès Bellegarde, and other intellectuals of the re-formed Association du Centenaire support from the government and a budget of three hundred

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thousand Haitian dollars. In a letter to the society’s former president, Monsieur Joseph Jérémie, the committee declared it would be responsible for organizing a celebration “both dignified and affordable for the Centennial of our national Independence.”⁷⁰ The association went a step further and published a proclamation to the Haitian people explaining its role, along with the government’s, in planning for the momentous day.⁷¹ The year leading up to 1904 was filled with conferences on revolutionary heroes, newspaper accounts of the club’s activities, petitions to build monuments, and celebrations of events leading to independence, such as the centennial of the Haitian flag, Toussaint Louverture’s death, and the Battle of Vertières. In addition, the Port-au-Prince paper Le Soir, edited by Justin Lhérisson, a member of the association, ran a ninety-two-day countdown to January 1 to make sure its readers never forgot the date.⁷² The club lasted only a few more years. Following the centennial of JeanJacques Dessalines’s death in the fall of 1906 the group disbanded. Regardless, the association’s actions and words impacted Haiti’s commemorative practices and the development of the official memory of independence and Dessalines. First, Florvil Hyppolite, who approved the Association du Centenaire, oversaw the inauguration of a mausoleum for Dessalines on September 19, 1893, the first official physical commemoration.⁷³ A decade later, Nord Alexis would reenact Dessalines’s Declaration of Independence by traveling to Gonaïves for the centennial. He began his speech that morning stating, “It is a great pleasure for me to come to the same place as the Founder to renew, on the Altar of the Homeland, our oath of Independence.”⁷⁴ Returning to Gonaïves connected Alexis and his presidency to the original event in 1804. A northerner and noiriste, he proclaimed his political legitimacy by holding the ceremony in Gonaïves and commemorating Dessalines. The official historian of the centennial went so far as to compare Alexis’s election to the War for Independence; both were necessary for Haiti to move forward.⁷⁵ Complementary to the government’s actions, members of the Association du Centenaire and other Haitian intellectuals organized multiple conferences on Dessalines. The conferences sought to correct the injustices of the past and portray a more balanced picture of the hero.⁷⁶ Some lecturers admitted Dessalines’s flaws, calling him a “tyrant” or noting “his violence and brutal energy.”⁷⁷ Others wisely pointed out how these negative images had been perpetuated by “haters of our race” who have “obscured” our understanding of him.⁷⁸ The collection of conferences stressed the importance of remembering Dessalines as a “founder,” “liberator,” “benefactor,” and “defender of our history.”⁷⁹ In response to growing popular support of Dessalines, Alexis’s government responded with a centennial celebration of Dessalines’s death in October 1906. Alexis issued a proclamation declaring October 17, 1906, a

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holiday and calling for nationwide memorial services to solemnly remember the “Illustrious Founder of the Haitian Nation.”⁸⁰ The service further legitimated Alexis’s government. Commemorating Dessalines’s death made him the heir to black power and the rightful ruler of Haiti. Furthermore, the commemorations and long overdue monuments combined to move Dessalines out of the antechamber and into the main gallery of the national pantheon, where mixed-race revolutionary heroes resided. The first of January 1904 symbolized a momentous achievement for the island nation. One hundred years of independence, even with economic and political difficulties, was worthy of a proper celebration. To plan, the state turned to the traditions of past Independence Days but also welcomed the participation of private societies. The increased role of individuals influenced new developments in commemorative traditions. The symbolic potential of 1904 would quickly dim as commemorations and symbolic genealogies of black power could not sustain the country’s fragile sovereignty. The centennial did offer one rebirth—the memory of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. No longer ostracized from official memory, the founder of Haiti marched forward to accept his rightful place.

Notes Research for this essay was supported by the French government’s Chateaubriand Fellowship, a New York Public Library short-term grant, the Conference on Latin American History, and the University of Florida’s Department of History. All translations are my own. 1. “Jurons de combattre jusqu’au dernier soupir pour l’Indépendance de notre pays.” Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti (1847–48; repr. Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1988–91), 3:145–46. 2. “Haitian Declaration of Independence,” The National Archives of the United Kingdom, CO 137/111/1; Madiou, Histoire, 3:151. We do not know exactly when the generals conferred the title of governor-general for life on Dessalines. 3. Boisrond-Tonnerre’s memoirs, published only months after independence, make no mention of the ceremony or his role writing the declaration: Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Hayti ([Haiti]: Imprimerie Central du Gouvernement, 1804), 90–93. Deborah Jenson argues Madiou’s description is “imperial in style.” Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 87. The details of the event may have been embellished by Madiou, who was writing under the aegis of black leader Faustin Soulouque and during the first reentry of the memory of Dessalines into official commemorations. Yet his bias serves to illustrate the process of recuperation. Moreover, the general narrative of the ceremony

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resembles that of his colleagues; see Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, suivies de la vie du Général J.-M. Borgella (Paris: Dézobry et E. Magdeleine, 1853–60), 6:25–30; and Joseph Saint-Rémy, Pétion et Haïti: étude monographique et historique, 2nd ed. (1854–57; repr. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1956), 4:5–10. 4. Current linguists debate the literacy statistics of Haiti today with estimates that approximately 5 percent of the population is fully bilingual in Kreyól and French; see Yves Dejean, Yon lekòl tèt anba nan yon peyi tèt anba (Port-au-Prince: FOKAL, 2006). Nineteenth-century literacy rates for French-literate Haitians must have been near this level or even lower. 5. David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 71. 6. See David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 8. Thomas Abercrombie has argued for a similar supplement to Anderson’s print focus; see Abercrombie, “Mothers and Mistresses of the Urban Bolivian Public Sphere: Postcolonial Predicament and National Imaginary in Oruro’s Carnival,” in After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas, ed. Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 176–220. Hendrik Kraay’s recent study of Brazilian civic festivals also moves between official and popular expression using printed texts and public celebrations: Days of National Festivity in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1823–1889 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 9. Carlo Célius, “Neoclassicism and the Haitian Revolution,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 360. 10. As David Geggus’s and Patrick Tardieu’s essays in this volume demonstrate, the proclamation existed and appeared in translation in the Times (London), February 6, 1804, 3. 11. Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 230. 12. Few members of the audience, including Dessalines, would have fully understood Boisrond-Tonnerre’s text; however, its publication in French made the document fully accessible to an international French-reading public. Thus, in contrast to the printed histories and literary works aimed at a small, literate Haitian elite and an international audience, the national holiday celebrations were principally a means of transferring history and constructing identity on the local level. 13. Célius, “Neoclassicism and the Haitian Revolution,” 361. 14. Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 98.

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15. Madiou, Histoire, 3:234–35. 16. “Couplets,” Gazette Politique et Commerciale d’Haïti, November 22, 1804, 8. The various negative reactions often appeared later in memoirs and histories; however, they illustrate how Dessalines would quickly become labeled as a tyrant and dictator and how long this label would remain in Haitian collective memory. See Madiou, Histoire, 3:171; Ardouin, Études, 6:81; and Edmond Bonnet, ed., Souvenirs historique de Guy-Joseph Bonnet (Paris: Auguste Durand, 1864), 131. 17. Madiou, Histoire, 3:237. 18. Haitian historian Beaubrun Ardouin describes the ceremony as a commemoration of January 1, 1804. See Ardouin, Études, 6:119. 19. Gazette Politique et Commerciale d’Haïti, January 10, 1805, 36. 20. Haiti, Imperial Constitution (1805), Constitutions of the World, www.modern -constitutions.de/nbu.php?page_id=02a1b5a86ff139471c0b1c57f23ac196&show_doc=HT -00-1805-05-20-fr. 21. Condy Raguet, “Memoirs of Hayti” (February 1806), The Port-Folio 5, no. 3: 247. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 246–47. I follow the author’s spelling of Capoix with an “x.” 24. Under Jean-Pierre Boyer, announcements for Independence Day appeared in December issues of the official paper, Le Télégraphe, December 9, 1821, 3. 25. W. W. Harvey, Sketches of Hayti: From the Expulsion of the French to the Death of Christophe, 2nd ed. (1827; repr. London: Frank Cass, 1971), 300. 26. Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, 40; Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012), 49. 27. For a more complete discussion of Haiti’s postindependence economy and land distribution, see Johnhenry Gonzales, “The War on Sugar: Forced Labor, Commodity Production and the Origins of the Haitian Peasantry, 1791–1843,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012). 28. Madiou, Histoire, 3:370. 29. Gazette Politique, October 16, 1806, 161. I have been unable to locate issue 42 which would be the next in the series, thus we must jump to November 6 to find coverage of the assassination. 30. “Depuis quelques temps le mécontentement éclatait dans plusieurs endroits de l’empire. Une mauvaise administration, diverse injustices, et des actes contraires à la sûreté des premiers fonctionnaires publics, ainsi que des particuliers, avaient excités un dégoût général du gouvernement qui vient d’être renversé,” Gazette Politique, November 6, 1806, 169. 31. “Il nous reste maintenant à désirer une Constitution sage et convenable, qui puisse, sous un chef paternel et des administrateurs amis de leur pays, faire oublier nos malheurs passés, et nous faire jouir du bonheur après lequel nos soupirons depuis long-temps [sic],” Gazette Politique, November 6, 1806, 170. 32. Gazette Politique, August 1, 1805, 133.

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33. “La tyrannie est abattue . . . La liberté renaît . . . nous sommes enfin libres,” Madiou, Histoire, 3:420. 34. Madiou, Histoire, 3:406. The memoirs of General Guy-Joseph Bonnet also recount Défilée burying the body. Bonnet, Souvenirs, 142. 35. Ardouin, Études, 6:74, note 1. 36. Madiou, Histoire, 3:406. 37. Jerry Gilles and Yvrose Gilles, Sèvis ginen: rasin, rityèl, respè lan vodou (Davie, FL: Bookmanlit, 2009), 127. 38. Joan (Colin) Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 30–31, 43. 39. Madiou, Histoire, 6:485. 40. Ardouin, Études, 10:11–12. 41. “Décret August 21, 1843,” (Port-Républicain: Imprimerie Nationale), Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 42. Among the most famous accounts is that of French naturalist Michel-Etienne Descourtilz, Voyages d’un naturaliste, et ses observations (Paris: Dufart, 1809), 3:304. 43. Feuille du Commerce, February 4, 1844, 2–3, and January 21, 1844, 4. 44. Le Moniteur Haïtien, October 25, 1845, 2. 45. “[L]es deux actes [independence and 1805 constitution] les plus mémorables et les plus glorieux de l’histoire d’Haïti appartiennent donc à Dessalines,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, October 25, 1845, 2. 46. Le Moniteur, November 1, 1845, 1. 47. Dubois, Haiti, 131; Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, 79. Noiristes viewed themselves as supporters of the black peasantry and believed political power should be in the hands of the majority (black) population. 48. Le Moniteur, November 1, 1845, 1. 49. “[L]a mémoire du vengeur de la race noire, du libérateur d’Haïti, du héros de l’Indépendance, du fameux Jean-Jacques Dessalines,” “Procès-verbal” (Aux Cayes: Imprimerie Nationale, 1845), 6. 50. Dubois, Haiti, 145. 51. Murdo MacLeod, “The Soulouque Regime in Haiti, 1847–1859: A Revaluation,” Journal of Caribbean Studies 10, no. 3 (1970): 36. 52. Haiti, Imperial Constitution (1849), Constitutions of the World, www.modern -constitutions.de/nbu.php?page_id=02a1b5a86ff139471c0b1c57f23ac196&show_doc=HT -00-1849-09-17-fr; Louis Joseph Janvier, Les Constitutions d’Haïti, 1801–1885 (Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, 1886), 261. 53. Le Moniteur, December 22, 1848. 54. Ibid., February 3, 1849. 55. Janvier, Les Constitutions d’Haïti, 272; L’Opinion Nationale, January 5, 1861. 56. L’Union, October 25, 1860. 57. Ibid., December 20, 1860. 58. “Levraud à Thouvenel, Ministre des Affaires Étrangères,” December 23,

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1860, Correspondance Politique, 1860–68, Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes. 59. Célius, “Neoclassicism and the Haitian Revolution,” 389. 60. Joseph Jérémie, ed. Haïti indépendante (Port-au-Prince: Chéraquit, 1929), 25–27. Founding members included the editor of the association’s papers, Joseph Jérémie, the noiriste and nationalist author Massillon Coicou, the Lhérisson brothers, and Pierre Laforest. 61. This stands in contrast to commemorative traditions in Latin America in which associations and the state played a role in organizing festivities. See William H. Beezley and David E. Lorey, eds., ¡Viva Mexico! ¡Viva La Independencia!: Celebrations of September 16 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2001); Hendrik Kraay, ” ‘Let us Be Brazilians on the Day of Our Nationality’: Independence Celebrations in Rio de Janeiro 1840s–1860s,” in Negotiating Identities in Modern Latin America, ed. Hendrick Kraay (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007), 27–48; Days of National Festivities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1823–1899 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 62. “Je ne puis voir qu’avec plaisir se créer une société dont le titre seul est déjà une recommendation,” Jérémie, Haïti indépendante, 31. 63. Dubois, Haiti, 185. 64. “[E]n vue de préparer les esprits à la célébration du centenaire de notre Indépendance,” Jérémie, Haïti indépendante, iii. 65. Le Peuple, January 28, 1893; Jérémie, Haïti indépendante, 35–51, 59–74. 66. Le Nouvelliste, October 17, 1899, and October 16, 1900. 67. Less than a decade later, Firmin would try to run for office again and members of the association supported his return from exile. For author and member Massillon Coicou, his support cost him his life. Gérard Jolibois, L’exécution des Frères Coicou (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Le Natal S.A., 1986). 68. Le Devoir, July 2, 1902, 69. 69. Jérémie, Haïti indépendante, iv; Le Nouvelliste, December 30, 1902; Jérémie, Haïti indépendante, 79. 70. “D]’une façon à la fois digne et modeste, la célébration du Centenaire de notre Indépendance nationale,” Jérémie, Haïti indépendante, 79. 71. Ibid., 84. 72. See Le Soir, September 30–December 31, 1903. 73. L. C. Lhérisson, Pour Dessalines (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Aug. A. Héraux, 1906), 9. 74. “C’est une bien grande satisfaction pour moi de venir a la même place que le Fondateur, faire renouveler sur l’Autel de la Patrie notre serment d’Indépendance,” Le Moniteur, January 2, 1904, 1. 75. Antoine Augustin, Les fêtes du centenaire aux Gonaïves, 1804–1904 (Port-auPrince: Imprimerie Aug. A. Héraux, 1905), 51. 76. Jules Rosemond, Conférence historique sur la vie de Jean-Jacques Dessalines:

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fondateur de l’indépendance haïtienne (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l’Abeille, 1903), 20. 77. Lhérisson, Pour Dessalines, 8; Rosemond, Conférence historique, 50. 78. Septimus Marius, “Discours apologique: en mémoire de Jean-Jacques Dessalines” (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Aug. A. Héraux, 1906), 3; Duraciné Vaval, “Conférences historiques: Dessalines devant l’histoire et Toussaint Louverture à travers la littérature nationale” (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l’Abeille, 1906), 13. 79. Marius, “Discours apologique,” 3; Lhérisson, Pour Dessalines, 8–10. 80. Jérémie, Haïti indépendante, 129.

Appendix The Haitian Declaration of Independence

The following is a transcription of the Haitian Declaration of Independence according to the official printed copies held at The National Archives of the United Kingdom. This version maintains all original spelling, capitalization, and typos. The translation was produced collaboratively by the editor and contributors of this volume. L I B E R T Y O R D E AT H .

L I B E R T É , O U L A M O R T.

I N D I G E N O U S A R M Y.

ARMÉE INDIGÈNE.

T O D AY , January first, eighteen hundred and four, the General in Chief of the Indigenous army, accompanied by the Generals, Chiefs of the army, who were summoned in order to take the measures that will ensure the welfare of the country. After having made known to the assembled Generals, his true intentions, which are to assure forever a stable Government for the Indigenous of Hayti, his primary objective; which he did in a speech that has been made known to Foreign Powers, his resolution to make the country independent, and to enjoy a liberty consecrated by the blood of the inhabitants of this Island; and after having taken their advice, has asked that each of the assembled Generals take an oath to renounce

AU J O U R D ’ H U I premier Janvier, mil huit cent quatre, le Général en Chef de l’armée Indigène, accompagné des Généraux, Chefs de l’armée, convoqués à l’effet de prendre les mesures qui doivent tendre au bonheur du pays. Après avoir fait connaître aux Généraux assemblés, ses véritables intentions, d’assurer à jamais aux Indigènes d’Hayti, un Gouvernement stable, objet de sa plus vive sollicitude; ce qu’il a fait par un discours qui tend à faire connaître aux Puissances Étrangères, la résolution de rendre le pays indépendant, et de jouir d’une liberté consacrée par le sang du peuple de cette Isle; et après avoir recueilli les avis, a demandé que chacun des Généraux assemblés prononçât le serment

240APPENDIX

The Generals, deeply moved by these sacred principles, after having given with a unanimous voice their adherence to the clearly stated project of independence, have all sworn to posterity, to the whole universe, to renounce France forever, and to die rather than live under its dominion.

de renoncer à jamais à la France, de mourir plutôt que de vivre sous sa domination, et de combattre jusqu’au dernier soupir pour l’indépendance. Les Généraux, pénétrés de ces principes sacrés, après avoir donné d’une voix unanime leur adhésion au projet bien manifesté d’indépendance, ont tous juré à la postérité, à l’univers entier, de renoncer à jamais à la France, et de mourir plutôt que de vivre sous sa domination.

Done at Gonaives, this 1st. of January 1804 and the 1st. day of the independence of Hayti Signed, D E S S A L I N E S , General in chief; Christophe, Pétion, Clervaux, Geffrard, Vernet, Gabart, Division Generals; P. Romain, E. G[é]rin, F. Capoix, Daut, JeanLouis-Francois, F[é]rou, Cangé, L. Bazelais, Magloire Ambroise, J. Jques. Herne, Toussaint Brave, Yayou, Brigadier Generals; Bonnet, F. Papalier, Morelly, Chevalier, Marion, Adjutant Generals; Magny, Roux, Chiefs of Brigade; Char[é]ron, B. Loret, Quené, Makajoux, Dupuy, Carbonne, Diaquoi aîné, Raphaël, Malet, Derenoncourt, Officers of the army, and Boisrond Tonnerre, Se[c]retary

Fait aux Gonaïves, ce 1er. Janvier 1804 et le 1er. jour de l’indépendance d’Hayti. Signés, D E S S A L I N E S , Général en chef; Christophe, Pétion, Clervaux, Geffrard, Vernet, Gabart, Généraux de Division; P. Romain, E. Gerin, F. Capoix, Daut, JeanLouis-François, Ferou, Cangé, L. Bazelais, Magloire Ambroise, J. Jques. Herne, Toussaint Brave, Yayou, Généraux de Brigade; Bonnet, F. Papalier, Morelly, Chevalier, Marion, Adjudans-Généraux; Magny, Roux, Chefs de Brigade; Chareron, B. Loret, Quené, Makajoux, Dupuy, Carbonne, Diaquoi aîné, Raphaël, Malet, Derenoncourt, Officiers de l’armée, et Boisrond Tonnerre, Seérétaire.

THE GENERAL IN CHIEF,

LE GÉNÉRAL EN CHEF,

T O T H E P E O P L E O F H AY T I

AU P E U P L E D ’ H AY T I .

France forever, to die rather than live under its dominion, and to fight for independence until their last breath.

CITIZENS,

CITOYENS,

I T is not enough to have expelled from your country the barbarians who have bloodied it for two centuries; it is not enough to have put an

C E n’est pas assez d’avoir expulsé de votre pays les barbares qui l’ont ensanglanté depuis deux siècles; ce n’est pas assez d’avoir mis un

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end to those resurgent factions that one after another mocked the phantom of liberty which france exposed to our eyes; it is necessary by a last act of national authority, to forever ensure the empire of liberty in the country that gave us birth; we must seize from the inhuman government that has for a long time kept us in the most humiliating torpor, all hope of re-enslaving us; we must then live independent or die. Independence, or death...... let these sacred words unite us, and let them be the signal of battle, and of our reunion. Citizens, my Countrymen, I have assembled on this solemn day those courageous soldiers, who, as liberty lay dying, have spilled their blood to save her; these Generals who have guided your efforts against tyranny, have not yet done enough for your happiness..... the French name still haunts our country. Everything here recalls the memory of the cruelties of those barbarous people; our laws, our manners, our towns, everything still carries the imprint of the French; what do I say, there are Frenchmen in our Island, and yet you think you are free and independent of that Republic which fought every other nation, it is true; but which has never vanquished those who are determined to be free. What! victims for fourteen years of our credulity and indulgence; vanquished, not by French armies,

frein aux factions toujours renaissantes qui se jouaient tour-à-tour du fantôme de liberté que la france exposait à vos yeux; il faut par un dernier acte d’autorité nationale, assurer à jamais l’empire de la liberté dans le pays qui nous a vu naître; il faut ravir au gouvernement inhumain qui tient depuis longtems nos esprits dans la torpeur la plus humiliante, tout espoir de nous réasservir; il faut enfin vivre indépendans ou mourir. Indépendance, ou la mort…… que ces mots sacrés nous rallient, et qu’ils soient le signal des combats et de notre réunion. Citoyens, mes Compatriotes, j’ai rassemblé dans ce jour solemnel ces militaires courageux, qui, à la veille de recueillir les derniers soupirs de la liberté, ont prodigué leur sang pour la sauver; ces Généraux qui ont guidé vos efforts contre la tyrannie, n’ont point encore assez fait pour votre bonheur….. le nom français lugubre encore nos contrées. Tout y retrace le souvenir des cruautés de ce peuple barbare; nos lois, nos mœurs, nos villes, tout encore porte l’empreinte française; que dis-je, il existe des français dans notre Isle, et vous vous croyez libres et indépendans de cette République qui a combattu toutes les nations, il est vrai; mais qui n’a jamais vaincu celles qui ont voulu être libres.

Eh quoi! victimes pendant quatorze ans de notre crédulité et de notre indulgence; vaincus, non

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but by the misleading eloquence of their agents’ proclamations; when will we be tired of breathing the same air as they do? What do we have in common with these executioners? Their cruelty compared to our patient moderation; their color with ours, the vast expanse of the seas that separate us, our avenging climate, all tell us that they are not our brothers, that they will never be, and that if they find asylum among us, they will again be the instigators of our troubles and our divisions.

Native Citizens, men, women, girls and children, cast your gaze on every part of this Island, look for your wives, your husbands, your brothers, and your sisters; what do I say, look for your children, your suckling babies? What has become of them...... I shudder to say it...... the prey of these vultures. Instead of these precious victims, your saddened eye only sees their assassins; these tigers still covered with their blood, and whose atrocious presence reproaches your insensitivity and your culpable slowness in avenging them. What are you waiting for before appeasing their spirits; remember that you want your remains to rest near those of your fathers, when you have driven tyranny out; will you descend into their tombs without having avenged them? No, their bones would repulse yours. And you precious men, intrepid

par des armées françaises, mais par la pipeuse éloquence des proclamations de leurs agens; quand nous lasserons-nous de respirer le même air qu’eux? Qu’avons-nous de commun avec ce peuple bourreau? Sa cruauté comparée à notre patiente modération; sa couleur à la nôtre, l’étendue des mers qui nous séparent, notre climat vengeur nous disent assez qu’ils ne sont pas nos frères, qu’ils ne le deviendront jamais, et que s’ils trouvent un asile parmi nous, ils seront encore les machinateurs de nos troubles et de nos divisions. Citoyens Indigènes, hommes, femmes, filles et enfans, portés vos regards sur toutes les parties de cette Isle, cherchez-y, vous vos épouses, vous vos maris, vous vos frères, vous vos sœurs; que dis-je, cherchez-y vos enfans, vos enfans à la mamelle? Que sont-ils devenus…… Je frémis de le dire…… la proie de ces vautours. Au lieu de ces victimes intéressantes, votre œil consterné n’apperçoit que leurs assassins; que les tigres dégouttant encore de leur sang, et dont l’affreuse présence vous reproche votre insensibilité et votre coupable lenteur à les venger. Qu’attendezvous pour appaiser leurs mânes; songez que vous avez voulu que vos restes reposassent auprès de ceux de vos pères, quand vous avez chassé la tyrannie; descendrez-vous dans leur tombes, sans les avoir vengés? Non, leur ossemens repousseraient les vôtres. Et vous hommes précieux,

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Generals who, without concern for your own misfortunes, have resuscitated liberty by giving her all your blood; know that you have accomplished nothing, unless you give to the nations a terrible, but just, example of the vengeance that must be wrought by a nation proud of having recovered its liberty, and jealous of maintaining it; let us frighten all those who would dare to try to take it from us again: let us begin with the French........ Let them shudder when they approach our coasts, if not from the memory of the cruelties they perpetrated there, then by the terrible resolution that we shall enter into of putting to death, anyone who is born French, and who would soil with their sacrilegious foot the territory of liberty. We have dared to be free, let us dare to be so by ourselves and for ourselves; let us imitate the growing child: his own weight breaks the bassinet that has become useless to him and that shackles him in his march. What people fought for us? What nation would reap the fruits of our labors? And what dishonorable absurdity it would be to vanquish to become slaves. Slaves!... let us leave that epithet to the French; they have won, only to lose their freedom. Let us walk in other footsteps, let us imitate those nations who, carrying their solicitude all the way to the future and not willing to leave an example of cowardice for posterity, have preferred to be exterminated rather than to lose their place on the list of free nations.

Généraux intrépides qui, insensibles à vos propres malheurs, avez ressuscité la liberté en lui prodiguant tout votre sang; sachez que vous n’avez rien fait, si vous ne donnez aux nations un exemple terrible, mais juste, de la vengeance que doit exercer un peuple fier d’avoir recouvré sa liberté, et jaloux de la maintenir; effrayons tous ceux qui oseraient tenter de nous la ravir encore: commençons par les français……. Qu’ils frémissent en abordant nos côtes, sinon par le souvenir des cruautés qu’ils y ont exercées, au moins par la résolution terrible que nous allons prendre de dévouer à la mort, quiconque né français, souillerait de son pied sacrilége le territoire de la liberté. Nous avons osé être libres, osons l’être par nous-mêmes et pour nous-mêmes; imitons l’enfant qui grandit: son propre poids brise la lisière qui lui devient inutile et l’entrave dans sa marche. Quel peuple a combattu pour nous! quel peuple voudrait recueillir les fruits de nos travaux? Et quelle déshonorante absurdité que de vaincre pour être esclaves. Esclaves!... laissons aux français cette épithète qualificative; ils ont vaincu pour cesser d’être libres. Marchons sur d’autres traces, imitons ces peuples qui, portant leurs sollicitudes jusques sur l’avenir et appréhendant de laisser à la postérité l’exemple de la lâcheté, ont préférés être exterminés que rayés du nombre des peuples libres.

244APPENDIX

Let us ensure however that a proselytizing spirit does not destroy our work; let our neighbors breathe in peace, let them live quietly under the aegis of the laws that they have made for themselves, and let us not go, as revolutionary firebrands proclaiming ourselves legislators of the Antilles, seek glory by disturbing the tranquility of the neighboring Islands; they have not, like the one that we inhabit, been drenched with the innocent blood of their inhabitants; they have no vengeance to claim from the authority that protects them. Fortunate to have never known the scourges that have destroyed us; they can only wish for our welfare. Peace to our neighbors, but anathema to the French name, eternal hatred to france: that is our cry. Natives of Hayti! My happy destiny was to be one day the sentinel who is to guard the idol to which you sacrifice: I have stood guard, fought, sometimes alone; and if I have been so fortunate to deliver to you the sacred charge you entrusted to my care, remember that it is now your turn to preserve it. In fighting for your liberty, I labored towards my own happiness. Before consolidating it by laws that ensure your individual liberty, your Chiefs, whom I am assembling here, and I, owe you the last proof of our devotion.

Generals, and you Chiefs, gathered here with me for the happiness

Gardons-nous cependant que l’esprit de prosélitisme ne détruise notre ouvrage; laissons en paix respirer nos voisins, qu’ils vivent paisiblement sous l’égide des lois qu’ils se sont faites, et n’allons pas, boutes-feu révolutionnaires, nous érigeant en législateur des Antilles, faire consister notre gloire à troubler le repos des Isles qui nous avoisinent; elles n’ont point, comme celles que nous habitons, été arrosées du sang innocent de leurs habitans; ils n’ont point de vengeance à exercer contre l’autorité qui les protège. Heureuses de n’avoir jamais connu les fléaux qui nous ont détruit; elles ne peuvent que faire des vœux pour notre prospérité. Paix à nos voisins, mais anathême au nom français, haine éternelle à la france: voilà notre cri. Indigènes d’Hayti! mon heureuse destinée me réservait à être un jour la sentinelle qui dût veiller à la garde de l’idole à laquelle vous sacrifiez: j’ai veillé, combattu, quelquefois seul; et si j’ai été assez heureux que de remettre en vos mains le dépôt sacré que vous m’avez confié, songez que c’est à vous maintenant à le conserver. En combattant pour votre liberté j’ai travaillé à mon propre bonheur. Avant de la consolider par des lois qui assurent votre libre individualité, vos Chefs, que j’assemble ici, et moimême nous vous devons la dernière preuve de notre dévouement. Généraux, et vous Chefs, réunis ici près de moi pour le bonheur de

APPENDIX245

of our country, the day has arrived, this day will eternalize our glory, our independence. Should a cool heart be amongst you, let him draw back, and tremble at the thought of pronouncing the oath that is to unite us.

notre pays, le jour est arrivé, ce jour qui doit éterniser notre gloire, notre indépendance. S’il pouvait exister parmi nous un cœur tiède, qu’il s’éloigne et tremble de prononcer le serment qui doit nous unir.

Let us swear before the whole universe, to posterity, to ourselves to renounce France forever, and to die rather than live under its dominion.

Jurons à l’univers entier, à la postérité, à nous-mêmes de renoncer à jamais à la france, et de mourir plutôt que de vivre sous sa domination.

To fight until our last breath for the independence of our country.

De combattre jusqu’au dernier soupir pour l’indépendance de notre pays.

And you, people who have too long been unfortunate, witness the oath that we are taking, remember that I have counted on your fidelity and courage when I entered the pursuit of liberty to fight the despotism and the tyranny against which you had struggled for fourteen years; remember that I have sacrificed everything to fly to your defense, parents, children, fortune, and now I am rich only in your liberty; that my name has become a horror to all those who want slavery, and that despots and tyrants never utter it unless to curse the day that I was born; and if you ever rejected or grumbled while receiving the laws that the spirit that watches over your destiny dictates to me for your happiness, you would deserve the fate of ungrateful peoples.

Et toi, peuple trop long-tems infortuné, témoin du serment que nous prononçons, souviens toi que c’est sur ta constance et ton courage que j’ai compté quand je me suis lancé dans la carrière de la liberté pour y combattre le despotisme et la tyrannie contre lesquels tu luttais depuis quatorze ans; rapelle-toi que j’ai tout sacrifié pour voler à ta défense, parens, enfans, fortune, et que maintenant je ne suis riche que de ta liberté; que mon nom est devenu en horreur à tous les peuples qui veulent l’esclavage, et que les despotes et les tyrans ne le prononcent qu’en maudissant le jour qui m’a vu naître; et si jamais tu refusais ou recevais en murmurant les lois que le génie qui veille à tes destins me dictera pour ton bonheur, tu mériterais le sort des peuples ingrats. Mais loin de moi cette affreuse idée; tu seras le soutien de la liberté

But I reject this shocking idea; you will be the support of the liberty

246APPENDIX

you cherish, the support of the chief who commands you. Take then before him the oath of living free and independent, and to prefer death to anything that will try to place you back under the yoke. Swear at last, to pursue forever the traitors and the enemies of your independence.

que tu chéris, l’appui du Chef qui te commande. Prête donc entre ses mains le serment de vivre libre et indépendant, et de préférer la mort à tout ce qui tendrait à te remettre sous le joug. Jure enfin, de poursuivre à jamais les traîtres et les ennemis de ton indépendance.

D O N E at the Headquarters at Gonaïves, the first January, eighteen hundred and four, the first year of independence,

F A I T au Quartier-général des Gonaïves, le premier Janvier, mil huit cent quatre, l’An premier de l’Indépendance,

Signed, J . J . D E S S A L I N E S .

Signé, J . J . D E S S A L I N E S .

IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE

AU N O M D U P E U P L E

O F H AY T I .

D ’ H AY T I .

W E the Generals in Chief of the Armies of the Island of Hayti, penetrated with gratitude for the benefits guaranteed by the General in Chief, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the protector of the liberty which the nation enjoys. In the name of liberty, in the name of independence, in the name of the people he has made happy, we proclaim him Governor-General, for life, of Hayti; we swear to blindly obey the Laws issued by his authority, the only one we acknowledge: we give him power to make peace, war, and to name his successor.

N O U S Généraux en Chefs des Armées de l’Isle d’Hayti, pénétrés de reconnaissance des bienfaits que nous avons éprouvés du Général en Chef, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, le protecteur de la liberté dont jouit le peuple. Au nom de la liberté, au nom de l’indépendance, au nom du peuple qu’il a rendu heureux, nous le proclamons Gouverneur-Général, à vie, d’Hayti; nous jurons d’obéir aveuglement aux Lois émanées de son autorité, la seule que nous reconnaîtrons: nous lui donnons le droit de faire la paix, la guerre et de nommer son successeur.

Done at the Headquarters of Gonaïves, this 1st. of January 1804, and the 1st. day of independence

Fait au Quartier-Général des Gonaïves, ce 1er. Janvier 1804, et le 1er. jour de l’indépendance.

APPENDIX247

Signed, Gabart, P. Romain, J. Herne, Capoix, Christophe, Geffrard, E. G[é]rin, Vernet, Pétion, Clervaux, Jean-Louis-Francois, Cangé, F[é]rou, Yayou, Touissant Brave, Magloire Ambroise, Louis Bazelais.

Signés, Gabart, P. Romain, J. Herne, Capoix, Christophe, Geffrard, E. Gerin, Vernet, Pétion, Clervaux, Jean-Louis-François, Cangé, Ferou, Yayou, Toussaint Brave, Magloire Ambroise, Louis Bazelais.

AT P O R T - AU - P R I N C E , F R O M T H E

AU P O R T - AU - P R I N C E , D E L’ I M -

GOVERNMENT PRINTING PRESS.

P R I M E R I E D U G O U V E R N E M E N T.

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Contributors

DAVID ARMITAGE is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. Among his fourteen books to date are The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2008), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (coedited with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 2010), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013), and The History Manifesto (coauthored with Jo Guldi, 2014). JEAN CASIMIR teaches at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the State University

of Haiti, including courses on culture and society of Haiti and the Caribbean. He previously served with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and represented his country as ambassador to the United States and the Organization of American States. Among his published books are La cultura oprimida (1980), which received the Jean-Price Mars award of the Faculty of Ethnology, State University of Haiti; La Caraïbe, une et divisible (1991); Haití, acuérdate de 1804 (2007); Haïti et ses élites, un interminable dialogue de sourds (2009); and Haití de mis amores (2012). LAURENT DUBOIS is the Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and His-

tory at Duke University. He is the author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012). He is currently working on a history of the banjo in the Atlantic World. JULIA GAFFIELD is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University. She is the author of “Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early NineteenthCentury Atlantic World,” (William and Mary Quarterly, 2012) and Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution (2015). JOHN GARRIGUS is Associate Professor of History and advisor for the Trans-

Atlantic History PhD Program at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in Saint-Domingue (2006), which won the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. He coedited, with Laurent Dubois, a collection of primary sources on the Haitian Rev-

268CONTRIBUTORS

olution entitled Slave Revolution in the Caribbean (2006). He is currently working on a comparative study of Saint-Domingue and Jamaica with Trevor Burnard of the University of Melbourne. DAVID GEGGUS is Professor of History at the University of Florida, Gainesville. His books include Slavery, War and Revolution (1982), Haitian Revolutionary Studies (2002), and, most recently, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (2014). MALICK W. GHACHEM is Associate Professor of History at MIT and the author of The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (2012). PHILIPPE GIRARD is the author of two books on the Haitian Revolution. The

first, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon (2011), retraced the Haitian war of independence. The second was a critical edition of Toussaint Louverture’s memoir (2014). He is Professor of History and Department Head at McNeese State University. He is working on a biography of Toussaint Louverture. DEBORAH JENSON is Professor of Romance Studies and Global Health and

Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, where she also codirects initiatives including the “Brain and Society” theme of Bass Connections and the Duke Neurohumanities in Paris global education program. Her publications include Yale French Studies, No. 107: The Haiti Issue (2005), Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (2011), Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (with Warwick Anderson and Richard C. Keller, 2011), and Poetry of Haitian Independence (with Doris Kadish, 2015). JEREMY D. POPKIN is the William T. Bryan Chair of History at the University

of Kentucky. His publications on the Haitian Revolution include Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (2007), You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (2010), and A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution (2012). PATRICK TARDIEU is the Information Science Specialist Curator at the Biblio-

thèque Haitienne des Pères du Saint-Esprit. ERIN ZAVITZ is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy,

and Social Science at the University of Montana Western. Her research has received support from the Dan David Foundation’s Young Scholars Fellowship and the Chateaubriand Humanities and Social Sciences Fellowship among others. She is the author of “Encountering Creole Genesis in the Haitian Press: Massillon Coicou’s Fin-de-Siècle Feuilleton ‘La Noire,’ ” in La Española: Isla de Encuentros (edited by Hanna Greiger, Jessica Barzen, and Silke Jansen, 2015).

Index

Abercrombie, Thomas, 233n8 abolition of slavery, 99–100, 102–3, 105, 112, 141, 144, 148–49, 152n13, 184; in French Empire, 26, 112n11, 127, 142, 193; in Saint-Domingue, 4–5, 26, 29–30, 67, 104, 108, 124, 187, 194–95 Abomey, 205 Abrantès, Laure Junot d’, 74–75 Abricots, 197 acculturation, 189 Achilles, 76 Adams, John, 143 Adams, John Quincy, 173–74, 180n47, 180n51 Africa, and people of African descent, ix, 2, 17n4, 18n6, 26–27, 38n13, 45, 59, 67, 77–79, 81–82, 88, 88n1, 91n43, 106, 129, 137, 140, 143, 146, 165, 184, 189–90, 195, 199, 201, 206, 207–12, 214–15, 221, 222, 226 Agamben, Giorgio, 106 Age of Revolution, ix–x, 7, 9, 17, 21n35, 25–26, 98, 109, 111, 112n6, 151 Aimé, B., 34 Alaux, Gustave d’, 86 Albany (ship), 175 Albany Register, 166 Alexis, Nord, 230–32 Álvarez, Benita Rodríguez, 1 American Declaration of Independence. See under United States American occupation of Haiti, 8 American Revolution. See United States Amis des noirs, 50, 86

Ancien Régime, 182, 194 anciens libres, 39n37, 224 anthropology, 72, 80, 82, 85–86, 207 Aponte, José Antonio, 147 Aquin, 45, 47, 49–50, 52, 57n54 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 80 archives, vii, 7, 10, 12, 37n7, 62, 65–66, 139, 203–4, 239 Ardouin, Beaubrun, 6–7, 10, 28, 33–35, 42–43, 55n7, 59, 63–64, 116, 121, 123, 127–128, 134n24, 134n28, 143, 194, 225–26, 234n18 Aristotle, 76 Armée Indigène, 9, 11–12, 26, 34, 58– 59, 161, 197, 222 Armitage, David, viii, ix, xi, 101, 104, 112n3, 122 Armstrong, Andrew, 174 armies, 4, 81; Dessalines’s, 12, 26, 50, 66, 72, 146, 161; French, 4–5, 27, 32, 35, 53, 66, 118, 127, 161, 187, 194; evacuation of French, 5, 34, 58–59, 118, 184; Haitian, 11, 63, 150, 221, 228, 230; Louverture’s, 50, 142, 145; rebel, 145, 168, 221. See also Armée Indigène Artibonite, 127, 208, 210, 222 Artigas, José Gervasio, 172 assimilation, 186. See also acculturation associated statehood, 29 Association de Généalogie d’Haïti, 57n40 asylum, 99, 105, 119, 148, 156n81 Atlantic Ocean, viii, 48, 51, 60, 66, 210, 212–14

270INDEX

Atlantic revolutions. See Age of Revolution Atlantic World, vii–viii, ix, xi, 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12, 16–17, 25–26, 36, 61, 66, 97–100, 103–5, 108–11, 129, 137, 147, 151, 164, 172, 174, 176 audience, 14, 21n43, 26, 31, 74, 104, 120, 136, 173, 221–23, 233n12 Auerbach, Erich, 80 Auguste, Claude, 7 Auguste, Marcel, 7 Aurora General Advertiser (Philadelphia), 166 Austrian Empire, 9 authoritarianism, 30, 98, 103, 109–11, 196, 203, 220, 222 authorship (of the Haitian Declaration of Independence), 13, 26–29, 42, 53–54, 64–65, 72–73, 76, 85, 116, 121–23, 130, 219 Ávila, Martín, 1 Badi, Azo, 205 Baltimore, 161, 171, 174–75 Banda Oriental, 172 Barbados, 146, 188 Barsalou, Lawrence, 79–80 Barstow, Eric, 205, 217n16 Barthes, Roland, 75 Bastille, 193 Battle of Vertières, 231 Beauvoir, Max, 208 Bellegarde, Dantès, 230 Benot, Yves, 29 Benton, Lauren, 172, 176, 179n40 Bergeaud, Émile, 128 Besse, Martial, 143 Biassou, Georges, 126 Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Pères du Saint-Esprit, 207 Bilby, Kenneth, 204 Bissainthe, Max, 64 Blackburn, Robin, 33–34, 40n47, 116 Blake, William, 78–79, 81, 87 blood, 1, 5, 16, 28, 31–32, 39n37, 42, 65, 73–74, 76–77, 118, 121, 123–26, 128–29, 138 Boca Nigua (Dominican Republic), 140

Boileau, Nicolas, 83 Bois Caïman, 3, 18n7, 101 Boisron, Marie Catherine, 44–45 Boisrond, Claude, 47 Boisrond, François, 45–47 Boisrond, Laurent, 50 Boisrond, Louis-François, 49–50 Boisrond, Marie Adelaide, 47 Boisrond, Marie Françoise, 47 Boisrond, Mathurin, 43, 47 Boisrond-Tonnerre, Louis Félix, 41n48, 42–57; naming of, 43, 48; Mémoires, 21n3, 42–43, 51–53, 232n3 Boissé, Marie Rose, 47 Bolívar, Simón, 32, 66, 99, 105, 149, 151 Bonaparte, Napoléon, viii, 4, 26, 29– 30, 32, 52, 66, 77, 101, 107, 129, 138, 141–42, 145, 150, 184, 194, 201 Bonnet, Guy-Joseph, 116, 121, 125, 133n4, 235n34 Bombay, viii, 12 bossale, 67, 106, 187. See also Africa, and people of African descent Boston, 166 Boukman, 3 Bourbonne-les-Bains, 115 Boury, Jacques, 46 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 33, 148–49, 151, 173– 74, 226, 234n24 Brandom, Eric, 135n52 Braquehais, Pierre, 47 Brière, Jean-François, 170 brigands, 118, 166 Brissot, Jean-Pierre, 140, 142 broadside printing, vii, 11–12, 20n29, 37n7, 62, 65, 201 Broca, Paul, 82, 85–86, 90n31, 91n43 Brown, Gordon S., 162, 174 Brown, Karen McCarthy, 204, 206 Buck-Morss, Susan, 131 Bullet, Jeannot, 126 Bureau des Domaines, 50 Bureau National d’Ethnologie (Haiti), 217n24 Cangé, Pierre, 53 Cap Français. See Cap Haïtien Cap Haïtien, 1, 5, 39n39, 40n39, 43, 49,

INDEX271

52, 60, 62–63, 112n1, 118–119, 126, 173, 212, 222–23, 227 Cap Henry. See Cap Haïtien capitalism, 188, 193 Capois-la-Mort, François (also Capoixla-Mort), 223 caporalisme agraire (agrarian authoritarianism), 188, 196 captives, 2, 61, 148, 181–82, 186–87, 189–92, 195–96, 198 Cartagena, 141, 147 Casimir, Jean, 2–3, 15, 202–3 Catling, J., 164 Cauna, Jacques de, 6 Cavaillon, 47, 52 Célius, Carlo, 221–22, 229 Chanlatte, François Desrivières, 150 Chanlatte, Juste, 28, 39n37, 41n48, 123–24 Charéron, Jean-Jacques, 33, 41n48, 64–65, 121 Charleston, South Carolina, 140, 147, 166 Chavannes, Jean-Baptiste, 118 Chazotte, Peter Stephen, 124–25 children, 32, 34, 40n39, 43, 45–49, 50, 52–53, 58–59, 67, 73–74, 83, 116, 119–20, 124, 133n9, 192, 228–29 Chirinos, José Leonardo, 141 Christophe, Henry, 5, 30, 35, 41n54, 41n57, 59–60, 86–87, 88n5, 121, 125, 148, 150–51, 170–75, 222–23; as monarch, 106, 173, 180n45 citizens, 193; active, 182; French, 2–3, 166, 195; Haitian, 2, 33, 62–63, 73, 76, 117, 120, 127–28, 221–22, 227; passive, 182; United States, 171, 174–75 citizenship, 2–4, 30, 148–49, 183, 222 City Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Charleston), 166 civil war: in Haiti (1806–20), 106, 148, 173, 180n46; in Haiti (1902), 230; in Saint-Domingue (1799–1800), 29, 34, 50, 122, 124, 143, 224, 226; in the United States (1861–65), 176; Vattel’s analysis of, 168 Clark v. the United States (1809), 167, 169–70

Clervaux, Augustin, 5, 35, 41n54, 41n57, 59–60, 88n5, 121 Coal, Clement, 175 cocoa, 163 Code civil (France), 107 Code Henry (1812), 204 Code noir, 107, 110, 124, 183, 186, 193, 195 coffee, 2, 4, 47, 55–56n21, 161, 163, 171 cognitive linguistics, 13, 75, 79 Coicou, Massillon, 230, 236n60, 236n67 colonialism, viii, 1–4, 8–9, 25–26, 28–30, 40n46, 44–46, 48–52, 54, 57n48, 61, 66, 72–73, 75, 78–79, 85, 90n33, 91n43, 97, 99, 101–2, 104–8, 112n11, 116–19, 124, 126–27, 129, 131, 137–43, 144–50, 165, 167–70, 181–88, 190–95, 197–98, 203, 205, 212, 215, 221, 227 colonists, 3, 14, 25, 28–29, 31, 33, 35–36, 44–45, 49, 54, 55n7, 73, 81, 88, 120, 122, 124, 126–27, 129–30, 134n32, 181, 186, 197 Conseil des Notables (SaintDomingue), 62 Continental Congress, 104 commemorations of independence, 219–32, 232n3, 234n18 commerce, 51, 108, 163, 169, 197 Congo, 210–11, 214; kingdom of, 2 Congo River, 2 constitutions, 199, 224; 1787, of the United States, 102; 1795, of France, 112n11; 1801, of Saint-Domingue, 4, 30, 66, 100–102, 104, 107, 109, 145–46, 168, 182, 184; 1805, of Haiti, 72, 104, 109, 146, 168, 223, 227; 1806, of Haiti, 148; 1807, of Haiti, 148; 1816 revision, of Haiti, 148–49; 1846, of Haiti, 228 consuls, 7; American, 180n51 Corbet, Edward, 64 Coro revolt, 141 Council of Five Hundred (France), 43, 49 counter-plantation system, 3, 190–91, 203–4

272INDEX

courts, 168, 203; Circuit Court of Pennsylvania, 167, 170; claims cases by merchants against the Haitian government, 171–76; colonial, 44; District Court of Eastern Pennsylvania, 167; prize, 167; US, 164, 167–68, 170 creole, 26, 53–54, 67, 106, 141, 210–11; creolization, 197, 214; languages, 33, 202, 209. See also Krèyol/Creole Cri des colons (1810), 86 Croix-des-Bouquets, 81 Cuba, 145, 147–48, 150, 164, 197; governor of, 5; slave conspiracies, 39, 140 cultivators (cultivateurs), 4, 49, 104, 144, 146, 182, 184, 193 Curaçao, 141, 143, 151 Dahomey, 205 Danticat, Edwidge, 95 Danton, Georges, 142 Daut, Marlene, 161–62, 170, 180n45 Davies, Henry, 175 Davis, David Brion, 102 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 97 Dayan, Colin (Joan), 207, 226 dechoukaj, 28 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), 3, 102, 112n11, 151. See also rights decolonization, 26, 30, 91n43, 146 de facto independence, 15, 29, 101, 128, 221–22 Défilée (Haitian woman), 225 Dehaene, Stanislas, 90n33 Dehoux, J. B., 85 de jure independence, 15, 29 De la gérontocratie en Haïti, 87 democracy, 17, 25, 30–31, 110, 137, 226 Desai, Rutavik, 84 Descoubes, Alexis, 47 Descourtilz, Michel-Etienne, 88n1, 134n21, 135n36, 210 Deslondes, Charles, 147 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, vii, 4–5, 9, 11–16, 26–35, 37n9, 38n22, 39n37, 40n44, 40n47, 41n54, 42, 44, 50,

52–53, 55n7, 59–66, 72–76, 78, 80, 82, 85–87, 88n5, 90n33, 95–101, 104–11, 113n25, 115–16, 118–25, 127–31, 132n4, 134n24, 134n28, 136–39, 145–51, 152n13, 156n68, 161, 164, 166, 168, 173–74, 180n46, 194, 201–3, 205–10, 219–32, 232n3, 233n12; assassination, 31, 148, 224–25, 228, 231–32, 232n3, 234n16; children, 228; as emperor, 1, 30–31, 88n5, 119, 146, 164, 206, 208, 222–29; as governor general, 11–12, 26, 30, 64, 125, 219–20, 232n2; as lwa, 16, 205–6, 225 Dessalines, Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité Bonheur, 125, 164–65, 223, 227 Dévot, Justin, 230 Diaquoi (or Diakwé), General, 125 Diaz, Michele, 84 dictatorships, 8–9, 30, 109, 117, 125, 130–31, 234n16 Dictionnaire de bibliographie haïtienne, 64 Diderot, Denis, 123–24, 129, 134 dignity, 5, 121, 175, 190 diplomacy, 14, 42, 64, 145–46, 150, 161–62, 166–67, 169–72, 175–77, 229 discrimination, 2, 48, 100, 113, 182 Domage (cousin of Dessalines), 125 Drescher, Seymour, 150 drums, 81, 206, 222 Dubois, Laurent, 3, 6, 16, 25, 116, 132n4 Dufay, Louis, 115 Duke University, 76–77, 202, 205, 218n28 Duvalier dictatorships, 8, 112, 130 earthquake, 8, 10 education, 13, 28, 41, 44, 48, 51, 53, 64, 73, 77, 85, 87, 90n33, 112n1, 117, 121, 124, 164, 185, 188–89, 191, 221 Egerton, Douglas, 143, 154n46 Ely, William, 164–65 emancipation, 29, 103, 140–42, 144, 146, 153n19, 182–87, 193, 195–96. See also abolition Embargo Act (1807), 167

INDEX273

emergency law, 106–9, 121 Enlightenment, 12, 25, 97, 129 enslaved people, 2–4, 15, 26–27, 29–30, 34, 39n37, 45–47, 49, 52, 66, 76–77, 82, 88, 99, 102–3, 106, 117–18, 127, 131, 137, 139–42, 144–50, 166, 176, 181–89, 192–93, 195, 197–98, 201, 203, 210, 212, 214–15, 221, 224, 228. See also captives equality, 9, 74, 102–3, 113n24, 166, 185, 194; legal, 103, 108, 185; racial, 26, 29, 31, 50, 72, 86, 149 ethnicity, 86, 131, 183, 186, 189–91, 198 Eurocentrism, 86, 181, 195, 197–98 Europe, 2, 4, 5, 7, 17, 26, 28, 33, 47, 51, 66, 72, 74, 77, 118, 123, 128, 130, 139–40, 142–43, 151, 184–85, 187–88, 199, 202, 220 Estates General, France, 49 Estimé, Dorsainville, 205, 216n16 evacuation of French army, 5, 35, 40n39, 59, 161, 168 Félix, Marie Louise, 47 Ferrand, Jean-Louis, 77, 89n16, 119, 168 Ferrer, Ada, 105, 139–40, 148 Feuille du Commerce, 220 Fick, Carolyn, 6 Firmin, Joseph Anténor, 72, 85–86, 230, 236n67 Fischer, Sybille, 25 flag, 66, 231 Flemish estates, 9 Floridas, 166 forgeries, 38n19 Fort-Dauphin (now Fort-Liberté), 60, 119, 127, 135n35 Fouchard, Jean, 63 France, viii, 1–5, 11–12, 14, 16, 26, 28–34, 40n44, 40n46, 41n48, 42–44, 48– 51, 52–54, 56n29, 57n48, 67, 73–74, 76–77, 81–82, 86, 97–101, 102, 105, 107–8, 110, 115, 118–19, 121, 127–31, 132n1, 134n21, 136, 138, 140, 142–45, 147, 148, 150, 154n46, 161–62, 164– 65, 167–71, 177, 181–82, 184, 187, 191, 193–95, 198–99, 207, 210, 218n27, 222–23, 226, 227, 229, 235n42;

and abolition, 140–41; army of, 4–5, 26–27, 29, 32, 34–35, 41n57, 52–53, 59, 66, 72, 96–97, 118–19, 122, 127, 146, 148, 161, 168, 184; authority of, viii, 4, 73, 120, 168, 223; citizens of, 2, 166; and citizenship, 2; and colonialism, 44–45, 50, 107, 141–42, 221; colonists of, 3, 6, 44, 54–55, 129, 138, 181, 197; colonies of, viii, 26, 30, 63, 101, 112n11, 138, 144, 152, 169–70, 185, 195; commissioners of, 3, 49, 126, 142–43, 201; culture of, 51; documents of, 11, 43; and education, 28, 48, 64; Empire of, 1, 4–5, 101, 167, 170; government of, 4, 54, 127, 142, 144, 150, 164, 166–67, 202, 229; language of, 12, 14, 26–27, 33, 37n7, 43, 76–77, 97, 107–8, 114n35, 121–22, 133n7, 136–37, 201–2, 219, 220–21, 233n4, 233n12; laws of, 44, 101–2, 107, 112n11, 141, 145, 150, 186; monarchy of, 141; National Convention, 115; navy of, 180n45; planters from, 185, 224; privateers from, 164; recognition of Haiti, 16, 226; refugees from, 141; Republic, 3, 26, 29; Revolution, vii, 8, 17, 25, 30, 44, 49, 74, 97–98, 100, 111, 112n6, 117, 122–23, 126, 129–30, 137, 140–41, 143, 151, 182–83, 193–94, 198, 222; slaveholders from, 27; troops of, 4, 25, 58, 127, 221; and violence, viii, 33, 52, 116, 219, 222, 224. See also war for independence freedom, 3–5, 14, 17, 30–33, 66, 76, 82, 99, 103, 110, 115–17, 127, 131, 137, 141, 148, 184, 186–89, 193–97, 203, 206, 222 free soil, 105, 148 Gaffield, Julia, 15, 37n7, 62, 64–65, 77, 88n5, 97, 104, 127, 147, 201 Gallant, Christine, 78 Gallatin, Albert, 15, 162 Gallese, Vittorio, 85 Garrigus, John, 6, 13 Gaston, Colonel, 125 Gautarel (soldier), 73

274INDEX

Gazette politique et commerciale d’Hayti, 222, 224–25, 234n29 Geffrard, Fabre, 229 Geffrard, Nicolas, 34, 52, 125 Geggus, David, 6–7, 13, 15, 42, 98, 137, 139, 233n10 Gelée, Claude-Charles, 44 genocide, 32–33, 54, 116, 132n5, 187 Genovese, Eugene, 137 George III (king), 119 Gérin, Étienne, 34 German Coast Uprising (1811), 147 Germantown (ship), 175 Ghachem, Malick, 17, 30, 37n11, 39n31, 121 Gilroy, Paul, 215 Girard, Philippe, 5, 15, 40n39, 116, 122, 130, 132 Gonaïves, 1, 9, 11, 25–26, 32, 60, 63–64, 95–97, 99, 104–6, 205, 219, 223, 228, 231 Gonzalez, Johnhenry, 177n3 Gould, Eliga, 21n43, 114n37 Gran Colombia, 65–66 Great Britain, 14, 16, 29, 40n39, 146, 187–88; abolition in, 193; Admiralty/ navy of, 12, 31, 65, 118, 146, 173; agents of, 11, 135n35, 145; and the American Revolution, 119; army of, 142; blockade of Saint-Domingue by, 5, 142; British Empire, 61, 64, 96, 101; consuls of, 229; newspapers of, 61, 69n13, 74; occupation of Martinique by, 147; occupation of Saint-Domingue by, 3, 26, 124, 140–41; slaveowners of, 148; and the slave trade, 143, 146; and trade, 40n44, 127; treaties with, 143. See also Jamaica; Trinidad Grégoire, Henri (Abbé), 199 Grito de Dolores (Mexico, 1810), 16 Grito de Iparanga (Brazil, 1822), 16 Gros, Gabriel, 126, 134n32 grounded cognition theory, 79–83 Guadeloupe, 142–43, 147, 151, 152n13, 188, 216 Guerrier, Philippe, 227, 228 Guha, Ranajit, 203

Guiana, 152n13 Guinen, 210 Haiti as member of a community of nations/sovereign state, 5, 108, 162, 164, 176 Haitian exceptionalism, 8, 98, 103 Haitian revolution of 1843, 226–27 handwritten copies, vii, 12–13, 77, 201, 202 Happy Couple (ship), 163 Harnet (ship), 173 head of state, 109, 172, 174, 220, 225, 227; Dessalines as, 12, 26, 29, 106, 120, 127, 180n46, 228 Hebblethwaite, Benjamin, 206, 216n5 Hébrard, Jean, 197 Hector, Michel, 61, 70n17 Hédouville, Gabriel d’, 143 Hérard, Charlemagne, 52 Hérard, Charles, 227 Hérard, Marie, 45, 57n54 Heurtelou, Elie, 229 Hogstrom, Larson, 84 holidays, 11, 34, 41n55, 88n5, 220–26, 228–29, 232, 233n12, 233n8 Holst-Knudsen, Heidi, 132n1 Homer, 76 Horner, Joseph P., 175 houmfou, 205 Hugues, Victor, 142–43, 88n5 Hymne Haytiène (1803), 14, 58, 65, 67n1 Hyppolite, Florvil, 230–31 Iacoboni, Marco, 80 Ibo (nation), 207 Ibo, Jean-Pierre, 206, 207–8 identity, 8, 33, 36, 51, 53–54, 100, 111, 130, 140, 151, 182–83, 186, 192, 221, 233n12 “I have Avenged America” speech. See proclamation of April 28, 1804 indemnity, 150, 171 indentured servants/laborers, 183, 188, 195, 215 Independence Day, 6, 32, 61, 220–21, 223, 226, 229, 234n24; bicentennial, 69n13; centennial, 62, 220, 229–32, 236n64; sesquicentennial, 62

INDEX275

Independence Hall (Philadelphia), 10 Indians/Amerindians, 33–34, 45 indigo, 45, 47 Indostan (ship), 166, 173 inequality, 17, 185 Inginac, Balthazar, 174, 180 isolation, 8, 42–43, 53, 66, 151, 161–62 Jacmel, 146, 173 Jacquesson, Henri, 48 Jacquesson, Pierre Simon, 48 Jamaica, 3, 5, 31, 37n7, 65, 105, 127, 141–43, 145–46, 148, 151; governor of, 5, 11–12, 64, 135n35, 143, 164 James, C. L. R., 6, 29, 40n44, 143 Janvier, Louis Joseph, 85 Jefferson, Thomas, viii, ix, 104–5, 151, 161, 166 Jenson, Deborah, 13–14, 21n35, 27–28, 34–35, 37n10, 42, 80, 116–17, 122, 146, 201, 216n5 Jérémie, 50, 124–25 Jérémie, Joseph, 231, 236n60 Johnson, Mark, 73, 75, 79, 82 Johnson, Michael P., 147 Jomini, Antoine-Henri de, 72 Josué, Erol, 208, 211, 217n24, 218n28, 218n30 Journal de Campagne, 65 Journal Officiel (Port-au-Prince), 64 justice, 5, 68n1, 97, 120, 123, 127–28, 194; injustice, 122, 171, 224, 231 Kaplan, Lynda, 1 Kane, Archibald, 162–65, 178n10 Kane, Elias, 162–64 Kane, James, 163, 178n10 Kane, Julie, 83, 87 Kerpoisson, 53 King, Rufus, 166 Kingdom of Congo, 2, 210, 214 Kosovo, 10 Kraay, Hendrik, 233n8 Krèyol/Creole, 33, 40n47, 124, 201–2, 204, 216 Labadie, Guillaume, 49 Lacey, Simon, 84, 87

Laforest, Pierre, 236n60 La Fossette, 119 Lakoff, George, 73, 75, 79 lakou, 192, 203, 205; Lakou Badjo, 205, 217n16 Lamoureux, Catherine, 49 landowners and landownership, 35, 53, 183, 186, 224 language and linguistics, 2, 12–15, 27, 32–33, 42, 53–54, 63, 72, 75, 79–80, 82–85, 87, 91n43, 101, 105–7, 109–10, 113n24, 116, 121–22, 124–25, 136, 190, 202–4, 219, 221–222, 226, 233n4. See also cognitive linguistics; France, language of; Krèyol Lartigue, Arnaud André Roberjot, 147 L’Association du Centenaire de l’Indépendance Nationale, 230–31 Latin America, 6, 9, 17, 30, 66, 98, 105, 111, 112n6, 151, 220, 236n61 Laurent, Gérard Mentor, 7, 38n19, 60 law, 13, 39n31, 97, 99–100, 104–7, 109– 10, 113n11, 123, 149, 162, 167–70, 172, 185, 195, 199; Haiti, 11, 30–31, 59–60, 62–64, 99, 102, 104, 107, 120–21, 138, 148, 184, 204, 228; natural, 14, 108; of Saint-Domingue, 48, 98, 103, 108. See also Code civil; Code Henry; Code noir; emergency law; France, laws of; law of nations; United States law of nations, 15, 105, 123, 162, 164, 168, 171, 176 Leclerc, Charles, 4, 5, 32, 41n57, 118, 123, 202; expedition to Saint-Domingue (1802), 4, 29, 41n57, 52, 54, 66, 118, 125, 126–27, 145, 201 Les Cayes, 43–44, 47–49, 52, 228 Levasseur, Armand, 72 Lewis, Jacob, 166, 173–74, 180n46 Lhérisson, Justin, 230–31, 236n60 Lhérisson, L. C., 230, 236n60 Liberia, 16, 149, 177 liberty, 4–5, 13, 59, 66, 76, 103, 107–9, 120, 123, 137–38, 142, 144, 149, 210, 221, 224–25; general, 99, 102–4, 112n9, 144; individual, 99, 102–4, 108, 112n9 Lincoln, Abraham, 16, 177

276INDEX

Logan, Rayford, 161–62, 165, 173, 175, 180n47 London, vii, viii, 37n7, 65 longue durée, 212 Louis XVIII (king), 150 Louverture, Toussaint, 4, 27, 29–31, 35, 40n47, 50–51, 54, 66, 85–86, 98–104, 106–9, 110, 112n9, 122, 126–27, 139, 141–49, 151, 168, 184, 188, 196, 205, 208–10, 224, 231 Lundahl, Mats, 6 L’Union, 38n24, 64–65, 81, 229 lwa, 16, 205–6, 210, 212, 214, 225; Agwe, 206–7, 213–14; Ezili, 206; Danhi, 210; Lasirèn, 213–14; Loko Atisou, 206; Ogou, 206, 209, 225. See also Jean-Jacques Dessalines MacLeod, Murdo, 228 Maddow, Rachel, vii, viii, Madiou, Thomas, 6–7, 10–11, 26–28, 32–33, 35, 37n7, 38n22, 39n38, 42, 59–60, 63, 70, 116, 121, 127–28, 146, 181, 189, 194, 196, 219, 225, 232n3, 232n87 Madison, James, 164–65, 171 mahogany, 2, 161 Makandal, 206, 212 Mangonès, Edmond, 70n22 Manigat, Leslie, 32, 34, 61 Maracaibo, 141 Marcelin, Milo, 206 Marchand (Haiti), 222–23 maroons, 139, 148–49, 156n81, 183, 187, 192, 194 marriage, 44–45, 47–49, 163 Marseillaise, 58, 129 Martelly, Michel, 202 Martinique, 138, 147, 152n13, 188 massacres, 6, 9, 14, 32–33, 35, 39n39, 40n43, 41n48, 41n57, 43, 54–55, 107, 110, 115–19, 122, 124–31, 133n9, 138, 166, 224, 226. See also genocide Matthewson, Tim, 162, 166 McGilchrist, Iain, 87 memory (and memories), 10, 16–17, 28, 59, 66, 73, 77–78, 80, 99–100, 106, 119, 123, 128–29, 190, 192, 196, 212,

219–20, 222, 224–32, 232n3, 234n16 Mennesson-Rigaud, Odette, 207–8, 210 mercantilism, 162, 188, 191, 194–95 merchants, 2, 5, 52, 140, 143, 145, 161– 65, 167, 169–77, 178n10, 180n45, 228 metaphor, 2, 14, 27, 36, 72–76, 79–80, 82–85, 87, 204, 212 Mexico, 1, 16 Middle Passage. See slave trade military, 1, 9, 12, 26, 30, 52, 72–73, 75, 85, 88, 96, 102, 106, 110, 118, 120–22, 124–25, 127, 133n14, 140, 142, 146, 150, 153, 191, 203, 206, 220, 222–24 militias, 46 Miranda, Francisco de, 66, 140, 146, 156n68 modernity, 25, 198 Moïse, Claude, 103 monarchy, 2–3, 30, 106, 129, 207, 229. See also Christophe, Henry Moniteur Haïtien, Le (Port-au-Prince), 227–28 Morton, Washington, 166 Moyse rebellion (1801), 127, 135n35 mulâtre, 7, 41n54, 43, 53, 193, 197–98 Nago, 205–6, 214 naming (of Haiti/“Hayti”), 11, 33–34, 40n46, 60 National Archives (London), 7, 10, 12, 37n7, 62, 65, 88n5 National Archives (Washington, DC), 10 National Convention (France), 3, 112n11, 115, 142 National Guard, 118, 228 nationalism, 221 National Library of Jamaica, 135n35 national palace, 219, 228 Nau, Ignace, 80, 82 Nemours, Auguste, 7 Nérette (colonial officer), 52–53 Nesbitt, Nick, 25 Nessler, Graham, 145 neurobiology, 82, 87 neuroscience, 80, 84–87 New Granada, 32, 141

INDEX277

newspapers, vii, viii, 13, 21n35, 34, 61, 64, 74, 81, 136, 220–21, 228, 230–31 New York, 40, 161, 163–64, 166 New-York Historical Society, vii, ix, xi, 1 New York Times Magazine, 112n1 Nicholls, David, 220 noirisme, 228, 230–31, 235n47, 236n60 Non-Intercourse Act (1809), 167, 169–70 nonrecognition, 162, 170–72, 175–77 notary, 44–45, 48 Nouët, Jean-Claude, 132n1 nouveaux libres, 63, 224 November 29, 1803, declaration of independence (Saint-Domingue), 5–6, 10, 33–35, 58–62, 66, 88n5, 121, 136, 138, 195, 221 Normandy, 44 Nugent, George, 11, 64, 135n35 Ogden, Samuel G., 166 Ogé, Vincent, jeune, 44, 48, 55n8, 118 oligarchies, 181, 185, 188, 191, 194–95 Oliver, Robert, 174 oral history, 7–8, 15–16, 204, 225 O’Shaughnessy, Andrew, ix, xi ouanga, 190, 207 Panama Congress (1826), 66 Papillon, Jean-François, 140 Paris, 48–51, 65, 85, 117, 142 Payton, Claire, 205, 217n16 Peace of Basel (1795), 3, 144 peasants, 224, 235n47 Pedro I, Dom (of Brazil), 16 performance, 15, 58, 81, 136, 220–21, 226 Pétion, Alexandre, 41n50, 66, 99, 105– 6, 143, 148–51, 174, 194, 225, 227 Petit-Trou, 52 Philadelphia, viii, 61, 161, 175 Pichon, Louis André, 164, 166 Pierre, Jacques, 197, 202 Pierrot, Louis, 228–29 Pinto, Antonio, 140 piracy (pirates), 194 plantations, 2, 4, 11, 41n55, 45, 47, 49– 51, 53, 81, 102, 108, 121, 126, 143–44, 146, 183, 186, 192, 221; owners, 2,

118; planters, 26, 43, 44–48, 50, 52, 54, 55n13, 124, 138–41, 144–45, 148, 174, 184–89, 191, 193–95; societies, 4, 17, 78, 98, 102–3, 107, 111, 137–39, 147, 149, 181–91, 193, 196–98, 201, 203–4 poetry, 73–76, 78–79, 82–84, 87, 88n5, 149, 230; poetics, 13, 27, 72, 75, 77, 79, 81–84, 87, 122 Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 140 politique du doublure, 228 Polverel, Étienne, 3, 103, 126, 202 Popkin, Jeremy, 14, 98, 113n11 Port-au-Prince, viii, 12, 26, 32, 43, 46, 64, 81, 112n1, 118, 149, 163, 173–75, 207, 224–25, 229–31 Porto-Novo, 205 poverty, 8, 46 Pradine, Jean-Baptiste Symphore Linstant de, 11, 59–60, 64 Prévost, Julien (Comte de Limonade), 125 Price, Richard, 204 printing press, 12, 63–65 prisoners, 51, 118, 126, 129, 141, 146, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191, 196, 198, 205; of war, 5 prisons, 117, 185–86 privateers, 141–42, 164, 172, 176, 194 proclamation of April 28, 1804 (“I have avenged America”), 14, 39n37, 73, 88n5, 123, 131, 134n28, 138 Progrès, Le (Port-au-Prince), 229 Prophète, Ernst, 95–98, 109, 112n1 Prosser, Gabriel, 143 quasi-slave system. See cultivators Quasi War (1797–98), 143 Quintilian, 75 Rabinowitz, Richard, 1 Rachel Maddow Show, vii, viii Raimond, Julien, 44–45, 47–54, 56n29, 57n48 Rainsford, Marcus, 37n7, 61–62 Rameau, Septimus, 229 Raynal, Abbé Guillaume Thomas, 123–24, 129, 134n28

278INDEX

recognition of independence, viii, 10–11, 15–16, 64, 110, 117, 128, 149– 50, 162, 170–77, 226. See also de facto independence; de jure independence; nonrecognition Reign of Terror, 51 reparations, 16 repatriation, 146 republic, 25, 29, 110, 142, 147; French, 3, 26, 107, 184, 193–94; of Haiti, 30–31, 64, 104, 106, 148, 227, 229; republicanism, 17, 30–31, 98, 110, 141, 184, 194–95 resistance, 52, 66, 98, 117, 119, 122, 139, 186–88, 190, 192, 196 revolution, Haitian, of 1843, 226–27 Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire et de Géographie, 63 Richman, Karen, 204 Richmond, 143 Rigaud, André, 50–51, 86, 122, 124, 141, 143, 151, 224 rights, 2, 15, 17, 25, 30–31, 35, 58–59, 124, 128, 131, 136, 145, 168, 171, 175, 182–84, 193, 195, 198–99, 222; human, 25, 110, 124, 195; individual, 117; political, 26, 184, 196; property, 187; republican, 30; rights of man, 3, 102, 109, 112n11, 113n16, 123, 130, 138, 151 Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, ix, xi Robinson, William Davis, 173–74 Rochambeau, Donatien, 5, 52, 118, 123 Romain, P., 171 Rose v. Himely (1804), 179n32 Rouget, Gilbert, 205 Roumain, Jacques, 206 Roume, Philippe, 143, 151 Roux, Pierre, 63 royalists, 141, 184, 194 rule of law, 100–103, 106, 108–10 runaway slaves. See maroons sailors, 105, 119, 126, 134n34, 143 Saint-Christophe, 44–45 Saint-Domingue, viii, 1–5, 9, 13, 26, 29, 31, 33–34, 36, 41n55, 43–44, 48–54, 56n29, 59, 61, 63, 66, 71n40, 78, 85,

95–98, 101–4, 106–7, 109–11, 115–18, 127, 129, 131, 139–45, 147, 161, 165, 167, 181–82, 185, 187–88, 191–95, 197, 202, 212 Saint-Louis, Vertus, 6 Saint-Louis, 49, 52–53 Saint-Rémy, Joseph, 42–43 Salomon, Louis Étienne Félicité Lysius, 228–29 Sannon, Pauléus, 60 sans-culottes, 194 Santiago de Cuba, 197 Santo Domingo, 77, 119, 138, 140, 142, 144–45, 148, 168; 1801 invasion of, 144; 1804–5 invasion of, 33, 146; 1822 annexation of, 33, 67, 149, 151 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 79, 86 Sasportas, Abraham, 140 Sasportas, Isaac, 140, 143, 151 Sathian, Krish, 84 Savarese, Ralph James, 79, 83 Scott, Julius S., 216n6 Scott, Rebecca, 197, 216n6 secession, 29, 31, 184, 193 Sepinwall, Alyssa Goldstein, 132n5 Seven Years’ War, 100, 111, 183 Shapiro, Norman, 73 Sheller, Mimi, 7, 222 ships, 5, 53, 64, 144, 148, 167, 180, 213– 15; British, 5, 118, 142; US, 40n39, 143, 161, 163–64, 166–67, 171, 173, 175 slave revolts, 36, 48, 78, 134n32, 136–37, 139–42, 147, 150 slave system, 2, 4, 118 slave trade, 2, 66, 78, 104, 143, 146–47, 184, 188, 192–93, 197, 207, 211–12 slaves. See enslaved people Société d’anthropologie, 85 Soir, Le (Port-au-Prince), 231 Sonthonax, Léger-Félicité, 3, 49, 51, 81, 103, 126, 142, 148, 194, 201–2 Soulouque, Faustin, 86, 228–29, 232n3 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 197 South America, 139–40, 146, 149, 163 South Asia, 9 Southeast Asia, 183 South Sudan, 10 sovereignty, 4, 9–11, 14–15, 17, 33, 64,

INDEX279

66, 100, 105, 108, 111, 126, 137, 139, 150, 168–70, 172, 175, 181, 183–85, 190, 192–96, 198–99, 232 Spain, 32–33, 66–67, 88n5, 99, 119, 127, 138, 144–45, 147–49, 168; invasion of Saint-Domingue, 3–4, 26, 140–41, 187 Spinoza, Baruch, 25 Stalin, Joseph, 151 “state of exception” (also “state of emergency”), 106–9, 121 Stedman, John, 78 Stella (Bergeaud), 128 Stilla, Randall, 84 St. Lucia, 142 St. Marc, 162, 164 St. Vincent, 142 sugar, 1–2, 4, 45, 81–82, 142, 163, 223 Tailors’ conspiracy (Bahia), 141 Taínos, 33, 41n53 Tapia, Ángel Sanz, 151 Tardieu, Patrick, 6, 11, 38n24, 233n10 Taylor, Mr. (American merchant), 73 Télégraphe, Le (Port-au-Prince), 220 Thoret, Norbert, 39n39, 115–19, 125, 128, 131, 132n1, 133n9 tigers, 14, 31, 72–79, 86–88, 88n1, 89n20, 123 Tonnerre (France), 48 Torbec Parish, 45–48, 55n13 trade, 25, 29, 40n44, 43, 86, 102, 161– 62, 185, 188; British, 40n44, 127, 174; illegal, 167, 170; US, 162–72, 174–77. See also slave trade transcription, 12–13, 21n35, 76–77, 82, 202, 207–8, 216n5, 218n28, 218n30 translation, 12, 29, 37n7, 38n22, 40n41, 73, 106, 108, 112n8, 130, 133n7, 136, 193, 197, 201, 205, 207–8, 218n28, 227 treaty, 5, 114n37, 143–44; trade, 40n44, 127, 163, 174 Treaty of Ryswick (1697), 181 tree of liberty (also liberty tree), 27, 219, 221–22 Trimble, Michael, 87 Trinidad, 147

Trouillot, Henock, 60 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 6, 55–56n21, 78, 106, 176, 204 Tussac, François-Richard de, 86 United Kingdom, 183, 188 United States, vii, viii, 5, 9, 12, 16, 61–62, 88n5, 97, 100, 104, 108, 110, 138, 140, 143, 145, 147, 149, 161– 70, 172–75, 220; citizens of, 171, 175–77; Civil War, 176; Congress, 64, 165–67, 169, 173–74; constitution, 101–2; Declaration of Independence, viii, ix, 6, 8–11, 13–16, 21n38, 21n43, 34, 78, 96, 98, 101, 103, 106, 108, 112n3, 112n6, 114n37, 119, 121, 128; foreign policy, 161–62, 170, 172, 177; government, 162, 164–73, 175–77; law, 167; military, 75; occupation of Haiti, 8; press, viii, 21n35, 34, 37n10, 61, 136–37; prohibition on trade with St. Domingo, 165–67, 170; representatives of, 9, 143, 162, 165, 174; Revolution, vii, 17, 97–98, 100–101, 103–4, 109, 111, 143, 151, 221; Senate, 166. See also courts; merchants; ships; trade universalism, 17, 15, 31, 79–80, 139, 184–85, 191 vagabonds, 102 Vansina, Jan, 204 Vastey, Pompée Valentin (Baron de Vastey), 148, 185, 196–97, 199, 203 Vattel, Emer de, 14, 123, 168 Venezuela, 12, 65–66, 141, 149 vengeance, viii, 28, 31–32, 35, 39n37, 43, 67n1, 73, 77, 79, 83, 120, 122–25, 127, 129–31, 136, 222, 225, 228 Vermont, 9 Vernet, André, 163 Versailles, 1, 47–48 Vertières, Battle of, 231 Vesey, Denmark, 147–48 violence: 4, 10, 13–14, 16, 32, 42–44, 50, 52, 54, 72–73, 78–79, 95, 115–19, 122, 126–31, 134n34, 166, 187, 231 Vixen (ship), 175

280INDEX

Vodou (vaudoux), 78, 196, 204–5, 209–10, 214, 225; ceremony, 204, 206, 210; pantheon, 16, 205–6, 212, 220, 225; ritual, 16, 206; songs, 8, 11, 16, 204, 207–15, 218n28; “Vodou Archive,” 217n12, 217n16

Wernicke, Karl, 82 Whitfield, W. L., 135n35 women, 2, 32, 40n39, 44–45, 47–48, 53, 73, 104, 116, 118–19, 125, 133n9, 163–64, 181, 192, 210, 225, 227, 229 Wood, Gordon, 109

wanga. See ouanga War of Independence (Haiti), 4, 13, 26, 34, 52–53, 100–101, 106–7, 207–8, 210, 116, 118, 122, 229, 231 Washington, George, 151, 225 weapons, 63, 66, 145, 148, 161, 164, 184, 207

Yayou (Haitian General), 27 yellow fever, 4 Zavitz, Erin, 16 Žižek, Slavoj, 131 zombies, 187

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