Haitian Revolution Encyclopedia of Race and Racism

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HAITIAN REVOLUTIONThe thirteen-year sequence (1791–1804) of diverseevents that we know as the Haitian Revolution inSaint-Domingue, the former French colony on the west-ern side of Hispaniola, more often was dubbed the ‘‘dis-asters in Saint-Domingue’’ by Europeans at the time. In1914, Theophilus Gould Steward, an African Americancollege professor, AME chaplain, and buffalo soldier withthe US Colored Infantry, became one of the first (alongwith African American abolitionist and lawyer John Mer-cer Langston) to explicitly use ‘‘Haitian Revolution’’ tocompare the overthrow of French colonial dominanceand slavery in Saint-Domingue to the French andAmerican revolutions and to the South American inde-pendences. And yet, Steward noted that the example ofHaiti was different from these other major events ofthe age of revolutions because of the prodigious natureof the social cataclysm it heralded. Although theFrench and American revolutions and the Latin Amer-ican independences also clearly represented social cata-clysms, the Haitian Revolution stands apart for itsradical reframing of the connections between race,slavery, national sovereignty, and cultural achievementthat had been at the heart of European hegemony inthe post-Columbian era.

‘‘READING’’ THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION

Not only did French Saint-Domingue import, propor-tionally to its population, the largest number of Africanslaves of any colony, but it had among the highest‘‘replacement’’ rates for its enslaved population. The aver-age survival rate for a slave arriving in Saint-Domingue

was seven to ten years. The 1780s saw the highest mortal-ity rate among enslaved Africans, tens of thousands ofwhom, having survived the Middle Passage, were disem-barked off ships arriving in Saint-Domingue each year inthe period leading up to the Haitian Revolution. Atthe time that the slave insurrection broke out in August1791, the great majority of the colony’s populationwas African-born. The diversity of this forced migrantpopulation contributes to fundamental difficulties ofreading the Haitian Revolution. The historical texts ofthe time sometimes differentiate between the categories ofthe African-born and the Creole or locally born Afro-diasporic participants in the Haitian Revolution, but theyprovide only scant information about the many distinctAfrican cultures and languages that were involved in rev-olutionary behaviors and philosophical challenges toFrench dominance.

The biased representational ambitions and igno-rance of African languages and cultures that characterizecontemporaneous European print accounts of the Hai-tian Revolution make it particularly challenging to tracethe roles of free and unfree people of African origins ordescent in contesting existing racial formations andcreating a new political reality. It is unlikely that adocument in the same mold as those European accountswill surface to actively represent African populations inSaint-Domingue, but new research technologies andmethodologies are filling in the gap. The onlineTrans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database includes a ‘‘Voy-ages Database,’’ with which researchers can search thelogs of thousands of slave ships. This resource nowcompetes with the published literary and historiograph-ical narratives that long concretized not only the factual

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basis but also the symbolism and rhetoric of the HaitianRevolution.

Likewise, although slave owners documented andpublicly discussed a strict minimum of information aboutthe humans they purchased from another continent, theirads for runaway or maroon slaves in Saint-Dominguenewspapers were designed to reveal whatever details mightmake runaways recognizable for arrest and return. As aresult of this goal of making slaves recognizable for arrest,slaves’ identities are becoming clearer. Another onlineresource, Marronnage in Saint-Domingue (Haıti): His-tory, Memory, Technology, reveals a patchwork of morethan a hundred slave ‘‘nations,’’ ranging from CentralAfrican jumbo categories (‘‘Congo’’) to obscure and curi-ously named categories, such as the ‘‘Miserable’’ ethnonymfrom the Grain Coast. The epistemological and linguisticinteractions of African and European conceptions ofslaves’ identities are still being charted.

The consequences of Euro-American ignorance ofthe languages of Africa—like the consequences of Euro-American illiteracies in such key African semiotic systemsas scarification—form an increasingly prominent parallelto the alphabetic illiteracy of the majority of slaves.Eighteenth-century ethnographers acknowledged thatslaves would sometimes fall to their knees after ‘‘reading’’the texts inscribed on the bodies of fellow slaves, butcolonists failed to understand or record most details ofAfrican productions and receptions of scarred incisionson the body. Nevertheless, because ads for runaway slavesfrequently recorded ‘‘marks of his [or her] country’’ ordental shaping, we can now appreciate the proto-alpha-betic complexity of these signs in the age of the HaitianRevolution.

Though slaves who fled suffered harsh punishment,including torture and execution, large groups of escapedslaves, called ‘‘maroons,’’ lived in remote areas of thecolony throughout the eighteenth century. Because thesemaroon communities lived in armed opposition to theplantation society that surrounded them, they can beunderstood as the precursors to the insurgents of theHaitian Revolution. Once the enslaved of Saint-Dom-ingue rose up in revolt, they used many of the tactics ofthe maroons to defend themselves against the French.Slaves who had not fled plantations also sometimesunited with members of their African ‘‘nation’’ duringthe revolution. Questions of collective action by distinctAfrican groups in Saint-Domingue are prompting newresearch on the specific role of African-born participantsin revolutionizing the New World. To what extent wasthe Haitian Revolution an African revolution againstEuro-American practices of dominance and slavery, andhow did it reconfigure equality as conceptualized in theEuropean Enlightenment?

THE DEMAND FOR RIGHTS FOR

GENS DE COULEUR

The exact date of the beginning of the Haitian Revolu-tion depends on how historians privilege the continuumof race-related bids for emancipation and equality, whichemerged in uneven alignment to the strategies for mobi-lity of different groups in Saint-Domingue. A multitudeof racial designations in colonial Saint-Domingue createda racial hierarchy that formed a pigmentocracy. In Anglo-phone slave-holding environments, variations on colorassociated with degrees of African and Euro-Americanancestry were not as routinely used to describe non-whites, because ‘‘one drop’’ ideologies and taxonomiesof race made blackness an all-encompassing category forindividuals with African ancestry. In Saint-Domingue, incontrast, a significant number of gens de couleur (peopleof color), composed of those of mixed African and Euro-pean ancestry (often the offspring of relationships, bothconsensual and nonconsensual, between white mastersand their black female slaves), benefited from freedomfrom slavery, although a larger group of mixed-raceinhabitants of the island remained enslaved. These freepeople of color continued to suffer discrimination fromwhite planters, however. A person with only one Africangrandparent, for example, was still not allowed to prac-tice certain occupations or use the name of his or herwhite ancestors.

The movements for improvement in the treatmentof the gens de couleur and for the abolition of slavery werenot originally connected. Many free people of color inthe extremely wealthy colony, like their white relatives,made money from the institution of slavery and did notinitially support its abolition. Instead, they wished forcitizenship, parliamentary representation, and an end todiscriminatory laws. Representatives of the gens de couleurbegan lobbying for their rights in the 1780s. The wealth-iest of this class owned plantations and slaves and, likewhites, sent their children to be educated in France.Though contact between whites and the gens de couleurwas frequent, the latter group was discriminated againstin an effort to keep most money and political power inthe hands of people of only European ancestry.

White colonists, fearful of losing political power tothe gens de couleur, formed the Club Massiac to promotetheir interests in Paris. They refused major concessions tothe free people of color. Frustrated and angered by thiscontinued discrimination, one of the prominent repre-sentatives of the gens de couleur, Vincent Oge, who hadbeen defended in the writings of his fellow plantationowner Julien Raimond, returned to Saint-Dominguefrom Paris via London and the United States in October1790 and began an uprising against the white colonists.Though Oge initially made some gains, his white

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JULIEN RAIMOND

Julien Raimond (1744–1801), a wealthy free man born in

the French colony of Saint-Domingue, became one of the

most prominent advocates for the colony’s class of gens de

couleur (people of color)—free individuals of either Afri-

can or both European and African ancestry. The wealthiest

of the gens de couleur owned plantations and slaves and,

like whites, sent their children to be educated in France.

Raimond was an example of rare continuity of name and

property ownership between the generation of his father—

a white planter who had earlier been a vineyard owner

from the Landes in France—and offspring with any part of

African ancestry. Raimond’s father had married the

‘‘quadroon’’ woman, Marie Begasse, with whom he had

twelve children. Raimond married a rich woman of color,

the daughter of a free black woman and a white planter.

The Saint-Domingue ethnographer would note that when

one traveled to the wealthy Aquin region, the first plan-

tation on the road was that of Julien Raimond, the earnest

activist for the assimilation of men of color into the cat-

egory of the rights of white men.

Raimond articulated his demands for rights around

distinctions between free and enslaved people more so

than between those of European and African ancestry.

Yet the movement for the improvement of the treatment

of the gens de couleur and the movement for the abolition

of slavery were not initially directly connected. Many

free people of color mobilized around demands for

citizenship, parliamentary representation, and an end to

discriminatory laws.

Raimond first lobbied the government for an

amelioration of the treatment of the gens de couleur in

1783. Though the monarchy listened to his demands at

first, very few changes were made in the 1780s. At the

onset of the French Revolution in 1789, he appealed to

the pro-slavery Club Massiac in Paris. When they

refused any concessions, he turned to the abolitionist

Societe des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of

the Blacks), who supported his bid for parliamentary

representation for the gens de couleur. Like the Marquis

de Condorcet, Raimond supported a gradual abolition

of slavery. When insurrection broke out among the

enslaved classes of Saint-Domingue in 1791, Raimond

stressed that order and respect for the French Republic

were necessary to prove that they were worthy of the

freedom that the republic would bestow on them.

In the early 1790s, the rights that were granted to the

free people of color by the National Assembly, such as

citizenship for those gens de couleur whose parents had been

free, served only to inflame tensions in the colony. Vincent

Oge, a free person of color who returned to Saint-Domingue

and took up arms against the whites, was defeated, publicly

tortured, and executed in 1792. Raimond avoided violence

and even successfully defended himself when he was arrested

and imprisoned during the Reign of Terror of the French

Revolution. He returned to the Caribbean as a French

commissioner to the Windward Islands in 1796, from which

position he issued proclamations cosigned with Leger-Felic-

ite Sonthonax and Philippe Roume, espousing the opinion

that those who neglected labor in the revolutionary Carib-

bean would inevitably become slaves to an active metropole.

But Raimond found a changed political landscape in Saint-

Domingue; slavery had been abolished and Toussaint Lou-

verture had gained much political power. By this point,

Raimond’s actions indicate that he had changed his position

on the abolition of slavery. In August 1800 he wrote to

Napoleon Bonaparte asking for assurance that he would not

reestablish slavery in Saint-Domingue. Like Toussaint Lou-

verture, Raimond pledged his loyalty to France but was

known as a member of a pro-independence assembly. Rai-

mond died in 1801 just after signing Louverture’s new

constitution, before Louverture’s capture in 1802, and before

Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s 1804 declaration of an

independent Haiti.

BIBL IOGRAPHY

Dubois, Laurent. 2004. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution andSlave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early AmericanHistory and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia.

Garrigus, John D. 2006. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship inFrench Saint-Domingue. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Moreau de Saint-Mery, Mederic-Louis-Elie. 1985. A CivilizationThat Perished: The Last Years of White Colonial Rule in Haiti.Translated, abridged, and edited by Ivor D. Spencer. Lanham,MD: University Press of America.

Popkin, Jeremy D. 2010. You Are All Free: The HaitianRevolution and the Abolition of Slavery. Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press.

Deborah JensonDuke University, NC

Lesley CurtisUniversity of New Hampshire

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RACE AND RACISM, 2ND EDITION 279


opponents responded violently, defeating the rebels.They publicly tortured and executed Oge and his collab-orator, Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, in February 1791, mak-ing them martyrs. Though he never claimed to be againstslavery, Oge’s rebellion revealed the extent to whichwhite colonists believed in the notion of their racialsuperiority and remained obstinately committed to main-taining an exclusive hold on power based on this assump-tion of supremacy. Nevertheless, the bid of individuals ofmixed race, often plantation owners, to access privilegeswithout abolishing slavery correlates poorly to universalemancipation models and is thus often framed as aprecursor phase to the Haitian Revolution.

REVOLUTIONARY CONTAGION

Structuring Oge’s and Chavannes’s political claims andinsurrection as precursors to the Haitian Revolutionrather than the revolution itself overlooks their parallel-ism with revolutionary activity by nonwhites elsewherein the Caribbean as well, in a larger phenomenon sug-gestive of a greater revolutionary contagion inspired bythe French Revolution. As early as the fall of 1789,deputies in the French National Assembly voiced fearsthat recent insurrections in Martinique and Guadeloupewere precursors to revolution in Saint-Domingue. Apoem published in the New York Daily Advertiser inthe spring of 1790 took a jubilant rather than a direview of the extension of revolutionary momentum fromFrance to the Caribbean: ‘‘What progress does libertymake every week! / How quick from Versailles has shereached Martinique!’’

The Haitian Revolution certainly coincided tempo-rally with the French Revolution and the circulation ofEnlightenment ideas of human rights and freedom. Infact, because the names of many of Saint-Domingue’slarge plantations were the names of major landholdersand aristocrats in France who held seats in the NationalAssembly and published writings on the French Revolu-tion, research on plantation names like ‘‘Cormier’’ and‘‘Choiseul’’ reveals an oddly double historical moment,in which the same proper names—absentee plantationowners in the colony and deputies in the metropole—areassociated with discussion of slavery in Saint-Domingueand discussion of the metaphorical ‘‘enslavement’’ ofwhite citizens to monarchy in Europe. But in Saint-Domingue and other sites of Afro-diasporic insurrectionfollowing the fall of the Bastille in France, the limitedapplication beyond the metropole and across class, eth-nic, and migrant communities of the ostensibly universalFrench revolutionary conception of the ‘‘Rights of Man’’was openly challenged. When in August 1791 the eventsmost commonly associated with the start of the HaitianRevolution broke out, they augured the day in April

1804 when Haiti’s first national leader, Jean-JacquesDessalines, would be able to claim on behalf of popula-tions of the enslaved and the indigenous, ‘‘I have avengedAmerica.’’ In 1804, French colonial power in Saint-Domingue would be overthrown not by colonists, as inthe American Revolution, nor by the colonized, as inAlgeria’s twentieth-century revolution, but by the slavesof colonists.

THE INSURRECTION

Revolutionary planning by slaves, free blacks, and peopleof color in the summer of 1791 was mostly hidden fromthe public record. In June and July, there were small-scaleinsurrections on three separate plantations near Port-au-Prince. On August 14, there was a large-scale (and openlyknown) meeting of leaders (slave drivers, domestics,coachmen, etc.) from the nonwhite communities of sev-eral dozen plantations on the Lenormand de Mezy plan-tation in the north, near what is now called Cap Haıtien.There is some discrepancy of dates in the historicalrecord, but on August 16 or 17 a black slave overseeron the Chabaud plantation near the Cape Francois wascaught setting fire to a building. Interrogated, he admit-ted a large-scale plot to burn and destroy plantations andkill whites. Many of the conjures (a word for ‘‘plotters’’that also means ‘‘conjured’’ or ‘‘bewitched’’) were ques-tioned. All denied the report and were eventuallyreleased. On August 20 or 21, the manager of La Gos-sette plantation was attacked. In Acul, the revolutionaryleader Boukman, a coachman on the Clement plantation,led slaves on a torrent-like path of destruction. But it wason the late evening of August 22 and the early morningof August 23 that the insurrection was generalized. Theash and smoke from the burning cane fields surroundingthe city covered the sky for days.

In the days leading up to the insurrection, slavesand their proxies at the leadership level are believed tohave met for a vodou ceremony in the ‘‘Caymanwoods.’’ These woods were probably located in the areaon the Choiseul plantation known as the ‘‘Savane aCayman’’ on the banks of the Haut du Cap River,which earlier in the eighteenth century had been suffi-ciently deep to be hospitable to alligators. But that riverno longer flows through the area, which is just one ofseveral ways in which access to this key moment of Afro-diasporic revolutionary sensibility has been partiallyerased. The ceremony, led by the houngan (vodoupriest) and Boukman, was not described in print untilthe account of the colonist Antoine Dalmas in 1814.Dalmas mentioned such details as the sacrifice of a blackpig surrounded by fetishes that was offered up in flamesas the symbol of the all-powerful genius of the blacks.The bristles from the pig were kept as multiple

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individual talismans meant to confer invulnerability inthe coming battles. It was then not until 1824 that aHaitian writer, Herard Dumesle, published an accountof the Creole oath taken in the ceremony, in which theslaves addressed a god, hidden in nature, who witnessedthe crimes that were allowed to occur by the god of the

whites, and who would guide the blacks’ arms in venge-ance. Portraits of the whites’ god should be thrownaway, the oath counseled, because it actively thirstedfor water of the tears in their eyes. What they shouldattend to was the spirit of freedom speaking in all oftheir hearts.

JEAN-JACQUES DESSALINES

Jean-Jacques Dessalines (c. 1758–1806) was the first leader of

independent Haiti and the first leader in the world of a self-

emancipated colony of former slaves. There is little direct

documentation of his early life. The earliest biographical

sources, ranging from a racially charged biography to early

encyclopedia entries, claim that he had been brought as a slave

from the African coast and purchased by a free black slave

owner in Haiti, whose name he later took. Evidence in favor of

this possibility includes a contemporaneous ethnographic

account of Dessalines marshaling black troops by leading them

in African songs, a popular tradition in Haiti associating

Dessalines with Nago (Yoruba) ethnic heritage, and the

absence of known commentary from any white ‘‘owning’’

Dessalines. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century and

beyond that details of the currently prevailing paradigm of

Dessalines as a Creole slave born in Grande Riviere emerged.

Dessalines participated in the 1791 slave insurrection.

He became a soldier in the French Army in Saint-

Domingue, and then a general under Toussaint

Louverture. After Toussaint’s deportation to a prison in

the Jura in France in 1802, Dessalines emerged as the

general in chief of the ‘‘French Indigenous Army’’ in the

battles against the French, and he and the Count de

Rochambeau, a French general, negotiated the French

evacuation after the Battle of Vertieres in November 1803.

Although he had had no formal schooling, Dessalines

worked effectively with secretaries to generate sophisticated

military correspondence. After the defeat of the French,

Dessalines issued a series of rousing and philosophically

intricate proclamations in which the identity of the post-

colony was articulated. He and the other signatories of the

early independence documents, including the Haitian Dec-

laration of Independence, named the new nation Hayti

(Ayiti in Kreyol) after the Taino Amerindian name for the

highlands of the island of Hispaniola. He also famously

declared that he had ‘‘avenged America,’’ claiming a new

start in radical fidelity to the historically oppressed peoples

of the pre- and post-Columbian ‘‘New World.’’

Dessalines accepted his nomination as emperor in the

summer of 1804, but the Haitian Constitution of 1805, and

other Haitian codes, showed sharp divergences from the

Napoleonic conception of empire. Much of Dessalines’s early

rule was dominated by a struggle against a remaining French

outpost, led by General Marie-Louis Ferrand, on the eastern

side of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic). Maritime

space was a key front in Ferrand’s pitch to reframe Haiti as a

rebellious domain of Napoleon’s empire. Ferrand issued legal

challenges to any vessels engaged in commerce on the Haitian

coast, thus threatening to choke off Haiti’s economy. Haiti’s

increasing vulnerability in the international arena, com-

pounded by the violence associated with Dessalines’s rule

domestically, culminated in Dessalines’s assassination by his

own countrymen on October 17, 1806.

Among Haitian revolutionary political leaders,

Dessalines was the only one to refer frequently to colonial

enslavement as a determining violence. He aligned power

emanating from nature and the glory of the warrior

against European racialized hegemony. His internation-

ally disseminated political proclamations contested

Western political values, identities, and institutions

ranging from Abrahamic religious monotheism to

abstract rationalism. Dessalines thus left one of the

earliest-known oeuvres of radical black Atlantic political

theory, in which he contested every trace of French col-

onial slaveholding culture—and, indirectly, showed

exactly what black independence movements were up

against.

BIBL IOGRAPHY

‘‘Dessalines.’’ 1806. In Biographie moderne, p. 79. Leipzig,Germany: Paul-Jacques Besson.

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

Deborah JensonDuke University, NC

Lesley CurtisUniversity of New Hampshire

Haitian Revolution



One astonishing early product of the 1791 insurrec-tion was the convergence of slaves, free blacks, free peopleof mixed race, and whites around communicative goalsand cohabitation of military structures. The Creole for-mer slave Toussaint Louverture, who as a free black priorto the revolution had been a leaseholder of property towhich slaves were attached, did not join in the firstmonths of the insurrection. However, he soon came toserve as a diplomatic and secretarial ouverture, or opening,between the different demographics in the camp of theGrande Riviere, and according to some contemporaneousobservers, his last name, Louverture, derived from thissignature role. Within the first months after the outbreakof the insurrection, the blacks composed and sent formalcommunications outlining their political philosophy andstrategic concerns to the National Assembly in France.

The leadership roles of Toussaint, Dessalines, HenriChristophe, Moyse, Charles Belair, and many others inthe French Army in Saint-Domingue reveal the hybridityof colonial structures during this period. There weremany instances in which blacks served as military supe-riors to whites. In this historical era, correspondencedictated to secretaries was a crucial infrastructural dimen-sion of French military life, and history owes much of thefirst-person representation of the Haitian leaders’ experi-ence to the texts produced as a routine feature of theirmilitary work. The racially diverse French Army in Saint-Domingue was a kind of literary machine during theHaitian Revolution, grinding out letters, reports, records,and proclamations. Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe,and their high-ranking Afro-diasporic peers in the mili-tary learned to use this textual system to construct inter-nationally influential political personae and to build alocally authoritative documentary apparatus. (Influentialblack or mixed-race leaders who were not officially inte-grated into the military remain shadowy figures to this daydue to the lack of written representation.) By contrastwith abolitionism in Anglophone environments, French abo-litionism helped not so much to produce narratives in acertain genre, such as the ‘‘slave narrative,’’ as to produce textsof revolutionary dialogue with (former) slaves—politicalcorrespondence, manifestos, treatises, and constitutions—inthe context of the interconnections of the French andHaitianrevolutions and the demands of Caribbean nonwhites thatthey be accepted as interlocutors.

THE FRENCH RESPONSE

Slavery was abolished in Saint-Domingue in August 1793,by order of the French civil commissioner Leger-FeliciteSonthonax. Sonthonax showed a surprising awareness ofthe stakes of the Creole language—the closest thing to acommon language among the linguistically diverse slaves—by publishing this document and other important texts in

Creole for public consumption. That same day, Toussainthad addressed a camp of black soldiers with the lines, ‘‘I amToussaint Louverture.. . . I have undertaken vengeance.I want Liberty and Equality to reign in Saint-Domingue’’(quoted in Dubois 2005, p. 176). Toussaint later com-plained, in reports intended to discredit Sonthonax withthe Executive Directory in France, that Sonthonax appro-priated the abolition of slavery despite mixed approaches tothe issue at the time. (Sonthonax was the first in a line ofFrench colonial administrators whom Toussaint wouldeventually discredit and deport back to France, in a signof Toussaint’s de facto pursuit of political autonomy.)

The possibility of ending slavery in the colony hadindeed been a topic of intense debate among Frenchrevolutionaries since the formation of the Societe desAmis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of the Blacks) in1788. But the abolition of slavery in Saint-Dominguehighlights the slaves or former slaves as the most proactiveand effective group of abolitionists of all. The militaryroles and texts of revolutionary leaders like Toussaint andDessalines prove that people of African descent succeededto a significant extent in demanding that French colonialleaders interact with them as equals. It was not until thefollowing year in Paris, in 1794, that slavery was officiallyabolished in all the French colonies (although it would bereinstated by Napoleon in many locales in 1802).

Numerous watershed events and landmark datesmark the decade between the abolition of slavery inSaint-Domingue and the final defeat and withdrawal ofthe French colonial army in November and December of1803. Hoping to profit from the political volatility inFrance and its colonies, both English and Spanish armiesattacked the colony in an effort to gain control of whathad been the most profitable ‘‘sugar’’ colony in theworld. In 1795, under the Treaty of Basel, the easternside of the island of Hispaniola, Spanish Santo Domingo,was allotted to the French; this is just one of manyrounds in the musical chairs of French, Spanish, andBritish bids for ascendance, each of which correlated inunique ways to strategic gains by the Afro-diasporic com-munity. In 1797, Toussaint expelled Commissioner Son-thonax from the island, and then Gabriel Hedouville metthe same fate in 1798, as did Philippe Roume in 1800.Tensions between Toussaint and the mixed-race leaderAndre Rigaud created an internal military conflict. In1801, Toussaint invaded nominally French Santo Domi-ngo and brought it under black control. That same year,in his new role as governor-general for life, he issued a newconstitution for the colony. Napoleon Bonaparte’s govern-ment viewed Toussaint’s constitution as a step towardindependence, and France took the decision to invade.

General Charles Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law,headed the expedition of more than 30,000 troops. From

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the spring of 1802 onward, until the Haitian independ-ence of January 1804, the previous years of power strug-gles and intermittent battles were replaced by a moreactive phase of revolutionary conflict between the forcesof the Afro-diasporic leaders and the French forces.Toussaint was forced into retirement in the late springof 1802, but Leclerc suspected that he remained active.In early June 1802, Leclerc arranged a ruse throughwhich Toussaint was lured into a house and away fromhis guards; he was seized. Toussaint and his whole familywere taken captive and deported to France, where Tous-saint was imprisoned in a remote mountain stronghold,the Fort de Joux. The kidnapping of Toussaint did nothave the decisive effect hoped for by Leclerc. In August,Leclerc complained to Napoleon, ‘‘It is not enough tohave kidnapped Toussaint, here there are 2000 leaders tokidnap’’ (quoted in Jenson 2011, p. 213).

While in prison in France, Toussaint desperately triedto communicate his story and to articulate his defense. Hesent numerous letters and a lengthy handwritten memoirto Napoleon. These documents featured the characteristicsthat were the hallmark of Toussaint’s informal educationand partial literacy: an almost completely invented orthog-raphy, reiteration of proverb-like exemplars, and apoignant rhythmic and imagistic mode of description.Recalibration of the deviations from standard French toan English translation would yield passages like this:‘‘sendingme naked as en erthwerm to the deps of thisdun jon, isn this like cuhting off the legge of a some oneand tellingim walk, isent this like cuhting out the tongueand tellingim talk, isent this bur ee ing a man alive?’’(Jenson 2011, p. 17). Or, with conventional spelling andword spacing: ‘‘sending me naked as an earthworm tothe depths of this dungeon, isn’t this like cutting offsomeone’s legs and telling him to walk, isn’t this likecutting out someone’s tongue and telling him to talk,isn’t this burying a man alive?’’ Napoleon, annoyed atthese reminders of his prisoner, ordered that all writingimplements be taken from Toussaint’s cell. Yet uponToussaint’s death of cold, neglect, and illness in April1803, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp reported that they hadfound a sheaf of handwritten documents hidden underToussaint’s headscarf; Toussaint died wearing his pro-tests like a second skin.

THE DEFEAT OF FRANCE AND THE CHALLENGES

OF INDEPENDENCE

General Leclerc had predeceased Toussaint, succumbingin November 1802 to yellow fever, which carried awaythousands of French troops. The position of the French,now under the command of the ferocious French generalDonatien Rochambeau, who was said to have broughtman-eating dogs from Cuba to attack the blacks, became

increasingly precarious. On November 18, 1803, Dessa-lines’s army resoundingly defeated the French at theBattle of Vertieres. Treatises of surrender and evacuationwere finalized. On November 29, Dessalines, along withgenerals Christophe and Philippe Clerveaux (sometimesrendered Clervaux), issued an internationally distributedproclamation of the independence of Saint-Domingue:For the first time in the world, former African slaves hadrisen up over their masters and conquered the state itself.Another document, the Haitian Declaration of Inde-pendence, followed a January 1, 1804, ceremony. Thisdocument featured the new name of the postcolonialblack nation, drawn from the local Amerindian wordfor ‘‘highlands’’: Hayti.

In the Haitian independence, the discursive skillsand practices cultivated through colonial military serviceallowed a population that had recently been enslaved toestablish a corpus of state-building documents. Yet thisdocumentary apparatus remained in the language of thecolonial infrastructure, which is to say French, ratherthan Creole or African languages. That linguistic imprintof the former slave-owning colonial system set the foun-dations of a schism between the state, its functionaries,and the people they purported to serve. Education andliteracy, which were exclusively associated with French inthe colonial culture of the time, had been valued by slavesin Saint-Domingue as an area of privilege and sometimesillicit mobility; ads for runaway slaves that mention con-tested freedom papers signaled the power of documentsto transform status not just figuratively but literally.Toussaint Louverture and Henry Christophe had bothsent their children to be educated in France despite therisks of handing them over to the metropolitan govern-ment during the Haitian Revolution. When GeneralLeclerc arrived with the French expedition, he broughtwith him Toussaint’s sons Isaac and Placide as implicithostages—to which gesture Toussaint had responded,‘‘Take my children.’’ Isaac and Placide Louverture sub-sequently were allowed to return to their family. ForChristophe, the scenario was tragic: upon the defeat ofthe French in Saint-Domingue in 1803, Christophe’seldest son Ferdinand was removed from a school forthe children of colonists and forcibly interned in a Parisorphanage, where he died, reputedly of abuse. Such inter-woven histories of the mortal stakes of language andliteracy in the Haitian Revolution are symbolic of thestruggles Haiti would face to carve out an identity and aposition of security in a world still dominated by Euro-American colonial hegemony. After Henry Christophebecame the first king of Haiti in 1811, he never men-tioned that his eldest son had died a virtual prisoner ofthe Napoleonic government in France.

And as Dessalines learned in the first days of theindependence, the French were not actually gone from

Haitian Revolution



the island. General Marie-Louis Ferrand, who had takenover a small French outpost in the city of Santo Domi-ngo in what is now the Dominican Republic, used thattactical position to issue ‘‘legal’’ proclamations makinginternational trade in Haitian ports illegal; the ships ofthose who defied the French ban were sometimes seizedand their cargoes confiscated. Dessalines, infuriated at theongoing French challenges, massacred remaining Frenchcolonists in Hayti. The etymological roots of the wordrevolution in revolving, rather than a completed rotation,remained classically figured in this ongoing life, postin-dependence, of the Haitian Revolution as a race-relatedsocial cataclysm in a modernity characterized by colonialand slave-holding hegemony. It is in this sense that theHaitian Revolution remains today a contemporary as wellas a historical problem; its ultimate role in inauguratingAfro-diasporic political and cultural power is still beingtraced.

SEE ALSO Genocide and Crimes against Humanity:Haitian Massacre of 1937; Janvier, Louis-Joseph;Racial Formations: Haiti; Schœlcher, Victor; ToussaintLouverture.

B IBL IOGRAPHY

Dubois, Laurent. 2005. Avengers of the New World: The Story ofthe Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press.

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

Le Glaunec, Jean-Pierre, Leon Robichaud, et al. Marronnage inSaint-Domingue (Haıti): History, Memory, Technology.Universite de Sherbrooke. Accessed January 31, 2012.Available from http://www.marronnage.info/en/index.html

Steward, Theophilus Gould. 1914. The Haitian Revolution.New York: T.Y. Crowell.

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. ‘‘Voyages Database.’’Accessed January 31, 2012. Available from http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces

Deborah Jenson (2013)Duke University, NC

Lesley S. Curtis (2013)University of New Hampshire

HAMER, FANNIE LOU1917–1977

Fannie Lou Hamer was born Fannie Lou Townsend onOctober 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi.She was the youngest of twenty children born to share-croppers Jim and Lou Ella Townsend. At the age of six

she began working in the cotton fields of SunflowerCounty and by age twelve she had dropped out of school.She married Perry ‘‘Pap’’ Hamer in 1944, and the couplesettled in Ruleville, Mississippi, to work as sharecroppers.

Hamer did not know that blacks could vote until1962 when, at age forty-four, she attended a mass meet-ing of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC). She volunteered, along with seventeen others,to attempt to register to vote. She failed the requiredliteracy test, however, and when she returned home shelearned that she had also lost the job she had held foreighteen years because of her attempt to register. Thusbegan a public life dedicated to having America fulfill itsdemocratic promises to all citizens. She became a polit-ical, social, and economic activist.

In 1964 Hamer helped to organize the events ofFreedom Summer, out of which emerged the MississippiFreedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to which she wasselected as vice chairman. As a delegate to the Demo-cratic National Convention in Atlantic City, she chal-lenged the seating of the all-white party delegation (the‘‘Regulars’’). Hamer became a national figure when sheprovided testimony during televised hearings beforethe Credentials Committee. She spoke of atrocities facedby blacks in Mississippi when attempting to register andvote and of being severely beaten after she was arrested inWinona, Mississippi, for attending a civil rights meeting.She stated, ‘‘If the Freedom Democratic Party is notseated now, I question America, is this America, the landof the free and the home of the brave where we have tosleep with our telephones off the hook because our livesbe threatened daily?’’(Mills 1993, p. 121). As a compro-mise, the MFDP was offered two seats, which Hamerrejected, stating, ‘‘We didn’t come all this way for no twoseats ’cause all of us is tired’’ (Mills 1993, p. 5). TheMFDP did not win its political challenge, but this effortpaved the way for future delegations to Democratic con-ventions to be integrated.

In 1968 the Loyalist Democrats of Mississippi, abiracial outgrowth of the MFDP, ousted the Regulars atthe Chicago Democratic Convention. Hamer wasselected as a delegate, but she argued that the party hadlost touch with poor people. In the lawsuit Hamer v.Campbell, Hamer sought to block elections in SunflowerCounty on the grounds that blacks had not had anopportunity to register. A federal appeals court over-turned a district court decision against her, and newelections were ordered. Hamer also helped organize theNational Women’s Political Caucus in 1971.

Hamer dedicated her life to helping the poor, chil-dren, and working people. In 1963 she formed DeltaMinistry, a community development program. In 1968,she founded Freedom Farms Cooperative, a nonprofit

Hamer, Fannie Lou



Haitian Revolution Encyclopedia of Race and Racism

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