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Image:Haitian revolution.jpg Battle at "Snake Gully" in 1802
Haiti is the first black republic in modern history. It went directly from being a French colony to self-governance through a process that has had lasting effect on the nation. The system established by slaveholders demonstrated the effectiveness of violence and force in controlling the majority. This system survived the revolution and continued under the nascent black republic. A light-skinned elite took control of political and economic power.[1] Historians traditionally identify the catalyst as being a particular vodou service in August 1791 performed at Bois Caïman by Dutty Boukman, a high priest.[2] A number of complex events set the stage for the most significant revolt in the history of African enslavement.
PrecursorsThe slave population on Saint-Domingue totaled at least 500,000 by 1789, almost half of the 1 million slaves in the Caribbean.[3] They were mostly African-born as the slavery system there was extremely harsh, thus making it difficult to have children. The slave population declined at an annual rate of two to five percent, due to overwork, inadequate food, shelter, clothing and medical care, and the misbalance between the sexes.[4] About one-fifth of the slaves were domestics, who worked as cooks, personal servants and artisans around the plantation manor, largely born in the Americas.
White colonists and black slaves frequently had violent conflicts. Bands of runaway slaves, known as maroons, lived in the woods and often raided the island's sugar and coffee plantations. Although the numbers in these bands grew large (sometimes into the thousands), they generally lacked the leadership and strategy to accomplish large-scale objectives. These attacks did, however, establish a black Haitian martial tradition. The first effective maroon leader to emerge was François Mackandal, who led a rebellion from 1751 through 1757 that succeeded in focusing the black resistance on its target. A vodou priest, Mackandal inspired his people by drawing on African traditions and religions. In 1758, he was captured by the French and burned at the stake.[6] Among St. Domingue’s 40,000 white French colons in 1789, European-born Frenchmen monopolized administrative posts, lording over proud but insecure native-born Creoles. The sugar planters, the grand blancs, were largely minor aristocrats, or upwardly mobile bourgeoisie. Most returned to France as soon as possible, where their fortunes allowed nobles to reestablish their social positions, and bourgeois to buy into the noblesse de robe, while those residing on the island passed their leisure time with banquets, gambling and slave women, hoping to avoid the dreaded Yellow Fever. “A manager and an overseer, and the more intelligent of their slaves were more than sufficient to run their plantations.”[7] Beneath them were coffee planters, usually of less affluent origin, since coffee thrived in marginal hillside plots and required less capital and fewer slaves. Finally, there were the poor whites, petit blancs-artisans, shopkeepers, slave dealers, overseers, and day laborers. Contemptuous of their wealth and power of the planter class, they despised free blacks and free coloreds even more, their defensive racial pride earning them the title aristocrats of the skin. St. Domingue’s free coloreds, the gens de couleur numbered over 28,000 by 1789.[8] Through the custom of placage, planters enjoyed a type of common-law marriage with their slave mistresses, freeing their mulatto offspring and allowing them to inherit property. Many freed coloreds became coffee planters and slave-owners; by 1789, the gens de couleur owned a quarter of the land and slaves in the colony; in the west and the south, the portion was higher. As they grew in numbers and wealth, free coloreds were stripped of many of the rights they once enjoyed under the Code Noir, enacted by Louis XIV. Statutes forbade gens de couleur from taking up certain professions, marrying whites, wearing European clothing, carrying firearms in public, or attending social functions where whites were present. Reacting to this social ostracism, mulatto planters sought to identify with the grand blancs, whitening their children through marriage to lighter-skinned mulattoes and educating them in Paris while acting with contempt towards darker-skinned mulattoes, free blacks and poorer whites. BeginningsAfter two years of dispute among elements of the free population, a great slave uprising plunged the country into civil war in 1791. Besides the racial conflicts cultivated by slavemasters between whites, gens de couleur, and blacks of whom many were slaves of African birth, the country was polarized by regional rivalries between the North, South, and West. In addition, there was class conflict between rich white planters (grands blancs), poorer whites (petits blancs), free blacks or gens de couleur (affranchis), and slaves, as well as conflict between proponents of independence, those loyal to France, allies of Spain, and allies of Britain. Closely shaping the course of the conflict was the French Revolution which began in 1789, and was at first widely welcomed in the island. So many were the twists and turns in the leadership in France, and so contorted were events in Haiti itself, that various classes and parties changed their alignments many times. The African population got wind of the agitation for independence by the rich European planters, the grands blancs, who had resented France's mercantilistic limitations on the island's foreign trade. This class mostly realigned itself with the royalists and the British within a few years of the French Revolution. Africans understood that if 'Saint-Domingue's' independence was to be led by vile and brutal European slavemasters, it would probably mean even harsher treatment and injustices for the African population, who would be free to inflict slavery as they pleased - without being accountable to their French peers whatsoever. News had probably travelled from the newly independent United States that revolution by whites there had not abolished slavery or improved the lives of slaves in any way. DisturbancesSaint-Domingue's free people of color, most notably Julien Raimond, had been actively appealing to France for full civil equality with whites since the 1780s. Raimond used the French Revolution to make this the major colonial issue before the French National Assembly. In October 1790, Vincent Ogé, another wealthy free man of color from the colony, returned home from Paris, where he had been working with Raimond. Convinced that an ambiguous law passed by the French Constitutent Assembly had given full civil rights to wealthy men of color like himself, Ogé demanded the right to vote. When the colonial governor refused, he led a brief insurgency[6] in the area around Cap Francais, before being captured and brutally executed, in early 1791, by being tied to a wheel, crushed by hammer blows and left to die. Ogé was not fighting against slavery, per se, but his treatment was cited by later slave rebels as one of the factors in their decision to rise up in the same parishes in August 1791, and to resist treaties with the colonists. Eventually, in 1792, the French legislature proclaimed the equality of all free people in the French colonies regardless of color, and sent Léger-Félicité Sonthonax to Saint-Domingue to ensure that the colonial authorities complied. However, by that time, even larger disturbances were underway, as the slave uprising begun in August 1791, and led by Jean François and Biassou, associated itself with the pro-royalist Spanish authorities in Santo Domingo. The slave rebellion began on the plantations in the north and spread across most of the colony. Slaves burnt the plantations where they had been forced to work, and killed masters, overseers and other whites. One of the most successful black commanders was Toussaint L'Ouverture, a self-educated former domestic slave. A French general, Étienne Laveaux, was able to convince L'Ouverture to change sides in May 1794 and fight for the French Republic against the Spanish; meanwhile Sonthonax had proclaimed an end to slavery on 29 August 1793. Leadership of ToussaintUnder the military leadership of Toussaint, the rebellious slaves were able to gain the upper hand and restore most of Saint-Domingue to France. Having made himself master of the island, however, Toussaint did not wish to surrender power to France, and ruled the country effectively as an autonomous entity. Toussaint overcame a succession of local rivals (including Sonthonax, André Rigaud, and Comte d'Hédouville). Hédouville forced a fatal wedge between Rigaud and Toussaint before he escaped back to France.[9] Toussaint defeated a British expeditionary force in 1798, and even led an invasion of neighboring Santo Domingo, freeing the slaves there by 1801. In the same year, Toussaint issued a constitution for Saint-Domingue which provided for autonomy and made Toussaint himself governor-for-life. In retaliation, Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched an expeditionary force of French soldiers to the island, led by Bonaparte's brother in law Charles Leclerc, to restore French rule. The French soldiers were accompanied by mulatto troops led by Alexandre Pétion and André Rigaud, who had been defeated by Toussaint three years earlier. Some of Toussaint's closest allies, including Jean-Jacques Dessalines, defected to the French. Toussaint was promised his freedom, if he agreed to integrate his remaining troops into the French Army. Toussaint agreed to this in May 1802, but was deceived, and was seized and shipped off to France, where he later died, while imprisoned at Fort-de-Joux. Culmination of rebellionImage:Dessalines.jpg Jean Jacques Dessalines For a few months the island was largely quiescent under Napoleonic rule. But when it became apparent that the French intended to re-establish slavery, Dessalines and Pétion switched sides again, in October 1802, and fought against the French. In November, Leclerc died of yellow fever, like much of his army, and his successor, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, fought an even more brutal campaign than his predecessor. His atrocities helped rally many former French loyalists to the rebel cause. The French were further weakened by a British naval blockade, and by the unwillingness of Napoleon to send the requested massive reinforcements. Napoleon had sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States in April 1803, and had begun to lose interest in his ventures in the Western Hemisphere. Dessalines led the rebellion until its completion, when the French forces were finally defeated at the Battle of Vertières in November 1803.[6] Free republicOn January 1, 1804, Dessalines, the new leader under the dictatorial 1801 constitution, declared Haiti a free republic. Thus Haiti became the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States, and the only successful slave rebellion in world history. However, the country had been crippled by years of war, its agriculture devastated, its formal commerce nonexistent, and the people uneducated and mostly unskilled.[10][11] Haiti was forced to make reparations to French slaveholders in 1825 in the amount of 90 million gold francs (a value of $21 billion USD today), Haiti was forced to pay France for the next one hundred years for its independence. A great many historians believe that this indemnity has contributed significantly to making Haiti the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. The end of the Haitian Revolution in 1804 marked the end of colonialism, but the social conflict that had been cultivated under slavery continued to affect the population. The revolution left in power an affranchi élite as well as the formidable Haitian army. These elements split into two factions – the supporters of Alexandre Pétion who were predominantly milat (mulatto, light-skinned), and those of Henri Christophe who were mainly nwa (noir, dark-skinned). The two factions assumed control of most of the businesses in the new country. ImpactsThe Haitian Revolution was influential in slave rebellions in American British colonies. Many of the freed slaves of Saint-Domingue settled in New Orleans, profoundly influencing the history of that city. In 1807, Britain became the first major power to permanently abolish the slave trade. In 2004, Haiti celebrated the bicentennial of its independence from France. See alsoReferences
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