Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (61 page)

victory over, the brutality of colonialism, something which the enslaved

shared with those wiped out by the Spanish centuries before they ever ar-

rived. The choice of the name Haïti, then, infused the declaration of inde-

pendence with a broader historical significance. Haiti was to be the nega-

tion not only of French colonialism, but of the whole history of European

empire in the Americas. The new nation was to channel the centuries of

suffering of those pushed to the margins by the official activity of colonialism into a new political community meant to guarantee the eternal free-

dom of its scarred constituency.40

The proclamation declared that spirits of the dead who had died at the

hands of “those vultures” the French demanded revenge. It was necessary,

furthermore, to give “to the nations” a “terrible, but just, example of the

vengeance that a people proud of having won back its liberty, and ready to

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299

jealously preserve it, must exercise.” In the months following the declara-

tion of independence, Dessalines, who like Louverture named himself

governor “for life” (though he would soon give himself another title, that of emperor), made good on these threats. In late February he declared that

all those who were suspected of participation in the massacres ordered by

Leclerc and Rochambeau should be put on trial. He produced a letter

written to Bonaparte in late 1802 by a number of residents celebrating

Rochambeau’s successes and complimenting him for rejecting the “false

philosophy” that had been so detrimental to Saint-Domingue, which could

be “made fertile” only by Africans held under “strict discipline.” It was a

thinly veiled call for the return of slavery, Dessalines claimed, and all the signatories were therefore complicit in the terror the French had inflicted

during their final year in the colony. Dessalines also feared that whites in

the colony were actively conspiring to prepare a new attack aimed at bring-

ing slavery back to the island. He ordered a series of massacres of white in-

habitants, although precisely how many perished is difficult to establish.41

In the wake of the massacres, Dessalines explained that a “handful of

whites” who had “professed” the right “religion”—the rejection of slav-

ery—were under his personal protection. He granted them naturalization

papers that welcomed them “among the children of Haiti.” In order to re-

ceive the papers the whites had to take an oath renouncing France and ac-

cepting the laws of their new land. Many of those who were naturalized

were white women, presumably widows, who were allowed to retain their

property. Their special status was solidified in the constitution proclaimed

in 1805. In it Dessalines declared that “no white, no matter what his na-

tion,” could come to Haiti as “master or property owner,” but he exempted

those who had been naturalized. He also singled out two special groups

who were not included in the ban: the Poles who had deserted or remained

in the colony after the evacuation, and a group of Germans who had been

settled in the colony before the revolution. The constitution went on to de-

clare that, in the interest of eliminating all distinctions of “color” in the nation, all Haitians would henceforth be known as “black.” Haiti was a black

nation, but those who embraced its creed of rejecting France and the slav-

ery it had propagated were welcome to change their official identity and

become a part of it, and therefore of the black race.42

Such exceptions did not lessen the effect of the killing of whites, which

many outside the country pointed to as proof of the barbarity of the new

regime. Dessalines defended his actions as the only way to preserve the

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freedom won at such cost by his army. “These implacable enemies of

the rights of man have been punished for their crimes,” he declared in an

April 1804 proclamation. The ax had been taken to the tree of “slavery and

prejudice.” The people of Haiti were “mutilated victims” of the “French

whites” and had done what was necessary to preserve their freedom. “Yes,

we have paid these true cannibals back crime for crime, war for war, out-

rage for outrage,” Dessalines thundered. “I have saved my country. I have

avenged America.”43

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Epilogue: Out of the Ashes

In1803worshiperscarryingfruit,meat,fish,milk,andother

food gathered around an ancient mapou tree in the Artibonite plain.

A call had gone out from the local priests: 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.”1

Haiti needed to be healed, for it was a nation founded on ashes. Years of

insurrection and war had weakened and disrupted the economy. It was be-

ing rebuilt when Leclerc’s mission had arrived in 1802, but the final, cata-

clysmic war had brought fire and destruction to most of the cities and

plains. There were dead beyond counting—it is estimated that 100,000 or

more residents of the colony died during the revolution—and many others

were permanently crippled.2

The years of conflict left other, more enduring scars: impulses toward

democracy would long run up against autocratic and militaristic political

traditions, and the social and racial conflicts of the revolutionary years

would continue unabated. While some elites rebuilt parts of the colony’s

plantation economy, producing and profiting from coffee during the nine-

teenth century, many ex-slaves and their descendants chose what they saw

as the true independence of peasant agriculture over the limits of wage la-

bor. In the middle of the century, peasant movements struggled against au-

tocratic governments, seeking to fulfill some of the unachieved promises of

the Haitian Revolution, but were ultimately defeated. Burdened by heavy

taxes and confronted with the cumulative consequences of environmental

degradation, their struggle for a decent life was a difficult one, leaving

many in a grinding poverty that impelled migrations to the nation’s cities

and beyond.3

There was little peace in the years after independence. Dessalines’s

short reign ended with his assassination in 1806, and the young nation

again found itself in a civil war pitting the south, under the command of

Alexandre Pétion (who hosted a beleaguered Simón Bolívar, encouraging

him to abolish slavery in his pursuit of independence in South America),

against the north, ruled by Henri Christophe, who crowned himself king.

On the slopes of the mountains bordering the northern plain, above his

palace at Sans-Souci, Christophe built an impressive fortress. The Citadel,

as he called it, was to stand against the continuing threat of a foreign invasion that would bring slavery back to the land.

Such a threat had been evoked before, in April 1804, by Dessalines,

who had dared the defeated French to try to return: “Let her come, this

power crazy enough to dare attack me!” “At her approach,” he promised,

“the irritated genie of Haiti” would appear, “emerging from the sea,” stir-

ring up the waves, calling up the storms. Its “strong hand” would “shatter

and disperse” the ships. It would send “sickness,” “hunger, “fire,” and “poi-

son” upon its enemies. “But why count on the succor of the climate and

the elements?” Dessalines asked. They were not needed; he had under

his command “rare souls, nourished on adversity,” “sixty thousand men,”

“war-hardened,” ready to fight to avenge their dead brothers. “Let them

come, these homicidal troops; I am waiting for them, standing firm, with a

steady eye.”4

The invasions would come, but not precisely as either Dessalines or

Christophe expected. They would begin with the simple denial that Haiti

existed. Some exiled planters sought to erase what had happened: in 1806

one of them, exiled in Louisiana, noted as part of his property his “Negroes

remaining in Saint-Domingue.” Many governments reacted similarly. The

refusal of diplomatic relations with Haiti pioneered by Jefferson would last

until 1862, when Confederate secession made it possible for the abolition-

ist senator Charles Sumner to lead the way to opening relations with Haiti.

The denial of political existence was accompanied by other attacks on sov-

ereignty. In 1825 the Haitian government agreed to pay an indemnity to

France in return for diplomatic and economic relations. Exiled planters

had been clamoring for such a payment for years: it was meant to repay

them for what they had lost in Saint-Domingue, including the money in-

vested in their slaves, and amounted to a fine for revolution. Unable to pay, e p i l o g u e

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the Haitian government took loans from French banks, entering a cycle of

debt that would last into the twentieth century. When foreign invasion did

finally come, it was not by the French, but by the United States, which oc-

cupied Haiti in 1915, crushing a resistance movement whose soldiers be-

lieved they were fighting a second Haitian Revolution, and departed in

1934, but not before Haiti’s constitution was altered to allow whites again

to own land there.5

Even as Haiti struggled, the ramifications of its revolution reshaped the

world around it. The victory of the black troops of Saint-Domingue paved

the way for the Louisiana Purchase. Bonaparte’s mission to the colony had

been the centerpiece of a new colonial policy aimed at reinvigorating the

French presence in the Americas—Louisiana was meant to supply food

for the reconstructed plantation society of Saint-Domingue—and when it

was crushed he had little choice but to give up his ambitions, to the profit

of an expanding United States. As a result slavery thrived and expanded in

North America during the next decades. In the Caribbean, planters and

administrators in Cuba stepped into the vacuum created by the destruc-

tion of what had been the most important supplier of the world’s sugar.

In the nineteenth century sugar plantations sprang up throughout Cuba,

sometimes staffed by exiles from Saint-Domingue, and worked by African

slaves. The latter were imported into the colony in massive numbers: be-

tween 1790 and 1867 nearly as many were introduced to Cuba as had been

imported to Saint-Domingue in the entire eighteenth century. The prece-

dent of the Haitian Revolution, however, made some worry about the

danger of importing African slaves: one Puerto Rican writer wondered

whether they would “come to form a multitude” that might become an “ex-

terminating thunderbolt.”6

While Haiti represented a nightmare to many slave masters, it was

a source of inspiration for slaves throughout the Americas. “Within one

month after the 1791 uprising, slaves in Jamaica were singing songs about

it,” and within a few years masters “from Virginia to Louisiana to Cuba and

Brazil were complaining of a new ‘insolence’ on the part of their slaves,

which they often attributed to awareness of the successful black revolu-

tion.” In Richmond the example of Haiti inspired a slave named Gabriel

in 1800 to plan a bold conspiracy that envisioned a collaboration between

whites and blacks—perhaps an echo of the alliance that brought down slav-

ery in Saint-Domingue in 1793—in pursuit of emancipation. Years later,

in 1861, an anonymous pamphlet was published in Boston, reprinting

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Sonthonax’s 1793 decrees and arguing that the Union should follow his ex-

ample by arming and freeing slaves in order to defeat internal rebellion.7

Images of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution were an inspiration to

people of African descent throughout the Americas. In Rio de Janeiro in

1805, soldiers of African descent wore “medallion portraits of the emperor

Dessalines.” In Cuba a free black named José Antonio Aponte, who was

accused of conspiring to revolt in 1812, had portraits of Henri Christophe,

Toussaint Louverture, Jean-François, and Dessalines in his home. Rebels