On August 14, 1791, a large meeting of 200 slaves took place in the northern province of St. Domingue, one half of the Island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea. There, these slaves, representative of many thousands more with whom they interacted on a daily basis, agreed to revolt against their oppressors, the French plantation owners and sugar producers. One week later, on August 21, at an outdoor meeting, a vodou priest and maroon leader named Dutty Boukman led the plotters in a final ceremony signifying the beginning of their revolt. The next night, August 22, hundreds of enslaved people carried out dozens of attacks on nearly all the plantations in the northern parish of Cap-Haitien. The Haitian Revolution had begun.
The Haitian Context
The Haitian Revolution was a part of a chain of revolutions in regions across the world challenging the European colonial order. Haiti, then called Saint Domingue, had been a French colony for more than a century by the time of the revolution and was one of the wealthiest posessions of any European colonial empire. The wealth of the colony rested on sugarcane and slave labor. Massive sugar plantations covered the island and, in order to farm the sugarcane, a huge labor force was needed. The French planters bought hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans stolen from Africa. Slavery in Saint Domingue was brutal: sugarcane farming is a labor intensive process, and many enslaved people died through the exertion of forced labor as well as torture. French planters often found it cheaper to work enslaved people until death and buy new slaves from slave traders rather than keep their slaves alive.
Besides the enslaved African peoples and white French planters, small white planters and townspeople and free people of color also lived in Haiti. While white people of both the rich planter class and the middle class enjoyed special rights and privileges because of their skin color, mixed race free people were discriminated against, even though many owned businesses and some were even wealthier than whites. Enslaved Black people had no rights at all.
The Revolution
It was in this context of brutal slavery and tension over race and class that the French Revolution arrived. Beginning in 1789, the French people overthrew the remnants of feudalism and absolute monarchy, first opting for a constitutional monarchy and eventually for a republic. The French Revolution was an inspiration and set off waves around the world, including in French colonies such as Saint Domingue. The big white planters, frustrated by their subservient status to French merchants and being forced to sell their sugar only to those French merchants, advocated for independence from France. Inspired by the calls for liberty and equality, the free people of color also started agitating for equal rights. In this stew of competing interests, many enslaved African people also began to think about new avenues to freedom. For years the slaves had nurtured community, networks of communication, and leaders, in many instances through their religious practices. Boukman was an example of the religious leader who worked as a horse driver, and therefore was able to connect slaves from disparate plantations and spread word of plans for uprisings. Preparation and organization were key to the success of the rebellion, and slaves like Boukman were conduits in this process of planning and organizing.
In August 1791, the enslaved people, observing the increasing tensions between white planters and the free people of color on one hand and the French revolutionary government on the other, made their bid for freedom. They attacked and killed planters and their employees, and burned millions acres of land, including hundreds of large plantations. The rebellion was initially concentrated in the northern plain of Haiti. While Boukman and many early leaders were killed in the months following the start of the uprising, other leaders would emerge. Slaves who had fought in wars in Kongo, or some free people of color who had been part of French colonial militias, took the lead in fighting. Some fighting was brutal and consciously cruel – the predictable response to decades of cruelty they had experienced as slaves. But there were many instances of moderation, attempts to reach compromises to avoid bloodshed, and even outright sympathy and compassion. The uprising was large, with as many as 80,000 rebels by September of 1791 out of about 500,000 enslaved people on the island. But the rebels were poorly armed. The weapons they had were taken from plantations, or obtained through trade with Spanish officials in Santo Domingo who wanted to weaken the French position on the island. Nonetheless, the uprising and its fighting brought the economy of the island to a standstill, destroying the sugar economy that had enriched French planters and the French state.
Thousands of slaves were freed within days, many more in the coming years. They wanted complete and total freedom from servitude. Their primary enemy was the white French planter class, who had dominated their lives completely for decades. In many cases, enslaved people took over the plantations from those former masters and began to run them for themselves and their communitiy. In many parts of the island, particularly in the south, it took years before slaves were freed. As the Revolution proceeded, formerly enslaved leaders like Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines became leaders of armies that grew and became more professional as the years passed.
Many free people of color saw themselves as having different interests than the enslaved, and often wanted slavery to continue. They wanted moderation, at first only demanding political rights for themselves. They were represented by Andre Rigaud, a free person of color, who became their leading general and for years slowed the expansion of the revolution to the plantations of the south. But even there, many slaves took matters into their own hands, burning their plantations or escaping into the mountains, becoming bandits who survived by attacking government troops and raiding plantations or ports.
In Europe, France became embroiled in wars with other European powers, including the United Kingdom. Seeing an opportunity to expand their colonial empire while at war with France, Britain sent a force of 30,000 soldiers and 200 ships to capture the French colonies in the Caribbean, primarily Haiti. British control of Haiti would mean the reimposition of slavery. The newly freed people and some already free people of color, led by the emerging leader Louverture, fought off these invaders.
In the first year of the Revolution the new French Republican government offered free people of color political equality in an effort to keep them from supporting the more threatening slave revolt. In late 1792 they sent Etienne Polverel and Leger-Felicité Sonthanax to govern the island and to try to end the revolt. But after one year of negotiations in which they came under increasing attack from the white planter class, they realized that the planters would never compromise on their rights to own slaves as property, and the slave rebels would never return to their previous condition of servitude. After surveilling the balance of forces already in motion, they realized that the massive slave uprising was already washing away the system of plantation slavery that had existed for more than one hundred years. After seeing the reality, in August of 1793 they announced the full emancipation of all slaves and their incorporation into the French Republic as citizens. Just days later, an open meeting of about 15,000 in Le Cap, the Northern city where the revolt had begun, voted in favor of the emancipation of all slaves in the north. Within the colony itself, the edifice of slavery was being brought down.
At the same time in France, the Revolution had become more radical. By then the Jacobins controlled the revolutionary government, supported by the revolutionary Parisian masses known as the sans-culottes. Three envoys from Saint Domingue, including a Black man and former slave, Bellay, were given credentials to join the revolutionary government in Paris. Bellay made an impassioned speech on the floor of the National Convention, urging the complete abolition of slavery and pledging the colony’s masses to the cause of the revolution. The National Convention passed a decree abolishing slavery throughout the French empire. The actions of the massive slave uprising had changed the balance of power in the colony and in the colonial capital, and had smashed the slave system of Saint Domingue. Despite continuing combat with both recalcitrant planters and foreign colonial powers, the revolution in Saint Domingue was succeeding.
But with the Thermidorian Reaction in the summer of 1794, in which the Jacobin government was overthrown, reaction set in against the French Revolution. It would ultimately end with Napoleon Bonaparte coming to power in 1799, reversing many of the most radical measures of the French Revolution – including the abolition of slavery. In 1802, he revoked the abolition of slavery passed by the National Convention and sent a force of 30,000 French soldiers to capture Saint Domingue and reimpose slavery.
But nothing could make that happen. Already on the island, newly freed Africans had remade their habits, customs, and expectations for what their lives were to be. They had gained an understanding of their power, and were unwilling to relinquish their gains. What is more, Napolean’s aggression made clear to the newly freed Africans throughout the colony that they would never be free under French rule. Their cause now became complete and total Independence. Fighting resumed.
But as with the previous British invasion of the island, the attempt by Napolean to reenslave its inhabitants would prove futile. Yellow fever ravaged the French troops, while the revolutionary army under the command of Jean-Jacques Dessalines (who became the leading rebel general and leader after Louverture was captured by the French) fought fiercely. Finally, at the end of 1803, with over half of his expeditionary force dead, Napoleon withdrew his troops. Haiti was proclaimed an independent nation in 1804 – only the second independent nation and republic in the western hemisphere, and the only independent republic declared and then ruled by a Black majority.
The Punishment
The colonialist powers of the world then punished Haiti for her courage in overthrowing tyranny. In 1825, France forced Haiti to pay for the so-called debt incurred through the abolition of slavery. This debt crippled the newly sovereign nation and was not fully paid back until 1947. Also, throughout the 19th century, the United States tried to isolate Haiti and prevent the example it offered of slaves freeing themselves from spreading to the U.S. The United States invaded Haiti in the early 1900s and controlled the nation’s economy, taking 40% of the Haitian gross domestic product to pay off France and U.S. loans. Throughout the 20th Century, the U.S. sought to keep Haiti in its sphere of influence, supporting the brutal father-and-son Duvalier regime until its collapse in 1986, and overthrowing the popularly elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Since then, the U.S. and other imperialist powers continue to manipulate the political system from afar and to back leaders with no popular support. This has led again to spiraling political crises, assassinations, increasing impoverishment for millions, and the rise of heavily armed gangs that terrorize the population.
The Significance of the Revolution Today
Even through the two centuries of capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression imposed on Haiti, the example set by the Haitian Revolution to the oppressed people of the world shines like a beacon. It sounded the death knell of slavery not only in Haiti, but across much of the world. It was a momentous event: a revolution for freedom and equality born largely out of the self-activity and organization of enslaved people. It spread the idea of liberty throughout the Caribbean, but also to other regions of Latin America, and, of course, to enslaved people in the United States. We should all celebrate Haiti’s revolution and the the tens of thousands who fought for freedom and gave their lives in the cause.
Today, the people of Haiti are still struggling to win independence from imperialist domination and to overcome the effects of more than one hundred years of oppression and domination by the Haitian oligarchy who developed under French and U.S. tutelage. In these terrible conditions, the examples of Boukman, Dessalines, Louverture, and the hundreds of thousands of others who made the Haitian Revolution could not be more relevant.
For those who want to learn more about the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussant L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, published in 1963 by the Marxist historian C.L.R. James, remains the classic account. Another more recent book, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, by Laurent DuBois in 2004, adds some detail and precision that was not available when James was writing.
