Across Oceans and Revolutions: Law and Slavery in French Saint‐Domingue and Beyond

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (03) ◽  
pp. 758-782
Author(s):  
Laurie M. Wood
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Legal Regime ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Legal Regimes ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free People

New work on colonial legal regimes suggests new pathways for scholarship on legal regimes, legal consciousness, judicial personnel, and the Atlantic world. Malick Ghachem's recent book, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (2012), introduces scholars to one legal regime—that of the French plantation colony of Saint‐Domingue—to show how enslaved and free people continually negotiated the terms of master sovereignty and manumission. This debate lasted from Saint‐Domingue's establishment as a slave society in the seventeenth century to its revolution in the 1790s, which overthrew the slave regime and culminated in independence in 1804 as the republic of Haiti.

The Haitian Revolution in Atlantic Perspective

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Geggus
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free People ◽  
North And South America ◽  
North And South

Of all the Atlantic revolutions, the fifteen-year struggle that transformed French Saint-Domingue into independent Haiti produced the greatest degree of social and economic change, and most fully embodied the contemporary pursuit of freedom, equality, and independence. Between 1789 and 1804, the Haitian Revolution unfolded as a succession of major precedents: the winning of colonial representation in a metropolitan assembly, the ending of racial discrimination, the first abolition of slavery in an important slave society, and the creation of Latin America's first independent state. Beginning as a home-rule movement among wealthy white colonists, it rapidly drew in militant free people of colour who demanded political rights and then set off the largest slave uprising in the history of the Americas. Sandwiched between the colonial revolutions of North and South America, and complexly intertwined with the coterminous revolution in France, Haiti's revolution has rarely been grouped with these major conflicts despite its claims to global significance.

Atrocity, Race, and Region in the Early Haitian Revolution: The Fond d’Icaque Rising

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Geggus
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Men Of Color ◽  
Grande Anse ◽  
Unique Experience ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free People ◽  
The Revolution

Set within a larger analysis of class relations in the Haitian Revolution, this is a microhistory that intersects with several important themes in the revolution: rumor, atrocity, the arming of slaves, race relations, and the origins and wealth of the free colored population. It is an empirical investigation of an obscure rebellion by free men of color in the Grande Anse region in 1791. Although the rebellion is obscure, it is associated with an atrocity story that has long resonated in discussion of the revolution. Formerly the least-known segment of Caribbean society, research has shed much new light on free people of color in recent decades, but much remains to be clarified. In certain ways, they are the key to understanding the Haitian Revolution, because of their anomalous position in Saint Domingue society and the way their activism precipitated its unraveling. The Grande Anse region had a unique experience of the revolution in that white supremacy and slavery were maintained there longer than in any other part of the colony. Based primarily on unexploited or little-known sources the article demonstrates the range and depth of research that remains possible and suggests that a regional focus is best way to advance current scholarship on the Haitian Revolution.

scholarly journals Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 1061-1087 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Scott
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
National Convention ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Vieux Carre ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free People

In the summer of 1809 a flotilla of boats arrived in New Orleans carrying more than 9,000 Saint-Domingue refugees recently expelled from the Spanish colony of Cuba. These migrants nearly doubled the population of New Orleans, renewing its Francophone character and populating the neighborhoods of the Vieux Carré and Faubourg Marigny. At the heart of the story of their disembarkation, however, is a legal puzzle. Historians generally tell us that the arriving refugees numbered 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color, and 3,226 slaves. But slavery had been abolished in Saint-Domingue by decree in 1793, and abolition had been ratified by the French National Convention in 1794. In what sense and by what right, then, were thousands of men, women, and children once again to be held to be “slaves”?

The Shock Waves of the Haitian Revolution

Slave No More ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 164-196
Author(s):  
Aline Helg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Shock Waves ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Northern United States ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

This chapter explores the shock waves caused by the Haitian Revolution and the massive slave insurrection that took both the Americas and Europe by surprise. Despite the rarity of large-scale revolts after 1794, the Saint Domingue insurrection did have a lasting impact on the slaves. The greatest lesson they retained from Haiti was that the institution of slavery was neither unchangeable nor invincible. Amid the troubled backdrop of the age of revolutions, many attentively followed the legal changes upsetting their owners, like the Spanish Códigno Negro, the French abolition of slavery, gradual emancipation laws in the northern United States, and the ban of the slave trade by Great Britain and the United States. Furthermore, after 1794, protests during which slaves claimed freedom they believed to have been decreed by the king or the government, but hidden by their masters, multiplied.

Circuits

2019 ◽  
pp. 177-195
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Secret History

This chapter reads the dynamics of gender and racial violence in Leonora Sansay’s 1808 novel Secret History in transoceanic context. Even as the French Atlantic triangle generated enormous wealth through enormous exploitation, encounters and events in the transnational Pacific were laying bare the unequal terms and coercive relations that underpinned such triangles and the circuits that spun around them. Set in Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, the novel situates the violence of both marital and plantation intimacies within the turning global circuits of sexual-economic drive and their production of disproportion and inequality. By presenting French European and French creole desire in terms of a sexualized colonialism and a pornographic capitalism, Secret History exposes the rotations of capitalist drive as a violent obscenity, and revolution as its violent offspring.

Vincent OGé Jeune (1757-91): Social Class and Free Colored Mobilization on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution

2011 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Garrigus
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Public Square ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Men Of Color ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Vincent Ogé jeune (the younger) was one of the wealthiest free men of color in Saint-Domingue, but his behavior in the year before the Haitian revolution (1791-1804) was a puzzling anomaly. Returning to the colony from Paris in October 1790, Ogé quickly emerged at the head of a group of free colored militiamen demanding voting rights. Colonists labeled this a “revolt” and four months later they executed Ogé and three of his colleagues, breaking their bodies bone by bone in a public square and mounting their severed heads on posts.

Abbé Ouvière

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Rey
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Catholic Priest ◽  
Confederate Army ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Entitled “Abbé Ouvière,” Chapter 3 seeks to answer three questions: (1) Who was Abbé Ouvière? (2) Why did he wind up in Saint-Domingue? (3) How and why did he become a principal in the early stage of the Haitian Revolution? Born into a family of meager means in Aix-en-Provence in 1762, Ouvière received a benefice as an adolescent by which he became an abbé and a secular priest. This afforded him an excellent education in both theology and medicine, enabling Ouvière to involve himself politically, as a Catholic priest, in the Haitian Revolution, and culturally, as a scientist and physician, in the intellectual life of early Republican America. The chapter reveals the means by which Abbé Ouvière would become a trusted adviser to the free colored Confederate Army, which was preparing to wage war to secure the full civil rights of free blacks and mulattoes as French citizens.

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