scholarly journals How Did Geography Affect the Haitian Revolution?

Perceptions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Jennifer Romine
Keyword(s):  
Local Environment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Asymmetric Warfare ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Economic Ties ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Impact

This paper concerns Haiti’s geography and how it affected the Haitian Revolution. Its aims involve detailing the geography (especially human and physical) of colonial Saint-Domingue at the end of the Eighteenth Century and investigating the impact of that geography on the Haitian Revolution. The study focuses chiefly on primary sources from France, Saint-Domingue, and the United States in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries and uses them to narrate the relationship of the Haitian revolutionaries to the geography of their country. It paints a picture of colonial Saint-Domingue as a mountainous and sparsely-populated place, largely remote from the French metropole, and with certain regions alienated from each other by a lack of economic ties. It then discusses the unconventional, Fabian, and proto-Guerrilla tactics that the Haitian revolutionaries employed, including asymmetric warfare, the employment of the surrounding biome in manufacturing supplies and gaining positional advantages, and the use of mountainous jungle to bluff the enemy concerning the size and equipment of insurgent forces. It notes how this strategy works symbiotically with the local environment, and how it propelled the Haitian Revolution to victory and allowed the continuous maintenance of an upper hand against enemy armies despite a disadvantage in numbers and equipment and a pro forma colony-metropole relationship with France. It describes the ways in which this symbiotic relationship with geography not only won Haiti’s independence but also shook the world. This paper describes Saint-Domingue’s geography during the time of the Haitian Revolution, and then discusses the importance of this geography in the creation of the first revolutionary black republic.

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.

Reimagining Instruction in Special Collections: The Special Case of Haiti

2020 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-321
Author(s):  
Kellee E. Warren
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
The Past ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Special Case

ABSTRACT A growing body of literature has developed around critical archival instruction and archivists as educators. This development demonstrates the pedagogical evolution beyond show-and-tell sessions to critical approaches in archival instruction and specific standards in archival literacy. This article provides a cross-disciplinary discussion of an approach to archival instruction. Also included is a reimagined instruction session using a fragmentary collection from the Saint-Domingue/Haiti colonial administration. Stories of the enslaved are usually marked by death and brutality. But Haiti's is a story of triumph; though fleeting, a victory nonetheless. When instructors decolonize archival instruction, they bring the past into the present and the future. The Haitian Revolution was a large-scale revolt by enslaved Africans, and it was also directly connected to the expansion of the United States. Archival instructors should encourage students to reimagine the stories told from the Saint-Domingue colonial administration collection and from any colonial collections that may be under their care.

The Priest and the Prophetess

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Rey
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The North ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Coastal Cities ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Shortly after a slave revolt in the North Province of the French colony of Saint-Domingue sparked the Haitian Revolution in August 1791, a free black immigrant coffee farmer and gender-bending religious visionary named Romaine-la-Prophétesse launched a separate insurgency on behalf of his own beleaguered people. Leading thousands of free colored insurgents and the slaves they liberated in the colony’s West Province, Romaine achieved something that no other rebel leader ever did in the colonial history of the Americas: conquering not one, but two coastal cities: Jacmel and Léogâne. His political adviser was a French Catholic priest named Abbé Ouvière, who brokered the treaty that formally tendered to Romaine rule over the latter city. What was the nature of their relationship? In what ways was each man instrumental in broader revolutionary events in the colony? This book answers these and related questions, deepening our understanding of the function of religion in the Haitian Revolution, along with those of race, science, and medicine, in the broader revolutionary Atlantic world, the latter topics impelled by the second half of the priest’s remarkable life as a scientist and physician in the United States, as Dr. Felix Pascalis. That Abbé Ouvière and Dr. Pascalis were one and the same person has heretofore been lost on scholars, and that Romaine-la-Prophétesse, though ultimately betrayed by the priest, would be judged by him as worthy of honor from his “tyrannized nation,” accentuate the historical significance of each man and the major contributions of this book.

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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