Blue and Brown: Contraband Indigo and the Rise of a Free Colored Planter Class in French Saint-Domingue

1993 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Garrigus
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
New World ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
French Caribbean ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free People

In 1791 the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue became the site of the only successful slave uprising in the history of the New World. As the French Revolution reshaped the political and social institutions of the mother country, Saint-Domingue's free people of color, led by an indigo planter from the island's southern peninsula, began a campaign for civil reform that helped destabilize colonial slave society. Despite their pivotal role in what would become the Haitian Revolution, relatively little is known about this important population. Widely acknowledged to be the largest and wealthiest group of its kind in the New World, this class comprised a remarkable 47 percent of the colony's free inhabitants in 1788. While elsewhere in the eighteenth-century Caribbean free coloreds tended to be urban based, most of Saint-Domingue's gens de couleur dwelt in the countryside and a number were successful planters. By 1790 members of this class owned enough slaves and plantations that they were said to possess one-third of the colony.

One and Indivisible?

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-427
Author(s):  
Manuel Covo
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolution Francaise ◽  
The One ◽  
French Nation ◽  
Free People

Abstract Histories of the French Revolution usually locate the origins of the “one and indivisible Republic” in a strictly metropolitan context. In contrast, this article argues that the French Revolution's debates surrounding federation, federalism, and the (re)foundation of the French nation-state were interwoven with colonial and transimperial matters. Between 1776 and 1792 federalism in a French imperial context went from an element of an academic conversation among bureaucrats and economists to a matter of violent struggle in Saint-Domingue that generated new agendas in the metropole. Going beyond the binary language of union and secession, the article examines the contest over federation and federalism in Saint-Domingue between free people of color and white planters who, taking inspiration from both metropolitan and non-French experiences with federalism, sought to alter the colony's relationship with the metropole while also maintaining the institution of slavery. Revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, unsure which direction to take and without the benefit of hindsight, used the language of federalism to pursue rival interests despite a seemingly common vocabulary. This entangled history of conflicts, compromises, and misunderstandings blurred ideological delineations but decisively shaped the genesis of the French imperial republic. Généralement, les histoires de la Révolution française placent les origines de la « République une et indivisible » dans un contexte strictement métropolitain. Cet article soutient en revanche que les débats de la Révolution française sur la fédération, le fédéralisme et la (re)-fondation de l'Etat-nation français étaient liés à des questions coloniales et transimpériales. Dans le contexte impérial français, entre 1776 et 1792, le fédéralisme ne fut plus seulement un objet de débats académiques entre bureaucrates et économistes, mais devint un élément central dans une lutte violente à Saint-Domingue qui contribua à infléchir les choix politiques faits en métropole. Au-delà du langage binaire de l'union et de la sécession, l'article examine les conflits cristallisés par les notions de fédération et de fédéralisme entre des libres de couleur et des planteurs blancs qui, s'inspirant d'expériences fédéralistes métropolitaines et étrangères, cherchèrent à modifier la relation de la colonie avec la métropole tout en maintenant l'institution esclavagiste. Des deux côtés de l'Atlantique, les révolutionnaires, qui ne savaient quelle direction emprunter, employèrent le langage du fédéralisme pour défendre des intérêts contradictoires malgré l'usage d'un vocabulaire apparemment commun. Cette histoire faite de conflits, de compromis et de malentendus contribua à brouiller les partages idéologiques mais n'en influença pas moins la genèse de la République impériale française.

The Archive of Fear

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Zwarg
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
New World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Not about Haiti but about the haunting power of its revolution, The Archive of Fear explores the traumatic force field that continued to inflect U.S. discussions of slavery and abolition both before and after the Civil War, sometimes with surprising intensity and endurance. Focusing on U.S. slavery and its aftermath in the nineteenth century, it challenges the long-assumed distinction between psychological and cultural-historical theories of trauma, discovering a virtual dialogue between three central U.S. writers and Sigmund Freud concerning the traumatic response of slavery’s perpetrators. To do so, it shows how trauma theory before Freud first involves a return to an overlap between crisis, insurrection, and mesmerism found in the work of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Mesmer’s “crisis state” has long been read as the precursor to hypnosis, the tool Freud famously rejected when he created psychoanalysis. But the story of what was lost to trauma theory when Freud adopted the “talk cure” can be told through cultural disruptions of New World slavery, especially after mesmerism arrived in Saint Domingue where its implication in the Haitian revolution in both reality and fantasy had an impact on the history of emancipation in the United States. The Archive of Fear argues that a strain of trauma theory and practice comes alive in the temporal and spatial disruptions of New World slavery—and that key elements of that theory still inform the infrastructure of race relations today. Reviewing trauma theory through its pre-Freudian roots—especially as the alarm of slavery’s perpetrators relates to the temporal patterns of Mesmer’s “crisis state”—widens our sense of the affective atmospheres through which emancipation had to be sought. And it illuminates the fugitive approach Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois devised to confront and defuse the archive of fear still blocking full emancipation today.

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.

The Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Peabody
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Slave Revolt ◽  
Sugar Plantations ◽  
Free People

Slave labor in eighteenth-century Isle Bourbon was shaped by the cultivation of staple crops, unlike the proto-industrial forms of labor found in the sugar plantations of the Atlantic world, and may have been milder, though periodic cyclones brought famine to slaves and their masters alike. On the eve of the French Revolution, following the death of Charles Routier, Madeleine’s mistress filed manumission papers, freeing her. As a result of the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), France issued the 1794 Decree of 16 Pluviôse abolishing slavery throughout the colonies. Although Madeleine should have been considered free twice over, the widow Routier declared Madeleine her slave on her 1796 census, a moment when Madeleine—like many free people of color in France’s empire—faced potential or actual re-enslavement.

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.

The Borders of Citizenship in the Haitian Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 009059172097534
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Ravano
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
The Political ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Plantation Labor ◽  
Free People

This essay surveys the appropriations and transformations of the modern concept of citizenship by the actors of the Haitian Revolution, analyzed through the intertwining of race, plantation labor, and the postcolonial state. The concept of citizenship is interpreted as an instrument of emancipative struggles as well as of practices of government. The reconstruction is focused around four moments: the liberal critique by free people of color of the racial boundaries of French citizenship; the strategic uses of citizenship by the insurgent slaves to secure their freedom; the inclusion of former slaves into citizenship to preserve the plantation system within the republican order; and postcolonial Haitian citizenship. By analyzing the constitutional shifts and the political thinking of different figures, such as Julien Raimond, Georges Biassou, Jean-François, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the essay shows the conceptual originality of Haitian political thought and its relevance for the history of modern political concepts.

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”?

A Colonial Media Revolution:The Press in Saint-Domingue, 1789–1793

2017 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy D. Popkin
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Right ◽  
Free People ◽  
Commercial Center

Like metropolitan France, the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue experienced a media revolution during the first four years of the French Revolution. In 1789, there was only one newspaper on the island, the officially licensedAffiches américaines, with two editions, one in the colony's capital, Port-au-Prince, and the other in its commercial center, Cap Français. By the time of the destruction of Cap Français, the colony's major city in June 1793, more than a dozen different newspapers had been founded in the colony, making it the second site in the New World, after Britain's North American colonies, to experience the phenomenon of a revolutionary press. Not only were there more newspapers, but their content and language were radically different from those of theAffiches. Like the newspapers created in France in 1789, those in Saint-Domingue denounced the vestiges of royal power and called on the colony's white citizens to demand the right to govern themselves. By helping to break down traditional authority, the press played an essential if unintentional role in making the revolts against white rule by Saint-Domingue's free people of color and its slave population possible.

scholarly journals Viral Events: Epidemiology, Ecology and the Outbreak of Modern Sovereignty // Eventos virales: Epidemiología, ecología y la irrupción de la soberanía moderna

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-132
Author(s):  
Carlos Fonseca Suárez
Keyword(s):  
Yellow Fever ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Ecological History ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
History Books ◽  
The Revolution

      Like most revolutionary processes, the history of the Haitian revolution has typically been narrated from the perspective of revolutionary heroes. Whether as the feat of Toussant L’Ouverture, Francois Macandal or Jean-Jacques Dessalaines, historians have often tried to encapsulate the revolution within the narrow margins of human causality. In this article, I attempt to sketch the contours of another possible history: an ecological history in which the feats of the revolutionary heroes give way to the radical power of nature. By focusing on the role that two epidemic phenomena—yellow fever and mesmerism—had within the revolution, I attempt to show how the emergence of an “epidemiological discourse” proved to be fundamental for imagining the outbreak of modern sovereignty as it occurred in Saint-Domingue. Drawing on the ecological history of the Greater Caribbean and the routes of exchange that determined the historical development of its radical environment, the article attempts to imagine what an ecocritical history of the revolutionary process could look like. It lays out a political cartography unlike that which one usually encounters in history books, following a mosquito in its route from Africa to America and retracing the way in which a European pseudo-science—mesmerism—arrived from France to America. The epidemiological discourse surrounding both yellow fever and mesmerism reveals the emergence of a new sociological language capable of figuring the crisis of imperial modes of sovereignty as well as the emergence of new modes of radical subjectivity. Departing from the works Deleuze and Guattari, but also in dialogue with recent debates in ecocriticism, the significance of the Haitian Revolution is reconsidered in its relationship to the emergence of sociology as a language capable of explaining the emergence of the modern political subject par excellence: the modern multitude. Resumen      Como la mayoría de los procesos revolucionarios, la historia de la revolución haitiana usualmente ha sido narrada desde la perspectiva histórica de los héroes revolucionarios. Ya sea como la épica de Toussant L’Ouverture, Francois Macandal o Jean-Jacques Dessalaines, los historiadores han intentado encapsular la revolución dentro de los márgenes de la causalidad humana. En este artículo, intento esbozar los contornos de otra posible historia: una historia ecológica en la que las hazañas de los héroes revolucionarios ceden el escenario al poder radical de la naturaleza. Mediante una articulación del rol que dos fenómenos epidémicos—la fiebre amarilla y el mesmerismo—tuvieron dentro de la revolución, intento demostrar cómo la aparición de un “discurso epidemiológico” demostró ser fundamental en el proceso de crisis de soberanía imperial que ocurrió en Saint-Domingue. Investigando tanto la historia ecológica del Gran Caribe como las rutas de intercambio que determinaron la radicalización de su atmósfera política, el artículo intenta imaginar una historia ecocrítica del proceso revolucionario. A través de una cartografía de las rutas transatlánticas de circulación de un mosquito, así como del desembarco en América de una pseudociencia—el mesmerismo—el artículo esboza una historiografía política distinta. Se escudriña el discurso epidemiológico que giraba en torno tanto a la fiebre amarilla como al mesmerismo en relación con el surgimiento de un nuevo discurso sociológico capaz de representar la crisis de los modelos imperiales de soberanía y el surgimiento de nuevas subjetividades radicales. Partiendo de los trabajos de Deleuze y Guattari, pero también en conversación con los recientes debates sobre la ecocrítica, el significado de la Revolución Haitiana es reconsiderado en relación con el surgimiento de la sociología como el idioma del sujeto moderno por excelencia: la multitud.

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