Fr a n k l i n W . K n i g h t

The Haitian Revolution andthe Notion of Human Rights

The Haitian Revolution, long neglected and occasionally

forgotten by historians, represents one of the truly noteworthy

achievements in the annals of world history. Among its many ac-

complishments was a bold, though unsuccessful, attempt to advance

universal human rights in the early nineteenth century. The measure

was bold and farsighted. Had it succeeded, one of the greatest rev-

olutions in the modern past would have fundamentally changed the

course of history and the relations between the peoples of the earth.

One of the cruel ironies of history is that so little is known or re-

membered of one of the greatest and most noble revolutions of all

time. And it is especially ironic that hardly anyone anywhere today

associates Haiti with either democracy or the exercise of human

rights. Nevertheless, Haiti played an inordinately important role in

the articulation of a version of human rights as it forged the second

independent state in modern history.

Haiti failed spectacularly as a symbol of political freedom. Yet

it established and maintained a viable state for more than a cen-

tury when state formation was a novel undertaking anywhere.

The attempt to promote human rights also largely failed because

those ideas were so far ahead of their time; even acknowledged

The Journal of The Historical Society V:3 Fall 2005 391

T h e J o u r n a l

humanitarians of that era failed to recognize the full equality of

all persons. After all, it was not until after the Second World War

that the then newly established United Nations made the pursuit

of human rights one of its goals. The Haitian ideals failed because

Haiti not only sought political freedom but also equality for black

people in a world where the power structure was overwhelmingly

white—and whites held a rigid, hierarchical view of the world that

they refused to have challenged at that time. Although they won

their freedom, the Haitians lost the long postwar publicity campaign

along with the early struggle to make human rights an international

issue. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the history

of white-on-white atrocities and extreme forms of genocide forced

the world to reconsider the notion of international human rights—

which has become one of the interests of the United Nations since

1947.

In order to understand the Haitian role in the development of hu-

man rights it is vitally important to examine the context of that un-

usual revolution that took place in the French colony on the western

part of the island of Hispaniola at the end of the eighteenth century.

The Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution represents the most thorough case study of

revolutionary change anywhere in the history of the modern world.1

In ten years of sustained internal and international warfare a colony

populated predominantly by plantation slaves overthrew both its

colonial status and its economic system and established a new, in-

dependent political state of entirely free individuals—with former

slaves constituting the new political authority.

As the second state to declare and establish its independence in

the Americas, the Haitians had no viable administrative models to

follow, but eighteenth-century revolutionaries, unlike their succes-

sors, did not look for precedents. The British North Americans who

declared their independence in 1776 left slavery intact in their new

state and in any case theirs was more a political revolution than a

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The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights

social and economic revolution. The success of Haiti against all

odds, however, would make social revolutions an extremely sen-

sitive issue among the leaders of political revolt elsewhere in the

Americas during the final years of the eighteenth century and the

first decades of the nineteenth century.2

The genesis of the Haitian revolution cannot be separated from

the wider concomitant events of the later eighteenth-century At-

lantic World, as has been noted repeatedly by such writers as Laurent

Dubois and David Geggus.3 Indeed, the period between 1750 and

1850 represented an age of spontaneous, interrelated revolutions,

and events in Saint Domingue/Haiti constitute an integral—though

often overlooked—part of the history of that wider world.4 These

multifaceted revolutions combined to alter the way that individuals

and groups saw themselves and their worlds.5 But even more, the

intellectual changes of the period instilled in some political leaders

a confidence (not new in the eighteenth century, but far more gener-

alized than before) that creation and creativity were not exclusively

divine or accidental attributes, and that both general societies and

individual conditions could be rationally engineered or re-ordered.6

All this clearly indicated that the world of the eighteenth cen-

tury was experiencing a widespread revolutionary situation. Not all

of such revolutionary situations, of course, ended up in full-blown

convulsing revolutions.7 But everywhere the old order was being

challenged. New ideas, new circumstances, and new peoples com-

bined to create a portentously “turbulent time.”8 Bryan Edwards,

a sensitive English planter in Jamaica as well as an articulate mem-

ber of the British Parliament, lamented in a speech to that body in

1798 that “a spirit of subversion had gone forth that set at naught

the wisdom of our ancestors and the lessons of experience.”9 But

if Edwards’s lament was for the passing of his familiar cruel and

constricted world of privileged planters and exploited slaves, it was

certainly not the only view.

For the vast majority of workers on the far-flung plantations un-

der the tropical sun of the Americas, the revolutionary situation

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presented an occasion to seize the opportunity and fundamen-

tally change their personal world, and maybe the world of oth-

ers equally unfortunate.10 Nowhere was that reality more sharply

demonstrated than in the highly productive and extremely valu-

able French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue between 1789

and 1804. The hundreds of thousands of African slaves and tens

of thousands of legally defined free coloreds found the hallowed

wisdom and experiential “lessons” of Bryan Edwards to be a de-

spicably inconvenient barrier to their quest for individual and col-

lective liberty. It was a sentiment motivated by differences not

only of geography and culture but also of race and condition.

Masters and slaves interpreted their worlds in quite different

ways.

Within fifteen turbulent years, a colony of coerced and exploited

slaves successfully liberated itself and radically and permanently

transformed its slaveholding world. It was a unique case in the

history of the Americas: a thorough revolution that resulted in a

complete metamorphosis of the social, political, intellectual, and

economic life of the colony. Socially, the lowest stratum of the

society—the slaves—became equal, free, and independent citizens.

Politically, the new citizens created the second nominally indepen-

dent state in the Americas, and the first independent non-European

state to be carved out of the European empires anywhere. By so

doing they not only declared that all men within their new state

would be free, but that they would all enjoy equal privileges as well.

In short, the Haitian Revolution abolished social rank and privi-

leges based on status, color, condition, and occupation. Their lead-

ers hoped that Haiti would become a genuine model meritocracy. In

this they elevated human rights above civil rights.

Intellectually, the ex-colonists gave themselves a new, if not

entirely original name—Haitians—and defined all Haitians as

“black,” thereby striking a shattering psychological blow against the

emerging intellectual traditions of an increasingly racist Europe and

North America that saw a hierarchical world eternally dominated

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The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights

by types representative of their European-derived somatic norm im-

ages.11 In Haiti all citizens were legally equal, regardless of color,

race, or condition. Equally important, the example of Haiti convinc-

ingly refuted the patently ridiculous notion, still enduring among

some social scientists by the end of the twentieth century, that slav-

ery produced “social death” among slaves and persons of African

descent.12

In the economic sphere, the Haitians dramatically transformed

their conventional tropical plantation agriculture, especially in the

north, from a large-scale latifundia-dominated structure into a soci-

ety of minifundists, or small-scale, marginally self-sufficient produc-

ers who reoriented their production away from export-dependency

to an internal marketing system supplemented by a minor, although

considerably varied, export market sector.13 These changes, how-

ever, were not accomplished without extremely painful dislocations

and severe long-term repercussions both for the new Caribbean state

and its society.14

The Haitian model of state formation drove xenophobic fear into

the hearts of the great majority of white people along the Atlantic

seaboard, from Boston to Buenos Aires, and shattered their com-

placency about the unquestioned superiority of their own political

models.15 To Simón Bolı́var, himself of partial African ancestry, it

was a model of revolution that was to be avoided by the Spanish-

American states seeking their independence after 1810, but he sug-

gested the best way was to free all slaves.16

The Atlantic Context for Revolution

If the origins of the revolution in Saint-Domingue lie in the broader

changes of the Atlantic World during the eighteenth century, the im-

mediate precipitants must be found in the French Revolution.17 The

symbiotic relationship between the two remained extremely strong

and will be discussed later, but both resulted from the construction

of a newly integrated Atlantic world community during the seven-

teenth and eighteenth centuries.

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T h e J o u r n a l

Those broader movements of empire building in the Atlantic

world produced the dynamic catalyst for change that fomented po-

litical independence in the United States of America between 1776

and 1783. Even before that event, Enlightenment ideas had agi-

tated the political structures on both sides of the Atlantic, overtly

challenging the traditional mercantilist notions of imperial admin-

istration and appropriating and legitimating the unorthodox free

trading of previously defined interlopers and smugglers.18 The En-

lightenment proposed a rational basis for reorganizing state, society,

and nation.19 The leading thinkers promoted and popularized new

ideas of individual and collective liberty, of political rights, and of

class equality, and even to a certain extent, of social democracy that

eventually included some unconventional thoughts about slavery.20

But their concepts of the state remained rooted in the traditional

Western European social experience, which did not accommodate

itself easily to the current reality of the tropical American world, as

Peggy Liss shows in her insightful study entitled Atlantic Empires.21

Questions about the moral, religious, and economic justifications

for slavery and the slave society formed part of this range of in-

novative ideas. Eventually these led to changes in jurisprudence,

such as the judgment reluctantly delivered by British Chief Justice

Lord William Mansfield in 1772 that the owner of the slave James

Somerset could not return him to the West Indies, thereby implying

that by being brought to England, Somerset had indeed become a

free man. In 1778 the courts of Scotland declared that slavery was

illegal in that part of the realm. Together with the Mansfield rul-

ing in England, the Scottish decision meant that slavery could not

be considered legal in the British Isles. Those legal rulings encour-

aged the formation of societies designed to promote the amelioration

in the condition of slaves, or even advocating the eventual abolition

of the slave trade and slavery.22

Even before the declaration of political independence on the

part of the British North American colonies, slavery was under

attack from a number of religious leaders—among the Quakers

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The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights

and Evangelicals, for example—and political leaders—such as

William Wilberforce [1759–1833], Thomas Clarkson [1760–1846],

and Granville Sharp [1735–1813]. Anti-slavery movements flour-

ished both in the metropolis and in the colonies.23 In 1787, the Abbé

Gregoire [1750–1831], the Abbé Raynal [1713–1796], the Marquis

de Lafayette [1757–1834], and others formed an anti-slavery com-

mittee in France called the Société des Amis des Noirs, which took

up the issue in the recently convened Estates General in 1789 and

later pushed for broadening the basis of citizenship in the National

Assembly.24 Their benevolent proposals, however, were prematurely

overtaken by events.

The intellectual changes throughout the region cannot be sepa-

rated from changes on the ground in the Caribbean. During the

eighteenth century the Caribbean plantation slave societies reached

their apogee. English and French (mostly) absentee sugar producers

made headlines in their respective imperial capitals, drawing the at-

tention of political economists and moral philosophers.25 The most

influential voice was probably that of Adam Smith [1723–1790],

whose Wealth of Nations appeared in the auspicious year of 1776.

Basing his arguments on the comparative costs of production, Smith

insisted “. . . from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe,

that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than that

performed by slaves.”26 Slavery, Smith further stated, was both un-

economical and irrational not only because the plantation system

was a wasteful use of land, but also because slaves cost more to

maintain than free laborers.27 Smith did not condemn slavery as

immoral, although, as Jerry Muller points out, Smith thought “eco-

nomic stagnation was coupled with the degradation that goes with

personal dependency.”28

The Caribbean Plantation System

The plantation system had, by the middle of the eighteenth century,

created some strange communities of production throughout the

Caribbean—strange in the sense of being highly artificial constructs

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involving labor inputs from Africa, capital and managerial

direction from Europe, and provisions from mainland America.

These colonies largely produced tropical products such as sugar,

coffee, cotton, and tobacco for overseas markets in Europe, Africa,

and North America. Strange, too, because despite the ideas of Adam

Smith, those coerced Caribbean societies were, at times, enormously

productive as well as profitable.29

Elsewhere I have referred to this unintended consequence of the

sugar revolutions as the development of exploitation societies—a

tiered system of interlocking castes and classes all determined by

the necessities, structure, and rhythm of the sugar plantations.30

French Saint-Domingue prided itself, with considerable justifica-

tion, as being the richest colony in the world. According to David

Geggus, in the 1780s Saint-Domingue accounted for

. . . some 40 percent of France’s foreign trade, its 7,000 or so

plantations were absorbing by the 1790s also 10–15 percent

of United States exports and had important commercial links

with the British and Spanish West Indies as well. On the coastal

plains of this colony little larger than Wales was grown about

two-fifths of the world’s sugar, while from its mountainous

interior came over half the world’s coffee.31

The population reflected the structural distortion of the typical slave

plantation exploitation society in tropical America. A white popu-

lation of approximately 25,000 psychological transients dominated

a social pyramid that included an intermediate subordinate stratum

of approximately the same number of free, black, or miscegenated

persons referred to throughout the French Caribbean colonies as

gens de couleur, and a depressed, denigrated, servile, and exploited

majority group of some 500,000 workers from Africa or of African

descent.32

Those demographic proportions would have been roughly famil-

iar for Jamaica, Barbados, or Cuba during the acme of their slave

plantation regimes.33 The centripetal cohesive force remained the

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The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights

plantations of sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo, and the subsidiary

activities associated with them, especially cattle-raising and local

food production. The plantations, therefore, molded both local so-

ciety and local economy with a human umbilical cord—the transat-

lantic slave trade—that attached the colony to Africa. Sustained

economic viability depended on the continuous replenishing of the

indispensable labor force by the importation of African slaves.34

Nevertheless, the system was both sophisticated and complex, with

interlocking commercial marketing operations that extended to sev-

eral continents.35

If whites, free coloreds, and slaves formed the three distinct castes

in the French Caribbean colony, then these caste divisions over-

shadowed a complex system of classes with corresponding inter-

nal class antagonisms across all sectors of the society. Among the

whites the class antagonisms were between the successful so-called

grands blancs and their associated hirelings—plantation overseers,

artisans, and supervisors—on the one hand and the so-called pe-

tits blancs—small merchants’ representatives, small proprietors, and

various types of hangers-on—on the other. The antagonism was pal-

pable. At the same time all whites shared varying degrees of fear and

mistrust of the intermediate group of gens de couleur, but especially

the economically upwardly mobile sector of wealth, education, and

polished French culture.36 For their own part, the free non-whites

had seen their political and social abilities increasingly circumscribed

during the two or so decades before the outbreak of revolution. Their

wealth and education certainly placed them socially above the petits

blancs. Yet, theirs was also an internally divided group, albeit with

a division based as much on skin color as on genealogy. All slaves

were distinguished—if that terminology may be employed here—by

their legal condition as the lifetime property of their masters, and

were occasionally subject to extraordinary degrees of daily control

and coercion. Within the slave sector, status divisions derived from

a bewildering number of factors applied in an equally bewilder-

ing number of ways: skills, gender, occupation, location (urban or

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T h e J o u r n a l

rural, household or field), relationship to production, or simply the

arbitrary whim of the master.37

The slave society was an extremely explosive society, although

the tensions could be, and were, carefully and constantly reduced

by negotiations between and across the various castes.38 While the

common fact of owning slaves might have produced some common

interest across caste lines, that occurrence was neither often enough

nor strong enough to establish class solidarity. White and free col-

ored slave owners were often insensitive to the basic humanity and

civil rights of the slaves but they were forced nevertheless to negoti-

ate continuously the ways in which they operated with their slaves in

order to prevent the collapse of their fragile plantation world. Nor

did similarity of race and color facilitate an affinity between free

non-whites and slaves. Slaves never accepted their legal condemna-

tion, but perpetual militant resistance to the system of plantation

slavery was neither inherent to Saint-Domingue in particular, nor to

the other slave communities of the Caribbean in general.39 Specific

cases of systemic breakdown resulted more from the coincidence

of any combination of circumstances than from an inherent rev-

olutionary disposition of the individual artificial commercial con-

struct. Slave resistance did not appear to be a major preoccupation

of Caribbean slave owners before the Haitian Revolution. In any

case, to see the slave society as precariously poised between polar

extremes of accommodation or resistance is to deny the complex

operational features of that, or any other society.

Haiti, nevertheless, presented the classic case of breakdown. Both

its internal dynamics and its colonial connection provided the per-

fect coincidence of time, place, and circumstances that permanently

shattered the construct of the slave society. Both the context and the

coincidence are vitally important.

Without the outbreak of the French Revolution it is unlikely

that the system in Saint-Domingue would have broken down in

the fateful year of 1789. And while Haiti precipitated the collapse

of the system regionally, it seems fair to say that a system such as

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The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights

the Caribbean slave system bore within itself the seeds of its own

destruction and therefore could not last indefinitely. According to

David Geggus in A Turbulent Time,

More than twenty [slave revolts] occurred in the years 1789-

1832, most of them in the Greater Caribbean. Coeval with the

heyday of the abolitionist movement in Europe and chiefly

associated with Creole slaves, the phenomenon emerged well

before the French abolition of slavery or the Saint-Domingue

uprising, even before the declaration of the Rights of Man.

A few comparable examples occurred earlier in the century,

but the series in question began with an attempted rebellion

in Martinique in August 1789. Slaves claimed that the gov-

ernment in Europe had abolished slavery but that local slave

owners were preventing the island governor from implement-

ing the new law. The pattern would be repeated again and

again across the region for the next forty years and would

culminate in the three large-scale insurrections in Barbados,

1816, Demerara, 1823, and Jamaica, 1831. Together with the

Saint-Domingue insurrection of 1791, these were the biggest

slave rebellions in the history of the Americas.40

In the case of Saint-Domingue—as later in the cases of Cuba and

Puerto Rico—abolition resulted from an economically weakened

and politically isolated metropolis at the end of the eighteenth cen-

tury. But the eventual demise of the slave system resulted from a

complex combination of internal and external factors.

Revolutions in France and Saint-Domingue

The local bases of the colonial slave society as well as the structural

organization of political power could not have been more differ-

ent in France and its overseas Caribbean territories. In France in

1789 the political estates had an extremely long tradition and the

metropolitan social hierarchy was firmly established by genealogy

and antiquity. In colonial Saint-Domingue the political system was

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T h e J o u r n a l

relatively new and the hierarchy was determined arbitrarily by race

and the occupational relationship to the plantation. Yet the novelty

of the colonial situation did not produce a separate and particular

language reflective of its reality, and the limitations of a common

language (that of the metropolis) created a pathetic confusion with

tragic consequences for both metropolis and colony.

The basic divisions of French society derived from socioeco-

nomic class distinctions, and the popular slogans generated by the

Revolution—Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity as well as the Rights

of Man—did not (and could not) express sentiments equally appli-

cable in both metropolis and colony.41 What is more, the Estates

General, and later the National Assembly, simply could not under-

stand how a common language would divide Frenchmen at home

and overseas. And yet it hopelessly occurred.

The colonies were not homogenous. They were also geograph-

ically and socially distinct. French Saint-Domingue was, in ef-

fect, three separate though contiguous colonies—North Province,

West Province in the center, and South Province—each with its

own administration. The large sugar plantations with their equally

large concentrations of slaves found in North Province were not

typical of West or South Province. The linguistic imagery of the

Revolution resonated differently both by social groups and by

geography.

The linguistic confusion sprung from two situationally differ-

ent foundations. In the first place, the cahiers de doléances of the

colonies represented overwhelmingly not the views of a cross section

of the population, but merely of a small minority, composed in the

main of wealthy plantation owners and merchants, and especially

the absentee residents in France. Moreover, as the French were to

find out eventually, the colony was quite complex geographically

and the wealthy, expatriate planters of the Plaine du Nord were a

distinct numerical minority. The interests and preoccupations of the

middling sorts of West Province and South Province were distinctly

different.

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The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights

In the second place, each segment of the free population accepted

the general slogans of the Revolution to win acceptance in France,

but they then particularized and emphasized only such portions as

applied to their individual causes. The grands blancs interpreted the

Rights of Man as rights and privileges pertaining to bourgeois man,

much as did Thomas Jefferson and the framers of North Ameri-

can independence at Philadelphia in 1776. Moreover, grands blancs

saw liberty not as a private affair but rather as greater colonial

autonomy, especially in economic matters. They also hoped that

the metropolis would authorize more free trade, thereby weakening

the restrictive effects of the mercantilist commerce exclusif with the

mother country. Petits blancs wanted equality, that is, active citizen-

ship for all white persons, not just the wealthy property owners, and

less overall bureaucratic control over the colonies. They also stressed

a curious fraternity based on the accidental whiteness of skin color

that they equated with being genuinely French. Gens de couleur

also wanted equality and fraternity, but they based their claim on

an equality of all free persons regardless of skin color, since they—

even more so than petits blancs—fulfilled all other qualifications

for active citizenship.

Slaves were not part of the initial discussion and sloganeering,

but from their subsequent actions they clearly supported liberty. It

was not the liberty of the whites, or even the free coloreds, how-

ever. Theirs was a personal and individual freedom that potentially

undermined their relationship both to their direct masters and the

plantation on which they lived. This interpretation clearly jeopar-

dized the material wealth and well-being of a considerable number

of those who were already free.42

Both in France and in its Caribbean colonies the course of the

Revolution took strangely parallel paths. In France, as in Saint-

Domingue and the other colonies, the Revolution began with the

calling of the Estates-General to Versailles in the auspicious year of

1789.43 Immediately conflict over form and representation devel-

oped but it affected metropolis and colonies in quite different ways.

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In the metropolis the Estates-General, despite not having met for

175 years, had an ancient (albeit almost forgotten) history and tra-

dition. The various overseas colonists who assumed themselves or

aspired to be Frenchmen and hoped to participate in the metropoli-

tan deliberations as well as the unfolding course of events did not

really share that history and that tradition. In many ways they were

new men created by a new type of society—the overseas plantation

slave society. Those French colonials were quite distinct from the ex-

perience of the planters and slave owners in the English Caribbean.

For example, Edward Long of Jamaica was simultaneously an in-

fluential and wealthy member of English society as well as an estab-

lished Jamaican planter. Bryan Edwards was a long-serving member

of the Jamaica Legislature and after 1796 a legitimate member of

the British Parliament, representing at the same time a metropoli-

tan constituency as well as overseas colonial interests.44 The French

political structure had no room for such duplication.

At first things seemed to be going well for the French colonial

representatives as the Estates-General declared itself a National As-

sembly in May 1789 and the National Assembly proclaimed France

to be a Republic in September 1792. In France “the subsequent his-

tory of armed rebellion reveals a seemingly irresistible drive toward

a strong, central executive. Robespierre’s twelve-man Committee of

Public Safety (1793–94), gave way to a five-man Directorate (1795–

99), then to a three-man Consulate, followed by the designation of

Napoleon as First Consul in 1799, and finally to Napoleon’s coro-

nation as emperor in 1804.”45 In the colonies the same movement

is discernible with a significant difference—at least in the provinces

of Saint-Domingue. There the consolidation of power during the

period of armed rebellion gravitated toward non-whites and ended

up in the hands of slaves and ex-slaves or their descendants.

Seen another way, the political structure of metropolis and colony

diverged in two crucial ways. In the first place the metropolis moved

toward an increasingly narrow hierarchical structure of power even

as the state moved away from dynastic succession to national

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The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights

administration in a declared republic, while in the colonies,

especially in Saint-Domingue, power gravitated democratically

downward to the actual majority of the population. In the second

place the metropolis pursued a policy of political exclusion elim-

inating royalists, but seeking to expand the power base as well as

privileges of the bourgeoisie. In the colonies, however, once the slave

revolt broke out the quest was for a leveling or elimination of all dis-

tinctions of social class and political power—although this was not

an idea universally accepted at the beginning of the revolt. Clearly, as

Laurent Dubois points out, the new citizens of the French Caribbean

colonies expanded the political conception of the Enlightenment by

enfranchising a group of individuals whose inclusion vastly enlarged

the conventional idea of universal rights.46

With the colonial situation far too confusing for the metropolitan

legislators to resolve easily, the armed revolt in the colonies started

with an attempted coup by the grands blancs in the North who re-

sented the petits blancs-controlled Colonial Assembly of St. Marc (in

West Province) writing a constitution for the entire colony in 1790.

Both white groups armed their slaves and prepared for war in the

name of the Revolution in France.47 When, however, the National

Assembly passed the May Decree of 1791 enfranchising propertied

mulattos, the whites temporarily forgot their class differences and

forged an uneasy alliance to forestall what to them appeared to be

a more serious revolutionary threat of racial equality.

The determined desire of the free non-whites to make a military

stand to secure their rights—also arming their slaves for war—made

the impending civil war in the colony inevitably a racial war.

The precedence set by the superordinate free groups was not lost

on the slaves who comprised the overwhelming majority of the pop-

ulation. If slaves could fight in separate causes for the antagonistic

free sectors of the population, white as well as non-white, they could

fight equally on their own behalf. And so they did. Violence, first

employed by the whites, became the common currency of political

change. Finally in August 1791 after warring for almost a year on

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T h e J o u r n a l

one or another side of free persons who claimed they were fighting

for liberty, the slaves of the Plain du Nord applied their fighting to

their own cause. And once they had started they refused to settle

for anything less than full freedom for themselves. When it became

clear that their emancipation could not be sustained within the colo-

nial political system, they created an independent state in 1804 to

secure that freedom. It was the logical extension of the collective

slave revolt that began in 1791.

But before that could happen, Saint-Domingue experienced a pe-

riod of chaos between 1792 and 1802. At one time as many as six

warring factions were in the field simultaneously: slaves, free per-

sons of color, petits blancs, grands blancs, plus invading Spanish

and English troops in addition to the French forces vainly trying

to restore order and control. Alliances were made and dissolved

in opportunistic succession. As the killing increased, power slowly

gravitated to the overwhelming majority of the population—the

former slaves no longer willing to continue their servility. After

1793 under the control of Toussaint Louverture, himself an ex-

slave and ex-slave-owner, the tide of war turned inexorably, assuring

the victory of the concept of liberty held by the slaves.48 That was

duly, if temporarily, ratified by the National Assembly in September

1793. But that was neither the end of the fighting nor the end of

slavery.

The victory of the slaves in 1793 was, ironically, a victory for

colonialism and the Revolution in France. The leftward drift of the

Revolution and the implacable zeal of its colonial administrators,

especially the Jacobin commissioner, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, to

eradicate all traces of counterrevolution and Royalism—which he

identified with the whites—in Saint-Domingue facilitated the ulti-

mate victory of the blacks over the whites.49 Sonthonax’s role, how-

ever, does not detract from the brilliant military leadership and polit-

ical astuteness provided by Toussaint Louverture. In 1797 he became

governor-general of the colony and in the next four years expelled

all invading forces (including the French) and gave the colony a

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The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights

remarkably modern and egalitarian constitution. He also suppressed

(but failed to eradicate) the revolt of the free coloreds led by André

Rigaud and Alexander Pétion in the South, and captured the neigh-

boring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, freeing its small number

of slaves. Saint Domingue became a new society of equals with a

new political structure as an independent state. As a reward, Tous-

saint Louverture made himself governor-general for life (July 1801)

much to the displeasure of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Distinctiveness of the Haitian Revolution

Why did the revolution follow such a unique course in Saint

Domingue that eventually culminated in the abolition of slavery?

Carolyn Fick presents a plausible explanation when she writes:

It can be argued therefore that the abolition of slavery in

Saint Domingue resulted from a combination of mutually re-

inforcing factors that fell into place at a particular historical

juncture. No single factor or even combination of factors –

including the beginning of the French Revolution with its cat-

alytic ideology of equality and liberty, the colonial revolt of the

planters and the free coloreds, the context of imperial warfare,

and the obtrusive role of a revolutionary abolitionist as civil

commissioner – warranted the termination of slavery in Saint

Domingue in the absence of independent, militarily organized

slave rebellion . . .

From the vantage point of revolutionary France the aboli-

tion of slavery seems almost to have been a by-product of the

revolution and hardly an issue of pressing concern to the na-

tion. It was Sonthonax who initiated the abolition of slavery

in Saint Domingue, not the Convention. In fact, France only

learned that slavery had been abolished in Saint Domingue

when the colony’s three deputies, Dufay, Mills, and Jean-

Baptiste Mars Bellay (respectively, a white, a mulatto, and a

former free black), arrived in France in January, 1794 to take

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their seats and asked on February 3 that the Convention offi-

cially abolish slavery throughout the colonies . . . .

The crucial link then, between the metropolitan revolution

and the black revolution in Saint Domingue seems to reside

in the conjunctural and complementary elements of a self-

determined, massive slave rebellion, on the one hand, and the

presence in the colony of a practical abolitionist in the person

of Sonthonax, on the other.50

Such “conjunctural and complementary elements” did not appear

elsewhere in the Americas—not even in the neighboring French

colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

The reality of a politically semi-free Saint Domingue with a free

black population ran counter to the grandiose dreams of Napoleon

to reestablish a viable French American empire. It also created what

Anthony Maingot called a “terrified consciousness” among the rest

of the slave masters in the Americas. Driven by his desire to restore

slavery and his demeaning disregard of the local population and its

leaders, Napoleon sent his brother-in-law General Charles Victor

Emmanuel Leclerc with about 10,000 of the finest French troops in

1802 to accomplish his aim. It turned out to be a disastrously fu-

tile gesture. Napoleon ultimately lost the colony, his brother-in-law,

and most of the 44,000 fine troops eventually sent out to conduct

the savage and bitter campaign of reconquest. Although he treach-

erously spirited Toussaint Louverture away to exile and premature

death in France, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the independence

of Haiti on January 1, 1804.

Haiti, the Caribbean, and the Americas would never be the same

as before that portentous slave uprising of 1791. The idea of liberty

as a fundamental principle of human rights slowly took life among

slaves in the Americas.51

The Impact of the Haitian Revolution

The impact of the revolution was immediate and widespread. The

anti-slavery fighting immediately spawned unrest throughout the

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The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights

region, especially in communities of Maroons in Jamaica, and

among slaves in St. Kitts. It sent a wave of immigrants flooding

outward to the neighboring islands, and to the United States of

America and Europe. It revitalized agricultural production in Cuba

and Puerto Rico. As Alfred Hunt shows, Haitian emigrants also pro-

foundly affected American language, religion, politics, culture, cui-

sine, architecture, medicine, and the North American conflict over

slavery, especially in Louisiana.52 Most of all, it deeply affected the

psychology of the whites throughout the Atlantic world. The Haitian

Revolution undoubtedly accentuated sensitivity to race, color, and

status across the Caribbean.

Among the political and economic elite of the neighboring

Caribbean states the example of a black independent state as a viable

alternative to the legally recognized Maroon communities compli-

cated their domestic relations. The predominantly non-white lower

orders of society might have admired the achievement in Haiti, but

they were conscious that such an example could not be easily dupli-

cated. “Haiti represented the living proof of the consequences of not

just black freedom,” wrote Anthony Maingot, “but, indeed, black

rule. It was the latter which was feared; therefore, the former had

to be curtailed if not totally prohibited.”53

The favorable coincidence of time, place, and circumstances that

produced a successful Haiti failed to materialize again elsewhere.

For the rest of white America, the cry of “Remember Haiti” proved

an effective way to restrain exuberant local desires for political lib-

erty, especially in slave societies. Indeed, the long delay in achieving

Cuban political independence can largely be attributed to astute

Spanish metropolitan use of the “terrified consciousness” of the

Cuban Creoles regarding what had happened in Saint Domingue

between 1789 and 1804.54

Nevertheless, after 1804 it would be difficult for the local politi-

cal and economic elite to continue the complacent status quo of the

middle of the eighteenth century. Haiti cast an inevitable shadow

over all slave societies. Anti-slavery movements grew stronger

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T h e J o u r n a l

and bolder, especially in Great Britain, and the colonial slaves

themselves became increasingly more restless. Most important, in

the Caribbean the whites lost the supreme confidence that they had

before 1789 about their ability to maintain the slave system indef-

initely. In 1808 the British abolished their transatlantic slave trade

and dismantled the British colonial slave system between 1834 and

1838. During that time free non-whites (and Jews) were given po-

litical equality with whites in many colonies. The French abolished

their slave trade in 1818 and their slave system, reconstituted after

1803 in Martinique and Guadeloupe, limped on until 1848. Both

British and French imperial slave systems—as well as the Dutch and

the Danish—were dismantled administratively from the center of

their respective empires. The same administrative dismantling could

be used to describe the process for the mainland Spanish American

states and Brazil. Slavery in the United States ended abruptly in a

disastrous civil war. Spain abolished slavery in Puerto Rico (where

it was not vitally important) in 1873. The Cuban case, where slav-

ery was extremely important, proved far more difficult and also

resulted in a long, destructive civil war before emancipation was fi-

nally accomplished in 1886. By then, however, it was not the Haitian

revolution but Haiti itself that evoked negative reactions among its

neighbors.55

The Haitian Revolution and Human Rights

The great but frequently overlooked contribution of the Haitian

Revolution lies in its fundamental articulation of the notion of hu-

man rights, not just in Haiti but also throughout the world. Haiti

was the first country to articulate a general principle of common,

unqualified equality for all its citizens, although special privileges

remained for soldiers and the political elite. Nevertheless, the fun-

damental concept of a common humanity ran deeply through the

early Haitian constitutions.

Europeans thought in terms of civil rights rather than general

human rights. They assumed that the civil state was analogous

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The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights

to the body and that each component had attributes from which

certain differential privileges derived. Viewed this way, society be-

came irreversibly ranked hierarchically, and non-Europeans as well

as women, children, the mentally handicapped, and the socially

delinquent remained irrevocably inferior to all European men. It

was this notion that permeated the constitution of the United States

and made problematic the incorporation of free non-Europeans in

the emerging state until well into the twentieth century.

Haitians to various degrees thought everyone in the state—

regardless of gender, rank, occupation, color, or place of origin—

was equal. They sought to construct a state and a constitution to

reflect this. They sought, as Laurent Dubois terms it, “a colony of

citizens.”56 By declaring that all Haitians were black as well as free

they sought—unsuccessfully but conscientiously—to remove race

and color as fundamental criteria of nationalism, or as the French

described it at the time, “citizenship.” That they failed to implement

their ideas does not indicate that those ideas were either absent or

flawed. They were, like so many other good ideas, articulated too

far ahead of their time. The ideas foundered miserably against the

harsh pragmatic necessity of establishing a viable administration

in a war-ravaged state constantly threatened by hostile and envi-

ous neighbors. In the long run, Haiti did not have the power and

resources to impose itself politically and militarily on the Atlantic

World.

The failure of the Haitians to elevate human rights over civil rights

would be repeated many times in many places around the globe, not

only by aspiring states but also by idealistic organizations. One of

the most poignant cases was that of the National Association for

the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the United States,

as meticulously recounted in the recent brilliant book by historian

Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the

African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955.57 After

the Second World War the United Nations articulated a charter for

human rights, a notion still actively debated. A century and a half

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before the Haitians tried to do the same in their constitutions. The

bold Haitian example should neither be forgotten nor lost as we

enter the third century of Haitian independence.

NOTES

1. The bibliography on the Haitian Revolution is large and growing. For a samplesee Colin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London:Verso Press, 1988); Philip D. Curtin, “The Declaration of the Rights of Man inSaint-Domingue, 1788–1791,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 30, 2 (May1950), 157–75; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revo-lution 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 27–179; Alex Dupuy,Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment Since 1700(Boulder: Westview Press, 1989); Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The SaintDomingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, TN: The University of TennesseePress, 1990); John Garrigus, “A Struggle for Respect: The Free Coloreds in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue, 1760–69,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, TheJohns Hopkins University, 1988; David Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: TheBritish Occupation of Saint Domingue 1793–1798 (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1982); David Geggus, “The Haitian Revolution,” The Modern Caribbean,edited by Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer (Chapel Hill, NC: The Univer-sity of North Carolina Press, 1989), 21–50; Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellionto Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World(Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); François Girod, De lasociété Créole. Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1972); RobertDebs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the HaitianPeople 1492–1971 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978); Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’sInfluence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (BatonRouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); C. L. R. James, The BlackJacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York:Random House, 1963. First published in 1938.); David Nicholls, From Dessalinesto Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1979); Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution 1789–1804 (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1973); George Tyson, Jr.,ed., Toussaint L’Ouverture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973); M.L.E.Moreau de Saint Méry, Description topographique, physique, civil, politique ethistorique de la partie Française de l’isle de Saint Domingue (Philadelphia: Chezauteur, 1796); P, My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Rev-olutions, edited and translated by Althéa de Peuch Parham (Baton Rouge, LA:Louisiana State University Press, 1959), and Alyssa G. Sepinwall, The Abbé Gre-goire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2005). The best studies to date of the Caribbeanaspects of the French Revolution, however, are Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Cit-izens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and Laurent Dubois,Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

2. See especially, Jorge I. Domı́nguez, Insurrection or Loyalty: The Breakdown ofthe Spanish American Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 146–69; Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1996), 159–77.

3. Dubois, Avengers of the New World; David P. Geggus, ed. The Impact of theHaitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC: University of SouthCarolina Press, 2001); and David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A

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The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights

Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1997).

4. See R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution 2 vols. (Princeton: Prince-ton University Press, 1959); Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revo-lution 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); James H. Billington,Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books,1980).

5. For an example see Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Gregoire and the FrenchRevolution.

6. Franklin W. Knight, “The Disintegration of the Slave Systems, 1772–1886,” Gen-eral History of the Caribbean, Volume III The Slave Societies of the Caribbean,edited by Franklin W. Knight (London: UNESCO/Macmillan, 1997), 322–45.

7. A case in point is England, where the revolutionary situation was defused throughreformist politics.

8. The phrase is taken from the title of A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution andthe Greater Caribbean, edited by David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

9. Quoted in J. H. Parry, Philip Sherlock, and Anthony Maingot, A Short History ofthe West Indies 4th edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 136.

10. The quest for individual and collective freedom was widespread among all slavesand occasionally new views of society and social relations embraced both slaveand free, but rarely did these revolts involve the establishment of a state as in thecase of Haiti. In Coro in western Venezuela, a free republic was declared in 1795that would have fundamentally altered the social status quo but it had a very shortexistence. See Domı́nguez, Insurrection or Loyalty, 55–56, 151–60, and Geggus,Impact of the Haitian Revolution.

11. It is uncertain why the Haitians selected this name for their new country. It rep-resented one of the pre-Hispanic chiefdoms that existed on Hispaniola of whichthe population in 1804 presumably had no connected memory. It is interestingsymbolically that the Haitians would choose an indigenous American rather thanan African name for their new state.

12. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). The idea may also be found in Fick, Makingof Haiti, 27: “To assure the submission of slaves and the mastership of the owners,slaves were introduced into the colony and eventually integrated into the planta-tion labor system within an overall context of social alienation and psychological,as well as physical violence. Parental and kinship ties were broken; their nameswere changed; their bodies were branded with red-hot irons to designate their newowners; and the slave who was once a socially integrated member of a structuredcommunity in Africa had, in a matter of months, become what has been termeda ‘socially dead person.’” It is hard to accept such a totally nullifying experiencefor Africans in the Americas for two reasons. The first is that Africans constructedthe new American communities along with their non-African colonists, and per-manently endowed the new creations with a wide array of influences from speechto cuisine, to music, to new technology. The various bodies of slave laws were apatent recognition that although slaves were property, they were also people requir-ing severe police control measures. Non-Africans established social contacts withthem and their mating produced a mélange of demographic hybridity throughoutthe Americas. In the second place, Africans produced offspring in the Americasand these formed viable communities everywhere—communities that were dulyrecognized in law and custom. For a remarkable case of achievement and upwardsocial mobility see Marı́a Elena Dı́az, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves ofEl Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780 (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 2000). The development of viable Afro-American communitiesthroughout the Americas does not in any way negate the fact that slavery was a

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de-humanizing experience permeated with violence and exploitation. Nevertheless,the imagery of “social death” greatly exaggerates and does harmful violence to thereality of enslaved people in the Americas.

13. Alex Dupuy, Haiti, 55–57.14. Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism,

2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 196–219.15. See John Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (New York:

Norton, 1973).16. Langley, Americas in the Age of Revolution, 196–200.17. See Gaspar and Geggus, A Turbulent Time.18. These changes have been examined more thoroughly in Atlantic Port Cities: Econ-

omy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, edited by FranklinW. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991).

19. While there is a wide range of opinion on exactly when the Enlightenment started,there is better consensus on what it was: a major demarcation in the emergence ofthe modern age and the French Revolution. See Franco Venturi, The End of the OldRegime in Europe 1768–1776: The First Crisis, translated by R. Burr Litchfield(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Peter Gay, The Enlightenment; AnInterpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1967–69).

20. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1966), especially, 391–445.

21. Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–1826 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 105–26.

22. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 99–100.23. Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (London: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1974).24. Ruth F. Necheles, The Abbé Grégoire, 1787–1831: The Odyssey of an Egalitarian

(Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1971), 71–90.25. See, for example, Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: Uni-

versity of North Carolina Press, 1944); Robert Louis Stein, The French SugarBusiness in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UniversityPress, 1988); and Patrick Villiers, “The Slave and Colonial Trade in France justbefore the Revolution,” in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, edited byBarbara L. Solow (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1991), 210–36.

26. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Abbreviated edition. New York: PenguinBooks, 1974. First published 1776), 184.

27. The debate over relative labor costs of free and enslaved workers has not ter-minated. See Did Slavery Pay?, edited by Hugh G. J. Aitken (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1971); Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: TheEconomics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little Brown, 1974).

28. Jerry Z. Muller, Adam Smith in His Time and Ours: Designing the Decent Society(New York: The Free Press, 1993), 121. The extract is by Muller, not Adam Smith.

29. Except for tobacco, the primary export crops were all introduced into the Americasby Europeans. Sugar cane came from India via the Mediterranean and the AfricanAtlantic Islands. Coffee was Arabian in origin. Cotton was Egyptian.

30. For a description of settler and exploitation societies see Knight, The Caribbean,74–82. This did not indicate that sugar production was the only economic activityor that all the Caribbean islands concentrated on sugar production. It did meanthat sugar production and its collateral activities dominated the trades and eco-nomic calculations of metropolises and colonies during that period. B.W. Higmanhas examined the history and use of the term “sugar revolutions” in “The SugarRevolution,” Economic History Review, 53:2 (May, 2000): 213–36.

31. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 6.32. The demographic proportions varied considerably throughout the Caribbean. For

figures see Knight, Caribbean, 366–367.33. Knight, Caribbean, 120–58.

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The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights

34. See Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI: Universityof Wisconsin Press, 1969); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Formation ofthe Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);Colin A. Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America,1700–1739 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Herbert S. Klein, AfricanSlavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press,1986); Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Volume of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis”Journal of African History, 23,4 (1982): 473–501; David Eltis, Economic Growthand the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1987).

35. See Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, edited by Barbara L. Solow (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1991); The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects onEconomies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, editedby Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 1992); The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of theAtlantic Slave Trade, edited by Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (NewYork: Academic Press, 1979).

36. Garrigus, “A Struggle for Respect.” See also, Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Pow-dered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens,GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2001).

37. Regardless of the extreme degree of coercion it is fatuous to insist that slaveryobliterated from Africans and their descendants the ability to be creative, so-cially active, and even to establish some modicum of self-respect and economicstatus. See Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves:Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (BatonRouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), and especially its excellentbibliography.

38. Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in AtlanticHistory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 103–10, 160–69.

39. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

40. David Patrick Geggus, “Slavery, War and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean,”in Gaspar and Geggus, A Turbulent Time, 7–8.

41. Curtin, “The Declaration of the Rights of Man,” 157–75.42. Curtin, “The Declaration of the Rights of Man”; Ott, The Haitian Revolution,

28–75.43. The French Revolution may be followed in, inter alia, Simon Schama, Citizens: A

Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989); Leo Gershoy, TheFrench Revolution, 1789–1799 (New York Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1960); AlbertSoboul, The French Revolution, 1787–1799: From the Storming of the Bastille toNapoleon, translated from the French by Alan Forest and Colin Jones, with anew introduction by Gwynne Lewis (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989); GaetanoSalvemini, The French Revolution, 1788–1792, translated from the French by I.M. Rawson (New York: Holt, 1954).

44. On Long and Edwards see Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Societyin Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1971), 73–79; ElsaGoveia, A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies to the End ofthe Nineteenth Century (Mexico: Instituto Panamericano de Geogafı́a é Historia,1956), 53–63.

45. James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith(New York; Basic Books, 1980), 22.

46. Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 250–66.47. Carolyn Fick, “The French Revolution in Saint-Domingue: A Triumph or a Fail-

ure?” in Gaspar and Geggus, A Turbulent Time, 53–55.48. Toussaint Louverture always wrote his name without an apostrophe although many

French and non-French writers have, for reasons unknown, used L’Ouverture.

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49. Robert L. Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic(Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985).

50. Fick, “The French Revolution,” 67–69.51. Anthony P. Maingot, “Haiti and the Terrified Consciousness of the Caribbean,”

in Ethnicity in the Caribbean, edited by Gert Oostindie (London: Macmillan Edu-cation Ltd., 1996), 53–80.

52. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America.53. Maingot, “Haiti”, 56–57.54. For the “Africanization of Cuba scare” see Arthur F. Corwin, Spain and the Abo-

lition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817–1886 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967),115–21; Philip S. Foner, A History of Cuba and its Relation with the United States2 volumes. (New York: International Publishers, 1963), II, 45–85; Luis Martı́nez-Fernández, Torn Between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of PoliticalThought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840–1878 (Athens, GA: University of Geor-gia Press, 1994), 33–40; Robert L. Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood: The Con-spiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 184–186, 265–266; Gerald E.Poyo, “With All and for the Good of All”: The Emergence of Popular National-ism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1899 (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 1989), 6–7, 86. For the impact of the Haitian Revolutionelsewhere in the Caribbean see Philip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideasin a Tropical Colony, 1830–1865 (New York: Atheneum, 1970. First published in1952.); H. P. Jacobs, Sixty Years of Change, 1806–1866: Progress and Reaction inKingston and the Countryside (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1973), 12–37; Brid-get Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783–1962 (Kingston: Heinemann,1981), 25–51; Hilary Beckles, A History of Barbados (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1990), 78–79; Edward L. Cox, Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies ofSt. Kitts and Grenada, 1763–1833 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press,1984), 76–100; Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National His-tory (New Rochelle, NY: Hispaniola Books, 1995), 91–164; Valentin Peguero andDanilo de los Santos, Visión General de la Historia Dominicana (Santo Domingo:Editorial Corripio, 1978), 125–78.

55. See Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

56. Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the FrenchCaribbean, 1787–1804.

57. Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African AmericanStruggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press,2003).

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