The uprising of nearly 100,000 slaves in Saint-Domingue from 1791-1804 was the largest insurrection of slaves in history. The Haitian Revolution resulted in the creation of the first successful independent freed slave state in the world, a fact that rocked the socio-political, economic, and moral foundations of the Caribbean.[1] However, in the period following the Revolution, there is a noted increase of slavery in the Caribbean as a whole. Did the success of the Haitian uprising merely serve as a lesson for Caribbean planters and reinforce the slave society? To answer this question one must examine the factors that led to the Revolution’s success both externally, in the European metropoles, and internally, in the psychological and socio-political dynamics of Caribbean societies. Therefore, the Haitian Revolution appeared to impede abolition in the Caribbean in the short term because it reinforced white stereotypes of African savagery and inferiority, convinced planters of the danger of liberal and abolitionist ideals, and created a large void in the coffee and sugar markets which other colonies quickly filled by introducing more slave labor. While these effects should not be minimized, they were merely the logical aftershock of the tumultuous events in the established racial hierarchy. Ultimately, the Haitian Revolution was a major turning point in abolitionist history because it restructured the balance of power in the Caribbean thereby allowing a political gap for British abolitionists, the first organized anti-slavery movement from a metropole, to enter and because it drastically altered the psyche of enslaved Africans throughout the Caribbean world by proving that the combination of external pressures and internal uprisings could result in emancipation. It was no coincidence that the Haitian Revolution occurred so soon after the French Revolution. The ideologies of the French Revolution of 1789 permeated throughout the western world because they originated in a metropole and because their core was defined by the commitment to “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” radical ideas especially in the colonial Caribbean that also became the motto of Haiti.[2] These ideals, which were embodied in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, angered the whites of Saint-Domingue, who refused to grant any liberties to the wealthy, educated Creole population of the colony in fear that the racial balance of power would shift. The first clash between the planters and the metropole occurred when the Constituent Assembly granted citizenship to wealthy free people of color in 1791, which white planters also refused to accept. This denial ignited the island and led to a slave insurrection which grew exponentially in a matter of weeks. Internally, this revolt was preceded by one of the most hierarchical socio-racial structures in the Caribbean in which whites occupied an extreme minority (they were outnumbered almost eighteen-to-one). While there had been maroon insurrections in the past (namely that led by Francois Mackandal from1751-1757) it was not until white elites were pressured by both the metropole and slave revolts that the revolution actually spread. In a desperate attempt to appease revolting slaves, France formally abolished slavery in the colonies in 1794. While appearing to support France initially, after the expulsion of Spanish and British forces Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leading general and a self-educated former slave, broke away and later declared Haitian independence in 1801[3]. To understand the true significance of the Revolution in the colonial Caribbean one must first understand the prevalence of entrenched socio-political divisions and constructs. The emergence of a sugar culture in the Caribbean also meant the emergence of a planation structure because maximizing profits required a cheap source of labor that could be controlled by a minority. In order to ensure dominance over slaves and to secure their power, whites developed a highly centralized social hegemony. This was especially prevalent in French colonies, as evidenced by the refusal of Saint-Domingue planters to relinquish any power even to wealthy Creoles, many of which owned slaves themselves. This social division was paired with a moral doctrine of domination that justified brutal slavery by citing white moral superiority to savage, subhuman Africans. This social division and moral justification had been entrenched in Caribbean society for nearly three hundred years before the Haitian Revolution.[4] Thus, not only was a successful slave rebellion unconscionable to whites, it also was morally revolting. This viewpoint was well chronicled by Don Pedro Irisarri of nearby San Juan, who wrote the Informe communicating instructions to Puerto Rico’s representative in the Cádiz about the Saint-Domingue uprising. Based on the history of racial division and subjugation in the Caribbean it is not surprising that Irisarri does not sympathize with the former slaves but instead notes that “just as it would be impossible to change their color from black to white it would be less possible that their corrupt and vicious hearts be innocent during their captivity.” The lesson Irissari drew from the Revolution was that the slaves’ success was due to their “numerical superiority.” Thus, he suggests a more careful use of slavery, not its abolition. This same reaction was held by whites around the Caribbean. Superficially, the Revolution strengthened slavery by giving other Caribbean planters an opportunity to correct the mistakes of the French and reinforced racial divisions. However, the white response was merely a predictable reaction to the events, as it reflected the desire by whites to retain dominance that was molded by centuries of exploitation and mercantilism, and displays a superficial analysis that does not take into account the deeper social ramifications of the rebellion.[5] In other words this view did not represent any fundamental change in how white colonialists viewed people of color. There other planter response to the success at Saint-Domingue was not to blame slave labor, “on which the Caribbean colonies had always depended,” but instead to showcase the dangers of abolitionist ideals.[6] Slaveholders became extremely suspicious of the spread of Haitian ideals and actively tried to suppress any information that contradicted the doctrine of racial hierarchy. Again, while the suppression of information that opposed the socio-political hegemony would seem to be detrimental to abolitionism, it in fact had much deeper consequences that ultimately undermined slavery as an institution, especially in British colonies. According to both Stinchcombe and Sheller, one of the main causes of slave emancipation was the autonomy of the planters’ government and the strength of its ‘channels’ with the metropole.[7] Thus, by adopting policies that potentially contrasted with the metropolitan center, planters ran a higher risk of collapse by being pressured both from the constant threat of slave resistance and from the metropole. This scenario proved true for British Jamaica, which was fearful of the spread of the nearby Revolution, because the rise of the abolition movement in Britain (discussed further below) ultimately forced the planters to accept emancipation or risk insurrection.
Next, it is easy to overemphasize the rise of plantation cultures in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil after the Saint-Domingue uprising because while this was a negative consequence, the same time period also saw the decline of the British participation in the slave trade. One reason why Saint-Domingue was so important to the French was because it produced half of the world’s coffee and nearly as much sugar as Jamaica at the time of the Revolution and was the most profitable Caribbean colony.[8] The sudden elimination of this exporting center created a massive demand for sugar and coffee, which spawned huge increases in slave importation to Spanish and Portuguese colonies; the number of disembarked slaves in Cuba rose from 21,103 between 1796 and 1800 to 101,002 between 1816 and 1820. However equating this escalation of the slave trade to the failure of the Haitian Revolution to positively affect abolition would be an oversight because of the exit of British colonies from the slave trade. Indeed in the same time period the number of disembarked slaves in Jamaica dropped from 78,351 to 0 due to the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which ended British importation of slaves.[9] The fact that this Act occurred in 1807 is significant because the British abolition movement made its first tangible gains in 1787 with the creation of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and did not achieve success until after the Haitian Revolution. To understand the connection between the abolition movement and the Revolution we must first examine the societal changes the Revolution catalyzed in Caribbean culture.
The adoption of the 1807 Slave Trade Act, which was preceded by more than twenty years of active abolitionist organizing and lobbying in Britain, could not have occurred if legislators were worried about French economic competition. Indeed, the abolitionists had successfully organized millions of citizens around Britain to pressure legislators. However, they were only able to achieve real success once France was not deemed as an economic threat. The need to remove France was compounded by the fact that ending the slave trade was actually economic suicide for major parts of Britain economy.[10] Thus, in order to keep its economic position in the balance of power the British economy needed to reduce competition. By removing France from Saint-Domingue and ultimately thwarting its efforts to regain dominance in the Caribbean, the Haitian Revolution “facilitated Britain’s disengagement from slave-trading in 1807 and from slavery itself in 1833.”[11] Historian David Davis states that while “Haiti posed no direct military danger to foreign slaveholders” (with the possible exception of Louverture’s 1801 foray into Spanish Santo Domingo) its “very existence…challenged every slaveholding regime in the New World.” This intangible threat was evidenced by Haitian inspired slave revolts in Barbados, Maracaibo in Venezuela, Cartagena in Colombia, Cuba, Louisiana, Charleston, etc. Even in 1791, only one month after the revolt began, Jamaican slaves sang songs about the insurrection.[12] Eugene Genovese points to the changed mindset in Caribbean slaves, who heard about the Revolution despite planters’ efforts to suppress the spread of information: he describes the French and Haitian Revolutions as critical turning points in the history of slave resistance because initial maroon uprisings were only acting against direct enslavement while after the revolutions slave revolts targeted the system of slavery through revolutionary, egalitarian ideology.[13] In addition to egalitarian ideology the Haitian Revolution left the legacy of success, which proved to slaves that the white social hegemony could be reversed. Frederick Douglass best summarizes this psychological effect in an 1893 speech where he calls Haiti “the original emancipator of the nineteenth century.”[14] This follows the trajectory of many slave resistance efforts; in Haiti the early marronage uprisings did not lead to structural victories while the 1791 Revolution led to independence; in Jamaica the maroon wars were a constant thorn in the side of the British but they did not succeed until the revolts of the early 1830s which resulted in the abolition of slavery in 1833.[15] Thus, I reject the totally Eurocentric theories of Anstey, Craton, and Drescher because they hold slave resistance as a constant and do not acknowledge the potential of changes in resistance capabilities and the possibility of self-liberation determining the success of emancipation.[16] Therefore, the success of Haitian Revolution was determined by the tradition of subjugation and racial hierarchy within Saint-Domingue and by the spread of the ideals of the French Revolution. Both factors forced the planter elite to either relinquish some power or risk a violent uprising. This success led to some ostensibly negative impacts on emancipation efforts but was often outweighed by the positive ramifications. I have used a combination of Eurocentric, slave agency, and colonial-metropole channel theories to demonstrate that the Haitian Revolution had catalyzing effects upon several arenas that contributed to the emancipation movement.