Haiti and Kenya independence · CHAPTER 2 ·
Outbreak of the Haitian Revolution
Chapter 2 of Two Roads to Independence: Haiti 1789–1838 and Kenya 1895–1978: “The Revolution Crosses the Atlantic”
The Declaration of the Rights of Man reached Saint-Domingue in 1789 as a dispute over who counted as a citizen. Planters claimed self-government, free people of colour equality; Vincent Ogé’s revolt of October 1790 ended with his public execution at Le Cap in February 1791, and in August 1791 the enslaved of the north rose.
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The map above is the world of Saint-Domingue, September 1791 — The northern plain rises.
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SHORT EXPLANATION
In August 1789 France's Declaration of the Rights of Man announced that men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Like a modern bill of rights, it offered a principle of equal treatment. In Saint-Domingue, white planters took it as support for colonial self-government; free people of colour, free people of African or mixed descent, claimed equality. When Vincent Ogé took up arms for that claim in October 1790, colonists defeated him and publicly broke him on the wheel at Le Cap in February 1791, a punishment intended to terrify spectators. The National Assembly, the elected parliament that had taken power from the king in Paris, gave a few hundred free men of colour rights in May 1791, then withdrew them in September. Each side could see that pressure might change the decision in Paris.
The enslaved majority had its own plans. By tradition, leaders met in August 1791 at a night ceremony at Bois Caïman led by a man called Boukman. On the night of 22–23 August the northern estates rose. Arrows trace the spread from Limbé and Acul, while the gray zone marks the plain and mountains around Le Cap held by the insurgents at year's end. More than a thousand estates were in ruins by December, and tens of thousands had left the plantations. The French Revolution had opened a struggle, but the people who entered it sought an end to the whip, time and land for themselves and, before long, freedom for all.
The full story
The Declaration gave Saint-Domingue's free groups a common language without giving them a common purpose. White planters elected colonial assemblies, councils rather like state legislatures, and the boldest at Saint-Marc in 1790 demanded control over colonial laws, including slavery and race. In Paris the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, an anti-slavery club founded in 1788, lobbied for the rights of free people of colour as a modern campaign group might lobby parliament. The planters' lobby fought those claims. Vincent Ogé, a merchant of colour who had argued for equality in Paris, returned secretly by the route shown by the northern arrow. In October 1790 he raised a few hundred armed men near Grande-Rivière; he did not call for abolition. Defeated within days, Ogé and his comrade Jean-Baptiste Chavannes escaped into Spanish Santo Domingo, whose officials handed them back. In February 1791 Ogé and Chavannes were broken on the wheel at Le Cap. The spectacle was meant to warn others; it also made the men martyrs.
France's National Assembly now had to decide how far its principles would reach into a colony whose trade supported French prosperity. On 15 May 1791 it granted full political rights to men of colour with a free father and a free mother, at most a few hundred people. White colonists reacted with fury and threats of secession. On 24 September, as the Assembly was about to be replaced by an elected Legislative Assembly, it returned the question to the colonial assemblies, canceling even this limited reform. Only a new law on 4 April 1792 granted equal rights to all free people of colour. The reversals taught observers that pressure could move Paris. The Assembly had said nothing about the enslaved, but they could draw their own lesson from the dispute.
On the northern estates, enslaved people were preparing to act. Drivers, the enslaved foremen who ran work gangs, met on an estate at Morne-Rouge on 14 August 1791. About a week later, by tradition, Boukman led a ceremony at Bois Caïman at which conspirators bound themselves by oath. The estates of Limbé and Acul rose on the night of 22–23 August, and the arrows show the rising spreading across a plain soon on fire. Jean-François and Georges Biassou organized armies, often under royalist flags and claiming that the king had granted them free days. By year's end more than a thousand estates were destroyed. Estimates of whites killed range from 400 to 2,000; far more insurgents and enslaved people died in battle and reprisals, though no reliable count exists. Meanwhile, free men of colour at Croix-des-Bouquets in the West forced planters to accept their equality. Paris could still issue decrees, but the struggle over freedom was now being fought in Saint-Domingue.
FULL EXPLANATION
Bois Caïman: evidence and memory
For Haitians, Bois Caïman became a founding act: Africans had sworn an oath in an African religion before a French decree freed them. The evidence for the ceremony itself is harder to sort out. No document from 1791 describes it. The first published account appeared in 1814, written by the planter's physician Antoine Dalmas; in the 1850s Haitian historian Céligny Ardouin published a fuller version after speaking with a former insurgent. Literary scholar Léon-François Hoffmann argued in 1990 that the ceremony was largely a later invention. David Geggus answered that thin evidence nevertheless points to a real meeting. He separates the drivers' gathering at the Lenormand de Mézy estate on 14 August from a religious ceremony probably held on Sunday 21 August; Ada Ferrer's work supports that date. Cécile Fatiman, often named as Boukman's partner in the rite, appears only in twentieth-century writing based on family tradition. The documented event and its place in national memory raise different questions, and both belong to its history.
French rights or African kingship?
The insurgents' flags and demands give historians different ways into their political thinking. C. L. R. James stressed French revolutionary ideas in 1938. John Thornton draws attention to royalist flags and argues that many Kongolese veterans understood a just king as a protector of his subjects. Carolyn Fick emphasizes resistance among maroons and on the estates. Laurent Dubois's Avengers of the New World (2004) shows insurgents using several political languages as circumstances required. Their objectives changed as well. Early claims commonly asked for three free days a week and an end to the whip. In December 1791 Jean-François and Biassou offered to help restore order in exchange for freedom for a few hundred officers; colonists refused. General emancipation became the goal later in the war. The change matters: the insurgents were making their own politics as the struggle developed.
The other revolution: free people of colour
The struggle of free people of colour had its own history and its own leaders. John Garrigus's Before Haiti (2006) traces their growing wealth in the mid-eighteenth century, especially as coffee and indigo planters in the South and West, and the racial laws that pushed them out of public life after the Seven Years' War. Their Paris spokesman, indigo planter Julien Raimond, argued that equality would make them loyal defenders of the colony, slavery included. Many owned enslaved workers and were slow to support abolition. In the West in 1791 they formed armed confederations, recruited enslaved fighters and defeated white militias. Their concordats, local treaties with white planters, recognized equality before Paris did. André Rigaud, Louis-Jacques Beauvais and Alexandre Pétion learned war in these campaigns and later commanded armies and helped shape the Haitian state. Their alliance with formerly enslaved people was never automatic. The tension returned in the War of Knives, the 1799–1800 civil war between Toussaint and Rigaud, and in the divided Haiti of 1807.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Rights declared for all and applied to few. The Assembly proclaimed rights for all men while depending on colonial trade and hesitating to apply that principle in Saint-Domingue. Its 1790 and 1791 decrees offered free people of colour limited rights and then withdrew them. Excluded people could point to the Declaration itself when challenging their exclusion. The gap supplied both a reason to resist and a language in which to make the claim.
Masters at war with each other. By 1791 planters were defying royal officials, poor whites were attacking free people of colour, and free people of colour had taken up arms for equality. The colony's forces were divided three ways; troops from France were few and unreliable. Those held in slavery could see that their rulers were fighting one another. This division gave a general rising room to begin.
A conspiracy built on the estates. The organizers needed ways to connect many parishes for a rising on one night. Drivers managed gangs and traveled between estates, coachmen carried news, and Sunday markets and religious gatherings brought people from different plantations together. Planters overlooked these networks, partly because they believed the enslaved incapable of planning a revolution. That belief helped conceal the preparations.
Mountains and a border. The northern plain offered more than one route of survival. Insurgents could retreat into neighboring mountains, regroup and grow food; across the border lay Spanish Santo Domingo, ready by 1793 to supply weapons in return for help against France. Risings on smaller, flatter Caribbean islands had been crushed within weeks. Here rebels could survive a defeat and return to fight.
THE TURNING POINT
Bois Caïman and the night of 22 August 1791. Before August 1791 the future of Saint-Domingue was disputed by free people in Paris and the colonial assemblies. The rising following Bois Caïman brought enslaved people into that contest as its largest army. They failed to take Le Cap, and their early demands were modest, but they survived the winter. Restoring the old order would now require a French government to reconquer the colony. Every later turn of the Haitian revolution depended on the insurgents having kept that possibility open.
What it changed
War across the North. The insurgent armies held much of the northern plain and mountains through 1792 against colonial militias and troops from France. Leaders emerged and competed. One was a freedman in his late forties, an aide to Biassou who would soon call himself Toussaint Louverture. The next chapter follows his rise and the advantage gained by turning insurgent bands into a disciplined army.
Paris sends commissioners and soldiers. France sent civil commissioners led by Léger-Félicité Sonthonax to enforce the equality granted to free people of colour on 4 April 1792. They landed at Le Cap in September with about 6,000 troops, intending to restore order and preserve slavery. In less than a year, invasion and civil war would lead Sonthonax himself to abolish slavery in the North.
Rival empires see an opening. Spain in neighboring Santo Domingo and Britain in Jamaica saw an opportunity in France's burning colony. When both went to war with revolutionary France in 1793, Spain armed the northern insurgents and Britain landed troops at the invitation of planters. Competition between great powers gave insurgents bargaining power, which they used brilliantly.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Did the French Revolution cause the Haitian Revolution?
The French Revolution opened the way for a Haitian revolution. It weakened royal authority, divided the free population and sent decrees that raised and then dashed expectations. Free people of colour and later formerly enslaved people made powerful use of its language of rights. Yet the Assembly had ignored the people who planned the August 1791 rising on the estates. Their networks, religious bonds and military experience came from Africa and life in the colony; their leaders flew royalist flags as often as republican ones, and their aims changed during the war. James, Thornton and Fick give these influences different weight, but most historians now see French events interacting with the agency of the enslaved. The opening and the force that acted on it were distinct. Ideas traveled, and the people who received them put them to their own uses.
An interesting fact
An image of the northern plain burning reached Europe in an engraving published in 1795. Jean-Baptiste Chapuy made it after a drawing by Jean-Louis Boquet and titled it “View of the forty days of fire on the plantations of the plain of Cap-Français”. Smoke rises over cane fields and mills while ships lie at anchor in the harbor. The print is now in the departmental archives of the Gironde in Bordeaux, the port whose merchants had financed many of the estates shown burning.
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