The Haitian Revolution

By the 1780s the most profitable colony in the world occupied the western third of a single Caribbean island. Saint-Domingue was the French portion of Hispaniola, ceded by Spain at the end of the seventeenth century and developed with a speed that astonished Europe. Owing to its rainfall and its harbours, the territory suited sugar cane almost perfectly; owing to French capital and an apparently limitless supply of forced labour, it turned that cane into money on a scale nothing else in the Americas approached. Sugar and coffee left its ports in quantities that supplied a very large share of what Europe drank and sweetened, and the French port cities grew rich on the traffic in both directions. Consequently the colony acquired a nickname that has outlived it: the Pearl of the Antilles, its planters bywords for wealth. What generated all of this was the plantation, a form of agriculture with almost nothing pastoral about it. Cane spoils quickly once cut, so it had to be crushed, boiled and refined on the spot, at speed, in heat, through the night, for months on end. Nothing about that arrangement was accidental.

The plantations were worked by around half a million enslaved Africans, by some distance the largest such population in the Caribbean. The system consumed the people inside it. Deaths outran births year after year, and the workforce was sustained not by families growing up on the island but by continuous new arrivals from the slave ships, tens of thousands a year in the final decades. This was attrition operating as an economic model: a cold calculation that it cost less to work human beings to death and purchase more than to keep them alive. Sugar was the most lethal of the crops, with its boiling houses, its mills and its unrelenting harvest. Cruelty was not incidental to the system but structural to it, and although a royal code had regulated the treatment of the enslaved since the previous century, it was ignored wherever enforcement was distant and profit near. One consequence mattered enormously later: because the population had to be replaced constantly from Africa, a very large proportion of the enslaved had been born free, remembered another life, spoke languages the planters did not, and some had military experience.

Saint-Domingue society was rigidly stratified, and the layers were policed with care. At the top sat the grands blancs, the great white planters and officials. Below them came the petits blancs — overseers, artisans, shopkeepers, sailors — poor, numerous, and fiercely attached to the one advantage they had. Alongside both stood the gens de couleur libres, the free people of colour: tens of thousands of them, many educated in France, many owning property, some owning enslaved people themselves, and yet excluded by law from political rights, office and the professions purely on grounds of colour. Beneath everyone lay the enslaved majority, who outnumbered every other group combined many times over. Into this hierarchy, in 1789, came the news from Paris: a National Assembly had declared that men are born and remain free and equal in rights. The contradiction was instant, and each group on the island read it differently. In 1790 Vincent Ogé, a free man of colour recently returned from France, led a small uprising demanding that the rights of man be applied to men like him. It was crushed, and Ogé was executed with a cruelty intended as a warning. Nevertheless, the argument he had lost did not go away.

In August 1791, in the rich northern plain around Cap-Français, the enslaved rose. Tradition connects the beginning with a ceremony at a wooded place called Bois Caïman, where leaders among the enslaved — including a man remembered as Boukman — are said to have gathered, sworn an oath and set a date. Historians dispute how much of that account rests on contemporary evidence and how much was reconstructed later; what followed is not in dispute. Within weeks, plantations across the northern plain were burning and the uprising had grown from hundreds to many thousands. It was not the spontaneous chaos that frightened colonists described: the rebels organised in bands, chose commanders, took supplies and struck at the economic machinery itself — the cane fields, the mills, the boiling houses. The authorities responded with mass executions, which did not work, then with concessions, which came too late. Meanwhile the European war reached the Caribbean, as Spain, holding the east of the same island, and Britain, holding Jamaica, both moved to seize the richest colony in the world while France was distracted. As a result, a revolt inside one colony became a war involving three European powers and armies of formerly enslaved soldiers whose loyalty every side now had to bid for.

Out of that confusion emerged the most remarkable figure of the age. He had been born enslaved on the Bréda plantation near Cap-Français, worked with horses and livestock, and was freed well before the revolution began — a free man of colour of some standing, literate, connected, and by 1791 already middle-aged. He is known to history as Toussaint Louverture, the second name adopted during the war and usually explained as a reference to the openings he made in enemy lines. He first took service with the Spanish, who armed and paid the rebel commanders. Then, in 1793, the French commissioner Sonthonax, desperate for soldiers, proclaimed the freedom of the enslaved in the north; in February 1794 the government in Paris went further and voted to emancipate the enslaved throughout the French colonies. Consequently Toussaint changed sides and turned his forces against his former Spanish allies. Over the following years he proved an exceptional commander and an equally exceptional politician: he drove out the Spanish, wore down a large British expedition through disease and attrition until it withdrew, defeated rivals within the colony, and reassured the remaining planters that the cane would keep moving.

By 1801 Toussaint governed the entire island, including the formerly Spanish east, and issued a constitution that abolished slavery permanently and named him governor for life — a document that stopped short of declaring independence, albeit only just. In Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte drew the obvious conclusion. In 1802 he despatched the largest expedition France had ever sent across the Atlantic, tens of thousands of troops under his brother-in-law General Leclerc. The stated purpose was to restore French authority; the real purpose, correctly guessed on the island, was to reimpose slavery, as it was in fact reimposed that same year in Guadeloupe. The campaign was savage on both sides. Several black generals came to terms, Toussaint among them, and he retired to his estate. Shortly afterwards he was invited to a meeting, arrested and put aboard a ship — treachery carried out under the protection of a truce. He was imprisoned in the Fort de Joux, high in the cold of the Jura mountains, and died there in April 1803. He is remembered as having warned his captors that in felling him they had cut down only the trunk, and that the roots would grow again; the words reach us second hand and cannot be verified. The prediction proved accurate.

The removal of Toussaint did not end the war; it ended any remaining doubt about French intentions. When news arrived that slavery had been restored elsewhere in the French Caribbean, the officers who had come to terms with Leclerc turned on him, and the fighting resumed with a ferocity that shocked contemporaries. The French army, meanwhile, was being destroyed by something no general could out-manoeuvre. Yellow fever swept the European ranks, killing soldiers who had no acquired immunity within days of their arrival. Leclerc himself died of it in November 1802. His successor, Rochambeau, answered military failure with a campaign of exemplary terror — mass drownings, executions and imported hunting dogs — which hardened resistance rather than breaking it. This was a war of attrition the French could not win: their reinforcements arrived only to sicken, while their opponents fought on their own ground for something that could not be compromised. In November 1803 the French were beaten decisively at Vertières and evacuated the colony. On 1 January 1804, at Gonaïves, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence and gave the country back an indigenous name: Haiti, from the Taíno word for the island. It remains the only time in recorded history that an uprising of enslaved people has produced a lasting independent state.

Independence was declared; it was not, however, conceded. In the months after the proclamation Dessalines ordered the killing of most of the remaining French population, several thousand people, arguing that only this could guarantee the planters would never return — an act still debated by historians, and one seized on abroad as proof of everything slaveholding societies wanted to believe. Those societies were already frightened. A successful revolt of the enslaved was, for the plantation world of the Americas, the most dangerous story imaginable, and their response was to ostracise the new republic entirely. Haiti was excluded from trade agreements, denied recognition, and treated for decades as a state that could not be acknowledged without conceding its argument. The United States, whose southern economy rested on slavery, withheld recognition until 1862, in the middle of its own civil war. There was, nevertheless, one enormous unintended consequence in the other direction. With his Caribbean army destroyed, Napoleon abandoned his design for an American empire and sold the vast Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803. Consequently the largest single expansion of the American republic was made possible, indirectly, by the people of Saint-Domingue.

Then came the bill. In 1825 a French squadron appeared off the coast with an offer that was not really an offer: King Charles X would recognise Haitian independence in exchange for 150 million francs, paid to former colonists as compensation for the property they had lost — property consisting, in large part, of the very people being asked to pay. Facing invasion and desperate to end the isolation, President Boyer accepted. The sum was later reduced, but to meet the instalments Haiti borrowed from French banks, and servicing that debt and the loans that replaced it swallowed an enormous share of national revenue for well over a century. Money that might have built schools, roads and harbours went abroad instead. Haiti had won its sovereignty on the battlefield and was then made to buy it a second time, on credit, from the losers; historians now widely regard the indemnity as a central cause of the country's long impoverishment, albeit not the only one. The echoes ran the other way too: for the enslaved elsewhere in the Americas, and for abolitionists everywhere, Haiti was proof that the thing could be done at all — which is precisely why it was ostracised so carefully, and why the world took so long to say plainly what had happened there.