H

HAITIAN REVOLUTION
The thirteen-year sequence (17911804) of diverse
events that we know as the Haitian Revolution in
Saint-Domingue, the former French colony on the western side of Hispaniola, more often was dubbed the disasters in Saint-Domingue by Europeans at the time. In
1914, Theophilus Gould Steward, an African American
college professor, AME chaplain, and buffalo soldier with
the US Colored Infantry, became one of the first (along
with African American abolitionist and lawyer John Mercer Langston) to explicitly use Haitian Revolution to
compare the overthrow of French colonial dominance
and slavery in Saint-Domingue to the French and
American revolutions and to the South American independences. And yet, Steward noted that the example of
Haiti was different from these other major events of
the age of revolutions because of the prodigious nature
of the social cataclysm it heralded. Although the
French and American revolutions and the Latin American independences also clearly represented social cataclysms, the Haitian Revolution stands apart for its
radical reframing of the connections between race,
slavery, national sovereignty, and cultural achievement
that had been at the heart of European hegemony in
the post-Columbian era.
READING THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION

Not only did French Saint-Domingue import, proportionally to its population, the largest number of African
slaves of any colony, but it had among the highest
replacement rates for its enslaved population. The average survival rate for a slave arriving in Saint-Domingue

was seven to ten years. The 1780s saw the highest mortality rate among enslaved Africans, tens of thousands of
whom, having survived the Middle Passage, were disembarked off ships arriving in Saint-Domingue each year in
the period leading up to the Haitian Revolution. At
the time that the slave insurrection broke out in August
1791, the great majority of the colonys population
was African-born. The diversity of this forced migrant
population contributes to fundamental difficulties of
reading the Haitian Revolution. The historical texts of
the time sometimes differentiate between the categories of
the African-born and the Creole or locally born Afrodiasporic participants in the Haitian Revolution, but they
provide only scant information about the many distinct
African cultures and languages that were involved in revolutionary behaviors and philosophical challenges to
French dominance.
The biased representational ambitions and ignorance of African languages and cultures that characterize
contemporaneous European print accounts of the Haitian Revolution make it particularly challenging to trace
the roles of free and unfree people of African origins or
descent in contesting existing racial formations and
creating a new political reality. It is unlikely that a
document in the same mold as those European accounts
will surface to actively represent African populations in
Saint-Domingue, but new research technologies and
methodologies are filling in the gap. The online
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database includes a Voyages Database, with which researchers can search the
logs of thousands of slave ships. This resource now
competes with the published literary and historiographical narratives that long concretized not only the factual

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Haitian Revolution

basis but also the symbolism and rhetoric of the Haitian

Revolution.

THE DEMAND FOR RIGHTS FOR

GENS DE COULEUR

Likewise, although slave owners documented and

publicly discussed a strict minimum of information about
the humans they purchased from another continent, their
ads for runaway or maroon slaves in Saint-Domingue
newspapers were designed to reveal whatever details might
make runaways recognizable for arrest and return. As a
result of this goal of making slaves recognizable for arrest,
slaves identities are becoming clearer. Another online
resource, Marronnage in Saint-Domingue (Hati): History, Memory, Technology, reveals a patchwork of more
than a hundred slave nations, ranging from Central
African jumbo categories (Congo) to obscure and curiously named categories, such as the Miserable ethnonym
from the Grain Coast. The epistemological and linguistic
interactions of African and European conceptions of
slaves identities are still being charted.

The exact date of the beginning of the Haitian Revolution depends on how historians privilege the continuum
of race-related bids for emancipation and equality, which
emerged in uneven alignment to the strategies for mobility of different groups in Saint-Domingue. A multitude
of racial designations in colonial Saint-Domingue created
a racial hierarchy that formed a pigmentocracy. In Anglophone slave-holding environments, variations on color
associated with degrees of African and Euro-American
ancestry were not as routinely used to describe nonwhites, because one drop ideologies and taxonomies
of race made blackness an all-encompassing category for
individuals with African ancestry. In Saint-Domingue, in
contrast, a significant number of gens de couleur (people
of color), composed of those of mixed African and European ancestry (often the offspring of relationships, both
consensual and nonconsensual, between white masters
and their black female slaves), benefited from freedom
from slavery, although a larger group of mixed-race
inhabitants of the island remained enslaved. These free
people of color continued to suffer discrimination from
white planters, however. A person with only one African
grandparent, for example, was still not allowed to practice certain occupations or use the name of his or her
white ancestors.

The consequences of Euro-American ignorance of

the languages of Africalike the consequences of EuroAmerican illiteracies in such key African semiotic systems
as scarificationform an increasingly prominent parallel
to the alphabetic illiteracy of the majority of slaves.
Eighteenth-century ethnographers acknowledged that
slaves would sometimes fall to their knees after reading
the texts inscribed on the bodies of fellow slaves, but
colonists failed to understand or record most details of
African productions and receptions of scarred incisions
on the body. Nevertheless, because ads for runaway slaves
frequently recorded marks of his [or her] country or
dental shaping, we can now appreciate the proto-alphabetic complexity of these signs in the age of the Haitian
Revolution.
Though slaves who fled suffered harsh punishment,
including torture and execution, large groups of escaped
slaves, called maroons, lived in remote areas of the
colony throughout the eighteenth century. Because these
maroon communities lived in armed opposition to the
plantation society that surrounded them, they can be
understood as the precursors to the insurgents of the
Haitian Revolution. Once the enslaved of Saint-Domingue rose up in revolt, they used many of the tactics of
the maroons to defend themselves against the French.
Slaves who had not fled plantations also sometimes
united with members of their African nation during
the revolution. Questions of collective action by distinct
African groups in Saint-Domingue are prompting new
research on the specific role of African-born participants
in revolutionizing the New World. To what extent was
the Haitian Revolution an African revolution against
Euro-American practices of dominance and slavery, and
how did it reconfigure equality as conceptualized in the
European Enlightenment?

278

The movements for improvement in the treatment

of the gens de couleur and for the abolition of slavery were
not originally connected. Many free people of color in
the extremely wealthy colony, like their white relatives,
made money from the institution of slavery and did not
initially support its abolition. Instead, they wished for
citizenship, parliamentary representation, and an end to
discriminatory laws. Representatives of the gens de couleur
began lobbying for their rights in the 1780s. The wealthiest of this class owned plantations and slaves and, like
whites, sent their children to be educated in France.
Though contact between whites and the gens de couleur
was frequent, the latter group was discriminated against
in an effort to keep most money and political power in
the hands of people of only European ancestry.
White colonists, fearful of losing political power to
the gens de couleur, formed the Club Massiac to promote
their interests in Paris. They refused major concessions to
the free people of color. Frustrated and angered by this
continued discrimination, one of the prominent representatives of the gens de couleur, Vincent Oge, who had
been defended in the writings of his fellow plantation
owner Julien Raimond, returned to Saint-Domingue
from Paris via London and the United States in October
1790 and began an uprising against the white colonists.
Though Oge initially made some gains, his white

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Haitian Revolution

JULIEN RAIMOND
Julien Raimond (17441801), a wealthy free man born in
the French colony of Saint-Domingue, became one of the
most prominent advocates for the colonys class of gens de
couleur (people of color)free individuals of either African or both European and African ancestry. The wealthiest
of the gens de couleur owned plantations and slaves and,
like whites, sent their children to be educated in France.
Raimond was an example of rare continuity of name and
property ownership between the generation of his father
a white planter who had earlier been a vineyard owner
from the Landes in Franceand offspring with any part of
African ancestry. Raimonds father had married the
quadroon woman, Marie Begasse, with whom he had
twelve children. Raimond married a rich woman of color,
the daughter of a free black woman and a white planter.
The Saint-Domingue ethnographer would note that when
one traveled to the wealthy Aquin region, the first plantation on the road was that of Julien Raimond, the earnest
activist for the assimilation of men of color into the category of the rights of white men.
Raimond articulated his demands for rights around
distinctions between free and enslaved people more so
than between those of European and African ancestry.
Yet the movement for the improvement of the treatment
of the gens de couleur and the movement for the abolition
of slavery were not initially directly connected. Many
free people of color mobilized around demands for
citizenship, parliamentary representation, and an end to
discriminatory laws.
Raimond first lobbied the government for an
amelioration of the treatment of the gens de couleur in
1783. Though the monarchy listened to his demands at
first, very few changes were made in the 1780s. At the
onset of the French Revolution in 1789, he appealed to
the pro-slavery Club Massiac in Paris. When they
refused any concessions, he turned to the abolitionist
Societe des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of
the Blacks), who supported his bid for parliamentary
representation for the gens de couleur. Like the Marquis
de Condorcet, Raimond supported a gradual abolition
of slavery. When insurrection broke out among the
enslaved classes of Saint-Domingue in 1791, Raimond
stressed that order and respect for the French Republic
were necessary to prove that they were worthy of the
freedom that the republic would bestow on them.

In the early 1790s, the rights that were granted to the

free people of color by the National Assembly, such as
citizenship for those gens de couleur whose parents had been
free, served only to inflame tensions in the colony. Vincent
Oge, a free person of color who returned to Saint-Domingue
and took up arms against the whites, was defeated, publicly
tortured, and executed in 1792. Raimond avoided violence
and even successfully defended himself when he was arrested
and imprisoned during the Reign of Terror of the French
Revolution. He returned to the Caribbean as a French
commissioner to the Windward Islands in 1796, from which
position he issued proclamations cosigned with Leger-Felicite Sonthonax and Philippe Roume, espousing the opinion
that those who neglected labor in the revolutionary Caribbean would inevitably become slaves to an active metropole.
But Raimond found a changed political landscape in SaintDomingue; slavery had been abolished and Toussaint Louverture had gained much political power. By this point,
Raimonds actions indicate that he had changed his position
on the abolition of slavery. In August 1800 he wrote to
Napoleon Bonaparte asking for assurance that he would not
reestablish slavery in Saint-Domingue. Like Toussaint Louverture, Raimond pledged his loyalty to France but was
known as a member of a pro-independence assembly. Raimond died in 1801 just after signing Louvertures new
constitution, before Louvertures capture in 1802, and before
Jean-Jacques Dessaliness 1804 declaration of an
independent Haiti.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dubois, Laurent. 2004. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and

Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 17871804.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American
History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia.
Garrigus, John D. 2006. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in
French Saint-Domingue. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Moreau de Saint-Mery, Mederic-Louis-Elie. 1985. A Civilization
That Perished: The Last Years of White Colonial Rule in Haiti.
Translated, abridged, and edited by Ivor D. Spencer. Lanham,
MD: University Press of America.
Popkin, Jeremy D. 2010. You Are All Free: The Haitian
Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RACE AND RACISM, 2ND EDITION

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Deborah Jenson
Duke University, NC
Lesley Curtis
University of New Hampshire

279

Haitian Revolution

opponents responded violently, defeating the rebels.

They publicly tortured and executed Oge and his collaborator, Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, in February 1791, making them martyrs. Though he never claimed to be against
slavery, Oges rebellion revealed the extent to which
white colonists believed in the notion of their racial
superiority and remained obstinately committed to maintaining an exclusive hold on power based on this assumption of supremacy. Nevertheless, the bid of individuals of
mixed race, often plantation owners, to access privileges
without abolishing slavery correlates poorly to universal
emancipation models and is thus often framed as a
precursor phase to the Haitian Revolution.
REVOLUTIONARY CONTAGION

Structuring Oges and Chavanness political claims and

insurrection as precursors to the Haitian Revolution
rather than the revolution itself overlooks their parallelism with revolutionary activity by nonwhites elsewhere
in the Caribbean as well, in a larger phenomenon suggestive of a greater revolutionary contagion inspired by
the French Revolution. As early as the fall of 1789,
deputies in the French National Assembly voiced fears
that recent insurrections in Martinique and Guadeloupe
were precursors to revolution in Saint-Domingue. A
poem published in the New York Daily Advertiser in
the spring of 1790 took a jubilant rather than a dire
view of the extension of revolutionary momentum from
France to the Caribbean: What progress does liberty
make every week! / How quick from Versailles has she
reached Martinique!
The Haitian Revolution certainly coincided temporally with the French Revolution and the circulation of
Enlightenment ideas of human rights and freedom. In
fact, because the names of many of Saint-Domingues
large plantations were the names of major landholders
and aristocrats in France who held seats in the National
Assembly and published writings on the French Revolution, research on plantation names like Cormier and
Choiseul reveals an oddly double historical moment,
in which the same proper namesabsentee plantation
owners in the colony and deputies in the metropoleare
associated with discussion of slavery in Saint-Domingue
and discussion of the metaphorical enslavement of
white citizens to monarchy in Europe. But in SaintDomingue and other sites of Afro-diasporic insurrection
following the fall of the Bastille in France, the limited
application beyond the metropole and across class, ethnic, and migrant communities of the ostensibly universal
French revolutionary conception of the Rights of Man
was openly challenged. When in August 1791 the events
most commonly associated with the start of the Haitian
Revolution broke out, they augured the day in April

280

1804 when Haitis first national leader, Jean-Jacques

Dessalines, would be able to claim on behalf of populations of the enslaved and the indigenous, I have avenged
America. In 1804, French colonial power in SaintDomingue would be overthrown not by colonists, as in
the American Revolution, nor by the colonized, as in
Algerias twentieth-century revolution, but by the slaves
of colonists.
THE INSURRECTION

Revolutionary planning by slaves, free blacks, and people

of color in the summer of 1791 was mostly hidden from
the public record. In June and July, there were small-scale
insurrections on three separate plantations near Port-auPrince. On August 14, there was a large-scale (and openly
known) meeting of leaders (slave drivers, domestics,
coachmen, etc.) from the nonwhite communities of several dozen plantations on the Lenormand de Mezy plantation in the north, near what is now called Cap Hatien.
There is some discrepancy of dates in the historical
record, but on August 16 or 17 a black slave overseer
on the Chabaud plantation near the Cape Francois was
caught setting fire to a building. Interrogated, he admitted a large-scale plot to burn and destroy plantations and
kill whites. Many of the conjures (a word for plotters
that also means conjured or bewitched) were questioned. All denied the report and were eventually
released. On August 20 or 21, the manager of La Gossette plantation was attacked. In Acul, the revolutionary
leader Boukman, a coachman on the Clement plantation,
led slaves on a torrent-like path of destruction. But it was
on the late evening of August 22 and the early morning
of August 23 that the insurrection was generalized. The
ash and smoke from the burning cane fields surrounding
the city covered the sky for days.
In the days leading up to the insurrection, slaves
and their proxies at the leadership level are believed to
have met for a vodou ceremony in the Cayman
woods. These woods were probably located in the area
on the Choiseul plantation known as the Savane a`
Cayman on the banks of the Haut du Cap River,
which earlier in the eighteenth century had been sufficiently deep to be hospitable to alligators. But that river
no longer flows through the area, which is just one of
several ways in which access to this key moment of Afrodiasporic revolutionary sensibility has been partially
erased. The ceremony, led by the houngan (vodou
priest) and Boukman, was not described in print until
the account of the colonist Antoine Dalmas in 1814.
Dalmas mentioned such details as the sacrifice of a black
pig surrounded by fetishes that was offered up in flames
as the symbol of the all-powerful genius of the blacks.
The bristles from the pig were kept as multiple

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Haitian Revolution

JEAN-JACQUES DESSALINES
Jean-Jacques Dessalines (c. 17581806) was the first leader of
independent Haiti and the first leader in the world of a selfemancipated colony of former slaves. There is little direct
documentation of his early life. The earliest biographical
sources, ranging from a racially charged biography to early
encyclopedia entries, claim that he had been brought as a slave
from the African coast and purchased by a free black slave
owner in Haiti, whose name he later took. Evidence in favor of
this possibility includes a contemporaneous ethnographic
account of Dessalines marshaling black troops by leading them
in African songs, a popular tradition in Haiti associating
Dessalines with Nago (Yoruba) ethnic heritage, and the
absence of known commentary from any white owning
Dessalines. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century and
beyond that details of the currently prevailing paradigm of
Dessalines as a Creole slave born in Grande Rivie`re emerged.
Dessalines participated in the 1791 slave insurrection.
He became a soldier in the French Army in SaintDomingue, and then a general under Toussaint
Louverture. After Toussaints deportation to a prison in
the Jura in France in 1802, Dessalines emerged as the
general in chief of the French Indigenous Army in the
battles against the French, and he and the Count de
Rochambeau, a French general, negotiated the French
evacuation after the Battle of Vertie`res in November 1803.
Although he had had no formal schooling, Dessalines
worked effectively with secretaries to generate sophisticated
military correspondence. After the defeat of the French,
Dessalines issued a series of rousing and philosophically
intricate proclamations in which the identity of the postcolony was articulated. He and the other signatories of the
early independence documents, including the Haitian Declaration of Independence, named the new nation Hayti
(Ayiti in Kreyo`l) after the Taino Amerindian name for the
highlands of the island of Hispaniola. He also famously
declared that he had avenged America, claiming a new
start in radical fidelity to the historically oppressed peoples
of the pre- and post-Columbian New World.

individual talismans meant to confer invulnerability in

the coming battles. It was then not until 1824 that a
Haitian writer, Herard Dumesle, published an account
of the Creole oath taken in the ceremony, in which the
slaves addressed a god, hidden in nature, who witnessed
the crimes that were allowed to occur by the god of the

Dessalines accepted his nomination as emperor in the

summer of 1804, but the Haitian Constitution of 1805, and
other Haitian codes, showed sharp divergences from the
Napoleonic conception of empire. Much of Dessaliness early
rule was dominated by a struggle against a remaining French
outpost, led by General Marie-Louis Ferrand, on the eastern
side of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic). Maritime
space was a key front in Ferrands pitch to reframe Haiti as a
rebellious domain of Napoleons empire. Ferrand issued legal
challenges to any vessels engaged in commerce on the Haitian
coast, thus threatening to choke off Haitis economy. Haitis
increasing vulnerability in the international arena, compounded by the violence associated with Dessaliness rule
domestically, culminated in Dessaliness assassination by his
own countrymen on October 17, 1806.
Among Haitian revolutionary political leaders,
Dessalines was the only one to refer frequently to colonial
enslavement as a determining violence. He aligned power
emanating from nature and the glory of the warrior
against European racialized hegemony. His internationally disseminated political proclamations contested
Western political values, identities, and institutions
ranging from Abrahamic religious monotheism to
abstract rationalism. Dessalines thus left one of the
earliest-known oeuvres of radical black Atlantic political
theory, in which he contested every trace of French colonial slaveholding cultureand, indirectly, showed
exactly what black independence movements were up
against.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dessalines. 1806. In Biographie moderne, p. 79. Leipzig,

Germany: Paul-Jacques Besson.
Jenson, Deborah. 2011. Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics,
Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution. Liverpool,
UK: Liverpool University Press, 2011.
Deborah Jenson
Duke University, NC
Lesley Curtis
University of New Hampshire

whites, and who would guide the blacks arms in vengeance. Portraits of the whites god should be thrown
away, the oath counseled, because it actively thirsted
for water of the tears in their eyes. What they should
attend to was the spirit of freedom speaking in all of
their hearts.

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Haitian Revolution

One astonishing early product of the 1791 insurrection was the convergence of slaves, free blacks, free people
of mixed race, and whites around communicative goals
and cohabitation of military structures. The Creole former slave Toussaint Louverture, who as a free black prior
to the revolution had been a leaseholder of property to
which slaves were attached, did not join in the first
months of the insurrection. However, he soon came to
serve as a diplomatic and secretarial ouverture, or opening,
between the different demographics in the camp of the
Grande Rivie`re, and according to some contemporaneous
observers, his last name, Louverture, derived from this
signature role. Within the first months after the outbreak
of the insurrection, the blacks composed and sent formal
communications outlining their political philosophy and
strategic concerns to the National Assembly in France.
The leadership roles of Toussaint, Dessalines, Henri
Christophe, Moyse, Charles Belair, and many others in
the French Army in Saint-Domingue reveal the hybridity
of colonial structures during this period. There were
many instances in which blacks served as military superiors to whites. In this historical era, correspondence
dictated to secretaries was a crucial infrastructural dimension of French military life, and history owes much of the
first-person representation of the Haitian leaders experience to the texts produced as a routine feature of their
military work. The racially diverse French Army in SaintDomingue was a kind of literary machine during the
Haitian Revolution, grinding out letters, reports, records,
and proclamations. Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe,
and their high-ranking Afro-diasporic peers in the military learned to use this textual system to construct internationally influential political personae and to build a
locally authoritative documentary apparatus. (Influential
black or mixed-race leaders who were not officially integrated into the military remain shadowy figures to this day
due to the lack of written representation.) By contrast
with abolitionism in Anglophone environments, French abolitionism helped not so much to produce narratives in a
certain genre, such as the slave narrative, as to produce texts
of revolutionary dialogue with (former) slavespolitical
correspondence, manifestos, treatises, and constitutionsin
the context of the interconnections of the French and Haitian
revolutions and the demands of Caribbean nonwhites that
they be accepted as interlocutors.
THE FRENCH RESPONSE

Slavery was abolished in Saint-Domingue in August 1793,

by order of the French civil commissioner Leger-Felicite
Sonthonax. Sonthonax showed a surprising awareness of
the stakes of the Creole languagethe closest thing to a
common language among the linguistically diverse slaves
by publishing this document and other important texts in

282

Creole for public consumption. That same day, Toussaint

had addressed a camp of black soldiers with the lines, I am
Toussaint Louverture.. . . I have undertaken vengeance.
I want Liberty and Equality to reign in Saint-Domingue
(quoted in Dubois 2005, p. 176). Toussaint later complained, in reports intended to discredit Sonthonax with
the Executive Directory in France, that Sonthonax appropriated the abolition of slavery despite mixed approaches to
the issue at the time. (Sonthonax was the first in a line of
French colonial administrators whom Toussaint would
eventually discredit and deport back to France, in a sign
of Toussaints de facto pursuit of political autonomy.)
The possibility of ending slavery in the colony had
indeed been a topic of intense debate among French
revolutionaries since the formation of the Societe des
Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of the Blacks) in
1788. But the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue
highlights the slaves or former slaves as the most proactive
and effective group of abolitionists of all. The military
roles and texts of revolutionary leaders like Toussaint and
Dessalines prove that people of African descent succeeded
to a significant extent in demanding that French colonial
leaders interact with them as equals. It was not until the
following year in Paris, in 1794, that slavery was officially
abolished in all the French colonies (although it would be
reinstated by Napoleon in many locales in 1802).
Numerous watershed events and landmark dates
mark the decade between the abolition of slavery in
Saint-Domingue and the final defeat and withdrawal of
the French colonial army in November and December of
1803. Hoping to profit from the political volatility in
France and its colonies, both English and Spanish armies
attacked the colony in an effort to gain control of what
had been the most profitable sugar colony in the
world. In 1795, under the Treaty of Basel, the eastern
side of the island of Hispaniola, Spanish Santo Domingo,
was allotted to the French; this is just one of many
rounds in the musical chairs of French, Spanish, and
British bids for ascendance, each of which correlated in
unique ways to strategic gains by the Afro-diasporic community. In 1797, Toussaint expelled Commissioner Sonthonax from the island, and then Gabriel Hedouville met
the same fate in 1798, as did Philippe Roume in 1800.
Tensions between Toussaint and the mixed-race leader
Andre Rigaud created an internal military conflict. In
1801, Toussaint invaded nominally French Santo Domingo and brought it under black control. That same year,
in his new role as governor-general for life, he issued a new
constitution for the colony. Napoleon Bonapartes government viewed Toussaints constitution as a step toward
independence, and France took the decision to invade.
General Charles Leclerc, Napoleons brother-in-law,
headed the expedition of more than 30,000 troops. From

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Haitian Revolution

the spring of 1802 onward, until the Haitian independence of January 1804, the previous years of power struggles and intermittent battles were replaced by a more
active phase of revolutionary conflict between the forces
of the Afro-diasporic leaders and the French forces.
Toussaint was forced into retirement in the late spring
of 1802, but Leclerc suspected that he remained active.
In early June 1802, Leclerc arranged a ruse through
which Toussaint was lured into a house and away from
his guards; he was seized. Toussaint and his whole family
were taken captive and deported to France, where Toussaint was imprisoned in a remote mountain stronghold,
the Fort de Joux. The kidnapping of Toussaint did not
have the decisive effect hoped for by Leclerc. In August,
Leclerc complained to Napoleon, It is not enough to
have kidnapped Toussaint, here there are 2000 leaders to
kidnap (quoted in Jenson 2011, p. 213).
While in prison in France, Toussaint desperately tried
to communicate his story and to articulate his defense. He
sent numerous letters and a lengthy handwritten memoir
to Napoleon. These documents featured the characteristics
that were the hallmark of Toussaints informal education
and partial literacy: an almost completely invented orthography, reiteration of proverb-like exemplars, and a
poignant rhythmic and imagistic mode of description.
Recalibration of the deviations from standard French to
an English translation would yield passages like this:
sendingme naked as en erthwerm to the deps of this
dun jon, isn this like cuhting off the legge of a some one
and tellingim walk, isent this like cuhting out the tongue
and tellingim talk, isent this bur ee ing a man alive?
(Jenson 2011, p. 17). Or, with conventional spelling and
word spacing: sending me naked as an earthworm to
the depths of this dungeon, isnt this like cutting off
someones legs and telling him to walk, isnt this like
cutting out someones tongue and telling him to talk,
isnt this burying a man alive? Napoleon, annoyed at
these reminders of his prisoner, ordered that all writing
implements be taken from Toussaints cell. Yet upon
Toussaints death of cold, neglect, and illness in April
1803, Napoleons aide-de-camp reported that they had
found a sheaf of handwritten documents hidden under
Toussaints headscarf; Toussaint died wearing his protests like a second skin.
THE DEFEAT OF FRANCE AND THE CHALLENGES
OF INDEPENDENCE

General Leclerc had predeceased Toussaint, succumbing

in November 1802 to yellow fever, which carried away
thousands of French troops. The position of the French,
now under the command of the ferocious French general
Donatien Rochambeau, who was said to have brought
man-eating dogs from Cuba to attack the blacks, became

increasingly precarious. On November 18, 1803, Dessaliness army resoundingly defeated the French at the
Battle of Vertie`res. Treatises of surrender and evacuation
were finalized. On November 29, Dessalines, along with
generals Christophe and Philippe Clerveaux (sometimes
rendered Clervaux), issued an internationally distributed
proclamation of the independence of Saint-Domingue:
For the first time in the world, former African slaves had
risen up over their masters and conquered the state itself.
Another document, the Haitian Declaration of Independence, followed a January 1, 1804, ceremony. This
document featured the new name of the postcolonial
black nation, drawn from the local Amerindian word
for highlands: Hayti.
In the Haitian independence, the discursive skills
and practices cultivated through colonial military service
allowed a population that had recently been enslaved to
establish a corpus of state-building documents. Yet this
documentary apparatus remained in the language of the
colonial infrastructure, which is to say French, rather
than Creole or African languages. That linguistic imprint
of the former slave-owning colonial system set the foundations of a schism between the state, its functionaries,
and the people they purported to serve. Education and
literacy, which were exclusively associated with French in
the colonial culture of the time, had been valued by slaves
in Saint-Domingue as an area of privilege and sometimes
illicit mobility; ads for runaway slaves that mention contested freedom papers signaled the power of documents
to transform status not just figuratively but literally.
Toussaint Louverture and Henry Christophe had both
sent their children to be educated in France despite the
risks of handing them over to the metropolitan government during the Haitian Revolution. When General
Leclerc arrived with the French expedition, he brought
with him Toussaints sons Isaac and Placide as implicit
hostagesto which gesture Toussaint had responded,
Take my children. Isaac and Placide Louverture subsequently were allowed to return to their family. For
Christophe, the scenario was tragic: upon the defeat of
the French in Saint-Domingue in 1803, Christophes
eldest son Ferdinand was removed from a school for
the children of colonists and forcibly interned in a Paris
orphanage, where he died, reputedly of abuse. Such interwoven histories of the mortal stakes of language and
literacy in the Haitian Revolution are symbolic of the
struggles Haiti would face to carve out an identity and a
position of security in a world still dominated by EuroAmerican colonial hegemony. After Henry Christophe
became the first king of Haiti in 1811, he never mentioned that his eldest son had died a virtual prisoner of
the Napoleonic government in France.
And as Dessalines learned in the first days of the
independence, the French were not actually gone from

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Hamer, Fannie Lou

the island. General Marie-Louis Ferrand, who had taken

over a small French outpost in the city of Santo Domingo in what is now the Dominican Republic, used that
tactical position to issue legal proclamations making
international trade in Haitian ports illegal; the ships of
those who defied the French ban were sometimes seized
and their cargoes confiscated. Dessalines, infuriated at the
ongoing French challenges, massacred remaining French
colonists in Hayti. The etymological roots of the word
revolution in revolving, rather than a completed rotation,
remained classically figured in this ongoing life, postindependence, of the Haitian Revolution as a race-related
social cataclysm in a modernity characterized by colonial
and slave-holding hegemony. It is in this sense that the
Haitian Revolution remains today a contemporary as well
as a historical problem; its ultimate role in inaugurating
Afro-diasporic political and cultural power is still being
traced.
Genocide and Crimes against Humanity:
Haitian Massacre of 1937; Janvier, Louis-Joseph;
Racial Formations: Haiti; Schlcher, Victor; Toussaint
Louverture.

SE E A LS O

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dubois, Laurent. 2005. Avengers of the New World: The Story of

the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
Jenson, Deborah. 2011. Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex,
and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution. Liverpool, UK:
Liverpool University Press.
Le Glaunec, Jean-Pierre, Leon Robichaud, et al. Marronnage in
Saint-Domingue (Hati): History, Memory, Technology.
Universite de Sherbrooke. Accessed January 31, 2012.
Available from http://www.marronnage.info/en/index.html
Steward, Theophilus Gould. 1914. The Haitian Revolution.
New York: T.Y. Crowell.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Voyages Database.
Accessed January 31, 2012. Available from http://
www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces

she began working in the cotton fields of Sunflower

County and by age twelve she had dropped out of school.
She married Perry Pap Hamer in 1944, and the couple
settled in Ruleville, Mississippi, to work as sharecroppers.
Hamer did not know that blacks could vote until
1962 when, at age forty-four, she attended a mass meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). She volunteered, along with seventeen others,
to attempt to register to vote. She failed the required
literacy test, however, and when she returned home she
learned that she had also lost the job she had held for
eighteen years because of her attempt to register. Thus
began a public life dedicated to having America fulfill its
democratic promises to all citizens. She became a political, social, and economic activist.
In 1964 Hamer helped to organize the events of
Freedom Summer, out of which emerged the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to which she was
selected as vice chairman. As a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, she challenged the seating of the all-white party delegation (the
Regulars). Hamer became a national figure when she
provided testimony during televised hearings before
the Credentials Committee. She spoke of atrocities faced
by blacks in Mississippi when attempting to register and
vote and of being severely beaten after she was arrested in
Winona, Mississippi, for attending a civil rights meeting.
She stated, If the Freedom Democratic Party is not
seated now, I question America, is this America, the land
of the free and the home of the brave where we have to
sleep with our telephones off the hook because our lives
be threatened daily?(Mills 1993, p. 121). As a compromise, the MFDP was offered two seats, which Hamer
rejected, stating, We didnt come all this way for no two
seats cause all of us is tired (Mills 1993, p. 5). The
MFDP did not win its political challenge, but this effort
paved the way for future delegations to Democratic conventions to be integrated.

19171977

In 1968 the Loyalist Democrats of Mississippi, a

biracial outgrowth of the MFDP, ousted the Regulars at
the Chicago Democratic Convention. Hamer was
selected as a delegate, but she argued that the party had
lost touch with poor people. In the lawsuit Hamer v.
Campbell, Hamer sought to block elections in Sunflower
County on the grounds that blacks had not had an
opportunity to register. A federal appeals court overturned a district court decision against her, and new
elections were ordered. Hamer also helped organize the
National Womens Political Caucus in 1971.

Fannie Lou Hamer was born Fannie Lou Townsend on

October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi.
She was the youngest of twenty children born to sharecroppers Jim and Lou Ella Townsend. At the age of six

Hamer dedicated her life to helping the poor, children, and working people. In 1963 she formed Delta
Ministry, a community development program. In 1968,
she founded Freedom Farms Cooperative, a nonprofit

Deborah Jenson (2013)

Duke University, NC

Lesley S. Curtis (2013)

University of New Hampshire

HAMER, FANNIE LOU

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(c) 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.