CARIBBEAN DREAMS, HAITIAN NIGHTMARES

Abstract

Trained, as most of us are, to focus on a small corner of the globe during an equally small moment in time, historians too often miss the larger interconnections that help explain regional racial identity and specific types of class formations in the Atlantic world. Denmark Vesey, for example, is too often depicted merely as an “enslaved rebel leader” (despite being free for two decades prior to his execution) rather than a black abolitionist, or a man of the black Atlantic. In the same way, Simón Bolívar is forced into equally simplistic categories. He is a general and a politician, but rarely a resident of Paris at the time of Bonaparte's coronation, or a visitor to Vesey's South Carolina, or a refugee in Haiti. However, in their later years, and especially in the early 1820s, they both thought much about events in Haiti, and their competing views of the black nation say much about the shifting boundaries of race and class in the western Atlantic. Conventional wisdom holds that for much of the late colonial era and early national periods in both North and South America, the connection between race and class can scarcely be overemphasized. Scholars now acknowledge that racial definitions are always being defined and redefined, just as class status is never static. Nothing better illustrates this understanding than the way these two individuals viewed the possibilities, as well as the dangers, inherent in Haiti's destruction of old correlations and new perceptions of class structures. If elite whites regarded Haiti as a terrifying example of a world turned upside down, Vesey evidently regarded the black nation as the sort of country where bright, aggressive, ambitious men like him could prosper and advance in rank. Historians, with a few notable exceptions, have been dismissive and patronizing of post-1804 Haiti, with its governor-generals, emperors, and presidents for life. But as a former resident of Danish St Thomas, French Saint Domingue, and patriarchal South Carolina (and, most likely, as the child of West Africans), Vesey had never actually seen a truly egalitarian society. If the antislavery ever harbored the sort of communalistic ideals that scholars wish to impose upon black abolitionists, there is now no evidence for it. Vesey appeared to care little about the fact that post-Louverture Haiti was both politically undemocratic and class based. With Christophe's eradication of the blancs and the gens de couleur, race was no longer a component in its class structure, except to the extent that the old order's racial structure was turned upside down. For an exceedingly entrepreneurial businessman like Vesey, Boyer's country was not just liberty or a convenient safe haven; it was the very picture of class mobility.