Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic

Abstract

IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, the French colony of Saint-Domingue was the richest colony in the world. Set in the Caribbean Sea, a short sail from some of the principal American colonies of Britain and Spain, in the 1780s it produced about half of all the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe and the Americas. It was, in the nomenclature of the time, the “Pearl of the Antilles,” the “Eden of the Western World.” It was there, in late August 1791, that the colony’s enslaved rose up, eventually declaring war against the regime of slavery at its seat of most extreme and opulent power. Within a month, the rebel slaves numbered in the tens of thousands, and the property destroyed amounted to more than a thousand sugar and coffee farms. With this event—the largest and best-coordinated slave rebellion the world had ever seen—the enslaved of Saint-Domingue forced the issue of slavery upon the French Revolution and the world. By August 1793, colonial authorities began decreeing abolition, and in February 1794, the National Convention in Paris ended slavery in France’s colonies, in a sense ratifying what enslaved rebels had already made real on the ground in many parts of Saint-Domingue. A decade later, those same rebels declared themselves free not only from slavery, but also from French rule. On January 1, 1804, the independent nation of Haiti was proclaimed—the second independent state in the Western Hemisphere, and the only one ever founded by former slaves and without slavery.1 The Haitian Revolution—the name by which we now know these events—commanded the attention of everyone in the region and beyond. But surely few followed