LRB, Vol. 42 No. 22 · 19 November 2020
The End of the Plantocracy
by Pooja Bhatia
The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian
Revolution
by Julius S. Scott.
Verso, 246 pp., £12.99, September, 978 1 78873 248 2
Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti
by Johnhenry Gonzalez.
Yale, 302 pp., £30, August 2019, 978 0 300 23008 6
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture
by Sudhir Hazareesingh.
Penguin, 442 pp., £25, September, 978 0 241 29381 2
The movement for Black liberation made its world-historical debut in
August 1791 when ten thousand slaves in the north of Saint-Domingue rose
up and laid waste to sugar plantations. Within three months, the numbers
involved in the insurrection had grown eightfold. Sugar production
almost ceased. Fortunes burned. Planters fled, and some were killed. By
1794, the rebels had compelled France to abolish slavery throughout its
colonies. Here was one of the most astonishing achievements in history,
but it was fleeting. Napoleon, who seized power in 1799, reneged on
France’s promise of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ for those with dark
skin. His regime couldn’t tolerate a former slave ruling over its most
valuable colony. But Toussaint Louverture’s army of self-freed soldiers
– men and women uprooted from their homelands and families, survivors of
the Middle Passage and of an especially brutal form of slavery –
wouldn’t submit to bondage again. The French general Charles Leclerc
promised to subdue Saint-Domingue within two weeks, but nine months
later he was dead, along with tens of thousands of his soldiers. In
1804, Haiti became the second republic in the New World and the first
Black one. The second article of its constitution abolished slavery; the
fourteenth declared all Haitians, regardless of their skin colour, to be
Black. Haiti was post-colonial before many colonies existed.
A handful of contemporaries grasped what was happening: ‘There’s not a
breathing of the common wind/That will forget thee,’ Wordsworth wrote in
homage to Louverture, who was by then dying in a French prison. Most
contemporary writers, as the Haitian historian and anthropologist
Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued, were too blinded by racism to see what
was taking place. The idea that Black slaves could imagine or desire
freedom, let alone engineer a protracted, eventually victorious struggle
for it, was unthinkable. In 1804 the economies of most Atlantic powers
depended on Black slavery. The US president was a slaver celebrated for
a Declaration of Independence that didn’t need to specify that only
white men were created equal. Humiliation may also have had something to
do with this failure of comprehension. France, routed, was forced into a
firesale of the Louisiana Territory, a lacklustre end to Napoleon’s
western ambitions. (Britain, for its part, lost sixty thousand men in
its attempt to gain control of the Caribbean.)
Archives reflect inequalities. While written records by the protagonists
are scarce (Louverture, who was said to send out more than two hundred
letters a day, was a rare exception), accounts from planters, European
officials and opponents of Black liberation are plentiful, many of them
steeped in a baroque and obsessive racism. Too many historians have
taken such sources at their word. Not that many historians wrote about
the revolution. The exception was C.L.R. James, whose Black Jacobins,
published in 1938, was neglected for decades then reissued in 1963 as
decolonisation movements gained momentum across the African continent.
Writing about the Haitian Revolution has often reflected (and recreated)
the inequalities that gave rise to it. For nearly two centuries, the
revolution was an affront to economies grown fat on slavery, to empires
still carving up the Third World under the auspices of civilising it, to
polities ostensibly based on universal rights. But by the mid-1990s, a
shift in scholarly attitudes towards Black liberation was beginning to
take place. Trouillot’s work was key to that shift, particularly his
emphasis on the ways in which the forces of slavery, colonialism and
racism shaped the modern world. Now, a new generation of historians are
inventing or applying fresh methods to fragmentary archives, critically
interpreting the better-known primary sources and hypothesising about
what has been left out. They scour the manifests of ships and the
ledgers of overseers, travelogues, newspapers, Vatican dossiers and
Vodou iconography, searching for traces of the people who made the
revolution. Dozens of books and articles now appear every year about the
Haitian Revolution, while historians take to Twitter and the popular
press to remind us of Haiti’s singular place in the history of
liberation movements.
On the eve of the 1791 insurrections, Saint-Domingue was France’s most
profitable colony. But France was in the throes of its own revolution,
and the turmoil created an opening for Britain and Spain to try to take
control, using former slaves as mercenaries. Louverture initially fought
for the Spanish but after France abolished slavery throughout its
colonies in 1794, he transferred his allegiance, and his troops. By
1796, he was the colony’s lieutenant-governor; two years later, he had
defeated the British and restored French control over most of the
colony. But when, in 1801, he orchestrated his own appointment as
governor-general and issued a constitution, Napoleon interpreted his
actions as threatening independence and invaded. The ensuing war was
fiery and bloody. In May 1802, Leclerc and Louverture reached an
apparent détente and Louverture agreed to retire. But the following
month, Leclerc lured him to a meeting, had him arrested and sent to France.
The Common Wind, which takes its title from Wordsworth’s sonnet to
Louverture, is based on Julius Scott’s 1986 doctoral dissertation. It
didn’t find a publisher until 2018, by which time Scott was an emeritus
lecturer at Michigan and had given up on his work reaching a wide
audience. Photocopies – and, later, PDFs – of his thesis had circulated
among historians like an ‘underground mixtape’. As the dissertation did
the rounds, through at least two generations of professors and students,
it helped define the emerging field of Atlantic world history.
Scott insisted on understanding ‘enslaved people as thinking people’.
Then he tried to find out what they were thinking about. Others took it
for granted that the insurrection in Saint-Domingue was merely an
imitation, and a shabby one at that, of the French Revolution that began
two years earlier. Some historians still insist that the rebels were
never more than royalist pawns, proxies in a struggle among empires, or
victims of revolutionary contagion. In this version of events, the
desire for freedom is imitative, not enlightened.
Scott unearthed a good deal of evidence to the contrary. Slaves rarely
had the chance to speak for themselves, but the record nonetheless
contains numerous traces of them, often via encounters with the
‘masterless’ people of the Caribbean, who lived beyond the reach of
social control. Scott discovered many more such people than had
previously been accounted for:
Slaves deserted plantations in large numbers; urban workers ducked their
owners; seamen jumped ship to avoid floggings and the press gang;
militiamen and regular troops grumbled, ignored orders and deserted
their watch; ‘higglers’ left workplaces to peddle their wares in the
black market; and smugglers and shady foreigners moved about on
mysterious missions from island to island.
These rebellious figures inevitably showed up in the records: newspaper
stories, colonial edicts and assembly proceedings, complaints by
governors-general, notices of desertion and runaway slaves, oral
testimony from sailors on seized ships. They were rarely central
characters, but Scott would trace a passing reference in a dusty archive
in Spanish Town, Port-au-Prince or London, and, weaving it together with
other loose threads, reconstruct the fabric to which it had once
belonged. In one instance, a few articles published in the Kingston
Royal Gazette during the spring of 1792 yielded a wholly credible saga
about two musicians, a clarinettist and a drummer, one Irish and one
from Quebec, who absconded from their regiment and ended up, perhaps,
‘fishing and shooting’ on the southern coast of Jamaica, looking ‘as
brown as some people of colour’.
In the Old World, free movement of labour was at most an annoyance to
the ruling class. On the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, it posed an
existential threat. In Saint-Domingue on the eve of the revolution, 90
per cent of the population were slaves, and as Laurent Dubois points out
in Avengers of the New World (2005), they had every reason to rise up.
Life expectancy was 37, and 5 or 6 per cent of the slave population died
every year. Owners and overseers reassured themselves that the slaves
didn’t have it in them to revolt, but still lived in constant terror of
insurrection. As the revolution in France ran its course and news
trickled into the colony, white fears grew.
Containment was the planters’ best hope, but it proved impossible to
stockade the fields against masterless people of all types, including
runaway slaves, and the news they brought. Among slaves, marronage was
common and sometimes tacitly condoned. Itinerant traders carried goods
and gossip between plantations and cities. Deported criminals from
Europe vexed the colonial authorities, soldiers absconded and waves of
white immigrants arrived to seek their fortunes – or simply to escape
‘the reprisals of relatives and the law’. Then there were the sailors.
Saint-Domingue was full of them: the colony, which dominated the sugar
trade, was a site of constant peripheral commerce and territorial
skirmishes. In Cap Français, now Cap Haitien, sailors were said to
outnumber both white residents and free residents of colour. Many had
been pressed into service on their vessels and subjected to the lash;
they may have been traumatised witnesses to the slave trade. Scott
raises the intriguing possibility of solidarity between slaves and
seamen: Black people, free and not, tried to learn a smattering of
nautical terminology to pass themselves off as sailors, while some
sailors tried to pass as slaves in order to sell their wares on the
wharves. In one instance, smugglers accused of stealing slaves turned
out to be liberating them. It isn’t a coincidence that British sea
shanties ‘bear striking resemblances to Caribbean slave songs’. Indeed,
the ‘very practice of shantying may have its roots in the interaction of
sailors and black dockworkers.’
Throughout the Caribbean, masterless people spread news of the French
Revolution, of British debates on the slave trade, and of the
insurrection in Saint-Domingue. After the first uprising, in August
1791, authorities in Jamaica contrived a ‘conspiracy of silence’ that
extended to official proclamations, newspapers and even personal
correspondence. Nonetheless, by September traditional slave songs were
incorporating stanzas about the rebellion. Well into the 1800s, the
‘magick word Liberty’ spread from port to port, despite news blackouts,
the destruction of printing presses and the demand of French commanders
that their soldiers remove ‘Liberty or Death’ from their banners.
John Henry Gonzalez acknowledges a paradox in the title of his book,
Maroon Nation. A maroon is a runaway slave, and slavery was abolished in
the western half of Hispaniola even before the Haitian state existed. A
nation without slavery can’t, strictly speaking, be a nation of maroons.
But Gonzalez is using the term ‘maroon’ figuratively, as contemporary
Haitians do: to practise mawonaj is to be evasive or difficult to pin
down, especially by persons in authority. It is to behave contrary to
expectations or even to fail to keep one’s promises, without suffering
any loss of personal honour as a consequence. Mawonaj is a weapon of the
weak – flight, escape, motion, illegibility, a refusal to be known – and
in Haiti it can be an effective strategy for everyone from a president
negotiating an international loan to a lover trying to evade commitment.
But for Gonzalez ‘maroon’ is not only a metaphor, because in his view
independence in 1804 did not lead to genuine emancipation. (Neither, for
that matter, did the temporary French abolition of slavery ten years
earlier.) Although constitution after constitution ‘began by affirming
that there were not and could never be any slaves in Haiti’, successive
regimes forced the supposedly liberated cultivateurs back onto the
plantations. The imperative was to produce sugar (and to a lesser extent
other cash crops, such as coffee, cotton and indigo) for export, and use
the profits to pay for the weapons and fortifications that Haiti’s
leaders believed they needed to defend their fledgling state.
Their terror of re-invasion was warranted. The revolution had lasted
more than a dozen years – a vicious and costly war during which
alliances among the French, British, Spanish and the rebels in
Saint-Domingue, as well as various factions, shifted abruptly and
murderously. It was not improbable that one Atlantic power or another,
including the slavery-sanctioning United States, might try to claim the
country. Early leaders believed commodity production was the key to its
remaining independent. Even in the last decade of the 18th century, when
Saint-Domingue was still stuck in its abusive relationship with France,
Louverture was determined to rebuild the plantation economy. He enticed
Europeans to return to Saint-Domingue, both to restore sugar production
and to mollify the French, and ordered emancipated men and women back to
the plantations, sometimes the same ones where they had been enslaved.
But having lost their ‘spirit of submission’ over the long years of
revolutionary struggle, they weren’t keen to do so. As cultivateurs –
sharecroppers, essentially – they would be entitled to a quarter of the
revenue from the sale of the crop (the state got another quarter, and
owners got half), but wage theft was common. When commodity prices rose,
managers found little reason to tell the cultivateurs. Wages, anyhow,
could hardly compensate for the similarities to the old regime.
Supposedly liberated citizens worked six days a week, and weren’t
allowed to leave the plantations without permission; those who did could
be arrested as vagabonds. There was corporal punishment and mass
defections to the hills, followed by ‘round-ups’: the cultivateurs were
still regarded as state property. Even after independence, conditions
were so draconian that there may have been more marronage than before
the 1791 insurrection.
Sensitive to the symbolic power of the whip and chain, Haiti’s early
leaders avoided their use. Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri
Christophe had all been slaves themselves. But the overseers used
violence to make cultivateurs work harder: clubs (for beating), vines
(for lashing) and ropes (for shackling). Anyone who dared suggest that a
vine was a whip au naturel, or compared the new agricultural system to
slavery, could be arrested or fined on Louverture’s orders.
As well as wooing white planters to return to their plantations,
Louverture also used land to consolidate power within Saint-Domingue,
awarding abandoned estates to rebel officers. After his death,
Dessalines and Christophe followed a similar course, but aimed to
replace the white plantocracy with a native one. For most Haitians, it
didn’t matter whether the plantation owner was Black, mixed-race or
white; or whether he claimed France, Britain or Haiti as his nation, nor
did it much matter whether the system was called slavery or
sharecropping or militarised agriculture. The point was to stop
participating in it.
Eventually they succeeded. By 1820, the men who had tried to revive
plantation agriculture had met violent ends. Louverture, whose own
nephew, Moïse, organised a servile revolt against him in 1801, died in
French custody. Dessalines was assassinated by political opponents.
Christophe, having suffered a stroke and facing insurrection, shot
himself in his Palais Sans Souci. The only one of Haiti’s founding
fathers who died a natural death was Alexandre Pétion, also known as
Papa Bon-Coeur, who saw quickly that his regime, in the south (Pétion
and Christophe ruled over different parts of Haiti for a time), couldn’t
survive without land reform. He divided up small parcels of land and
distributed them among the former slaves. It was on these plots,
unsuitable for intensive monoculture but adequate for supporting a
family (with a small surplus to barter) that, according to Gonzalez,
Haitians finally secured their freedom.
Descriptions of the early ‘counter-plantation system’ aren’t new; the
Haitian sociologist Jean Casimir coined the term around thirty years
ago. Gonzalez, though, puts the movement at the very centre of Haiti’s
revolution. In his view, its main achievement wasn’t formal emancipation
– though Haiti was the first nation to abolish slavery – or casting off
the colonial yoke, or even the formation of the first Black republic.
Rather, its victory was in the cultivateurs’ permanent rejection of
plantation agriculture, which had put Haiti at the bottom of the
emerging capitalist order. According to Gonzalez, the tiny plots of land
were so fertile that, once Haiti shifted from sugar production to
growing food for its citizens, small-scale farmers generated higher than
expected surpluses, which were exported or used for strategic reserves.
‘In a Haitian hillside conuco,’ Gonzalez writes, borrowing a Taino term
for a small-scale farm, ‘manioc, sugarcane, coconut, taro, sweet potato,
yams, plantain and mango might all vie for sunlight against the wild
shrubs and grasses that provide forage for goats or the jungle tree that
the farmer might cut down to make charcoal.’
The other advantage of such plots was that they weren’t obvious to tax
collectors, soldiers and others who might confiscate or tax some portion
of the yield. The isolation of the hillside farms was already a
disincentive. Those who could make the arduous trek to remote farms
might not even know when they had arrived. Gonzalez calls this
‘cryptoculture’: ‘remote and shifting systems of farming designed to
conceal crops and entire settlements’. At times, cultivateurs took their
agricultural production underground by focusing on roots and tubers. The
point was to conceal evidence of productivity from state authorities,
who were ‘generally useless at best, repressive at worst and perpetually
tax hungry’.
Unlike many chroniclers of Haiti’s revolutionary struggle, Gonzalez is
not much interested in grand narratives of triumph and glory. The
ex-slaves finally found freedom, but it was a parsimonious version,
organised entirely around avoiding the attentions of the Black republic
they’d helped to create. He mentions vehicles of mutual aid, such as
savings societies and secretive religious organisations, but there was
undoubtedly also much exploitation and abuse, especially of women and
children. The possibilities of freedom seem to have been slim and rather
grim. The ‘common wind’ didn’t blow through the hillside concucos.
Nonetheless, his book inspires a series of provocative questions. How
might the Haitian state, scorned by many (to this day it has been unable
to execute a reliable cadastral survey or issue national ID cards),
repair its relationship with its citizens? Are there any fair terms
under which Haiti could today take part in the global capitalist system?
And, perhaps fancifully: what might have happened if early Haiti had
known a ruler who openly advocated the dismantling and parcelling out of
the plantations and the creation of a state of small, independent
landowners?
Toussaint Louverture sat for at least one portrait during his lifetime
but none has survived. Since his death, Louverture (né Bréda, for the
plantation where he was born a slave) has been depicted again and again:
on currency and propaganda posters, in paintings and lithographs,
stories, folktales, plays, biographies, poetry. He has become an icon of
Black liberation. Vodou quickly incorporated him into representations of
Ogoun Fer, the warrior spirit, even though he suppressed the religion.
And despite his obsession with restoring the plantocracy in
Saint-Domingue, James wrote a play celebrating him as an anti-colonial
hero (Paul Robeson took the lead role: he had admired Louverture since
he was a teenager). In 1998, Toussaint’s remains were interred at the
Panthéon: he was commemorated as a ‘freedom fighter, architect of the
abolition of slavery and Haitian hero’, although he died, most likely
tortured and murdered, at the hands of the French state.
Sudhir Hazareesingh’s new biography of Louverture, Black Spartacus,
points to the difficulty of describing a figure for whom obscurity was
political strategy.
He was a very private man who confided in no one and went out of his way
to conceal important information about himself, his movements and his
ultimate goals. He spread misinformation and rumours, often put false
locations on his letters, and his most confidential messages were
dictated in separate parts to different secretaries ... he was renowned
for his almost magical capacity to appear in the most unexpected of
settings and vanish without a trace.
There is no doubt that Louverture had a genius for military and
political strategy. He led his enemies and rivals, especially in Europe,
to believe that he was weak and even stupid, then used their arrogance
against them. In the last five years of the 18th century he managed to
rid the colony of a succession of French agents. The first was
Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, who is commonly and inaccurately credited with
ending slavery in the French colonies. Louverture dispatched him to the
Directory in Paris, sending after him a humiliating forty-page letter,
which included a fictional dialogue that lampooned Sonthonax’s
white-saviour tendencies. Louverture tricked the next agent, Gabriel de
Hédouville, convincing him to publish a strict labour decree under his
own name and then fomenting an uprising against him. (He ‘later reported
that Toussaint’s mobilised cultivateurs had cast a spell on him in a
ritual which involved “dancing around a bull’s head”’.) Another agent
was locked up for two weeks in a chicken coop and violently threatened
until he capitulated to Louverture’s plan to invade eastern Hispaniola,
the present-day Dominican Republic.
Hazareesingh gives a sense of Louverture’s inexhaustibility and
charisma, and makes a strong case that from the outset the fight against
slavery was his guiding principle: he wasn’t fighting for independence
or to make Haiti a Black republic; on the contrary, he envisaged a
multiracial polity, claiming that nature ‘takes pleasure in diversifying
the colours of the human species’. It’s difficult to square this with
the fact that he consistently exhorted and then forced Haitians back
onto the plantations to work in conditions similar to those they had
endured during slavery. His moral appeals to his fellow citizens
stressed the virtue of work; he chastised them for their alleged
laziness, just as the Haitian elite does today. He told cultivateurs
that the constitution obliged them to avoid ‘idleness, the mother of all
vices’. He urged the newly liberated slaves of neighbouring Santo
Domingo to work ‘harder than before’: ‘I have never believed that
freedom and licence are the same, or that men who have become free can
abandon themselves to laziness or disorder.’ After quashing a rebellion
led by Moïse, Louverture told the defeated rebels: ‘In a free country,
liberty consists not in following one’s whims but in doing that for
which one is destined.’ If he ever explained why some people are
destined for hard labour, while others are destined to profit from it,
the evidence has been lost. Increasingly, he was forced to rely on
physical coercion. He imposed what was in effect a martial order on
agricultural production, demanding ‘submision and obedience’ from
labourers. Towards the end of his rule he became trapped in an
‘authoritarian spiral’, surrounding himself with puppets and organising
grandes fêtes in his own honour, at which speakers compared him to
Bacchus, Hercules and Alexander the Great.
‘His agrarian policy was not an end in itself,’ Hazareesingh argues, and
it is possible that during his years in power Louverture was playing for
time. Saint-Domingue remained a French colony and support from French
planters helped to protect his regime from Napoleon’s predations. The
colony lacked the infrastructure – roads, markets, administration – to
support small-scale agriculture. Perhaps Louverture envisioned building
it; perhaps he believed that over time threats to the colony’s existence
would fade, and so would its need for armaments and the sugar exports to
buy them.
By the late 1700s, he had begun to look seaward. Cuba and Jamaica are
only hours away by boat, and Louverture believed that mastering the seas
could provide greater access to markets and, according to Scott,
‘consolidate the revolution’. The British and Americans, however, were
quick to grasp the implications of a Black maritime power in the
Caribbean, and though they’d fought their own war two decades earlier,
joined forces to prevent it.
Louverture’s first and only sea voyage came after his arrest. As he
boarded the French ship Héros he told his captors: ‘By striking me, you
have cut the tree of Black liberty in Saint-Domingue. But it will spring
back up from its roots, for they are many and deep.’ Louverture was
taken from Brest, where the ship docked, to a castle in the Jura
mountains. His captors accused him of stealing treasure and funds,
harassed him with night searches, and deprived him of firewood, though
his cell was freezing. They stripped him of his military title and
uniform, as well as his clock, and held him in solidary confinement. The
aim was to ‘humiliate, disorient and torture’ him, according to the
historian Marlene Daut. He developed a bad cough but was not allowed to
see a doctor. ‘The composition of negroes,’ one of his guards wrote,
‘being nothing at all resembling that of Europeans, I am ill-inclined to
provide him with a doctor or a surgeon, which would be useless in his
case.’ In January 1803 the minister of the marine was informed that the
prisoner’s health was deteriorating rapidly: fever, vomiting, loss of
appetite, pain, inflammation of the entire body. Three months later, he
was dead.
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