the haitian revolution essay

The Haitian Revolution essay

The Haitian Revolution started as a massive slave uprising on August, 1791. A massive slave uprising erupted in the French colony Saint-Domingue which is now called Haiti. The rebellion was fueled by a Vodou service that was organized by Boukman, a Voudou hougan or High Priest. Most historians view this revolt as the most celebrated event that began the 13-year revolution that culminated in the independence of Haiti in the year 1804. Saint-Domingue became France’s wealthiest producing colony in the eighteenth century.

A plantation system that was ran by slaves, imported from Africa brought the wealth of men who were mainly French planters from Africa and France. The third and fourth positions of the stratified class system were filled by a few middle class of white men, but the majority of men were black. The colony was in a melee with several revolutionary movements, at the time of the uprising from the slaves. The planters were moving toward independence from France and the free colored people wanted a full citizenship, while the slaves wanted their freedom.

All were inspired by the French Revolution of 1789 that wanted equality and freedom. Toussaint L’ Ouverture was one of the most remembered leaders of the Haitian Revolution who was a former slave. “He organized armies of former slaves that defeated the Spanish and British forces,” explains (Heinl, 1996) He conquered Santo Domingo by 1801, which is currently called Dominican Republic and he eradicated slavery and gave himself the title of governor-general for life over the entire island which he fought for and won.

Napoleon Bonaparte in 1801, sent out General Leclerc and thousands of troops to arrest Toussaint and to reinstate slavery and to restore the French rule was described by Carolyn Fick, (1990, Fick) Toussaint was sent to France after being captured, after being deceived. He died in prison in 1803. One of Toussaint’s generals, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, led the last battle and defeated Napoleon’s forces.

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Dessalines declared the nation as independent on January 1, 1804, when it became known as Haiti, the country that was the first black republic in the world and the first independent nation in Latin America. The year 2004 will commemorate the bicentennial celebration of the Haitian Revolution where many will take part in the event, remembering the brave battle in the Haitian Revolution.

Most accounts of the Haitian Revolution focus on the role of the North and famous leaders such as Toussaint L’ Ouverture, along with Dessalines and Henry Christophe. They are the main people who are remembered for their bravery in Haiti, today. Many of the freed slaves of Saint-Domingue settled in New Orleans, profoundly influencing the history of that city.

1990, Fick, Carolyn E. , The Making of Haiti, The Saint Domingue Revolution, p. 23 1996, Heinl, Robert Debs, Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood, The Story of the Haitian People

History Cooperative

The Haitian Revolution: The Slave Revolt Timeline in the Fight for Independence

The end of the 18th century was a period of great change around the world. 

By 1776, Britain’s colonies in America — fueled by revolutionary rhetoric and Enlightenment thought that challenged the existing ideas about government and power — revolted and overthrew what many considered to be the most powerful nation in the world. And thus, the United States of America was born.

In 1789, it was the people of France that overthrew their monarchy; one that had been in power for centuries, shaking the foundations of the Western world. With it, the République Française was created.

However, while the American and French Revolutions represented a historic shift in world politics, they were, perhaps, still not the most revolutionary movements of the time . They purported to be driven by ideals that all people were equal and deserving of freedom, yet both ignored stark inequalities in their own social orders — slavery persisted in America while the new French ruling elite continued to ignore the French working class, a group known as the sans-culottes .

The Haitian Revolution, though, was led and executed by slaves, and it sought to create a society that was truly equal. 

Its success challenged notions of race at the time. Most Whites thought that Blacks were simply too savage and too stupid to run things on their own. Of course, this is a ludicrous and racist notion, but at the time, the ability of Haitian slaves to rise up against the injustices they faced and break free from bondage was the true revolution — one that played just as much of a role in reshaping the world as any other 18th century social upheaval. 

Unfortunately, though, this story has been lost to most people outside of Haiti. 

Notions of exceptionalism keep us from studying this historic moment, something that must change if we are to better understand the world in which we live today.

Haiti Before the Revolution

Saint domingue.

Saint Domingue was the French portion of the Carribean island of Hispaniola, which was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492. 

Since the French took it over with the Treaty of Rijswijk in 1697 — the result of the Nine Years’ War between France and the Grand Alliance, with Spain ceding the territory — it became the most economically important asset among the country’s colonies. By 1780, two thirds of France’s investments were based in Saint Domingue. 

So, what made it so prosperous? Why, those age-old addictive substances, sugar and coffee, and the European socialites who were beginning to consume them by the bucketload with their shiny, new coffeehouse culture . 

At that time, no less than half of the sugar and coffee consumed by Europeans was sourced from the island. Indigo and cotton were other cash crops which brought wealth to France via these colonial plantations, but in nowhere near as great numbers.

READ MORE: Who Invented the Cotton Gin? Eli Whitney and Cotton Gin Impact on America

And who should be slaving away (pun intended) in the sweltering heat of this tropical Carribean island, so as to ensure satisfaction for such sweet-tooth having European consumers and profit-making French polity? 

African slaves taken forcibly from their villages. 

By the time just before the Haitain Revolution began, 30,000 new slaves were coming into Saint Domingue every year . And that’s because the conditions were so harsh, so terrible — with things like nasty diseases especially dangerous to those who had never been exposed to them present, such as yellow fever and malaria — that half of them died within only a year of arriving.

Viewed, of course, as property and not as human beings, they did not have access to basic needs like adequate food, shelter, or clothing. 

And they worked hard. Sugar became all the rage — the most in-demand commodity — across Europe. 

But to meet the ravenous demand of the moneyed class on the continent, African slaves were being coerced into labor under the threat of death — enduring the dueling horrors of the tropical sun and weather, alongside blood-curlingly cruel working conditions in which slave drivers used violence to meet quotas at essentially any cost. 

Social Structure

As was the norm, these slaves were at the very bottom of the social pyramid that developed in colonial Saint Domingue, and were most certainly not citizens (if they were even considered as a legitimate part of society at all). 

But though they had the least structural power, they made up the majority of the population: in 1789, there were 452,000 Black slaves there, mostly from West Africa. This accounted for 87% of the population of Saint Domingue at the time. 

Right above them in the social hierarchy were free people of color — former slaves who became free, or children of free Blacks — and people of mixed race, often called “mulattoes” (a derogatory term alikening mixed race individuals to half-breed mules), with both groups equaling around 28,000 free people — equal to around 5% of the colony’s population in 1798. 

The next highest class were the 40,000 White people who lived on Saint Domingue — but even this segment of society was far from equal. Of this group, the plantation owners were the richest and the most powerful. They were called grand blancs and some of them did not even remain permanently in the colony, but instead traveled back to France to escape the risks of disease. 

Just below them were the administrators who kept order in the new society, and below them were the petit blancs or the Whites who were mere artisans, merchants, or small professionals. 

Wealth in the colony of Saint Domingue — 75% of it to be exact — was condensed in the White population, despite it making up only 8% of the colony’s total population. But even within the White social class, most of this wealth was condensed with the grand blancs, adding another layer to the inequality of Haitian society (2).

Building Tension

Already at this time there were tensions brewing between all of these different classes. Inequality and injustice were seething in the air, and manifesting in every facet of life. 

To add to it, once in a while masters decided to be nice and let their slaves have a “slavecation” for a short time to release some tension — you know, to blow off some steam. They hid out in the hillsides away from Whites, and, along with escapee slaves (referred to as maroons ), tried to rebel a few times. 

Their efforts weren’t rewarded and they failed to achieve anything significant, as they weren’t organized enough yet, but these attempts show that there was a stirring which occurred before the onset of the Revolution. 

Treatment of slaves was unnecessarily cruel, and masters often made examples in order to terrorize other slaves by killing or punishing them in extremely inhumane ways — hands were chopped off, or tongues cut out; they were left to roast to death in the scalding sun, shackled to a cross; their rectums were filled with gun powder so that spectators could watch them explode.

The conditions were so bad in Saint Domingue that the death rate actually exceeded the birth rate. Something that is important, because a new influx of slaves was constantly flowing in from Africa, and they were usually brought from the same regions: like Yoruba, Fon, and Kongo. 

Therefore, there was not much of a new African-colonial culture which developed. Instead, African cultures and traditions remained largely intact. The slaves could communicate well with each other, privately, and carry on their religious beliefs. 

They made their own religion, Vodou (more commonly known as Voodoo ), which mixed in a bit of Catholicism with their African traditional religions, and developed a creole that mixed French with their other languages to communicate with the White slave owners.  

The slaves who were brought in directly from Africa were less submissive than those who were born into slavery in the colony. And since there were more of the former, it could be said that rebellion was already bubbling in their blood. 

The Enlightenment

Meanwhile, back in Europe, the Era of Enlightenment was revolutionizing thoughts about humanity, society, and how equality could fit in with all of that. Sometimes slavery was even attacked in the writings of Enlightenment thinkers, such as with Guillaume Raynal who wrote about the history of European colonization. 

As a result of the French Revolution, a highly important document called the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was created in August of 1789. Influenced by Thomas Jefferson — Founding Father and third president of the United States — and the recently created American Declaration of Independence , it espoused the moral rights of freedom, justice, and equality for all citizens. It did not specify that people of color or women, or even people in the colonies, would count as citizens, however. 

And this is where the plot thickens. 

The petit blancs of Saint Domingue who had no power in colonial society — and who had perhaps escaped Europe for the New World, in order to gain a chance at a new status in a new social order — connected with the ideology of Enlightenment and Revolutionary thinking. The people of mixed-race from the colony also used Enlightenment philosophy to inspire greater social access. 

This middle group was not made up of slaves; they were free, but they were not legally citizens either, and as a result they were barred legally from certain rights.

One free Black man by the name of Toussaint L’Ouverture — a former slave turned prominent Haitian general in the French Army — began making this connection between the Enlightenment ideals populating in Europe, particularly in France, and what they could mean in the colonial world. 

Throughout the 1790s, L’Ouverture began making more speeches and declarations against inequalities, becoming an avid supporter of the complete abolition of slavery in all of France. Increasingly, he began taking on more and more roles to support freedom in Haiti, until he eventually began recruiting and supporting rebellious slaves. 

Due to his prominence, throughout the Revolution, L’Ouverture was an important liaison between the people of Haiti and the French government — though his dedication to ending slavery drove him to switch allegiances several times, a trait which has become an integral part of his legacy.   

You see, the French, who were adamantly fighting for liberty and justice for all, had not yet considered what implications these ideals could have on colonialism and on slavery — how these ideals they were spouting would perhaps mean even more to a slave held captive and brutally treated, than to a guy who couldn’t vote because he wasn’t rich enough.

The Revolution

The legendary bois caïman ceremony.

On a stormy night in August of 1791, after months of careful planning, thousands of slaves held a secret Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman in the north of Morne-Rouge, a region in the northern part of Haiti. Maroons, house slaves, field slaves, free Blacks, and people of mixed-race all gathered to chant and dance to ritual drumming.  

Originally from Senegal, a former commandeur (meaning “slave driver”) who had become a maroon and Vodou priest — and who was a giant, powerful, grotesque-looking man — named Dutty Boukman, fiercely led this ceremony and the ensuing rebellion. He exclaimed in his famous speech:

“Our God who has ears to hear. You are hidden in the clouds; who watch us from where you are. You see all that the White has made us suffer. The White man’s god asks him to commit crimes. But the god within us wants to do good. Our god, who is so good, so just, He orders us to avenge our wrongs.” 

Boukman (so called, because as a “Book Man” he could read) made a distinction that night between the “White man’s God” — who apparently endorsed slavery — and their own God — who was good, fair, and wanted them to rebel and be free.

He was joined by priestess Cecile Fatiman, daughter of an African slave woman and a White Frenchman. She stood out, as a Black woman with long silky hair and distinctly bright green eyes would. She looked the part of a goddess, and the mambo woman (which comes from “mother of magic”) was said to embody one.

A couple of slaves at the ceremony offered themselves up for slaughter, and Boukman and Fatiman also sacrificed a pig plus a couple other animals, slitting their throats. The human and animal’s blood was dispersed to the attendees to drink. 

Cecile Fatiman was then supposedly possessed by the Haitian African Warrior Goddess of Love, Erzulie . Erzulie/Fatiman told the group of uprisers to go forth with her spiritual protection; that they would return unharmed. 

And go forth, they did. 

Infused with the divine energy of the incantations and rituals performed by Boukman and Fatiman, they laid waste to the surrounding area, destroying 1,800 plantations and killing 1,000 slave owners within one week.

Bois Caïman in Context

The Bois Caïman Ceremony is not only considered the starting point of the Haitian Revolution; it is considered by Haitian historians as the reason for its success. 

This is due to the potent belief and powerful conviction in the Vodou ritual. In fact, it is still so important that the site is visited even today , once a year, every August 14th. 

The historic Vodou ceremony is a symbol to this day of unity for Haitian people who were originally from different African tribes and backgrounds, but came together in the name of freedom and political equality. And this may even extend further to represent unity among all Blacks in the Atlantic ; in the Caribbean islands and Africa.

Furthermore, the legends of the Bois Caïman ceremony are also considered an origin point for the tradition of Haitian Vodou. 

Vodou is commonly feared and even misunderstood in Western culture; there is a suspicious atmosphere around the subject matter. Anthropologist, Ira Lowenthal, interestingly posits that this fear exists because it stands for “an unbreakable revolutionary spirit threatening to inspire other Black Caribbean republics — or, God forbid, the United States itself.” 

He goes further to suggest that Vodou can even act as a catalyst for racism, confirming racist beliefs that Black people are “scary and dangerous.” In truth, the spirit of the Haitian people, which was formed in tandem with Vodou and the Revolution, is of a human will to “never be conquered again.” The rejection of Vodou as a vicious faith points to embedded fears in American culture of challenges to inequality.

While some are skeptical about the precise details of what took place at the infamous rebellion meeting at Bois Caïman, the story nevertheless presents a crucial turning point in history for Haitians and others of this New World. 

The slaves sought vengeance, freedom, and a new political order; the presence of Vodou was of the utmost significance. Before the ceremony, it gave slaves a psychological release and affirmed their own identity and self-existence. During, it served as a cause and as a motivation; that the spirit world wanted them to be free, and they had the protection of said spirits. 

As a result, it has helped to shape Haitian culture even until today, prevailing as the dominant spiritual guide in daily life, and even medicine.

The Revolution Begins

The onset of the Revolution, kicked off by the Bois Caïman ceremony, was strategically planned by Boukman. The slaves began by burning plantations and killing Whites in the North, and, as they went along, they attracted others in bondage to join their rebellion. 

Once they had a couple thousand in their ranks, they disbanded into smaller groups and branched out to attack more plantations, as pre-planned by Boukman.

Some Whites who were warned ahead of time fled to Le Cap — the central political hub of Saint Domingue, where control over the city would likely determine the outcome of the Revolution — leaving their plantations behind, but trying to save their lives.

The slave forces were held back a bit at the onset, but each time they retreated only into the nearby mountains to reorganize themselves before attacking again. Meanwhile, about 15,000 slaves had joined the rebellion at this point, some systematically burning down all plantations in the North — and they hadn’t even gotten to the South yet. 

The French sent in 6,000 troops as an attempt for redemption, but half of the force was killed off just like flies, as the slaves went forth. It is said that, although more and more Frenchmen kept arriving on the island, they only came to die, as the former slaves slaughtered them all. 

But eventually they managed to capture Dutty Boukman. They put his head on a stick to show the revolutionaries that their hero had been taken. 

(Cecile Fatiman, however, could not be found anywhere. She later went on to marry Michelle Pirouette — who became president of the Haitian Revolutionary Army — and died at the ripe old age of 112.)

The French Respond; Britain and Spain Get Involved

Needless to say, the French had started to realize that their greatest colonial asset was beginning to slip through their fingers. They also happened to be in the midst of their own Revolution — something that deeply affected the Haitian’s perspective; believing that they too deserved the same equality espoused by the new leaders of France. 

At the same time, in 1793, France declared war on Great Britain, and both Britain and Spain — which controlled the other portion of the island of Hispaniola — entered the conflict. 

The British believed that they could make some extra profit by occupying Saint-Domingue and that they would have more bargaining power during peace treaties to end their war with France. They wanted to reinstate slavery for these reasons (and also to prevent slaves in their own Carribean colonies from getting too many ideas for rebellion). 

By September of 1793, their navy took over a French fort on the island.

At this point, the French really began to panic, and decided to abolish slavery — not only in Saint Domingue, but in all of their colonies. At a National Convention in February 1794, as a result of the panic ensuing from the Haitian Revolution, they declared that all men, regardless of color, were considered French citizens with constitutional rights. 

This really shocked other European nations, as well as the newly born United States. Although the push for including the abolition of slavery in France’s new constitution came from the threat of losing such a great source of wealth, it also set them morally apart from other countries in a time when nationalism was becoming quite the trend. 

France felt especially distinguished from Britain — which was contrarily reinstating slavery wherever it landed — and like they would set the example for liberty. 

Enter Toussaint L’Ouverture

The most notorious general of the Haitian Revolution was none other than the infamous Toussaint L’Ouverture — a man whose allegiances switched throughout the entirety of the period, in some ways leaving historians pondering his motives and beliefs. 

Although the French had just claimed to abolish slavery, he was still suspicious. He joined ranks with the Spanish army and was even made a knight by them. But then he suddenly changed his mind, turning against the Spanish and instead joining the French in 1794. 

You see, L’Ouverture didn’t even want independence from France — he just wanted former slaves to be free and have rights. He wanted Whites, some being former slave owners, to stay and rebuild the colony. 

His forces were able to drive the Spanish out of Saint Domingue by 1795, and on top of this, he was also dealing with the British. Thankfully, yellow fever — or the “black vomit” as the British called it — was doing much of the resistance work for him. European bodies were much more susceptible to the disease, what with having never been exposed to it before. 

12,000 men died from it in just 1794 alone. That’s why the British had to keep sending in more troops, even while they hadn’t fought many battles. In fact, it was so bad that being sent to the West Indies was fast becoming an immediate death sentence, to the point that some soldiers rioted when they learned where they were to be stationed. 

The Haitians and the British fought several battles, with wins on either side. But even by 1796, the British were only hanging around Port-au-Prince and rapidly dying off with severe, disgusting illness. 

By May of 1798, L’Ouverture met with the British Colonel, Thomas Maitland, to settle an armistice for Port-au-Prince. Once Maitland had withdrawn from the city, the British lost all morale and withdrew from Saint-Domingue altogether. As part of the deal, Matiland asked L’Ouverture to not go riling up the slaves in the British colony of Jamaica, or support a revolution there.

In the end, the British paid the cost of 5 years on Saint Domingue from 1793–1798, four million pounds, 100,000 men, and did not gain much at all to show for it (2).

L’Ouverture’s story seems confusing as he switched allegiences several times, but his real loyalty was to sovereignty and freedom from slavery. He turned against the Spanish in 1794 when they wouldn’t end the institution, and instead fought for and gave control to the French on occasion, working with their general, because he believed that they promised to end it. 

He did all this while also being aware that he didn’t want the French to have too much power, recognizing how much control he had in his hands. 

In 1801, he made Haiti a sovereign free Black state , appointing himself as governor-for-life. He gave himself absolute rule over the entire island of Hispaniola, and appointed a Constitutional Assembly of Whites. 

He had no natural authority to do so, of course, but he had led the Revolutionaries to victory and was making the rules up as he went along. 

The story of the Revolution seems like it would end here — with L’Ouverture and the Haitians freed and happy — but alas, it does not. 

Enter a new character in the story; somebody who wasn’t so happy with L’Ouverture’s newfound authority and how he had established it without the approval from the French government.

Enter Napoleon Bonaparte

Unfortunately, the creation of a free Black state really pissed off Napoleon Bonaparte — you know, that guy who became Emperor of France during the French Revolution. 

In February of 1802, he sent his brother and troops in to reinstate French rule in Haiti. He also secretly — but not-so-secretly — wanted to reinstate slavery. 

In quite a devilish manner, Napoleon instructed his comrades to be nice to L’Ouverture and lure him to Le Cap, assuring him that the Haitains would retain their freedom. They planned to then arrest him. 

But — by no surprise — L’Ouverture didn’t go when summoned, not falling for the bait. 

After that, the game was on. Napoleon decreed that L’Ouverture and General Henri Christophe — another leader in the Revolution who had close allegiances with L’Ouverture  — should be outlawed and hunted down. 

L’Ouverture kept his nose down, but that didn’t stop him from devising plans. 

He instructed the Haitians to burn, destroy, and rampage everything — to show what they were willing to do to resist ever becoming slaves again. He told them to be as violent with their destruction and killings as possible. He wanted to make it hell for the French army, as slavery had been a hell for him and his comrades. 

The French were shocked by the gruesome rage brought forth by the previously-enslaved Blacks of Haiti. For the Whites — who felt slavery was the natural position of Blacks — the havoc being wreaked on them was mindbending. 

Guess they’d never paused to think how the terrible, grueling existence of slavery could really grind someone down.

Crête-à-Pierrot Fortress

There were many battles then that followed, and great devastation, but one of the most epic conflicts was at Crête-à-Pierrot Fortress in the valley of the Artibonite River. 

At first the French were defeated, one army brigade at a time. And all the while, the Haitians sang songs about the French Revolution and how all men have the right to freedom and equality. It angered some Frenchmen, but a few soldiers began to question Napoleon’s intentions and what they were fighting for. 

If they were simply fighting to gain control over the colony and not reinstate slavery, then how could a sugar plantation be profitable without the institution? 

In the end, though, the Haitains ran out of food and ammunition and had no choice but to retreat. This wasn’t a total loss, as the French had been intimidated and had lost 2,000 among their ranks. What was more, another outbreak of yellow fever struck and took with it another 5,000 men. 

The outbreak of disease, combined with the new guerilla tactics the Haitains adopted, began to significantly weaken the French hold on the island.

But, for a short time, they weren’t weakened quite enough. In April of 1802, L’Ouverture made a deal with the French, to trade his own freedom for the freedom of his captured troops. He was then taken and shipped off to France, where he died a few months later in prison. 

In his absence, Napoleon ruled Saint-Domingue for two months, and did indeed plan to reinstate slavery. 

The Blacks fought back, continuing their guerilla warfare, plundering everything with makeshift weapons and reckless violence, while the French — led by Charles Leclerc — killed the Haitians by the masses. 

When Leclerc later died of yellow fever, he was replaced by a horribly brutal man named Rochambeau, who was more keen on a genocidal approach. He brought 15,000 attack dogs from Jamaica trained to kill Blacks and “mulattoes” and had Blacks drowned in the bay of Le Cap. 

Dessalines Marches to Victory

On the Haitian side, General Dessalines matched the cruelty displayed by Rochambeau, putting the heads of White men on pikes and parading them around. 

Dessalines was yet another crucial leader in the Revolution, who led many important battles and victories. The movement had turned into a grotesque race war, complete with burning and drowning people alive, cutting them up on boards, killing masses with sulfur bombs, and a great many other terrible things. 

“No mercy” had become the motto for all. When a hundred Whites who believed in racial equality chose to abandon Rochambeau, they welcomed Dessalines as their hero. Then, he basically told them, “Cool, thanks for the sentiment. But I’m still having you all hanged. You know, no mercy and all that!”

Finally, after 12 long years of bloody conflict and huge loss of life, the Haitians won the final Battle at Vertières on November 18, 1803. 

The two armies — both sick from the heat, years of war, yellow fever, and malaria — fought with reckless abandon, but the Haitian force was almost ten times the size of their opponent and they nearly wiped out Rochambeau’s 2,000 men. 

Defeat was upon him, and after a sudden thunderstorm made it impossible for Rochambeau to escape, he had no other choice. He sent his comrade to make negotiations with General Dessalines, who was, at that point, in charge. 

He wouldn’t allow the French to sail, but a British commodore made a deal that they could leave in British ships peacefully if they did so by December 1st. Thus, Napoleon withdrew his forces and turned his attention fully back on Europe, abandoning conquest in the Americas. 

Dessalines officially declared independence for the Haitians on January 1, 1804, making Haiti the only nation to win its independence via a successful slave rebellion. 

After the Revolution

Dessalines was feeling vengeful at this point, and with the final triumph on his side, a vicious spite took over to destroy any Whites who hadn’t already evacuated the island. 

He ordered an absolute massacre of them immediately. Only certain Whites were safe, like Polish soldiers who had abandoned the French army, German colonists there before the Revolution, French widows or women who had married non-Whites, select Frenchmen with connections to important Haitians, and medical doctors. 

The Constitution of 1805 also declared that all Haitian citizens were Black. Dessalines was so adamant on this point that he personally traveled to different areas and countrysides to ensure that the mass killings were ensuing smoothly. He often found that in some towns, they were only killing a few Whites, instead of all of them. 

Bloodthirsty and enraged by the merciless actions of French militant leaders like Rochambeau and Leclerc, Dessalines made sure the Haitians demonstrated the killings and used them as a spectacle in the streets. 

He felt that they had been mistreated as a race of people, and that justice meant imposing the same kind of mistreatment on the opposing race. 

Ruined by anger and bitter retaliation, he probably tipped the scales a little too far the other way.

Dessalines also implemented serfdom as a new socio-political-economic structure. Although victory had been sweet, the country was left to its new beginnings impoverished, with badly devastated lands and economy. They had also lost about 200,000 people in the war, from 1791–1803. Haiti had to be rebuilt. 

Citizens were placed into two main categories: laborer or soldier. Laborers were bound to the plantations, where Dessalines tried to distinguish their efforts from slavery by shortening working days and banning the very symbol of slavery itself — the whip. 

But Dessalines wasn’t very strict with plantation overseers, as his main goal was to increase production. And so they often just used thick vines, instead, to spurn the laborers to work harder. 

He cared even more about military expansion, as he feared the French would return; Dessalines wanted Haitian defenses strong. He created many soldiers and in turn made them construct large forts. His political opponents believed his over-emphasis on militant efforts slowed down production increases, as it took from the labor force. 

The country was already split between Blacks in the North and people of mixed-race in the South. So, when the latter group decided to rebel and assassinate Dessalines, the freshly born state rapidly devolved into civil war.

Henri Christophe took over in the North, while Alexandre Pétion ruled in the South. The two groups fought each other consistently until 1820, when Christophe killed himself. The new mixed-race leader, Jean-pierre Boyer, fought off remaining rebel forces and took over all of Haiti.

Boyer decided to make clear amends with France, so that Haiti could be recognized by them politically going forward. As reparations to former slaveholders, France demanded 150 million francs, which Haiti had to borrow in loans from the French treasury, though the former later decided to cut them a break and bring down the fee to 60 million francs. Even still, it took Haiti until 1947 to pay off the debt. 

The good news was, by April of 1825, the French officially recognized Haitian independence and renounced France’s sovereignty over it. The bad news was that Haiti was bankrupt, which really impeded its economy or the ability to rebuild it.

After Effects 

There were several after-effects of the Haitian Revolution, both on Haiti and the world. At a base level, the functioning of Haitian society and its class structure was deeply changed. On a large scale, it had a massive impact as the first post-colonial nation led by Blacks which had gained independence from a slave rebellion. 

Before the Revolution, races were often mixed when White men — some single, some wealthy planters — had relations with African women. The children born from this were sometimes given freedom, and often given an education. Once in a while, they were even sent to France for a better education and life. 

When these mixed race individuals returned to Haiti, they made up the elite class, as they were wealthier and more highly educated. Thus, class structure developed as an aftermath of what had happened before, during and after the Revolution.

Another important way the Haitian Revolution drastically impacted world history was the sheer demonstration of being able to fend off the biggest world powers at the time: Great Britain, Spain, and France. These forces themselves were often shocked that a group of rebel slaves without long-term adequate training, or resources, or education could put up such a good fight and could win so many battles. 

After getting rid of Britain, Spain, and finally France, Napoleon then came, as great powers are wont to do. Yet the Haitians would never be slaves again; and somehow, the determination behind that spirit won out over arguably one of history’s greatest world conquerors. 

This shifted global history, as Napoleon then decided to give up on the Americas altogether and sell Louisiana back to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase . As a result, the US was able to preside over much more of the continent, spurring on their affinity for a certain “manifest destiny.”

And speaking of America, it too was affected politically by the Haitian Revolution, and even in some more direct ways. Some Whites and plantation owners escaped during the crisis and fled to the Americas as refugees, sometimes taking their slaves with them. American slave owners often sympathized with them and took them in — many settled down in Louisiana, influencing the culture there of mixed race, French-speaking, and Black populations. 

The Americans were frightened by the wild stories they heard of the slave uprising, of the violence and destruction. They were even more worried that the slaves brought from Haiti would inspire similar slave revolts in their own nation. 

As is known, that didn’t happen. But what did was a stirring in the tensions among disparate moral beliefs. Stirrings which still seem to have exploded out in American culture and politics in waves, rippling until even today. 

The truth is, the idealism propounded by revolution, in America and elsewhere, was fraught from the beginning. 

Thomas Jefferson was President during the time Haiti gained its independence. Commonly viewed as a great American hero and a “forefather,” he himself was a slaveholder who refused to accept the political sovereignty of a nation built by former slaves. In fact, the United States did not politically recognize Haiti until 1862 — well after France did, in 1825. 

Coincidentally — or not — 1862 was the year before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, freeing all slaves in the United States during the American Civil War — a conflict wrought by America’s own inability to reconcile the institution of human bondage.

Haiti clearly did not become a perfectly egalitarian society after its Revolution. 

Before it was established, racial divide and confusion were prominent. Toussaint L’Ouverture left his mark by establishing class differences with military caste. When Dessalines took over, he implemented a feudal social structure. The ensuing civil war pit lighter-skinned people of mixed-race against darker-skinned citizens. 

Perhaps a nation bred out of such tensions from racial disparity was fraught from the beginning with imbalance. 

But the Haitian Revolution, as a historical event, proves how Europeans and the early Americans turned a blind eye to the fact that Blacks could be worthy of citizenship — and this is something that challenges the notions of equality purported as the foundation for the cultural and political revolutions that took place on either side of the Atlantic in the later decades of the 18th century.

Haitians showed the world that Blacks could be “citizens” with “rights” — in these specific terms, which were so very important to the world powers who had all just overthrown their monarchies in the name of justice and freedom for all . 

But, as it turned out, it was just too inconvenient to include the very source of their economic prosperity and rise to power — slaves and their non-citizen-ness — in that “all” category. 

For example, in the United States, recognizing Haiti as a nation was a political impossibility — the slave owning South would have interpreted this as an attack, threatening disunion and even eventually war in response. 

This created a paradox in which Whites in the North had to deny basic rights to Blacks in order to protect their own liberties.

All in all, this response to the Haitian Revolution — and the way in which it has been remembered — speaks to the racial undertones of our world society today, which have existed in the human psyche for eons but have materialized through the process of globalization, becoming more and more pronounced as European colonialism spread around the world starting in the 15th century.

The Revolutions of France and the US are seen as era-defining, but intertwined in these social upheavals was the Haitian Revolution — one of the few movements in history to so directly tackle the ghastly institution of racial inequality. 

However, in most of the Western world, the Haitian Revolution remains nothing but a side note in our understanding of world history, perpetuating systemic issues that keep that racial inequality a very real part of today’s world.

But, part of human evolution means evolving, and this includes how we understand our past. 

Studying the Haitian Revolution helps identify some of the flaws in the way we’ve been taught to remember; it provides us with an important piece in the puzzle of human history that we can use to better navigate both the present and future.

1. Sang, Mu-Kien Adriana. Historia Dominicana: Ayer y Hoy . Edited by Susaeta, University of Wisconsin – Madison, 1999.

2. Perry, James M. Arrogant armies: great military disasters and the generals behind them . Castle Books Incorporated, 2005.

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The Haitian Revolution: Successful Revolt by an Enslaved People

One of the Few Complete Social Revolutions in Modern History

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The Haitian Revolution was the only successful revolt by enslaved Black people in history, and it led to the creation of the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States. Inspired in large part by the French Revolution , diverse groups in the colony of Saint-Domingue began fighting against French colonial power in 1791. Independence was not fully achieved until 1804, at which point a complete social revolution had taken place where formerly enslaved people had become leaders of a nation.

Fast Facts: The Haitian Revolution

• Short Description: The only successful revolt by enslaved Black people in modern history, led to the independence of Haiti
• Key Players/Participants : Touissant Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines
• Event Start Date : 1791
• Event End Date : 1804
• Location : The French colony of Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean, currently Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Background and Causes

The French Revolution of 1789 was a significant event for the imminent rebellion in Haiti. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was adopted in 1791, declaring "liberty, equality, and fraternity." Historian Franklin Knight calls the Haitian Revolution the "inadvertent stepchild of the French Revolution."

In 1789, the French colony of Saint-Domingue was the most successful plantation colony in the Americas: it supplied France with 66% of its tropical produce and accounted for 33% of French foreign trade. It had a population of 500,000, 80% of whom were enslaved people. Between 1680 and 1776, roughly 800,000 Africans were imported to the island, one-third of whom died within the first few years. In contrast, the colony was home to only around 30,000 White people, and a roughly similar number of affranchis , a group of free individuals composed mainly of mixed-race people.

Society in Saint Domingue was divided along both class and color lines, with affranchis and White people often at odds in terms of how to interpret the egalitarian language of the French Revolution. White elites sought greater economic autonomy from the metropolis (France). Working-class/poor White people argued for the equality of all White people, not just for landed White people. Affranchis aspired to the power of White people and begun to amass wealth as landowners (often being enslavers themselves). Beginning in the 1860s, White colonists began to restrict the rights of affranchis. Also inspired by the French Revolution, enslaved Black people increasingly engaged in maroonage , running away from plantations to the mountainous interior.

France granted almost complete autonomy to Saint-Domingue in 1790. However, it left open the issue of rights for affranchis , and White planters refused to recognize them as equals, creating a more volatile situation. In October 1790, affranchis led their first armed revolt against White colonial authorities. In April 1791, revolts by enslaved Black people begin to break out. In the meantime, France extended some rights to affranchis , which angered White colonists.

Beginning of the Haitian Revolution

By 1791, enslaved people and mulattoes were fighting separately for their own agendas, and White colonists were too preoccupied with maintaining their hegemony to notice the growing unrest. Throughout 1791, such revolts grew in numbers and frequency, with enslaved people torching the most prosperous plantations and killing fellow enslaved people who refused to join their revolt.

The Haitian Revolution is considered to have begun officially on Aug. 14, 1791, with the Bois Caïman ceremony, a Vodou ritual presided over by Boukman, a maroon leader and Vodou priest from Jamaica. This meeting was the result of months of strategizing and planning by enslaved people in the northern area of the colony who were recognized as leaders of their respective plantations.

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Due to the fighting, the French National Assembly revoked the decree granting limited rights to affranchis in September 1791, which only spurred on their rebellion. That same month, enslaved people burned one of the colony's most important cities, Le Cap, to the ground. The following month, Port-au-Prince was burned to the ground in fighting between White people and affranchis .

The Haitian Revolution was chaotic. At one time there were seven different parties warring simultaneously: enslaved people, affranchis , working-class White people, elite White people, invading Spanish, English troops battling for control of the colony, and the French military. Alliances were struck and quickly dissolved. For example, in 1792 Black people and affranchis became allies with the British fighting against the French, and in 1793 they allied with the Spanish. Furthermore, the French often tried to get enslaved people to join their forces by offering them freedom to help put down the rebellion. In September 1793, a number of reforms took place in France, including the abolition of colonial enslavement. While colonists began negotiating with enslaved people for increased rights, the rebels, led by Touissant Louverture , understood that without land ownership, they could not stop fighting.

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Throughout 1794, the three European forces took control of different parts of the island. Louverture aligned with different colonial powers at different moments. In 1795, Britain and Spain signed a peace treaty and ceded Saint-Domingue to the French. By 1796, Louverture had established dominance in the colony, though his hold on power was tenuous. In 1799, a civil war broke out between Louverture and the affranchis. In 1800, Louverture invaded Santo Domingo (the eastern half of the island, modern-day Dominican Republic) to bring it under his control.

Between 1800 and 1802, Louverture tried to rebuild the destroyed economy of Saint-Domingue. He reopened commercial relations with the U.S. and Britain, restored destroyed sugar and coffee estates to operating condition, and halted the wide-scale killing of White people. He even discussed importing new Africans to jump-start the plantation economy. In addition, he outlawed the very popular Vodou religion and established Catholicism as the colony's main religion, which angered many enslaved people. He established a constitution in 1801 that asserted the colony's autonomy with respect to France and became a de facto dictator, naming himself governor-general for life.

The Final Years of the Revolution

Napoleon Bonaparte , who had assumed power in France in 1799, had dreams of restoring the system of enslavement in Saint-Domingue, and he saw Louverture (and Africans in general) as uncivilized. He sent his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc to invade the colony in 1801. Many White planters supported Bonaparte's invasion. Furthermore, Louverture faced opposition from enslaved Black people, who felt he was continuing to exploit them and who was not instituting land reform. In early 1802 many of his top generals had defected to the French side and Louverture was eventually forced to sign an armistice in May 1802. However, Leclerc betrayed the terms of the treaty and tricked Louverture into getting arrested. He was exiled to France, where he died in prison in 1803.

Believing that France's intention was to restore the system of enslavement in the colony, Black people and affranchis, led by two of Louverture's former generals, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, reignited the rebellion against the French in late 1802. Many French soldiers died from yellow fever, contributing to the victories by Dessalines and Christophe.

Haiti Independence

Dessalines created the Haitian flag in 1803, whose colors represent the alliance of Black and mixed-race people against White people. The French began to withdraw troops in August 1803. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines published the Declaration of Independence and abolished the colony of Saint-Domingue. The original indigenous Taino name of the island, Hayti, was restored.

Effects of the Revolution

The outcome of the Haitian Revolution loomed large across societies that allowed enslavement in the Americas. The success of the revolt inspired similar uprisings in Jamaica, Grenada, Colombia, and Venezuela. Plantation owners lived in fear that their societies would become "another Haiti." In Cuba, for example, during the Wars of Independence, the Spanish were able to use the specter of the Haitian Revolution as a threat to White enslavers: if landowners supported Cuban independence fighters, their enslaved people would rise up and kill their White enslavers and Cuba would become a Black republic like Haiti .

There was also a mass exodus from Haiti during and after the revolution, with many planters fleeing with their enslaved people to Cuba, Jamaica, or Louisiana. It's possible that up to 60% of the population that lived in Saint-Domingue in 1789 died between 1790 and 1796.

The newly independent Haiti was isolated by all the western powers. France would not recognize Haiti's independence until 1825, and the U.S. did not establish diplomatic relations with the island until 1862. What had been the wealthiest colony in the Americas became one of the poorest and least developed. The sugar economy was transferred to colonies where enslavement was still legal, like Cuba, which quickly replaced Saint-Domingue as the world's leading sugar producer in the early 19th century.

According to historian Franklin Knight, "The Haitians were forced to destroy the entire colonial socioeconomic structure that was the raison d'etre for their imperial importance; and in destroying the institution of slavery, they unwittingly agreed to terminate their connection to the entire international superstructure that perpetuated the practice and the plantation economy. That was an incalculable price for freedom and independence."

Knight continues, "The Haitian case represented the first complete social revolution in modern history...no greater change could be manifest than the slaves becoming masters of their destinies within a free state." In contrast, the revolutions in the U.S., France, and (a few decades later) Latin America were largely "reshufflings of the political elites—the ruling classes before remained essentially the ruling classes afterward."

• "History of Haiti: 1492-1805." https://library.brown.edu/haitihistory/index.html
• Knight, Franklin. The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• MacLeod, Murdo J., Lawless, Robert, Girault, Christian Antoine, & Ferguson, James A. "Haiti." https://www.britannica.com/place/Haiti/Early-period#ref726835
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Haitian revolution (1791-1804).

The Haitian Revolution has often been described as the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere. Enslaved people initiated the rebellion in 1791 and by 1803 they had succeeded in ending not just slavery but French control over the colony. The Haitian Revolution, however, was much more complex, consisting of several revolutions going on simultaneously. These revolutions were influenced by the French Revolution of 1789, which would come to represent a new concept of human rights, universal citizenship, and participation in government.

In the 18th century, Saint Domingue, as Haiti was then known, had become France’s wealthiest overseas colony, generating more revenue for France than all 13 North American colonies for Great Britain.  This wealth came largely because of the island’s production of sugar, coffee, indigo, and cotton generated by an enslaved labor force. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789 there were five distinct sets of interest groups in the colony. There were white planters—who owned the plantations and the slaves—and petit blancs , who were artisans, shop keepers and teachers. Some of them also owned a few slaves. Together they numbered 40,000 of the colony’s residents. Many of the whites on Saint Domingue began to support an independence movement that began when France imposed steep tariffs on the items imported into the colony. The planters were extremely disenchanted with France because they were forbidden to trade with any other nation. Furthermore, the white population of Saint Domingue did not have any representation in France. Despite their calls for independence, both the planters and petit blancs remained committed to the institution of slavery.

The three remaining groups were of African descent: those who were free, those who were enslaved, and those who had run away. There were about 30,000 free black people in 1789. Half of them were mulatto and many of them were wealthier than the petit blancs . The slave population was close to 500,000. The runaway slaves were called maroons; they had retreated deep into the mountains of Saint Domingue and lived off subsistence farming. Haiti had a history of slave rebellions; the enslaved were never willing to submit to their status and with their strength in numbers (10 to 1) colonial officials and planters did all that was possible to control them. Despite the harshness and cruelty of Saint Domingue slavery, there were slave rebellions before 1791. One plot involved the poisoning of masters.

Inspired by events in France, a number of Haitian-born revolutionary movements emerged simultaneously. They used as their inspiration the French Revolution’s “Declaration of the Rights of Man.” The General Assembly in Paris responded by enacting legislation which gave the various colonies some autonomy at the local level. The legislation, which called for “all local proprietors…to be active citizens,” was both ambiguous and radical. It was interpreted in Saint Domingue as applying only to the planter class and thus excluded petit blancs from government. Yet it allowed free citizens of color who were substantial property owners to participate. This legislation, promulgated in Paris to keep Saint Domingue in the colonial empire, instead generated a three-sided civil war between the planters, free blacks, and the petit blancs . However, all three groups would be challenged by the enslaved black majority which was also influenced and inspired by events in France.

Led by former slave Toussaint l’Overture , the enslaved would act first, rebelling against the planters on August 21, 1791. By 1792 they controlled a third of the island. Despite reinforcements from France, the area of the colony held by the rebels grew as did the violence on both sides. Before the fighting ended 100,000 of the 500,000 blacks and 24,000 of the 40,000 whites were killed. Nonetheless the former slaves managed to stave off both the French forces and the British who arrived in 1793 to conquer the colony, and who withdrew in 1798 after a series of defeats by l’Overture’s forces. By 1801 l’Overture expanded the revolution beyond Haiti, conquering the neighboring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic). He abolished slavery in the Spanish-speaking colony and declared himself Governor-General for life over the entire island of Hispaniola.  Haitian control of Santo Domingo lasted until 1844.

By 1802 the Haitian Revolution had outlasted the French Revolution which had been its inspiration. Napoleon Bonaparte, now the ruler of France, dispatched General Charles Leclerc, his brother-in-law, and 43,000 French troops to capture L’Overture and restore both French rule and slavery. L’Overture was taken and sent to France where he died in prison in 1803. Jean-Jacques Dessalines , one of l’Overture’s generals and himself a former slave, led the revolutionaries at the Battle of Vertieres on November 18, 1803 where the French forces were defeated. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared the nation independent and renamed it Haiti. France became the first nation to recognize its independence. Haiti thus emerged as the first black republic in the world, and the second nation in the western hemisphere (after the United States) to win its independence from a European power.

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The Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois , Julia Gaffield LAST REVIEWED: 05 May 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 28 October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766581-0030

The Haitian revolution was a complicated and trans-regional event, one that brought together actors, ideas, and institutions from three empires—France, Spain, and Great Britain—as well as the United States. The scholarship on the Haitian revolution, too, has been produced in a wide range of contexts and languages. The past decades have seen an explosion of such scholarship, notably in the United States, which has substantially expanded our understanding of the cultural, social, and political dynamics of the colony of Saint Domingue and the process that led to the creation of independent Haiti in 1804. But this scholarship has built on essential work by previous generations, most importantly on the work of Haitian historians going back to the 19th century, which those interested in the period should also continue to consult. This bibliography, necessarily selected, attempts to foreground what we consider to be the essential works on the period. While it is tilted toward the presentation of English-language sources, we have also included a selection of important French-language works.

The French acquired the western third of Hispaniola, Saint Domingue, as a colony in 1659. During the 18th century, French colonists transformed the colony into a land of export agriculture by establishing large sugar and coffee plantations as well as smaller indigo, cacao, and cotton plantations. The colonists purchased slaves from Africa through the transatlantic slave trade to labor these plantations. Saint Domingue quickly became an enormous source of wealth for metropolitan France. The population of the colony was overwhelmingly enslaved with a minority of whites and free people of color. Hector and Moïse 1990 is an excellent French-language overview of the history of Saint-Domingue. Cauna 2003 provides a detailed study of plantation life, and Garraway 2005 explores representations of sexuality in the colony. Frostin 1975 explores the political activities of the white population before the revolution, while McLellan 1992 examines the intellectual and scientific activities among the colony’s elite. Garrigus 2006 and King 2007 provide the most detailed studies of free people of color in Saint Domingue.

Cauna, Jacques de. Au temps des isles a sucre: Histoire d’une plantation de Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe siècle . Hommes et Sociétés. Paris: Karthala, 2003.

One of the most detailed studies of plantation life in Saint Domingue, based on plantation papers and correspondence from one major sugar plantation.

Frostin, Charles. Les révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles . Collection Histoire et Littérature Haïtiennes. Paris: L’École, 1975.

Examines the political mobilization among whites in Saint Domingue from its earliest days as a colony, providing a rich portrait of the governance and social life of the colony.

Garraway, Doris Lorraine. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

A study of French accounts of the social world of the French Antilles during the 17th and 18th centuries, with an emphasis on discourses surrounding gender and sexuality.

Garrigus, John D. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue . Americas in the Early Modern Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Provides an analysis of research on free people of color from the southern province of Saint Domingue, following the history of the group from colonial times through the revolution. Emphasizes the frontier nature of the colony and argues that this characteristic allowed for the development of a large mixed-race population and a society organized by a class hierarchy.

Hector, Michel, and Claude Moïse. Colonisation et esclavage en Haïti: Le régime colonial français à Saint-Domingue (1625–1789) . Port-au-Prince: H. Deschamps, 1990.

An excellent overview of the colonial history of Saint Domingue by two of Haiti’s most important historians.

King, Stewart R. Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue . Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007.

Studies the free colored population in Saint Domingue primarily using notarial records. Emphasizes distinctions between urban and rural groups and the occupations of individuals as planters or policemen and soldiers.

McLellan, James E. Colonialism and Science: Saint-Domingue in the Old Regime . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Through an exploration of Enlightenment culture and thought in colonial Saint Domingue, this book provides one of the most detailed portraits of the social and cultural life among the planter elite in the colony.

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African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents

Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon. 2009. 259 pages. This anthology connects the experience of African Americans and the Haitian revolution.

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ISBN: 9780415803762 | Routledge Books

More Teaching Resources

Haitian Revolution

By Paul Campbell | Reader-Nominated Topic

The Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in the history of the modern world, caused large numbers of both Black and white people to flee the Caribbean, with many relocating to the United States. In 1793 Philadelphia received hundreds of these refugees, including white slaveholders and their enslaved Africans. Foreign policy decisions also were made in Philadelphia, the nation’s capital during the 1790s. Therefore, on both the local and national levels the Haitian Revolution played an important role in Philadelphia’s federal period.

Occurring on what was then known as the French colony of St. Domingue, the Haitian Revolution lasted from 1791 to 1804. The army of rebelling slaves, commanded by Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743-1803), wrested control of the colony from its white rulers, and, after a series of brutal power struggles, Haiti eventually became the first Black-led nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Refugees arriving from St. Domingue had a definitive influence on the culture of the city. The Haitian immigrants of African descent added diversity to Philadelphia’s Black community. It became common to find people of color with French names, and the French language could be frequently heard on the street. Also, the congregations of the city’s Catholic churches, particularly St. Joseph’s , became instantaneously biracial. Philadelphia residents, feeling sympathy for the whites who had lost land and possessions, raised nearly $14,000 in relief aid.

The refugees were not exempt from the terms of the Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 , so there was controversy upon their arrival in Philadelphia. The Act stipulated that enslaved individuals had a right to claim their freedom after six months of residing in the state. As a result, from 1793 to 1796 there were 456 manumissions of West Indian slaves in Philadelphia. Most, however, especially if they were young, became indentured servants for varying periods of time.

Yellow Fever’s Toll

It was and continues to be speculated that the yellow fever was brought to Philadelphia by ships carrying Dominguan refugees. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), the eminent physician and abolitionist, sincerely believed that Black people had immunity to the illness, and, as such, thought they had an obligation to attend to the afflicted. The Free African Society , possibly the first African American benevolent society in the United States, concluded that acting on Rush’s plea for help would strike a blow against racism by showing how Black people could be valuable citizens. Led by former slaves Richard Allen (1760-1831) and Absalom Jones (1746-1818), the Society demonstrated remarkable courage by nursing the sick and burying the dead. Tragically, Rush was wrong in his estimation that Black people were immune to the fever; they died at a rate almost equal to that of whites.

During the decade the federal capital was in Philadelphia, United States policy toward St. Domingue changed substantially. Important policy decisions emanated from the presidential residence , located at Sixth and Market Streets. George Washington (1732-99), president until 1797, was not supportive of the Dominguans in rebellion, but his successor, John Adams (1735-1826), took a different position following a visit by Joseph Bunel, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s diplomatic representative. Bunel arrived in 1798 to meet with U.S. government officials accompanied by his wife, Marie Bunel. Marie, a free Black creole, worked in the city as an independent merchant, choosing to stay even after the revolution concluded.

Bunel reportedly met with Adams in 1798 or 1799, and trade subsequently opened up between St. Domingue and the United States. It is probable that Adams saw this move as an opportunity to lend support to those fighting a common enemy, as the United States was then engaged in a quasi-war with France. It was also a chance to help American merchants by gaining a valuable trading partner in the West Indies. However, the good will did not last for long. Relations between the two republics soured after Adams left office in 1800, and the United States did not officially recognize Haiti until 1862.

Paul Campbell is an M.A. candidate in American History at Temple University. He also works as an interpretive Park Guide at Independence National Historical Park. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Copyright 2013, Rutgers University 

The President's House (1790s)

Historical Society of Pennsylvania

The President's House, located at Sixth and High (Market) Streets, was the setting for a significant change in United States policy regarding the Haitian Revolution. George Washington and John Adams resided and produced policy within this house while Philadelphia served as the nation's capital, prior to the federal government's move to the District of Columbia. Washington was not supportive of the Dominguans rebellion and refrained from trading with the new government. But after Haitian diplomatic representative Joseph Bunel reportedly met with President John Adams in 1798 or 1799, Adams shifted foreign policy and opened economic trade between St. Domingue and the United States. This watercolor by an unknown painter depicts the President's House as it would have looked in the 1790s.

• President's House Site

Visit Philadelphia

Pictured here is 2010 in the President's House site, located on Sixth and Market Streets in Independence National Historical Park. The open-air exhibit consists of partial walls that suggest the appearance of the President's House while George Washington and John Adams resided there. The exhibit interprets the national policies created in the President's House, the narrative of slavery in the United States in the early years of the United States, and the story of nine slaves who were owned by Washington and who lived within this house during his presidency. Among the subjects are the Haitian Revolution and Joseph Brunel, showing the prominence that the Haitian Revolution had in Philadelphia and the nation in the 1790s. (Photograph by G. Widman)

Related Topics

• Philadelphia and the World
• Philadelphia and the Nation
• Cradle of Liberty

Time Periods

• Capital of the United States Era
• American Revolution Era
• Center City Philadelphia
• Free African Society
• U.S. Congress (1790-1800)
• Slavery and the Slave Trade
• Philadelphia and Its People in Maps: The 1790s
• Yellow Fever
• French Revolution
• France and the French
• Red City (The)

Related Reading

Girard, Philippe R. “Trading Races: Joseph and Marie Bunel, a Diplomat and a Merchant in Revolutionary St. Domingue and Philadelphia.” From Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 30 No. 3 (Fall 2010): 351-376.

Klepp, Susan E. “‘How Many Precious Souls are Fled’?: The Magnitude of the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic.” From A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic , edited by J. Worth Estes and Billy G. Smith, 163-82. Canton, MA: Science History Publications/ USA, 1997.

Nash, Gary. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

——. The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

—–. “Reverberations of Haiti in the American North: Black Saint Dominguans in Philadelphia.” Pennsylvania History 65 (1998): 44-73.

Newman, Richard S. Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black   Founding Fathers . New York: New York University Press, 2008.

The United States Department of State, Office of the Historian. “Milestones: 1784-1800.” The United States and the Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804.  

White, Ashli.  Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic . Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Related Collections

• The Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection Temple University Libraries
• Independence National Historical Park Library and Archives Third and Walnut Streets, Philadelphia.
• Historical Society of Pennsylvania 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia.

Related Places

• African American Museum in Philadelphia
• The Benjamin Rush House Site
• Free African American Society historical marker
• Mother Bethel AME Church
• Richard Allen Museum
• Old St. Joseph's Church
• St. Thomas African Episcopal Church historical marker

Backgrounders

Connecting Headlines with History

• In Philadelphia, Haitians celebrate heritage and seek U.S. protection (WHYY, May 19, 2017)
• Haitian Immigration (In Motion: The African American Migration Experience)
• Toussaint L'Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
• Latin American Revolutionaries Primary Source Set (Digital Public Library of America)

Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy

The Haitian Revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture painted on the body of a bus operating in Port-au-Prince, July 2008. Photo by Jan Sochor/Latincontent/Getty Images

Atlantic freedoms

Haiti, not the us or france, was where the assertion of human rights reached its defining climax in the age of revolution.

by Laurent Dubois   + BIO

Here is the challenge: to write a history of modern political thought and culture that can simultaneously – and equally – embody and communicate the perspectives of those who arrived in Virginia in the hold of the slave ship São João Bautista , of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Napoleon Bonaparte, of Andrew Jackson and Harriet Tubman. While such a project might seem quixotic, we have to try. That is the political history that we’ll need in order to construct a future politics that moves beyond the legacies of racial slavery, rather than perpetually dwelling with them. The field of ‘Atlantic History’, which has expanded dramatically in the past decades, is the thing that will enable us to do it.

That the United States was born of a history of conquest and settlement that brought people from Europe and Africa across the Atlantic is, of course, an unavoidable part of the nation’s history. More broadly, this is the story of all the Americas, though the particular ways in which European, African and Native American peoples became intertwined in the process varies greatly from place to place. The questions posed by Atlantic History are about how to tell that story. Who do we place at the centre of this history? What categories of analysis should we use, and what social, economic and institutional structures should we focus on?

It makes good sense that a body of water has become the basis for a questioning of some of our broadest and most cherished historical narratives. Until the invention of the railroad, water was the most important vehicle for movement – of people, goods, rumours, songs, ideas. The world was connected by ports, and in many ways ports came to resemble each other. But if it was a connected world, it was also one in which experiences and perspectives were widely divergent. From whose perspective should we try to reconstruct what the Atlantic world actually looked like?

At the basis of every work of history is a question of positioning. This is also, on some level, an ethical question. Whose history are you telling? And from whose perspective? As the Haitian thinker Jean Casimir likes to put it, when you write the story of Columbus arriving in what the indigenous people then called Ayiti, you have to make a decision: are you on the boat or on the shore?

T raditionally, the history of the Americas was written largely from perspective of Europeans, the conquerors and settlers. It was their writings, their archives, that sustained the history, and in a broader sense European epistemologies and ideologies that undergirded the very sense of what constituted history. In the past decades, historians have struggled to reverse this pattern, telling histories grounded in the perspectives and experiences of Native Americans as well as the Africans and African-Americans who were enslaved in the Americas.

There is a dream at the centre of a lot of historical work that we can find a balance between all these perspectives – that we can in fact, be both on the boat and the shore at the same time, or perhaps floating above, taking notes with equanimity. But while that is at least useful as an aspiration, it is never really that simple. The view from the shore and the view from the boat imply so much else, from the ability to see and understand certain things, to the language spoken and how it’s understood. The two perspectives involve deep questions: how does each group think of human history, and their place in it, at the moment of encounter? Casimir, then, is probably right that there are fundamental choices to be made. And while there are few moments in history where the potential for divergent perspectives is quite as radical as it is at the moment of conquest, any historical moment is defined by the differences in perspective – themselves historically constituted – carried by different participants.

The region’s intellectuals, writers, artists and musicians have long grappled with how to narrate the history of indigenous genocide

That is notably true when we think about how to write the history of slavery, and more particularly of the enslaved themselves and how they experienced, viewed and, at times, rebelled against the institution. The Atlantic was the site of one of the most dramatic movements of people in human history: the slave trade, which brought at least 12 million Africans to the Americas between the 16th and the 19th centuries. The history of the slave ship is at the centre of Atlantic History.

About 45 per cent of the Africans brought to the Americas came to the Caribbean, a region that has been one of the most generative in terms of both theory and practice surrounding the problem of writing history. The region’s intellectuals, writers, visual artists and musicians have long grappled in particularly rich ways with the question of how to narrate and confront the history of indigenous genocide, European colonialism, the slave trade and the plantation, and the rich and layered cultural history that emerged out of this interaction of global and local forces. Historians such as C L R James and Eric Williams, whose work has been pivotal in the development of Atlantic History, were part of this broader cultural and intellectual matrix. In the decades since, other thinkers – notably the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot – have been at the centre of discussions about how we write modern history from a perspective rooted in the Caribbean. And at the centre of much of this thinking about history and politics in the Caribbean has been one of the most interesting epics in modern history: the Haitian Revolution.

S tretching from 1791 to 1804, the Haitian Revolution was both a local and a global event, a true world-historical moment in ways that are increasingly acknowledged today. One useful way for us to think about the Haitian Revolution is as the most radical (and therefore one of the most important) assertions of the right to have rights in human history. Even more so than the American and French revolutions, with which it was intertwined, the Haitian Revolution posed a set of absolutely central political questions. It did so in a way that was illegible to many and forcibly repressed by others. But any true analysis of modern political history, not only of Haiti but of the world, has to grapple with the implications of this revolution for core concepts surrounding modern politics.

The French colony of Saint-Domingue, the pinnacle of the Atlantic slave system and the richest of the plantation colonies of the Americas, was based on a radical refusal of sovereignty to the majority. Ninety per cent of the population of the colony was enslaved – more than half of them African-born, many of them recent arrivals in the colony at the time of the beginning of the revolution in 1791 – and were not considered legal or political subjects in any sense. They were chattel property who, through a carefully institutionalised system of law combined with forms of violent repression, were refused any possibility for self-autonomy. Nevertheless, they carved out spaces of autonomy within the plantation, by cultivating small plots of land and bringing products to market. They also created spaces of cultural and intellectual freedom, crafting political visions that would ultimately find voice in the revolution.

The plantation order was based on racial ideologies that emerged out of and were buttressed by the Atlantic slave system. At the core of these ideologies was a kind of dialectic that enabled the simultaneous celebration of a capacity for free action and sovereignty on the part of certain groups while simultaneously denying that same capacity to others. The colony’s system of racial thinking was based on a set of arguments about the fundamental incapacity of a group that was defined by its skin colour to successfully exercise sovereignty over itself. As such, the slave plantation system in Saint-Domingue and elsewhere was one of the most successful mechanisms for the mass denial of human rights in the history of the modern world.

Starting with the 1791 slave insurrection, it is therefore not surprising that those who set about courageously, brilliantly and systematically destroying this system crafted particularly powerful assertions of human rights. Haiti, not the US or France, was where the assertion of true universal values reached its defining climax during the Age of Revolution. Enslaved people who were considered chattel rather than human beings successfully insisted that they had the right to be free and, secondly, that they had the right to govern themselves according to a new set of principles. Their actions were a signal and a transformative moment in the political history of the world. The Haitian revolutionaries propelled the Enlightenment principles of universalism forward in unexpected ways by insisting on the self-evident – but then largely denied – principle that no one should be a slave. And they did so at the very heart of the world’s economic system, turning the most profitable colony in the world into an independent nation founded on the refusal of the system of slavery that dominated all the societies that surrounded it in the Americas.

But crafting an intellectual history of the Haitian Revolution provides a striking challenge, for the vast majority of its key actors did not leave written traces of their political philosophy. That, of course, does not mean they didn’t have one. It just means that they didn’t articulate it through writing. In this they were in fact not all that different from the vast majority of actors in the American or French revolutions, who also depended on conversation and oral transmission of information to shape their thoughts and actions.

The majority were survivors of the middle passage, who’d grown up in African societies with their own traditions of political thought

Print media was not absent from the Haitian Revolution, but it certainly played a smaller role than it did in the American and French revolutions, where the explosion of print was key to the revolution itself. Historians of the American and French revolutions have often depended and focused on the role of print media. But because of the very different circumstances of the Haitian Revolution, namely the fact that slavery itself had prevented most of the event’s key actors from gaining access to literacy, we have to use a different method. And in the process we gain insight not just about the Haitian Revolution, but perhaps also new ways of looking at the history of politics more broadly.

Historians depend on texts to do their work. Although they are increasingly incorporating other materials into their analysis, archives remain largely textual. This can lead to a kind of distortion: because we use texts to access the past, we can sometimes overestimate the centrality of those particular texts within that past. But, as when we study the Haitian Revolution, we need to constantly remind ourselves that these texts are mostly traces of a much larger set of conversations that did not take place through writing, but rather through speaking, organising and debating in the midst of military and political action.

What makes the case of the Haitian Revolution particularly intriguing is that the majority of the people involved were not just enslaved, but African-born. They were survivors of the middle passage, and they had grown up in a wide range of African societies with their own traditions of political thought. They had, in their minds, examples of different institutions, ways of debating, models of leadership and rule, and cultural and social organisation. In fact, for many of them, such reference points would have been far more important than the experience of slavery and the plantation. In the years before the Haitian Revolution, about 40,000 people were brought to the colony each year on slave ships. That means that, at the time of the revolution, as many as 100,000 people or more (out of a slave population of perhaps 500,000) had been in the colony for just a few years.

Most of these recent arrivals, and in fact the majority among the enslaved, were Central African. That means that, as the historians John Thornton and more recently Christina Mobley have argued, to write the political history of the Haitian Revolution is necessarily to study and write Central African political history. This represents a profound re-orientation: the central organising principle for most of the writing of the Haitian Revolution, from James on, has been about the relationship between the French and Haitian revolutions, a reflection on the ways in which that particular set of Atlantic connections became the vector for change and transformation.

T he research of scholars such as Thornton and Mobley raises many issues about how we can know and interpret the Central African context that so profoundly shaped Haitian history. The diversity and complexity of the region, and the limits of written sources, mean that researchers have to deploy a range of approaches – including wide-ranging archival research, historical linguistics, oral history and archaeology – to reconstruct the social and political context of the region in the 17th and 18th centuries. There are intense debates, notably around the question of religion: Catholicism was present in the region, and was embraced by the leaders of the Kingdom of Kongo, starting in the 16th century, which means that many enslaved people crossing the Atlantic practised the religion. But Kongolese Catholicism took shape on its own terms, with a complex theology and practice rooted in, and connected to, local religious and cultural practices.

Furthermore, figuring out precisely where in the region captives came from before being shipped to Haiti is extremely complicated: registers of slave ships most often indicate ports of embarkation, and sources that do indicate regional or ethnic origins for Africans have to be interpreted with care. We know a great deal, but there is still so much more to learn and discover about these questions. What the remarkable research in this area shows, though, is that to write Haitian history is also to write African history. The opposite, interestingly, is also true: the sources of Haitian – and more broadly Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic – history can help us understand African history of the period in new ways.

Women participated in military combat and political debate, leading the way to new labour practices on plantations after emancipation

Historians are still working on understanding the relationship between the Haitian Revolution, Europe and Africa. How do politics travel? Who creates political ideas? How do they transform into action, and institutions? Trying to answer these questions means confronting a knot of issues: reconstructing ideas about and experiences of gender and sexuality in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. It also means finding ways to narrate the question of rape and sexual violence while reconstructing the history of reproduction of enslaved people: pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing. A fuller understanding of the practices of family and community structure is imperative to narrating the political history of slavery and emancipation.

Because gendered ideas have constructed society, they have also shaped the archives. Usually, the archives give us only a fragment of people’s lives, so it’s important to understand what influences those fragments. In the case of the Haitian Revolution, women participated in military combat and political debate, and led the way to changing labour practices on plantations following emancipation. Women insisted on time and autonomy for themselves, and constructed forms of land tenure, religious life and family organisation to try to move beyond the experience of slavery. There are now exemplary new histories that reconstruct the experiences of enslaved women, like the early chapters in Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard’s Freedom Papers (2012). This work expands our understanding of the period and pushes people to re-think history-telling and its possibilities.

T he example of the scholarship on the Haitian Revolution is just one part of a more ‘Atlantic’ history. What ‘Atlantic History’ actually means, however, depends a great deal on the speaker, or historian. Sometimes the term is so vague that it veers toward the meaningless. This problem is not limited to the term ‘Atlantic’. Ask a group of historians at a bar what ‘Europe’ or ‘Africa’ are, and you should be ready to pay for many rounds of drinks, and wake up the next morning with a hangover and no clear answer. Are they geographical or political designations? When did people begin to use the terms in question, and what did they mean when they did so? What should be the relationship between categories people used during a given historical period and those categories contemporary historians might use to describe that period?

Still, the politics surrounding calling something ‘Atlantic’ history have a particular valence. Atlantic History tackles a critical question: what is ‘the West’? The question is, as it has long been, an urgent one. There are few concepts that have been as historically consequential, on a global scale. Of course this term is never really on its own: it exists as part of a concatenation of terms and ideas about race and culture, geography, and the history of ideas.

The geography of Atlantic History approaches relationships between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Its chronology stretches from the late-15th century through the 19th century. Its fundamental ethos is to avoid teleological narratives that read nationalist histories back into the colonial period. As a colleague of mine used to put it, we have to get away from the idea that, as soon as they arrived from England, settlers began looking at their watches and saying: ‘I wish I was my grandchild so that I could fight in the American Revolution.’ None of this, in other words, had to happen the way that it did.

Slavery provides the most powerful place from which to critique triumphalist narratives of American history. Viewed from the slave ship and the plantation, the triumphalist stories many have told about the ‘West’ start to unravel. Thinking about the history of the modern world from the perspective of slavery, and more specifically of the enslaved, compels a different story about almost everything. It also allows a vision of political history that will be particularly meaningful, and helpful, for today’s world.

James and Williams, two of the key intellectual touchstones for the approach taken in today’s Atlantic History, both came from Trinidad. The titles of their two most renowned books condense the challenge they issued. James’s book The Black Jacobins (1938), first written as a play, tells the story of the Haitian Revolution and of the political thought and actions of its key leader, Toussaint Louverture. William’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944) argued that the plantation complex of the Caribbean was central to the development of industry in Great Britain, and that economic changes rather than ideology spurred on abolitionism in the 19th century.

Williams’s book provoked the most response. Much of it attempted to debunk its claims, but important parts of his argument have held up well. James’s The Black Jacobins meanwhile, made the story of the Haitian Revolution a subject of debate among historians, and provided the foundation for a renaissance in work on Caribbean history. Both remain riveting and inspiring reads, great works both in analysis and style.

When Michelle Obama talks about living in a house built by slaves, she makes Americans think of a history that’s often obfuscated

Not all scholars in the field claim James and Williams as key ancestors. There are other genealogies, built by French and North American historians who, starting in the 1960s and ’70s, began paying increasing attention to the crossings between Europe and the Americas, especially with regards to the question of political history. R R Palmer produced a classic comparative study of the Age of Revolution, though with what now has come to seem as a startling omission: there is no discussion of the Haitian Revolution. At the same time, historians of the Atlantic slave trade, notably Philip Curtin , began the long process of documenting this history, a project that has culminated in recent years with the production of a remarkable open online database containing essentially all currently known slave-trade voyages.

All of this work has given scholars a huge amount of new data. Today, not a month goes by without new articles and books on the connections between different ports, of the lives that transpired between and in them. These stories often challenge received ideas about what American history is, about who Americans are, and therefore about who they might still become. Each historian has to navigate the ethics and challenges of telling these stories, making choices that are at once empirical and ethical.

The past is constantly present in the present and its political debates. When Michelle Obama talks about living in a ‘house that was built by slaves’, she is prompting Americans to consider this history, one that is often obfuscated or distorted because it is not a happy and patriotic story. To understand and confront the present, however, a capacious sense of the past is vital. There is a genealogy linking the Haitian Revolution to abolitionism, the Civil Rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. Understanding, or even just being aware of, that genealogy can help us all better understand the world in which we live, and to recognise and reach for justice.

The work of history is ongoing, never-ending, which is itself a testament to its necessity as a practice. The very fact that so much of the past remains unwritten is also a constant reminder that the future is unwritten as well.

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The Haitian Revolution: a basic reading guide

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The Revolution in North American Scholarship The literature of the Haitian Revolution is substantially rich. The scholarship that does exist focuses on class and race structures, resistance of the enslaved and marronage, economic and political forces, and Toussaint Louverture. (2) The subsequent paragraphs will review and assess pertinent studies directly and indirectly relating to the subject matter, in order to identify various approaches to the issue. In North American scholarship, Alfred Hunt was the first to publish a full monograph on Haiti&#39;s influence on antebellum America. In Haiti&#39;s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (1988), Hunt explores Haiti&#39;s influence on antebellum America with respect to the social, political, and cultural repercussions of the Haitian Revolution and the meaning of the figure Toussaint Louverture to enslaved Africans in the United States. Very recently, in Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: Th...

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Video transcript

Tearing the White Out: The Haitian Revolution: The Aftermath

"[t]oday's haiti...is a place where only the brave survive.", —edwidge danticat,  brother i'm dying , 93, a recruitment poster written by frederick douglass in 1863. [10], 19th century haiti.

The revolution in Haiti stunned the world.  It sent a wave of emigrants to neighboring Caribbean islands.  In the United States and much of white America, there arose a cry of “Remember Haiti” as a way to restrain desire for political liberty—particularly in slave societies. [1]   Despite declaring independence to the world in 1804, Haiti was largely ignored as a sovereign nation throughout most of the nineteenth century.  France, the United States, and other world powers refused to recognize Haiti as an independent country.  France finally recognized Haiti as an independent nation in 1825, but immediately billed the Haitian government for 150 million francs for property losses. [2]   Attempting to recoup their losses from the revolution. Losses that only existed due to their gross mistreatment of slaves and disregard for human life.  Haiti, the larger victim in all this, now was to pay to be recognized as a sovereign nation.  

The United States was no better. Following the Haitian revolution, President Jefferson embargoed the Haitian Republic.  In fact, in a letter written to James Monroe and dated November 24, 1801 President Jefferson wrote that any unruly slaves in the United States should be sent to Haiti:

"...where the blacks are established into a sovereignty de facto, & have organised [sic] themselves under regular laws & government.  I should conjecture that their present ruler [Toussaint] might be willing, on many considerations, to receive even that description which would be exiled for acts deemed criminal by us, but meritorious perhaps by him.” [3]

It wasn’t until 1862, during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln and in the throes of the American Civil War that the United States finally recognized Haiti as a sovereign nation. A move that could easily be argued to be one of political significance for the Union’s stance against the Confederate states.  The United States refused to recognize Haiti until the moment that it most benefitted their own cause.  

This attitude toward Haiti refused to die throughout the next two hundred years.  Haiti gained independence, but it still fights for equality in the minds of the Western powers.

Three Haitian men observe US Navy and commercial ships off the coast of Haiti. [12]

20th century haiti.

As World War I loomed early in the twentieth century, President Woodrow Wilson ordered an invasion of Haiti.  The United States had significant interests in Haiti, including owning 40 percent of the stock of the Haitian national bank. From July 1915 to August of 1934, United States Marines occupied Haiti, employing forced labor of Haitians—akin to slavery—to build bridges and roads.  In 1934, United States pulled out their troops. Suffering from The Great Depression at home, and with the rise of fascism in Europe, the United States had other things to worry about. [4]

As the century wore on, conditions worsened in Haiti.  Left virtually penniless by the United States, Haiti attempted to rebuild its economy.  It wasn’t until the 1950s that Haiti found some stability—albeit of a dangerous type. A man by the name of Dr. Francois Duvalier came to power—commonly known as "Papa Doc."  He and his son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, ruled Haiti until 1986.  Their regime was cruel.  They created a nationwide militia known as the Tonton Macoutes, a battalion of brutal men and women aggressively recruited from the country's poor—of which there were many.  This caused another wave of Haitian emigres. They left their beloved nation on boats, hoping to find asylum in the United States.  Yet, the United States was dealing with racial upheaval of its own throughout these decades, and many of the Haitian refugees were detained and sent directly back to their politically unstable country.  

In 1986 Baby Doc Duvalier fled Haiti for France, leaving a vacuum of political power to be filled. The presidential office became a revolving door. In 1990, a man by the name of Jean-Bertrand Aristide won the vote for the presidency, only to be removed from power seven months later in a military coup.  He returned in 1994 accompanied by twenty thousand United States soldiers.  Around this same time, President Bill Clinton launched Operation Uphold Democracy.  The United States, with the approval of the United Nations, stayed in Haiti until the year 2000, overseeing their democratic government. [5]   This created a modern type of colonization of Haiti.  While Haiti remained an independent nation, the United States effectively ran the country.  Yet despite the presence of the United States, Haiti still failed to fully stabilize.

Click on the video to see Conan O'Brien's Haitian History Lesson.

21st century haiti.

Haiti has continued to struggle in the early part of the twenty-first century.  We’re only eighteen years into the new century and Haiti has already seen political upheaval and mass destruction from natural disasters.  The most prominent disaster was in 2010, when a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince. This earthquake did major structural damage and killed an estimated 200,000-300,000 Haitians, while injuring 300,000 more, and displacing over 1.5 million. [6]   To compound this disaster, Hurricane Matthew swept through Haiti the end of 2016. Many of the displaced Haitians looked to the United States for help. The United States offered Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians, but the TPS was limited and will expire in July of 2019.  Many Haitians will be forced to leave, still with nowhere to go.

The deep prejudice against Haiti still courses through the history of the Atlantic.  In January 2018, President of the United States Donald Trump made it clear that this prejudice still exists.  In a meeting held with a bipartisan group of senators, President Trump referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” and asked the group of politicians “Why do we need more Haitians, take them out.” [7]   Not only has the president made comments, but the Justice department has also chimed in.  In Jennings vs. Rodriguez that was decided in February of 2018, Supreme Court decided that illegal immigrants or those seeking asylum could be detained indefinitely while the government decides whether or not the claim is credible. [8]  Haiti has continually been beat down through years of civil strife, foreign meddling, and natural disasters.  In the United Nations’ most recent Human Development Report, Haiti came in a dismal 163rd out of 188 countries. [9]   

Despite all its efforts, Haiti still struggles to receive the respect it deserves. The first and only nation established through a slave revolution.  It is a nation that should be revered for its deep history.  Perhaps there is hope for Haiti moving forward throughout the twenty-first century.  As the world continues to progress, perhaps we’ll remember Haiti for what it is: One of the greatest nations in history.

[1]  Knight, Franklin W. “The Haitian Revolution.”  The American Historical Review , vol. 105, no. 1, 2000, pp. 103–115.  JSTOR , JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2652438. 

[2]  Sansay, Leonara, and Michael J. Drexler.  Secret History or the Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura. Broadview Press, 2008.

[3]  “From Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 24 November 1801,”  Founders Online, National Archives, last modified February 1, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-35-02-0550 . [Original source:  The Papers of Thomas Jefferson,  vol. 35, 1 August—30 November 1801,  ed. Barbara B. Oberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, pp. 718-722.]

[4]  Danticat, Edwidge.  Brother, I’m Dying.  Vintage Books, 2007.

[5]  U.S.  Department of State, U.S. Department of State, history.state.gov/milestones/1993-2000/haiti

[6]  “Haiti Earthquake Fast Facts.”  CNN , Cable News Network, 20 Dec. 2017,  www.cnn.com/2013/12/12/world/haiti-earthquke-fast-facts/index.html

[7]   “Trump Referred to Haiti and African Nations as ‘Shithole’ Countries.”  NBCNews.com , NBCUniversal News Group, www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-african-countries-shithole-nations-n83694

[8]  Williams, Pete. “Supreme Court upholds government power to detain immigrants without bail.”  NBCNews.com, NBC Universal News Group, 27 Fe. 2018,  https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/supreme-court-upholds-government-power-detain-immigrants-indefinitely-n851676

[9]  Jahan, Selim.  Human Development Report 2016: Human Development for Everyone. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2016.

Image Credits

[10] "File:Men of Color Civil War Recruitment Broadside 1863.png."  Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository . 2 Mar 2018, 10:55 UTC. 18 Apr 2018, 00:20 < https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Men_of_Color_Civil_War_Recruitment_Broadside_1863.png&oldid=290103966 >.

[11]  teamcoco. “Conan's Haitian History Lesson - CONAN on TBS.”  YouTube , YouTube, 27 Jan. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn4mxYDmWgo&t=2s. 

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The Haitian Revolution, Essay Example

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A Short Analysis of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s Memoir in Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography by J. R. Beard

The leader of the revolt of almost half million enslaved Africans on the island of St. Domingue (modern-day Haiti); attained his people’s freedom and created the first independent country to rise out of the oppressions of slavery. The Haitian Revolution was the only successful revolution of slaves in modern time and struck fear in the hearts of imperialists and gave courage to the enslaved everywhere. In 1801, L’Ouverture set up an Assembly and passed a constitution which abolished slavery, removed the color barrier in employment and established municipal government. L’Ouverture was made governor-for-life. After Napoleon Bonaparte became the ruler of France he promised to restore slavery in Haiti and capture L’Ouverture. In February, 1802 Napoleon sent General Charles Leclerc to the island to retake the colony. Leclerc captured L’Ouverture and transported him back to France. Toussaint L’Ouverture was imprisoned in the notorious dungeons of Fort de Joux , located in the Jura Mountains of France. L’Ouverture died in the prison in April 1803, according to the French autopsy report, of pneumonia.[1]

In 1863, Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography was published. The version replaced Beard’s 1853 description of the Haitian revolution with an English version that included Toussaint L’Ouverture’s autobiography, the French autopsy report, tributes written by prominent public figures and some additional documents. Book IV of the new publication contains the letter written to Napoleon Bonaparte by Toussaint L’Ouverture, titled Memoir of General Toussaint L’Ouverture. It is L’Ouverture memoir that is analyzed herein.

Toussaint L’Ouverture wrote his autobiography during the time he was imprisoned at Fort de Joux. It offers the reader a unique perspective of the Haitian fight for independence through the eyes of one of its leaders. L’Ouverture said that he wrote it,” in order to render to the French Government an exact account of my conduct and to acquit himself of treason in the conflict between his Haitian forces and those of French general Charles Leclerc”.[2] He states,” I shall relate the facts with all the simplicity and frankness of an old soldier, adding to them the reflections that naturally suggest themselves. In short, I shall tell the truth, though it be against myself.[3] He writes that as commander of the revolutionary forces that it was his duty to insure that enemies of Haiti would not penetrate the island. He ordered the commander of seaports to stop and ships from entering anchorage. When French General Leclerc’s forces arrived, the commanders refused him entry. Leclerc grew impatient and attacked the harbor. The rebels responded by burning the city of Gonaïves . This caused Leclerc to begin an all-out war. After several months of fighting, L’Ouverture surrendered control of the island to the French and believing that he was safe from the French. He was captured and sent to the Fort de Joux , believing that he was betrayed by France.

L’Ouverture’s memoir describes the beauty of the island and goes on to explain how the French consul promised peace by General Leclerc wanted conflict. He describes the hardship he and his family received on the voyage to France. The tone he uses is very to the point and describes, in detail, his actions that led up to surrender of the island to General Leclerc and his transfer to the Fort de Joux prison. Toussaint L’Ouverture’s memoir might silence his critics who blame him for the loss of the French colony.

Beard, J. R. Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography , Book IV . Boston: James

Redpath, 1863. http://www.marxist.org/reference/archive/toussaint-puventure/memoit/ index.htm. October 9, 2013.

[1] J. R. Beard. Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography , Book IV . Boston: James Redpath, 1863. http://www.marxist.org/reference/archive/toussaint-puventure/memoit/ index.htm. October 9, 2013.

[2] J. R. Beard. Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography , Book IV . Boston: James Redpath, 1863. http://www.marxist.org/reference/archive/toussaint-puventure/memoit/ index.htm. October 9, 2013.

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The Haitian Revolution’s Principles Essay

For an effective analysis and study of information about a particular research question, it is essential to distinguish between types of sources. Thus, primary and secondary sources are two fundamental options for the origins of relevant information about a topic. Primary ones imply using direct sources of information such as documents, personal conversations, interviews, testimonies, and others. However, it is possible to study only documentation and archives for historical questions since one cannot directly communicate with historical figures. Primary sources are more difficult to find as they provide valuable information. One may find it in libraries, historical societies, specialized archives, or special forums. However, one should refrain from using primary sources found on any third-party sites, as these may contain distorted data.

In turn, secondary sources include all other information origins, such as scientific papers, statistics, documentaries, and Internet sources. This option is suitable for supplementing the information found in primary origins, as it requires additional verification. Regarding reliability, primary sources are more secure as they were created in the historical period that is being studied. Accordingly, there are no various misrepresentations, political distortions of facts, and other shortcomings in the primary sources.

Speaking about why it is important to consult a variety of sources when conducting historical research, one can highlight several aspects. Primarily, several origins contribute to the confirmation or refutation of the information found in a particular source. In other words, if the fact is the same in all sources, then it probably is true information. At the same time, if a certain fact is presented only in one out of five origins, then it indicates the unreliability of such a source. Moreover, several origins help to consider a particular historical aspect from different points of view. It is vital for compiling the most relevant and objective picture, as well as for the overall development and search for additional information.

On the other hand, relying on one type of source can lead to significant errors in work and inaccuracies in the facts. In addition, as already indicated, several origins allow one to create a more objective picture due to different points of view. Accordingly, the use of a single source may result in the work having one-sided nature without providing additional information and a broader view. Finally, the most significant danger of using a single origin is the possibility of using incorrect information. It may happen if, for example, the author of the original source made a mistake, and in this case, one does not have the opportunity to double-check the information.

The selected research question is about the founding fathers of Haiti, the rise of independence, and the root causes of the slave revolt. It is worth noting that Haiti became the first independent state in Latin America, and numerous attempts to suppress the uprising failed. In addition, Haiti became the only state that became free from slavery and was ruled by formerly enslaved people. The main reasons for the uprising were the inhuman living conditions of enslaved people, high mortality, and the poor attitude of the white population. In addition, some uprisings have already taken place in the world, which also caused the birth of protest sentiments.

Reliable origins have been selected to cover this topic, including both primary and secondary sources. In ‘The Haitian Revolution: The History and Legacy of the Slave Uprising that Led to Haiti’s Independence’, Charles River was based on documentary evidence and archival material (River 3). Due to this, the author managed to create one of the most detailed and reliable works telling about the revolution in Haiti. It also touches on the causes of the revolution, its pros, and cons, as well as the consequences for both the islanders and the outside world. Moreover, the work is supplemented with photographs, which allows one to study the issue in more detail.

A secondary source was also chosen to supplement the information found in addition to the above-mentioned primary source. Therefore, in work ‘Haiti’s Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954’ Chelsea Stieber talks about the revolution in Haiti and post-revolutionary life, relying on scientific works and one’s own search for information (Stieber 5). Moreover, the author considered some other aspects of Haitian life, such as literature. After conducting a study, Stieber was able to establish which ideas prevailed in the literary aspect and whether they changed before and after the revolution. The author reflects on how colonial thought in Haiti changed, what was the root cause of this change and how it turned into a decolonial process.

Current events that are related to the subject of the research question may include modern revolutions. It has a similar principle and approach to the study of causes and effects. Thus, a group of people who are dissatisfied with the current conditions of life take to the streets to demonstrate it, similar to the past. However, it is worth noting that today’s conditions and environment formulate other approaches to the study of this issue. Regardless, one may use similar studying principles such as root cause analysis, consideration of ideas in the literature, and, today, the Internet and television.

Works Cited

River, Charles. The Haitian Revolution: The History and Legacy of the Slave Uprising that Led to Haiti’s Independence . Independently Published, 2020.

Stieber, Chelsea. Haiti’s Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954. NYU Press, 2020.

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IvyPanda. (2024, January 19). The Haitian Revolution's Principles. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-haitian-revolutions-principles/

"The Haitian Revolution's Principles." IvyPanda , 19 Jan. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/the-haitian-revolutions-principles/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'The Haitian Revolution's Principles'. 19 January.

IvyPanda . 2024. "The Haitian Revolution's Principles." January 19, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-haitian-revolutions-principles/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Haitian Revolution's Principles." January 19, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-haitian-revolutions-principles/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Haitian Revolution's Principles." January 19, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-haitian-revolutions-principles/.

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You Say You Want a Revolution. Do You Know What You Mean by That?

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

In June, 2018, the political commentator Fareed Zakaria found himself in the Campo de’ Fiori, in the center of Rome, with Steve Bannon , who was then President Trump’s chief strategist. Bannon—whom Zakaria describes as a “volatile personality” and as a conduit for the international resurgence of nativist sentiment—had come to Italy to help convince two populist parties, one on the left and the other on the right, that their interests were aligned. He drew Zakaria’s attention to a monument to Giordano Bruno , the sixteenth-century poet and cosmologist who held Copernican views about the universe and was burned at the stake for heresy. Where Galileo sold out and recanted, Bannon explained, Bruno was a real hero. Zakaria was surprised by Bannon’s admiration for Bruno, who is widely regarded as a progressive, proto-Enlightenment figure. But Bannon was less interested in the substance of Bruno’s opinions than in his uncompromising defiance. It was Bannon’s conviction, Zakaria writes, “that in times of turmoil, take-no-prisoners radicalism is the only option.”

In his new book, “ Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present ” (Norton), Zakaria concedes the turmoil but resists the radicalism. Everywhere you look, he says, you can see dramatic change. The rules-based international order has been destabilized. Traditional left-right divides have been transfigured. The trade-friendly economic consensus of the post-Communist era has yielded to protectionism and autarky. Given that we may be living through “one of the most revolutionary ages in history,” he thinks that lessons can be drawn from previous revolutionary ages, especially those that involved actual revolutions.

The concept of revolution, Zakaria notes, is a slippery thing. How is it that Bannon, of all people, identifies himself as a revolutionary? Zakaria finds the problem embedded in the word itself. “Revolution” was originally employed to describe the orbital movement of a celestial body around a fixed axis. A full revolution is completed by returning to a starting point. But before long the word acquired a secondary meaning, designating a rupture that renders everything utterly different. The word now refers at once to predictability and to transformation. “Revolution” is hardly the only word that contains its opposite—“to sanction” and “to dust” are similar in that way—but in this particular case Zakaria sees something profound. Revolutions contain the seeds of their own undoing: “Radical advance is followed by backlash and a yearning for a past golden age imagined as simple, ordered, and pure.”

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Taken to its logical conclusion, this idea would represent a cyclical idea of history—a fatalist notion that has recently found favor among conservatives. Zakaria believes that we can and do make progress. But he is wary of the assumption that history tends to move in the direction of ever-greater human flourishing, a Whiggish view he associates with such frustrated optimists as Steven Pinker. Zakaria’s book represents an attempt to distinguish between revolutions that have inspired thermostatic reactions and revolutions that have endured.

The most auspicious models, Zakaria suggests, might be found in the Netherlands and in England. In the sixteenth century, all of Europe was confronted with a series of economic, technological, and social shocks: the globalization spurred by the Age of Exploration, the innovations that emerged from war and from the necessity of economic expansion, and a “radical identity revolution ” driven by the Protestant Reformation. After most of the Netherlands threw off Habsburg rule, in 1579, the Dutch formed a republic that capitalized on these changes. For reasons of geography, they were accustomed to diffuse authority. The need to reclaim land from the sea, and the collective action required to do so, Zakaria explains, had insured that feudal centralization never took hold: “People had to work together to get anything done.” Technological development, in the form of windmills and dikes, was a necessity for survival, and precocious urbanization provided an infrastructure for industry and trade. The cultural shift to Protestantism encouraged freethinking. Finance was democratized in the form of the world’s first stock exchange, and the leaders of the republic were wise enough to ally themselves with the country’s commercial interests.

The Netherlands might have been early to liberalize, but that didn’t mean it was exempt from what Zakaria describes as the “familiar story” of reaction: “rapid advancement, dislocation, and then a wave of conjured memories of a lost golden age.” The Dutch Republic was split between the economic dynamism of tolerant coastal technocrats and the atavistic impulses of more conservative rural populations that had been left behind by liberal merchants and bankers. The country’s Golden Age came to an end in 1672, when the French invaded. A version of liberalism, in the form of a young William of Orange, nevertheless survived and, sixteen years later, was ported across the Channel to lead a constitutional monarchy. England, like the Netherlands, was prepared to make a seamless transition to a liberal dispensation. The brilliance of England’s Glorious Revolution , Zakaria thinks, lay in the collaboration of the country’s Whig and Tory élites in a “ bipartisan escape from dangerous polarization,” and in their agreement that “English prosperity defined the national interest, not dynastic glory or religious zeal.”

A good revolution, as Zakaria tells it, is not initiated by political actors. It occurs when exogenous shocks—in the form of economic or technological trends—are tamed by competent management. Liberalism flourished in the Netherlands and England because revolution was a “bottom-up process” in those countries. When Dutch and English leaders saw fit to intervene in the course of human affairs, they were content merely “to implement, confirm, and codify the transformations that had already taken place in society, beneath the surface of politics.” These revolutions succeeded insofar as they were scarcely needed. A good revolution respects the limits of natural forces. A bad revolution crosses a line and provokes the backlash necessary to maintain equilibrium. Zakaria’s counterexample to the Netherlands and England is France, whose revolution was a “grisly failure” insofar as revolutionary élites “tried to impose modernity and enlightenment by top-down decree on a country that was largely unready for it.” The Reign of Terror and the consolidation of power under Napoleon, Zakaria says, prove that social change “must take place organically.”

Zakaria’s descriptions of revolutionary activity make a great din—when things aren’t “plunging” or “soaring,” they have “skyrocketed” or “ricocheted”—but his evocations of historical inflection points feel dutiful and formulaic. They are also confusing. After a while, one can’t help but wonder what Zakaria means by “revolution.” What he calls the “Dutch revolution” seems to refer to the entirety of the country’s Golden Age, which lasted about ninety years and ended with the republic’s abrupt decline. We’re invited, with fine illogic, to compare the success of the Industrial Revolution with the failure of the French Revolution, even though a failed industrial revolution would be no industrial revolution at all. He identifies the English Revolution with the Glorious Revolution, treating decades of bloodletting and repression as mere prelude to a crowning moment of liberal reconciliation. By this reasoning, one might claim that the Russian Revolution culminated in glasnost.

Nor is it clear what Zakaria means by “top-down” or “bottom-up.” The French Revolution failed because the élites tried to force top-down change, but the Glorious Revolution—which might better be described as a coup by Dutch commercial interests—somehow reflected a wise acquiescence to bottom-up processes. The specifics of revolutionary activity seem of secondary interest. Zakaria takes solace in the fact that civilization seems able to heal itself. The revolutions of 1848, for example, may have been “crushed” by societies mired in primordial autocracy, but everything that they hoped to enact—the proliferation of human freedoms—was “almost invariably adopted through gradual reform.” The implication is that what the vanguard struggled to achieve by fiat was going to happen anyway. All they had to do was sit tight.

Most revolutions have, at one point or another, had their revolutionary credentials challenged. Events that purportedly failed to rise to the radical occasion include the English Revolution (merely a bid for bourgeois power, skeptics say), the Mexican Revolution (a rivalry between warlords), and even the French Revolution. The American Revolution is a recurring example. At the time, it seemed as though an awful lot changed after 1776; in retrospect, many things in fact remained the same. Some historians have introduced further distinctions without introducing further clarity. The colonists’ struggle against the British, it has been suggested, qualified as a political revolution but did not meet the criteria for a social revolution. This, however, is just a restatement of the observation that the same set of historical episodes might, with equal plausibility, be described from one point of view as continuous and from another as a break. The word “revolution” may be perfectly useful as a compliment we pay to inflection points for developments that are, by consensus, important. But the attempt to provide a load-bearing definition might be more trouble than it’s worth.

In “ The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It ” (Basic), Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, a professor of history at the University of Southern California, offers what he calls an “anti-exceptionalist history of the age of revolution.” In his view, there is an alternative way to understand why the great transatlantic revolutions that straddled the turn of the nineteenth century—in the United States, France, Haiti, and Latin America—are often said to have “failed.” Unlike Zakaria, Perl-Rosenthal doesn’t really believe that counter-revolutionary or illiberal reversals prove that the early revolutionaries were overweening. He argues, instead, that the degree to which these revolutions met (or did not meet) their egalitarian aims should be understood in the light of processes that took a full generation to unfold. In 1972, Henry Kissinger asked the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, what he thought of the French Revolution. Zhou is said to have responded that it was “too early to tell.” (The story apparently turns on a miscommunication—Zhou was probably referring to the events of 1968 rather than those of 1789—but it persists for a reason.) Perl-Rosenthal doesn’t go that far, but, like a professor who generously grants extensions before grading, he thinks that revolutionary fervor can be assessed only as the spark of a longer undertaking.

Perl-Rosenthal’s book follows several members of what he calls the first generation of “gentlemen revolutionaries”: his cast includes famous political actors such as John Adams; less well-known but influential women such as Maria Rivadeneyra, a prioress in Peru, and Marie Bunel, a merchant in Haiti; and more run-of-the-mill figures like France’s Louis-Augustin Bosc, now best known for the pears that bear his name. Perl-Rosenthal believes that these figures had considerable difficulties “overcoming the hierarchical reflexes of the mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic old regime in which they had grown up.” Theirs was a largely closed world of intimate relationships and norms opaque to outsiders. Their social attitudes made it difficult for them to forge alliances beyond their station.

Take Rivadeneyra, who presided over a convent in Cuzco, Peru, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Her ancestors had come to South America with Francisco Pizarro, and she was raised in luxury as part of the imperial colony’s criollo élite. She liked ballads sung from balconies and farces performed in the evenings. Her skirts were inlaid with mother-of-pearl medallions, and she took chocolate for breakfast. In 1780, a member of the native nobility, Túpac Amaru, launched a revolt against the Spanish. At the time, Perl-Rosenthal notes, it was easy to imagine that the interests of the natives and those of the criollos might be united against an extractive empire. Rivadeneyra herself seems to have considered the possibility of such an alliance. In the end, however, she and her family led a defense of Cuzco that turned the war against Amaru, who was executed.

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Rivadeneyra, like the other figures of Perl-Rosenthal’s first revolutionary generation, “never lost sight of the interests of her caste.” But even if she had given freer rein to her sympathy with the rebellious natives, Perl-Rosenthal argues, the two worlds were simply too far apart for such a political confederation to be realized. He is a careful reader of personal letters, attentive to the codes of polite salutation that marked the worthiness of a correspondent. His principals had sparse experience with the cultivation of cross-class coalitions, and there was no social infrastructure that might have afforded them opportunities to learn. Hereditary inequality was too great. The coalitions that did emerge were held together weakly—by the mere agreement among individuals that what they wanted was “not this”—or they arose by default. The wealthiest people were risk-averse because they had a lot to lose; the poorest people were risk-averse because they couldn’t afford to lose the little they had.

Insurrectionary outbreaks were thus almost random. Perl-Rosenthal takes as one example the storming of the Bastille. “The working classes in Paris, conditioned by decades of increasingly separate living, had a remarkable capacity for self-organization,” he writes. “Yet the same social realities that had made them effective self-organizers also defined the horizon of their political vision.” The dark, crenellated fortress of the Bastille seemed like a reasonable target. It just looked like a place that deserved storming. And it was, if only symbolically, which is why we remember it. As a strategic objective, however, the Bastille—which housed nothing of royal or military importance—left something to be desired. The crowd’s unfamiliarity with which sanctum actually mattered, Perl-Rosenthal says, “spurred action against places and people who did not in fact have much power to meet their demands.” This miscalculation wasn’t the protesters’ fault; they had no way to obtain the right information or to develop the proper alliances.

In Perl-Rosenthal’s telling, the revolutions on the other side of the Atlantic followed a similar script. The social stratification of the pre-revolutionary era, in each case, provided little room for egalitarianism. The United States Constitution was “the product of a successful revolution from above,” he writes. “The Constitutional Convention itself was a virtual coup by the elite against the existing government.” Something comparable happened in Haiti. Toussaint Louverture , the leader of the Haitian Revolution, was born into slavery, but even as a freedman he remained a product of a hierarchical world. Although this revolution had “begun as a revolt from below,” Louverture “tried to transform it into a revolution from above,” falling into what one recent biographer has described as an “authoritarian spiral.” In his attempts to protect the nascent country’s independence, he was perfectly willing to send the masses back to their plantations, in a condition of near-bondage. Élites acted this way because they were certain that only they could know what was best for everyone.

But this was a generational limitation, and it eroded with time. If such men as John Adams and Toussaint Louverture could only imagine rearranging the game pieces, Perl-Rosenthal says, they nevertheless enabled their successors to upend the board: “They had managed to irretrievably fracture the old regime. Out of the disarray, new people and new kinds of politics were beginning to emerge.” As classes started to mix, movements became broader and more heterogeneous. When the United States’ capital moved to Washington, D.C., elected officials and other élites had no choice but to room and drink with men of the lower orders. In the provinces, the seventeen-nineties saw the coalescence of the Republican Party, which took shape as “a mass organization that united elite and working-class voters.” Drinking together led to durable institutions that advanced more equitable forms of mobilization, expanding the franchise, and political participation more generally, beyond property owners. In Latin America, solidarity movements succeeded in an extended campaign for independence from the Spanish crown, though, as Perl-Rosenthal notes, the revolutionary results frequently assumed an illiberal cast. In Haiti, the militarized coercion of the Louverture era and its immediate successors coalesced into a pattern of one-man rule, even as the country’s development was hamstrung by punitive foreign debts.

As a piece of scholarship, Perl-Rosenthal’s book is a persuasive and inspired contribution to perennial historical debates. Was the American Revolution a project of radical egalitarianism, or was it simply a transfer of élite power? Was the French Revolution stymied by external forces of reaction, or was it fundamentally illiberal to begin with? His response is that we should not limit our gaze to “supposedly sharp turning points and dramatic transformations” but instead narrate the past as a series of successive and intertwined campaigns to improve our estate. Perl-Rosenthal’s book is written for a general readership, and he makes the further case that the stakes of this enterprise extend beyond those of scholarship: “Buying into this fantasy of instantaneous revolution has significant consequences—most damagingly, a potential loss of faith in the possibilities of change if the transformation fails to arrive as quickly as expected.”

It’s little wonder that our current political climate—in which the stagnation and senescence at the top can feel disconnected from agitation and ferment below—has called forth treatises on revolutionary ages. Electrifying visions of the future seem in short supply. As the writer and historian Steve Fraser put it in a recent essay for the magazine Jacobin , the right and the left have settled on competing calls not for revolution but for restoration. Both Zakaria and Perl-Rosenthal want to shore up our faith in transformative incrementalism, the idea that we might extricate ourselves from this mess by putting one foot in front of the other.

Zakaria’s book concludes that revolutions fail when they’re visited on societies that are unprepared to adapt to new conditions. He has little to say about what kinds of outcomes might be desirable, but much to say about what we should not do. He is very concerned about the rise of identity politics. Although he opens his book with the Bannon anecdote, he implies that men like Bannon aren’t worth worrying about, and are best seen as a reaction engendered by an overreaching left. In a 2022 opinion piece for the Washington Post , Zakaria suggested that the problem with the Democratic Party was that it was too concerned with pronouns.

A fixation on contemporary identity politics helps explain his assessment of revolutionary precedents. The Glorious Revolution was good because the conservative and liberal élites of the time agreed to stop harping on religious differences and focus instead on economic commonalities. Their French counterparts a century later failed to heed this lesson: the Reign of Terror, he says, “shows how appeals to exclusive categories of identity can easily get out of control. When everyone is either a patriot or a traitor, heads will roll.” Technological lurches, such as the rise of artificial intelligence, are scary, but the social order can be preserved, and the pendular threat of “backlash” staved off, as long as politicians do not use identity to pander to anxious constituencies: “Where politics was once overwhelmingly shaped by economics, politics today is being transformed by identity.”

This may be an untenable distinction. Economic interests are not simply waiting to be revealed. They’re mediated through social identity, and that’s true even of political groups defined overtly through economic relations. (As the historian E. P. Thompson put it, “The working class made itself as much as it was made.”) If economics directly shaped politics, people like Maria Rivadeneyra would have allied themselves with the natives against the Spanish. Those common interests had to be constructed, made socially legible, through a process of trial and error.

In this respect, Perl-Rosenthal’s book can be taken as a story of how novel forms of solidarity became available to a post-revolutionary generation. This new cohort was no longer in thrall to the old regimes’ social structures. What the first generation broke, in his account, the second generation was able to piece back together more deliberately. An abatement of inequality created the occasion to gather and make trade-offs. These trade-offs required sustained personal interactions among heterogeneous groups that scarcely existed in an earlier era, further reducing inequality. This was not a matter of giving up on “identity politics” but a matter of reshuffling, and expanding, the kinds of identities that mattered. Perl-Rosenthal suggests that, in the early decades of the United States, the Republican Party afforded a mechanism for a more capacious national self-image, one that could encompass both élites and commoners. With the tumult of the American Revolution behind them, the longing for freedom in theory gave way to the administration of particular freedoms in practice.

Those freedoms were, needless to say, unevenly distributed, which is one of the reasons that some critics have written off the American Revolution. At the end of Perl-Rosenthal’s introduction, he suggests that his “anti-exceptionalist” story of revolutions might put to rest the notion that the American Revolution was “distinctively tainted by the patriot movement’s imbrication with slavery and racism.” His primary reference here seems to be the Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, with its charge that the putative egalitarianism of the Framers was little more than a lie. What this interpretation leaves out, according to Perl-Rosenthal, is that all the transatlantic revolutions began to unfold at an accelerating pace as the initial revolutionary vanguard was swept aside. By our lights, it is monstrous that this branching egalitarianism remained racist and exclusionary, and that freedom for some entailed the perpetuation of violent bondage for others. But there was nothing singular about this compromise. After all, Haiti freed the enslaved but maintained a system of plantation agriculture that was virtually indistinguishable from slavery. Contemporary activists on the left like to quote Emma Lazarus and Maya Angelou to the effect that none of us are free until all of us are free. This is lovely as an aspirational ideal and powerful as an exhortation, but it should not be mistaken for an empirical claim. Perl-Rosenthal’s book shows in detail how some people achieved a measure of freedom while others remained in chains. The “we” of “We the people” represented an expansion of the circle of moral concern; it took, and will take, a lot more work to expand that circle further.

If we act in good faith to “reckon in this way with the pervasive illiberalism of the revolutionary era,” Perl-Rosenthal offers, this discussion might “point to an exit from today’s heated debates” about the rot at the core of our nation’s founding. It could replace the low hum of mutual suspicion—and the fantasy that a true revolution can come only at the hands of the morally pure—with a renewed commitment to the unglamorous work of political organization. His emphasis on the logistics of solidarity reminds us that moral advances are neither a salutary by-product of economics or technology, as Zakaria seems to think, nor a matter of progressive inevitability.

Still, the analytic edge of Perl-Rosenthal’s account, like Zakaria’s, is blunted by its central historical category. The concept of revolution, especially in contrast to mere reform, conveys an exhilaration that’s hard to relinquish. Yet it’s worrying when an argument places weight, as Zakaria’s does, on an honorific that encompasses both the removal of Louis XVI and the widespread adoption of steam power. Perl-Rosenthal does his best to preserve something productive in the idea of a grand event that requires a generational shift to fructify. But this scheme, he seems to concede, makes much more sense in the case of the United States than it ever did in Peru or in Haiti. The halting progress he describes so well could just as easily be portrayed as the result of distinct campaigns, rather than as belated aspects of a dramatic and all-encompassing movement. Perhaps the most revolutionary step we could take would be to relax our grip on “revolution” itself. ♦

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America Owes a Historical Debt to Haiti

The united states is complicit in the nation’s political chaos. it’s time to change that..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

My name is Lydia Polgreen, and I’m an opinion columnist for “The New York Times.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I think you have a lot of people in Haiti who are ready at this moment to help build this new future. And really, what they need is financial support, security support, and also, the time and space to build their own ideas of what a future Haiti could look like. And just because there is this long history of failure doesn’t mean that success is not possible.

I’ve been traveling to Haiti as a journalist since 2003. It was actually the first big international assignment that I was ever asked to do. And it began, I think, a decades-long engagement with the story of Haiti and its struggle for self-determination, for security, for dignity, and just a deep interest in the lives and culture of the Haitian people.

Whenever you’re talking about Haiti, it’s hard to know where to begin the story because, obviously, the country was born in this extraordinary act of liberation way back in the 19th century, but this most recent crisis, I think, is worth just sort of taking on its own terms. And it really began with the assassination of Haiti’s president, a man called Jovenel Moise, who was assassinated in July of 2021.

The gunmen broke into the home of Haiti’s president early this morning. Then shots are fired.

The assassination just really threw the country into total disarray.

In addition to the political crisis, kidnappings for ransom have surged in recent months.

And Haiti just hasn’t been able to recover since then. It’s had an appointed prime minister. A man named Ariel Henry ostensibly has been the head of the government, but for the past three years, has not been able to organize new elections to return Haiti to democracy. He’s become a very unpopular figure. The civil society organizations and political parties and others have been pushing him to resign.

And then he was also facing pressure from these armed groups that have popped up in Haiti and have been a very, very big part of the crisis because there’s just real kind of, like, lawlessness and violence happening in the streets. And under some pressure from various regional leaders, and of course, the internal pressure within Haiti, he did agree to resign.

It’s hard to talk about a crisis in Haiti without thinking about the kind of broader global context. The United States has meddled and interfered. They’ve invaded, they’ve occupied, they’ve sanctioned. They’ve restored leaders. They’ve backed dictators. They’ve tried to bring democracy back. And it’s a constant back and forth, almost to the point where it’s sometimes hard to draw a line of where the United States’ policy and action ends and where Haitian agency begins.

The question of what we owe Haiti now, I think, is a really complex one. And I don’t think that there’s an easy answer. Where I ultimately come down is that if, in the past, the United States has had a kind of paternalistic attitude towards Haiti, where you’re kind of trying to tell Haiti what to do, tell Haiti how it should be governed, who should be in charge, that the role that the US should play now is really more of a midwife. And it’s a role of supporting and creating an environment in which Haitians themselves can determine their own future.

I think every American needs to understand that Haiti is not some separate thing from the United States. Our fates, our stories, our histories are deeply, deeply intertwined. The United States owes, I believe, a deep debt to Haiti. And so much of the story of what Haiti has become is a story of our misdeeds and actions over many, many years. So there’s a historic debt there.

Also, one thing that you’ll often hear people say when they say why we should care about what happens in Haiti, they’ll often talk about migration. There is a very, very ugly history of using Haitians as a kind of bogeyman, and deportations continue.

But I think that it goes even deeper than that during the early days of the AIDS crisis. For example, when people would talk about who has HIV and AIDS, it would be homosexuals, Haitians, and hemophiliacs. The United States has a lot to answer for in terms of the relationship that we’ve had with Haiti over a very, very long time. And they’re part of our story.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been tracking these conversations with various political groups and civic groups and religious groups that have just been working tirelessly to come up with a blueprint for what a just transition in Haiti back towards democracy might look like.

And the one thing that was really standing in their way was that the prime minister was refusing to step down. And look, now he’s gone, and there’s an opportunity to take all of that incredibly difficult and hard work that these people have done and imagine a new and different future for Haiti. And that’s the thing that gives me a sense of hope. There are lots and lots and lots of problems on the horizon. There are lots of things that could derail it. But this is a moment for a fresh start for a country that desperately needs one.

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By Lydia Polgreen

Produced by Vishakha Darbha

Despite the violence and political turmoil in Haiti, New York Times Opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen argues that this might be the tipping point that finally brings peace to that island nation. U.S. interference in Haiti has long been criticized, and in this audio essay, she says we finally have a chance to repair the damage we’ve done and help set the country back on a course toward dignity and democracy: “Just because there is this long history of failure doesn’t mean that success is not possible.”

(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud, Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Special thanks to Shannon Busta.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist and a co-host of the “ Matter of Opinion ” podcast for The Times.

Here’s How AP African American Studies Helps Teachers ‘Get Students to Think’

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Ahenewa El-Amin has taught African American literature and AP English Literature and Composition for years at Henry Clay High School in Lexington, Ky.

She heard that Florida state officials moved to ban the pilot of the College Board’s AP African American Studies course last year for allegedly defying state law that restricts instruction on race. (Kentucky itself has a similar law in effect.) That got her interested. El-Amin spoke to her school administration about getting involved in the pilot program.

This school year, El-Amin’s students are helping her give shape to the course ahead of its official launch nationally and at Henry Clay in the fall.

El-Amin spoke with Education Week about her experience with the pilot, the skills her students are learning in the interdisciplinary course, and how it can help students learn to build connections with others.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What has it been like to teach AP African American Studies?

It is truly interdisciplinary. You have to know a little bit about a lot to be successful for the students. It’s been hard but it’s been so much fun. Because not only am I trying to figure out exactly what the College Board wanted me to know and what they wanted the students to know, [but] I don’t have a practice test to look at to see exactly what the kids [need to] know. I just have to figure it out on my own. So it is difficult. However, it is so much fun.

Unfortunately, time is a thing. I knew nothing about the Haitian Revolution and the lesson should have taken two days. The lesson took me almost a week and a half, because I would stop and say “oh this is so interesting.” And then we had to follow my mind as it meanders through history.

I also have gotten enormous support from not just an online community of educators, but also from the people in this building. Because when I’m teaching unit one for AP American Studies, it’s the African diaspora . And we started with a map of the continent of Africa. I’ve been to places: a Fulbright scholarship to South Africa, studying reparations after the fall of apartheid, and then I’ve been to Senegal and The Gambia, because I read Roots and decided I wanted to go there. That’s all I knew about Africa. So I had to pull a lot from the information of my colleagues who taught AP [European History], and AP World [History] and AP Human Geography, just to understand that. So I have loved this year, because it has made me collaborate with so many different people.

What are some of the skills students are learning in the class that they can use in college and beyond?

Critical thinking skills. I tell them you were blessed with cognitive functions. Thinking should be [the] number one thing that you do every day. And the way we start thinking in this course, it’s wonderful. It forces you to change the lens from which you view the world. It really is probably some of the same information that is in other studies, you’re just looking at it from a different lens. Kind of like when I teach in AP [English] Literature [and Composition] we’re looking at The Great Gatsby . The Great Gatsby is absolutely white-centric. You’re talking about the times of the 1920s. And there are very few African Americans. But if you take another novel, another great love-story novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was told entirely from an African American perspective, you can see that they are talking about the same time period from two different perspectives.

It’s also some research skills. We’re not there yet, except for when we did take that trip to the library [to learn about redlining in students’ neighborhoods]. They were fascinated by the microfiche machine and the idea of going into the stacks and looking at books.

How do you feel about teaching a course that has become a hot-button political issue?

As a teacher, my entire goal is to get kids to think. I don’t care what they’re thinking about. And read everything and then use that reading to think.

I’ve been at Henry Clay as the only Black teacher of a core class for 15 years or so. And I teach at Henry Clay, named for a grievous slave owner. Even when I wear Henry Clay across my chest, I have to think about these things. I’ve navigated a world in which when I was teaching AP [English Literature and Composition] was criticized for teaching too many Black voices.

To me, it’s par for the course. And I also teach British literature. Rudyard Kipling has never been brought up in a conversation to ban, and he [espoused] more on white supremacy than anyone. Never once have I been questioned for teaching white voices who speak actively about separatism and supremacy. But I’ve been questioned for teaching about Black characters, who are not even expressing Black [thoughts] in any kind of way.

So par for the course, doesn’t bother me.

Any other insights for teachers looking to teach the course this fall?

One of the primary jobs of a teacher is to make connections with students. If you can make connections with students, and have those students make connections with the curriculum, [then] that breaks down barriers, [and] there can be no choice but to offer the course. Teaching a course like this is important. It’s not simply important because you’re teaching historical happenings. It is important because it gives you a level of knowledge to have conversations.

There can never be a wrong time to break down a barrier of communication and learning.

It’s one of the reasons I love teaching. Something I say to somebody eventually is going to help them communicate better with somebody else in this life. We’re all connected. And I truly do believe it’s not the grades that you make, it’s the hands that you shake. And you can’t shake hands outside of your own group unless you are willing to learn about other groups.

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‘It’s a siege, it’s a war’: Haiti’s gangs tighten violent grip in lethal insurrection

Port-au-Prince, the capital, has plunged into chaos, and gangs have shifted their offensive to places once considered safe

As gang fighters and police battled outside his home near Haiti’s beleaguered capital late last month, Nielsen Daily Fierrier hurled himself to the ground.

“From six in the morning until six in the evening, the gunfire hardly stopped,” said the 25-year-old electrician from Pétion-Ville, a middle-class suburb in the hills south of Port-au-Prince.

“In the morning, you could have short breaks of three or four minutes before the gunfire resumed. But all afternoon, there was non-stop shooting,” Fierrier said of the clashes, in which several neighbours were wounded and one local man killed.

“He had left his home without identification papers and was reportedly shot by mistake,” the electrician said, his voice cracking with emotion. “He was someone from the area, who was just on his way home.”

Not far away, a British aid worker was also hunkered down awaiting evacuation . During past outbreaks of violence and natural disasters, the area had been considered a relatively safe sanctuary, said Matt Knight from the humanitarian group Goal, as shots went off outside. “Now the battle has come to Pétion-Ville.”

A month after a coalition of criminal groups called “Viv Ansanm” (Live Together) plunged Haiti’s capital into chaos with an audacious offensive against the state, the fighting continues – and in recent days has begun shifting to places long considered oases of calm.

The reason for that migration into areas such as Pétion-Ville, Laboule and Thomasin is unclear.

Amy Wilentz, an American journalist who has covered Haiti for nearly four decades, suspected the highly unusual attacks were designed to intimidate members of Haiti’s political and economic elite who lived in such enclaves and might be part of a future government after Ariel Henry, the prime minister, was forced to resign by the gang insurrection. “It’s very calculated … and it’s very frightening,” she said.

Emmanuela Douyon, a Haitian activist and writer, suspected sowing terror in wealthier districts was partly about projecting power and gaining territory, but fundamentally part of a gang ploy to pose as revolutionaries, challenging the rich on behalf of Haiti’s downtrodden masses.

Speaking to Sky News – one of the few foreign news organizations to reach Port-au-Prince since the revolt began on 29 February – the man acting as the main gang mouthpiece lambasted Haiti’s corrupt elites and the “indecent” chasm between rich and poor.

“We have weapons in our hand and it’s with the weapons that we must liberate this country,” Jimmy Chérizier, a notorious gang boss nicknamed Barbecue, told the British channel .

Douyon and many other Haitians spurn such posturing.

“They are just adopting this discourse and this narrative to try to gain sympathy and have people forgive them for what they have done,” the activist said of the gangs, who many suspect are using violence to strong-arm Haiti’s future leaders into granting them an amnesty.

“No one in Haiti believes any gang member is a revolutionary,” Douyon added. “They are rapists, killers, kidnappers.”

Robert Fatton, a Haitian politics professor from the University of Virginia, agreed the gangs were “trying to present a revolutionary face – [even though] there’s nothing revolutionary about them. Most of those groups were financed and created by politicians and by business elites - and now they have great autonomy from those forces and they’re enjoying that power,” Fatton said, adding:“This is not something that, in my mind at least, represents any type of popular uprising, let alone a revolution.”

Revolution or not, Haiti’s capital has been indisputably upended by the insurrection, which has seen police stations and government offices ransacked and torched, airport shut down and thousands of prisoners released from jail.

A UN report released last Thursday said Haiti faced a “cataclysmic situation” with state institutions “close to collapse”, violence out of control, and 1.4 million people “a step away from famine”. Haiti’s already fragile health system is also teetering on the brink , with 18 health institutions no longer functioning in the capital region, including the country’s largest public hospital, the State University hospital. More than 1,500 people were killed in the first three months of this year, compared with 4,451 in the whole of 2023.

“The vacuum of governance in Haiti has left everybody scrambling for power and domination. I think that’s what we’re seeing right now … It’s a free-for-all,” said Wilentz, comparing the turmoil to the ‘dechoukaj’ (uprooting) – looting and violence that followed the 1986 downfall of the dictator François ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier.

“This is like a giant dechoukaj - [only that] was machetes and stones. It was grotesque – but no one had a gun.”

The 2024 uprising, in contrast, is being waged with the help of a large and sophisticated arsenal of semi-automatic weapons, mostly smuggled into Haiti from the US thanks to its lax firearm laws.

“It is shocking that despite the horrific situation on the ground, arms keep still pouring in. I appeal for a more effective implementation of the arms embargo,” the UN human rights commissioner, Volker Türk, said last week.

Some believe the key to a possible solution lies with a presidential transitional council which is being set up in the hope of steering the rudderless Caribbean country towards fresh elections. Haiti currently has no elected officials and has lacked an elected president since 2021 when the incumbent, Jovenel Moïse, was murdered in his home.

The council is also tasked with paving the way for the deployment of a controversial Kenya-led multinational “security support mission” , supposedly designed to help Haiti’s police force fight back against gangs now said to control 90% of the capital.

In its first declaration last week, eight of the council’s nine members vowed to work together to restore “public and democratic order” and “relieve the suffering of the Haitian people, trapped for too long between bad governance, multi-faceted violence and disregard for their opinions and needs.

“We are at a crucial turning point,” said the group, which includes representatives of political parties such as the Fanmi Lavalas and Pitit Desalin, civil society and the private sector. “It is imperative that the entire nation comes together to overcome this crisis.”

Holy Week saw tentative signs of a lull in the violence but, for now, there is little hint of lasting peace. On Monday there were reports of heavy gunfire near the national palace and other parts of downtown Port-au-Prince. Bodies reportedly appear on the city’s streets most mornings and, with its airport and seaport still surrounded by the gangs and closed, Haiti’s capital remains largely cut off from the world.

Aid workers say more than 30,000 Haitians have been displaced by the recent fighting, while the US, Canada and France have begun airlifting hundreds of citizens to safety in helicopters.

“To me the message that’s being sent [with these evacuations] is that nothing is going to be done and everybody’s too scared of the gangs to leave their citizens in this maelstrom,” said Wilentz, warning of the disastrous humanitarian consequences for the millions left behind.

“It’s a siege, it’s a war,” Wilentz added.

“And when people are in that kind of desperate situation, they tend to pick themselves up and go to the nearest coastline. And then they get on boats and they die in great numbers in the water.”

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