The Haitian Revolution's Role in Advancing Human Rights

Fr a n k l i n W . K n i g h t
The Haitian Revolution and
the Notion of Human Rights
The Haitian Revolution, long neglected and occasionally
forgotten by historians, represents one of the truly noteworthy
achievements in the annals of world history. Among its many
ac-
complishments was a bold, though unsuccessful, attempt to
advance
universal human rights in the early nineteenth century. The
measure
was bold and farsighted. Had it succeeded, one of the greatest
rev-
olutions in the modern past would have fundamentally changed
the
course of history and the relations between the peoples of the
earth.
One of the cruel ironies of history is that so little is known or
re-
membered of one of the greatest and most noble revolutions of
all

time. And it is especially ironic that hardly anyone anywhere
today
associates Haiti with either democracy or the exercise of human
rights. Nevertheless, Haiti played an inordinately important role
in
the articulation of a version of human rights as it forged the
second
independent state in modern history.
Haiti failed spectacularly as a symbol of political freedom. Yet
it established and maintained a viable state for more than a cen-
tury when state formation was a novel undertaking anywhere.
The attempt to promote human rights also largely failed because
those ideas were so far ahead of their time; even acknowledged
The Journal of The Historical Society V:3 Fall 2005 391
T h e J o u r n a l
humanitarians of that era failed to recognize the full equality of
all persons. After all, it was not until after the Second World
War
that the then newly established United Nations made the pursuit

of human rights one of its goals. The Haitian ideals failed
because
Haiti not only sought political freedom but also equality for
black
people in a world where the power structure was
overwhelmingly
white—and whites held a rigid, hierarchical view of the world
that
they refused to have challenged at that time. Although they won
their freedom, the Haitians lost the long postwar publicity
campaign
along with the early struggle to make human rights an
international
issue. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the
history
of white-on-white atrocities and extreme forms of genocide
forced
the world to reconsider the notion of international human
rights—
which has become one of the interests of the United Nations
since
1947.
In order to understand the Haitian role in the development of

hu-
man rights it is vitally important to examine the context of that
un-
usual revolution that took place in the French colony on the
western
part of the island of Hispaniola at the end of the eighteenth
century.
The Haitian Revolution
The Haitian Revolution represents the most thorough case study
of
revolutionary change anywhere in the history of the modern
world.1
In ten years of sustained internal and international warfare a
colony
populated predominantly by plantation slaves overthrew both its
colonial status and its economic system and established a new,
in-
dependent political state of entirely free individuals—with
former
slaves constituting the new political authority.
As the second state to declare and establish its independence in
the Americas, the Haitians had no viable administrative models
to

follow, but eighteenth-century revolutionaries, unlike their
succes-
sors, did not look for precedents. The British North Americans
who
declared their independence in 1776 left slavery intact in their
new
state and in any case theirs was more a political revolution than
a
392
The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights
social and economic revolution. The success of Haiti against all
odds, however, would make social revolutions an extremely sen-
sitive issue among the leaders of political revolt elsewhere in
the
Americas during the final years of the eighteenth century and
the
first decades of the nineteenth century.2
The genesis of the Haitian revolution cannot be separated from
the wider concomitant events of the later eighteenth-century At-
lantic World, as has been noted repeatedly by such writers as

Laurent
Dubois and David Geggus.3 Indeed, the period between 1750
and
1850 represented an age of spontaneous, interrelated
revolutions,
and events in Saint Domingue/Haiti constitute an integral—
though
often overlooked—part of the history of that wider world.4
These
multifaceted revolutions combined to alter the way that
individuals
and groups saw themselves and their worlds.5 But even more,
the
intellectual changes of the period instilled in some political
leaders
a confidence (not new in the eighteenth century, but far more
gener-
alized than before) that creation and creativity were not
exclusively
divine or accidental attributes, and that both general societies
and
individual conditions could be rationally engineered or re-
ordered.6
All this clearly indicated that the world of the eighteenth cen-

tury was experiencing a widespread revolutionary situation. Not
all
of such revolutionary situations, of course, ended up in full-
blown
convulsing revolutions.7 But everywhere the old order was
being
challenged. New ideas, new circumstances, and new peoples
com-
bined to create a portentously “turbulent time.”8 Bryan
Edwards,
a sensitive English planter in Jamaica as well as an articulate
mem-
ber of the British Parliament, lamented in a speech to that body
in
1798 that “a spirit of subversion had gone forth that set at
naught
the wisdom of our ancestors and the lessons of experience.”9
But
if Edwards’s lament was for the passing of his familiar cruel
and
constricted world of privileged planters and exploited slaves, it
was
certainly not the only view.

For the vast majority of workers on the far-flung plantations un-
der the tropical sun of the Americas, the revolutionar y situation
393
T h e J o u r n a l
presented an occasion to seize the opportunity and fundamen-
tally change their personal world, and maybe the world of oth-
ers equally unfortunate.10 Nowhere was that reality more
sharply
demonstrated than in the highly productive and extremely valu-
able French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue between 1789
and 1804. The hundreds of thousands of African slaves and tens
of thousands of legally defined free coloreds found the hallowed
wisdom and experiential “lessons” of Bryan Edwards to be a de-
spicably inconvenient barrier to their quest for individual and
col-
lective liberty. It was a sentiment motivated by differences not
only of geography and culture but also of race and condition.
Masters and slaves interpreted their worlds in quite different

ways.
Within fifteen turbulent years, a colony of coerced and
exploited
slaves successfully liberated itself and radically and
permanently
transformed its slaveholding world. It was a unique case in the
history of the Americas: a thorough revolution that resulted in a
complete metamorphosis of the social, political, intellectual,
and
economic life of the colony. Socially, the lowest stratum of the
society—the slaves—became equal, free, and independent
citizens.
Politically, the new citizens created the second nominally
indepen-
dent state in the Americas, and the first independent non-
European
state to be carved out of the European empires anywhere. By so
doing they not only declared that all men within their new state
would be free, but that they would all enjoy equal privileges as
well.
In short, the Haitian Revolution abolished social rank and privi -
leges based on status, color, condition, and occupation. Their

lead-
ers hoped that Haiti would become a genuine model
meritocracy. In
this they elevated human rights above civil rights.
Intellectually, the ex-colonists gave themselves a new, if not
entirely original name—Haitians—and defined all Haitians as
“black,” thereby striking a shattering psychological blow
against the
emerging intellectual traditions of an increasingly racist Europe
and
North America that saw a hierarchical world eternally
dominated
394
by types representative of their European-derived somatic norm
im-
ages.11 In Haiti all citizens were legally equal, regardless of
color,
race, or condition. Equally important, the example of Haiti
convinc-
ingly refuted the patently ridiculous notion, still enduring

among
some social scientists by the end of the twentieth century, that
slav-
ery produced “social death” among slaves and persons of
African
descent.12
In the economic sphere, the Haitians dramatically transformed
their conventional tropical plantation agriculture, especially in
the
north, from a large-scale latifundia-dominated structure into a
soci-
ety of minifundists, or small-scale, marginally self-sufficient
produc-
ers who reoriented their production away from export-
dependency
to an internal marketing system supplemented by a minor,
although
considerably varied, export market sector.13 These changes,
how-
ever, were not accomplished without extremely painful
dislocations
and severe long-term repercussions both for the new Caribbean
state

and its society.14
The Haitian model of state formation drove xenophobic fear
into
the hearts of the great majority of white people along the
Atlantic
seaboard, from Boston to Buenos Aires, and shattered their
com-
placency about the unquestioned superiority of their own
political
models.15 To Simón Bolı́var, himself of partial African
ancestry, it
was a model of revolution that was to be avoided by the
Spanish-
American states seeking their independence after 1810, but he
sug-
gested the best way was to free all slaves.16
The Atlantic Context for Revolution
If the origins of the revolution in Saint-Domingue lie in the
broader
changes of the Atlantic World during the eighteenth century, the
im-
mediate precipitants must be found in the French Revolution.17
The

symbiotic relationship between the two remained extremely
strong
and will be discussed later, but both resulted from the
construction
of a newly integrated Atlantic world community during the
seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries.
395
T h e J o u r n a l
Those broader movements of empire building in the Atlantic
world produced the dynamic catalyst for change that fomented
po-
litical independence in the United States of America between
1776
and 1783. Even before that event, Enlightenment ideas had agi-
tated the political structures on both sides of the Atlantic,
overtly
challenging the traditional mercantilist notions of imperial
admin-
istration and appropriating and legitimating the unorthodox free
trading of previously defined interlopers and smugglers.18 The

En-
lightenment proposed a rational basis for reorganizing state,
society,
and nation.19 The leading thinkers promoted and popularized
new
ideas of individual and collective liberty, of political rights, and
of
class equality, and even to a certain extent, of social democracy
that
eventually included some unconventional thoughts about
slavery.20
But their concepts of the state remained rooted in the traditional
Western European social experience, which did not
accommodate
itself easily to the current reality of the tropical American
world, as
Peggy Liss shows in her insightful study entitled Atlantic
Empires.21
Questions about the moral, religious, and economic
justifications
for slavery and the slave society formed part of this range of in-
novative ideas. Eventually these led to changes in
jurisprudence,

such as the judgment reluctantly delivered by British Chief
Justice
Lord William Mansfield in 1772 that the owner of the slave
James
Somerset could not return him to the West Indies, thereby
implying
that by being brought to England, Somerset had indeed become
a
free man. In 1778 the courts of Scotland declared that slavery
was
illegal in that part of the realm. Together with the Mansfield
rul-
ing in England, the Scottish decision meant that slavery could
not
be considered legal in the British Isles. Those legal rulings
encour-
aged the formation of societies designed to promote the
amelioration
in the condition of slaves, or even advocating the eventual
abolition
of the slave trade and slavery.22
Even before the declaration of political independence on the
part of the British North American colonies, slavery was under

attack from a number of religious leaders—among the Quakers
396
and Evangelicals, for example—and political leaders—such as
William Wilberforce [1759–1833], Thomas Clarkson [1760–
1846],
and Granville Sharp [1735–1813]. Anti-slavery movements
flour-
ished both in the metropolis and in the colonies.23 In 1787, the
Abbé
Gregoire [1750–1831], the Abbé Raynal [1713–1796], the
Marquis
de Lafayette [1757–1834], and others formed an anti-slavery
com-
mittee in France called the Société des Amis des Noirs, which
took
up the issue in the recently convened Estates General in 1789
and
later pushed for broadening the basis of citizenship in the
National
Assembly.24 Their benevolent proposals, however, were
prematurely

overtaken by events.
The intellectual changes throughout the region cannot be sepa-
rated from changes on the ground in the Caribbean. During the
eighteenth century the Caribbean plantation slave societies
reached
their apogee. English and French (mostly) absentee sugar
producers
made headlines in their respective imperial capitals, drawing the
at-
tention of political economists and moral philosophers.25 The
most
influential voice was probably that of Adam Smith [1723–
1790],
whose Wealth of Nations appeared in the auspicious year of
1776.
Basing his arguments on the comparative costs of production,
Smith
insisted “. . . from the experience of all ages and nations, I
believe,
that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than
that
performed by slaves.”26 Slavery, Smith further stated, was both
un-

economical and irrational not only because the plantation
system
was a wasteful use of land, but also because slaves cost more to
maintain than free laborers.27 Smith did not condemn slavery as
immoral, although, as Jerry Muller points out, Smith thought
“eco-
nomic stagnation was coupled with the degradation that goes
with
personal dependency.”28
The Caribbean Plantation System
The plantation system had, by the middle of the eighteenth
century,
created some strange communities of production throughout the
Caribbean—strange in the sense of being highly artificial
constructs
397
T h e J o u r n a l
involving labor inputs from Africa, capital and managerial
direction from Europe, and provisions from mainland America.

These colonies largely produced tropical products such as sugar,
coffee, cotton, and tobacco for overseas markets in Europe,
Africa,
and North America. Strange, too, because despite the ideas of
Adam
Smith, those coerced Caribbean societies were, at times,
enormously
productive as well as profitable.29
Elsewhere I have referred to this unintended consequence of the
sugar revolutions as the development of exploitation societies —
a
tiered system of interlocking castes and classes all determined
by
the necessities, structure, and rhythm of the sugar
plantations.30
French Saint-Domingue prided itself, with considerable
justifica-
tion, as being the richest colony in the world. According to
David
Geggus, in the 1780s Saint-Domingue accounted for
. . . some 40 percent of France’s foreign trade, its 7,000 or so
plantations were absorbing by the 1790s also 10–15 percent

of United States exports and had important commercial links
with the British and Spanish West Indies as well. On the coastal
plains of this colony little larger than Wales was grown about
two-fifths of the world’s sugar, while from its mountainous
interior came over half the world’s coffee.31
The population reflected the structural distortion of the typical
slave
plantation exploitation society in tropical America. A white
popu-
lation of approximately 25,000 psychological transients
dominated
a social pyramid that included an intermediate subordinate
stratum
of approximately the same number of free, black, or
miscegenated
persons referred to throughout the French Caribbean colonies as
gens de couleur, and a depressed, denigrated, servile, and
exploited
majority group of some 500,000 workers from Africa or of
African
descent.32
Those demographic proportions would have been roughly famil -

iar for Jamaica, Barbados, or Cuba during the acme of their
slave
plantation regimes.33 The centripetal cohesive force remained
the
398
plantations of sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo, and the
subsidiary
activities associated with them, especially cattle-raising and
local
food production. The plantations, therefore, molded both local
so-
ciety and local economy with a human umbilical cord—the
transat-
lantic slave trade—that attached the colony to Africa. Sustained
economic viability depended on the continuous replenishing of
the
indispensable labor force by the importation of African
slaves.34
Nevertheless, the system was both sophisticated and complex,
with

interlocking commercial marketing operations that extended to
sev-
eral continents.35
If whites, free coloreds, and slaves formed the three distinct
castes
in the French Caribbean colony, then these caste divisions over -
shadowed a complex system of classes with corresponding inter -
nal class antagonisms across all sectors of the society. Among
the
whites the class antagonisms were between the successful so-
called
grands blancs and their associated hirelings—plantation
overseers,
artisans, and supervisors—on the one hand and the so-called pe-
tits blancs—small merchants’ representatives, small proprietors,
and
various types of hangers-on—on the other. The antagonism was
pal-
pable. At the same time all whites shared varying degrees of
fear and
mistrust of the intermediate group of gens de couleur, but
especially
the economically upwardly mobile sector of wealth, education,

and
polished French culture.36 For their own part, the free non-
whites
had seen their political and social abilities increasingly
circumscribed
during the two or so decades before the outbreak of revolution.
Their
wealth and education certainly placed them socially above the
petits
blancs. Yet, theirs was also an internally divided group, albeit
with
a division based as much on skin color as on genealogy. All
slaves
were distinguished—if that terminology may be employed
here—by
their legal condition as the lifetime property of their masters,
and
were occasionally subject to extraordinary degrees of daily
control
and coercion. Within the slave sector, status divisions derived
from
a bewildering number of factors applied in an equally bewilder -
ing number of ways: skills, gender, occupation, location (urban
or

399
T h e J o u r n a l
rural, household or field), relationship to production, or simply
the
arbitrary whim of the master.37
The slave society was an extremely explosive society, although
the tensions could be, and were, carefully and constantly
reduced
by negotiations between and across the various castes.38 While
the
common fact of owning slaves might have produced some
common
interest across caste lines, that occurrence was neither often
enough
nor strong enough to establish class solidarity. White and free
col-
ored slave owners were often insensitive to the basic humanity
and
civil rights of the slaves but they were forced nevertheless to
negoti-
ate continuously the ways in which they operated with their

slaves in
order to prevent the collapse of their fragile plantation world.
Nor
did similarity of race and color facilitate an affinity betw een
free
non-whites and slaves. Slaves never accepted their legal
condemna-
tion, but perpetual militant resistance to the system of
plantation
slavery was neither inherent to Saint-Domingue in particular,
nor to
the other slave communities of the Caribbean in general.39
Specific
cases of systemic breakdown resulted more from the
coincidence
of any combination of circumstances than from an inherent rev-
olutionary disposition of the individual artificial commercial
con-
struct. Slave resistance did not appear to be a major
preoccupation
of Caribbean slave owners before the Haitian Revolution. In any
case, to see the slave society as precariously poised between
polar

extremes of accommodation or resistance is to deny the complex
operational features of that, or any other society.
Haiti, nevertheless, presented the classic case of breakdown.
Both
its internal dynamics and its colonial connection provided the
per-
fect coincidence of time, place, and circumstances that
permanently
shattered the construct of the slave society. Both the context
and the
coincidence are vitally important.
Without the outbreak of the French Revolution it is unlikely
that the system in Saint-Domingue would have broken down in
the fateful year of 1789. And while Haiti precipitated the
collapse
of the system regionally, it seems fair to say that a system such
as
400
the Caribbean slave system bore within itself the seeds of its
own

destruction and therefore could not last indefinitely. According
to
David Geggus in A Turbulent Time,
More than twenty [slave revolts] occurred in the years 1789-
1832, most of them in the Greater Caribbean. Coeval with the
heyday of the abolitionist movement in Europe and chiefly
associated with Creole slaves, the phenomenon emerged well
before the French abolition of slavery or the Saint-Domingue
uprising, even before the declaration of the Rights of Man.
A few comparable examples occurred earlier in the century,
but the series in question began with an attempted rebellion
in Martinique in August 1789. Slaves claimed that the gov-
ernment in Europe had abolished slavery but that local slave
owners were preventing the island governor from implement-
ing the new law. The pattern would be repeated again and
again across the region for the next forty years and would
culminate in the three large-scale insurrections in Barbados,
1816, Demerara, 1823, and Jamaica, 1831. Together with the

Saint-Domingue insurrection of 1791, these were the biggest
slave rebellions in the history of the Americas.40
In the case of Saint-Domingue—as later in the cases of Cuba
and
Puerto Rico—abolition resulted from an economically weakened
and politically isolated metropolis at the end of the eighteenth
cen-
tury. But the eventual demise of the slave system resulted from
a
complex combination of internal and external factors.
Revolutions in France and Saint-Domingue
The local bases of the colonial slave society as well as the
structural
organization of political power could not have been more differ -
ent in France and its overseas Caribbean territories. In France in
1789 the political estates had an extremely long tradition and
the
metropolitan social hierarchy was firmly established by
genealogy
and antiquity. In colonial Saint-Domingue the political system
was
401

T h e J o u r n a l
relatively new and the hierarchy was determined arbitrarily by
race
and the occupational relationship to the plantation. Yet the
novelty
of the colonial situation did not produce a separate and
particular
language reflective of its reality, and the limitations of a
common
language (that of the metropolis) created a pathetic confusion
with
tragic consequences for both metropolis and colony.
The basic divisions of French society derived from socioeco-
nomic class distinctions, and the popular slogans generated by
the
Revolution—Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity as well as the
Rights
of Man—did not (and could not) express sentiments equally
appli-
cable in both metropolis and colony.41 What is more, the
Estates

General, and later the National Assembly, simply could not
under-
stand how a common language would divide Frenchmen at home
and overseas. And yet it hopelessly occurred.
The colonies were not homogenous. They were also geograph-
ically and socially distinct. French Saint-Domingue was, in ef-
fect, three separate though contiguous colonies—North
Province,
West Province in the center, and South Province—each with its
own administration. The large sugar plantations with their
equally
large concentrations of slaves found in North Province were not
typical of West or South Province. The linguistic imagery of the
Revolution resonated differently both by social groups and by
geography.
The linguistic confusion sprung from two situationally differ -
ent foundations. In the first place, the cahiers de doléances of
the
colonies represented overwhelmingly not the views of a cross
section
of the population, but merely of a small minority, composed in

the
main of wealthy plantation owners and merchants, and
especially
the absentee residents in France. Moreover, as the French were
to
find out eventually, the colony was quite complex
geographically
and the wealthy, expatriate planters of the Plaine du Nord were
a
distinct numerical minority. The interests and preoccupations of
the
middling sorts of West Province and South Province were
distinctly
different.
402
In the second place, each segment of the free population
accepted
the general slogans of the Revolution to win acceptance in
France,
but they then particularized and emphasized only such portions
as

applied to their individual causes. The grands blancs interpreted
the
Rights of Man as rights and privileges pertaining to bourgeois
man,
much as did Thomas Jefferson and the framers of North Ameri -
can independence at Philadelphia in 1776. Moreover, grands
blancs
saw liberty not as a private affair but rather as greater colonial
autonomy, especially in economic matters. They also hoped that
the metropolis would authorize more free trade, thereby
weakening
the restrictive effects of the mercantilist commerce exclusif
with the
mother country. Petits blancs wanted equality, that is, active
citizen-
ship for all white persons, not just the wealthy property owners,
and
less overall bureaucratic control over the colonies. They also
stressed
a curious fraternity based on the accidental whiteness of skin
color
that they equated with being genuinely French. Gens de couleur

also wanted equality and fraternity, but they based their claim
on
an equality of all free persons regardless of skin color, since
they—
even more so than petits blancs—fulfilled all other
qualifications
for active citizenship.
Slaves were not part of the initial discussion and sloganeering,
but from their subsequent actions they clearly supported liberty.
It
was not the liberty of the whites, or even the free coloreds,
how-
ever. Theirs was a personal and individual freedom that
potentially
undermined their relationship both to their direct masters and
the
plantation on which they lived. This interpretation clearly
jeopar-
dized the material wealth and well-being of a considerable
number
of those who were already free.42
Both in France and in its Caribbean colonies the course of the
Revolution took strangely parallel paths. In France, as in Saint-

Domingue and the other colonies, the Revolution began with the
calling of the Estates-General to Versailles in the auspicious
year of
1789.43 Immediately conflict over form and representation
devel-
oped but it affected metropolis and colonies in quite different
ways.
403
T h e J o u r n a l
In the metropolis the Estates-General, despite not having met
for
175 years, had an ancient (albeit almost forgotten) history and
tra-
dition. The various overseas colonists who assumed themselves
or
aspired to be Frenchmen and hoped to participate in the
metropoli-
tan deliberations as well as the unfolding course of events did
not
really share that history and that tradition. In many ways they
were

new men created by a new type of society—the overseas
plantation
slave society. Those French colonials were quite distinct from
the ex-
perience of the planters and slave owners in the English
Caribbean.
For example, Edward Long of Jamaica was simultaneously an
in-
fluential and wealthy member of English society as well as an
estab-
lished Jamaican planter. Bryan Edwards was a long-serving
member
of the Jamaica Legislature and after 1796 a legitimate member
of
the British Parliament, representing at the same time a
metropoli-
tan constituency as well as overseas colonial interests.44 The
French
political structure had no room for such duplication.
At first things seemed to be going well for the French colonial
representatives as the Estates-General declared itself a National
As-
sembly in May 1789 and the National Assembly proclaimed
France

to be a Republic in September 1792. In France “the subsequent
his-
tory of armed rebellion reveals a seemingly irresistible drive
toward
a strong, central executive. Robespierre’s twelve-man
Committee of
Public Safety (1793–94), gave way to a five-man Directorate
(1795–
99), then to a three-man Consulate, followed by the designation
of
Napoleon as First Consul in 1799, and finally to Napoleon’s
coro-
nation as emperor in 1804.”45 In the colonies the same
movement
is discernible with a significant difference—at least in the
provinces
of Saint-Domingue. There the consolidation of power during the
period of armed rebellion gravitated toward non-whites and
ended
up in the hands of slaves and ex-slaves or their descendants.
Seen another way, the political structure of metropolis and
colony
diverged in two crucial ways. In the first place the metropolis

moved
toward an increasingly narrow hierarchical structure of power
even
as the state moved away from dynastic succession to national
404
administration in a declared republic, while in the colonies,
especially in Saint-Domingue, power gravitated democratically
downward to the actual majority of the population. In the
second
place the metropolis pursued a policy of political exclusion
elim-
inating royalists, but seeking to expand the power base as well
as
privileges of the bourgeoisie. In the colonies, however, once the
slave
revolt broke out the quest was for a leveling or elimination of
all dis-
tinctions of social class and political power—although this was
not
an idea universally accepted at the beginning of the revolt.

Clearly, as
Laurent Dubois points out, the new citizens of the French
Caribbean
colonies expanded the political conception of the Enlightenment
by
enfranchising a group of individuals whose inclusion vastly
enlarged
the conventional idea of universal rights.46
With the colonial situation far too confusing for the
metropolitan
legislators to resolve easily, the armed revolt in the colonies
started
with an attempted coup by the grands blancs in the North who
re-
sented the petits blancs-controlled Colonial Assembly of St.
Marc (in
West Province) writing a constitution for the entire colony in
1790.
Both white groups armed their slaves and prepared for war in
the
name of the Revolution in France.47 When, however, the
National
Assembly passed the May Decree of 1791 enfranchising
propertied

mulattos, the whites temporarily forgot their class differences
and
forged an uneasy alliance to forestall what to them appeared to
be
a more serious revolutionary threat of racial equality.
The determined desire of the free non-whites to make a military
stand to secure their rights—also arming their slaves for war—
made
the impending civil war in the colony inevitably a racial war.
The precedence set by the superordinate free groups was not
lost
on the slaves who comprised the overwhelming majority of the
pop-
ulation. If slaves could fight in separate causes for the
antagonistic
free sectors of the population, white as well as non-white, they
could
fight equally on their own behalf. And so they did. Violence,
first
employed by the whites, became the common currency of
political
change. Finally in August 1791 after warring for almost a year
on

405
T h e J o u r n a l
one or another side of free persons who claimed they were
fighting
for liberty, the slaves of the Plain du Nord applied their fighting
to
their own cause. And once they had started they refused to
settle
for anything less than full freedom for themselves. When it
became
clear that their emancipation could not be sustained within the
colo-
nial political system, they created an independent state in 1804
to
secure that freedom. It was the logical extension of the
collective
slave revolt that began in 1791.
But before that could happen, Saint-Domingue experienced a
pe-
riod of chaos between 1792 and 1802. At one time as many as
six

warring factions were in the field simultaneously: slaves, free
per-
sons of color, petits blancs, grands blancs, plus invading
Spanish
and English troops in addition to the French forces vainly trying
to restore order and control. Alliances were made and dissolved
in opportunistic succession. As the killing increased, power
slowly
gravitated to the overwhelming majority of the population—the
former slaves no longer willing to continue their servility. After
1793 under the control of Toussaint Louverture, himself an ex-
slave and ex-slave-owner, the tide of war turned inexorably,
assuring
the victory of the concept of liberty held by the slaves.48 That
was
duly, if temporarily, ratified by the National Assembly in
September
1793. But that was neither the end of the fighting nor the end of
slavery.
The victory of the slaves in 1793 was, ironically, a victory for
colonialism and the Revolution in France. The leftward drift of
the

Revolution and the implacable zeal of its colonial
administrators,
especially the Jacobin commissioner, Léger Félicité Sonthonax,
to
eradicate all traces of counterrevolution and Royalism—which
he
identified with the whites—in Saint-Domingue facilitated the
ulti-
mate victory of the blacks over the whites.49 Sonthonax’s role,
how-
ever, does not detract from the brilliant military leadership and
polit-
ical astuteness provided by Toussaint Louverture. In 1797 he
became
governor-general of the colony and in the next four years
expelled
all invading forces (including the French) and gave the colony a
406
remarkably modern and egalitarian constitution. He also
suppressed

(but failed to eradicate) the revolt of the free coloreds led by
André
Rigaud and Alexander Pétion in the South, and captured the
neigh-
boring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, freeing its small
number
of slaves. Saint Domingue became a new society of equals with
a
new political structure as an independent state. As a reward,
Tous-
saint Louverture made himself governor-general for life (July
1801)
much to the displeasure of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Distinctiveness of the Haitian Revolution
Why did the revolution follow such a unique course in Saint
Domingue that eventually culminated in the abolition of
slavery?
Carolyn Fick presents a plausible explanation when she writes:
It can be argued therefore that the abolition of slavery in
Saint Domingue resulted from a combination of mutually re-
inforcing factors that fell into place at a particular historical
juncture. No single factor or even combination of factors –

including the beginning of the French Revolution with its cat-
alytic ideology of equality and liberty, the colonial revolt of the
planters and the free coloreds, the context of imperial warfare,
and the obtrusive role of a revolutionary abolitionist as civil
commissioner – warranted the termination of slavery in Saint
Domingue in the absence of independent, militarily organized
slave rebellion . . .
From the vantage point of revolutionary France the aboli -
tion of slavery seems almost to have been a by-product of the
revolution and hardly an issue of pressing concern to the na-
tion. It was Sonthonax who initiated the abolition of slavery
in Saint Domingue, not the Convention. In fact, France only
learned that slavery had been abolished in Saint Domingue
when the colony’s three deputies, Dufay, Mills, and Jean-
Baptiste Mars Bellay (respectively, a white, a mulatto, and a
former free black), arrived in France in January, 1794 to take
407

T h e J o u r n a l
their seats and asked on February 3 that the Convention offi -
cially abolish slavery throughout the colonies . . . .
The crucial link then, between the metropolitan revolution
and the black revolution in Saint Domingue seems to reside
in the conjunctural and complementary elements of a self-
determined, massive slave rebellion, on the one hand, and the
presence in the colony of a practical abolitionist in the person
of Sonthonax, on the other.50
Such “conjunctural and complementary elements” did not
appear
elsewhere in the Americas—not even in the neighboring French
colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe.
The reality of a politically semi-free Saint Domingue with a
free
black population ran counter to the grandiose dreams of
Napoleon
to reestablish a viable French American empire. It also created
what
Anthony Maingot called a “terrified consciousness” among the

rest
of the slave masters in the Americas. Driven by his desire to
restore
slavery and his demeaning disregard of the local population and
its
leaders, Napoleon sent his brother-in-law General Charles
Victor
Emmanuel Leclerc with about 10,000 of the finest French troops
in
1802 to accomplish his aim. It turned out to be a disastrously
fu-
tile gesture. Napoleon ultimately lost the colony, his brother -in-
law,
and most of the 44,000 fine troops eventually sent out to
conduct
the savage and bitter campaign of reconquest. Although he
treach-
erously spirited Toussaint Louverture away to exile and
premature
death in France, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the
independence
of Haiti on January 1, 1804.
Haiti, the Caribbean, and the Americas would never be the same

as before that portentous slave uprising of 1791. The idea of
liberty
as a fundamental principle of human rights slowly took life
among
slaves in the Americas.51
The Impact of the Haitian Revolution
The impact of the revolution was immediate and widespread.
The
anti-slavery fighting immediately spawned unrest throughout
the
408
region, especially in communities of Maroons in Jamaica, and
among slaves in St. Kitts. It sent a wave of immigrants flooding
outward to the neighboring islands, and to the United States of
America and Europe. It revitalized agricultural production in
Cuba
and Puerto Rico. As Alfred Hunt shows, Haitian emigrants also
pro-
foundly affected American language, religion, politics, culture,
cui-

sine, architecture, medicine, and the North American conflict
over
slavery, especially in Louisiana.52 Most of all, it deeply
affected the
psychology of the whites throughout the Atlantic world. The
Haitian
Revolution undoubtedly accentuated sensitivity to race, color,
and
status across the Caribbean.
Among the political and economic elite of the neighboring
Caribbean states the example of a black independent state as a
viable
alternative to the legally recognized Maroon communities
compli-
cated their domestic relations. The predominantly non-white
lower
orders of society might have admired the achievement in Haiti,
but
they were conscious that such an example could not be easily
dupli-
cated. “Haiti represented the living proof of the consequences
of not
just black freedom,” wrote Anthony Maingot, “but, indeed,

black
rule. It was the latter which was feared; therefore, the former
had
to be curtailed if not totally prohibited.”53
The favorable coincidence of time, place, and circumstances
that
produced a successful Haiti failed to materialize again
elsewhere.
For the rest of white America, the cry of “Remember Haiti”
proved
an effective way to restrain exuberant local desires for political
lib-
erty, especially in slave societies. Indeed, the long delay in
achieving
Cuban political independence can largely be attributed to astute
Spanish metropolitan use of the “terrified consciousness” of the
Cuban Creoles regarding what had happened in Saint Domingue
between 1789 and 1804.54
Nevertheless, after 1804 it would be difficult for the local
politi-
cal and economic elite to continue the complacent status quo of
the

middle of the eighteenth century. Haiti cast an inevitable
shadow
over all slave societies. Anti-slavery movements grew stronger
409
T h e J o u r n a l
and bolder, especially in Great Britain, and the colonial slaves
themselves became increasingly more restless. Most important,
in
the Caribbean the whites lost the supreme confidence that they
had
before 1789 about their ability to maintain the slave system
indef-
initely. In 1808 the British abolished their transatlantic slave
trade
and dismantled the British colonial slave system between 1834
and
1838. During that time free non-whites (and Jews) were given
po-
litical equality with whites in many colonies. The French
abolished
their slave trade in 1818 and their slave system, reconstituted
after

1803 in Martinique and Guadeloupe, limped on until 1848. Both
British and French imperial slave systems—as well as the Dutch
and
the Danish—were dismantled administratively from the center
of
their respective empires. The same administrative dismantling
could
be used to describe the process for the mainland Spanish
American
states and Brazil. Slavery in the United States ended abruptly in
a
disastrous civil war. Spain abolished slavery in Puerto Rico
(where
it was not vitally important) in 1873. The Cuban case, where
slav-
ery was extremely important, proved far more difficult and also
resulted in a long, destructive civil war before emancipation
was fi-
nally accomplished in 1886. By then, however, it was not the
Haitian
revolution but Haiti itself that evoked negative reactions among
its
neighbors.55

The Haitian Revolution and Human Rights
The great but frequently overlooked contribution of the Haitian
Revolution lies in its fundamental articulation of the notion of
hu-
man rights, not just in Haiti but also throughout the world. Haiti
was the first country to articulate a general principle of
common,
unqualified equality for all its citizens, although special
privileges
remained for soldiers and the political elite. Nevertheless, the
fun-
damental concept of a common humanity ran deeply through the
early Haitian constitutions.
Europeans thought in terms of civil rights rather than general
human rights. They assumed that the civil state was analogous
410
to the body and that each component had attributes from which
certain differential privileges derived. Viewed this way, society

be-
came irreversibly ranked hierarchically, and non-Europeans as
well
as women, children, the mentally handicapped, and the socially
delinquent remained irrevocably inferior to all European men. It
was this notion that permeated the constitution of the United
States
and made problematic the incorporation of free non-Europeans
in
the emerging state until well into the twentieth century.
Haitians to various degrees thought everyone in the state—
regardless of gender, rank, occupation, color, or place of
origin—
was equal. They sought to construct a state and a constitution to
reflect this. They sought, as Laurent Dubois terms it, “a colony
of
citizens.”56 By declaring that all Haitians were black as well as
free
they sought—unsuccessfully but conscientiously—to remove
race
and color as fundamental criteria of nationalism, or as the
French

described it at the time, “citizenship.” That they failed to
implement
their ideas does not indicate that those ideas were either absent
or
flawed. They were, like so many other good ideas, articulated
too
far ahead of their time. The ideas foundered miserably against
the
harsh pragmatic necessity of establishing a viable
administration
in a war-ravaged state constantly threatened by hostile and envi-
ous neighbors. In the long run, Haiti did not have the power and
resources to impose itself politically and militarily on the
Atlantic
World.
The failure of the Haitians to elevate human rights over civil
rights
would be repeated many times in many places around the globe,
not
only by aspiring states but also by idealistic organizations. One
of
the most poignant cases was that of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the United

States,
as meticulously recounted in the recent brilliant book by
historian
Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the
African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955.57
After
the Second World War the United Nations articulated a charter
for
human rights, a notion still actively debated. A century and a
half
411
T h e J o u r n a l
before the Haitians tried to do the same in their constitutions.
The
bold Haitian example should neither be forgotten nor lost as we
enter the third century of Haitian independence.
NOTES
1. The bibliography on the Haitian Revolution is large and
growing. For a sample
see Colin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–
1848 (London:
Verso Press, 1988); Philip D. Curtin, “The Declaration of the

Rights of Man in
Saint-Domingue, 1788–1791,” Hispanic American Historical
Review, 30, 2 (May
1950), 157–75; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in
the Age of Revo-
lution 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 27–
179; Alex Dupuy,
Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and
Underdevelopment Since 1700
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1989); Carolyn Fick, The Making of
Haiti: The Saint
Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, TN: The
University of Tennessee
Press, 1990); John Garrigus, “A Struggle for Respect: The Free
Coloreds in Pre-
Revolutionary Saint Domingue, 1760–69,” unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, The
Johns Hopkins University, 1988; David Geggus, Slavery, War,
and Revolution: The
British Occupation of Saint Domingue 1793–1798 (Oxford:
Oxford University
Press, 1982); David Geggus, “The Haitian Revolution,” The
Modern Caribbean,
edited by Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer (Chapel Hil l,
NC: The Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 1989), 21–50; Eugene D.
Genovese, From Rebellion
to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of
the Modern World
(Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1979);
François Girod, De la
société Créole. Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris:
Hachette, 1972); Robert
Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The
Story of the Haitian
People 1492–1971 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978); Alfred N.

Hunt, Haiti’s
Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the
Caribbean (Baton
Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); C. L. R.
James, The Black
Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution (New York:
Random House, 1963. First published in 1938.); David Nicholls,
From Dessalines
to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti
(Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1979); Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian
Revolution 1789–
1804 (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1973);
George Tyson, Jr.,
ed., Toussaint L’Ouverture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1973); M.L.E.
Moreau de Saint Méry, Description topographique, physique,
civil, politique et
historique de la partie Française de l’isle de Saint Domingue
(Philadelphia: Chez
auteur, 1796); P, My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee
from Two Rev-
olutions, edited and translated by Althéa de Peuch Parham
(Baton Rouge, LA:
Louisiana State University Press, 1959), and Alyssa G.
Sepinwall, The Abbé Gre-
goire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern
Universalism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005). The best studies to date
of the Caribbean
aspects of the French Revolution, however, are Laurent Dubois,
A Colony of Cit-
izens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French
Caribbean, 1787–1804
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004),

and Laurent Dubois,
Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian
Revolution (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
2. See especially, Jorge I. Domı́nguez, Insurrection or Loyalty:
The Breakdown of
the Spanish American Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1980), 146–
69; Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution,
1750–1850 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 159–77.
3. Dubois, Avengers of the New World; David P. Geggus, ed.
The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC:
University of South
Carolina Press, 2001); and David Barry Gaspar and David
Patrick Geggus, eds., A
412
Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater
Caribbean (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997).
4. See R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution 2
vols. (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1959); Lester D. Langley, The Americas in
the Age of Revo-
lution 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996);
James H. Billington,

Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of Revolutionary Faith (New
York: Basic Books,
1980).
5. For an example see Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé
Gregoire and the French
Revolution.
6. Franklin W. Knight, “The Disintegration of the Slave
Systems, 1772–1886,” Gen-
eral History of the Caribbean, Volume III The Slave Societies
of the Caribbean,
edited by Franklin W. Knight (London: UNESCO/Macmillan,
1997), 322–
45.
7. A case in point is England, where the revolutionary situation
was defused through
reformist politics.
8. The phrase is taken from the title of A Turbulent Time: The
French Revolution and
the Greater Caribbean, edited by David Barry Gaspar and David
Patrick Geggus
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
9. Quoted in J. H. Parry, Philip Sherlock, and Anthony Maingot,
A Short History of
the West Indies 4th edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1987), 136.
10. The quest for individual and collective freedom was
widespread among all slaves
and occasionally new views of society and social relations
embraced both slave
and free, but rarely did these revolts involve the establishment

of a state as in the
case of Haiti. In Coro in western Venezuela, a free republic was
declared in 1795
that would have fundamentally altered the social status quo but
it had a very short
existence. See Domı́nguez, Insurrection or Loyalty, 55–56, 151–
60, and Geggus,
Impact of the Haitian Revolution.
11. It is uncertain why the Haitians selected this name for their
new country. It rep-
resented one of the pre-Hispanic chiefdoms that existed on
Hispaniola of which
the population in 1804 presumably had no connected memory. It
is interesting
symbolically that the Haitians would choose an indigenous
American rather than
an African name for their new state.
12. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A
Comparative Study (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). The idea may also be
found in Fick, Making
of Haiti, 27: “To assure the submission of slaves and the
mastership of the owners,
slaves were introduced into the colony and eventually integrated
into the planta-
tion labor system within an overall context of social alienation
and psychological,
as well as physical violence. Parental and kinship ties were
broken; their names
were changed; their bodies were branded with red-hot irons to
designate their new
owners; and the slave who was once a socially integrated
member of a structured
community in Africa had, in a matter of months, become what

has been termed
a ‘socially dead person.’” It is hard to accept such a totally
nullifying experience
for Africans in the Americas for two reasons. The first is that
Africans constructed
the new American communities along with their non-African
colonists, and per-
manently endowed the new creations with a wide array of
influences from speech
to cuisine, to music, to new technology. The various bodies of
slave laws were a
patent recognition that although slaves were property, they were
also people requir-
ing severe police control measures. Non-Africans established
social contacts with
them and their mating produced a mélange of demographic
hybridity throughout
the Americas. In the second place, Africans produced offspring
in the Americas
and these formed viable communities everywhere—communities
that were duly
recognized in law and custom. For a remarkable case of
achievement and upward
social mobility see Marı́a Elena Dı́az, The Virgin, the King, and
the Royal Slaves of
El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780
(Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000). The development of viable Afro-
American communities
throughout the Americas does not in any way negate the fact
that slavery was a
413

T h e J o u r n a l
de-humanizing experience permeated with violence and
exploitation. Nevertheless,
the imagery of “social death” greatly exaggerates and does
harmful violence to the
reality of enslaved people in the Americas.
13. Alex Dupuy, Haiti, 55–57.
14. Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a
Fragmented Nationalism,
2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 196–
219.
15. See John Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, 1808–
1826 (New York:
Norton, 1973).
16. Langley, Americas in the Age of Revolution, 196–200.
17. See Gaspar and Geggus, A Turbulent Time.
18. These changes have been examined more thoroughly in
Atlantic Port Cities: Econ-
omy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850,
edited by Franklin
W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville, TN: University of
Tennessee Press, 1991).
19. While there is a wide range of opinion on exactly when the
Enlightenment started,
there is better consensus on what it was: a major demarcation in
the emergence of
the modern age and the French Revolution. See Franco Venturi,
The End of the Old
Regime in Europe 1768–1776: The First Crisis, translated by R.
Burr Litchfield

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Peter Gay, The
Enlightenment; An
Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1967–69).
20. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western
Culture (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1966), especially, 391–445.
21. Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and
Revolution, 1713–
1826 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 105–
26.
22. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 99–100.
23. Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American
Revolution (London: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1974).
24. Ruth F. Necheles, The Abbé Grégoire, 1787–1831: The
Odyssey of an Egalitarian
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1971), 71–90.
25. See, for example, Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
(Chapel Hill, NC: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1944); Robert Louis Stein, The
French Sugar
Business in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, LA:
Louisiana State University
Press, 1988); and Patrick Villiers, “The Slave and Colonial
Trade in France just
before the Revolution,” in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic
System, edited by
Barbara L. Solow (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press,
1991), 210–36.

26. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Abbreviated edition.
New York: Penguin
Books, 1974. First published 1776), 184.
27. The debate over relative labor costs of free and enslaved
workers has not ter-
minated. See Did Slavery Pay?, edited by Hugh G. J. Aitken
(Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1971); Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on
the Cross: The
Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little Brown,
1974).
28. Jerry Z. Muller, Adam Smith in His Time and Ours:
Designing the Decent Society
(New York: The Free Press, 1993), 121. The extract is by
Muller, not Adam Smith.
29. Except for tobacco, the primary export crops were all
introduced into the Americas
by Europeans. Sugar cane came from India via the
Mediterranean and the African
Atlantic Islands. Coffee was Arabian in origin. Cotton was
Egyptian.
30. For a description of settler and exploitation societies see
Knight, The Caribbean,
74–82. This did not indicate that sugar production was the only
economic activity
or that all the Caribbean islands concentrated on sugar
production. It did mean
that sugar production and its collateral activities dominated the
trades and eco-
nomic calculations of metropolises and colonies during that
period. B.W. Higman
has examined the history and use of the term “sugar

revolutions” in “The Sugar
Revolution,” Economic History Review, 53:2 (May, 2000): 213–
36.
31. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 6.
32. The demographic proportions varied considerably
throughout the Caribbean. For
figures see Knight, Caribbean, 366–367.
33. Knight, Caribbean, 120–58.
414
34. See Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census
(Madison, WI: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1969); John Thornton, Africa and Africans
in the Formation of
the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992);
Colin A. Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to
Spanish America,
1700–1739 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Herbert
S. Klein, African
Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford
University Press,
1986); Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Volume of the Transatlantic Slave
Trade: A Synthesis”
Journal of African History, 23,4 (1982): 473–501; David Eltis,
Economic Growth
and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York:
Oxford University
Press, 1987).

35. See Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, edited by
Barbara L. Solow (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); The Atlantic Slave
Trade: Effects on
Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and
Europe, edited
by Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman (Durham, NC:
Duke University
Press, 1992); The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic
History of the
Atlantic Slave Trade, edited by Henry A. Gemery and Jan S.
Hogendorn (New
York: Academic Press, 1979).
36. Garrigus, “A Struggle for Respect.” See also, Stewart R.
King, Blue Coat or Pow-
dered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint
Domingue (Athens,
GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2001).
37. Regardless of the extreme degree of coercion it is fatuous to
insist that slavery
obliterated from Africans and their descendants the ability to be
creative, so-
cially active, and even to establish some modicum of self-
respect and economic
status. See Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material
Culture of Slaves:
Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and
Louisiana (Baton
Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), and
especially its excellent
bibliography.
38. Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation

Complex: Essays in Atlantic
History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 103–
10, 160–69.
39. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery
in the British West Indies
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
40. David Patrick Geggus, “Slavery, War and Revolution in the
Greater Caribbean,”
in Gaspar and Geggus, A Turbulent Time, 7–8.
41. Curtin, “The Declaration of the Rights of Man,” 157–75.
42. Curtin, “The Declaration of the Rights of Man”; Ott, The
Haitian Revolution,
28–75.
43. The French Revolution may be followed in, inter alia,
Simon Schama, Citizens: A
Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989);
Leo Gershoy, The
French Revolution, 1789–1799 (New York Holt, Rinehart,
Winston, 1960); Albert
Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787–1799: From the Storming
of the Bastille to
Napoleon, translated from the French by Alan Forest and Colin
Jones, with a
new introduction by Gwynne Lewis (London: Unwin Hyman,
1989); Gaetano
Salvemini, The French Revolution, 1788–1792, translated from
the French by I.
M. Rawson (New York: Holt, 1954).
44. On Long and Edwards see Edward Brathwaite, The
Development of Creole Society

in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Clarendon: Oxford University Press,
1971), 73–79; Elsa
Goveia, A Study on the Historiography of the British West
Indies to the End of
the Nineteenth Century (Mexico: Instituto Panamericano de
Geogafı́a é Historia,
1956), 53–63.
45. James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of
the Revolutionary Faith
(New York; Basic Books, 1980), 22.
46. Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 250–66.
47. Carolyn Fick, “The French Revolution in Saint-Domingue:
A Triumph or a Fail-
ure?” in Gaspar and Geggus, A Turbulent Time, 53–55.
48. Toussaint Louverture always wrote his name without an
apostrophe although many
French and non-French writers have, for reasons unknown, used
L’Ouverture.
415
T h e J o u r n a l
49. Robert L. Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost
Sentinel of the Republic
(Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985).
50. Fick, “The French Revolution,” 67–69.
51. Anthony P. Maingot, “Haiti and the Terrified Consciousness
of the Caribbean,”

in Ethnicity in the Caribbean, edited by Gert Oostindie
(London: Macmillan Edu-
cation Ltd., 1996), 53–80.
52. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America.
53. Maingot, “Haiti”, 56–57.
54. For the “Africanization of Cuba scare” see Arthur F.
Corwin, Spain and the Abo-
lition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817–1886 (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1967),
115–21; Philip S. Foner, A History of Cuba and its Relation
with the United States
2 volumes. (New York: International Publishers, 1963), II, 45–
85; Luis Martı́nez-
Fernández, Torn Between Empires: Economy, Society, and
Patterns of Political
Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840–1878 (Athens, GA:
University of Geor-
gia Press, 1994), 33–40; Robert L. Paquette, Sugar is Made with
Blood: The Con-
spiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over
Slavery in Cuba
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 184–186, 265–
266; Gerald E.
Poyo, “With All and for the Good of All”: The Emergence of
Popular National-
ism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1899
(Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1989), 6–7, 86. For the impact of the
Haitian Revolution
elsewhere in the Caribbean see Philip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas:
The Role of Ideas
in a Tropical Colony, 1830–1865 (New York: Atheneum, 1970.
First published in

1952.); H. P. Jacobs, Sixty Years of Change, 1806–1866:
Progress and Reaction in
Kingston and the Countryside (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica,
1973), 12–37; Brid-
get Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783–1962
(Kingston: Heinemann,
1981), 25–51; Hilary Beckles, A History of Barbados
(Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1990), 78–79; Edward L. Cox, Free Coloreds in
the Slave Societies of
St. Kitts and Grenada, 1763–1833 (Knoxville, TN: University of
Tennessee Press,
1984), 76–100; Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A
National His-
tory (New Rochelle, NY: Hispaniola Books, 1995), 91–164;
Valentin Peguero and
Danilo de los Santos, Visión General de la Historia Dominicana
(Santo Domingo:
Editorial Corripio, 1978), 125–78.
55. See Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban
Struggle for Equality, 1886–
1912 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1995).
56. Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave
Emancipation in the French
Caribbean, 1787–1804.
57. Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and
the African American
Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge
University Press,
2003).
416

Name:
Date:
Public Speaking Touchstone 2 Template
Complete the following template, including all parts. Fill out
all cells using complete sentences, aiming for one to three
complete sentences for each cell of the template.
PART 1: TOPIC
Purpose
What are you hoping to achieve with this speech?
Audience
Who will be in your audience? What do you know about them?
Thesis
What is the key message of your speech?
PART 2: SOURCES
SOURCE 1
Source Title
Author(s) Name
Retrieved from
Where did you get this source? Include location, book,
periodical, url, etc.
Age
How recent is the data or information presented in your source?

When was the source published? If the source is a website,
when was the website last updated?
Depth
What does the source cover?
How well-researched and detailed is the source? How much
depth is the topic covered in?
How is this content and level of detail relevant to your purpose,
audience, and message?
Author
How is the author qualified to speak on the topic?
What is the author's purpose?
What biases might they have?
Is the information the author's opinion alone or is it supported
by cited facts?
Money
Who funds the website or publication?
Are there items endorsed or for sale? If so, what items?
What is the reputation of the website or publication?
SOURCE 2
Source Title
Author(s) Name
Retrieved from

Age
Depth
Author
by cited facts?
Money
SOURCE 3
Source Title
Author(s) Name
Retrieved from

Age
Depth
Author
by cited facts?
Money
PART 3: SUPPORT
SUPPORT #1
Support
What is the piece of support (example, statistic, analogy,
definition, visual, story, testimony) that you are going to use in
your speech? E.g. “50% of all American voters…”

Type of Support
What type of support is it? Is it an example, a statistic, an
analogy, a definition, a visual, a story, or a testimony?
Relevance
How does this piece of support reinforce your message?
SUPPORT #2
Support
Type of Support
Relevance
SUPPORT #3
Support
Type of Support

Relevance
SUPPORT #4
Support
Type of Support
Relevance
SUPPORT #5
Support
Type of Support
Relevance

PART 4: REFLECTION
What have you learned from completing this activity?
Directions
1. Think about an informative speech that you would like to
present on a topic of your choice.
2. The speech can be for any context and any length, but the
purpose must be to inform. See the list of example speech
occasions for inspiration.
3. Download and answer each question in the the Unit 2
Touchstone Template based on the speech you are thinking
of: Touchstone_2_Template.doc
4. Consider your audience, purpose, and thesis and complete
Part 1 of the template.
5. Utilize your program resources, the internet or a local library
to find three credible sources that are relevant to your speech
and complete Part 2 of the template.
6. Read through your sources to identify five pieces of evidence
that support your thesis and complete Part 3 of the template. Be
sure to use at least three different types of sources (example,
statistic, analogy, definition, visual, story, testimony).
7. Review the rubric to ensure that you understand how you will
be evaluated. Ask a Sophia learning coach if you have any
questions.
8. Review the checklist and requirements to ensure that your
Touchstone is complete.
9. Submit your completed Unit 2 Touchstone Template on
Sophia.
Touchstone Support Videos
Evaluating your SourcesMaintaining Relevance and Balance
Speech Occasions

Personal
· Demonstration presentation (showing how to do something)
· Product analysis
Academic
· Presenting academic work (paper, research, report)
· Present and explain original creative work
Community
· Sharing relevant information at a community gathering (PTA
meeting, boy/girl scout convention, town hall, homeowner’s
association, athletic league, school board meeting, etc.)
· Communicating a community initiative or policy
Business
· Presenting to staff (new initiatives, pep talks, announcements,
etc.)
· Presenting to colleagues or peers (idea sharing, status updates,
etc.)
· Presenting to superiors (project plan, project summary, etc.)
Submission checklist
_ I have completed all aspects of the template.
_ My answers demonstrate thoughtful consideration of each
question.
_ I have selected sources that are credible and relevant.
_ I have selected five pieces of support that are relevant to my
thesis.
_ I have selected three or more different kinds of support.
_ I have adhered to all of the requirements.
_ I have read through the rubric and I understand how my
Touchstone will be evaluated.
Requirements
· All writing must be appropriate for an academic context
· Follow academic writing conventions (correct grammar,
spelling, punctuation, and formatting)
· Composition must be original and written for this assignment;
plagiarism of any kind is strictly prohibited
· Use a readable 11- or 12-point font

· Submission should include your name and the date
· Submit a single file only, including the answers to all
questions
· Acceptable file formats include .doc and .docx.

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