Franklin W. KnightThe Haitian Revolution andthe Notion o.docx

Franklin W. Knight
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
The Journal
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 revolutionary situation
393
The Journal
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
The Journal
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
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The Journal
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
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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 between
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

The Journal
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.
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The Journal
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
The Journal
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

The Journal
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
The Journal
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
The Journal
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 Hill,
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

The Journal
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
The Journal
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

Universalizing Human Rights: The Role of Small States in the
Construction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Susan Eileen Waltz
Human Rights Quarterly, Volume 23, Number 1, February 2001,
pp. 44-72
(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of Washington @ Seattle (17 Jan
2018 19:35 GMT)
https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2001.0012
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13764
https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2001.0012
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13764
HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
Human Rights Quarterly 23 (2001) 44–72 © 2001 by The Johns
Hopkins University Press
Universalizing Human Rights:
The Role of Small States in the

Construction of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights
Susan Waltz*
I. INTRODUCTION
In the fifty years that have passed since the United Nations
General
Assembly approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR),1
literally hundreds of books on the subject of human rights have
come to fill
the shelves of major university libraries in the United States and
around the
world. Human rights has claimed the attention of scholars in
several
disciplines, and the notion is alternatively approached as a
philosophical
idea, a legal concept, or a political project. Human rights
readily finds a
home in Western political philosophy, where theories of natural
rights and
social contract are well-anchored and help elaborate the modern
concept of
human rights. This concept has also been discussed in
comparative
philosophical frameworks.2 Human rights as a legal concept is
part of the
bedrock of contemporary international law, and neither legal
scholarship
* Susan Waltz is Professor of Public Policy at the Gerald
School of Public Policy at the
University of Michigan. From 1993–1999, she was a member of

the International Executive
Committee of Amnesty International, and from 1996–1998, she
was chairperson of that
governing board. She is author of Human Rights and Reform:
Changing the Face of North
African Politics (University of California Press, 1995).
1. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted 10 Dec.
1948, G.A. Res. 217A (III),
U.N. GAOR, 3d Sess. (Resolutions, pt. 1), at 71, U.N. Doc.
A/810 (1948), reprinted in
43 AM. J. INT’L L. 127 (Supp. 1949) [hereinafter UDHR].
2. JACK DONNELLY, UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS IN
THEORY AND PRACTICE (1989); JOHAN GALTUNG,
HUMAN
RIGHTS IN A ANOTHER KEY (1994); ANN ELIZABETH
MAYER, ISLAM AND HUMAN RIGHTS: TRADITION AND
POLITICS (1995); HUMAN RIGHTS IN CROSS-CULTURAL
PERSPECTIVES: A QUEST FOR CONSENSUS
(Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im ed., 1991); Michael Freeman, The
Philosophical Founda-
tions of Human Rights, 16 HUM. RTS. Q. 491 (1994).
2001 Universalizing Human Rights 45
nor discussion of the international implementation mechanisms
(and their
flaws) is wanting. The study of international human rights as a
political
project, however, has been relatively neglected. A political

project refers to
concerted efforts to build a public and worldwide consensus
around the
idea of human rights, including political strategies, diplomatic
initiatives,
agreement of explicit principles, and conclusion of an
international accord.3
The field of international relations is the most natural
disciplinary home for
such inquiry, but until the 1970s, the paradigmatic attachment
to the notion
of sovereignty excluded virtually all treatment of human rights.
Scholars in
international relations tended to view concern with human
rights as a matter
of domestic governance, and thus out of their domain. It was
only with
discussions of transnationalism, international regimes, and the
limits to
political realism that human rights began its slow creep into that
literature.4
Political analyses of international human rights began to appear
in the late
1980s, and today they are complemented by a growing body of
writings
about the construction of international human rights as a
political project.5
As this article will demonstrate, recent scholarship on the
political
origins of the Universal Declaration has proved enlightening.
Efforts to
account for both inspiration and political motivation have taken
several

scholars deep into archives, and in the process several forgotten
or obscured
facts have been unearthed. As the erstwhile unproblematic
history of the
UDHR has been reconstructed, it has become more complex,
and more
nuanced. One of the subtle but powerful truths to emerge is that
no single,
straightforward story about the origins, shape, and content of
the Interna-
tional Bill of Rights can be told.6
3. I have borrowed this term from Tony Evans, whose usage is
similar. See TONY EVANS, US
HEGEMONY AND THE PROJECT OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN
RIGHTS (1996).
4. The evolution of this literature can be traced over several
decades through publications
in journals such as International Organization, World Politics,
International Studies
Quarterly, and Millenium.
5. See DONNELLY, supra note 2; R.J. VINCENT, HUMAN
RIGHTS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (1986);
DAVID P. FORSYTHE, THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF
HUMAN RIGHTS (1991) [hereinafter FORSYTHE,
INTERNATIONALIZATION]; HENRY SHUE, BASIC
RIGHTS: SUBSISTENCE, AFFLUENCE, AND U.S. FOREIGN
POLICY
TOWARD LATIN AMERICA (1981); DAVID P. FORSYTHE,
HUMAN RIGHTS AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY:
CONGRESS RECONSIDERED (1988).
6. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights together with the

International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on
Social, Economic, and
Cultural Rights comprise the “International Bill of Rights.” For
many months between
1946 and 1948 there was active debate about whether or not to
have a single document
and the exact form any document(s) should take. After the
Declaration was acclaimed
in 1948, debate continued as to whether there should one or two
main treaties. Largely
due to pressures from the United States—whose own internal
political landscape had
changed dramatically from 1945 to 1952—the covenants were
split. See EVANS, supra
note 3, at 89–92.
In this article, the term “international bill of rights” has two
meanings: (1) when
capitalized, this term refers to the three documents, namely the
UDHR, ICCPR, and
Vol. 2346 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
This article focuses on the little known story of the contribution
of small
states. To orient readers, it begins with a review of the familiar
accounts, the
scholarship at our disposal, and the historical treatment that
gave rise to the
UDHR. Four distinct roles of small states are then discussed. In
the most
minimal role, small state delegations bore witness to the
proceedings that

produced the text of the UDHR; their representatives also
participated
actively in the debates. Delegates from certain small powers
accepted vital
leadership roles; on some issues they fought hard to see their
concerns
reflected in the final text. After this systematic review of the
contributions of
small states, the article concludes with reflections on the
complex history of
the UDHR, some cautions about overemphasizing the role of
hegemonic
states, and speculation as to how the document we have
inherited might
have been different without the participation of small states.
II. FAMILIAR ACCOUNTS AND
LESS FAMILIAR SCHOLARSHIP: A REVIEW
The historical account of the UDHR best known in the United
States begins
with the Roosevelts.7 In his 1941 State of the Union address to
Congress,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered the well-known Four
Freedoms speech,8
providing a rhetorical touchstone for many who subsequently
took up the
cause. So influential was the notion of “fundamental freedoms”
that the
1941 speech is considered by many as the seminal contribution.
However
important was Franklin Roosevelt’s contribution, though, his
widow’s role
was more celebrated: from January 1947 to June 1948 she
chaired the UN

Human Rights Commission that produced the draft
Declaration.9 In her own
time, Eleanor Roosevelt was famous—or infamous—as an
advocate of
social justice. In the years after her death, however, a number of
film
documentaries have popularized an understanding of her
leadership role in
promoting international human rights.10
ICESCR; and (2) when not capitalized, it refers to the entire
political project before it was
known that there would be three, not one, document.
7. See M. Glen Johnson, The Contributions of Eleanor and
Franklin Roosevelt to the
Development of International Protection for Human Rights, 9
HUM. RTS. Q. 19 (1987).
8. Roosevelt’s speech proclaimed freedom of speech, freedom
of religion, freedom from
want, and freedom from fear. See LOUIS HENKIN ET AL.,
HUMAN RIGHTS 1108 (1999).
9. For additional insights into Eleanor Roosevelt’s role, see
EVANS, supra note 3; Johnson,
supra note 7; JOHN P. HUMPHREY, HUMAN RIGHTS AND
THE UNITED NATIONS: A GREAT ADVENTURE
(1984); A. DAVID GUREWITSCH, ELEANOR ROOSEVELT:
HER DAY (1973). As the Chair of the
Commission of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt was invited to
introduce the draft
UDHR to the Third Committee for formal debate. See U.N.
GAOR, 3d Sess., 3d Comm.,
Pt. 1, at 32–33 (1948) [hereinafter Third Committee Records].

10. See, e.g., THE ELEANOR ROOSEVELT STORY (Richard
Kaplan ed., 1966); ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: A
RESTLESS SPIRIT (A&E Home Video 1994); THE
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT (PBS
1999).
From this side of the Atlantic there are few challenges to a view
that the
Roosevelts shaped and molded the human rights story, and
indeed, many
consider the human rights project to be no more and no less
than an
American project.11 Alternative views persist, however, and
there are
variations to challenge even this most basic story. The fact that
the UDHR
was finalized under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower allows
France to call
itself the birthplace of universal human rights. The version of
the story
commonly told in France puts renowned legal scholar René
Cassin at center
stage. Cassin had great influence over the final draft text and
was awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in fostering the UDHR. As
part of their
own political legacy, the French recall that the Rights of Man
manifesto
arose from the French Revolution. When the freshly created
United Nations
Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) decided

in 1946 to
conduct an international survey on the multicultural basis of the
philosophi-
cal idea of human rights, French philosopher Jacques Maritain
was among
those chosen to participate in the study. That UNESCO
investigation had no
appreciable impact on the political project of human rights
(which was
carried out by the Commission on Human Rights, under the
aegis of the
Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)), but Maritain’s active
participa-
tion nevertheless buttresses the French claim to sponsorship of
the human
rights project.12
In recent years, scholars have had opportunity to peruse many
contem-
poraneous documents and retrospective accounts. Eleanor
Roosevelt’s
rather circumspect views were published concurrently with her
own
participation in the process, as installments in the news column
“Her
Day.”13 Her autobiography contains additional notes, as do
some of her
private papers and US State Department documents.14 John
Humphrey, the
United Nation’s first Director of the Division on Human Rights,
published
his own memoir in 1984, presenting the account of another
player central to
the political process of constructing the UDHR.15 More
recently, in 1996,
British political scientist Tony Evans developed an account of

the interna-
tional human rights project that privileges hegemonic interests.
Grounding
his carefully researched and well-documented study in the
dominant theory
of international relations, he argues that the UDHR was an
American project
that rose, and fell, with the tide of US interest.16 Studies of US
domestic
11. See EVANS, supra note 3.
12. See JACQUES MARITAIN, On the Philosophy of Human
Rights, in HUMAN RIGHTS: COMMENTS AND
INTERPRETATION 72 (UNESCO ed., 1949). See generally
HUMAN RIGHTS: COMMENTS AND
INTERPRETATION (UNESCO ed., 1949).
13. See GUREWITSCH, supra note 9.
14. See ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT (1992). For an account
based in part on a review of Eleanor Roosevelt’s private papers,
see EVANS, supra note 3.
15. See HUMPHREY, supra note 9.
16. See EVANS, supra note 3.
politics during the Truman-Eisenhower transition also help
explain the
waning of US interests in a project initially championed by a
US president.17

An alternative perspective on political dynamics is offered by
William
Korey, whose richly anecdotal version of the story emphasizes
the arguably
crucial role of nongovernmental organizations.18
Representatives of some
forty-two US-based and international nongovernmental
organizations were
invited to the April 1945 San Francisco conference that created
the United
Nations. Although formally they served in an advisory capacity
to the US
delegation, they contributed to debates and influenced delegates
from their
position offstage, in the corridors and private meeting rooms. It
was thanks
to their lobbying efforts that a Human Rights Commission was
created, and
of course it was that body which was charged to draft the
Universal
Declaration.19 Jan Burgers’ investigation of political
developments during
the interwar period also emphasizes the role of non-state actors
in
promoting the human rights idea. Archival research led Burgers
to uncover
evidence that a groundswell of support for creating international
human
rights standards was growing among civic groups in Europe and
the United
States well before the worst Nazi atrocities were known.20 His
work has
been expanded by Paul Lauren, who traces the international
human rights
movement back to the late nineteenth century.21

Finally, there has also been scholarly scrutiny of the drafting
process
itself. A group of Scandinavian scholars published an article-
by-article
examination of the origins of the Universal Declaration in 1992,
and their
work supplements accounts published several decades ago.22
More re-
cently, Johannes Morsink has opened UN archives to consider
both the
process and the politics of the initial drafting phases. His book
The
Universal Declaration: Origins, Drafting, and Intent is by far
the most
comprehensive and authoritative work on the authorship of the
Universal
Declaration.23
17. See RICHARD O. DAVIES, DEFENDER OF THE OLD
GUARD: JOHN BRICKER AND AMERICAN POLITICS 153–
83 (1993); DUANE TANANBAUM, THE BRICKER
AMENDMENT CONTROVERSY: A TEST OF
EISENHOWER’S
POLITICAL LEADERSHIP (1988).
18. See WILLIAM KOREY, NGOS AND THE UNIVERSAL
DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: “A CURIOUS
GRAPEVINE” (1998).
19. See id. at 36.
20. See Jan Herman Burgers, The Road to San Francisco: The
Revival of the Human Rights
Idea in the Twentieth Century, 14 HUM. RTS. Q. 447, 465
(1992).
21. See PAUL GORDON LAUREN, THE EVOLUTION OF

INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS: VISIONS SEEN 72–138
(1998).
22. See THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN
RIGHTS: A COMMENTARY (Asbjørn Eide et al. eds.,
1992). See also NEHEMIAH ROBINSON, THE UNIVERSAL
DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: ITS ORIGINS,
SIGNIFICANCE, APPLICATION, AND INTERPRETATION
(1958); ALBERT VERDOODT, NAISSANCE ET
SIGNIFICATION:
DÉCLARATION UNIVERSELLE DES DROITS DE L’HOMME
(1964).
23. JOHANNES MORSINK, THE UNIVERSAL
DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: ORIGINS, DRAFTING,
AND INTENT
(1999).
III. SMALL STATES AND THE UDHR
Despite the rich historical resources now at our disposal, at
least one
version of the story remains untold as an account unto itself.
Some 250
delegates and advisors from fifty-six countries were accredited
to participate
in the construction of the Universal Declaration, but most
scholarly
attention has been directed to the role of a few delegations. The
story of the

majority remains enshadowed. It is that story, and most
particularly the role
and contribution of states that would come to be known as the
Third World,
that is most intriguing. Parts of their story, of course, have
appeared in other
versions, often as interesting sidelines or incidental elements.
This article is
intended to present a systematic review that allows readers to
understand
the contributions and appreciate the commitment of participants
from these
small states. Similarly, the author hopes that this presentation
will inspire
researchers from countries that played significant roles in the
historical
process to extend this investigation to the debates and positions
developed
within their countries’ delegations.
In reassembling this account of the UDHR’s birth, the author
makes no
claim to present the main version of the story, much less the
“true” version
of events that unfolded from 1946 through the early 1950s. To
the best of
the author’s knowledge, the material presented below is truthful
and
represents one accurate version of events that transpired, and
this version is
an important one. Novelists, filmmakers, and literary critics
have helped us
appreciate the value of considering a story from alternative
perspectives,
both to capture complexity and to query a given account that
might

otherwise go unexamined. At very least, the story of Third
World contribu-
tions and contributors enriches our understanding of the range
of political
dynamics and concerns that were brought to the table as the
International
Bill of Rights was being negotiated. It also sheds light on the
knotty question
of the universality of human rights.
Unfortunately, a coherent story that accents the role and
contributions
of small states is not easily told. The narrative assembled is
complex and
interwoven. Elements that in more familiar versions of the story
commonly
figure in the foreground must recede here, and more obscure
events,
prominent in an account that privileges the smaller states,
require additional
explanation. Except to those intimately familiar with historical
events of the
post-war era, there is risk that the sheer detail of the story,
organized as a
narrative, would overwhelm and bore even the most tolerant.
The account
that follows is thus organized to preserve the goodwill of
readers. Rather
than recount a chronologically ordered narrative, the author has
identified
four principal roles that Third World participants played. In the
pages that
follow, the author offers anecdotes to illustrate and substantiate
the claim.
To engage directly with the material that follows, some

familiarity with
the most basic sequence of events in the UDHR story is required
as pre-
sented in Figure 1. The UDHR went through several distinct
phases, and the
anecdotes that will be recounted come from various phases. It
will also be
useful to consider that the argument presented is not that small
state
participants dominated the debate over the UDHR. The
argument here is
more modest, and the threshold of proof accordingly lower. The
claim made
is a simple but important one: a wide range of participants
outside the
Western bloc made significant contributions to the construction
of the most
elemental international standard of human rights, and they were
aware at
the time of the significance of their words and deeds.
Well before the opening of the San Francisco conference that
was to
create a United Nations, the idea of establishing an international
human
rights standard was in the air. The concept of a worldwide
declaration of
human rights can be traced back at least as far as the 1920s,
soon after the
nongovernmental Fédération Internationale des Droits de
l’Homme (FIDH)

FIGURE 1
A Brief and Basic History of the UDHR Project
Phase I. Germination of a political idea
1945. United Nations created, in San Francisco. Human Rights
is included in the UN
Charter, and ECOSOC asked to appoint a Human Rights
Commission charged to
produce an appropriate international framework.
Phase II. Drafting the UDHR
1946–48. The Human Rights Commission, in various
incarnations, worked on drafting
the UDHR for two years.
Main questions addressed in the drafting phase included
whether there would be a
single document, and what form it should take—a statement of
principle only, for
example, or a fully developed and legally-binding treaty. The
final outcome was a
Declaration of Human Rights, followed by two legally binding
international human
rights covenants.
Phase III. Formal Debate of the UDHR
Fall 1948. Completed draft referred to the UN General
Assembly’s Third Committee, for
formal debate by accredited delegations.
December 1948. Modified draft UDHR referred to a plenary
session of the UN General
Assembly. Passed without dissenting vote (8 abstentions).

Phase IV. Creating the Human Rights Covenants
1966. Two formal covenants approved and opened for
ratification in the early 1960’s.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the
International Covenant
on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights entered force in the
mid-1970’s. Together with
the Declaration, they comprise the International Bill of Rights
and are today the bedrock
of international human rights law.
was created in Paris.24 Later, in 1939, aging science fiction
writer H.G.
Wells published an impassioned plea for a mid-century
declaration that set
humanitarian standards for future generations.25 His own
version of such a
declaration was disseminated in many languages.26 The 1941
Atlantic
Charter signed by Roosevelt and Churchill, and subsequently
endorsed by
forty-four additional countries, referred to human rights and
fundamental
freedoms.27 It galvanized popular support and raised many
hopes around
the world for social justice in the areas of race relations,
women’s rights,
and colonial rule. US Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles
was a strong
advocate of human rights, and under his guidance, a working
group at the
State Department made some initial efforts at drafting their own

interna-
tional bill of rights.28
It seemed natural that the idea of a human rights declaration
would find
its way into proposals for a new worldwide organization of
United Nations.
It did, but barely. Papers prepared by the United States in
preparation for
meetings at Dumbarton Oaks referenced human rights, but
support was at
best lukewarm. Though it will seem ironic today, of the four
Sponsoring
Powers, it was China that was most supportive of the idea.29
The Chinese
argued that a central purpose of the United Nations should be to
enforce
justice for the world. To that end they were prepared “‘to cede
as much . . .
sovereign power as may be required.’”30 Neither Churchill nor
Stalin,
however, recognized China’s status as a great power, and
China’s views did
not carry substantial weight.31 For their part, both the USSR
and the United
Kingdom resisted the idea of human rights.32 So did US
Secretary of State
Cordell Hull, who in the meantime had forced the resignation of
Sumner
24. See FDIH Homepage (visited 25 Oct. 2000),
<http://www.fidh.org/home.htm>.
25. See H.G. Wells, Letter, War Aims: The Rights of Man,
TIMES (London), 25 Oct. 1939;
H.G. WELLS, THE RIGHTS OF MAN OR WHAT ARE WE

FIGHTING FOR? (1940) (for the original draft
of his Declaration of Rights and additional commentary on
human rights).
26. For a discussion of Wells’ work, see Burgers, supra note 20,
at 465–68 and LAUREN, supra
note 21, at 152–53. Lauren notes that Wells’ declaration was
translated into Chinese,
Japanese, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Gujerati, Hausa,
Swahili, Yoruba, Zulu, and
Esperanto. Id. Wells also circulated his declaration among
European and American
intellectuals. For the broad range of Well’s political concerns
during this period, see
MICHAEL FOOT, THE HISTORY OF MR. WELLS 253–307
(1995).
27. The document commenly known as the Atlantic Charter was
initially released as the
Declaration of Principles Issued by the President of the United
States and the Prime
Minister of the United Kingdom on 14 August 1941.
28. See LAUREN, supra note 21, at 161–62.
29. See id. at 166. The four sponsoring powers were the United
States, Great Britain, the
USSR, and China. These were the four states that met at
Dumbarton Oaks, producing
the proposal for the United Nations, which was then discussed
in San Francisco.
30. Id.
31. See id. at 148–49, 166–71; archival sources are referenced
at 331–32.
32. See Farrokh Jhabvala, The Drafting of the Human Rights

Provisions of the UN Charter,
64 NETH. INT’L L. REV. 1, 3 (1997).
Welles. Hull regarded human rights chiefly as a useful wartime
propaganda
tool, otherwise antithetical to the interests of a sovereign
nation, and his
views prevailed.33 The Dumbarton Oaks proposals ultimately
contained
only one small reference to human rights.34
As the curtain rises on our story, there was no reason at all to
expect that
the nascent United Nations would focus rhetorical attention on
human
rights. There was nothing inevitable about the Universal
Declaration, much
less the human rights treaties that followed. Certainly, the Great
Powers did
not advance the idea. Once it was loose, their concern was to
manage the
process and ensure at least that the results did not run counter to
their
interests. They quickly seized leadership roles in the crafting of
the human
rights project, but the smaller powers also participated actively.
In many
regards the story of the UDHR belongs to them. Some of the
ideas advanced
by smaller powers were incorporated into the final product.
Some were not.

Sometimes they supported the larger powers; sometimes they
did not.
Sometimes they were divided among themselves. In several
instances, their
concerted efforts prevented the larger powers from having their
way.
From a review of relatively accessible documents and secondary
texts,
four distinct roles played by small states can be identified.
First, the smaller
powers were witnesses and accessories to the creation of the
International
Bill of Rights. They were included in a process that extended
over a period
of eighteen months. Second, these nations were active
participants; third,
they provided leadership from their ranks. Fourth, Third World
delegates
were also ardent advocates and partisans, advancing agendas of
their own.
There is little doubt that without their efforts that the
International Bill of
Rights would have looked rather different, if indeed it had
finally been
agreed at all. Each of these four roles is elaborated and
illustrated in turn.
A. The Small Powers as Witness
Contrary to what is often imagined, the negotiations over the
UDHR were a
very public affair. There were no doubt important conversations
that took
place off the record, but for a variety of reasons, the debates
were protracted

and to a significant degree open to all. Official records were
kept during the
debates of both the Commission and the Third Committee
proceedings
(Phases II and III, Figure I). Whether or not they actively
participated in the
debate, every delegate who attended the Third Committee
debates of
autumn 1948 at minimum heard, and witnessed, discussion of
the meaning
33. See LAUREN, supra note 21, at 165.
34. See Jhabvala, supra note 32.
of human rights. Sometimes that discussion strayed into the
abstractly
philosophical. More often, comments were pedantic; the official
record is
replete with suggestions for amending the text.35 As the
following pages will
show, there is ample evidence, though, that delegates also
wrestled in a
basic way with the substance of human rights problems. They
understood
that their debate was helping to define rights as well as create
standards.
Regular reference to poignant and concrete human rights
problems of the
day kept the purpose of the debate in clear focus.
Not surprisingly, Nazi atrocities and fascist brutalities were
frequently

evoked. Delegates referred to Nazi practices during the drafting
and
discussion of more than half of the Declaration’s thirty articles.
Sometimes
anecdotal references to Nazi practices were adduced to buoy
political
arguments and sway opinions. In other places, profound
reactions to Nazi
practices in the concentration camps appear to have shaped the
very
essence of the moral code being drafted. Articles 3, 4, and 5
(establishing
the general right to life, liberty and security of person and
prohibiting
practices of slavery and torture) in particular were deeply
influenced by the
Holocaust experience, and not simply by Enlightenment thought
enshrined
in many existing national constitutions.36
The Nazi holocaust was frequently evoked, but it was not by
any means
the only point of reference for participants in the Third
Committee debates.
During these debates, Soviet bloc delegates regularly pointed
out the
human rights shortcomings of their Western counterparts. They
noted the
Swiss denial of the political franchise to women,37 and the
British Empire’s
denial of the franchise to the vast majority of its subjects
worldwide.38 They
noted the US Congress’ ignominious failure to approve a
proposed federal
law against lynching.39 Delegates were witness to many attacks
on South

Africa, where the Afrikaner Nationalist Party had just come to
power on a
platform of racist and segregationist promises they intended to
keep.40
Some of the issues hit very close to home. An emergency report
from
UN envoy Ralph Bunche on the crisis of Palestinian refugees
was the only
issue allowed to interrupt the concentrated focus on the UDHR
during the
two-month session of the Third Committee in 1948.41 Delegates
from Egypt
35. See Third Committee Records, supra note 9, at 26–980.
36. See MORSINK, supra note 23, at 38–43.
37. Swiss women received the right to vote only in 1971. See
Third Committee Records,
supra note 9, at 461.
38. See id.
39. See id. at 142.
40. See id. at 57, 92, & 131.
41. Bunche was replacing Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden,
who served in 1948 as the
Security Council’s mediator in Palestine. Count Bernadotte had
been negotiating a
ceasefire between Arab and Jewish leaders in Palestine when he
was assassinated by
and Iraq seized the opportunity to point out that there was

nothing abstract
about that particular human rights crisis. Less far-reaching, but
with its own
measure of drama, the Chilean delegation brought its grievance
about the
Soviet Union’s restrictions on emigration to the deliberating
body.42 Just as
the Third Committee debates were opening in Paris in
September 1948, the
USSR had denied an exit visa to a Soviet member of the Chilean
ambas-
sador’s family. In the resulting imbroglio, Chile broke off
diplomatic
relations with the USSR, and for several tense days each
country held the
other’s ambassador in custody.43
The UDHR was constructed with great deliberation. At all
stages of the
drafting, delegates understood what they were about, even if
they could
only imagine the ultimate significance of their work. No
participating
delegation could reasonably claim to have been unaware of its
content, or
its relevance.
B. The Small Powers As Active Participants
Representatives of the small powers were not passive
participants in any
stage of the international human rights project. From the
moment that the
Dumbarton Oaks proposals were distributed, Latin American
participants
began to discuss a common approach to the question of human

rights.
Along with other small states in the West, they helped bring the
Commission
into being. Once the Commission was appointed, the UDHR
project moved
to the drafting phase, and some eighteen states were formally
represented in
the drafting committee. Included in this number were Chile,
Lebanon,
China, Egypt, India, Panama, Philippines, and Uruguay.44
Delegates from
several other small non-Western powers served in a second tier
of drafters.
Representatives of the small powers actively contributed to
discussions on
the full gamut of rights under consideration. They proposed
additions and
changes to the initial draft prepared by the UN Secretariat; they
queried and
challenged proposed changes suggested by others.45
Small states remained vocal during the proceedings of the
General
Zionist extremists, less than two weeks before the Third
Committee convened in Paris.
See RALPH HEWINS, COUNT FOLKE BERNADOTTE: HIS
LIFE AND WORK (1950).
42. See Third Committee Records, supra note 9, at 316.
43. See Human Rights Questions at the Third Regular Session
of the General Assembly: The
United States Position, in 1 FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE
UNITED STATES 1948, 289, 293–99
(1975) [hereinafter Human Rights Questions].

44. See MORSINK, supra note 23, at 28–33. Morsink identifies
by name approximately forty
“second-tier” delegates who in his estimation made significant
contributions during the
drafting phase. Id.
45. See Third Committee Records, supra note 9, Annexes, at 9–
58.
Assembly’s Third Committee, convened in September 1948. Out
of the 166
written proposals to amend the declaration as drafted by the
Commission on
Human Rights, twenty-eight were forwarded by the Cuban
delegation.46 The
Soviet Union, Panama, Lebanon, France, and Egypt each offered
at least ten
written amendments.47
Whether or not they tried to shape or reshape the draft
document
through written amendments, nearly every delegation
participated in the
oral debate at some juncture. Whether the contributions
represented a
formal government position or not depended largely on the
delegation—
and on the matter at hand. US State Department records show
that the US
delegation agreed to positions in advance, but, for example, so
did

Pakistan.48 Then as now, many other delegates from a wide
variety of
nations were allowed considerable latitude in shaping their
interventions.
As a random example of the oral exchange, on the text that
eventually
became Article 21, some twenty-eight voices joined the debate,
including
delegates from Belgium, Uruguay, the United States, Greece,
Brazil,
Venezuela, Iraq, China, Haiti, Cuba, Sweden, the former Soviet
Union,
Lebanon, Philippines, and Saudi Arabia.49 In their
interventions, small
powers engaged substantive issues, and they engaged each
other. During
the debate on what would become Article 5 (prohibiting
torture), for
example, the Philippine Republic objected to a proposal by
Cuba to insert
provisions for cultural differences. The Philippine delegate
argued that with
such a provision in place, Nazis might have claimed that their
torture
chambers were customary and therefore legal in Nazi
Germany.50 In the
debate on what would become Article 16, the Pakistan
delegation resisted
efforts by Saudi Arabia to change the provisions for
marriageable age from
“full age” to “legal marriageable age.” Mrs. Shaista Ikramullah
argued that
the original draft language more clearly conveyed the intent to
prevent child
marriages, and nonconsensual marriages.51 Emile Saint Lot of
Haiti voiced

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