The Haitian Revolution: Part 1

by Jack R Johnson 06.2022

In 1791, the ceremony that kicked off the Haitian revolution began with a sacrificed black pig and the desecration of the white sky god. Dutty Boukman was no fool. A well-respected houngan, or Voodoo priest, he led the ceremony that would eventually see the Haitian slave population freed, and force the French whites to flee their own colony, or be murdered where they stood.

Boukman was one of thousands of people from Dahomey, Africa who were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic to islands in the Caribbean. During the French Colonial Period, the economy of Haiti (named Saint-Domingue by the French) was based on slave labor, working on sugar plantations. These West African natives brought the Vodun culture and religion from their homeland to Haiti. Vodun alongside the western enforced Roman Catholicism fused to create what we know today as Haitian Voodoo. 

In 1791, the French plantations on the island of Hispaniola offered some of the cruelest conditions African slaves had ever suffered. Compare to the North American plantations the Haitian coffee and sugar plantations required vast amounts of labor. As a result, the slave population outnumbered the French colonialists by what must have seemed a terrifying number. By 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, the estimated population in Haiti was well over half a million; this included roughly 500,000 African slaves, 32,000 European colonists, and some 24,000 affranchis (free mulattoes or blacks). The slaves endured long, backbreaking workdays and often died from injuries, infections, and tropical diseases. Malnutrition and starvation also were common. Some slaves managed to escape into the mountainous interior. Nicknamed ‘Maroons’, these rebels fought guerrilla battles against colonial militia. Because of their overwhelming numbers, however, the white colonialists allowed the Africans to retain much of their culture and to establish more or less independent social systems.  This combination proved explosive.

Boukman and another houngan held a meeting with the slaves in the mountains of North Haiti on August 24, 1789. They decried their situation, of course, but the meeting was also a Voodoo ceremony—a religious ritual preserved from their African homeland. Here’s a description from the official "History of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution":

 It was raining and the sky was raging with clouds; the slaves then started confessing their resentment of their condition. A woman started dancing languorously in the crowd, taken by the spirits of the loas. With a knife in her hand, she cut the throat of a black pig and distributed the blood to all the participants of the meeting who swore to kill all the whites on the island.

Egged on by Boukman, over one hundred thousand slaves rose up against the vastly outnumbered and infinitely hated French the following day. Unlike the French Revolution and the American Revolution, the Haitian revolution was driven largely by the passions of men and women who had been enslaved most if not all of their lives. “They didn’t simply desire liberty, they wanted vengeance.” 

Over the next three weeks, the Haitian slaves burned every plantation throughout the fertile regions of Haiti and executed all Frenchmen they could find. The French fled to the seacoast towns and pleaded with France to help them out while the island burned. For a short while, a brilliant and charismatic ex-slave named Francois Dominique Toussaint managed to hold the French at bay by negotiating potential military support for Haiti from the British and the Spanish, but his influence came to an end with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Aside from the fact that Bonaparte did not like sharing power, he was also a deep-seated racist. Napoleon sent General Victor Leclerc with over twenty thousand soldiers to unseat Toussaint, who then waged guerrilla warfare against the French. Toussaint was imprisoned and what followed next was one of the most horrifying struggles in history. Leclerc brutally decided to execute blacks whenever and wherever he found them. It didn’t matter if they had participated in the revolution or not. According to Richard Hooker, the slaughter that Leclerc perpetrated on non-combatants would not be equaled until the Jewish pogroms and the Holocaust of the World War II era. 

Although occurring on the isolated island of Hispanola in the Carribean, the Haitian revolution would have far-reaching consequences for the slaves of North America as well. According to Alfred Hunt, “No issue having to do with slavery and the role of blacks in American society was discussed at so many different times, in so many different ways, for so many different reasons as the lessons of the Haitian Revolution.” 

Reports of the fury vented by the Haitian slaves on their white oppressors reached the United States and caused considerable agitation and fear. One eyewitness described, “Young children transfixed upon the points of bayonets.”  Others described slaves dragging white planters from their homes and tearing off their limbs one by one, or strapping them to wooden racks and sawing them in half.

According to Thomas Otts even prior to the Haitian revolution, “Whites had always been aware of slaves as ‘troublesome property,’” but after the revolt the threat became more concrete. 

Their fears were not entirely unfounded. In 1822, almost all the slaves in the plantations surrounding Charleston, South Carolina had joined a revolt planned by a slave named Denmark Vesey. His plan was simple. The slave rebels would all station themselves at the doors of plantation owners and, late at night, a group of rebels would start a major fire. When the men ran out of their homes to extinguish the flames, the slave rebels would kill them with axes, picks, or guns. They would then enter the houses and kill all the occupants. They almost succeeded. It was only the day before they began the revolt that a slave, who knew the entire plot, betrayed Vesey. He and his co-leaders were hanged, but only one confessed. 

Nat Turner from Virginia had considerably more success in his uprising. He and a group of seven slaves entered the house of his master where, with one hatchet and one broadax between them, they executed all the members, including two teens, with the exception of an infant. They then moved from house to house throughout the night and executed every white plantation owner they could find. They only spared a single white plantation family that did not own slaves. As they traveled that night, they gathered slaves and weapons. Turner was eventually captured and hanged, but the damage was done. Virginians were seized with panic. Hundreds fled the county and many left the state for good. Reacting to the Haitian Revolution, and the various slave revolts, particularly Turner’s, Southern slaveholders increased the repression of their own slaves. Southern state legislatures passed laws “to control the movements of Blacks and to prohibit the assembly of free Blacks and slaves.” Since Turner was literate, many Southern states also passed laws forbidding the education of slaves. This repression in turn infuriated the Northern abolitionists and galvanized opposition to slavery, inevitably increasing tensions that led directly to the American Civil War. Next month: The Haitian Revolution Part 2.