The Haitian Slave Revolt --- 1791-1804

James Michener writes what are called historical novels.  There are a few fictitious names and color added to the novel that is far more history than novel.  Michener says, "The black General Toussaint L 'Ouverture, Napoleon's General Charles Le Clerc and his wife, Pauline Bonaparte, the English General Thomas Maitland and the black voodoo leader Boukman are all historic, as was the ill-fated Polish battalion.  All other characters are fictional, but the various swings of war and the ultimate black victory are accurately described."

So you should almost forget that this is a novel because in essence it is factual history.  Michener is a much better writer than most historians and a much better condenser of history than most historians.  So I regard The Tortured Land chapter int the book entitled, Caribbean, superior to most book length treatments of the early history/slave revolt of Haiti.

Michener calls his chapter on Haiti The Tortured Land.  I would rename this chapter The Oppressed People, or The Traumatized People.  Napoleon calls Haiti his most prosperous colony.  Did Napoleon make a pact with the devil to turn Haiti into his most prosperous colony?  Apparently so.  Napoleon's French slave masters were evil and arrogant, ethnocentric and oppressive, brutal and treacherous  beyond measure. 

I prefer daily and deadly demonic oppression, not a one time pact with the devil.  Under French slavery Haitians suffered from a daily and deadly demonic for one hundred years.  Then they experienced daily and deadly demonic oppression under one hundred years of French debt slavery.  Biblically oppression crushes, humiliates, animalizes, enslaves, traumatizes, impoverishes and kills people created in the image of God.  Biblically oppression smashes the body, crushes the spirit, and creates poverty.  This is what I mean by the daily and deadly demonic.

Only President Jefferson's treatment of his two hundred sixty slaves plus his planned treatment of Indians [Indian Removal Act or the genocide and land theft of all Indian land east of the Mississippi which was later implemented by President Jackson], would come close to the extraordinary evil of the French/Napoleon.

After the successful slave revolt, the evil of the French and Americans combined in the one hundred plus years of French debt slavery.  Today American oppression of Haiti is the dominant form of external oppression.  Haiti is our "puppet colony", economically and sometimes politically.

The unsubstantiated myth of Haitian slaves making a pact with the devil to gain their freedom conveniently blames Haitians, not the French, for their many problems.

If a Christian had a deep understanding of the five hundred fifty-five OT references to oppression, and  if an American church was busy at releasing the American oppressed, and if the American church understood the implied severe critique of Jewish ethnocentrism found in Luke 4:25-30, then American Christians would have the biblcial background to understand the French oppression of Haitians.

But since most American Christians are biblically ignorant about oppression and justice, are historically and sociologically ignorant about their own ethnocentric and oppressive history, they are nearly incapable of understanding deeply the role of French oppression in Haitian history.

Napoleon's title, The Profitable Colony, would have been true from his perspective in 1789.  1789 happens to be the first year of George Washington's eight year presidential reign.  1804 marks the successful end of the Haiti slave revolt.  Jefferson's presidential term was from 1801-1809.

Jefferson sided with the French oppressors.  He was against the successful slave revolt.  Jefferson was a master oppressor.

The French oppression of the Haitian slaves was indescribably evil.  The killing, the slaughter, the torture on both sides of the successful slave revolt was fueled by French ethnocentrism and oppression.  African enslavement, Indian oppression and land theft from both the Indian peoples and Mexicans was also indescribably evil and fueled by American ethnocentrism and oppression.

So, it is no surprise Americans sided with both French slavery for one hundred years and French debt slavery for another hundred plus years.  Yet, the French oppressors called themselves civilized and their slaves savages.  American oppressors called themselves civilized and their slaves and Indians savages.

Both the French and the Americans would have called themselves Christians, but they ignored Jesus' severe critiques of social economic oppression in Luke 4:18 and his severe critique of Jewish ethnocentrism against the Gentiles in Luke 4:25-30.

With these introductory comments, I now turn to  Michener's chapter on the slave revolt, The Tortured Land.

According to Michener Haiti was both blessed and cursed.  Blessed in being the most profitable colony, but "it's curse was that three classes of its citizens hated one another, and the wild upheavals of twenty years -- 1789-1809 -- not only failed to weld these groups into a reasonable whole; they divided them so thoroughly that tragedy became inevitable.  The three groups were white French slavemasters, black slaves, and mulattoes, or half breeds, commonly called in Haiti free-coloreds."

"In 1789 the whites, in Haiti, numbered about forty thousand, free-coloreds, about twenty-two thousand, black slaves not less than four hundred fifty thousand."

It appears that the French deliberately created these three groups to be enemies so that they could not unite in opposition to the French.

During the slave revolt, they fought with one another viciously.  The first leader was a Haitian black named Boukman.  He was a voodoo priest, but of greater significance, he found out information about the revolution that was going on in France.  "Big fighting in Paris.  People like you, me, we taking command.  All new.  All new.  Pretty soon, here in Le Cap, to big change.  There must be liberty for all.  There must be true fraternity between master and slave.  And there must be equality.  Do you know what equality is?  And he would scream, it means you are as good as the white man."

In August 1791, Boukman led the slave revolt.  The French would not give Haitian blacks equality so he told blacks, "They have enslaved us, and they must go!  They have starved our children, and they must be punished!"

Michener writes, "On the morning of 22 August, Boukman stopped his preaching and threw lighted brands into the powder kegs of the north.  Rallying a thousand slaves, then ten, then fifty thousand, he started in the far environs of Cap-Francais and moved like some all-encompassing conflagration toward the city.  Every plantation encountered was ablaze, every white man was slain, as were any women or children caught in the chaos.  The destruction was total, as when a horde of locusts strips a field in autumn.  Trees were chopped down, irrigation ditches destroyed, barns burned, and the great houses laid in ashes -- a hundred plantations wiped out in the first rush, then two hundred, and finally nearly a thousand; they would produce no more sugar, no more coffee.  The wealth of the north was being devastated to a point from which it could never recover."

"But the real horror lay in the loss of life, in the extreme hatred the blacks manifested toward the whites.  Hundreds upon hundreds of white lives were lost that first wild day: men killed with clubs, women drowned in their own private lakes, children pierced with sticks and carried aloft as banners of the uprising, and there were other savageries too awful to relate.  One black woman who had not participated in the orgy of killing said as she passed the piles of dead bodies: 'This day, even the earth is killed.' "

An American sailor visited Haiti soon after this slaughter.  He reported the following after he left his ship at Port-au-Prince to travel overland to rejoin his crew at Cap-Francais:

"I passed eight burned-out plantations a day, a hundred in all, and I was only one man on one road.  I saw white bodies stretched on the ground with stakes driven through them.  I saw innumerable white and black bodies dangling from trees, and I heard of scores of entire white families slain in the rioting.  At the edge of settlements where the whites had been able to assemble and defend themselves I would see heaps of slaves who had attacked guns with only sticks and hoes, and by the time I finished my journey and rejoined my ship, I no longer bothered to look at the latest indecency, but I did wonder whether, in this flaming burst of terror and murder, there was no slave who merely killed his master and let go at that, or no white who had been satisfied merely to shoot the slave without desecrating the corpse.  May God preserve us from such horrors."

The French soon caught Boukman, tortured and killed him.  The next leader of the slave revolt was Toussaint L' Ouverture.  He was a brilliant military strategist who outwitted the French again and again.  At one point in the slave revolt, the French and Toussaint agreed to sit down and negotiate a settlement.  Toussaint unwisely agreed to go to France for the political negotiations, but the treacherous French never intended to negotiate with a black savage.  They threw him in jail where he soon died.  


The French would have beaten down the slave revolt and were on the verge of winning the battle when the slaves were unexpectantly aided by yellow fever which killed far more Frcnch troops than the slaves ever did.

After the death of Toussaint, a new slave general took over named Dessalines.  He was almost driven insane by the French betrayal of Toussaint.  So he vowed to never show the French any mercy whatsoever.  From now on, under his command, it was ruthless murder and death for the French.  Dessalines was described as a "murdering monster", by Michener.

Dessalines won the battle.  The slave revolt succeeded.  "The great Napoleon, having lost the richest colony in the world and nearly one hundred thousand of his best European troops, temporarily gave up on Haiti."

In a final act of rage and betrayal and insanity, Dessalines tricked the free-colored slaves to come to Meduc where they were to be forgiven and reconciliation was to take place.  After the free-coloreds had gathered in the square, Dessalines came out and cried in a wild voice, "Kill them all!"

"Dessalines' behavior became so murderoussly irrational that his two military cohorts, Petion and Christphe, decided that there was no other course but to murder him, which they did.  Thus began the recurring cycle of dictatorship, mismanagement and assassination that would plague Haiti henceforth."

This is how Michener summarizes Haiti's history and slave revolt: "In 1789 it contained half a million prosperous and well-behaved people; now, probably less than two hundred thousand, they say.  Plus all the dead English and Spanish and Polish invaders.  Can a land tolerate such brutal abuse?  Does the blood spilled upon it not contaminate it?  Is our new Haiti condemned to be a ghost that will never be real?"

"Looking again to the north, he could see the roof of the chateau at Cap-Haitian and the multiple massacres its inhabitants had known: 1791, 1793, 1799, 1802 . . . no land could absorb such devastation; the scars would never be erased.  He thought of the individuals responsible for this unending tragedy; grands blancs like Jerome Espivent, who hated both blacks and free-coloreds. And then he winced: Or blacks like me, who 'cleansed the land' of whites and coloreds alike.  Well, now we have our black nation, totally black, and what are we going to make of it?"

"As the dark cold of night spread over his tormented land, he wondered if it would ever lift."

These last comments are by Lowell Noble, not from the pen of James Michener:

I believe that the American white treatment of Native Americans [Indian genocide and our land theft of Indian land] which went on for roughly three hundred years and our two hundred plus years of slavery; this combination of arrogance and evil, ethnocentrism and oppression, brutality and treachery is every bit as evil as what you have just read in the history of Haiti.  I realize that most white Americans will deny this and say that American social evil doesn't even come close to French social evil in Haiti, but I think if you could interview some Native Americans who lived through those times, and interview some slaves, they would confirm ,"Yes, our experiences were as demonic and deadly as that of the Haitians".  And they might even swear a little bit because American whites are experts at sanitizing history to make it look less evil.

Any caring human being should weep every day over the evil of Haiti.  Those same human beings should weep every day over the history of America.  Any American that is going to Haiti to assist Haitians today in the rebuilding of their communities should be brought to tears over the history that you just read about.  But they probably won't be brought to tears over the history of Haiti if they haven't previously been brought to tears over the victims of white ethnocentrism and oppression in America.  You should weep all day for the American tragedy and weep all night over the Haitian tragedy.  Don't say you love Haitians unless you have wept over this tragedy, this demonic evil.