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Reviews
| Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection, by Jeremy D. Popkin. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 400 pages. $19.00, paper.
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| During the later decades of the eighteenth century, the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was a tropical bonanza. Seeking to enrich themselves quickly before returning to France, Europeans crossed the Atlantic to make their fortunes in San-Domingue by satisfying Europe's appetite for sugar and coffee, two commodities produced by black slaves that became symbols of Enlightenment civilization. Saint-Domingue was the jewel in France's colonial crown, supplying half the world's sugar and coffee by 1790, when 450,000–500,000 black slaves, 30,000 whites, and 28,000 people of mixed race inhabited the colony. Despite the small size of this colony occupying the western third of the island of Hispaniola, Saint-Domingue in 1790 had two-thirds as many slaves as the whole United States. Two-thirds of Saint-Domingue's slaves were born in Africa and roughly one-third were owned by free people of mixed race. |
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In Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection, historian Jeremy D. Popkin offers a fascinating selection of first-person narratives of one of the world's most remarkable events. The slave insurrection begun by the black leader Boukman in August 1791 led to the destruction of slavery in Saint-Domingue and the creation of the independent black republic of Haiti in 1804. The only successful slave uprising in history, the Haitian Revolution also bears the distinction of being the second successful independence movement in the Western Hemisphere, Great Britain having formally acknowledged the independence of the United States in 1783. During the Age of Revolution, many of Saint-Domingue's white plantation owners stubbornly tried to forestall the effect on the colony of the French Revolution's ideals of liberty and equality. The catalyst for insurrection in Saint-Domingue came from the revolutionary movements in the United States and France, but, unlike the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, the Haitian Revolution explicitly contested the system of racial hierarchy that had characterized the entire Atlantic world since Christopher Columbus first established a colony on Hispaniola in 1492. |
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Liberty being incompatible with slavery, the Haitian revolutionaries asserted that equality should encompass all people regardless of racial classifications. As Saint-Domingue's slaves effectively fought their masters and the French colonial state by killing plantation owners, burning fields, and destroying equipment, the slave insurgency escalated into a civil war. Britain and Spain declared war on Revolutionary France in early 1793, embroiling Saint-Domingue in international conflict. The French Republic sent commissioners to Saint-Domingue who abolished slavery in hopes of attracting ex-slaves to fight against Britain and Spain. After emancipation was ratified by the French National Convention in February 1794, the emerging leader of the insurrection, the ex-slave Toussaint Louverture, professed allegiance to France. Toussaint defeated the British and the Spanish and asserted control over Saint-Domingue. In early 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte sent his brother-in-law, General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, with a large army to reinstitute slavery and reassert French dominance in San-Domingue. Toussaint was arrested and deported to France, where he died in prison. Warfare continued, taking the lives of tens of thousands of French soldiers. Leclerc died in an epidemic of yellow fever. A defeated French Army boarded ships and departed. After the independent republic of Haiti was declared on January 1, 1804, the ex-slave Jean-Jacques Dessalines took control and ordered the massacre of nearly all the new nation's remaining white population. |
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From the first days of the slave insurrection to the story of the last French survivors in San-Domingue, Popkin presents chronologically arranged excerpts from more than a dozen accounts written by colonists who watched the hierarchy established through white racial domination collapse in the Age of Revolution's most valuable piece of colonial real estate. News of the slave uprising sent shockwaves throughout the Atlantic world. Indeed, many of the narratives included in this volume were written and published in the United States as cautionary tales by refugees from the insurrection, which demonstrated to slaveholders in Europe and the Americas that people of African descent were active agents in the making of history who could overthrow white rule and seize control of the crown jewel of a great European empire. Popkin's collection provides numerous portrayals of the Haitian revolutionaries, depicting encounters with the uprising's leaders like Boukman, Toussaint, and Dessalines, as well as with French colonials like Leclerc. Each chapter contains helpful commentary that provides essential background about the authors and the events they describe. Popkin's commentary addresses the complicated questions of the reliability of the narratives, encouraging readers to ponder the implications of the various authors' perspectives. A valuable resource for scholars and students, Facing Racial Revolution reveals the complexities of slavery and racism, colonialism and imperialism, insurrection and enlightenment, and democracy and human rights during the Age of Revolution. |
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| Michigan State University, East Lansing |
David M. Carletta |
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