Reviewed by Douglas R. Egerton | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1

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Reviewed by Douglas R. Egerton | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Douglas R. Egerton, Le Moyne College

Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. By Laurent Dubois. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 384 pages. $29.95 (cloth), $17.95 (paper). A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. By Laurent Dubois. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 466 pages. $55.00 (cloth), $22.50 (paper).
Students cannot find it on a map. Too many historians—even those who specialize in the early national era—confuse the French colony of Saint Domingue with Spanish Saint Domingo. One celebrated biographer of John Adams refers to the colony as "San Domingo" and misspells the name of Toussaint-Louverture. Residents of the 1790s knew better, of course. On the August night in 1791 when slaves set fire to the cane, Saint Domingue was the most prosperous colony in the Americas, and its subsequent saga was recounted daily in mainland newspapers. During the next decade, the strange fortunes of the Haitian Revolution inspired blacks and alarmed whites throughout the Atlantic world.	1
In the first comprehensive account since Thomas O. Ott's slim 1973 survey, Laurent Dubois's Avengers of the New World recounts the Haitian saga from the eve of the revolution to independence on New Year's Day, 1804.¹ (Like Ott, Dubois includes a brief introductory chapter on early Haitian history and concludes with a short epilogue on the legacy of the revolt.) In a second volume intended more for specialists, A Colony of Citizens, the author broadens the story to cover the larger course of abolition and reenslavement in the French empire, this time with the focus on Guadeloupe. Elegantly written and meticulously researched, both will be regarded as the standard accounts for some time to come.	2
Designed for students and academics alike, Avengers of the New World sets the record straight on a number of issues, yet Dubois does so without breaking his narrative stride. On the question of whether Boukman, the initial rebel leader, held a religious ceremony in the woods near Bois-Caïman—Léon-François Hoffman famously denounced it as mythical in 1993—Dubois not only sides with David P. Geggus and Carolyn E. Fick in believing that it took place but also demonstrates that by moving the generally accepted date to Sunday, August 14, the isolated plantation offered a convenient gathering place for slaves on their way back from the town's markets.² Stripping away its legendary trappings, Dubois shows how the ceremony indicates the central place that religion played in the initial revolt. All popular revolutions require leaders and careful planning. But once "the insurrection began," Dubois observes, "religion helped inspire insurgents, and solidified the power of certain leaders" (101). French soldiers reported that rebels marched toward battle singing African songs, music broken only by the religious incantations of insurgent leaders. As in other parts of the Americas, Africans armed themselves with ouanga (fetishes) as protection against white military might.	. . .

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