Read The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Online
Authors: David Brion Davis
Tags: #History, #United States, #19th Century, #Social History, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #Slavery
On the other hand, even Cuba, South Carolina, and other slave-importing regions sought to exclude bondsmen from colonies in which blacks had been exposed to revolutionary ideas. Although
slave insurrections had usually been
associated with a labor force containing a high proportion of recently imported Africans, white leaders were now far more fearful of blacks who had been contaminated by French or abolitionist conceptions of liberty. Haiti thus represented the fullest effects of the
contagion of liberty among
slaves. Measures had to be put into place to stop the spread of people inordinately exposed to the germ of freedom. It could spread.
In Britain and the United States abolitionists argued that slavery itself was the obvious cause of slave revolts. Early in 1792,
Thomas Clarkson insisted that while the French Revolution had presented the slaves with an opportunity to vindicate their humanity, the insurrection in Saint-Domingue could be attributed only to the slave trade and the oppressive system it produced. Far from being an argument against Britain’s antislave-trade
petitions, the events in Saint-Domingue showed that it was sheer madness for the British to continue transporting Africans who, having “the passions of men,” would sooner or later avenge their wrongs.
5
Such reasoning was clearly influential in the United States, where planters could rely on a rapid natural increase in the slave population and where opposition to further slave importation had won sanction from the War of Independence. The nation as a whole was outraged and alarmed by
South Carolina’s reopening of the slave trade in 1803; the
Haitian Revolution strengthened the political argument for outlawing the
American slave trade in 1808, the earliest date allowed by the
Constitution.
6
The Haitian example, supplemented by a major slave conspiracy in Virginia, also led to
laws restricting manumission and nourished interest in deporting free blacks to some distant colony.
Haiti’s effects on
British policy were more ambiguous. Like their French neighbors, British planters lived as small white minorities surrounded by vast
slave majorities. But they were accustomed to risk and were convinced that their fortunes depended on a labor force that would soon die off unless replenished by continuous imports from Africa. The catastrophe in Saint-Domingue, they claimed, showed the dangers of abolitionist agitation, not of a labor supply on which the Caribbean colonies had always depended. Even in 1795–96, when the British colonies were most seriously threatened by racial warfare and by French armies that included large numbers of emancipated slaves, Parliament deferred to the West India planters and merchants and failed to renew a 1792 resolution calling for an end to the slave trade in four years. Indeed, the British successfully defended their slave colonies only by enlisting black troops directly from the slave ships. It would be difficult to show that fear of another
Haitian Revolution motivated Parliament’s crucial votes in 1806 abolishing the slave trade to rival foreign markets, and in 1807 abolishing the British slave trade altogether.
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Yet it cannot be denied that both the government and the British public had learned a lesson from
William Pitt’s disastrous attempt to conquer Saint-Domingue, restore slavery, and subdue
Toussaint Louverture. In 1796, nearly three years after the first British forces landed in Saint-Domingue, the Pitt administration sent off to the West Indies one of the greatest expeditionary forces in British history. Before the end of the year
Edmund Burke heard that ten thousand men had died in less than two months. It was reported in the
House of Commons that almost every Briton had a personal acquaintance who had perished in the Caribbean campaigns. Burke wrote caustically of “recruits to the West Indian grave” and of fighting to conquer a cemetery. Although the mortality figures were somewhat exaggerated and British casualties were much heavier in the
Windward Islands than in Saint-Domingue, there were good grounds for public outrage and for opposition party attacks on the conduct of the war. The loss in the Caribbean of nearly fifty thousand British soldiers and seamen, to say nothing of the expenditure of more than £16,000,000, underscored the cost of defending colonies that might at any moment
become replicas of Saint-Domingue.
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The West Indian “image,” already tarnished by years of antislavery literature and iconography, never recovered from Britain’s defeat in Saint-Domingue.
In this broad sense the
Haitian Revolution surely contributed to the British government’s decisions, beginning in 1797, to limit the expansion of plantation agriculture in
Trinidad, an undeveloped frontier that Britain had just seized from Spain. There were many competing political and economic interests involved in the government’s disposition of the rich crown lands in Trinidad, and after 1803 in the conquered
Dutch Guianan colonies. But shrewd politicians and reformers were able to dramatize the extreme danger of any policy that would encourage the unlimited importation of slaves. The failure of British and French armies to subjugate Saint-Domingue fostered discussion of alternative forms of labor and made it easier for government leaders to restrict the flow of slaves to Trinidad and Guiana, despite pressure from planters and investors who were eager to profit from the rising world demand for
cotton,
sugar,
coffee, and other plantation staples.
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In the short run, however, the Haitian Revolution seriously damaged the antislavery movement. As
abolitionists were increasingly portrayed as inciters of violence, there was a marked decline in antislavery activity and publication in both Britain and America. In France the movement virtually disappeared. Even after 1815 abolitionists found it difficult to escape the stigma of Saint-Domingue and the need to defend the record of Haiti, as if the rights of every black in the hemisphere depended on the virtue and magnanimity of Haiti’s rulers. As a result of the trauma that swept much of the white world, especially after
Dessalines ordered the extermination of the whites remaining in Haiti, abolitionists were long obsessed with disavowing violence or any form of slave resistance. Until the mid-nineteenth century we find few white abolitionists like “
Philmore,” who had argued in 1760 that since blacks were held in slavery by unjust force, they may “lawfully repel that force with force, and to recover their liberty, destroy their oppressors”; or
Jean de Pechméja, who had written in 1774 that “whoever justifies so odious a system deserves scornful silence from the philosopher and a stab with a poniard from the Negro.”
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But there was another side to this legacy. Abolitionist literature had tended to portray slaves as passive victims or as sentimental objects
of benevolence, typified by
Josiah Wedgwood’s famous cameo of the kneeling, chained slave, supplicating the viewer with the inscription
Am I Not a Man and a Brother?
The emphasis on the slave’s meekness and humility contrasted with a literary tradition descending f
rom
Aphra Behn’s
Oroonoko, the heroic African slave rebel, to the
Abbé Raynal’s “
Black Spartacus,” who would lead the slaves “to vengeance and slaughter” and redeem the honor of the human species. The
Haitian Revolution not only brought Oroonoko and Spartacus to life but showed that the slave masses could fight indefatigably for their own liberty. While antislavery writing would continue to invent and reinvent Uncle Toms, the significance of such figures could never be separated from the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of black slaves had won their freedom by force of arms. In their very eagerness to prove the safety of emancipation and the capability of blacks for freedom, abolitionists covertly challenged the claim that black slaves were either so content or docile that they could never seriously threaten a plantation regime.
Most important was the effect of the Haitian Revolution on blacks themselves, both slave and free.
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In 1893 Frederick
Douglass simply reaffirmed an argument that runs through African American culture from the time of
Toussaint Louverture’s initial victories. Later on we shall examine some specific black responses to this central liberating event. For now it is sufficient to consider Douglass’s key point. Learned Southerners like Thomas Jefferson had been fond of comparing the
achievements of white slaves in antiquity with the dismal record of modern Negroes. But where in Greek or Roman history, Douglass asked, could one find an example of nobler daring?
It will ever be a matter of wonder and astonishment to thoughtful men, that a people in abject slavery, subject to the lash, and kept in ignorance of letters, as these slaves were, should have known enough, or have had left in them enough manhood, to combine, to organize, and to select for themselves trusted leaders with loyal hearts to follow them into the jaws of death to obtain liberty.
12
Black slaves had revolted, of course, from the time of the first New World settlements. But it was only in Saint-Domingue that slaves began to fight against the institution of slavery itself; and there, for
the first time, they proved that white power was not invincible.
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It was the example of Haiti, in
Douglass’s view, that first “startled the Christian world into a sense of the Negro’s manhood.”
Geographically, Haiti lay near the center of a galaxy of slave systems that depended on the fiction that slaves were incapable of acquiring or exercising power. Slaveholders needed to interpret their slaves’ powerlessness as a natural condition, as the result of inherent limitations. Throughout the ages, the behavior of slaves of all races had normally lent support to this interpretation. By definition a “slavish” person was a cringing Sambo, degraded and dependent, totally lacking in manly or womanly honor. Even the children of
Israel, in their paradigmatic exodus from bondage, cried out to Moses that they would have preferred to serve the
Egyptians than to be slain by
Pharaoh’s pursuing army.
14
On rare occasions, circumstances encouraged seemingly docile slaves to cut their masters’ throats. But throughout the New World, the same whites who armed themselves to suppress possible insurrections spoke with contempt of the blacks’ cowardice and contentment. As Douglass intimated, when the Dominguan slaves vindicated the honor and true character of the black man, the message was as important for self-doubting blacks as for arrogant and self-deluding whites.
Since the
Haitian Revolution was precipitated by a demand for freedmen’s rights, the cataclysm drew attention to the anomalous condition of the free black and colored populations of the New World.
15
Did the presence of such people breed unrest among slaves and pose a
danger to the slave system? Would planters be more secure if they widened or narrowed the distinctions between freedman and slave status? What did the behavior of freedmen suggest with respect to the slaves’ capability for eventual freedom and “civilization”? If racial slavery was dangerous to the long-term safety and virtue of any social order, as many political leaders agreed, did the condition of freedmen provide a preview of post-emancipation society or suggest that slavery could not be abolished without producing even worse social problems?
The Age of Revolution, roughly defined as the half-century between the onset of the
American Revolution and the conclusion of the
Napoleonic wars and Latin American
struggles for independence,
marked a dramatic growth in the free
black and colored populations of the New World. In colonial
Brazil and Spanish America, this was part of a long-term trend encouraged by sexual intermixture and relatively frequent
manumission, especially of women and small children. By the late eighteenth century, free African Americans outnumbered
slaves in most of Spanish America; even in Cuba over 45 percent of the African American population was free.
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In regions where manumission had always been extremely rare, such as the
British mainland and Caribbean colonies, the number of free nonwhites now multiplied at an unprecedented rate. Some of this growth was attributable to natural reproduction at a time when most slave populations were not self-sustaining. Various slaveholding societies, including
Saint-Domingue, sought to restrict manumissions, which were increasingly seen as a threat to white supremacy. But military needs reinforced religious zeal, paternal goodwill, and revolutionary ideology, inducing many masters to free their slaves during the American and
French revolutions and then in the Hispanic wars of independence. Thousands of North American slaves won their freedom by joining forces with the British army or British loyalists. The British, during their protracted
struggle with France for control of the Caribbean, found it necessary to enlist thousands of African slaves in special West Indian regiments and by a single legislative act to free some ten thousand of these veterans.
17
The disruptions of war and revolution enabled untold numbers of slaves to escape and find precarious niches where they could at least pass as freedmen. The fluidity and uncertainties of the Age of Revolution provided blacks with opportunities to take new initiatives and to express their own values and aspirations, though often in contradictory and self-divisive ways.
We are not concerned here with the impact of revolution on the economics of slavery. Our point of departure is the relevance of the rapidly expanding free black and colored populations to subsequent debates over the feasibility and probable consequences of general emancipation. As we shall see, the volcanic upheavals in the French colonies were widely attributed to the free coloreds’ struggles for equal rights. In the United States, the large-scale emancipations that resulted from the American Revolution evoked a backlash of racial discrimination that increased support for plans to colonize
free blacks in West Africa or other refuges. And it was the militant reaction against
colonization, initiated by blacks themselves, that gave a distinctive stamp
to American abolitionism. In the United States, far more than in any other New World society, the condition of
free blacks as the beneficiaries of “the first emancipation” set the framework for later debates over the abolition of slavery.