Haitian Revolution

Duvalier, 1957-1986 and his Tonton Macoutes Edwidge Danticat, Dew Breaker (2004)

St .Domingue, 1789

Watercolor by unknown artist, in Musee du Chateau des Ducs de Bretagne, Nantes, France. Published in Madeline Burnside (ed.), Spirits of the Passage (New York, 1977), p. 124 and E.D.C. Campbell and K.S. Rice, eds., Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South (Univ. Press of Virginia, 1991), plate 6, p. xv. Comments View of Cap Francais, St. Domingue (Haiti) and slave ship. Shows purchase of slaves aft on the main deck, an iron barrier separating them from the quarter-deck, and Europeans apparently having a picnic on the stern; also cross- section of ship's hull with storage quarters. Caption on illustration reads: "Vue du Cap Francais et du n[avi]re la Marie Seraphique de Nantes, Capitaine Gaugy, le jour de l'ouverture de sa vente, troisieme voyage d'Angole, 1772,1773" [View of Cap Francais and the Marie Seraphique of Nantes/Captain Gaugy/the day of the opening of its [slave] sale [after] its third voyage from Angola, 1772, 1773].

Slave Revolt http://www.hnoc.org/stdomingue/flash_commonroutes.html

On April 4, 1792, the National Assembly of France declared that “the hommes de couleur and nègres libres must enjoy, along with the white colons, equality of political rights.” This means that henceforth, there will only be two kinds of people in the French colonies: free and enslaved. Legal distinctions on the basis of race have been outlawed!

1792 decree As one historian wrote: “the slave insurgents of Saint-Domingue had expanded the political horizon in a paradoxical way, making it necessary to grant racial equality in order to save slavery.” Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 131

Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743-1803)

Statute of Dessalines, Cap-Haitien Statue de Jean-Jacques Dessalines, figure de la révolution haïtienne. La statue se trouve à Cap-Haïtien.

St. Domingue-Louisiana Common Routes St. Domingue-Louisiana

Jean-Jacques Dessalines

See Laurent Dubois, Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 66-68.

Interview of Laurent Dubois with Madison Smartt Bell, Common Place, July 2007