Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World

Recognition after Revolution

Julia Gaffield

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469625638
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

On January 1, 1804, Haiti shocked the world by declaring independence. Historians have long portrayed Haiti's postrevolutionary period as one during which the international community rejected Haiti's Declaration of Independence and adopted a policy of isolation designed to contain the impact of the world's only successful slave revolution. Julia Gaffield, however, anchors a fresh vision of Haiti's first tentative years of independence to its relationships with other nations and empires and reveals the surprising limits of the country's supposed isolation. Gaffield frames Haitian independence as both a practical and an intellectual challenge to powerful ideologies of racial hierarchy and slavery, national sovereignty, and trade practice. Yet that very independence offered a new arena in which imperial powers competed for advantages with respect to military strategy, economic expansion, and international law. In dealing with such concerns, foreign governments, merchants, abolitionists, and others provided openings that were seized by early Haitian leaders who were eager to negotiate new economic and political relationships. Although full political acceptance was slow to come, economic recognition was extended by degrees to Haiti--and this had diplomatic implications. Gaffield's account of Haitian history highlights how this layered recognition sustained Haitian independence.

1: I Put Fear in the Hearts of Those Who Engage in This Trade

French Efforts to Isolate Haiti in the Atlantic World

On 19 November 1803, Dessalines signed a proclamation with the adjutant commander of the French forces in Saint Domingue coordinating the evacuation of the French army from Cap Français, the last French stronghold in Saint Domingue. This proclamation gave the French army ten days to leave Cap Français, and it listed eight articles, including a guarantee for the safety of the white inhabitants who chose to remain on the island, as well as the means for others to leave the island with the French army.¹ In one sense, this proclamation officially began the postcolonial process that led to the emergence of a new country in the Atlantic World. In hindsight, we know that when Napoléon Bonaparte’s troops set sail from Cap Français in November 1803 and when Dessalines declared independence a month later, it signaled the end of French rule in what had been the French Empire’s most profitable colony. While many French citizens and officials dreamed of reconquest, neither Bonaparte nor his successors ever launched a military campaign designed to defeat Haitian independence. At the time, however, French government and army officials and refugee Dominguan planters variously ignored, denied, and challenged the fact of Haitian independence. They largely saw the situation as temporary and continued to claim that Haiti was simply a “belligerent” colony.² The details of the proclamation make clear that France viewed this retreat as a temporary setback. It did not announce a French surrender; it simply stated that the French forts and war matériel would be given to Dessalines and that the French troops would leave the city. This omission allowed the French to continue to claim to be the legal authorities and to embark on a campaign to isolate Haiti in order to cut off international trade, weaken the rebel forces, and thereby facilitate reconquest. For this reason, the point of departure for understanding how Haiti was able to establish new connections within the Atlantic World is to examine why France was not able to fulfill this imperial ambition.

At the outset, the Haitian leaders had to contend with the continued threat from a small contingent of French soldiers on the eastern side of the island in the city of Santo Domingo, led by the French general Jean-Louis Ferrand. In late 1803, after he refused the opportunity to escape the island on a British ship, Ferrand assumed command from the less senior François de Kerversau.³ As would be expected, the French government viewed Haiti’s Declaration of Independence on 1 January 1804 as an illegitimate document, and officials worked to convince other powers—both enemies and allies—that the territory officially remained a French colony and would soon be functionally reunited with the French Empire. Ferrand worked intently to reestablish French authority and to undo the abolition of slavery. “At its core,” historian Graham Nessler argues, “the underlying logic behind the policies of the Ferrand regime was the desire to crush the new Haitian state and reestablish a rejuvenated French plantation colony on its ruins.”⁴ Despite the relatively small size of his military force, Ferrand was able to instigate a great deal of trouble for the new Haitian state, especially by helping French privateers police the waters around the island in order to prevent other foreign nations from trading with the claimed colony.⁵ In addition to challenging slave emancipation and unleashing French privateers along the Haitian coasts, Ferrand launched a war of proclamations in order to undermine Haiti’s independence. “He [Ferrand] established the foundational textual basis,” French studies scholar Deborah Jenson has shown, “for a cascading series of political and legal conclusions that the free citizens of the new black republic were simply revolted colonized subjects of France.”⁶

In order to help prevent the supposedly illicit trade between foreign merchants and the ports of Saint Domingue, French privateers patrolled the waters around Hispaniola and other islands in order to capture merchants whom they suspected were trading with the “brigands.” In this effort, they received help from Spanish corsairs and courts in keeping with the Spanish-French alliance in the war. When Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haitian independence on the first day of 1804, France and Spain were waging a brutal war against the British. Therefore, when France outlawed trade with Haiti, they had the support of Spanish privateers from Cuba in their efforts to suppress international trade.⁷

French privateers captured over 100 American ships accused of trading with Haiti in the two years after the Haitian Declaration of Independence.⁸ According to a British emissary writing in early 1804, the American trade with Haiti had been “completely interrupted by privateers from Cuba.”⁹ Because of Ferrand’s precarious position in Santo Domingo and because of the geographic location of his base relative to the Haitian waters and to the British islands, French privateers used Spanish ports to process and condemn their prizes.¹⁰ “Often the property was condemned de facto and without trial,” historian Ada Ferrer reveals, “the vessels and their (human and other) cargo sold, and duties that should have been paid to the King and state instead were divided among local Cuban officials complicit in the enterprise.”¹¹ Spanish support for their French allies and opportunism on the part of individual actors in Cuba led the Haitian state to declare war on the Spanish Empire and to retaliate in the waters west of the island of Hispaniola. Haitian ships captured Spanish vessels and brought them to Haitian ports for processing and condemnation.¹² While allied with France, however, Cuban authorities were reluctant to react to Haitian independence with explicit policy either in support of or in opposition to Haiti’s new proclaimed status. Thus, while they continued to refer to the island as a “foreign colony,” “Cuban authorities pretended that Haiti was a nonentity, and pretending, they hoped, would make it true.”¹³

Ferrand’s challenges meant that the war between the Haitian and French armies was, as the French believed, clearly not over. Frustrated by the harassment from Ferrand and keen to assume control over the entire island of Hispaniola, in 1805 Dessalines and 20,000 soldiers marched from the western side of the island to launch an attack on Santo Domingo. Despite Dessalines’s advantage in terms of manpower, his campaign was met with defeat because of the arrival of a French naval force.¹⁴ In fact, Ferrand and his band of troops were able to hold out at Santo Domingo until 1809, when they were defeated by a joint Haitian, Spanish, and British effort. Afterward, the eastern side of Hispaniola again became a Spanish colony, despite continued claims by the Haitian government.

Meanwhile, the schemes to reinvade Haiti began soon after the retreat of the French army at the end of 1803.¹⁵ Between 1804 and 1815, French action vis-à-vis Haiti was characterized by efforts to collect information about the former colony in order to “simply turn the clock back to 1789.” If such action were successful, “slavery would be re-imposed and the plantation system re-established in an effort to return the colony to its former glory.”¹⁶ Even a decade after Haitian independence, French citizens continued to submit reconquest schemes with the hope of reclaiming the lost colony.¹⁷ The French government hoped to regain control over Saint Domingue/Haiti for a variety of reasons: they worried about the spread of the rebellion to their remaining Caribbean colonies, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana; they wanted to prevent the British from achieving a monopoly on the colonial markets; and they sought the revitalization of French commerce in the Atlantic.¹⁸

In the immediate years after 1804, the key problem for the French was that other imperial governments and their local representatives—as well as Caribbean and Atlantic merchant communities—had their own well-established connections with Saint Domingue/Haiti. Both before and during the revolution, Saint Domingue’s economy was organized around foreign trade, specifically the exchange of plantation crops for provisions, manufactured goods, and war supplies. The Haitian Revolution disrupted colonial trade regulations and opened Saint Domingue to a range of international trade. Merchants flocked to the island to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the multifaceted war. The free ports of Curaçao and St. Thomas provided immense opportunities for merchants of diverse nations and empires since goods could cross between imperial boundaries and circumvent the restrictive laws of mercantilism.¹⁹

At the time, the French ambition to ensure the isolation of Haiti must have been a quite attractive alternative to military reinvasion as a strategy to reject the Declaration of Independence and reassert imperial control. In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars and on the heels of a disastrous attempt by the Leclerc Expedition to regain control over the colony, the French military could not spare the forces that would be necessary for such a feat. French officials could not count on renewed military support and therefore had to find an alternative method for suppressing the Haitian Declaration of Independence. The conviction that trade was vital for Haiti’s prospects as an independent country was also shared by Haiti’s new leaders, who focused on continued Atlantic commerce as the key to their survival. They welcomed foreign merchants and assured government officials that trade with Haiti was a safe and profitable undertaking.

Foreign onlookers, however, feared that the influence of the revolution in Saint Domingue might spread beyond the boundaries of the island or that Haitian leaders might initiate foreign military campaigns in order to overturn the slavery-dependent economic systems of the Atlantic World. France was indeed justified in expecting the support of foreign governments; the Napoleonic Wars worked against the prospect of France getting everyone’s support for any particular project, but, in this case, the hope of coordinated actions seemed reasonable since the economic underpinnings of European empire in the Caribbean were at stake. It is understandable, therefore, that scholars have assumed that French officials succeeded in their attempts to isolate Haiti after the Haitian Declaration of Independence. But to what extent does the archival record support this theory? Were the French agents in the Caribbean able to orchestrate and enforce trade policies in the region that would thwart Haiti’s economic ambitions? Did the rest of the Atlantic World support, in practice as well as in theory, the isolation of Haiti?

In order to address these key questions, we must focus on the efforts of French agents at two central trading hubs in the Caribbean—Curaçao and St. Thomas—to convince the governors of those islands to outlaw trade between Dutch and Danish merchants and the “rebels” in Saint Domingue/Haiti. Fortunately, the extant historical evidence includes substantial correspondence between the local agents and the French general Jean-Louis Ferrand in Santo Domingo, to whom they reported.²⁰ This evidence is worth examining in detail in order to understand the difference between aspirations in France and everyday life in the Caribbean after 1804. In particular, the experiences of three agents in Curaçao and St. Thomas who attempted to carry out the critical mission of stopping trade with Haiti reveal why implementation proved so difficult. In Dutch Curaçao, J. Thilorier served as French agent during late 1803 and early 1804 before Jean-Pierre Gouges replaced him and served until 1807. In Danish St. Thomas, Arnaud André Roberjot Lartigue served as the French agent beginning in 1805 and ending in 1807.²¹ The British Empire occupied both islands beginning in 1807. During their time as agents, all three men wrote frequently to Ferrand in order to ask for advice, assistance, and aid while also informing the general of the actions undertaken, decisions made, and publications issued in the foreign colonies. One of the governors of Curaçao, Pierre-Jean Changuion, also wrote regularly to Ferrand, not only to update him regarding the prohibition of trade but also to complain about French encroachments on Dutch sovereignty. Taken together, a detailed analysis of the flows of correspondence within the Caribbean sheds new light on the meaning and significance of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence. Moreover, this evidence helps explain why France did in fact lose its colony, why the ambition to isolate Haiti failed, and why Haiti achieved considerable sovereignty despite all odds in the early nineteenth-century Atlantic World.

Challenging and Strengthening Haitian Connections within the Atlantic Economy

Until the end of the eighteenth century, Saint Domingue was immensely profitable, a draw for merchants in the Greater Caribbean and across the Atlantic World. Although Toussaint Louverture was able to stabilize the economy during the latter half of the 1790s and revive the plantation export system, trade never returned to the prerevolutionary levels, primarily as a result of the steep decline in sugar production.²² Louverture and postindependence leaders, including Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe, tried to reconstruct the sugar economy, but they did so only with partial success. A British agent reported in 1804 that the only crops being produced in Haiti were coffee and cotton and that he doubted that the sugar plantations could be restored.²³ Two years later, a British merchant reported that sugar production had been completely wiped out. “The Cultivation of the Sugar Cane (which used to be its first staple),” Robert Sutherland wrote, “from the destruction of the works the want of capital as well as Artificers to replace them...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: I Put Fear in the Hearts of Those Who Engage in This Trade
• 2: I, Leader of a Country, Treat for My Citizens
• 3: Legislators of the Antilles
• 4: Aiming a Blow at Their Very Vitals
• 5: The “States of Hayti” and the British Empire
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index