Jeffersonian America

Creation, Context, and Legacy

Julia Gaffield, Julia Gaffield

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813937885
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

While the Age of Revolution has long been associated with the French and American Revolutions, increasing attention is being paid to the Haitian Revolution as the third great event in the making of the modern world. A product of the only successful slave revolution in history, Haiti's Declaration of Independence in 1804 stands at a major turning point in the trajectory of social, economic, and political relations in the modern world. This declaration created the second independent country in the Americas and certified a new genre of political writing. Despite Haiti's global significance, however, scholars are only now beginning to understand the context, content, and implications of the Haitian Declaration of Independence.

This collection represents the first in-depth, interdisciplinary, and integrated analysis by American, British, and Haitian scholars of the creation and dissemination of the document, its content and reception, and its legacy. Throughout, the contributors use newly discovered archival materials and innovative research methods to reframe the importance of Haiti within the Age of Revolution and to reinterpret the declaration as a founding document of the nineteenth-century Atlantic World.

The authors offer new research about the key figures involved in the writing and styling of the document, its publication and dissemination, the significance of the declaration in the creation of a new nation-state, and its implications for neighboring islands. The contributors also use diverse sources to understand the lasting impact of the declaration on the country more broadly, its annual celebration and importance in the formation of a national identity, and its memory and celebration in Haitian Vodou song and ceremony. Taken together, these essays offer a clearer and more thorough understanding of the intricacies and complexities of the world's second declaration of independence to create a lasting nation-state.

PART I

Writing the Declaration

Haiti’s Declaration of Independence

DAVID GEGGUS

To redress the biases of earlier generations that either ignored the Haitian Revolution or emphasized its supposedly aberrant peculiarity, recent scholarship on the topic has often sought to integrate it within larger narratives of liberal democracy, Atlantic revolution, or emergent modernity, and thus to stress similarity rather than otherness. If the pioneering works in Atlantic history notoriously neglected the topic, scholars now routinely accord it a place in the Age of Revolution.¹ Historians of the French Revolution similarly have come to acknowledge the colonial dimension of their subject.² Laurent Dubois argues that the slave insurrection that was at the heart of Haiti’s revolution made a major contribution to the development of democracy, and Sibylle Fischer, that it forces us to revise our concepts of modernity and progress.³ Nick Nesbitt claims that the black revolution was an extension of the Radical Enlightenment, indirectly influenced by Spinoza, and devoted to universal human rights.⁴

Although specific arguments may be debatable, this trend toward inclusivity as regards the Haitian Revolution has undoubtedly been salutary. Any focus on Haiti’s manner of declaring independence, however, is likely to take us in a different direction and highlight instead the revolution’s distinctiveness. This is because the Haitian declaration is unusual in a number of respects: 1) it concluded rather than initiated the revolutionary process; 2) it did not establish a republic and makes no mention of rights; 3) it called for the elimination of the former colonizers; and 4) there were, in fact, not one, but two declarations of independence. These differences reflect more general ways in which the Haitian Revolution was unusual.

Proclaimed January 1, 1804, in the port city of Gonaïves, a month after the last French troops had left, the text now known as Haiti’s Declaration of Independence marked the end of fifteen years of revolution. The revolution had begun in 1789 as a movement for home rule and free trade among wealthy white colonists. They were quickly challenged by working-class whites and free men of color, who each demanded political rights for themselves, and in 1791 a massive slave uprising transformed the scale and scope of the conflict. Between 1793 and 1798, a radical, multiracial regime fought off Spanish and British invasions in the name of the French Republic, but in 1802–3 a French invasion led to a war of independence fought by the population of African descent against a military expedition sent by Napoléon Bonaparte.⁵

In its social and political complexity, the Haitian Revolution resembled the simultaneous revolution in France more than the mainland independence movements. As the white, free colored, and enslaved populations in Saint-Domingue each pursued their own separate struggles, the revolution’s achievements were correspondingly more wide-ranging and included not just decolonization (1803) but colonial representation (1789), the establishment of racial equality (1792), and the outright abolition of slavery (1793). It was the most transformative of the Atlantic revolutions, both because of these multiple achievements and because of the high price paid for them. By the time independence was declared, the former French colony had lost more than one-third of its population and at least three-quarters of its export capacity.⁶

Printed in Port-au-Prince in late January 1804, the Declaration of Independence does not seem to have circulated in large numbers. Only two copies of the original printed version survive.⁷ It is a three-part document. The longest and most important section, “The General in Chief to the People of Haiti,” is known as the “Proclamation.” It functions as a prologue, although in the original printed version it comes after the act of independence.⁸ It has one signatory, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a former slave, who was the insurgent army’s commander. The act of independence itself records, in the name of the Armée Indigène (Native Army), an oath to renounce France taken by thirty-seven military officers.⁹ The third section, signed by seventeen of them, all general officers, names Dessalines head of state.¹⁰

Before an enthusiastic audience on the main square of Gonaïves, Dessalines began the independence-day ceremony with a speech in Haitian Creole that recounted “the cruelty of the French toward the native people” and concluded, “Let us swear to fight to our last breath for our country’s independence.” What else Dessalines said is unknown.¹¹ As, like most former slaves, Dessalines was illiterate and would have spoken little French, one of his secretaries, Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, then read out the proclamation, followed by the act of independence. According to Haiti’s first historian, Thomas Madiou, Boisrond-Tonnerre wrote both texts.¹²

Of the thirty-seven signatories of the act of independence, more than twothirds were of mixed Afro-European descent, probably all of whom were freeborn. One, Nicolas Pierre Mallet, was a white creole planter from the south coast who had led his former slaves against the French army. Apparently eleven signatories were black, of whom six or seven seem to have been born into slavery. None was African—not even General Yayou—although in 1804 nearly half the adult population of Haiti would have been African-born and barely one in twenty of mixed racial descent.¹³

Authorship

Although historians have generally accepted Madiou’s version of the making of the declaration, Deborah Jenson has made an interesting case that Dessalines should be regarded as the document’s “political author” and that Boisrond-Tonnerre’s role was merely “secretarial.”¹⁴ The first proposition seems to me convincing; the second perhaps goes too far. That Dessalines’s “voice” is in some sense heard in this material is surely not controversial; Madiou himself describes the general intervening in the document-making process to reject a first draft drawn up by his secretaries and then reassign the task to Boisrond-Tonnerre alone. This consistent dependence on the writing of others, however, surely diminishes Dessalines’s authorial claims and makes his secretaries less secretarial. If Dessalines were closely engaged with producing the text, he would not have needed to change writers but persisted with his original choice, dictating exactly what he wanted.

There is no record of Dessalines interacting with his secretaries to rework prose in the manner that his predecessor Toussaint Louverture is famously described as doing.¹⁵ Nor would one expect it. Louverture could read and write by the early years of the revolution, and he eventually owned a library. Dessalines learned no more than to sign his name late in life. Although he apparently could speak some French, it is highly unlikely he could have matched even the limited command of the language exhibited by Louverture. Dessalines had been a praedial slave, long owned by free blacks, some of whom were illiterate. Louverture was a former domestic servant with French masters who had lived as a freeman and property owner for some twenty years before the revolution.¹⁶ One can call Dessalines author of the declaration in the sense of instigator, and he obviously had veto power over its contents, but as it was written in a language he would have struggled to understand, he seems unlikely to have been author in the sense of composer.

Part of Jenson’s argument is that the public documents produced under Dessalines display a common style, irrespective of which of his secretaries signed them. She points to a “singular rhetorical and poetic ferocity,” “shocking symbolism,” and a tendency to recast established political tropes, such as the tree of liberty metaphor. She acknowledges that somewhat similar passages might be found in the later publications of Boisrond-Tonnerre and Juste Chanlatte, the government’s most talented writers, but then concludes that the two men’s French education made them less able than Dessalines to “challenge European logic.”¹⁷

Yet it was precisely Juste Chanlatte who had written more than twelve years earlier during the early months of the rebellion of the free people of color “let us plunge our bloodied arms, avengers of perjury and perfidy, into the breast of these European monsters” and, evoking the dechoukaj metaphor, “let us tear up by its deepest roots this tree of prejudice.”¹⁸ An earlier supposed “Declaration of Confederate Freedmen” had described white colonists as “this vermin that gnaws away at the colony.”¹⁹ Indeed, Boisrond-Tonnerre’s statement that a declaration of independence required a white man’s skin for a parchment famously got him the job of writing it and the enthusiastic approbation of Dessalines: “Yes! That’s exactly what we need. That’s what I want.”²⁰ Thus there is no reason to think Dessalines had a monopoly on “insurgent and vengeful rhetoric.”²¹

Nor is there need to be especially skeptical of Madiou’s rendering of independence day and Boisrond-Tonnerre’s role. His entire history of the revolution drew on participant memories and, in this case, we are concerned with unique, high-profile events with multiple witnesses that had a better chance of being remembered than most of what he recorded. If the story of Boisrond-Tonnerre’s writing the text in a single night strains credulity, we should note that Dessalines’s secretaries, of which he was one, had already been working on the project for several days. Finally, Jenson’s notion that Madiou’s description of the January 1 ceremony was anachronistically “imperial” and, therefore, “propagandistic” seems questionable.²²

Beaubrun Ardouin, Haiti’s other great historian, and no admirer of Boisrond-Tonnerre, was happy to correct what he considered Madiou’s errors, but on this topic he tells exactly the same tale. The morning after completing the texts, Boisrond-Tonnerre read them out to Dessalines and his officers. They approved them and signed them “immediately.” Ardouin thought Boisrond-Tonnerre deserved blame for the declaration’s violent and vengeful character but he added that “He merely interpreted in blood-drenched terms the intimate thoughts of his chief and of many of his contemporaries.”²³

Before Madiou wrote his Histoire in the 1840s, Jenson notes, no French or Haitian writer had attributed the Declaration of Independence to Boisrond-Tonnerre.²⁴ This surely reflects the paucity of French witnesses that survived the transition to independence in Haiti, and also Boisrond-Tonnerre’s unpopularity. After his political murder in 1806 in the wake of Dessalines’s assassination, few in Haiti wanted to sing his praises. But none has ever put forward an alternative author for the declaration. Hence, it seems to me that, although he no doubt styled his message in a manner that would please the new head of state, Boisrond-Tonnerre was more than a mere amanuensis and translator of Dessalines’s words.

An Endpoint No...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Haitian Declaration of Independence in an Atlantic Context
• Part I: Writing the Declaration
• Part II: Haitian Independence and the Atlantic
• Part III: The Legacy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence
• Appendix: The Haitian Declaration of Independence
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index