HAITIAN LESSONS

HAITIAN REVOLUTIONARY LESSONS The island of Hispaniola , where Christopher Columbus fortuitously landed in 1492, later came under French and Spanish sovereignty, exploitation and enslavement. The French portion, “Sainte Dominque”, is known to us as Haiti. The Spanish portion, “Santo Domingo”, now called the Dominican Republic. “Haiti” is known to world history as the first republic to be created from a successful slavery revolution. Not coincidentally, Haiti was also the richest of all of France’s colonies including those in the United States’ of America’s vast Louisiana Territory, west of Mississippi River. Spain, France and England were competitors for colonies and riches in the “New World” as they were in old Europe. So, during the American Revolution, enslaved troops from Haiti fought around or in Savannah, Georgia, for American colonies’ who were then fighting for independence from England . Henri Christophe, the later king of Haiti, was among these several hundred enslaved Haitian fighters. Colonists’ revolutionary warfare and belligerent rhetoric returned to Haiti with the blooded, enslaved, Haitian fighters who directly went about the very serious business of applying its American revolutionary principles to themselves in their freedom fight. By 1791, under Dutty Boukman, a spiritual revolutionary slave in Haiti and Cecile Fatima, priest and priestess, emboldened the embryonic heart beat of the first drum beats for freedom that began among the enslaved masses of Africans. Boukman, was later betrayed and met death on the wheel, but not before the American spirit of revolution had swept the Island of Sainte Dominque, as it had France itself! Their was as much turmoil in France as there was in its richest colony, Sainte Dominique ! The Breda plantation in Sainte Dominique was no exception to this political fervor. It aroused a favored, Christian slave from his observant lethargy. His name was Toussaint Breda later known as Toussaint L’Overture. He was also well-read, like Boukman (or Bookman), a literate coachman, who was yet steeped in the spiritual culture of the slaves; a Christian, very secret, importantly: indefatigable organizer of the African slaves, free blacks, mulattoes, Christians, “voodoo” worshippers into fierce fighters. By 1803, Toussaint’s mighty legions had defeated the French colonists , in military victory, and they had defeated the Spanish grandees in slaveholding Santo Domingo. By might and daring they came to command the entire island, and to resist all wound-be white slavers. Toussaint’s command had exploited divisions within mulattoes’ (gens de couleur) various grades of French revolutionary politics (which had been also ignited by the American revolution’s 1776 “Declaration of Independence “) and had exploited the French Assembly itself through them. Toussaint became adroitly became able to achieve a semblance , a modicum of Haitian independence, before he was betrayed, deceived into coming aboard ship for an ensnaring peace parley during which the command ship weighed anchor, and sailed swiftly to France with their prize, Toussaint L’Overture, in chains. Haiti, then, had no navy, so it could not pursue nor relieve its kidnapped leader. But Toussaint L’Overture had left behind capable leaders like Jean Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe and others who later defeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s 30,000 men army that was sent out under Rochambeau and LeClerc from France to re-enslave the Africans . These formerly enslaved Africans had not only defeated this army, but their 1804, pre-Waterloo (1815), destruction of the French armadas of presumably invincible Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte; not only defeated , but, routed it, utterly! That shameful loss thus compelled Emperor Napoleon’s hurried “fire-sale” of the large Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803 for 3 cents an acre. The next year the leaders declared the birth of a new nation “Haiti” in 1804; adopted its own revolutionary constitution that excluded whites’ owning land, and became a beacon for freedom to all black and colored people who yet endured slavery or colonial subjugation. Many African Americans in North America made note of the Haitian Revolution, were inspired by it, or duplicated it in the United States by all indirect means. One South American who observed the beacon from Haiti was Simon Bolivar. He fled to Haiti for succor strategy, safety before he launched his substantially successful South American Revolution from Haitian with arms , troops, supplies in 1815.