A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution. Jeremy D. Popkin
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      Gros was certainly a partisan witness, who left no doubt about his desire to see the rebellious blacks forced back into submission. Does this mean that we can dismiss everything he says? Even some of the most surprising details he gives, such as his claim that one of the white colonial military leaders fighting the blacks wrote a letter saying that he was prepared to sacrifice the prisoners rather than make any concessions to the insurgents, are confirmed by other documents. He gives a nuanced portrait of Jean-François, saying that he showed “a degree of good sense, a fund of humanity, and a ray of genius, far superior to any sentiment that might have been expected from his kind,” although we must bear in mind the fact that one of the reasons he praised the black leader was that Jean-François proved willing to listen to Gros’s advice.22 On the other hand, Gros unfairly accused the white officials of being counterrevolutionary conspirators who set out deliberately to destroy the colony. In short, there is much to be learned from Gros’s account, both about the black insurrection and about white attitudes, but his story has to be read with his own very obvious prejudices in mind and the assertions it makes have to be carefully compared with those in other sources.

      For Haitians themselves, the story of their ancestors’ struggle for freedom has great symbolic importance, and its heroes remain sources of inspiration to a population facing what often seem like insurmountable challenges. This account, constrained by the guidelines of modern historical research, may strike some readers as less vivid than the colorful scenes of revolutionary events painted by many of Haiti’s talented contemporary artists. Reconciling the living historical memory of the Haitian Revolution with the results of modern historical research is not a simple task. Nevertheless, historians’ attempts to understand the events of the revolutionary period as the outcome of the actions of the men and women who participated in them have their own value, even if the historical record is not complete enough to answer all our questions. The aim of this book is, then, to provide students and general readers with a concise overview of the generally accepted historical facts about the Haitian Revolution, drawing on the scholarship of historians from Haiti itself as well as the research of those in the United States, Europe, and other countries who have contributed to the subject.

      The beginning of the Haitian Revolution in August 1791 shocked the entire Atlantic world because it occurred, not in some remote backwater of the Americas, but in the fastest-growing and most prosperous of all the New World colonies. By 1791 Europeans had been staking out territory across the Atlantic and importing African captives to work for them for 300 years, but nowhere else had this colonial system been made to function as successfully as in Saint-Domingue. In the 28 years since the end of the eighteenth century’s largest conflict, the Seven Years War, in 1763, the population of the French colony had nearly doubled as plantation-owners ca2shed in on Europe’s seemingly unquenchable appetite for sugar and coffee. Imports of enslaved Africans to the island averaged over 15,000 a year in the late 1760s; after an interruption caused by the American War of Independence, they soared to nearly 30,000 in the late 1780s. No other slaveowners had learned to exploit their workforce with such harsh efficiency: by 1789, there were nearly 12 enslaved blacks for every white inhabitant, and the wealthiest Saint-Domingue plantation-owners were far richer than Virginians like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Cap Français, the colony’s largest city, was one of the New World’s busiest ports; on an average day, more than 100 merchant ships lay at anchor in its broad harbor. The city itself, with its geometrically laid-out streets and its modern public buildings, was a symbol of European civilization in the tropics.

      Map 2 The French Colony of Saint-Domingue in 1789.

      Source: Adapted from СКАЧАТЬ