August was an important month in the early years of the Haitian revolution.

In August 1791, thirteen years of revolution in the French colony of St. Domingue began when slaves on the Northern Plain rose up, killing their masters and burning down plantations.

Two years later, on August 29, 1793, the French Republican commissioner Léger Félicité Sonthonax and emerging revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture simultaneously and independently declared the emancipation of the slaves in the French colony.

Following the trail blazed by Trinidadian scholar C.L.R. James with his 1938 classic “The Black Jacobins,” Laurent Dubois, an associate professor of history at Michigan State University, published last year an important new account of revolutionary St. Domingue entitled “Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution” (Harvard University Press, 2004).

“By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world,” Dubois writes in the book’s prologue. “It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere.”

Dubois’s account, broadly researched and beautifully written, is destined to become a standard reference on the Haitian Revolution alongside James’s masterpiece. Over the next two weeks, we will reprint selections from Avengers, which details how the “revolution began as a challenge to French imperial authority by colonial whites, but soon became a battle over racial inequality, and then over the existence of slavery itself.”

From the chapter “Fire in the Cane”:
In August 1791 a series of nighttime meetings of slaves took place in the northern plain... On the night of August 21 the manager of [the sugar plantation] La Gossette, Pierre Mossut, was awakened by a group of slaves who announced that they were “coming to talk to him” and who then attacked him. Mossut was wounded in the arm but fought back and managed to escape. He sent word to the main Gallifet plantation, and soon Odeluc [the administrator of the marquis de Gallifet’s three plantations] and several other whites arrived at La Gossette. The next morning, accompanied by a judge from Le Cap, they interrogated slaves and extracted a worrisome confession: there was a plan afoot to start “a war to the death against the whites.” The slave overseer of the plantation, Blaise, was identified as one of the ringleaders. Blaise, however, was nowhere to be found.

That night, slaves rose up on several plantations in the nearby parish of Acul. A band led by a slave named Boukman “spread like a torrent” through the parish. On one plantation, “twelve or fourteen of the ringleaders, about the middle of the night, proceeded to the refinery,” where they seized “the refiner’s apprentice, dragged him to the front of the dwelling house, and there hewed him into pieces with their cutlasses: his screams brought out the overseer, whom they instantly shot. The revels now found their way to the apartment of the refiner, and massacred him in his bed.” These slaves were soon joined by a large troop from two neighboring plantations, and together they burned the entire plantation to the ground. The only person they spared was the plantation’s surgeon, whom the slaves took with them “with the idea that they might stand in need of his professional assistance.” From there the insurgent band attacked surrounding plantations, and by early the next morning all but two of the plantations in the parish had risen in revolt.

During the morning of August 23 the revolt spread from Acul to the neighboring parish of Limbé. A troop of nearly 2,000 slaves went from plantation to plantation, killing whites, burning houses, and setting cane fields alight. In parishes farther east, meanwhile, slaves rose up on several plantations. Much of the northern plain was soon engulfed by the rebellion. “The fire, which they spread to the sugarcane, to all the buildings, to their houses and ajoupas [huts], covered the sky with churning clouds of smoke during the day, and at night lit up the horizon with aurora borealis that projected far away the reflection of so many volcanoes, and gave all objects a livid tint of blood.”

From the chapter “New World”:
Early in August 1791 free-coloreds [the affranchis] organized a mass political assembly in the town of Mirebalais. A well-respected, French-educated man named Pierre Pinchinat was elected president, and forty delegates were chosen to address demands for political rights to the National Assembly, as well as to local assemblies and the colony’s governor. Just as the revolt began in the Northern Province, however, the governor responded by ordering them to dissolve their “illegal” assembly. The angry free-colored assembly soon decided to take up arms. Among their leaders was André Rigaud, a goldsmith who had been educated in Bordeaux and had a long military career that, according to many accounts, stretched back to the siege at Savannah during the American Revolution...

By late November Jean-François and Biassou were the most important insurgent leaders in the northern plain. They had survived as other leaders had fallen. Jean-Baptiste Cap, who was elected king of Limbé and Port-Margot in late August, had been captured trying to recruit slaves on a plantation and broken on the wheel. An in mid-November Boukman was surrounded by a troop of cavalry and gunned down during a battle. He was decapitated, his body burned by the French troops in view of the insurgent camps, and his head displayed on a stake in the main plaza of Le Cap. The man who killed him was awarded the large bounty promised to anyone who brought in the “heads of the different chiefs of the rebels.” The death of the man who had set the uprising in motion made a deep impression in the rebel camps, where insurgents launched into a three-day calenda - dance - during which they taunted white prisoners (whom some wanted to put to death in revenge for their leader’s death) and told stories of their exploits in the war.

Several months of war had taken their toll. Many thousands of insurgents had died in the fighting. Those who had survived were often hungry and sick. How long could the insurrection hold out if troops arrived from France? What, ultimately, was to be gained? Jean-François and Biassou decided it was time to sue for peace. Other officers, including one who went by the name Toussaint, agreed. It would be a test of their leadership and of the extent of their power, for many of the insurgents’ camps were determined never to return to the old world.

From the chapter “Defiance”:
By May 1792 news had arrived from France about the April 4 decree granting full political rights to free coloreds. The looming danger of slave revolt and the turnabout in Paris combined to weaken the political will of those whites who still resisted the demands of the free-coloreds. The first stage of the Haitian Revolution was coming to a close. The free people of color had taken advantage of the opening provided by slave revolt and, through effective lobbying in Paris and armed struggle in Saint-Domingue, unraveled the racial hierarchy that had oppressed them for decades. In the process they had become essential allies for the Republican administrators from France in Saint-Domingue. Many of them would embrace this role in the coming year, and in so doing would break with those among their white planter allies who turned against the Republic. General Bauvais would explain that the free-coloreds had never been the “dupes” of the wealthy planters, having joined with them only because they needed “auxiliaries” as they struggled for their rights. “If the devil had presented himself, we would have recruited him,” he declared. The free-coloreds, in any case, no longer needed their local white allies, for they had gained an even more powerful ally: the metropolitan government, which increasingly came to depend on them as its base of power in the colony.

There was, of course, one problem: what to do with the slaves who had been central in securing victory? Most free-coloreds, as well as their white allies, wanted the slaves who had risen up to return to their plantations. Having at last realized that times had changed, however, they made an important concession to the slave insurgents, granting freedom to several hundred of their leaders. This promise came with one condition: that the leaders allow themselves to be organized into a police unit to keep order on the plantations from which many of their followers had come...

From the chapter “Liberty’s Land”:
Jean-François and Biassou [allied now with the Spanish] launched a new round of attacks [in June 1793] and, aided by other defections among the troops fighting the Republic, made significant advances across the northern plain... It was, [Sonthonax] declared in early July, “with the natives of this country, that is, the Africans, that we will save Saint-Domingue for France.” But the liberty Sonthonax was offering the “Africans” in return for military service was nothing more than what the Spanish had been offering for several months, and there were few new converts...

The commissioners, desperate to gain the allegiance of the mass of the insurgents, understood they had to offer more. As early as July they had warned a free-colored commander in the north that if the members of his class resisted their gradual preparation of “an emancipation that is now inevitable,” it would happen “all at once” through “insurrection and conquest.” They challenged the free-coloreds to embrace a “pure republicanism,” reminding them that equality was not “the only principle,” and that liberty preceded it...

On August 24 [1793], at an open meeting in Le Cap, 15,000 “souls” voted in favor of the emancipation of the slaves of the north. Finally, on August 29, when Sonthonax issued a decree that began “Men are born and live free and equal in rights,” all who were “currently enslaved” in the Northern Province were declared free. They would “enjoy all the rights attached to the quality of French citizenship.” Slavery had been abolished in the richest region of Saint-Domingue, on the plains out of which the revolt of 1791 had emerged, in the mountains that had served as “boulevards of liberty” to the insurgents. The specter of liberty that had loomed over Saint-Domingue for years, haunting and taunting masters and slaves, had become a reality...

In the next months [Port-au-Prince-based French Republican commissioner Etienne] Polverel followed suit, though more gradually, in the west and south... A few weeks later he freed state-owned slaves and - in an effort to maintain some peace between former masters and former slaves in the new order - invited whites “penetrated with the principles of liberty and equality that form the foundation of the French Republic” to emancipate their own slaves. His proclamations made it clear that there was ultimately little choice in the matter: “the slavery of a single individual is incompatible with the principles of the Republic.” Finally, on October 31, Polverel decreed that all “Affricains & Affricaines” (African men and African women), as well as all descendants of Africans - and all those who were to arrive in the colony or to be “born there in the future” - were “free” and “equal to all men.” They would enjoy “all the rights of French citizens and all the other rights pronounced” in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Declaration itself was translated into Creole and posted and distributed so it would be accessible to all. All men over eighteen were to present themselves to the local administration, where after taking an oath they would receive a printed declaration of their French citizenship...

There was no precedent for what had happened. The small-scale, gradual elimination of slavery launched earlier in several U.S. states had opened the way for what Sonthonax and Polverel did in 1793. But the scope of emancipation in Saint-Domingue was massive in comparison...

Perhaps the most radical part of their proclamations was the granting not just of liberty but also of citizenship to the slaves. The new order was, in principle, to be based on uncompromising equality. Race was to have no place within it. This, too, was a dramatic challenge, not only to the pathologically stratified society of Saint-Domingue, but to the forms of democracy that reigned in the Americas and in Europe. The promise of 1793 - a transracial citizenship in which ex-slaves and ex-masters would live together as political equals - was a great step forward, indeed in many ways out of its time. Undermined and attacked almost immediately, it produced in later years eloquent defenders of the principle that all people, of all races, were equal in rights. Distorted and eventually destroyed during the next decade, it nevertheless lingered as a fleeting possibility, one that would not find its home again in the Americas for many years.

(To be continued)