ABSTRACT
In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot contended that the Haitian Revolution was “unthinkable” not just because it militated against the interests of planters, but because it could not be “conceive[d] within the range of possible alternatives, that which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the questions are posed.” 2 He argued that this epistemological block continued into the contemporary historical scholarship, which had not yet “broken the iron bonds of the philosophical milieu in which it was born . . . a continuous Western discourse on slavery, race, and colonization.” 3 The recent resurgence of scholarly interest in the Haitian Revolution has taken Trouillot’s frustrations to heart; it has become increasingly difficult to write Atlantic history without giving the Haitian Revolution its due.4 In bringing the revolution back into view, scholars have elaborated a vision organized around the revolutionary army and its leaders-most often Toussaint L’Ouverture, but also increasingly Jean-Jacques Dessalines. In narrating the history of the revolution first through the rise of the army and then its battles, historians are able to present a fairly linear narrative, relatively easy to track in the archive. Revolutions, though, do not lend themselves to this sort of straightforward narration. They rarely have one definite beginning, rather bubbling forth in a variety of places at once. Yet, while figures like Georges Biassou, Makandal, Boukman Dutty, and Sans Souci make guest appearances in anecdotes and footnotes, spiritual leaders, maroons, smaller insurgent groups, or really even the mass of enslaved people not enlisted in the revolutionary army are not understood as motive forces of the revolution. It may help to think the Haitian Revolution in Anthony Bogues’s terms, as a “Legba Revolution,” occurring at the crossroads of the Atlantic world and of colonial modernity, and depending on the syncretism of political ideas across traditions.5 Within vodou, Legba is the guardian of the crossroads, the source of divine creative power, and the initial procreative whole.6 To signal Legba as symbol of the revolution indicates its critical place within Caribbean history and, indeed, the struggle for Black freedom in the modern world. However, to call on Legba is also to call on his function as “guardian of the sacred gateway, of the Grand Chemin, the great road leading from the mortal to the divine world.” 7 The concept of a Legba Revolution invokes ancestors and the often covert struggles waged by enslaved people in the Americas. Their traditions of resistance-freedom dreams,
but also strategized resistance-made the Haitian Revolution possible. Enslaved people not only harbored hopes, desires, and visions of a more free world, but had also engaged in conscious struggles at micro and macro levels in order to bring those visions into being. Thus, their successors drew on both their rich and vibrant political visions and their deep practical experiences waging political struggle under brutal and violent domination. Enslaved people crossed the Atlantic with few material possessions, but they came with detailed memories of their homes and a set of cultural, political, and intellectual traditions. These would serve as an important foundation for the ways of life and resistance that they created in the Americas. As Vincent Brown has contended, the political life of enslaved people cannot be understood simply as a “typical battle between partisans,” but as “a struggle to construct a social being that connected the past and the present” and “an attempt to withstand the encroachment of oblivion and to make social meaning from the threat on anomie.” 8 Spiritual practice, drawing on African religious practices or the melding of African, Christian, and indigenous Caribbean practices into the new religion known as vodou, served as an important place for working through terror and trauma, for seeking spiritual solace in a context of great distress and pain, both physical and psychic, and a space of community that provided dignity and humanity for people that were often denied both, as well as a material space for organizing resistance.9 Provision grounds, small plots of land where enslaved people grew food for subsistence, could serve to preserve African foodways and medicinal practices, as well as an economic toehold for enslaved people who sold the resulting produce in markets. Sometimes, over many years, an enslaved person could even earn enough to buy their freedom.10 Further, markets themselves served as an important social space for the transfer of news and the creation of community among enslaved people living on different plantations.11 Marronage, running away from bondage to find a space of relative freedom, either for a few days or for years at a time, was one of the significant and consistent forms of resistance, serving to establish and maintain ties around the region and even the colony.12 Enslaved people struggled to create a social world that valued their lives, freedom, and dignity, in the midst of a system predicated on their dehumanization and devaluation. Were scholars more attentive to this deeper history and the variety of emergent political forms, the Haitian Revolution might not seem as singular an event within the Atlantic context, but rather a moment when a set of rather common dynamics in other colonial Caribbean contexts had an opening, due to metropolitan distractions, to unfold into an unusual sequence of events which shook the foundations of colonial power. I hope, through grounding my analysis in a specific place and moment-a revolt around the southern port city of Les Cayes, just at the moment when enslaved people across the colony began to take up arms en masse-to defamiliarize the narrative of the revolution and compel readers to see it through fresh eyes. I focus here for several reasons. First, these events are unique in that they represent the first explicit demand for the complete abolition of slavery in Saint Domingue. They also serve as an example of a particularly large maroon
community (10,000-12,000 people) and a militant example of enslaved people’s self-activity in the south-contrary to prevailing scholarly wisdom that the stories of revolution in the south are those of free people of color. Second, the sources are particularly rich. In addition to the usual government documents and military reports, the contents of four mailbags, seized by a British privateer from a French merchant vessel, have been preserved in the High Court of the Admiralty Papers in the British National Archives. These letters span the crucial months of November 1792 to January 1793 and allow an unusual degree of insight and precision. Third, studying Platons-one of the earliest episodes of the revolution in the south-allows some insight into the ways in which enslaved people mobilized and built political power in this moment and provides a glimpse at routes untaken which might have arrived at different ends.
