Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc was a French Army general who served under Napoleon Bonaparte during the French Revolution. He was husband to Pauline Bonaparte, sister to Napoleon. In 1801, he was sent to Saint-Domingue (Haiti), where an invasion force under his command captured and deported the Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture, as part of an unsuccessful attempt to reassert imperial control over Saint-Domingue and reinstate slavery on the local population. Leclerc died of yellow fever during the failed invasion.
In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily of black African descent with little mixture. They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America.
The Haitian Revolution was a successful insurrection by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign state of Haiti. The revolt began on 22 August 1791, and ended in 1804 with the former colony's independence. It involved black, biracial, French, Spanish, British, and Polish participants—with the ex-slave Toussaint Louverture emerging as Haiti's most prominent general. The revolution was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery and ruled by non-whites and former captives. The successful revolution was a defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World and the revolution's effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. The end of French rule and the abolition of slavery in the former colony was followed by a successful defense of the freedoms the former slaves had won, and with the collaboration of already free people of color, of their independence from white Europeans.
Léger-Félicité Sonthonax was a French abolitionist and Jacobin before joining the Girondist party, which emerged in 1791. During the French Revolution, he controlled 7,000 French troops in Saint-Domingue during part of the Haitian Revolution. His official title was Civil Commissioner. From September 1792, he and Polverel became the de facto rulers of Saint-Domingue's non-slave population. Because they were associated with Brissot’s party, they were put in accusation by the convention on July 16, 1793, but a ship to bring them back in France didn’t arrive in the colony until June 1794, and they arrived in France in the time of the downfall of Robespierre. They had a fair trial in 1795 and were acquitted of the charges the white colonists brought against them. Sonthonax believed that Saint-Domingue's whites were royalists or separatists, so he attacked the military power of the white settlers and by doing so alienated the colonial settlers from their government. Many gens de couleur asserted that they could form the military backbone of Saint-Domingue if they were given rights, but Sonthonax rejected this view as outdated in the wake of the August 1791 slave uprising. He believed that Saint-Domingue would need ex-slave soldiers among the ranks of the colonial army if it was to survive. On August 1793, he proclaimed freedom for all slaves in the north province. His critics allege that he was forced into ending slavery in order to maintain his own power.
Dutty Boukman was an early leader of the Haitian Revolution. Born in Senegambia, he was enslaved to Jamaica. He eventually ended up in Haiti, where he became a leader of the Maroons and a vodou houngan (priest).
George Biassou was an early leader of the 1791 slave rising in Saint-Domingue that began the Haitian Revolution. With Jean-François and Jeannot, he was prophesied by the vodou priest, Dutty Boukman, to lead the revolution.
Julien Raimond was a Saint Dominican indigo planter in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now the Republic of Haiti, who became a leader in its revolution and the formation of Haiti.
Slavery in the British and French Caribbean refers to slavery in the parts of the Caribbean dominated by France or the British Empire.
Étienne Polverel (1740–1795) was a French lawyer, aristocrat, and revolutionary. He was a member of the Jacobin club. In 1792, he and Léger Félicité Sonthonax were sent to Saint-Domingue to suppress the slave revolt and to implement the decree of April 4, 1792, that gave equality of rights to all free men, regardless of their color.
Randall Robinson was an American lawyer, author and activist, noted as the founder of TransAfrica. He was known particularly for his impassioned opposition to apartheid, and for his advocacy on behalf of Haitian immigrants and Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Due to his frustration with American society, Robinson emigrated to Saint Kitts in 2001.
Compensated emancipation was a method of ending slavery, under which the enslaved person's owner received compensation from the government in exchange for manumitting the slave. This could be monetary, and it could allow the owner to retain the slave for a period of labor, an indenture. Cash compensation rarely was equal to the slave's market value.
According to its Constitution and written laws, Haiti meets most international human rights standards. In practice, many provisions are not respected. The government's human rights record is poor. Political killings, kidnapping, torture, and unlawful incarceration are common unofficial practices, especially during periods of coups or attempted coups.
The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the subsequent emancipation of Haiti as an independent state provoked mixed reactions in the United States. Among many white Americans, this led to uneasiness, instilling fears of racial instability on its own soil and possible problems with foreign relations and trade between the two countries. Among enslaved black Americans, it fueled hope that the principles of the recent American Revolution might be realized in their own liberation.
Horace G. Campbell is an international peace and justice scholar and Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, he has been involved in Africa's Liberation Struggles and in the struggles for peace and justice globally for more than four decades. From his years in Toronto, Canada, to his sojourns in Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom and parts of the Caribbean, he has been an influential force offering alternatives to the hegemonic ideas of Eurocentrism. In an attempt to theorise new concepts of revolution in the 21st century he has been seeking to expand on the ideas of fractals and the importance of emancipatory ideas. He currently teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University.
The Haitian Declaration of Independence was proclaimed on 1 January 1804 in the port city of Gonaïves by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, marking the end of 13-year long Haitian Revolution. The declaration marked Haiti becoming the first independent nation of Latin America and only the second in the Americas after the United States.
Slavery in Haiti began after the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the island in 1492 with the European colonists that followed from Portugal, Spain and France. The practice was devastating to the native population. Following the indigenous Tainos' near decimation from forced labor, disease and war, the Spanish, under initial advisement of the Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas and with the blessing of the Catholic church, began engaging in earnest during the 17th century in the forced labor of enslaved Africans. During the French colonial period, beginning in 1625, the economy of Saint-Domingue, was based on slavery; conditions on Saint-Domingue became notoriously bad even compared to chattel slavery conditions elsewhere.
Macaya, was a Kongolese-born Haitian revolutionary military leader. Macaya was one of the first black rebel leaders in Saint-Domingue to ally himself with the French Republican commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel. He helped to lead forces that recaptured Cap-Français on behalf of the French Republicans.
The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution is a 2018 book by Julius S. Scott, based on his influential but previously unpublished 1986 Duke University doctoral dissertation. The book traces the circulation of news in African diasporic communities in the Caribbean around the time of the Haitian Revolution, and links the "common wind" of shared information to political developments leading to the abolition of slavery in the British and French Caribbean.
Yarimar Bonilla is a Puerto Rican political anthropologist, author, columnist, and professor of anthropology and Puerto Rican studies at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. As of 1 July 2023 she is a Professor at Princeton's Effron Center. Bonilla’s research questions the nature of sovereignty and relationships of citizenship and race across the Americas.
