3. Although Waldo E. Martin Jr. emphasizes the centrality of the Haitian Revolution in Douglass’s mind, he relies on the 1893 Chicago speech and on some passages in a West Indian Emancipation Day address of August 2, 1858. The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 50–52, 269, 271. But these passages do not appear in the text that was printed in Frederick Douglass’s Paper, The New York Times, the Rochester Democrat and American, and other newspapers. John Blassingame’s edition of Douglass’s speeches and debates from 1841 to 1863 does not contain a single positive reference to the Haitian Revolution except for occasional praise of Toussaint Louverture. John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vols. 1–3 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979; 1982; 1985). It seems probable that Douglass avoided the subject for tactical reasons, especially when addressing white audiences.
4. Douglass, “Lecture on Haiti,” 486; Chicago Tribune, Jan. 3, 1893. For colonial sources of North Atlantic sugar imports, see Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1977), p. 48, table 11.
5. Katherine Plymley Diaries, 1066/1, book 5: 10–15, County Record Office, Shire Hall, Abbey Fossgate, Shrewsbury. Clarkson was in close touch with his coworkers Joseph and Katherine Plymley, and kept them fully up-to-date on abolitionist activities. In March 1792, Katherine noted that the abolitionists were being blamed for the bloodshed in Saint-Domingue; the West Indians were complaining that their own slaves were aware of the abolitionist agitation in England and were already showing signs of unrest, although Joseph had obtained a letter from a planter who affirmed that “the Negroes never were more peaceful & quiet, no disturbances of any kind nor the least appearance of a revolt.…” (March 5 to 20, 1792, book 7: 10–11). By November 1793, Clarkson was convinced that the upheavals in the French colonies had convinced even the British merchants that “nothing but ameliorating the condition of the slaves in the other West India islands can save the inhabitants from revolts & insurrections, & the proportion of blacks to whites is now greater than ever” (Nov. 9 to 15, 1793, book 21: 1–2). But Clarkson overestimated this fear and also underestimated the fear on the part of more conservative abolitionists that his sympathies with the French Revolution would harm the cause.
6. This point was stressed by W. E. B. DuBois in his classic study of 1896, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (1986; repr., New York: The Social Science Press, 1954), 70–93; it is reaffirmed in more recent works, such as Alfred Nathaniel Hunt, “The Influence of Haiti on the Antebellum South, 1791–1865” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1975), 127, published as Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 108–10.A slew of new work has sought to trace the influence of the Haitian Revolution and its figures, such as Toussaint, in the United States. A sampling includes Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005); Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon, eds., African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents (New York: Routledge, 2010); Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
7. Drescher, Econocide, 167–70. On the arming of slaves by the British, and other European powers in the West Indies, see Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006).
8. David Geggus, “The Cost of Pitt’s Caribbean Campaigns, 1793–1798,” The Historical Journal 26, no. 3 (1983): 699–706; Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint-Domingue, 1793–1798 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1982), 212, 383. Geggus estimates that from 1793 to 1798 12,695 British troops died in Saint-Domingue, about one-third of the total mortality in the Caribbean theater. His estimate for deaths of seamen ranges from 12,500 to a maximum of 20,000. To this figure he adds 5,740 deaths among foreign regiments in British pay. These estimates have been updated in Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar, and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War Against Revolutionary France (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1987), 366.
9. See sources cited in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 159–60, 441–43; and Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 173–74, 345; David Geggus, “British Opinion and the Emergence of Haiti, 1791–1805,” in Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846, ed. James Walvin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 134–36, 142–49. It is significant that in 1798, when Toussaint finally triumphed over the British in Saint-Domingue, Georgia became the last American state to close off the slave trade and even Southern congressmen agreed to a prohibition of any slave from outside the United States into Mississippi Territory. As a result of the British abolition of the African slave trade and restriction of the intercolonial slave trade, which would otherwise have more than made up for heavy mortality, the slave population of the new sugar colonies, such as Trinidad, Dominica, Saint Vincent, and Guiana, declined by 25.3 percent between 1807 and 1834. B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 72–85.
10. J. Philmore [pseud.], Two Dialogues on the Man-Trade (London, 1760), 54; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), 418. Diderot also defended the right of bondsmen to use any possible means to regain their freedom.
11. The importance for American blacks of the Haitian Revolution has been explored in much recent scholarship, in particular see White, Encountering Revolution, 145–46; and the essays in Jackson and Bacon, African Americans and the Haitian Revolution.
12. Douglass, “Lecture on Haiti,” 486.
13. Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), xviii–xx, 82–125. Black slaves staged a massive uprising in Iraq as early as 869 CE and were not suppressed for fourteen years. See Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 5–8. But no slaves in history had supplanted their masters and created a state based in principle on universal freedom. Yet, as much as the Haitian Declaration of Independence positioned Haiti among the “world’s free peoples,” it was clear that its claims of freedom against enslavement were for Haitians. The document officially rejected a “missionary spirit” in spreading the revolution, and shirked from being “the lawgivers of the Caribbean,” or letting their “glory consist of troubling the peace of the neighboring islands.” The other islands, unlike Haiti, the Declaration claimed, had not been “drenched in the innocent blood of its inhabitants … they have no vengeance to claim from the authority that protects them.” “The Haitian Declaration of Independence, January 1, 1804,” in Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: a Brief History with Documents, ed. Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), 188. Despite the assurances in the Declaration, British officials in London and in Jamaica perceived Haiti as a troubling precedent, and worried that a spirit of rebellion would emanate from the island. Julia Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (July 1, 2012): 58
3–614. And even for Haitians, the ideal of universal freedom was circumscribed in the new republic—there was no right of public assembly or of association, and the Catholic faith remained the state religion, not to mention the aggressive disciplinary regime set up within the constitution aimed at shoving the new republic back onto the road to prosperity. Carolyn E. Fick, “The Saint-Domingue Slave Revolution and the Unfolding of Independence, 1791–1804,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 177, 183–84.
14. Orlando Patterson has argued that the “Sambo” stereotype is “an ideological imperative of all systems of slavery, from the most primitive to the most advanced,” and is “simply an elaboration of the notion that the slave is quintessentially a person without honor,” totally lacking in “manhood.” While rightly insisting, contrary to Stanley Elkins, that slaves retained “the irrepressible yearning for dignity and recognition,” Patterson seems to underestimate the degree to which many oppressed peoples internalize the standards and values of their oppressors. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 96–97. Michael Walzer, drawing on centuries of commentary on Exodus, emphasizes the extreme difficulty of transforming slaves into freemen (the lesson of the forty years in the wilderness), and holds that in Egypt the bulk of slaves “admitted into their souls the degradation of slavery.” He adds, however, that at least some of the Israelite slaves were ready to fight and thought of themselves as free or potentially free. Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 43–66. The tension between the slave’s internalized degradation and his “irrepressible yearning for dignity and recognition” has been central to the continuing debate over both slavery and the human condition; it was precisely because so many slaves degraded themselves in order to please their masters that the example of Haiti was so inspiring to blacks like Denmark Vesey and David Walker.
15. There has always been confusion and controversy over the terms used to designate persons of African and mixed African and European ancestry. In the United States the term “Negro” usually included “colored” persons of mixed ancestry (usually lumped together as “mulattoes”), and there was no widely accepted terminology to denote the varying degrees of racial intermixture or phenotypic distinctions such as lighter skin and Caucasoid hair. In the Caribbean, usage varied from one island to another and was never entirely consistent. In the French colonies, the legal category “free men of color” (hommes de couleur libres or gens de couleur) included free blacks; some British officials extended the term “free colored” to include blacks as well as browns. But in the Caribbean, both whites and freedmen drew sharp distinctions based on color and accorded higher status to persons with diminishing degrees of African ancestry. As far as possible I will follow the usage that best fits the region being discussed. When referring to the United States, I will use the term “black” or “African American” in general, except where the context indicates a more specific phenotype. When discussing the West Indies, “free coloreds,” “gens de couleur,” and “anciens libres” will usually refer to people of mixed racial ancestry but will sometimes include, especially in Saint-Domingue, free blacks. Following the practice of recent historians of the Caribbean, I will use the convenient term “freedmen” to refer to African Americans of both sexes, whether colored or black, who were either manumitted or born free.
16. Lyman L. Johnson, “Manumission in Colonial Buenos Aires, 1776–1810,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 59, no. 2 (May 1, 1979): 261. Frank “Trey” Proctor III, “Gender and the Manumission of Slaves in New Spain,” Hispanic American Historical Review 86, no. 2 (May 2006): 309–36.
17. Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815 (New Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 79.
18. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, chapters 8–10.
19. For a useful comparative survey, see David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, eds., Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
20. Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), 222; Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 89, 95–96. For the evolving responses by white refugees to the causes of the Haitian Revolution while in the United States, see Ashli White, “The Saint-Dominguan Refugees and American Distinctiveness in the Early Years of the Haitian Revolution,” in Geggus and Fiering,The World of the Haitian Revolution, 248–58.
21. Robert Stein, “The Free Men of Colour and the Revolution in Saint Domingue, 1789–1792,” Histoire sociale—Social History 14 (May 1981): 7–28; Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 137–48.
22. Jerome S. Handler, The Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 80; Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 191.
23. David Geggus, “The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series (April 1987); 288–99. For Toussaint’s status as a freedman, see note 53, infra.
24. Gad J. Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 24; Richard B. Sheridan, “The Maroons of Jamaica, 1730–1830: Livelihood, Demography and Health,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Comparative Studies 6, no. 3 (Dec. 1985): 152–70; Geggus, “Enigma of Jamaica,” 275–85; Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: Capricorn Books, 1976), 393–97.
25. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 14–18, 51–67; Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 114–21; Phillip Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” in Brown and Morgan, Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 180–208.
26. Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats, passim. Also see the comparative essay of Christopher Leslie Brown, “The Arming of Slaves in Comparative Perspective,” in Brown and Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves, 330–53.
27. Cohen and Greene, Neither Slave nor Free; Berlin, Slaves Without Masters; Herbert S. Klein and Clotilde Andrade Paiva, “Freedmen in a Slave Economy: Minas Gerais in 1831,” Journal of Social History 29, no. 4 (July 1, 1996): 933–62. Jerome S. Handler and John T. Pohlmann, “Slave Manumissions and Freedmen in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 3 (July 1, 1984): 390–408.
28. Population statistics for the early nineteenth century are usually unreliable, especially for the Caribbean, and there are many discrepancies in the censuses and other standard sources. I have used the tables in Higman, Slave Populations, 77; B. W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 61–62; Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 46–47; Cohen and Greene, eds., Neither Slave nor Free, 4, 10, 194; Handler, Unappropriated People, 18–19; Heuman, Between Black and White, 7–8; Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967), 95–97; Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Printing Office, 1975), 1:22–36; Bureau of the Census, Negro Population, 1790–1915 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918), 53–57.
29. Douglas Hall, “Jamaica,” in Cohen and Greene, Neither Slave nor Free, 196; Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1971), 167–75. For the criteria used in listing color in the West Indian slave registrations from 1813 to 1832, see Hi
gman, Slave Populations, 19–21.
30. Frederick P. Bowser, “Colonial Spanish America,” in Cohen and Greene, Neither Slave nor Free, 55; Philip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830–1865 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 44–45.
31. See especially Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971). Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684–1745,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 54, no. 4 (Nov. 1, 1974): 603–35.
32. White, Encountering Revolution, 87–123. See also Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1994); Juliet E. K. Walker, “Racism, Slavery, and Free Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship in the United States Before the Civil War,” The Business History Review 60, no. 3 (Autumn 1986): 343–82; Thomas N. Ingersoll, “Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718–1812,” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 2 (April 1, 1991): 173–200.
33. Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 3–29, 127–29.
34. Handler, Unappropriated People, 98–99, 190–94, 201–04.
35. Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, passim; Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 29–32, and passim.
36. In the United States, “free black” has replaced “free Negro,” even though the latter term more clearly indicated people of mixed black and white descent. In the Caribbean and elsewhere, “free colored” remains the appropriate term for a population in which people of mixed descent predominated.
37. Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 46–49, 136–37; Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, 1: 8–9, 24–36; Bureau of the Census, Negro Population, 53–57; Fields, Slavery and Freedom, 1–15. Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1–14.
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