NEGRO REVOLUTION IN HAITI
TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE ESTABLISHES THE DOMINION OF HIS RACE
a.d. 1791
CHARLES WYLLYS ELLIOTT
Haiti, the Spanish Santo Domingo, earlier called Española, is the largest of the West Indian islands except Cuba. The bloody revolutionary and slave revolts which began in 1791 and ended in the supremacy of the negroes, form the most memorable passages in its history. From 1797 their great leader, Toussaint Louverture, whose achievements are here recounted, was Governor of the whole island, whose independence he proclaimed in 1801. Having afterward opposed Napoleon's attempt to reëstablish slavery, Toussaint was treacherously arrested and sent to France, where, in a dungeon, he died in 1803. But white supremacy was never restored in Haiti.
In 1697 France, by treaty, acquired the western part of the island, the eastern portion remaining in the possession of Spain, which had held it ever since its discovery by Columbus. The French found their Haitian lands very profitable in cotton and sugar, and the western region prospered, while the Spanish community was stagnant. At the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789) the whole island was thrown into a ferment, out of which came the changes that Elliott relates.
At that time the French portion of Haiti had about half a million inhabitants, of whom some forty thousand were of European blood, thirty thousand free negroes, the rest negro slaves. The free colored people, mostly mulattoes, had no voice in the Government, but in 1790 the French National Assembly decreed to those born of free parents full citizenship. Opposition on the part of the whites caused delay in carrying out the decree. Taking advantage of the ensuing commotion, the slaves rose in revolt (August, 1791), and the conditions which Toussaint at length was called upon to meet were inevitably brought about.
This black hero, of whose origin and personality information is given below, has been made the subject of a noble sonnet by Wordsworth, of an equally fine eulogy by Wendell Phillips, of a tragedy by Lamartine, and of a romance, The Hour and the Man, by Harriet Martineau. Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, placed Toussaint in his new calendar among the great modern liberators—Hampden, Cromwell, Algernon Sidney, Washington, and Bolivar.