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Article Excerpt
"One of the most extraordinary men of a time when so many extraordinary men appeared." (1) The French historian Alphonse Beauchamp, who wrote these words in the Universal Biography at the opening of the nineteenth century as a series of democratic revolutions in Europe and throughout the Americas came to an end, did not intend them for George Washington, the Virginia planter who led Britain's thirteen North American colonies to independence. Nor did he intend them for Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican soldier who brought order out of the chaos of the French Revolution and conquered Europe, or Simon Bolivar, the Venezuelan aristocrat who ended Spanish rule throughout much of Latin America. They referred instead to Francois Dominique Toussaint Louverture, the black general and former bondman who led an army of rebel slaves to victory over their former masters as well as the armies of France, England, and Spain at the end of the eighteenth century in the Saint-Domingue or Haitian Revolution. (2) It may come as a revelation that Beauchamp was not alone in his assessment. While today it is difficult to find people who revere the black slaves who centuries ago killed whites to be free, in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, men and women throughout the Atlantic world celebrated Louverture as a Great Man, a slave who compared favorably to other Great Men of the Age of Revolution.
Americans in the new republic resisted this enlightened interpretation of history. Louverture's greatness conflicted with their collective memory of the Haitian Revolution. They remembered that the slave revolt that began in 1791 in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue led to thirteen years of bloodshed between nearly a half-million black slaves; tens of thousands of mulattoes; and French, English, and Spanish colonists and soldiers--that when the revolution came to an end in 1804, black leaders declared national independence, gave their new nation the name used by the island's indigenous Taino inhabitants, Haiti, and ordered the massacre of nearly every white man, woman, and child remaining in the territory. The events in Haiti had a profound impact on the American mind; they were a constant reminder of the possible outcome of any society built on the bedrock of slavery. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the 1850s when the sectional conflict between northerners and southerners grew violent and war over slavery seemed imminent, public memory of the Haitian Revolution surged. In public speeches and printed texts, southern secessionists and northern unionists conjured disturbing images of the horrors of St. Domingo in an effort to secure public policy committed to maintaining the status quo regarding the institution of slavery. Both groups warned that with the end of slavery the United States would experience a racial apocalypse like that which took place in Haiti a half century before.
African Americans and their radical white allies put the memory of the Haitian Revolution to a different use. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, they joined the transatlantic commemoration of Louverture and in lectures, books, articles, pamphlets, and illustrations offered him to an American audience as a symbol of the virtue and potential of the black race. In addition to challenging the widespread belief in white supremacy, these abolitionists placed great emphasis on Louverture's character for another reason: to calm widespread fears of slave insurrection. By stressing his compassion and integrity at the expense of his militancy, abolitionists tried to soften the rock hard image of this indomitable black warrior. The strategy worked, for Louverture remained an antislavery icon among even the most conservative social reformers decades after his death. The convergence of European and American abolitionism around the memory of Haiti's preeminent founding father proved resilient. It was, however, only temporary.
An analysis of abolitionist oral, print, and visual culture reveals that in the decade before the Civil War, African Americans and their radical white allies transformed Louverture into a symbol of black masculinity and violence, which they deployed to bring about the destruction of the status quo. They insisted that if slavery did not end immediately, then they would follow Louverture's example and use violence to deliver freedom to their brothers and sisters in bondage. A look at radical abolitionism and in particular John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859 reveals the iconic stature of Louverture among American abolitionists; it moreover illuminates an important trajectory. The men who invaded Harpers Ferry not only carried on the memory of Louverture, but they joined their movement to a black revolutionary tradition deeply rooted in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. While historians typically mark the beginning of abolitionism in the United States with the publication of either David Walker's Appeal in 1829 or William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator in 1831, the devotion of Brown and his band of brothers to the violent tactics of the Haitian Revolution locates the American abolitionist movement beyond the geographical boundaries of the United States and establishes its foundation prior to the nineteenth century.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, public discourse on the Haitian Revolution was a transatlantic affair. With American print culture in its adolescence, American readers poured over foreign newspapers, periodicals, and books. In these texts, the memory of Louverture survived among African Americans and their radical white allies. In 1802, England's Annual Register, a widely read chronicle of the world's important events, devoted its pages to a biography of Louverture. The periodical detailed his great character and accomplishments. It compared him favorably to both Washington and Bonaparte, concluding, he was "undoubtedly the most interesting of all the public characters which appeared on the great stage of political events for the present year." (3) At the same time that the Annual Register labeled Louverture its "man of the year," Marcus Rainsford, a British soldier and eyewitness to the Haitian Revolution published a history of the event. (4) In the next two years, at a time when very few books enjoyed a second printing, London publishers reprinted the book twice more in revised and expanded editions. Popular periodicals reviewed these works and reprinted lengthy excerpts. Rainsford knew Louverture and venerated him. He referred to him as a "truly great man" who surpassed Napoleon in both personal character and political power. (5) All three editions of Rainsford's book included detailed biographical accounts of Louverture's "character."
The third edition, which appeared in 1805, offered something else as well: It included several wood engravings that extended the image of Louverture as a Great Man from print to visual culture. This engraving, drawn by Rainsford himself, would become the most recognized image of Louverture in the nineteenth century. In the illustration, Louverture stands erect with his eyes focused toward the viewer. He is strong and undaunted. His figure dominates the landscape as well as the nameless and faceless foot soldiers relegated to the background. Here is a Great Man, the embodiment of both a land and a people. The image proved resilient; three decades later, a reproduction of it appeared on the front page of the world's most popular periodical. Published simultaneously in London and New York, the Penny Magazine attracted a tremendous following. Its editor claimed an annual readership of one million in Britain alone. (6) In the article accompanying the illustration, British writer and reformer Harriet Martineau amplified Rainsford's sentiments, writing that Louverture "was a Great Man: and what one man of his race has been, others may be." (7) The image also crossed the Atlantic in one of Samuel Goodrich's popular illustrated textbooks for American children, Lights and Shadows in American History. Goodrich's artist took some license in adding a beard to Louverture's face and all but eliminating the background scenery; nevertheless, the accompanying text reinforced the transatlantic abolitionist memory of Louverture clearly: "The leader of the blacks, was one of the most extraordinary characters of modern times, and exhibited proofs of genius and elevation of character which gave him a high rank in the annals of great men." (8)
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African Americans embraced this memory of Louverture. The pages of Samuel Cornish's and John Russworm's Freedom's Journal, the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans, included numerous accounts of the Haitian Revolution and the struggling independent black nation. (9) A three-part biographical sketch on Louverture, which the editors copied directly from the Quarterly Review of London, illuminated Louverture's character as proof of the equality of the black race. (10) The same English article influenced an oration on the Haitian Revolution delivered by the abolitionist medical doctor James McCune Smith in New York City in 1844. Like Rainsford's narratives and the article copied into Freedom's Journal, the oration included "a sketch of the character of Toussaint L'Ouverture." But this is where the similarities ended. Smith drew from the prominent works of American, British, and Haitian authors to offer a flesh perspective. Among his central ideas was that the French government did not emancipate the colony's enslaved people; it was rather something they seized "by force of arms." Led by a former bondman who "reached the prime of manhood, a slave," enslaved Haitians secured both individual liberty and national independence. Once free, "Like Leonidas at Thermopylae, or the Bruce at Bannockburn, Toussaint determined to defend from thralldom his sea-girt isle, made sacred to liberty by the baptism of blood." (11) The oration was a commentary on the efficacy of violence that anticipated a significant transformation in the memory of Louverture, which would take place among American abolitionists on the eve of the Civil War. Considered alongside the articles in Freedom's Journal and the numerous other abolitionist accounts of the Haitian Revolution, it challenges those who find a reticence of African Americans to invoke the Haitian Revolution because of the images it evoked of race war and the failure of black government. (12)
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Given the high regard that prominent African Americans accorded foreign accounts of the revolution, biographies of Louverture written and published in Europe continued to figure prominently in American abolitionists' memory of the Haitian Revolution. Four widely read books published in England in the middle of the nineteenth century deserve attention, as they indicate an important modification of the symbol of Louverture. The authors of...
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