This post is a part of our “Race and Revolution” series.

By Chelsea Stieber

Given the growth in Haitian Studies over the last twenty years or so, the Haitian Revolution and its relationship to the Age of Revolution no longer requires the laborious contextualization and explanation it once did. The civil war context in post-independence Haiti, however, is decidedly less studied. As David Geggus reminds us, the Haitian Revolution was far from a unified effort but rather “several revolutions in one.”[1] Moreover, the period was marked by intense regional and ideological conflict between revolutionary factions, culminating in a civil war between Toussaint Louverture and André Rigaud known as the War of the South or the War of Knives (1799–1800). Though the two sides united briefly in the final years of the battle for independence under the banner of Dessalines’ Armée indigène, the newly independent state of Haiti divided along these same lines: between North and South, between those who envisioned a military authoritarian regime and those who wished to establish an independent republic. These tensions culminated in Dessalines’ assassination in 1806 at the hands of the pro-republican faction, an act that triggered another decade of civil war with Henry Christophe leading the North, and Pétion and Boyer leading the South (1807–1820).

We must think outside of the simplistic, indeed specious, narratives that point to race as the cause of Haiti’s post-independence civil wars. I draw here on recent work from Marlene Daut that tackles the question of race head-on. In her excellent transatlantic literary history of the Haitian Revolution, Daut reveals how race was incessantly narrated “in a particularly ‘racialized’ way,” laying bare the discursive origins of a race-based idea of the Haitian Revolution that prevailed in the Atlantic imaginary.[2] More important, she points to the way these 19^th-century racialized narratives get co-opted by longer studies of Haiti’s history, such as in David Nicholls’ race-based explanations of Haitian historiography.[3] As Daut points out, one of the biggest problems with these “racialized” historiographic narratives is that they foreclose other possible avenues for analyzing the Haitian experience. As Daut puts it, the race-based analytic frame “circumscribes our interpretive capacities” for understanding Haitian historiography.[4]

Haitian Revolutionary historiography has long grappled with how to present Haitian Revolutionary agency beyond race. Carolyn Fick calls for a “certain degree of discernment” when approaching the “race question as a cause of civil war,” while Geggus argues that the War of the South was “in essence a regional power struggle.”[5] Haitian historians Gaétan Mentor and Claude Auguste have each explored the War of the South in great detail and, while they do not eschew race entirely, provide a much more complex portrait of Haitian agency.[6] More recently, John Garrigus has zeroed in on Haitian revolutionary historiography’s continued equivocation on the question of race in revolutionary civil war: “Historians have long portrayed Revolutionary-era conflicts between Saint-Domingue’s South and North provinces as racial warfare between ‘blacks’ and ‘mulattoes’ even while acknowledging that these labels were inaccurate.”[7] Of course, these 20^th-century historians aren’t the first to point out the problem with race in revolutionary civil wars, either. They are reactivating an argument made by Baron de Vastey in 1819, which concluded that European accounts of race in the Haitian Revolution got it all wrong (“ont tombé dans de grandes erreurs”) when they cast the Haitian civil war as one between “les nègres dans le Nord et les mulâtres dans le Sud.”[8]

Yet if historiography of the revolutionary civil war has long interrogated the question of race, we have yet to broach the question of race and agency in studies of the immediate post-independence period—a moment that remains “in the historiographical shadows,” as Chris Bongie recently put it.[9] How and why did newly-independent Haitians divide up the way that they did after 1804, between supporters of Dessalines’ military authoritarian state, and the “republican” opposition? Even less analyzed is how or why people divided up in the 1807–1820 civil war between North and South. Ever the pioneer, Vastey offered a rebuttal to the dominant race-based arguments of his time. He argued that it was the contingent factor of geography rather than the biological determinism of color that accounted for filiation in civil war: “dans nos guerres civiles, soit avec les blancs ou entre nous-mêmes, la population a pris part dans ces guerres, suivant le territoire où elle s’est trouvée placée, plutôt que suivant les opinions et les couleurs des individus.”[10]

Returning to Daut by way of conclusion, then: how can we unleash our “interpretative capacities” beyond race and bring them to bear on our analysis of the early post-independence period? We might take Vastey’s regionalist approach as a start. How did geographic and social factors shape Haitian mobilities during the post-independence civil wars? Who was allowed to move? How did revolutionary armies create mobility—both geographic and social? Alternatively, how did labor codes restrict mobility? Finally, and most importantly in my mind, how can thinking beyond race allow us to confront the question of ideology, in the sense that Bernard Bailyn uses the term?[11] The “raced” explanations of Haitian civil war preclude us from analyzing the ideological divisions—and origins—of Haiti, between those who envisioned a republic in the mold of 1789, those who wished for an imperial state, and those who imagined something else entirely. These are questions that come into view only when we move beyond the simplistic race-based explanations for Haitian agency, toward a more complex accounting of 1804 and its aftermath.

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Chelsea Stieber is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the Catholic University of America. She is currently completing a book manuscript on civil war and post-independence writing in Haiti entitled, Haiti’s Paper War: Post-Independence Writing and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954. She is also working on a Digital Humanities project in conjunction with the National Digital Initiatives at the Library of Congress called the RSHHGG Lab: an interactive online index of over 90 years of the Haitian social science journal, the Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire, de Géographie et de Géologie. The site is slated to go live via labs.loc.gov in 2018 and also on www.rshhgglab.com. You can find out more about her work at www.chelseastieber.com or on Twitter @chelseastieber.

Title Image: Ile a vache map.

Endnotes:

[1] David Geggus. “The Haitian Revolution in Atlantic Perspective.” The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World: 1450-1850. Ed. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 535.

[2] Marlene Daut, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 3. For a similar discursive analysis of US newspapers specifically, and the “making” of a dangerous, violent, raced idea of Saint-Domingue-Haïti in the US imaginary see James A. Dun, Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

[3] David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For a more recent example of race-based historical analysis, see Philippe Girard, Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Basic Books, 2016).

[4] Daut, Tropics, 547.

[5] Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 200. David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 22.

[6] Gaétan Mentor, Histoire d’un crime politique (Port-au-Prince: Imp. Le Natal, 1999). Claude B. Auguste, “André Rigaud, Leader des anciens libres,” Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire, de Géographie et de Géologie 52, no. 187 (Mar. 1997).

[7] John. D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 17.

[8] Baron de Vastey, Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayti (Sans Souci: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1819), 124.

[9] Baron de Vastey, The Colonial System Unveiled, ed. and trans. Chris Bongie (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 2. On the post-independence period see Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012) and Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

[10] Vastey, Essai, 124–125. “In our civil wars, either with the French or between ourselves, the masses sided with the territory they were bound to, rather than following the opinions and the colors of individuals.”

[11] Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). See John K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4, no. 2 (1993): 181–214.