Abstract: Revered in Haiti as a Founding Father committed to his countrymen’s freedom and independence, decried by his white contemporaries as a bloodthirsty brute, the Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines was actually a multifaceted historical figure who borrowed much of his worldview and policies from the colonial plantation system of the Atlantic world.
Résumé: Vénéré en Haïti comme père fondateur de la nation, haï en son temps par les esclavagistes, Jean-Jacques Dessalines était en fait un personnage complexe inspiré par le modèle colonial de son temps.
Introduction (for the full text of the article, go to the William and Mary Quarterly).
Jean-Jacques
Dessalines, slave, revolutionary, and first leader of independent Haiti (a.k.a.
Saint-Domingue), has proved a divisive figure [Figures 1 and 2].
Nineteenth-century non-Haitian authors generally portrayed him as a
bloodthirsty brute on account of his decision to massacre most of Haiti’s white
population in the spring of 1804.[1]
Early Haitian historians were somewhat circumspect, acknowledging his courage
and decisiveness in the struggle for independence, while lamenting the
corruption and despotism that characterized his rule.[2]
Non-Haitian historians now tend to ignore him and instead focus their attention
on Toussaint Louverture, but for the past 150 years, many Haitians, and
particularly black nationalists, have held him as the father of independence.[3]
The national anthem of Haiti, the Dessalinienne,
is named after him; his likeness adorns stamps; and his statue is featured
prominently on Port-au-Prince’s Champ de Mars.[4]
Alas, Haitian scholarship has been polluted by racial politics: emphasizing his
achievements is a way for black nationalists to minimize those of mixed-race
revolutionary leaders like Alexandre Pétion or of more moderate figures like
Louverture; criticizing him is a covert way to denounce the economic
exploitation of Haitians by its army, black dictators in particular. As a
result, books on Dessalines can be highly polemical and unscholarly.[5]
Though assessments of Dessalines’s
record vary immensely, most are based on a similar premise: that he was a
radical with a profound hatred for slavery, colonialism, France, and white planters.
To his detractors and admirers, Dessalines may have been a psychopath or a
hero; but he was undoubtedly a rebel. One should be wary of such one-sided
claims, however; Louverture’s own reputation underwent a thorough re-evaluation
after scholars first submitted him to the rigorous standards of modern
historical inquiry.[6]
One should thus approach his popular image with considerable caution until the
scholarship develops.
Another unfortunate penchant of the
historiography is scholars’ tendency to analyze Dessalines within a narrow
national and racial context. Works written by his countrymen today describe him
as a Haitian statesman preoccupied with independence and as a black nationalist
whose policies prefigured the black-mulatto disputes that later plagued Haitian
society. Nineteenth-century non-Haitian works, by presenting him as a crude
slave eager to shed the blood of white planters, also confined him to a black
and Haitian world. Deborah Jenson’s recent work brought much-needed attention
to Dessalines as an independent actor and author, but she still analyzed him as
a revolutionary of African descent, however articulate.[7]
What is too often left unmentioned is the fact that Dessalines grew up in a
Creole colony at the confluence of French, American, and African influences,
that he served for eight years as an officer of the French Republican army, and
that he was acutely aware of the larger diplomatic and commercial networks in
which he operated. Only by taking into account these larger trends (and
accessing the U.S., British, and French archives that document Dessalines’s
dealings with non-Haitian actors) can we fully comprehend his actions and
relevance as a man inspired by, and fully integrated into, the Atlantic system
in which he was raised.
This Atlantic system was
characterized in the Caribbean by five major elements. First came the colonial
bond, which (with the exception of the nearby United States) had remained
unchallenged since the days of Christopher Columbus. Second came the
international trade links that connected European metropolises with their
colonies, particularly the exchange of foodstuffs and manufactured goods with
tropical crops. Third came the predominance of the large plantation as the
preferred unit of production, particularly for Saint-Domingue’s dominant export
crop, sugar. Fourth, given the high labor needs of sugar plantations and the
prohibitive death rate among white newcomers, came African slavery and the
attendant slave trade. In turn, the arrival of five million African slaves in
the Caribbean (one million of them in Saint-Domingue), along with pre-existing
Native American settlements, European immigration, and widespread
miscegenation, explain the fifth element that characterized integrated Atlantic
societies like Saint-Domingue: the intricate fusion of races and ideas from three
continents into a manifold Creole culture.
Leaving aside Dessalines’s youth and
early career, about which too little is known to reach definitive conclusions
about his views, a thorough reappraisal of Dessalines’s place in this Atlantic
system must focus on the period 1802-1806, immediately prior to and after
Haiti’s independence. These years saw Dessalines’s rise from relative obscurity
to international prominence and marked the first time that documents by and
about him became abundant. These, interestingly, showed him to be a skillful,
even duplicitous individual willing to betray officers of color and to exploit
black cultivators to further his political and economic interests—in other
words, a fairly typical character in a tumultuous era and a commerce-driven
region of the globe in which upward financial mobility and
political survival loomed larger than moral scruples, national loyalty, and even race. In
particular, archival findings show that Dessalines encouraged French officers
to arrest fellow revolutionaries like Louverture, was long ambivalent about
advocating independence from France, and maintained close relations with some
white Frenchmen even after the 1804 massacres. He maintained diplomatic
channels with Haiti’s neighbors (particularly Jamaica) in an effort to keep
open
the trade routes inherited from the colonial era. He
also
strove to preserve Haiti’s plantations (albeit in the hands of black and
mixed-race officers rather than white planters) and made no effort to export the
Haitian slave revolt. Further, Dessalines enforced a strict feudal
system among former slaves and encouraged slave traders to import some of their
human cargo to Haiti. It is clear from the sources, too, that he drew from a Creole culture that
incorporated American and European influences as well as African.
All of these policies, it
should be noted, were inspired by the “Atlantic system” defined above, not
developed in opposition to it, and could have been embraced by colonial officials
and planters of any race in the eighteenth century. One should of course not
deny entirely the revolutionary nature of a rebel colony governed by a black
ex-slave. But the reputation of Dessalines as a destroyer of worlds, one
whose political agenda could be summarized as “couper têtes et brûler cayes”
(cut off heads and burn houses), must be thoroughly reappraised, along with, by
extension, the image of early Haiti as a pariah nation isolated from, and at
war with, white Atlantic societies.
Dessalines’s cunning ways,
occasionally conservative policies, and international savvy will come as a
surprise to those of his admirers who view him as a one-sided Haitian patriot;
these characteristics also stunned contemporaries like
Louverture, who looked down upon him as an obedient and dim-witted executioner,
only to see him outsmart and outlive them. In order to fully account for his
actions, one must thus downplay ideological factors
like his yearning for independence and abolition (cited by his admirers to the
present time), or psycho-racial explanations like his
innate thirst for blood (cited by his detractors in the nineteenth century).
Instead, highly pragmatic and personal factors more convincingly explain some
of his policies, starting with his economic interests as a planter, along with
his political ambitions as an officer and statesman, his personal grudges and
friendships, and the strategic and commercial needs of his new country. Despite
the sharp contrast usually drawn between Dessalines and Louverture, each
of whom has his supporters in present-day Haiti, the former’s combination of
revolutionary activism with hard-nosed realpolitik
eerily matches the latter’s, which suggests that, ultimately, one last dynamic
may have been unfolding: Dessalines as a rebellious son, simultaneously
emulating and betraying the man who had been his superior for so many years.
[1] Juan
Lopez Cancelada, Vida de J. J.
Dessalines, Gefe de los negros de Santo Domingo (Mexico City: Mariano de
Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1806); Anonymous, History of the Island of St. Domingo,
from its First Discovery by Columbus to the Present Period (1818; reprint,
New York: Mahlon Day, 1824), 179; Charles Mackenzie, Notes on Haiti Made during a Residence in that Republic vol. 1
(1830; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1971), 143-145; Alfred Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America:
Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1988), 91.
[2] Thomas Madiou, Histoire
d’Haïti 3 vols. (Port-au-Prince: Courtois, 1847); Beaubrun Ardouin, Etudes sur l’histoire d’Haïti, suivies de la
vie du général J-M Borgella 11 vols. (Paris: Dezobry et Magdeleine,
1853-1860).
[3] For admiring works, see Timoléon Brutus, L'homme
d'Airain: étude monographique sur Jean-Jacques Dessalines, fondateur de la
nation haïtienne 2 vols. (Port-au-Prince:
Théodore, 1946); Dantès-Bellegarde, Dessalines a parlé (Port-au-Prince: Société d’éditions et de
librairie, 1948); Luc Dorsinville, Jean-Jacques
Dessalines et la création du drapeau bleu et rouge haïtien (Port-au-Prince:
Les Presses Libres, 1953); Gérard Mentor Laurent, Six études sur J. J. Dessalines (Port-au-Prince: Les Presses
Libres, [1961?]); Hénock Trouillot, Dessalines
ou la tragédie post-coloniale (Port-au-Prince: Panorama, 1966); Martin
Renauld, Jean-Jacques Dessalines dans la guerre d'indépendance haïtienne:
les stratégies utilisées pour imposer son leadership (Montréal: Université
de Montréal, 2004); Gérard Desnoyers Montès, Dessalines face à l'armée de
Napoléon Bonaparte (Montréal : SORHICA, 2006); Berthony Dupont, Jean-Jacques Dessalines: itinéraire d’un
révolutionnaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006). For a
rare look at Dessalines in non-Haitian scholarship, see Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex,
and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2011).
[4]
On the growing cult of Dessalines, see
Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods
(1995; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 27; Michael
Largey, Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music
and Cultural Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006),
74-89.
[5] For
an example of politicized scholarship (on the origins of the Haitian flag), see
Michel Aubourg, Le drapeau dessalinien:
Contribution à l’histoire d’Haïti (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l’Etat,
1964), 38-40. On Dessalines and racial politics, see David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour,
and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979)
[6] Marie-Antoinette Menier,
Gabriel Debien, and Jean Fouchard, “Toussaint Louverture avant 1789. Légendes
et réalités,” in Jacques
de Cauna, ed., Toussaint Louverture et
l’indépendance d’Haïti (Paris: Karthala, 2004), 61-67.
il faut tout un siècle et demie pour montrer et parler du vrai JN JACQUES DESSALINES
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