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In this excerpt from Professor John Garrigus’ award-winning book “A Secret Among the Blacks”: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution, the cast of characters whose lives and deaths would help set the stage for history’s only successful slave revolution is introduced.
This book tells the story of men and women who, alone and together, over thirty years, prepared the land they lived on for revolution. They toiled in fields and houses, tended cattle in remote mountains, stoked refinery fires that burned day and night, drove coaches on roads through sugarcane fields, and kept vigil over the sick and injured, healing when they could. They were enslaved and freed Africans and their descendants who lived on the mountain slopes and in the coastal plains surrounding the French-controlled city of Cap Français—the commercial capital of a territory that would become the nation of Haiti. In a colony built on their submission, these people persisted and resisted in communities that were the seedbed for a revolution that would end slavery in the most profitable plantation economy in the Americas.
Introductions are in order because these few individuals, along with thousands of other enslaved people silenced by history, played a vital but misunderstood role in fighting against slavery. First comes Médor, an enslaved domestic servant who lived in the port city of Cap Français in the 1740s. When his enslaver moved the household to a mountainous coffee estate, he was forced to leave friends who had helped him and others work toward freedom. The Seven Years’ War erupted shortly thereafter, and a terrible drought struck the colony. During these years, a wave of unexplained deaths swept the region. Médor was accused of being a poisoner, and, after three days of interrogation, he confessed to secretly drugging his masters for freedom. He revealed that free Black people were using medicines to soften their enslavers and hasten their manumission. A growing community of freed people hoped to ultimately confront the colonists, he said. Médor’s confession led to a spiraling investigation into poisoning that ensnared many free and enslaved Black people.
A plantation nurse named Assam was one of the next to be accused. Her enslaver had sent her away on foot in search of African-style medicines to cure other captives. After days of searching, she found and administered the medicines. When her patients died, she was tortured as a poisoner. Assam’s confession pointed authorities toward an African man named Makandal, who had escaped slavery to live hidden in the mountains. Black men and women sought out Makandal to have him divine the future with the help of spirits. His rituals created the kinds of deep loyalties that could embolden a person to resist oppression. Makandal was arrested and unjustly convicted of running a network of poisoners who aimed to destroy the colony.
Makandal became known to history as a fearsome poisoner even though he denied it, and, within two decades of his execution, medical experts concluded that a newly diagnosed illness could have caused the unexplained deaths. As planters continued to accuse alleged poisoners, enslaved people across many communities found creative ways to resist. A free Black woman named Lizette went to court to save her freed adult son Kangal when his former enslaver levied a poisoning accusation calculated to return him to bondage. While fear and death navigated the colony, an enslaved woman named Kingué used African-inspired rituals to divine the identity of poisoners. An enslaved man named Nicolas undertook a dangerous journey with thirteen others from a coffee plantation to Cap Français and succeeded in filing a formal complaint of torture against their enslaver.
Resisting in obscurity on a sugar plantation that would become the cradle of the Haitian Revolution, enslaved foremen Jean-Jacques and Hippolyte led strikes among cane field and refinery workers that paralyzed the plantation. Nine years later, on the neighboring estate, a coachman named Boukman lit the first of the fires that within a month would burn thousands of acres of sugar to the ground. This was the August 22 revolt that ignited the Haitian Revolution. Historians have chronicled Boukman’s fires but failed to illuminate the decades of resistance that preceded them.
Until 30 years ago, most historians of the only successful slave revolution in modern history maintained that it occurred in a colony with no tradition of organized resistance, for Saint-Domingue had no documented revolts between the 1720s and the revolution. Even today, except for work focused on slave escapes, very little has been written about how enslaved men and women resisted captivity in Saint-Domingue. In some ways this is not surprising; enslaved people are too often silenced in the sources that scholars rely on. Historian Tiya Miles calls this “the conundrum of the archive.” Thousands of documents record enslaved people’s existence as economic assets, but almost none record their voices.
A manager named Pierre Mossut who survived Boukan Dutty’s assault on the Galliffet plantation would later write, “How could we ever have known that there reigned among these men, so numerous and formerly so passive, such a concerted accord that everything was carried exactly as was declared?” Knowing so little, if Mossut is to be believed, colonists nonetheless had their say. Many colonial narratives about the Haitian Revolution persist today. Colonists insisted that the enslaved people who launched the rebellion had no political goals or vision; they were driven only by a violent desire for revenge. Colonists also told and retold the Makandal poisoning myth, which writers and people across Haiti adopted a century later as evidence of an organized rebellion. Historians have abandoned many misleading colonial narratives; this book has challenged a few more.
The stories told here of African people and their descendants resisting slavery in Saint-Domingue’s North Province show that modern-day Haiti is not newly afflicted with environmental disaster, global dislocation, and industrial capitalism; it was born of them. French colonial plantations were voracious factories in the field that relied on forced migration to replace dying and dead workers. At first, West African people were the majority of Saint-Domingue’s population, drawn through the Cap Français port and out across the sugar plain. Later, a growing stream of Congo captives from Central Africa traveled that path and beyond into mountainous coffee territory. At the end of a journey that for many would be their last, some people formed communities to access the power of an African spiritual world that surrounded them even away from their homelands. When dislocated people began to earn, worship, heal, and defend themselves, white fear produced intense persecution across racial and religious lines. When thousands of enslaved Africans, hundreds of colonists, and tens of thousands of livestock animals perished in recurring outbreaks of anthrax, French colonists blamed Africans for the devastating consequences of their own actions.
Enslaved people who lived where the first fires of the Haitian Revolution burned knew how to make the costly personal decision to resist. They were ready when revolution called, and a tide of thousands who had been siphoned from distant homelands surged from fields, factories, and dwellings to make a new world for themselves.
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