– 8 June 2020 –

Janus:

The ongoing race riots, fanned and assisted by traitorous white revolutionaries, shows parallels with other bloody ideology-led revolutions throughout Western history, namely the English Civil War and the French and Russian Revolutions. With the savage addition of race to this revolutionary spirit, the case of Haiti during the French Revolution offers a particularly grim example of the worst that could happen in the United States if our current trajectory continues.

The French Revolution in San Domingo, written in 1914 by Harvard [?!] professor Dr. T. Lothrop Stoddard, covers the fall of white rule in French San Domingo—now known as ‘Haiti’—from 1788 to 1805. The account is quite readable, with many quotes from contemporaries that give life and urgency to these horrific yet fascinating historical events. [Note: Rather than use the more proper French name “Saint-Dominigue,” for this article I will follow Stoddard’s exonym from his book, “San Domingo.”]

Before reading this book, I thought I knew a fair amount about the Haitian revolution, but Loddard’s book showed me that I hardly knew a thing. Previously, I had believed that the French had simply abandoned the white colonists during the internal turmoil of the French Revolution, that the blacks and mulattoes took advantage of the situation, rose up, and spontaneously exterminated most of the whites, and afterward the blacks turned against the mulattoes and massacred them. What a surprise to learn instead that the transition of white rule to black was a drawn-out, entirely preventable tragedy that owed its failure not to isolation but to repeated acts of incompetence and sabotage on the part of the whites. One misstep after another compounded together to destroy San Domingo like deliberate repeated blows from a hammer, tragedy after tragedy. Stoddard’s book is a fascinating but depressing read, with significant lessons for today’s white civilization, stricken under uncannily similar circumstances, only on a worldwide scale.

In the first part of the book, Stoddard details the history and geography of the French colony, then describes the three dominant population groups: the whites, the “free coloreds”, and the slaves.

During the first half of the 17th century, the western portion of the island of Hispaniola was largely a den of pirates and hunters of various European nationalities. The French gradually established rule over this area, but they could never quite eliminate this rough and unsavory element, a factor that aided in the colony’s later destruction. Over time, the colony of San Domingo grew into the so-called Gem of the West Indies, the richest land in all of the western hemisphere. To put it in perspective, in 1789 San Domingo generated more wealth by itself than the entirety of the United States.

In 1789, roughly 35,000 whites lived in Haiti along with about 27,000 free colored and 450,000 slaves.

San Domingo’s white population, about 7% of the colony’s total, lacked cohesion and had few ties to the land apart from the extraction of wealth. European-born colonists, the majority of whites, sneered at the unsophisticated Creoles. Townspeople hated the country people and vice versa. Poor whites resented the rich. The “official” class, those in charge of the government, remained aloof from everyone. The clergy were weak, poor, and corrupt; and rather than alleviate moral vice they often participated in it. Stoddard quotes an Abbé Raynal, describing the lack of unity:

“Ordinarily, we seek for the character of a people in its national point of view; but, in San Domingo, there is no real ‘people,’— only a mass of individuals, with common interests but isolated viewpoints.”

The free coloreds, originally very few in number, had rapidly grown to about 5% of the colony by 1789. White women were always relatively few in San Domingo; even in 1789 white men outnumbered white women more than two to one. This lack of white women along with the abundance of slave and mulatto women led to inevitable race-mixing. While many of these offspring remained slaves, some of the white men chose to form families with their mixed-race concubines and pass inheritance to their children. However, though free coloreds could legally own property (and many were quite wealthy), whites maintained a strict “color line” to preserve their own rule and identity. Free blacks and coloreds were segregated in public to their own reserved sections. They could not hold public office or work in learned professions, they were forbidden to earn patents of nobility, and sumptuary laws barred them from “adopting European dress and habits.” However wealthy or European the free coloreds might become, they could never cross the “color line” into whiteness. And as their numbers grew, so did their resentment of the whites. From the book:

“White San Domingo was obviously much divided against itself, but there was something upon which it was at one. Creole or European, poor white or planter, smuggler or governor,—all remembered that they were white; all were determined that the white race should keep white and should rule San Domingo.”

Numbering about 450,000, Negro slaves made up almost 90% of San Domingo’s population. For various reasons, the slave population failed to replace its numbers, and a majority of the Negro population was born in Africa. Taken from all over the sub-Saharan continent, they had little in common apart from their slavery. While the slaves adopted the trappings of Christianity, efforts to stamp out the cult of “vaudoux,” based on their tribal religions, failed. The independent existence of a Negro priesthood and religion aided greatly in the Negro uprisings against white rule.

For the remainder of the book, Stoddard chronologically describes the events of the revolution itself over the course of sixteen tumultuous years. While Stoddard himself doesn’t do so, I will describe these events in groups of destructive waves, each wave after wave battering and ultimate destroying white San Domingo.

First Wave: The French Revolution

In 1787, the weak French king Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates General that would ultimately destroy his life, his family, and the French monarchy and engulf the world in more than twenty years of tragic war. Not wishing to miss out, a noisy minority of colonists in French San Domingo scrambled to have their own delegates recognized in the new French parliament.

While the overwhelming majority of the colonists either opposed this move or didn’t care,

“as has often happened, they were unable to defeat the plans of an aggressive minority which knew what it wanted and strove to a definite end.”

The colonial government also opposed this democratic movement, yet they proved impotent and disorganized. Power was divided between a local Governor and an Intendant, and rather than take decisive action the two wasted their efforts fighting one another. A system of checks and balances that might check rash or poor decisions in peaceful, reasonable times proved to create nothing but indecision and weakness in perilous times.

So the raucous, vocal minority formed regional assemblies to send their chosen delegates to France. San Domingo gained only six colonial representatives out of roughly 1,000 delegates in the French Estates General. As the Estates General quickly grew more radical and egalitarian in their agenda, the colonial delegates soon regretted their invitation for revolutionary France to directly rule their colonial affairs.

Within a few months French radicals stormed the Bastille, deposed the King, and published the “Declaration of the Rights of Man.” The declaration, while it didn’t ban slavery, threatened to remove any legal distinctions between the races. The most radical members of the new French National Assembly clamored to ban slavery altogether, terrifying the French colonists. And as the revolutionary words leaked back into San Domingan society, the mulattoes and slaves grew increasingly restless while “Patriots” clamored with the royal colonial government and the planter class.

At first, the French National Assembly supported white colonial interests over the “Amis de Noir” (“Friends of the Blacks”) and their allies. The Decree of March 8, 1790 attempted to settle the question of colonial affairs by establishing a hands-off policy of internal rule for each of the French colonies. However, the decree, if taken literally, seemed to impose the legal equality of the free coloreds and to outlaw the Color Line. The squabbling French Assembly chose to leave this ambiguity in place rather than clarify the law, leading to much trouble with the mulattoes in San Domingo which boiled into two uprisings that the colonists quickly suppressed.

By the summer of 1790, San Domingo’s radical new Colonial Assembly set off open warfare between the patriots and the royalists, with the Assembly trying to take control of the military from the government. While most of the Army remained loyal to the king, the navy revolted in favor of the patriots. The royalist army crushed the patriot forces, and the Colonial Assembly fled the colony for France to appeal their case. The warring parties agreed to a truce in August 1790 to await the decision of the French National Assembly on the authority of the colonial assembly, though the truce itself fell apart seven months later.

In October 1790, the ever-vacillating French National Assembly passed a decree that once again maintained a hands-off policy for the restless colonies, this time clarifying that it would not interfere with the status of persons without colonial approval. However, radicalism in France continued to sweep the land, and on March 15, 1791, the National Assembly partially reversed its earlier decree with a compromise that recognized the equality of free coloreds whose parents were born free. It also condemned slavery in principle, if not in law.

News of the Decree of March 15 seemed to finally unite the warring factions of San Domingo against its abuses, if only temporarily. They set up a new Colonial Assembly to meet on August 25, 1791. But they acted too late.

Second Wave: The Negro Revolt in the North

Before the new assembly could meet, a horrific Negro uprising in the North on August 23, 1791 caught the colonists off-guard and shocked them in its scale and brutality. After a few months, Negroes controlled all of the North province except the main city of Le Cap and a few fortified camps. They killed roughly 4,000 whites. From the text:

“The men were at once killed, often with every species of atrocity, while the unfortunate white women were violated — frequently upon the very bodies of their husbands, fathers, and brothers. The full horror of the situation was soon brought home to the people of Le Cap itself. A reconnoitring party of National Guards which ventured a little way out into the Plain was suddenly overwhelmed in the half-light of dawn by a horde of negroes whose ghastly standard was the impaled body of a white child: only two or three of the soldiers escaped to carry the dreadful tidings.”

Meanwhile, in the Western province, a bizarre union of French royalists made a pact with the free coloreds to fight against the radical “patriots” of Port-au-Prince. Forming a pact with the city’s merchant class, the royalist/mulattoes took control of the city in October 1791. And naturally the mulatto soldiers tended to lord it over the local whites.

But the French National Assembly continued to muddy the waters. When word of San Domingo’s Negro insurrection reached France, the shocked delegates passed a new decree on September 24 which reversed its earlier decree and once again allowed the colonies to decide the status of their peoples.

Third Wave: Mulatto Revolt in the West and South

When news of this new decree reached San Domingo in November 1791, the disheartened mulattoes in Port-au-Prince demanded that the city continue to recognize their rights. When the matter was put to a vote, the city erupted in riots with pitched battles between the mulattoes and the local white citizens. The whites drove the mulattoes from the city, but the latter seems to have burned the city down as they departed. The mulatto army then ravaged the countryside, looting and killing. From the text:

“The horror of the race war in the West now almost surpassed that of the North. The mulatto Confederates, in hideous token of their Royalist sentiments, fashioned white cockades from the ears of their dead enemies. The atrocities perpetrated upon the white woman and children are past belief. ‘The mulattoes,’ writes the Colonial Assembly to its Paris commissioners, ‘rip open pregnant women, and then before death force the husbands to eat of this horrible fruit. Other infants are thrown to the hogs.'”

The raging mulattoes took control of much of the countryside in the West and in the South, though Southern white planters offered successful resistance fighting in the mountains with their black slaves who seemingly remained ignorant of the Negro revolt in the north, or indifferent.

Fourth Wave: The First Civil Commissioners

On November 20, 1791 three commissioners arrived unexpectedly at Le Cap with full authority of the National Assembly to “investigate and appease the troubles” of the island. The men were minor functionaries of a moderately radical bend, supporting slavery but also intending to uphold the May 5 decree which established the equality of the free coloreds.

Like the good liberals they were, they immediately set about to save the day with peace negotiations with the Negro rebels, which failed despite a promising start because the colonists refused to grant amnesty to the Negro chieftains. This failure led to a renewed Negro offensive and a breach between the liberal French commissioners and the Colonial Assembly. The commissioners quickly began to court the mulatto factions for support, which further infuriated the white colonists. The infuriated whites rose up, drove out two of the three commissioners, arrested the governor, but they ultimately failed in their coup attempt.

Fifth Wave: The Second Civil Commissioners

Characteristically, the French National Assembly had another change of heart towards the colonies as the radical Jacobin Party took over. The National Law of April 4, 1792 unambiguously recognized the full equality of the free coloreds, demanded new free elections immediately, and sent three new commissioners to enforce the new law.

This second trio of commissioners were more radical than the first, and unlike the previous commissioners, the National Assembly granted these new commissioners the power to force racial equality for free coloreds and to send any troublemakers back to France for trial.

They arrived on September 18, 1792 with 6,000 soldiers. One of these commissioners was the villainous Sonthanax. If any single person can be blamed for the total collapse of French San Domingo, it is this devious man.

The new commissioners immediately pitted the white rabble against the white planters in order to destroy the colonial government. They dissolved the Colonial Assembly and sent the royal governor to France as a prisoner, where the Jacobins had him guillotined.

The commissioners set up a “Commission Intermédiaire” composed to five whites, four mulattoes, and one free Negro. Within a few months, they had either driven out or sent all of Le Cap’s leading royalists across the sea to French prisons.

Two of the commissioners then departed Le Cap to deal with the dissident royalists of the Western and Southern provinces, leaving Sonthanax alone to rule Le Cap increasingly as a tyrant. Sonthanax filled departing ships with political prisoners for unhopeful fates in France, while he surrounded himself with leading free coloreds and turned against the poor whites, whom he now labeled “Aristocrates de la Peau.” He began parading colored soldiers around the city and appointing colored officers, and he sent away anyone who dared to resist.

The other two commissioners allied with the poor whites of Port-au-Prince. But outside the city, royalists in the form of a white/colored alliance ruled the countryside in the Western province, and in the Southern province whites had gained the upper hand against the coloreds. The commissioners tried with little success to make a dent in the state of affairs. Then word of Sonthanax’s pro-colored policies from the North led to a break in the royalist alliance in the Western countryside, with coloreds turning against white royalists, and the white townspeople of Port-au-Prince making common cause with the white royalists.

In the middle of this realignment the Negroes of the Western province revolted, led by maroon bands. Sonthanax left Le Cap to join his colleagues in Port-au-Prince to deal with this latest threat. Using colored troops, Sonthanax surrounded the city, which promptly surrendered, and the coloreds plundered and murdered without resistance. As in the North, hundreds of the local whites were imprisoned and expelled from the Western province on ships to France.

The commissioners assembled armies to dole out the same treatment to the whites of the South, then had to respond to another crisis in Le Cap. Because war had broken out with Great Britain, the French government had sent a new governor-general, Galboud, to rule San Domingo in military affairs. Jealous of the honorable Galboud’s popularity and power, the commissioners arrived at Le Cap with columns of colored soldiers on June 10, 1793. The commissioners ordered Galboud to depart, but the sight of ships filled with political prisoners and of the looting and murdering colored troops led Galboud to join the white resistance. Galboud’s forces took Le Cap, and the commissioners fled to the forts that guarded the city from the ongoing Negro insurrection. Rather than lose the city to Galboud, the commissioners offered plunder and liberty to the black hordes of the plain, who then overran the town, murdered its inhabitants, and burned the whole place to the ground. Galboud escaped along with a flotilla of ten thousand white refugees that escaped to the Chesapeake Bay in the United States.

The destruction of the largest city in San Domingo finally destroyed the hope of most of the white inhabitants, and those who could leave generally did so. Soldiers and sailors began to leave as well. Floods of refugees crossed the land border into Spanish Santo Domingo. Seeing this opportunity to strike at the French revolutionaries, the Spanish invaded San Domingo along with a strange array of the French colony’s black rebel chiefs and French whites.

In the face of this looming destruction, Sonthanax betrayed his colored supporters and proclaimed the emancipation of all slaves on August 29, 1793. Despite this revolutionary act, however, the blacks failed to rally behind the commissioners. Most of the rebels melted back into the hills and forests once the plunder of Le Cap was gone, while others defected to the invading Spanish, and the slaves who had remained loyal to the Republic all this time regarded emancipation as permission to stop working altogether.

The Sixth Wave: The British Invasion

Upon arrival in San Domingo in September 1793, the British soldiers and sailors were surprised to find themselves greeted as liberators, even by the mulattoes. The whites of the Southern province quickly announced their allegiance to the English crown. All over the colony, the British and Spanish advanced with little resistance. Sonthanax and another commissioner ultimately fled for France in June 1794, leaving the third commissioner to lead a guerrilla campaign.

But the British had more difficulty capturing the Northern province. A 50-year-old African-born black general had arisen named Toussaint Louverture. He had risen through the ranks during the Negro insurrection, then joined the Spanish when they had declared war on the Republic in 1793. Just as the English and Spanish forces were getting ready to capture Port-au-Prince in the West and the last stronghold of the North, Port-de-Paix, Toussaint defected in the spring of 1794 with his army to the French Republic.

The rapid advance of the English was halted around this time as the rainy season brought a deadly scourge of yellow fever, and the Spanish forces had fallen into disorder. Over the summer Toussaint had captured most of the Northern province while the colored forces made advances in the West. With its ranks gutted by disease, the English were only able to hold their own throughout the year while Spain had surrendered to France in September 1795, and with it Spanish Santo Domingo. 7,000 new British soldiers arrived in October, yet made only a few gains until spring when yellow fever again wiped out most of the British.

With the English left clinging to the Western province, the black North led by Toussaint Louverture began to turn against the mulatto South led by the mulatto French commissioner Rigaud.

The Seventh Wave: The Third Civil Commissioners

On May 11, 1796, five new commissioners, including the returned villain Sonthanax, arrived at Le Cap with an army of 3,000, where the population greeted them with enthusiasm, including Toussaint Louverture’s negro soldiers, who despite proclaiming their support for the republic, owed their real devotion to their black general. Sonthanax took advantage of this devotion to form an alliance with Toussaint Louverture against his fellow commissioners, who were aligning with the mulattoes. In the power scuffle, mulattoes incited blacks with rumors of a return to slavery, leading to the another massacre of all the remaining whites in the district of Port-de-Paix. In the mulatto South, Sonthanax’s efforts to depose the disloyal mulatto commissioner Rigaud failed dramatically, but by the summer of 1797, the joint rule of Sonthanax and Toussaint Louverture reigned supreme in the North.

The Eighth Wave: The Kingdom of Toussaint Louverture

Having driven out all of his white competitors, Sonthanax expected to rule over Toussaint Louverture, but to his suprise, the underestimated negro general expelled him to France in August 1797.

At this time France was fighting a war with Great Britain and could not send troops to quell Toussaint. Instead they sent General Hedouville, who had recently crushed the Vendee revolt. The English, barely holding on in the West, decided to negotiate directly with Toussaint for the surrender of British-held Port-au-Prince and Western forts in order to strengthen Toussaint’s position against Hedouville. By August 1798, the British had left San Domingo. Toussaint then stirred up a riot against Hedouville and sent him fleeing to France with about 1,000 white refugees in October.

Toussaint next turned against the Southern mulatto commissioner Rigaud. As the conflict began, Rigaud incited mulattoes and free blacks all over the North to rise up, but Toussaint’s forces butchered them into submission. Toussaint then invaded the South in often nasty fighting. Finally on July 31, 1800 the mulatto Rigaud fled to Cuba with 700 mulatto officers. Toussaint’s soldiers, led by the bloodthirsty Congo-born General Dessalines, then pacified the South by exterminating the mulattoes.

While cleaning up the South, Toussaint turned on Spanish Santo Domingo, the eastern half of the island of Hispaniola. The Spanish colony had been ruled by France since 1795, and even though Toussaint technically proclaimed allegiance to France, he hurried to defeat the French-led armies of the East before the French could intervene under the new leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte. On January 28, 1801, Toussaint marched through the Spanish colonial capital, thus attaining mastery of the entire island of Hispaniola, minus a few remote bands of highland maroons.

By this time Toussaint Louverture had already begun using his dedicated army to re-enslave his black subjects. From the text:

“The whole country was soon scoured by Toussaint’s flying columns, and the negroes were herded from their vagabond life in the woods and mountains back to work such as they had never known under the Old Regime.”

With slavery ruthlessly restored under his bloodthirsty generals, Toussaint filled his state warehouses and treasury and used the money to purchase arms from Great Britain and the United States.

Perhaps surprisingly, Toussaint also encouraged the return of white emigres by offering to restore their estates. Thus he gained white expertise and their fearful loyalty, plus the prestige that ruling over whites would give him from his black generals.

Not all of Toissant’s generals enjoyed the new state of affairs. Toissant’s nephew Moyse led an uprising that massacred another 1,000 whites before Toissant could crush it and all effective resistance to his rule. Unsatisfied with de facto rule of the island, in July 1801 Toussaint approved a new constitution that appointed him Governor-General for life.

The Ninth Wave: Napoleon’s Army

On January 29, 1802, the first squadrons of Napoleon’s 20,000-strong force arrived. These seasoned veterans of a decade of European wars quickly set about conquering the coastal forts and cities. In some cases, black generals, including the commander of the whole South, transferred their allegiance to the French without a fight. Wherever the French went, apart from Toussaint’s stronghold in the North, the terrorized black and mulatto population threw off the horrors of black rule and welcomed the soldiers as liberators. By April 2, the French had speedily reconquered the whole of the island, minus several scattered wilderness strongholds, though at the cost of thousands of French soldiers. At the arrival of the last 1,200 of Napoleon’s forces, Toussaint gave himself up to the French on May 6, though his mountain forces refused to surrender.

Because the French were so weakened and had little hope of resupply, and because their rule largely depended on the support of local negro and mulatto regiments, they allowed Toussaint and his generals to retire to their estates rather than formally imprison them. Only through betrayal by some of his top generals, including his top man Dessalines, was Toussaint finally arrested and sent to France to ultimately die in prison in April 1803.

In mid-May an unusually deadly and persistent bout of yellow fever broke out, scourging the French forces. In just a few weeks, three thousand men had died. Nevertheless, the French armies had little trouble restoring order to the colony until word of Napoleon’s restoration of slavery broke out at the end of July 1802. As the fever continued to rage, the Negroes once again rose up against their re-enslavement, though Toussaint’s old generals, still loaded with wealth and power themselves, showed little inclination to join them. Yet, crippled by the disease, the French abandoned the hinterlands to the blacks.

The French might still have been able to hold the island if word of Napoleon’s policy to restore the color line against mulattoes hadn’t led to the violent defection of mulatto troops on October 10, 1802. Toussaint’s former generals soon joined them, led by the merciless Dessalines.

Even with these defections, the French still likely would have reconquered the island. Another 10,000 soldiers arrived at the end of 1802 to join the recovering ranks who had survived the yellow fever, and the French began to make gains in what had become a full-fledged race war.

But all of this screeched to a halt with the resumption of war with England on May 12, 1803.

The Tenth Wave: The British to the Rescue

By June 1803, the British had blockaded all of the ports of Hispaniola, cutting off all supply to the French soldiers. The negro and mulatto armies poured out of the countryside, and rather than face slaughter from these savage hordes, the French generals surrendered to the British admirals by the end of November 1803, leaving San Domingo to its fate.

The Eleventh Wave: Dessalines

In December 1803, Dessalines declared the independence of “Haiti,” named after a tribe in the Congo. The new emperor promised protection to all white civilians who remained in the country, and he invited all white emigres to return. Many of them foolishly did so.

“But no sooner was the black leader firmly seated on his imperial throne than these unfortunates discovered their mistake in trusting the word of Dessalines. Scarcely had the new year begun when orders went forth to massacre the white population…”

The entirety of the white population, “down to the very women and children”, were tortured and slaughtered like animals.

And thus ended white San Domingo.