Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Western CIV. Episode four ninety four.
Speaker 1: Sandumong sun Damang is apparently, by the way, the correct
Speaker 1: French pronunciation of the French colony, and I get it
Speaker 1: wrong when I was talking about it earlier. Sorry about that.
Speaker 1: I was using the English phrase, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: use the correct French from now on. So the seventeen eighties,
Speaker 1: let's introduce what we're talking about here, Francis colony of Sandomong,
Speaker 1: occupying the western third of the island of Hispaniola, which
Speaker 1: today is Haiti, and then the other half is the
Speaker 1: Dominican Republic. This had become effectively the richest colony in
Speaker 1: the world. Voltaire Ones quipped that it was quote the
Speaker 1: pearl of the Antilles en quote, and indeed it's wealth
Speaker 1: surpassed that of Britain's Jamaica or Spain's Cuba. Its prosperity
Speaker 1: was built entirely on sugar, indigo, coffee, and cotton luxury goods,
Speaker 1: seeming intent on feeding an insatiable European market. French merchants
Speaker 1: grew rich from the trade, and the monarchy depended on
Speaker 1: the colonies duties and taxes to pop up. For a time,
Speaker 1: it's fragile finances, but Sandmong's prosperity restored on an extreme
Speaker 1: and brutal system of labor African slavery. The island's population
Speaker 1: of about five hundred thousand enslaved Africans dwarfed the thirty
Speaker 1: thousand whites and roughly twenty five thousand free people of color.
Speaker 1: It was a society in which the ruling minority clung
Speaker 1: fiercely to privilege, while the enslaved majority endured staggering cruelty.
Speaker 1: The structure of colonial society in sand Among was layered
Speaker 1: and intense. The granz Blancs, the wealthy white planters and
Speaker 1: merchants who owned vast sugar estates and dominated the colonial assembly,
Speaker 1: were the elite, or top of the pyramid. They styled
Speaker 1: themselves as an aristocracy, aspiring to autonomy and jealously guarding
Speaker 1: any privilege that they had. The petite blanks, the poor whites,
Speaker 1: who were often artisans, overseers, or small traders, made up
Speaker 1: probably the smallest percentage of the overall population. They had
Speaker 1: little wealth but valued their skin color as a badge
Speaker 1: of superiority over non whites. Then there were the free
Speaker 1: people of color, the gens de color libris. Many of
Speaker 1: these were of mixed African and European sent often property
Speaker 1: owners themselves, and some were even slaveholders. Despite their wealth,
Speaker 1: they were barred from political rights by law and constantly
Speaker 1: humiliated by a variety of racial codes. And then, of course,
Speaker 1: there was the enslaved majority. These were Africans, many recently
Speaker 1: arrived through the brutal Middle Passage, brought in to replace
Speaker 1: the thousands who died each year from overwork, malnutrition, and disease.
Speaker 1: Mortality rates were so high that planters calculated that it
Speaker 1: was cheaper to import new captives than to sustain a
Speaker 1: family born enslaved population. Now, what codified all of this
Speaker 1: was the Code Noir, the French royal decree regulating slavery,
Speaker 1: theoretically offering protections requiring masters to provide food, clothing, and
Speaker 1: religious instructions, but in practice that aspect of the Code
Speaker 1: was little more than paper. Enslaved people's endured grueling labor
Speaker 1: in cane fields overseer violence and punishments ranging from the
Speaker 1: whip to mutilation and death. The entire economy of San
Speaker 1: Damong was dependent on the most important cash crop of
Speaker 1: the eighteenth century, sugar. Sugar was the beating heart of
Speaker 1: Sando Mung's colonial economy, and to understand the Haitian Revolution,
Speaker 1: one must first understand the brutal machinery of sugar production.
Speaker 1: It was a system of labor, land, and capital that
Speaker 1: transformed cane stalks into white crystals prized in Europe. Yet
Speaker 1: it consumed human lives at a staggering pace. A large
Speaker 1: sugar plantation or habitacion was more than a farm. It
Speaker 1: was an industrial complex. At its center stood the grand
Speaker 1: mansion of the planter, surrounded by workshops, kitchens, and quarters
Speaker 1: of enslaved laborers. The cane fields spread outward, covering thousands
Speaker 1: of acres, divided into plots that had to be cut
Speaker 1: in a relentless cycle. Near the grand mansion loomed the
Speaker 1: suguri or sugar mill, the boiling house where the crop
Speaker 1: was transformed from raw stocks into market ready sugar. It
Speaker 1: was really basically vertical integration from plant all the way
Speaker 1: to processed sugar. The plantations of Sandomong they did it
Speaker 1: all now. Sugar production followed a punishing rhythm tied to
Speaker 1: the seasons. During the planting season, cane cuttings were driven
Speaker 1: into the soil by enslaved laborers who worked in gangs
Speaker 1: under the overseers whip. The feeds had to be weeded
Speaker 1: and irrigated constantly the harvesting season, about once every twelve
Speaker 1: to eighteen months the cane was ready to be cut.
Speaker 1: The harvest was, of course the most intense season of all.
Speaker 1: Enslaved men and women worked from dawn until nightfall, hacking
Speaker 1: cane with machetes. Each stalk had to be carried swiftly
Speaker 1: to the mill before it could dry out, and then,
Speaker 1: of course there was the milling. At the Sukari. Stocks
Speaker 1: were fed between enormous rollers powered by horses, oxen or
Speaker 1: later on water and wind. The juice ran out into troughs,
Speaker 1: while the crushed stalks called legacy, were dried out and
Speaker 1: used as fuel for the boiling process, which of course
Speaker 1: then brought to boiling and refining. The juice was then
Speaker 1: boiled in a series of great copper kettles, each hotter
Speaker 1: than the last, tended constantly by enslaved workers. Timing was
Speaker 1: crucial and the sugar would not crystallize too long and
Speaker 1: it would burn. From here, it was poured into wooden molds,
Speaker 1: hardened and then packed into hogsheads for shipment to Europe.
Speaker 1: The human cost was staggering, The work was unrelenting, and
Speaker 1: the conditions lethal cane knives and rollers mangled bodies, boiling
Speaker 1: kettle's scalded skin. The heat of the boiling houses was
Speaker 1: positively suffocating. Overseers drove the enslaved laborers, with the lash
Speaker 1: demanding impossible speed. One contemporary observer rote quote, never is
Speaker 1: the work done, for when the harvest ends, the planting
Speaker 1: must begin again. Because mortality was so high, disease, overwork,
Speaker 1: and malnutrition killed tens of thousands each year, planters did
Speaker 1: not expect an enslaved laborer to live more than seven
Speaker 1: years after arriving on the island. The system was sustained
Speaker 1: by the constant importation of new captives from Africa, making
Speaker 1: Sandomang one of the greatest consumers of the Transatlantic slave trade.
Speaker 1: From all this machinery of death came immense profit. By
Speaker 1: the eve of the French Revolution, Sandemang produced about forty
Speaker 1: percent of the world's sugar and more than half of
Speaker 1: all of Europe's coffee. Ships left its ports ladened with wealth,
Speaker 1: and French merchants in Bordeaux and Nons built fortunes from it. Yet,
Speaker 1: of course the system was very brittle. It required enormous
Speaker 1: numbers of enslaved laborers kept in brutal subjugation, overseers, over
Speaker 1: a watchful with the whip, and constant imports of fresh bodies.
Speaker 1: It was a pyramid built on the narrowest of bases.
Speaker 1: When revolt came finally in seven ninety one, the very
Speaker 1: structure of sugar production, its dependence on concentrated labor, its
Speaker 1: reliance on terror, its disregard for human survival made the
Speaker 1: uprising all the more explosive. When news of the French
Speaker 1: Revolution reached Sandeman in seventeen eighty nine, it threw this
Speaker 1: fragile social order into turmoil. The grounds Blancs saw a
Speaker 1: chance to push for more autonomy from Paris. The petite
Speaker 1: Blanks demanded equality with their social betters, and of course,
Speaker 1: the free people of Color, inspired by the Declaration of
Speaker 1: the Rights of Man, petitioned for full citizenship, rights famously
Speaker 1: championed by veniss Oge, who in seventeen ninety led a
Speaker 1: short lived rebellion that ended with his execution by torture.
Speaker 1: The most radical of all were the enslaved themselves, a
Speaker 1: voice they listened. Many had memories of freedom in Africa,
Speaker 1: and a maroon community of escaped slaves already resisted French
Speaker 1: power from the mountains. Whisted rumors of liberty began to
Speaker 1: circulate among the plantations, mingled with the example of freemen
Speaker 1: of color demanding rights and the fiery language of revolution
Speaker 1: carried on ships from France. By the summer of seventeen
Speaker 1: ninety one, Sandoman was a powder keg. The colony's rigid
Speaker 1: social hierarchy. Whites, free people of color, and the enslaved
Speaker 1: majority were fracturing under the pressures of the French Revolution.
Speaker 1: Free Men like color, like Julian Ramond and Vincent Auger,
Speaker 1: had already demanded the rights of citizenship, invoking the Declaration
Speaker 1: of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Though Age was
Speaker 1: captured and executed in seventeen ninety one, his rebellion stirred
Speaker 1: deep anxieties whites and flickered like a signal to the
Speaker 1: enslaved population. Reports from the period reveal how tense life
Speaker 1: had become. In March of that year, a French administrator,
Speaker 1: the Intendant Francois Barbe Marbeau, warned that Paris quote the
Speaker 1: colonies are filled with a restless spirit. The enslaved grow
Speaker 1: bold in their discourse, and every wind brings them rumors
Speaker 1: of liberty end quote. Now oral tradition preserves the most
Speaker 1: iconic moment in the start of the Haitian Revolution, the
Speaker 1: voodoo ceremony at Boskaman on the night of August fourteenth,
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety one. According to accounts passed down through generations,
Speaker 1: leaders gathered in a forest clearing study Bokman, the enslaved
Speaker 1: man from Jamaica, who had become a priest, invoked divine
Speaker 1: justice and called for rebellion. Account by Antoine d'lmas, a
Speaker 1: French doctor in Cape Francois, described how participants quote swore
Speaker 1: to exterminate the whites and to be faithful to one
Speaker 1: another end quote. Damas, writing in eighteen fourteen, so a
Speaker 1: long time after these events, was horrified by what he
Speaker 1: interpreted as superstitious rites. But for the enslaved, this was
Speaker 1: nothing less than just a binding oath of freedom, their
Speaker 1: own Tennis court oath in the Caribbean. In the Haitian
Speaker 1: memory of the event, the priestess Selisee Fateman invoked the
Speaker 1: spirits and offered a black pig as sacrifice its blood,
Speaker 1: sealing the covenant. According to one quote, the god who
Speaker 1: created the sun, who makes the storm, who gives us
Speaker 1: the earth, commands us to seek liberty end quote. Whether
Speaker 1: or not anyone actually uttered those words, we won't know,
Speaker 1: but it's been passed down for generations now. Within a week,
Speaker 1: this oath was set into action. On the night of
Speaker 1: August the twenty first to twenty second, enslave laborers across
Speaker 1: the Great Northern Plain Roses One. The plantation of Gallifet,
Speaker 1: one of the largest in the colony, was among the
Speaker 1: first to fall. Cane fields burned in sheets of fire,
Speaker 1: their glow visible for miles. The planter Grows described the
Speaker 1: shock quote, at midnight, we saw the horizon ablaze. By dawn,
Speaker 1: the flames had reached within leagues of our house, and
Speaker 1: bands of Negroes armed with cane knives, torches and clubs,
Speaker 1: swept from plantation to plantation, sparing nothing. Hundreds of estates
Speaker 1: were destroyed within days. The violence was indiscriminate. White planters
Speaker 1: and their families were killed. Overseers were hacked down, Mills
Speaker 1: and boiling houses were smashed. The enslaved carried with them machetes, clubs, hoes,
Speaker 1: tools of toil, now all turned into weapons of liberation.
Speaker 1: European observers left accounts steeped in fear. The Abbe de Gregoras,
Speaker 1: writing from Paris, after receiving the news, described quote, an
Speaker 1: avenging army of the oppressed end quote sweeping through the colony.
Speaker 1: A colonist named Moreau de Saint Marie, in his description
Speaker 1: Topography Physique civile politique at history a de party Francis
Speaker 1: de il de sant Deman later recalled quote, never has
Speaker 1: a land been so suddenly and violently overturned In a
Speaker 1: single night, fifty thousand blacks rose in a fury, destroyed
Speaker 1: the plantations, and with fire and iron, shattered the power
Speaker 1: of their masters and quote. Letters from refugees who fled
Speaker 1: to North America also circulated. One printed in Philadelphia newspaper
Speaker 1: in late seventeen ninety one told the readers that quote.
Speaker 1: The Negroes proclaimed, they fight not for France, nor Spain
Speaker 1: nor England, but for liberty, which they swear never to abandon.
Speaker 1: By September, the revolt had engulfed the northern plane. Tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of enslaved men and women had joined. Leaders emerged,
Speaker 1: among them Georgies Bissau, Jean Francois Papilion, and soon tous
Speaker 1: Saint l' vitour, who at first worked in the background.
Speaker 1: The colonists appealed desperately to Paris for help, but the
Speaker 1: sheer scale of the uprising stunned the capitol. A revolution
Speaker 1: begun in France, now reverberated back upon its colonies, carried
Speaker 1: on the blades and torches of those who had nothing
Speaker 1: to lose but their chains. The events of August seventeen
Speaker 1: ninety one were not merely a slave revolt. They were
Speaker 1: the opening act of a revolution that would reshape the
Speaker 1: Atlantic world. In the words of Abbe Gregorae, they have
Speaker 1: confounded the prejudices of centuries. The slaves of Sandoman have
Speaker 1: shown that they are men, and that their cry of
Speaker 1: liberty is the most legitimate of all. It was a
Speaker 1: fire that could not be put out. Caine fields had
Speaker 1: fueled the fortunes of Europe. Now those same fields burned,
Speaker 1: igniting the first successful slave revolution in history. After the
Speaker 1: first wave of August seventeen ninety one uprising, the entire
Speaker 1: northern plain of San de Main, France's most productive plantation
Speaker 1: region was in gald in chaos. By September, at least
Speaker 1: one thousand plantations lay in ruin, and nearly ten thousand
Speaker 1: whites had either fled or been killed or taken refuge
Speaker 1: in Cape Francois modern day Cape Hate, The governor Balanched
Speaker 1: wrote in desperation to Paris that quote, the whole colony
Speaker 1: is in flames. The Negroes rise in numbers like the
Speaker 1: sea itself. End quote. The insurgents, often organized in bands
Speaker 1: led by figures such as Jean Francois, Biseau and Geneau,
Speaker 1: fought with remarkable coordination. Though armed mostly with machetes and
Speaker 1: makeshift weapons, they quickly overwhelmed isolated plantations and seized European arms.
Speaker 1: A French refugee later recalled they fought with the ferocity
Speaker 1: that astonished US. Discipline was born in the midst of
Speaker 1: the flames. These men who had been slaves yesterday were
Speaker 1: soldiers today. But the rebellion was not a single unified force.
Speaker 1: Some groups committed atrocities against captured whites, others tried to negotiate.
Speaker 1: Leaders like Jens Francois styled themselves as generals of liberty.
Speaker 1: And soon began receiving covert encouragement from Spain across the
Speaker 1: border in Santo Domingo. Meanwhile, in France, the revolution was
Speaker 1: spiraling towards radicalization. The Nationally Assembly faced a dilemma how
Speaker 1: to keep its most lucrative colony while also honoring its
Speaker 1: ideals of liberty. In March seventeen ninety two, the Legislative
Speaker 1: Assembly debated slavery and citizenship in the colonies. White planters
Speaker 1: and their allies in Paris warned that granting rights to
Speaker 1: people of color would destroy colonial authority, but abolitionist deputies,
Speaker 1: including the Abbe Gregoray and the Amiste Noois Friends of
Speaker 1: the Blacks, invoked the Declaration of the Rights of Man
Speaker 1: and Citizen. Gregory argued, quote men of color have shed
Speaker 1: their blood for France. How can we deny them the
Speaker 1: title of citizen? End quote. A degree of April fourth,
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety two granted full citizenship to all free people
Speaker 1: of color and free blacks in the colonies. This radical
Speaker 1: decision electrified san demand for the free peoples of color,
Speaker 1: who had long fought for recognition. It was a legal victory,
Speaker 1: but among the whites, especially the Petites blanc who resented
Speaker 1: their rivals of color. The decree was seen as a
Speaker 1: betrayal on the ground. In San Deman, the spring and
Speaker 1: summer of seventeen ninety two brought open civil war between
Speaker 1: whites and free people of color in towns. Armed clashes
Speaker 1: erupted as white militias tried to exclude freemen of color
Speaker 1: from political assemblies. One white colonist wrote bitterly back to Paris,
Speaker 1: the decree of April has thrown oil on the fire.
Speaker 1: The Mulattoes claim equality with the whites who resist, and
Speaker 1: the Negroes rejoice at our division. At the same time,
Speaker 1: the great slave revolt in the North continued, with insurgents
Speaker 1: pressing now against the city of Ca Francaise. French commissioners
Speaker 1: and colonial troops, weakened by infighting, struggled to contain the rebellion.
Speaker 1: To restore order, the Legislative Assembly sent three commissioners, Sona Thax, Pulvrell,
Speaker 1: and Ahad to Sandman, arriving in September of seventeen ninety two.
Speaker 1: Their mission was delicate. Enforced the April decree, reconcile whites
Speaker 1: and people of color free ones, and then suppress the
Speaker 1: slave revolt, all while defending the colony for revolutionary France.
Speaker 1: When they arrived, they found chaos. Sofa Nas later wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: we set foot on soil divided against itself, Whites against Mulato's,
Speaker 1: citizens against slaves, Republicans against Royalists. The commissioners quickly allied
Speaker 1: with the free men of color, who had been fighting
Speaker 1: both whites and rebel slaves. By recognizing their citizenship, the
Speaker 1: commissioners gained a crucial base of support. Yet this policy
Speaker 1: deepened the fury of the white planters, many of whom
Speaker 1: leaned towards Royalism or even welcomed intervention by the nearby
Speaker 1: Britain or Spain. By October of seventeen ninety two, the
Speaker 1: situation had become essentially a three sided struggle. The white
Speaker 1: colonists fractured between Republicans and Royalists, but united in fear
Speaker 1: of both blacks and free people of color, the free
Speaker 1: people of color who were now legally citizens of France,
Speaker 1: who were fighting but really just for their place as equals.
Speaker 1: And then, of course there were the enslaved insurgents still
Speaker 1: in arms across the north, declaring that only full emancipation,
Speaker 1: not compromise would satisfy them. One French officer stationed near
Speaker 1: Camp Francois wrote that month every party fights for itself.
Speaker 1: There is no colony, only factions. The flames consume what
Speaker 1: once was the richest land in the world. By the
Speaker 1: end of October seventeen ninety two, Sandaman was effectively in
Speaker 1: civil war. The commissioners struggled to enforce the authority of
Speaker 1: revolutionary France, but the reality on the ground was that
Speaker 1: liberty had already been claimed by force of arms. Next week, though,
Speaker 1: we turned back to France and witnessed the downfall of
Speaker 1: Louis the sixteenth