Haitian Revolution: Causes

Here are a compilation of secondary sources reflecting on the causes of the Haitian revolution. If students who are pursuing their own research question need more sources, this may be a good place to start. 

What were the most important causes of the Haitian Revolution?

1: From C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Vintage Books, 1989, p.86. James was a Trinidadian writer. The first edition of this book was published in 1963.

“Voodoo was the medium of the conspiracy. In spite of all prohibitions, the slaves traveled miles to sing and dance and practice the rites and talk; and now, since the [French] revolution, to hear the political news and make their plans.”

2: From David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, Indiana University Press, 2002, p.9. Geggus is a professor of history at the University of Florida in the United States.

“Whether the whites’ desire for autonomy, the free coloreds’ desire for equality, or the slaves’ desire for liberty would of themselves have led to violent conflict must remain a matter for speculation. No one doubts, however, that the French Revolution of 1789 precipitated the colony’s destruction. If Saint Domingue was a dormant volcano, as contemporaries liked to say, it needed only the shock waves of the political earthquake in Paris to provoke its eruption.”

3: From Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography, Pantheon Books, 2007, p.16. Bell is a novelist from the United States.

 “Between 1784 and 1790 a total of 220,000 slaves were brought in. One unintended consequence of this situation was that two-thirds of the more than half a million slaves in the colony had been born free in Africa—and nearly half of the whole slave population had been deprived of freedom within the past ten years. Therefore the atmosphere in Saint-Domingue was infinitely more volatile than in other slave regimes like the United States, where by the end of the eighteenth century the majority of slaves had been born into servitude.”

4: From Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p.18. Dubois is a professor of French studies and history at Duke University and Garrigus

“Saint-Domingue’s rapid transformation from a near-empty frontier to a densely populated economic powerhouse made it ripe with tensions and fissures.”

5: From Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, The University of Tennessee Press, 1990, pp.87-88. Fick is an associate professor of history at Concordia University in Canada.

“The colony had never been in such a state of social and administrative chaos.... Planters were far too preoccupied with these problems to worry much about the effects their words and actions might have upon their slaves. They had come to Saint Domingue to make a fortune out of slavery, and they saw no reason for things to change. Although a few might have foreseen the dangers that lay ahead, most generally assumed that slavery was as inviolable as it was enduring. It had lasted for over two hundred years.... For the planters, there was no reason to believe that slave activity was any different from what it had been in the past. They would soon learn, but only by the raging flames that within hours reduced their magnificent plantations to ashes, how wrong they were.”

6: From Doris L. Garraway, “Introduction,” Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Doris L. Garraway, ed.), University of Virginia Press, 2008, p.2. Garraway is an associate professor of French at Northwestern University in the United States.

“As the only successful slave revolt in world history and the second anticolonial independence movement in the modern world, after that of the United States, the Haitian Revolution was distinct for being the only one led by the subalterns [people of lower status] and the “property” rather than the owners. Hence the unusual degree of mass mobilization that it required compared to other American independence struggles, and the radical assault it launched against colonialism, slavery, and the ideology of white racial supremacy.”

7: From Charles Arthur and Michael Dash (eds.), Libète: A Haitian Anthology, Markus Weiner Publishers, 1999, p.29. Arthur is the director of the Haiti Support Group in Lon- don and Dash is a professor of French at New York University in the United States.

"Haven’t they committed unheard-of cruelties, crimes until then unknown to humankind? Haven’t they burnt, roasted, grilled and impaled alive the unfortunate slaves?... Haven’t they hung men upside down, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars?”—Pompée Valentin Vastey, an enslaved mulatto who joined Louverture’s army in 1796. He wrote this in 1814 to describe some of the tortures French colonists inflicted on their slaves."