This past August marked the 235th anniversary of the start of the Haitian revolution. The following is an excerpt from a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) magazine article titled “The History of Haiti” published in 2014. The history of Haiti offers lessons for all working people. 

In Part I of this series, we traced the early history of Ayti (the Taíno word for the island later known as Hispaniola and now modern day Haiti and Dominican Republic), the Spanish and French conquest that followed, and the beginnings of the revolutionary fight to end slavery, up through 1792. That year, the French Revolution entered a more radical phase: the monarchy was deposed, and France moved toward war against the monarchs of Europe. As Saint-Domingue's large sugar planters fled to join the royalist opposition, the Jacobin French commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax opened political office and the army's officer corps to the gens de couleur, and a racially integrated delegation was chosen to represent Saint-Domingue in the National Assembly in Paris. We left off in 1793, with the execution of the French king, as Republican France went to war with Spain and Great Britain, the other major colonial powers in the Caribbean. The ongoing slave rebellion had become a force in this wider inter-colonial conflict.

Haiti was born of slave rebellion, and its history makes clear that slavery and racism were essential elements in the very foundation of capitalism. The working class in Haiti has also endured some of the most vicious exploitation by imperialism, both direct and indirect. Yet ever since Haitian workers rose up to abolish slavery in the 1790s, they have fought back with militancy, pushing for reform after reform in an effort to free themselves from exploitation. Time and again, however, these reforms have failed.

Today, conditions facing Haitian workers continue to deteriorate. Gangs, weapons imported from the U.S., and assassinations have devastated the well-being of the Haitian working class, while the racist attack on Haitian workers' Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the U.S. has brought further uncertainty and pain.

This history carries the most important lesson for all workers: only communism can end exploitation and put the international working class in control of society. It is a reminder that while Black workers around the world remain the most brutally exploited section of our class, the fight against racism can never be separated from the fight against capitalism and imperialism. Only communist revolution can end this system of exploitation for good. From Haiti to the United States, Black workers' leadership remains a crucial revolutionary force.

Part II will discuss the revolution to its triumph in 1804, and the role independent Haiti then played in fueling the fight against slavery across the Americas. 

Fighting to eradicate slavery 

The Spanish in Santo Domingo, the eastern half of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic) recruited Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, and other leaders of the slave insurgency to their army with offers of freedom and land. Britain, on the other hand, acted to protect sugar profits and to gain more territory for exploitation by invading and occupying southern and western Haiti (the region closest to its sugar colony of Jamaica). 

There they both enforced slavery and reinstituted race-based restrictions on the gens de couleur. In this context, Commissioner Sonthonax reached out to the slaves to defend the French republic. He reduced hours of work, then offered freedom and French citizenship to all black warriors who fought for France. In August 1793 after a mass meeting in Cap Français voted for emancipation, the commissioner took the final step and abolished slavery throughout the colony, in a sense acknowledging in law what was the reality in fact.6

In 1794, Saint-Domingue’s delegates to the French National Assembly—one white, one mixed race, one an African-born former slave—asked that the Assembly abolish slavery in all of France’s colonies. The privations of war had further angered the French working class and weakened (for the moment) the power of the planters, and the Assembly ratified the proposal by acclamation.

The slave insurrection of Saint-Domingue had pushed the French Revolution into its most radical endorsement of freedom. French officials freed slaves in Guadeloupe and in the other islands they captured during the on-going war with Britain and Spain. With this Toussaint Louverture and others deserted Spain to swear allegiance to the French Republic. Toussaint became the most important French general, leading French troops, most of them former insurgents, as they drove Britain out of Saint-Domingue in the name of abolishing slavery.

Enslaved workers throughout the Americas took notice. As word of the 1791 uprising in Saint-Domingue spread, slave revolts broke out in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Curacao, and Grenada. Major slave conspiracies were detected in Cuba and Spanish Louisiana. Armed slaves battled to establish an inland maroon sanctuary in Jamaica. And in 1800, the enslaved blacksmith Gabriel, inspired by Saint-Domingue and the French Revolution, attempted to end slavery through an insurrection in Virginia.7

Bosses unite to keep workers in chains

Slave owners, however, were determined to end these threats to their profits. By 1798, French planter interests had begun to reestablish their power in Paris. They found an ally in Napoleon Bonaparte, the French general and future emperor, whose wife was from a Caribbean planter family. In 1802 Napoleon invaded Saint-Domingue with encouragement from British and American elites. The British and French would fight each other in Europe for another decade. But when it came to defending the super-exploitation of slavery they could unite: British Prime Minister Henry Addington declared that with regard to Saint-Domingue, the “interest of the two governments is exactly the same—to destroy Jacobinism, especially that of the blacks.” Thomas Jefferson described Toussaint and other Black leaders of Saint-Domingue as “Cannibals of the terrible republic” and promised to aid French efforts to “starve Toussaint” into submission.

The initial French expedition was led by Napoleon’s brother-in-law, the slave-owning General Charles Victor Leclerc, and involved half of the entire French fleet. Leclerc initially appealed to loyalty to the French republic—to patriotism—to win some insurgent generals to his army and to arrest and deport Toussaint Louverture. But when the French re-imposed slavery on the island of Guadeloupe, the people of Saint-Domingue rose up in resistance, forcing their former leaders to desert Leclerc and begin a renewed insurgency. When Leclerc declared a war of extermination that aimed to kill all Black men and women except “infants less than twelve years old,” some white troops, many of them Poles, deserted the French army to join the insurgents.

By 1803, the workers of Haiti—ideologically committed to their struggle for freedom, disciplined and experienced in guerilla warfare—did what no army in Europe had done. They gave Napoleon’s army its first defeat. And in 1804, Saint-Domingue declared its independence as the nation of Haiti. The British lost 40,000 soldiers and the French close to 50,000 in the effort to re-impose slavery in Haiti and other islands of the West Indies. Half of Haiti’s Black population was killed. In all, over 300,000 people died in the fight to end slavery in Haiti. The United States refused to recognize the independence of Haiti, and in 1815 the treaty ending Europe’s Napoleonic Wars accepted France’s claim to Haiti as a colonial possession. Jefferson continued his efforts to protect slave owners by isolating Haiti as an economic and ideological force. While Saint-Domingue/ Haiti had been the U.S. 's second largest trading partner (even through the period of warfare), Jefferson instituted a trade embargo and exhorted the New England merchant-traders to accept the loss of a prime market as a sacrifice for the nation.

The slave owning nations—the United States, Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal—expanded slavery in the years after the Haitian revolution. In the U.S., slave-based cotton and sugar production expanded into the old southwest and the new Louisiana territory. The French re-imposed slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique. The Spanish expanded sugar production in Cuba, and the Portuguese developed sugar and coffee plantations in Brazil. All of this meant an increase in the slave trade to restock the depleted labor force in the region.

Antiracist uprisings

The Republic of Haiti, on the other hand, continued its attempts to spread the idea of revolution against slavery. In 1815-16, Haitian president Alexandre Pétion sheltered Simon Bolivar as he initiated an independence movement against Spain. Haiti provided Bolivar with ships, arms and ammunition, a printing press, and troops to train his men, demanding in exchange that he pledge to free the slaves in any republics gaining independence from Spain. As Spain was importing slaves, many free Blacks and slaves within Spain’s colonies flocked to the armies of the independence movement. In Peru up to three-quarters of those who fought in the liberation army were men of color. In 1821, Gran Colombia adopted a law to emancipate all born of slave mothers after that date. In 1829, Mexico became the second American nation to abolish slavery absolutely.

Please find the conclusion of this series in our next issue of CHALLENGE available September 16th.