1. Haiti: Behind the Headlines

2. What words/images come to mind when someone mentions Haiti?

3. Haiti is the only nation to ever gain its independence from a successful slave revolt and was the second (after the United State’s successful revolution in 1776) independent nation in the Western Hemisphere.

4. The French first began bringing slaves to Haiti in the 1500’s
The French first began bringing slaves to Haiti in the 1500’s. Over the next two centuries, approximately 1 million African slaves would die in Haiti from abuse and hard plantation labor.

5. Haitian Social Structure
500,000
30,000 people
20,000 people
Whites
Free people of color
Enslaved blacks
Maroons

6. 4 main groups in late 1700s THE WHITES
There were approximately 20,000 whites, mainly French, in San Domingue. They were divided into two main groups: ) Planters ) the less wealthy petit blancs, who were artisans, shopkeepers, and merchants.
THE FREE PERSONS OF COLOR
There were approximately 30,000 free persons of color in About half of them were mulattoes, children of white Frenchmen and slave women.
The other half of the free persons of color were black slaves who had purchased their own freedom or been given freedom by their masters for various reasons.

7. THE BLACK SLAVES
There were some 500,000 slaves on the eve of the
French Revolution, divided into 2 groups.
1)Domestic slaves- About 100,000 of the slaves were domestics who worked as cooks, personal servants and various artisans around the plantation manor, or in the towns. These slaves were generally better treated than the common field hands and tended to identify more fully with their white and mulatto masters.
2) Field hands-the 400,000 field hands were the slaves who had the harshest and most hopeless lives. They worked from sun up to sun down in the difficult climate of San Domingue. They were inadequately fed, with virtually no medical care, not allowed to learn to read or write and in general were treated much worse than the work animals on the plantation.

8. THE MAROONS
There was a large group of run-away slaves
who retreated deep into the mountains of San
Domingue. They lived in small villages where they did
subsistence farming and kept alive African ways,
developing African architecture, social relations,
religion and customs. They were bitterly anti-slavery,
but alone, were not willing to fight the fight for
freedom. They did supplement their subsistence
farming with occasional raids on local plantations,
and maintained defense systems to resist planter
Attempts to capture and reenslave them. most
scholars believe there were tens of thousands of them
prior to the Revolution of Actually two of the
leading generals of the early slave revolution were
maroons.

9. "Le Negre Marron" (The Black Maroon), Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1970

10. By about 1790, Saint-Domingue had quickly became
the richest French colony in the New World due to
the immense profits from the sugar, coffee and indigo
industries.

11. The French, like the British, figured out that it was cheapest to keep their slaves alive for 4-7 years and then replace them with new slaves from Africa rather than allow them to reproduce naturally.

12. The French, who were outnumbered 10:1 by their slaves in Haiti,
lived in constant fear of a revolution. To prevent them from
organizing resistance movements, the owners tried to keep slaves
of the same tribes apart; forbade any meetings of slaves at all; tied
slaves to their own plantations, and used brutal forms of
punishment to keep the slaves under control.

13. One of the most frightening threats to disobedient slaves in the rest of the Americas was to threaten to sell them to San Domingue.

15. The colony of San Domingue was torn by numerous dissensions:
many white planters wanted independence from Revolutionary France ( ).
free persons of color, attracted to the concept of equality embedded in the doctrine of The Rights of Man, were struggling for full rights of citizenship.
slaves, hearing the talk of human equality, and oppressed by inhuman conditions, revolted to improve their lot.

16. Haitian Revolution:

17. Shortly after the 1791 uprising, Toussaint Louverture, a former slave who was over forty years old, joined the camp of the rebels as a medical officer. Toussaint practiced herbal and African healing, but unlike most such healers, he was not a Voodoo houngan.
Toussaint did not remain a medical officer for long. His ability to organize, train and lead men became immediately apparent. Toussaint rose from his position of aide-de-camp to become a general.

18. By August of 1800 Toussaint was ruler of all San Domingue and no foreign power was on San Domingan soil. He was governor general of the whole colony.
When the

19. On June 7, 1802 Toussaint received a message from French General Brunet to meet with him at a plantation near Gonaives. Brunet assured Toussaint that he'd be perfectly safe with the French, who were, after all, gentlemen!
Shortly after arriving at the plantation he was arrested and shipped off to prison in France. Toussaint was taken to Fort de Joux, a cold, damp prison near the Swiss border. Toussaint soon withered away and died on April, 7, 1803.

20. INDEPENDENCE DAY, JANUARY 1, 1804
After 13 years of revolutionary activity France was formally removed from the island and Haitian independence declared, only the second republic in the Americas.
The country was in ruins, the masses mainly uneducated and struggling for survival. The western world's large and interested nations, the United States, Britain, Spain and, of course, France, were all skeptical and nervous about an all-black republic. After all, the large nations were all slave-owning states.
The immediate post-revolutionary period of Haitian history was a terribly difficult one. The country was in shambles. Most of the plantations were destroyed, many skilled overseers were gone (either dead, in hiding, or having fled for their lives because of the treatment of slaves), skilled managers were often also gone, the former slaves did not want to work someone else's plantation, there was a grave fear that France would re- invade, and the rest of the international community was either openly hostile or totally uninterested in Haiti.

21. Henri Christophe- King of Northern Haiti, 1806-1820

22. Haiti’s Economy after the Revolution
In 1804, Haiti's economy was dependent on agricultural exports, primarily sugar, which required plantation production and thus coercive forms of labor.
The leaders of the Haitian Revolution immediately recognized that they needed to restart their economy, which had been devastated during fighting with the French. Haiti needed money, not only to feed its own people but also to support a strong military that could protect the young country's independence against the very real threat of invasion. (French war ships remained in Haitian waters until 1825!)