Bois Caïman

On 14 August 1791 a houngan named Boukman led a ceremony at Bois Caïman in the hills above the northern plain. A pact was sworn, an animal was sacrificed, and eight days later the north burned. Two things get argued about endlessly and both arguments miss the mechanism. The first is whether the ceremony happened exactly as described, which is a question about sources. The second is Pat Robertson calling it a pact with the devil on television in 2010, which is a question about nothing. Here is what actually matters operationally. Vodou was the only institution that crossed plantation boundaries, mixed African nations, and could gather people at night without a white man present. The colony had banned assembly. The ceremony was the assembly. When you outlaw every legal way for people to coordinate, the religion becomes the command structure.

On 14 August 1791 Boukman gathered the conspirators at Bois Caiman, on the Lenormand de Mezy plantation, and made them swear loyalty before the rising. The ceremony was a blood oath. Under the branches of a mapou, with lightning crossing the sky and thunder over the silent assembly, a priestess made her signs and drove the sacrificial knife into the throat of a wild pig, then spread the entrails on ground flooded with blood. Boukman spoke the words in Creole. The good God who makes the sun, who lifts the sea and makes the storm rumble, is hidden in the cloud and sees everything the whites do. The god of the whites commands crime; ours asks for kindness and orders us to take vengeance. Throw away the image of the white god who thirsts for the water in our eyes, and listen to the liberty that speaks in all our hearts. Thirteen years of war followed, ending in the black state of 1804.

Smith opens his account of Haitian regional ties before the Haitian nation existed. Within hours of the first shots of August 1791, refugees from the western half of Hispaniola set sail for Jamaica. At that stage they were mostly French planters, and they scattered across the Caribbean leaving durable marks: their contribution to the nineteenth-century development of Cuban coffee, and family names that survive in Jamaica such as Desnoes, Malabre and Espeut. Over the following century and a half the waves widened to include Haitians of every social class, political exiles, and nearly a dozen former heads of state who settled in Jamaica. Smith stresses that the traffic ran both ways, since a good many people from the British islands went the other way and settled in Haiti during the closing quarter of the century. His point is that regional integration long predated any treaty.

Joseph's fullest treatment of a dated event sits in an endnote. On the night of 14 August 1791, in a forest called Bois-Caiman in the parish of Morne-Rouge in the north, a large group of drivers, about two hundred of them sent from various plantations, gathered on the Lenormand de Mezy estate under the direction of the maroon and religious leader Dutty Boukman and set plans for a large-scale revolt to begin a week later. Joseph cites the testimony of an enslaved man named Francois, who reported that a man of colour read public papers to the assembly and declared that the king and the National Assembly had granted them three days of freedom a week, that the white planters opposed this, and that they must await troops sent to enforce the decree, though people on some estates in Acul and Limbe wanted to begin the war at any cost before the troops arrived. Where this account departs from the standard one: Places the Bois-Caiman gathering itself on 14 August at the Lenormand de Mezy plantation, where Dubois in this batch argues the ceremony fell on 21 August at a different site.