European printmakers freeze the revolution at Cap Francais

The engravings of the revolution are remarkable for their narrowness. Where the visual record of the French and American revolutions follows events year by year and sometimes month by month, that of the Haitian Revolution fixes on two moments at Cap Francais, the rising of 1791 and the fighting of 1793, and then jumps to the independence campaign of the early 1800s. Many prints were made in Europe by people who had never crossed the Atlantic, whose aims ranged from selling an arresting picture to damping enthusiasm for abolition to attacking the French revolutionary government. As a group they show black violence against white residents and property and pass over the brutality of white men toward people of African descent. White draws the political consequence. Readers in Europe and America learned of abolition and of black troops defeating British invaders in text, but what they saw was the port on fire. Where this account departs from the standard one: White argues the Haitian Revolution was made into a race war partly by objects, against accounts that treat the racial framing as a straightforward description of events.

In 1791 free people of colour in Saint-Domingue armed enslaved men to strengthen their hand against the white colonists who refused them equal rights. The armed men were known as the Swiss, a name borrowed from the mercenary guards of the French king. Once the free coloured leaders obtained the concessions they wanted, the soldiers who had fought for them became an embarrassment. Two hundred and seventeen of them were put aboard ship late that year and carried to the Mosquito Coast of Central America. They were held below deck in irons, and the crews tried to sell them on arrival. Officials at Belize and in Jamaica, worried about what such men might say to the enslaved people around them, refused to let them land. The ships turned back to Saint-Domingue, where the men appear to have been killed without trial. Political exile, sale and massacre ran together in a single voyage, eleven years before the same combination returned on a much larger scale.

On 10 May 1795 Jose Caridad Gonzalez, an African from the Loango coast, joined Jose Leonardo Chirino in leading a rising of enslaved and free Black people in the Coro district of Venezuela. It was not the first of its kind there. A rebellion around Caracas in 1749 was led by a man remembered as Miguel Loango. Central Africans shipped through Loango made up a large part of the enslaved population of Maracaibo, Caracas, the state of Falcon and the Barlovento district of Miranda. The coastal town of Curiepe, founded in the seventeenth century by two men called Manuel and Antonio Congo, was the first settlement of free Black people in the country. The demands raised in 1795 were taken up two years later by Manuel Gual and Jose Maria Espana, whose conspiracy Venezuela treats as a founding act. The port that filled Saint-Domingue filled Venezuela as well, and risings followed in both places.

Speaking to the African Masonic Lodge in Boston, Prince Hall, who had fought in the war against Britain, told his brethren not to be cast down under the abuses they laboured under, because the darkest hour comes before daybreak. He asked them to remember how dark a day it had been for their African brethren six years earlier in the French West Indies, when nothing but the snap of the whip was heard from morning to evening. Jackson uses the speech to open a two century argument. Black and white Americans took opposite meanings from the same events, with white reaction running to shock, fear, surveillance and harsh law, while black Americans saw in Haiti and in the figure of Toussaint the possibilities of their race and its movement toward freedom.