C4 (Dilemma): Violence in the Haitian Revolution

Instructions

Answer the following questions about the role that violence played in the Haitian Revolution.

Source: EdPost - Why the Haitian Revolution Isn't Taught in Schools

Beginning in August 1791, Black revolutionaries torched the plantation landscape. They set fire to sugar mills, cane fields, and plantation estates, making an intricate white supremacist system of torture, profit, and power totally unusable. The flames they spread launched the Haitian Revolution, an antislavery rebellion that would defeat the French, Spanish, and British empires before establishing the first antislavery state in the Western Hemisphere.

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Those in power went to extraordinary lengths to suppress news of the Haitian Revolution...They understood that a successful slave revolt undermined the racist mythologies they used to justify the plantation economy and the world of consumer goods it created.

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White leaders in the Americas wanted to make sure that everyone heard the news about the destruction caused by the black Haitian revolutionaries.

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While white elites did everything in their power to cover up the revolution and its impact, they did get one thing right: knowledge of the Haitian Revolution did indeed spread the flames of Black revolution far beyond the shores of Haiti. As historians have shown, we can better understand events like Second Maroon War of 1795 in Jamaica, the multicultural German Coast Rebellion of 1811 in Louisiana, and the Black and Indigenous defense of Negro Fort in 1816 as part of this larger transnational Black revolutionary movement.

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People outside of Haiti ended up hearing about the Revolution even though leaders tried to keep it quiet.

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Abolitionists in the U.S. even found ideological and tactical inspiration in reports of the revolution and its most famous leader, Toussaint Louverture. The abolitionist raid on Harpers Ferry, for example, which has long been seen as a catalyst for secession and the Civil War, grew from a close reading of Louverture and the lessons of the Haitian Revolution.

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Based on the information in this paragraph, what do you think an abolitionist is?

Enslaved people in Haiti didn’t choose to revolt because they had too much time on their hands...They risked life and limb to fight for their freedom because, as Jean-Jacques Dessalines wrote in the Haitian Declaration of Independence, French enslavers were “barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries.”

James echoed Dessalines on this point, who reminded his audience in the Haitian Declaration of Independence that “your spouses, your husbands, your brothers, your sisters” were “the prey of these [French] vultures.” The regime was already violent—that was the very reason it existed. The revolution sought simply to end that violence.

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C4 (Dilemma): Violence in the Haitian Revolution

White leaders in the Americas wanted to make sure that everyone heard the news about the destruction caused by the black Haitian revolutionaries.

People outside of Haiti ended up hearing about the Revolution even though leaders tried to keep it quiet.

Based on the information in this paragraph, what do you think an abolitionist is?

Why does the author of this section believe that the Haitian revolutionaries should not be blamed for their violence?

What did the black Haitian revolutionaries set fire to?

The Black revolutionaries set these fires to make sure that the whites could no longer profit from the slave system in Haiti.

White leaders in the Americas wanted to make sure that everyone heard the news about the destruction caused by the black Haitian revolutionaries.

People outside of Haiti ended up hearing about the Revolution even though leaders tried to keep it quiet.

Inspired by Haitian events, black revolutionaries outside of Haiti staged their own rebellions against other slave systems.

Based on the information in this paragraph, what do you think an abolitionist is?

Why does the author of this section believe that the Haitian revolutionaries should not be blamed for their violence?

What did the black Haitian revolutionaries set fire to?

Inspired by Haitian events, black revolutionaries outside of Haiti staged their own rebellions against other slave systems.