Abstract
By looking at largely contemporaneous nineteenth-century writing about Vastey from England, the United States, and France, this chapter examines how Baron de Vastey’s writings became the signs and symbols of the promises of black sovereignty in the Atlantic World. The author also shows the way in which Vastey’s ideas positively inflected international attitudes towards Haitian independence. By reading reviews of Vastey’s works, Daut argues, we can see how journalists, politicians, scientists, and abolitionists used Vastey’s writing to make the case for Haitian sovereignty.
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Notes
- 1.
Documents standing almost entirely alone as evidence for the encouragement of slave rebellion may have been a common phenomenon in the Caribbean. In a recent article, Romy Sanchez has revealed that B.B. Thatcher’s fairly innocuous 1834 Memoir of Phillis Wheatley , A Native African and A Slave, was among the documents listed in an indictment of the Cuban rebel, Jorge Davidson (467, 474). Davidson was a “mulatto” from Jamaica who was expelled from Cuba in 1837 under “suspicion of having diffused pernicious doctrine among the slaves of this island” (Sanchez 461).
- 2.
Despite the charges listed in the indictment, it is unlikely that Strafford was formally working for Christophe. The Almanach Royal d’Hayti for the years 1814, 1815, 1816, 1817, and 1818, do not list any Thomas Strafford as a member of Christophe’s government.
- 3.
I first learned of this document from a footnote in Jonathan Dalby’s Crime and Punishment in Jamaica (2000) (50; 70 ftn68).
- 4.
Vastey’s Réflexions was directed toward a publication that appeared in France in 1814 under the title, De l’Utilité des colonies, which was signed “M. Mazères, colon.”
- 5.
Recall that in his Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères , Vastey referred to his mother as the “Africaine” who “gave him life” (31).
- 6.
Writing of Vastey’s, Le Système colonial dévoilé (1814), and its “stunningly detailed critique of ‘the injustice and inhumanity of the colonial system,’” Chris Bongie suggests that “[f]irst time readers of the text today will no doubt be struck by the incendiary contents of Colonial System as were readers and reviewers in the 1810s” (Bongie, The Colonial System 64). Vastey’s postcolonial reversal on the title page of Le Système would likely have seemed particularly incendiary to the French colonists. Mocking the former French colonist, Baron de Malouet, the title page of Vastey’s Le Système reads: “At last, the secret full of horrors is known: the Colonial System is the domination of the Whites, It is the Massacre or the Enslavement of Blacks.”
- 7.
In 1808, the Abbé Henri Grégoire published his famous, De la littérature des nègres (a work which Vastey cites in his Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères [18–19]), which would be almost immediately translated into English, where it would appear in Brooklyn in 1810 under the title, An Inquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes. Wheatley , Equiano , and Sancho , as well as Saint-Domingue’s Julien Raimond , are all discussed in Grégoire’s book as proof of African literacy as the sign of African humanity. The entire point of chapter VII entitled, “Littérature des Nègres” is to prove “that with Negroes the intellectual faculties are just as susceptible to development as they are with the Whites” (178).
- 8.
Hamilton is here quoting from (in italics) and paraphrasing passages from Vastey’s Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères , which I have left in the original French: “des centaines de victimes enfermées dans le fond de cale des bâtiments, périssaient asphyxiées par les vapeurs du soufre” (96–97). Elsewhere Vastey describes Rochambeau’s infamous usage of starved dogs trained to “devour” alive the Haitian revolutionaries (99–100). Another passage details the kidnapping and arrest of Toussaint Louverture , along with “his wife, his children, his family,” as well as the executions of Generals Jacques Maurepas and Charles Bélair, who are both described as having “meurent dans les supplices,” in front of, and in the case of Bélair with, a spouse (102). Vastey’s account of these events was repeated by Thomas Madiou in his daunting Histoire d’Haïti: “In the great harbor of Port-au-Prince and in that of Cap [Français] the warshps had become floating prisons where des noirs and des hommes de couleurs were suffocated in the hold” (2: 433) Victor Schoelcher described these bateaux à vapeur as well in his Vie de Toussaint Louverture (1889) when he wrote, “They had invented floating prisons called étouffoirs” (143). For a more recent account of the genocidal tactics of the French, see Claude M. Ribbe , Le Crime de Napoléon (2005).
- 9.
According to Howard et al., Hamilton visited Nevis in April 1812 and from May–June 1814. From May–July 1815, Hamilton was on the island of Dominica, and in January 1816, he can be placed in Guadeloupe. Although Hamilton “did not specify the year” that he visited Haiti, an article published in the Liverpool Mercury on 3 April 1818, establishes that he was “residing at Cape Henry” at that time, while the publication of the English translation of Vastey’s Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères , published in 1817, had noted that the translator was a resident of Haiti, putting him in Haiti in the years 1817 and 1818.
- 10.
A “postscript” apparently written by the publisher notes, “The following work was within a few pages of being ready for publication, when the melancholy intelligence of the death of the patriotic Henry, and the unfortunate overthrow of his wise system of administration, arrested the progress of the press, and put a stop to the completion of the translation. Anxious however to give the work in a perfect form, to a few of the more zealous friends of the African Cause, the Translator has ventured to complete a limited impression of only One hundred copies, for private distribution—not for sale, hoping that the interest which its perusal can hardly fail to excite, at the present period more especially, may eventually lead to its more extensive circulation, through the medium of a larger impression. Stonehouse, July 1st, 1823.”
- 11.
According to Junius P. Rodriguez , the African Institution was created in 1807 after England abolished the slave trade in the Commonwealth, and it was “the premier national British anti-slavery group during the early nineteenth century.” Among its members were noted abolitionists, William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and Zachary Macaulay . The institution closed its doors in 1827 (Rodriguez 12).
- 12.
The piece was simply entitled, “Proclamation: The King to the Haitians.” It bears the strong influence of Vastey’s Réflexions politiques, particularly, in its argument for what we might call, after Gayatri Spivak, a form of “strategic silence.” The proclamation states, for instance, “we will meet [our calumniators] with dignified silence and profound contempt.” Furthermore, the king also makes an appeal to what Vastey had called the “civil death” of Haitians during the era of slavery and revolution. The proclamation states, “Robbed of every right, civil, natural and political, we were destitute of everything—without country—asylum—or possessions. Bent beneath the yoke of tyrants we were detested, we held no rank in the scale of men, but were, in effect, civilly and politically dead to the world.” For Vastey’s similar statement, see Chap. 4 of the present volume.
- 13.
Hamilton also wrote about having traveled extensively in the Caribbean. According to Howard et al., “We know from articles cited in his bibliography that Hamilton was on Nevis on April 27, 1812, and again in May and June of 1814. In May, June, July, 1815, he was on Dominica, and in January, 1816, on Guadeloupe. He wrote of being in Haiti in the months of January through July, but did not specify the year” (213).
- 14.
The translation appeared in London in 1818. The title page notes that it was “Translated exclusively for the Pamphleteer” (n.p.). The inaugural issue of the British Pamphleeter , which appeared in 1813, gives some clues to the broader aims of the publication set to appear “an average of four or five numbers annually” (n.p.): “we have considered the better sort of those compositions, which, under the appellation of Pamphlets, burst forth upon the public, on every new object of inquiry, as stars; which, for the purpose of concentrating their rays into a more durable, as well as convenient, focus for observation, we propose to collect and combine together into distinct volumes, like so many constellations, by means of which these guides through the obscurity of transient opinions will be made mutually to reflect their light upon each other” (iv).
- 15.
Sir Joseph Banks was a famous botanist and natural historian. For over forty years, he presided over the Royal Society, the oldest scientific institution of England. He also established the Kew Botanical Gardens, one of the most noteworthy centers for the study of botany in the world (P. Edwards, “Sir Joseph Banks and the Botany of Captain Cook’s Three Voyages”). Baron Dupuy is listed as “sécretaire interprète du Roi” in the Almanach Royal d’Hayti (1814) (12). Dupuy was also a member of the Privy Council of the King (29) and was a knight of the royal order (32).
- 16.
“j’apportais deux especes de plantes de votre pays qui sont tres [sic] jolies, et tres interessantes, car c’est la premiere fois qu’elles ont été apportées en Europe,” but, he writes, “Les graines qui [sic] j’apportais n’ont pas données jusqu’à ce temps aucune apparence de la vegetation, qui me fait bien facher.”
- 17.
The scientific term for wheat.
- 18.
Vastey’s sense that the colonists had promoted the cultivation of only four crops at the expense of “farming substantial products, so necessary, and so indispensable to the existence of man” (RP 110), is in many respects confirmed by the pamphlets produced during the Saint-Domingue grain crisis of 1789. These pamphlets have been translated and curated by Abby Broughton, Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, and Nathan Dize as a part of the digital humanities project, A Colony in Crisis. The project can be accessed in English translation: https://colonyincrisis.lib.umd.edu/the-translations/ (Accessed 18 May 2016).
- 19.
Even though Hamilton was thoroughly anti-slavery, noticeably, he is not actually anti-empire, which is to say that unlike Vastey, slavery and empire were not locked into a mutually dependent relationship. For example, Hamilton described the goal of his reforms as a plan that could “awaken the planters, so long slumbering on the verge of ruin, to a sense of their true interests and convert the West India islands, from a fatal millstone about the neck of Great Britain, into what a bountiful providence designed they should be, a terrestrial paradise, and a source of benefit to the parent state” (qtd. in Howard et al. 236). In addition, in his Application for a Radcliffe Traveling Fellowship, Hamilton enumerates rather unequivocally his historical willingness to support empire: “Upon the first appointment of British Consuls to South America,” he writes, “I eagerly availed myself of the opportunity to attempt the introduction of the various valuable productions of those diversified, even now but imperfectly explored regions, into our own Colonies, for the mutual advantage of those Settlements and the Parent Country” (2). He continued by saying, “I am at this moment endeavouring also to establish the Pita Plant […], in Jamaica, with the double view of improving the agriculture and commerce of our Colonies, and rendering Great Britain independent of foreign nations for the supply of those essential maritime stores, canvass and cordage” (2).
- 20.
The same April 1818 article from the Liverpool Mercury that placed Hamilton in Haiti, also placed Prince Saunders there. The “Note of the Translator” states that “Prince Sanders, Esq. [sic]” was the director of a school at Sans Souci.
- 21.
Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 38.
- 22.
The first full English translation of Le Système appeared in 2014 with Liverpool University Press.
- 23.
Reprinted in the Alexandria Gazette, September 26, 1815.
- 24.
Cushing, in any event, quotes from Vastey’s original French rather than from Hamilton’s English translation.
- 25.
Cushing’s article on Vastey was either referenced or quoted several times in the northern U.S. See, for example, “Review of New Books,” Literary Gazette; or Journal of Criticism, Science, and the Arts, February 17, 1821; “From the Catskill Recorder: Revolutionary Incidents. St. Domingo,” Rhode Island American, February 13. 1821; “From the Catskill Recorder: Revolutionary Incidents. St. Domingo,” Essex Patriot, August 18, 1821. The invaluable Index to the North American Review , published posthumously in 1877 by William Cushing, lists Caleb Cushing as the author of this unsigned piece (124). For further confirmation of Cushing’s authorship of this article and further contextual discussion of it, see Belohlavek (10).
- 26.
The North American Review was not the only U.S. newspaper to print positive reviews of Christophe after 1817, as evidenced by the following extract from a letter written by a U.S. person from Virginia who lamented the glowing reports of the Haitian monarch in the northern press: “It astonishes me a great deal to see that the editors of our newspapers treat the name of that monster, Christophe, the soi-disant king of Hayti, with the shadow of respect” (Boston Daily Advertiser, June 26, 1816; repr. Enquirer, July 6, 1816).
- 27.
The publications under review in Cushing’s article for the North American Review included three of Vastey’s works, Réflexions Politiques and Réflexions sur les Noirs et les Blancs, Relation de la Fête de S.M. la Reine d’Hayti, and six additional publications from Haiti: Acte de l’indépendance, Code Henry , Gazette Royale d’Hayti, Des Almanachs Royals d’Hayti, Des Ordonnances, Déclarations, Proclamations, &c. du Roi d’Hayti, and L’Entrée du Roi en sa Capitale, Opéra Vaudeville, par M. le Comte de Rosiers (Cushing 112).
- 28.
The author is speaking of the previously mentioned articles about Vastey in the Quarterly Review and The British Review , and London Critical Journal.
- 29.
Buffon’s naturalist writings were premised on the assumption that blacks represented a “degenerate” form of the white race, for instance. The French author even proposed racial mixing to speed up the process of regeneration, writing that if such “amalgamation” were promoted, “the Mulatto would have only a light trace of brown that would disappear altogether within the next generations; it would only take therefore 150 or 200 years to clean the skin of a Negro by this method of mixing with white blood” (Histoire naturelle générale et particuliére, 14: 313–314). It was not long before racial mixing was proffered as a possible solution to help end slavery and to hasten the “regeneration” of the black race. In his Études des races humaines, Michel-Hyacinthe Deschamps wrote, for example:
“The regeneration of the human species, or the return of all the colored races to the white type, is possible, suppressing the odious prejudice, by means of perpetual crossing of the métis with the primordial white, now European, race. We could whiten the natives of an island, of a country, of a vast colony. The Negroes would not have to be born slaves, our inferior brothers; they are our equals in the order of creation; they have the right—as do we—to the sun, to liberty, and to the banquet of life…. Glory to the promoters of the emancipation of the slaves!” (135, emphasis in original)
A reviewer of John R. Beard’s biography of Toussaint Louverture also encouraged miscegenation as a way to help end slavery in the United States, writing that “many sensible men who have lived in Hayti are of opinion that an increase of the mulatto stock, by legitimate and permanent sanctions would vastly improve it, in as much as the public interests fare well at the heads of these men of mixed blood who are not, as we commonly supposed, faded copies of both black and white, but specimens of an original ability as yet but imperfectly displayed” (“Toussaint L’Ouverture,” North American Review , 1864, 596).
- 30.
For literacy as humanity, see Chukwudi, Introduction, 5; and Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 270.
- 31.
For an intriguing argument about Dessalines’s desire to export the revolution in Haiti elsewhere in the Americas, see Jenson, “Before Malcom X” (340).
- 32.
Here, Vastey specifically refutes the writing of the former French colonist Malouet, who had written that “the [Haitian] revolution has transferred from the whites to the blacks the question of control over the Caribbean, and our unfortunate rivalries must give way in the face of the great interest in the region that is obviously developing” (Collection de mémoires, 4: 2). Christophe’s Code had followed in the stead of Dessalines’s constitution, which had mandated, “The Emperor will never form any enterprise with the view of conquest or of troubling the peace or domestic regimes of foreign colonies” (Art. 36).
- 33.
Thomas Jefferson , once a proponent of “Toussaint’s Clause,” which allowed the United States to continue to trade in arms and other goods with Toussaint Louverture during the Haitian Revolution, changed his tune remarkably after Haitian independence, when he began attempting to have a bill imposing a trade embargo on Haiti passed in Congress. The Logan Bill was passed in February of 1806, and it forbade U.S. merchants from trading with any portions of the colony not in possession of France. See Matthewson, “Jefferson and the Nonrecognition of Haiti” (32). Official trade statistics (which do not take into account the illegal trade, of course) show that U.S. exports to the French islands stood at $6.7 million in 1806 but fell to $5.8 million in 1807 and to $1.5 million in 1808 (ibid., 35). When the trade embargo expired in 1810 and was not renewed, trade resumed between the two countries. For a table indicating the trade statistics after 1810, see Logan , Diplomatic Relations (194–195).
- 34.
For Dessalines in the U.S. press, see Jenson, “Before Malcom X,” 331. In 1809 King Henri Christophe sought to counteract his negative image abroad by issuing a heart-felt plea to U.S. merchants. The article stated that its purpose was “to make known the truth, and to bring to light the falsity of the infamous impostures my enemies have spread with so much profusion against me.” Christophe’s letter was reprinted in the Observer, July 30, 1809, and the American, August 4, 1809. An additional article in the New-England Palladium on August 4, 1809, which made reference to this letter, stated that Christophe’s address to the merchants was brought to the United States by a “gentleman from the West-Indies.” This last article was also reprinted several times. See Boston Patriot, August 5, 1809; Providence Gazette, August 5, 1809; Massachusetts Spy; or Worcester Gazette, August 9, 1809; and Rutland Herald, August 19, 1809.
- 35.
In the words of the Abbé Henri Grégoire, speaking specifically of the north, “The creation of nobility in the North of Haiti has made [France] rain, if I can say that, with criticisms and sarcasms” (Observations 149).
- 36.
Claude Pierre Joseph Leborgne de Boigne , Nouveau système de colonisation pour Saint-Domingue (1817).
- 37.
Recall that Jacques Pierrot Brissot de Warville, the founder of the Société des Amis des Noirs, was executed during the French Revolution in 1793.
- 38.
A character in Hugo’s 1826 novel about the Haitian Revolution, Bug-Jargal, alludes to French disdain for the word “philanthropist” with its implied connection to anti-slavery thought: “the philosophes fathered the philanthropists, who gave birth to the négrophiles , who produced the eaters of the whites,” concluding, “these purportedly liberal ideas of which we are intoxicated in France are a poison in the tropics” (68).
- 39.
Geggus writes, “Deborah Jenson has made an interesting case that Dessalines should be regarded as [the Haitian Declaration of Independence’s] ‘political author’ and that Boisrond Tonnerre’s role was merely ‘secretarial’,” but in Geggus’s estimation, “The first proposition seems to me convincing; the second perhaps goes too far” (27).
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Daut, M.L. (2017). The Uses of Vastey: Reading Black Sovereignty in the Atlantic Public Sphere. In: Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47067-6_3
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