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Thread: War the black man won

  1. #1
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    Default War the black man won

    The Haitian Revolution (French: Révolution haďtienne [ʁevɔlysjɔ̃ ajisjɛ̃n]) was a successful anti-slavery and anti-colonial insurrection by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign nation of Haiti. It began in 1791 and ended in 1804 with the former colony's independence. It was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state, which was both free from slavery, and ruled by non-whites and former captives.[3] With the recent increase in Haitian Revolutionary Studies, it is now widely seen as a defining moment in the history of racism in the Atlantic World.[4]

    Its effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. The ending of French rule and the abolition of slavery in the former colony by the former slaves was followed by their successful defense of the freedoms they won, and, with the collaboration of mulattoes, their independence from rule by white Europeans.[5][6][7] It represents the largest slave uprising since Spartacus's unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years before.[8] It challenged long-held beliefs about black inferiority and about enslaved persons' capacity to achieve and maintain their own freedom. The rebels' organizational capacity and tenacity under pressure became the source of stories that shocked and frightened slave owners.[9]

    Background

    Much of the Caribbean economic development was contingent to Europeans' demand for sugar, which plantation owners traded for European and North American manufactured goods. Saint Domingue also had extensive coffee, cocoa, and indigo plantations, but these were smaller and less profitable than the wealthy sugar plantations.[16] Starting in the 1730s, French engineers constructed complex irrigation systems to increase sugarcane production. By the 1740s Saint-Domingue, together with Jamaica, had become the main supplier of the world's sugar. Sugar production depended on extensive manual labor provided by enslaved Africans in the harsh Saint-Domingue colonial plantation economy. Saint-Domingue was the most profitable French colony in the entire world, indeed one of the most profitable of all the European colonies in the 18th century, with an average of 600 ships engaged every year in shipping products from Saint-Domingue to Bordeaux and the value of Saint-Domingue's goods almost equal in value to all of the products shipped from the British 13 colonies to Great Britain.[17] The economic importance of St. Domingue to France can be seen in the livelihood of 1 million out of the 25 million or so people who lived in the Kingdom of France in 1789 depended directly upon the imports of coffee, indigo and sugar from St. Domingue, and several million indirectly depended upon trade from France's richest colony to maintain their standard of living.[18] To sustain the sugar production amid the unhealthy climate of the Caribbean with malaria and yellow fever running rampant was slavery. In one year alone, namely 1787, the French imported about 20, 000 slaves from Africa into Saint-Domingue while the British imported about 38, 000 slaves to all of their Caribbean colonies.[17] The death rate from yellow fever was such that at least 50% of the slaves imported from Africa died within a year of arriving, and as such the masters preferred to work their slaves as hard as possible while providing with them with the barest minimum of food and shelter, calculating that it was better to get the most work out of their slaves with lowest possible expense possible since they were probably going to die of yellow fever anyway.[19] The death rate was so high that polyandry-one woman being married to several men at the same time-came to be a common form of marriage among the slaves.[19] As slaves had no legal rights, rape by the masters was a common occurrence on the plantations.[20]

    The white planters who derived their wealth from the sale of slave-produced sugar knew they were outnumbered by slaves by a factor of more than ten; they lived in fear of slave rebellion.[21] Even by the standards of the Caribbean, the French slave masters were extremely cruel in their treatment of their slaves.[17] White masters extensively used the threat of physical violence to maintain control and limit this possibility for slave rebellion. When slaves left the plantations or disobeyed their masters, they were subject to whipping, or to more extreme torture such as castration or burning, the punishment being both a personal lesson and a warning for other slaves. Louis XIV, the French King, passed the Code Noir in 1685 in an attempt to regulate such violence and the treatment of the enslaved person in general in the colony, but masters openly and consistently broke the code, and local legislation reversed parts of it throughout the 18th century.[22]

    In 1758, the white landowners began passing legislation restricting the rights of other groups of people until a rigid caste system was defined. Most historians have classified the people of the era into three groups. One was the white colonists, or blancs. This group is generally subdivided into the plantation owners and a lower class of whites who often served as overseers or day laborers.

    A second was the free blacks (usually mixed-race, known as mulattoes or gens de couleur libres, free people of color). These gens de couleur tended to be educated and literate and they often served in the army or as administrators on plantations. Many were children of white planters and enslaved mothers while others had purchased their freedom from their owners through the sale of their own produce or artistic works. They often received education or artisan training, and sometimes inherited freedom or property from their fathers. Some gens de couleur even operated their own plantations and were slave owners.

    The third group, outnumbering the others by a ratio of ten to one, was made up of mostly African-born slaves. A high rate of mortality among them meant that planters continually had to import new slaves. This kept their culture more African and separate from other people on the island. Many plantations had large concentrations of slaves from a particular region of Africa, and it was therefore somewhat easier for these groups to maintain elements of their culture, religion, and language. This also separated new slaves from Africa from creoles (slaves born in the colony), who already had kin networks and often had more prestigious roles on plantations and more opportunities for emancipation.[23] Most slaves spoke a patois of the French language known as Creole, which was also used by native mulattoes and whites for communication with the workers.[24] The majority of the slaves were Yoruba from what is now modern Nigeria, Fon from what is now Benin and from the Kingdom of Kongo in what now modern northern Angola and the western Congo.[25] The Kongolese at 40% were the largest of the African ethnic groups represented amongst the slaves.[19] The slaves developed their own religion, a synesthetic mixture of Roman Catholicism and West African religions known as Vodou, usually called voodoo in English, which provided the slaves with their own belief system that implicitly rejected their status as slaves.[26]

    White colonists and black slaves frequently came into violent conflict. Saint-Domingue was a society seething with hatred. The French historian Paul Fregosi wrote: "Whites, mulattos and blacks loathed each other. The poor whites couldn't stand the rich whites, the rich whites despised the poor whites, the middle class whites were jealous of the aristocratic whites, the whites born in France looked down upon the locally born whites, mulattoes envied the whites, despised the blacks and were despised by the whites; free Negroes brutalized those who were still slaves, Haitian born blacks regarded those from Africa as savages. Everyone-quite rightly-lived in terror of everyone else...Haiti was hell, but Haiti was rich".[27] Many of these conflicts involved slaves who had escaped the plantations. Many runaway slaves—called Maroons—hid on the margins of large plantations, living off the land and what they could steal from their former masters. Others fled to towns, to blend in with urban slaves and freed slaves who often concentrated in those areas. If caught, these runaway slaves would be severely and violently punished. However, some masters tolerated petit marronages, or short-term absences from plantations.[23]

    Often, however, larger groups of runaway slaves lived in the woods away from control. They often conducted violent raids on the island's sugar and coffee plantations. Although the numbers in these bands grew large (sometimes into the thousands), they generally lacked the leadership and strategy to accomplish large-scale objectives. The first effective maroon leader to emerge was the charismatic François Mackandal, who succeeded in unifying the black resistance. A Haitian Vodou priest, Mackandal inspired his people by drawing on African traditions and religions. He united the maroon bands and also established a network of secret organizations among plantation slaves, leading a rebellion from 1751 through 1757. Although Mackandal was captured by the French and burned at the stake in 1758, large armed maroon bands persisted in raids and harassment after his death.[21][28]

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz5zFzvbib4

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    It was a massacre, not a war.

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