…Atlantic
"In the late eighteenth century, the French colony of Saint-Domingue was the richest colony in the world. Set in the Caribbean Sea, a short sail from some of the principal American colonies of Britain and Spain, in the 1780s it produced about half of all the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe and the Americas. It was, in the nomenclature of the time, the "Pearl of the Antilles," the "Eden of the Western World." It was there, in late August 1791, that the colony's enslaved rose up, eventually declaring war against the regime of slavery at its seat of most extreme and opulent power. Within a month, the rebel slaves numbered in the tens of thousands, and the property destroyed amounted to more than a thousand sugar and coffee farms. With this event—the largest and best-coordinated slave rebellion the world had ever seen—the enslaved of Saint-Domingue forced the issue of slavery upon the French Revolution and the world. By August 1793, colonial authorities began decreeing abolition, and in February 1794, the National Convention in Paris ended slavery in France's colonies, in a sense ratifying what enslaved rebels had already made real on the ground in many parts of Saint-Domingue. A decade later, those same rebels declared themselves free not only from slavery, but also from French rule. On January 1, 1804, the independent nation of Haiti was proclaimed—the second independent state in the Western Hemisphere, and the only one ever founded by former slaves and without slavery.1
The Haitian Revolution—the name by which we now know these events—commanded the attention of everyone in the region and beyond. But surely few followed the situation as closely as enslaved people, who apprehended that the world's most profitable and powerful system of slavery had been destroyed by its own slaves. Masters, meanwhile, heard about men much like themselves whose lives and fortunes had just been shattered by the actions of enslaved men and women like their own. Authorities in neighboring slave societies responded quickly with measures such as bans on the entry of so-called French blacks, limits on the slave trade, and surveillance of slaves in their own territory.
Whatever hopes and fears the Haitian Revolution generated across the Atlantic world, its impact on slave emancipation beyond Haiti's borders was not at all clear. In the French Empire, the emancipation of 1794 had been rescinded, and by the time of Haitian independence in 1804, slavery and the slave trade were thriving again in Guadeloupe and Martinique. While organized and popular opposition to slavery gained momentum in England, perhaps some three-quarters of a million people still lived enslaved in its colonies. In the United States, abolitionism became increasingly popular in the north, but in the south slavery remained entrenched, its advocates bent on expanding it to new American territories. In the Spanish world, meanwhile, the model of plantation slavery pioneered in the French and British Caribbean was gaining ground. In Cuba, in particular, planters strove to supplant Saint-Domingue in the world market, and the rapid expansion of slavery there turned the Spanish island into the world's largest producer of sugar and one of the greatest consumers of Africans in the nineteenth-century world…"
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Amicalement
Armand
paints brigs for the British fleet.
