Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

As the dying-off of the native population of Mexico accelerated, colonial authorities became seized with the importance of Black labor, which, although numerically small in comparison to the Indian workforce, “provided the foundation on which the entire structure of the labor force rested.”

About half the gold that Spain would obtain from the New World originated in the New Kingdom of Granada, as present-day Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela were then known, and this production was also largely brought about through the bound labor of Blacks.

little recognized fact about early Spanish America, which the public imagines was populated by conquistadores and white settlers, is that unlike the English and even French colonies that would follow in its wake, very little use was made of European voluntary or indentured servants. During the first century or more of Spanish America’s existence, in many parts of the Caribbean rim, Blacks and mixed-race people, or “mulattoes,” outnumbered colonial Spaniards. This

During his conquest of Puerto Rico, in 1508, Ponce de Léon employed armed Africans. Fielding, as he said, “many black slaves,” Diego Velázquez copied these tactics three years later during his conquest of Cuba.

Readers will recall that Spain and Portugal had unified their crowns in 1580, and that for Holland, attacking the basis of rich new sources of Portuguese wealth derived from the exploitation of Africans was a potent means of weakening Spain’s ability to finance its campaigns in the Thirty Years War.

As they proceeded southeast along the levee, slaves on other plantations rose up and joined them, quickly lifting their numbers from twenty-five or so at the outset to perhaps as many as two hundred men. Their ranks swelled even further when they attacked the plantation of a white settler named James Brown, where two Coromantee plotters, Kook and Kwamena, joined the uprising.

After extensive reconnoitering, the American forces advanced on horseback and quickly surrounded the rebels’ camp. They were counting on the element of surprise as they launched a carefully conceived attack. But by the time the smoke from their heavy fusillade had cleared, all they found were a handful of unarmed Blacks; all of the others had successfully melted away well before the attack. The American army had no way of knowing it, but it had fallen victim to classic tactics from theaters of war in western Central Africa, whose armies were famous for scattering in the face of massed Portuguese attacks. Drawn into confused pursuit, or simply reduced to exhaustion, the enemy could then be picked off singly or in small groups.

Deslondes’s rebellion was put down decisively but had a major impact on the political history of Louisiana, and thereby upon the entire Mississippi River Valley. Planter communities that had once looked upon the idea of integration into the United States with suspicion and hostility now quickly warmed to statehood. This was out of a shared belief that their local militias would never again be adequate to the task of enforcing the radical inequality and suffocating oppression that were the inescapable foundations of a slave society.

Cotton began its takeoff throughout the region, powerfully hoisting the United States in its entirety and transforming the Atlantic world.

The search took me to some of the grandest surviving plantation homes, which now do a bustling business offering tours that have more to do with nostalgia for a strangely romanticized past and an oblivious kind of escapism for many who seem not to have given the past much thought at all. This

Visibly jarred by this, when we had reached the minivan again, they inquired about the hardships the slaves had been subjected to, and I suppressed the temptation to speak up. Our guide then explained, as it had almost certainly been explained to her, that the slaves in this region had been lucky, because the area had been colonized by the French, and the French, she said credulously, treated their slaves “best of all.”

I came upon something that I had been unprepared for: three rows of realistic-looking Black heads, nineteen in all, in red or white bandannas covered in cowries, erected on pikes. In the artists’ rendering, each of them had been given a distinctive face. There, out front in a row by himself, stood the head of Charles Deslondes, his mouth slightly agape as if caught in the act of speaking. The white marble plaque in front of it bore his name, together with a single-word legend: Leader.

In August 1791, after two years of the French Revolution and its repercussions in San Domingo, the slaves revolted. The struggle lasted for 12 years. The slaves defeated in turn the local whites and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of some 60,000 men, and a French expedition of similar size under Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. The defeat of Bonaparte’s expedition in 1803 resulted in the establishment of the Negro state of Haiti, which has lasted to this day.

But left largely outside of this already full scope is how the liberation of Haiti gave birth to continental power for the young United States, and changed world history to a degree matched by scant few other modern revolutions.

Like so many of the stories contained in these pages, outside of lineaments so bare boned that they would struggle to fill an almanac entry, the history of this revolution is scarcely known or appreciated even among highly educated Western readers.

For at least two reasons, the invisibility of this self-liberation by slaves, most of them recently disembarked from Africa, is especially perverse and disturbing for Americans. That is because of the close physical proximity to America of Hispaniola, the island where Haiti is located, and the outsized impact of Haiti’s revolution not just on the size and sh...

In the same way the doomed uprising of Charles Deslondes was directly inspired by the news of the French Revolution, and by the uprising in Haiti that followed on its heels, the Haitian Revo...

Less widely appreciated is the way that slaves brought to Haiti from Jamaica and other parts of the British Caribbean helped energize Black resistance in Saint Domingue and came to play many of the leading roles in the uprisings of the late eighteenth century there.

What did it mean for the French-held third of Hispaniola to become the richest colony ever? It has been estimated that between 1716 and 1787, a period that covers France’s greatest boom years in the eighteenth century, fully 15 percent of its economic growth derived from its Caribbean empire. No fewer than a million of the French king’s subjects depended directly on the colonial trade for their livelihoods. Saint Domingue alone generated as much trade as the entire United States.

we have seen through plentiful examples, the very phrase “slave colony” meant an utter dependence on Black bodies for the creation and sustenance of wealth. What made Saint Domingue different from others was mostly a matter of the rate at which it consumed African bodies, which increased rapidly throughout the century to attain monstrous heights on the eve of revolution there.

Fittingly, slave imports reached their peak in 1790, the year before the revolt began. In all, roughly 685,000 slaves were shipped in chains to this charnel house during the eighteenth century, with a significant concentration of them coming from the general region of the Kongo. Although white planters seem not to have fully appreciated it, the inclination and willingness to put up with their exploitation of a population of slaves dominated by people brought to the island directly from Africa may have been low compared to Creoles raised in bondage. The African newcomers had a fresh, lived experience of freedom and many of them, like the Kongolese, would have already tasted the arts of resistance and of war.

political discourse. The technologically driven account of the country’s rise to industrialization and greatness is remarkably centered on the invention of a single, transformative device, the cotton gin, and on its inventor, Eli Whitney. It

Many historians have also objected to the way that the standard narrative of the Whitney gin’s invention long promoted a view of the South as a world of indolent slaves and backward whites. The region’s denizens were presented as having been powerless to fundamentally change the economics of the region—that is, until fortune brought them Whitney, a Yale-educated northerner who quickly solved the riddle bedeviling the production of a crop that he had no prior exposure

is beyond dispute that cotton production took off in the 1790s in the American South, and that the Whitney gin played a not inconsiderable role. By one estimate, prime land used to grow cotton quickly tripled in value after its adoption.

More than the new gin, to which most of the credit is attributed, the increase in cotton production was due to a series of developments involving slaves. First came surging imports in human beings from Africa.

Almost entirely overlooked in traditional accounts of the rise of American cotton, was the concomitant massive increase in slave productivity on the plantation, which the historian Edward Baptist has estimated at 400 percent in the period from 1800 to 1860. This, he argues, was procured through a systematic increase in violent methods of supervision and punishment, combined with ever more far-reaching record keeping:

This bottleneck was not relieved via any of the more comfortable and familiar story lines of American history—things like homespun ingenuity, sacrifice, and perseverance—or even solely through the new forms of inhumanity inflicted upon slaves, such as those documented by Baptist. It was lifted, instead, as the ironic result of the unquenchable desire of Blacks on Saint Domingue to live in freedom.

That is because the looming loss of Saint Domingue forced Napoleon to largely abandon his visions of empire on the American mainland.

PRIOR TO THE TERRITORY’S SALE to the United States, French colonization of Louisiana had been tenuous bordering on theoretical. It was an imperial project that made sense for France only as a kind of colonial back office or supply platform to provision the country’s cornerstone overseas possession, its extraordinarily lucrative colony of Saint Domingue.

Napoleon later adopted this concept as his own, believing that once the slave revolt in Saint Domingue was put down and the plantation system there restored, wealth from the island would, in the words of historian Robert Paquette, “drive France’s other American possessions and probably France itself into an interdependent and, above all, self-contained prosperity.”

And this abandonment by Napoleon of his dreams of Atlantic empire centered on Saint Domingue was the key to two of the greatest events of the nineteenth century. For Britain, France’s defeat in the Caribbean removed that country as a competitive threat in the plantation-centered world of the Atlantic, psychologically freeing the British to slowly work their way toward abolition. This was achieved not with the end of British slave trading, in 1808, but only thirty-five years later. Resolute in their desire for freedom, the Haitians were equally instrumental in placing America on the path to great powerhood in the nineteenth century. More than any other single event that has happened in the country’s entire history, in fact, Saint Domingue’s self-liberating slaves formed and shaped the continent-size America we know on the map today.

ACQUISITION OF PROPERTY on a scale so vast as the Louisiana Purchase allowed Jefferson and others in the Virginia elite to pursue a long held aim: the partial divestment of their state of slaves, whose concentrated presence in their midst had all along been considered a potentially mortal danger. With the example of the Haitian Revolution fresh in people’s minds, this took on fresh urgency.

Theirs was a society built on and sustained by violence, actual and threatened.” This is the reality that caused Alexis de Tocqueville to write that the specter of race “constantly haunts the imagination of [all] Americans like a nightmare.”

But gratitude to a slave revolution for America’s enormous geopolitical good fortune was well beyond Jefferson, for whom Toussaint Louverture was a mere “cannibal.” “Never

“By the 1760s, Virginia’s leaders worried that they had more than enough slaves for the economy and too many for their own security from revolt.” The banning of the transatlantic trade in the United States in 1808 then sparked a rush to capitalize on the booming demand for slaves and the high prices they fetched in the newly acquired territories, creating the thriving internal trade mentioned above.

This was indeed all one enormous and coordinated enterprise. Many of the routes and trails that Indians employed in their forced exile out of the eastern United States were the precise pathways that chained Black slaves would tread.

Under the vigilance of whites riding in wagons, the captives were marched—with their wrists handcuffed, and all linked together by an enormous length of chain—across the Southeast to booming slave markets in places like Natchez, and especially New Orleans.

In the latter city, perhaps a half million Blacks were sold at public auctions, which rivaled the French Opera House and the Théâtre d’Orléans as a source of white entertainment. Despite this, according to one historian of this thriving internal commerce in enslaved Black people, New Orleans had only one public historic marker as of 2015 commemorating this trade.

Not only would the evacuation of Blacks from the Old South lessen the dangers they were perceived as posing to whites in the heartland of Jefferson’s beloved Virginia, as well as make good money both for Virginian slave owners and, via taxation, for the state, but the slaves sold to the southwest would work for those yeoman whites, furnishing Jefferson’s grand imperial vision with a practical foundation: forced Black labor. And from Jefferson’s perspective, this was just in the normal order of things.

Dominion and other slave-dense areas of the Old South also forestalled the emergence of a feared potential alliance between Blacks and the worst off of the whites, many of whom had recently been indentured servants. As Gordon-Reed observes, “Instead, poor whites, encouraged by the policies of the elites, took refuge in their whiteness and the dream that one day they, too, could become slave owners” in the western parts of the country that were just opening up.

Historians have recently argued that Jefferson could have conceivably used monies raised from the sale of western lands to purchase the freedom of Blacks from the slavery that he sometimes professed to loathe.

Embedded in an idea like this is a criticism of the teleology that saturates so much of our thinking about this era—i.e., that what happened in the past was simply inevitable, what the French historian François Furet called the second illusion of truth. In his book The Forgotten Fifth, the historian Gary Nash notes that pro-slavery sentiment had not yet taken firm hold of the young country, making bold scenarios like these far less outlandish seeming than they might appear from the perspective of today.

Thomas M. Bayly, a colonel in the Virginia militia, and later a congressman, said, “In addition to the danger to be apprehended from foreign enemies, we have in the bosom of our Country an enemy more dangerous than any we can expect from the other side of the Atlantick.”

fact, in their desperation, it was Virginians themselves who had armed five hundred slaves to fight the English during the Revolution, but thereafter this was denied and largely

British and American, echoed prior events in the American War of Independence, although few Americans learn about these facts in school nowadays, either.