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This conforms to a broad pattern of New World revolts led by slaves who enjoyed positions of relative confidence. Time after time they were coachmen, valets, and drivers.
A 1797 note to Congress spoke eloquently about how little the Louisiana Territory would have been worth under different circumstances. “Your Memorialists beg leave to represent that the great part of the labour in the Country is performed by slaves, as in the Southern States, and without which, in their present situation the farms in this District would be of little more value to the occupiers than an equal quantity of waste land.”
One major appeal of his Louisiana project that is little emphasized in the traditional teaching of American history was to lessen that risk by using the Mississippi River Valley and the cotton plantations that began lining its banks as an escape valve for Virginia. His view was that a second great migration of slaves westward out of the Founder’s state and out of places like the Carolinas, Maryland, and Georgia would lift the ratio of whites to Blacks there, and reduce the risk of Black revolutionary violence.
As John Adams, the Founding Father and second American president, wrote bemusedly in his diary, “The negroes have a wonderful art of communicating intelligence among themselves. It will run several hundreds of miles in a week or fortnight.”
By the end of the 1780s, Saint Domingue produced more wealth than the rest of France’s colonies combined. It alone generated a third of France’s trade.
Perhaps the most consistent rule of this revolutionary age was that precautions taken to prevent the spread of information about human rights and freedom among Blacks were in vain.
their creolizing movement’s ideology and tactical plans both evolved in “a lively and fertile milieu in which ideas and practices were exchanged between Europe and the Caribbean, as well as between Africa and the Caribbean.”
Far from condemning them to “social death” in the famous phrase of Orlando Patterson, the Middle Passage into enslavement positioned trafficked Africans to use their mastery of religious customs to forge powerful new identities and alliances, as well as to quickly integrate the esoteric vocabulary and rituals of Catholicism in the New World.
Although revolution in Saint Domingue was very much an unintended consequence, the announcement of the volcano’s inevitable eruption came with the launch of the French Revolution. The very first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, adopted by the National Assembly a few weeks after the fall of the Bastille, was earthshaking: it announced, “Men are born and remain equal in rights.”
In fact, Toussaint—who was born in slavery, and freed only in his midforties, by which time he had become not only literate but a student of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Rousseau—was said to have been especially captivated by the words of Raynal, which he had read over and over, adopting as his own personal call to arms.
“There can be no cultivation in Saint Domingue without slavery; we did not go to find and purchase five hundred thousand savage slaves on the African coast in order to introduce them into the colony as French citizens. Their existence as free people is physically incompatible with the existence of our European brethren.”
The revolution that he took over leadership of gave the newly freed a sense of “the possibility of achievement, confidence and pride.”
Toussaint may not have known of the existence of viruses and parasites, but he had observed that the foreign troops were at their weakest and most susceptible during the wet seasons, and therefore planned many of his biggest operations for then.
More British soldiers fought and died in the failed attempt to take over Saint Domingue than at the hands of America’s revolutionary army two decades earlier.
It may seem like a cliché, but one of them was the pervasive feeling of anachronism, of throwback timelessness to the texture of things: here, life seemed to ooze more than flow.
Jazz’s exact origins are somewhat more obscure, though. Beyond some roots in the blues and in the African American experience of slavery, its effective birth is usually traced to Black urbanism in the South. Of special importance to jazz was the emergence of a diverse Creole society and culture in New Orleans, which drew on Haitian and African influences as well as Spanish, French, and early American ones. All stewed up together, these elements produced something utterly new and sublime.
With the era of Big Cotton dawning in the Mississippi River Valley, as it was opened up to white men pouring in from the East, three elements were considered essential to their social legitimacy and personal wealth: a Caucasian woman for a wife, a parcel of land, and slaves.
In the 1830s, Mississippi alone imported 130,000 slaves, who were forcibly moved from older slaveholding states. Eventually, in the fifty years before the Civil War, roughly a million slaves would be marched or shipped out of the Upper South by sea, roughly twice the number of Blacks who had been landed in British North America from Africa.
In 1790, American cotton production hovered somewhere around 1.5 million pounds. By 1800, it had risen to 36.5 million pounds. In 1820, annual production stood at 167.5 million pounds. And by the eve of the American Civil War, the output of cotton, expanding geographically but still concentrated in the Mississippi River Valley, was nearing an astounding 2 billion pounds annually.
For example, in 1924, in his The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America, Du Bois wrote, “It was black labor that established the modern world commerce which began first as a commerce in the bodies of the slaves themselves and was the primary cause of the prosperity of the first great commercial cities of our day.”
In the space of a short few decades, though, meaning by the middle of the nineteenth century, it had ridden plantation slavery—based on one crop above all, cotton—to become a rapidly industrializing nation and an incipient world power. Indeed, as one historian has written, “The cotton trade was the economy’s only ‘major expansive force.’”
It 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. What else, then, is missing from this story? Processing technology was not the only bottleneck restricting cotton production in this era, nor was it even the most important one.
“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.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. . . . [I]f I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would also do it. . . . .What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it would help to save the Union.
