Currently Reading:
“A majority of planters and officials believed that maintaining racial distinctions toward free-colorees was vital to preserving slavery in Saint-Domingue”

“A 1767 ministerial directive declared that, for those whose ancestors had come from Africa, the ‘first stain’ of slavery extended to ‘all their descendants’ and could not be ‘erased by the gift of freedom’”

“administrators of Saint-Domingue argued that in order to maintain a feeling of inferiority ‘in the hearts of slaves’ it was necessary to maintain racial distinctions ‘even after liberty is granted’ so that they would understand ‘their color is condemned to servitude’”

Always question the terms of “emancipation”

Because slavery is indeed interminable

You know the part about the Haitian Revolution that’s really sitting with me is the divide between the slaves and the free people of color (many of which were planters + slave owners)

The first wave of the revolt was settled in part because the free people of color negotiated “citizenship” rights (esp. voting rights) for themselves & afterward returned the same slaves who fought alongside them back to their plantations

“The National Assembly declared: ‘the men of color & free Blacks must enjoy, along with the white colonists equality of political right.’ They would be allowed to vote & be eligible for all positions if they met the financial criteria for active citizenship”

“The decree was presented as a way of responding to the uprising of the slaves: it noted that the unity of citizens was the only thing that could preserve their property from pillage and fire..”

“From that day forward, there would only be two categories of distinction in the colonies, free and enslaved; and there would be no racial distinctions among the free.”

The “free man’s” revolt was a struggle for equality and citizenship; “for the rights of Man”

The slave’s revolt one that sought to abolish slavery through the abolition of the colony..

they understood that as property/commodity citizenship/rights of man would never be extended to them by the state that profited from their labor

There’s a reason why Article 1 of Haiti’s constitution prohibited slavery AND Article 10 Defines “property” to include one’s own labor

The Haitian Revolution’s key distinction from those other western revolutions (namely America & France) during the Age of Revolutions was the ways liberation & citizenship was understood from the vantage of the former slave

The constitution established citizenship via the revolutionary rights of property, not the “rights of man”

Articles 38/39 denied white men the attainment of citizenship & prohibited their right to own property

Haiti literally re-wrote the grammars of “liberty” and “liberation” and invalidated what the Europeans understood as attaining/accumulating capital to be