1. The following—one of the more concise and understandable descriptions of the geographic names used to describe the lands that comprised the island now made up of Haiti and the Dominican Republic—appears in Rayford W. Logan, Haiti and The Dominican Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 3: “Precise terminology will clarify much confusion about the island on which Haiti and the Dominican Republic are situated. The aboriginal Indians called it Quisqueya or Hayti, The Land of the Mountains. Columbus named it Española, later Anglicized to Hispaniola. Nomenclature became particularly confusing after Spain ceded the western part of the island to France in 1697. In this book, except in quotations, ‘Hispaniola’ means the whole island until 1697, ‘Santo Domingo’ means the Spanish colony before and after partition, and the Dominican Republic, the independent nation. Saint Domingue is the French colony from 1697 to 1804, and Haiti the independent nation.” In an effort to bring clarity to this essay, which considers both pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue and its post-Revolutionary incarnation as Haiti, the latter designation, which is more familiar to contemporary readers, will be used exclusively.
2. George F. Tyson, Jr., Toussaint L’Ouverture (Englewood CliVs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1973), pp. 2–3.
3. Thanks to Electa Kane Tritsch for her considerable research into Boston-area abolitionist history, associated publications and advertisements, and records of ceramic production in Medford. For mention of Medford brick manufactories, see John Hayward, A Gazeteer of Massachusetts (Boston: John Hayward, 1846); James M. Usher, History of the Town of Medford From 1630–1885 (Boston: Rand, Avery, & Co., 1886).
4. The quoted passage is in The Massachusetts Abolitionist 2, no. 43 (December 10, 1840). There is also mention in the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society Reports of Anti-Slavery Fairs with “bazaars” being staged during the 1840s at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, as well as Salem, Fitchburg, Upton, Uxbridge, Milford, Hingham, Nantucket, Worcester, West Winfield, New Bedford, Weymouth, and elsewhere. The largest seems to have been an annual Christmas fair, held at Amory Hall and then at Faneuil Hall. In the 1843 report it is mentioned that the Christmas fair “was furnished from many towns in the State.” On August 1, 1843, a celebration with a parade, banquet, and “an elegant collocation furnished by general contribution” was held in Dedham in honor of the anniversary of the emancipation of the West Indian slaves. The Dedham celebration is mentioned in Twelfth Annual Report Presented to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, January 24, 1844, pp. 44–45.
5. Middlesex Deeds, 384:118 and 408:515. Stephen’s use of the term “sable,” which originally appeared in The Opportunity (London, 1804), is quoted in David Geggus, “Haiti and the Abolitionists: Opinion, Propaganda and International Politics in Britain and France, 1804–1838,” in David Richardson, editor, Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790–1916 (London: Frank Cross, 1985), p. 115.
6. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 1–22.
7. George F. Tyson, Jr., Toussaint L’Ouverture, pp. 1–2.
8. The physical descriptions of Toussaint noted in this paper, and many additional period references, appear in Tyson, pp. 89–154.
9. Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, From the American Revolution to World War I, part 1, Slaves and Liberators (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 109.
10. David Geggus, “The Haitian Revolution,” in Hilary Beckley and Verene Shephard, Caribbean Slave Society and Economy: A Student Reader (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1991), p. 413.
11. The earliest known image of Toussaint was a hostile caricature, published in Francois Bonneville’s Portraits des Personnages Célèbres de la Revolution (Paris, 1802); Bonneville also published a pamphlet attacking Toussaint and his “horrible crimes” in the same year. Tyson’s book records most of the known period descriptions of Toussaint. Tyson, Toussaint L’Ouverture, pp. 132, 79. See also Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, pp. 105–9.
12. Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), p. 95. Thanks to Susan V. Donaldson for this reference and for providing a copy of a lecture, entitled “Southern Narrative and Haitian Shadows.”
13. William Wells Brown, St. Domingo: Revolutions and Its Patriots (Boston: Bela March, 1855), p. 32, quoted in Donaldson, “Southern Narrative.”
14. James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), pp. 104–5.
15. David Walker, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829; reprint, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000 ), p. 23.
16. Tyson, Toussaint L’Ouverture, p. 132.
17. Geggus in Richardson, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath, p. 114.
18. Eleventh Annual Report Presented to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society by Its Board of Managers (Jan. 25, 1843), p. 27. Five years previously, two men had been sent by the American Anti-Slavery Society on a similar trip to the free English-speaking islands of the West Indies, and they concluded that “the emancipated people are perceptibly rising on the scale of civilization, morals, and religion. Reason cannot fail to make its inferences in favor of two and a half millions of slaves in our republic.” Horace Kimball and James A. Thome, Emancipation in the West Indies: A Six Month Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, in the Year 1837 (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838).
19. On colonization, see P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement 1816–1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 82–87; Ludwell Lee Montague, Haiti and the United States 1714–1938 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1940); William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization (Boston: Garrison and Knapp, 1832); G. B. Stebbins, Facts and Opinions Touching the Real Origin, Character, and Influence of the American Colonization Society (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1853); Early Lee Fox, The American Colonization Society 1817–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1919).
20. Saunders is quoted in Alice M. Dunbar, Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence (New York: Bockery, 1914), p. 14.
21. Earl Leslie Griggs and Clifford H. Prator, Henry Christophe – Thomas Clarkson: A Correspondence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), p. 68.
22. James Redpath, editor, A Guide to Hayti (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860); Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, pp. 244, 247.
23. Maria Weston Chapman, Memorials of Harriet Martineau (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1877), pp. 334–52; Harriet Martineau, The Hour and the Man: A Historical Romance (London: Edward Moxon, 1843). For more on Martineau see Adam Lively, Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), pp. 84–85.
24. Wendell Phillips, “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” in Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1863), pp. 468–94; Maria Weston Chapman, Memorials, p. 352. For a competing but less frequently stated abolitionist use of the Haitian revolution, which presented the event as a cautionary tale about the inevitable violence created by slavery, see An Essay on the Late Institution of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color, of the United States (Washington, 1820), pp. 33–59.
25. Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, editors, Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings, and Murals (1935–1999), A Catalogue Raisonné (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), pp. 27ff. The cycle of paintings has also been used as the basis of a children’s book, Walter Dean Myers’ Toussaint L’Ouverture :The Fight for Haiti’s Freedom (New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1996).
26. James Theodore Holly, A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government, and Civilized Progress, as Demonstrated by the Events of the Haytian Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Afric-American Printing Co., 1857), p. 48. |