Haiti, The Devil and Pat Robertson

Pat Robertson has shown a knack for publicly stating the injudicious. His latest comments on Haiti’s possible bond with the devil were rendered suspect if only because Mr. Robertson did no fact checking and alluded to the wrong Napoleon.
There is no question that Haiti defeated a Napoleon (or at least one of his armies), but it was the FIRST Emperor Napoleon (1804-1815), not the Third (1852-1870). Haiti has certainly had a checkered history, both before and after Napoleon.
It began as a pirate haven, and as late as the 1780s, pirate Jean Lafitte, who loaned his cannon to Andrew Jackson to ensure the American victory at New Orleans, was born there. But its early wealth came as perhaps the richest of the Caribbean sugar colonies. (Sugar was the petroleum of the 17th and 18th centuries, creating huge fortunes, using slave labor—and the French colony of St. Dominique [Haiti] was probably the richest source of sugar in the world.)
Slaves in the Caribbean died like flies. The first slaves had been imported to the Island of Hispaniola in 1517—and in the 1780s they had to keep importing them, so many died so fast. Sugar in the tropics was a brutally labor intensive crop.
Mulattoes—resulting from liaisons between French men and slave women—were given a much higher status, and were often freed, creating a Creole class of “gentlemen of color”, who could own land and serve as officers in the French Army.
This racial distinction created a form of black vs Mulatto racism that bedevils Haiti to this day. At the top were the white Frenchmen who poured into Haiti from France—there were half as many French in tiny St. Dominique when the French gave up Canada (1763) as there were in all of North America.
In 1789, the French world turned upside down. The Bastille, symbol of oppression everywhere, was stormed and destroyed. A month later, in August, 1789, the revolutionary French government issued its “Declaration of the Rights of Man”—proclaiming that all men, everywhere were free and equal.
Two years later, the black slaves of Haiti claimed that promise for themselves. Over three hundred thousand slaves rose up against 40,000 whites, and 28,000 “gens de couleur” were caught in the middle. (A fair number of those refugeed out to places like New Orleans.)
Thirteen years of very bloody warfare followed. France sent thousands of troops (when they could slip them past the British blockade during the War of the French Revolution). Haitian leaders proved themselves a match for the finest France could send.
Toussaint L’Ouverture proved he could lick his weight in French armies—as did generals like Dessalines and Henri Christophe. Napoleon returned from Egypt and Syria 1799 and he sent more troops under his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc.
Leclerc asked for a parlay with L’Ouverture. He kidnapped him and sent him to France where the Haitian “George Washington” died in 1803. But the Haitians fought on. They proved they could defeat Napoleon’s battle hardened veterans in a stand up, face to face fight.
Napoleon gave up. He put his dreams for a new French Empire in the Caribbean and North America on hold, sold Louisiana to the Americans and granted Haiti its independence.
Fifty thousand French troops had to died—to disease and wounds. Twenty-four thousand French planters had died and over 100,000 black slaves. In some ways it makes the American Revolution look like a Sunday School picnic.
Haiti was free—the first nation in Latin America to gain its independence. Hers was also the first successful slave revolt in human history. Whither now the richest sugar island in the Caribbean—source of nearly half the world’s sugar?
More on that tragic story tomorrow.