Dan Snow's History Hit - The Haitian Revolution

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

In 1791 the slaves of the French colony of Sant-Domingue rose up against their colonial masters and after a long and bloody struggle, defeated them to found the state of Haiti. Led by charismatic leaders such as Toussaint Louverture it was the only example of a successful slave revolution and the state that was founded was one free of slavery. It was a conflict that sucked in several competing empires and was defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World. Marlene Daut, Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of Virginia, joins Dan for this fascinating episode of the podcast. They explore the slave economy and the terrible conditions that led to the uprising, how the French Revolution acted as an inspiration for the revolutionaries, how the slaves were able to emerge victorious, and the consequences of this monumental moment in history.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We have on the podcast today one of the most epic stories of recent history. It is the story of the Haitian Revolution. A revolution that would see the first successful overthrow by an indigenous or enslaved population of a European empire in the modern age. It was one of Napoleon Bonaparte's greatest and most important defeats. It's an episode of history with monumental consequences right around the world, particularly in Haiti itself, of course, but also in France and in the United States of America. French dreams of empire in the Western Hemisphere destroyed in Haiti would lead Napoleon to sell the gigantic Louisiana Purchase to Thomas Jefferson and the American government just a couple of years later. This is a big, big story. And I've got a fantastic historian to tell

me all about it. She is Marlena Dout. She is a professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of Virginia, and she's written on Haiti in particular. As you'll hear, she is an outstanding communicator and definitely does justice to this monumental story. You'll hear how the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue, which is the place we now call Haiti, rose up in the middle of 1791, influenced not just by the French Revolution raging in France, but also heavily influenced by the terrible situation

they found themselves in, the awful reality of enslavement and working on these plantations. They rose up and for 10 years there was the most extraordinary conflict as these rebels fought against the French, other European powers, and different French regimes were sucked in in all sorts of different sides. A kaleidoscope, a kaleidoscope which only adds to the war's fascination and terror. If you want to listen to other podcasts about the Haitian Revolution, you can do so at History Hit TV. It's like Netflix. We've got this TV channel, but also for audio.

We've got a history site, folks. You go over there, you pay a small subscription, you watch hundreds of hours of documentaries, both licensed and new material. You can also listen to all these back episodes of the podcast. You can listen to, for example, the Oxford historian Sudhir Hazari Singh talking about Toussaint Louverture, one of the great leaders of this Haitian rebellion. But we've got other Haitian stories on there as well. Of course we do.

It's one of the great stories from our past. And you can listen to all those without the ads at History Hit TV. If you sign up today, you get 30 days free. Go and check it out. But in the meantime, everyone, here is the excellent Marlena Daut talking about Haiti. Marlena, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. You almost run out of superlatives to describe the importance of what happens in Haiti, Saint-Domingue.

Just as a starter for 10, tell me, how unusual is what happened there in this period? Well, during the Haitian Revolution, what happened, a massive revolution, wasn't necessarily that unusual because it's happening during the age of revolutions, where we've already seen the American of revolutions where we've already seen the American Revolution for independence. We've seen the French Revolution. But what makes the case of Saint-Domingue Haiti unique, of course, is that this is led by formerly enslaved people and then later also free people of color. So what makes it unusual is the makeup of the people who are involved in it. And I would say another thing is how long coming it was, how the catalyst for it had existed for a really long time, at least since the 17th

century, but we could take it back to the 16th century with the indigenous population, who mount the first resistance against European colonialists who come to the island, first with Columbus, and then of course, later and subsequent generations of Spanish and French colonizers. And there's just always opposition from the beginning. So the Haitian Revolution is kind of the culmination of a lot of different circumstances that made the island of Saint-Domingue, Haiti, really kind of ripe for an independence movement. And you mentioned indigenous people there. It's important that we remember them. In fact, we happen to be talking on the day on which Christopher Columbus spotted the so-called New World for the first time. Haiti is the western part of an island that we call Hispaniola,

which was one of the first islands Columbus came across. Who was living there in the late 15th century? So when Columbus arrives on the island in 1492, the people who are living there don't necessarily consider themselves to be unified. We use the word in North America, tribes. There are collections and groups of people, and there's about five main principalities on the island. One of the largest and most prominent is called Zaragua. So we could say if we were thinking the way we name things in the quote unquote Western world, we'd call them Zaraguans. But subsequent anthropologists and archaeologists,

when they began to study these societies, they gave them names like Tainos and Arawaks and Caribs. And so that's what's really stuck. But those terms refer to language groups that existed across South America, some as well in North America and the Caribbean, among groups of people who wouldn't have necessarily even known of one another's existence. So it's a little bit anachronistic to call them all one term. So if we talk about the island of Ait, that the French renamed La Española in the 16th century, we can say that we call them indigenous precisely to respect the fact

that what we're necessarily naming them is not necessarily what they named themselves. But as I mentioned, one of the largest and most principal groups was the Zaraguans led by a woman named Ana Caona, and she's eventually going to mount resistance against some of the men who Columbus and the Spanish leave there on the island to form it into a colony. And these indigenous people are almost entirely wiped

out. There's very few of them left by the time you get to the end, as they say, of the 18th century. That's right. It's through a combination of disease. There is going to be later in the 16th century, a smallpox outbreak that's really going to cause a lot of destruction. But before that, there's warfare between the indigenous on the island and the Spanish who are seeking to colonize it. And so one of the things they do is they'll deport, in quotation marks, they will deport people who are causing them trouble and they deport them to other islands in the Caribbean. So they really kind of isolate them from the communities of resistance. And then those who stay, they make war against them, which is what happens to Anacaona, the queen I mentioned, who ends up being hanged at the gallows, accused of treason. Again, these are the words the Spanish use, but saying

that she betrayed the Spanish governor. And so this was her punishment along with that of her followers. saying that she betrayed the Spanish governor. And so this was her punishment along with that of her followers. And the island is then seen as perfect territory for introducing a plantation economy with the workforce, not these indigenous people, but enslaved African people. Yes. So if you're deporting or making war against or causing to die the indigenous population, then you want to replace it if your goal is to set up a plantation economy. And so that's what the Spanish do. The Portuguese had

instituted an African slave trade already. And so by the earliest years of the 1500s, the Spanish are beginning to import, forcibly transport captive Africans from the continent to the colony to force them to work. Some of these captive Africans will band together with some of the indigenous. So there's a cacique, as they were called by the Spanish, named Enrique, who mounts a resistance and creates what is known as the First Maroon Treaty. And he did that with other enslaved Africans. He was also himself resisting slavery. So there were indigenous people who were enslaved, but not in the numbers that we're going to see. Because by the time of the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, which is what seeds the western third of the island to France,

the French, between that time, 1697, and the outbreak of the formal revolution in 1791, will have transported nearly 900,000 captive Africans into the island, which just really overtakes anything else they did in Martinique, Guadeloupe, their other colonies. This is an astronomical amount when we consider that it's just the western third of the island as well. Why did that island get a reputation as a great sort of, I think, was it the Pearl of the Caribbean? Yes. Is it particularly fertile? Is the weather perfect? Is it harbors? What is it about, the island? Yes. So the Pearl of the Antilles, it really is actually, if you look at it in a map of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, it's kind of strategically positioned. It's not that far from the mainland of North America. It's also not that far from the other big islands, Jamaica

and Cuba, for example, which are going to become the kind of jewels of British and Spanish empire, respectively, eventually. And in terms of its climate, well, its climate doesn't necessarily differ from that of the other Caribbean islands. It was susceptible to earthquakes and hurricanes. So we did have those problems also that remain today on the island because of the two major fault lines. But at the same time, even with the difficult geography and the strategic placement, it becomes the pearl of the Antilles because of the amount of sugarcane that is being cultivated there and then exported back to Europe and sold, you know, in the famous words of Candide, right, to sweeten the tea of Europeans, essentially.

I was reading a book on British naval power the other day, and it said that the French trade with Saint-Domingue, which became Haiti, it was equivalent to the entire British trade with its colonies in North America. I mean, this was an unbelievably valuable imperial possession. It really was. I mean, it's for this reason that when the formal revolution breaks out, both the British and the Spanish, who are occupying the eastern two-thirds of the island today, known as the Dominican Republic, invade, essentially. So the Spanish send their troops in, the British send squadrons in. They're both interested in capturing this island to enrich their empires, which are

already fairly robust. But because they know that they can make a lot of money, they essentially try to take it over. Let's get into it. What about the revolution? Now, is it right to say 1791? Yes. Because obviously the French Revolution in Paris, you get 1789. So push-pull.

Is this about Paris? Is it about what's going on in the French world? Or is it about the conditions on the island, the nature of enslavement, which is always about violence and revolution and resistance? Yeah, I mean, I think that to too strongly tie the Haitian revolution to the French revolution is kind of the first mistake that people make when they try to understand this event, because the catalyst, as I mentioned, kind of occurs much earlier. It's the violence that the French are using in order to maintain this system where they're vastly outnumbered. So if you think about at the time of the revolution, when it breaks out in

August 1791, after the famous ceremony of Bois Caiman, which takes place on August 14th. At this moment, there are only 465,000 captive Africans, so enslaved people remaining. But remember, I mentioned that the French had imported nearly 900,000. That number doesn't take into account the enslaved Africans who are born on the island. So their death rate is incredibly high. Even with that incredibly high death rate, the colonists are outnumbered 30,000 white colonists, which is actually a lot because you didn't have the same rates of absentee planters that you necessarily had on some of the British Islands or even on some of the plantations on the mainland in what becomes the United States. And there's a really high population of free people of color as well.

Estimates are between 20,000 at the lower end and 40,000 at the higher end. So they've created this tripartite society, the French have, but in which they're going to be vastly outnumbered by all people of color and especially by the people that they're enslaving. So what do they do? They institute draconian punishments. We've got the 1685 Code Noir to regulate the slave system. When the planters are kind of getting out of control, the French try to regulate it and issue edicts in the 1770s and 1780s to try to actually regulate the planters so they won't be so harsh. But actually, by defining enslaved people in those subsequent edicts as meubles or furniture or things, they make it worse because the planters are like,

we can just buy and sell at will and we don't have to worry about things like converting them anymore, as earlier iterations of the Code Noir had said. And so this, in one scholar's words, this sort of attempt to protect, in quotation marks, becomes a guarantee of tyranny. And that's what we see as the catalyst for earlier revolts and rebellions such as Makandal in the 1750s, but then especially in the 1790s when the enslaved population en masse just says no more and burns the plantations essentially. of enslaved people right across the Atlantic world. So actually, this is not super unusual, right? We're now understanding this was the Dutch colonies and British colonies elsewhere. But what makes it so universal in 1791, this huge rising? I think the enslaved people were just incredibly organized when you actually get into the nitty gritty of the mechanics of what they did. So

instead of just making warfare, right, or engaging in marronage, and then trying to construct treaties with the colonists, which is what we see on a lot of other islands, especially in Jamaica, for example, what they did was they started burning everything. And so they essentially bring the plantation economy to a standstill. So you've now taken away the subsistence of many of the colonists. You've taken away their homes. You've taken away their livelihood and ability to actually use slavery, perpetuate slavery, and you've made them fearful. So a lot of the planters and colonists and slavers, if you will, start to leave.

They flee the island en masse. They go to the United States. They're going to go to places like Jamaica and Cuba and also to the eastern side of the island, which isn't in this same sort of consternation. And now, of course, France is not too happy that this is happening. So they send troops to restore order, which always means to restore slavery. So even though we say that slavery is not abolished until August of 1793 on the French-claimed part of the island, really, it's abolished for so many other people on the island much earlier because they freed themselves. They didn't need to wait for a decree.

And all of the actions that they are doing, burning the city of Cap-Francais in June 1793, for example, that's their own declaration of abolition. That's their own emancipation decree, which is we're just no longer going to be enslaved by you. You listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about the Haitian Revolution. More coming up. More coming up. that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Talk to me about leadership, because that is something that this has become famous for,

but it's also very contested. Yeah. So the early days of the revolution, the ceremony of Guacaymon that I mentioned from August of 1791 was led by a man who's believed to have been born in Jamaica, Duddy Buchman, sometimes called Buchman Duddy. And he's the one who gives this famous speech.

And he says, you know, the God of the white man calls him to commit crimes, but our God asks only good works of us. So let's all fight together for liberty and let's make it happen. And so he, along with another enslaved man named Jean-Francois, Biasu is another one, Jeannot, they band together and they create this plan. And by about 10 days later, August 23rd to August 24th is when the formal revolution breaks out.

The burning of so many plantations in the Northern Plain that this is a very often depicted image of just plantations on fire. All the French newspapers by September of that year are reporting the numbers of deaths and the numbers of plantations that are on fire. By October, November, this is spreading just throughout the colony. And other leaders start to kind of come to the fore. Toussaint Louverture, who's the most famous of the Haitian revolutionary generals, he knows Dari Boukman, he knows Jean-François Mbiassou,

but he kind of waits in the wings at first. But by 1793, we see him really rising to the leadership position, positions of negotiation. He has since this time defected to the Spanish. He's trying to see which side is going to cave first and give freedom to the slaves formally, to formally decree the abolition of slavery. And so when the French do that in February of 1794 at the French National Convention, which has replaced the monarchy, when they finally do decree the end of slavery, a few months later, Toussaint Louverture will reunite to the French and become actually a French general, a general in the French army. want to dwell on it, but I'm really interested in the nature in which enslavement didn't represent a kind of a wiping of the slate. And there are examples of enslaved Africans who came from military backgrounds, elite backgrounds, educated backgrounds, however you want to say it,

in West Africa. So it's not super surprising they proved very able on the battlefield, engineers, soldiers, diplomats. Yeah, I think this is also a really important point about the makeup of the enslaved population at the time of the revolution. So because the French are constantly forced to, or desire to rather, bring more and more enslaved Africans because of the ones who are dying through neglect, but there's also these kind of large scale famines and outbreaks of diseases as well. And so of course, they're not giving the enslaved people proper medical care. So you see a lot of deaths for various kinds of reason. And so a lot of the enslaved people at the moment of

the revolution, 60% in some estimates had only been in the colony for up to three years, many much less than that. So they're still speaking another language. They are still have other spiritual systems and world beliefs. So they are really the sort of embodiment of the idea that you might be able to enslave a person's body, but you can't really enslave their mind or their soul. And so what are they thinking about? What is happening in their minds as they're seeing the fact that they vastly outnumber the white colonists, the people who are doing this to them, and that they actually do have the power to free themselves. And that's exactly what they do. There's a period in the 1790s when the French have

liberated the slaves. What happens though when Napoleon Bonaparte gets into power and attempts to recolonize Saint-Domingue? This is one of those moments in history that you sort of look at and you think, why would a person do this? Except when you understand the nature and inner workings of white supremacy, right? And so there's an economic factor, but that economic factor has to be put into context because Toussaint Diverture, when he rises to the rank of governor general, he's perfectly willing to keep the plantation economy going by the euphemism of what they called free hands. So they would constantly, the commissioners sent by France

and Toussaint Louverture say, we're going to make this colony profitable with free hands. And Louverture was sending proof back to the Directory government before Napoleon Bonaparte got there and after Napoleon Bonaparte helps overthrow the Directory in 1799, saying, here's our revenues and this year we'll double it. And we're almost back up to what we were producing under the Ancien Régime. And Ancien Régime becomes another euphemism for the period of slavery. So this is Toussaint Louverture's proof that he can make the colony as profitable, the pearl, quote unquote, that it was supposedly in the old regime. But Napoleon Bonaparte sees him definitely as a rival because Louverture has sent this constitution for Saint-Domingue in 1801 that says that slavery is forever abolished. And so because Napoleon has it in his mind that he wants to reinstate slavery not only on Saint-Domingue, but on the island of Guadeloupe and then in Martinique

that has recently come back into French possession, he believes that Toussaint-Leverture is going to be the biggest obstacle. And in fact, when Toussaint-Leverture is arrested by the French in June of 1802, General Leclerc, Napoleon Bonaparte's brother, who had headed the expedition of 30,000 French soldiers to, quote unquote, restore order, bring back slavery. He said, you know, though, there's like 3,000 Louvertures here. Like he's gone, but there's like 3,000 of them. And this was the problem, is that there was always someone else ready to step in. And that was Dessalines, Christophe,

Macaillat, Candide, Sans Souci, names of some of the other less known generals who nonetheless end up being really important to the revolution. Now, I obviously, like anybody else, I love the story, and I really don't need you to tell me this is not true. But Sanité Belair, the female general who is in a relationship with another Haitian revolutionary, and she urges him to go to his death with bravery and everything. I mean, these people are extraordinary. Yes. Sanité Belair, who was married to Charles Belair, one of the Haitian revolutionary generals. And it's absolutely true because that's the story that the Haitian revolutionaries told,

including a man named Baron de Vaté who fought in the revolution. We do actually have accounts of people saying she's this brave heroine, they call her. She fought in a man's uniform, in her husband's uniform. And there are so many figures like that in Haitian revolutionary history. Cécile Fatima is another woman who was there at one of the early ceremonies. A lot of people say it was the Bloc Caïman ceremony, but there were actually multiple of these types of planning meetings and is there helping propel the revolution forward, providing support. And actually, women did fight in the revolution in combat roles, but they also were in other support roles, including engaging in subterfuge and telling the French troops that, oh, no, no,

the rebels are in another direction, and then allowing them to be ambushed. They brought food and vivres for the soldiers, and they healed them as well. In fact, some of the enslaved women and formerly enslaved women also would heal the French and British and Spanish soldiers as well. And so we see a lot of accounts of this, that there was a lot of humanity in this revolution, especially on the side of the formerly enslaved Africans. Because humanity is not what it's famous for, right? I mean, people talk about the genocide, the French expeditionary force

ended up fighting a war, a kind of racial annihilation. Talk to me a little bit about that. The first thing I always say is that the only people who ever committed an actual genocide on the island were the Spanish. The French tried again. And if it weren't for the Haitian revolutionaries, they might have actually been successful. Because under Leclerc and then his successor, General Rochambeau, Leclerc is going to die of yellow fever in the fall of 1802.

They were engaged in drowning, mass drowning. Multiple eyewitnesses, British, Polish, and French, including the Haitian revolutionaries themselves as well, talk about these mass drownings. Bodies were floating up, and these are a lot of free people of color and a lot of the enslaved Africans who had risen to high ranks within the army. Then Leclerc issues, of course, his famous letter saying, we're going to kill everyone over the age of 12, never let anybody who's worn a Paulette remain, kill half of the people in the mountains. And they also use this terrible tactic of stuffing people of color into the holds of ship and

allowing the sulfur gases to build up and then just dumping the bodies. And this was a tactic adapted from the French Revolution under a man named Jean-Baptiste Carrier, who's very famous for what's called the Noyade de Nantes, the drownings in Nantes. And in those drownings, they just released the people into the sea. So in this one, sometimes they did that and sometimes they killed them first with the sulfur gases. And as if things could get worse, General Rochambeau, when he comes to be the captain general of the colony, he gets imported dogs from Cuba and he sends them to, quote unquote, eat the blacks is his infamous letter. And there's a very famous image of this from Marcus Rainsford's 1805 history of the Haitian Revolution showing kind of the scared black woman and her child

being attacked by dogs trained to eat them. Another image shows the French soldiers in Rainsford's words under the captions trying to exterminate the Black Army. So even in 1805, I mean, this is the language that people used, extermination. And when they used that language, they were talking about the French. It is only much later under Haitian independence that you start to see people saying the opposite, that it's Dessalines who wants to exterminate. And it's clearly reactionary because there are also British newspapers who are saying, don't believe any of the French newspapers. All of these accounts are false or hugely exaggerated. Yeah, because you do,

even in the modern historiography, you do sometimes see they're both sides in it, right? They often both sides it nowadays. And I think that the reason for that is that it's really hard to understand the vast disparity in the violence that the enslaved are using to get themselves free and the violence that the French are using. But when you look at it as a war and as both sides, then it seems more understandable because people sort of wonder, well, why would the French want to kill off the population of the people who are, quote unquote, enriching them? want to kill off the population of the people who are, quote unquote, enriching them. Well, they actually very plainly say in their letters, the colonists, as well as the French military say, you know what we can do? We can just go to Africa and forcibly transport more. So we'll just kill them all. And even in 1814, we find former French colonists repeating this plan. A man named Drouin de Bercy, for example, he says, kill everyone over the age of 14, then we'll go to Africa with armed ships, we'll bring more in, and we'll repopulate the colony. And so I think it's just easier to understand both sides'

argument if you think people might be equally at fault. But when you're talking about slavery and the violence, of course, for all those years being all on one side, those hundred years that the French are there, then more than that, when we think of we factor into the Spanish, it's only losers in wars. I think during the age of revolutions, especially when we're talking about slavery, that that kind of modern understanding of the destruction of war doesn't really hold. Speaking of winners and losers, the revolutionary forces win. They defeat the French on the battlefield. They storm their fortresses and Haiti becomes independent. What's that moment mean? It must have represented an existential threat to white imperialism in the Atlantic world. Yeah, I mean, well, first, what it means for Haitians is, I mean, when I read their declarations of independence and the memoirs that they published

immediately after the revolution was over to write down for posterity, they had this very clear understanding of what they were trying to do. To me, it's like this exhalation. They're sighing, they're lamenting. So many of these memoirs by Bois-Antonin and a man named Jus-Chan-Lat, they're saying, I remember everything. And I hope one day that future generations will remember all we fought for, but that they won't have these like terrible memories. There's this line in Juchon Lot, he says, if you had seen that deboned chest, if you had seen those pulsating, tattering threads of flesh in the streets, then you would understand why we have created the state that we have created, which is an empire. So Haiti's first state, people like to say it's the first black republic, but

as Chelsea Stieber in her recent book on Haiti's paper war reminds us, Haiti's not a republic until 1806. At first we have this empire and people also often wonder why would they do that? They're trying to build this strong state. It's the Haitian revolutionary generals who actually nominate Cécile to the position of emperor, which he accepts but modifies and says that he doesn't want it to be a hereditary empire. So he actually does away with that. He says, no, I can either name a successor maybe if I know I'm going to die or it will have to be voted on by a council of state. So that's sort of what Haitian independence means to Haitians living in Haiti is they've got these terrible memories, but they're determined to build this slavery-free state, the first state in the modern world to ever

permanently eliminate slavery. But also they've got to keep the French state in the modern world to ever permanently eliminate slavery. But also they've got to keep the French at bay. They want to build up a strong military. So these are things, of course, that are striking fear into the hearts of the other empires of the world and also in the United States. They still are relying upon and want to keep going their plantation economies. And so they do things to try to, they never successfully do, but isolate and punish Haiti. So the United States infamously with the trade embargo, England in more symbolic fashion doesn't formally recognize Haitian independence.

They don't ever try to strike against it per se. But this is definitely, even though Great Britain is trading with Haiti, Haitians definitely want their formal recognition. And so we see the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce get involved. And with France, the situation is vastly different. They're building their army, the Citadel, and all of these fortresses to keep the French away because the French are saying, oh, yeah, as soon as, you know, we're done fighting this war, which are many wars, we're going to come back and try to reconquer Saint-Domingue. try to reconquer Saint-Domingue. And they use that language, Saint-Domingue, throughout a good part of the 19th century instead of Haiti to signify that, nope, this is still our colony. And they are runaway slaves in this infamous letter that Louis XVIII, when he overthrows Napoleon, has one of his ministers send is that, you know, we just consider you as runaway slaves, essentially. People will know Haiti today as a kind of failed state. But it's probably important to emphasize

that everything that could have been done by its neighbors, which were imperial powers at that point, was done in order to try and throttle this experiment, this innovation. Yeah. And I mean, I would even qualify, I would say that if Haiti is in fact a failed state, it's been a state that's been forced to fail, right? Because if you think about the trajectory of the world, people could have made different choices. And so the reason I don't like the sort of passive formulation of it is because the United States could have said, actually, you know what the Haitians have done is shown us the way forward and we should follow their example. Great Britain could have said the same thing. And in fact, when we look at what happens, especially in the context of the British colonies with the Christmas rebellion, for example, things that end up

putting enormous pressure and forcing Britain to abolish slavery, maybe before it would have done so in 1833, for example, you know, because the Baptist rebellion or Christmas rebellion, as it's called, is 1831, 1832. So when we see how much violence and destruction it takes to propel it forward, you can very clearly see that the leaders of each of these nations could have made different choices. And instead, the choices that they made were to try to strangle this new country of people who, especially in the context of the U.S., Haitian authors always said, you should admire us. We're trying to do what you did. You wanted to be free. And there were some U.S. newspaper writers who said, you know, we have to understand the Haitian reaction to the Leclerc expedition to bring back slavery.

Because what if England had tried that with us? We wouldn't have allowed it. Do you think George Washington and all of these quote unquote great men would have just rolled over and said, OK, take our military titles away, take our government away and come back? Well, of course not. They would fight. And so there was an attempt to sort of understand the Haitian Revolution and Haitian independence in comparative terms. But it was on a much more sort of individual, not it wasn't on a state level, because the statesmen of the United States

are definitely when you look at the floors of Congress and the minutes, there are very few supporters formally and openly for Haitian independence. You know what, I guess like any period, but it strikes me that to have been at that time as an American states person, you had to hold some pretty inconsistent views in your head at the same time, right? Like it was pretty crazy. Absolutely. Milena, thank you so much. That was a tour de force. That was amazing. Wow. I love interviewing people like you. I don't do anything. You just, that was great. So tell everyone what the book is called. So I have a new collection of stories out about the Haitian Revolution from the 19th century called Haitian Revolutionary Fictions, an anthology that I co-edited and co-translated with Gregory Pierrot and Marion Rolaitner, and it is available for

pre-order at the University of Virginia Press. Check it out, everyone. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Danston's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors, that's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast,

Gone Medieval, with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got the ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods