Haiti had the misfortune of being amongst the first islands where Columbus landed in August of 1492. In his journals, he exclaims that its natural beauty does “surpass human belief,” speculates that its mountains “abound in various kinds of species, golds, and metals,” and surmises that its valleys are “most fertile both for cultivation and for pasturage, and well adapted for constructing buildings.”[1] As for the natives, he found that they were strong but “gentle,” “well made,” and quite “timid and full of terror.” However, once their (well-founded!) “fear is banished, they are guileless and honest, and very liberal of all they have…They manifest great affection towards all of us, exchanging valuable things for trifles.” Indeed, he notes their excessive generosity, saying “No one refuses the asker anything he possess; on the contrary they themselves invite us to ask for it.” Finally, ominously, he reports that they are without advanced weapons. When I think about these journal entries, I always imagine the counterfactual history that seems to call forth from them, the possibility of fellowship and friendship they seem to promise.   

After declaring all these islands to be under Spanish dominion, he left some mercenaries to set up camp, and departed back to Spain with ~20 kidnapped natives, only eight of whom survived the voyage.  When Columbus returned within a year to Haiti again, he began to demand tribute from the natives, cutting off the hands of those who refused, putting the rest to work, and taking their gold etc. Within just 30yrs, 80-90% of the population had been effectively liquidated through disease and murder, and the Taínos all but disappeared as a culture and a people.[2] Soon after, the Atlantic slave trade began. 

Between 1525-1866, Europeans took an estimated 12.5 million Africans as slaves to the so-called new world—10.7million survived the voyage.[3] Haiti received the most of any other place in the NW Hemisphere, upwards of 800,000. For comparison, the American colonies received about 388,000. In the last decade of the 18^th century, in the lead up to the Haitian revolution, Haiti was receiving 1/3 of all incoming slaves, amounting to about 40,000 per year.[4] Even according to the atrocious standards of new world slavery, Haitian slavery was particularly bad.[5] That’s why they needed so many: they were working them to death, and the average lifespan was 21 years. On the eve of revolt, slaves accounted for 90% of the population![6] So you can imagine why this would require particular widespread brutality on part of slaveholders. On the backs of black slaves, Haiti became the richest country in the Americas, known as ‘the pearl of the Antilles’.  

When American colonists decided to rebel on the basis of some relatively innocuous forms of British taxation (or at least that is how it starts to seem in comparison), guess who came to their aid? That’s right: Haiti! A contingent of free coloured men fought for American freedom, along with the French, against the British.[7] This contingent of 800 Haitians means that more Haitians fought for American freedom in the Fall of 1779 than the 500 Americans present at the bloody battle of Savannah. There’s a statue for these Haitian men there today, in Savannah, Georgia. 

About a dozen years later, when Haiti would begin their own fight to throw off their colonial masters, do you think America would return the favour, and defend their emancipation against European tyranny? No, of course not. At different times, the united slaves of Haiti found themselves fighting against the Americans, the British, the French, and the Spanish. The only thing these countries could agree on was that Haiti could not be free. Indeed, one of the only non-Haitian parties to take their side were a group of Polish people: sent there by the French to suppress the Haitians, they realized the Haitians were fighting for their freedom, and they sided with liberty against the French.[8]

Against all odds—and I mean all odds—Haiti threw off these imperialist parties, in an excessively bloody series of revolutionary wars that waged from 1791-1804. In so doing, Haiti became the first and only slave revolt in history that successful established a government. At first, the Haitians, led by the former slave-cum-emperor Toussaint Louverture, weren’t even trying to secede from the French; they just wanted to be free, and carry France’s proclaimed principles of Liberté, Egalité, et Fraternité to their logical and necessary conclusions. But Napoleon couldn’t stand it: unable to tactically defeat Louverture and the Haitians, he instead tricked him, and posing as a “sincere friend,” kidnapped him back to France, and let him die of exposure in a cold prison cell in the mountains.

Then Napoleon sent the largest armada he’d ever assembled, 20,000 troops (2/3 of the French Navy), to reinstate slavery in Haiti after having promising to abolish it (Napoleon would eventually send 80,000 additional soldiers over the next couple years).[9] But, as Louverture had warned and proclaimed, Haiti’s newly freed slaves defeated Napoleon’s army for the second time, under the ferocious leadership of Dessalines. It was a merciless, murderous war, full of terror and bayoneted babies; after generations of slavery and injustice, Haitians now wanted every single white person dead or off the island (except the Poles, who were officially considered noir—black). In this extermination campaign, the Haitians had an advantage: in a poetic twist of fate centuries in the making, European colonists, who had once decimated natives with their old world diseases, were now themselves being decimated by yellow fever, which had been brought to Haiti by Africans. 

Napoleon, after his defeat and having bankrupted himself trying to deny Haiti freedom, found himself having to make a sale to Jefferson to get some cash: this became known as the Louisiana Purchase, and in exchange for $18 per sqmile, the USA nearly doubled its size.[10] The USA gained a wealth of resources and land, avoided having Napoleon in their backward, and it was all thanks to the Haitian’s thirst for freedom, and Napoleon’s thirst for domination. Many people know about Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of wintery Russia, but few know how he first crashed against the reef of Haitian freedom, and how all of this immensely benefited the Americans.  

Now that Haiti had joined the USA as the only other independent country in the new world, do you think they could be natural allies? Again, no, of course not. Haiti’s very existence as a former-slave-now-free-black nation was itself an existential threat to the slaveholding nation of America. And so began a generations long relationship of American embargoes, military occupation, and sponsored coups, which even includes the USA kidnapping the first democratically elected Haitian president and flying him to exile in the Central African Republic![11] Most Americans will be surprised to learn that the USA occupied Haiti from 1915-1945 (after the National City Bank of New York pressed Woodrow Wilson to take financial and military control of the country).[12] The Marines ruled Haiti through Martial law, organizing labour through a deadly unpaid corvée system, and restructuring their economy in order to benefit extraction by foreign nations. The notion that Haitians present a threat to American borders, security, and way of life is, of course, completely backwards. Few nations have been made to taste America’s boot heel for as long and as severely as has Haiti.

Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that this whole time, Haiti had been paying money to France—and I mean money. Money for what, you ask? For being free! That’s right, because in 1825 France surrounded Haiti’s ports with gunships, and demanded to be made whole, to the tune of 150million francs, after losing all their slaves 20 years ago.[13] (For comparison, that’s 10x the amount France demanded from the US for the Louisiana Purchase.) And for further comparison, after the American Revolution, Britain went right back to be being America’s chief trading partner–no hard feelings. Not for nothing does Jefferson appeal to their “consanguinity” in the Declaration of Independence, and not for nothing is it an old black proverb that “When white people say ‘Justice,’ they mean ‘just us’.

And so with the entire world still against them, Haiti had little choice, and so they paid reparations to their former slavers. They took out crushing loans, primarily with French banks of course (although American and German banks were also involved) and spent the next 122 years making payments to France, sometimes amounting up to 70% of the country’s annual budget, and totalling almost 30billion dollars today. Inevitably, it left the Haitian economy in shambles, with all the socio-political implications that flow from such utter destitution.

Haiti is now the poorest country in the NW hemisphere, suffering continual political turmoil, and constant foreign occupation, sharing the island with a country that often treats them as sub-human. And America has their fingerprints all over Haiti’s misery. Just last year, Daniele Foote, Biden’s special envoy to Haiti, resigned in protest over American treatment of Haiti.[14] Haiti has always been the whipping boy of the Euro-Atlantic powers.

When I first taught the Haitian revolution a couple years ago in class, I had to begin by apologizing to my students: I didn’t know the history as well as the American or French Revolutions–it had been hidden from me, downplayed, ignored. This angered me (it still does), and since then, I’ve tried to rectify that. For a host of reasons, the Haitian revolution must be taught alongside the other Atlantic Revolutions, of which it is an integral–and probably the most interesting–part. We are all us heirs to the world-historical achievements of the Haitians. The first country to be colonized, the first to be free of slavery, will Haiti ever be able to regain a sliver of the splendour or peace it may have possessed before it was plundered by the West? When I think of Haiti’s momentous history, and their sad situation, I find myself paraphrasing Porfirio Diaz: ‘Poor Haiti, so far from God, so close to the United States.’

 I really didn’t want to write this final paragraph, I didn’t want to even mention Trump, but… I watched last week’s presidential debate together with friends and colleagues. Before the debate, another political theorist, said he was looking forward to it, was sure Harris would trounce him. I was more skeptical; how does one win against someone who is not at all committed to the idea that the claims that come out of his mouth correspond to some independently existing reality? I said I feared for Harris, and that we should all remember Mark Twain’s warning: ‘never get in an argument with an idiot, they’ll drag you down to their level and beat you.’ I said if Trump’s behind a pulpit, he’s winning, he just wants to spit his poison. We turned to our dean, who said he would not be watching the debate because Trump makes him physically sick. I couldn’t decide if this political stance was deeply honourable or a profound abdication of civic responsibility. When Trump got behind his podium and told those lies about Haitians eating pets, almost everyone in the room laughed. Our college president grabbed his head with both hands and leaned back moaning in exasperation. And even as Trump was fact-checked in real time but continued doubling and tripling down, the laughter just continued, and grew. I thought back to the dean, and decided he was indeed upon a higher plane than us; to be willing spectator (let alone laugh) to Trump’s terrible theatrics is to be sullied. As students repeated the phrase the next days, as tiktok dance videos about it proliferated, I realized Twain was right: in making us laugh, Trump had dragged us down, made us complicit. The vilification of minorities and immigrants has always been the core of Trump’s political identity, whether it be Mexican migrant rapists or Obama birthirism. But as Eric Levitz and Zack Beauchamp have recently pointed out this rhetoric is a distinct escalation: ‘eating pets’ is a such an intimate, alien violation (compared to ‘selling drugs’ etc), and the specificity of targeting a particular group of 15,000 people in a certain community makes the underlying intention especially clear: to foment violence, which is exactly what is happening. And now people like Stanley Thelusma, a nursing student who came from Haiti with his parents to escape gang violence, finds groups of Proud Boys roving the streets of Springfield. As we laugh and chuckle at what we construe as Trump’s absurdity and even meanness, the fact that he and JD Vance continue to hammer away at this lie so systematically suggests something much more sinister: that their machinations are meant to manifest a good old fashion lynching. And if that sounds too far to you, remember that this is a man who once took out full-page adds in several New York newspapers, clamouring for the execution of five black children. For all his lies, Trump has always shown us exactly what he is about, and he will take his venom as far as he can, as far as we let him, and nobody will be laughing then.

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[1] https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/columbus-reports-his-first-voyage-1493

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C3%ADno

[3] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us/#:~:text=Between%201525%20and%201866%2C%20in,the%20Caribbean%20and%20South%20America.

[4] https://bittersweetmonthly.com/haitis-brutal-history

[5] https://slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/?id=A0111#:~:text=The%20slave%20system%20in%20Saint,Africans%20carried%20to%20North%20America).

[6] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Haitian-Revolution

[7] https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/haitian-soldiers-battle-savannah-1779/

[8] After the revolution, the first leader of an independent Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, gave these Poles special status, written into the constitution, and there is still a Polish community in Haiti until this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Haitians

[9] Philippe Gerard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon, 2011, pp7.

[10] https://history.state.gov/milestones/1801-1829/louisiana-purchase

[11] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-haiti-coup/

[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Haiti

[13] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/10/05/1042518732/-the-greatest-heist-in-history-how-haiti-was-forced-to-pay-reparations-for-freed

[14] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/23/1040055089/us-special-envoy-haiti-quits-deportations-refugees