Dispatch from a Revolution of Sugar and Blood
The predatory vengeance of Jean-Jacques Dessalines: Installment 1
In the papers of Thomas Jefferson, housed in the Library of Congress, a mysterious diplomatic dispatch has lived for over 200 years. The hand that penned “Decout” in June of 1804 never signed its name, and the eyes to whom the dispatch was addressed are not identified. (It is possible that “Decout” referred to Jefferson’s acquaintance Jean Decout, but the name appears nowhere on the 12-page document). In chapter 4 of The Devil Lives in Haiti I rely on an isolated piece of its diplomatic intelligence to establish the living hostility between agents of the French and those of the British in 1801-1804, a hostility which destroys the absurd narrative of a political world united in cheerful alliance against the “unwelcome guest” of independent Haiti. In this page I plan to do justice to the document’s full importance, as a witness to the later years of the Haitian Revolution when the flag of Jean-Jacques Dessalines flew in brutal leadership over the lost promise of Toussaint Louverture. My translations may be the very first
The incursions of Haitian revolutionary leadership in the 1790s and early 1800s into Spanish Santo Domingo are widely reported, including in Toussaint Louverture’s Memoire (1802-1803). It was contact with General Dessalines that inspired a Spanish witness, likely a Dominican, to immortalize the vengeance of the General in this artwork, which is housed in the digital collections of the NYPL. “matando blancos” = killing whites.
For the full original text, visit the digital collection of the Library of Congress. This document is also referenced in The Devil Lives in Haiti , and cited in Chapter 4, “An Unwelcome Guest?”
The following two paragraphs are translations of the original document, but the second paragraph translates a paragraph that does not display on page 1 of the French original. When French vocabulary cannot be deciphered beyond a guess, it is noted as “illegible.”
How does a narrative of convenience neutralize inconvenient facts?
How does a narrative of convenience neutralize inconvenient facts?
Method 1: Omission
The skeptical historian does not need to cast a stone very far before striking a bearer of mythology in Haitian studies. My stone was cast only a short distance into the pond of the internet before it struck, with predictable success, All The Devils Are Here (2020). A double standard in the representation and historical reporting of Haitian Revolution-era casualties is the theme of Marlene Daut’s online article. Comparative violence and comparative losses are weighed, and it is the thesis of Daut that the atrocities against blacks in the revolution were underappreciated by white audiences. The same atrocities against whites, it is argued, fulfilled a self-serving interpretation of inherent black monstrosity. If atrocities are the theme of this article, those of Jean-Jacques Dessalines are buried in silence.
The narrative of convenience reproduced by Daut assumes a theater of violence between noble black resistance fighters and white reactionaries, whose fortune alternates between dominance and defeat between 1791 and 1804. Nowhere in this narrative are the documented brutalities of Dessalines against non-whites, as evidenced in “Decout” above, nor are there the white-on-white atrocities between the forces of reaction and revolution. The assassination of Ferrand de Baudieres in 1789, and other white officials who shared his modest defiance of the colonial caste system, are far beyond the scope of memory in All the Devils Are Here. The field is only large enough to accommodate one Devil, and I abhor competition.
For those readers who believe the first page of “Decout” weakly suggests that Dessalines was not purely a soldier for revolutionary justice, but could have been tainted by excesses in pursuit of virtue, return for the next installment. The General’s white victims will receive the delayed justice of recognition