Two hundred years after the Haitian Revolution, its complexity and spirit still live in surviving documents at the John Carter Brown Library.
The library will feature an exhibition on the revolution this month as a complement to an international scholarly conference hosted by the library in June. Among the speakers at the conference was H.E. Jean Casimir, Haitian ambassador to the United States from 1991 to 1997.
The exhibition's 66 historical items tell a story rich with motifs; it is a study about prejudice and oppression, fear and courage, leadership and revolution.
Library Director Norman Fiering described the "cataclysmic" revolutionary event, its causes and repercussions, as a story about "man's painfully won gains amidst horrendous cruelty and blindness."
While many historical moments embody this theme of overcoming, the Haitian Revolution is unique - the slave revolts against French domination led to the second republic in the New World and the first independent black republic in history.
Much of the exhibition's features are written in French, but accompanying English descriptions and the chance to observe up close provide the sense of having interacted with history.
One of the exhibition's pieces is a caricature of Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation with images of "St. Oassawatomie," the white anti-slavery militant John Brown and the Haitian slave revolt.
The caricature suggests that Lincoln's noble act was motivated more by pragmatic security concerns than by a penchant for human rights, but Fiering said that Lincoln had always been a passionate anti-slavery activist who vocalized a belief in human rights.
The exhibition is diverse in the perspectives it presents, including the royal command, planter grievances, anti-slavery activists and free people of color. The voice of black slaves, however, was not directly represented. Fiering said that such pieces of the story are hard to find - most slaves were illiterate and deprived of the ability to keep records.
It is remarkable then that, deprived of unity and means of communication, slaves were able to organize under the leadership of early revolutionaries and, later, the famed Toussaint Louverture.
The seeds of revolution were initially planted by royal laws like the Code Noir of 1685, which granted manumission, prohibiting torture and mutilation of slaves by anyone other than royal authority. The exhibit features several of these ordinances and details the ensuing resistance by white planters. A culture of fear, in which both royalty and plantation owners feared slave rebellion, thrived as revolt seemed to be encouraged by both increasing brutality and granting greater freedoms and rights to slaves.
The exhibition features a famous commentary by Moreau de Saint-Mery that delineates no fewer than 128 racial combinations in the colony. It established a "science" to skin color and created a sense of objectivity to the social placement and value of individuals. A citizen's worth was based on whether they were mixed race or "pure blood."
Such documents make the origins of prejudice more tangible but no less easy to untangle and productively correct.
After the French Revolution of 1789, the restless impatience of Haiti's slaves turned into action and revolt in 1791.
In a letter written by members of the Provincial Assembly of the North, they said the northern provinces of the island had been ravaged by the upheaval: "Our fertile fields are flowing with the blood of our brethren."
Herald staff writer Krista Hachey '07 can be reached at herald@browndailyherald.com.
