Read on Twitter
Here's a more detailed account of who took part in the conspiracy that would create Haiti, 229 years ago tonight
"The insurrection that broke out in August 1791 was by no means a spontaneous or unmediated event. The slaves in the North had been consciously preparing and organizing themselves...
for weeks before that fateful night of 22 August, which marked the beginning of the end of one of the greatest wealth—producing slave colonies the world had ever known—the pearl of the Antilles, as it was extravagantly called.
On Sundays, slave representatives from the major plantations would meet clandestinely to lay the plans for the general insurrection, but it was on the night of the fourteenth, one week before the actual outbreak, that the final scheme was drawn up and the instructions given out.
Numbering some two hundred in all, consisting of ‘two delegates each from all the plantations of Port-Margot, Limbé, Acul, Petite-Anse, Limonade, Plaine du Nord, Quartier-Morin, Morne-Rouge, etc., etc.’ covering the entire central region of the North Province, they were assembled
to fix the date for the revolt that had been in the planning for some time. They met at the Lenormand de Mezy plantation in Morne-Rouge, and all of the delegates were upper-strata slaves in whom the masters had placed their confidence,
most of them commandeurs whose influence and authority over the field slaves were undoubtedly considerable. Upon a given signal, the plantations would be systematically set aflame, and a generalized slave insurrection set afoot.
To dissipate any hesitation or equivocation the assembled conspirators may have had, a statement was read by an unknown mulatto or quarteroon to the effect that the king and the National Assembly in France had decreed three free days per week for every slave,
as well as the abolition of the whip as a form of punishment. They were told that it was the white masters and the colonial authorities who refused to consent and that royalist troops were on their way from France to execute the decree by force.
The news was of course false, but it represented the nearest thing to freedom the slaves had ever known, and it served as a rallying point around which to galvanize the aspirations of the slaves, to solidify and channel these into open rebellion.
Although the majority of the delegates agreed in principle that they should await the arrival of these royalist troops, the slave representatives from some of the plantations in Limbé and Acul insisted upon instigating the war against the whites at whatever cost,
with or without the troops. In the end, they nearly agreed to begin the revolt that very night, but then went back on this decision as they considered it inopportune to carry out, on the spot, a general insurrection for which the plans had been finalized only that evening.
The majority of the slaves had thus decided to wait, and the date was fixed for the twenty-second.
The early leaders forming the core of this movement were Boukman Dutty, Jeannot Bullet, Jean-François, and Georges Biassou.
The first two, according to one source, were to take charge of the initial stages of the movement, while Jean-François and Biassou were to take over first and second command of the insurrection once under way.
Toussaint Louverture, who would emerge as supreme leader of the revolution years later, served, inauspiciously at this point, as the link between these leaders and the system, carefully dissimulating his actual participation.
Although he remained on the Bréda plantation, where he served as coachman for the manager, Bayon de Libertas, he had by now already been a free black, or affranchi, for well over a decade.
With a pass signed by the governor, Toussaint was thus permitted to circulate freely and to frequent other plantations; but he was also in communication with influential elements of the royalist faction...
who hoped to profit from, and who even helped stimulate, the brewing slave insurrection by invoking a common cause--the defense of the king, who had, they rumored, granted the slaves three free days per week.
Once they had used the slave insurrection to defeat the rival patriot faction, once power was restored in royalist hands and the king securely on the throne of France,
the blacks, they no doubt believed, could then be persuaded by their leaders to return to the plantations and be duped back into slavery. Undeniably, links between the slave leaders and certain royalists in the early stages were important,
but for the latter to have assumed that the slave insurrection would, in the end, amount to little more than a traditional jacquerie was, in the unmitigated context of impending revolution and imperial wars, to make a profoundly grave mistake.
Of the leaders, it was Boukman who was to give the signal for the revolt. He had been a commandeur and later a coachman on the Clément plantation, among the first to go up in flames once the revolt began.
While his experience as commandeur provided him with certain organizational and leadership qualities, the post as coachman no doubt enabled him to follow the ongoing political developments in the colony,
as well as to facilitate communication links and establish contacts among the slaves of different plantations. Reputedly, Boukman was also a voodoo priest and, as such, exercised an undisputed influence and command over his followers, who knew him as ‘Zamba’ Boukman.
His authority was only enhanced by the overpowering impression projected by his gigantic size.
Once the conspirators had reached agreement on the date, set for the twenty-second, the accord was solemnized by a voodoo ceremony held in a thickly wooded area known as Bois-Caiman, not far from the Lenormand plantation.
According to most accounts, the ceremony was officiated by Boukman and a voodoo high priestess, an old African woman ‘with strange eyes and bristly hair,’ just as terrifying as her counterpart.
Amidst raging streaks of lightning and violent bursts of thunder, as the account goes, accompanied by high winds and the torrential rains of the storm that had broken out that night, the high priestess raised her knife to kill a sacrificial pig,
the blood of which was passed round for all to partake. As she began to invoke the deities, Boukman rose to deliver an impassioned oration to the assembled slaves. It was, in essence, a call to arms:
>
The Good Lord who created the sun which gives us light from above, who rouses the sea and makes the thunder roar—listen well, all of you—this god, hidden in the clouds, watches us.
The Good Lord who created the sun which gives us light from above, who rouses the sea and makes the thunder roar—listen well, all of you—this god, hidden in the clouds, watches us.
He sees all that the white man does. The god of the white man calls him to commit crimes; our god asks only good works of us. But this god who is so good orders revenge! He will direct our hands; he will aid us.
Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears and listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us.
>
>
Couté la liberté li palé nan coeur nous tous: ‘Listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us.’
It was a refrain that would later recur under Boukman's leadership during the early days of the insurrection as he would exhort the insurgent slaves under his command to attack."
@threader_app compile
