If you’ve never heard of the Haitian Revolution, the one which turned France’s wealthy Caribbean slave colony of Saint-Domingue into the first free black republic of the New World, there might be a reason why. Historian Trouillot posited that from the moment it began, Haiti’s Revolution was subject to a systemic silencing. The French Revolution? Check. The American Revolution? Russian Revolution? Chinese Revolution? British children are often exposed to the Glorious Revolution, might have to describe it for A levels. But Haiti’s Revolution? Most people are at best vaguely aware of something by that name. More likely their knowledge of Haiti is that it’s the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, a place of earthquakes, kidnappings, and presidential assassinations. Voodoo. We could talk at length about the French and broader Western effort to keep Haiti down after its independence. For example, after the slaves of Saint-Domingue freed themselves and created Haiti, their former colonizer, the French, forced them to pay reparations in exchange for diplomatic relations. But these preposterous injustices deserve their own treatment. Instead, I want to simply infect you with the same passion for Haiti that I have. You see, years ago, I started a lengthy script on Haiti, which I later abandoned. And last year, I started planning some sort of masterpiece on Haiti. I really wanted to put out lengthy videos dissecting the revolution from multiple angles. And I wrote a lot, over 10,000 words in one script. But I realize now in my attempt to bring you everything there was to know, I was paralyzing myself with process perfection. So here I am, 7 years after initially deciding to make a video on Haiti, finally uploading something. The Haitian Revolution, a necessarily insufficient synopsis: Modern-day Haiti was known as Saint-Domingue, A French colony founded in 1659 through displacement of native people initiated by the Spanish. Saint-Domingue was a major exporter of sugar, coffee, and indigo, building immense wealth for plantation owners, and the French mainland. About half of coffee and sugar consumed in Europe originated in Saint-Domingue (17). That wealth stood atop a pile of enslaved bodies. The average life expectancy of an enslaved person on Saint-Domingue was 7-10 years (1), which meant there was a tremendous churn of new slave importation to replace dead workers. The total number of slaves was approximately 500,000 prior to the revolution, around 90% of its total population (17). Of that 90%, half were born on Saint-Domingue, the rest imported to supplement the brutal losses each year. And when that 90% began revolting in rural northern areas in 1791, conflict eventually spread to the entire colony. A mysterious figure named Toussaint Louverture, a freed man of color, rose to a position of military power, then through the success of the revolt, took control of the de facto independent Saint-Domingue. However, Louverture and Saint-Domingue stood in a precarious position as a colony-not-colony of France acting independently. When Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in mainland France, he planned the arrest of Louverture and the subjugation of the colony. Further, it was feared Napoleon would bring about the return of slavery, something the French National Assembly had outlawed in the entirety of the French Empire because of the events in Haiti. This fear of a reversal in their freedom led many Saint-Domingueans to stand and fight the French Army which came to put them back in chains, and a terribly violent year began. In 1802, a decade after the initial revolt, Napoleon sent a force to put the colony back in its place. Saint-Domingue would eventually repel the invaders, bringing about the creation of an independent free-black state known as Haiti. But Toussaint Louverture’s luck would run out. Fooled by representatives of Napoleon, Louverture appeared for a meeting only to be arrested, shipped to mainland France, and to die alone in a French prison. Still, despite the loss of their leader, Haiti stood and fought, and won their independence at great cost. A free black republic in the western atlantic, as we’ll see, an ‘unthinkable revolution’. Haiti’s lost leader, Toussaint Louverture, is where I want to formally begin my list of reasons you should think Haiti’s Revolution is so friggin interesting. When trying to convince someone that this revolution is profoundly interesting, I usually start with the legendary, difficult, and enigmatic Toussaint Louverture. I did not say ‘enigmatic’ for dramatic effect; Louverture, particularly in his early years, is a mystery that historians investigate and debate to this day. He is a man who rose from obscurity in obscure circumstances during obscured events with an obscured timeline to lead a succesful slave revolt that upended the French Empire during the French Revolution. Here’s what we know for sure about his life before the revolution: He was born sometime in the 1740’s, enslaved at the Breda plantation, and thus carried the name Toussaint Breda. At some point, he learned to write phonetically, so must have been able to read some too. He married twice and had children. He became a free man, had a coffe business venture, and went on to own a number of slaves himself (7,25). After this venture, he went back to Breda Plantation to work as coachman, Then, he showed up during the slave revolt. That’s it. That’s all we know for sure. There are anecdotes about being of royal origin, working early in animal husbandry, how exactly he learned to read, what he read, how exactly he acquired his freedom, the origin of his nickname. But these things are less secure because they come from dodgier sources, notably, material published by his son in 1825, a singular second-hand past-facto source (7,19). In French prison before his death, Louverture wrote his autobiography. And you would expect an autobiography to be a treasure trove of early biographical details. But it’s actually not. The book was more of a posturing plea to Napoleon to reconsider Louverture’s imprisonment, and reads a bit more like a pitch than a story. Louverture goes into elaborate details to explain his actions after he secured power in the revolt, and skips his early days. After all, why would Napoleon care about his childhood? What if such an exposition meant that Napoleon didn’t get far enough to read the apologetics? And so we get this from his prison memoir: he mentions he has a wife and children, that he accrued some wealth before the revolt, and quote, “I was a slave, I dare to announce it, but I never had to endure even a reproach on the part of my master.” And in the entire memoir, those are all the personal details we get. That leaves us today in a pickle. What was Toussaint doing at the very start of the revolt? How did he end up at its head? How did he get his leadership skills? What were his beliefs before the revolt, and how did they play into his participation? For example, Louverture, the liberator of Saint-Domingue owned slaves before the revolt, when he appears in the historical record, he is negotiating for the extremely limited emancipation of some of the revolters. And when he took power after the revolt, he returned freed slaves to plantation in conditions a cynic might say looked a lot like the slavery that just ended. So was Louverture Black Spartacus or an ideology-free pragmatist, something in between? Both? Professionals are working on answers, debating the sources, and that might continue forever. Louverture pops on the scene at some point during the revolt, a message of negotiation from revolters to the colonial assembly bore his name. Can you imagine if American History books just started their mention of George Washington with him showing up Yorktown on a horse from obscurity? No, neither can I. Louverture isn’t the only piece of the revolution hard to understand. Reason number two Haiti’s Revolution is interesting to me is because of its radical complexity, its intersectionality, its color. Saint-Domingue’s society is hard to wrap your head around. There are slaves and owners, yes. But first, many owners, often called ‘big whites’, ‘Grand-blancs’, were absentee, residing in mainland France and absorbing their prosperity from afar. In some cases, children of owners would inherit a plantation, and never lay eyes on it. The actual running of plantations was done by another class, so-called ‘small whites ’Petit-blancs’. Small whites were non-gentry who kept the island running as plantation managers and enforcers. The term would also apply to the class of free merchants and tradesmen in the cities. A colonel visiting Saint-Domingue would describe this class of small whites as “adventurers from every part of Europe in quest of fortune.” (1,30) The main disadvantage these whites had was one of politics: like another group we will discuss next, they did not participate in governing Saint-Domingue; that was the exclusive territory of landed gentry, who fought, often violently, to protect their status. So far it’s not too complicated, right? Though we wouldn’t use the French terms, this structure is somewhat recognizable to anyone whose studied plantation slavery in the southern United States. One race is enslaved. And white gentry sit atop, directing lower class whites to keep it all running. Until the Jacksonian era, excluding non-land owners from politics was also normal in the US. The analogues are still making sense. But here’s where it gets more complicated. Saint-Domingue also had a class of free people of color, in French gens de couleur libres, something much less common in the US, particularly in the South. A free person of color might be completely of African descent, though they often were of mixed race. That’s because many white plantation owners would father children with black women they owned; that’s a euphamism for sexual assault. The resulting children would often be freed, along with their mothers. The male children, then, might inherit the property of the white father, and thus enter an ownership class. Other free men of color, like in the port city of Cap Francais, even became landlords for small whites (1,64). Free women of color were more likely to work than their rarer white women counterparts. Many free people of color also occupied laborer or artisan roles similar to the small whites of Saint-Domingue. And some became law officers, tasked with arresting runaway slaves (1); wrap your head around that. Thus, free people of color occupied a unique place racially and economically. When race and class intersect like this, the result is so damn interesting, but for us, so damn demanding as each intersection needs attention. One of the most famous histories of the Haitian Revolution was written by Trinidadian historian CLR James, a Marxist historian. As a Marxist historian, one’s explanations of history are usually based on universal laws and stages of society - economics is often a driving force. If you’re examining Russia’s revolution, for example, you might focus on the class structure of Russia in the pre-revolutionary stage of development: serfs and landlords, sailors and their officers - bourgeoisie, proletariat. I’m not at all saying 1917 Russia didn’t have ethnic components, but an old-school Marxist history might attend to those secondarily. And that’s why CLR James’s Black Jacobins is interesting (2). Because of course, James does indeed use the typical verbiage of a Marxist, proletariat and bourgeoisie. But of course, Haiti doesn’t fit so nicely into that box. Race was an undeniably profound aspect of Saint-Domingue society. And so James says things like this, intersecting race and class: “The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors. But working and living together in gangs of hundreds...they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time”. You see that? Race and class are balanced. Proletariat. Slave. Jacobin. Black. It’s a needle he threads, and it’s worth a read if you ever get the chance. Not to get too far down the rabbit hole, but James elevates Toussaint Louverture in his narrative, placing him squarely in Western History and Atlantic Revolutions - where he undoubtedly belongs: quote “Pericles, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Marx and Engels, were men of a liberal education, formed in the traditions of ethics, philosophy and history. Toussaint was a slave, not six years out of slavery, bearing alone the unaccustomed burden of war and government.” Speaking of Atlantic Revolutions, I mentioned the French Revolution earlier, and that’s reason number three I think Haiti’s Revolution is so darn interesting. It fits into the larger tapestry of the Atlantic revolutions uniquely. But in particular, parts of the Haitian Revolution were derivative of the French Revolution, and in turn, it influenced the French Revolution back. Things really kicked off in France in 1789 when the Estates General, called by King Louis XVI to address unrest, resulted in the formation of a National Assembly in June 1789, and the iconic ‘Storming of the Bastille’ in July 1789. The Revolution led to the fall of the French Monarchy, even the execution of Louis XVI by guillotine. We’re gonna keep that bird’s-eye view on France’s Revolution as it intersects with Haiti’s. The general dynamic at the start of all this was that news came across the Atlantic to Saint-Domingue, sentiments of liberté, égalité, fraternité arrived, and the various groups in Saint-Domingue tried to appropriate the happenings for their own ends. Keep in mind that France’s Revolution began roughly summer 1789. Haiti’s slave revolt started summer 1791, two years later. So a lot happened in between. The first groups to try and use revolutionary rhetoric about liberty and equality out of France are the ‘big white’ landowners of Saint-Domingue, and the free people of color. When the Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man arrived in Saint-Domingue, whites were the first to take phrases to fit their own interests, phrases like ‘natural law’, ‘born..free and equal in their rights’, ‘the general will’, ‘liberty, property, security’. Assemblies sprouted up across Saint-Domingue in the wake of the Declaration, interpreting it to grant them a degree of self-governance on the island. A degree of independence would allow the big whites to control trade regulations, ignore anti-cruelty slavery regulations from the mainland, maintain the racial status quo in their own way. The irony that the Declaration of the Rights of Man included guarantees of property, while also freedom of liberty of all men (who in Saint-Domingue might indeed be property) is something that will factor in momentarily. But there’s another aspect of the racial status quo that factored in first. When Assemblies popped up in Saint-Domingue, one of the biggest priorities of big whites was to keep the free people of color from joining the assemblies. Egalite, fraternite and property were for white owners, not free blacks. (12) Naturally, free men of color took their turn applying the Declaration of the Rights of Man to their interests. Because where whites formed assemblies in Saint-Domingue, free people of color were excluded. In fall of 1789, a delegation of free men of color made their appeals to the National Assembly in Paris. (10) A political fight ensued over their rights in Saint-Domingue. How could universal natural rights not apply to free men of color, one argument went. Another more cynical argument was deployed: without the help of free men of color, how could the institution of slavery be preserved on Saint-Domingue? Whites were the tiniest of minorities; by joining forces with free people of color, they increased their odds against the vast enslaved population were they ever to revolt. Neither argument appealed to the National Assembly at the time, and a law was passed which enshrined the status quo. Free men of color would not be integrated into the politics of the island. In short, the law left colonial governance to the colony. One of the ringleaders of the attempt to bring free people of color political rights in Saint-Domingue was named Vincent Ogé. After the failure in Paris, Ogé returned across the Atlantic, and led a band of rebels to attack Cap Francais in an attempt to force the whites to accept their rights. The rebels were repelled. Ogé was eventually captured and horrifically executed. But as we know, Ogé would not be the last to use violence and the ideals of the French Revolution to pursue their interests on Saint-Domingue. The slave revolt arrived not long after in August of 1791. And the difficult question for us is: to what extent did the French Revolution inspire the revolt? Were the slaves pursuing ideals from the Declaration of the Rights of Man, or were they just…revolting? The obvious short answer is that the French Revolution clearly played a role in the revolt, and the goals of it. But that answer is also deeply insufficient, and taken to an extreme, disempowering. Oh, you think the slaves never knew slavery sucked before they heard about enlightenment principles? Born free, oh you mean me? Gee, thanks. But obviously the situation in France, the unrest between whites and free people of color, the general atmosphere lay the groundwork for the revolt. What we’re really after is evidence the language of the French Revolution infused the justifications the revolters gave to each other and to outsiders. Of that, there is evidence. I’m gonna hug Laurent Dubois’s examples in Avengers of the New World (12). First, according to one account, a captured revolting man was found to have French pamphlets in his pocket referencing the Rights of Man (12,102). There were more examples of such pamphlets appearing in the clothes of dead revolters. Second, a group of revolting slaves told a French officer they wanted full emancipation of all slaves, and demanded the “promise of liberty” (12,105). Third, an interrogated group said they were inspired by the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The longer the revolt went on, the more the leaders of the revolt used the language of the French Revolution in their communications and negotiations (12,141). All this means it’s clear we can’t extricate the French Revolution’s ideals from the Haitian Revolution. On the flipside, early leaders of the revolt actually invoked the French King as their true guarantor of their liberty, and of course invoking a monarch deposed by the revolution as a justification for further revolution gets pretty convoluted. Speaking of convoluted, some revolters would align with the Spanish for help, who of course occupied the other half of the island, the part which you know today as the Dominican Republic. When those revolters joined with the Spanish, they would invoke the Spanish King as the guarantor of liberty. Listen, I’m not trying to put your brain in a blender, but there were obviously some contradictions and subtleties in a situation as fluid and decentralized as this. The famous Vodou ceremony of Boukman, which took place several nights before the start of the revolt in August 1791, reportedly called upon God for vengeance against enslavers. And vengeance seems like yet another perfectly reasonable motivation for a revolting slave. In short, we must acknowledge the impact of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, while also seeing as clear as we can that in an event like this, each person had their own reason for joining in, continuing, and those reasons likely evolved due to circumstance, interest, and sincere reconsiderations over time. It’s nice the enlightenment wrote down ideals of natural rights, but even someone enslaved from birth would understand that breaking chains might be a worthwhile endeavor. We can now talk about that revolutionary reciprocity. Because I also said the Haitian Revolution influenced the French Revolution in return. And boy did it. In a huge way. We already spoke about the hang-wringing of the French National Assembly when faced with the prospect of extending the principles of their revolution to free people of color in the colonies. As the Assembly radicalized, they wouldn’t only revisit this issue in May 1791, but they would soon take on an issue of a much grander scale (13). The story is actually quite short. In January of 1794, nearly three years since the initial slave revolt, delegates from Saint-Domingue arrived in Paris, sparking a debate on slavery in the National Assembly, which was now called the National Convention. On February 4th, the Convention heard from one of the Saint-Domingue delegates named Jean-Baptiste Belley, a former slave who had purchased his freedom (2,140). He asked the Convention to abolish slavery. What happened next shows how much the revolutionary Assembly slash Convention had changed over the years. A member named Levasseur rose and said that because the revolution had not granted political rights to black people in the colonies earlier, they should undo that wrong by making that consideration now. They should abolish slavery, and to help atone for the wrongs of the past, they should pass the motion of abolition without debate. CLR James picks up the description from here, and I like it so I’m using it: quote “The Assembly rose in acclamation. The two deputies of color appeared on the tribune and embraced while the applause rolled round the hall from members and visitors.” (2,140) That was it. The Convention passed a motion which quote, “declares slavery abolished throughout all the colonies: consequently, it decrees that all men, without distinction of color, domiciliated in the colonies, are French citizens, and entitled to the enjoyment of all the rights secured by the Constitution.” (8,112) That was it. Slavery was abolished in Saint-Domingue. But did you catch that one bit. The motion abolished slavery “throughout all the colonies”. That meant that as a consequence of the Haitian Revolution, slavery was abolished not only in Saint-Domingue, but the entirety of the French Empire. In one go, and without debate. Snap. Done. Slavery abolished. That leads me to reason number four I think you should find Haiti’s Revolution interesting. Think about it: the abolition of slavery in a snap. Done. Think of the implications for other places in 1794 with slavery. Might the enslaved people in those places consider revolting as well, perhaps in hope of extracting the abolition of slavery from their governments? What large slave population was near Saint-Domingue? Why, look. It’s the brand new United States of America. Haiti’s slave revolt started in 1791, so that was towards the beginning of the Washington presidency. In the wake of the rebellion, American coastal towns and cities received more migrants and refugees from Saint-Domingue than any other region, and enslaved people in the US were able to put together what was going on through these arrivals, and through second hand newspapers accounts (11). The tumultuous events lasted through the Administration of John Adams, and then well into the Jefferson presidency. Inevitably, the 18th-century news cycles and the arrival of people churned American society, particularly in the South. If you’ll recall, the French assisted the US quite decisively during the struggle for independence from England, and so when France asked the US to send aid to Saint-Domingue as a means of restoring order to their colony, the Washington Administration complied (14). You’ll notice the irony of a former colony which had freed itself from the shackles of empire - now helping a different empire keep the literal shackles on subjects. But as both Washington and his Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson were slave owners, their intermittent assistance in trying to keep down a slave rebellion was nonetheless unsurprising. After the slave revolt was successful, and slavery ended on Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture rose to power in the colony. Though he pledged allegiance to the French as they had ended slavery, he operated rather independently. When President Adams took over in the US, he flirted with Louverture’s quasi independent Saint-Domingue, sending a consul there to establish unofficial diplomatic ties, and to pressure the colony to declare full independence from France. The next president, Jefferson, 180-ied this policy. While Jefferson was a francophile, and was therefore excited about the French Revolution from its onset, he was less enthusiastic about the whole ‘abolition of slavery’ part. Once president of the US starting in 1801, Jefferson pursued a policy of isolation for Haiti, attempting to cut them off from aid and trade out of fear the revolt mentality would be exported to enslaved people in the United States. And before talking about whether that mentality did export, a notion that we’ll get to, I think it’s worth dwelling on the motif of fear. Because I think if you had to encapsulate the American reaction to Haiti’s slave revolt and eventual independence as a black republic in a single word, that word would be fear. News of Saint-Domingue spread far and wide in American newspapers, and slave owners were terrified that that revolt would lead to an insurrection 800 miles north of the French colony. Every southern state passed laws in the wake of the events of Saint-Domingue (14,107). Some were preoccupied with stopping the spread of information, censoring news from the revolt; others tried to stop to the arrival of former slaves from Saint-Domingue that might inspire others. Source 14 below from Alfred N. Hunt has a decent rundown of reaction and laws in South and North Carolina, Georgia , Maryland, and Virginia. He points out a fearful white who lamented that, quote “God will raise up a Toussaint or a Spartacus against us…” (14,114). Suppressed insurrections in Louisiana and Virginia years later were attributed to inspiration from the events in Saint-Domingue. The 500-rebel incident in Louisiana in 1811 was notable, because in the aftermath, a free man of color from Saint-Domingue was identified as a ringleader (14,187). The attempted rebellion was the one of the largest in American History (16). Supposed plots were uncovered across the country, creating an atmosphere of hysteria. One planter complained of quote creeping in among slaves (14,114). Because much of our info comes second-hand through whites, it’s hard to know exactly what reaction was among enslaved people, but it’s certain that news made it to plantations across the south. A more recent mass published work by Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind, addresses the reaction of people of color, enslaved and free, throughout the New World to the Haitian Revolution. Scott references a number of newspapers started in the United States to cater to those interested in the events in Saint-Domingue, many of them published by Haitian diaspora, and highlights the communication networks that underpinned those papers, including writing and sourcing from people of color. In a letter Scott found, a young enslaved woman who had traveled to Saint-Domingue from Baltimore with her “Master” reported to her mother that the colony had a dearth of white people, and the people of color were demanding liberty, though she described all this as quote “troublesome” (14,197). The point is, though we don’t often hear their voices or read their words directly, enslaved people in North America were aware and influenced by what occured in Saint-Domingue. And once again, just as Scott writes that the events in Saint-Domingue “inspired slaves in the United States,” and that’s undoubtedly true. It’s also important, again, to just reiterate that hearing of freedom doesn’t suddenly create the notion of freedom. Enslaved people resisted American slavery before and after Saint-Domingue. Oh and one more thing relating to the United States. The Louisiana Purchase was a direct result of the Haitian Revolution. When Napoleon failed to retake control of Saint-Domingue and reimpose slavery, he decided it was time to consider pawning off another batch of French territory across the Atlantic. Though a bunch of the Louisiana purchase was only nominally controlled by the French, President Jefferson was keen to expand his vision of a small-farmer nation to a doubled territory. Now every school kid in the US learns about the Louisiana Purchase, but how many of them know the people they could thank for the biggest bit of ‘Manifest Destiny’ were two freedmen named Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Reason #5: You aren’t supposed to think about Haiti’s Revolution, because the creation of the first black republic made up of former slaves was the ‘unthinkable revolution’. (13) In 1995, Michel-Rolph Trouillot published a book titled, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Its pages not only focus on Haiti, but on the generation of historical work itself. How do events become the stories we tell each other about the past, as amateurs or as professionals? For example, was the battle of the Alamo a righteous last stand of liberty-inspired Texans? Or was it a strategic defeat of whites cynically moved onto Mexican territory to cause trouble, and be eventually annexed into the United States? Events occur, but history is, according to Trouillot, both what happened, and what is said to have happened. What literally happened, and how we interpret what happened back to ourselves. When certain events are lifted while others drop, historical silencing occurs, and that historical silencing finds its basis in fact creation, assembly, and retrieval. The whole book is influential and worth its own video. Trouillot explores the silencing of Haiti's Revolution, which begins as a contemporary silencing of reality, and ends with a lack of historical coverage. Let me explain. When the rebellion broke out in Haiti, reaction in France was disbelief. It wasn’t just concern that the news might be rumors, but a disbelief in the ability of enslaved black people to rise up. As the scale of the rebellion in the North and West became clear, Trouillot argues that observers found any explanation that worked around the disbelief: the English were meddling, the plantation owners mismanaged, the number of participants were small, there were agitators leading the slaves; anything was concievable, except for the possibility that the slaves were rebelling for their own deeper reasons. (91) A revolt of enslaved blacks was impossible, inconceivable. So Trouillot writes, “The Haitian Revolution thus entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened.” What does Trouillot mean by unthinkable? He references a definition: “that for which one has no adequate instruments to conceptualize,” (82). Political thinkers didn’t have a “frame of reference” for slaves with agency. Planters thought of slave resistance in terms of individual rogue slaves, not organized groups of them. No debates prior to the rebellion acknowledge or encourage a right to self-determination for slaves (88). After the rebellion began, debaters within the French Assembly denied it was happening, and searched for alternative explanations. (102) This denial had effects for early writings on Haiti’s Revolution, with many avoiding the word ‘revolution’ altogether. When the reality of a black uprising isn’t conceivable, deny it. When it grows, explain it away. When it sticks, ignore it. When it’s history, make it a footnote, a blip. And the key here is that this is implicit bias, not necessarily active. The denial of slave agency is insidious, not molded. It is not that thinkers of the time should have conceived of the equality of all men and chose not to, it’s that they could not conceive of the equality of all men. Quote “How does one write the history of the impossible?” The way Saint-Domingue’s revolution was described was like limiting a discussion of seafaring to the port and starboard sides of a ship, when ocean currents abound. The ‘unthinkable’ revolution led to a literal lack of thinking about Haiti’s History in the Western world. (15). And if even the professionals and experts weren’t seeing it as important, how was the information supposed to get out to people like you and me? The fact we don’t hear much about Haiti’s Revolution is rooted in this historical silencing. Trouillot points to this: “If some events cannot be accepted even as they occur, how can they be assessed later?” (73) Even when I revisit my own writing earlier in this script, I wonder if I’ve given enough agency to the ‘unthinkable’ rebelling slaves. My first instinct is to look for that Declaration of Independence equivalent. Where is the written evidence signed in a decorative hall that the enslaved of Saint-Domingue wanted to be part of an Atlantic enlightenment revolution, wanted to be free and equal? But if the inalienable rights of the enlightenment are true, they don’t need to be written down. Humanity’s desire for freedom is as implicit as our bias not to see it. There’s another blind spot I’d like to touch on. If you’ll allow me to remove my impassioned academic hat and put on an editorial cap. I’m interested in Haiti for selfish reasons. Learning about Haiti has also allowed me to see aspects of my own enlightenment Atlantic revolution, the American Revolution, more clearly - perhaps get past juvenile narratives entrenched deep through grade school. When the white planter class on Saint-Domingue learned of the Declaration of the Rights of Man from Mainland France, they simply sought to apply the principles within to their own interests. Notions of equality applied to white property owners, allowed for their own self governing, enabled them to shed the colonial authority to reinforce their own racial status quo, a status quo which by my personal measure was a moral abomination; how could anyone look at a top-heavy slave society with a 7-year life expectancy in the cane fields and declare otherwise? The planters in Saint-Domingue protected their interest through lofty ideals. And yet when I look at the history of my own country, I tend to ignore the obvious. The American founders also compromised at the writing of the Constitution to protect their landed interests, not only excluding non-landed whites, but maintaining the racial status quo in the American South. And they wrapped it in the pretty packaging of the enlightenment. “All men are created equal,” wrote the slaveholder who produced children by sexually assaulting his property. Isn’t it obvious what’s going on? Why is it so hard to shed the fairytale version? I’m obviously going to an extreme to make a point, I’m editorializing. Look back at the content on this channel, and you’ll find more subtle approaches to the founders and their documents. But the dynamic remains for me, personally: learning about Haiti allowed me to see parallels, to poke holes in stories I’ve internalized. It’s a part of my journey, and maybe now your interest is peaked, and it can be part of yours. Later yall.