Pandemonium in Paradise
Lothrop Stoddard’s The French Revolution in San Domingo

3,181 words

Never have we had a more livid moment in the history of global race relations than in the former French colony of San Domingo. Today it is known as Haiti, an impoverished and volatile basket case of a nation, which is not coincidentally run by sub-Saharan blacks. How it got this way after being “gem of the West Indies” over two centuries ago is the topic of Lothrop Stoddard’s gripping 1914 history The French Revolution in San Domingo (available for free download here). If there ever was a history tailored specifically for white people, this is it. It’s not merely a cautionary tale demonstrating the perils of ignoring racial differences. It also recounts a painfully teachable moment from history in which white Europeans flew too close to the Sun in their arrogance and paid for it dearly. Although Stoddard never relinquishes a historian’s objectivity, he paints this history as a series of missed opportunities for whites to make up for their sins and mistakes which ultimately ended in the most abhorrent tragedy. Between the lines he implies that whites are on a special path, that we could have done better. It didn’t have to end this way.

In his preface, Stoddard describes the events in San Domingo in the 1790s as “the first great shock between the ideals of white supremacy and race equality.” But trouble truly began years earlier when the white colonists bristled at the French Crown’s control over their affairs. As part of that age’s zeitgeist, they called for lower taxes, fewer trade restrictions, and “a republican liberty.” Ironically, they would get just that with the French Revolution, which also issued their death warrant. After all, the Crown’s insistence upon the color line and slavery had been the one thing keeping them alive. Once Robespierre and his ilk abolished both in the name of freedom and equality, life for whites in San Domingo became dangerous to say the least.

Yet it is difficult to sympathize too much with the white colonists of San Domingo. For one, their presence on the island was mostly mercantile; they were less interested in building a great civilization than in making money for themselves. Stoddard reports that the colonial government had been rife with “disorder, wastefulness, and graft,” and that many a colonist’s fortune had been “amassed by very shady practices.” Further, he has little regard for the poor whites of the colony, whom he refers to as “a vicious rabble of adventurers” and “the scum of France.” Not only were a significant portion of these people criminals, but their brutal maltreatment of blacks and mulattoes “did much to envenom the race question.” Still, San Domingo remained extremely profitable, and with the advent of king sugar in the 18th century, the colony became the Empire’s prized possession. Unfortunately, this led to an astounding level of opulence among wealthy colonials, which provoked envy and bitterness among white, black, and brown alike.

Secondly, this profitability was derived entirely from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Slavery, which Stoddard refers to as an “evil institution,” had wiped out the white middle class in San Domingo after it had established itself in small holdings during the previous century. This ended any real efforts to form a unified people among the colonists. Instead of elevating the blacks, slavery in many cases degraded the whites since, as a contemporaneous observer states, “by contact with these primitive beings, they necessarily absorbed much of these people’s nature, defects, and vices.” As for the blacks, Stoddard reports that by the time of the French Revolution there were thousands of “free negroes,” a significant portion of whom owned property and slaves themselves. So slavery in San Domingo may have been less repressive than in other parts of the world. But with the stultifying tropical climate, constant threat of disease, and unrelenting toil, conditions were so bad that slaves could not be relied upon to produce issue themselves—unlike, say, in the milder confines of the antebellum South. Slaves had to be continually imported from Africa, and in vast numbers.

This leads to our third reason to look askance at the whites of San Domingo: it was they themselves who turned their colony into a powder keg. By 1789, official reports estimated there were 28,000 whites, 22,000 “free colored,” and over 400,000 black slaves in the French portion of the island. What did they think was going to happen? Did they really believe that such a state of affairs could continue indefinitely? Maybe it would have without the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but Stoddard makes it clear that importing African slaves from a state of abject savagery and then allowing them to outnumber the whites nearly 15-to-1 made for a dangerous situation indeed.

The final reason is the great amount of interbreeding the white colonists did with their slaves. During the early days of the colony there were few white women, so unfortunately the colonists sought solace (or debauchery) where they could find it. But this was shortsighted on the part of both the colonists and the French government, which would have been well served to prioritize balancing the white population across the sexes. By 1789, not only did mulatto numbers nearly equal those of whites’, but they had formed their own caste, fully apart from the castes of their progenitors. Many of these people had been educated in Europe where they absorbed the Enlightenment ideas percolating there at the time. The color line predictably engendered tremendous mulatto resentment towards the whites, while their contempt for the blacks—whether free or not—often superseded that of the whites. Even during the direst of troubles, the mulattoes never formed lasting alliances with either the whites or the blacks. Although Stoddard does not state this explicitly, my reading of The French Revolution in San Domingo leads me to conclude that interbreeding between whites and blacks is an abomination, in part because the vast genetic differences between the two irrevocably cuts generations apart from one another.

Despite pervasive miscegenation in San Domingo, however, the whites, almost to a man, abided by the color line when it came to marriage and title. They were quite fanatical about it given the obvious racial differences on display. Stoddard offers plenty of contemporaneous observations regarding inferior black intelligence, morality, and industry. As an official document of the time stated, “[T]he slave must thus see that his color is ordained to servitude, and that nothing can make him his master’s equal.” This was the iron law of the land, and when the French usurpers in Paris insisted upon abolishing it, the whites of San Domingo rose up in furious rebellion. Not only this, the mulattoes, encouraged by the storming of the Bastille in 1789, led separate uprisings against the colonial authorities. Stoddard’s brisk reporting of the head-spinning chaos which followed reveals how in times of crisis, different races cannot rely on one another.

But this was merely the beginning. In May 1791, the French government decreed political equality for some of the San Domingo mulattoes. This was followed months later by full equality for them as well as for free blacks. While the colonists were distracted dealing with these changes as well as each other and the mulatto uprisings and the French authorities charged with enforcing these decrees, the blacks launched a major rebellion surrounding Le Cap in the colony’s northern region. Stoddard does not spare us the details.

The scattered white population of the plantations could offer no resistance. The men were at once killed, often with every species of atrocity, while the unfortunate white women were violated — frequently upon the very bodies of their husbands, fathers, and brothers. The full horror of the situation was soon brought home to the people of Le Cap itself. A reconnoitering party of National Guards which ventured a little way out into the Plain was suddenly overwhelmed in the half-light of dawn by a horde of negroes whose ghastly standard was the impaled body of a white child: only two or three of the soldiers escaped to carry the dreadful tidings. Within a few days the whole of the great North Plain was to be only a waste of blood and ashes.

Having read all of The French Revolution in San Domingo, I can almost look back at this passage—which is at the book’s 40 percent mark—and view it as quaint. A mere 2,000 whites had been massacred in two months before many more blacks and mulattoes met the same fate in retribution. This is a but drop in the bucket of blood that was about to be filled to the brim.

For the next hundred pages Stoddard offers a gruesome account of warfare, torture, arson, terror, rape, and starvation, which is interrupted only by scenes in France in which the revolutionaries, and later Napoleon, only make things worse. And there are no innocent sides in Stoddard’s accounting. Once the blacks and mulattoes had a taste of the equality and freedom spilling from continental quills, they could not resist. And they fought each other as hard as they fought the whites. They enslaved each other as well. True, they were in a bad position to begin with, and the whites were no angels, but instigating a war of all against all ultimately harmed them as much as it harmed the whites—because no quarter was given anywhere. Also, it soon became clear that they were not seeking freedom and equality as the naïve and ideologically minded Jacobins had supposed—they were seeking to dominate racial outgroups as thoroughly as possible. Slavery in San Domingo was abominable, no doubt, but Stoddard reveals that the conflagration which followed was infinitely worse.

In the book’s latter half, Stoddard focuses on three figures who perhaps had the greatest impact on the course of events in San Domingo. Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, whom Stoddard paints as a villain, was the unscrupulous civil commissioner sent to the colony along with 6,000 troops to enforce the above decrees. He was instructed to use the most vigorous measures to crush white resistance and ensure that “mulattoes and free negroes are everywhere not only voters but candidates as well.” This he did, with maximum ruthlessness and Machiavellian acumen. Sonthonax then quickly allowed himself to be corrupted. He lived extravagantly. He ruled the northern region of San Domingo through outright terror. He pampered himself with public funds. Most odiously, this overweening petty dictator surrounded himself exclusively with mulattoes, which included numerous mistresses. Essentially, Sonthonax took up the mulatto cause, which only solidified the racial divide in the colony.

Stoddard describes:

For while there were a good many genuine Royalists among the mulattoes, the race question so overshadowed politics with the bulk of the caste that Sonthonax’s ultraradical measures were fast bringing the mulattoes to see that they had more to gain from the Commissioners than from their white Confederate allies. And, conversely, Sonthonax’s treatment of the Northern whites had roused such terror throughout the colony that the whites of the West felt they must sink every political difference before a peril which menaced their very existence.

After Sonthonax’s commissioners allowed thousands of black guerrillas (whom Stoddard refers to as “howling savages”) sack and burn Le Cap and slaughter its white inhabitants, Sonthonax emancipated all blacks in his jurisdiction. He also replaced the mulattoes in his entourage with pureblood blacks, which alienated the mulattoes. If he thought this move would endear the blacks to the Republic, he was in for a rude awakening since it only increased social disorder—especially along the black-mulatto axis. It also decreased popular respect for Sonthonax himself. Stoddard ends this episode’s chapter with a shiftless black announcing that for 50 portugaises he would murder Sonthonax within the hour.

Perhaps the most famous actor in the dramatis personae of the decline and fall of San Domingo is François-Dominique Toussaint, otherwise known as Toussaint “Louverture.” As a military leader, this full-blooded black seems to be 15 IQ points higher than every black and brown in the colony. He knew when to be cruel and when to be merciful; he knew when to attack and when to bide his time; he knew when to keep his word and when not to. Stoddard relays a couple fascinating episodes in which Toussaint gives his mulatto opponents just enough rope to hang themselves. And they do; the difference being that the mulatto leaders took everything personally and often let their passions consume them in this game of tropical thrones. But not Toussaint. It was almost as if he was having fun.

Toussaint was unusually charismatic, which led to a cult of personality among his loyal troops and a perceived aura of invincibility among his enemies. Even some Europeans fell under his sway. He also stressed discipline and so attracted the best soldiers. And he fought like hell. Furthermore, he was a natural politician. This made him formidable indeed.

Stoddard describes this aspect of Toussaint’s character quite adroitly:

Still more noteworthy was Toussaint’s friendly attitude toward the whites. The chief cause of his rupture with Hédouville in 1798 had been his welcome of the emigres in contravention to the laws of the Republic, and ever since then he had shown increasing favor to the returned colonists. Several motives combined to influence Toussaint in favor of this policy. First of all, he realized that he needed the whites’ superior intelligence in his plans for reconstructing the shattered edifice of San Domingan society, and he also knew that in this work his white subordinates would be thoroughly trustworthy, both through lack of sympathy for the negroes and from fear of their vengeance should he be overthrown. Again, he realized that nothing would so raise his prestige among the blacks as the sight of their former masters in his service. Lastly, in case of war with France, the whites would be most valuable hostages. For all these reasons, then, the white colonists were invited to return, and all who consented to do homage to the black ruler were assured of his most gracious favor.

Stoddard’s sympathies certainly do not coincide with Toussaint’s, but in the spirit of fair play he never ceases to express high regard for this noteworthy historical figure.

The final character dominating the pages of The French Revolution in San Domingo is also the most tragic. After the fall of the revolutionaries in France and the rise of Napoleon in 1799, the French finally got serious about San Domingo. The future emperor dispatched his brother in-law Charles Leclerc to the troubled colony with around 20,000 troops in order to clean up the mess left by his enlightened predecessors. Leclerc was not to reinstate slavery, but was otherwise instructed to smash all black and mulatto resistance and return the colony to its relatively peaceful and productive state from a decade earlier.

And this Leclerc did. Victor Davis Hanson’s thesis of Western martial superiority proffered in his 2001 book Carnage and Culture plays out in the pages of The French Revolution in San Domingo. The blacks, especially under Toussaint, did fight stubbornly, but they were no match for seasoned French troops who had cut their teeth in Austria and Egypt. Despite many hardships and setbacks, Leclerc not only subdued the island within a year, but won back many of the blacks and mulattoes to the French cause. After nonstop fighting, the inhabitants of San Domingo, regardless of color, were ready to return to normal life.

Happy ending, right?

Well, it could have been. But the egomaniacal Napoleon, having learned nothing from the twin curses of slavery and globalism, re-instated slavery in all French colonies. This tragic reversal put Leclerc in an impossible situation as alliances he had painstakingly formed with the blacks and mulattoes began to crumble, causing chaos to reign once again. The blacks and mulattoes now had no reason whatsoever to trust the whites. Add to this a deadly outbreak of yellow fever and a resumption of France’s ongoing war with England, and there was nothing Leclerc could do. Since the advent of slavery in the colony, it had produced mostly cash crops and relied entirely upon imported food. With the English now blockading the island, the possibility of mass starvation had become frighteningly real. Stoddard’s penultimate chapter consists mostly of Leclerc’s increasingly desperate letters to his Corsican brother in-law, and makes for some harrowing reading.

By 1803 the French finally evacuated San Domingo, after which the blacks under the leadership of a warlord named Dessalines crushed the mulattoes and exterminated all remaining whites down to the last man, woman, and child. Even in the worst days of slavery, the whites had never been this genocidal. In an astonishing act of cold-blooded malice, Dessalines had actually invited all émigré whites to return to San Domingo where he promised them protection. And when they arrived, he slaughtered them all. This was the man who declared himself emperor and renamed his newly independent republic “Haiti.”

Stoddard vividly describes what happened, so we will never forget:

The nature of these events is well shown by the letter of a French officer secretly in Port-au-Prince at the time, who himself escaped by a miracle to the lesser evil of an English prison in Jamaica. “The murder of the whites in detail,” he writes, “began at Port-au-Prince in the first days of January, but on the 17th and 18th March they were finished off en masse. All, without exception, have been massacred, down to the very women and children. Madame de Boynes was killed in a peculiarly horrible manner. A young mulatto named Fifi Pariset ranged the town like a madman searching the houses to kill the little children. Many of the men and women were hewn down by sappers, who hacked off their arms and smashed in their chests. Some were poniarded, others mutilated, others ‘passed on the bayonet,’ others disemboweled with knives or sabres, still others stuck like pigs. At the beginning, a great number were drowned. The same general massacre has taken place all over the colony, and as I write you these lines I believe that there are not twenty whites still alive — and these not for long.”

Despite the grisly nature of the narrative, The French Revolution in San Domingo is one of the most entertaining histories I have ever read. One hundred and ten years have done nothing to diminish the directness and poignancy of Stoddard’s prose. He wastes almost no words, recounts the events as evenhandedly as possible, and even ends each chapter with a cliffhanger. My only caveat is that Stoddard requires a certain literacy regarding French Revolution. For example, when casually referring to “Thermidor” he assumes the reader knows that Robespierre had been guillotined in the French month of Thermidor in 1794. When he refers to someone called the “First Consul,” he means Napoleon, who held that position from 1799 until he crowned himself emperor in 1804. But Lothrop Stoddard makes it so any amount of research would be worth it—for in The French Revolution in San Domingo he has written a chapter in the history of the white race in the New World which is as crucial and instructive as it is tragic.