In 1791 the enslaved revolted in Saint Domingue. Their uprising culminated in emancipation from enslavement and independence from the French Empire in 1804. The most consequential and impactful revolution of enslaved people in the Atlantic world, the Haitian Revolution shaped how planters and pro-slavery intellectuals, abolitionists, and colonial bureaucrats analyzed and represented the possibilities, promises, and pitfalls of abolition despite conceiving of enslavement and emancipation in considerably different terms.Footnote 1
Heeding Ada Ferrer’s suggestion to “explore the ways in which Haiti was talked about as it was created,” this article analyzes how nineteenth-century representations of the Haitian Revolution sparked ambivalent and limited liberal abolitionist imaginaries by engaging Harriet Martineau’s writings on revolutionary Saint Domingue.Footnote 2 Born in 1802 in Norwich, England, Martineau became one of the most prominent women writers and abolitionists in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Her writings include the article “Account of Toussaint L’Ouverture” (1838) and the historical novel The Hour and the Man (1841). The latter became the most influential novel about the Haitian Revolution in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.Footnote 3
Foregrounding political-economic issues in Martineau’s work, I contend that her representation of the Haitian Revolution advanced liberal abolitionist projects. For liberal abolitionists like Martineau, emancipation should transform the enslaved in an orderly way into free laborers who would work in plantations and sell their labor on the market in exchange for wages. Writing about the Haitian Revolution, Martineau contended that it was an emancipation process that successfully maintained order and stability in the post-emancipation plantation economy under the leadership of the statesman Toussaint Louverture. In her account, Louverture’s government increased Saint Domingue’s economic prosperity by providing a labor supply for sugar cultivation, protecting planters’ landownership, expanding profitable trade networks, and instilling labor discipline in cultivateurs.
Analyzing Martineau’s account of the political economy of revolutionary Saint Domingue, I argue that she disavowed the conflict between Louverture’s use of state coercion to force cultivateurs to labor in plantations and cultivateurs’ demands to obtain provision grounds. A “disavowal,” explains Sibylle Fischer, “becomes productive, generating further stories, further screens that hide from view what must not be seen.”Footnote 4 Borrowing from Fischer’s claims about political thinkers in the Atlantic world at once acknowledging and concealing the realization of freedom and racial equality in the Haitian Revolution, I emphasize how Martineau obscured the coercive mechanisms with which the Louverture regime forced cultivateurs to work in sugar production after abolition. Using the category of disavowal allows me to trace how Martineau denied the revolutionary dimensions of Haitian emancipation and instead made it a referent for liberal abolitionist projects that sought to end enslavement without disrupting plantation production. Namely, Martineau stressed that cultivateurs accepted and supported Louverture’s project, transforming them into free laborers working in the capitalist sugar industry. Denying cultivateurs’ efforts to leave plantations and subsist autonomously outside planters’ and the state’s control, Martineau conceived of the Haitian Revolution as an exemplary state-managed emancipation process. This conception rejected the importance of cultivateurs’ revolutionary agency in resisting the continuation of coercive sugar cultivation under the novel free-labor regime.
Exploring political-economic issues in Martineau’s writings on the Haitian Revolution, this paper contributes to scholarship examining her abolitionism. Deborah Anna Logan contends that moral principles anchored the abolitionism of Martineau, who thought that “the progressive moral and ethical evolution of humanity” necessitated “immediate, universal emancipation.”Footnote 5 However, other scholars have highlighted how Martineau did not frame her abolitionism solely in moral terms but tied it to her work as a political economist. Cora Kaplan suggests that Martineau “drew heavily on the stadial theories of civilization so key to T. R. Malthus and [Adam] Smith,” to frame abolition as a requirement for political-economic development.Footnote 6 Drawing on Kaplan’s work, I investigate how Martineau criticized enslavement as an unproductive, unprofitable, and inefficient organization of labor that relied on low-quality workers and kept plantation economies stagnant. In contrast, she insisted that a process of state-managed emancipation, like the Haitian Revolution, would bolster sugar production. Transforming the enslaved into disciplined and motivated free laborers would make the plantation economy prosperous, productive, and profitable. My analysis of Martineau’s representation of the Haitian Revolution therefore underscores how political-economic issues, rather than moral principles, grounded her abolitionism.
Attending to Martineau’s writings on the Haitian Revolution, this article furthermore expands scholarship that has analyzed “the conflicts between different visions of Haiti” developed by nineteenth-century political thinkers in the Atlantic world.Footnote 7 For Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “the Haitian Revolution was unthinkable in its time” for European political thinkers, whose categories failed to grasp how the enslaved engaged in revolutionary action.Footnote 8 Without discounting unthinkability, Susan Buck-Morss notes that some “eighteenth-century Europeans were thinking about the Haitian Revolution,” pointing to how Hegel saw Haitian emancipation as the universal realization of freedom.Footnote 9 Turning to the Americas and the Caribbean, scholars have noted how planters and pro-slavery intellectuals feared that the example of Haitian revolutionaries would animate the enslaved elsewhere to fight for emancipation, ruin plantation economies, and engage in racial violence.Footnote 10 Different from planters’ and pro-slavery intellectuals’ fear, Adom Getachew notes that Haitian revolutionaries “pointed to another vision of freedom” that enriched and expanded abolitionism transnationally through “the collective autonomy of sovereignty” and “a transnational empire of liberty.”Footnote 11 Indeed, Julius S. Scott has shown how black abolitionists built transnational communication networks joining Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean to spread the Haitian Revolution’s influence and demonstrate black people’s capacities for freedom and self-determination.Footnote 12
Expanding this scholarship’s focus on how conflicting representations of the Haitian Revolution shaped conceptions of emancipation in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, this article analyzes Martineau’s writings to uncover a distinct way of thinking about revolutionary Saint Domingue. Specifically, I show how Martineau’s representation of the Haitian Revolution advanced a liberal abolitionist project that pointed to the possibility of ending enslavement and maintaining a stable labor supply to continue producing and trading sugar. By elaborating representations of revolutionary Saint Domingue that often stood in for the historical revolution itself, liberal abolitionists provided ideological foundations to conceptions of emancipation as a state-managed process that would transform the enslaved into free laborers without disrupting capitalist plantation production. Although this paper focuses on how liberal abolitionists represented the Haitian Revolution, it traces connections and differences with views of this revolution held by pro-slavery thinkers and abolitionists for whom emancipation should realize cultivateurs’ self-determination and autonomy from the plantation economy.
This article proceeds in three sections and a conclusion. In the first section, I introduce Martineau’s abolitionism and her work as a political economist by discussing the short story “Demerara” (1832) and Society in America (1837). The second section contextualizes Martineau’s writings on the Haitian Revolution and foregrounds her representation of Louverture as a statesman with admirable military and political leadership who rejected excessive violence. In the third section, I analyze how Martineau disavowed the tensions between Louverture’s use of state coercion to sustain agricultural capitalism and cultivateurs’ efforts to work for themselves in provision grounds. To conclude, I underscore the ideological and political-economic ambivalences and limits of how liberal abolitionists represented the Haitian Revolution and conceived of emancipation.
Harriet Martineau, liberal political economy, and abolitionism
Harriet Martineau was born in 1802 in Norwich, England, into a wealthy Unitarian family and, with her seven siblings, enjoyed access to education in schools and with tutors. It was precisely in class with one of her tutors that Martineau first encountered political economy in lessons about the national debt. Yet Martineau only started studying political economy systematically in 1827, first reading Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy and then the works of major authors, such as Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, James Mill, and Adam Smith. Motivated by her interests in and knowledge of political economy, Martineau wrote Illustrations of Political Economy between 1832 and 1834 with her brother James’s assistance.Footnote 13 A nine-volume work that explained the core tenets of liberal political economy, Martineau wrote it in the format of short stories, rather than as a social-scientific tract, for two reasons. First, women in nineteenth-century Britain were supposed to write in genres such as fiction that appealed to passion, while men wrote more “seriously” about history and political economy. Second, Martineau sought to make political economy accessible to the middle-class English, who understood a short story but not the discipline’s specialized language.Footnote 14 In Britain, Illustrations received glowing reviews, sold fast, and elevated Martineau’s intellectual stature and popularity. The first two thousand copies sold in ten days and total sales reached roughly ten thousand copies.Footnote 15
In the second volume of Illustrations, Martineau included the short story “Demerara” to narrate the return of Alfred and Mary Bruce, the children of a planter, to the British colony of Demerara after spending several years in England. Writing about enslaved labor in the British Caribbean, Martineau drew on Adam Smith to highlight how transforming the enslaved into free workers improved their laboring capacities.Footnote 16 For Smith, “a slave … who can acquire nothing but his maintenance, consults his own ease by making the land produce as little as possible over and above that maintenance.”Footnote 17 Echoing Smith, Martineau argued that enslaved workers were unproductive, costly, and prone to stealing, therefore reducing the productivity and profitability of plantation labor. In societies “where the labourer is held as capital, the capitalist not only pays a much higher price for an equal quantity of labour, but also for waste, negligence, and theft, on the part of the labourer.”Footnote 18 An unproductive and costly labor force rendered plantation economies stagnant. The land remained undeveloped and the population failed to increase. The character of Alfred explained that “the country, cultivated as it is, looks uninhabited. No villages, no farm-houses! Only a mansion here and there, seemingly going to decay, with a crowd of hovels near it.”Footnote 19 Martineau underscored how planters received little benefit from enslaved laborers despite importing them to cultivate sugar. Plantations were poorly maintained and sites for settlement did not exist. For Martineau, enslaved workers’ low-quality laboring capacities meant that their labor neither created nor sustained a productive economy.
Martineau, however, did not think that enslaved workers were inherently inferior, instead arguing in “Demerara” that their laboring capacities would improve if employed like free laborers. Arguably, Martineau shared in a key assumption held by liberal political economists and abolitionists in the 1830s, who thought that wages would incentivize black laborers to work productively like their white counterparts.Footnote 20 Debating about transforming the enslaved into wage laborers in the Anglo-Caribbean, British abolitionists employed what Seymour Drescher calls “the experimental metaphor … to convey the implication of a tightly controlled protocol” of emancipation.Footnote 21 British abolitionists expected that the imperial state would control the experiment of West Indian emancipation, incentivizing the formerly enslaved to act rationally, develop new needs, and become free laborers in sugar plantations. Although the results of abolition, as of any experiment, could not be predetermined, British abolitionists insisted that a controlled transition from enslavement to wage labor would benefit labor and capital. Black laborers would earn high wages and planters and merchants would capture more profits from sugar cultivation and trade.Footnote 22
Adopting the experimental metaphor and speaking to its debates in “Demerara,” Martineau narrated how Alfred carried out an experiment in Mr Mitchelson’s plantation. Alfred employed the enslaved in conditions reminiscent of free labor to improve their laboring performance. If “the main feature of Alfred’s plan was to pay wages” to black workers, he also “promised them clothing in case of their working early and late, [and] showed them the ample provision of meat, bread, and vegetable he had stored at hand.”Footnote 23 Incentivized by wages and material rewards, black laborers worked productively when Alfred carried out his experiment. Contrary to the slow and low-quality labor of other enslaved workers, “the whole gang, from Cassius down to the youngest and weakest, were as busy as bees, and from them came as cheerful a hum.”Footnote 24 For Martineau, Alfred’s experiment highlighted the advantages of free labor over enslavement, with wages and material rewards improving black workers’ productivity. Thus Martineau advanced a core political-economic tenet of liberal abolitionism: free labor is more productive and efficient than enslaved labor.
Martineau further elaborated the experimental metaphor in her 1832 article “What Shall We Do with the West Indies?”, published to complement “Demerara.”Footnote 25 This article reflected a view of British abolition as an experiment carrying out “a consciously shaped, coherent, and controlled program of social change.”Footnote 26 Martineau stated that emancipation would succeed by ensuring that “the Slaves will be free” and that “the Abolitionists will emancipate” through a process controlled by the imperial state because “nobody temporizes but the British Government, the eternal temporizer.”Footnote 27 A state-managed process, abolition would create political-economic conditions to keep the emancipated in plantations as a productive and reliable labor force serving the West Indian sugar industry. To do so, the state would appropriate unoccupied lands to prevent free black laborers from becoming peasant proprietors who would leave plantations to work for themselves. Martineau wrote, “let every acre of unappropriated land be formally taken possession of in the name of the King of England,” and, afterwards, “let the entire emancipation of the Negroes be proclaimed.” Without access to land, the formerly enslaved could not become self-subsistent but would have to work in sugar cultivation as wage laborers to subsist: “if they expect not to starve, they must sell the only merchandise they have—their labour.”Footnote 28 Martineau claimed that transforming the enslaved into productive free laborers in the Anglo-Caribbean required the state to control the experiment of emancipation and make black laborers landless and wage-dependent.
Conceiving of the emancipated as capable of becoming productive wage laborers, Martineau rejected biological views of race and held this position her entire intellectual and political life. Accordingly, she never agreed with frameworks posing black workers as inherently inferior. For instance, Thomas Carlyle insisted that black laborers were unwilling to work unless forced to do so. “If it be his [the black worker’s] own indolence that prevents and prohibits him,” then a “wiser, more industrious person” should “compel him to do the work he is fit for.”Footnote 29 Although both Carlyle and Martineau stressed the importance of labor discipline, Martineau found Carlyle’s racist ideology unconvincing. In a letter to her cousin Henry Reeve, she stated that “one might easily show him [William Rathbone Greg] & Carlyle negroes considerably less ‘savage’ than themselves.”Footnote 30 Martineau even asserted publicly her view that black workers could improve their laboring performance when Carlyle’s racist ideology enjoyed immense influence and popularity in 1860s Britain.Footnote 31 Writing about the US Civil War, she noted that northerners found impressive “how well and diligently they [the emancipated] worked under the stimulus of pay.”Footnote 32 For Martineau, wages incentivized the formerly enslaved to work productively.
Following the publication of Illustrations, Martineau embarked on a trip to the United States between 1834 and 1836, visiting states in the North, South, and West (present-day Midwest). Holding publicly known antislavery views due to the popularity of Illustrations, Martineau visited a slave society for the first time in the South. She also met with planters, colonizationists, and abolitionists, from whom she gained insights about the two main projects to end enslavement: sending black workers to Liberia or transforming them into free laborers and citizens.Footnote 33 Observing enslavement in the US South, Martineau echoed claims she made in “Demerara.” She suggested that undeveloped conditions in southern plantation production evinced how enslavement rendered black workers idle, unmotivated, and unskilled. In the South, “the depression of agriculture is only temporary, I believe. It began from slavery, and is aggravated by the opening of the rich virgin soils of the south-west.” Contrary to enslaved workers’ use of low-quality methods that deteriorated farmlands, Martineau insisted that “improved methods of tillage, with the advantage of free labour, will renew the prosperity of Virginia, and North and South Carolina.”Footnote 34 Echoing her claims in “Demerara,” Martineau suggested that Southern agricultural production would improve if the enslaved became free workers.
Despite the similarities between Martineau’s political-economic analyses of enslaved labor in “Demerara” and in Society in America, her views on ending enslavement changed from colonization to abolitionism while she was in the US. In “Demerara,” Martineau supported colonization, conveying this point in a conversation between Alfred and his father. Alfred said, “we planters take upon ourselves the expense of transportation, and the society receives our free blacks under the protection of its agent at Liberia,” where “they will labour, and prosper and be happy.”Footnote 35 Before traveling to the United States, Martineau thought that projects to transport enslaved workers from the Americas and the Caribbean to West Africa would successfully transform them into happy, productive, and industrious free laborers.
However, she enthusiastically embraced abolition and rejected colonization while visiting the US, echoing a broader move made by Anglo-Atlantic abolitionists who shifted from gradualism to immediatism after 1830. For Anglo-Atlantic abolitionists, immediatism prevented planters from abusing gradual measures such as colonization to control black workers and ensured that the evil of enslavement would end promptly.Footnote 36 Martineau’s turn to abolitionism while in the US also reflected US abolitionists’ increasing agitation. In the US, abolitionists saw British emancipation as an ideal example for popularizing the abolition of enslavement among the US public. Moreover, US abolitionists followed news and accounts about Anglo-Caribbean emancipation to note how the end of enslavement was orderly and peaceful.Footnote 37 Martineau, of course, knew that the US public paid attention to British emancipation and recounted to Lord Durham how “our experiment in the West Indies is being watched with intense interest” in the US.Footnote 38
Immersed in that context, Martineau committed to abolitionism in 1835 after attending meetings organized by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS). Persuaded by US abolitionists’ positions to end enslavement immediately and transform the enslaved into free workers and citizens, Martineau became one of the movement’s leading figures in the Anglo-Atlantic world. In Society in America, Martineau underscored her abolitionist commitments by emphasizing its superiority over colonization. “The scheme of transporting the coloured population of the United States to the coast of Africa is absolutely absurd” because it “would carry away the labourers” and leave the southern states without a labor force for plantations.Footnote 39 In contrast, “abolition would not only leave the land as full of labourers as it is now, but incalculably augment the supply of labour by substituting … the forced, inferior labour, and wasteful arrangements which are always admitted to be co-existent with slavery” for free laborers.Footnote 40 In Martineau’s view, abolition provided a more plausible solution to the issue of enslavement than colonization. Abolishing enslavement guaranteed the southern plantation economy a labor supply of motivated, productive, and industrious free black workers, while colonization would deplete the labor force and destabilize agricultural production in the South.
Supporting immediate emancipation, Martineau shared similar views with black radical abolitionists like Robert Wedderburn. Inspired by the Haitian Revolution, Wedderburn encouraged black and white workers to engage in a transatlantic revolution that would end enslavement and proletarianization immediately.Footnote 41 He wrote, “the fermentation will be universal” because “they [the enslaved] will slay man, woman, and child, and not spare the virgin, whose interest is connected with slavery.”Footnote 42 Despite sharing immediatist positions, Martineau and Wedderburn viewed the process and effects of abolition in different terms. For Martineau, ending enslavement immediately would introduce a capitalist wage labor market to provide the US plantation economy with a motivated, reliable, and productive free black labor force. In contrast, Wedderburn encouraged the emancipated to keep “possession of the land you now possess as slaves … for if once you give up the possession of your lands, your oppressors will have power to starve you to death.”Footnote 43 Unlike Martineau, Wedderburn claimed that the formerly enslaved should hold the land in common to escape starvation as a mechanism of labor control that planters would enact.
Transformed into an immediatist, Martineau participated in Boston abolitionist circles, where she became interested in the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint Louverture. She claimed that “Dr [Charles] Follen,” an abolitionist and Harvard professor, “first fixed my attention on this Man [Toussaint L’Ouverture].”Footnote 44 Even more, Martineau regularly read the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. Edited by William Lloyd Garrison, this newspaper published articles favorable to the Haitian Revolution and Louverture, including one that recounted the July 1835 lectures of British abolitionist George Thompson in Andover, Massachusetts. Praising the Haitian revolutionaries’ and Louverture’s accomplishments, Thompson explained that under Louverture’s leadership “peace and order were restored” and “the liberated slaves were industrious and happy, and continued to work on the same plantations as before.”Footnote 45 Although Martineau did not know Thompson personally, she was aware of him and echoed his account of how Louverture kept cultivateurs in plantations to maintain order and make the island more economically prosperous.Footnote 46
Martineau encountered further references to the Haitian Revolution in the works of other Boston abolitionists such as David Walker, whose 1829 pamphlet Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World circulated widely and called for the enslaved in the US to rebel.Footnote 47 Having read Walker’s Appeal, Martineau characterized “its language” as “perfectly appalling.”Footnote 48 In Appeal, as Melvin Rogers explains, Walker contended that “African Americans must perform their freedom” to resist the domination of enslavement, servility, and ignorance.Footnote 49 A crucial dimension of Walker’s view about black Americans performing their freedom entailed embracing insurrectionism. Destroying enslavement in the US through a revolution would show black Americans’ capacity for and commitment to freedom and self-government. Walker stated that “my colour will root some of them [whites] out of the very face of the earth. They shall have enough of making slaves of, and butchering, and murdering us in the manner which they have.”Footnote 50 To illustrate his claims about black Americans needing to act as revolutionaries to become free, Walker pointed to the Haitian Revolution and encouraged black Americans to follow its example.Footnote 51 He wrote, “Hayti, the glory of the blacks and the terror of tyrants, is enough to convince the most avaricious and stupid of wretches.”Footnote 52 Unlike black Americans, Walker suggested that Haitians did not live in conditions of enslavement, ignorance, and servility to whites. Instead, Haiti elucidated how blacks had ample capacities to perform their freedom by engaging in revolutionary self-emancipation and improving their social and individual conditions.
Besides Walker’s Appeal, Martineau probably knew about Maria Stewart, another Boston abolitionist who referenced Haiti in her speeches. As Kristin Waters notes, Stewart was a friend and mentee of David Walker and possibly attended meetings organized by the BFASS in 1833, only two years before Martineau joined.Footnote 53 There, Stewart would have met one of Martineau’s closest friends, Maria Weston Chapman. Adopting black nationalist positions influential among African American abolitionists, Stewart drew inspiration from Haiti as a nation where a sovereign black people showed their ability for freedom, engaged in militance, and enjoyed independence and self-determination from European colonialism.Footnote 54 Claiming that “it is useless for us [black Americans] any longer to sit with our hands folded reproaching the whites, for that will never elevate us,” Stewart urged black Americans to stop waiting for whites to abolish enslavement and rather follow the Haitians and fight for freedom. “All the nations of the earth have distinguished themselves,” including “the Haytians, though they have not been acknowledged as a nation, yet their firmness of character and independence of spirit have been greatly admired and highly applauded.”Footnote 55 Stewart stressed that African Americans should fight as a sovereign nation like the Haitians to assert their freedom, independence, and self-determination from enslavement and racial domination.
After spending two years in the US, Martineau returned to Britain in 1836 transformed into a committed and influential Anglo-Atlantic abolitionist. Earning recognition as an “American affairs expert,” she wrote extensively about US enslavement and abolition for British journals and newspapers.Footnote 56 Importantly, Martineau continued cultivating her interests in the Haitian Revolution. She read extensively about revolutionary Saint Domingue and Louverture and in 1838 visited Fort de Joux, where he was imprisoned and died.Footnote 57 Fascinated by Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, Martineau decided to write about this historical figure and event.
The Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, and state-managed emancipation
Martineau focused on the Haitian Revolution, especially on Toussaint Louverture’s government, in two texts: the article “Account of Toussaint L’Ouverture” published in 1838 in Penny Magazine, and the two-volume historical fiction The Hour and the Man (1841). In both works, Martineau stressed that the Haitian Revolution did not amount to an enslaved uprising but was an emancipation process controlled by the state under Louverture’s command. She insisted that Louverture’s government managed a transition from enslavement to free labor that remained orderly and increased Saint Domingue’s prosperity by implementing labor policies that kept cultivateurs in plantations, protecting estates owned by planters, and curbing violence. Conceiving of the Haitian Revolution as an emancipation process that did not disrupt the plantation economy, Martineau disavowed the tensions between cultivateurs and the Louverture regime. She argued that the formerly enslaved supported Louverture’s project maintaining them as plantation laborers, thereby concealing how the state used coercion and cultivateurs resisted it and sought to become self-subsistent. Engaging in a disavowal, Martineau denied how the Haitian Revolution inspired conceptions of emancipation as a process enacting black freedom and self-determination from the capitalist plantation economy. Instead, she incorporated the Haitian Revolution into a liberal abolitionist framework that advanced a view of post-emancipation societies in which cultivateurs, while formally free, would remain under the state’s and planters’ control in the process of plantation production.
Although The Hour and the Man was a historical fiction, Martineau did not frame it as purely fictional but argued that it accurately presented the main revolutionary leaders’ actions, beliefs, personalities, and policies. To write it, Martineau consulted various historical sources about the Haitian Revolution, including the two most popular early accounts of it: Bryan Edwards’s An Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo (1797) and Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805). Martineau likewise read the Haytian Papers, a compilation edited by the abolitionist Prince Saunders that included documents written by French and Haitian military leaders and the Haitian Declaration of Independence.Footnote 58 As Martineau stated, “the portraits which have some pretension to historical truth are those of Toussaint himself, Jean Français, Christophe, Dessalines, and the other negro generals, old Dessalines, Bellair, Raymond, the French commissaries and envoys, Bayou, and Moyse.”Footnote 59 Claiming historical accuracy, Martineau praised the historical Louverture’s project to abolish enslavement while controlling cultivateurs to maintain a labor supply for sugar production. Such a process, as Jean Casimir underscores, relied on “draconian agricultural regulations … to rebuild the commodity-producing plantation system,” and necessitated the development of “a repressive apparatus” to control cultivateurs in plantations and punish those who left.Footnote 60
After its publication, The Hour and the Man became immensely popular, especially among US abolitionists who were the book’s intended audience.Footnote 61 The newspaper National Anti-slavery Standard published its first two chapters and a glowing review written by Lydia Maria Child. She “hail[ed] these volumes with grateful joy, as powerful agents in the anti-slavery reform” that showed “in an impartial, but glorious light, the much misrepresented Revolution of St. Domingo.”Footnote 62 Like Child, other US abolitionists, such as James Theodore Holly, Wendell Phillips, and William Wells Brown, among others, elaborated their representations of the Haitian Revolution influenced by The Hour and the Man.Footnote 63
In the novel, Martineau challenged negative representations of the Haitian Revolution, specifically rebuffing Bryan Edwards. Historical Survey was “useful chiefly as representing the prejudices as well as the interests of the planters.”Footnote 64 The owner of approximately 1,500 enslaved laborers in Jamaica and a Member of the British Parliament between 1796 and 1800, Edwards participated in the mission sent by the governor, the Earl of Effingham, to the city of Cap Français with aid and supplies for the French colonists after the initial uprising in 1791.Footnote 65 Writing Historical Survey six years after visiting Saint Domingue, Edwards compared the island’s political-economic conditions before and after the revolution. Edwards explained that before the revolution Saint Domingue’s plantation economy was immensely profitable and prosperous. Fertile agriculture provided “greater returns than perhaps any other spot of the same extent in the habitable globe,” and Saint Domingue’s “towns abounded in warehouses, which were filled with the richest commodities and production of Europe, and the harbours were crouded [sic] with shipping” that had a value “equal to £4,765,129.”Footnote 66 For Edwards, Saint Domingue’s productive and profitable sugar cultivation and trade generated tremendous opulence.
Yet Edwards noted that revolutionary emancipation hindered the colony’s access to profits, wealth, and markets. Haitian revolutionaries destroyed plantations, leaving the island without its key places for producing sugar. Citing the Saint Domingue Assembly leader, Edwards emphasized the devastation engendered by the revolution: “that verdure with which our fields were lately arrayed, is no longer visible; discoloured by the flames, and laid waste by the devastations of war.”Footnote 67 If the island’s plantation economy quickly fell into ruin despite its past prosperity, Edwards also insisted that Haitian insurgents remorselessly slaughtered the French population. In June 1793 “a negro chief called Macaya, with upwards of three thousand of the revolted slaves, entered the town [of Cap], and began an universal and indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children.”Footnote 68 According to Edwards, the Haitian revolutionaries ruined the prosperous sugar industry and massacred French colonists.
That Martineau criticized Edwards’s representation of the Haitian Revolution highlights its influence in discussions about emancipation in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. As Edward Rugemer notes, “Edwards’s interpretation translated into a general theory of insurrection that implicated abolitionist agitation in the origin of slave rebellion.”Footnote 69 Enslavers, especially in the US, adopted Edwards’s theory and evoked the “horrors” of Haiti to suggest that abolitionist agitation caused the 1811 Louisiana rebellion and Nat Turner’s rebellion.Footnote 70 Martineau, who met planters on her US trip, rejected this argument. Abolitionists like “Garrison … a strenuous ‘peace-man’,” are “the chief reason … why no insurrection movement has taken place in the United States.”Footnote 71 Contrary to Edwards and US planters, Martineau claimed that abolitionism prevented enslaved rebellions.
If Martineau criticized Edwards’s Historical Survey, she also found unconvincing representations of Louverture as a fickle, vicious, and untrustworthy general who was “savage in warfare, hypocritical in religion,” and “the very prince of dissemblers.” Instead, Martineau claimed that Louverture was fair, heroic, rational, and courageous: “remarkable for a singular gentleness and placability, [Louverture] ought to not be believed sanguinary from that time forward on the strength of the unsupported charges of his disappointed enemies.”Footnote 72 Praising Louverture, Martineau drew on Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti.
Charles Forsdick explains that Rainsford developed one of the initial positive representations of Louverture in Britain after visiting Saint Domingue and meeting Louverture in 1798.Footnote 73 Rainsford’s representations shifted from previous ones demonizing Louverture to admiring his character, discipline, and egalitarianism. For Rainsford, Louverture refused to participate in the initial revolutionary actions because his “heart revolted from cruelties attendant on the first burst of revenge in slaves about to retaliate their wrongs and sufferings on their owner.” Only after helping the owner of the plantation where he worked leave safely for Baltimore, Louverture “join[ed] the army of his country” and quickly “rose superior to all around him.”Footnote 74 Instead of representing Louverture as a vengeful revolutionary, Rainsford extolled him as a political and military leader who rose to a position of command based on his accomplishments, commitment, and impeccable judgment.
Echoing Rainsford, Martineau contended that Louverture bore no responsibility for the violent start of the Haitian Revolution. The character of Louverture stated that “the revolution of St. Domingo proceeded without any interference from me—a negro slave.” Rather than ascending in political rank by leading a revolution, “I associated myself with the Spaniards … who had extended protection to the loyal troops of my colour” and then “an unerring voice told me that my allegiance was thenceforward due to the [French] republic.” Fighting initially on the side of the Spanish and then with the French to abolish enslavement, “the blacks in their new condition wanted a leader” and “they chose me to lead them—to be the chief.”Footnote 75 Suggesting that Louverture had no involvement in the planning and execution of the initial revolutionary activities, Martineau explained his political importance based on his military campaigns, leadership, and skills.
For Martineau, cultivateurs and soldiers’ actions and demands, which were key to ensuring the historical Louverture’s rise to power, held little relevance except their decision to choose him as their chief with the sovereign power to lead revolutionary Saint Domingue.Footnote 76 Thus Martineau equated Louverture to a statesman, a political and military leader entrusted with sovereign command of the revolution freeing his people from enslavement. Indeed, she used this category to describe Louverture’s political standing, calling him “the great negro statesman” whose “frequent presence among the adoring people” underscored the tremendous legitimacy and support that he enjoyed.Footnote 77 As a political leader, Louverture exemplified the knowledge, reason, sovereignty, and strategy of a statesman rather than the bloodthirstiness and vengefulness of a revolutionary.
Martineau furthermore noted how Louverture found nothing agreeable in the violent acts that the Haitian revolutionaries perpetrated at the beginning of the revolution. According to Martineau, the revolutionaries ravaged sugar fields and terrorized the whites before Louverture assumed command: “it was clear that the negroes had everything in their own hands, and that the spirit roused in them was so fierce, so revengeful, as to leave no hope that they would use their power with moderation.”Footnote 78 Lacking in moderation, Haitian revolutionaries attacked planters and their families with excessive violence. Enslaved insurgents “murdered his [a planter’s] brother-in-law on Flaville’s estate, and carried off his sister and her three daughters into the woods.”Footnote 79 Despite no campaigns of mass executions of whites occurring when the revolution began, Martineau evoked physical and sexual abuse of white men and women by enslaved insurgents to suggest that Louverture responded with reprobation and disgust to racial violence.Footnote 80 His character asserted, “I look at the hell you have made of this colony between night and morning, and I say that if this be not from revenge, there must be something viler than revenge in the hearts of devils and of men.”Footnote 81 Underscoring how Louverture criticized violence, Martineau insisted that he disapproved of murdering enslavers and destroying plantations regardless of the revolution’s abolitionist aims.
Martineau, however, could not present Louverture as entirely against violence because he led military campaigns. Contending that Louverture did not rely on excessive and indiscriminate violence, Martineau explained that he only used it for self-defense against the expedition led by General Leclerc under Bonaparte’s orders to reestablish enslavement in Saint Domingue.Footnote 82 In a conversation with Euphrosyne, the granddaughter of a cruel planter, who supported the revolution, Louverture explained his position. “The bracing process of defensive warfare” would “be inevitable” and “good for my people” to prize “their liberties, thus hardly won.” For Martineau, Louverture only resorted to violence for the sake of protecting cultivateurs’ freedom, unlike Haitian revolutionaries who killed and abused planters and their families indiscriminately. Indeed, the character of Louverture rejected using violence as a mechanism of racial vengeance, finding it illegitimate and unfounded. He explained to Euphrosyne, “if, however, one stroke is inflicted for other purposes than defence—if one life is taken for vengeance, we shall be set back long and far in our career. It shall not be under my rule.”Footnote 83 Besides praising Louverture’s military leadership, statesmanship, and rejection of revolutionary violence, Martineau also stressed that his government strengthened and benefited Saint Domingue’s sugar industry.
The Haitian Revolution and the post-emancipation plantation economy
Martineau analyzed revolutionary Saint Domingue’s plantation economy by comparing its productivity and profitability before and after Louverture became the leading Black General. In this comparison, Martineau drew on three contexts that shaped British abolitionism. For one thing, as Jack Webb explains, “Haiti became a test case for those campaigning for abolition,” who in the 1820s started contending that the island’s plantation economy evinced how emancipation increased productivity and profitability due to the higher efficiency of free labor over enslavement.Footnote 84 Writing about the Haitian Revolution, Martineau echoed these abolitionist arguments, suggesting that revolutionary Saint Domingue produced and exported large amounts of sugar after emancipation.
Martineau furthermore built on influential conceptions of emancipation in 1830s and 1840s British abolitionism that highlighted the importance of the British imperial state controlling the labor of the emancipated to compel them to work in sugar plantations.Footnote 85 Similar to her article “What Shall We Do with the West Indies?”, in which she called the British imperial state the temporizer of abolition, Martineau saw the state led by Louverture as the main institution ensuring that cultivateurs would keep producing sugar in revolutionary Saint Domingue.Footnote 86 Moreover, when Martineau wrote about the Haitian Revolution in the late 1830s and early 1840s, British abolitionists and anti-abolitionists debated the prospects of sugar production in the post-emancipation West Indies. With Anglo-Caribbean sugar unable to meet British demand by 1840, planters and anti-abolitionists suggested that emancipation ruined the sugar industry and that reviving it required forcing the emancipated to return to plantations and importing indentured laborers from other parts of the world.Footnote 87 Rebutting anti-abolitionist claims, Martineau insisted that revolutionary Saint Domingue proved how emancipation benefited the sugar industry by transforming the enslaved into disciplined and efficient free laborers.
Recounting the revolution’s start in The Hour and the Man, Martineau claimed that cultivateurs vacated plantations, making them inhospitable and halting sugar cultivation. At the Breda estate, where Louverture lived and worked at the beginning of the novel, “the canefields, heretofore so trim and orderly, with the tall canes springing from the clean black soil, were now a jungle. The old plants had run up till they had leaned over with their own weight, and fallen upon one another.”Footnote 88 With sugarcane overgrown and uncared for and the plantation deserted, production at Breda stopped, indicating how the island’s sugar industry stagnated because cultivateurs withdrew their labor. In historical Saint Domingue, cultivateurs indeed left plantations during the revolution “and carved out semi-autonomous rural farms and communities” to become self-subsistent.Footnote 89 Martineau, of course, knew about these efforts to access provision grounds. In a conversation with Louverture, the revolutionary leader Jean Français confessed, “we have stopped all the mills” so that “every stream in the colony has a holyday [sic] today, and may frolic as it likes.”Footnote 90
To respond to cultivateurs’ flight from sugar estates, the historical Louverture and his government relied on state coercion retaining them in plantations. Louverture restricted cultivateurs’ freedom to control their labor by building on the policies of Étienne Polverel’s and Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, two French Jacobins and colonial administrators who decreed the abolition of enslavement in Saint Domingue in 1793. For instance, Louverture’s government upheld Polverel and Sonthonax’s policy of only recognizing the landownership of those who had bought or inherited it, most of whom were planters. Louverture also forbade selling small plots of land, ensuring that cultivateurs could not become peasant proprietors. Besides enacting policies separating the emancipated from the land, Louverture introduced wage labor in Saint Domingue by decreeing that cultivateurs should be paid to work. Yet his policies forbade the formerly enslaved from refusing to labor and introduced punishments like imprisonment and forced labor if they left plantations without authorization. When cultivateurs stopped laboring to rebel against these policies, such as in 1795 in the parish of Marmelade and in 1796 in the mountains above the town of Port-de-Paix, Louverture responded forcefully. He mobilized his soldiers, most of whom were also previously enslaved, and repressed the rebellions to restore order. Preventing cultivateurs from accessing land, compelling them to labor under threat of punishment, and repressing their uprisings forced them to continue working in the plantations where they had been enslaved.Footnote 91
Writing about the Louverture administration’s labor policies, Martineau disavowed their coercive character by concealing how state force structured the transformation of the enslaved into free workers. Engaging in a disavowal, Martineau adopted what Eduardo Grüner calls a “strategy of forgetting,” making state coercion under Louverture a matter that “one does not speak of.”Footnote 92 Crucially, disavowing how the state forcefully deprived cultivateurs of access to land and retained them in plantations allowed Martineau to insist that the enslaved in Saint Domingue easily and in an orderly manner became free workers whose labor strengthened the post-emancipation plantation economy. Martineau therefore echoed the historical Louverture’s belief that “the liberty of the blacks can be secured only by the prosperity of their agriculture.”Footnote 93 With agricultural labor securing freedom, Martineau suggested, the emancipated enthusiastically supported Louverture’s labor policies, which were intended to minimize disruption in the plantation economy by ensuring that sugar cultivation continued and that Saint Domingue remained dominant in the global sugar market.
Noting that Louverture “decreed that the former negro cultivators, though now free, should work for five years for their former masters,” Martineau stressed that cultivateurs welcomed this decree despite having to continue working in plantations. She wrote, “upon his thus pronouncing, the blacks flocked to the fields, with arms by their sides, and the hoe in their hands; and all traces of war soon disappeared.”Footnote 94 Insisting that cultivateurs immediately and obediently follow Louverture’s orders to return to their jobs, Martineau disavowed how the decree authorized using state coercion to punish the formerly enslaved who refused to cultivate sugar. The emancipated did not become free plantation laborers willfully but faced forcible restrictions enacted by the state to prevent them from engaging in subsistence agriculture. As Carolyn Fick explains, “Toussaint knew that the only way managers could obtain the requisite labor from the workers was through coercive measures.”Footnote 95 In Saint Domingue, cultivateurs did not approve, enact, and manage the introduction of free labor; it represented a coercive state-led process to procure a labor supply for sugar production.
The extensive influence of The Hour and the Man in nineteenth-century abolitionism meant that Martineau’s disavowal of Louverture’s coercive labor policies influenced how US abolitionists represented the Haitian Revolution. The abolitionist James Theodore Holly, who advocated for African American emigration to Haiti, drew on this disavowal in his 1857 lecture A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government, and Civilized Progress.Footnote 96 Echoing Martineau, Holly suggested that cultivateurs supported Louverture’s decree keeping them in plantations and trusted his commitment to emancipation and efforts to sustain sugar production. “There was no other man” but Louverture that “freemen would have permitted to carry out such stringent measures in the island … which were so necessary at that time in order to restore industry” and had to be enacted by “one of their own caste” with “unreserved devotion to the cause of their freedom.” For Holly, Louverture’s measures were stringent but uncoercive, with cultivateurs agreeing to them rather than facing state coercion to work in sugar plantations. Louverture thus was “the very man for the hour,” capable of both abolishing enslavement and providing a labor supply to the sugar industry.Footnote 97
Martineau further expanded the disavowal of coercive labor policies under Louverture’s government by lauding what she saw as their beneficial economic effects. In a conversation between the characters of Louverture and his former owner, Bayou, who had regained control of Breda after returning to Saint Domingue from Baltimore, the Black General ordered Bayou to “show us what can be done with the Breda estate with free labourers … Make the blacks work well, that, by the welfare of your small interests, you may add to the general prosperity of the administration of the commander-in-chief of St. Domingo.”Footnote 98 In Martineau’s view, transforming the enslaved into free laborers benefited the island materially by expanding cultivation and trade. The formerly enslaved “are all honestly cultivating the fields,” which shows “how rich the whole island is growing; and how contented, and industrious, and honest the people are.”Footnote 99 Martineau contended that Saint Domingue’s exports grew considerably with a productive free labor force increasing the amount of commodities cultivated in plantations.
Underscoring her points about growing exports, Martineau recounted how, in the town of St Marc, Jean-Jacques Dessalines saw “how busy were the wharves—how the storehouses were overflowing—how the sea was covered with merchant-ships—and how the cheerful hum of prosperous industry was heard the long day through.”Footnote 100 Although cultivateurs in historical Saint Domingue challenged state efforts forcing them to cultivate sugar for exportation, Martineau nonetheless stated that Louverture’s labor policies sustained the export-oriented plantation economy effectively. Cultivateurs worked hard, honestly, and happily, solidifying Saint Domingue’s dominant position in the global sugar market and the profitability of its plantation economy.
Suggesting that the increasing profitability and prosperity of sugar production and trade showed the commitment of the emancipated to Louverture’s political-economic project, Martineau refused to grapple with how growth in the plantation economy depended on exercising state coercion over cultivateurs. In fact, she contended that improvements in the island’s sugar exports reinforced popular support for Louverture: “the commerce of all nations visited the shores of St. Domingo under the American flag; the treasury filled; the estates flourished, and Toussaint was adored.”Footnote 101 Absent from Martineau’s account were the mechanisms of state coercion that sustained and expanded the export-oriented plantation economy by repressing cultivateurs’ efforts to subsist based on small-scale farming.
As with the disavowal of Louverture’s coercive labor policies, US abolitionists drew on Martineau’s representation of revolutionary Saint Domingue’s export-oriented plantation economy. In a speech about Louverture, Wendell Phillips noted that exports in Saint Domingue grew when he ruled the island, without mentioning the importance of state coercion in this process. Contending that Louverture declared that “the ports of St. Domingo are open to the trade of the world,” Phillips highlighted how “the commerce of the world was represented in its harbors” to emphasize the tremendous increase in sugar exports.Footnote 102 Phillips, who carried a copy of The Hour and the Man to his speaking engagements, followed Martineau in disavowing that the growth of Saint Domingue’s export-oriented plantation economy depended on the state coercing cultivateurs to continue producing sugar.Footnote 103 Aware of Phillips’s speeches, including the one on Louverture, Martineau praised them in a letter to Henry Reeve: “how very fine Wendell Phillips’s speeches are!”Footnote 104
Based on her account underscoring cultivateurs’ support for Louverture’s policies, Martineau disavowed that they revolted against his efforts to coercively control their labor. In October 1801, approximately six thousand workers in the Northern Province revolted against Louverture’s policies depriving them of land and imposing control over their labor. With General Moïse, the north’s agricultural inspector, as their spokesman, the rebels killed about three hundred whites and abandoned sugar estates where they were forced to labor. Military units commanded by Dessalines crushed the rebellion and Louverture ordered Moïse’s execution by firing squad.Footnote 105 Martineau, however, obfuscated how the Moïse uprising was a manifestation against Louverture’s coercive labor policies, instead suggesting that the rebels hated whites and wanted to remain idle. She claimed that “this new violence had for its object the few whites who were rash and weak,” with the rebels “wandering from plantation to plantation, idle and discontented.”Footnote 106 In other words, Martineau framed the rebels’ motivations in terms of racial vengeance and an abuse of freedom by equating it to vagrancy.
Martineau, of course, advanced a similar argument in her description of Moïse’s involvement in the rebellion. Rather than highlighting how Moïse sided with cultivateurs because he opposed Louverture’s restrictions on landownership and subsistence farming, she contended that he shared the rebels’ hate for the whites. Talking to Louverture’s daughter Génifrède after being captured by the army, Moïse argued that he “heard of the insufferable insolence of some of the whites out at Limbé” and “quarrel[ed] with none who avenge our centuries of wrong.”Footnote 107 According to Martineau, Moïse only wanted to avenge enslavement at the hands of the white population. This claim occluded how he supported granting cultivateurs access to provision grounds. Martineau thus denied cultivateurs’ and Moïse’s agency in opposing the Louverture regime and dismissed their resistance to Louverture’s project forcing cultivateurs to become wage-dependent laborers in the post-emancipation sugar industry.
Besides disavowing the coercive character of Louverture’s labor policies and that cultivateurs rebelled against them, Martineau noted that his administration protected private property, especially land owned by planters. Indeed, the historical Louverture never enacted a widespread expropriation policy and allowed planters who abandoned their estates to return even if they had conspired against him with the British or the French. When his army captured the Mirabalais region from the British in August 1795, he requested Étienne Laveaux, then Saint Domingue’s colonial governor, to return abandoned plantations to their owners. Louverture reasoned that planters, who had expertise in producing and exporting sugar, would help rebuild the island’s sugar industry by improving their estates’ conditions.Footnote 108
In The Hour and the Man, Martineau followed Louverture’s rationale and presented his measures protecting big landownership favorably. Caze, the representative of planters in the story, illustrated how the measures succeeded: “your voice reached us, inviting us to our homes. We trusted that voice; we find our lands restored to us, our homes secure.” The character of Louverture not only concurred with Caze’s assessment but emphasized how his government enshrined property rights to benefit Saint Domingue’s sugar industry. He stated, “I have restored your estates because they were yours; but I also perceive advantages in your restoration.”Footnote 109 For Martineau, Louverture’s policies ensured that planters enjoyed safe and stable landownership and that cultivateurs could not take control of abandoned fields for subsistence labor.
Even more, Martineau argued that planters who stayed in Saint Domingue during the revolution benefited from Louverture’s commitment to safeguarding their estates. Thérèse Dessalines, who was Dessalines’s wife in the story, mentioned these benefits in a conversation with her former owner, Papalier, after he returned to the island as part of Bonaparte’s expedition to restore slavery. During Louverture’s rule, “white proprietors were very happy, perfectly satisfied … I can undertake for L’Ouverture that your daughters’ income from their estates shall be sent to them at Paris.”Footnote 110 In Martineau’s view, an antislavery government respectful of private property, such as Louverture’s, kept planters’ land safe from expropriation and serviced by a productive free labor force that made it highly profitable. Crucially, Martineau suggested that Louverture’s decision to not disrupt landownership in sugar estates explained revolutionary Saint Domingue’s rising prosperity. In a conversation between the planter Revel and his agent, the latter explained that “the property had never before been so secure, nor the estate so prosperous; and that all would go well.”Footnote 111 To explain how Louverture established conditions improving sugar production and exportation, Martineau pointed to his measures protecting planters’ landownership.
Martineau’s account of planters’ secure landownership and growing prosperity while Louverture governed likewise influenced how US abolitionists elaborated positive representations of the Haitian Revolution. The abolitionist William Wells Brown, who corresponded with Martineau and likely read The Hour and the Man, adopted her claims about planters benefiting materially from Louverture’s protection and promotion of the sugar industry.Footnote 112 He wrote, “even the planters who had remained on the island acknowledged the prosperity of Hayti under the governorship of the man whose best days had been spent in slavery.”Footnote 113 Drawing on Martineau, Brown pointed to the Haitian Revolution as an instance of how emancipation benefited planters. Generating a prosperous and stable plantation economy required upholding extant property relations in land to sustain sugar production.
Although Martineau accurately underscored Louverture’s commitment to protecting planters’ landownership, her claim that these policies made the Haitian Revolution successful illuminates the limits of her representation of this revolution and her broader liberal abolitionism. Contrary to Martineau’s suggestion that state-managed emancipation in revolutionary Saint Domingue maintained order, prosperity, and stability, Louverture navigated complex conflicts in this society. His efforts to revive the sugar industry through agrarian capitalism required an ample labor supply, yet cultivateurs sought to leave plantations to become subsistent peasants.Footnote 114 To control them, Louverture relied on coercive measures that, as C. L. R. James states, “confined the labourers to their plantations more strictly than ever,” with the aim of providing a post-abolition labor supply for sugar production.Footnote 115 Employing coercive measures meant that Louverture sidestepped demands for accessing land from his core supporters, namely cultivateurs and soldiers.
At the same time, Louverture enjoyed limited support from planters and French colonial agents, from whom he maintained political autonomy even if he protected property rights and never sought independence from the French Empire.Footnote 116 Remaining politically autonomous, Louverture, in Srinivas Aravamudan’s words, “create[d] military and political openings despite insurmountable odds.”Footnote 117 One of these openings allowed Dessalines to declare Haitian independence in 1804 by deepening the path of autonomy opened by Louverture. Contrary to Martineau’s claims, what made Louverture a paramount political leader was not his policies protecting planters’ landownership but his key role in Haiti’s foundation as a black abolitionist state. Despite retaining control over sugar estates, planters supported French efforts to capture and exile Louverture because he never accepted their demands to reclaim ownership of cultivateurs.
Writing about the Haitian Revolution, Martineau advanced a liberal abolitionist project, insisting that emancipation in revolutionary Saint Domingue exemplified how ending enslavement benefited the export-oriented plantation economy. Arguing that Louverture managed an orderly transition from enslavement to free labor without disrupting sugar production, Martineau disavowed how controlling cultivateurs required using state coercion to dispossess them from the land and retain them in plantations. Thus Martineau’s representation of the Haitian Revolution limited the scope of cultivateurs’ freedom to a process transforming them into disciplined, motivated, and skillful wage laborers who would continue working in sugar cultivation.
Conclusion
In her Autobiography, Martineau insisted that The Hour and the Man “present[ed] that genuine hero [Louverture] with his actual sayings and doings (as far as they were extant) to the world.”Footnote 118 For Martineau, revolutionary Saint Domingue showed how a state-managed process ending enslavement would strengthen the productivity and profitability of capitalist plantation production. Cultivateurs supported Louverture’s post-emancipation measures by quickly returning to work in plantations and not rebelling against his government. Obfuscating the tensions between Louverture’s government and cultivateurs, Martineau disavowed that Louverture used state coercion to sustain agrarian capitalism and cultivateurs resisted this effort and instead sought to become free as self-subsistent peasants in provision grounds.
Martineau’s representation of the Haitian Revolution was far from unique. Other liberal abolitionists shared her account of revolutionary Saint Domingue’s capitalist sugar industry growing and developing through a process of state-managed abolition led by Louverture. For the African American abolitionist James McCune Smith, Louverture’s policies restored sugar production by making cultivateurs disciplined and productive. Importantly, Martineau and Smith shared intellectual backgrounds. The latter also engaged Adam Smith’s work in his studies at the University of Glasgow.Footnote 119 In a lecture on the Haitian Revolution, published in 1841 like the The Hour and the Man, Smith wrote, “this [revolutionary] army was converted by the commander-in-chief into industrious laborers, by the simple expedient of paying them for their labor.”Footnote 120 In Smith’s view, Louverture’s policies introducing wage labor motivated cultivateurs to work efficiently in sugar production. Smith thus disavowed the importance of state coercion to forcibly retain cultivateurs in plantations through measures such as barring their access to provision grounds.
Even more, Smith also stressed how Louverture’s policies revived the export-oriented plantation economy despite the labor force’s smaller size: “the best proof of the entire success of his government is contained in the comparative views of the exports of the island, before the revolutions, and during the administration of Toussaint.”Footnote 121 Although Smith noted that after the revolution 160,000 fewer cultivateurs worked in sugar cultivation, he pointed out the large amount of commodities exported under Louverture to show how cultivateurs worked productively and brought profits to Saint Domingue. Echoing Martineau, Smith claimed that state-managed emancipation in revolutionary Saint Domingue was necessary and beneficial for agricultural capitalism and devoid of state coercion compelling cultivateurs to keep serving the sugar industry.
Through representations of the Haitian Revolution that underscored the political-economic benefits of ending enslavement, liberal abolitionists shaped their views of how emancipation happened and benefited other plantation economies in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In her 1866 book History of the Peace, Martineau followed her favorable representation of the Louverture administration’s policies protecting planters’ landownership to analyze similar measures taken by the British imperial state to abolish West Indian enslavement. Anglo-Caribbean planters retained their landholdings and received a £20 million indemnity to compensate economic losses stemming from costs incurred in transforming the enslaved into free laborers.Footnote 122 For Martineau, state measures that maintained West Indian planters’ landownership and economic stability highlighted the apt political-economic foundations of British abolition. Since “the law had recognized human beings as property, and on how bare a legal basis all right to property rests,” Members of the British Parliament “were willing to avoid subtle controversy” to pass the Slavery Abolition Act and approved “the gift of twenty millions … which must ever be considered a remarkable and honorable sign of the times.”Footnote 123 As in revolutionary Saint Domingue, Martineau claimed that the British imperial state aptly sustained post-emancipation capitalist plantation production by protecting private property and paying an indemnity to offset massive economic losses.
Liberal abolitionists, then, drew on their representations of the Haitian Revolution to engage in what David Scott characterizes “as an ideological maneuver that takes up a position and puts forward a move.”Footnote 124 As Scott explains in his insightful analysis of C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, Martineau engaged in an ideological maneuver that brought the Haitian Revolution under the fold of liberal abolitionism. Martineau contended that revolutionary Saint Domingue showed how emancipation created material benefits in the form of profits, prosperity, the expansion of an export-oriented plantation economy, and stable landownership. In her view, abolition need not be a violent break with the extant order of capitalist plantation economies, but rather resulted in these economies growing and flourishing. Ideologically, Martineau’s representation of the Haitian Revolution illustrated how liberal abolitionists conceived of emancipation as reproducing and strengthening agricultural capitalism, limiting the horizon of cultivateurs’ freedom to become wage-dependent workers forcibly subjected to the capitalist labor market.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Adam Dahl, Nicole Daphnis, and Ronald C. Den Otter for productive comments in previous drafts of this article. Audiences at the 2024 American Political Science Association annual conference and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis provided helpful suggestions to improve this paper. I am especially thankful to Leslie Alexander, Jennet Kirkpatrick, James Martel, and Kevin Olson. Thank you to Brandon Byrd, Edward Rugemer, and an anonymous reviewer at Modern Intellectual History for helpful guidance and feedback.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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