24 March 2007: Man's unconquerable mind: CLR James and The Black Jacobins

Many people contributed to the abolition of the slave trade; including those African authors such as who Olaudah Equiano were freed and then protested against the conditions in which they had been held; as well as the Jacobin workers of the London Corresponding Society who demonstrated repeatedly in favour of abolition; and even those parliamentarians who joined the campaign belatedly and have been the heroes of our government's celebrations. At the head of the list, without a question, the true and greatest champions, were the rebellious slaves of St. Domingo (today's Haiti).

The story of their revolt is told in The Black Jacobins, a book by the Trinidadian Marxist and activist CLR James. By 1789, the island of Haiti had been divided into two colonies. The eastern half Santo Domingo was ruled by Spain. The total population was 125,000, around one-eighth slaves. The western region St Domingue belonged to France. Of a total population of around 500,000, four-fifths were black African slaves, the remainder being chiefly white owners and mulattoes of mixed race. In 1789, St Domingue was the very richest island on earth. It exported sugar, cotton and coffee in vast quantities. This production was dependent, however, on servile conditions. Slaves worked eighteen-hour days. A generous owner would expect to lose one in nine workers each year, killed by their conditions of over-work. The Black Jacobins is a history of the slave revolt that followed.

The protests began in 1791. France was then in the midst of its own revolution. The intellectuals whose writing provided the inspiration for revolt held that all men were created equal, but they did little to demand the improvement of conditions in the French colonies. How then could the new society permit the continuation of slavery? In St Domingue, the slaves had heard of the revolution and had constructed it in their own images; the white slaves in France has arisen, and killed their masters, and were now enjoying the fruits of the earth. Between the needs of empire and liberty, a compromise was reached. French citizenship was extended to any mulatto in St Domingue who could prove that their father and mother had both been born in France. Some 400 were freed, while 40,000 mulattoes were left unfree, as were half a million black slaves. An insurrection broke out in the north of the island. A literate coachman, Toussaint L'Ouverture, joined the slave army. If the Republic, liberty and equality gave the army its morale, its centre was Toussaint himself ... His presence had that electrifying effect characteristic of great men in action. The slave army won a series of victories, and the powers responded with offers of negotiation. Toussaint message for three years was simple: trust no owner, nor any white envoy.

In 1794, three delegates from San Domingo were sent to address the revolutionary French Assembly. The Assembly voted to end slavery. Yet the slaves' triumph was short-lived: the chief global sponsor of slavery could not allow an entire nation of slaves to go free. Britain invaded. The British lost 80,000 soldiers in St Domingue, more than in all the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon. The defeat was so overwhelming that it goes unmentioned in almost all British histories of the period. Napoleon's France saw the British defeat, and felt threatened for its own part. Napoleon determined to replace Toussaint, first bribing his generals to rise against him, and then sending an army of their own. Spain sent its own troops, too. In this way, Toussaint and his supporters were compelled to defeat successive British, French and Spanish armies, simply in order to maintain their freedom.

By 1801, Toussaint was in control of the entire island. His strategy was two-fold. First, there must be no return of slavery. Second, having seen the machinations of all the imperial powers at close hand, Toussaint came to the conclusion that some patron was required, and revolutionary French was the most trustworthy. Over the succeeding two years, he attempted to reconcile these two policies in the face of French tactics aiming at the re-annexation of the island. An authoritarian constitution was declared. A popular rival emerged to Toussaint's left: the general ordered his execution. James's writing drips with despair at the wasting of the revolution: 'Toussaint published a series of laws surpassing in severity anything he had decreed. He introduced a rigid passport system for all classes f the population. He confined the labourers more strictly to their plantations than ever ... And while he broke the morale of the black masses, he laboured to reassure the whites.' 

Toussaint was captured by French troops in August 1802 and died six months later. Wordsworth dedicated a sonnet to him. It ends 'Thou has left behind / Powers that will work for thee, air, earth and skies! / There's not a breathing of the common wind / That will forget thee: thou hast great allies: / Thy friends are exultations, agonies, / And love, and man's unconquerable mind.' 

Despite Toussaint's death, the slaves triumphed. Under Dessalines, the French were finally driven out, and an independent black state formed. Elsewhere, James described their victory as the most outstanding event in the history of the West Indies. 

Part of The Black Jacobins' force lies in its argument, that the slave trade was not abolished as a result of the actions of a few Conservative Members of Parliament, individuals such as Wilberforce or Pitt, but as a result of a class struggle on the part of the slaves. Part of its great strength lies also in the method of the book. James describes Haitian society in totality, seeing the lives of the different classes from the perspective of the most oppressed. He relates developments there to political changes in conservative England and revolutionary France. The latter had of course been a great influence. It is impossible to understand the San Domingo revolution unless it is studied in close relationship with the revolution in France. Twenty years before such historians as Royden Hilton, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson wrote 'history from below'; James anticipated and matched the very best of their work.

The book has had a very wide audience, wherever similar struggle haves remained alive. The censors of apartheid South Africa would later ban The Black Jacobins. Yet, Scott McLemee records, it was circulated. 'Copies were scarce and the potential audience was large, so people had to improvise. One circle of activists typed up key passages and distributed them in carbon copies. Another group tore James' thick book into clusters of a few pages, to be circulated a little at a time. Members would study each fragment closely and then pass it on to the next eager reader.' 

If any criticism can be made of the book it is only that James's narrative (perhaps like Trotsky in his celebrated History) ends abruptly: with slavery defeated and an independent Haitian state. Such is our own contemporary knowledge of post-colonial regimes that a present-day reader is left wishing that James, if not here, at least somewhere, had set out to explain the next period, when the revolutionary enthusiasm was lost; and what might have been done, so that hope might have been regained.