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Essay on Haitian Slave Rebellion
The Haitian slave rebellion was an intimate part of the French Revolution and as such had both local and international connections. It involved formal military campaigns and the establishment among the slaves of a functioning government virtually from the first months of the 1791 uprising. It was to prove a unique event in Afro-American history, one not repeated. The events of Guadeloupe do show that it took more than the collapse of the elite to carry such a revolution to success. The vacillation of the black leadership over the maintenance of the old plantations, in turn, shows that only the absolute rejection by the ex-slave masses of any reimposition of forced plantation labor kept the movement committed to the total abolition of slavery. Finally the rebellion would show to all the white master class of America that internal civil war or wars of independence against the metropolitan power could lead to a destruction of the very regimes which they sought to protect. (W. Michael Md Mph Byrd, Linda A. Md Mph Clayton, 2000).
The Haitian slave rebellion thus guaranteed that most of the later slave rebellions would be carried on without the support of such classes and groups as the free colored and poor whites, but rather in the face of their opposition. Typical of this isolation, and rather special in its religious overtones, were the series of Islamic slave revolts which occurred in urban and rural Bahia between 1808 and 1835.
Houssa and Nago slaves in 1808 seized sugar plantations and attempted to march on the city. It took a major battle to defeat them. In 1810 came another such plantation uprising of Muslim slaves, followed by an uprising of coastal fishermen in 1814. Some fifty slave fisherman were killed by troops sent from Salvador, but not before many local white masters were slaughtered......
