Confronting Black Jacobins

The Saint-Domingue Revolution and its impact on slavery in the Americas no longer remain understudied subjects. In light of burgeoning recent scholarship, C. L. R. James's Black Jacobins (1939), whatever its limitations, laid out in poetic style for future investigators the momentousness of the event and the greatness of its most conspicuous leader, Toussaint Louverture. He deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Alexander Hamilton and Napoleon Bonaparte as one of the most remarkable figures in an age of revolution. In a book of eleven chapters, Gerald C. Horne, clearly inspired by James's opus, charts the evolving relations between Saint-Domingue/Haiti, from the start of the slave revolution in 1791 to the attempted U.S. annexation of Hispaniola eighty years later. Despite flashes of insight and what appears to be wide reading, Horne fails, however, to deliver a compelling volume. Horne argues that the Saint-Domingue Revolution and the example of independent Haiti “created a general crisis for the system of slavery that could only be resolved with its collapse” (p. 10). To be sure, the metastasis of a localized slave insurrection into a unique social revolution driven by former slaves who influenced and were influenced by the course of the French Revolution unsettled slaveholders and inspired slaves far and wide in the Americas. In making the case for the decisive importance of Saint-Domingue/Haiti, however, Horne ignores or underestimates the largely effective responses of white elites to counter the Haitian influence and maintain order on profitable plantations

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