Читать книгу A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution - Jeremy D. Popkin - Страница 8

On 16 August 1791, a building on one of the hundreds of sugar plantations in France’s wealthy Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, today’s independent Republic of Haiti, was set on fire. The local white colonists immediately suspected one of the plantation’s enslaved blacks. Under interrogation, he made a startling confession. “The most trusted slaves on the neighboring plantations and those in the adjacent districts had formed a plot to set fire to the plantations and to murder all the whites,”¹ he claimed. The authorities in the nearby port of Cap Français, the largest city in the colony, dismissed the idea that uneducated black captives could have conceived such a scheme. For years, a small minority of whites had successfully exploited the labor of a far larger enslaved population; the whites could not imagine that the blacks they had treated with such contempt for so long were capable of organizing themselves to overthrow their oppressors. Less than a week later, on the night of 22–23 August 1791, the white colonists learned how wrong they were. Just as the suspect arrested for arson had said, bands of blacks attacked plantations in Saint-Domingue’s richest sugar-growing area, setting fire to the crops and killing or driving out their white owners and overseers. It was the start of a movement that would culminate almost 13 years later, on 1 January 1804, when a leader who had once been enslaved, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, proclaimed the independence of the nation of Haiti.