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When I visited St. John, I learned of the revolt that had happened there 3 decades before this one. It's a much smaller island but the fighting slaves seemed l
by stephenhuey 9y ago
When I visited St. John, I learned of the revolt that had happened there 3 decades before this one. It's a much smaller island but the fighting slaves seemed like they were making progress towards conquering the entire island. But the Danish got help from 2 ships carrying hundreds of French and Swiss soldiers and the revolt ended a few months later. It feels like plantation owners had a virtually unending supply of firepower and reinforcements, but I imagine for a few brief months the revolting slaves felt they had a real opportunity to gain and preserve their freedom forever.
- raman162 9y agoSt. John, Antigua?
- yardie 9y agoUSVI
- neves 9y agoThat was what happened in Haiti, the slaves killed all their masters. As punishment for their audacity, now Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas.
- brightball 9y agoHaiti was pretty intense from what I'd read about it. One of those things that was a big enough deal that people talked about it for decades afterward. I always understood it to be a big reason why John Brown is even a known figure from the US Civil War because he essentially lit a match on a lot of latent fear.
- wu-ikkyu 9y agoIt's like reverse reparations. The Haitians had to pay for freeing themselves, and it wasn't until 1947, more than a 150 years later, that they finally settled the debt. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_debt_of_Haiti https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_debt_of_Haiti
- abecedarius 9y agoHoly shit, they really did pay? I had no idea.
- mobilefriendly 9y agoIt wasn't "audacity" it was an ethnic genocide of the island -- they killed thousands of their masters, their masters' innocent children, and even white abolitionists. Haiti is poor for other reasons, though. In 1960 Haiti and neighboring Dominican Republic had roughly the same per capita GDP. Since then DR has tripled and Haiti has declined by 50%
- edbaskerville 9y agoLet me get this straight: African slaves rise up against their masters, and you're blaming the slaves for not carefully differentiating between the "innocent" and the "guilty" free people, all of whose existence on the island is built on the prior genocide of the native Taino people and subsequent enslavement of Africans?
- literallycancer 9y agoIt's not very constructive to kill people that share your goals, is it?
- edbaskerville 9y agoCertainly not. I'm not questioning the wisdom of avoiding unnecessary killing. And certainly any children and white abolitionists killed did not deserve their fate. I'm not even really questioning the facts—I haven't read a proper history of Haiti yet. I'm questioning the implied moral judgment I read from mobilefriendly's comment: that this revolt by people in chains, people with no choice to be illiterate and uneducated, can't be called an audacious freedom fight because the killing spread beyond those who directly enslaved them to other free white people. Rather, it must be called genocide, a term generally used to describe free people exterminating those deemed a pest to their society. (The fact that Haiti's elite is made up largely of mixed-race people also calls into question the "genocide" categorization on factual, not just moral, grounds.)
- mikhailfranco 9y agoSee "The Black Jacobins" by C.L.R.James https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Jacobins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Jacobins