Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War by Clavin Matthew J.;

Author:Clavin, Matthew J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Figure 8. Engraving of Major Martin R. Delany published in Joseph T. Wilson, The Black Phalanx (1890). The abolitionist and army recruiter became the first black field officer in the Union Army. His son, Toussaint L’Ouverture Delany, served in the famed Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment. Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

The Confederate army failed to stop the advance of both the Union army and northern print culture. A South Carolinian named John was among the contrabands who demonstrated firsthand knowledge of Haiti. John confessed his knowledge of the political events swirling around him, admitting that, for example, he knew of John Brown and had read stories of the white martyr “to heaps of the colored people.” He revealed further that he owned a “history of San Domingo,” which he stored away in his trunk.70 That a bondman counted a narrative of the Haitian Revolution among his personal possessions is notable, as historians are just beginning to understand the extent to which enslaved people’s networks of communication extended beyond plantation boundaries. Through seaports and sailors, word-of-mouth communication, and hand-to-hand exchanges of printed matter, information from both the North and the greater Atlantic world penetrated America’s slave society.71 James Meriles Simms’s career as a publisher provides an example. A former bondman and Union soldier, Simms published an edition of William Wells Brown’s Black Man in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865. It is, according to Phillip Lapsansky, “the first book written by a black, celebrating black accomplishment, published by a black in the New South—or the Old.”72 A surviving copy of this unique volume belonged to the free black merchant Anthony Desverney. That black southerners published, distributed, and read a book by a radical black abolitionist that gloried in the accomplishments of Louverture and other Haitian revolutionaries speaks to both the transforming nature of the Civil War and the reach of northern print culture. It testifies, moreover, to the resiliency of the public memory of the Haitian Revolution among African Americans.

Oral culture was the second major source of African American memory of the Haitian Revolution in the South. A Union chaplain stationed for a time at Port Royal, South Carolina, claimed an intimate knowledge of the life of bondmen, and thus felt that they had the potential to make excellent soldiers. He avowed, “From the earliest ages of the world, the people from whom the contrabands of this country originally sprang, have been a people of war.” Confident in his understanding of enslaved people’s oral tradition, he added, “The result of the insurrection in St. Domingo has long been known among the contrabands of the South—the name of Toussaint L’Overture has been passed from mouth to mouth until it has become a secret household word—and a love of liberty, fed by a love of arms, has been rendered universal and almost omnipotent. It has been felt that it was right for the colored Haytiens to fight to be free, it is equally right for colored Americans.” This was a bold statement.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.