Section B - The Revolutionary Atlantic

Question 1

What were all the revolutions in the period?

Answer 1

• American, French, Haitian and the Latin American

Question 2

The American rev and slavery?

Answer 2

• Direct inspiration for slave revolt in Haiti
• This quest for liberty and freedom coexisted the institution of slavery - did it maintain or justify slavery?

Question 3

What founding fathers were slaveholders?

Answer 3

• Washington, Jefferson and Madison

Question 4

What did the Declaration of Independence state?

Answer 4

• ‘all men are created equal’ and have ‘certain unalienable Rights’

Question 5

Slavery and the economy?

Answer 5

• Became deep part of economy and society e.g. Southern economy dependent on plantation and enslaved labor

Question 6

When was the Haitian Revolution?

Answer 6

• 1791-1804

Question 7

Haiti before the rev?

Answer 7

• around 8000 slave plantations
• Early 18c approx 24,000 slaves; 16,500 free people
• 1700-1791: 685,000 Africans imported
• 1790: 148,000 slaves in Haiti outnumbered white population 10: 1
  After Brazil, Haiti consumed more enslaved workers from Africa than any other New World society

Question 8

Causes of the Haitian rev?

Answer 8

• Large non-white people slaved and free
• Divided white pop (elite vs Petit Blancs)
• Desire to transform colonial ties with France
• Free people of colour
• African slaves united by religious practices
• Slave elite provided leadership
• American Revolution fresh in peoples’ mind

Question 9

Who led the Haitian rev?

Answer 9

• Toussaint L’Ouverture
• Former slave who emerged as a military ad poliitcal leader

Question 10

Events of the Haitian rev?

Answer 10

• Military opposition from French, British and Spanish got involved to undermine French control
• Haitian Flag, 1804
• 1804 - Haiti declared its Declaration of Independence from France, becoming the first independent nation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Only a successful slave revolt.

Question 11

Impact of the Haitian rev?

Answer 11

• Formation of the first black republic
• Extension of French citizenship across the colour line
• Dramatic changes in laws regarding race in the French empire
• Reparations/limited trade crippled Haiti’s economy

Question 12

The Atlantic world after the Haitian rev?

Answer 12

• Reconfiguration of imperial power in the Americans
• Napoleon was forced to sell French Louisiana to the US (1803)
• Cuba met the demand for sugar
• 15,000-25,5000 free
  Sparked over revolt

Question 13

What does D. Armitage note about historiography surrounding the revolutionary Atlantic?

Answer 13

• While there is general agreement that the American Revolution was the first Atlantic revolution, eighteenth-century observers, transatlantic revolutionaries, and recent historians have differed over what it might mean to put the Revolution into Atlantic perspective.
• For some, it marked the first time any European overseas dependencies had cast off metropolitan rule to secure self-government: this was a new form of revolution, secessionist in form and anti-imperial in purpose, and it has originated in the British Atlantic world.
• For others, it marked the beginning of a sequence of fundamental social and political transformations in the Americas and Europe that would come to include the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution, and the civil wars and independence movements of Iberian America.
• The American Revolution occurred amind an explosion in population and migration, both free and unfree

Question 14

What was postponed to 1808 under the Consitution of 1787

Answer 14

• Slave trade issue

Question 15

Who was the Secretary of Treasury and who was the Secretary of State under the new Constitution?

Answer 15

• Secretary of Treasury = Alexander Hamilton
• Secretary of State = Thomas Jefferson

Question 16

Slavery under the new Consitution?

Answer 16

Emancipation Acts:
- 1780 Pennsylvania (prohibited importing of enslaved people)
- 1783 Massachusetts (Commonwealth vs Jennison case, Massachussets declare ‘all men are born free and equal’)
- led to a legal end to slavery in Massachusetts, and by 1790, no slaves left there
- both crucial steps toward the end of slavery
- By 1804, same for all Northern states (Northwest Territory 1787 - all north of Ohio River)

Question 17

American rev influence over French rev?

Answer 17

• Enlightenment ideas
• End to monarchical rule and hence war

Question 18

What does R. Blackburn note about the Revolutionary Atlantic? (there are 11 points)

Answer 18

• ‘The revolutions - American, French, Haitian, and Spanish-American - should be seen as interconnected, with each helping to radicalize the next.’
• ‘The American Revolution launched an idea of popular sovereignty that, together with the cost of the war, helped to provoke the downfall of the French monarchy.’
• ‘The French Revolution, dramatic as was its influence on the Old World, also became a fundamental event in the New World because it was eventually to challenge slavery as well as royal power’ - through Haitian rev
• ‘Decolonization in Africa and elsewhere helped to attract some attention to the Haitian Revolution in the 1960s, and historians have begun to study the revolution as an event in the history of the moral imagination as well as a dramatic political episode with a wide influence’
• ‘Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued that the events leading to the foundation of Haiti have suffered from either “erasure” or “banalization” in general histories of the Americans and the West because they were seen as lacking sufficient coherence and meaning’
• due to the fact america didn’t recognise Haiti till 1863 meant, scholars paid little attention to it
• ‘The survival of Haiti had implications for the future of slavery in the Americas and tested and tempered the outlook of the abolition movement’
• ‘Even Thomas Paine’ saw the new world as a haven for Europeans not Africans or Native Americans
• ‘French Declaration of the Rights of Man” “Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights”’ - also reinforced those who property not have rights aka slaves, similar to those with no community/governance in America aka slaves have no application to declaration
• ‘The sequence of revolutions meant that there were narrower limits to the New World slave system in North and South America and a growing free-coloured population that was to agitate for equal rights and against slavery.’ -
• ‘The torch of freedom and citizenship…crisscrossed the Atlantic…eventually vanquishing slavery in the New World’

Question 19

What does David Davis note as the impacts of Haitian and French Revolution?

Answer 19

• ‘Throughout the Americas planters and governments officials learned to live in a state of alert. The very words “Santo Domingo,”…evoked at least a moment of alarm and terror in the minds of slaveholders throughout the Americas’
• As Charleston’s merchants well knew, the defeat of Napolean’s New World ambitions had opened the way for the Louisiana Purchase, which along with the new cotton gin, ensured that American slavery could expand westward without foreign interference’
• ‘South Carolina reopened the slave trade and in the next four years imported some forty thousand Africans’
• ‘yet the French emancipation decree of 1794 was a crucial precedent’

Question 20

What does W. Klooster note about American rev and the Atlantic front? (also what about Spanish-America?)

Answer 20

• ‘Colonial uprisings such as the American Revolution can…only be understood in an international context’
• The French ‘In their protests over one of the laws Brienne proposed - a stamp act - the parlemnt of Paris drew inspiration from the arguments American pamphlets had used.’
• ‘The Haitian Revolution, coupled with slave revolts in Virginia in 1800 and 1802, helped federal advocates of abolition of the slave trade carry the day in the United States in 1807’
• ’

Question 21

What could a essay on the Revolutionary Atlantic look like?

Answer 21

Historiography:
- D. Armitage
- David Davis
- W. Klooster
- R. Blackburn

PS:
- Declaration of Independence
- Tom Paine - for Europeans not Africans or Natives

French:
- Enlightened though e.g. Rousseau and John Locke leading to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man
- America show example of no monarchy, solidify conceptions of state without monarchical rule or structure

Haiti:
- slavery and freedom inspired by Americas declaration ‘all men are born equal’
- later become threat for america through rise of abolition movements

America:
- Panic e.g. purchase of Louisana led to expansion of slavery westward and reintroduction of it in South Carolina
- America not recognise Haiti until 1863
- U.S. try support Napolean in taking back Haiti