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It can be argued that two general and apparently contradictory approaches to the Haitian Revolution have prevailed since the start of the slave uprising in August of 1791. The first has tended to neglect, silence, and underestimate the revolution and its impact. Evidence of this approach can be detected in the earliest reactions to and interpretations of the bloody events of that August. Faced with a revolution made by enslaved men and women, a revolution that eventually destroyed in its territory the principal institutions of its age, contemporaries were incapable of apprehending the possibility of a slave-led revolution, let alone a successful one leading to the creation of an independent state. So they observed and interpreted the revolution only with their readymade categories and explained the events in ways that denied the possibility of slaves making a revolution. They reverted to explanations about the decisive role of outside agitators, to the pernicious effects of French revolutionary ideology, to the miscalculations of slaveowners, but rarely if ever to the will or power or consciousness of slaves themselves.
This contemporary inability to understand the revolution has marked the way historical scholarship treats, or doesn't treat, the revolution. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot and others have argued, the contemporary failure of categories and the subsequent failure of historical narration to challenge those contemporary accounts, accounts for the relative absence of the Haitian Revolution from historical knowledge, accounts for its place as (in the words of Trouillot): "the revolution the world forgot."2
If this represents one approach to the revolution, the second approach appears, on the surface, to be its exact opposite. For alongside the incomprehension and silence that accompanied and followed the revolution, is the fact that mentions of Haiti and the revolution were also ubiquitous from 1791 throughout the nineteenth century all over the slave societies of the New World. Once the revolution started, people-regardless of whether or not they were capable of understanding the revolution as a slave revolution-began talking, writing and thinking about it. At the time of the revolution, this was certainly clear: news spread among slaves and slaveowners, and colonial bureaucrats attempted to keep "contaminated" slaves and seditious ideas out of their territories. But even decades...