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I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom
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- [00:00]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
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- [01:20]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
Welcome to.
- [01:20]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
The New Books Network.
- [01:24]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Hello everyone and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler and today I am pleased to be joined by Dr. Julia Gaffield, who is the author of I have Avenged Jean Jacques Dessamines and Haiti's Fight for Freedom. Welcome to the show Dr. Gatfield.
- [01:49]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:51]
Dr. Christina Gessler
I am so glad that you're here and that we get to learn about this book from you. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?
- [01:59]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
Sure. I am an associate professor of History at William Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. I'm currently the interim editor of the William Mary Quarterly and let's see some non academic stuff. On the weekends I like to take photographs of my children and their teammates playing sports and in another life I think I would have had a career as a sports photographer.
- [02:24]
Dr. Christina Gessler
I have a friend who got involved in sports photography for that exact same reason.
- [02:29]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
It is so much fun and so rewarding when you get the perfect shot of my kids are 11 and 8 and so they're these little kids very seriously into sports and it's so great when you get the perfect shot. It's like just so satisfying Here at.
- [02:48]
Dr. Christina Gessler
The Academic Life, we are curious about how people found their path. When you were heading off to college, did you know that college had been a long term plan for you? Did you know where you were going to end up?
- [03:01]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
Very much not. I, for most of my life, kind of considered myself an athlete rather than an academic. I played basketball, my whole family played basketball. And I started university. I was at the University of Toronto where I played basketball and I started in the kinesiology program and my plan was to be a physical therapist. So very much not what I ended up doing with my life. And it was a really interesting transition. In my first year of university I was taking a history elective class. And up until that point I like, you know, was the type of person, type of high schooler who was like, I hate history, it's so boring. I, you know, it's just memorizing dates and it was nothing I was interested in. And I should say that some of that, you know, might be some kind of youthful resistance to parental advice because my dad is a historian. But in this first year of college I was taking a history elective and I was kind of learning history very differently. We were looking at primary sources and asking different questions and thinking about different topics. And I was getting an A in the class. And I also was simultaneously discovering that I really did not like anatomy and I was failing that class. And so I had this realization that, you know, maybe my, the plan that I started with was not actually the plan that I was going to follow through with. And so I pretty quickly changed majors and changed all my classes over to history and history related classes. And that was, that was the kind of, the bit, the beginning of the rest of my, my academic journey.
- [05:05]
Dr. Christina Gessler
This book is what I would describe as an undertold story. It's the story where people think they know and they don't. How did you get interested in the story behind the story as your pathway as a historic.
- [05:19]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
I really like how you phrase that, an undertold story. It. I, I, in this kind of, you know, journey into wanting to, to study history and wanting to be a historian, I simultaneously became more interested in Caribbean history. And that was primarily through like a really good class, which is a good lesson for me now that I'm a professor, that like one class can really change a kid's life. It was a class taught by Melanie Newton at the University of Toronto and she first taught me about the Haitian Revolution. We read Clr James in her class and that was kind of, you know, I never looked Back, but in when, you know, learning about the Haitian revolution, one of the things that I noticed this was in, you know, the. I think I started in 2004. Ish. One of the things that I noticed about the narratives of the Haitian revolution was that they kind of, you know, ended with the Haitian declaration of independence on January 1, 1804. And then that was it. It was like the end. And every now and then you'd get this kind of description of, you know, and then everybody else in the Atlantic world isolated Haiti and tried to make sure that it failed as a country. But so one of the kind of first, you know, intellectual questions that I had was like, what happens after the revolution? And if everybody wanted Haiti to fail, how did it succeed and how did it stay independent? And so, you know, as part of this kind of under told story was like, you know, the denouement of the revolution, early independence, and how Haiti sustained its sovereignty in this very hostile world. And Jean Jacques Dessalines story is very much integral to Haiti's success at remaining independence. And so my first book from 2015, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic Recognition After Revolution, focused on the Haitian state's diplomacy after independence. And Jean Jacques Dessalines was Haiti's first head of state. And so his negotiations were key to that story. But then in terms of kind of transitioning to this book, in terms of your phrasing of an undertold story, one of the things that I kept noticing was that in the international community, there was a real focus on Toussaint Louverture as like the main figure, the main leader of the Haitian revolution, which I think is right. You know, people should write biographies of Toussaint Louverture. He was, of course, very important. But I noticed that nobody, I mean, people were. People were writing about Dessalines, but nobody really wanted to, like, focus in the way of writing a biography of Dessalines. And so I saw there was this kind of gap in the storytelling, but I saw a real need to tell his story, especially kind of in conversation with these other publications about Toussaint l'.
- [08:48]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Altero, and in digging through the literature, you found a biography on him. But part of what you're doing is really writing the opposite of what that biography says, right?
- [09:00]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
And I think, I mean biography and I, in the book, I often use, you know, scare quotes to talk about the biography. There was a book that was written by this French guy who was kind of a mouthpiece for the Napoleonic government, and it was written during Dessalines life, and it was less a Kind of real biography, but more, you know, anti Haitian propaganda. And the goal was to kind of demonize Dessalines as a way to undermine Haitian statehood, Haitian sovereignty. Because in 1804 when this, this book was published, France was refusing to recognize Haitian independence and was still claiming the country as a colony. Their colony had been called Saint Domingue under the French empire. And so they continued using that name. They denied Haitian independence. And so demonizing Dessalines was a way to kind of accomplish this goal. And that, that quote, biography was, I think, you know, in. In doing research for this book, I kind of. I realized that it was in a lot of ways like a self plagiarism because this guy Dubroca was his last name, had previously written an alleged biography of Toussaint Louverture. And he just kind of like copy and pasted or whatever. Not you can't copy and paste in the early 19th century, but taken passages out of that earlier so called biography and just, you know, used them for another book on Dessalines, but then kind of inserted Dessalines into different events and kind of fictionalizing moments in which Dessalines was said to have appeared at different times. And the point was to kind of paint him as this, you know, savage, barbaric, hyper, violent man that, you know, could not possibly be trusted to lead a nation state in the early 19th century.
- [11:24]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And you pointed out a number of reasons why the world would have wanted to embrace that, because they didn't want the reality. And it was terrifying to them to think that slavery could be abolished, that that this would affect the international economy. And they were too invested in what they had. They were terrified of losing it. And the other huge part, though, of why this biography has been allowed to stand is this sort of idea that while he was there at the time, this is an eyewitness account. He was boots on the ground. And that gave it a really intense but false sense of legitimacy.
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Dr. Julia Gaffield
Well, so Dubroca was not on the ground in Haiti. He was in France. But I, I suspect was kind of getting. Reading reports about what was happening in Haiti or what was allegedly happening in Haiti. You know, there's newspaper reports circulating throughout the Atlantic world, and a lot of them kind of do similar work in terms of playing up violence and then downplaying any violence perpetrated by French people during the Haitian revolution and kind of attributing all sources of violence to the Haitian revolutionaries. And there is this kind of. I think, yeah, I mean, I don't know, the remarkable staying power of it. That people believe it in a way, because it, I think it told a narrative that they were, you know, ready to hear, wanted to hear it, like matched up with their worst fears, as you're saying, as you said, because the Haitian revolution abolished slavery. Haiti was the first nation to permanently ban slavery. This is the beginning of the age of abolition. And so they were kind of primed to be receptive to this kind of narrative. And, you know, the Haitian state was kind of like, ready for that. And at the same time, like, very close to the publication of this so called biography by Louis Dubrocas, there's one of Dessalines secretaries, his secretary general Boiron Tonnerre, published, you know, his account of. Of the war for independence in Haiti. And this is a book that's kind of authorized by Dessalines. And, you know, they're like, we need to put down our narrative of events because, you know, we know we're going to be slandered basically in the international press. And that book, you know, the circulation of that book is so limited. Whereas the Louis du Broca book, it gets widely circulated, it gets translated into multiple languages and has this kind of much more prolific life than the Haitian account of events, which is obviously very intentional.
- [14:30]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And your work seeks to reclaim the story and put it in context. You did a tremendous amount of primary research, and one of the things that stood out to me is that revolutions are intense. You can use words like violent or some of the words that they. That they only put on Dessalines to describe any revolution. I was thinking how I recently went to a. I was visiting friends and I went to this small museum in, on the east coast, and it was in an area where, and I may get the order wrong, but it was something like the French came and then the Spanish came, and so then they burned down everything the French had built and killed them. And then the British came and they burned everything down and killed people. Maybe I have the order wrong, but the point was the playbook of how you take something over, how you create a whole new order there. How you rebel has sort of the same characteristics. And yet we see in, in your book and as you lay out the whole entire thing, we. We see Dessalines using tools that the oppressors had used again and again. And yet he's described in the most intense negative language for doing it. And it seems to be a way of saying, look over there, but not over here, what the white people were doing. Just look over there. And that's what's bad, but not that this is the nature of how these things get to these flashpoints.
- [16:03]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
You're right. And you know, the way the story of the Haitian revolution generally, but also specifically of Dessalines life, the way that kind of his story gets told is centered on violence and claims of a kind of extraordinary violence, you know, even in this more generally violent context. And one of the things that I kind of learned in researching and writing this book is that that was very strategic and that in fact, you know, his participation in the revolution does not represent, you know, extraordinary use of violence. Even though that was his reputation and even though sometimes he himself played up that reputation because strategically that was the kind of smart thing to do for, for self preservation, but also for the kind of long term success of the revolution, you know, and I think that, that some of the, the kind of portrayals of unequal levels of violence, you know, reflects the much longer history of slavery in the colony. And that, you know, slavery was an incredibly violent institution, but it was not kind of recognized as being violent. That somehow that violence was acceptable because of this kind of deep seated racism that ran through the empires in the colony. And so there's a kind of denial of that kind of violence, but that, you know, the Haitian revolutionaries were responding to that violence in the beginning of the revolution, throughout the revolution, by themselves kind of fighting, fighting for their lives, fighting for their freedom. And there's no recognition that there, you know, that that is a legitimate fight on the part of the colonizers. And then, you know, during the revolution there's this kind of double standard in terms of this, the kind of like so called rules of legitimate warfare and like, you know, this like civilization discourse that, you know, the Haitian revolutionaries kind of get criticized for allegedly not participating or not following the, the rules of. And I'm doing like scare quotes, you can't see them, but I'm doing scare quotes through half of this. You know, the like so called rules of civilized warfare. But the French themselves never felt the need to follow those same rules because they were or they thought that they were engaging with quote, savages and you know, people who were barbaric and therefore outside these rules. So there's this total double standard in terms of how violence is perpetrated, but then how that kind of violence is narrated and recorded.
- [19:23]
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Dr. Julia Gaffield
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Dr. Julia Gaffield
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- [20:38]
Dr. Christina Gessler
It's important to you in reclaiming Destiny and story to reclaim as much of his voice and his biography as you as you possibly can. And we know that right from the get go that title is I have Avenged America. And that is directly a quote from him.
- [20:55]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
It is. And I think, you know, this, the, the kind of goal of centering his voice stems from some of the things that we were just talking about, this kind of framing of Dessalines as savage and barbaric. And a lot of times when people kind of offer character descriptions, one of the things that they insert is that he was illiterate, allegedly. And this is a way to, to, you know, show that he's not capable of leading a country, et cetera. And so in, you know, in doing my research, and this is in fact actually one of the things that inspired me to write the biography. It kind of started as a project in which I wanted to do an edited volume of all of his writing because I'm like, well, you know, for somebody who was allegedly illiterate, he, he sure produced a whole lot of text. And I thought it was kind of more text. And this includes letters, proclamations, orders, those types of things. And I thought it was kind of as a corpus, it was much larger than people had really taken account of. And then I transitioned from, I was like, well, maybe in fact, a full biography is actually what I want to write. But my focus had really been early on, on kind of trying to compile every single thing that he had signed his name to. And thinking about his voice in the record of the Haitian revolution, you know, and I think his voice doesn't appear quite as prolifically as somebody like Toussaint Louvalturo, who has gotten more attention, but it's certainly more than, I think, popular. Popular and academic accounts really kind of. I don't know if give him credit for is the right word, but really recognize. So his voice, his language, his word choice was really important to me. And I think, you know, there's a conversation that I have in the book about voice and his use of secretaries, which has also come in into the conversation about Dessalines and his alleged illiteracy. You know, and I think, on the one hand, a lot of politicians and military leaders use secretaries. This was not like an. A totally abnormal thing to do. But there's evidence that he was certainly, you know, a participant in the creation of these documents and that he knew what he was signing. He may have given feedback and edits before signing things, but he is in kind of in signing the letters and proclamations and stuff, you know, he's attaching his name to those words and claiming them as his own. And I took that really seriously in the book.
- [24:14]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You give us his early biography, where he was born, what his life was like. You take us through the different places that he was moved around to because he was enslaved for his early life. And as you were trying to comb through the records and piece all this together, I was thinking about how we're taping this right now in summer of 2025, and it's a time when a lot of George ORWELL Quotes from 1984 are resurfacing. And what those quotes really get to is about who controls the narrative and how that narrative affects not only the future, but how we see the past. And as historians, we know that in practical terms, it comes down to who gets to keep records, and not just in real time, meaning writing them, but who gets to keep them, meaning what saved and what's destroyed. What was your process like in trying to figure out as much as you could about his early life?
- [25:13]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
Yeah, that was. That was a really tough part of writing the book. There is one single document that mentions him by name from the colonial period. And this is the document that was found by the French historian Jacques de Conna. And he found it in the context of writing about Toussaint Louverture. And so this is the kind of first evidence of their early connection, but nobody had really analyzed it from the perspective of what Dessalines life might have been like under slavery. And so, you know, writing. Writing 30 plus years of somebody's life with one document is not. Is not ideal for a historian and not an easy task. And so you have to do a kind of. A lot more work. You know, every. Every shred of information that you can get from the one source available is valuable, but you have to do a lot more work in terms of thinking about the general context and what life might have been like, asking questions of your reader and asking questions of yourself as a historian to kind of build out with evidence the kind of world that he lived in. You know, from that one document and from, you know, some other sources, we. We learned that he was born in a northern parish in Saint Domingue called Grand Riviere du Nord. He was kind of born in a mountainous area that was primarily coffee plantations, and that he was enslaved on probably two different plantations and likely enslaved by three or four different people. One of the things that was also kind of super interesting to think about, but also frustrating as a. As a researcher was that Dessalines almost never talked about his time under slavery, even though it was clear that that time kind of very deeply shaped his goals and his fight during the Revolution. But he never kind of reflected on his. Not never. He almost never reflected on his personal experience, personal experiences under slavery. And so it was a. It was a kind of, you know, a tricky thing to narrate and to think about this thing that this. This era that had been so central and so formative for him was something that he was kind of unwilling to discuss publicly in the sense of, like a personal experience, even though he was willing to discuss it kind of more generally as, you know, a phenomenon that they were, you know, fighting against. And so that was. It was. It was really tough to think about his early life. But I think I was able to. To fill in the gaps with other sources, with kind of early histories told in Haiti and published in Haiti. They were super useful for recounting those events.
- [28:48]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You also try to take us into his personal life when he's an adult. You know that royalty is incredibly important to him, both to receive it from others and to give it back. You know, that he has some people around him who he's had for a very long time. At one point, you. You depict him going off into a battle. When you see that some of his childhood friends are there with him, battling alongside him, you find evidence of a first wife, of a second wife, and of him potentially having about A dozen children. But trying to track the path of all of these things was very difficult for you, partly because of the racialized rules about who got to have records. So if it was a white person having children, there would be a more formal record. But for him, because he was a person of color, it, it wasn't a given that there be any sorts of records. And so you find evidence of a daughter, but it's later when she's about 17 and he's sort of formalizing some paperwork regarding her. How did you go about piecing together his personal life?
- [29:50]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
Who's another challenge, Right. And this is somebody who like, we don't know, we don't even know any information about his parents. We do not know exactly when he was born. People kind of say about 1758. That's the assumed date. And that's actually a date that has got. This has had kind of remarkable consensus across the board, but we don't know the day. We know through this one document about his time during slavery that he was enslaved with extended family members, an uncle, some aunts and some cousins. And then there's evidence of him kind of fighting for the safety of one of his cousins much later who kind of who, you know, fought with him during the revolution. And so there are these like, very limited snippets of that show evidence of these longer term connections. There's evidence that many of his officers were these kind of childhood friends who continued calling him by the last name Duclos, which was the name of his first enslaver, and so would have been his last name for some of his life at least. And these are people that he kind of keeps close to him throughout the revolution into independence. And there's evidence, you know, there's like the death record published in the newspaper for one of his closest, I think, confidants, officers, friends. This, this man named Gabard. And the kind of, the tribute to him is, is very heartfelt. And so, you know, once you kind of, once you look for it, I think there is, even if small amounts, there is evidence of these personal relationships that were also, I think, professional relationships. But you know, you can imagine that these, that these men and women having gone through so much together, had kind of formed these lasting friendships that, you know, kind of maybe border on familial relationships, but that this is his kind of core community. And so thinking about that in writing the book was a lot of fun in terms of, you know, creating like a more complex version of this man who for 200 plus years had been either criticized or celebrated as somebody who is kind of violently committed to the cause of the revolution. But there are these much more tender moments. There are moments of humor and levity, but as you said, you know, deep loyalty.
- [32:57]
Dr. Christina Gessler
We've been talking about Haiti in the late 1700s and early 1800s. You. You do a lot in the book to depict what it was like there. Can you take us to Haiti? Can you set the scene?
- [33:09]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
So in early independence, you're talking about early independence, is that.
- [33:15]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Yes.
- [33:17]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
So they dissoline declares Haitian independence on January 1, 1804. And this is after a. A military defeat of the French, but a defeat that the French themselves don't recognize. And so they've won the war, but the French are denying that they've won the war, and they're still threatening to attack, to reinvade. They're still claiming Haiti as a colony. And so while, you know, the achievement of independence or the declaration of independence is, you know, a time to celebrate kind of, you know, a monumental achievement, it is still very precarious. They are under threat. That threat is very real. Even though we know, you know, over 200 years later, that the French never actually did re. Invade. They threatened to reinvade, and they would have had, you know, it was unclear whether, you know, that this was going to happen and how many ships they were going to send or whatever. So it was a very real threat. So the, you know, Dessalines, entire time as head of state, he's leading a country at war. And the French are. They have a. They established a military based on the eastern side of the island. And the Spanish colony. Well, what was the Spanish colony and then kind of legally became French and is now the Dominican Republic, but it was then called Santo Domingo. And they are attacking Haitian ships and foreign ships trading with Haiti. They're kind of patrolling the waters around the island. And so this is very much a hostile world. And Dessalines focus becomes national defense. And he's kind of organizing the entire country around protecting. Protecting sovereignty and. Well, and establishing sovereignty, having his country recognized. So they're building forts inland. This was their. Their main strategy. And they were there. This kind of. Inland would be in mountainous regions. And so they're readying the port cities for attack. And they're. They can kind of be, like, easily burned and destroyed. And then they would retreat to the mountains where they were, you know, planting subsistence crops and kind of getting ready to be able to, like, hunker down in case of a French invasion. This also means that Dessalines still kind of tries to revive and maintain the plantation economy. And that is so that he has or that the country has export crops to trade with people like the British in the US in exchange for war material. They need guns, they need ammunition. And the only thing that the British and the Americans are interested in buying is sugar and coffee and cotton and kind of these staple crops. And so of course, the maintenance of the plantation economy requires labor. The maintenance of a standing military requires regular citizens to participate in the military. The construction of forts requires people's labor. And so one of the things that Dessalines has been criticized for is the use of the laborers are called cultivate cultivators. The use of kind of a labor style that for many at the time was kind of too closely mirrored the work that they had done under slavery. Obviously it is not slavery. There were kind of different guidelines, different rules regulating the labor economy, and the population overwhelmingly resisted a lot of this work.
- [37:34]
Dr. Christina Gessler
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- [38:05]
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- [39:02]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Conditions apply and you take us into the work codes that are Enacted and the, the fight to define what freedom is. They, they want to come up with this new way of keeping the plantation system, but just not calling it slavery. And, and one of the things that's, I think, interesting about this particular site of battle is that this is an island. It's not a particularly large island. The plantation system is happening in much, much larger regions throughout the United States, such as it was at that time in the West Indies and at this time period, you know, we're talking about the late 1700s when, when this story gains momentum and it goes on into the early 1800s. For anyone to even know what is happening in Haiti, they have to wait to get their newspaper. Newspapers weren't necessarily daily. Even if you had a newspaper, it didn't mean it would arrive quickly. People in towns would subscribe to different newspapers, read theirs and swap with friends. So the idea that you would get news quickly is not a thing. And yet the world really was riveted on this small island. And what was happening in a way that outside of today's social media would seem to be impossible.
- [40:24]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
Yeah, you're right. I think, you know, I mean, the size of, of Haiti or, and previously Saint Domingue, previously called Saint Domingue, you know, does kind of seem to not quite match the attention that this event was getting. However, you know, during the colonial period, this colony was the most wealth producing colony in the world. And so the sugar that was produced in Saint Domingue was kind of well known and was extremely lucrative for the French empire. And so the destruction of this system was very much newsworthy. And there's different kind of scales of circulation of information. You know, Jamaica, the kind of largest British colony in the area, was, you know, a day or two sail away. Cuba is also very close. And having information reach the US probably took a couple weeks, but relatively, you know, took a little bit of time. But news very much was circulated and people had their attention, had their eyes on, on Haiti. And one of the things that you see over the course of the revolution, but then into independence, is there's a transition in terms of like, who gets, who gets to narrate the story. And in the early years of the revolution that began in 1791, it's. It's reports by French colonists that get printed in US Newspapers. And they're absolutely horrified by what's happening. You know, there are tales of violence, of burning, of, you know, what they consider kind of all sorts of atrocities. And, you know, they paint themselves as these kind of like helpless victims, not as colonizers or enslavers. But then over the course of the revolution, you know, the, the words of Haitian revolutionaries start to appear in, in international newspapers in the US but also elsewhere. And some of this is because, you know, there's a segment of the revolution in which the Haitian revolutionaries are fighting with the French kind of on the same side against the British, against the Spanish, but they're allied with the French. Right. And Toussaint Virtue becomes the kind of recognized governor of the colony. And so his voice and, and Dessalines as well. Right. There's this period where Dessalines is like, celebrated for being a good republican general that is an era of his life that I think is understudied. And so their words end up getting printed a lot more because of this legitimacy within the French empire. But then once they've gotten that platform, you know, it's. There's, in some ways I, I think there's, I don't know, maybe no going back, right. That there's a recognition that this platform is important for their fight. And so there's an intentional, you know, sending proclamations to US Newspapers to have them printed. The, the Haitian Declaration of Independence gets printed throughout the United States. Even if there is that time lag, they're recognizing that like, oh, we need to tell our story too, because at the same time there's all these other reports by French people and other people, you know, demonizing the revolution.
- [44:23]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And Haiti is the first to abolish slavery. And we see all these parties who invest are invested in the idea that Haiti has to fail in that mission. Was there a sense that if Haiti succeeds in abolishing slavery, than all the dominoes fall?
- [44:44]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
Yeah, I think it's, it's a good question. I think it's in some ways not only that they've abolished slavery, but how they did it, and that it wasn't the decision on the part of those in power to kind of grant the abolition of slavery and that they insult that Haitian revolutionaries instead kind of claimed it for themselves in a very violent way because, of course, the French defended the institution very violently. So it's, it's both about abolition, but also about how abolition came about. Right. And I think that this is an era when, you know, gradual, so called gradual abolition is gaining some momentum. You know, there's certain states in the US that have kind of partially recognized that slavery will eventually fade out, but haven't kind of immediately abolished slavery across the board. And that's what, what Haiti does, right. It's, it's a violent fight for abolition, and it is immediate and universal, every single person right now, forever. Right. There's no sense of, like, well, we need to teach people to be independent or to be free first. So I think that there's. That it's a threat for the kind of economic investment and a threat for, you know, the racial hierarchy and, you know. Yeah. Like a kind of a threat to what they call order and stability. Right. Which was, of course, not very stable for. For those who were enslaved.
- [46:45]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You tell us in the book that while Dessalines is incredibly committed to his cause and he's all in on that, at the same time, he's able to have the perspective that the world is not going to see him the way he sees this fight that he foresees scorn in the future against him, against his nation. And in 1804, he issues a proclamation to inhabitants of the universe. Can you talk about this knowledge he had that history was not going to be kind to. To what he had done?
- [47:20]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
Yeah, I mean, it's a recognition of the world that he was living in and that he was kind of fighting a fight against all odds. Right. That the chips were stacked against him and that what they were doing was truly revolutionary. This upending of slavery and colonialism and racism. And that he was very confident in. In what he had achieved. Right. That he was kind of. Okay, you know, that he was. What's the right word? That he was kind of comfortable with. With what he had done and how he had achieved it, and that's what was necessary. But he knew, because slavery, colonialism, and racism still very much shaped the world that he lived in, that. That the narrative would be unkind, untruthful, I think. But he didn't really care. And he was not really. You know, I think on. On the one hand, I think he was conscious of his reputation and. And both in private correspondence, but also public proclamations worked to shape the narrative favorably for him and for Haiti. But at the end of the day, that, in fact, didn't matter how he personally was remembered as long as the kind of broader mission was a success. And I especially, like. He's got a quotation that basically, for somebody writing a book about him, was very humbling, that he was basically like, I don't actually care what you think about me. And I. I had to take a moment and be like, he doesn't care. Whatever I'm writing, it is irrelevant to. To whatever Dessalines did or whatever. And so, yeah, there's a sense that, yeah, There's a future looking. He was kind of, yeah, looking toward the future, but very confident in kind of what they had accomplished in the Haitian rev.
- [49:44]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You tell us in the book that for centuries after his death, enemies and those who have an agenda have repurposed and repackaged him in ways that are outside the historical record, that are factually incorrect. You take us into examples from prominent TV network here in America where a host mischaracterized him. But in the epilogue, it's called we have dared to be Free. You say the memory of any founding father is fraught. For more than two centuries, Jean Jacques Dessalines life and legacy have been celebrated, condemned, co opted and fictionalized to serve various political, social and cultural ends. Both when in Haiti and around the world, Haitians call on the memory of Dessalines when the nation's sovereignty is under attack and the revolutionary leader has come to embody independence and an unwavering opposition to foreign rule. In contrast, for centuries foreigners have used Dessalines to argue the opposite, that Haiti is unfit for self rule. It seems in a way that entitling his 1804 proclamation to inhabitants of the Universe, he was aware that he personally couldn't care about his legacy or. But he was aware that his legacy would remain contested and reused.
- [51:12]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
Yeah, no, you're right that, yeah, it didn't matter to him, but I think he was aware. Yeah, there's an interesting way that kind of him as a person and Haiti as a country and the narrative of each were kind of very deeply intertwined. And I think he was more concerned about the kind of the success of the country and the long term stability or sovereignty of the country than he was about his own kind of personal memory. But he kind of came to represent the country I like to the Inhabitants of the Universe because of these kind of conversations about universalism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and how, you know, in Haiti abolition was universal, citizenship was universal. There was no distinction in terms of how the law was applied. And I think there's this kind of situating Haiti. And just like in the title of the book, I have Avenged America, there's a situating of Haiti in a bigger context, in a bigger, bigger kind of political world and conversations about sovereignty relations of nation states. And that was initially, initially what drew me to studying Dessalines was, was his international diplomacy and trying to secure Haitian sovereignty and engaging with the so called, you know, family of nations and that kind of rhetoric in terms of statehood according to these like European Euro American measures But that, you know, he's challenging those and kind of exposing the lie in the so called universalism of these other states.
- [53:29]
Dr. Christina Gessler
On the last page of the epilogue, you quote him as saying, do not unheard, accuse us of cruelty. Remember our past sufferings, and you will judge less severely our present acts of necessity, of despair. And you go on to say to such a plea, we must listen. We're coming to the end of our time together. And I want to ask you, what do you hope this episode sparks for listeners?
- [53:55]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
I really, I like, I really like that quotation by him because I think, you know, there is the need to think about Dessalines and his story and the story of the Haitian revolution in this, this broader context, what they were up against and the kind of the world that they had grown up in. But then, you know, how the French defended those institutions and there's a, you know, that they weren't. Dessalines is also, is, is often kind of subject to criticisms that he was violent because he was kind of naturally a violent person. And I think that quotation really highlights that he was doing that. He was kind of using violence as a last resort rather than a first resort in terms of the fight. And so I'm really hoping that listeners will kind of gain a better understanding of Dessalines, a very complicated person, a very thoughtful and strategic person who engaged in diplomacy as well as warfare, who had, you know, cherished family members and was very loyal to childhood friends. But that also could be very severe and kind of cutthroat when, when the, the situation demanded it.
- [55:28]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And finally, what do you hope listeners take away?
- [55:31]
Dr. Julia Gaffield
I think, I hope that they take away a desire to learn more about the Haitian revolution. There's, it's a really complicated event or series of events, I would think. And rather than, I think reading one book about the Haitian revolution, I think, you know, readers should, should read many. There are some great books out there and, you know, I think it's a really hard event to kind of boil down to a paragraph to a sentence to an article or whatever. And so I think people should commit to reading a bunch of books about the Haitian revolution.
- [56:12]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Thank you so much for being here today, Professor Julia Gaffield, and sharing from your book I have Avenged America. This is the academic life. I'm Dr. Christina Gessler inviting you to please join us again.
- [56:36]
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