Thomas Clarkson - Thoughts on The Haitian Revolution

The following is an excerpt of a 1823 book by Thomas Clarkson: Thoughts on the Necessity for improving the Condition of the Slaves in the British Colonies.... It illustrates the importance many observers gave to the Haitian Revolution.

Clarkson, a British abolitionist, was not only a contemporary of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Toussaint Louverture, but was also directly involved in the struggle in Saint-Domingue, for example through his support of Vincent Ogé in the years leading up to the start of the Haitian Revolution after the 1791 vodou ceremonies of Bois Caïman.

Mémoire historique et politique des Colonies, et particulièrement de celle de St. Domingue, &c. Paris, August 1814. 8vo. p. 58.

Pp. 125, 126.

There were occasionally marauding parties from the mountains, who pillaged in the plains; but these were the old insurgent, and not the emancipated Negroes.

P. 78.

Mémoires, p. 311.

Ibid. p. 324.

The French were not the authors of tearing to pieces the Negroes alive by bloodhounds, or of suffocating them by hundreds at a time in the holds of ships, or of drowning them (whole cargoes) by scuttling and sinking the vessels;—but the planters.