The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies

Aesthetics as Counter-Memory Historiography and the Iconography of Toussaint Louverture

On November 10, 1864, in the midst of the American Civil War, the New Orleans Tribune featured a column about a portrait with “intrinsic value” of Toussaint Louverture.¹ In it, the author noted that Jacob Snider, Jr., a Republican of the “blackest and noblest” kind, had presented the Louverture portrait to a fund established to support the family of Washington Wilks, a prominent English abolitionist who died suddenly while giving an oration at the Freemason’s Hall in London earlier in the year. Snider himself was not infrequently involved with the art world and had acquired the portrait from John Bigelow, who had been serving as U.S. consul in Paris under President Abraham Lincoln’s administration.² One of the most noteworthy details of the column is the information that Snider had traded his portrait of George Washington in exchange for Bigelow’s one of Toussaint Louverture. The author concluded the New Orleans Tribune piece with a wish that Snider’s gift to the fund might prompt a sale to help support the Wilks family. As extraordinary as it is to imagine a portrait of Louverture in the possession of a U.S. consulate, and one stationed in Paris no less, the story also evinces how Louverture was being positioned as a black founding father, with the same iconic value as George Washington.

But perhaps the most salient aspect of the column is what it intimates about the intersection of counter-memory historiography and mid-nineteenth-century notions of politics when they are animated by questions of the aesthetic. The author’s passing comment about the portrait’s “intrinsic value” could have been meant to intimate a number of ideas, including the painting’s monetary value (determined by the market), its own artistic value (determined by “aesthetic judgment”), or its semiotic value (determined in a field of symbolic order). On the one hand, the author’s hope that some “American historical society of New England Abolitionist[s]” would make a bid to help support the Wilks fund is a reminder of the authority that entities like historical societies exercise not simply as archeologists of knowledge and curators of archives but as agents in contemporary political affairs. On the other hand, the author’s admission that, beyond the fact that Bigelow had acquired the painting from an old Parisian curiosity shop, the provenance and history of the painting was “unknown,” might be thought of as a reminder that the Haitian Revolution has too often been occluded from standard histories of the Age of Revolution.³ More importantly, the notice about the painting itself accentuates that sources other than those traditionally used by historians are needed to more fully delineate Haiti’s presence in accounts of the United States and the hemisphere of the Americas writ large, no less than of France and European colonialism. And no small part of these other counterarchives about Haiti have come from and been created by African American intellectuals and cultural producers from activist Anna Julia Cooper to musician Charles Mingus, from painter Jacob Lawrence to writer Ntozake Shange, among many others.

African Americans have challenged the popular, if not official, discourse on Louverture and the Haitian Revolution by fashioning alternative archives in an intellectual and political project that might be called “counter-memory historiography.” “Counter-memory” is most often identified with Michel Foucault and his critical analyses of history, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the figure of the author. As Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn have noted, Foucault’s definition of “counter-memory designated the residual or resistant strains that withstand official versions of historical continuity.”⁴ Foucault’s notion of counter-memory, especially where he is concerned with the epistemological relationship between “history” and “genealogy,” also has bearings on his later discussions of the policing mechanisms of the disciplines that produce “subjugated knowledges,” and ultimately heuristically, the insurrection of these subjugated knowledges.⁵ Engaging Nietzische’s consideration of history, Foucault defines genealogy as “the constitution of the subject across history which has led up to the modern concept of the self” and as a mode of critical inquiry to investigate those elements that “we tend to feel [are] without history.”⁶ We might turn this on its head somewhat to intimate that the constitution of history across subjects, themes, and chronologies have led to the modern concept of the self. In this sense, there is no universal history, only multiple genealogies from which a history emerges and masquerades itself as universal.⁷

How might the Haitian Revolution be thought of as a counter-memory, as a “discontinuity” or residual strain against the official histories of the United States? How might such counter-memories resist teleological narratives of American self-actualization and exceptionalism? What are the ways that the Haitian Revolution and other uprisings like the Irish Rebellion of 1803 belie common perceptions about the Age of Revolution as the apotheosis of European enlightenment discourse? And, inasmuch as Louverture and the Haitian Revolution are subjugated knowledges within the histories of the United States and France, how might we accommodate art and aesthetics as iterations of subjugated knowledges within the disciplinary regimes of history that privilege primary sources as history’s most fundamental object of analyses?

Nineteenth-century African American intellectuals enacted a mode of political critique by engaging counter-memory historiography, and no exercise symbolized this more than the iconography of Louverture. Many of these illustrations or sketches invert the literal definition of iconography as “picture writing” into, instead, an aesthetic practice of “writing picture” with their biographical vignettes of Louverture and social histories of the Haitian Revolution.⁸ Manipulating the aesthetic practice of iconography, writers crafted these images as discursive allegories to enter into debates about the diaspora and Pan-Africanism, black independence and sovereignty, and chattel slavery in the United States and elsewhere.

In what follows, I turn to portraits of Louverture as they are represented in speeches and orations as well as a wide range of literary genres including the novel, poetry, and nonfiction prose. The vast majority of these sketches were represented narratively, rendered through a robust textual constellation of mid-century periodical culture rife with newspapers, pamphlets, and magazines. With respect to the political project of counter-memory historiography, it is precisely the fact that these sketches cannot be said to constitute primary documents about Louverture or the Haitian Revolution, since most of them were produced decades later, that they warrant analyses for the ways they were positioned to be both axiomatic artifacts of the past and emblematic claims on the present.

The specter of Haiti has had a latent presence in the imagination of the African American public sphere beginning immediately after the revolution’s conclusion.⁹ On July 4, 1804, after their white counterparts had celebrated American independence, black Philadelphians took to the streets to celebrate Haitian independence.¹⁰ News from Haiti was also covered in the early African American press, at least from 1827, when Freedom’s Journal began publishing pieces about it. In its short existence of only two years, the editors of Freedom’s Journal included several features involving Haiti: a six-part series of articles about the country’s history and present condition, a three-part biographical account of Louverture, and the short story “Theresa—A Haytien Tale,” among others.¹¹ David Walker, who in his 1829 pamphlet Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World calling for U.S. black resistance to oppression, suggested that if blacks must “see fit to go away,” they should do so with the English and, if not with them, then the Haitians, “who, according to their word, [are] bound to protect and comfort us.”¹² And James McCune Smith, among others who would deliver orations about Louverture (including William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Wendell Phillips), offered the lecture “Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haytian Revolutions” as his topic before the Stuyvestant Institute in 1841. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, then, Haiti circulated through a number of mediums including public performances and parades, periodicals, pamphlets, and oratory.

What becomes visible in these invocations of Haiti is how they constitute a concomitant cultural gesture that was at least as much an honorific, consecrating of Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, as it was an epistemic mechanism deployed to ensure that Haiti would not drop out of the public imagination, or, worse still, history altogether. As these invocations of Haiti indicate, African American intellectuals were acutely aware of the ways in which black subjects were being continually elided in national and global histories, and they imagined aesthetics as both a corrective and supplement, not only to standard historical accounts but also to normative practices of historiography.¹³

In an 1848 article in Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, the North Star, the anonymous author of an essay on Toussaint Louverture worries that the same military forces that subdued Louverture were also suppressing the historical account by compromising the archives and records on the Haitian leader. “The same tyranny which meanly murdered him in a European dungeon, blotted out all the best sources of information as to the means by which he accomplished them. But the facts which are derived through this very enemy, unsmoothered by avalanches of abuse, are quite sufficient for our purpose.”¹⁴ It is not clear if the author means to suggest that “the best sources of information” had been “blotted out” ex post facto or not created at the moment of a given historical event itself, but it is evident that the author is concerned about an uneven archive that ostensibly privileges only the French version of events. The writer here, then, would seem to prefigure some claims that the Haitian Revolution has been occluded, claims most often associated with Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s seminal work.¹⁵ Whereas the “silencing” that Trouillot addresses is decidedly more a problem of political ontology (inasmuch as the Haitian Revolution was “unthinkable” or unimaginable), the problem that the author of this North Star article evinces is an epistemic one concerning historiography. In using the word “blotted,” the author means to convey the ways that, on the one hand, the sketch of Louverture’s character or reputation is being sullied and, on the other hand, accounts of the country are being materially obscured from various official histories.

Yet, as important as these early representations of Haiti, Louverture, and the revolution remain, they increased in frequency and assumed particular currency in the decade before the American Civil War. Haiti circulated in the U.S. imagination during this period for a number of reasons including the heightened discourse about the annexation of Cuba and continued fears by the Southern plantocracy of looming black insurrections, in addition to African Americans themselves increasingly invoking Haiti in debates about political sovereignty. These debates about sovereignty principally centered on issues of self-governance and citizenship, underwritten by the political philosophical question of the Right of Revolution. If, as F. O. Matthiessen outlined decades ago, the central preoccupation that united writers of the classic period now identified as the “American Renaissance” was the question of democracy, African American writers of the same moment, including Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Frank J. Webb, frequently addressed this very question through both national and international registers.¹⁶ During the “impending crisis” and the Civil War, the geographical proximity and political history of Haiti put this question into high relief with particular urgency.¹⁷

As the novel that famously, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, started the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) features apparitions of Haiti in two important moments to stage dialogues about black emigration and self-governance, respectively. In one instance, the escaped slaves George and Eliza Harris, after being reunited and now ensconced in Canada, have a tête-à-tête about their possible next steps, with George championing emigration. George’s preference of Liberia over Haiti—the two sites most vigorously considered in the emigration debates during the African American convention movements—depends upon a depiction of Haiti as both an effeminate and a failed country. Desperately wanting to adopt “an African nationality,” George tells Eliza that such a subjectivity cannot be found in Haiti but rather on the shores of Africa where there is “a republic formed of picked men, who, by energy and self-educating force, have, in many cases, individually, raised themselves above a condition of slavery. Having gone through a preparatory stage of feebleness, this republic has, at last, become an acknowledged nation on the face of the earth,—acknowledged by both France and England.”¹⁸ It almost seems as if George were indeed speaking of Haiti for, by the time of the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it had in fact gained diplomatic recognition from France in 1825 and England some eight years later in 1833.

If George’s doubts about Haiti stem from his desire to embody an “African nationality,” Stowe’s use of the trope of “sans culottes” in a conversation between the St. Clair brothers correlates the Haitian Revolution to the French. On the heels of watching young Henrique beat his slave Dodo, Augustine coolly warns his brother Alfred that the current social system may be up-ended and mentions Haiti as a foreboding example. When Alfred retorts that the “Haytiens were not Anglo Saxons; if they had been, there would have been another story,” Augustine replies, “If ever the San Domingo hour comes, Anglo Saxon blood will lead the day.”¹⁹ The “San Domingo hour” has often been used as shorthand by critics to note white fear of black insurrection, while often leaving unacknowledged the second half of the conditional sentence, with Augustine’s full espousal of racial romanticist discourse, part and parcel of a wider articulation of racial romanticism so central to the novel’s ideological subtexts. Variants of the word “St. Domingo” were used by Stowe’s contemporaries to signal white fear of black insurrection. This was certainly the case with Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), in which he sets the story of a slave revolt gone awry and off course aboard a ship named the San Dominick to adumbrate the already gothic foreboding language of his prose.

However, more salient to the relationship of aesthetics and countermemories to revealing subjugated knowledges is the visual work that the “sans culottes” image performs to underscore class stratification as a central issue of the Haitian Revolution. It is important to recall that the words immediately preceding the line about the “San Domingo hour” concern class; the brothers mention the upper- and underclass, machinery, and the masses. Thus, when Augustine summons Haiti as an example of the precipitating decline of the French noblesse, the most immediate context is class more so than race. The interpolation of Haiti into a discussion about class or of class into a discussion of race (taking the initial context of Henrique’s reign of terror over Dodo as the starting point) should be taken not so much as a non sequitur as a glimmer of the kind of “insurrection of knowledges” that will come to the fore some ninety years later when C. L. R. James offers a Marxist reading of the Haitian Revolution as one of class struggle in The Black Jacobins (1938).²⁰ Thus, we can see James’s The Black Jacobins as an act to correct the overdetermination of race in previous depictions of slavery by considering its class implications as well. The scene with the St. Clair brothers (one where race is interpolated into a discussion primarily about class in a novel that is ostensibly about race) functions in the same ways that Marx’s marginalia on chattel slavery do in his analyses of class formation—as a subjugated knowledge of an imminent genealogy of a historiography on race and class to come.

If Stowe was among those who invoked “St. Domingo” as an apparition of sorts, another group of writers was equally preoccupied with offering fuller biographical sketches of Louverture. Freedom’s Journal’s first installment on him, for example, opened with lines advertising that it was “copying into our paper the following sketch of the character of TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE.”²¹ While essentially every account of Haiti also includes one of Louverture, these figurative sketches range from vignettes to more detailed portraits. In the first half of the nineteenth century these included William Wordsworth’s sonnet “To Toussaint l’Overture” (1803), John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1833 ballad stanzas, Harriet Martineau’s novel The Hour and the Man (1840), and Alphonse de Lamartine’s verse drama Toussaint Louverture (1850). Wordsworth’s sonnet, which finds Louverture imprisoned in Joux, is essentially concerned with the corporeal dematerialization of his body and the ostensible freedom engendered by his transubstantiation into nature.²² If Wordsworth’s sonnet can be thought of as a vignette, whereby the principal image fades into its background, the vast majority of biographical sketches of Louverture employ a different tactic of representation; rather than the aesthetics of ethereality and dissolution, these other sketches embody an aesthetics of corporeality and adumbration. In contrast to Wordsworth’s concentration on the ethereal, later portraits perceptibly attended to the physical, the body and soul of Louverture as it were. The three most recurrent features of Louverture that these portraits illustrate are his sagacity and wisdom, racial identity, and leadership in both military command and political office.

Considerations of Louverture’s wisdom—whether learned or untutored—were pressing concerns during this period when claims about black intelligence were often indexed to claims about their humanity. In one of the Louverture portraits in the North Star, the author notes that a French writer had reproached Bayou de Libertas for “not being aware that his slave had learned to read.”²³ The French writer was apparently mortified that Louverture had gained enough faculties that he was able grow familiar with Abbé Raynal. A little more than two years later, another piece in the North Star suggested that Bayou himself had instructed Louverture “in some of the first branches of education.”²⁴ And earlier than these two pieces for the North Star, James McCune Smith’s 1841 Stuyvesant Institute lecture made similar note of Louverture’s literacy. Although detractors of the Haitian Revolution were dismayed by the idea of a slave learning to read and write, antebellum African American intellectuals took measures to accentuate Louverture’s literacy as both a personal sign of his individual virtue and a symbolic sign of the social, if not radically subversive, value of literacy for all African Americans. When these portraits highlight Louverture’s literacy, they evince the strategies that Robert B. Stepto calls “liberation through literacy.”²⁵ In a metacritical sense, such abilities enable subaltern subjects to enter into, and engage with, the conventions of normative historiographic practices.

While observations about Louverture’s intelligence attempted to illuminate his cerebral qualities, many of the sketches were also preoccupied with portraying his physical attributes, delineating them as “Negro” or “African.” In the same 1848 issue of the North Star that noted the complaint of the French writer who lamented Louverture’s ability to read, the author prefigured the entire piece by underscoring Louverture’s blackness—“Not a drop of any other than African blood flowed in his veins.”²⁶ This detail was reiterated in public lectures by both William Wells Brown and Wendell Phillips. “This man was the grandson of the king of Arradas,” Brown proclaimed, “one of the most wealthy, powerful, and influential monarchs on the west coast of Africa.”²⁷ And Phillips drew a similar picture, echoing that Louverture had “no drop of white blood.”²⁸ In making at least a partial response to the science of phrenology and the discourse of racial romanticism, Phillips was at pains to reify Louverture’s blackness as undiluted, “with no drop of white blood,” in order to make a case that “the Negro race … is entitled … to a place close by the side of the Saxon.” Brown’s and Phillips’s characterization seem almost to be a rejoinder to the scene of the St. Clair brothers in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where Augustine surmises that, should the San Domingo hour come, “Anglo Saxon blood will lead the day.”²⁹

But the most recurrent trace in these sketches was Louverture’s position as a leader in political office and especially the battlefield, and, by employing techniques of effulgence, these sketches moved from the domain of mere biography to the realm of iconography. In The Garies and Their Friends, Frank J. Webb’s novel about the tragic lives of middle-class African American families (the Garies who pass for white and the Ellises who do not), there is a crucial episode that is animated by a discussion of an image of Louverture. After arranging accommodations to stay at one of the homes of a wealthy black Philadelphian, Mr. Walters, Garie finds himself intrigued by a painting hanging on the parlor wall.

“So you, too are attracted by that picture,” said Mr. Walters, with a smile. “All white men look at it with interest. A black man in uniform of a general officer is something so unusual that they cannot pass it with a glance…. That is Toussaint l’Ouverture and I have every reason to believe it to be the correct likeness…. That looks like a man of intelligence. It is entirely different from any likeness I ever saw of him. The portraits generally represent him as a monkey-faced person, with a handkerchief about his head.”³⁰

Walters’s comments to Garie about representation read dress and attire as social signifiers. Recalling the article in the New Orleans Tribune about Jacob Snider’s acquisition of a portrait of Louverture that opens this essay, it is worth noting that the author of that article also took notice that “Toussaint [was] dressed in the uniform of a Haytien general.”³¹ Here, accoutrements designate social position—the uniform works as a political emblem against black caricature. Considering Maurice Wallace’s acute analyses of the ways that the military uniform transformed the political noncomformist Martin Delany into a “disciplinary individual and model (black) citizen” of the U.S, one whose “corporal asceticism” no longer constituted “a menace to the representational integrity of the body politic,” we might conceptualize Louverture’s uniform as a sartorial symbol that proleptically indexes the yearned-for body politic of Haiti as a nation.³² Walters’s statement also discloses the efforts to not only dehumanize Louverture as “monkey-faced” but to render him effeminate through the symbol of the “handkerchief [tied] about his head,” as some of Webb’s American readers would have interpreted the rag. Another way to read the handkerchief, however, is in terms of class consciousness, as a sign that Louverture was unpretentious, modest, even humble in his appearance to promote a sense of egalitarianism through his visual representation as a man of the people, as Wendell Phillips noted—“He hated the restraint of his rank; he loved to put on the gray coat of the Little Corporal, and wander in camp. Toussaint also never could bear a uniform. He wore a plain coat, and often the yellow Madras handkerchief of the slaves.”³³

The Louverture image in The Garies and Their Friends amounts to an example of Webb’s practice of literary portraiture, and the placement of the image itself is significant in a novel marked by what Sam Otter calls its “still-life aesthetics.” In lucid readings of The Garies, Otter argues that the novel’s meanings and unfolding are hinged by the two counterparts of the Georgia tea table and the Philadelphia supper episodes. “Across the novel,” Otter writes, “Webb presents scenes that are characterized by what we might call a still-life aesthetics: meticulously arranged domestic interiors—visions of freedom, consumption, and constraint—whose surfaces, imbued with narrative and historical meanings, invite viewers to partake of their complex pleasures.”³⁴ What pleasures might be taken in this key scene of literary portraiture? Walters’s pleasures with the image seem to stem from at least two sources, one formal (that the picture was “the correct likeness”) and the other a thematic anomaly (that “a black man in uniform of a general officer is something so unusual”). Webb accentuates literary portraiture as a political strategy that seeks to picture U.S. abolitionism as something akin to the Haitian Revolution, but to do so he must figuratively activate the still life, set it in motion as it were, as its calm serenity will soon be breached by the hurried, frantic activity of the race riot afoot.

In a more general sense, Webb’s description of the Louverture portrait, no less than the placment of it, is meant to signal his singularity, almost as if there was no historical precedence for someone like the Haitian leader. This singularity is reinforced by its placement within the spatial domain of the home as the primary piece of art. By comparison, we might recall an important scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose author also wrote the introduction for Webb’s novel. In Stowe’s novel, there are both biblical scriptures as well as a drawing of George Washington (fancifully colored, perhaps black) hanging on the wall of Aunt Chloe and Uncle Tom’s cabin, offered as the necessary text and image discourse that underlines the sanctioned social logic of their positions as Americans. Both episodes illuminate Mitchell’s notion of “iconology” as the relationship between “pictures” and “verbal or literary imagery” inasmuch as the word choice of Stowe’s and Webb’s respective prose both fashions and indexes the curatorial efforts of African Americans to approach interior decorating as an exercise of political articulation.³⁵

While Webb stressed Louverture’s singularity, he was frequently compared to other political actors, on scales of both national and global histories. In terms of narratives within national symbolic orders, Louverture was compared to French and American figures. The oratorical and literary portraits of Louverture drawn by Brown, Smith, and Phillips were markedly different from those created by Wordsworth and Webb, both in terms of aesthetics and political strategy. Inasmuch as Brown, Smith, and Phillips were preoccupied with situating Louverture in various honorific pantheons and as the apotheosis of a particular teleology, these acts of consecration illustrate the notion of what might be called “correlative historiography”; that is, methodological practices that put into high relief or resurrect subjugated knowledges by the representations of overdetermined or overwrought acts of analogy. In such overwrought moments, the very partiality of portraying history is revealed at each moment of comparison, as those histories can only approximate something like universal history through the logic of analogy or, with respect to art more specifically, semblance and verisimilitude.

In his speeches on the lecture circuit, Brown linked Louverture to Napoleon before publishing them under the title St. Domingo: Its Revolutions and Patriots in 1855. Brown’s likening of Louverture to Napoleon depends upon the use of the rhetorical device of parallelism, less for establishing a comparison between the two than a contrast.³⁶ And, although Napoleon’s name is not mentioned in Wordsworth’s Louverture sonnet, the connection between the two is more fully borne out when it is later included in Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty (1815). Within the pantheon of U.S. figures, Louverture was most often likened to George Washington. “He was truly the Washington of Hayti,” reads the 1848 feature of him in Douglass’s North Star.³⁷ Perhaps more than any other mid-nineteenth-century figure, it was Brown who associated Louverture with Washington again and again, and there he deployed a similar tactic of contrast through parallelism.³⁸ Even when Louverture was not explicitly compared to a specific figure, his name was put into a circulatory orbit with other prominent figures. Such was the case with Douglass’s lecture on “Self-Made Men” (1859), in which the famed orator spoke about Benjamin Bannaker and William Dietz and essentially made Louverture a black American by figuratively pulling Haiti closer to the orbit of the United States.

While Douglass’s strategy in his lecture was to use the honorific space of the pantheon trope to bring Haiti closer to the United States, both Smith and Phillips employed the trope to illustrate Louverture as a world-historical figure whose iconography cuts across time and space. In his 1841 lecture before the Stuyvesant Institute, Smith lamented the rise of the caste system in the United States as something that is an antidemocratic or “unrepublican” practice. It is only in the last line of Smith’s speech that it becomes less of an anecdote and more prophetic when he notes that Louverture had learned to read while a slave—a suggestion that there may yet be a Louverture amongst the ranks at the Colored Orphan Asylum if only they too were afforded the opportunity to be educated. While the message of Smith’s lecture may not have been unanticipated, his tactic of illustrating Louverture and the Haitian Revolution as part of a world-historical constellation that included “Leonidas at Thermopylæ and “Bruce at Bannockburn” was perhaps less foreseen. Smith announced that these events and figures were necessary study for “every American citizen,” and he implored his audience to take notice that “among the many lessons that may be drawn from this portion of history is one not unconnected with the present occasion.”³⁹

Delivered some twenty years later in 1861, Phillips’s speech hoped to convince his audience of the equality of the “Negro race” by revealing “the great men they produce.” In the process, Phillips is almost too conspicuous in his efforts to make an icon of Louverture, contending that few men have been more deserving. Phillips notes that, with George Washington, there was “no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his Country,” while Louverture languishes in relative obscurity with “hardly one written line.”

You think me a fanatic tonight, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocion of the Greek, and Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown the ripe fruit of our noonday, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint l’Ouverture.⁴⁰

Phillips’s speech is perhaps the most resonant nineteenth-century illustration of the practice of “correlative historiography.” While the speech itself is marked by an oratorical style indebted to classical rhetoric, it depends upon an alternation between synecdoche and metonymy. In order to underscore Louverture’s exceptionalism, Phillips must delineate his extraordinary features as a part that can stand for the whole, indeed as the species for the genus. But Louverture’s exceptionalism must also operate metonymically, as something that could be closely related to the quotidian ranks of the “Negro race” to function as an argument for a larger claim about black humanity. Phillips’s speech should be contextualized within the debates on the meanings of the Civil War and efforts to correlate it with the earlier American Revolution. Phillips offered his New York and Boston audiences a sketch that was “at once a biography and an argument”; the speech was intended as a biography of “a Negro soldier and statesman” as well as “an argument in behalf of the race from which he sprung.” Not content with placing him in a pantheon of some of the most notable figures in world history, Phillips saw him as a combination of them all. Phillips’s oratorical portrait of Louverture and the revolution are presented not simply in epic terms but as a world-historical phenomenon—a picture that might have struck his audience as somewhat hyperbolic, something that Phillips himself acknowledges in his closing words. Phillips’s acknowledgement should be taken less as an apology for the formal properties of rhetoric per se, than for what it metacritically evinces about normative historiography as a practice that needs other things besides the official archives to approach an understanding of a moment or event.

In 1863, Brown published the omnibus The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, returning to some of the biographical sketches he had outlined earlier in myriad publications, including his previous St. Domingo lectures. Like Phillips, Brown was concerned that the monumental history of Louverture and the Haitian Revolution was being effaced by public memory, and he intended The Black Man to act as a corrective: “When impartial history shall do justice to the St. Domingo revolution, the name of Toussaint Louverture will be placed high upon the roll of fame.” Of the fifty-three character sketches in The Black Man, seven of them are related to Haiti or the revolution. Published at a moment more fully entrenched in the Civil War, the catalogue of Brown’s text reveals a preoccupation with black rebellion as a form of revolution with entries on Nat Turner, Joseph Cinque, and Denmark Vesey. Indeed, Brown essentially draws upon his early descriptions of Louverture for The Black Man compendium.

One of the sketches, however, that did not make it into the newer publication was the brief one of a woman named “Vida.” Brown recounts her story in the earlier lecture, when he covers the period of the revolution in which Dessalines begins his campaign against Rochambeau, noting that she, like Lamour de Rance, was a native of Africa. Vida and Lamour were “mawons,” alternatively known as cimarróns or maroons in different parts of the Caribbean. “Her face was all marked with incisions, large pieces had been cut out of her ears. Vida kept a horse, which she had caught with her own hands, and had broken to the bit. When on horseback, she rode like a man…. This woman, with her followers, met and defeated a battalion of the French, who had been sent into the mountains. Lamour and Vida united, and they were complete masters of the wilds of St. Domingo.”⁴¹ Why did Vida disappear from Brown’s account? What ideological and curatorial undercurrents guided his editorial choices to republish aspects of Lamour in the newer book but not include ones about Vida? In crafting the Black Man compendium, a volume that might be called an attempt at Nietzschean “critical history,” with dozens of sketches of male figures but less than a handful about women, Brown created a genealogy of the Haitian Revolution that was decidedly masculinist. But in creating such a gendered genealogy, he also diminished aspects of the archives that were deemed otherwise not normative: the savage (versus the civilized), the performative (versus the scripted), and “guerrilla” warfare (versus traditional military tactics). If Brown’s sketches of Louverture and the revolution are emblematic of a process of hagiography, they are also reminders that all histories are counter-memories that move from moments of latency and incipience to degrees of seeming permanence and concretization. In this instance, the story of Vida and other women of the revolution would remain dormant in the archives until activated, as it were, by a practice of counter-memory historiography that sought to unfold a feminist genealogy.

More than simply illustrating the cultures of textual reproduction in African American letters, Vida’s omission from The Black Man draws attention to the epistemic problematic that comes into being when the production of counter-memories operationalizes the Foucauldian distinction between genealogy and history. Inasmuch as Vida does indeed constitute part of the history of the Haitian Revolution, she, and others like her, became increasingly less representative of the particular genealogy Brown was constructing. And in this sense, the anecdote of Vida between Brown’s St. Domingo and Black Man intimates that counter-memory historiographies—whether in guises ranging from revisionist history to subaltern history—can only persist as interventions inasmuch as they reveal their very partiality, as both an acknowledgment of the impossibility of a total history and as a declarative statement of a political position, and continually perform against the grain.