Haitian revolutionaries murdered virtually all white men, and spared only the women willing to marry black men. [1] "Black Jacobins" is indeed an apt term for such barbarism.
L'Overture was admired by many in revolutionary France because of his compassion towards the former slave-owning whites and mulattos. He was incredibly forgiving and humane given the circumstances. Even the former slave-owners couldn't hate him because he consistently stuck his neck out to protect the lives of whites and mulattos.
What you reference happened in 1804. In 1803, L'Overture was arrested and exiled to France where he died later that yet. Also in 1803, Napoleon announced that he would re-introduce slavery in Haiti. The whole episode would have been avoided if Napoleon had a conscience.
Yep, their a lot of guilty folks in this violation, but someone also was selling on the Africa side. I often wonder if the bad shape and tragedy that has visited Africa is the result.
Sadly, this is still current events and not history.
The Europeans deserve 100% of the blame for the slave trade.
I grew up learning that they traded manufactured goods (and, according to Roots and 1776, rum) to certain kings who were now able to gain more power by using European-made weapons to expand their territory and capture more prisoners. This led to a sharp increase in warfare as militaries could plunder not just wealth found in cities but bodies of civilians in villages.
Can you link to a source on your account?
This is not to say that the Atlantic slave trade wasn't incredibly destructive, unusually pervasive and far reaching, but the idea that the fault was entirely with the West is a ridiculous denial of the agency of every African individual and political unit that took part in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa
Is this bit true? I thought they also traded wood to the Arabian peninsula for instance. Granted, my knowledge here is coming from an episode of CrashCourse[1] and my knowledge of pre-colonial Africa is woeful.
Sure is a lot of presentism and tu-quoque-ing going on here.
The British Empire managed to abolish slavery without anything remotely so horrific as the Haitian Revolution. As a result, former British colonies are what, hellholes? And Haiti is a paradise on Earth?
You are likely inheritor to the American Abolitionist tradition, which managed to abolish slavery by fomenting a Civil War that, in its wake, claimed the lives of a quarter of the newly freed slaves—approximately a million people. Does your heart bleed for them? Or to the dead do you say, at least you aren't slaves?
Certainly many civilians were killed in WW2, ostensibly to further the war effort and thus prevent a worse outcome of the Axis winning.
At the very least, we should judge this in the context of the terrible barbarism committed against Black slaves.