WI: The Early Haiti Slave Revolt is More Successful?

[Christian]

Emperor Dessalines and King Henry both ruled as absolute monarchs in the style of the French Kings. African Kings tended to be much less powerful and much more bound by the views of their subchiefs. Hence the workers councils being far more prominent in the African rebel groups than they were afterwards.

The flip side to this is part of the reason Dessalines was accepted as the leader of the rebels was the African rebel groups tended to be divided by language, you had Kongo groups and Yoruba groups and Fon groups. It's arguable that you needed a Haitian born, French speaking figure to unite them as he'd be outside of that division. Prior to the defection there wasn't as much working together as there was afterwards.

The flip side to that flip side is that the negotiations that unified the defectors and the existing rebels only came to fruition after Henry flat out murdered Sans-Souci in a parley and the unity was at least partly achieved at gunpoint.

It is not impossible for the defectors to be killed by the French prior to defecting and so the existing rebels win without being coopted by the pro plantation leaders (though Dessailnes was a very good general who bought with him lots of trained men so certainly a rebel victory is a lot harder without that defection).

And after the French get kicked out, you had much the same. In that Dessalines and Henry both faced huge opposition to their land codes, as a result Petion ultimately came to the conclusion that he had to work with the plantation workers rather than against them (pretty much the only one from his generation who did) and leant into land reform and share cropping in order to win loyalty during his civil war with Henry (his men were paid in land). It's certainly not a conclusion it's impossible for the leaders to come to.

Also Louverture was undoubtedly the best politician of his generation but he and his faction (Dessalines, Henry, Belley, Rigaud) were not the original leaders of the revolt, that was Boukman, Jeannot, Papplion and Biassou. Louverture rose to power once the revolt had settled into stalemate, and Boukman had bene killed, as the man who could negotiate with the French. A more successful initial revolt (Boukman's original plan was to decapitate the Island's leadership before trying to free slaves but he abandoned that on fear he'd been caught) and you never see the pro plantation leaders get into power. It's almost certain that Boukman's lot would have leant firmly into extending the subsistence farms.

As mentioned above, the early leaders of the slave revolt, unlike Toussaint and the rest of his faction, were decidedly against the plantation system, so that has me thinking, what if they were more successful. What if the aforermentioned early revolt became a bigger success than it was? How would the French, who are in the midst of great changes in the political system take this?

If one should believe in the Butterfly Effect, in that something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings, let alone a slave uprising would change things quite significantly in the world, let alone just in France, then what would change? Would Boukman be willing to negotiate with the French? From what I've read on the Haitian's alliance with the Spaniards and why they switched sides, it wasn't that they turned because they heard the news of the French abolishing slavery, no that stuff took quite a while to reach the islands, but it was due to personal animosity between Toussaint and the Spanish commanders.

So, what do you all suspect would have happened?

 

[Gary Oswald]

I've always been tempted by the idea of a much larger Haitian equivalent of the Maroon Towns.

Say the slaves do manage to decapitate the big whites, before freeing themselves and then take Northern Haiti relatively quickly in the chaos, with a much shorter less bloody war, but the South, where the slave revolts were much less organised, doesn't go up and the shock of the North falling entirely leads to a much more pragmatic French response where the freed coloureds and the whites resolve their differences and give up on the North entirely. With Northern Haiti working as a pressure valve the same way the maroons do for escaped slaves and France and Spain using it as a buffer zone.

Is that a super plausible result? Probably not. Is it a better result than the OTL? No, the slaving system is much more intact here which the OTL Haitian revolution for all it's tragedies and missed potential, broke.

Is it an interesting place to set a story, I think so yeah. Perhaps your hero could be a free born Haitian from a much less centralised Northern Haiti, aiding a slave revolt in the South.