a1620: Bois Caiman: Simidor responds to Corbett (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Karioka9@cs.com

In #a1564, Bob Corbett refers to my comments as "manifestly unfair to the
Hoffmann text."  The Hoffmann piece, he says is "not an analysis of the
question of Bois Caiman itself," but "a review and analysis of the written
records of it." He then chastises me for grasping at straws and for
challenging Hoffmann's "considered analysis of the existing historical and
literary literature" with "mere speculations."  But, to paraphrase a higher
authority, speculation of speculations, everything is speculation!  Before
taking Hoffmann to task, I checked some of his sources.  I read the relevant
passages in Garran Coulon's voluminous report and a copy of the forced
confession of Francois Chapotin, one of the slaves captured during the failed
attack on the Chabaud/Gallifet plantations.  (I invite the reader who has not
done so to please read my initial contribution on this subject, post #a1063,
and also Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique's article, post #a1112.)

A lot of the confusion around Bois Caiman is caused by the fact that most
historians have collapsed two important meetings, the August 14 meeting on
the Mezy plantation, and the Bois Caiman meeting one week later, into one.
Hoffmann finds suspicious that there is ample evidence of the Mezy meeting
and scant information on the latter. His claim that the Bois Caiman ceremony
is a myth fabricated by the malevolent Antoine Dalmas is based entirely on
the mistaken belief that Dalmas is the sole primary source for the Bois
Caiman story.  If Corbett's reading of Hoffmann's intent was accurate, then
the latter would have drastically revised his findings, in order to account
for the two independent accounts of the Bois Caiman ceremony pointed out by
David Geggus.  Hoffmann must quite simply recant, or he must convincingly
refute Geggus' sources.

Here I make an appeal to common sense. Let us start with the accepted fact
that some 200 delegates from the Plaine du Nord plantations met on August 14
and decided on a general slave uprising, for which no date was agreed upon.
The Acul and Limbé blacks were short on patience; the gang on the Gallifet
estate jumped the gun on the night of Aug. 17 or Aug. 20, and botched up
their attempt to set the place on fire.  Those captured confessed of a plot
to kill all the whites.  The Limbé whites decided to take their captives to
the Cape to convince the Governor of the urgency of the situation.  But
before they could safely make their way there, the insurrection exploded with
the force of a wild prairie fire.  Boukman fearing that the plot was
unraveling, had called his followers to the Caiman woods, on the night of the
22nd, and improvised a ceremony that was partly political agitation and
partly blood rite.  One thousand French men, women and children lost their
lives in the space of two weeks.  The white population in the Cape, including
the refugees from the Plaine, took no prisoners in their defense of the city.
 Their bloodthirsty and unbelievable cruelty against innocent slaves and
freedmen in the Cape is a matter of record.  That they did not form a
commission to document each step in the planning of the insurrection is only
surprising to some.  That the lack of a paper trail 200 years later is
evidence that a particular event did not happen only seems foolish.

Against common sense, Hoffmann would have us believe that the hateful Dalmas
invented what turns out to be a traditional Dahomean blood oath.  In the
tradition of other white historians, he turns his back on the work of his
native counterparts, and simply dismisses the weight of local and family
tradition in the retention of history where the written word is not
available.  Why this bias?  I reason that it is partly because of the
ideology that Hoffmann and many Francophile historians adhere to, namely that
the Haitian revolution was the "daughter" of the French revolution. To
suggest that Hoffmann is biased or not exhaustive in his research may seem
unfair, but it is a fact.  Even marxist historians, like Etienne Charlier and
CLR James, ascribed to the notion that the slaves could not "spontaneously"
rise up to such a heightened state of rebellion by themselves, and that the
French revolution was the catalyst, the "revolutionary situation," that
brought first the settlers, then the freedmen of color, and finally the
blacks into motion.  It wasn't until Jean Fouchard's work on the maroons that
it became accepted that the slaves had their own tradition of struggle, their
own aspiration to independence, and that they as a class held a separate
agenda from the other classes in the colony.

Daniel Simidor

P.S.  For those who do not read French, here is the translation of a footnote
on Bois Caiman from Etienne Charlier's book, "Apercu sur la formation
historique de la Nation haitienne" (p. 49) published half a century ago:

"Cecile Fatiman, the wife of Louis Michel Pierrot, who led a black battalion
at Vertieres and later became president of Haiti, took part in the Bois
Caiman ceremony: she was a mambo [Vodou priestess].  The daughter of an
African woman and of a Corsican prince, Cecile Fatiman was a mulatto with
green eyes and long black silky hair, who was sold into slavery with her
mother in Saint Domingue.  The mother also had two sons who disappeared
without a trace on the auction block.  Cecile Fatiman lived in the Cape until
the age of 112, in full possession of her mental ability.

"We hold this information from General Pierre Benoit Rameau, the grandson of
Louis Michel Pierrot and his wife, who gave us permission to publish it.
General Rameau is one of our national heroes, but he is seldom mentioned,
probably because he is alive and therefore cumbersome.  It is a fact that
when the North American military intervention took place in 1915, he was
fighting in the North as a leader of Rosalvo Bobo's forces.  Loyal to Bobo in
spite of the invader's alluring offers, he opposed the Convention militarily,
which earned him eleven years in jail and the subtilization of his wealth.

"With the greatest indifference, the Haitian of today, this curious byproduct
of our glorious past, watches this old man go by, with his grandeur from a
different era deserving of our respect.  In his crude French, he expressed an
implacable logic and the highest sense of virtue, in this reply to the
occupant who wanted to buy him: "Your 100,000 dollars cannot supply to my
honor, Captain Waller!"  Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines and the leaders of
1804 did not speak more elegantly.  Rameau's encounter with Waller and
Admiral Caperton took place in September 1915, in Dattes, Gonaives, in the
house of Mr. Desert and in the presence of Mr. Woel, US Consul and father to
Mr. Gaston Woel."