The Black Jacobins Chapter Summaries

The Black Jacobins by C.L.R James: A Response
“But one does not need education or encouragement to cherish a dream of freedom” (James, 1963: 18).
The notion that African slaves could not conceptualise self emancipation nor possess the political thought necessary for planning and achieving such liberation was a common held assumption amongst white plantation owners and larger European society in the sixteenth century. Nowhere else was this contestation more strongly believed than on the French island of Saint Domingue, where due to an ontology that privileged white skin over black, a slave rebellion and subsequent liberation was thought to be impossible. Such an ontology allowed for people to view humanity in varying degrees where certain
James brings to light the complex dynamics of race and ownership on the Caribbean Island and the many social forces that played a role leading up to the Revolution in 1791, namely the slave owners or “small whites”, the free blacks and Mulatoes, the French bureaucracy and the African Slaves. James also interweaves the happenings of the French Revolution and its effects with the Haitian experience by relating the events and influences of each to one another for example how the proletarian uprisings and the taking of the Bastille had a heavy impact on the way in which the French working class related to their “black brothers” in San Domingo (James, 1963, 120). Based on the parallel experiences of both the French worker and the Haitian slave, the paradox of Enlightenment thought could be brought to light. Such thought celebrated universal human rights coupled with equality and liberty while oppressive institutions that encouraged slavery and racial oppression persisted. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 stated that before the law all citizens are equal yet, despite being a French Colony, the Mulatoes and Africans of San Domingue remained marginalised as white fear and profit bound them to the lucrative business of slavery leaving mass insurrection as the only alternative. What was interesting was the way in which the happenings of the French Revolution directly influenced slave meetings and organisation as revolutionary literature circulated amongst mass meetings and French soldiers passed over revolutionary sentiment to African slaves. In March 1791 James documents how French soldiers, on landing at Port-au-Prince, had given the fraternal embrace to all Mulattoes and all Negroes, telling them that the Assembly in France had declared all men free and equal