The above article even mentions This Is Spinal Tap.  That’s the trifecta.

Though scholars disagree very slightly on the precise date that a small group of elite black slaves first took up arms against their masters[2], the evidence seems clear that August of 1791 marked a turning point in Haiti, and, as many claim, the world.  The slaves who revolted that summer night could not have foreseen the transformations that their actions ultimately precipitated:  they were not, as yet, revolutionaries.  They were, rather, simply one more group of oppressed people who, like countless oppressed people before and since, took the only course of action that they perceived to be available.  When, over a decade later, the violence finally came more or less to an end, any of those slaves still alive who participated in the August 1791 revolt would have found their country entirely transformed.  By almost any measure, society had been turned upside down from what it had been throughout the preceding two centuries or more.  The conditions that preceded the uprising; the circumstances that provoked it; the events both diplomatic and military that defined it; the people who engaged actively for and against it; and the myriad transformations brought about by it are the subjects of numerous articles and monographs dating back to the time of the Revolution itself.  As with most historical topics, the perspectives and the positions of the writers of that history have evolved over time.  In this essay we will briefly explore several of those authors and arguments, and propose some aspects of the Haitian Revolution that might be better illuminated by further discussion.

Background

First, it might be useful to consider the various problems associated with writing about colonial Caribbean in general, and the Haitian Revolution in particular.  Indeed, Haiti itself presents distinct problems as a topic of writing for myriad reasons.  Most obviously, the Revolution notwithstanding, the nation’s history is almost uniformly tragic.

The precipitous decline in the population of native Taíno and Carib Indians following the island’s European discovery by Columbus in 1492 now stands as a bleak omen.  In spite of laws enacted by the Spanish in 1512 ostensibly to govern the behavior of its colonial settlers in the New World and protect the Indians from abuse, the Indians continued to suffer.  The practical effect of the Leyes de Burgos appears in retrospect to have been highly counter-productive.  By requiring that, “for the improvement and remedy” of the many health and safety concerns plaguing the natives, the “chiefs and Indians should forthwith be brought to dwell near the villages and communities of the Spaniards who inhabit that Island, so that they may be treated and taught and looked after as is right and as we have always desired,” the Spanish only exacerbated an already serious problem.[3] Living in such close proximity to Europeans who carried diseases to which they were dangerously susceptible, the Taíno and Carib Indians began dying at alarming rates.  Estimates vary, but from the tally of three million indigenous people made by Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas upon Columbus’s arrival, the native population shrank to well under two hundred Caribs in 1550.[4] Meanwhile, requiring that the indigenous people adopt Spanish religious and social customs while simultaneously brutally forcing them to engage in unpaid labor, any seemingly benign motives of the Spanish are called into question.  Given this brutality, and the shocking and practically genocidal demise of the native Taíno and Carib Indians, records from this period are either scarce or largely unreliable.  Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas’s population estimate, for example, appears to be improbably high, though any realistic number would still render European contact a tremendously unproductive circumstance for Hispaniola’s natives.

Also contributing to the perceived limitations in the historiography of Haiti is the overall dearth of primary documents and sources.  In the preface to Written in Blood (1978), Heinl and Heinl argue that “[d]espite a story that is dramatic, eventful, tragic, ironic, and bizarre, the world’s first black republic, born of the only successful slave insurrection in history, can claim no history in print today in any language.”  The authors claim that, although Haiti has not gone “unnoticed” by scholars, the then-current works “passing for history” largely present “impressionistic writing,” and not the history of the Haitians themselves.  Heinl and Heinl point out that

The rebel slaves who founded Haiti were largely illiterate or semiliterate.  They kept no records.  The few public documents of the time, together with donations of books intended for a national library, were allowed to be dispersed or destroyed during the 1820s under the Boyer regime; and the upheavals and conflagrations of a country with nearly two hundred years of subsequent revolutions, coups, insurrections, and civil wars, aside from the ravages of the tropics, of theft and of neglect, did for the rest.[5]

So, when an explosion destroyed the National Palace in the mid-nineteenth century, also lost were innumerable diplomatic and military documents and files.  The National Archives were destroyed in 1883, and in the following quarter century, several more catastrophes, along with theft, loss, and pilferage, would again cost Haiti the precious and dwindling documents of its national heritage.[6]

Meanwhile, over two hundred years since the founding of the République d’Haïti, the nation has struggled in vain to maintain even the most basic semblance of order.  The assassination of Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s first head of state, in 1806, precipitated a territorial division between the northern and southern portions of the island that continued for almost a decade.  After reunification, and an ultimately futile attempt to claim Santo Domingo, Haiti continued to suffer through one disastrous president after another, and lost several leaders to assassination, perhaps reaching a political nadir during the ten-year period in the mid-nineteenth century when the Republic was disbanded altogether.  The constitution was frequently and flagrantly disregarded by corrupt or incompetent leaders.  The twentieth century was similarly unkind to Haiti, leading to United States intervention, followed by years of corrupt, totalitarian and extraordinarily violent rule by François Duvalier, followed by further ineffective leadership leading into the new millennium.  Though “according to its constitution and written laws, Haiti meets most international human rights standards” today, “in practice…many provisions are not observed,” and “the government’s human rights record is poor.”  Fewer than half of its citizens are employed, and they have a life expectancy and literacy rate considerably lower than the rest of Latin America.[7] Today, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.  It ranks near the bottom of the United Nations International Human Development Index.[8]

Perhaps most tragically, Haiti has been the regular victim of a variety of natural disasters.  Hurricanes Hazel (1954), Flora (1963), Cleo (1964) and Inez (1966) killed many thousands of people, and left many hundreds of thousands homeless by leveling entire towns, while decimating agriculture and livestock.[9] Most devastating, of course, was a 2010 earthquake that measured 7.0 on the moment magnitude scale.  Following the quake and an associated tsunami, the government estimated that well over two hundred thousand people had been killed, and 1.3 million made homeless.[10] Once again, Haiti saw its government and resources stretched beyond their limits, and only with considerable international aid was an even greater loss of life prevented.

Finally, the Haitian Revolution was an astonishingly complex event, or, rather, sequence of small events that resulted in an outcome that only became clear in time  – like a sophisticated painting or tapestry that from a distance represents something we believe we recognize, but at closer inspection reveals details that surprise and confuse us.  It may be tempting to explain that the rebellion in Saint-Domingue was an insurgency of black slaves against their white masters.  It was that, but it wasn’t only blacks or slaves who participated in the insurrection and its violence.  Another myth is that armed black rebels slaughtered whites without mercy – an interpretation shaped, perhaps, by the accounts of elite French refugees and British soldiers sent to subdue the uprising.  But history is seldom as simple as it seems.  As David Geggus points out, “the insurrection produced acts of great savagery from the slaves, as from the whites and coloureds, but also numerous acts of loyalty or kindness both individual and collective.  Toussant Louverture maintained calm on his master’s plantation for a month before conveying the manager’s wife to safety and joining the rebels.”[11] Similarly, motivations and allegiances frequently shifted, and enemies sometimes became allies before once again becoming enemies.  Thus, attempts to over-simplify the causes, progress, and effects of this history do disservice to those who participated in this unique episode.

All of these details serve to illustrate the almost uniquely tragic story of the Republic of Haiti and its people, and suggest the myriad challenges facing those undertaking a historical analysis of the revolution that began there over two hundred years ago.

Three Primary Sources

Laurent Dubois opens the first chapter of his book Avengers of the New World (2004) by introducing one of the many exiles of Saint-Domingue living in Philadelphia in the mid-1790s.  Like so many white merchants and masters, along with the black slaves they brought with them as property, Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de St. Méry

had arrived carrying almost nothing.  He was in fact lucky to be alive: a warrant for his arrest had been issued in Paris just as he left the port of Le Havre in 1793.  In his haste he had left behind an irreplaceable possession: a set of boxes filled with notes and documents he had collected over a decade of research for books he was writing on French Saint-Domingue and Spanish Santo Domingo.[12]

Given the terrific strife underway in Saint-Domingue at the time, it is astonishing that Moreau—a Creole lawyer and freemason—was ever reunited with his lost cache of writings.  It was, perhaps, far more likely that his work would have been destroyed in one of the countless fires that destroyed white property in the cities, towns, and plantations of Saint-Domingue during the uprising.

Moreau’s writings are presented in a “vastly abridged” 1985 translation edited by Ivor D. Spencer.  The full title of Moreau’s two-volume manuscript, published in Philadelphia between 1797 and 1798, translates to A Topographical, Physical, Civil, Political and Historical Description of the French Part of the Island of Santo Domingo, with General Observations on its Population, on the Character and Customs of its Diverse Inhabitants, on its Climate, Culture, Production, Administration, Etc. This is a conspicuously benign title considering the nature of both the events transpiring in Saint-Domingue at the time, and Moreau’s own experiences as a refugee fleeing the violence there. Curiously, Spencer titles his translation, A Civilization that Perished: the Last Years of White Colonial Rule in Haiti.  Taken at face value, the implications of such a name are rather troubling, and contrast markedly with Dubois’ Avengers of the New World, Nick Nesbitt’s Universal Emancipation: the Haitian Revolution and Radical Enlightenment (2008), Doris Garraway’s Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (2008), and Jeremy Popkin’s You Are All Free (2010).   Those books’ titles promise a hopeful ethos and the possibility for redemption.  Even Ashli White’s Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (2010), and Martin Ros’s Night of Fire: the Black Napoleon and the Battle for Haiti (1994) present titles that suggest the revolutionaries were working toward something positive, whether or not the results of their efforts were as successful as they would have hoped.  Even C.L.R. James’s seminal The Black Jacobins (1938), though far from neutral in its depiction of events, offers a less overtly provocative title provided one recognizes the distinction between the original meaning of “Jacobin” and the rather more pejorative burden the word carries today.

Spencer does not appear eager to escape a potential controversy.  In his introduction he poses two rhetorical questions: First, was pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue “a true civilization, when human beings were kept as slaves, and under a cruel administration at that, after transportation from Africa under most brutal conditions”?  Spencer appears to defer to Moreau, claiming that Saint-Domingue was not merely a cruel and brutal colony, but one “of wealth and even brilliance.”  Citing the colony’s “repertory theaters, staffed by professional actors,” “newspapers and scientific activity,” and “efficient economic pursuits,” might accurately reflect Moreau’s own definition of “civilization,” but by appearing to accept these definitions at face value, Spencer wades into dangerous waters.  The second question Spencer asks and answers only muddies those waters: “Did this society perish?”  It seems like a straightforward question, and Spencer does not shy away in his response: “Yes, pretty much.”  Why?  Spencer’s answer is, in essence, “white society disappeared,” and with it the cultural and economic institutions that they controlled.[13] Considering the relative scarcity of original contemporary sources, it is extremely useful to have Moreau’s account of Saint-Domingue in the years before Haitian independence, whatever his attitudes may be about colonial society, and Spencer’s translation fills an important gap.

Two other significant contemporary texts exist related to the turbulent years of the Haitian Revolution, and, fortunately, they are both in English.  The first is The Haitian Journal of Lieutenant Howard, York Hussars, 1796-1798, available in a volume edited by Roger Norman Buckley, published the same year (1985) as Spencer’s translation of Moreau.  Lieutenant Thomas Phipps Howard and his regiment were dispatched to the West Indies during the last years of Great Britain’s presence in Saint-Domingue.  Buckley describes Howard’s Journal as “probably the only reliable firsthand military account in English,” that “provides a rare and stark look at the slow yet inexorable wearing down of the British army in Saint-Domingue.”[14] In it we read the words of a thoughtful English officer dispatched to help preserve the institution of slavery during a period of fierce slave insurrection.  His initial impressions of the human chattel are telling, and quite consistent with his background.  Having perceived that “People of Colour” outnumber whites “twenty to one,”[15] he also recognizes the complex racial dynamic that involved free blacks and mulattoes.[16] Still, in spite of his “deep inner conflict about slavery,” Howard was nevertheless unsentimental, noting in places that “the slaves appear to be used very well [and] some of them are by no means ugly, setting aside their colour.”[17] He also doesn’t hesitate to describe the atrocities committed by the black insurgents:

Murder, Assassination, Rape, [and] Robbery was the order of the day [and] the Cruelties that were committed in St. Domingo are scarcely to be believed.  As revenge is the ruling Passion of a Negro…the whole Island was immediately filled with Murder [and] Atrocities of every kind.  What ever the most cruel fancy could imagine was put into Execution…and hundreds of…Men, Women, [and] Children were made to expire in most excruciating agonies.  Instances may be quoted of Men absolutely skinned alive [and] then roasted to death before a Slow fire.  … Children were cut out of their Mothers’ Womb [and] dashed to pieces before their faces.[18]

Accounts like Howard’s were not unique among white individuals present during the darkest days of the Revolution.

The second significant contemporary text written by a white witness to the violent uprising is Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808).  Sansay’s work is an epistolary novel, presented in the form of letters from “a lady at Cape Francois to Colonel Burr, late vice-president of the United States.”[19] Sansay did, indeed, have a relationship with Aaron Burr, and she was, in fact, an eyewitness to the horrific events that transpired during the bloody conclusion of French rule in Saint-Domingue.  While we may assume that she takes some artistic liberties in her novel, she nevertheless presents a narrative that withstands a great deal of historical scrutiny.  Characters within the novel are genuine historical figures, and the author’s accounts of violence and terror bear a striking resemblance to those of Lieutenant Howard.  Meanwhile, Sansay is, if anything, even more observant and astute.  Her protagonist remarks that

the general in chief [Rochambeau] is at Port-au-Prince, but he possesses no longer the confidence of the people.  He is entirely governed by his officers, who are boys, and who think only of amusement.  He gives splendid balls, and elegant parties; but he neglects the army, and oppresses the inhabitants.[20]

Sansay’s novel also presents a vastly more nuanced image of the Revolution, particularly in its observations that strike one as the sort that women might make more capably than men.

A black chief and his wife were made prisoners last week, and sentenced to be shot.  As they walked to the place of execution the chief seemed deeply impressed with the horror of his approaching fate: but his wife went cheerfully along, endeavoured to console him, and reproached his want of courage.  When they arrived on the field, in which their grave was already dug, she refused to have her eyes bound; and turning to the soldiers who were to execute their sentence, said “Be expeditious and don’t make me linger.”  She received their fire without shrinking, and expired without uttering a groan.

Indeed, as Michael J. Drexler, the editor of Broadview’s excellent edition of Secret History, points out, “unlike the racial taxonomer Moreau de Saint-Méry, not to stabilize ideologically rigid distinctions of caste, but to draw relations between multiple fluid categories.”[21]

Perhaps most powerful of all, however, are the societal parallels Sansay notes between the United States, then in its infancy, and the revolutionary Saint-Domingue.  If we assume that both the American and Haitian revolutions were in part reflective of dynamic and powerful social phenomenon, then Sansay’s observations become even more telling.

Among the oppositions Sansay describes as being on shaky ground in both Saint-Domingue and the United States are geographic hierarchies (such as the distinction between Creole and native French), and political hierarchies (such as the distinctions between French subjects under Napoleon and the “citoyens” of the collapsed French Republic); similarly unstable is the partisan divide in the United States between Federalism and Antifederalism.[22]

Adding to these complexities these were, of course, the similar economic and political factors that motivated both the American colonists and the residents of Saint-Domingue, most significantly the free-trade ethos that permeated the merchant and planter classes.  Disdainful of distant metropolitan restrictions on their commerce, residents of both colonies reacted, with results noted by Sansay.

Though ostensibly a work of fiction, Leonora Sansay’s words read like a genuine diary of an eyewitness to history, and strike one as every bit as credible as either Moreau’s or Howard’s accounts.  Though Heinl and Heinl would likely not be impressed, their label of “impressionistic” could hardly describe Secret History.

Some Later Texts

Perhaps the most important and well-known book on the subject of the Haitian Revolution is C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938), which appeared when there was a significant shortage of material on the subject in English.  Prior to that, political and social discourse on either side of the Atlantic likely made the topic unappealing.  But James proceeds to recount the lives of the Revolutions key actors, most especially Toussaint Louverture.  A reader clearly perceives that one of James’s primary objectives is to describe what motivated an individual like Louverture, who appears rather like a superhero in James’s account: “he slept but two hours every night,” possessed “reckless physical bravery,” satisfied “all who came to see him,” and “never broke his word”.[23] Dismissing the gratuitous violence that historic sources describe as a key characteristic of the Revolution, James makes a forceful, often suspect, but occasionally convincing claim for Louverture’s greatness:

The basis of his power was the support of the black laborers.  Its framework was the army.  But from the simplest black laborer to the French generals and the best educated and most traveled and experienced of the local whites, all recognized that both in his work and personal idiosyncrasies he was the first man in San Domingo, and such a man as would have been in the first rank in any sphere.[24]

The Black Jacobins can, in some places, come across as mere hero worship, but it is an astonishingly readable and powerful narrative of a terrifically complex event.

Among the best recent works on the topic of the Haitian Revolution, Laurent Dubois’ Avengers of the New World (2004) stands out.  In the prologue Dubois posits that

the impact of the Haitian Revolution was enormous.  As a unique example of successful black revolution, it became a crucial part of the political, philosophical, and cultural currents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. [25]

One would not dispute the uniqueness of the events that took place in Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804, but in the course of Avengers, Dubois paints another, less cheerful picture – one which suggests that the society that emerged from the Revolution was not entirely harmonious, and that the methods used to reach independence sometimes undermined the ostensible ideals and goals of the Revolution itself.

First, though, keeping in mind that the Haitian Revolution was never a simple struggle between black slaves and white colonial masters, we must remember that what became a revolution began as something else, and that the objectives of its participants were not always clear.  As Dubois points out, “the goal of the slave insurgents during [the] first phase of the Haitian Revolution was not to break away from France.”  Rather, “it was slave owners, not slaves, who clamored most for autonomy and even for independence.”[26] The shifting allegiances and alliances Dubois details in Avengers, particularly in chapters five through ten, demonstrate how protean the actors in this struggle really were.  Underscoring the potential for ambiguity, to increase clarity Dubois diverges from the methods of other historians (including Wim Klooster in Revolutions in the Atlantic World), and replaces the “misleading” label “mulatto” with “gens de couleur,” or “free people of color,” which he argues would be an expression familiar to this story’s protagonists.[27] This is only a small example of the sensitivity with which Dubois approaches the subject.  As we see later in his descriptions of racially motivated violence, the author makes clear that context is key.[28]

Dubois arranges Avengers in a chronological fashion, beginning with an analysis of Saint-Domingue’s early colonial history, barely touching on its pre-Columbian existence, but moving directly into the origins of slavery on the island.  Having pointed out the scarcity of primary sources from the perspective of slaves and free blacks, Dubois makes good use of the observations of the creole “Médéric-Lois-Elie Moreau de St. Méry, a lawyer, writer, and one-time resident of Saint-Domingue” who had kept copious notes on Saint-Domingue and Spanish Santo Domingo.  Moreau, Dubois explains, was an astute observer of colonial life in Saint-Domingue, and found the island to be blessed with beauty, natural splendor, and a source of potential riches for France, but he did not wish to delve into the horrors of the Revolution.  His 1796 book is deliberately set in 1789, on the eve of the revolt.[29] “Moreau was in Saint-Domingue” in 1787, when France denied the colony permission to create its own colonial assembly as it had allowed in Martinique and Guadeloupe, enraging the elites.  Saint-Domingue’s merchant and planter class had a stubbornly autocratic attitude that was reflected in their attitudes toward free trade, contraband, and slavery.  The reaction of the merchants and slave masters, who felt that restrictions granting slaves quality-of-life improvements and the right to complain about abuse undermined their authority as owners of property, helped “lay the foundation for the demands of self-government that would explode into open rebellion.”[30]

Approximately “685,000 slaves were brought into Saint-Domingue during the eighteenth century alone,” and their labor fueled the most prolific and profitable plantation colony on earth, generating an enormous percentage of the world’s sugar, coffee, indigo, and other commodities.[31] Slaves outnumbered whites nine to one by the eve of the revolution.  As Dubois makes clear, there was a good deal of compromise on plantations between black slaves and their masters.[32] The simple mathematics of the equation necessitated a degree of practicality on the part of slaveholders.  But racism was omnipresent, and informed every facet of life, even for the gens de couleur.  Free black women were often treated as mere courtesans, and slaves, of course, were merely possessions to be used in whatever way owners wished.[33] When masters wantonly abused their slaves, authorities might contradict the letter of the law and side against the slaves, making a risky bet in the process: “if slaves saw planters punished on the basis of [slave] testimony, there would be a breakdown of authority and, ultimately, a slave rebellion.”  “On the other hand…if the violence of planters was not kept in check, and if slaves found no recourse from the administration, they would have no option but violent vengeance.”[34] That, it turns out, appears to be a significant factor in the outbreak of violence that began in August 1791.

In chapter four of Avengers, Dubois lays out the incidents of the Revolution’s first days in the summer of 1791.  The uprising of black slaves against plantation owners and overseers seems straight-forward enough, and the descriptions of the bloody violence speak for themselves.  But the course of events that followed is far less clear-cut.  Dubois describes the ways in which the revolutionaries shifted from framing their cause “in the language” of the French Revolution (making references to the Rights of Man), to appealing to more Loyalist sentiments.[35] This, again, underscores the complexities of the Haitian Revolution, which, like its participants, defy simple categorization.

Many of the Revolution’s participants are chronicled in Avengers.  Dubois, appropriately, devotes considerable attention to Toussaint Louverture, a free man of color who led the revolutionary forces for years until his betrayal, capture, and exile in France.  In Revolutions in the Atlantic World, Wim Klooster feels comfortable confirming that Louverture was descended from African royalty.[36] Louverture was constantly reevaluating his situation, switching allegiance from one side to the other as it suited his cause.  It is sad, then, that a leader who showed so much promise devolved into a virtual tyrant, enforcing draconian rules without mercy, as Dubois describes in chapter eleven.

If Toussaint Louverture comes out looking less heroic for his tactics, Dubois seeks to remind us that his ideas were noble:

Louverture wanted free trade, control over economic policy within the colony, and political autonomy.  Unlike [earlier planter activists], he had successfully forced such a regime on the metropolitan officials in the colony.  Like the planters, he envisioned a thriving plantation economy.  But, unlike them, he sought to construct an order without slavery.  In a curious reversal of the situation in 1793 and 1794, when planters sought autonomy to save slavery, Louverture sought it to save emancipation.[37]

That emancipation would ultimately be permanently achieved from a technical standpoint, even if conditions bordering on slavery continued to exist on plantations after independence in 1804.

Klooster argues that “revolutions are not foreordained.  They could have been prevented, derailed, or postponed.”[38] Dubois would likely agree that conditions in Saint-Domingue would have required only limited modification to avert the revolution that took place there beginning in 1791.  That is a lesson that one could draw from the entire ordeal.  But as it becomes clear in both Dubois’s and Klooster’s books, the Haitian Revolution is far too complex to boil down to simple statements.

Conclusions

Michel-Rolph Trouillot claims that the events and outcomes of the Revolution were “unthinkable” to many ostensive revolutionaries at the time whose own ideas of equality could not abide black freedom, and who maintained institutions that suppressed it.[39] David Nicholls believes that

the ideas and beliefs of Haitians, which must be seen largely as the products and beliefs of their history, have influenced their actions, and…the story of the country cannot properly be told without an knowledge of these ideas.  For us to comprehend what was said and believed in the past it may be necessary to employ concepts which were not themselves used by those whose ideas were are studying.[40]

This seems like good advice for historians of all subjects, but may prove especially true for those who seek to study the Haitian Revolution.  Over two centuries have passed since the world’s first successful slave rebellion gave birth to a nation of free black citizens, but in many ways the promise of that revolution remain unfulfilled.  This is partly due, no doubt, to tragic circumstances beyond anyone’s control, and partly to outside prejudice and domestic corruption and incompetence.  But whatever the failures and whatever the reasons, the citizens of Haiti share a remarkable and unique heritage, and that heritage only becomes more impressive the more scholars examine the fascinating story of the Revolution of Saint-Domingue.

[1] Blackburn, Robin. “Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic Revolution.” The William and Mary Quarterly 63.4 (2006): 643-74. Print. P. 673.

[2] The two dates most commonly cited are 21 August and 22 August in 1791.

[3] Bakewell, Peter. Laws of Burgos, 1512. 1512. MS. Southern Methodist University, Burgos. 1512-1513. The Laws of Burgos. Southern Methodist University. Web. 3 Dec. 2010.

[4] Heinl, Robert Debs, and Nancy Gordon Heinl. Written in Blood: the Story of the Haitian People, 1492-1971. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. Print. P. 13.

[5] Ibid., 7.

[6] Heinl and Heinl lament that “the Acte d’Indépendance, Haiti’s 1804 declaration of independence, is said to be in the hands of a private collector.”  As luck would have it, the earliest government-issued copy of the Acte was uncovered this year in the British National Arvives by Julia Gaffield, a Canadian graduate student.  See: Cave, Damien. “Haiti’s Founding Document Found in London.” The New York Times [New York] 1 Apr. 2010, sec. A: 12. Print.

[7] United States. Library of Congress. Federal Research Division. Country Profile: Haiti. Washington: Library of Congress, 2006. Print.  Pp. 2-13.

[8] United Nations. United Nations Development Program. Human Development Index Trends, 1980-2010. New York: United Nations, 2010. Print.

[9] Heinl and Heinl, Pp. 569, 647.

[10] United States. United States Geological Survey. Earthquake Hazards Program. Magnitude 7.0 – Haiti Region. Reston, Virginia: USGS, 2010. Web.

[11] Geggus, David Patrick. Slavery, War, and Revolution: the British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. Print. P. 41.

[12] Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: the Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2005. Print. P. 8.

[13] Moreau De Saint-Mery, M.L.E. A Civilization That Perished: the Last Years of White Colonial Rule in Haiti. Trans. Ivor D. Spencer. Lanham, MD: University of America, 1985. Print.  Pp. iii-iv.

[14] Howard, Thomas Phipps. The Haitian Journal of Lieutenant Howard, York Hussars, 1796-1798. Ed. Roger Norman Buckley. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1985. Print. P. xii.

[15] The actual ratio was much higher.

[16] Ibid., 103.

[17] Ibid., xii, 25.

[18] Ibid., 78.

[19] Sansay, Leonora. Secret History, Or, The Horrors of St. Domingo; And, Laura. Ed. Michael J. Drexler. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2007. Print. P. 59.

[20] Ibid., 91.

[21] Ibid., 26.

[22] Ibid.

[23] James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print. P. 249-251.

[24] Ibid., 255.

[25] Dubois, Pp. 6-7.

[26] Ibid., 3.

[27] Ibid., 6.

[28] Ibid., 5.

[29] Ibid., 8-11.

[30] Ibid., 31.

[31] Ibid., 39.

[32] Ibid., 53.

[33] Ibid., 69.

[34] Ibid., 56.

[35] Ibid., 105.

[36] Klooster, Revolutions, 104.

[37] Dubois, Avengers, 226.

[38] Klooster, Revolutions, 104.

[39] Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1995. Print. P. 73.

[40] Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race Colour, and National Independence in Haiti. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Print. P. 15.

As most people know, Monticello was the home of Thomas Jefferson, which he designed himself.  It is located in the hills just outside Charlottesville, Virginia.  Jefferson chose the site when he was only a boy, and the house was under construction in some form or another from the 1760s until Jefferson’s old age.  The house and its surrounding gardens are, simply put, an amazing place to visit, and in 1987 were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Like George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Monticello is owned and operated by a private non-profit, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.  And, as at Mount Vernon, that non-profit has done an impeccable job preserving and protecting a unique national treasure.  While, as a rule, I would generally prefer to see such places operated by the National Park Service, the rather high admission fee charged at Monticello–a fee which would not be charged were the site run by the NPS–allows the Thomas Jefferson Foundation to maintain Monticello and defend it from myriad threats.  For example, rising above Monticello is a grassy mountain capped with tall trees.  Jefferson owned that land in his lifetime, but the mountain, along with countless acres surrounding Monticello itself, were sold off after his death to cover debts.  A few years ago a proposal was hatched to build condos atop the mountain.  While the view from those condos would be spectacular, the view from Monticello would be ruined.  The Thomas Jefferson Foundation forked over millions of dollars to purchase the land and protect it from development forever.  As a Monticello staffer told me, “anytime any land near Monticello comes up for sale, the Foundation buys it at once”.  Monticello is in good hands.

We had made reservations online, and our scheduled tour was at noon.  All that was required was for us to pay for our tickets at the visitor center, which we did, before catching the van up to the house.  The drive up the mountain took only a few minutes, and we were let out on a gravel driveway circled by tall ash and linden trees.  We waited on a bench until the guide summoned us to form a line.  From the east side Monticello looks smaller than I expected.  In fact, there are houses in Gainesville that appear grander at first glance.  But my eyes were drawn to the clever things: a clock above the front door that displays the time both inside and out; a dial on the ceiling above the front steps that indicates the direction of the wind; a half-circle window above the portico that tilts in.

We were advised that photography is prohibited inside the house, and I complied, of course.  But I can tell you what I saw.  Directly inside the tall French doors (which, we were told, are reproductions, to protect the originals from wear at constant use), is a large room with painted wood floors and a balcony.  On the side walls are animal specimens (sent to Jefferson by Lewis and Clark), maps of the United States, and portraits.  Above the French door through which we passed to enter is the other side of the clock, slightly offset from the one outside to account for the single mechanism.  Two long chains attached to weights emanate from the clock and pass through small holes in the floor at the corners of the room.  The number of wights visible indicates the day of the week.  We passed through a doorway to the left into a small study used by the lady of the house, then into Jefferson’s library.  There were scads of books, all of which were carefully researched to accurately reflect the titles in Jefferson’s original library, which today is at the Library of Congress.  Only one small bookcase contained volumes actually owned and read by Jefferson, and those were behind glass for protection.  Almost every other thing in the house is original, which is why visitors are instructed not to touch anything, though I couldn’t help but brush my fingers across a table as I walked by it.  We saw a small guest room with a bed built into an alcove, then moved into Jefferson’s own large bedrooms, which, too, had a bed within an alcove that divided the space.  Jefferson, we were told, died in that bed.  Skylights made the space bright, and the contents of the rooms indicated clearly that its former resident was an intellectual and polymath. Off the bedroom was another large room with a high ceiling and walls covered in portraits of Jefferson’s heroes, including Washington.  Two large mirrors hung on either side of a doorway into the parlor.  These mirrors appeared to be quite old, and I asked the tour guide if they were original to the house.  Indeed, she said, they were.  In fact, she added, most of the glass in the windows was also original.  The most affecting moment for me, then, was the realization that I could see my reflection in a mirror that Jefferson himself looked into every day.  We passed through the modest dining room, and out of the house through a side door, where, from the back yard one can see down into Charlottesville, and spy the roof of the rotunda at the University of Virgina that Jefferson designed.

The day was warm and sunny, and although there were many visitors, it wasn’t what I would call crowded.  We were free to tour the garden and the exterior of the house without supervision.  The garden was beautiful and colorful almost beyond belief.  Butterflies were everywhere.  Within a short time we joined a guided tour of the gardens and grounds, and it was extraordinarily informative.  We learned that Monticello has a huge staff of full-time gardeners, which, considering the size of the property oughtn’t be too surprising.  In Jefferson’s time, he had the hillside to the south of the house terraced to accommodate planting, and even today the Monticello staff grow every conceivable vegetable.

A short walk down a brick path lead us to a small grassy plot of land surrounded by an iron fence.  A stone obelisk within bears the inscription:

HERE WAS BURIED
THOMAS JEFFERSON
AUTHOR OF THE
DECLARATION
OF
INDEPENDENCE
OF THE
STATUTE OF VIRGINIA
FOR
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
AND FATHER OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

That’s it.  No mention of his being the first secretary of state, the second vice president of the United States, or third president.

One aspect of Jefferson’s life that is mentioned at Monticello is slavery.  Jefferson owned many slaves, and his home was built by enslaved men.  Indeed, one look at the plantation itself makes clear that that whole lifestyle would have simply been impossible without slavery.  Wealthy planters like Jefferson could not have afforded to live without free labor.  Jefferson understood this, clearly.  But it is a shame to think that the man who wrote that “all men are created equal” chose to 0wn other human beings because it was to his personal advantage to do so.

Our tour had begun at noon, but it was four o’clock before we left the visitor center.

We made one last stop just outside the grounds of Monticello, at an eighteenth century mill and tavern.  Today, of course, it is a gift shop, and while we were there we found our official 2010 Christmas ornament: a small handmade wooden model of Monticello.  Overjoyed at our find, we got back into the car, and back on the road for the long drive home.

When Miriam had finished her work we set out for the Smithsonian, to finish our survey of the National Museum of American History that we started the day before.  It was noticeably more crowded on Saturday than it had been Friday, but we were determined to see it all.

We went straight upstairs when we arrived and toured an exhibit about the military history of the United States.  Every war was represented along with its technology of battle.  They had more guns than I could count, including one used by John Brown’s men at Harper’s Ferry.  I was impressed by George Washington’s sword,  Andrew Jackson’s sword and coat, and William Tecumseh Sherman’s sword and hat.  Most amazing of all were the table and two chairs used by Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House.  In effect, the Civil War ended on that small oval-shaped table.

I was similarly thrilled to behold three Medals of Honor in a small glass case.  I had never seen one in person before.

Being the Summer of Baseball, I found myself jealous of President Warren Harding’s free pass to all National League ballparks.

There was a great deal of interest in a small exhibit of American pop culture items upstairs, and understandably so.  In separate glass cases near one another were the Ruby Slippers and Kermit the Frog.  The younger visitors seemed less interested in Fonzie’s jacket and Archie Bunker’s chair.

Still, the most memorable artifact in the entire Smithsonian Institution wasn’t the most popular.  Indeed, Julia Child’s kitchen and the exhibit of first ladies’ gowns were far and away more crowded.  In the middle of the museum is a doorway to a dark hallway.  Dim lights on the floor lead you around the corner, where, behind thick glass, spread out across a raked platform, lay the Star Spangled Banner.  The real one.  The one Francis Scott Key saw when he wrote the poem that, when set to music, later became our national anthem.  Miriam and I sat for quite a while staring at the enormous flag.  It was simply awesome.  (Photos were not allowed.  Sorry.)

Satisfied that we’d seen just about everything, we set out.  It was still light outside, so we walked down Constitution Avenue, past the National Archives and the Newseum, to the entrance to the National Gallery of Art.  I really wanted to see the Calder mobile and David’s portrait of Napoleon, but, alas, the museum was closed for the day.  (I reassure myself that the museum will always be there, and we are sure to visit Washington again in our lifetimes.)  We walked briefly along the Mall, then turned north, and enjoyed the amazing architecture of the city as we made our way back to the hotel.  I love old buildings, and Washington has lots of them.  Along our route back we ran across a shop Miriam wanted to explore, so I left her and went on to do more sight-seeing of my own.  The sun was setting, and I took a walk past our hotel and a fancy statue, down to see the White House again.  Though I think the north side is handsomer, the south lawn is impressive.

We rested in our room for a while before heading downstairs where the doorman hailed us a taxi that drove us to the FDR Memorial.  It was night, and some of the inscriptions on the memorial’s walls were difficult to read in the dim light.  But it was a large and suitably noble tribute to the man who led this country through the Depression and Second World War.  Unlike other memorials, this one attempts to place Roosevelt’s presidency in context.  Visitors move through the site–which is expansive–along a chronologically-oriented path.  The president is depicted in a wheelchair.

The night air was cool, and there were plenty of people around, so we elected to walk toward the other monuments along the western portion of the National Mall.  We arrived shortly at the Lincoln Memorial, which I suppose is busy any time of the day or night.  We sat for quite some time at the top of the steps, looking out over the reflecting pool to the Washington Monument and Capitol in the distance.  The moon was full or nearly full, and was just coming up over the line of trees to the southeast.  We walked down through the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the World War II Memorial, then across the Elipse to the northwest.

We had walked approximately six billion miles since the start of our trip, so Miriam was understandably fatigued.  Given my tendency to say things like, “oh, it’s not too far; we can walk”, and her tendency to wear stylish, yet impractical shoes, she had reason to complain.  She joked that I was subjecting her to “tourist torture”.  She felt better, though, when we made a return visit to the Old Ebbitt Grill.  It was late, and we had no reservation, but they still seated us at a lovely table within view of my new favorite painting.  I was still full from eating Five Guys (for the first time) eight hours before, so I just had ice cream and a Sprite.

We got back to our hotel room well after midnight and I slept like a baby.  In the morning we were leaving Washington.

Memorial Day weekend is probably always busy in Washington, D.C., but it was made more so by the presence of tens of thousands of bikers, who rode up and down the city streets–with no apparent single destination, from what I could tell–generating an incessant rumbling noise with their motorcycles.  The major attractions would be doubly crowded because it was a Saturday.  While Miriam got some important work done on the computer in the room, I left the hotel to run some important errands.

My first chore was to check on the car, parked in a garage on G Street.  They had a sign indicating something to the effect that vehicles could not be left over the weekend, or that patrons had to pay every day.  The fellow in the booth told me, however, that it was fine to leave it as long as I like and just pay on my way out.

From the garage I walked a few blocks down to try and get tickets to Ford’s Theater – not for a performance, but for the tour and museum.  The line in front of the building was quite long, but it was full of people who already had tickets.  I asked the National Park Service ranger what to do, and she told me I should see inside if anyone had returned tickets for the day.  Luckily, someone had, and we had a scheduled tour of the theater and museum later that afternoon.

On my way back to the hotel I was walking behind a tourist family with three kids.  Two girls were throwing a superball back and forth to each other.  Not surprisingly, the ball got away from one of the girls and bounced out into the street, which sloped down so that the ball began rolling away.  One of the girls, without even looking, began to run directly into the street.  Her parents caught her, thank God.  Her older brother took off down the sidewalk to grab the ball before it went into a drain, and he came back up with it.  The second of the two girls, who had been watching him, began to cross the street after her parents, also without looking.  I could not believe how foolishly the whole family was behaving.  Though I know it wasn’t what Darwin had in mind, I could not help but think that the concept of natural selection was on display at that moment.

Abraham Lincoln had been on my mind a great deal throughout the summer, and especially on this trip.  I was reading David Herbert Donald’s excellent biography at the time, and my former reverence for the great man was turning nearly to idolatry.  I was desperate to see places and things associated with Lincoln, and that is what took us that afternoon to Ford’s Theater on 10th Street.  Visitors are first led down a narrow staircase to a basement-level museum, which contains many Lincoln-era artifacts, and many items owned and used by the Lincoln family.  A shaving mug, in particular, stood out to me as an object that Lincoln would have used on a daily basis.

As you might expect, a great deal of attention is paid at Ford’s Theater to the assassination of President Lincoln, and the exhibits thereto pertaining are both fascinating and disquieting.  The conspirators who joined John Wilkes Booth were armed to the teeth, and only their cowardice and incompetence prevented the government from collapsing altogether.  Lincoln wasn’t their only target: Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward were on the hit list, as well.  Of course, Booth succeeded in killing the only man who mattered, and it is hardly any mystery how he did it.  The presidential box in Ford’s Theater is amazingly accessible.  It’s impossible to imagine this today, but to reach his box that night (and every previous night he had attended), Lincoln had to walk up a flight of very public stairs, across a very public balcony, and through a door visible to half the audience.  He had one guard with him, though having more might not have kept Booth out.  He was a famous actor whose work Lincoln knew.  He would surely have been admitted.  On the other hand, had General and Mrs. Grant accepted the Lincolns’ invitation that night, security would have been much tighter, with army guards stationed inside and outside the box.  Alas, Mary Todd Lincoln’s jealous tirades had appalled Julia Grant, and she wanted nothing more to do with Mrs. Lincoln.  In a glass case in the Ford’s Theater museum, the tiny single-shot pistol that took Abraham Lincoln’s life sits inanimate.  No object so small ever caused more harm.

The most meaningful artifact at Ford’s Theater is not a gun, however.  It’s a long, black Brooks Brothers overcoat.  Abraham Lincoln wore it to Ford’s Theater the night he died, but, more importantly, he wore it a few weeks before, at his second inauguration, where he delivered the greatest address of all time – the speech in which he articulated his hope for “a just and lasting peace”.  Stitched inside the silk lining of the frock coat are two embroidered eagles and the words “One Country, One Destiny”.  It is amazingly poignant.   In the rush to keep up with the museum tour, most visitor’s to Ford’s Theater probably miss seeing that coat in its display case in the lobby.  It’s a shame, too, because it plainly symbolizes the beliefs of the man who single-handedly saved the Union.  Many other men fought and died in the Civil War, but had anyone else on earth been president of the United States between 1861 and 1865, my visit to Washington, D.C. would have required a passport.

Miriam had a great deal of work to do back at the hotel that afternoon, so I took the opportunity to walk by the White House once again.  I had never seen it in daylight.  Pennsylvania Avenue is closed in front of the Executive Mansion now, and it is actually hard to imagine that cars were ever allowed to just drive right on by, since the pedestrian traffic alone makes that a bad idea, and the short distance from the road to the north portico formerly made an Oklahoma City-type bombing distinctly possible.  (Note to Secret Service personnel reading this page because internet-crawling supercomputers flagged it for containing specific word combinations: I love America and am not threatening anything or anyone.  Please don’t come to my house.)

Speaking of maniacs, just across the street from the White House is Blair House, a handsome building with a flag hanging from just above the second floor.  That is where President Truman lived while the Executive Mansion was being renovated in the late-1940s.   One day some crazy Puerto Rican nationalists attacked the house but were repulsed by police, one of whom, Leslie Coffelt, was killed.  There is a plaque out front commemorating his sacrifice.  Next to Blair House is Lee House, built in 1858.  It’s neat to think that when Abraham Lincoln moved to Washington in 1861, he could look across the street from a White House window and see his neighbors’ brand new brick home.

And while standing in front of the White House I couldn’t help but think about the last speech Lincoln ever delivered.  It was on 11 April, 1865, less than a week before he died.  The War had just ended and the streets of Washington were full of revelers.  The president spoke from a second story window to a large crowd assembled out in front of the mansion, which in those days was open to anyone.

He alluded to the presence of the band, and said that our adversary had always claimed one old good tune–”Dixie”–but that he held that on the 8th of April we fairly captured it – in fact, he said, he had submitted the question to the attorney general, who had decided that the tune was our lawful property; and he asked that the band play “Dixie”, which they did.  The President then proposed three cheers for General Grant and the officers and men under him, then three for the navy, all of which were given heartily, and the crowd dispersed.

We see the White House on the news every day of our lives, and it is perhaps inevitable that it has mostly come to represent the idea of power, and even government itself.  So it is easy, then, to forget that the White House is a physical place – a large house in the middle of a busy city where men both corrupt and incorruptible have lived and worked.  Some of these men we think of only as two-dimensional faces on coins and currency; others we forget altogether.  We will never forget Abraham Lincoln.  He is, in a way, immortal – the embodiment of wisdom, virtue, honesty, and honor, and everything we wish America itself could be.  But Lincoln was a living, breathing man who, like all of us, had his own flaws.  We needn’t mythologize him.  On the contrary, Lincoln’s greatness stems not from some inherent perfection, but from his capacity for personal growth.  The man who had once said that he would let slavery be if it would save the Union later came to believe that the War must be about “a new birth of freedom”, and rejected Confederate proposals to rejoin the Union with slavery intact.  He worked diligently to ensure the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.  “I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views”, he said.  And when his true views made him profoundly unpopular he said, “I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me”.  Abraham Lincoln was a living, breathing man, and his last home was the large white house in the middle of a busy city.

Miriam is obsessively thorough in her research of hotels, so we knew in advance that our room in Richmond contained a small refrigerator.  This was good news, since she always has leftovers from dinner, and getting two meals out of one is a good way to save money on the road.  Alas, we awoke to the disappointment of finding our room’s refrigerator not cold at all.  When we went to the desk to complain the clerk explained that they unplug the appliances when guests check out to save energy.  That’s a fine idea, but I wish they’d told us in advance.  Miriam’s breakfast was lost.  Fortunately, the regretful clerk offered us their buffet for free.  I made my own waffle, and placed it atop a mountain of bacon.  And, in spite of the refrigerator blunder, the hotel was quite nice and a good value.  By the end of the day, however, we’d be sleeping in a hotel so opulent that it would make even the fanciest of hotels seem like a Bangladeshi sewage treatment plant.

We were packed into the car and heading back north on I-95 as soon as we finished breakfast.  Our destination was Washington, D.C., but in the mean time I was excited to be traveling through the real heart of the Civil War.  The names of towns, counties, and rivers that we passed along our route stood out to me as landmarks in some great historical atlas.  I vividly recall the roadsigns for battlefields seeming like a chronicle of the War’s progression: Fredericksburg, Gaines’ Mill, Wilderness, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and so on.   I remember looking out the window as we crossed the Rappahannock River.  The highway went from maybe six lanes to at least a dozen as we approached the Beltway encircling the District of Columbia.  In the middle was a lane that can be used for traffic going in either direction, which can be changed depending on the time of day.  We crossed the Potomac and got our first look at Washington.

I have driven a car in Puerto Rico, so almost no amount of traffic or dangerous road conditions can upset me too much anymore.  That said, Washington is a frustrating place to drive, if only because unpredictable road closures render almost any system of navigation, old-fashioned or electronic, useless.  Miriam is fond of using the GPS device on her phone.  In many places that gadget would suffice.  In Washington, however, it will say, “Turn right at Pennsylvania Avenue”, unaware that attempting to turn right at Pennsylvania Avenue would result in a significant Department of Homeland Security incident.  We had a hotel reservation and a car.  But we didn’t want to valet to park our car at the hotel because that would be absurdly expensive.  Finding a reasonably-priced garage near our hotel was challenging.  Meanwhile, Miriam was nervous that the hotel would demand a substantial deposit above and beyond the price of the room, which was already paid.  In Puerto Rico last year, the resort there demanded many hundreds of dollars as a deposit, which significantly depleted our walkin’ around money.  The price of our room in San Juan, however, was a bargain compared to the price of our room in Washington.  If we had to pay a thousand dollars as a deposit in D.C., our time there would be significantly less lavish.  I could not imagine how they would expect guests to front so much money, so I was not nearly as worried as Miriam.  And, thankfully for both of us, no unreasonable deposit was required.

The Willard Hotel is historic.  There is no disputing that fact.  Every important political figure of the past two centuries has either stayed there or visited.  The original building has been replaced by a far more grandiose one, which would look quite at home in Paris, but the new building has a legacy almost as rich.  The lobby is opulent, with the seals of the fifty states painted on the coffered ceiling.  Behind the reception desk are old fashioned slots for room keys.  The Pennsylvania Avenue side of the hotel is one floor lower than the F Street side: to get up to F Street you pass through a long corridor and up some steps, where there is a second small, but still fancy lobby.  Our room, No. 914, was on a high floor facing east.  You can see our room’s window, surrounded by fluted stonework, directly above the very center of this photograph.  When we first got to our room a tuxedo-clad man was exiting, having just left a basket of fruit on a table by the window.  The radio was on, and I took it as a good sign that Schumann’s Konzertstück for For Horns was playing.  The furnishings were elegant, and the bed was comfortable.  The bathroom appeared to be made entirely of marble.

We didn’t stay in the room long.  In fact, we put our bags down and almost immediately took off for the Mall.  On our previous trip to Washington, the National Museum of American History was closed.  We were so disappointed to miss it then, and our return trip was prompted, in large part, by our desire to see the treasures that great museum holds.  We walked briskly down 14th Street and entered the building along Constitution Avenue.  Inside the lobby, long glass display cases hold assorted neat things: fancy jars for leeches, pretty kitty dresses, C-3POs, shirts for Magnum, P.I.s, and so on.  The Smithsonian exhibits are arranged by subject, with a “featured artifact” displayed prominently.  At the transportation exhibit, for example, a historic locomotive sits on rails.  In that area they had an old car from the Chicago L, a D.C. streetcar, old automobiles, a ship’s engine, and several locomotives, including one spectacular early-twentieth century engine with wheels as tall as me.  The first ladies’ gowns were extremely popular, and people pressed their faces against the glass to get a look.  Everyone who passed it stopped and stared at Mrs. Obama’s dress.  Another star attraction at the Smithsonian is Julia Child’s kitchen.  We spent so much time looking at every little thing that the museum closed and we had to leave.  We weren’t willing to rush it and miss things, so we decided we’d come back the next day.

We still had hours of daylight, and I thought we might check out the view from the tower at the Old Post Office, but, alas, it was closed.  So we took a leisurely walk back to the hotel to get ready for our night out.  We were looking sharp.

I had made us reservations at the Old Ebbitt Grill on 15th Street, just a half block from our hotel.  It’s an old place, and remarkably popular.  The bar is legendary.  It had a great atmosphere, and, to my great relief, Mrs. Hill was very pleased with the menu.  She loved her meal; I loved mine.  The service was impeccable.  The prices were not obscene.  Sure, it was more than we usually spend on a meal, but it was special.  They had a painting hanging on the wall there that I loved, and were it not larger than me, I’d have been tempted to snatch it off the wall and abscond with it.   All together, the dinner was an experience we won’t forget.

Though it was after ten o’clock, we weren’t ready to turn in just yet, so we took the short walk around the White House grounds.  The skies were cloudy, but the temperature was comfortable, and the walk back to our hotel was pleasant.  The lobby was quiet at that hour, and we took the time to explore more of the hotel before heading up to our room.  Once there, we found little chocolates on our bed, and the covers had been turned down.

God’s Protecting Providence was published in Philadelphia in 1699.³ Like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe twenty years later, Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal attracted immediate attention in the American colonies and in Europe.  Interest in the work has been sustained, and since its first publication there have been over “twenty-two reprintings in English, Dutch, and German.”⁴ While the Journal was initially popular for its message of unwavering faith in the midst of peril—and its Quaker publishers emphasized that aspect—it is notable today for its depiction of late seventeenth century Florida, and the sometimes hostile interaction between the peninsula’s indigenous inhabitants and European settlers.

On August 23, 1696, a ship called “Reformation” sailed from Port Royal, near present-day Kingston, Jamaica.  At that time, England, Spain and others were allied against France in the Nine Years’ War, with all parties fighting for their commercial interests in the Americas.⁵ This hostile atmosphere rendered solo voyages impossible, so the Reformation traveled within a convoy, protected by an armed frigate.  “On board [the Reformation] were eight mariners besides the master [Joseph Kirle]; a Quaker missionary, Robert Barrow; a young Quaker merchant, Jonathan Dickinson; his wife and little baby; a relative named Benjamin Allen; and Dickinson’s eleven slaves.”⁶ Dickinson had chartered the vessel to carry cargo to Philadelphia, where he would establish a business.  It is clear from Dickinson’s Journal, however, that the journey was beset by trouble from its very start.

Within days after the Reformation departed Port Royal, Dickinson noted that calm winds prevented the ship from moving under sail, that the ship had been carried off its intended course by currents, and that his party had “lost sight of the Hampshire frigate.”⁷ They had even lost their ship’s anchor.  On the eighteenth of September, while the Reformation stood stalled north of Havana, a violent storm brought a boom down on the captain, Robert Kirle, breaking his leg – a substantial injury in light of their circumstances.  On September 24, a month after Dickinson’s ship left Jamaica, it ran aground during a violent storm, on the east coast of Florida, near present-day Jupiter Inlet.  In his Journal, Dickinson remarks that he and his companions “rejoiced at this our preservation from the raging seas; but at the same instant feared the sad consequences that followed.”⁸

Dickinson was evidently displeased by the Florida landscape he first observed, describing it as harsh and bleak: “the wilderness country looked very dismal, having no trees, but only sand hills covered with shrubby palmetto, the stalks of which were prickly.”⁹ Having lived for some time in the Caribbean, he was used to the heat, but the flat, treeless coastal terrain bore little resemblance to the lush topography of Jamaica.  Moreover, Dickinson believed that his party had run aground far from civilization, and deep inside territory populated by “barbarous people such as were generally accounted man-eaters.”¹⁰

Dickinson’s party was soon discovered by “the Jobeses, or dwellers of the Rio Jobe, as the Spaniards called what later came to be known first as Jupiter and later as Grenville Inlet.”¹¹ The Indians promptly stripped Dickinson’s party of their clothing and supplies, and ordered them to their village.  Dickinson had refused to allow his companions to use their guns against the Indians they first encountered.  He probably recognized the futility of such an action, but in keeping with his Quaker faith, likely opposed violence on principle.  Believing that he, his wife, child, and other companions were in imminent physical danger, Dickinson nevertheless professes in his Journal to putting his fate before God.

Still, he wasn’t above deceiving the Indians to ensure his party’s safety.  It was clear to Dickinson that the Indians harbored a violent hatred for the English.  With nearly every Indian his party encountered on their trek, a similar introduction took place:

Their Casseekey (for so they call their king) with about thirty more came down to us in a furious manner, having a dismal aspect and foaming at the mouth. … They rushed in upon us and cried Nickaleer Nickaleer.  We understood them not at first: they repeating it over unto us often.  At last they cried Epainia or Spaniard, by which we understood them that at first they meant English.¹²

Sensing the genuine risk for physical violence should the Indians believe them to be English, Dickinson persuaded Solomon Cresson, one of his companions, to address the Indians in Spanish, since only he among them understood that language.  From more than a century of interaction with the Spanish, many of the Indian tribes had acquired a limited degree of Spanish proficiency.  Still, communication between Dickinson’s party and the Indians remained awkward, and often tense.  Dickinson notes that on October 27, in the Indian village of Jece, members of the party were nearly tricked into revealing their English identity, when they were offered berries.  Dickinson’s companions, sensing that they were being tested, called the fruit by its Spanish name “vivaes,” instead of “plums.”¹³

Hoe-Bay, the town in which the Jobeses lived, consisted of “little wigwams made of small poles stuck in the ground, which they bended one to another, making an arch, and covered…with thatch of small palmetto-leaves.”¹⁴ Dickinson’s party remained at Hoe-Bay for three days, and his description of the Indians’ customs borders on condemnation.  He found their diet revolting, their manners greedy, and their singing and dancing “hideous” and “terrible,” and he was startled to hear exclaim, “English Son of a Bitch.”¹⁵¹⁶ But, both at Hoe-Bay and in other Indian villages along their route to St. Augustine, Dickinson found the Indian women to be compassionate, particularly when they nursed his child while his wife could not.  Still, the party was eager to leave Hoe-Bay.

Throughout his Journal, it appears that Dickinson and his companions were afraid to venture north without an escort.  Certainly, they needed canoes to transport the infirm of the party.  Besides Robert Kirle’s broken leg, Dickinson’s wife was weak.  Their journey was terribly dangerous.  Indeed, in mid-November, along the Atlantic coast (between present day Ormond Beach and the Matanzas Inlet), five of the party died, including Dickinson’s kinsman, Benjamin Allen.¹⁷ But soon after, the party reached the southern edge of Spanish Florida, and the sentinel posts south of St. Augustine.

Spain had had a settlement at St. Augustine since 1565, and when Dickinson’s party reached the town, they could see the newly-completed Castillo de San Marcos, finished in 1695.¹⁸ It was the height of the First Spanish Period, and Dickinson observed the power the Spanish appeared to wield in Florida.  When his party had first encountered members of a Spanish outfit sent to aid them at Jece, he observed how “the Indians were like a people amazed an overcome with fear: we perceived the noise of a gun was terrible unto them.”¹⁹ Spain had earned its fearsome reputation during the brutal adelantado period.

By early December 1695, more than two months after the Resolution had run aground, Jonathan Dickinson and the remaining members of his party slipped out of Florida en route to the Carolinas, and thenceforth to Philadelphia.  They had trekked two hundred thirty miles through a dangerous and unforgiving territory, and suffered tremendous loss.  The publication of Dickinson’s Journal in 1699 brought the incidents relayed therein vividly to life.  At a time when “private entrepreneurs and public statesmen” were advertising Florida as a land of riches, few had read “complete accounts of people who actually visited the peninsula.”²⁰ The Journal, then, was a revelation to those who read it.

In the coming decades, many more would read accounts similar to Jonathan Dickinson’s.  In 1766, a Frenchman named Pierre Viaud, sailing from Haiti to New Orleans, was shipwrecked on the Florida coast, and his account, published in 1768—with a French title that, while less overtly religious, was certainly as long as God’s Protecting Providence—was also a sensation.²¹²² The public’s appetite for adventure stories was unquenchable, and whether fiction, like Robinson Crusoe, or fact, like Dickinson’s Journal, enjoyed tremendous success – even when the Spanish and English endeavors in Florida failed.

Jonathan Dickinson was a success himself.  He reached Philadelphia, established a profitable business, and made repeat voyages to and from Jamaica, with Robert Kirle as captain.²³ Until his death in 1722, he remained convinced that he and his party had been delivered through God’s Protecting Providence.

[2] Defoe’s inspiration for Robinson Crusoe may have come from the marooning of Alexander Selkirk in 1704.

[3] The full title as published in 1699 was God’s Protecting Providence Man’s Surest Help and Defence In the times Of the greatest difficulty and most Imminent danger.

[4] Leonard W. Labaree, foreword and introduction to Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), v, xxiv.

[5] Paul Langford, “The Eighteenth Century,” in The Oxford History of Great Britain, ed. Kenneth O. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 402

[6] Leonard W. Labaree, introduction to Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), x.

[7] Jonathan Dickinson, Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence, ed. Evangeline Andrews and Charles Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 3.

[8] Ibid., 5.

[9] Ibid., 6.

[10] Ibid., 7.

[11] Charles Andrews, “Florida Indians in the Seventeenth Century,” in Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence, ed. Evangeline Andrews and Charles Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 97.

[12] Jonathan Dickinson, Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence, ed. Evangeline Andrews and Charles Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 7.

[13] Ibid., 40.

[14] Ibid., 13.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 15.

[17] Ibid., 55-56.

[18] Michael Gannon, A Short History of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 10, 15.

[19] Jonathan Dickinson, Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence, ed. Evangeline Andrews and Charles Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 40-41.

[20] Daniel Murphree, “Constructing Indians in the Colonial Floridas,” Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 2 (2002), 136-137.

[21] The full title was Naufrage et Aventures de M. Pierre Viaud, Natif de Bordeaux, Capitaine de Navire, Histoire véritable, vérifiée sur l’Attestation de Mr. Sevettenham, Commandant du Fort St. Marc des Appalache.

[22] Robin Fabel, introduction to Shipwreck and Adventures of Monseur Pierre Viaud (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1990), 1.

[23] Leonard W. Labaree, introduction to Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal, or God’s Protecting Providence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), xviii.

Today, the Willard Hotel becomes even more historic:  Mrs. Dana John Hill and I are spending our fifth wedding anniversary here.

Our room is splendid.