Part 22

"About 1632 the French took possession of the western shore, and increased so rapidly that the Spaniards found it impossible to drive them out; and the footing they had gained was recognized by the Treaty of Ryswick, in 1697, when the western portion of Haiti was confirmed to France. The latter nation was fully conscious of the importance of the new acquirement, and under French rule it became of great value, supplying almost all Europe with cotton and sugar. But the larger eastern portion of the island, which still belonged to Spain, had no share in this progress, remaining much in the same condition as formerly; and thus matters stood—a sluggish community side by side with a thriving one—when the French Revolution broke out, and plunged the island into a state of ferment. In 1790 the population of the western colony consisted of half a million, of which number 38,360 were of European origin, 28,370 free people of colour, and the whole of the remainder negro slaves. The government of the island excluded the free people of colour—mostly mulattoes—from all political privileges, although they were in many cases well-educated men, and themselves the owners of large estates. … On the 15th May, 1790, the French National Assembly passed a decree declaring that people of colour, born of free parents, were entitled to all the privileges of French citizens. When this news reached the colony, it set the inhabitants in a perfect frenzy, the mulattoes manifesting an unbounded joy, whilst the whites boiled at the indignity their class had sustained. The representations of the latter caused the governor to delay the operation of the decree until the home government could be communicated with—a measure that aroused the greatest indignation amongst the mulattoes, and civil war appeared inevitable, when a third and wholly unexpected party stepped into the arena. The slaves rose in insurrection on August 23rd, 1791, marching with the body of a white infant on a spear-head as a standard, and murdering all Europeans indiscriminately. In the utmost consternation the whites conceded the required terms to the mulattoes, and, together with the help of the military, the rising was suppressed, and there seemed a prospect of peace, when the Assembly at Paris repealed the decree of the 15th May. The mulattoes now flew to arms, and for several years a terrible struggle was sustained, the horrors of which were augmented by vindictive ferocity on both sides. Commissioners sent from France could effect no settlement, for the camp of the whites was divided into two hostile sections, royalist and republican. {1632} The English and Spaniards both descended on the island, and the blacks, under able chiefs, held impregnable positions in the mountains. Apprehensive of a British invasion in force, the Commissioners, finding they could not conquer the blacks, resolved on conciliating them; and in August, 1793, universal freedom was proclaimed—a measure ratified by the National Convention early in the following year. Meanwhile the English had taken Port-au-Prince, and were besieging the French governor in Port de la Paix, when the blacks, relying on the recent proclamation, came to his assistance, under the command of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and effected his release. … François Dominique Toussaint, a negro of pure blood, a slave and the offspring of slaves, was born in 1743, and on attaining manhood was first employed as a coachman, and afterwards held a post of trust in connexion with the sugar manufactory of the estate to which he belonged. The overseer having taken a fancy to him, he was taught to read and write, and even picked up some slight knowledge of Latin and mathematics." He was slow to join the rising of the blacks; "but at length, after having secured the escape of his master and family, he joined the negro army in a medical capacity," but quickly rose to leadership. "At first the blacks fought with the Spaniards against the French;" but Toussaint came to the conclusion that they had more to hope from the French, and persuaded his followers to march to the relief of the French governor, Levaux. When the latter heard that Toussaint had won the blacks to this alliance, he exclaimed, "'Mais cet homme fait ouverture partout,' and from that day the black commander-in-chief received the surname of L'Ouverture, by which he is best known in history. Acting with wonderful energy, Toussaint effected a junction with Levaux, drove the English from their positions, took 28 Spanish batteries in four days, and finally the British abandoned the island, whilst the Spaniards [1797] gave up all claim to its western end. Toussaint L'Ouverture—now holding the position of commander-in-chief, but virtually dictator—succeeded with great skill in combining all the hostile elements of the colony. Peace was restored, commerce and agriculture revived, the whites were encouraged to reclaim their estates, and by a variety of prudent and temperate measures Toussaint showed the remarkable administrative abilities that he possessed. At this stage he assumed great state in public, being always guarded by a chosen body of 1,500 men in brilliant uniform, but in private life he was frugal and moderate. In the administration of affairs he was assisted by a council of nine, of whom eight were white planters. This body drew up a Constitution by which L'Ouverture was named president for life, and free trade established. The draft of this constitution, together with an autograph letter, he forwarded to Bonaparte; but the First Consul had no toleration for fellow-upstarts, and replied, 'He is a revolted slave whom we must punish; the honour of France is outraged.' At this time the whole island of Haiti was under Toussaint's sway. As some excuse for Bonaparte it must be acknowledged that Toussaint undoubtedly contemplated independence. … Anxious to divest his new presidency of even nominal subjection to France, he declared the independence of the island, with himself as supreme chief, in July 1801. Most unfortunately for the Haitian general, hostilities had for the moment ceased between Great Britain and France, and the First Consul was enabled to bestow his close attention on the former French colony. Determined to repossess it, Bonaparte sent out an army of 30,000 men, with 66 ships of war, under the command of his brother-in-law General Leclerc. … During Toussaint's presidency he had abolished slavery, the negroes still working the plantations, but as free men, and under the name of 'cultivators.' … Leclerc now endeavoured by proclamations to turn the cultivators against their chief, and also laboured to sow dissension in the ranks of the black army, by making the officers tempting offers, which they too often believed in and accepted. For months a bloody war raged, in which great cruelties were inflicted; but the discipline of the French was slowly telling in their favour, when Leclerc made a political blunder that destroyed the advantages he had gained. Thinking that all obstacles were overcome, he threw off the mask, and boldly declared the real object of the expedition—the re-enslavement of the negro population. This news fell like a thunderbolt amongst the blacks, who rallied round Toussaint in thousands." Alarmed at the effect, Leclerc recalled his proclamation, acknowledged it to be an error, and promised the summoning of an assembly representative of all races alike. "This specious programme won over Cristophe, Dessalines, and other negro generals; and finally, on receiving solemn assurances from Leclerc, Toussaint accepted his offers, and peace was concluded." Soon afterwards, by an act of the blackest treachery, the negro statesman and soldier was lured into the hands of his mean enemy, and sent, a prisoner, to France. Confined, without trial, or any hearing, in the dungeons of the Château Joux, in the department of Doubs, he was there allowed to pine away, without warm clothing and with insufficient food. … Finally the governor of the prison went away for four days, leaving his captive without food or drink. On his return Toussaint was dead, and the rats had gnawed his feet. It was given out that apoplexy was the cause of death. … This breach of faith on the part of the French aroused the fury and indignation of the blacks. … Under Dessalines, Cristophe, Clerveaux, and others, the fires of insurrection blazed out afresh." At the same time yellow fever raged and Leclerc was among the victims. General Rochambeau, who succeeded him, continued the war with unmeasured barbarity, but also with continued defeat and discouragement, until he was driven, in 1803, to surrender, and "the power of the French was lost on the island."

_C. H. Eden, The West Indies, chapter 13._

_Toussaint L'Ouverture: A Biography. (by J. R. Beard) and an Autobiography._

ALSO IN: _H. Martineau, The Hour and the Man._

_J. Brown, History of St. Domingo._

_H. Adams, Historical Essays, chapter 4._

HAYTI: A. D. 1639-1700. The Buccaneers.

See AMERICA: A. D. 1639-1700.

{1633}

HAYTI: A. D. 1804-1880. Massacre of whites. The Empire of Dessalines. The kingdom of Christophe. The Republic of Pétion and Boyer. Separation of the independent Republic of San Domingo. The Empire of Soulouque. The restored Republic of Hayti.

"In the beginning of 1804 the independence of the negroes under Dessalines was sufficiently assured: but they were not satisfied until they had completed a general massacre of nearly the whole of the whites, including aged men, women and children, who remained in the island, numbering, according to the lowest estimate, 2,500 souls. Thus did Dessalines, in his own savage words, render war for war, crime for crime, and outrage for outrage, to the European cannibals who had so long preyed upon his unhappy race. The negroes declared Dessalines Emperor: and in October 1804 he was crowned at Port-au-Prince by the title of James I. Dessalines was at once a brave man and a cruel and avaricious tyrant. He acquired great influence over the negroes, who long remembered him with affectionate regret: but he was not warmly supported by the mulattoes, who were by far the most intelligent of the Haytians. He abolished the militia, and set up a standing army of 40,000 men, whom he found himself unable to pay, from the universal ruin which had overtaken the island. The plantation labourers refused to work. … Dessalines authorised the landowners to flog them. Dessalines was himself a large planter: he had 32 large plantations of his own at work, and he forced his labourers to work on them at the point of the bayonet. Both he and his successor, Christophe, like Mahomed Ali in Egypt, grew rich by being the chief merchants in their own dominions. … He failed in an expedition against St. Domingo, the Spanish part of the island, whence the French general Ferrand still threatened him: and at length some sanguinary acts of tyranny roused against him an insurrection headed by his old comrade Christophe. The insurgents marched on Port-au-Prince, and the first black Emperor was shot by an ambuscade at the Pont Rouge outside the town. The death of Dessalines delivered up Hayti once more to the horrors of civil war. The negroes and mulattoes, who had joined cordially enough to exterminate their common enemies, would no longer hold together; and ever since the death of Dessalines their jealousies and differences have been a source of weakness in the black republic. In the old times, Hayti, as the French part of the island of Española was henceforth called, had been divided into three provinces: South, East, and North. After the death of Dessalines each of these provinces became for a time a separate state. Christophe wished to maintain the unlimited imperialism which Dessalines had set up: but the Constituent Assembly, which he summoned at Port-au-Prince in 1806, had other views. They resolved upon a Republican constitution." Christophe, not contented with the offered presidency, "collected an army with the view of dispersing the Constituent Assembly: but they collected one of their own, under Pétion, and forced him to retire from the capital. Christophe maintained himself in Cap François, or, as it is now called, Cap Haytien; and here he ruled for 14 years. In 1811, despising the imperial title which Dessalines had desecrated, he took the royal style by the name of Henry I. Christophe, as a man, was nearly as great a monster as Dessalines. … Yet Christophe at his best was a man capable of great aims, and a sagacious and energetic ruler." In 1820, finding himself deserted in the face of a mulatto insurrection, he committed suicide. "In a month or two after Christophe's suicide the whole island was united under the rule of President Boyer." Boyer was the successor of Pétion, who had been elected in the North, under the republican constitution which Christophe refused submission to. Pétion, "a mulatto of the best type," educated at the military academy of Paris, and full of European ideas, had ruled the province which he controlled ably and well for eleven years. In discouragement he then took his own life, and was succeeded, in 1818, by his lieutenant, Jean Pierre Boyer, a mulatto. "On the suicide of Christophe, the army of the Northern Province, weary of the tyranny of one of their own race, declared for Boyer. The French part of the island was now once more under a single government: and Boyer turned his attention to the much larger Spanish territory, with the old capital of St. Domingo, where a Spaniard named Muñez de Caceres, with the aid of the negroes, had now followed the example in the West, and proclaimed an independent government. The Dominicans, however, were still afraid of Spain, and were glad to put themselves under the wing of Hayti: Boyer was not unwilling to take possession of the Spanish colony, and thus it happened that in 1822 he united the whole island under his Presidency. In the same year he was elected President for life under the constitution of Pétion, whose general policy he maintained: but his government, especially in his later years, was almost as despotic as that of Christophe. Boyer was the first Haytian who united the blacks and mulattoes under his rule. It was mainly through confidence in him that the government of Hayti won the recognition of the European powers. … In 1825 its independence was formally recognised by France, on a compensation of 150,000,000 of francs being guaranteed to the exiled planters and to the home government. This vast sum was afterwards reduced: but it still weighed heavily on the impoverished state, and the discontents which the necessary taxation produced led to Boyer's downfall," in 1843, when he withdrew to Jamaica, and afterwards to Paris, where he died in 1850. A singular state of affairs ensued. The eastern, or Spanish, part of the island resumed its independence (1844), under a republican constitution resembling that of Venezuela, and with Pedro Santana for its President, and has been known since that time as the Republic of San Domingo, or the Dominican Republic. In the Western, or Haytian Republic, large numbers of the negroes, "under the names of Piquets and Zinglins, now formed themselves into armed bands, and sought to obtain a general division of property under some communistic monarch of their own race. The mulatto officials now cajoled the poor negroes by bribing some old negro, whose name was well known to the mass of the people as one of the heroes of the war of liberty, to allow himself to be set up as President. The Boyerists, as the mulatto oligarchy were called, thus succeeded in re-establishing their power," and their system (for describing which the word "gerontocracy" has been invented) was carried on for some years, until it resulted, in 1847, in the election to the Presidency of General Faustin Soulouque. "Soulouque was an illiterate negro whose recommendations to power were that he was old enough to have taken part in the War of Independence, having been a lieutenant under Pétion, and that he was popular with the negroes, being devotedly attached to the strange mixture of freemasonry and fetish worship by which the Haytian blacks maintain their political organisation." {1634} The new President took his elevation more seriously than was expected, and proved to be more than a match for the mulattoes who thought to make him their puppet. He gathered the reins into his own hands, and crushed the mulattoes at Port-au-Prince by a general massacre. He then "caused himself to be proclaimed Emperor, by the title of Faustinus the First (1849)," and established a grotesque imperial court, with a fantastic nobility, in which a Duke de Lemonade figured by the side of a Prince Tape-à-l'œil. This lasted until December 1858, when Soulouque was dethroned and sent out of the country, to take refuge in Jamaica, and the republic was restored, with Fabre Nicholas Geffrard, a mulatto general, at its head. Geffrard held the Presidency for eight years, when he followed his predecessor into exile in Jamaica, and was succeeded by General Salnave, a negro, who tried to re-establish the Empire and was shot, 1869. Since that time revolutions have been frequent and nothing has been constant except the disorder and decline of the country. Meantime, the Dominican Republic has suffered scarcely less, from its own disorders and the attacks of its Haytian neighbors. In 1861 it was surrendered by a provisional government to Spain, but recovered independence three years later. Soon afterwards one of its parties sought annexation to the United States, and in 1869 the President of the latter republic, General Grant, concluded a treaty with the Dominican government for the cession of the peninsula of Samana, and for the placing of San Domingo under American protection. But the Senate of the United States refused to ratify the treaty.

_E. J. Payne, History of European Colonies, chapter 15._

ALSO IN: _Sir S. St. John, Hayti, or the Black Republic, chapter 3._

HAYTI: End--------

HEAD-CENTER, Fenian.

See IRELAND: A. D. 1858-1867.

HEARTS OF OAK BOYS. HEARTS OF STEEL BOYS.

See IRELAND: A. D.1760-1798.

HEAVENFIELD. Battle of the (635).

Defeat of the Welsh, with the death of Cadwallon, the "last great hero of the British race," by the English of Bernicia, A.D. 635. "The victory of the Heaven-field indeed is memorable as the close of the last rally which the Britons ever made against their conquerors."

_J. R. Green, The Making of England, page 275._

ALSO IN: _Bede, Ecclesiastical History, book 3, chapters 1-2._

HÉBERT AND THE HÉBERTISTS IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1790; 1793 (MARCH-JUNE), (SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER), to 1793-1794 (NOVEMBER-JUNE).

HEBREW, The Name.

See JEWS: THEIR NATIONAL NAMES.

HEBRIDES: Start--------

HEBRIDES OR WESTERN ISLANDS, The.

"The Hebrides or Western Islands comprise all the numerous islands and islets which extend along nearly all the west coast of Scotland; and they anciently comprised also the peninsula of Cantyre, the islands of the Clyde, the isle of Rachlin, and even for some time the isle of Man."

_Historical Tales of the Wars of Scotland, volume 3, page 60._

HEBRIDES: 9th-13th Centuries. The dominion of the Northmen.

See NORMANS. NORTHMEN: 8TH-9TH CENTURIES, and 10TH-13TH CENTURIES; also, SODOR AND MAN.

HEBRIDES: A. D. 1266. Cession to Scotland.

See SCOTLAND; A. D. 1266.

HEBRIDES: A. D. 1346-1504. The Lords of the Isles.

In 1346, the dominion of most of the Hebrides became consolidated under John, son of Ronald or Angus Oig, of Islay, and he assumed the title of "Lord of the Isles." The Lords of the Isles became substantially independent of the Scottish crown until the battle of Harlaw, in 1411 (see HARLAW, BATTLE OF). The lordship was extinguished in 1504 (see SCOTLAND: A. D. 1502-1504).

_Historical Tales of the Wars of Scotland, pages 65-72._

HEBRIDES: End--------

HEBRON.

In the settlement of the tribes of Israel, after the conquest of Canaan, Caleb, one of the heroes of Judah, "took possession of the territory round the famous old city of Hebron, and thereby gained for his tribe a seat held sacred from Patriarchal times. … Beginning with Hebron, he acquired for himself a considerable territory, which even in David's time was named simply Caleb, and was distinguished from the rest of Judah as a peculiar district. … Hebron remained till after David's time celebrated as the main seat and central point of the entire tribe, around which it is evident that all the rest of Judah gradually clustered in good order."

_H. Ewald, History of Israel, book 2, section 3, A._

"Hebron was a Hittite city, the centre of an ancient civilization, which to some extent had been inherited by the tribe of Judah. It was undoubtedly the capital of Judah, a city of the highest religious character full of recollections and traditions. It could boast of fine public buildings, good water, and a vast and well-kept pool. The unification of Israel had just been accomplished there. It was only natural that Hebron should become the capital of the new kingdom [of David]. … It is not easy to say what induced David to leave a city which had such ancient and evident claims for a hamlet like Jebus [Jerusalem], which did not yet belong to him. It is probable that he found Hebron too exclusively Judahite."

_E. Renan, History of the People of Israel, book 2, chapter 18._

See, also, ZOAN; and JEWS: THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL IN EGYPT.

HECANA, Kingdom of.

One of the small, short-lived kingdoms of the Angles in early England, its territory was in modern Herefordshire.

_N. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, chapter 7, section 70._

See ENGLAND: A. D. 547-633.

HECATOMB

"Large sacrifices, where a great number of animals were slaughtered, [among the ancient Greeks] are called hecatombs."

_G. F. Schömann, Antiquity of Greece: The State, page 60._

HECATOMBÆON, Battle of.

Fought, B. C. 224, by Cleomenes of Sparta with the forces of the Achæan League, over which he won a complete victory. The result was the calling in of Antigonus Doson, king of Macedonia, to become the ally of the League, and to be aided by it in crushing the last independent political life of Peloponnesian Greece.

_C. Thirlwall, History of Greece, chapter 62._

{1635}

HECATOMPEDON, The.

See PARTHENON AT ATHENS.

HECATOMPYLOS.

The chief city of Parthia Proper, founded by Alexander the Great, and long remaining one of the capitals of the Parthian empire.

HEDGELEY MOOR, Battle of (1464)

See ENGLAND: A. D. 1455-1471.

HEDWIGA, Queen of Poland, A. D. 1382-1386.

HEELERS.

See BOSSISM.

HEERBAN, The.