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Marronage and Mass Resistance as Jurisgenerative Law-Making in the Saint-Domingue Revolution

Yuan Stevens, Autumn 2016

Map of Saint-Dominque (now Haiti), Stephanie Curci and Chris Jones’s project
Mapping the Haitian Revolution, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

“This is a Call to Action Against Slavery in America,” wrote the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) earlier this year.[1] The US-based IWOC announced a nationally coordinated prisoner work stoppage for September 2016.[2] The protest organizers called this the largest prison strike in the country’s history.[3]

Although prison officials have tightly controlled any public information about this movement, the organizers say that 20,000 prisoners have protested — at 29 prisons and in 12 states — since September 2016.[4] One of the protestors’ primary demands includes an end to free prison labour. However, proponents of prison labour have argued that such programs offer inmates a sense of meaning and purpose and, further, help to increase their chances of finding employment once they are released.

The problem is nonetheless twofold: prisoners are required to work (and are often harshly punished if they refuse to work or fail to meet standards) and their pay tends to be abysmal, running from 12 to 40 cents per hour in federal prisons while in state prisons, the pay could be nothing.[5] These protestors are demanding not only for changes in law, but also for reconfigured notions of the meaning of their labour.

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The prisoners’ explicit calls to the end of slavery and demands for self-determined freedom are not dissimilar to the cries of slaves in Saint-Domingue — the former name of Haiti — for justice. I argue in this paper that Carolyn Fick’s telling of the Haitian Revolution in The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below enables us as jurists to see another critical example of resistance as an act of law-making.[6] Indeed, such resistance can be placed on a continuum of practices in (counter)revolutions towards alternative realities without subjugation and slavery.

Through resistance, Saint-Domingue’s slaves have reconfigured the ethical and legal significance of freedom from slavery and landholding, resulting in what Robert Cover calls jurisgenesis: the collective construction of new legal meanings that fundamentally differ from statist interpretations of the law.[7] More specifically, the actions of Haiti’s former slaves demonstrate that the legal meaning of holding land was not necessarily an act falling within the liberal tradition, which is centred on the primacy of property ownership as a core element of legal personhood. Instead, landholding for the freed slaves in Saint-Domingue marked a break from subjugation and slavery, ultimately constituting an emancipatory act in efforts to define their social identity, and imporantly, provide a sense of collective and personal dignity.[8]

A shared understanding of Saint-Domingue’s slaves is critical to seeing their acts as law-making. One reason that Fick’s representation of the Haitian Revolution is so profound can be traced to her focus on the Black masses, whose self-mobilization and independently organized resistance brought the Revolution to its end.[9] While the Black and enslaved masses are the focal point of this paper, “it is important to remember that the Saint-Domingue revolution began with the breakup of its own ruling class [related to the French revolution], and not with the slave rebellion”[10] — which in turn gave rise to the material conditions in which “revolutionary movements could take root.”[11]

Many historians of the Haitian Revolution have predominantly sought to categorize various elements of the Revolution[12] or have focused solely on its “distinguished and prominent leaders.”[13] In contrast to this, Fick elucidates the social, economic, and cultural realities that the collective of Black and enslaved people sought to forge, and the myriad forms of rebellion that they utilized in order to “overthrow the rule of the white masters, to destroy slavery itself, and to achieve independence.”[14]

How did the resistance of the enslaved Saint-Domingueans create new law? Robert Cover posits that our realities consist of constantly-created and -maintained notions of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, and of valid and void.[15] He differentiates between world-creating (paidic) and world-maintaining (imperial) realities — the former in which we collectively and performatively decide our community’s norms, and the later in which norms are universal and institutionally enforced.[16] In his description of jurisgenesis, Cover contends that new and non-statist legal precepts become normatively meaningful when they are incorporated into everyday life practice through collective “commitment in living out legal meaning.”[17]

Understanding the Saint-Dominiguean masses’ resistance through such a framework is not a difficult task. The unquestioned control of planters — drawing clear lines between who was property and who owned property — was indisputably a statist source of world-maintaining power in Saint-Domingue. And the slaves’ committed and collective responses to this social control — particularly their acts of marronage (efforts to extricate themselves from slavery) — gave rise to new legal norms both in terms of their independence from slavery, as well as what would constitute this independence.

Through everyday occurrences of marronage, slaves overthrew the possibility that their masters could rely on them to work the land and produce. Fick eloquently describes how contemporary historians now recognize that disparate acts of suicide — whether aboard slave ships or on plantations — were calculated actions “on the part of slaves who committed suicide either individually or collectively to inflict serious economic damage, if not ruin, upon the master.”[18] Fick further reminds us that self-inflicted invisibilization, whether temporary or permanent and through marronage or suicide, meant that the “power in the hands of the Saint Domginuean colonists was never totally absolute, nor were the slaves ever totally victims.”[19]

To be sure, other examples of resistance were numerous in the Haitian Revolution: [p]artial revolts, conspiracies, plots to kill the master, suicide, infanticide, voodoo, poisonings,” etc.[20] And interestingly, historians’ analyses of marronage have generally attempted to examine it as though it existed in abstraction from the reality of the Saint-Dominguean slaves.[21] But as an “integral and active part” of resistance to the slave system[22] that offered the masses “equal and armed footing with the other actors,”[23] marronage instead allowed the slaves to build networks of resistance in clandestine ways and ultimately enact the guerrilla warfare that led to the Revolution‘s end.[24] In this way, Fick helps us realize that marronage as an act of resistance was not simply a lazy act of desertion that afforded an escape to slavery, but was an “active revolutionary force” — and thus part and parcel of the “strategy that would break the French army,” leading to self-determined independence for the mass, slave population.[25]

We must remember here that the Black masses fought for not only freedom from slavery, but also freedom for self-identity and personal dignity. Indeed, Fick compellingly argues that the former slaves achieved just this through landholding. “Finally,” Fick surmises, “permanent freedom from slavery had been won through independence. But the masses had not yet won the freedom to till their own soil.”[26] When the obscure individuals who had brought the Revolution to its end finally did receive the right to do with the land what they willed, they received a “personal claim to the land upon which one labo[u]red and from which to derive and express one’s individuality.”[27]

Those who make sense of the Saint-Domingue Revolution without a certain critical gaze may see the Revolution as finally achieving for its former slaves the French bourgeois-revolutionary notions of liberty and equality, and particularly the right to property. But in the end, the ex-slaves’ ultimate agricultural egalitarianism perhaps had more to do with “the desire to define their lives through their relationship to the land” as a means to mark the break from slavery, define their social identity, and provide a sense of collective personal dignity.[28] In doing so, Saint-Domingue’s people have reconfigured the ethical and legal productivities that inform our understanding of both their freedom and landholding, and, in turn, offer us a critical example of resistance as law-making on multiple levels.

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IWOC’s methods of resistance against slavery — including the seemingly passive response of not-working — can be traced to the methods of resistance used by Saint-Domingue’s slaves in the country’s revolution. And it is my hope that these prisoners, in a paradigm where prisons exist, receive the standards that they are due: reasonable wages or wages at all for work that help to define their self-identity and treatment that corresponds to their statuses as whole, complex human beings who also deserve collective dignity and freedom.

→ References

[1] “Announcement of Nationally Coordinated Prisoner Workstoppage for Sept 9, 2016”, IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (1 April 2016) (blog), online: https://iwoc.noblogs.org/post/2016/04/01/announcement-of-nationally-coordinated-prisoner-workstoppage-for-sept-9-2016/.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Alice Speri, “The Largest Prison Strike in the US History Enters its Second Week”, The Intercept (16 September 2016), online: https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/the-largest-prison-strike-in-u-s-history-enters-its-second-week/.

[4] Jeff Spross, “Why no one knows about the largest prison strike in U.S. history”, The Week (18 October 2016), online: http://theweek.com/articles/655609/why-no-knows-about-largest-prison-strike-history.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, (Knoxville, Tennesse: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990).

[7] Robert Cover, “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term -- Foreword: Nomos and Narrative“ (1983) Harvard Law Review 97(1).

[8] Fick supra, note 6 at 250.

[9] Ibid, at 248-249.

[10] Ibid, at 238, 239.

[11] Ibid, at 238.

[12] Ibid, at 2-10.

[13] Ibid, at 250.

[14] Ibid, at 250.

[15] Ibid, at 1.

[16] Ibid, at 12-13.

[17] Ibid, at 10.

[18] Ibid, at 47-48.

[19] Ibid, at 66.

[20] Ibid, at 73.

[21] Ibid, at 9-10.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid, at 242.

[24] Ibid, at 227.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid, at 249.

[27] Ibid, at 249.

[28] Ibid, at 250.

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