Last week I wrote about the causes of the Haitian Revolution and got lots of great feedback. Thanks 🙏

I also had a couple of sources I left out and wanted to share. The night before the enslaved Africans on Haiti launched their revolt, they held a ceremony at Bois-Caïman. There are lots of paintings of this ceremony that was central to the revolution. The ceremony was one more example of how the enslaved Africans weren’t inspired by the Enlightenment. Here’s a painting by Ernst Prophete.

In 1793 or 1794, Antoine Dalmas, the surgeon at the nearby Gallifet plantation, wrote this account of the ceremony:

They celebrated a kind of feast or sacrifice in the middle of an uncultivated wooded plot on the Choiseul plantation, called le Caïman, where a very large number of slaves gathered. A black pig, surrounded by spirit objects, each loaded with offerings more bizarre than the next, was the offering made to the all powerful spirit of the black race. The religious ceremonies that the slaves practiced in slaughtering it, their greed to drink its blood, their eagerness to have some of its bristles as a kind of talisman that, according to them, would make them invulnerable, are all characteristics of the African.

In 1818, Antoine Metral, a Haitian historian, wrote this account. He borrowed from Dalmas, but he also added the priestess who appears in most images of the ceremony:

They celebrated a kind of feast or sacrifice in the middle of an uncultivated wooded plot on the Choiseul plantation, called le Caïman, where a very large number of slaves gathered. A black pig, surrounded by spirit objects, each loaded with offerings more bizarre than the next, was the offering made to the all powerful spirit of the black race. The religious ceremonies that the slaves practiced in slaughtering it, their greed to drink its blood, their eagerness to have some of its bristles as a kind of talisman that, according to them, would make them invulnerable, are all characteristics of the African.