Haitian slaves transformed themselves into organized armies under radical leadership.

Evidence

But the slaves were now transformed into Black armies, marching into battle “to African martial music and with unfurled banners inscribed with ‘death to all whites.’” From that moment on, the grand historical parade of the Haitian Revolution proceeded. The witnesses learned the names of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the ex-slave who had acquired slaves of his own before joining and then becoming the first overall commander of the Black revolution; Dessalines, the slave whose military genius and hatred of the whites would knit the movement back together again when it was wounded by Napoleon’s treacherous betrayal of Toussaint, and propel it toward new revolutionary heights; Henri Christophe, the slave whose old intimacy with Cap François society would seduce him into becoming Emperor of Haiti, matching his station with the much grander presences of Napoleon. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 736

Categorization

• XREF: Toussaint, Dessalines, and Christophe’s trajectories map the rise-and-fall arc of the Black radical tradition the reader is tracking.