Slaveowners fleeing Haiti literally transported the Haitian Revolution to America

Evidence

Hegel’s “cunning of history,” for one instance, was evident when in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Franco-Haitian slaveowners fled to Louisiana, Virginia, and the Carolinas with as many slaves as they could transport, thereby also transporting the Haitian Revolution. The outrage, courage, and vision of that revolution helped inspire the Pointe Coupee Conspiracy in 1795 in Louisiana, the Gabriel-led rebellion in 1800 in Virginia, and the rebellion organized by Denmark Vesey in 1822 outside of Charleston. And, in turn, Denmark’s movement informed the revolutionary tract, APPEAL in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, penned by David Walker in Boston in 1829. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 87

Categorization

• CANDY: The gorgeous irony that fleeing slaveowners carried the Haitian Revolution with them into the American South is perfect dinner-table material.
• XREF: This genealogical chain of insurrection (Haiti to Vesey to Walker) parallels analyses of how revolt networks move through forced migration, resonant with the broader reading purpose.