The sole contemporary account of Bois-Caïman frames the ritual as African barbarism.

Evidence

There, in 1793 and 1794, he wrote a memoir in which he described how “before executing” the plan they had made at the August 14 meeting, the conspirators had a “kind of celebration or sacrifice” in which “a black pig, surrounded by fetishes, covered with offerings each one stranger than the next, was the holocaust offered to the genius of the black race.” “The religious ceremonies that the blacks practiced in slitting the pig’s throat,” he continued, “the eagerness with which they drank its blood, the value they placed on possessing some of its hairs—a kind of talisman that, according to them, would make them invulnerable—serves to characterize the African.” He concluded that “it was natural for such an ignorant and stupid class to take part in the superstitious rituals of an absurd and bloody religion before taking part in the most horrible of assassinations.” Dalmas’s work—which, when it was finally published in 1814 was followed by an essay arguing that the Haitian Revolution was illegitimate and that the French should take back their former colony—is the only surviving account of the event written soon after it took place. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 344

Categorization

• QUESTION: Since Dalmas’s is the only contemporary account and he was an enemy of the revolution, how much of the received Bois-Caïman story rests on a fundamentally hostile single source? Dubois seems to flag this.
• SEED: The fact that everything known about a founding ritual comes from a biased ex-slaveholder’s account, published to argue for recolonization, is a rich angle on how revolutionary memory gets built from hostile sources.