Article Commentary by Erica Johnson Edwards
Christianity’s Role in Colonial and Revolutionary Haiti (Article Commentary)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.1
Cite: Edwards, Erica Johnson. 2021. “Christianity’s Role in Colonial and Revolutionary Haiti (Article Commentary),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 1-4.
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On October 26, 2020, the US Senate confirmed Amy Coney-Barrett’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. In the lead up to her confirmation, while senators and the media focused heavily on her Catholic faith, some on social media drew attention to the two Haitian children she and her husband adopted following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.2 The connections between Coney-Barret’s Christianity and the Haitian earthquake recalled Pat Robertson’s controversial claim that the earthquake was caused by a Haitian “pact with the devil” during the Haitian Revolution.3 Whatever else one might say about Robertson’s comments, they show his ignorance of the important but little-known role Christianity and the Catholic clergy played in eighteenth-century colonial Haiti.
Scholarly work on the Catholic Church and its clergy in the colony is minimal and does not offer much information on the Haitian Revolution.4 George Breathett claims the Catholic Church in colonial Haiti “practically disappeared during the excitement of the years following the revolt of 1791.”5 Sue Peabody suggests Christianity made the enslaved docile, and low eighteenth-century conversion rates allowed the enslaved to remain wild and violent, helping to bring about the Haitian Revolution.6 Other scholars, however, have begun to uncover the contributions of the religious to the Haitian Revolution. For instance, Laënnec Hurbon claims various primary sources demonstrate “the participation of the clergy in the insurrection of August 1791.”7 Hurbon references a similar study by Father Antoine Adrien that “makes it possible at once to abandon the current view that the clergy was wholly committed to the cause of slavery.”8 Indeed, my own research shows how the enslaved embraced Christianity throughout the eighteenth century and allied with Catholic clergy members during the Haitian Revolution.9
Scholars have long recognized the African religious origins of the Haitian Revolution but have focused too narrowly on Vodou.10 However, the enslaved brought other religious influences from Africa. Black Haitian Christianity traces back to the western coasts of Africa, where the Portuguese introduced Catholicism even before Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas. In the Kongo in particular, the local population embraced Christianity following the voluntary conversion of the Kingdom’s royalty and nobility. Over time, the Kongolese incorporated Christianity into their culture and adapted it for their own needs. Dating from the sixteenth century, Catholic clergy permitted syncretic practices in Kongolese Christianity.11 A civil war in the Kingdom of Kongo lasting from the 1760s through the 1780s resulted in great numbers of prisoners of war who were sold into slavery in colonial Haiti. Many of the Kongolese soldiers would have been Christians or had at least been exposed to Christianity. By the time of the Haitian Revolution, the Kongolese had been practicing Christianity continuously for more than two centuries. European missionaries also had success in the Kingdom of Warri in West Africa. Under the Portuguese, a group of Augustinian monks introduced Christianity into the Kingdom of Warri in the second half of the sixteenth century. As in the Kongo, the king of Warri led his people, the Itsekiri, to accept Christianity. Local ministering, beyond the efforts of the royal family, would have been necessary to perpetuate Christianity in the Kingdom of Warri. Missionary activity waned and came up against resistant Itsekiri leaders throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Nonetheless, more than one hundred years later, a new ruler of the Itsekiri in the 1760s repeatedly requested that missionaries be sent to his kingdom, demonstrating a significant Christian spirit in Warri.12 A significant proportion of those enslaved in colonial Haiti before the Haitian Revolution were from the Bight of Benin, a bay along the Atlantic coast stretching across modern Ghana and Nigeria that included the historic Kingdom of Warri.13
Before the Haitian Revolution, the Catholic clergy were not the only people taking part in the religious instruction of the enslaved population. Black catechists were vital in communicating Christianity with enslaved African populations because they better understood the languages and cosmologies of the potential African converts.14 Similar to the catechists in Africa, enslaved and free Blacks in colonial Haiti shared Christianity with one another. Haiti’s shortage of priests and growing enslaved population made it necessary for people of African descent to provide religious instruction.15 The religious hierarchy implemented by the Capuchins starting in the 1760s included the elevation of several baptized and married enslaved persons to lead catechism and prayer and serve as beadles while wearing a cassock and surplice.16 By rewarding certain enslaved peoples with church functions and official clerical attire, the Capuchins gave other enslaved peoples incentive to embrace Catholic rituals of baptism and marriage as well as instilled a positive perception of Catholicism and the clergy. In giving a small number of the enslaved an elevated status and observable benefits, the Capuchins positioned themselves as respectable paternal authorities for the enslaved. There was an active and faithful enslaved Christian population aiding the official clerics in spreading and maintaining Catholicism in the colony before the Haitian Revolution.
When the Haitian Revolution began in August 1791, parish priest Father Cachetan allied with the insurrectionists, serving as their chaplain. One plantation attorney explained, “Father Cachetan . . . preferred to stay in the midst of the black insurgents to preach the Evangel of the law to them, and encourage them to persist in an insurrection that was holy and legitimate in his eyes.”17 The attorney implied that the priest, like most whites, had the option to flee or be taken prisoner, but he willingly stayed with the insurgents because he fully supported their cause. In fact, when authorities took over the rebel camp where Cachetan resided, the priest claimed that “he was peaceful in the midst of his parishioners [the Blacks].”18 In calling them his parishioners, Cachetan demonstrated how he saw the shared humanity of enslaved Blacks and free whites. In keeping the priest among them, the revolutionaries signaled their value of Christianity and some clergy members in their fight against slavery. Authorities eventually imprisoned Cachetan but kept his punishment secret “in order not to scandalize the public and above all the blacks.”19 The perceived need for confidentiality regarding the consequences of Cachetan’s actions further indicates the depth of the alliance between the priest and the insurgents as well as a sense of denial on the part of many whites that the enslaved would rise up on their own. Nonetheless, if some believed that news of his death could incite further rebellion among the enslaved, he must have been a genuine ally, perhaps even an abolitionist.
Nearing the end of the Haitian Revolution, Black revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture assembled a group of colonists to draft a colonial constitution in 1801, which declared Catholicism the official religion of the island. Louverture corresponded with Abbé Henri Grégoire, member of the philanthropic society the Amis des Noirs in Paris, seeking more priests to volunteer to go to colonial Haiti. According to Paris’s Annales de la Religion, “For three years and on several occasions, he [Louverture] solicited Grégoire, his friend and that of the blacks . . . for the sending of twelve priests . . . . Grégoire proposed . . . to found a great church in [colonial Haiti].”20 Eventually, Grégoire arranged for the establishment of four constitutional bishops in colonial Haiti.21 After Haitian independence from France in 1804, while the country continued to experience political struggles, the religious leaders continued as counsel to the newly founded Black nation. Just after declaring independence, Haiti’s leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines ordered the massacre of most of the whites in Haiti. However, Dessalines spared “a handful of whites,” including many clergy members, “distinguished by the opinions they have always held and who, besides, have taken the oath to live with us obedient to the law.”22 Through the revolution and independence, one priest continuously counseled the Haitian authorities. Corneille Brelle, or Corneille de Douai, served as a chaplain to Louverture and performed Dessalines’s coronation as emperor in 1805.23 When Dessalines signed the first Haitian constitution as emperor in 1805, independent Haiti did not have an official religion but allowed for freedom of worship.24
Christianity and the Catholic clergy maintained a constant presence in eighteenth-century Haiti, and that legacy lives on in Haiti’s current Christian population. In fact, despite what Pat Robertson would have us believe, it is likely the children Coney-Barrett adopted came from Haitian Christian homes. According to The World Factbook put out by the CIA, Haiti’s population is more than eighty-two percent Christian, with over half of the Black nation being Catholic. Through the effort of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, around twenty-eight percent of Haitians identify as Baptist, Pentecostal, Adventist, or Methodist.25 Yet, only two percent of Haiti’s population reports practicing Vodou, even though it was recognized as an official religion in 2003.26 Of course, Vodou is a syncretic religion, combining African animism with Catholicism, so some Haitians may practice a form of Catholicism quite different than people in France or other parts of the world. Nonetheless, Christianity has been part of Haitian life since its beginnings as a French colony and continues in the twenty-first century.
ENDNOTES
[1] Following the lead of Rob Taber, I use colonial Haiti instead of Saint-Domingue. See Robert D. Taber, “Saint-Domingue or Colonial Haiti? Naming Conventions and Perspective in Historical Analysis” (paper presentation, Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Atlanta, GA, February 2019); Taber, “Family Formation, Race, and Honor in Colonial Haiti’s Communities, 1670–1789,” in French Connections: Cultural Mobility in North America and the Atlantic World, eds. Robert Englebert and Andrew Wegmann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 146–169.
[2] John Cormack, “The New York Times Digs into the Adoptions of Amy Coney Barrett’s Children,” National Review, October 21, 2020, https://news.yahoo.com/york-times-digs-adoptions-amy-154928157.html.
[3] Frank James, “Pat Robertson Blames Haitian Devil Pact for Earthquake,” NPR, January 13, 2010, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/01/pat_robertson_blames_haitian_d.html.
[4] See for example, J. M. Jan, Les Congrégations religieuses à Colonial Haiti, 1681–1793 (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1951); R. P. Joseph Janin, La Religion aux Colonies Française sous l’ancien régime (de 1626 à la Révolution) (Paris: D’Auteuil, 1942).
[5] George Amitheat Breathett, “Religious Missions in Colonial French Saint Domingue” (PhD diss., State University of Iowa, 1954), 154.
[6] Sue Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal’: Catholic Missions in the French Antilles, 1625–1800,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 53-90, 57.
[7] Laënnec Hurbon, “Church and Slavery in Colonial Haiti,” The Abolitions of Slavery: From Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848, ed. Marcel Dorigny (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 62.
[8] Hurbon, “Church and Slavery in Colonial Haiti,” 62.
[9] See Erica R. Johnson, Philanthropy and Race in the Haitian Revolution (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 23–67.
[10] See for example Léon-François Hoffman, “Un Mythe national: La cérémonie du Bois-Caïman,” in La République haïtienne: Etat des lieux et perspectives, eds. Gérard Barthélemy and Christian Girault (Paris: Karthala, 1993), 434–48; Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); and Hein Vanhee, “Central African Popular Christianity and the Making of Haitian Vodou Religion,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 243–264.
[11] John K. Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” The Journal of African History 25, no. 2 (1994): 147–167; Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas,” The Americas 44, no. 3 (1988): 261–278; and Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of the Kongo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
[12] Alan Ryde, “Missionary Activity in the Kingdom of Warri to the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2, no. 1 (1960): 1–2, 5, 7, 21.
[13] Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal,’” 65.
[14] Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo,” 270–71.
[15] Breathett, “Catholic Missionary Activity,” 281.
[16] Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal,’” 85.
[17] Anonymous, “La Révolution de Saint-Domingue, contenant tout ce qui s’est passé dans la colonie française depuis le commencement de la Révolution jusqu’au départ de l’auteur pour la France, le 8 septembre 1792,” 300, F 3 141, 268, Archives nationales d’outre-mer.
[18] Anonymous, “La Révolution de Saint-Domingue, 268-269, Archives nationales d’outre-mer.
[19] Anonymous, “La Révolution de Saint-Domingue, 269, Archives nationales d’outre-mer..
[20] Annales de la religion, vol. 12 (Paris: Imprimerie-Libraire Chrétienne, 1801), 25–27.
[21] Jean-François Brière, “Abbé Grégoire and Haitian Independence,” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 37.
[22] “Dessalines’ Proclamation, 28 April 1804,” translated and printed in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, 182.
[23] Hubert Cole, Christophe: King of Haiti (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 145, 191; Jacques de Cauna, Haïti: L’Eternelle Révolution (Monein: PRNG, 2009), 146.
[24] “Haitian Constitution,” translated and printed in Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents, eds. Laurent Dubois and John Garrigus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 194.
[25] Bertin M. Louis, Jr. “Haiti’s Pact with the Devil?: Bwa Kayiman, Haitian Protestant Views of Vodou, and the Future of Haiti,” Religions 10, no. 8 (2019): 1–15.
[26] “Haiti: People and Society,” The World Factbook, accessed October 27, 2020, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/geos/ha.html.
