Why did Haitians spare white women?

by UndeadRhodesian

So I was recently reading up on the Haitian Revolution after watching a Crash Course video on it. Much of the brutality (on both sides) is very sad, but I'm somewhat confused. Why did the Haitian government spare white women when they were much more harsh with white men and male children? Was it because they were less involved in the slave trade? I suspect this but have no evidence.

In summation, why weren't white women endangered by the Haitian Revolt in the same way white men were?

Elphinstone1842

Well in most conflicts men are the primary targets of violence and killing since they're the biggest threat, but women were certainly endangered in other ways even when they weren't outright killed. When women were spared in the Haitian Revolution it was often because they were kept to be raped by both sides and there are many accounts of this. Other times they were simply killed along with the men or killed after being raped. One reason rape was so common was because the gender ratio of Haiti was skewed since the white French planters were predominantly male and the African slaves tended to have a lopsided gender ratio too since males were preferred for manual labor and this hadn't had time to even out yet because many slaves were first-generation and had been born in Africa.

They weren't just sparing women and girls because they were chivalrous -- far from it. There was propaganda surrounding the rape of white women disseminated in hyperbolic pamphlets to inflame white fears of slave rebellion elsewhere and paint the rebels as irredeemable savages, but that rape of white women did occur and was extremely common is undoubtable. One account that seems to shed light on this without resorting to many of the usual cliches is by a plantation owner named M. Le Clerc about events in 1791. Popkin writes that "At one point, indeed, [Le Clerc] engages in a genuinely troubling moment of self-revelation, acknowledging an illicit love affair with one of the white women who had been raped by the blacks, and allows us to sense the element of sexual rivalry that was part of the fuel for Saint-Domingue's explosive racial conflicts" (Popkin, 94). Again, these reports should be viewed with caution since they were used as propaganda by proslavery groups but the rape of white women certainly seems to have been standard.

Le Clerc describes the rescue of white female prisoners from a church that sheds some light on their condition:

The plantation owners had obtained the general's permission to go liberate the white women. ... The detachment burst into the church ... Livid women, starved, with out stockings, without shoes, their hair undone, most almost naked, a few covered with rags, others with nothing but a scrap to cover their nudity: specters, in a word. ... everything had made them fear that they would be killed, They hid under their planks, and anywhere they thought they would be concealed.

He continues:

Soon afterward, one of my neighbors, a little old woman, whose soul was her only beauty, came up to me. The curé had wanted to sleep with her, and, when she refused, she had received fifty lashes, whose scars she still bore. ... It was then, after a moment of silence, that she told me, under oath, her sufferings, those of her daughters and her companions.

The above account is also mentioned in a number of other contemporary sources which even cite names, making it appear more reliable (Popkin, 94).

The rape of enslaved black women by white slaveowners had also been extremely common before the Haitian Revolution, so much so that an entire class of "gens de couleur" or mulattos had been created. This sexual violence toward black women doubtless continued to occur throughout the insurrection perpetrated by white soldiers, though accounts of this are more scarce. English chronicler Marcus Rainsford whose account is generally favorable to the rebel cause in Haiti wrote that the whites had set a precedent of sexual exploitation and rape that came back to haunt them: "The licentiousness of their intercourse with the female slaves, could leave no impression to prevent a retaliation on the occasion, with objects, too, of such superior attraction, alas! unhappily for themselves" (Popkin, 94). Girard writes:

Then, as later, sexual crimes, particularly those committed against white women, struck white observers as the most vivid insults to the racial and social order; then, as later, acts of cruelty against civilians seemed intended as payback for the slave masters' own sexual crimes. (Girard, 126).

During the large-scale massacres of thousands of whites directed by the rebel general Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1804, white women and children were routinely killed along with the men although sometimes they were kept until last so that they could be raped or pushed into forced marriages:

White women were also targeted at this stage and were often raped or pushed into forced marriages under threat of death. Dessalines finally offered amnesty to surviving whites--only to kill them as they got out of hiding--and left the town with eighty-seven mules laden with spice and silver. (Girard, 321).

Sadly rape has continued to be an endemic problem in Haitian society and still is, but I won't get into that because it violates the "20 year rule" about covering recent history. I can say that throughout the late 20th century from the 1950s to 1990s when Haiti was going through political turmoil and a series of dictatorships, systematic rape was used as a political tool of suppression by dictators like Jean-Claude Duvalier and Raoul Cédras.

Sources:

Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness accounts of the Haitian insurrection by Jeremy D. Popkin

The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801-1804 by Philippe R. Girard