Blood White and Blue

          For the Latin America Revolutions lesson, the Essential Questions were: why is it necessary to acknowledge human value regardless of race? How are the events in the Latin American Revolutions evidence of this social imperative? This is a very important question to discuss because of all the racism, oppression, discrimination, and persecution that still exists today and will continue to exist in at least the near future. To go about answering the proposed question, we turned to pie. This pie came in the form of a chart. In a pie chart we assigned sectors to the different races that made up Latin America in the years before the revolutions occurred. Then we looked at the social structure. The conclusion after looking at these together was that Latin America had a minority given privileges over the majority. The lesson continued after the class broke into groups to learn about a specific revolution. The revolutions we studied occurred in Mexico, Gran Colombia, and Brazil. Eventually we all learned about these revolutions by regrouping so each group included an "expert" on each revolution. After comparing the timelines that we created, we worked together to answer the essential question. 

Comparing the revolutions, we found commonalities and differences. These similarities were first, each revolution ended around 1830 and second, all the revolts ended with declared independence and a constitution. One difference was that the revolution in Brazil started in the last 1700s, when the other two did not begin to spark until the turn of the century. Another difference noted was that even with their close proximity, all revolts were fought against different oppressors. In response to why it is imperative to acknowledge rights regardless of race, it was obvious. Suppressing people is not a permanent solution. People, especially those repressed, desire representation in their government and the majority, if not everyone, desire to have their basic rights acknowledged. Repressed people do not stay repressed! The three revolutions were fought for the shared goal of independence. After the Brazil revolution, the new Emperor, Pedro, did not have an easy reign. People were suspicious of him, the main reason being that he was not born in Brazil, but instead, he was born in Portugal. Brazilian people wanted a Brazilian Emperor. In Gran Columbia and Mexico the rebels hoped to create their own country, separate from their mother colony, which would allow their people, of their race, to run their own country. The majority requires representation, and in the system depicted by the Casta paintings, representation in government is not attainable for everyone. 

          Racism is still an issue today. Just yesterday, the 24th of November, the news came in that the Police Officer that shot unarmed Michael Brown, six times in total and twice in the head, will not be indicted. Now anger directed at the jury's decision is ravishing the town. People are setting fire to buildings. People are throwing rocks. People are breaking into stores. People are rioting. People are protesting, some peacefully and some violently. Some people are doing nothing. There is tear gas in the air. There is a heavy police presence, including the National Guard. I believe that stereotyping is the problem with these cops shooting and killing these citizens. That is why the new saying is "Hands Up, Don't Shoot". Most people, unfortunately including cops too, see black people as more threatening than white people. In extreme cases, this suspicion leads to unnecessary deaths. Yes, race is still an issue because although these are extreme cases, they still happen, they have happened and they will happen. They are happening now! People deserve to live in a place where they are not constantly worrying for their own safety, fearing for their lives. 

"The problem is not a Ferguson problem; it is an American problem." -Barrack Obama

Liberté, Égailté, Fraternité!

James Buchanan was the president that preceded Abraham Lincoln, and some call him The Worst President Ever. Granted, he was inaugurated during a difficult time, in 1857 half of his country was pro-slavery and the other half wished the horrendous thing to be abolished. When his efforts to maintain peace failed and Southern states seceded, President Buchanan did nothing. He saw that secession was illegal and that going to war to prevent secession was also illegal. For a man that aspired to have a presidency like that of George Washington, he fell very short. From James Buchanan’s failure to unite his nation, it is evident that reaction is an important quality of a leader. President Buchanan and Toussaint L’Ouverture were both leaders. L’Ouverture was born into slavery in the French colony of Saint Domingue, now the western side of Haiti. During the 1780s, Saint Domingue was one of the most profitable colonies in the world, producing forty percent of the world’s sugar and more than half of the world’s coffee. The laborers that created this profit were slaves. About ninety percent of the population of Saint Domingue in 1789 was made up of slaves. By 1789, Toussaint L’Ouverture was a free man and a citizen of France working his way to becoming a leader. L’Ouverture deserves to be remembered. He should be remembered most for his biggest accomplishment: the liberation of the enslaved population of Saint Domingue. He is an abolitionist before he is a military or government leader – from those positions of power he strived to achieve his largest goal of emancipating slaves.

Toussaint L’Ouverture should be remembered as a liberator of slaves. L’Ouverture proves with his actions that the matter of slavery is more important to him than any allegiance. The first slave revolt of Saint Domingue began in 1792 against France, their mother country. The revolution did not end until two years later when the new French government under Robespierre abolished slavery in France and all of its colonies. Now that the multitudes of Saint Domingue plantation workers were no longer enslaved, they were able to happily cease revolting. (Doc A) This peace did not last. By 1795, just a year after Robespierre had come to power, the conservative French Directory took over. It was feared that this new governing party would once again reinstate slavery. Toussaint L’Ouverture responded by writing a letter to The French Directory. In it he stated that Saint Domingue was prepared to fight to maintain its freedom (or liberté as the French say). He writes, “Could men who have enjoyed the benefits of liberty look on calmly while it is taken from them! They bore their chains when they knew no condition of life better than that of slavery. But today when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives, they would rather sacrifice them all rather than be subjected again to slavery…” (Doc B) Now that his people have experienced a life of freedom, they would much rather die than ever be re-enslaved. In the 1801 Saint Domingue Constitution, signed by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the colony finally became a place where slavery would never again exist. The constitution states that: “ All men are born, live and die free and French.” (Doc C) With all his hard work towards this success, L’Ouverture deserves to be remembered as a liberator of the slaves of Saint Domingue.

Another achievement of Toussaint L’Ouverture was his time as the leader of Saint Domingue. It was the same Constitution of Saint Domingue that officially put Toussaint L’Ouverture, a prominent leader during the revolution, in charge of the colony. (Doc C) As the leader of his homeland, unlike President Buchanan, L’Ouverture was not afraid of action. He was prepared to fight France if they re-imposed slavery. In the letter he sent to the French Directory he says, “We have known how to confront danger to out liberty, and we will know how to confront death to preserve it.” (Doc B) When he was not writing threats, L’Ouverture’s time was spent protecting the wealthy economy of the island. He implicated rules that made sure everyone that had once been enslaved was still working and with as much gusto as before they had been freed. In a Proclamation in 1801, just after the constitution had come to pass, he stated that “As soon as a child can walk, he should be employed on the plantation according to his strength in some useful work…” (Doc D) He also had strict punishments put in place. The repercussion for being a vagabond was being arrested by a member of the “gendarmerie”, which was the name for the police force stationed at each plantation. If any plantation was harboring a runaway worker, failing to report them in 24 hours resulted in a week in prison for whoever was harboring them. These rules were set in place to keep the former slaves working and working hard enough that the economy of the rich island did not falter. Unfortunately, after freeing the slaves, Toussaint L’Ouverture created an environment very similar to the one the former slaves were used to being confined to. L’Ouverture used his power as a leader to abolish slavery, but he still needed a way to keep the plantations producing profits so his decisions made him unpopular among the plantation workers. It is important to remember that not all of L’Ouverture’s actions were beneficial to his country.

Toussaint L’Ouverture was a sagacious military leader. In 1798 he defeated British troops who were nervous that the revolutionary ideas would spread to their enslaved colony of Jamaica. (Doc A) Not only good with tactics, L’Ouverture was an expert at rallying his troops. Before Napoleon's army-- who wanted to take control of the colony once again-- landed on Saint Domingue, Toussaint L’Ouverture sang to his troops, “Here come the enslavers of our race…not France, with all her troops of the Rhine, the Alps, the Nile, the Tiber, nor all Europe to help her, can extinguish the soul of Africa.” (Doc F) His troops were about to face the most powerful army in the world, but L’Ouverture was ready to put up a fight. Thanks to the quick mind of the leader of Saint Domingue, there was no town left for the troops to seek shelter or previsions, just smoking ruins. The troops of Saint Domingue had taken off for the mountains, where they would have a large advantage over the European troops who were only trained in traditional fighting and not guerrilla tactics. Toussaint L’Ouverture was playing to the strengths of his army, because they had been taught guerrilla style fighting, so they were able to use their surroundings efficiently. (Doc A) The 31,131 troops of the French, Dutch, and Polish, sent by Napoleon, lost against the mind of Toussaint L’Ouverture and his impressive army. L’Ouverture was a powerful and strategic military leader, but his motivation was to keep slavery from Saint Domingue.

Although Toussaint L’Ouverture was a brave leader and resourceful military commander, he would have wanted to be remembered as a liberator of slaves. His passion lies in that, and his motivation to become a strong leader of Saint Domingue and a brilliantly tactical man was to keep his colony free from bondage. He defeated Napoleon’s army so no one in Saint Domingue would ever again become enslaved. L’Ouverture made sure the economy maintained as stellar as it had been while enslaved so that Saint Domingue could continue to prosper. Both L’Ouverture and Buchanan were disliked; however, L’Ouverture is far more impressive. The Ruler of Saint Domingue was a man of action. The dislike aimed at him stemmed from and action and that is far nobler than President Buchanan, who did nothing when some type of action was necessary. Buchanan left the emancipating to Abraham Lincoln when L’Ouverture set out to do it himself. Toussaint’s grandest accomplishment was slave liberation and that is how we should remember his intricate legacy. 

Works Cited

Document A: Timeline of Abolition in Saint Domingue 
Document B: Letter to the French Directory, November 1797
Document C: Constitution of 1801
Document D: Proclamation, 25 November 1801
Document F: The Battle of Samana 

Don't Pass Me By

These last couple of History classes we have politely been disagreeing with the views of many historians. In Europe in 1830 and 1848 there were waves of revolts, and some historians believe these were failures in the harshest degree. That was not how we saw it. The lesson began with us creating a chart (my group’s chart is on the right) and what I enjoyed about this was the level of freedom we were allowed that I do not usually expect in school. We had to have at least five ticks, one success, one neutral, and one failure, and two in between, and that was all the criteria. We never even went over them, just went straight to using them, and I found that very refreshing. Then, in order to use our charts, we reorganized into new groups and read about a particular European revolution from either 1848 or 1830, mine was the Frankfurt Assembly. Once we comprehended and took notes on our revolution we made surveys to help the rest of the groups learn about the Frankfurt Assembly. The surveys worked out well because the students were allowed the same resources that the creators had used to make the survey.

Making this survey helped to reinforce what I had learned, reading about the Frankfurt Assembly. My revolution began with, like the name suggests, an assembly. The members of this assembly were
Nationalists and Liberals who wished to unite the German states under a constitution. The opponent of this revolution was King Fredrick William IV who was at first a person the Frankfurt Assembly had hoped would help them reach their goals. In the one of the sources we were presented with, a speech of Johann Gustav Droysen, one of the members of the 1848 Frankfurt Assembly, he boils down the point of their assembly to two sentences, "We need a powerful ruling house. Austria's power meant lack of power for us, whereas Prussia desired German unity in order to supply the deficiencies of her own power.” The conclusion of the Frankfurt Assembly was to offer the role of German King to Prussia’s King, Fredrick William IV, but as we already know, things did not go as planned. In a proclamation during 1849, Prussia’s King said, "I am not able to return a favorable reply to the offer of a crown on the part of the German National Assembly [the meeting in Frankfurt], because the assembly has not the right, without the consent of the German government, to bestow the crown which they tended me..." That same year the Assembled Germans dissolved when threatened by the Prussian military. It was members of the middle class who were either inspired by the assembly or ex-members who took to the streets and began the revolt, and Conservatives, like usual, were the ones who stopped the revolutionaries. As punishment, the revolutionaries that were not killed were mostly sent to prison. People who had not been sent to jail left their homeland of Germany, fearing for their safety.

Generalizing the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848, none of them succeeded completely, so it is easy to draw the conclusion that they were all failures. However, looking at the chart we made at the beginning of this lesson, a revolution is not something that either accomplishes everything it sets out to or fails to make any difference at all, there are in-betweens. The French Revolution of 1830 was, for the reign of King Louis Philippe, a temporary success. These 1830 French revolutionaries wanted freedom from the restricting govern of King Charles X's ruling, and they got that, even if it was only for a short time, that taste of change could have helped inspire the next revolution in France in 1848. Louis Philippe was only on the throne because his citizens put him there and he thanked his people by having policies that mostly benefiting the middle class. Another revolution that cannot be classified as a complete failure is the 1848 revolt in Hungary. Again here, the key word is temporary. Louis Kossuth, a Hungarian activist and writer of pamphlets, led a revolt against the government, demanding an end to serfdom, an independent government, and a written document protecting the basic rights of Hungarians. Overwhelmed, the government agreed to the propositions and enacted them, but, when Austrian troops regained control of Prague, it was back to the old unhappy ways. With the revolutions of Hungary, 1830 France, and the Frankfurt Assembly, they had ephemeral successes, however, due to the Principle of Intervention, the revolutionaries never got their way, which is how the Congress of Vienna hoped it would play out.