When U.S. students are taught the history of slavery, they are often schooled in one very limited, albeit important, time of enslavement. A comprehensive narrative of slavery however, does not begin or end with the United States. In Freedom’s Mirror, readers learn about the history of slavery and resistance in Haiti and its subsequent effects on Cuba and ultimately the rest of the world. Whereas historians have analyzed slavery through a national lens, Ada Ferrer chronicles the stories of Haiti and Cuba with a transnational perspective, demonstrating that the histories of these two nations are intrinsically linked and stressing the power of black freedom in an antiblack world.
In the opening chapters, Ferrer chronicles the transformation of Cuba from a society with slaves to a slave society in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The British occupation of Havana in 1762 laid the groundwork for economic and social transformation within Cuba’s borders. In only ten months, Ferrer estimates, British traders brought close to four thousand Africans to Havana, a number that is striking considering that only about eight thousand had entered in the twenty-year period immediately before occupation (18–19). While the period of British occupation was short-lived, the economic gains substantiated the already significant calls coming from the local elite pushing for slave trade reform. Although Haiti had once held a monopoly on sugar production, recent uprisings had resulted in a “sugar-shaped hole” in the world market. Aided by the Haitian Revolution, Cuban planters looked to fill this gap in production and increase their own profits.
These first chapters provide key insight into the minds of Cuban planters and policymakers, who yearned to grow the sugar plantation economy through mass enslavement long before the Haitian Revolution. Through the use of census data and material from national archives, Ferrer negates any presuppositions that the Haitian Revolution inadvertently led to the growth of mass chattel slavery in Cuba, while also demonstrating how the Haitian Revolution helped to accelerate Cuba’s preceding plans to take over the sugar empire. Through her summary, readers then follow Cuban elites through the process of negotiating the thin line between becoming the new Haiti, a country dependent on slave labor for economic success, and suffering the consequences of Haiti and finding themselves the “victims” of their own slave uprising. With the growth of the Cuban economy, however, came the arrival of ships trading merchandise and information about current events in the neighboring land of Haiti. The news of black liberation would become impossible to contain and would eventually circulate back to Cuban slaves, providing a tangible example of resistance.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the war between France and Spain and serve to demonstrate how the Haitian Revolution pushed for new and different recognition of blacks as political subjects. Black rebels faced potential reenslavement by the French and strategically aligned themselves with Spanish forces in 1793 in the struggle along the border of French Saint-Domingue and Spanish Santo Domingo. Additionally, Spain redirected many troops to the frontier border, most of whom came from Cuba. In Cuba, blacks were witnessing the entrenchment of a system that profited from their bondage, but in Saint-Domingue, these same men found themselves in a land where slavery was already being destroyed. “The alliance between these Cuban soldiers and rebel slaves was not just an encounter between two worlds, but also between the very making and unmaking of slavery” (84).
Spanish and nonblack Cuban soldiers found their very ethics questioned as they fought alongside black auxiliary forces, intermingling at banquets and battles. Black insurgents, meanwhile, used these new relationships to obtain food, clothing, arms, and other supplies as they silently recognized their power over white commanders, who both depended on and feared the auxiliaries. As the war continued, the French ultimately recognized the strength of auxiliary allies and, through written proclamation, announced the abolition of slavery in 1793 in Saint-Domingue. With both Spain and France looking to secure black forces as their loyal allies, rebels now held the upper hand, and black freedom was transformed from something that once had seemed ontologically impossible to a tangible reality, thanks to Haitian revolutionaries.
The following chapters demonstrate how France later waged economic and intellectual war on Haiti by refusing to acknowledge its revolution and threatening to undo its progress. France routinely targeted Haitians’ ability to engage in trade by relying on Spanish ports in Cuba, going so far as to license privateers to capture U.S. vessels traveling to or from Haiti for the sole purpose of palpably tormenting those who were willing to trade with “brigands,” and authorizing civilian and military personnel to target and capture Haitian children on Haitian soil (200–204). Furthermore, European governments routinely turned to racism in order to devalue and depoliticize the Haitian Revolution, arguing that Africans were savage by nature and that their insurgency was the result of a genetic inferiority, not a reaction to the endless violence they experienced as slaves. These chapters demonstrate the threat that black freedom posed, for although early Haitian leaders overwhelmingly operated within the capitalist system and avoided antislavery as a global perspective, French, Spanish, British, and U.S. forces routinely felt that black freedom meant that white freedom was constantly in danger. This sentiment is echoed in the alliance between France and Spain, two once-opposing forces that united under the name of whiteness and European interests.
In the final chapters, Ferrer addresses the opportunities that the Haitian Constitution of 1816 created for blacks enslaved globally, a fact that historical records have overwhelmingly overlooked. By extending the physical reach of Haitian free soil policies into the Caribbean and Atlantic seas, human cargo captured by Haitian or allied forces would be immediately liberated, without payment or apologies to any white planter. “In Haiti, the space of citizenship—made available to nonwhite and enslaved foreigners—was expressly international, even diasporic” (334).
Here Ferrer questions the lack of attention paid to a postindependent, antislavery Haiti, noting the availability of records citing the Somerset case, which established England as free soil in 1772, in online British archives, and the lack of any comparable documentation established for Haiti’s admiralty courts. Ferrer offers one possible explanation for this glaring omission: “the outcome of that struggle is taken as a foregone conclusion” (335), as both England and the United States had already committed to abolishing slavery in 1807–8. Ferrer is right to contest the validity of this argument, however, because the Haitian Revolution was an inescapable push toward intercontinental antislavery, serving as a specter that haunted whites and simultaneously providing a clear, recognizable image of liberation to black slaves.
In Freedom’s Mirror, Ferrer pieces together her narrative from various archives, searching through accounts of Haiti, Cuba, Spain, France, and the United States, connecting different histories in an attempt to paint a full picture of events and key individuals. By analyzing government archives and newspapers from the time, Ferrer manages to dig out the truth, instead of relying on oppressive propaganda aimed at vilifying slave revolutionaries as natural architects of violence. Since much of the true history has been lost to time, Ferrer also offers varied interpretations of testimonies and questions the legitimacy of hyperbolized accounts of violence. Furthermore, she analyzes gaps in the history and questions the lack of press coverage of certain events. Her careful attention to detail has crafted chapters that weave together a story of white barbarity against a black resistance that refused to be anything but free.
Unfortunately, because black voices were rarely written down for posterity, many of the narratives found in these chapters still place a heavy emphasis on the thoughts and actions of white men. We may never know what most of the former slaves felt and thought during times of rebellion and eventual freedom, though we do have access to the innermost thoughts of their white counterparts. Fortunately, Ferrer manages to use white hegemony against itself, using their own narratives as proof of the racism, violence, and hatred to which blacks were subjected. In Freedom’s Mirror, Ferrer reflects white history back on itself, forcing readers to take a second look at the image of freedom placed before them by those who designed the status quo and to question everything that they think to be true.
