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Record W224306484

The Haitian Response to the John Brown Tragedy

2006· article· en· W224306484 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Leon D. Pamphile

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Haitian Studies · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicCaribbean and African Literature and Culture
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTragedy (event)NothingSurpriseHistoryWhite (mutation)LawArtPhilosophySociologyLiteraturePolitical science
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

While growing up in Port-au-Prince in the sixties, I would travel quite often on the Avenue John Brown which runs in the middle of the city. It was a hard thing back then to pronounce the name of the avenue and understandably, I knew nothing about its significance. I had never even questioned the reason people gave the street such a name. Only after I migrated to the United States did I discover that everyone associated John Brown's name with the struggle of the people of the United States-the land of the free and the home of the brave-to remove the hideous stain of slavery from the face of America. It was something of a surprise to discover that John Brown was born in 1800, the very year Toussaint L'Ouverture was winning decisive battles in his war against the French slaveholders. But my most exciting discovery was that John Brown, when he began his own crusade to liberate all of the slaves in the United States, turned to Toussaint L'Ouverture for guidance. David Reynolds, his biographer, explained: The society of blacks that was by far the greatest inspiration for John Brown was the one created in Haiti by Toussaint L'Ouverture.1 This should not be surprising for what Toussaint and his followers demonstrated to John Brown-and the test of the world-was that people of African descent in Haiti not only could work together to break the chains of slavery, but that they possessed the ability, the discipline, and the skills to win their freedom on the battlefield. Even Napoleon's 60,000 troops dispatched to Haiti in 1802 were no match for the tenacity and military prowess of Toussaint's soldiers. Despairing over their inability to achieve a military victory, the French resorted to despicable, shameless trickery to defeat Toussaint. Their heinous plan was to promise him absolute and total safety if he would meet with them to discuss terms for peace. Unfortunately, Toussaint trusted them. When he appeared to discuss ways of ending the conflict, the treacherous French put him in chains, shipped him to a dungeon in France and kept him there until he died in 1803. When William Wordsworth, England's famous poet, learned of Toussaint's death, he glorified his life with these words: There is not a breathing of the common wind that will forget this, thou hast great allies; thy friends are exultations, agonies, and love and man's unconquerable mind.2 Outraged over France's duplicity the Haitian soldiers mercilessly drove all of their troops from Haiti. Soon after, in 1804, the Haitians issued their declaration of independence and drew up a political framework for what would be the world's first Black Republic. When John Brown began his crusade to emancipate America's slaves, this period in Haitian history did indeed inspire him. Yet, unlike other nineteenth century abolitionists who used moral persuasion to win converts to their cause, John Brown chose the path of direct action. A strong supporter of the Underground Railroad, he assisted slaves to escape to Canada by directing a way-station in Pennsylvania for them. In the Kansas territory he led the brutal attack against proslavery supporters who settled there. Many saw John Brown to be an enigmatic figure who perceived himself to have a divine mission to end the vicious, inhumane institution of slavery . Since John Brown's plan for the emancipation of slaves envisioned the creation of a separate colony in the southern region of Appalachian mountains, he convened in May of 1858 a convention to meet in Chatham, a small town in Canada not far from Detroit, Michigan, to draw up a provisional constitution. Its Prelude enunciated the reasons for this action: ...slavery throughout its entire existence in the United Sates, is none other than the most barbarous, unprovoked and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion, the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination, in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set fourth in our Declaration of Independence. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.608
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.237
Teacher spread0.216 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueThe Journal of Haitian StudiesSame topicCaribbean and African Literature and CultureFrench-language works237,207