Reading and Discussion Questions

Letters of Abigail Adams;  Dessalines, Haitian Declaration, 1804

Winter 2013

 

 

Letters of Abigail Adams

 

1.  In Abigail Adams’ letter to Isaac Smith, what evidences of the public sphere do you find?

 

2.  How does Adams characterize women?  Human nature?

 

3.  Why does she ask Smith about Catharine Macaulay’s work on education?  

 

4.  How would you describe the tone of Abigail’s letter to John of March 31, 1776?

 

5.  Where do you hear echoes of the Enlightenment themes and language?  How are they used?

 

6.  In his response of April 14th, what does John Adams mean by asserting that “our Masculine systems” are “little more than Theory” (237).  Does this exchange remind you of conversations you’ve heard—among friends, family, or in popular culture—about the relative power of men and women?  How does humor work in such exchanges?

 

7.  In Abigail Adams’ letter to Mercy Otis Warren, what genre of political rhetoric does she mention? 

 

8.  How do Enlightenment principles enter into her discussion?

 

9.  What does she mean by writing that she was “making trial of the Disintresstedness of his Virtue”?  (How does the word “disinterest” differ in meaning from “uninterest”?)

 

10.  In Abigail’s letter to John of May 7th, she confronts him with a contradiction and a threat.  How does the contradiction appear in the Declaration of Independence that Adams will participate in writing that summer?  How do you understand the threat?

 

11.  John Adams’ letter to James Sullivan (May 26, 1776) is full of questions.  Why?

 

12.  Upon what other excluded subjects does John Adams reflect in this letter?  What is his fear?

 

13.  What are you thoughts about his metaphor comparing government with a machine?

 

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“The Haitian Declaration of Independence, 1804”

 

This document was commissioned by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a lieutenant of Toussaint L’Ouverture who took charge of Saint-Domingue’s rebel forces fighting the French expedition of 1802.  Toussaint L’Ouverture’s successful insurgency in the 1790s abolished slavery but maintained a relationship with France.  In 1800, Napoleon began a campaign to restore slavery and suppress independent governments in the Caribbean.  In Saint-Domingue, he had Toussaint arrested and sent to France in 1803, where Toussaint died in prison.  Dessalines had been working with the French to hunt down guerillas, but with news of Toussaint’s death, as resistance grew, and the French forces became increasingly cruel and brutal in their dealings with the native population, Dessalines changed sides, seeking to unite officers from various indigenous forces in May 1803.  He created a new flag, ripping the white panel out of the French tricolor, combining blue and red to symbolize the unity of blacks and men of color, and successfully drove out the French army by November 1803.    

On January 1, 1804, Dessalines called together leading generals of what he was calling a “native” or indigenous army, in a public ceremony at which he formally declared the independence of a new state, Haiti, a name used by original inhabitants at the time of Columbus’ arrival and revived in the 1780s. 

According to Dubois and Garrigus, Dessalines had several versions of this declaration drafted by various secretaries but rejected those based in the language and ideas of Jefferson’s declaration (38).  On New Year’s Eve, 1803, he ordered Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, born to a free, wealthy family of color and educated in France, to write the declaration Dessalines delivered before a crowd at Gonaïves, a coastal town north of Port-au-Prince.

 

Source:  Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean 1789-1804.  A Brief History with Documents.  Boston:  Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006.  35-38, 188-91. 

 

 

1.   In both the US and Caribbean cases, a colonial population seeks to throw off the rule and control of a “mother” country.  What similarities and differences do you find in the circumstances surrounding the two declarations?

 

 

­2.   What sense of time is created by the Haitian declaration?  (You may want to use the rhetorical term “exigence”:  the urgent situation to which the rhetorical act is addressed or itself creates.)

 

 

3.  Who speaks?  What kind of ethos is constructed through this declaration?

 

 

4.  To whom is the declaration addressed?

 

 

5.  What is the aim of the document?  What does it seek to accomplish?

 

 

6.  What principles or warrants seem to underpin the reasoning of the Haitian declaration?