telligence and resentments of human beings" (11-12). Moreover, it "was this intelligence which refused to be crushed, these latent possibilities, that frightened the colonists, as it frightens the whites in Africa to-day" (18). Throughout The Black Jacobins, James emphasizes the struggle, the tension between the demands made by the society and the human need for expression. Although, "Many slaves could never be got to stir at all unless they were whipped" they still found their ways of expression (16). Often, the only form of expression they had was suicide. "Suicide was a common habit, and such was their disregard for life that they often killed themselves, not for personal reasons, but in order to spite their owner" (16). The slave revolt was a necessary expression of the masses of the population. Through his descriptive account of the daily lives of the slaves, James shows that the only way to truly understand the San Domingo revolution is to understand the slaves. The slave masses were in fact the creators of their own history. James acknowledges that the success of the slave revolt was made possible due to the internal rivalries in the colony. "From the very momentum of their own development, colonial planters, French and British bourgeois, were generating internal stresses and intensifying external rivalries, moving blindly to explosions and conflicts which would shatter the basis of their dominance and create the possibility of emancipation" (26). Nevertheless, James asserts that "Men make their own history, and the black Jacobins of San Domingo were to make history which would alter the fate of millions of men and shift the economic currents of three continents" (25). While he maintains the importance of the mass movement in the revolution, James also shows the importance of a powerful and influential leader. For the slaves of San Domingo, this leader was the ex-slave Toussaint L'Ouverture. Toussaint had been un...
