The Priest and the Prophetess

Shortly after a slave revolt in the North Province of the French colony of Saint-Domingue sparked the Haitian Revolution in August 1791, a free black immigrant coffee farmer and gender-bending religious visionary named Romaine-la-Prophétesse launched a separate insurgency on behalf of his own beleaguered people. Leading thousands of free colored insurgents and the slaves they liberated in the colony’s West Province, Romaine achieved something that no other rebel leader ever did in the colonial history of the Americas: conquering not one, but two coastal cities: Jacmel and Léogâne. His political adviser was a French Catholic priest named Abbé Ouvière, who brokered the treaty that formally tendered to Romaine rule over the latter city. What was the nature of their relationship? In what ways was each man instrumental in broader revolutionary events in the colony? This book answers these and related questions, deepening our understanding of the function of religion in the Haitian Revolution, along with those of race, science, and medicine, in the broader revolutionary Atlantic world, the latter topics impelled by the second half of the priest’s remarkable life as a scientist and physician in the United States, as Dr. Felix Pascalis. That Abbé Ouvière and Dr. Pascalis were one and the same person has heretofore been lost on scholars, and that Romaine-la-Prophétesse, though ultimately betrayed by the priest, would be judged by him as worthy of honor from his “tyrannized nation,” accentuate the historical significance of each man and the major contributions of this book.