Introduction

Haiti and the Early United States, Entwined

ELIZABETH MADDOCK DILLON AND MICHAEL J. DREXLER

It should no longer be possible to write a history of the early republic of the United States without mentioning Haiti, or St. Domingue, the French colonial name of the colony known as the “pearl of the Antilles” and the site of a world historical anticolonial, antislavery revolution that occurred between 1789 and 1804. In repeating this, we join a distinguished cohort of writers who have made similar claims in the past, though historically, such claims have tended to rise to the fore only to recede beneath subsequent waves of amnesia. Today, Haiti is known, in the words of Haitian poet and historian Jean-Claude Martineau, as the only country in the world with a last name—“Haiti, poorest country in the western hemisphere.”¹ Haitian exceptionalism, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot recounts, has effectively singled out Haiti as a place apart from the rest of the world and defined Haiti in strikingly negative terms—as “bizarre, unnatural, odd, queer, freakish, or grotesque … erratic, and therefore unexplainable.”² This tendency to place Haiti out of relation to and in isolation from other cultures and histories masks a deep history of connection between Haiti and a host of other countries. Unquestionably, Haiti bears strong historical ties to France, but the country’s relation with the United States has been historically decisive as well. Moreover, the United States has, in turn, been shaped in cultural and political terms by its Caribbean neighbor. It is this early and far-reaching history of mutually entwined relations between Haiti and the United States that we explore in this volume.

Haitian exceptionalism has its double in American exceptionalism, a doctrine that holds that the United States embodies the world-exceptional origin and purest form of political liberty and democracy. While this doctrine still holds sway in contemporary popular political debate, it has been widely criticized in the field of American studies in recent decades. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that these twin exceptionalisms—one superlatively negative and the other superlatively positive—wield considerable force in the popular imagination of Haiti and the United States today. This polarization of the United States and Haiti has substantive effects: it places Haiti conceptually far, far away from the United States, thereby erasing both the geographical proximity of the two states and their historical and political contiguity and interrelation.

In contrast to this image of two distinct and unrelated societies with disparate histories, let us conjure two prosperous eighteenth-century colonial societies—French St. Domingue, and British North America—marked by compelling similarities to one another. In fact, the political histories of the two colonial societies are remarkably parallel for a period of time. At the close of the eighteenth century, colonists in both locations began to find exclusion from metropolitan seats of political power increasingly burdensome. “No taxation without representation” is a phrase that might be understood to have launched the Haitian Revolution as surely as it did the American Revolution that preceded it. In the case of the North American colonies, British colonials were rebuffed by the English Parliament in their attempt to achieve representation there, precipitating outrage and, eventually, armed insurrection against British colonial rule. In the case of St. Domingue, French colonials demanded representation in the French Estates General in Paris in 1788—amidst the political ferment of the French Revolution—and were, in contrast to North American British colonials, granted this right. But together with the right to representation in the French metropole came a second question: Which inhabitants of St. Domingue—white, black, mixed race, free, enslaved, and/or property-owning—would count as the citizenry of the colony? It was over this question that violence first erupted in St. Domingue, marking the beginning of a revolution that lasted from 1789 to 1804—a revolution that eventually succeeded, like the American Revolution, in throwing off colonial rule.³

At the very moment when French colonials secured the right to representation in the Estates General, Honoré Mirabeau, a prominent French statesman, underscored the contradictions inherent in a political system that operated on a principle of democratic representation while countenancing slavery. According to C. L. R. James, Mirabeau attacked the logic of the slaveholding proprietors of St. Domingue who sought representation for themselves and denied it to free and enslaved blacks: “You claim representation proportionate to the number of the inhabitants. The free blacks are proprietors and tax payers, and yet they have not been allowed to vote. And as for the slaves, either they are men or they are not; if the colonists consider them to be men, let them free them and make them electors and eligible for seats; if the contrary is the case, have we, in apportioning deputies according to the population of France, taken into consideration the number of our horses and our mules?”⁴ Two aspects of Mirabeau’s speech are worth noting: first, he succinctly points out that slavery operates by what we might call a “differential distribution” of the human—that is, some humans count as human, and others do not, or they count in different ways, as, for instance, animal bodies rather than voting citizens. In so doing, he reveals a core aspect of European colonialism: the uneven and racialized distribution of humanity across white, black, and indigenous peoples. Second, we might note that Mirabeau’s critique of the contradiction between democracy and slavery is one that the United States faced at the same historical moment: in 1787, during the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, statesmen grappled with precisely the question of how to enumerate whites and blacks in apportioning representational power to the states. The problem of how to count citizens and dis/count slaves was infamously resolved in the case of the U.S. Constitution by enumerating disenfranchised slaves as three-fifths of a person. At the moment of revolution, then, white colonials and free and enslaved blacks in St. Domingue and British North America confronted precisely the same situation: how to reconcile the development of modern doctrines of universal political liberty and equality with the economic engine of modernity—namely, a colonial system of labor and production premised upon dehumanizing practices of race slavery.

Despite their related origins, and the geopolitical similarities of St. Domingue and the British colonies of North America within the imperial Atlantic world of the late eighteenth century, the American and Haitian Revolutions ultimately charted very different courses, most particularly with regard to slavery. The specific history of how Haitian blacks achieved freedom from slavery while enslaved U.S. blacks remained in bondage is worth attending to. A measure of freedom arrived for some enslaved blacks in the North American colonies during the American Revolution when the British freed slaves in order to allow them to fight against white colonials on behalf of the Loyalists.⁵ However, as is well known, many of the white colonials who fought the British in the name of independence and later engineered the creation of the U.S. state were slaveholding men. Indeed, as Edmund Morgan argued long ago, slavery itself may have (ironically) facilitated republicanism in the United States insofar as race- and not class-based division characterized the deepest form of social hierarchy in the colonies: rather than overcoming this hierarchy in order to enable popular sovereignty for all persons, U.S. racial politics permitted a restricted white, male republicanism to masquerade as universal. In short, by writing off a sizeable portion of the population by means of racialization, a smaller, less diverse group of men were able to agree that they were “all created equal.”⁶ The unequal distribution of humanity, upon which colonial economic systems were erected, was written into the founding political documents of the United States.

In St. Domingue, freedom for the enslaved initially arrived in the form of a decree from the French Revolutionary government: much as the British in North America emancipated some slaves in hopes of turning the tide of war in their direction, in 1793, the French Republican commissioners in St. Domingue, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, issued decrees freeing slaves in St. Domingue in order for them to assist French Republican troops in fighting off challenges from counter-revolutionary French planters and from British and Spanish troops who were then invading St. Domingue. In 1794, the National Convention in Paris voted to end slavery in all French territories. Notably, then, the division between French Revolutionary Republicans and French monarchists as well as the division between French and British imperial forces, were both judged to be of greater significance (by Sonthonax and Polverel) than the divide between free whites and enslaved blacks. And it is worth underscoring that, at various points within the long and complex unfolding of the Haitian Revolution, a variety of factions faced off in a dizzying array of oppositions and alliances: forces were, at different moments during the war, fractured along European imperial lines (French, English, Spanish), French political lines (Republican, monarchist), geographical lines (metropolitan, creole—both white and black), class lines (petit blancs, grand blancs, property owners, and nonproperty owners), status lines (gens de couleur or free mulattos, enslaved blacks), and racial lines (white, black, mixed race). The decision to emancipate the slaves on the part of the French Republican government was largely pragmatic: Sonthonax and Polverel sought to consolidate the fractured military and political landscape by aligning (newly freed) enslaved blacks with their own faction of French Republicans.⁷ And in this regard they succeeded. The skilled black military leader, Toussaint Louverture, had previously joined forces with the Spanish who were supporting black revolutionary fighters in attacking the French on St. Domingue. When Toussaint learned that the French had emancipated the slaves in 1794, however, he deserted the Spanish and joined forces with Sonthonax and Polverel to fight the Spanish and the British. Toussaint quickly became the most powerful military and political figure in St. Domingue, consolidating his authority as a leader of the freed slaves and as the top-ranking French officer in colonial St. Domingue.

With this brief account, we do not mean to summarize the whole of the Haitian Revolution (excellent accounts of which exist elsewhere). Nonetheless, we do mean to underscore a few key points. First, the Haitian Revolution was a long and complex series of events that pitted not just blacks against whites, but many Atlantic world factions against one another. It is important, then, to understand the colonial Atlantic context of the revolution as one that was decidedly far-reaching: French, British, Spanish, and African soldiers died by the tens of thousands in St. Domingue, not because St. Domingue was an isolated, exceptional place apart from the world, but because it was an island that stood at the very center of the network of the developing capitalist world economy.⁸ Second, the tension between the revolutionary politics of republicanism and an economy fueled by slave labor was a constitutive one in the broader Atlantic world: both revolutionary Haiti and the revolutionary early U.S. republic were sites where this contradiction rose to the fore. How each fledgling state addressed this contradiction would serve to chart its relations with the Atlantic world for centuries to come.

The end of slavery in St. Domingue did not mark the end of the Haitian Revolution. Rather, the revolution took a new turn—a turn not just in an antislavery, but in an anticolonial direction as well—as Toussaint consolidated his authority in St. Domingue. While officially serving as the leader of St. Domingue under the aegis of the French government, Toussaint exercised authority with increasing independence and distance from France in the years from 1797 to 1802.⁹ Indeed, U.S. officials in the Adams administration established diplomatic relations with Toussaint despite the fact that the United States was at political loggerheads with the French, in the midst of the socalled Quasi-War with France. As Ronald Angelo Johnson argues, “By 1798 … [officials in Adams’s cabinet] concluded among themselves that the Louverture regime was moving to declare eventual independence from France. They consented to the United States’ helping establish the first nation-state with a majority-black government and citizenry.”¹⁰ In effect, then, the Adams administration sought to make common cause with what they anticipated would be another newly independent, postcolonial American nation. Trade between the United States and St. Domingue reached new heights as U.S. merchants supplied Toussaint with both foodstuffs and armaments.¹¹ And in 1799, John Adams signed into law a bill, ratified by the U.S. Congress, which included language known as “Toussaint’s Clause,” authorizing the United States to trade and conduct independent diplomatic relations with Toussaint, despite an embargo against doing so with the French.¹²

This tenuous alignment of two independent, postcolonial American nations was short-lived. Two regime changes—one in France and one in the United States—were to have radical effects on St. Domingue in the years from 1799 to 1804. In France, Napoleon came to power in 1799, ceased war with England in 1801, and sought to reinstate slavery in the colonies.¹³ The armed resistance of black citizens in St. Domingue to Napoleon’s efforts to reinstall French colonial rule and eradicate black leadership in the military there ultimately resulted in the final defeat of the French and the establishment of the Republic of Haiti in 1804 under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. In the United States, Thomas Jefferson took office in 1801. A southern, slaveowning president, Jefferson would ultimately assist in efforts to eradicate both trade and diplomatic relations with the free black government of Haiti. It would be another sixty-two years before the United States formally recognized Haiti as an independent sovereign nation.

For a brief moment, then, it appeared that Haiti and the United States were (or would be) two newly minted American nations moving from colonialism to independence and sharing resources in charting parallel paths. However, this story was rapidly and decisively overwritten in the United States by a quite different narrative—one in which Haitian and U.S. histories were not parallel but antithetical. And this is the story that continues to appear on the front pages of newspapers around the world today. What caused this sharp turn toward a revisionary narrative? And why has the story of the deep relation between Haiti and the United States been so insistently and repeatedly “forgotten” and eclipsed from public view? As we indicate above, the most proximate cause of the shifting narrative of the relation between the United States and Haiti involved the presidency of Thomas Jefferson together with the military and political decisions of Napoleon regarding French involvement in the Caribbean. When Napoleon came to power in France, he laid plans to reconstruct a French Caribbean empire, linking Louisiana, France, and the Antilles. According to Napoleon’s “Western Design,” Louisiana would serve as the breadbasket for the French colonies in the Caribbean, including St. Domingue. Because St. Domingue’s plantations were geared toward the production of sugar and coffee, the island could not feed itself and had long relied upon the North American colonies for provisions of all kinds. Rather than support U.S. commercial gain in this trade, however, Napoleon envisaged a closed French circuit of production and profit: provisions from Louisiana would feed the Caribbean colonies; the Caribbean colonies would produce sugar and coffee for sale in Europe, the profits of which would enrich the French metropole. Napoleon’s plan relied upon the reassertion of French control of St. Domingue and Louisiana, an effort that he undertook with a massive military intervention, sending forty thousand troops to St. Domingue in 1801 under the leadership of his brother-in-law, General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc. Although it is not entirely clear whether or not Napoleon intended to reinstate slavery in St. Domingue, he certainly aimed to depose Toussaint and black military leaders in the colony: “Rid us of these gilded negroes,” Bonaparte wrote to Leclerc in July 1802, “and we will have nothing more to wish for…. Once the blacks have been disarmed and the principal generals sent to France, you will have done more for the commerce and civilization of Europe than we have done in our most brilliant campaigns.”¹⁴

Napoleon’s massive military expedition to St. Domingue inaugurated the final phase of the Haitian Revolution. Despite successfully capturing Toussaint and imprisoning him in France (where he later died), the Leclerc expedition ultimately ended in spectacular failure. Leclerc died of yellow fever within eight months of arriving in St. Domingue, as did thousands of French soldiers, and, energized by rumors of the reinstatement of slavery, as well as the cruelties of Leclerc’s successor, Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Rochambeau, black troops ultimately defeated the French and drove them from St. Domingue. General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, leader of the black rebel army, pronounced the independence of the state of Haiti in 1804, and in 1805 the first constitution of the sovereign and free state of Haiti was declared the law of the land. Following the defeat of French troops in Haiti, Napoleon abandoned his plans for a French empire in the Americas. In 1803, Napoleon famously expostulated, “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies.”¹⁵ That same year he abruptly sold the whole of Louisiana to Jefferson for roughly fifteen million dollars, thereby washing his hands of the American empire he had imagined.

With the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, Jefferson doubled the size of the United States and opened the way for a geographical and economic reconfiguration of the nation. Lauded today as “the greatest real estate deal in history,” the Louisiana Purchase is portrayed in popular accounts of U.S. history as an event that “confirms our national self-image as a republic expanding benignly, bringing the gospel of freedom to people long deprived of its incalculable benefits. We purchased Louisiana; we did not conquer it…. The Louisiana Purchase … supports a story of a free people accepting land freely sold to them.”¹⁶ The irony of such an account is that it ignores the bloody backdrop of the Haitian Revolution out of which the Louisiana Purchase emerged. Moreover, the new reach of U.S. territory westward sustained the maintenance and extension of slavery in those territories, even as such an expansion was enabled by the antislavery revolution in Haiti. Nearly one hundred years after the event, Henry Adams still felt that the connection between the Louisiana Purchase and Haiti remained untold: “Toussaint exercised on [the history of the United States] an influence as decisive as that of any European ruler,” wrote Adams. Without the black rebellion, “Ten thousand French soldiers … might have occupied New Orleans and St. Louis before Jefferson could have collected a brigade of militia at Nashville.”¹⁷ Arguably, then, black freedom fighters in Haiti are in part responsible for the continental shape of the U. S. today.¹⁸

The irony with respect to Jefferson’s presidency is also profound. Whereas the Adams administration pragmatically sought the benefits of trade with St. Domingue regardless of matters of race, Jefferson and southern Republicans were ultimately willing to forego the profits of a thriving trade between the United States and St. Domingue out of fear that an antislavery revolt might spread from Haiti to the southern United States. Jefferson’s policy toward Toussaint has been the subject of some debate, in part because his motivations and actions shifted over time. Initially willing to assist the French with “starving” Toussaint out of power, Jefferson later supported Toussaint against the Leclerc expedition after gleaning a sense of Napoleon’s ambitions for Louisiana.¹⁹ Following Haitian independence, however, Jefferson became more willing to accommodate French demands that the United States cease trade with Haiti. In agreement with both French and southern slave-owners’ entreaties to keep munitions out of the hands of Haitians, the Jefferson administration sought to regulate and curtail trade between U.S. merchants and Haiti. Although Federalists ardently supported the continuation of trade with Haiti, southern Republicans cited the violence of Jean-Jacques Dessalines against white colonials at the close of the Haitian Revolution as evidence of the peril represented by antislavery revolution. In 1806, Senator George Logan introduced a bill to prohibit all trade with Haiti, which played upon the fear of slave rebellion in the United States. At the center of the pro-embargo policy was a fundamental embrace of the racism that allowed many white Americans to support slavery: “Is it sound policy to cherish the black population of St. Domingo whilst we have a similar population in our Southern States?” asked Logan.²⁰ Despite the objection of Federalists, the 1806 embargo bill passed, and trade between the United States and Haiti plummeted; diplomatic relations between the United States and Haiti ended altogether.²¹ As then Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin later noted, “One of the principal motives for passing [the embargo of 1806] was the apprehension of the danger which at that time (immediately after the last massacre of the whites there) might on account of our numerous slaves, arise from the unrestricted intercourse with the black population of that island.”²²

The imposition of a political and economic break between Haiti and the United States marked a turning point of significant dimensions—one that changed the shape of slavery in the United States as well as the geography of the U.S. nation and its place in the world. Indeed, a fundamental shift in the nature of slavery occurred in the United States following the Haitian Revolution. We might characterize this shift as occurring in three separate (albeit related) registers: in the geography of slavery, in the economics and labor practices of slavery, and in the ideological justification of slavery. First, the geography of slavery shifted decisively given the expansion of the slave economy westward with the Louisiana Purchase and the simultaneous shutting down of the slave trade between the Caribbean and the United States. Anxiety concerning the spread of antislavery revolution to the United States caused a flurry of legislation in southern states barring the importation of slaves (or the migration of free black persons) from the Caribbean to the United States.²³ And in 1808, when the U.S. federal government closed the slave trade with Africa, what had formerly been a largely Atlantic trade in slaves became one of decidedly continental dimensions: slaves from the Chesapeake were, in growing numbers, sold “down the river” to territories southward and westward. Second, the end of the Haitian Revolution marked the advent of what historians have recently begun to describe as the “second slavery”—a slavery in which labor regimes were intensified as they were integrated with industrial technologies and international capital markets. In the United States, in particular, this took the form of the rapid growth of cotton production, pushing westward along the so-called “cotton frontier.”²⁴ And third, slave owners shifted from apologetic defenses of slavery to aggressive ones that described slavery as a positive good. Coupled with this ideology was a strong set of claims that antislavery revolution was not a result of the action of slaves or a response to the oppressive conditions of slavery, but rather the result of white abolitionist agitation.

These three changes, which followed on the heels of the Louisiana Purchase and the 1806 embargo, were interrelated and had far-reaching consequences in the United States. The fear that the specter of antislavery revolution in Haiti had generated in the southern plantocracy mobilized a new discourse concerning slavery—one that took aim at abolitionists and defended slavery as part of a core American identity in the United States. Republican Senator John Taylor from Virginia vigorously asserted this new set of claims regarding slavery in a series of essays published in 1803. Taylor argued that blacks were incapable of liberty and that the Haitian Revolution had been caused by white abolitionists; consequently, he concluded, slavery could not peacefully be abolished in the United States. As Tim Matthewson suggests, Taylor’s writings “set the stage for the positive-good proslavery argument; they suggested a fundamental shift in southern thought about the place of slavery in America, and they encouraged a consensus of the view that antislavery sentiment was directly responsible for the bloodbath in Saint Domingue.”²⁵ Perhaps more importantly, in conceding to French and southern demands to cut diplomatic ties with Haiti and thus to shape international policy around the defense of slavery, the Jefferson administration embraced slavery as a core aspect of the national economy.

The economic and diplomatic turn away from the Caribbean and toward the Mississippi and westward regions effected a significant reconfiguration of the geography of the United States: the Haitian Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, and the 1806 embargo fundamentally redefined the geographical imaginary of the United States. Once consisting of thirteen states lining the North Atlantic littoral (an orientation that turned the United States toward an Atlantic economy in which the Caribbean was central), the United States was redrawn on a continental, rather than Atlantic, scale in the early nineteenth century: the Caribbean disappeared from this map of the United States and areas west of the Mississippi, in turn, assumed increasingly distinct and prominent contours. Following the Haitian Revolution and the Louisiana Purchase, then, the geography of the United States assumed a westward face, and it was this westward face that would, in turn, cement itself in the mythology of the American frontier and the doctrine of manifest destiny central to the history of the nineteenth-century United States.

The new geographical imaginary coincided—not incidentally—with a new geography of slavery and the emerging economic and labor regimes associated therewith. Historians including Dale Tomich and Anthony Kaye have defined the “second slavery” in terms of a post-eighteenth-century shift in the economics and labor practices of slavery—a shift that involved the industrialization of production, together with the development of increasingly intensive labor regimes and the integration of slave labor/production into international capital markets.²⁶ Cotton was the motor of the U.S. economy between the 1790s and the Civil War, and in the words of Sven Beckert, its value “catapulted the United States onto the center stage of the world economy.”²⁷ The forced migration of enslaved African Americans to the cotton frontier provided the labor to cultivate and harvest the cotton that changed the place of the United States in the world economy: between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery “grew from 800,000 captives to four million, and from a narrow coastal strip of mostly declining plantations to a subcontinent-sized expanse of factories in the field; slave labor camps whose productivity per worker expanded every year.”²⁸ Not only did the territorial geography of the United States shift away from an Atlantic orientation, so too did the U.S. slave trade and the economy as a whole.

Indeed, once the federal government closed the international slave trade in 1808, the internal slave trade became the primary means of supplying the expanding cotton industry with slave labor: between 1790 and 1860 roughly one million slaves were torn from their homes and families within the United States and forced to move southward and westward. The internal slave trade was on a scale, and at a level of social violence for slaves forced to move, that has led Ira Berlin to describe it as a “second middle passage.”²⁹ Furthermore, as slavery expanded westward, new and more brutal labor regimes for slaves—what Edward Baptist evocatively calls the “whipping machine,” also known as the “pushing system”—replaced previous task-based labor systems as cotton production ramped up. The destruction of families and social worlds of slaves who were uprooted by the funneling of labor to the cotton frontier also enabled the destruction of existing work patterns and their replacement by harsh regimes aimed at increased productivity.³⁰ As Baptist points out, the narrative that enshrines the cotton gin as the source of the booming cotton industry in the nineteenth century is one that fails to recognize the source of the cotton that is fed into the gins—a source found in the increased labor of slaves whose bodies were forcibly bent to the work of the industrializing second slavery. For our purposes in understanding the effects of the Haitian Revolution on the United States, it is particularly significant that the new “whipping machine” is coincident with (and indeed, relies upon) the geographical reconfiguration of the United States away from an Atlantic economic and spatial regime to a continental one.

The production of cotton was central to the new geography and economy that we describe here. Baptist argues that cotton created the United States as we know it in the nineteenth century: “The expansion of U.S. slavery made the U.S., in no small part because it also made more of the industrial revolution’s key product—cotton, which was its petroleum, its most widely-traded, most important, most price-setting commodity.”³¹ The value of cotton shot up just after the Haitian Revolution and was fundamental to the growth of the U.S. economy. Cotton was the “driving piston that pushed the U.S. economy” for decades prior to the Civil War, and the wealth generated by cotton enabled the United States to import goods from England, establish credit in foreign markets, and ultimately attract foreign capital investment in U.S. industry.³² In short, cotton and the second slavery enabled the United States to assume a core role in the developing capitalist world economy.

As the U.S. economy was propelled forward by global investment in the cotton industry, the economy of Haiti suffered from being cut off from trade with former partners such as the United States and France. Isolated from an Atlantic economy in which it once served as a key node of production and consumption, the Haitian economy struggled. And a debilitating blow to it was delivered in 1825, when the government of France (with the assistance of threatening French gunboats floating off Haitian shores) secured from Haitian President Jean Pierre Boyer the promise of an “indemnity” payment of 150 million francs to recompense the French for their loss of property—including the “property” of slaves—during the Haitian Revolution; in return, France granted Haiti official recognition of its independence. Boyer agreed to these terms so that Haiti could rejoin the world economy; however, the indemnity repayments, by all accounts, proved crippling. Boyer was forced to obtain a loan from France to make the first payment in 1825; the French charged interest and fees on top of the loan, which increased the debt further. A decade later, fully 30 percent of Haiti’s annual budget was spent servicing the national debt while less than 1 percent was spent on education.³³ And indeed, Haiti did not finish paying off the debt until the following century: the last payment to France was made in 1922, when Haiti took out a loan from the United States for $16 million: that loan, in turn, was paid off in 1947. According to Randall Robinson, in 1915, as much as 80 percent of the Haitian government’s resources were devoted to debt repayments to French and American banks.³⁴ The effects of the indemnity payments were significant. Unable to invest in infrastructure, the Haitian government was forced, instead, to devote funds to debt repayment: “Year after year, Haiti’s population watched as money that could have been used to build roads, ports, schools, and hospitals simply vanished.”³⁵

Although ostensibly aimed at repaying French colonials who had lost property during the revolution, the indemnity was in fact aimed at bringing Haiti back into the economic orbit of France, by creating, in the words of one scholar, “an independence debt.” Frédérique Beauvois argues that the 1825 indemnity ordinance was a concerted effort on the part of France to take Haiti “economic hostage” and thus to “retain an official hegemony over a rebellious colony become sovereign state.”³⁶ In short, with the indemnity ordinance, economic authority came to stand in for what was once the direct political control of France with respect to Haiti: we know this structure today by the name of “neocolonialism.” Twenty-five years after the Haitian Revolution, then, the United States was catapulted into a starring role as a leader of the global economy, propelled there by the “petroleum” of the antebellum economy—cotton—and by the labor of slaves in the fields of the cotton frontier. Haiti, whose slaves had freed themselves, was, in contrast, exiled from the global economy until the moment when the nation agreed to assume the yoke of debt. “With the indemnity,” concludes Laurent Dubois, “Haiti suddenly became a debtor nation, an unlucky pioneer of the woes of postcolonial economic dependence.”³⁷ In 1825 Haiti was readmitted into the world economy on the condition that it assume a neocolonial position therein, and it is this configuration that has held sway, under the rule of debt (and occasionally gunboats and military occupation as well), since then.

From a narrative in which the United States and Haiti could be seen as parallel colonial states seeking independence and freedom from metropolitan authority, we have moved, then, to one in which the United States is a core state in the world economic system and Haiti is moved to the periphery and recolonized, in no small part due to racism and the utility of racism to the development of capitalism on an Atlantic and (later) world scale.³⁸ The story that has been poorly narrated, or not narrated at all, is thus the story of this transition—from Haiti as world historical site of antislavery and anticolonial revolution to Haiti as neocolonial debtor nation. This is a story that begins with revolutionary Haiti as the double of the revolutionary United States but shifts suddenly to a nineteenth-century Haiti literally written off the map of the continental United States, and ultimately to a contemporary Haiti seen as a poor and obscure space antithetical to “America” as we know it—a nation whose flickering encroachments on U.S. consciousness appear in the form of refugees, disease, and disaster. In accounts of the impoverished contemporary Haiti, no mention of the history of the French indemnity or the U.S. embargo of 1806 appears.³⁹ We contend that the un-narrated story of Haiti and the United States is one of a continued relation sustained under the guise of antithesis: it is not that the relation between Haiti and the United States suddenly ends with the embargo of 1806; rather, this relation is reconstructed in terms that construe the United States and Haiti as opposites. This is not a non-relation but a relation of obscured interdependence, and it is one that deserves our attention. As Troulliot has eloquently argued, “Haitian exceptionalism has been a shield that masks the negative contribution of the Western powers to the Haitian situation. Haitian exceptionalism functions as a shield to Haiti’s integration into a world dominated by Christianity, capitalism, and whiteness. The more Haiti appears weird, the easier it is to forget that it represents the longest neocolonial experiment in the history of the West.”⁴⁰

We have argued that a continental geographical imaginary of the United States—one that underwrites the story of U.S. nationhood as one of westward progress—effectively erased an earlier, Atlantic configuration of colonial North America and the early United States. However, placing the Haitian Revolution and the American Revolution next to one another enables us to bring this earlier geography back into focus. Moreover, such a move also opens up the possibility of viewing alternative geographies taking shape from the period of revolution onward. For instance, with the Atlantic context in view, we can trace what Edward Rugemer has described as a “geography of freedom” inaugurated by the Haitian Revolution—one created and sustained in the writings and performances of diasporic Africans in the United States and the larger Atlantic world in the years after 1804.⁴¹ The recent volume of writings edited by Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon on African American literature and the Haitian Revolution documents the depth and significance of a geography connecting Haiti and the United States following the Haitian Revolution.⁴² In related terms, work by scholars including Colin Dayan, Susan Buck-Morss, Sibylle Fischer, David Scott, and Nick Nesbitt, among others, has argued for the centrality of the Haitian Revolution to modernity and the development of Enlightenment thought.⁴³ This is important scholarship that draws Haitian history and culture into narratives of world history—scholarship that places Haiti in a central position with respect to the geography of modernity and its countercultures and erasures. Trouillot’s description of the Haitian Revolution as “unthinkable” within (racist and colonial) Enlightenment thought is perhaps the most often repeated phrase in current scholarship in this area.⁴⁴ Trouillot argues that the Haitian Revolution was silenced at the time that it occurred and in subsequent history. But the silencing to which Trouillot refers is not an erasure and it would be a mistake to understand it as such. As the scholars cited above demonstrate, what is required to redress the silencing (and here we would include geographical isolation as part of that silencing) of the Haitian Revolution, is the evocation of new ontologies, new narratives, and new geographies. In fact, the archive is replete with evidence of alternative narratives that allow us to see more than the familiar account of erasure, isolation, and negative exceptionalism. In this volume, then, we collect essays that explore alternative narratives to the one that places the United States and Haiti conceptually, historically, and geographically distant from one another. By drawing Haiti and the early United States into sustained relation, however, we do not so much offer a corrected narrative or geography as open a series of debates that allow us to speculatively redraw the map on which Haiti and the United States do not appear to share any spatial or historical relation.

We organize the essays that follow into three categories: Histories, Geographies, and Textualities. In each of these instances, we imagine the essays collected under these headings to approach the relation of Early America and the Haitian Revolution, as, in the words of cultural geographer Doreen Massey, a “realm of multiple trajectories.”⁴⁵ Each section begins with an introduction that sketches the conversation in which the essays that follow are engaged. In Histories, the essays tackle how the Haitian Revolution was encountered in the early United States as it unfolded in time. These essays explore issues including perspectival bias and the influence of genre on the representation of history. In the Geographies section, essays consider how the Haitian Revolution led to new ideas about center and periphery or to reconceived pivotal or focal spaces of influence. And finally, in Textualities, the conversation turns to creative acts of appropriation, inspiration, and transposition, which extend the influence of the Haitian Revolution beyond the common historical archive and allow us to examine the way in which the national literary imaginary of the United States is traversed by a shared U.S./Haitian history.