The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies

The Haitian Revolution emerged as a textual and historical flashpoint for a New World modernity that profoundly challenged the discursive frameworks surrounding race and slavery in the Americas.¹ For C. L. R. James, the antislavery radicalism of the Haitian Revolution was an unintended, yet powerful consequence of the brutal modernity of racial slavery in colonial St. Domingue.² Thirteen years of internecine warfare among enslaved blacks, gens de couleur, and French, English, and Spanish colonists and soldiers ended with the violent declaration of Haitian independence, which was marked by the massacre of the remaining white population on the island. Proslavery ideologues marshaled the violence of St. Domingue as a dire warning against slave emancipation and racial equality on U.S. soil. They exploited fears of “the lawless and simibarbarous [sic] population” of Haiti to justify growing states rights aggression over the preservation of slavery.³ Even Anglo-American abolitionists who embraced the Haitian Revolution’s egalitarian ideals were forced to contend with gruesome tales of the atrocities committed by the formerly enslaved. From the vantage of 1893, Frederick Douglass reflected that “Haiti and its inhabitants, under one aspect of another, have, for various reasons, been very much in the thoughts of the American people.”⁴ “While slavery existed amongst us, her example was a sharp thorn in our side and a source of alarm and terror,” he continued. “She came into the sisterhood of nations through blood” (LH, 206). The first among the New World nations to abolish racial slavery, Haiti was forced to wait another twenty-one years before France—the first among the Western nations—acknowledged its independence and sovereignty in exchange for a large indemnity that undermined Haiti’s economic stability.

This essay examines the dynamic ways in which three different, yet at times overlapping discourses from various sites in the black Atlantic world contested the boundaries and routes of Haiti’s revolutionary New World modernity. In the 1820s, the consolidation of a long-divided Haiti and the conquest of Spanish Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) under the leadership of Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer reignited fears of slave revolt in the U.S. South. However, many black Americans welcomed these same events as a powerful portent of black political progress and possibility in the Atlantic. This essay begins by revisiting a controversial episode in American cultural history—the 1822 Denmark Vesey conspiracy and the black quarantine codes that emerged in its wake—to explore the changing significance of Haiti to the twofold expansion of a proslavery racial jurisprudence and the cultures of early black American resistance to it. Following upon Boyer’s successful campaign in Spanish Santo Domingo, the public revelation of a secret slave conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina, gave powerful form to the specter of a counter-revolutionary St. Domingue on U.S. soil. Southern slaveholders mobilized a racialized discourse of disease emergence and health security in their legal efforts to contain the “contagion” of slave revolution and black militancy associated with the idea of Haiti. These black codes constructed the South as vulnerable to the dangers of slave revolt (and hence different from the North) and jeopardized U.S. foreign trade relations with the other Atlantic nations.

The second half of the essay resituates these local events within a transnational geopolitical context, charting Boyer’s efforts to recruit black American emigrants and reshape the counter-revolutionary St. Domingue of proslavery political discourse. Boyer repositioned Haiti within the histories of the modern West and emphasized the benefits of black American emigration to Haiti over competing schemes of African colonization to Liberia spearheaded by the American Colonization Society (ACS). In these emigrant recruitment campaigns, Boyer laid the discursive groundwork for countervailing representations of black militancy and revolution in early African American print culture. Black American editors and writers, including Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm of the Freedom’s Journal, Prince Saunders, and William Wells Brown celebrated this Haitian modernity as they readapted fears over U.S. slave revolts such as the Vesey conspiracy for the transatlantic antislavery campaign at mid-century. They transformed the counter-revolutionary St. Domingue that Anglo-American writers such as Leonora Sansay and Bryan Edwards depicted as gothic theaters of racial savagery into the free modern Haiti where the egalitarian promise of America might be fulfilled.

Early American writers and political commentators viewed the most wellknown of the averted slave conspiracies of Gabriel Prosser (1800) and Denmark Vesey (1822) and the failed slave revolt of Nat Turner (1831) as legacies of the racial violence that St. Domingue unleashed into the Atlantic world.⁵ “Every community the other side of ‘Dixon’s Line’ feels that it lives upon a volcano that is liable to burst out at any moment,” wrote William Wells Brown of the events surrounding Vesey.⁶ Comparisons to St. Domingue heightened the threat that these various plots posed to the slaveholding social order and legitimized the anti-black legal violence that followed swiftly in their wake. After discovery of Prosser’s conspiracy, Virginia Governor James Monroe remarked that the “occurrences in St. Domingo for some years past … doubtless did excite some sensation among our Slaves.”⁷ Two decades later, the Vesey conspiracy was also linked to Haitian radicalism, and it remains the most controversial of the recorded slave plots.⁸ For example, Michael P. Johnson’s revisionist account challenges the narrative of black resistance generally associated with the Vesey conspiracy. By emphasizing the agency of the Charleston Court of Magistrates and Freeholders in the making of the plot, he argues that white officials colluded with convicted black men seeking commutation of death sentences to create testimonies affirming the plans for a nonexistent large-scale slave revolt.⁹ For Johnson, Vesey and his conspirators were the victims of a court seeking to publicly vindicate its actions. This section does not attempt to resolve that historiographical controversy; rather, it revisits the pamphlet literature surrounding the Vesey conspiracy to examine how proslavery efforts to interdict the dangerous circulation of radicalizing black bodies and print culture contributed to the construction of a counter-revolutionary St. Domingue. A struggle over the interpretation of the American legacy of St. Domingue lay at the heart of the Vesey conspiracy and the racial jurisprudence that was passed in its wake.

In the hands of southern lawmakers, the anticolonial revolutionary black agency of St. Domingue became the discursive groundwork for the expansion of slave state power in the form of black quarantine codes referred to as the “Negro Seamen Acts.” Following the suppression of the Vesey slave plot, South Carolina enacted the first of a series of laws “for the better regulation of Free Negroes and persons of color,” targeting those engaged in the seafaring trade that soon extended to North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. These Seamen Acts barred the ingress of all free black sailors, regardless of their nationality, and interrupted long-standing commercial networks between the United States and European nations. South Carolina’s Negro Seamen Act went so far as to direct that all black sailors be imprisoned until their vessels departed the state under penalty of being sold as “absolute” slaves if their confinement fees went unpaid. Protests condemned these Seamen Acts as infringements of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause and international bilateral treaties. In response, southern lawmakers defended them as a legitimate exercise of police power, couching restrictions in the language of quarantine against the “Moral Contagion of Liberty,” as Michael Schoeppner argues.¹⁰

These black codes served to proliferate (if not create) fears of Haitian antislavery radicalism as Carolinian planter politicians argued for health safety and the “law of self-preservation” against “foreign negroes” seeking “to disturb the peace and tranquility of the state.”¹¹ The Negro Seamen Acts sought to prevent black foreigners from “infecting” domestic slave populations with ideas about freedom, and they popularized a racialized discourse of disease emergence and contagion associated with the specter of counter-revolutionary St. Domingue. Quarantine laws were not uncommon in the United States; however, the Negro Seamen Acts specifically racialized foreign bodies as carriers of revolutionary antislavery thought in the South. One legal advocate argued that “South Carolina has the right to interdict the entrance of such persons into her ports, whose organization of mind, habits and associations, render them peculiarly calculated to disturb the peace and tranquility of the state, in the same manner as she can prohibit those afflicted with infectious disease, to touch her shores.”¹² These coastal slave states began prohibiting the circulation of free black sailors (as bearers of antislavery radicalism and “incendiary pamphlets”) in their efforts to territorialize their racially based economies. They viewed black sailors as a menace to slaveholding localisms and used this racial threat to expand their sphere of power, fashioning a powerful discourse of self-preservation against the subversive hydra head of disorder long associated with Atlantic seafaring life. In this manner, changing representations of Haiti and the revolutionary antislavery upon which it was founded exerted a powerful shaping influence upon U.S. foreign policy and interstate relations in the 1820s.

Given the significance of black maritime labor to the capitalist world economy, the Negro Seamen Acts immediately affected U.S. trade relations with Britain and France as these nations began to reconsolidate their Atlantic empires in the wake of the Haitian Revolution and later West Indian emancipation. British merchant vessels plying the waters of these lucrative Atlantic economies were often crewed by those colonial subjects whom they once held as commodities. One writer noted that “thousands of coloured able bodied and expert seamen” regularly shipped along the North Atlantic currents that brought the coastal United States into contact with Europe and the Caribbean.¹³ By 1865, black sailors, writes Jeffrey Bolster, had “established a visible presence in every North Atlantic seaport and plantation roadstead.”¹⁴ When harbormasters first began seizing black crewmen from their vessels in Charleston Harbor, representatives from Britain, France, and the U.S. North besieged the federal government with protests and petitions. Indeed, “Sundry masters of American vessels lying in the port of Charleston” delivered a joint petition to Congress, “in which they loudly complained of the existence and operation of a certain law of the state of South Carolina, affecting the persons of free colored mariners employed by them all—all such being liable to arrest and confinement in jail, only because of their color, though it might be that they were actual citizens of the United States.”¹⁵ Not only did this “obnoxious law” heighten sectional antagonisms, but it also placed further stress upon U.S. foreign relations with Great Britain as the British antislavery campaign for West Indian emancipation began to gather momentum.

Southern slave states insisted that the Negro Seamen Acts issued from their “right of self-preservation” and the doctrine of states’ rights in studied disregard of both federal and international diplomatic appeals.¹⁶ British Minister Stratford Canning angrily demanded that U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams carry out the immediate suspension of these sanctions against British merchant vessels. Such appeals for federal intervention only encouraged the South Carolina governor to more energetically rally his slaveholding sister-states to resist any violation of their right of self-government. Coastal U.S. slave states acknowledged, in this negative fashion, the revolutionary possibilities of an Atlantic reshaped by the Haitian Revolution. The Richmond Enquirer, for example, angrily justified South Carolina lawmakers: “Are they bound to receive aliens, who may carry the very seeds of insurrection into their bosom? Suppose our slaves returning from Hayti,—suppose suspected tools from that island should arrive in Charleston in a British vessel,—is there no right to guard against the danger?”¹⁷ Proslavery lawmakers repeatedly invoked the racialized specter of counter-revolutionary St. Domingue to defend these regulations as necessary policing measures. In the beleaguered 1845 Congressional debate over the admission of Iowa and Florida, Mississippi Senator Robert Walker defended a similar prohibition in the Florida constitution as the only guarantee against the entry of “free colored seamen [who] were dangerous to a slaveholding community,” including “runaway slaves from St. Domingo, who had been concerned in all the atrocities perpetrated there, and whose hands had been imbrued in the blood of their masters.”¹⁸ These proslavery ideologues portrayed averted slave plots such as the Vesey conspiracy as localized intensifications of St. Domingue and gave powerful form to the political discourses of southern jurisprudence at mid-century.

Planter politicians represented the Vesey conspiracy as a propitiously forestalled reenactment of the Haitian Revolution on U.S. soil. The Official Report of the Charleston Court of Freeholders and Magistrates related the events leading to the hanging of thirty-five men and exile of forty more “beyond the limits of the United States, not to return therein, under the penalty of death.”¹⁹ Because it is likely that the “testimonies” recorded in the Official Report were the results of either coercion or fabrication as Johnson argues, they illuminate the powerful ways in which the Haitian Revolution informed the southern imagination of this slave conspiracy.²⁰ For black witnesses and white court officials alike, the Vesey plot seemed unimaginable without reference to the example of St. Domingue, and the many sentences of exile reinforced the discourses of contagion and quarantine promulgated in the conspiracy’s wake.²¹ Historian James Sidbury argues that “it is almost as interesting to know that black Charlestonians imagining a conspiracy to overthrow slavery would include a letter to the president of Haiti as it is to know whether such a letter was sent.”²² In these various documents, Charleston officials sought to represent domestic unrest as the product of foreign, and specifically, Haitian, influence as they drew upon the “apocalyptical possibilities of slave emancipation” to garner local and state support for increasingly stringent black codes that included the controversial Negro Seamen Act.²³ In their efforts to consolidate southern slave state power, proslavery interests began expanding the historical and geographical scope of the Haitian Revolution.

The official pamphlet literature takes pains to construct Vesey as a product of New World slavery and a direct heir to the racial barbarism of counter-revolutionary St. Domingue. Vesey’s biography takes the form of an extended footnote appended to the Official Report’s “Narrative of the Conspiracy and Intended Insurrection,” which Magistrates Lionel Kennedy and Thomas Parker copied from An Account of the Late Insurrection published by the Corporation of Charleston. The fourteen-year-old Vesey was purchased from the Danish island of St. Thomas by Captain Joseph Vesey, who sold him, along with a cargo of 390 slaves, in St. Domingue’s Le Cap-Français. A year later, Vesey was returned to the captain when the planter who purchased him found him subject to epileptic fits. The captain brought Vesey back to Charleston where he slaved for the next seventeen or eighteen years until Vesey purchased his freedom with prize money that he had drawn in a local lottery.²⁴ In linking Vesey’s early life to St. Domingue, this biographical note emphasizes Vesey’s foreign origins and imagines the Charleston plot as a means for the adult to reenact the “bloody events of San Domingo” that he had missed as an adolescent:

As Denmark Vesey has occupied so large a place in the conspiracy, a brief notice of him will, perhaps, be not devoid of interest. The following anecdote will show how near he was to the chance of being distinguished in the bloody events of San Domingo. During the revolutionary war, Captain Vesey, now an old resident of this city, commanded a ship that traded between St. Thomas’ [sic] and Cape François (San Domingo). He was engaged in supplying the French of that Island with Slaves. In the year 1781, he took on board at St. Thomas’ 390 slaves and sailed for the Cape; on the passage, he and his officers were struck with the beauty, alertness and intelligence of a boy about 14 years of age, whom they made a pet of, by taking him into the cabin, changing his apparel, and calling him by way of distinction Telemaque, (which appellation has since, by gradual corruption, among the negroes, been changed to Denmark, or sometimes Telmak)²⁵

In referencing colonial St. Domingue, the anecdote also locates Vesey squarely within another revolutionary moment: the American Revolution. Transported and sold during the War for American Independence in 1781, the young slave was given a name that unwittingly captured the difficult journeys of those caught up in the forced migrations of the Atlantic slave trade. “Denmark” was an Anglophone translation or “corruption” of the name of the eponymous hero of a popular didactic French tale Telemaque (1699). Writer François Fénelon based the story upon the Odyssey, and it charts the various trials of Telemachus in search of his father Ulysses. Other accounts further heightened the mythic St. Domingue dimensions of the conspiracy by emphasizing Vesey’s longing to return to Haiti; one witness reported that the fifty-five-year-old Vesey yearned to “go back to his own country” once Charleston was plundered (OR, 121).

Kennedy and Parker’s Official Report tells us much about the place of Haiti in narratives of slavery and freedom in the United States.²⁶ Nearly all accounts emphasize the powerful hold that St. Domingue exerted upon the imaginary of the black conspirators and white officials who recorded their testimony. According to the Official Report, “knowledge of an army from St. Domingo” prepared to “march towards this land” galvanized all those involved in the conspiracy, and they intended “to hoist sail for Saint Domingo” once they had overthrown Charleston (OR, 73, 68). Other witnesses testified that Vesey had opened a correspondence with Port-au-Prince, asking for military assistance. Vesey’s co-conspirator, Peter Poyas, a slave, reportedly recruited insurgents with reassurances that “an army from St. Domingo” would join them (OR, 67, 73). Indeed, some men had joined the plot under the idea that Vesey had “a promise” from Boyer that Haiti “would receive and protect them” (OR, 83). According to these reports, Vesey had also secured the cooperation of a black sailor—a cook named William aboard an outbound vessel—to relay insurrectionary messages to Boyer (OR, 146). Yet another account recorded in the Official Report elevates this black sailor into the brother of a Haitian general (OR, 153). Such accounts lent additional force to the implementation of racialized maritime restrictions such as the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act.

The Haitian Revolution repeatedly appears throughout Kennedy and Parker’s Official Report as a historic precursor to the Charleston conspiracy. For many of the alleged black conspirators, the Haitian revolutionaries had achieved what the American Revolution failed to do. Rolla Bennett, a slave, confessed that Vesey “said, we must unite together as the St. Domingo people did, never to betray one another,” while the slave Jesse confessed that Vesey urged the men to “seek for our rights, and that we were fully able to conquer the whites, if we were only unanimous and courageous, as the St. Domingo people were” (OR, 67, 82). Other accounts recorded in the Official Report channeled the bloody horror of St. Domingue in their claim that no white men, women, or children were to be spared in Vesey’s planned attacked upon the city for “this was the plan they pursued in St. Domingo” (OR, 82, emphasis in the original). While some witnesses seized upon Haiti as emblematic of the struggle for the liberty and equality called for in both the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and American Independence, other alleged conspirators channeled, with equally persuasive impact, the “indiscriminate massacre” and universal devastation brought about by the Haitian revolutionists.²⁷ Such conflicting yet complementary representations of St. Domingue express the deep ambivalence with which Americans, black and white, slave and free, negotiated the mixed legacy of the Haitian Revolution on U.S. soil.

These competing visions of Haiti shaped the structure and meaning of the Vesey conspiracy in early American print culture. References to the racial barbarism of counter-revolutionary St. Domingue suffuse the pages of the Official Report; however, the Charleston magistrates paid little attention to how the alleged black conspirators also drew powerful inspiration from Boyer’s recent and successful reunification of postrevolutionary Haiti. Some accounts emphasized Boyer’s thrilling capture of Spanish Santo Domingo over the more historically distant battles of the Haitian Revolution. Free black Saby Gaillard reportedly gave another informant “a piece of paper from his pocket; this paper was about the battle that Boyer had in St. Domingo … and said if he had as many men he would do the same too, as he could whip ten white men himself” (OR, 93).²⁸ Another witness reports that Vesey “was in the habit of reading to me all the passages in the newspapers that related to St. Domingo, and apparently every pamphlet he could lay his hands on, that had any connection with slavery. He one day brought me a speech which he told me had been delivered in Congress by a Mr. King [who] … declared … that slavery was a great disgrace to the country” (OR, 42, emphasis in the original). These testimonies cast racial slavery as incompatible with the tenets of a modern democratic nation. They, too, resonated with the image of a unified free Haiti that Boyer sought to present before the Western world. Black testimony from the earlier account published by the Corporation of Charleston further insisted that Vesey’s plan included British reinforcements who would assist in their escape to Haiti: “The English were to come here and help them, … the Americans could do nothing against the English, and … the English would carry them off to St. Domingo.”²⁹

Proslavery U.S. lawmakers marshaled the specter of a counter-revolutionary St. Domingue—of irrational, dehumanizing black violence—to justify the various black codes passed in the wake of the Charleston plot. In this, they held onto the sensationalized “horrors of St. Domingo”—to borrow the subtitle of Sansay’s novel, refusing to acknowledge the post-revolutionary black state of Haiti. In the public controversy over the Vesey trials, Charleston Times editor Edwin C. Holland utilized a discourse of white self-preservation against black barbarism in defense of the actions of the Charleston Court of Magistrates and Freeholders: “They were indubitably justified by every principle of the first and great law of nature—SELF-PRESERVATION.”³⁰ Holland admonished that “every possible precaution should be adopted, that is calculated, in the remotest degree, to save us from a catastrophe which at all times threatens us, and of the horrors of which, the imagination can form no definite idea.”³¹ The “catastrophe” and “horror” to which Holland alludes is a second St. Domingue on U.S. soil. His Refutation of the Calumnies Circulated Against the Southern Western States described “our negroes as the ‘Jacobins’ of the country, against whom we should always be upon our guard, and who … should be watched with an eye of steady and unremitted observation.”³²

The specter of the Haiti Revolution shaped such representations of a Manichean race struggle for life or death. Even an ardent critic of the Vesey court such as U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice William Johnson, a Charleston native, was unable to elude these rhetorical snares when ruling in the case of Jamaica-born free black Henry Elkison—the first of many unsuccessful British lawsuits challenging the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act.³³ Johnson’s ruling in Ex parte Henry Elkison v. Francis G. Deliesseline (1823) ultimately ceded authority to the slave state although he admitted, in what was tantamount to a declaration of the law’s inherent lawlessness, that Elkison’s “right to his liberty” as a free black subject, yet without “remedy to obtain it” in a slave state, was an “obvious mockery” of law. Johnson sent a copy of his controversial opinion in Elkison v. Deliesseline to President Thomas Jefferson, expressing concerns over the mounting agitation in Charleston: “I fear nothing so much as the Effects of the persecuting Spirit that is abroad in this Place. Should it spread thro’ the State & produce a systematic Policy founded on the ridiculous but prevalent Notion—that it is a struggle for Life or Death, [then] there are no Excesses that we may not look for—whatever be their Effect upon the Union…. They now pronounce the Negros the real Jacobins of this country.”³⁴ The state’s sovereign right to self-preservation became the cornerstone of the southern defense of its increasingly punitive racial jurisprudence, particularly of the Negro Seamen Acts. When the British Consul in Charleston again protested the seizure of black crewmen from British merchant vessels, the Charleston Mercury argued that this law “has its foundation in the right of every organized society to protect itself,—a right which no Government can be expected to surrender.”³⁵ Periodic expansions to the Negro Seamen Act over the next thirty-four years (especially in 1835 and 1844) continued to respond to the changing geopolitics of the Atlantic world as black freedom in the Caribbean, following Haitian independence and West Indian emancipation threatened to drift westward to U.S. shores. Official accounts of the Vesey conspiracy illuminate how local fears over slave revolt were necessarily articulated with transnational anxieties over the dismantling of Europe’s Atlantic slave economies.

For proslavery ideologues like South Carolina governor William Aiken, U.S. slaves could not envision freedom for themselves unless they were acted upon by a foreign—specifically, Haitian—influence. South Carolina’s native slave population, Aiken insists, was vulnerable to the “seduction” of “foreign free persons of color.”³⁶ The historic events of Vesey’s plot had become, in his words, “the most irrefragable evidence” for the continued necessity of South Carolinian policy against these dangerous foreigners.³⁷ Aiken, of course, neglects to mention the presence of certain foreigners—“people of colour” and slaves of French colonial émigrés fleeing from St. Domingue—whom the city had welcomed into its midst during the turmoil of the Haitian Revolution.³⁸ Cities such as Charleston, Baltimore, Boston, New York, Norfolk, and Philadelphia received sizable shares of the roughly ten thousand refugee planters and their slaves fleeing St. Domingue.³⁹ Indeed, Creole French-speaking slaves supposedly numbered among the conspirators named in the Vesey conspiracy, and one witness threatened that a “French Band was armed throughout, and were ready” (OR, 112, 114). However, planter politicians, such as Aiken, sought explanations for domestic slave revolts or plots like the Vesey conspiracy that helped reinforce their worldviews.⁴⁰ Consequently, slave revolts on U.S. soil were phenomena unnatural to the South’s paternalistic order as its politicians and lawmakers sought desperately to reinforce Michel Rolph Trouillot’s oft-cited description of the Haitian Revolution as “unthinkable even as it happened.”⁴¹

Aiken’s “appeal to history,” sought, among other things, to locate an insurrectionary desire for freedom in an external “foreign” population even though the depositions of suspects named in the conspiracy tended to “prove that this, like all other attempts of this kind, sprung from internal causes, for the existence of which the state alone was responsible.”⁴² Rather than acknowledge the local origins of slave unrest, southern legislators and officials represented “the rank and file of the conspiracy as the victims of foreign seduction” in the concerted effort to redirect the source of black antislavery radicalism on southern soil elsewhere beyond the boundaries of the U.S. nation-state.⁴³ Hence, the Vesey conspiracy serves as a focal point in a much longer history of Southern anxiety over the idea of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution, which imagined internal slave populations as vulnerable to the contagion of black radicalism. The following sections explore how a broad range of black and white American writers, activists, and commercial interests acted in concert with Haitian leaders such as Boyer to challenge these proslavery discourses of counter-revolutionary St. Domingue. They countered with representations of Haiti as a modern post-revolutionary nation fulfilling the ideals of Western enlightenment and coeval with the United States.

The specter of counter-revolutionary St. Domingue helped shape U.S. foreign relations in the 1820s as the federal government deferred to the individual states’ sovereign authority to enforce their Negro Seamen Acts against the free black subjects of northern states as well as of foreign nations. According to Gordon S. Brown, the ensuing conflicts over U.S. foreign trade policies also aggravated disputes between northern mercantile interests and southern slaveholding interests over the diplomatic recognition of a sovereign Haiti under Boyer. These negotiations over the place of the modern black state in the Americas provided yet another discursive context for the Haitian dimensions of the Vesey conspiracy. In the immediate wake of the Haitian Revolution, Jean-Jacque Dessalines had initiated efforts to secure international treaties for the incorporation of the newly independent black nation into the Atlantic political economy. However, the various Atlantic nations at the time responded with the diplomatic isolation of Haiti in the effort to contain the political implications of a nation founded on slave revolution and governed by former slaves and free people of color.⁴⁴ By 1806, Spain, the Dutch and Danish Empires, and the United States had prohibited trade with Haiti. Shortly after assuming leadership of a reunified Haiti, Boyer undertook the difficult task of resolving the ambiguous diplomatic and economic status of Haiti in his post-revolutionary reconstruction efforts. In July 1822, Boyer’s secretary general, Joseph Inginac, invited the United States to become the first Western nation to recognize Haiti’s sovereignty and independence.⁴⁵ President James Monroe refused, and he later blocked Haiti’s invitation to the Western Hemisphere Panama Conference of 1825.⁴⁶

Northern petitions asking for U.S. recognition of Haiti often came before Congress, yet proslavery representatives consistently maligned them as “marks of incendiarism.”⁴⁷ Between 1838 and 1839 alone, Congress received more than two hundred petitions asking for federal recognition of Haiti.⁴⁸ Those favoring Haitian recognition observed that “the people of Hayti are not yet fully understood” as they expressed their desire for “the United States … [to] acknowledge their Independence, with the full consent not only of the philanthropists, but of the sagacious Statesman.”⁴⁹ In particular, northern merchants pressed for federal recognition of Haiti, arguing that it was in the country’s “interest … to secure so very valuable a branch of our West India trade” with a commercial treaty.⁵⁰ These requests increased after the Haitian government began taxing commercial interactions with countries that refused to acknowledge its sovereignty.⁵¹ When Boyer finally negotiated the contested French recognition of Haitian sovereignty in 1825—accorded in a Royal Ordinance delivered by no less than three French vessels of war—it came at the expense of a 150-million franc indemnity to the dispossessed French planters of St. Domingue. King Louis Philippe later reduced the indemnity to sixty million francs and extended Haiti full recognition in 1838.⁵² U.S. newspapers reported these proceedings with great interest, and many were convinced that “if our government shall treat them [Haitians] judiciously, a very large portion of their commerce will fall into the hands of merchants of this country.”⁵³ However, even after French diplomatic recognition of Haiti, the United States maintained its policy of disavowing Haitian sovereignty and its place among the Western nations.⁵⁴ In a letter widely reprinted in U.S. newspapers, Boyer stressed his desire for Haiti to be “elevated to the rank of civilized nations,” with “the surest means of accomplishing that object” being the establishment of “mutual relations with other nations.”⁵⁵ He asked that the “friends of liberty in the U. States” continue to pressure the federal government to disencumber itself from the “obstacles which, until now, have prevented it from pronouncing itself in favor of the independence of the Republic of Hayti.”⁵⁶

In his efforts to secure U.S. diplomatic recognition, Boyer challenged the idea of a counter-revolutionary St. Domingue that was proliferated by proslavery ideologues as a caution against slave emancipation in the Americas. One of Boyer’s translated proclamations republished in U.S. newspapers denounced his country’s “most embittered slanderers … the promoters of the horrid traffic in human flesh” who “imagine that they behold Hayti always ready to annihilate them.”⁵⁷ In response to southern black codes like the Negro Seamen Acts, Boyer enforced restrictive economic trade policies against the slave states, claiming that he wished to avoid “every occasion for umbrage to other governments, in relation to the internal police of their colonies.”⁵⁸ He specifically prohibited the transit of Haitian trade vessels “to North and South Carolina in the United States of America” after the enactment of the Negro Seamen Acts.⁵⁹ He also took these opportunities to publicly condemn the “unworthy and scornful treatment the Haytiens have received from foreign governments…. The outrage done to the Haytien character, is a deplorable effect of the absurd prejudices resulting from the difference of colours.”⁶⁰ Boyer cited the Negro Seamen Acts among these new racial restrictions as a profound mark of U.S. national retrogression: “The proscription practiced, now, more than ever, in certain countries, against men of the colour of Haytiens … recently established in the middle portion of America … [are] strange proceedings, … [and] horrible as they are, would appear less surprising at a period less advanced than the present.”⁶¹ Such public avowals of black racial pride stimulated fears that Haiti might instigate and support slave uprisings like the Vesey conspiracy, and such fears persisted in the U.S. South until the abolition of slavery.⁶² Thus, the localized events in Charleston over the summer months of 1822 may be understood as part of these broader geopolitical negotiations within the Atlantic world.

At the time of the Vesey conspiracy, Haiti had begun advertising for skilled black immigrants in U.S. newspapers in order to address its acute labor shortages.⁶³ In 1819, Boyer expressed an early interest in the recently established American Colonization Society (ACS) as he attempted to redirect the course of black colonization from Africa to Haiti. In encouraging black American emigration to Haiti, Boyer sought to strengthen the relations between the two countries, seeing in it “an infallible means of augmenting the commerce of the United States, by multiplying relations between two people.” By 1821, Boyer’s secretary of state had established a society at Port-au-Prince “to encourage the emigration of free Africans and their descendants from the United States.”⁶⁴ Advertisements for emigrants continued throughout the 1820s as the Haitian government extended offers of free passage and generous land grants to skilled black Americans in hopes of revitalizing an economy compromised by years of internecine warfare. Many metropolitan black American writers and reformers began to embrace Boyer’s recruitment efforts. They saw in Haiti the realization of the unfinished project of American egalitarian democracy.

From the time they began publication on March 16, 1822, until they ceased two year later, Samuel Cornish and Jamaica-born John Brown Russwurm, editors of the Freedom’s Journal—the first black U.S. newspaper—listed among their many goals the dissemination of “correct information” on Haiti: “As the relations between Hayti and this country are becoming daily more interesting, it is highly important that we have correct information concerning the state of affairs there. Our readers may depend on our columns, as we shall never insert any news whatever, of a doubtful nature, concerning the island.”⁶⁵ Accurate news was particularly needful given, in the editors’ words, “the dissatisfied and envious in this country, who are continually forging ‘News from Hayti,’ … [and] unmanly attacks upon a brave and hospitable people.”⁶⁶ Cornish and Russwurm often reprinted from abolitionist Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation salutary reports promoting the advantages of Haitian emigration.⁶⁷ For many black Americans, emigration to Haiti was a far more promising alternative to Liberia and the American Colonization Society’s undisguised efforts to draw “off the free people of colour from the United States.”⁶⁸ “I have often asked myself,” observed one emigration advocate, “why Hayti, whose climate is so mild, and whose government is analogous to that of the United States, was not preferred as their place of refuge.”⁶⁹ Black writers encoded a powerful counternarrative to American national culture in their embrace of Haitian emigration. For example, David Walker, the Freedom’s Journal’s fiery Boston agent, proclaimed that “Hayti, the glory of the blacks and the terror of tyrants,” offered a far more invigorating example of revolutionary egalitarianism than the American Revolution.⁷⁰ In his radical Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), Walker also admonished those who had fallen for the American Colonization Society’s “colonizing trick,” although he endorsed emigration to Haiti for those “of us [who] see fit to go away … go to our brethren, the Haytians, who, according to their words, are bound to protect and comfort us.”⁷¹

In the United States, the Haitian emigration movement commenced in earnest when Boyer began financing the emigration of some thirteen thousand black Americans to Haiti in 1824.⁷² Earlier that year, Loring D. Dewey, a Presbyterian minister and ACS agent, had begun corresponding with Boyer in hopes of initiating a resettlement program in the black republic. Dewey helped oversee the establishment of the Society for Promoting the Emigration of Free Persons of Colour to Hayti in the United States (CR, 28, 30). The ACS did not support Haitian emigration and promptly “recommended the removal of Mr. Dewey from his agency” as a representative for the organization.⁷³ In her antislavery masterpiece Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe likewise denigrated Haiti in order to sing the praises of African colonization. Her protagonist George Harris, a fugitive slave, embraces emigration to Liberia, rejecting Haiti, “For in Hayti they had nothing to start with … [and a] stream cannot rise above its fountain.” “The race that formed the character of the Haytiens,” he continues, “was a worn-out, effeminate one; and, of course, the subject race will be centuries in rising to anything.”⁷⁴ The swift and intolerant actions of the ACS in the matter of Dewey and Haitian emigration gave the organization’s more liberal supporters pause as they reconsidered the racial ideologies that underlay colonization to Africa: “But when we find the advocates for slavery in Missouri among its zealous friends—when we find it encouraged and patronized in South Carolina, a state that has passed a law to seize free negroes and sell them for slaves; and in Charleston, a city that has made it a penal offence to teach a slave to read or write;—and now, when the members of a Society think it necessary to dismiss an agent because he has corresponded with the free government of Hayti—we cannot prevent a lurking suspicion that all is not right.”⁷⁵ Boyer subsequently sent his agent Jonathas Granville to New York with funds sufficient to defray the expenses of six hundred emigrants and the authority to arrange for the immigration of six thousand more within the year.⁷⁶ With this arrangement in place, Dewey continued promoting Haitian emigration, observing that “among the Coloured People themselves, a preference of Hayti over Africa was frequently expressed,” given the “present peaceful state of the island, and the fair prospects before the Haytiens, of having their Independence acknowledged by other nations.”⁷⁷

Boyer sought to use black American emigration to Haiti as a means to influence U.S. public sentiment and secure federal recognition of his country. He identified black Americans as fellow “children of Africa” and welcomed their immigration to Haiti as a refuge from racial oppression. America’s failure to abolish slavery made it possible for Boyer to proclaim postrevolutionary Haiti as the “land of true liberty.” Moreover, black freedmen, “who drag out in the United States a painful and degrading existence, will become, on arriving at Hayti, citizens of the Republic, and can there labour with security and advantage to themselves and children” (CR, 14). Boyer’s letters fashion Haiti as a refuge for free blacks seeking the promised “happiness, security, tranquility” withheld from them in America: “the descendants of the Africans … are compelled to leave the country, because … far from enjoying the rights of freemen, they have only an existence, precarious and full of humiliation” (CR, 10, 6–7). Boyer went so far as to describe his emigration plan as a charitable act of humanitarianism toward a sister-nation. In rhetoric shaped by Enlightenment thought, Boyer crafted a utopian vision of black civility and social reproduction to be fulfilled upon Haitian soil:

What joy it will give hearts like yours, to see these scions of Africa, so abased in the United States, where they vegetate with no more utility to themselves than to the soil which nourishes them, transplanted to Hayti, where they will become no less useful than estimable, because the enjoyment of civil and political rights, ennobling them in their own eyes, cannot fail to attach them to regular habits, and the acquisition of social virtues, and to render them worthy by their good conduct, to enjoy the benefits which their new country will bestow upon them! (CR, 16–17)

For Boyer, slavery was antithetical to Western modernity. Indeed, the emergence of a unified Haitian state facilitated the abolition of slavery throughout the island. In 1822, after taking the capital city of Spanish Santo Domingo, Boyer’s first act was to proclaim the emancipation of all slaves.⁷⁸ Boyer’s emigration rhetoric stressed the political and social progress of Haiti, and he also took pains to circulate his proposal widely through black as well as white agents. He later made “a verbal statement of the same offer” to Thomas Paul, the founder of Boston’s African Baptist Church, who was to act “as an organ of communication to the free people of color in the United States.”⁷⁹ A vocal advocate for Haitian emigration, Paul praised the independent black state as the ideal “asylum for the enjoyment of liberty and the common rights of man,” urging his fellow “emancipated people of colour” to swiftly transplant themselves amongst those “who are determined to live free, or die gloriously in the defence of freedom.”⁸⁰ Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, later served as chair of the Haitian Emigration Society in Philadelphia.⁸¹

Boyer’s discursive struggle to reposition Haiti within Western historiography was not without its shortcomings; it demanded that he cast out Africa from these discourses of New World modernity and revolution. Indeed, Joan (Colin) Dayan reminds us that Boyer’s Haitian modernity must be viewed alongside the “codification of servitude” and repression of the black peasantry in his Code Rural, which placed labor and agriculture under state control.⁸² Hence, these public discussions over black emigration to Haiti allowed Boyer to question modernity (and Haiti’s place within this new world order) without necessarily challenging its Western racial biases. Boyer embraced his fellow black Americans who had suffered the forced migrations of the Atlantic trade even as he rejected the “barbarous” Africa from where they had been stolen. This discourse of African barbarism allowed Boyer to portray his island nation as coeval with other white Western nations. “Animated with the desire to serve the cause of humanity,” reads Boyer’s letter to Dewey, “I have thought that a finer occasion could not have presented itself to offer an agreeable hospitality, a sure asylum, to the unfortunate men, who have the alternative of going to the barbarous shores of Africa, where misery or certain death may await them” (CR, 11). In renouncing Africa as “barbarous,” he emphasizes the similarity of the “principles of legislation and government” between Haiti and the United States, which “ought necessarily to render them friends, although a blind prejudice seems until now to have put obstacles in the way of more direct relations between the one and the other” (CR, 11). Indeed, black Americans and Haitians are the true products of New World modernity—men, who are, in Boyer’s words, “accustomed to live in the midst of civilized people.” Thus the emigration of black Americans to Africa—“the cradle of their fathers”—would be less a homecoming than a forced “exile” to a primitive land.

This ambivalence towards Africa is built into the very structure of Boyer’s struggles to forge a political and social identification with the United States. Boyer felt compelled to differentiate his country from the undeveloped primitivism of the African continent and reposition Haiti within the progressive histories of the modern West. Haitian modernity is thus given shape and meaning against the specter of unenlightened Africa. It is not a coincidence that one of the more lurid accounts from the Vesey conspiracy had linked Haiti and Africa through its shared racialized barbarism: “St. Domingo and Africa would come over and cut up the white people if we only made the motion here first” (OR, 62). White officials granted freedom and immunity to the unnamed slave who offered this statement. This lead witness also maintained that the Vesey plot involved not only the savage murder of Charleston’s white men, but also the rape of its white women (OR, 62–63). Against this ever-present specter of African barbarism, Boyer envisioned the futures of the United States and Haiti interlaced through hemispheric ties of commerce, government, and people. Indeed, his rhetoric struck a delicate balance between praise and critique of the United States as a sister-nation, and it persuaded many black Americans. Between 1824 and 1827, an estimated thirteen thousand immigrated to Haiti, although a “considerable number of these immigrants, and probably some of the best of them, and those who had means, returned to the United States” when the Haitian government suddenly halted its subsidies.⁸³

Many black American writers saw Haiti as a successful example of selfgovernment “hitherto unseen in these modern and degenerate days,” while they stressed the failures of American democracy and rejected the prospects of African colonization.⁸⁴ Boyer’s rhetoric of Haitian modernity found a ready home in the columns of Freedom’s Journal. Editors Cornish and Russwurm reprinted various articles about Haiti, including a three-part biography of Toussaint Louverture.⁸⁵ One issue offered a “few lines on the past and present conditions of a people, who have bravely burst asunder the galling chains of slavery,” especially given that “many of our New England friends believe, and practice the self-evident truths, ‘that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, with certain inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”⁸⁶ “The Haytiens,” lauded another editorial, “can look back on the past with great satisfaction; they have fought the good fight of Liberty, and conquered: and all that is … required of them, is, to enjoy this invaluable blessing, as accountable beings, who look forward to what man, even the descendants of Africa, may be, when blessed with Liberty and Equality and their concomitants.”⁸⁷ The newspaper also ran advertisements for agricultural workers to contract in Haiti, asking those interested to contact Russwurm.⁸⁸ In embracing Boyer’s vision of black modernity, these black writers and editors saw in post-revolutionary Haiti the achievement of the American promise of egalitarian democracy and freedom.

French acknowledgement of Haitian independence further encouraged black American emigration to the island for it provided Western confirmation of Haiti’s rightful place among the Atlantic nation-states. In public and private ceremonies, scores of black Americans commemorated this event as the realization of the emancipatory project that had begun with the Haitian Revolution in 1791.⁸⁹ For some, French recognition lent legitimacy to Haiti’s founding revolutionary antislavery, and it energized literary efforts to remake the Haitian Revolution into the origins of what Paul Gilroy first described as a black “counterculture of modernity.”⁹⁰ In four issues between January 18 and February 15, 1828, the Freedom’s Journal serialized a short story entitled “Theresa—a Haytien Tale” under “Original Communication.” Reserved for pieces written by black contributors, the “Original Communication” section included letters to editors, testimonials, wedding and death announcements, and poetry and short fiction.⁹¹ Set during the Haitian Revolution, “Theresa—a Haytien Tale” crafts a domestic plot of black familial reunion that channels and amplifies the Haitian modernity of Boyer’s emigration recruitment campaigns. It also predates the earliest known works of black American fiction, including Francophone writer Victor Sejour’s “Le Mulatre,” or “The Mulatto” (1837), Frederick Douglass’s “A Heroic Slave” (1852), William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or The President’s Daughter (1853), and Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857).

Frances Smith Foster speculates that American educator Prince Saunders may have been the author of “Theresa—A Haytien Tale,” which was signed simply with the initial “S.”⁹² An early émigré to Haiti, Saunders (who married the daughter of Paul Cuffee, the earliest proponent of African colonization) became one of the most vocal advocates of emigration, preceding by several decades the work of well-known Haitian emigrationalist James Theodore Holly.⁹³ In 1816, Saunders became the official courier to the Court of St. James for Emperor Henri Christophe, who had control of northern Haiti (and was battling Alexandre Pétion for leadership of the south).⁹⁴ While in London negotiating British diplomatic recognition of Christophe’s Haiti, Saunders associated with the likes of abolitionist luminaries William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson and oversaw the translation and publication of the Haytian Papers (1816), a compendium of selected official ordinances and legal codes, including extracts from the Code Henri. Saunders republished it in Boston in 1818. A public relations document, the Haytian Papers sought to refute the “gross misrepresentation[s]” circulated against Haiti by offering Anglophone readers “correct information with respect to the enlightened systems of policy, the pacific spirit, the altogether domestic views, and liberal principles of the Government” under Christophe.⁹⁵ In 1818, in Philadelphia, Saunders delivered an address advocating Haitian emigration before the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race. “Among the various projects or plans which have been devised or suggested, in relation to emigration,” Saunders insisted, “there are none which appear to many persons to wear so much the appearance of feasibility, and ultimate successful and practical operation, as the luxuriant, beautiful and extensive island of Hayti, (or St. Domingo).”⁹⁶ Saunders went so far as to suggest U.S. intervention in Haiti to facilitate the consolidation of the “two rival governments of Hayti … into one well balanced pacific power.”⁹⁷ A unified Haiti would become a refuge for the “many hundreds of the free people in the New England and middle states, who would be glad to repair there immediately to settle.”⁹⁸ In 1823, Saunders returned to Haiti with clergyman Thomas Paul on a mission for the Baptist Missionary Society. Boyer subsequently appointed Saunders the attorney general of Haiti, where Saunders remained until his death in 1839.⁹⁹

“Theresa—a Haytien Tale” emphasizes the French atrocities committed against the Haitians in the “long and bloody contest … between the white man” and “the sons of Africa.”¹⁰⁰ “French barbarity” destroys the domestic repose of an “unfortunate village” in Môle-Saint-Nicholas, the strategic northwestern harbor that the United States later sought to annex as a naval base in 1889, during Frederick Douglass’s appointment as U.S. Minister to Haiti (THT, 639).¹⁰¹ The merciless French even put Haitian mothers and their infants to the sword. Madame Pauline and her two daughters, Amanda and Theresa, are left without the protection of their father and uncle, revolutionaries who died in battle (THT, 639). In identifying with the Haitian people, “Theresa—a Haytien Tale” offers a meditation on revolutionary Haiti for the purposes of its black American audience. Moreover, it resignifies the Haitian Revolution through the American War of Independence by likening Toussaint Louverture’s black freedom fighters to the American revolutionaries in their cries of “Freedom or Death!” as they charge into battle against the French (THT, 645).

The female protagonists and domestic plot of “Theresa—a Haytien Tale” emphasize the forms of black social reproduction engendered—not destroyed—by the Haiti Revolution, building upon the very promises that Boyer extended to all black American emigrants. In this, the story reads against the grain of Sansay’s epistolary novel, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), as well as Sejour’s “Le Mulatre,” which depicts the Haitian Revolution as an inter-racial domestic drama of parricide. Revolutionary impulses have often been channeled through the figurative act of parricide, according to Russ Castronovo, and patricide—specifically, the literary imagery of black sons killing white slaveholding fathers—emerged as one of the primary metaphors for the Haitian Revolution.¹⁰² “Theresa—a Haytien Tale” also figures the Haitian Revolution as a familial drama; yet, it is one that ends by establishing Toussaint Louverture as the black patriarch of the reunited Haitian family as nation. It offers a powerful counternarrative to these plots of tragic familial drama characterizing the black and white literary imaginary of the Haitian Revolution. In this, “Theresa—a Haytien Tale” provides an earlier iteration of the plot of black familial reunion as hemispheric slave revolution found in Martin R. Delany’s famously unfinished Blake; or, The Huts of America.¹⁰³

The persuasive force of “Theresa—a Haytien Tale” lies in its female protagonists, for they are ordinary women caught up in the extraordinary events of the Haitian Revolution.¹⁰⁴ Believing the “salvation of her oppressed country” at stake, young Theresa temporarily forsakes mother and sister to travel the dangerous route to “the military quarters of the great Toussaint,” where she conveys the secret intelligence leading to the eventual “destruction of the French, and their final expulsion from her native island” (THT, 644). Theresa’s heroic actions reconcile the warring tensions between filial duty and revolutionary nationalism, for “the salvation of her oppressed country to her, was an object of no little concern; but she also owed a duty to that mother, whose tender solicitude for her happiness, could not be surpassed by any parent” (THT, 643). In this, the tale illuminates the interdependence of the social and political in the Haitian Revolution. In Louverture, Theresa finds a paternal substitute for the father whom she lost in war, and the tale ends with the reconstitution of Theresa’s family writ large. The revolutionaries rout the invading French forces and rescue the captured mother and sister—a powerful portent of the independent black nation-state that was soon to emerge from the Haitian Revolution. This ending also aligns itself with the image of a reunified Haiti under Boyer. After the assassination of Dessalines in 1806, civil strife fractured the country into two warring regions. In 1818, Saunders stressed the urgency for Haitian pacification and unity, noting the detrimental effects of civil war upon families: “There is scarcely a family whose members are not separated from each other, and arrayed under the banners of the rival chiefs, in virtual hostility against each other,” he observed. “In many instances the husband is with Henry, and the wife and children with Boyer.”¹⁰⁵ Haitian civil unrest had discouraged earlier recruitments of black American emigrants. In celebrating Haitian (familial and national) reunification, “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” enhances the Freedom’s Journal’s emi-grationalist stance by figuring the promise and possibilities for black social reproduction in Boyer’s unified Haiti.

In depicting the mutually constitutive forces of social reproduction and black revolution in Haiti, “Theresa—a Haytien Tale” worked in tandem with the political views of the Freedom Journal’s editors. The Freedom’s Journal was an international print medium with a vast distribution network from Maine and New York to Washington, D.C., Maryland, North Carolina, Canada, England, and Haiti.¹⁰⁶ It provided crucial links between the United States and Haiti as well as between the U.S. North and South as sectional divisions over slavery and states’s rights threatened to fracture the country like Haiti, dividing families and turning kin against each other. In the pages of the Freedom’s Journal, editors Cornish and Russwurm “created for the black community a social and cultural space in which to articulate their opposition to white oppression while also providing an invaluable lesson in literary interaction and the power of print,” according to Elizabeth McHenry.¹⁰⁷ In a publication dedicated to disseminating “correct information” on Haiti, “Theresa—a Haytien Tale” offers a fictional meditation upon the profound challenge that the Haitian Revolution and Boyer’s post-revolutionary republic offered, in Trouillot’s words, to “the universalist pretensions of both the French and the American revolutions.”¹⁰⁸

At the height of the transatlantic antislavery campaign in the 1850s, black abolitionist William Wells Brown took up the power and potential of black militancy so long exploited by proslavery lawmakers to fashion a revisionist account of the Haitian Revolution that would stand as a precursor to C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins. “No revolution,” writes Brown, “ever turned up greater heroes then that of St. Domingo. But no historian has yet done them justice.”¹⁰⁹ Over the course of Brown’s career as an abolitionist, he wrote extensively on the Haitian Revolution, especially during the prolific years of his self-described exiled from the United States. In advance of the implementation of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Brown, a fugitive slave, fled to Europe where he remained until British philanthropists secured his manumission.¹¹⁰ In his five years abroad, Brown traveled more than twenty-five thousand miles and delivered over one thousand lectures while authoring numerous essays, a travelogue, and Clotel.¹¹¹ He also served as the official delegate for the American Peace Society at its international conference in Paris. Like Frederick Douglass, Brown was fêted in Europe. He socialized with the likes of Victor Hugo, the president of the Peace Congress and acclaimed poet and author of the lesser known novel, Bug-Jargal (1826), based upon the tumultuous events of the Haitian Revolution. Once state governments began enforcing the new Fugitive Slave Law, interest in black American emigration abroad again revived, and the American Peace Society required a “talented man of colour” like Brown in Europe to challenge the American Colonization Society’s promotion of imperialist resettlement schemes to Africa.¹¹²

On the eve of his long-awaited departure from England in May 1854, Brown delivered a lecture on Haiti entitled “Santo Domingo: Its Revolutions and Its Patriots” at the London Metropolitan Athenæum, which he repeated four months later at Philadelphia’s St. Thomas Church. The speech sold rapidly in the United States.¹¹³ The second in a series of three highly successful lectures, “Santo Domingo” drew heavily upon John R. Beard’s largely sympathetic biography, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, The Negro Patriot of Hayti (1853), published in the same year as Brown’s Clotel. Lara Langer Cohen has most recently traced the influence of Beard’s text on Clotel to consider the fragmentation, juxtaposition, and reassembly at the heart of Brown’s “patchwork aesthetic.”¹¹⁴ The Life of Toussiant L’Ouverture remains the most frequently cited text in Clotel, and it also serves as a key intertext in Brown’s “Santo Domingo” address. In Clotel, Brown draws directly from Beard’s account of the 1802 Haitian yellow fever outbreak crippling Napoleon’s forces in his description of the New Orleans epidemic that sends two of Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughters to the auction block.¹¹⁵ Brown’s transposition of Beard’s account demands that we reread the novel’s themes of racial amalgamation and the genealogical legacies of American slavery in relation to the Haitian Revolution.¹¹⁶ These intertextual references linking Haiti and New Orleans figure the U.S. South as dangerously open to the “infection” of slave revolt. In this, Brown offered powerful critical commentary upon the racialized discourses of contagion and quarantine established by the Negro Seamen Acts, which figured “foreign” black bodies as infectious carriers of revolutionary epistemologies.

In the face of increasing sectional strife over slavery, black American writers often turned to the Haitian Revolution in their efforts to rethink the meaning of the American Revolution in the decade leading to Civil War.¹¹⁷ For example, Webb’s The Garies subtly infuses black revolutionary thought—in the figure of Toussaint Louverture—into its domestic plot of urban race riot. Decorating the handsomely appointed abode of wealthy black Philadelphian Mr. Walters, a majestic portrait of Louverture, purported to have been presented to “an American merchant by Toussaint himself,” captivates Clarence Garie, a progressive-minded white Georgia planter.¹¹⁸ “ ‘All white men look at it with interest,’ ” Walters remarks. “ ‘A black man in the uniform of a general officer is something so unusual that they cannot pass it with[out] a glance.’ ”¹¹⁹ Like Webb’s, Brown’s writings crafted nuanced textual and geographical links between the United States and Haiti.¹²⁰ Brown could not imagine a revolutionary history of the West without the Haitian Revolution as its pivotal point. In perhaps the most unexpected citation of Beard in Clotel, Brown fuses two passages from The Life of Toussaint to anachronistically introduce Nat Turner’s revolt during Clotel’s heroic but failed rescue of her daughter.¹²¹ Like “Theresa—A Haytien Tale,” Brown conjoins the domestic narrative of Clotel’s self-sacrificing mother love to a historical plot of black militancy.

In “Santo Domingo,” Brown drew upon both Beard’s Life of Toussaint and Clotel’s fictional recontextualization of Turner’s revolt to craft a radical vision of coeval revolutions. The lecture reinvents Haiti as the geographical and historical wellspring of revolutionary antislavery in the Americas. It offers a complex model of historiography that accounts for the contingent transnational interests vested in sustaining African slavery and the revolutionary antislavery that transformed the colony into a modern black republic. From a depiction of internal social strife within the island’s “black” populations, Brown traces these local tensions in a transnational field of colonial relations with France, England, Spain, and the United States. He uses the adverbial form of “while” to conjoin multiple events, expanding the account’s geographical and temporal scale. Variously comparing Toussaint Louverture to figures such as Nat Turner, Napoleon Bonaparte, and George Washington, Brown unites the nonsynchronous events of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions within a single representational field that includes U.S. slave conspiracies and revolts.

Unlike Boyer’s earlier efforts to locate Haiti within the developmental narratives of the West, Brown’s historical account acknowledges the brutal violence that helped forge the country’s revolutionary antislavery and propel it into New World modernity.¹²² Neither does Brown shrink from detailed descriptions of the atrocities that Dessalines’s black revolutionary forces committed against the white colonists of St. Domingue: “the banks of the Artibonite … strewn with dead bodies, and the waters dyed with the blood of the slain.”¹²³ Exploiting the specter of black militancy used so effectively by proslavery politicians, Brown offers this image of white “slaughter” and “carnage” as a terrifying portent of what is yet to pass within the slaveholding United States: “Let the slave-holders in our Southern States tremble when they shall call to mind these events” (SD, 25). In this, Brown anticipates the militant antislavery of John Brown and justifies bloodletting in the cause of universal freedom. “Should we be obliged to shed rivers of blood; should we, to preserve our freedom, be compelled to set on fire seven-eighths of the globe,” he proclaims, “we shall be pronounced innocent before the tribunal of Providence, who has not created men to see them groan under a yoke so oppressive and so ignominious” (SD, 31–32).

Unlike Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, and Alexander Crummell, Brown did not promote black American emigration to Africa or Haiti. Rather, his writings sought to reveal the historical connections between the United States and Haiti in ways that invigorated the revolutionary character of the American antislavery struggle. In remapping the Haitian Revolution onto U.S. soil, Brown delineates the transnational contours of what Sibylle Fischer calls the “emancipatory project of revolutionary anti-slavery”—one that exists simultaneously in the Haitian past and the American present.¹²⁴ “The spirit that caused the blacks to take up arms, and to shed their blood in the American revolutionary war, is still amongst the slaves of the south; and, if we are not mistaken, the day is not far distant when the revolution of St. Domingo will be reenacted in South Carolina and Louisiana,” warns Brown (SD, 32). The revolutionary antislavery unleashed in the Haitian Revolution—the sympathetic echo of which was sounded in the Denmark Vesey conspiracy and Nat Turner revolt—is a fundamental aspect of the “spirit” of radicalism that pervaded the Western world in the age of revolution. In this, Brown undermines the implicit claims of conventional historiography as a narrative of developmental progress. He conjures the specter of a revolutionary St. Domingue to haunt the topography of America’s internal slave colony of the South: “Already the slave in his chains, in the rice swamps of Carolina and the cotton fields of Mississippi, burns for revenge” (SD, 37). Brown retrieves the Haitian past and projects it into the American future. By positing a future that doubles back upon itself as a repetition, or in his words, a “re-enactment” of a revolutionary Haitian past, Brown’s “Santo Domingo” destabilizes a teleological narrative of U.S. national history that takes 1776 as its inaugural moment.¹²⁵

Brown’s “Santo Domingo” identifies Haiti as the radical epicenter for the complex spatial and temporal cartographies of the black Atlantic binding together the United States, Europe, and Africa. His revolutionary historiography of antislavery in the Americas is not invested in preserving a linear continuity of past, present, and future. Revolution and racial slavery destroy historical continuity and produce ruptures in the diachronic narrative of nation. The Haitian Revolution becomes a possible future for the United States—one that does not reenact the contradiction of America’s founding and its uneasy reconciliation of democratic consciousness with racial slavery. “Toussaint’s government made liberty its watchword, incorporated it in its constitution, abolished the slave-trade, and made freedom universal amongst the people,” writes Brown, whereas “Washington’s government incorporated slavery and the slave-trade, and enacted laws by which chains were fastened upon the limbs of millions of people” (SD, 37). The Haitian Revolution becomes a touchstone for the “unfinished revolution” of 1776: “The indignation of the slaves of the south would kindle a fire so hot that it would melt their chains, drop by drop, until not a single link would remain; and the revolution that was commenced in 1776 would then be finished” (SD, 38). In enforcing racial jurisprudence like the Negro Seamen Acts, U.S. slave states sought to purge from their boundaries the specter of black radicalism unleashed by the Haitian Revolution. However, these legal efforts to draw a racialized cordon sanitaire around the slaveholding South conjured a powerful imaginary of a counter-revolutionary St. Domingue that black American writers like Brown adapted into a rallying cry to end slavery and racial injustice.

Haiti’s emergence as a post-revolutionary modern black state profoundly challenged the “ontological order of the West and the global order of colonialism,” according to Trouillot.¹²⁶ The United States would deny Haiti diplomatic recognition until 1862, when the Civil War began to bring the era of legal slavery to an end.¹²⁷ However, official recognition served only to draw Haiti further into the bellicose sphere of U.S. overseas empire and neocolonialism. Forty years later, in 1893, Frederick Douglass echoed Brown in two speeches on Haiti and the Haitian Revolution for the Haitian Pavilion dedication ceremony at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.¹²⁸ Appointed as commissioner of the Haitian Pavilion by Haitian President Florvil Hyppolite, Douglass presented the “Lecture on Haiti” at the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Quinn Chapel in the evening before he gave a version of it as his keynote address. The lecture began by boldly asserting, “My subject is Haiti, the Black Republic; the only self-made Black Republic in the world,” and condemned the United States for failing to accept Haiti as a “sister republic” at its founding (LH, 203). “Haiti is black,” Douglass noted wryly, “and we have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black or forgiven the Almighty for making her black” (LH, 203). In a world reshaped by U.S. Jim Crow and the global diffusion of white supremacist ideologies, Douglass, in words hearkening back to Brown’s “Santo Domingo,” invoked the Haitian Revolution as a rallying call for Americans to complete the “unfinished revolution” of Reconstruction. Haiti “came into the sisterhood of nations through blood,” and Douglass, like Brown, justified this bloodshed in the “cause of universal human liberty” (LH, 206, 208). In citing Haiti as example, Douglass portrays these early black revolutionaries as “linked and interlinked with their race, and striking for their freedom, they struck for the freedom of every black man in the world” (LH, 208). Of all the so-called Western nations, Haiti should be regarded as “the original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century” (LH, 209). In this, Douglass stressed the enduring power and significance of Haiti and its black revolutionary history to America after Reconstruction, for it remains “the greatest of all our modern teachers” (LH, 209).