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

The Triumphs of Love, the Haitian Revolution, and Early American Performance Cultures

On May 22, 1795, Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre saw a theatrical representation of the Haitian Revolution in John Murdock’s sentimental comedy The Triumphs of Love; or, Happy Reconciliation.¹ Although Murdock’s comedy does not directly depict St. Domingue’s slave revolts of the 1790s, its hapless refugees and rebellious black characters dramatize subtle but meaningful shifts in the Atlantic social worlds during the age of the Haitian Revolution. The Triumphs of Love’s plot, though relatively conventional, features unusual supporting characters. Pointing to American understandings of the slave revolts then in progress, Murdock’s characters suggest that the Haitian Revolution had begun to alter American conventions and cultural forms in the 1790s. Murdock’s rebellious black characters provided audiences with a safe way of encountering Haiti’s unthinkable violence, and his refugees, implicated as well in St. Domingue’s disorder, allowed audiences to imagine their own local connections to the revolution’s offstage refugees, who had begun arriving in significant numbers in American cities soon after the Haitian Revolution began.

The Triumphs of Love shows how popular entertainments operated as sites where the North American public responded to the Haitian Revolution, ridiculing racial revolution but also registering its profound impact through the conventional forms of popular theater. The play and its changing environs also point to ways in which audiences could imagine the points of connection and disconnection among the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. Murdock’s play registers the proximity of a radically changing Atlantic world, even as its stock dramatic devices and clichéd characters—the dissolute Frenchman, the wayward Quaker reformed, the beautifully suffering female stranger, the unruly freed slave—allow audiences to strategically disavow the full import of those changes.

John Murdock’s play reached the stage just as early American theater reemerged from its post–Revolutionary War doldrums. Under the managerial guidance of Thomas Wignell, the New Theatre (later known as the Chestnut Street Theatre) saw increasing success in the 1790s. Wignell, coming to Philadelphia from New York City, had imported a stable of English actors who would become America’s first stage celebrities. Those players put on regular seasons of conventional English dramas, recycling Shakespearean favorites and Restoration comedies. Occasionally, the early national stage presented the work of homegrown playwrights, trumpeting their “native genius,” but creativity cost more than imitation, and literary originality seems to have been a low priority for troupes, publics, and critics alike.² The Triumphs of Love exemplifies this phenomenon. Despite Murdock’s self-promotional efforts, it appeared only once on any stage, failing to merit a longer production run. Even so, Murdock’s play offered relatively distinctive fare for Philadelphia theatergoers. Its local scenes and topical subject matter departed from the general run of English-authored scripts. As Heather Nathans has observed, the play depicts “the Philadelphia Murdock knew, a hodgepodge of recent German and Irish immigrants, slaves and free blacks, Quakers, artisans, and wealthy elite.”³ Advertisements announced Murdock’s script as presenting “several interesting subjects, such as Negro Slavery, and our glorious Revolution.”⁴ Although the ads do not trumpet the fact, Murdock’s play also displays the profound impact of refugees from French St. Domingue, who had begun to arrive in Philadelphia in increasing numbers during the 1790s.

The slave revolts and political unrest that would later become known as the Haitian Revolution propelled between fifteen and twenty thousand French Caribbean islanders to North America during the 1790s and early 1800s.⁵ Their numbers increased dramatically after June 1793, when slaves burned Cap-Français and forced many of its white residents to evacuate, sometimes in complete destitution. Refugees from St. Domingue arrived in a brief but spectacular influx. Then, according to Gary Nash, by the “spring of 1794, the exodus of French islanders to North America tapered off and by the late fall of 1795 had nearly ended.”⁶ Philadelphia, one of the epicenters for refugee arrivals, received around five thousand Caribbean exiles—a substantial addition to its forty-five thousand residents.⁷ Although many of these refugees eventually returned to France, and some even went back to the Caribbean, those who remained exercised conspicuous influences on Anglo-American culture and theater. Speaking in French, Caribbean, and African accents, the islanders appeared foreign while also interacting and connecting with North Americans in distinctive ways.⁸ Under the umbrella terms of “French” and “Creole,” the Haitian Revolution thus propelled to North America a radically heterogeneous assortment of free, enslaved, black, brown, and white people—outsiders marked as different and tied together by shared experiences and memories of Caribbean slave revolt.

Murdock scripted The Triumphs of Love’s refugees and rebels amid the frictions and interactions generated by Philadelphia’s distinctive French Caribbean newcomers. The play’s direct attention to St. Domingue’s revolution and its characters is rare—very few contemporary Anglo-American dramas refer to slave revolt, let alone to the Haitian Revolution.⁹ The characters brought to Philadelphia by the slave uprisings offer Murdock’s play more than topical interest, however. Slave revolt reconfigures the raw materials for the sentimental comedy, furnishing usable character types and key plot turns on the way to its titular happy resolution. Articulating subtly shifting structures of feeling, the play registers the impact of the Haitian Revolution’s vexed, contingent, and displaced histories as they occurred. St. Domingue and its revolts pose problems and offer solutions for Murdock’s play. In its early acts, for example, French Caribbean influences corrupt American characters: Thus, the rakish French dandy Beauchamp leads George, a young Philadelphia Quaker, in playful irresponsibility. George’s reform from his youthful dissipation begins only when Beauchamp receives “some bad news” from St. Domingue, which forces him to leave Philadelphia; “cruel necessity” (presumably slave unrest and revolutionary disorder) compels Beauchamp to “sail direct for the Cape.”¹⁰ During Beauchamp’s absence, George gradually renounces his unruly ways, even freeing his slave Sambo (who has imbibed the troubling revolutionary spirit of St. Domingue’s rebels) in what Heather S. Nathans has identified as American drama’s first emancipation scene.¹¹

French Caribbean influences also assist in the play’s resolutions. At the beginning of the final act, Beauchamp’s beautiful and destitute sister, Clementina, arrives in Philadelphia, putting an appealing face on the consequences of Caribbean slave revolts. Clementina charmingly declares herself “wretched and unfortunate,” deprived of her wealth and sent down a path strewn with “distress and sorrow” (69–70). George, infatuated with his friend’s sister, completes his reform by marrying the lovely refugee just as Beauchamp returns to Philadelphia. The Triumphs of Love, although at first marking their difference, finally incorporates St. Domingue’s refugees into the American social landscape. Murdock’s play ultimately embodies them as strangely attractive aliens, victims of distant but somehow intimately familiar violence, outsiders finally naturalized into the American family through the performance of shared trauma.

As Murdock’s script and other performances suggest, the Haitian Revolution exercised profound influences on American popular culture and everyday life. Those influences operated in complex, multifaceted, and sometimes repressed or obscured ways.¹² As Sibylle Fischer has persuasively argued, responses to the Haitian Revolution were characterized by “fantasy, paranoia, identificatory desires, and disavowal”; ultimately, “imaginary scenarios became the real battleground.”¹³ Moreover, the slow-moving processes of repression and substitution that Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes as the “general silencing” of the Haitian Revolution appear to have been already at work in the 1790s.¹⁴

Murdock’s play, of course, is hardly innocent of such tendencies, nor would we expect it to be. On the contrary, it participates fully in the shared practices that formed, reformed, and deformed other representations of St. Domingue and its slave revolution. Even if, as Trouillot powerfully argued, the revolution was politically or historically “unthinkable,” its histories have hardly been characterized by a simple lack of representation. Instead, the Haitian Revolution was transformed into the raw material for amusements, and Murdock’s play shows just this: the Haitian Revolution becomes “diversion,” first diverted or repressed, and then returning as play or entertainment—as seeming distraction. Of course, the entertaining deflection of St. Domingue’s slave revolts into play does not necessarily make for resolution. The process does, however, seem to reroute representation into non-narrative, antidiscursive, and extralinguistic modes. In its diversion, the Haitian Revolution inspired pantomime, gesticulation, song, and dance. Staging scene and scenario, the theater indirectly embodied the effects of the Haitian Revolution. If the stage never contemplated the epic horror of the actual revolution, the ghostly presence of revolution nevertheless shaped costume, complexion, mask, gesture, accent, mannerism, and style. Making meaning through allusion, association, innuendo, and exaggeration, performances such as The Triumphs of Love trafficked in complex emotions, desires, and fantasies. Theater’s paradoxical formal blend of disguise and open display lent itself to the task of characterizing the Haitian Revolution’s broader impact on North American culture.¹⁵

The Triumphs of Love codes representations of the Haitian Revolution using theater’s ambivalent forms. Taking those ambivalent and coded meanings into account usefully foregrounds the challenges of understanding how contexts and influences shape cultural expressions. The Triumphs of Love’s scenes appear within a matrix of related meanings. Murdock’s own personal responses to the Haitian Revolution were no doubt important; his perspective, of course, appeared before readers and spectators, each with their own individual interpretations. At the same time, theatrical acts meet their audiences through preexisting theatrical conventions; those practices make acts legible not simply as individual actions but as variations on types. Plays and other performances also occur at sites that lend specific meanings to the act; other factors such as actors, troupes, and occasional contexts contributed to the meaning as well. Those specific scenarios of performance, moreover, are nestled within broader matrices of related cultural meanings. In the case of The Triumphs of Love, the broadly understood traits of French Atlantic people and unruly slaves articulate a complex of assumptions (many unspoken) about national identity, gender roles, racialized characteristics, socioeconomic standing, and political attitudes. Those assumptions were shaped, of course, by collectively held experiences, practices, discourses, perceptions, and assumptions, which drew upon—among other influences—theatrical and social performances.

Murdock’s play carries out conflicted cultural work, gathering audience members around unthinkable scenes displayed in conventional forms. St. Domingue’s refugees, fleeing scenes of racialized violence, act out nothing more perilous than the risk of not making an idealized love match, but their amusements seem dangerously freighted with the horrors of slave rebellion. Familiar characters, predictable plots, and recognizable generic forms seem loaded with implications in the context of the Haitian Revolution. Slavery and freedom, violence and revolution, all inform the comedic performance, although their threats are ultimately defused by happy reconciliations and marital unions.

At the same time, as the play enfolds the problems of the Haitian Revolution within dramatic conventions, those threats could just as well be seen as driving the plot, with the horrors of slave revolt steering the course of sentimental comedy. Anxieties about slave revolt transform dramatic tensions, heightening the stakes of traditional forms. Even as the play masks the revolution’s full import behind lighthearted amusements, the Haitian Revolution has inexorably shifted the implications of such conventions, and Murdock’s characters display St. Domingue’s corporeal consequences. At the end of the play, the refugees, for example, form a Creole pairing—a potential transnational New World family, innovating upon the usual comic conclusion. The misbehavior of unruly slaves displays veiled threats, embodying the contagious influence of slave revolution. As a response to slave revolt, the play thus radically reimagines sentimental comedy as a product of, and perhaps a performative antidote to, revolutionary black violence.

The play’s cultural work, moreover, surpassed the boundaries of the early national playhouse. Its characters and scenes permeated the popular imagination and shaped offstage social interactions. St. Domingue’s refugees brought new social performances to everyday life in North America, new ways of presenting identity, and new cultural affiliations. Rebellious slaves and fleeing refugees operated as distinctive social types and enacted competing versions of the Haitian Revolution in public. Such offstage acts, independent from the stage but sharing its forms, techniques, and theatrical principles, show the dispersed kinds of cultural work in which theater took part—the business of embodying slave revolt, of transforming its consequences into entertainment, and of gathering audiences around those scenes. The Triumphs of Love shows theatrical texts and social performances each borrowing from and influencing the other. That interplay appears particularly intense in a Philadelphia setting shaped by the Haitian Revolution’s radically new characters, scenes, and historical plots.

Typical of sentimental comedy, as Lisa Freeman has argued, The Triumphs of Love addresses the problems of “good breeding” in changing social contexts.¹⁶ Murdock’s play stages a struggle over the character of America’s rising youth, setting its conflicts in an early national Philadelphia profoundly altered by slave revolt and the presence of problematic Creole intercultures. The play’s early scenes center on the youthful follies and eventual reform of its Quaker protagonist, George Friendly Jr., George’s elders worry that “the rank weeds of vice will overgrow the seeds of virtue” (14). Those vices are cultivated by George’s friend Beauchamp, a cosmopolitan French planter with ties to St. Domingue. George celebrates his attachment to Beauchamp, remarking that he is, of “all the young foreigners I am acquainted with, that youth I most esteem”(38). George’s affection, cemented by “an hour in young Beauchamp’s company,” models a profound and immediate attraction to St. Domingue’s refugees, a transcending of cultural and national differences through the bonding power of privileged male fraternization (38).

George’s attraction to French style and culture spurs a sort of moral panic in the play’s imagined world. Beauchamp underwrites a freewheeling, alluring, and rakish youth culture that leads George away from traditional Quaker ideals and into extravagant, dissolute bachelorhood. At times, their youthful sport takes on tones of boisterous homoeroticism, as when George poses as a “damn’d great Frenchman,” donning a mask with a suggestively long nose and pursuing a friend with threatening swordplay (48–49).¹⁷ French Caribbean influences seem both playfully rakish and suggestively threatening. Murdock’s script seems itself ambivalent about such transgressive and entertaining influences, working to contain the threats even as it conjures them up for the audience’s pleasure.

However, as if unable to resolve these tensions, Murdock’s script temporarily dismisses Beauchamp, turning away from such dangerous fun. The unrest in St. Domingue requires his return to Cap-Français, the “very jaws of hell” (71). First bringing Beauchamp to Philadelphia, the exigencies of slave revolt then separate the young protagonists and enable George’s reform. After the Frenchman’s departure, the play displaces George’s desires onto Beauchamp’s sister, Clementina, another “of the late sufferers of St. Domingo” (81). First appearing in the play’s fourth act, Clementina tearfully claims the “privilege of the wretched and unfortunate,” to relate her journey to Philadelphia:

I was in the full enjoyment of all the luxuries of life—and in one day, obliged to fly my country and possessions, with some few hundred dollars: thought myself fortunate in getting a passage for this famed country of liberty and tranquility. But was arrested by the way, by cruel pirates, and stripped of the remnant of my fortune, save a few dollars the relentful [sic] savages left me: and here I am, a wretched refugee; reduced almost to the last extremity. (69–70)

Alone, impoverished, and traumatized by pirates and rebellious slaves, Clementina tells a gripping tale of exceptional suffering. “Oh, who is like unto me,” she asks rhetorically, “in so short a time to experience such a reverse of fortune?” (70). Clementina’s predicament feminizes the refugee dilemma, turning the drama’s attention from the pleasures of cosmopolitan debauchery to the more sentimental pleasures offered by helpless, destitute women.

Those pleasures, of course, produce their own consequences, effects whose seriousness it is a real challenge to decipher. George’s friend Trifle, for example, enthusiastically pursues a mixed-race French woman, presumably one of the many slaves and servants of color brought to Philadelphia by the island insurrection. Alongside fantasies of pitiable but attractive white refugees like Clementina, Murdock’s play suggests, slave revolution also produces erotic visions of exotic Caribbean women, racially marked characters whose complexion is “superior to all our boasted fair whites and reds” (19–20). Trifle’s racialized desire adds interracial attraction to the list of slave revolt’s consequences, enacting an illicit version of George’s attraction to Clementina.

Taken together, Murdock’s French-Caribbean brother and sister embody a beautified, culturally acceptable form of the trauma of slave revolt, distracting the audience’s gaze from the Haitian Revolution’s offstage horrors. As Clementina’s self-indulgent monologue suggests, the play positions them as the distinctive victims of extraordinary hardships. At the same time, Murdock’s script uses the refugees to promote transnational Creole identifications and transcultural sympathies, paradoxically converting the horrors of St. Domingue into refined cosmopolitan American pleasures. In the end, the play’s exiles allow Anglo-Americans—both on and off the stage—to imagine the United States as itself proudly exceptional, a haven from slave revolt, a “great asylum of the unfortunate and persecuted of all the earth!”(56).¹⁸

Murdock and his audience responded to offstage slave revolts and refugees in varied ways. Especially before 1793, white Americans could envision St. Domingue’s slave revolts as a kindred revolution along with the French Revolution, admiring their colorblind extension of universal rights. White radicals such as the New Englander Abraham Bishop, for example, could advocate black rights and openly praise the uprisings.¹⁹ Other observers, however, reacted with fear and paranoia, while still others sympathized with refugees while condemning them for allowing the slave revolt to happen. Moreover, the presence of a certain number of free gens de couleur and mixed-race slaves troubled North American racial categories, and white Americans oscillated between expressions of solidarity and assertions of difference. In addition, local, national, hemispheric, and intercultural politics created reactions “rife with inconsistency and hairsplitting logic,” as Ashli White has observed.²⁰ Of course, St. Domingue’s slave revolts could carry entirely different connotations for black onlookers, who could see positive examples or inspiration in St. Domingue’s uprisings. The slaves and servants of refugees, moreover, helped spread news of the Haitian Revolution and the political cultures of black Americans.²¹ The Triumphs of Love, oscillating between sympathy for and suspicion of St. Domingue’s refugees, dramatizes Americans’ initial collective ambivalence about the Haitian Revolution.

Despite some ambivalence, the dominant American public mood seemed sympathetic toward the exiles after the 1793 burning of Cap-Français. Those refugees, moreover, took active roles in Philadelphia’s public life, and Murdock’s play participated in an emergent culture of refugee display. For example, theaters began offering benefit nights in the 1790s, donating proceeds to the “unfortunate St. Domingo sufferers” who had arrived in the United States.²² Outside playhouses, newspaper announcements kept the sufferings of French refugees on exhibit, and the exiles themselves printed an impressive number of scholarly monographs, newspapers, broadsides, gazettes, songs, poems, speeches, and advertisements. In print and public performance, the refugees thus found or put themselves on display, sometimes achieving a sort of celebrity status.²³

French newcomers also offered language, music, art, and dance lessons, attempting to use social performance to capitalize both upon their cultured reputations and their supposed victimization by rebellious slaves. One newspaper notice, for example, announced the 1794 arrival of a “young married Man,” his wife, and three brothers, whom “the disturbances of St. Domingo have driven to America for an asylum.” Hoping to “procure for his family those comforts to which they have been accustomed,” he advertised music, dancing, and drawing lessons, the “fruits of his education.”²⁴ Attempting to recreate or perpetuate prestigious performances of Caribbean gentility, the lessons also offered access to those leisure practices. In the end, such lessons attempted to translate a lost aristocratic plantation lifestyle into material wealth.

Exhibitions of Creole refinement did not always result in profit, of course, and former islanders sometimes resorted to more extreme measures. The same advertisement also offers for sale two dozen silver-handled knives, a “remnant of his fortune.” As St. Domingue’s refugees sometimes did, the advertiser performed elegant destitution, simultaneously displaying gentility and material want. The knives became props for the act, at once “handsome” reminders of former wealth and luxurious sublimations of the violence that had driven the refined sufferers into exile. The display of cultured misfortune before a backdrop of imagined black violence, of course, explicitly aimed at recreating the familiar luxuries of St. Domingue. Such acts suggest a certain resilience in exile, the ability to transport cultural performances and adapt them in a strange land. They also reveal the lines of cultural and economic continuity between Caribbean plantations and North American cities; with the sympathy and economic support of many Americans, exiles used cultural performances to restore lost modes of social dominance. Others noticed such connections as well. Leonora Sansay, the onetime companion to Aaron Burr and planter’s wife who fled St. Domingue before fictionalizing her experiences in the 1808 novel Secret History, or, the Horrors of St. Domingo, remarked upon the exiles’ urge to reproduce the “expensive pleasures” of St. Domingue.²⁵ Refugees transformed the consequences of slave revolt into resources for transcultural exchange, as Sansay (perhaps with some self-consciousness) both observed and demonstrated.

While The Triumphs of Love participates in the public reception of St. Domingue’s refugees, the North American stage also saw visible and distinctive performances by and about those refugees. In the early 1790s, a prominent group of francophone actors appeared in North American cities from Charleston to Boston. Itinerant French actors, some fleeing the French Revolution, had appeared on American stages at the beginning of the decade, but Caribbean revolution made them a permanent, if peripatetic, presence in American theaters. From 1792 onwards, audiences in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston attended entertainments headlined by Alexandre Placide, who had achieved European success as the “first rope dancer to the king of France” before pursuing his trade for three years in St. Domingue.²⁶ Driven northward by the slave revolts, Placide and his imported actors settled in Charleston from 1794 to 1797. After a few years as a separate troupe, they integrated into Anglo-American companies and circulated among the cities of the eastern seaboard.

Those actors became some of St. Domingue’s most visible exiles. Appearing night after night before American audiences, their performances evoked their misfortunes as well as their sophisticated, cosmopolitan ability to traverse boundaries between languages and cultures. St. Domingue’s actor-refugees exercised an appeal reminiscent of Murdock’s fictional exiles. Their hospitable reception in South Carolina, for example, reveals cosmopolitan attraction and sympathy. Announcing the actors’ arrival from St. Domingue, the Charleston City Gazette argued that the twin titles of “French” and “unfortunate men” ought to “recommend them to the public benevolence.”²⁷ Audiences in other locales also greeted St. Domingue’s refugees with a sense of transnational mutuality based on common economic and racial privileges, shared fears of slave revolt, and the transcultural appeal of Franco-Atlantic theatrical styles. The refugee success also reveals the readiness of North American entertainment institutions to accommodate certain kinds of outsiders.

Although none of the actors in Murdock’s play appears to be a known refugee, St. Dominguan actors had appeared regularly on Philadelphia stages during the decade, and thus, Murdock’s refugee characters appeared in close proximity to both offstage refugees and refugee actors. The year before The Triumphs of Love premiered, French performers had appeared at Philadelphia’s Cedar Street Theatre, a seasonal competitor of the New Theatre. A well-known dancer and pantomime performer, Madame Gardie, appeared at the New Theatre itself in 1794.²⁸ Gardie, displaying on stage “all the fascinating vivacity of her nation,” became famous as the “principal attraction” of “the first introduction of serious pantomime on our stage.”²⁹ In June 1794, Gardie had shared her season-ending benefit with Miss Willems, the Anglo-American actor who played Clementina in Triumphs of Love.³⁰ A few weeks after the premier of Murdock’s play in 1795, Gardie moved northward, appearing in New York City theater notices.

The acting exiles had a significant impact on Anglo-American theater, and we might image Murdock’s characters as appearing in the context of a North American entertainment industry that had been subtly but profoundly altered by the presence of the French performers. Primarily, they introduced their conventional repertoire, bringing French dramas and associated performance styles to American audiences.³¹ Philadelphia audiences, for example, witnessed one of the more evocative productions of St. Dominguan exiles when they performed Mirza and Lindor, a Parisian operatic export dramatizing competition for the affections of a Creole woman against a background of black Caribbean violence. The play, first produced in 1779, predates St. Domingue’s slave uprisings, but its themes were perhaps newly evocative in the 1790s, and even more so in the hands of exile actors.³² Placide introduced the play to Boston in 1793, and the growing troupe then developed the play into a pantomime extravaganza by 1794. Set on Martinique, the “Grand, Historical, and Tragi-Heroic Pantomime” staged colonial conflicts among French soldiers, Spanish privateers, and Caribbean “savages,” some “dressed in the real custom of those in South-America.” Under the direction of Jean Baptiste Francisquy, a French dancer and choreographer who had performed in France, Martinique, St. Domingue, and Charleston, the actors performed a “Military Evolution with the savages, to remind the Governor of the manner the Europeans and the Savages formerly went to War.”³³ The play featured numerous blackface roles and dances in character, relying for effect on racial mimicry and performances presented as authentically Caribbean. Advertisements listed a “minuet de la nation,” three “savage” dances (one a “pas de cinq” including a child actor), a “Negro dance” and a “Creole dance.”³⁴

When Philip Lailson, a Swedish circus entrepreneur who had come to the United States from France in 1796, brought the play to Philadelphia with other francophone actors, it carried the subtitle “The First Adventurers in America.” The play still featured blackface roles; former Philadelphia star Susanna Haswell Rowson, for example, played Zoé, a servant (presumably darker-skinned), while some of the French actors appeared as six “Negro musicians.” A number of local amateurs also appeared as supporting cast alongside the French refugees.³⁵ As an exile performance in the 1790s, the pantomime presents a wishful mythology of French Caribbean colonial conflicts. Dancing servants and Spanish corsairs stand in for rebelling slaves; only the “Savages,” now cowed by the ceremonial exercises of French soldiers, represent the distant memory of island unrest. The scenes seem evocative and wishful, for, as revolts drove slaveholders from their St. Domingue plantations, actors in exile celebrated the supremacy of colonial masters over rebellious islanders and threatening outsiders.

The refugees also altered Anglo-American plays to feature threatening blackface and Caribbean conflict. In 1796, for example, they acted in a New York City production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s pantomime version of Robinson Crusoe, in which exiles (including the famous Madame Gardie) arranged and executed “Negro” and “Savage” dances. In scenes that must have resonated with the refugees’ estrangement from both France and St. Domingue, the pantomime staged the “deplorable situation” on Crusoe’s island and ended by celebrating the hero’s “return to his native country.” Victor Pelissier, a musician from Cap-Français, and Monsieur Francisquy, another refugee who had co-managed the Charleston troupe with Placide, composed new music and dances for the pantomime, transforming Crusoe’s English colonial adventure into a transcultural, trans-imperial display of Caribbean unrest and triumphal homecomings.³⁶ In effect, French refugees reenacted nostalgic, even reactionary, revisions of their contemporary revolutionary Caribbean. Such theatricals share with Murdock’s play a subjunctive desire to reconstruct or deflect the horrors of Caribbean insurrection and exile.

Those refugee performances literally profited from collective desires to stage the dramas and counter the traumas of St. Domingue. The trouble with representing the Haitian Revolution’s refugees, however, was that they inevitably reminded audiences of the slave revolts whose presence they seem to want to repress. As Simon P. Newman has argued, the “very presence” of French refugees continued to evoke “the specter of black insurrection.”³⁷ In The Triumphs of Love, the specter of Haiti arguably appears in the character of Sambo. As a conventional figure of blackness, Sambo operates in the stage tradition of wildly kinetic black servants, including most famously the servant Mungo in Isaac Bickerstaff’s 1768 comic opera, The Padlock.³⁸ As David Worrall has noted, William Bates, the white actor who played Sambo in blackface in the Philadelphia production, had also written the successful Harlequin Mungo, a musical pantomime that premiered in 1787 at the Royalty Theatre in London’s East End.³⁹

Although a conventional type, Bates’s character seems to have taken on edgy and tense overtones in his new American contexts. After Sambo gains his freedom in the American stage’s first manumission scene, he parrots French radical slogans and songs, comically reenacting St. Domingue’s black revolution. Following these cues, the play’s producers presented Sambo as an example of the incendiary influence of the Caribbean; a prologue spoken before the play declares the slave “caught” by the flames of revolt spreading to the United States.⁴⁰ Sambo’s misbehavior, though framed as comedy, also appears part of a northward-creeping contagion of slave revolt. As one reviewer wrote, Sambo seemed “calculated to irritate the risible muscles.”⁴¹ His antics, as the review’s language suggests, appear at once exasperating and laughable, both provoking and pleasing. His disorder energizes the play against the white characters’ ideals of sedate and sentimental behavior. Performing the pleasures of black rebelliousness, Sambo adds a shrewd and even celebratory brand of low comedy to the play.

Sambo’s rebellion operates by imitation and mimicry; his behavior becomes for a time the play’s primary joke as well as its overwhelming problem. Sambo takes cues indiscriminately from his master, radical French republicans, and other freed slaves, threatening to hijack the plot. In his first scene, for example, he plays the trickster servant, reading George’s confidential note and scheming to take over his master’s role, becoming a “rogue among fair sex too” (19). Later in the first act, Sambo imitates George’s song, a rakish celebration of the pleasures of elite misbehavior. Sambo declares his desire (in characteristic stage dialect) to “trife [trifle] time away” as his master does (19). The slave transforms servile imitation into kinetic, celebratory, and unruly blackness. Sambo’s stage dialect and comic malapropisms, of course, may dilute any real social critique in scorn for his servile aping. Nevertheless, Sambo’s act repeats with a difference—he does not simply imagine a life of privilege; he performs freedom from slavery. Significantly, his mimicry occurs after George’s exit; then, Sambo dominates the stage for a brief scene, supplanting his master while imagining elite leisure.

Murdock’s script presents Sambo as a counterfeiter mimicking an imitation—George’s rakishness is itself a pose, a mannered performance of faux-roguishness. Sambo’s mimicry thus answers George’s act in kind while compounding his master’s act with threatening black male sexuality. Moreover, the tangled composite of imitations and substitutions appears in a layered, black-on-white figure of stylized racial mimicry. Sambo’s blackface appears in a sequence of masked acts with no discernible original, a hall of mirrors invoking extended Atlantic genealogies of racial performance. Of course, Murdock’s play does not deploy its racial counterfeit as self-consciously as would minstrelsy of the 1820s and 1830s, with its knowing jokes about burnt-cork makeup and genuine imitations.⁴² Nevertheless, The Triumphs of Love revels in the problems of George and Sambo’s mirror-image mutual mimicry; the play seems aware of the complications and implications of racial representation on the American stage, but also willing to transform such tensions into casual entertainment.

Even as it presents Sambo’s mimicking misbehavior, Murdock’s play works to control that unruly knot of imitations. In one of the play’s more sentimental and serious scenes, George manumits the still imitative (but now grateful) Sambo. In the act of freeing Sambo, the play tries to redirect the slave’s energies, refiguring his imitative capacity as the desire for improvement. Sambo earns the respect of his master with an “untutored, pathetic soliloquy” that George overhears in the third act (52). It also reveals a keen understanding of the ways African Americans could appropriate conventions of black theatricality. Sambo declares himself “handsome” and “berry complish’d” in singing, dancing, and fiddling; his performance provides proof that “we negro improbe berry much” (52). Observing that he can “tink so, so, pretty well,” he goes on to wonder in the third person, “why he slave to white man? Why black foke sold like cow or horse?” (52). Slavery, he asserts, opposes the will of “de great somebody above”; certainly, his bondage runs counter to the emergent abolitionism of the late eighteenth century (52). Although favored with the “bess massa in e world,” Sambo laments his continued dependence and vulnerability to the harsh contingencies of a slaveholding society. Overhearing those ruminations “sensibly” affects George, and he grants Sambo his freedom, offering him the option of remaining on wages or leaving (52). Sambo’s habitual mimicry, despite its unruliness, thus enables his freedom. George’s friend Careless, for example, opposes manumission, declaring that slaves, “after they are set free, become vicious.”⁴³ Although the more enlightened George rejects this as a justification for slavery, he still declares Sambo in “want of education” and post-emancipation guidance (52).

Sambo’s sentiments echo the Quaker-inflected rhetoric of Philadelphia’s abolitionists, including the prominent doctor and public figure Benjamin Rush, who supported the publication of Murdock’s play with a subscription for six copies.⁴⁴ The sentiments reassuringly echo the conventional wisdom of late eighteenth-century abolitionism, which sometimes argued, as Benjamin Rush had, that slavery produced “habits of vice” which freedom would only exacerbate.⁴⁵ For George (and perhaps for the audience as well), the black mimicry of white thought becomes a gratifying demonstration of Sambo’s capacity for humanity, proof he deserves freedom. More pointedly, it offers a critique of white abolition’s appetite for pleasurably progressive performances. Sambo’s manumission requires him to repeat abolitionist platitudes in another entertaining act, a sentimentalized counterpart to his singing, dancing, or fiddling. For George, the act of manumission itself becomes one of the most “luxurious gratifications” imaginable (53).

Participating in the pleasures of manumission, Sambo shares or mimics George’s pleasure, declaring himself full to bursting with emotion. In another of the play’s proto-minstrelsy scenes, the former slave declares his desire to “dance and sing,” now “more happy dan a king” (53). Sambo sings complex sentiments; elevating slave above king, his lyrics articulate a kind of carnivalesque inversion. At the same time, Sambo declares himself satisfied with emancipation—imagining himself as a king may be just another act of servile mimicry. Sambo’s celebratory injunction to dance and sing (made famous in plays such as George Colman’s 1787 Inkle and Yarico) perhaps seemed a clichéd act of ethnically or racially marked characters by the 1790s. At the same time, the moment also provides a foretaste of the nineteenth-century minstrel show as Sambo’s act takes center stage, briefly advancing the alluring, charismatic stage presence of blackness. Despite the limitations of his performance, Sambo’s act displays an appealing black theatricality. The freed slave dances around the politically charged desires to supplant his master and become a king, putting the theatrical charisma of blackness on display. Starting off as mere mimicry, Sambo’s act quickly turns into a celebration of the pleasures and even the allure of black performance that would characterize later blackface minstrelsy.⁴⁶

In freedom, Sambo’s threatening antics trouble the play further. Baffling the constraints of racial paternalism, he eludes George’s benevolence and makes the imagined consequences of black freedom central to the play’s meaning. In the third act, the newly freed Sambo celebrates his manumission with Caesar and Pompey, two other black characters. Entering “with two candles, reeling and singing,” he sings a garbled but recognizable rendition of “La Carmagnole” and drunkenly repeats “liberty and quality for eber and eber” (67). Read one way, the scene mocks black imitators of the French Revolution, ridiculing revolution’s decline into hiccupping drunkenness—“liberty and quality, heighup, forever” (69). History’s grand dramas repeat, as Marx would later observe, in the form of farce.⁴⁷ Sambo’s slogans stage the dismissive notion that St. Domingue’s “Black Jacobins” were merely servile imitators of the French Revolution.⁴⁸

Such scenes can be seen as restaging early national anxieties about French-inspired black radicalism. The stage blackening of French radicalism appeared in other settings, as in a 1797 Boston production of John O’Keefe’s The Poor Soldier. When local political disputes generated controversy over “Bagatelle,” a white character satirizing French revolutionary republicanism, the managers rewrote him as the black valet “Domingo.”⁴⁹ The move seems slippery, signaling the ongoing Haitian Revolution while somehow appearing more comedic and less controversial when masked behind burnt-cork makeup. Like Murdock’s characters in The Triumphs of Love, the 1797 rewrite of The Poor Soldier reveals the ease with which conventions of performance and spectatorship could reconfigure radical blackness as light comedy. Such scenes participate in the general silencing of the Haitian Revolution, not simply by repressing it, but by reformulating dangerous behavior while nevertheless keeping it near at hand—by making a joke of black insubordination.

Although a drunken slave certainly does not seem very politically dangerous, Sambo’s actions implicitly acknowledge the radical potential of black fraternization. Exercising their newfound freedom, Sambo and his inebriated cohort become “mischievous rogues” (68).⁵⁰ They appear in Murdock’s script dangerously uncontrolled, literally intoxicated with revolution. When George orders him quieted, Sambo resists, violently hiccupping his right to liberty and equality. French radicalism and black freedom, the scene suggests, produce dangerously proud former slaves, and St. Domingue had made such combinations increasingly dangerous. Slaves from the French Caribbean, numbering perhaps a third of all St. Domingue’s refugees, were widely regarded as an alien and potentially revolutionary presence. In the mid-1790s, reports reached North America, for example, of Caribbean rebels displaying French cockades; closer to home, “impudent” black Americans, as Simon Newman has observed, appropriated French revolutionary symbols such as Phrygian caps and liberty poles to promote “FREEDOM TO AFRICANS” in the 1790s.⁵¹ In the nineteenth century, Americans increasingly heard of regular, organized black celebrations of French radicalism and Haitian independence. Observers linked St. Domingue’s slaves to various plots and uprisings, ranging from spates of arson in the 1790s to Gabriel’s 1802 rebellion in Richmond.⁵² In Philadelphia itself, refugee slaves increased the black population by 25 percent.⁵³ Onlookers suspected that these “French Negroes,” as they were often called, plotted revolt, spread unrest, and modeled general bad behavior for other black Americans.⁵⁴ Legal records indicate that slaves brought by St. Domingue refugees frequently resisted or fled bondage. Gary Nash has found at least 43 advertisements in Philadelphia newspapers for runaway francophone slaves between 1791 and 1797; during the same years, 90 of the 244 runaways listed in the city’s Vagrancy Dockets were francophone slaves and servants.⁵⁵ With the disruption of mastery through gradual emancipation as well as immediate escapes, Philadelphia’s francophone black population seemed increasingly uncontrolled and potentially insubordinate.

Slaves from the French Caribbean may have appeared conspicuously in public spaces; they may have spoken French, Caribbean, or African languages; when they spoke English, it may have been in patois or pidgin forms, or with distinctive accents. And they did not always need to speak, their identity often discernible by distinctive clothing and sometimes branding.⁵⁶ At times, such people parlayed their alien appearance into cannily staged performances. A young slave named Tower, for example, escaped from Baltimore in 1793 and headed toward Philadelphia. Wearing a “striped jacket, with sleeves, in the fashion of a sailor’s” and walking “with a considerable swing” in his “somewhat bow leged [sic]” gait, Tower either had some maritime experience or passed as a sailor. Of course, both ability and pretense could help an escaping slave, especially if Tower intended to travel the same nautical routes that shuttled black sailors and news of revolution to and from St. Domingue. The owner also presumed that Tower, having absconded with some cash, would likely change his appearance. The slave apparently spoke “a little French” and was “known to have put a striped ribbon round his hat,” and his owner speculated that Tower would “attempt to pass as one who lately came in the fleet from Cape François.⁵⁷ The owner suspected that his slave would take on multiple roles in his escape. Tower could pose as a sailor, manipulating the expectations of mobile and sometimes free sailors, and he must have appeared light-skinned enough to pass as a refugee, blending in with the recent dramatic arrival of mixed-race foreigners. If nothing else, the runaway could signal support of French republicanism with his tricolor ribbon and his repertoire of French phrases, perhaps stirring fellow feeling among American supporters of the French Revolution. Tower’s theatrical escape reveals a subtle and cunning manipulation of the forms of theatrical self-display shaped by the Haitian Revolution. His act also reveals the potentially destabilizing effects caused by public displays of St. Domingue’s refugees. Tower performed black freedom in a public arena that mustered spectators’ abilities to detect runaways—a stage, as Tower knew, on which the field of possible social performances had multiplied radically with the arrival of the St. Domingue refugees.

Official records of St. Domingue’s darker-skinned refugees, although certainly failing to capture their full experiences, suggest that outsiders perceived them to move in cryptic and sporadically visible circles. When they achieve visibility in the official record, “French Negroes” often appear as fugitives, running and dodging the policing regime of slavery. One of the more spectacular and apparently alarming performances of St. Domingue appears in an 1804 newspaper account of black Philadelphians who transformed Fourth of July festivities into a local reenactment of St. Domingue’s revolutionary violence. The report echoes and perpetuates the notion that unrestrained blacks might enact violent imitations of St. Domingue, confederating and causing trouble in North American cities. The account claims “a considerable number of strange black people” loitering about, blaming the disturbance on intrusive outsiders. As the black celebrants gathered in the streets, they allegedly threatened bystanders and even performed acts of violence. Reaching a fever pitch, the outraged accounts culminate with the black celebrants’ threats to “shew them St. Domingo!”⁵⁸ The event, with its display of threatening mimicry, constitutes theatrical behavior; the account itself seems unabashedly theatrical as well, displaying in print a crowd of threatening aliens whose unruliness finally erupts into violence. Ultimately, the suspicious account turns on the uttered threat to repeat and perhaps surpass the spectacular violence of St. Domingue.

Such reports of runaway, unruly, and theatricalized “French Negroes” reveal the depth of the alarm caused by St. Domingue. Caribbean revolt seemed to inspire formless fears of contaminating influences, secret communications, illicit associations, and underground networks. Working through those channels, St. Domingue’s slave uprisings seemed to produce a performing black population whose acts escaped the regulation of playhouse conventions and benevolent masters. Against the background of those threats, The Triumphs of Love stages its own imitations of radical black performances. As white performers black up and give comedic form to representations of violent blackness, the stage seems compelled, at least for a brief moment, to respond to the rebellious black figures appearing just offstage.

Sambo perpetrates his comic misbehavior until the play no longer requires (or tolerates) his presence. At the end of the third act, he disappears without explanation, shepherded offstage by the invisible hand of Murdock’s script. Sambo’s disappearance seems symptomatic of the play’s anxieties—like contemporary advocates of African colonization, Murdock’s plot seems unable to imagine freed slaves remaining on stage alongside the drama’s white protagonists. The play’s shift in focus also enfolds Sambo’s black unruliness within the drama of refugee union and reunion, clearing the way for a dramatic revision of the Haitian Revolution’s consequences. As if to neutralize the performative influence of Sambo’s unruliness, the final act of Murdock’s play returns to the marital storyline, resolving George’s youthful rebellion and the refugees’ penury. In the end, Murdock’s Philadelphia plays host to the reconciliation of the tensions produced by the Haitian Revolution. Freed slaves disappear conveniently, leaving former slaveholders to work out their differences. George’s marriage to Clementina allies the newly abolitionist reformed Quaker with the no-longer slaveholding French Caribbean, thereby imagining a creolized hemispheric union as a magical solution for slave revolt.

Sentimental comedy, as Lisa Freeman has argued, revolves around “the relations that sustain the public and private spheres, that is, who will breed with whom, on what basis, and with what prospects ensured for future offspring.” Having finished with Sambo, The Triumphs of Love turns to those concerns with an almost manic energy.⁵⁹ George has fallen in love with Clementina sight unseen, before she arrives in Philadelphia; upon meeting her, he declares himself “caught in love’s trap, at last” (71). Despite Clementina’s impoverishment, George presses ahead with his suit, and the two engage in an accelerated courtship. The marriage seems remarkably rushed, George’s offers of brotherly kindness and monetary assistance transforming into ecstatic hand-kissing and longing looks with almost satirical speed. George’s union with Beauchamp’s sister becomes the ready-made solution to the corrupting influences of slavery and French rakishness. Clementina’s embodiment of “suffering virtue” and “honor” eclipses the play’s earlier concern with transgres sive desires (74). As a “young lady of most extraordinary beauty” whose race never comes under scrutiny, her match with George carefully avoids any insinuations of miscegenation (74). Clementina thus becomes the play’s single antidote to the double problem of refugeeism: racially unmarked, virtuous, and heterosexually available, she solves the twin problems of St. Domingue’s troubling blackness and dissolute homosociality that had earlier troubled the play.

Rescuing Clementina from her refugee hardships through marriage, the ending transforms George’s earlier French-lnspired dissipation into a newly virtuous kind of Francophilia. It seems significant, then, that Beauchamp returns in the closing moments of the play. Clementina, who has spoken unaccented English to this point, bursts into accented English (“my broder, my broder”) before declaring her happiness in French (82). Beauchamp echoes her vocal performance, declaring his own gratitude in French accents. Audibly, the play scripts the marriage not as a performance of assimilation, but as the formation of a transnational, multilingual Creole cohort. Beauchamp’s alien accents reintroduce French speech for the first time in the play since Sambo’s raucous departure at the end of the third act. The accented dialogue serves as a reminder—at once threatening and reassuring—of the strangers brought to American shores by St. Domingue’s slave revolution.

Perhaps predictably, those slave revolts remain in the realm of implication and rumor throughout the play; they never appear as more than a displaced (if not precisely unthinkable) horror, coded in suffering refugees and rowdy black Francophiles. Murdock’s play works energetically to enclose the threats of St. Domingue within conventional theatrical forms. Celebrating an alliance of reformed slaveholders, the play ultimately diverts attention from the troubling forms of black violence that lurk on its margins. Even so, the play has accomplished a nimble piece of cultural work, not simply unthinking slave revolt, but imagining how slave insurrection provides critical motive forces for social change. In The Triumphs of Love, slave revolt first generates conflict and then provides for its resolution, displaying alien refugees and rebellious slaves before transforming them into a transnational and hemispheric (and decidedly white) extended family. Slave revolution, however suppressed its details, provides the comedy’s symbolic complications and crucial opportunities. Perhaps most importantly, the play embodies the material consequences of the Haitian Revolution on stage before live audiences. The unruly black bodies and sentimentally suffering white refugees of St. Domingue appear intertwined in acts of mutual imitation, and St. Domingue’s slaves and refugees alike become vectors of dangerous and pleasurable theatricality. Finally, The Triumphs of Love reveals North American theater’s participation in circum-Atlantic networks that shaped and communicated various understandings of slave revolt. Clichéd dramatic conventions and novel social performances intersect in Murdock’s play, dramatizing the theatrical qualities of rebel slaves and refugees as well as the stage’s distinctive ways of displaying the Haitian Revolution’s impact.