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

On February 17, 2004, the U.S. cable news network CNN covered the burgeoning coup d’état in Haiti that would eventually force Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power and send him into exile in the Central African Republic. The broadcast began with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer announcing that “increasing violence” was “pushing the country closer toward complete chaos.” Blitzer then turned to David Ensor, a national security correspondent for CNN, who declared that though “Haiti is not strategically important … it is close by,” and he noted that the U.S. Coast Guard was on the watch for “desperate Haitians” who might try to “make the dangerous journey to U.S. shores.” Shortly afterward, the former ambassador to Haiti, William Jones, rather tersely used the myth of “Haitian exceptionalism” as a “shield that masks the negative contribution of the Western powers to the Haitian situation,”¹ when he suggested that he did not believe that the “American taxpayer should be saddled once again for coming in and trying to solve the problem in Haiti.”² What the CNN broadcast did not mention is the fact that many of the people to whom Ensor referred as “rebels” had U.S.-backed “paramilitary training”³ or that U.S. dollars were used to support both repressive Duvalier regimes long before the United States had decided to, in Ensor’s words, “help … to ease out a military government and oversee elections in the Caribbean nation.”⁴ The broadcast equally omitted the fact that the United States had funded the opposition to Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s candidacy in 1990 and had continued to fund opposition to him after he was democratically elected.⁵ Finally, there was no consideration given to the fact that the United States had been involved in destabilizing the Haitian government nineteen times between 1857 and the turn of the century alone (Bellegarde-Smith, 269), not to mention that the U.S. military had occupied Haiti from 1915–1934.⁶ By evoking such a notion of Haiti’s essential disconnectedness from the United States, the CNN broadcasters continued to mask the deep historical, political, and cultural relationship between the United States and Haiti, ultimately making it seem as if Haiti’s problems concerned the United States only insofar as the dollars of the U.S. “taxpayer” were concerned.⁷

Given the increasingly fractured interactions between Haiti and the United States that eventually culminated in what one critic has called the “alleged kidnapping of Aristide,”⁸ it would be more than tempting to conclude that Haitians have always been the victims of an unequivocally “bad press,” which they have been powerless to influence or respond to.⁹ However, if we examine the complicated dialogic interactions between early Haitian political writers and the northern U.S. newspaper press in the first two decades of Haitian independence, we find that the idea of Haiti as a powerless “apparent state”¹⁰ and of its early literary tradition as unimportant emerge as concepts of more recent date.

Literary reviews of Haitian works in nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers, advertisements for their books, and inclusion of their texts in U.S. libraries indicate that early U.S. American newspaper editors and readers living in the northern states were intimately acquainted with Haitian authors and in particular with the works of the Baron de Vastey (1781–1820).¹¹ Vastey composed at least eleven different prose works that all circulated either in the original or in English translation in the Atlantic world.¹² These works were variously concerned with promoting Haitian arts and letters, responding to calumnious French writing, decrying the evils of the colonial system, arguing with journalists from Alexandre Pétion’s republic, defending Africans and the “black race,” and most importantly, narrating the history of Haiti from a Haitian point of view.

Vastey’s works were reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic, and in fact, they were so powerfully received that a reviewer of his Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères referred to him as “the Alpha and Omega of Haytian intellect and literature”; a reviewer of his Le Système colonial dévoilé lauded his works as well, calling Vastey “the most able Haytian of the present era.”¹³ The Fireside Magazine or Monthly Entertainer (1819) also announced Le Système to its readers as a worthy piece of literature, while the Baltimore Patriot added to its mention of Vastey’s works that of all the “important State papers issued lately” by Haiti, Vastey’s Le Système “excites our particular interest.”¹⁴ A prior review of Vastey’s Le Cri de la conscience in the Boston Daily Advertiser and again in the Alexandria Gazette stated that Vastey’s writing was characterized by a “great zeal and ingenuity.”¹⁵ Furthermore, the reviewer was pleased to find that Vastey “quotes Grotius and other writers on public law with familiarity, and applies their maxims, with a good deal of judgment.”

In the eyes of Caleb Cushing, who provided a lengthy and much reprinted and referenced review of Vastey’s Réflexions politiques in the North American Review, a U.S. magazine known for its interest in Latin America and the Caribbean,¹⁶ “The works of M. de Vastey are very favourable specimens of the native mental force of a Haytian.”¹⁷ Yet another U.S. journalist wrote, after reprinting large passages of Vastey’s Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères: “We think these extracts cannot but leave a favourable impression on the minds of our readers, relative to the state of Haytian literature. And upon the whole, if we consider the state of the people in Hayti.”¹⁸

Northern U.S. newspaper editors who published these kinds of reviews assumed not only that their readers would be interested in Haitian literature, but that they would also be “cheer[ed]” by the “rapid progress of the intellectual culture” and “literary state of the negro or mulatto empire of Hayti.”¹⁹ In other words, these editors assumed that the U.S. reading public would be interested in knowing about Haitian literature and pleased to learn that it was worthy of their attention and praise.²⁰

Owing to what Meredith McGill has called a “culture of reprinting” in the early United States, “unauthorized”²¹ reprints of Vastey’s works were also disseminated across a broad spectrum by newspaper editors in the north, who printed his words sometimes with or sometimes without attribution. The numerous northern U.S. newspapers that referenced or otherwise made use of Vastey’s work thus helped to generate a vibrant anglophone audience for his texts. In fact, by the time of the U.S. Civil War, although Vastey himself was already deceased, his writings formed a distinct part of Haitian revolutionary historiography circulating in the anglophone world. Vastey was mentioned by name in the U.S. press before the Civil War more than any other Haitian writer throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. From a literary standpoint, his ideas were remarkably effective in helping shape and influence not just a United States based abolitionist movement,²² but northern U.S. discourse on Haitian recognition until at least 1825.

Because the early U.S. press was neither static nor homogenous, early nineteenth-century U.S. attitudes toward the existence of Haiti and Haitian writing were anything but monolithic. Before 1816 (and widespread circulation and reviews of Vastey’s works), Christophe’s government was highly criticized in the both the northern and southern U.S. presses. U.S. newspapers in the north that printed or reviewed Vastey’s works after 1816, however, tended to view Haiti favorably, intimately tying his ideas to northern U.S. notions of national identity. Vastey’s works thus became attached to and identified with some of the most important debates of the era—namely how best a nationstate should be governed, the meaning and consequences of revolution and universal emancipation, the emergence of national literary traditions, the capacity of blacks for self-rule, and the issue of international trade. Moreover, as this essay will show, Vastey’s ideas were crucial to the development of northern U.S. attitudes toward Haitian independence after 1816.

The U.S. newspaper press can provide an adequate measure of Vastey’s popularity and contribution to popular political opinion of Haiti in the United States precisely because, as Jeffrey Pasley has written, in early America the press “was the political system’s central institution.” In fact, according to Pasley, almost every little town in the early national United States had its own newspaper, which Pasley, quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, says helped “political life to circulate in every corner of the land.” Furthermore, these newspapers were “not simply a forum or atmosphere in which politics took place”; instead, they were the “ ‘linchpin’ ” of nineteenth-century politics.²³ Through the reproductions of Vastey’s works in these early U.S. newspapers, we can essentially chart not only the way that his ideas moved from state to state in the northern United States, but how they affected U.S. political opinions on northern Haiti in the early nineteenth century.

By reconsidering early Haitian-U.S. relations, in light of the heavy circulation of Vastey’s works in the northern United States, I find that the prorecognition arguments that often preceded reviews or reprints of Vastey’s publications complicates the idea that Haiti suffered a unilateral “bad press” in the nineteenth century that has influenced and overdetermined its relationship to the United States up until the present time.²⁴ For, contrary to popular belief, Haiti was not isolated by nonrecognition in the first two decades of independence, if by isolation we mean a lack of contact. Instead, Vastey—like the Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines and King Henry Christophe, the latter of whom addressed a letter to American merchants in the Republican Watch-Tower on July 28, 1809—understood the power of the U.S. press to influence popular ideas about Haiti and often used it to his own advantage.²⁵

The fact that both postcolonial and American studies have largely ignored a figure who was so central to the development of early U.S.-Haitian relations requires that we interrogate the silences surrounding Vastey’s works on a level beyond simply his usage of the French language or his seeming imitation of European forms of discourse. As Deborah Jenson and Daniel Desormeaux have each pointed out, Haitian authors have often been critiqued for practices that are considered standard in European and U.S. American literature.²⁶ The attempt of Haitian authors to distance the country from the former metropole while simultaneously making use of its language, some of its literary traditions, and even its audience, for example, was a strategy of all early postcolonial states, including the antebellum United States²⁷ (and according to Bakhtin characterizes all thought),²⁸ and does not make Haitian authors mimic men or the strange proponents of “collective bovarysme.”²⁹ Furthermore, the seeming absence of native readers for nineteenth-century political writing was not a singular feature of Haitian society either but was rather a constitutive element of most literate countries in the mid-nineteenth century.³⁰

The absence of early Haitian voices within the discourse of the Age of Revolution has led to a distortion of the Haitian intellectual’s role in what would come to be called “postcolonial discourse.” The silencing by the West of the Haitian revolutionists who, as Clinton A. Hutton has pointed out, were the first to argue for the cosmological basis of freedom and natural rights for all human beings regardless of skin color or “race,” reinforces the myth of the West as the generator of knowledge and knowing in both the philosophical and postcolonial traditions.³¹ Perhaps the most salient example of this comes when Hegel or Spinoza is considered to have originated the idea of the absolute logic of freedom, even though Toussaint Louverture espoused such a concept when he wrote, “It is not a circumstantial liberty conceded to us that we wish, but the unequivocal adoption of the principle that no man, whether he be born red, black or white, can become the property of his fellow men.”³² The silencing of Vastey’s own “radical anti-colonial” discourse as a part of what we now call postcolonial theory obscures the “provocative recontextualization of the Enlightenment as an ideology both illuminated and refashioned” not just by “slaves or former slaves,”³³ but by the very real, as opposed to apparent, states of early nineteenth-century Haiti. As J. Michael Dash has written, Vastey’s Le Système provides the “prototype of the voice of protest that would predict the end of the materialist Western World during the American Occupation.”³⁴ The 1971 Annual Report of the Library Company of Philadelphia anticipates Dash’s assessment of the avant la lettre nature of Vastey’s works in writing of his Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères that it was not only “a pioneer work in positive black thinking, but probably the first scholarly, serious socio-ethnological study by a Negro” and thus that it “deserve[s] a fate better than limbo.”³⁵ Without an acknowledgement and understanding of how former slaves and eventual statesmen like Louverture, Pétion, Christophe and Dessalines, along with their sometime allies Vastey, Louis-Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, Noël Colombel, Julien Prévost, and Jules Solime Milscent, theorized the postcolonial and indeed challenged the concept of Enlightenment humanism, we end up silencing their voices and thus reproducing the very power structures that we are striving to critique.

The silencing of Vastey’s work indicates a serious disciplinary problem for early American studies as well, for it seems to me that the majority of studies concerning U.S.-Haitian relations have been too “U.S.-centric,” to use Carol Boyce Davies’s term.³⁶ In other words, too much attention has been paid to U.S. reactions to and readings of the Haitian Revolution—or what Mimi Sheller has called the “Haytian Fear”³⁷—at the expense of analyzing the Haitian reaction to U.S. nonrecognition, on the one hand, and Haitian reactions and contributions to U.S. readings of their revolution, on the other.³⁸ In fact, U.S.-centricity or “one-centeredness” has had a particularly stifling affect upon Americanists who seek to “critique the insular and exceptionalist analyses of U.S. culture” and who have, according to Michael Drexler, “opened up new avenues for research” into the connection between the United States and the Caribbean basin.³⁹ In many studies of early Haitian-U.S. relations the Haitian Revolution, like the coup in 2004, seems to matter only insofar as it affected U.S. lives, U.S. slavery, U.S. politics, U.S. history, and U.S. literature. This reflects “a constantly expanding” center “logic” that in taking the United States as its primary and “most important” object of study, finds it increasingly difficult to imagine “multiple and equal centers.”⁴⁰ Such a center “logic” also has the effect of placing the United States, its authors, its politicians, and its historians on center stage in studies of the Haitian Revolution, forcing the Haitian actors of this revolution into a secondary position whereby they operate behind the curtains of an independence movement that they not only scripted and staged and later theorized and historicized themselves, but for which they suffered and died.

If Haiti was a prominent, if not vexed, symbol in the nineteenth-century U.S. political and literary imaginary, the United States formed a distinct part of the “initial burgeoning of hemispheric thought within the national imagination” in Haiti upon independence as well.⁴¹ Like many early American writers, early Haitian authors believed in the power of literature, and specifically the press, to express nationhood and that “artists could be responsible agents for achieving national liberation.”⁴² In the minds of nineteenth-century Haitian authors like the poet, journalist, and historian Emile Nau (1812–1860), creating a distinctly Haitian literary tradition did not require immediately disavowing European or U.S. literary traditions or even the French language. Nau once wrote, “What a great day it will be when in every genre Haiti has its own original artists,” and he compared the emergence of Haitian literature to the emergence of U.S. literature. Nau wrote that eventually Haiti would have its own Edgar Allan Poe and James Fennimore Cooper. He believed not only in the genius of the Haitian literary imagination, but also that over time Haitians would create their own national language, “a little bit darkened,” and that the French, and ultimately the world, would read this writing.⁴³

Nau’s comments demonstrate that the early Haitian literary tradition shared with the early U.S. American literary tradition both a desire for foreign readers and a conception of itself in transnational terms.⁴⁴ The American Renaissance was, in fact, typified by a kind of “inter-American system of political relations” that was characterized by the “overlap” and “simultaneity of different national claims upon territories as well as upon literary texts and traditions,” or what Anna Brickhouse calls “hemispheric thought.”⁴⁵ Similarly, the emergence of the Haitian literary tradition was connected to a transatlantic and at times hemispheric political and territorial imaginary. In the United States this “hemispheric” imaginary was buttressed by imperial, expansionist, and, often even, colonial claims, but in Haiti it took the shape of a comparative nationalism, whose fantasy was a form of inter-Atlantic humanism that predates Glissant’s theory of creolization as the recognition of difference and “diversity” rather than its “sublimation.”⁴⁶

If, as Sean Goudie has written, the United States had a “paracolonial” relationship with the West Indies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—meaning that the United States’s relationship to the Caribbean operated with a kind of proto-colonialism “alongside,” “near,” and “resembling” European colonialism⁴⁷—then we might describe the relationship that early Haiti had with the antebellum United States as paranational. Haiti’s process of imagining the nation in discursive terms grew up alongside and near—and in effect, resembled—the United States’s own vibrant print culture, where the printing press “provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community” that Haiti, like the United States, wanted to become.⁴⁸ While later Haitian authors like Dantès Bellegarde would view the looming presence of the United States as a distinct threat to Haitian sovereignty—in 1907 Bellegarde warned that “God is too far and the United States is too close”—early nineteenth-century Haitian writers used the United States as the only other independent nation of the hemisphere as a point of political comparison and departure.⁴⁹

Although Europe was the most obvious referent in “measuring the new development of a national literature” for early Haitian authors as it had been for early U.S. writers,⁵⁰ Haitian authors from both the north and the south like Milscent and Nau, along with the Baron de Vastey, compared Haiti’s origins as a former French colony wishing to create its own distinct culture to the United States’ relationship with England. However, Nau importantly distinguished between U.S. and Haitian societies by noting that the American had been merely “transplanted” while the Haitian had been “treated like a veritable pariah of civilization” and had to build an entirely new society “upon the ruins of colonial society.”⁵¹ Nau’s comment bespeaks the ambivalent effect of comparing the accomplishments of the descendants of Africans to white men of European descent who were a part of the very colonial system that had produced the subjugation of Africans.

Baron de Vastey, too, expressed ambivalence about Haiti’s paranational relationship to the United States when he wrote: “We do not really know, if we would be able to gain certain advantages in seeing ourselves compared to the United States of America.”⁵² After all, he had asked, “Is it reasonable to expect that men who had been burdened under the weight of ignorance and slavery, who were even refused intellect, would have all of a sudden Franklins and Washingtons?” (RP, 31). Vastey pointed out that because the new nation of Haiti had suffered the paralyzing effects of slavery, which had stifled the kind of “wisdom” and “clarity” found in the writing of Franklin and Washington, it needed time to recover (RP, 30).

Though Vastey says that he hesitates to compare Haiti’s national emergence to that of the United States, this is exactly whathe does when he essentially argues that there is an ethical imperative to do so. For unlike those proponents of Haitian exceptionalism who hold that Haiti and its revolution lie beyond all comparison,⁵³ throughout his prose works Vastey calls attention to what Susan Gillman has identified as a lack of awareness or recognition on the part of American studies concerning the “unevenness of situations” that characterize the “imperial” and “neo-colonial histories” of the Americas. According to Gillman, such oversight produces a “misleading symmetry” and “static synchronicity” in comparative American studies, which elides the uneven development of nation-states, as well as the distinct histories of “slavery” and “racial relations” found across the myriad geographical locales of the Americas.⁵⁴ Vastey, in fact, recognized the effect of such “misleading symmetry” with respect to Haiti’s position in the Atlantic world and attributed it to the fact that the French colonists had generated an entire written archive precisely in order to further subjugate the slaves and free people of color. He wrote that “the majority of historians who have written about the colonies were whites, colonists even…. The friends of slavery, those eternal enemies of the human race have written thousands of volumes freely; they have made all the presses in Europe groan for entire centuries in order to reduce the black man below the brute.” “Now that we have Haitian printing presses,” he countered, “we can reveal the crimes of the colonists and respond to the most absurd calumnies, invented by the prejudice and greed of our oppressors.”⁵⁵ Vastey believed that Haitian writers had a duty, not only to themselves but to all of Africa, to counter such “calumnies” by producing their own histories of colonialism, slavery, and the revolution.⁵⁶

Vastey’s call for Haitian writers to pen histories of Haiti demonstrates not only his explicit comprehension of the “unevenness” of access to the public sphere, but the “unevenness” of the very comparative terms upon which Haiti was discussed in the first place. On that account, in his Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, he spoke of what he called the “fatal truth” of Haitian independence and wrote that the Haitian Revolution and the subsequent independence of Haiti were hardly remarkable in and of themselves.⁵⁷ Elsewhere, he pointed out that “all the changes that have taken place in Europe” since the classical age had been “the result of revolutions, revolts, wars, force” (RP, 22, 23). The culmination of the Haitian Revolution in the independence of Haiti was in his mind simply a part of the natural historical progression that had produced countless other changes to the maps of the world, including the one that had resulted in the creation of the United States. For Vastey, the Haitian revolutionists’ creation of a new state in the Americas was hardly exceptional or remarkable in this comparative historical context. He wrote that what was exceptional instead was that when Switzerland separated itself from Austria, the United States from England, and Portugal and the seven provinces of the Pays-Bas from Spain, these changes were “undertaken under the aegis and sanction of European public opinion” (RP, 22). The Haitian revolutionists’ creation of a new nation-state, on the other hand, was equated with “a political fiction” (RM, 90). So begins Vastey’s assiduous documentation of the ways in which Haitian exceptionalism as a discourse promulgated by European colonists to mask their “negative contributions” worked to make the commonplace in Haiti extraordinary and the extraordinary mundane.

To the suggestion that the Haitians should monetarily compensate the French colonists for the loss of their plantations as U.S. American proprietors did for the English as part of Jay’s Treaty (1794), Vastey pointed out that the Americans did this in a state of relative peace, as propertied men who themselves sought compensation from the British for the loss of their slaves and for the confiscation of American ships (RP, 48). Haitians, on the other hand, had been “deprived of everything … possessed nothing … were nothing, and … counted for nothing” (RP, 50). Consequently, Haitians had a right to the properties of the former French colonists since “we have conquered all over these vampires: country! liberty! independence and property” (RP, 50). Though Vastey acknowledged that the laws of modern warfare, as opposed to ancient practices, protected both the persons and the property of the vanquished, he pointed out that “we do not find any comparable example to ours in the annals of nations” (RP, 52).

Though Vastey’s statement above may seem like a contradiction of his earlier position that Haiti was not so different from the other former European colonies, it actually reflects his acute awareness that comparison must always move upon a shifting axis of sameness and difference. For although the U.S. and Haitian Revolutions had similar historical antecedents, according to Vastey, there was an immeasurable difference between U.S. and Haitian independence. For him, the revolutions that had occurred in the United States and Haiti were both products of a “torrent and … coincidence of events” that had eventually culminated in the termination of a “bad marriage [mauvaise ménage]” with the metropole (RP, 31). However, there was no comparison to be made between the material conditions of Haitians and U.S. Americans at the moment of independence. At the moment of independence, Vastey observed, Haitians had been “mort civilement” or “civilly dead” and “inhabited this earth as if they did not really inhabit it; … lived as if they were not really living” (RP, 49–50). Vastey then asks, “Is it not a wish to distort everything, to find examples in subjects that are completely dissimilar?” (RP, 49). Vastey further pointed out that those who would become immediate citizens of the United States “were themselves white Englishmen, free and propertied [who] enjoyed their natural civil and political rights, [and] no one disputed them these rights” (RP, 49). In other words, the U.S. American Revolution was solely a question of independence, but not emancipation. Because Haitians, on the other hand, were what Orlando Patterson would later describe as “socially dead” beings,⁵⁸ any comparison between the two acts of independence that sublimated the racial distinctions of Haiti as a country populated mostly by Africans who were, “black and enslaved, without country, without property, deprived of their natural rights” (RP, 49). only contributed to Haiti’s threatened position in the New World, while the United States enjoyed economic and political prosperity as one of the privileges of whiteness.

One of Vastey’s most ardent, crucial, and effective engagements with his U.S. audience appears in those passages in which he connects critiques of Henri Christophe to white privilege. Some U.S. newspapers, like their French counterparts, were quite fond of ridiculing the fact that Christophe had instituted a monarchy—saying that “the black King of Hayti is as jealous of his royal titles, as any White Legitimate in any part of this world.”⁵⁹ One newspaper even described Christophe as a “black emperor” who was “imitating his white brother [Napoleon]” in committing “robberies” against the United States.⁶⁰ Each of these judgments connects monarchy to tyranny in some form, suggesting that there was a kind of hypocrisy in a former black slave crowning himself king when it was a king who had subjugated him in the first place. The judgments above also cast aspersion on Christophe’s character, linking his blackness to imitation, robbery, treachery, and jealousy.

In at least one U.S. periodical this disdain turned to all-out mockery when Christophe’s entire court was ridiculed in the Baltimore-based Niles Weekly Register. The article of November 9, 1816, referred to Vastey as the “baroness Big Bottom,” to Christophe as “king Stophel himself” and to Limonade as “Lime Punch.” The article further stated that the “vast pomposity” of Christophe’s court was being described for the “benefit of all who desire to ‘laugh and to be fat’, at the fools and knaves who applaud it—black or white.”⁶¹ The author of the Niles article even associated Christophe with primates, which had been a common “leitmotif” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:⁶² “Bonaparte once asked a West Indian how Christophe aped royalty—the newspapers can now inform him, for they give a long account of a set of black fellows at Hayti, the quondam grooms and scullions of the “legitimate” days, disguised as gentlemen and ladies, riding in somber processions, acting royalty with about as much display of sense as is usual on such occasions; that is little or none at all.”⁶³ This passage renders the current government in Haiti illegitimate by referencing the “ ‘legitimate’ days” when “black fellows” did not “disguise” themselves as “gentlemen and ladies.” The article also associates monarchy in Haiti with a form of mimicry or “ap[ing]” that was nonsensical. Even though the article in the Niles Weekly purportedly ridiculed anyone “black and white” who applauded the monarchy of Christophe, the article took specific aim at Haiti in such a way that it dealt explicitly with race, even poking fun at Christophe’s personal physician: he was “no ordinary physician, but a negro” who specialized in “itch ointment.”

In response to this kind of writing, in general, Vastey highlighted the idea that what was disturbing about Christophe’s monarchy to the Atlantic World was decidedly: “The crown on the head of a Black man! There you have what the French publicists, the journalists, the creators of Colonial Systems cannot digest; one would say to hear them, that a black king is a phenomenon that has never been seen in the world! Who will therefore reign over the blacks, if the blacks cannot be kings. Is royalty such a privilege that it belongs exclusively to the white color? (RP, 17). Vastey also decried the historical revisionism taking place in European and U.S. discourse by reminding his readers that black kings had existed for a long time.

In pointing out the hypocrisy of those who criticized the black king while they showed deference to their own king, Vastey clearly spoke to a European audience. However, at the same time, the defense of monarchy as a system of government was explicitly directed at the United States, for Vastey knew that if he wanted to appeal to his U.S. audience, he would have to defend the monarchy on political, as well as racial grounds.⁶⁴ Vastey devoted an entire chapter in his Essai to defending the monarchy as a system of government. In his earlier Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères he had already taken up the topic, writing that the method of government hardly mattered as long as it was “wise, just, enlightened, and benevolent, and the governees have religion, virtues and good morals!” (RM, 73). Vastey further wrote that since no two peoples were exactly alike, no single form of government could suit all nations. To that end, he paraphrased Montesquieu to prove that it would be an error to think that a republican government was always better than a monarchy since “the best constitution is not the one that is most beautiful in theory, but the one that suits itself the best to the people for whom it has been made.”⁶⁵ This statement seems specifically aimed at the United States since Vastey appeared to view the country as having a democracy that was an exceptionally good form of government with “sage laws” that were specifically suited to the U.S. mindset. His point, however, was that such a democracy might not be exportable.⁶⁶

Vastey’s work challenges developing notions of “American exceptionalism”⁶⁷ by making the radical assertion that putative democratic republics could be just as flawed and tyrannical as monarchies. Vastey explained, for example, that Pétion’s republic, modeled after that of the United States in theory, was a colossal failure precisely because through a series of what Vastey called “demagogical farces” (Essai, 297), Pétion broke the laws of republicanism. First, when he refused to step down in March of 1815 after three successive terms, and later, Vastey admonished Pétion for revising his constitution to state that the term of the Haitian presidency was “à vie,” or “for life,” rather than for four years, as the original constitution had mandated (Essai, 297, 315–316). Vastey’s recitation of this relatively minor episode in Haitian history was supposed to demonstrate that it was rulers with their personal flaws and political ambitions and not systems of government that had the power to make a nation prosperous or to destroy its foundations.

In critiquing Pétion’s mangled adoption of republican principles, Vastey also avoids appearing to criticize the United States’s republican mode of government. Simultaneously, he also claims that “one finds this institution [monarchy] in all of the most free people, the most civilized and the most enlightened on the earth” (Essai, 153). Vastey continued to imagine the nation in paranational terms when he flattered the United States in claiming that Americans “have acquired a reputation for sagacity and prudence that is justly merited” (Essai, 153), but he still considered that each nation should develop its own government according to its own needs and not according to the doctrines or ideologies of another.

After 1816, many U.S. journalists began internalizing Vastey’s own understanding of the meaning of Haitian independence for the hemisphere. Cushing repeated Vastey’s very own words about Haitians needing time to produce a Franklin and Washington, he echoed Vastey’s words again when he wrote that the French were responsible for all civil strife in Haiti, and he also bought into Vastey’s ideas about compensating the French colonists when he wrote: “No man of course but a colonist can seriously think the king of Hayti was under the least obligations to restore the lands of the planters, or even give them an equivalent.”⁶⁸

A more radical adoption of Vastey’s language and rhetoric occurs when Cushing defends Christophe’s monarchy:

A nation, which has attained considerable refinement, which is tranquil within and threatened by nothing but ordinary dangers from abroad, can enjoy a free and republican government; but when a country has been plunged for two centuries in the lowest degradation, when its inhabitants have been sunk below the level of ordinary political oppression, and when, although exalted to the rank of a nation, it has continued to be harassed by restless and able enemies,—in such a country, the firm hand of kingly power is needed to stifle faction, repel aggressors, and give energy, dispatch, and secrecy to the public measures.⁶⁹

Cushing continued by repeating Vastey’s very own words: “Little does it matter, indeed,” he wrote, “what is the form of a government, if it be sagely conducted, and its only aim be the public happiness and peace.”⁷⁰ This point is also to be found in a toast given by Rufus King, who, according to Michael Zuckerman, was, like many Federalists, “unabashed” in his “defiance of Jeffersonian policy towards Haiti”: “To the government of Haiti, founded on the only legitimate basis of authority—the people’s choice.”⁷¹ A prior review of Vastey’s work in May of 1815, also published in the North American Review, had a more semantic reason for defending Christophe’s monarchy: “There is as pretty and numerous a collection of Princes, Dukes, Counts, Barons as any country in Europe could produce,” the article states; “indeed England is quite outdone; she has produced only one Black Prince, but in St. Domingo there are many. These titles sound as well as any similar appellations; and may wear as well as older ones. If the colour of the heart be right, that of the skin is of inferior importance.”⁷² Finally, an additional U.S. journalist even went so far as to defend the “military attitude” of the north of Haiti by writing that it was “necessary, perhaps, as a preservative against the attempts of France.”⁷³

It might at first seem astonishing that a monarchy, with its attendant “collections of Dukes, Counts, Barons” and many “Black Prince[s],” was so openly defended in a country whose origin story rests upon the opposition between monarchy and democracy. John Adams’s very own “Defence of the of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States” (1787) had provided a harsh critique of “kingly power” by suggesting that the “American people” were too “enlightened” to ever allow the “executive power” to rest with “one single person.”⁷⁴ The force of Vastey’s argument, however, lies in his recognition that true international democracy rested not in imposing one nation’s government on another, but in accepting that different peoples might choose to be governed in different ways. It is this idea of democratic relativity that was implicitly accepted by those in the United States who read, published responses to, and even adopted Vastey’s words to defend the Haitian government of the north.

Perhaps even more telling than Cushing’s adoption of Vastey’s very own rhetoric to defend the Haitian monarchy was his joy at discovering that King Christophe wished to change the language of Haiti from French to English. Cushing wrote that Christophe “could not hesitate in adopting that language, which now possesses a literalure unrivalled by the proudest in ancient or modern times, which is making rapid strides to a diffusion almost universal, and which is spoken in the first instance by two nations of which one is the noblest in the old and the other the noblest in the new world.”⁷⁵ Here, Cushing actually argues for United States recognition of Haiti on the grounds that Haiti wanted to be more like the United States, with its “unrivalled” anglophone literature. Cushing invited Haitians to join in the imagined solidarity of England and the United States by adopting the English language and by degrees the anglophone literary tradition. This invitation hardly reflects the kind of isolation and non-recognition—cultural, diplomatic, and commercial—that is described by many scholars of early Haitian-U.S. relations. Instead it indicates that northern U.S. newspaper editors and contributors, through their engagement with Haitian writing, imagined and even acknowledged the independence of Haiti—a fact that thereby dismantles the fable of nonrecognition propagated by the U.S. government.

Traditional historiography and political theory of early Haitian-U.S. relations suggest that Haiti (both the north and the south) suffered almost total diplomatic isolation in the early nineteenth century as the result of European and U.S. non-recognition. The United States’s official non-recognition of Haiti until 1862 has led many scholars to conclude that the Haitian government was consistently undermined by the U.S. government—resulting in a “century of isolation”⁷⁶—and thus that U.S. citizens and the people of Haiti have had a generally hostile relationship since 1804.⁷⁷

Though I would not argue with Tim Matthewson’s claim that antebellum U.S. foreign policy was undoubtedly “pro-slavery,” nor with Paul Farmer’s statement that as early as 1804 Haitians feared “Yankee imperialism,”⁷⁸ examining the literary-politico archive of the two nations forces us to consider the separation between the state and its formal authority and the private participants of a capitalist economy, for whom the market was king. McGill has written that the U.S. American “market” is a “tricky concept” precisely because “from the perspective of government seeking to regulate corporate behavior, the market is aligned with the private sphere and is often depicted as dangerously independent of public oversight.”⁷⁹ U.S. trade with early Haiti, coupled by a press that was “dangerously independent,” provides an interesting case study for the consequences of such a lack of oversight.

Haiti was extremely important to U.S. commerce throughout its early existence, as is illustrated by the fact that Haitian and U.S. trade continued to be robust throughout the early nineteenth century. Haitian trade was especially valuable for northern U.S. merchants because it represented the singular opportunity for the U.S. to have virtually “unrestricted” trade in the area.⁸⁰

In the early nineteenth century it was not only merchants and corporations who often found themselves at odds with formal U.S. policy when it came to Haiti, but journalists whose right to free speech was protected by the First Amendment. In fact, as Donald Hickey has pointed out, while Congress was attempting to craft and then pass a trade embargo against Haiti in 1804 and again in 1805, “Newspapers in the North [of the United States] were especially vigorous in upholding the independence of Haiti and America’s right to trade with her.”⁸¹ In addition, Sara Fanning tells us that in the early 1820s northern U.S. journalists launched a “modern media campaign” to urge official recognition of Haiti.⁸² We might conclude, therefore, that in the nineteenth-century United States, the fact that the government refused to formally recognize Haitian independence did little to disrupt the intricate everyday interactions between private individuals in the United States—namely, journalists and merchants—and the government in Haiti.

This contradiction between what the U.S. government mandated and what private U.S. merchants and journalists—who were also permitted to travel to and from Haiti—were allowed to do under U.S. law was not lost on either the Haitian or the U.S. governments. According to Vastey, Milscent (a journalist from the Pétion’s republic), and Julien Prévost (the Duke de Limonade who often wrote in an official capacity for Christophe’s government), Haitian trade with the citizens of a foreign nation equaled recognition, and recognition equaled a state of peace. Milscent wrote, for example, that if a nation’s citizens traded with Haiti, “It must be inferred from this reasoning that, by that fact, we are in a state of peace with the nations which have tacitly recognized the independence of Haiti … because their ships have been frequenting the ports of this island.”⁸³ Vastey added that U.S. citizens “who have traded with Haiti for many years, who enjoy the protection of the government” were friends of Haiti who, “like us, had been brought to liberty and independence” (Essai, 356). Limonade echoed Milscent almost verbatim when he wrote to Clarkson that “for sixteen years the subjects of all maritime and trading nations (France alone excepted) have carried on a commerce with Haiti. These activities and mutual interchanges are in fact equivalent to a tacit, if not formal, recognition of our independence.”⁸⁴ In other words, it was not possible to trade with Haiti if Haiti did not exist, on the one hand, and if a nation’s “subjects” traded with Haiti this fact made a nation a friend and ally, on the other.

Joseph Clay of Pennsylvania acknowledged the danger of this “tacit” recognition as early as 1804 when he told Congress, “We cannot trade with them without acknowledging their independence;” but trade with them was exactly what U.S. merchants continued to do despite the fact that the U.S. government refused to recognize the sovereignty of either Christophe or Pétion.⁸⁵ The government of the United States, therefore, as Senator Clay remarked, unwittingly and “tacitly” recognized the sovereignty of the two Haitian governments every time its citizens engaged in trade with the country.⁸⁶ The fable of nonrecognition is noteworthy precisely because it demonstrates what Lauren Berlant has called the “contradiction between the sovereignty of abstract citizens” and “formal” state power.⁸⁷ It also reflects the power of what one nineteenth-century American politician called the “tyranny” of the U.S. “newspaper government.”⁸⁸

U.S. merchants’ “tacit” recognition of Haitian independence was explicitly tied to articles about Vastey that appeared in the northern U.S. press. The powerful northern press argued for formal recognition using a similar logic to that found in the review of Vastey’s works published in the Analectic Magazine: “The Americans enjoy the advantage of going into the West India markets, at the lowest possible scale of expense…. These circumstances combine to render the trade with Hayti advantageous at least in this point of view.” The author of this particular article then explicitly states that since Vastey’s works “cannot but leave a favourable impression on the minds of our readers relative to … the state of the people in Hayti the most cogent arguments which his Majesty could urge, in favour of such a recognition, would be, to present the other powers with a copy of le Baron de Vastey’s Reflections.”⁸⁹ Another U.S. writer, also in the context of Vastey’s writings, stated that Haiti’s “commercial importance is too well known to require any notice in this place…. Perhaps … a reciprocity of benefits may be secured…. Our statesmen and financiers should look to this business, with a steady and unquenching eye.”⁹⁰ The same writer for the Boston Commercial Gazette took the point even farther in saying, “We must confess that we have not learned any principle in philosophy, that shows a natural incompatibility of black skin, or any other feature of this people, for excellence in government, or science, or military tactics.”⁹¹ These kinds of reviews of Vastey’s work formed a part of a campaign by the northern press to urge that Haiti could govern itself and to prove that the only obstacle was that the country was populated with blacks.⁹² Vastey’s remonstrations were, therefore, reverberating in the U.S. national imagination in ways that resulted in measurable material consequences for both the northern kingdom and the southern republic.

Not only did the U.S. press use Vastey’s works to argue explicitly for formal recognition of Haitian independence, but U.S. journalists themselves discursively recognized the independence of Haiti when they wrote articles acknowledging that there was a king or a president of the country. Journalists routinely referred to “the kingdom of Hayti”⁹³ and to Christophe as “the King” of Haiti.⁹⁴ One journalist even recognized that the country had a “written bill of rights.”⁹⁵ A review of Vastey’s Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères also acknowledged that Haitian independence was a fact whether or not France or the United States wanted to accept it: “It was stipulated in the late continental treaty, that France should not be interfered with, in any attempts to recover her lost possessions; and she may flatter herself with an idea, therefore, that St. Domingo can be gathered again unto her dominion; but she will learn, we apprehend,—if, indeed, she has not already been taught,—that the Haytians are resolved upon the alternative of liberty or death, and that it is going to cost as much as the island is worth, to regain possession of it.”⁹⁶ There is a fleeting dance here with the name of Haiti. When referring to what France believes, the author uses “St. Domingo”; but when discussing reality the author recognizes “the Haytians.” Furthermore, northern U.S. newspapers began referring to the former colony of St. Domingue as Haiti as early as 1804.⁹⁷ In these small ways, northern Americans had actually been discursively recognizing Haitian independence and affirming Haitian sovereignty for quite some time.

Although the recognition of Haitian sovereignty by U.S. journalists, merchants, abolitionists, and other private individuals cannot be equated with official, government recognition, these discursive acts of recognition were not without political, national, or economic meaning. They exposed at once the delicate position of Haiti within the American hemisphere in the nineteenth century and the burgeoning neo-imperial relationship that was developing between Haiti and the United States. These acts of discursive recognition also ask us to consider what it meant for the United States to politically disavow the independence of a country while reifying that independence with everyday speech acts and commercial involvement. This informal recognition placed the sovereignty of Berlant’s “abstract citizens” above the political will of the U.S. government (and the southern states), exposing a deep chasm between U.S. capitalism, when aligned primarily with the people, and U.S. democracy, when viewed as a system of governance.

Nineteenth-century Haitian writing from both the north and the south also fundamentally asks us to consider what recognition actually meant to post-independence Haitians. Milscent described the relativity and symbolism of nonrecognition perfectly when he wrote that

the Independence of Haiti would not be able to produce the same effects in the eyes of different powers, nor furnish to each one of them the same degree of annoyance…. [Our independence] does not carry with it any attack on the United States. The peoples of that country, enlightened by the past, must tacitly applaud our resolution. Our principles of moderation are not a mystery for them; they know that we do not purport to intervene in causes that have nothing at all to do with the soil of our country. As such, those sage philanthropists can only smile at our prosperity. They are not interested in breaching the bounds of neutrality that have always procured for them real advantages. It is therefore quite consoling for us to be able to, for many reasons, consider them as neighbors whose system is generably favorable to the amelioration of the fate of mankind.⁹⁸

Milscent’s uses the language of pacification in this passage—a language that highlights the relative obsolescence of U.S non-recognition because Haiti and the United States are involved in whathe sees as a mutually beneficial relationship that has “real advantages.” He makes it clear, for example, that the Haitian government poses no real threat to U.S. interests. Milscent even makes an appeal to sameness, arguing that the two nations have much in common—a reference to their origins in revolution. In so doing, Milscent imagines a hemispheric solidarity that would make Haiti and the U.S. potential allies precisely because their citizens were imagined to be so.

Vastey also conflated the acts of U.S. citizens with the government.⁹⁹ He repeatedly sought to make it clear to his U.S. audience that the northern kingdom wanted to have a peaceful relationship with the government of the United States by welcoming U.S. citizens in Haitian ports.¹⁰⁰ Vastey also wanted the United States to equate Haitian treatment of U.S. subjects as a friendly overture to the U.S. government. Though his position seems contradictory—nonrecognition from France equals war but from the United States it was merely an annoyance—it reflects the wholly symbolic and relative nature of the elusive, transitory notion of recognition.¹⁰¹ What Vastey sought from France on behalf of the Haitian government was little more than their acknowledgment, indeed their acceptance, of Haiti’s right to be free and independent from them without clause. Vastey hoped to make it explicitly clear that the non-recognition, which he disdained in the conduct of France, could not be compared to the chimera of non-recognition propagated by the United States and England. The latter did not carry with it any perceived threat to Haitian sovereignty; instead, it was a political fable that allowed the United States and England to formally disavow the revolution and subsequent independence of Haiti while benefiting from it materially, as the nineteenth-century Haitian historian Beaubrun Ardouin observed.¹⁰² If, as Milscent wrote, Haiti’s independence could not provide the “same degree of annoyance” to each country, neither could non-recognition by those same countries carry the same “degree of annoyance” that it did coming from France.¹⁰³

Although the idea that the U.S. had recognized Haitian independence when its citizens engaged in trade with the country may have been merely a powerful rhetorical move on the part of Vastey, Limonade, and Milscent, their political writings exposed U.S. nonrecognition for what it was as well: a powerful political fable that was contested by the everyday interactions between Haitian and U.S. merchants and journalists. While the official policy of the U.S. was to not recognize the independence of either Haitian government, U.S. American journalists and other private individuals discursively recognized the country’s sovereignty on their own, thus accomplishing what their government would not.

Like the abolitionist publications that cited Vastey’s works in the antebellum United States, early national newspaper editors and journalists from the north used Vastey’s words to argue that Haiti had reached a sufficient level of civilization to deserve formal U.S. recognition.¹⁰⁴ The way in which these arguments were framed revealed the United States’s own anxieties concerning its national identity.

Vastey’s Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, for example, was described in several U.S. newspapers as being “perhaps the first work by a negro, on which the energies of the mind had been powerfully excited, and have found a proper scope for action, where sentiments favorable to freedom could be avowed without the immediate threat of the scourge, the axe, or the jibbet, and where in fact, this long oppressed race have not been suffered to say a word in defence.”¹⁰⁵ This reviewer claimed that the “mind[s]” of blacks had so changed that they were now able to take revenge with their pens, rather than with weapons. This was an allusion to the violence of the Haitian Revolution, which was portrayed as exceptionally horrific in the U.S. media in the first few years of the nineteenth century.¹⁰⁶ The reviewer makes the claim that blacks no longer need violence to force access to what Nick Nesbitt has called the “global discursive sphere”¹⁰⁷ but could simply use their civilized pens to “avow” “sentiments favorable to freedom.”

Cushing also connected Vastey’s writings to the post-Enlightenment discourse of regeneration and degeneration circulating in the Atlantic World when he noted that Vastey was “self-educated” and applauded the fact that he had arisen out of the “lowest moral and intellectual degradation, by the force of his own powers.” He wrote that “the vehemence of the once oppressed, but now victorious soldier, the fire of an emancipated slave, the vigorous pride of a regenerate African are all wrought into the style” of his works.¹⁰⁸ Cushing concluded that Vastey’s works proved “the regeneration of Hayti,” saying that “we may hope that before long they will have wiped away all the disgraceful stains contracted in a life of bondage.”¹⁰⁹

Milscent’s uses the language of pacification in this passage—a language that and early nineteenth centuries. By “the [French] Revolution, regeneration had become an extremely popular and more general word, referring to improvement, a freeing from corruption, or societal renewal.”¹¹⁰ By the nineteenth century, regeneration was equally connected to both the abolition of slavery and racial miscegenation.¹¹¹ According to Robert Fanuzzi, early nineteenth-century U.S. writers were distinctly affected by the French discourse of “the elevation of the African race” through “structural” and “institutional philanthropy.”¹¹² In fact, the idea that slavery had caused a corruption of humankind that only abolition and philanthropy could cure would become a favorite claim of abolitionists like the Abbé Grégoire, who claimed that slavery corrupted equally the masters, slaves, and the free people of color.¹¹³

Vastey had also internalized this idea that slavery had resulted in a complete corruption of humanity, and he understood Haitian independence as a part of a larger post-Enlightenment project of rehabilitating humankind. Vastey wrote that after the Haitian Revolution, humanity had triumphed and “the regeneration of a large part of the human race [was] beginning.”¹¹⁴ Not only did Vastey believe that humankind was being “regenerated,” but he also believed that whatever happened in Haiti would mean something for the world and not just for Africans.¹¹⁵

Like early Haitians, the early American colonists had also spoken of themselves in connection with the concepts of regeneration and degeneration in the years immediately leading up to the U.S. War of Independence.¹¹⁶ This regeneration was wholly connected in their minds to the emergence of a national literature after the American Revolution. In a famous essay entitled “American Literature,” the Massachusetts politician Fisher Ames wrote: “Few speculative subjects have exercised the passions more or the judgment less, than the inquiry, what rank our country is to maintain in the world for genius and literary attainments. Whether in point of intellect we are equal to Europeans, or only a race of degenerate creoles.”¹¹⁷ Ames had lamented that despite the fact that “nobody will pretend the Americans are a stupid race,” the country had not produced “one great original work of genius.” He asked, “Is there one luminary in our firmament that shines with unborrowed rays?”¹¹⁸ Later in the century Ralph Waldo Emerson would take up this theme as well when he wrote that “Americans” needed a poet to sing their glory, having “listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” Emerson argued that U.S. writers needed their own scholarly traditions in order to end “our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands” and to prove that the “American freeman” was not “timid, imitative, tame.”¹¹⁹ The idea that literature was essential to nation-building did not evaporate after the Civil War either, for in “Democratic Vistas” (1871) Walt Whitman famously wrote: “Our fundamental want to-day in the United States … is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatures, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known.”¹²⁰

This a priori conflation of literacy with humanity and civilization may have been part and parcel of the Enlightenment and the burgeoning science of race,¹²¹ but it also formed a crucial element in early U.S. American assessments of Haiti’s potential as an independent nation. Indeed, the City of Washington Gazette equated literature with civilization as well when the writer wrote of Vastey: “We have been gratified and surprised to find the author, not only well acquainted with the works of Buffon, [Bernardin de] St. Pierre, and Montesquieu, but also in some degree with those of Homer, Tacitus, Milton, etc., and possessing a degree of learning and classical knowledge, which we could not by any means have expected in a country which Europeans are in the habit of considering as in a very uncivilized state.”¹²² Knowledge of European writing here stands as evidence capable of refuting the belief that Haiti exists “in a very uncivilized state” precisely because it was supposed to have provided the same evidence for U.S. Americans.

Vastey wrote about the connection between literacy and civilization in much the same way when he suggested that Haitians were regenerated men precisely because “we write and we print. Even in our infancy our nation has already had writers and poets who have defended its causes and celebrated its glory” (RM, 84). It is perhaps not surprising that U.S. writers who were engaged in their own project of creating a “poetry and philosophy of insight” that was distinctly American and therefore not beholden to “their,” meaning European traditions, were so willing to make the case that Vastey’s writing was proof of “black” capacity for “civilization.”¹²³ U.S. writers were infinitely willing to accept Haitian writing, in general, and Vastey’s argument in particular, as proof of such capacities and as evidence of Haiti’s right to nationhood precisely because they were involved in their own project of national consolidation through the development of a specifically American U.S. literary tradition.

In the United States this project of literacy as humanity was intimately connected to a “cultural milieu” that “sought alternately to solidify and to signify across the unstable boundaries of nation and race within a New World arena characterized by its transnationality.”¹²⁴ Yet the consolidation of U.S. American identity was also formed in conjunction with a fantasy of imperialism that was paradoxically bound in certain ways to the recognition of Haitian independence. An article in the Boston Commercial Gazette argued that it would be in the best interests of U.S Americans to recognize Haitian independence so that the Haitian government might allow “our ships of war” to be stationed in the port of Môle-Saint-Nicolas.¹²⁵ The expression of this desire to station U.S. troops in Caribbean waters seems now like a dangerous precursor of what Paul Farmer has called “the uses of Haiti.” Almost immediately after Christophe’s death in 1820 and again after the United States formally recognized Haitian independence in 1862, the United States “began showing great interest” in Môle-Saint-Nicolas.¹²⁶

This stationing of U.S. troops, nevertheless, was curiously coupled with the stability and validity of U.S. democracy when the author of the article in the Boston Commerical Gazette continued:

Under the influence of reason and sound sense, a more enlightened policy than has yet existed towards the Haytiens will arise, and the declaration of our bill of rights, that ‘ALL MEN ARE BORN FREE AND EQUAL’, [will] be considered as having some weight in the scales of justice and humanity. When this period arrives, it will become our duty, as a moral people, to seek their alliance, that we may the more readily aid them in the advancement of learning and Christian philanthropy.¹²⁷

The article oscillates uncertainly between patrimony and militarization of Haitian-U.S. relations, coming dangerously close to proposing a civilization mission of “Christian philanthropy.” This civilizing mission would perhaps provide closure to the project of the American Revolution that the continuation of slavery in the United States had stifled.

The United States’s revolution was supposed to have brought liberty to the hemisphere, but as the Abbé Grégoire observed, the United States would have to do something about its enslavement of more than “one million six hundred thousand Africans” “to conciliate, as republicans, this contradiction of their principles, and to justify, as Christians, this profanation of evangelical maxims.”¹²⁸ If it was true that, as Brissot de Warville observed during his visit to the United States, “Americans, more than any other people, are convinced that all men are born free and equal,”¹²⁹ then the philosophical underpinnings of the “American” identity were threatened by a policy toward Haiti that was viewed as devoid of “reason and sound sense.”

As Nesbitt has written, the very existence of Haitian revolutionists and masses of revolting slaves who had written their own Declaration of Independence “presented freedom to the world as an absolutely true logic,” and one that had to be made “universal”: the Haitian Revolution had meant that “no humans can be enslaved.”¹³⁰ If no humans could be enslaved and Haiti was both the argument and the proof, then the United States’s revolution was not just incomplete, but as Sibylle Fischer has noted, was of spurious virtue.¹³¹

Vastey acknowledged that U.S. slavery confounded the meanings of liberty and revolution for the world, too, when he wrote: “The independence of the United States of America has been a source of goodness for Europe and the entire world; ours will contribute to the Happiness of the human race, because of its moral and political consequences” (RP, 15). Vastey refers to the fact that the American Revolution may have introduced the world to a useful political philosophy and form of governance, but that the Haitian Revolution had put into practice the moral ideals that underpinned such a democratic philosophy and system of governance. Vastey’s comparative take on the Age of Revolution continued when he argued that the Haitian Revolution was good for humanity because it “thrust us into civilization and enlightenment,” whereas the French Revolution was harmful for humanity because it caused the French to “descend into barbarity and the dark ages” (RP, 25). It was, therefore, the Haitian Revolution and not the U.S. or the French Revolution that signaled the “triumph of humanity.”¹³²

Vastey’s most important reversal concerning the meaning of the Age of Revolution comes when he suggests that it was not Haiti that needed philanthropy, but that Haitians could instead provide “a base of support where the philanthropists will be able to plant the powerful lever which will lift up the moral world against the enemies of the human race” (RM, 41). People who are pro-slavery are here not just enemies of the African race, but enemies of humanity, and it is their world, not Haiti, that needs to be uplifted by philanthropists.

At heart, Vastey’s argument illustrates what Ralph Bauer has called two different and competing conceptions of the nation-state in the Americas as it developed into the twentieth century: one as “the agent of hemispheric or global hegemony” and the other as “a protection against United States cultural, economic, and military expansion.”¹³³ If the nation for early U.S. Americans was defined and indeed “imagined” in terms of a limitless expansion, the nation-state in early Haiti was conceived of in terms of clearly defined unity within the borders of Hispaniola. In other words, in nineteenth-century Haiti, “cultural nationalism” might be considered what Simon During has called in another context “a mode of freedom” that was “developed against imperialism.”¹³⁴ For, there was surely a desire in Haiti to unify the north and the south and even the eastern parts of the island, as Vastey noted in his 1819 letter to Clarkson,¹³⁵ but there was not a wish to expand the borders of the country beyond the limits of the island; nor was there any considerable effort made to transfer the Haitian ideals of universal emancipation and liberty for all human beings to other countries in any way that accorded with the U.S. American belief that it has to the right to “violently export” its democracy to other countries.¹³⁶ Vastey vehemently argued against the slave trade and the horrors of colonialism in Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, Le Système, and Notes, but simultaneously affirmed that Haitians were not going to meddle in the affairs of the other countries in the hemisphere. Furthermore, Vastey pointed out that the Codes of Christophe, as Dessalines’ 1805 Constitution had already done, expressly prohibited Haitians from interfering with “affairs outside of our island.”¹³⁷ Vastey also explicitly noted that Haitians did not desire to create a Caribbean empire when he wrote: “The revolution did not transfer from the whites to the blacks the question of control of the West Indies…. Haiti is one of the islands of this archipelago and is not itself the West Indies.”¹³⁸ Vastey’s point was that Haitian nationalism was not going to be defined by or based upon its ability to expand its territories, but rather upon Haitians’ own particular claim to sovereignty over a small part of the region.

In the end, literature, like trade in Haiti, was about imagining the nation in dialogic, paranational terms, not about projecting an imperial fantasy that resembled the ever-creeping expansionism of the United States. Instead, in Haiti both literature and trade became metaphors for hemispheric, transatlantic, and ultimately humanistic interactions that would carry over to the later Haitian literary tradition, most readily seen in the works of Pierre Faubert, Joseph St. Rémy, Antènor Firmin, Demesvar Delorme, and Louis Joseph Janvier. In many respects, these authors were before their times in their beliefs that the nation-state was only “second-best to world unity”¹³⁹ and that trade and contact, or what Édouard Glissant has referred to as creolization,¹⁴⁰ would be the instrument to produce Aimé Césaire’s “humanism made to measure the world.”¹⁴¹ The Haitian historian Joseph St. Rémy had this to say about trade as a metaphor for human relationships: “There is a law made by nature, that the races only ameliorate themselves in mixing, that well-being only increases by free commerce, that understanding is only enriched by the exchange of ideas, that populations only become more civilized by coming into contact with others.”¹⁴² His was a utopian vision of human contact articulated in an age of seemingly unending war, to be sure, but one that underscores the prescient cosmopolitanism of early nineteenth-century Haitian authors who at the very least imagined that they could have a relationship with the United States and indeed the Western world that was not based upon colonial domination.

The takeaway from this attempt to reconstitute and then make sense of the circulation of Vastey’s works in the early United States, then, is that by not reading the very Haitian authors who addressed and described in the nineteenth century their understanding of Haiti’s relationship with the United States, we tend to unwittingly propagate not only the fable of nonrecognition, but the fiction of Haiti’s essential lack of importance. Perhaps renewed attention to the dialogic interactions between Haiti and the United States in the first two decades of the nineteenth century can serve as a reminder not only that “Haiti Matters,” as President Barack Obama said in the January 25, 2010, edition of the U.S. magazine, Newsweek, but that Haitians matter, too.