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

3. For recent histories of the Haitian Revolution, see Dubois, Avengers of the New World, and Popkin, You Are All Free; for an excellent collection of primary source documents on the Haitian Revolution, see Dubois and Garrigus, eds., Slave Revolution in the Caribbean.

5. See Gilmore, Black Patriots and Loyalists, and Frey, Water from the Rock.

6. Edmund Morgan argues that “the most ardent American republicans were Virginians, and their ardor was not unrelated to their power over the men and women they held in bondage…. Racism thus absorbed in Virginia the fear and contempt that men in England … felt for the inarticulate lower classes. Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty” (American Slavery, American Freedom, 381, 386).

7. For further discussion of these events, see Popkin, You Are All Free, 189–216.

8. For further consideration of the Atlantic dimensions of the Haitian Revolution, see the essays collected in Geggus, ed., Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World.

9. For extended discussion of Toussaint’s political and economic strategy vis-à-vis the United States (and vice versa) during this period, see Carolyn Fick’s essay in this volume, “Revolutionary St. Domingue and the Emerging Atlantic: Paradigms of Sovereignty.”

11. Donald R. Hickey reports that in 1797, more than six hundred U.S. vessels were engaged in trading with St. Domingue, carrying as much as §5 million of imported merchandise. See Hickey, “America’s Response,” 365.

13. Napoleon reinstated slavery in Martinique in 1802 and in Guadeloupe in 1803. He did not ever overtly attempt to reinstate slavery in St. Domingue, but many speculated (at the time) that he intended to do so. For further discussion, see Dubois, “Haitian Revolution,” 18–41.

14. Napoleon Bonaparte to Leclerc, July 1, 1802, Lettres du Général Leclerc, ed. Paul Roussier (Paris: Sociéte de l’Histoire des Colonies Françaises, 1937), 305–306, as cited in Dubois, “Haitian Revolution.” Dubois’s article includes an extended discussion of the reestablishment of slavery in the French colonies.

16. Library of Congress, Guide to the Louisiana Purchase; Cayton, “ ‘Relations of Blood and Affection,’ ” 151. Note that Cayton is here ventriloquizing popular understandings of the Louisiana Purchase rather than arguing for this view.

18. For an extended discussion of the relation between the Haitian Revolution and the Louisiana Purchase, and historiographical debates related to this issue, see the essay by David Geggus in this volume, “The Louisiana Purchase and the Haitian Revolution.”

19. For discussion of Jefferson’s shifting position with respect to Toussaint, see Matthewson, “Jefferson and the Nonrecognition of Haiti,” 22–48.

20. Speech of George Logan, December 20, 1805, Annals of Congress, 9th Cong., 1st sess., 26–29, as cited in Hickey, “America’s Response,” 375.

The value of American exports to the French islands stood at §6.7 million in 1806, but fell to §5.8 in 1807, to §1.5 in 1808. These were nothing more than official trade statistics, collected at a time when it was illegal to trade with the Haitians. Obviously, they do not consider the substantial illicit trade, which was pervasive in the West Indies, but they did reflect a trend, for they were echoed by observers on the ground. At the end of the decade, a British merchant, William Doran, noted that the combined impact of the embargoes and other restrictions “at length put us in possession of this branch of commerce.” (“Jefferson and the Nonrecognition of Haiti,” 35)

23. “The southern conservative reaction was embodied in legislation, which included laws passed by Virginia (1801, 1802, 1804, 1805, 1806), North Carolina (1802), South Carolina (1800, 1805), Georgia (1802, 1804), Maryland (1805), and the Mississippi Territory (1805). This new body of legislation was aimed at slaves and free coloreds, requiring, for example, recently manumitted slaves in Virginia to leave the state within one year. It also encouraged new systems of surveillance and control, especially for free blacks, whom southerners thought to be dangerous incendiaries, owing to their role in the Dominguan revolution” (Matthewson, “Jefferson and the Nonrecognition of Haiti,” 25). Jed Handelsman Shugerman notes that South Carolina reopened the African slave trade immediately following the Louisiana Purchase in a move that, he argues, was calculated by southern slaveholding interests to facilitate the spread of slavery westward by supplying ample slave labor and simultaneously preempting any increase in the illicit smuggling of slaves (and revolutionary antislavery sentiment) from the Caribbean into the port of New Orleans. According to Shugerman, South Carolina slaveholders concluded that “Louisiana either would continue to smuggle slaves from the Caribbean (and thus increase the risk of revolt as South Carolinians had fears), or South Carolina could provide the legal alternative by opening the African slave trade” (“Reopening of the Slave Trade,” 276).

24. For important histories of the cotton frontier and the second slavery in the United States see Baptist, Half Has Never Been Told; Beckert, Empire of Cotton; and Johnson, River of Dark Dreams.

25. Matthewson, “Jefferson and the Nonrecognition of Haiti,” 26. For more extensive treatment of this point, see Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, as well as David Brion Davis’s statement that “the myth that abolitionists were directly responsible for the bloodbath of Santo Domingo became an entrenched part of master class ideology, in Latin America as well as the United States” (Slave Power Conspiracy, 35).

26. The term “second slavery” was coined by Dale Tomich; see Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery. Anthony Kaye describes the second slavery as follows:

After 1790, slavery expanded onto new ground, slaves tended new crops and new machinery, and the planter classes gained dominance in rising world markets and acquired new powers from reconstituted states in Cuba, Brazil, and the South. Profits reaped from sugar, coffee, and cotton derived, in part, from burgeoning industrial production in two ways. First, upturns in output met increased demand from the growing populations of industrial workers. The transition of tropical commodities from elite luxuries to common necessities reached midcourse around 1800 and was completed during the nineteenth century. Second, planters integrated industrial machines with slave labor. In the new techniques and increased scale of production and the sheer mobility and adaptability of slave labor, the second slavery was, in a word, modern. (“Second Slavery,” 627)

From 1804, cotton climbed rapidly in importance until it became in most years 50% or higher of all U.S. exports by value. It would remain that way all the way until the Civil War. It was the main source of the foreign exchange needed to repay the imported manufactured goods brought in each year from British factories. The patterns and cycles of cotton, credit and other commodities would suffer astonishing crises, and would be rebuilt repeatedly. But in each version, the cycle of overseas goods and credit exchanged for cotton made on slavery’s frontier, was still the driving piston that pushed the U.S. economy forward each year. For cotton brought not only income, activity, and the ability to repay short-term commercial debts. The world market for cotton was so large, and growing so quickly—and U.S. enslavers were demonstrating the ability to extract from the enslaved not only more cotton but higher-quality cotton than could be bought from free-labor peasants in other parts of the world—that the southwestern frontier began to look like an ideal place to invest money. Outsiders wanted to invest money in generating additional cotton-making capacity. (“Second Slavery,” 19)

33. Schoelcher, Colonies étrangères et Haïti, 279–280, as cited by Dubois, Haiti, 103.

34. Robinson, Unbroken Agony, 22. Robinson writes, “After extended negotiations, in 1838, under the Traité d’Amitié the original obligation of 150 million francs was reduced to 90 million francs, with the government of Haiti required to make thirty annual payments of 2 million francs in order to pay off the 60 million franc balance. Haiti had to make these payments in addition to the payments it had been making to a succession of private banks from which it had to borrow at onerous interest rates in order to meet the terms of its original unjust obligation to France…. The Haitian economy has never recovered from the financial havoc France (and America) wreaked upon it, during and after slavery” (21–22).

36. Beauvois, “L’Indemnité de Saint-Domingue,” 109–124. Beauvois’s conclusions are drawn on the basis of analyzing the extent (or lack thereof) of French governmental repayments to former land-owners in St. Domingue; the insignificant nature of these payments leads him to conclude that the French government was pursuing political ends rather than seeking repayment for individuals who lost property during the Haitian Revolution.

38. On the use of racism for the workings of capitalism, see Wallerstein, “Ideological Tensions of Capitalism,” 29–36.

39. In 2003, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide demanded that France repay the indemnity to Haiti (close to §22 billion in current value), given that the indemnity was initially exacted for the cost of slaves lost by French colonists, and that slavery is now recognized as a crime against humanity. The French were dismissive of Aristide’s demand. See Charles, “Aristide Pushes for Restitution from France,” Miami Herald, December 18, 2003.

42. Jackson and Bacon, African Americans and the Haitian Revolution. Essays by Ivy Wilson and Marlene Daut included in this collection also describe the substantive connections between the United States and Haiti (despite the U.S. official non-recognition of Haiti) in the period following 1806.

43. Fischer, Modernity Disavowed; Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods; Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History; Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation; and Scott, Conscripts of Modernity.

4. Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, 4:11–12. For a comprehensive treatment of the structural complexities that characterized and handicapped Haiti’s colonial economy in its relations to international commerce, see Saint-Louis, Aux origines du drame dHaïti.

5. De Conde, Quasi-War, 130–136; Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 64–67; Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 130–132; Saint-Louis, Aux origines du drame dHaïti, 115–121; James, Black Jacobins, 207–212.

7. Toussaint Louverture, Général en chef de l’Armée de Saint Domingue à Monsieur Adams, Président du Congrès des États-Unis d’Amérique, le Cap, 16 brumaire An 7, in Jameson, ed., “Letters of Toussaint Louverture and Edward Stevens, 1798–1800,” 66.

8. Brown, Toussainf’s Clause, 18–22, 27–30. For the extent of commercial relations between Philadelphia merchants, in particular, and Saint Domingue during the 1790s, see Dun, “ ‘What avenues of commerce,’ ” 357–364.

9. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 73–75; Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 32–44.

11. The “XYZ Affair” refers to the scandal that erupted when it became known in the United States that the three commissioners President Adams had sent to Paris in an effort to ease tensions between the two countries during the Quasi-War were rebuffed, insulted, and expected to pay a bribe if they wished to begin negotiations with Minister of Foreign Affairs Charles Talleyrand. See Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 124–127.

12. Cabon, Histoire d’Haïti, 4:88–89; Saint-Louis, Aux origines du drame d’Haïti, 131.

13. For a fuller discussion of militarized agriculture under the regime of Toussaint Louverture, see Moïse, Le projet national de Toussaint Louverture et la Constitution de 1801, 62–65; James, Black Jacobins, 242; Saint-Louis, Aux origines du drame d’Haïti, 150–155; and Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti,” 26–27.

14. Bibliothèque Nationale [BN] (France), MSS 12102, Correspondance de Toussaint Louverture, v. 2, no. 415; Ordonnance du Citoyen Toussaint Louverture, Général en chef de l’Armée de Saint-Domingue, le Cap, 27 brumaire An 7 (November 17, 1798).

15. Ibid. On Toussaint’s administrative initiatives, also see Ardouin, Histoire d’Haïti, 4:11–12; Moïse, Le projet national de Toussaint Louverture, 56–57; and Saint-Louis, Aux origines du drame d’Haïti, 133–134.

16. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 95; De Conde, Quasi-War, 138–140; Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 144–161.

18. Edward Stevens to Timothy Pickering, le Cap, September 30, 1799, in Jameson, ed., “Letters of Toussaint Louverture and Edward Stevens,” 82–85.

20. Edward Stevens to Brigadier-General Maitland, Gonaïves, May 23, 1799, in Jameson, ed., “Letters of Toussaint Louverture and Edward Stevens,” 73.

21. For a fuller discussion of the complex underlying and immediate causes of the civil war between the two rivals, see James, Black Jacobins, 224–231; Sannon, Histoire de Toussaint Louverture, 2:191–205, 219–223; Ardouin, Études, 4:3–11, 19–26; and Saint-Louis, Aux origines du drame d’Haïti, 122–131.

22. Edward Stevens to Timothy Pickering, Arcahaye, June 24, 1799, in Jameson, ed., “Letters of Toussaint Louverture and Edward Stevens,” 79, 80.

25. Edward Stevens to Timothy Pickering, le Cap, February 13, 1800, in Jameson, ed., “Letters of Toussaint Louverture and Edward Stevens,” 93.

27. Quoted ibid., 83. Additional quotations in this paragraph are also quoted in Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 83, 84.

28. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 85–88; Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 145–154.

29. Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, January 23, 1799, in Oberg, ed., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 30:633–637.

30. Thomas Jefferson to John Page, Philadelphia, January 24, 1799, in Oberg, ed., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 30:640. See also Thomas Jefferson to Nicholas Lewis, Philadelphia, January 30, 1799, in Oberg, ed., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 30:663–664.

31. Thomas Jefferson to Aaron Burr, Philadelphia, February 11, 1799, in Oberg, ed., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 31:22–23.

32. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, February 12, 1799, in Oberg, ed. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 31:30.

33. Toussaint Louverture, Général en chef de l’Armée de Saint-Domingue à Monsieur John Adams, Président des États-Unis de l’Amérique, Port-de-Paix, 27 thermidor An 7 (August 14, 1799), in Jameson, ed., “Letters of Toussaint Louverture and Edward Stevens,” 82.

34. Edward Stevens to Timothy Pickering, Léogane, January 16, 1800, in Jameson, ed., “Letters of Toussaint Louverture and Edward Stevens,” 91.

36. Quoted in Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 104. Additional quotations in this paragraph are also quoted in Logan.

40. Quoted in Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 65; and in Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 100.

1. General Advertiser, July 20, 1791 (Philadelphia); Federal Gazette, July 20, 1791 (Philadelphia); reprinted in Gazette of the United States, July 23, 1791. All newspapers cited here were published in Philadelphia unless otherwise noted. The Hetty arrived on July 19. See Records of Arrivals and Clearances (entry 1057), vol. 1, Records of the U.S. Customs Service, Philadelphia, 1789–1791, Record Group 36, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Mid-Atlantic Regional Branch, Philadelphia, PA. For the Hetty’s cargo, see Inward Foreign Manifests (entry 1059b), box 8, Record Group 36, NARA. For Davis’s logbook of this and other voyages to and from St. Domingue, see Dutilh and Wachsmuth Papers, IV Dut 2, 69.120.5, Independence Seaport Museum, Philadelphia, PA.

2. Federal Gazette, July 21, 1791. This captain was John Davidson, of the schooner Charming Sally. See Records of Arrivals and Clearances (entry 1057), vol. 1, Record Group 26, NARA.

3. In addition to those accounts quoted elsewhere, notices of the decree in this period include Federal Gazette, July 22, 1791 (“FOR THE FEDERAL GAZETTE”), reprinted in General Advertiser, July 23, 1791; General Advertiser, July 26, 1791 (“France. NATIONAL ASSEMBLY May 14”); General Advertiser, July 28, 1791 (“France. NATIONAL ASSEMBLY May 16”); Federal Gazette, July 30, 1791 (Philadelphia and Montego Bay, June 25 headings). Between August and December 1791 the decree was discussed in at least twenty-five writings in Philadelphia newspapers.

4. I use this phrase, rather than “free colored,” “mulatto,” or affranchi, to refer to people of mixed parentage in St. Domingue. After a certain point the categories of “free” and “freed” are no longer sufficiently specific when various groups were actively fighting on their own behalf. “Mulatto,” though the term usually used by contemporary white Americans, was considered derogatory in St. Domingue.

5. For the question of the number enfranchised, see James, Black Jacobins, 77, who suggests four hundred; see also Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery. Fick, Making of Haiti, 85, suggests a “few hundred.” Geggus, “Racial Equality,” 1303 n. 83, however, finds that number “scarcely credible.” Dubois, Avengers, 89, finds the question irrelevant, except as an index of the various agendas at work in Paris. For the plight of the gens de couleur more generally, see Garrigus, Before Haiti.

6. Geggus, “Racial Equality”; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 185–190; and Dubois, Avengers, 89–90. See also Garrigus, Before Haiti, 352–359.

7. See Federal Gazette, April 2, 1791 (New York, March 31), and General Advertiser, April 2, 1791 (New York, March 31), in which the colonel killed is not named. See also Federal Gazette, April 4, 1791 (Baltimore), reprinted in General Advertiser, April 5, 1791, and Pennsylvania Gazette, April 6, 01791. For further details, see General Advertiser, April 11, 1791 (New London, April 1), Federal Gazette, May 7, 1791 (Boston, May 2, “From the Moniteur Colonial, a paper printed at Cape Francois, of the 10th March, a gentleman of this town has been pleased to favor us with the following translation.”) These sources were presumably the basis of contemporary accounts of this episode, most notably that provided in Edwards, Historical Survey, ch. 5, Rainsford, Historical Account, ch. 3. See also James, Black Jacobins, 82–84.

8. See Gazette of the United States, March 16, 1791, General Advertiser, March 19, 1791, reprinted in Federal Gazette, March 21, 1791, and Pennsylvania Gazette, March 23, 1791. See also Edwards, Historical Survey, ch. 4.

9. For cockades, see, for example, Gazette of the United States, November 11, 1789 (“Extract of a letter from a gentleman in Martinique, to his correspondent in this town”), Pennsylvania Gazette, November 18, 1789 (“BY order of the Excellencies the Governor and Intendent …”), and Pennsylvania Gazette December 16, 1789 (Kingston, October 10). For “the People,” see Federal Gazette, May 4, 1790 (“American Intelligence”). For the National Assembly, see Gazette of the United States, September 8, 1790. See also Pennsylvania Gazette, September 15, 1790, in which a commentator noted that “one party are for declaring themselves independent from France altogether, the other are for the National Assembly, which has altered this place amazingly.” For an example of notice of tyranny, see Pennsylvania Gazette, December 16, 1789 (Montego Bay, October 17). For “the cause of liberty,” see Federal Gazette, October 14, 1790 (“FRENCH WEST INDIES”). For a parallel drawn between the blanc Intendent and the “governor” of the Bastille, see Federal Gazette, November 25, 1789 (Boston, November 13).

12. Readers learned of this development in the text of the National Assembly’s decree of October 12, which castigated the St. Marc Assembly and praised Mauduit. See Philadelphia Gazette of the United States, December 29, 1790 (Paris, October 12). The General Assembly at St. Marc was reacting to the National Assembly’s decree of March 8, 1790, which gave legislative power to local entities for local issues. See Federal Gazette, June 1, 1790 (“By This Day’s Mail. Foreign Intelligence. Paris”), reprinted in Gazette of the United States, June 2, 1790. For the National Assembly’s subsequent instructions, issued on March 28, warning against pushing towards independence, see Gazette of the United States, July 28, 1790 (“Paris: Instructions for the Colonies”). Dubois, Avengers, 85–87; Fick, Making of Haiti, 81.

13. For their reception in Paris, see Gazette of the United States, December 4, 1790 (Paris, September 18). For their defense, see Federal Gazette, December 8, 1790 (Paris, October 2, “Colonial Committee”). For their castigation, see General Advertiser, January 4, 1791 (National Assembly, October 15, “FRENCH WEST INDIES”).

14. General Advertiser, December 24, 1790 (“Extract of a letter from Cape Francois, dated November 1, 1790”), reprinted in Pennsylvania Gazette, December 29, 1790.

15. Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 182–183; Dubois, Avengers, 87–88; Fick, Making of Haiti, 80–84.

16. General Advertiser, December 2, 1790 (Philadelphia, “Extract from Cape Francois”). See also General Advertiser, December 13, 1790 (“Extract of a letter from a gentleman in Cape Francois, to the Printer of the Independent Gazetteer, &c. dated November 3”), in which “Ojay” was maligned as an “ambitious villain” whose efforts were based on the decrees for freedom and equality given by the National Assembly—a “dangerous step” that would give the gens de couleur “the balance of power on the island.”

17. General Advertiser, March 3, 1791 (Charleston, February 15, Savannah, February 3).

19. General Advertiser, April 29, 1791 (“Concise Sketch of the POLITICS of St. Domingo”). Bache was fluent in French, having lived in France from 1776 to 1785 while traveling with Benjamin Franklin, his grandfather. He had to relearn English after returning to the United States. Few, if any, of Philadelphia’s other newspaper editors could claim fluency in French. On Bache, and on French language competency in general during this period, see Spurlin, French Enlightenment in America, 29–48 and Daniel, Scandal and Civility, 109–147.

20. Federal Gazette, December 8, 1790 (Boston, November 26). This was the opinion of officials on Martinique.

21. See, with different emphases, Newman, Parades and Politics; Waldstreicher, Perpetual Fetes; and Cleves, Reign of Terror. See also Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots.

22. For newspapers, reading, and ideas about national identity, see Hale, “On Their Tiptoes,” and Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America. On Philadelphia’s importance as a source of information, see Mott, American Journalism, 116–131; and Pasley, “ Tyranny of Printers,” passim and especially 74–95, 109–118, and 438 n. 49. For Philadelphia as a cultural center, see, for example, Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames.

24. See, for example, Richard How to John Pemberton, August 8, 1789, Pemberton Papers, vol. 52, p. 167, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), Philadelphia, PA, in which the British correspondent hoped that “the most commendable Example of ye Pennsylvanians will at length be as universally imitated as it is extolled, till not a single negro remain in Bondage.” See also de Warville, New Travels, passim.

25. Federal Gazette, June 2, 1791. Federal Gazette, April 4, 1791 (Baltimore), reprinted in General Advertiser, April 5, 1791, and Pennsylvania Gazette, April 6, 1791.

27. General Advertiser, August 2, 1791 (“Address of the Municipality of Port-au-Prince, to the National Assembly”).

28. General Advertiser, November 9, 1792 (“St. Domingo”); Federal Gazette, November 9, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”). Similar accounts are continued in General Advertiser, November 14, 1792 (“St. Domingo”) and Federal Gazette, November 14 and 15, 1791 (“ST. DOMINGO”).

29. This charge was made by the blanc governor Blanchelande. General Advertiser, May 12, 1791.

30. Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 186–187; Davis, Problem of Slavery, 142–144; Fick, Making of Haiti, 84–85; Geggus, “Racial Equality,” 1302–1303.

32. General Advertiser, July 16, 1791 (London, May 6). That Burke’s speech was given during debate over Parliament’s right to create a constitution for Canada indicates the extent to which the issues raised in St. Domingue penetrated into other discussions around colonial issues. Though this speech was given before the decree was passed, it was read in Philadelphia contemporaneously with its reception.

33. Bache’s chief competitor was John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States. The space devoted to St. Domingue and French debates over the colonial question in the General Advertiser far outpaces that in other papers in this period.

34. General Advertiser, July 30, 1791 (“Abstract of a letter from a gentleman in Cape Francois to his friend in this city, dated July 9th, 1791”), reprinted in Federal Gazette, August 1, 1791, and Pennsylvania Gazette, August 3, 1791. The scraps of debate in the National Assembly that Bache printed were suggestive. The July 26, 1791 issue (“France. NATIONAL ASSEMBLY”) reported a debate on May 14 in which a letter from the gens de couleur delegates was read, but not discussed. Two days later, under the same heading, the debate of May 16 was recorded, in which the Assembly received notice from Parisian Jews “who, encouraged by the decree which raised a number of mulattoes to the rank of active citizens, begged that a similar favour might be conferred on them.”

35. General Advertiser, August 8, 1791 (“Translated for the Independent Gazetteer,” Cape Francois, July 10). This issue also supplied a translation of the text of the May 15 decree. The Gazette of the United States reprinted some of this material in its August 10, 1791 issue, but did not include the Bordeaux merchants’ address.

36. These phrases were from a French merchant group. See National Gazette, December 5, 1791 (Paris, September 6), reprinted in General Advertiser, December 7, 1791. See also Gazette of the United States, August 24, 1791 (“A Letter from the Provincial Assembly of the North of St. Domingo, to the King of the French”); Gazette of the United States, September 10, 1791; and General Advertiser, September 13, 1791. For accounts placing gens de couleur at the head of the insurgent slaves, see, for example, Gazette of the United States, September 24, 1791 in which Cap-Français is described in the Pennsylvania Legislature as “closely besieged by an enraged and brutal multitude of Negroes and Mulattoes.”

37. This agreement came about when Western gens de couleur organized a confederation with local free blacks (including a maroon band) to confront the rouge leadership of the city. Local blanc factions, sensing an opportunity, offered to ally with this confederation and to support the Decree of May 15. In response, the rouge in Port-au-Prince signed a concordat in September 1791 with the confederates that went well beyond the decree in its recognition of gens de couleur citizenship. Violence began when jealous nonslaveholding whites in the city (petits blancs) refused to honor the agreement. Faced with alarming signs of slave unrest, however, rouge leaders regained control and offered additional promises of recognition to the gens de couleur in October. Shortly afterwards, when news that the National Assembly had repealed the May 15 Decree, the whites of Port-au-Prince reneged again. In the ensuing riot the city burned. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 119–122; Fick, Making of Haiti, 118–134; James, Black Jacobins, 96–103; Stein, Sonthonax, 64–65. For the quotation, see Gazette of the United States, October 19, 1791. For news of the concordats in Philadelphia, see Federal Gazette, October 18, 1791 (“Agreement between the White Citizens of Port-au-Prince and the Citizens of Color, September the 11th, 1791”), and Pennsylvania Gazette, October 19, 1791. Readers would have noticed that, in addition to mandating a broad acceptance of the Decree of May 15, they included provisions that explicitly adopted the gens de couleur interpretation of the March 8 and March 28, 1790, decrees of the National Assembly, as well as measures designed to rehabilitate Ogé’s reputation.

39. For the debates in the Legislative Assembly, see General Advertiser, November 18, 1791 (“Affairs of the Colonies”), reprinted in National Gazette, November 24, 1791, and Gazette of the United States, December 10, 1791. Robespierre, by this account, “giving a loose to his violent temper,” charged that Barnave and Lameth were “traitors to their country” because they had actively prevented the Decree of May 15 from being enforced. For threats of secession, see Federal Gazette, February 13, 1792 (“INSURRECTIONS in ST. DOMINGO”). See also General Advertiser, December 2, 1791 (“Extract of a letter from London, Sept. 16”). For the Decree of September 24 as a measure against the “counter-revolution,” see National Gazette, December 22, 1791 (Paris, September 24), reprinted in General Advertiser, December 23, 26, 1791. See also General Advertiser, December 19, 1791 (Paris, September 8), in which sources suggest the British navy, in league with reactionaries in St. Domingue, would open the island’s ports simultaneously with attacks by the counter-revolutionary forces massed along France’s borders.

40. See, for example, Federal Gazette, December 19, 1791 (“Extract of a letter from Cape-Francois, of the 16th of November, 1791, received by the brig Keziah, Capt. Robert Brown”), reprinted in General Advertiser, December 20, 1791, Gazette of the United States, December 21, 1791, and Pennsylvania Gazette, December 21, 1791. See also General Advertiser, January 18, 1792 (Boston, January 4).

41. For the news of the Decree of April 4, see National Gazette, June 4, 1792 (Paris, March 24). For the wave of optimism, see, for example, General Advertiser and Federal Gazette, August 8, 1792, Federal Gazette, August 11, 1792 (Providence, August 4), reprinted in Gazette of the United States and Pennsylvania Gazette, August 15, 1792; summarized in National Gazette, August 15, 1792.

42. For the “newspaper war” in Philadelphia in 1792, see Pasley, “Tyranny of Printers,” 48–78; and Daniel, Scandal and Civility, 116–128. For Jefferson’s and Madison’s roles, see Boyd, “Jefferson, Freneau, and the Founding of the National Gazette.” For an overview, see Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 82–92, 239–240.

43. National Gazette, August 11, 1792, reprinted in Federal Gazette, August 21, 1792.

44. General Advertiser, August 14, 1792. It is tempting to correlate Bache’s shift in opinion on “levelling principles” and “pretentions” between this writing and his depictions, using the same phrases, of Ogé in late 1790. I find the general shift more convincing than this suggestive, but singular, moment when his rhetoric flip-flopped.

49. General Advertiser, December 5, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”). The specific reference here was the creation of the Intermediate Commission, a body that would replace the provincial assembly in the north. All accounts stressed the break this body represented with the past because of its make up “without distinction of colour.” See General Advertiser, November 9, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”), November 12, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”), November 12, 1792 (“PROCLAMATION,—In the name of the NATION”).

50. For material maligning both governor Blanchelande and Mauduit, see General Advertiser, November 9, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO, Succint ACCOUNT of the MISFORTUNES of the COLONY in a letter from the Colonial Assembly to the French National Assembly, agreed to on the 4th”); General Advertiser, November 10, 1792 (“St. Domingo”); National Gazette, November 17, 1792; and General Advertiser, November 23, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”). These accounts intimate connections between the counter-revolution in France, to include Louis XVI’s actions, and in St. Domingue.

52. Bache printed a call to Americans for contributions by a society on the island, but interrupted the plea by widening the call. “American Reader, go and do thou likewise!” he wrote. France had served “the cause of American freedom”; now its citizens should not “call in vain for our aid against a merciless foe.—Forbid it honor, forbid it justice, humanity forbid it!” General Advertiser, November 23, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”).

54. This alien sensibility was embodied in Bache’s report of his apparent meeting in mid-1791 with a gens de couleur delegate from Martinique. The man was visiting the city in order to speak with George Washington, having what appeared to be an invitation, “distributed throughout the French colonies” via a printed leaflet, to “such oppressed people of colour, as chose to remove, and form a colony in Virginia.” Bache explained to his readers that this plan was obviously “nothing less than a gross imposition” and that it appeared that “the Mulattoe” had been tricked. General Advertiser, June 4, 1791. See Cox, “British Caribbean,” 282–283.

55. On white antislavery in the United States in this period, see, for example, Melish, Disowning Slavery, 50–118; Nash and Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees; Newman, Transformation of American Abolitionism, 1–59. More generally, see Davis, Problem of Slavery. For African American freedom efforts, see Egerton, Death or Liberty, and Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom.

56. National Gazette, March 12, 1792, reprinted in General Advertiser, March 14, 1792, and American Museum, July 1792.

57. See, for example, General Advertiser, August 8, 1791 (“Translated for the Independent Gazetteer,” Cape Francois, July 10.).

58. National Gazette, March 12, 1792, reprinted in General Advertiser, March 14, 1792, and American Museum, July 1792.

59. General Advertiser, March 14, 1792 (“ Translation of an address [from M. Gregory, Deputy to the National Assembly of France &c.] to the Colored Citizens and Free Negroes of the French Islands in America, upon the subject of the Rights of Man, confirmed to them by the National Assembly of France.”). For Grégoire, see Sepinwall, Abbé Grégoire.

1. Washington Federalist (Georgetown, District of Columbia), October 20, 1802.

2. For a detailed survey of the U.S. concerns about the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the domestic order, see Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael J. Drexler’s introductory essay in this volume.

4. For more information on how the XZY Affair and the Quasi-War impacted Franco-American relations, see Hale, “ ‘Many Who Wandered in Darkness’ ”; Ray, “ ‘Not One Cent for Tribute’ ”; and DeConde, Quasi-War.

8. For more information on the relationship between the Haitian Revolution and domestic slave uprising see Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America.

9. Daily Advertiser (New York), August 11, 1802; Commercial Advertiser (New York), August 11, 1802; New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, August 11, 1802; New-York Evening Post, August 11, 1802; and Philadelphia Gazette & Daily Advertiser, August 12, 1802.

11. Mercantile Advertiser (New York), August 16, 1802; and Commercial Advertiser (New York), August 16, 1802.

12. New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, August 16, 1802 (emphasis in the original).

13. New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, August 16, 1802. See Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser, August 17, 1802; Alexandria Advertiser and Commercial Intelligencer (Alexandria, VA), August 19, 1802; Connecticut Journal (New Haven), August 19, 1802; Albany Centinel, August 20, 1802; Republican or, Anti-Democrat (Baltimore), August 20, 1802; Columbian Advertiser; and Commercial, Mechanic, and Agricultural Gazette (Alexandria, VA), August 16, 1802; Independent Chronicle (Boston), August 16, 1802; The Commercial Register (Norfolk, VA), August 23, 1802; Salem Register (Massachusetts), August 16, 1802; Connecticut Courant (Hartford), August 16, 1802; Providence Gazette (Rhode Island), August 21, 1802; Eastern Herald & Maine Gazette (Portland), August 23, 1802; Middlebury Mercury (Vermont), August 25, 1802; New-Hampshire Sentinel (Keen), August 21, 1802; Balance, and Columbian Repository (Hudson, NY), August 17, 1802; Courier (Norwich, CT), August 18, 1802; New-Jersey-Journal (Elizabethtown), August 17, 1802; United States Oracle, and Portsmouth Advertiser (New Hampshire), August 21, 1802; Greenfield Gazette (Massachusetts), August 23, 1802; True American (Trenton, NJ), August 23, 1802; OLIO (Georgetown, DC), August 19, 1802; Columbian Courier (New Bedford, MA), August 20, 1802; Farmers’ Museum, or Literary Gazette (Walpole, NH), August 24, 1802; and Kentucky Gazette (Lexington), September 10, 1802 (the late August and early September editions of the Kentucky Gazette are not accessible through Readex’s on-line Early American Newspapers Series 1–7, 1690–1922, but it seems likely from the presentation of the September 10 narrative that the paper had carried notice of the event at some earlier date).

14. It may have been a fear of these deportation schemes that fueled the desire to proceed with the Louisiana Purchase, with acquisition of the territory being imagined as a preemptive means of foreclosing Louisiana as a dumping ground for forcibly deported French slaves from the West Indies. See Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 404.

15. For information about the reported murder see, for example, New-York Gazette, September 10, 1802, and Virginia Argus, September 22, 1802. For the story about the escapees spotted near Hoboken, see New-York Evening Post, September 13, 1802. The story was shortly thereafter reprinted in Philadelphia (two papers), Boston (two papers), Connecticut, New Jersey, Newport, RI, Salem, MA, Concord, NH, Kennebunk, ME, Washington, Norfolk, VA, Augusta, ME, Keene, NH, and Burlington, VT.

17. United States Chronicle (Providence, RI), September 23, 1802. The story carried by the Chronicle reprints an article that first appeared in the New-York Evening Post two weeks prior (September 6, 1802).

19. As I will discuss in more detail below, Fontaine Maury and Wade Hampton jointly authored a letter to Secretary of State James Madison about the situation in New York on August 21, 1802. Madison forwarded the letter to Jefferson less than a week later, and references to the Hampton-Maury letter (and the situation in New York more broadly) appear intermittently in Madison’s correspondence for the next several weeks. In his exchange with Jefferson, Madison underscores that both Secretary of War Henry Dearborn and Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin were quickly apprised of the situation. Jefferson’s initial reply to Madison on August 27, 1802 openly references both the Hampton-Maury letter and the correspondence between Mayor Edward Livingston and French officials in New York. In his letter to James Monroe (the governor of Virginia), Maury suggests that he and Hampton had sent either individual or jointly authored letters to the governors of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. See Wade Hampton and Fontaine Maury to James Madison, August 21, 1802, and Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, August 27, 1802, in The Papers of James Madison 3:503 and 3:522. See also Fontaine Maury to James Monroe, August 21, 1802, The Papers of James Monroe 4:609–10.

21. The press loudly decried any attempts to discharge the prisoners. While a few New Yorkers reportedly tried to acquire some of the prisoners (presumably taking advantage of the flotilla’s dire need for supplies to purchase slaves cheaply), no one agitated for their conditions to be improved.

23. The exchange of letters was reprinted in virtually every paper published in New York City. In addition, the exchange appeared in Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), August 18, 1802; Federal Gazette (Maryland), August 19, 1802; Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), August 19, 1802; Columbian Advertiser; and Commercial, Mechanic, and Agricultural Gazette (Alexandria, VA), August 20, 1802; New-Jersey-Journal (Elizabethtown), August 24, 1802; Connecticut Journal (New Haven), August 26, 1802; South-Carolina State Gazette and Timothy’s Daily Adviser (Charleston), August 31, 1802. On August 20, the Albany Centinel carried the news of the accident, and on the following day Boston’s Columbia Centinel ran its story about the collision in New York harbor.

24. A copy of Livingston’s letter to Dearborn (dated September 1, 1802) was forwarded to James Madison on September 7, 1802. See Mayor Edward Livingston to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, September 1, 1802 (copied by Daniel Brent and forwarded to James Madison), in The Papers of James Madison, 3:556.

25. Fontaine Maury was living in Fredericksburg when Gabriel’s Rebellion shook nearby Richmond—and quickly unnerved the entire southern region. Fredericksburg’s local paper, the Virginia Herald, in which Fontaine Maury’s name frequently appeared in advertisements, notices, and letters to the editor, openly speculated that the French Revolutionary mantras of “Liberty and Equality” had “been infused into the minds of the negroes,” and spurred Gabriel’s uprising in 1800. Many southerners equated these French revolutionary slogans with contagions, which if not successfully quarantined could potentially ravage the United States, and it is likely that Maury’s panic about the influx of revolutionary prisoners into New York harbor was inflected by his experiences in Virginia during Gabriel’s Rebellion. See Wade Hampton & Fontaine Maury to James Madison, August 21, 1802, in The Papers of James Madison, 3:503. For more detailed information about the devastating effects of the Haitian Revolution on the French economy, see Trouillot Silencing the Past and Dubois Colony of Citizens.

26. Maury’s letter to Monroe is perhaps the most charged of his extant letters about the situation in New York harbor, although it closely resembles the others (as well as those he coauthored with Wade Hampton) in shape and detail. The difference in tone is likely attributable to Maury’s personal relationship with Monroe. Fontaine Maury to James Monroe, August 21, 1802, The Papers of James Monroe 4:609–10. Drayton sent a letter to Thomas Jefferson on September 12, 1802, which begins by saying he has just received a letter from Colonel Wade Hampton about the situation in New York; see John Drayton to Thomas Jefferson, September 12, 1802, Thomas Jefferson Papers 38:385.

27. Fontaine Maury was just three years younger than Monroe, and they would surely have known one another when Monroe was a resident at his father’s school. Maury’s father officiated at the wedding of Jefferson’s daughter, and his brother James Maury was the first U.S. consul to England—all of which suggests the level of familiarity between the Maury family and members of both Jefferson’s administration and the planter elite of Virginia. See James Monroe to Fontaine Maury, September 6, 1802, James Monroe to William Davies, September 6, 1802 and James Monroe to Thomas Newton, September 6 1802, James Monroe: Papers in Virginia Repositories, microfilm reel no. 9.

29. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802, 48. Winthrop Jordan argues that “while” the Gabriel plot “confirmed [Virginians’] fears about the Negro, it jarred their picture of slavery and themselves,” because it shattered the illusion that they lived in an “enlightened day when slaves were better treated and there were relatively fewer of them” (White over Black, 394).

30. Virginia had been a popular haven for refugee Creole planters since the initial outbreaks of violence in Haiti, largely because it lacked the prohibitions against both West Indian slaves and free “French Negroes” that other southern states, notably Georgia in 1793, South Carolina in 1794, and Maryland in 1797, had enacted as precautionary restraints. Despite the wariness of Virginia’s slaveholders about the infection of revolutionary contagions—especially in the aftermath of Gabriel’s Rebellion—they, inexplicably, remained “the only southern state not to adopt preventive measures” prohibiting the importation of West Indian slaves (Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 169).

31. James Monroe to William Vaughan, March 17, 1802, James Monroe: Papers in Virginia Repositories microfilm, reel no. 8

35. For more detailed information on the population history of Georgetown County, see George C. Rogers, The History of Georgetown County.

37. John Drayton to Thomas Jefferson, September 12, 1802, Thomas Jefferson Papers 38:385.

38. Edes’ Kennebec Gazette (Augusta, ME), November 4, 1802. For more information on how information was suppressed in order to keep it from the domestic slave population see Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 155–158; and Jordan, White over Black, 391–399.

39. Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase,” 263. See also Ohline, “Georgetown, South Carolina,” 130–131.

42. See Girard, Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon, 190. Girard has done extensive work in French naval archives in Brest and Paris, but does not list any information about particular ships in his volume.

This essay has benefitted from generous conversations with a number of colleagues. I am grateful for audiences at Cornell University (especially Cheryl Finley and Hortense Spillers) and Yale University (espcially Jill Campbell, Wai Chee Dimock, Jackie Goldsby, and Caleb Smith) as well as the keen insights of the volume’s editors, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael J. Drexler.

1. “An Authentic Portrait of Toussaint,” New Orleans Tribune, November 10, 1864, 1.

5. Foucault defines “subjugated knowledges” as having two primary characteristics: “When I say ‘subjugated knowledges’ I mean two things. On the one hand, I am referring to historical contents that have been buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systemizations…. Second, when I say ‘subjugated knowledges’ I am also referring to a whole series of knowledges that have been disqualified as … insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity” (Society Must Be Defended, 7).

6. Foucault, “About the Beginnings,” 202; Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 139.

7. As Foucault writes, “Genealogies are, quite specifically, antisciences…. They are the insurrection of knowledges. Not so much against the contents, methods, or concepts of a science; this is above all, primarily, an insurrection against the centralizing power-effects that are bound up with the institutionalization and workings of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours” (Society Must Be Defended, 9).

8. In this sense, this essay approaches “literary portraiture” in ways that are indebted to W. J. T. Mitchell’s notion of “iconology,” especially where he outlines a methodological approach to iconology as the “ways that images in the strict or literal sense (pictures, statues, works of art) are related to notions such as mental imagery, verbal or literary imagery, and the concept of man as an image and maker of images,” Mitchell, Iconology, 2.

9. The essays that comprise Jackson and Bacon’s recent volume African Americans and the Haitian Revolution are the best single source glossing the wide range of African American responses to Haiti from the revolution to the early twenty-first century.

11. The first article in the series on Haiti was published on April 20, 1827, and seems to have run for the next six weeks. The first piece in the three-part installment of the Louverture biographical sketch was published on May 4, 1827. And installments of the short story “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” were published on January 18, January 25, February 8, and February 15, 1828. See Bacon, “ ‘Revolution Unexampled,’ ” 81–92.

13. For further discussion in broader context, see Wilson, “On Native Ground,” 454.

16. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, ix. On the transnational dimensions of the American Renaissance, see Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations, 25.

17. For more on African Americans and the Civil War, see Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War.

18. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 300 (emphasis in the original). The effect of George’s words on Eliza is reminiscent of an earlier scene with Mr. Wilson, his former boss at the bagging factory, inasmuch as they (Wilson and George) are both impassioned but the content of their words are markedly different. In the earlier episode with Mr. Wilson, George’s tenor is purposely meant to sonically echo Patrick Henry and, as such, authorize George’s actions through the sanctioned discourse of the Founding Fathers. The chapter, then, in which George “gets into an improper [revolutionary] state of mind” is not underwritten by his having been influenced by the Haitian Revolution or modeling himself after Louverture—which is to say that Stowe prefigures George’s understanding of the right of revolution on a version based more on a circumscribed national model rather than other instances of black insurrection by the likes of figures such as Denmark Vesey, Joseph Cinque, and others.

22. As Srinivas Aravamudan argues, Wordsworth’s sonnet, which finds Louverture imprisoned in Joux, “attempts to ‘turn’ Toussaint into Nature but apotropaically acknowledges the realities of a ‘tropical’ oppression both poetic and historical” (Tropicopolitans, 312).

36. “The history of Toussaint, placed by the side of that of Napoleon, presents many striking parallels,” Brown noted. “The parallels, however, have their contrast” too (St. Domingo, 36).

Toussaint’s career as a Christian, a statesman, and a general, will lose nothing by comparison with that of Washington. Each was the leader of an oppressed and outraged people, each had a powerful enemy to contend with, and each succeeded in founding a government in the New World. Toussaint’s government made liberty its watchword, incorporated it in its constitution, abolished the slave-trade, and made freedom universal amongst the people. Washington’s government incorporated slavery and the slave-trade, and enacted laws by which chains were fastened upon the limbs of millions of people. Toussaint liberated his countrymen; Washington enslaved a portion of his, and aided in giving strength and vitality to an institution that will one day rend asunder the Union that he helped to form. (St. Domingo, 37)

CHAPTER 5. FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ANTÉNOR FIRMIN, AND THE MAKING OF U.S.-HAITIAN RELATIONS

3. Ibid., 121; Polyné, From Douglass to Duvalier, 5–7 (emphasis in the original).

5. I draw here and in the following paragraphs on my overview of Haitian history in Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.

7. Firmin, Lettres de Saint-Thomas, 111–115; Firmin, Equality; Janvier, La République d’Haïti.

10. Polyné, Douglass to Duvalier, 25–26, 38; May, Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire.

11. Denis, “100 Ans,” 22–24. “Vous autres, vous créez facilement des machines, mais difficilement des idées.”

14. On the role of descendants of migrants from Saint-Domingue in politics in Louisiana, see Scott, Degrees of Freedom.

18. Douglass, “Haïti and the United States,” 456; Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 406–407, 433–434.

19. Douglass, “Haïti and the United States,” 339–340; Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 447–448.

20. Montague, Haiti, 148–149; Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 436, 442, 447–448; Douglass, “Haïti and the United States,” 343–344.

22. The full correspondence is published in Firmin, Roosevelt, 497 and 501. See also Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 448–450. Benjamin, Diplomatie, 91–96: “Le Gouvernement d’Haïti n’afferme aucun port ou autre portion de son territoire, ni n’en dispose autrement, n’y accordant aucun privilège spécial ou droit d’usage à aucun pouvoir, état ou gouvernement.” “L’acceptation de votre demande avec une telle clause serait, aux yeux du Gouvernement d’Haïti, un outrage à la souveraineté de la République d’Haïti et une violation flagrante de l’article Ier de notre Constitution, car en renonçant au droit de disposer de son territoire, il en aurait consenti l’aliénation tacite”; “sans paraitre céder à une pression étrangère et compromettre ipso facto notre existence de peuple indépendant, d’autant plus que plusieurs journaux américains, dans un but indevinable, font une propagande mensongère tendant à faire croire qu’il y a eu des engagements signés”; “de mauvaise volonté ”; “à la plus glorieuse et la plus généreuse république du Nouveau Monde et peut-être du Monde Moderne.”

24. Firmin, Roosevelt, 497–501; Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 437–438, 451.

Toutefois l’Haïtien intelligent, au lieu de s’emballer dans une méfiance irraisonnée des Etats-Unis, à cause de leur ‘impérialisme’ et de leur ‘préjugé de couleur,’ doit-il étudier la question, l’histoire en mains, avant de prendre une posture qui, pour digne qu’elle puisse paraître, ne prêterait pas moins à l’ironie, si ceux dont il se plaint avec le plus d’humeur, étaient encore les plus respectueux de son droit de peuple indépendant, en supposent même que cette attitude correcte ne fût que de pures formes. C’est, en effet, for significatif que les Américains gardent les formes là où les Européens s’en passent avant tant de cavalière aisance…. L’Amérique n’en a pas besoin. (Firmin, Roosevelt, 468–469)

Haïti, la République noire, libre et indépendante, peut vivre et elle vivra, à côté de l’Union américaine, sans que l’ombre colossale de sa grande voisine la fasse disparaitre dans la lumière resplendissante de l’Archipel des Antilles. Au contraire, à cette ombre elle doit grandir, elle doit se développer, sans s’y laisser jamais absorber. Et, pour cela, que faut-il? Du bon sens, de la sagesse et de l’intelligence. Les États-Unis, par force des choses, ont un intérêt actuel et capital à voir notre nation s’affermir et se civiliser, afin d’enlever tous les prétextes que les autres grandes puissances mettent ordinairement en avant, pour nous molester et surtout menacer notre autonomie nationale. (Firmin, Roosevelt, 478)

Les États-Unis ont tout ce dont nous avons besoins pour nous lancer dans le sillon d’une civilisation active et laborieuse. Ils ont les capitaux de toute sorte: argent, machines, expérience du travail hardi et énergie morale à résister contre les difficultés. Pourquoi, s’ils désirent notre amitié,–notre conservation étant devenue solidaire à leurs plus puissants intérêts,–ne nous offriraient-ils pas cette main secourable que nous cherchons depuis un siècle, sans trop le crier, il est vrai, mais en dépensant en pure perte nos amabilités et nos concessions souriantes envers les nations riches et civilisées, qui n’auraient qu’à laisser descendre jusqu’à nous leur bienveillance philanthropique, pour assurer notre ascension au milieu des peuples christianisés? (Ibid., 480)

28. “Ce n’est que dans le cas où notre indépendance nationale menacerait de s’anéantir par une impéritie, une infirmité interne aussi avilissante qu’irrémédiable, que l’Oncle Sam tendrait ses longs bras, pour ne point nous laisser choisir d’autre mains. Mais est-ce là une fatalité historique?” (Firmin, Roosevelt, 477). See also:

On ne peut résister contre l’évidence. Cette évidence actuelle, pour nous, c’est que les Etats-Unis ont acquis une prépondérance presque indiscutée dans les affaires internationales des deux Amériques. Qu’on s’en réjouisse ou qu’on s’en attriste—et nous n’avons aucune raison de nous en réjouir ni de nous attrister—il faut en prendre son parti et agir en conséquence. Au lieu donc de nous mettre en posture de barrer la voie à un torrent impétueux et irrésistible, c’est notre intérêt de le laisser suivre son cours, en nous tenant de façon à en être fructueusement arrosée; sans nous exposer à être emportés, en essayant d’y faire obstacle, dans un geste où notre impuissance n’égalerait que notre inconscience. (Ibid., 480)

29. “Homme je puis disparaitre sans voir poindre à l’horizon national l’aurore d’un jour meilleur. Cependant même après ma mort, il faudra de deux choses l’une : ou Haïti passe sous une domination étrangère, ou elle adopte résolument les principes au nom desquels j’ai toujours lutté et combattu. Car, au vingtième siècle et dans l’hémisphère occidental aucun peuple ne peut vivre indéfiniment sous la tyrannie, dans l’injustice, l’ignorance et la misère” (Moïse, Constitutions, 2:12).

1. Benot, Révolution française; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery; Trouillot, Silencing the Past.

2. Compare Palmer, Age of the Democratic Revolution; Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution; and Liss, Atlantic Empires, with Langley, Americas in the Age of Revolution; Calderón and Thibaud, Revoluciones en el mundo atlántico; Benjamin, Atlantic World; and Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World.

3. Dubois, Colony of Citizens; Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation; Fischer, Modernity Disavowed; and Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History.

4. McLynn, Napoleon: A Biography; Blaufarb, Napoleon: Symbol for an Age; and Belaubre, Dym, and Savage, Napoleon’s Atlantic.

5. Quinn, French Overseas Empire, 77; Lachance, “Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution,” 210–211; Hernández Guerrero, “La Révolution haïtienne,” 453–467; Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 224–228; Dubois, “Haitian Revolution and the Sale of Louisiana,” 18; and Belaubre, Dym, Savage, Napoleon’s Atlantic, 5, 9. See also below, n.68.

7. Hosmer, History of the Louisiana Purchase, 45, 58, 71; Bruce, Romance of American Expansion, 46; Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 194–195; Priestley, France Overseas, 353; Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 142–146; Handlin, Chance or Destiny, 27–48; Pratt, History of United States Foreign Policy, 96; Graebner, Ideas and Diplomacy, 82; Peterson, Thomas Jefferson, 759–761; LaFeber, “Foreign Policies of a New Nation,” 34–35; Sprague, So Vast, So Beautiful, 299–300; Morison, Commager, and Leuchtenburg, Growth of the American Republic, 340; Burns, Vineyard of Liberty, 176; Liss, Atlantic Empires, 280 n.17; Kennedy, Orders From France, 126; Thernstrom, History of the American People, 1:225; Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 92, 120, 281; Hoffman, Luisiana, 295, 306; Zuckerman, Almost Chosen People, 218; and Richard, Louisiana Purchase, 28–30.

8. Geggus, “French Imperialism,” 31, 272 n.32. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 143, 146, notes some exceptions but see, most recently, Garnier, Bonaparte et la Louisiane.

10. Paquette, “Revolutionary Saint Domingue,” 210, 221 n.3; Dubois, “Haitian Revolution,” 18. Paquette cites only one case of such “Eurocentric interpretation,” and Dubois cites only Paquette.

11. Even general U.S. history textbooks of half a century ago relate it to France’s loss of troops in St. Domingue. See, e.g., Canfield, Making of Modern America, 166; Morris, Encyclopedia of American History, 132; Graff and Krout, Adventure of the American People, 171–172 (which completely ignores the “European” factor); Current et al., American History, 197–199; Carman et al., History of the American People, 322; and Kraus, United States to 1865, 304–306. Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 92, exaggerate only slightly in affirming that St. Domingue “has of course always been acknowledged” as a contributory factor.

16. Benot, Démence coloniale, 9, 100; Benot, “Bonaparte et la démence coloniale,” 13–35.

18. This view is expressed in Gaffarel, Politique coloniale, 133–138, 154; Hanotaux and Martineau, Histoire des colonies françaises, 1:535; Adams, History of the United States, 1:390; Benot, Démence coloniale, 21–31; and by most historians of the Haitian Revolution.

19. Deschamps, Histoire de la question coloniale, 70–71; Roloff, Kolonialpolitik Napoleons, 69–74, 249–252; Saintoyant, Colonisation française, 70–76; Leclerc, Lettres du général Leclerc, 33; Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, 446–453.

20. See the chapters by Bélénus, Benot, and Elisabeth in 1802 en Guadeloupe.

21. Girard, Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon, 46–47, 186–191; quotations from 187, 188.

22. See Leclerc, Lettres du général Leclerc, 287. This partly encoded dispatch was disguised as an “agricultural plan” but obviously referred to slavery. What remains unclear is the degree to which the hapless and disapproving Leclerc had been forewarned before leaving France.

23. Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture, 447. Other historians who have expressed similar views include Maurice Besson, Robert Paquette, and Dolores Hernández Guerrero.

24. Emmanuel de Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, 1:687–688, 2:685–686. The idea is hinted at in official correspondence drafted in March 1801 but never sent. Other evidence suggests Bonaparte’s attitude toward Toussaint radically changed during this month.

25. Dubois, “Haitian Revolution and the Sale of Louisiana,” 18–41. Moreover, historians who emphasize that Toussaint presided over an economic revival usually forget that the colony’s export figures for 1801–1802 benefited from the recent incorporation of regions where British occupiers had maintained slavery down to 1798.

27. DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 108–109; Smith, “Napoleon and Louisiana,” 61.

28. The official instructions for the intended Captain-General of Louisiana, written in November 1802, recommend merely the defense of Louisiana and maintaining the colony’s existing trade links with Spanish possessions. See Robertson, Louisiana Under the Rule of Spain, 359–376.

29. Talleyrand appears to have played along with Dupont so as to defuse American hostility. Inconclusive evidence, suggestive of an early willingness to sell, is summarized in Lyon, Louisiana, 141 n.52; DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 96, 119, 130.

30. The argument was made in Lyon, Louisiana, 191–192, and given primacy in Stenberg, “Napoleon’s Cession of Louisiana: A Suggestion,” 354–361.

31. See Benot, Démence, 331 n.2; Bruce, Romance of American Expansion, 46; Hernández Guerrero, Revolución haitiana, 115, which relied on the lightweight and unreliable Chidsey, Louisiana Purchase, 133–134, which presents St. Domingue as just a “pause” en route to Louisiana.

32. Montague, Haiti and the United States, 43; Barbé-Marbois, Histoire de la Louisiane, 184.

33. Roloff, Kolonialpolitik Napoleons, 244–254 (instructions); Leclerc, Lettres du général Leclerc; Napoléon Ier, Correspondance de Napoléon, vols. 7 and 8.

35. Lyon, Louisiana, 120–125; DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 103–105.

36. Napoléon Ier, Correspondance de Napoléon, 7:210, 226, 293, 345–346, 442, 532.

37. Lyon, Louisiana, 132–134, argues he took the need for paperwork seriously.

43. Roederer, Journal du Comte P.-L. Roederer, 165; Lyon, Louisiana, 193–194; De-Conde, This Affair of Louisiana, 151.

44. Benot, “Bonaparte et la démence coloniale,” 19 n.11; Lyon, Louisiana, 194; Hoffman, Luisiana, 295, 306. Sprague, So Vast, So Beautiful, 300, wrongly claims that the French were driven out of St. Domingue at this time. This did not happen until November 1803.

45. Roloff, Kolonialpolitik Napoleons, 142–144; Thomas Ott, Haitian Revolution, 179–180, 186; Fleming, Louisiana Purchase, 56; Lyon, Louisiana, 137.

46. Paquette, “Revolutionary Saint Domingue,” 205–206, 209; Barbé-Marbois, Histoire de la Louisiane, 271.

47. Napoléon Ier, Correspondance de Napoléon, 8:200–202. He proposed to take a levy from the 276 infantry battalions in Europe that had not yet sent troops to the colonies.

48. Lyon, Louisiana, 141–142. This activity is claimed to have been a smokescreen in Adams, History of the United States, 2:16–17.

49. One on-the-spot assessment reckoned that the army and navy had lost 30,000 of 43,000 men by May 1803. See Arango y Parreño, Obras, 1:354–355.

50. See ibid., 1:369–370; Barbé-Marbois, Histoire de la Louisiane, 293–297.

51. Marbois does not identify the minister in question. Almost all writers have assumed he was Denis Decrès, the minister of the navy and colonies, or Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, the foreign minister, but mention of his military service in North America leaves little doubt it was Berthier.

52. Lyon, Louisiana, 202–204, 214; DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 110–145, 155. See also Matthewson, Proslavery Foreign Policy, 113–115. DeConde stresses Jefferson’s bellicosity and provides the best detail on French knowledge of U.S. opinion, but also observes that the American and European factors were interdependent.

53. Pichon’s role is emphasized in Lyon, Louisiana, and in Bowman, “Pichon, the United States, and Louisiana,” 257–270, which nonetheless corrects Lyon in showing that Pichon’s most important dispatches arrived too late to affect the decision to sell.

54. Lyon, Louisiana, 203, 214; DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 157; David A. Carson, “The Role of Congress,” 369–383; Bowman, “Pichon,” 267; Paquette, “Revolutionary Saint Domingue,” 221 n.4.

55. Williams, Shaping of American Diplomacy, 77–79; Lewis, Louisiana Purchase, 49–52; and Lyon, Louisiana, 152–157. The supposed weakness of Jefferson’s diplomacy is the focus of Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty.

56. Benot, La Démence coloniale, 102; Barbé-Marbois, Histoire de la Louisiane, 285–287, 335.

57. Roloff, Kolonialpolitik Napoleons, 149; Renaut, Question de la Louisiane, 117. Jefferson himself later mentioned he had not expected the French to sell until after war broke out with Britain. See Peterson, Thomas Jefferson, 761.

58. Lyon, Louisiana, 196, 199–201; Bowman, “Pichon,” 269; Smith, “Napoleon and Louisiana,” 59–62. The documents Lyon cites (202–207) to show Bonaparte’s “prime motive was to placate the United States” suggest just as much the centrality of the British threat.

63. DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 156–157 (on Monroe); Barbé-Marbois, Histoire de la Louisiane, 275, 282, 284–287, 299.

64. Adams, History of the United States, 2:13–17; Lyon, Louisiana, 195–196, 199–200; Paquette, “Revolutionary Saint Domingue,” 205–211. The fact that the maintenance of French troops on Dutch soil was the main casus belli, and that Napoleon justified their presence by stating they were awaiting departure for Louisiana, suggests another link. However, for financial reasons, Napoleon stationed many troops abroad, and the Louisiana expeditionary force constituted less than a third of those in the Netherlands. Cf. Deutsch, Genesis of Napoleonic Imperialism, 87–88. Paquette makes a causal link by arguing the cost of the Saint Domingue expedition was a major factor in the regime’s financial problems but he provides no figures.

65. Signaling renewed plans of conquest in the Middle East, the report increased British reluctance to withdraw from Malta, which was a major cause for the resumption of hostilities. Deutsch, Genesis of Napoleonic Imperialism, 116–120, tentatively suggests that the report should not be seen as a turning point but a petulant outburst that the French rapidly sought to excuse. A similar media-related puzzle was created the previous spring, when, although the retrocession of Louisiana was officially denied, the government-controlled Gazette de France argued that France should curb U.S. westward expansion by occupying Louisiana and detaching Kentucky and Tennessee. Bowman, “Pichon,” 266; Lyon, Louisiana, 151.

66. Quotes from Bruce, Romance of American Expansion, 46; Bemis, Diplomatic History, 134–137.

67. The phrase comes from a 1799 letter to Aaron Burr and was an ironic reference to the French. See Scherr, “Jefferson’s ‘Cannibals’ Revisited,” 251–282.

68. See Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 294; Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 270; and Palmié and Scarano, eds., Caribbean, 310, 417.

1. For a discussion about the influence of smallpox on the outcome of the American Revolution, see Fenn, Pox Americana. For a history of the relation of yellow fever, malaria, and the growth of empire in the Caribbean, see McNeill, Mosquito Empires.

2. The precise length of the pandemic is difficult to pinpoint, but lasts from 1793 to about 1820. I focus on the decade of the Haitian Revolution because the movement of soldiers and refugees across the Atlantic world during that decade was central to the outbreak, and helped make it visible in the imaginations of people on both sides of the ocean. For more on the yellow fever in particular, see McNeill, Mosquito Empires, and Arner, “Making Yellow Fever American,” 447–471.

3. It has by now become a cliché that yellow fever determined the ultimate success of the revolution. While the impact of yellow fever on European troops was unquestionably a major factor in their failure to take and hold the colony, such claims ultimately oversimplify the tactical and strategic strength of St. Domingue’s black fighters. For a further discussion of this issue—which verges on immunological determinism—see McNeill, Mosquito Empires, 236, 260–261.

4. Arner argues that transatlantic debates about the contagiousness of yellow fever were central to emergent strains of U.S. nationalism, but that these strains can only be properly understood by positioning “American medicine in a more ‘multi-centered’ Atlantic world” (“Making Yellow Fever American,” 448).

6. Geggus, “Yellow Fever in the 1790s,” 38–58, 38. See also McNeill, Mosquito Empires, 32, and Carter, Yellow Fever.

9. See Geggus, “Yellow Fever in the 1790s,” Howard, Haitian Journal of Lieutenant Howard, 137.

12. Geggus, “Yellow Fever in the 1790s,” 48, 50. McNeill cites the following statistics in his study: “in the course of the occupation, 1793–1798, the British multinational army committed a total of about 23,000 to 25,000 troops to St. Domingue. Roughly 15,000 or 60 to 65 percent, died there” (Mosquito Empires, 247). For an eyewitness account of this mortality, see Howard.

14. Geggus, “Yellow Fever in the 1790s,” 39, 44; and Carter, Yellow Fever, 10.

15. For more on herd immunity, see Timmreck, Introduction to Epidemiology, 49–51, and Lilienfeld and Lilienfeld, Foundations of Epidemiology, 61. See also Wald, Contagious, 48–49, and Silva, Miraculous Plagues, 111–116. McNeill also writes of herd immunity, but describes its effects in terms of the useful phrase “differential immunity” (Mosquito Empires, 4).

16. Monnier, Observations sur quelques epidémies, 6: “Très-rarement un seul échappe au tribut qu’elle exige pour se créoliser, suivant l’expression du pays.” Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. On the “seasoning fever,” see, for example, Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies… with Remarks upon the Seasoning or Yellow Fever of Hot Climates; William Pym, Observations upon the Bulam Fever, 3; and Williamson, Medical and Miscellaneous Observations, 1:291.

18. Gilbert, Histoire Médicale de l’armée française, 81: “On évitera avec le plus grand soin la promenade du bord de mer le soir, temps où la fraîcheur précipite les émanations marécageuses que le soleil a tenues en évaporation dans la journée. Les militaires se souviendront toujours que rien n’est plus dangereux que de se coucher et s’endormir sur la terre humide.”

19. For an extended discussion of the Philadelphia outbreak, see Otter, Philadelphia Stories; Estes and Smith, Melancholy Scene of Devastation; and Powell, Bring Out Your Dead.

20. Pernick, “Politics, Parties, and Pestilence,” 559–586, 562. As Arner argues in “Making Yellow Fever American,” this was an important debate that played out beyond the borders of Philadelphia and the United States to the greater Atlantic world.

25. Devèze, An Enquiry into, and Observations upon the Causes and Effects of the Epidemic Disease, 36.

27. François, Dissertation sur la fièvre jaune, 6: “Aux Antilles, à la Terre-Ferme, elle épargne les habitants du pays, tandis qu’elle tue avec fureur les étrangers, quelquefois très-peu de jours après leur arrivée. Aux Etats-Unis d’Amérique, c’est tout le contraire: l’indigène seul paraît susceptible de contracter la fièvre jaune, tandis que l’étranger en est exempt.”

28. Nassy, Observations sur la cause, 39. This text was published in French with English translations on facing pages.

30. Wald, “Imagined Immunities,” 189–208, 190. See also Wald, Contagious.

34. Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, 62–63. For a further discussion of the debates among Carey, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen, see Otter, Philadelphia Stories.

36. For more on the formation of black community during the outbreak, see Gould, “Race, Commerce, and Literature,” 157–186.

2. McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 4–5. Traces of mesmerism in St. Domingue date back to at least 1782; see Regourd, “Mesmerism in Saint-Domingue,” 326.

3. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, 45–52. Page numbers are from the French edition and modified translations are from Moreau de Saint-Méry, A Civilization that Perished.

4. She is “possessed [pénétrée] by God. She shakes, her whole body is convulsed, and the oracle speaks through her mouth.” A convulsive dancer later experiences what Saint-Méry refers to as “mount Vaudoux” (monter Vaudoux), 48–49.

7. Méheust calls “l’évènement Puységur” the emergence of the unconscious as an object of study which would eventually revolutionize the notion of the self during the nineteenth century. See his preamble in Somnambulisme et médiumnité. See also Chertok and de Saussure, The Therapeutic Revolution.

9. Later, the famous Puységur will actually attribute to his seafaring brother the honor of having penetrated Mesmer’s “secret” first and discovering the crucial and surreptitious influence of the magnetizer’s “will” on the patient and in provoking a state of artificial or magnetic somnambulism (Puységur, Du Magnétisme animal, 134–135).

15. Touchard, L’Hermès, 3–4:367–370. I would like to thank Garret T. Murphy for the help with this translation.

16. Franklin et al., “Rapport des commissaires chargés par le Roi de l’examen du magnétisme animal.”

18. Mesmer’s “baquet” was a large container or “bucket” that was filled with water and contained iron filings, ground glass, and other materials that were supposed to channel the “magnetic fluid” between patients who were holding cables attached to the apparatus. With such sensational tools, Mesmer achieved great placebo effects. Anne Chastenet also brought the “baquet” to Saint Domingue.

20. Gottschalk, Lafayette; Helmut Hirsch, “Mesmerism and Revolutionary America”; Darnton, Mesmerism, 65–66, 88–89.

21. Zwarg notes that we still do not know much about the early influence of mesmerism in North America. She suggests that another early surge of mesmerism probably arrived in North America along with white and black refugees who were fleeing the slave insurrection in St. Domingue. The knowledge they brought with them about magnetic somnambulism may have been a key factor in the mesmeric context informing Charles Brocken Brown’s Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799); see Zwarg, “Vigorous Currents,” 32 n.57.

24. Ex-Haitian president François Dénis Légitime is an early commentator who brings support to this claim:

Even more miserable than the inhabitants of ancient Délos, they [Haitians] are continually tormented, no longer by that same python, but by reptiles which though smaller are no less dangerous, and we would like to speak about those demented writers who march in the footsteps of Moreau de St-Méry, those who have taken malicious pleasure in broadening the scope, then falsifying or amplifying his texts so as to render their virulent effects even more noxious, without even trying to understand whether, at the time when the master was composing those works, Mesmer’s ‘baquet’, transported to Santo Domingo by a French naval officer, was not, without the participation of all those snakes, performing as many magnetically induced wonders as the so-called box of couleuvres. (Légitime, Vérité sur le vaudoux, 34) Couleuvre is a small snake, the name of which has come into the vernacular to mean humbug and trumpery.

27. “Haiti indeed stands at the vanguard of the history of modernity. The Haitian experience was not a modern phenomenon too, but first” (Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, 137–138).

30. Ibid., 51, 54, 56, 72. Dayan writes: “A vodou history might be composed from materials such as oral accounts of the possession of Dessalines and his emergence as lwa, god, or spirit, and equally ambivalent accounts of figures like Ezili, Jean Zombi, or Défilée. Sinkholes of excess, these crystallizations of unwritten history force us to acknowledge inventions of mind and memory that destroy the illusions of mastery, that circumvent and confound any master narrative” (ibid., 54).

32. Citing works by Karen McCarthy Brown and Kesner Castor, Benedicty-Kokken nuances Dayan’s account of Vodou possession as “reciprocity” when she writes “Vodou is as much about power relations as it is about equality. To be ready to accept the spirits into one’s body … is nonetheless uncomfortable and even physically dangerous” (Spirit Possession, 320).

35. Bourguignon, “Spirit Possession” 384–385. See also Hurston, Tell My Horse, 221.

38. “To be mounted by the lwa–that is, to be temporarily released from of one’s earthly soul, of one’s worldly knowledge of one’s day-to-day burden, oppressions, and subjugations–is the ultimate release from the chains of servitude to an oppressive system” (Benedicty-Kokken, Spirit Possession, 317).

40. Since the Haitian Revolution “Vodou practice was pushed to the margins, an embarrassment for ‘modern’ Haitian elites, yet it has remained a way of manipulating the poor peasantry, hence a source of power for political oppositions of every persuasion. To narrate Haiti’s history as good versus evil stunts our capacity for moral judgment. Past suffering does not guarantee future virtue. Only a distorted history is morally pure” (Buck-Morss, Hegel, 138).

42. “None of Vodou’s precedents in Africa ever conceived of eliminating the institutional arrangement of master and slave altogether. No European did either. The radical anti-slavery articulated in Saint-Domingue was politically unprecedented” (ibid., 132–133).

47. The master’s skin fetish and arbitrary naming process resurface in the malevolent side of Haitian lore: “The gods, monsters, and ghosts spawned by racial terminology redefined the supernatural. What colonists called sorcery was, rather, an alternative philosophy. The most horrific spirits of the Americas came out of the perverse logic of the master, reinterpreted by slaves who had been mediated to their bones by the colonial myths” (Dayan, Haiti, 237). Through Haitian esoteric beliefs, the paranoid fantasies of the agents of colonial power transpire, as do, in turn, the arbitrary and domineering components that made up white enlightenment.

49. Kerner, The Seeress of Prevors. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, where Valdemar appears to survive his own death due to his magnetic connection to the narrator, would probably not have worked as a hoax if not for the international success of Kerner’s book on the extraordinary magnetic gifts of the clairvoyant from Prevorst: “As early as 1855 the anonymous author of Rambles and Reveries of an Art Student in Europe pointed to the last page of Justinus Kerner, The Seeress of Prevorst… as the source for Poe’s gruesome finale [in The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar]” (Beaver, The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, 394).

My thanks to Peter Reed, Hsuan Hsu, and Chris Iannini for their helpful insights on earlier drafts and to Phil Lapsanky of the Library Company of Philadelphia for his invaluable research assistance.

4. Douglass, “Lecture on Haiti,” 206. Further references will be cited parenthetically in text as “LH.”

5. Lesser-known slave rebellions and plots periodically erupted in the slaveholding south. Charles Deslonde, a slave from St. Domingue, led the largest of these recorded slave uprisings, which occurred in 1811 outside of New Orleans (Dixon, African America, 28).

8. For a critical overview of the historiographical debates over the Vesey archive, see Hyde, “Novelistic Evidence,” 32–36.

9. The Official Report was not a verbatim transcript of the June, July, and September trials. It introduced information not found in the surviving manuscripts of the Vesey Court (Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspiration,” 925).

12. “Legislature of South Carolina,” Niles’ Weekly Register, December 25, 1824, 261.

13. “Hayti—And the Emancipation of the Blacks,” New-York Literary Journal, and Belles-Lettres Repository,” December 1820, 93.

15. “Free People of Color,” Niles’ Weekly Register, August 23, 1823, 392 (emphasis in the original).

17. “Art. VII.—Mr. Hoar’s Mission,” Southern Quarterly Review, April 1845, 455 (emphasis in the original).

18. “Debate in the Senate on the Admission of Florida and Iowa,” Cincinnati Weekly Herald and Philanthropist, April 2, 1845, 1.

19. Kennedy and Parker, An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes, viii. Further references will be cited parenthetically in text as “OR.” Over the June sessions, the Court of Freeholders and Magistrates ordered six executions, including Vesey’s; the July sessions convicted an additional twenty-six men to the gallows and the August sessions another man—William Garner—to hang (Johnson, “Denmark Vesey” 939, 940–941).

21. According to David Robertson, the alleged presence of “French Negroes” brought by masters fleeing St. Domingue may have provided another source for the rumored connections between the Vesey conspiracy and Haiti (Robertson, “Inconsistent Contextualism,” 155).

25. Corporation of Charleston, An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection, 17.

27. “An Account,” Republican Star and General Advertiser (September 10, 1822), 2.

28. It is likely that such reports came from local newspapers. The April 11, 1822, Charleston Courier, for example, carried just such a report “relative to the occupation of the Spanish port of the island of St. Domingo, by the troops of President Boyer” (Johnson, “Denmark Vesey,” 964).

30. Holland, A Refutation of the Calumnies Circulated Against the Southern Western States, 62.

33. The British Consul brought charges against the Charleston Sheriff Francis Deliesseline and petitioned Johnson for a writ of habeas corpus to release Elkison after authorities, at the urging of the South Carolina Association—an extralegal organization of private citizens (many of whom were Charleston public officials)—arrested him off the Liverpool merchant vessel Homer.

36. “Massachusetts and South Carolina,” Liberator, December 12, 1845, 197.

38. Fears over the influx of “people of colour” from St. Domingue who were “dangerous to welfare and peace of the state” had even prompted the governor to issue a 1793 proclamation ordering all free blacks who had arrived in South Carolina less than a year to leave (Alderson, “Charleston’s Rumored Slave Revolt of 1793,” 98–99). For an account of one refugee household from St. Domingue, see Jones, “Time, Space, and Jurisdiction,” 1031–1060.

49. “President of Hayti,” National Advocate, for the Country, August 13, 1822, 2.

50. “Hayti,” Village Register and Norfolk Country Advertiser, July 19, 1822, 22.

53. “Hayti,” Portsmouth Journal of Literature & Politics, November 18, 1826, 2.

57. “Republic of Hayti. Proclamation,” Independent Chronicle & Boston Patriot, April 12, 1823, 2.

58. Lacerte, “Xenophobia and Economic Decline,” 504; and “From Hayti,” Aurora and Franklin Gazette, April 26, 1826, 2.

68. “From the Baltimore Federal Gazette,” Daily National Journal, September 6, 1824, 2.

69. Dewey, Correspondence Relative to the Emigration to Hayti, 7–8. Further references will be cited parenthetically in text as “CR.”

75. “Colonization of the Blacks,” Portsmouth Journal of Literature & Politics, July 3, 1824, 2.

79. Paul founded Boston’s African Baptist Church. Prince Saunders used the first floor of the church for his African school. In 1823, Paul traveled with Saunders to Haiti on a mission for the Baptist Missionary Society (White, “Prince Saunders,” 527, 534).

82. Dayan, “Few Stories,” 162. The Code Rural declared rural inhabitants not under contract to a proprietor or renter to be vagabonds and subject to imprisonment until they were bound to a contractor, presumably of their own choice. Those vagabonds who refused to be bound were to be put on public works construction until they agreed to contract (Baur, “Mulatto Machiavelli,” 333).

83. Hunt, Remarks on Hayti as a Place of Settlement, 11–12; and Baur, “Mulatto Machiavelli,” 326–327.

84. “For the Freedom’s Journal. Hayti.—No. VI. From the Scrap Book of Africanus,” Freedom’s Journal, October 12, 1827, 122–123.

86. “From the Christian Watchman. Hayti, No. I. From the Scrap Book of Africanus,” Freedom’s Journal, April 20, 1827, 22.

93. White, “Prince Saunders,” 527. In the 1850s, Holly emerged as one of the most vocal proponents of emigration to Haiti. He spearheaded the emigration movement of the 1850s, which led to the establishment in 1860 of the U.S. Haitian Bureau of Emigration overseen by Scottish-American abolitionist James Redpath (Dixon, African America and Haiti, 3, 8–9). Unlike the 1820s movement, Christian evangelism played a significant role in the 1850s emigration movement, which figured black American emigrants as a source of spiritual salvation for benighted Haitians (Dixon, African America, 9, 36).

100. Foster, ed., “Theresa—A Haytien Tale,” 639. Further references will be cited parenthetically in text as “THT.”

101. Douglass’s “Lecture on Haiti” reads: “The Mole St. Nicolas [sic] of which we have heard so much and may hear much more, is a splendid harbor. It is properly styled the Gibraltar of that country. It commands the Windward Passage, the natural gateway of the commerce both of the new and old world. Important now, our statesmanship sees that it will be still important when the Nicaragua Canal shall be completed. Hence we want this harbor for a naval station” (204). Henceforth, Douglass’s work will be cited in the text as “LH.”

102. Marlene Daut argues that the “miscengenated ‘oedipal drama’ of slavery described in Sejour’s story was distinctly … associated with the Haitian Revolution” (Daut, “ ‘Sons of White Fathers,’ ” 5). See also Castronovo, Fathering the Nation.

103. Like “Theresa—a Haytien Tale,” Delany’s militant novel was also serially published in the New York–based African American periodicals the Anglo-African Magazine (1859) and the Weekly Anglo-African (1861)–(1862) (Cole, “Theresa and Blake,” 158, 163–164).

109. Brown, “St. Domingo,” 33. Further references will be cited parenthetically in text as “SD.”

110. In 1854, British abolitionist Ellen Richard raised funds to purchase Brown’s manumission from his master, Enoch Price, so that Brown might return to the United States without fear of recapture and reenslavement. Richard was a member of the same British family who secured Frederick Douglass’s manumission (Jefferson, “Introduction,” 18).

113. “William Wells Brown at Philadelphia,” Liberator, January 26, 1855, 14.

121. Cohen, “Notes,” 170. In Clotel, Brown draws upon Beard’s description of the black Haitian revolutionary Lamour de Rance to craft the fictional runaway slave Picquilo, a participant in Turner’s Revolt, who takes refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp. Brown’s fictionalization also signified upon the Haitian dimensions of Turner’s revolt. After the violent suppression of the revolt, Virginia Governor James Floyd received a letter signed by “Nero,” which predicted additional slave revolts under a leader who was once a slave in Virginia and “escaped to St. Domingo, where his noble soul became warmed by the spirit of freedom, and where he imbibed a righteous indignation, and an unqualified hatred for the oppressors of his race” (Jackson and “Fever and Fret,” 14).

125. Brown returned to this material during the Civil War. In the first of two biographical race histories, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863) and The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancements of the Colored Race (1874), the entry on Nat Turner reenergizes the specter of slave uprising through the present threat of arming black soldiers in the Union war effort (Cohen, “Notes,” 172).

128. Meelish, “Frederick Douglass and the Consequences of Rhetoric,” 38, 39–40.

CHAPTER 10. THE HAYTIAN PAPERS AND BLACK LABOR IDEOLOGY IN THE ANTEBELLUM UNITED STATES

1. Prince Saunders, Haytian Papers, iii. Henceforth cited in the text as “HP.”

2. Saunders, born in Vermont in the late eighteenth century, studied in England and became acquainted with prominent abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, among others, then traveled to Haiti to help Henri Christophe create a system of public schools. In 1816, he returned to England. The epigraph is from a letter he received from an English abolitionist; Saunders cites this passage in his Memoir Presented to the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, an address presented in the United States in 1818. This information comes from Maxwell Whiteman’s biographical note in the facsimile of Saunders’s United States writings, republished in one volume in 1969. There is some speculation that Saunders was a contributor to Freedom’s Journal, which featured numerous articles about Haiti and Africa. Saunders’s invocation of Divine Providence to assert an African American destiny of freedom and peace in Haiti certainly resembles the argument of those articles. As Jacqueline Bacon explains, citing Craig Wilder, “Haiti represented ‘the culmination of God’s plan for African freedom’ ” for many of the readers and writers of Freedom’s Journal. Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, 148.

5. For further discussion of agricultural labor policies and peasant resistance, see Ramsey and Dupuy, Haiti in the World Economy, 86–91.

6. As Laurent Dubois points out, Thomas Clarkson, who had recommended Saunders to Christophe as an agent to bring African American settlers, expressed some reservations about how they might adjust. Specifically, “Clarkson admitted that some American emigrants might have some trouble adjusting to Haiti. For one thing, being ‘free men’ in the United States, they were ‘accustomed to go where they pleased in search of their livelihood without any questions being asked them or without any hindrance by the Government. No passports are even necessary there.’ That was not the case under Christophe’s regime, which policed movement assiduously: plantation laborers were, after all, required to stay on their plantations and could not move about freely looking for work” (Haiti, 75).

7. I have discussed the problem of the idea of “paternal solicitude” previously. Certainly, Christophe or Boyer did not solicit the opinion of Haitian peasants when they invited African American settlers to their county. My point in this case, however, is to understand Saunders’s appeal to a free black audience and the ways in which his portrayal of Haiti plays on desires for autonomous land ownership and freedom from masters. See O’Brien, “Paternal Solicitude,” 32–54.

10. Bogues has also pointed out the differences in the articulation of natural rights philosophy by Black Atlantic writer Quobna Cugoano. Well aware that natural rights philosophy was distorted by Atlantic slavery, Cugoano asserted that progress and civilization would enhance, rather than diminish, natural rights because he did not differentiate them from civil rights. Bogues states, “For Cugoano, the fundamental natural right was the right of the individual to be free and equal, not in relationship to government, but in relationship to other human beings” (Black Heretics, 45).

11. As Jonathan Glickstein points out, antebellum labor ideology in the United States was hemmed in by “the centuries-old division between mental and manual labor” and a belief that “differential rewards and esteem attended this division,” While the Jacksonian assumption that “an individual” would use his “education to leave his laboring status behind him” as well as to gain property reconfirmed the ideology of social mobility in the United States, “the sanctity of private property and the rights of capitalists and other mental laborers to their superior rewards” were intrinsic to free labor ideology. See Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor, 8.

12. Ruffin, Black on Earth, 29. Kimberly K. Smith makes similar claims about black agrarianism in African American Environmental Thought.

13. James McCune Smith’s alternative view of civilization emerges as a collaborative project carried out by manual and intellectual laborers.

17. See Girard, “Black Talleyrand,” 87–124; and “Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System,” 549–582.

23. As Daniel Schafer explains, “The government encouraged immigration of free persons of color from the United States and permitted them to lease land upon arrival. After a one-year residence, leaseholders would become eligible for Haitian citizenship and for legal purchase of Haiti’s abandoned lands” (Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, 67).

26. Ibid., 154 (emphasis in the original). Moses defines Ethiopianism (a sense of black racial pride founded in biblical accounts of African greatness) as a literary-religious tradition common to English speaking Africans, regardless of nationality (see Golden Age, 156). Moses explains elsewhere that “The Ethiopian’ tradition sprang organically out of certain shared political and religious experiences of English-speaking Africans during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, finding expression in slave narratives and folk culture. As prophecy, it was supposedly common knowledge among free blacks before the Civil War” (“Poetics of Ethiopianism,” 411–426).

28. According to Leslie Harris, Smith’s success as a doctor and pharmacist “did not remove him from the problems of the black working class in New York; rather, he went out of his way to address their needs in his medical practice and in his writings in newspapers, most notably in Frederick Douglass’s papers, and as physician for the Colored Orphan Asylum from 1842. Perhaps his experiences with self-directed working-class parents and children of the asylum caused him to become an imaginative and outspoken supporter of all types of black labor, as well as a proponent of ways for black workers to improve themselves” (In the Shadow of Slavery, 231).

29. Smith, A Lecture on the Haytien Revolutions, 9. M’Cune is an alternate spelling of his name. Henceforth, references to this work will be made in the text as “LHR.”

30. This example of the black freedmen of Haiti organizing and establishing a productive community in the absence of white oversight or influence reflects Smith’s own belief in black self-reliance and political autonomy. As C. Peter Ripley and the editors of The Black Abolitionist Papers: Volume 3 note, “Smith defended the autonomous black press and directed efforts to establish the National Council of the Colored People in the early 1850s. He promoted black education and self-help principles through his writings and his work” with various community organizations, including the Colored Orphan Asylum (350).

31. The rhetorical situation is also significant; he is addressing supporters of a “Colored Orphan Asylum” who need to educate their charges. Similarly, Saunders addressed societies formed for the express purpose of creating free schools. The economic and educational connection is significant.

32. In a 1930 article entitled “Education in Haiti,” Rayford Logan refutes the ongoing charge that “the Negro’s inherent incapacity for self-government” is best evidenced by conditions in Haiti” (401). To the contrary, he draws from Saunders’s Haytian Papers to illustrate that Haiti has struggled to succeed since the early nineteenth century, as evidenced by “Christophe’s sincere desire and intelligent determination to provide an adequate system of schools” (416).

37. The spectacle of Haiti in the white American political imaginary, what Smith refers to as the “Horrors of St. Domingo,” emanates in part from the anxiety about whether the romanticized notion of what Joseph Schumpeter calls “that semi-mystic entity endowed with a will of its own-the ‘soul of the people’ ” could manifest among black Haitians as it had, ostensibly, among white Americans (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 252).

38. The hemispheric labor ideology that emanates from this comparison between Haiti and the United States took a more concrete shape when, in 1846, McCune Smith joined fellow New Yorker and future cofounder of the Radical Abolition Party, Gerrit Smith, as well as black newspaper editor Charles Ray and Theodore Wright, to allot 120,000 acres of Gerrit Smith’s land to free blacks in New York State. Gerrit Smith’s philanthropy was also influenced by stories of West Indian emancipation. Endowing 250 free black New Yorkers with land reaffirmed their potential as self-sufficient, productive laborers (if not yeoman farmers) and secured their status as eligible voters. Gerrit Smith’s choice to announce his land reform plan on the anniversary of West Indian emancipation, combined with a perfectionist religious worldview that included the global manifestation of what Saunders understood as “God’s plan” for Haiti, connects his and McCune’s vision for New York State to the agrarian demands of Haitian freedom fighters. Gerrit Smith’s and James McCune Smith’s vision coincides with the West Indian work ethic. According to John Stauffer, they and West Indians defined freedom as the right “to work on small plots of land on which they could earn their subsistence and resist the authority of former masters” (Black Hearts of Men, 140).

43. Alfred Hunt, for example, notes the abstract concept of enlightenment, saying “Saunders chose to publish laws and proclamations, hoping that readers would see how enlightened was the constitutional monarchy of Henri Christophe.” He attends, briefly, to the issue of Toussaint’s “forced-labor policy under martial law,” but he does not consider the implications of Saunders’s extended attention to issues of labor and freedom and subtle criticism of Christophe. See Hunt, Haiti’s Influence, 89, 160.

44. A notable exception to this rule might be Leonora Sansay’s 1808 novel, Secret History: or, The Horrors of St. Domingo, which takes place during Dessalines’s reign. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon argues that the most pressing form of violence in the novel is a patriarchal/colonial one connected to “the dynastic model of marriage associated with the European aristocracy and the sterile colonial model of extractive production” that suppresses the development of a creolized social reproduction in which women can be active agents (“Secret History,” 94).

45. Bogues, “Haitian Revolution,” 7. As Bogues also points out, Cugoano’s anticolonial insistence that conquest and domination are forms of evil—1 ittle more than robbery and plunder–contrasts with his plan to replace the slave trade with agricultural trade (Black Heretics, 41–42, 44). If Haitian revolutionaries were to avenge the island’s original inhabitants, they would be entitled to fruits of their agricultural labor.

47. On the one hand, proslavery authors invoked a gothic tradition to recount the violence of the Haitian Revolution as a cautionary tale about the dangers of freedom; on the other hand, abolitionists “finding slave owners and white soldiers culpable for the ‘horrors of St. Domingo’ ” argued “that whites who brutally enslaved Africans sowed the seeds of their own destruction” (Clavin, “Race, Rebellion, and the Gothic,” 2).

48. Clavin also notes that abolitionists “marginaliz[ed] the role of Dessalines and other rebel leaders, as well as the nameless and faceless black masses” in favor of creating an image of Toussaint as a “Great Man, a slave who compared favorably to other Great Men of the Age of Revolution” (Clavin, “Race, Rebellion, and the Gothic,” 2; and “Second Haitian Revolution,” 118).

1. The first American edition of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1791) had subscription orders numbering only 336 copies. There were two later reprints that precede Douglass’s Autobiography, the first in 1829 and another in 1837.

2. The 1786 edition was an unchanged reissue of the first edition of 1773. It was sold out of the shop of Benjamin Crukshank in Philadelphia.

4. We pass over here another, but perhaps the weakest, possible objection to consideration of Toussaint’s Constitution: that it was written in French. At a moment that sees a collection like Sollors and Shell’s Multilingual Anthology of American, not to mention common inclusion of French and Spanish texts in U.S. literature anthologies, this criticism does not seem to warrant much attention.

5. Toussaint’s name appears in Title 6 §16, Title 8 §§ 28, 30 (twice), and 31, and Title 13 § 77. His signature concludes the text.

7. Our numbers are based on searches of the Readex Newspaper Database, and of several papers not included in that database, like Philadelphia’s Aurora; we assume that the text appeared in more papers than we have listed.

8. We note, too, the publication of Mason Locke Weems’ The Life of Washington in 1800, which continued through nine editions in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

9. Paine’s critical letter to Washington, written in 1796, was widely reprinted following the announcement of Paine’s return.

10. Reprinted from the Gazette of the United States, May 7, 1801. Here, the piece gets reactivated by the appearance of Toussaint’s Constitution.

11. The original is slightly edited, and the passage about the shoe-blacks appears much earlier in the original text.

1. Quoted in Geggus, “The Naming of Haiti,” 207. Geggus cites the Archives de la Guerre, Vincennes, MS 597, ANOM, CC9B/23, proclamation of April 28, 1804. He explains, “Exceptions were made for certain whites who had allied themselves with the blacks. In the constitutions of 1805, 1806, and 1816, the ban on Europeans was rephrased to exclude ‘whites of whatever nation,’ but it was omitted in the 1807 and 1811 constitutions of Henry Christophe, ruler of northern Haiti between 1807 and 1820” (295).

2. Gulick’s essay “We Are Not the People” reads the 1805 Constitution formally and rhetorically, as an “emerging legal and political genre,” which places the newly independent nation at the center of revolutionary studies.

3. Thomas Newton to Governor Henry Lee, May 10, 1792, Executive Papers, Box 74, 1–10 May Folder, quoted in Sidbury’s Ploughshares into Swords, 14–49.

5. Ibid., 91; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson writes, “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race” (264).

6. “The Vision,” New York Magazine, or Literary Repository, April 2, 4, 1791, 198.

7. Charles Brockden Brown’s “On the Consequences of Abolishing the Slave Trade to the West Indian Colonies,” cites the Haitian Revolution as evidence for why slavery should be abolished in the states. In his edition of Leonora Sansay’s The Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), Michael Drexler highlights Sansay’s use of slave revolution as a way of allowing for Clara to “speak for herself” rather than through her husband or lover, Aaron Burr.

8. See Haywood’s Bloody Romanticism. He argues that out of two primary strains of British Romanticism–s ensibility and the sublime–comes the “bloody vignette,” which uses “hyperbolic realism” to negotiate the spectacular violence of the revolutionary period.

11. See Gibbons, “Ireland, America, and Gothic Memory,” 25–47. Gibbons locates the source of the American gothic in Irish underground groups, such as the United Irishmen, which I discuss in my analysis of William Cobbett’s pamphlets. See also Leask, “Irish Republicans and Gothic Eleutherarchs,” 347–367.

12. Quoted in List, “Role of William Cobbett,” 4. List argues in her dissertation that we misread Cobbett as a conservative Federalist in America when we should understand his changed political proclivity as a Tory, the result of his sense of Britishness in the face of what he felt was an “immoral and empty” American culture. See also Swanwick, A Rub from Snub and A Roaster; Bradford, Imposter Detected, xii, xiii; and Carey, Pill for Porcupine.

13. Madison quoted in Gaines, William Cobbett and the United States, xiv; Coleridge quoted in Hughes, ed., Cobbett, 15.

15. All quotations from Cobbett come from Wilson, ed., Peter Porcupine in America, 145.

20. “Letter to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787.” Here, Jefferson refers both to Shays’s Rebellion in Western Massachusetts and the subsequent fear of insurrection generally.

21. As in Edmond Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, Jefferson understands revolution as posing a choice between two poles: accepting the status quo or jeopardizing civil liberties, civilization, and white culture. His statements here reflect his acceptance of inevitable change to the status quo while attempting to manage and delimit the scope and quality of these changes brought on by slave violence and ultimate emancipation.

22. “Letter to St. George Tucker, August 28, 1797.” He begins the letter by situating his warning in inevitable revolution: “the first chapter of this history, which has begun in St. Domingo.”

23. Wilson, Peter Porcupine, 241–257. The full title is Detection of a Conspiracy, Formed by the United Irishmen, with the Evident Intention of Aiding the Tyrants of France in Subverting the Government of the United States of America. By Peter Porcupine.

24. In an answer to why the role of “system” comes to be so important to narrative, Clifford Siskin suggests that “in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, two genres mixed. As novels took on the constitutive force of systems—making [Anna] Barbauld’s nation–systems assumed causal roles in novels. Embedded within Romantic-era fictional narratives, system was rewritten into something that could be blamed–even something that could kill” (“Novels and Systems,” 203). The intermixing of form (for Siskin, system and novel) is a central premise of my thesis on the transformation of the American gothic novel, as something which uses different forms of print, especially those which attempt to narrate collective violence. As I suggest, however, for Burke and Cobbett system is coterminous with revolutionary violence.

25. Burke, “Speech on the Occasion of the recommitment of the Quebec Bill, 6 May 1791,” Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, in the House of Commons, and in Westminster-Hall (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816): 4:8.

28. Stern’s Plight of Feeling identifies the source of American romance as the French Revolution but, as I am arguing, this ignores the impact of the Haitian Revolution on early American literature.

31. Godwin’s invocation of “terror” was also a clear reference to the Jacobin “terror,” which was still in full force during at the time of the novel’s publication. Ibid., 4.

32. Marquis de Sade wrote in his notes that the Gothic seemed to be “the necessary fruit of the Revolutionary terrors felt by the whole of Europe.” Extracts from “Idée sur les romans” in Les Crimes de l’amour, quoted in Sage, Gothic Novel, 48–49; Mathias, Pursuits of Literature, 194. For a discussion of the rise of the gothic in 1790s British culture, see Miles and Clery’s Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 124.

33. Ian Duncan’s Modern Romance and the Transformation of the Novel presents two theories of gothic origins: “more than anything else, this romance revival involved the confrontation with cultural origins that were at once native and alien” (21).

36. Following Duncan’s argument, I am making a distinction between premodern Romance as archetypal and mythological, and post-novel, modern romance, which renders these archetypes tropes, one of many features of its rhetorical structure.

38. My argument builds upon Teresa Goddu’s incisive study Gothic America, in which she changes the critical register from the psychoanalytic to the historical, arguing that “the site of slavery” is a crucial locus for the genre’s horror. I am less convinced by Edwards, Gothic Passages, in which he considers the gothic a “mode” rather than a genre, a move that diminishes many of its contours and much of its potency. See also Davidson’s seminal Revolution and the Word, which argues for the specifically national character of the gothic novel, one in which the critique of “individualism” is fairly limited. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon offers a significant challenge to this enduring nationalist frame suggesting that the “correspondence between nation and novel in early America should be reconsidered” in order to account for the persistence of “colonial and creole social reproduction” in early American novels (“Secret History,” 78–79).

40. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 144 (emphasis in the original).

42. I borrow these terms from Richard Slotkin’s influential Regeneration through Violence. But as more an “archetype” than a fully-fleshed character, “neither demonic nor a disturbing figure by the time he has been naturalized in popular literature,” the “noble savage,” gets replaced by the terrifying specter of blackness in the earliest articulations of the novel (Fiedler, Love and Death, 159).

49. See Goudie, “On the Origin of American Specie(s),” 60–87. He argues that “no development is more disturbing to the reader … than his subsequent awakening to a racially supremacist consciousness” (60).

50. See Kenny’s American Irish. The chapter on the eighteenth century details the different waves of immigration and their numbers, argues for an increased critical focus on the Scotch-Irish and their Presbyterianism as something apart from the Catholic, South Carolinian settlers, and suggests that over one quarter of the Irish immigrants settled in Philadelphia by 1790. Kenny briefly discusses the role of the United Irishmen and their contribution to radicalism in Philadelphia, as “an important catalyst for the radicalism of the contemporary Atlantic world” (41). See also Bric, “Irish and the Evolution of the ‘New Politics,’ ” 147. To be sure, two waves of immigration threatened to contaminate American slaves: the Irish (250,000 came from Ireland, 1717–1775) and thousands of Creole refugees and black slaves after the onset of revolution in St. Domingue in August 1791. Arriving in port towns such as Charleston and New Orleans, St. Dominguan refugees very quickly migrated to larger cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

55. Ibid. The immediacy of the violence collapsed into a brief moment echoes both Jefferson’s and Cobbett’s warnings of the mere “single spark” required to obliterate the nation in the “twinkling of an eye.”

62. Brown’s novel anticipates the terror of slave conspiracies, like Gabriel’s Rebellion (1800), Denmark Vesey’s Conspiracy (1822), and Nat Turner’s Revolt (1831), which influence much antebellum print. After such events, the concealed agency of murderous black slaves haunt more and more literature perhaps none more seamlessly than Herman Melville’s gothic novella, Benito Cereno (1855).

69. See Tragle, Southampton Slave Revolt. Tragle devotes almost 150 pages to newspaper articles and notices published in the days and months following Nat Turner’s insurrection (27–170). For example, in the aftermath of Turner’s insurrection, a Baltimore paper, Niles’ Register, published this notice: “Incendiary Publications—The ‘Vigilance Association of Columbia,’ (South Carolina), composed of gentlemen of the first respectability, have offered a reward of fifteen hundred dollars for the apprehension and prosecution to conviction, of any white person who may be detected in distributing or circulating within the state the newspaper called, ‘The Liberator,’ printed in Boston, or the pamphlet called ‘Walker’s Pamphlet’ or any other publications of a seditious tendency” (quoted in Tragle, Southampton Slave Revolt, 131).

70. See Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, where he argues that historicism is a process that translates modernity (or capitalism) as something that has developed over time, a temporal plane constructed as “first in Europe, then elsewhere.” He writes, “Historicism thus posited historical time as a measure of the cultural distance (at least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-West” (7). Drawing on John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty,” which argues that the pinnacle of civilization is self-rule, a position not quite suitable–“not yet” —for African or Asian colonial subjects, Chakrabarty explains: “Some historical time of development and civilization (colonial rule and education, to be precise) had to elapse before they could be considered prepared for such a task. Mill’s historicist argument thus consigned Indians, Africans, and other ‘rude’ nations to an imaginary waiting room of history. In doing so, it converted history itself into a version of this waiting room…. That was what historicist consciousness was: a recommendation to the colonized to wait” (8).

CHAPTER 13. DISPOSSESSION AND COSMOPOLITAN COMMUNITY IN LEONORA SANSAYS SECRET HISTORY

1. In a recent overview of the critical trends organizing the field of early American literature, Stephen Shapiro summarizes the cultural work of sentimental fiction in these terms: “The problematic enshrined at the heart of eighteenth century sentimental tales involves the nexus of new associative relations made possible by the bourgeois subject freed from aristocratic lineage and status hierarchies” (Shapiro, Culture and Commerce, 21).

2. As Elizabeth Barnes puts it, “For American authors, a democratic state is a sympathetic state, and a sympathetic state is one that resembles a family” (Barnes, States of Sympathy, 2).

3. Beginning with Terence Martin’s The Instructed Vision, which draws together Scottish Common Sense philosophy and American fiction, the presence of Enlightenment language and ideas in American letters has been given its most extensive consideration in Brown’s Consent of the Governed; Weinstein’s Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Early American Culture; Tennenhouse’s The Importance of Feeling English, and Boudreau’s Sympathy in American Literature.

4. Tennenhouse has argued that broken and makeshift families are an indelible fact of the late eighteenth-century American experience, causally connected to the kind of international migration we see in Secret History: “the British diaspora in America was made up of a large number of partial families, transplanted second sons, as well as a disproportionately large ratio of single men to unmarried women who emigrated to America under a variety of contracts and conditions. As a result, during and immediately following the very substantial emigrations from Britain from the 1750s to the 1770s, and again after 1781, there was a sizeable population of fractured and makeshift families” (Importance, 44).

5. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 4. In her article on Secret History and the form of the early American novel, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon construes the novel’s “fractured domestic scenes” (“Secret History,” 79) and the mobility of its women in terms of “the difficulties and the possibilities of creole social reproduction in the colonial Atlantic world” (“Secret History,” 96). This paradigm invites us to rethink, in particularly generative ways, the politics of domestic relations in the early American novel: “Any consideration of domestic reproduction in the colonial New World would entail an effort to think against, through, or around the presumed sterility of the creole and the racialized and gendered ideologies that comprised the substance of [the] colonial doxa” (“Secret History,” 99). Like Dillon, I am invested in integrating Sansay into a continuous literary tradition in the colonial Atlantic world in such a way that revises the nationalist coordinates that have persisted in early American criticism and challenges the more canonical readings of domestic literature as the narrative expression of a new American democracy. To my mind, Sansay is part of a literary tradition that reaches back to the captivity narrative and received ideas about Enlightenment sociability that exposes the model of the self-enclosed individual as a measure of life particularly ill-suited to the exchanges and displacements characteristic of the Atlantic colonial world.

6. Cheah and Robbins’s collection Cosmopolitics offers a thorough overview of the problems and possibilities at stake in cosmopolitanism. Goodlad’s “Trollopian ‘Foreign Policy’ ” contains a concise account of the current critical views shaping the discussion.

7. Drexler, “Brigands and Nuns,” 184–185. In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Joan Dayan similarly credits Sansay’s “insights into the relations between castes and colors during the last days of Saint-Domingue” as revealing “more about the kinds of mixtures and erosions of boundaries that prevailed there more than any other document about this period” (172). To this point, conventional historiographies of the Haitian revolution have largely centered on its ideological relation to the French Revolution and contemporary debates over the hypocrisy of Enlightenment principles of equality and liberty, or the potentially disastrous repercussions to the slave trade anticipated by Southern slaveholders. Dayan’s book and James’s Black Jacobins remain two of the most influential historical accounts of the revolution, while Popkin’s “Facing Racial Revolution” offers a helpful overview of the white colonists’ and black revolutionaries’ engagement with French popular radicalism. Woertendyke, “Romance to Novel,” and Dillon, “Secret History,” offer particularly helpful readings of Secret History’s synchronic political dimensions—the novel, in other words, “both activates and depends upon two geopolitical spaces at once, Early America and Early Haiti” (Woertendyke, “Romance to Novel,” 258). See also Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti.”

8. As Woertendyke has artfully demonstrated, Secret History is a generically composite text whose temporal, spatial, and formal scope “obsessively resists both the consolidating impulses of the novel and the attendant compulsion toward a totalizing progressive historicism” (Woertendyke, “Romance to Novel,” 263). For Woertendyke, the text’s chief generic coordinates can be found in the British tradition of the secret history.

9. For this line of thought, I am particularly indebted to Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, whose article “The Problem of Population and the Form of the American Novel” offers a compelling theoretical paradigm for reading the early American novel as a cosmopolitan form that draws on captivity narrative traditions to articulate the growing tensions between competing social bodies that included “the population.” It is my aim to broaden this paradigm in such a way as to recuperate the hitherto neglected cultural and political history of Caribbean revolution and its impact on North American literary production. To this end, I am less concerned with the more overt objects of Sansay’s critique—namely, the humanitarian abuses and social excesses of a postrevolutionary French colonial elite. To be sure, that critique places Secret History in a much larger context of transatlantic revolutionary history, slave insurrection, and early republican political paranoia, but we should resist succumbing to the mimetic fallacy that the novel reflects deeply encoded political and social anxieties that precede their articulation in writing. Rather, I want to consider how the text’s formal qualities perform specific ideological functions. On the recent Americanist turn to historical formalism, see especially Weinstein and Looby, American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions, and Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination.

11. When he proclaims that “in the beginning all the world was America” (ibid., 117), Locke tacitly acknowledges that nothing less than a new act of creation is necessary to create a fiction of origins for the modern individual.

12. This is how Locke describes the paternal household: “Let us therefore consider the master of a family with all these subordinate relations of wife, children, servants, and slaves, united under the domestic rule of a family; which [resembles] a little common-wealth” (ibid., 126). In a statement that neatly reproduces the operations of the contract, The Coquette’s Mrs. Richman makes a case for just such a formation: “It is the glory of the marriage state … to refine, by circumscribing our enjoyments. Here we can repose in safety…. True, we cannot always pay that attention to former associates, which we may wish, but the little community which we superintend is quite as important an object; and certainly renders us more beneficial to the public” (Foster, Coquette, 123). In exchange for relinquishing certain freedoms of association, a woman is compensated with protection and authority over a “little community” that mirrors society at large and perfects the citizenship of its constituents under the governance of a paternal head. As the sum of its rational individuals assembled at the level of the household, this is civil society in Lockean terms.

13. The works I have in mind, such as Stern’s The Plight of Feeling or Barnes’s States of Sympathy, successfully challenged the peripheral place of sentimental writing in an almost exclusively masculinized canon by assigning a progressive social agenda that was anchored to and predicated on sentiment’s essentially “feminine” qualities. Critics continue to revise this enormously influential work from the early 1990s by challenging its gendered ideal of a democratic nation built on a horizontal model of shared human feeling.

16. Sansay, Secret History, 73–74. Hereafter this work will be referred to in the text as SH.

17. It seems plausible that Clara’s description of the “countless multitudes” (SH, 145) of land crabs that swarm over the mountains of Cuba is an allegorical allusion to the slave revolutionaries that likewise draws on the language of undifferentiated masses. Clara relates the tale of a Spaniard whose local knowledge of the crabs’ migratory patterns helps him successfully dupe credulous English soldiers into believing that the sound of the crustaceans’ scuttling is, in fact, an opposing military “army.” Much like the black revolutionary army that expels the invading French colonial powers, this “brown stream,” Clara observes, cannot be deflected or redirected. In this sense, the revolutionaries, much like the crabs, offer a collective force that observes many of the principles of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, a multidirectional network, or “weave,” that changes in nature according to the circuits it incorporates and abandons.

18. As Michael Drexler notes, Clara “is surprised to find a wholly different system of land ownership and property management [in central Cuba] than that present before the revolution on Saint-Domingue,” offering her new insights into how different “collectives get started, gain strength, and move into action” (“Brigands and Nuns,” 190).

19. The revolution in France turned all questions of citizenship in St. Domingue, for free gens de coleur, Creoles, and colonial whites alike, into a highly vexed subject. The white inhabitants had long resented the trade restrictions placed upon them by royal administrators in the metropole, yet they just as readily recognized the dangers inherent in the popular rhetoric of liberty and equality. Popkin explains that “the violent disagreements among the whites themselves” (“Facing Racial Revolution,” 514) over the colony’s relationship to France and the future of slavery in the Caribbean precluded any meaningful public debate over granting the rights of citizenship to the island’s free mixed-race population. Indeed, the island was institutionally organized in such a manner as to make such issues prohibitively complicated: as Drexler tells us, “Saint Dominguan society recognized a staggering 128 racial categories to discriminate all conceivable gradations from white to black” as part of “an elaborate system of regulations severely restrict[ing] anything resembling civic equality” (“Introduction,” 17).

20. Sansay’s comment about such rapacious greed is an accurate reflection of French colonial practices in St. Domingue both before and during the slave revolt. The island’s chief commodities, coffee and sugar, made easy fortunes for whites whose disdain for Creole culture–a phrase considered something of an oxymoron—sent them back with haste to the Parisian metropole, where fortunes could be spent on luxurious aristocratic lifestyles. Perversely, this fueled the demand for increased slave labor, until enslaved blacks outnumbered whites and free gens de coleur ten to one by 1790. The voracious exploitation of St. Domingue’s commodities and slave labor force by the French in the revolutionary years is discussed in Drexler, “Brigands and Nuns,” Dillon, “Secret History,” and Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery.

21. It is striking that Sansay’s character shares her name with Samuel Richardson’s famous protagonist, another dead sentimental heroine whose death arguably results from a deficiency of male figures capable of recognizing her unique brand of interiority.

22. As several historians have documented, the kind of domestic violence we encounter in Clara’s marriage has a social history outside the gothic. Such hidden forms of cruelty became more visible during the nineteenth century through court cases and publicized first-hand accounts. Those cases offer insight into the nature of gendered domestic relations, property rights, legal procedure, and the changing nature of paternal authority in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Foyster, Marital Violence, and Daniels and Kennedy, Over the Threshold.

25. Ibid., 245. Giorgio Agamben builds on Foucault’s discussion of the population by first challenging Foucault’s insistence that the eighteenth century marked a epistemic shift toward biopolitics. In Homo Sacer, Agamben traces an idea of biopolitics back to classical political theory, making the notion of sovereignty over “bare life” a long-held political assumption.

27. In Fictions of Mass Democracy, Stacey Margolis makes the case that there is a constitutive relationship between “diffuse, informal, and largely disorganized” (2) social networks of modern democratic power and the formal structures of nineteenth-century U.S. fiction. The early American novel, she argues, returns time and again to the political potential of decentered networks of exchange, in such a way that “transform[s] the very notion of political agency, making it possible to rethink what counts as a political action and who counts as a political actor” (30). The question of who counts as a political actor, I would argue, lies at the heart of the figure of the “population,” which Secret History construes as its own decentered form of political agency.

28. Historian Jeremy Popkin has documented several important, albeit rare, contemporary eyewitness accounts of the uprising, which he classifies as captivity narratives insofar as they are told from the perspective of white colonists imprisoned by the former slaves. I find it wholly plausible that Sansay was familiar with this form of writing given its general popularity at the time, the existence of these contemporary local versions, and the language of Secret History itself.

30. Since first appearing in 1684, Mary Rowlandson’s narrative was republished fifteen times before 1811. Twelve of those were in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century. John Williams’ narrative, first published in 1707, reappears eleven times before 1811. Nine of these editions appeared after 1770. See Evans’ American Bibliography and Armstrong and Tennenhouse, “Problem of Population,” 668–669.

31. I am indebted here to Ezra Tawil’s compelling reading of racial and cultural identity in Jemison’s captivity narrative. See Tawil, Making of Racial Sentiment, 100–108.

33. Secret History therefore shares conceptual ground with a form of cosmopolitanism resembling Immanuel Kant’s laws of universal hospitality. In 1795, Kant claimed in Perpetual Peace that “the right to visit, to associate, belongs to all men by virtue of their common ownership of the earth’s surface; for since the earth is a globe, they cannot scatter themselves infinitely, but must, finally, tolerate living in close proximity, because originally no one had a greater right to any region of the earth as anyone else” (“Perpetual Peace,” 118). As refugees, the sisters’ survival comes to depend on such principles of universal tolerance: in every “strange country” to which they retreat, Mary and Clara find “asylum” with “strangers” (SH, 105, 106). Thus the novel evokes a late eighteenth-century notion of cosmopolitan sociability to suggest that all humans are fundamentally the same by nature but potentially different by culture and will encounter one another in a transnational system of international communication.

1. Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser, May 22, 1795. Murdock’s script was printed with the support of “a number of gentlemen,” and advertised for sale beginning September 25, 1795. The introduction to another play by Murdock, The Beau Metamorphized, gives the author’s perspective on the reception of Triumphs of Love.

2. See Nathans, “Trampling Native Genius,” 29–43. Murdock’s script circulated in print the year before its stage production, supported by subscribers including Charles Wilson Peale, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin West, and even Pennsylvania governor Thomas Mifflin. For more on the early American stage and its social contexts, see Nathans, Early American Theatre and Johnson, Absence and Memory.

3. Nathans, Early American Theatre, 93. As Nathans has elsewhere argued, American theater’s customary anglophile repertoire, class biases, and limited desire for local authorship limited the play’s popularity (“Trampling Native Genius,” 29–43).

5. See White, Encountering Revolution. The figures appear in White, “ ‘A Flood of Impure Lava,’ ” 37. By that same count, a third of them were people of color.

6. Nash, “Reverberations of Haiti,” 67 n.14. As Nash and others observe, St. Domingue’s refugees joined preexisting French expatriate communities in Philadelphia. The ambiguities involved in identifying the different Franco-Atlantic populations should remind us that contemporary Anglo-American discourse used “French” loosely to designate a diverse assortment of francophone or Franco-Atlantic people. As an identity category, “French” could modify or overwrite other political, geographical, cultural, and racial labels. Such relaxed usage habits accommodated a reality in which many of the revolutionary era’s people, characters, and identities were mobile, rapidly changing, or never firmly anchored in fixed geopolitical categories in the first place.

7. Philadelphia’s passenger lists, a partial enumeration at best, identify 3,084 refugees between 1791 and 1794, of whom 848 were slaves or free blacks. Ibid., 50.

8. On the influence of these refugees, see Childs, French Refugee Life; Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans; Branson and Patrick, “Étrangers dans Un Pays Étrange,” 193–208. The differences seem to have been particularly noticeable in terms of racial practices. French Caribbean immigrants, for example, brought different social categories and understandings of race, and the considerable numbers of slaves and servants of color they brought to Philadelphia augmented the city’s black population by about 25 percent (Nash, “Reverberations of Haiti,” 47).

9. A character in André: a Tragedy, in Five Acts by William Dunlap, for example, refers obliquely to revolutions in other “climes” (73). At the end of the decade, a number of Anglo-Atlantic plays addressed slave unrest, but they staged individual banditry rather than organized revolution. Such plays typically imagine slave revolt as local, isolated, and dispersed forms of marronage or banditry. Francophone theater appears also reticent on the topic, although one notable exception is Charles de Rémusat’s published but never-performed 1825 play, The Saint-Domingue Plantation, or, The Insurrection: a Drama in Five Acts.

10. Murdock, Triumphs of Love, 37–38. Henceforth all page references to this work will be made directly in the text.

12. See Hunt, Haiti’s Influence. More recently, see Clavin, Toussaint Louverture; Garraway, Tree of Liberty; Gaspar and Geggus, Turbulent Time; Geggus and Fiering, World of the Haitian Revolution; Jackson and Bacon, African Americans and the Haitian Revolution; Kachun, “Antebellum African Americans,” 249–273.

15. My sense of how theater works in this context is informed by theoretical discussions about the relationships among sites of performance—between on- and offstage performances that we might characterize as more or less “theatrical” or “performative”—conducted by interdisciplinary thinkers in the arts and social sciences such as Erving Goffman, Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, and Judith Butler. More recently, performance studies scholars such as Tracy Davis, Marvin Carlson, Janelle Reinelt, and Thomas Postlewait have questioned the definitions of and boundaries between formal theater and unconscious social acts (to pose one sort of performance continuum), discussing issues such as political meaning, authenticity, artificiality, and imitation.

17. The mask’s nose is “as big as the man of Strasburgh,” an allusion to book 4 of Sterne’s Tristam Shandy, in which an enormous, phallic nose inspires comical curiosity and desire.

18. The patriotic turn also helps Murdock’s play deploy St. Domingue refugees in a for-profit display that supports his claim to “native genius” as an American playwright. That American exceptionalism is also the subject of White, “Saint-Domingue Refugees,” 248–260.

19. See Matthewson, “Abraham Bishop,” 148–154; Waldstreicher and Grossbart, “Abraham Bishop’s Vocation,” 617–657.

20. White, “Saint-Domingue Refugees,” 249; see also Newman, “American Political Culture,” 72–89. For a fuller picture of St. Domingue’s French Creole culture, see Garraway, Libertine Colony.

21. On black responses to the Haitian Revolution, see Scott, “Common Wind”; and White, “ ‘It Was a Proud Day,” 13–50.

22. Philadelphia General Advertiser, August 9, 1793, boasts of donations collected from theaters, circuses, and the “French patriotic Society” in excess of §10,000.

23. Philadelphia, for example, saw more than 110 francophone publications during the 1790s (Hébert, “French Publications in Philadelphia,” 38). Anglo-American newspapers made figures such as Genêt, Talleyrand, La Rouchefoucauld-Liancourt, and M. L. E. Moreau de St. Méry household names during the 1790s. In French Refugee Life Childs amply describes the celebrity French refugee social scene of diplomats, intellectuals, aristocrats, religious figures, and merchants of both Creole and European origins.

26. New-York Journal, & Patriotic Register, January 25, 1792. Brockett, “European Career of Alexandre Placide,” 306–313, surveys Placide’s two decades of English and French success before his arrival in America. Sodders, “Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 10–11, gives a brief overview of Placide’s Caribbean career. See also Hoole, Ante-Bellum Charleston Theatre; Curtis, “John Joseph Stephen Leger Sollee,” 285–298; Willis, Charleston Stage.

28. The advertisement for Gardie’s “first appearance on this stage” does not elaborate upon her Caribbean routing to American theaters, promoting her origins in “the Theatre at Paris” (Gazette of the United States, April 28, 1794). Scholars have not fully explored the implications of Gardie’s story; she has received brief mentions in Brooks, “Decade of Brilliance,” 333–365; Winter, “American Theatrical Dancing,” 58–73; Shapiro, “Action Music in American Pantomime,” 49–72.

29. Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, 1:402–404. Gardie pursued an acting career in France, St. Domingue, New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston until her sensational murder by her second husband in 1798.

30. Benefit performance for Gardie and Willems advertised in the Philadelphia Gazette, June 26, 1794. Dunlap identifies Willems as coming from England (ibid., 1:234).

31. Sonneck examines the French influences on American opera in Early Opera in America, 197–219.

32. Foster, Choreography and Narrative, 128–130, and Meglin, “ ‘Sauvages, Sex Roles, and Semiotics,’ ” 87–132, describe the European versions of Mirza, the first two choreographed by Maximilien Gardel in 1779, and a shortened 1781 Fête de Mirza. The earlier versions staged lurking black “assassins,” although American performances do not specifically indicate their presence.

34. When the play appeared first in the Boston, it was simply billed a “military pantomime” and apparently revolved around a demonstration of swordsmanship (Boston Argus April 16, 1793). Beginning in June 1794, a more elaborate version appears in Charleston; theatergoers could read elaborate descriptions beginning with the Charleston City Gazette of June 6, 1794.

35. Lailson’s production appears in the Philadelphia Gazette, July 18, 1797.

38. Lewis Hallam Jr., acted Mungo to great acclaim, reportedly after making a study of African American character. See Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity, 217.

39. For a detailed discussion of racialized performances in various London settings, see Worrall, Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 68–106. See also Carlson, “New Lows,” 139–147.

40. Prologue preceding Triumphs of Love in theatrical performance; the text (included in some, but not all, printed versions of the play) does not indicate who spoke the prologue.

42. Paul Gilmore describes the “type of imitation and repetition staged by the minstrel show” that rendered race “simultaneously a mask and an essential identity” (Genuine Article, 50).

44. In what might be a sign of Murdock’s regard for his patron’s views, the list of subscribers displays Rush’s name prominently, out of strict alphabetical order at the top of the names beginning with “R.”

45. Rush, letter to Nathanael Greene, September 16, 1782, quoted in Nash, Forging Freedom, 3.

46. For more on the pleasures and perils of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, see Lott, Love and Theft; Lhamon, Raising Cain; Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow.

48. James, Black Jacobins. On the ways in which both French and American historiography have reconceived the Haitian Revolution, see Sepinwall, “Specter of Saint-Domingue,” 317–338.

49. Sonneck, Early Opera in America, 145; Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity, 70–71. Ads for performances of the Poor Soldier featuring Domingo appear in the Polar Star and Boston Daily Advertiser, January 2, 1797, and the Boston Columbian Centinel, April 12, 1797, “for the last time this season.” The next year saw a return to Bagatelle, the original white character, “as originally written” (Boston Gazette, and Weekly Republican Journal, June 4, 1798).

50. Murdock recycled this satire in his 1798 play The Politicians. Caesar, Pompey, and Sambo reappear, this time debating the relative merits of French and English allegiances (19–20). There is no evidence that the play ever appeared on stage.

51. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street, 157–160 describes white support and celebration of the French Revolution alongside the increasingly diminishing possibilities of black political expression during the 1790s. In response to such shifts in political culture, black Americans performed their own celebrations of Haitian independence and the end of the slave trade.

52. See Alderson, “Charleston’s Rumored Slave Revolt,” 93–111; Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords; Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra.

54. Ashli White examines the implications of “French Negroes” in North American discourse. Reports of black St. Dominguans frequently used the label to signal vaguely threatening, exotic or foreign (often, though not exclusively, francophone) characters. The xenophobic designation broadly associates threatening outsiders with radical revolution and slave revolt (Encountering Revolution, 138–154).

58. New York Spectator, July 14, 1804. There has been significant debate over the nature and the extent of African American awareness of Haiti. As a reprinted anecdote, this account indicates more reliably the ways that white onlookers imagined and narrated reenactments of Haitian-style insurrection in their midst.

7. Anna Brickhouse has recently written about the connection between the discourse of blame and disgust surrounding Haitian refugees in the U.S. and Hurricane Katrina victims. See, “L’Ouragan de Flammes (The Hurricane of Flames),” 1121.

10. For apparent states, see Glick-Schiller and Fouron, Georges Woke Up Laughing, 27; and Braziel, “Haiti, Guantánomo,’ ” 12.

11. In an article entitled “Mulatto Literature,” which appeared in The Albion on July 9, 1853, the Haitian writer Ignace Nau was referred to as “one of the cleverest of the negro novelists” and Dupré was called the “Haytian Molière.” When the playwright Pierre Faubert’s son won the French prize of honor at the Sorbonne in 1858—“the highest prize … at the concourse of all the colleges”–it was widely reported in the U.S. press. The northern kingdom of Haiti’s Gazette Royale d’Hayti was referred to repeatedly in the U.S. press as well. There are also numerous mentions of J. S. Milscent’s L’Abeille Haytienne, the first Haitian review, in the U.S. press, particularly around the time of Pétion’s death. For Faubert’s son in the U.S. press see, Littell’s Living Age, May 7, 1859; Liberator, December 24, 1858; Friends’ Review, December 11, 1858; Liberator, October 8, 1858; African Repository, December 1858; Independent, September 30, 1858; Farmer’s Cabinet, October 28, 1858. For L’Abeille Haytienne see, Newbury Port Herald, August 16, 1816; Baltimore Patriot, August 17, 1816; Rhode Island American, August 16, 1816; City Gazette, August 16, 1816; New England Palladium, August 13, 1816; Nantucket Gazette, August 17, 1816; Boston Gazette, August 19, 1816; Carlisle Gazette, August 21, 1816; Hallowel Gazette, August 21, 1816; Platsburgh Republican, August 24, 1816; Union, September 6, 1816; Vermont Gazette, September 10, 1816; Baltimore Patriot, November 5, 1816; National Advocate, November 5, 1816. For mentions of the Gazette Royale, see Nantucket Gazette, July 8, 1816; Sun, July 6, 1816; Franklin Herald, July 9, 1816; Delaware Gazette and Peninsula Advertiser, July 11, 1816; Independent American, July 17, 1816; Otsego Herald, July 18, 1816; Commercial Advertiser, September 11, 1816.

12. Le Système colonial dévoilé (1814); Notes à M. le Baron V.P. de Malouet (1814); Le Cri de la conscience (1815); Le Cri de la patrie (1815); A Mes Concitoyens! (1815); Réflexions adressées aux Haytiens de partie de l’ouest et du sud, sur l’horrible assassinat du Général Delvare, commis au Port-au-Prince, dans la nuit du 25 décembre, 1815, par les ordres de Pétion (1816); Communication officielle de trois lettres de Catineau Laroche, ex-colon, agent de Pétion (1816); Relation de la fête de la Reine S.M. d’Hayti (1816); Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, ex-colon français, … sur les noirs et les blancs, la civilization de l’Afrique, le Royaume d’Hayti, etc. (1816); Réflexions politiques sur quelques ouvrages et journaux français concernant Hayti (1817); and Essai sur les causes de la Révolution et des guerres civile d’Hayti (1819).

13. “Review of New Books,” Literary Gazette; or Journal of Criticism, Science, and the Arts, February 17, 1821. “Review of New Books.” The Literary Gazette; or Journal of Criticism, Science, and the Arts, February 17, 1821.

15. “Boston: Friday Morning, Sept. 15,” Boston Daily Advertiser, September 15, 1815, 2; repr. Alexandria Gazette, September 26, 1815.

16. For the North American Review, see Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations, 3-4.

17. Cushing, “Article VI—Refléxions politiques,” 112. Cushing’s article on Vastey was very influential and was either referenced or quoted several times in the northern United States. See, for example, “Review of New Books,” Literary Gazette; or Journal of Critricism, Science, and the Arts, February 17, 1821; “From the Catskill Recorder: Revolutionary Incidents. St. Domingo,” Rhode Island American, February 13, 1821; “From the Catskill Recorder: Revolutionary Incidents. St. Domingo,” Essex Patriot, August 18, 1821.

18. “Article V—Reflexions sur une Lettre de Mezeres [sic], Ex-Colon français, addressee à M. J. C. L. Sismonde de Sismondi, etc.,” Analectic Magazine, May 1817, 403.

19. “Mulatto Literature,” Albion: A Journal of News, Politics, and Literature, July 9, 1853, 326.

20. Many newspaper articles like the one printed in the Weekly Visiter [sic] also referred to “numerous publications” that they had “received from Cape François” (see the issue dated February 1,1817). Most articles that criticized Vastey or other Haitian writings from the north did so because of what they perceived as the northern kingdom’s “false defamation of Pétion.” This is particularly the case with those who referred to Vastey’s Le Cri de la Patrie. See also Weekly Recorder, July 10, 1816.

22. See Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, 151, and Fanning, “Roots of Early Black Nationalism,” 70.

24. The northern kingdom of Haiti had a very distinct relationship to the northern United States, which differed considerably from its relationship to the southern states. The southern United States maintained a hostile, fear-driven attitude toward Haiti. Evidence of this exists in a report in L’Abeille Haytienne, which stated, “Captain Mackenzie reports also that the appearance of the Haitian pavilion in New Orleans had the effect of water on a hydrophobe. The view of our emblematic colors caused them to have violent convulsions” (see the issue dated September 1, 1817). The historian Logan tells us that in fact “most of the trade was between the Northern ports of the United States and Haiti since the attitude of the Southern states was not conducive to the coming of ships and sailors from the free Negro republic” (see Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 195). In addition, an article entitled “Look Sharp!” (published in the Federal Republican & Commercial Gazette, March 28, 1810) reported that “the mulatto general Rigaud arrived at Philadelphia from France on the 7th” and that “attention is anxiously drawn towards him, by a report that he was lately in this state…. It is not for the sake of persecuting an individual that we introduce this article, but the safety of this and the southern states imperiously requires that he should be expelled, if he has really entered them, and that at any rate his motions should be closely watched.” This last article was reprinted in the Repertory on April 3, 1810; the Connecticut Mirror on April 9, 1810; the Berkshire reporter on April 11, 1810; and in the Sun on April 21, 1810.

25. For Dessalines in the U.S. press, see Jenson, “Before Malcom X,” 331. In 1809 King Henry Christophe sought to counteract his negative image abroad by issuing a heart-felt plea to U.S. merchants. The article stated that its purpose was “to make known the truth, and to bring to light the falsity of the infamous impostures my enemies have spread with so much profusion against me.” Christophe’s letter was reprinted in the Observer, July 30, 1809, and the American, August 4, 1809. An additional article in the New-England Palladium on August 4, 1809, which made reference to this letter, stated that Christophe’s address to the merchants was brought to the United States by a “gentleman from the West-Indies.” This last article was also reprinted several times. See Boston Patriot, August 5, 1809; Providence Gazette, August 5, 1809; Massachusetts Spy; or Worcester Gazette, August 9, 1809; and Rutland Herald, August 19, 1809.

26. Jenson, “Before Malcom X,” 33; Desormeaux, “First of the (Black) Memorialists,” 135.

29. For “collective bovarysme,” see Price-Mars, So Spoke the Uncle, 8. The Haitian literary historians Pradel Pompilus and Dieudonné Fardin have each written that Haitian literature, like all literature, owes something to the literatures that have come before it. J. Michael Dash, who makes one of the principal arguments against using negritude as the dominant mode of understanding nineteenth-century Caribbean literature, has explained that the dismissal of early Haitian literature is largely because “revolutionary ideologies in the francophone Caribbean in the 1930s were constructed around myths of rupture and innovation” leading to a condemnation of nineteenth-century texts that outwardly resembled European literature as “a time blind imitation” (Dash, “Marvelous realism,” 70; Dash, “Nineteenth-Century Haiti,” 46). See Pompilus, Manuel Illustré de la littérature haïtienne, 1; Fardin, Histoire de la littérature haïtienne, 8.

30. For the absence of audience, see Bernabé et al. Eloge de la créolité / In Praise of Creoleness, 76; and Laroche, L’Avènement de la littérature haïtienne, 162–174. For literacy in the nineteenth century, see Egerton, “Politics and Autobiography,” 229.

32. For Hegel, see Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 60. For Spinoza, see Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation, 22–23; and Hutton for Louverture quotation, 54.

38. Much of the scholarship on U.S.-Haiti relations is concerned with the reactions of scared southerners, northern abolitionists, or African American activists, but rarely do early Haitian authors significantly figure. For southerners, see Sidbury, “Saint Domingue in Virginia,” 539–541; Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America, 101; Sheller, “ ‘The Haytian Fear,’ ” 287; and White, “Limits of Fear,” 363. For northern abolitionists, see Sheller, “ ‘The Haytian Fear,’ ” 286; and Clavin, Toussaint Louverture, 118. For African Americans, see Fanning, “Roots of Early Black Nationalism,” 63; and Dixon, African America and Haiti, 8.

45. Brickhouse, TransAmerican Literary Relations, 6–7 (emphasis in the original).

49. Bellegarde, as quoted in Bellegarde-Smith, “Overview of Haitian Foreign Policy,” 58.

52. Vastey, Réflexions politiques, 32. Henceforth cited in the text as “RP.”

54. Gillman, “Otra vez Caliban/Encore Caliban: Adaptation/Translation/Americas Studies,” 205, 193.

56. It was not only Vastey who recognized the difficult subject position of Haitian authors. The following review of Colonial System, published in the Antijacobin Review in 1818, acknowledges the complicated relationship of the Haitian Revolution to vengeance:

Of the cruelties practised [sic] by the French in St. Domingo, Europe had, in a great measure, till now, been totally ignorant. The mask has, however, been withdrawn, by the liberty which the Haytians have given themselves, and perhaps the most signal vengeance they can now take of their ancient oppressors, is to give an impartial history. In reading over the tract before us we have doubted whether we were in the society of men or of wild beasts; but a little reflection easily convinced us that the brutes of the field could not act as the monsters we have been placed in company with. (315; repr. Port-Folio, April 1819).

57. Vastey, Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, 90. Henceforth cited as “RM” in the text.

61. “Royalty,” Niles Weekly Register, November 9, 1816, 168 (emphasis in the original).

63. Ibid. The article from Niles Weekly was published in response to the Boston Palladium’s report of a birthday party given for Henry Christophe’s wife, Queen Marie-Louise, in 1816. Vastey had published a pamphlet detailing the event, and parts of it appeared in translation in the Boston paper; the article was reprinted in the Daily National Intelligencer, October 16, 1816.

64. According to Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, the Abbé Grégoire was “disgusted with the return of monarchy” in northern Haiti, and for this reason he was an ardent supporter of Pétion. Sepinwall writes that Grégoire was “appalled that as much of the world was slowly adopting republican principles, the North of Haiti was abandoning them. He was especially incensed at the irony of blacks’ creating a system based on arbitrary titles” (“Exporting the Revolution,” 48). Grégoire’s disdain and unwillingness to correspond with the northern kingdom derived from the fact that he viewed Haiti as a “laboratory for republicanism” (ibid.) and saw Christophe’s kingdom as an obstacle to spreading a republican message throughout the Atlantic World, just as he saw the United States’s continued slavery as a similar obstacle. See Grégoire (abbé de), De la noblesse de la peau, 86. See also Vastey’s letter to Thomas Clarkson, in which he complained that the French priest ignored his letters in Griggs and Prator, Henri Christophe and Thomas Clarkson, 180.

69. Ibid., 116. Cushing was not the only U.S. newspaper editor to print positive reviews of Christophe after 1817, as evidenced by the following extract from a letter written by a U.S. person from Virginia who lamented the glowing reports of the Haitian monarch in the northern press: “It astonishes me a great deal to see that the editors of our newspapers treat the name of that monster, Christophe, the soi-disant king of Hayti, with the shadow of respect” (Boston Daily Advertiser, June 26, 1816; repr. Enquirer, July 6, 1816).

71. Rufus as quoted in Zuckerman, “Power of Blackness,” 194. Thomas Jefferson, once a proponent of “Toussaint’s Clause,” which allowed the United States to continue to trade in arms and other goods with Toussaint Louverture during the Haitian Revolution, changed his tune remarkably after Haitian independence, when he began attempting to have a bill imposing a trade embargo on Haiti passed in Congress. The Logan Bill was passed in February of 1806, and it forbade U.S. merchants from trading with any portions of the colony not in possession of France. See Matthewson, “Jefferson and the Nonrecognition of Haiti,” 32. Official trade statistics (which do not take into account the illegal trade, of course) show that U.S. exports to the French islands stood at §6.7 million in 1806 but fell to §5.8 million in 1807 and to §1.5 million in 1808 (ibid., 35). When the trade embargo expired in 1810 and was not renewed, trade resumed between the two countries. For a table indicating the trade statistics after 1810, see Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 194–195.

72. “Miscellaneous and Literary Intelligence,” North American Review 1.1 (May 1815): 134.

74. Adams, “Defence of the Constitutions of the Governments of the United States.”

76. For “century of isolation,” see Leyburn, Haitian People, 11; and Mintz, Foreword to Leyburn, Haitian People, vi.

77. For hostilities, see Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 195; Sidbury, “Saint Domingue in Virginia,” 551; Farmer, Uses of Haiti, 69; Matthewson, Pro-Slavery Foreign Policy, 129–140; and Fanning, “Roots of Early Black Nationalism,” 73.

80. According to Logan, by 1821, “American interests in the northern part of Haiti were sufficiently important to make it a topic of national interest.” Logan tells us that “Haitian trade [with the U.S.] generally ranked above that of Norway and Denmark, Sweden and the Swedish West Indies; South America, Austria, Turkey and the Levant; Egypt, Mocha and Aden; Morocco and the Barbary States; Africa, generally; the South Seas; and the northwest coast of America” (Diplomatic Relations, 194). Farmer adds to this that “with brief exception … the United States and Haiti have been trading partners from the first decade of the nineteenth century, when they were the only independent republics in the hemisphere. That the United States did not officially recognize Haiti did little to alter the fact that, by 1851, the United States sold more goods to Haiti than it did to any other Latin American country, including Mexico” (Uses of Haiti, 51).

82. Fanning, “Roots,” 78. For more information about this, see also Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 198; and Hickey, “America’s Response,” 373, where he argues that this campaign actually began much earlier than the 1820s. Hickey writes that as early as 1804 the Philadelphia newspaper the United States Gazette led the way with support among the Federalists of the north for opposing limited trade with Haiti.

84. See Limonade’s letter as translated in Griggs and Prator, Henri Christophe, 174.

85. Clay as quoted in Matthewson, “Jefferson and the Nonrecognition of Haiti,” 234.

86. This tacit recognition was politically important precisely because it was understood among the three governments that to treat with Christophe as a king or Pétion as a president was to recognize the independence of the country. This much was evident by the conflict between the U.S.-appointed agent Septimus Tyler’s refusal to address Christophe as the king after the latter seized the property of some U.S. merchants in 1810 (for more historical details, see n.88 below). This situation led to an eventual showdown between John Quincy Adams and Christophe in 1817 (see Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 189–190), ending with the former boldly refusing to address Christophe as the king of Haiti, ever. The same problem of discursive, “tacit” recognition was an issue for France when Thomas Clarkson agreed to act as an emissary between Christophe’s kingdom and the French monarch. First, the French government refused to treat with Clarkson formally as long as he presented himself as a government agent of Haiti. Christophe wanted Clarkson to transmit his proposal for the conditions of opening negotiations with respect to French recognition (written by the Duke of Limonade) to Louis XVIII and the French cabinet. Clarkson’s response was this: “With respect to the Diplomatic Paper by which your Majesty authorized me to act as your Envoy at Paris … we were unanimously of the opinion that the French Cabinet would not receive it. By receiving it the … Cabinet would be acknowledging the independence of Hayti at the very outset” (translated in Griggs and Prator, Henri Christophe, 97–98). It goes without saying that Clarkson, a frequent correspondent of Christophe, recognized the independence of Haiti, but he also recognized that he was acting as an “individual” rather than a government agent (translated in Griggs and Prator, Henri Christophe, 161). Vastey, Limonade, and Christophe, too, understood the implications of treating with France under these circumstances–that is to say, without an emissary. Both Vastey (as a private citizen) and Limonade (in an official capacity) wrote that it was impossible for the Haitians to treat with France without the country first recognizing Haiti’s independence because to do so would have been to have “tacitly recognized their rights of sovereignty and have renounced independence” (Vastey, RM, 134). To enter into negotiations with France upon a point that Haitians wanted a priori recognized would have been to legitimate France’s position in the first place. In this way, Haiti and France were engaged in bold stand-off since neither side felt it could even communicate directly with the other side without losing some of its justification.

88. Quotation from Pasley, Tyranny of the Printers, 317. As far as the U.S. government was concerned, U.S. merchants were free to recognize the independence of Haiti only when acting as commercial or private individuals. The minute they stepped into the role of government agent, as in the case of Septimus Tyler, Christophe, Pétion, and Haiti ceased to exist as separate and sovereign. Beginning in 1812, Henry Christophe was engaged in a dispute with the U.S. government over §125,000 dollars that he claimed he had sent there for the purchase of supplies in 1810. In “retaliation” Christophe seized U.S. cargoes valued at §132,000. When the U.S. government attempted to intervene on behalf of the merchants, Christophe refused to respond to the claim. Christophe charged that Tyler, the agent who had been appointed to oversee the matter in 1817, had addressed his letter to Christophe rather than to King Henry I. Subsequent attempts to collect the claim failed because John Quincy Adams refused to give Tyler the authority to address Christophe as the king. The dispute was never resolved because Adams determined that the two rulers were at an impasse, finding that “no further measures” would be “practicable on the part of the Executive in th[at] case” (quoted in Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 184–190). This conflict was widely reported in U.S. newspapers when it first occurred. Each of these newspapers published one of three versions of the story in which Christophe wanted to start a “predatory war” of commerce with the United States. See New York Commercial Advertiser, Mercantile Advertiser, New York Herald, April 28, 1810; Connecticut Mirror, April 30, 1810; Fredonian, New England Palladium, Repertory, May 1, 1810; New York Spectator, May 2, 1810; Newburyport Herald, Northern Whig, Virginia Patriot, May 4, 1810; Essex Register, Freedman’s Friend, Merrimack Intelligencer, Weekly Visiter [sic], May 5, 1810; Eagle, Herald of Liberty, Independent American, May 8, 1810; Berkshire Reporter, Political Barometer, May 9, 1810; Connecticut Journal, May 10, 1810; Cooperstown Federalist, Portsmouth Oracle, True American, May 12, 1810; Supporter, May 19, 1810; Reporter, May 21, 1810; New-Hampshire Gazette, May 22, 1810; Evening Post, May 25, 1810; Alexandria Daily Gazette, May 29, 1810; Courier, May 30, 1810.

89. “Article V—Reflexions sur une Lettre de Mezeres [sic], Ex-Colon français, addressee à M. J. C. L. Sismonde de Sismondi, etc.,” Analectic Magazine, May 1817, 410.

90. “History of Hayti,” Boston Commercial Gazette 62.43 (October 31, 1822): 1; hereafter referred to as “BCG et al.” in the notes. This article was reprinted several times. See Times and Weekly Advertiser, November 11, 1822; Nantucket Inquiror [sic], January 7, 1823; Hampshire Gazette, November 13, 1822; New Hampshire Observatory, February 3, 1823.

91. According to Matthewson, Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, who had helped to broker Toussaint’s Clause, disagreed with the trade embargo of 1805 and 1806, noting that it would harm the trade for which he had arduously labored during the Adams administration; he claimed that the Haitians’ only fault was “having black skin” (as quoted in Matthewson, “Jefferson and the Non-Recognition of Haiti,” 235–236.

92. For a newspaper article that made precisely this argument, see the Northern Whig, December 2, 1817. In 1817, when the United States began to support and recognize the former Spanish colonies of South America, a couple of U.S. newspapers drew explicit connections to the situation in St. Domingue/Haiti, noting that the difference was that Haitians were black. Others, like the Dedham Gazette on November 21, 1817, for example, wrote that the United States should not recognize “St. Domingo” or the Spanish colonies either.

93. “From a Late English Paper,” City of Washington Gazette, May 21, 1818, 2; repr. in the Philanthropist, March 20, 1819, 228.

94. “ ‘State of Hayti,’ ” Review of “La [sic] Système colonial dévoilé”–Par le Baron de Vastey,” Port-Folio 7.4 (April 1819): 315.

95. BCG et al. Reprinted in Times and Weekly Adviser, November 12, 1822; Nantucket Inquiror [sic], January 7, 1823; Hampshire Gazette, November 13, 1822; New Hampshire Repository, February 3, 1823.

97. “St. Domingo,” New York Herald, April 7, 1804, 2. For additional examples of the many articles in which this was done, see Green Mountain Patriot, March 28, 1804; Oracle Post, April 10, 1804; Bee, April 10, 1804.

98. Milscent, “Considérations sur l’île d’Haiti, par J.S. Milscent, Haitien,” L’Abeille Haytienne, August 1, 1817, 7.

99. The most telling conflation of the government with the people occurs when Vastey uses an article that was written in the Gazette Royale d’Hayti, the official publication of Henry Christophe’s kingdom, to express his disdain over the actions of a U.S. merchant ship from New York named the Sidney Crispin, which was under the captainship of Elesha Kenn. Reprinted in his Essai, Vastey’s article stated that on October 17, 1816, Crispin along with his crew brought a letter from two French warships hovering off the coast of Cap-Henry to the Count of Marmelade seeking to open negotiations with Christophe. Because the letter did not recognize the sovereignty of Christophe, addressing him as General Christophe rather than King Christophe, the count naturally refused to transmit the letter. In the article Vastey conflated the “dishonorable” actions of these merchants with their government when he stated that Christophe “was astonished that Americans who had been trading with Haiti for so many years, and who enjoy the protection of the government, and who, like us, had been brought to liberty and independence, could have burdened themselves with a commission that was as dishonorable as it was disturbing for men who belong to a nation that is friends with Haiti” (Vastey, Essai, 351–356). This event was widely reported in the U.S. press. See New-England Palladium & Commercial Advertiser, December 3, 1816; Albany Advertiser, December 4, 1816; Boston Patriot and Morning Advertiser, December 4, 1816; Essex Register, December 4, 1816; American Advocate and Kennebec Advertiser, December 7, 1816; People’s Advocate, December 7, 1816; Weekly Visiter [sic], December 7, 1816; Recorder, December 10, 1816; Newburyport Herald, December 10, 1816; American, December 11, 1816; Burlington Gazette, December 12, 1816; Merrimack Intelligencer, December 14, 1816; Columbian Register, December 21, 1816; American Beacon and Commercial Diary, December 23, 1816; People’s Advocate, March 22, 1817. See also the captain’s defense of his actions, which was printed in several U.S. newspapers: Commercial Advertiser, December 3, 1816; Baltimore Patriot, December 5, 1816; Boston Daily Advertiser, December 6, 1816; New-England Palladium, December 6, 1816; Alexandria Gazette, December 9, 1816; Lancaster Journal, December 9, 1816; American Beacon and Commercial Diary, December 10, 1816.

103. Even though both Vastey and Christophe publicly maintained that non-recognition from both the United States and England was merely a fable, they still actively sought formal recognition. See, for example, Vastey’s letter to Clarkson, November 29, 1819, translated in Griggs and Prator, Henri Christophe and Thomas Clarkson, 180–181, and Christophe to Clarkson, November 20, 1819, translated in ibid., 169.

104. For abolitionist publications, see, Christian Observer, December 1817; Anti-Slavery Record, November 1835; Freedom’s Journal, February 7, 1829, and February 14, 1829).

105. City of Washington Gazette, May 21, 1818; repr. in the Philanthropist, March 20, 1819. These words, however, were reprinted from the 1818 English translation of Vastey’s Reflexions politiques published in London. See Political Remarks, 10.

108. Cushing, “Article VI,” 114. British reviews of Vastey’s works often used a similar language. The British Review (1820) equally applauded Vastey’s writing by saying that “a black” who had once been “deplorably illiterate” stood as a “specimen of the native black genius,” while the Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature (1819) wrote of Vastey’s Reflexions, “We have here a great curiosity, a vindication of the Negroes by a Negroe.” See “History, Literature, and Present State of Hayti,” British Review and London Critical Journal 15 (1820): 74; and “Article VI,” Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature 14 (1819): 329.

111. Buffon’s naturalist writings were premised on the assumption that the “Negro” represented a “degenerate” form of the white race. The French author even proposed racial mixing to speed up the process of regeneration, writing that if miscegenation were promoted, “the Mulatto would have only a light trace of brown that would disappear altogether within the next generations; it would only take therefore 150 or 200 years to clean the skin of a Negro by this method of mixing with white blood” (Histoire naturelle générale et particuliére, 14:313–314). It was not long before racial mixing was proffered as a possible solution to help end slavery and to hasten the “regeneration” of the black race. In his Études des races humaines, Michel-Hyacinthe Deschamps wrote, for example:

The regeneration of the human species, or the return of all the colored races to the white type, is possible, suppressing the odious prejudice, by means of perpetual crossing of the métis with the primordial white, now European, race. We would whiten the natives of an island, of a country, of a vast colony. The Negroes would not have to be born slaves, our inferior brothers; they are our equals in the order of creation; they have the right—as do we—to the sun, to liberty, and to the banquet of life…. Glory to the promoters of the emancipation of the slaves! (135, emphasis in the original)

A reviewer of John R. Beard’s biography of Toussaint Louverture also encouraged miscegenation as a way to help end slavery in the United States, writing that “many sensible men who have lived in Hayti are of opinion that an increase of the mulatto stock, by legitimate and permanent sanctions would vastly improve it, in as much as the public interests fare well at the heads of these men of mixed blood who are not, as we commonly supposed, faded copies of both black and white, but specimens of an original ability as yet but imperfectly displayed” (“Toussaint L’Ouverture,” North American Review, 1864, 596).

116. See Goudie, Creole America, 77–78; and Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 5.

121. For literacy as humanity, see Chukwudi, Introduction, 5; and Aravamudan, Tropico-politans, 270.

122. City of Washington Gazette, May 21, 1818; repr. in the Philanthropist, March 20, 1819.

131. For revolution as incomplete, see Fanuzzi, “Taste,” 582. For virtues of the revolution, see Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 9.

134. During, “Literature—Nationalism’s Other?” 139 (emphasis in the original).

135. See Vastey’s letter as translated in Griggs and Prator, Henri Christophe, 180–181. See also, Farmer, Uses of Haiti, 69.

137. Vastey, Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, 36. For an intriguing argument about Dessalines’s desire to export the revolution in Haiti elsewhere in the Americas, see Jenson, “Before Malcom X,” 340.

138. Vastey, Notes, 7. Here, Vastey specifically refutes the writing of the former French colonist Pierre Victor Malouet, who had written that “the [Haitian] revolution has transferred from the whites to the blacks the question of control over the Caribbean, and our unfortunate rivalries [nos misérables rivalités] must give way in the face of the great interest in the region that is obviously developing” (Collection de mémoires, 4:2).

1. Cited in Jackson and Bacon, African Americans and the Haitian Revolution, 170.

6. This phrase is taken from the title of a 1989 exhibition in Paris done by the Haitian artist Edouard Duvall Carrié.

11. For a discussion of the idea of the Long Revolution of Haiti, see Bogues, “And What About the Human?,” 29–47.

12. I develop the idea of the slave as a “living corpse” drawing from the poetry of Nicolas Guillen particularly his poem, “I Came on a Slave Ship.” For a further discussion of this, see Bogues, “And What About the Human?”

20. As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon writes, slaves might be considered “bare labor” because, although treated inhumanly, they had economic and juridical value. See Dillon, New World Drama, 26–27.

21. For a further discussion of this see Bogues, “And What About the Human?”