For nearly 230 years extraordinary men and women have represented the United States abroad under all kinds of circumstances. What they did and how and why they did it remain little known to their compatriots. In 1995 the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) and Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired (DACOR) created a book series to increase public knowledge and appreciation of the involvement of American diplomats in world history. The series seeks to demystify diplomacy by telling the story of those who have conducted our foreign relations, as they lived, observed, and reported them. Former ambassador Gordon Brown’s lively study of early American foreign relations and economic diplomacy, Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution, advances these aims.
Brown relates how America’s early leaders and their diplomatic representatives dealt with the politically sensitive issue of the 1790-1810 slave rebellion in Haiti led by Toussaint Louverture. Founding fathers Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison struggled with the dilemma of how to protect America’s highly profitable trade with the rich French colony while ensuring America’s national security and maintaining its beneficial position of neutrality between the warring European powers. The leaders’ policy toward the revolt was consistent on only one point—the need to protect America from what they saw as Haiti’s radicalism. America’s diplomats contributed significantly to resolving the controversy. Although communications were often slow, insecure, uncertain, and frequently overtaken by events, this left room for a degree of improvisation unthinkable today.
Before turning to historical and analytical writing, Gordon S. Brown spent thirty-five years in the Foreign Service, mainly in the Middle East and North Africa. He served as political advisor to General Norman Schwarzkopf in the first Gulf War and as ambassador to Mauritania. His previous publications include Coalition, Coercion and Compromise: Diplomacy of the Gulf Crisis, 1990–1991 (Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 1997) and The Norman Conquest of Southern Italy and Sicily (McFarland, 2003).
In Toussaint’s Clause, Gordon Brown vividly recounts how, from the nation’s earliest days, fiercely partisan politics, congressional constraints, the pressure of economic interest groups, bureaucratic ambition, and larger foreign and domestic goals shaped, and then reshaped, critical foreign policies.
— KENNETH L. BROWN, President
Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training
— ROBERT L. FUNSETH, President
Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired