Assignment 450 words

International Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution

Author(s): John E. Baur

Source: The Americas , Apr., 1970, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Apr., 1970), pp. 394-418

Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/980183

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INTERNATIONAL REPERCUSSIONS OF THE HAITIAN

REVOLUTION

NO REVOLUTION worthy of the name has stopped at its national borders. For good and for evil revolution is exportable. Numerous studies have been made of the international and even the global re-

sults of such modern upheavals as the English, American, French, Russian, and

Chinese revolutions. Although several treatises have been published on the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, and its creation of the first Negro republic and

second independent nation in the New World, there has appeared no full-scale survey of its foreign significance. Inescapably, many histories of the Dominican

Republic indicate the pervasive postrevolutionary relations of Haiti and her eastern neighbor on Hispaniola. Dominican life has been moulded in every sense by reactions to Haitian events, particularly the Haitian attempt to assim-

ilate that republic and several eastward migrations of Haitian people.' Other- wise, studies of the Haitian uprising have been limited to internal changes or the extensive diplomatic relations of the Black Republic.

Deep were the roots of the Haitian Revolution in a slave system which had made St. Domingue the richest colony of France and an intolerably unjust society seething with the hatreds of color and caste. Willing to lead a revolu- tion was an activist minority of free men, mostly mulatto, and often educated

property-owners, whose privileges had recently been limited by a ruling class which noted with concern its growing numbers and energy. At the bottom of

the social pyramid the great masses of slaves had no domestic defenders. The turmoil of Revolutionary France, 1789-91, and its ideology of liberty, equality,

and fraternity, presented a chance for mulattoes to seek justice from Paris, while French intellectuals supported the abolition of slavery. Revolts by both

*-"Haiti" is a term which was not used until the nation became independent of France in 1804. It was derived from the ancient Indian name meaning "highland." Columbus, who discovered the island, called it "Espafiola," or "Hispaniola," and the term is still applied geographically to the whole island. The term "Santo Domingo" was used by the Spaniards; thus was derived later the name for the Dominican Republic. When the French colonized the western third of Hispaniola they used the French form, "Saint Domingue." To distinguish the French and Spanish colonies the terms "French Part" and "Spanish Part" are sometimes em- ployed. Varieties such as "San Domingo" and "St. Domingo" are sometimes found in English- language works. After 1804, British and American writers frequently used the spelling "Hayti" and "Haytians," now obsolete.

1An excellent recent study of this is Rayford W. Logan, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1968).

394

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JoHN E. BAUR 395

mulattoes and Negroes occurred prematurely. When it seemed that the mu- lattoes would share political power with them, St. Domingue's ruling creoles defied Paris. Thus with group against group and island opposed to Continent, one revolution grew out of another. By 1791, the slaves had taken up arms. For the next thirteen years this "Garden of the West Indies" was ravaged by revo-

lution, race war, and the devastation of enormously valuable property. Then, as in the case of nearly every modern civil war, St. Domingue's torments were

increased by foreign intervention. Great Britain and Spain landed troops in the

early 1790's to cooperate with the island's warring factions. After these two powers had finally evacuated the colony, Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former slave,

became the leading revolutionary, virtual father of his country soon to be re-

named Haiti, and master of the entire island, including the Spanish eastern section. Despite the flight of most of the whites, L'Ouverture was unable to maintain the integrity of his rule, for with his betrayal by Napoleon in 1802, a new struggle followed which brought true independence under Toussaint's successor, Jean Jacques Dessalines, who declared the freedom of the State of Haiti.

The first intimate impression foreign peoples and governments received of this long-sustained and complicated series of events came with the dramatic exodus of its refugees. The initial outpouring of consequence occurred in 1793. On July 14, the American Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, wrote his friend, James Monroe:

The situation of the St. Domingo fugitives (aristocrats as they are) calls aloud

for pity & charity. Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of

man. I deny the power of the general government [at Philadelphia) to apply money to such a purpose, but I deny it with a bleeding heart. It belongs to the State governments. Pray urge ours [Virginia'sJ to be liberal. The executive

should hazard themselves more on such an occasion, & the Legislature when

it meets ought to approve & extend it. It will have a great effect on doing away the impression of other disobligations towards France.2

During the troubled period between the Negro revolt of 1791 and the British

attempt to conquer St. Domingue in 1793, about 90 per cent of the white popu- lation of 40,000 had fled the colony. It has been estimated that at least 10,000,

and perhaps twice that number, went to the United States. St. Domingue's creoles, many of them republican, tended to go to the Southern states, while French-born royalists generally settled in New England and the Middle Atlan- tic states. Whatever their politics and prejudices, they mingled more easily with

2Paul Leicester Ford (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1895), VI, 349.

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3% REPERCUSSIONS OF HAITIAN REVOLUTION

European immigrants in the northern republic than with native-Americans who understood so imperfectly their way of life.3

Capital, largest city, and acknowledged cultural center of the United States was Philadelphia. Now it knew even more drama than its political primacy had brought through the sudden influx of Caribbean refugees. Philadelphia was

also enduring a major medical crisis, the infamous yellow fever epidemic, which

some townspeople insisted the St. Domingans had brought. Most of the fugi- tives were destitute. Yet, despite the sanitary and economic problems inherent

in their coming, they were treated hospitably. The French Patriotic Society contributed $800 for their relief, while subscriptions from other quarters swelled

the fund to $1,000. Had not yellow fever hampered activity, the charity drive

would probably have been much more successful. By February, 1795, the Penn-

sylvania legislature had appointed a committee to distribute funds to the de- serving, except:

Such persons as, having slaves, do by any act or device contravene or evade the law of this State made and provided for the abolition of slavery, so as, contrary to the true intent and meaning thereof, to deprive the persons by them so held or claimed as slaves of their just rights to freedom.4

Indirectly the recipients rewarded Philadelphia. For example, Jean Deveze (1753-1829), a French military surgeon self-exiled that summer from devastated

Cap Francois, .used his tropical remedies against the fever. He pioneered in recognizing yellow fever as noncontagious. Devize became the principal physi- cian of Philadelphia's Bush Hill hospital.5 Other refugees taught Philadelphians

French, piano, and dancing, or became excellent housekeepers. Yet, some emi- gres proved 'to be an embarrassment to the United States government located in the city until 1800. Like Cuban refugees of nearly two centuries later, they were far from united in their objectives for the future of their homeland. Each

group sought President Washington's approval. As late as 1817, it was reported that some of Philadelphia's St. Domingan colony planned to settle in Texas. Nothing came of the scheme, partly because many of its supporters were des-

3Howard Mumford Jones, America and French Culture, 1750-1848 (Chapel Hill: Uni- versity of North Carolina Press, 1927), pp. 134-136. There were also refugees in Wilkes- Barre, Pennsylvania, Wilmington, Delaware, and various communities in Massachusetts.

4J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884 (Philadel- phia: L. H. Everts and Company, 1884), I, 470.

5C. F. Volney, A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States of America (Philadel- phia, privately printed, 1801), p. 243. See also L. H. Butterfield (ed.), Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), II, 738, and T. Wood Clarke, Emigris in the Wilderness (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941), pp. 165-167. Many refugees found employment with the Du Ponts of Wilmington. See J. R. Rosengarten, French Colonists and Exiles in the United States (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1907), pp. 73-88.

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JOHN E. BAUR 397

titute, and, according to one French writer, had "long vegetated at Charleston

and Mobile" en route to their western goal.6

After 1793, New York, then America's second city, played host to about four thousand refugees. New York State was about as generous as Pennsylvania and later was reimbursed for half its expenditure by the federal government.7 In the early 1790's, Americans were grateful for French aid during the Rev- olutionary War and still believed that the French Revolution would achieve moderate internal reforms without terror. This Francophile sentiment was re-

vealed in the many French names which inns, boarding houses, and even public buildings bore. Moreover, the Continental Frenchmen in New York found congenial the urban ways which were more similar to their sophisticated style than either rural St. Domingue or the American South offered. Most of these

twice-transplanted Gallic wanderers had fled north after the Cap Francois fire of 1793 had destroyed that once prosperous colonial town. In New York they worked as goldsmiths, locksmiths, cabinetmakers, sea captains, or merchant sailors.8 The New York Committee of Charity helped several of the poorest voyage to France or resettle in British Jamaica. Others were provided for in the city almshouse.9 In Manhattan, all of St. Domingue's colors were repre- sented, white, mulatto, and Negro. Although the creoles did not mingle easily with New York's rather select society, they did help improve the city culturally.

For example, they were credited with introducing new fashions in jewelry, fresh modes of dancing and music, and a variety of confections.'0 Their French cotillions were gradually adopted by New Yorkers and other Americans. It was said that they induced their host country to use sweet oil and tomatoes, teach-

ing Anglo-Saxons to prepare excellent soups, salads, ragouts, and fricassees.l" Significant was the establishment of a refugee press. For a generation before the upheaval, their Gallic part of Hispaniola had been famous for its literature,

6Just Jean Etienne Roy, The Adventures of a French Captain, trans. Blanche Murphy (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1878), p. 68. Another eagerly planned colony was Azyl, or "Asylum," in Pennsylvania, populated by St. Domingans and Continental royalists. The colony failed after a ten-year endeavor, commenced in 1794, because of the lack of working people and an unwillingness to learn English or the ways of America. See Rosengarten, op. cit., p. 140.

7Sidney I. Pomerantz, New York, An American City, 1783-1803: A Study of Urban Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), p. 204. The refugees in New Jersey gave a concert and ball to raise contributions to their cause.

8Frances Sergeant Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790-1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1940), pp. 50-56, 60-66.

9Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784-1831 (New York City of New York, 1917), II, 306, 436-438, and VIII, 307.

1oJohn F. Watson, Annals and Occurrences of New York City and State in the Olden Time (Philadelphia: Henry F. Anners, 1846), p. 210. 11Loc. cit.

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398 REPERCUSSIONS OF HAITIAN REVOLUTION

theater, and architecture, amenities of a patrician society. Among the intellectuals

now ensconced in North America was M.L.F. Moreau de St. Mery, a prolific writer, who conducted a bookshop in Philadelphia. Tanguey de la Boissiere edited a transplanted newspaper.12 Most of the refugee journals were short- lived, but while they survived they were exceptionally vitriolic, vividly express-

ing strong opinion on the French Revolution and attempting to generate favor- able attitude in Federalist and Democratic Republican circles. For example, many opposed Edmond Gen&t because he objected to allowing' antirepublican St. Domingans to return to the island during a lull in its turmoil.

Among the famous emigres in New York was Rene Nicolas Theard, a Breton settler of St. Domingue who had fled to the island to escape the troubles

in France only to escape again to America in order to elude the oncoming Hai- tian explosion. Since Theard was both an ardent Catholic and staunch royalist, his life abroad was often imperiled. Nevertheless, good fortune met him in North America, where he was appreciated as an architect, invented a marble- polishing mill, and helped to construct the buildings of the United States Mili- tary Academy at West Point.13

Farther south, Virginia harbored many Caribbean escapees. There, Norfolk was their major goal. Dramatically in July, 1793, a fleet of 137 square-rigged ships flying the French flag entered Hampton Roads, their decks crowded with destitute refugees. The Norfolk borough government hastily provided them with temporary aid until the Virginia state legislature, as Jefferson had hoped, voted them funds. More prosperous 6migres brought slaves whom they could

legally keep in Virginia. For several years there were about three thousand St. Domingans in Norfolk, and as late as 1806, one still noted them as a distinct group, especially prominent among the town's shopkeepers."4

Learning that Baltimore offered even greater financial opportunities, some of

Virginia's rmigres removed to that city.'" Meanwhile, Baltimoreans opened their

12Childs, op. cit., p. 128.

13Stanley Clirley Arthur and George Campbell Huchet de Kernion, Old Families of Louisiana (New Orleans: Harmanson Publishers, 1931), pp. 381-82. Not many St. Domingans went to Rhode Island and the other New England states. Congress in 1794 granted only $1,000 for Rhode Island's 200 refugees, out of a total grant of $20,000 for all fugitives to America. Most of those in New England later removed to the milder clime of the Carolinas. See Mary Ellen Oughrey, France and Rhode Island, 1686-1800 (New York: King's Crown Press, 1944), pp. 39-40, 56, and 139.

14Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Norfolk: Historic Southern Port (Durham: Duke University Press, 1931), p. 97.

s1Alth'a de Puech Parham (ed. and trans.), My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), pp. 99-100. This is the fascinating memoir of a sixteen-year-old creole from St. Domingue. He remains unknown, but internal evidence of his reminiscences shows much of the work to be credible.

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JOHN E. BAUR 399

homes to the newcomers and open-handedly organized a relief committee." Although sympathy was nearly universal, some residents, like those of Phila- delphia, believed that the refugees had introduced yellow fever to their city when it arrived coincidentally with them.7 Racially, Maryland's share of the newcomers that summer numbered approximately a thousand whites and five

hundred mulattoes.'s An eyewitness declared that:

Far from bringing any calamity on the country, the influx of the flying colonists has greatly contributed to the prosperity of Baltimore; its trade, agriculture, manufactures have increased. So true is it that an enlightened policy, is not less advantageous than honourable to a country.19

As late as 1818, former President James Madison could say, "I have under- stood that the market of Baltimore has been much benefited in dry seasons by

the irrigation introduced by exiles from St. Domingo."20 The American expe- riences of Haitian refugees was an acid test of their character. Even an aristo-

crat like the Marquis de Cairon energetically turned to raising poultry and

pigs! The learned Louis Francois Picot condescended to become a dancing teacher, but later changed his name to Louis Hue Girardin and, in the proper Horatio Alger tradition, rose in the field of education to become by 1822 pres- ident of Baltimore College and first president of the Maryland Academy of Science and Literature.21

For a full century before the French and Haitian revolutions, Charleston, South Carolina, had been infused with a French atmosphere. As refugees after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Huguenots had settled there. Now 'they offered the newest wave of emigres an ethnic if not necessarily a re- ligious or political familiarity. The semitropical climate of South Carolina was congenial to the West Indian fugitives. For the initial influx of 430 destitute

people, /?12,500 was raised, supplying them with clothing and shelter.22 Fitting easily into the mainstream of this Franco-American city, Charleston's refugees became successful teachers, lawyers, and shopkeepers. After a few years, one

16J. Thomas Scharf, History of Baltimore City and County (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1881), p. 82.

17Annie Leakin Sioussat, Old Baltimore. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931), pp. 133-134.

18Thomas W. Griffith, Annals of Baltimore (Baltimore: William Wooddy, 1824), p. 140. 19M. Berquin-Duvallon, Travels in Louisiana and the Floridas in the Year 1802 (New York,

1806), p. 74.

20Letters and Other Writings of James Madison (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1867), III, 88. This remark was made in Madison's Address to the Agricultural Society of Albemarle, Virginia.

21Sioussat, op. cit., p. 133.

22Thomas Petigru Lesesne, History of Charleston County, South Carolina: Narrative and Biographical (Charleston: A. H. Cranston, 1931), p. 76.

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400 REPERCUSSIONS OF HAITIAN REVOLUTION

resident asserted that thirteen of the community's best instructors belonged to

this group. A later age would read in stone the vital statistics of many an erst- while St. Domingan at the tombs of St. Mary's Catholic Church. There the daughters of a French hero of the American Revolution, Admiral Frangois Joseph, Comte de Grasse, were buried. Also settled in Charleston was the ma- ternal family of Joseph Jefferson, America's great nineteenth-century thespian,

who remembered from childhood his mother's hair-raising tales of escape from massacre.28

Although their lasting impact was social and cultural, no permanently im- portant Franco-American minority evolved from these exiles. Worsening rela- tions with the French Republic, 1793-1800, weakened sympathy for them. With-

in a generation or so most of the refugee families had either left America or had intermarried with Anglo-Saxons, thereby losing their peculiar ethnic iden-

tity.24

For at least three generations under the old regime strong and significant ties

bound Louisiana to St. Domingue. At one time both had been French colonies, although Louisiana, usually underestimated by France, had become a Spanish possession in 1763. There developed a brisk commerce between the two. When New Orleans was cut off from the foodstuffs of St. Domingue in 1791-1792, near starvation resulted in Louisiana, which was saved by the arrival of a thou-

sand barrels of flour swiftly shipped from Philadelphia.25 In the past, Louis- ianans had enjoyed warm human contacts with the inhabitants of the Caribbean isle. Some of the former had gone as refugees to Port-au-Prince when Louis- iana was transferred to Spain. Again, when New Orleans suffered the devas- tations of a great fire, its Caribbean kinsmen quickly sent succor. Ironically, it

was reported that Louisianans did not show equal kindness to imigres in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.26 When authorities learned of the calamities in

St. Domingue, the New Orleans cabildo expressly forbade, under penalty of fine, the landing of refugee Negroes on their soil. This rule inhibited the coming of some creoles who planned to bring their slaves with them. In several cases, illegally entering bondsmen were seized.27 Meanwhile, the Spanish governor of

23Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel, Charleston: The Place and the People (New York: Macmillan Company, 1929), pp. 365 and 403. See also Rosengarten, op. cit., p. 93, and William Winter, Life and Art of Joseph Jefferson (New York: Macmillan Company, 1894), p. 154.

24Childs, op. cit., p. 186.

25Charles Gayarre, History of Louisiana: The Spanish Domination (New Orleans, James A. Gresham, 1879), III, 314-315.

26Berquin-Duvallon, op. cit., pp. 63 and 70-71. 27Ibid., pp. 74-76. See also C. C. Robin, Voyages dans l'Interieur de la Louisiane, de la

Floride, Occidentale, et dans les Isles de la Martinique et de Saint-Domingue (Paris: F. Buisson, 1807), II, 112-113.

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JOHN E. BAUR 401

Louisiana also prohibited the importation of slaves from Jamaica, fearing that

these British bondsmen might be "infected" with the dread spirit of insurrection

that had swept St. Domingue.

Financially in the same predicament as most other refugees, Louisiana's new-

comers were often penniless. Only a few brought gold, jewels, and fine furni-

ture. Yet, their impact on the province was to be much greater than that of their compatriots in the United States. For example, they were credited with the introduction of the sugar industry which replaced inldigo as one of Louis- iana's chief money crops. Although Louisiana had more frost than did St. Do- mingue, the emigres were correctly convinced that cane would flourish. Al- though the sugar they were soon raising was somewhat inferior to that of the West Indies, it proved to be satisfactory. The white frosts of a delta December

actually forced its ripening. By 1801, 84,000 cwt. at ?27 10 shillings per cwt. were exported.28 Only cotton was a greater export crop than sugar, and this, too, had been tremendously stimulated by the plantation-wise emigrants. Two cotton mills near New Orleans processed a thousand pounds of mercantile cot- ton daily by the turn of the century.29

In other ways, refugees aided the frontier economy of Louisiana. Some of them either sold or farmed out their finally-admitted "servants" as day laborers.

Creoles, meanwhile, served as overseers, managers, or clerks of plantations, and

in town became teachers, musicians, or shopkeepers. Indeed, they entered any livelihood to gain survival's necessities. The women turned to handicraft work,

such as dressmaking and fine embroidery, for which the West Indies were famous. One latter-day "Anglo" historian informs us that these Caribbean folk

imported a full-blown "love of luxury" which the little colony in its pioneer simplicity had never known before.30

Among the cultural attractions they established was a theater. A company of comedians from fire-razed Cap Frangois arrived in New Orleans and offered its entertainment-starved folk their first opportunity to enjoy regular dramatic

exhibitions.21 Other refugees opened academies for Louisiana youth. Before their time the only educational facilities were a school conducted in the Spanish idiom and the excellent but small school at the convent of the Ursuline nuns.32

28M. Perrin du Lac, Travels Through the Two Louisianas . . . in 1801, 1802, and 180. (London: Richard Phillips, 1807), pp. 87-91. See also, C. C. Robin, Voyages, op. cit., II, 226. 29James Alexander Robertson, Louisiana under the Rule of Spain, France, and the United

States, 1785-1807 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1911), II, 170. 30John Smith Kendall, History of Louisiana (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1922),

I, 86.

31FranCois-Xavier Martin, The History of Louisiana, From the Earliest Period (New Orleans: A. T. Penniman and Company, 1829), II, 109. Berquin-Duvallon also describes this troupe, op. cit., p. 25. 32Martin, op. cit., II, 109.

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402 REPERCUSSIONS OF HAITIAN REVOLUTION

In 1794, Louis Duclot, an emigre, founded the province's first newspaper, Le Moniteur de La Louisiane, a weekly.33 Of more suspect cukural advantage, if the claim is correct, was the introduction of the Haitian cult of Vodoun, a Da-

homean fetish religion which had become a national folk belief in St. Domingue.

Some of Louisiana's proudest families founded their North American future after a flight from St. Domingue. Most famous refugee of all, of course, was young John James Audubon, an exile from Aux Cayes. Even more colorful, if possible, was General Jean Robert Humbert, who in 1802-03, served in General Charles V. E. Leclerc's army of invasion in Haiti. After his commander's death Humbert returned to France as consort of his merry widow, Pauline Bonaparte

Leclerc, sister of the Emperor. Later, Humbert joined Mexican rebels against Spain, and finally settled down in New Orleans. Pierre d'Herbigny also had a stunning career. He fled France for St. Domingue in 1792, and later escaped from Haiti to Pittsburgh. Eventually he became fifth United States governor of Louisiana.34 Don Diego Morphy, Sr., born in Madrid, had become a resident

of Cap Francois, but fled that city during its desolation. Morphy and his wife made the rounds of refugee headquarters, living at various times in Philadel- phia and Charleston, and eventually in New Orleans, where they arrived in 1803. He served as Spanish consul in American New Orleans after the Louis- iana Purchase until his death in 1814.35

The last great influx of refugees into Louisiana occurred during the Penin- sular War when Napoleon's forces had invaded Spain, placed the Emperor's usurping brother on the Spanish throne, and were resisted by Spanish patriots assisted by the British army. Until then, thousands of French St. Domingan refugees had been welcomed in Spanish Cuba. Now, with Frenchmen and French culture considered "the enemy," they were suspect. Since they shared a

common language and culture with Louisiana, the new United States territory became their natural asylum. In 1806, Louisiana counted only 12,000 inhabi- tants, but four years later its population had risen to 24,552, largely due to the Haitian-Cuban refugees, since few Anglo-Saxons had as yet moved there. Within

a period of only two months, May 19 to July 18, 1809, thirty-four vessels arrived at New Orleans from Cuba, bringing 5,754 refugees. Thirty-two of these ships

had come from Santiago. Nearly two thousand of the passengers were slaves, and about an equal number free colored people. Apparently Louisiana's creoles were no more eager to see them than they had the arrivals of thirteen years

33This journal expired in 1814. It has been suggested that the St. Domingan slaves may have forged the wrought iron railings so familiar even today in New Orleans' Vieux Carr6. See Rayford W. Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States With Haiti, 1776-1891 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), p. 48.

34Arthur and de Kernion, op. cit., p. 342.

aslbid., p. 55.

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JOHN E. BAUR 403

before. Nor were the Anglo-Saxon Louisianans pleased, for they feared this im-

pressive augmentation, doubling Gallic numbers, would not blend easily into their young nation. An immediate result of the onrush was the inflation of the prices of food and housing."3

Fears of Franco- and Anglo-Louisianans that Haiti's transported Negroes would spread concepts of liberation were not groundless, for at the plantation of the wealthy Julien Poydras at Pointe Couple, 150 miles from New Orleans, a conspiracy, probably inspired by the Haitian precedent, was hatched in April, 1795. It called for the massacre of local whites. The plotters quarreled among themselves, their secret leaked out, and the revolt was quickly smothered. Twenty-three rebels were hanged and thirty-one flogged, while three white instigators were merely exiled from the colony.37

Colored refugees from St. Domingue could fight on more than one side. An- drew Jackson held a grand review of his defenders of New Orleans on December

18, 1814, three weeks before the critical battle against the British invaders. Among the soldiers commanded by Major Jean Plauch6 were companies of free Negroes and mulattoes who had fought in Haiti and then fled to Louis- iana. Jackson had conceived the idea of organizing and uniforming them, de- spite strong opposition from several local personages of power.38 White St. Domingans refuged in Louisiana also were enthusiastic for the American cause in the War of 1812. For example, Louis Guillaume Valentin de Bourg, Catholic prelate and apostolic administrator in New Orleans, worked tirelessly for Jack- son by encouraging the city's defense.39

Considerably more lasting than the numbers and personalities of Haiti's ref- ugees was the impact of the economic and military repercussions of the island's

revolution. Cuba, like Louisiana, was to a large extent transformed. The first impact was military. Governor Don Luis de Las Casas, one of Spain's best rulers in colonial Cuba, decided on improving defenses against a belligerent St. Domingue. He supported naval construction, which resulted in six war vessels

and four frigates. When Republican France, thanks to the impressive military

36Kendall, op. cit., I, 86. See also Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1927), p. 165.

37Gayarre, op. cit., III, 314 and 355, and also Martin, op. cit., p. 266. This explains in part the fears of the citizens of Pointe Coupbe when in November, 1804, they petitioned Governor William C. C. Claiborne of Louisiana to protect them against a slave uprising they had heard rumors was about to break out as the news of the victories of Dessalines spread through the plantations. See Robertson, op. cit., II, 300.

38Francis F. Beirne, The War of 1812 (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1949), p. 353.

39"Louis Guillaume Valentin Du Bourg," Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930), V, 473-475.

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404 REPERCUSSIONS OF HAITIAN REVOLUTION

exploits of Toussaint L'Ouverture, nominally obtained control of Spanish Santo Domingo, another unpredicted event occurred. On January 15, 1796, the mortal remains of Christopher Columbus were carried from the City of Santo Do- mingo to Havana for "safekeeping" and deposited in its historic cathedral.4o Ecclesiastical events were influenced, when with the loss of Santo Domingo, the Spanish archbishopric was removed to Santiago de Cuba.

Cuba received refugees from both the French and Spanish parts of His- paniola, but particularly from the highly populated French area. No matter which Latin population it garnered, Cuba's quota of the flood of refugees en- riched the Pearl of the Antilles. For the most part these migrants added su- perior knowledge, experience, and energy to Cuba's economy. A twentieth- century United States historian, Willis F. Johnson, had dramatically asserted that, "From the moment the two great Antilles changed roles, San Domingo lapsed into barbarism; Cuba placed her foot in the chariot of fortune.""4

Coffee was the refugees' first contribution to Cuba. They settled in the hilly

areas of eastern Cuba, topographically not unlike their Haitian homeland. Un- fortunately, in some cases the rains washed the soils from their new foothill plantations, leaving the roots of coffee trees above ground. Erosion had not been

such a peril in St. Domingue's tablelands.42 The aforementioned Luis de Las Casas and the Cuban Enlightenment's scientifically-oriented Real Sociedad Econ6mica de Amigos del Pais, encouraged immigration. By the time that King Charles IV of Spain had ordered the French colonists' expulsion, they had made that area blossom with coffee. Not all the refugees left, and some of them returned to Cuba in the quiet postwar years. Their Gallic blood still exists there.43

If coffee was aided, Cuba's staple, sugar, became even more predominant as a result of Haiti's tragedy. The prices of both sugar and coffee had risen during

the turbulence in Hispaniola and the later Napoleonic wars. The competition of St. Domingo's renowned sugar had been removed and Hispaniola had suf- fered economic collapse, despite the efforts of L'Ouverture to reorganize labor

and renew production. The Haitian refugees transplanted their expertise in sugar production to the plains southeast of Havana, the vicinity of Matanzas, the hilly regions near Santiago, and the fields of Baracoa.4 There they effected

40Willis Fletcher Johnson, The History of Cuba (New York: B. F. Buck and Company, 1920), II, 183.

41Ibid., II, 191.

42Abiel Abbot, Letters Written in the Interior of Cuba (Boston: Bowles and Dearborn, 1829), p. 135.

43Duvon C. Corbitt, "Immigration to Cuba," Hispanic American Historical Review, XXII, (May, 1942), pp. 280-308.

44Johnson, op. cit., II, 191.

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JOHN E. BAUR 405

a technological revolution. The price of slaves had risen rapidly when Spanish authorities, fearing a Haitian-style revolt, had limited 'their importation and through white migration attempted to raise the ratio of white Cubans to black. Thus new sugar production techniques were vitally needed in order to cheapen

the cost of production without massive injections of slave labor. Water mills, similar to those long used in Hispaniola, appeared, often constructed under Haitian guidance. These machines meant much greater efficiency. In some in- stances, even the capital for these undertakings was supplied by the wealthier French emigres and Spanish Santo Domingans, self-exiled when in 1795 the Spanish Part fell to the French Republic by the Treaty of Basle.4" By 1805, Cuba's sugar exportation equalled that of prosperous prerevolutionary St. Do- mingue.

As in every other area of refuge, French migrants to Cuba entered the skilled trades and professions. Here again, they opened a theater.4" When one considers that by 1803, 27,000 people had fled from Hispaniola, most of them sailing to Cuba, and that they had left what had been until recently the most prosperous island in the New World, the impact on Cuba seems not only credible but inevitable.47

Ripples of Haitian influence reached far beyond the West Indies. Even in Venezuela planters were encouraged to cultivate sugar and coffee. To a lesser degree, this was true in Puerto Rico. In some cases, their mentors were fugitives from Hispaniola.48 In the French Lesser Antilles, a minor rebellion called the Brigands' War, led by Victor Hugues, a mulatto and former St. Domingue merchant, attempted to free the slaves of the smaller French and British islands

i la St. Domingue. Hugues failed, due to British resistance and the fact that the servile population was much smaller and more scattered than in Hispaniola. Thus, unlike major upheavals elsewhere, the Haitian Revolution was never successfully exported militarily. Yet, even in French Martinique coffee came into vogue when St. Domingue temporarily vanished from the market of trop- ical production.49

45Hubert H. S. Aimes, A History of Slavery in Cuba, 1511-1868 (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907), pp. 57-60. In 1792, Cuba had 136,559 whites, 54,852 free Negroes, and 84,590 slaves. See also L. J. Clausson, Precis Historique de la Revolution de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Chez Pillet AinU, 1819), p. 120.

46Mary Hassal, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo, In a Series of Letters Written By a Lady at Cape Francois to Colonel [Aaron] Burr (Philadelphia: Bradford nd Inskeep, 1808), p. 137. Jose Antonio Saco, the champion of abolition in the Spanish West Indies, said that Cuba should have called for the end of the slave trade at this time. See Corbitt, op. cit., p. 286.

47Jones, op. cit., p. 147. See also Abbot, op. cit., p. 21.

48Jean Francois Dauxion-Lavaysse, A Statistical, Commercial, and Political Description of Venezuela, Trinidad, Margarita, and Tobago (London, 1820), p. 222.

49Robin, op. cit., I, 91. See also Mitchell Bennett Garrett, The French Colonial Question, 1789-1791 (Ann Arbor: George Wahr, 1916), p. 134.

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406 REPERCUSSIONS OF HAITIAN REVOLUTION

When Haiti finally became fully independent in 1804, territorially claiming the entire island of Hispaniola, the event had major effects in the British Em-

pire, for, except for Cuba, Hispaniola was the Caribbean's most strategically centered landmass. Since 1793, the British had carried on unofficial relations

with L'Ouverture and other Haitian leaders and traded extensively with them. As workshop of the world, Great Britain gauged well the value of Haitian commerce and hastened to benefit from it, as she did the freer trade of each

new independent Latin American state in the years to come. Yet, ironically, Britain's Caribbean economy was still based on slavery, and this was particu- larly evident in nearby Jamaica. Some observers felt that diplomatic recognition

and trade would prove more important to both Haiti and England than any potential Haitian hostility concerning slaveowners. The empire, as one Briton, James Stephens, suggested, was in the envied position of becoming the most favored nation commercially in St. Domingue, and perhaps even of gaining a monopoly of Haitian trade."5 In 1804, Stephens predicted:

[That] St. Domingue, whatever course we take, will one day be mistress of the Western archipelago, is indeed highly probable; and that the shocking slavery of our colonies cannot longer be maintained, is sufficiently certain, but by a just and rational policy, we might be enabled to look forward to the progress not only of African freedom, but of African sovereignty, in the West Indies, with satisfaction rather than dismay.5l

When Napoleon failed to reconquer Haiti, some Britons such as the Rt. Hon. Henry Addington, Chancellor of the Echequer, feared that France might next covet Jamaica as a second choice base for a new sugar empire in the Western Hemisphere. Addington thus suggested raising forces of Negro troops in Ja- maica to defend British interests. Further he advocated that the recently-ac-

quired island of Trinidad be thickly settled to insure its prosperity and preserve it from Napoleon.52

The most significant impact on Jamaica paralleled that of Cuban reactions to the Haitian misfortune. Through its fertile soils and modern production methods, the St. Domingue of 1789 had been the world's richest sugar colony, far superior to Jamaica. By contrast, the British possession had virtually reached its full soil production after more than a century of intensive tilling. St. Do- mingue required more shipping and produced more cane than the whole of the British West Indies. Then, with the French Revolutionary Wars and the

SOJames Stephens, The Opportunity; or, Reasons for an Immediate Alliance with St. Domingo (London: J. Hatchard, 1804), pp. 10-13, 20-31. s1Ibid., p. 42. 52Henry Addington, The Crisis of the Sugar Colonies (London: J. Hatchard; 1802), pp.

28, 90, 118, 154.

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JOHN E. BAUR 407

Haitian debacle, the French market was ruined. Sugar prices in London rose from 32 shillings a cwt. in 1793 to the unprecedented level of 87 shillings by 1798, for the world supply of sugar had been reduced by over a million cwts. Jamaica increased its output by nearly half, and introduced the Bourbon variety of cane, a greater yielder than earlier types. An excellent observer of Jamaican

affairs during the fascinating period, Bryan Edwards, tells us that a St. Do- mingan named Millet who refined muscovado (raw sugar obtained from cane by evaporation and the draining off of molasses) used the lime juice technique

of Haiti which he had introduced to Jamaica in 1790. It proved a great success.53 The sugar boom lasted until 1799, when overproduction brought a collapse. By 1807, a quarter of Jamaica's new sugar plantations had been abandoned. Yet, during the years of prosperity and expansion British investors had averaged better than 10 per cent profits.54

During Hispaniola's years of turmoil more than a thousand coffee planta- tions had been destroyed. Jamaica filled the vacuum. Its coffee production of 2,000,000 pounds in 1794, rose by 1820 to over 22,000,000 pounds. This progress was possible because two-thirds of Jamaica was mountainous, of elevations from

2,000 to 3,000 feet, where coffee could flourish.55 As was true elsewhere, Jamaica

found emigre experts to advise her pioneering. Outstanding among these men was P. J. Laborie, who published The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo in 1798, explaining in great technical detail the bases of St. Domingue's earlier success in this difficult culture."5 Those French 6migres who accompanied the

British naval forces on their departure from St. Domingue usually settled in Jamaica's new coffee regions.57

As for St. Domingue's erstwhile residents now domiciled in Jamaica, a West Indian traveler of the 1830's could still report that in his day:

The French emigrants from St. Domingo are a very respectable, industrious class of people. The gardens about Kingston almost exclusively belong to them; and these abound in fruits and vegetables of the choicest kinds. Many of them are of ancient French families some thirty years ago of the first distinction; but they have been deprived of their properties - most of them of their

53Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (London: John Stockdale, 1793), II, 30. See also, Richard Robert Madden, M.D., A Twelvemonth's Residence in the West Indies (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1835), I, 125.

54William Law Mathieson, British Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823-1838 (London: Long- mans, Green and Company, 1926), p. 9.

55Ibid., p. 75.

56See P. J. Laborie, LL. D., The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1798). See for tables of Haitian exports, Charles Mackenzie, Notes on Haiti (London, 1830), II, 298.

57Madden, op. cit., I, 125.

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408 REPERCUSSIONS OF HAITIAN REVOLUTION

friends, and nothing remains to them but their prejudices and their fears. They speak of their negroes as of monsters that are hardly human, and yet I do not believe they treat them with cruelty. On the contrary, generally speaking, their slaves are treated with more familiarity than ours, and seem much more attached to those very masters who villify their character than they are to your

own proprietors; this is an anomaly I cannot understand.58

Trinidad, for three centuries Spanish soil after Columbus discovered it, was captured by the British General Sir Ralph Abercrombie in 1797. A decade earlier

it had undergone a sociological metamorphosis when a Spanish cedula per- mitted French settlers to migrate to Trinidad. As a result, 1784-89, the island's

population, which had been virtually static for two centuries, increased from 1,000 to 10,422. A further addition occurred in 1793, due to the flight of St. Domingue's refugees, most of them staunch supporters of monarchy. Later Gallic arrivals were nearly all republicans. This division of dogma produced turbulence of considerable extent for Trinidad under its early British rule.59 Several of the fleeing aristocrats had brought slaves with them. Harold Cour- lander, a twentieth-century anthropologist, tells us that creole, the patois of Haiti's Negroes, a blending of African tongues with French, was first spoken on the plantations of Trinidad following this migration. Trinidad's adopted African deities were also imported at that time by St. Domingan slaves.60

The ubiquitous fear of slave uprisings inspired by the precedent of Haiti re- mained in the conscience of most Jamaica planters. With perhaps 200,000 slaves

in Jamaica by 1791, the great landowners demanded protection, and "the island

was guarded by its militia to the water's edge-while every church, every house, resounded with a fearful litany, 'Save us from the example of Saint Domingo and from the daggers of our slaves'."61 Meanwhile, Jamaicans complained that

the government had raised tax rates on the theory that the Haitian upheaval had commercially enriched their island enough so higher payments were jus- tified!62 By 1795, the Jamaican governor, the Earl of Balcarres, increased his power by declaring martial law, ostensibly foreseeing a Haitianization of the generations-old communities of Jamaican Maroons, even though these auton- omous Negro towns had not rebelled in several years. Yet, outbreaks occurred,

especially in the Maroon War of 1796, in which 600 Negroes were convicted

5sIbid., I, 82.

59James H. Stark, Stark's Guide and History of Trinidad (Boston, privately published, 1897), p. 13. 60Harold Courlander, "Vodoun in Haitian Culture," in Theodore L. Stoddard (ed.), Religion

and Politics in Haiti (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Cross-Cultural Research, 1966).

61George Wilson Bridges, The Annals of Jamaica (London: John Murray, 1828), II, 201- 211.

62Ibid., p. 214.

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JOHN E. BAUR 409

and transported, and again in the uprising of Cuffee in 1798. The Haitian precedent was blamed." Interestingly, when in 1807 some Haitians opened clandestine correspondence with Jamaica's disaffected blacks in order to plan revolution, Henri Christophe, then the tyrannical Negro ruler of northern Haiti and generally a friend of the British, arrested the leaders of the con- spiracy.64 Anglo-Haitian commerce continued to increase.

The Haitian phenomenon strongly influenced England's pioneers of the abolitionist movement. The British public and their spokesmen, already fright-

ened by revolutionary events in Paris, turned away from the cause of abolish-

ing the African slave trade, which had been making headway until 1793. Frank

J. Klingberg, an American student of the antislavery movement in Britain, argued that this accounted for George III, William Pitt, and others changing sides and coming to oppose the end of the African trade. It is ironic, as the Haitian Revolution's impacts so often were ironic, that Haiti's struggle to end slavery at home had made Britain the great purveyor of sugar and thus caused for some years the increase of British capital devoted to the maintenance of slave labor."

A decade later, however, the slave trade had been outlawed and the pressing humanitarian issue in Great Britain was the emancipation of slaves. During the 1820's a favorite argument of abolitionists was that Haiti would not be re- peated if Jamaica's blacks were free. They pointed out that even in the case of

St. Domingue, emancipation had been granted by whites in 1793, and that the independence of Haiti was only declared against France when Napoleon be- trayed this earlier abolition of slavery."6 Others raised the bogy of a possible Haitian invasion of the British West Indies to set free British slaves if England herself did not first do so.67

The Hispanic-American movements for independence from Spain, 1810-25, were profoundly influenced by what happened in Haiti, the first Latin Amer-

ican republic. It is not well remembered that fear of a repetition of Haiti's race

63Madden, op. cit., II, 169.

64W. W. Harvey, Sketches of Hayti, from the Expulsion of the French to the Death of Christophe (London: L. B. Seeley and Son, 1827), pp. 335-336. A plan to arm the Jamaican slaves at Black River was discovered by a St. Domingan overseer. It was said that 250 slaves were involved, and a Negro from Haiti had been active in the scheme. Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (London: John Murray, 1834), p. 227.

65Frank Joseph Klingberg, The Anti-Slavery Movement in England: A Study in English Humanitarianism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926), pp. 92-94, 100-103, 121.

66Thomas Clarkson, Thoughts on the Necessity of Improving the Condition of the Slaves in the British West Indies (London: Society for Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery, 1824), passim.

67Klingberg, op. cit., p. 194.

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410 REPERCUSSIONS OF HAITIAN REVOLUTION

war inhibited some would-be Spanish American rebels. Although by no means of the archly conservative political persuasion of Dr. Agustin Pomposa Fer- nindez de San Salvador, former rector of the University of Mexico, who de- scribed Haiti as a horrible example of economic ruin and thus warned against the Mexican revolt of 1810,68 even Francisco de Miranda, precursor of Vene- zuelan independence, writing in 1795, expressed alongside his desire for New World liberation a fear that anarchy might come from his Pandora's box. "God forbid," he wrote, "that these beautiful countries become, as did St. Domingue,

a theater of blood and of crime under the pretext of establishing liberty." Mi-

randa preferred that they "rather remain, if necessary, one century more under the barbarous and imbecile oppression of Spain."69 Here, then, was probably the first important "white backlash" in the independently-minded New World.

Much better remembered is the role of Alexandre Sabes P6tion, President of southern Haiti, 1806-18, who considerably aided the cause of Sim6n Bolivar. In 1815-16, during a dark period in his struggle for the independence of northern South America, the Liberator received from Petion 4,000 guns and 15,000 pounds of powder, some lead, and the promise of a printing press to diffuse patriotic propaganda. A few Haitians volunteered to join the fight. Yet, by 1825, Bolivar felt that Negroes and Indians tended to block the development of democracy in his liberated lands. This creolism predominated for decades. That same year, Vice President Francisco de Paula Santander of Colombia re- fused to sign a treaty with Haiti because, under its President Jean Pierre Boyer, the latter republic had seized Spanish Santo Domingo in 1822, just after it had sought Colombian protection. Added to this anti-Haitian syndrome was the Colombian desire to win French goodwill, of considerable value at the time. No Latin American nation officially sent a consul to Haiti until 1865, when Brazil set a precedent, ironic for the last New World state to maintain slavery! Mexico, a land of considerable racial mixture, established no diplomatic relations with the Black Republic until 1934, although some European nations of conservative and monarchical tradition had dispatched commercial agents to Haiti before the 1820's and even Mother France had recognized it in 1825.70 In fairness, however, it should be noted that all the Latin American nations ex-

cept Brazil had abolished Negro slavery well before the United States did so.

Ironically for a nation that was not recognized anywhere in the Western Hemisphere until the administration of Lincoln, Haiti influenced profoundly one of the greatest diplomatic and political decisions in United States history,

68Juan E. Hernandez y Divalos (ed.), "Memoria Cristiana Politica," Colecci6n de Docu- mentos para la Historia de la Guerra (Mexico, 1882), III, Doc. 145, p. 754.

69Quoted in Salvador de Madariaga, The Fall of the Spanish American Empire (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 295.

70Logan, Diplomatic Relations, pp. 223, 231-232.

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JOHN E. BAUR 411

the Louisiana Purchase. This particular episode, at least in vague outline, is well known and popularly recorded. Nearly a century after that momentous event, Henry Adams observed that "race prejudice alone has blinded the Amer-

ican people to the debt they owe to the desperate courage of 500,000 Haitian negroes who would not be enslaved."71

The attempt of Napoleon to develop a New World empire through the res- toration of French military and economic power-and slavery-in Haiti and Louisiana, caused great concern to President Thomas Jefferson. America's pe- rennial frontier problem, first with a relatively weak Spain as a western neigh- bor, and now, by the retrocession of Louisiana, with an ambitious and powerful France, loomed as an imminent peril for the United States. Jefferson feared that

France's closing of Western America's commercial access via the Mississippi River to New Orleans might cause fiery frontiersmen to seize the Crescent City, open that port for trade with the Gulf, and thus initiate war between France and the United States. So long as a major power controlled the river's mouth, the future of our Westward Movement was in doubt. Napoleon's desire for a Middle American empire viewed New Orleans and Port-au-Prince as its invaluable keys. Abstractly, Jefferson preferred French order in St. Domingue,

and his coolness toward L'Ouverture may have encouraged Napoleon's attempt to conquer the island. Yet, Jefferson realized that French victory in the Carib-

bean would transform Louisiana into a danger. In 1802, Napoleon sent his brother-in-law, the aforementioned General Leclerc, to pacify St. Domingue. Ominously for St. Domingue's welfare, Bonaparte restored slavery in Marti- nique and Guadeloupe. By a coup Toussaint, virtual ruler of St. Domingue for the past decade, was arrested and deported to France. Here Napoleon miscal- culated. Native resistance spread. Leclerc erred, too, by letting circulate his plan to transport rebellious Haitian Negroes to Louisiana. As far away as South Carolina this news roused indignation among those fearful of Haiti. Ap- parently it even affected the local elections of 1802 in the South.72

Pressing for the sale of the "Island of Orleans" in order to control the delta's

commerce, Jefferson saw the need of using St. Domingue's newest rebellion as a diplomatic wedge. American vessels continued to trade with L'Ouverture's countrymen to strengthen them against Napoleon. By 1803, the French were being defeated by both Haitians and yellow fever. The lull in the long French war with England which the Treaty of Amiens had brought in 1802, now had ended. Bonaparte, having virtually lost St. Domingue, might be forced to sur-

71Quoted in James K. Hosmer, A History of the Louisiana Purchase (New York: D. Apple- ton and Company, 1904), p. 71, from Adams' History of the United States During the Ad- ministration of Thomas Jefferson, I, Ch. XIII.

72Irving Brant, James Madison: Secretary of State, 1800-1809 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1953), pp. 93, 180, 328.

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412 REPERCUSSIONS OF HAITIAN REVOLUTION

render no-longer-vital New Orleans to the Royal Navy. He needed both money and American goodwill; so he decided to sell. Thereby, the United States, ac- quiring much more territory than was originally contemplated, doubled its ter-

ritory, increased the probability of its eventual great-power status, and made possible the Mexican and Civil wars. Henry Adams' charge of racism seems verified by Robert McColley, a modern historian, who has found that after the

Louisiana Purchase was consummated, Jefferson was willing to cooperate with Napoleon in Haiti, for the President wanted the Emperor's help in convincing Spain to sell the Floridas to the United States. Jefferson shared the Southern fear of the possibility of an exported Haitianization.73

United States relations with Haiti, although not diplomatically established until 1862, expanded through trade and individual contacts. For a time during Jean Pierre Boyer's long presidency (1818-43), supporters of an American Negro

"homeland," Thomas Jefferson among them, considered Haiti as a logical goal. A few freedmen settled there in the 1820's, but most returned. Those who re-

mained established today's small Haitian Protestant congregations.74 Mean- while, Great Britain feared less a free Haiti than a French-controlled island ready to attack the British West Indies. For many years, both directly and indirectly, Haiti influenced the American

Negro. The fear of "another Haiti" became nearly paranoic, lasting until Eman-

cipation. It led the Southern states immediately after 1791 to move toward the exclusion of the African slave trade. In 1792, South Carolina forbade Negroes from both the West Indies and Africa to enter that state for the next two years.

This prohibition was soon extended till 1803. In 1794, North Carolina forbade the trade and imposed a fine of /100 on those importing slaves. By legislative action, 1798-1803, other states followed the pattern. Finally, in 1803, the federal

government declared that any ship bringing in Negroes would be forfeited.75 73Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

1964), p. 113. Jefferson himself had said in 1793: "I become daily more & more convinced that all the West India islands will remain in the hands of the people of colour, & a total expulsion of the whites sooner or later take place. It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of Potommac,) have to wade through, & try to avert them." See Ford (ed.), The Writings, VI, 349.

74Logan, Diplomatic Relations, pp. 72, 154. See also Theodore D. Jarvey, Robert Y. Hayne and His Times (New York: Macmillan Company, 1909), p. 192. See my "Mulatto Machia- velli; Jean Pierre Boyer," Journal of Negro History XXXII, (July, 1947), pp. 324-328 for a brief narrative of the American Negroes in Boyer's Haiti, and W. D. Boyd, "James Redpath and American Negro Colonization in Haiti, 1860-1862," The Americas, XII, (October, 1955), pp. 169-182, for a later campaign.

75W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1896), pp. 71-72. Ber- quin-Duvallon tells us that during the flight of St. Domingans to Baltimore, the State of Mary- land, which had outlawed the slave trade, made a special exception of those brought in by the emigres because of "a law more sacred, the caritas humani generis, love of the human species" [!)op. cit., p. 72. See also Arthur Young Lloyd, The Slavery Controversy, 1831-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), p. 18.

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JOHN E. BAUR 413

Under the powers vested in it by the Constitution, Congress in 1807 prohibited

the slave trade. The example of Haiti was almost universally cited by advocates of these moves.

In the years following 1804, Haiti's recent revolutionary past and its condi- tions as a nascent nation were observed by both its American friends and foes.

Here, indeed, was a showcase of both good and evil. The story of Haiti was an inspiration for freedom, and, conversely, an object of horror seldom told in grays. These images, evolving into a new folklore, served the philosophies of freedom and slavery emerging in North America before the Civil War. The advocates of slavery supported an active press, pulpit, and rostrum. In 1800, for

example, St. George Tucker, a Virginian essayist and poet, spoke of the "cala- mities" of St. Domingue as a warning to American slaveholders.76 Another prominent author-politician was John Taylor of Caroline, who fully discussed the attributes of slavery and concluded that the institution could be ameliorated

but never abolished, for he feared that freed Negroes would contest white su-

premacy and become black "sans-culottes," repeating the fate of Haiti. Fur- thermore, liberation would inevitably lead to the extermination of one race or possibly both! Taylor did not elaborate on how double genocide could be achieved. Foreseeing Reconstruction's stereotyped Carpetbagger, he predicted that freedmen would become creatures of unscrupulous whites.77

Most defenders of slavery depicted in great detail the former prosperity of

the French system in St. Domingue, contrasting the "happy past" with the poverty, ignorance, and disorder of tyrannical black and mulatto rulers in free

Haiti.78 Even abolitionist-minded missionaries returning from Haiti could be recruited for the slavers' purposes. One of these was E. B. Underhill, who de- scribed the abandoned plantations, decayed sugar mills, and the supposed scan-

dals of Vodoun, as examples of the steady advance of barbarism. These polemi- cists never contrasted this lack of Western European orderliness, education, and

self-government in Haiti with the same general conditions in several other Latin American republics, by no means ruled by Negroes or mulattoes, but rather by creoles of Spanish ancestry.79 Nor did they explain that the denial of

liberty and initiative under the French regime had given St. Domingans no preparation for personal or collective achievement in a country already beset by geographical problems and limited land.

76William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), p. 63.

77E. T. Mudge, The Social Philosophy of John Taylor of Carolina: A Study in Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 207. 78Lloyd, op. cit., p. 103.

79Samuel F. B. Morse (ed.), "Emancipation and Its Results," Number 6 of Papers from the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge (New York: The Society, 1863), pp. 10-11.

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414 REPERCUSSIONS OF HAITIAN REVOLUTION

Other writers delved more deeply into the sanguinary yesterdays of the Hai-

tian struggle. They composed lurid passages describing Negroes marching with mutilated infants on their spears and repeated rumors and half-truths about the sawing asunder of prisoners and the violation of women, all in the name of "freedom." 80

The establishment of monarchical governments, first by Jean Jacques Des- salines as Emperor Jacques I (1804-06), later by Henri Christophe as King Henry I (1811-20), and finally by Faustin Soulouque as Emperor Faustin I (1849-59) was ridiculed in North America as the "mock empire of Hayti," partly because it was considered incongruous that ex-slaves should wear crowns, and because since 1776 Americans had considered any royalist government at least symbolically tyrannical.81 Interestingly, the perceptive British Consul Gen- eral, Charles MacKenzie, was quoted on President Boyer's Rural Code of 1826, which in MacKenzie's estimation was as severe compulsory agricultural labor as slavery had imposed years before.82 Professor Thomas Dew, one of the most

famous Southern apologists for slavery, reasoned that the Haitian Revolution had been stimulated by the French radical reformers of the Amis des Noirs in Paris, and that even after revolution had been kindled in St. Domingue, it could

have been easily suppressed had whites maintained a united front. This in part was true, but it led Dew on to caution Americans not to tinker with slavery but

solidly and harmoniously support it, lest Haiti be repeated in Dixie.83 Consensus politics need not necessarily be humane.

In 1834, the Tennessee state convention adopted a report on slavery which admitted its evils, yet recommended preserving the institution because eman-

80Ibid., p. 6. Perrin du Lac concluded that the "cruel experience of St. Domingo" demon- strated that a relaxation of the "chains of slavery" would mean that the colonies would be lost in the West Indies, op. cit., p. 94. Some clergymen echoed this. See Rev. Richard Fuller and Rev. Francis Wayland, Domestic Slavery Considered As a Spiritual Institution (New York: Lewis Colby and Company, 1847), p. 148.

81Periodical and newspaper alike ridiculed Haitian royalty for half a century. Perhaps typical is Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry Into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America, To Wlhich is Prefixed an Historical Sketch of Slavery (Philadelphia: T. and J. W. Johnson and Company, 1858), p. cxcvii. Seldom did these writers seriously attempt to analyze the careers of Dessalines, Christophe, or Soulouque. For example, J. H. Van Evrie, M.D., in his Negroes and Negro Slavery (New York: Van Evrie, Horton and Company, 1861), p. 331, called Soulouque "a serpent worshipper and Obi-man."

82Thomas Dew, et al., The Pro-Slavery Argument (Charleston: Walker, Richards and Company, 1852), p. 430.

831bid., pp. 464-1465. According to J. Stewart in A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1823), p. 352, the fear-filled Jamaicans had attempted to keep their slaves from knowing any "more of the events which have been passing there [in Haiti] for the last thirty years than the inhabitants of China - though the two islands are but a day's sail distance from each other." This was written in 1821, but it seems that already the effort had been in vain.

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JOHN E. BAUR 415

cipation had failed in Haiti, and concluded that the two races could never live

together under any other system. For yet another generation, the United States Department of State received reports from observers in the West Indies similar

to those of Robert M. Walsh, a Marylander, who argued that the Haitian ex- periment demonstrated that Negroes would never fully attain civilization.84 No wonder even men of goodwill might be convinced. The spectre of Haiti re- ceived constant nourishment. Late-twentieth-century historians, such as Avery Craven, suggest that the raid of John Brown on Harper's Ferry in October, 1859, finally roused the common white man of the South against the North, bringing to the surface at last the old fear of a repetition of St. Domingue. Al-

bert G. Brown, a Mississippian, at the time had stated the case clearly.85

On the shiny side of slavery's heavy coin one finds propaganda favorable to abolition, illustrated by the Haitian Revolution and the experiences of the next two generations in the virtually outlawed land of Haiti. British and American travelers and writers championed this cause. Charles Elliott, a Briton writing about Haiti to the Earl of Aberdeen in 1845, predicted that:

The history of that Country will prove that those people are as susceptible of improvement, by freedom and Christian Instruction, as any other in the world. -It will show that great Men can have black faces, and unhappily that white Men can have black hearts; that the virtues of generosity, and constancy, and courage were as freely displayed by blacks as whites in that memorable struggle,

and lastly, that the true curse of St. Domingo has been promised of old, and came to pass by the neglect of the sacred warning, that the sins of the Fathers shall be visited on the Children to the third and fourth generation.86

Arguing slavery's immorality, some abolitionists followed John L. Parkhurst of

Maine"8 who insisted that even if abolition should bring a sanguinary harvest like Haiti's this ought to be less deplored than the perpetual atrocity of man's owning man.88

William Jay, son of the great John Jay, and a lifelong foe of slavery, contra-

dicted those who said that the black republicans had made a desert of Haiti. How could this be, he asked, when a few years after the conflict Haiti's export

84Jenkins, op. cit., pp. 88 and 246.

85Avery Craven, An Historian and the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

86Ephraim Douglas Adams (ed.), "British Correspondence Concerning Texas," South- western Historical Quarterly, XIX, (April, 1916), p. 438. See also B. C. Clark, A Plea for Hayti, With a Glance at Her Relations With France, England, and the United States (Boston: Eastburn's Press, 1853), p. 40.

87Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America, p. cxcvii.

88Calvin Montague Clark, American Slavery and Maine Congregationalists (Bangor, Maine, privately printed, 1940), p. 28.

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416 REPERCUSSIONS OF HAITIAN REVOLUTION

to the United States showed such a recovery that they exceeded those the latter

nation got from Prussia, Scandinavia, Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, Bel- gium, the Dutch East Indies, British West Indies, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Turkey? He insisted that, quite the opposite of being belligerent, Haiti had been "perfectly inoffensive in all its foreign relations" since independence.89 Of

course, Dominicans, whose coveted land was a special case in Haitian eyes, could differ with Jay's assertion!

Considering that France was the despised mother country warred against by Haitians, it is curious that while Anglo-Saxons were divided on their interpre- tation of Haiti, French intellectuals were much more united in their praise of the leaders of the former French colony, and by indirection, critics of their own

land. The Parisian stage of 1789-1800 was particularly Negrophile, and did not even condemn the obvious excesses and inhumanities of the Haitian conflict.

Toussaint L'Ouverture appeared as a glamorous hero, the fulfillment of numer-

ous literary calls for a new Spartacus. Although the French literature of the century's end did not produce a pro-Negro masterpiece of the popularity of the

later Uncle Tom's Cabin, it did go far in removing color prejudice. In 1818, the

young Victor Hugo indulged a romantic love of violence in his first novel, Bug-Jargal, using a slave as his hero of St. Domingue.90 Finally, in 1848, France, for the second and final time, abolished Negro slavery throughout its overseas

possessions. The effects of the Haitian Revolution on slave insurrections in the United

States were extensive and long-lasting, although the farthest reaches of Haiti's

indirect psychological impacts may never be calculated. As early as 1793, there

were so many Negro emigres in Portsmouth, Virginia, wrangling among them-

selves that they were declared a public menace.9' That year a white resident of Richmond reported overhearing Negroes threaten to repeat the Haitian up- rising. Costly fires which broke out in Charleston three years later were de- scribed as arson inspired by Haiti, and in 1798 a conspiracy was uncovered show-

ing that Haitian Negroes planned to burn that city.92 During the Quasi-War with France, 1798-1800, national leaders including George Washington, Harri- son Gray Otis, Charles C. Pinckney, and Albert Gallatin feared a sea attack might be made upon North America by Haitians outfitted by the French who

89William Jay, Miscellaneous Writings on Slavery (Boston: J. J. Jewett, 1853), p. 182.

90Edward Derbyshire Seeber, Anti-Slavery Opinion in France During the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1937), p. 195. For a discussion of the faring of St. Domingue's refugees in Toulouse, France, 1794-95, see J. Adher, "Les colons refugies d'Ambrique pendant la Revolution," in Bulletin de la Soci&t~ Geographique de Tou- louse, XXXIV, 1915, pp. 152-168.

91Joseph Cephas Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800-1865 (Boston: Chapman and Grimes, 1938), pp. 44, 88, and 95.

92 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), pp. 96-97.

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JOHN E. BAUR 417

still controlled some allegiance in St. Domingue. When a white mob in Phila- delphia attacked resident Negroes, the outraged blacks rallied, crying, "Show them San Domingo."93

Apparently American Negroes, free and slave, had an astonishingly well- broadcast and accurate knowledge of Haitian affairs. This seemed poetically just, since a far different communication had long affected them; several Amer-

ican slave states had partially copied the British and French West Indian black codes.94

One of the largest American slave uprisings to be inspired by Haiti was that of Gabriel Prosser in 1800. Gabriel, as he was usually known, was a Negro of uncommen talents living in Henrico County, Virginia. It is clear that he knew

the outlines of the Haitian Revolution and planned his own insurrection on the

Caribbean model. Two slaves revealed his plans, and the uprising failed.95

Denmark (or Telemaque) Vesey, a free black, probably a native of the Vir- gin Islands, was another remarkable rebel. Near Charleston, South Carolina, he had joined the African Methodist Church where he gained influence through its classes ostensibly organized for religious instructions. Vesey was literate and

could quote Scripture with powerful effect. He identified Negroes with the Biblical Israelites and in'terpreted the well-publicized debates on the Missouri Compromise to mean that slaves were held in defiance of the law. In 1821-22, Vesey carried his message of freedom through a hundred-mile area, reading Haitian newspapers to his illiterate brethren. His scribe even wrote a letter to President Boyer soliciting Haitian aid when the slaves should rise. In case of failure, Vesey's followers hoped to escape to Haiti.96 They rebelled in June, 1822, but again a betrayer defeated this enterprise. When captured, Vesey ably

defended himself in court, but the evidence of informers brought his convic- tion and hanging.97

Even as late as 1831, in the much-publicized revolt of Nat Turner in South- ampton, Virginia, the example of Haiti had not been forgotten. Turner was a preacher who frequently traveled about the country, thus having the oppor- tunity of hearing from West Indian refugees their tales of L'Ouverture and Dessalines.98

Not all would-be repeaters of the Haitian episode were black. John Brown admitted that he had "posted himself on the campaigns of Toussaint and other

93 Ibid., p. 98. 94Dwight Lowell Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1961), pp. 112-113. 95sbid., p. 113. 96Carroll, op. cit., pp. 88-89.

97See A. H. Grimke, Right on the Scaffold; or, The Martyrs of 1822 (New York, 1901); and also Logan, Diplomatic Relations, p. 196.

98Carroll, op. cit., p. 148.

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418 REPERCUSSIONS OF HAITIAN REVOLUTION

phases of the wars in Hayti.""99 Brown was equally versed on the feats of Turner and Vesey.'oo In one of his most famous discourses during the Civil War, Brown's colleague, Wendell Phillips, undertook to honor the memory of L'Ou- verture, using him as the prime symbol incarnate of Negro courage, intelli- gence, ability, and accomplishment. Thereby Phillips attempted to demon- strate through the career of the greatest Haitian the capacity of America's Ne-

groes on the eve of their emancipation to flourish in a diverse society.xl0 It is appropriate that James Redpath, a prot6g6 of Phillips, and a crusader who had worked in Haiti for the American freedmen's colonization there, in 1860 dedi-

cated a posthumous edition of John Brown's speeches to President Nicolas Fabre Geffrard of Haiti.102 Fittingly, Geffrard's regime had gone into mourning in December, 1859, when Brown was executed. A few years later a bust of the fire-

brand of Osawatomie could be seen in an honored position in Geffrard's presi-

dential mansion.l03

Thus, politically, militarily, socially, culturally, and economically for three generations the tragico-triumphant events of St. Domingue, a slave pen uniquely metamorphosed into the nation of Haiti, influenced much of the circum-Caribbean Americas. The drama's controversial nature persisted, a double symbol of man's struggle for liberty and equality regardless of color, yet a tale of the fetters of man's inhumanity and of racism which have so often brought tragedy to dit least two races, neither of them devoid of bigotry. Ob- servers today know that Haiti's painfully slow progress is due to a pathetic complication of factors not always directly due to race, and it is seldom em- ployed as an example by modern debaters. Yet, it had for years the peculiar role of a catalyst that no one could have predicted. Like all revolutions, the Haitian phenomenon demanded a very high cost. Its heroism achieved the zenith of human nobility; its cruelties reached the hideous nadir of man's baseness. It may be that researchers shall yet discover that its implications have

been even greater for aliens than for Haitians. In any case the whole story evades

the gauge of a single writer. May future historians study in greater depth its

byways as well as its chief paths, which have been barely traced on the pages above.

Los Angeles, California JOHN E. BAUR 99Richard J. Hinton, John Broun and His Men (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company,

1894), p. 183. 100W. E. Burghardt Dubois, John Brown (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs and Company,

1909), p. 97. 10oLouis Filler (ed.), Wendell Phillips on Civil Rights and Freedom (New York: Hill and

Wang, 1965), p. 184. See also Lorenzo Sears, Wendell Phillips. Orator and Agitator (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 190r), p. 244.

102See James Redpath, Echoes of Harper's Ferry (Boston: Thayer and Eldredge, 1860). 103Anti-Slavery Reporter (London), April 2, 1860, and Frederick W. Seward, Reminiscences

of a War-Time Statesman and Diplomat, 1830-1914 (New York, 1916), p. 322.

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