Ashli White’s Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic, is a masterful account of the experiences of refugees from the Haitian Revolution and their impact on the nascent American Republic. Much in her account is new and the most interesting sections of the book reinterpret and challenge long-standing beliefs about the impact of the Haitian Revolution in the United States.
White’s book is part of a larger recent literature which examines the influence of the Haitian Revolution in the United States and throughout the Atlantic World. Though much has been written over the past 150 years regarding the diplomatic relations of the United States with Haiti, only recently have historians become interested in other parts of Haiti’s legacy. The only other monograph which takes a broad view of Haiti’s influence in the United States is Alfred N. Hunt’s Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean, which compliments White’s book quite well.[1] There have been a number of important edited volumes that appraise the legacy and transnational impact of the Haitian Revolution, including The Impact of the Haitian Revolution, The World of the Haitian Revolution, Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and its Cultural Aftershocks and Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World.[2] Additionally, several recent dissertations and articles by Julius S. Scott, Matthew Clavin, Tim Matthewson, James Sidbury, James Alexander Dun, Alejandro E. Gomez, and John Davies, among others, have greatly improved our knowledge of the impact of the revolution.[3]
Encountering Revolution, adapted from White’s dissertation, opens with an examination of refugee life and culture in the United States. After discussing the similarities and differences between the cities of Saint Domingue and the United States, she discusses the many travails of the displaced refugees in the United States and tells how they were able to make a living and integrate into a foreign culture. Though this chapter, like the book as a whole, focuses primarily on white experiences, White also discusses the divergent experiences of black Saint Dominguans, both free and enslaved. She focuses primarily on cultural aspects of their experience, for example contrasting their clothing and appearance to American blacks and examining the place of the Saint Dominguan in American theater and literature (37-50).
The following two chapters examine the refugees’ place in American politics and public opinion. White shows how sympathy for the refugees grew, despite initial criticism of their decision to leave the island, largely because of their writings and the terrifying events in Saint Domingue (57). Though this sympathy led to widespread private charity, the influx of so many destitute refugees led to a major debate over the role of local, state, and federal governments in providing relief, which laid the groundwork for later debates over the proper role of government (70). In the third chapter, White demonstrates that many of the refugees, regardless of their personal beliefs, attempted to portray themselves as republicans to garner the sympathy of the Americans upon whom they relied for charity while, at the same time, trying to avoid being connected with any one faction of the French Revolution, since events in and opinions regarding France tended to change very quickly (95). In one of the most interesting sections of the book, White shows that one of the main lessons that white Americans took from the experience of whites in the Haitian Revolution was “the debilitating consequences of faction” (109). This conclusion was voiced in the political realm mainly by Democratic-Republicans who emphasized the importance of racial consensus and solidarity in the face of potential race war (112). Ironically, the call for white unity failed miserably in the face of increasing political polarization of the 1790s.
Next, White discusses “The Contagion of Rebellion” that whites feared would come from Saint Domingue. In this chapter she shows that Whites attempted to discount likelihood of a slave uprising occurring in the United States, mostly because conditions were much worse in the “hell of the West Indies,” but were still intensely afraid of the possible influence of Saint Dominguan Blacks, “French negroes,” on American slaves (126, 139). White focuses on the direct impact and fears of Americans regarding “Frenchmen” and trade with the revolted slaves, but, unfortunately, ignores the more abstract fears regarding the example provided by the rebellion and creation of the black republic. White also considers the reactions of American abolitionists to the revolt in Saint Domingue, discussing a variety of writings at length. In doing so, however, she improperly conflates two very different strains of abolitionism. She begins by discussing the writings of mainstream and radical abolitionists, such as Thomas Clarkson and Abraham Bishop, who blamed slavery itself for the uprising, supported the “rights of black men,” and envisioned a multiracial society. While these abolitionists were often hesitant to explicitly endorse the revolt and its universalist implications, they believed it “telling evidence against slavery” and admonished Americans to pursue emancipation and a just, biracial, society (130-36). She follows this with a discussion of St. George Tucker, an elite Virginian, who, after the uprising in Saint Domingue came to believe that slavery had to be abolished because it was too dangerous to whites. Drawing on the thought of Thomas Jefferson, however, he also believed that any form of racial equality would lead to race war and thus proposed gradually freeing the slaves while denying them any legal rights (136-37).[4] Though both of these factions were inspired by Haiti, they took entirely different lessons from it, and had extremely different visions for the racial future of the United States.
The final chapter examines the immigration of Saint Dominguan refugees and their slaves to New Orleans after being forced out of Cuba in 1809, focusing primarily on their impact on Louisiana and the relation of their immigration to the 1808 abolition of the slave trade. Though this part of the story is necessary to get a full picture of the experiences of Saint Dominguan refugees, its geographic, temporal, and thematic distance from the rest of the narrative makes it feel somewhat tacked on. Her discussion of American territorial politics and the refugee crisis, a major part of the chapter, is quite interesting, but it, again, lacks coherence with the rest of the book (188).
Though Encountering Revolution is certainly the best account of the Saint Dominguan refugee experience in the United States and the most important recent monograph regarding the impact of the Haitian Revolution in the United States, it has two deficiencies: one minor and one major. Perhaps because her book focuses primarily on the experiences and views of white refugees and white Americans, White fails to discuss one of the most interesting aspects of the refugee experience in the North, legal issues regarding slave holding under gradual emancipation statutes. Slaves were the most valuable property many refugees owned, so they were loath to free or abandon them. When they arrived in New York or Philadelphia, however, they were entering a legal jurisdiction which had put slavery on the path to extinction. Refugees were required to register their slaves, and were only allowed to stay in the states for short periods of time without freeing their slaves. This legal conflict led many to attempt to sell their slaves to the South or move to states such as New Jersey or Maryland which still allowed slavery, but the these actions were opposed and often stopped by the actions of abolitionist groups such as the New York Manumission Society and Pennsylvania Abolition Society.[5] White’s account would certainly have benefitted from including a discussion of the legal and symbolic issue of the status of refugee slaves.
More significantly, White fails to discuss the proslavery consensus which grew in the South during and after the Haitian Revolution. In part, this is because she aims to dislodge, in her fourth chapter, the scholarly consensus that Americans primary reaction to the slave revolt was pure terror. Though she presents a great deal of evidence that many Americans were less frightened of the revolt that is commonly believed, and mentions in the conclusion that Haitian Revolution “called into question for Americans whether a slaveholding republic was viable,” she fails to acknowledge that for the vast majority of Americans a slaveholding republic seemed far more viable than any form of emancipation (204). In many ways the Southern proslavery consensus, and indeed the Antebellum South itself, was a result of the Haitian Revolution. The question faced by White Americans was expressed by an anonymous Virginian in the aftermath of Gabriel’s Rebellion, “The question now is a plain one, shall we abolish slavery, or shall we continue it? … If we continue it, we must restrict it. We must re-enact all those rigorous laws which experience has proved necessary to keep it within bounds. In a word, if we will keep a ferocious monster in our country, we must keep him in chains.”[6] Americans chose to keep the ferocious monster in chains and in the South built up the legal and cultural institutions that made up the Antebellum South.
Though the proslavery argument in the Early Republic has been characterized as “inchoate and often contradictory” it began to become more systematic during and especially after, the Haitian Revolution.[7] During the 1804 debate over the Breckinridge Bill, which would have banned slavery in the Louisiana Territory, the Senators opposed to the bill often simply asserted that slavery, though an evil, was necessary to cultivate the land in the territory.[8] By the early-nineteenth century, however, the proslavery argument began to be more systematically expressed, especially by John Taylor of Caroline. Though mostly known for his pro-agrarian anti-Hamiltonian views, Taylor also believed that “slaves are docile, useful and happy, if they are well managed,” and that in the shadow of Saint Domingue, it was necessary for Americans to look slavery “in the face” and find ways to both maximize production and prevent insurrection.[9] The main part of the proslavery reaction to the Haitian Revolution, however, came in the form of laws passed by state legislatures throughout the South.
As the insurrection in Saint Domingue grew and spread, Southern legislatures quickly began to make legal changes that fit their understanding of why the uprising occurred. Since they blamed the revolution on the machinations of abolitionists and free people of color, some of the most important changes restricted the rights of these groups. Additionally, the legislatures restricted slave life even further.[10] For example, they increased punishment on anyone, slave or free, connected with a slave conspiracy, forced free Blacks to register or leave the state, attacked the small abolitionist groups in the South, and increased slave patrols. These legal changes, which cemented the Antebellum South, were all made in reaction to American understandings of the Haitian Revolution, and White’s failure to discuss them is a major flaw in her otherwise quite wide-ranging and detailed book.
Despite these omissions, Encountering Revolution remains a incredibly important book, which will doubtlessly remain the standard account of the Saint Domingue refugees experiences and influence in the United States. A book fully analyzing the how Haiti made the Early Republic and Antebellum South, however, remains to be written.
Notes
- [1] Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, 1988).
- [2] David P. Geggus ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution (Columbia [SC], 2001); David P. Geggus and Norman Fiering eds., The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington, 2009); Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw eds., Reinterpreting the Haitian revolution and its Cultural Aftershocks (Kingston, 2006); Doris Lorraine Garraway ed., Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Charlottesville, [VA], 2008).
- [3] Julius S. Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 1986); Matt Clavin, “Race, Rebellion, and the Gothic: Inventing the Haitian Revolution.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5 (2007); James Sidbury, “Saint Domingue in Virginia: Ideology, Local Meanings, and Resistance to Slavery, 1790-1800,” The Journal of Southern History 63 (1997); James Alexander Dun, “Dangerous Intelligence: Slavery, Race, and St. Domingue in the Early American Republic,” (Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 2004); Alejandro E. Gomez, “Le Syndrome De Saint-Domingue. Perceptions Et Représentations De La Révolution Haïtienne Dans Le Monde Atlantique, 1790-1886.” (Ph.D. thesis, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2010); John Davies, “Class, Culture, and Color: Black Saint-Dominguan Refugees and African-American Communities in the Early Republic.” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Delaware, 2008).
- [4] The colonizationist Thomas Branagan could also be discussed alongside Tucker. See Thomas Branagan, Serious remonstrances, addressed to the citizens of the northern states... (Philadelphia, 1805).
- [5] Sue Peabody, “‘Free Upon Higher Ground’: Saint-Domingue Slaves' Suits for Freedom in U.S. Courts, 1792-1830,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution; Martha Jones, “Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York” Law and History Review 29 (2011): 1031-1060.
- [6] Virginia Herald, 23 Sept. 1800, quoted in Douglas Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill, 1993), 163.
- [7] Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974), 86.
- [8] See Everett S. Brown, ed., “The Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill for the Government of Louisiana, 1804” American Historical Review 22 (1917): 342-47.
- [9] John Taylor, Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays: Practical & Political (Georgetown, [VA}, 1813), 64-65, 118.
- [10] See, Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 92-97; Clement Eaton, Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (New York, 1964).
