Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (Early American Studies) - Hardcover

Dun, James Alexander

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812248317 ISBN 13: 9780812248319

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016

Synopsis

Dangerous Neighbors shows how the Haitian Revolution permeated early American print culture and had a profound impact on the young nation's domestic politics. Focusing on Philadelphia as both a representative and an influential vantage point, it follows contemporary American reactions to the events through which the French colony of Saint Domingue was destroyed and the independent nation of Haiti emerged. Philadelphians made sense of the news from Saint Domingue with local and national political developments in mind and with the French Revolution and British abolition debates ringing in their ears. In witnessing a French colony experience a revolution of African slaves, they made the colony serve as powerful and persuasive evidence in domestic discussions over the meaning of citizenship, equality of rights, and the fate of slavery.

Through extensive use of manuscript sources, newspapers, and printed literature, Dun uncovers the wide range of opinion and debate about events in Saint Domingue in the early republic. By focusing on both the meanings Americans gave to those events and the uses they put them to, he reveals a fluid understanding of the American Revolution and the polity it had produced, one in which various groups were making sense of their new nation in relation to both its own past and a revolution unfolding before them. Zeroing in on Philadelphia—a revolutionary center and an enclave of antislavery activity—Dun collapses the supposed geographic and political boundaries that separated the American republic from the West Indies and Europe.

About this title

About the Author

James Alexander Dun teaches history at Princeton University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
Making Revolution in Philadelphia

Late in the morning of July 7, 1794, Friar José Vázquez arrived at the town of Fort Dauphin. Though he could not know it at the time, he came telling stories of the Haitian Revolution. Perched on the northern coast of French Saint Domingue, Fort Dauphin sat close to the border with Spanish Santo Domingo. Vázquez, in fact, came from the Spanish colony, from the interior town of Dajabón where he was a priest. What made his arrival noteworthy, however, was less his spiritual authority than his earthly influence. Insurgent ex-slaves had controlled the area since late 1791, and Vázquez was known to be an advisor to one of their leaders, Jean-François. After Spain and France declared war in 1793, the priest had become an intermediary between the insurgents and Spanish authorities. In spring 1793 Jean-François had been made a general and his troops declared auxiliaries of the Spanish army. Relying on these forces, Spain had nominally taken control of wide swaths of Saint Domingue's North and West provinces. In January 1794 they secured Fort Dauphin, known to the Spanish as Bayajá, and began to mass Spanish and black troops in preparation for an attack against the French republican forces at Cap Français.

For the anxious inhabitants of Fort Dauphin, Friar Vázquez seemed like a safe source of information as they tried to make sense of this shifting ground. Many of them were planters, white French colonists of a royalist bent who hoped the fight against the Republic would ultimately bring stability back to the region, even if it also put the colony under foreign control. A sizable number among them had recently returned from the United States, having fled there during earlier moments of tumult in the colony. In American cities they had read an invitation addressed to all who opposed the "anarchy" of the French Revolution to rally to the Spanish flag. By July 1794 that anarchy included the French decree made earlier in the year that abolished slavery in all French possessions. For the nervous French planters in Fort Dauphin, the question was whether Jean-François's alliance with Spain would protect them as well. In reassuring them that it would, Friar Vázquez told of a revolution resisted. Yes, the Spanish had embraced troops of African descent, but, bound by a common commitment against the French Republic, the forces massing at Fort Dauphin would be acting to preserve, not overturn, the social order.

Any comfort provided by Vázquez's vision was fleeting. When Jean-François entered Fort Dauphin around midday on July 7, his troops almost immediately began to kill the French émigrés, though it was not clear whether they did so by his orders or on their own. The Spanish soldiers, either complicit or fearful for their own safety, pointedly refused to intervene and, in some cases, actively gave the frantic French up for execution. More of the white colonists drowned as they tried to flee to the shipping in the harbor. By early evening between six hundred and eight hundred were dead. More than simply wrong, the story told by José Vázquez was outstripped—overtaken by events and derailed by more wide-ranging ideas about the change at hand.

Graced by the perspective offered by time, historians have produced more enduring narratives of the events at Fort Dauphin, usually casting them as a minor, if dramatic, example of the complex origins and motives behind like moments in Saint Domingue. As an episode among those other moments, the violence there evokes the tensions that arose as the slave rebellions of 1791 evolved and were inflected by imperial struggles. Rebel leadership had recently fractured, the French policy of emancipation playing a role in the decision of one of Jean-François's subordinates, Toussaint Louverture, to switch his allegiance from Spain to France. The questions around Jean-François's control over the violence signal divergences among different insurgents' objectives: the general, as he had on other occasions, may have followed his fighters more than he led them. For historians, the bloodshed at Fort Dauphin in July 1794 was the product of the disruptions that accompanied competing agendas in and for Saint Domingue at the time. Over the next decade, such disruptions would produce what later interpreters could call the Haitian Revolution—the series of events in the French colony between 1789 and 1804 that culminated with the establishment of the second independent state in the hemisphere.

A decade, though, is a long time, and the impulse to craft narratives about the upheavals transpiring in Saint Domingue would not wait. For contemporary Americans, who are the subject of this book, the events at Fort Dauphin were no prelude or sideshow, they were important news; they were meaningful, even profound. They were also confusing. Weeks after the violence took place, Philadelphia Quaker matron Elizabeth Drinker mistook the town of Fort Dauphin for an island in her diary, one in which the "French white people" had been massacred by "Negroes." Others made different errors, telling that the violence had been committed by the colony's "molottoes" and that it was part of their bid to take over. Such misperceptions would fade in time, subsumed within a broadly consistent, if similarly problematic, story in which the events of July 7, 1794, were connected to later developments in unsustainable ways. Especially as Toussaint Louverture rose to prominence in Saint Domingue, more than one author made the violence at Fort Dauphin a way to contrast Louverture's wisdom with the treachery of the Spanish and the cruelty of ex-slaves such as Jean-François. Others turned to Fort Dauphin to connect Louverture's emergence to the radicalism of white French republicans or, eventually, to the infidelity of Napoleon Bonaparte.

As anthropologist Michel-Rolf Trouillot reminds us, such narrative production, whether in the eighteenth century or the twenty-first, tends to flatten a history out, pushing aside inconvenient elements of "the story" in service of a coherence that follows the dictates and desires of those in positions of power. Recovering contemporary American stories of Saint Domingue as events unfolded adds a new wrinkle to Trouillot's admonition. Most modern Americans only vaguely contemplate the Caribbean nation, commonly associating it with poverty, corruption, disease, and disaster. This book returns to a period when things were very different. The tales told of Fort Dauphin are examples from a long period of fascination among Americans toward Saint Domingue. Beginning in the late 1780s and continuing on into the early nineteenth century, they avidly followed developments there. They were transfixed.

To be sure, part of the reason for this interest was the dramatic nature of the changes that took place in the French colony over that span of time. By 1804 Saint Domingue, once the most prosperous plantation society in the western hemisphere, had ceased to exist. In its place was Haiti (known to most Americans as "St. Domingo" or sometimes "Hayti"), an independent nation in which slavery was forever abolished and citizenship was predicated on blackness. Along the way, a host of sensational developments unfolded, many of them brimming with the sorts of graphic turns, lurid details, and shocking violence witnessed at Fort Dauphin. Few at the time understood this as the "Haitian Revolution," but none missed its significance. More than mere voyeurism, American interest was driven by the sense that these events were globally important and locally relevant. The torches that incinerated Saint Domingue's slave regime inflamed more than bodies, plantation houses, and sugar works. Tidings from the colony also fired imaginations, raising hackles in some and hopes in others. These events reverberated in America because of their capacity to provoke self-reflection. They stimulated connections and comparisons; they raised questions about Americans' own revolutionary pasts and their current realities. In crafting narratives from and about Saint Domingue, Americans fashioned and refashioned their own stories.

This book recaptures and unpacks those interpretive moments. It does so by focusing on the phenomenon as it took place in the city of Philadelphia. By the last decade of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia was the leading metropolis of the newly United States. Long a seat of local political power, it was now the national capital and an important locus for regional and national politics. Its nearly forty-five thousand residents made it the largest American urban area; its political status made it the most cosmopolitan. Citizens from every state walked its streets; it was a requisite stop for foreign visitors, too, not to mention European diplomats. Mid-Atlantic geography and topography made the city a commercial center as well; grain was borne along the roads and rivers that connected it to its hinterlands in central Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Delaware. These and other goods came to the stores of the city's numerous merchants and traders, most of which were located just off of the Delaware River on Water Street. Jutting out from their backs was a thicket of wharves. Merchandise moved in and out of the city across those jetties, but so too did less tangible wares. Philadelphia's theaters and museums were where elite Americans often first encountered European fashions and literature. A different public, meeting in the city's streets, taverns, and coffeehouses, similarly encountered information and ideas from abroad. In many respects, Philadelphia was the new nation's center of gravity.

Most significantly for this study, Philadelphia's prominence also made it a hub, especially for domestic and international news. In 1794 thirteen newspapers were printed in the capital. Over the course of the 1790s, Philadelphia was home to forty-three newspapers, a number that outpaced that of all other American places. This dominance was no accident. Philadelphia's commercial and political advantages were enhanced by structural decisions made in Congress as part of a concerted effort to ease communications in the new nation. The post roads established after 1789 made the city central to a growing transportation network that linked it to places west and north via New York and south via Baltimore. The centripetal effects of this infrastructure were amplified by the Post Office Act of 1792, which, in addition to regularizing the postal service, allowed newspapers to move through the system at very low rates—and for free between editors. Before long, 70 percent of all postage by weight consisted of newspapers. Editors, who often also served as local postmasters, would lift and reprint the reports coming through the mail that they saw as interesting and important. These efforts combined to make newspapers a collective centerpiece of American cultural life. Read aloud in taverns and coffeehouses, they had a functional readership well beyond their modest circulation lists. Philadelphia's editors worked at the heart of this system and at the eye of the public life it embodied. Their names (Fenno, Brown, Freneau, Bache, Cobbett, Duane) were on the lips of American readers; the writings they composed and printed were loud in American ears at a particularly raucous, and vital, period in the formation of American politics. As a place to explore Americans' reception, and conception, of the burgeoning Haitian Revolution, therefore, Philadelphia offers a vantage point that is both exemplary and influential.

Even before disruptions began there, Saint Domingue's economic importance made it a familiar place to Philadelphians, and Americans more generally. By 1789 the colony was the most successful European holding in the West Indies. Its thousands of plantations grew two-fifths of the world's sugar and half of the world's coffee. This bounty made it a centerpiece of the Atlantic economy. The colony's export trade was more than triple that of the entire British West Indies combined. Nearly 1,600 vessels entered its ports in 1789 alone. Many of them were American, and many also traveled to Philadelphia.

This commercial prominence was fundamental to the ways the Haitian Revolution could be understood elsewhere. For Americans to be stimulated by events there, they had to be aware of them. The age of sail was one in which communication across space depended on the physical movement of human bodies, and trade was the reason that most bodies moved over any sizable distance in this period. Hundreds, if not thousands, of American merchantmen traveled from Saint Domingue between 1789 and 1804 with accounts of the various events that shook the colony. Over that span vessels coming from Saint Domingue made up nearly 20 percent of all arrivals to Philadelphia from foreign ports. At various points, that proportion was even greater.

This contact, however, did not produce a simple moment of reception or an objective movement of information. Knowing about Saint Domingue, rather, was an ongoing process, one in which an understanding of the changes occurring there was constructed and reconstructed over time. American narratives of the Haitian Revolution began as news; news consisted of relevant detail and developments, all of which were made intelligible by words and the ideas that they referenced. At every stage, different vessels contained and carried the stuff by which this act of creation took place. Seagoing vessels conveyed accounts over water to American shores, where they were transmitted into newspapers and moved between various nodes of news reception and production in the young nation. Like the boats, newspapers were vessels whose interests and assumptions shaped their contents. News from Saint Domingue was made part of other information, a forging that rendered it as part of discernible world developments. This was an active intellectual process, one in which putative descriptions of developments in Saint Domingue were actually acts of ascription—moments when their meaning and character were being determined. The discourse in which this meaning-making took place was another vessel, one whose operations were fundamentally external to the events in the colony; in explaining the revolution in Saint Domingue, Americans were explaining—and arguing over—their own Revolution and its implications. Over the course of these discussions, Saint Domingue itself emerged as a vessel, one that held American political ideas in succinct form. This study will show how those ideas, like the boats that initiated their travels, sometimes got lost, battered, or painted afresh along the way.

* * *

Tracing the movement of the events at Fort Dauphin into American minds and mouths offers a case in point. Numerous American vessels were in the harbor at Fort Dauphin on July 7, 1794. In addition to seeking to sell American goods and buy Dominguan sugars and coffee, many of their captains had brought the returning French colonists as passengers. Casper Faulk, captain of the schooner Commerce, was one. Faulk left Philadelphia for "Fort Dolphin" in early June, carrying flour, lard, beef, pork, "hamms," and dry goods for sale, as well as "13 passengers trunks." Massachusetts captain Thomas Roach carried others in the brig Two Sisters. The Commerce and the T...

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0812248317
• ISBN 13: 9780812248319
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352