Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America 9780812292978

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Dangerous Neighbors

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Series editors: Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

Dangerous Neighbors

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Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America

James Alexander Dun

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y L VA N I A P R E S S

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8122-4831-9

For Kelly In memory of our daughter, Josephine Ann Dun

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Contents

k Introduction

Making Revolution in Philadelphia 1 Chapter 1

France in Miniature: Naming the Revolution 27 Chapter 2

Unthinking Revolution: French Negroes and Liberty 56 Chapter 3

The Negrophile Republic: Emancipation and Revolution 87 Chapter 4

Making Places of Liberty: Emancipation and Antislavery 121

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Contents Chapter 5

Black Jacobins: Saint Domingue in American Politics 143 Chapter 6

Second Revolutions: Saint Domingue and Jeffersonian America 179 Chapter 7

Naming Hayti: The End of the Revolution in Philadelphia 209 List of Abbreviations

239 Notes

241 Selected Bibliography

321 Index

331 Acknowledgments

339

Introduction

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Making Revolution in Philadelphia

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ate 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.1 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

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Revolution to rally to the Spanish flag.2 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.3 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.4 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.5 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 contempo-

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rary 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.”6 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.7 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 exslaves 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.8 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.9 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.10 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 “Hai-

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tian 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.11 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.12 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.13 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.

Figure 1. Map of Philadelphia and surrounding areas, by P. C. Varle, c. 1794, detail. During the 1790s the Encyclopedia Britannica expressly identified Philadelphia as a leader in global efforts to benefit humanity (Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988], 4). While observers could make reference to Philadelphian penal reforms, educational innovations, and ventures to improve public health, the campaign against slavery had a special resonance. 093:577 M, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, San Marino, California. Used by permission.

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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.14 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.15 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.16 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.17 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.18 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.19 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.20

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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.”21 Massachusetts captain Thomas Roach carried others in the brig Two Sisters.22 The Commerce and the Two Sisters were among over 40 vessels that cleared Philadelphia alone for Saint Domingue in May and June 1794, to include 21 on the single day of May 26. One was reported as carrying 200 passengers.23

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The captains and crew of these vessels were eyewitnesses to the subsequent violence at Fort Dauphin. During the chaos, the terrified townspeople had flocked to the waterfront when Jean-François and his troops arrived, hoping that they might escape onto the shipping in the harbor. American mariners watched as they were cut down. Afterward, in what had become a common practice during such moments in the colony, officials closed the port, both to prevent unauthorized departures and to preserve an escape route if further violence took place. It was nearly two weeks before the first vessels were allowed to depart, carrying stories alongside the barrels of sugar and hogsheads of coffee in their holds. This particular cargo reached the United States along one of five paths, each of which made up a vector of information moving outward from the colony to an array of American ports. Two of these reached the United States on the same day, August 9, when the schooner Eagle entered New York harbor and the brig Paragon moved up the Chesapeake to Baltimore. Within days New Yorkers were hearing the accounts of Fort Dauphin from the Eagle’s captain Brown and from a passenger named John Simon; in Baltimore the reports came from the Paragon’s captain Dashiell. Around August 15 accounts of the violence arrived at Boston via captain A. Billings. On August 18 a small group of French colonists disembarked at Norfolk and relayed their traumatic experiences. The final influx was at Philadelphia. On August 19 Captain Thomas Eggar arrived there in the schooner Maria. The brig Franklin, Captain Thomas Baker, came the following day.24 Such commercial rhythms were typical and were the means by which the Haitian Revolution was made available in America. Just over a month after Jean-François entered Fort Dauphin, Americans in spots up and down the eastern seaboard knew something about the violence that had taken place there. What they knew, however, was by nature incomplete. Mariners such as Baker, Billings, Brown, Dashiell, and Eggar were hardly objective reporters. While the accounts they brought were more than scuttlebutt—captains understood their role as purveyors of firsthand information in the Atlantic littoral and took it seriously—theirs was a particular, and sometimes precarious, perspective.25 Tumultuous moments were difficult to follow, making “authentic information” hard to pick out.26 Language could be another impediment. One newspaper editor blamed the “frequent contradictory accounts received” from the colony in 1791 on “American Captains . . . who generally not speaking the language of the inhabitants . . . have not many opportunities of gathering information.”27 Even captains with impeccable French and shrewd vision, however,

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had limited prospects. Their view was from the mastheads and piers of Saint Domingue’s ports. Events from the colony’s interior almost always came to them as rumors or via displaced colonists. Other information came from elsewhere in the colony. Captain Dashiell, traveling from the southern port of Jérémie, had not witnessed the violence at Fort Dauphin firsthand. The information he carried took the form of a letter from an American merchant there to his “friend” in Baltimore. Dated July 21, and written some 180 miles southwest of Fort Dauphin (and many more by water), it only briefly—and imperfectly— mentioned the events in the northern town. Thomas Eggar left the western port of Saint Marc on July 27 and similarly gave only a fleeting account of the events in the North province. Thomas Baker, who left Port-au-Prince on the same day, provided much more detail, probably because of the greater amount of information available in that busy trading city. The greatest precision, understandably, came from eyewitnesses to the violence. John Simon’s account, first heard in New York, was especially exhaustive. Captain Billings carried a letter to Boston from a writer who stepped over corpses on the wharves when he arrived in the town six days after the killings. The Norfolk émigrés’ tales of woe were similarly explicit. Even though they included such moments of clarity and focus, the timing and content of these vectors bear witness to further convolutions at work as information moved between Saint Domingue and the United States. Winds and currents moved these vessels, but it was commercial concerns that pointed them; the dictates of commerce, therefore, not geography, determined how and where information traveled.28 Thomas Baker’s journey, for example, was directed in part by the Franklin’s owner, Philadelphia merchant Peter Lemaigre, who commissioned him to bring fifty-five passengers to the northern port of Môle Saint Nicolas in May. Baker returned from Port-au-Prince, where he had gathered other passengers and 70,000 “Spanish segars” to sell, in addition to the information from Fort Dauphin.29 American trading centers, because of their contacts—and in this particular case because they were also places in which French émigrés had congregated in the years before their return to the colony— were functionally closer to Saint Domingue than other areas. New York, lying nearly 1,500 miles from Fort Dauphin, received information from there before Norfolk, despite being 300 miles further away. Towns such as Savannah and Charleston, meanwhile, received no direct contact at all. Commercial cadences altered chronology as well. Direct and contemporaneous observances of the violence arrived interspersed among the impressions of those who had only

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learned of events later and secondhand. It was a jumble of information from Fort Dauphin that arrived in the various American ports in mid-August 1794. American newspapers made what was piecemeal into a whole. Captains Eggar and Billings may have drawn crowds with the tales they told along the docks, and the shaken émigrés may have chilled listeners’ blood in local taverns, but their accounts gained a broader force, and a particular cast, when they were printed. Newspaper editors in American ports had long sought out arriving seamen for information.30 Once they had heard their accounts or copied the letters they had ferried, editors moved these stories from the waterfront to their offices (which were often nearby). Thomas Baker, for example, would likely have drawn the Franklin up to the dock outside Lemaigre’s store on Water Street between Race and Arch.31 From there it was only a few blocks to the offices of many of Philadelphia’s printers. Baker’s account was first rendered as news in Benjamin Franklin Bache’s General Advertiser (at Franklin Court on Market Street, between Third and Fourth). In offices like Bache’s, after painstakingly setting words into rows and columns of type, applying sticky ink, laying out sheets of paper, and twice pulling the press, editors landed such stories onto the printed page, stowing them in the well-established and important vessel that American newspapers were by the late eighteenth century.32 Like their wooden counterparts, these paper vessels were fundamentally driven by mercantile concerns. To be sure, drawing on British traditions, American newspapers often adopted a particular political bent. Whether espousing Whig (or, less often, Tory) principles during the 1770s or Federalist (or, less often, antifederal) positions in the late 1780s, however, the vast majority of the nation’s newspapers were shaped by commercial interests.33 To remain viable they needed revenue and so would typically include paid advertisements in the attempt to supplement their subscription payments. The first and last of the four pages of the American Minerva and the New-York (Evening) Advertiser that contained John Simon’s account from Fort Dauphin, for example, were comprised of ads for soap and perfume, sugar and salt, wine and rum, books and speeches, and ropes and sail duck, as well as paid notices for a French school, vessels in search of cargoes, and offers of work for painters and glazers. To remain relevant, in between those pages its editor had gathered information in ways that were meant to be useful, recognizable, and consistent. The newspaper’s second page was devoted to accounts from Europe. Three of its five columns were taken up with a May 2 debate in the British House of Commons over the alliance with Prussia against France. This was followed by reports in

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London, as of June 7, of the progress of the war in Genoa, Charleroi, Valenciennes, Warsaw, Brussels, Flanders, and Ostend. Simon’s account from Fort Dauphin came on the following page, under the New York heading, which gathered reports that had entered there. Readers took in his tale alongside that of an embargo against American shipping at Halifax, the efforts at Boston to deal with a recent fire, the capture of several American vessels by the British navy in the North Atlantic, and an essay on the effects of tree shade on surrounding vegetation. Nearly four columns were then devoted to news that came from other domestic entry points, collected under the heading “By This Day’s Mail.” On this day the only mail worth noting had come from Philadelphia, which provided more reports from Europe.34 This configuration was generally consistent across American newspapers of the day. Even as local and national political divisions gained force, readers looked to “shipping news” that detailed maritime arrivals and clearances, and captain’s “reports” and “speakings” that recounted events that would impact markets and prices. Those portions less expressly tied to commerce, “foreign intelligence” and reports arriving “by this day’s mail,” were often deemed germane because of their implications for trade—not to mention, as we have seen, the extent to which their very presence was determined by trading patterns and contacts. “Numbers of Americans lost all their cargoes by having them on shore,” the letter carried by Captain Billings from Fort Dauphin to Boston told.35 In addition to reiterating the basic account, Captain Eggar explained that, because the British were likely to abandon Saint Marc, “in a few days an embargo would be laid upon all the vessels in port” and that Americans were finding no one to buy their goods.36 The information from Fort Dauphin, then, was worth printing not simply because it provided a sensational rendering of the fate of the French colonists but also because it was judged to be material to the fate of American commerce. Given Philadelphia’s commercial, political, and journalistic sway, the fact that the Philadelphia heading was a prominent feature in a New York paper is not surprising. In printing reports from other American cities, American newspapers articulated the national polity and formed what one historian has described as a “terrain of public debate.”37 It was on that terrain that the disparate accounts of Fort Dauphin arriving at New York, Baltimore, Boston, Norfolk, and Philadelphia were woven together. In sifting through the various reports, editors noted features that were “confirmed” and corroborated in those they already had at hand. In the process, they transformed the information from Fort

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Dauphin into news that, though it centered on an event in Saint Domingue, was American in its composition and orientation.38 The volume and number of Philadelphia’s newspapers ensured that the city would function as an entrepôt and engine in the network of communication through which this composition took place. Information entering elsewhere moved to the capital quickly. Though vessels from Saint Domingue’s north arrived at Philadelphia later than other places in 1794, Philadelphians knew about the events at Fort Dauphin within a day of the first arrivals in the United States from the town. The account given by Simon (who was from Philadelphia) arrived in the city hours after being printed in New York, likely coming via the “New York Packet,” a water route so regular that it had its own dock between Market and Chestnut streets.39 The news items that came by way of Baltimore, Boston, and Norfolk were all current in Philadelphia by the time Captains Eggar and Baker arrived in the city with their own tales. The converse cannot be said for the other places where information from Fort Dauphin arrived. Boston’s news circulated readily across New England, ranging northward to Portland and inward to Catskill, New York. Boston itself, however, only received the single report via Captain Billings. Norfolk’s information was even more limited, though once it was reported in Philadelphia it moved as far as Rutland, Vermont, and Savannah, Georgia. Similarly, while Baltimore’s newspapers only printed the letter that arrived there directly, Baltimore’s news traveled in Philadelphia’s papers as far as Portsmouth, New Hampshire. While news from New York gradually moved up the Hudson and Connecticut rivers, New York City’s newspapers only reprinted the Boston report.40 No other American city’s newspapers were as capacious and as wide-ranging as those that came from the capital. The commercial implications of the accounts from Fort Dauphin accounted for their inclusion in newspapers, but the travels of these stories were not over when they reached the page. The political and social interests of Philadelphia’s newspaper editors shaped the contents of their papers, as did their sense of the interests and needs of their readers. The stakes behind these choices were high. In an era when political culture was shaped by a faith in reason and the existence of truth, news was crucial: Possessing precise and accurate information would lead rational people to consensus and the republic would flourish; false information allowed tyrants to manipulate the public.41 News and newspapers, therefore, were understood as playing an essential role in maintaining the nation’s political health. Developments in Saint Domingue were more than simply

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captivating; they deserved ink because they were deemed important to this broad project. As such—as “news” in this charged sense—accounts from Saint Domingue entered what historian Seth Cotlar has termed the “public political discourse” that stemmed from reading and discussing news in this period.42 In the case of Fort Dauphin, this movement produced a tangible image. Late in August 1794 an engraver in Philadelphia advertised a mezzotint print of the “massacre” there (Figure 2). More commonly, such impressions were conveyed by words. John Simon, for example, described Jean-François as the “general of the banditti” and told of his orders to “kill without distinction all the French white people,” a depiction that seems to have penetrated Elizabeth Drinker’s diary. The newspapers that printed Simon’s story entitled it “An account of the Massacre which took place at Fort Dauphin.” The mezzotint massacre preserved Simon’s depiction, which had been largely substantiated by the letters and captains’ reports that had been printed around it: as presented in American newspapers, the violence at Fort Dauphin marked the ex-slaves who committed it as atavistic and anarchic agents, outside the realm of rational action. In filling the void created by this elision of the rebels’ agency, the news from Fort Dauphin deployed common expectations and assumptions about the world’s workings. To explain the violence, the accounts looked to European actors. In addition to Vázquez’s perfidy, Simon blasted the “the unfeeling Spaniards” for their “indifference” to the plight of the French victims. This stance, he revealed, was more than simple callousness; it stemmed from their attitudes toward the French Revolution. Pushing the colonists away at bayonet point, the

Figure 2. “FINE ARTS,” Gazette of the United States Aug. 26, 1794. No extant copies of the print are available. Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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soldiers had proclaimed “loudly that [this] is what the French deserve” and had chanted “Long live the King!!!” while they were cut down.43 Subsequent accounts repeated this rendition. The “horrible massacre” was perpetrated on the “miserable aristocrats by order of the Spaniards,” one noted, who had commanded “the noted villain JEAN FRANCOIS” to kill them “without distinction of age, sex, or colour.”44 This aspect of the story allowed American commentators to move the news from Fort Dauphin along the final leg of its travels, a voyage that brought it firmly into the domestic political sphere. On August 19, Benjamin Franklin Bache, an emergent leader among critics of President George Washington’s administration, introduced his printing of Simon’s account in the General Advertiser by emphasizing that the victims were “French aristocrats” who had been “deluded” by the Spanish monarch, an enemy of all republicans.45 Another writer took the episode as a direct opportunity to defend the French Republic. “Read the account, ye worshipers of tyrants,” he exclaimed, “of the massacres at Fort Dauphin.” While critics had maligned France and the violence of its Revolution as “cruel and barbarous,” he explained, this news proved that it was France’s royalist opponents who were truly vicious.46 Having received and made sense of the news, these writers were now deploying it as part of wider debates at home. In so doing, they explained the goings-on at Fort Dauphin as part of a revolution. Properly understood, the violence at Fort Dauphin served as a spotlight onto the true principles of those looking on in the United States; those who justified the cruelty were highlighted as “aristocrats, and the minions of Royalty.”47 Bache followed his renditions of this “interesting foreign intelligence” with a domestic report, that of the recent celebration in Philadelphia of the second anniversary of the declaration of the French Republic. That “death-blow to Royalism in France” had been honored in the American capital by the erection of a liberty pole, by a mass singing of the French Revolutionary anthem “La Marseillaise,” and by orations to and by the French minister. Finally, Bache rounded out his packaging of the day’s news with a letter facetiously comparing the effort to punish those who burned the British flag during the celebration with Washington’s recent neutrality proclamation.48 Aristocrats, it would seem, were at work in Philadelphia, too. Fort Dauphin, by this light, was one of several regions of the globe in which the forces of republicanism and monarchy were at war. In the weeks and months after the initial flurry of information from Fort Dauphin, the violence there would continue to be referenced in Philadelphia

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newspapers in service of identifying and developing instances of “tyranny” and “republicanism.” From the perspective of those like Bache, the former included the actions of the British privateers that were capturing American merchant ships at an alarming rate around the Caribbean. Those less sure tended to rely on the crop of French-language newspapers, often edited by Dominguan émigrés, who castigated the republican forces in the colony as licentious demagogues. Bache’s opponents soon got into the act as well. Over three years later, Federalist William Cobbett reprinted Bache’s compositions of August 19, placing the editor’s words and Simon’s depictions side by side so as to show Bache’s craven attempt to bend the news to his needs.49 By this point, the actual events at Fort Dauphin were less important than their capacity to serve domestic political ends. Thus one episode of the unfolding Haitian Revolution took form in Philadelphia, having moved from mariners’ accounts to commercial news, and then to partisan bellwether. It was not the first, and the nearly constant travels of merchant vessels between Saint Domingue and the city ensured that it would not be the last. Beginning in the late 1780s and continuing on into the first decade of the nineteenth century, newspapers in Philadelphia contained accounts from or about the colony on nearly three-quarters of all days in which newspapers were printed.50 Hundreds of episodes like the “massacre at Fort Dauphin” were put before the American public over these years. Taken together, these accounts—complex, confusing, and opaque as they sometime were— constituted Philadelphia’s Haitian Revolution. Around the time the news from Fort Dauphin was forming in Philadelphia, John Murdock wrote a play. Murdock was a hairdresser in the city, a profession, strange to say, that may well have led him to think particularly about revolutions, both near and far and past and present. Beginning in 1790, the arrival of émigrés from France and Saint Domingue brought elements of French and Caribbean culture into the capital. Years later, one young man remembered the time when Philadelphia was “thronged with French people of all shades from the colonies, and those from Old France.” Walking through the streets of this “great hotel,” he heard French spoken, listened to French music, saw French styles, and witnessed the adoption of French practices. He recalled the exotic beauty of the women of color, as well as the fact that they walked arm in arm with white men.51 Perhaps he tasted French cooking, saw French dancing masters, or sampled French wares. Hairstyles were only one of many pieces of evidence of this influx and influence.52

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Introduction

While the ways John Murdock snipped and shaped hair may have shifted after 1790, the French presence seems to have led him to think afresh about the United States. Sometime during 1794 that tension became creative, leading him to write The Triumphs of Love, a play about his city and the changes it was experiencing. In lobbying the Chestnut Street Theatre to put it on he touted the play as a “native production” that would be “consonant with American ears.”53 The reception it met when staged in May 1795 seemed to bear this out. A reviewer in Bache’s General Advertiser felt that the “sentiments” that stood behind the plot “did honor to the writer’s heart as a man and a citizen,” though he also found them “rather trite.”54 If no literary triumph, The Triumphs of Love did successfully convey ruminations that were commonplace among the audience that Murdock spoke to and for. The frontispiece of its printed version showed an American veteran celebrating the late war as “a revolution which has given freedom to millions living, and will secure it to millions yet unborn.”55 The rest of the play addressed the scope of that “freedom.” Émigrés from France and the French Caribbean were key characters; people of color and refugees stalked the action. Murdock’s chief concern, however, was America, and here an important means of asking the question involved raising the issue of American slavery. Characters debated the meaning of “Liberty and Equality,” slaves were freed, “Citizen Sambo” danced the “carmagnole” and got drunk. While touting the basic fact of the American Revolution, The Triumphs of Love engaged in questions about that revolution’s terms. That this was something of a hackneyed theme is precisely the point. Despite the hopes of the Federalists of 1788, the ratification of the American Constitution did not usher in a period of stability and consensus in the new nation. The 1790s were a tumultuous period in the United States, one in which the American Revolution’s meaning was very much up for debate. To be sure, few Americans would publicly argue that the Revolution that had created the nation was a mistake, but the space between voicing enthusiasm over the Revolution’s ideals and identifying specific markers of its promise could be vast. If the conflict, as one historian has aptly put it, “provided an ideological straightjacket that no publically articulate American could or would overlook,” as a heritage, it pinched different people in different places.56 Murdock’s questions register that discomfort. How to gauge the freedom, liberty, and equality secured by the Revolution? Who were to be included in the unborn “millions” that would feel its blessings? The Revolution, as history, had supplied an end but left out the means. The tensions and anxieties that came as a result were the cruci-

Introduction

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ble in which American political culture developed. It did so not according to the dynamics of the clashing of pristine ideas or simply through the competition of prominent elites but through an unfolding process, replete with twists and turns, in which unforeseen contingencies could have a significant impact.57 Disruptions in Saint Domingue were among those contingencies. Stories from the French colony raised questions about slavery and rebellion, but they also gave rise to more fundamental queries about revolution—whether or not its principles operated universally, about the boundaries it established between race and citizenship, and over its anticolonial implications. Because Saint Domingue was a French place, developments there were connected to the ardent reactions Americans had to the French Revolution. But, as was the case with regard to France, the narratives of revolution stimulated by these ruminations were more about the United States than they were about the wider world. This study is organized around those narratives. It traces the phases of the Haitian Revolution that took form in Philadelphia, those moments in which blurry images and ideas streaming from Saint Domingue were brought into focus and resolved into telling episodes. The journeymen and apprentices who set and inked the type that conveyed these stories were engaged in a process that made them American, one in which the events that historians have only recently marked out as a Haitian Revolution were first organized according to domestic concerns. Analyzing this process of Americanization demonstrates the ways in which Saint Domingue was constitutive to American political culture as it developed over the early national period. In Philadelphia, that process was particularly sensitive to the issue of the American Revolution’s meaning for the institution of slavery. When the curtain went up on The Triumphs of Love, Pennsylvania’s abolition act had been in operation for fifteen years. Over two thousand free blacks lived in the city, making it the largest such population in the nation.58 Pennsylvanian antislavery is most often noted for its moderation, and it does provide a useful demonstration of the limits of American Revolutionary-era abolitionism. To be sure, the 1780 act worked at a glacial pace, freeing children born to slave mothers after March 1, 1780, but requiring that those children serve a twenty-eight-year period of indentured labor.59 This mechanism was a nod to slaveholders’ demands for compensation for their lost property. If the struggle for liberty and independence prompted many to question slavery, the political demands of union—and an equally strong ideological commitment to the sanctity of property—attenuated the impact of that questioning. The problem that slavery posed for American

18

Introduction

Revolutionaries, at least the white ones, could be resolved by positing a republic in which equality was for whites alone, blacks were outside the civic body, and slavery’s presence was variegated across the polity according to its economic viability rather than by any singular sense of its consistency with the Revolution’s logic.60 Just as Murdock’s treatment reveals lingering anxieties over this schema, charting Saint Domingue’s shifting function in American discourse reveals this development to have been an evolution rather than a foregone conclusion. In changing ways over the decade, events in the colony evoked elements of American antislavery thinking, provoking actors to confront, and sometimes refine, their ideas about slavery’s fate in the Revolutionary polity. Many Americans in Philadelphia began the decade confident that their state was a harbinger of a world order in which slavery did not exist, and perhaps in which their city’s racially mixed population was a model for the future. This spirit stood behind the efforts of activists in rejuvenating the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, in pushing Congress to act against slavery, and in connecting their doings with likeminded laborers such as the Société des Amis des Noirs in Paris and the London Society. “The present age has been distinguished by a remarkable Revolution,” the Abolition Society wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette in mid-1788, “mankind begin at last to consider themselves as Members of one family.”61 It was a vision shared by British and French activists such as Thomas Clarkson, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and others. Murdock’s “revolution” was potentially expansive and the “freedom” it was to provide possibly universal.62 Developments in Saint Domingue channeled the anxieties slavery produced in American politics and ultimately fragmented ideas about a unitary revolutionary era, but the colony was not a simple presence. Even after moments of violence like that at Fort Dauphin, Americans found ways to voice support for the changes going on there. The colony’s fate offered a benchmark that worked across the political spectrum in the young American republic. Only in the early years of the nineteenth century would its meanings be effectively reduced to a singular equation with black violence. The initial phases of Philadelphia’s Haitian Revolution, by contrast, contained moments of acceptance and optimism. Between the late 1780s and mid1791 Americans confronted the colony’s reactions to the unfolding French Revolution and wondered if the “regeneration” of the kingdom would lead to the independence of its colonial holdings. This was a tripartite struggle in Saint Domingue, one mediated by the upheavals—and new possibilities—in Paris.

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19

Self-proclaimed “patriots” looked for the Revolution to produce greater economic freedom and autonomy for the colony. Their adversaries were local authorities who sought to maintain their, and perhaps France’s, control. Representatives of Saint Domingue’s twenty-five thousand gens de couleur— free people of color—meanwhile, were spurred by hopes that the rhetoric of expanded rights in Paris would herald civic equality across racial lines among the un-enslaved. While Americans in Philadelphia would learn of changes in Europe in broad strokes (and via news that came through London and was usually quite old), this was fresh, and pressing, information: the terms of the struggles led them to see Saint Domingue as a gauge of the French Revolution more generally. Receiving reports of rival assemblies, deposed governors, declarations of colonial rights, and violent clashes, they plumbed the colonial conflicts for clues to the extent of the universal claims to rights made in that Revolution’s name. This was at once an imposition on events—the so-called colonial question was of marginal importance in Paris—and a canny line of questioning, since the National Assembly itself repeatedly stumbled around the issue. Americans witnessed a succession of its decrees concerning the colonies, and their results in Saint Domingue, and wondered if metropolitan ideals or local interests would hold sway. The same questions prompted a group of free coloreds to try to force the issue in late 1790, violence that, in turn, spurred the National Assembly toward a halting expansion of civil rights across the color line in a decree made in May 1791. Whether judged as “lost” by independence or as undone by this egalitarianism, Saint Domingue’s fate suggested links between American and French revolutionary ideals. While whites in the American South may have been correct in their sense of this issue as alien to their own circumstances, audiences in Philadelphia, by then the site of perhaps the grandest state-sponsored experiment in racial equality on earth, discussed the advance of free colored equality as part of a conversation about revolution that gathered together news from France, Britain, and the West Indies and put it in line with happenings at home. A next phase took shape after August 1791, when thousands of slaves in Saint Domingue’s North province rose in insurrection, killing hundreds of white colonists and sending many more scurrying to the relative safety of Cap Français (also known as “Le Cap”). Within weeks, a stalemate emerged in the region, as the insurgents formed into bands, consolidated their control of the rural areas, and defended themselves against the forays made by white and free

20

Introduction

colored troops that ventured out of the city. By late 1791, fighting had broken out in the West and South provinces as well, where it was shaped by the ongoing struggles by free coloreds to attain civic equality. These developments produced real limitations among some observers, but the essence of the cosmopolitan worldview already established endured. If slave violence was, for most, impossible to applaud, it was understood by many as endemic to slavery and as an expression of its evils. The achievement of a temporary peace in places through white acceptance of colored civil equality gave further force to the idea that revolutionary changes were at hand.63 The slave system, while not eradicated by any means, was significantly shaken across the colony. Further waves of violence would continue, with massacres meted out by all sides, into 1793 and beyond. While the true challenge being mounted to the slave regime in Saint Domingue escaped observers in Philadelphia, the actions that expressed it provoked much conversation about slavery (and antislavery) and revolution nevertheless. These conversations were continued, but fundamentally altered, when events in the colony pushed Revolutionary France to the Left. News of the insurrections cemented the alliance between pro-revolutionary whites and free colored activists in the spring of 1792, leading to a decree granting full political rights to all free colored people in the colonies that was signed by the king on April 4. This established a tenuous equilibrium in Saint Domingue’s coastal areas. That stability crumbled, however, between late 1792 and the middle of 1793, when the balance of power was altered by the presence of a new group of French civil commissioners, led by Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel. They arrived in Saint Domingue in September 1792 with a mandate to enforce the April 4 decree, a measure that was to finally unify the colony’s slaveholding classes behind the new French order and to allow them to end the insurrections. For Americans, this program served to organize the combatants in the colony into pro- and counterrevolutionary groupings. As Sonthonax and Polverel consolidated their power, they shunted aside various self-proclaimed “patriot” groups by tying themselves to free colored militia battalions. The stability this produced was shattered, however, by the arrival of a new governorgeneral, Francois-Thomas Galbaud, who attracted white support in opposition to the commissioners. Driven out of Cap Français and defended by a dwindling contingent of their free colored allies, Sonthonax and Polverel turned to the ex-slaves for support. Harried and desperate, they eventually offered freedom to all those who would fight for them, an offer taken up by several bands who

Introduction

21

drove Galbaud out, burned Le Cap, and forced the governor and thousands of his supporters to evacuate the colony for the United States. By midsummer 1793 the commissioners had expanded their offer of freedom into an edict that freed all slaves who would side with France. On February 4, 1794, these actions were sanctioned, ratified, and extended to all French possessions by the National Convention in Paris. While these developments only represent the gestures of French law toward a condition that many ex-slaves in the colony already possessed, a signal moment had indeed taken place, both on the ground in the colony and in the evaluations of American observers. The declaration of war between France and much of Europe, which in Saint Domingue led to an invasion of the colony by both Britain and Spain, intensified this feeling. Some saw the end of the colony in this development, but others found ways to embrace versions of the notion of black liberation. The tension between the twin expressions of that liberation over this period—that achieved by violence and that provided by Revolutionary principles—was visible in Philadelphia through the varying use of the term “French negro.” Witnessing, comprehending, and digesting the seismic changes in the colony was not the same as identifying those changes as distinct and meaningful on their own. Americans saw a French Revolution in Saint Domingue, not a Dominguan (let alone Haitian) Revolution. White Americans’ conceptual limitations—the constraints of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot terms their “discursive context”—thwarted their capacity to comprehend the truly radical changes going on in Saint Domingue.64 The latter portion of this study examines the consequences of those limitations. Whereas events in Saint Domingue during the early 1790s imparted a new degree of intensity to American rhetoric and action, contributing to a high tide of Revolutionary-era antislavery sentiment and activity, the political divisions that developed in the American context after 1795 impacted those ideals in practice. In Philadelphia, though French emancipation empowered individual blacks to secure and preserve freedom, their experiences, and that of the city’s African Americans, reveal the limits of the cosmopolitan understandings of events in the colony. Rather than part of a universal trend, liberation was revealed to be a local, and particular, development. The American Revolution’s meaning for slavery had been altered, or at least constrained. Events in Saint Domingue, meanwhile, had taken on a new cast. In many ways, the violence at Fort Dauphin served as a break of sorts. By mid-1795 the Spanish and British invasions had stalled, the Spanish having sued for peace

22

Introduction

and the British having become hemmed in at a handful of coastal towns in each province. These events were the context for the emergence of Toussaint Louverture as a leader in Saint Domingue, a development that was vital to the ways that the Haitian Revolution unfolded thereafter and to the ways Americans understood it. After a protracted correspondence with the French general Etienne Laveaux, Louverture abandoned the Spanish in mid-1794. This shift, whether made to further his military ambitions, to advance a personal antislavery agenda, or because of the National Convention’s decree of February 4, was momentous.65 While Louverture was by no means unbeatable, his exploits were vital to France’s revived fortunes in the colony. They also provided an opening for his rise as Saint Domingue’s preeminent leader. In the spring of 1796 he rescued Laveaux from a plot by free coloreds at Port de Paix, prompting the grateful general and acting governor to name Louverture lieutenant governor. Between 1797 and 1799 he further consolidated his position, first by cannily negotiating agreements with the British and American governments, and then by outmaneuvering the metropolitan officials sent to maintain French control over the colony. In the late summer of 1797 he forced Sonthonax, who had returned to Saint Domingue in mid-1796, to leave through a combination of flattery and force. In October 1798 Sonthonax’s replacement, Gabriel Marie Théodore Joseph d’Hédouville, met the same fate. After a short but bloody conflict in which he defeated the free colored forces under André Rigaud in the colony’s South province in 1799, Louverture’s control was secure. Triumphant, he next invaded Spanish Santo Domingo, claiming it for France. He then imposed an agricultural regime that restricted laborers’ movements and allowed colored and white elites (and black army officers) to control them in the name of restarting the plantation economy. These actions created a loyal cadre for him to rely on, though they also produced considerable unrest, and even rebellion, among the rural workers. While the general continued to proclaim that his acts were in the name of France and to pledge his opposition to slavery, in the spring of 1801 he convened a special assembly to write a new constitution for the colony that made it all but independent, and Louverture governor for life. For Americans in Philadelphia, these developments were integral parts of the heat of domestic politics, which, by the late 1790s, had cauterized fissures and catalyzed new realities, hardening them with the passion and warmth of the times. The changing capacity of the idea of Saint Domingue over this period was an important motor to a shift in weight behind the meaning of blackness in white minds and mouths, one that ultimately resolved the problems produced

Introduction

23

for them by “French negroes.” The Federalist party, though presiding over a close diplomatic relationship with Louverture’s emergent Dominguan polity, did so by reducing Louverture’s meaning as a transcendent figure. If the “loss” of Saint Domingue under the general was acceptable because he was not “French,” he was also not permitted to be a representative of “negroes” elsewhere. From this perspective, Louverture’s polity was sui generis and therefore not threatening, though it was still something to treat carefully. The emergent Republican party, meanwhile, took advantage of this conception, invoking an American Revolution that all whites could embrace by ensuring the more radical challenges being offered—both at home and abroad—were put beyond the pale. Race, once a locus of ideological debate, was now merely an effective tool for use in arguments about politics. In this developing environment, African Americans continued to espouse alternative ideals, though the viability of using Saint Domingue to assert their agenda was increasingly unproductive and dangerous. The final stage of the Haitian Revolution, as witnessed in Philadelphia, marked the triumph of the Republican conception. Louverture’s consolidation of power had rankled in France, where Napoleon Bonaparte’s temporary peace with the nation’s European neighbors allowed him to focus on the Caribbean. Early in 1802 the first consul sent a massive force to subdue the colony. The French invasion opened a new phase of the violence there. By late in the year Louverture had been captured and transported to a jail in the French Alps, where in 1803 he would die, claiming loyalty to France until the end. In the colony, however, the continuing resistance of ex-slave insurgents and the devastating effects of the fever season literally decimated the French offensive. In late 1803 the remaining French troops evacuated the colony. On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had emerged as Louverture’s successor, declared the colony’s independence. In Saint Domingue’s place was the new nation of Haiti. Even as white Americans continued to strenuously disagree about the tenor of events in their own young republic, most of them acceded to a depiction of this new polity, which they persisted in calling “St. Domingo,” as an alien and dangerous place. More to the point, it was increasingly irrelevant to their discussions about race, slavery, and revolution. In reducing the intricate and nuanced revolutionary agendas at work in Saint Domingue over the period to a simple portrait of black violence, Americans pieced together a basic agreement about their own nation’s Revolution, one that marked it as complete. In thus ultimately denying the revolutionary character of the changes that had taken

24

Introduction

place in the French West Indies, Americans had come together around a portrait of the Revolution they had accomplished at home. Though Americans “made” a Haitian Revolution, they did not fabricate it. Between 1789 and 1804, events in Saint Domingue rocked the Atlantic world, dominating that portion of the “Age of Revolutions” to an extent that scholars have only recently come to appreciate.66 This book is less concerned with Haiti’s nature as an emblem or an anomaly in that age than it is with its function as a lodestar to American audiences. Still, by recognizing and studying that function, it shows that contemporaries experienced the same quandaries as historians in trying to make sense of events in the Caribbean as part of wider changes. Americans knew a revolution when they saw one, and they embraced the opportunity it provided to discuss themselves. Thinking about the (evolving) meaning of the Haitian Revolution this way reminds us that this period was constructed by its participants well before it became an historical “age.” As historian Ashli White observes in her study of Dominguan refugees and the political issues they raised in the early American republic, these Atlantic moments are best understood as connected by a web: later developments would shape and reshape the meaning of prior ones.67 The “age” would be “remade” several times over. That remaking was a first go at historicization. And, like later analysis, it was shaped by the realities of power among its various participants. Whereas Atlantic historians have looked to discern Haiti’s impact elsewhere, this book’s focus suggests that its impact was molded by the sociopolitical dynamics at work in the various places—here, Philadelphia and by extension the United States—where it was received. The web was not neutral, nor did it operate with equal facility between its various nodes. It has been more than a decade since Michel-Rolph Trouillot gave his elegant paean against the “silencing” of the Haitian Revolution in history. Even the scholars who have since contested the idea that Haiti lay outside the capacities of European-American discourse accept the more essential point that Haiti, if noted, was a burr under the saddle.68 Recognizing that reactions to the Haitian Revolution in the United States were influenced more by American realities than they were by Haitian ones shapes how we understand the idea of “impact,” emphasizing the asymmetrical process by which the meanings that the Haitian Revolution could take on within a wider “age” were produced. At the same time, this approach allows for a Haitian role in the making of the American Revolution’s meaning. That

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Revolution, by this understanding, was in flux; by looking at what is usually understood as its postlude, we can see how Americans regarding Saint Domingue were pushed to define its ideals. Saint Domingue’s presence did not fundamentally alter the trajectory of that meaning—the declension of the freedom and liberty it offered, for example, to being meant for white men alone— but it did impact the ways in which the radical edge of the American Revolution was defined. More important, considering this process over time reveals how, where, and when that edge endured. Scholars of both the Haitian and American revolutions continue to differ over the ideological imperatives behind each. This analysis suggests a complex dance, one in which Americans led and were humming their own tune. Furthermore, it helps highlight the changing tenor among the American pas de deux, a change that would ultimately produce the single note sounded after 1804. But, before that point, Americans looked to Saint Domingue with more fascination than horror. In the process of enunciating that interest, they articulated ideas about rights and equality, slavery and antislavery, citizenship and race, and, eventually, independence and nationhood, all of which served to develop answers to their ongoing questions about the American Revolution’s meaning. Here is the essence of the Haitian Revolution’s impact in the United States. Vague misgivings and uncertainties fell away, leaving horror and hysteria as the sole expressions behind “St. Domingo.” This was a development that was neither natural nor predetermined. Rather than reflecting the innate flaws of the grand ideas of the American Revolution or the tragic failure of its promise, however, that this did take place shows that the racism of the early American republic was contingent. It developed through politics. It was shaped by commerce and trade. Ideals were transmogrified in the mouths of newspapermen, ship captains, activists, and merchants. Gambits to claim and define an American public by a set of universal ideals were cut down, leaving a union based on an acceptance of local differences and an American Revolution that was exceptional, and over. Through it all, the fate of Saint Domingue served as an intriguing and vital ground for discussion and debate. Parsing its meanings reveals as much about the observers as the observed.

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Chapter 1

k

France in Miniature: Naming the Revolution

P

ulses quickened in Philadelphia after William Davis, captain of the brig Hetty, arrived from Cap Français on July 18, 1791. No doubt Davis’s arrival had caused this same sort of physiological reaction before. This was the Hetty’s eighth voyage to and from Saint Domingue over the previous three years, part of a profitable course of trade in which the brig ferried barrels of flour for sale in Le Cap, returning with coffee, sugar, and molasses.1 This time, however, Davis’s cargo was only part of the stimulation stemming from his appearance. Having left the Hetty with a pilot who would bring the vessel up the Delaware, Davis sped ahead to Philadelphia in order to tell of a “great disturbance in the colony.” Whites there were in revolt. Shortly before he sailed, Davis explained, the governor had announced a national decree giving “to the free negroes and mulattoes in [the] colonies equal rights with the other inhabitants.” Not only did the Provincial Assembly of the North resolve to reject this fiat, it also voted to prepare to fight the French army rumored to be en route to enforce it and made overtures to Britain and Spain.2 Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the fledgling General Advertiser, and Political, Commercial, and Literary Journal, heard Davis’s news secondhand on July 19. He printed it the next morning. Picked up immediately in other Philadelphia papers, Davis’s account was amplified within days. On July 21 readers learned that the enraged colonists had “trampled under foot the National Cockade” after hearing of the National Assembly’s ruling. Another captain reported that French regulars at Martinique were about to embark to Saint Domingue to ensure “that the mulatoes [sic] and negroes were to enjoy every right of free men,” and that in response the colonists had “mounted black British ribbons” in their

Figure 3. “A Map of the Island of St. Domingo,” published in Bryan Edwards, An Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo … (London: For John Stockdale, 1801). Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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hats and buttonholes.3 Being fluent in French, Bache scoured the Parisian newspapers that came to hand over the next week in an attempt to learn the precise ruling the National Assembly had made.4 Ultimately he translated some reports of debates in mid-May touching on colonial issues, but, though several of these alluded to a new order, none gave its terms or features.5 Only when a letter from a reliable Le Cap merchant arrived could he confirm that the National Assembly had given “to negroes and people of color, the same rights, and the same weight in government, as belongs to the white colonists.”6 This understanding was confirmed in Philadelphia three days after by a snippet from Paris describing a decree issued on May 15.7 Prompted by a radical assertion of egalitarian rights across the color line made in Paris, Saint Domingue, it seemed, teetered on the cusp of a civil war that might well separate it from France. Despite Bache’s diligence, the news of the decree of May 15 and its reception in Saint Domingue was imprecise at best. Davis, for one, publicly protested that he had never mentioned some of the details of disloyalty and disorder that had been attributed to him; Bache offered a tepid mea culpa: the importance of the moment had led him to move quickly.8 This, in fact, was a second, more fundamental, kind of mistake. The scrutiny given to the decree of May 15 made it out to be an epic change in the course of events in Saint Domingue and in Revolutionary France itself. Thomas Jefferson included the decree in an overview of European news for his son-in-law. “France,” he explained, “is going on steadily,” despite the “dangerous fermentation” the decree had caused in the colony.9 Americans in Paris featured it prominently among the reports they sent of other developments there.10 This was certainly a misreading. The decree passed by the National Assembly on May 15, 1791, was more of a signal of the French Revolution’s limits than a sign of its results. Despite the intimations of some American captains, it expressly protected slavery; the rights the Assembly granted were only for the colony’s free colored population, and only for a portion of them. Furthermore, even this change was ephemeral. When the alliance that had secured the decree melted away in the last days of the Constituent Assembly, the decree was repealed entirely.11 This, then, was hardly a grant of “every right of free men,” even to the gens de couleur in Saint Domingue. Nor was it a signal moment in the unfolding French Revolution. Nevertheless, in the weeks after the Hetty’s arrival, the decree and its impact were discussed nearly every day in Philadelphia’s newspapers. The breathless tenor of the topic was maintained as the news spread northward via New York to Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine, and southward to Mary-

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Chapter 1

land and South Carolina.12 When, two months later, news arrived of a massive slave insurrection on the Plaine du Nord around Le Cap, Philadelphians were already well acquainted with Saint Domingue as a place of “disturbances.” Why did American observers get this news so wrong? What accounts for their fascination? Answering these questions requires fending off familiar narratives. By the time Captain Davis sailed up the Delaware, Saint Domingue had long been a place of interest in the United States. Reasonably, and perhaps unavoidably, Americans described events there after 1789 as emanations of the French Revolution. Those events, which, for historians, are typically taken as subsidiary (to developments in France) or as background (to developments in Haiti), were neither to contemporary Americans: they were current events. To be sure, there was a practical side to American interests. Americans like Davis were in Saint Domingue to do business; they paid close attention to developments that disrupted trade and they kept a weather eye out for changes that might herald better times ahead.13 As a French place, however, Saint Domingue was also important in the abstract. Between the calling of the Estates General in May 1789 and the declaration of the republic in late 1792, Americans eagerly followed events in France. A large portion of this enthusiasm was driven by the sense that the American past and French present were connected, and perhaps were but different expressions of a transcendent global moment.14 As a local vantage onto the French Revolution, Saint Domingue provided grist for this mill. Commercial concerns attracted Americans’ attention, but their gaze was conditioned by the colony’s capacity to tell them about themselves. The precise relationship between the two revolutions, however, was uncertain and even up for grabs. The course of events in Saint Domingue was fertile ground for this thinking, providing multiple opportunities to define the French Revolution’s underlying principles, determine their provenance, and gauge their reach. As Americans in Philadelphia strove to make sense of Saint Domingue as part of a revolution they could recognize, several strains of interpretation emerged. The disorders in the colony might simply be the effects of the obliteration of the old order and a widening of the interests represented in its governance. This was a French Revolution but one that was an expression of transnational and historic—even “American”—forces.15 The acclaim given to the decree of May 15, however, bears witness to the continuing sway of metropolitan France in American estimations. Part of the weight of Captain Davis’s news was that it seemed to mark a reverse in French policy, one that extended

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the precept of equality that was reshaping society at the center out into the empire. That same answer, however, only raised more questions. Tales of trampled cockades raised the possibility that equality was the source of the colony’s disorders. Americans, looking to explore the coupling between the French present and the American past, wondered about the implications of these changes for their own revolution’s egalitarian ethos.16 These ruminations began Saint Domingue’s career as a divisive standard in American politics.

Remembering Mauduit The career of Colonel Thomas-Antoine, the Chevalier de Mauduit du Plessis, offers a sounding of the waters the Hetty would enter. The importance of Mauduit’s life in Philadelphia, however, came through contemplation of his death. On March 4, 1791, Mauduit was killed by his own troops at Port-auPrince. Philadelphians read about it a month later. Slashed by a saber and pierced by a bayonet, he died during a spasm of popular violence in the capital city. After mutilating and decapitating his corpse, members of the crowd dragged it through the streets to the Chevalier’s house. There they broke in and destroyed everything they could find. Once they had mounted Mauduit’s head on a post outside, they razed the building to the ground.17 At the time of his death, Mauduit was well-known in Philadelphia. He had fought in the Continental Army in the late 1770s, was familiar to Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and the Marquis de Lafayette, and by the 1780s was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati.18 These American connections were in the air as Americans read of his demise. The colonel was “much respected in the United States, during the war,” readers were reminded as they digested the grisly tale.19 For most, however, the violence that dismembered the Chevalier brought the French Revolution to mind. Mauduit had been made commander of the royal troops in Saint Domingue just as the Old Regime began to shake. “General [Mauduit] DuPlessis . . . has been promoted lately and . . . desires that you and every Body else should be informed of it,” Gouverneur Morris wrote to Washington from Paris. In the same letter he also described the “astonishing” changes unleashed in France by the impending meeting of the Estates General.20 Once installed in Saint Domingue, Mauduit drew Americans’ eyes and ears. Along with the colony’s successive governors, he embodied established authority there. Mauduit’s American connections, however, also evoked a broader land-

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scape, one in which the American and French revolutions were linked. Other moments of violence prompted more explicit and fully articulated assertions and associations. In the wake of the fall of the Bastille, which was itself accompanied by mob-led killings and destruction, Lafayette sent one of the prison’s keys to Washington as “a tribute” from “a Missionary of liberty to its patriarch.” Thomas Paine, whom Lafayette entrusted with the key, described it as an “early trophy of the Spoils of Despotism and the first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted into Europe.” “That the principles of America opened the Bastile [sic] is not to be doubted,” he crowed, “the Key comes to the right place.” For Lafayette, the events in Paris extended from America, making both part of a “Revolution . . . which . . . Will propagate . . . liberty and Make it flourish throughout the world.”21 Mauduit’s career offered a gauge by which Americans could try to understand how the burgeoning French Revolution would affect France’s colonial holdings, but his past raised questions about the nature of this revolution and the markers of the flourishing liberty it would produce. The notion that such bonds existed was a premise, not a conclusion. In articulating their cosmopolitan sensibilities, Americans looking to Saint Domingue established (and sometimes tempered) connections across space and time. Amid the news of the meeting of the Estates General and the debates over its composition, Americans took special note of the efforts of delegates from the colony to be seated.22 The same accounts that described the Tennis Court Oath told that they had proclaimed that “henceforward [the French Caribbean holdings] would call themselves Colonies Nationales.”23 This was a significant claim. It signaled that colonial interests would be heard in the deliberations over the implications of the changes at the center. As Americans well knew, however, colonial interests were multiple and often divergent. Groups of self-proclaimed “patriots” organized across the colony after the fall of the Bastille, looking to wrest control away from metropolitan officials and to loosen the mercantilist policies they enforced. Elections for delegates to a new colonial assembly took place in late 1789. When the new body, which convened at the town of Saint Marc in April 1790, established itself as permanent and began to legislate for the colony, delegates from the North province withdrew in protest, prompting new rounds of conflict. Americans’ commercial interests gave them a stake in these struggles. Hoping that the Revolution would sweep away the frustrating and baffling maze of Old Regime regulations that had long vexed American merchants, commentators looked to Saint Domingue with trade as a marker of Revolu-

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tionary progress. “If the governments of the French West India islands should be really free, and formed upon the principles and declarations made by their National Assembly,” one Philadelphia editor surmised, “a very beneficial commerce to those islands and these states must follow.” 24 Philadelphian political economist Tench Coxe went still further, suggesting that a free and open trade between the French colonies and the United States would naturally proceed from the Revolution; unless that Revolution was corrupted, it would come. Telling of the seating of the colonial delegates in Paris, he explained that “The Question now . . . appears only to be whether the virtue and discretion of the leaders of the People will conduct them in the broad road of substantial liberty . . . or whether this great Revolution shall be made the perverted means of a deplorable Convulsion.”25 Convulsions were what Americans in Philadelphia saw when they looked to Saint Domingue, however, or at least a road to liberty that was rutted and filled with twists. The fate of the Chevalier de Mauduit was one of a long train of moments of violence and disruption that Americans witnessed in the colony. “No business is going on here,” one letter lamented, “as every one is taken up with meetings, committees, and arming themselves.”26 These bumps complicated drawing easy lines between the Continent and the Caribbean, but they fanned hopes. Beginning in the fall of 1789, Philadelphians read that the “regeneration of the kingdom” had sparked widespread joy and demonstrations of loyalty in the colony but also rumors of plots and disruption.27 Was this sort of violence salutary, or was it a sign of Coxe’s subversion? Observers looked for clues. News of the fall of the Bastille prompted inhabitants to send out batches of national tricolored cockades to local officials, Philadelphians learned. The colonial intendant, François, Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, had even worn one to the theater at Port-au-Prince.28 At Cap Français, however, when another royal official had accosted a theatergoer wearing the cockade, a crowd had beaten him and thrown him into his carriage, which was “loaded with filth of the vilest description, and conveyed under a gallows,” where the official was forced to publicly apologize and the carriage was burned.29 When readers learned that “governor” Barbé-Marbois had fled the colony, one observer wondered if in doing so he had escaped the “fate of the governor of the Bastille.”30 These sorts of evaluations deployed continental ideas and emblems in the effort to render the tumult in Saint Domingue as extensions of the Revolution in France, but they posed the disruptions in the colony in ways that also resonated with the American Revolutionary past. “There are the greatest commo-

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tions here that you can possibly conceive,” one correspondent had it, regarding the contests in 1789 and early 1790, “much greater than at Boston at the commencement of the late war.”31 Committees of “the inhabitants,” others noted, hearkening to the American committees of correspondence of the 1760s and 1770s, had forced their demands on local administrators.32 This vein of commentary would continue to surface during moments of tension between Saint Domingue and Paris. The “bodies of merchants, officers of the volunteers &c. &c.,” one letter told, “have had meetings . . . and voted and resolved similar to the meetings in New-England previous to the commencement of the last war.”33 Nathaniel Cutting, an American merchant who spent time in both France and Saint Domingue in the early 1790s, walked on this ground when he considered the plight of the “persecuted Colonists” in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. “Indeed I think that every Free American who indulges Political Reflections must feel himself peculiarly interested in the Fate of the valuable and flourishing Colony of St. Domingue,” he wrote, “which at some future period may possibly fall within the Jurisdiction of the Thirteen United States!”34 Cutting’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, this was no flight of fancy. Though full-throated predictions of Saint Domingue’s independence were rare, the idea of independence was central to Philadelphians’ understanding of events in the colony. If the “regeneration of the kingdom” were to operate universally, the colonies’ interests would receive attention. If they did not, the American experience suggested a framework and provided a remedy. When the delegates from around Le Cap withdrew from the Saint Marc Assembly, a report (mistakenly) told that the North province had declared its independence and that the town’s first act had been “to declare their port open to the vessels of every nation.”35 Shortly thereafter news came from Martinique that a committee had been established to approach local American captains “to know what part they would act in case of a rupture” with France. The captains’ reply—that “our wish was to act in such a manner as to give them satisfaction”—was so “highly acceptable” that the town’s inhabitants offered their public thanks.36 Here was a conceptualization of Saint Domingue, the United States, and the times at hand in which commercial connections were but the material signs of a deeper sort of change. “Revolution,” by this understanding, was a force by which illicit and irrational privilege was being swept away. Hearkening to ideas current after 1776, it equated (in Thomas Paine’s famous iteration) “the cause of America” with “the cause of mankind.” 37 That cause’s march was marked by a new world order, one in which sovereign nations, directed by the true interests

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of their citizens, would peacefully coexist, their rational commercial exchanges disadvantaging those regimes that continued to cling to old ways. Freed from tyranny within, national self-interest and virtue would be fastened together. Mercantilist holdouts in France were missing the historical boat, Jefferson argued in late 1790; they were, in effect, advocating “ripping up the hen, and getting all the eggs at once.” He hoped that French policymakers would see the light and act in favor of “the prosperity of the islands,” a direction that would “bring advantage at the same time to the mother country and to us.”38 “We have it in our power,” Paine had proclaimed, “to begin the world over again.”39 The news from Saint Domingue suggested that events in the Caribbean were following an American cast. Alternate frameworks coexisted with this one and by late 1790 were coming to predominate over it. These plumbed the tumults in the colony for their relationship to a revolution that was decidedly French. They fed on attacks on that revolution. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France arrived in American bookshops in the same month as the news of Mauduit’s death. Burke’s French Revolution was a corrosive force. Disregarding practical or local concerns, its adherents wantonly asserted new principles, thereby tampering with the social structures that had evolved over time to hold societies together.40 The violence seen in places like Saint Domingue, by this measure, had nothing to do with a new world order; they were a sign of disorder and dissolution. “We have now a civil war throughout this island,” one letter from Cap Français explained in August 1790.41 “The Island is divided into two parties, who are in arms against each other,” a captain wrote from Port-au-Prince around the same time, “one party are for declaring themselves independent from France altogether, the other are for the National Assembly.”42 Early in 1791 one observer looked to the “contention” in the French West Indies and saw “no reference to the French revolution,” instead describing a local struggle for power.43 Americans’ general warmth toward France allowed for an effective rejoinder to Burke’s blanket condemnation. It, too, rejected the notion that the tumult in the colony was progressive, but rather than describing it as anarchy, linked the fighting to wicked and shortsighted local agendas. This conception gained currency after the new regime in Paris determined the nation’s policy toward the colonies. In early March 1790 the National Assembly haltingly articulated its stance. Influenced by planter interests, its Colonial Committee successfully produced a statement that mediated between the principles that would reshape the center and practice in the Caribbean. “While [the colonies] should enjoy the

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benefits of the happy revolution which has been accomplished here,” the ruling explained, they were to be considered “under the special protection of the nation.” Colonial law would follow “local and particular interests,” not the precepts that guided the French constitution.44 The ambiguities of the statement sparked new rounds of violence in Saint Domingue, including Mauduit’s attacks on the Saint Marc Assembly, but an important threshold had been crossed. Chaos in the colony was a sign of bad, perhaps even counterrevolutionary, actors. The letters, proclamations, and accounts Philadelphians read offered up various groups as acting “in favor of the People” and as “friends of the National Assembly,” while others were identified as engaged in “tyranny” and opposed to those who “take the lead in the cause of liberty.”45 The possibility of Dominguan independence lost its luster in this environment; increasingly the assertion of national control seemed like the best remedy for the colony’s disorders. From Paris, American chargé d’affaires William Short saw the National Assembly as the colony’s savior. After routing out some figures of questionable loyalty and trusting others to rule responsibly, it had set the stage for peace and prosperity. “Should this be the case,” he wrote, “no metropolis will ever have shewn more favorable dispositions to its colonies.”46 Readers in Philadelphia received the Assembly’s March decree as an expression of the National Assembly, the same body that had recently abolished hereditary privilege and seemed to be acting against arbitrary power—in a word, as an expression of the French Revolution as it then stood. The decree was printed and reprinted in Philadelphia.47 Spotlighting metropolitan policy led to a new degree of certainty in understanding the disruptions in the colony and allowed observers to render the divisions there in stark terms. This approach made the colony into a readily observable site for the forces at war elsewhere and gave salience to the heated rhetoric and polarized labels coming into use to describe the contest, regardless of its location. This framework, like that articulated by Burke, established metropolitan France as the font of the Revolution at hand. Nathaniel Cutting linked the Saint Marc Assembly’s constitution to the fall of the Bastille and labeled its opponents “anti-Revolutionists” and “imperious aristocrattes,” men whose efforts in the colony were the first steps toward “a Counter-Revolution in France.”48 William Short, meanwhile, saw colonial developments as evidence of the dangers created when central authority was flouted and cast a wary eye toward those who pushed for colonial autonomy.49 Americans might disagree about what they were seeing, but, in attempting to nail down colonial events by

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delineating them in metropolitan terms, they increasingly regularized the unfolding conflict, at once simplifying and empowering it. By the fall of 1790 one editor would offer a summary of the previous year’s events in the “FRENCH WEST INDIES” that suggested they were “little else than the revolution in Old France in miniature”: “Altho’ they have no Bastiles [sic] to storm or Monarch to bring to a sense of his duty, yet in every one of these distinct and minute dependent governments, such efforts have been made as to convince the retainers to despotic and aristocratic tyranny that the spirit of French liberty has reached them, and must soon (if not already) have its full effects there as well as in the mother country.”50 Watching for the effects of French liberty made the Dominguan contests more intelligible, but doing so also conditioned the ways in which the revolutionary “spirit” behind it all was rendered. At the end of April 1791 Benjamin Franklin Bache offered a “Concise Sketch of the POLITICS of St. Domingo” to the readers of his General Advertiser. Bache, like Short, accepted the struggles in the colony as direct expressions of the Revolution in France and identified the conflicts that had ensued as the products of local bastardizations of salutary French developments. “The flame of Liberty, which broke out in France,” he told his readers, had jumbled the colony, giving those who “still breathed a spirit of aristocracy” the opportunity to fight against the “democratical” and “moderate republican” elements. The return to “old laws” and metropolitan control, however, meant peace and stability were coming.51 These terms contained the seeds of a more fervid embrace of the French Revolution among Americans such as Bache. Though the Revolution in Saint Domingue was constrained to being French alone, events in the colony were given the capacity to shape—and even distort—ideas about the French Revolution. The focus on allegiance and who or what to embrace or vilify, even though it placed politics before principle, had the potential to make colonial factions and developments stand-ins for Revolutionary orthodoxy. At the time of his death, Mauduit had run afoul of this interpretation. “New disturbances have distracted St. Domingo,” Philadelphians read as the news of the colonel’s gruesome end trickled in, “a spirit of liberty, in opposition to aristocratical principles is . . . the ground of difference.” Further details enhanced the sense that Mauduit died because he was on the wrong side of the Revolution. During a previous confrontation it was revealed that he had ordered his troops—who were identified as “aristocratically inclined”—to fire into a body of “the people.” When fresh troops arrived from France, they had broken

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with their officers, united with the “citizens” of Port-au-Prince in the cause of “greater freedom,” and forced Mauduit to recant his past acts. It was during the ensuing confrontation that he lost his life.52 As this story was fleshed out in Philadelphia, Mauduit was marked as allied with those who were “attached to the ancient political order of things.”53 As such, his death would “serve as an example to all those who wish to stop the rapid progress of the revolution.” Later he was revealed to have been in league with the Spanish crown.54 As a personification of the counterrevolution, the lessons of the Chevalier’s life were clear. Americans looking to the French Caribbean increasingly saw it as French, and they saw France as a bastion of revolutionary equality. The “tumults” at “St. Domingo,” according to one writer, were linked to a French-inspired “universal convulsion . . . which will shake the thrones of tyrants, and produce a new and glorious epoch in the annals of mankind.”55

Fanatical Principles Five days after Mauduit was torn apart by the mob at Port-au-Prince, Vincent Ogé met a similar end at Cap Français. Ogé, a free man of color, had attempted to force colonial authorities to recognize men such as himself as citizens the previous October. Using the ambiguity of the National Assembly’s colonial policy as a rationale, and with support of activists in Paris, London, and the United States, he had argued before the Assembly at Le Cap that the Revolution’s equality, at least among slave owners, transcended race. Rejected, he gathered a small armed force outside the city. In response, white factional divisions vanished. Militias from Cap Français quickly scattered Ogé’s forces; he and his officers fled across the border to Santo Domingo. Captured and convicted, he was bound to a wheel in the public square, where his arms, legs, thighs, and back were broken. When death finally came, like Mauduit, his head was removed and his property demolished.56 If the liberty reordering Saint Domingue was French in American eyes, the colony’s particular social structure offered opportunities to assess the borders of the “tyranny” that it would vanquish. Ogé was more than a fly in the ointment. His fate, coming as it did alongside news of the National Assembly’s developing policy toward the French Caribbean, sounded new notes in American discussions about the principles behind the French Revolution, their relationship to the American Revolution, and their implications going forward.57 “AUGET,” a letter printed in early December 1790 noted, had arrived from France via “New

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England.” He grounded his claims in the “bill of rights” recently drawn up in France “by which all men are declared to be born free and equal.” This writer rejected these “pretensions” as “mischief ” but, regardless, saw such ideas as fatal to the colony: “If this levelling principle should be adopted,” he proclaimed, “the colony is lost for ever.”58 Further publications reinforced this idea. “Ojay,” one ran, was an “ambitious villain” whose claim for representation and participation in government was based “on a decree of the National Assembly of France, who have declared, that all men are not only free, but equal, and have the right to the same privileges.” If acted on, this “dangerous step” would give the free coloreds “the balance of power” in the colony.59 Ogé’s celebrity derived from the sensational features of his plot and the gruesome features of his death, but it was this aspect of the episode—the relationship between his actions and the French Revolution’s egalitarian ethos— that made him noteworthy among observers in Philadelphia. Mapping the variety of responses to the issue reveals the tensions produced as Americans strove to understand this “French” Revolutionary development in an “American” space. The Revolution in Saint Domingue might be French, but its implications might be felt elsewhere, even in Philadelphia. The phrase that marked this tension—that shows us contemporaries navigating it—was the charge of “fanaticism.” Ogé, one depiction read, was a “fanatic,” a “deluded Mulatto chief ” with “extravagant pretentions to the rights and privileges of enfranchised citizenship.”60 Fanatics were those who ardently followed a (misbegotten) sense of principle, overextending and inappropriately forcing it where it did not belong. Their acts were often sarcastically denigrated as “philanthropic” or as involving “philosophy,” labels that added an airy-headed and impractical connotation. Burke had fathered the indictment with regard to the French Revolution in general, but Ogé’s efforts gave it new animation, focus, and weight. Philadelphians read how a delegate in the National Assembly “trembled” at the consequences of allowing free coloreds to join that body. Above all, he railed against the “mistaken and fatal philanthropy” that lay behind the attempt, “which is less calculated to benefit the human species, than to overthrow empires and governments.” 61 Burke himself deployed Saint Domingue as proof of his more general depiction. The colony was an opened “Pandora’s box,” he declared in a spring 1791 speech, a place of “confusion and ruinous disorder.” Philadelphians read his words in July: “The fatal venom of democracy infected every breast [there], the free men and the slaves, the black, the white, the part[l]y coloured inhabitants partook alike of the dire phrensy. . . . Mingle all in

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this maze of anarchy, uproar, rage, and assassination, while the sorceress Sedition flourishes over her head the Rights of Man, & inflames their souls to deeds of havoc and desolation.”62 Conflating the various aims of the factions struggling in Saint Domingue in the interest of damning all things French, Burke described a Revolution (in the negative) that was defined by the (fanatical) universalism of its principles. Equality bolstered the point. Americans, having mostly accepted the Revolution in Saint Domingue as “France in miniature,” were left to divide over the probity of those principles. To do so, they differed over where to locate the source of the disruptions there. Benjamin Franklin Bache was cautious. His April 1791 “sketch” subsumed the free coloreds’ fight beneath the struggles among whites that he saw as the real story. Ogé’s efforts, as he explained them, stemmed from the sudden introduction in Saint Domingue of “a system of equality, instead of that spirit of subordination, which was thought essential to their prosperity.” 63 This decriminalized Ogé and his followers to a degree, but it also took their efforts as inadvertent and unintended derivatives of the legitimate changes at hand. Tepid as it was, Bache’s treatment opened avenues for a different sort of reaction. With the fighting in the colony understood as marking out the divide between Revolutionary and counterrevolutionary actors more generally, free coloreds, and the notion of racially inclusive citizenship, might well become legitimate portions of the new order, especially if their opponents were branded as reactionaries. The implications of French Revolutionary doctrines were sufficiently ambiguous and fluid with regard to racial equality as to make news from Saint Domingue fit right in with this pliable moment. One observer bemoaned the paradox of Ogé’s execution “for the crime of asserting the rights of human nature.”64 When a body of regular troops defected to the “patriot” faction at Port-au-Prince, the governor reported that they had “treated with the most dangerous familiarity the negroes and mulattoes, saying ‘You are our equals, the National Assembly has declared it.’ ”65 While discounted in Philadelphia the following day, this report offered echoes of the sentiments of those in Paris who were pushing for an expansive definition of rights and citizenship. Learning of the election of a “free black” from another French colony to the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, Philadelphians read that this was “a revolution in the history of mankind . . . a singular and unexampled instance of change in the sentiment of the Western world, thus breaking down, in some degree, the strong and established line of distinction between colours.”66 Though men such as Vincent Ogé were not French, they might appropriate the ideals of the French Revolu-

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tion. As the soldiers of the National Guard at Port-au-Prince made clear, what France stood for might well shift. These possibilities roiled the waters in which William Davis sailed. The brutality of Ogé’s execution, plus the continuing tumult in the colony, set the stage for the shift in French policy. The attention drawn to the free colored issue at once undercut the Colonial Committee’s capacity to push through its recommendations without wider discussion and empowered those on the Left to connect colonial issues to the principles of the Revolution. When the colonial question was revived in the spring of 1791, Maximilien Robespierre vowed to let the colonies “perish” rather than allowing them to subvert those principles. The ensuing debate produced the decree of May 15, though, in the aftermath of Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes, leaders of the Colonial Committee successfully had it revoked on September 24. Nevertheless, the notion of “special laws”— that the ideals spurring the Revolution in Paris had to be mediated in the colonies—had been sapped and the color line had been crossed, albeit on tiptoes. The decree of May 15 provided for troops and a number of commissioners for Saint Domingue in order to enforce the law and to stave off the lingering possibility of colonial secession.67 Here was the motor behind Americans’ misreading of the decree’s importance: given their proclivity to take French colonial policy as a gauge of French developments more generally, it introduced the idea of civic equality as a defining element of the French Revolution. American fascination would develop thereafter. The pervasiveness of the commentary on the news after Davis’s arrival made free colored equality an important measure of Revolutionary probity, both abroad and at home. Finding such measures mattered. Though patriotic ardor and faith in the new constitutional order—and above all devotion to the Revolutionary heroturned-president George Washington—still dominated political discourse in Philadelphia, by the early 1790s fissures had begun to emerge. While domestic issues such as the question of executive titles, the nature of public ceremonies, and especially Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s plans for the republic’s finances were discussed, events in France proved to be particularly divisive, especially as the Revolution began to move leftward. Philadelphia’s newspapers were the medium through which these questions became public. In late October 1791, prompted by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Virginian congressman James Madison, Philip Freneau established the National Gazette in hopes of countering the perceived British and Hamiltonian bias behind publications such as John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States. The National Gazette’s

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florid offerings soon tilted Bache’s General Advertiser in the same direction. This divide would widen and become more virulent over time, but an important shift in the size, shape, and workings of the public sphere in the city, and beyond, had begun.68 The publication of the first portion of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man in Philadelphia in May 1791, an answer to Edmund Burke’s disparagement of the French Revolution, amplified this incipient divide and provided the coin by which the “fanatic” charge would be answered. Jefferson penned a foreword to the work that suggested it would serve as a timely remedy against “aristocratic” tendencies in America.69 Paine himself reemerged as an explosive figure in American discourse, one that embodied (either in the positive or negative) the Revolutionary moment and focused discussion around the issue of the extent and degree of the equality it was to provide. “Democracy” was newly divisive. “Revolution” had its discontents and opponents. New avenues had been created by which to consider, and measure, the advent of “French” principles in the United States. This dynamic would dominate the twists and heaves of American politics for the rest of the decade. Words are not acts, but discourse does reflect the scope of conceivable acts. The presence of free colored equality as a component of what was “publicly utterable” in American newsprint as part of this rights talk suggested an expansive potential for revolutionary egalitarianism.70 A spectrum of opinion emerged over what other permutations would flow from this premise, but, as with Paine’s pamphlet, few disagreed with the sense that great and positive—even utopian— progress was taking place. The president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society saw the decree as an important step in “the great business of the abolition of slavery, and . . . a just recognition of the Rights of Man.”71 A letter from Bordeaux, the city (after Paris) most closely identified with the decree by angry colonists, saw it as protecting slavery but posed free colored citizenship as a natural extension of the Revolution and as emblematic of its glory.72 The Bordeaux writers urged colonial whites to accept the decree in the name of “justice and equality.” The rights that the Revolution had restored to Frenchmen had to be matched by these other “free beings” who were also “children of their country.” Discrimination was no longer possible: “Once perhaps that condition was supportable to them. All classes of citizens being equally debased; what was then called liberty was only its shadow, and offered only to our eyes the varied shades of real slavery—but now all Frenchmen restored to the rights of justice and equality, will be governed, and at the same time protected by them.” This was a

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Revolution whose logic was irrefutable. With the eyes of the world, and the future, upon them, the National Assembly had risen above local concerns to create a law that brought reason to racial rules. “What have you to oppose the claims of the heretofore intermediate class,” the address asked. “Is it their colour?” To permit that would be to sully the universal claims that rooted the new order. “The regeneration of the empire,” it proclaimed, “can no longer be partial.” 73 Wherever one fell on the divide over the “fanaticism” of the changes going on in France, words such as these made Saint Domingue a site where revolutionary theory was meeting practice. Americans still saw Saint Domingue as a window onto France, but this focus reinvigorated notions that the changes going on around the Atlantic were interrelated. This was a different sensibility than the ideas about colonial independence after 1789. Connected with ideas about the “rights of man,” free colored equality suggested a Revolution driven by principle, as well as enabling a newly capacious understanding of equality as a guiding precept. This Revolution, while “French,” was rooted in a commitment to human equality that, though it might produce specific national iterations, was to operate universally. Unless undone, it would slowly, perhaps inevitably, come to define human relations. Saint Domingue bolstered this cosmopolitan connection, giving racial equality traction as a marker of revolutionary change. As such, it entered into conversations about the scope of the changes going on around the Atlantic, offering an opening to describe them as of a piece. The extracts, articles, anecdotes, and compositions that maligned slavery or lauded its opponents that cropped up regularly in Philadelphia’s newspapers in this period stemmed from this same sensibility.74

Violence and Equality Of course, practice in Saint Domingue would not proceed quietly along theory’s paths. On August 22, 1791, slaves in the northern plains around Cap Français began to burn plantations and kill slave owners, producing a series of insurrections pointed at the destruction of the colony’s slave system. This news would reach Philadelphia in mid-September. The advent of slave violence, which observers quickly recognized as being of an unprecedented scale, did not alter the way in which events in the colony were understood. Slave insurrection was an idea observers had encountered before. As we will see in the following chapter, it existed as a mental framework upon which they could hang informa-

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tion from Saint Domingue. The issue of free colored equality, however, allowed observers to tap into broader currents, ones that were connected and related to the Revolution in France—and to their own. Slave violence did change the context of this discussion, intensifying the emergent divisions among commentators in Philadelphia over the relationship between the insurrection and French “philosophy.” This debate began directly in the aftermath of the news from the Plaine du Nord. Benjamin Franklin Bache hastened to defend against the charge that the May 15 decree—and by extension the French Revolution as a whole—was at fault. Among the cascade of reports from Saint Domingue he interjected his assertion that “this affair has nothing at all to do with the decree of the National Assembly, which some time ago agitated that colony.” 75 Such news led the Pennsylvania Assembly, then considering a bill to send aid to the colony, to remove language describing the “Mulattoes” as part of the “brutal multitude” that was surrounding Cap Français.76 Less than a week later, however, John Fenno pointed to civic equality as a symptom of philanthropy gone awry. On September 28 many Philadelphia newspapers printed a report confirming the massive destruction in the North and telling that the gens de couleur “were in arms for their own defence, and had informed the white people that if they would conform to the decrees of the National Assembly, they would assist them to suppress the insurrection.” 77 Readers of Fenno’s Gazette, however, received this fresh news alongside a lengthy letter from the town of Nantes to the National Assembly assailing the May 15 decree. While the effort to legislate away racial divisions in the colonies was certainly “sublime in the eyes of philosophy,” the writers predicted (for Fenno, prophetically) the effect would be “more terrible than the hurricanes which ravage these rich countries.” “As long as your fatal decree shall exist, the whites and coloured people cannot live together,” they foretold, “one party or the other must be exterminated.” 78 Fenno complemented this vision with a snippet placed directly after it describing New England sailors reading in their crow’s nests by the light of burning plantations.79 Edmund Burke could not have better delineated the dangers to society inherent in wayward “French ideas.” Fenno’s depiction was echoed in the words of conservative French commentators read in Philadelphia over the weeks and months after the insurrections began. Angry petitions to the National Assembly from slave trade ports such as Bordeaux and Havre de Grace denounced the (partial) grant of rights to free coloreds as “false philanthropy” and compared its doctrines to the “fanatical opinions” of the Spanish Inquisition.80 A speech before the Assembly printed in

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Philadelphia in mid-October 1791 took the same tack. “From [France’s] regeneration we expected everything,” the speaker cried. “But alas! what bitter fruits we have reaped from it! Why must our ruin be the necessary consequence of its principles?” Thus the “fictitious philanthropy” and “destructive principles” popular in France, inappropriately brought to bear in the colony, were condemned as having “kindled” the fires set by insurgent slaves and as having “put the instruments of death and ruin” into their hands.81 Others similarly identified the true progenitors of the violence. “May the terrible history of this revolt,” one wrote, “serve as a lesson to certain philosophers . . . who, in disseminating their visionary principles have turned loose upon us a host of barbarians, whose warfare is indiscriminate slaughter.”82 Another writer bleakly forecast that “the evil . . . is like to become universal” across the island, “by the methods certain philanthropists have fallen upon to propogate [sic] their opinions.”83 Initially, the chief objects of this “philanthropy,” the free coloreds of Saint Domingue, served as the physical proof for this argument. Sighted at the head of the insurgents, or plotting within the cities to aid them in breaching white defenses, the insurrections seemed to involve myriad Vincent Ogés. As the violence grew, however, and beleaguered whites turned to them for aid, the gens de couleur emerged as a source of potential stability.84 This shift, which was in no small part due to the efforts and designs of the free coloreds themselves, provided an analytical opening for observers such as Bache and Freneau to explore civic equality as a positive and rational development. The acceptance of free colored rights appeared to produce the possibility of order. In contrast to the news from the devastated North, initial reports from the West told of a tenuous calm created by “agreements” between whites and free coloreds to league together to prevent the spread of slave violence. These arrangements were printed at length in several papers. In addition to embracing the May 15 decree and recognizing “the rights and privileges granted to the people of colour,” they vindicated the free colored understanding of the March 1790 ruling and adopted measures designed to rehabilitate Ogé’s reputation.85 When the peace was broken and Port-au-Prince burned in November 1791, accounts consistently pointed to the city’s white population as at fault. Their “intrigues” included the lynching of a “free negro” by “evil-minded persons.”86 They were a “minority,” whose disregard for the rule of law had led to the destruction.87 “The cause of all these evils,” one captain wrote, was “the want of strength in Government to do justice,” not the “opposition of Government to the rights of free coloured people.”88 This violence was a product of partisan

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strife, not democracy’s venom. “It is difficult, I find, to determine who is right and who is wrong in the first principles of this Tragical business,” Nathaniel Cutting wrote from Cap Français, “doubtless there is blame on all sides;—I fear the result will be the ruin of the Colony!”89 Free colored membership in civil society, at least in this frame of reference, was a legitimate expression of the Revolution’s meaning. News from France fortified this impression. Philadelphians read of the repeal of the May 15 decree as a measure designed to combat the threat of “counter-revolution” in Saint Domingue by white colonists, who were using the issue as an excuse for secession.90 Subsequent news telling that the repeal had led free coloreds to question their allegiance to France reinforced the notion that granting civic equality was a vital part of ending the violence.91 When, in early June 1792, Philadelphians learned of a French decree, affirmed by the king on April 4, that granted full political rights to all gens de couleur in the colonies, most observers were sanguine about the probable peace and stability that would result.92 In Francophilic hands the cautious welcome of civic equality on Saint Domingue evolved quickly into open celebration. “The strict enforcement of the decree of the National Assembly, confirming the Mulattoes of the islands in their privileges,” Freneau decided, “seems the only practicable method of restoring peace & good order.”93 Shortly thereafter, Bache printed a letter from “a warm aristocrat” in Paris to a correspondent in the colony in which the Parisian predicted that France would soon collapse before the armies surrounding it, allowing the nation’s new leaders to invade Saint Domingue to “put every one in his place again.” Such opinions, Bache editorialized, “shew that all ENRAGES are not Jacobins.” The writer’s wild hopes illuminated his odious politics, as well as his harebrained imagination. To oppose the “levelling system” that had “overset all the pretentions of birth and fortune” in France and the colonies, he asserted, was to be on the wrong side in “the contest between liberty and despotism.”94 To stand against civic equality for the free coloreds was to stand against the Revolution. Looking to Saint Domingue, Bache and Freneau let their affection for France trump their previously muted reactions to civic equality. In defining their loyalties in Saint Domingue negatively—that is, by identifying enemies to France in the colony and opposing what they stood for—they came to incorporate the goals of the free coloreds as emblematic of a wider worldchanging movement. This response was facilitated, and boosted, by the doings of the Girondin

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commissioners in the colony after September 1792. Led by the fiery Léger Félicité Sonthonax, the commission increasingly turned to the free coloreds as allies in their tussles with white factions.95 Bache’s readers learned of a celebration of the creation of a biracial national guard at Port de Paix at which white and free colored citizens held a ball. “Patriotic toasts were drank, and the advantages of a cordial re-union were sung” by the partygoers, who also promised to “denounce those who . . . should endeavour anew to create disturbances.” The company parted in the wee hours of the morning, pledged to the idea that only racial unity could “save the colony.”96 Fenno’s accounting of the same news was far more subdued.97 Having already established French colonial policy as a crucial element by which to measure the Revolution, Philadelphian readers correlated developments such as the storming of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792, the subsequent abolition of the monarchy and declaration of the French Republic, and the advent of open war between Britain and France in February 1793 with happenings in the colony. Over this period, Saint Domingue, always interesting, emerged in Philadelphia newspapers as an important site of Revolutionary and counterrevolutionary struggles. Toward the end of 1792, the General Advertiser began an extensive series of translations and explanations of recent events in the colony, developments that had culminated with the deportation of a number of royalists from the North on October 19. “The fate of that colony,” Bache told his readers, “as forming a respectable portion of the French nation must interest every American.”98 Nearly half the issues he published over the next month were dominated by information from Saint Domingue, and more made mention of it. In mid-December, sounding a similar chord, Bache again explained why Saint Domingue was worth so much of his ink. He offered two reasons. For one, information from the colony “must be interesting to those who feel for the fate of an important part of the French republic.” An echo of the wider possibilities sounded in his next point. Saint Domingue was useful “to the theoretical politician,” who looked there to determine if the “spirit of liberty and republicanism” was consistent with colony holding.99 Bache’s treatment of the news, however, answered his question: colony holding was consistent with French liberty. Colonial independence in the Caribbean was a product of the counterrevolution. Moments like the deportations of October 19 were directly related to events in France. Referencing the storming of the Tuileries, Bache judged them as “dictated by the same spirit, that shone so conspicuous on the 10th of August last in Paris.”100 “The transactions of the 19th may be consid-

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ered as the struggle of republicanism against perverted authority and an oppressive aristocratical interest,” he reported later. The new government in the colony was “democratical.”101 In this environment, Bache returned to the various disruptions seen in the colony since 1789 to identify the Atlantic machinations of the counterrevolution at work. The actions against the Saint Marc Assembly were the “counter-part” of the “affairs of Nancy, Avignon, and Arles.” The flight of Louis XVI to Varennes was to have been a spark by which Blanchelande and his minions were to begin their ravages. Another account outlined a “project relative to ST. DOMINGO, by the FRENCH PRINCES, at COBLENTZ.”102 By these accounts, the issue of civic equality determined the sides of a war. At the heart of the commissioners’ efforts—a “struggle of republicanism against perverted authority and an oppressive aristocratical interest”—was the inclusion of the free coloreds in the new “democratical” government in the colony.103 Resistance to this new order was a guise for wider counterrevolutionary efforts. When Sonthonax, supported by a mixed-race council, successfully routed out a number of his opponents, Bache’s enthusiasm was palpable. “The ceremony may be considered as the prelude of a new, and . . . more prosperous state of things,” he gushed, “the sentiments of the colonial governors now vibrate in union with those of the prevailing party in the mother country.” Americans should support these developments. Printing an appeal for contributions made by a society in the colony, he interrupted the petition by widening the plea. “American Reader, go and do thou likewise!” he wrote. France had served “the cause of American freedom”; now its citizens should not “call in vain for our aid against a merciless foe.—Forbid it honor, forbid it justice, humanity forbid it!”104 With the sides and stakes of the battle delineated, American supporters of France seized upon civic equality as a litmus test for republican orthodoxy. Opponents of free colored rights were opponents of France; their “epidermocratical tyranny” made their loyalties transparent.105

The Limits of Equality The drama of the violence in Saint Domingue, from that among white factions, to that of men such as Vincent Ogé, to that between French Revolutionaries and France’s internal and external enemies on the global stage—and especially that visited by the colony’s enslaved population—all served at once to focus attention in Philadelphia and to multiply the possibilities for interpretation there. Many agreed they saw Revolution in Saint Domingue, but the

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border between fanaticism and the principle of equality in their evaluations had been destabilized and disrupted. If commentators such as Bache and Freneau sharpened their defense of France through an embrace of one side in this struggle—making Sonthonax and his free colored allies embodiments of the French Revolution in the process—they did so in a way that maintained a certain distance between those developments and events at home. They did not expressly connect free colored equality with a call for change in policy in the United States, instead merely implying that the principles at work in both France and the United States were in parallel, if not of a piece. For some Americans the “fanaticism” charge was sufficient to dispel even this assertion: the suggestion that the American Revolution’s founding principles constituted a direct threat to slavery was simply invalid.106 The ideal of equality was too central to too many, however, for this to be broadly convincing outside the Deep South. John Fenno agreed with Bache, for example, that slavery would end and that slave violence was a horrible reminder of the fact. He seconded, however, those who saw French “philanthropy” as counterproductive to that end—and as culpable for the violence in Saint Domingue. Bache, meanwhile, defended French equality as unrelated to the violence, and as a sign of progress. In short, the editors differed over France, not over the fate of slavery in the American republic.107 The continuing power of the French Revolution in American political discourse gave the Francophilic conception articulated by Bache and Freneau force. Outside of the South, however, opponents of French fanaticism, who were no less inheritors of the American Revolution, were forced to account for the egalitarian content of their own Revolutionary movement. These efforts produced other, sometimes odd pronouncements and prognostications, strange echoes of the mental gyrations conducted as observers tried to square their ideas about revolution with others about equality, race, and slavery from a vantage point that encompassed Saint Domingue, France, and their own young republic. In some hands, as it had among those contemplating free trade in 1789 and 1790, this revolution took on transnational and anti-imperial trappings. It was understood as banishing European control and as operating through colonial independence; it was “American.” The implications writers took from this possibility varied, but the potential changes were radical. For a writer in the Federal Gazette, the violence in Saint Domingue had nothing to do with racial equality but instead foretold the end of colonialism in the Caribbean. Connected to European nations, the various islands had been

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subjected to destructive wars, invasions, and occupations, all “broils, which originate in European ambition.” Slave uprisings were but another symptom of this problem, offering “a melancholy proof of the fatal effect of external domination.” The writer’s remedy was revolution, but not one that was French. “As the present century has been productive of revolutions, more extraordinary than any which have happened in the same space of time,” he asked, “may it not be supposed that an Independent government may be formed by those Islands in the Atlantic, usually denominated the West-Indies?” Unified and independent, their wealth, geographical position, and population would make it “impossible to subjugate them.” Moreover, he hinted, this new entity could count on receiving from the United States “more effectual succour, than can be afforded them by any European Power.” Crucially, this scenario included the end of slavery. The “Confederation” and “Independency” he envisioned were predicated on the understanding that white West Indians were “no longer slave-holders, but patrons of the unhappy Africans (or their descendants under their authority).”108 Freed by a revolution to end tyranny from without, former colonists would pass on liberty to their slaves as they became fit for it, thereby protecting themselves from within. Discounting, or ignoring, the impact of French ideology on slaves and planters, this approach projected an American regimen onto Saint Domingue. An array of conclusions proceeded from this application of an American prism. These included self-congratulatory evaluations of American slavery’s beneficence, conditions that might well allow slavery to continue indefinitely there. More, however, were prompted to conceptualize the institution as ending. Insurrection was “nothing more . . . than the natural consequence of European despotism and monarchical vanity,” a writer in late November 1791 observed. The tyranny of the lash was a product of the tyranny of the imperial project as a whole, in which the drive for global domination had led whites to develop a trade in humans in order to enrich themselves and their nations. While the writer hoped that “the establishment of liberty and a free government” in France would inexorably spread similar institutions across the Continent, making “the lust of European foreign domination . . . itself cease,” this eventuality would only mark the Continent’s movement toward an American reality. Slavery would end when “reformed or independent governments” in the Caribbean would free their bondsmen. This, in turn, would occur only after blacks had “gradually acquire[d] the habits and education of freemen.” This construct made the United States a benchmark to measure progress. “America, in general,” the piece ended, “will then assert her own rights, and make known to

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Europe that she is the best judge of pursuing such measures as tend to her own peace, emolument and honorable character among the potentates of the earth.”109 This was a revolution that worked on its own. Its adherents were not activists, they were observers, describing an expansion of freedom that would come naturally if men simply got out of the way. Those who interfered were another version of fanatic, and they included French Revolutionaries and their allies who sought to subvert existing structures and rational steps by which history advanced. Independence, not political equality, was the first step, and mainspring, of this “American” Revolution. As opposed to the misbegotten expressions of universal rights that motivated acts such as the May 15 and April 4 decrees, this approach allowed for local, or perhaps national, solutions. Crucially, this American-style shift recast the line between fanaticism and principle by allowing race to serve as one of the characteristics that separated the nations.110 Race itself was natural. Writing in Philadelphia early in 1790, an author calling himself “Rusticus” gave flesh to this conception. Mankind was not “of one blood,” as some critics of slavery would have it. The “sheep-hairy African negroe” and the “spirited, noble, and generous American Freeman” were distinct “nations.” To attempt to interfere with this “immutable order of the universe” was to “overthrow the fixed order of nature.” It was, in other words, an act of fanaticism. Slavery would end when it ceased to serve American interests. Accelerating the process was flouting that natural course—and the natural divide between black and white—and would only produce disaster. The innate differences between the two “interests” meant that attempting to incorporate ex-slaves into society was an act of folly. If followed, “tranquility would fly from Columbia, and not be re-established until intermarriage had dyed the nation one and the same colour!” “But then Rusticus sighed, “the original character of the nation will only stand recorded in the historic page.” For him, the postlude to abolition was black removal, not racial inclusion.111 Two years later, another writer drew on the same understanding in thinking about the “MULATTOES OF ST. DOMINGO.” In an essay printed in several Philadelphia newspapers and a literary magazine, this author outlined the implications of the American-style approach to slavery for ideas about human equality. The free coloreds, he explained, were the “motley” descendants of European adventurers, who, in addition to the pursuit of lucre, sought “the enslaved African female” to satisfy their carnal needs. The resulting “yellow race” was “neither European nor African” and therefore “felt no attachment to either.”

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Elevated above the most degrading labor and educated by their indulgent fathers (which “always engenders discontent, where there is no equality of condition”), this group came to resent their oppressive condition. The violence on the island derived from their campaign to gain “equal privileges.” Opportunistically allied with the slaves, they had “carried fire and sword through the territories of the white inhabitants.” As it was for Rusticus, race here was a natural and definitive divide. In the next stage of the writing, the “MULATTOES” author moved from history to prognostication, suggesting an American solution to Saint Domingue’s problems along the way. White factions, he guessed, would coalesce around an effort to quash the gens de couleur. Once crushed by collective white might, “the future condition of the mulattoes in the islands will be changed for the worse.” Their privileged status would end and they would be reduced to the “condition of the . . . negroes.” This eventuality, however, would ultimately serve them well. Without free people of color as competition, Saint Domingue would become more attractive to white colonists: “When once the colonial whites begin to consider the West-Indies as their only proper home, a legitimate offspring of their own grade will ensue, who may in time, as has happened on this continent, render some of the insular governments independent of European supremacy; and grant those natural rights of man to the negroes and mulattoes, which they will in vain look for from the justice, the humanity, or the philosophy of Europe.”112 White self-interest, properly cultivated, would give whites independence, after which they would grant liberty to the nonwhites around them. By harnessing the wheels of history and nature, freedom would come from slavery, equality from injustice. In Benjamin Bache’s General Advertiser this writing was abutted by an address from Amis des Noirs leader Abbé Baptiste Henri Grégoire (or “M. Gregory”) to the gens de couleur of the colonies. A celebration of the decree of May 15, Grégoire’s oration was old news; it rehashed ideas already printed and, after all, was concerned with a measure that was known to have been repealed. Bache’s publication of it at this point, therefore, suggests a new relevance to his purposes. It also signals some of the limits of the Francophilic position. Railing against his opponents in Paris, Grégoire posed the decree of May 15 as a part of renewal taking place across France. Prejudice, like all unnatural distinctions, was melting away, improving morals and energizing the citizenry as it went. Those who wished “to perpetuate in America, the reign of despotism, crushed in France,” would oppose this, he continued. They would, no doubt, “attempt a

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stroke, which, tearing the colonies from the mother country . . . will throw St. Domingo into confusion.”113 Consciously or not, Bache had placed together contradictory senses of the logic of revolution as it applied to the gens de couleur. What Grégoire described as counterrevolutionary “strokes” and “confusion” was, for the “MULATTOES” author, a natural reaction that would ultimately lead to revolutionary ends. Both conceptions, however, made the gens de couleur passive vessels. They had been given their rights, Grégoire explained. Freedom would be bestowed upon them, the “MULATTOES” author told, after they had been reenslaved. If in both cases the gens de couleur were generally understood as viable political actors, the radical implications of this shift had been fundamentally sapped. As an ideal, Revolutionary egalitarianism was a radical extension of democratic ideology. As a marker of Revolutionary politics, it had lost some of its revolutionary capacity. Reduced to a signal of political position, it could not become a challenge to the future. As such, the debate in Philadelphia’s newspapers over equality for the gens de couleur described a struggle over power in Saint Domingue, not a call for justice in the world. As proto-Republicans worked to cobble together a political entity around opposition to the Washington administration and support of the French Revolution, the implications of being unable to square the calls for racial equality being made (by some) in France with the racial politics in Philadelphia would be borne out. Racial egalitarianism would prove to be a weak reed in describing a national politics; multiracial free communities would increasingly become exceptional, not the rule. As the decade went on, antislavery efforts would often be paired with plans for black removal. Though, as we will see, a considerable number of squibs decrying slavery and supporting antislavery efforts in America and Europe came in and around the writings describing events on Saint Domingue, any perceived relationship between French equality and the gradual, compensated liberty provided in some portions of the United States after its Revolution remained unarticulated in Philadelphia’s newspapers. Emotional enthusiasm for the topics these writings described may have stood in for more explicit connections. In the few places where lines were hazily drawn, the resulting picture indicates the ways in which the embrace of civic equality as a vital measure of French Revolutionary ideals would prove hollow. Other notions of the American future, however, had been in the air. Scraps of evidence suggest that free people of color around the Caribbean entertained coming to the United States because of the possibilities for equality there. A

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group from Grenada wrote George Washington early in 1791 to explore the idea of relocating en masse, a proposal Secretary of State Jefferson recommended the president ignore.114 Around the same time, Bache reported that he had met with a gens de couleur delegate from Martinique who was visiting Philadelphia to the same end. The man claimed to have been invited, via a printed leaflet “distributed throughout the French colonies” to the “oppressed people of colour,” to resettle “and form a colony in Virginia.” This, Bache told his readers, was obviously “nothing less than a gross imposition.” It appeared that “the Mulattoe” had been tricked.115 The notion of the United States as an oasis of racial equality, however, was illusory, not delusional. In a speech before the National Assembly in early 1792 (which was read in Philadelphia that same year), a delegate repeatedly held up American antislavery efforts as predecessors and parallels to the French policies for free colored rights.116 A writer translated by Freneau later that year celebrated the United States as a place where Quakers pushed for emancipation, state governments and Congress both acted against slavery, and “free mulattoes . . . enjoy the same privileges as whites.”117 Underpinning these expressions was a radical understanding of revolution and race, but not one that was chimerical. Arguing that all of mankind was truly equal meant asserting either the ephemeral nature of racial difference or the possibility of capacious citizenship—or both. A writer calling himself “Africanus” rose in opposition to Rusticus in Philadelphia’s newsprint to do just that. Describing himself as a “sheep-hairy negro” who had been free from a young age and who had subsequently obtained both a trade and enough education to be “in some degree enlightened,” Africanus, in body and pen, refuted Rusticus’s charge. Whereas that dubious “philosopher” had labored to establish the races as discrete, Africanus unabashedly embraced what he described sarcastically as the “old fashioned erronious scriptures” and their message that “God, who hath made the world, hath made of one blood all the nations of men that dwell on all the face of the earth.” Color was no marker of inferiority. Rusticus’s arguments reflected self-interest and self-justification. His “most admirable philosophy!” was merely a rationalization for the barbarous use of superior European power to abduct and enslave their fellow men. This was a principle that was dangerous to American freedom. “So not only the sheep hairy negro is born for slavery,” Africanus explained, “but the horse hairy native of America, or in short, people of black, brown or [red] hair, if another people have force or cunning to subdue them.” Fortunately, Africanus explained, the nation was not yet completely under the sway of these

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ideas. His own status made him feel “equal to the duties of a spirited, noble, and generous American freeman.” Yet Rusticus’s notions inculcated unreasoned, uncharitable, and unchristian treatment. The hatred Africanus encountered on the streets, the discrimination based on color and the anger at his appearance outside his station, suggested a nation defined by different premises was at hand. If the ideas animating it became more general, Africanus wanted none of it: “may I still remain in simplicity of heart, a plain, unphilosophic, black, sheep hairy, free citizen of America.”118 If Africanus was right, Rusticus was the fanatic and the Revolution— American or French—was less about independence than it was about human equality. The Revolution in Saint Domingue, meanwhile, would continue to buffet these evaluations. By the middle of the decade, equality was no longer at the forefront of anyone’s agenda there. Instead a more essential drive, toward something termed liberty or freedom, caught American eyes and ears.

Chapter 2

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Unthinking Revolution: French Negroes and Liberty

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ales of horror from Saint Domingue’s Plaine du Nord arrived in Philadelphia beginning in late 1791. The slave uprising had begun outside Cap Français in August. Hundreds of whites had fled into the city, prompting authorities to shut the port and detain the American vessels there in case an evacuation became necessary. As the crisis wore on, the Assembly of the North sent emissaries to France and elsewhere to plead for help. Early in 1792 Philadelphians were able to read the case made by the delegation that reached the National Assembly in Paris in November. “The picture they draw of the revolt of the negroes . . . mentioned some circumstances uncommonly horrible,” the account told. Foremost among them was the fact that the “standard borne by the insurgents was a white child impaled upon a pike.”1 By the end of the year the delegates’ entire address had been translated and was available in Philadelphia, complete with the depiction of the impaled infant.2 The nightmarish image endured. It surfaced as the emotional center of an attack on Brissot by Camille Desmoulins before the National Assembly in late 1792 and was subsequently replicated by Jamaican planter Bryan Edwards in his influential history of Saint Domingue in 1797.3 Stories of the ghastly banner would continue to surface in the nineteenth century as a demonstration of the ferocity of the insurrections. As the colonial delegates put it in late 1791, the slaves were looking to “accomplish the extermination of the Europeans in the colony.” If successful, “St. Domingo” would soon become “a picture of all the atrocities of Africa.”4 Readers in Philadelphia knew better, or at least more. By late 1791 all three of Saint Domingue’s provinces were experiencing slave unrest. While there were periods of respite, resistance and revolt were endemic in the colony going

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forward. Philadelphia received accounts of these developments on nearly a daily basis. The scope of the insurgents’ actions produced a certain degree of interest; the ongoing mental gymnastics Americans conducted in understanding the colony in the context of the French Revolution ensured their consistent attention. Taken together, these factors produced a remarkably detailed body of material in Philadelphia, one that tested the familiar and complicated assumptions. Though the accounts that reached Philadelphia dripped with blood, they also included information that belied the idea that the upheaval was simply a random spasm or atavistic reflex. While terrifying, this was a rebellion that Americans recognized. Insurrection, or the possibility of insurrection, was a familiar feature of slave societies. A set of ideas about slave violence—its origins, forms, and objectives—was well established by the mid-eighteenth century. This understanding, though it made that violence terrifying, also allowed it a particular logic. Insurrections were purposeful and predictable.5 They involved atrocities but were not simply campaigns for extermination. This broad understanding held true in Philadelphia. Readers there would not encounter the shocking image of the impaled child until they read Bryan Edwards—indeed, the specific instance the delegates to the National Assembly described likely did not occur.6 The contemporary accounts received in Philadelphia, imperfect as they might be, were finely attuned to the different degrees and sources of violence in the colony as the insurrections progressed and changed. Whereas later accounts tended to paint the insurrections in Saint Domingue in broad strokes, Philadelphia readers experienced it as episodic. This variegated evidence conveyed a more nuanced sense of its progress and meaning. This is not to say that the reading public in Philadelphia was all-seeing; recognition had its perils and paying close attention produced options, not acuity. A host of evidence was available that described the insurgents’ goal as “liberty.” The practical reversal of slavery embodied by the rebellions enacted an understanding of that concept that was beyond most observers’ ken. The very vocabulary and frames of understanding they brought to the news hampered their capacity to see more than a series of insurrections in Saint Domingue.7 Whites in particular, in Philadelphia as in the colony, were left to react to black actions, scurrying to match their language to doings that lay outside their cognitive frameworks and beyond their discursive capabilities. Much was lost in the process. Recovering some of that lost material reveals interpretative possibilities

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present in the news of the violence in Saint Domingue. Among the clamor of the generalized “negro” population, individual slaves’ voices could be heard. Amid the standardized savagery of their doings, the aberrant behavior of some emerged. The corpus of material reaching Philadelphia contained evidence of the rebelling slaves’ sophistication, their far-reaching and collective aims, and their pan-black connections; the slaves’ ideas about “liberty” crept into print in Philadelphia. Though their “wonted ravages” came to predominate among the characterizations reaching the city, a host of counterevidence—nuggets left undigested by contemporaries who would not or could not see black activities as self-directed—was simultaneously conveyed.8 This was one way that black agency was elided. But it was not the only way. Even as it reveals a wider range of activity, recovering the folds in the story of black violence in Saint Domingue highlights the power of white narrative interpretation. Frameworks existed for Americans to place the news from the colony. Standing amid the swirl of incoming information, commentators in Philadelphia sought to render it meaningful by incorporating it into their ongoing discussions about France, about slavery, and about revolution. This effort could involve omitting inconvenient truths, but the very questions being asked about the news had an impact. The act of relation itself, even when accepting the notion that slaves sought “liberty,” not simply destruction, contained assumptions about that word’s meaning that placed further limits on how black violence could be understood. In relating the incipient Haitian Revolution to their own and to that in France, American observers tended to blunt the implications of the challenge being posed to slavery in the colony.9 Those challenging slavery in Philadelphia were left with only this impaired understanding with which to work. Sapped of any proactive meaning, meanwhile, black violence was left as a threat alone—a threat understood as operating universally across slave societies in general.

Recognizing Rebellion, Misreading Liberty Though they were confronting an unfolding revolution, readers in Philadelphia witnessed a series of insurrections. Nearly sixty American vessels lay in Le Cap’s harbor on August 22, 1791.10 Once released by the local authorities, their captains and crews brought descriptions of the insurrections that engulfed the North province to the United States. The first accounts touched at New London during the second week of September; the news was current in Phila-

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delphia by September 20. When Rufus Green of the schooner Hardy arrived on October 1 with a first-person account from Le Cap, he only confirmed the stories swirling around the city.11 This was an “INSURRECTION OF THE NEGROES,” as everyone agreed.12 Whether via the terse statements of ship captains or the frenzied letters of colonists, the slaves’ acts had been transferred from the colony’s interior to American ports and then bundled into print under the phrase. It was a package that was familiar, though the news from Cap Français certainly described an insurrection of unprecedented size and scope. On the night of August 22 an immense number of slaves had killed and burned in concert. “The insurgents began their ravages . . . and proceeded in different directions,” one letter noted, “burning dwelling-houses and sugar-houses, laying waste fields of cane, and butchering the whites of all ages and both sexes, in the most barbarous manner.”13 Readers might wonder at the seventy thousand slaves said to be involved, the thousand-mile swath of ground they had burned, or the nearly two hundred plantations that had been destroyed, but the fire and carnage were what one expected in such moments.14 With these metrics of the mayhem came details of the death that accompanied it. Abstractions such as “ravages” were filled in with stories that included a body found “mangled, and marks of teeth on several parts,” whites who had been sawed in half, raped, beheaded, tortured, and burned.15 Such tales were horrific but predictable. Visiting Elizabeth Drinker on September 21, Benjamin Rush mentioned the news of “the Insurrection of the negroes in Cape-Francoies” over tea. Writing later in her diary, Drinker noted that the event had “occasion’d the rise of many articles here, such as Sugar, Coffe &c.”16 The news from Le Cap penetrated daily life in Philadelphia; it attracted notice and prompted conversations, but, though disconcerting, it was not disruptive. In just over a month after the first news arrived, Captain Timothy Russell of the brig Betsy described the burning of sugar and coffee plantations as the slaves’ “usual ravages.”17 For Philadelphia’s merchant community, insurrection created opportunities that no tales of horror could discourage. Over twenty vessels set out for Saint Domingue in the months immediately after the Plaine du Nord burned. The brig Hetty, steered by William Davis, was one.18 Robert Lillibridge, master of the sloop Charming Sally, was another. Lillibridge, like a number of American mariners, had fought against insurgents outside Le Cap in September. In December he sailed there again.19 Timothy Russell and Rufus Green were close behind. Over the course of 1792 over 150 vessels traveled to the colony from

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Philadelphia, a greater number than had ever done so before. Most went to Le Cap, with a lesser number traveling to Port-au-Prince. An increasing number, however, touched at other Dominguan ports. Often clearing out at the Customs House for “Hispaniola,” for “St. Domingo,” or “for a market,” they would return from areas such as Le Borgne, Port de Paix, and Môle Saint Nicolas in the North, Gonaïves, Saint Marc, and Léogane in the West, or Jérémie, Les Cayes, and Jacmel in the South.20 The magnitude of the violence outside Le Cap, therefore, expanded the array of locales Americans would visit, increasing their exposure to the colony as its disorders reached a crucial stage. Fresh information would continue to flow not only from the Plaine du Nord and its environs but also from the Plaine du Cul de Sac and the surrounding mountains outside Port-au-Prince and the Massif de la Hotte in the interior of the South province. Violence touched all of these places after 1791, but violence was also said to have taken place. Recognizing the role of that narration is crucial to understanding the impact of these moments in Philadelphia. From the very instant that slaves sought to reject the regime under which they toiled, both violent acts and the way they were presented were essential components of the unfolding events in the colony and how those events were perceived. Slave violence was a statement: a declaration of purpose that matched and refuted the violence that undergirded slavery itself.21 On the scale attained in Saint Domingue, it served a uniting and motivational function across and among insurgent groups and therefore quickly became a feature that insurgent leaders sought to control, and even sometimes to limit. Because violence expressed and explained events, it also influenced them, providing openings, creating possibilities, and producing shifts in direction as events unfolded. This stage of the Haitian Revolution, therefore, was given structure by both violent acts and understandings of the meaning of those acts.22 As witnesses, both in person and in print, Americans imposed a structure as well, one that attempted to fit the accounts of the violence to existing frameworks. It could be a puzzling effort. As the incidences of insurrection proliferated and endured, details emerged that strained against the lurid descriptions of black savagery in Philadelphia newspapers. Along with reports of “a bloody flag” inscribed with a call for “death to all whites!” came others that described insurgent goals in more abstract terms. One told of a helmet found after a skirmish that was embossed with the phrase “Death or Liberty.”23 Others quoted black troops as stating that “they required perfect liberty for all negroes” and

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would fight until they had obtained “equal liberty.”24 As the conflicts stretched on in the North, depictions of the insurgents as organized and sophisticated emerged. Governor Blanchelande ventured out to attack the forces outside Cap Français and was turned back. “Each negro had provided a kind of light mattress stuffed with cotton,” a report told, “through which the balls could not penetrate, and thus stood the fire, without shewing any signs of fear.”25 Over time, Philadelphians would read of the insurgents’ use of cavalry and artillery.26 “They are now reckoned 10,000 strong, divided into 3 armies,” one white peering from behind the barricades noted, “of whom 7 or 800 are on horseback, and tolerably well armed.”27 Another told that the slaves had separated into “bodies of three or four hundred,” each of which occupied a different part of the battlefield.28 White and free colored troops made forays against these forces, resulting in depictions that made both sides bloody-minded but also legitimated both as adversaries. The colonial troops “take no prisoners, but kill every thing black or yellow, [and] leave the negroes dead upon the field,” one American captain remarked.29 James Perkins, a Boston merchant in Cap Français, derisively called the insurgents’ chants their “native war-whoop,” but he also described their feints, diversionary maneuvers, and diversity of attack.30 “In the beginning of the insurrection, the negroes made their attacks with much irregularity and confusion,” an American captain explained, but “they now come on in regular bodies, and a considerable part of them are well armed.”31 By early 1792 Philadelphians had learned the names of the insurgent leaders, including Boukman, Jeannot, Jean-François, and Biassou, monikers they read at least as regularly as those of the colonial commanders who opposed them. This sort of information coexisted with lurid descriptions of blacks’ “savage gambols” in Philadelphia newspapers.32 Two interpretive frameworks developed to make sense of these conflicting tableaux. The first, which flourished especially in the early months after the initial risings, represented the organization and success—as well as the very fact—of the insurrections as the product of outside interference. This understanding tended to treat slave violence as a natural force, an eruption produced by material factors such as imbalanced population ratios or the supply of food.33 According to this logic, if run properly, slavery was safe: slave violence was a dangerous potential, but it was contained by the system. As the havoc continued, many reports suggested that the cork had been deliberately pulled. In casting about for the perpetrator, observers hit on several groups that had already

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been highly visible as part of the colony’s troubles. The free coloreds of Cap Français were suspect, at least until they joined the white defenders in a series of successful attacks against the insurgents.34 Accounts of mysterious white agents among the slaves had longer legs. A colonial diarist recounted seeing white “abettors” among the throng on the plain and repeatedly told that the colonial forces had captured and hanged white prisoners. “It is said there are at least 100 in the negro camp who direct their barbarities, who act as their advisers and chiefs,” the author maintained, “some have been leading them with blackened faces who were discovered by their hair.”35 White bodies would continue to be found on the battlefields well into spring 1792.36 The debate over who these abettors were gained momentum as the Revolution in France moved leftward. One account told of the hanging of a man who “had been an Abbé” and who “declared that he was sent over with four more from France, by M. —— to teach negroes to revolt.”37 Such evidence sat beside other tidbits that suggested local parish priests had been involved.38 Increasingly, the whites found prompting or aiding the slaves were identified as counterrevolutionaries. Mauduit, dead for more than six months, reemerged as a plotter; as Governor Blanchelande’s efforts against the insurgents bogged down, his reputation followed.39 “COLONISTS know now the authors of the murders and devastations in St. Domingo,” ran one typical writing, “the heads of the counter-revolution have adopted it and are now executing it.”40 This accusation coupled nicely with a body of evidence that the rebels had received support from royalist Spain. In addition to spotting Spaniards in the field, accounts told of weapons and artillery emblazoned with the seal of the Spanish monarchy and correspondence between black leaders and Spanish officials.41 By mid-1792 a clear line of argument had developed. Spain, Philadelphians read, “if she did not excite [the insurrection], sanctioned it by a warm support in a clandestine manner.”42 Such explanations were sensational, but they were not surprising. They followed presumptions about insurrections’ causes. The role purportedly played by Spain, for example, followed a perception of Spanish policy and proximity among Anglo- (and African) Americans that was nearly a century old: Spanish holdings were places of refuge and had long been seen as enticements to escape and rebellion.43 As the violence in Saint Domingue continued, a second framework emerged—one equally familiar—by which contemporary observers could explain what they were seeing there. Blacks, after all, had forged spaces outside of slavery before. These groups were known as maroons and were accepted fea-

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tures of Caribbean society. Composed of escapees from plantations, maroon bands were typically militarized communities that had established fiercely defended enclaves, usually in mountainous or secluded interior spaces.44 After 1739, maroon groups in Jamaica achieved quasi-independence through a series of treaties that recognized their status in return for promises of their aid in returning runaways.45 As the insurrections evolved into war in the North, Americans drew parallels between the insurgent armies and this type of result. In the winter months of 1791 readers learned of white offensives in Petite Anse and Limbé, reports that provided glimpses of the insurgent leaders. An order from Jean-François, seemingly calling for the death of Boukman, was found on one dead rebel’s body.46 The death of the “black chief king Bookman” was noted later.47 Witnesses recognized this sort of thing: it was “the fierce and despotic mode of military command that is customary on the Guinea coast in Africa,” according to one, the kind of organization that typified maroon bands.48 Among the bad news that merchant Nathaniel Cutting conveyed from Cap Français in late November 1791 was the rumor that “the ancient maroon negroes” were joining the “Brigands who have recently scatter’d firebrands and death” across the North.49 Another writer suggested that Jamaican maroon troops be brought in to put the rebellion down, since Saint Domingue was on a similar course. “We have every reason to suppose that this insurrection will have a conclusion similar to [the] former one in Jamaica,” this observer wrote, “the negroes retiring into inaccessible mountains, where they will bid defiance, and in the end force us to declare them independent to prevent their invasions and robberies.”50 Maroons, and the marginal but permanent liberty that they evoked, proved to be more enduring than royalists as vehicles for giving structure to the “liberty” the violence sought to achieve. Reports coming out of the North suggested that the insurgents had specific goals, desires that provided gauges for the liberty they were pursuing. French minister to the United States Jean Baptiste Ternant unwittingly captured the crux of the picture when he explained that the insurgents sought “to exterminate all the whites[,] their tirants, and to destroy all the sugar plantations,” and quoted captured fighters saying “ ‘this is our land . . . we have tilled and watered it long enough with our sweats and blood to seize it as our property.’ ”51 The insurgents, though their bid for self-control constituted an essential reversal of the slave system, also looked to control their own labor. They pushed for land. They sought to follow leaders who they judged would best accomplish those ends. One band of blacks that approached

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white troops near Haut du Cap in late 1791 offered to lay down their arms in exchange for three days free from plantation work. Furious when their request was rejected, they hacked six of the seven white message bearers to death (only one, “formerly of Philadelphia,” returned alive). “The negroes had ceased to burn and destroy,” one report of the incident noted, “as they intended to preserve what was left for their own enjoyment.”52 Other like episodes accentuated the purposefulness behind the rebels’ exploits.53 Early in 1792 Philadelphia mariner John Latimer explained that “the negroes had made some proposals to surrender.”54 This proved to be an attempt by Jean-François and Biassou, who had emerged as the most prominent insurgent leaders, to broker an exchange of peace for their own personal freedom, a measure of amelioration of slave conditions, and a general pardon for those who had fought.55 The maneuver failed, most likely because the bulk of the insurgents rejected its terms.56 By spring 1792, readers in Philadelphia learned that the violence had resumed. “The treaty with them is entirely laid aside, and they have again begun depredations with additional vigor,” one letter explained before detailing a bloody attack made by Biassou’s forces outside of Cap Français.57 The advent of slave violence in other portions of Saint Domingue extended this conception of slave motives and generalized them. Fighting in the West and South was conditioned by the ongoing struggles by free coloreds for civic equality. Gens de couleur groups in both provinces turned to slaves as allies, confident that they could reassert control and maintain slavery afterward. In both areas, however, the slave groups armed by the warring factions took measures in different directions. Bands in the mountains outside of Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes formed around charismatic leaders. Some slaves in the South, in fact, had taken up arms before the August insurrections in the North. A group at Port Salut had demanded three free days to themselves each week in January 1791. By spring 1792, after the April 4 decree had cemented the alliance between pro-revolutionary whites and the gens de couleur, André Rigaud, a free colored leader active in the West, sought to disarm the southern insurgents. This effort was met with widespread resistance and sparked a series of large-scale insurrections across the region.58 Witnesses to these developments, first in the colony and then in Philadelphia, heard of them with the news from the North roaring in their ears. Reasonably enough, they characterized the various insurgencies as cut from the same cloth. “We hear, that the spirit of insurrection had been the cause of no

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actual mischief,” one editor summarizing the news from the western port of Léogane told, “but that the effects of it were every moment dreaded.”59 Later, once violence had begun, a Boston correspondent imputed it to “the example” of the slaves in the North, which, “like the effect of a epidemical disease, [had] communicated itself ” to other areas, bringing “horror and devastation” wherever it touched.60 Whether treated as a spirit or a pathogen, observations such as these conveyed the sense that slave violence, no matter the place or context, was of a piece. The “example” from the North was a course of action that was available and relevant elsewhere. In relating the different episodes of violence over space, observers, though they made black acts abnormal and alien, allowed for their reason. In depicting the insurgents’ organization, the source of their cohesion, and their projected ends, white accounts made the slaves’ violence cogent, if threatening. The “liberty” it was pointed toward was rational, and potentially expansive. The “spread” of revolt to the West in late 1791 and early 1792 encapsulates that potential. Early in April 1792, amid the news of free colored–white struggles around Port-au-Prince and the continuing tales of woe from the North, Philadelphia readers learned of a revolt at Léogane the previous month. Slaves had risen and marched on the town. They had been driven back after attempting to burn it. Afterward, they had set the surrounding plantations alight.61 These accounts likely describe the activities of slaves led by Romaine Rivière, a free colored of Spanish descent. Also known as “Romaine-la-prophétesse” (perhaps because of his claims that he spoke for the Virgin Mary), Rivière gathered followers among slaves between Léogane and Jacmel using a combination of messianic religious imagery, calls for freedom, and charges for vengeance. Centered around his plantation at Trou Coffy, Rivière’s movement reached into Léogane toward the end of 1791, at which point he gained control over the local government. By spring 1792 he and his followers had moved outward into adjoining areas, gathering and arming followers, and destroying sugar and coffee plantations as they went.62 Philadelphia reports provided glimpses of these developments. One relayed that the slaves were led by “some Spanish creoles”; another identified the “gang from Trou Caffee” as the nucleus of the attacks.63 While the specifics of Rivière’s call to arms went unmentioned, these and other accounts did convey the racialized solidarity that underpinned it. The insurgents were understood as a single entity acting by a common design. The “gang” gathered adherents through an active process. What was distilled into the “spread” of the insurrection actually

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consisted of several stages. The first was to “rise,” when slaves physically removed themselves from their plantations. One report explained that they had “[begun] to leave their masters[’] service some time past.” Instead of simply running away or lurking on the margins, this flight was followed by a “gathering.” More than one observer described the slaves as having “embodied” on the plains. What had been an area where things were “tranquil” now became a place of violence. Slaves joined the embodied group “immediately” and “in great numbers.” The revolt became “general.” The next stage involved movement. Most slaves, reports agreed, joined the rebellion after a force of free coloreds allied with the French civil commissary St. Leger had driven the band out of Léogane. Dividing their forces in order to more efficiently burn the surrounding plantations, the slave groups proceeded to the high grounds in the interior, where it was presumed their enemies could not follow. The path to liberty progressed from revolt, to embodiment, to destruction, and finally to separation.64 The cloud of violence obscured some of this from observers, but the nature of the challenge this and other similar episodes presented was clear. Reports differed over the danger presented by the free coloreds and whether the slaves were extensions of their struggles; most counted the rebellion as over when Léogane was abandoned. Accounts from there, however, recognized that the slave system had been compromised. A final report told that the “rebellion in Leogane is in a great degree crushed” and claimed that its leaders had been captured and killed.65 The “gang from Trou Caffee” and other bands, however, continued. Several months later a captain arriving from Saint Marc noted that many of the “rebel blacks” were still “determined vigorously to hold out.” Their intransigence had a widespread impact, even on slaves who had not participated in the fighting: “Though they still remain with their masters, they work but little, and ask two days in the weeks for themselves. The whites seeing the impolicy of severity in the present state of things, are obliged to wink at many irregularities; which, however, if suffered to continue, may become rooted habits, and produce the worst of consequences to the prosperity of the colony, under its present regimen.”66 Rivière and those who followed him, both literally in the hills and figuratively from afar, embodied a direct challenge to slavery. They challenged it when they attacked and burned but also by the example they provided, moments in which they refuted the chattel principle and undercut white authority. That the end point of this challenge involved a physical withdrawal was significant, and careful readers in Philadelphia might have noted as much. From

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the very start of the insurrections, observers paired generalizations about black unrest with speculations involving their collective removal, in particular to Saint Domingue’s mountainous interior. Half of the slaves “lost” because of the violence, one report from the North calculated, were either dead or “wild in the mountains, to which there is no access.”67 Slaves in the West had “come down” to fight at Léogane.68 Free coloreds had “retired to the mountains” outside Portau-Prince, joining the slaves already encamped there.69 Reports from the North in 1792 and 1793 told of white offensives against the insurgents in the mountains near the Spanish border.70 Mountains had long been associated with maroon enclaves. Taking to the high ground was not only a strategic move, it was also an appropriation of control over a slave’s personal whereabouts that fundamentally negated slavery. Slaves in the mountains were no longer slaves. White observers understood. “We are told . . . that most of the Slaves in the Southern and some in the Western Department of the Colony are actually in Insurrection,” Nathaniel Cutting reported from Cap Français in March 1792. “I begin to be of opinion that it will be most prudent for Government to enter into a Treaty with them similar to that which the Government of Jamaica formerly made with the Maroon Negroes in that Island.” 71 Characterizations of slaves who had achieved this state tended to be expressed through designations that were negative but vague: they were “wild,” “defiant,” and “troublesome.” The unfolding violence in the South, however, offered greater specifics. There, a group of affiliated rebel bands established a stronghold in a mountainous region known as Les Platons. From this center, they offered a challenge to slavery whose terms were audible even in Philadelphia. The Platons insurgents’ primary leaders were Armand and Maréchal (or Martial), men who had been armed by free colored groups sometime in mid1791. Meeting with white officials after rebuffing André Rigaud’s attempt to disarm their fighters, they presented demands that echoed those made by JeanFrançois and Biassou in the North: freedom for a limited number of their followers, three free days for all slaves each week, and the abolition of the whip.72 When these terms were rejected, they returned to their base, where they were joined by additional escapees from surrounding areas. Philadelphians first became aware of these doings when they read that Armand and Maréchal had met with Governor Blanchelande. While he deliberated over their demands, the Platons rebels were depicted burning plantations and taking captives.73 Defeated at the negotiation table, Blanchelande was then defeated on the field and would shortly thereafter be deported to France and the guillotine.74

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The insurgents of the Platons now had the whites and free coloreds of Les Cayes on the defensive and so increased their demands. First they required the general emancipation of all of their followers and three free days for all slaves, a shift witnessed by a Philadelphia ship captain.75 After further dithering on the part of the Provincial Assembly, they made the price of peace freedom for “all those who are in a state of insurrection,” as a letter in Philadelphia described it, as well as “Les Platoons (a delightful coffee country in the mountain) for themselves.” 76 This last component was vital. After threatening to burn Les Cayes, Armand and Maréchal secured a promise from the Assembly of freedom and arms for seven hundred of their number, an arrangement that would also establish them as a rural police force. As in the North, this solution served the rebels’ leaders better than the main body of insurgents, who rejected it. A large group “would not accept freedom without land,” one captain noted, “and have retired to the mountains.” 77 The maroons of the Platons would be forced to retreat onto higher ground in early 1793. A captain reported in the spring of that year that “the revolted Negroes still possess the high country in that quarter, and are very troublesome even in the plantations retained by the whites, contiguous to the town.” 78 The continued presence of these self-liberated slaves would be a factor in the South throughout the decade. Slaves such as those of the Platons, the bands that parleyed with troops in the North, Jean-François and Biassou, and Rivière’s “gang” all pushed toward a reversal of the system of slavery—toward “liberty”—in terms that were discernible in Philadelphia. Subsequent developments might make the Platons maroons seem marginal, the slave bands “wild,” and Jean-François and Biassou Spanish, but their various demands, despite their differences, pointed toward measures of group autonomy and personal self-control. Black resistance in Saint Domingue was not limited to the slitting of white throats, though it certainly included that act. That image, however, would tend to drown out other actions that also represented the aspiration for liberty. In this way, white observers described a rebellion whose goal was their own eradication—epitomized by the image of a baby on a pike. Black liberty, however, was not predicated on that killing. Black words and actions demonstrated an understanding that “killing” slavery, not (necessarily) their masters, was the true end of their rebellion. In this framework, each of the kinds of efforts outlined above constituted a freedom act, an effort to overturn the system by which slaves were considered the property of another human. This was a far more radical and subversive goal than even the most hysterical colonist in Saint Domingue could admit.

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Connecting Revolutionary Violence Observers in Philadelphia had more options than those in the colony, or in some other parts of the United States, in interpreting these acts. The horror by which Saint Domingue was understood was influential in the city, but other considerations pushed against the reductionism that came to dominate elsewhere. While the insurgents’ radicalism lay beyond the ken of most, Philadelphia’s particular past produced questions among people confronting the challenge embodied by the insurrections. The range of their answers reveals the fluidity of American politics in the early 1790s: rebellion in Saint Domingue made Philadelphians think about their own Revolutionary settlement. In addition to sending a delegation to France after the insurrections began, the General Assembly at Cap Français had sent agents around the Caribbean and the United States. The Assembly’s appeals were targeted, their terms attuned to the specific audience at hand; the results they achieved were mixed. Speaking in Jamaica, Philadelphians read, they reminded the British colonists that they had an “interest” in Saint Domingue’s problems, since both colonies had been “exposed to danger from the spirit of philosophy” that had sparked the slave revolt. Radical ideas and policies in Paris “being equally inimical to your system, would plunge you into the same misfortunes, if the crime were once completed.” 79 The Jamaican government promptly sent naval vessels, arms, and aid across the Windward Passage.80 A similar call to Cuba met a different reception. Spanish officials saw the delegates as representatives of the French Revolution and treated them “with contempt, telling them that they would have no connexion with a nation without religion; and that their present calamities were a just judgment upon them for the injustice done their King.”81 In the United States, the delegates’ appeal was commandeered by Minister Ternant, who warily made it into a call for aid between allies.82 This was successful: the Washington administration would provide funds and arms to the colony, drawing down the debt the United States had accumulated in France during the War for Independence.83 In South Carolina, however, the planters of Saint Domingue met a more visceral connection. There, Governor Charles Pinckney reacted as a fellow slaveholder. Explaining his response to George Washington, he wrote that insurrections were “particularly unpleasant to us who live in Countries where Slaves abound.” To the Saint Domingue delegation visiting Charleston he fretted over the possibility that the violence would spread, given “how nearly similar the situation of the southern States and St. Domingo are in

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the possession of Slaves.” South Carolina and Saint Domingue were connected by a common threat. Since “a day may arrive when [we] are exposed to the same insurrections, we cannot but sensibly feel for your situation.”84 If the calls for aid produced clear (if contrasting) responses in places like Cuba and Charleston, in Philadelphia they revealed the hybrid character of contemporary ideas about the connections between France, its colony, and the United States. Saint Domingue’s plight revealed tensions in Philadelphia— seam lines between different understandings of what the essence of the relationship between the two places was. When M. Roustan arrived in the city from Saint Domingue on September 20, 1791, with a plea for aid, the Pennsylvania Assembly sprang into action, producing a bill that would allow Governor Thomas Mifflin to purchase provisions for the relief of Cap Français and to charter two vessels to bring them there, returning with any colonists who wanted to flee.85 For Representative Richard Wells of Philadelphia, this was a humanitarian act. Cap Français was “closely besieged by an enraged and brutal multitude of Negroes and Mulattoes,” he argued. The legislators, “as citizens of the world,” were “duty bound to relieve our fellow creatures in an hour of such terror and misery.” 86 Help given out of sympathy, however, presented a variety of targets; that borne of empathy raised a host of problems. The passive distinction Wells drew between the “multitude” outside Le Cap and the global citizens within—“fellow creatures” deserving aid—spurred an amendment the following day. Relying on new information published by Benjamin Franklin Bache, Francis Gurney of Philadelphia explained that the free coloreds were actually fighting against the insurgents. He successfully moved that the language deriding “those people” be removed from the bill.87 Next, Representative Samuel Maclay moved to similarly mute the language describing the slaves as “a murdering and desperate host.” Might not the world find “an inconsistency in the Legislature of this state,” he asked, “which had lately emerged from the shackles of monarchy, and risked all for the liberty they now enjoy to become the allies of the oppressors of people who were contending for that liberty in any part of the world?” To deny the slaves of Saint Domingue the “natural right of self-preservation common to all men,” in fact, was to undermine the ideals of the nascent American nation. “Whilst we are stigmatizing those unhappy people for attempting their dernier resort,” he argued, “we are stigmatizing ourselves.”88 The final bill would simply authorize the governor to send provisions to Cap Français without reference to the forces before it.89

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This omission was significant. The expenditure was authorized, tacitly affirming a philanthropic commitment based on whiteness but refusing to articulate the precise relationship between Pennsylvania and the sides at war on the Plaine du Nord. As noted, slavery was the subject of critical public commentary at this stage of the eighteenth century, and particularly so in Philadelphia, the polestar of organized American abolitionism. The reception of the images of black violence from Saint Domingue was filtered through that critique, at once underscoring the stakes involved in choosing between the sides and highlighting the quandary the choice caused. For a relatively brief moment, ideas circulated about the violence that made it out to be an expression of a desire for liberty that was roughly commensurate with the negation of slavery that the insurgents were acting out. The very terms of that acceptance, however, contained the seeds of its limitations. Images of violence, the more stark threat provided by the insurgents’ ongoing challenge, would prove to be Saint Domingue’s more lasting export. Unsurprisingly, given the ongoing and overlapping debate over free colored civic equality, most interpreters related the “liberty” slaves sought to ideas about liberty being contested in France. American consul Sylvanus Bourne wrote to Thomas Jefferson weeks after the initial insurrections began, telling that “the cry of ‘les droits de l’homme’ is echoed thro their Camp.”90 Another early report similarly quoted the rebels as saying they wanted “to enjoy the liberty they are entitled to by the Rights of Man.”91 Even those who doubted this connection admitted that the idea was popular. “They are spurred on by the [lure] of plunder, carnage, and conflagration,” a Cap Français merchant wrote in October 1791, “not by the spirit of liberty, as some folks pretend.”92 For observers such as these, the insurgents’ motive was violence itself. “Men actuated by the love of liberty, in any revolt will manifest in their actions some tokens of the generous principle upon which the revolt is founded,” Philadelphians read around the time of the attempted negotiations of Jean-François and Biassou; “this has not been the case with the negroes [who] have acted on all occasions with the most relentless barbarity.”93 Nathaniel Cutting judged the violence to be “only the ebullitions of uncultivated spirits, which have made a sudden transition from the extreme ignorance and despotic restraint, to certain mistaken ideas of the rights of man, and that unbridled licentiousness consequent thereto.”94 Among European commentators, many of whom were read in Philadelphia, making violence into an articulation of the slaves’ intent was a convenient way to wrap anxieties about the Revolution in France around the disruptions in the

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Caribbean, extending their censure of the “fanaticism” of civic equality to embrace ideas of freedom for slaves as well. The 1792 address of the Saint Domingue delegates before the National Assembly, in addition to providing the enduring image of the child on the pike, laid the blame on the antislavery activist Abbé Grégoire and the other “meddlers” of the Amis des Noirs who had broadcast the notion that slaves were also possessors of the “Rights of Man.” Printed in Philadelphia under the title A Particular Account of the Commencement and Progress of the Insurrection of the Negroes of St. Domingo, the address portrayed the slaves as happy until they were “seduced” by this false notion. Corrupted and misled, these “savage men [who] are incapable of knowing in what true social liberty consists, or of enjoying it with moderation,” had been set loose on the colony. The result would be a return to the “atrocities of Africa” from which both whites and blacks would suffer. A “volcano” had been set loose upon the world. “What a lesson for the Amis des Noirs!” the delegates exclaimed. “Posterity will be shocked at so many cruelties, committed in the names of philosophy and liberty,” they forecast, “can it be doubted . . . that our ruin is their work?” 95 Other planter voices ran with this portrait. The Particular Account had identified the Amis as “those who have seconded the English project for abolishing the Slave-Trade,” and British opponents of that effort could be read in Philadelphia embracing the connection.96 “These insurrections,” a British author wrote in early 1792, “are the natural fruits of what has been said and done by the Society of the Amis des Noirs, and of Mr. Wilberforce’s wild visions respecting the emancipation of the negroes . . . henceforth in England.” The abolitionist’s “clamorous wailings” were “exhortations to the blacks to destroy the whites.”97 The charge, in fact, had been made before. In late 1789 Philadelphia activist William Dillwyn wrote to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society from London to tell of rumors that Thomas Clarkson and other abolitionists “had sent 10,000 stand of arms to encourage the Slaves of St. Domingo to assert their natural rights.”98 Months before the news broke of the insurrections around Cap Français, Philadelphians read portions of a debate in Parliament in which Wilberforce was held accountable for “a most violent commotion” in the Windward island of Dominica.99 The magnitude of the violence in Saint Domingue sharpened this construction, producing a significant blow to the burgeoning promise of British antislavery.100 Tarred in this manner, slave violence could be folded into a more general slur upon France as a whole. Just months after Philadelphians read Edmund

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Burke’s smear of egalitarian ideals as a Pandora’s box in the French West Indies, other writers blamed the French Revolution specifically for the colony’s new round of woes. The insurrections, one judged, were proof that “neither the rights of man—the leveling of distinctions—the destruction of royalty, or the banishment of religion, will be able to secure those valuable possessions to the tyrannical usurpation of the new democracy.”101 “Enthusiasts” such as Grégoire (and Wilberforce) had created “A Fire-ship, turned loose upon the colonial Negroes for [the colonies’] destruction.”102 “French” ideas, by this depiction, had seeped into slave societies, producing a dangerous “spirit of revolt.”103 One report suggested that some even wanted to curtail the entry of French books to fend off this evil: “They seem as if they would wish to interdict the language itself, since it has become the vehicle of the sentiments of freedom.”104 Like the Particular Account authors, these writers posited slavery as a reasonable and humane institution, one that contained the anarchy of barbaric insurrection—a containment compromised by the inappropriate interference of misguided agitators. Pro-abolition voices would not take this sitting down, but they shared the assumption about slave violence with their opponents that made it out to be a natural force. Rather than being produced by malicious French ideas, however, they saw insurrection as generated by the horrors of slavery itself. British abolitionist Percival Stockdale, in a letter to Granville Sharp published late in 1791 and read in Philadelphia, balked at the notion that violence revealed the slaves to be “savages.” Their “ravages,” he argued, were proof of their humanity: “we are (to speak properly) the savages; the Africans act like men; like beings endowed with rational, and immortal minds.”105 Insurrection came not from outside interference but from the cruelties of the slave owners themselves. Another British abolitionist, William Roscoe, responded to the insurrections with chagrin, but not with surprise. “When the native ferocity of Africa is sharpened by the deep sense of long-continued injury,” he reasoned, “who shall set the bounds to its revenge?” Antislavery ideals were not to blame; their self-evidence and justice only awakened slaves to action. “Is not the love of freedom contagious?” Roscoe asked.106 Other writers joined in this approach, in particular by pointing to the slave trade as an exemplar of the cruelty inherent to the system that sparked slave resistance. “WHOEVER has read the history of the West-India islands,” one opinion read, “must know, . . . that the slave-trade itself is the sole CAUSE of insurrections.”107 Pronouncements such as these made slavery a focal point for efforts to un-

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derstand radical political ideas, especially those emanating from France. The prevalence of the efforts against the slave trade, for example, led Philip Freneau to see the movement “as one of the benign effects of that philanthropic philosophy, whose sun is rising upon mankind.”108 Another writer surmised that abolition would let Britain “fall in with the natural current of things,” making it “the first nation to recognize the rights of men of whatever colour.”109 While such assertions allowed slave violence a progressive role in this advance, it was more of a signal—a call for (white) action—than something salutary on its own. It was around this period that the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, thwarted in an effort to persuade Congress to act nationally against slavery, turned to publicizing the peaceful model for emancipation that Pennsylvania offered to the world.110 Still, the concerns that spurred Samuel Maclay to offer his amendment to the Pennsylvania bill for aid to Cap Français suggest that other lessons were in the air. In several instances, individuals in and around Philadelphia were inspired by the insurgents to embrace black violence as a valid expression of the ideals of the age. Foremost among these was Abraham Bishop, a young Connecticut-born politico and newspaper editor who, at this stage of his career, embraced a radical democratic sensibility that stemmed from Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Near the end of 1791 Bishop penned a series of writings collectively entitled “RIGHTS OF BLACK MEN” for the Boston Argus; Philadelphians read them during the first two weeks of December.111 For Bishop, the events in Saint Domingue were emblematic of a universal pattern of struggle. The insurrections, as he described them, had nothing to do with French policy or abolitionist interference. Instead, the violence was an urgent expression of an ongoing fight against tyranny in all forms. As such, he explained, the blacks of the Plaine du Nord were acting in parallel with the patriots of Lexington, Concord, Saratoga, and Yorktown. Having “never voluntarily resigned that freedom” that was the natural possession of all humanity, they were “asserting those rights by the sword, which it was impossible to secure by mild measures.” Their fury in doing so was a product of their bondage. “If their Lords had kept them in savage ignorance, shall they be blamed that they fight like savages?” he asked. “Had they been treated with mildness, perhaps their measures had been more mild.” Where Bishop departed from Stockdale or Roscoe was his insistence that those violent measures were inevitable, regardless of the mildness of the slavery imposed. For Bishop, the insurrections in Saint Domingue, like the American Revolution, were a moment of developing global and universal freedom; he

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welcomed the slaves’ violence as another chapter in the unfolding history of mankind’s struggle against despotism. Bishop was not alone in this embrace. Two printed orations circulated in Philadelphia by mid-1792, one by Connecticut lawyer and author Theodore Dwight and the other by Reverend David Rice of Kentucky. In a Fourth of July address to the Connecticut chapter of the Society of the Cincinnati, Dwight characterized black violence as “a noble, vigorous, and manly attack on their oppressors” and decided that “justice must behold with a smile of approbation, the rapid progress of the slaves to triumph and independence.”112 Rice suggested that Americans look to Saint Domingue to “see the sable, let me say, the brave sons of Africa, engaged in a noble conflict,” in which they were “sacrificing their lives on the altar of liberty.”113 Bishop, however, offered the most impassioned response. Outraged by what he considered American hypocrisy, he in effect answered the question that Representative Maclay had asked the Pennsylvania Assembly: to aid colonial whites would be to spurn the quintessence of the American Revolution. He railed against white Americans’ horrified reaction to the violence and mocked the phlegmatic timidity of American abolition societies. Revolutionaries who had coined slogans such as “Liberty or Death” and “all men are equal” on their own behalf betrayed their own principles when they now said “it is enough” when witnessing blacks fight for freedom.114 “Let us be consistent Americans,” he declared, “if we justify our own conduct in the late glorious Revolution, let us justify those who, in a cause like ours fight with equal bravery.”115 This was more than an issue of constancy. Adherence to these principles was being faithful to ideals vital to the success of the new republic. Americans had sworn oaths pledging universal liberty in order to secure God’s favor and their own victory. In practice, Bishop cautioned, those promises had lagged. “Zealous in the theory of liberty, we talked in high strains about the equal rights of man,” he cried, “provided that we white men can enjoy the whole of them.”116 Americans’ hostility to developments in Saint Domingue suggested the nation was now on the wrong side of Providence. God Himself “is taking his own way to emancipate these blacks,” he explained. “Not waiting for your tardy measures, votes and corresponding letters, he has put [it] into their hearts to assert their own cause. He is leading them to work out their political salvation, as he led you to do it. He is teaching them, as he taught you, that freedom from the tyranny of men is to be had only at the price of blood. By this lesson, he instructs them, as he did you, in the value of freedom.”117

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Getting these lessons wrong had consequences. Rice held up the “tyranny and inconsistency” of an America that abided slavery. “A slave,” he wrote, “is declared by the united voice of America, to be by nature free . . . yet [is] retained in slavery.” This was a “striking instance of a people carrying on war in defence of principles, which they are actually and avowedly destroying by legal force.”118 The same disjunction even worked its way into antislavery activist Warner Mifflin’s dreams, where he argued with a shadowy figure who criticized the slaves for “being so bad as to break out.” Mifflin’s answer suggested his adversary’s sense of danger was off-kilter: the insurgents were not the real threat; being on the wrong side of history was. God had caused “a kind of itching” to “runn through the blood of their veins so as that they would not be easy but have a craveing for Liberty,” Mifflin explained in his dream. Describing it later, he reflected that the feeling was “a little like the Americans had” in making their own Revolution. These musings brought the historical moment at hand into high relief. The slaves of Saint Domingue were a spur: “if we can do any thing to save our Country it ought not to be omitted,” Mifflin wrote, worrying that the “ever lasting Arm of Power” operating in Saint Domingue might soon be at work in the American South.119 By this understanding Saint Domingue was a herald of the fate of the American Revolution itself. It prompted actions that others considered fanatical but that its adherents saw as essential. This reaction to the insurrections sprang from a particular blend of cosmopolitan notions of connection, universalist understandings of human rights, and millennial sensibilities about revolution. It was a potent brew, if only among a certain swath of Americans. Slavery’s violence had long been one of the reasons to oppose the institution. In a 1785 pamphlet Benjamin Franklin asked readers to imagine their sugar as “not merely spotted, but thoroughly dyed scarlet in grain,” a writing excerpted in Philadelphia newspapers late in 1791.120 Those same newspapers were replete with extracts, articles, and anecdotes describing slavery’s brutality and its effects on master and slave alike. These depictions often asked readers to place themselves in relation to slavery’s victims.121 In one example a defiant slave drowned himself rather than accept punishment from a ship captain, shouting “I defy your tyranny!” before plunging beneath the waves.122 In another, a Virginia slave murdered his abusive overseer when “rouzed, at length, to a manly sense of his own nature, he exerted the superior strength and spirit with which Heaven had endowed him.”123 Similarly, other accounts told of blacks “emancipating themselves” and “regaining” their natural freedom through various acts of self-assertion.124 Like William Roscoe and the

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white Dominguans who penned A Particular Account, these conceptions posed blacks as idealized natural men, untutored and even primal. If those writers disagreed over the function the institution of slavery played with regard to black violence—clamping down on it by one understanding, accelerating it by the other—they agreed that enslaved blacks were explosive and that they were so because of their “savage” nature. For radical democrats like Bishop, as well as for less dramatic authors, the early 1790s were a fertile moment to take a step further, imbuing the notion of rights, and of man, with greater power and capaciousness than the European abolitionists reacting to Saint Domingue would do.125 “If Freedom depends on colour,” Bishop reasoned, “we have only to seek for the whitest man in the world, that we may find the freest, and for the blackest, that we may find the greatest slave.”126 The illogic of that proposition led to a sense of rights that was universal and that demanded immediate implementation. The ideals of the American Revolution, which had reverberated to the “ends of the earth,” had not maintained that “all white men are free, but all men are free.”127 To tamper with this truth was to risk all; to temporize was to invalidate it entirely. Providentially minded clergy such as Rice agreed. “Will the colour of my skin prove a sufficient defence against . . . injustice and cruelty?” he asked. “Will straight hair defend me against the blow which falls so heavily on the woolly head?”128 Patriots such as Dwight emphasized the American origins of this impetus, but all partook in treating the rights of black men as the “Rights of Man,” taking from Thomas Paine’s title more than the Declaration made by the French National Assembly.129 In Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Dickinson College president Charles Nisbet wrote to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to explain that only “a Negro war, which may probably break out soon,” would snap slaveholders out of their stupor. He suggested (somewhat flippantly) that the society send copies of “Paine’s Pamphlets” among blacks in the South.130 These writers presented a single revolution for liberty, orchestrated by God, under way at once in America, France, and Saint Domingue. In the French colony, Bishop averred, the “Universal Father” was demonstrating that “of one blood, he has created all nations of men that dwell on the face of the earth,” a formulation that was familiar in Philadelphia.131 He beseeched his fellow Americans to follow the next logical step and to embrace the slaves’ efforts. “If that, which is the rights of blacks cannot be quietly obtained,” he wrote, “I wish success to their arms, with all my heart, and lament, that it is not in my power to afford them effectual assistance.” “Decided Americans,” he was convinced, would do the same.132

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Of course, many Americans would not agree to Bishop’s terms. The radical ideas prompted by the insurgents of Saint Domingue are important as demonstrations of the latent possibilities in American Revolutionary ideology. The universalist understanding of slaves as fellow men and the cosmopolitan orientation that connected their struggles to others against oppression expanded the scope of the “liberty” that the American Revolution promised. This logic, however, was not inescapable, and other conclusions were possible. Cosmopolitan connections could just as easily lead to comparisons that particularized, rather than universalized, the problem of slavery. Although American commentators generally agreed that slavery was wrong or sinful and that it would end, this segmentation allowed for the possibility that other mechanisms than the innate human right to liberty would drive that change. Violence on the part of slaves might well be a sign of the sins of specific slave regimes, not a signal of the righteous unraveling of the system as a whole. This interpretation offered opportunities to contrast American slavery with that in the Caribbean. A Charleston letter written shortly after the insurrections began touted a banner rice crop in South Carolina, pointing to the benevolent treatment of the area’s slaves “contrary to what is observed of the West-Indies.”133 “SAVILLON,” a writer from Maryland, echoed the arguments of William Roscoe but to different ends. “Were a true statement of the origins of these commotions to be given,” he observed, “there would not perhaps appear much reason for the whites to expect a different mode of procedure from men who have been uniformly conversant all their lives with scenes of barbarity . . . —from such breasts revenge is not easily eradicated.” The brutality of Caribbean slavery had brutalized the enslaved people, he reasoned, and the world should not be surprised “if the utmost detestation for white people should be unalterably fixed in the sable race.” Violent resistance was natural, even glorious, but “SAVILLON” was no advocate of emancipation. Saint Domingue’s slaves were agents of God’s retribution, but the lesson colonial whites were to take was to “never transgress the laws of humanity in their conduct towards those whom providence has permitted to be under their authority.”134 Rather than placing events in Saint Domingue in the context of a larger “age” of Revolution, interpretations like this privileged the American Revolution, either as an exceptional event or as a harbinger for future change. In either case, the end of slavery that came under its auspices was slow and under the direction of whites, who would judge when the damages slavery entailed upon blacks were sufficiently undone so as to allow them to (re)join society in the

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equal capacity nature had ordained. The “liberty” embodied by the insurgents in Saint Domingue fundamentally disordered this conception; their freedom acts challenged belief in the need for a mediated egalitarian path, a leap that most white Americans could not abide. The radical alternatives suggested by the ideas of those who could abide the leap were more than ephemeral signs of what might have been. They were an indication of an available set of conclusions—a rational pathway within the various confines of American ideology—which events on Saint Domingue spurred some Americans to consider. That they did not prompt action—the fact that M. Roustan’s mission in Philadelphia was a success—does not invalidate their cogency or even necessarily reveal their impotence. With the concurrent conversations about free colored equality, these words admitted the possibility of a world without slavery. To view them simply as marginalia is to presuppose their ultimate fate rather than to explain the reasons behind it. In the end, what is important about the presence, and fate, of these ideas are the specific features of the logic at work behind them that did not take hold. Radical ideas about humanity and revolution would resonate into the 1790s, but expressions like those of Abraham Bishop made the American Revolution the font of universal and transnational values, decentering the birth of the United States and making it representative, not exceptional. This was the feature that made ideas such as his a cul-de-sac rather than a widely traveled path. The deterioration of a purely “American” Revolutionary antislavery was not the end of public discourse that associated revolution with emancipation, however. As we will see, further developments in Saint Domingue led Francophiles to embrace a strain of antislavery paired with the Revolution in France. Rather than a cosmopolitanism rooted in universal human rights, this was a connection centered around national identities: Americans looked to France as a fellow republic, not as a hope for mankind. This national lens was more lasting as an interpretive pathway. Following it, however, crucially sapped the elements in American Revolutionary ideology that sought to square the young republic with the biblical edict that men were “of one blood.” Both “Rusticus” and “Africanus” understood as much in 1790. The violence in Saint Domingue accelerated the process by which racial difference, always problematic for white antislavery thinkers, acquired more salience and explanatory capacity.

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French Negroes, Dangerous Neighbors The saga of a group of Dominguan slaves known as Les Suisses (“the Swiss”) forecast this declension and encapsulated its moving parts. Armed for the most part by free coloreds in the West province, the Suisses were participants in the conflict that erupted there in late 1791, specifically in the hilly region outside Port-au-Prince. Once the free colored–white alliance had brought peace to the region, however, these allies became liabilities. Part of their agreement was that the Suisses be disarmed, captured, and removed from the colony. Accordingly, 240 of them were forced onto a French vessel and brought to an uninhabited island near British Honduras. There, some were sold as slaves and the rest left to starve. Nearby planters, however, nervous about the dangerous effect these rebels might have on their own slaves, arranged to have the survivors sent to Jamaica. In early 1792 the Jamaican government angrily deported the group on the same basis, sending them to Governor Blanchelande at Cap Français rather than to the coalition at Port-au-Prince. Saint Domingue’s Colonial Assembly, profuse in its apologies, ordered those Suisses who were still alive to be held in a prison ship off the desolate coast of Môle Saint Nicolas. Sixty were executed outright, their bodies decapitated and the heads thrown into the sea. The rest were left to die. By early 1793 only twenty were still alive.135 The bits of this story that Americans read were strained through the conflict between Blanchelande and the western white–free colored alliance and were tainted by the deep suspicions among Jamaican whites toward those in Saint Domingue who had brought slaves into the fight. In both cases, the Suisses were made out to be the victims of the deceitful free coloreds, whose role in the burning of Port-au-Prince still resonated suspiciously in Philadelphia newspapers. To gain the slaves’ support, accounts told, the free coloreds had promised them liberty, only to renege “in a cruel manner, as might be expected from their character,” according to one Cap Français writer.136 As dupes, the Suisses were to be pitied. “These unhappy people,” a Jamaican editorialist explained, had “suffered themselves to be corrupted and seduced from their duty,” only later to be “sacrificed to [free colored] conveniency” when the “wretches” were no longer useful. The “gentleman” from Port-au-Prince who informed this judgment, however, styled them “La crème de nos brigands.”137 The identification is significant. “Brigand” was a designation that had come to be applied to the rebellious slaves by the middle of 1792. Nathaniel Cutting

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often employed it, for example, embracing the word as an epithet that captured both the savagery of the uprisings and the increasingly organized and regular actions taken by the insurgents as they fought against white forces around the North. “Brigands,” in his mind, were known for their “indiscriminate fury,” but he also used the moniker as a modifier, identifying Jean-François and Biassou as “Chiefs of the Brigands,” for example, when they met with the civil commissioners to try to negotiate peace.138 By June 1792, when all three provinces were experiencing some form of unrest, the term had become a generalized reference to slave forces, a descriptor that emphasized their external and alien quality to normal society. Observant readers would notice the same connotation when the word described factions battling in France. A French-language paper in Philadelphia translated an account that maligned the populace of Paris as brigands.139 Months later another account applied the term to the “Aristocrats” of Nantes.140 According to whites, the brigands of Saint Domingue were those who threatened the very essence of the colonial society. Cutting characterized their rise as an approach to “the verge of total Ruin!”141 A more lyrical depiction came in a widely circulated letter from Cap Français in late spring 1792. Suggesting the colony’s fate had been sealed by the sins practiced by the initial Spanish colonists on the island’s native population, the writer pointed to the tens of thousands of “brigands” in the field as agents of woe and retribution. “To give you an account of the various assassinations, murders, tortures, and excesses of almost every kind that have been committed within these few months would ask a large volume,” he explained. Physically ruined as a colony, Saint Domingue was also a dangerous neighbor. “We are willing to hope that the ocean which surrounds Hispaniola will check the extension of the spirit of revolt,” the writer explained. Otherwise, “if it should become general through the islands, it will require almost half Europe to subdue it.” Accordingly, the author planned to leave that “miserable country”: Where cruel passions the warm heart infest And banish pity from the human breast, Where hostile ruffians draw the vengeful blade And stain with infant gore the blushing shade! I turn, disgusted, from this horrid scene Or tortur’d captives, slaves, and murder’d men, To where the far fam’d Pennsylvanian stays, Renown’d for justice, and for length of days.142

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The Suisses added a new element to this sense of danger, one alluded to by the Le Cap poet. As a body of blacks who had escaped slavery, gained arms, and been a valued component of a struggle against white power, they were the kind of menacing influence that he, and others, hoped to contain. Philadelphians witnessed the fear that pervaded the instructions given by the Honduran authorities to the captain taking the surviving Suisses to Jamaica. This was a threatening cargo; the captain’s chief errand was to dispose of them. He was to pay attention to his own safety, to remain in close contact with the ship sent to accompany him, and, if prevented from fobbing the Suisses off, to dispose of them by any means possible. These were, after all, “French Negroes.” The “fears and apprehensions” they inspired derived from the “dread of a similar visitation” that the writer explained (somewhat awkwardly) would “everkeep awake in our minds.”143 “French negroes” were brigands outside of Saint Domingue. The phrase, it should be noted, was not a neologism—it had been deployed to distinguish slaves from the French West Indies from others for decades.144 Violence there, however, had changed its meaning. The Suisses became “French” in the minds and mouths of observers because they were beyond the colony’s shores, incipient bearers of its miseries. Even before the Suisses arrived, Jamaican reports expressed the threat produced by contact with slaves from Saint Domingue. While the plight of the white planters aroused sympathy, “a prudent attention to our own safety is also requisite,” one reminded as the initial insurrections raged. Those French who fled to the British island should only be allowed to bring a limited number of their slaves with them, “lest, while we are affording protection to others, we should ourselves receive a wound.”145 Nevertheless, hard on the heels of this hope came news from a Philadelphia captain that the “conversation” of slaves from Saint Domingue had given rise “to some treasonable intentions” in Jamaica.146 In late December 1791 news arrived that an insurrection had been only narrowly avoided there, leading a commentator to surmise that “the spirit of revolt” had at last “reached the island.” Echoing the image deployed by Governor Pinckney in South Carolina, the captain announced that “the flame is spreading, and threatens the West India islands with ruin and devastation.”147 The insurrections in Saint Domingue, like a fire, had the capacity to catch on elsewhere and expand. “French negroes” were its fuel. The Jamaican Assembly, one report told, would likely “prohibit the ingress of all French negroes.”148 Another observer explained that the very knowledge of events in Saint Domingue could fan the fire.149 Others looked for the “symp-

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toms of negro insurrection.”150 Like the Cap Français poet, such writers described “French negroes” as tinder to a flame, bearers of disease, or conveyors of a spirit—the source of a threat, in other words, that put society itself at risk. These images all described the same entity—the violent revolutionary negation of slavery made manifest by the insurgents—but as literary devices they represented more of an evasion in white mouths than an explanation of black actions. The denomination “French negro” at once expressed the disorder whites saw and realigned the parameters of the threat, universalizing it across colonial borders and connecting it by race. “The negroes in Jamaica,” a report in Philadelphia explained, had “intimated that they meant to follow the example of their brethren, the French negroes of Hispaniola.”151 “French negroes” were volatile exemplars to slaves everywhere. Their blackness was understood as a conduit for action. This was an idea that had been expressed from the outset of the insurrections in the North. Early reports, for example, paid great attention to the “free negro” Jean-Baptiste Cap (or Cappe), who was arrested shortly after the violence began on the suspicion that he was to lead a revolt within Cap Français. Broken on a wheel, Cap told of a plot involving “every workshop in the city” to set fires in collaboration with the armies on the plains.152 As a free black at the head of a slave revolt, Cap bridged the fault lines of both plantation society and the insurrection besetting it; what made his story make sense was the understanding that blackness made people of African descent “brethren,” regardless of their station. The designation “French negro,” therefore, articulated a logic behind slave violence that connected it across space according to a constructed notion of race. The slaves who rose up under “Romaine-la-prophétesse” near Léogane were “insurgent French negroes,” according to one report, notwithstanding the Spanish (and free colored) origins of their leader.153 A free man from St. Kitts was placed in the workhouse at Kingston, readers learned at around the same time, because of rumors that he had been part of the “dreadful outrages” in Saint Domingue.154 Those outrages marked the slaves involved and, eventually, came to emblematize any kind of violent resistance. When the so-called black Caribs rose up against the British in St. Vincent, Grenada, and St. Lucia in the spring of 1795, Philadelphians read of their brutal “intention to extirpate the English inhabitants,” as well as hints of French involvement.155 Later that fall, they would read of an insurrection among the “Moroon or free negroes” of Jamaica, the product of “French principles” or perhaps “French gold.”156 In both cases, British authorities responded aggressively with troops and martial law designed

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to separate the insurgent groups from the surrounding slave populations. Ultimately, like the Suisses, both were removed entirely from their locales, the Caribs to Central America and the Jamaican maroons to Halifax.157 That maroon groups and “French negroes” were described in the same ways and met with the same efforts to limit their contact with the rest of slave society complicates attempts to differentiate forms of resistance or to distinguish between maroon efforts and rebellion in general.158 Focusing on the language of white fear reveals a less stark divide and allows for a wider range of evidence of the “influence” of the uprisings across the Atlantic stage.159 The collective, selfdetermined, and autonomous attitude that characterized violent slave resistance in the region leaked into the descriptions read in Philadelphia. Slaves in rebellion were “brigands,” but their actions and intents were those of maroons. While maroons were typically secluded in the mountains, “French negroes,” and the “contagion” they bore, traveled the seas. This was what made them such a cause for fear. It was the power of this fear that undercut the logic of observers such as Bishop, Dwight, and Rice, a logic that married violence with revolution and revolution with universalist ideas about humanity. At this stage, “French negroes” were more “negro” than “French.” Americans felt that fear firsthand shortly after groups like the Suisses rode the waves. News of rebellious American slaves did not always expressly attract the “French” label, but their activities were treated in the same manner. Toward the end of May 1792, accounts of armed slaves in rebellion in coastal Virginia circulated in Philadelphia. Reports told of “an agreement (it is said) . . . between the heads of the insurgents at Norfolk and those on the Eastern Shore” to gather hundreds of slaves from the surrounding areas, capture munitions and weapons, and then “massacre the inhabitants” of both Norfolk and Portsmouth.160 The passive voice used in the account might well have given Philadelphian readers some pause, but whites in Virginia took the threat very seriously.161 Governor Henry Lee assumed the plot would begin with the setting of fires, after which the whites “will fall easy prey to men prepared for their slaughter.” Rather than wait for that, Norfolk’s mayor ordered increased patrols, arrested a number of slaves, and brought sixteen to trial. Though none was convicted, three were deported to Cuba.162 Similar fears rippled through slaveholding communities elsewhere. A writer from nearby King William County wrote Lee in June worrying over “very large night meetings” at which blacks elected officers.163 Rumors came from North Carolina a few months afterward that slaves were plotting “to procure themselves their liberty.”164 In Charleston whites re-

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acted by forming committees and resolving to prevent people of color who had committed “crimes” elsewhere from being allowed to enter the port. Philadelphians read their resolves just days after reading of the arrival of the Suisses in Jamaica.165 Early in 1793 these popular measures were given legal force by a state law banning the importation of slaves into South Carolina for two years.166 In Philadelphia, the moratorium was noted for the way it singled out the West Indies as a dangerous source.167 Subsequent developments would produce similar scenes in Virginia and South Carolina in 1793.168 The threat of violence, of course, was not new in these slaveholding communities. In reading about these reactions, Philadelphians were witnessing the formation of an interpretive framework that would have legs to the south; the proclivity among slaveholding Americans to see unfamiliar, and especially displaced, slaves as a particular threat would develop and proliferate. Describing this threat as “French,” however, was new. The epithet “French negroes,” by making black violence external, but also racially determined, took insurrections—real or imagined—as an opportunity for whites to mark slaves as outsiders, even if they remained within society. If the reports from Virginia were correct, enslaved people there may well have seen possibilities to violently secure new degrees of freedom in the same “French” idiom.169 Whatever ends slaves might have sought, and no matter how frightened whites became, the fundaments of power in these slave societies ensured that white ideas would play a major, even determinative, role in shaping the meaning of the violence done by “French negroes.” When Jean-François attacked the French planters at Fort Dauphin in July 1794, though he was serving as a Spanish officer, his menace derived from his position as a “black general” beyond the pale of planter control. A year and a half later, when Spain had agreed to give him up to France for trial, accounts told of his having absconded to the mountains.170 Thereafter, anxious reports told of his movements around the Caribbean. Cuban officials, because they “so much and so justly . . . dread the introduction of such a bloody miscreant,” blocked his entry to Havana.171 When a group of “brigand negroes” connected to Jean-François was found on Cumberland Island off of Georgia, a detachment of federal troops arrested and deported them to Saint Augustine.172 These ex-slaves were not “French”; nominally, they were Spanish. The fear they engendered, however, and the remedies it produced among the communities they encountered buffeted them around the Atlantic littoral. Jean-François ended up in Cadiz, where he continued to serve as a Spanish officer. Biassou died in relative obscurity in Florida. Their

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followers, captured conceptually (if not physically) by the moniker “French negro,” were left bobbing on the waves, outcasts that would undercut the safety of any slave society they reached. But “French negroes” did not land only in slave societies. Nor, as we have seen, did the French Revolution create the drive for liberty their actions expressed. Revolutionary tumult in Saint Domingue did, however, provide new opportunities for that expression and conditioned the way it was understood. At the end of 1793, France would make a grant of freedom to slaves in Saint Domingue that would completely upend the colony. Ideas about blackness may have revealed the limits of most white Americans’ cosmopolitanism by that point, but their enduring interest in all things French ensured that their ongoing discussions over slavery and revolution would be shaped by the event. As the French Revolution moved through some of its most dramatic and radical moments, Americans with their eyes on Saint Domingue would rework their emphases in articulating the phrase “French negroes.” In the process they shifted their ideas about both the Revolution in France and its relationship to concurrent changes at home.

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umors about “French negroes” flew in the haze of the long summer of 1793. By mid-July hundreds of white and black people from Saint Domingue were pouring into communities along the eastern seaboard of the United States, refugees from a set of events that many white Americans found frightening. As they understood it, during a moment of epic violence at Cap Français toward the end of June, French officials had freed the colony’s slaves. In some places, those fears formed the rumors that spread. White Virginians and Carolinians connected the refugees to a new degree of restiveness and even rebellion among their slaves that summer.1 These were “French negroes” of the sort that had inhabited white nightmares since 1791. Fear swept Philadelphia, too. Groups of beleaguered vessels began to arrive in the city in the second week of July, bearing clutches of destitute Dominguans and stories of their desperate escape “by swimming from fire and sword” at Le Cap. Thousands more were said to be on the way.2 Whatever alarm these tales of woe prompted, however, paled compared to that produced by a far more baleful arrival. During the summer and fall of 1793 Philadelphia was besieged by an outbreak of yellow fever. The epidemic, which arrived in the same vessels as the refugees, functionally shut the capital down and led other locales to shut it out. Wealthier citizens escaped to the hinterlands. The federal and state governments ceased to meet. Farmers refused to bring their crops to market. Businesses, including most newspapers, closed up shop, some of them permanently. By mid-fall those remaining in the city confronted a strange and horrifying landscape, one in which families and friends were abandoned, funeral bells tolled unceasingly, carts bearing corpses rumbled through the streets, red badges

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marked the houses of the infected, and periodic musket blasts registered the attempts of the remaining inhabitants to purify the air.3 Fearful rumors flourished in this grim setting. In Germantown, where her family had fled from the fever, Elizabeth Drinker heard an echo of the stories of “French negroes” that chilled the bones of slaveholders to the south. Early in September a man burst from his doorstep to interrupt her evening walk with a warning that a cadre of local blacks, hearing that French troops were marching on Philadelphia, had poisoned the city’s wells. To the staid Quaker woman such talk was “flying reports, and most likely to be false,” but she was wrong to discount it entirely.4 A group of French sailors had in fact begun a march to Philadelphia from New York. Local militia units, already in the field to quarantine the capital, arrested them and placed them in the city jail.5 Drinker’s neighbor may have been overly panicky in describing the poison plot, but his story accurately reflected the new ways in which ideas about France were being linked to racial violence and black freedom after the anxious summer of 1793. While the fears felt to the south invoked generalized connections between “St. Domingo” and black violence, Drinker’s encounter highlights the specific context of the news from Le Cap. French emancipation in Saint Domingue, which was endorsed as a policy in Paris a few months later, fundamentally shifted the ground by which the colony could serve as a place for Philadelphians to view, and judge, the tenor of the French Revolution. As a sanctioned expression of the Revolution, emancipation legitimized the fires and bloodletting in the colony as facets of the Revolutionary struggle. Once slaves could become citizens, “French negroes” were no longer simply unfettered blacks; potentially, they were Revolutionary agents. In Richmond or Charleston, this might be a distinction without a difference, but Elizabeth Drinker’s disdain for the reports “flying” around Philadelphia registers a more nuanced dynamic in the capital. The city’s antislavery ethos, its position at the center of national politics, and its ongoing racial tensions all ensured that the prospect of “French negroes” would not produce a simple reaction. This is not to say that Philadelphians were more enlightened than others. Unlike places where slaves existed in concentration, French-ness had as much heft as blackness in the reception given to the news from Le Cap in the city. Analyzing the ways in which French emancipation rippled through Philadelphia reveals the turning of gears rather than the slamming of a door. With that said, French-ness had become an explosive mechanism in American political discourse by the summer of 1793. Over the preceding half year,

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the advent of war with Austria and Spain, the declaration of the French Republic, the execution of Louis XVI, and then the expansion of the war to include Britain and Holland all reverberated powerfully through American society and politics. In response to a radical turn in France, the great powers of Europe had launched into what everyone understood to be an epochal struggle. Americans watched breathlessly from the sidelines, but most saw the nation as deeply implicated in the fight. British and French strategies in the Atlantic constantly threatened to sweep the United States into the maelstrom. Even formal neutrality, however, did not mean that the nation could remain aloof. To American observers, the battles in Europe were pregnant with meaning. The French republicans and their monarchical adversaries seemed to embody a fundamental divide, one familiar to Americans courtesy of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, over the proper location of authority in all societies; so-called Jacobins and aristocrats personified mutually exclusive notions of the true bastion of a people’s liberty. This sensibility brought the conflict home, weaving it into divergent ideas over domestic issues.6 News of the Terror and of the outbreak of civil war in the French provinces intensified the American sense of the stakes in this global battle between freedom and tyranny. One man’s reform was another’s bastardization; one side’s victory the other’s catastrophe. Some Americans looked to France as a beacon and others as a warning, but by mid-1793 all agreed that French developments were meaningful everywhere. For Americans in Philadelphia, emancipation in Saint Domingue was another—and important—“French” development. By the end of 1792 the French civil commissioners, Sonthonax and Polverel, were on their way toward consolidating metropolitan control of the colony, an effort they conducted in the face of white resistance to free colored civic equality and against the backdrop of continuing insurgent violence. With free colored support, they first deported portions of their white opponents at Le Cap and then, in March 1793, led a mixed-race force against Port-au-Prince after bombarding it from the water. By mid-May the commission had achieved similar results in the South. These successes were the setting for the arrival of a new governor-general to the colony, Francois-Thomas Galbaud. Landing at Cap Français on May 6 while the commissioners were in the West, Galbaud was heralded as a savior by their opponents and encouraged to act independently from them. The resulting standoff exploded on June 20, when Galbaud led a party of sailors from the fleet in Le Cap harbor against the commissioners and their allies. Driven out of town, Sonthonax and Polverel turned to the colony’s slaves. They first freed the

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captured insurgents held in Cap Français’s jails, then appealed to the city’s domestics. Finally, they offered freedom to any insurgent who would fight on their behalf. By the evening of June 21, these moves led Galbaud’s forces to flee, abandoning the town to mobs and looters. Fires broke out and, as bands of insurgents began to enter the city, thousands of terrified whites flocked to the vessels in the harbor. There, they and Galbaud’s forces watched as the fires spread and the city was engulfed. On June 23 Galbaud and most of the French fleet took to the waves.7 Something momentous, unanticipated, and unintended had happened. In Saint Domingue, the destruction of Le Cap and the commissioners’ proclamations led to a cascade of further changes. As Sonthonax and Polverel struggled to maintain control over the subsequent months, their desperate offers evolved into edicts. On July 11 they extended emancipation to the families of insurgents who fought for the Republic; on July 25 the proclamation was expanded beyond the North. On August 29 Sonthonax abolished slavery in the North altogether. Polverel, moving more slowly, later advanced a more qualified emancipation for the rest of the colony. These actions would be sanctioned, ratified, and extended to all French possessions by the National Convention in Paris on February 4, 1794. With this single stroke, France released some five hundred thousand slaves from bondage in Saint Domingue alone. These slaves were declared free without provisions for their removal or separation from the colony. Indeed, they were envisioned as contributors to the colony’s return to prosperity and as soldiers against France’s enemies. These “French negroes” were to become citizens. There was no deeper invocation of the ideals of universal human equality espoused by the French Revolutionaries than this. Americans in Philadelphia knew as much. Even as they misunderstood the changes in the colony as direct expressions of French intent, they registered the conceptual connections between Revolutionary liberty and an end to slavery. What is more, they did so at a moment when Saint Domingue had more impact than ever in Philadelphia as a site to witness, and understand, French Revolutionary struggles. Events in Europe were captivating in America, but they were also elusive, especially after the Anglo-French conflict seriously disrupted the flow of transatlantic information. Saint Domingue’s proximity, meanwhile, continued to make it an accessible French space. The British invasion of the colony in September 1793 then made it a local front in the war, a conflict Americans experienced directly as the British navy ratcheted up its presence and activity in closing off French colonial ports.8 The hundreds of stops, captures, and seizures

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of American vessels and cargoes stirred American passions, but they also heightened Saint Domingue’s immediacy in Philadelphia as a place to understand the greater conflict. The embargo the Washington administration placed on all American shipping for two months in the spring of 1794 intensified the tendency.9 Finally, in this same period, Philadelphians witnessed French republican actors firsthand, foremost among them the Girondin ambassador Edmond Genet. More than anything else, Genet, whom Americans correctly viewed as a counterpart to Sonthonax and Polverel, put the global struggle onto Philadelphia’s streets. As more French émigrés entered the city, Dominguan factions wrangled in their midst, some of which Genet identified as “aristocrats.” By mid-1794 Saint Domingue was not only a venue for the Revolutionary conflict at hand, it was a touchstone and source of battles that were taking place before Americans’ very eyes. The heat of these battles warmed American fights. Arguments in Philadelphia over Saint Domingue in this period evoked the burgeoning divide in American politics, but they also illuminate the dynamic nature of that division. The clash between the “friends of the administration” and its critics, to be sure, involved real differences over ideas about the nascent republic. These groups, gradually denominated Federalists and Republicans, parted over questions about the extent of the people’s sovereignty and the government’s authority, about the republic’s best economic basis, and about the worrisome role of interests in directing policy. The news from Saint Domingue, however, and the issues it raised, gave these developing divisions expression and life.10 Especially as emancipation became clearly identified as French metropolitan policy, it emerged as a key issue by which observers in Philadelphia could articulate their conceptions of France and its ongoing Revolution, even as they vehemently disagreed with each other about its relevance to their own polity and its racial future. Rooted in an expression of universal commitment to equality and linked to the multifaceted fight against tyranny, emancipation challenged American Francophiles and provided fodder for their political opponents. Thus when the news arrived that Le Cap had been burned and the slaves set free, it landed on fertile ground. Freedom in Saint Domingue, and the French policy that putatively provided it, completely altered the landscape in the colony, jumbling combatants and agendas there and reconfiguring the possibilities for further change. In Philadelphia, its impact on ideas about the Revolution taking place there was equally important. The news of French emancipation touched off a process by which the most radical implications of American Revolutionary

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ideology were tested and turned aside. That course came as the meaning and character of the American nation were actively hashed out, an effort that took place with the French colony, and its “French negroes,” serving as a mirror by which various American groups could describe their ideas about the future. Ironically, this cosmopolitan atmosphere saw the sapping of American cosmopolitanism. With elements of the Revolution in Saint Domingue, and France, actually on their shores, American divisions over their own Revolution accelerated and intensified, but did so by flattening the terms in play, circumscribing liberties that once might have been understood as universal rights into national, and sometimes local, properties alone.

Finding True Frenchmen, and Americans Just weeks before the vessels fleeing Cap Français moved up the Delaware, two other arrivals brought the French Revolution to Philadelphia in newly powerful ways. One was that of the new French minister, Edmond Charles Genet. Citizen Genet, as he was known, was a thirty-year-old diplomat who had recently been expelled from the Russian court of Catherine the Great. His ardent republicanism there had gained him favor with the Girondins as they rose to power. Embarking on his American mission, Genet would be the incarnation of their approach to the world, and especially of the ideas of their leader, Jacques-Pierre Brissot: the Revolution was a universal movement that pitted republicanism against tyranny everywhere.11 Genet’s instructions were to take actions that would gather Americans to the French side in this global struggle. This was mostly to take the form of increased commercial and financial support, but the minister was also to promote expeditions against their common enemies. Landing in Charleston in early April, purportedly because of “contrary winds,” he immediately set to work recruiting Americans to the task. He then began an overland march to the capital, stopping at regular intervals to soak up the enthusiastic popular celebrations that met him along the way. Soon French privateers manned by Americans (including one named the Sans Culotte) prowled American waters.12 In Philadelphia, editors Benjamin Franklin Bache, Philip Freneau, and David Claypool each began to take subscriptions for donations in support of France in their printing offices.13 When the French frigate L’Embuscade took a British vessel just outside the Delaware, thousands of Philadelphians lined the wharves to cheer as the prize was sent into port with the British colors reversed. “Freemen!” they read emblazoned on the frigate’s top-

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sails, “we are your brethren and friends.”14 Genet arrived in the capital two weeks later, on May 16. “My voyage has been a succession of uninterrupted civic fetes,” he reported to the government at home, “and my entry into Philadelphia a triumph for liberty. True Americans sound the height of joy.”15 But was Genet a “true” Frenchman? Thousands of Americans obviously took him as such, but the reception of another French emissary just days before exposed the fluidity of the category and American anxieties over it. LouisMarie, the Vicomte de Noailles, arrived in Philadelphia in early May. A veteran of the American Revolution, Noailles had fought alongside Lafayette (who later became his brother-in-law) and was well-known by Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton. His arrival, however, created a sticky situation for the president. Washington’s weekly levees, quasi-public events at which he formally received visitors, were already the subject of criticism as unrepublican; the president, wags noted, stood on a platform elevated above his guests.16 Noailles’s presence at this sort of event was problematic. He had come from Britain, where he had fled amid charges that he was a royalist. His companion, Antoine Omer Talon, was sought by French authorities as one of Louis XVI’s conspirators before the August 10 journée. In the aftermath of Noailles’s departure from France, his parents, wife, and his wife’s mother and grandmother went to the guillotine. Now he was presenting himself to Washington, ostensibly looking for help for Lafayette, who had himself recently fled the Revolution and who was under arrest in Austria.17 Washington was in a quandary. To receive Noailles as a public figure was to officially engage with the forces arrayed against France. To reject him was to make a statement in support of the French government. Washington’s solution was to enlist Hamilton to “gently & delicately” explain the president’s need to hold the Vicomte at arm’s length, “notwithstanding our former acquaintance.”18 These precautions failed. Within a month newspapers contained a letter written by an official within Hamilton’s own department telling that Noailles, the “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from the Prince Regent of France,” had arrived from the “Court of Ex-Princes at Coblentz” and had talked in private with Washington nearly all night.19 Readers of this account might conclude that the administration was edging away from France. Such impressions were important. Since 1789 the Washington administration had looked to find a middle path between Britain and France, and, as its perseverations over the application of the debt to France toward Saint Domingue relief in 1791 demonstrates, it had taken care not to make any overt

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statement about the legitimacy of the successive French governments. The execution of Louis XVI heightened these tensions. Washington’s declaration of neutrality, issued on April 22 as Genet made his way to Philadelphia from Charleston, was yet another attempt to navigate this slippery terrain. Neutrality was a statement of policy, but it was also an expression of the nation’s independence from European broils. As such, even Jefferson, who favored France and deeply mistrusted Britain, could go along with it.20 But more was involved than simply the demonstration of American sovereignty. The weight behind the controversy over Noailles, as it would be over Genet, derived from the implications of being connected with either man for the content of that sovereignty—for the principles reified by a sovereign United States.21 Americans saw the position each seemed to represent vis-à-vis the French Revolution as a meaningful marker within their own burgeoning political culture. Jefferson, writing to James Monroe on the day Noailles arrived, explained that the war between France and Britain was having a good effect on the populace. “All the old spirit of 1776, is rekindling,” he wrote, “even the Monocrat papers are obliged to publish the most furious Philippics against England.” In his mind, this environment revealed Hamilton’s calls for neutrality to be so much window dressing, exposing the treasury secretary’s proBritish motives. More telling, Jefferson noted that the loyalties of Jean Baptiste Ternant, the French minister Genet was to replace, had fluctuated wildly as news trickled in. Hearing that he had been replaced, and “thinking he had nothing further to hope from the Jacobins,” he picked a fight with the secretary of state, “attached himself to Hamilton[,] put on mourning for the king, and became a perfect Counter-revolutioner,” Jefferson told. Once Ternant learned from Genet that he might be given a position in the French army, however, “he . . . tacked about again, became a Jacobin, and refused to present the Viscount Noailles.”22 Revolutionary political positions were malleable because events were in flux: men such as Ternant (according to Jefferson, at least) were fickle, but their rectitude, or their falsehood, at once was established by their actions and defined by them. Public declarations of affinity, though commonly taken as emanating from ideals, in fact served to constitute American political ideology. No less an unimpeachable republican than Benjamin Bache himself demonstrated the point. He first published a defense of Noailles’s reputation, reminding readers that the Vicomte had been the mover behind the National Assembly’s abolition of feudal privileges.23 Within weeks, however, he was embroiled in a

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public struggle with Noailles, who objected to Bache’s slightly veiled use of his name to attack Hamilton and Secretary of War Henry Knox in the General Advertiser. Here, the Francophilic critics of the administration—or at least of Hamilton’s influence in it—were fleshing out the details of their opponents’ evils on the fly. Noailles, no longer a repentant nobleman or Revolutionary paragon, was now the means of questioning Knox’s fitness for office. The war in Saint Domingue proved the point. “What should be thought of a Man [Knox],” Bache printed, “to whom a late General officer in the French armies [Noailles] would dare to cry out with exultation, that St. Domingo was ruined?” Such a man—neither man—was trustworthy.24 American political divisions were defined on this fluctuating firmament. The tensions around Hamilton’s Whiskey Excise, over the criticism of Washington’s administration, and generated by Genet’s activities all originated in intrinsic ideological differences, but these sorts of moments shaped the content of American politics: in distinguishing their enemies, men such as Bache forged the bonds of partisanship. The source of Bache’s Knox-Noailles scoop (or, depending on one’s position, of his scurrility) was Pascal, one of the secretaries of Genet’s legation.25 This confluence of the Genet mission, questions about French émigrés, American political battles, and the stunning violence in Saint Domingue was no accident. The destruction of Le Cap brought the Revolution in Saint Domingue directly into American communities, changing the dynamic behind Genet’s tumultuous career as a diplomat in the United States by charging the issue that made it explosive. As Genet’s activities raised difficult questions about the practical relationship between France and the United States, the presence of the Dominguan émigrés provided a new interface for this debate, one in which the minister’s opponents, both French and American, could produce a more precise picture of what he, and by extension France as a whole, represented. By the same token, the shift in the debate around Genet caused by events in Saint Domingue provided Francophilic Americans with palpable evidence for their portrait of the threat provided by the administration. In both cases, this clarity derived from the ways in which the episode crystallized the meaning of the epithets each side could hurl at each other: the destruction of Cap Français gave new meaning in the United States to both “Jacobin” and “aristocrat” as labels. The result was an acceleration of the heightened tensions produced by Genet’s mission, but it also produced an important tack in the ways in which American political discourse collectively described the “Revolution” that “Jacobins” were fomenting and that “aristocrats” were contesting. In so doing, the sides of the

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contest over the evolving meaning of the American polity, and the Revolution that had produced it, were evoked in new ways. Genet himself promoted a particular understanding of the relationship between the two republics. As a good Girondin, his working assumption was that the two nations would collaborate toward the common goal of expanding “liberty” by spreading the revolution against “tyranny” wherever it stood. Just before he arrived in Charleston, Philadelphians read of a recent decree made by the National Convention declaring republican revolution to be a universal right and pledging support for it outside France.26 The instructions the minister carried directed him to encourage the revolt of peoples in the Floridas, Louisiana, and Canada against their Spanish and British masters, a situation that was to take place through both his efforts to “instill the principles of the French revolution” and his outreach among sympathetic Americans.27 The outfitting of privateers in American ports to cruise against the British was an eastward-facing iteration of this undertaking; his attempts to have local French officials adjudicate prize cases was part of an effort to blur the line between French and American space. While these efforts complicated Genet’s diplomacy with the administration, the Girondin worldview that he articulated soon dominated public life in Philadelphia. At civic receptions and public gatherings orators described the United States and France as “sister republics” whose efforts, in the words of one, were “as incorporate as light and heat.”28 Emergent Republicans then acted out such vague declarations of affinity in the city’s streets. Men and women addressed each other as “Citizen” and “Citess.” Crowds sang “La Marseillaise,” as well as the more plebeian “Ça Ira” and “La Carmagnole.” Phrygian bonnets, usually called liberty caps, were passed from head to head at public celebrations.29 Democratic Societies were established (one named by Genet himself ), seemingly modeled on the Jacobin clubs of Paris. At one of their meetings the participants purportedly decapitated a roast pig they had declared to be Louis XVI, after which they made the head don a liberty cap and repeatedly stabbed the body. On Eighth Street a model guillotine was set up so that citizens could see the “national razor” perform on a dummy, a pantomime that crowds assembled to watch many times each day.30 As historian Simon Newman has shown, popular enthusiasm for this stage of the French Revolution provided a venue for non-elite groups to voice their politics, something that gave pause even to some opposition leaders.31 However elites in the city might mutter privately against such demonstrations, to all appearances the common fight against tyranny had opened a new front. “The situation of transatlantic politics is now uncommonly

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interesting to Americans,” Bache informed his readers in late July: “Upon the establishment or overthrow of liberty in France probably will depend the permanency of the Republic in the new world.” If France’s enemies prevailed, he continued, “they will endeavor directly or indirectly totally to extinguish the fire of freedom in every part of the globe.”32 The fires of freedom flickered in Saint Domingue as well. Genet’s orders were closely linked with the doings of his fellow Girondin agents, Sonthonax and Polverel.33 An official French state paper translated in Philadelphia newspapers just after Genet arrived there informed the commissioners that war had begun and directed that they were “to keep the intercourse between the United States and the Colony free.” Genet was expressly put in charge of supplying the colony, a directive that fit well with his general orders to reenergize FrancoAmerican commercial relations.34 The minister in the United States and the civil commissioners in Saint Domingue were personifications of the new French state. Both were understood as battling local emanations of the general counterrevolution. Some of Genet’s American recruits served on privateers licensed and fitted out at Cap Français.35 The minister’s instructions included warnings against the “heinous lies” and corrupting influence of the colonists that the commissioners had deported.36 After the bombardment of Port-au-Prince, Sonthonax issued an address to Genet, published in Philadelphia newspapers, explaining that the action had been against counterrevolutionary forces there. “Tell Free Americans, and Friends of the Republic that the colony has at length found severe executors of the laws,” he proclaimed, and “that we have put to flight the enemies of France.”37 Those enemies were a worrisome presence. They might influence the American public, misleading the nation into betraying its true interests. “Those inveterate enemies of France, are, no doubt those who have spread a notion through the United States, that American vessels carrying provisions to the French parts of St. Domingo, might run the risk of being seized there,” Philip Freneau explained in the wake of the attack on Port-au-Prince.38 Those who saw things clearly, according to this position, found the Washington administration’s proclamation of neutrality at best mystifying. At worst, it was a signal that the president was under the sway of those enemies and their allies among the British. Writing to his superiors in late May, Genet told that “the voice of the People continues to neutralize” the proclamation.39 If the president had been deceived, the citizenry had not. And yet, as Genet continued to meet checks at the hands of the American

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government, the minister and his American supporters began to suspect the worst. Within a month of his triumphant arrival in Philadelphia Genet had received notice from Jefferson that nearly all of his goals had been thwarted. The administration refused to allow privateers to be armed in American ports and declined to free up funds for his use by liquidating the debt to France. The fact that the public continued to fete him, along with the vitriolic line of criticism of the neutrality policy in the city’s newspapers (material he incorrectly assumed came from Jefferson), convinced Genet that something like a conspiracy was afoot. “The aristocracy has planted deep roots here,” he wrote to the minister of foreign affairs. He had fed the republicans of Saint Domingue, excited the Canadians against Britain, and armed men in Kentucky against Spain, “but old Washington” resented his successes and had met delegations from British merchants and accepted letters (via Noailles and Talon) “from the pretended Regent, that the old man had the weakness to open.” Genet contrasted this state of affairs with that of his colleague Sonthonax in Saint Domingue, where things were calm, “since the incendiaries have been expelled.”40 This was truly a crisis for Genet; he would soon burn all bridges with the administration through his ongoing efforts to arm vessels for privateering and with his supposed threat to “appeal to the People”—itself a none-too-tacit call for a Girondin-style of international republicanism—in order to get around Washington’s obstructionism. His consular officials in American ports would continue to interfere in American affairs in the name of spreading the revolution. The vice-consul in Boston would be expelled in October when, on Genet’s orders, he used armed men to prevent local marshals from seizing a privateer’s prize vessels there.41 In Charleston, Michel-Ange-Bernard Mangourit battled with committees of émigré planters and their supporters over the dispensation of aid, a question that Genet understood as central to defining who exactly could be called “French.”42 Taken together, these struggles constituted a critical existential moment. Neutrality, in Genet’s view, revealed the true colors—the “aristocratic” tendencies—of Washington’s cadre. As he understood it, the administration was under the sway of a faction attempting to subvert the American republic, the same one that the French Republic was battling in the fields and on the seas. False Frenchmen were behind it all. To a certain extent, Alexander Hamilton would have agreed. At a cabinet meeting on July 23 he seconded the president’s opinion that Genet should be recalled to France, the culmination of a series of meetings on the topic that had begun earlier in the month. Hamilton went further than Washington, however.

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While the president found Genet personally objectionable but hoped that the nation’s friendship with France could be maintained, the treasury secretary contended that Genet, as French, was a dangerous presence. He was intimately involved with the Democratic Societies that had cropped up in towns and cities across the eastern seaboard and, together with the various French consuls, was stirring up resentment against the administration. Henry Knox chimed in with an overheard tale of a man describing the president “as great a tyrant as any of them” and noting that “it would soon be time to chase him out of the city.” Pascal’s role in the Noailles affair was evidence of the French minister’s attempts to influence the public. All in all, as Jefferson remembered the meeting, Hamilton “represented that we were now in a crisis whereon the continuance of the government or it’s [sic] overthrow by a faction depended” and that, while the people were still loyal, “if we let the incendiaries go on, they would soon have taken side with them.”43 As threatening as this was, by Hamilton’s reckoning Genet’s conduct was also productive: it served to identify the nation’s internal enemies. Describing Genet’s arrival in Philadelphia, an event that Hamilton disparaged as having been overinflated in newspapers such as Bache’s and Freneau’s, he noted that the figures behind the speeches and gatherings “were the same men who have been uniformly the enemies and the disturbers of the peace of the Country.” “We too have our disorganizers,” he explained, agents plotting to bring the United States into the war on the side of France. This was not the same Revolutionary spirit that had produced the American nation. “I own, I do not like the comparison,” Hamilton continued. The violence, “fanaticism,” and “Rapacity” of the movement in France revealed that “there is no real resemblance between what was the cause of America & what is the cause of France—that the difference is no less great than that between Liberty & Licentiousness.”44

Jacobins, Aristocrats, and News from the Lost Colony Comparisons and concerns like Hamilton’s framed the reception of the reports of fire and freed slaves arriving from Cap Français after June 1793. The same news, however, also shaped that framework, intensifying competing conceptions of the Revolutionary moment at hand. Lloyd Jones, captain of the schooner Eagle, arrived in Philadelphia from Le Cap on July 6, 1793. Jones’s was the first of a whirlwind of accounts over the following weeks.45 In discussing the tales he and others brought, American commentators articulated differing measures of the line between Revolutionary “liberty” and sordid “licentiousness.”

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The fulcrum of their debate—the signal that that line had or had not been crossed—was the image of Saint Domingue as “lost.” The idea that the colony had in some sense met its end had been in the air since 1789, but it now took on a new salience as the Cap Français fleet arrived. As American observers tried to reckon the causes and mete out responsibility for the “conflagration of Cape Francois,” they marked a watershed in the way many understood events, both in the colony and beyond. The violent liberation had been presided over by French national representatives, compatriots of Citizen Genet. For observers in Philadelphia, this fact ensured Saint Domingue’s prominence as part of discussions about France, its Revolution, and its meaning in the United States. Among emergent Federalists, the chaos at Le Cap lifted the veil on French developments, revealing that France had veered from America’s righteous path. Those more willing to entertain Genet’s Girondin notions of a global movement for liberty were first given check by that charge, but their willingness to see false Frenchmen at work in both the colony and Philadelphia eventually led them to embrace the new French order. The cataclysmic stories provided by Jones and others raised uncomfortable questions for Genet boosters such as Benjamin Bache and Philip Freneau. Arriving mariners and white Dominguan fugitives pointed to the system of egalitarianism in the colony—ideals that the editors embraced—as a French Revolution run amok. The commissioners’ alliance with the people of color had devolved into petty favoritism, they told. Local whites had been baited and attacked. Sonthonax and Polverel, instead of mediating, had intensified their bonds with the gens de couleur, at one point entertaining them with a concert of music. This was the powder keg ignited by Galbaud’s arrival. Once the fighting began, the same dynamic opened the door for the violence to widen. One of Jones’s passengers explained that “Mulattoes came to his house, and asked his Negroes if they were not ready—and immediately upon which they burst open the doors, and exclaimed ‘Vive le Commissare, it is he who has given us liberty, and we will fight for him.’ ” As Jones described it, “two hours after the sailors landed, the commissaries opened all the prisons, and let the Brigands out, to destroy the town and its inhabitants.”46 Report after report bolstered this image of racial bloodletting inspired and instigated by the colony’s metropolitan representatives. A captain told that the commissioners had armed the city’s slaves “and encouraged them to assist in destroying all the whites,” acts that produced “an indiscriminate massacre of both sexes. . . . to the number of between 8 and 10 thousand.”47 An arriving passenger explained that the free coloreds had

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opened the prisons and then allowed “a great number of the brigands of the plain” into the city, where they had collected white prisoners in a barracks, pillaged their houses, and “unmercifully murdered” the entire group.48 The lingering view of Le Cap provided in Philadelphia’s newspapers in the late summer of 1793 was taken from the vantage point of the merchant fleet departing the harbor with the charred city in its wake. The “pardon and freedom” granted to the ex-slaves was indelibly paired with images seen from the mastheads, visions of “negroes from the country . . . continually travelling, . . . coming in, in consequence of the proclamation, to reinforce the commissioner’s party.”49 Critics of Citizen Genet, and defenders of the Washington administration, leaped at the opportunity to connect these stories to Burkean depictions of the French Revolution more generally. John Fenno appended his news of the events in the Gazette of the United States with an opinion that the flames at Cap Français were the natural product of a disordered society. The brutal events there, “which make the blood freeze in the veins at their recital,” were the result of “setting up rival, coeval and uncontrolled authorities,” he explained, a fact “exemplified in . . . the whole history of the French Revolution.”50 Pettiness, not principle, explained the course of events at Le Cap. Galbaud’s arrival in the colony, a letter signed “JUBA” maintained, had laid bare the true motivations of the “humble Citizens” Sonthonax and Polverel. “These are the men who talk so much of equality,” JUBA sneered, “but when they come to act, we find that, rather than endure the least supposed diminution of their power, they will hazard the total demolition of a great and flourishing city, and the shedding of the blood of all its inhabitants.”51 Francophiles were put on their heels by this critique. Bache hastened to the wharves after the Eagle landed to speak with some of the refugees who had arrived ahead of the incoming fleet. Reminding his readers of the difficulties of relying on “impassioned informants” at such moments and cautioning that “the chief of our information at present is from one party,” he nevertheless admitted that the idea that the commissioners had freed slaves to save their own skins was an “accusation of the deepest die.” “Should it prove a fact,” he finished, “that the independence of the negroes in St. Domingo is declared . . . the colony is for a great lapse of time lost to the world.”52 A French program of emancipation was improbable, but it was also unfortunate and probably disastrous, even to friends of France. Once confirmed, it was a problem. Sonthonax and Polverel’s June 21 proclamation was translated and printed in numerous Philadelphia newspapers in

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late July, informing the public that it was “the will of the French Republic . . . to give liberty to all the negro warriors, who will fight for the republic . . . against . . . enemies, whether internal or external.” Those who were made free were decreed to be “equal to all freemen, whether white or any other color: they shall enjoy all the rights belonging to French citizens.”53 Some readers were aghast. A correspondent in Fenno’s Gazette wrote in to ask “whether the proclamation of Citizens Polverel and Sonthonax . . . declaring all the black warriors free, is a forgery or not?”54 As reports coming from the North province described relative calm in the aftermath of the fire, Fenno hastened to point out that this was not a return to any recognizable order. So that his readers could better “judge the strength and permanency of the government” he reminded them that it was now supported by the “negroes from the plantations who made the first insurrection.” “White people are going out of fashion,” he finished, “and the black and brown are in vogue.”55 “The government of the Whites is at an end,” a similar report explained later.56 Fenno’s reminder was no casual prompt. The loss of Saint Domingue that he and like-minded commentators described was akin to that imagined in the early days after the risings on the Plaine du Nord. Now firmly hitched to the Revolution in France, however, it demonstrated the dangerous results of French fanaticism, and just at the same moment as like efforts were cropping up at home. The flames at Le Cap, in this view, marked a pyrrhic victory. Following Brissot’s orders, Sonthonax had ended slavery, creating a bizarre state-sponsored maroon colony from what had once been the pearl of the Antilles. This “black and brown” government was an alien entity replete with threatening anomalies. Emancipation meant that there would be no plantation labor, for example, or any labor whatsoever. “The negroes who were declared free,” one writer told, “now retain their arms to support their freedom—and will not labor—slavery and hard work being to their comprehension synonimous terms.”57 French liberty, applied to blacks, was evidence of the chaotic implications of the Revolution’s ideals. “Slaves thus restored to liberty,” another writer explained, “do not acquire more extensive ideas” of citizenship that other “regenerated” groups had. Instead of working, they were idle. Instead of becoming soldiers, “these barbarians, thus let loose on society,” were beyond control. Freeing slaves, by this telling, was of a piece with the leveling of property and arming of the poor against the wealthy that France had embarked upon across Europe.58 Over the fall and winter of 1793 a new inflection on JUBA’s rebuke emerged to deepen the Burkean critique: the commissioners may well have been petty,

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but their principles were in and of themselves dangerous. They were exemplary “Jacobins,” a moniker that evolved unmistakably into a slur over those months, becoming a catchall by which to tar the flights of public enthusiasm for France and criticisms of the Washington administration as dangerous disruptions.59 The “spirit of innovation” employed by Sonthonax and Polverel, a British officer lectured colonial whites as his troops moved into Môle Saint Nicolas, was a pathway to “ruin.” Laws governed society and proper subordination was essential to preserving order.60 The commissioners’ talk of liberty and equality were masks, disguising a more fundamental commitment to the undercutting of legitimate authority. As Hamilton had noted, that same talk served to identify local “disorganizers,” though the ashes of Le Cap in the wind gave new urgency to the task. Jacobins’ “maternal tenderness embraces all the inhabitants of the globe,” a correspondent calling himself “D” taunted in the Gazette of the United States, reminding readers of Genet’s attempts to foment trouble in the American Southwest. This was yet another moment, he explained, when they sought to expand “the noble gratification of cutting one another’s throats, in order to establish among them the blessed system of equality which prevails in the French Islands.”61 Identifying such Jacobins was important. The new influx of Dominguan émigrés, the horrors of the yellow fever epidemic, the tensions over Genet’s efforts, and the commercial disruptions created by the Anglo-French war all made for an undulating ground upon which to discern and declare affinities. Prior developments in France—the September Massacres, the execution of the king, the declaration of the republic—had proven rather easy, if momentous, for Americans to digest. Especially with regard to the death of Louis, these moments confirmed their more general reactions to the tenor of events, for or against. Now, however, just as reliable information from the Continent became scarce, Americans confronted the stage of the French Revolution that came to be known as the Terror. The news of the fall of the Girondins arrived in Philadelphia early in 1794, followed by hints of the rise of the Mountain and the efforts to crush internal opposition.62 Only fuzzily understood, these changes made it far easier to generalize about the Revolution than it was to isolate particular features, factions, or developments in Europe. With precise descriptions of metropolitan Jacobins thin on the ground, conservatives tended toward blanket condemnations of the violence and frenzy of the movement as a whole.63 While the blanket was meant to be large enough to cover “Jacobins” at home as well, it did not provide specific meanings to their stances. Instead it offered ar-

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guments, say, of the anarchy produced by the Democratic Societies, making them signals of the direction the group seemed to be pointing. In this environment, identifying local “Jacobins” put a shadow of the Terror onto Philadelphia’s streets. News from Saint Domingue gave those shadows flesh and form. The fact that French equality now extended to ex-slaves quickly filtered into depictions of the disorder Jacobins embodied. A writer calling himself “A Sans Culotte Brissotine” told of a conversation he had overheard in Philadelphia’s market between “Citizen Caesar” and “Citizen Pompey” in which Pompey revealed that “Citizen Jenny” (Genet) was writing under assumed names in the papers in order to try to manipulate the public.64 A printed etching lampooning Philadelphia and New York democrats (Figure 4) posed a ragged Genet nearby to “Citizen Mungo,” who, asked if he would agree to a “creed” that included “The People are All and we are the People,” chuckled, “Fine ting . . . our turn nex.” Blacks as citizens, like black “government” in Saint Domingue, parted the curtain on French ideals and on those Americans who subscribed to them. For Fenno, the events at Cap Français were the result of “the insurrection of the blacks and democratic demons (for nothing better than demons can they be called).”65 Domestic democrats, friends of France, were demonic as well. The terms, and truculence, of this sort of attack inspired a response among Francophilic writers. If Fenno and his ilk would disparage the French Revolution by connecting its ideals with the chaos at Le Cap, emergent Republicans could offer a rewired version of that same connection, one that linked the violence to the counterrevolution and focused on the misdeeds of the commissioners’ opponents rather than the Revolution’s supposed fanaticism. The effort began on the wharves, where the accounts Bache pieced together suggested to him that the violence at Le Cap lay at Galbaud’s feet. Legally barred by a national decree preventing landowners in the colony from holding office, the general had tapped into local white resentments toward the policy of civic equality, a “rational principle” as Bache described it, “that does not admit of a distinction founded on that of colour.” Galbaud had twisted these divisions to his own ends, and he did so, the editor hinted, as part of a greater scheme: “It is not altogether clear that he was hearty in the cause of the revolution.”66 This emphasis, as it had been in castigating Noailles, was a fruitful way to sabotage a target’s credibility. In reality, Galbaud was no royalist; his service and Girondin credentials compared with those of Sonthonax or Genet.67 The general’s American career, however, from his arrival in New York in early July to his

Figure 4. “A Peep into the Antifederal Club,” 1793. In addition to Satan, viewers of this cartoon would recognize the gavel-wielding Thomas Jefferson, obese New York governor George Clinton, Philadelphian astronomer David Rittenhouse, and other prominent opponents of the Washington administration. Genet’s book is entitled “Strictures on the Executive.” Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University (accession number 6421).

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departure for France in mid-February 1794, allowed Genet to successfully label him as an “aristocrat” in Philadelphia’s newspapers. Doing so gave new coherence and weight to the threats facing the Revolution, both abroad and at home. The general and minister clashed repeatedly over that time span, each claiming that his authority was legitimate and that the other’s resistance suggested treason. It was a public spat that produced some dramatic moments. Sailors of the Jupiter, the flagship of the French squadron that had ferried the refugees from Le Cap, allowed Galbaud to escape rather than give him up to Genet. They then began an armed march toward Philadelphia to support the general, erroneously believing that he was headed that way. (These were the troops that spooked Elizabeth Drinker’s neighbor in Germantown.) Galbaud, meanwhile, was headed north. Cornered in a Westchester tavern, he escaped and fled to Canada. After a brief foray around Quebec, he returned to New York in December, where he publicly demanded Genet give him either an immediate trial or permission to go to France. Proclaiming that Genet’s reluctance showed that the minister had something to hide, the general eventually returned to Paris in mid-February to clear his name.68 Readers followed along, agog, especially as Genet, already the focus of rapt attention, made Galbaud part of his case against the Washington administration. By mid-fall the minister had established the general as the linchpin of a royalist plot to deliver Saint Domingue to the British. Writing to Jefferson, he described a “dreadful conspiracy” fomented by Galbaud and leaders among the refugee community to mount an attack on the Republic’s forces in the colony. These accusations splashed across Philadelphia’s newspapers.69 For Genet, they helped to explain his diplomatic difficulties. Saint Domingue, he told officials in Paris, was a “Volcano [that] has expelled all its lava,” thanks to the efforts of Sonthonax and Polverel. The removal of the émigrés was “a great boon for the Colony but a great evil for my mission,” however, because it had brought these dangerous elements into his sphere.70 In fact, many of the thousands of refugees were simply men and women swept up by events, though a vocal group among them were active critics of French colonial policy and the men who conducted it. In echoing Genet’s ideas, however, writers such as Bache and Freneau adapted the “conflagration of Cape Francois” into a narrative of counterrevolutionary intrigue, one that had begun in the West Indies and was now on their very doorsteps. Freneau held up revelations that Galbaud had served under Dumouriez, the French general who had recently defected to Austria, and gave voice to claims that he was a British spy acting in the name of “the little Capet.”71

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Alongside Genet’s public warnings that some of the arriving colonists were not to be trusted, other accounts blamed their “aristocracy of color” for Le Cap’s destruction.72 Jefferson, even as his discomfort over Genet’s diplomacy evolved into alarm, accepted the understanding that Saint Domingue’s divisions were expressions of the Revolution. Though he lamented “the situation of the St. Domingo fugitives,” he accepted that they were “aristocrats.” 73 As with “Jacobins,” recognizing them as such let Americans organize their ideas about their neighbors, and themselves. If the discussion of “the conflagration of Cape Francois” intensified existing interpretive trends, the specific context of events there ensured that emancipation would remain a powerful part of these American evaluations of the French Revolution and their relationship to it. No one disputed, after a point, that Sonthonax and Polverel had freed slaves in the colony. While Galbaud took no public stance on the fact, the émigré community in Philadelphia, contesting the idea that they were false Frenchmen, did. Most important, so did Citizen Genet. The minister’s battles, and the ease with which he adapted his ideas of Girondin revolution to the new racial regime in the Caribbean, would prove the means for Republicans such as Bache and Freneau to reconfigure their ideas about the “loss” of Saint Domingue and their sense of the place of emancipation as a Revolutionary act. The émigré community in Philadelphia was by no means monolithic, but after July 1793 its public pronouncements were dominated by voices that saw in the events at Le Cap evidence of a Revolution that had been hijacked: liberating slaves, in this view, was not the will of the republic.74 As the Dominguan community became more firmly ensconced, a flurry of newspapers cropped up in American port cities that conveyed the point. In Philadelphia this included short-lived papers such as the Radoteur, which ran for three months in the summer of 1793, and its successor, the Courrier Politique de la France et des Colonies, which ran into February 1794. The latter was edited by Louis Gatereau, a journalist from Saint Domingue who was already in Philadelphia when the refugees from Cap Français arrived. With the fleet came ClaudeCorentin Tanguy de la Boissière.75 Tanguy first printed a continuation of his colonial paper, the Journal des Révolutions de la Partie Française de SaintDomingue, and then began a new venture, L’Étoile Américaine or the American Star. While the two émigré editors were not always in sync, they agreed that Sonthonax and Polverel had ruined Saint Domingue and that Genet was in league with them. Gatereau christened the commissioners “Satanas and Pul-

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vereux.” 76 Tanguy’s American Star, printed in both French and English, was a vehicle for constant vitriol against the lot. Assertions in print were soon followed by actions on the ground. While some elements among the community looked to return to the colony in order to cast the commissioners out, others acted in the United States against the Republic’s agents. In early October a group in Norfolk set upon a man identified as having been the commissioners’ secretary.77 In Philadelphia, the landing of the ship Rebecca in early November sparked a conflict that seemed like a reprise of the June violence at Le Cap. Among the disembarking passengers were Pascal, Genet’s erstwhile secretary, and the members of a delegation sent by Sonthonax and Polverel to present their policy of emancipation to the National Convention in France.78 Composed of mixed-race, white, and Afro-creole members (“tricolor,” by Genet’s description), this body was met on the wharves by a crowd of white “Frenchmen, who from their dress might have been taken for gentlemen,” according to Philadelphia mayor Matthew Clarkson. Their finery notwithstanding, the émigrés attacked the delegates, beating several with fists and clubs and slashing another with a sword. After pushing one delegate into the Delaware, members of the mob hurled stones at his head. Others cornered Jean-Baptiste Belley, a black member of the delegation, pointed a sword at his breast and attempted to tear the national cockade from his jacket.79 When local officials and city militiamen fended the white French off and brought the bloodied group to City Hall, the crowd assembled outside and “insolently uttered threats of their future murderous intentions.”80 The crisis ended only when Genet shepherded the delegates to New York, where he publicly welcomed them as representatives of the French nation and ensured their safe departure for Paris.81 The émigré attacks in Philadelphia continued, albeit in print. By early 1794 Tanguy would lump Genet and the commissioners together as representatives of “the sanguinary philanthropy of Brissot” (then known to be dead), making them all part of a depiction of a French Revolution that had gone off the rails.82 The policy of emancipation was their case in point. According to the “Genetical thermometer,” Sonthonax and Polverel “were men almost of a divine nature, who had very humanely massacred and burnt the colonists.”83 Genet had seconded the racial policies of his “darling friends,” making it “necessary to be either a negro, or a mulattoe, to be protected by a negrophile minister.”84 As tensions ratcheted upward between the émigré community and Genet, Tanguy printed

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material that suggested that the commissioners were criminals and that their policy of emancipation would be, or had been, rejected by France.85 These “daring outrage[s],” as Mayor Clarkson termed the attack on the wharf in the General Advertiser, energized Genet’s efforts and gradually altered the attitudes of his American defenders.86 Even before they knew that the policy of emancipation had been confirmed in Paris, emergent Republicans in Philadelphia were willing to discuss it as a positive action, one undertaken by agents of the French nation in the name of the Revolution. The ending of slavery not only empowered the French state against its enemies, they noted, it was an extension of the Revolutionary commitment to equality and gave France the moral high ground in the global struggle. Freneau demonstrated the expansive potential of this embrace. After outlining the abuses of the Old Regime, ostensibly to allow Americans to make informed decisions as to their loyalties, he offered his own opinion. Alluding to the violence of the Terror, he asked, “To whom shall we impute the crime of murders and conflagration? to the people who are the instruments, or their oppressors who have driven them to desperation?” To seal his point, he turned to the West Indies: “Witness the late catastrophe in St. Domingo,” where slavery provided a ready-made model of tyranny that he knew would resonate. “Insurrections are always [blamed] upon the insurgents as a crime,” he noted, “but they are nine times in ten, more imputable to the tyranny of the master, than to the cruelty of the slave.”87 This was a well-known antislavery stance, but many of those masters now lived in Philadelphia neighborhoods. In connecting events in Le Cap with those in Paris, Freneau universalized both tyranny and resistance to it in ways that Genet surely appreciated. In his first issue after the June 21 decree was made public, Freneau applauded the commissioners’ actions. Sonthonax and Polverel, “in opposition to the arrogance and tyranny of the white Creolians,” had taken measures that “[give] the first ray of hope that the condition of the West-India mulattoes and negroes will be bettered.”88 This was a small step from the open endorsement of emancipation he offered a few months later. “It is a gross error to believe in the maintenance of slavery, in St. Domingo,” he wrote in the fall of 1793. Slavery, as tyranny, bred resistance. Lumping the violence against the planters with that committed at Nantes and the Vendée, he asked, “Can the annihilation of a cruel, vicious, aristocratic people, enemies to the French Republic, be a crime? No! No! of what consequence is it to the mother country that there should exist great planters,

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great merchants, or men possessing millions. Those blood-suckers of the people who have never done any thing for the Republic, who know nothing but gold, . . . pollute the land of liberty. Such men ought already to have manured with their infectious bodies the ground which has been exhausted for them, and upon which they still breathe.”89 Whether this “land of liberty” was France or Saint Domingue was ambiguous, and immaterial. If few writers matched Freneau’s passion, others evoked similar sensibilities. A report of slave unrest in Guadeloupe in the Federal Gazette was interspersed with sarcastic comments, such as “[O horrid! what, shall Negroes be free!—those black devils whom we have bought with our cash, and who are as much our slaves as the Hessians and Hanoverians are slaves to Britons—shall these be free!!! O bella, horida bella!].”90 Further “aristocratic” threats to the Revolution intensified this arc. Fears of the loss of Saint Domingue envisioned in July as a result of emancipation were elided in December by anxieties over its loss to the enemies of the French state. Citizen Genet himself, flailing in paroxysms of activity and rhetoric, paved the way. “Our colonies have also had their Vendée,” he wrote to Paris in telling of the British invasion, abetted by colonial whites.91 In combination with Galbaud’s flight to Canada and the émigrés’ enmity, this event led him to envision an intricate and expansive threat to the Republic, and to the United States. The émigrés “strive to pervert public opinion towards their royalist system,” working in combination with “agents” of the French princes, the Capet family, the British, and “the Party of this nation that has not yet lost hope that you will be reconquered,” he wrote to Jefferson in October. Opportunistically descending on slaveholding states, they hoped to drive the South into the arms of the British with their tales of “French negroes.” These plans, Genet argued, made it obvious that it was time for the United States to take a more active stance on behalf of France, otherwise “soon the Patriots of 1775 will no longer be anything in the country they have created, the tree of liberty whose roots have been watered in their blood will only cover with its shadow their most cruel enemies.”92 Among those enemies, the minister hinted, was the Washington administration itself, members of which he labeled “liberticides.” Elsewhere he even suggested that Washington, “this friend of Lafayette,” had “medallions of Capet and his family” on his walls and was the head of a faction “whose only purpose is to establish here a monarchy.”93 Genet’s various gambits got nowhere as a spur to American policy. Jefferson politely passed on his information about the forces massing in American ports to local officials and promised to investigate the riot in Philadelphia; the crimes

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imputed to Galbaud, since they were committed outside the United States, he explained, were not an American concern.94 As Mayor Clarkson demonstrated, at the local, state, and federal levels, Americans would intervene to preserve the peace but stayed out of what Freneau termed “local or party disputes.”95 By the time Genet was revealing his vast counterrevolutionary conspiracy with Galbaud at its center, Jefferson had distanced himself from the minister completely. The futility of Genet’s diplomatic efforts, however, should not distract from his continuing influence in American political culture. The Girondin minister certainly misunderstood the structure of the American federal system and underestimated the people’s trust in George Washington, but his capacity to drive American political discourse had real and radical implications. By the end of 1793 Genet’s cosmopolitan sense of the Revolution had embraced emancipation, and the “French negroes” it created, as the essence of the Revolution in France and as the recipe for its success worldwide. Sympathetic newspaper editors bore witness to his efforts in this spirit, gradually allowing it to leak into their own pronouncements. For his part, Genet saw emancipation as a marker of “philosophy”—a capacity to overcome ancient prejudices and accept equality as an inherent truth. Thus, in his efforts to secure the allegiance of the French sailors in New York harbor, Genet distinguished between the sailors’ “patriotism,” which he touted, and their “philosophy,” which fell short of his own. Mobilizing them, in his mind, would reform and regenerate their ideals, a “sublime design” that was part of the general effort to make “all of the new world free.”96 This was the same sort of hyperbolism that echoed throughout Genet’s writings, but in this case it reflected a widened sense of the stakes at hand after June 1793. The November attack on the delegation in Philadelphia added fuel to this fire. Writing to Jefferson, Genet warned that the ex-slaves of Saint Domingue, “though very young, sir, know their rights.” He was “alarmed” that the “tricolored deputation sent by the freemen of the North was scandalously insulted and mistreated.” This was an affront to France and a sign of the counterrevolution’s presence in the American capital, and he hoped Jefferson understood as much. The change in Saint Domingue, after all, was “not one of the less remarkable phenomena of our revolution.”97 Genet’s Revolution, defined by the impetus to spread French principles and freedom, reflexively embraced emancipation and black citizenship. And, for a time, those ideas had traction writ large. The minister’s efforts to protect and support the “tricolor” delegation were certainly his most success-

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ful and significant public act. In Paris, its members would provide influential testimony before the National Convention during the debates that would produce the decree of February 4, 1794, ending slavery across the French empire.98 Genet’s public presence in the United States ensured that Americans would confront those issues as well, taking Saint Domingue as the representative edge of the global struggle at hand. With the terms of the battle simplified, and cleansed, American defenders of France leaped in with new vigor. Seizing upon accounts of French republican resistance, pro-French voices offered depictions of Saint Domingue that embraced the new racial order as a source of strength. A captain arriving from Cap Français described the city as “governed entirely by the Negroes, who had between 30 and 40,000 soldiers under arms, with between 4 and 500 constantly on guard,” and explained that they “were in high spirits, fearing no enemy under Heaven.”99 Another report told that Polverel’s force in the South consisted of “persons of every description” and predicted that it would soon drive “away the ‘fugitive English’ ” from the province.100 Sonthonax himself, always conscious of the power of public words, described Saint Domingue as exemplifying the future in his spirited rejection of a British call to surrender at Port-au-Prince. Racial equality was rational, and it made the Republicans a formidable opponent. Prejudice and discrimination had become “intolerable to an enlightened people,” he cried, “the ancient friends of all colors are united in heart and soul for general liberty.” The new black citizens would defend “the property of their patrons,” he stressed.101 Answering critics’ portrayals of “black government,” these and other accounts presented evidence that “general liberty” was a source of peace and order. Sonthonax’s August 29 decree, printed in Philadelphia in October, sternly reminded the “new citizens” that they would need to work. “You shall no longer be the property of another, your own shall be sacred to you, and you shall live happy,” he told them. “Liberty draws you out of nonentity into existence,—Shew yourselves worthy of it—abjure forever indolence . . . have the courage to be a free people, and you will join the European nations.”102 These sorts of sentiments were echoed as French republican forces moved against British holdings across the Caribbean.103 In early May 1794 Philadelphians read the news that the National Convention had sanctioned emancipation in Saint Domingue and extended it to all French colonies. The deputies in Paris were described as embracing the colored delegates who, courtesy of Genet, had arrived safely from America. In adopting the abolition decree, members of the convention were quoted as castigating

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Galbaud for his intrigues to “debauch the negroes.” France, Danton proclaimed, was the “torch of liberty” to the world.104 “It is to be feared,” wrote a correspondent in the American Star, “that the French islands will undergo a total ruin when the decree . . . declaring the entire abolition of slavery of the negroes, shall be known there.”105 Benjamin Franklin Bache and other supporters of France, though they had worried over the same potential for “loss” in mid-1793, no longer saw things that way. French emancipation was now an unencumbered good. Securely fastened to a French Revolution that had “avenged both nature and humanity of two centuries of crimes,” it was a reasonable and reliable path to progress.106 Even publications unfriendly to that cause recognized that emancipation had “transformed all the negroes into so many heroes.”107 Fittingly, Philadelphians also read the words of Sonthonax, who, having been recalled, was forced to defend his actions in the colony during Thermidor. “These blacks are so brave, so devoted to the cause of Liberty for which they fought,” he declared, “that they had preferred to eat grass rather than submit.” Since being freed, they “have acquitted themselves . . . with a degree of energy which has rendered them formidable to the enemies of Liberty. . . . It will not be long before their efforts will render St. Domingo the most powerful and the most flourishing of our Colonies.”108 These sentiments proved to be infectious. At a massive public “Civic Festival” the same day as the news of the February 4 decree was confirmed, eight hundred members of Philadelphia’s Democratic Societies gathered to celebrate the victory of the French armies at Toulon. Among the sentiments they toasted were the hope that “every species of tyranny” would soon be destroyed and that “freedom and friendship” would lead men to distinguish among “The great family of Mankind” only by “their virtues and their talents.”109 Antislavery expressions in Philadelphia’s newspapers reached similar heights in the months that followed.110 A toast made at one Philadelphia group’s July Fourth celebration called for “a speedy extinction of that species of slavery which disgraces our country—degrades too many of our fellow citizens—and gives lie to our declaration of Independence.”111 American readers were told to snort at the ads for runaway slaves in British Jamaica, which Bache sarcastically pilloried as “charming proof of civilized society, of that age of reason and philosophy, of humanity, or approaching millenium [sic] and of the rights of man!”112 Millennium indeed: French emancipation, begun by Sonthonax and completed by the National Convention, was placed firmly in the context of the wider global struggle. For Republicans it could serve as a marker of Revolutionary probity and could set

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the terms of the fight. Another article expounded on the “revolution” at hand, one that would “conform the government of the world to the interest and welfare of the human race” and would only be complete when all nations partook of its blessings. Slavery’s end was an integral part of this goal, and, for the author, it was forthcoming: “Let us combine our exertions in accelerating the accomplishment of this happy event, . . . let us address the father of the mercies with this humble supplication: . . . —that domestic and national slavery, may be abolished throughout the world, and that civil government may be every where established upon the broad and permanent basis of political liberty, and the general good; and flourish till time shall be no more.”113 In this heady environment, to countenance slavery was not merely hypocritical, it verged on treason. This was precisely the point. Placing emancipation at the center of a schema by which the world’s struggles were defined created a high point of antislavery expression. As a framework of understanding, it operated by generalizing from the bifurcated categories by which the Revolution was understood. The counterrevolution, waged by “aristocrats” in the name of “tyranny,” was to be identified by an acceptance of slavery. “Liberty” and “freedom” were to be defined by its absence. “What opinion must we then form of those men, however they may talk of patriotism, of liberty, equality, &c. &c. who keep their fellow creatures, in a state of wretched servitude,” one writer naming himself “A Democrat” wondered. “Can they feel, can they know the value of liberty?”114 Men who failed to find slavery repugnant, he asserted, were not only obviously ignorant of the meaning of liberty and therefore untrustworthy as citizens, they were dangerous to the republic itself. Antislavery pronouncements, therefore, had a utilitarian function for American watchers of France, one that was as much related to political contests at home as it was to those abroad. In identifying their enemies to know their friends, Americans worked to define their own beliefs.

French Negroes and the Ends of Philosophy Paradoxically, this embrace of the opposition to slavery as a marker of global Revolutionary probity ultimately yielded a more circumscribed understanding of the changes taking place. As momentous as the grant of freedom was in the Americas, in France the policy of emancipation was as much a political process as it was a statement of principle; the February 4 decree came about through the sort of abrupt reversal produced by the Terror’s frenzied focus on extirpat-

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ing enemies of the Revolution.115 That observers in Philadelphia, deeply interested in these struggles, seized upon slavery as an important site to judge French radicalism is significant. It shows the continuing power of slavery as a domestic political issue and reveals the ways in which the question of its future as part of the settlement of the American Revolution remained open. The popular discourse around French emancipation as an expression of the republican revolution reveals the antislavery elements within American Revolutionary ideology to still have traction as political ideas. This rhetoric certainly registers a highwater mark of acceptance for the most radical elements of the dramatic shifts unfolding around the Atlantic. Even these expressions, however, signal the constraints of this understanding and explain their ephemerality. The insurgents of 1791, whom Abraham Bishop celebrated and who lurked in southern white nightmares, were “negroes” for whom “French” was a qualifier—their universal qualities, as representatives of oppressed men or simply as slaves everywhere, were what made them significant. By 1794, the emphasis within the phrase “French negroes” had changed in some ears; these were rational products of the French Revolution who had the potential to be “heroes” against the counterrevolutionary foe. They were still, however, objects of French creation. The public discourse aired by Bache and Freneau was primarily driven by Francophilia, not the universalism that prompted Bishop. Only rarely would their writings go so far as to actually accept black actors as rational and competent agents on their own behalf. Few made much of the fact, for example, that many insurgents (such as Jean-François) rejected Sonthonax’s flag and continued to fight on the side of kings. Freneau appended a report that told that “the negroes have joined the Spanish against the commissioners” with a single editorial comment: “[Doubtful.]”116 For Republicans in Philadelphia, Sonthonax (and Genet) provided the only appropriate connection to an acceptable “revolution.” The emancipation they touted was French; its connections to other places were left unstated, and unexamined. The fact that even his most ardent American allies understood the United States as related to but distinct from France ensured Citizen Genet’s diplomatic problems. The Girondin minister’s alienation, however, should not be taken as inevitable. Genet was not simply a litmus test, revealing the set features of the American landscape; he was a catalyst. In bringing the French Revolution to the United States, he spurred Washington’s neutrality, sharpened Hamilton’s suspicions, and forced Jefferson to recalibrate his opposition to the emergent Federalists. In embracing the Revolution in Saint Domingue, complete with its

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message of revolutionary emancipation, Genet injected the issue of slavery into American discourse. And while he made plenty of blunders, his misreading of the evolving parameters of American liberty should not make that evolution seem preordained. The denouement of American Revolutionary antislavery thought was a process, not a path. In resisting the implications of Genet’s global revolution, some Americans articulated a different sense of their position in the world. The bifurcated picture of the Revolution that the minister presented might function in Paris and in the Caribbean as the war between France and its European enemies tore across the plantation societies there. In the United States, however, the diversity of American relationships to slavery ensured that the Girondin conception of the Revolution could not take. To be sure, Philadelphia Francophiles sounded Genet’s notes: in response to a Charleston paper’s juxtaposition of a Fourth of July celebration and a report of the arrival of a cargo of slaves, Bache appended a “Query” in which he asked, “is this article genuine? Or was it foisted in by some waggish hand, in order to ridicule the inconsistency of Southern patriotism?”117 For Bache, the question was its own answer, but that was not so elsewhere. Genet’s haphazard efforts, in setting out the logic of a global revolution, ultimately served to reify a response to slavery in which localism, not cosmopolitan connections, was the hallmark. Genet’s failure in this regard undergirded all of his other problems. American slaveholders, he thought, were like the crew members of the French fleet: they were good patriots but were struggling to match their conduct to the true ideals of the Revolutionary moment. Their compromised position offered an opportunity to counterrevolutionaries such as Galbaud and the émigrés, who hoped to frighten them through tales of French-inspired insurrection into disassociating themselves from France and the “Revolution of Color.”118 “Why do these dangerous men prefer to choose the territory of freedom” in which to live, rather than landing in nations that allow slavery throughout? he asked Jefferson as he tried to persuade the secretary to stiffen his support for France. It could only be part of their attempt to “taint your moral and political existence and divide your federation into two parts.”119 To the government in Paris he went further, suggesting that “a great number of the American inhabitants[,] wretches of the same prejudices and attached by interest to the system of Slavery,” were supportive of the royalists’ intrigues. “These planters sympathize with ours,” he explained. “Color is for them the end of Philosophy.”120 Slavery, for Genet, was a wedge that aristocrats across borders would use to foil a revolution defined by racial egalitarianism and emancipation.

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Jefferson’s response to Genet’s conception of the Revolution is well-known. The secretary’s reactions to French emancipation, however, highlight a different set of emphases, and conclusions, than those voiced by Bache and Freneau. Jefferson, after all, was as concerned by aristocratic intrigues as the minister and the editors. Quite reasonably, however, given his own position as a slaveholder, he resisted the idea that slavery could mark out political enemies or that a stance toward it could make one “right” with the Revolution. When an émigré in Philadelphia approached him in late 1793 with news that two gens de couleur agents, including a known associate of Genet’s, were en route to Charleston “to excite an insurrection among the negroes,” Jefferson reluctantly passed the rumor along to South Carolina’s governor, but he made it clear that he did not think the threat was real.121 Nor, however, did the story lend credence to Genet’s portrait of émigrés’ counterrevolutionary doings. For Jefferson, this was merely an episode of French politics, albeit one taking place on American soil. Slave violence was a possibility, but it was not linked to the fundamental principles held by one side or the other. French emancipation was distinct to France; as a development it served to emphasize the separation between the American context and changes going on elsewhere. Months earlier, in his private correspondence, Jefferson had reacted to the “conflagration” at Cap Français with a vision of the future which that development heralded that was quite different than Genet’s. The news made him “daily more and more convinced that all the West India islands will remain in the hands of the people of colour,” he wrote to James Monroe in Virginia, and that “a total expulsion of the whites sooner or later [would] take place.” The violence led Jefferson to see a warning in Saint Domingue for the people of the American South: slavery would produce “bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (South of Patowmac) [will] have to wade through.”122 Black liberation, however, was not the point of the lesson. Rather, it was that safety would come through black removal. After Sonthonax’s emancipation policy became better known, Jefferson explained to his daughter that “St. Domingo has expelled all it’s [sic] whites, has given freedom to all it’s blacks, has established a regular government of the blacks and coloured people, and seems now to have taken it’s [sic] ultimate form.” This segregated fate, he judged, was one to which “all of the West India islands must come” as well.123 Black liberty in Saint Domingue had seized his attention and spurred his thinking, but, for Jefferson, it forecast a world segregated by race, not a future of global egalitarianism.124 It was an idea that made for strange bedfellows. John Fenno ridiculed

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French liberty as a cynical ploy, but he agreed that French emancipation was epoch making. “The world is probably reaping its last harvest from the slavery and toil of the native of Africa,” he wrote in late 1794. Emancipation ensured that blacks would soon become “the Lords of the Soil,” which would mean the end of cultivation after “the negroes . . . revert . . . to the state of life to which the great majority of them were accustomed in their own country.”125 Freedom having sundered their connection to the economic system that brought them westward, blacks would now naturally remove from the modern world. “French negroes,” then, were perhaps revolutionary actors, but, for most of white America, they were still fearsome figures. “Black government” in Saint Domingue had transformed the colony, one report told. Whites, free coloreds, slaves, and “mountain negroes” were “no more at enmity, their cause has become one—the sound of liberty is echoed through every part of the Island.” This society, however, constituted a lesson to “every good American, who knows not only the value of liberty, but of a good government to protect it.”126 Absent proper controls, such changes could look like anarchy. As a writer in Saint Croix telling of the French capture of nearby Saint Eustatia in the spring of 1795 explained, “as soon as the French land in an island, they set the negroes free, and then the negroes cut throats, burn and destroy all before them.” This sanctioned violence would spread. Hearing of the onset of these forces, he continued, local blacks were “growing very impertinent in this, as well as in all the rest of the West India Islands.”127 Genet himself resorted to this sense of threat in conveying his outrage to Jefferson over the émigré attack on Sonthonax’s tricolored delegation in Philadelphia. Only his efforts to protect them had avoided the “blind rage” that the “four hundred thousand blacks” of the colony would have vented on “the white race” had the incident gone further, Genet explained, warning that “the new people who are formed in this Island will become a useful friend or a dangerous neighbor.”128 Jefferson failed to rise to this bait either. In his response to Genet, he made no reference to the racial composition of the group of “respectable strangers” that had been attacked. Noting Mayor Clarkson’s proclamation, he assured Genet that the United States would “make a signal example of those who have thus violated that protection which the laws of the US. extend to all persons within their pale.”129 Saint Domingue’s “Revolution of Colors” was external to shifts in America; Jefferson posed as a simple observer and arbitrator, not the interested participant that Genet wanted him to be. The lingering power of the fear of free “French negroes” explains why. Genet’s depiction of Saint Domingue’s

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importance after the events of June 1793 flew in the face of prevailing attitudes toward race in the United States. As we have seen, fears of black rebellion reverberated across the South just at this moment. The same day that Sonthonax’s August 29 proclamation was printed, a report from Charleston told that “’Tis much feared that the negroes who have come here with the French people have said so much about the insurrections at St. Domingo, that we have every reason to apprehend one here.”130 In Philadelphia these fears would not be so immediate, but they did register. One report in the days after the news from Cap Français became current resisted blaming either Galbaud or the commissioners, instead suggesting that the black violence, as it had all along in Saint Domingue, came when the proper authorities were distracted. The same report noted that Galbaud had liberated a group of British prisoners during the fight, exclaiming “how remarkable to see the French and British soldiers and sailors, who, but a few days before, were employed in the trade of slaughtering one another, so soon join hands and fight like brethren against the Mulattoes and Negroes!”131 Racial divisions, by this account, were natural and reasonable; this facet of the violence at Cap Français clarified the conflict. Even supporters of emancipation were flummoxed by the overt racial egalitarianism that “French negroes” represented in eyes like Genet’s. Shortly after Sonthonax and Polverel issued their harried decree at Cap Français, a writer in Philadelphia supported the idea. If France emancipated immediately, while America did so gradually, it was because France was besieged by greater and more active enemies. In explaining his position, however, he demonstrated the limitations of the liberty and equality both nations purportedly served. The prevailing objection to freeing slaves, he noted, was that “Blacks, . . . by acquiring freedom and property, . . . will by degrees mix with the whites and destroy the colour of both.” Arguing that this reasoning was fallacious, he explained that “Mulattoes,” the obvious measure of this tendency, were most common in areas where slavery endured, not where it was restricted.132 It was slavery that led to racial mixing, in other words, and it was racial mixing that was the real enemy. If a society that included a population of free blacks was safe, by this understanding, it was only because of whites’ majority and their racial aversions. It was only safe, in other words, in a place like Philadelphia, where blacks might not be slaves, but neither were they citizens. Elizabeth Drinker understood as much. This was not the cosmopolitan universalism voiced by Bishop or Rice; this was not a realignment of human society in recognition that all men were “of

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one blood.” By 1794, white observers in Philadelphia might relate the events in Saint Domingue to the “revolutionary” movements in France and the United States, but the fit was uneasy. Tensions existed within the white community over what they saw. In no small part, that was due to a greater tension produced by people of color in both areas, whose sense of the radical revolutionary possibilities at hand was far less encumbered.

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Making Places of Liberty: Emancipation and Antislavery

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wo young men, one named Azor and the other Geff, were among the hundreds of people of color who came to Philadelphia in the wake of the events of June 1793 in Saint Domingue. Azor arrived first. Toward the end of 1793 he landed with Tranquille St. Victor, a Cap Français upholsterer who had been “obliged to fly from the assassins and incendiaries” who had ravaged the city after Galbaud fled. Azor was St. Victor’s slave, “a faithful negro,” as the furniture maker saw it, who had “benevolently followed me.” Once in Pennsylvania, however, Azor painted a different picture, one in which he had not followed but had been “brought” and in which his loyalties were directed elsewhere. By Pennsylvanian law, slave owners like St. Victor had six months before people such as Azor could simply walk out of their doors. And, on July 2, 1794, with the help of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Azor did just that, leaving St. Victor’s house at 87 North Second Street and making his way out into the city.1 Less than a year later, Geff stepped off the schooner Molly onto Philadelphia’s wharves. Like Azor, when Geff left his home in Trinidad, he had been a slave. Unlike Azor, he was already free when he arrived. En route to Havana, the Spanish vessel transporting him had been stopped by a French privateer out of Le Cap, enabling Geff and the other slaves onboard to jump ship “in order that they might obtain their liberty agreeably to the National Decree” in Saint Domingue. When the privateer decided next to put into Charleston, South Carolina, for supplies, its captain first allowed his new passengers to move to the Molly, since it was bound for Philadelphia, a place where “the blacks might enjoy their freedom.”2 These journeys evoke an Atlantic topography in which, by the mid-1790s,

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both Saint Domingue and Philadelphia figured as places of liberty amid a world of slavery. By the time people such as Azor and Geff were walking Philadelphia’s streets, Pennsylvania’s laws had been gradually ending slavery in the state for well over a decade. In Saint Domingue, the commissioners’ decrees in 1793, validated by the National Convention’s act of February 4, 1794, seemed to represent an analogous, and far more rapid, movement. Pennsylvania was a place where Azor’s defiance could gain traction. French emancipation in Saint Domingue transformed a trifling episode of privateering into an epochal moment for Geff, one in which he could not only attain “liberty” but also (in Philadelphia) “enjoy [his] freedom.” Sonthonax and Genet may have strained the cosmopolitan connections entertained by whites in Philadelphia, but this sense of parallel landscapes was impossible to ignore. White Dominguans understood as much. Even before the arrival of the refugees of 1793, émigrés in Philadelphia had mounted a bid for exemption from the Pennsylvania law that Azor would later deploy.3 In rejecting their petition, the state legislature ruled that slavery was “contrary to the laws of nature, the dictates of justice,” and, therefore, “to the Constitution of this state.”4 After Le Cap burned, only a small portion of the thousands who left with Galbaud disembarked purposefully in the American capital. More landed in Norfolk, Baltimore, and even New York, places where, in the words of one French West Indian, “the laws . . . permit slavery.” These concerns notwithstanding, by mid-1794 over eight hundred people of color, most of them slaves, had made their way to Philadelphia.5 Whether by fate or design, in coming to Philadelphia these people had found a sanctuary, a locale that offered protection and allies. Stories like Azor’s and Geff ’s, however, reveal the limits, as well as the promise, of Philadelphia as a place of liberty. They also highlight a distinction between the emancipation described by the laws in effect in the city and that put into practice as black lives unfolded there.6 Changes in Saint Domingue, eventually including the policy of emancipation, touched the forms and direction of those black struggles. Pennsylvania’s laws ended slavery surely, but slowly; the freedom they granted was also measured. Gradual emancipation was paired with an effort to “improve” or “prepare” the people it liberated. After escaping St. Victor, for example, Azor was bound by the Abolition Society’s Committee of Guardians to a Philadelphia alderman, who was to teach him to be a tanner.7 In practice this was yet another form of control: state-approved indenture was but a different kind of bondage. The Committee of Guardians was one of four committees established to monitor and shape free black life in the city so as “to qualify those

Figure 5. “A Plan for improving the condition of the Free Blacks,” Pennsylvania Abolition Society broadside, 1789. Partnered with regular addresses to the free black community printed in Philadelphia newspapers, efforts such as this reflected both the society’s paternalistic approach and its leaders’ sense of Pennsylvania’s visibility and meaning as a place where slavery was (slowly) being vanquished. Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty.” The terms of that qualification set out an idea of citizenship that was steeped in elite white Protestant sensibilities with regard to work, family, morality, and education.8 Nevertheless, Pennsylvanian freedom was not irrelevant nor was it empty. After a mariner claimed Geff as his slave and tried to ferry him out of Philadelphia, Geff obtained a certificate testifying to his freedom.9 Threats to liberty did not only come from places like South Carolina; freedom in Philadelphia consisted of the capacity to make one’s own choices, to assert one’s own ideas about liberty, and to gain a measure of self-control. Geff ’s role in this process is opaque, but Azor’s motives and desires can be recovered. Indenture to the tanner was his choice, or at least it was a repudiation of St. Victor’s attempt to impose his own meaning on his ex-slave’s newfound liberty. Within a month of Azor’s initial departure, the upholsterer physically dragged him before Mayor Matthew Clarkson and secured an indenture that would have made Azor his servant for thirteen years. Getting wind of this, the Abolition Society’s Acting Committee (the body that did its daily business) served a writ of habeas corpus and brought Azor before Judge Edward Shippen of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Shippen ruled that the young man was “free and entirely at his own disposal” but recommended Azor stay with his old master, just for a shorter term. Azor refused. St. Victor fumed, but his efforts to define (or confine) Azor’s freedom had failed.10 Constrictive, coercive, and normative as Pennsylvanian freedom could be, it provided people of color with a spate of options not easily available elsewhere. It made the state, and especially Philadelphia, a place where they could create institutions, accrue modest resources, gain some measure of security, and form a community. The place Philadelphia provided was one of opportunity, perhaps better described as a “space,” in which fetters that existed elsewhere—both figurative and literal—were absent or less binding. French emancipation reverberated through the space that Philadelphia provided. The “National Decree” of February 4, 1794, impacted the mechanisms of legal and social power that structured Pennsylvanian freedom on the ground. While that ground was not fundamentally altered, important trends were accelerated. Developments in Saint Domingue sparked white antislavery activists to heighten their labors but reemphasized the particularities of their local context and intensified the sense that emancipation was exceptional, not the rule. For African Americans in Philadelphia, while the ideals involved were important, French emancipation was Janus-faced. As it did in the Caribbean more gener-

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ally, the French policy shaped enslaved people’s choices, offering them a new tool that some might use to improve their situation. At the same time, the practical effects of the events that produced the policy, beginning with the arrival of French refugees and including the political battles between white parties over France more generally, most often served to blunt the impact of their calls for an American Revolution that was to lead to their equal citizenship. As this “American” space was defined and constricted, however, the actions of some of the émigrés of color in Philadelphia—flesh-and-blood “French negroes”— produced a countercurrent, one in which “French” liberty reached across the city’s borders.

Promise and Peril The mid-1790s was a period of antislavery promise in Pennsylvania. Just before vessels began to arrive from the ruins of Cap Français, the Abolition Society, emboldened by a string of successes and by the tenor of the times, looked into abandoning their commitment to gradual emancipation and contemplated taking efforts to end slavery in Pennsylvania all at once.11 At around the same time, the state legislature received a motion to fundamentally alter the 1780 abolition act in a similar way. The period of servitude that the act mandated, Representative John Shoemaker argued, was incompatible with the state constitution’s declaration “that all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent and indefeasible rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty.” The committee bringing in the bill went further, judging “that slavery is inconsistent with every principle of humanity, justice and right” and proposing that “slavery be abolished in this commonwealth” for all slaves over age twenty-one.12 These developments took place at a high point of African American organization and hope in Philadelphia. As debate over the proposed change continued in the state house, another one leaped onto the pages of the city’s newspapers. For over two years, members of Philadelphia’s African American community, having experienced increasing discrimination in their current congregations, had worked to establish an independent “African” Church. Led by clergymen Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, this campaign had met some success in the form of financial contributions but also hostility, as white religious leaders reacted angrily to what they saw as black ingratitude and presumptuousness. By spring 1793, however, the effort was resurgent. Activist

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Benjamin Rush had become involved and had proved to be a tireless booster and fund-raiser.13 Merchant Robert Ralston agreed to act as treasurer. Most important, John Nicholson, a wealthy speculator, had swept in with a timely loan that allowed the group to buy land and hire builders. Work began in March.14 By July 1793, just before the news of the destruction of Cap Français arrived, the implications of the creation of a separate church were being talked through in public. “A TRUE AMERICAN” regarded white support for the African Church as a deeply disconcerting sign of the failure of the nation’s promise of racial equality. Blacks, he argued, “have a right to all the privileges of citizens,” but that right was being denied, here in the form of discrimination in the congregations. For “TRUE AMERICAN,” such inequity was an attempt to “bar the gates of heaven to all who are not of the ROYAL BLOOD” and was but an opening move in a wider effort to constrict citizenship and its attendant rights by lineage. It was a scheme concocted by “an aristocratic junto” to create gradations throughout society. The effort to create a separate church, therefore, was reasonable but wrongheaded; it was “dangerous to, and incompatible with, the equality we now struggle to establish.” It was of a piece with laws and practices that treated blacks separately and, as such, was “as alarming to us, as a meditated attack on our own liberties.”15 When “A FRIEND TO TRUTH” responded reminding that blacks themselves had suggested the separation, “TRUE AMERICAN” replied that bigotry had prompted them to do so. Incorporation into an America typified by a raceless equality, he maintained, was a sacred American principle that, if sacrificed, created a society of disparate interests that could produce only violence.16 Abraham Bishop could not have said it better. White racial antipathy was a reality in Philadelphia, but this posture marked the founding of the African Church as a moment when society was teetering between Revolutionary outcomes defined by the fate of slavery and racial prejudice in the republic. In fact, the black bid for an African Church signaled the disjunction between that promise and reality in the city. Having experienced discrimination in their existing Quaker, Methodist, and Episcopal congregations, these men were accepting Philadelphia’s racial dynamic as they found it: their effort was rooted in the common burdens of being black in a white society—a burden that led them to attempt to abandon denominational differences in order to coalesce around a common “African” identity.17 In their argument before the public, however, black leaders maintained their

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longstanding commitment to an expansive understanding of the American polity and their claims that the Revolution that had established it was an expression of fundamental human rights intended for universal application.18 They posed their act of separation as a remedy to the Revolution gone awry. It was a principled expression of ideals consonant with the times: God had “made of one blood all the nations of the earth,” they reminded.19 Rising racial tensions had made following God’s word difficult in existing churches, hence the need to separate.20 This argument—and act—made black separation consistent with the attainment of a kind of freedom deemed foundational to the American polity; it acknowledged that others were pitted against those essential precepts. This was the same end point that “TRUE AMERICAN” desired; they differed only on the means to get there. On August 18, 1793, a work party that consisted of both black and white men raised the African Church’s roof. Resting for supper, the blacks first served their coworkers and then were seated and served by them. The scene distilled a situation in which black and white Philadelphians were not quite separate and not quite equal but in which all understood the work as progress. Men wept with joy. Toasts were made, including one by Benjamin Rush expressing the hope that “African churches [would] everywhere soon succeed to African bondage.”21 On their face, the disruptions stemming from Saint Domingue at this particular moment—the arrivals from Le Cap, the enhanced fears of “French negroes” among slaveholders, the horrors of the yellow fever, and the discursive heat over slavery and revolution—all seemed to shine a light that illuminated the shallowness of white commitment to racial equality and the fleeting nature of the enthusiasm for emancipation. To be sure, in the summer and fall of 1793 white communities up and down the eastern seaboard hastily raised funds to provide emergency aid to the French refugees, quickly gathering amounts that far outpaced those the African Church effort had struggled to raise. In Philadelphia, $12,000 was secured in a matter of weeks. Worse, subscribers who had pledged funds for the African Church reneged, diverting their monies to the relief effort instead.22 In August Rush sent black leader William Gray to Baltimore to try to scare up contributions but soon learned the new and harsh reality. “I was sorry to be obliged to advise him not to prosecute the business,” Rush’s correspondent wrote. “The people here are very willing to promote . . . every laudable design, but . . . the whole town had just been Laid under a heavy contribution for the French refugees.”23 Racial preference and prejudice alone, however, are insufficient as explana-

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tions. The funds for the African Church, after all, had been pledged in the first place. Even Rush’s correspondent from Baltimore advised that Gray “give people time to breathe” before trying again. The refugee crisis was a sudden, shocking, and captivating event, one that led American communities to confront their affinities and calibrate the boundaries of their sympathy, but it did not, in and of itself, reconfigure the humanitarian landscape.24 Amid the numerous notices of meetings of relief societies, donations, and special events designed to raise funds, Benjamin Franklin Bache printed a poem lamenting the situation of the “UNFORTUNATE EMIGRANTS” that was meant to elicit more of the same. It described the “savage hands” and “ferocious ire” in Saint Domingue that had produced a “scene, suffus’d with human gore,” from which the refugees “landed helpless on COLUMBIA’s shore.”25 Though accounts such as these accessed the portraits of racialized violence that had cascaded from Saint Domingue for over three years, they also distinguished between the West Indian and American contexts.26 Generalized as simply slave violence, the destruction of Le Cap could serve to bolster the sense that slavery was a danger, that it produced violence, and that the United States was rightfully treating this dangerous problem. American benevolence, in other words, might be distracted from the plight of American slaves and free blacks, but its premises could endure. That the refugees arrived and were immediately prioritized as obvious objects of philanthropy did not necessarily mean that other objects were replaced or had not been real. By 1794 two independent African American churches had been founded in Philadelphia, both with white aid. The Abolition Society’s work continued, meanwhile, and in some ways even expanded. These realities suggest a more dynamic sort of impact when contemplating the effect of developments in Saint Domingue in Philadelphia, one that functioned less as an exposure of the “true” tenets of white American ideology than a shock to that framework—a jolt that disrupted its workings, jumbled its components, and rejiggered its functioning. The Revolutionary moment embodied by the public discussion of the African Church—the balance of ideals and sensibilities that made it a positive eventuality for some, a problem for others, and a cause for thought for many—was thrown off by the changes in the French colony. Not only were resources rerouted, so too was public attention. Voices, black and white, pressing universalistic claims were disempowered, their volume reduced. The nearly concurrent outbreak of yellow fever exacerbated and intensified this effect. At a visceral level, the fever scare vitalized a distrust of outsiders;

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more abstractly, it served to vitiate connections across space. Practically, the fever simply compromised the channels by which people interacted with the wider world. Over the fall of 1793 most of Philadelphia’s newspapers closed up shop, in the case of Philip Freneau’s National Gazette, permanently. In this horrific environment, the politics of Revolution simply ceased to weigh much in public discourse, even as controversies arose over the origins and treatment of the disease.27 African Americans in Philadelphia operated within the landscape set out by those notions. While they acted toward ends distinct from white agendas and pushed for expansive renderings of the republic, they were ultimately constrained by the limits of what was expressible in Philadelphia at this moment and in this setting. This reality had shaped their reactions to developments in Saint Domingue from the start. Witnessing the rejection of slavery and assertion of freedom made manifest by the insurrections there, African American leaders had approached that violence cautiously. Openly embracing it was not a viable option in the early 1790s, nor would it have been a wise strategy.28 Instead, while the logic behind such vengeance may have resonated, the attempt to act according to a self-defined brand of freedom took the form of the effort to establish their independent church.29 This act of separation, in their view, was a remedy to society’s failings, not a cause of disruption. It was not justified vengeance, but it was justice; it even prevented a sort of violence that was being committed against black congregants. The contingencies of the moment complicated this contention and ultimately exposed the limits of African American calls for civic equality. Prompted by Benjamin Rush, who played an active (if controversial) role in treating the fever in the city, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones sidelined their work for the African Church and instead offered the services of African American Philadelphians as nurses and grave diggers during the epidemic. Rush erroneously believed that blacks were not susceptible to the disease; in the end they died in the same proportion as their poor white neighbors.30 As a project, however, the offer to serve the larger society was an opportunity to demonstrate the black community’s membership in and value to the city as a whole. “As it is a time of great distress in this city,” Jones and Allen wrote, “many people of black colour under a grateful remembrance of the favours received from the white inhabitants have agreed to assist them as far as is in their power.”31 This message got through. Susanna Emlen wrote to her father in Britain to tell of the fever, explaining that “no part of the city is exempt, nor any class of people except the

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Negroes.” Blacks’ aid in this terrible time, she guessed, would reform the white community. “On those who survive, these oppressed and despised people will have a new claim,” she supposed, “that of gratitude and by this means be raised into a greater degree of consequence.”32 Emlen’s prediction was not borne out. In the aftermath of the epidemic, Mathew Carey, who had been a member of the committee of citizens that had overseen the fever relief efforts, published several accounts of the tumultuous time. The fever he described was one that exposed both Philadelphia’s woes and strengths. Carey lambasted the city’s neighbors for shunning its residents, suggested rumors had overstated the sickness’s extent, and questioned the wisdom and courage of those who had fled. At the same time, he noted that the trauma of the preceding months had produced some heroes, including longstanding French residents such as Stephen Girard and Cap Français doctor Jean Devèze.33 While blacks such as Allen, Jones, and Gray deserved “public gratitude,” Carey also charged that “some of the vilest of the blacks” had extorted patients in their hour of need and stolen from others after they had died.34 Jones and Allen were shocked and immediately sought to refute Carey’s story. Both men were literate and had some access to resources and white allies, all of which enabled them to mount their response in the public sphere. They first turned to the newspapers, where they published a statement of the contributions they had made, work they argued that had “saved between two and three hundred lives.”35 Their next effort, completed in early 1794, was a pamphlet that gave their own account of the fever. This was far more ambitious. Their A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the year 1793 offered more than a defense against Carey’s accusations; it also was a compendium that contained a testimonial from Mayor Clarkson and three addresses from the authors to different portions of the community. Taken together, these writings constituted an aggressive declaration of principle and comprehensive argument. “We wish not to offend,” Jones and Allen wrote, “but when an unprovoked attempt is made, to make us blacker than we are, it becomes less necessary to be over cautious on that account.” Not only did Jones and Allen defend the conduct of the mass of black workers during the fever, they pointed out that blacks had given more, and behaved far less badly, than the city’s whites, some of whom now maligned them. Carey, for one, had fled the city. “We believe he has made more money by the sale of his ‘scraps,’ ” Jones and Allen snorted, “than a dozen of the greatest

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extortioners among the black nurses.” Holding up the crimes of a few was more than unfair, it was a hostile violation of more basic truths. The reading public would accept Carey’s tales as representative of African American conduct everywhere, they protested. Even his compliments to Jones, Allen, and Gray personally “leaves these others, in the hazardous state of being classed with those who are called the ‘vilest.’ ”36 In effect, Jones and Allen objected to Carey’s writing for the way it produced, or perpetuated, ideas about race. They were combatting the printer’s definition of blackness, one that equated it with baseness and criminality. “Justice to our colour” required that they intervene. “We have many unprovoked enemies, who begrudge us the liberty we enjoy,” they explained, “and are glad to hear of any complaint against our colour, be it just or unjust.” This observation was the bridge to the first of several addresses the authors paired with their defense, components that expanded the writing from the specific situation in Philadelphia into a manifesto. Speaking to “those who keep Slaves, and [those who] approve the practice,” Jones and Allen moved from their defense to an attack on racial justifications for slavery in general. The institution, they explained, was a self-fulfilling prophecy with regard to race. Slavery degraded black capacities. Carey’s writing was a good example of the ways in which white prejudice produced the very characteristics used to justify enslavement. Those imposed burdens prevented black people from “rising from the state of barbarism, you represent us to be in.” Here, Jones and Allen were deftly pushing the limits of what was tactically possible to express in Philadelphia. They did so by beginning from what they took to be accepted truisms about humankind. If enslaved blacks were in some sense barbaric, that state was not what made them dangerous; slavery was what did that. Giving voice to themes of liberation theology that had been sung by antislavery activists such as Warner Mifflin but also by republican thinkers such as Abraham Bishop and Thomas Jefferson, Jones and Allen reminded their audience that blacks were men, that slavery was evil, and that God was watching. “We do not wish to make you angry,” they wrote, but “if you love your children, if you love your country, if you love the God of love, clear your hands from slaves, burden not your children or country.” For proof, they gestured toward Saint Domingue and the threatening images of revolutionary black violence familiar to white Philadelphia. “Our hearts have been sorrowful for the late bloodshed of the oppressors,” they wrote, “as well as the oppressed.” Both masters and slaves in the Caribbean had been guilty of violence, both had flouted

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God’s commands against bloodshed and for forgiveness. The whites of Philadelphia could rest assured that the free blacks in their city would not follow those paths; Jones and Allen’s address to “the people of colour” and to those whites who stood with them, as well as the psalm they composed to end the pamphlet, reiterated the message that these dangers need not come to pass at home.37 Even this oblique gesture toward Saint Domingue as a harbinger of a possible American future marked the furthest extent of the utility of the actions of “French negroes” for blacks in Philadelphia. Jones and Allen placed their own community’s efforts in line with those of generalized insurgent slaves— subjugated men whose God-given natures led them to rise up—not the agents of liberty that Sonthonax embraced and that Bache and Freneau celebrated. Though their ruminations on race implied the justice of egalitarianism, their emphasis was on the workings of Providence, not of Genet’s Revolution. To this extent, they accepted the threatening undercurrents around the news from Saint Domingue that fueled fears in the American South and the ideas about poisoned well water in Philadelphia. Indeed, those ideas were vital to their purposes. Stemming from Christian precepts, Jones and Allen’s embrace was universal, but their focus was local. White antislavery activists followed the same course. By 1794 Pennsylvania remained the hub of American antislavery efforts, but its status as a bellwether for the rest of the nation was uncertain. While the Abolition Society could crow over the establishment of like organizations across New England, New York, and New Jersey and in parts of the Upper South, increasingly its initiatives were less sweeping. When the fever broke, Representative Shoemaker’s motion was not taken up when the state legislature resumed work. Though the society could take comfort from the fact that their approach seemed to be driving the state’s intentions toward slavery, and their earlier victories ensured that the abolition act would be applied to the slaves who came with the white émigrés from Saint Domingue, the sense that Pennsylvania’s solution to the problem of slavery was on the march across the Union was tenuous. Increasingly, the Abolition Society focused its efforts on Pennsylvania, leaving the national effort to the annual meetings of the American Convention for the Promotion of the Abolition of Slavery, a body that began its career in January 1794. The American Convention’s vision was national, but its actions lacked the urgency voiced by men such as Jones and Allen. Its meetings became mired in efforts to collect information and present petitions toward limited goals. After 1798 its annual

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meetings would become biannual; thereafter its activities and purview dwindled.38

Rapid Motions The news that the French National Convention had abolished slavery across the French empire on February 4, 1794, arrived in Philadelphia, therefore, to an environment in which cosmopolitan connections were fashionable among Democratic-Republican politicos but where the French policy could gain little intellectual traction as a development relevant to the local antislavery effort. As the details emerged, activists were heartened but only cautiously connected the news to their own efforts. Benjamin Rush learned from a British friend that “the French . . . are more rapid in their motions than we.”39 Abolition Society president James Pemberton wrapped the news into other positive developments, to include British and American actions against the slave trade and the increasing public acceptance of “emancipation.”40 These responses suggested a sense that the struggle was general, but the tendency among Philadelphia abolitionists was to distinguish between French efforts and those at home. Pemberton received news of the February 4 decree in a letter from a colleague in Britain, who viewed it favorably, “whatever may be the sentiments of men Concerning the Conduct of that Assembly in other respects.”41 The Anglo-French war, internal French instability, and continued havoc on Saint Domingue contributed to a hesitancy on the part of white Pennsylvanian activists to fully embrace French developments. This distancing signaled a fraying of the society’s sense of its connection to other antislavery struggles, a development that ultimately impacted its conception of Pennsylvania’s place in the world.42 After their lukewarm notice of the February 4 decree, the Abolition Society’s leadership generally approached the National Convention’s act as a practical issue. Both the society and the American Convention repeatedly resolved to find out the specific provisions of the decree, but, beyond a resolution to put the decree into effect, no specific actions were taken.43 The society’s Acting Committee, however—the body involved in the cases like those of Azor and Geff— was interested in the February 4 decree. Their efforts to combat kidnappings, to prevent evasions of the 1780 act, and to reverse the illegal or improper binding of black laborers made the details of the French law vitally relevant and important. In addition to continuing efforts to ensure that Pennsylvania law was applied to the people of color brought by émigrés from Saint Domingue, they now

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worked to ascertain whether French citizens could treat any people as slaves, even if they departed Pennsylvania for American places where slavery was permitted. This proved a difficult task. Beginning in the autumn of 1794, the Acting Committee pressed the society’s Committee of Correspondence to gather more information about the new French order, an effort that was fruitless until 1797.44 Thereafter, they used the French decree as a partner to the Pennsylvanian 1780 act as it worked on behalf of black people in jeopardy in Philadelphia and its environs.45 The utilitarian and pragmatic character of this response to French emancipation registered an important counter to the expansive and universal goals and prospects the Pennsylvania Abolition Society had entertained since 1789. The Acting Committee, by definition, focused on Philadelphia’s immediate environment: it sought to prevent the “place” of liberty that Pennsylvania represented from being compromised by French West Indians sidestepping French emancipation. This emphasis surfaced elsewhere in the society’s outreach beyond Pennsylvania. “We have been informed that many persons . . . notwithstanding the decree in their favor, have been brought from the West India Islands, by emigrants, into the United States, and are now held as slaves,” activists wrote to the Georgia legislature in January 1795; “we suggest to you the propriety, as well as [the] necessity . . . of effecting their liberation, so far as may be found consistent with the laws of your state.”46 A year later the American Convention suggested that all antislavery groups follow the same course.47 In addition to being tepid, this response had conservative implications. In understanding French emancipation as relevant to efforts to preserve pockets of American liberty, the society had conceded an important point. Places that were not “of liberty” would endure. Local successes need not have cosmopolitan meanings. Georgia’s laws, for example, not universal truths, would dictate the fate of slavery there. What had been conceptualized as a global campaign could now be understood as a collection of local efforts, each intimately related to its particular context. The effect was to disentangle antislavery from the content of the American Revolution, jettisoning the institution’s fate as a quintessential marker of the change that Revolution embodied. Similarly, the transnational connections among radical activities in France, Britain, Saint Domingue, and the United States were thrown into question. Pennsylvania might be unique and exceptional, even in America, rather than a portent of the future. This possibility, and the shift in approach it represented, was a lesson Abolition Society activists learned piecemeal thereafter during the 1790s. Events at home and

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abroad forced them to confront the limits of the expansion of antislavery space, first by calling into question the tactics they considered to be so central to the fight, and then by empowering an alternate vision of the nation’s future that was more compelling to the public. Benjamin Giroud’s visit to Philadelphia from Saint Domingue in the winter of 1796 highlighted this shift. Giroud was an officer in the new commission of metropolitan officials (headed by the phoenix-like Sonthonax) that had come to the colony that year to continue the fight against the British. He was also a member of the resurgent Société des Amis des Noirs, who had re-formed with new purpose after the Terror.48 Giroud, therefore, arrived in Philadelphia as a French republican and as an abolitionist, identities that for him overlapped. And he came to the city looking for allies: his first stop was the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. The “friends of the Blacks at Paris,” he explained, recognized that the “Philanthropists of Philadelphia” had taken the “first acts of virtue” in the fight against slavery. This made the society the ideal partner for France’s project in Saint Domingue. Having abolished slavery, the nation was now bent on “rendering this liberty useful to the new french citizens.” The state had appropriated plantations formerly owned by the émigré royalists. Giroud proposed that the society purchase or rent these lands and use them to provide the ex-slaves with “the example of [your] virtues.” The process could begin by sending a single delegate to the new colony. The “Citizen whom you shall chuse for this Mission,” he told, would be welcomed “as a sincere friend of France, and of the principles of humanity, liberty, and equality” that were now the fundaments of its “colonial system.”49 Writing to the society from Saint Domingue, Sonthonax recapitulated Giroud’s logic. “The immutable principles . . . which I have reduced to practice at Saint Domingue,” he explained, “are your own.”50 Julien Raimond, a man of color and one of Sonthonax’s fellow commissioners, wrote at around the same time to express the hope that the United States would follow France’s lead in providing general emancipation. He closed with the story of a group of slaves en route to Jamaica from West Africa who, intercepted by French forces, had become “free the moment they touched in this part of the Republic.” Both Philadelphia and Saint Domingue proffered relief from slavery, Raimond implied, but Saint Domingue’s freedom was more complete and perhaps even a better model for the future.51 Giroud himself described the new society—he called it “Philanthropolis”—which, he said, was flourishing in the colony. Black soldiers maintained order and defended Saint Domingue against its enemies. “These

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soldiers of Philosophy and of the rights of man” were led by “black, yellow, and white” officers, “without any other distinction but that of their respective grades.” Those who did not fight worked on plantations, where “large and valuable crops” were being produced, “now that the labour [was] performed by freemen.”52 Race unified Philanthropolis, rather than demarcating it. Giroud extolled the prevalence of “marriages which confound and mix the Black and White colour.” This was a society transformed by its inclusion of new members. “The ancient prejudices are daily wearing a way [sic],” he explained. Blacks and mixed-race people held public office. Children of all colors attended school together.53 Saint Domingue’s citizens were in the process of liberating “this wonderful island, which the author of nature seems to have created for the happiness of man.”54 The Abolition Society’s leadership found Giroud’s proposal “highly interesting” and formed a committee to look into it. Little else, however, was done. One or two individuals may have been discussed as potential voyagers to “Philanthropolis.”55 At Giroud’s request, the society had both his correspondence and the text of the February 4 decree published in local newspapers.56 There the matter rested. Giroud’s depiction of racial mixing would certainly have been jarring to many Philadelphian readers, but his proposal is more than simply a reminder of the limits of white antislavery activism there. The French officer’s portrayal of universal freedom, after all, differed only in degree from the vision of the Abolition Society. Just before Giroud’s visit, the society took up another such vision: a plan for gradual emancipation written by Virginian jurist St. George Tucker. Tucker’s blueprint stemmed from familiar ideas about the American Revolutionaries’ hypocrisy with regard to slavery and outlined a mechanism for gradual emancipation that resembled Pennsylvania’s. The core of his effort, however, veered sharply from the Pennsylvania model. Tucker hoped that by denying freed blacks all civic rights whatsoever in Virginia, they would be driven to leave the state “to seek those privileges in some other climate.” This feature would not only cleanse the American republic of its inconsistency but also protect it. “At this moment we have the most awful demonstrations” of the dangers slavery produced for white society, Tucker exclaimed, pointing to Saint Domingue. While the population of American slaves was relatively small, a recent count showed it was rising. Tucker wanted Virginian whites to deal with the problem, getting out while the getting was still good.57 The Abolition Society, in order to decide whether Tucker’s plan “contain[ed] such matter as to render it proper for

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this Society to undertake to distribute it,” bought a copy, perhaps at the shop of its printer, Mathew Carey.58 Tucker’s ideas, however, clashed with the society’s ideals. His Saint Domingue–inspired portrait of racial separation and black removal flew in the face of its goals. In early 1797 the society resolved that it would have nothing further to do with the plan.59 If, by that point, the society no longer understood its purpose as making the United States into the nation without slaves that its notion of the American Revolution had once seemed to suggest, it did not accept the racial ideology that equated whiteness alone with citizenship.

Forging Newfangled Liberty The “place of liberty” that Azor and Geff entered, though subject to the constraints of white imaginations, was no less real for that fact. While the Abolition Society and the American Convention dithered in their attempts to get the details of the February 4 decree straight, people of African descent in Philadelphia—enslaved and free, “French” and American—ensured that French emancipation would be meaningful in the city. Though Philadelphia’s black community was not monolithic, white racial ideas shaped the burdens it bore. The various efforts among Philadelphians of color to forge freedom (to paraphrase historian Gary Nash’s memorable phrase) might divide them by religion and ethnicity, but all participated in a common effort to enact a self-defined conception of “free” life that was entirely their own. If, since 1780, the “place” of Philadelphia had provided a fairly hardy barrier to reenslavement, Philadelphian freedom was not necessarily congruent with that sought by people of color there themselves. At a tactical level, the advent of “French” freedom added to the spate of available options as they contested white resistance to unfettered egalitarianism. Exercising those options had real effects. By their actions people of color in Philadelphia made the French policy relevant, pushing entities such as the Acting Committee to take note and forcing the issue of France’s reach. While accessing the levers of French law was not equally available to all, the presence of that mechanism vitalized the “space” at hand, giving traction to black efforts in general and widening their efforts to attain autonomy and self-control. Much of this conflict revolved around the physical movement of people of color.60 Azor wanted to control his own whereabouts; Geff rode the waves around Saint Domingue into Philadelphia but then had to act in order to stay

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there. Other people of color had similar goals. Henry and Marietta, servants of émigré Jean (or John) Simon, were removed from Philadelphia when Simon left the city for Fort Dauphin. Marietta never returned, freed in Saint Domingue “by the operation of the National Decree of France,” but Henry did. Once back in Philadelphia, he worked to ensure that Simon could not force him to leave again.61 Most likely, like Azor, Henry received a certificate proclaiming his freedom. Two other blacks from Saint Domingue, a man and a woman, attracted the attention of the Acting Committee in mid-1795. They were being held in a New Castle prison but swore they were free and had the papers to prove it. In this case, the papers in question were certificates signed in Port-au-Prince and registered by a notary public. The committee took them to the French minister, Pierre Auguste Adet, who agreed they were legitimate. The two then came up the Delaware to Philadelphia.62 In both cases, the presence of the Acting Committee served to legitimate and empower individual black efforts. Its members, charged with the task of preventing circumventions of Pennsylvania law, were motivated to determine the workings of the still new French policy. In the process, they made legal papers—whether those accessing Pennsylvanian or French law—central to the demonstration of freedom.63 They also engaged local agents of the French state to take a more assertive role. Early in 1795 an abolitionist called on Adet in New York to ask him about the workings of the February 4 decree. The French minister was cagey about whether or not the law applied to slaves brought to the United States before it went into effect, but he agreed that he would need to be more active in enforcing it. He had “intended to do so before he left Philadelphia,” he admitted, “but it had escap’d him.”64 Over a year later, however, the effort to gain clarity continued. By spring 1796 Philadelphia activists decided that the 1778 consular agreement between the United States and France (the same regulations that Genet had deployed to pursue Galbaud) made the French consuls the proper arbiters for the question. Still, the details of the emancipation decree remained fuzzy. The Acting Committee, finding itself “Frequently applyd to by Blacks . . . claiming their freedom under the laws of France,” sought out naturalized American and lawyer Peter Duponceau for advice. “Duponso” provided a potential source for the text of the decree, which the committee intended to then present to Adet for certification.65 When an émigré brought a woman named Rebeckah whom he claimed as a slave to Philadelphia, Rebeckah escaped, contacted the Acting Committee, and “claim[ed] her freedom on the decree of France.” In fact, she explained later,

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she had always been free but only now could act upon it. Born in Charleston to free parents, she had left with a British army officer when the British evacuated the city in 1778. He, however, abandoned her in Jamaica. Rebeckah hired herself to a French family there and later moved with them to “Cape Nichola Mole.” At that point, she was sold as a slave to a woman in Cap Français. Her protests led to another sale, this time to the man who had come to Philadelphia. Over the spring of 1796 the Acting Committee chased down the local French consul, who verified her account. “A Paper is put into Rebeckah’s hands,” the committee reported; “should her liberty be calld in Question,” it would protect her. “She is now at work for her own support,” they noted.66 Rebeckah’s life might still be a struggle, but her personal freedom would mean that she would control where she lived and that she would keep the wages she earned. Spurred by black assertions, both Adet and the Abolition Society had been induced to police the borders of their respective spheres, and both were led to accord people of color legal rights and protections—Adet because they were deemed French and the Abolition Society because they were within the bounds of Pennsylvania. These designations, and the status they signaled, were recorded in the Abolition Society’s records and registered with local officials. When Stephen Girard’s brother Jean ran afoul of the law in attempting to ship his servant Sofiah and her young child to Saint Domingue, the society retained copies of her manumission papers and threatened legal action.67 If white power could still jeopardize their freedom and local white hostility blunted their equal inclusion in society, these developments did have tangible consequences for African Americans in Philadelphia. After a struggle, Philadelphia was a place where French freedom, as a legal reality, could take hold and produce results. In combination with Pennsylvanian freedom, it could provide the ground for efforts such as the African Church, or the African School, Freemason chapters, and collective economic activities that leaders such as Jones and Allen worked at as the decade wore on.68 Philadelphia attained a new weight as an antislavery place through the growth of these institutions and the agendas that drove them. While white activists approached their task as caretakers, charged with preserving and maintaining the local effort, African American efforts provided a position from which they could continue to participate in public discourse, adopting a stance that retained a focus on American ideals, or, rather, molding those ideals in such a way as to define them by their own standards. Four black petitioners to Congress in early 1797 described the “men of cruel disposition, and void of just

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principle” who had seized, jailed, and reenslaved them after they had been manumitted in North Carolina.69 These “kidnappers” were empowered by the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, which, along with the laws governing the African slave trade, were the subject of another petition written by a group led by Absalom Jones in 1799.70 The North Carolina petition, which may also have been authored by Jones, appealed to the “essential principles respecting the human right to freedom” and spoke “as fellow men” to Congress, “intrusted with the distribution of justice, for the terror of evil-doers.” 71 These words posited a nation founded on universal rights in which slavery would soon end and raceless citizenship was a possibility, if not yet a reality. At around the same time, Richard Allen authored a eulogy to George Washington that celebrated the fact that the president freed his slaves in his will—a public claim for a common position among other mourning Americans and a call to push the polity in the same direction.72 Jones’s 1799 petition ended with a call for the gradual end of slavery. The reception these efforts met in Congress dashed African American hopes. More significantly, the terms by which they were rejected rewired their logic in ways that refuted the essence of the claims to humanity being made by the petitioners. John Rutledge of South Carolina offered a very different conception of the dangers facing the nation in 1799, one that stood priorities like Absalom Jones’s on their head. “They now tell the House these people are in slavery,” he railed. “I thank God they are! if they were not, dreadful would be the consequences.” For Rutledge, the “black gentlemen” who bore the petition in 1799 represented the real threat to peace and security. “Already had too much of this new-fangled French philosophy of liberty and equality found its way . . . among these gentlemen in the Southern States,” he growled. Exposed to this pernicious doctrine, they were ruined and “nothing would do but their liberty.” Emancipation, not slavery, produced violence by this understanding. Slavery was not evil, another southern congressman agreed; evil would come, rather, from misplaced “philanthropy” and its capacity to free American blacks to “ravage, murder, and commit every species of crime.” 73 White lives, not black (or universal) rights, were the entity under threat. The protection of the one was linked to the destruction of the other. Congressional defenders of the 1799 petition, though they opposed this stance on procedural grounds and for its flights of rhetoric, failed to counter this reversed picture of the logic behind black violence. The petition’s stoutest proponent, and the sole congressman to vote for it, was Massachusetts Federalist George Thatcher.74 Slavery was evil, Thatcher proclaimed, and he even went

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so far as to praise the French for their efforts to quash it.75 The moral imperative against slavery that Thatcher articulated, however, was generated as much by self-interest and self-preservation as it was by justice. Enslaved blacks constituted “700,000 enemies, in the very body of the United States,” which was “a greater evil” than any other; “it was a cancer of immense magnitude, that would some time destroy the body politic.”76 Thatcher’s solution was to excise both the cancer and its symptoms: the “enemies” slavery had created were to be removed from the nation altogether.77 Black leaders in Philadelphia appreciated Thatcher’s support, but they must have regarded it as a bitter pill. Writing shortly after the debate ended, black businessman James Forten thanked Thatcher for his “philanthropic zeal” and echoed the assertions of black humanity that he had made during the debate. Forten’s emphasis, however, lay on the adaptability and mutability of black Americans’ conditions. “Though our faces are black, yet we are men,” he agreed, “and though many among us cannot write because our rulers have thought proper to keep us in ignorance, yet we all have the feelings and passions of men.” The petition “has in view the diffusion of knowledge among the African race, by unfettering their thoughts and giving full scope to the energy of their minds.” The “seven hundred thousand” Forten referenced were “of the human race” and he continued to hope that blacks, free and slave, brethren no matter their circumstances, would escape the injustices of their condition. Thatcher’s cancer was Forten’s poultice: slavery’s evil was not localized but general; fixing the problem would heal the nation by making its practices conform to natural laws.78 African Americans would not give up on their principled claims to citizenship, but with the precepts of their claims undone even by their friends, the community increasingly turned to pragmatic measures. In addition to separate churches, they established schools, perhaps in recognition of the fact that education was a prerequisite to continuing the struggle in the public sphere.79 In early 1800 Philadelphia blacks offered to pay a special tax to raise revenue to purchase and free those who still remained slaves in the Commonwealth.80 Their reminders of the promise of the American Revolution increasingly falling on deaf ears, black leaders fought slavery directly, seeking to defend their beleaguered community, not incorporate it into the wider whole. Sapped by the currency of tales of violence in Saint Domingue, their portrait of the United States as singular, if pluralistic, in its commitment to universal human rights no longer resonated.

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Even white activists who opposed slavery increasingly acted on this ground, accepting a portrait of the American “body” that was imperiled by the black presence rather than by the tyranny of slavery or the illogic of prejudice. In the process, they articulated a conception of Philadelphia that made the city an exceptional oasis rather than an augur of coming change. There would be no American Philanthropolis, at least in the way that Citizen Giroud might have hoped. The travels of people like Azor and Geff, however, remind us that any oases, as places of liberty, complicated the evolution of racially specific notions of citizenship such as that championed by Rutledge. The attenuation and blighted focus of white antislavery in this period meant that the debates over that citizenship would be firmly rooted in the sphere of politics. While an embrace of black inclusion was possible on that field, it was also subject to the vagaries of events, not fundamental principles. Developments in Saint Domingue, and ideas about them in Philadelphia, would continue to shape those debates, especially as Afro-creole Toussaint Louverture emerged as a leader.

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flotilla from Saint Domingue moved slowly up the Delaware toward the end of June 1798. Observers in Philadelphia took careful note. The vessels came from Port-au-Prince, having departed just as the British army was surrendering the city to French forces led by Toussaint Louverture. Though some were American, several bore French names and foreign registries.1 Arriving during the fever season, they anchored at Mud Island, a low and swampy site several miles south of Philadelphia proper where arriving vessels were quarantined during the summer months.2 Over the following days, alarming reports filtered in from the river. The vessels from Port-au-Prince were said to hold hundreds of white and black passengers, a presence that stirred up predictable fears. An American at Mud Island wrote to argue that they should be turned away. If, as seemed likely, war were declared with France, these people were “fully ripe” to serve as fifth columns. Worse, the blacks among them were armed and “attached to their master’s interests.” Made public in the city’s newspapers, the letter spurred Governor Thomas Mifflin to order that the vessels be held at Fort Mifflin on the island. Fearing that these dangerous elements might sneak into neighboring states, he also wrote to President John Adams to suggest a similar ban across the eastern seaboard.3 Meantime, news came that a group of blacks had rowed among the fleet during the day of June 27 to organize a “mutiny” that night. “There is now in these vessels between 250 and 300 negroes, well armed, trained to war, and saying they will land,” explained the fort’s commander, Louis Toussard, “they know no laws and count their lives for nothing.” Toussard brought the fort’s guns to bear and had Captain Stephen Decatur move the U.S. sloop Delaware

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to guard the “insurgents.”4 Though no attack took place, by the next day the Senate had hastily passed a bill authorizing Adams to bar certain French from entering American ports and to “prohibit the landing of any French negroes or other people of colour.”5 “To poison our country by the admission of these people, would be infinitely worse than importing the yellow fever,” a supportive writer shuddered. Fevers abated, but this “hardened bloodthirsty set” would spread “a political disease throughout the country” that “would not only aid in destroying our rights and liberties, but our property, our lives and every object near and dear to us.”6

Figure 6. “A plan of the city of Philadelphia and environs surveyed by John Hills, in the summers of 1801, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7” (Philadelphia: Published by the author, 1808), detail. Mud Island, with Fort Mifflin marked, is located at the bottom left. Image courtesy of Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University.

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By 1798 the “French negroes” of Saint Domingue had long stalked white American nightmares, and, even if some in Philadelphia entertained notions of them as soldiers of liberty, this nearby presence was no doubt troubling. The political environment at hand, however, served to pair that concern with a thrilling sense of righteousness. Over the latter portion of the 1790s the tensions that had emerged earlier in American politics heightened and hardened. The mistrust that underlay Francophiles’ reactions to Washington’s neutrality policy, exacerbated by the advent of Jay’s Treaty with Britain in 1795, had evolved into a clear partisan divide by the time John Adams became president. Critics of Adams’s Federalist administration coalesced around these and other developments, forming a fairly cohesive party that they called DemocraticRepublican, or simply Republican.7 There was no relativism to this competition. Both Federalists and Republicans conceived of themselves as the heirs of the Revolution and understood their acts as reflections of the truth that underlay its ideals. Following this logic meant that their adversaries opposed the Revolution, or at least had deviated from its true principles. At best they were irrational; more likely, they were insidious. To carry out their malevolent goals, the men leading the other side obscured their true natures in order to gain favor. They concocted plots and employed shadowy agents. To resist these efforts, political commentators looked to connect the dots for the public—to reveal the other side’s intent as demonstrated by their actions, now fully and accurately understood. What they exposed was that their opponents, rather than acting to advance the common good, were narrow, corrupt, venal, and selfinterested. Left alone, their plans to fool the public would jeopardize the national well-being and the meaning of the Revolution itself.8 Lifting the veil was no small delight. The news from the river fueled these partisan fires. As it happened, the whites at Mud Island were planters in league with the British who had fled when the troops evacuated. By early July the sense of crisis in Philadelphia fizzled as the initial reports were contested and both Governor Mifflin and Congress rescinded their orders.9 Regardless, commentators fanned the flames. “Our new [British] allies are wondrous kind!” Republican Benjamin Franklin Bache taunted in his rechristened paper, the Aurora. “Finding they could no longer keep Port-au-Prince, even by the assistance of French rebels and their slaves, they impressed American vessels into their service to evacuate the place,” he explained, “and no longer wishing the service of those allies, they . . . have sent them hither, and they are now pouring upon our coasts in swarms.”10 For

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Bache, the administration’s labeling of the blacks at Mud Island as “French” was a purposeful misrepresentation, one in a long chain of Federalist obfuscations. The peril at hand did not arise because of links with France but instead derived from the administration itself, and its British connections. William Cobbett, a British émigré and editor of Porcupine’s Gazette, perhaps the most venomous Federalist publication of the period, took the same details and made them suit his own purposes. The people from Port-au-Prince, though French, were “royalists,” not “Jacobins,” he explained.11 Though this made the “French negro” flap “much-a-do about Nothing,” the fact that these were not the usual “murderous French cut-throats” oozing across American shores was what made the entire hubbub useful. Pro-French Republicans, Cobbett hinted, might have manufactured the false alarm to cover more sordid (and unspecified) agendas.12 Above all, it showed that these “loud liberty men” were liable to fly off at spurious causes. This was a fire he stoked even as the affair died down, mockingly telling of a similar event in the “Sans-Culotte borough” of Wilmington when people heard that the “Royalists from Port-au-Prince” were arriving. “The Democrats were in a rage, running in every direction through the town, declaiming at the corners,” he told. A “mob” of “extensive patriots (ready enough to defend their country when in no danger)” formed “with no other authority than their own transcendent power” and was ready to “make an example of the first naked, hungry, aristocratic negro” that it encountered. The punch line was their sheepish discovery that the arriving vessel was an American privateer in service of the French.13 For Cobbett and Federalists more generally, these sorts of flare-ups laid bare the false principles and dangerous tendencies behind Republican politics. If the alarm over the black rowboaters in the Delaware was fleeting, Saint Domingue’s utility in American politics was not. Scores of similar episodes involving the colony circulated through Philadelphia during the late 1790s, sharpening American political divisions in the process. Federalist-Republican fights over the meaning of the American Revolution took place alongside what turned out to be the middle portion of the Haitian Revolution. That portion, as observers around the world understood it, revolved around the emergence of Toussaint Louverture. Radical changes were taking place in the colony, some directed by Louverture and others that the general resisted. Notwithstanding, observers and commentators focused on Louverture’s leadership as the most salient expression of the nature of those developments. This perception shaped the way Saint Domingue would reverberate through American politics.

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Whereas earlier in the decade Americans had bobbed on waves from the colony and striven to understand them, now domestic political agendas gave an order to the information that arrived. With American political discourse tied tightly to the Anglo-French fight, the colony, and its leader, held a particular power. Both Federalists and Republicans deployed the news of developments there as a way to denigrate France or Britain and thereby to claim and define their American identity. In incorporating Saint Domingue and its leader into domestic political struggles, they created a Haitian Revolution that served their own needs. For most of the latter part of the 1790s, Adams and the Federalists held the upper hand in this effort. Amid French blunders and outrages, they seized upon Louverture’s ascendancy, making Saint Domingue’s independence a major component of the way they waged the Quasi-War with France. In the process, they were able to marshal a cohesive national coalition and articulate a coherent national identity. Making Louverture and Saint Domingue part of that effort, however, complicated even as it facilitated the development. For as hard as Americans pushed to place Saint Domingue into familiar boxes, the colony’s distinctive presence and history were inescapable. American debates about their republic’s relations with a colony in which citizens were ex-slaves ensured that those discussions would raise questions about slavery’s meaning at home. Events between 1795 and 1799 allowed Federalists to provide serviceable answers, but they also sowed seeds for the party’s demise as a trans-sectional entity. Republicans, reeling and reactive, met them on this ground. They followed Louverture’s career closely and, for a time, fought the Federalist depiction on Federalist terms, debating the general’s motives in relation to the interests of metropolitan France. The heat of domestic politics, however, soon seared away such nuance. By the end of the decade Philadelphia’s Republican writers had found their political footing and emerged with a clearer sense of the American identity they would champion. As the election of 1800 drew near, they married a simmering effort to expose the Federalists as betrayers of American honor and independence to a portrait of Louverture as a despot. In this discourse the ideals of universal rights that Republicans in Philadelphia had long celebrated were re-formed. Softening the soldering that had joined “French” and “negro” as a positive, Republicans displaced black equality as an essential marker of French identity. In the process, they redefined their own identity, distancing the United States, its Revolution, and the meaning of that Revolution for slavery from the

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ideal that had been encapsulated by the “French” moniker to that point. Saint Domingue served as a place that was dangerously alien to these American values and ideals. No longer tied to defending its “French” qualities, they now treated it simply as “negro.” The efforts of Louverture and the politics of Saint Domingue in the United States thus served to free Philadelphia’s Republican ideologues to articulate a newly constituted commitment to universal rights, albeit one that circumscribed that commitment by race. This formulation made their party a viable national entity by paring away southern foes of “fanatical” antislavery and wrapping them into a fold that defined equality through whiteness.

Louverture’s Openings in Philadelphia The figure of François Dominique Toussaint Louverture became central to American understandings of events in Saint Domingue after 1796, though Louverture, sometimes identified as “Toussan” or “Touissant,” can be recognized as early as 1794. For modern historians, Louverture has usually defined the Haitian Revolution, his arrival on the stage serving to help chart the change from slave revolt to proto-nationalist movement. This is due to the circumstances around his rise as a leader and to accomplishments in that role. While he was not the black Spartacus forecast by the Abbé Raynal in the 1770s and 1780s—a slave destined to liberate his race—Louverture was fundamentally committed to the freedom of Saint Domingue’s black population. When the slaves rose in 1791, he was already free and was serving as a coachman on an estate at Breda outside of Cap Français. Joining the forces led by Jean-François and Biassou, by late 1793 he had gained a reputation as a canny fighter. His shift in allegiance from Spain to France in May 1794, after a lengthy negotiation with French general Etienne Laveaux, fundamentally recast the struggles in the colony. Thereafter, Louverture’s alliances, agendas, and victories would fundamentally shape Saint Domingue’s evolution as a place of liberty. Not only did his exploits significantly hamper Spanish and British offensives, they also helped preserve and define the quality of French rule. In March 1796 he rescued Laveaux, then the acting governor, from a challenge by gens de couleur general Jean-Louis Villatte and was made lieutenant governor in return. By May, when Sonthonax returned to the colony from France, Louverture was the preeminent military leader in the North and West. By June 1798 his victories had bottled the British up and his negotiations with the United States had laid

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a path toward stability and potentially even independence. This career marked important stages in the unfolding of early Haitian history.14 Contemporary Americans, experiencing Louverture’s actions in real time, were necessarily hesitant in their understanding of that history, but none could mistake his significance. Captain Robert Lillibridge reported on the fighting led by “General Tousant” when he returned from Anse à Veau in May 1797 in the schooner Swallow. Just over a year later merchant Daniel Coxe wrote to his brother Tench from Môle Saint Nicolas of the “black General Toussaint de L’Ouverture.” Louverture was a familiar figure in Philadelphia; his name was read hundreds of times by people in the city as they followed the conflicts in the Caribbean. As his prominence grew, so did his words, in the form of translations of public letters, proclamations, and decrees. This public presence grew to the point that, by 1803, Elizabeth Drinker would copy lines from local newspapers into her diary that referenced Louverture as “the celebrated African Chief.”15 As Coxe’s and Drinker’s terms suggest, race was part of this interest, but only part. Louverture came into view in Philadelphia at a high point of commercial activity between the city and Saint Domingue. In the wake of the brief spring 1794 embargo, more vessels traveled to and from the colony than ever before. In 1795 vessels from Saint Domingue made up nearly 30 percent of arrivals to Philadelphia from all foreign ports, a rate that continued in 1796 and 1797 before dipping only slightly in 1798.16 Americans such as Lillibridge and Coxe were in Saint Domingue to do business, not to make pronouncements on the new order. Because they were there in such numbers, however, a wealth of information by which those sorts of assertions could be made became available in Philadelphia. Sifting through this information, Americans encountered Louverture as a successful general, one who had joined the French and emerged to replace other leaders of the insurgent armies. While British voices continued to cast him as a “general of the brigand negroes,” careful readers would discern less uniformity among the warring factions in the colony.17 As often, Louverture was identified as one of the “chiefs of the Republican army,” one who offered proclamations “in the name of the French republic.” His forces, though consisting of “Mulattoes and Blacks,” were distinguished from other insurgent groups.18 During the spring of 1796, when his liberation of Laveaux splashed his name across Philadelphia’s papers, all remaining ambiguities about his relationship to France were dispelled completely. “Major-general Tussain, a black man, who received his commission from the national convention of France,”

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one report told, “immediately marched his army before the Cape” after hearing of Laveaux’s imprisonment. “ ‘I am here with ten thousand men,’ ” Louverture proclaimed (and Philadelphians read), “ ‘I do not enquire of you wherefore it is done, it is enough for me to know that my chief is in prison, he is appointed by the constituted authorities of France, and shall be protected in his command. But should you be hardy enough not to listen to me, I will commence to destroy you by fire and sword.’ ” Because of this threat, the author noted, “order is restored.”19 In an open letter to American ship captains and merchants in the aftermath, Laveaux identified Louverture as the leader of “the true people, the real friends of order, and general liberty,” calling him a “man without equal, to whom St. Domingo and its constituted authorities owe their safety.”20 For Americans doing business in Saint Domingue, the order Louverture defended was what really mattered. Vanquishing Villatte produced the sort of “tranquility” that allowed commerce to flourish. “The culture of the plantations of St. Domingo already recommence[s],” an observer told, “every circumstance inspires new hopes of future prosperity.”21 Later news detailed elements of the new labor regime, which included the renting of vacant estates.22 For Unite Dodge, a merchant living in Cap Français, overseeing these changes made Louverture the colony’s savior. Pegging the rebirth of Le Cap to the practice of renting émigrés’ estates “to citizens of all colours, without distinction of persons,” he called the idea “the wisest scheme that could have been adopted by government” because it both created peace and ensured that the colony would remain French.23 By early 1797, Americans emphatically connected Toussaint Louverture to both results. As Laveaux noted, emancipation was central to this order. Over the balance of the decade, Louverture’s successive battles defined the “French” authority he had sustained around the themes of peace and equality. Readers in Philadelphia encountered both celebrations and castigations of that order, but no one doubted that he was central to it. At one end of the spectrum were the depictions of Benjamin Giroud, whose communications with the Abolition Society (along with those of Sonthonax, Raimond, and Pascal) were printed in Philadelphia newspapers in July 1797, as per his request. Louverture’s armies, “almost entirely composed of our brave and good brethren, the black republicans,” protected “Philanthropolis” against the “enemies of mankind, the partisans of Slavery,” Giroud’s letters reminded.24 The grateful whites “call [Louverture] father and protector,” another wrote earlier.25 Whether against the British, French royalists, or schemers such as Villatte, the French fight, in Louverture’s hands,

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was made in the name of a liberty that ended slavery and an equality that expressly included people of color.26 Speaking from Paris, Laveaux described Saint Domingue as a land populated by patriots. The ex-slaves were loyal citizens, ardent soldiers, and reliable workers.27 He singled Toussaint Louverture out as their leader and their paragon. Of course, Laveaux’s defense of the new order was necessary. Readers in Philadelphia were also privy to voices such as that of Viénot de Vaublanc, a planter living in France who mounted a vigorous campaign to present Saint Domingue as being in shambles because of emancipation. “The Negroes have turned the arms with which they were entrusted against the Republic,” he declared before the Council of Five Hundred. They were killing and robbing the white colonials and “are loaded with the spoils of the victims they have butchered.” The heart of the outrage lay in the fact that these atrocities were committed by those to whom “we have given the rank, which honour PICHEGRU, MOREAU, and BUONAPARTE.”28 This was the same clamor against irresponsible “philanthropy” that planters had chanted since 1789, but now the images of black violence that it relied upon were something like stock footage, and the fall of Brissot and his cadre made it more permissible to question the probity of a colony rooted in republican equality. The treatment of a revolt among ex-slaves east of Port-au-Prince echoed the charges made by planters in the wake of the emancipation decrees in 1793. “The negroes who have returned to their habitations will not absolutely attend to speak to their masters,” a report told, “they are willing enough to be republicans, but point de travail, (no work)—they think it is contrary to republican rights.”29 An American captain described a similar situation in the North several months later, explaining that “the blacks are daily laying down their arms at Port de Paix, and foutre themselves if they will fight when they can get nothing to manger.”30 These contrasting portraits allowed American commentators to weave accounts of Louverture and the developments he presided over into domestic political divisions. Just as images like those supplied by Giroud buoyed the proFrench stances taken by Bache and other Francophilic holdouts, ideas like those of Vaublanc unleashed a rancorous response among commentators looking to attack them. William Cobbett’s Bloody Buoy, a gleeful screed against France written in 1796, connected the “anarchy and infidelity” of the Terror to Mauduit’s gory end, to the fanaticism of the February 4 decree, and to the rapes, pillaging, and murders done by freed slaves.31 By early 1797 Cobbett’s Porcupine’s Gazette had become a medium for more of this fare. The chief symptom

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of the French disorder that he described was the rise of black status. An American captain seethed in his pages over the fact that Sonthonax allowed any “black soldier to have a white man arrested for the smallest offence.” For Cobbett, French Saint Domingue, a place in which whites were “INSULTED EVEN BY BLACKS,” typified the topsy-turvy nature of society where French ideas ruled.32 The critique registered by these potshots, however, was of France, not of racial equality per se. Cobbett—and here he typified Federalist writers in the city—sought to castigate “the villainy of [the] French agents in the WestIndies,” as well as that of the French officials serving in the United States, but his ultimate quarry was their Americans allies, foremost among which was “the Devil’s speaking trumpet,” Bache’s Aurora.33 This distinction is vital to understanding the direction Federalists would take with regard to Saint Domingue as the decade closed, but it also helps explain Louverture’s actions on the Atlantic stage. Toussaint Louverture was a remarkable leader, but he was not the master of events that some contemporary Americans (or later historians) made him out to be. Forever juggling varying constituencies, at home and abroad, his success came from his deft maneuverings between rival insurgent leaders, his timely adoption of the French cause, his victories on the battlefield, his coups behind the scenes, and, above all, his capacity to marshal support among the colony’s African and Afro-creole majority, for most of whom he came to embody the best bet for continued existence outside of slavery.34 Americans, whose supplies he needed, were another one of these constituencies. Whatever feints and slips he made on the ground in Saint Domingue, Louverture seems to have been unerring in his understanding of ways to appeal to white American witnesses and observers. As he consolidated power in the colony, he took several measures that tended to separate him from the French officials he putatively served and from the French war policies that he seemingly personified. While the French dynamic in Philadelphia provided the general with a ready lever by which to act, it also objectified him. By taking Louverture as either French, or not, Americans ignored his actual intents. Louverture’s disentanglement from France became apparent in Philadelphia as he rose to power. The Anglo-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce (or Jay’s Treaty) of 1795 had sparked genuine anger on the part of France. By late 1796 Americans learned that the Directory had declared that neutral vessels en route to any British port (as opposed to places in active rebellion against France in Saint Domingue) would be considered lawful prizes.35 Immediately insurance rates on voyages headed to the colony shot up: in the summer of 1796 they

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had hovered around 6 percent; six months later they had doubled and within a year ranged between 15 and 25 percent.36 “Premiums are now got to such a pitch that no trade I know of can support them,” wrote one correspondent from Norfolk.37 In response, the Adams administration accelerated its efforts to expand the nation’s naval forces. Louverture read these signs. Early in 1797 an American captain writing from Port de Paix reported that “general Tousant” was “enraged” by Sonthonax’s privateer “piracies” and was determined to end them.38 When he became supreme leader of the military forces in the colony, Philadelphians read that the general’s first act had been to march to the Cape “to stop the iniquitous proceedings of those monsters the civil commissioners” against American vessels. By late 1797 he was “the incorruptible General Toussaint,” in the words of an American merchant at Cap Français. In addition to clamping down on privateers, he was reported to have diverted large portions of his armies into agricultural labor. Later, a New England captain relayed that Louverture, upon learning that “his friends the Americans” were resisting France, had ordered more of his soldiers into the fields so as to have goods to trade with them. He also seemed poised to ferret out bad actors in the colony, including (Federalists were no doubt gratified to hear) Genet’s erstwhile secretary, Pascal. Louverture was, Cobbett admitted, “a good man by all accounts.” He was a defender of American commercial interests.39 He was also a defender of white lives. The general’s desire for stability also involved pledging security to whites in the colony, an effort he conducted in part in American newspapers. As he gained control over greater amounts of territory, Louverture wrote publicly to the émigré community living in American cities, assuring them of their safety if they would return to their estates.40 This was a pragmatic attempt to regain agricultural production, but it was also an opportunity to refute the visions of black savagery peddled by detractors such as Vaublanc. A more dramatic example of the same impulse took place in the fall of 1797, when reports surfaced that Louverture had forced Sonthonax to leave Saint Domingue the previous August after refusing to join the commissioner’s plan to massacre the white French in the colony and declare its independence. The full extent of the plot was revealed in a lengthy publication of a dialogue between Louverture and Sonthonax in early October (Figure 7). This was Louverture’s account, one in which he steadfastly remained committed to France because of the nation’s defense of black freedom; Sonthonax, meanwhile, was made out to

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be the vicious Jacobin of Porcupine’s dreams. To preserve his power, Louverture recounted, Sonthonax proposed that the “enemies of liberty” among the white community “must all be killed.”41 Publicly foiling this plan highlighted Louverture’s own virtue, but it also served to reinforce Federalist ideas about France. “It is supposed that Gen. Touissant has, by his spirited conduct and the discovery of Santhonax’s plot, saved all the white inhabitants on the island from being massacred,” a report in Fenno’s Gazette explained. Sonthonax’s effort to “debauch Toussaint,” another told, showed the commissioner was “as weak as he is wicked.” The same report decried the “motley crew” making up the government in Saint Domingue but noted that “those officers who have African blood in their veins are infinitely the least criminal.”42 Louverture’s gambits functioned in Philadelphia because the general’s prominence and literacy allowed him to enter the American public sphere and because Saint Domingue’s importance made that public see his news as significant.43 As a public figure, however, Louverture could himself be maneuvered. Editors such as Cobbett, Fenno, and Bache deployed his figure, and that of the colony as a whole, as part of their domestic battles. That use did not merely stem from an opportunistic employment of a salient place during a time of change. Developments in Saint Domingue resonated because they touched upon, or seemed to touch upon, significant issues. Because their readers had their eyes on Saint Domingue and Louverture anyway, commentators could stretch to demonstrate connections they judged might be convincing about more general points. Thus Louverture’s efforts to consolidate power and generate American support were fed into Philadelphia’s politics. Once there, they reflected the ideological divisions that existed, but they also refracted them, concentrating some to the point where they affected political decision making over the latter half of the 1790s.

French Fires and American Jacobins In Philadelphia, the rise of Toussaint Louverture took place against a backdrop of domestic happenings that gave Saint Domingue new weight in discussions about the nature of the French Revolution and its relationship to the American polity. The violence of the French Revolution, filtered through the colony’s chaos, seemed to be reaching American shores. The furor over the French refugees at Mud Island was but one moment when shadowy “French” figures were seen padding American streets and plotting against American lib-

Figure 7. [Philadelphia] Aurora Oct. 7, 1797. The purported dialogue was read in New York City on Oct. 11, in Albany on Oct. 23, and in Brattleboro, Vermont, on Nov. 6. Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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erty. In this environment, the generalized slur against the French—“Jacobin”— attained new, and specific, connotations. Louverture’s position vis-à-vis these wicked actors shaped the ways he was understood, and deployed, in domestic debates. As in Saint Domingue itself, the transformation began with fire. A spate of suspicious fires terrified people in cities from Georgia to Massachusetts during the winter of 1796–97, sparking panicked calls to find the “incendiaries” who had set them. By mid-December 1796 the crisis came to Philadelphia, where the municipal government, linking the local fires with those in Savannah, Baltimore, and New York, offered a $500 reward for information.44 “Never since our existence as a nation have we witnessed the devastations of fire in so striking a manner,” a New Jersey writer quavered, “the danger has now reached to our own doors.” Before long, writers had connected the fires to other threats that beset the public; very quickly, the fires in Philadelphia became “French,” almost immediately thereafter they were connected to Saint Domingue. In a facetious letter between “A TRUE ONE” and his fellow “Jacobin” conspirators around the world, this dynamic was at once lampooned and reified. Sardonically attacking the “tyrannical” measures of “Mr. Mayor and his watchmen” and linking them to the “British and Washington faction” who were seeking to “prostrate . . . our rights and liberties,” the writer equated French-ness with anarchy and destruction. “Let the word be liberty, equality,” this Jacobin proclaimed, “and as all men are equal, why should we who own not a single house in America permit aristocrats to use and have any[?]” By this understanding, the fires were part of the larger goal of the “Democrats” to level social and economic distinctions. They were connected to “pads from all [over] the world” and were controlled by domestic Jacobins, including the editor of the Aurora. Another writer, calling himself “Americanus,” identified “a refugee cut-throat from St. Domingo” as behind the fire that had ravaged Charleston.45 Confronting the real flames cropping up around them, Americans looked to clear away the smoke in order to expose the nefarious connections to external dangers that they identified. Bache and his ilk responded in kind, but the fires were easier to place at the feet of the French.46 A letter from a ship captain in mid-1797 revealed that Sonthonax was conspiring with the French minister Adet to make “a feu de joye of every town on the continent” by spurring “a few Cape agents” to burn them.47 Published in Porcupine’s Gazette, this letter was of course suspect as a source of information and received no immediate comment elsewhere. Nevertheless, the idea of French incendiaries continued to gain currency among Federalists. A

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less sensational iteration of the report (the same captain’s name was referenced) appeared a month later in nearly every Philadelphia newspaper. While the Aurora sought to mute the story’s impact by appending “—if fact” in its printing, all other papers judged the idea that Sonthonax was sending arsonists to the United States to be “HORRID! HORRID!”48 Within weeks the idea that French agents “had a hand” in a fire at Albany would be debated on its merits.49 Republicans contested such accusations with both fact and logic. When the Albany arsonists were apprehended, Bache indignantly pointed out that not one had a name that was French. Furthermore, Republicans argued, the Federalist contention made no sense. “There is not a calamity which this country has suffered, but has been laid to the charge of the French,” wrote “FAIR PLAY,” “if it was possible for man to cause famines, earthquakes and tornadoes, we should probably see them charged to the French likewise.” After Sonthonax was deported, Bache wondered aloud where his opponents would now place blame for any fires, fever outbreaks, or robberies that took place. On the contrary, he later pointed out, it was a British practice to sow seeds of Francophobia in order to manipulate their allies. Americans should look clearly to their own real interests and should avoid becoming the dupes of British plotting.50 For all of its pique, the Republican rejoinder conceded some important ground. The Federalist depiction of French agents planning to burn American cities was a neat riposte to Bache’s and others’ jibes that Jay’s Treaty was an ungrateful slap at America’s oldest ally. Republicans, they suggested, were foolishly falling prey to a false logic in which all republics were innately linked by ideals alone. The essential point behind this charge was difficult to unravel. If Bache succeeded in proving that particular Frenchmen were not to be found with tinderboxes in their hands, the general idea that connections with the French nation were potentially explosive went untouched. France, exemplified by “SANTHONAX, The PHILANTHROPIC Santhonax,” was not the republican partner with whom Republicans hoped to curry favor.51 The nation masked its cynical goals, hiding behind the name “citizen” in the attempt to fool Americans into acting against their own best interests. That term, Cobbett explained, was “borrowed from the newfangled vocabulary of anarchy and sedition” and was best understood as “synonymous with scoundrel.”52 Fenno saw it as unnatural and un-American. “You might as well expect that an individual should thrive and fatten on the flesh of his own limbs—by gnawing his shoulders to the bone,” he explained, “as that a nation can exist as Independent, if this disorganizing principle be put into practice.”53

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Judged in this way, writings that expressed “French” ideas could be the means of dowsing for domestic enemies. One writer posed as “Marat of Philadelphia” to make the point. Writing to “the Democratic jacobins of Baltimore,” he presented the plan and divulged the plotters: writers were to continue to stoke the irrational hatred of all things British, and Americans serving on French privateers would continue to provoke conflict on the seas; a French army lay ready in the wings. Cobbett even suggested that Bache was in league with the Republican Virginian delegation to Congress and Adet, noting that the Aurora had information from France ahead of other papers. Hidden among the citizenry were “French” individuals who held secrets, made plots, and planned destruction. The winter fires exposed French “fraternity” for the “infernal plot” and “hellish plan” that it was. Late in November 1797 Cobbett included the Sonthonax-Adet arson plot among a list of French abuses and offered new evidence of Frenchmen who “THREATENED TO FIRE THE CITY!” By this point, however, he had swapped his argument’s contentions and its evidence. Whereas before the idea of Sonthonax’s agents had served as a signal that the French were dangerous enemies, now aggressive French behavior served as proof that Sonthonax’s plans had been real. The arsonists in Charleston were “Gallic Incendiaries.” A few weeks later reports identified them as “FRENCH NEGROES.” Cobbett was amazed that Bache—“young Lightning Rod”—failed to openly support them. Bache, after all, had “justified the attempts on our Independence, [and] the insults heaped upon our government.” If he was willing to defend Adet, why not also defend the arsonists? “Both were of the same nation, and both (in their different ways) were promoting the interests of France, and the ruin of the united states.”54 Federalist furor over internal enemies and their foreign connections intensified and had real effects as the Adams administration lurched into a more overt conflict with France. In early spring 1798, in the wake of the XYZ Affair, Federalists in Congress passed laws that marked foreign connections and influences as criminal and traitorous. The Naturalization Act, passed just before the vessels from Port-au-Prince appeared outside Philadelphia, nearly tripled the period of residence needed for citizenship. Within the following two weeks Congress passed the Alien Enemies Act and Alien Act, both of which were designed to allow the government to clamp down on foreign residents. The infamous Sedition Act, passed in mid-July (on Bastille Day), made domestic criticism of the administration illegal.55 These efforts were married to others designed to increase the administration’s powers and prepare for open warfare.

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The “ancient alliance” between the United States and France was annulled. The nation’s armies were enlarged and reorganized; the navy’s advance accelerated. Congress also acted to allow American commercial vessels to arm and permitted privateers to set out in pursuit of French shipping.56 Meanwhile, the fires found additional fuel. The new commissioner to Saint Domingue, Gabriel Marie Théodore Joseph d’Hédouville, was reported as doubting the accuracy of the news of the XYZ reports. Republican George Logan attracted intense notoriety among Federalists for his decision to travel to France on a mission of private diplomacy.57 Federalists painted the Aurora as a French organ by pointing out that Bache had printed information received directly from Talleyrand himself. “The Editor of the Aurora,” a Federalist congressman complained, “is the agent of the Executive Directory.”58 One correspondent pointed to Bache, whom he connected to Genet as well as Talleyrand, and argued that all of them had attempted to deflect righteous American anger against France. “AMERICANS,” he beseeched, “Beware of French Intrigue!—and Of your own CITIZENS who are agents for the French!”59 Bache, who had been twice beaten by Federalist toughs, was arrested even before the Sedition Act went into effect. The resulting prosecution nearly bankrupted him, as well as the Aurora. When yellow fever struck the city again later that summer, he was too engrossed to flee for the countryside; he died in early September.60 Federalist success in the halls of government was in no small part due to their control of the grounds of political discourse. “Whatever construction may be derived from the words Liberté, Equalité [sic], and Fraternité,” one report explained, the attacks on American shipping around Saint Domingue revealed that the terms actually meant “hugging, squeezing, robbing, plundering and murdering all nations, who may be unfortunately, either from inclination or compulsion, their allies or their subjects.” “Gallo-Americans” were taking part in this process. They and their French allies were not only enemies of the nation, they were “enemies of nature.”61

Not a French Negro The Adams administration’s policy toward Saint Domingue, like its preparation for war in general, developed in this environment. Over the latter half of his term, John Adams would initiate America’s closest official dealings with the black and colored leadership in Saint Domingue until the Lincoln administration recognized Haiti’s independence in 1862. In addition to encouraging trade,

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Adams opened communication with Louverture and negotiated what was effectively a tripartite alliance among the colony, the United States, and Great Britain. Eventually the administration would aid Louverture militarily and push for the colony’s independence. There was more at work here than diplomacy alone.62 Saint Domingue’s sensational capacity to encapsulate the most salient political questions of the day made it an inescapable centerpiece of the administration’s wider efforts. Steered by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, the policy toward Saint Domingue reflected the political discourse in which French fires and Jacobin agents threatened the American polity. For a time, Federalists could use this environment to justify their cooperation with an emergent state populated by emancipated slaves while maintaining a commitment to slavery at home. The terms by which they accomplished that feat not only affected Federalist notions of the fate of slavery in the republic, they also compromised and constrained their connections to the ideals of the American Revolutionary past. Saint Domingue was central to the administration’s preparations for war in 1798. Though an actual invasion from the colony seemed unlikely, expanding the navy to fend off and defeat the privateers then plaguing American shipping was a way to at once protect and encourage the nation’s commerce and to meet the French menace far from American shores.63 With these measures came a diplomatic stick (though it was disguised as a carrot): on July 16, 1798, Congress passed the Non-Intercourse Act, which empowered the president to bar American trade with France until that nation renounced privateering. Early in the following year, Federalists in Congress renewed the act with a new twist, the so-called suspension clause that authorized the president to lift the ban on trade in particular areas that he judged to be out from under the Directory’s thumb. Saint Domingue was the object of the change. Late in 1798 Adams and Pickering had responded to overtures from Louverture and had entered into secret talks with the general and Thomas Maitland, the commander of the British expedition. Within months, Adams had dined with Louverture’s emissary Joseph Bunel, sent Philadelphian Edward Stevens to Saint Domingue as consul-general, and, in general, made it clear that Louverture could count on a privileged position with American commerce once the French privateers were no longer supported. To emphasize this potential, Stevens arrived on a ship full of supplies.64 This policy is best understood as an attempt to contain Saint Domingue. In partnership with the British, the Adams administration looked to regulate the

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colony’s contact with the outside world by maintaining a monopoly over its trade. They would support the responsible and responsive Louverture against both his internal enemies and the French. This would at once preserve his control of the colony, prevent the reins of power from falling into more dangerous hands, damage French prestige, and provide profits for American shippers. As Edward Stevens understood it, the Anglo-American goal was to stem the spread of “dangerous principles” through the “pacific arrangements” of trade. Done properly, the action would “put an end, in toto, or as nearly as possible, to all maritime operation or exertion of any kind in the island of St. Domingo.”65 This last emphasis was crucial. The danger Federalists saw in Saint Domingue grew directly from its capacity to extend beyond its shores. In the abstract this fear could be discussed in terms of “principles,” but the colony gave those principles flesh. French privateers had long tormented American merchantmen, but after 1797 small barges and rowboats also increasingly roved the shipping lanes around Saint Domingue’s ports. The Adams policy, in effect, moved the aegis of the U.S. government outward into this watery intermediate zone in order to protect its citizens from a menace that all described as “French.” Whether portrayed as stemming from France’s anarchic ideology or from its scheming thirst for power, this specific threat stood in for the general danger French Saint Domingue presented. As one account described it, the “cut-throats of Saint Domingo” were presiding over a new and sinister political economy, one in which “republicans” in the interior worked the plantations while those on the coast attacked foreign shipping.66 Hearkening back to conceptions coined in 1791, such accounts depicted the actions of “brigand barges” that, in a vacuum of proper authority, were allowed to feast on unwary vessels. Dissolute privateer captains, in cahoots with conniving officials onshore, robbed Americans of their property under the cover of the code of war. These colonial administrators were “worse than the Turks at Algiers,” one captain fumed.67 Behind it all stood a metropolitan government whose tenets frayed the bonds of society by creating unnatural connections across national boundaries. At both the tactical and strategic level, the administration’s policy strove to combat these hazards. While the nascent United States Navy was authorized to attack privateers and barges, Stevens was empowered to encourage Louverture to move toward independence. Both efforts were designed to make Saint Domingue a safe place by stifling its connections to the wider world—whether physically, by curtailing movement beyond its coast, or ideologically, by separating it from France. Just as Federalists understood themselves as plagued by un-

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Americans (both domestic and foreign born), the Adams-Pickering policy looked to create “un-French” in Saint Domingue—to sever the colony from the aggressive Jacobinism they thought they saw at work there. This general approach was the means by which Federalists coalesced in support of a policy that, on its face, committed the United States, a republic comprised in part of slaveholders, to the support of an independent nation of ex-slaves. Federalists hailing from different states would accept the policy for different reasons and with different emphases. In Philadelphia, where Federalist policymakers and political operatives were seeking to articulate a national political vision, two main rationales emerged. Those prioritizing the slaveholding interest described the effort in defensive terms: deploying long-held images of “French negroes” and their inspirational capacity for slaves everywhere, they framed the diplomacy with Louverture as producing a cordon sanitaire. Others, concerned more generally with the disruptions produced by “French” ideas, imagined a filter. While an actual invasion was improbable, they held up other sorts of aggressive acts—shadowy agents, arsonists, and abusers on the high seas—as warlike behavior that the policy would quash. The “French negroes” being held in check here, therefore, were those who fought for France and according to its “Jacobin” principles. This latter vein of thought parsed economic and racial freedom; the United States would continue to trade with Saint Domingue, containing (or ignoring) the radical egalitarianism put into play there. While the administration’s policy was capacious enough to embrace different emphases in order to gain supporters across sectional lines, here a tension emerged. Both rationales made the alliance with Louverture more about independence than about emancipation—about escaping the chaos and aggression derived from French associations rather than the implications of its Revolutionary ideals for slavery. Both also relied upon a vision of Louverture as an anti-French: an individual expression of the general Federalist hope to separate Saint Domingue from the French Revolution. Rather than an embodiment of French ideals of equality, he was unique. He was not, in any sense, a “French negro.” In reality, however, Louverture was (of course) black and was pledged to enacting a French policy against slavery. In making policy and playing politics, Federalists could accommodate the divisive implications of these facts, but the problem remained: Would rejecting “French” ideas necessarily mean opposing emancipation as an ideal? In the end, the tensions produced by Saint Domingue would have a profound influence on Federalists’ stance toward American slavery and on their future as a national political party.

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In the short term, however, the stratagem worked well enough, at least in part because of the aggressive stance taken by Hédouville, the Directory’s agent who had replaced the civil commissioners in April 1798. Within weeks, he and Louverture came into conflict, clashing over the general’s negotiations with Maitland, over control of the army, and over the best means of reviving the colony’s economy.68 The crux of their differences seems to have been Hédouville’s inclination to go on the offensive, to export the racial revolution beyond Saint Domingue’s shores by invading enemy territories. “I was informed . . . that the Agency of Saint Domingo [Hédouville] had received positive Orders from the Executive Directory to invade both the Southern States of America and the Island of Jamaica,” Edward Stevens wrote to Maitland in May 1799. André Rigaud, Louverture’s subordinate in the South (and rival), had followed the order, having “sent down a white Emissary to excite the Negroes in Jamaica to revolt, and be ready to join him at his Arrival.”69 The attack never materialized, but similar rumors had been in the air for months. Just before the “French negroes” arrived at Mud Island, a report circulated in Philadelphia that a plot had been uncovered to burn the city and kill its inhabitants on a day of proclaimed fast and public prayer by the Adams administration.70 These whispers were muted versions of the fears expressed further south. Porcupine told of an “Invasion” by three French privateers of Edisto Island, south of Charleston, in which the raiders asked questions about the relative size of the local black and white populations while they bought provisions. “I wish this may not be the forerunner of a Santhonax rexolution [sic] to the Southward,” Cobbett gloated. In March 1799 news came to Philadelphia that French agents had been caught in Charleston with coded papers secreted in false-bottomed tubs and a rolling pin. While this account was quickly disputed, another report identified them as emissaries of Hédouville and Talleyrand seeking to lay the groundwork for an invasion. South Carolina congressman Robert Goodloe Harper went public with the details in an open letter to his constituents.71 Louverture’s forced removal of Hédouville the previous October further burnished his image (and tarnished that of France) among Federalist commentators. The general had adroitly thwarted the Directory’s plan to invade the United States “with an army of blacks . . . with the purpose of exciting a rebellion among the black people in the southern states, and of laying waste the country,” a report told; Americans should feel the “most devout gratitude for this remarkable instance of divine favour.” Louverture, with God’s (and British) help, had turned Jacobin plotting aside. This news was “highly interesting,” one

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observer wrote, since it established that “the inhabitants of every description there have been completely purified from the contagion of the political fanaticism which first involved them in the horrors of revolution and anarchy.” Louverture’s “considerable talents” were proven by his “rescuing his unhappy country from the miseries with which it was afflicted by the tyranny of France.”72 The idea that supporting Louverture and separating Saint Domingue from France were defensive measures against slave revolt and invasion resonated among southern Federalists. Pickering highlighted this aspect in his discussions with slaveholding congressmen and senators, an effort that prompted Harper to write his public letter.73 During the debate over the suspension clause Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina argued that the South would be safer if Saint Domingue became independent than if it remained French. Reestablishing slavery was impossible. If the people of Saint Domingue were to be free, therefore, it was better to deal with them directly rather than “under the direction of the French Government, unreasonable and arbitrary as we have found it.” Others focused more squarely on trade, but the vague sense of threat remained. Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts denied that the United States would be inducing the colony to secede, but he hedged his bets when he speculated that, if independence took place, “it would be a good policy to be upon the best terms with the persons in authority there.” Imagining the possibility of a new Barbary Coast in the Caribbean, he promoted a sort of one-way free trade. “Let us feed and clothe them,” he lobbied, “and deprive them of inducements to quit their Island.” Pinckney agreed. While French, Saint Domingue was dangerous. If independent, only trade would prevent it from developing into a different sort of danger born of anarchy. “If these people in St. Domingo find that we withhold from them supplies which are necessary for their subsistence,” they had limited options, none of which was good: “they must turn their attention to cultivating their land, look to Great Britain, or become freebooters . . . and make our commerce the object of their plunder.”74 These concerns were not simply window dressing among advocates for the Adams-Pickering policy. Louverture and Maitland’s agreement, established in August 1798, traded British troop removal for promises to prevent any intrigues with British slaves in Jamaica. American policy would be set in similar terms.75 To tamp down on any French sparks that might waft toward American shores, as well as to aid Louverture in his struggle for supremacy, Rigaud’s southern ports were excluded when Anglo-American-Dominguan trade was formally reopened on August 1, 1799.76 Rigaud, described by Stevens as seek-

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ing “to extend the destructive Influence of french Principles and to add another Million to those which already crouch under the Iron Sceptre of modern Liberty, and Equality,” was dangerous.77 By the end of 1799, the small crafts that attacked American vessels were “Rigaud’s barges.”78 Early in 1800, Adams authorized the American navy to aid Louverture’s forces in an attack on Rigaud at Jacmel.79 Shortly thereafter Rigaud would flee for France and Louverture would be the sole authority in Saint Domingue. As Stevens’s mission progressed and the Adams-Pickering policy developed, news from Saint Domingue presented Louverture, already a stalwart against Jacobin excess and a steady business partner, as a paragon of virtue, wisdom, and moral behavior. He was a “wonderful man, sent by Heaven” to “do justice to every individual and protect him,” a letter from Cap Français gushed. Besides continuing efforts to protect American traders, his leadership also meant a return to recognizable patterns of production. In more than one speech the general linked emancipation to a call for continued work on the plantations. Subsequent commentary noted that “cultivation goes on favourably and with much spirit, thanks to our good general Toussaint Louverture.” The published reports of his arrangements with Stevens made him out to be a savvy negotiator. His military exploits made him out to be a righteous warrior. Character portraits of Louverture were printed repeatedly over the period, each, with varying degrees of accuracy, nuance, and flourish, describing him as a man of honor, integrity, faith, and thoughtfulness. One, from Boston, produced a flattering portrayal that featured the general’s disdain for the “modern French rulers” and stressing that “it is to be recollected, that Gen. Toussaint is not a Frenchman, but a native of St. Domingo.” As Louverture quashed French decadence, he also ensured black labor.80 Both results served American interests.

Tubs, Tailors, and Toussaint If Louverture was good, he was also black. “General Toussaint, though a black man, possesses qualifications of the Statesman and the general,” continued the newspaper quoted above.81 As a political partner, Louverture could be an ally against extremism; as an ex-slave, he raised questions about the relationship between republican revolution, civic rights, and emancipation. While Federalist politicians might subsume these questions in their deliberations over policy, the wider political discourse could and would not. The response of Federalist writers in Philadelphia, goaded by their political opponents and drawing

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on ideas presented by British abolitionists, was to defend Saint Domingue’s independence by articulating a separate process of revolutionary change than that provided by France, one that was sui generis because it was in the hands of Toussaint Louverture. The problem was that Louverture would not inhabit the “non-French negro” space that Federalists had created for him. “But what is Toussaint’s plan?” one writer asked in discussing Hédouville’s ouster. “To be permanently independent and neutral, or only till the close of the war?” The issue was “considerably interesting to this country” but only “time will answer.” In the short term, however, time only caused more confusion. In the wake of his negotiations with Maitland, Louverture vigorously and publicly asserted his fealty to France, and then did so again after his arrangements with Stevens. “The designs of this sable General continue unfathomable,” an observer complained after comparing Louverture’s speeches with Maitland’s actions. A Philadelphia editor suggested that “Toussaint is playing a deep game,” intending to deceive France, the United States, or both.82 Various strands of public discourse were available in Philadelphia by which Louverture’s designs could be deciphered and the goals of his “game” grasped. The dynamics of political competition in the capital, however, empowered some over others. The result was a battle over Louverture that crystallized the limits of the Federalist stance and suggested a path forward for Republicans. Following British abolitionist writers, some editors and commentators drew on longstanding antislavery conceptions to make the general into the rebel slave so many had looked for in 1791, a man who would naturally seek liberty and resist tyranny, thereby proving the universality of mankind and the falseness of racial difference. “Toussaint is a Negro, and in the jargon of the war has been called a Brigand,” one writer explained, “but according to all accounts he is a negro, born to vindicate the claims of his species and to shew that the character of man is independent of exterior colour.” Independence, by this understanding, was the product of a “happy revolution” and a sign that “the black race, whom the Christian world, to their infamy, have been accustomed to degrade, and trample upon, are now acknowledged as brothers, and are treated with upon equal terms.” “Every virtuous man will rejoice to heaven,” the writer concluded, “that a Negro-standard is now floating.”83 Another argued that Louverture’s character and conduct made evident the fact that “good sense and sound judgment do not lie in the colour of the skin, and that prejudice against it is folly.” His leadership

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would ensure that freedmen would move toward a “state of civilization” characterized by peace, labor, prosperity, and moral conduct.84 In 1791 and 1792, expressions like these had stretched the connections between the Revolutionary polity and racial egalitarianism in Philadelphia. In the political environment of the late 1790s, however, they had less traction than the more specific image of Louverture that Federalist commentators had pieced together after 1794. Here, too, the general embodied a revolution, but the point was to establish him as a beacon by which to judge others. Louverture’s struggles with Rigaud in 1799, for example, were scrutinized for clues as to each leader’s political goals rather than their greater meaning as figures. Rigaud was reported variously as fighting for French sovereignty, in resistance to Louverture’s treasonous dealings with the British, or in defense of gens de couleur interests.85 Louverture, meanwhile, was portrayed as fighting against Rigaud’s extremism (a product of the mulatto leader’s association with Hédouville) and to preserve the peace and stability that his moderate leadership had provided. Sympathetic observers made Louverture out to be an exception to the French rule. His “rare qualities” allowed him, “amidst scenes of great peril and difficulty, [to] raise the island of St. Domingo from a condition of abject brutality, to a point of comparative tranquility and increasing prosperity,” one argued. His defeat would mean an explosion, “and civilization [would] be banished.”86 This depiction tied Louverture to a particular understanding of Saint Domingue’s recent past in which the mysterious “game” he played was a purposeful, and masterful, dance in which the general rejected certain aspects of French policy—its aggression toward American commerce and its strategy of employing black forces offensively in the region—while maintaining an allegiance to a particular version of the nation’s ideals.87 Federalists saw practical benefits in this presentation. Louverture was not to be a “sovereign of St. Domingo,” one writer argued, but was to lead the colony in the manner of some of France’s other possessions, such as Isle de France (modern Mauritius). His control of the area, unlike that of metropolitan officials, would take local considerations into account, to include both the need to accept British sea power and protection and an end to persecution of white émigrés. This arrangement, another explained, would give Saint Domingue “a state of real independence” from destructive French policies while making it “nominally dependent on the French government.” Separated from radical French imperatives, the entire region would be stabilized. Internally, violence

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and destruction would be quashed; externally, Louverture’s polity would be connected to the region by trade. The ideology of “Capitalists,” not that of anarchic Jacobins or insurgent slaves, would drive Saint Domingue’s interaction with the world.88 Yet no one forgot that Saint Domingue had been the site of, and even the spur to, France’s antislavery policies. Federalist newspapers strove to parse the French and antislavery aspects of Saint Domingue’s past. To do so, they relied on extant ideas of French-ness as motivated by ideals that were either cynical ploys or misguided “philanthropy.” Louverture’s figure played a key role in this effort. As one typical account had it, his innate talents led to his rise, once the disruptions of the Revolution had broken out. That Revolution, however, was the occasion, rather than the cause, of his advancement. Its “misinterpretation of the principles of liberty and equality” had “desolated St. Domingo,” creating a vacuum of leadership after the death of most of the whites. Once in power, Louverture had acted in a most un-French manner: he was gracious and humane toward the former masters and he treated with the British so as to restore the colony’s commerce.89 John Fenno Jr. felt so strongly about the notion that he reprinted a depiction of Louverture first seen in his paper six months before: Louverture was a “negro,” but only in “the jargon of the war” was he a “brigand.” Properly understood, he was living proof of the fallacy of black inferiority and his leadership away from French control was an event unparalleled “in the history of the present war, [and] . . . in the cause of humanity.”90 This great victory was Louverture’s and Britain’s, however; it only involved France in the negative. To embrace this change as a challenge to slavery, however, was to emphasize its limits. “A new empire is rising in the Caribee ocean,” one writer exclaimed, echoing Congressman Otis. “Happy will it be for America if those people of colour” being liberated “are our friends and not our determined enemies.”91 Another applauded Louverture’s doings, noting that “however we may incline to avoid dabbling in revolutionary matters, this is a case in which our interest is so deeply involved, that secondary considerations ought to be disregarded.”92 Revolutions were not to be taken lightly, even when they seemed to be guided by such sure hands. The latter commentator combined his observations with a warning. Americans should strive to ensure that “the black citizens of our southern states” were not encouraged “to attempt erecting a democratical republic after the model of Mr. Jefferson, and other friends to the Rights of Negro Men.”93 Black independence, as long as it represented a thwarting of French

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ideals, was acceptable, but those ideals continued to provide a threat if placed in the wrong hands. A revolution in Saint Domingue could be salutary for the United States, but only if the United States itself rejected the false and dangerous ideals that France had unleashed upon the world. This sort of understanding represented a tension within Federalist ideology. When focused on policy toward Saint Domingue, it could be elided. The uncertainty over the implication of an independent black Saint Domingue did not mar the utility of Louverture’s figure in demonstrating the probity of Federalist ideals and politics. While the effort was naturally married to their portrait of the French Revolution as a whole, it also had implications for their notions of its wider meaning for slavery, antislavery, and race—topics that divided Federalists hailing from different sections of the nation in ways that they could not ignore.94 Critics of the Federalist administration found this weak spot and gradually developed a rejoinder that took advantage of it. At first they sought simply to flip the Federalist critique on its head, finding British agents operating behind the scenes directing policy in the Caribbean and arguing that Adams and his cronies were tools of the “British interest” there. By labeling the Federalists as crypto-British, Republicans asserted that their opponents sought to compromise the essential accomplishment of the American Revolution: independence. Rather than being directed toward neutrality, the Federalist agenda was intended to provoke war with France. Unchecked, this marked the end of the republic. Though posing their measures as designed for the general good, Federalists in fact were only benefiting select and particular interests. By contrast, Republicans presented themselves as an inversion of these threatening and treacherous tendencies. Ideals, not interest, drove their ideas about policy. Their efforts to treat the French and British as equals and to judge them according to their behavior represented the will of the majority rather than the interests of a faction. Saint Domingue provided a stage upon which this stance could develop. A shipment of cavalry horses had been sold to the British in Saint Domingue, making the United States abettors in their assault on the French colony.95 The administration’s efforts against French privateers were similarly disingenuous. The expanded navy and arming of merchant vessels were attempts to “force” trade with areas looking to separate from France.96 More than simply unfair, this was a surrender of principle. “It is from the bottom of my heart that I lament—that I mourn the lost liberties of my country,” a writer concluded.”97 Federalists were British lapdogs, not patriots. Republicans, whether in the halls

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of Congress or surrounding the British at Port-au-Prince, were their common opponents.98 As long as Louverture stood with the Republicans in the Caribbean, those in Philadelphia looked elsewhere for proof of the administration’s falseness and sleaze. The Aurora howled at the audacity of General Maitland’s last-minute proclamation designating various French-controlled ports on the island as blockaded in 1798, even as the British were clearly departing with their tails between their legs. “Recipe for a Blockade, according to the newest British method,” Bache sneered. “First evacuate a place, then declare it, by proclamation, in a state of Blockade. Inquire of General Maitland, OFF Port-au-Prince.”99 Defeated in battle, the British were clearly attempting to make Saint Domingue independent at the negotiation table, and the administration was helping them.100 The tocsins it was sounding over “French” agents were no more than “tubs to the whales”—attempts to manipulate and deceive the American people much like the barrels that whalers used to bamboozle their prey.101 The idea took corporeal form with the aforementioned arrest in Charleston of French agents—a white man and woman and three men of color—and the discovery of their cryptic papers concealed in a tub with a false bottom. Within days, however, the “Tub Incendiaries,” as one account described them, were set free.102 Rather than an agent of the Directory, the mysterious “diplomatic lady” was found to be the pregnant consort of an important figure in the local government, perhaps General Pinckney himself. The white man was her brother, the mulattoes her servants. The mysterious papers were merely financial records.103 “The tub appears to have lost both its bottoms,” one Republican writer gloated as these details came to light.104 The “Adventure of the Tubs,” besides revealing the embarrassing peccadilloes of Federalist officials, showed the nature of the plots they uncovered.105 Rather than depicting real fires, their inflammatory reports were smoke screens, behind which they could perform pernicious deeds unobserved. Taken in this way, developments that pointed toward Saint Domingue’s independence served as a measure of American dependence. To a point, this was a stance by which Republican commentators could continue to embrace French emancipation. In a series of installments beginning in late 1798, William Duane (the Aurora’s new editor after Bache’s death) turned back nearly a decade to provide a history of Saint Domingue from the earliest moments of the French Revolution. In every instance, he traced the disorder, violence, and destruction that had plagued the colony to attempts to make it independent. Forgetting his

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predecessor’s depiction of Mauduit, he identified those who had resisted separation from France as true patriots, including “the blacks who are either sufficiently enlightened to comprehend the blessings of civil liberty, or sufficiently acquainted with the miseries of slavery, to prefer death to the return of the old system.” White factions, and a degree of excess on the part of Sonthonax, had complicated matters, but French policy in the West Indies was inspired by “the love of liberty.”106 Americans siding with Britain stood against that liberty; those abetting its efforts in Saint Domingue were anti-republican. Because its raison d’être lay in domestic political concerns, the Republican depiction of Saint Domingue was immediately subject to the same forces that divided Federalists. Like their opponents, Republicans confronted the implications of supporting French emancipation. Any effort to separate Saint Domingue from France, Duane explained, would need American aid. Though southern Federalists had thus far been supportive, they would not be slow to see the danger of having an “African” nation as a neighbor. A letter writer several days later echoed this reasoning. “As to the independence of the Island, it is a chimera!” he exclaimed, “Can it be supposed Great Britain . . . would pledge herself as guarantee [a] Republic, and a black one too, at the very staircase of her brightest West-India possession?”107 But which was the greater threat, Saint Domingue’s republican character or its blackness? Republican commentary in Philadelphia referenced the difference between the universal liberty proffered by France and that established by ex-slaves themselves but went no further. The one was rational and revolutionary. The other was contagious, violent, and expansive. The difference in their nature, however, was left unexplained. Toussaint Louverture served as a figure by which Republicans would work out this ambiguity. As long as he stood against Britain, Republican writers could contain, or ignore, the implications of supporting black equality. Against Federalist rationalizations for treating with Louverture, the Aurora printed accounts that linked Saint Domingue to the worldwide struggle between republicanism and tyranny. Far from seeking independence from France, Louverture acted in service of the “True Friends of Liberty”—a liberty expressly connected to emancipation.108 As we have seen, this was a notion that Louverture himself put before the American public.109 By the spring of 1799, the Aurora touted Louverture’s arrangements with Maitland as part of a plan to “make use of the British under the present circumstances of convenience, and no more nor longer.”110 Not only did this program protect American shipping and serve to ease tensions between the United States and France, it also showed that the

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“Black General” had outfoxed his British rival. Having “outgeneraled” Maitland on the field, Louverture had now “out-negociated” him at the table.111 He was a sincere and enthusiastic republican citizen, loyal to France as the nation that provided his “personal liberty, . . . elevated rank, and an individual consideration, from which his colour, under a different system, would be to him an eternal bar.”112 Saint Domingue was a safe, if embattled, seat of a French republican advance in universal liberty. Louverture embodied that effort. Yet an important note had been sounded. France, not liberty, was the fulcrum on which Philadelphia Republicans would respond to Louverture’s Saint Domingue. Once convinced that he was in fact scheming to separate from that nation, or operating in concert with Federalists, the general’s reputation plummeted. When his representative, Joseph Bunel, visited Philadelphia, the Aurora held Louverture up as an anti-republican tyrant. His accord with Maitland, Duane spat, was “a Treaty . . . ratified between the monarch Toussaint the first and George the third.” In an apparent reference to the leaders of the Barbary States in North Africa, he was “the new Bashaw of St. Domingo, Bashaw Toussaint,” or the “new emperor of new Morrocco.”113 These designations were meant to illuminate Britain’s intentions, but their true aim was to unmask the Federalists’ Anglophilia. As the details of the Adams-Pickering policy became public, Republicans saw proof that the administration, like Louverture, was serving the British welfare. Saint Domingue’s independence, in addition to exposing the Federalists as puppets, represented the knell of American’s own self-government.114 Though Louverture’s image in Republican papers shifted as varying reports about his loyalty arrived in Philadelphia, a pattern had been set. Writers would turn to him as a way to demonstrate their opponents’ duplicity and corruption, and the monarchism that was its font. Rather than simply a co-conspirator, however, Louverture was depicted as a fool. On the pages of the Aurora, this treatment increasingly related his failings to his blackness. Amid one particular crisis, Duane paused to remind readers that Louverture was “originally a coachman” and “is known to possess qualifications of mind of a very slender compass.” He was avaricious and cunning, and put his own power and wealth over all else. It was “chance [that] gave him a place at the head of the blacks,” not skill or courage. Rather than an actor, he was a pawn. He had “always been the instrument of unseen advisers—advisers too [sic] whom he changes as often as they discover his ignorance or his weakness.” This fecklessness was determined by his race. Louverture’s motives were a product of his innate rapaciousness and almost bestial ferocity; “his hatred of slavery was natural, his knowlege [sic] of

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the white race of men was acquired in servitude, and his unquenchable hatred of the white race is not the least justifiable to his dispositions,” Duane explained. More than a despot, Louverture was a black despot. As such, he was disconnected from both republican and antislavery ideals. “Toussaint is in the hands of the Romish Clergy,” the same writing proclaimed, and was therefore in league with men who were “furiously inveterate against the French revolution.” Having fallen under the thumb of “the friends of order, the pious allies of Turkey, Russia, and Algiers,” he was in effect supporting slavery.115 Rigaud, by contrast, as Louverture’s rival, remained “French” in Republican papers. The “Political Views” of “ST. DOMINGO” that Duane offered at the end of 1798 made Rigaud a hero valiantly thwarting Louverture’s attempts to make Saint Domingue independent. Whereas Louverture was depicted “at the head of his dark host,” Rigaud’s white looks and French education were offered as proof of his humanity and honor. As the two fought during 1799, Louverture continued to be identified as the “black emperor” who was seeking to expand his “dominions,” while Rigaud “had always experienced the hatred of the British . . . has always been faithful to France, [and was] not only a republican but considers us as republicans.” Given these connections, the news that Adams’s policies would open ports under Louverture’s control but keep shut those held by Rigaud heightened the tenor of Republican commentary. Accounts of Louverture’s victories stressed the brutality and carnage he meted out. “Americans this is our ALLY,” Duane reminded after printing tales of public executions at Port-au-Prince. American policy was rewarding “the most deadly and cruel enemy of the republic,” while it punished the areas where “our ships had been invariably respected, those under Rigaud.” Louverture’s ascendance reduced the episodes by which Duane and other writers could make this point, but Republicans nevertheless maintained a focus on the general as unprincipled, disloyal, dangerous—and as black.116 Besides highlighting the co-opting of American policy by British interests, this and like accounts emphasized the de facto alliance Federalists had forged with free blacks, an observation intended to score political points. Robert Slender, a humorous plainspoken character created by Philip Freneau for Duane’s paper, made aspersions on Louverture’s “Guinea” secretary part of a diatribe over Adams’s reopening of the trade with Saint Domingue.117 Racialized slurs also came into Duane’s attacks on Robert Goodloe Harper. Besides amending his public warning that the French were planning an invasion of South Carolina with a contemptuous “Boo!” the Aurora also began a campaign linking the

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Federalist congressman to black women. Rumors of his cynical pursuit of an Irish heiress as a wife, the charge went, had complicated his existing relationship with a mulatto mistress, a “brown beauty” who was “pouting and flouncing” out of jealousy. “Quasheba,” however, had “been pacified by being told that ‘this was all a story’ and that the lovers have kissed and made friends.”118 Sex and race entered the “tubs” controversy as well when Republican writers intimated that General Thomas Pinckney was the father of a mixed-race child with the mysterious woman in Charleston.119 This feature was part of the reason the tale had such staying power. As the incident faded, Philadelphia Republican writers revealed successive Federalist “tubs,” each of which served, ratchet-like, to prove the reality of its predecessors and the underlying truth of the Republican picture of the administration’s corruption and hypocrisy. In late April 1799, when a group of Philadelphia tailors were arrested for having secretly made a large number of military uniforms, Cobbett proclaimed that they were destined for a French army being raised by Republicans in Philadelphia. The Aurora soon offered contrary proof that in fact the tailors were in British pay and that they had made the “breeches” for soldiers of “King Toussaint Louverture,” adding grist to the charge that Louverture was in Maitland’s pocket. “Federal zeal was never exhibited with so much wisdom,” the Aurora jeered, “—so much energy, or so much,—but language is very defected so let us tell the story, without laughing—if possible!”120 In the wake of Harper’s warning of an invasion from Saint Domingue, the Aurora located the real danger in the administration’s efforts to crack down on domestic opposition. The expanded army, Duane suggested, was to be employed against “enemies of our government,” not the French.121 Harper’s letter was “so much in the character of the Taylors conspiracy, that we cannot forbear publishing it,” Duane mocked. Its “absurdity and falsehood,” however, were not laughing matters. Printed “in the newspapers of the English government in this city,” it revealed the connection between the Gazette of the United States and like-minded vehicles, the British, and Adams. “Such are the men whose works are read at St. James’s and who are employed by our administration to do its dirty work,” Duane wrote. A French invasion paled beside the Anglo-Federalist threat to American liberty.122 The arrival of British general Thomas Maitland in the United States, fresh from his negotiations with Louverture, and the subsequent news of the suspension clause compounded this charge. The Aurora charted Maitland’s movements with a gimlet eye, painting a picture in which he, British minister Robert Liston, and Cobbett colluded to pry Saint Domingue from France while Amer-

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icans, either deluded or corrupted, sat by. Duane’s function was to raise the veil. In multiple reports he sought to prove that American agent Edward Stevens had ventured to Saint Domingue to treat with Louverture laden with wares forbidden before Adams’s proclamation, which he then sold for his own profit with the acquiescence of treasury and customs officials.123 The date that the proclamation was to take effect was similarly cloudy (or deliberately clouded), leading some merchants—those privileged with prior knowledge—to set out early.124 (Liston had the ultimate authority over American shipping, the Aurora smirked; he was “the best good natured man in the world—and the British officers the most of gentlemen—and Whales are small fish!”)125 Such revelations confirmed other elements of the Republican critique. “Having shewn our imitation of Britain in the plotting business,” Duane explained, “our readers will advert to the Alien and Sedition bills,” which they would see were also “faithful” copies of British models. Maitland’s “treaty with the Black General Toussaint,” he continued, was being similarly mirrored by “our Directory” and its “treaty with this new American potentate.”126 Federalists were dangerous. Their “constant cry” was “Beware of French Emissaries,” but this was merely smoke to distract from their “plots, conspiracies, clues and tub stories.” These “ridiculous contrivances” were part of “the plan of the federal leaders to spread alarm” so as to distract the public from “the number of British intriguers and emissaries” and their “American Royalist” allies.127 By this point, in Republican commentary, Louverture was one of those allies, and Saint Domingue’s independence under him was a signal of the Federalist intent to sacrifice American interests. Amid the swirling reports of the suspension clause, Duane promised to make public “measures and intrigues of an almost unparalleled and wicked extent connected with this business of St. Domingo” unless Congress investigated.128 This threat revolved around the doings of one George Sweezy, reputedly a loyalist and horse thief who had fled to Canada during the Revolution and who had now been apprehended in Pennsylvania while acting as a courier for Liston. When opened, Sweezy’s pouches revealed letters from Liston that fully exposed the insidious connections among the administration, the British government, and “the black emperor Toussaint.”129 Describing the administration’s Saint Domingue policy, the British minister reported to his superiors that “THE [American] GOVERNMENT HAS GIVEN NEW SUBJECT OF PROVOCATION TO FRANCE,” as the Aurora rendered it, “BY ENCOURAGING (IN CONJUNCTION WITH US) the Negro Chief Toussaint, in measures which appear ultimately to

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tend to a separation of the Island of St. Domingo from the mother country. Whether this AFFRONT will be POCKETED BY THE DIRECTORY, I do not pretend to decide; but I cannot PERSUADE myself that it is PROBABLE!”130 That the administration was working to encourage Louverture’s independence was bad enough, but the idea that the British were cavalierly designing to use U.S. policy to instigate open war with France was truly sinister. Over the latter half of 1799 and into 1800, Republican writers saw “Federal embellishment” in all the news coming from Saint Domingue. “Liston exults at our having formed a treaty with the Black Chief,” the Aurora crowed, describing the policy as a culmination of his “long labouring to involve us in an unnatural war.” Whether “our government [had] been duped once more or [if ] they entered the trap with their eyes open” remained an open question, but the answer hardly mattered.131 The situation was dire. At best, Federalists were hypocrites; at worst, they were cynical shills—warmongers seeking to distract the public so as to consolidate power at home in service to their British masters. Adams’s policies were a victory of “British influence and monarchical doctrines” over “American republican sentiments.” The news from Saint Domingue, Sweezy’s dispatches, Liston’s influence, and the trade with Louverture were all “precious monuments” to the fact that Federalists had betrayed the nation.132 When, in early December, Fenno reported that the Royal Navy was preventing Spanish and Dutch vessels from trading with Saint Domingue, the Aurora delighted in what it saw as a double-edged misstep. Given Britain’s acknowledged hatred for the “French regicide tri-color,” the nation that it was protecting was obviously not France. That the British described the area as “Toussaint’s dominions” only sealed the fact. Fenno “cannot keep even the secrets of his friends,” Duane sneered. “The black emperor Toussaint and his dominions will be presently as real as the royalty of George III” and Federalists were to blame. They had leagued with “the black emperor Toussaint,” making him “our great and good ally and beloved cousin.” The suspension clause was in reality a “negro-anglo treaty” that committed the United States to Saint Domingue’s independence and that was partnered with British intrigues.133 For Republicans, the imperative to defeat this dangerous combination made Saint Domingue a source of rhetorical flourish, but it also opened up avenues of new meaning. An (inaccurate) report that Rigaud had defeated Louverture led the Aurora to include “the total failure of the project of the independence of St. Domingo” on a list of “Wonderful Concurrence” of good news to republicans around the globe. “WHO IS THE DUPE?” Duane asked.134 George Sweezy’s

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saddlebags and Edward Stevens’s cargo continued to regularly resurface as a chorus in the Republican chant detailing Federalist Anglophilia and corruption. As the presidential election between Jefferson and Adams neared, however, the racial element of the Republican critique emerged with new salience. Adams’s silence over the “boasted alliance with Toussaint, the rebel agent of the French republic,” was “astonishing,” Duane exclaimed. “Our executive has never condescended to deny so momentous, and so black a charge; think of this!” Louverture’s victories in the spring of 1800 were noted for the atrocities he committed. In charting the conflict, the Aurora privileged Rigaud’s perspective, including his depiction of Louverture as a “tyger, as a dread monster in human shape . . . [and an] atrocious fanatic who feeds on the blood of the Divinity, as well as on the blood of men.” Rigaud, meanwhile, portrayed himself as the leader of “the true friends of France” who sought to “save our parent country.” That the infant American navy was active in aiding Louverture’s cause sealed the issue. When the British had seized several of his vessels for violating his agreement with Maitland, Louverture successfully appealed to the frigate General Greene to blockade Jacmel, a key moment in Rigaud’s ultimate defeat. This typified “a kind of heterogeneous, incomprehensible arrangement,” a Republican writer protested. Adams’s stated goals of peace did not square with his deal with “the Negro chief of St. Domingo.”135 At this point, the man formerly distinguished as the chief architect of French victory in the Caribbean was no longer welcome in the Republican fold. Where once black equality had epitomized the French Revolution, now the position of race within Revolutionary ideology had been fundamentally shaken and jarred.136 As a Negro whose French-ness was suspect, Louverture marked the inappropriate and dangerous qualities of Federalist policy. Within the political discourse of the period, this dynamic had two effects. First, it added force and weight to racial components of national arguments. Louverture’s blackness was available as a weapon in domestic political struggles. Second, this distinction helped refine the Republican logic by which the public should understand, and judge, Federalists’ true aims and nature. Federalism was, in fact, a misnomer. Rather than acting for the general good, the administration’s policies actually served an interest that was alien. This narrowness signaled a dangerous corruption of the ideals that the nation had been founded on, a contention that Republican writers made with increasing frequency and ardor as the election neared. “Is it then come to this already,” Duane asked as he investigated Stevens’s speculations and the timing

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of the “St. Domingo business,” that Pickering “cannot only dispense with a law, but authorize an agent to do acts which cut up and jeopardize the whole commercial industry of the country?” If so, “it is ridiculous indeed to talk of republican government.” Federalists sought to mask their pursuits by wrapping themselves in the national flag, but in reality a unified nation did not exist under their leadership. In the wake of the Sweezy affair Duane scorned the Federalist rationale “that there are two distinct interests in the United States—the Northern and the Southern”—and that this policy simply represented a benefit for the former. This was not the case, the Aurora explained, “it is the Southern states that suffer by the curtailment of our trade with Europe—it is the Northern that profit by opening the trade to St. Domingo.” Properly understood, Adams’s conduct set the nation against itself: “the federal constitution, however, intended that there should be a common interest.”137 During the debates over the administration’s proposal to increase the number of standing troops in the national army, Federalist Henry Lee justified the measure with what was at this point an old chestnut: the proximity of French Saint Domingue made an invasion likely. White or black, France constituted a threat.138 A Republican calling himself “Agricola” responded with facetious support, suggesting “A New Way to Employ a Standing Army” that would bring the same “benefits” to yeoman farmers as the expanded navy had to the commercial sector. The Federalist troops would combat “sans-culottes insects” and “disorganizing birds.” “Though France or Rigaud should not invade us,” he opined, “we have nevertheless all the best of internal enemies to keep down.”139 The Federalists, in other words, sought to crush American liberties, hurting the many while profiting the powerful few. Saint Domingue contributed an important portion of the litany of proof of that fact. Their attachment to republicanism was “dubious.” Electing Thomas Jefferson was vital.140

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little over ten years after smoke first covered the Plaine du Nord, news of another rebellion in Saint Domingue wafted into Philadelphia. Like their forebears in the summer of 1791, plantation workers from around that fertile plain (and revolutionary center) had risen in late October 1801 to fight for liberty.1 Readers in Philadelphia closely followed the “very alarming affair.” The insurgents, they learned, had killed hundreds of whites on the plain and had planned to kill the black and colored commandants controlling the region as well, after which they would divide the land up among themselves.2 Their goal had been to “overthrow the present Governmt.,” consul Tobias Lear explained to James Madison, the new secretary of state, “and to distroy the whites.” The government, however, composed in part by the rebels of 1791, had quickly struck back. Lear praised General Henri Christophe’s “utmost coolness” in crushing the plotters in Le Cap. Troops under Toussaint Louverture then scattered the “brigands assembled on different plantations” and dispatched their leaders.3 After meting out this harsh peace, Louverture also provided new details. The revolt, he revealed, had been the brainchild of one of his most trusted subordinates, his adopted nephew Moïse. The rebels had chanted, “It is General Moyse who is for us; it is General Moyse who is for us; he is our Chief; he supports us.”4 The very mention of Moïse’s name revived the violence at Cap Français. Citing this evidence, Louverture had Moïse arrested on October 25. Just over two weeks later, he was executed at Port de Paix.5 Tales of violence in Saint Domingue were common fare in Philadelphia by 1801, but readers who gave the revolt further thought might have been puzzled.

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Why would ex-slaves rebel against the regime that had given them freedom? Why would Moïse, long familiar in Philadelphia as Louverture’s loyal lieutenant, be their “chief ”? This was a man Laveaux had praised before the Directory and who had been instrumental in Louverture’s campaigns against Hédouville and Rigaud.6 When the USS Constitution visited Cap Français in 1800, Moïse and his officers had dined onboard and were “saluted with a discharge of 15 guns” as the frigate left port.7 News of the rebellion and of Moïse’s involvement in it raised questions about the nature of the new order in Saint Domingue and about the “Governmt.” that presided over it. For Toussaint Louverture, these questions were serious enough to warrant a series of proclamations, many of which were translated and printed in Philadelphia. Having defeated the rebels in the field, Louverture now crushed Moïse in print, revealing him to have been a traitor, both to the governor-general and to Saint Domingue’s liberty. “This conspiracy,” Louverture wrote, was “formed with the greatest malice.” It was a cynical grab for power, in which Moïse had recruited followers by falsely claiming that Louverture was plotting to return them to slavery. In Limbé, Moïse’s home parish, the conspirators had even produced shackles and chains as proof.8 In refuting these charges, Louverture recaptured the public depiction of his Saint Domingue as a place of liberty, and of himself as its defender. In fact, the governor-general may have protested too much. Prior to the conspiracy, in the spring of 1801, he had convened a special assembly to write a new constitution for Saint Domingue, one that all but separated it from France. Under this constitution, Louverture would be governor for life and hold extensive powers in the name of preserving liberty in the new regime. In order to revive the colony’s plantation economy, however, he instituted a labor system that allowed elites—colored, white, and black army officers—to control agricultural laborers’ movements. The 1801 constitution also permitted Louverture to import new workers, though it was unclear whether this meant the liberation or the purchase of slave ship cargoes.9 For people on the Plaine du Nord, this form of liberty smacked of slavery, and Moïse, whether he led them or not, was sympathetic.10 Even local whites understood the rebels’ “design” as a rejection of the regime of forced labor and a bid for greater control over their lives.11 Louverture’s victory quashed this vision. “Tranquility is again established,” the governor-general reported in the aftermath. “The most positive orders have been given that the works of the plantations should be carried on with the greatest vigour, that no inconvenience should accrue to persons or property, and

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that the smallest attempt upon the public peace be most exemplarily punished.”12 After the executions, Louverture further tightened control. A November proclamation made the army a national police force, established a “card of safety” system to track and control individual movements, outlawed vagrancy, and decreed that offenders would be sent into forced labor. The same ruling encouraged marriage in the church and mandated that all plantations supply lists of their workers to a central bureaucracy.13 Taken in sum, Louverture’s actions in 1801 sought to establish and define a revolutionary polity; the death of Moïse reminds us that such a revolution involved the repression of other agendas—ones that the insurgents of 1791 might have recognized.14 This same dynamic was at work around the Atlantic. Despite all of its restrictions, Louverture’s revolution was no sham. Distinguishing between individual and general liberty, it sacrificed elements of the former in order to preserve the latter. Saint Domingue’s liberty, though nominally French (and posed in universal terms), was to be protected through the revival of agriculture and commerce, and through the allies those efforts created.15 The consolidation of power the general undertook to establish this liberty, however, was an affront to Napoleon Bonaparte. Early in 1802, the first consul sent fortythree thousand veteran troops under the leadership of his brother-in-law Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc to subdue the colony, opening a new, and in some sense final, phase of the violence there. Bonaparte ultimately sought to reimpose slavery in France’s possessions, an effort that would doom Leclerc’s efforts in Saint Domingue.16 While Louverture would not survive the ensuing struggles, Haiti would. The fact that distinguishing between rebellion and revolution was an intensely political undertaking, one that legitimized some forms of change while rejecting others, was as true in Philadelphia as it was in Le Cap or Paris. Riven by the battles of the late 1790s and gripped by the tightly contested presidential election of 1800, Americans were quite sure that their Revolution hung in the balance. And, with these domestic concerns roaring in their ears, they were equally certain that developments in Saint Domingue played into the crisis at hand. By Republican estimations, developments like the violence outside Le Cap in late 1801 proved that the Federalist administration had been corrupt and callow. For Federalists, the Republican responses to news from Saint Domingue lifted the veil from their lofty rhetoric. In both cases, news from the colony was freighted with ideas about the fate of liberty and slavery in the American republic. Republican operatives continued to harp on the fact that

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the Adams administration had treated with black rebels. Federalists, meanwhile, held up their opponents, and Thomas Jefferson in particular, as supporters of slavery or as inordinately driven by the interests of the American South. In the wake of the election—with Federalists reeling in defeat and Republicans basking in victory—President Jefferson’s supporters in Philadelphia found the terms to articulate a trans-sectional agenda.17 Federalist charges would impact Jefferson’s conduct thereafter, but they could not disrupt Republican power. A certain battle to define the American revolutionary polity had been won. Explaining this victory highlights an end point, of sorts, to Saint Domingue’s influence in the early American republic. In the period between the lead-up to Jefferson’s election and Haitian independence, Saint Domingue’s longstanding capacity as an accelerant in American political discourse in Philadelphia crested, burning the new nation’s divisions clean. As in the past, the sites of this scalding clarification were moments of violence. For the first time, however, that violence, rather than lending Saint Domingue an array of meanings, simplified American interpretations. Independence, or quasi-autonomy, made it a “black” place alone. Americans would once again view scenes of fire and death there when Leclerc’s forces invaded but would increasingly only see them as relevant to Americans as a warning. As commercial contact diminished, few sources of ideas to the contrary arrived on American shores. For American observers, the Haitian Revolution was, in a sense, complete. That completion, however, was a circumscription, one that left out more radical notions of Saint Domingue’s meanings (such as those imputed to Moïse) in the name of a revolution defined in more moderate terms. This reduction of Saint Domingue meant a similar simmering away of potential meaning for the Revolution at home. As in Saint Domingue, defining the American Revolution was a political act, and, as was the case for Toussaint Louverture, it involved defeating internal enemies with a very different definition.

Federalists and Responsible Revolution Where the freedpeople of the Plaine du Nord hoped to follow Moïse (or Moses) out of bondage, some slaves in Virginia looked for salvation from a man named Gabriel. Gabriel was himself a slave, owned by Thomas Prosser of Richmond. Late in the summer of 1800, reports identified him as the leader of a conspiracy among slaves to rise in revolt, a plot only narrowly averted when a rainstorm delayed it and the plans leaked.18 In the frantic days afterward, testi-

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mony from would-be rebels composed a picture of a plan informed by domestic politics, steeped in egalitarian ideals, and involving foreign actors. Gabriel’s rebellion, the evidence suggested, was nothing short of a revolutionary bid to recast local society. The public battles between Virginian Federalists and Republicans had led area slaves to believe that Richmond’s freedom-loving artisans would support an effort to oust the conservative merchant faction that had constrained American liberty. One of the insurgents equated the effort to that of white Americans during the American Revolution. “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial,” he reputedly told the magistrates. “I have adventured my life in endeavouring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause.”19 Other evidence arose that two white men were somehow mixed up in the plot and that they were understood by the conspirators as French and as compatriots. Virginia’s Republican governor, James Monroe, hastily gathered together all physical proofs of their involvement, refused to circulate the evidence to investigators, and seemingly destroyed it in short order.20 The idea that Gabriel was a Virginian “French negro” was explosive indeed. Federalists knew a liability when they saw one and could make do without hard facts. Embattled amid an increasingly desperate presidential campaign, commentators sought to make political hay by following a now familiar script.21 “The insurrection of the Negroes in the southern states,” the Gazette of the United States explained, “appears to be organized on the true French plan.” That plan, according to editor John Fenno Jr., was equal parts intrigue and idiocy. “Jacobins,” hoping to seduce white voters, had spewed their “common cant of Liberty and Equality” in the attempt to split the “Eastern” and “Southern” states, overthrow Adams, and replace him with Jefferson. These “French principles,” however, had backfired by prompting slaves to plot fire, rape, and bloodshed. Information that Frenchmen were involved, that Gabriel had intended to spare French whites, and that the slaves “expected that every Frenchman would join them . . . [along with] many of the most redoubtable democrats in the state” completed the picture. Dangerous demagogues had nearly produced “the horrors of St. Domingo” at home. “Mourn hapless State, thy follies mourn!” a poem to Virginia called, “By ruthless Blacks and Demo’s torn.”22 Though familiar in form, the context of the election produced a new emphasis in this line of attack. Against Republican charges that the Adams administration had served “Northern” needs at the expense of the South, Federalists

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deployed Gabriel as proof that in fact it was their party that acted for the common, American interest.23 By tying “Virginia Gabriel” to Republican “cant” and French violence, commentators meant to smear their opponents by association, but such opportunism had its costs. Slave revolt proved to be a weak reed for flag waving. For one thing, the institution of slavery was the foundation for real regional political-economic differences. More to the point, because the institution was a handy and longstanding topic of discussion by which wider truths could be demonstrated, it could reveal strains of argument that were divergent. The figure of Gabriel served some Federalist aims, but it undercut others, exposing inconsistencies and raising uncomfortable questions for a party seeking to articulate a trans-sectional identity. As a political jab, Gabriel gave teeth to an ongoing effort to expose Republican tenets as not only specious but dangerous to slaveholders.24 “We hope the deluded South will take warning from these beginnings of St. Domingo atrocity,” Fenno Jr. told his readers, “while the fiery Hotspurs of [Virginia] vociferate their French babble of the natural equality of man, the insulted negro will be constantly stimulated to cast away his cords, and to sharpen his pike.”25 The nature of that encouragement, however, was unclear. Some treatments delegitimized black freedom altogether. Insurgent slaves were “Jacobins,” the dregs of society looking to rise above their station.26 “It appears, that the blacks . . . reasoned on the Jeffersonian principles of emancipation” and plotted a massacre so that they could “erect a republic for themselves,” one editor proclaimed. Their goal, like those of the French “cut-throats,” was “A CHANGE OF CIRCUMSTANCES WHERE THEY WOULD BE THE UPPERMOST.”27 This lumping served local political battles in Philadelphia, but it conflicted with older notions that slavery was a problem and that violence against it was at some level just. “Black GABRIEL,” Fenno Jr. exclaimed, “may shortly be expected in Pennsylvania, where, if he do not obtain the title of General he will at least stand a good chance of being appointed Major of Fries’s regiment of Militia!” The crux of the jab was that both the Pennsylvania tax rebel and the Richmond slave considered themselves to be an “insurgent” for the “purpose of gaining his liberty!!!”28 Yet elsewhere the Federalist treatment described the prospective revolt as natural and reasonable.29 It was not surprising or unjust, one letter read: “That man must be a fool who thinks there can be any compromise between liberty and slavery.” Slaves were “thing[s] in human shape . . . little better than a beast,” but “the slave holder who is a democrat, and at the same time, an owner of slaves” was more than a hypocrite, he was “the beast of beasts.”30 Re-

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publican ideals threatened society itself. These various takes held up Federalist actions as responsible and realistic, but as a collective statement of principle they offered only a disordered jumble.31 Slaps at “black Gabriel” as a “General,” of course, also stood in tension with the treatments of the black general Toussaint Louverture Federalist writings had touted over the latter part of the 1790s. Reports of Louverture’s constitution of 1801 circulated in Philadelphia just after the American presidential election was decided; its text arrived in the city in August.32 Confronted with Jefferson’s triumph, many Federalist commentators looked to an independent Saint Domingue as a place of principle lacking at home. Though maintaining the sense that the situation there was unique, commentators also expressed a new willingness, now that the politics of the moment removed the necessity of mollifying slaveholding interests, to connect the changes there to a wider, even revolutionary, movement. In the relative calm after his defeat of Rigaud in July 1800, Louverture had taken steps to transform his vision for Saint Domingue as a society into a functioning polity. Besides his efforts to revive the plantations, he enacted regulations that would protect the lives and property of the white émigrés who would return to run them and who would direct the revenue generated through American commerce into state coffers.33 He invaded Santo Domingo and gathered arms and built fortifications. The colonial constitution was the centerpiece of this effort. In addition to codifying his labor system, it imposed a moral regime that encouraged marriage, the raising of children, and the observation of Roman Catholicism.34 This was the tense society that rankled Moïse. Thwarting “his” rebellion completed Louverture’s Revolution. By the end of 1801 his Saint Domingue acted as an autonomous participant in the Atlantic market, an armed centralized state, and a polity in which slavery did not exist. Even as they wondered whether or not Louverture was separating that polity from France, Federalist commentators described the constitution, in the words of one, as “an event which may be classed among the most extraordinary of the present age.” Ex-slaves, “hitherto disgraced by their colour,” had demonstrated “the progress of moral principles among all descriptions of men” in creating a government that protected their freedom and guaranteed their equality. This was “a sublime spectacle to the world.”35 On the one hand, it offered proof of black humanity. This “great astonishing negro Toussaint” had “burst upon the world, as if formed by nature for the purpose” of vindicating his race, one writer proclaimed.36 Louverture’s efforts were also hailed for their sensible limits. His

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government was suited to Saint Domingue’s situation and station. It offered important rights but also recognized the need for measured steps. “Though the system formed is not a Roman republican system,” one author admitted, “it may fairly be considered the parent of one.”37 At Timothy Pickering’s request, Alexander Hamilton had sent along a brief sketch of his ideas for the governance of an independent Saint Domingue with Edward Stevens in 1799. “No regular system of Liberty will at present suit,” he decided. Instead, Hamilton outlined a tightly controlled regime in which Louverture and his officers were the center.38 Whether this schema influenced (or was even seen by) Louverture is unknown, but the features it forecast were among those celebrated by Federalists in 1801. Freed slaves, many of whom had been in arms for years, were a “multitude” not yet ready for full participation in government, one wrote. Freedom and equality, therefore, were paired with safeguards against disorder. Louverture’s lifelong leadership and control were wise steps that “guarded against the introduction of popular or democratic influence.”39 His pronouncements encouraging moral behavior were designed to inculcate civic values and as such were appropriate measures designed to put Saint Domingue on a path toward stability. This was a decidedly responsible revolution, one that Federalists could embrace. Over the latter part of 1801, they did so, fleshing out a portrait of Saint Domingue that highlighted their own position in, and on, Jeffersonian America. In Louverture’s speeches and edicts, Philadelphians witnessed attempts to organize and regularize civil government, to promote commercial growth, to establish common social practices, and to rationalize Saint Domingue’s society around common ideals.40 One proclamation regulated marriage, encouraging it as a source of “public tranquility and happiness” but also using it to control plantation laborers’ movement and choices.41 Another empowered the military to inspect departing vessels to prevent unauthorized emigration.42 Philadelphians also witnessed rational efforts to develop the colony. Louverture, they learned, had created a new province, to be called “Louverture,” centered around the city of Gonaïves. Citizens were encouraged to invest in and build up the port and could lose their property if they refused. As an incentive to American shippers, the governor-general reduced tariffs on arriving vessels.43 As had long been the case, applauding Louverture often served as a stalking horse for comment on France. Federalists celebrated the governor-general’s divergences from French practice. Louverture abolished the Revolutionary calendar as a way of reestablishing Christian cultural authority.44 “It is not a little

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remarkable,” one exclaimed, “that the black French general Toussaint . . . has the honour of being the first to restore the observation of the Christian Sabbath . . . and to abolish the impious ordination of decades.”45 Such plaudits provided backhanded opportunities to comment on developments elsewhere. “HUMANITAS” gushed over Louverture’s “maintenance of order and . . . establishment of security and protection” but focused on “the immutable principles of religion, morality, and industry” that inspired his policies. Unlike the Republicans of Paris (and Philadelphia), Louverture had resisted the “flattering of democratic fury and insolence,” the “wailing of ‘oppressed humanity,’ and the ‘distresses of the labouring poor.’ ” He might identify himself as French, but, for commentators such as these, his acts served to tear away the veil masking the “cant of political hypocrisy” that disguised “French” realities, revealing its true nature.46 This approach accommodated new developments in the colony. Moïse’s rebellion, according to one editor, typified the violent disorder France produced. “When will these volcanic eruptions no longer spread terror and distress among the quiet, and the well-disposed?” he asked. “Never while the evil spirit of democracy continues to feed this destructive element with fresh fuel, and to blow up the flame with its noxious breath.”47 The prospect, and then fact, of Bonaparte’s troops on the march was grist for the same point. Leclerc’s fleet was rumored ultimately to be destined for Louisiana. With “the military standard of French Democracy” planted there, one writer made clear, the French would “send forth their political missionaries to propagate their strange doctrines and principles.”48 Another predicted that the inhabitants of the American Southwest would soon “be favored with the first ‘fraternal hug’—a friendly grapple indeed!”49 When, in early 1802, French troops invaded and Saint Domingue’s cities burned once again, Federalist commentary focused on the chaos as antiAmerican. In late March, a series of letters began in Federalist papers, each ending with the note that they were written from the “ruins of Cape-Francois.” Besides detailing atrocities committed by the French and hinting that the violence stemmed from Leclerc’s ham-handed conduct, these writings quoted French officers disparaging Americans as “Arabs,” base opportunists who would trade with any party, no matter how low, for profit.50 Another group was heard boasting that, after dispatching with Louverture, they would turn to New Orleans, “ ‘then . . . WE’LL GIVE LAWS TO THE UNITED STATES!!’ ”51 Further news of the jailing and persecution of American mariners reinforced the sense that France was a threat. “LIBERTY!!!! EQUALITY!!!!” one “ruins” letter spluttered.52 French republican troops in the Caribbean gave credence to long-

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standing Federalist depictions of French hypocrisy; their proximity amplified the sense of danger. The violence that took place after Leclerc’s invasion also clarified the issue of colonial independence for Federalist observers. The difficult question of Louverture’s intents (and the troubling Republican accusations that American policies had supported him) fell away as it became clear that the French planned to reimpose slavery. Amid the chaos of the roiling colony, Federalist observers simplified the stakes. Leclerc and the French were the aggressors; Louverture’s resistance was natural. “Man, fighting for freedom, of whatever nation or complexion, is no contemptible foe,” Fenno Jr. wrote, “the mask is now thrown aside and the blacks see that unconditional servitude is their destiny on submission.”53 Louverture himself had something to do with this understanding. Before the fleet arrived, while he professed to doubt France’s “liberticidal intentions,” he publically pledged to defy the nation if the rumors about reenslavement were true: “A child who knows the rights which nature has given over him . . . will shew himself obedient and submissive towards his father and mother, [but] if regardless to his submission . . . [they] persist in annihilating him, there remains nothing to do . . . but to resign his vengeance into the hands of God. I am a soldier, I dread not man; I fear God only.”54 Such heroic words may have stirred hearts in Philadelphia, but they also conceptualized Louverture and his troops as wronged citizens and as rational men; they enabled a logic that gave the news from Saint Domingue epic importance. In the mouths of Federalist polemicists, the blacks of Saint Domingue were defending an essential liberty that spread far beyond their shores. To register the idea, they called them “cosmopolites.”55 The moniker “cosmopolite” was effective because it sounded deep ideological chords, but it was also an important shift in emphasis in Philadelphia Federalists’ discussions of revolution and slavery. Revolution, as long as not “French,” was once again a positive force. French proslavery, in fact, brought antislavery more securely into the Federalist ideological fold, allowing their political expressions to embrace a universalistic understanding of mankind that, for years, had been the provenance of Republicans. These articulations, of course, were made in the interest of maligning Jefferson and his adherents by foregrounding France’s hypocrisy. “How degraded must those men be,” one spat, “who, at the will of ONE MAN, suffer themselves to be . . . made the engines for enslaving a set of men who had solemnly been declared free by the legal representatives of the whole French nation.”56

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Such observations emphasized Republicans’ reflexive Francophilia, their ethereal (and demagogic) philosophy, and their dangerous political views, but they also tacitly took a stand on principle, connecting Louverture and Saint Domingue to a Revolutionary tradition that Federalists now identified as their own. “St. Domingo . . . has as strong a claim to the exercise of independent powers with regard to its internal government, as the American colonies had in ’76,” one Federalist opined. “Where are the splendid doctrines, which, according to modern philosophers, are to illumine the universe, and to impart every country . . . the prerogatives of independence?” Republicans’ opposition revealed their abandonment of the original principles of the American Revolution, tenets that were defined as universal egalitarianism. “Has St. Domingo forfeited her claim to a participation in this universal liberty,” the same writer continued, “merely because a portion of her inhabitants are black?” American Revolutionaries had made a comparable bid for freedom. Why not support these efforts?57 Instead, the French design to quash their bid, abetted by Republicans, was not only a blow against “THE LIBERTY, PEACE, PROSPERITY, UNION AND INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNITED STATES” but a strike against “the liberty of the world.” Louverture and his cosmopolites were the only thing standing in the way: “God crown their arms with success!”58 Saint Domingue served as effective evidence of the claim that Republicans were a faction that had stolen control; it illustrated the ways in which they were jeopardizing the new nation’s true and intended meaning.

Republicans and Revolution Deferred The vehemence and extent of Republicans’ responses to the Federalist charges are a measure of their effectiveness. Beginning during the lead-up to the election, the slavery issue had been a thorn in Republican political operatives’ sides. Commentators attempted to speak to both slaveholding and nonslaveholding audiences, an awkward effort that involved moving back and forth between ideas about slavery’s eventual demise and explanations of its endurance.59 These efforts took on greater coherence in the face of Federalist attacks. Falling back into existing ideas about blackness and violence, Republican writers in Philadelphia first deployed Gabriel and Louverture as embodiments of the threat produced by rebel slaves. In addition to stifling mention of the righteous black warriors some of them had touted after 1794, the rhetoric signaled a shift in their attitude toward France, one in which they distanced themselves from

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totalizing worldviews. Practically speaking, this partnered well with their effort to expose Federalists as manipulative operatives. In revealing Federalists as outside the mainstream—and even as radicals—however, this effort re-formed Republicans’ approach to the issue of slavery. As long as Saint Domingue continued to evoke connections between revolution and emancipation, the colony posed a problem. Republican writers’ solution was to decouple the equation— to suggest that their Revolution need not produce a single answer to the problem of slavery. Federalists’ frequent efforts to suggest the opposite made the task all the easier. Focusing on refuting Federalist assertions about Gabriel and Louverture served to obviate more troublesome differences within Republican political thought around slavery. In the end, the response in Philadelphia would result in a separation of a principled opposition to slavery from the series of changes Republicans argued their Revolution was supposed to produce. The Republican victory of 1800, in this and many respects, was one that faced south. Gabriel might be a “Jacobin” to Federalist writers, but Duane and other Republican operatives focused on his race and, building upon their treatment of Louverture during the Quasi-War, forged a line of argument that conflated, and equated, all black violence. Part of the effort was to link that violence to Federalist machinations. “While our administration was encouraging to revolt and treating with Toussaint in the West Indies,” the Aurora averred, “what could be expected from the unfortunate blacks in our states from the example?” Adams’s policy had accepted a man like Gabriel in leadership. Only a difference in “situation” made Louverture “entitle[d] to a present of three carriages from a British agent in Philadelphia” while Gabriel was “an object for the gibbet.”60 The British connection helped make the point sting. The “Black Empire” that the British had worked to establish in Saint Domingue was part and parcel with the “revolt of the Blacks in America,” Duane declared; “our government encouraging the one must operate to justify the other.”61 Looking to Saint Domingue, he and others increasingly gave an expressly racial logic to developments there. In addition to reviving images of Louverture as a monster in human form current in 1799, their accounts reduced his efforts to being a “project to expel or extirpate the whites” in the island.62 Saint Domingue was to become a black nation. One writer even suggested that Louverture planned to capture Guadeloupe and Martinique as refuges for mulattoes. Whites, meanwhile, were to be destroyed.63 This news swirled among that of the disputed election, contributing to the passionate political mood and adding weight to the idea that the results were of

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vital importance, especially in areas where slaves lived in numbers. Indeed, Federalist writers tried to take advantage of the same dynamic. One, equating the violence in Saint Domingue with “the most horrid scenes of the reign of Robespierre,” finished with the exhortation to “Tell these things in South Carolina! Yea, let them be published in the State of Virginia!”64 The Aurora’s response demonstrated Duane’s willingness to mix race, antislavery, and politics. A recent report had alleged that thousands of arms had arrived in Philadelphia, returned by Louverture on the grounds that they were not what he had paid for. Besides reviving questions of the legality of Adams’s negotiations, this news sparked a new degree of clarity over Louverture’s motives and character. Ungrateful to the nation that “had raised him from the seat of a coach box to the seat of commander and chief of an army, and which had emancipated all his black brethren from the condition of brutes to that of freemen,” Louverture had revealed himself to be a “savage.”65 Now, in the face of Federalist scare tactics, Duane flew a jingoistic flag. “Twenty thousand of these assassins from St. Domingo might work mischief ” if brought to American shores, Duane countered, but he had no doubt that they would be quickly routed by brave American militiamen. How ironic that such “sanguinary Helots” would be using the same weapons that American citizen-soldiers had used to defeat the “mercenary hordes” of Britain during the Revolution. It was the Federalists—“monsters in our country”— who had treated with “the black usurper” and made such nightmare counterrevolutionary scenarios possible.66 Federalists who countenanced aid to a “black man in revolt against his too indulgent government” were worse than fools, they were threats to American safety. Gabriel’s late attempt added a chill to the Aurora’s musings over the result. Thousands of white Americans might have been killed had “these . . . arms . . . been landed and put in the hands of . . . West India negroes, under the guidance of any emissary of Gen. Maitland,” the paper concluded.67 Though the emphasis here was on the dangers fomented by the British, the thrust was to point out the more general danger produced when alien influences tampered with the national interest. In the wake of the Gabriel news, Republican writers made this argument explicitly by identifying Federalists as a sectional cabal. At first, this effort could accommodate what were some basic, if aging, antislavery tenets. Squaring themselves with well-known portions of Jefferson’s position, these writers reminded readers that slavery had been imposed on the American colonies and that the Declaration of Independence had originally struck out against it as part of its catalogue of charges against George III.68

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The ongoing presence of slavery was a product of craven commercial interests (abetted by the British) and a natural concern for safety. New England slave traders had thwarted efforts to restrict the slave trade (Duane even asserted that “eastern” delegates had edited out the Declaration’s antislavery clause) and had evaded the state laws that had been passed. Southern states, by this understanding, were left in a difficult position. Given their scattered settlement of whites and “the constitutional character of the negroes,” the black population would continue to increase at a greater rate than the white. For “the safety of these states, and the peace of society,” therefore, it was vital to promote “a great accession of white population.” Federalist policy ran counter to this need. The Alien Act, in concert with British efforts in Ireland, served to discourage European emigration, stifling a vital source of southern white population. Partnered with the treaty with Louverture and the encouragement it gave to the likes of Gabriel, this charge filled out the Republican position that Federalists did not speak for the nation. Their exposure and defeat, therefore, would lead to a host of salutary developments. “We augur better things,” Duane wrote. With Jefferson elected, the nation could look forward to “the effectual stoppage of the African trade [and] measures for a gradual emancipation of the offspring of those who now exist in slavery.” For this trajectory to begin, southerners needed only to be “aroused by their danger, from the delusion [in] which they have been placed by a New England administration.”69 “The insurrection of the negroes, will produce . . . happy effects,” Duane asserted. In addition to forcing an investigation of the negotiations with Louverture, it would “put the eastern delegation to congress, to the ordeal, and make them openly avow their desire to retard the white population of the southern states.” 70 The Republican interest was truly national. That interest was also identified as antislavery, but the emphasis was on white protection. Signaling a willingness to distance themselves from France, Republican commentators suggested that it was the Federalists, in fact, who were the dangerous elements. Gabriel’s revolt revealed that their plotting with ex-slaves in the West Indies jeopardized American safety.71 In their cynical pursuit of commercial power, the administration had capriciously bridged the gap between the colony—a place where “all were already emancipated!”—and the United States, where slavery continued to exist.72 This recklessness revealed Federalists’ embrace of Louverture as a “cosmopolite” to be yet another “federal trick” designed to manipulate the public.73 After threatening to do so for months, in April 1802 Duane printed a five-column collection of letters, writ-

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ings, and documents that purported to reveal the truths behind several Republican sawhorses: Adams had sought to use Saint Domingue as a way to undercut his negotiations with Talleyrand; émigré royalists and British agents were in league with the administration in attacking Rigaud; the British government had decreed which American goods could be imported into the colony (Figure 8).74 Duane next exposed the “ruins of Cape Francois” author as actually being a British merchant writing comfortably in New York, “a man who has in private professed the most sovereign contempt for every thing American!” 75 “The puny genius who wrote or seemed to write from the ruins of the Cape,” he snickered, “and who termed Toussaint, Christophe, and other incendiaries, Cosmopolites, or Citizens of the World” was another in a long line of Federalist tubs.76 For Duane and his ilk, Saint Domingue served to finally reveal the vanquished Federalists as what they had long charged them as being: a New England faction that had sacrificed American honor and independence. Louverture’s constitution, however, had changed the landscape upon which this sort of charge operated. Claiming the national mantle in an environment in which their Federalist opponents held Saint Domingue up as the embodiment of republican liberty had a decisive effect on the way Republicans in Philadelphia positioned the Jeffersonian polity in relation to slavery. “It may be said that the United States lent aid to freemen to maintain their freedom,” the Aurora explained, “but this argument is futile and has been exploded long ago.”77 In fact, however, the Federalist accusations struck deep, pinning Republicans down by articulating the implications of principles and ideals that sat at their core. Parrying this swipe necessitated changing the terms of the debate. Having already signaled their willingness to shift in their use of blackness, Republican writers in Philadelphia now swung round on the idea of “French”-ness. Some notes had been sounded before. If Federalists were low-minded in their policy toward the colony, so was their Dominguan ally. Republican writers perpetuated images of Louverture as a despot, where Federalists touted him as a principled opponent of slavery. Rather than the birth of a new order, Louverture was an exemplar of the sort of disorder that all Americans censured as they distanced themselves from Bonaparte’s France. The “black consul” of Saint Domingue had created “a spurious mimicry of the constitution of the 8th Brumaire,” by which Bonaparte had grabbed power. Louverture’s government was “despotism of the worst kind, formed in the worst manner, conceived in treachery and masked by hypocrisy,” Duane wrote. His lifelong governorship (making him a “hereditary fellow-citizen”) and his concentration of power exposed him as

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an “enemy of the French revolution.” He was without principle other than selfinterest. His opposition to slavery, a function of “passion” rather than intellect, was a “powerful agent of his ambition.” 78 “Was the constitution established in St. Domingo such a one as the anti-republicans approve?” Duane asked. “Was it a constitution conferring freedom or reducing the free blacks to slavery?” Louverture, he inferred, like the Federalists themselves, was something other than he appeared. Duane compared him to Alexander Hamilton, recalling Hamilton’s attempt to create a “monarchical constitution” in 1787.79 This was no “cosmopolite.” Instead, he was a brigand. In the furor and violence after Leclerc’s invasion, Republicans slid toward a depiction of Louverture that made him sinister and dangerous. “He is in fact a ferocious brigand,” one writer snarled, “who would sacrifice the lives and property of any who might stand in the way of his ambition.”80 Accounts of the fighting described the massacre of white colonists by “the renowned myrmidons of Toussaint” who moved “through the country like roaring lions, burning, killing, and destroying.”81 Bestialized and savage, Louverture’s resistance was not a defense of liberty; it was a licentious rampage. This emphasis gave the violence meaning for Republican commentators, bolstering their portrayal of the prior administration as either insensitive to the needs of slaveholders or uncaring about the dangers treating with Louverture had exposed them to. Federalists “have condescended . . . to become the defenders of oppressed humanity, the commiserators of the (black) inhabitants of St. Domingo,” Duane scoffed, but they did not do so from “philanthropic sentiments.”82 Instead, they were cynically pursuing power by attempting to frighten slaveholders with tales of French invasions. By depicting the French armies as hapless and by supporting Louverture’s cause as just, these “anti-republicans” threatened to “promote domestic insurrection and bloodshed.”83 They were using slavery as a “weapon of party” without consideration of the dangers it created, a charge that became less theoretical when news of a slave uprising in North Carolina arrived in mid-May.84 Federalists might “denounce the French as jacobins and incendiaries, but let them look at home and enquire who are the real incendiaries?” Duane asked.85 It was they who were the “true sanguinary Jacobins, of the Robespierran cast, who would loan to the devil to work bloodshed—consistent allies of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Consistent advocates and Figure 8 (facing page). [Philadelphia] Aurora Apr. 24, 1802. Editor William Duane’s longpromised demonstration that the Adams administration was in the pocket of the British government, as proven by its actions toward Saint Domingue. Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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defenders of Pickering. Worthy adorers of Alexander Hamilton.”86 Such men would “take any steps to excite commotion and uproar in the southern states,” even those that endangered the South and threatened the union.87 Amid related efforts to combat Federalist aspersions on Jefferson as a “negro president,” elected only by the preponderance of electoral influence wielded by the slavepopulated South, Republicans held up Adams’s relations with Louverture as proof that Federalists favored slave rebellion, even hinting that they had played a role in “opening the sluices of destruction as has been exemplified in St. Domingo.”88 This turn was decisive. Rather than being part of a cosmopolitan trend against slavery, an independent Saint Domingue was a threat to the United States. “We ask if it was proper to encourage a colony of people to declare themselves independent,” the Aurora cried, “who were not sufficiently civilized to be a useful neighbor, or to be able to preserve themselves from becoming a horde of pirates?”89 As a bastion of escaped slaves, Saint Domingue was a source of discord. Its presence would “capacinate [slaves] for mischief ” and could only bring “war for the countries in its neighbourhood.”90 In pulling off Louverture’s and the Federalists’ masks, Republicans identified their own position more clearly. Their response triangulated the American polity, moving it away from the revolutionary republican commitment to universal rights. Slavery was less an evil than a wrong. The problems it produced could be borne. More important, those problems paled before greater ones produced by tampering with the system. In squaring this circle, Republican writers muted some of their longstanding notions of slavery’s fate in the American republic, lowering the horizon of revolutionary change and attenuating their embrace of universal citizenship. “We are sincerely zealous for the freedom of every man of every color as any other who exist,” Duane wrote around the high point of the internecine battles in Philadelphia’s newspapers, but slavery, an evil that “Britain has devolved on us,” was a difficult problem.91 To go too far too fast, as Federalists had done, was to risk an inferno that would run out of control. Responding to a Federalist taunt that the Aurora was now renouncing materials from the Amis des Noirs that it had printed in the early 1790s, Duane explained that “experience, woeful experience has demonstrated that men, held for the greater part of their lives in slavery, are unfit to receive instantaneous emancipation, that it is only by gradual means the evil can or ought to have been remedied.” Republicans were not inconsistent, Duane made clear; education and moral improvement were necessary to make the transition into free society safe. Louverture’s vile “ingratitude”

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to France for his freedom and station, whose constitution “reduced his fellow blacks to . . . pristine slavery,” was to blame for Saint Domingue’s fate.92 His sins, and those of his Federalist abettors, “had retarded the freedom of the unfortunate African race a full century.”93 Stopping there, Republicans could still claim continuity within their thinking about slavery and the American Revolution. Slavery was an evil—a plague entailed upon the nation by the British that American principles would inevitably cure. The pace of that settlement could be slowed by the tampering of smallminded men, but liberty and equality would win out—that is, unless the republic were corrupted from within. Such corruption could come from a derailing of proper principles or from an absence of principle altogether. Republicans talking about Saint Domingue accused Federalists of both. For Duane, a rival editor’s recent “lucubrations” celebrating Louverture’s successes against Leclerc proved his sordid motivations. “It cannot be from principle or philanthropy that he now advocates their cause,” he explained. He hated France, the only nation to emancipate its slaves, and embraced Britain, which was still actively conducting the slave trade. The only explanation for the disjunction was that all was not as it seemed: rather than driven by his opposition to slavery, the Federalist’s position derived from “his enmity to France, his partiality to England and his disregard of America.”94 Self-interest and political calculation drove the Federalist position, in other words, not the ideals of 1776. Alongside the annual printing of the Declaration of Independence in July 1802, Duane listed John Adams’s crimes in parallel to those of George III. Foremost among them was his dealings with Maitland and Louverture.95 Properly understood, the Federalist position on slavery was more smoke and mirrors than genuine. Saint Domingue illuminated the fact that they were not true Americans. Treated in this way, Republican writers posed Saint Domingue’s travails as highlighting the dangers of external interference with slavery. In defending their position on Louverture, writers such as Duane articulated a stance on the problem posed by slavery in a republic committed to liberty that was consistent with the fulminations against “fanatics” made by Antoine Barnave in 1790, Bryan Edwards in 1791, and William Cobbett in 1794. Universal ideals could not be blithely applied to slave societies; local control was the only way to prevent the carnage and anarchy produced by unfettering slaves too quickly. Especially after the abortive North Carolina insurrection, Republican writings treated slavery as an issue best left in the hands of those who lived with it. By thus planting themselves firmly on southern ground, they privileged an understanding of

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slavery as a problem that could only be solved gradually—if at all. Since “it is almost impracticable, at least inexpedient, for the southern states to get rid of that hereditary curse of slavery,” one account went, it was necessary to clamp down on the “fruitless, though natural” attempts made by “that ill-fated race . . . to obtain their just rights.” Duane concurred: “every friend to humanity” must “lament their situation and the states which are exposed to the calamities of domestic broils from their neighbourhood.”96 The “their” in his designation referred to white as well as black victims of slavery. The second portion of the sentence emphasized the white polity as a whole. Slavery was a problem, but it was one that Americans would likely need to live with, at least in some places. Of course slaves were also property, which was not only part of the American Revolutionary troika but also a means by which to demonstrate a commitment to a truly national purview. For Republican writers in Philadelphia, the commercial implications of events on Saint Domingue offered ways to further undercut Federalist claims to the American interest. “While we deplore the immense sacrifices of property and human happiness and lives . . . in St. Domingo,” Duane wrote as Cap Français smoldered, an opportunity arose from the “revolution in the agriculture and exportation of that noble colony.” Americans trading in molasses, rum, sugars, and coffee would need to turn elsewhere, and should act as vessels for transferring the technology and know-how to other, more stable places in the hemisphere. This would also prevent those places from developing into competitors for American cotton.97 It would also cohere the economies of the sections. “Our agriculture, manufactures, commerce, navigation, and fisheries stand in real and fixed relations to each other,” Duane wrote. “Those relations are among the best and safest ligaments of our FEDERAL COMPACT.”98 Adopting a southern perspective had implications that eased Republican difficulties and empowered their critique of their opponents. Rather than a “negro president,” Jefferson was a defender against the Federal “faction” looking for “new opportunities to conclude treasonable treaties with some new Toussaint whom they wish to see erect his bloody standard to the Southward.”99 Federalists had created dangerous slave rebels in Saint Domingue, and perhaps in Virginia; they had invited French aggression, making the United States a possible target for its expansionist tendencies. Illegal and immoral, they were also parochial in their interests and un-American in their effect. A truly national purview would take into account the different needs of the sections, to include the par-

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ticular concerns of slaveholders. Pious denunciations of slavery were easy, and irresponsible, to make from the outside, but Saint Domingue revealed “the danger of letting loose on society—incendiaries and assassins, incapable from nature of their unhappy condition of regulating themselves in civil society, or of sustaining themselves but by violence more grievous on the rights of others than they themselves are now subjected to.”100 Slavery’s tyranny was less abhorrent than the violence that came from overturning it. The South was to determine how, and if, slavery would end.101 “It is civilized emancipation, not savage liberation, which the southern people wish to bestow on them,” the Aurora explained.102 White life was more important than black liberty.

Revolutions in Black and White in Jeffersonian America Early in 1799, Republican congressman Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania rose to argue against the then new Federalist proposal to allow the Adams administration to trade, and treat, with Toussaint Louverture. Most of his positions seconded objections made by his fellow Republicans. Suspending the Non-Intercourse Act would only intensify the conflict with France, he reasoned, railing against the two-facedness of the administration’s professed desires for peace. He suggested that important details about American trade were being withheld from Congress and, above all, that the entire gambit represented an unprecedented power grab on the part of the executive branch. When Gallatin turned to Saint Domingue itself, however, and imagined the colony as an “independent State,” his arguments against the bill provided new clarity about the nature of the revolution there. “What is this population?” he asked. “It is known to consist, almost altogether, of slaves just emancipated, of men who received their first education under the lash of the whip, and who have been initiated to liberty only by that series of rapine, pillage, and massacre, that have laid waste and deluged that island with blood.” Such men were a threat. They were not, as the administration would have it, trading partners. And in fact, they were not really men at all. To encourage the creation of “a whole nation of freed slaves,” Gallatin explained, was to “throw so many wild tigers on society.” Defined by its violent reversal of slavery, that nation could not exist peaceably among others where slavery continued. Rather than producing goods for market, it would attack the world around them. Its emissaries would “spread their views among the negro people” in the American South and would “excite dangerous insurrections among them.” The ex-colony would become “an asylum” for runaways.

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Independent, Saint Domingue would “become dangerous neighbors,” just as Citizen Genet had fretted it would (albeit to different ends) in 1793.103 What was novel in Gallatin’s response to the suspension clause in 1799 would become axiomatic among Republicans by 1801 when they emerged from the election controversy as victors conscious of the need to maintain a national coalition. That coalition, though rooted in a commitment to egalitarian and republican principles, a deep suspicion of unmerited privilege, and a reverence for the ideal of the independent yeoman, was also an organic political entity.104 Its abstract tenets were shaped by the needs of the political moment. Jefferson famously designated his election as a “second American Revolution,” and, to be sure, the election of 1800 represented a peaceful transfer of power and signaled the onset of a more unified polity.105 The Constitution’s procedures had worked (albeit by prompting some necessary alterations), the republic had survived a challenge, and Americans were “all republicans—[and] all federalists,” as the president proclaimed during his inaugural address.106 Jefferson’s meaning, however, was less conciliatory than it might appear. By his and his supporters’ estimation, dangerous elements had been defeated in 1800. Dark forces bent on corrupting the first American Revolution had been turned back, making the second one an act of preservation and perfection—a kind of second step or follow-through after a moment of near disaster. This sense made the Republican victory out to be a natural event, casting it as a logical, and even an inevitable, development. A true American republic had been preserved. The foreign influences behind their opponents—un-Americans by definition—had sought to pervert the republic’s essence, making it serve other (British) interests rather than that of the greater good. The unity suggested by Jefferson’s phrase, therefore, reflected a cropping rather than a gathering effort. Pseudo-Americans had been excised, at least from the avenues of power. Gabriel’s fate reminds us that this achievement took place on more than one front. Gallatin’s warnings show that the Jeffersonian republic was conceptualized with the prospect of Saint Domingue’s independence set at center stage. Toussaint Louverture might have termed his efforts in 1800 and 1801 as a “second revolution,” had he dared, but all revolutions are not created equal. Clamping down on the threat personified by Moïse, Louverture had acted to realize a revolutionary polity whose identity was predicated on the absence of slavery (at least within its bounds) but in which liberty was strictly defined. These same issues posed Jeffersonians a problem at home, one that complicated their political unity and compromised their stated principles. The shifts made

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by Philadelphia Republicans were vital in solving this puzzle.107 Gallatin, deploying the words, phrases, and images used by Republican commentators to that point, made Louverture’s Saint Domingue into a mirror by which Americans could better see themselves. This course had a practical impact, both in American politics and on the way in which events unfolded in the Caribbean. The Republicans’ success in bridging the divide over slavery among their constituents shaped the fate of Louverture’s bid to revolutionize Saint Domingue. This same success had more abstract implications as well. The Republican victory did not suddenly transform the United States into a white man’s republic, but it did transform the terms by which Americans would compare their revolutionary polity to other changes going on elsewhere.108 Jefferson’s second revolution, as historian John Murrin has argued, laid the footings for an understanding of the American polity, and the Revolution that produced it, as exceptional.109 On the Atlantic stage, that same revolution sapped the capacity of Louverture’s efforts to register as a revolutionary moment, both among the Federalists who wanted to see him as a “cosmopolite” and among generations of American and European historians who, until recently, have failed to peel back the victors’ interpretation and take events in Saint Domingue on their own terms. Gallatin’s vision in 1799 embodied both these practical and conceptual shifts. His opposition to the suspension clause was a statement of policy, but it was one that quickly rose from details to operating principles. While he hoped to reduce tensions between the United States and France, Gallatin did not propose to do so through an embrace of a sister republic but instead by the restriction of the ill-conceived and perhaps evil policies being pursued at home. Calling for a change in American conduct, however, involved recasting Saint Domingue, once considered by Republican commentators as the seat of a global egalitarian revolution, as something quite different. This effort involved disaggregating “French” and “negro” as an amalgam that encapsulated that revolution. Taken separately, each could now serve to distinguish positive features of the Republican agenda by contrast. Toward France, and toward the idea of universal liberty Republicans had once celebrated, Gallatin now cast a wary eye. “No man . . . wishes more than I do to see an abolition of slavery,” Gallatin stressed, “when it can be properly effected.” The process in Saint Domingue, however, had been too fast and too indiscriminate. The violence and anarchy that accompanied it had fragmented, rather than unified, the polity and was now leading toward a point where Saint Domingue was near to separating from France. Gallatin’s professed hostility to slavery distinguished between emancipation

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and independence. Freedom he could stomach, but “no man would be more unwilling than I to constitute a whole nation of freed slaves.”110 This left independent Saint Domingue as a “negro” place. The nation that Gallatin feared Federalists were creating in 1799 was dangerous because “that the interest will be wholly black is clear.” Gallatin’s formulation suggested that independent ex-slaves were dangerous because they were alien to human society more generally. These were the “wild tigers” that threatened the American South.111 This assertion had implications both for his conceptualization of slavery’s future in the United States and for his positioning of Saint Domingue within the wider Atlantic world. To critique the undue speed of French emancipation was to hold up American-style gradualism, but Gallatin was featuring the variegated fate of slavery across the United States—the partialness of emancipation rather than its pace. Since black freedom, improperly administered, was destructive, he posited the existence of some American locales in which slavery’s demise would be so gradual as to be imperceptible, or perhaps even impossible. The independent nation produced by the American Revolution would not have a universal solution to the problem of slavery; the freedom it produced would be for whites alone. Just as this conceptualization denied the possibility of black incorporation within American society, it also reified a universal black identity outside of, and in opposition to, that entity. Its very presence complicated and threatened the workings of other societies, and of the system as a whole, whose interests, by implication, were “white.” Paradoxically, Saint Domingue, conceived as a black place, was at once cordoned off from wider society and linked to enslaved people everywhere. In Gallatin’s mouth, race had trumped universal ideals about humankind and made Saint Domingue serve as a force that gathered together the community of masters endangered by its presence—a community of fear, threatened by the “black” interest in the West Indies. As part of an argument about policy, Gallatin’s stance encapsulated the idea that his Federalist opponents were disregarding national interests and, in acting for the good of a limited section of the American people, were endangering the whole. Gallatin’s critique, in effect, imposed the approach to the problem of slavery advocated by the slaveholding South onto the entire nation. Describing a “black interest” was an argument that both functioned politically within the burgeoning Republican opposition to the administration’s conduct and smoothed over divisions between Republicans from different portions of the nation over slavery. This was something that Jefferson himself under-

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stood well. Writing to James Madison as the suspension clause debates progressed, he matched the news with other nefarious Federalist operations—the creation of the Provisional Army, the increase of the navy, the Alien and Sedition acts, and what he saw as the disingenuous diplomacy toward France. Jefferson, however, was encouraged. These efforts were so overt that people everywhere, and especially in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, were able to see Adams’s true colors. Virginia should be heartened, he wrote, by “the favorable disposition of these middle states” and should work to ensure they would not slip back into “rally[ing] again round the measures which are ruining us.”112 As the so-called Toussaint’s clause advanced, Jefferson was no less sanguine. If Dominguan independence was unavoidable, “the treaty made with them by Maitland is . . . the best thing for us.” Saint Domingue would be a ready mart for American grain, but the Royal Navy would be responsible for preventing the “black” nation from becoming an “American Algiers.” To be sure, there was danger in having such a neighbor, but the benefit of marginalizing New England and adding to the “many heavy circumstances about to fall into the republican scale” was paramount.113 Properly understood, Saint Domingue could cement the alliance between the mid-Atlantic and the Chesapeake. It was also educative to wayward southerners. Federalists there supported the expansion of the armed forces, supposedly to defend against a French invasion, but the suspension clause opened the eyes of their constituents. The prospect of “admit[ting] Toussaint’s subjects to a free commerce . . . & free ingress & intercourse with their black brethren in these states” exposed the Federalists’ twofacedness, Jefferson explained to Aaron Burr in New York. “If they are guarded against the Cannibals of the terrible republic [i.e., France], they ought not to object to being eaten by a more civilized enemy.”114 To Madison, Jefferson described the prospect of “black crews, supercargoes & missionaries” in the South as a “leven” that would operate in “our Northern country.”115 Early in his term Jefferson would discount the actual possibility of “pirates from St. Domingo” harassing the southern United States.116 The danger was real, but the black nation also created opportunities. Jefferson’s victory bore witness to those opportunities. The Republican response to Saint Domingue sheared the slavery issue of its divisive potential within their ranks. Republicans’ political success in 1800 came on the back of a realpolitik motivation to move away from a singular and universal approach to the problem. At the same time, it empowered a vision of the republic that was fundamentally oriented toward agrarian political economy and cautious about

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commercial activity.117 This conceptualization placed an emphasis on the value of land and its products; it was rooted in the need for expansion across space. As such, this “empire of liberty” would accept, and perhaps even require, the continuing existence of chattel slavery in its midst. Both Louverture’s and Jefferson’s “second revolutions” set in motion events that would destroy Saint Domingue. Beyond the now familiar ravages from violence and war, in different ways Louverture’s bid for quasi-autonomy and Jefferson’s victory and ideological ascendance both served to efface the colony. Louverture’s constitution spurred Bonaparte’s invasion, justifying his predisposition against black citizenship and presaging France’s turn away from racial equality and emancipation as state policies. By 1803, Louverture had been captured and imprisoned in France, where he would die, asserting his loyalty to the republic with his final breaths. In the colony, Leclerc’s armies were stymied by the continuing resistance of the black insurgents, who by that time had been rejoined by many of Louverture’s officers. Increasingly bottled up in a few port cities, and withering in the face of waves of yellow fever, the French reacted with a program of brutal massacres—a policy that was redoubled after Leclerc’s death from the fever in November 1802 by his successor, Donatien Rochambeau. Both leaders attempted to force American merchants to accept lowered prices and promissory notes and, if refused, often confiscated their goods. These efforts failed, however. Unable to supply their forces, and after twentyone months and thousands of casualties, seven thousand of the nearly eighty thousand French troops that had been sent to Saint Domingue evacuated in November 1803. Shortly after this withdrawal, Louverture’s successor, JeanJacques Dessalines, declared the colony’s independence and renamed it “Haiti,” purportedly the original Taino Arawak term for the island. Saint Domingue was no more. “St. Domingo,” however, lived on as a presence in American imaginations and politics. Jefferson’s leadership, which played a definitive role in Bonaparte’s failure, also ensured that its symbolic power would endure. In presiding over the end of meaningful American contact with Saint Domingue/Haiti, Thomas Jefferson set the terms by which the revolutionary polity could be understood thereafter. Ironically, this result came from what seemed to be an inconsistent policy toward the French invasion. By deed and by word, the new president encouraged Louis André Pichon, the new French chargé d’affaires, in his mission to secure American support for Bonaparte’s plans in the colony.118 Edward Stevens was recalled and replaced by Tobias Lear, an agent with fewer Carib-

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bean connections who was less open to dealing with Louverture.119 Early in 1802 Secretary of State Madison instructed Lear (in code) that, with the French fleet on the way, it would “be better to leave the island altogether than to remain under circumstances which might hazard the confidence or good will of the French government.”120 Pichon reported that Jefferson had suggested in their meeting that, since two-thirds of the United States were “menaced” by blacks, American interests lay in seeing Louverture crushed. The president had surmised that Britain, too, “observing like us how St. Domingo is becoming another Algiers in the seas of Americas,” would act to “suppress this rebellion.”121 “Nothing would be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything,” Pichon quoted the president as saying, “and to reduce Toussaint to starvation.” This construction of events permeated and bolstered the French plans for the invasion. Talleyrand wrote the French minister in London that Leclerc’s efforts would eradicate a “dangerous neighbor to the European colonies in the Antilles.”122 Bonaparte’s instructions to Leclerc referenced “the common advantage . . . in destroying this rebellion of the blacks” and noted that “the Spanish, the English, and the Americans, view with equal anxiety the black republic.”123 Given this understanding, Pichon was justifiably confused when, in February 1802, he formally requested aid in support of Leclerc’s armies and was informed that the United States would follow a policy of neutrality. Concerned over the size of the French force and over Bonaparte’s ultimate intention to move from Saint Domingue to Louisiana, Jefferson, in a seeming flip-flop, allowed trade to continue with all parts of the colony and denied France any special loans, credit, or financial assistance. This dearth of aid, combined with the impact of the yellow fever and the valor of the black fighters, doomed the invasion to failure. As a bonus, since Louisiana was no longer useful to Bonaparte as a potential replacement for American provisions to the French West Indies, when an American delegation approached Talleyrand in an attempt to secure American trading rights along the Mississippi, he was authorized to sell them the entire territory. Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” was intimately connected to the successful preservation of freedom and the establishment of independence in the place that had once been called Saint Domingue.124 It is tempting to treat Jefferson’s diplomacy around Saint Domingue as an example of a triumph of canny statesmanship or of the nimble flexibility of his priorities. To be sure, Bonaparte’s ambition gave him pause. Furthermore, Saint Domingue’s place as a trading partner blunted his impulse to treat France as an ally, revealing the vital, if subordinate, role commerce played in his vision for the

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nation’s future.125 Taking note of the distance Republicans had traveled since the mid-1790s, however, tells us more about the motors behind the policy shift, in addition to making it seem less inconsistent. In confronting the potential of an independent Saint Domingue during the election, Republicans had severed the American revolutionary polity from the notions of the ideals of universal citizenship and rights that many had espoused in those heady days. Saint Domingue, which once might have served as a vision of the future, was now simply another place. That this place was “black” made it a counterpoise to Republican ideas about the United States. That it was antithetical, however, did not make its presence unbearable. Though it was threatening because of its capacity to corrupt other slave societies, if safely contained, it was simply an “other.” This was Minister Pichon’s mistake. Jefferson’s approach based American relations with France on national interests, not racial solidarity. Jeffersonian America’s whiteness was a domestic identity, it was not to serve as a motor to national policy, making the United States a part of a coalition of slaveholding nations. Looking to Saint Domingue, Madison had explained, the Americans were “taking things just as they are without pretending to judge them.”126 Several days later, Jefferson suggested that Louverture’s independence was a fait accompli.127 Significantly, he then proposed a tripartite agreement that would make Saint Domingue nominally independent but under the close monitoring of France, the United States, and Britain.128 Pichon misread or ignored these signals, reporting as fact what Jefferson had posited as a conditional: the United States would aid France in suppressing Saint Domingue if Saint Domingue provided a threat. Such a threat was possible, but not likely. “The course of things in the neighboring islands of the West Indies appears to have given a considerable impulse to the minds of the slaves,” Jefferson wrote to Rufus King in London, noting that “a great disposition to insurgency [had] manifested itself among them.”129 Writing to Virginia governor James Monroe, however, Jefferson noted the order and stability that Louverture’s government had provided. The blacks of Saint Domingue, he explained, “are established into a sovereignty de facto, & have organised themselves under regular laws & government.”130 In terms of politics, American neutrality was the best way to navigate this situation. With regard to political ideology, this squared with Jefferson’s ideas of “nations.” Saint Domingue was not to be a political entity or a recognized state, but it was to be understood as occupying a distinct—and separate—place in the region.131

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Jefferson’s correspondence with Monroe was part of a larger discussion between the two on the subject of black removal in the wake of Gabriel’s revolt. Jefferson partook of the general fear that the plot had produced among slaveholders, but to the Virginian governor he was sanguine about the ongoing threat. The relative strength of the American South made it unlikely that raiders from Saint Domingue “might . . . conduct vindicative [sic] or predatory descents on our coasts, and facilitate concert with their brethren remaining here.” This downplaying of the immediate threat, however, was rooted in the understanding of Saint Domingue as embodying a “black interest” that, echoing Gallatin’s characterization, was distinct and mutually exclusive from that of the (white) United States. The Gabriel episode highlighted this distinction, prompting Jefferson to propose that the jailed rebels might be deported there. Looking at Louverture, he suggested that “their present ruler might be willing . . . to receive [the portion of the slave population] which would be exiled for acts deemed criminal by us, but meritorious, perhaps, by him.”132 Deviance in white society was praiseworthy behavior in one peopled by blacks. Rather than a triumph of political manipulation and statesmanship, Jefferson’s actions regarding Saint Domingue and Louisiana in 1802 must be seen as a reiteration of his long-held conception of the impossibility of racial mixture, the likelihood of insurrection, and the danger of black freedom. If the president was a realist in his relations with the black quasi-nation, that nation still represented a world turned upside down—and an entity that could provide a threat if American policy did not treat it in the proper way. Posed in these terms, white Americans were more unified and less divided than they knew. Measured by its effects, Jefferson’s policy toward Saint Domingue mirrored that of Adams: the island was to be treated as an independent entity that, because of its dangerous nature, needed to be kept separate from the rest of the hemisphere. Where Federalists had posed the danger in terms of French ideals, Republicans described a black menace. As the French threat receded, however, all parties could describe this place as black, and alien. This difference did not prevent a degree of contact. Madison and Jefferson worked to continue trade between the United States and Saint Domingue, both as a way to nod toward those Republicans in their emergent coalition who were engaged in commerce and because they understood commerce as playing a role in the proper development of the republic’s political economy.133 Here, however, Republicans did conceive of their approach as different than that of their predecessors in important ways. As victors in a dire election battle

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and as stewards of a truly unified American state, they saw their victory as a narrow defeat of those who had sought to allow the interests of a particular faction to guide policy in ways that endangered the wider whole. Once they were in power, this understanding guided their approach to trade with Saint Domingue. At issue was the nature of the entity Saint Domingue had become. Already defined racially, the policy debates played out around the implications of that definition. Saint Domingue was a black place, but could—or should—a black place be treated as a nation? Between 1803 and 1806 Jefferson and his allies in Congress would seek to answer that question, prompted by both events in the Caribbean and commercial interests at home. Their debates show a shifting set of priorities behind the Republican position, a shift that ultimately determined the administration’s decision to treat Haiti as a pariah and to cut it off from contact with America. In the process of flattening out political differences over this trajectory among their own party, Republicans explained this treatment by articulating a particular version of the American identity. In crafting their answer to the question of Haiti’s nationhood, Republicans wove “Hayti” into a wider depiction of the character and meaning of the United States. Like a photo negative, the picture that emerged served to emphasize what was different, and therefore what was accepted as normal, at home.

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Naming Hayti: The End of the Revolution in Philadelphia

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hough he set out for “St. Domingo,” Jacob Ritter returned from Haiti. And though the young clerk had been anxious as he left Philadelphia, his homecoming was a triumph. Toward the end of 1803, Ritter was made supercargo of the schooner Fly and was directed by his employer to voyage to the West Indies. As the vessel made its way down the Delaware River, he was dismayed to read in a newspaper he found onboard that they were bound specifically for “St. Domingo,” an “Island,” the paper went on, that “was revolutioned by the blacks.” Ritter’s arrival off Saint Domingue coincided with an end point of sorts to the Haitian Revolution. By December 1803 Donatien Rochambeau’s troops were hemmed in at Cap Français by forces led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines; their surrender was imminent. Drawing near, the Fly’s captain Jeremiah Norris cautiously skirted this remaining “French part” of the terrain, instead pointing the vessel toward the southern port of Jacmel. Jacob Ritter did not have a name for this non-French place, which, like “all the rest of the Island was claimed by the blacks,” but he set up shop there. Over the next several weeks he enjoyed “a glorious time” for trade.1 There were, of course, challenges. Ritter had to weather the demands of Maglan, an ex-slave who was the local commander, and work around the venalities of Villain, a “mustee” customs official (who “proved to be what his name was,” Ritter remembered). Jacmel was not a peaceful place, but the young supercargo successfully navigated its “revolutioned” landscape. He witnessed two white residents being shot on a hill at one point. At another moment he chased off a “negro” who crept into his rooms and later mollified a group of black soldiers who had threatened him with their bayonets after he had “dared to frown”

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at them. These scares, however, were more than outweighed by Jacmel’s opportunities. Among the few whites in town was Thomas Thuat, a Frenchman who had spent time in New Jersey. Thuat arranged the sale of Ritter’s cargo on fantastic terms. In exchange for the Fly’s goods, Maglan had coffee brought in from the countryside in amounts so great that Norris and his crew had to store much of it in bulk in the schooner’s hold and cabin. “Ritter,” the captain laughed as he watched the coffee pour in, “it is up to our necks, brim and full.” Jacob Ritter returned to Philadelphia with dramatic tales but also with handsome profits.2 Tales from “St. Domingo” endured in Philadelphia, though the passage of time tended to simplify and shallow them. Writing over fifty years later, Jacob Ritter’s son Abraham told his father’s story. Looking to explain Philadelphia’s rise to greatness, he evoked the city of his youth, crafting a literary walking tour of the old port at the turn of the century that began with Jacob’s intrepid voyage. For Abraham, the return of the Fly, so full of coffee that “the water washed her gunwales,” was a testament to Philadelphia’s mercantile grit. That case, however, was predicated on tales of blood that his father had not told. Abraham Ritter’s “St. Domingo” was a place of horror, one “embargoed by the savage hatred of the blacks against the whites” after the insurrection of “1792–3.” By Abraham’s reckoning, this was a singular moment of rupture, one that tore Saint Domingue out of all recognized communities, creating a “gauntlet” that daring men such as his father would test and cross. Abraham’s Thomas Thuat was a “marred and mutilated” captive whose fingers, toes, and nose had been removed “to prevent his escape and secure his services.” This lonely figure was the “decrepit survivor of his race,” spared only to be a conduit to the outside world.3 While he had certainly experienced some tense moments, this was not Jacob Ritter’s Jacmel. To be sure, when the Fly entered its harbor a grizzled American captain had warned him that “they care for nothing but for killing on shore,” but this proved only to be a ploy to try to scare the young supercargo off. Jacob’s Jacmel was strange, a place that combined “antique grandeur” with empty houses, “save those, of a few straggling . . . Sambo coloured people,” but it was exotic, not macabre. During his stay he attended “a negro dance” and befriended a “mulatoe” family. If a gauntlet existed that he could not safely cross, it lay outside Jacmel, in the hills of the countryside where the coffee was grown, and was a line traversed with the help of General Maglan and Thuat. The French merchant, furthermore, was not the only white in town; rather than a prisoner he was a vital intermediary. On New Year’s afternoon 1804 the Americans in the

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harbor invited him to the feast they put on for Maglan. In addition to feting the general, this was also a moment for them to celebrate the first day of Haitian independence. “Patriotic songs were sung,” Ritter remembered later, “and the American and the haytian flag waved with great hilarity.”4 The racial violence that defined Abraham Ritter’s “St. Domingo” was part of his father’s story, but as Jacob’s own reminiscences attest, it was only part. By 1860, Haiti and its Revolution had been shorn of its earlier nuance in American political discourse and was defined by its violence alone. In 1803, newspapers like the ones that Jacob Ritter read on the Fly purveyed rich and complex information from Saint Domingue. As the French invasion collapsed, Ritter was not alone in voyaging there; the Fly joined around a dozen American vessels in Jacmel harbor. More than two hundred traveled from Philadelphia to the island as a whole between 1802 and 1805.5 The information ferried by these voyages contained the seeds of Abraham Ritter’s racialized vision but also much else. Reports that Saint Domingue stood on the cusp of independence, like other news over the previous fourteen years, made up the center of an American story involving France and revolution, equality and human rights, slavery and freedom. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a key figure in that story, was known immediately, if imperfectly, for his success over Rochambeau, and then as the face of the Haitian state and the force behind the repression of white and colored dissidents. Americans of the day encountered him as a national leader, a commercial partner, a military defender, and a revolutionary.6 They were well familiar with his ideas of the ongoing and vibrant presence Haiti was to have on the world stage. By the time Dessalines stood on that stage, however, the discourse around Haiti’s emergence in Philadelphia had been flattened. As Americans argued over policy toward the new nation, the power of black violence in Jeffersonian politics narrowed the interpretive scope of their ideas about what some were calling a Haitian Revolution. Haiti endured, of course, and continued to embody the paradoxical and contradictory implications of a historical period in which human freedom and chattel slavery were both essential to what was novel and modern in human experience.7 What ended at this point was the vibrancy and fluidity of American interpretations of that embodiment. The result was a “St. Domingo” that Abraham Ritter would recognize but that his father would not. In the years after Jacob’s return to Philadelphia, the nation he had visited ceased to be a place through which Americans could access and interpret complex issues. This development had a definitive impact on Haiti’s presence in

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America. Between 1805 and 1807, when Jefferson’s embargo would close off commercial contact with the new nation, Haitian voices—and voices describing Haitian news in general—were increasingly silenced. In their place, “St. Domingo” (sometimes “Hayti”) endured as a simple, if sharp-edged, figure.8

Fashioning a Brigand State This narrowed view was not inevitable or inescapable. The travels of men such as Jeremiah Norris and Jacob Ritter ensured that American readers would confront a portrait of Haiti that made the new nation a just and legitimate, if formidable and severe, product of the times. Ultimately, however, it was the voyage of another Philadelphia vessel, the ship Pilgrim, and the experience of its first mate, Robert Tate, that shaped the terms by which Haiti was discussed and developed. Like the Fly, the Pilgrim left the new nation with coffee. Its hold also contained a group of clandestine passengers, however, a cargo that sparked a conflict that left Tate dead, hanged alongside a number of white French colonists on the public scales on Le Cap’s wharves late in 1804. Tate’s story would tap into existing questions about Haiti’s emergence; in the end his death would be made to supply answers about “Hayti,” ones that endured because they functioned so well in American political debates. Before the emergence of this “Hayti,” Americans had become well acquainted with the Haiti presided over by Jean-Jacques Dessalines. They witnessed its declaration of independence as they—at least the Republicans among them—celebrated their own. They parsed its new constitution and read through its laws and regulations. These public proclamations and words articulated a picture of a Haitian state whose independence held deep meaning. Dessalines’s Haiti asserted more than simply its membership in a revolutionary era; by his terms, the Haitian polity could even claim primacy as an expression of that age’s ideals.9 This stance began with efforts to signify the essential character of the state being created. To distinguish his coalition of ex-slave and colored forces, Dessalines identified his army as “indigenous,” a label that served to connect them to the original Amerindian inhabitants of the island and to define their struggle as retribution for the violence of colonization. That connection may have been behind the choice of the name “Haiti” for the nation, a word that seemingly translates as “rugged mountains” in the Taino Arawak language.10 As useful as these choices were in forging internal unity and purpose, like Louverture’s pro-

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nouncements, they also were meant to operate abroad. American readers had “indigenous” rendered to them as “NATIVE,” a designation that defined the inhabitants by their place of birth and in opposition to colonial invaders.11 They learned that Dessalines had “substituted for St. Domingo, HAYTI, the name which the island originally bore,” therefore, as part of a more general hemispheric context.12 “Hayti” was a term of legitimacy—an important identityclaiming act that made the nation’s independence part of an established revolutionary history. Americans in Philadelphia would read the name hundreds of times after its introduction in the public prints, accepting, if not embracing, it as a referent to the forces fighting against the French. Dessalines’s words defined the nation’s purpose in lofty terms and by its commitment to universal liberty. “Restored to our primitive dignity,” the proclamation of independence Americans read averred, “we have claimed our rights.” Those rights derived from the essential equality of mankind, a quality that had been established by the “supreme being . . . who has distributed so many species of creatures on the surface of the earth for the purpose of manifesting his glory and his power by the diversity of his work.” Their new society was rooted in this moral standard. Sacrifices for Haitian freedom, Dessalines told assembled citizens, were made “to revive the last sigh of Liberty.” The “God of freemen” had permitted them to hold out against those who rejected and sought to reverse the principles of liberty and equality that their independence embodied. To establish and preserve it, Dessalines and his generals fractured the third element of the French Revolutionary triad, fraternity. “Toward those men who do us justice,” they explained, “we will act as brothers.” Those who did not were “forgetting the object for which they have not ceased fighting since 1789.”13 Thus Haitians proclaimed a polity that was at once French and antiFrench—or, more accurately, was the seat of the “true” principles that France had once embraced. Its proclamations referred to its members as “citizens,” marked independence as the start of revolutionary time, and spoke in terms of the majesty of “the people.” Those people were emphatically not slaves, or enslaveable; those who rejected the fact were their enemies, the forces of Bonaparte. “What have we in common with these murderous people,” Dessalines thundered, perhaps reminding some American readers of Paine’s formulation in Common Sense, “their cruelty compared with our patient moderation; their colour contrasted with ours; the extent of sea which separates us; our vengeful climate; all tell us sufficiently that they are not our brothers; that they never will become such.” They were “barbarians who have stained [the land] with blood

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for two centuries.” They were “vultures” or “tygers” whose presence “pollute[d] the land of liberty” established in Haiti. The bestial qualities of the French forces contrasted with the humanity of the Haitian citizenry, their corruption a foil to Haitian purity. “Never had a nation more right to withdraw themselves,” a Haitian writer trumpeted. The French, having “proclaimed liberty,” then “sought to enslave us, by deviating from the sacred principles [they had] adopted.” The second article of the Haitian Constitution of 1805 stated simply “slavery is forever abolished.” It also prevented any white man from having the title of “master or proprietor.” All Haitian proclamations began with the slogan “LIBERTY OR DEATH.”14 In featuring human freedom as the center of the national purpose, Haiti’s public presence joined liberty and equality in ways not articulated since the days of Sonthonax and Genet, though its excision of the white French replaced raceless republicanism with a “colored” racial identity. Early after independence was declared, Dessalines composed an address to Dominguans of color living in the United States, offering to pay their passage so that they could return. “You . . . men of color, and negroes,” a Haitian writer later enjoined, “return again to liberty, [to] independence, to your country.” “Blacks and yellows, whom the refined duplicity of Europeans has for a long time endeavored to divide,” Dessalines pronounced, “are now consolidated, and make but one family.”15 That family, the constitution ruled, would not be divided by any “exception of colour among . . . [its] children.” Therefore, all “Haytians shall henceforward be known only by the generic appellation of blacks.”16 Dessalines posed this revolutionary polity in terms that made it stern and righteous but also rational and orderly. Amid tales of violence against the faithless French came others that suggested random cruelty was being quashed. While foreign observers often described “massacres,” public Haitian documents described purposeful actions taken against enemies. Two traders were executed, “conformably to the laws,” because they were found to be spies and, as Italians, subjects of Bonaparte. Such laws, and others, were printed in Philadelphia, as were a host of decrees announcing new regulations governing trading practices and prices. As long as Americans hewed to these rules, they would be safe in this new nation and would be treated, as Dessalines assured an American supercargo in a public letter, in an “honorable and loyal manner.”17 Words like these presented readers in Philadelphia with a Haitian government that acted in reasonable and recognizable ways; tacitly, they asserted Haiti’s sovereignty by demonstrating its national interests. In reading of Dessalines’s (ultimately un-

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successful) attempts to negotiate a trading treaty with the British, Philadelphians learned of his aim to establish “universal commerce” based on the principle that “the island was open to the commerce of the whole world, France excepted.” Taken together, these documents described and enacted a Haitian state linked to the world around it by trade and rooted in a revolutionary commitment to human equality and antislavery.18 These precepts, however, were not to be a threat. Unlike France, “that idol like Saturn,” who “devoured its children,” the governor-general imagined his nation—black, independent, and committed to freedom—as part of the wider fellowship of nations. “Let us . . . not to suffer the spirit of proselytism to destroy our work,” he cautioned. “Let us not disturb the peace of our neighbours [and become] a revolutionary firebrand, setting ourselves up for legislators of all the West Indies.” Though he wondered if “a spark from the same fire which enflames us” would prompt changes elsewhere, that spark emanated from the principles, not the machinations, of the Haitian state. Haiti may well have “avenged America,” as Dessalines famously proclaimed, but its political activity stopped at its shores. When Dessalines was “nominated” as emperor because of his proven capacity to “consolidate the edifice of our independence and liberty,” he took on the mantle in order to further the state’s foundational “enterprize,” which was to “impress upon the nations least friendly to liberty, not the opinion that we are a herd of revolted slaves, but that we are men . . . who . . . are the authors of their own liberty.”19 Other men would have to be their own authors. Americans in Philadelphia witnessed this vision of Haiti and, conditioned by the range of their previous responses, the broad outlines of their reactions were familiar. As always, American eyes were attracted to the disruption being produced on Haiti’s shores. Predictably, the “French” character of Haitian developments was key to judging them. The radical possibilities suggested by Haitian independence, however, brought a new focus on the question of the meaning of the violence that accompanied it. British and Federalist voices found principle behind the “massacres” that took place in the spring of 1804. Identifying the victims as “French,” they compared “black” violence to the well-known reports of Rochambeau’s depravity. These were acts of war, or at least were reasonable responses. “The blacks shew no resentment against any whites, excepting the French soldiery,” one “gentleman of information” explained, “and them they will destroy with the rage of infuriated men.” White French violence gave rise to that of black Haitians. “They have suffered so many cruelties from the two-legged and four-footed Blood-

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hounds,” he continued, “that they give them no quarter or mercy when they fall into their hands.”20 This stance produced a relativism in which Haitian violence could be seen as productive. Vanquishing the French made the region safer, one commentator explained. “At all events [ Jamaica] is most fortunate in getting rid of its French neighbors,” he wrote. Between France and Haiti, the former “certainly [was] the most unprincipled of the two.”21 A Federalist with an eye on domestic politics took the idea further. Haitian independence was meaningless without the removal of the French presence, he suggested, just as the continuing influence of France over American “Jacobins” proved that the United States was not truly independent. “To read, that we owe our liberty to the detested monsters [i.e., the French] who have destroyed that of every other free republick in the world” was beyond the pale, he howled. “Surely General Dessalines, if his soul is not blacker than his skin, would tremble with indignation if he read it of his island of St. Domingo.” “If with feelings so base,” he concluded, “we call ourselves a nation, there is no more hope that St. Domingo will preserve its independence than we shall ever retrieve ours.”22 By this telling, Haitian violence shattered the edifice of Republican politics, revealing the sordid reality beneath. It even legitimated like efforts at home. William Duane’s initial reactions to an independent Haiti were more muted, but he, too, found reason and meaning there. Duane also featured France in explaining the event. Tacitly recognizing the logic of Dessalines’s declaration, he blamed Bonaparte’s attempt to reimpose slavery for provoking the movement toward independence, something he considered inherent to the rights of the people of the colony but which he viewed with a dismal eye. Independence should have come later, he suggested, when Haitians were better prepared. He noted that they had copied all of the unappealing elements of Bonaparte’s regime—its militarism, authoritarianism, and hereditary power— in crafting their own. Duane’s regret was that the revolutionary moment had not advanced far enough, “that all people . . . have not arrived at such a state of civilization as to know their actual rights and to determine to maintain them.” This line of thought prompted quiet reflection on slavery at home as well. An independent Haiti would be an accelerant to the “natural jealousy of power” felt by slaves in the United States. Duane’s treatment suggested American slavery was unfortunate but that it was better left “within the controul of those who associate for mutual happiness”—those good masters and wise statesmen who understood how to safely deal with the problems it produced. For Duane, Haitian violence, while legitimate, served to legitimate an acceptance of American

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slavery as it was. It also raised a call for “a delicate and circumspect line of conduct” with regard to the new nation, “for reasons too obvious to need elucidation.”23 These sorts of responses fit snugly into the patterns of partisan discourse that had been developing over the previous decade, but ultimately they were fleeting. The public discussion of Haitian developments after 1803 followed a familiar dynamic of reaction and use on the part of white American commentators in which domestic politics framed, and often blunted, their implications. At the same time, a steady crescendo of images of Haitian violence competed with Dessalines’s picture of orderly vengeance and eventually provided traction for cruder, more simplistic ideas about Haiti. These images portrayed a violence that was without principle; it was chaotic, even demonic. One Captain Hodge described a horrific landscape in which white Dominguans were “expecting every moment a general massacre, as it was known that Christophe had received orders from gov. Dessalines to that purpose.” By this conception official Haitian proclamations were “mere flummery,” contradicted by the stories of white French people being executed or dying of exhaustion from forced labor. Such tales described a place in which American property was brazenly stolen and in which armed blacks violated white honor at will.24 An arrival after Hodge told that “the hellish work” of massacre had taken place and described bloody scenes of slaughter and mass graves. Corruption, not retribution, fueled this mayhem. Black soldiers extorted “gold, jewels and plate” from their victims in exchange for clemency, and then cut them down anyway. Commentators termed the violence “wanton” and “indiscriminate,” even as they held up ways in which it purposefully created the antithesis of plantation society, one in which whites were slaves and blacks were masters, whites were powerless and blacks in authority.25 Dessalines’s assertion that these actions were warranted—that he had “avenged America”—was printed in full the same day as this latter report. The day previous, “An Injured Man of Color” offered Americans a less fervent, if equally radical, interpretation. “It is evident that the Haytians have nothing in view, but to be acknowledged and treated as men,” he wrote, “let me ask those masters of vessels, who are real Americans, whose bosoms are still warm with the genuine principles of liberty . . . if your cause was just and honorable, was not theirs the same?” Pointing in particular at Captain Hodge, the “Man of Color” pushed back at the idea that blackness was an explanation for the violence at hand. Instead, it was France’s reneging on its promise of freedom, not to

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mention its barbarous fighting tactics, that had created the situation. “As dark as is the complection of those unhappy mortals, they are susceptible of benevolent feelings,” he argued, “As servile as has been their condition, they have natural affections, social and domestic attachments, keenness of sensibility, and strength and vigor of mind, which, if oppression had not been the fatal bar to their improvement, would have registered their names among the enlightened of the world.”26 Articulating a conception of humankind that would have been familiar to Pennsylvania abolitionists and a view of the revolutionary era recognizable to Abraham Bishop, Citizen Giroud, and, in certain moments, Benjamin Franklin Bache, this writer accepted Haiti, and its violent beginning, as an expression of universal principles. Different principles, however, would dictate the terms by which Haiti was discussed and developed at this stage of its birth. Robert Tate’s death, reported in Philadelphia beginning in late 1804, raised questions about the nation extolled by Dessalines and explicated by the “Injured Man of Color.” The answers substantiated images like those of Captain Hodge. Tate’s vessel, Philadelphians learned, had arrived at Le Cap in mid-July 1804. Like Jacob Ritter in Jacmel, he and the ship’s captain, William Gibson, had confronted a new and changing environment there. They learned the regime’s new names (Cap Haïtien for their port of destination, Port-au-Prince for the former Port Republicain). They witnessed its shifts away from the French calendar. They were subject to its new regulations, made, as Dessalines wrote to one of their number who had complained, “for the interests of my country.”27 They also intuitively understood the link between those national interests and the pledge of “LIBERTY OR DEATH.” Dessalines counted on American vessels like the Pilgrim to provide his armies with weapons and munitions for his excursions against the remaining French forces on the island, those under General Marie-Louis Ferrand in Santo Domingo. He also anticipated new offensives sent by Bonaparte from Europe. American trade was vital to his preparations, especially after negotiations with the British in Jamaica broke down.28 Because Tate ran afoul of the Haitian state, his tale offered opportunities to characterize this new order. The Pilgrim had been at the mouth of Cap Haïtien harbor on October 12, 1804, part of a convoy assembling for the homeward voyage, when Haitian officials had ordered the vessel to return to the public wharf. Armed guards then tore through the ship, uncovering the passengers cowering within. While Gibson was ashore facing the port commandant, more soldiers arrived, who whisked Tate and the passengers to the public scales and

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hanged them. Vessels from the convoy departed the next day, bringing the news to Philadelphia in early November. Gibson himself arrived in the middle of the month and supplied a firsthand account.29 Eyewitnesses notwithstanding, the circumstances around Robert Tate’s death remained unclear. Reports differed over the number of secret passengers and were vague about who they were and their motives for seeking to escape. Several were described as white and others were identified as “mulatto.” Their crime, it seemed, was that they were seeking to embark without permission. One Cape merchant wrote that Christophe, the commander-in-chief of the city, had been aware of their intent, had denied them their passports, and had watched the situation develop “with much regret,” hoping that the runaways would “repent their temerity” and return. Once caught, only two were summarily executed. As “Frenchmen,” they were hanged without trial.30 But why did Robert Tate meet the same fate? As the details of Tate’s death were fleshed out, new interpretive possibilities emerged by which to characterize the environment, and polity, in which it had occurred. In one manner or another, the first mate had transgressed Haitian law. Some accounts suggested that he was killed because he had resisted the guards’ right to search the Pilgrim or because, with Gibson away, he was the ship’s commanding officer. Before dying, Tate himself asserted that he was merely “executing [his] orders” in protecting the passengers. But perhaps this was precisely the point: perhaps the line Tate had crossed had less to do with the rules and proclamations of the Haitian state than with the foundations of Haitian identity. Extirpating the French presence was certainly part of the Haitian project; Tate understood as much and even tried to use the fact to save himself. As he was led to the scales he frantically called to his “amazed countrymen,” asking that they “assert his innocence”—that they confirm his American-ness—so that he would not be executed “like a dog” merely because of his white skin. Gibson later blamed the episode on Christophe, who had refused to grant Tate a trial, insisting that he was a “Frenchman.” Accidentally or otherwise, however, Tate had died because his whiteness made him vulnerable.31 Further details suggested that something more purposeful, if radical, had taken place on the public scale at Cap Haïtien. As Tate dangled before the crowd, an American sailor stepped forward to intervene but was chased away at bayonet point. If the soldiers on the wharf were killing whites, they were also killing white Americans and might have killed more had the sailors tried to rescue their compatriot. While Gibson, under a different guard before the com-

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mandant, was threatened with death and was nearly shot, in the end he was merely jailed. After he was released, Gibson brought news to Philadelphia of recently issued proclamations governing the way American cargoes could be sold and forbidding their taking passengers without permission. The penalty was seizure of property and imprisonment, however, not death. Haitian law, it would seem, had caught up to and checked some of the actions of its citizenry. After a few tense days in which commerce stopped and American vessels prepared to be attacked, Cape officials sent a note to the merchants, “asking them if they were willing to continue in the Cape and go on as usual.”32 They accepted the offer and business began again. The spirit of Moïse had been turned back, corralled, and quashed by the successor of Louverture. Yet the Haitian state’s position as a moderating factor seemed far from certain. The reports about Tate also included news of a capture by “the Haytians of a Spanish vessel carrying silks and muslins.” The vessel’s crew was killed and within days Dessalines and his “principal officers appeared in new suits of silk.” A member of the Pilgrim’s fleet was taken en route to Baltimore by an “Indegene privateer” and its crew met the same fate. “It is deeply to be lamented,” wrote a merchant at the Cape, “that an act so humane” as Gibson’s attempt to save his passengers “should so ill accord with the laws of the country.”33 Haiti might well be a place where whiteness was alien and illegal. If “humane” acts were contrary to law, perhaps the polity itself was inhumane. Over the following months these questions were resolved. The meaning of Tate’s hanging was determined over the course of a particular argument about commercial policy toward Haiti. Gibson’s Pilgrim was an armed ship, one of many fitted out by American merchants doing business there after 1804.34 Ostensibly, these measures were taken because of the general insecurity of the area, but in reality they were vestiges of the Quasi-War—defenses taken against French privateers who sought to prevent American goods from entering Haitian markets. This was especially the case after Ferrand, having repulsed Dessalines’s forces around the City of Santo Domingo, proclaimed himself the sole French representative in the colony of Saint Domingue and declared trade with the “rebel” ports illegal.35 Jefferson’s drastic reduction of American naval power, and then the deployment of most of what remained to deal with the burgeoning crisis around the Barbary States in North Africa, intensified the situation.36 For those involved in maritime trade, mostly Federalists and port city residents, arming merchant ships was more than a logical practice; it was steeped in principle. Free trade had long been considered an American right, whether ex-

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pressed in Washington’s statement on neutrality or in Adams’s justification for trading with Louverture. Haitian independence, now a declared fact, merely simplified the position that, as a sovereign nation, the United States was free to trade with whomever it pleased. The Republican administration, meanwhile, for reasons both practical and principled, sought to limit American commerce with Haiti. Doing so might mollify the French into supporting Jefferson’s efforts to acquire West Florida; it would certainly ease the transition to American rule in Louisiana. On a different plane, while the administration joined the Federalists in seeing Haitian commerce as an issue involving American sovereignty, it came to a precisely opposite conclusion. Victorious in 1800, Republicans saw themselves as stewards of a unified American state. This national purview assumed a collective sense of the national purpose, one that aggregated multiple viewpoints and interests and acted for the greater good of the whole. As such, the Republican goal was once again stated in terms of foiling the attempts of un-American Federalists to “force” American goods into areas that compromised the nation’s well-being. In his message to Congress on November 8, 1804, Jefferson called for legislation that would make arming merchant vessels illegal. That “individuals should undertake to wage private war, independently of the authority of their country,” he argued, “cannot be permitted in a well ordered society.”37 Commercially minded Republicans squirmed under this directive, exposing fissures within Republican ranks over the national interest as the president had articulated it. The bill produced in response to the president’s call required captains to forfeit an expensive bond if their vessel committed any violence in nations with which the United States was at peace. This measure was designed to prevent conflict, not trade. The so-called clearance bill, penned by a committee led by Boston Republican William Eustis, stood the president’s assumptions on their head. Jefferson had treated American trade, which included that in arms, as a form of violence itself. Commercial Republicans looked to prevent violence done by Americans but did not consider trade itself as a form of conflict. Selfdefense, in fact, they argued, prevented violence. Congressmen such as Jacob Crowninshield of Massachusetts, who had spent his life at sea, and William McCreery, who represented Baltimore merchants, defined a different national interest, one damaged by the loss of an important and valuable source of commerce.38 As the debate drew to a close, this division allowed Federalists and commercial Republicans to successfully shape the clearance bill. While the amended version of the bill weakened and constrained merchants’ range of ac-

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tions, the desire of some Republicans to cut off contact with Haiti altogether was thwarted.39 Robert Tate’s ghost flitted through the public discussion over the clearance bill, both during its passage and afterward. More than a figure of pathos, this presence fashioned the terms by which Haiti would be understood, terms that tended to refract the multiple possibilities in Haitian independence into a single beam of meaning. The recurrent return to his death reinforced the tendency to focus on the tumult and violence that took place there. Tate’s specter highlighted an ongoing concern over its nature and evoked questions about its implications for Haiti’s neighbors. As a figure of interest, however, Tate provoked a certain set of answers to these issues. In crafting their response, Republican operatives forged an understanding of Haiti that served to unify the divisions revealed by the clearance bill debate. In the process, they settled on a portrait of Haiti that constrained interpretive possibilities. Instead of Haiti, or “Hayti,” most Americans were left with “St. Domingo,” a name increasingly associated with barbarism, disorder, and death. The expansive meanings intended by men such as Dessalines had been stifled.40 For Republicans, violence of the sort that claimed the mate of the Pilgrim signaled the troublesome nature of American trade with Haiti. If this commerce was lawful, no arms should have been required to conduct it. Unless Ferrand’s French vessels were to be considered “pirates,” acting beyond the law of nations, no violence should have taken place. That it did meant that the piracy lay elsewhere. Representative John W. Eppes, Jefferson’s son-in-law and staunch supporter, pointed at the armed American merchantmen, whom he labeled “highwaymen” and “armed banditti” for illicitly following their self-interest over that of the greater good. Such men placed “their own emolument at a higher rate than the peace and honor of the nation,” the Aurora seconded. This approach posed the question in moral terms: mercantile activities were not neutral but instead were connected to the health and standing of the nation as a whole. Men “whose God is not gain, and whose bible is not his ledger” would understand as much. Even Republicans who admitted the right to trade pointed out that supporting the state that had presided over the massacres was “against the honor and interests of the American nation.”41 Moving from calls to preserve honor to regulations that protected interests necessitated a more fine-toothed explanation of the stakes involved. To explain that the trade itself was a form of violence, those seeking a harder hand contended that American goods sustained those responsible for the killings. This

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gambit was intended to draw stark distinctions. During the clearance bill debate, Eppes argued that American merchants were aiding “a class of people it is in the interest of the United States to depress and keep down, rather than put arms in their hands, to do such extensive mischief as is every day practiced in that island.”42 Trade with Haiti was illegitimate by definition and dangerous by nature because it partnered the United States with a body of people who were illegitimate and dangerous themselves. “The question then,” Duane wrote, was “are the revolters in St. Domingo, that ferocious banditti by whom the unfortunate TATE was executed for only participating in an act of humanity,—are these people . . . to be considered . . . as an independent nation?”43 With increasing specificity, Duane and other Republicans argued that they were not. To do so, the key was the designation “banditti,” or often “brigand,” an epithet that had long marked the border between acceptable and unacceptable violence in Saint Domingue. As a brigand state Haiti was marked as beyond the pale, as were the merchants doing business there. Making this point clarified the United States’ relative position in the world by calcifying Haiti’s position outside of it. “Brigands” were not citizens; “banditti” could not form a legitimate polity. Republican arguments tended to contest Haiti’s nationhood by divesting it of any principled meaning. Against Dessalines’s definition of a nation populated by men who were “the authors of their own liberty,” Duane and others depicted a pirate state manned by rebels. To Federalist assertions that French policy, first emancipating slaves in 1794 and then seeking to reimpose slavery in 1802, justified resistance, they held up Tate’s corpse—and those of the other whites “massacred” by Dessalines—as proof that lawlessness and license, not liberty, were the bases of Haitian society. Federalist calls for emancipation to be “understood to be an abandonment of the colony to the blacks,” the Aurora barked in response to a piece in the Boston Centinel, were precisely wrong. Emancipation had been a French policy; freedom granted by authority was different than that seized by insurgents. To argue otherwise was to argue that slavery itself was wrong—and could be taken by force—everywhere. Such logic vindicated Tate’s execution: “Well done thou faithful Centinel—of iniquity,” the Aurora finished.44 Though targeting Federalist iniquity, the Republican position lingered on Haiti. Hoping to hold up the bedfellows created through American commerce as strange, it partnered the amoral avarice of the one with the immoral actions of the other. Printing a toast purportedly given at a dinner aboard a well-known armed ship to “The government of Hayti, founded on the only legitimate basis

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of all authority—the people’s choice!” Duane scoffed at the pretensions of both the merchants and their trading partners, ironically noting the toast’s final wish that Haitian independence “be as durable as its principles are pure.”45 As Republicans increasingly posed them, those principles were dangerous. To league behind them was to accept the legitimacy of rebellious slaves everywhere. “Had congress decided upon admitting the right of forcing a trade to every island in which the negroes should be successful in insurrection . . . and . . . that insurrection placed them on a level of independence with every European nation,” the Aurora spelled out, the United States would be in opposition with “every other European nation having West India settlements.”46 This was an issue “with which we have no more right to interfere, than France has to declare the blacks in our southern states free, sovereign, and independent.”47 As discussion of the clearance bill continued during 1805, this became the crux of the Republican position and the element that would bear the most weight. Would Americans allow it if the French, or another power, armed their slaves? Responding to a memorial from Philadelphia merchants asking for naval protection of their trade after the clearance bill had been passed, Duane provided a graphic portrait of a massive American slave insurrection stretching from New York to South Carolina. “Suppose they should all rise in arms,” he mused, “and seize upon the white males of every age, and all the females above a certain age—and bring them to some plain contiguous to some capital town—and under the command of some Dessalines or Christophe there plant cannon in front of those whites.” The nation that supplied “the gunpowder and the grape” that fueled the massacre “merited the execration of mankind.”48 Against Dessalines’s portrait of a nation founded in human freedom, Republicans cast an image of a “brigand government” of “land pirates” whose violence was anarchic rebellion, not a revolutionary expression.49 This picture placed the United States into a wider community of slaveholding nations. By equating Haitian violence with black freedom struggles everywhere, it sought to motivate an American response powered by fear of racial massacre. Tate’s crime was that he had “wished to save white men from butchery!”50 His death was a harbinger of similar bloodshed elsewhere if Haiti’s “principles” were permitted to endure. Dessalines’s nation was a “herd of revolted slaves”—“a horde of uncivilized and blood-thirsty blacks, who, if encouraged would devastate the West Indies, and even threaten us with domestic danger.” Beyond the rule of law, the proper American response derived from the “principle of self-preservation . . . and this answer alone would we apprehend

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supercede every other.” Those who defended trade with Haiti and “recommended the recognition of the black emperor of Hayti” were “apologizing for the murder of Tate” and “could feel no pangs for [his] distracted widow.” If black freedom were legitimate, and free trade lawful in establishing it, “as well might England or France furnish our black population with the means of murdering our white people.” The Republican rejection of trade with Haiti thus tacitly collected mankind across the nations according to race, siding the United States with other slaveholding powers and against a “barbarian empire” that “no civilized nation” would acknowledge.51 Eppes’s private opposition to the clearance bill implicitly set the stakes when, in conversation with his colleagues in the Senate, he went so far as to “pledge the Treasury of the United States, that the Negro government should be destroyed.”52 In the face of Dessalines’s disclaimers about Haiti’s “sparks” and his proclamations describing its principled liberty—and in the face of Federalists’ assertions of their “pure principles”— Republicans coalesced around a definition of Haiti that centered on white death and extermination. To accept the “black empire at Hayti” was “as preposterous as to suppose that, when his next neighbour’s house is in flames, a man could be mad enough to rejoice in it and, could throw oil on the flames.”53 This line of reasoning left the administration’s opponents little room. A pristine defense of free trade required they recognize Haiti’s independence in principle, rather than simply de facto. It was much easier, and more politically palatable, to deflect the charge of piracy from American merchants than defend the nation of Haiti. In so doing, however, free trade boosters adopted the Jeffersonian picture of Haiti as a source of danger. Against the clearance bill, Joseph Clay of Pennsylvania argued that if other nations stepped in to replace the United States in Haiti “the evil of having the present inhabitants for our neighbors would not be lessened.” A Federalist writer explained that American trade with Haiti was in the national interest because if it were stopped, Dessalines’s vengeance would be directed on American shipping. Such arguments, besides enabling Duane to paint once again a picture of the Federalists following profit over national honor, accepted that America’s interests with regard to Haiti involved self-preservation, as well as self-interest. It abandoned a principled defense of free trade, let alone of the rights of man.54 By the end of 1806, most reports from Haiti described the nation in terms that fleshed out the brigand state’s shape. The constitution of 1805 was received amid biographies of Haitian leaders that stressed their lowly origins, illiteracy, and rash behavior.55 Dessalines, in particular, was noted as a “tiger” who had

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risen through the ranks since 1791 solely because of his inveterate hatred of white people.56 A commercial disagreement between American shippers and the Haitian government was treated extensively in Philadelphia papers, with all sides agreeing that Haitian law was defined by lawlessness.57 Corruption and savagery, not law and liberty, ruled the new nation. “This is a sad country,” a correspondent reported, “with no laws but what are made to suit the moment.”58 Accurate or not, this was the Haiti that Americans evoked when they discussed events and issues emanating from the new nation. The heat of American political discourse had transformed Dessalines’s sparks into an inferno whose intensity would serve to cut off the Haitian state from the wider world. Ironically, the man fanning this flame was a Pennsylvania Quaker, known best for his unswerving commitment to peace.

Effacing the Black Empire George Logan was an unlikely person to preside over the end of America’s substantive contact with Haiti. Best known for his private diplomatic mission to France in 1798 during the height of the Quasi-War, the Pennsylvania senator was an infrequent participant during congressional debate and had expressed little interest in the issues and ideas raised by Saint Domingue in the political discourse of the 1790s. He had, however, been a regular voice in opposition to slavery in the United States and had served as a bridge between antislavery activists and the Senate. He had repeatedly brought in antislavery petitions from the Society of Friends, of which he was a devout member. At the outset of Thomas Jefferson’s second term of office, Logan served as an inside source of information to antislavery activists, gleefully telling news of the Senate’s decisions to prohibit slave imports into Louisiana and hinting that slavery would be gradually abolished there. Both efforts, he reported, would allow Congress to “rescue the National character from its greatest degradation.”59 In introducing a bill suspending all commerce with “the French Island of St. Domingo” on December 20, 1805, Logan pointed out features of that national character and its flaw as they stood in American political discourse at that moment. His effort involved both politics and principle. In articulating the balance between the two, however, his stance embodied an evolution of the position the United States was to have in a world confronting the problem of slavery. The politics behind Logan’s bill were driven by the administration’s need to close ranks around an approach to Haiti that at once mollified France, serviced

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the wing of the Republican coalition involved in commerce, and fended off Federalist attempts to use trade with Haiti as a wedge issue. With their indignant paeans to free trade increasingly neutered during the clearance bill debates, Federalists were left resuscitating their claims that Republicans were servants of French interests.60 Logan offered an opportunity to fend off this charge. Rather than crass commercial interest or petty political affinities, he presented the question in terms of his well-known stance as a peacemaker. “Whilst we are anxious to have our own national rights respected,” he asked in introducing the measure, “is it honorable to violate the rights of a friendly power with whom we are at peace?” Logan’s concerns, however, pointed beyond conflict with France. “Or is it sound policy to cherish the black population of St. Domingo,” he continued, “whilst we have a similar population in our Southern states . . . ?”61 If the senator’s political impetus was the attempt to calm U.S.-French relations, his pacifism structured the situation in ways that reflected assumptions about France, the United States, and Haiti. Prospective French violence was legitimate; American slave violence was natural. Both needed to be avoided. The threat Haiti provided was an amalgam of the two. That nation was an upsidedown world, one in which the state was presumed to be defined by violence directed according to race. The debates over Logan’s bill played out the implications of that definition.62 By distilling the issue into deliberations over the relative threats to American peace, Logan’s formulation served to bridge Republican divisions over trade. In the process, he married an opposition to Haiti with an opposition to slavery, a combination only possible because the terms of both had been shifted in the wake of Jefferson’s election, divesting antislavery of its millennial and universal content. Logan had encountered this approach when he had brought forward a Quaker petition against slavery during the previous Congress. To debate the petition in the national forum, one senator had objected, “would render [the] slaves uneasy, useless & rebellious, [and] would produce the scenes of St. Domingo in their own land.”63 Logan now acted on this reasoning at a practical level. To do so, he facilitated an understanding of Haiti that scrubbed the place of any antislavery meaning whatsoever. The debate in Congress over Logan’s bill revealed intensely felt divisions among Republicans over the proper course of policy toward the new nation, but it also signaled their new unity over the sense of danger Haiti represented. Trade with Haiti would make it an ally, James Jackson of Georgia proclaimed, “a melancholy subject . . . [because] one of those brigands introduced into the

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Southern States was worse than an hundred importations of blacks from Africa, and more dangerous to the United States.” Even when disagreeing over the bill, commercially minded Republicans agreed on the fundamental threat. “The Haytians will have provisions if they are to be found on the ocean,” Samuel Smith of Maryland argued, “the interdiction will be considered by them as the declaration of war . . . a war with a view to starve them. They will send out their vessels of war, (for they have armed vessels,) they will take your unarmed ships.”64 What divided Republicans was the means to deal with the danger of a black nation, not the danger itself. In the face of this unity, Federalists in Congress could only watch as the trading relationship with Saint Domingue forged by John Adams and Timothy Pickering, now that its object was Haiti, was undone. Their defeat, however, was as much due to their means of argument as it was to their diminished numbers. Fundamentally, as they had during the Quasi-War, Federalists agreed that an independent black nation was a threat. Then, as now, seeking to identify France as the source of that threat, they charged Republicans with caving to French demands and placing France’s interests before American ones. With France expelled from Haiti, however, the net effect was to leave it out altogether. Haiti was simply an example of things gone wrong. Even “if our commerce with St. Domingo was worth nothing,” Federalist Samuel White explained, he “would equally resist the present measure, because it was dictated by France.” Though he bemoaned the folly of “our enlightened sister Republic of France,” who, in “one of her paroxysms of philanthropy,” had freed her slaves, he did not fault the ex-slaves for fighting to preserve their freedom. Citing Vattel’s Law of Nations, he argued that they were belligerents and thus subject to open trade. Brandishing a portrait of Marie Antoinette, he proclaimed that the French had sacrificed any claim to their colonies “when the axe of the guillotine had extinguished the magic luster of royalty” and the “ruthless fangs of the Jacobins” had radicalized the Revolution beyond recognition or merit.65 Trading with Haitians, however, did not imply that they were not dangerous. White’s argument went beyond clarion calls for a defense of free trade and tirades against French fraternity. While Haitians depended on Americans for supplies, he cautioned, they would stay on “neutral ground.” Suspend that trade, however, and “you immediately bring upon your trade a whole nation of pirates.” This was a lesson for “our Southern country, viewing its particular description of population.” The mare liberum was a buffer that would ensure the South would “avoid the calamity” of a Haiti-inspired slave insurrection.66 This

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position was opposite to that taken by representatives from the Deep South. Jackson castigated northern representatives during the Logan bill debates for sitting safe in New England while their efforts jeopardized the safety of “the whole southern country, where the horrid scenes [of Saint Domingue] would be reacted, their property destroyed, and their families massacred.”67 But White’s—and the Federalists’—sense of the danger was national, not regional. The “Haytian” threat, like the French menace, they stressed, could strike anywhere. To this extent, it mirrored the danger slavery itself created for the nation. During Logan’s attempt to introduce the Quaker petition, arch-Federalist James Bayard had observed “that the southern states ought not to complain of the eastern & middle States for wishing to prevent the further encrease of slaves—For he would Venture to say that all the plagues of Egypt united were not equal to the plague that slavery will eventually prove to the southern States.” Jackson might complain that Federalists did not understand the situation that slaveholding states were in, but Federalists saw in slavery a similar threat, both of violence and to the union itself. William Plumer reflected that “this very subject of Negro slavery will I am convinced eventually produce a division of the United States.”68 This difference would remain. The American polity would continue (for a time) despite it, and despite white Americans’ differences over policy toward “Hayti,” because they fundamentally agreed that Haitians were dangerous. Even if Federalists and commercially minded Republicans saw the potential to harness them to the nation’s economy, White, echoing the policy of Adams before him, looked to exactly the same goal as Jefferson, and even John Eppes, albeit by employing different means. Whereas some saw trade as a controlling force by which to contain dangerous doctrines, others looked to isolate the island physically. Federalists would supply the negative votes when Logan’s bill passed the Senate. It then flew through the House, during which Federalist J. C. Smith of Connecticut termed it a “sacrifice of the honor and independence of this nation upon the altar of Gallick despotism.” In response, Joseph Clay of Pennsylvania proclaimed the recognition of Haiti’s independence “a sacrifice on the altar of black despotism and usurpation.”69 The Republican gambit worked: no representative would side directly with Haiti on these terms. It worked because of the logic that had ossified around “Hayti.” The nation was “black.” The United States, in turn, was “white.” Revolution in the latter had created a nation. In the former, it had unleashed forces dangerous to its neighbors. When Francisco Miranda set out from New York in late January

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1806 on his bid to liberate Venezuela, it was no surprise to American readers that his ship Leander was pointed first toward Jacmel. Nor was it a shock that Samuel Ogden, a merchant known for his participation in the Haitian trade, had fitted the Leander out with arms. The Aurora lingered long on the affair, embracing it as yet more proof of the illegitimacy of Federalist patriotism (Ogden was a “bitter tory”; a newspaper defending him was derided as the “Royal Gazette”), as revelatory of Federalist attempts to pose “petty piracy” as free trade, and as exposing the fallacy of Federalist critiques of Jefferson’s foreign policies.70 Haiti’s threatening character was a given within all of these positions. “They have furnished us a text,” the Aurora proclaimed, “and we shall preach upon it.” That text was founded on the truism that Federalists were men who “celebrated the black empire of Haiti,” a charge that had become shorthand for their infamy. Haiti was reported as ready to supply a host of mulattoes to attack Spanish possessions. Dessalines was depicted as enthusiastic. Sitting at the head of his throng of “Brigands” in “the new city of Dessalines” in the mountainous interior, he required that Miranda send him news as soon as he had landed at Caracas. Colored by this connection, American accounts were generally disdainful of Miranda’s claims to be a liberator, acting in the name of escaping tyranny and “liberty &c.” 71 Such a revolution had only to do with a change in leadership, not any higher principle. These were exactly the terms by which Dessalines’s own rule came to an end. When the emperor was assassinated in October 1806, the event was reported laconically as a “Revolution in Hayti”—one of the very few times that phrase was ever employed with regard to Saint Domingue or Haiti in the American press.72 The very next day the Aurora positioned the news as proof that Jefferson’s policy was sound. In the process it cemented a picture of Haiti as a dangerous neighbor, not only because of its violence but also because of the inherent violence contained in the principles of its birth. Because “St. Domingo” was a “land of negro liberty,” its very presence destabilized and jeopardized societies that continued to have slavery around it. More than just a “stronghold of pirates, robbers, and black buccaneers,” Haiti was a bastion of resistance and a beacon for bloodshed. Slaves elsewhere would compare themselves to those freed blacks and, suddenly aware of their plight, would be goaded to action by the “nest of depraved and ferocious monsters” whose sole purpose was “to pester and annoy the whites.” Any and all contact with this entity was therefore to be cut off. Though this argument imagined a state composed of self-liberated blacks as imbued with irresistible power for nearby slaves, it actually spoke

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more to white imaginations than to black motives. Haiti was a “locus of black and infernal malignity” spurred by slavery’s inherent evil, but it was rendered irrelevant to those who objected to slavery on principle. The violence of selfemancipation overawed and overwhelmed “whatever desires philanthropy may cultivate for the freedom and amelioration of the state of those unfortunate beings.” Dessalines may have understood himself as having “avenged America,” but, by early 1806, white Americans understood his victory as one that “establish[ed] a liberty hostile to the happiness of the American world.”73 Dessalines’s “Haiti” had ceased to exist in American discourse. Signed into law by Jefferson on February 28, 1806, the embargo of Haiti would effectively destroy the longstanding American commerce there. Export totals dwindled, from $6.7 million in 1806, to $5.8 million in 1807, and to $1.5 million in 1808.74 The decline of contact in Philadelphia was even more marked. Beginning in 1803, the number of commercial arrivals from Saint Domingue plummeted. In 1805, only fifteen vessels came to the city from Haitian ports, and these were mostly foreign. Included in the administration’s general embargo after 1807, trade with Haiti would not be legal until 1810. Little remained at that point in the nation to attract American merchants. With direct contact increasingly less likely, fear of the island would diminish after 1812. As a symbol of white death and destruction, however, the “horrors of St. Domingo” would endure.75

The Horrors of St. Domingo in Philadelphia A group of young African American men gathered together in the Southwark area of Philadelphia on the evening of July 4, 1804, less than a mile from the annual celebration of American independence held at the Pennsylvania State House. They did so to celebrate a different revolution. Gathering together, the group appointed “a captain, lieutenant and ensign” before moving en masse from Small to Shippen Street, and from there to Fifth and Sixth streets. Along the way, they picked up “clubs and swords” and, as the group grew in size, began to threaten and accost whites they met along the way. The violence continued the next night. At around ten o’clock, as many as two hundred men gathered again. This time they caused even greater alarm by “damning the whites, and saying they would shew them St. Domingo!” 76 The quality of the “place of liberty” that was Philadelphia had been considerably circumscribed by 1804. While most African Americans there were not

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slaves, they were subject to an increasingly hostile environment. One year after the young men evoked “St. Domingo,” white mobs chased black Americans away from the Independence Day celebrations in the city, making a clear statement about the racial character and lack of inclusiveness of the America that they were celebrating.77 For many, by this point “St. Domingo” had become a metonym for black violence and white death. By the time the young black men marched, the nuanced variety of conversations, postulations, suppositions, and arguments that developments in Saint Domingue had provoked had been drowned out by a steady crescendo of racialized fear, an evolution akin to the quiet roar of the static between radio stations gradually rising above all other intelligible noise. Though African American leaders maintained aspects of the principled call for equality and inclusion those developments embraced, few others could escape “St. Domingo’s” less progressive meaning and the racial ideas that undergirded it. Even white antislavery activists operated on this ground, accepting a portrait of the American body that was imperiled by the black presence rather than by the tyranny of slavery or the illogic of prejudice. In the process, they and others stripped the American Revolution that had formed that body of some of its more radical potential. Just days after the black men threatened to bring “St. Domingo” to Philadelphia, Benjamin Rush received a strange and threatening letter from Danville, Pennsylvania, a small settlement one hundred miles northwest of the city on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River. It was from Andrew Forsyth, a man Rush did not know and whom he must have found odd. In his letter, Forsyth explained that Philadelphia was in danger, and in fact had been for years. The threat came from above. God was displeased with the city’s sins and, beginning in 1789, had sent him visions foretelling the “very great Judgements . . . coming on the whole World” and of the “great wrath” that He would visit on Philadelphia in particular. For some reason, in each instance the Lord had stayed Forsyth’s hand, preventing him from warning the people and so fevers and fires had raged. In 1789 God had kept him from finding his horse; in 1797 He had led Forsyth’s eye to a passage in the book of Revelation that gave him pause. Now, however, Forsyth was unbound and could warn Philadelphia “of another great calamity that is like to assail you . . . which may be more extensive and more fatal in its consiquence.” In 1804, Providence was working through Haiti. “Desalines” had prompted slaves in Jamaica to poison the island’s rum exports, much of which would be imbibed by Philadelphians if Rush did not intervene.78

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Unbidden, and perhaps unbalanced, Forsyth nevertheless registers a new note among those thinking about the problem of slavery from the vantage point of Philadelphia. The very spring behind Providence’s workings had changed. Rather than righteous wrath against the sin of slavery, black vengeance derived from Haitian enticement. Others might have connected the black nation’s emergence to God’s will, but, for Forsyth, its presence and that of Jamaican slavery were the conditions of the threat to Philadelphia, not its cause. The slaves were not doing God’s work, they were the body from whom God was saving Philadelphia, through the works of Andrew Forsyth and Benjamin Rush. Forsyth evoked Revelation’s description of the church at Sardis: Philadelphia was to be redeemed because of its merits—a virtuous place in an imperfect world. More conventional voices offered a more full version of this sensibility. Author, reformer, and ex–slave trader and overseer Thomas Branagan assailed slavery in his writings from Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century. Branagan saw the institution as an evil, something he knew firsthand before experiencing a moment of conversion in the 1790s. Like Forsyth, he, too, saw retribution coming and was specific about the form that God’s wrath would take. Spurred by South Carolina’s decision to reopen African slave importation in 1803, he saw a danger that was defined by geography and section. Northern emancipation, he wrote, was a capstone to the Revolution, but the southern states were jeopardizing the political balance of the union and the rights of nonslaveholding states by bringing more blacks into the nation. Importing slaves was “to the body politic what the yellow fever is to the individual,” Branagan pronounced, “every slave ship that arrives at Charleston, is to our nation what the Grecians’ wooden horse was to Troy,” a truism that the “fate of St. Domingo will abundantly demonstrate.” 79 For Branagan, Saint Domingue’s “fate” evoked a providential warning: the ex-colony was evidence that “national sins have drawn down fearful national judgments.”80 The agents of that Divine judgment were human, but, by the early nineteenth century, “St. Domingo” also could serve as a practical threat. “The fate of St. Domingo is fresh in all [slaves’] minds, as well as in all our memories,” Branagan explained, “that the tragical, bloody scene, which has recently been acted in that unhappy island, should ever be re-enacted among us, God forbid!”81 Such an event was possible, Branagan posited, because black slaves operated on the same principles everywhere. Like Albert Gallatin, he educed a generalized “black” agenda. “St. Domingo” proved that blacks were enemies within the polity. “Have we not among us . . . five hundred thousand per-

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sons, who were . . . dragged from their own beloved country; forced into a grievous servitude in this land; and . . . detained in it?” he asked.82 These slaves, as had those in Haiti, were “waiting . . . for the moment, when they may have an opportunity of revenging all their wrongs on the guilty whites.”83 The lesson that Saint Domingue provided was “that blacks are jealous of their liberties, and would wade through a sea of blood, when an opportunity would offer, to vindicate their rights, and revenge past injuries.”84 Having universalized black vengeance, Branagan further simplified his depiction of the dangers facing the nation. Since “the negroes, almost to a man,” were “our most inveterate and formidable . . . foes,” he included free blacks as part of the domestic menace. “To suppose that the negroes in the northern states, would not espouse the cause of their degraded countrymen, is to suppose a drop of patriotic blood does not flow through their veins,” he explained, “between the blacks and whites, it is fallacious to talk about reconcilement.”85 In addition to exacting racial revenge, free blacks damaged the body politic by their very presence. Those “seek[ing] an asylum in the northern states” sought “an equality with the whites.”86 This equality was equally dangerous. Free blacks often aspired to become “up-start gentlemen” and were “not satisfied until they get white women for wives.” This “aspiring to gain an ascendency” was natural— it was “something like his negro majesty, the emperor Dessalines,” had accomplished—but it was disruptive and dangerous. It depressed wages, created poverty, led to social and sexual mixing, and sapped the vigor of the American, that is, white, polity. Nature and history proved that black citizenship was an impossibility. For an “African” to be loyal to the United States he would need to be “in open hostility to his country-men, and of all his color,” making him “a tory, and worse than a tory, a traitor.” In his later writings Branagan imagined a black revolt that produced a society of enslaved whites, a picture enhanced by his excerpts of lengthy reports of Dessalines’s massacres.87 Abandoning his earlier calls for amelioration and gradual emancipation, he now advocated the forced removal of all blacks to the farthest reaches of the new Louisiana territory. Physically excising blacks from the nation would do more than stifle a domestic threat: if his plan were followed, Branagan suggested, the republic would be redeemed and perfected. He proposed celebrating the day as a second Fourth of July.88 Black activists in Philadelphia were hamstrung by such logic. Even as it invalidated their presence and presumed their innate treachery, it did advocate for an end to slavery. Richard Allen paid the printer’s costs for Branagan’s first pub-

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lication. Branagan sought subscriptions for his antislavery poem Avenia through black networks.89 With the figure of “St. Domingo” ossified in their minds, friends like these made blacks into enemies. Haitian violence had long clarified matters for white abolitionists, but the message had changed. Sometime shortly after Rush received Forsyth’s letter, John Parrish sat down to compose his thoughts on American slavery, comments that he would eventually publish as a pamphlet in Philadelphia in 1806. A devout Quaker, Parrish had labored against slavery for most of his life and had been an early activist among those who would later form the Pennsylvania Abolition Society; these “remarks” were meant as a culmination of sorts to that career. As they had for his cousin Warner Mifflin, the insurgents of Saint Domingue had spurred Parrish to greater heights, or at least intensified his sense of purpose. In late 1791, shortly after hearing from Mifflin about the dream he had in the lodging house, Parrish had a similarly challenging and inspiring experience. While on a wintry ride he was visited by a message from God calling him to further his work on behalf of mankind. “My mind was l[o] vingly open’d,” he recorded privately, “and I beheld in the Vision of God, large fields of labour allotted me in his Service.” “A Language ran livingly thro my Soul,” relaying the command that “I have ordained the[e] a Prophet to the Nations.” A stern reminder, however, accompanied this message’s grandeur. Failure, Parrish understood, would erase all of his efforts to that point, dooming them—and himself—to meaninglessness; instead of an agent of godly change, he would be in effect furthering Satan’s purposes.90 Now, more than a decade later, Parrish still felt an urgency, but the threat he articulated took on a different cast. What, in 1791, had been a call for efforts on behalf of the family of man was in 1806 discussed in terms of the American nation. Parrish still dreamed big—and placed himself at the center of a course of change—but the boundless purview of the call he had heard on horseback had been reduced to the nation’s borders as he scratched out his ideas in the house of his friends Elizabeth and Henry Drinker.91 As Parrish would have it, the times, not his ideas, had changed. Casting over the course of American history, he quickly established the United States as embodying a revolutionary challenge to the institution of slavery, turning to the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and state constitutions and addresses to prove the fact. “All spake the same language,” Parrish explained, and he included the documents in a lengthy appendix to prove the point. This promise was to have spread outward to the globe. The divergent moral response

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to slavery across the nation, the continuing slave trade, episodes of kidnapping, and the general cruelty of slavery, however, showed that it had been sapped from within. Parrish was certain that God was still watching. Thwarted and subverted, the injustice of American slavery was fuel to the fires burning unnoticed at the polity’s core. Reminding his readers “that the delay of justice is injustice,” he likened himself to a modern-day Jonah, proclaiming that “a dark cloud now hangs over this nation, which . . . nothing short of what removed the impending judgment which awaited the inhabitants of Nineveh, will avert.”92 God still spake through John Parrish, but his fellow Americans were not listening. Others were. In making his point, Parrish echoed the picture of black violence current among writers such as Branagan. “Awful examples” attesting to this truth could be found, particularly in the West Indies.93 Americans should “witness St. Mingo,” he scrawled on the margins of his notes for the writing, as proof of God’s empowerment of those whose injustice went unaddressed.94 Like Branagan, Parrish’s solution to this quandary was emancipation. With Thomas Jefferson (whose Notes on Virginia he referenced directly), he was motivated by the notion that “God is just.” Like both Jefferson and Branagan, he accompanied this verdict with a call for freedom to be granted slowly and to be accompanied by the removal of blacks from the polity altogether. With this development, Parrish, once a paragon of American antislavery egalitarianism, moved toward a line of Virginian antislavery activists, men such as Fernando Fairfax, St. George Tucker, and George Tucker, who offered plans for emancipation over the 1790s that paired freedom with black removal. The correspondents Parrish circulated his pamphlet among seconded his picture of an America jeopardized by the newly hardened southern opinion in favor of slavery.95 From Washington, Granville Sharp noted that the retribution Parrish foretold had already begun in “every part of Hispaniola that is subject to the Blacks.” “The French Plan of thinning the island” had “produced the late cruel massacre of all ‘the whites’ in retaliation!”96 The racially determined violence inherent in slavery, both abolitionists agreed, had produced an equal and opposite violence that was therefore also fundamentally determined by race. What was natural, and unnatural, for Parrish and his fellow antislavery activists in making their arguments had been amply demonstrated as they confronted the realities of the Revolutionary era and the polities it had produced. Whereas in the heady years after the end of the Revolution Pennsylvanian abolitionists had imagined their efforts as spreading outward across the nation, by the early nineteenth century Pennsylvanian freedom was seen as exceptional,

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not representative, and as finite, not a harbinger. The American solution to the problem of slavery, by this understanding, was a variegated polity in which places of liberty existed alongside others in which slavery continued. Rather than taking on measures designed to end slavery nationally, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and its affiliates worked to defend individual ex-slaves and to preserve the enclaves of antislavery that had come into existence. Privileging political unity over principle, this conception emphasized a commitment to equality—among citizens—over one to liberty. As such, it contributed to a focus on the underlying condition of that equality. Though some Pennsylvania Abolition Society activities were directed toward ensuring equality before the law, others were predicated on a notion of society in which status and race were linked and in which freedom from slavery was never meant to lead to socioeconomic equity. This sensibility was not necessarily bound to the idea that only white Americans could be citizens, but neither was it in tension with that idea. As Parrish’s writing shows, it fit well with the conception that race—and specifically racial separation—was vital to the process of emancipation going forward. The young black men who roamed Philadelphia’s streets calling for “St. Domingo” in July 1804 left no written explanation of their ideas, aims, and goals. Indeed, the reality of the mob’s chanting itself can be called into question. As it did for other groups of enslaved and oppressed peoples around the Atlantic littoral, evoking “St. Domingo” was shorthand for resistance, one that embraced violence as a principled step against slavery. If direct Haitian contacts were rare, the presence of the black nation was meaningful. Historians seeking to measure the “impact” of the Haitian Revolution have shown that, while the Haitian example did not teach slaves to rebel, in many cases it brought rebellion to the forefront of their minds.97 The Philadelphia mob may well have walked this line, even figuratively. Yet, at the same time, the known capacities of the phrase make it equally plausible that white Philadelphians would have expected such words from the alarming gathering on July 4–5. Two men were arrested in the aftermath, but the charges against them were dropped.98 Ultimately the meanings and intents behind the words—and indeed even the fact of their utterance—for these black Philadelphians cannot be recovered. What we can be sure of is the presence and function of the idea of Haiti as it had developed by this point in American public discourse. If the young black men, departing from the careful tones of their elders, were not actually advocating the massacre of their white neighbors, they were embracing violence (or at

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least the display of violence) as a way to redress their problems. Because of Haiti’s dangerous neighbors to the north, the terrible meaning the nation had taken on by that point was one that even these defiant marchers could not avoid when articulating their rage.

Abbreviations

k

AHP

Harold C. Syrett, ed. The Papers of Alexander Hamilton Digital Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

CFM

Frederick Jackson Turner. “Correspondence of the French Ministers to the United States, 1791–1797.” American Historical Association Reports 2 (1903).

GWP

Theodore J. Crackel, ed. The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008.

HSP

Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, PA.

JMP

J. C. A. Stagg, ed. The Papers of James Madison Digital Edition (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2010).

LCP

Library Company of Philadelphia. Philadelphia, PA.

NAMARB RG 36 Records of the U.S. Customs Service, National Archives Mid-Atlantic Regional Branch. Philadelphia, PA (Record Group 36). E1057

Inward & Outward Entry Volumes (Entry 1057).

E1059B

Inward Foreign Manifests, Entry 1059B.

E1125

Foreign & Coastwise Outward Manifests, Entry 1125.

E1126

Outward Book, 1793–1796, Entry 1126.

PPAS ACM 1

Papers of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Acting (Standing) Committee Minute Book, vol. 1, 1784–88 (microfilm series I, reel 4).

240

Abbreviations

ACM 2

Acting Committee Minute Book, vol. 2, 1789–97 (microfilm series I, reel 4).

CCL 1

Committee of Correspondence Letterbook, vol. 1, 1789–94 (microfilm series II, reel 11).

CCL 2

Committee of Correspondence Letterbook, vol. 2, 1794–1809 (microfilm series II, reel 11).

GMM 1

General Meeting Minute Book, vol. 1, 1787–1800 (microfilm series I, reel 1).

LCi

Loose Correspondence, incoming: 1784–95 (microfilm series II, reel 11).

PSA

Pennsylvania State Archives. Harrisburg, PA.

TJP

Barbara B. Oberg, ed. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008.

TPP

Timothy Pickering Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA (microfilm).

WMQ

William and Mary Quarterly.

Virginia Calendar

Calendar of Virginia State Papers. Richmond: R. F. Walker, 1875–93.

Notes

k Introduction: Making Revolution in Philadelphia 1. For the insurgents’ activities around Fort Dauphin in the early 1790s, see Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 111–12. For the Spanish role in the region, see Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 83–113; and David Patrick Geggus, “The Slave Leaders in Exile: Spain’s Resettlement of Its Black Auxiliary Troops,” in Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 179–80. 2. The offer was made via Santo Domingo governor Joaquín García. See American Star/L’Étoile Américaine Apr. 10, 1794 (“ST. DOMINGO, Proclamation of the Spanish Government”), dated Oct. 13, 1793, reprinted [New York] The Diary, or, Loudon’s Register Apr. 14, 1794. See also Gazette of the United States Aug. 10, 1793 (Nassau, July 9). 3. For Vázquez’s promise, see American Minerva and the New-York (Evening) Advertiser Aug. 14, 1794 (“An account of the Massacre . . .”). 4. In addition to the newspaper sources cited hereafter, see Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 120–23. A survivor of the massacres gave a rendition of Jean-François’s orders, which began with his reminder to his troops of “what I told you in the wood” before commanding them to “slaughter each of them as you would a hog.” See Althéa de Puech Parham, ed., My Odyssey; Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959). This account is usefully reprinted and discussed in Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 256. Popkin mentions colonist Guillaume Thomas Dufresne’s understanding that the insurgent troops “reproached Jean-François, their leader, for abandoning them; they reproached him for colluding with the Spanish in recalling their masters and sending them back to work” (253). See also page 383 for Jean-François’s orders in the original Kreyol. 5. Until recently, many English-language histories of the Haitian Revolution left it out altogether. Accepting the idea that the Spanish were in control of the town, C. L. R. James uses it to support the point that slave violence could be derived by European examples. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 151. More recently, Laurent Dubois explains Jean-

242

Notes to Pages 3–6

François’s fury as a result of his recent losses to French forces elsewhere in the North. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 180. For Louverture’s interactions with the Spanish, see Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 115–18. 6. Elaine Forman Crane, ed., The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 1:582 (Aug. 15, 1794). 7. [Boston] Columbian Centinel Aug. 16, 1794 (“From FORT-DAUPHIN, 14th July”). 8. See, for example, Bryan Edwards, An Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo . . . (London: John Stockdale, 1797), 222; Colonel Venault de Charmilly, Answer, by Way of Letter, to Bryan Edwards . . . (London: For the author, by Baylis, 1797), 8–9; Louis Dubroca, The Life of Toussaint Louverture . . . (Charleston, [SC]: Printed by T. B. Bowen, 1802), 10–12; and The Life and Military Achievements of Tousant Loverture, Late General in Chief of the Armies of St. Domingo . . . ([United States]: Printed for the author, 1804), 9–10. For a later example, see John Relly Beard, The Life of Toussaint L’ouverture, the Negro Patriot of Hayti . . . (London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853), 81. 9. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 10. Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Henry Holt, 2012), 1–4. 11. Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). 12. See Peter Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and Michelle L. Craig, “Grounds for Debate? The Place of the Caribbean Provisions Trade in Philadelphia’s Prerevolutionary Economy,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 128, no. 2 (2004): especially 168–69. 13. Chronological Tables of American Newspapers, 1690–1820, compiled by Edward Connery Lathem (Barre, MA: American Antiquarian Society & Barre Publishers, 1972), 37–38. The next closest city in 1794 was New York, with nine. 14. Alan R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 80. 15. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 30–42. 16. For the best guesses as to those numbers (informed solely by those of the editors themselves), see Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969), 17. 17. For Philadelphia as “the epicenter” of journalistic activity during this period, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), especially 109–18, 74–95, 438 n49. See also Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690–1940 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1941), 116–31. For Philadelphia newspapers’ importance to early national political culture, see Marcus Leonard Daniel, Scandal & Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also Andie Tucher, “Newspapers and Periodicals,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 2, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley (Chapel Hill: University of

Notes to Pages 6–8

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North Carolina Press, 2010), 388–408. For regional distinctions, see John L. Brooke, “Print and Politics,” in ibid., 179–90. 18. James, Black Jacobins, 49–50; Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), 163; Fick, Making of Haiti, 22; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 18–21. For a contemporary sense, see M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, A Civilization That Perished: The Last Years of White Colonial Rule in Haiti, trans. Ivor D. Spencer (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985). 19. For the relationship between news, commerce, and information flow across space, see Pred, Urban Growth; Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), especially 213– 28; and Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 110–31. For an exploration of these issues in other contexts and with different emphases, see C. A. Bayly, An Empire of Information: Political Intelligence and Social Communication in North India, c. 1780–1880 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3–9; John J. McCusker, “The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 110 (Apr. 2005): 295–321; and Will Slauter, “Forward-Looking Statements: News and Speculation in the Age of the American Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 81, no. 4 (Dec. 2009): 759–92. 20. The average for these years is 19.95 percent. These statistics are derived from calculations performed on data drawn from NAMARB RG 36, E1057 and the four volumes of pilots’ reports contained in Records of the Port of Philadelphia, RG 41, microfilm roll 0864 (mislabeled “Health Officer’s Accounts of Passenger Entries, 1789–1794”), PSA. For further details (using slightly different figures), see James Alexander Dun, “‘What Avenues of Commerce, Will You, Americans, Not Explore!’: Commercial Philadelphia’s Vantage onto the Early Haitian Revolution,” WMQ 62, no. 3 (2005): 473–504. 21. Gazette of the United States Jun. 3, 1794 (“PORT OF PHILADELPHIA”), NAMARB RG 36, E1126, E1125 box 15. 22. Gazette of the United States Jun. 20, 1794 (“For Fort Dolphin and St. Marc”), NAMARB RG 36, E1126, E1125 box 16. 23. See NAMARB RG 36, E1126. For the number of passengers, see Gazette of the United States Aug. 26, 1794 (Philadelphia). 24. For arrivals at New York, see American Minerva and the New-York (Evening) Advertiser Aug. 11, 1794 (New York), and Aug. 14, 1794 (“An account of the Massacre . . .”). For Baltimore, see Baltimore Daily Intelligencer Aug. 14, 1794 (“Extract of a letter . . .”). For Boston, see the Columbian Centinel Aug. 16, 1794 (“From FORT-DAUPHIN, 14th July”). For Norfolk, see Virginia Chronicle & General Advertiser Aug. 21, 1794 (Norfolk), and Gazette of the United States Aug. 26, 1794 (Philadelphia). For Philadelphia, see General Advertiser, Gazette of the United States, and Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 19, 1794 (Philadelphia), Aug. 20, 1794 (Philadelphia). Baker arrived with as many as forty-five passengers. See “Pilot’s Reports, 1793–1794,” Records of the Port of Philadelphia, RG 41, microfilm roll 0864, PSA. Simon’s first name is a conjecture, based on the minutes of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s Acting Committee detailing its efforts to protect two black servants that John Simon had taken to “Fort Daufin in Cape Franswa” in May 1794. See ACM 2:343 ( Jan. 14), 2:345 ( Jan. 21), 2:346 ( Jan. 28, 1795), PPAS. 25. For an instance of an unfounded rumor erroneously made into historical fact, see Thomas Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,

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Notes to Pages 8–12

1973), 78, as noted in David Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 5, 405 n6, 432 n92. 26. General Advertiser Jul. 26, 1793 (Philadelphia). 27. General Advertiser Aug. 4, 1791 (Philadelphia). 28. Pred, Urban Growth; McCusker, “The Demise of Distance”; Dun, “‘What Avenues.’” 29. For Baker’s outbound travels, see NAMARB RG 36 E1126, E1125 box 15. For his arrival, see E1057 vol. 2 and E1059B box 16. 30. William Slauter, “News and Diplomacy in the Age of the American Revolution” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2007), 26–48. 31. Abraham Ritter, Philadelphia and Her Merchants, as Constituted Fifty & Seventy Years Ago . . . (Philadelphia: By the author, 1860), 26. 32. Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 33. David Copeland, “America, 1750–1820,” in Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and America, 1760–1820, ed. Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 140–58. 34. American Minerva and the New-York (Evening) Advertiser Aug. 14, 1794. 35. [Boston] Columbian Centinel, Aug. 16, 1794 (“From FORT-DAUPHIN, 14th July”). 36. General Advertiser, Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 19, 1794 (Philadelphia), reprinted Independent Gazette Aug. 20. 37. Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 17. 38. See, for example, [Boston] Columbian Centinel, Aug. 16, 1794 (“From FORTDAUPHIN, 14th July”), and [Philadelphia] General Advertiser Aug. 19, 1794 (Philadelphia). 39. See Philadelphia Gazette, Gazette of the United States Aug. 15, 1794 (“An Account of the Massacre . . .”). By land the trip would likely have taken several days. For the typical timing of stages in the period, see John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia . . . (Philadelphia: Uriah Hunt, 1830), 1:218–19. For the New York Packet, see Ritter, Philadelphia and Her Merchants, 34. 40. The initial reports arriving at New York on Aug. 9, printed there on Aug. 11 and 14, were reprinted in Philadelphia on Aug. 15 (in the Philadelphia Gazette and Gazette of the United States), again in New York on Aug. 16 (in Greenleaf ’s New York Journal and the Weekly Museum) and on Aug. 18 (in The Herald; A Gazette for the Country). It was then reprinted, with modifications (see below) in Philadelphia’s General Advertiser on Aug. 19 and again in Philadelphia’s Independent Gazetteer on Aug. 20. The report was printed in the [Wilmington] Delaware Gazette on Aug. 23, in the [Springfield, Massachusetts] Federal Spy and the [Exeter, New Hampshire] Herald of Liberty on Aug. 26, in Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, or, The Worcester Gazette and the [Northampton, Massachusetts] Hampshire Gazette on Aug. 27, and in the Greenfield [Massachusetts] Gazette on Aug. 28. The reports arriving at Baltimore on Aug. 9 were printed there on Aug. 14, before being reprinted in Philadelphia on Aug. 18 (in the Philadelphia Gazette) and then in the [Portsmouth, New Hampshire] Oracle of the Day on Sept. 2. The reports in Boston, first printed there on Aug. 16, were next printed on Aug. 19 in the Salem Gazette and the [Portsmouth] Oracle of the Day, then on Aug. 21 in the [New London] Connecticut Gazette and the [Concord, New Hampshire] Mirrour. On Aug. 23 it was printed in the [New York] Weekly Museum and the [Portland, Maine] Eastern

Notes to Pages 12–15

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Herald. It was then reprinted in the [Concord] Mirrour and in Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser of Philadelphia on Aug. 25. Two days later it was printed again in the Pennsylvania Gazette. On Aug. 30 it was printed in the Catskill [New York] Packet & Western Mail, before being printed in the [Wilmington] Delaware Gazette on Sept. 13. The reports arriving at Norfolk on Aug. 18 were reprinted three times: first in Philadelphia on Aug. 30 in the Independent Gazette, then on Sept. 11 in the [Savannah] Georgia Gazette, and finally on Sept. 16 in the [Rutland] Farmer’s Library, or, Vermont Political & Historical Register. The Philadelphia reports, arriving in the city on Aug. 19 and 20, were printed in the [Trenton] New Jersey State Gazette on Aug. 27, the [Portsmouth] Oracle of the Day on Aug. 30 and Sept. 2, the [Providence, Rhode Island] United States Chronicle on Sept. 4, and the [Rutland] Farmer’s Library on Sept. 9. 41. Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially 8–12. For the American context, see Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers,” 1–13, 33– 47. For the expectations for consensus around ideas about the public good, see Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776–1787 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 53–65; and James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 17–50. For the role of newspapers in fracturing those expectations, see Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 282–92 passim. For the contrasting colonial-era approach to political news, see Stephen Botein, “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 127–225; and Joseph M. Adelman, “‘A Constitutional Conveyance of Intelligence, Public and Private’: The Post Office, the Business of Printing, and the American Revolution,” Enterprise and Society 11, no. 4 (2011): 709–52. 42. Seth A. Cotlar, “In Paine’s Absence: The Trans-Atlantic Dynamics of American Popular Political Thought, 1789–1804” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2000), 8. See also Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 5–11. 43. Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 15, 1794 (New York, Aug. 13). 44. General Advertiser, Gazette of the United States Aug. 20, 1794 (Philadelphia). 45. General Advertiser Aug. 19, 1794 (Philadelphia). The General Advertiser changed its name several times over the newspaper’s early history. Originally entitled General Advertiser, and Political, Commercial, Agricultural, and Literary Journal, on Jan. 1, 1791, it became the General Advertiser and Political, Commercial, and Literary Journal. On Aug. 16 of that year its name was shortened to General Advertiser. On Nov. 7, 1794, it became the Aurora. See Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820 (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1947–61), 891, 916. For the sake of clarity, my references will be noted as General Advertiser or Aurora, as appropriate. 46. Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 25, 1794 (New York, Aug. 23). 47. Ibid. 48. General Advertiser Aug. 19, 1794 (“The receipt of much interesting foreign intelligence . . .”) and (“From a Correspondent”). 49. Porcupine’s Gazette Nov. 25, 1797 (“From the Gazette of the United States, of 15th August, 1794”) and (“The following is Bache’s account of the massacre, given in the Aurora of the 19th August, 1797 [sic]”).

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Notes to Pages 15–16

50. Between Sept. 30, 1789 and Dec. 31, 1806, for example, accounts treating Saint Domingue were printed on over 72 percent of the days in which newspapers printed (no papers were published on Sundays). This computation is derived from the records of a database of my own creation in which I have collected (first by transcription, later in pdf form) what I think is every mention of the colony in print in Philadelphia between the mid-1780s and 1808. 51. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Mar. 8 and Apr. 8, 1828 (“Our City”), reprinted in Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 1:180–83. See also Clare A. Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender & Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 195; and John Davies, “Class, Culture, and Color: Black Saint-Dominguan Refugees and African-American Communities in the Early Republic” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2008), 65–66. 52. For Philadelphia’s French presence in general, see François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (New York: Penguin, 2014), especially 89–136; and Frances Sergeant Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940), 103–21. On white colonial refugees’ sociability and cultural impact, see Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 26–37. For the pace and volume of the refugee immigration to Philadelphia, see Gary B. Nash, “Reverberations of Haiti in the American North: Black Saint Dominguans in Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania History 65 (1998): 47–50. For the question of the cultural impact of refugees of color on Philadelphia’s African American community, see Nash, “Reverberations,” 58–60; Susan Branson and Leslie Patrick, “Étrangers Dans Un Pays Étrange: Saint-Domingan Refugees of Color in Philadelphia,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David Patrick Geggus (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 193–208; and Davies, “Class, Culture, and Color,” 43–82. For American ideas on West Indian “creole” women, see Sean X. Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 202–14. 53. Heather S. Nathans, “Trampling Native Genius: John Murdock Versus the Chestnut Street Theatre,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 14 (Winter 2002): 29–43, quotations at 39, 29. I am grateful to Professor Nathans for recommending Murdock’s work to me. 54. General Advertiser May 25, 1795 (“NEW THEATRE”). Samuel Breck, one of the subscribers who financed the production, scribbled “This silly thing was written by an eccentric hairdresser” on the title page of his copy, noting that it was “pretty much such a play as might be expected from an author in that station of society.” See John Murdock, The Triumphs of Love, or, Happy Reconciliation . . . , 1st ed. (Philadelphia: R. Folwell, No. 33, ArchStreet, 1795), LCP. For public notice of the delay in production, see Philadelphia Gazette Apr. 28, 1795 (“The Philadelphia Gazette”). An advertisement for the sale of copies of the play described it as having received “the greatest applause.” See Gazette of the United States May 26, 1795. Murdock was similarly acclaimed as a source of “another Relish of American literary Cookery” at the start of the following season. See Gazette of the United States Jan. 11, 1796 (“Theatrical Information”). 55. Murdock, The Triumphs of Love, 16. For Murdock’s selection as president of the Mutual Assistance Society of Hair-dressers and Surgeon Barbers, see Gazette of the United States Jan. 9, 1798.

Notes to Pages 16–18

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56. Larry Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 190. 57. Of the major works treating the politics of this period from the top down, see Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism; and Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Other scholars have embraced a more wide-ranging approach. See David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America. 58. Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 100–109, 158–64; Richard Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 60–85; Paul J. Polgar, “‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’: Early National Abolitionism, Gradual Emancipation, and the Promise of African American Citizenship,” Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 229–58. 59. Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 124–37; Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, “Philanthropy at Bargain Prices: Notes on the Economics of Gradual Emancipation,” Journal of Legal Studies 3 (1974): 377–401; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 255–60; Gary B. Nash and Jeanne R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 99–113. 60. The most enduring and influential interpretation of this dynamic remains Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, especially 84–212. See also Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990); and Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), especially 363–87. For slavery’s ongoing divisiveness among the American public, see Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Don E. Fehrenbacher (and Ward M. McAfee), The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); and Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Cf. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). 61. General Meeting minutes Jul. 7, 1788, GMM 1:39, PPAS. See also Richard How to John Pemberton, Aug. 8, 1789, Pemberton Papers, 52:167, HSP; J. P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America. Performed in 1788 . . . Translated from the French (New York: Printed by T. & J. Swords, for Berry & Rogers, 1792). For Brissot’s visit to the Abolition Society, see General Meeting minutes Sept. 3, 1788, GMM 1:44, PPAS. 62. For a wider discussion of this tension between localism and nationalism in American cultural productions, see Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age

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of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and John M. Murrin, “A Roof Without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 333–48. 63. Fick, Making of Haiti, 118–30; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 118–21; Robert L. Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), 64–65; John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 251. 64. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 70–95, quotation at 73. 65. David Patrick Geggus, “The ‘Volte-Face’ of Toussaint Louverture and the Ending of Slavery in Saint Domingue,” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 65 (1978): 481–99. 66. Contrast the treatments given to Haiti in R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959) with that in Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution; and Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). More recently, see Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern (London: Verso, 1997); and Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery. See also Geggus, Impact of the Haitian Revolution; David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Lester Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750– 1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); and Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 67. White, Encountering Revolution, 3–8. White’s work, which I admire immensely, conceptualizes a connecting web made up of people and ideas moving between the United States and Saint Domingue. This focus directs the force behind the “making” in her subtitle in a different way than I do here. White convincingly argues that Haitian events served as a way to reveal American realities. My focus is more on the formation of those realities, which I see as deeply bound up in the “making” of a particular “Haitian Revolution” in Philadelphia. This leads me to think of the webbing by which the Atlantic world was defined as acting in multiple directions. 68. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 31–69, 95–107; Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

Chapter 1. France in Miniature 1. For the Hetty’s movements, see the brig’s log and account book, 1787–1792, Business Papers, IV Dutilh 2, accession no. 69.120.5, Dutilh and Wachsmuth Papers, Independence Seaport Museum, Philadelphia, PA, as well as NAMARB RG 36, E1057 1:58, 59, E1059B boxes 1–5, 7–9; E1125 box 2, 4, 6, 7. For Davis’s earlier voyages, see “Register of Vessels[,] arrivals and clearances, 1787–1788,” Records of the Port of Philadelphia, RG 41, microfilm roll 0864, PSA. 2. General Advertiser Jul. 20, 1791 (Philadelphia), reprinted Federal Gazette Jul. 20,

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1791 (“A morning paper has the following intelligence”), Gazette of the United States Jul. 23, 1791, Pennsylvania Journal Jul. 27, 1791. 3. Federal Gazette Jul. 21, 1791 (Philadelphia). This captain was John Davidson, of the schooner Charming Sally. See NAMARB RG 36, E1057 vol. 1. 4. Bache had lived in France between 1776 and 1785 while traveling with his grandfather, Benjamin Franklin. He had to relearn English after returning. Few, if any, of Philadelphia’s other newspaper editors could claim fluency. On Bache, and on French-language competency in general during this period, see Paul Merrill Spurlin, French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Times of the Founding Fathers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 29–48; and Daniel, Scandal & Civility, 109–47. 5. For the suggestive scraps, see General Advertiser Jul. 21, 1791 (“Consise SKETCH of the most important objects, which came under the consideration of the NATIONAL ASSEMBLY of France, from the 20th of April to the 9th of May”), Jul. 22 (“Latest proceedings of the National Assembly on the state of the Colonies”), Jul. 26 (“France. NATIONAL ASSEMBLY”), and Jul. 28 (“France. NATIONAL ASSEMBLY”). The latter was an account of the debates on May 16, in which the Assembly received notice from Parisian Jews “who, encouraged by the decree which raised a number of mulattoes to the rank of active citizens, begged that a similar favour might be conferred on them.” 6. General Advertiser Jul. 30, 1791 (“Abstract of a letter from a gentleman in Cape Francois . . .”), reprinted Federal Gazette Aug. 1, 1791, Pennsylvania Gazette Aug. 3, 1791. For Bache’s designation of this account as reliable, see General Advertiser Aug. 4, 1791 (Philadelphia). 7. General Advertiser Aug. 3, 1791 (“France. NATIONAL ASSEMBLY”). 8. For Davis’s objections, see the letter from “A CONSTANT READER” in Federal Gazette Jul. 22, 1791 (“FOR THE FEDERAL GAZETTE”). See General Advertiser Jul. 23, 1791 (Philadelphia), for Bache’s response. 9. Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., Aug. 7, 1791, TJP 22:11. See also Jefferson to James Madison, Jul. 21, 1791, TJP 20:657. In addition to the public accounts, Jefferson received news of the decree from American consul Sylvanus Bourne, who described it as “giving the privileges of freemen to the Mulattoes” in Saint Domingue. See Bourne to Henry Remsen Jr., Jul. 14, 1791, TJP 20:627. 10. See William Short to Jefferson, Aug. 24, 1791, TJP 22:70 and Aug. 30, 1791, TJP 22:107. 11. Garrigus, Before Haiti, 352–59; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 65–71. For free colored communities and strategies before 1791 more generally, see Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001). The decree granted political rights to free coloreds born of free parents and owning property. At most several hundred were enfranchised by the measure and probably fewer exercised their rights as citizens. See David Patrick Geggus, “Racial Equality, Slavery and Colonial Secession During the Constituent Assembly,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 1303 n83. 12. See New-York Daily Gazette Jul. 22, [New York] Weekly Museum Jul. 23, Litchfield [CT] Monitor Jul. 27, [Providence] United States Chronicle Jul. 28, [Annapolis] Maryland Gazette Jul. 28, [Portland] Cumberland Gazette Aug. 1, Albany Register Aug. 1, [Newburyport] Essex Journal & Newhampsh[ire] Packet Aug. 3, and [Charleston] State Gazette of South Carolina Aug. 4. 13. Dun, “‘What Avenues.’”

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Notes to Pages 30–32

14. On American identification with and understanding of the French Revolution in this early phase, see (with different emphases) Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 308– 29; Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 15–38; and Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 14–17, 67–74. Still useful is Beatrice Hyslop, “American Press Reports of the French Revolution, 1789–1794,” Quarterly of the New York Historical Society 42, no. 4 (1958): 329–48. 15. For a formulation of this wider American history, see Goudie, Creole America, especially 101–8. 16. Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots, 3–13, 23–35. For the role of ideas about the United States (and Pennsylvania in particular) in the early stages of the French Revolution, see Joyce O. Appleby, “America as a Model for the Radical French Reformers of 1789,” WMQ 28, no. 2 (1971): 267–86. 17. See Federal Gazette Apr. 2, 1791 (New York, Mar. 31), General Advertiser Apr. 2, 1791 (New York, Mar. 31), in which the colonel killed is not named. Also Federal Gazette Apr. 4, 1791 (Baltimore), reprinted General Advertiser Apr. 5, 1791, Pennsylvania Gazette Apr. 6, 1791. For further details, see General Advertiser Apr. 11, 1791 (New London, Apr. 1), and Federal Gazette May 7, 1791 (“From the Moniteur Colonial, a paper printed at Cape Francois, of the 10th March, a gentleman of this town has been pleased to favor us with the following translation”). For contemporary accounts building on these and other sources, see Edwards, An Historical Survey, 57; and Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti . . . (London: Albion Press for James Cundee, 1805), chap. 3. See also James, Black Jacobins, 82–84. 18. For an overview, see Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe Siècle (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1866), 10:1356. Mauduit knew Franklin in Paris (see From Thomas-Antoine de Mauduit, Chevalier du Plessis, c. Jan. 11, 1777, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–), 23:154). For his experience during the American war, see Maj. Gen. William Heath to Washington, Apr. 1, 1777, Maj. Gen. Lafayette to Washington, Nov. 26, 1777, Henry Laurens to Washington, Feb. 22, 1778, Continental Artillery Officers to Washington, Feb. 10, 1778, Washington to Continental Army Officers, Mar. 2, 1778, Lt.Col. Mauduit du Plessis to Washington, May 25, 1778, Washington to Henry Laurens, Oct. 21, 1778, in GWP 9:37, 12:417–19, 13:313, 494–95, 14:24–26, 15:218–21, 17:506. Also Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, ed. Worthington C. Ford et al. (Washington, DC, 1904–37), 7:269, 272 (Apr. 15 and 16, 1777), 9:967 (Nov. 26, 1777), 10:64 ( Jan. 19, 1778), 12:1104–5 (Nov. 5, 1778). For the Society of the Cincinnati, see Lafayette to Washington, Mar. 9, 1784, GWP 1:181–83; and Mauduit du Plessis to Washington, Feb. 12, 1787, GWP 5:23–25. 19. General Advertiser Sept. 3, 1791 (“African Fidelity”). This was a tale of a faithful house slave who gathered up Mauduit’s body parts after he had been killed. See also General Advertiser Apr. 11, 1791 (New London, Apr. 1), which gave a summary of Mauduit’s American career. 20. Gouverneur Morris to Washington, Mar. 3, 1789, GWP 1:359. 21. Lafayette to Washington, Mar. 17, 1790, GWP 5:242; Thomas Paine to Washington, May 1, 1790, GWP 5:369. See also Paine to Washington, May 31, 1790, GWP 5:444. Washington received the key in early August. See Gazette of the United States Aug. 11, 1790 (“Last week the key to the Bastille . . .”). Also Washington to Thomas Paine, Aug. 10, 1790, and Washington to Lafayette, Aug. 11, 1790, GWP 6:230–31, 233–35. In return, Washing-

Notes to Pages 32–34

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ton sent Lafayette a pair of American-made shoe buckles, possibly in reference to the news that National Assemblymen were contributing their shoe buckles to the state coffers in displays of patriotic sacrifice. See Gouverneur Morris to Washington, Jan. 24, 1790, GWP 5:48– 52, in which Morris described the buckle display as a fandango characteristic of the tone and conduct of the National Assembly. Pieces of the Bastille would be exhibited in Philadelphia in Charles Willson Peale’s museum and in Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry’s bookshop. See Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 67, 169 n52. 22. See Jefferson to John Jay, Jun. 17, 1789, and Jun. 29, 1789, TJP 15:190, 221. 23. [New York] Gazette of the United States Sept. 2, 1789 (London, May 15). Jefferson had included the presence of these delegates in his letters describing the sitting of the Estates General. See Jefferson to John Jay, Jun. 17, 1789, TJP 15:190. 24. Federal Gazette Mar. 11, 1790 (Philadelphia). Neighboring sugar islands that maintained the old stance, he reasoned, would be unable to compete with the low costs incurred “in a colony that has a free trade with this country.” For Jefferson’s understanding of the colonial delegates’ efforts as common sense, see Jefferson to John Jay, Sept. 19, 1789, TJP 15:456. 25. Tench Coxe to Madison, Sept. 20, 1789, JMP 12:414. For the question of free trade as a marker of the Revolution’s meaning in general among contemporaries, see Manuel Covo, “Commerce, Empire, et Révolutions Dans le Monde Atlantique: La Colonie Française de Saint-Domingue Entre Métropole et États-Unis (ca. 1778–ca. 1804)” (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales, 2013), 146–96. 26. Federal Gazette Dec. 4, 1789 (Cap Français, Oct. 29). See also Federal Gazette Jun. 25, 1790 (Philadelphia): “At Aux-Cayes little business [is] done except training and exercising the inhabitants.” 27. Pennsylvania Gazette Nov. 18, 1789 (Port-au-Prince, Oct. 7). 28. Pennsylvania Gazette Nov. 18, 1789 (Port-au-Prince). 29. Pennsylvania Gazette Dec. 16, 1789 (Kingston, Oct. 10). For other notice of the national cockade, see, for example, Gazette of the United States, Nov. 11, 1789 (“Extract of a letter from a gentleman in Martinique, to his correspondent in this town”), and Pennsylvania Gazette Nov. 18, 1789 (“BY order of the Excellencies the Governor and Intendent . . .”). 30. Federal Gazette Nov. 25, 1789 (Boston, Nov. 13). Marbois’s American connections were significant. He had served as secretary to the French Legation in Philadelphia beginning in 1779 and briefly as chargé d’affaires in 1780. In 1784 he married Elizabeth Moore, the daughter of Philadelphia merchant William Moore. See Barbé-Marbois to Washington, May 28, 1791, GWP 8:214 n2. During his American service he circulated a questionnaire to various luminaries asking for details about their states. Thomas Jefferson’s response was the basis of his Notes on the State of Virginia. See “Marbois’ Queries concerning Virginia, [before 30 November 1780],” TJP 4:166–67. Also Dorothy Medlin, “Thomas Jefferson, André Morellet, and the French Version of Notes on the State of Virginia,” WMQ 35, no. 1 (1978): 85– 99. Marbois would later be instrumental in the sale of the Louisiana territory in 1803. For Marbois’s role in guiding French ideas about commercial possibilities with the young United States, see Paul Cheney, “A False Dawn for Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism? FrancoAmerican Trade During the American War of Independence,” WMQ 63, no. 3 (2006): 478– 82. Marbois’s younger brother, Pierre François Barbé-Marbois Jr., was the French vice-consul for Pennsylvania and Delaware from 1785 until 1791, when he moved to New York. 31. Pennsylvania Gazette Dec. 16, 1789 (Cap Français, Oct. 21). 32. Federal Gazette Feb. 24, 1790 (Norfolk, Feb. 18).

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Notes to Pages 34–36

33. General Advertiser Sept. 5, 1791 (Boston, Aug. 29). 34. Nathaniel Cutting to Jefferson, Apr. 19, 1791, TJP 20:240. For a general treatment, see Simon P. Newman, “American Political Culture and the French and Haitian Revolutions: Nathaniel Cutting and the Jeffersonian Republicans,” in Impact of the Haitian Revolution, 72–92. 35. Pennsylvania Gazette Apr. 7, 1790 (New Bern, Mar. 18). 36. Federal Gazette May 4, 1790 (“American Intelligence,” Boston, Apr. 21). The same report noted that a French naval officer who had declared himself “in favour of the people” was greeted “with similar marks of joy to those shewn by the Bostonians to their beloved President.” 37. Thomas Paine, Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (Philadelphia: Printed and sold by W. & T. Bradford, 1776), introduction (no pagination). 38. Jefferson to Nathaniel Cutting, Nov. 26, 1790, TJP 18:79. For the efforts of Gouverneur Morris in Paris to promote French West Indian independence, see Morris to Jefferson, Nov. 6, 1791, TJP 22:260–61. 39. Paine, Common Sense, 43. See also Peter S. Onuf and Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776–1814 (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993), 103–13, 155–56; and David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 28–44, 63–90. On Enlightenment hopes for the rationalization of world society, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 40. Hyslop, “American Press Reports,” 338. For the pervasive influence of Burke’s ideas, see Jonathan Den Hartog, “Trans-Atlantic Anti-Jacobinism: Reaction and Religion,” Early American Studies 11, no. 1 (2012): 135–36. 41. Federal Gazette Aug. 21, 1790 (Philadelphia), reprinted Gazette of the United States Aug. 28, 1790. 42. Pennsylvania Gazette Sept. 15, 1790 (Philadelphia). 43. General Advertiser Jan. 4, 1791 (Salem, Dec. 21), reprinted Gazette of the United States Jan. 5, 1791. 44. Proclamation du Roi, sur le décret de L’Assemblée nationale, concernant les colonies, Du 10 mars 1790 (A Paris: De l’Imprimerie royale, 1790), accessed at Internet Archive at http:// www.archive.org/details/proclamationduro02fran. 45. For “the People,” see Federal Gazette May 4, 1790 (“American Intelligence”). For the National Assembly, see Gazette of the United States Sept. 8, 1790 (Philadelphia). Also Pennsylvania Gazette Sept. 15, 1790 (Philadelphia). For an example of notice of tyranny, see Pennsylvania Gazette Dec. 16, 1789 (Montego Bay, Oct. 17). For “the cause of liberty,” see Federal Gazette Oct. 14, 1790 (“FRENCH WEST INDIES”). 46. William Short to John Jay, Mar. 3, 1790, TJP 16:201. 47. The proclamation was translated in Gazette of the United States Jun. 1, 1790 (“Foreign Intelligence,” Paris, “To the PRESIDENT and COMMISSIONERS of TRADE at BOURDEAUX”), and Federal Gazette Jun. 1, 1790 (“By This Day’s Mail. Foreign Intelligence. Paris”), reprinted Gazette of the United States Jun. 2, 1790. See also the argument of a delegate from Guadeloupe that “the principles of the Constitution where [sic] not properly applicable” to the situation in the West Indies: Gazette of the United States Feb. 20, 1790 (Paris, Nov. 26). For the instructions of March 28, see Gazette of the United States Jul. 14, 17, 21, 28, 31, and Aug. 4, 1790 (all under the heading “Paris. INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE COLONIES”).

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48. Nathaniel Cutting to Jefferson, Aug. 4, 1790, TJP 17:300, 303–4, 307. See also Cutting to Jefferson, Aug. 9, 1790, TJP 17:327–29. Cutting would later argue that U.S.Dominguan trade would “mutually invigorate those principles of Constitutional Freedom which have apparently taken such deep root in both Countries,” touting “reciprocal advantage” as “the most durable cement of Political Union.” Nathaniel Cutting to Jefferson, Apr. 19, 1791, TJP 20:240. See also Gazette of the United States Feb. 5, 1791 (Bordeaux, Oct. 25), and William Short to Jefferson, Aug. 9, 1791, TJP 22:22, for French reactions to the appointment of Sylvanus Bourne as consul in Saint Domingue. Also Timothy M. Matthewson, “Slavery and Diplomacy: The United States and Saint Domingue, 1791–1793” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1976), 15–16. 49. William Short to Jefferson, Sept. 26, 1790, TJP 17:524–25. See also Short to Jefferson, Oct. 3, 1790, TJP 17:556. 50. Federal Gazette Oct. 14, 1790 (“FRENCH WEST INDIES”). Emphasis in original. 51. General Advertiser Apr. 29, 1791 (Philadelphia). 52. Federal Gazette Jun. 2, 1791 (Philadelphia), Federal Gazette Apr. 4, 1791 (Baltimore), reprinted General Advertiser Apr. 5, 1791, Pennsylvania Gazette, Apr. 6, 1791. 53. Federal Gazette Jun. 2, 1791 (Philadelphia). 54. General Advertiser Aug. 2, 1791 (“Address of the Municipality of Port-au-Prince, to the National Assembly”). 55. Federal Gazette Dec. 1, 1790 (“Retrospective View of the State of Politics during the last Week”). 56. For details of the execution, see Gazette of the United States Mar. 16, 1791 (Philadelphia), General Advertiser Mar. 19, 1791 (Philadelphia), reprinted Federal Gazette Mar. 21, 1791 (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania Gazette Mar. 23, 1791 (Philadelphia). See also Edwards, An Historical Survey, 39–50; Garrigus, Before Haiti, 239–49; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 85–89; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 182–83; Fick, Making of Haiti, 80– 84; and Herbert Elmer Mills, The Early Years of the French Revolution in San Domingo (Poughkeepsie, NY: Press of A. V. Haight, 1892), 86–90. 57. William Short’s report of the revolt also told of the passage of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. See William Short to Jefferson, Jan. 16, 1791, TJP 18:504. 58. General Advertiser Dec. 2, 1790 (Philadelphia). 59. General Advertiser Dec. 13, 1790 (“Extract of a letter from a gentleman in Cape Francois . . .”). By this account Ogé came via North Carolina and had been secreted ashore at Petit Ance near Cap Français by a Philadelphia captain who was later arrested, had his cargo confiscated, and was tried for his life by colonial officials. This same letter reported that Ogé, hearing that the white commander opposing him had put a price on his head, had reciprocated with the same bounty and had sent a miniature likeness of himself so as to prevent any false claims on the reward. See also General Advertiser Dec. 24, 1790 (“Extract of a letter from Cape Francois, dated November 1, 1790”), for a report that the American captain had been spared after other Americans interceded on his behalf. The captain in question was named John Brown. See Assembly of the Northern Province of Saint Domingue to Washington, Nov. 7, 1790, GWP 6:630–33; and Edmund Randolph to Washington, Mar. 29, 1794, GWP 15:466. 60. General Advertiser Mar. 3, 1791 (Charleston, Feb. 15). See also the Savannah heading in the same issue, which repurposed the text describing events in Saint Domingue as “France in miniature,” written several months prior, to this same end.

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Notes to Pages 39–42

61. General Advertiser Jun. 17, 1791 (Baltimore, Jun. 10). Emphasis in original. 62. General Advertiser Jul. 16, 1791 (London, May 6). 63. General Advertiser Apr. 29, 1791 (Philadelphia). 64. General Advertiser May 13, 1791 (New York, May 10). 65. General Advertiser May 12, 1791 (Philadelphia). 66. General Advertiser Jan. 28, 1791 (“Liberality”). The colony was Isle de France. 67. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 89–90; Geggus, “Racial Equality”; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 185–90. For the shifting ground on the issue of free colored rights in Paris, see Garrigus, Before Haiti, 352–59. 68. For the “newspaper war” in Philadelphia, see Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers,” 48– 78. For Jefferson’s and Madison’s role, see Julian Boyd, “Jefferson, Freneau, and the Founding of the National Gazette,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950–2000), 16:335–39, 414–41, 718–59. For an overview, see Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 238–40, 282–92. For Bache’s shift in this period, see Daniel, Scandal & Civility, 116–28. For the importance of newspapers to forming political discourse and newly fashioning the public sphere, see Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 13–36; and Marcus L. Daniel, “‘Ribaldry and Billingsgate’: Popular Journalism, Political Culture and the Public Sphere in the Early Republic” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1998), 1–10. Cf. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 69. Jefferson claimed these thoughts were meant to have been private and that they had been published without his knowledge, but this seems unlikely. For this episode, and the impact of Rights of Man on political discourse in the capital, see Daniel, Scandal & Civility, 62–91. For the impact of the work on oppositional thought, see Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 37–44. Rights of Man was first printed serially in the Federal Gazette and then widely reprinted elsewhere. See Federal Gazette Apr. 30, May 2, May 5, May 6, May 7, May 9, and May 10, 1791 (“RIGHTS OF MAN”). See also General Advertiser Apr. 22, 1791 (“ANSWER to BURKE”), in which Bache printed Paine’s dedication of the work to George Washington with the hope that he “may enjoy the happiness of seeing the new world regenerate the old.” For the full printing in Philadelphia, see Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution (Philadelphia: Re-printed by Samuel Harrison Smith, 1791). 70. Cotlar, “In Paine’s Absence,” 8. For a similar argument with regard to the effects of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, which was published in Philadelphia in 1792, see Rosemary Zagarri, “The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America,” WMQ 55, no. 2 (1998): 203–30. Zagarri notes that the effects of Wollstonecraft’s tract were magnified (and popularized) by its discussion in newspapers and magazines. These media “picked up her terminology and popularized a new language—the language of rights—by which Americans could understand, refer to, and analyze women. This language had radical implications” (210). See also Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 11– 45; and Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 173–77. For equality as a means of talking about revolutions among Americans, see David Brion Davis, Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 3–26. On “rights talk” in general, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 45–71. 71. James Pemberton to President of the Friends of the Blacks, Aug. 29, 1791, CCL

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1:68, PPAS. Brissot had sent a copy of the decree to the society earlier, noting that it meant free coloreds “are now active Citizens.” J. P. Brissot to James Pemberton, Jul. 6, 1791, CCL 1:63, PPAS. 72. For the correlation between Bordeaux and the decree, see Federal Gazette Jul. 30, 1791 (for white colonists’ proposed embargo on ships from the port), General Advertiser Aug. 11, 1791 (for the rumor of a Bordeaux fleet en route to enforce it), Federal Gazette Aug. 15, 1791, General Advertiser Aug. 16, 1791, and Pennsylvania Gazette Aug. 17, 1791 (colonial efforts to send a Bordeaux slave ship with its cargo back to the city, telling the captain “that they might go and sell their negroes in France”), and Federal Gazette Sept. 3, 1791 (reports of Bordeaux merchants receiving the decree with “universal applause and satisfaction”). Garrigus notes that the Bordeaux Jacobin club was a source of petitions for free colored citizenship at this point. Before Haiti, 25–58. 73. General Advertiser Aug. 8, 1791 (“Translated for the Independent Gazetteer,” Cape Francois, Jul. 10”). This issue also provided a translation of the May 15 decree. The Gazette of the United States reprinted some of this material on Aug. 10, 1791 (Philadelphia), but did not include the Bordeaux address. 74. James Alexander Dun, “Atlantic Antislavery, American Abolition: The Problem of Slavery in the United States in an Age of Disruption, 1770–1808,” in The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, ed. Andrew Shankman (New York: Routledge, 2014), 226–28. 75. General Advertiser Sept. 21, 1791 (Philadelphia). 76. Journal of the House of Representatives of the Assembly of Pennsylvania, 1st Assembly, 2nd sess., 530 (Sept. 22, 1791), LCP. 77. General Advertiser, Federal Gazette, Gazette of the United States, Pennsylvania Gazette Sept. 28, 1791. The news seems to have come from New York. 78. Gazette of the United States Sept. 28, 1791 (“An Address from the Town and Commerce of Nantes, to the National Assembly dated May 20, 1791”). 79. Gazette of the United States Sept. 28, 1791 (Philadelphia). See also General Advertiser Oct. 10, 1791 (“St. DOMINGO DISTURBANCES”), in which a colonist described the insurrections as motivated by slaves’ desires “to enjoy the liberty they are entitled to by the Rights of Man.” 80. General Advertiser Dec. 7, 1791 (Paris, Sept. 6). Though these addresses were written before the slave violence was known in France, they were made relevant to the current problems. The petition from Havre de Grace, dated Aug. 26, 1791, defined the May 15 decree as “the emancipation of the Negroes and Mulattoes in the West Indies.” Whether the understanding was that of the petitioners or of the French newspaper being excerpted is unclear. The Bordeaux petition, referenced in the same paper, describes the decree as “granting liberty and equal privileges with the whites to the Mulattoes in St. Domingo.” 81. General Advertiser Oct. 13, 1791 (“Speech of the President, to the General Assembly of St. Domingo”). The last quotation cited was made in a letter from the General Assembly to the king, National Gazette Nov. 21, 1791 (Cape Francois, Sept. 13). 82. National Gazette Dec. 22, 1791 (Philadelphia). 83. General Advertiser Nov. 5, 1791 (“Cape-Francois, Sept. 26, 1791”). This line of argument would endure among the émigré community in Philadelphia. See White, Encountering Revolution, 80–83. 84. Many described them as the only group capable of successfully defeating the insurgents because of their vigor and aggressiveness. See, for example, Pennsylvania Gazette Nov.

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Notes to Pages 45–46

9, 1791 (“Extract of a letter from Mr. Worlock at St. Domingo, to his wife in Philadelphia”). 85. Gazette of the United States Oct. 19, 1791 (Philadelphia), Federal Gazette Oct. 18, 1791 (“Agreement between the White Citizens of Port-au-Prince and the Citizens of Color, September the 11th, 1791”), and Pennsylvania Gazette Oct. 19, 1791. This agreement came about when West province free coloreds organized a confederation with local free blacks. Local white factions, sensing an opportunity to gain on their opponents, offered to ally with this confederation and to support the decree of May 15. In response, their opponents in Port-au-Prince signed a concordat in September 1791 with the confederates that went well beyond the decree in its recognition of free colored citizenship. Violence began when jealous nonslaveholding whites in the city refused to honor the agreement. Faced with alarming signs of slave unrest, however, city leaders regained control and offered additional promises of recognition to the free coloreds in October. Shortly afterward, when news arrived that the National Assembly had repealed the May 15 decree, the whites of Port-au-Prince reneged again. In the ensuing riot the city burned. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 119–22; Fick, Making of Haiti, 118–34; James, Black Jacobins, 96–103; Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, 64–65. 86. General Advertiser Dec. 14, 1791 (Salem, Nov. 29), Dec. 28, 1791 (Philadelphia). See also National Gazette Dec. 29, 1791 (“The following is a translation of a French letter from a gentleman in Baltimore, who had just arrived from Port-au-Prince, to his friend in this city”). See General Advertiser Jan. 20, 1792 (“Particulars relative to the destruction of Port-au-Prince, and the contest between the whites and mulattoes”), for the “imprudence” of the execution. For general coverage of the fire, see Federal Gazette Dec. 23, 1791, National Gazette Dec. 23, 1791, General Advertiser Dec. 27, 1791, Gazette of the United States, Pennsylvania Gazette Dec. 28, 1791, Federal Gazette Dec. 30, 1791, Gazette of the United States Dec. 31, 1791, General Advertiser Jan. 4, 1792, Jan. 6, 1792, and Federal Gazette Jan. 7, 1792. 87. National Gazette Dec. 26, 1791 (Philadelphia), reprinted General Advertiser Dec. 28, 1791. 88. Federal Gazette Feb. 21, 1792 (Salem, Feb. 7), reprinted General Advertiser Feb. 22, 1792. 89. Nathaniel Cutting to Thomas Jefferson, Dec. 4, 1791, TJP 22:373. 90. For the debates in the Legislative Assembly, see General Advertiser Nov. 18, 1791 (“Affairs of the Colonies”), reprinted National Gazette Nov. 24, 1791, Gazette of the United States Dec. 10, 1791. Robespierre, by this account, “giving a loose to his violent temper,” charged that Barnave and Lameth were “traitors to their country” because they had actively prevented the decree of May 15 from being enforced. For threats of secession, see Federal Gazette Feb. 13, 1792 (“INSURRECTIONS in ST. DOMINGO”). See also General Advertiser Dec. 2, 1791 (“Extract of a letter from London, Sept. 16”). For the decree of Sept. 24 as a measure against the “counter-revolution,” see National Gazette Dec. 22, 1791 (Paris, Sept. 24), reprinted General Advertiser Dec. 23, 26, 1791. See also General Advertiser Dec. 19, 1791 (Paris, Sept. 8), in which sources suggest the British navy, in league with reactionaries in Saint Domingue, would open the island’s ports simultaneously with attacks by the counterrevolutionary forces massed along France’s borders. See also John Skey Eustace to Jefferson, Sept. 24, 1791, and William Short to Jefferson, Sept. 25, 1791, TJP 22:164, 167. 91. See, for example, Federal Gazette Dec. 19, 1791 (“Extract of a letter from CapeFrancois, of the 16th of November, 1791, received by the brig Keziah, Capt. Robert Brown”), re-

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printed General Advertiser Dec. 20, 1791, Gazette of the United States, Dec. 21, 1791, and Pennsylvania Gazette Dec. 21, 1791. Also General Advertiser Jan. 18, 1792 (Boston, Jan. 4). 92. For the news of the decree of April 4, see National Gazette Jun. 4, 1792 (Paris, Mar. 24). For the wave of optimism, see, for example, General Advertiser and Federal Gazette Aug. 8, 1792 (Philadelphia), Federal Gazette Aug. 11, 1792 (Providence, Aug. 4), reprinted Gazette of the United States, Pennsylvania Gazette Aug. 15, 1792, summarized National Gazette Aug. 15, 1792. 93. National Gazette Aug. 11, 1792 (Philadelphia), reprinted Federal Gazette Aug. 21, 1792. 94. General Advertiser Aug. 14, 1792 (Philadelphia). It is tempting to correlate Bache’s shift in opinion on “levelling” as a principle and the “pretentions” it produced between this writing and his depictions, using the same phrases, of Ogé in December 1790 (above). I find the general shift more convincing than this suggestive, but singular, moment when his rhetoric flip-flopped. 95. Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, 41–62; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 197–200. 96. General Advertiser Oct. 8, 1792, reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette Oct. 10, 1792. 97. See Gazette of the United States Oct. 10, 1792 (Philadelphia), Oct. 13, 1792 (Philadelphia). These reports centered on the efforts of General Desparbes, who arrived with the commission at the head of its contingent of troops, rather than those of Sonthonax. 98. General Advertiser Nov. 9, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”). 99. General Advertiser Dec. 17, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”). 100. General Advertiser Nov. 17, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”). 101. General Advertiser Dec. 5, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”). 102. General Advertiser Nov. 9, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”). For similar charges against Governor Blanchelande, see National Gazette, Pennsylvania Gazette Sept. 19, 1792 (Philadelphia), National Gazette Nov. 17, 1792 (Philadelphia), and General Advertiser Nov. 23, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”). See also General Advertiser Nov. 10, 1792 (“St. Domingo”), for the further outline of such plots, which ends, “COLONISTS,—know now the authors of the murders and devastations in St. Domingo. The project I communicate is true in every print; the heads of the counter-revolution have adopted it and are occupied in executing it.” 103. General Advertiser Dec. 5, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”). The specific reference here was the creation of the Intermediate Commission, a body that would replace the provincial assembly in the North. All accounts stressed the break this body represented with the past because of its makeup “without distinction of colour.” See General Advertiser Nov. 9, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”), Nov. 12, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”), Nov. 12, 1792 (“PROCLAMATION,— In the name of the NATION”). 104. General Advertiser Nov. 23, 1792 (“ST. DOMINGO”). 105. National Gazette Jul. 6, 1793 (Philadelphia). 106. For the continuing career of this notion of fanaticism, see Edward B. Rugemer, “Caribbean Slave Revolts and the Origins of the Gag Rule: A Contest Between Abolitionism and Democracy, 1797–1835,” in Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation, ed. John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 94–113. 107. For their respective explanations of the slave violence in relation to slavery’s ultimate fate, see General Advertiser Sept. 21, 1791 (Philadelphia), and Gazette of the United States Sept. 28, 1791 (Philadelphia). 108. Federal Gazette Sept. 24, 1791 (Philadelphia).

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Notes to Pages 51–56

109. National Gazette Nov. 21, 1791 (Philadelphia), reprinted General Advertiser Nov. 23, 1791. 110. For this notion of nation as a way of measuring progress in the United States, see Peter S. Onuf, “‘To Declare Them a Free and Independent People’: Race, Slavery, and National Identity in Jefferson’s Thought,” Journal of the Early Republic 18 (1998): 1–46. See also Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000). 111. Gazette of the United States Feb. 27, 1790 (“LETTER.—No. III”), Gazette of the United States Mar. 5, 1790 (“FOR THE GAZETTE OF THE UNITED STATES, LETTER.—No. IV”). Rusticus’s other installments were printed in Gazette of the United States Feb. 20, Feb. 24, Mar. 6, and Mar. 10, 1790. 112. National Gazette Mar. 12, 1792, reprinted General Advertiser Mar. 14, 1792, American Museum, Jul. 1792. 113. General Advertiser Mar. 14, 1792 (“Translation of an address (from M. Gregory, Deputy to the National Assembly of France &c.) to the Colored Citizens and Free Negroes of the French Islands in America, upon the subject of the Rights of Man, confirmed to them by the National Assembly of France”). As suggested by this snippet, Grégoire combined a commitment to universal rights with the notion that polities embracing that truth would be regenerated (or, by this translation, renewed) by them. For the power of this combination in reflecting the unfolding of the Revolution in France, see Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 81–93 passim. For Grégoire’s particular ideas about racial differences, see Sepinwall, “Eliminating Race, Eliminating Difference: Blacks, Jews, and the Abbé Grégoire,” in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler Edward Stovall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 28–41. 114. See Louis Lagrenade et al. to George Washington, Jan. 24, 1791, GWP 7:274–77. Jefferson to George Washington, Jun. 20, 1791, TJP 22:558. Jefferson’s reasoning at once recognized the free coloreds as political beings, being “parties in a domestic quarrel,” and as racially alien: it was not a good idea, he wrote, “to draw a body of sixty thousand free blacks and mulattoes into our country.” For the murky background to this proposal, see Edward L. Cox, “The British Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” in Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 282–83. 115. General Advertiser Jun. 4, 1791 (Philadelphia). 116. [William Roscoe], An Inquiry into the Causes of the Insurrection of the Negroes in the Island of St. Domingo . . . (Philadelphia: Joseph Crukshank, 1792), 28–29, 33. An appendix to the pamphlet contained the decree of Apr. 4, 1792. 117. National Gazette Dec. 22, 1792 (“On the origin of the insurrection of St. Domingo”). 118. For Africanus, see Gazette of the United States Mar. 5 and 6, 1790 (“FOR THE GAZETTE OF THE UNITED STATES”), the former reprinted Federal Gazette Mar. 18, 1790.

Chapter 2. Unthinking Revolution 1. General Advertiser Feb. 11, 1792 (“By the British December Packet arrived at New York on Tuesday last, we have received the following intelligence,” FRANCE. NATIONAL LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY”).

Notes to Pages 56–59

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2. A Particular Account of the Commencement and Progress of the Insurrection of the Negroes of St. Domingo, begun in August, 1791: Translated from the French (London: For J. Sewell, 1792), 4–5. 3. Edwards, An Historical Survey, 70. See also William Cobbett, The Bloody Buoy thrown out as A warning to the Political Pilots of America . . . (Philadelphia: Printed for and sold by Benjamin Davies, no. 68, High-Street, and William Cobbett, no. 25, North Second-Street, 1796), 130–31. 4. A Particular Account, 11. 5. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 137–44; Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, 1–50; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Jason T. Sharples, “The Flames of Insurrection: Fearing Slave Conspiracy in Early America, 1670–1780” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2010), especially 83–135. For the production of ideas about slave rebellions in an earlier context, see Sharples, “Discovering Slave Conspiracies: New Fears of Rebellion and Old Paradigms of Plotting in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” American Historical Review 120, no. 3 ( June 2015): 811– 43. I am grateful to Professor Sharples for sharing a preview of this essay. 6. Laurent Dubois, “Avenging America: The Politics of Violence in the Haitian Revolution,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 111, 123 n3. 7. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, especially 70–107. 8. National Gazette Feb. 9, 1792 (“Authentic copy of a letter from a gentleman of character and information in Cape-Francois to his correspondent in this city, dated Cape-Francois, Dec. 28”). 9. For ruminations about this sort of erasure of black agency by historians, see Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 113–24. 10. Gazette of the United States, Federal Gazette, Pennsylvania Gazette Sept. 28, 1791 (New York, Sept. 26), General Advertiser Sept. 28, 1791 (Philadelphia, “IMPORTANT INTELLIGENCE”). 11. For the initial accounts in Philadelphia, see Federal Gazette Sept. 20, 1791 (New York, Sept. 19) and (“Extract of a letter from Cape Francois, dated the 26th August, received in Town on Friday, by way of New-London”). For Green’s arrival, see NAMARB RG 36, E1057 vol. 1, E1059B box 9; General Advertiser Oct. 2, 1791 (Philadelphia), reprinted (with expansions) Federal Gazette Oct. 3, 1791, Gazette of the United States Oct. 4, 1791. 12. For example, Federal Gazette Sept. 20, 1791 (“INSURRECTION OF THE NEGROES”). 13. Federal Gazette Sept. 23, 1791 (Hartford, Sept. 19). 14. Gazette of the United States Sept. 28, 1791 (Philadelphia), General Advertiser Sept. 21, 1791 (Philadelphia) [size estimates], Pennsylvania Gazette Oct. 5, 1791 (Boston, Sept. 26, “Extract of a letter from a gentleman at Cape Francois, to another in this town”) [burned ground], Federal Gazette Oct. 3, 1791 (Philadelphia) [destruction]. The most detailed account of the initial insurrections is Fick, Making of Haiti, 97–108. For comparatives, see Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, 33–50. 15. General Advertiser Oct. 10, 1791 (“The following account of the late disturbances at St. Domingo was taken from a Journal kept there, handed to us by an obliging Correspondent, and translated for the GENERAL ADVERTISER” [entry for Aug. 24]); Federal Gazette Nov. 8, 1791 (“Extract of a letter from Mr. Worlock at St. Domingo, to his wife in

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Notes to Pages 59–61

Philadelphia, Cape Francois, October 4”), reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette, General Advertiser Nov. 9, 1791 [sawed in half ]; for intimations of rape, see General Advertiser Oct. 2, 1791 (Philadelphia), reprinted Federal Gazette Oct. 3, 1791; Federal Gazette Oct. 1, 1791 (“A gentleman of this city has favoured the Editor with the following INTERESTING INTELLIGENCE”); General Advertiser Nov. 14, 1791 (“St. Domingo Disturbances”). For an instance of torture, General Advertiser Nov. 11, 1791 (Philadelphia). 16. Crane, Diary of Elizabeth Drinker 1:471 (Sept. 21, 1791). 17. Federal Gazette Dec. 2, 1791 (Philadelphia). See also NAMARB RG 36, E1057 vol. 1, E1059B box 9. 18. For departures to Dominguan ports over the latter part of 1791, see NAMARB RG 36, E1125 box 6. 19. Federal Gazette Oct. 3, 1791 (Philadelphia), reprinted Gazette of the United States Oct. 5, 1791. For Lillibridge’s voyage, see NAMARB RG 36, E1125 box 5, E1057 vol. 1, E1059B box 9. For other Americans’ service, see General Advertiser Oct. 10, 1791 (“The following account of the late disturbances at St. Domingo was taken from a Journal kept there, handed to us by an obliging Correspondent, and translated for the GENERAL ADVERTISER” [entry for Aug. 30]); General Advertiser Oct. 11, 1791 (“Extract of a letter dated Cape Francois Sept. 11”); Pennsylvania Gazette Oct. 12, 1791 (“AUTHENTIC PARTICULARS of the late Disturbances at St. Domingo, received from a gentleman at Cape Francois, in a letter to his friend in this city”). By early 1792 an “American Corps de Garde” had been established. Nathaniel Cutting was a member. Nathaniel Cutting to Jefferson, Jan. 21 and Jan. 24, 1792, TJP 23:51, 61, printed in Pennsylvania Gazette Mar. 7, 1792 (“Copy of a letter from a gentleman of the best information at Cape Francois, to his correspondent in this city, dated Jan. 21” and “Copy of another letter from the same gentleman, dated Cape Francois, Jan. 24”). 20. NAMARB RG 36, E1059B, boxes 8–12, E1057 vol. 1, E1125, boxes 5–10. 21. For exemplary (albeit differing) formulations of slavery as violence, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 2–14; Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 25–49; and Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 19–44. 22. See Dubois, “Avenging America,” 111–24. For the function of continental violence in shaping ideas about events in Saint Domingue over the 1790s, see Malick Ghachem, “The Colonial Vendée,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, 156–76. 23. General Advertiser Nov. 12, 1791 (“Continuation of the Journal kept at Cape Francois during the late disturbances” [entry for Sept. 27]). 24. General Advertiser Oct. 11, 1791 (“St. DOMINGO DISTURBANCES [entry for Sept. 1]), Federal Gazette Oct. 31, 1791 (Philadelphia), reprinted General Advertiser Nov. 1, 1791. 25. General Advertiser Sept. 21, 1791 (Philadelphia). See John Thornton, “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Caribbean History 25 (1992): 58–80. 26. See Pennsylvania Gazette Oct. 12, 1791 (“AUTHENTIC PARTICULARS of the late Disturbances at St. Domingo, received from a gentleman at Cape Francois, in a letter to his friend in this city” [journal entry for Sept. 11]. Also General Advertiser Nov. 11, 1791 (“Continuation of the Journal kept at Cape Francois during the late disturbances” [journal entry for Sept. 19 and Sept. 23]). 27. General Advertiser Oct. 10, 1791 (“The following account . . .” [journal entry for Aug. 27]).

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28. Federal Gazette Oct. 3, 1791 (“Translation of a Letter from CAPE FRANCOIS, dated September 11”), reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette Oct. 5, 1791. 29. General Advertiser Nov. 14, 1791 (“St. Domingo Disturbances”). For comparisons of the violence of the insurrection and that meted out by whites in response, see James, Black Jacobins, 88–89; Genovese, From Resistance to Rebellion, 104–10; and Fick, Making Haiti, 108. 30. General Advertiser Oct. 29, 1791 (“Further Particulars of the Hispaniola Insurrection—In a letter from JAMES PERKINS, Esq. Resident at Cape Francois”). 31. General Advertiser Nov. 14, 1791 (“St. Domingo Disturbances”). 32. For “savage gambols,” see Federal Gazette Oct. 18, 1791 (New London, Oct. 13), reprinted General Advertiser Oct. 19, 1791. 33. For accounts focusing on demographics, see Gazette of the United States, General Advertiser, Pennsylvania Gazette Dec. 14, 1791 (Philadelphia), reprinted National Gazette, Federal Gazette Dec. 15, 1791. Also General Advertiser Apr. 13, 1791 (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania Gazette Nov. 2, 1791 (Philadelphia). For forecasts that the insurrections would end when the slaves began to starve, see Gazette of the United States Oct. 8, 1791 (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania Gazette Nov. 2, 1791 (“The latest accounts from St. Domingo from the Betsey, Crawford and Alexandria, Town, just back from there”), and Federal Gazette Nov. 8, 1791 (“Extract of a letter from Mr. Worlock . . .”). 34. For examples of free colored military actions, see Federal Gazette Oct. 3, 1791 (Philadelphia), Federal Gazette Oct. 5, 1791 (Philadelphia), General Advertiser Oct. 10, 1791 (“The following account . . .” [journal entry for Aug. 25]), Pennsylvania Gazette Oct. 12, 1791 (“AUTHENTIC PARTICULARS . . .”), and Pennsylvania Gazette Nov. 9, 1791 (Philadelphia). 35. General Advertiser Oct. 10, 1791 (“The following account . . .” [journal entry for Aug. 28]). See also Federal Gazette Oct. 3, 1791 (Philadelphia), and Pennsylvania Gazette Oct. 12, 1791 (“AUTHENTIC PARTICULARS . . .” [journal entry for Sept. 11]). 36. See, for example, Federal Gazette Apr. 20, 1792 (Baltimore, Apr. 17), General Advertiser May 28, 1792 (Philadelphia), and General Advertiser Jun. 19, 1792 (“Foreign Intelligence”). 37. General Advertiser Oct. 10, 1791 (“The following account . . .” [journal entry for Aug. 28]). See also General Advertiser Jun. 7, 1792 (Baltimore, Jun. 1), for the arrival of “celebrated Characters” from France, including “Count D’E——,” and General Advertiser Jun. 19, 1792 (“Foreign Intelligence”), for a similar report of the Colonial Assembly to its delegates in Paris. 38. See, for example, General Advertiser Dec. 15, 1791 (Philadelphia), and Dec. 28, 1791 (Boston, Dec. 15). See also General Advertiser Mar. 4, 1793 (“ACCOUNT of the OPERATIONS of the armies, in the northern part of ST. DOMINGO since our last of the 21st of January continued”), for a Cap Français extract cursing the curates of Dondon and La Grande Riviere: “these apostates of liberty of the blacks have excited and kept alive, for these eighteen months past, among the rebels a spirit of holy insurrection; these fanatics, it is said, will be shipped off to France.” For the connection between clergy and maroon and insurgent slaves in the colony, see Gabriel Debien, “Marronage in the French Caribbean,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 107–34, especially 118. 39. See General Advertiser Oct. 11, 1791 (“ST. DOMINGO DISTURBANCES [continued]” [journal entry for Sept. 8]).

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Notes to Pages 62–63

40. General Advertiser Nov. 10, 1792 (“St. Domingo”). See also National Gazette Nov. 17, 1792 (“St. Domingo”), for the suggestion that the counterrevolution was being coordinated in the Caribbean and Europe. For white royalists’ involvement in the initial uprisings, see Yves Benot (trans. David Geggus), “The Insurgents of 1791, Their Leaders, and the Concept of Independence,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, 99–110. 41. For accounts mentioning Spanish individuals, see General Advertiser Oct. 11, 1791 (“ST. DOMINGO DISTURBANCES [continued]” [journal entry for Sept. 1]). For found articles, see General Advertiser Nov. 12, 1791 (“Continuation of the Journal kept at CapeFrancois during the late disturbances, concluded from yesterday’s paper” [journal entry for Sept. 27, 1791]), which provided the text of a Spanish commander’s note. See also General Advertiser Aug. 2, 1791 (“Address of the Municipality of Port-au-Prince, to the National Assembly,” from the Gazette de St. Domingo Jul. 2), and General Advertiser Nov. 9, 1791 (Roux to Faures, Oct. 3). For evidence of arms sales to the rebels, see General Advertiser Nov. 10, 1791 (Philadelphia), Federal Gazette Aug. 25, 1792 (Philadelphia), reprinted Gazette of the United States Aug. 29, 1792. For accusations that whites in Santo Domingo sold white refugees to the insurgents, see General Advertiser Nov. 11, 1791 (“Continuation of the Journal kept at Cape Francois during the late disturbances” [journal entry for Sept. 23]), and Feb. 11, 1792 (“By the British December Packet arrived at New York on Tuesday last, we have received the following intelligence”). 42. Pennsylvania Gazette Jun. 6, 1792 (“Extract from Lindsay’s Hotel Diary, May 20”). See also National Gazette Jun. 11, 1792 (Philadelphia). 43. This perception dates at least to the Royal Edict of 1693 and its impact on South Carolina. See Jane Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687–1790,” Florida Historical Quarterly 62 (1984): 296–313; and Landers, “Gracia Real De Santa Teresa De Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 9–30. 44. Richard Price, “Introduction: Maroons and Their Communities,” in Maroon Societies, 1–30; Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, 51–81. Cf. Gad J. Heuman, ed., Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways, Resistance, and Marronage in Africa and the New World (London: Frank Cass, 1986); and Kathleen Wilson, “The Performance of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial Order in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the Atlantic Sound,” WMQ 66, no. 1 (2009): 45–86. 45. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 256–62; Craton, Testing the Chains, 61–98. 46. General Advertiser Nov. 10, 1791 (“Continuation of the Journal kept at Cape Francois during the late disturbances” [journal entry for Sept. 19]). 47. General Advertiser Dec. 28, 1791 (Boston, Dec. 15). The idea that the insurgent groups were led by “kings” or “chiefs” was pervasive, and was also typical of conceptions of maroon groups. See, for example, General Advertiser Oct. 11, 1791 (“ST. DOMINGO DISTURBANCES [continued]” [journal entry for Sept. 4]), in which an early leader was identified as having been “elected” as “King of Limbé and Port-Margot.” See also Federal Gazette Nov. 29, 1791 (“Extract of a letter from Cape-Francois, of the 2d of Nov. received by the brig James, capt. Row, arrived here yesterday”), for the death of slave leader Paul Blin at the hands of Jeannot in punishment for a loss to white troops. Jean-François executed Jeannot for this act. See Fick, Making of Haiti, 113. 48. National Gazette Dec. 22, 1791 (Philadelphia).

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49. Nathaniel Cutting to Jefferson, Nov. 29, 1791, TJP 22:350. 50. National Gazette Nov. 3, 1791 (“Extract of a letter from Cape-Francois. dated October 4”). 51. Jean Baptiste Ternant to George Washington, Sept. 24, 1791, GWP 9:17. 52. General Advertiser Nov. 14, 1791 (“St. Domingo Disturbances”), this portion reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette Nov. 16, 1791 (Salem, Nov. 1). 53. For example, see General Advertiser Nov. 11, 1791 (“Continuation of the Journal kept at Cape Francois during the late disturbances” [journal entry for Sept. 22]), for the demands by some “black cavalry” that “all the slaves should be made free.” 54. Federal Gazette Feb. 6, 1792 (Philadelphia), reprinted General Advertiser Feb. 7, 1792, Gazette of the United States, Pennsylvania Gazette Feb. 8, 1792. 55. Jean-François and Biassou’s proposition was read in Philadelphia alongside a proclamation of amnesty by the newly arrived civil commissioners for those “malcontents” who had opposed the Revolution in France. Though in actuality pointed toward the free colored and white factional fighting, subsequent reports indicated that the “brigand chiefs” were coming in, begging for forgiveness under its auspices. For the proclamation, see General Advertiser Feb. 8, 1792 (“PROCLAMATION”), reprinted Federal Gazette Feb. 14, 1792. For the report of the offer of peace for freedom for insurgent leaders, see Federal Gazette Feb. 6, 1792 (“A merchant of this city has favored the Editor with the following extracts from a letter just received from Cape Francois”), reprinted Gazette of the United States Feb. 8, 1792. For “brigand chiefs,” see National Gazette Feb. 9, 1792 (“Authentic copy of a letter from a gentleman of character and information in Cape-Francois to his correspondent in this city, dated Cape-Francois, Dec. 28”), which was a letter from Nathaniel Cutting to Thomas Jefferson. See Cutting to Jefferson, Dec. 28, 1791, TJP 22:459–65. Jefferson received the letter on Feb. 5. For the begging of “John Francois, Chief of the revolted negroes,” see Federal Gazette Mar. 2, 1792 (Newport, Feb. 1). See also Nathalie Piquionne, “Lettre de Jean-François, Biassou, et Belair, Juillet 1792,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française no. 311 (1998): 132–39. 56. Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 65–66; Fick, Making of Haiti, 91; James, Black Jacobins, 104–5. 57. Federal Gazette Feb. 28, 1792 (Philadelphia [2 letters from Cap Français]), reprinted General Advertiser Feb. 29, 1792. For an overview, see National Gazette Mar. 1, 1792 (Philadelphia). 58. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 118–21; Fick, Making of Haiti, 118–30, 137– 38; Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, 64–65; Garrigus, Before Haiti, 251, 265–70. 59. General Advertiser Oct. 2, 1791 (Philadelphia). 60. General Advertiser Oct. 29, 1791 (Boston, Oct. 20). 61. Gazette of the United States Apr. 11, 1792 (Philadelphia), Federal Gazette Apr. 11, 1792 (Wilmington, Apr. 7). 62. Fick, Making of Haiti, 127–29. Rivière preached that God was black, that whites should be extirpated, and that his own actions were directed by communication with the Virgin. 63. General Advertiser Apr. 12, 1792 (Philadelphia), General Advertiser, Federal Gazette Apr. 25, 1792 (Boston, Apr. 14). 64. This reading is drawn from material across the newspaper sources describing the episode in Philadelphia. See Gazette of the United States, Apr. 11, 1792 (Philadelphia), Federal Gazette Apr. 11, 1792 (Wilmington, Apr. 7), General Advertiser Apr. 12, 1792 (Philadelphia), National Gazette Apr. 16, 1792 (Philadelphia), Federal Gazette Apr. 20, 1792

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Notes to Pages 66–69

(Baltimore, Apr. 17), General Advertiser and Federal Gazette Apr. 25, 1792 (Boston, Apr. 14), Pennsylvania Gazette Apr. 25, 1792 (New York, Apr. 21), General Advertiser Apr. 28, 1792 (Salem, Apr. 17) (also National Gazette Apr. 30, 1792 and Pennsylvania Gazette May 2, 1792), Federal Gazette May 7, 1792 (Baltimore, May 3), and General Advertiser, Federal Gazette May 16, 1792 (Philadelphia). 65. General Advertiser, Federal Gazette May 16, 1792 (Philadelphia). 66. Federal Gazette Aug. 18, 1792 (Philadelphia). 67. Gazette of the United States, Pennsylvania Gazette Dec. 14, 1791 (Philadelphia), reprinted Federal Gazette Dec. 15, 1791. See also Pennsylvania Gazette Nov. 2, 1791 (“Extract of a letter from Cape Francois, dated October 4”). 68. General Advertiser Apr. 25, 1792 (Boston, Apr. 14). 69. General Advertiser Dec. 14, 1791 (“Port-au-Prince”). 70. See, for example, Federal Gazette, General Advertiser Feb. 21, 1793 (“St. Domingo”), which details the trials of climbing toward the batteries commanded by Biassou. Also General Advertiser Mar. 18, 1793 (New York, Mar. 14), and General Advertiser Jun. 4, 1793 (Salem, May 28). 71. Nathaniel Cutting to Jefferson, Mar. 1, 1792, TJP 23:179. 72. Fick, Making of Haiti, 141. 73. General Advertiser Aug. 28, 1792 (Philadelphia), reprinted Federal Gazette, Pennsylvania Gazette Aug. 29, 1792. This result redoubled feelings against Blanchelande, who was suspected of having intrigued with the rebels. His offer to the Platons insurgents was a general amnesty, to which the violence was a resounding negative. 74. Philadelphians read of these developments. See Federal Gazette Sept. 4, 1792 (Philadelphia), reprinted General Advertiser Sept. 5, 1792, Gazette of the United States Sept. 8, 1792. See Jeremy D. Popkin, “The French Revolution’s Royal Governor: General Blanchelande and Saint Domingue, 1790–92,” WMQ 71, no. 2 (April 2014): 203–28. 75. Federal Gazette Aug. 30, 1792 (Philadelphia), and Federal Gazette Sept. 4, 1792 (Baltimore, Sept. 1), reprinted Gazette of the United States Sept. 8, 1792. Ultimately the maroon leaders would moderate their demands to freedom for four hundred of their number when the Assembly resisted their proposal. 76. General Advertiser Sept. 18, 1792 (“Extract of a letter from Cayes”), reprinted National Gazette, Pennsylvania Gazette Sept. 19, 1792. 77. National Gazette Oct. 18, 1792 (Norfolk, Oct. 10), reprinted Gazette of the United States, National Gazette Oct. 20, 1792. The captain understood the offer as “freedom to 2 chiefs and 800 negroes without the town and 200 negroes within.” 78. Federal Gazette Apr. 12, 1793 (Salem, Apr. 2). 79. General Advertiser Oct. 8, 1791 (“Extracts from St. Domingo Papers, Letter from the President of the General Assembly to the members of the General Assembly of Jamaica, Cap François, August 24, 1791”). A similar chord was struck in subsequent correspondence between the islands. See General Advertiser Oct. 11, 1791 (“Extracts from Papers of ST. DOMINGO”), and General Advertiser Nov. 14, 1791 (“Extract from the Journal of the Colonial Assembly of the French part of Hispaniola, 26th of September, 1791”). 80. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 52. 81. Federal Gazette Nov. 3, 1791 (Baltimore, Nov. 1). See also Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 44–49. For reactions to French and Saint Domingue events in this period in the Spanish Caribbean, see David Patrick Geggus, “Slave Resistance in the Spanish Caribbean in the Mid-1790s,” in A Turbulent Time, 131–55.

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82. This was a product of both circumstance and design. The Saint Domingue delegates arrived in New London, Connecticut, on Sept. 13. Meeting with the French consulgeneral Antoine René Charles Mathurin de la Forest, they were persuaded to bring their request to Ternant, who then wrote to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and War Secretary Henry Knox. Washington, then at Mount Vernon, approved the assistance. See Hamilton to Washington, Sept. 22, 1791, GWP 8:552–53, Knox to Washington, Sept. 22, 1791, GWP 8:554–55, and Washington to Ternant, Sept. 24, 1791, GWP 9:15. Ternant was concerned that the Assembly was turning to the United States (let alone the British West Indies) before France. He and the delegation quarreled extensively, and he delivered the Assembly’s request reluctantly. See Ternant to Montmorin, Sept. 28, 1791, Oct. 7, 1791, and Oct. 24, 1791, CFM 45–51, 56, 60–65. 83. The payments were made until October 1792, when they were withheld after the overthrow of the monarchy. They resumed in early 1793. See Ternant to Montmorin, Mar. 4, 1792, to Lessart, Mar. 9, 1792, CFM 88–93; Jefferson to Ternant, Mar. 7, 1792, TJP 23:31; Jefferson to Morris, Mar. 12, 1793, TJP 25:367–70, and the sources elsewhere in this note. Unofficially, Washington (or perhaps Jefferson, who drafted the letter in question) referred to the planters of Saint Domingue as “brethren” in need of aid (see Jefferson to Washington, Nov. 6, 1791, GWP 9:145 n1), but the administration’s main concern was to avoid seeming to circumvent France and push Saint Domingue toward independence (an issue, as we have seen, that was in the air). See Jefferson to William Short, Nov. 24, 1791, TJP 22:330. In France, the issue continued to produce tensions as Americans sought to balance the national interest (especially as new French governments were created) with French imperial concerns and metropolitan commercial desires to maintain control over supplying the colony. See Gouverneur Morris to Washington, Dec. 27, 1791, GWP 9:335–38; Short to Jefferson, Jan. 25, 1792, TJP 23:68–73; “Notes on the Legitimacy of the French Government, with Addendum,” Nov. 18, 1792, TJP 24:632–33; Hamilton to Washington, Nov. 19, 1792, GWP 11:406–10; Jefferson to Ternant, Nov. 20, 1792, TJP 24:652–54; Jefferson to Morris, Dec. 30, 1792 ,TJP 24:800–802; and Jefferson to Ternant, Jan. 1, 1793, TJP 25:51–52. By 1793 the issue of the French debt and the aid to Saint Domingue had become part of the divisions in Washington’s cabinet. See Short to Jefferson, Apr. 5, 1793, TJP 25:494–510. For an overview, see Tim Matthewson, A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations During the Early Republic (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 19–27. 84. Charles Pinckney to George Washington, Sept. 20, 1791, GWP 8:542. Pinckney’s response to Polony, the General Assembly’s delegate, is recorded in the same letter, GWP 8:543. Despite his empathy, Pinckney explained that only Congress could dispense foreign aid. To Washington he offered unsolicited advice that aiding the colony might be problematic, given the divisions within France and between France and its colonies. 85. Journal of the House of Representatives of the Assembly of Pennsylvania, 1st Assembly, 2nd sess., 534 (Sept. 22, 1791), LCP. In the afternoon session, during which the bill would be formally passed, the Assembly learned of the federal government’s measures to aid Saint Domingue and tabled the Pennsylvania bill. See also Ternant to Montmorin, Sept. 28, 1791, CFM 48–49. 86. Journal of the House of Representatives of the Assembly of Pennsylvania, 1st Assembly, 2nd sess., 528 (Sept. 21, 1791), LCP. See also Gazette of the United States Sept. 24, 1791 (Philadelphia), for an account that includes details not noted in the Pennsylvania House records of Wells’s motion. 87. Journal of the House of Representatives of the Assembly of Pennsylvania, 1st Assembly,

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2nd sess., 530 (Sept. 22, 1791), LCP. On the previous day Bache had provided reports that the gens de couleur of Cap Français were united with the whites. See General Advertiser Sept. 21, 1791 (Philadelphia). 88. The only published reference to this part of the debate is in General Advertiser Sept. 24, 1791 (Philadelphia). See also Ternant to Montmorin, Sept. 30, 1791, CFM 53, in which Ternant noted the debate as proof that “Representatives of this State are always remarkable by their enthusiasm for freedom.” He quoted Maclay as suggesting that it was “inconsistent” for Pennsylvania to assist in putting down a slave insurrection, asking, “‘if one treated a negro rebellion as insurrection, what name would one give to that [rebellion] of Americans to achieve their independence?’” (my translation). 89. Journal of the House of Representatives of the Assembly of Pennsylvania, 1st Assembly, 2nd sess., 530, 534 (Sept. 22, 1791), LCP. For a slightly different treatment of this episode, see Matthewson, Proslavery Foreign Policy, 23. 90. Sylvanus Bourne to Jefferson, Sept. 8, 1791, TJP 22:133. The same letter applauded the “Genius of Liberty” behind events in France. 91. General Advertiser Oct. 10, 1791 (“St. DOMINGO DISTURBANCES” [journal entry for Aug. 21]), reprinted Gazette of the United States Oct. 12, 1791. 92. General Advertiser Nov. 9, 1791 (letter of Mr. Roux to Mr. Faures, Oct. 3, 1791). 93. National Gazette Dec. 22, 1791 (Philadelphia), reprinted General Advertiser Jan. 4, 1792. 94. Nathaniel Cutting to Jefferson, Dec. 28, 1791, TJP 22:461. This letter was printed in National Gazette Feb. 9, 1792 (“Authentic copy of a letter . . .”). 95. A Particular Account, 6–17. At least four editions were printed and circulated in Philadelphia. 96. A Particular Account, 5. 97. Federal Gazette Feb. 13, 1792 (London, Dec. 10, “INSURRECTIONS in ST. DOMINGO”). 98. William Dillwyn to Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Oct. 8, 1789, LCi, PPAS. 99. Federal Gazette Jun. 9, 1791 (House of Commons, “Commotion in Dominica”). Lord Carhampton was quoted as telling Wilberforce that he “ought to be acquainted with the consequences of his philanthropy” and that, in Dominica, “he was stiled by the Negroes, ‘Massa King Wilberforce,’ who was determined to relieve the poor Blacks.” Because of this, the slaves had “resolved to cut the throats of all the Whites.” For similar ideas among white West Indians, see Gazette of the United States Jun. 12, 1790 (Antigua, Apr. 13), and General Advertiser Jun. 10, 1791 (London, Apr. 5). 100. David Patrick Geggus, “British Opinion and the Emergence of Haiti, 1791–1805,” in Slavery and British Society, 1776–1838, ed. James Walvin (London: Macmillan, 1982), 123–49; Geggus, “Haiti and the Abolitionists: Opinion, Propaganda, and International Politics, 1804–1838,” in Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790–1916, ed. David Richardson (London: Cass, 1985), 113–40. For the issue of violence more generally (and treating a later period), see Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). Cf. Christopher L. Brown, “Empire Without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” WMQ 56 (1999): 273–306. 101. Federal Gazette Oct. 20, 1791 (London, Sept. 3). 102. Federal Gazette Dec. 1, 1791 (London, Sept. 16). 103. Pennsylvania Gazette Jan. 4, 1792 (“Jamaica”).

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104. Federal Gazette Apr. 17 1792 (London, Feb. 27). This referred to the perceived spread of French influence in Spain. 105. Percival Stockdale, A Letter from Percival Stockdale to Granville Sharp, Esq. Suggested to the Authour [sic], by the Present Insurrection of the Negroes, in the Island of St. Domingo (Durham: Printed by L. Pennington, 1791), 17, 20. 106. [Roscoe], An Inquiry into the Causes, 3, 18. Roscoe’s writing was serialized in Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser on Jul. 6, Jul. 7, Jul. 9, Jul. 10, Jul. 19, Jul. 20, Jul. 21, and Jul. 23, 1792. 107. General Advertiser Jun. 30, 1792 (“From the Columbian Centinel”). Writings and accounts of the British effort for abolition are pervasive in Philadelphia newspapers in this period. 108. National Gazette Jul. 4, 1792 (Philadelphia). 109. National Gazette Dec. 12, 1791 (London), reprinted Federal Gazette Dec. 19, 1791. 110. James Alexander Dun, “Philadelphia Not Philanthropolis: The Limits of Pennsylvanian Antislavery in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 135, no. 1 (2011): 73–102. See also W. Caleb McDaniel, “Philadelphia Abolitionists and Antislavery Cosmopolitanism,” in Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice in the City of Brotherly Love, ed. Richard Newman and James Mueller (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 149–73. 111. For the originals, see [Boston] Argus Nov. 22, Nov. 25, and Dec. 6, 1791, under the pseudonym “J. P. Martin.” Bishop’s authorship is established in Franklin B. Dexter, “Abraham Bishop, of Connecticut, and His Writings,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 19, 2nd ser. (1905): 190–99. See also Tim Matthewson, “Abraham Bishop, ‘the Rights of Black Men,’ and the American Reaction to the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 67 (1982): 148–54. For treatments of Bishop’s writings on slavery, including this one, see David Waldstreicher and Stephen R. Grossbart, “Abraham Bishop’s Vocation; or, the Mediation of Jeffersonian Politics,” Journal of the Early Republic 18, no. 4 (1998): 617–57, especially 650; and Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, 181 n7, 244. Both of these works focus on Bishop’s development as a political figure and therefore treat his erstwhile radicalism on race as a signal of the ultimate limitations of Jeffersonian ideals rather than a potential direction of thought that would be buffeted by changing needs and circumstances across the decade. Cf. Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 58–59. 112. Theodore Dwight, An Oration Spoken before the Society of the Cincinnati, of the State of Connecticut, Met in Hartford, on the 4th of July (Hartford, CT: Hudson and Goodwin, 1792), 16–17. Unlike Bishop, Dwight connected the insurrections to the efforts of American abolition societies, which he judged to be the fruit of the American Revolution. 113. David Rice, Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy, Proved by a Speech Delivered in the Convention, Held at Danville, Kentucky. By Philanthropos (Lexington, KY: J. Bradford; Philadelphia: Parry Hall, 1792), 9. On Rice and the evangelical call to the republic, see James D. Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals Against Slavery, 1770– 1808 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), chap. 4, especially 87. 114. Federal Gazette Dec. 7, 1797 (“RIGHT [sic] OF BLACK MEN, Continued, From a Boston Paper”). 115. Federal Gazette Dec. 3, 1791 (“following remarks”). 116. Federal Gazette Dec. 7, 1791 (“RIGHT”). 117. Ibid.

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118. Rice, Slavery Inconsistent, 9. 119. Warner Mifflin to John Parrish, Oct. 10, 1791, Cox-Parrish-Wharton Collection, box 1 (“John Parrish Correspondence, 1794–1799”), folder “Parish, John 1791, 1792,” HSP. 120. National Gazette Dec. 5, 1791 (“Extract from MARITIME OBSERVATIONS, Written in 1785 by Dr. Franklin”). 121. For the arc of what he terms “this distinctively cosmopolitan variant of anti-slavery discourse,” see Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 55–67. 122. General Advertiser, Federal Gazette Jul. 23, 1791 (“Anecdote of a Negro Slave”). 123. General Advertiser Sept. 6, 1791 (“A Lesson to the Oppressed”). 124. For an example, see Federal Gazette Aug. 30, 1791 (New York, Aug. 29), reprinted General Advertiser Sept. 1, 1791. See General Advertiser Feb. 5, 1791 (“ANECDOTE”), for the heroism of Rhode Island blacks during the siege of Yorktown. See also General Advertiser Feb. 11 and May 29, 1794, for accounts of slave ship mutinies posed as the recovery of liberty by blacks, who had been “robbed” of it by slavers. 125. This is an area in which my interpretation offers different emphases than that of Ashli White, whose study I generally admire. Whereas White accents the ways in which the events in this early stage of the Haitian Revolution affirmed the American trajectory regarding slavery, I want to stress the fluidity of the moment and the possibilities these more radical ideas offered. See White, Encountering Revolution, 126–38. 126. Federal Gazette Dec. 3, 1791 (“following remarks”). 127. Federal Gazette Dec. 17, 1791 (“RIGHTS OF BLACK MEN. By J. P. Martin of Boston. Concluded”). Dwight similarly described the American Revolution as a “lesson” to the world. France, especially, was indebted to the American example, he argued. Dwight, Oration, 11–12. 128. Rice, Slavery Inconsistent, 10. Dwight also saw the hand of God at work, though by his lights it was American freedom that was progressing. Quoting Jeremiah, he described “the sound of Independence, first raised in the United States, as having ‘gone out, and filled the earth,’” inspiring efforts against slavery everywhere, including those of slaves themselves. Dwight, Oration, 16. 129. For July 4 orations and the French Revolution as a sign of the spread of “American” liberty more generally in this period, see Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 146–51. 130. Charles Nisbet to Rev. William Rogers, Aug. 17, 1792, LCi, PPAS. 131. Federal Gazette Dec. 3, 1791 (“following remarks”); Dun, “Philadelphia Not Philanthropolis.” 132. Federal Gazette Dec. 7, 1791 (“RIGHT”). 133. National Gazette Nov. 28, 1791 (Philadelphia), partial reprint Gazette of the United States Nov. 30, 1791. 134. National Gazette May 24, 1792 (“To the Editor of the NATIONAL GAZETTE”). 135. Historians have disagreed over the origins and character of the group. David Geggus provides the most detail of any English-language account. See David Geggus, “The ‘Swiss’ and the Problem of Slave/Free Colored Cooperation,” in Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 99–118; and Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 50. Cf. Fick, Making of Haiti, 124–25; and James, Black Jacobins, 98–100. The label “Swiss”/“Suisses” was not used in contemporary accounts in Philadelphia. One report identified the slaves as “Zuzards.” See National Gazette Mar. 26, 1792 (Philadelphia). 136. National Gazette Mar. 26, 1792 (Philadelphia).

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137. Gazette of the United States Mar. 28, 1792 (Philadelphia), General Advertiser Mar. 27, 1792 (Kingston, Jamaica, Jan. 21). See also Gazette of the United States Jun. 27, 1792 (London, Apr. 24), for the French National Assembly’s decrees blaming the captain of the vessel that brought the group to British Honduras. The Assembly apologized to the British government and offered to pay restitution. 138. For “indiscriminate fury,” see Cutting Journal, Apr. 17, 1792, Nathaniel Cutting Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA, quoted in Newman, “American Political Culture,” 79. For “chiefs,” see Cutting to Jefferson, Dec. 28, 1791, TJP 22:461, which is also printed in National Gazette Feb. 9, 1792 (“Authentic copy of a letter . . .”). See also Cutting to Jefferson, Jan. 21 and Jan. 24, 1792, TJP 23:51–52, 61, both of which were printed in National Gazette Mar. 5, 1792 (“Copy of a letter”) and (“Copy of another Letter”), reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette Mar. 7, 1792. 139. Courier de l’Amerique Dec. 7, 1792 (“Après les massacres commis à Lyons . . .”). 140. Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser Aug. 31, 1793 (“By the ship Andrew . . .”). 141. Cutting to Jefferson, Nov. 29, 1791, TJP 22:350. 142. National Gazette May 14, 1792 (Philadelphia), reprinted General Advertiser May 15, 1792, Pennsylvania Gazette May 16, 1792. It is tempting to suggest that this writer is the author of “Mon Odyssée,” an undated first-person account by a white colonist who experienced the insurrections, the destruction of Cap Français, and the violence at Fort Dauphin between 1791 and 1794. The original manuscripts, now housed in the library of the Historic New Orleans Collection, were selectively edited and translated by Althéa de Puech Parham as My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions, by a Creole of Saint Domingue (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), though, as Jeremy Popkin has shown, Puech Parham removed all of the sections in poetry or recast them as prose. See Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 59–92, 208–18, 252–69. This portion of verse is not included in the excerpts Popkin reproduces. 143. General Advertiser Mar. 27, 1792 (Kingston, Jan. 21). 144. See Davies, “Class, Culture, and Color,” 124 n4. For discerning overviews of the use of the phrase, see Ashli White, “The Politics of ‘French Negroes’ in the United States,” Historical Reflections 29, no. 1 (2003): 103–21; and Davies, “Class, Culture, and Color,” 124– 44. My engagement with these interpretations continues in the following chapter. For a suggestive treatment of Haiti’s cultural emanations organized around an alternate use of the phrase, see Sara E. Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). For its different resonance in a burgeoning slave society nearby, see Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, especially 60–82. 145. General Advertiser Nov. 4, 1791 (Kingston, Sept. 13). 146. National Gazette Nov. 7, 1791 (Philadelphia). 147. Gazette of the United States Dec. 31, 1791 (Philadelphia), reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette Jan. 4, 1792, Federal Gazette Jan. 12, 1792. For a less editorialized report, see General Advertiser Dec. 29, 1791 (Philadelphia). 148. General Advertiser Jun. 25, 1792 (Kingston, May 14). 149. See, for example, General Advertiser Jan. 6, 1792 (Philadelphia), and National Gazette Apr. 2, 1792 (Philadelphia). 150. National Gazette Feb. 16, 1792 (Philadelphia). 151. National Gazette Feb. 9, 1792 (Philadelphia). 152. See General Advertiser Oct. 10, 1791 (“St. DOMINGO DISTURBANCES”

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[journal entries for Aug. 31–Sept. 2, Sept. 4]). Yves Benot identifies Cap as an associate of Ogé’s and cites sources that place him at the center of the initial uprisings in the North. See Benot, “The Insurgents of 1791,” 100–101. 153. National Gazette Apr. 16, 1792 (Philadelphia). 154. Pennsylvania Gazette Jun. 27, 1792 (Kingston, May 12). 155. Philadelphia Gazette Apr. 18, 1795 (“From the Martinico Gazette of March 18”). For “French”-Carib connections, literal and figurative, see Philadelphia Gazette Apr. 20, 1795 (“The Philadelphia Gazette”), Philadelphia Gazette May 14, 1795 (“The Philadelphia Gazette”), and Minerva Jun. 20, 1795 (Bermuda, Jun. 6). 156. Aurora Sept. 18, 1795 (“Extract of a letter from a gentleman in Jamaica to his friend in his [sic] Newyork [sic], dated June 23”). 157. For the “black Caribs,” the fighting in St. Vincent and Grenada, and the Second Maroon War, see Craton, Testing the Chains, 145–53, 180–94, 211–23; and Cox, “The British Caribbean in the Age of Revolution.” For the cultural hybridity that shaped Carib resistance in the period, see Julie Chun Kim, “The Caribs of St. Vincent and Indigenous Resistance During the Age of Revolutions,” Early American Studies 11, no. 1 (2012): 117–32. In exploring the differing factors behind the relative disorder in Saint Domingue and Jamaica, David Geggus’s interpretation differs from Craton’s depiction of slave resistance as sharing important continuities. See Geggus, “The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions,” WMQ 44 (1987): 274–99. For contemporary calls to remove the maroon groups that surrendered, see Pennsylvania Gazette Jun. 1, 1796 (Kingston, Apr. 15). For their arrival at Halifax, see Gazette of the United States Aug. 9, 1796 (Halifax, Jul. 13). 158. See Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, 51–68, 82–92. For a productive counterpoint, see David Patrick Geggus, “The French and Haitian Revolutions, and Resistance to Slavery in the Americas: An Overview,” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 56 (1989): 107–24. 159. For a nuanced exploration of this sort of influence, see David Patrick Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815,” in A Turbulent Time, 1–50. 160. National Gazette May 28, 1792 (Philadelphia), reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette May 30, 1792. See also New-York Daily Gazette May 28, 1792 (Petersburg, May 17). This news spread far afield. For notice in London, see Federal Gazette Sept. 24, 1792 (“ABRIDGEMENT of the STATE of POLITICS. FOR THIS WEEK [ July 7]”). 161. See, for example, Smith Snead, County Lieutenant, to the Governor, May 5, 1792, and W. Wilson to the Governor, May 10, 1792, Virginia Calendar, 5:534–35, 542. 162. Litt. Savage to the Governor, May 17, 1792, Virginia Calendar, 5:546–47. Also Miles King to Robert Goode, May 17, 1792, in ibid., 5:547. Egerton, Death or Liberty, 260– 61, quotation at 261. 163. Holt Richardson to the Governor, Jun. 5, 1792, Virginia Calendar, 5:571–72. 164. For notice in Philadelphia, see General Advertiser Aug. 13, 1792 (Philadelphia, “Extract from Newbern, N.C., Jul. 26”), reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette Aug. 15, 1792. 165. For the Charleston municipal resolves, see Federal Gazette Jun. 26, 1792 (Charleston, Jun. 6), General Advertiser Jun. 28, 1792 (Charleston, Jun. 11), and National Gazette Jul. 11, 1792 (Charleston). For an updated set of resolutions, see Federal Gazette Sept. 4, 1792 (Charleston, Aug. 13), reprinted General Advertiser Sept. 5, 1792. 166. See “An Act to prohibit the Importation of Slaves from Africa or other places

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beyond the sea, into this State, for two years, and also to prohibit the importation or bringing in Slaves, Negroes, Mulattoes, Indians, Moors or Mestizoes, bound for a term of years, from any of the United States, by land or water,” in The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, ed. David McCord and Thomas Cooper (Columbia, SC: Printed by A. S. Johnston, 1836–40), 7:431. This spring 1792 evidence suggests that the perception of danger preceded that identified by George Terry in his study of white Charleston’s reactions to the events in Saint Domingue in mid-1793. See George D. Terry, “South Carolina’s First Negro Seamen Acts, 1793–1803,” Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (1980): 78–93; Terry, “A Study of the Impact of the French Revolution and the Insurrections in Saint-Domingue upon South Carolina, 1790–1805” (MA thesis, University of South Carolina, 1975), 43–44. 167. National Gazette Jan. 30, 1793 (Philadelphia). 168. Egerton, Death or Liberty, 261–63; James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 41–43. 169. See James Sidbury, “Saint Domingue in Virginia: Ideology, Local Meanings, and Resistance to Slavery, 1790–1800,” Journal of Southern History 63 (1997): 531–52; and Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords, 43–48. For black networks of communication in this period more generally, see Julius Scott III, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1986). 170. Aurora and Gazette of the United States Nov. 18, 1795 (Philadelphia), reprinted Minerva Nov. 21, 1795. 171. Gazette of the United States Feb. 19, 1796 (Philadelphia, “Extract of a Letter, Dated Havanna, January 10”), reprinted Aurora Feb. 20, 1796. 172. Gazette of the United States Apr. 19, 1796 (“SAVANNAH, March 24. Extract of a letter from St. Mary’s, March 15”), reprinted Philadelphia Gazette Apr. 21, 1796. Reports later told of Jean-François’s arrival in Spain. See Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Jun. 20, 1796 (Cadiz, March 18), reprinted Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 21, 1796. See also Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 77–94; and Geggus, “The Slave Leaders,” 179–85.

Chapter 3. The Negrophile Republic 1. See, for example, “John Randolph’s Deposition,” Jul. 21, 1793, Virginia Calendar 6:452–53; Secret Keeper, Richmond to Secret Keeper Norfolk (copy), undated, enclosed in William Nelson Jr. to Thomas Newton, Aug. 8, 1793, Henry Lee Executive Papers, box 4, folder 13, Executive Papers, Office of the Governor (RG3); Peter Oram to William Moultrie, Aug. 16, 1793, Records of the General Assembly, Governor’s Messages, 1783–1830 (no. 577-35, 39), South Carolina Department of Archives and History. I am grateful to Jason Sharples for providing me with copies of his research files concerning these episodes. See also Egerton, Death or Liberty, 261–63; Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords, 41–43; Robert Alderson, “Charleston’s Rumored Slave Revolt of 1793,” in Impact of the Haitian Revolution, 93–111; and White, Encountering Revolution, 138–45. 2. General Advertiser Jul. 13, 1793 (“Extract of a letter from a gentleman in Baltimore to his friend in this city, containing some important details relative to the unfortunate affair at Cape François”). For guesses as to the number of future arrivals, see Federal Gazette Jul. 11, 1793 (Baltimore, Jul. 10), and General Advertiser Jul. 12, 1793 (Baltimore, Jul. 8). As compared to the hundreds expected elsewhere, eleven vessels from Le Cap arrived at Philadel-

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phia between Jul. 8 and 13, followed by about the same number over the following two weeks. Several reported having lost their shipping records in the fire. NAMARB RG 26, E1057 vol. 2, E1059B box 14. 3. On the origins of the fever, see Billy G. Smith, Ship of Death: A Voyage That Changed the Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), especially 69–72, 110– 11, 157–76, 185–86. See also Susan E. Klepp, “Zachariah Poulson’s Bills of Mortality, 1788–1801,” in Life in Early Philadelphia: Documents from the Revolutionary and Early National Periods, ed. Billy G. Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 221–23; and J. H. Powell, Bring out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949, reprinted 1993), 11–17. For contemporary ideas, see Henry Lee to Jefferson, Jun. 28, 1793, “Notes of Cabinet Meeting and Conversations with Edmond Charles Genet,” Jefferson to Henry Lee, Jul. 17, 1793, TJP 26:391, 437, 516. Elizabeth Drinker noted that the fever was said by some to have been “occasion’d by damag’d Coffee, and fish” left to rot at a wharf on Water Street, while others “say it was imported in a Vessel from Cape-Francoies which lay at our warfe, or at the warfe back of our Store.” Crane, Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 1:495 (Aug. 23, 1793). For notice of restrictions placed on vessels entering the port, see National Gazette Sept. 7, 1793 (Philadelphia). For notice that Virginia ports would require vessels from Philadelphia to be quarantined, see Henry Lee to Jefferson, Sept. 18, 1793, TJP 27:135. For the environment in Philadelphia, see Smith, Ship of Death, 187–241; and Simon Finger, The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 120–34. Andrew Brown’s Federal Gazette was the only newspaper to print continuously over this period. The final issue of Philip Freneau’s National Gazette was Oct. 23, 1793. 4. Crane, Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 1:500 (Sept. 3, 1793). 5. See General Advertiser Sept. 2, 1793 (Philadelphia), and Sept. 4, 1793 (Philadelphia), reprinted National Gazette Sept. 7, 1793 (Philadelphia), and Gazette of the United States Sept. 4, 1793 (Philadelphia). See also Gertrude MacKinney, ed., Pennsylvania Archives, 9th ser., vol. 1, part 2, “Executive Minutes of Governor Thomas Mifflin, 1792–1794” (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Archives, Bureau of Publications, 1931), 656–57 (Sept. 2, 1793); Thomas Mifflin to Washington, Sept. 2, 1793, GWP 14:14; and Henry Knox to Washington, Sept. 24, 1793, GWP 14:129. Knox was being held at Elizabeth Town, New Jersey, for fear that he might be a carrier. For the French troops’ fate, see Sundry Frenchmen in a Philadelphia Jail to Washington, Dec. 3, 1793, GWP 14:460; Committee to Attend to and Alleviate the Sufferings of the Afflicted with the Malignant Fever, Minutes of the . . . Committee . . . to Attend to and Alleviate the Sufferings of the Afflicted with the Malignant Fever . . . (Philadelphia: Printed by order of the Select and Common Councils of the City of Philadelphia, 1848), 29–30, 33–34 (entries for Sept. 19, Sept. 21, and Sept. 25, 1793); Thomas Mifflin to Jefferson, Dec. 13, 1793, and Dec. 20, 1793, TJP 27:511, 597; and Jefferson to George Washington, Dec. 21, 1793, TJP 27:607. 6. Matthew Rainbow Hale, “On Their Tiptoes: Political Time and Newspapers During the Advent of the Radicalized French Revolution, Circa 1792–1793,” Journal of the Early Republic 29, no. 2 (2009): 191–218; Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 61–73. See also Davis, Revolutions, 28–42. 7. The most detailed account in English of these events is Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 85–245. For differing emphases, see Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, chaps.

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3–6; Fick, Making of Haiti, 161–82; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 213–28; and Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 152–70. 8. This effort culminated with the Orders in Council of November 6, 1793. Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 388–89. 9. The embargo lasted from Mar. 26 to May 25. See Alexander Hamilton to Washington, Mar. 8, 1794, GWP 15:336; and Richard Peters, ed., The Public Statutes at Large of the United States, from the Organization of the Government in 1789 to March 3, 1845 (Boston: C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1845), 1:400–401. In mid-April Pennsylvania militiamen were called out to quell a riot of British sailors in the capital. See MacKinney, Pennsylvania Archives 754 (Apr. 14, 1794). 10. Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 67–81, 170–88. 11. Suzanne Desan, “Foreigners, Cosmopolitanism, and French Revolutionary Universalism,” in The French Revolution in Global Perspective, ed. Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 86–100; Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 238–40; M. J. Sydenham, The Girondins (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1961), 103–6. See also Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 163–72. For the confluence of metropolitan, Caribbean, and American developments in forming and elevating the Girondin approach, see Covo, “Commerce, Empire, et Révolutions,” 205–10, and, for Genet’s role, see 222–29, 362–72, 400–407. 12. Thomas Newton Jr. and William Lindsay to Washington, May 5, 1793, GWP 12:521. 13. General Advertiser May 25, 1793 (“To the Public”). 14. General Advertiser May 3, 1793 (Philadelphia); Jefferson to James Monroe, May 5, 1793, TJP 25:660. L’Embuscade had carried Genet from France to Charleston and had sailed north during the minister’s march on land. 15. For Genet’s early career and general diplomatic approach, see Harry Ammon, The Genet Mission (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 10–31; and Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 330–36. For his arrival in Charleston, see Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Apr. 16, 1793, CFM 211–13. Also Robert J. Alderson, This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions: French Consul Michel-Ange-Bernard Mangourit and International Republicanism in Charleston (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 20–22. For his entry into Philadelphia, see General Advertiser May 17, 1793 (Philadelphia), and Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, May 18, 1793, CFM 214–15. 16. For criticism of the levees, see Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 51. For the politics of Washington’s social activities more generally, see Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 43–46, 52–57; and Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 49–50. 17. For Noailles’s American career (and much else), see Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French, 35–40, 59–62, 150–54. For his later efforts in Saint Domingue, Jamaica, and Cuba, see Philippe R. Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801–1804 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 237–39; and Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 157. 18. Washington to Alexander Hamilton (Private), May 5, 1793, GWP 12:515. It is unclear whether or not Washington had invited Noailles to visit him prior to this. See

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Noailles to Washington, May 4, 1793, GWP 12:315, for his note referencing Washington’s “introduction this morning,” which has not been found. This may well be an error of usage on Noailles’s part, since his written English seems to have been spotty. 19. See Concord [New Hampshire] Herald Jun. 6, 1793 (“Extract of a letter from a gentleman in the Treasury department at Philadelphia, to his friend in Hanover, May 4th”), reprinted [Portsmouth] New Hampshire Gazette Jun. 18, 1793, Boston Centinel Jun. 19, 1793, Salem Gazette Jun. 25, 1793. The Herald’s editor, George Hough, revealed the letter writer to have been John Phillips Ripley, who worked at the comptroller’s office in the Treasury Department and who had corresponded with William Woodward, a recent Dartmouth College graduate. See George Hough to Hamilton, Jul. 23, 1793, AHP 15:120–21. 20. Matthewson, Proslavery Foreign Policy, 46–47; Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 336–41; Albert Hall Bowman, The Struggle for Neutrality: Franco-American Diplomacy During the Federalist Era (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974), 48–55. 21. Armitage, Declaration of Independence, 67–93; Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 82–97; Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots, 64–87. 22. Jefferson to James Monroe, May 5, 1793, TJP 25:660. 23. General Advertiser May 10, 1793 (Philadelphia). 24. General Advertiser Jul. 20, 1793 (“FROM A CORRESPONDENT. Two questions to two Great Men, one apiece”). Noailles responded publicly that the story was “a lye.” See General Advertiser Jul. 23, 1793 (“For the GENERAL ADVERTISER”). See also General Advertiser Jul. 24, 1793 (“Mr. BACHE”), for an extract of Noailles’s call to abolish titles in the National Assembly. 25. Hamilton and Knox twisted the editor’s arm to learn the name; Noailles himself visited the General Advertiser’s offices to demand the identity of his slanderer. See “Notes of Cabinet meeting on Edmond Charles Genet,” Jul. 23, 1793, TJP 26:555–56. For accounts of the visit, see Gazette of the United States Aug. 3, 1793 (“For the Gazette”), and General Advertiser Aug. 4, 1793 (Philadelphia). 26. This was the convention’s decree of Nov. 19, 1792. See Federal Gazette Feb. 23, 1793 (“From a London Paper of January 8th”), and National Gazette Mar. 2, 1793 (“Foreign Affairs. London, January 9”). 27. “Relatif aux Instructions de Genet,” Dec. 1792, CFM 201. Note that this was a subsidiary statement to Genet’s full instructions that was added to them after the declaration of war with Spain and Britain. This text suggests that Genet’s actions were meant primarily as a diversion that would sap British and Spanish power and that the efforts were not meant to hurt the United States. 28. General Advertiser Jul. 17, 1793 (“On Monday last . . .”). 29. For accounts of select Philadelphia public celebrations, see General Advertiser May 21, 1793 (GENERAL ADVERTISER), General Advertiser Aug. 14, 1793 (Philadelphia), General Advertiser Feb. 8, 1794 (Philadelphia), General Advertiser May 3, 1794 (CIVIC FESTIVAL), and General Advertiser Aug. 28, 1794 (“TOASTS For the 10th of August 1794”). 30. See Newman, Parades and Politics, 54, 127–45; and John M. Murrin, “Escaping Perfidious Albion: Federalism, Fear of Aristocracy, and the Democratization of Corruption in Postrevolutionary America,” in Virtue, Corruption, and Self-Interest: Political Values in the 18th Century, ed. Richard K. Matthews (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1994), 116–20. For the dinner and guillotine, see Peter Porcupine [William Cobbett], History of the American Jacobins, Commonly Denominated Democrats (Philadelphia: Printed for William

Notes to Pages 96–99

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Cobbett, 1796), 24. See also General Advertiser Mar. 5, 1794 (“Curiosités en Cire” [“Wax Curiosities”]), which described the “natural sized” guillotine, complete with a basket to catch the mannequin’s head. 31. Newman, Parades and Politics, 124–26, 131. 32. General Advertiser Jul. 26, 1793 (Philadelphia). 33. On the commissioners’ appointment, see Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, 22–25. Marcel Dorigny, “Sonthonax et Brissot: Le cheminement d’une filiation politique assumée,” Revue Francaise d’Histoire d’Outre Mer 84 (Sept. 1997): 29–40, argues that Sonthonax’s connection with the Gironde developed in early 1793 as Sonthonax became active in Jacobin club debates and embraced Brissot’s ideas about expanding the Revolution abroad. He finds a close connection between Genet’s instructions and those of the civil commissioners (see page 36). 34. General Advertiser Apr. 18, 1793 (“For the GENERAL ADVERTISER”). 35. See General Advertiser May 6, 1793 (Philadelphia), reprinted National Gazette May 8, 1793, for the report of being boarded by such a privateer made by a recently arrived passenger in Philadelphia. For a similar account blending the privateering issue with news about Genet and Saint Domingue, see General Advertiser May 1, 1793 (Charleston, Apr. 17). 36. “Supplement Aux Instructions Données au Citoyen Genêt . . .,” CFM 210–11. 37. General Advertiser, Federal Gazette May 28, 1793 (Philadelphia). Bache introduced this account by noting that “the accounts we have hitherto received of the cannonade of Portau-Prince, were given by persons not well affected to the national cause in the islands.” 38. National Gazette Jun. 8, 1793 (Philadelphia). 39. Genet to Le Brun, May 31, 1793, CFM 216. 40. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jun. 19, 1793, CFM 217. The portions of the letter criticizing Washington were written in code. 41. See Christopher Gore to Jefferson, Sept. 10, 1793, TJP 27:79–82; and Jefferson to Antoine Charbonnet Duplaine, Oct. 3, 1793, TJP 27:184–85. For Jefferson’s frustration with Genet over this episode, see Jefferson to James Madison, Sept. 8, 1793, TJP 27:62. 42. For consul Mangourit’s efforts, see Alderson, This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions, 40–43, 55–58, 60–62, 65–67. For Genet’s efforts to prevent relief from going to disloyal French, see Edmond Charles Genet to Jefferson, Aug. 4, 1793, TJP 26:612. For an acknowledgment of the tension between the émigrés’ likely counterrevolutionary politics and their dire needs, see General Advertiser, Federal Gazette Jul. 12, 1793 (Philadelphia). Notices of the various relief societies established to collect funds for them suffuse the newspapers in this period. For efforts involving Genet, see, for example, Federal Gazette Jul. 30, 1793 (Baltimore, Jul. 29), reprinted General Advertiser Jul. 31, 1793, Gazette of the United States Aug. 3, 1793 (“For the Gazette”), General Advertiser Aug. 4, 1793 (Philadelphia), National Gazette, Pennsylvania Gazette Aug. 7, 1793 (Philadelphia), General Advertiser Nov. 30, 1793 (“COPY OF A CIRCULAR LETTER FROM THE MINISTER OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, TO THE CONSULS OF THIS REPUBLIC IN THE UINTED STATES”), reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette Dec. 4, 1793, Gazette of the United States Dec. 27, 1793 (Baltimore, Dec. 21), Gazette of the United States Dec. 28, 1793 (Charleston, Nov. 20), Gazette of the United States Dec. 30, 1793 (Charleston), General Advertiser Dec. 31, 1793 (Philadelphia), reprinted with comment Gazette of the United States Dec. 31, 1793, Gazette of the United States Jan. 6, 1794, and Philadelphia Gazette Jan. 31, 1794. 43. “Notes of Cabinet Meeting on Edmond Charles Genet,” Jul. 23, 1793, TJP 26:553–54.

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44. Hamilton to [———], May 18, 1793, AHP 14:473–76. For French violence as a cause of disaffection among the emergent Federalists more generally, see Rachel Hope Cleves, “On Writing the History of Violence,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 641–65. 45. NAMARB RG 36, E1057 vol. 2. Jones’s reports and those of his passengers typify the pace and pervasiveness of the news. For the reprints of the news he brought to Philadelphia, see The Guardian or New Brunswick [New Jersey] Advertiser Jul. 10, [Elizabethtown] New-Jersey Journal Jul. 10, [Easton] Maryland Herald Jul. 16, Salem Gazette Jul. 16, [New Haven] Connecticut Journal Jul. 17, Norwich Packet Jul. 18, [New London] Connecticut Gazette Jul. 18, The Phenix, or, Windham [Connecticut] Herald Jul. 20, and Catskill Packet Jul. 22, 1793. 46. Federal Gazette Jul. 6, 1793 (Philadelphia), reprinted General Advertiser Jul. 8, 1793, Pennsylvania Gazette, Gazette of the United States, National Gazette Jul. 10, 1793. 47. Federal Gazette Jul. 9, 1793 (“Capt. Fanning of the brig Union, arrived yesterday in 14 days from Cape Francois, gives the following melancholy particulars respecting the fate of that unhappy island”). 48. Federal Gazette Jul. 9, 1793 (“Information from the schooner Barbara, Joseph White, arrived yesterday”), reprinted National Gazette Jul. 13, 1793. 49. General Advertiser Jul. 8, 1793 (Philadelphia), reprinted Gazette of the United States Jul. 10, 1793. 50. Gazette of the United States Jul. 10, 1793 (Philadelphia). 51. Gazette of the United States Jul. 13, 1793 (New York). 52. General Advertiser Jul. 9, 1793 (“Conflagration of Cape-Francois”), reprinted Federal Gazette Jul. 10, 1793. 53. Federal Gazette Jul. 25, 1793 (“Proclamation of the Civil Commissioners, Cape Francois June 21, 1793”), reprinted General Advertiser Jul. 26, 1793, Gazette of the United States, National Gazette Jul. 27, 1793. 54. Gazette of the United States Jul. 31, 1793 (Philadelphia). 55. Gazette of the United States Sept. 7, 1793 (Philadelphia, “Hispaniola”). 56. Federal Gazette Oct. 21, 1793 (Salem, Oct. 15). 57. Gazette of the United States Aug. 28, 1793 (Philadelphia). This particular reference was to the policy of emancipation as applied to Martinique. 58. Gazette of the United States Dec. 24, 1793 (“Mr. Russell . . .”). 59. Cleves, Reign of Terror, 58–68; Cleves, “‘Jacobins in This Country’: The United States, Great Britain, and Trans-Atlantic Anti-Jacobinism,” Early American Studies 8, no. 2 (2010): 410–45. 60. General Advertiser Dec. 2, 1793 (“Proclamation of John Whitlock . . .”). “It is not in order to become a theatre of republican virtues . . . that a colony is established,” Whitlock chided. Instead, colonies’ “true prosperity consisted in raising a great deal of produce.” 61. Gazette of the United States Jan. 7, 1794 (“To the Printer of the Gazette of the United States”). 62. Hyslop, “American Press Reports,” 342–43; General Advertiser Jan. 23, 1793 (Paris, Oct. 12). In the news from France that Americans did receive, the “crimes” of the Brissotins were commonly connected to Girondin colonial policies. See, for example, Gazette of the United States Jan. 27, 1794 (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania Gazette Jan. 29, 1794 (“The Charges against the Members of the Convention, executed at Paris . . .”), and General Advertiser Feb. 12, 1794 (Norfolk). It is clear that Americans failed to fully understand the implications and

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meaning of the fall of the Girondins or the differences between their universalism and the nationalist motivations of Montagnards such as Robespierre. See Donald Sutherland, France, 1789–1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 184–239. 63. Cleves, Reign of Terror, 73–87. For the spotty records in Philadelphia of the doings of the actual Jacobins of Paris in this period, see General Advertiser Jan. 23, 1793 (Paris, Oct. 12), Apr. 2, 1793 (Paris, Feb. 21), May 7, 1793 (Paris, Mar. 12), Jun. 5, 1793 (Paris, Apr. 9), and Jun. 7, 1793 ( Jacobin club, Apr. 8–9). On the whole, treating the specific response to events in Saint Domingue simply adds to Cleves’s useful and convincing argument that French violence empowered an anti-Jacobin discourse among Federalists and orthodox clergy, particularly in New England. That these same “Jacobins” were widely seen as having emancipated the empire’s slaves, however, complicates her depiction of American antislavery as fundamentally shaped by that same discourse. 64. Gazette of the United States Jan. 7, 1794 (“To the FARMER, alias Citizen MOUNTAIN”). 65. Gazette of the United States Dec. 24, 1793 (Plymouth, Oct. 2). 66. General Advertiser Jul. 9, 1793 (Philadelphia, “Conflagration of Cape-Francois”), reprinted Federal Gazette Jul. 10, 1793. 67. Popkin, You Are All Free, 155–59, 177–79. 68. For a Galbaud in America, see ibid., 302–9. Galbaud was almost omnipresent in Philadelphia’s newspapers between Jul. 1793 and Jan. 1794. What follows is only a representative sampling, many of which were reprinted across numerous newspapers. For his initial arrest, see General Advertiser Jul. 17, 1793 (Philadelphia). For letters and proclamations regarding the Jupiter, see General Advertiser Jul. 27, 1793 (Norfolk, Jul. 17), Federal Gazette Aug. 13, 1793 (Philadelphia), Gazette of the United States Aug. 24, 1793 (New York), Federal Gazette Aug. 27, 1793 (New York, Aug. 26), National Gazette Aug. 27, 1793 (New York, Aug. 21), and General Advertiser Aug. 28, 1793 (New York, “To the Printers of the Diary”), summarized National Gazette Aug. 31, 1793. For the arrest, see Gazette of the United States Aug. 21, 1793 (New York, Aug. 19). See also a summary of the events to that date, Pennsylvania Gazette Aug. 28, 1793 (New York). Genet argued that the general was a deserter and appealed to provisions of the Franco-American treaty of 1778 that directed American officials to aid in capturing him. When Clinton’s officers caught up with the French group in a Westchester tavern on Aug. 31, however, they realized that their documents were dated for the next day. Galbaud protested that this invalidated the order and argued furthermore that since he had never been a member of the Jupiter’s crew he was not a deserter. While the arresting officers hesitated, he escaped again. For Genet’s efforts and Galbaud’s escape, see General Advertiser Sept. 2, 1793 (New York), and Gazette of the United States Sept. 4, 1793 (New York, Aug. 31). For Galbaud in Canada, see Federal Gazette Sept. 7, 1793 (Philadelphia), Federal Gazette Oct. 17, 1793 (Quebec, Sept. 26), National Gazette Oct. 19, 1793 (Philadelphia), Federal Gazette Nov. 21, 1793 (New York, Nov. 20), General Advertiser Dec. 2, 1793 (Philadelphia), and General Advertiser Jan. 7, 1794 (Quebec). For the meeting with Genet in New York, see Gazette of the United States Dec. 30, 1793 (New York, Dec. 23), General Advertiser, Federal Gazette Jan. 1, 1794, Pennsylvania Gazette Jan. 1, 1794, and General Advertiser Jan. 2, 1794, Jan. 4, 1794 (“From the New York Daily Advertiser”). For Galbaud’s letter to Edmund Randolph, see Federal Gazette Jan. 21, 1794 (New York, Jan. 20). For Galbaud’s reception in Paris, see General Advertiser May 1, 1794 (National Convention, Feb. 5), Federal Gazette Jun. 27, 1794 (“The Courier Francois

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of yesterday, contains the following article”), and Pennsylvania Gazette Jul. 2, 1794 (Philadelphia). 69. Edmond Charles Genet to Jefferson, Sept. 6, 1793, TJP 27:41–42. For public accusations of British involvement, see Federal Gazette Sept. 7, 1793 (Philadelphia), and General Advertiser Sept. 9, 1793 (Philadelphia). For evidence of Galbaud’s conspiracy with émigré royalists, see Federal Gazette Sept. 11, 1793 (Philadelphia), and Pennsylvania Gazette Sept. 11, 1793 (Baltimore). 70. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sept. 19, 1793, CFM 243. Genet was, of course, anxious to justify his doings before the new regime, since his status after the fall of the Girondins was unclear. 71. National Gazette Sept. 14, 1793 (New York, Sept. 9). See also National Gazette Jul. 13, 1793 (Philadelphia), in which Freneau described Galbaud’s conduct as “inexcusable” and guessed that he would now, “in imitation of Dumourier’s [sic] conduct, use his influence to deliver as much of the fleet as is in his power, into the hands of the enemies of the republic.” This was precisely Genet’s concern. For his connections between the two, see Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oct. 5, 1793, CFM 271–72. See also Federal Gazette Sept. 11, 1793 (Philadelphia), for a bulletin to the French squadron along the same lines. Galbaud had served on Dumouriez’s staff during the invasion of France by Austria and Prussia and had been part of the victory at Valmy. He had brought the news of his former commander’s defection to Saint Domingue in mid-May. See Popkin, You Are All Free, 157–58. 72. General Advertiser, Federal Gazette Jul. 12, 1793 (“Report of the meeting of the French Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality,” Jul. 9). 73. Jefferson to James Monroe, Jul. 14, 1793, TJP 26:503. Jefferson had earlier voiced support of the commissioners’ policies using similar terms, describing the people that Sonthonax had deported as “aristocrats and monocrats,” and noting that he “wish[ed] we could distribute [those coming to the United States] among the Indians, who would teach them lessons of liberty and equality.” Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph, May 26, 1793, TJP 26:123. 74. For the commissioners as agents of “Louis Capet,” see Gazette of the United States Aug. 3, 1793 (“FROM THE BALTIMORE EVENING POST”). For the commissioners as “fiery despots,” acting beyond the Revolution’s intent, see National Gazette Aug. 21, 1793 (“For the NATIONAL GAZETTE”). See also Thomas Millet to Washington, Aug. 20, 1793, GWP 13:512–17. Millet, the past president of the Saint Marc Assembly, warned of a conspiracy between Genet, the commissioners, the British, and the American “aristocratic party” to divide the United States from France. Jefferson advised Washington to ignore the letter. Jefferson to George Washington, Aug. 26, 1793, TJP 26:759. See also Tobias Lear to Thomas Jefferson, Aug. 24, 1793, GWP 13:535. 75. For the publication dates of various French-language newspapers in Philadelphia, see George Parker Winship, “French Newspapers in the United States from 1790–1800,” Proceedings and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 14 (1920): 92–126. See also Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French, 108; and Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States, 122–40. For Tanguy’s stance toward the Revolution in France, see White, Encountering Revolution, 95–99. For his struggles with the commissioners, see Popkin, You Are All Free, 145–46. Gatereau and Tanguy held differing positions; Gatereau had departed the colony in a period when wealthier whites were becoming increasingly leery of the direction of events at home, while Tanguy was an ardent republican who had run afoul of the commissioners politically. See, for example, his prospectus for the paper, dated “January” 1794.

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76. As quoted in Popkin, You Are All Free, 309. 77. National Gazette Oct. 12, 1793 (Norfolk, Oct. 2). 78. NAMARB RG 36, E1057 vol. 2, E1059B box 15. 79. Edmond Charles Genet to Jefferson, Nov. 18, 1793, TJP 27:404; Belley, Lettre Écrite de New-Yorck par les députés de Saint-Domingue, A Leurs Commettans (Paris: Imprimée Par Ordre de la Convention Nationale, 1794), 6–8. 80. Federal Gazette Nov. 9, 1793 (“THE FEDERAL GAZETTE. By the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia. A PROCLAMATION”); MacKinney, Pennsylvania Archives 789 (Nov. 8, 1793); Popkin, You Are All Free, 320. 81. Popkin, You Are All Free, 321–24. 82. American Star/L’Étoile Américaine Feb. 4, 1794 (“To souls devoid of sensibility . . .”). 83. American Star/L’Étoile Américaine Feb. 13, 1794 (“Great variation of the Genetical thermometer”). 84. American Star/L’Étoile Américaine Feb. 6, 1794 (“Information to the Mulattoes of St. Domingo, and to their powerful Protectors on the Continent”). 85. For rumors regarding emancipation, see American Star/L’Étoile Américaine Feb. 6, 1794 (“A Gentleman lately arrived at Philadelphia says . . .”), reprinted Gazette of the United States Feb. 7, 1794. For accounts of the commissioners’ crimes, see, for example, American Star/L’Étoile Américaine Feb. 13, 1794 (“Information to the disturbers of those, who cry down the draughts of St. Domingo, on the national treasury”), Feb. 15, 1794 (“Fresh News”), and Feb. 18, 1794 (Boston, Jan. 8). For the refugee community’s efforts to claim and defend their republican orthodoxy, see White, Encountering Revolution, 98, 115–20. 86. General Advertiser Dec. 3, 1793 (Philadelphia). 87. National Gazette Aug. 17, 1793 ([no heading]). “I am no friend to the violence of the Paris mob—I detest every violation of property and law,” he continued, “but I am persuaded that Americans who pronounce positively on the merits or demerits of parties in France, would be more sparing of censure if they were better acquainted with the whole detail of fact.” 88. National Gazette Jul. 31, 1793 (Philadelphia). 89. National Gazette Oct. 26, 1793 (Philadelphia). Bache’s public reactions were less demonstrable because the General Advertiser suspended publication between Sept. 27 and Nov. 23, 1793, during the yellow fever epidemic. 90. Federal Gazette Oct. 25, 1793 (New York, Oct. 24, “West Indies”). 91. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oct. 26, 1793, CFM 273–75. 92. Edmond Charles Genet to Jefferson, Oct. 30, 1793, TJP 27:284–89. 93. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sept. 19, 1793, CFM 242–43. See also Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oct. 7, 1793 (second letter, labeled “13B”), CFM 252, in which he explains that only the news of the declaration of the French Republic after Aug. 10 prevented Washington’s “liberticidal project” of proclaiming himself “Constitutional King of the Americans.” 94. In addition to protesting against the attack in Philadelphia, Genet passed information to Jefferson suggesting that émigrés were arming expeditions for Saint Domingue in Charleston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. For Jefferson’s responses, see Jefferson to Edmond Charles Genet, Nov. 22, 1793, TJP 27:415 (Baltimore), Nov. 30, 1793, TJP 27:458–59 (Charleston), and Dec. 6, 1793, TJP 27:486 (Philadelphia). For Jefferson’s stance on Galbaud’s “crimes,” see Jefferson to Genet, Sept. 12, 1793, TJP 27:97–99. 95. National Gazette Oct. 12, 1793 (Norfolk, Oct. 2).

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96. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Aug. 2, 1793, CFM 234–35. Genet judged his plan to deploy the fleet against the British as “the means to bring back our Crews, who are good patriots and friends of equality as long as one does not speak to them about the coloured persons and the Commissaries.” For a similar characterization of the French sailors’ “philosophie,” see Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Aug. 16, 1793, CFM 239. 97. Edmond Charles Genet to Jefferson, Nov. 18, 1793, TJP 27:404. 98. Popkin, You Are All Free, 326. 99. Federal Gazette Dec. 2, 1793 (“Entries at the Customs House”). See also the Norfolk heading dated Nov. 20 in the same issue, in which a captain from Môle Saint Nicolas told of a “large body of white and black troops at Port Paix [sic]” under Sonthonax. 100. Gazette of the United States, Federal Gazette Dec. 21, 1793 (Kingston, Nov. 2), reprinted (only this portion out of the larger text) General Advertiser, Jan. 10, 1794. 101. Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 3, 1794 (“Copy of a letter addressed by commodore Ford, captain of the ship Europe, commander of the English squadron anchored in the road of PortRepublican to Sonthonax civil commissary from the French Republic, at St. Domingo”), reprinted General Advertiser, American Star/L’Étoile Américaine, Mar. 4, 1794, summarized Gazette of the United States Mar. 4, 1794. 102. National Gazette Oct. 12, 1793 (“Abstract of the proclamation issued by Leger Felicte Santhonax, Civil Commissary of the French Republic, delegated to the Islands to reestablish order and tranquility, dated August 29, 1793”), reprinted Federal Gazette Oct. 15, 1793. 103. See the account of General Rochambeau arming the blacks against the “English and the Aristocrats” in General Advertiser Aug. 27, 1793 (Salem, Aug. 20). Also Rochambeau’s address to the freedmen thereafter, Federal Gazette Sept. 10, 1793 (“Translated from a French paper received from Martinique”), reprinted General Advertiser Sept. 14, 1794, National Gazette Sept. 21, 1793. See also General Victor Hugues’s proclamation of emancipation to the slaves of Guadeloupe and his strictures for their continued labor and respect for property, Philadelphia Gazette, General Advertiser Jul. 21, 1794 (“TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, Department of Guadeloupe”), referenced in Gazette of the United States Jul. 17, 1794. Also Aurora Nov. 15, 1795, for Hugues’s address to émigrés in the United States telling that the island was tranquil, blacks were working, and peace had been established. For an account from Guadeloupe suggesting this was true, see Gazette of the United States Dec. 11, 1794 (“From GUADALOUPE”). On Hugues, see Laurent Dubois, “‘The Price of Liberty’: Victor Hugues and the Administration of Freedom in Guadeloupe, 1794–1798,” WMQ 56 (1999): 363–92; and Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1789–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 189–314. 104. Aurora May 1, 1794 (National Convention, Feb. 5), reprinted Gazette of the United States May 2, 1794. Ironically, the convention’s orders arresting and recalling Sonthonax and Polverel arrived in Saint Domingue in the same vessel as the Feb. 4 decree. For the charges against the Brissotins that linked them to the commissioners, see Gazette of the United States Jan. 27, 1794 (Philadelphia), and Pennsylvania Gazette Jan. 29, 1794 (which also printed [false] rumors of the commissioners’ arrest). For the actual recall, see Gazette of the United States Oct. 4, 1794 (Nassau, Aug. 26). 105. American Star/L’Étoile Américaine May 1, 1794 (Amsterdam, Feb. 25). 106. This characterization came in General Advertiser May 27, 1794 (“GLEANINGS,”

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Paris, Ventose), purportedly from an address to the National Convention by “the popular society of Semur, department of the Gold-coast.” 107. Gazette of the United States Jun. 23, 1794 (Philadelphia), reprinted Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 26, 1794. See also General Advertiser, Pennsylvania Gazette Aug. 6, 1794 (“From the Courier Francois, of the 26th ult.”), which described the French army at Port de Paix as “small but redoubtable . . . composed of 2500 European troops and seven or eight hundred regenerated citizens.” The force was “unshaken in its principles” and “in case of danger could accomplish as much as double its number.” 108. Gazette of the United States Nov. 4, 1794 (“Translated from the Courier Francois, for the Gazette of the United States. JACOBIN CLUB, Sitting—19th Thermidor”). 109. General Advertiser (“CIVIC FESTIVAL”). The festival took place at Republican leader Israel Israel’s tavern at 89 Chestnut Street. Among those present were Pennsylvania governor Thomas Mifflin, Genet, and “several officers of the State and Federal Governments.” James Hardie, The Philadelphia Directory and Register (Philadelphia: Jacob Johnson & Co., 1794), 76. 110. Nash, Race and Revolution, 3–21; Egerton, Death or Liberty, 41–64; Robert G. Parkinson, “‘Manifest Signs of Passion’: The First Federal Congress, Antislavery, and Legacies of the Revolutionary War,” in Contesting Slavery, 49–68. 111. General Advertiser Jul. 8, 1794 (Philadelphia). Readers of the same issue would note that New York merchants at the Tontine Coffee House articulated a similar sentiment in their hope that “the soil of America be consecrated by the genius of universal emancipation.” 112. General Advertiser Aug. 5, 1794 (New York). 113. General Advertiser Aug. 5, 1794 (“An Extract”). 114. General Advertiser Aug. 8, 1794 (“Slavery”). 115. Popkin, You Are All Free, 327–75. 116. National Gazette Aug. 17, 1793 (Philadelphia). 117. General Advertiser Aug. 2, 1793 (Alexandria, Jul. 25). 118. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oct. 5, 1793, CFM 260. 119. Edmond Charles Genet to Jefferson, Oct. 30, 1793, TJP 27:286. 120. Genet to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oct. 5, 1793, CFM 259–60. 121. Jefferson to William Moultrie, Dec. 23, 1793, TJP 27:614. The agents were “La Chaise,” a “Quarteron, of a tall fine figure,” and “Castaing,” a “small dark mulatto.” The latter was Charles Guillaume Castaing, who had been a close ally of Sonthonax and Polverel in Cap Français since their arrival, was active in the struggle against Galbaud, and was part of the “tricolored” delegation that was attacked in Philadelphia (see Popkin, You Are All Free, 122–23, 171–73, 388). Jefferson explained that his contact had said that the planned insurrection in Charleston was part of “a general plan formed by the Brissotine party at Paris, the first branch of which has been carried into execution at St. Domingo.” 122. Jefferson to James Monroe, Jul. 14, 1793, TJP 26:503. 123. Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph, Dec. 1, 1793, TJP 27:467. 124. This would be an enduring response for Jefferson. See Jefferson to St. George Tucker, Aug. 28, 1797, TJP 29:519, in which he wondered if events in Saint Domingue constituted a “first chapter” of the end of white habitation of the Caribbean. Applauding Tucker’s recent gradual emancipation plan for Virginia, which included provisions for black removal, Jefferson warned that “if something is not done, and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children.” “The . . . revolutionary storm now sweeping the globe” would

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come, he cautioned, and emancipation, paired with racial separation, was the only way to “give it an easy passage over our land,” a lesson he took from Saint Domingue. 125. Gazette of the United States Dec. 8, 1794 (Philadelphia). See also Gazette of the United States Dec. 12, 1794 (“For the Gazette of the United States”), in which an ex-slave, writing to “Massa Printer,” purportedly found free life under the French to be worse than slavery. 126. Gazette of the United States Sept. 7, 1793 (“Hispaniola”). 127. Aurora May 7, 1795 (Philadelphia). 128. Edmond Charles Genet to Jefferson, Nov. 18, 1793, TJP 27:404. 129. Jefferson to Edmond Charles Genet, Nov. 24, 1793, TJP 27:429–30. 130. National Gazette Oct. 12, 1793 (Charleston, Aug. 25). 131. Pennsylvania Gazette Jul. 10, 1793 (Philadelphia). 132. Federal Gazette Jul. 15, 1793 (Philadelphia).

Chapter 4. Making Places of Liberty 1. For competing accounts of these events, see Courier Français Aug. 22, 1794, reprinted and translated in Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 27, 1794 (“The Philadelphia Gazette”); ACM 2:309, 316 ( July 2, Aug. 13, 1794), PPAS; Hardie, The Philadelphia Directory, v. 2. ACM 2:364 ( June 17, 1795), PPAS. For Charleston’s codes regarding Caribbean immigrants of color, see Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 203–37. 3. The émigré group wanted relief from a 1788 ruling by the state legislature that, because of the 1780 abolition act, slaves brought to the state were “deemed and taken to be free.” For the Abolition Society’s opposition, see General Meeting minutes, Jan. 7, 1793, GMM 1:179, PPAS. Also Federal Gazette Nov. 5, 1792 (“For the FEDERAL GAZETTE”), and Federal Gazette Nov. 12, 1792 (“FOR the FEDERAL GAZETTE”). 4. Journal of the House of Representatives of the Assembly of Pennsylvania, 3rd Assembly, 1st sess., 39, 42, 45, 55, 60 (Dec. 17–19, 27–28, 1792), LCP. 5. Jeremy Popkin estimates that between 3,000 and 5,000 people departed Le Cap in the initial wave. Gary Nash suggests that the total number neared 15,000. Among the first arrivals, 2,000 went ashore at Norfolk and 1,500 at Baltimore. Popkin, You Are All Free, 291–93; Nash, “Reverberations,” 48–50. Approximately 187 white and black refugees arrived in Philadelphia on eight vessels between Jul. 8 and 10, 1793. As of Aug. 17, 960 passengers had entered the city. By spring 1794 around 2,400 refugees from postemancipatory Saint Domingue had entered the city. See “Pilot’s Reports, 1793–1794,” Records of the Port of Philadelphia, RG 41, microfilm roll 0864, PSA. For the assessment of the relative merits of each locale by white Dominguans, see Kenneth Roberts and Anna M. Roberts, eds. and trans., Moreau de St. Méry’s American Journey [1793–1798] (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1947), 49–50. For Pennsylvania as a destination of choice for African Americans in this period more broadly, see Richard S. Newman, “‘Lucky to Be Born in Pennsylvania’: Free Soil, Fugitive Slaves and the Making of Pennsylvania’s Antislavery Borderland,” Slavery & Abolition 32, no. 3 (2011): 413–30. New York did not enact its gradual abolition act until 1799. Even afterward travelers could bring their slaves into the state without jeopardizing their property rights. See “An Act Concerning Slaves and Servants” (Apr. 8, 1801), in Laws of the State of New York Passed at the Session of the Legislature Held in the Year 1801 (Albany,

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1887), 5:548–49, and, for a nine-month grace period, “An Act in addition to the Act concerning Slaves and Servants” (Mar. 30, 1810), in Laws of the State of New-York Containing the Public Acts . . . 1812 (Albany, 1812), 6:32. My thanks to Sarah Gronningsater for pointing these sources out to me. 6. For a wider view on the disjunctions between law and the lived experience of slavery, see Rebecca J. Scott, “Slavery and the Law in Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, and Justice,” and Scott, “Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution,” both in Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (2011): 915–24 (especially 922–24) and 1061–87; and Sue Peabody, “‘Free Upon Higher Ground’: SaintDomingue Slaves’ Suits for Freedom in U.S. Courts, 1792–1830,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, 261–83. 7. ACM 2:318 (Aug. 26, 1794), PPAS. 8. General Meeting minutes, Oct. 19, 1789, GMM 1:93, PPAS. The other bodies were the Committee of Inspection, the Committee of Education, and the Committee of Employ. During the 1790s, the Abolition Society would regularly publish and deliver addresses to the free blacks of Philadelphia designed to infuse them with proper values. See, for example, Federal Gazette Nov. 19, 1789, for a list of articles for improvement to the city’s free blacks and Aurora Jan. 18, 1796, for an address “to the free Africans and other free people of color in the United States.” For the latter, see also Minutes of the Delegates of the Abolition Societies, established in different parts of the United States, Jan. 6, 1796, 90–94, PPAS and General Meeting minutes, Apr. 11, 1796, GMM 1:257, PPAS. For different approaches to the project of the incorporation of free and freed blacks into society, see Nash, Forging Freedom, 100–109, 158–64; Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism, 60–85; and Polgar, “‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation.’” 9. ACM 2:364 ( June 17, 1795), PPAS. Before turning toward Charleston, the French privateer had come across a damaged ship and had stopped to bring onboard Cap Rinker and John Jones, its captain and mate. Rinker and Jones also traveled to Philadelphia. On the way, Rinker hired one of Geff ’s fellow travelers as a servant. Jones claimed Geff as his slave when the Molly docked. Somehow Geff got the Abolition Society’s attention and its lawyers intervened. 10. ACM 2:309 ( July 2, 1794), PPAS; Courier Français Aug. 22, 1794, reprinted and translated in Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 27, 1794 (“The Philadelphia Gazette”). St. Victor described the Acting Committee as wearing “spectacles which makes that appear to them white which is black.” As if this weren’t appalling enough, he told of committee members giving Azor “the Neapolitan kiss (upon the mouth!)” before Shippen’s very eyes. For the Abolition Society’s response, see ACM 2:318 (Aug. 26, 1794), PPAS, which was also printed in the Philadelphia Gazette. St. Victor had acted on the advice of French notary Peter Lebarbier Duplessis. Duplessis was subsequently expelled from the Abolition Society over this and other moments when he “counteracted the Endeavours of the Acting Committee to Establish [the] Freedom” of blacks in Philadelphia. See ACM 2:308 ( Jun. 25, 1794) and General Meeting minutes, July 7, 1794, GMM 1:216 (both in PPAS). 11. For the General Meeting’s cool response to a proposal for a legal strategy that would use county courts to free individual slaves immediately, see James Pemberton to Alexander Addison, Feb. 12, 1793, CCL 1:103, PPAS; and General Meeting minutes, Apr. 1 and Apr. 8, 1793, GMM 1:188, 191, PPAS. For the proposal, see Addison to Pemberton, Jan. 1, 1793, CCL 1:99, PPAS. Instead, the society decided at around the same time to appeal to the state Supreme Court that slavery was unconstitutional in Pennsylvania.

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12. Journal of the House of Representatives of the Assembly of Pennsylvania, 3rd Assembly, 1st sess., 195, 201, 205 (Feb. 21, 1793); ibid., 291 (Mar. 21, 1793). A similar effort languished after the fever of 1798. 13. For the thanks to Rush on the part of “his unfortunate Brothers, the africains,” see “J. B.” to Benjamin Rush, Jul. 24, 1791, Benjamin Rush Mss Correspondence (LCP in HSP), 39:41. J. B. wrote a sonnet in the voice of “afric’s muse” who would “sing of Rush with true Poetic fire” because of his efforts, and because he understood that blacks, “if mature’d aright, / Their gen[i]us equals that of skins thats [sic] white.” For an example of evidence of Rush’s efforts, see J. Edwd. Jessup to Benjamin Rush, Nov. 6, 1791, Benjamin Rush Mss Correspondence (LCP in HSP), 21:124. 14. For notice that the cornerstone had been set, see Gazette of the United States Apr. 6, 1793 (Philadelphia). “One of the [members],” the account reported, “afterwards kneeled down upon the stone and prayed in a fervent manner, for the success and usefulness of the undertaking.” Nash, Forging Freedom, 116–19; Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 8–12; Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 63–70. For suggestions for the content and form of the opening services, see T. Hutson to Benjamin Rush, May 27, 1793, Benjamin Rush Mss Correspondence (LCP in HSP), 27:121. 15. National Gazette Jul. 3, 1793 (“For the NATIONAL GAZETTE”). The piece was sent to editor Freneau by “S. R.,” who puffed the National Gazette as “the enemy to despots, villains and knaves,” and suggested that by printing it “you will declare war against another class of our foes.” 16. For Friend to Truth, see National Gazette Jul. 13, 1793 (“AFRICAN CHURCH, For the National Gazette”). For True American’s rejoinder, see National Gazette Jul. 20, 1793. 17. Nash, Forging Freedom, 111–15, 126–28; Egerton, Death or Liberty, 188–91. This attempt was ultimately unsuccessful. Allen had separated from the Free African Society in 1789 because of its Quaker leanings but had rejoined other leaders around the plans for a separate church. When the African Church was finally established in the spring of 1794, however, a majority of its members decided to affiliate as Episcopalians. Their church would ultimately be called the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas and would be led by Absalom Jones. Unable to abandon Methodism, Allen founded a separate African Methodist Episcopal Church. See Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 70–73; and Nash, Forging Freedom, 130–32. 18. Nash, Forging Freedom, 183–90; Nash, Race and Revolution, 57–83; Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 151–76; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 125–76. 19. Federal Gazette Sept. 1, 1791 (“The following copy of the articles of faith and practice of the African Church of Philadelphia, is submitted to the public, by the undernamed representatives of the same church”). 20. General Advertiser Aug. 27, 1791 (“To the Friends of Liberty and Religion in the city of Philadelphia”), reprinted Federal Gazette Aug. 29, 1791, Gazette of the United States Sept. 7, 1791. The General Advertiser reprinted the “address” in its advertisement section into

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early 1792. Gary Nash dates an incident in which a group of African Methodists left the St. George’s Methodist Church after a dispute over segregated seating in 1792, whereas previous treatments had placed it in 1787. He argues persuasively that this separation was the culmination of a longstanding project of resistance, therefore, rather than the event that instigated it. See Nash, Forging Freedom, 118–19. For notice of Absalom Jones’s ordination as minister at the African Church, see Philadelphia Gazette Sept. 9, 1795 (“The Philadelphia Gazette”), reprinted Aurora Sept. 10, 1795. 21. Benjamin Rush to Julia Rush, Aug. 22, 1793, in The Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. Lyman H. Butterfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 2:639. For this episode as an “early display of the separate-but-equal doctrine,” see Nash, Forging Freedom, 1, 121. For Rush’s antislavery ideas, activities, and inconsistencies, see David Freeman Hawke, Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 360–63. 22. On relief efforts in general, see White, Encountering Revolution, 62–67, 72–73. 23. Joseph G. Bend to Benjamin Rush, Aug. 12, 1793, Benjamin Rush Mss Correspondence (LCP in HSP), 22:82. 24. White, Encountering Revolution, 78–86. White argues that discussions about relief efforts, because they could be posed as existing outside the “big” questions around the nature of the French Revolution (as it developed in Saint Domingue) and its relationship to the United States, took place on “neutral ground” (85). Questions about this specific form of “philanthropy,” in other words, constituted a place in which people staked positions on those issues without having to be overt about it. 25. General Advertiser Aug. 6, 1793 (“For the General Advertiser”). 26. See General Advertiser Sept. 4, 1793 (Baltimore, Aug. 7), for an opinion that the refugees must surely appreciate finding themselves “in a country where the blessings of government are so conspicuous” after having experienced the “ravages of intestine war and anarchy” that “threaten the destruction of every monument of art and industry.” 27. For different approaches to the politics of treatment for the disease, see Martin S. Pernick, “Politics, Parties, and Pestilence: Epidemic Yellow Fever in Philadelphia and the Rise of the First Party System,” WMQ 29 (1972): 559–86; David Paul Nord, “Readership as Citizenship in Late-Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” in A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic, ed. J. Worth Estes and Billy G. Smith (Philadelphia: Science History Publications, 1997), 19–44; and Jacquelyn C. Miller, “Passions and Politics: The Multiple Meanings of Benjamin Rush’s Treatment for Yellow Fever,” in ibid., 79–95. 28. See Scott, “Common Wind.” For African American networks of information, see Scott, “Afro-American Sailors and the International Communication Network: The Case of Newport Bowers,” in Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour, ed. C. Howell and R. Twomey (Fredericton: Acadienses Press, 1991), 37–52; Scott, “Crisscrossing Empires: Ships, Sailors and Resistance in the Lesser Antilles in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 128–46; and W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). For the inefficacy of evoking Haiti among African Americans, see Mitchell A. Kachun, “Antebellum African Americans, Public Commemoration, and the Haitian Revolution: A Problem of Historical Mythmaking,” Journal of the Early Republic 26, no. 2 (2006): 249–73. Kachun notes, however, that this is not to say that great meanings were not attached to the new nation. See Leslie M. Alexander, “‘The Black Republic’: The

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Influence of the Haitian Revolution on Northern Black Political Consciousness, 1816– 1862,” in African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents, ed. Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon (New York: Routledge, 2010), 57–92; Matthew J. Clavin, “American Toussaints: Symbol, Subversion, and the Black Atlantic Tradition in the American Civil War,” in ibid., 107–20; and Davies, “Class, Culture, and Color,” 104–20. Gary Nash argues that language and cultural differences hindered immediate contact between African Americans in Philadelphia and the black Dominguans who arrived in the city after 1793. He suggests that the eventual integration and success of the ex-slaves in the city’s culture was a product of their urban background in Saint Domingue, but represented their adoption of American norms, rather than a creation of a new, creole, black culture. See Nash, “Reverberations.” The failure of the emigration movement to Haiti in the 1820s certainly suggests a vague and idealized notion of Haiti among Philadelphian African Americans. See Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon, “Fever and Fret: The Haitian Revolution and African American Responses,” in African Americans and the Haitian Revolution, 9–23. Also Chris Dixon, African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000). For the impact of that conceptualization, see Sara C. Fanning, “The Roots of Early Black Nationalism: Northern African Americans’ Invocations of Haiti in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in African Americans and the Haitian Revolution, 39–55. For an exploration of Haiti’s continuing and conflicting presence among diasporic peoples, see Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 29. The connection is expressly made in Nash, “Reverberations,” 44. 30. Powell, Bring out Your Dead, 94–101; Finger, Contagious City, 129–30; Miller, “Passions and Politics”; Phillip Lapsansky, “‘Abigail, a Negress’: The Role and Legacy of African Americans in the Yellow Fever Epidemic,” in A Melancholy Scene of Devastation, 61–78. 31. General Advertiser Sept. 9, 1793 (“FOR THE NURSING OF THE SICK AND BURIAL OF THE DEAD”). See also Federal Gazette Sept. 7, 1793 (“To the Editor of the Federal Gazette”) for Mayor Mathew Clarkson’s public announcement that the “African Society” had agreed to provide aid. (Both reprinted National Gazette Sept. 11, 1793.) 32. Susanna Emlen to William Dillwyn, Sept. 9, 1793, Dillwyn Manuscript, vol. 1, box “1770–1793,” folder “8 mo.–9 mo 1793,” HSP. One day earlier, Elizabeth Drinker noted in her diary that “’tis remarkable [that] not one Negro has yet taken the infection. they are appointed to [serve] as Nurses to the sick.” At some point later Drinker crossed out “are appointed” and replaced it with “have offered.” Crane, Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 1:502 (Sept. 8, 1793). See Emlen to Dillwyn, Sept. 17, 1793, Dillwyn Manuscript, vol. 1, box “1770– 1793,” folder “8 mo–9 mo,” HSP, for Emlen’s judgment that black nurses were more ethical than the white ones they had replaced at the hospital at Bush Hill. 33. Sally F. Griffith, “‘A Total Dissolution of the Bonds of Society’: Community Death and Regeneration in Mathew Carey’s Short Account of the Malignant Fever,” in A Melancholy Scene of Devastation, 45–59. 34. Mathew Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever . . . (Philadelphia: Printed by the author, 1793), 76–77. This was the title given the second edition, which was dated Nov. 23, 1793. The first was a shorter account, printed on Oct. 16, which had sold so quickly that Carey expanded his work and printed it again. The expanded account went through multiple editions and sold over ten thousand copies. 35. Federal Gazette Nov. 8, 1793 (“FOR THE FEDERAL GAZETTE”).

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36. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People . . . (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1794), 8–9. 37. Ibid., 12, 23. For an early public testimonial to the services rendered by blacks during the fever, see Federal Gazette Nov. 8, 1793 (“FOR THE FEDERAL GAZETTE”). For notice of the sale of Jones and Allen’s Narrative, see General Advertiser Feb. 25, 1794. African American freemason Prince Hall similarly presented Dominguan violence as a spur for white society to be on the right side of history. See Prince Hall, A Charge Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797, at Menotomy, By the Right Worshipful Prince Hall (Boston: Benjamin Edes, 1797). Both Jones and Allen were Masons. 38. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism, 19–20. 39. Anonymous to Benjamin Rush, Mar. 3, 1794, Benjamin Rush Mss Correspondence (LCP in HSP). 40. James Pemberton to Committee of the London Society for Promoting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, May 6, 1794, CCL 1:112, PPAS. 41. William Lindsay to John Pemberton, Mar. 17, 1794, Gratz Collection, box 1, case 14, HSP. 42. Black activists in Philadelphia were more effusive. At some point after the spring of 1794, a group of African American “citizens” drafted a memorial to the National Convention thanking the French government for its “immoral Decree wiping out all traces of slavery in the French colonies.” Whether this document circulated or if it was ever sent is uncertain. See “Les Citoyens de couleur de Philadelphie à L’Assemblée Nationale,” Révolutions de Saint-Domingue Collection, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, as referenced in Scott, “Common Wind,” 282; Nash “Reverberations,” 53; White, Encountering Revolution, 145. 43. See Acting Committee Minutes, Sept. 3, 1794, ACM 2:321, PPAS, for a request that the president obtain the text of the decree. Also American Convention minutes, Jan. 9, 1795, PPAS, for the creation of a committee to approach French minister Adet on the same errand. The following day the convention recommended that its member societies “exert themselves for the liberation” of any slaves brought by French émigrés, a resolve that the convention as a whole agreed to. See American Convention minutes, Jan. 10, 1795, and Jan. 14, 1795 (microfilm series V, reel 28), PPAS. 44. Acting Committee minutes, Sept. 3, 1794, ACM 2:321, PPAS; Lawrence Embree to James Pemberton, Jan. 24, 1795, CCL 2:10, PPAS. For similar efforts among the New York Manumission Society, see Martha S. Jones, “Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York,” Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (2011): 1031–60. 45. General Meeting minutes, Apr. 11, 1796, GMM 1:257, PPAS; Acting Committee minutes, Apr. 21–22, 1796, ACM 2:409–10, PPAS. 46. American Convention minutes, Jan. 14, 1795, PPAS. 47. General Meeting minutes, Apr. 11, 1796, GMM 1:257, PPAS. See also General Meeting minutes, Oct. 6, 1795, and Nov. 9, 1795, GMM 1:243, 246, PPAS, for reports that the committee charged with pursuing the questions around the Feb. 4 decree was “not ready.” 48. See Sepinwall, Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution, 149–54. 49. Giroud to Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Jan. 17, 1797, CCL 2:42, PPAS. See also Giroud to Doctor [Samuel] Griffitts, Jan. 23, 1797, CCL 2:47, PPAS. Giroud visited Philadelphia in December 1796, during which time he met with James Pemberton and Griffitts and attended a meeting of a society subcommittee. Upon returning to Saint Domingue, he

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reiterated and expanded on his offer, and provided lists of the Amis des Noirs members who were then serving in the colony. See Giroud to Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Jan. 17, 1797, LCi, PPAS. 50. Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 20th Germinal, Year 5 (Apr. 9, 1797), CCL 2:51, PPAS. 51. Julien Raimond to Pennsylvania Abolition Society, undated (probably Mar. 1797), CCL 2:52, PPAS. For iterations of this sort of claim (and its implications), see Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” American Historical Review 117 (2012): 40–66. 52. Giroud to Abolition Society, undated (probably Apr. 1797), CCL 2:55, PPAS. 53. Giroud to Abolition Society, Jan. 17, 1797, CCL 2:42, PPAS. 54. Giroud to Abolition Society, undated (probably Apr. 1797), CCL 2:55, PPAS. 55. Giroud mentioned that Joshua Barney of Baltimore had rented an estate. Both Pascal and Raimond referred to “friend Marsellac” as someone who “seems desirous of seeing free Africans at work.” This was Jean/John de Marsillac, a French Quaker whom Elizabeth Drinker later judged to have “turn’d out to be an Imposture” because he was heard singing a song onboard ship en route to France. Crane, Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 2:1101 (Oct. 24, 1798). 56. James Pemberton to Commissioners of the French Republic at Cape francois [sic], Jan. 17, 1797, CCL 2:48, PPAS; General Meeting minutes, Apr. 3, 1797, GMM 1:272, PPAS. For the committee, see General Meeting minutes, Apr. 28 and Jun. 5, 1797, GMM 1:280, 281, PPAS. For the newspaper publication, see Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Jul. 12, 1797 (“Philadelphia, 6 mo. 6, 1797”), reprinted Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser Jul. 15, 1797. 57. St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it, in the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1796), 91–94. 58. General Meeting minutes, Oct. 3, 1796, GMM 1:265, PPAS. 59. General Meeting minutes, Feb. 1, 1797, GMM 1:267, PPAS. 60. For this effort in general, see Richard Newman, “The Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” in Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia, especially 128–34. 61. See Acting Committee minutes, Jan. 21, 1795, ACM 2:235, PPAS. 62. Acting Committee minutes, Jun. 24, 1795, and Jul. 1, 1795, ACM 2:366, 268, PPAS. 63. For this same dynamic in a different context, see Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), especially 38–82. 64. Lawrence Embree to James Pemberton, Jan. 24, 1795, box 10, “Miscellaneous Correspondence Alphabetical by Author, Col-Eml,” folder “Embree, Lawrence,” Cox-ParrishWharton Collection, HSP. The same letter is also in CCL 2:10, PPAS. 65. Acting Committee minutes, Apr. 21 and 22, 1796, ACM 2:409, 410, PPAS. For Duponceau in Philadelphia, see Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French, 106–7, 130. 66. Acting Committee minutes, Apr. 27, May 4, May 25, Jun. 1, and Jun. 8, 1796 (quote at Jun. 8), ACM 2:410–12, 414–16, PPAS. 67. Acting Committee Minutes, Dec. 9, 1795, ACM 2:384, PPAS. 68. Notice of these efforts pervaded the public record in Philadelphia. For reference to

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a library, see Federal Gazette Oct. 22, 1792 (“The Friends of the Blacks . . .”). For news of Jones and Allen’s nail manufactory, see Federal Gazette Feb. 20, 1794 (“We the subscribers, free Africans . . .”). For report of an African school, see Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 17, 1796 (“African School”), and Aurora Aug. 8, 1804 (Philadelphia). 69. Annals of Congress, vol. 6, 4th Cong., 2nd sess., 2016 ( Jan. 30, 1797). 70. Annals of Congress, vol. 10, 6th Cong., 1st sess., 229 ( Jan. 2, 1800). See also Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, 1797–1801, vol. 3, 550 ( Jan. 2, 1800). 71. Annals of Congress, vol. 6, 4th Cong., 2nd sess., 2018 ( Jan. 30, 1797). 72. Philadelphia Gazette Dec. 31, 1799 (“On Sunday the 29th Dec. 1799 . . .”). See also Richard S. Newman, “‘We Participate in Common’: Richard Allen’s Eulogy of Washington and the Challenge of Interracial Appeals,” WMQ 64, no. 1 (2007): 117–28. For notice of Washington’s will regarding his slaves, see Aurora Jan. 11, 1800 (Philadelphia). 73. Annals of Congress, vol. 10, 6th Cong., 1st sess., 230, 235 ( Jan. 2, 1800). Rutledge incorrectly assumed Quakers had originated the petition. 74. In fact, Thatcher’s vote was placed against a resolution by Virginia congressman Samuel Goode stating that the House did not approve of this or any similar sort of petition. Goode was prompted by Pennsylvanian Robert Waln’s attempt to separate the emancipation portion of the petition from those dealing with the slave trade and fugitive law, a move that prompted Rutledge to move for adjournment before any further votes could be taken that might admit the petition for discussion. For the final vote, see Annals of Congress, vol. 10, 6th Cong., 1st sess., 244–45 ( Jan. 3, 1800). 75. Annals of Congress, vol. 10, 6th Cong., 1st sess., 240 ( Jan. 3, 1800). See also Annals of Congress, vol. 8, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., 1310–11 (Mar. 23, 1798), for Thatcher’s position that those who advocated for slavery’s expansion were taking the illogical stance that it was possible to “have a right in a wrong.” 76. Annals of Congress, vol. 10, 6th Cong., 1st sess., 232 ( Jan. 2, 1800). 77. Thatcher referenced Jefferson’s and others’ plans for gradual emancipation. This same stance lay behind his opposition to the allowance of slavery in the Mississippi Territory, in which he had opposed Virginian William Giles’s argument that allowing slaves to spread into the territories would eventually cause slavery to end through dissipation. “The gentlemen wished to take the blacks away from where they are huddled up together, and spread them over this territory; they wished to get rid of them, and to plague others with them. But they had them, and if they determined to keep them, he wished only they should be plagued by them.” Annals of Congress, vol. 8, 5th Cong., 2nd sess. 1311 (Mar. 23, 1798). 78. James Forten to George Thatcher, Jan. 1800, Cox-Parrish-Wharton Collection, box 11, “Miscellaneous Correspondence Alphabetical by Author Ems-Hun,” folder “Forten, James,” HSP. 79. For this dynamic at a later moment, see Emma Jones Lapsansky, “‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia,” American Quarterly 32 (1980): 54–78. 80. Journal of the House of Representatives of the Assembly of Pennsylvania, 10th Assembly, 1st sess., 172 ( Jan. 28, 1800). This petition was one among a flurry of petitions received by the Assembly for the complete abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania.

290

Notes to Pages 143–145 Chapter 5. Black Jacobins

1. Among the fleet were the schooners Daurade, Pierre Mares, Heureux, John L. Boyreau, Mole Packet, Francess Ruby, brigs James, John Gemeny and Friendship, Andrew Gallagher, and the ships Fair American, John C. Brevoor, Josephus, Henry M. Kennedy, and Melpomene, William Majastre. NAMARB RG 36, E1057 vol. 3, E1059B box 34. Most carried between ten and thirty passengers, but the Melpomene had nearly 160. See “Pilot’s Reports, Nov. 19, 1795–Dec. 31, 1795,” Records of the Port of Philadelphia, RG 41, microfilm roll 0864, PSA. 2. For news of the British loss of Port-au-Prince, see Aurora May 31, 1798 (Baltimore, May 28), and Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 5, 1798 (“By the brig Favorite . . .”). For Philadelphia’s quarantine policy, see J. B. Blake, “Yellow Fever in Eighteenth Century America,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 44 (1968): 678–79; and Finger, Contagious City, 127 3. Philadelphia Gazette, Porcupine’s Gazette Jun. 28 1798 (“SIR . . .”). The letter was from David Pinkerton, an American onboard the ship Josephus. NAMARB RG 36, E1057 vol. 3, E1059B box 34. For Mifflin’s orders, see Mifflin to Nathaniel Falconer, Jun. 27, 1798, “Wardens of the Port Letter Book, May 25, 1793–June 7, 1799,” Records of the Port of Philadelphia, RG 41, microfilm roll 0860, PSA; and Gertrude MacKinney, ed., Pennsylvania Archives, 9th ser., vol. 2, “Executive Minutes of Governor Thomas Mifflin, 1796–1799” (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Archives, Bureau of Publications, 1931), 1407–9 ( Jun. 25, Jun. 27, 1798). 4. Aurora Jun. 29, 1798 (“Extract of a letter from major Lewis Toussard to the Secretary of War, dated Fort Mifflin, June 28, 1798”), reprinted Porcupine’s Gazette Jun. 30, 1798. Sharp-eyed readers might have recognized Toussard as one of the white commanders who fought the initial insurgency outside Le Cap in 1791. 5. Porcupine’s Gazette Jul. 2, 1798 (Congress, Jun. 29) and (“In the House of Representatives . . .”). See also Timothy Pickering to Richard Harrison, Jun. 25, 1798, TPP 8:597–98; Pickering to Robert Liston, Jul. 2, 1798, TPP 9:3; and Thomas Mifflin to Pickering, Jul. 2, 1798, TPP 9:4. The House took the bill up during its next session. For this episode as an example of “the St. Domingo bugaboo,” see Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 139. 6. Porcupine’s Gazette Jul. 3, 1798 (“The Alarming News!!”). 7. Mathew Rainbow Hale, “‘Many Who Wandered in Darkness’: The Contest over American National Identity, 1795–1798,” Early American Studies 1, no. 1 (2003): 127–75; Daniel, Scandal & Civility, 134–42; Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers,” 91–97. 8. Sharp, American Politics, 6–13 passim; Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, 141–73; Andrew W. Robertson, “‘Look at This Picture . . . And on This!’ Nationalism, Localism, and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787–1820,” American Historical Review 106, no. 4 (2001): 1263–80. 9. A. J. Dallas to Nathaniel Falconer, Jul. 3, 1798, “Wardens of the Port Letter Book, May 25, 1793–June 7, 1799,” Records of the Port of Philadelphia, RG 41, microfilm roll 0860, PSA; Porcupine’s Gazette Jun. 28, 1798 (“Mr. PINKERTON might have found objections . . .”); Aurora, Gazette of the United States Jun. 29, 1798 (“Extract of a letter from the Supercargo . . .”), reprinted Porcupine’s Gazette Jun. 30, 1798; Annals of Congress, vol. 8, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., 2064–66 ( Jun. 29–30, Jul. 3, 1798). When the ship Deborah, captain Edward Yard, arrived from Jérémie on Jul. 19 with nearly one hundred Dominguans onboard (many of whom were of color) there was no public reaction. For the arrival, see NAMARB

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RG 36, E1057 vol. 3, E1059B box 34; “Pilot’s Reports, Nov. 19, 1795–Dec. 31, 1805,” Records of the Port of Philadelphia, microfilm roll 0864, PSA; and “Alien Passenger Lists,” Port of Philadelphia Records, Harrold Edgar Gillingham collection, HSP. 10. Aurora Jun. 29, 1798 (Philadelphia). For similar ideas (and language), see Henry Tazewell to Madison, Jun. 28, 1798, JMP 17:158; and Stevens Thomson Mason to Jefferson, Jun. 29, 1798, TJP 30:438. 11. Porcupine’s Gazette Jun. 30, 1798 (“REPLY Of the French Royalists”), reprinted Aurora Jul. 3, 1798; Porcupine’s Gazette Jul. 2, 1798 (“WE the subscribers, masters and pilots . . .”); Porcupine’s Gazette Jul. 3, 1798 (Philadelphia). Cobbett did understand Saint Domingue as a threat. Three days earlier he forwarded a note he had received from a resident émigré warning of “nêgres francois” and their allies in Philadelphia. See William Cobbett to Pickering, Jun. 27, 1798, TPP 22:243–45. For Cobbett’s importance in articulating and popularizing Francophobic ideas, see Den Hartog, “Trans-Atlantic Anti-Jacobinism”; Seth Cotlar, “The Federalists’ Transatlantic Cultural Offensive of 1798 and the Moderation of American Democratic Discourse,” in Beyond the Founders, 274–99; and Cleves, “‘Jacobins in This Country.’” 12. Porcupine’s Gazette Jul. 3, 1798 (“French Royalists”) and (“The Alarming News!!”). The “cut-throat” designation was editor Andrew Brown’s, whose Philadelphia Gazette first “broke” the story and, as such, attracted most of Cobbett’s vitriol. See Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 21, 1798 (“ALARMING”). 13. Porcupine’s Gazette Jul. 6, 1798 (“The Ridiculous Mistake”). 14. Geggus, “‘Volte-Face’”; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 170–84, 197–203. For an imaginative reconstruction of Louverture’s life and character, see Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007). See also Philippe R. Girard and Jean-Louis Donnadieu, “Toussaint Before Louverture: New Archival Findings on the Early Life of Toussaint Louverture,” WMQ 70, no. 1 (2013): 41–78. 15. Gazette of the United States May 22, 1797 (Philadelphia); NAMARB RG 36, E1057 vol. 3, E1059B box 30 (Lillibridge); Daniel W. Coxe to Tench Coxe, Apr. 26, 1798, Correspondence and General Papers, Feb.–Jun. 1798, Tench Coxe Papers, HSP; Crane, Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 3:1659 ( Jun. 17, 1803); see also 2:1489 ( Jan. 26, 1802). For Louverture’s self-conscious efforts to present his doings, and developments in Saint Domingue, to a wider (French) audience, see Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 47–80. 16. The exact tallies are as follows: 1795, 29.3 percent; 1796, 34.6 percent; 1797 31.6 percent; 1798, 24.4 percent. On average nearly 18 vessels arrived in Philadelphia from a Dominguan port each month between summer 1794 and 1798. The average number of departures over the same period was nearly 16. Figures derived from NAMARB RG 36, E1126 and E1057 vols. 1–3, respectively. 17. Philadelphia Gazette May 17, 1796 (“Extract of a letter from the same place . . .”), reprinted Aurora Jun. 7, 1796. 18. Philadelphia Gazette May 16, 1795 (“Capt. Henry, of the brig Diana, from Gonaives . . .”), reprinted Aurora May 18, 1795. For examples of differentiation among Dominguan leaders, see (with regard to Jean François) Philadelphia Gazette Jan. 27, 1795 (“The Philadelphia Gazette”); Pennsylvania Gazette Sept. 7, 1796 (Philadelphia); (with regard to “chiefs” Claude and Gilliame of the Cabos) Gazette of the United States Oct. 24, 1794 (Kingston, Sept. 6).

292

Notes to Pages 150–152

19. Philadelphia Gazette Apr. 21, 1796 (“Another by the same, dated March 24”). 20. Aurora May 11, 1796 (“AUTHENTIC COMMUNICATION”), reprinted Gazette of the United States May 18, 1796. 21. Philadelphia Gazette Jul. 21, 1796 (“By This Day’s Mail”), reprinted Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Jul. 22, 1796. 22. Aurora Jun. 20, 1797 (New York, June 14). For the restrictive nature of the labor regime, see Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 164. 23. Philadelphia Gazette Oct. 20, 1797 (“Extract of a letter from Mr. UNITE DODGE . . . dated Sept. 15, 1797”), reprinted Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Oct. 23, 1797. 24. Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Jul. 12, 1797 (Philadelphia), reprinted Philadelphia Gazette Jul. 15, 1797 (“The Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser”). See also Porcupine’s Gazette Jul. 13, 1797 (Philadelphia), for Cobbett’s (unfulfilled) promise to give his take on “the extraordinary correspondence between the bloods, the infernal Santhonax and the abolition society of Philadelphia . . . in a proper time and place.” 25. Courier Français May 10, 1796, reprinted Aurora May 11, 1796, Independent Gazette May 14, 1796. 26. See, for example, Courier Français Jul. 16, 1796 (“Authentic Intelligence . . .”), reprinted Gazette of the United States Jul. 16, 1796, Aurora Jul. 18, 1796, and Pennsylvania Gazette Jul. 20, 1796. Also Aurora and Gazette of the United States May 11, 1797 (Kingston, Apr. 8). When Louverture learned that the British at Saint Marc were selling black prisoners, he publicly threatened to sell British prisoners “as slaves” in retaliation. See Aurora Sept. 15, 1796 (Boston, Sept. 9). 27. Gazette of the United States Nov. 29, 1797 (“Foreign Intelligence”). 28. Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 28, 1797 (“Colonies”), reprinted Aurora Mar. 30, 1797. For Vaublanc, see Dubois, “Avenging America,” 118–20. 29. Courier Français Sept. 23, 1796, reprinted Gazette of the United States Sept. 23, 1796, Aurora Sept. 24, 1796. 30. Gazette of the United States and Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 18, 1797 (“By This Day’s Mail”), reprinted Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, Porcupine’s Gazette Mar. 20, 1797. 31. Peter Porcupine [William Cobbett], The Bloody Buoy, ix, 63–66 (crimes of freed slaves), 157–58 (Mauduit). See also 130–31 (and the plate illustration) for tales of infants impaled on pikes, though these horrors were depicted in the French countryside. Cobbett was inspired by the antipathies of émigrés such as Gatereau, whose newspaper he quoted (140). 32. For “black soldier,” see Gazette of the United States May 29, 1797 (Philadelphia, “Extract of a letter . . .”), reprinted (and expanded upon in) Porcupine’s Gazette May 30, 1797; Porcupine’s Gazette May 30, 1797 (“Something to Excite our ‘Warmest Sensibility’” [“insulted”]). In the same column, Cobbett suggested that he might produce “another BLOODY BUOY” comprised completely of tales from the French West Indies. 33. Porcupine’s Gazette Oct. 19, 1797 (“Santhonax—A Traitor . . .”). For Cobbett more generally, see Daniel, Scandal & Civility, 187–230; and Den Hartog, “Trans-Atlantic AntiJacobinism,” 138–39. My analysis of Cobbett’s writings differs from that of Arthur Scherr in “‘Sambos’ and ‘Black Cut-Throats’: Peter Porcupine on Slavery and Race in the 1790’s,” American Periodicals 13 (2003): 3–30. 34. Geggus, “‘Volte-Face’”; Philippe R. Girard, “Black Talleyrand: Toussaint Louverture’s Diplomacy, 1798–1802,” WMQ 66, no. 1 (2009): 87–124. Cf. James, Black Jacobins. 35. Gazette of the United States Dec. 29, 1796 (“By This Day’s Mail”) and (Philadel-

Notes to Pages 153–156

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phia), both reprinted Philadelphia Gazette and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Dec. 30, 1796, [Philadelphia] Minerva Dec. 31, 1796. Also Aurora Jan. 2, 1797 (Baltimore, Dec. 18). 36. The trajectory continued: by 1798 rates were typically between 30 and 33 percent. Alexander DeConde, The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797–1801 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966), 124–30. In late 1804, round-trip voyages to “Hayti” could be insured for between 17.5 and 40 percent, more than quadruple the rates involving other destinations. See Aurora Oct. 26, 1804 (“COMMERCIAL INTELLIGENCE”). 37. Gazette of the United States Mar. 6, 1797 (“Extract of a letter from Norfolk . . .”). 38. Gazette of the United States and Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 18, 1797 (“By This Day’s Mail”), reprinted Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, Porcupine’s Gazette Mar. 20, 1797. See also Gazette of the United States Feb. 23, 1797 (“Gazette Marine List”). 39. Aurora May 19, 1797 (Philadelphia), reprinted Aurora May 30, 1797 [“iniquitous proceedings”]; Philadelphia Gazette Oct. 20, 1797 (“Extract of a letter from Mr. UNITE DODGE . . .”) [“incorruptible”]; Gazette of the United States and Carey’s United States Recorder Jul. 17, 1798 (Norfolk, Jul. 10), reprinted Aurora Jul. 18, 1798, Universal Gazette Jul. 19, 1798 [labor rumors]; Philadelphia Gazette Oct. 16, 1798 (New London, Oct. 10) [“friends”]; Porcupine’s Gazette Jan. 20, 1798 (Baltimore, Dec. 28, “French Fraternity”); Gazette of the United States (“By This Day’s Mail,” Charleston, Oct. 18), portions reprinted Aurora Nov. 6, 1797; Aurora Nov. 6, 1797 (Norfolk, Oct. 24) [Pascal]; Porcupine’s Gazette Jan. 20, 1798 (Baltimore, Dec. 28, “French Fraternity”) [“good man”]. See also Gazette of the United States Jan. 29, 1798 (Falmouth, Jan. 3), reprinted Porcupine’s Gazette Jan. 30, 1798, for a contrast between Louverture and “the Robber Santhonax.” 40. See, for example, Carey’s United States Recorder Jan. 30 1798 (“Extract of a letter . . .”), Gazette of the United States Jul. 17, 1798 (Norfolk, Jul. 10), and Aurora Nov. 1, 1798 (“PROCLAMATION OF AMNESTY . . .”). 41. Aurora Oct. 7, 1797 (“French Colonies”), reprinted Philadelphia Gazette Oct. 7, 1797 (“From the Aurora”). See also Aurora Oct. 9, 1797 (“French Colonies”), reprinted Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Oct. 11, 1797. The dialogue reached the federal government in pamphlet form a few days earlier. See Timothy Pickering to John Adams, Oct. 7, 1797, TPP 7:277. The news of Sonthonax’s departure was first given in Gazette of the United States Sept. 26, 1797 (“Gazette Marine List”), reprinted Aurora Sept. 27, 1797. See also Gazette of the United States Sept. 28, 1797 (“By This Day’s Mail”), reprinted Aurora Sept. 29, 1797. See also Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 70–73; and Bell, Toussaint Louverture, 150–53. 42. Gazette of the United States Sept. 30, 1797 (“OF SANTHONAX”), reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette Oct. 4, 1797 [“spirited conduct”]; Gazette of the United States Oct. 14, 1797 (“By This Day’s Mail”), reprinted Aurora Oct. 16, 1797, Porcupine’s Gazette Oct. 17, 1797 [“motley crew”]. 43. For black participation in the American public sphere more generally, see Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Phillip Lapsansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–31; Joanna Brooks, “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic,” WMQ 62, no. 1 (2005): 67–92; and Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 96–97. 44. See Gazette of the United States Dec. 19, 1796 (“ALARMING!”); Crane, Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 2:869 (Dec. 21, 1796); and Gazette of the United States Dec. 21, 1796. For the proclamation announcing the reward, see Gazette of the United States Dec. 24, 1796.

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Notes to Pages 156–159

45. Aurora Jan. 14, 1797 (Elizabeth-town, Jan. 11) [“own doors”]; Gazette of the United States Dec. 26, 1796 (“Alarm to the Jacobins”) [“TRUE ONE”]; Gazette of the United States Dec. 28, 1796 (Philadelphia) [“pads”]; Porcupine’s Gazette Mar. 20, 1797 (“For PORCUPINE’S GAZETTE”) [“Americanus”]. 46. See Aurora Dec. 28, 1796, reprinted Gazette of the United States Dec. 29, 1796 (“From the Aurora”), for the attempt to connect the fires to Hamilton’s alleged response to the Whiskey rebels two years before, a moment in which the secretary had supposedly hoped that Pittsburgh would burn so as to justify the federal government’s suppression efforts. For the dubious merits of this charge, see Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 118–24. See also Aurora Dec. 30, 1796 (“For the Aurora”). 47. Porcupine’s Gazette Jul. 20, 1797 (Kingston). The captain purported to have seduced a mulatto servant girl whom Sonthonax had entrusted with his secrets. 48. Aurora Sept. 5, 1797 (Boston, Aug. 31), Porcupine’s Gazette Sept. 5, 1797 (“Extract of a letter . . .”), reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette Sept. 6, Gazette of the United States Sept. 7, 1797. 49. Porcupine’s Gazette, Sept. 20, 1797 (“From a communication . . .”). 50. Aurora Sept. 28, 1797 (Albany) [name], Aurora Oct. 2, 1797 [misdated Oct. 1] (New London, Sept. 27) [“FAIR PLAY”], Aurora Sept. 28, 1797 (“Since Santhonax has gone . . .”), Aurora Sept. 27, 1797 (New York, Sept. 25) [British practice]. 51. Porcupine’s Gazette, Sept. 5, 1797 (“This if fact caps the climax . . .”). 52. Porcupine’s Gazette, Sept. 21, 1797 (“FRATERNAL BURNERS”). 53. Gazette of the United States Jan. 30, 1797 (Philadelphia). More generally, see Newman, Parades and Politics, 127–30; and Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames, 72–75. 54. Gazette of the United States Jan. 3, 1797 (“COMMUNICATION”) [“Marat”], Porcupine’s Gazette Apr. 23, 1797 (“No one is ignorant . . .”) [Bache-Adet], Porcupine’s Gazette, Sept. 21, 1797 (“FRATERNAL BURNERS”) [“plot”], Porcupine’s Gazette, Sept. 5, 1797 (“This if fact caps the climax, I think, of French FRIENDSHIP”) [“plan”], Porcupine’s Gazette Nov. 27, 1797 (New York, Nov. 27, “French Incendiaries”) [“FIRE”], Philadelphia Gazette Dec. 8, 1797 (“The Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser”), reprinted Porcupine’s Gazette Dec. 9, 1797, Pennsylvania Gazette Dec. 13, 1797 [“FRENCH NEGROES”], Porcupine’s Gazette Dec. 9, 1797 (after “Extract of a letter from Charleston . . .”) [“young Lightning Rod”]. Several days later, he amended his report by suggesting that the blacks could not have acted without prompting by white agents. Porcupine’s Gazette Dec. 14, 1797 (New York, Dec. 12). 55. Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 588–92; Pasley, “Tyranny of Printers,” 118–31, 153–75. 56. Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975); Marshall Smelser, Congress Founds the Navy, 1787–1798 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959). 57. Pennsylvania Gazette May 30, 1798 [Hédouville]; for Logan, see, for example, Gazette of the United States Jun. 18, 1798 (“COMMUNICATION”), which included proof that he intended to return with plans for building a guillotine. Cobbett warned: “watch Philadelphians, or the fire is in your house and the couteau at your throats.” Porcupine’s Gazette Jun. 18, 1798 (“IMPORTANT”). 58. Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Jun. 19, 1798 (“After this dispatch was

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read . . .”). See also Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Jun. 19, 1798 (“From the American Daily Advertiser of this day”), also in Carey’s United States Recorder and Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 19, 1798. 59. Gazette of the United States Jun. 19, 1798 (“AMERICANS”). See also Gazette of the United States Jun. 23, 1798 (“COMMUNICATION”), in which Bache was connected to Logan’s trip. Also Gazette of the United States Jun. 25, 1798 (“The following elegant Morceau . . .”), which reprinted issues from the Aurora in 1793, in which Bache had criticized Washington and supported Genet. 60. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers,” 98–102; Daniel, Scandal & Civility, 254. Bache was attacked at least twice. In early 1797 Clement Humphries beat him on Philadelphia’s wharves. In May 1798 a crowd besieged his house. 61. Gazette of the United States Nov. 4, 1797 (“By This Day’s Mail”) [“hugging”], Gazette of the United States Sept. 7, 1797 (after “We understand, says the Massachusetts Mercury . . .”), Porcupine’s Gazette Sept. 5, 1797 (Norfolk Aug. 24) [“Gallo-Americans”], Gazette of the United States Oct. 25, 1797 (“Communication”) [“enemies”]. 62. Charles C. Tansill, The United States and Santo Domingo, 1798–1873; a Chapter in Caribbean Diplomacy (Baltimore: P. Smith, 1938); Rayford W. Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776–1891 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941); Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 645–62; Donald R. Hickey, “America’s Response to the Slave Revolts in Haiti, 1791–1806,” Journal of the Early Republic 2 (1982): 361–80; Matthewson, Proslavery Foreign Policy; Gary Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003); Brown, Toussaint’s Clause. Cf. Paul Finkelman, “The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Federalism,” in Federalists Reconsidered, ed. Doron S. Ben-Atar and Barbara Oberg (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 135–56; Egerton, Death or Liberty, 265–69; and Ronald Angelo Johnson, Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014). 63. Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 596. 64. For the proclamations opening trade with certain ports in Saint Domingue, see Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1853), 9:176, 177–78 ( Jun. 26, 1799, May 6, 1800). 65. Adams, Works of John Adams, 8:639–40 (May 1, 1799); Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 157–59. 66. Porcupine’s Gazette May 9, 1797 (“West Indies”). 67. Gazette of the United States May 29, 1797 (“Extract of a letter . . .”). 68. Fick, Making of Haiti, 198–200; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 217–22; Philippe R. Girard, “Rêves D’empire: French Revolutionary Doctrine and Military Interventions in the Southern United States and the Caribbean, 1789–1809,” Louisiana History 48, no. 4 (2007): 399–402. 69. Edward Stevens to Brigadier-General Maitland, May 23, 1799, in “Letters of Toussaint Louverture and of Edward Stevens, 1798–1800,” American Historical Review 16 (1910–11): 73. 70. Crane, Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 2:1027–28 (Apr. 29, 30, May 1, 1798); Aurora May 8, 1798 (Philadelphia). 71. Porcupine’s Gazette May 24, 1798 (“French Invasion”) [“forerunner”], Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 5, 1799 (“Important!!!”), reprinted Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, Porcupine’s Gazette, Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 6, 1799, Aurora, Universal Gazette Mar. 7, 1799

296

Notes to Pages 164–166

[tubs]. See also Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 13, 1799 (“More of the Tubs!”) and (“Another French Claim to Gratitude!”), reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette Mar. 20, 1799. For Harper’s letter, see Gazette of the United States Apr. 3, 1799 (“The following letter . . .”), and Aurora Jun. 4, 1799 (“The following is an extract of a letter from the Ninety-six member [Harper] to his constituents . . .”). 72. Gazette of the United States Apr. 8, 1799 (“COMMUNICATION”) [“army of blacks”], Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser May 28, 1799 (“ST. DOMINGO”), reprinted Porcupine’s Gazette May 29, 1799 [“highly interesting”]. 73. See Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 657; Terry, “Study of the Impact,” chap. 3. 74. Annals of Congress, vol. 9, 5th Cong., 3rd sess., 2767 ( Jan. 23, 1799) [Pinckney]; Annals of Congress, vol. 9, 5th Cong., 3rd sess., 2744–45 ( Jan. 22, 1799) [Otis]. 75. For the list of articles agreed upon by Maitland and Pickering in Philadelphia in April 1799, see Adams, Works of John Adams, 639–40; and Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 144–61. 76. See Stevens to Pickering, May 3, 1799, in “Letters of Toussaint Louverture,” 64– 101, 67; Hickey, “America’s Response,” 366–67. 77. Stevens to Pickering, Sept. 30, 1799, in “Letters of Toussaint Louverture,” 83. 78. See, for example, Philadelphia Gazette Oct. 5, 1799 (“Shipping News”), Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 20, 1799 (“By Capt. Smith . . .”), Pennsylvania Gazette Jan. 22, 1800 (“Since I last had . . .”). 79. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 171; Johnson, Diplomacy in Black and White, 119–20; Matthewson, Proslavery Foreign Policy, 85–86. 80. Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 12, 1799 (“Extract of a letter . . .”) [“wonderful man”]. For examples of his discussion of labor, see Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 11, 1799 (Boston, Mar. 2), Aurora Apr. 17, 1799 (“St. Domingo”), Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 21, 1799, reprinted Aurora Jun. 24, 1799. Aurora Jun. 20, 1799 (“Extract of a Letter . . .”), reprinted Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 24, 1799, Gazette of the United States Jun. 27, 1799 [“cultivation”]. For the first definitive report of the Stevens-Louverture arrangement, see Philadelphia Gazette, Pennsylvania Gazette, Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Jun. 18, 1799 (Charleston, Jun. 3). Rumors of the negotiations circulated as early as May. For statements indicating Louverture’s character, see, for example, Aurora and Carey’s United States Recorder Mar. 10, 1798 (New York, Mar. 7), Aurora Mar. 14, 1798 (Philadelphia), Philadelphia Gazette and Carey’s United States Recorder Mar. 22, 1798 (Baltimore, Mar. 20), Aurora and Gazette of the United States May 16, 1798 (Norfolk, May 8), Gazette of the United States Jun. 4, 1798 (“Cape Francois, 22d Floreal, 6th year, 11th May”), Aurora Jun. 6, 1798 (Charleston, May 21), and Gazette of the United States and Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 7, 1798 (“Particulars of the Evacuation . . .”). Aurora Dec. 17, 1798 (Boston, Dec. 8) [“native”]. 81. Aurora Dec. 17, 1798 (Boston, Dec. 8). 82. Aurora Dec. 28, 1798 (Georgetown, Dec. 12) [“plan”], Philadelphia Gazette Apr. 19, 1799 (“TOUSSAINT”), reprinted Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Apr. 20, 1799 [“sable General”]; Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 9, 1799 (“Suspicions have frequently been expressed . . .”) [“deep game”]. See also Gazette of the United States Apr. 27, 1799 (Nassau, Apr. 2), reprinted Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Apr. 29, 1799, for notice that “very strange game is playing in St. Domingo.” 83. Gazette of the United States Feb. 1, 1799 (“Foreign News, London Jan. 1”), reprinted Aurora Feb. 2, 1799.

Notes to Pages 167–170

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84. Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 21, 1799 (“Extracts from several letters . . .”), reprinted Aurora Jun. 22, 1799, Universal Gazette Jun. 27, 1799. 85. For treatments of Rigaud’s motives, see, for example, Gazette of the United States and Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 22, 1799 (New York, Jun. 21), reprinted Aurora Jun. 24, 1799, Pennsylvania Gazette Jun. 26, 1799, and Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 24, 1799 (“The Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser”). 86. Philadelphia Gazette Jul. 3, 1799 (“General TOUSSAINT”). 87. Louverture himself identified Saint Domingue around the ideal of racial equality and the peace it provided. See Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Jun. 28, 1799 (“ANSWER Of Citizen Toussaint Louverture . . . to the calumnies . . . of Rigaud . . .”), reprinted Philadelphia Gazette Jul. 1, 1799. 88. Gazette of the United States Apr. 2, 1799 (“ST. DOMINGO”) [“sovereign,” “Capitalists”], Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser May 28, 1799 (“ST. DOMINGO”), reprinted Porcupine’s Gazette May 29, 1799 [“nominally dependent”]. 89. Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 21, 1799 (“ST. DOMINGO”), reprinted Gazette of the United States and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Aug. 22, 1799. 90. Gazette of the United States Aug. 22, 1799 (“On the same subject”). The original printing was Feb. 2, 1799. 91. Aurora Aug. 25, 1798 (“ST. DOMINGO”). 92. Gazette of the United States Nov. 30, 1798 (“ANOTHER”). 93. Gazette of the United States Nov. 30, 1798 (“Extract of a letter from Cape Francois . . .”). 94. For the striations of Federalist approaches to antislavery, see Rachel Hope Cleves, “‘Hurtful to the State’: The Political Morality of Federalist Antislavery,” in Contesting Slavery, 207–26. 95. See Aurora Jul. 11, 1796 (Philadelphia). For more objections based on the idea of neutrality, see Aurora Feb. 24, 1796 (“From the Norfolk Herald”), and Aurora Jul. 8, 1796 (“From the New York Argus”). For a poem narrated by a horse that ran away rather than serve its British masters, see Aurora Jul. 6, 1796 (“The Republican Horse”). For a report that Washington reversed the Virginia governor’s order to prevent the sales, see Aurora, Gazette of the United States Feb. 26, 1796 (Norfolk, Feb. 15), reprinted [Philadelphia] Minerva Feb. 27, 1796. 96. For the debates over arming vessels in Congress, see Porcupine’s Gazette Jun. 8, 1797, Aurora Jun. 9, 1797 (“Federal Legislature”), Porcupine’s Gazette Jun. 10, 1797, and Porcupine’s Gazette Jun. 23, 1797. For the Aurora’s charge that Robert Goodloe Harper had changed an amendment because of a visit from “anglo-French” royalists from Port-au-Prince, see Aurora Jun. 9, 1797 (Philadelphia), Aurora Jun. 10, 1797 (Philadelphia), and Aurora Jun. 12, 1797 (“For the Aurora”). 97. [Philadelphia] Minerva Jan. 16, 1796 (Norfolk, Jan. 1). 98. The Aurora expressly connected the two sets of republicans/Republicans. See, for example, Aurora Jun. 9, 1797 (Philadelphia), and Aurora Jun. 12, 1797 (“For the Aurora”). 99. Aurora Jul. 18, 1798 (“For the Aurora”). 100. See Aurora Jul. 23, 1798, Aurora Jul. 30, 1798, Aurora Aug. 23, 1798, and Aurora Aug. 24, 1798. For a critique of a British double standard that the administration seemingly countenanced, see Aurora Nov. 7, 1798 (“The perfidious policy of England . . .”). 101. For the expression in common parlance, see Kenneth R. Bowling, “‘A Tub to the Whale’: The Founding Fathers and Adoption of the Federal Bill of Rights,” Journal of the Early Republic 8 (1998): 223–51.

298

Notes to Pages 170–173

102. Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 20, 1799 (“Intelligence by the sloop Betsy . . .”), reprinted Aurora Mar. 21, 1799. 103. Aurora Mar. 21, 1799 (“Extract of a letter . . .”). See also Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 26, 1799 (New York, Mar. 25), reprinted Universal Gazette Mar. 28, 1799, Porcupine’s Gazette Mar. 26, 1799 (“False Alarm”), and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Apr. 2, 1799 (Charleston, Mar. 18). 104. Aurora Mar. 25, 1799 (“To the editors of the Aurora”). See also Aurora Mar. 28, 1799 (Philadelphia), and Aurora Mar. 30, 1799 (Philadelphia). For a more lurid suggestion concerning Pinckney, see Aurora Mar. 21, 1799 (New York, Mar. 12). 105. Aurora Apr. 3, 1799 (Philadelphia). The Charleston story would continue to resonate. See Aurora May 3, 1799 (Philadelphia). 106. Aurora Dec. 15, 1798 (“POLITICAL VIEWS. ST. DOMINGO”), Aurora Dec. 17, 1798 (“POLITICAL VIEWS. ST. DOMINGO”). See also Aurora Jan. 1, 1799 (“POLITICAL VIEWS. ST. DOMINGO”). 107. Aurora Dec. 17, 1798 (“POLITICAL VIEWS. ST. DOMINGO”) [“African”], Philadelphia Gazette Dec. 24, 1798 (“MR. BROWN . . .”) [“chimera”]. 108. Aurora, Gazette of the United States, Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Apr. 6, 1799 (“Extract of a letter, dated the 5th of November, written by Toussaint Louverture . . .”), reprinted Universal Gazette Apr. 18, 1799. See also Aurora Apr. 5, 1799 (“St. Domingo”). Also Aurora May 1, 1799 (Philadelphia), for a summary of a statement by Laveaux vouching for Louverture’s loyalty. This same notice was thrown in the Aurora’s face a month later when the paper was again attacking Louverture’s motives. See Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 4, 1799, reprinted Porcupine’s Gazette, Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Jun. 5, 1799, Universal Gazette Jun. 6, 1799. 109. See Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Apr. 18, 1799 (“Latest Foreign News”), reprinted Aurora Apr. 24, 1799, for a letter from one of Louverture’s officers explaining that he and the other “defenders of St. Domingo” were of course loyal to the nation to which “they owe their liberty and their existence.” Also Aurora Apr. 17, 1799 (“St. Domingo”), for a proclamation celebrating the anniversary of French emancipation. 110. Aurora May 27, 1799 (“The arrival of dispatches from Dr. Stevens . . .”). 111. Aurora May 28, 1799 (Philadelphia). See also Aurora May 31, 1799 (Philadelphia), and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Jun. 14, 1799 (“General Toussaint L’Ouverture . . .”), reprinted Aurora Jun. 19, 1799. 112. Aurora May 29, 1799 (Philadelphia). 113. Aurora Feb. 4, 1799 (“As Mr. Otis . . .”) [“Toussaint the first”], Aurora Mar. 8, 1799 (Philadelphia) [“Bashaw”], Aurora Jul. 19, 1799 (Philadelphia) [“new emperor”]. See also Aurora Mar. 28 (London, Dec. 5), for a writing from Jamaica identifying Louverture as “Sovereign of St. Domingo” and Saint Domingue as “in effect a colony of the British empire.” 114. For Duane’s reaction to the policy, see Aurora May 3, 1799 (Philadelphia). See also the reaction to the news that American shipping would not have equal access to Saint Domingue’s markets. Aurora May 11, 1799 (Philadelphia). See also Aurora May 10, 1799 (“Further Extracts from Madrid Gazettes”), for reports of the treaty between Maitland and the “black general of St. Domingo” giving exclusive trading rights with Saint Domingue to Britain. See also Aurora Jun. 5, 1799 (“Toussaint Louverture . . .”), which was a reprint from the Argus. 115. Aurora Jul. 18, 1799 (Philadelphia). 116. Aurora Jan. 1, 1799 (“Political Views. ST. DOMINGO”) [“dark host”], Aurora Jul.

Notes to Pages 173–174

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8, 1799 (Philadelphia), Aurora Dec. 5, 1799 (Philadelphia), Aurora Dec. 6, 1799 (Philadelphia) [“black emperor”]. See also Aurora Nov. 4, 1799 (Philadelphia). For Rigaud, see Aurora Jul. 17, 1799 (“MORE ABOUT THE DISPATCHES!”). For Louverture’s brutality, see Gazette of the United States Oct. 29, 1799 (Boston, Oct. 22), reprinted Aurora and Universal Gazette Oct. 31, 1799. Also Aurora Dec. 10, 1799 (Philadelphia), Aurora Dec. 17, 1799 (Philadelphia), Aurora Oct. 26, 1799 (Portland, Oct. 14), reprinted Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 2, 1799 (without Duane’s addendum) [“ALLY”]. Aurora Oct. 29, 1799 (Philadelphia) [“deadly and cruel”]. See also Aurora Aug. 6, 1799 (“British Influence”), Aurora Aug. 8, 1799 (“St. Domingo”), Aurora Aug. 9, 1799 (Philadelphia), Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 9, 1799, Gazette of the United States and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Sept. 4, 1799 (Newport, Aug. 27), Aurora Sept. 5, 1799 (Bristol), and Aurora Nov. 22, 1799 (“Aurora”). See also Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Jul. 11, 1799 (“Extract of a letter . . .”), reprinted Aurora, Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Jul. 12, 1799. Over this period the Aurora and the Federalist-leaning Philadelphia Gazette engaged in a running debate over the true source of attacks on American shipping around Saint Domingue. “Rigaud always respected American property and forbad any neutral vessels being brought into the districts of the South,” Duane explained, “for Rigaud is not only a republican but considers us as republicans.” Aurora Jul. 17, 1799 (“MORE ABOUT THE DISPATCHES!”). Hédouville was resuscitated as better than Louverture in honoring American trade. See Aurora Aug. 8, 1799 (“St. Domingo”), which connected Louverture to Sonthonax. In early September Duane publicly and pointedly questioned Timothy Pickering over the timing and origin of certain captures made in the South, intimating that American consul T. Folger was acting with “agents of the Cape Directory” against Rigaud. 117. Aurora Aug. 9, 1799 (Philadelphia). See also Aurora Oct. 19, 1799 (“From the Baltimore Advertiser”). For Robert Slender, see Daniel, Scandal & Civility, 108. 118. For “Boo!” see Aurora Jun. 4, 1799 (“The following is an extract of a letter . . . so much in the character of the Taylors conspiracy, that we cannot forbear publishing it”). For the attacks, see Aurora Aug. 5, 1799 (Philadelphia), and Aurora Dec. 14, 1799 (Philadelphia). See also Aurora Apr. 11, 1799, for the Aurora’s amazed noting of the coincidence that “a negro wench of the Congo country, marked 96,” was advertised in a Kingston newspaper directly before an excerpt from Porcupine’s Gazette providing one of Harper’s speeches in Congress. 119. See Aurora Mar. 21, 1799 (“Extract of a letter . . .”) and, in the same paper, (New York, Mar. 12). For the charges regarding Hédouville, see Pennsylvania Gazette Mar. 20, 1799 (New York, Mar. 12). 120. Aurora Apr. 30, 1799 (“The Taylors’ Plot”). For the original charge, see Philadelphia Gazette Apr. 29, 1799 (“Yesterday forenoon about 130 French uniform coats . . .”), reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette May 1, 1799, Universal Gazette May 2, 1799. See also Porcupine’s Gazette Apr. 29, 1799, in which Cobbett proclaimed the arrests a “capital discovery.” “It is said, . . . that [the uniforms] were destined for the French Sans-cullottes in Saint Domingo; but, I rather suppose them to be intended for backs, which are much nearer at hand.” See also Aurora May 1, 1799 (Philadelphia), for a reference to a similar charge from Fenno. The Aurora continued to remind readers of the “plot” over the following months. See Aurora Apr. 29, 1799 (“POSTSCRIPT. ANOTHER PLOT!!!”), May 1, 1799 (Philadelphia), May 2, 1799 (“ON THE SPREADING OF FALSE ALARMS BY THE GAZETTE OF THE UNITED STATES”), Aurora May 4, 1799 (Philadelphia), and Jul. 19, 1799 (“The Aurora’s compliments to the TUBS . . .”).

300

Notes to Pages 174–176

121. Aurora Apr. 8, 1799 (“More Alarms!”). See also Aurora May 15, 1799 (Philadelphia), in which Duane lambasted the Federalist rationale for the expanded army as a costly standing force for use against their domestic political opponents, not the French, in Saint Domingue or elsewhere. 122. Aurora Jun. 4, 1799 (Philadelphia). 123. See, for example, Aurora Jul. 24, 1799 (“British Influence”), and Aurora Jul. 25, 1799 (Philadelphia), which asked “how these goods could be cleared out of the United States Custom House, without particular permission for that purpose?” See also Aurora Aug. 16, 1799 (“For the Aurora”). See Aurora Nov. 28, 1799 (Philadelphia), for the intimation that Hamilton (“a New-York major general”) and Stevens were brothers and that Hamilton was using his influence to prevent Stevens’s speculations from coming to light. The charge of speculation and misconduct would continue throughout Stevens’s tenure. See Aurora Jan. 4, Jan. 8, Feb. 18, Mar. 5, May 23, Aug. 1, Aug. 31, and Oct. 4, 1800. See also Jan. 6, 1801 (Philadelphia), for the suggestion that Hamilton and Stevens were half brothers, having the same father but different mothers. 124. Aurora Jul. 8, 1799 (Philadelphia), Jul. 19, 1799 (“from Brown and Relf ”). This excerpt was preceded with the comment that the news showed “that Brown’s paper is the official organ of the administration.” See also Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Jul. 19, 1799, Aurora Jul. 22, 1799 (Philadelphia), and Aurora Aug. 9, 1799 (Philadelphia). The confusion stemmed from the ambiguous phrasing of the suspension act, which didn’t specify whether Aug. 1 was the date after which vessels could enter Saint Domingue ports or if that was when vessels could leave American ports for Saint Domingue. 125. Aurora Aug. 5, 1799 (“Our trade to that part of St. Domingo which has been the harbour of pickeroons . . .”). 126. Aurora Apr. 10, 1799 (“Imitation”). See also “In consequence . . .” in this same issue. 127. Aurora Apr. 19, 1799 (Philadelphia). This squib explicitly identified Cobbett as being on the British payroll, as well as comparing Maitland to Satan. 128. Aurora Jul. 4, 1799 (Philadelphia). To highlight the irony, Duane placed this after his printing of the Declaration of Independence and Adams’s proclamation opening the trade. 129. Aurora Jul. 8, 1799 (Philadelphia). 130. Aurora Jul. 13, 1799 (“Extract of a letter from Bucks County, dated July 11th, 1799”). For similar treatments, see also Aurora Jul. 4, Jul. 8, Jul. 13, Jul. 15, Jul. 16, Jul. 17, Jul. 25, Aug. 2, Aug. 17, Oct. 24, Nov. 27, 1799, Apr. 14, 1800, and Sept. 3, 1800. For reaction within the administration, see Pickering to John Adams, Jul. 12, 1799, TPP 11:417–18. 131. Aurora Aug. 9, 1799 (Philadelphia) [“embellishment”], Aurora Jul. 29, 1799 (Philadelphia) [“Black Chief ”], Aurora Jul. 26, 1799 (Philadelphia) [“duped”]. Several writers used these reports to raise doubts about Adams’s break with the more aggressive members of his cabinet in order to seek a diplomatic solution to the conflict with France. See Aurora Aug. 31, 1799 (Bristol). 132. Aurora Aug. 2, 1799 (Philadelphia). Note that this writing also connects the suspension clause to the effort of Tennessee senator William Blount to detach Spanish holdings in Louisiana and Florida, an effort the Aurora also described as a product of British intrigues. Duane also noted in this issue that fifty-one men had applied to serve as his bodyguard against recent attacks on him “set on foot by men who are vexed about St. Domingo and British Influence!” Aurora Jul. 11, 1799 (Philadelphia) [“monuments”].

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133. Aurora Dec. 6, 1799 (Philadelphia) [“secrets”]. For Fenno’s original printing, see Gazette of the United States Dec. 5, 1799, reprinted Philadelphia Gazette Dec. 6, 1799. Aurora Jan. 10, 1800 (Philadelphia) [“black emperor”]. This snippet noted that “sumptuous carriages” had been sent from Philadelphia to Louverture, the “soi-disant emperor.” Aurora Feb. 18, 1800 (Philadelphia) [“negro-anglo”]. 134. Aurora Dec. 28, 1799 (“A Wonderful Concurrence”), Aurora Jan. 21, 1800 (“MORE OF ST. DOMINGO”). This report came in the wake of news that British cruisers had acted to force American vessels into Saint Domingue. See Philadelphia Gazette Jan. 15, 1800 (“Extract of a letter . . .”), reprinted Aurora Jan. 20, 1800. 135. Aurora Jan. 22, 1800 (Philadelphia) [“black a charge”], Aurora May 14, 1800 (“From St. Domingo”) [“tyger”]. For the Royal Navy’s actions, see Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Mar. 7, 1800 (Baltimore, Mar. 4), reprinted Aurora Mar. 10, 1800, Pennsylvania Gazette Mar. 12, 1800. Aurora Jul. 18, 1800 (“From the Epitome”) [“Negro chief ”]. 136. See Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Apr. 7, 1800 (“The Consuls of the French Republic . . .”), which proclaimed the need for “special laws” in the colonies that would preserve emancipation. 137. Aurora Jan. 8, 1800 (Philadelphia) [“St. Domingo business”], Aurora Mar. 5, 1800 (Philadelphia). This report noted that Stevens “acted in a manner very injurious to our merchants, but very advantageous to himself.” Aurora Jul. 25, 1799 (Philadelphia) [“common interest”]. 138. The exchange was reported in the Aurora amid news of Louverture’s attacks on Rigaud and charges of Stevens’s corruption. See Aurora Jan. 21, 1800 (Federal Legislature, Jan. 8.). See also Aurora Jan. 22, 1800 (Congress, Jan. 9). 139. Aurora Jan. 27, 1800 (Philadelphia). 140. Aurora Mar. 3, 1800 (Philadelphia, “To the electors of the United States”).

Chapter 6. Second Revolutions 1. Readers in Philadelphia made this connection. More than one account of the violence noted the leadership of Joseph Flaville, who had formerly been the slave Joseph on the Flaville plantation in 1791 but who was now commandant at Limbé. One report remarked upon his revolutionary lineage, describing him as the “Chief cause of the former revolution in this Colony” and noting that, as the “oldest General in the Island,” he had been instrumental in Louverture’s rise. Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 28, 1801 (“REVOLT IN CAPEFRANCOIS!”). See Fick, Making of Haiti, 95–96, 210. 2. Gazette of the United States Nov. 28, 1801 (“Cape Francois”), reprinted Aurora, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 30, 1801; Aurora Dec. 4, 1801 (“A NARRATIVE . . .”). In addition to the accounts cited, see Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 28, 1801 (“Extract of a letter . . .”) and (“Cape Francois, October 30”); Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 28, 1801 (Baltimore, Nov. 26), reprinted Aurora Nov. 30, 1801; Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 30, 1801 (“Extract of a letter . . .”), reprinted Aurora Dec. 1, 1801; Aurora Dec. 9, 1801 (“COMMOTIONS AT ST. DOMINGO”). 3. Lear to Madison, Oct. 27 and Oct. 30, 1801, JMP 2:207–8, 212. 4. Gazette of the United States Dec. 1, 1801 (“Revolt at St. Domingo”). 5. Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 30, 1801 (“RECITAL Of Events . . .”), reprinted Aurora Dec. 1, 1802. For a digest of Louverture’s report, see Gazette of the United States Dec. 1, 1802 (“Revolt at St. Domingo”); Philadelphia Gazette Dec. 21, 1801 (“General Moyse . . .”), reprinted

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Aurora, Gazette of the United States, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Jan. 1, 1802; Aurora Jan. 2, 1802 (“From different letters . . .”); Aurora Jan. 5, 1802 (Philadelphia); Tobias Lear to Madison, Nov. 25, 1801, JMP 2:272. For the insurrection and Moïse’s disputed role in it, see Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 246–48; Claude Moïse, Le Projet National de Toussaint Louverture et la Constitution de 1801 (Port-au-Prince: Editions Mémoire, 2001), 47–50; and Fick, Making of Haiti, 208–10, 325 n14. 6. For early notices of Moïse’s actions, see Aurora May 6, 1797 (“Extract of a letter to the Editor . . .”), Aurora May 8, 1797 (“Extract of a letter from Gen. DESFOURNEAUX . . .”), Aurora May 26, 1797 (“Letter from an officer in the French Army [Moïse] . . .”), and Aurora May 2, 1798 (“Extracts from the official Bulletin of St. Domingo”). For Laveaux, see Gazette of the United States, Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 29, 1797 (“Foreign Intelligence. COUNCIL OF ELDERS”). For Hédouville’s initial plaudits, see Philadelphia Gazette Jul. 3, 1798 (“Answer of General Hedouville . . .”). For Moïse’s role in Hédouville’s fall, see Gazette of the United States Nov. 29, 1798 (“By This Day’s Paper”), reprinted Aurora, Philadelphia Gazette, Porcupine’s Gazette, Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 30, 1798. Among those who returned to France with Hédouville was Jean-Baptiste Belley. On this episode more generally, see Carolyn E. Fick, “The Saint-Domingue Slave Revolution and the Unfolding of Independence, 1791–1804,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, 179–81; and Ghachem, “The Colonial Vendée,” 169. For Moïse’s military victories and leadership against Rigaud, see Aurora May 3, 1799 (Philadelphia); Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser Sept. 20, 1799 (“Port de Paix, St. Domingo, Sept. 1799”), reprinted Aurora Sept. 23, 1799; and Gazette of the United States Aug. 28, 1800 (“PEACE Between RIGAUD and TOUSSAINT”). For his efforts in Spanish Santo Domingo, see Aurora Feb. 4, 1801 (Kingston, Dec. 13), and Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 13, 1801 (“COLONIES OF FRANCE”), reprinted Aurora Mar. 16, 1801. 7. Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 30, 1800 (“From the Boston Mercury”), reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette Sept. 3, 1800. 8. Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 28, 1801 (“INSURRECTIONS IN ST. DOMINGO”). See also Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 30, 1801 (“RECITAL”), and Gazette of the United States Dec. 1, 1801 (“Revolt at St. Domingo”). 9. Historians have continued to debate Louverture’s motives during this period, but his desire to create economic stability, control land, and preserve his brand of emancipation were clearly pointed toward a wary autonomy, if not outright independence. See Fick, “The SaintDomingue Slave Revolution,” 181–88; and Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 209–50. For analysis of the impact of Louverture’s policies, see Mats Lundahl, “Toussaint L’ouverture and the War Economy of Saint Domingue, 1796–1802,” in Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1993), 2–11. For competing notions of the meaning of freedom in tension with Louverture’s, see Carolyn E. Fick, “The French Revolution in Saint Domingue: A Triumph or a Failure?” in A Turbulent Time, 179–82, 207–10. Moïse was selected as part of the constitutional committee but declined to serve. See Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 242. For notice of the importation of enslaved workers, see Aurora, Gazette of the United States Nov. 28, 1801 (London, Oct. 7). 10. For Moïse’s “ungovernable and savage spirit” and his “proud, haughty, imperious and abusive [bearing] to the whites,” see Philadelphia Gazette, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Dec. 8, 1801 (“ST. DOMINGO”). 11. See Aurora Dec. 4, 1801 (“A NARRATIVE . . .”); and Tobias Lear to Madison, Oct. 22, 1801, JMP 2:194.

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12. Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 28, 1801 (“INSURRECTIONS IN ST. DOMINGO”). Lear agreed, noting both the return to the plantations and the great number of executions that took place in the aftermath of the rebellion. Tobias Lear to Madison, Nov. 21, 1801, JMP 2:258. 13. The proclamation was read in installments in Philadelphia. See Philadelphia Gazette Dec. 31, 1801, and Jan. 4, 1801 (“TRANSLATION. LIBERTY. EQUALITY . . .”), reprinted Aurora Jan. 1, 1802, and Jan. 5, 1802. For an earlier decree requiring all soldiers to get Louverture’s permission before marriage and preventing workers from marrying people outside of the plantation where they worked, see Gazette of the United States Dec. 17, 1801 (“COLONY OF ST. DOMINGO”). The proclamations were enclosed in Tobias Lear to Madison, Nov. 28, 1801, JMP 2:285. 14. For a general development of this point, see Trouillot, Silencing the Past, chap. 2. 15. Moïse, Le Projet National de Toussaint Louverture, 69. 16. For a careful parsing of Bonaparte’s motives in planning the invasion, see Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon, 34–49, 62–63. 17. For the implications of this shift, see Douglas R. Egerton, “The Empire of Liberty Reconsidered,” in The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, ed. James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 309–30. 18. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords. See also Jordan, White over Black, 386–99; Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 7 n3, 451–52; and Mason, Slavery and Politics. Mason, like Egerton and Jordan, treats Gabriel’s revolt in the context of reactions to Saint Domingue. 19. John Randolph to Joseph Nicholson, Sept. 26, 1800, as quoted in Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 102. 20. Their names were Alexander Beddenhurst and Charles Quersey. For a careful discussion of their role, and of Monroe’s activities, see Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 82–85, 102– 4. Egerton’s argument for Gabriel’s egalitarian motives and Atlantic consciousness is made throughout the text, but see especially 40–49. Sidbury finds it unconvincing (see Ploughshares into Swords, 88 n68). For a powerful evocation of this episode as a denial of the American Revolution’s radical potential, see Egerton, Death or Liberty, 271–81. 21. For the initial report in Philadelphia, see Aurora Sept. 11, 1800 (Richmond, Aug. 30). Further details continued to emerge over the following two weeks. See Pennsylvania Gazette Sept. 17, 1800 (Richmond), Gazette of the United States and Philadelphia Gazette Sept. 18, 1800 (“Governor Monroe . . .”), Gazette of the United States and Philadelphia Gazette Sept. 19, 1800 (“From a Richmond Paper of September 12”), reprinted Aurora Sept. 19, 1800, Aurora Sept. 23, 1800 (Richmond, Sept. 12). 22. Gazette of the United States Sept. 23, 1800 (“The insurrection . . .”) [“true French plan”], Philadelphia Gazette Sept. 27, 1800 (“The Philadelphia Gazette”) [“French principles”], Philadelphia Gazette Sept. 29, 1800 (Fredericksburg, Sept. 23) [“horrors of St. Domingo”], Philadelphia Gazette Sept. 27, 1800 (“VIRGINIA: a vision”) [“Blacks and Demo’s”]. 23. See, for example, Aurora Jul. 25, 1799 (Philadelphia). 24. Just prior to the news from Richmond, this effort centered on the ideas Jefferson expressed about slavery in his 1781–82 treatise, Notes on the State of Virginia. See Philadelphia Gazette Sept. 5 and 6, 1800 (“THE PRETENSIONS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON

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TO THE PRESIDENCY, EXAMINED”). For the same effort afterward, see Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Sept. 18, 1800 (“HOLY INSURRECTION”). More generally, see Robert M. S. McDonald, “Was There a Religious Revolution in 1800?” in The Revolution of 1800, 173–98. 25. Gazette of the United States Oct. 3, 1800 (“To Readers and Correspondents”). See also Gazette of the United States Oct. 1, 1800 (Philadelphia), which maligned slaveholding Republicans for their “eagerness and anxiety to propagate the doctrines of liberty and equality which their practice and principles so flagrantly belied, [in effect] whetting the knife that would surely and infallibly sooner or later, cut their own throats.” 26. This understanding would echo in southern mouths for decades. In 1822, during the scare over Denmark Vesey’s alleged conspiracy, Edwin C. Holland explained that “We regard our negroes as the ‘Jacobins’ of the country,” a stance that justified the severe response to the alleged rebels. Edwin C. Holland, A Refutation of the Calumnies Circulated Against the Southern & Western States Respecting the Institution and Existence of Slavery Among Them . . . (Charleston, SC: Printed by A. E. Miller, 1822), 61. 27. Philadelphia Gazette Sept. 24, 1800 (“SEDITION AND INSURRECTION”). 28. Gazette of the United States Sept. 19, 1800 (Philadelphia). “If Fries’ regiment was to be ordered to Virginia,” he wondered a few days later, “which side would he take, Black or White?” Gazette of the United States Sept. 25, 1800 (Philadelphia). For similar ties between Gabriel and local “Demos,” see Philadelphia Gazette Sept. 27, 1800 (“The Philadelphia Gazette”), Gazette of the United States Oct. 2, 1800 (“From the following article . . .”), and Philadelphia Gazette Oct. 13, 1800 (“The Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser”). 29. Gazette of the United States Oct. 2, 1800 (“Natural cause of the INSURRECTION OF THE NEGROES”). 30. Philadelphia Gazette Sept. 29, 1800 (Fredericksburg, Sept. 23). See also Gazette of the United States Oct. 1, 1800 (Philadelphia), in which Fenno reminded his readers of previous warnings from northern writers that slavery would eventually produce rebellion. 31. For other expressions of the “moral war” against Jeffersonians, see Cleves, “‘Hurtful to the State.’” 32. Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 13, 1801 (“James Blake, Esq. Consul of the United States for Santo Domingo . . .”). Tobias Lear informed Madison in Washington of the “new and important Æra [that] has commenced here” in mid-July. Tobias Lear to Madison, Jul. 17, 1801, JMP 1:428. Lear sent a copy of the constitution the next week, as well as liquors and sweetmeats to the president. Tobias Lear to Madison, Jul. 25, 1801, JMP 1:478; Lear to Jefferson, Jul. 25, 1801, TJP 34:637. For the ceremonies surrounding Louverture’s acceptance of the constitution, see Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 5, 1801 (“From the Register of the Central Assembly of St. Domingo”), reprinted Aurora, Gazette of the United States, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Aug. 6, 1801. For the text of the document itself, see Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 12 and 13, 1801 (“From the Official Bulletin of St. Domingo . . .”), reprinted Gazette of the United States, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Aug. 13, 1801. Also Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 15, 1801 (“THE CONSTITUTION OF THE FRENCH COLONY OF ST. DOMINGO”). 33. For notice of these efforts, see Tobias Lear to Madison, July 20, 1801, JMP 1:445–46. 34. Moïse, Le Projet National de Toussaint Louverture, 20–39. 35. Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 13, 1801 (“WASHINGTON CITY”), reprinted Aurora, Poulson’s Daily Advertiser Aug. 14, 1801.

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36. Philadelphia Gazette Dec. 8, 1801 (“ST. DOMINGO”). See also Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Aug. 13, 1801 (“CHARACTER Of the Celebrated Black General TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE”), reprinted Gazette of the United States Aug. 20, 1801. 37. Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 13, 1801 (“WASHINGTON CITY”). 38. Hamilton to Timothy Pickering, Feb. 21, 1799, AHP 22:492–93. In writing to solicit Hamilton’s thoughts, Pickering expressed his “great anxiety” that a “practicable & efficient” government be established; “it cannot be a republic,” he wrote, perhaps with the tumult of the American election cycle in mind. Timothy Pickering to Hamilton, Feb. 9, 1799, AHP 22:473–75. Hamilton felt that “the Government if independent must be military—partaking of the feodal system.” For the question of Hamilton’s influence on Louverture’s plans, see Egerton, “Empire of Liberty Reconsidered,” 321. 39. Philadelphia Gazette Aug. 17, 1801 (“ST. DOMINGO”). 40. For an overview, see Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 10, 1801 (“FROM ST. DOMINGO”), reprinted Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 11, 1801, Aurora Nov. 12, 1801, and Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 20, 1801. 41. Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Dec. 17, 1801 (“COLONY OF ST. DOMINGO”). 42. Aurora, Gazette of the United States, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Oct. 27, 1801 (“Toussaint Louverture, Governor of St. Domingo, To all Civil and Military officers”). Note that this order was presented as a measure against “piratical attempts” to reenslave citizens by enticing them to take voyages to the United States. 43. See Gazette of the United States Nov. 25, 1801 (“In the name of the French Colony of St. Domingo”), reprinted Aurora Nov. 26, 1801. Also Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 25, 1801 (“By a recent proclamation . . .”). 44. Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 7, 1801 (“Extract of a letter . . .”), reprinted Aurora Nov. 9, 1801. By contrast, see Gazette of the United States Jun. 23, 1800 (“It is reported . . .”), reprinted Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 24, 1800, for rumors that Jefferson had instituted the “French week or Decade” in his personal life and the stinging notice that his election would raise up “a man . . . who countenances the abolition of the Christian Sabbath.” 45. Philadelphia Gazette Nov. 11, 1801 (“By The Mails”), reprinted Gazette of the United States, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 12, 1801. 46. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Jan. 12, 1802 (“For Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser”). 47. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser (“ANOTHER REVOLUTION”). This writing connected Moïse’s revolt to another in Guadeloupe that had been put down by General Magloire Pelage. This action made Pelage “the Toussaint of Guadaloupe.” For Pelage, see Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 374–401. 48. Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 2, 1802 (“There can be little doubt . . .”), reprinted Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Mar. 3, 1802. See also Gazette of the United States, Aurora Feb. 9, 1802 (“Extract of a letter . . .”), reprinted Philadelphia Gazette Feb. 15, 1802. 49. Gazette of the United States Mar. 6, 1802 (“Extract of a letter . . .”). 50. The series began with Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 26, 1802 (“THE MAIL”). For “Arabs,” see Philadelphia Gazette Apr. 10, 1802 (“By The Mails”), reprinted Gazette of the United States Apr. 12, 1802. 51. Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Apr. 19, 1802 (“Extract of a letter . . .”). See also Gazette of the United States Apr. 20, 1802 (“Extract of a letter . . .”), for a

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similar threat that “the day is fast approaching, when America will feel the magnanimity and power of the Conquerors of the World!!!” 52. Gazette of the United States May 21, 1802 (“FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT AT NEW-YORK”), reprinted Philadelphia Gazette May 22, 1802. 53. Gazette of the United States Mar. 24, 1802 (“General Leclerc boasts . . .”). 54. Gazette of the United States Feb. 4, 1802 (“Toussaint Louverture . . . to the inhabitants of that colony”), reprinted Aurora Feb. 5, 1802. See also Gazette of the United States Mar. 26, 1802 (“THE MAIL”). Louverture had earlier signaled his intentions and concerns to Lear, anticipating “dreadful” violence if the French attempted to “subject the people to their former State.” See Tobias Lear to Madison, Dec. 11, 1801, JMP 2:306. See also Pierre Pluchon, “Toussaint Louverture Defie Bonaparte: L’addresse Inedite de 20 Decembre 1801,” Revue Francaise d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 79 (1992): 383–89. 55. For the first use of the term, see Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 20, 1802 (“Extract of a letter . . .”). See also Gazette of the United States Mar. 26, 1802 (“THE MAIL”). 56. Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette May 26, 1802 (“INTERESTING”). 57. Gazette of the United States Mar. 24, 1802 (“General Leclerc boasts . . .”). 58. Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia Gazette May 26, 1802 (“INTERESTING”). 59. See Aurora Sept. 2, 1800 (“To the Author of a Pamphlet . . .”); Aurora Sept. 12, 1800 (Philadelphia); Aurora Sept. 15, 1800 (Philadelphia); Gazette of the United States Sept. 18, 1800 (“Truly Mr. J. . . .”); Aurora Sept. 18, 1800 (Philadelphia); Aurora Sept. 22, 1800 (“The Friend of the Constitution . . .”). 60. Aurora Sept. 24, 1800 (“NEGRO SLAVERY VERSUS ALIEN LAWS”). For previous notice of Louverture’s carriages, see Aurora Jul. 17, 1799 (“MORE ABOUT THE DISPATCHES!”), and Aurora Jan. 10, 1800 (Philadelphia). 61. Aurora Sept. 25, 1800 (Philadelphia). See also Aurora Sept. 26, 1800 (Philadelphia), for the opinion that the “disgraceful convention with the black emperor of St. Domingo” was treasonous. 62. Aurora Oct. 8, 1800 (Philadelphia). 63. Ibid.; Aurora Nov. 27, 1800 (Philadelphia). Rigaud, by comparison, fought to preserve a mixed society, a vision Republicans might have hailed as “French” if the moniker had not been so toxic to American ears. See, for example, Aurora Oct. 31, 1800 (Philadelphia). 64. Philadelphia Gazette Jan. 16, 1801 (“ST. DOMINGO”). 65. Aurora Dec. 30, 1800 (“ST. DOMINGO”), Aurora Jan. 5, 1801 (Philadelphia). 66. Aurora Jan. 17, 1801 (“ST. DOMINGO”). 67. Aurora Jan. 5, 1801 (Philadelphia). 68. Aurora Sept. 24, 1800 (“NEGRO SLAVERY VERSUS ALIEN LAWS”). The idea that slavery had been imposed on the American colonies, and that its continued presence was the product of foreign and/or un-American interests, was a constant thread in commentary across the political spectrum. While Federalist writings tended to malign “Virginian” hypocrisy in espousing liberty while maintaining slavery, Republicans asserted the role played by the “eastern” interest and by the British in conducting the slave trade. For examples of Federalist commentary, see Gazette of the United States Nov. 1, 1796 (Philadelphia), Porcupine’s Gazette Sept. 27, 1797 (“FINING FOR MURDER!!!”), Porcupine’s Gazette Dec. 6, 1797 (“For Porcupine’s Gazette”), and Porcupine’s Gazette May 3, 1798 (“From

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a Correspondent”). For examples of Republican commentary, see Aurora Oct. 8, 1795 (Philadelphia), Aurora Apr. 14, 1801 (“There were imported . . .”), and Aurora Jul. 31, 1802 (Philadelphia). 69. Aurora Sept. 24, 1800 (“NEGRO SLAVERY VERSUS ALIEN LAWS”). 70. Aurora Sept. 26, 1800 (Philadelphia). 71. Aurora Jan. 5, 1801 (Philadelphia). 72. Aurora Sept. 25, 1800 (Philadelphia). 73. Aurora Mar. 13, 1802 (Philadelphia). Duane soon began devoting considerable ink to the details of arms shipments made by various prominent merchants. See Aurora May 18, 1802 (Philadelphia), and July 1, 1802 (Philadelphia) for intimations that the burning of the War Department was part of a cover-up engineered by Hamilton. 74. Aurora Apr. 24, 1802 (Philadelphia). 75. Aurora June 9, 1802 (Philadelphia). The agent’s name was Howell. See also Aurora Mar. 29, 1802 (Philadelphia). 76. Aurora Apr. 24, 1802 (Philadelphia). 77. Aurora May 15, 1802 (Philadelphia). 78. Aurora Aug. 17, 1801 (Philadelphia). 79. Aurora Mar. 26, 1802 (Philadelphia). 80. Aurora May 7, 1802 (“The nominal or supposed legislature of St. Domingo”). See also Aurora, Gazette of the United States Mar. 13, 1802 (“Extract of a letter . . .”). 81. For “myrmidons,” see Aurora, Philadelphia Gazette Mar. 19, 1802 (Wilmington, Mar. 13, “EVENTS AT PORT REPUBLICAN”). Also Aurora May 3, 1802 (Philadelphia). For “lions,” see Aurora Mar. 22, 1802 (Philadelphia). Louverture’s forces were also described as “tigers.” See Philadelphia Gazette Apr. 2, 1802 (“EXTRACT OF A LETTER”), reprinted Aurora Apr. 3, 1802. 82. Aurora Apr. 14, 1802 (Philadelphia). 83. Aurora Apr. 16, 1802 (Philadelphia). 84. Aurora Mar. 29, 1802 (Philadelphia). For notice of events in Halifax, North Carolina, see Aurora May 10, 1802 (“The following we extract from a Virginia paper . . .”), Gazette of the United States and Philadelphia Gazette May 19, 1802 (“Authentic particulars of the late intended INSURRECTION OF THE NEGROES”), reprinted Aurora May 20, 1802, and Gazette of the United States May 28, 1802 (“Captain Berbeck . . .”). Also Philadelphia Gazette Jun. 16, 1802 (“The Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser”), reprinted Aurora Jun. 17, 1802, Aurora Jun. 21, 1802 (Norfolk, Jun. 15), Aurora Jun. 22, 1802 (Warrenton, NC), Aurora Jun. 24, 1802 (Norfolk, Jun. 16), Aurora Jun. 25, 1802 (“We have been favored . . .”), Aurora Jun. 26, 1802 (Murfreesborough, Jun. 14), Aurora Jul. 9, 1802 (Baltimore), and Aurora Aug. 11, 1802 (Martin, Jul. 12). See Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 119–46. 85. Aurora Jun. 24, 1802 (Philadelphia). 86. Aurora May 29, 1802 (Washington, Apr. 29). See also Aurora May 15, 1802 (Philadelphia), for Duane’s suggestion that Federalist improprieties justified Leclerc’s poor treatment of American merchants. 87. Aurora Mar. 16, 1802 (Philadelphia). See also Aurora Apr. 15, 1802 (Philadelphia): “The tories have reason to remember a French fleet which arrived [in the Chesapeake] before, and enabled the whites to Burgoyne Cornwallis.” 88. Aurora Jun. 19, 1802 (Philadelphia), Jun. 22, 1802 (Philadelphia). Both of these writings were in response to attacks in the Boston Centinel on the unequal electoral power of the slaveholding South. See also Aurora May 10, 1802 (“The following we extract from a

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Notes to Pages 196–201

Virginian paper . . .”), which the Aurora appended with a statement blaming the revolt on “the machinations of men inimical to the United States.” 89. Aurora May 8, 1802 (Philadelphia). 90. Aurora Aug. 17, 1802 (Philadelphia). 91. Aurora Mar. 29, 1802 (Philadelphia). 92. Aurora Apr. 19, 1802 (Philadelphia). 93. Aurora May 28, 1802 (Philadelphia). 94. Aurora May 8, 1802 (Philadelphia). 95. Aurora Jul. 5, 1802 (Philadelphia). 96. Aurora May 10, 1802 (“The following we extract from a Virginia paper . . .”). See Gazette of the United States May 10, 1802, for the extract without any commentary. For a call for an increase in white emigration to the southern states in response to the violence in Saint Domingue, see Aurora Aug. 17, 1801 (Philadelphia). 97. Aurora Mar. 12, 1802 (Philadelphia, “EVENTS IN ST. DOMINGO”). 98. Aurora Mar. 16, 1802 (Philadelphia, “RECENT EVENTS IN ST. DOMINGO”). 99. Aurora Jun. 19, 1802 (Philadelphia). See also Aurora Jun. 22, 1802 (Philadelphia). 100. Aurora Sept. 15, 1802 (“RELIGIOUS STEADY HABITS”). 101. Aurora Dec. 1, 1802 (Philadelphia). Newspaper commentary increasingly featured notice of southern efforts to ameliorate slave conditions in this period. See Oakes, “‘Whom Have I Oppressed?’ The Pursuit of Happiness and the Happy Slave,” in Revolution of 1800, 220–39; and Aurora Mar. 29, 1802 (Philadelphia). 102. Aurora Sept. 15, 1802 (“RELIGIOUS STEADY HABITS”). 103. Annals of Congress, vol. 9, 5th Cong., 3rd sess., 2752 ( Jan. 22, 1799). 104. Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980); Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire; Joyce Appleby, “Thomas Jefferson and the Psychology of Democracy,” in Revolution of 1800, 155–72. 105. Though Jefferson only explicitly used this phrase years later, the new president’s correspondence (especially that to foreigners) immediately after the election results were certain are replete with references to the dangers avoided by the “tory” defeat. See, for example, Jefferson to Volney, Mar. 17, 1801, Jefferson to Thomas Paine, Mar. 18, 1801, and Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, Mar. 21, 1801, TJP 33:341, 358, 393–95. For the phrase itself, see Jefferson to Spencer Roane, Sept. 6, 1819, in Jefferson’s Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1425. For arguments that Jefferson’s estimation was correct, see John Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 207–15; and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 97–140. 106. James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1896), 1:322. 107. For the particular reverberations of this moment in Pennsylvanian politics, see Murrin, “Escaping Perfidious Albion.” For the Republican effort to cast Federalists as foreign in 1800, see Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, chap. 3. 108. For an extended meditation on Jefferson’s thinking about the nature of the republic and its impact on the shape, both physical and conceptual, going forward, see Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire. Recent scholarship has placed weight on the actions and efforts of the yeoman farmers that Jefferson conceptualized in moving the nation westward and establishing its

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ideals of liberty in partnership with the existence of chattel slavery. See Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West, Jeffersonian America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). For the political and social impact of these shifts, see James Sidbury, “Thomas Jefferson in Gabriel’s Virginia,” in Revolution of 1800, 199–219. 109. John M. Murrin, “The Jeffersonian Triumph and American Exceptionalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 20, no. 1 (2000): 1–25. 110. Annals of Congress, vol. 9, 5th Cong., 3rd sess., 2752 ( Jan. 22, 1799). 111. Ibid. 112. Thomas Jefferson to Madison, Jan. 30, 1799, JMP 17:223–24. 113. Jefferson to James Madison, Feb. 5, 1799, TJP 31:9. 114. Jefferson to Aaron Burr, Feb. 11, 1799, TJP 31:22. For the use of this phrase by a generation of historians as evidence of Jefferson’s essential “hostility to the Haitian Revolution,” see Arthur Scherr, “Jefferson’s ‘Cannibals’ Revisited: A Closer Look at His Notorious Phrase,” Journal of Southern History 77, no. 2 (2011): 251–82, quotation at 254. As Scherr notes, Jefferson’s allusion was to the phrase used by Cobbett, Burke, and others to denigrate France. Though Scherr oversimplifies the course of events in Saint Domingue, his conclusion that Jefferson’s reference was to France, and was meant mockingly, is indisputable given the phrasing and context of the letter. For conservative deployment of cannibalism as part of a more general reaction to the violence of the French Revolution, see Cleves, “‘Jacobins in This Country,’” 435–38. 115. Jefferson to James Madison, Feb. 12, 1799, TJP 31:29. Jefferson described those emissaries as a “combustion” that “we have to fear,” but the thrust of his letter, here and elsewhere, was the benefits the suspension clause would provide to Republicans across the sections. 116. Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, Jul. 26, 1801, TJP 34:644. 117. McCoy, Elusive Republic, 185–95. 118. For Pichon’s perspective, see Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, “À la Recherche d’un Diplomatie Post-Révolutionnaire: Louis-André Pichon, Chargé d’affaires à Washington, 1801– 1804,” in La France et Les Amériques au Temps de Jefferson et de Miranda, ed. Marcel Dorigny and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 2001), 13–29. 119. Lear did not carry a personal letter from Jefferson to Louverture, as Stevens had from Adams, a fact that led Louverture to conclude that “his Colour was the cause of his being neglected.” Tobias Lear to Madison, Jul. 17, 1801, JMP 1:427 (also in Carl Ludwig Lokke, “Jefferson and the Leclerc Expedition,” American Historical Review 33 [1928]: 325 n8). Lear’s instructions presented him as a consul like any other serving the nation but were specifically altered so as to emphasize that the United States would not recognize Saint Domingue’s independence, a feature, Madison wrote, “which may possibly be noticed, but on which if not noticed, you will of course be silent.” Madison to Tobias Lear, Jun. 1, 1801, JMP 1:243. See also Douglas R. Egerton, “Gabriel’s Conspiracy and the Election of 1800,” Journal of Southern History 56 (1990): 169. 120. Madison to Tobias Lear, Feb. 26, 1802, JMP 2:489. 121. Lokke, “Jefferson and the Leclerc Expedition.” 122. Ibid., 326–27. 123. Carl Ludwig Lokke, “The Leclerc Instructions,” Journal of Negro History 10 (1925): 80–98. See Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 252–61.

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124. Robert L. Paquette, “Revolutionary Saint Domingue in the Making of Territorial Louisiana,” in A Turbulent Time, 204–25; Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 213–28; White, Encountering Revolution, 163–64; Murrin, “The Jeffersonian Triumph.” 125. See McCoy, Elusive Republic, 166–84. For the politics of Jefferson’s policy, see Tim Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” Journal of Southern History 61 (1995): 209–48. This is a helpful supplement to the portrait supplied in Michael Zuckerman, “The Power of Blackness: Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution in St. Domingue,” in Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain, ed. Michael Zuckerman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 175–218. My interest in this episode is less for its capacity to reveal the nature of Jefferson’s presidency—either its pragmatic statesmanship or its essential racism—than for the ways it shows the politics of Jefferson’s stances and decisions in relation to the discursive ground upon which he operated. 126. Lokke, “Jefferson and the Leclerc Expedition,” 323. 127. Ibid., 325. 128. See Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” 222–31. 129. Jefferson to Rufus King, Jul. 13, 1802, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (Washington, 1903), 10:326–27. Jefferson was pursuing a request from the Virginia Assembly that slaves involved in the insurrection plot be sent to Sierra Leone. While the leaders had been executed, these slaves “are not felons, or common malefactors, but persons guilty of what the safety of society, under actual circumstances, obliges us to treat as a crime, but which their feelings may represent in a far different shape.” 130. Jefferson to Monroe, Nov. 24, 1801, TJP 35:720. See also Douglas R. Egerton, “‘Its Origin Is Not a Little Curious’: A New Look at the American Colonization Society,” Journal of the Early Republic 5 (1985): 463–80; Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” 224. 131. For Jefferson’s conceptions of the relationship between race and nation, see Onuf, “‘To Declare Them a Free and Independent People.’” 132. Jefferson to Monroe, Nov. 24, 1801, TJP 35:720. 133. See McCoy, The Elusive Republic, especially 23–32, 185–208.

Chapter 7. Naming Hayti 1. “Autobiography of Jacob Ritter, Jr.,” Mar. 12, 1836, Am. 1305, HSP, 38–44, quotations at 38, 42. For the details of Jacob Ritter’s employment to merchant Abraham Piesch, see Henry Simpson, ed., The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians, Now Deceased, Collected From Original and Authentic Sources (Philadelphia: William Brotherhead, 1859), 846. For the Fly’s voyage, see NAMARB RG 36, E1059B box 71, E1057 vol. 3. The vessel entered Philadelphia on Feb. 14, 1804. Ritter had disembarked south of Dover and arrived Feb. 7. See [New York] Morning Chronicle Feb. 9, 1804 (Philadelphia). 2. “Autobiography of Jacob Ritter,” 40, 39. 3. Ritter, Philadelphia and Her Merchants, 19–20. 4. “Autobiography of Jacob Ritter,” 39–42. By Jacob Ritter’s account, it was Thuat’s horse that was “decrepit,” though he also noted that the Frenchman had been deformed by a bout of poison “some time ago.” For contemporary notice of the Haitian flag, see Philadelphia Evening Post Apr. 7, 1804 (“Capt. Micks, lately arrived . . .”), reprinted Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Apr. 12, 1804. 5. For reports of vessels at Jacmel with the Fly, see Alexandria Daily Advertiser Feb. 9, 1804 (Norfolk, Feb. 4), [New York] Morning Chronicle Feb. 9, 1804 (Philadelphia), and

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[Baltimore] Telegraphe and Daily Advertiser (New York, Jan. 30). Between 1802 and 1805 the Philadelphia Customs House recorded 192 vessels as cleared for ports in Saint Domingue (including Santo Domingo) and 207 as having arrived from there. For American trade in this period more generally, see Logan, Diplomatic Relations, chap. 5. 6. Philippe R. Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal,” and Julia Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early NineteenthCentury Atlantic World,” WMQ 69, no. 3 (2012): 549–82, 583–614. Americans do not seem to have read of the moment at Gonaïves in May 1803 when Dessalines was said to have torn the white stripe from the French tricouleur, symbolically defining the racial composition of the new nation. For the episode, see Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 293; and James, Black Jacobins, 365. For Dessalines’s agenda, see Laurent Dubois, “Dessalines Toro D’haiti,” WMQ 69, no. 3 (2012): 541–48; and Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon, 248–66. A more lurid tale evoking Dessalines’s ideas for Haiti was his rejection of the reasoned declaration of Haitian independence composed by his colored secretary, Charéron, in favor of one written by Boisrond Tonnerre, who reputedly exclaimed that “to draw up the Act of Independence, we need the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for a writing desk, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.” Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’haïti (Port-au-Prince: Impr. E. Chenet, 1922), 3:145, is the source for most subsequent histories that note this event. See David Patrick Geggus, “The Naming of Haiti,” in Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 208; and Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 86–94. See also David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 36, who cites Boisrond Tonnerre’s own Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Haïti (Dessalines: Imprimerie centrale du gouvernement, 1804), x. 7. For the Haitian Revolution as constitutive to important facets of European modernity, see, for example, Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 821–66; Fischer, Modernity Disavowed; Ada Ferrer, “Talk About Haiti: The Archives and the Atlantic’s Haitian Revolution,” in Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. Doris Lorraine Garraway (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 21–40; Doris Lorraine Garraway, “‘Légitime Defense’: Universalism and Nationalism in the Discourse of the Haitian Revolution,” in Tree of Liberty, 63–88; and Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). 8. For Haiti in nineteenth-century discourse, see Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); and Matthew Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). See also Cleves, Reign of Terror, 146–52; and Clavin, “Race, Revolution, and the Sublime: The Gothicization of the Haitian Revolution in the New Republic and Atlantic World,” Early American Studies 5, no. 1 (2007): 1–29, pace Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 111. 9. Looking at the news of Haitian developments at this point, principally in Cuba, Ada Ferrer contrasts the tales of violence and massacre with “very different interpretations of the events [that] also circulated at the time, [most of which were] forgotten later.” See Freedom’s Mirror, 185–96, quotation at 195. For Dessalines’s strategic use of American newspapers to at once support and legitimate Haiti’s independence, see Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 122–42.

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Notes to Pages 212–214

10. For the operation of this conception in Haiti, see David Geggus, “The Naming of Haiti,” New West Indian Guide 71, no. 1/2 (1997): 43–68. For examples of use of the label “indigenous,” see Aurora Mar. 27, 1804 (New York, March 24), Philadelphia Evening Post, Apr. 3, 1804 (“HAYTI”), and Aurora Aug. 27, 1804 (“We learn by capt. Perry . . .”). See also Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, 1–94 (an account of Spanish colonization) and 344, 366, 431 (“native”). 11. Gazette of the United States Feb. 13, 1804 (Baltimore, Feb. 10), reprinted Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Feb. 18, 1804. 12. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, Philadelphia Evening Post, United States Gazette Mar. 7, 1804 (“MASSACRE AT AUX-CAYES”), reprinted Aurora Mar. 8. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser and United States Gazette used the spelling “HATTI.” 13. Aurora Jan. 5, 1804 (“PROCLAMATION OF DESSALINES, CHRISTOPHE . . .”), reprinted Gazette of the United States Jan. 6, 1804 [“primitive dignity” and “Toward those men . . .”]; United States Gazette July 16, 1805 (“CONSTITUTION OF HAYTI”), reprinted Aurora Jul. 17, 1805 [“supreme being”]; Aurora Mar. 9, 1804 (“FRAGMENT OF A PROCLAMATION BY GEN. DESSALINES”), reprinted Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Mar. 10, 1804 [“last sigh”]. Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon, 288–90. 14. See, for example, Aurora Mar. 9, 1804 (“FRAGMENT . . .”), which noted the proclamation as being made during the “First year of the independence of the people of Hayti” and was addressed to “Citizens, compatriots!”; Philadelphia Evening Post Apr. 3, 1804 (“HAYTI”) [“land of liberty”]; Philadelphia Evening Post Apr. 25, 1804 (“Copy of a letter . . . dated AuxCayes, March 1, 1804, first year of the independence of Hayti”) [“Never had a nation”]; United States Gazette July 16, 1805 (“CONSTITUTION OF HAYTI”). See also Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon, 262. 15. For the open letter, see Aurora, Philadelphia Evening Post, United States Gazette Mar. 29, 1804 (“LIBERTY. OR DEATH. GOVERNMENT OF HAYTI”). See also Aurora Apr. 4, 1804 (Boston), which referenced the invitation to return. Philadelphia Evening Post Apr. 25, 1804 (“Copy of a letter . . .”) [“return again to liberty”], Philadelphia Evening Post Jun. 5, 1804 (“From the New York Mercantile Advertiser of June 4”) [“blacks and yellows”]. 16. United States Gazette Jul. 16, 1805 (“CONSTITUTION OF HAYTI”). David Nicholls suggests that this moment represents the “first time that the term ‘black’ has been used in an ideological sense.” See Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, 36. The racial identity of the Haitian state was rendered less clear-cut by the inclusion of select groups of Poles, Germans, and “white” Santo Dominguans over time. The “black” clause was not included in successive iterations of the constitution. See also Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 230–35 (and 275–81 for the text of the 1805 constitution itself ). 17. For an example of reduced violence, see United States Gazette Mar. 12, 1804 (New York, Mar. 10). For the executions, see Aurora Feb. 21, 1806 (“EMPIRE OF HAYTI”). For Dessalines’s assurance to Americans, see Aurora Sept. 4, 1804 (“The following is a translated copy of a letter addressed by gen. Dessalines to an American supercargo . . .”). See also United States Gazette Jun. 1, 1804 (Mar. 1). For an example of published laws, see Aurora Jul. 20, 1805 (“PENAL CODE”). See Aurora Aug. 7, 1804 (Philadelphia), for a public notice that only the government would thereafter purchase and sell goods. See Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Aug. 20, 1804 (“ST. DOMINGO”), for a fixing of prices. For a decree mandating that importers procure bonds for their cargoes upon arrival and sell through Haitian-owned commercial houses, see Aurora Aug. 7, 1805 (Philadelphia), Aurora Oct. 22, 1805 (Baltimore, Oct. 17), and United States Gazette Nov. 5, 1805 (Philadelphia), reprinted Aurora Nov.

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11. See United States Gazette Jan. 27, 1806 (Charleston, Jan. 13), for a prohibition of salt exports. For a decree mandating the export of Haitian produce rather than other goods in exchange for foreign imports, see United States Gazette Feb. 11, 1806 (“IMPERIAL DECREE”), reprinted Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, Aurora Feb. 14. 18. Aurora, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Aug. 14, 1804 (London, June 19). Similarly, see Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Aug. 13, 1804 (London, Jun. 19). 19. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Oct. 10, 1804 (“NOMINATION OF THE EMPEROR OF HAYTI, JOHN JACQUES DESSALINES”), reprinted Aurora, United States Gazette Oct. 12, 1804 [“idol like Saturn” and “authors of their own liberty”]; Philadelphia Evening Post Apr. 3, 1804 (“HAYTI”) [“Let us not”]; Philadelphia Evening Post June 5, 1804 (“From the New York Mercantile Advertiser of June 4”) [“spark”]. 20. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Mar. 26, 1804 (“BLACKS OF ST. DOMINGO”). This was reference to the widespread reports of Rochambeau’s use of dogs imported from Cuba in his attacks and killing prisoners. See, for example, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Mar. 8, 1803 (“TOUSSAINT TO BONAPARTE”) and (“The American Daily Advertiser,” Philadelphia), Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Apr. 29, 1803 (Baltimore, Apr. 27), Aurora Jun. 13, 1803 (Philadelphia), Philadelphia Repository and Weekly Register Feb. 18, 1804 (“Miscellaneous Articles”), and United States Gazette Nov. 26, 1805 (“St. Domingo”). See also Johnson, Fear of French Negroes, 21–48; and Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon, 239–43. 21. Philadelphia Evening Post Mar. 19, 1804 (“As it will be highly interesting to know . . .”). 22. United States Gazette Apr. 18, 1804 (“The Jacobins who are in the habit of looking abroad for their patriotism . . .”). 23. Aurora Mar. 28, 1804 (“We have read part of the address of the black general Dessalines . . .”). 24. United States Gazette May 12, 1804 (Newburyport, May 8), reprinted Philadelphia Evening Post May 14, 1804, Aurora May 15, 1804. 25. Aurora, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, United States Gazette Jun. 5, 1804 (“MASSACRE OF ALL THE WHITES AT ST. DOMINGO”). 26. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser May 30, 1804 (“From the New-York Commercial Advertiser”). 27. United States Gazette Aug. 28, 1804 (“The following is a translated copy . . .”), reprinted Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Aug. 29, 1804, Aurora Sept. 4, 1804. 28. For notices about the Haitian-Jamaican negotiations, see Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Aug. 13, 1804 (London, Jun. 19), and Aurora, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Aug. 14, 1804 (London, June 19). For French protests against this trade, see, for example, Louis-André Pichon to Madison, Mar. 9, 1804, JMP 6:569. Also Robert R. Livingston to Madison, Aug. 29, 1804, and Nov. 17, 1804, JMP 7:653, 8:296. For Ferrand’s influence on Haiti’s development (and reception), see Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 199–206. 29. For records of the Pilgrim’s arrival and cargo, see NAMARB RG 36, E1057 vol. 3, E1059B box 77, and “Pilot’s Reports, Jan. 1, 1802–Apr. 17, 1805,” Records of the Port of Philadelphia, RG 41, microfilm roll 0864, PSA. 30. Aurora, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 13, 1804 (“Extract of a letter . . .”). For notice of Christophe’s proclamation banning vessels from taking on French passengers, including a penalty of death by firing squad, see Philadelphia Evening Post Apr. 4, 1804 (“Capt. Micks, lately arrived . . .”).

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Notes to Pages 219–222

31. Aurora, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 14, 1804 (New York, Nov. 12). The same episode demonstrated that mixed-race people—“mulattoes”—were not “French” and therefore did belong to Haiti. On Jun. 20, the day the Pilgrim unmoored, Dessalines ordered the people of color at the Cape to gather “on the very spot where the French had formerly been collected to be massacred.” While “they might have been mistaken for Frenchmen,” an American captain explained, Dessalines stressed that they were within the fold. “Instead of massacreing [sic] them,” he “assured them of his wish to make them all happy” and promised to “protect them and their families.” 32. Aurora, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 14, 1804 (New York, Nov. 12), United States Gazette Nov. 12, 1804 (“By capt. Gilder from Cape Francois . . .”). 33. Aurora, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 14, 1804 (New York, Nov. 12), Aurora Nov. 27, 1804 (“Ship News”), Aurora, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 13, 1804 (“Extract of a letter . . .”). 34. Several reports mention the convoy returning from Cape Haïtien as being under the Pilgrim’s charge. See Aurora Nov. 16, 1804 (“Ship News”), and Aurora Nov. 27, 1804 (“Marine Memoranda”). 35. For Ferrand’s declarations, see Aurora Sept. 4, 1804 (Philadelphia), and Sept. 13, 1804 (Philadelphia). See Aurora Jan. 16, 1805 (“Extract of a letter dated from Santo Domingo . . .”), for a call to trade with France, rather than the “negro corsairs” of Haiti. Ferrand was excoriated in American newspapers for purportedly decreeing that he would execute any traders “caught within three leagues of the brigands [sic] ports.” Aurora Mar. 30, 1805 (“Captain Clapp informs . . .”). For the discussion, see Aurora Apr. 8, 1805 (“The Gazette U.S. expresses . . .”), United States Gazette Apr. 13, 1805 (“We are at length furnished . . .”), and Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Apr. 16, 1805 (“The bravery and humanity of General Ferrand . . .”). 36. Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005); Wood, Empire of Liberty, 633–39. 37. Annals of Congress, vol. 14, 8th Cong., 2nd sess. 11 (Nov. 8, 1804). 38. For McCreery’s participation in the debate, see Annals of Congress, vol. 14, 8th Cong., 2nd sess., 816 (Dec. 13, 1804). Crowninshield was similarly active throughout in molding the penalty structure and seeking to protect trade to other areas from falling under the bill. 39. The version of the bill coming out of the House imposed severe penalties on those caught trading in arms or attacking French forces. The bill that passed in the Senate the following February only allowed arms for self-defense. For the act itself, see Annals of Congress, vol. 14, 8th Cong., 2nd sess., 1698–99. Tim Mathewson’s description of the House debate as strictly following sectional lines is not borne out by the voting lists. Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti.” Fifteen Pennsylvanian representatives voted for the bill. For a different account of the passage of the clearance bill, see Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 249–62. Relying on the reports provided by French minister Pichon, Brown misidentifies Tate as captain. See also Wills, Negro President, 43–46. 40. For Tate’s ongoing presence, see, for example, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Oct. 8, 1806 (“Circumstantial account of the MASSACRE in St. Domingo, in May 1806, Its causes, &c.”). 41. Annals of Congress, vol. 14, 8th Cong., 2nd sess., 819 (Dec. 13, 1804) [Eppes]; Aurora Jan. 12, 1805 (“In the Gazette U.S. of last evening we find the following paragraph . . .”) [“own emolument”]; Aurora Dec. 5, 1804 (Philadelphia) [“whose God”]. For the

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same reasoning, and iterations on the same phrase, see Aurora Jan. 23, 1806 (“THE MEMORIAL TESTED”), and Aurora Mar. 7, 1806 (Philadelphia). Aurora Feb. 18, 1805 (“Illicit commerce”) [“against the honor”]. 42. Annals of Congress, vol. 14, 8th Cong., 2nd sess., 813 (Dec. 13, 1804). This approach came nearest to Jefferson’s original hopes for American policy. In Mar. 1804 he proposed to British minister Anthony Merry that “all Governments who have Colonies in the West Indies” make “an Agreement not to suffer the former [slaves] to have any Kind of Navigation whatsoever or to furnish them with any Species of Arms or Ammunition” (quoted in Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” 233). Since the United States was not an imperial power itself, this made the nation party to this agreement as a fellow participant in the slaveholding system that made such colonies worth having (and which made armed Haitians a threat). 43. Aurora Dec. 10, 1804 (Philadelphia). 44. Aurora Dec. 27, 1804 (“The Boston Centinel . . .”). 45. Aurora June 17, 1805 (“Among the toasts given at the dinner . . .”). The vessel was the ship Indostan, owned by New Yorker Samuel Ogden. For scrutiny of Ogden and his vessel’s intents, see Aurora Nov. 27, 1804 (New York, Nov. 24), Aurora Dec. 1, 1804 (Congress), Aurora Dec. 5, 1804 (Congress), and Aurora Dec. 6, 1804 (Philadelphia). Ogden would live on in the paper as another example of merchants’ depravity and Federalist culpability as Duane defended the administration over issues as diverse as Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, the mammoth cheese, and the Miranda expedition (see below). See Aurora Mar. 7, 1806 (“It is worthy of notice . . .”), Aurora Mar. 10, 1806 (“FROM THE AMERICAN CITIZEN”), Aurora Mar. 7, 1806 (“GENERAL MIRANDA”), and Aurora Oct. 14, 1807 (“INDEPENDENCE OF HAYTI”). 46. Aurora Feb. 28, 1805 (“Trade to the West India islands”). See also Aurora Feb. 8, 1805 (“Armed merchantmen”), which explained that “we should make enemies of every European nation, holding colonies, if we permitted our merchantmen to carry warlike implements to those persons in those colonies who might be successful in insurrection and massacre.” 47. Aurora Dec. 27, 1804 (“The Boston Centinel . . .”). This was an argument that Pichon made to Madison. See Louis-André Pichon to Madison, May 7, 1804, JMP 7:185. 48. Aurora Jan. 23, 1806 (“THE MEMORIAL TESTED”). This same writing noted that “this passion for trading with black emperors is an old one—Toussaint and the ship Kingston are not yet forgotten.” See also Aurora Jan. 22, 1806 (“THE PITH OF THE PHILADELPHIA MEMORIAL”). 49. Aurora Jan. 12, 1804 (“Ship News”) [“brigand government”], Aurora Dec. 10, 1804 (Philadelphia) [“land pirates”]. 50. Aurora Dec. 27, 1804 (“The Boston Centinel . . .”). See also Aurora Jan. 22, 1805 (“In our paper this morning . . .”), in which Haiti was typified as a place that had witnessed “the vengeance of a multitude of beings who are yet covered with the blood of the innocent, aged, and infirm . . . whites, and with that of our countryman, Tate.” 51. Aurora Feb. 18, 1805 (“Illicit commerce”) [“horde”], Aurora Dec. 29, 1804 (Philadelphia) [“apologizing”], Aurora Jan. 22, 1805 (“In our paper this morning . . .”) [“as well might”], Aurora Dec. 29, 1804 (Philadelphia) [“barbarian empire”], Aurora Jan. 22, 1805 (“In our paper this morning . . .”) [“no civilized nation”]. 52. Everett Somerville Brown, ed., William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803–1807 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1923), 243. 53. Aurora Mar. 9, 1805 (“Capture of the Dart, Nichols, of Baltimore, bound to ‘Hayti’ with military stores”).

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Notes to Pages 225–228

54. Annals of Congress, vol. 14, 8th Cong., 2nd sess., 815 (Dec. 13, 1804) [Clay], Aurora Jan. 22, 1805 (“In our paper this morning . . .”). 55. Aurora Jul. 19, 1805 (“The recent accounts by Americans who have been at St. Domingo concerning the government of the blacks, does not present so flattering a picture . . .”), reprinted United States Gazette Jul. 20, 1805. This was also the tenor of an ongoing series providing an overview of events in Saint Domingue/Haiti in Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser. Having consisted mostly of government documents for several weeks, in midDecember 1804 the series shifted to the journal of its author, which featured depictions of clownish black officers and indiscriminate violence. See Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 22, Nov. 26, Nov. 28, Dec. 3, Dec. 7, Dec. 10, Dec. 19, Dec. 21, Dec. 28, 1804, Jan. 2, Jan. 4, Jan. 10, Jan. 12, Feb. 15, Feb. 20, Feb. 28, and Mar. 19, 1805 (“A short account of the present state of affairs in ST. DOMINGO”). 56. See, for example, Aurora Jul. 24, 1804 (“FROM A LATE FRENCH PAPER, EMPEROR OF HAYTI”). See also Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Jul. 23, 1805, for a letter, supposedly from Dessalines to Bonaparte, excerpted from the [Halifax] Gazette of May 15, 1805. 57. This was the case of the ship Louisiana, which left from Jérémie without paying custom duties in the summer of 1805. The Aurora attacked the merchants, despite having “as little regard for Dessalines or his government as most people.” “If trade is to be carried on with robbers,” the nation’s honor required that it be done fairly. See Aurora Aug. 7, 1805 (“According to the Philadelphia Gazette . . .”). The supercargoes of the Louisiana responded in print, explaining how they had been extorted, “a most shameful treatment” that, had they accepted, “would have been a submission to gross injury.” See United States Gazette Oct. 17, 1805, reprinted Aurora Oct. 22, 1805. See also Aurora Aug. 8, 1805, and Aurora Aug. 9, 1805. For the Haitian decree made in response to the Louisiana’s actions, see Aurora Oct. 22, 1805 (Baltimore, Oct. 17). 58. See Aurora Nov. 8, 1805 (“From St. Domingo”), for a description of new commercial regulations, which amounted to a system sustained by bribery and fraud. Pennsylvania Correspondent, Jul. 2, 1805 (“Extract of a letter . . .”), reprinted Aurora Jul. 23, 1805 [“sad country”]. 59. George Logan to John Pemberton, Jan. 30, 1804, box 31, page 53, Etting Collection, folder “Scientists,” HSP. See also Logan to John Dickinson, Feb. 6, 1804, box 4, folder 11 (“Incoming Correspondence September 2, 1803–February 6, 1804”), John Dickinson Papers, HSP. 60. During the debate, New Hampshire Federalist William Plumer worried about the “extensive discretionary power” being granted to the president and the “degradation” of passing such a law to “gratify France.” He also railed against Republicans’ generalizations in the House about the character of American merchants. Brown, William Plumer’s Memorandum, 210, 234. 61. Annals of Congress, vol. 15, 9th Cong., 1st sess., 29 (Dec. 20, 1805). 62. Republicans criticizing the clearance bill as too weak had taken the same line. James Jackson of Georgia “believed the self created emperor of Hayti must be subdued . . . the peace & security of both America and Europe demanded it.” Brown, William Plumer’s Memorandum, 244. For an overview of the debates, see Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 263–74. 63. Brown, William Plumer’s Memorandum, 250. 64. Annals of Congress, vol. 15, 9th Cong., 1st sess., 31 [ Jackson], 41 [Smith] (Dec. 20, 1805).

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65. Annals of Congress, vol. 15, 9th Cong., 1st sess., 121 (Dec. 24, 1805). See also Connecticut congressman James Hillhouse’s similar reasoning in Annals of Congress, vol. 15, 9th Cong., 1st sess., 36 (Dec. 20, 1805). 66. Annals of Congress, vol. 15, 9th Cong., 1st sess., 125, 131, 136–37 (Feb. 20, 1806). White’s speech covered twenty pages in the Congressional Annals. See United States Gazette Mar. 19, 1806 (“We are indebted . . .”), for an approval of it as “eloquent.” 67. Annals of Congress, vol. 15, 9th Cong., 1st sess., 37 (Dec. 20, 1805). 68. Brown, William Plumer’s Memorandum, 251. Similarly, see Timothy Pickering’s prediction that, since the “real patriots of ’76 are overwhelmed by the modern pretenders to that character,” the Union would dissolve, with the borders being determined by slavery’s presence. Pickering to Richard Peters, Dec. 24, 1803, Richard Peters Papers, 10:89, HSP. After Logan’s bill passed, Pickering attempted to persuade Jefferson to veto it by appealing to levers that no longer worked. In addition to holding up the honor of the French decree of Feb. 4, 1794, and the heroic resolution of the “Haytians” to “live free or die,” he noted that people who would be “abandoned” by the act were “‘guilty,’ . . . of [having] a skin not colored like our own.’” See Donald R. Hickey, “Timothy Pickering and the Haitian Slave Revolt: A Letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1806,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 123, no. 3 (1984): 149–63; and Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 274–75. 69. Annals of Congress, vol. 15, 9th Cong., 1st sess., 515 (Feb. 25, 1806). 70. Aurora Mar. 7, 1806 (Philadelphia) [“tory”], Aurora Mar. 11, 1806 (“GENERAL MIRANDA”) [“petty piracy”]. Miranda’s project was subject to intense scrutiny and comment in American newspapers at around this time. For Miranda’s Haitian connection, see Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 255–56; and Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 176–90. 71. Aurora Mar. 7, 1806 (“It is worthy of notice . . .”) [“text”], United States Gazette Apr. 8, 1806 (Philadelphia) [attack plans], Aurora Apr. 24, 1806 (“More of Miranda”) [“brigands”]. For the demand for news, see Aurora Jun. 18, 1806 (“Extract of a Letter from General Kirkland . . . to His Haytian Friend”). 72. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Nov. 17, 1806 (“Revolution in Hayti”). 73. Aurora Nov. 18, 1806 (“ST. DOMINGO”). See also Aurora May 10, 1806 (Philadelphia), for news that Dessalines “laughs at the law of congress, interdicting the trade, and in exulting and contemptuous language declares that ‘as long as he has a bag of coffee or a dollar, he will never want Americans ready and willing to buy them, in disregard of all laws.’” The same report told that “the black emperor” had bought land in Pennsylvania in case he was forced from his throne. For a report that Madame Dessalines had arrived in Wilmington after her husband’s death, see Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser Sept. 11, 1807 (“It is said the wife of Dessalines . . .”). 74. Mathewson, Proslavery Foreign Policy, 131. 75. See, for example, Mary Hassal (Leonora Sansay), Secret History, or, The Horrors of St. Domingo, in a Series of Letters, Written by a Lady at Cape Francois, to Colonel Burr, Late Vice-President of the United States, Principally During the Command of General Rochambeau (Philadelphia: Bradford & Inskeep, 1807). More generally, see Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire, 441–59. 76. Freeman’s Journal and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser Jul. 7, 1804. See also [New York] Spectator Jul. 14, 1804 (“From the Philadelphia Journal”). See Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, 327–28; Nash, “Reverberations,” 65; and Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 160–61. 77. Horton and Horton, In Hope of Liberty, 125–76.

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Notes to Pages 232–236

78. Andrew Forsyth to Benjamin Rush, Jul. 11, 1804, Benjamin Rush Mss Correspondence (LCP in HSP), 5:63, HSP. 79. Thomas Branagan, The Penitential Tyrant, or, Slave Trader Reformed: A Pathetic Poem in Four Cantos . . . (Philadelphia: For the author, 1805), 51. 80. Thomas Branagan, A Preliminary Essay on the Oppression of the Exiled Sons of Africa, Consisting of Animadversions on the Impolicy and Barbarity of the Deleterious Commerce and Subsequent Slavery of the Human Species; to Which Is Added a Desultory Letter Written to Napoleon Bonaparte, Anno Domini, 1801 (Philadelphia: John W. Scott, 1804), 133. 81. Ibid., 218–19. 82. Ibid., 221. 83. Branagan, Penitential Tyrant, 146. 84. Thomas Branagan, Serious Remonstratives Addressed to the Citizens of the Northern States, and Their Representatives, Being an Appeal to Their Natural Feelings & Common Sense: Consisting of Speculations and Animadversions, on the Recent Revival of the Slave Trade in the American Republic. With a Simplified Plan for Colonizing the Free Negroes (Philadelphia: Thomas T. Stiles, 1805), 54. 85. Branagan, Penitential Tyrant, 148. 86. Thomas Branagan, Avenia, or, A Tragical Poem, on the Oppression of the Human Species and Infringement on the Rights of Man (Philadelphia: S. Engles for Silas Engles and Samuel Wood, New York, 1805), 314. 87. Branagan, Serious Remonstratives, 70, 55; see especially 66. For white slaves, see 45. For the reprint, see Branagan, Penitential Tyrant, 149–60. 88. Branagan, Serious Remonstratives, 129. Branagan wrote to Jefferson in the spring of 1805 to ask the president to subscribe to one of his writings. Jefferson hesitated to respond for political reasons but asked George Logan to explain to Branagan that he agreed with his ideas but could not openly offer support. “Yet I cannot be easy in not answering Mr. Brannagans [sic] letter unless he can be made sensible that it is better I should not answer it,” he wrote. See Jefferson to George Logan, May 11, 1805, in “Biographical Sketches of the Life and Character of Dr. George Logan written by his Afflicted and Affectionate Widow, Deborah Norris Logan,” 85–86, Logan Family Papers, HSP. For the ongoing tensions in white American identity around these issues, see Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire, 413–41. 89. See Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 159; and Branagan, Preliminary Essay. 90. Nov. 28, 1791, Cox-Parrish-Wharton Collection, box 9, folder “Anonymous,” HSP. 91. See Crane, Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 3:1873 (Oct. 23 and 24, 1805). Elizabeth Drinker reported that Parrish met with Samuel Griffits, Thomas Morris, Jonathan Evans, Henry Drinker, Thomas Stewardson, and (later) Thomas (?) Scattergood “in our parlour to look over some writing of JPs relative to Slavery.” 92. The reference here is seemingly to God’s reprieve to the sinful city of Nineveh after its inhabitants heard Jonah’s preaching and repented their sins. Parrish referenced Jonah 3:3 and 4:11, Matthew 12:41, and Luke 11:32. 93. John Parrish, Remarks on the Slavery of the Black People; Addressed to the Citizens of the United States, Particularly to Those Who Are in Legislative or Executive Stations in the General or State Governments; and Also to Such Individuals as Hold Them in Bondage (Philadelphia: For the author, by Kimber, Conrad, & Co., 1806), 2, 36. 94. See the drafts for the pamphlet in “Parrish, John, Notes relating to the Blacks, no. 1 & no. 2,” in box “Volumes #3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 18, 21, 25, 26, 32,” Cox-Parrish-Wharton Collection, HSP. Parrish also terms Saint Domingue “Santomingo” earlier in the notes when he

Notes to Pages 236–237

319

describes how France’s reneging of its emancipation of slaves had resulted in a “deluge of Blood.” 95. Shortly after its publication, Parrish’s pamphlet was sent to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to Wakefield and Baltimore, Maryland, and to several correspondents in Washington, D.C. It was also forwarded to Georgia and South Carolina. See Quomony Clarkson to John Parrish, Mar. 13, 1806, John Parrish to [unknown], May 1806, and John Parrish to William Morgan, May 5, 1806, John Parrish to “Governor of SC,” Jun. 3, 1806, Philip Thomas to John Parrish, Aug. 31, 1806, Philip Williams to John Parrish, Oct. 1, 1806, and James Sloan to John Parrish, Dec. 25, 1806, all in “Parrish, John 1806,” box, 2, “John Parrish Correspondence, 1800–1807, n.d.,” Cox-Parrish-Wharton Collection, HSP. The latter letter noted that large portions of the pamphlet had been published in the National Intelligencer. See also Joseph Bartlett to Joseph Parrish, Apr. 16, 1806, and Apr. 22, 1806, both in “Parrish, Joseph 1806–1807,” box 7, “Joseph and Susan Parrish Correspondence, 1806–1807,” Cox-ParrishWharton Collection, HSP. 96. Granville Sharp to John Parrish, Jul. 12, 1806, “Parrish, John 1806,” box, 2, “John Parrish Correspondence, 1800–1807, n.d.,” Cox-Parrish-Wharton Collection, HSP. 97. Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean”; Matt D. Childs, “‘A Black French General Arrived to Conquer the Island’: Images of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba’s 1812 Aponte Rebellion,” in Impact of the Haitian Revolution, 135–56; Geggus, “The Slaves and Free Coloreds of Martinique During the Age of the French and Haitian Revolutions: Three Moments of Resistance,” in Parts Beyond the Seas: The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 300–321. 98. Their names were Benjamin Lewis and Simon Fox. Nash, “Reverberations,” 65.

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Smith, James McCune, and Riverdale Children’s Association (New York, N.Y.). “A Lecture on the Haytien Revolutions with a Sketch of the Character of Toussaint L’ouverture.” New York: Printed by Daniel Fanshaw, 1841. Stephen, James. The History of Toussaint Louverture. New ed. Slavery and AntiSlavery: A Transnational Archive. Part 3: The Institution of Slavery. London: Printed for J. Butterworth and son etc., 1814. ———. The Opportunity, or, Reasons for an Immediate Alliance with St. Domingo. London: Printed by C. Whittingham, for J. Hatchard, 1804. Stockdale, Percival. A Letter From Percival Stockdale To Granville Sharp Esq. Suggested to The Authour, by The Present Insurrection of the Negroes in the Island of St. Domingo. Durham: Printed by L. Pennington, 1791. Vastey, Pompée-Valentin. An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti, Being a Sequel to the Political Remarks Upon Certain French Publications and Journals Concerning Hayti. Exeter, [England]: Printed at the Western Luminary Office, 1823. Wante, Charle Etienne Pierre. Memoire Relatif á L’administration de la Partie Françoise de St. Domingue. Publié par Charles Etienne Pierre Wante, cy Devant Ordonnateur Civil de la Dite Colonie. Baltimore: Samuel and John Adams, 1793. Warville, J. P. Brissot de. Lettre De J. P. Brissot A M. Barnave, Sur Ses Rapports Concernant Les Colonies. Paris: Desenne, Bailly, Bureau Du Patriote Francois, 1790. ———. Memoire Sure Les Noirs De L’Amerique Septentrionale Lu A L’Assemblee De La Societe Des Amis Des Noirs, le 9 Fevrier 1789. Paris: Cailleau for Bailly and De Senne, 1789. ———. New Travels in the United States of America. Performed in 1788 . . . Translated from the French. Trans. Joel Barlow. New York: Printed by T. & J. Swords, for Berry & Rogers, 1792. ———. Oration upon the Necessity of Establishing at Paris, A Society to Promote the Abolition of the Trade and Slavery of the Negroes. Philadelphia: Francis Bailey, 1788. Watson, John Fanning. Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, in the olden time; being a collection of memoirs, anecdotes, and incidents of the city and its inhabitants, from the days of the Pilgrim founders: intended to preserve the recollections of olden time, and to exhibit society in its changes of manners and customs, and the city in its local changes and improvements. 3 vols. Philadelphia: Uriah Hunt, 1830.

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Newspapers and Periodicals American Star/L’Étoile Américaine Carey’s United States Recorder Courier de l’Amerique Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser Federal Gazette Gazette of the United States General Advertiser Independent Gazetteer Independent Whig and Philadelphia Commercial Gazette The Minerva Le Niveau/The Level National Gazette Pennsylvania Gazette Philadelphia Evening Post Philadelphia Museum Philadelphia Repository and Weekly Register Porcupine’s Gazette Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser United States Gazette Universal Gazette

Archives and Manuscript Collections Arthur C. Bining Collection (HSP) Benjamin Rush Mss Correspondence (LCP in HSP) Boats and Cargoes Collection (HSP) Claude Unger Collection (HSP) Cox-Parrish-Wharton Collection (HSP) Deborah Norris Logan Diaries (HSP)

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Dillwyn Manuscript (HSP) Dreer Collection (HSP Drinker Papers (HSP) Duponceau Letter Book (HSP) Emlen Papers (HSP) Etting Collection (HSP) Gratz Collection (HSP) Isaac Harvey Jr. Letterbook (HSP) John Dickinson Papers (HSP) Jones and Clark Papers (HSP) Joshua Barney Papers (HSP) Josiah S. Johnson Collection (HSP) Lea and Febiger Papers (HSP) Logan Family Papers (HSP) Maritime Documents (Independent Seaport Museum of Philadelphia) Papers of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (microfilm, HSP) Parrish Collection, Pemberton Papers (HSP) Pemberton Papers (HSP) Powell Family Papers, Robert Johnston section (HSP) Records of the Port of Philadelphia (microfilm, PSA) Records of the United States Customs Service—Philadelphia (NAMARB) Reed and Forde Papers (HSP) Stauffer Collection (ALS) (HSP) Society Collection (HSP) Society Miscellaneous Collection (HSP) Special Collections (Princeton University Library) Tench Coxe Papers (microfilm, HSP) Timothy Pickering Papers (microfilm, Massachusetts Historical Society) Uselma Clark Smith/William Jones Papers (HSP) Vaux Papers (HSP) William Tilghman Papers (HSP)

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Index

k abolitionism: American, 17–18, 74, 77; in Britain, 18, 72–74, 133–34; equality discourses and, 42, 58; French policy and, 112–14, 133–37; Haitian independence and, 215; Philadelphia and, 125–33. See also emancipation; revolution; slavery and slaves Adams, John, 143–47, 153–54, 159–65, 172–77, 183, 190–97, 202–3, 221, 228, 309n119 Adet, Pierre Auguste, 138–39, 156–57 African Americans: constraints of freedom upon, 17–18, 121–25; Dominguan immigrants and, 285n28; Dominguan insurrectionary violence and, 84–85, 130–32, 271n1; political organizing of, 125–33. See also race; slavery and slaves; United States African Church (Philadelphia), 125–33, 139, 284n17 Alien Act, 158, 175, 203 Alien Enemies Act, 158 Allen, Richard, 125–26, 129–31, 140, 234– 35, 284n17 American Convention for the Promotion of the Abolition of Slavery, 132–34, 137–42 American Minerva (newspaper), 10 Anglo-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce. See Jay’s Treaty Argus (newspaper), 74 Armand, 67–68 Aurora, 145, 152, 155, 156–59, 170–78, 190–91, 194, 195–96, 222, 230, 298n116, 300n132 Avenia (Branagan), 235 Azor, 121–24, 133, 137–38, 142

Bache, Benjamin Franklin: attacks on, 295n60; death of, 170; France’s citizenship laws and, 27–31, 47, 49, 249n4; Republicanism of, 14–15, 41–42, 94, 96–97, 99–100, 104, 107, 113, 116, 145–46, 151–52, 154, 156– 57, 218, 257n94; revolutionary principles and, 45–46, 52–53; Saint Domingue’s politics and, 36–40, 47–48, 70, 128; sources for, 10–11, 101 Baker, Thomas, 8–10, 12, 243n24 Baltimore, 11, 158 Barbary States, 220–21 Barnave, Antoine, 197 Beddenhurst, Alexander, 303n20 Belley, Jean-Baptiste, 108 Biassou, 61, 64, 67–68, 71, 81, 85, 148, 263n55 Billings, A., 8–9, 11–12 Bishop, Abraham, 74–75, 77–79, 115, 119– 20, 126, 131–32, 218, 267n111 Blanchelande (Saint Domingue Governor), 48, 61–62, 67, 80, 257n102, 264n73 Blin, Paul, 262n47 Bloody Buoy (Cobbett), 151–52 Blount, William, 300n132 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 23, 181, 193, 204–5, 214–18 Boston, 11–12, 34 Boukman, 61, 63 Bourne, Sylvanus, 71 Branagan, Thomas, 233–36, 318n88 Breck, Samuel, 246n54 brigands, 13, 80–86, 100–101, 161, 166, 168, 195, 212–26 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre, 92, 102, 275n33, 276n62

332

Index

Britain: abolition movements in, 18, 72–74, 306n68; American diplomatic relationships with, 93–94, 145, 152–54, 159–65, 190, 193; colonial holdings of, 80, 83, 135, 315n42; Federalists and, 145–48, 168–78; France’s relationship to, 10–11, 21–22, 27, 89, 103, 110, 146–47, 274n27, 280n96; Louverture’s relation to, 143–44, 148–49; Saint Domingue relationship of, 11, 90–91, 112, 168–69, 171–72, 175, 214–15. See also specific colonies and people Bunel, Joseph, 160 Burke, Edmund, 35–36, 39–40, 42, 44, 89, 101–3 Burr, Aaron, 203 Cap, Jean-Baptiste, 83 Cap Français, 1–2, 19–21, 27–31, 38–43, 58–74, 80, 83, 89–90, 97–104, 119, 197–98 Carey, Matthew, 130–31, 137, 286n34 Caribs, 83–84 Castaing, Charles Guillaume, 281n121 Catholicism, 186–87 Charleston, 9, 69–70, 78, 84, 88, 92–98, 116–21, 156–63, 170, 270n166 Chestnut Street Theatre, 15–16 Christophe, Henri, 179, 193, 217, 219, 224 citizenship: enemies within and, 104–14, 117–20; racial qualifications of, 17–18, 27– 31, 88–92, 101–2, 104, 111–14, 121–25, 133–42, 182–89, 196–99, 256n85. See also France; Saint Domingue; United States Clarkson, Matthew, 108–9, 111, 118, 124, 130 Clarkson, Thomas, 72 Clay, Joseph, 229 Claypool, David, 92 clearance bill, 221–23, 225, 227, 314n39, 316n62 Cobbett, William, 15, 146, 151–52, 154, 157–58, 163, 174, 197, 291n11, 292n31 coffee, 7–8, 210, 212 colonialism: British, 80, 83, 113, 135, 315n42; France’s North American holdings and, 96, 181–82, 187–89; violence’s inherence in, 49–50, 56–58, 187–89, 215–16. See also specific colonial possessions Committee of Guardians (of PAS), 122–23 Common Sense (Paine), 213–14 Cotlar, Seth, 13 Council of Five Hundred, 151

Courrier Politique de la France et des Colonies (newspaper), 107 Coxe, Daniel, 149 Coxe, Tench, 33, 149 criminality, 130–32. See also race; violence Crowninshield, Jacob, 221 Cuba, 70, 84–85, 121, 311n9, 313n20 Cutting, Nathaniel, 34, 46, 63, 67, 71, 80–81, 253n48, 260n19 Dashiell (captain), 8–9 Davis, William, 27–31, 41 Decatur, Stephen, 143 Democratic Societies, 98–99, 104, 113 Desmoulins, Camille, 56–57 Dessalines, Jean-Jeacques, 23, 209–16, 222– 26, 230–34, 314n31, 316n57, 317n73 Devèze, Jean, 130 Dillwyn, William, 72 Dodge, Unite, 150 Dominica, 72 Drinker, Elizabeth, 13, 59, 88, 106, 119–20, 149, 235, 272n3, 286n32, 288n55, 318n91 Duane, William, 170–71, 173, 175, 177–78, 190, 193, 197–98, 216, 300n132 Dufresne, Guillaume Thomas, 241n4 Duplessis, Peter Lebarbier, 283n10 Dwight, Theodore, 75, 268n128 Edwards, Bryan, 56 Eggar, Thomas, 8–12 emancipation: French policy of, 2, 20, 22, 27– 31, 89–92, 102–14, 133–37, 162–65, 171, 186, 249n11; gradualism and, 140, 189–99, 281n124, 289n77; violence’s connection to, 54, 70–79, 114–20, 125–33. See also race; Saint Domingue; slavery and slaves Emlen, Susanna, 129–30 Eppes, John W., 222, 225, 229 equality (principle): French Revolution and, 38–41, 73–74; Louverture’s meaning and, 166–78; race’s problematizing of, 48–55, 64–65, 103–20, 182–99; United States’ revolutionary values and, 42, 54, 69–79; violence and, 43–55. See also race; revolution; United States Fairfax, Fernando, 236 “fanatic” (term), 39–41, 43, 49–51, 54–55, 71–72, 99, 102, 164 Faulk, Casper, 7 Federal Gazette (newspaper), 49, 110

Index Federalists: anti-French dispositions of, 160– 65, 168–69, 187–89, 228–29, 277n63; British associations of, 98–99, 110, 117, 145–48, 156–59, 168–78, 181–82, 186–87, 190, 193; commerce and, 221–22; emergence of, 91, 100; racial discourses and, 23, 168–69, 181–89, 191, 201–8, 229–31, 306n68; revolutionary processes and, 165–78; slavery debates and, 16, 140–41, 163–65, 184–85, 191–98. See also Adams, John; Britain; Hamilton, Alexander Fenno, John, 41–42, 44, 49, 101–2, 104, 117–18, 154 Fenno, John, Jr., 168, 176, 183–84, 188 Ferrand, Marie-Louis, 218, 220, 314n35 Ferrer, Ada, 311n9 fires, 156–59, 170, 232 Flaville, Joseph, 301n1 Fly (schooner), 209–12 Forsyth, Andrew, 232–33, 235 Fort Dauphin, 1–4, 7–15, 138, 269n142 Forten, James, 141 Fox, Simon, 319n98 France: abolition movements in, 18; America’s diplomatic relationships with, 93–99, 106, 111, 187–89, 199–208, 226, 265n83, 277n68; Britain’s relations with, 10–11, 21–22, 27, 89, 103, 110, 146–47, 152–54, 274n27, 280n96; colonial laws of, 35–36, 56–58, 96, 101–2, 116–20, 181–82; emancipation policy of, 2, 18–21, 31–38, 46, 77, 86–92, 102–15, 121–22, 124, 133–38, 151–54, 168, 171, 186, 223–24, 249n11, 287n42; Federalist images of, 151–52, 156–57; National Assembly of, 19, 27, 29–31, 35–36, 38–40, 44–45, 54, 56–58, 71–72, 77, 94–95; Philadelphia’s cosmopolitanism and, 15–24; privateers and, 92, 97–98, 153–59, 161–65, 220, 225, 230; racialized rights in, 19–20, 88–93, 101–2, 145–48; Republicans’ associations with, 168–71, 174–78, 189–99, 309n114; Revolution’s American reception and, 13–14, 17–21, 27–31, 33–55, 57–58, 69–79, 88–120, 151–59, 190–91, 195, 227–31, 276n62; Saint Domingue’s “loss” and, 99–114, 186–89, 212–26, 306n54; Spain’s wars with, 1, 21–22, 27, 62, 89, 148–49, 274n27. See also specific colonies and people Franklin, Benjamin, 31, 76, 249n4 Free African Society, 284n17

333

“French negro” (term), 21–23, 82–92, 115– 20, 125–27, 145–48, 162–65, 183, 201 Freneau, Philip, 41–42, 46–49, 54, 74, 92, 97–100, 106–9, 115, 129, 173, 278n71 Fugitive Slave Act (1793), 140 Gabriel, 182–85, 189–90, 192, 200, 207, 303n20 Galbaud, Francois-Thomas, 20–21, 89–90, 100–121, 138, 278n71, 281n121 Gallatin, Albert, 199–202, 233–34 García, Joaquin, 241n2 Gatereau, Louis, 107, 292n31 Gazette of the United States (newspaper), 13, 41–42, 44, 101–3, 154, 174, 183, 252n47 Geff, 121–22, 133, 137–38, 142, 283n9 Geggus, David, 268n128, 270n157 General Advertiser (newspaper), 245n45; Fort Dauphin violence and, 14; French Revolution’s reputation and, 27–31, 47; political leanings of, 41–42, 95, 99; Saint Domingue reporting of, 36–38; sources for, 10–11, 27, 109 General Assembly (Saint Domingue), 56, 69 Genet, Edmond Charles, 91–101, 103–4, 106–12, 115–20, 138, 153, 199–200, 274n27, 277n68, 279n94 Georgia, 134, 156 Gibson, William, 218–20 Giles, William, 289n77 Girard, Jean, 139 Girard, Stephen, 130, 139 Girondins, 46–47, 91, 96, 100, 103–4, 107, 111, 115–16, 275n33, 276n62 Giroud, Benjamin, 135–36, 142, 150–52, 218 Gonaïves, 186, 311n6 Goode, Samuel, 289n74 gradualism (in emancipation rhetoric), 140, 199–208, 281n124, 289n77 Gray, William, 127–28, 131 Green, Rufus, 59 Grégoire, Baptiste Henri, 52–53, 72–73, 258n113 Grenada, 54, 83 Guadeloupe, 110, 190, 305n47 Gurney, Francis, 70 Haitian Revolution: commerce and, 6, 228– 30; Constitution of 1801 and, 180–82, 214, 225–26; Dessalines and, 212–26; diplomacy and, 159–65, 214–15, 218–26; Haiti’s creation and, 3; naming of, 2–4, 23,

334

Index

Haitian Revolution (cont.) 204, 209–12; nationalism in, 148–54; news reports of, 7–15; outside influence narrative in, 61–62; Republican fears of, 215–26. See also Dessalines, Jean-Jeacques; Louverture, Toussaint; race; Saint Domingue; slavery and slaves; violence Hall, Prince, 287n37 Hamilton, Alexander, 41, 93, 95, 98–99, 103, 186, 195, 294n46 Harper, Robert Goodloe, 163–64, 173 Haut du Cap, 64 d’Hédouville, Gabriel Marie Théodore, 22, 159, 163, 165–66, 180, 298n116 Hemings, Sally, 315n45 Hetty (brig), 27–31, 248n1 Hispaniola, 81, 83 Holland, Edwin C., 304n26 Honduras, 80, 82 Hough, George, 274n19 Humphries, Clement, 295n60 indentured labor, 17–18, 122–24, 133 independence (of St. Domingue), 34, 66, 182, 186–89, 200–206, 210–12, 216–22 Intermediate Commission (Saint Domingue), 257n103 Israel, Israel, 281n109 Jackson, James, 316n62 Jacmel, 65, 165, 177, 209, 211, 230 Jacobins (as epithet), 95–114, 146–48, 154–62, 168, 183, 195–96, 216, 228–29, 277n63. See also Republicans; United States Jamaica, 56, 63, 80, 83, 113, 135, 163–64, 216, 218, 233 James, C. L. R., 241n5 Jay’s Treaty, 145, 152, 156–57, 251n24 Jean-François, 1–3, 8, 13, 61–71, 81, 85, 115, 148, 241n4, 263n55 Jefferson, Thomas: election of 1800 and, 177–78, 182–83, 200, 203–4, 221, 227; Federalist maligning of, 187–89, 230; French Revolution and, 94, 205–6; Genet and, 106–19; Haiti’s embargo and, 212, 231; liberation theology and, 131–32; Notes on Virginia and, 236; racial politics of, 29–31, 54, 71, 168–69, 209–12, 258n114; Republicanism of, 106–7, 110, 279n94, 305n44, 308n105; revolution’s ideals and, 34–35; Saint Domingue’s independence

and, 34, 204–8; Sally Hemings and, 315n45; suspension clause and, 202–3 Jérémie, 9 Jones, Absalom, 125–26, 129–31, 140, 284n20 Jones, John, 283n9 Jones, Lloyd, 99–100, 276n45 Journal des Révolutions de la Partie Française de Saint-Domingue (newspaper), 107 kidnappings (African American), 133, 140, 236 King, Rufus, 206 Knox, Henry, 95, 99, 272n5 Lafayette (Marquis de), 18, 31–32, 93, 110 Latimer, John, 64 Laveaux, Etienne, 22, 148, 150–51, 180 Law of Nations (Vattel), 228 Lear, Tobias, 179, 204, 304n32, 306n54, 309n119 Leclerc, Charles Victor Emmanuel, 181, 187–88, 195, 204–5 Lee, Henry, 84, 178 Lemaigre, Peter, 9–10 Léogane, 65–67, 83 Les Cayes, 68 Les Platons, 67–68 Les Suisses, 80–86, 268n128 L’Étoile Américaine (newspaper), 107–8, 113 Lewis, Benjamin, 319n98 liberty, 99–114; American revolutionary principles and, 74–75; citizenship and, 89–92, 131–33; gradualism and, 189–208; Haitian Constitution of 1805 and, 213–14; Louverture’s policies and, 180–82; maroons and, 62–68, 83–84; places of, 121–25, 133–42, 231–38; as threat to American slave regime, 80–86; violence in the name of, 71, 74–75. See also race; revolution; United States; violence Lillibridge, Robert, 59, 149 Limbé, 180, 301n1 Liston, Robert, 174–76 Logan, George, 159, 226–31, 317n68, 318n88 London Society, 18 Louisiana, 187, 205, 207, 221, 226, 234, 300n132 Louis XVI, 41, 48, 89, 93–94, 96 Louverture, Toussaint: 1801 Constitution and, 180–82, 186, 193, 212–13; American understandings of, 23, 148–54, 181–82,

Index 192, 195–99, 204–6, 306n54; blackness of, 149, 153–54, 171–78, 190–91, 193, 195–99; death of, 204; diplomacy of, 148– 49, 159–66, 168–78, 187–89, 220–21; French loyalty and, 2, 148, 152, 175–78; labor policies of, 22, 302n9; Leclerc’s invasion and, 187–91, 204; Moïse’s relation to, 179–82, 186–87, 200, 220, 305n47; realpolitik of, 152, 166–68, 170, 205–6, 292n26; revolutionary meaning of, 165–78, 199–208; rise of, 3, 22, 142, 146–47 Maclay, Samuel, 70, 74–75, 266n88 Madison, James, 41–42, 179, 202–4, 206–7, 304n32 Maglan, 209–10 Maitland, Thomas, 160, 163, 166, 170–71, 174, 177, 191, 203 Mangourit, Michel-Ange-Bernard, 98 Marbois, François, Marquis de Barbé-, 33, 251n30 Maréchal (Martial), 67–68 maroons, 62–63, 66–68, 83–84 Martinique, 27, 34, 54, 190 Mathewson, Tim, 314n39 Mathurin de la Forest, Antoine René Charles, 265n82 Mauduit (Thomas-Antoine, Chevalier de), 31–38, 62, 170–71 McCreery, William, 221 Merry, Anthony, 315n42 Mifflin, Thomas, 70, 143, 145, 281n109 Mifflin, Warner, 76, 131–32, 235 Millet, Thomas, 278n74 Miranda, Francisco de, 229–30 Mississippi Territory, 289n77 Moïse, 179–82, 186–87, 200, 220, 305n47 Môle Saint Nicolas, 9, 80, 103, 149 Monroe, James, 94, 117, 183, 206 Moore, Elizabeth, 251n30 Mud Island, 143, 145–46, 163 Murdock, John, 15–24 Murrin, John, 201 Napoleon Bonaparte, 23, 181, 193, 204–5, 214, 216, 218 A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the year 1793, 130 Nash, Gary, 137, 282n5, 284n20, 285n28 National Gazette (newspaper), 41–42, 129 Naturalization Act, 158

335

neutrality, 89, 94, 98, 115–16, 145, 205–6; Washington’s declaration of, 14 New England, 29–30, 34, 132, 193, 203 Newman, Simon, 96 newspapers: French-language reports and, 15, 27, 29–30, 36–38, 81; political leanings of, 10–11, 15, 78, 126; Post Office Act of 1792, 6; Saint Domingue debates in, 51–55; sources of, 7–15 New York, 6, 9, 11, 132 Nicholls, David, 312n16 Nicholson, John, 126 Nisbet, Charles, 77 Noailles (Louis-Marie, Vicomte de), 93–95, 98 Non-Intercourse Act, 160, 199, 201–3 Norfolk, 84, 108, 153 Norris, Jeremiah, 209 North Carolina, 84, 140, 197 North province (of St. Domingue), 19, 56–58, 65, 68, 81, 90, 257n103 Notes on Virginia ( Jefferson), 236 Ogden, Samuel, 315n45 Ogé, Vincent, 38–43, 45, 48, 253n59 Otis, Harrison Gray, 164, 168 Paine, Thomas, 32, 34–35, 42, 74, 77, 89, 213–14 Parrish, John, 235–36 A Particular Account of the Commencement and Progress of the Insurrection of the Negroes of St. Domingo, 72–73, 76–77 Pascal, 95, 99, 108, 150, 153, 288n55 “A Peep into the Antifederal Club” (cartoon), 105 Pelage, Magloire, 305n47 Pemberton, James, 287n49 Pennsylvania: abolition act (1780) of, 17, 70, 121–25, 236–37; citizenship discourses in, 121–33. See also Philadelphia; specific organizations and people Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 18, 42, 72, 74, 77, 121–23, 123, 128, 132–33, 135–42, 150, 218, 235–37, 283n8 Pennsylvania Assembly, 70–71, 75 Philadelphia: African American political organizing in, 125–33; as commercial hub, 6–15, 24–25, 32–33, 57–58, 90–91, 101–2, 121–22, 209–12, 218–20; cosmopolitanism of, 15–25, 65–66, 96–97, 103, 119–20, 133, 150–51; émigré community

336

Index

Philadelphia (cont.) in, 105–14, 116, 118, 121–25, 127–42, 263n55, 282n3, 287n42; epidemics in, 87–92, 128–30, 132, 144, 159, 286n32; fires in, 156–58; Haiti’s independence and, 209–12; maps of, 5, 144; metropolitan status of, 4, 31; Saint Domingue refugees and, 87–92; slave rebellions and, 43–44, 58–68, 70–80, 84–85; violence in, 231–38. See also specific newspapers and people Philadelphia Gazette (newspaper), 298n116 “Philanthropolis,” 135–36 philanthropy, 44, 49, 103, 140–42, 168. See also emancipation; France; race; slavery and slaves Pichon, Louis André, 204–6 Pickering, Timothy, 159–60, 162, 164–65, 172, 177–78, 186, 228, 298n116, 317n68 Pilgrim (ship), 212, 218, 220, 222, 314n31 Pinckney, Charles, 69, 82, 164, 170, 265n84 Plaine du Cul de Sac, 60 Plaine du Nord, 30, 43–44, 56–59, 71, 102, 180, 182–83 Plumer, William, 229, 316n60 Polverel, Etienne, 20–21, 89–91, 97, 100– 114, 119, 280n104 Popkin, Jeremy D., 241n4, 282n5 Porcupine’s Gazette (newspaper), 146, 151–52, 156–57, 163 Port-au-Prince, 9, 45, 60, 80, 89, 97, 112, 145, 218, 256n85 Port Salut, 64 Post Office Act of 1792, 6 Poulsen’s American Daily Advertiser (newspaper), 316n55 privateers, 92, 97–98, 153–54, 157–59, 161, 163, 165, 220, 225, 230 Prosser, Thomas, 182–83 Provincial Assembly du Sud (Saint Domingue), 68 Quakers, 54, 88, 126, 226–27, 235, 284n17 Quasi-War, 187–90, 195, 209–12, 220, 226–31 Quersey, Charles, 303n20 race: agency’s elision and, 58; American slavery and, 17, 22–23, 49–55, 86, 186–89, 216– 22, 229–31, 312n16; brigand discourse and, 13, 80–86, 100–101, 161, 166, 168, 195, 212–26; citizenship and, 17–18, 89– 92, 102–4, 111–14, 121–25, 136–42, 182– 89, 195–99, 201–8, 256n85; criminality discourses and, 130–32; equality principles

and, 43–55, 114–20, 166–78, 186, 189– 99, 201–8; French laws and, 18–21, 27–31, 143–48, 174–78, 287n42; Louverture and, 149, 153–54, 171–78, 199–208; national loyalty questions and, 1–2, 51–52, 66–67; Pennsylvania politics and, 70–71, 121–33, 137–42; Saint Domingue’s quasi-autonomy and, 182, 201–2, 229–38; separation discourses and, 135–37, 206–8, 281n124, 310n129; sexuality and, 173–74, 234, 315n45; universal principles and, 51–53, 60–61, 64–65, 73–79, 111–20, 147–48, 166–78, 187–89; violence and, 3, 13, 18–19, 22–25, 27–43, 48–55, 57–71, 73, 80–86, 100–114, 151–52, 162–65, 172–73, 179–99, 204–5, 207, 209–12, 215–26, 231–38, 256n85, 270n166. See also Saint Domingue; slavery and slaves; United States Radoteur (newspaper), 107 Raimond, Julien, 135, 288n55 Ralston, Robert, 126 Rebeckah, 138–39 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 35 Republicans: emergence of, 91; French connections of, 94–96, 145–48, 156–57, 168–69, 174–78, 184–85, 187–89, 195– 96, 216; Louverture’s image and, 147–48, 172–73; news outlets of, 14, 41–42; racial hierarchies and, 23, 53–55, 109, 115, 147–48, 151–52, 181–82, 186–99, 205–6, 223–26; sectionalism and, 183–84, 189–99. See also Bache, Benjamin Franklin; Jefferson, Thomas revolution: American slavery’s meaning and, 16, 22–23, 34–35, 64–65, 75–79, 168–78, 226–31; Federalists’ vision of, 182–89; France’s American reputation and, 14, 27– 31, 47, 115–20; Louverture and, 148–54, 165–78, 180–82; raced discourses of, 13, 18–19, 21–25, 58–68, 75–76, 80–86, 125–33, 149–54, 182–89; Saint Domingue as apotheosis of, 212–26; universal principles of, 17–19, 40–51, 77–79, 90–93, 99–120, 125–37, 147–48, 182–99, 201–8, 212, 214–22, 254n69, 308n108; violence and, 31–38, 62–86, 101–14, 227–31, 279n87, 313n20. See also France; race; Saint Domingue; slavery and slaves; United States; violence Rice, David, 75–77, 119–20

Index Rigaud, André, 22, 64, 67, 163–65, 167, 172–73, 178, 180, 186, 298n116 Rights of Man (Paine), 40, 42, 74, 254n69 Rinker, Cap, 283n9 Ripley, John Phillips, 274n19 Ritter, Abraham, 210–12 Ritter, Jacob, 209–12, 218, 310n4 Rivière, Romaine, 65, 68 Roach, Thomas, 7 Robespierre, Maximilien, 41, 191, 195, 276n62 Rochambeau, Donatien, 209, 211, 215–16, 313n20 Roscoe, William, 73–74, 76, 78 Roustan, M., 70, 79 Royal Edict of 1693 (Spain), 262n43 Rush, Benjamin, 59, 126–29, 133, 232–33, 284n13 Russell, Timothy, 59 Rutledge, John, 140, 142, 289n74 Saint Domingue: 1801 Constitution of, 22– 23, 180–82, 186, 193, 212–13; American race discourses and, 22–23, 69–79, 91, 121–25, 154–59, 168–78, 181–82, 192– 99, 206–8, 244n40; Britain and, 11, 21–22, 90–91, 112, 168–78; emancipation in, 90–92, 115–25, 134–37, 168; French Revolution and, 18–21, 35–43; Haiti’s naming and, 204; independence of, 34, 66, 186–89, 200–202, 205–6, 210–26; Louverture’s economic policies in, 22, 171–78, 180–82, 186; maps of, 28; Napoleon’s invasion of, 187–89; Philadelphia’s racial violence and, 231–38; racialized violence in, 1–3, 11, 17, 19–20, 22–23, 27–31, 35–38, 43, 56–58, 76–77, 82–92, 117, 153–54, 179–82, 209–10, 215–16, 219–20, 225–26, 265n83; refugees from, 87–92, 100, 106–7, 121–42, 231–38; revolutionary violence and, 31–38, 43–55, 148–49, 182–89, 209–10; slavery in, 3–4, 17–19, 27–31, 43–48, 56–58, 69–79, 107, 121–25, 128, 162–65; Spain’s incursions into, 1–2, 21– 22, 148–49; United States’ commerce with, 6–15, 21–25, 32–35, 81–86, 91, 97–99, 159–65, 181–82, 186–89, 203–5, 207–12, 228–31, 316n57, 317n68. See also specific leaders and places Saint Marc, 9, 11, 32, 34, 36, 66, 278n74, 292n26 Santo Domingo, 22, 67, 220 Sedition Act, 158–59, 175, 203

337

September Massacres (Paris), 103 sexuality, 173–74, 234, 315n45 Sharp, Granville, 73 Shippen, Edward, 124 Shoemaker, John, 125, 132 Short, William, 36 Simon, John ( Jean), 8–9, 12–13, 15, 138 slavery and slaves: American revolutionary ideals and, 16–17, 49–55, 61–62, 69–70, 72, 74–79, 90–92, 113–20, 125–37, 140–42, 147–48, 160–65, 181–89, 201–8, 216–22, 226–31, 233–38, 254n69, 268n125; brigand discourses and, 13, 80– 86, 100–101, 161, 166, 168, 195, 212–26; French Revolution’s relationship to, 29–31, 57–58, 72–73, 107, 114–20, 133–37, 140–41, 187–89, 223–24; gradualism and, 140, 189–99, 281n124, 289n77; Haitian Constitution of 1805 and, 214–15; as internal enemies, 1–2, 141–48, 156–58, 162–65, 171–78, 233–34; kidnapping and, 133, 140, 236; places of liberty and, 121–25, 133–42; rebellions of, 1–2, 8–15, 17–20, 56–68, 117–20, 148–49, 182–89; variegated nature of, in the United States, 17–18, 78, 121–27, 133–42, 160–65, 183–89, 224–26, 306n68; violence’s inherence in, 20, 43–49, 57–58, 128–33, 141–42, 171–78, 182–208, 241n5; white fears and, 19–20, 192–99, 215–26, 228–38, 270n166. See also abolitionism; emancipation; France; race; Saint Domingue; violence Smith, J. C., 229 Smith, Samuel, 228 Société des Amis des Noirs, 18, 52, 72, 196 Society of the Cincinnati, 31, 75 Sonthonax, Léger Félicité: American understandings of, 102–14, 156–57; arrest of, 280n104; Genet and, 91, 275n33, 278n73; revolutionary violence and, 46–49, 89, 115, 117, 151–52, 170–71; in St. Domingue, 20–22, 89–90, 97–102, 107–9, 112–13, 118, 135, 148–49, 153–54, 163, 298n116 South Carolina, 30, 69–70, 78, 84–85, 88, 117–19, 124, 164, 173, 233, 262n43 Southern province (of St. Domingue), 67 Spain: American understandings of, 12–14, 68, 81, 85, 115; France’s wars with, 1, 3, 21–22, 27, 62, 89, 148–49, 274n27; Santo Domingo and, 1, 13, 22 St. Augustine, 85 Stevens, Edward, 160–65, 175, 177–78, 204

338

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St. Kitts, 83 St. Lucia, 83 Stockdale, Percival, 73–74 St. Victor, Tranquille, 121, 124, 283n10 St. Vincent, 83 suspension clause, 160, 176, 199, 201–3, 226–31 Sweezy, George, 175–78 Talleyrand, 159, 163, 193, 205 Talon, Antoine Omer, 93, 98 Tanguy de la Boissière, Claude-Corentin, 107–8 Tate, Robert, 218–19, 222–25 Tennis Court Oath, 32 Ternant, Jean Baptiste, 94, 266n88 Terror, the, 41, 89, 109, 191 Terry, George, 270n166 Thatcher, George, 140–41, 289n74 Thuat, Thomas, 210, 310n4 Tonnerre, Boisrond, 311n6 Toussard, Louis, 143 Trinidad, 121 The Triumphs of Love (Murdock), 15–24 Trou Coffy, 65–66 Trouillot, Michel-Rolf, 3, 21 tub incendiaries, 170–78 Tucker, George, 236 Tucker, St. George, 136–37, 236, 281n124 tyranny, 35–43, 48, 95–96 United States: anti-monarchical discourses in, 14–15, 35–43, 48, 95–96; diplomacy of, 92–94, 106, 145–47, 152–54, 158–65, 204–5, 215–26, 251n24, 277n68; exceptionalism of, 79, 100–114; French Revolution’s image in, 13–14, 20–21, 30– 55, 57–58, 69–79, 88–93, 95–99, 111–14, 145–48, 151–59, 187–89, 195, 265n83, 276n62; Louverture’s meaning in, 22, 148– 54, 166, 200–208; Navy of, 161–62, 165, 180, 203, 220–21; neutrality policies of, 14, 89, 94, 98, 115–16, 205–6; news media in, 6–15, 99, 101–2, 244n40; partisan politics in, 91, 145–48, 151–54, 156–58, 168–78, 181–99, 221–22; revolutionary principles of, 38–43, 49–50, 54–55, 60–61, 69–79, 90–92, 99–120, 125–33, 151–52, 166–78, 182–89, 195–99, 226–31, 233; Saint Domingue commerce and, 6, 21–25, 32–35, 81–86, 91, 97–99, 159–65, 181–82, 187–89, 192, 199–208, 220–21, 223–26, 251n24, 316n57, 317n68;

sectional concerns in, 110, 114–20, 133– 37, 147–48, 163–65, 182–84, 189–208, 227–31; slavery in, 16–17, 22–23, 49, 75–86, 114–20, 125–37, 140–42, 147–48, 160–65, 182–99, 201–8, 216–22, 233–38, 268n125, 287n42, 306n68, 308n108; slave violence and, 63, 65, 73, 80–86, 88–93, 107–14, 154–59, 171–78, 199–200, 291n11. See also specific leaders, newspapers, parties, and places Vaublanc, Viénot de, 151, 153–54 Vázquez, José, 1–2, 13 Venezuela, 230 Vesey, Denmark, 304n26 Villatte, Jean-Louis, 148–50 violence: arson and, 156–59, 170; colonialism’s association with, 49–50, 187–89, 215–16; as contagion, 63, 65, 73, 82–86, 88–93, 107–14, 154–59, 171–78, 199–200, 291n11; French Revolution and, 14, 31–38, 43–48, 69–79, 82–86, 88–93, 162–65, 183–84, 279n87; as inherent to slavery, 20, 43–49, 57–58, 128–33, 141–42, 171–78, 182–208, 241n5; racial discourses and, 3, 13, 19–20, 27–31, 38–43, 48–55, 58–86, 100–114, 151–52, 162–65, 179–99, 207, 209–12, 215–38, 256n85, 270n166; slave rebellions and, 1–2, 8, 43–48, 57–58, 74–75, 117–20, 128–33, 182–89, 195, 197, 199–208, 241n5, 313n20 Virginia, 84–85, 88, 182–84, 203, 206–8 Waln, Robert, 289n74 Washington, George, 14, 31–32, 53–54, 69, 91–99, 103, 106, 111, 115–16, 140, 183 Wells, Richard, 70 West province (of St. Domingue), 256n85 Whiskey Excise (and Rebellion), 95, 294n46 White, Ashli, 24, 248n67, 268n125, 285n24 White, Samuel, 228 Wilberforce, 72–73 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 254n70 Woodward, William, 274n19 XYZ Affair, 158–59 Yard, Edward, 290n9 yellow fever, 87, 127–30, 132, 144, 159, 204– 5, 233, 286n32 Zagarri, Rosemary, 254n70

Acknowledgments

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I

have been looking forward to thanking people for the help given to me while working on this book almost as much as I have looked forward to finishing it. I have been graced with many forms and sources of support over the years and without them would not have been able to complete this project. I want to express here my deep gratitude to everyone who has aided me along the way. I consider myself lucky to have had Princeton University as my academic home to this point in my career. I can’t think of a more congenial, stimulating, and generous place to work. In addition to benefiting from a number of research grants from the Graduate School and the University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, I have experienced countless kindnesses on this campus. Most of these have come from the History Department. Bill Jordan has looked out for me in more ways than I know. Judy Hanson, Etta Recke, Pamela Long, Debbie Macy, Carla Zimowsk, Max Siles, and the late Lynn Kratzer not only helped me navigate challenges at work but have made Dickinson Hall a pleasant place to go each day. In Firestone Library, microform librarians Sooni Johnson, Colleen Burlingham, and Deborah Paparone have been exceedingly generous with their time. At one stage they even allowed me to take a microfilm reader home on extended loan (something that didn’t really disrupt my non-academic friends’ stereotypes about historians). I’m indebted to my colleagues in Princeton’s History Department, many of whom have profoundly shaped this book through their comments and interventions, as well as by their example. Early on, I learned important lessons from Jim McPherson and Colin Palmer. Sean Wilentz has long provided encouragement and general support; he also offered particularly useful advice in the late stages. Both Michael Gordin and Keith Wailoo closely read a draft manuscript and offered numerous useful suggestions. Jeremy Adelman also provided help-

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ful comments and conversation at an early stage. As important, he also offered kind and generous support to my family at a particularly difficult time, something I will never forget. A thoughtful intervention by David Bell led me to significantly recast one chapter in ways that I hope improve the entire book. Kevin Kruse has continuously provided advice and support. Barbara Oberg has on many occasions given me much-appreciated counsel and morale boosts. Rosina Lozano intrepidly organized a reading group in which she, Caley Horan, Rob Karl, Matt Karp, Beth Lew-Williams, Jon Levy, Rebecca Rix, and Wendy Warren offered useful thoughts on several chapters. Wendy, Rosina, Rob, and I also exchanged work outside of the group, and I can only hope that I was as helpful to them as they were to me. John Murrin’s influence on this work, and on my historical outlook, continues to be pervasive and powerful. John’s catholic interests, unending curiosity, flexible intellect, and ongoing willingness to learn as he teaches are traits I can only hope to emulate. Dirk Hartog’s contributions—to this book, to my work in general, and to my welfare—cannot be quantified, nor can I adequately thank him here. Dirk has done far more than read drafts, offer suggestions, and write letters, though he has done all of those things. Eons ago he held my daughter as an infant; more recently he has played tennis with my teenage son. Over our years of talk (and tennis) he has given me advice and support and, above all, has provided a model of the ways to blend and balance work and life. This book has been in the works for quite a while, and I’ve benefited from the help of a large number of people and institutions over the years that I’ve been working on it. During its early stages I was the beneficiary of fellowships that allowed me to spend time at the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP) and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), two fantastic institutions where I performed the bulk of my research. The staffs at both maximized the efficiency, productivity, and fun of that work. In particular I’d like to mention Connie King, Phillip Lapsansky, Wendy Woloson, and Jim Green at the LCP, and Laura Beardsley and Max Moeller at the HSP. I’d also like to thank Cathy Matson, director of the Program in Early American Economic Studies (PEAES) at the LCP, for her guidance during my second stay there as a PEAES fellow and for her thoughts on the manuscript at that stage. Gail Farr of the National Archives Regional Branch Office in Philadelphia sorted through hundreds of boxes of commercial records at my behest, turning what was supposed to be a short visit into many months of productive and useful research. More recently, Paul Erickson and the staff of the American Antiquarian Society

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(AAS) shepherded me through a wonderful stay as a research fellow. Microfilm was the only game in town when I began this project, but during the later stages I’ve been aided immensely by the digitization projects going on at the AAS, and so on behalf of all of us who use early American newspapers, I’d like to offer my thanks for that work here. In Philadelphia, Worcester, and beyond, I’ve been fortunate to encounter a wide array of wonderful scholars whose thoughts and ideas have seeped into my thinking and work, and whose friendship has sustained my efforts. I’d like to thank George Boudreau, Steve Bullock, Bill Carter, John Davies, Brendan Kane, Brian Luskey, Michelle Craig MacDonald, Roderick MacDonald, Andrew McMichael, Dan Richter, Andy Shankman, Peter Silver, and David Silverman for their talk and good company. Andy Graybill and Nick Guyatt have each helped me in more ways than I can count and in more ways than I deserve. Their humor, candor, and support have made even the most trying times manageable. Denver Brunsman read and improved several chapters of this book and has in general has been a mensch. I’d like to thank Jeremy Popkin for his encouragement and conversation, not to mention his including me in a fruitful conference in 2009. Gary Nash, though we have never met in person, provided comments on a very early draft that still resonate today. Phil Morgan helped me see what was useful about my approach and gave me ideas about how to best bring it out. Rebecca Scott offered several helpful suggestions. Mike Zuckerman read a draft of a chapter and offered recommendations that improved the entire work. Ashli White graciously read an iteration of the manuscript and offered a number of helpful comments. Sarah Gronningsater’s ideas about and reactions to the chapter that she read invigorated and improved my approach at a key moment. Matt Clavin and François Furstenberg heroically read at least two complete drafts and offered generous and productive suggestions about how to make the work better. David Waldstreicher read a full draft with astonishing speed and acuity, offering me a set of comments that served to get the book into its final form. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, Erica Ginsburg, Jennifer Konieczny, and Amanda Ruffner capably shepherded me through the final stages. Through it all, Bob Lockhart has been an invaluable source of aid and advice—not to mention editing. I’m truly thankful for the time and effort he has devoted to this project. Lastly, I’d like to thank Pierre Gaborieau, whose eleventh-hour heroics provided the image for the book’s cover. I have been blessed (not a phrase I use lightly) in life by dear friends, people who have supported my family and me during the years while I have been work-

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ing on this book—and of course well before. That they have thought about and asked after my progress at all is a testament to their generosity and warmth. Far, far more important have been their various acts of kindness in general, acts that provided help, showed their concern, and buoyed me up during difficult times. These people know who they are and understand more precisely what I mean. These are debts that can only be repaid in kind and I cherish any opportunity to do so. My sister, sisters-in-law, and brothers-in-law—and my in-laws— fantastically blur the line between family and friends. My nieces and nephews offer sweet reminders of our lives together and the wonderful fun of family. I once noted long ago that Mairi Alice and James William Dun walked between every line that I write. That was when they were small and, though their little footprints will never go away, Mali and Liam now walk beside their mother and me. Their influence on this book may have changed, but the unique joy they provide me every day that I open my eyes has not, nor can it, ever. They truly have done more to sustain me than they can ever understand. I’m thankful for them, and here want to put in print how thankful I am to them. I’m also thankful for their little sister Josie, whose impact on my life has been just as large, just as important, and, even though it has been hard to understand sometimes, just as sweet. Jim and Doreen Dun are the pillars upon which my life rests. Their gifts to me have been boundless; I am only noting here the (substantial) help they have provided having to do with this book, but those acts are only a small fraction of all that they have done. My mother has read and reread more iterations of this text than anyone else. She has always made it better through her comments and has constantly encouraged me by her enthusiasm and engagement. My father has read a lot as well and has been his usual patient, supportive, and helpful self as my years of work unwound. My debts and the depth of my thanks to my parents are impossible to fully express. All of these people have helped me make this book better. (I’m responsible for the flaws that remain.) All of them have enriched my life as I’ve written it. Kelly Jenkins Dun, on the other hand, is my life. With her I’ve learned that marriage is an active verb. My wife and I have experienced joys beyond belief and tragedies we could never have imagined. The good came only because we were together, the bad was bearable only because we continued to plight each other our troths. More than anyone, she has lived with this book in prospect. For her support, but more so for everything else, I dedicate it to her.