Dangerous Neighbors

This excellent study extends our understanding of the impact of revolutionary-era events in St. Domingue/Haiti on political culture in the emergent United States. Americans were transfixed by the slave rebellions, civil wars, and foreign interventions that led to creation of the Western Hemisphere's second republic. They consumed and shaped these events to reflect their republican realities. The primary conduits for such reflections were newspapers, especially the forty-three titles published in Philadelphia during the 1790s. (And no, these are not all digitized and searchable. James Alexander Dun's archival labor has been prodigious). After the Post Office Act of 1792, 70 percent of all postage by weight within America was newspapers. Thoroughly embedded in this tonnage, developments in St. Domingue, as presented by famous editors such as John Fenno, William Cobbett, Benjamin Bache, and William Duane, were an “accelerant” that helped produce a scissor effect within American political culture (p. 182). Could universal ideals such as liberty or equality be applied to slave societies? The question was inescapable after the French National Convention decree of February 4, 1794, establishing the immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery and instant citizenship for all emancipated slaves—in the decree's language, “hurling liberty into the new world.” Federalists were appalled. Seizing on lurid accounts of violent slave rebellion, glossing these with ascriptive “blackness,” Federalists used the progress of events in St. Domingue to paint Democratic-Republicans as devotees of Jacobinical anarchy. But by the end of the 1790s, Federalists had pivoted. St. Domingue, under the guidance of Toussaint L'Ouverture remained “black” and exotic but, crucially, trade with the United States made the island less “French.” Although Dun is careful not to overplay a Federalist commitment to racial equality or opposition to slavery, and while he demonstrates the partisan dimensions (and limits) of Federalist support for the island's resistance to Charles Leclerc's 1802 invasion, by that year Federalists had come to accept the Haitian inhabitants' refusal to be re-enslaved as a rational (and wholly American) expression of belief in essential liberty. Democratic-Republicans traveled in the opposite direction, dragging the United States with them. Dun possibly overstates the breadth and depth of initial support among Democratic-Republicans for an expansive “French” reading of the rights and liberties due island inhabitants. Nonetheless, Dun delineates with great care a general Democratic-Republican retreat from idealism and a growing support for regressive policies in matters of racial equality and slavery inextricably grounded in reactions to, and the creation of, the Haitian Revolution

Citizenship · Constitution · Decree · Democracy · Economic history · Newspaper · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Presidency · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History · Law

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