Today, Haiti is in a difficult political and economic period. It is helpful to put this in historical perspective. Haiti and the United States have been intertwined throughout our histories. Most Americans are unaware of the importance of the Haitian revolution to the newly founded United States, particularly the South.
The Haitian revolution was noteworthy in several respects. It is the only successful slave rebellion in history to form a nation. It formed the first modern black-governed nation. Haitians defeated the most powerful European army of its era – the French of Napoleon Bonaparte. And it founded the second independent nation in the Americas – after the United States – in 1804. If you thought that The U.S.A. would welcome another new nation which had thrown off the yoke of its European colonialists, you would be wrong. As a slave-owning nation, the United States responded by refusing to recognize the new Haitian nation, joined European nations by imposing a trade embargo (now known as “sanctions”) and generally tried to repress the new nation.
In his book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, author Clint Smith tells the story of the largest slave rebellion in the United States and the role that the Haitian revolution played. Here is an excerpt.
On a rainy southern Louisiana evening in January 1811, Charles Deslondes, a mixed-race slave driver, led this massive armed rebellion. Composed of hundreds of people, Deslondes’s army advanced along the serpentine path of southern Louisiana’s River Road to New Orleans with a military discipline that surprised many of their adversaries. It is remarkable to consider that hundreds of enslaved people, who came from different countries, with different native languages and different tribal affiliations, were able to organize themselves as effectively as they did.
On the German Coast of Louisiana, where the rebellion took place—named as such for the German immigrants who settled there—roughly 60 percent of the total population was enslaved. The fear of armed insurrection had long been in the air. That fear had escalated over the course of the Haitian Revolution, in which the enslaved population in Haiti rose up against the French and in 1804 and founded what became the first Black-led republic in the world.
The French army was so beleaguered from battle and disease—by the end of the war, more than 80 percent of the soldiers sent to the island had died—that Napoleon Bonaparte, looking to cut his losses and refocus his attention on his military battles in Europe, sold the entire territory of Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson’s negotiators for a paltry fifteen million dollars—about four cents an acre. Without the Haitian Revolution, it is unlikely that Napoleon would have sold a landmass that doubled the size of the then United States, especially as Jefferson had intended to approach the French simply looking to purchase New Orleans in order to have access to the heart of the Mississippi River. For enslaved people throughout the rest of the “New World,” the victory in Haiti—the story of which had spread through plantations across the South, at the edges of cotton fields and the quiet corners of loud kitchens. – served as inspiration of what was possible.
Even William C. C. Claiborne, the governor of the territory that would become the state of Louisiana in 1812, wanted the territory to stop importing enslaved people from Haiti, fearing that some of them might have taken part in the Haitian Revolution. In 1804, Claiborne wrote a letter to then secretary of state James Madison, sharing his concern: “At present I am well assured, there is nothing to fear either from the Mulatto or negro population,” he said, beginning by attempting to assuage any immediate fears the president and his cabinet may have had, “but at some future period, this quarter of the Union will (I fear) experience in some degree, the misfortunes of St. Domingo [Haiti], and that period will be hastened, if the people should be indulged by Congress with a continuance of the African-trade.” Claiborne said that he would attempt “to prevent the bringing in, of slaves that have been concerned in the insurrection of St. Domingo. ”According to historian David Brion Davis, “For nearly seventy years the image of Haiti hung over the South like a black cloud.”
Excerpt From: How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, Smith, Clint